Africa
Multilingual Transfer and Domain Adaptation for Low-Resource Languages of Spain
Luo, Yuanchang, Wu, Zhanglin, Wei, Daimeng, Shang, Hengchao, Li, Zongyao, Guo, Jiaxin, Rao, Zhiqiang, Li, Shaojun, Yang, Jinlong, Xie, Yuhao, Wei, Jiawei Zheng Bin, Yang, Hao
This article introduces the submission status of the Translation into Low-Resource Languages of Spain task at (WMT 2024) by Huawei Translation Service Center (HW-TSC). We participated in three translation tasks: spanish to aragonese (es-arg), spanish to aranese (es-arn), and spanish to asturian (es-ast). For these three translation tasks, we use training strategies such as multilingual transfer, regularized dropout, forward translation and back translation, labse denoising, transduction ensemble learning and other strategies to neural machine translation (NMT) model based on training deep transformer-big architecture. By using these enhancement strategies, our submission achieved a competitive result in the final evaluation.
Public interest in science or bots? Selective amplification of scientific articles on Twitter
Rahman, Ashiqur, Mohammadi, Ehsan, Alhoori, Hamed
With the remarkable capability to reach the public instantly, social media has become integral in sharing scholarly articles to measure public response. Since spamming by bots on social media can steer the conversation and present a false public interest in given research, affecting policies impacting the public's lives in the real world, this topic warrants critical study and attention. We used the Altmetric dataset in combination with data collected through the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) and the Botometer API. We combined the data into an extensive dataset with academic articles, several features from the article and a label indicating whether the article had excessive bot activity on Twitter or not. We analyzed the data to see the possibility of bot activity based on different characteristics of the article. We also trained machine-learning models using this dataset to identify possible bot activity in any given article. Our machine-learning models were capable of identifying possible bot activity in any academic article with an accuracy of 0.70. We also found that articles related to "Health and Human Science" are more prone to bot activity compared to other research areas. Without arguing the maliciousness of the bot activity, our work presents a tool to identify the presence of bot activity in the dissemination of an academic article and creates a baseline for future research in this direction.
'Simulacrum of Stories': Examining Large Language Models as Qualitative Research Participants
Kapania, Shivani, Agnew, William, Eslami, Motahhare, Heidari, Hoda, Fox, Sarah
The recent excitement around generative models has sparked a wave of proposals suggesting the replacement of human participation and labor in research and development--e.g., through surveys, experiments, and interviews--with synthetic research data generated by large language models (LLMs). We conducted interviews with 19 qualitative researchers to understand their perspectives on this paradigm shift. Initially skeptical, researchers were surprised to see similar narratives emerge in the LLM-generated data when using the interview probe. However, over several conversational turns, they went on to identify fundamental limitations, such as how LLMs foreclose participants' consent and agency, produce responses lacking in palpability and contextual depth, and risk delegitimizing qualitative research methods. We argue that the use of LLMs as proxies for participants enacts the surrogate effect, raising ethical and epistemological concerns that extend beyond the technical limitations of current models to the core of whether LLMs fit within qualitative ways of knowing.
Psychometrics for Hypnopaedia-Aware Machinery via Chaotic Projection of Artificial Mental Imagery
Chang, Ching-Chun, Gao, Kai, Xu, Shuying, Kordoni, Anastasia, Leckie, Christopher, Echizen, Isao
Neural backdoors represent insidious cybersecurity loopholes that render learning machinery vulnerable to unauthorised manipulations, potentially enabling the weaponisation of artificial intelligence with catastrophic consequences. A backdoor attack involves the clandestine infiltration of a trigger during the learning process, metaphorically analogous to hypnopaedia, where ideas are implanted into a subject's subconscious mind under the state of hypnosis or unconsciousness. When activated by a sensory stimulus, the trigger evokes conditioned reflex that directs a machine to mount a predetermined response. In this study, we propose a cybernetic framework for constant surveillance of backdoors threats, driven by the dynamic nature of untrustworthy data sources. We develop a self-aware unlearning mechanism to autonomously detach a machine's behaviour from the backdoor trigger. Through reverse engineering and statistical inference, we detect deceptive patterns and estimate the likelihood of backdoor infection. We employ model inversion to elicit artificial mental imagery, using stochastic processes to disrupt optimisation pathways and avoid convergent but potentially flawed patterns. This is followed by hypothesis analysis, which estimates the likelihood of each potentially malicious pattern being the true trigger and infers the probability of infection. The primary objective of this study is to maintain a stable state of equilibrium between knowledge fidelity and backdoor vulnerability.
On the universality of neural encodings in CNNs
Guth, Florentin, Ménard, Brice
We explore the universality of neural encodings in convolutional neural networks trained on image classification tasks. We develop a procedure to directly compare the learned weights rather than their representations. It is based on a factorization of spatial and channel dimensions and measures the similarity of aligned weight covariances. We show that, for a range of layers of VGG-type networks, the learned eigenvectors appear to be universal across different natural image datasets. Our results suggest the existence of a universal neural encoding for natural images. They explain, at a more fundamental level, the success of transfer learning. Our work shows that, instead of aiming at maximizing the performance of neural networks, one can alternatively attempt to maximize the universality of the learned encoding, in order to build a principled foundation model.
