OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Data Equity: Foundational Concepts for Generative AI
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

This briefing paper focuses on data equity within foundation models, both in terms of the impact of Generative AI (genAI) on society and on the further development of genAI tools. GenAI promises immense potential to drive digital and social innovation, such as improving efficiency, enhancing creativity and augmenting existing data. GenAI has the potential to democratize access and usage of technologies. However, left unchecked, it could deepen inequities. With the advent of genAI significantly increasing the rate at which AI is deployed and developed, exploring frameworks for data equity is more urgent than ever. The goals of the briefing paper are threefold: to establish a shared vocabulary to facilitate collaboration and dialogue; to scope initial concerns to establish a framework for inquiry on which stakeholders can focus; and to shape future development of promising technologies. The paper represents a first step in exploring and promoting data equity in the context of genAI. The proposed definitions, framework and recommendations are intended to proactively shape the development of promising genAI technologies.
AI Ethics and Ordoliberalism 2.0: Towards A 'Digital Bill of Rights'
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

This article analyzes AI ethics from a distinct business ethics perspective, i.e., 'ordoliberalism 2.0.' It argues that the ongoing discourse on (generative) AI relies too much on corporate self-regulation and voluntary codes of conduct and thus lacks adequate governance mechanisms. To address these issues, the paper suggests not only introducing hard-law legislation with a more effective oversight structure but also merging already existing AI guidelines with an ordoliberal-inspired regulatory and competition policy. However, this link between AI ethics, regulation, and antitrust is not yet adequately discussed in the academic literature and beyond. The paper thus closes a significant gap in the academic literature and adds to the predominantly legal-political and philosophical discourse on AI governance. The paper's research questions and goals are twofold: First, it identifies ordoliberal-inspired AI ethics principles that could serve as the foundation for a 'digital bill of rights.' Second, it shows how those principles could be implemented at the macro level with the help of ordoliberal competition and regulatory policy.
User Persona Identification and New Service Adaptation Recommendation
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Providing a personalized user experience on information dense webpages helps users in reaching their end-goals sooner. We explore an automated approach to identifying user personas by leveraging high dimensional trajectory information from user sessions on webpages. While neural collaborative filtering (NCF) approaches pay little attention to token semantics, our method introduces SessionBERT, a Transformer-backed language model trained from scratch on the masked language modeling (mlm) objective for user trajectories (pages, metadata, billing in a session) aiming to capture semantics within them. Our results show that representations learned through SessionBERT are able to consistently outperform a BERT-base model providing a 3% and 1% relative improvement in F1-score for predicting page links and next services. We leverage SessionBERT and extend it to provide recommendations (top-5) for the next most-relevant services that a user would be likely to use. We achieve a HIT@5 of 58% from our recommendation model.
ExFake: Towards an Explainable Fake News Detection Based on Content and Social Context Information
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

ExFake is an explainable fake news detection system based on content and context-level information. It is concerned with the veracity analysis of online posts based on their content, social context (i.e., online users' credibility and historical behaviour), and data coming from trusted entities such as fact-checking websites and named entities. Unlike state-of-the-art systems, an Explainable AI (XAI) assistant is also adopted to help online social networks (OSN) users develop good reflexes when faced with any doubted information that spreads on social networks. The trustworthiness of OSN users is also addressed by assigning a credibility score to OSN users, as OSN users are one of the main culprits for spreading fake news. Experimental analysis on a real-world dataset demonstrates that ExFake significantly outperforms other baseline methods for fake news detection.
Emotion-Aware Music Recommendation System: Enhancing User Experience Through Real-Time Emotional Context
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

This study addresses the deficiency in conventional music recommendation systems by focusing on the vital role of emotions in shaping users music choices. These systems often disregard the emotional context, relying predominantly on past listening behavior and failing to consider the dynamic and evolving nature of users emotional preferences. This gap leads to several limitations. Users may receive recommendations that do not match their current mood, which diminishes the quality of their music experience. Furthermore, without accounting for emotions, the systems might overlook undiscovered or lesser-known songs that have a profound emotional impact on users. To combat these limitations, this research introduces an AI model that incorporates emotional context into the song recommendation process. By accurately detecting users real-time emotions, the model can generate personalized song recommendations that align with the users emotional state. This approach aims to enhance the user experience by offering music that resonates with their current mood, elicits the desired emotions, and creates a more immersive and meaningful listening experience. By considering emotional context in the song recommendation process, the proposed model offers an opportunity for a more personalized and emotionally resonant musical journey.
Integration and Implementation Strategies for AI Algorithm Deployment with Smart Routing Rules and Workflow Management
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

