Oceania
AI for All: Operationalising Diversity and Inclusion Requirements for AI Systems
Bano, Muneera, Zowghi, Didar, Gervasi, Vincenzo, Shams, Rifat
The pervasive role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in social interactions, from generating and recommending contents, to Our research methodology encompasses three stages: 1) data processing images and voices, brings numerous benefits but collection and analysis from the published literature on D&I in also necessitates addressing ethical implications and risks, such AI to extract relevant themes, 2) proposing a tailored user story as ensuring equitable and non-discriminatory decision-making, template, and 3) focus group exercise to explore the use of the and preventing the amplification of existing inequalities and extracted themes and user story template to specify D&I biases [1]. Diversity and inclusion (D&I) in AI involves requirements for AI systems. Furthermore, given that involving considering differences and underrepresented perspectives in many stakeholders with diverse attributes in requirements AI development and deployment while addressing potential elicitation is challenging and time-consuming, we decided to biases and promoting equitable outcomes for all concerned explore the utility of Large Language Models in generating user stakeholders [1]. Incorporating D&I principles in AI can enable stories from the D&I in AI themes. After each focus group technology to better respond to the needs of diverse users while exercise, we used GPT-4 to generate D&I user stories. We aimed to examine how closely the user stories from both human 2 Bano et.
High-fidelity 3D Reconstruction of Plants using Neural Radiance Field
Hu, Kewei, Wei, Ying, Pan, Yaoqiang, Kang, Hanwen, Chen, Chao
Accurate reconstruction of plant phenotypes plays a key role in optimising sustainable farming practices in the field of Precision Agriculture (PA). Currently, optical sensor-based approaches dominate the field, but the need for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction of crops and plants in unstructured agricultural environments remains challenging. Recently, a promising development has emerged in the form of Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), a novel method that utilises neural density fields. This technique has shown impressive performance in various novel vision synthesis tasks, but has remained relatively unexplored in the agricultural context. In our study, we focus on two fundamental tasks within plant phenotyping: (1) the synthesis of 2D novel-view images and (2) the 3D reconstruction of crop and plant models. We explore the world of neural radiance fields, in particular two SOTA methods: Instant-NGP, which excels in generating high-quality images with impressive training and inference speed, and Instant-NSR, which improves the reconstructed geometry by incorporating the Signed Distance Function (SDF) during training. In particular, we present a novel plant phenotype dataset comprising real plant images from production environments. This dataset is a first-of-its-kind initiative aimed at comprehensively exploring the advantages and limitations of NeRF in agricultural contexts. Our experimental results show that NeRF demonstrates commendable performance in the synthesis of novel-view images and is able to achieve reconstruction results that are competitive with Reality Capture, a leading commercial software for 3D Multi-View Stereo (MVS)-based reconstruction. However, our study also highlights certain drawbacks of NeRF, including relatively slow training speeds, performance limitations in cases of insufficient sampling, and challenges in obtaining geometry quality in complex setups.
Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Reading Music Systems
Calvo-Zaragoza, Jorge, Pacha, Alexander, Shatri, Elona
The International Workshop on Reading Music Systems (WoRMS) is a workshop that tries to connect researchers who develop systems for reading music, such as in the field of Optical Music Recognition, with other researchers and practitioners that could benefit from such systems, like librarians or musicologists. The relevant topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not limited to: Music reading systems; Optical music recognition; Datasets and performance evaluation; Image processing on music scores; Writer identification; Authoring, editing, storing and presentation systems for music scores; Multi-modal systems; Novel input-methods for music to produce written music; Web-based Music Information Retrieval services; Applications and projects; Use-cases related to written music. These are the proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Reading Music Systems, held in Milan, Italy on Nov. 4th 2023.
