Africa
Mind the Knowledge Gap: A Survey of Knowledge-enhanced Dialogue Systems
Shaier, Sagi, Hunter, Lawrence, Kann, Katharina
Many dialogue systems (DSs) lack characteristics humans have, such as emotion perception, factuality, and informativeness. Enhancing DSs with knowledge alleviates this problem, but, as many ways of doing so exist, keeping track of all proposed methods is difficult. Here, we present the first survey of knowledge-enhanced DSs. We define three categories of systems - internal, external, and hybrid - based on the knowledge they use. We survey the motivation for enhancing DSs with knowledge, used datasets, and methods for knowledge search, knowledge encoding, and knowledge incorporation. Finally, we propose how to improve existing systems based on theories from linguistics and cognitive science.
Automated Configuration and Usage of Strategy Portfolios for Bargaining
Renting, Bram M., Hoos, Holger H., Jonker, Catholijn M.
Bargaining can be used to resolve mixed-motive games in multi-agent systems. Although there is an abundance of negotiation strategies implemented in automated negotiating agents, most agents are based on single fixed strategies, while it is widely acknowledged that there is no single best-performing strategy for all negotiation settings. In this paper, we focus on bargaining settings where opponents are repeatedly encountered, but the bargaining problems change. We introduce a novel method that automatically creates and deploys a portfolio of complementary negotiation strategies using a training set and optimise pay-off in never-before-seen bargaining settings through per-setting strategy selection. Our method relies on the following contributions. We introduce a feature representation that captures characteristics for both the opponent and the bargaining problem. We model the behaviour of an opponent during a negotiation based on its actions, which is indicative of its negotiation strategy, in order to be more effective in future encounters. Our combination of feature-based methods generalises to new negotiation settings, as in practice, over time, it selects effective counter strategies in future encounters. Our approach is tested in an ANAC-like tournament, and we show that we are capable of winning such a tournament with a 5.6% increase in pay-off compared to the runner-up agent.
InterMulti:Multi-view Multimodal Interactions with Text-dominated Hierarchical High-order Fusion for Emotion Analysis
Qiu, Feng, Kong, Wanzeng, Ding, Yu
Humans are sophisticated at reading interlocutors' emotions from multimodal signals, such as speech contents, voice tones and facial expressions. However, machines might struggle to understand various emotions due to the difficulty of effectively decoding emotions from the complex interactions between multimodal signals. In this paper, we propose a multimodal emotion analysis framework, InterMulti, to capture complex multimodal interactions from different views and identify emotions from multimodal signals. Our proposed framework decomposes signals of different modalities into three kinds of multimodal interaction representations, including a modality-full interaction representation, a modality-shared interaction representation, and three modality-specific interaction representations. Additionally, to balance the contribution of different modalities and learn a more informative latent interaction representation, we developed a novel Text-dominated Hierarchical High-order Fusion(THHF) module. THHF module reasonably integrates the above three kinds of representations into a comprehensive multimodal interaction representation. Extensive experimental results on widely used datasets, (i.e.) MOSEI, MOSI and IEMOCAP, demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art.
Biased processing and opinion polarization: experimental refinement of argument communication theory in the context of the energy debate
In sociological research, the study of macro processes, such as opinion polarization, faces a fundamental problem, the so-called micro-macro problem. To overcome this problem, we combine empirical experimental research on biased argument processing with a computational theory of group deliberation in order to clarify the role of biased processing in debates around energy. The experiment reveals a strong tendency to consider arguments aligned with the current attitude more persuasive and to downgrade those speaking against it. This is integrated into the framework of argument communication theory in which agents exchange arguments about a certain topic and adapt opinions accordingly. We derive a mathematical model that allows to relate the strength of biased processing to expected attitude changes given the specific experimental conditions and find a clear signature of moderate biased processing. We further show that this model fits significantly better to the experimentally observed attitude changes than the neutral argument processing assumption made in previous models. Our approach provides new insight into the relationship between biased processing and opinion polarization. At the individual level our analysis reveals a sharp qualitative transition from attitude moderation to polarization. At the collective level we find (i.) that weak biased processing significantly accelerates group decision processes whereas (ii.) strong biased processing leads to a persistent conflictual state of subgroup polarization. While this shows that biased processing alone is sufficient for the emergence of polarization, we also demonstrate that homophily may lead to intra-group conflict at significantly lower rates of biased processing.
Understanding Stereotypes in Language Models: Towards Robust Measurement and Zero-Shot Debiasing
Mattern, Justus, Jin, Zhijing, Sachan, Mrinmaya, Mihalcea, Rada, Schölkopf, Bernhard
Generated texts from large pretrained language models have been shown to exhibit a variety of harmful, human-like biases about various demographics. These findings prompted large efforts aiming to understand and measure such effects, with the goal of providing benchmarks that can guide the development of techniques mitigating these stereotypical associations. However, as recent research has pointed out, the current benchmarks lack a robust experimental setup, consequently hindering the inference of meaningful conclusions from their evaluation metrics. In this paper, we extend these arguments and demonstrate that existing techniques and benchmarks aiming to measure stereotypes tend to be inaccurate and consist of a high degree of experimental noise that severely limits the knowledge we can gain from benchmarking language models based on them. Accordingly, we propose a new framework for robustly measuring and quantifying biases exhibited by generative language models. Finally, we use this framework to investigate GPT-3's occupational gender bias and propose prompting techniques for mitigating these biases without the need for fine-tuning.
