South America
A Unified Framework for Deep Symbolic Regression
The last few years have witnessed a surge in methods for symbolic regression, from advances in traditional evolutionary approaches to novel deep learning-based systems. Individual works typically focus on advancing the state-of-the-art for one particular class of solution strategies, and there have been few attempts to investigate the benefits of hybridizing or integrating multiple strategies. In this work, we identify five classes of symbolic regression solution strategies---recursive problem simplification, neural-guided search, large-scale pre-training, genetic programming, and linear models---and propose a strategy to hybridize them into a single modular, unified symbolic regression framework. Based on empirical evaluation using SRBench, a new community tool for benchmarking symbolic regression methods, our unified framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in its ability to (1) symbolically recover analytical expressions, (2) fit datasets with high accuracy, and (3) balance accuracy-complexity trade-offs, across 252 ground-truth and black-box benchmark problems, in both noiseless settings and across various noise levels. Finally, we provide practical use case-based guidance for constructing hybrid symbolic regression algorithms, supported by extensive, combinatorial ablation studies.
Code Readability in the Age of Large Language Models: An Industrial Case Study from Atlassian
Takerngsaksiri, Wannita, Fu, Micheal, Tantithamthavorn, Chakkrit, Pasuksmit, Jirat, Chen, Kun, Wu, Ming
Programmers spend a significant amount of time reading code during the software development process. This trend is amplified by the emergence of large language models (LLMs) that automatically generate code. However, little is known about the readability of the LLM-generated code and whether it is still important from practitioners' perspectives in this new era. In this paper, we conduct a survey to explore the practitioners' perspectives on code readability in the age of LLMs and investigate the readability of our LLM-based software development agents framework, HULA, by comparing its generated code with human-written code in real-world scenarios. Overall, the findings underscore that (1) readability remains a critical aspect of software development; (2) the readability of our LLM-generated code is comparable to human-written code, fostering the establishment of appropriate trust and driving the broad adoption of our LLM-powered software development platform.
Explainable Adversarial Attacks on Coarse-to-Fine Classifiers
Heidarizadeh, Akram, Hatfield, Connor, Lazzarotto, Lorenzo, Cai, HanQin, Atia, George
Traditional adversarial attacks typically aim to alter the predicted labels of input images by generating perturbations that are imperceptible to the human eye. However, these approaches often lack explainability. Moreover, most existing work on adversarial attacks focuses on single-stage classifiers, but multi-stage classifiers are largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce instance-based adversarial attacks for multi-stage classifiers, leveraging Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), which assigns relevance scores to pixels based on their influence on classification outcomes. Our approach generates explainable adversarial perturbations by utilizing LRP to identify and target key features critical for both coarse and fine-grained classifications. Unlike conventional attacks, our method not only induces misclassification but also enhances the interpretability of the model's behavior across classification stages, as demonstrated by experimental results.
In the Picture: Medical Imaging Datasets, Artifacts, and their Living Review
Jiménez-Sánchez, Amelia, Avlona, Natalia-Rozalia, de Boer, Sarah, Campello, Víctor M., Feragen, Aasa, Ferrante, Enzo, Ganz, Melanie, Gichoya, Judy Wawira, González, Camila, Groefsema, Steff, Hering, Alessa, Hulman, Adam, Joskowicz, Leo, Juodelyte, Dovile, Kandemir, Melih, Kooi, Thijs, Lérida, Jorge del Pozo, Li, Livie Yumeng, Pacheco, Andre, Rädsch, Tim, Reyes, Mauricio, Sourget, Théo, van Ginneken, Bram, Wen, David, Weng, Nina, Xu, Jack Junchi, Zając, Hubert Dariusz, Zuluaga, Maria A., Cheplygina, Veronika
Datasets play a critical role in medical imaging research, yet issues such as label quality, shortcuts, and metadata are often overlooked. This lack of attention may harm the generalizability of algorithms and, consequently, negatively impact patient outcomes. While existing medical imaging literature reviews mostly focus on machine learning (ML) methods, with only a few focusing on datasets for specific applications, these reviews remain static -- they are published once and not updated thereafter. This fails to account for emerging evidence, such as biases, shortcuts, and additional annotations that other researchers may contribute after the dataset is published. We refer to these newly discovered findings of datasets as research artifacts. To address this gap, we propose a living review that continuously tracks public datasets and their associated research artifacts across multiple medical imaging applications. Our approach includes a framework for the living review to monitor data documentation artifacts, and an SQL database to visualize the citation relationships between research artifact and dataset. Lastly, we discuss key considerations for creating medical imaging datasets, review best practices for data annotation, discuss the significance of shortcuts and demographic diversity, and emphasize the importance of managing datasets throughout their entire lifecycle. Our demo is publicly available at http://130.226.140.142.
