Education
Perceptions and Realities of Text-to-Image Generation
Oppenlaender, Jonas, Silvennoinen, Johanna, Paananen, Ville, Visuri, Aku
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a widely popular technology that will have a profound impact on society and individuals. Less than a decade ago, it was thought that creative work would be among the last to be automated - yet today, we see AI encroaching on many creative domains. In this paper, we present the findings of a survey study on people's perceptions of text-to-image generation. We touch on participants' technical understanding of the emerging technology, their fears and concerns, and thoughts about risks and dangers of text-to-image generation to the individual and society. We find that while participants were aware of the risks and dangers associated with the technology, only few participants considered the technology to be a personal risk. The risks for others were more easy to recognize for participants. Artists were particularly seen at risk. Interestingly, participants who had tried the technology rated its future importance lower than those who had not tried it. This result shows that many people are still oblivious of the potential personal risks of generative artificial intelligence and the impending societal changes associated with this technology.
Generative AI Assistants in Software Development Education: A vision for integrating Generative AI into educational practice, not instinctively defending against it
Bull, Christopher, Kharrufa, Ahmed
The software development industry is amid another disruptive paradigm change - adopting the use of generative AI (GAI) assistants for programming. Whilst AI is already used in various areas of software engineering, GAI technologies, such as GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT, have ignited peoples' imaginations (and fears). It is unclear how the industry will adapt, but the move to integrate these technologies by large software companies, such as Microsoft (GitHub, Bing) and Google (Bard), is a clear indication of intent and direction. We performed exploratory interviews with industry professionals to understand current practice and challenges, which we incorporate into our vision of a future of software development education and make some pedagogical recommendations.
StudioGAN: A Taxonomy and Benchmark of GANs for Image Synthesis
Kang, Minguk, Shin, Joonghyuk, Park, Jaesik
Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is one of the state-of-the-art generative models for realistic image synthesis. While training and evaluating GAN becomes increasingly important, the current GAN research ecosystem does not provide reliable benchmarks for which the evaluation is conducted consistently and fairly. Furthermore, because there are few validated GAN implementations, researchers devote considerable time to reproducing baselines. We study the taxonomy of GAN approaches and present a new open-source library named StudioGAN. StudioGAN supports 7 GAN architectures, 9 conditioning methods, 4 adversarial losses, 12 regularization modules, 3 differentiable augmentations, 7 evaluation metrics, and 5 evaluation backbones. With our training and evaluation protocol, we present a large-scale benchmark using various datasets (CIFAR10, ImageNet, AFHQv2, FFHQ, and Baby/Papa/Granpa-ImageNet) and 3 different evaluation backbones (InceptionV3, SwAV, and Swin Transformer). Unlike other benchmarks used in the GAN community, we train representative GANs, including BigGAN and StyleGAN series in a unified training pipeline and quantify generation performance with 7 evaluation metrics. The benchmark evaluates other cutting-edge generative models (e.g., StyleGAN-XL, ADM, MaskGIT, and RQ-Transformer). StudioGAN provides GAN implementations, training, and evaluation scripts with the pre-trained weights. StudioGAN is available at https://github.com/POSTECH-CVLab/PyTorch-StudioGAN.
RoCourseNet: Distributionally Robust Training of a Prediction Aware Recourse Model
Guo, Hangzhi, Jia, Feiran, Chen, Jinghui, Squicciarini, Anna, Yadav, Amulya
Counterfactual (CF) explanations for machine learning (ML) models are preferred by end-users, as they explain the predictions of ML models by providing a recourse (or contrastive) case to individuals who are adversely impacted by predicted outcomes. Existing CF explanation methods generate recourses under the assumption that the underlying target ML model remains stationary over time. However, due to commonly occurring distributional shifts in training data, ML models constantly get updated in practice, which might render previously generated recourses invalid and diminish end-users trust in our algorithmic framework. To address this problem, we propose RoCourseNet, a training framework that jointly optimizes predictions and recourses that are robust to future data shifts. This work contains four key contributions: (1) We formulate the robust recourse generation problem as a tri-level optimization problem which consists of two sub-problems: (i) a bi-level problem that finds the worst-case adversarial shift in the training data, and (ii) an outer minimization problem to generate robust recourses against this worst-case shift. (2) We leverage adversarial training to solve this tri-level optimization problem by: (i) proposing a novel virtual data shift (VDS) algorithm to find worst-case shifted ML models via explicitly considering the worst-case data shift in the training dataset, and (ii) a block-wise coordinate descent procedure to optimize for prediction and corresponding robust recourses. (3) We evaluate RoCourseNet's performance on three real-world datasets, and show that RoCourseNet consistently achieves more than 96% robust validity and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by at least 10% in generating robust CF explanations. (4) Finally, we generalize the RoCourseNet framework to accommodate any parametric post-hoc methods for improving robust validity.