Social influence under uncertainty in interaction with peers, robots and computers
Zonca, Joshua, Folso, Anna, Sciutti, Alessandra
Taking advice from others requires confidence in their competence. This is important for interaction with peers, but also for collaboration with social robots and artificial agents. Nonetheless, we do not always have access to information about others' competence or performance. In these uncertain environments, do our prior beliefs about the nature and the competence of our interacting partners modulate our willingness to rely on their judgments? In a joint perceptual decision making task, participants made perceptual judgments and observed the simulated estimates of either a human participant, a social humanoid robot or a computer. Then they could modify their estimates based on this feedback. Results show participants' belief about the nature of their partner biased their compliance with its judgments: participants were more influenced by the social robot than human and computer partners. This difference emerged strongly at the very beginning of the task and decreased with repeated exposure to empirical feedback on the partner's responses, disclosing the role of prior beliefs in social influence under uncertainty. Furthermore, the results of our functional task suggest an important difference between human-human and human-robot interaction in the absence of overt socially relevant signal from the partner: the former is modulated by social normative mechanisms, whereas the latter is guided by purely informational mechanisms linked to the perceived competence of the partner.
Train YOLO for Object Detection on a Custom Dataset using Python
I recently started working in the field of computer vision. And in these early days, I'm studying how the various algorithms of object detection work. Among the most well-known ones are R-CNN, Fast R-CNN, Faster R-CNN and of course YOLO. In this article, I want to focus on the last mentioned algorithm. YOLO is the state of the art in object detection and there are endless use cases where YOLO can be used.
World Cup predictions: How many games did our AI get right?
World Cup 2022 produced incredible football. At the start of the tournament, Al Jazeera introduced Kashef, our artificial intelligence (AI) robot, to crunch the numbers and predict the results of each game. After every day of action, Kashef downloaded the day's data and compared it with more than 200 metrics, including the number of wins, goals scored and FIFA rankings, from matches played over the past century, totalling more than 100,000 records, to see who was most likely to win the following day. The group stages from November 20 to December 2 were not very kind to Kashef, who erred on the side of caution and failed to foresee any of the many major upsets. The good news for us sentient beings is that every time Kashef got it wrong, we were treated to a feast of World Cup magic, including Saudi Arabia's stunning 2-1 victory over Argentina, Morocco's 2-0 defeat of Belgium and Tunisia's 1-0 win over 2018 champions France.
An ensemble neural network approach to forecast Dengue outbreak based on climatic condition
Panja, Madhurima, Chakraborty, Tanujit, Nadim, Sk Shahid, Ghosh, Indrajit, Kumar, Uttam, Liu, Nan
Dengue fever is a virulent disease spreading over 100 tropical and subtropical countries in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. This arboviral disease affects around 400 million people globally, severely distressing the healthcare systems. The unavailability of a specific drug and ready-to-use vaccine makes the situation worse. Hence, policymakers must rely on early warning systems to control intervention-related decisions. Forecasts routinely provide critical information for dangerous epidemic events. However, the available forecasting models (e.g., weather-driven mechanistic, statistical time series, and machine learning models) lack a clear understanding of different components to improve prediction accuracy and often provide unstable and unreliable forecasts. This study proposes an ensemble wavelet neural network with exogenous factor(s) (XEWNet) model that can produce reliable estimates for dengue outbreak prediction for three geographical regions, namely San Juan, Iquitos, and Ahmedabad. The proposed XEWNet model is flexible and can easily incorporate exogenous climate variable(s) confirmed by statistical causality tests in its scalable framework. The proposed model is an integrated approach that uses wavelet transformation into an ensemble neural network framework that helps in generating more reliable long-term forecasts. The proposed XEWNet allows complex non-linear relationships between the dengue incidence cases and rainfall; however, mathematically interpretable, fast in execution, and easily comprehensible. The proposal's competitiveness is measured using computational experiments based on various statistical metrics and several statistical comparison tests. In comparison with statistical, machine learning, and deep learning methods, our proposed XEWNet performs better in 75% of the cases for short-term and long-term forecasting of dengue incidence.
Multimodal Learning for Multi-Omics: A Survey
Tabakhi, Sina, Suvon, Mohammod Naimul Islam, Ahadian, Pegah, Lu, Haiping
With advanced imaging, sequencing, and profiling technologies, multiple omics data become increasingly available and hold promises for many healthcare applications such as cancer diagnosis and treatment. Multimodal learning for integrative multi-omics analysis can help researchers and practitioners gain deep insights into human diseases and improve clinical decisions. However, several challenges are hindering the development in this area, including the availability of easily accessible open-source tools. This survey aims to provide an up-to-date overview of the data challenges, fusion approaches, datasets, and software tools from several new perspectives. We identify and investigate various omics data challenges that can help us understand the field better. We categorize fusion approaches comprehensively to cover existing methods in this area. We collect existing open-source tools to facilitate their broader utilization and development. We explore a broad range of omics data modalities and a list of accessible datasets. Finally, we summarize future directions that can potentially address existing gaps and answer the pressing need to advance multimodal learning for multi-omics data analysis.