Mixture of Experts (MoE): A Big Data Perspective
Gan, Wensheng, Ning, Zhenyao, Qi, Zhenlian, Yu, Philip S.
As the era of big data arrives, traditional artificial intelligence algorithms have difficulty processing the demands of massive and diverse data. Mixture of experts (MoE) has shown excellent performance and broad application prospects. This paper provides an in-depth review and analysis of the latest progress in this field from multiple perspectives, including the basic principles, algorithmic models, key technical challenges, and application practices of MoE. First, we introduce the basic concept of MoE and its core idea and elaborate on its advantages over traditional single models. Then, we discuss the basic architecture of MoE and its main components, including the gating network, expert networks, and learning algorithms. Next, we review the applications of MoE in addressing key technical issues in big data. For each challenge, we provide specific MoE solutions and their innovations. Furthermore, we summarize the typical use cases of MoE in various application domains. This fully demonstrates the powerful capability of MoE in big data processing. We also analyze the advantages of MoE in big data environments. Finally, we explore the future development trends of MoE. We believe that MoE will become an important paradigm of artificial intelligence in the era of big data. In summary, this paper systematically elaborates on the principles, techniques, and applications of MoE in big data processing, providing theoretical and practical references to further promote the application of MoE in real scenarios.
A Method for Multi-Hop Question Answering on Persian Knowledge Graph
Ghafouri, Arash, Firouzmandi, Mahdi, Naderi, Hasan
Question answering systems are the latest evolution in information retrieval technology, designed to accept complex queries in natural language and provide accurate answers using both unstructured and structured knowledge sources. Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) systems fulfill users' information needs by utilizing structured data, representing a vast number of facts as a graph. However, despite significant advancements, major challenges persist in answering multi-hop complex questions, particularly in Persian. One of the main challenges is the accurate understanding and transformation of these multi-hop complex questions into semantically equivalent SPARQL queries, which allows for precise answer retrieval from knowledge graphs. In this study, to address this issue, a dataset of 5,600 Persian multi-hop complex questions was developed, along with their decomposed forms based on the semantic representation of the questions. Following this, Persian language models were trained using this dataset, and an architecture was proposed for answering complex questions using a Persian knowledge graph. Finally, the proposed method was evaluated against similar systems on the PeCoQ dataset. The results demonstrated the superiority of our approach, with an improvement of 12.57% in F1-score and 12.06% in accuracy compared to the best comparable method.
Enhancing Diagnostic in 3D COVID-19 Pneumonia CT-scans through Explainable Uncertainty Bayesian Quantification
Fierro, Juan Manuel Liscano, Hortua, Hector J.
Accurately classifying COVID-19 pneumonia in 3D CT scans remains a significant challenge in the field of medical image analysis. Although deterministic neural networks have shown promising results in this area, they provide only point estimates outputs yielding poor diagnostic in clinical decision-making. In this paper, we explore the use of Bayesian neural networks for classifying COVID-19 pneumonia in 3D CT scans providing uncertainties in their predictions. We compare deterministic networks and their Bayesian counterpart, enhancing the decision-making accuracy under uncertainty information. Remarkably, our findings reveal that lightweight architectures achieve the highest accuracy of 96\% after developing extensive hyperparameter tuning. Furthermore, the Bayesian counterpart of these architectures via Multiplied Normalizing Flow technique kept a similar performance along with calibrated uncertainty estimates. Finally, we have developed a 3D-visualization approach to explain the neural network outcomes based on SHAP values. We conclude that explainability along with uncertainty quantification will offer better clinical decisions in medical image analysis, contributing to ongoing efforts for improving the diagnosis and treatment of COVID-19 pneumonia.
