Oceania
Linear Representations of Political Perspective Emerge in Large Language Models
Kim, Junsol, Evans, James, Schein, Aaron
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to generate text that realistically reflects a range of different subjective human perspectives. This paper studies how LLMs are seemingly able to reflect more liberal versus more conservative viewpoints among other political perspectives in American politics. We show that LLMs possess linear representations of political perspectives within activation space, wherein more similar perspectives are represented closer together. To do so, we probe the attention heads across the layers of three open transformerbased LLMs (Llama-2-7b-chat, Mistral-7b-instruct, Vicuna-7b). We first prompt models to generate text from the perspectives of different U.S. lawmakers. We then identify sets of attention heads whose activations linearly predict those lawmakers' DW-NOMINATE scores, a widely-used and validated measure of political ideology. We find that highly predictive heads are primarily located in the middle layers, often speculated to encode high-level concepts and tasks. Using probes only trained to predict lawmakers' ideology, we then show that the same probes can predict measures of news outlets' slant from the activations of models prompted to simulate text from those news outlets. These linear probes allow us to visualize, interpret, and monitor ideological stances implicitly adopted by an LLM as it generates open-ended responses. Finally, we demonstrate that by applying linear interventions to these attention heads, we can steer the model outputs toward a more liberal or conservative stance. Overall, our research suggests that LLMs possess a high-level linear representation of American political ideology and that by leveraging recent advances in mechanistic interpretability, we can identify, monitor, and steer the subjective perspective underlying generated text. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to generate text that reflects a range of different subjective perspectives (Argyle et al., 2023b; Gao et al., 2024). This paper examines whether LLMs possess general representations of political perspective in activation space, whether such representations are linear, and whether they can be used to steer model outputs. Specifically, we show that LLMs possess a linear representation of the "liberal-conservative" political axis in American politics. It is widely believed for LLMs that "important" concepts are encoded linearly as directions in activation space (Mikolov et al., 2013; Nanda et al., 2023; Elhage et al., 2022; Gurnee & Tegmark, 2024; Park et al., 2024b). Assistant: On the one hand, those who support immigration On one hand, pro - choice advoc ates argue that a woman argue that it can bring many benefits to a country. On the other ha rt ages in certain industries, such as healthcare or nd, pro - life advoc ates argue that abortion is the intent io technology.
Minimum-Length Coordinated Motions For Two Convex Centrally-Symmetric Robots
We study the problem of determining coordinated motions, of minimum total length, for two arbitrary convex centrally-symmetric (CCS) robots in an otherwise obstacle-free plane. Using the total path length traced by the two robot centres as a measure of distance, we give an exact characterization of a (not necessarily unique) shortest collision-avoiding motion for all initial and goal configurations of the robots. The individual paths are composed of at most six convex pieces, and their total length can be expressed as a simple integral with a closed form solution depending only on the initial and goal configuration of the robots. The path pieces are either straight segments or segments of the boundary of the Minkowski sum of the two robots (circular arcs, in the special case of disc robots). Furthermore, the paths can be parameterized in such a way that (i) only one robot is moving at any given time (decoupled motion), or (ii) the orientation of the robot configuration changes monotonically.
TactStyle: Generating Tactile Textures with Generative AI for Digital Fabrication
Faruqi, Faraz, Perroni-Scharf, Maxine, Walia, Jaskaran Singh, Zhu, Yunyi, Feng, Shuyue, Degraen, Donald, Mueller, Stefanie
Recent work in Generative AI enables the stylization of 3D models based on image prompts. However, these methods do not incorporate tactile information, leading to designs that lack the expected tactile properties. We present TactStyle, a system that allows creators to stylize 3D models with images while incorporating the expected tactile properties. TactStyle accomplishes this using a modified image-generation model fine-tuned to generate heightfields for given surface textures. By optimizing 3D model surfaces to embody a generated texture, TactStyle creates models that match the desired style and replicate the tactile experience. We utilize a large-scale dataset of textures to train our texture generation model. In a psychophysical experiment, we evaluate the tactile qualities of a set of 3D-printed original textures and TactStyle's generated textures. Our results show that TactStyle successfully generates a wide range of tactile features from a single image input, enabling a novel approach to haptic design.