Personality Style Recognition via Machine Learning: Identifying Anaclitic and Introjective Personality Styles from Patients' Speech
Bitew, Semere Kiros, Schelstraete, Vincent, Zaporojets, Klim, Van Nieuwenhove, Kimberly, Meganck, Reitske, Develder, Chris
In disentangling the heterogeneity observed in psychopathology, personality of the patients is considered crucial. While it has been demonstrated that personality traits are reflected in the language used by a patient, we hypothesize that this enables automatic inference of the personality type directly from speech utterances, potentially more accurately than through a traditional questionnaire-based approach explicitly designed for personality classification. To validate this hypothesis, we adopt natural language processing (NLP) and standard machine learning tools for classification. We test this on a dataset of recorded clinical diagnostic interviews (CDI) on a sample of 79 patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) -- a condition for which differentiated treatment based on personality styles has been advocated -- and classified into anaclitic and introjective personality styles. We start by analyzing the interviews to see which linguistic features are associated with each style, in order to gain a better understanding of the styles. Then, we develop automatic classifiers based on (a) standardized questionnaire responses; (b) basic text features, i.e., TF-IDF scores of words and word sequences; (c) more advanced text features, using LIWC (linguistic inquiry and word count) and context-aware features using BERT (bidirectional encoder representations from transformers); (d) audio features. We find that automated classification with language-derived features (i.e., based on LIWC) significantly outperforms questionnaire-based classification models. Furthermore, the best performance is achieved by combining LIWC with the questionnaire features. This suggests that more work should be put into developing linguistically based automated techniques for characterizing personality, however questionnaires still to some extent complement such methods.
Time-Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Stochastic Stateful Policies
Al-Hafez, Firas, Zhao, Guoping, Peters, Jan, Tateo, Davide
Stateful policies play an important role in reinforcement learning, such as handling partially observable environments, enhancing robustness, or imposing an inductive bias directly into the policy structure. The conventional method for training stateful policies is Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT), which comes with significant drawbacks, such as slow training due to sequential gradient propagation and the occurrence of vanishing or exploding gradients. The gradient is often truncated to address these issues, resulting in a biased policy update. We present a novel approach for training stateful policies by decomposing the latter into a stochastic internal state kernel and a stateless policy, jointly optimized by following the stateful policy gradient. We introduce different versions of the stateful policy gradient theorem, enabling us to easily instantiate stateful variants of popular reinforcement learning and imitation learning algorithms. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical analysis of our new gradient estimator and compare it with BPTT. We evaluate our approach on complex continuous control tasks, e.g., humanoid locomotion, and demonstrate that our gradient estimator scales effectively with task complexity while offering a faster and simpler alternative to BPTT.
Generative Structural Design Integrating BIM and Diffusion Model
He, Zhili, Wang, Yu-Hsing, Zhang, Jian
Intelligent structural design using AI can effectively reduce time overhead and increase efficiency. It has potential to become the new design paradigm in the future to assist and even replace engineers, and so it has become a research hotspot in the academic community. However, current methods have some limitations to be addressed, whether in terms of application scope, visual quality of generated results, or evaluation metrics of results. This study proposes a comprehensive solution. Firstly, we introduce building information modeling (BIM) into intelligent structural design and establishes a structural design pipeline integrating BIM and generative AI, which is a powerful supplement to the previous frameworks that only considered CAD drawings. In order to improve the perceptual quality and details of generations, this study makes 3 contributions. Firstly, in terms of generation framework, inspired by the process of human drawing, a novel 2-stage generation framework is proposed to replace the traditional end-to-end framework to reduce the generation difficulty for AI models. Secondly, in terms of generative AI tools adopted, diffusion models (DMs) are introduced to replace widely used generative adversarial network (GAN)-based models, and a novel physics-based conditional diffusion model (PCDM) is proposed to consider different design prerequisites. Thirdly, in terms of neural networks, an attention block (AB) consisting of a self-attention block (SAB) and a parallel cross-attention block (PCAB) is designed to facilitate cross-domain data fusion. The quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the powerful generation and representation capabilities of PCDM. Necessary ablation studies are conducted to examine the validity of the methods. This study also shows that DMs have the potential to replace GANs and become the new benchmark for generative problems in civil engineering.
