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When Ben Wu, an engineer in China, wanted to install Facebook's open-source AI framework PyTorch in 2017, he visited its online community on GitHub and asked for some pointers. Soumith Chintala, a Facebook AI research engineer based in New York, showed him how he could download it quickly. PyTorch has become a foundational component of AI technology, thanks in large part to knowledge-sharing exchanges like the one between Wu and Chintala that happen every day. And although it's become increasingly corporatized, the borderless, open-source software movement has risen above geopolitical tensions between China and the U.S., which have centered on concerns over China's use of AI to carry out repressive surveillance, its plans to transfer civilian tech for military applications, and Chinese government espionage and intellectual property theft. "I'm definitely surprised at how much [of the] general global considerations you would have from a business angle don't really come in when you're talking about open-source collaboration, especially with AI," Chintala told Protocol in September when Facebook parent company Meta handed over PyTorch to the nonprofit open-source software consortium Linux Foundation.

Analysis While the legal and ethical implications of assistive AI models like GitHub's Copilot continue to be sorted out, computer scientists continue to find uses for large language models and urge educators to adapt. Brett A. Becker, assistant professor at University College Dublin in Ireland, provided The Register with pre-publication copies of two research papers exploring the educational risks and opportunities of AI tools for generating programming code. The papers have been accepted at the 2023 SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, to be held March 15 to 18 in Toronto, Canada. In June, GitHub Copilot, a machine learning tool that automatically suggests programming code in response to contextual prompts, emerged from a year long technical preview, just as concerns about the way its OpenAI Codex model was trained and the implications of AI models for society coalesced into focused opposition. In "Programming Is Hard – Or at Least It Used to Be: Educational Opportunities And Challenges of AI Code Generation" [PDF], Becker and co-authors Paul Denny (University of Auckland, New Zealand), James Finnie-Ansley (University of Auckland), Andrew Luxton-Reilly (University of Auckland), James Prather (Abilene Christian University, USA), and Eddie Antonio Santos (University College Dublin) argue that the educational community needs to deal with the immediate opportunities and challenges presented by AI-driven code generation tools.

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In this paper, we present a novel neural graph matching approach applied to document comparison. Document comparison is a common task in the legal and financial industries. In some cases, the most important differences may be the addition or omission of words, sentences, clauses, or paragraphs. However, it is a challenging task without recording or tracing whole edited process. Under many temporal uncertainties, we explore the potentiality of our approach to proximate the accurate comparison to make sure which element blocks have a relation of edition with others. In beginning, we apply a document layout analysis that combining traditional and modern technics to segment layout in blocks of various types appropriately. Then we transform this issue to a problem of layout graph matching with textual awareness. About graph matching, it is a long-studied problem with a broad range of applications. However, different from previous works focusing on visual images or structural layout, we also bring textual features into our model for adapting this domain. Specifically, based on the electronic document, we introduce an encoder to deal with the visual presentation decoding from PDF. Additionally, because the modifications can cause the inconsistency of document layout analysis between modified documents and the blocks can be merged and split, Sinkhorn divergence is adopted in our graph neural approach, which tries to overcome both these issues with many-to-many block matching. We demonstrate this on two categories of layouts, as follows., legal agreement and scientific articles, collected from our real-case datasets.

Despite their wide adoption, the underlying training and memorization dynamics of very large language models is not well understood. We empirically study exact memorization in causal and masked language modeling, across model sizes and throughout the training process. We measure the effects of dataset size, learning rate, and model size on memorization, finding that larger language models memorize training data faster across all settings. Surprisingly, we show that larger models can memorize a larger portion of the data before over-fitting and tend to forget less throughout the training process. We also analyze the memorization dynamics of different parts of speech and find that models memorize nouns and numbers first; we hypothesize and provide empirical evidence that nouns and numbers act as a unique identifier for memorizing individual training examples. Together, these findings present another piece of the broader puzzle of trying to understand what actually improves as models get bigger.

Mill's classic argument for liberty requires that people's exercise of freedom should be governed by a no-harm principle (NHP). In this paper, we develop the concept of a no-harm equilibrium in $n$-person games where players maximize utility subject to the constraint of the NHP. Our main result is in the spirit of the fundamental theorems of welfare economics. We show that for every initial `reference point' in a game the associated no-harm equilibrium is Pareto efficient and, conversely, every Pareto efficient point can be supported as a no-harm equilibrium for some initial reference point.

Deep learning models often learn to make predictions that rely on sensitive social attributes like gender and race, which poses significant fairness risks, especially in societal applications, e.g., hiring, banking, and criminal justice. Existing work tackles this issue by minimizing information about social attributes in models for debiasing. However, the high correlation between target task and social attributes makes bias mitigation incompatible with target task accuracy. Recalling that model bias arises because the learning of features in regard to bias attributes (i.e., bias features) helps target task optimization, we explore the following research question: \emph{Can we leverage proxy features to replace the role of bias feature in target task optimization for debiasing?} To this end, we propose \emph{Proxy Debiasing}, to first transfer the target task's learning of bias information from bias features to artificial proxy features, and then employ causal intervention to eliminate proxy features in inference. The key idea of \emph{Proxy Debiasing} is to design controllable proxy features to on one hand replace bias features in contributing to target task during the training stage, and on the other hand easily to be removed by intervention during the inference stage. This guarantees the elimination of bias features without affecting the target information, thus addressing the fairness-accuracy paradox in previous debiasing solutions. We apply \emph{Proxy Debiasing} to several benchmark datasets, and achieve significant improvements over the state-of-the-art debiasing methods in both of accuracy and fairness.

Stance detection is typically framed as predicting the sentiment in a given text towards a target entity. However, this setup overlooks the importance of the source entity, i.e., who is expressing the opinion. In this paper, we emphasize the need for studying interactions among entities when inferring stances. We first introduce a new task, entity-to-entity (E2E) stance detection, which primes models to identify entities in their canonical names and discern stances jointly. To support this study, we curate a new dataset with 10,619 annotations labeled at the sentence-level from news articles of different ideological leanings. We present a novel generative framework to allow the generation of canonical names for entities as well as stances among them. We further enhance the model with a graph encoder to summarize entity activities and external knowledge surrounding the entities. Experiments show that our model outperforms strong comparisons by large margins. Further analyses demonstrate the usefulness of E2E stance detection for understanding media quotation and stance landscape, as well as inferring entity ideology.

One of the main promises of technology development is for it to be adopted by people, organizations, societies, and governments -- incorporated into their life, work stream, or processes. Often, this is socially beneficial as it automates mundane tasks, frees up more time for other more important things, or otherwise improves the lives of those who use the technology. However, these beneficial results do not apply in every scenario and may not impact everyone in a system the same way. Sometimes a technology is developed which produces both benefits and inflicts some harm. These harms may come at a higher cost to some people than others, raising the question: {\it how are benefits and harms weighed when deciding if and how a socially consequential technology gets developed?} The most natural way to answer this question, and in fact how people first approach it, is to compare the new technology to what used to exist. As such, in this work, I make comparative analyses between humans and machines in three scenarios and seek to understand how sentiment about a technology, performance of that technology, and the impacts of that technology combine to influence how one decides to answer my main research question.