Africa
Opinion
Artificial intelligence has moved from the realm of science fiction into our pockets. And while we are nowhere close to engaging with AI as sophisticated as the character Data from Star Trek, the forms of artificial narrow intelligence that we do have inform hundreds of everyday decisions, often as subtle as what products you see when you open a shopping app or the order that content appears on your social media feed. Examples abound of the real and potential benefits of AI, like health tech that remotely analyses patients' vital signs to alert medical staff in the event of an emergency, or initiatives to identify vulnerable people eligible for direct cash transfers. But the promises and the success stories are all we see. And though there is a growing global awareness that AI can also be used in ways that are biased, discriminatory, and unaccountable, we know very little about how AI is used to make decisions about us. The use of AI to profile people based on their personal information – essentially, for businesses or government agencies to subtly analyse us to predict our potential as consumers, citizens, or credit risks – is a central feature of surveillance capitalism, and yet mostly shrouded in secrecy.
Amortized Inference for Heterogeneous Reconstruction in Cryo-EM
Levy, Axel, Wetzstein, Gordon, Martel, Julien, Poitevin, Frederic, Zhong, Ellen D.
Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is an imaging modality that provides unique insights into the dynamics of proteins and other building blocks of life. The algorithmic challenge of jointly estimating the poses, 3D structure, and conformational heterogeneity of a biomolecule from millions of noisy and randomly oriented 2D projections in a computationally efficient manner, however, remains unsolved. Our method, cryoFIRE, performs ab initio heterogeneous reconstruction with unknown poses in an amortized framework, thereby avoiding the computationally expensive step of pose search while enabling the analysis of conformational heterogeneity. Poses and conformation are jointly estimated by an encoder while a physics-based decoder aggregates the images into an implicit neural representation of the conformational space. We show that our method can provide one order of magnitude speedup on datasets containing millions of images without any loss of accuracy. We validate that the joint estimation of poses and conformations can be amortized over the size of the dataset. For the first time, we prove that an amortized method can extract interpretable dynamic information from experimental datasets.
The Franz-Parisi Criterion and Computational Trade-offs in High Dimensional Statistics
Bandeira, Afonso S., Alaoui, Ahmed El, Hopkins, Samuel B., Schramm, Tselil, Wein, Alexander S., Zadik, Ilias
Many high-dimensional statistical inference problems are believed to possess inherent computational hardness. Various frameworks have been proposed to give rigorous evidence for such hardness, including lower bounds against restricted models of computation (such as low-degree functions), as well as methods rooted in statistical physics that are based on free energy landscapes. This paper aims to make a rigorous connection between the seemingly different low-degree and free-energy based approaches. We define a free-energy based criterion for hardness and formally connect it to the well-established notion of low-degree hardness for a broad class of statistical problems, namely all Gaussian additive models and certain models with a sparse planted signal. By leveraging these rigorous connections we are able to: establish that for Gaussian additive models the "algebraic" notion of low-degree hardness implies failure of "geometric" local MCMC algorithms, and provide new low-degree lower bounds for sparse linear regression which seem difficult to prove directly. These results provide both conceptual insights into the connections between different notions of hardness, as well as concrete technical tools such as new methods for proving low-degree lower bounds.
M2D2: A Massively Multi-domain Language Modeling Dataset
Reid, Machel, Zhong, Victor, Gururangan, Suchin, Zettlemoyer, Luke
We present M2D2, a fine-grained, massively multi-domain corpus for studying domain adaptation in language models (LMs). M2D2 consists of 8.5B tokens and spans 145 domains extracted from Wikipedia and Semantic Scholar. Using ontologies derived from Wikipedia and ArXiv categories, we organize the domains in each data source into 22 groups. This two-level hierarchy enables the study of relationships between domains and their effects on in- and out-of-domain performance after adaptation. We also present a number of insights into the nature of effective domain adaptation in LMs, as examples of the new types of studies M2D2 enables. To improve in-domain performance, we show the benefits of adapting the LM along a domain hierarchy; adapting to smaller amounts of fine-grained domain-specific data can lead to larger in-domain performance gains than larger amounts of weakly relevant data. We further demonstrate a trade-off between in-domain specialization and out-of-domain generalization within and across ontologies, as well as a strong correlation between out-of-domain performance and lexical overlap between domains.
A Systematic Review of Machine Learning Techniques for Cattle Identification: Datasets, Methods and Future Directions
Hossain, Md Ekramul, Kabir, Muhammad Ashad, Zheng, Lihong, Swain, Dave L., McGrath, Shawn, Medway, Jonathan
Increased biosecurity and food safety requirements may increase demand for efficient traceability and identification systems of livestock in the supply chain. The advanced technologies of machine learning and computer vision have been applied in precision livestock management, including critical disease detection, vaccination, production management, tracking, and health monitoring. This paper offers a systematic literature review (SLR) of vision-based cattle identification. More specifically, this SLR is to identify and analyse the research related to cattle identification using Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL). For the two main applications of cattle detection and cattle identification, all the ML based papers only solve cattle identification problems. However, both detection and identification problems were studied in the DL based papers. Based on our survey report, the most used ML models for cattle identification were support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbour (KNN), and artificial neural network (ANN). Convolutional neural network (CNN), residual network (ResNet), Inception, You Only Look Once (YOLO), and Faster R-CNN were popular DL models in the selected papers. Among these papers, the most distinguishing features were the muzzle prints and coat patterns of cattle. Local binary pattern (LBP), speeded up robust features (SURF), scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), and Inception or CNN were identified as the most used feature extraction methods.