This paper reviews the challenges hindering the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions in the healthcare industry, focusing on computer vision applications for medical imaging, and how interoperability and enterprise-grade scalability can be used to address these challenges. The complex nature of healthcare workflows, intricacies in managing large and secure medical imaging data, and the absence of standardized frameworks for AI development pose significant barriers and require a new paradigm to address them. The role of interoperability is examined in this paper as a crucial factor in connecting disparate applications within healthcare workflows. Standards such as DICOM, Health Level 7 (HL7), and Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) are highlighted as foundational for common imaging workflows. A specific focus is placed on the role of DICOM gateways, with Smart Routing Rules and Workflow Management leading transformational efforts in this area. To drive enterprise scalability, new tools are needed. Project MONAI, established in 2019, is introduced as an initiative aiming to redefine the development of medical AI applications. The MONAI Deploy App SDK, a component of Project MONAI, is identified as a key tool in simplifying the packaging and deployment process, enabling repeatable, scalable, and standardized deployment patterns for AI applications. The abstract underscores the potential impact of successful AI adoption in healthcare, offering physicians both life-saving and time-saving insights and driving efficiencies in radiology department workflows. The collaborative efforts between academia and industry, are emphasized as essential for advancing the adoption of healthcare AI solutions.
Path Planning in 3D with Motion Primitives for Wind Energy-Harvesting Fixed-Wing Aircraft
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

In this work, a set of motion primitives is defined for use in an energy-aware motion planning problem. The motion primitives are defined as sequences of control inputs to a simplified four-DOF dynamics model and are used to replace the traditional continuous control space used in many sampling-based motion planners. The primitives are implemented in a Stable Sparse Rapidly Exploring Random Tree (SST) motion planner and compared to an identical planner using a continuous control space. The planner using primitives was found to run 11.0\% faster but yielded solution paths that were on average worse with higher variance. Also, the solution path travel time is improved by about 50\%. Using motion primitives for sampling spaces in SST can effectively reduce the run time of the algorithm, although at the cost of solution quality.
Understanding and Mitigating Classification Errors Through Interpretable Token Patterns
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

State-of-the-art NLP methods achieve human-like performance on many tasks, but make errors nevertheless. Characterizing these errors in easily interpretable terms gives insight into whether a classifier is prone to making systematic errors, but also gives a way to act and improve the classifier. We propose to discover those patterns of tokens that distinguish correct and erroneous predictions as to obtain global and interpretable descriptions for arbitrary NLP classifiers. We formulate the problem of finding a succinct and non-redundant set of such patterns in terms of the Minimum Description Length principle. Through an extensive set of experiments, we show that our method, Premise, performs well in practice. Unlike existing solutions, it recovers ground truth, even on highly imbalanced data over large vocabularies. In VQA and NER case studies, we confirm that it gives clear and actionable insight into the systematic errors made by NLP classifiers.
Explainable Product Classification for Customs
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

The task of assigning internationally accepted commodity codes (aka HS codes) to traded goods is a critical function of customs offices. Like court decisions made by judges, this task follows the doctrine of precedent and can be nontrivial even for experienced officers. Together with the Korea Customs Service (KCS), we propose a first-ever explainable decision supporting model that suggests the most likely subheadings (i.e., the first six digits) of the HS code. The model also provides reasoning for its suggestion in the form of a document that is interpretable by customs officers. We evaluated the model using 5,000 cases that recently received a classification request. The results showed that the top-3 suggestions made by our model had an accuracy of 93.9\% when classifying 925 challenging subheadings. A user study with 32 customs experts further confirmed that our algorithmic suggestions accompanied by explainable reasonings, can substantially reduce the time and effort taken by customs officers for classification reviews.
HungerGist: An Interpretable Predictive Model for Food Insecurity
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

