This study examines the effect of grammatical features in automatic essay scoring (AES). We use two kinds of grammatical features as input to an AES model: (1) grammatical items that writers used correctly in essays, and (2) the number of grammatical errors. Experimental results show that grammatical features improve the performance of AES models that predict the holistic scores of essays. Multi-task learning with the holistic and grammar scores, alongside using grammatical features, resulted in a larger improvement in model performance. We also show that a model using grammar abilities estimated using Item Response Theory (IRT) as the labels for the auxiliary task achieved comparable performance to when we used grammar scores assigned by human raters. In addition, we weight the grammatical features using IRT to consider the difficulty of grammatical items and writers' grammar abilities. We found that weighting grammatical features with the difficulty led to further improvement in performance.

Kernel orchestration is the task of mapping the computation defined in different operators of a deep neural network (DNN) to the execution of GPU kernels on modern hardware platforms. Prior approaches optimize kernel orchestration by greedily applying operator fusion, which fuses the computation of multiple operators into a single kernel, and miss a variety of optimization opportunities in kernel orchestration. This paper presents Korch, a tensor program optimizer that discovers optimal kernel orchestration strategies for tensor programs. Instead of directly fusing operators, Korch first applies operator fission to decompose tensor operators into a small set of basic tensor algebra primitives. This decomposition enables a diversity of fine-grained, inter-operator optimizations. Next, Korch optimizes kernel orchestration by formalizing it as a constrained optimization problem, leveraging an off-the-shelf binary linear programming solver to discover an optimal orchestration strategy, and generating an executable that can be directly deployed on modern GPU platforms. Evaluation on a variety of DNNs shows that Korch outperforms existing tensor program optimizers by up to 1.7x on V100 GPUs and up to 1.6x on A100 GPUs. Korch is publicly available at https://github.com/humuyan/Korch.

Transformer networks excel in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) tasks. However, they face challenges in generalizing to Out-of-Distribution (OOD) datasets, that is, data whose distribution differs from that seen during training. The OOD detection aims to distinguish data that deviates from the expected distribution, while maintaining optimal performance on in-distribution (ID) data. This paper introduces a novel approach based on OOD detection, termed the Generate Rounded OOD Data (GROD) algorithm, which significantly bolsters the generalization performance of transformer networks across various tasks. GROD is motivated by our new OOD detection Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) Theory for transformer. The transformer has learnability in terms of OOD detection that is, when the data is sufficient the outlier can be well represented. By penalizing the misclassification of OOD data within the loss function and generating synthetic outliers, GROD guarantees learnability and refines the decision boundaries between inlier and outlier. This strategy demonstrates robust adaptability and general applicability across different data types. Evaluated across diverse OOD detection tasks in NLP and CV, GROD achieves SOTA regardless of data format. On average, it reduces the SOTA FPR@95 from 21.97% to 0.12%, and improves AUROC from 93.62% to 99.98% on image classification tasks, and the SOTA FPR@95 by 12.89% and AUROC by 2.27% in detecting semantic text outliers. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GROD-OOD-Detection-with-transformers-B70F.

Trajectory similarity computation is an essential technique for analyzing moving patterns of spatial data across various applications such as traffic management, wildlife tracking, and location-based services. Modern methods often apply deep learning techniques to approximate heuristic metrics but struggle to learn more robust and generalized representations from the vast amounts of unlabeled trajectory data. Recent approaches focus on self-supervised learning methods such as contrastive learning, which have made significant advancements in trajectory representation learning. However, contrastive learning-based methods heavily depend on manually pre-defined data augmentation schemes, limiting the diversity of generated trajectories and resulting in learning from such variations in 2D Euclidean space, which prevents capturing high-level semantic variations. To address these limitations, we propose T-JEPA, a self-supervised trajectory similarity computation method employing Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) to enhance trajectory representation learning. T-JEPA samples and predicts trajectory information in representation space, enabling the model to infer the missing components of trajectories at high-level semantics without relying on domain knowledge or manual effort. Extensive experiments conducted on three urban trajectory datasets and two Foursquare datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of T-JEPA in trajectory similarity computation.

Foundation models are increasingly ubiquitous in our daily lives, used in everyday tasks such as text-image searches, interactions with chatbots, and content generation. As use increases, so does concern over the disparities in performance and fairness of these models for different people in different parts of the world. To assess these growing regional disparities, we present World Wide Dishes, a mixed text and image dataset consisting of 765 dishes, with dish names collected in 131 local languages. World Wide Dishes has been collected purely through human contribution and decentralised means, by creating a website widely distributed through social networks. Using the dataset, we demonstrate a novel means of operationalising capability and representational biases in foundation models such as language models and text-to-image generative models. We enrich these studies with a pilot community review to understand, from a first-person perspective, how these models generate images for people in five African countries and the United States. We find that these models generally do not produce quality text and image outputs of dishes specific to different regions. This is true even for the US, which is typically considered to be more well-resourced in training data - though the generation of US dishes does outperform that of the investigated African countries. The models demonstrate a propensity to produce outputs that are inaccurate as well as culturally misrepresentative, flattening, and insensitive. These failures in capability and representational bias have the potential to further reinforce stereotypes and disproportionately contribute to erasure based on region. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/oxai/world-wide-dishes/.

