Calgary
Causal Models Applied to the Patterns of Human Migration due to Climate Change
Lai, Kenneth, Yanushkevich, Svetlana
The impacts of mass migration, such as crisis induced by climate change, extend beyond environmental concerns and can greatly affect social infrastructure and public services, such as education, healthcare, and security. These crises exacerbate certain elements like cultural barriers, and discrimination by amplifying the challenges faced by these affected communities. This paper proposes an innovative approach to address migration crises in the context of crisis management through a combination of modeling and imbalance assessment tools. By employing deep learning for forecasting and integrating causal reasoning via Bayesian networks, this methodology enables the evaluation of imbalances and risks in the socio-technological landscape, providing crucial insights for informed decision-making. Through this framework, critical systems can be analyzed to understand how fluctuations in migration levels may impact them, facilitating effective crisis governance strategies.
Intelligent Stress Assessment for e-Coaching
Lai, Kenneth, Yanushkevich, Svetlana, Shmerko, Vlad
Abstract--This paper considers the adaptation of the e-continuously learn the user's stress pattern in order to adjust The measure of usefulness includes accuracy, among others. As stated in In this paper, two-stage intelligent processing, as seen in [3], e-coaching "may contribute to a better understanding of Figure 1, is used: people's affective responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Stage I is aimed at gathering physiological information legal, and social implications are addressed appropriately, from a subject for human decision-making (reasoning). Stage II is aimed at supporting the human decisionmaker society by monitoring and improving people's mental health". Typical symptoms include anxiety, panic, avoidance, and stress.
Towards objective and systematic evaluation of bias in medical imaging AI
Stanley, Emma A. M., Souza, Raissa, Winder, Anthony, Gulve, Vedant, Amador, Kimberly, Wilms, Matthias, Forkert, Nils D.
Artificial intelligence (AI) models trained using medical images for clinical tasks often exhibit bias in the form of disparities in performance between subgroups. Since not all sources of biases in real-world medical imaging data are easily identifiable, it is challenging to comprehensively assess how those biases are encoded in models, and how capable bias mitigation methods are at ameliorating performance disparities. In this article, we introduce a novel analysis framework for systematically and objectively investigating the impact of biases in medical images on AI models. We developed and tested this framework for conducting controlled in silico trials to assess bias in medical imaging AI using a tool for generating synthetic magnetic resonance images with known disease effects and sources of bias. The feasibility is showcased by using three counterfactual bias scenarios to measure the impact of simulated bias effects on a convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier and the efficacy of three bias mitigation strategies. The analysis revealed that the simulated biases resulted in expected subgroup performance disparities when the CNN was trained on the synthetic datasets. Moreover, reweighing was identified as the most successful bias mitigation strategy for this setup, and we demonstrated how explainable AI methods can aid in investigating the manifestation of bias in the model using this framework. Developing fair AI models is a considerable challenge given that many and often unknown sources of biases can be present in medical imaging datasets. In this work, we present a novel methodology to objectively study the impact of biases and mitigation strategies on deep learning pipelines, which can support the development of clinical AI that is robust and responsible.
Log-based Anomaly Detection of Enterprise Software: An Empirical Study
Wijesinghe, Nadun, Hemmati, Hadi
Most enterprise applications use logging as a mechanism to diagnose anomalies, which could help with reducing system downtime. Anomaly detection using software execution logs has been explored in several prior studies, using both classical and deep neural network-based machine learning models. In recent years, the research has largely focused in using variations of sequence-based deep neural networks (e.g., Long-Short Term Memory and Transformer-based models) for log-based anomaly detection on open-source data. However, they have not been applied in industrial datasets, as often. In addition, the studied open-source datasets are typically very large in size with logging statements that do not change much over time, which may not be the case with a dataset from an industrial service that is relatively new. In this paper, we evaluate several state-of-the-art anomaly detection models on an industrial dataset from our research partner, which is much smaller and loosely structured than most large scale open-source benchmark datasets. Results show that while all models are capable of detecting anomalies, certain models are better suited for less-structured datasets. We also see that model effectiveness changes when a common data leak associated with a random train-test split in some prior work is removed. A qualitative study of the defects' characteristics identified by the developers on the industrial dataset further shows strengths and weaknesses of the models in detecting different types of anomalies. Finally, we explore the effect of limited training data by gradually increasing the training set size, to evaluate if the model effectiveness does depend on the training set size.
Source Separation of Unknown Numbers of Single-Channel Underwater Acoustic Signals Based on Autoencoders
Due to the influences of ocean environment noise and sea water channels, the separation of underwater acoustic signals is a challenging problem. Some studies have researched the separation of underwater signals by separating the different components of signals with different characteristics, such as spatial orientation information and category differences, in a certain signal transformation domain. Some methods separate signals directly on the feature domain based on expert knowledge [1-3]. The wrap transform was used to separate dispersive time-frequency components in [1]. A depth-based method was proposed in [2], where the modified Fourier transformation of the output power of a plane-wave beamformer was used to separate the signals obtained from a vertical line array. In [3], rigid and elastic acoustic scattering components of underwater target echoes were separated in the fractional Fourier transform domain based on a target echo highlight model. Most other algorithms rely on blind signal separation (BSS) methods [4-10]. In [4], the frequency components of the Detection of Envelope Modulation on Noise (DEMON) spectrum were used to separate signals in different directions via independent component analysis (ICA). According to the main frequency bands of different signals in a linear superposition signal, in [5], bandpass filters were used first, and then eigenvalue decomposition was employed for separation purposes [6] and [7] used the Sawada algorithm and ideal binary masking to separate artificially mixed whale songs.
