Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Government


Making AI Fair, and How to Use It

Communications of the ACM

A new technology, broadly deployed, raises profound questions about its impact on American society. Government agencies wonder whether this technology should be used to make automated decisions about Americans. Academic experts call attention to concerns about fairness and accountability. Comments from the public are requested. A White House press conference is announced.


A Computer Scientist with a Biologist's Ambition

Communications of the ACM

When I was growing up, I always wanted to be a writer like Tolstoy or Agatha Christie--until I got my first period. I realized then that women must endure much more pain than men to fulfill the human reproduction responsibilities. So, I wanted to become a geneticist who could make men pregnant to share the pain with women. My "ambition" was shattered when I was rejected by the biology department of the university I applied to. Instead, I became a computer science student without ever having seen a computer before.


Actionable Auditing Revisited

Communications of the ACM

Non-target corporations Kairos and Amazon have overall error rates of 6.60% and 8.66%, respectively. These are the worst current performances of the companies analyzed in the follow-up audit. Nonetheless, when comparing to the previous May 2017 performance of target corporations, the Kairos and Amazon error rates are lower than the former error rates of IBM (12.1%) and Face (9.9%) and only slightly higher than Microsoft's performance (6.2%) from the initial study.


Greenhouse gases emissions: estimating corporate non-reported emissions using interpretable machine learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As of 2022, greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions reporting and auditing are not yet compulsory for all companies and methodologies of measurement and estimation are not unified. We propose a machine learning-based model to estimate scope 1 and scope 2 GHG emissions of companies not reporting them yet. Our model, specifically designed to be transparent and completely adapted to this use case, is able to estimate emissions for a large universe of companies. It shows good out-of-sample global performances as well as good out-of-sample granular performances when evaluating it by sectors, by countries or by revenues buckets. We also compare our results to those of other providers and find our estimates to be more accurate. Thanks to the proposed explainability tools using Shapley values, our model is fully interpretable, the user being able to understand which factors split explain the GHG emissions for each particular company.


FAIR principles for AI models with a practical application for accelerated high energy diffraction microscopy

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A concise and measurable set of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles for scientific data is transforming the state-of-practice for data management and stewardship, supporting and enabling discovery and innovation. Learning from this initiative, and acknowledging the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in the practice of science and engineering, we introduce a set of practical, concise, and measurable FAIR principles for AI models. We showcase how to create and share FAIR data and AI models within a unified computational framework combining the following elements: the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, the Materials Data Facility, the Data and Learning Hub for Science, and funcX, and the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), in particular the ThetaGPU supercomputer and the SambaNova DataScale system at the ALCF AI Testbed. We describe how this domain-agnostic computational framework may be harnessed to enable autonomous AI-driven discovery.


Revisiting Residual Networks for Adversarial Robustness: An Architectural Perspective

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Efforts to improve the adversarial robustness of convolutional neural networks have primarily focused on developing more effective adversarial training methods. In contrast, little attention was devoted to analyzing the role of architectural elements (such as topology, depth, and width) on adversarial robustness. This paper seeks to bridge this gap and present a holistic study on the impact of architectural design on adversarial robustness. We focus on residual networks and consider architecture design at the block level, i.e., topology, kernel size, activation, and normalization, as well as at the network scaling level, i.e., depth and width of each block in the network. In both cases, we first derive insights through systematic ablative experiments. Then we design a robust residual block, dubbed RobustResBlock, and a compound scaling rule, dubbed RobustScaling, to distribute depth and width at the desired FLOP count. Finally, we combine RobustResBlock and RobustScaling and present a portfolio of adversarially robust residual networks, RobustResNets, spanning a broad spectrum of model capacities. Experimental validation across multiple datasets and adversarial attacks demonstrate that RobustResNets consistently outperform both the standard WRNs and other existing robust architectures, achieving state-of-the-art AutoAttack robust accuracy of 61.1% without additional data and 63.7% with 500K external data while being $2\times$ more compact in terms of parameters. Code is available at \url{ https://github.com/zhichao-lu/robust-residual-network}


Classification and mapping of low-statured 'shrubland' cover types in post-agricultural landscapes of the US Northeast