m4: A Learned Flow-level Network Simulator
Li, Chenning, Zabreyko, Anton A., Nasr-Esfahany, Arash, Zhao, Kevin, Goyal, Prateesh, Alizadeh, Mohammad, Anderson, Thomas
Flow-level simulation is widely used to model large-scale data center networks due to its scalability. Unlike packet-level simulators that model individual packets, flow-level simulators abstract traffic as continuous flows with dynamically assigned transmission rates. While this abstraction enables orders-of-magnitude speedup, it is inaccurate by omitting critical packet-level effects such as queuing, congestion control, and retransmissions. We present m4, an accurate and scalable flow-level simulator that uses machine learning to learn the dynamics of the network of interest. At the core of m4 lies a novel ML architecture that decomposes state transition computations into distinct spatial and temporal components, each represented by a suitable neural network. To efficiently learn the underlying flow-level dynamics, m4 adds dense supervision signals by predicting intermediate network metrics such as remaining flow size and queue length during training. m4 achieves a speedup of up to 104$\times$ over packet-level simulation. Relative to a traditional flow-level simulation, m4 reduces per-flow estimation errors by 45.3% (mean) and 53.0% (p90). For closed-loop applications, m4 accurately predicts network throughput under various congestion control schemes and workloads.
Learning Surrogate Equations for the Analysis of an Agent-Based Cancer Model
Burrage, Kevin, Burrage, Pamela, Kreikemeyer, Justin N., Uhrmacher, Adelinde M., Weerasinghe, Hasitha N.
In this paper, we adapt a two species agent-based cancer model that describes the interaction between cancer cells and healthy cells on a uniform grid to include the interaction with a third species -- namely immune cells. We run six different scenarios to explore the competition between cancer and immune cells and the initial concentration of the immune cells on cancer dynamics. We then use coupled equation learning to construct a population-based reaction model for each scenario. We show how they can be unified into a single surrogate population-based reaction model, whose underlying three coupled ordinary differential equations are much easier to analyse than the original agent-based model. As an example, by finding the single steady state of the cancer concentration, we are able to find a linear relationship between this concentration and the initial concentration of the immune cells. This then enables us to estimate suitable values for the competition and initial concentration to reduce the cancer substantially without performing additional complex and expensive simulations from an agent-based stochastic model. The work shows the importance of performing equation learning from agent-based stochastic data for gaining key insights about the behaviour of complex cellular dynamics.
Automated Annotation of Evolving Corpora for Augmenting Longitudinal Network Data: A Framework Integrating Large Language Models and Expert Knowledge
Liu, Xiao, Wu, Zirui, Li, Jiayi, Shao, Zhicheng, Pang, Xun, Feng, Yansong
Longitudinal network data are essential for analyzing political, economic, and social systems and processes. In political science, these datasets are often generated through human annotation or supervised machine learning applied to evolving corpora. However, as semantic contexts shift over time, inferring dynamic interaction types on emerging issues among a diverse set of entities poses significant challenges, particularly in maintaining timely and consistent annotations. This paper presents the Expert-Augmented LLM Annotation (EALA) approach, which leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) in combination with historically annotated data and expert-constructed codebooks to extrapolate and extend datasets into future periods. We evaluate the performance and reliability of EALA using a dataset of climate negotiations. Our findings demonstrate that EALA effectively predicts nuanced interactions between negotiation parties and captures the evolution of topics over time. At the same time, we identify several limitations inherent to LLM-based annotation, highlighting areas for further improvement. Given the wide availability of codebooks and annotated datasets, EALA holds substantial promise for advancing research in political science and beyond.
