Africa
The First Year of AI College Ends in Ruin
That's what the software concluded about a student's paper. One of the professors in the academic program I direct had come across this finding and asked me what to do with it. Then another one saw the same result--100 percent AI--for a different paper by that student, and also wondered: What does this mean? The problem breaks down into more problems: whether it's possible to know for certain that a student used AI, what it even means to "use" AI for writing papers, and when that use amounts to cheating. The software that had flagged our student's papers was also multilayered: Canvas, our courseware system, was running Turnitin, a popular plagiarism-detection service, which had recently installed a new AI-detection algorithm.
Are killer robots the future of war?
Humanity stands on the brink of a new era of warfare. Driven by rapid developments in artificial intelligence, weapons platforms that can identify, target and decide to kill human beings on their own -- without an officer directing an attack or a soldier pulling the trigger -- are fast transforming the future of conflict. Officially, they are called lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), but critics call them killer robots. Many countries, including the United States, China, the United Kingdom, India, Iran, Israel, South Korea, Russia and Turkey, have invested heavily in developing such weapons in recent years. A United Nations report suggests that Turkish-made Kargu-2 drones in fully-automatic mode marked the dawn of this new age when they attacked combatants in Libya in 2020 amid that country's ongoing conflict. Autonomous drones have also played a crucial role in the war in Ukraine, where both Moscow and Kyiv have deployed these uncrewed weapons to target enemy soldiers and infrastructure.
Gated Domain Units for Multi-source Domain Generalization
Föll, Simon, Dubatovka, Alina, Ernst, Eugen, Chau, Siu Lun, Maritsch, Martin, Okanovic, Patrik, Thäter, Gudrun, Buhmann, Joachim M., Wortmann, Felix, Muandet, Krikamol
The phenomenon of distribution shift (DS) occurs when a dataset at test time differs from the dataset at training time, which can significantly impair the performance of a machine learning model in practical settings due to a lack of knowledge about the data's distribution at test time. To address this problem, we postulate that real-world distributions are composed of latent Invariant Elementary Distributions (I.E.D) across different domains. This assumption implies an invariant structure in the solution space that enables knowledge transfer to unseen domains. To exploit this property for domain generalization, we introduce a modular neural network layer consisting of Gated Domain Units (GDUs) that learn a representation for each latent elementary distribution. During inference, a weighted ensemble of learning machines can be created by comparing new observations with the representations of each elementary distribution. Our flexible framework also accommodates scenarios where explicit domain information is not present. Extensive experiments on image, text, and graph data show consistent performance improvement on out-of-training target domains. These findings support the practicality of the I.E.D assumption and the effectiveness of GDUs for domain generalisation.
tasksource: A Dataset Harmonization Framework for Streamlined NLP Multi-Task Learning and Evaluation
The HuggingFace Datasets Hub hosts thousands of datasets, offering exciting opportunities for language model training and evaluation. However, datasets for a specific task type often have different schemas, making harmonization challenging. Multi-task training or evaluation necessitates manual work to fit data into task templates. Several initiatives independently tackle this issue by releasing harmonized datasets or providing harmonization codes to preprocess datasets into a consistent format. We identify patterns across previous preprocessing efforts, such as column name mapping and extracting specific sub-fields from structured data in a column. We then propose a structured annotation framework that ensures our annotations are fully exposed and not hidden within unstructured code. We release a dataset annotation framework and dataset annotations for more than 500 English tasks\footnote{\url{https://github.com/sileod/tasksource}}. These annotations include metadata, such as the names of columns to be used as input or labels for all datasets, which can save time for future dataset preprocessing, regardless of whether our framework is utilized. We fine-tune a multi-task text encoder on all tasksource tasks, outperforming every publicly available text encoder of comparable size in an external evaluation.
Literature Review of the Recent Trends and Applications in various Fuzzy Rule based systems
Varshney, Ayush K., Torra, Vicenç
Fuzzy rule based systems (FRBSs) is a rule-based system which uses linguistic fuzzy variables as antecedents and consequent to represent human understandable knowledge. They have been applied to various applications and areas throughout the soft computing literature. However, FRBSs suffers from many drawbacks such as uncertainty representation, high number of rules, interpretability loss, high computational time for learning etc. To overcome these issues with FRBSs, there exists many extensions of FRBSs. This paper presents an overview and literature review of recent trends on various types and prominent areas of fuzzy systems (FRBSs) namely genetic fuzzy system (GFS), hierarchical fuzzy system (HFS), neuro fuzzy system (NFS), evolving fuzzy system (eFS), FRBSs for big data, FRBSs for imbalanced data, interpretability in FRBSs and FRBSs which use cluster centroids as fuzzy rules. The review is for years 2010-2021. This paper also highlights important contributions, publication statistics and current trends in the field. The paper also addresses several open research areas which need further attention from the FRBSs research community.
