Africa
Are Large Language Models Fit For Guided Reading?
This paper looks at the ability of large language models to participate in educational guided reading. We specifically, evaluate their ability to generate meaningful questions from the input text, generate diverse questions both in terms of content coverage and difficulty of the questions and evaluate their ability to recommend part of the text that a student should re-read based on the student's responses to the questions. Based on our evaluation of ChatGPT and Bard, we report that, 1) Large language models are able to generate high quality meaningful questions that have high correlation with the input text, 2) They generate diverse question that cover most topics in the input text even though this ability is significantly degraded as the input text increases, 3)The large language models are able to generate both low and high cognitive questions even though they are significantly biased toward low cognitive question, 4) They are able to effectively summarize responses and extract a portion of text that should be re-read.
"Sch\"one neue Lieferkettenwelt": Workers' Voice und Arbeitsstandards in Zeiten algorithmischer Vorhersage
Klausner, Lukas Daniel, Heimstädt, Maximilian, Dobusch, Leonhard
The complexity and increasingly tight coupling of supply chains poses a major logistical challenge for leading companies. Another challenge is that leading companies -- under pressure from consumers, a critical public and legislative measures such as supply chain laws -- have to take more responsibility than before for their suppliers' labour standards. In this paper, we discuss a new approach that leading companies are using to try to address these challenges: algorithmic prediction of business risks, but also environmental and social risks. We describe the technical and cultural conditions for algorithmic prediction and explain how -- from the perspective of leading companies -- it helps to address both challenges. We then develop scenarios on how and with what kind of social consequences algorithmic prediction can be used by leading companies. From the scenarios, we derive policy options for different stakeholder groups to help develop algorithmic prediction towards improving labour standards and worker voice. -- Die Komplexit\"at und zunehmend enge Kopplung vieler Lieferketten stellt eine gro{\ss}e logistische Herausforderung f\"ur Leitunternehmen dar. Eine weitere Herausforderung besteht darin, dass Leitunternehmen -- gedr\"angt durch Konsument:innen, eine kritische \"Offentlichkeit und gesetzgeberische Ma{\ss}nahmen wie die Lieferkettengesetze -- st\"arker als bisher Verantwortung f\"ur Arbeitsstandards in ihren Zulieferbetrieben \"ubernehmen m\"ussen. In diesem Beitrag diskutieren wir einen neuen Ansatz, mit dem Leitunternehmen versuchen, diese Herausforderungen zu bearbeiten: die algorithmische Vorhersage von betriebswirtschaftlichen, aber auch \"okologischen und sozialen Risiken. Wir beschreiben die technischen und kulturellen Bedingungen f\"ur algorithmische Vorhersage und erkl\"aren, wie diese -- aus Perspektive von Leitunternehmen -- bei der Bearbeitung beider Herausforderungen hilft. Anschlie{\ss}end entwickeln wir Szenarien, wie und mit welchen sozialen Konsequenzen algorithmische Vorhersage durch Leitunternehmen eingesetzt werden kann. Aus den Szenarien leiten wir Handlungsoptionen f\"ur verschiedene Stakeholder-Gruppen ab, die dabei helfen sollen, algorithmische Vorhersage im Sinne einer Verbesserung von Arbeitsstandards und Workers' Voice weiterzuentwickeln.
AI's Regimes of Representation: A Community-centered Study of Text-to-Image Models in South Asia
Qadri, Rida, Shelby, Renee, Bennett, Cynthia L., Denton, Emily
This paper presents a community-centered study of cultural limitations of text-to-image (T2I) models in the South Asian context. We theorize these failures using scholarship on dominant media regimes of representations and locate them within participants' reporting of their existing social marginalizations. We thus show how generative AI can reproduce an outsiders gaze for viewing South Asian cultures, shaped by global and regional power inequities. By centering communities as experts and soliciting their perspectives on T2I limitations, our study adds rich nuance into existing evaluative frameworks and deepens our understanding of the culturally-specific ways AI technologies can fail in non-Western and Global South settings. We distill lessons for responsible development of T2I models, recommending concrete pathways forward that can allow for recognition of structural inequalities.