Automotive Multilingual Fault Diagnosis
Pavlopoulos, John, Romell, Alv, Curman, Jacob, Steinert, Olof, Lindgren, Tony, Borg, Markus
Automated fault diagnosis can facilitate diagnostics assistance, speedier troubleshooting, and better-organised logistics. Currently, AI-based prognostics and health management in the automotive industry ignore the textual descriptions of the experienced problems or symptoms. With this study, however, we show that a multilingual pre-trained Transformer can effectively classify the textual claims from a large company with vehicle fleets, despite the task's challenging nature due to the 38 languages and 1,357 classes involved. Overall, we report an accuracy of more than 80% for high-frequency classes and above 60% for above-low-frequency classes, bringing novel evidence that multilingual classification can benefit automotive troubleshooting management.
Dim-Krum: Backdoor-Resistant Federated Learning for NLP with Dimension-wise Krum-Based Aggregation
Zhang, Zhiyuan, Su, Qi, Sun, Xu
Despite the potential of federated learning, it is known to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Many robust federated aggregation methods are proposed to reduce the potential backdoor risk. However, they are mainly validated in the CV field. In this paper, we find that NLP backdoors are hard to defend against than CV, and we provide a theoretical analysis that the malicious update detection error probabilities are determined by the relative backdoor strengths. NLP attacks tend to have small relative backdoor strengths, which may result in the failure of robust federated aggregation methods for NLP attacks. Inspired by the theoretical results, we can choose some dimensions with higher backdoor strengths to settle this issue. We propose a novel federated aggregation algorithm, Dim-Krum, for NLP tasks, and experimental results validate its effectiveness.
Towards Learning Universal Hyperparameter Optimizers with Transformers
Chen, Yutian, Song, Xingyou, Lee, Chansoo, Wang, Zi, Zhang, Qiuyi, Dohan, David, Kawakami, Kazuya, Kochanski, Greg, Doucet, Arnaud, Ranzato, Marc'aurelio, Perel, Sagi, de Freitas, Nando
Meta-learning hyperparameter optimization (HPO) algorithms from prior experiments is a promising approach to improve optimization efficiency over objective functions from a similar distribution. However, existing methods are restricted to learning from experiments sharing the same set of hyperparameters. In this paper, we introduce the OptFormer, the first text-based Transformer HPO framework that provides a universal end-to-end interface for jointly learning policy and function prediction when trained on vast tuning data from the wild, such as Google's Vizier database, one of the world's largest HPO datasets. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the OptFormer can simultaneously imitate at least 7 different HPO algorithms, which can be further improved via its function uncertainty estimates. Compared to a Gaussian Process, the OptFormer also learns a robust prior distribution for hyperparameter response functions, and can thereby provide more accurate and better calibrated predictions. This work paves the path to future extensions for training a Transformer-based model as a general HPO optimizer.
Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning in 5G Networks -- A Comparison of Scientific Impact
Turker, Ilker, Tan, Serhat Orkun
Introduction of fifth generation (5G) wireless network technology has matched the crucial need for high capacity and speed needs of the new generation mobile applications. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) also empowered 5G cellular networks with two mainstreams as machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques. Our study aims to uncover the differences in scientific impact for these two techniques by the means of statistical bibliometrics. The performed analysis includes citation performance with respect to indexing types, funding availability, journal or conference publishing options together with distributions of these metrics along years to evaluate the popularity trends in a detailed manner. Web of Science (WoS) database host 2245 papers for ML and 1407 papers for DL-related studies. DL studies, starting with 9% rate in 2013, has reached to 45% rate in 2022 among all DL and ML-related studies. Results related to scientific impact indicate that DL studies get slightly more average normalized citation (2.256) compared to ML studies (2.118) in 5G, while SCI-Expanded indexed papers in both sides tend to have similar citation performance (3.165 and 3.162 respectively). ML-related studies those are indexed in ESCI show twice citation performance compared to DL. Conference papers in DL domain and journal papers in ML domain are superior in scientific interest to their counterparts with minor differences. Highest citation performance for ML studies is achieved for year 2014, while this peak is observed for 2017 for DL studies. We can conclude that both publication and citation rate for DL-related papers tend to increase and outperform ML-based studies in 5G domain by the means of citation metrics.
DDXPlus: A New Dataset For Automatic Medical Diagnosis
Tchango, Arsene Fansi, Goel, Rishab, Wen, Zhi, Martel, Julien, Ghosn, Joumana
There has been a rapidly growing interest in Automatic Symptom Detection (ASD) and Automatic Diagnosis (AD) systems in the machine learning research literature, aiming to assist doctors in telemedicine services. These systems are designed to interact with patients, collect evidence about their symptoms and relevant antecedents, and possibly make predictions about the underlying diseases. Doctors would review the interactions, including the evidence and the predictions, collect if necessary additional information from patients, before deciding on next steps. Despite recent progress in this area, an important piece of doctors' interactions with patients is missing in the design of these systems, namely the differential diagnosis. Its absence is largely due to the lack of datasets that include such information for models to train on. In this work, we present a large-scale synthetic dataset of roughly 1.3 million patients that includes a differential diagnosis, along with the ground truth pathology, symptoms and antecedents for each patient. Unlike existing datasets which only contain binary symptoms and antecedents, this dataset also contains categorical and multi-choice symptoms and antecedents useful for efficient data collection. Moreover, some symptoms are organized in a hierarchy, making it possible to design systems able to interact with patients in a logical way. As a proof-of-concept, we extend two existing AD and ASD systems to incorporate the differential diagnosis, and provide empirical evidence that using differentials as training signals is essential for the efficiency of such systems or for helping doctors better understand the reasoning of those systems.