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Novel plant communities reshape landscapes and pose challenges for land cover classification and mapping that can constrain research and stewardship efforts. In the US Northeast, emergence of low-statured woody vegetation, or shrublands, instead of secondary forests in post-agricultural landscapes is well-documented by field studies, but poorly understood from a landscape perspective, which limits the ability to systematically study and manage these lands. To address gaps in classification/mapping of low-statured cover types where they have been historically rare, we developed models to predict shrubland distributions at 30m resolution across New York State (NYS), using a stacked ensemble combining a random forest, gradient boosting machine, and artificial neural network to integrate remote sensing of structural (airborne LIDAR) and optical (satellite imagery) properties of vegetation cover. We first classified a 1m canopy height model (CHM), derived from a patchwork of available LIDAR coverages, to define shrubland presence/absence. Next, these non-contiguous maps were used to train a model ensemble based on temporally-segmented imagery to predict shrubland probability for the entire study landscape (NYS). Approximately 2.5% of the CHM coverage area was classified as shrubland. Models using Landsat predictors trained on the classified CHM were effective at identifying shrubland (test set AUC=0.893, real-world AUC=0.904), in discriminating between shrub/young forest and other cover classes, and produced qualitatively sensible maps, even when extending beyond the original training data. Our results suggest that incorporation of airborne LiDAR, even from a discontinuous patchwork of coverages, can improve land cover classification of historically rare but increasingly prevalent shrubland habitats across broader areas.


Ensemble learning techniques for intrusion detection system in the context of cybersecurity

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recently, there has been an interest in improving the resources available in Intrusion Detection System (IDS) techniques. In this sense, several studies related to cybersecurity show that the environment invasions and information kidnapping are increasingly recurrent and complex. The criticality of the business involving operations in an environment using computing resources does not allow the vulnerability of the information. Cybersecurity has taken on a dimension within the universe of indispensable technology in corporations, and the prevention of risks of invasions into the environment is dealt with daily by Security teams. Thus, the main objective of the study was to investigate the Ensemble Learning technique using the Stacking method, supported by the Support Vector Machine (SVM) and k-Nearest Neighbour (kNN) algorithms aiming at an optimization of the results for DDoS attack detection. For this, the Intrusion Detection System concept was used with the application of the Data Mining and Machine Learning Orange tool to obtain better results


Critic-Guided Decoding for Controlled Text Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Steering language generation towards objectives or away from undesired content has been a long-standing goal in utilizing language models (LM). Recent work has demonstrated reinforcement learning and weighted decoding as effective approaches to achieve a higher level of language control and quality with pros and cons. In this work, we propose a novel critic decoding method for controlled language generation (CriticControl) that combines the strengths of reinforcement learning and weighted decoding. Specifically, we adopt the actor-critic framework to train an LM-steering critic from non-differentiable reward models. And similar to weighted decoding, our method freezes the language model and manipulates the output token distribution using called critic, improving training efficiency and stability. Evaluation of our method on three controlled generation tasks, namely topic control, sentiment control, and detoxification, shows that our approach generates more coherent and well-controlled texts than previous methods. In addition, CriticControl demonstrates superior generalization ability in zero-shot settings. Human evaluation studies also corroborate our findings.


Text classification in shipping industry using unsupervised models and Transformer based supervised models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Obtaining labelled data in a particular context could be expensive and time consuming. Although different algorithms, including unsupervised learning, semi-supervised learning, self-learning have been adopted, the performance of text classification varies with context. Given the lack of labelled dataset, we proposed a novel and simple unsupervised text classification model to classify cargo content in international shipping industry using the Standard International Trade Classification (SITC) codes. Our method stems from representing words using pretrained Glove Word Embeddings and finding the most likely label using Cosine Similarity. To compare unsupervised text classification model with supervised classification, we also applied several Transformer models to classify cargo content. Due to lack of training data, the SITC numerical codes and the corresponding textual descriptions were used as training data. A small number of manually labelled cargo content data was used to evaluate the classification performances of the unsupervised classification and the Transformer based supervised classification. The comparison reveals that unsupervised classification significantly outperforms Transformer based supervised classification even after increasing the size of the training dataset by 30%. Lacking training data is a key bottleneck that prohibits deep learning models (such as Transformers) from successful practical applications. Unsupervised classification can provide an alternative efficient and effective method to classify text when there is scarce training data.