Oceania
QueSTMaps: Queryable Semantic Topological Maps for 3D Scene Understanding
Mehan, Yash, Gupta, Kumaraditya, Jayanti, Rohit, Govil, Anirudh, Garg, Sourav, Krishna, Madhava
Understanding the structural organisation of 3D indoor scenes in terms of rooms is often accomplished via floorplan extraction. Robotic tasks such as planning and navigation require a semantic understanding of the scene as well. This is typically achieved via object-level semantic segmentation. However, such methods struggle to segment out topological regions like "kitchen" in the scene. In this work, we introduce a two-step pipeline. First, we extract a topological map, i.e., floorplan of the indoor scene using a novel multi-channel occupancy representation. Then, we generate CLIP-aligned features and semantic labels for every room instance based on the objects it contains using a self-attention transformer. Our language-topology alignment supports natural language querying, e.g., a "place to cook" locates the "kitchen". We outperform the current state-of-the-art on room segmentation by ~20% and room classification by ~12%. Our detailed qualitative analysis and ablation studies provide insights into the problem of joint structural and semantic 3D scene understanding.
Advancements in Radiomics and Artificial Intelligence for Thyroid Cancer Diagnosis
Yousefi, Milad, Maleki, Shadi Farabi, Jafarizadeh, Ali, Youshanlui, Mahya Ahmadpour, Jafari, Aida, Pedrammehr, Siamak, Alizadehsani, Roohallah, Tadeusiewicz, Ryszard, Plawiak, Pawel
Thyroid cancer is an increasing global health concern that requires advanced diagnostic methods. The application of AI and radiomics to thyroid cancer diagnosis is examined in this review. A review of multiple databases was conducted in compliance with PRISMA guidelines until October 2023. A combination of keywords led to the discovery of an English academic publication on thyroid cancer and related subjects. 267 papers were returned from the original search after 109 duplicates were removed. Relevant studies were selected according to predetermined criteria after 124 articles were eliminated based on an examination of their abstract and title. After the comprehensive analysis, an additional six studies were excluded. Among the 28 included studies, radiomics analysis, which incorporates ultrasound (US) images, demonstrated its effectiveness in diagnosing thyroid cancer. Various results were noted, some of the studies presenting new strategies that outperformed the status quo. The literature has emphasized various challenges faced by AI models, including interpretability issues, dataset constraints, and operator dependence. The synthesized findings of the 28 included studies mentioned the need for standardization efforts and prospective multicenter studies to address these concerns. Furthermore, approaches to overcome these obstacles were identified, such as advances in explainable AI technology and personalized medicine techniques. The review focuses on how AI and radiomics could transform the diagnosis and treatment of thyroid cancer. Despite challenges, future research on multidisciplinary cooperation, clinical applicability validation, and algorithm improvement holds the potential to improve patient outcomes and diagnostic precision in the treatment of thyroid cancer.
Neural Optimizer Equation, Decay Function, and Learning Rate Schedule Joint Evolution
A major contributor to the quality of a deep learning model is the selection of the optimizer. We propose a new dual-joint search space in the realm of neural optimizer search (NOS), along with an integrity check, to automate the process of finding deep learning optimizers. Our dual-joint search space simultaneously allows for the optimization of not only the update equation, but also internal decay functions and learning rate schedules for optimizers. We search the space using our proposed mutation-only, particle-based genetic algorithm able to be massively parallelized for our domain-specific problem. We evaluate our candidate optimizers on the CIFAR-10 dataset using a small ConvNet. To assess generalization, the final optimizers were then transferred to large-scale image classification on CIFAR-100 and TinyImageNet, while also being fine-tuned on Flowers102, Cars196, and Caltech101 using EfficientNetV2Small. We found multiple optimizers, learning rate schedules, and Adam variants that outperformed Adam, as well as other standard deep learning optimizers, across the image classification tasks. Deep learning optimizers are built for solving optimization problems, where the goal is to find a set of parameters that optimizes a loss function in an efficient amount of time. The optimization landscapes of deep neural networks are vast and complex terrains with steep cliffs, saddle points, plateus, and valleys (Goodfellow et al., 2016). Being able to efficiently and intelligently maneuver across these landscapes is vital in order to achieve better performance and evaluation. The simplest way to update the weights of a network is through batch Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). With the goal of expediting convergence, adaptive methods have been created to efficiently scale the learning rate per parameter, such as RMSProp, AdaGrad (Duchi et al., 2011), and Adam (Kingma & Ba, 2017).
