Africa
Spatial State-Action Features for General Games
Soemers, Dennis J. N. J., Piette, Éric, Stephenson, Matthew, Browne, Cameron
In many board games and other abstract games, patterns have been used as features that can guide automated game-playing agents. Such patterns or features often represent particular configurations of pieces, empty positions, etc., which may be relevant for a game's strategies. Their use has been particularly prevalent in the game of Go, but also many other games used as benchmarks for AI research. Simple, linear policies of such features are unlikely to produce state-of-the-art playing strength like the deep neural networks that have been more commonly used in recent years do. However, they typically require significantly fewer resources to train, which is paramount for large-scale studies of hundreds to thousands of distinct games. In this paper, we formulate a design and efficient implementation of spatial state-action features for general games. These are patterns that can be trained to incentivise or disincentivise actions based on whether or not they match variables of the state in a local area around action variables. We provide extensive details on several design and implementation choices, with a primary focus on achieving a high degree of generality to support a wide variety of different games using different board geometries or other graphs. Secondly, we propose an efficient approach for evaluating active features for any given set of features. In this approach, we take inspiration from heuristics used in problems such as SAT to optimise the order in which parts of patterns are matched and prune unnecessary evaluations. An empirical evaluation on 33 distinct games in the Ludii general game system demonstrates the efficiency of this approach in comparison to a naive baseline, as well as a baseline based on prefix trees.
Visual Identification of Problematic Bias in Large Label Spaces
Bäuerle, Alex, Turker, Aybuke Gul, Burke, Ken, Aka, Osman, Ropinski, Timo, Greer, Christina, Varadarajan, Mani
While the need for well-trained, fair ML systems is increasing ever more, measuring fairness for modern models and datasets is becoming increasingly difficult as they grow at an unprecedented pace. One key challenge in scaling common fairness metrics to such models and datasets is the requirement of exhaustive ground truth labeling, which cannot always be done. Indeed, this often rules out the application of traditional analysis metrics and systems. At the same time, ML-fairness assessments cannot be made algorithmically, as fairness is a highly subjective matter. Thus, domain experts need to be able to extract and reason about bias throughout models and datasets to make informed decisions. While visual analysis tools are of great help when investigating potential bias in DL models, none of the existing approaches have been designed for the specific tasks and challenges that arise in large label spaces. Addressing the lack of visualization work in this area, we propose guidelines for designing visualizations for such large label spaces, considering both technical and ethical issues. Our proposed visualization approach can be integrated into classical model and data pipelines, and we provide an implementation of our techniques open-sourced as a TensorBoard plug-in. With our approach, different models and datasets for large label spaces can be systematically and visually analyzed and compared to make informed fairness assessments tackling problematic bias.
Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection by Self-Distillation and Negative Sampling
Rafiee, Nima, Gholamipoorfard, Rahil, Adaloglou, Nikolas, Jaxy, Simon, Ramakers, Julius, Kollmann, Markus
Detecting whether examples belong to a given in-distribution or are Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) requires identifying features specific to the in-distribution. In the absence of labels, these features can be learned by self-supervised techniques under the generic assumption that the most abstract features are those which are statistically most over-represented in comparison to other distributions from the same domain. In this work, we show that self-distillation of the in-distribution training set together with contrasting against negative examples derived from shifting transformation of auxiliary data strongly improves OOD detection. We find that this improvement depends on how the negative samples are generated. In particular, we observe that by leveraging negative samples, which keep the statistics of low-level features while changing the high-level semantics, higher average detection performance is obtained. Furthermore, good negative sampling strategies can be identified from the sensitivity of the OOD detection score. The efficiency of our approach is demonstrated across a diverse range of OOD detection problems, setting new benchmarks for unsupervised OOD detection in the visual domain.
Chatbot System Architecture
Mohammed, Moataz, Aref, Mostafa M.
The conversational agents is one of the most interested topics in computer science field in the recent decade. Which can be composite from more than one subject in this field, which you need to apply Natural Language Processing Concepts and some Artificial Intelligence Techniques such as Deep Learning methods to make decision about how should be the response. This paper is dedicated to discuss the system architecture for the conversational agent and explain each component in details.
DeepCreativity: Measuring Creativity with Deep Learning Techniques
Franceschelli, Giorgio, Musolesi, Mirco
Measuring machine creativity is one of the most fascinating challenges in Artificial Intelligence. This paper explores the possibility of using generative learning techniques for automatic assessment of creativity. The proposed solution does not involve human judgement, it is modular and of general applicability. We introduce a new measure, namely DeepCreativity, based on Margaret Boden's definition of creativity as composed by value, novelty and surprise. We evaluate our methodology (and related measure) considering a case study, i.e., the generation of 19th century American poetry, showing its effectiveness and expressiveness.
