To gain insight into the mechanisms behind machine learning methods, it is crucial to establish connections among the features describing data points. However, these correlations often exhibit a high-dimensional and strongly nonlinear nature, which makes them challenging to detect using standard methods. This paper exploits the entanglement between intrinsic dimensionality and correlation to propose a metric that quantifies the (potentially nonlinear) correlation between high-dimensional manifolds. We first validate our method on synthetic data in controlled environments, showcasing its advantages and drawbacks compared to existing techniques. Subsequently, we extend our analysis to large-scale applications in neural network representations. Specifically, we focus on latent representations of multimodal data, uncovering clear correlations between paired visual and textual embeddings, whereas existing methods struggle significantly in detecting similarity. Our results indicate the presence of highly nonlinear correlation patterns between latent manifolds.

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) integrates interconnected sensors and devices to support industrial applications, but its dynamic environments pose challenges related to data drift. Considering the limited resources and the need to effectively adapt models to new data distributions, this paper introduces a Continual Learning (CL) approach, i.e., Distillation-based Self-Guidance (DSG), to address challenges presented by industrial streaming data via a novel generative replay mechanism. DSG utilizes knowledge distillation to transfer knowledge from the previous diffusion-based generator to the updated one, improving both the stability of the generator and the quality of reproduced data, thereby enhancing the mitigation of catastrophic forgetting. Experimental results on CWRU, DSA, and WISDM datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DSG. DSG outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline in accuracy, demonstrating improvements ranging from 2.9% to 5.0% on key datasets, showcasing its potential for practical industrial applications.

We study the problem of Distributionally Robust Constrained RL (DRC-RL), where the goal is to maximize the expected reward subject to environmental distribution shifts and constraints. This setting captures situations where training and testing environments differ, and policies must satisfy constraints motivated by safety or limited budgets. Despite significant progress toward algorithm design for the separate problems of distributionally robust RL and constrained RL, there do not yet exist algorithms with end-to-end convergence guarantees for DRC-RL. We develop an algorithmic framework based on strong duality that enables the first efficient and provable solution in a class of environmental uncertainties. Further, our framework exposes an inherent structure of DRC-RL that arises from the combination of distributional robustness and constraints, which prevents a popular class of iterative methods from tractably solving DRC-RL, despite such frameworks being applicable for each of distributionally robust RL and constrained RL individually. Finally, we conduct experiments on a car racing benchmark to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Identifying misogyny using artificial intelligence is a form of combating online toxicity against women. However, the subjective nature of interpreting misogyny poses a significant challenge to model the phenomenon. In this paper, we propose a multitask learning approach that leverages the subjectivity of this task to enhance the performance of the misogyny identification systems. We incorporated diverse perspectives from annotators in our model design, considering gender and age across six profile groups, and conducted extensive experiments and error analysis using two language models to validate our four alternative designs of the multitask learning technique to identify misogynistic content in English tweets. The results demonstrate that incorporating various viewpoints enhances the language models' ability to interpret different forms of misogyny. This research advances content moderation and highlights the importance of embracing diverse perspectives to build effective online moderation systems.

While existing alignment paradigms have been integral in developing large language models (LLMs), LLMs often learn an averaged human preference and struggle to model diverse preferences across cultures, demographics, and communities. We propose Modular Pluralism, a modular framework based on multi-LLM collaboration for pluralistic alignment: it "plugs into" a base LLM a pool of smaller but specialized community LMs, where models collaborate in distinct modes to flexibility support three modes of pluralism: Overton, steerable, and distributional. Modular Pluralism is uniquely compatible with black-box LLMs and offers the modular control of adding new community LMs for previously underrepresented communities. We evaluate Modular Pluralism with six tasks and four datasets featuring questions/instructions with value-laden and perspective-informed responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Modular Pluralism advances the three pluralism objectives across six black-box and open-source LLMs. Further analysis reveals that LLMs are generally faithful to the inputs from smaller community LLMs, allowing seamless patching by adding a new community LM to better cover previously underrepresented communities.

