Oceania
Assessment of Sports Concussion in Female Athletes: A Role for Neuroinformatics?
Edelstein, Rachel, Gutterman, Sterling, Newman, Benjamin, Van Horn, John Darrell
Over the past decade, the intricacies of sports-related concussions among female athletes have become readily apparent. Traditional clinical methods for diagnosing concussions suffer limitations when applied to female athletes, often failing to capture subtle changes in brain structure and function. Advanced neuroinformatics techniques and machine learning models have become invaluable assets in this endeavor. While these technologies have been extensively employed in understanding concussion in male athletes, there remains a significant gap in our comprehension of their effectiveness for female athletes. With its remarkable data analysis capacity, machine learning offers a promising avenue to bridge this deficit. By harnessing the power of machine learning, researchers can link observed phenotypic neuroimaging data to sex-specific biological mechanisms, unraveling the mysteries of concussions in female athletes. Furthermore, embedding methods within machine learning enable examining brain architecture and its alterations beyond the conventional anatomical reference frame. In turn, allows researchers to gain deeper insights into the dynamics of concussions, treatment responses, and recovery processes. To guarantee that female athletes receive the optimal care they deserve, researchers must employ advanced neuroimaging techniques and sophisticated machine-learning models. These tools enable an in-depth investigation of the underlying mechanisms responsible for concussion symptoms stemming from neuronal dysfunction in female athletes. This paper endeavors to address the crucial issue of sex differences in multimodal neuroimaging experimental design and machine learning approaches within female athlete populations, ultimately ensuring that they receive the tailored care they require when facing the challenges of concussions.
Privacy Issues in Large Language Models: A Survey
This is the first survey of the active area of AI research that focuses on privacy issues in Large Language Models (LLMs). Specifically, we focus on work that red-teams models to highlight privacy risks, attempts to build privacy into the training or inference process, enables efficient data deletion from trained models to comply with existing privacy regulations, and tries to mitigate copyright issues. Our focus is on summarizing technical research that develops algorithms, proves theorems, and runs empirical evaluations. While there is an extensive body of legal and policy work addressing these challenges from a different angle, that is not the focus of our survey. Nevertheless, these works, along with recent legal developments do inform how these technical problems are formalized, and so we discuss them briefly in Section 1. While we have made our best effort to include all the relevant work, due to the fast moving nature of this research we may have missed some recent work. If we have missed some of your work please contact us, as we will attempt to keep this survey relatively up to date. We are maintaining a repository with the list of papers covered in this survey and any relevant code that was publicly available at https://github.com/safr-ml-lab/survey-llm.
Boosting Continuous Control with Consistency Policy
Chen, Yuhui, Li, Haoran, Zhao, Dongbin
Due to its training stability and strong expression, the diffusion model has attracted considerable attention in offline reinforcement learning. However, several challenges have also come with it: 1) The demand for a large number of diffusion steps makes the diffusion-model-based methods time inefficient and limits their applications in real-time control; 2) How to achieve policy improvement with accurate guidance for diffusion model-based policy is still an open problem. Inspired by the consistency model, we propose a novel time-efficiency method named Consistency Policy with Q-Learning (CPQL), which derives action from noise by a single step. By establishing a mapping from the reverse diffusion trajectories to the desired policy, we simultaneously address the issues of time efficiency and inaccurate guidance when updating diffusion model-based policy with the learned Q-function. We demonstrate that CPQL can achieve policy improvement with accurate guidance for offline reinforcement learning, and can be seamlessly extended for online RL tasks. Experimental results indicate that CPQL achieves new state-of-the-art performance on 11 offline and 21 online tasks, significantly improving inference speed by nearly 45 times compared to Diffusion-QL. We will release our code later.