Nonconvex Robust High-Order Tensor Completion Using Randomized Low-Rank Approximation
Qin, Wenjin, Wang, Hailin, Zhang, Feng, Ma, Weijun, Wang, Jianjun, Huang, Tingwen
Within the tensor singular value decomposition (T-SVD) framework, existing robust low-rank tensor completion approaches have made great achievements in various areas of science and engineering. Nevertheless, these methods involve the T-SVD based low-rank approximation, which suffers from high computational costs when dealing with large-scale tensor data. Moreover, most of them are only applicable to third-order tensors. Against these issues, in this article, two efficient low-rank tensor approximation approaches fusing randomized techniques are first devised under the order-d (d >= 3) T-SVD framework. On this basis, we then further investigate the robust high-order tensor completion (RHTC) problem, in which a double nonconvex model along with its corresponding fast optimization algorithms with convergence guarantees are developed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to incorporate the randomized low-rank approximation into the RHTC problem. Empirical studies on large-scale synthetic and real tensor data illustrate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both computational efficiency and estimated precision.
BOLT: Fast Energy-based Controlled Text Generation with Tunable Biases
Liu, Xin, Khalifa, Muhammad, Wang, Lu
Energy-based models (EBMs) have gained popularity for controlled text generation due to their high applicability to a wide range of constraints. However, sampling from EBMs is non-trivial, as it often requires a large number of iterations to converge to plausible text, which slows down the decoding process and makes it less practical for real-world applications. In this work, we propose BOLT, which relies on tunable biases to directly adjust the language model's output logits. Unlike prior work, BOLT maintains the generator's autoregressive nature to assert a strong control on token-wise conditional dependencies and overall fluency, and thus converges faster. When compared with state-of-the-arts on controlled generation tasks using both soft constraints (e.g., sentiment control) and hard constraints (e.g., keyword-guided topic control), BOLT demonstrates significantly improved efficiency and fluency. On sentiment control, BOLT is 7x faster than competitive baselines, and more fluent in 74.4% of the evaluation samples according to human judges.
A Novel Tensor Factorization-Based Method with Robustness to Inaccurate Rank Estimation
Zheng, Jingjing, Wang, Wenzhe, Zhang, Xiaoqin, Jiang, Xianta
This study aims to solve the over-reliance on the rank estimation strategy in the standard tensor factorization-based tensor recovery and the problem of a large computational cost in the standard t-SVD-based tensor recovery. To this end, we proposes a new tensor norm with a dual low-rank constraint, which utilizes the low-rank prior and rank information at the same time. In the proposed tensor norm, a series of surrogate functions of the tensor tubal rank can be used to achieve better performance in harness low-rankness within tensor data. It is proven theoretically that the resulting tensor completion model can effectively avoid performance degradation caused by inaccurate rank estimation. Meanwhile, attributed to the proposed dual low-rank constraint, the t-SVD of a smaller tensor instead of the original big one is computed by using a sample trick. Based on this, the total cost at each iteration of the optimization algorithm is reduced to $\mathcal{O}(n^3\log n +kn^3)$ from $\mathcal{O}(n^4)$ achieved with standard methods, where $k$ is the estimation of the true tensor rank and far less than $n$. Our method was evaluated on synthetic and real-world data, and it demonstrated superior performance and efficiency over several existing state-of-the-art tensor completion methods.
Migration Reframed? A multilingual analysis on the stance shift in Europe during the Ukrainian crisis
Wildemann, Sergej, Niederée, Claudia, Elejalde, Erick
The war in Ukraine seems to have positively changed the attitude toward the critical societal topic of migration in Europe -- at least towards refugees from Ukraine. We investigate whether this impression is substantiated by how the topic is reflected in online news and social media, thus linking the representation of the issue on the Web to its perception in society. For this purpose, we combine and adapt leading-edge automatic text processing for a novel multilingual stance detection approach. Starting from 5.5M Twitter posts published by 565 European news outlets in one year, beginning September 2021, plus replies, we perform a multilingual analysis of migration-related media coverage and associated social media interaction for Europe and selected European countries. The results of our analysis show that there is actually a reframing of the discussion illustrated by the terminology change, e.g., from "migrant" to "refugee", often even accentuated with phrases such as "real refugees". However, concerning a stance shift in public perception, the picture is more diverse than expected. All analyzed cases show a noticeable temporal stance shift around the start of the war in Ukraine. Still, there are apparent national differences in the size and stability of this shift.
