Law
Copula-Based Deep Survival Models for Dependent Censoring
Foomani, Ali Hossein Gharari, Cooper, Michael, Greiner, Russell, Krishnan, Rahul G.
A survival dataset describes a set of instances (e.g. patients) and provides, for each, either the time until an event (e.g. death), or the censoring time (e.g. when lost to follow-up - which is a lower bound on the time until the event). We consider the challenge of survival prediction: learning, from such data, a predictive model that can produce an individual survival distribution for a novel instance. Many contemporary methods of survival prediction implicitly assume that the event and censoring distributions are independent conditional on the instance's covariates - a strong assumption that is difficult to verify (as we observe only one outcome for each instance) and which can induce significant bias when it does not hold. This paper presents a parametric model of survival that extends modern non-linear survival analysis by relaxing the assumption of conditional independence. On synthetic and semi-synthetic data, our approach significantly improves estimates of survival distributions compared to the standard that assumes conditional independence in the data.
Hallucination is the last thing you need
Curran, Shawn, Lansley, Sam, Bethell, Oliver
The legal profession necessitates a multidimensional approach that involves synthesizing an in-depth comprehension of a legal issue with insightful commentary based on personal experience, combined with a comprehensive understanding of pertinent legislation, regulation, and case law, in order to deliver an informed legal solution. The present offering with generative AI presents major obstacles in replicating this, as current models struggle to integrate and navigate such a complex interplay of understanding, experience, and fact-checking procedures. It is noteworthy that where generative AI outputs understanding and experience, which reflect the aggregate of various subjective views on similar topics, this often deflects the model's attention from the crucial legal facts, thereby resulting in hallucination. Hence, this paper delves into the feasibility of three independent LLMs, each focused on understanding, experience, and facts, synthesising as one single ensemble model to effectively counteract the current challenges posed by the existing monolithic generative AI models. We introduce an idea of mutli-length tokenisation to protect key information assets like common law judgements, and finally we interrogate the most advanced publicly available models for legal hallucination, with some interesting results.
The Cultivated Practices of Text-to-Image Generation
Humankind is entering a novel creative era in which anybody can synthesize digital information using generative artificial intelligence (AI). Text-to-image generation, in particular, has become vastly popular and millions of practitioners produce AI-generated images and AI art online. This chapter first gives an overview of the key developments that enabled a healthy co-creative online ecosystem around text-to-image generation to rapidly emerge, followed by a high-level description of key elements in this ecosystem. A particular focus is placed on prompt engineering, a creative practice that has been embraced by the AI art community. It is then argued that the emerging co-creative ecosystem constitutes an intelligent system on its own - a system that both supports human creativity, but also potentially entraps future generations and limits future development efforts in AI. The chapter discusses the potential risks and dangers of cultivating this co-creative ecosystem, such as the bias inherent in today's training data, potential quality degradation in future image generation systems due to synthetic data becoming common place, and the potential long-term effects of text-to-image generation on people's imagination, ambitions, and development.
Deep Learning and Ethics
LaCroix, Travis, Prince, Simon J. D.
The value alignment problem is the task of ensuring that the objectives of AI systems are aligned with human objectives. Bias, explainability, artificial moral agency, and other topics can be viewed through this lens. AI can be intentionally misused, and this chapter detailed some ways this can happen. Progress in AI has further implications in areas as diverse as IP law and climate change. Ethical AI is a collective action problem, and the chapter concludes with an appeal to scientists to consider the moral and ethical implications of their work. Every ethical issue is not within the control of every individual computer scientist. However, this does not imply that researchers have no responsibility whatsoever to consider--and mitigate where they can--the potential for misuse of the systems they create.
Five big takeaways from Europe's AI Act
The AI Act vote passed with an overwhelming majority, and has been heralded as one of the world's most important developments in AI regulation. The European Parliament's president, Roberta Metsola, described it as "legislation that will no doubt be setting the global standard for years to come." Don't hold your breath for any immediate clarity, though. The European system is a bit complicated. Next, members of the European Parliament will have to thrash out details with the Council of the European Union and the EU's executive arm, the European Commission, before the draft rules become legislation.
Deep learning applied to computational mechanics: A comprehensive review, state of the art, and the classics
Vu-Quoc, Loc, Humer, Alexander
Three recent breakthroughs due to AI in arts and science serve as motivation: An award winning digital image, protein folding, fast matrix multiplication. Many recent developments in artificial neural networks, particularly deep learning (DL), applied and relevant to computational mechanics (solid, fluids, finite-element technology) are reviewed in detail. Both hybrid and pure machine learning (ML) methods are discussed. Hybrid methods combine traditional PDE discretizations with ML methods either (1) to help model complex nonlinear constitutive relations, (2) to nonlinearly reduce the model order for efficient simulation (turbulence), or (3) to accelerate the simulation by predicting certain components in the traditional integration methods. Here, methods (1) and (2) relied on Long-Short-Term Memory (LSTM) architecture, with method (3) relying on convolutional neural networks. Pure ML methods to solve (nonlinear) PDEs are represented by Physics-Informed Neural network (PINN) methods, which could be combined with attention mechanism to address discontinuous solutions. Both LSTM and attention architectures, together with modern and generalized classic optimizers to include stochasticity for DL networks, are extensively reviewed. Kernel machines, including Gaussian processes, are provided to sufficient depth for more advanced works such as shallow networks with infinite width. Not only addressing experts, readers are assumed familiar with computational mechanics, but not with DL, whose concepts and applications are built up from the basics, aiming at bringing first-time learners quickly to the forefront of research. History and limitations of AI are recounted and discussed, with particular attention at pointing out misstatements or misconceptions of the classics, even in well-known references. Positioning and pointing control of a large-deformable beam is given as an example.