Revisiting Softmax Masking: Stop Gradient for Enhancing Stability in Replay-based Continual Learning
Kim, Hoyong, Kwon, Minchan, Kim, Kangil
In replay-based methods for continual learning, replaying input samples in episodic memory has shown its effectiveness in alleviating catastrophic forgetting. However, the potential key factor of cross-entropy loss with softmax in causing catastrophic forgetting has been underexplored. In this paper, we analyze the effect of softmax and revisit softmax masking with negative infinity to shed light on its ability to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Based on the analyses, it is found that negative infinity masked softmax is not always compatible with dark knowledge. To improve the compatibility, we propose a general masked softmax that controls the stability by adjusting the gradient scale to old and new classes. We demonstrate that utilizing our method on other replay-based methods results in better performance, primarily by enhancing model stability in continual learning benchmarks, even when the buffer size is set to an extremely small value.
Multicultural Name Recognition For Previously Unseen Names
State of the art Named Entity Recognition (NER) models have achieved an impressive ability to extract common phrases from text that belong to labels such as location, organization, time, and person. However, typical NER systems that rely on having seen a specific entity in their training data in order to label an entity perform poorly on rare or unseen entities ta in order to label an entity perform poorly on rare or unseen entities (Derczynski et al., 2017). This paper attempts to improve recognition of person names, a diverse category that can grow any time someone is born or changes their name. In order for downstream tasks to not exhibit bias based on cultural background, a model should perform well on names from a variety of backgrounds. In this paper I experiment with the training data and input structure of an English Bi-LSTM name recognition model. I look at names from 103 countries to compare how well the model performs on names from different cultures, specifically in the context of a downstream task where extracted names will be matched to information on file. I find that a model with combined character and word input outperforms word-only models and may improve on accuracy compared to classical NER models that are not geared toward identifying unseen entity values.
DsDm: Model-Aware Dataset Selection with Datamodels
Engstrom, Logan, Feldmann, Axel, Madry, Aleksander
When selecting data for training large-scale models, standard practice is to filter for examples that match human notions of data quality. Such filtering yields qualitatively clean datapoints that intuitively should improve model behavior. However, in practice the opposite can often happen: we find that selecting according to similarity with "high quality" data sources may not increase (and can even hurt) performance compared to randomly selecting data. To develop better methods for selecting data, we start by framing dataset selection as an optimization problem that we can directly solve for: given target tasks, a learning algorithm, and candidate data, select the subset that maximizes model performance. This framework thus avoids handpicked notions of data quality, and instead models explicitly how the learning process uses train datapoints to predict on the target tasks. Our resulting method greatly improves language model (LM) performance on both pre-specified tasks and previously unseen tasks. Specifically, choosing target tasks representative of standard LM problems and evaluating on diverse held-out benchmarks, our selected datasets provide a 2x compute multiplier over baseline methods.
Model-Free $\delta$-Policy Iteration Based on Damped Newton Method for Nonlinear Continuous-Time H$\infty$ Tracking Control
This paper presents a {\delta}-PI algorithm which is based on damped Newton method for the H{\infty} tracking control problem of unknown continuous-time nonlinear system. A discounted performance function and an augmented system are used to get the tracking Hamilton-Jacobi-Isaac (HJI) equation. Tracking HJI equation is a nonlinear partial differential equation, traditional reinforcement learning methods for solving the tracking HJI equation are mostly based on the Newton method, which usually only satisfies local convergence and needs a good initial guess. Based upon the damped Newton iteration operator equation, a generalized tracking Bellman equation is derived firstly. The {\delta}-PI algorithm can seek the optimal solution of the tracking HJI equation by iteratively solving the generalized tracking Bellman equation. On-policy learning and off-policy learning {\delta}-PI reinforcement learning methods are provided, respectively. Off-policy version {\delta}-PI algorithm is a model-free algorithm which can be performed without making use of a priori knowledge of the system dynamics. NN-based implementation scheme for the off-policy {\delta}-PI algorithms is shown. The suitability of the model-free {\delta}-PI algorithm is illustrated with a nonlinear system simulation.
