Alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values and preferences, often achieved through fine-tuning based on human feedback, is essential for ensuring safe and responsible AI behaviors. However, the process typically requires substantial data and computation resources. Recent studies have revealed that alignment might be attainable at lower costs through simpler methods, such as in-context learning. This leads to the question: Is alignment predominantly superficial? In this paper, we delve into this question and provide a quantitative analysis. We formalize the concept of superficial knowledge, defining it as knowledge that can be acquired through easily token restyling, without affecting the model's ability to capture underlying causal relationships between tokens. We propose a method to extract and isolate superficial knowledge from aligned models, focusing on the shallow modifications to the final token selection process. By comparing models augmented only with superficial knowledge to fully aligned models, we quantify the superficial portion of alignment. Our findings reveal that while superficial knowledge constitutes a significant portion of alignment, particularly in safety and detoxification tasks, it is not the whole story. Tasks requiring reasoning and contextual understanding still rely on deeper knowledge. Additionally, we demonstrate two practical advantages of isolated superficial knowledge: (1) it can be transferred between models, enabling efficient offsite alignment of larger models using extracted superficial knowledge from smaller models, and (2) it is recoverable, allowing for the restoration of alignment in compromised models without sacrificing performance.

Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) involves extracting vehicle license plate information from image or a video capture. These systems have gained popularity due to the wide availability of low-cost surveillance cameras and advances in Deep Learning. Typically, video-based ALPR systems rely on multiple frames to detect the vehicle and recognize the license plates. Therefore, we propose a system capable of extracting exactly one frame per vehicle and recognizing its license plate characters from this singular image using an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model. Early experiments show that this methodology is viable.

Video-based vehicle detection and counting play a critical role in managing transport infrastructure. Traditional image-based counting methods usually involve two main steps: initial detection and subsequent tracking, which are applied to all video frames, leading to a significant increase in computational complexity. To address this issue, this work presents an alternative and more efficient method for vehicle detection and counting. The proposed approach eliminates the need for a tracking step and focuses solely on detecting vehicles in key video frames, thereby increasing its efficiency. To achieve this, we developed a system that combines YOLO, for vehicle detection, with Visual Rhythm, a way to create time-spatial images that allows us to focus on frames that contain useful information. Additionally, this method can be used for counting in any application involving unidirectional moving targets to be detected and identified. Experimental analysis using real videos shows that the proposed method achieves mean counting accuracy around 99.15% over a set of videos, with a processing speed three times faster than tracking based approaches.

Video-based Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) involves extracting vehicle license plate text information from video captures. Traditional systems typically rely heavily on high-end computing resources and utilize multiple frames to recognize license plates, leading to increased computational overhead. In this paper, we propose two methods capable of efficiently extracting exactly one frame per vehicle and recognizing its license plate characters from this single image, thus significantly reducing computational demands. The first method uses Visual Rhythm (VR) to generate time-spatial images from videos, while the second employs Accumulative Line Analysis (ALA), a novel algorithm based on single-line video processing for real-time operation. Both methods leverage YOLO for license plate detection within the frame and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract textual information. Experiments on real videos demonstrate that the proposed methods achieve results comparable to traditional frame-by-frame approaches, with processing speeds three times faster.

Deep neural networks are largely used for complex prediction tasks. There is plenty of empirical evidence of their successful end-to-end training for a diversity of tasks. Success is often measured based solely on the final performance of the trained network, and explanations on when, why and how they work are less emphasized. In this paper we study encoder-decoder recurrent neural networks with attention mechanisms for the task of reading handwritten chess scoresheets. Rather than prediction performance, our concern is to better understand how learning occurs in these type of networks. We characterize the task in terms of three subtasks, namely input-output alignment, sequential pattern recognition, and handwriting recognition, and experimentally investigate which factors affect their learning. We identify competition, collaboration and dependence relations between the subtasks, and argue that such knowledge might help one to better balance factors to properly train a network.

Dimensionality reduction methods, also known as projections, are frequently used for exploring multidimensional data in machine learning, data science, and information visualization. Among these, t-SNE and its variants have become very popular for their ability to visually separate distinct data clusters. However, such methods are computationally expensive for large datasets, suffer from stability problems, and cannot directly handle out-of-sample data. We propose a learning approach to construct such projections. We train a deep neural network based on a collection of samples from a given data universe, and their corresponding projections, and next use the network to infer projections of data from the same, or similar, universes. Our approach generates projections with similar characteristics as the learned ones, is computationally two to three orders of magnitude faster than SNE-class methods, has no complex-to-set user parameters, handles out-of-sample data in a stable manner, and can be used to learn any projection technique. We demonstrate our proposal on several real-world high dimensional datasets from machine learning.