Government
SEGAN: semi-supervised learning approach for missing data imputation
Pan, Xiaohua, Wu, Weifeng, Liu, Peiran, Li, Zhen, Lu, Peng, Cao, Peijian, Zhang, Jianfeng, Qiu, Xianfei, Wu, YangYang
In many practical real-world applications, data missing is a very common phenomenon, making the development of data-driven artificial intelligence theory and technology increasingly difficult. Data completion is an important method for missing data preprocessing. Most existing miss-ing data completion models directly use the known information in the missing data set but ignore the impact of the data label information contained in the data set on the missing data completion model. To this end, this paper proposes a missing data completion model SEGAN based on semi-supervised learning, which mainly includes three important modules: generator, discriminator and classifier. In the SEGAN model, the classifier enables the generator to make more full use of known data and its label information when predicting missing data values. In addition, the SE-GAN model introduces a missing hint matrix to allow the discriminator to more effectively distinguish between known data and data filled by the generator. This paper theoretically proves that the SEGAN model that introduces a classifier and a missing hint matrix can learn the real known data distribution characteristics when reaching Nash equilibrium. Finally, a large number of experiments were conducted in this article, and the experimental results show that com-pared with the current state-of-the-art multivariate data completion method, the performance of the SEGAN model is improved by more than 3%.
An Empirical Design Justice Approach to Identifying Ethical Considerations in the Intersection of Large Language Models and Social Robotics
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in social robotics presents a unique set of ethical challenges and social impacts. This research is set out to identify ethical considerations that arise in the design and development of these two technologies in combination. Using LLMs for social robotics may provide benefits, such as enabling natural language open-domain dialogues. However, the intersection of these two technologies also gives rise to ethical concerns related to misinformation, non-verbal cues, emotional disruption, and biases. The robot's physical social embodiment adds complexity, as ethical hazards associated with LLM-based Social AI, such as hallucinations and misinformation, can be exacerbated due to the effects of physical embodiment on social perception and communication. To address these challenges, this study employs an empirical design justice-based methodology, focusing on identifying socio-technical ethical considerations through a qualitative co-design and interaction study. The purpose of the study is to identify ethical considerations relevant to the process of co-design of, and interaction with a humanoid social robot as the interface of a LLM, and to evaluate how a design justice methodology can be used in the context of designing LLMs-based social robotics. The findings reveal a mapping of ethical considerations arising in four conceptual dimensions: interaction, co-design, terms of service and relationship and evaluates how a design justice approach can be used empirically in the intersection of LLMs and social robotics.
Language Model Council: Benchmarking Foundation Models on Highly Subjective Tasks by Consensus
Zhao, Justin, Plaza-del-Arco, Flor Miriam, Curry, Amanda Cercas
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates robust and challenging benchmarks. Leaderboards like Chatbot Arena rank LLMs based on how well their responses align with human preferences. However, many tasks such as those related to emotional intelligence, creative writing, or persuasiveness, are highly subjective and often lack majoritarian human agreement. Judges may have irreconcilable disagreements about what constitutes a better response. To address the challenge of ranking LLMs on highly subjective tasks, we propose a novel benchmarking framework, the Language Model Council (LMC). The LMC operates through a democratic process to: 1) formulate a test set through equal participation, 2) administer the test among council members, and 3) evaluate responses as a collective jury. We deploy a council of 20 newest LLMs on an open-ended emotional intelligence task: responding to interpersonal dilemmas. Our results show that the LMC produces rankings that are more separable, robust, and less biased than those from any individual LLM judge, and is more consistent with a human-established leaderboard compared to other benchmarks.