Partial Mobilization: Tracking Multilingual Information Flows Amongst Russian Media Outlets and Telegram
Hanley, Hans W. A., Durumeric, Zakir
In response to disinformation and propaganda from Russian online media following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian outlets including Russia Today and Sputnik News were banned throughout Europe. To maintain viewership, many of these Russian outlets began to heavily promote their content on messaging services like Telegram. In this work, we study how 16 Russian media outlets interacted with and utilized 732 Telegram channels throughout 2022. Leveraging the foundational model MPNet, DP-means clustering, and Hawkes Processes, we trace how narratives spread between news sites and Telegram channels. We show that news outlets not only propagate existing narratives through Telegram, but that they source material from the messaging platform. Across the sites in our study, between 2.3% (ura.news) and 26.7% (ukraina.ru) of articles discuss content that originated/resulted from activity on Telegram. Finally, tracking the spread of individual topics, we measure the rate at which news websites and their Telegram channels disseminate content within the Russian media ecosystem.
DimonGen: Diversified Generative Commonsense Reasoning for Explaining Concept Relationships
Liu, Chenzhengyi, Huang, Jie, Zhu, Kerui, Chang, Kevin Chen-Chuan
In this paper, we propose DimonGen, which aims to generate diverse sentences describing concept relationships in various everyday scenarios. To support this, we first create a benchmark dataset for this task by adapting the existing CommonGen dataset. We then propose a two-stage model called MoREE to generate the target sentences. MoREE consists of a mixture of retrievers model that retrieves diverse context sentences related to the given concepts, and a mixture of generators model that generates diverse sentences based on the retrieved contexts. We conduct experiments on the DimonGen task and show that MoREE outperforms strong baselines in terms of both the quality and diversity of the generated sentences. Our results demonstrate that MoREE is able to generate diverse sentences that reflect different relationships between concepts, leading to a comprehensive understanding of concept relationships.
Diffusion Dataset Generation: Towards Closing the Sim2Real Gap for Pedestrian Detection
Farley, Andrew, Zand, Mohsen, Greenspan, Michael
Abstract--We propose a method that augments a simulated dataset using diffusion models to improve the performance of pedestrian detection in real-world data. The high cost of collecting and annotating data in the real-world has motivated the use of simulation platforms to create training datasets. While simulated data is inexpensive to collect and annotate, it unfortunately does not always closely match the distribution of real-world data, which is known as the sim2real gap. In this paper we propose a novel method of synthetic data creation meant to close the sim2real gap for the challenging pedestrian detection task. Our method uses a diffusion-based architecture to learn a real-world distribution which, once trained, is used to generate datasets. We mix this generated data with simulated data as a form of augmentation and show that training on a combination of generated and simulated data increases average precision by as much as 27.3% for pedestrian detection models in real-world data, compared against training on purely simulated data.
Dual Self-Awareness Value Decomposition Framework without Individual Global Max for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Xu, Zhiwei, Zhang, Bin, Li, Dapeng, Zhou, Guangchong, Zhang, Zeren, Fan, Guoliang
Value decomposition methods have gained popularity in the field of cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, almost all existing methods follow the principle of Individual Global Max (IGM) or its variants, which limits their problem-solving capabilities. To address this, we propose a dual self-awareness value decomposition framework, inspired by the notion of dual self-awareness in psychology, that entirely rejects the IGM premise. Each agent consists of an ego policy for action selection and an alter ego value function to solve the credit assignment problem. The value function factorization can ignore the IGM assumption by utilizing an explicit search procedure. On the basis of the above, we also suggest a novel anti-ego exploration mechanism to avoid the algorithm becoming stuck in a local optimum. As the first fully IGM-free value decomposition method, our proposed framework achieves desirable performance in various cooperative tasks.
FitMe: Deep Photorealistic 3D Morphable Model Avatars
Lattas, Alexandros, Moschoglou, Stylianos, Ploumpis, Stylianos, Gecer, Baris, Deng, Jiankang, Zafeiriou, Stefanos
In this paper, we introduce FitMe, a facial reflectance model and a differentiable rendering optimization pipeline, that can be used to acquire high-fidelity renderable human avatars from single or multiple images. The model consists of a multi-modal style-based generator, that captures facial appearance in terms of diffuse and specular reflectance, and a PCA-based shape model. We employ a fast differentiable rendering process that can be used in an optimization pipeline, while also achieving photorealistic facial shading. Our optimization process accurately captures both the facial reflectance and shape in high-detail, by exploiting the expressivity of the style-based latent representation and of our shape model. FitMe achieves state-of-the-art reflectance acquisition and identity preservation on single "in-the-wild" facial images, while it produces impressive scan-like results, when given multiple unconstrained facial images pertaining to the same identity. In contrast with recent implicit avatar reconstructions, FitMe requires only one minute and produces relightable mesh and texture-based avatars, that can be used by end-user applications.