Government
Requirements for Explainability and Acceptance of Artificial Intelligence in Collaborative Work
Theis, Sabine, Jentzsch, Sophie, Deligiannaki, Fotini, Berro, Charles, Raulf, Arne Peter, Bruder, Carmen
The increasing prevalence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in safety-critical contexts such as air-traffic control leads to systems that are practical and efficient, and to some extent explainable to humans to be trusted and accepted. The present structured literature analysis examines n = 236 articles on the requirements for the explainability and acceptance of AI. Results include a comprehensive review of n = 48 articles on information people need to perceive an AI as explainable, the information needed to accept an AI, and representation and interaction methods promoting trust in an AI. Results indicate that the two main groups of users are developers who require information about the internal operations of the model and end users who require information about AI results or behavior. Users' information needs vary in specificity, complexity, and urgency and must consider context, domain knowledge, and the user's cognitive resources. The acceptance of AI systems depends on information about the system's functions and performance, privacy and ethical considerations, as well as goal-supporting information tailored to individual preferences and information to establish trust in the system. Information about the system's limitations and potential failures can increase acceptance and trust. Trusted interaction methods are human-like, including natural language, speech, text, and visual representations such as graphs, charts, and animations. Our results have significant implications for future human-centric AI systems being developed. Thus, they are suitable as input for further application-specific investigations of user needs.
Your Attack Is Too DUMB: Formalizing Attacker Scenarios for Adversarial Transferability
Alecci, Marco, Conti, Mauro, Marchiori, Francesco, Martinelli, Luca, Pajola, Luca
Evasion attacks are a threat to machine learning models, where adversaries attempt to affect classifiers by injecting malicious samples. An alarming side-effect of evasion attacks is their ability to transfer among different models: this property is called transferability. Therefore, an attacker can produce adversarial samples on a custom model (surrogate) to conduct the attack on a victim's organization later. Although literature widely discusses how adversaries can transfer their attacks, their experimental settings are limited and far from reality. For instance, many experiments consider both attacker and defender sharing the same dataset, balance level (i.e., how the ground truth is distributed), and model architecture. In this work, we propose the DUMB attacker model. This framework allows analyzing if evasion attacks fail to transfer when the training conditions of surrogate and victim models differ. DUMB considers the following conditions: Dataset soUrces, Model architecture, and the Balance of the ground truth. We then propose a novel testbed to evaluate many state-of-the-art evasion attacks with DUMB; the testbed consists of three computer vision tasks with two distinct datasets each, four types of balance levels, and three model architectures. Our analysis, which generated 13K tests over 14 distinct attacks, led to numerous novel findings in the scope of transferable attacks with surrogate models. In particular, mismatches between attackers and victims in terms of dataset source, balance levels, and model architecture lead to non-negligible loss of attack performance.
Learning-on-the-Drive: Self-supervised Adaptation of Visual Offroad Traversability Models
Chen, Eric, Ho, Cherie, Maulimov, Mukhtar, Wang, Chen, Scherer, Sebastian
Autonomous off-road driving requires understanding traversability, which refers to the suitability of a given terrain to drive over. When offroad vehicles travel at high speed ($>10m/s$), they need to reason at long-range ($50m$-$100m$) for safe and deliberate navigation. Moreover, vehicles often operate in new environments and under different weather conditions. LiDAR provides accurate estimates robust to visual appearances, however, it is often too noisy beyond 30m for fine-grained estimates due to sparse measurements. Conversely, visual-based models give dense predictions at further distances but perform poorly at all ranges when out of training distribution. To address these challenges, we present ALTER, an offroad perception module that adapts-on-the-drive to combine the best of both sensors. Our visual model continuously learns from new near-range LiDAR measurements. This self-supervised approach enables accurate long-range traversability prediction in novel environments without hand-labeling. Results on two distinct real-world offroad environments show up to 52.5% improvement in traversability estimation over LiDAR-only estimates and 38.1% improvement over non-adaptive visual baseline.
Manipulation Risks in Explainable AI: The Implications of the Disagreement Problem
Goethals, Sofie, Martens, David, Evgeniou, Theodoros
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is used in more and more high-stakes domains of our life such as justice [Berk, 2012], healthcare [Callahan and Shah, 2017], and finance [Lessmann et al., 2015], increasing the need to explain these decisions and to make sure that they are aligned with how we want the decision to be made. However, the complexity of many AI systems makes them challenging to comprehend, posing a significant barrier to their implementation and oversight [Arrieta et al., 2020, Samek et al., 2019]. Legislative initiatives, including the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), have recognized the'right for explanation' for individuals affected by algorithmic-decision making, emphasizing the legal necessity of explainability [Goodman and Flaxman, 2017]. In response, the field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has emerged, aimed at developing methods for explaining the decision-making processes of AI models [Adadi and Berrada, 2018, Holzinger et al., 2022, Xu et al., 2019]. Nevertheless, the landscape of post-hoc explanations is diverse, and each method can yield a different explanation. Furthermore, even within a single explanation method, multiple explanations can be generated for the same instance or decision. This phenomenon, known as the disagreement problem, has been studied in literature [Brughmans et al.,
Towards Benchmarking and Improving the Temporal Reasoning Capability of Large Language Models
Tan, Qingyu, Ng, Hwee Tou, Bing, Lidong
Reasoning about time is of fundamental importance. Many facts are time-dependent. For example, athletes change teams from time to time, and different government officials are elected periodically. Previous time-dependent question answering (QA) datasets tend to be biased in either their coverage of time spans or question types. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive probing dataset \tempreason to evaluate the temporal reasoning capability of large language models. Our dataset includes questions of three temporal reasoning levels. In addition, we also propose a novel learning framework to improve the temporal reasoning capability of large language models, based on temporal span extraction and time-sensitive reinforcement learning. We conducted experiments in closed book QA, open book QA, and reasoning QA settings and demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach. Our code and data are released on https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/TempReason.