Use of AI Is Seeping Into Academic Journals--and It's Proving Difficult to Detect
In its August edition, Resources Policy, an academic journal under the Elsevier publishing umbrella, featured a peer-reviewed study about how ecommerce has affected fossil fuel efficiency in developing nations. But buried in the report was a curious sentence: "Please note that as an AI language model, I am unable to generate specific tables or conduct tests, so the actual results should be included in the table." The study's three listed authors had names and university or institutional affiliations--they did not appear to be AI language models. But for anyone who has played around in ChatGPT, that phrase may sound familiar: The generative AI chatbot often prefaces its statements with this caveat, noting its weaknesses in delivering some information. After a screenshot of the sentence was posted to X, formerly Twitter, by another researcher, Elsevier began investigating.
Fostering User Engagement in the Critical Reflection of Arguments
Weber, Klaus, Aicher, Annalena, Minker, Wolfang, Ultes, Stefan, André, Elisabeth
A natural way to resolve different points of view and form opinions is through exchanging arguments and knowledge. Facing the vast amount of available information on the internet, people tend to focus on information consistent with their beliefs. Especially when the issue is controversial, information is often selected that does not challenge one's beliefs. To support a fair and unbiased opinion-building process, we propose a chatbot system that engages in a deliberative dialogue with a human. In contrast to persuasive systems, the envisioned chatbot aims to provide a diverse and representative overview - embedded in a conversation with the user. To account for a reflective and unbiased exploration of the topic, we enable the system to intervene if the user is too focused on their pre-existing opinion. Therefore we propose a model to estimate the users' reflective engagement (RUE), defined as their critical thinking and open-mindedness. We report on a user study with 58 participants to test our model and the effect of the intervention mechanism, discuss the implications of the results, and present perspectives for future work. The results show a significant effect on both user reflection and total user focus, proving our proposed approach's validity.
MaScQA: A Question Answering Dataset for Investigating Materials Science Knowledge of Large Language Models
Zaki, Mohd, Jayadeva, null, Mausam, null, Krishnan, N. M. Anoop
Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi 110016, India Abstract Information extraction and textual comprehension from materials literature are vital for developing an exhaustive knowledge base that enables accelerated materials discovery. Language models have demonstrated their capability to answer domain-specific questions and retrieve information from knowledge bases. However, there are no benchmark datasets in the materials domain that can evaluate the understanding of the key concepts by these language models. In this work, we curate a dataset of 650 challenging questions from the materials domain that require the knowledge and skills of a materials student who has cleared their undergraduate degree. We classify these questions based on their structure and the materials science domain-based subcategories. Further, we evaluate the performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models on solving these questions via zero-shot and chain of thought prompting. It is observed that GPT-4 gives the best performance (~62% accuracy) as compared to GPT-3.5. Interestingly, in contrast to the general observation, no significant improvement in accuracy is observed with the chain of thought prompting. To evaluate the limitations, we performed an error analysis, which revealed conceptual errors (~64%) as the major contributor compared to computational errors (~36%) towards the reduced performance of LLMs. We hope that the dataset and analysis performed in this work will promote further research in developing better materials science domain-specific LLMs and strategies for information extraction.
CMB: A Comprehensive Medical Benchmark in Chinese
Wang, Xidong, Chen, Guiming Hardy, Song, Dingjie, Zhang, Zhiyi, Chen, Zhihong, Xiao, Qingying, Jiang, Feng, Li, Jianquan, Wan, Xiang, Wang, Benyou, Li, Haizhou
Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a possibility to make a great breakthrough in medicine. The establishment of a standardized medical benchmark becomes a fundamental cornerstone to measure progression. However, medical environments in different regions have their local characteristics, e.g., the ubiquity and significance of traditional Chinese medicine within China. Therefore, merely translating English-based medical evaluation may result in \textit{contextual incongruities} to a local region. To solve the issue, we propose a localized medical benchmark called CMB, a Comprehensive Medical Benchmark in Chinese, designed and rooted entirely within the native Chinese linguistic and cultural framework. While traditional Chinese medicine is integral to this evaluation, it does not constitute its entirety. Using this benchmark, we have evaluated several prominent large-scale LLMs, including ChatGPT, GPT-4, dedicated Chinese LLMs, and LLMs specialized in the medical domain. It is worth noting that our benchmark is not devised as a leaderboard competition but as an instrument for self-assessment of model advancements. We hope this benchmark could facilitate the widespread adoption and enhancement of medical LLMs within China. Check details in \url{https://cmedbenchmark.llmzoo.com/}.
Approaches to Generative Artificial Intelligence, A Social Justice Perspective
In the 2023-2024 academic year, the widespread availability of generative artificial intelligence, exemplified by ChatGPT's 1.6 billion monthly visits, is set to impact academic integrity. With 77% of high school students previously reporting engagement in dishonest behaviour, the rise of AI-driven writing assistance, dubbed 'AI-giarism' by Chan (arXiv:2306.03358v2), will make plagiarism more accessible and less detectable. While these concerns are urgent, they also raise broader questions about the revolutionary nature of this technology, including autonomy, data privacy, copyright, and equity. This paper aims to explore generative AI from a social justice perspective, examining the training of these models, the inherent biases, and the potential injustices in detecting AI-generated writing.