Studying the Effects of Sex-related Differences on Brain Age Prediction using brain MR Imaging
Dibaji, Mahsa, Gianchandani, Neha, Nair, Akhil, Singhal, Mansi, Souza, Roberto, Bento, Mariana
While utilizing machine learning models, one of the most crucial aspects is how bias and fairness affect model outcomes for diverse demographics. This becomes especially relevant in the context of machine learning for medical imaging applications as these models are increasingly being used for diagnosis and treatment planning. In this paper, we study biases related to sex when developing a machine learning model based on brain magnetic resonance images (MRI). We investigate the effects of sex by performing brain age prediction considering different experimental designs: model trained using only female subjects, only male subjects and a balanced dataset. We also perform evaluation on multiple MRI datasets (Calgary-Campinas(CC359) and CamCAN) to assess the generalization capability of the proposed models. We found disparities in the performance of brain age prediction models when trained on distinct sex subgroups and datasets, in both final predictions and decision making (assessed using interpretability models). Our results demonstrated variations in model generalizability across sex-specific subgroups, suggesting potential biases in models trained on unbalanced datasets. This underlines the critical role of careful experimental design in generating fair and reliable outcomes.
PromptRE: Weakly-Supervised Document-Level Relation Extraction via Prompting-Based Data Programming
Gao, Chufan, Fan, Xulin, Sun, Jimeng, Wang, Xuan
Relation extraction aims to classify the relationships between two entities into pre-defined categories. While previous research has mainly focused on sentence-level relation extraction, recent studies have expanded the scope to document-level relation extraction. Traditional relation extraction methods heavily rely on human-annotated training data, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To mitigate the need for manual annotation, recent weakly-supervised approaches have been developed for sentence-level relation extraction while limited work has been done on document-level relation extraction. Weakly-supervised document-level relation extraction faces significant challenges due to an imbalanced number "no relation" instances and the failure of directly probing pretrained large language models for document relation extraction. To address these challenges, we propose PromptRE, a novel weakly-supervised document-level relation extraction method that combines prompting-based techniques with data programming. Furthermore, PromptRE incorporates the label distribution and entity types as prior knowledge to improve the performance. By leveraging the strengths of both prompting and data programming, PromptRE achieves improved performance in relation classification and effectively handles the "no relation" problem. Experimental results on ReDocRED, a benchmark dataset for document-level relation extraction, demonstrate the superiority of PromptRE over baseline approaches.
Complementary Domain Adaptation and Generalization for Unsupervised Continual Domain Shift Learning
Cho, Wonguk, Park, Jinha, Kim, Taesup
Continual domain shift poses a significant challenge in real-world applications, particularly in situations where labeled data is not available for new domains. The challenge of acquiring knowledge in this problem setting is referred to as unsupervised continual domain shift learning. Existing methods for domain adaptation and generalization have limitations in addressing this issue, as they focus either on adapting to a specific domain or generalizing to unseen domains, but not both. In this paper, we propose Complementary Domain Adaptation and Generalization (CoDAG), a simple yet effective learning framework that combines domain adaptation and generalization in a complementary manner to achieve three major goals of unsupervised continual domain shift learning: adapting to a current domain, generalizing to unseen domains, and preventing forgetting of previously seen domains. Our approach is model-agnostic, meaning that it is compatible with any existing domain adaptation and generalization algorithms. We evaluate CoDAG on several benchmark datasets and demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models in all datasets and evaluation metrics, highlighting its effectiveness and robustness in handling unsupervised continual domain shift learning.
Continual Learning via Manifold Expansion Replay
Xu, Zihao, Tang, Xuan, Shi, Yufei, Zhang, Jianfeng, Yang, Jian, Chen, Mingsong, Wei, Xian
In continual learning, the learner learns multiple tasks in sequence, with data being acquired only once for each task. Catastrophic forgetting is a major challenge to continual learning. To reduce forgetting, some existing rehearsal-based methods use episodic memory to replay samples of previous tasks. However, in the process of knowledge integration when learning a new task, this strategy also suffers from catastrophic forgetting due to an imbalance between old and new knowledge. To address this problem, we propose a novel replay strategy called Manifold Expansion Replay (MaER). We argue that expanding the implicit manifold of the knowledge representation in the episodic memory helps to improve the robustness and expressiveness of the model. To this end, we propose a greedy strategy to keep increasing the diameter of the implicit manifold represented by the knowledge in the buffer during memory management. In addition, we introduce Wasserstein distance instead of cross entropy as distillation loss to preserve previous knowledge. With extensive experimental validation on MNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and TinyImageNet, we show that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy in continual learning setup, outperforming the state of the arts.
Beyond Memorization: Violating Privacy Via Inference with Large Language Models
Staab, Robin, Vero, Mark, Balunović, Mislav, Vechev, Martin
Current privacy research on large language models (LLMs) primarily focuses on the issue of extracting memorized training data. At the same time, models' inference capabilities have increased drastically. This raises the key question of whether current LLMs could violate individuals' privacy by inferring personal attributes from text given at inference time. In this work, we present the first comprehensive study on the capabilities of pretrained LLMs to infer personal attributes from text. We construct a dataset consisting of real Reddit profiles, and show that current LLMs can infer a wide range of personal attributes (e.g., location, income, sex), achieving up to $85\%$ top-1 and $95.8\%$ top-3 accuracy at a fraction of the cost ($100\times$) and time ($240\times$) required by humans. As people increasingly interact with LLM-powered chatbots across all aspects of life, we also explore the emerging threat of privacy-invasive chatbots trying to extract personal information through seemingly benign questions. Finally, we show that common mitigations, i.e., text anonymization and model alignment, are currently ineffective at protecting user privacy against LLM inference. Our findings highlight that current LLMs can infer personal data at a previously unattainable scale. In the absence of working defenses, we advocate for a broader discussion around LLM privacy implications beyond memorization, striving for a wider privacy protection.