Network intrusion detection is one of the most important issues in the field of cyber security, and various machine learning techniques have been applied to build intrusion detection systems. However, since the number of features to describe the network connections is often large, where some features are redundant or noisy, feature selection is necessary in such scenarios, which can both improve the efficiency and accuracy. Recently, some researchers focus on using multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) to select features. But usually, they only consider the number of features and classification accuracy as the objectives, resulting in unsatisfactory performance on a critical metric, detection rate. This will lead to the missing of many real attacks and bring huge losses to the network system. In this paper, we propose DR-MOFS to model the feature selection problem in network intrusion detection as a three-objective optimization problem, where the number of features, accuracy and detection rate are optimized simultaneously, and use MOEAs to solve it. Experiments on two popular network intrusion detection datasets NSL-KDD and UNSW-NB15 show that in most cases the proposed method can outperform previous methods, i.e., lead to fewer features, higher accuracy and detection rate.

Tails used as inertial appendages induce body rotations of animals and robots--a phenomenon that is governed largely by the ratio of the body and tail moments of inertia. However, vertebrate tails have more degrees of freedom (e.g., number of joints, rotational axes) than most current theoretical models and robotic tails. To understand how morphology affects inertial appendage function, we developed an optimization-based approach that finds the maximally effective tail trajectory and measures error from a target trajectory. For tails of equal total length and mass, increasing the number of equal-length joints increased the complexity of maximally effective tail motions. When we optimized the relative lengths of tail bones while keeping the total tail length, mass, and number of joints the same, this optimization-based approach found that the lengths match the pattern found in the tail bones of mammals specialized for inertial maneuvering. In both experiments, adding joints enhanced the performance of the inertial appendage, but with diminishing returns, largely due to the total control effort constraint. This optimization-based simulation can compare the maximum performance of diverse inertial appendages that dynamically vary in moment of inertia in 3D space, predict inertial capabilities from skeletal data, and inform the design of robotic inertial appendages.

Deep learning crime predictive tools use past crime data and additional behavioral datasets to forecast future crimes. Nevertheless, these tools have been shown to suffer from unfair predictions across minority racial and ethnic groups. Current approaches to address this unfairness generally propose either pre-processing methods that mitigate the bias in the training datasets by applying corrections to crime counts based on domain knowledge or in-processing methods that are implemented as fairness regularizers to optimize for both accuracy and fairness. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning architecture that combines the power of these two approaches to increase prediction fairness. Our results show that the proposed model improves the fairness of crime predictions when compared to models with in-processing de-biasing approaches and with models without any type of bias correction, albeit at the cost of reducing accuracy.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance in various general multimodal applications such as image recognition and visual reasoning, and have also shown promising potential in specialized domains. However, the application potential of LVLMs in the insurance domain-characterized by rich application scenarios and abundant multimodal data-has not been effectively explored. There is no systematic review of multimodal tasks in the insurance domain, nor a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the capabilities of LVLMs in insurance. This gap hinders the development of LVLMs within the insurance domain. In this paper, we systematically review and distill multimodal tasks for four representative types of insurance: auto insurance, property insurance, health insurance, and agricultural insurance. We propose INS-MMBench, the first comprehensive LVLMs benchmark tailored for the insurance domain. INS-MMBench comprises a total of 2.2K thoroughly designed multiple-choice questions, covering 12 meta-tasks and 22 fundamental tasks. Furthermore, we evaluate multiple representative LVLMs, including closed-source models such as GPT-4o and open-source models like BLIP-2. This evaluation not only validates the effectiveness of our benchmark but also provides an in-depth performance analysis of current LVLMs on various multimodal tasks in the insurance domain. We hope that INS-MMBench will facilitate the further application of LVLMs in the insurance domain and inspire interdisciplinary development. Our dataset and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/FDU-INS/INS-MMBench.

With an evolutionary approach, the basis of morality can be explained as adaptations to problems of cooperation. With 'evolution' taken in a broad sense, evolving AIs that satisfy the conditions for evolution to apply will be subject to the same cooperative evolutionary pressure as biological entities. Here the adaptiveness of increased cooperation as material safety and wealth increase is discussed -- for humans, for other societies, and for AIs. Diminishing beneficial returns from increased access to material resources also suggests the possibility that, on the whole, there will be no incentive to for instance colonize entire galaxies, thus providing a possible explanation of the Fermi paradox, wondering where everybody is. It is further argued that old societies could engender, give way to, super-AIs, since it is likely that super-AIs are feasible, and fitter. Closing is an aside on effective ways for morals and goals to affect life and society, emphasizing environments, cultures, and laws, and exemplified by how to eat. Appended are an algorithm for colonizing for example a galaxy quickly, models of the evolution of cooperation and fairness under diminishing returns, and software for simulating signaling development. It is also noted that there can be no exponential colonization or reproduction, for mathematical reasons, as each entity takes up a certain amount of space.