Pitfalls of Conversational LLMs on News Debiasing
Schlicht, Ipek Baris, Altiok, Defne, Taouk, Maryanne, Flek, Lucie
This paper addresses debiasing in news editing and evaluates the effectiveness of conversational Large Language Models in this task. We designed an evaluation checklist tailored to news editors' perspectives, obtained generated texts from three popular conversational models using a subset of a publicly available dataset in media bias, and evaluated the texts according to the designed checklist. Furthermore, we examined the models as evaluator for checking the quality of debiased model outputs. Our findings indicate that none of the LLMs are perfect in debiasing. Notably, some models, including ChatGPT, introduced unnecessary changes that may impact the author's style and create misinformation. Lastly, we show that the models do not perform as proficiently as domain experts in evaluating the quality of debiased outputs.
CulturalTeaming: AI-Assisted Interactive Red-Teaming for Challenging LLMs' (Lack of) Multicultural Knowledge
Chiu, Yu Ying, Jiang, Liwei, Antoniak, Maria, Park, Chan Young, Li, Shuyue Stella, Bhatia, Mehar, Ravi, Sahithya, Tsvetkov, Yulia, Shwartz, Vered, Choi, Yejin
Frontier large language models (LLMs) are developed by researchers and practitioners with skewed cultural backgrounds and on datasets with skewed sources. However, LLMs' (lack of) multicultural knowledge cannot be effectively assessed with current methods for developing benchmarks. Existing multicultural evaluations primarily rely on expensive and restricted human annotations or potentially outdated internet resources. Thus, they struggle to capture the intricacy, dynamics, and diversity of cultural norms. LLM-generated benchmarks are promising, yet risk propagating the same biases they are meant to measure. To synergize the creativity and expert cultural knowledge of human annotators and the scalability and standardizability of LLM-based automation, we introduce CulturalTeaming, an interactive red-teaming system that leverages human-AI collaboration to build truly challenging evaluation dataset for assessing the multicultural knowledge of LLMs, while improving annotators' capabilities and experiences. Our study reveals that CulturalTeaming's various modes of AI assistance support annotators in creating cultural questions, that modern LLMs fail at, in a gamified manner. Importantly, the increased level of AI assistance (e.g., LLM-generated revision hints) empowers users to create more difficult questions with enhanced perceived creativity of themselves, shedding light on the promises of involving heavier AI assistance in modern evaluation dataset creation procedures. Through a series of 1-hour workshop sessions, we gather CULTURALBENCH-V0.1, a compact yet high-quality evaluation dataset with users' red-teaming attempts, that different families of modern LLMs perform with accuracy ranging from 37.7% to 72.2%, revealing a notable gap in LLMs' multicultural proficiency.
Is Your AI Truly Yours? Leveraging Blockchain for Copyrights, Provenance, and Lineage
Sai, Yilin, Wang, Qin, Yu, Guangsheng, Bandara, H. M. N. Dilum, Chen, Shiping
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) integrates into diverse areas, particularly in content generation, ensuring rightful ownership and ethical use becomes paramount. AI service providers are expected to prioritize responsibly sourcing training data and obtaining licenses from data owners. However, existing studies primarily center on safeguarding static copyrights, which simply treats metadata/datasets as non-fungible items with transferable/trading capabilities, neglecting the dynamic nature of training procedures that can shape an ongoing trajectory. In this paper, we present \textsc{IBis}, a blockchain-based framework tailored for AI model training workflows. \textsc{IBis} integrates on-chain registries for datasets, licenses and models, alongside off-chain signing services to facilitate collaboration among multiple participants. Our framework addresses concerns regarding data and model provenance and copyright compliance. \textsc{IBis} enables iterative model retraining and fine-tuning, and offers flexible license checks and renewals. Further, \textsc{IBis} provides APIs designed for seamless integration with existing contract management software, minimizing disruptions to established model training processes. We implement \textsc{IBis} using Daml on the Canton blockchain. Evaluation results showcase the feasibility and scalability of \textsc{IBis} across varying numbers of users, datasets, models, and licenses.