The escalating food insecurity in Africa, caused by factors such as war, climate change, and poverty, demonstrates the critical need for advanced early warning systems. Traditional methodologies, relying on expert-curated data encompassing climate, geography, and social disturbances, often fall short due to data limitations, hindering comprehensive analysis and potential discovery of new predictive factors. To address this, this paper introduces "HungerGist", a multi-task deep learning model utilizing news texts and NLP techniques. Using a corpus of over 53,000 news articles from nine African countries over four years, we demonstrate that our model, trained solely on news data, outperforms the baseline method trained on both traditional risk factors and human-curated keywords. In addition, our method has the ability to detect critical texts that contain interpretable signals known as "gists." Moreover, our examination of these gists indicates that this approach has the potential to reveal latent factors that would otherwise remain concealed in unstructured texts.
Multiple View Geometry Transformers for 3D Human Pose Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

In this work, we aim to improve the 3D reasoning ability of Transformers in multi-view 3D human pose estimation. Recent works have focused on end-to-end learning-based transformer designs, which struggle to resolve geometric information accurately, particularly during occlusion. Instead, we propose a novel hybrid model, MVGFormer, which has a series of geometric and appearance modules organized in an iterative manner. The geometry modules are learning-free and handle all viewpoint-dependent 3D tasks geometrically which notably improves the model's generalization ability. The appearance modules are learnable and are dedicated to estimating 2D poses from image signals end-to-end which enables them to achieve accurate estimates even when occlusion occurs, leading to a model that is both accurate and generalizable to new cameras and geometries. We evaluate our approach for both in-domain and out-of-domain settings, where our model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and especially does so by a significant margin in the out-of-domain setting. We will release the code and models: https://github.com/XunshanMan/MVGFormer.
Improving Adversarial Transferability by Stable Diffusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are susceptible to adversarial examples, which introduce imperceptible perturbations to benign samples, deceiving DNN predictions. While some attack methods excel in the white-box setting, they often struggle in the black-box scenario, particularly against models fortified with defense mechanisms. Various techniques have emerged to enhance the transferability of adversarial attacks for the black-box scenario. Among these, input transformation-based attacks have demonstrated their effectiveness. In this paper, we explore the potential of leveraging data generated by Stable Diffusion to boost adversarial transferability. This approach draws inspiration from recent research that harnessed synthetic data generated by Stable Diffusion to enhance model generalization. In particular, previous work has highlighted the correlation between the presence of both real and synthetic data and improved model generalization. Building upon this insight, we introduce a novel attack method called Stable Diffusion Attack Method (SDAM), which incorporates samples generated by Stable Diffusion to augment input images. Furthermore, we propose a fast variant of SDAM to reduce computational overhead while preserving high adversarial transferability. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by a substantial margin. Moreover, our approach is compatible with existing transfer-based attacks to further enhance adversarial transferability.
Secure Software Development: Issues and Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years, technology has advanced considerably with the introduction of many systems including advanced robotics, big data analytics, cloud computing, machine learning and many more. The opportunities to exploit the yet to come security that comes with these systems are going toe to toe with new releases of security protocols to combat this exploitation to provide a secure system. The digitization of our lives proves to solve our human problems as well as improve quality of life but because it is digitalized, information and technology could be misused for other malicious gains. Hackers aim to steal the data of innocent people to use it for other causes such as identity fraud, scams and many more. This issue can be corrected during the software development life cycle, integrating security across the development phases, and testing of the software is done early to reduce the number of vulnerabilities that might or might not heavily impact an organisation depending on the range of the attack. The goal of a secured system software is to prevent such exploitations from ever happening by conducting a system life cycle where through planning and testing is done to maximise security while maintaining functionality of the system. In this paper, we are going to discuss the recent trends in security for system development as well as our predictions and suggestions to improve the current security practices in this industry.
Geometric Data Augmentations to Mitigate Distribution Shifts in Pollen Classification from Microscopic Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Distribution shifts are characterized by differences between the training and test data distributions. They can significantly reduce the accuracy of machine learning models deployed in real-world scenarios. This paper explores the distribution shift problem when classifying pollen grains from microscopic images collected in the wild with a low-cost camera sensor. We leverage the domain knowledge that geometric features are highly important for accurate pollen identification and introduce two novel geometric image augmentation techniques to significantly narrow the accuracy gap between the model performance on the train and test datasets. In particular, we show that Tenengrad and ImageToSketch filters are highly effective to balance the shape and texture information while leaving out unimportant details that may confuse the model. Extensive evaluations on various model architectures demonstrate a consistent improvement of the model generalization to field data of up to 14% achieved by the geometric augmentation techniques when compared to a wide range of standard image augmentations. The approach is validated through an ablation study using pollen hydration tests to recover the shape of dry pollen grains. The proposed geometric augmentations also receive the highest scores according to the affinity and diversity measures from the literature.
DSCom: A Data-Driven Self-Adaptive Community-Based Framework for Influence Maximization in Social Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2023
Year: 2023