Set-Based Prompting: Provably Solving the Language Model Order Dependency Problem
McIlroy-Young, Reid, Brown, Katrina, Olson, Conlan, Zhang, Linjun, Dwork, Cynthia
The development of generative language models that can create long and coherent textual outputs via autoregression has lead to a proliferation of uses and a corresponding sweep of analyses as researches work to determine the limitations of this new paradigm. Unlike humans, these 'Large Language Models' (LLMs) are highly sensitive to small changes in their inputs, leading to unwanted inconsistency in their behavior. One problematic inconsistency when LLMs are used to answer multiple-choice questions or analyze multiple inputs is order dependency: the output of an LLM can (and often does) change significantly when sub-sequences are swapped, despite both orderings being semantically identical. In this paper we present Set-Based Prompting, a technique that guarantees the output of an LLM will not have order dependence on a specified set of sub-sequences. We show that this method provably eliminates order dependency, and that it can be applied to any transformer-based LLM to enable text generation that is unaffected by re-orderings. Delving into the implications of our method, we show that, despite our inputs being out of distribution, the impact on expected accuracy is small, where the expectation is over the order of uniformly chosen shuffling of the candidate responses, and usually significantly less in practice. Thus, Set-Based Prompting can be used as a 'dropped-in' method on fully trained models. Finally, we discuss how our method's success suggests that other strong guarantees can be obtained on LLM performance via modifying the input representations.
WannaLaugh: A Configurable Ransomware Emulator -- Learning to Mimic Malicious Storage Traces
Diamantopoulos, Dionysios, Pletka, Roman, Sarafijanovic, Slavisa, Reddy, A. L. Narasimha, Pozidis, Haris
Ransomware, a fearsome and rapidly evolving cybersecurity threat, continues to inflict severe consequences on individuals and organizations worldwide. Traditional detection methods, reliant on static signatures and application behavioral patterns, are challenged by the dynamic nature of these threats. This paper introduces three primary contributions to address this challenge. First, we introduce a ransomware emulator. This tool is designed to safely mimic ransomware attacks without causing actual harm or spreading malware, making it a unique solution for studying ransomware behavior. Second, we demonstrate how we use this emulator to create storage I/O traces. These traces are then utilized to train machine-learning models. Our results show that these models are effective in detecting ransomware, highlighting the practical application of our emulator in developing responsible cybersecurity tools. Third, we show how our emulator can be used to mimic the I/O behavior of existing ransomware thereby enabling safe trace collection. Both the emulator and its application represent significant steps forward in ransomware detection in the era of machine-learning-driven cybersecurity.
Traversing Mars: Cooperative Informative Path Planning to Efficiently Navigate Unknown Scenes
Rockenbauer, Friedrich M., Lim, Jaeyoung, Müller, Marcus G., Siegwart, Roland, Schmid, Lukas
The ability to traverse an unknown environment is crucial for autonomous robot operations. However, due to the limited sensing capabilities and system constraints, approaching this problem with a single robot agent can be slow, costly, and unsafe. For example, in planetary exploration missions, the wear on the wheels of a rover from abrasive terrain should be minimized at all costs as reparations are infeasible. On the other hand, utilizing a scouting robot such as a micro aerial vehicle (MAV) has the potential to reduce wear and time costs and increasing safety of a follower robot. This work proposes a novel cooperative IPP framework that allows a scout (e.g., an MAV) to efficiently explore the minimum-cost-path for a follower (e.g., a rover) to reach the goal. We derive theoretic guarantees for our algorithm, and prove that the algorithm always terminates, always finds the optimal path if it exists, and terminates early when the found path is shown to be optimal or infeasible. We show in thorough experimental evaluation that the guarantees hold in practice, and that our algorithm is 22.5% quicker to find the optimal path and 15% quicker to terminate compared to existing methods.
Watermarking Language Models with Error Correcting Codes
Chao, Patrick, Dobriban, Edgar, Hassani, Hamed
As language model capabilities improve, there are corresponding potential harms such as the creation of misinformation (Zellers et al., 2020) and propaganda (Solaiman et al., 2019). To mitigate this, a first step is to detect and filter content. A popular approach to reliably detecting AI generated content is to add a watermark (Kirchenbauer et al., 2023; Kuditipudi et al., 2023; Aaronson and Kirchner, 2022; Christ et al., 2023), a hidden signal embedded in the output. While there are exponentially many combinations of words and characters, watermarking biases generation towards specific patterns that are undetectable to humans. We consider the detection setting from the model-provider's perspective: the detection algorithm receives (user or machine-generated) text as input, but no further metadata such as prompts or generation parameters. We do not explore zero-shot or post-hoc methods to classify text as generated from any language model, such as GPT-Zero (Tian and Cui, 2023) and DetectGPT (Mitchell et al., 2023). This model-agnostic detection is inherently challenging as language models are trained to mimic human text (Bender et al., 2021).
