Abstract--Constraint-aware estimation of human intent is essential for robots to physically collaborate and interact with humans. Further, to achieve fluid collaboration in dynamic tasks intent estimation should be achieved in real-time. In this paper, we present a framework that combines online estimation and control to facilitate robots in interpreting human intentions, and dynamically adjust their actions to assist in dynamic object comanipulation tasks while considering both robot and human constraints. Central to our approach is the adoption of a Dynamic Systems (DS) model to represent human intent. Such a lowdimensional parameterized model, along with human manipulability and robot kinematic constraints, enables us to predict intent using a particle filter solely based on past motion data and tracking errors. For safe assistive control, we propose a variable impedance controller that adapts the robot's impedance to offer Figure 1: Our method uses particle filters to predict full 6 DoF intent and assistance based on the intent estimation confidence from the DS a variable impedance control scheme to assist the human, while being particle filter. This is achieved without human-robot co-manipulation task and present promising any external force-torque (F/T) sensing. Inspired by this human ability, in this in factories and warehouses, performing tasks that require work, we seek to endow robots with the capability to estimate high speeds and forces and can be dull, dirty or dangerous the human's intent solely from physical guidance while taking for humans, such as object transportation, inspection, palletization, into consideration kinematic and feasibility constraints of both etc.

The use of transformer-based models is growing rapidly throughout society. With this growth, it is important to understand how they work, and in particular, how the attention mechanisms represent concepts. Though there are many interpretability methods, many look at models through their neuronal activations, which are poorly understood. We describe different lenses through which to view neuron activations, and investigate the effectiveness in language models and vision transformers through various methods of neural ablation: zero ablation, mean ablation, activation resampling, and a novel approach we term 'peak ablation'. Through experimental analysis, we find that in different regimes and models, each method can offer the lowest degradation of model performance compared to other methods, with resampling usually causing the most significant performance deterioration. We make our code available at https://github.com/nickypro/investigating-ablation.

Increasingly, large language models (LLMs) are being used to automate workplace processes requiring a high degree of creativity. While much prior work has examined the creativity of LLMs, there has been little research on whether they can generate valid creativity assessments for humans despite the increasingly central role of creativity in modern economies. We develop a psychometrically inspired framework for creating test items (questions) for a classic free-response creativity test: the creative problem-solving (CPS) task. Our framework, the creative psychometric item generator (CPIG), uses a mixture of LLM-based item generators and evaluators to iteratively develop new prompts for writing CPS items, such that items from later iterations will elicit more creative responses from test takers. We find strong empirical evidence that CPIG generates valid and reliable items and that this effect is not attributable to known biases in the evaluation process. Our findings have implications for employing LLMs to automatically generate valid and reliable creativity tests for humans and AI.

Transformer models are increasingly prevalent in various applications, yet our understanding of their internal workings remains limited. This paper investigates the modularity and task specialization of neurons within transformer architectures, focusing on both vision (ViT) and language (Mistral 7B) models. Using a combination of selective pruning and MoEfication clustering techniques, we analyze the overlap and specialization of neurons across different tasks and data subsets. Our findings reveal evidence of task-specific neuron clusters, with varying degrees of overlap between related tasks. We observe that neuron importance patterns persist to some extent even in randomly initialized models, suggesting an inherent structure that training refines. Additionally, we find that neuron clusters identified through MoEfication correspond more strongly to task-specific neurons in earlier and later layers of the models. This work contributes to a more nuanced understanding of transformer internals and offers insights into potential avenues for improving model interpretability and efficiency.

This paper examines the issue of fairness in the estimation of graphical models (GMs), particularly Gaussian, Covariance, and Ising models. These models play a vital role in understanding complex relationships in high-dimensional data. However, standard GMs can result in biased outcomes, especially when the underlying data involves sensitive characteristics or protected groups. To address this, we introduce a comprehensive framework designed to reduce bias in the estimation of GMs related to protected attributes. Our approach involves the integration of the pairwise graph disparity error and a tailored loss function into a nonsmooth multi-objective optimization problem, striving to achieve fairness across different sensitive groups while maintaining the effectiveness of the GMs. Experimental evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework effectively mitigates bias without undermining GMs' performance.