The Energy Prediction Smart-Meter Dataset: Analysis of Previous Competitions and Beyond
Pekaslan, Direnc, Alonso-Moral, Jose Maria, Bandara, Kasun, Bergmeir, Christoph, Bernabe-Moreno, Juan, Eigenmann, Robert, Einecke, Nils, Ergen, Selvi, Godahewa, Rakshitha, Hewamalage, Hansika, Lago, Jesus, Limmer, Steffen, Rebhan, Sven, Rabinovich, Boris, Rajapasksha, Dilini, Song, Heda, Wagner, Christian, Wu, Wenlong, Magdalena, Luis, Triguero, Isaac
This paper presents the real-world smart-meter dataset and offers an analysis of solutions derived from the Energy Prediction Technical Challenges, focusing primarily on two key competitions: the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (IEEE-CIS) Technical Challenge on Energy Prediction from Smart Meter data in 2020 (named EP) and its follow-up challenge at the IEEE International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE) in 2021 (named as XEP). These competitions focus on accurate energy consumption forecasting and the importance of interpretability in understanding the underlying factors. The challenge aims to predict monthly and yearly estimated consumption for households, addressing the accurate billing problem with limited historical smart meter data. The dataset comprises 3,248 smart meters, with varying data availability ranging from a minimum of one month to a year. This paper delves into the challenges, solutions and analysing issues related to the provided real-world smart meter data, developing accurate predictions at the household level, and introducing evaluation criteria for assessing interpretability. Additionally, this paper discusses aspects beyond the competitions: opportunities for energy disaggregation and pattern detection applications at the household level, significance of communicating energy-driven factors for optimised billing, and emphasising the importance of responsible AI and data privacy considerations. These aspects provide insights into the broader implications and potential advancements in energy consumption prediction. Overall, these competitions provide a dataset for residential energy research and serve as a catalyst for exploring accurate forecasting, enhancing interpretability, and driving progress towards the discussion of various aspects such as energy disaggregation, demand response programs or behavioural interventions.
Human-AI Collaboration in Thematic Analysis using ChatGPT: A User Study and Design Recommendations
Yan, Lixiang, Echeverria, Vanessa, Nieto, Gloria Fernandez, Jin, Yueqiao, Swiecki, Zachari, Zhao, Linxuan, Gaลกeviฤ, Dragan, Martinez-Maldonado, Roberto
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) offers promising potential for advancing human-AI collaboration in qualitative research. However, existing works focused on conventional machine-learning and pattern-based AI systems, and little is known about how researchers interact with GenAI in qualitative research. This work delves into researchers' perceptions of their collaboration with GenAI, specifically ChatGPT. Through a user study involving ten qualitative researchers, we found ChatGPT to be a valuable collaborator for thematic analysis, enhancing coding efficiency, aiding initial data exploration, offering granular quantitative insights, and assisting comprehension for non-native speakers and non-experts. Yet, concerns about its trustworthiness and accuracy, reliability and consistency, limited contextual understanding, and broader acceptance within the research community persist. We contribute five actionable design recommendations to foster effective human-AI collaboration. These include incorporating transparent explanatory mechanisms, enhancing interface and integration capabilities, prioritising contextual understanding and customisation, embedding human-AI feedback loops and iterative functionality, and strengthening trust through validation mechanisms.
Exploring Jiu-Jitsu Argumentation for Writing Peer Review Rebuttals
Purkayastha, Sukannya, Lauscher, Anne, Gurevych, Iryna
In many domains of argumentation, people's arguments are driven by so-called attitude roots, i.e., underlying beliefs and world views, and their corresponding attitude themes. Given the strength of these latent drivers of arguments, recent work in psychology suggests that instead of directly countering surface-level reasoning (e.g., falsifying given premises), one should follow an argumentation style inspired by the Jiu-Jitsu 'soft' combat system (Hornsey and Fielding, 2017): first, identify an arguer's attitude roots and themes, and then choose a prototypical rebuttal that is aligned with those drivers instead of invalidating those. In this work, we are the first to explore Jiu-Jitsu argumentation for peer review by proposing the novel task of attitude and theme-guided rebuttal generation. To this end, we enrich an existing dataset for discourse structure in peer reviews with attitude roots, attitude themes, and canonical rebuttals. To facilitate this process, we recast established annotation concepts from the domain of peer reviews (e.g., aspects a review sentence is relating to) and train domain-specific models. We then propose strong rebuttal generation strategies, which we benchmark on our novel dataset for the task of end-to-end attitude and theme-guided rebuttal generation and two subtasks.
Improving Korean NLP Tasks with Linguistically Informed Subword Tokenization and Sub-character Decomposition
Jeon, Taehee, Yang, Bongseok, Kim, Changhwan, Lim, Yoonseob
We introduce a morpheme-aware subword tokenization method that utilizes sub-character decomposition to address the challenges of applying Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) to Korean, a language characterized by its rich morphology and unique writing system. Our approach balances linguistic accuracy with computational efficiency in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). Our evaluations show that this technique achieves good performances overall, notably improving results in the syntactic task of NIKL-CoLA. This suggests that integrating morpheme type information can enhance language models' syntactic and semantic capabilities, indicating that adopting more linguistic insights can further improve performance beyond standard morphological analysis.