Oceania
Seeking Subjectivity in Visual Emotion Distribution Learning
Yang, Jingyuan, Li, Jie, Li, Leida, Wang, Xiumei, Ding, Yuxuan, Gao, Xinbo
Visual Emotion Analysis (VEA), which aims to predict people's emotions towards different visual stimuli, has become an attractive research topic recently. Rather than a single label classification task, it is more rational to regard VEA as a Label Distribution Learning (LDL) problem by voting from different individuals. Existing methods often predict visual emotion distribution in a unified network, neglecting the inherent subjectivity in its crowd voting process. In psychology, the \textit{Object-Appraisal-Emotion} model has demonstrated that each individual's emotion is affected by his/her subjective appraisal, which is further formed by the affective memory. Inspired by this, we propose a novel \textit{Subjectivity Appraise-and-Match Network (SAMNet)} to investigate the subjectivity in visual emotion distribution. To depict the diversity in crowd voting process, we first propose the \textit{Subjectivity Appraising} with multiple branches, where each branch simulates the emotion evocation process of a specific individual. Specifically, we construct the affective memory with an attention-based mechanism to preserve each individual's unique emotional experience. A subjectivity loss is further proposed to guarantee the divergence between different individuals. Moreover, we propose the \textit{Subjectivity Matching} with a matching loss, aiming at assigning unordered emotion labels to ordered individual predictions in a one-to-one correspondence with the Hungarian algorithm. Extensive experiments and comparisons are conducted on public visual emotion distribution datasets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed SAMNet consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Ablation study verifies the effectiveness of our method and visualization proves its interpretability.
A Survey on Cross-domain Recommendation: Taxonomies, Methods, and Future Directions
Zang, Tianzi, Zhu, Yanmin, Liu, Haobing, Zhang, Ruohan, Yu, Jiadi
Traditional recommendation systems are faced with two long-standing obstacles, namely, data sparsity and cold-start problems, which promote the emergence and development of Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR). The core idea of CDR is to leverage information collected from other domains to alleviate the two problems in one domain. Over the last decade, many efforts have been engaged for cross-domain recommendation. Recently, with the development of deep learning and neural networks, a large number of methods have emerged. However, there is a limited number of systematic surveys on CDR, especially regarding the latest proposed methods as well as the recommendation scenarios and recommendation tasks they address. In this survey paper, we first proposed a two-level taxonomy of cross-domain recommendation which classifies different recommendation scenarios and recommendation tasks. We then introduce and summarize existing cross-domain recommendation approaches under different recommendation scenarios in a structured manner. We also organize datasets commonly used. We conclude this survey by providing several potential research directions about this field.
Online Continual Learning with Contrastive Vision Transformer
Wang, Zhen, Liu, Liu, Kong, Yajing, Guo, Jiaxian, Tao, Dacheng
Online continual learning (online CL) studies the problem of learning sequential tasks from an online data stream without task boundaries, aiming to adapt to new data while alleviating catastrophic forgetting on the past tasks. This paper proposes a framework Contrastive Vision Transformer (CVT), which designs a focal contrastive learning strategy based on a transformer architecture, to achieve a better stability-plasticity trade-off for online CL. Specifically, we design a new external attention mechanism for online CL that implicitly captures previous tasks' information. Besides, CVT contains learnable focuses for each class, which could accumulate the knowledge of previous classes to alleviate forgetting. Based on the learnable focuses, we design a focal contrastive loss to rebalance contrastive learning between new and past classes and consolidate previously learned representations. Moreover, CVT contains a dual-classifier structure for decoupling learning current classes and balancing all observed classes. The extensive experimental results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with even fewer parameters on online CL benchmarks and effectively alleviates the catastrophic forgetting.
No More Fine-Tuning? An Experimental Evaluation of Prompt Tuning in Code Intelligence
Wang, Chaozheng, Yang, Yuanhang, Gao, Cuiyun, Peng, Yun, Zhang, Hongyu, Lyu, Michael R.
Pre-trained models have been shown effective in many code intelligence tasks. These models are pre-trained on large-scale unlabeled corpus and then fine-tuned in downstream tasks. However, as the inputs to pre-training and downstream tasks are in different forms, it is hard to fully explore the knowledge of pre-trained models. Besides, the performance of fine-tuning strongly relies on the amount of downstream data, while in practice, the scenarios with scarce data are common. Recent studies in the natural language processing (NLP) field show that prompt tuning, a new paradigm for tuning, alleviates the above issues and achieves promising results in various NLP tasks. In prompt tuning, the prompts inserted during tuning provide task-specific knowledge, which is especially beneficial for tasks with relatively scarce data. In this paper, we empirically evaluate the usage and effect of prompt tuning in code intelligence tasks. We conduct prompt tuning on popular pre-trained models CodeBERT and CodeT5 and experiment with three code intelligence tasks including defect prediction, code summarization, and code translation. Our experimental results show that prompt tuning consistently outperforms fine-tuning in all three tasks. In addition, prompt tuning shows great potential in low-resource scenarios, e.g., improving the BLEU scores of fine-tuning by more than 26\% on average for code summarization. Our results suggest that instead of fine-tuning, we could adapt prompt tuning for code intelligence tasks to achieve better performance, especially when lacking task-specific data.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Insurance Market May See a Big Move : Google, Microsoft , IBM: Long Term Growth Story
New Jersey, NJ---- 07/19/2022-- The Global Artificial Intelligence in Insurance Market Report assesses developments relevant to the insurance industry and identifies key risks and vulnerabilities for the Artificial Intelligence in Insurance Industry to make stakeholders aware with current and future scenarios. To derive complete assessment and market...
