The era of big data opens a new opportunity to study input-driven approaches. We introduce a tool that computes the likelihood of patches, given a large dataset to learn from. Given this tool, we present a model that supports the approach and explains lightness and color visual illusions in a unified manner.

Do horror writers have worse childhoods than other writers? Though biographical details are known about many writers, quantitatively exploring such a qualitative hypothesis requires significant human effort, e.g. to sift through many biographies and interviews of writers and to iteratively search for quantitative features that reflect what is qualitatively of interest. This paper explores the potential to quickly prototype these kinds of hypotheses through (1) applying LLMs to estimate properties of concrete entities like specific people, companies, books, kinds of animals, and countries; (2) performing off-the-shelf analysis methods to reveal possible relationships among such properties (e.g. linear regression); and towards further automation, (3) applying LLMs to suggest the quantitative properties themselves that could help ground a particular qualitative hypothesis (e.g. number of adverse childhood events, in the context of the running example). The hope is to allow sifting through hypotheses more quickly through collaboration between human and machine. Our experiments highlight that indeed, LLMs can serve as useful estimators of tabular data about specific entities across a range of domains, and that such estimations improve with model scale. Further, initial experiments demonstrate the potential of LLMs to map a qualitative hypothesis of interest to relevant concrete variables that the LLM can then estimate. The conclusion is that LLMs offer intriguing potential to help illuminate scientifically interesting patterns latent within the internet-scale data they are trained upon.

With the industry trend of shifting from a traditional hierarchical approach to flatter management structure, crowdsourced performance assessment gained mainstream popularity. One fundamental challenge of crowdsourced performance assessment is the risks that personal interest can introduce distortions of facts, especially when the system is used to determine merit pay or promotion. In this paper, we developed a method to identify bias and strategic behavior in crowdsourced performance assessment, using a rich dataset collected from a professional service firm in China. We find a pattern of "discriminatory generosity" on the part of peer evaluation, where raters downgrade their peer coworkers who have passed objective promotion requirements while overrating their peer coworkers who have not yet passed. This introduces two types of biases: the first aimed against more competent competitors, and the other favoring less eligible peers which can serve as a mask of the first bias. This paper also aims to bring angles of fairness-aware data mining to talent and management computing. Historical decision records, such as performance ratings, often contain subjective judgment which is prone to bias and strategic behavior. For practitioners of predictive talent analytics, it is important to investigate potential bias and strategic behavior underlying historical decision records.

There has been an astounding improvement in domain-independent planning for solvable instances over the last decades and planners have become increasingly efficient at constructing plans. However, this advancement has not been matched by a similar improvement for identifying unsolvable instances. In this paper, we specialise pattern databases for dead-end detection and, thus, for detecting unsolvable instances. We propose two methods of constructing pattern collections and show that spending any more time constructing the pattern collection is likely to be unproductive. In other words, very few other pattern collections within the given space bounds are able to detect more dead-ends. We show this by carrying out a novel statistical analysis: a large computer cluster has been used to approximate the limit of pattern collections with respect to dead-end detection for many unsolvable instances, and this information is used in the analysis of the proposed methods. Consequently, further improvement must come from combining pattern databases with other techniques, such as mutexes. Furthermore, we explain why one of the proposed methods tends to find significantly more unsolvable variable projections, which is desirable since they imply that the instance is unsolvable. Finally, we compare the best proposed method with the winner and the runner up of the first unsolvability international planning competition, and show that the method is competitive.

In this paper we propose an extension to the Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) that aims at aggregating a number of reasoning tasks into a one parallel run. The described approach consists in replacing real-valued activation levels of concepts (and further influence weights) by random variables. Such extension, followed by the implemented software tool, allows for determining ranges reached by concept activation levels, sensitivity analysis as well as statistical analysis of multiple reasoning results. We replace multiplication and addition operators appearing in the FCM state equation by appropriate convolutions applicable for discrete random variables. To make the model computationally feasible, it is further augmented with aggregation operations for discrete random variables. We discuss four implemented aggregators, as well as we report results of preliminary tests.