Improving Machine Translation with Human Feedback: An Exploration of Quality Estimation as a Reward Model
He, Zhiwei, Wang, Xing, Jiao, Wenxiang, Zhang, Zhuosheng, Wang, Rui, Shi, Shuming, Tu, Zhaopeng
Insufficient modeling of human preferences within the reward model is a major obstacle for leveraging human feedback to improve translation quality. Fortunately, quality estimation (QE), which predicts the quality of a given translation without reference, has achieved impressive alignment with human evaluations in the last two years. In this work, we investigate the potential of employing the QE model as the reward model (the QE-based reward model) to predict human preferences for feedback training. We first identify the overoptimization problem during QE-based feedback training, manifested as an increase in reward while translation quality declines. We examine the problem and argue that the vulnerability of the QE model might lead to high rewards for incorrect translations, resulting in overoptimization and error propagation. To address the problem, we adopt a simple yet effective method that uses heuristic rules to detect the incorrect translations and assigns a penalty term to the QE-based rewards for the detected incorrect translations. Experimental results show that the proposed QE-based feedback training achieves consistent and significant improvements across various settings, further verified through human preference studies. Our subsequent analysis demonstrates the high data efficiency of the proposed QE-based feedback training: the proposed approach using a small amount of monolingual data can outperform systems using larger parallel corpora.
Evaluating Collaborative and Autonomous Agents in Data-Stream-Supported Coordination of Mobile Crowdsourcing
Bruns, Ralf, Dötterl, Jeremias, Dunkel, Jürgen, Ossowski, Sascha
Mobile crowdsourcing refers to systems where the completion of tasks necessarily requires physical movement of crowdworkers in an on-demand workforce. Evidence suggests that in such systems, tasks often get assigned to crowdworkers who struggle to complete those tasks successfully, resulting in high failure rates and low service quality. A promising solution to ensure higher quality of service is to continuously adapt the assignment and respond to failure-causing events by transferring tasks to better-suited workers who use different routes or vehicles. However, implementing task transfers in mobile crowdsourcing is difficult because workers are autonomous and may reject transfer requests. Moreover, task outcomes are uncertain and need to be predicted. In this paper, we propose different mechanisms to achieve outcome prediction and task coordination in mobile crowdsourcing. First, we analyze different data stream learning approaches for the prediction of task outcomes. Second, based on the suggested prediction model, we propose and evaluate two different approaches for task coordination with different degrees of autonomy: an opportunistic approach for crowdshipping with collaborative, but non-autonomous workers, and a market-based model with autonomous workers for crowdsensing.
Classification of grapevine varieties using UAV hyperspectral imaging
López, Alfonso, Ogayar, Carlos Javier, Feito, Francisco Ramón, Sousa, Joaquim João
The classification of different grapevine varieties is a relevant phenotyping task in Precision Viticulture since it enables estimating the growth of vineyard rows dedicated to different varieties, among other applications concerning the wine industry. This task can be performed with destructive methods that require time-consuming tasks, including data collection and analysis in the laboratory. However, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) provide a more efficient and less prohibitive approach to collecting hyperspectral data, despite acquiring noisier data. Therefore, the first task is the processing of these data to correct and downsample large amounts of data. In addition, the hyperspectral signatures of grape varieties are very similar. In this work, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proposed for classifying seventeen varieties of red and white grape variants. Rather than classifying single samples, these are processed together with their neighbourhood. Hence, the extraction of spatial and spectral features is addressed with 1) a spatial attention layer and 2) Inception blocks. The pipeline goes from processing to dataset elaboration, finishing with the training phase. The fitted model is evaluated in terms of response time, accuracy and data separability, and compared with other state-of-the-art CNNs for classifying hyperspectral data. Our network was proven to be much more lightweight with a reduced number of input bands, a lower number of trainable weights and therefore, reduced training time. Despite this, the evaluated metrics showed much better results for our network (~99% overall accuracy), in comparison with previous works barely achieving 81% OA.