Citing papers is the primary method through which modern scientific writing discusses and builds on past work. Collectively, citing a diverse set of papers (in time and area of study) is an indicator of how widely the community is reading. Yet, there is little work looking at broad temporal patterns of citation. This work systematically and empirically examines: How far back in time do we tend to go to cite papers? How has that changed over time, and what factors correlate with this citational attention/amnesia? We chose NLP as our domain of interest and analyzed approximately 71.5K papers to show and quantify several key trends in citation. Notably, around 62% of cited papers are from the immediate five years prior to publication, whereas only about 17% are more than ten years old. Furthermore, we show that the median age and age diversity of cited papers were steadily increasing from 1990 to 2014, but since then, the trend has reversed, and current NLP papers have an all-time low temporal citation diversity. Finally, we show that unlike the 1990s, the highly cited papers in the last decade were also papers with the least citation diversity, likely contributing to the intense (and arguably harmful) recency focus. Code, data, and a demo are available on the project homepage.

Legal judgment prediction is the task of predicting the outcome of court cases on a given text description of facts of cases. These tasks apply Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to predict legal judgment results based on facts. Recently, large-scale public datasets and NLP models have increased research in areas related to legal judgment prediction systems. For such systems to be practically helpful, they should be robust from adversarial attacks. Previous works mainly focus on making a neural legal judgement system; however, significantly less or no attention has been given to creating a robust Legal Judgement Prediction(LJP) system. We implemented adversarial attacks on early existing LJP systems and found that none of them could handle attacks. In this work, we proposed an approach for making robust LJP systems. Extensive experiments on three legal datasets show significant improvements in our approach over the state-of-the-art LJP system in handling adversarial attacks. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to increase the robustness of early-existing LJP systems.

Which technological linkages affect the sector's ability to innovate? How do these effects transmit through the technology space? This paper answers these two key questions using novel methods of text mining and network analysis. We examine technological interdependence across sectors over a period of half a century (from 1976 to 2021) by analyzing the text of 6.5 million patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and applying network analysis to uncover the full spectrum of linkages existing across technology areas. We demonstrate that patent text contains a wealth of information often not captured by traditional innovation metrics, such as patent citations. By using network analysis, we document that indirect linkages are as important as direct connections and that the former would remain mostly hidden using more traditional measures of indirect linkages, such as the Leontief inverse matrix. Finally, based on an impulse-response analysis, we illustrate how technological shocks transmit through the technology (network-based) space, affecting the innovation capacity of the sectors.

The trustworthiness of machine learning has emerged as a critical topic in the field, encompassing various applications and research areas such as robustness, security, interpretability, and fairness. The last decade saw the development of numerous methods addressing these challenges. In this survey, we systematically review these advancements from a data-centric perspective, highlighting the shortcomings of traditional empirical risk minimization (ERM) training in handling challenges posed by the data. Interestingly, we observe a convergence of these methods, despite being developed independently across trustworthy machine learning subfields. Pearl's hierarchy of causality offers a unifying framework for these techniques. Accordingly, this survey presents the background of trustworthy machine learning development using a unified set of concepts, connects this language to Pearl's causal hierarchy, and finally discusses methods explicitly inspired by causality literature. We provide a unified language with mathematical vocabulary to link these methods across robustness, adversarial robustness, interpretability, and fairness, fostering a more cohesive understanding of the field. Further, we explore the trustworthiness of large pretrained models. After summarizing dominant techniques like fine-tuning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, prompting, and reinforcement learning with human feedback, we draw connections between them and the standard ERM. This connection allows us to build upon the principled understanding of trustworthy methods, extending it to these new techniques in large pretrained models, paving the way for future methods. Existing methods under this perspective are also reviewed. Lastly, we offer a brief summary of the applications of these methods and discuss potential future aspects related to our survey. For more information, please visit http://trustai.one.

In formal argumentation, a distinction can be made between extension-based semantics, where sets of arguments are either (jointly) accepted or not, and ranking-based semantics, where grades of acceptability are assigned to arguments. Another important distinction is that between abstract approaches, that abstract away from the content of arguments, and structured approaches, that specify a method of constructing argument graphs on the basis of a knowledge base. While ranking-based semantics have been extensively applied to abstract argumentation, few work has been done on ranking-based semantics for structured argumentation. In this paper, we make a systematic investigation into the behaviour of ranking-based semantics applied to existing formalisms for structured argumentation. We show that a wide class of ranking-based semantics gives rise to so-called culpability measures, and are relatively robust to specific choices in argument construction methods.