New Datasets to Democratize Speech Recognition Technology
The next wave of AI will be powered by the democratization of data. Open-source frameworks such as TensorFlow and Pytorch have brought machine learning to a huge developer base, but most state-of-the-art models still rely on training datasets which are either wholly proprietary or prohibitively expensive to license [1]. As a result, the best automated speech recognition (ASR) models for converting speech audio into text are only available commercially, and are trained on data unavailable to the general public. Furthermore, only widely-spoken languages receive industry attention due to market incentives, limiting the availability of cutting-edge speech technology to English and a handful of other languages. The first is prohibitive licensing: Several free datasets do exist, but most of sufficient size and quality to make models truly shine are barred from commercial use. As a response, we created The People's Speech, a massive English-language dataset of audio transcriptions of full sentences (see Sample 1).
The Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation Helps Launch Artificial Intelligence in Ethiopia
When it comes to Sub-Saharan Africa, the media always focuses on war, famine and disease. Little is known about the innovation and positive attributes stemming from the region. One such attribute, is the growth of computer science and artificial intelligence. Indeed, the field of AI has skyrocketed in developing nations with the advent of the home computer, but has recently found burgeoning roots, not in Silicon Valley, India or China, but in the bustling capital of Ethiopia. Thanks to a leading AI group in Hong Kong called OpenCog Foundation, funding from the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation based in New York, and the Hong Kong government, the AI lab in Sidist Killo, Ethiopia called Addis AI Lab, has become the computer science pioneer in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Emerging Economies More Optimistic about Artificial Intelligence
According to a new survey, six out of ten expect that products and services using artificial intelligence will profoundly change their daily life in the next three to five years and half feel that this has already happened. These are some of the findings of a 28-country survey conducted by Ipsos for the World Economic Forum of 19,504 adults under the age of 75 between November 19 and December 3, 2021. "In order to trust artificial intelligence, people must know and understand exactly what AI is, what it's doing, and its impact," said Kay Firth-Butterfield, Head of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the World Economic Forum. "Leaders and companies must make transparent and trustworthy AI a priority as they implement this technology. At the World Economic Forum, we are focused on multistakeholder collaboration to optimize accountability, transparency, privacy and impartiality to create that trust. With the ability to solve many of society's pressing issues, we are focused on accelerating the benefits and mitigating the risks of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Only then can we gain public trust and benefit from the rewards of emerging tech like AI."
A Survey of Opponent Modeling in Adversarial Domains
Nashed, Samer | Zilberstein, Shlomo (UMass Amherst)
Opponent modeling is the ability to use prior knowledge and observations in order to predict the behavior of an opponent. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of existing opponent modeling techniques for adversarial domains, many of which must address stochastic, continuous, or concurrent actions, and sparse, partially observable payoff structures. We discuss all the components of opponent modeling systems, including feature extraction, learning algorithms, and strategy abstractions. These discussions lead us to propose a new form of analysis for describing and predicting the evolution of game states over time. We then introduce a new framework that facilitates method comparison, analyze a representative selection of techniques using the proposed framework, and highlight common trends among recently proposed methods. Finally, we list several open problems and discuss future research directions inspired by AI research on opponent modeling and related research in other disciplines.
Spatiotemporal Clustering with Neyman-Scott Processes via Connections to Bayesian Nonparametric Mixture Models
Wang, Yixin, Degleris, Anthony, Williams, Alex H., Linderman, Scott W.
Neyman-Scott processes (NSPs) are point process models that generate clusters of points in time or space. They are natural models for a wide range of phenomena, ranging from neural spike trains to document streams. The clustering property is achieved via a doubly stochastic formulation: first, a set of latent events is drawn from a Poisson process; then, each latent event generates a set of observed data points according to another Poisson process. This construction is similar to Bayesian nonparametric mixture models like the Dirichlet process mixture model (DPMM) in that the number of latent events (i.e. clusters) is a random variable, but the point process formulation makes the NSP especially well suited to modeling spatiotemporal data. While many specialized algorithms have been developed for DPMMs, comparatively fewer works have focused on inference in NSPs. Here, we present novel connections between NSPs and DPMMs, with the key link being a third class of Bayesian mixture models called mixture of finite mixture models (MFMMs). Leveraging this connection, we adapt the standard collapsed Gibbs sampling algorithm for DPMMs to enable scalable Bayesian inference on NSP models. We demonstrate the potential of Neyman-Scott processes on a variety of applications including sequence detection in neural spike trains and event detection in document streams.