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CA-Edit: Causality-Aware Condition Adapter for High-Fidelity Local Facial Attribute Editing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

For efficient and high-fidelity local facial attribute editing, most existing editing methods either require additional fine-tuning for different editing effects or tend to affect beyond the editing regions. Alternatively, inpainting methods can edit the target image region while preserving external areas. However, current inpainting methods still suffer from the generation misalignment with facial attributes description and the loss of facial skin details. To address these challenges, (i) a novel data utilization strategy is introduced to construct datasets consisting of attribute-text-image triples from a data-driven perspective, (ii) a Causality-Aware Condition Adapter is proposed to enhance the contextual causality modeling of specific details, which encodes the skin details from the original image while preventing conflicts between these cues and textual conditions. In addition, a Skin Transition Frequency Guidance technique is introduced for the local modeling of contextual causality via sampling guidance driven by low-frequency alignment. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in boosting both fidelity and editability for localized attribute editing. The code is available at https://github.com/connorxian/CA-Edit.


An Algebraic Notion of Conditional Independence, and Its Application to Knowledge Representation (full version)

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Over the last decades, conditional independence was shown to be a crucial concept supporting adequate modelling and efficient reasoning in probabilistics (Pearl, Geiger, and Verma, 1989). It is the fundamental concept underlying network-based reasoning in probabilistics, which has been arguably one of the most important factors in the rise of contemporary artificial intelligence. Even though many reasoning tasks on the basis of probabilistic information have a high worst-case complexity due to their semantic nature, network-based models allow an efficient computation of many concrete instances of these reasoning tasks thanks to local reasoning techniques. Therefore, conditional independence has also been investigated for several approaches in knowledge representation, such as propositional logic (Darwiche, 1997; Lang, Liberatore, and Marquis, 2002), belief revision (Kern-Isberner, Heyninck, and Beierle, 2022; Lynn, Delgrande, and Peppas, 2022) and conditional logics (Heyninck et al., 2023). For many other central formalisms in KR, such a study has not yet been undertaken. Due to the wide variety of formalisms studied in knowledge representation, it is often beneficial yet challenging to study a concept in a language-independent manner. Indeed, such languageindependent studies avoid having to define and investigate the same concept for different formalisms. In recent years, a promising framework for such language-independent investigations is the algebraic approximation fixpoint theory (AFT) Denecker, Marek, and Truszczyński (2003), which conceives of KR-formalisms as operators over a lattice (such as the immediate consequence operator from logic programming).


Discerning and Characterising Types of Competency Questions for Ontologies

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Competency Questions (CQs) are widely used in ontology development by guiding, among others, the scoping and validation stages. However, very limited guidance exists for formulating CQs and assessing whether they are good CQs, leading to issues such as ambiguity and unusable formulations. To solve this, one requires insight into the nature of CQs for ontologies and their constituent parts, as well as which ones are not. We aim to contribute to such theoretical foundations in this paper, which is informed by analysing questions, their uses, and the myriad of ontology development tasks. This resulted in a first Model for Competency Questions, which comprises five main types of CQs, each with a different purpose: Scoping (SCQ), Validating (VCQ), Foundational (FCQ), Relationship (RCQ), and Metaproperty (MpCQ) questions. This model enhances the clarity of CQs and therewith aims to improve on the effectiveness of CQs in ontology development, thanks to their respective identifiable distinct constituent elements. We illustrate and evaluate them with a user story and demonstrate where which type can be used in ontology development tasks. To foster use and research, we created an annotated repository of 438 CQs, the Repository of Ontology Competency QuestionS (ROCQS), incorporating an existing CQ dataset and new CQs and CQ templates, which further demonstrate distinctions among types of CQs.


AI Perceptions Across Cultures: Similarities and Differences in Expectations, Risks, Benefits, Tradeoffs, and Value in Germany and China

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, understanding public perceptions -- including biases, risks, and benefits -- is critical for guiding research priorities, shaping public discourse, and informing policy. This study explores public mental models of AI using micro scenarios to assess reactions to 71 statements about AI's potential future impacts. Drawing on cross-cultural samples from Germany (N=52) and China (N=60), we identify significant differences in expectations, evaluations, and risk-utility tradeoffs. German participants tended toward more cautious assessments, whereas Chinese participants expressed greater optimism regarding AI's societal benefits. Chinese participants exhibited relatively balanced risk-benefit tradeoffs ($\beta=-0.463$ for risk and $\beta=+0.484$ for benefit, $r^2=.630$). In contrast, German participants showed a stronger emphasis on AI benefits and less on risks ($\beta=-0.337$ for risk and $\beta=+0.715$ for benefit, $r^2=.839$). Visual cognitive maps illustrate these contrasts, offering new perspectives on how cultural contexts shape AI acceptance. Our findings underline key factors influencing public perception and provide actionable insights for fostering equitable and culturally sensitive integration of AI technologies.


Accelerating AI Performance using Anderson Extrapolation on GPUs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present a novel approach for accelerating AI performance by leveraging Anderson extrapolation, a vector-to-vector mapping technique based on a window of historical iterations. By identifying the crossover point (Figure 1) where a mixing penalty is incurred, the method focuses on reducing iterations to convergence, with fewer more compute-intensive but generally cacheable iterations, balancing speed and memory usage with accuracy and algorithmic stability, respectively. We demonstrate significant improvements in both training and inference, motivated by scalability and efficiency extensions to the realm of high-performance computing (HPC). Figure 1: Crossover and mixing penalty plotted against time.


