OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Learning to Select the Relevant History Turns in Conversational Question Answering
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The increasing demand for the web-based digital assistants has given a rapid rise in the interest of the Information Retrieval (IR) community towards the field of conversational question answering (ConvQA). However, one of the critical aspects of ConvQA is the effective selection of conversational history turns to answer the question at hand. The dependency between relevant history selection and correct answer prediction is an intriguing but under-explored area. The selected relevant context can better guide the system so as to where exactly in the passage to look for an answer. Irrelevant context, on the other hand, brings noise to the system, thereby resulting in a decline in the model's performance. In this paper, we propose a framework, DHS-ConvQA (Dynamic History Selection in Conversational Question Answering), that first generates the context and question entities for all the history turns, which are then pruned on the basis of similarity they share in common with the question at hand. We also propose an attention-based mechanism to re-rank the pruned terms based on their calculated weights of how useful they are in answering the question. In the end, we further aid the model by highlighting the terms in the re-ranked conversational history using a binary classification task and keeping the useful terms (predicted as 1) and ignoring the irrelevant terms (predicted as 0). We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed framework with extensive experimental results on CANARD and QuAC -- the two popularly utilized datasets in ConvQA. We demonstrate that selecting relevant turns works better than rewriting the original question. We also investigate how adding the irrelevant history turns negatively impacts the model's performance and discuss the research challenges that demand more attention from the IR community.
Movable Antenna-Enhanced Multiuser Communication: Optimal Discrete Antenna Positioning and Beamforming
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Movable antennas (MAs) are a promising paradigm to enhance the spatial degrees of freedom of conventional multi-antenna systems by flexibly adapting the positions of the antenna elements within a given transmit area. In this paper, we model the motion of the MA elements as discrete movements and study the corresponding resource allocation problem for MA-enabled multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) communication systems. Specifically, we jointly optimize the beamforming and the MA positions at the base station (BS) for the minimization of the total transmit power while guaranteeing the minimum required signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of each individual user. To obtain the globally optimal solution to the formulated resource allocation problem, we develop an iterative algorithm capitalizing on the generalized Bender's decomposition with guaranteed convergence. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed MA-enabled communication system can significantly reduce the BS transmit power and the number of antenna elements needed to achieve a desired performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques, such as antenna selection. Furthermore, we observe that refining the step size of the MA motion driver improves performance at the expense of a higher computational complexity.
MASC: A Tool for Mutation-Based Evaluation of Static Crypto-API Misuse Detectors
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

While software engineers are optimistically adopting crypto-API misuse detectors (or crypto-detectors) in their software development cycles, this momentum must be accompanied by a rigorous understanding of crypto-detectors' effectiveness at finding crypto-API misuses in practice. This demo paper presents the technical details and usage scenarios of our tool, namely Mutation Analysis for evaluating Static Crypto-API misuse detectors (MASC). We developed $12$ generalizable, usage based mutation operators and three mutation scopes, namely Main Scope, Similarity Scope, and Exhaustive Scope, which can be used to expressively instantiate compilable variants of the crypto-API misuse cases. Using MASC, we evaluated nine major crypto-detectors, and discovered $19$ unique, undocumented flaws. We designed MASC to be configurable and user-friendly; a user can configure the parameters to change the nature of generated mutations. Furthermore, MASC comes with both Command Line Interface and Web-based front-end, making it practical for users of different levels of expertise.
A Controllable Co-Creative Agent for Game System Design
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Many advancements have been made in procedural content generation for games, and with mixed-initiative co-creativity, have the potential for great benefits to human designers. However, co-creative systems for game generation are typically limited to specific genres, rules, or games, limiting the creativity of the designer. We seek to model games abstractly enough to apply to any genre, focusing on designing game systems and mechanics, and create a controllable, co-creative agent that can collaborate on these designs. We present a model of games using state-machine-like components and resource flows, a set of controllable metrics, a design evaluator simulating playthroughs with these metrics, and an evolutionary design balancer and generator. We find this system to be both able to express a wide range of games and able to be human-controllable for future co-creative applications.
Dataflow Dialogue Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We demonstrate task-oriented dialogue generation within the dataflow dialogue paradigm. We show an example of agenda driven dialogue generation for the MultiWOZ domain, and an example of generation without an agenda for the SMCalFlow domain, where we show an improvement in the accuracy of the translation of user requests to dataflow expressions when the generated dialogues are used to augment the translation training dataset.
Class Incremental Learning with Self-Supervised Pre-Training and Prototype Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Deep Neural Network (DNN) has achieved great success on datasets of closed class set. However, new classes, like new categories of social media topics, are continuously added to the real world, making it necessary to incrementally learn. This is hard for DNN because it tends to focus on fitting to new classes while ignoring old classes, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. State-of-the-art methods rely on knowledge distillation and data replay techniques but still have limitations. In this work, we analyze the causes of catastrophic forgetting in class incremental learning, which owes to three factors: representation drift, representation confusion, and classifier distortion. Based on this view, we propose a two-stage learning framework with a fixed encoder and an incrementally updated prototype classifier. The encoder is trained with self-supervised learning to generate a feature space with high intrinsic dimensionality, thus improving its transferability and generality. The classifier incrementally learns new prototypes while retaining the prototypes of previously learned data, which is crucial in preserving the decision boundary.Our method does not rely on preserved samples of old classes, is thus a non-exemplar based CIL method. Experiments on public datasets show that our method can significantly outperform state-of-the-art exemplar-based methods when they reserved 5 examplers per class, under the incremental setting of 10 phases, by 18.24% on CIFAR-100 and 9.37% on ImageNet100.
Intensity-free Integral-based Learning of Marked Temporal Point Processes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In the marked temporal point processes (MTPP), a core problem is to parameterize the conditional joint PDF (probability distribution function) $p^*(m,t)$ for inter-event time $t$ and mark $m$, conditioned on the history. The majority of existing studies predefine intensity functions. Their utility is challenged by specifying the intensity function's proper form, which is critical to balance expressiveness and processing efficiency. Recently, there are studies moving away from predefining the intensity function -- one models $p^*(t)$ and $p^*(m)$ separately, while the other focuses on temporal point processes (TPPs), which do not consider marks. This study aims to develop high-fidelity $p^*(m,t)$ for discrete events where the event marks are either categorical or numeric in a multi-dimensional continuous space. We propose a solution framework IFIB (\underline{I}ntensity-\underline{f}ree \underline{I}ntegral-\underline{b}ased process) that models conditional joint PDF $p^*(m,t)$ directly without intensity functions. It remarkably simplifies the process to compel the essential mathematical restrictions. We show the desired properties of IFIB and the superior experimental results of IFIB on real-world and synthetic datasets. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/StepinSilence/IFIB}.
A Machine Learning Method for Predicting Traffic Signal Timing from Probe Vehicle Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Traffic signals play an important role in transportation by enabling traffic flow management, and ensuring safety at intersections. In addition, knowing the traffic signal phase and timing data can allow optimal vehicle routing for time and energy efficiency, eco-driving, and the accurate simulation of signalized road networks. In this paper, we present a machine learning (ML) method for estimating traffic signal timing information from vehicle probe data. To the authors best knowledge, very few works have presented ML techniques for determining traffic signal timing parameters from vehicle probe data. In this work, we develop an Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model to estimate signal cycle lengths and a neural network model to determine the corresponding red times per phase from probe data. The green times are then be derived from the cycle length and red times. Our results show an error of less than 0.56 sec for cycle length, and red times predictions within 7.2 sec error on average.
Designing Fiduciary Artificial Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

