This dissertation will combine new tools and methodologies to answer pressing questions regarding inundation area and hurricane events in complex, heterogeneous changing environments. In addition to remote sensing approaches, citizen science and machine learning are both emerging fields that harness advancing technology to answer environmental management and disaster response questions. Freshwater lakes supply a large amount of inland water resources to sustain local and regional developments. However, some lake systems depend upon great fluctuation in water surface area.

The emergence of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in graph data analysis and their deployment on Machine Learning as a Service platforms have raised critical concerns about data misuse during model training. This situation is further exacerbated due to the lack of transparency in local training processes, potentially leading to the unauthorized accumulation of large volumes of graph data, thereby infringing on the intellectual property rights of data owners. Existing methodologies often address either data misuse detection or mitigation, and are primarily designed for local GNN models rather than cloud-based MLaaS platforms. These limitations call for an effective and comprehensive solution that detects and mitigates data misuse without requiring exact training data while respecting the proprietary nature of such data. This paper introduces a pioneering approach called GraphGuard, to tackle these challenges. We propose a training-data-free method that not only detects graph data misuse but also mitigates its impact via targeted unlearning, all without relying on the original training data. Our innovative misuse detection technique employs membership inference with radioactive data, enhancing the distinguishability between member and non-member data distributions. For mitigation, we utilize synthetic graphs that emulate the characteristics previously learned by the target model, enabling effective unlearning even in the absence of exact graph data. We conduct comprehensive experiments utilizing four real-world graph datasets to demonstrate the efficacy of GraphGuard in both detection and unlearning. We show that GraphGuard attains a near-perfect detection rate of approximately 100% across these datasets with various GNN models. In addition, it performs unlearning by eliminating the impact of the unlearned graph with a marginal decrease in accuracy (less than 5%).

The rapid development of the Large Language Model (LLM) presents huge opportunities for 6G communications, e.g., network optimization and management by allowing users to input task requirements to LLMs by nature language. However, directly applying native LLMs in 6G encounters various challenges, such as a lack of private communication data and knowledge, limited logical reasoning, evaluation, and refinement abilities. Integrating LLMs with the capabilities of retrieval, planning, memory, evaluation and reflection in agents can greatly enhance the potential of LLMs for 6G communications. To this end, we propose a multi-agent system with customized communication knowledge and tools for solving communication related tasks using natural language, comprising three components: (1) Multi-agent Data Retrieval (MDR), which employs the condensate and inference agents to refine and summarize communication knowledge from the knowledge base, expanding the knowledge boundaries of LLMs in 6G communications; (2) Multi-agent Collaborative Planning (MCP), which utilizes multiple planning agents to generate feasible solutions for the communication related task from different perspectives based on the retrieved knowledge; (3) Multi-agent Evaluation and Reflecxion (MER), which utilizes the evaluation agent to assess the solutions, and applies the reflexion agent and refinement agent to provide improvement suggestions for current solutions. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed multi-agent system by designing a semantic communication system, as a case study of 6G communications.

Conflict transformation and management are complex decision processes with extremely high stakes at hand and could greatly benefit from formal approaches to decision support. For this purpose we develop a general framework about how to use problem structuring methods for such purposes. More precisely we show how to transform cognitive maps to value trees in order to promote a more design-oriented approach to decision support aiming at constructing innovative solutions for conflict management purposes. We show that our findings have a much wider validity since they allow to move from a descriptive representation of a problem situation to a more prescriptive one using formal procedures and models.

This paper presents a deep learning-based system for efficient automatic case summarization. Leveraging state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques, the system offers both supervised and unsupervised methods to generate concise and relevant summaries of lengthy legal case documents. The user-friendly interface allows users to browse the system's database of legal case documents, select their desired case, and choose their preferred summarization method. The system generates comprehensive summaries for each subsection of the legal text as well as an overall summary. This demo streamlines legal case document analysis, potentially benefiting legal professionals by reducing workload and increasing efficiency. Future work will focus on refining summarization techniques and exploring the application of our methods to other types of legal texts.

Two different forms of responsibility, counterfactual and seeing-to-it, have been extensively discussed in the philosophy and AI in the context of a single agent or multiple agents acting simultaneously. Although the generalisation of counterfactual responsibility to a setting where multiple agents act in some order is relatively straightforward, the same cannot be said about seeing-to-it responsibility. Two versions of seeing-to-it modality applicable to such settings have been proposed in the literature. Neither of them perfectly captures the intuition of responsibility. This paper proposes a definition of seeing-to-it responsibility for such settings that amalgamate the two modalities. This paper shows that the newly proposed notion of responsibility and counterfactual responsibility are not definable through each other and studies the responsibility gap for these two forms of responsibility. It shows that although these two forms of responsibility are not enough to ascribe responsibility in each possible situation, this gap does not exist if higher-order responsibility is taken into account.