Kalahi: A handcrafted, grassroots cultural LLM evaluation suite for Filipino

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multilingual large language models (LLMs) today may not necessarily provide culturally appropriate and relevant responses to its Filipino users. We introduce Kalahi, a cultural LLM evaluation suite collaboratively created by native Filipino speakers. It is composed of 150 high-quality, handcrafted and nuanced prompts that test LLMs for generations that are relevant to shared Filipino cultural knowledge and values. Strong LLM performance in Kalahi indicates a model's ability to generate responses similar to what an average Filipino would say or do in a given situation. We conducted experiments on LLMs with multilingual and Filipino language support. Results show that Kalahi, while trivial for Filipinos, is challenging for LLMs, with the best model answering only 46.0% of the questions correctly compared to native Filipino performance of 89.10%. Thus, Kalahi can be used to accurately and reliably evaluate Filipino cultural representation in LLMs.


Scaling of Search and Learning: A Roadmap to Reproduce o1 from Reinforcement Learning Perspective

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI o1 represents a significant milestone in Artificial Inteiligence, which achieves expert-level performances on many challanging tasks that require strong reasoning ability.OpenAI has claimed that the main techinique behinds o1 is the reinforcement learining. Recent works use alternative approaches like knowledge distillation to imitate o1's reasoning style, but their effectiveness is limited by the capability ceiling of the teacher model. Therefore, this paper analyzes the roadmap to achieving o1 from the perspective of reinforcement learning, focusing on four key components: policy initialization, reward design, search, and learning. Policy initialization enables models to develop human-like reasoning behaviors, equipping them with the ability to effectively explore solution spaces for complex problems. Reward design provides dense and effective signals via reward shaping or reward modeling, which is the guidance for both search and learning. Search plays a crucial role in generating high-quality solutions during both training and testing phases, which can produce better solutions with more computation. Learning utilizes the data generated by search for improving policy, which can achieve the better performance with more parameters and more searched data. Existing open-source projects that attempt to reproduce o1 can be seem as a part or a variant of our roadmap. Collectively, these components underscore how learning and search drive o1's advancement, making meaningful contributions to the development of LLM.


GenAIOps for GenAI Model-Agility

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI-agility, with which an organization can be quickly adapted to its business priorities, is desired even for the development and operations of generative AI (GenAI) applications. Especially in this paper, we discuss so-called GenAI Model-agility, which we define as the readiness to be flexibly adapted to base foundation models as diverse as the model providers and versions. First, for handling issues specific to generative AI, we first define a methodology of GenAI application development and operations, as GenAIOps, to identify the problem of application quality degradation caused by changes to the underlying foundation models. We study prompt tuning technologies, which look promising to address this problem, and discuss their effectiveness and limitations through case studies using existing tools.


Bridging the Data Provenance Gap Across Text, Speech and Video

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Progress in AI is driven largely by the scale and quality of training data. Despite this, there is a deficit of empirical analysis examining the attributes of well-established datasets beyond text. In this work we conduct the largest and first-of-its-kind longitudinal audit across modalities--popular text, speech, and video datasets--from their detailed sourcing trends and use restrictions to their geographical and linguistic representation. Our manual analysis covers nearly 4000 public datasets between 1990-2024, spanning 608 languages, 798 sources, 659 organizations, and 67 countries. We find that multimodal machine learning applications have overwhelmingly turned to web-crawled, synthetic, and social media platforms, such as YouTube, for their training sets, eclipsing all other sources since 2019. Secondly, tracing the chain of dataset derivations we find that while less than 33% of datasets are restrictively licensed, over 80% of the source content in widely-used text, speech, and video datasets, carry non-commercial restrictions. Finally, counter to the rising number of languages and geographies represented in public AI training datasets, our audit demonstrates measures of relative geographical and multilingual representation have failed to significantly improve their coverage since 2013. We believe the breadth of our audit enables us to empirically examine trends in data sourcing, restrictions, and Western-centricity at an ecosystem-level, and that visibility into these questions are essential to progress in responsible AI. As a contribution to ongoing improvements in dataset transparency and responsible use, we release our entire multimodal audit, allowing practitioners to trace data provenance across text, speech, and video.


Singularity-Free Guiding Vector Field over B\'ezier's Curves Applied to Rovers Path Planning and Path Following

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents a guidance algorithm for solving the problem of following parametric paths, as well as a curvature-varying speed setpoint for land-based car-type wheeled mobile robots (WMRs). The guidance algorithm relies on Singularity-Free Guiding Vector Fields SF-GVF. This novel GVF approach expands the desired robot path and the Guiding vector field to a higher dimensional space, in which an angular control function can be found to ensure global asymptotic convergence to the desired parametric path while avoiding field singularities. In SF-GVF, paths should follow a parametric definition. This feature makes using Bezier's curves attractive to define the robot's desired patch. The curvaturevarying speed setpoint, combined with the guidance algorithm, eases the convergence to the path when physical restrictions exist, such as minimal turning radius or maximal lateral acceleration. We provide theoretical results, simulations, and outdoor experiments using a WMR platform assembled with off-the-shelf components. Keywords Wheeled Mobile Robots, Guiding Vector Fields, Parametric Paths, Path following, Speed controller, curvature changing speed setpoint, Rover.