Is GPT-3 all you need for Visual Question Answering in Cultural Heritage?
Bongini, Pietro, Becattini, Federico, Del Bimbo, Alberto
The use of Deep Learning and Computer Vision in the Cultural Heritage domain is becoming highly relevant in the last few years with lots of applications about audio smart guides, interactive museums and augmented reality. All these technologies require lots of data to work effectively and be useful for the user. In the context of artworks, such data is annotated by experts in an expensive and time consuming process. In particular, for each artwork, an image of the artwork and a description sheet have to be collected in order to perform common tasks like Visual Question Answering. In this paper we propose a method for Visual Question Answering that allows to generate at runtime a description sheet that can be used for answering both visual and contextual questions about the artwork, avoiding completely the image and the annotation process. For this purpose, we investigate on the use of GPT-3 for generating descriptions for artworks analyzing the quality of generated descriptions through captioning metrics. Finally we evaluate the performance for Visual Question Answering and captioning tasks.
Federated Learning via Decentralized Dataset Distillation in Resource-Constrained Edge Environments
Song, Rui, Liu, Dai, Chen, Dave Zhenyu, Festag, Andreas, Trinitis, Carsten, Schulz, Martin, Knoll, Alois
In federated learning, all networked clients contribute to the model training cooperatively. However, with model sizes increasing, even sharing the trained partial models often leads to severe communication bottlenecks in underlying networks, especially when communicated iteratively. In this paper, we introduce a federated learning framework FedD3 requiring only one-shot communication by integrating dataset distillation instances. Instead of sharing model updates in other federated learning approaches, FedD3 allows the connected clients to distill the local datasets independently, and then aggregates those decentralized distilled datasets (e.g. a few unrecognizable images) from networks for model training. Our experimental results show that FedD3 significantly outperforms other federated learning frameworks in terms of needed communication volumes, while it provides the additional benefit to be able to balance the trade-off between accuracy and communication cost, depending on usage scenario or target dataset. For instance, for training an AlexNet model on CIFAR-10 with 10 clients under non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) setting, FedD3 can either increase the accuracy by over 71% with a similar communication volume, or save 98% of communication volume, while reaching the same accuracy, compared to other one-shot federated learning approaches.
SeeGULL: A Stereotype Benchmark with Broad Geo-Cultural Coverage Leveraging Generative Models
Jha, Akshita, Davani, Aida, Reddy, Chandan K., Dave, Shachi, Prabhakaran, Vinodkumar, Dev, Sunipa
Stereotype benchmark datasets are crucial to detect and mitigate social stereotypes about groups of people in NLP models. However, existing datasets are limited in size and coverage, and are largely restricted to stereotypes prevalent in the Western society. This is especially problematic as language technologies gain hold across the globe. To address this gap, we present SeeGULL, a broad-coverage stereotype dataset, built by utilizing generative capabilities of large language models such as PaLM, and GPT-3, and leveraging a globally diverse rater pool to validate the prevalence of those stereotypes in society. SeeGULL is in English, and contains stereotypes about identity groups spanning 178 countries across 8 different geo-political regions across 6 continents, as well as state-level identities within the US and India. We also include fine-grained offensiveness scores for different stereotypes and demonstrate their global disparities. Furthermore, we include comparative annotations about the same groups by annotators living in the region vs. those that are based in North America, and demonstrate that within-region stereotypes about groups differ from those prevalent in North America. CONTENT WARNING: This paper contains stereotype examples that may be offensive.