OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Medical Face Masks and Emotion Recognition from the Body: Insights from a Deep Learning Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly changed the standards and affected all aspects of our lives, especially social communication. It has forced people to extensively wear medical face masks, in order to prevent transmission. This face occlusion can strongly irritate emotional reading from the face and urges us to incorporate the whole body as an emotional cue. In this paper, we conduct insightful studies about the effect of face occlusion on emotion recognition performance, and showcase the superiority of full body input over the plain masked face. We utilize a deep learning model based on the Temporal Segment Network framework, and aspire to fully overcome the face mask consequences. Although facial and bodily features can be learned from a single input, this may lead to irrelevant information confusion. By processing those features separately and fusing their prediction scores, we are more effectively taking advantage of both modalities. This framework also naturally supports temporal modeling, by mingling information among neighboring frames. In combination, these techniques form an effective system capable of tackling emotion recognition difficulties, caused by safety protocols applied in crucial areas.
Multi-generational labour markets: data-driven discovery of multi-perspective system parameters using machine learning
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Economic issues, such as inflation, energy costs, taxes, and interest rates, are a constant presence in our daily lives and have been exacerbated by global events such as pandemics, environmental disasters, and wars. A sustained history of financial crises reveals significant weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the foundations of modern economies. Another significant issue currently is people quitting their jobs in large numbers. Moreover, many organizations have a diverse workforce comprising multiple generations posing new challenges. Transformative approaches in economics and labour markets are needed to protect our societies, economies, and planet. In this work, we use big data and machine learning methods to discover multi-perspective parameters for multi-generational labour markets. The parameters for the academic perspective are discovered using 35,000 article abstracts from the Web of Science for the period 1958-2022 and for the professionals' perspective using 57,000 LinkedIn posts from 2022. We discover a total of 28 parameters and categorised them into 5 macro-parameters, Learning & Skills, Employment Sectors, Consumer Industries, Learning & Employment Issues, and Generations-specific Issues. A complete machine learning software tool is developed for data-driven parameter discovery. A variety of quantitative and visualisation methods are applied and multiple taxonomies are extracted to explore multi-generational labour markets. A knowledge structure and literature review of multi-generational labour markets using over 100 research articles is provided. It is expected that this work will enhance the theory and practice of AI-based methods for knowledge discovery and system parameter discovery to develop autonomous capabilities and systems and promote novel approaches to labour economics and markets, leading to the development of sustainable societies and economies.
Diagnosis of Covid-19 Via Patient Breath Data Using Artificial Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Using machine learning algorithms for the rapid diagnosis and detection of the COVID-19 pandemic and isolating the patients from crowded environments are very important to controlling the epidemic. This study aims to develop a point-of-care testing (POCT) system that can detect COVID-19 by detecting volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in a patient's exhaled breath using the Gradient Boosted Trees Learner Algorithm. 294 breath samples were collected from 142 patients at Istanbul Medipol Mega Hospital between December 2020 and March 2021. 84 cases out of 142 resulted in negatives, and 58 cases resulted in positives. All these breath samples have been converted into numeric values through five air sensors. 10% of the data have been used for the validation of the model, while 75% of the test data have been used for training an AI model to predict the coronavirus presence. 25% have been used for testing. The SMOTE oversampling method was used to increase the training set size and reduce the imbalance of negative and positive classes in training and test data. Different machine learning algorithms have also been tried to develop the e-nose model. The test results have suggested that the Gradient Boosting algorithm created the best model. The Gradient Boosting model provides 95% recall when predicting COVID-19 positive patients and 96% accuracy when predicting COVID-19 negative patients.
On the Liveliness of Artificial Life
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

There has been on-going philosophical debate on whether artificial life models, also known as digital organisms, are truly alive. The main difficulty appears to be finding an encompassing and definite definition of life. By examining similarities and differences in recent definitions of life, we define life as "any system with a boundary to confine the system within a definite volume and protect the system from external effects, consisting of a program that is capable of improvisation, able to react and adapt to the environment, able to regenerate parts of it-self or its entirety, with energy system comprises of non-interference sets of secluded reactions for self-sustenance, is considered alive or a living system. Any incomplete system containing a program and can be re-assembled into a living system; thereby, converting the reassembled system for the purpose of the incomplete system, are also considered alive." Using this definition, we argue that digital organisms may not be the boundary case of life even though some digital organisms are not considered alive; thereby, taking the view that some form of digital organisms can be considered alive. In addition, we present an experimental framework based on continuity of the overall system and potential discontinuity of elements within the system for testing future definitions of life.