Interpreting Themes from Educational Stories
Zhang, Yigeng, Gonzรกlez, Fabio A., Solorio, Thamar
Reading comprehension continues to be a crucial research focus in the NLP community. Recent advances in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) have mostly centered on literal comprehension, referring to the surface-level understanding of content. In this work, we focus on the next level - interpretive comprehension, with a particular emphasis on inferring the themes of a narrative text. We introduce the first dataset specifically designed for interpretive comprehension of educational narratives, providing corresponding well-edited theme texts. The dataset spans a variety of genres and cultural origins and includes human-annotated theme keywords with varying levels of granularity. We further formulate NLP tasks under different abstractions of interpretive comprehension toward the main idea of a story. After conducting extensive experiments with state-of-the-art methods, we found the task to be both challenging and significant for NLP research.
Optimization Methods for Personalizing Large Language Models through Retrieval Augmentation
Salemi, Alireza, Kallumadi, Surya, Zamani, Hamed
This paper studies retrieval-augmented approaches for personalizing large language models (LLMs), which potentially have a substantial impact on various applications and domains. We propose the first attempt to optimize the retrieval models that deliver a limited number of personal documents to large language models for the purpose of personalized generation. We develop two optimization algorithms that solicit feedback from the downstream personalized generation tasks for retrieval optimization -- one based on reinforcement learning whose reward function is defined using any arbitrary metric for personalized generation and another based on knowledge distillation from the downstream LLM to the retrieval model. This paper also introduces a pre- and post-generation retriever selection model that decides what retriever to choose for each LLM input. Extensive experiments on diverse tasks from the language model personalization (LaMP) benchmark reveal statistically significant improvements in six out of seven datasets.
Know When To Stop: A Study of Semantic Drift in Text Generation
Spataru, Ava, Hambro, Eric, Voita, Elena, Cancedda, Nicola
In this work, we explicitly show that modern LLMs tend to generate correct facts first, then "drift away" and generate incorrect facts later: this was occasionally observed but never properly measured. We develop a semantic drift score that measures the degree of separation between correct and incorrect facts in generated texts and confirm our hypothesis when generating Wikipedia-style biographies. This correct-then-incorrect generation pattern suggests that factual accuracy can be improved by knowing when to stop generation. Therefore, we explore the trade-off between information quantity and factual accuracy for several early stopping methods and manage to improve factuality by a large margin. We further show that reranking with semantic similarity can further improve these results, both compared to the baseline and when combined with early stopping. Finally, we try calling external API to bring the model back to the right generation path, but do not get positive results. Overall, our methods generalize and can be applied to any long-form text generation to produce more reliable information, by balancing trade-offs between factual accuracy, information quantity and computational cost.
EB-GAME: A Game-Changer in ECG Heartbeat Anomaly Detection
Park, JuneYoung, Kim, Da Young, Kim, Yunsoo, Yoo, Jisu, Kim, Tae Joon
Cardiologists use electrocardiograms (ECG) for the detection of arrhythmias. However, continuous monitoring of ECG signals to detect cardiac abnormal-ities requires significant time and human resources. As a result, several deep learning studies have been conducted in advance for the automatic detection of arrhythmia. These models show relatively high performance in supervised learning, but are not applicable in cases with few training examples. This is because abnormal ECG data is scarce compared to normal data in most real-world clinical settings. Therefore, in this study, GAN-based anomaly detec-tion, i.e., unsupervised learning, was employed to address the issue of data imbalance. This paper focuses on detecting abnormal signals in electrocardi-ograms (ECGs) using only labels from normal signals as training data. In-spired by self-supervised vision transformers, which learn by dividing images into patches, and masked auto-encoders, known for their effectiveness in patch reconstruction and solving information redundancy, we introduce the ECG Heartbeat Anomaly Detection model, EB-GAME. EB-GAME was trained and validated on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Dataset, where it achieved state-of-the-art performance on this benchmark.