Auditing large language models: a three-layered approach
Mรถkander, Jakob, Schuett, Jonas, Kirk, Hannah Rose, Floridi, Luciano
Large language models (LLMs) represent a major advance in artificial intelligence (AI) research. However, the widespread use of LLMs is also coupled with significant ethical and social challenges. Previous research has pointed towards auditing as a promising governance mechanism to help ensure that AI systems are designed and deployed in ways that are ethical, legal, and technically robust. However, existing auditing procedures fail to address the governance challenges posed by LLMs, which display emergent capabilities and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. In this article, we address that gap by outlining a novel blueprint for how to audit LLMs. Specifically, we propose a three-layered approach, whereby governance audits (of technology providers that design and disseminate LLMs), model audits (of LLMs after pre-training but prior to their release), and application audits (of applications based on LLMs) complement and inform each other. We show how audits, when conducted in a structured and coordinated manner on all three levels, can be a feasible and effective mechanism for identifying and managing some of the ethical and social risks posed by LLMs. However, it is important to remain realistic about what auditing can reasonably be expected to achieve. Therefore, we discuss the limitations not only of our three-layered approach but also of the prospect of auditing LLMs at all. Ultimately, this article seeks to expand the methodological toolkit available to technology providers and policymakers who wish to analyse and evaluate LLMs from technical, ethical, and legal perspectives.
Multisensor Multiobject Tracking With High-Dimensional Object States
Passive monitoring of acoustic or radio sources has important applications in modern convenience, public safety, and surveillance. A key task in passive monitoring is multiobject tracking (MOT). This paper presents a Bayesian method for multisensor MOT for challenging tracking problems where the object states are high-dimensional, and the measurements follow a nonlinear model. Our method is developed in the framework of factor graphs and the sum-product algorithm (SPA) and implemented using random samples or "particles". The multimodal probability density functions (pdfs) provided by the SPA are effectively represented by a Gaussian mixture model (GMM). To perform the operations of the SPA in high-dimensional spaces, we make use of Particle flow (PFL). Here, particles are migrated towards regions of high likelihood based on the solution of a partial differential equation. This makes it possible to obtain good object detection and tracking performance even in challenging multisensor MOT scenarios with single sensor measurements that have a lower dimension than the object positions. We perform a numerical evaluation in a passive acoustic monitoring scenario where multiple sources are tracked in 3-D from 1-D time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) measurements provided by pairs of hydrophones. Our numerical results demonstrate favorable detection and estimation accuracy compared to state-of-the-art reference techniques.
Measuring the Driving Forces of Predictive Performance: Application to Credit Scoring
Sullivan, Huรฉ, Christophe, Hurlin, Christophe, Pรฉrignon, Sรฉbastien, Saurin
In credit scoring, machine learning models are known to outperform standard parametric models. As they condition access to credit, banking supervisors and internal model validation teams need to monitor their predictive performance and to identify the features with the highest impact on performance. To facilitate this, we introduce the XPER methodology to decompose a performance metric (e.g., AUC, $R^2$) into specific contributions associated with the various features of a classification or regression model. XPER is theoretically grounded on Shapley values and is both model-agnostic and performance metric-agnostic. Furthermore, it can be implemented either at the model level or at the individual level. Using a novel dataset of car loans, we decompose the AUC of a machine-learning model trained to forecast the default probability of loan applicants. We show that a small number of features can explain a surprisingly large part of the model performance. Furthermore, we find that the features that contribute the most to the predictive performance of the model may not be the ones that contribute the most to individual forecasts (SHAP). We also show how XPER can be used to deal with heterogeneity issues and significantly boost out-of-sample performance.
Training Data Influence Analysis and Estimation: A Survey
Good models require good training data. For overparameterized deep models, the causal relationship between training data and model predictions is increasingly opaque and poorly understood. Influence analysis partially demystifies training's underlying interactions by quantifying the amount each training instance alters the final model. Measuring the training data's influence exactly can be provably hard in the worst case; this has led to the development and use of influence estimators, which only approximate the true influence. This paper provides the first comprehensive survey of training data influence analysis and estimation. We begin by formalizing the various, and in places orthogonal, definitions of training data influence. We then organize state-of-the-art influence analysis methods into a taxonomy; we describe each of these methods in detail and compare their underlying assumptions, asymptotic complexities, and overall strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we propose future research directions to make influence analysis more useful in practice as well as more theoretically and empirically sound. A curated, up-to-date list of resources related to influence analysis is available at https://github.com/ZaydH/influence_analysis_papers.
Asynchronous Execution of Heterogeneous Tasks in ML-driven HPC Workflows
Pascuzzi, Vincent R., Kilic, Ozgur O., Turilli, Matteo, Jha, Shantenu
Heterogeneous scientific workflows consist of numerous types of tasks that require executing on heterogeneous resources. Asynchronous execution of those tasks is crucial to improve resource utilization, task throughput and reduce workflows' makespan. Therefore, middleware capable of scheduling and executing different task types across heterogeneous resources must enable asynchronous execution of tasks. In this paper, we investigate the requirements and properties of the asynchronous task execution of machine learning (ML)-driven high performance computing (HPC) workflows. We model the degree of asynchronicity permitted for arbitrary workflows and propose key metrics that can be used to determine qualitative benefits when employing asynchronous execution. Our experiments represent relevant scientific drivers, we perform them at scale on Summit, and we show that the performance enhancements due to asynchronous execution are consistent with our model.