Training large language models (LLMs) is a costly endeavour in terms of time and computational resources. The large amount of training data used during the unsupervised pre-training phase makes it difficult to verify all data and, unfortunately, undesirable data may be ingested during training. Re-training from scratch is impractical and has led to the creation of the 'unlearning' discipline where models are modified to "unlearn" undesirable information without retraining. However, any modification can alter the behaviour of LLMs, especially on key dimensions such as fairness. This is the first work that examines this interplay between unlearning and fairness for LLMs. In particular, we focus on a popular unlearning framework known as SISA [Bourtoule et al., 2021], which creates an ensemble of models trained on disjoint shards. We evaluate the performance-fairness trade-off for SISA, and empirically demsontrate that SISA can indeed reduce fairness in LLMs. To remedy this, we propose post-processing bias mitigation techniques for ensemble models produced by SISA. We adapt the post-processing fairness improvement technique from [Hardt et al., 2016] to design three methods that can handle model ensembles, and prove that one of the methods is an optimal fair predictor for ensemble of models. Through experimental results, we demonstrate the efficacy of our post-processing framework called 'FairSISA'.

Text-to-image generative models offer many innovative services but also raise ethical concerns due to their potential to generate unethical images. Most publicly available text-to-image models employ safety filters to prevent unintended generation intents. In this work, we introduce the Divide-and-Conquer Attack to circumvent the safety filters of state-of-the-art text-to-image models. Our attack leverages LLMs as agents for text transformation, creating adversarial prompts from sensitive ones. We have developed effective helper prompts that enable LLMs to break down sensitive drawing prompts into multiple harmless descriptions, allowing them to bypass safety filters while still generating sensitive images. This means that the latent harmful meaning only becomes apparent when all individual elements are drawn together. Our evaluation demonstrates that our attack successfully circumvents the closed-box safety filter of SOTA DALLE-3 integrated natively into ChatGPT to generate unethical images. This approach, which essentially uses LLM-generated adversarial prompts against GPT-4-assisted DALLE-3, is akin to using one's own spear to breach their shield. It could have more severe security implications than previous manual crafting or iterative model querying methods, and we hope it stimulates more attention towards similar efforts. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/researchcode001/Divide-and-Conquer-Attack

Recent developments in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) have created a paradigm shift in multiple areas of society, and the use of these technologies is likely to become a defining feature of education in coming decades. GenAI offers transformative pedagogical opportunities, while simultaneously posing ethical and academic challenges. Against this backdrop, we outline a practical, simple, and sufficiently comprehensive tool to allow for the integration of GenAI tools into educational assessment: the AI Assessment Scale (AIAS). The AIAS empowers educators to select the appropriate level of GenAI usage in assessments based on the learning outcomes they seek to address. The AIAS offers greater clarity and transparency for students and educators, provides a fair and equitable policy tool for institutions to work with, and offers a nuanced approach which embraces the opportunities of GenAI while recognising that there are instances where such tools may not be pedagogically appropriate or necessary. By adopting a practical, flexible approach that can be implemented quickly, the AIAS can form a much-needed starting point to address the current uncertainty and anxiety regarding GenAI in education. As a secondary objective, we engage with the current literature and advocate for a refocused discourse on GenAI tools in education, one which foregrounds how technologies can help support and enhance teaching and learning, which contrasts with the current focus on GenAI as a facilitator of academic misconduct.

Recent research has made significant strides in applying alignment techniques to enhance the helpfulness and harmlessness of large language models (LLMs) in accordance with human intentions. In this paper, we argue for the importance of alignment for honesty, ensuring that LLMs proactively refuse to answer questions when they lack knowledge, while still not being overly conservative. However, a pivotal aspect of alignment for honesty involves discerning the limits of an LLM's knowledge, which is far from straightforward. This challenge demands comprehensive solutions in terms of metric development, benchmark creation, and training methodologies. In this paper, we address these challenges by first establishing a precise problem definition and defining ``honesty'' inspired by the Analects of Confucius. This serves as a cornerstone for developing metrics that effectively measure an LLM's honesty by quantifying its progress post-alignment. Furthermore, we introduce a flexible training framework which is further instantiated by several efficient fine-tuning techniques that emphasize honesty without sacrificing performance on other tasks. Our extensive experiments reveal that these aligned models show a marked increase in honesty, as indicated by our proposed metrics. We open-source a wealth of resources to facilitate future research at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/alignment-for-honesty, including honesty-aligned models, training and evaluation datasets for honesty alignment, concept glossary, as well as all relevant source code.