We apply a state-of-the-art difference-in-differences approach to estimate the impact of ChatGPT's release on the writing style of condensed matter papers on arXiv. Our analysis reveals a statistically significant improvement in the English quality of abstracts written by non-native English speakers. Importantly, this improvement remains robust even after accounting for other potential factors, confirming that it can be attributed to the release of ChatGPT. This indicates widespread adoption of the tool. Following the release of ChatGPT, there is a significant increase in the use of unique words, while the frequency of rare words decreases. Across language families, the changes in writing style are significant for authors from the Latin and Ural-Altaic groups, but not for those from the Germanic or other Indo-European groups.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased exceptional ability in causal reasoning from textual information. However, will these causalities remain straightforward for Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) when only visual hints are provided? Motivated by this, we propose a novel Multimodal Causal Reasoning benchmark, namely MuCR, to challenge VLLMs to infer semantic cause-and-effect relationship when solely relying on visual cues such as action, appearance, clothing, and environment. Specifically, we introduce a prompt-driven image synthesis approach to create siamese images with embedded semantic causality and visual cues, which can effectively evaluate VLLMs' causal reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we develop tailored metrics from multiple perspectives, including image-level match, phrase-level understanding, and sentence-level explanation, to comprehensively assess VLLMs' comprehension abilities. Our extensive experiments reveal that the current state-of-the-art VLLMs are not as skilled at multimodal causal reasoning as we might have hoped. Furthermore, we perform a comprehensive analysis to understand these models' shortcomings from different views and suggest directions for future research. We hope MuCR can serve as a valuable resource and foundational benchmark in multimodal causal reasoning research. The project is available at: https://github.com/Zhiyuan-Li-John/MuCR

Inspired by professional human interpreters, we utilize a novel data-driven read-write strategy to balance the translation quality and latency. To address the challenge of translating in-domain terminologies, CLASI employs a multi-modal retrieving module to obtain relevant information to augment the translation. Supported by LLMs, our approach can generate error-tolerated translation by considering the input audio, historical context, and retrieved information. Experimental results show that our system outperforms other systems by significant margins. Aligned with professional human interpreters, we evaluate CLASI with a better human evaluation metric, valid information proportion (VIP), which measures the amount of information that can be successfully conveyed to the listeners. In the real-world scenarios, where the speeches are often disfluent, informal, and unclear, CLASI achieves VIP of 81.3% and 78.0% for Chinese-to-English and English-to-Chinese translation directions, respectively. In contrast, state-of-the-art commercial or open-source systems only achieve 35.4% and 41.6%. On the extremely hard dataset, where other systems achieve under 13% VIP, CLASI can still achieve 70% VIP.

Marmosets use unique calls for other monkeys in their family groups, similar to how humans call each other by name. They are the first non-human primates known to do so. This discovery shows that communication in marmosets is more complex than previously thought, and it could help teach us more about how human language evolved. "Up till quite recently, people thought that human language is a singularity phenomenon that popped out of nothing," says David Omer at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "We're starting to see evidence that this is not the case."

The dominant practice of AI alignment assumes (1) that preferences are an adequate representation of human values, (2) that human rationality can be understood in terms of maximizing the satisfaction of preferences, and (3) that AI systems should be aligned with the preferences of one or more humans to ensure that they behave safely and in accordance with our values. Whether implicitly followed or explicitly endorsed, these commitments constitute what we term a preferentist approach to AI alignment. In this paper, we characterize and challenge the preferentist approach, describing conceptual and technical alternatives that are ripe for further research. We first survey the limits of rational choice theory as a descriptive model, explaining how preferences fail to capture the thick semantic content of human values, and how utility representations neglect the possible incommensurability of those values. We then critique the normativity of expected utility theory (EUT) for humans and AI, drawing upon arguments showing how rational agents need not comply with EUT, while highlighting how EUT is silent on which preferences are normatively acceptable. Finally, we argue that these limitations motivate a reframing of the targets of AI alignment: Instead of alignment with the preferences of a human user, developer, or humanity-writ-large, AI systems should be aligned with normative standards appropriate to their social roles, such as the role of a general-purpose assistant. Furthermore, these standards should be negotiated and agreed upon by all relevant stakeholders. On this alternative conception of alignment, a multiplicity of AI systems will be able to serve diverse ends, aligned with normative standards that promote mutual benefit and limit harm despite our plural and divergent values.