Growing Steerable Neural Cellular Automata
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) models have shown remarkable capacity for pattern formation and complex global behaviors stemming from local coordination. However, in the original implementation of NCA, cells are incapable of adjusting their own orientation, and it is the responsibility of the model designer to orient them externally. A recent isotropic variant of NCA (Growing Isotropic Neural Cellular Automata) makes the model orientation-independent - cells can no longer tell up from down, nor left from right - by removing its dependency on perceiving the gradient of spatial states in its neighborhood. In this work, we revisit NCA with a different approach: we make each cell responsible for its own orientation by allowing it to "turn" as determined by an adjustable internal state. The resulting Steerable NCA contains cells of varying orientation embedded in the same pattern. We observe how, while Isotropic NCA are orientation-agnostic, Steerable NCA have chirality: they have a predetermined left-right symmetry. We therefore show that we can train Steerable NCA in similar but simpler ways than their Isotropic variant by: (1) breaking symmetries using only two seeds, or (2) introducing a rotation-invariant training objective and relying on asynchronous cell updates to break the up-down symmetry of the system.
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Pre-trained Language Models in Predicting the Helpfulness of Online Product Reviews
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Businesses and customers can gain valuable information from product reviews. The sheer number of reviews often necessitates ranking them based on their potential helpfulness. However, only a few reviews ever receive any helpfulness votes on online marketplaces. Sorting all reviews based on the few existing votes can cause helpful reviews to go unnoticed because of the limited attention span of readers. The problem of review helpfulness prediction is even more important for higher review volumes, and newly written reviews or launched products. In this work we compare the use of RoBERTa and XLM-R language models to predict the helpfulness of online product reviews. The contributions of our work in relation to literature include extensively investigating the efficacy of state-of-the-art language models -- both monolingual and multilingual -- against a robust baseline, taking ranking metrics into account when assessing these approaches, and assessing multilingual models for the first time. We employ the Amazon review dataset for our experiments. According to our study on several product categories, multilingual and monolingual pre-trained language models outperform the baseline that utilizes random forest with handcrafted features as much as 23% in RMSE. Pre-trained language models reduce the need for complex text feature engineering. However, our results suggest that pre-trained multilingual models may not be used for fine-tuning only one language. We assess the performance of language models with and without additional features. Our results show that including additional features like product rating by the reviewer can further help the predictive methods.
A Comparative Analysis of CNN-Based Pretrained Models for the Detection and Prediction of Monkeypox
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Monkeypox is a rare disease that raised concern among medical specialists following the convi-19 pandemic. It's concerning since monkeypox is difficult to diagnose early on because of symptoms that are similar to chickenpox and measles. Furthermore, because this is a rare condition, there is a knowledge gap among healthcare professionals. As a result, there is an urgent need for a novel technique to combat and anticipate the disease in the early phases of individual virus infection. Multiple CNN-based pre-trained models, including VGG-16, VGG-19, Restnet50, Inception-V3, Densnet, Xception, MobileNetV2, Alexnet, Lenet, and majority Voting, were employed in classification in this study. For this study, multiple data sets were combined, such as monkeypox vs chickenpox, monkeypox versus measles, monkeypox versus normal, and monkeypox versus all diseases. Majority voting performed 97% in monkeypox vs chickenpox, Xception achieved 79% in monkeypox against measles, MobileNetV2 scored 96% in monkeypox vs normal, and Lenet performed 80% in monkeypox versus all.
Image Reconstruction via Deep Image Prior Subspaces
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Deep learning has been widely used for solving image reconstruction tasks but its deployability has been held back due to the shortage of high-quality training data. Unsupervised learning methods, such as the deep image prior (DIP), naturally fill this gap, but bring a host of new issues: the susceptibility to overfitting due to a lack of robust early stopping strategies and unstable convergence. We present a novel approach to tackle these issues by restricting DIP optimisation to a sparse linear subspace of its parameters, employing a synergy of dimensionality reduction techniques and second order optimisation methods. The low-dimensionality of the subspace reduces DIP's tendency to fit noise and allows the use of stable second order optimisation methods, e.g., natural gradient descent or L-BFGS. Experiments across both image restoration and tomographic tasks of different geometry and ill-posedness show that second order optimisation within a low-dimensional subspace is favourable in terms of optimisation stability to reconstruction fidelity trade-off.
