The Endless Tuning is a design method for a reliable deployment of artificial intelligence based on a double mirroring process, which pursues both the goals of avoiding human replacement and filling the so-called responsibility gap (Matthias 2004). Originally depicted in (Fabris et al. 2024) and ensuing the relational approach urged therein, it was then actualized in a protocol, implemented in three prototypical applications regarding decision-making processes (respectively: loan granting, pneumonia diagnosis, and art style recognition) and tested with such as many domain experts. Step by step illustrating the protocol, giving insights concretely showing a different voice (Gilligan 1993) in the ethics of artificial intelligence, a philosophical account of technical choices (e.g., a reversed and hermeneutic deployment of XAI algorithms) will be provided in the present study together with the results of the experiments, focusing on user experience rather than statistical accuracy. Even thoroughly employing deep learning models, full control was perceived by the interviewees in the decision-making setting, while it appeared that a bridge can be built between accountability and liability in case of damage.

Physical adversarial examples (PAEs) are regarded as "whistle-blowers" of real-world risks in deep-learning applications. However, current PAE generation studies show limited adaptive attacking ability to diverse and varying scenes. The key challenges in generating dynamic PAEs are exploring their patterns under noisy gradient feedback and adapting the attack to agnostic scenario natures. To address the problems, we present DynamicPAE, the first generative framework that enables scene-aware real-time physical attacks beyond static attacks. Specifically, to train the dynamic PAE generator under noisy gradient feedback, we introduce the residual-driven sample trajectory guidance technique, which redefines the training task to break the limited feedback information restriction that leads to the degeneracy problem. Intuitively, it allows the gradient feedback to be passed to the generator through a low-noise auxiliary task, thereby guiding the optimization away from degenerate solutions and facilitating a more comprehensive and stable exploration of feasible PAEs. To adapt the generator to agnostic scenario natures, we introduce the context-aligned scene expectation simulation process, consisting of the conditional-uncertainty-aligned data module and the skewness-aligned objective re-weighting module. The former enhances robustness in the context of incomplete observation by employing a conditional probabilistic model for domain randomization, while the latter facilitates consistent stealth control across different attack targets by automatically reweighting losses based on the skewness indicator. Extensive digital and physical evaluations demonstrate the superior attack performance of DynamicPAE, attaining a 1.95 $\times$ boost (65.55% average AP drop under attack) on representative object detectors (e.g., Yolo-v8) over state-of-the-art static PAE generating methods.

The vision of a broadly capable and goal-directed agent, such as an Internet-browsing agent in the digital world and a household humanoid in the physical world, has rapidly advanced, thanks to the generalization capability of foundation models. Such a generalist agent needs to have a large and diverse skill repertoire, such as finding directions between two travel locations and buying specific items from the Internet. If each skill needs to be specified manually through a fixed set of human-annotated instructions, the agent's skill repertoire will necessarily be limited due to the quantity and diversity of human-annotated instructions. In this work, we address this challenge by proposing Proposer-Agent-Evaluator, an effective learning system that enables foundation model agents to autonomously discover and practice skills in the wild. At the heart of PAE is a context-aware task proposer that autonomously proposes tasks for the agent to practice with context information of the environment such as user demos or even just the name of the website itself for Internet-browsing agents. Then, the agent policy attempts those tasks with thoughts and actual grounded operations in the real world with resulting trajectories evaluated by an autonomous VLM-based success evaluator. The success evaluation serves as the reward signal for the agent to refine its policies through RL. We validate PAE on challenging vision-based web navigation, using both real-world and self-hosted websites from WebVoyager and WebArena.To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first effective learning system to apply autonomous task proposal with RL for agents that generalizes real-world human-annotated benchmarks with SOTA performances. Our open-source checkpoints and code can be found in https://yanqval.github.io/PAE/

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful tools with extensive applications, but their tendency to memorize private information raises significant concerns as private data leakage can easily happen. In this paper, we introduce Private Association Editing (PAE), a novel defense approach for private data leakage. PAE is designed to effectively remove Personally Identifiable Information (PII) without retraining the model. Our approach consists of a four-step procedure: detecting memorized PII, applying PAE cards to mitigate memorization of private data, verifying resilience to targeted data extraction (TDE) attacks, and ensuring consistency in the post-edit LLMs. The versatility and efficiency of PAE, which allows for batch modifications, significantly enhance data privacy in LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of PAE in mitigating private data leakage. We believe PAE will serve as a critical tool in the ongoing effort to protect data privacy in LLMs, encouraging the development of safer models for real-world applications.