Causal Inference plays an significant role in explaining the decisions taken by statistical models and artificial intelligence models. Of late, this field started attracting the attention of researchers and practitioners alike. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of 37 papers published during 1992-2023 and concerning the application of causal inference to banking, finance, and insurance. The papers are categorized according to the following families of domains: (i) Banking, (ii) Finance and its subdomains such as corporate finance, governance finance including financial risk and financial policy, financial economics, and Behavioral finance, and (iii) Insurance. Further, the paper covers the primary ingredients of causal inference namely, statistical methods such as Bayesian Causal Network, Granger Causality and jargon used thereof such as counterfactuals. The review also recommends some important directions for future research. In conclusion, we observed that the application of causal inference in the banking and insurance sectors is still in its infancy, and thus more research is possible to turn it into a viable method.

"AI for Good is about building AI in the right way and using it for social good. We've learned there are good business reasons for building this technology safely – if you want people to adopt it and use it, they need to be able to trust it. We've done a lot of work around helping domestic abuse victims in South Africa, with a chatbot called rAInbow. It was designed to help people understand their legal rights. It can be quite overwhelming to take that first step to getting help and trusted information if you don't know where to begin. I think it's important to acknowledge the risks this technology brings, but there are also tremendous positive opportunities. I spend a lot of my time building AI that helps improve the justice system and helps people understand their legal rights. With this technology, we can produce legal drafts in minutes that used to take days. Courts can function better and faster, so people can get their hearing dates and we can make the system more efficient. What excites me is that the new generation of technologists don't have to have my background. I went to geek school after geek school, but the newest programming language is human language. This means we can bring in people from many different backgrounds to build it. If we do this right, we will be opening up the profile of people who work in technology and AI." Fanning the flames of a "culture war" might drive ratings, generate clicks and provide politicians with election fodder, but the idea there are ever-deepening divides in British social attitudes is misleading.

Plastic has imbibed itself as an indispensable part of our day to day activities, becoming a source of problems due to its non-biodegradable nature and cheaper production prices. With these problems, comes the challenge of mitigating and responding to the aftereffects of disposal or the lack of proper disposal which leads to waste concentrating in locations and disturbing ecosystems for both plants and animals. As plastic debris levels continue to rise with the accumulation of waste in garbage patches in landfills and more hazardously in natural water bodies, swift action is necessary to plug or cease this flow. While manual sorting operations and detection can offer a solution, they can be augmented using highly advanced computer imagery linked with robotic appendages for removing wastes. The primary application of focus in this report are the much-discussed Computer Vision and Open Vision which have gained novelty for their light dependence on internet and ability to relay information in remote areas. These applications can be applied to the creation of edge-based mobility devices that can as a counter to the growing problem of plastic debris in oceans and rivers, demanding little connectivity and still offering the same results with reasonably timed maintenance. The principal findings of this project cover the various methods that were tested and deployed to detect waste in images, as well as comparing them against different waste types. The project has been able to produce workable models that can perform on time detection of sampled images using an augmented CNN approach. Latter portions of the project have also achieved a better interpretation of the necessary preprocessing steps required to arrive at the best accuracies, including the best hardware for expanding waste detection studies to larger environments.

Machine learning practitioners often fine-tune generative pre-trained models like GPT-3 to improve model performance at specific tasks. Previous works, however, suggest that fine-tuned machine learning models memorize and emit sensitive information from the original fine-tuning dataset. Companies such as OpenAI offer fine-tuning services for their models, but no prior work has conducted a memorization attack on any closed-source models. In this work, we simulate a privacy attack on GPT-3 using OpenAI's fine-tuning API. Our objective is to determine if personally identifiable information (PII) can be extracted from this model. We (1) explore the use of naive prompting methods on a GPT-3 fine-tuned classification model, and (2) we design a practical word generation task called Autocomplete to investigate the extent of PII memorization in fine-tuned GPT-3 within a real-world context. Our findings reveal that fine-tuning GPT3 for both tasks led to the model memorizing and disclosing critical personally identifiable information (PII) obtained from the underlying fine-tuning dataset. To encourage further research, we have made our codes and datasets publicly available on GitHub at: https://github.com/albertsun1/gpt3-pii-attacks

This paper presents a classification model that predicts delays in Indian lower courts based on case information available at filing. The model is built on a dataset of 4.2 million court cases filed in 2010 and their outcomes over a 10-year period. The data set is drawn from 7000+ lower courts in India. The authors employed AutoML to develop a multi-class classification model over all periods of pendency and then used binary decision forest classifiers to improve predictive accuracy for the classification of delays. The best model achieved an accuracy of 81.4%, and the precision, recall, and F1 were found to be 0.81. The study demonstrates the feasibility of AI models for predicting delays in Indian courts, based on relevant data points such as jurisdiction, court, judge, subject, and the parties involved. The paper also discusses the results in light of relevant literature and suggests areas for improvement and future research. The authors have made the dataset and Python code files used for the analysis available for further research in the crucial and contemporary field of Indian judicial reform.