The Role of Deep Learning in Financial Asset Management: A Systematic Review
Reis, Pedro, Serra, Ana Paula, Gama, João
This review systematically examines deep learning applications in financial asset management. Unlike prior reviews, this study focuses on identifying emerging trends, such as the integration of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL), and their transformative potential. It highlights new developments, including hybrid models (e.g., transformer-based architectures) and the growing use of alternative data sources such as ESG indicators and sentiment analysis. These advancements challenge traditional financial paradigms and set the stage for a deeper understanding of the evolving landscape. We use the Scopus database to select the most relevant articles published from 2018 to 2023. The inclusion criteria encompassed articles that explicitly apply deep learning models within financial asset management. We excluded studies focused on physical assets. This review also outlines our methodology for evaluating the relevance and impact of the included studies, including data sources and analytical methods. Our search identified 934 articles, with 612 meeting the inclusion criteria based on their focus and methodology. The synthesis of results from these articles provides insights into the effectiveness of deep learning models in improving portfolio performance and price forecasting accuracy. The review highlights the broad applicability and potential enhancements deep learning offers to financial asset management. Despite some limitations due to the scope of model application and variation in methodological rigour, the overall evidence supports deep learning as a valuable tool in this field. Our systematic review underscores the progressive integration of deep learning in financial asset management, suggesting a trajectory towards more sophisticated and impactful applications.
Meta Learning-Driven Iterative Refinement for Robust Anomaly Detection in Industrial Inspection
Aqeel, Muhammad, Sharifi, Shakiba, Cristani, Marco, Setti, Francesco
This study investigates the performance of robust anomaly detection models in industrial inspection, focusing particularly on their ability to handle noisy data. We propose to leverage the adaptation ability of meta-learning approaches to identify and reject noisy training data to improve the learning process. In our model, we employ Model Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) and an iterative refinement process through an Inter-Quartile Range rejection scheme to enhance their adaptability and robustness. This approach significantly improves the models' capability to distinguish between normal and defective conditions. Our results of experiments conducted on well-known MVTec and KSDD2 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method not only excels in environments with substantial noise but can also contribute in case of a clear training set, isolating those samples that are relatively out of distribution, thus offering significant improvements over traditional models.
Evaluation and Facilitation of Online Discussions in the LLM Era: A Survey
Korre, Katerina, Tsirmpas, Dimitris, Gkoumas, Nikos, Cabalé, Emma, Kontarinis, Dionysis, Myrtzani, Danai, Evgeniou, Theodoros, Androutsopoulos, Ion, Pavlopoulos, John
We present a survey of methods for assessing and enhancing the quality of online discussions, focusing on the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs). While online discourses aim, at least in theory, to foster mutual understanding, they often devolve into harmful exchanges, such as hate speech, threatening social cohesion and democratic values. Recent advancements in LLMs enable facilitation agents that not only moderate content, but also actively improve the quality of interactions. Our survey synthesizes ideas from Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Social Sciences to provide (a) a new taxonomy on discussion quality evaluation, (b) an overview of intervention and facilitation strategies, along with a new taxonomy on conversation facilitation datasets, (c) an LLM-oriented roadmap of good practices and future research directions, from technological and societal perspectives.
KoWit-24: A Richly Annotated Dataset of Wordplay in News Headlines
Baranov, Alexander, Palatkina, Anna, Makovka, Yulia, Braslavski, Pavel
We present KoWit-24, a dataset with fine-grained annotation of wordplay in 2,700 Russian news headlines. KoWit-24 annotations include the presence of wordplay, its type, wordplay anchors, and words/phrases the wordplay refers to. Unlike the majority of existing humor collections of canned jokes, KoWit-24 provides wordplay contexts -- each headline is accompanied by the news lead and summary. The most common type of wordplay in the dataset is the transformation of collocations, idioms, and named entities -- the mechanism that has been underrepresented in previous humor datasets. Our experiments with five LLMs show that there is ample room for improvement in wordplay detection and interpretation tasks. The dataset and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/Humor-Research/KoWit-24