PRIBOOT: A New Data-Driven Expert for Improved Driving Simulations
Coelho, Daniel, Oliveira, Miguel, Santos, Vitor, Lopez, Antonio M.
The development of Autonomous Driving (AD) systems in simulated environments like CARLA is crucial for advancing real-world automotive technologies. To drive innovation, CARLA introduced Leaderboard 2.0, significantly more challenging than its predecessor. However, current AD methods have struggled to achieve satisfactory outcomes due to a lack of sufficient ground truth data. Human driving logs provided by CARLA are insufficient, and previously successful expert agents like Autopilot and Roach, used for collecting datasets, have seen reduced effectiveness under these more demanding conditions. To overcome these data limitations, we introduce PRIBOOT, an expert agent that leverages limited human logs with privileged information. We have developed a novel BEV representation specifically tailored to meet the demands of this new benchmark and processed it as an RGB image to facilitate the application of transfer learning techniques, instead of using a set of masks. Additionally, we propose the Infraction Rate Score (IRS), a new evaluation metric designed to provide a more balanced assessment of driving performance over extended routes. PRIBOOT is the first model to achieve a Route Completion (RC) of 75% in Leaderboard 2.0, along with a Driving Score (DS) and IRS of 20% and 45%, respectively. With PRIBOOT, researchers can now generate extensive datasets, potentially solving the data availability issues that have hindered progress in this benchmark.
Global AI Governance in Healthcare: A Cross-Jurisdictional Regulatory Analysis
Chakraborty, Attrayee, Karhade, Mandar
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being adopted across the world and promises a new revolution in healthcare. While AI-enabled medical devices in North America dominate 42.3% of the global market, the use of AI-enabled medical devices in other countries is still a story waiting to be unfolded. We aim to delve deeper into global regulatory approaches towards AI use in healthcare, with a focus on how common themes are emerging globally. We compare these themes to the World Health Organization's (WHO) regulatory considerations and principles on ethical use of AI for healthcare applications. Our work seeks to take a global perspective on AI policy by analyzing 14 legal jurisdictions including countries representative of various regions in the world (North America, South America, South East Asia, Middle East, Africa, Australia, and the Asia-Pacific). Our eventual goal is to foster a global conversation on the ethical use of AI in healthcare and the regulations that will guide it. We propose solutions to promote international harmonization of AI regulations and examine the requirements for regulating generative AI, using China and Singapore as examples of countries with well-developed policies in this area.
Unraveling Code-Mixing Patterns in Migration Discourse: Automated Detection and Analysis of Online Conversations on Reddit
Vitiugin, Fedor, Lee, Sunok, Paakki, Henna, Chizhikova, Anastasiia, Sawhney, Nitin
The surge in global migration patterns underscores the imperative of integrating migrants seamlessly into host communities, necessitating inclusive and trustworthy public services. Despite the Nordic countries' robust public sector infrastructure, recent immigrants often encounter barriers to accessing these services, exacerbating social disparities and eroding trust. Addressing digital inequalities and linguistic diversity is paramount in this endeavor. This paper explores the utilization of code-mixing, a communication strategy prevalent among multilingual speakers, in migration-related discourse on social media platforms such as Reddit. We present Ensemble Learning for Multilingual Identification of Code-mixed Texts (ELMICT), a novel approach designed to automatically detect code-mixed messages in migration-related discussions. Leveraging ensemble learning techniques for combining multiple tokenizers' outputs and pre-trained language models, ELMICT demonstrates high performance (with F1 more than 0.95) in identifying code-mixing across various languages and contexts, particularly in cross-lingual zero-shot conditions (with avg. F1 more than 0.70). Moreover, the utilization of ELMICT helps to analyze the prevalence of code-mixing in migration-related threads compared to other thematic categories on Reddit, shedding light on the topics of concern to migrant communities. Our findings reveal insights into the communicative strategies employed by migrants on social media platforms, offering implications for the development of inclusive digital public services and conversational systems. By addressing the research questions posed in this study, we contribute to the understanding of linguistic diversity in migration discourse and pave the way for more effective tools for building trust in multicultural societies.