Top challenge to internet health is AI power disparity and harm, Mozilla says
The top challenge for the health of the internet is the power disparity between who benefits from AI and who is harmed by AI, Mozilla's new 2022 Internet Health reveals. Once again, this new report puts AI under the spotlight for how companies and governments use the technology. Mozilla's report scrutinized the nature of the AI-driven world citing real examples from different countries. TechRepublic spoke to Solana Larsen, Mozilla's Internet Health report editor, to shed light on the concept of "Responsible AI from the Start," black box AI, the future of regulations and how some AI projects lead by example. Larsen explains that AI systems should be built from the start considering ethics and responsibility, not tacked on at a later date when the harms begin to emerge.
Researchers Identify a Resilient Trait of Deepfakes That Could Aid Long-Term Detection
Since the earliest deepfake detection solutions began to emerge in 2018, the computer vision and security research sector has been seeking to define an essential characteristic of deepfake videos – signals that could prove resistant to improvements in popular facial synthesis technologies (such as autoencoder-based deepfake packages like DeepFaceLab and FaceSwap, and the use of Generative Adversarial Networks to recreate, simulate or alter human faces). Many of the'tells', such as lack of blinking, were made redundant by improvements in deepfakes, whereas the potential use of digital provenance techniques (such as the Adobe-led Content Authenticity Initiative) – including blockchain approaches and digital watermarking of potential source photos – either require sweeping and expensive changes to the existing body of available source images on the internet, or else would need a notable cooperative effort among nations and governments to create systems of invigilation and authentication. Therefore it would be very useful if a truly fundamental and resilient trait could be discerned in image and video content that features altered, invented, or identity-swapped human faces; a characteristic that could be inferred directly from falsified videos, without large-scale verification, cryptographic asset hashing, context-checking, plausibility evaluation, artifact-centric detection routines, or other burdensome approaches to deepfake detection. A new research collaboration between China and Australia believes that it has found this'holy grail', in the form of regularity disruption. The authors have devised a method of comparing the spatial integrity and temporal continuity of real videos against those that contain deepfaked content, and have found that any kind of deepfake interference disrupts the regularity of the image, however imperceptibly.
The Future of A.I. Regulation
While I complain publically about the lack of a governing global body for A.I. regulation that's independent, most BigTech firms pretend like they regulate themselves. Nobody actually trusts that they are doing this properly. The most impressive A.I. and tech regulation I've seen is actually coming out of China. The American narrative on this is that they are anti-capitalistic. I find that attitude interesting.
Testing the Robustness of Learned Index Structures
Bachfischer, Matthias, Borovica-Gajic, Renata, Rubinstein, Benjamin I. P.
While early empirical evidence has supported the case for learned index structures as having favourable average-case performance, little is known about their worst-case performance. By contrast, classical structures are known to achieve optimal worst-case behaviour. This work evaluates the robustness of learned index structures in the presence of adversarial workloads. To simulate adversarial workloads, we carry out a data poisoning attack on linear regression models that manipulates the cumulative distribution function (CDF) on which the learned index model is trained. The attack deteriorates the fit of the underlying ML model by injecting a set of poisoning keys into the training dataset, which leads to an increase in the prediction error of the model and thus deteriorates the overall performance of the learned index structure. We assess the performance of various regression methods and the learned index implementations ALEX and PGM-Index. We show that learned index structures can suffer from a significant performance deterioration of up to 20% when evaluated on poisoned vs. non-poisoned datasets.
Robots Enact Malignant Stereotypes
Hundt, Andrew, Agnew, William, Zeng, Vicky, Kacianka, Severin, Gombolay, Matthew
Stereotypes, bias, and discrimination have been extensively documented in Machine Learning (ML) methods such as Computer Vision (CV) [18, 80], Natural Language Processing (NLP) [6], or both, in the case of large image and caption models such as OpenAI CLIP [14]. In this paper, we evaluate how ML bias manifests in robots that physically and autonomously act within the world. We audit one of several recently published CLIP-powered robotic manipulation methods, presenting it with objects that have pictures of human faces on the surface which vary across race and gender, alongside task descriptions that contain terms associated with common stereotypes. Our experiments definitively show robots acting out toxic stereotypes with respect to gender, race, and scientifically-discredited physiognomy, at scale. Furthermore, the audited methods are less likely to recognize Women and People of Color. Our interdisciplinary sociotechnical analysis synthesizes across fields and applications such as Science Technology and Society (STS), Critical Studies, History, Safety, Robotics, and AI. We find that robots powered by large datasets and Dissolution Models (sometimes called "foundation models", e.g. CLIP) that contain humans risk physically amplifying malignant stereotypes in general; and that merely correcting disparities will be insufficient for the complexity and scale of the problem. Instead, we recommend that robot learning methods that physically manifest stereotypes or other harmful outcomes be paused, reworked, or even wound down when appropriate, until outcomes can be proven safe, effective, and just. Finally, we discuss comprehensive policy changes and the potential of new interdisciplinary research on topics like Identity Safety Assessment Frameworks and Design Justice to better understand and address these harms.