Influence maximization aims to find a subset of seeds that maximize the influence spread under a given budget. In this paper, we mainly address the data-driven version of this problem, where the diffusion model is not given but needs to be inferred from the history cascades. Several previous works have addressed this topic in a statistical way and provided efficient algorithms with theoretical guarantee. However, in their settings, though the diffusion parameters are inferred, they still need users to preset the diffusion model, which can be an intractable problem in real-world practices. In this paper, we reformulate the problem on the attributed network and leverage the node attributes to estimate the closeness between the connected nodes. Specifically, we propose a machine learning-based framework, named DSCom, to address this problem in a heuristic way. Under this framework, we first infer the users' relationship from the diffusion dataset through attention mechanism and then leverage spectral clustering to overcome the influence overlap problem in the lack of exact diffusion formula. Compared to the previous theoretical works, we carefully designed empirical experiments with parameterized diffusion models based on real-world social networks, which prove the efficiency and effectiveness of our algorithm.
ECLM: Efficient Edge-Cloud Collaborative Learning with Continuous Environment Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Pervasive mobile AI applications primarily employ one of the two learning paradigms: cloud-based learning (with powerful large models) or on-device learning (with lightweight small models). Despite their own advantages, neither paradigm can effectively handle dynamic edge environments with frequent data distribution shifts and on-device resource fluctuations, inevitably suffering from performance degradation. In this paper, we propose ECLM, an edge-cloud collaborative learning framework for rapid model adaptation for dynamic edge environments. We first propose a novel block-level model decomposition design to decompose the original large cloud model into multiple combinable modules. By flexibly combining a subset of the modules, this design enables the derivation of compact, task-specific sub-models for heterogeneous edge devices from the large cloud model, and the seamless integration of new knowledge learned on these devices into the cloud model periodically. As such, ECLM ensures that the cloud model always provides up-to-date sub-models for edge devices. We further propose an end-to-end learning framework that incorporates the modular model design into an efficient model adaptation pipeline including an offline on-cloud model prototyping and training stage, and an online edge-cloud collaborative adaptation stage. Extensive experiments over various datasets demonstrate that ECLM significantly improves model performance (e.g., 18.89% accuracy increase) and resource efficiency (e.g., 7.12x communication cost reduction) in adapting models to dynamic edge environments by efficiently collaborating the edge and the cloud models.
Flat Minima in Linear Estimation and an Extended Gauss Markov Theorem
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We consider the problem of linear estimation, and establish an extension of the Gauss-Markov theorem, in which the bias operator is allowed to be non-zero but bounded with respect to a matrix norm of Schatten type. We derive simple and explicit formulas for the optimal estimator in the cases of Nuclear and Spectral norms (with the Frobenius case recovering ridge regression). Additionally, we analytically derive the generalization error in multiple random matrix ensembles, and compare with Ridge regression. Finally, we conduct an extensive simulation study, in which we show that the cross-validated Nuclear and Spectral regressors can outperform Ridge in several circumstances.
A Novel Perspective Process Simulation Framework Based on Automatic Differentiation
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2023
Year: 2023

Thermodynamic and flash equilibrium calculations are the cornerstones of simulation process calculations. The iterative approach, a widely used nonlinear problem-solving technique, relies on derivative calculations throughout the procedure that directly affect the stability and effectiveness of the solution. In this study, we use state-of-the-art automatic differentiation frameworks for thermodynamic calculations to obtain precise derivatives without altering the logic of the algorithm. This contrasts with traditional numerical differentiation algorithms and significantly improves the convergence and computational efficiency of process simulations in contrast to numerical differentiation algorithms. Standard chemical phase equilibrium calculations such as PT, PV, and PH flash are used to evaluate an automated differentiation approach with respect to numerical stability and iteration counts. It is used to evaluate the iteration count. The results of the experiment showed that the automatic differentiation method has a more uniform gradient distribution and requires fewer convergence iterations. The experimental results show that the system shows that the process is more uniform. The gradient distribution and computational convergence curves help to highlight the improvements provided by automatic differentiation. In addition, this method shows greater generalizability and can be used more easily in the calculation of various other chemical simulation modules.