Probabilistic Safe WCET Estimation for Weakly Hard Real-Time Systems at Design Stages
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Weakly hard real-time systems can, to some degree, tolerate deadline misses, but their schedulability still needs to be analyzed to ensure their quality of service. Such analysis usually occurs at early design stages to provide implementation guidelines to engineers so that they can make better design decisions. Estimating worst-case execution times (WCET) is a key input to schedulability analysis. However, early on during system design, estimating WCET values is challenging and engineers usually determine them as plausible ranges based on their domain knowledge. Our approach aims at finding restricted, safe WCET sub-ranges given a set of ranges initially estimated by experts in the context of weakly hard real-time systems. To this end, we leverage (1) multi-objective search aiming at maximizing the violation of weakly hard constraints in order to find worst-case scheduling scenarios and (2) polynomial logistic regression to infer safe WCET ranges with a probabilistic interpretation. We evaluated our approach by applying it to an industrial system in the satellite domain and several realistic synthetic systems. The results indicate that our approach significantly outperforms a baseline relying on random search without learning, and estimates safe WCET ranges with a high degree of confidence in practical time (< 23h).
Can Large Language Models Change User Preference Adversarially?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Pretrained large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly powerful and ubiquitous in mainstream applications such as being a personal assistant, a dialogue model, etc. As these models become proficient in deducing user preferences and offering tailored assistance, there is an increasing concern about the ability of these models to influence, modify and in the extreme case manipulate user preference adversarially. The issue of lack of interpretability in these models in adversarial settings remains largely unsolved. This work tries to study adversarial behavior in user preferences from the lens of attention probing, red teaming and white-box analysis. Specifically, it provides a bird's eye view of existing literature, offers red teaming samples for dialogue models like ChatGPT and GODEL and probes the attention mechanism in the latter for non-adversarial and adversarial settings.
On Function-Coupled Watermarks for Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Well-performed deep neural networks (DNNs) generally require massive labelled data and computational resources for training. Various watermarking techniques are proposed to protect such intellectual properties (IPs), wherein the DNN providers implant secret information into the model so that they can later claim IP ownership by retrieving their embedded watermarks with some dedicated trigger inputs. While promising results are reported in the literature, existing solutions suffer from watermark removal attacks, such as model fine-tuning and model pruning. In this paper, we propose a novel DNN watermarking solution that can effectively defend against the above attacks. Our key insight is to enhance the coupling of the watermark and model functionalities such that removing the watermark would inevitably degrade the model's performance on normal inputs. To this end, unlike previous methods relying on secret features learnt from out-of-distribution data, our method only uses features learnt from in-distribution data. Specifically, on the one hand, we propose to sample inputs from the original training dataset and fuse them as watermark triggers. On the other hand, we randomly mask model weights during training so that the information of our embedded watermarks spreads in the network. By doing so, model fine-tuning/pruning would not forget our function-coupled watermarks. Evaluation results on various image classification tasks show a 100\% watermark authentication success rate under aggressive watermark removal attacks, significantly outperforming existing solutions. Code is available: https://github.com/cure-lab/Function-Coupled-Watermark.
Harms from Increasingly Agentic Algorithmic Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Research in Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) has established many sources and forms of algorithmic harm, in domains as diverse as health care, finance, policing, and recommendations. Much work remains to be done to mitigate the serious harms of these systems, particularly those disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. Despite these ongoing harms, new systems are being developed and deployed which threaten the perpetuation of the same harms and the creation of novel ones. In response, the FATE community has emphasized the importance of anticipating harms. Our work focuses on the anticipation of harms from increasingly agentic systems. Rather than providing a definition of agency as a binary property, we identify 4 key characteristics which, particularly in combination, tend to increase the agency of a given algorithmic system: underspecification, directness of impact, goal-directedness, and long-term planning. We also discuss important harms which arise from increasing agency -- notably, these include systemic and/or long-range impacts, often on marginalized stakeholders. We emphasize that recognizing agency of algorithmic systems does not absolve or shift the human responsibility for algorithmic harms. Rather, we use the term agency to highlight the increasingly evident fact that ML systems are not fully under human control. Our work explores increasingly agentic algorithmic systems in three parts. First, we explain the notion of an increase in agency for algorithmic systems in the context of diverse perspectives on agency across disciplines. Second, we argue for the need to anticipate harms from increasingly agentic systems. Third, we discuss important harms from increasingly agentic systems and ways forward for addressing them. We conclude by reflecting on implications of our work for anticipating algorithmic harms from emerging systems.
pykanto: a python library to accelerate research on wild bird song
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2023
Year: 2023

Studying the vocalisations of wild animals can be a challenge due to the limitations of traditional computational methods, which often are time-consuming and lack reproducibility. Here, I present pykanto, a new software package that provides a set of tools to build, manage, and explore large sound databases. It can automatically find discrete units in animal vocalisations, perform semi-supervised labelling of individual repertoires with a new interactive web app, and feed data to deep learning models to study things like individual signatures and acoustic similarity between individuals and populations. To demonstrate its capabilities, I put the library to the test on the vocalisations of male great tits in Wytham Woods, near Oxford, UK. The results show that the identities of individual birds can be accurately determined from their songs and that the use of pykanto improves the efficiency and reproducibility of the process.
