This article reviews contemporary methods for integrating force, including both proprioception and tactile sensing, in robot manipulation policy learning. We conduct a comparative analysis on various approaches for sensing force, data collection, behavior cloning, tactile representation learning, and low-level robot control. From our analysis, we articulate when and why forces are needed, and highlight opportunities to improve learning of contact-rich, generalist robot policies on the path toward highly capable touch-based robot foundation models. We generally find that while there are few tasks such as pouring, peg-in-hole insertion, and handling delicate objects, the performance of imitation learning models is not at a level of dynamics where force truly matters. Also, force and touch are abstract quantities that can be inferred through a wide range of modalities and are often measured and controlled implicitly. We hope that juxtaposing the different approaches currently in use will help the reader to gain a systemic understanding and help inspire the next generation of robot foundation models.

Visual quality inspection systems, crucial in sectors like manufacturing and logistics, employ computer vision and machine learning for precise, rapid defect detection. However, their unexplained nature can hinder trust, error identification, and system improvement. This paper presents a framework to bolster visual quality inspection by using CAM-based explanations to refine semantic segmentation models. Our approach consists of 1) Model Training, 2) XAI-based Model Explanation, 3) XAI Evaluation, and 4) Annotation Augmentation for Model Enhancement, informed by explanations and expert insights. Evaluations show XAI-enhanced models surpass original DeepLabv3-ResNet101 models, especially in intricate object segmentation.

Data augmentation has emerged as a powerful technique in machine learning, strengthening model robustness while mitigating overfitting and under-fitting issues by generating diverse synthetic data. Nevertheless, despite its success in other domains, data augmentation's potential remains largely untapped in mobility data analysis, primarily due to the intricate nature and unique format of trajectory data. Additionally, there is a lack of frameworks capable of point-wise data augmentation, which can reliably generate synthetic trajectories while preserving the inherent characteristics of the original data. To address these challenges, this research introduces AugmenTRAJ, an open-source Python3 framework designed explicitly for trajectory data augmentation. AugmenTRAJ offers a reliable and well-controlled approach for generating synthetic trajectories, thereby enabling the harnessing of data augmentation benefits in mobility analysis. This thesis presents a comprehensive overview of the methodologies employed in developing AugmenTRAJ and showcases the various data augmentation techniques available within the framework. AugmenTRAJ opens new possibilities for enhancing mobility data analysis models' performance and generalization capabilities by providing researchers with a practical and versatile tool for augmenting trajectory data, Its user-friendly implementation in Python3 facilitates easy integration into existing workflows, offering the community an accessible resource to leverage the full potential of data augmentation in trajectory-based applications.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed more widely, customization with respect to vocabulary, style and character becomes more important. In this work we introduce model arithmetic, a novel inference framework for composing and biasing LLMs without the need for model (re)training or highly specific datasets. In addition, the framework allows for more precise control of generated text than direct prompting and prior controlled text generation (CTG) techniques. Using model arithmetic, we can express prior CTG techniques as simple formulas and naturally extend them to new and more effective formulations. Further, we show that speculative sampling, a technique for efficient LLM sampling, extends to our setting. This enables highly efficient text generation with multiple composed models with only marginal overhead over a single model. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that model arithmetic allows fine-grained control of generated text while outperforming state-of-the-art on the task of toxicity reduction.

While a substantial amount of work has recently been devoted to enhance the performance of computational Authorship Identification (AId) systems, little to no attention has been paid to endowing AId systems with the ability to explain the reasons behind their predictions. This lacking substantially hinders the practical employment of AId methodologies, since the predictions returned by such systems are hardly useful unless they are supported with suitable explanations. In this paper, we explore the applicability of existing general-purpose eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques to AId, with a special focus on explanations addressed to scholars working in cultural heritage. In particular, we assess the relative merits of three different types of XAI techniques (feature ranking, probing, factuals and counterfactual selection) on three different AId tasks (authorship attribution, authorship verification, same-authorship verification) by running experiments on real AId data. Our analysis shows that, while these techniques make important first steps towards explainable Authorship Identification, more work remains to be done in order to provide tools that can be profitably integrated in the workflows of scholars.

There are well-documented examples of AI systems making decisions that affect protected classes, such as housing assistance or unemployment benefits. AI can be used to screen resumes; banks apply AI models to grant individual consumers credit and set interest rates for them. Many small decisions, taken together, can have large effects, such as: AI-driven price discrimination could lead to certain groups in a society consistently paying more. But are there AI applications today that affect everyone, no matter their "class"? As I mentioned earlier, we are shifting our AI Ethics courses to more practical, useful techniques.

Correctly detecting the semantic type of data columns is crucial for data science tasks such as automated data cleaning, schema matching, and data discovery. Existing data preparation and analysis systems rely on dictionary lookups and regular expression matching to detect semantic types. However, these matching-based approaches often are not robust to dirty data and only detect a limited number of types. We introduce Sherlock, a multi-input deep neural network for detecting semantic types. We train Sherlock on $686,765$ data columns retrieved from the VizNet corpus by matching $78$ semantic types from DBpedia to column headers. We characterize each matched column with $1,588$ features describing the statistical properties, character distributions, word embeddings, and paragraph vectors of column values. Sherlock achieves a support-weighted F$_1$ score of $0.89$, exceeding that of machine learning baselines, dictionary and regular expression benchmarks, and the consensus of crowdsourced annotations.

A critical phase of oil well completion involves positioning cement between the outer surface of a metal casing and the sides of the well. This task is done by injecting a specially formulated cement slurry down the center of the casing and up the sides of the bore hole. Designing these slurry systems is time consuming and expensive because of the variability of the conditions between wells and the variability of the raw materials and techniques used in geographically diverse locations. SlurryMinder is a design tool to aid field engineers in creating globally consistent cement slurry formulations and to rapidly disseminate current well-cementing techniques. We describe the implementation of this system and why AI technology was used; we also discuss corporate benefits of the system, both real and projected.

In the Silver Anniversary year of FLAIRS, in an effort to promote discussion of emerging ideas and work in order to encourage and help guide researchers, especially new researchers, the program committee added the poster abstract submission category. This allows researchers to present a full poster in the conference poster session and receive that critical, work-shaping feedback that helps guide good work into great work.