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Invariant Descriptors of Motion and Force Trajectories for Interpreting Object Manipulation Tasks in Contact

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Invariant descriptors of point and rigid-body motion trajectories have been proposed in the past as representative task models for motion recognition and generalization. Currently, no invariant descriptor exists for representing force trajectories, which appear in contact tasks. This paper introduces invariant descriptors for force trajectories by exploiting the duality between motion and force. Two types of invariant descriptors are presented depending on whether the trajectories consist of screw or vector coordinates. Methods and software are provided for robustly calculating the invariant descriptors from noisy measurements using optimal control. Using experimental human demonstrations of 3D contour following and peg-on-hole alignment tasks, invariant descriptors are shown to result in task representations that do not depend on the calibration of reference frames or sensor locations. The tuning process for the optimal control problems is shown to be fast and intuitive. Similar to motions in free space, the proposed invariant descriptors for motion and force trajectories may prove useful for the recognition and generalization of constrained motions, such as during object manipulation in contact.


Privacy-Aware Data Acquisition under Data Similarity in Regression Markets

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Data markets facilitate decentralized data exchange for applications such as prediction, learning, or inference. The design of these markets is challenged by varying privacy preferences as well as data similarity among data owners. Related works have often overlooked how data similarity impacts pricing and data value through statistical information leakage. We demonstrate that data similarity and privacy preferences are integral to market design and propose a query-response protocol using local differential privacy for a two-party data acquisition mechanism. In our regression data market model, we analyze strategic interactions between privacy-aware owners and the learner as a Stackelberg game over the asked price and privacy factor. Finally, we numerically evaluate how data similarity affects market participation and traded data value. A. Context and Motivation In recent years, there has been a surge in Internet of Things (IoT) devices with sensing and computing capabilities, leading to an abundance of IoT data. Shashi Raj Pandey and Petar Popovski are with the Connectivity Section, Department of Electronic Systems, Aalborg University, Denmark. Pierre Pinson has primary affiliation with Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London, UK. He is also affiliated to the Technical University of Denmark, Department of Technology, Management and Economics, as well as with Halfspace This work was supported by the Villum Investigator Grant "WATER" from the Velux Foundation, Denmark.


A Dating App Tried to Update Its Interface. Unbridled, Horny Chaos Ensued.

Slate

When Aaron* logged on to the kinky, nonmonogamy-focused dating app Feeld on Thursday to finalize plans with a match, the interface wouldn't load. As a middle-aged man in an ethically nonmonogamous relationship, Aaron considers Feeld a great way to meet other like-minded people in his area--and that's exactly what he was hoping to do this past Friday. Someone he had a connection with was in town for one night only, and he wanted to take advantage. He tried logging in again and changing his Wi-Fi connection, but nothing seemed to do the trick. Flummoxed, he took to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to see if there was any explanation.


As the last vanguards of the Greatest Generation pass, 7 things to know when caring for a parent

FOX News

Fox News' Martha MacCallum has the latest on her new Fox Nation documentary on'The Story.' My father-in-law passed away last month, days away from his 99th birthday. He lived with us for 13 years. He was a great man, a World War II veteran who loved his wife and raised three children. As his vascular dementia worsened – unlike Alzheimer's, his long-term memory remained intact almost until the end – my wife would set him up with a familiar film. "The Godfather" played most frequently, followed by "Patton."


From Voices to Validity: Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for Textual Analysis of Policy Stakeholder Interviews

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Obtaining stakeholders' diverse experiences and opinions about current policy in a timely manner is crucial for policymakers to identify strengths and gaps in resource allocation, thereby supporting effective policy design and implementation. However, manually coding even moderately sized interview texts or open-ended survey responses from stakeholders can often be labor-intensive and time-consuming. This study explores the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs)--like GPT-4--with human expertise to enhance text analysis of stakeholder interviews regarding K-12 education policy within one U.S. state. Employing a mixed-methods approach, human experts developed a codebook and coding processes as informed by domain knowledge and unsupervised topic modeling results. They then designed prompts to guide GPT-4 analysis and iteratively evaluate different prompts' performances. This combined human-computer method enabled nuanced thematic and sentiment analysis. Results reveal that while GPT-4 thematic coding aligned with human coding by 77.89% at specific themes, expanding to broader themes increased congruence to 96.02%, surpassing traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods by over 25%. Additionally, GPT-4 is more closely matched to expert sentiment analysis than lexicon-based methods. Findings from quantitative measures and qualitative reviews underscore the complementary roles of human domain expertise and automated analysis as LLMs offer new perspectives and coding consistency. The human-computer interactive approach enhances efficiency, validity, and interpretability of educational policy research.