Product attribute extraction is an growing field in e-commerce business, with several applications including product ranking, product recommendation, future assortment planning and improving online shopping customer experiences. Understanding the customer needs is critical part of online business, specifically fashion products. Retailers uses assortment planning to determine the mix of products to offer in each store and channel, stay responsive to market dynamics and to manage inventory and catalogs. The goal is to offer the right styles, in the right sizes and colors, through the right channels. When shoppers find products that meet their needs and desires, they are more likely to return for future purchases, fostering customer loyalty. Product attributes are a key factor in assortment planning. In this paper we present PAE, a product attribute extraction algorithm for future trend reports consisting text and images in PDF format. Most existing methods focus on attribute extraction from titles or product descriptions or utilize visual information from existing product images. Compared to the prior works, our work focuses on attribute extraction from PDF files where upcoming fashion trends are explained. This work proposes a more comprehensive framework that fully utilizes the different modalities for attribute extraction and help retailers to plan the assortment in advance. Our contributions are three-fold: (a) We develop PAE, an efficient framework to extract attributes from unstructured data (text and images); (b) We provide catalog matching methodology based on BERT representations to discover the existing attributes using upcoming attribute values; (c) We conduct extensive experiments with several baselines and show that PAE is an effective, flexible and on par or superior (avg 92.5% F1-Score) framework to existing state-of-the-art for attribute value extraction task.

Text-to-image generative models, specifically those based on diffusion models like Imagen and Stable Diffusion, have made substantial advancements. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the delicate refinement of text prompts. Users assign weights or alter the injection time steps of certain words in the text prompts to improve the quality of generated images. However, the success of fine-control prompts depends on the accuracy of the text prompts and the careful selection of weights and time steps, which requires significant manual intervention. To address this, we introduce the \textbf{P}rompt \textbf{A}uto-\textbf{E}diting (PAE) method. Besides refining the original prompts for image generation, we further employ an online reinforcement learning strategy to explore the weights and injection time steps of each word, leading to the dynamic fine-control prompts. The reward function during training encourages the model to consider aesthetic score, semantic consistency, and user preferences. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method effectively improves the original prompts, generating visually more appealing images while maintaining semantic alignment. Code is available at https://github.com/Mowenyii/PAE.

With the advancement of neural networks, there has been a notable increase, both in terms of quantity and variety, in research publications concerning the application of autoencoders to reduced-order models. We propose a polytopic autoencoder architecture that includes a lightweight nonlinear encoder, a convex combination decoder, and a smooth clustering network. Supported by several proofs, the model architecture ensures that all reconstructed states lie within a polytope, accompanied by a metric indicating the quality of the constructed polytopes, referred to as polytope error. Additionally, it offers a minimal number of convex coordinates for polytopic linear-parameter varying systems while achieving acceptable reconstruction errors compared to proper orthogonal decomposition (POD). To validate our proposed model, we conduct simulations involving two flow scenarios with the incompressible Navier-Stokes equation. Numerical results demonstrate the guaranteed properties of the model, low reconstruction errors compared to POD, and the improvement in error using a clustering network.

Neural networks build the foundation of several intelligent systems, which, however, are known to be easily fooled by adversarial examples. Recent advances made these attacks possible even in air-gapped scenarios, where the autonomous system observes its surroundings by, e.g., a camera. We extend these ideas in our research and evaluate the robustness of multi-camera setups against such physical adversarial examples. This scenario becomes ever more important with the rise in popularity of autonomous vehicles, which fuse the information of several cameras for their driving decision. While we find that multi-camera setups provide some robustness towards past attack methods, we see that this advantage reduces when optimizing on multiple perspectives at once. We propose a novel attack method that we call Transcender-MC, where we incorporate online 3D renderings and perspective projections in the training process. Moreover, we motivate that certain data augmentation techniques can facilitate the generation of successful adversarial examples even further. Transcender-MC is 11% more effective in successfully attacking multi-camera setups than state-of-the-art methods. Our findings offer valuable insights regarding the resilience of object detection in a setup with multiple cameras and motivate the need of developing adequate defense mechanisms against them.

Face aging is an ill-posed problem because multiple plausible aging patterns may correspond to a given input. Most existing methods often produce one deterministic estimation. This paper proposes a novel CLIP-driven Pluralistic Aging Diffusion Autoencoder (PADA) to enhance the diversity of aging patterns. First, we employ diffusion models to generate diverse low-level aging details via a sequential denoising reverse process. Second, we present Probabilistic Aging Embedding (PAE) to capture diverse high-level aging patterns, which represents age information as probabilistic distributions in the common CLIP latent space. A text-guided KL-divergence loss is designed to guide this learning. Our method can achieve pluralistic face aging conditioned on open-world aging texts and arbitrary unseen face images. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method can generate more diverse and high-quality plausible aging results.

Recently introduced Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) bridges images and text by embedding them into a joint latent space. This opens the door to ample literature that aims to manipulate an input image by providing a textual explanation. However, due to the discrepancy between image and text embeddings in the joint space, using text embeddings as the optimization target often introduces undesired artifacts in the resulting images. Disentanglement, interpretability, and controllability are also hard to guarantee for manipulation. To alleviate these problems, we propose to define corpus subspaces spanned by relevant prompts to capture specific image characteristics. We introduce CLIP Projection-Augmentation Embedding (PAE) as an optimization target to improve the performance of text-guided image manipulation. Our method is a simple and general paradigm that can be easily computed and adapted, and smoothly incorporated into any CLIP-based image manipulation algorithm. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct several theoretical and empirical studies. As a case study, we utilize the method for text-guided semantic face editing. We quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate that PAE facilitates a more disentangled, interpretable, and controllable image manipulation with state-of-the-art quality and accuracy.