LegalScore: Development of a Benchmark for Evaluating AI Models in Legal Career Exams in Brazil
Caparroz, Roberto, Roitman, Marcelo, Chow, Beatriz G., Giusti, Caroline, Torhacs, Larissa, Sola, Pedro A., Diogo, João H. M., Balby, Luiza, Vasconcelos, Carolina D. L., Caparroz, Leonardo R., Franco, Albano P.
This research introduces LegalScore, a specialized index for assessing how generative artificial intelligence models perform in a selected range of career exams that require a legal background in Brazil. The index evaluates fourteen different types of artificial intelligence models' performance, from proprietary to open-source models, in answering objective questions applied to these exams. The research uncovers the response of the models when applying English-trained large language models to Brazilian legal contexts, leading us to reflect on the importance and the need for Brazil-specific training data in generative artificial intelligence models. Performance analysis shows that while proprietary and most known models achieved better results overall, local and smaller models indicated promising performances due to their Brazilian context alignment in training. By establishing an evaluation framework with metrics including accuracy, confidence intervals, and normalized scoring, LegalScore enables systematic assessment of artificial intelligence performance in legal examinations in Brazil. While the study demonstrates artificial intelligence's potential value for exam preparation and question development, it concludes that significant improvements are needed before AI can match human performance in advanced legal assessments. The benchmark creates a foundation for continued research, highlighting the importance of local adaptation in artificial intelligence development.
Over-the-Air Multi-Sensor Inference with Neural Networks Using Memristor-Based Analog Computing
Tegin, Busra, Ali, Muhammad Atif, Duman, Tolga M
Deep neural networks provide reliable solutions for many classification and regression tasks; however, their application in real-time wireless systems with simple sensor networks is limited due to high energy consumption and significant bandwidth needs. This study proposes a multi-sensor wireless inference system with memristor-based analog computing. Given the sensors' limited computational capabilities, the features from the network's front end are transmitted to a central device where an $L_p$-norm inspired approximation of the maximum operation is employed to achieve transformation-invariant features, enabling efficient over-the-air transmission. We also introduce a trainable over-the-air sensor fusion method based on $L_p$-norm inspired combining function that customizes sensor fusion to match the network and sensor distribution characteristics, enhancing adaptability. To address the energy constraints of sensors, we utilize memristors, known for their energy-efficient in-memory computing, enabling analog-domain computations that reduce energy use and computational overhead in edge computing. This dual approach of memristors and $L_p$-norm inspired sensor fusion fosters energy-efficient computational and transmission paradigms and serves as a practical energy-efficient solution with minimal performance loss.
Early Failure Detection in Autonomous Surgical Soft-Tissue Manipulation via Uncertainty Quantification
Thompson, Jordan, Koe, Ronald, Le, Anthony, Goodman, Gabriella, Brown, Daniel S., Kuntz, Alan
Autonomous surgical robots are a promising solution to the increasing demand for surgery amid a shortage of surgeons. Recent work has proposed learning-based approaches for the autonomous manipulation of soft tissue. However, due to variability in tissue geometries and stiffnesses, these methods do not always perform optimally, especially in out-of-distribution settings. We propose, develop, and test the first application of uncertainty quantification to learned surgical soft-tissue manipulation policies as an early identification system for task failures. We analyze two different methods of uncertainty quantification, deep ensembles and Monte Carlo dropout, and find that deep ensembles provide a stronger signal of future task success or failure. We validate our approach using the physical daVinci Research Kit (dVRK) surgical robot to perform physical soft-tissue manipulation. We show that we are able to successfully detect task failure and request human intervention when necessary while still enabling autonomous manipulation when possible. Our learned tissue manipulation policy with uncertainty-based early failure detection achieves a zero-shot sim2real performance improvement of 47.5% over the prior state of the art in learned soft-tissue manipulation. We also show that our method generalizes well to new types of tissue as well as to a bimanual soft tissue manipulation task.