Principle-Driven Self-Alignment of Language Models from Scratch with Minimal Human Supervision

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent AI-assistant agents, such as ChatGPT, predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with human annotations and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to align the output of large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, ensuring they are helpful, ethical, and reliable. However, this dependence can significantly constrain the true potential of AI-assistant agents due to the high cost of obtaining human supervision and the related issues on quality, reliability, diversity, self-consistency, and undesirable biases. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach called SELF-ALIGN, which combines principle-driven reasoning and the generative power of LLMs for the self-alignment of AI agents with minimal human supervision. Our approach encompasses four stages: first, we use an LLM to generate synthetic prompts, and a topic-guided method to augment the prompt diversity; second, we use a small set of human-written principles for AI models to follow, and guide the LLM through in-context learning from demonstrations (of principles application) to produce helpful, ethical, and reliable responses to user's queries; third, we fine-tune the original LLM with the high-quality self-aligned responses so that the resulting model can generate desirable responses for each query directly without the principle set and the demonstrations anymore; and finally, we offer a refinement step to address the issues of overly-brief or indirect responses. Applying SELF-ALIGN to the LLaMA-65b base language model, we develop an AI assistant named Dromedary. With fewer than 300 lines of human annotations (including < 200 seed prompts, 16 generic principles, and 5 exemplars for in-context learning). Dromedary significantly surpasses the performance of several state-of-the-art AI systems, including Text-Davinci-003 and Alpaca, on benchmark datasets with various settings.


'Authentic' Is 2023's Word of the Year. You Read That Right

WIRED

At first it looked unbelievable, but Henry Kissinger had died. At 100 years old, news outlets--and the world--had been preparing for the passing of President Nixon's secretary of state for a while. Still, when people were finding out via emoji-filled chain texts, it seemed unreal. Deepfakes, the metaverse, Elon Musk telling advertisers to fuck themselves at a time when X could probably use the money. Perhaps this is why there is a premium on genuineness these days.


Ridley Scott warns AI will be 'technical hydrogen bomb' in film industry

FOX News

AI expert Marva Bailer explains how, even though there are currently laws in place, the average person has more access than ever to create deepfakes of celebrities. Ridley Scott, director of sci-fi classics like "Alien" and "Blade Runner," is terrified about AI technology running away with society. In an interview with Rolling Stone promoting his film "Napoleon," Scott was asked if artificial intelligence worried him, and the answer was an emphatic yes. "We have to lock down AI. And I don't know how you're gonna lock it down," he told the outlet.


Deciphering Digital Detectives: Understanding LLM Behaviors and Capabilities in Multi-Agent Mystery Games

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this study, we explore the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in "Jubensha" (Chinese murder mystery role-playing games), a novel area in AI-driven gaming. We introduce the first Chinese dataset specifically for Jubensha, including character scripts and game rules, to foster AI agent development in this complex narrative environment. Our work also presents a unique multi-agent interaction framework using LLMs, allowing AI agents to autonomously engage in the game, enhancing the dynamics of Jubensha gameplay. To evaluate these AI agents, we developed specialized methods targeting their mastery of case information and reasoning skills. Furthermore, we incorporated the latest advancements in in-context learning to improve the agents' performance in critical aspects like information gathering, murderer detection, and logical reasoning. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods. This work aims to offer a fresh perspective on understanding LLM capabilities and establish a new benchmark for evaluating large language model-based agents to researchers in the field.


Pre-registration for Predictive Modeling

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Several scientific communities are currently facing a replication crisis, wherein it has proven difficult or impossible for researchers to independently verify the results of previously published studies. Failures to replicate large swaths of experimental work (Camerer et al., 2018; Nosek et al., 2015; Begley and Ellis, 2012; Baker, 2016) have come in fields like psychology or medicine, that focus on what Hofman et al. (2021) call explanatory modeling, where the goal is to identify and estimate causal effects (e.g., is there an effect of X on Y, and if so, how large is it?). While there are many different factors that can contribute to unreliable findings in explanatory modeling, the combination of small-scale experiments involving noisy measurements and the (mis)use of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) has received a great deal of attention in recent years. Under these conditions, researchers can mistake idiosyncratic patterns in noise for true effects, resulting in unreliable findings that do not replicate upon further investigation (Button et al., 2013; Loken and Gelman, 2017; Meehl, 1990; Simmons et al., 2011). More generally, some forms of data-dependent decision making (e.g., about how to define research questions or hypotheses, how to filter or transform data, how to model data, what tests to run, etc.) can lead to similar problems regardless of the specifics of the methods (Gelman and Loken, 2013). What about other fields, such as machine learning and data science, that focus less on explanation and more on predictive modeling, defined in Hofman et al. (2021) as directly forecasting outcomes (e.g., how well can an outcome Y be predicted using all available features X?) without necessarily focusing on isolating individual causal effects? Predictive modeling is typically done by testing (out-of-sample) predictions on large-scale datasets, and hence--unlike explanatory modeling--involves neither small experiments nor misuse of significance testing. With advances in the fields of statistics and machine learning (ML) we have seen remarkable performance gains in predictive modeling over the last decade, for both traditional ML tasks and for scientific applications. The same methods that have been shown to achieve at or above human-level performance on tasks like playing chess, classifying images, or understanding natural language (Zhang et al.,