Overriding Safety protections of Open-source Models
LLMs(Large Language Models) nowadays have widespread adoption as a tool for solving issues across various domain/tasks. These models since are susceptible to produce harmful or toxic results, inference-time adversarial attacks, therefore they do undergo safety alignment training and Red teaming for putting in safety guardrails. For using these models, usually fine-tuning is done for model alignment on the desired tasks, which can make model more aligned but also make it more susceptible to produce unsafe responses, if fine-tuned with harmful data.In this paper, we study how much of impact introduction of harmful data in fine-tuning can make, and if it can override the safety protection of those models. Conversely,it was also explored that if model is fine-tuned on safety data can make the model produce more safer responses. Further we explore if fine-tuning the model on harmful data makes it less helpful or less trustworthy because of increase in model uncertainty leading to knowledge drift. Our extensive experimental results shown that Safety protection in an open-source can be overridden, when fine-tuned with harmful data as observed by ASR increasing by 35% when compared to basemodel's ASR. Also, as observed, fine-tuning a model with harmful data made the harmful fine-tuned model highly uncertain with huge knowledge drift and less truthfulness in its responses. Furthermore, for the safe fine-tuned model, ASR decreases by 51.68% as compared to the basemodel, and Safe model also shown in minor drop in uncertainty and truthfulness as compared to basemodel. This paper's code is available at: https://github.com/techsachinkr/Overriding_Model_Safety_Protections
Automated conjecturing in mathematics with \emph{TxGraffiti}
\emph{TxGraffiti} is a data-driven, heuristic-based computer program developed to automate the process of generating conjectures across various mathematical domains. Since its creation in 2017, \emph{TxGraffiti} has contributed to numerous mathematical publications, particularly in graph theory. In this paper, we present the design and core principles of \emph{TxGraffiti}, including its roots in the original \emph{Graffiti} program, which pioneered the automation of mathematical conjecturing. We describe the data collection process, the generation of plausible conjectures, and methods such as the \emph{Dalmatian} heuristic for filtering out redundant or transitive conjectures. Additionally, we highlight its contributions to the mathematical literature and introduce a new web-based interface that allows users to explore conjectures interactively. While we focus on graph theory, the techniques demonstrated extend to other areas of mathematics.
How AI's data-crunching-power can help demystify the cosmos
We hear about artificial intelligence all the time nowadays--but what is it doing for astronomy? New research papers are published almost every week using AI for some new investigation in astronomy: classifying galaxies, identifying solar flares, exploring exoplanet atmospheres, and more. AI's biggest strength is that it can sort through mountains of data much faster than a human--a skill that's particularly timely as new telescopes are generating more and more data for astronomers to handle. "We can use [AI] to tackle problems we couldn't tackle before because they're too computationally expensive," said Daniela Huppenkothen, astronomer and data scientist at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research, in MIT Technology Review. One telescope in particular has many astronomers abuzz about AI: the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, scheduled to be completed in January 2025, just a few short months away.
AfriClimate AI participation at the Deep Learning Indaba 2024: from a spark to a community, leading AI for climate action
The Deep Learning Indaba 2024 was not just another event for us--it was a reunion. For AfriClimate AI, the Indaba represents our birthplace. It was at the Indaba 2023 in Accra, Ghana, that a pivotal conversation ignited a movement, sparking the creation of AfriClimate AI. "Last year, I was invited to give a talk about my work on Uncertainty, AI, and Climate Science at the Deep Learning Indaba in Accra, Ghana. As is usual with invited talks, one tends to focus on the successful parts of the work. But for some reason, that morning, I decided to add a slide about the challenges of working in AI and sustainability in Africa, primarily driven by the pervasive data scarcity issues. It turned out that almost everyone in the room identified with these issues. This was the birthplace of AfriClimate AI, a grassroots research community dedicated to tackling these issues head-on through capacity building, open datasets, representative benchmarks, and state-of-the-art weather forecasting models for Africa."
EarthquakeNPP: Benchmark Datasets for Earthquake Forecasting with Neural Point Processes
Stockman, Samuel, Lawson, Daniel, Werner, Maximilian
Classical point process models, such as the epidemic-type aftershock sequence (ETAS) model, have been widely used for forecasting the event times and locations of earthquakes for decades. Recent advances have led to Neural Point Processes (NPPs), which promise greater flexibility and improvements over classical models. However, the currently-used benchmark dataset for NPPs does not represent an up-to-date challenge in the seismological community since it lacks a key earthquake sequence from the region and improperly splits training and testing data. Furthermore, initial earthquake forecast benchmarking lacks a comparison to state-of-the-art earthquake forecasting models typically used by the seismological community. To address these gaps, we introduce EarthquakeNPP: a collection of benchmark datasets to facilitate testing of NPPs on earthquake data, accompanied by a credible implementation of the ETAS model. The datasets cover a range of small to large target regions within California, dating from 1971 to 2021, and include different methodologies for dataset generation. In a benchmarking experiment, we compare three spatio-temporal NPPs against ETAS and find that none outperform ETAS in either spatial or temporal log-likelihood. These results indicate that current NPP implementations are not yet suitable for practical earthquake forecasting. However, EarthquakeNPP will serve as a platform for collaboration between the seismology and machine learning communities with the goal of improving earthquake predictability.