Air pollution, especially particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5), is a pressing concern for public health and is difficult to estimate in developing countries (data-poor regions) due to a lack of ground sensors. Transfer learning models can be leveraged to solve this problem, as they use alternate data sources to gain knowledge (i.e., data from data-rich regions). However, current transfer learning methodologies do not account for dependencies between the source and the target domains. We recognize this transfer problem as spatial transfer learning and propose a new feature named Latent Dependency Factor (LDF) that captures spatial and semantic dependencies of both domains and is subsequently added to the feature spaces of the domains. We generate LDF using a novel two-stage autoencoder model that learns from clusters of similar source and target domain data. Our experiments show that transfer learning models using LDF have a 19.34% improvement over the baselines. We additionally support our experiments with qualitative findings.

Integration of speech into healthcare has intensified privacy concerns due to its potential as a non-invasive biomarker containing individual biometric information. In response, speaker anonymization aims to conceal personally identifiable information while retaining crucial linguistic content. However, the application of anonymization techniques to pathological speech, a critical area where privacy is especially vital, has not been extensively examined. This study investigates anonymization's impact on pathological speech across over 2,700 speakers from multiple German institutions, focusing on privacy, pathological utility, and demographic fairness. We explore both deep-learning-based and signal processing-based anonymization methods, and document substantial privacy improvements across disorders-evidenced by equal error rate increases up to 1933%, with minimal overall impact on utility. Specific disorders such as Dysarthria, Dysphonia, and Cleft Lip and Palate experienced minimal utility changes, while Dysglossia showed slight improvements. Our findings underscore that the impact of anonymization varies substantially across different disorders. This necessitates disorder-specific anonymization strategies to optimally balance privacy with diagnostic utility. Additionally, our fairness analysis revealed consistent anonymization effects across most of the demographics. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of anonymization in pathological speech for enhancing privacy, while also highlighting the importance of customized and disorder-specific approaches to account for inversion attacks.

Despite it being the cornerstone of BPE, the most common tokenization algorithm, the importance of compression in the tokenization process is still unclear. In this paper, we argue for the theoretical importance of compression, that can be viewed as 0-gram language modeling where equal probability is assigned to all tokens. We also demonstrate the empirical importance of compression for downstream success of pre-trained language models. We control the compression ability of several BPE tokenizers by varying the amount of documents available during their training: from 1 million documents to a character-based tokenizer equivalent to no training data at all. We then pre-train English language models based on those tokenizers and fine-tune them over several tasks. We show that there is a correlation between tokenizers' compression and models' downstream performance, suggesting that compression is a reliable intrinsic indicator of tokenization quality. These correlations are more pronounced for generation tasks (over classification) or for smaller models (over large ones). We replicated a representative part of our experiments on Turkish and found similar results, confirming that our results hold for languages with typological characteristics dissimilar to English. We conclude that building better compressing tokenizers is a fruitful avenue for further research and for improving overall model performance.

In the japanese anime industry, predicting whether an upcoming product will be popular is crucial. This paper presents a dataset and methods on predicting anime popularity using a multimodal textimage dataset constructed exclusively from freely available internet sources. The dataset was built following rigorous standards based on real-life investment experiences. A deep neural network architecture leveraging GPT-2 and ResNet-50 to embed the data was employed to investigate the correlation between the multimodal text-image input and a popularity score, discovering relevant strengths and weaknesses in the dataset. To measure the accuracy of the model, mean squared error (MSE) was used, obtaining a best result of 0.011 when considering all inputs and the full version of the deep neural network, compared to the benchmark MSE 0.412 obtained with traditional TF-IDF and PILtotensor vectorizations. This is the first proposal to address such task with multimodal datasets, revealing the substantial benefit of incorporating image information, even when a relatively small model (ResNet-50) was used to embed them.

The recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked concerns about their potential to spread misinformation. As a result, there is a pressing need for tools to identify ``fake arguments'' generated by such models. To create these tools, examples of texts generated by LLMs are needed. This paper introduces a methodology to obtain good, bad and ugly arguments from argumentative essays produced by ChatGPT, OpenAI's LLM. We then describe a novel dataset containing a set of diverse arguments, ArGPT. We assess the effectiveness of our dataset and establish baselines for several argumentation-related tasks. Finally, we show that the artificially generated data relates well to human argumentation and thus is useful as a tool to train and test systems for the defined tasks.