Replicable Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We design replicable algorithms in the context of statistical clustering under the recently introduced notion of replicability from Impagliazzo et al. [2022]. According to this definition, a clustering algorithm is replicable if, with high probability, its output induces the exact same partition of the sample space after two executions on different inputs drawn from the same distribution, when its internal randomness is shared across the executions. We propose such algorithms for the statistical $k$-medians, statistical $k$-means, and statistical $k$-centers problems by utilizing approximation routines for their combinatorial counterparts in a black-box manner. In particular, we demonstrate a replicable $O(1)$-approximation algorithm for statistical Euclidean $k$-medians ($k$-means) with $\operatorname{poly}(d)$ sample complexity. We also describe an $O(1)$-approximation algorithm with an additional $O(1)$-additive error for statistical Euclidean $k$-centers, albeit with $\exp(d)$ sample complexity. In addition, we provide experiments on synthetic distributions in 2D using the $k$-means++ implementation from sklearn as a black-box that validate our theoretical results.
Electronic Laboratory Notebook on Web2py Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2023
Year: 2023

Proper experimental record-keeping is an important cornerstone in research and development for the purpose of auditing. The gold standard of record-keeping is based on the judicious use of physical, permanent notebooks. However, advances in technology had resulted in large amounts of electronic records making it virtually impossible to maintain a full set of records in physical notebooks. Electronic laboratory notebook systems aim to meet the stringency for keeping records electronically. This manuscript describes CyNote which is an electronic laboratory notebook system that is compliant with 21 CFP Part 11 controls on electronic records, requirements set by USA Food and Drug Administration for electronic records. CyNote is implemented on web2py framework and is adhering to the architectural paradigm of model-view-controller (MVC), allowing for extension modules to be built for CyNote. CyNote is available at http://cynote.sf.net.
MAC-PO: Multi-Agent Experience Replay via Collective Priority Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Experience replay is crucial for off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) methods. By remembering and reusing the experiences from past different policies, experience replay significantly improves the training efficiency and stability of RL algorithms. Many decision-making problems in practice naturally involve multiple agents and require multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) under centralized training decentralized execution paradigm. Nevertheless, existing MARL algorithms often adopt standard experience replay where the transitions are uniformly sampled regardless of their importance. Finding prioritized sampling weights that are optimized for MARL experience replay has yet to be explored. To this end, we propose MAC-PO, which formulates optimal prioritized experience replay for multi-agent problems as a regret minimization over the sampling weights of transitions. Such optimization is relaxed and solved using the Lagrangian multiplier approach to obtain the close-form optimal sampling weights. By minimizing the resulting policy regret, we can narrow the gap between the current policy and a nominal optimal policy, thus acquiring an improved prioritization scheme for multi-agent tasks. Our experimental results on Predator-Prey and StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge environments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, having a better ability to replay important transitions and outperforming other state-of-the-art baselines.
Link Prediction on Latent Heterogeneous Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

On graph data, the multitude of node or edge types gives rise to heterogeneous information networks (HINs). To preserve the heterogeneous semantics on HINs, the rich node/edge types become a cornerstone of HIN representation learning. However, in real-world scenarios, type information is often noisy, missing or inaccessible. Assuming no type information is given, we define a so-called latent heterogeneous graph (LHG), which carries latent heterogeneous semantics as the node/edge types cannot be observed. In this paper, we study the challenging and unexplored problem of link prediction on an LHG. As existing approaches depend heavily on type-based information, they are suboptimal or even inapplicable on LHGs. To address the absence of type information, we propose a model named LHGNN, based on the novel idea of semantic embedding at node and path levels, to capture latent semantics on and between nodes. We further design a personalization function to modulate the heterogeneous contexts conditioned on their latent semantics w.r.t. the target node, to enable finer-grained aggregation. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, and demonstrate the superior performance of LHGNN.