DiPlomat: A Dialogue Dataset for Situated Pragmatic Reasoning
Li, Hengli, Zhu, Song-Chun, Zheng, Zilong
Pragmatic reasoning plays a pivotal role in deciphering implicit meanings that frequently arise in real-life conversations and is essential for the development of communicative social agents. In this paper, we introduce a novel challenge, DiPlomat, aiming at benchmarking machines' capabilities on pragmatic reasoning and situated conversational understanding. Compared with previous works that treat different figurative expressions (e.g. metaphor, sarcasm) as individual tasks, DiPlomat provides a cohesive framework towards general pragmatic understanding. Our dataset is created through the utilization of Amazon Mechanical Turk ( AMT ), resulting in a total of 4, 177 multi-turn dialogues. In conjunction with the dataset, we propose two tasks, Pragmatic Identification and Reasoning (PIR) and Conversational Question Answering (CQA). Experimental results with state-of-the-art (SOTA) neural architectures reveal several significant findings: 1) large language models ( LLMs) exhibit poor performance in tackling this subjective domain; 2) comprehensive comprehension of context emerges as a critical factor for establishing benign human-machine interactions; 3) current models defect in the application of pragmatic reasoning. As a result, we call on more attention to improve the ability of context understanding, reasoning, and implied meaning modeling.
The Manipulation Problem: Conversational AI as a Threat to Epistemic Agency
The technology of Conversational AI has made significant advancements over the last eighteen months. As a consequence, conversational agents are likely to be deployed in the near future that are designed to pursue targeted influence objectives. Sometimes referred to as the "AI Manipulation Problem," the emerging risk is that consumers will unwittingly engage in real-time dialog with predatory AI agents that can skillfully persuade them to buy particular products, believe particular pieces of misinformation, or fool them into revealing sensitive personal data. For many users, current systems like ChatGPT and LaMDA feel safe because they are primarily text-based, but the industry is already shifting towards real-time voice and photorealistic digital personas that look, move, and express like real people. This will enable the deployment of agenda-driven Virtual Spokespeople (VSPs) that will be highly persuasive through real-time adaptive influence. This paper explores the manipulative tactics that are likely to be deployed through conversational AI agents, the unique threats such agents pose to the epistemic agency of human users, and the emerging need for policymakers to protect against the most likely predatory practices.
Insufficiently Justified Disparate Impact: A New Criterion for Subgroup Fairness
Menghani, Neil, McFowland, Edward III, Neill, Daniel B.
In this paper, we develop a new criterion, "insufficiently justified disparate impact" (IJDI), for assessing whether recommendations (binarized predictions) made by an algorithmic decision support tool are fair. Our novel, utility-based IJDI criterion evaluates false positive and false negative error rate imbalances, identifying statistically significant disparities between groups which are present even when adjusting for group-level differences in base rates. We describe a novel IJDI-Scan approach which can efficiently identify the intersectional subpopulations, defined across multiple observed attributes of the data, with the most significant IJDI. To evaluate IJDI-Scan's performance, we conduct experiments on both simulated and real-world data, including recidivism risk assessment and credit scoring. Further, we implement and evaluate approaches to mitigating IJDI for the detected subpopulations in these domains.
Evaluating Privacy Questions From Stack Overflow: Can ChatGPT Compete?
Delile, Zack, Radel, Sean, Godinez, Joe, Engstrom, Garrett, Brucker, Theo, Young, Kenzie, Ghanavati, Sepideh
Stack Overflow and other similar forums are used commonly by developers to seek answers for their software development as well as privacy-related concerns. Recently, ChatGPT has been used as an alternative to generate code or produce responses to developers' questions. In this paper, we aim to understand developers' privacy challenges by evaluating the types of privacy-related questions asked on Stack Overflow. We then conduct a comparative analysis between the accepted responses given by Stack Overflow users and the responses produced by ChatGPT for those extracted questions to identify if ChatGPT could serve as a viable alternative. Our results show that most privacy-related questions are related to choice/consent, aggregation, and identification. Furthermore, our findings illustrate that ChatGPT generates similarly correct responses for about 56% of questions, while for the rest of the responses, the answers from Stack Overflow are slightly more accurate than ChatGPT.