A fiduciary is a trusted agent that has the legal duty to act with loyalty and care towards a principal that employs them. When fiduciary organizations interact with users through a digital interface, or otherwise automate their operations with artificial intelligence, they will need to design these AI systems to be compliant with their duties. This article synthesizes recent work in computer science and law to develop a procedure for designing and auditing Fiduciary AI. The designer of a Fiduciary AI should understand the context of the system, identify its principals, and assess the best interests of those principals. Then the designer must be loyal with respect to those interests, and careful in an contextually appropriate way. We connect the steps in this procedure to dimensions of Trustworthy AI, such as privacy and alignment. Fiduciary AI is a promising means to address the incompleteness of data subject's consent when interacting with complex technical systems.
From Military to Healthcare: Adopting and Expanding Ethical Principles for Generative Artificial Intelligence
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

In 2020, the U.S. Department of Defense officially disclosed a set of ethical principles to guide the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies on future battlefields. Despite stark differences, there are core similarities between the military and medical service. Warriors on battlefields often face life-altering circumstances that require quick decision-making. Medical providers experience similar challenges in a rapidly changing healthcare environment, such as in the emergency department or during surgery treating a life-threatening condition. Generative AI, an emerging technology designed to efficiently generate valuable information, holds great promise. As computing power becomes more accessible and the abundance of health data, such as electronic health records, electrocardiograms, and medical images, increases, it is inevitable that healthcare will be revolutionized by this technology. Recently, generative AI has captivated the research community, leading to debates about its application in healthcare, mainly due to concerns about transparency and related issues. Meanwhile, concerns about the potential exacerbation of health disparities due to modeling biases have raised notable ethical concerns regarding the use of this technology in healthcare. However, the ethical principles for generative AI in healthcare have been understudied, and decision-makers often fail to consider the significance of generative AI. In this paper, we propose GREAT PLEA ethical principles, encompassing governance, reliability, equity, accountability, traceability, privacy, lawfulness, empathy, and autonomy, for generative AI in healthcare. We aim to proactively address the ethical dilemmas and challenges posed by the integration of generative AI in healthcare.
Improving the Generalization Ability in Essay Coherence Evaluation through Monotonic Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Coherence is a crucial aspect of evaluating text readability and can be assessed through two primary factors when evaluating an essay in a scoring scenario. The first factor is logical coherence, characterized by the appropriate use of discourse connectives and the establishment of logical relationships between sentences. The second factor is the appropriateness of punctuation, as inappropriate punctuation can lead to confused sentence structure. To address these concerns, we propose a coherence scoring model consisting of a regression model with two feature extractors: a local coherence discriminative model and a punctuation correction model. We employ gradient-boosting regression trees as the regression model and impose monotonicity constraints on the input features. The results show that our proposed model better generalizes unseen data. The model achieved third place in track 1 of NLPCC 2023 shared task 7. Additionally, we briefly introduce our solution for the remaining tracks, which achieves second place for track 2 and first place for both track 3 and track 4.
Chatbot Application to Support Smart Agriculture in Thailand
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

A chatbot is a software developed to help reply to text or voice conversations automatically and quickly in real time. In the agriculture sector, the existing smart agriculture systems just use data from sensing and internet of things (IoT) technologies that exclude crop cultivation knowledge to support decision-making by farmers. To enhance this, the chatbot application can be an assistant to farmers to provide crop cultivation knowledge. Consequently, we propose the LINE chatbot application as an information and knowledge representation providing crop cultivation recommendations to farmers. It works with smart agriculture and recommendation systems. Our proposed LINE chatbot application consists of five main functions (start/stop menu, main page, drip irri gation page, mist irrigation page, and monitor page). Farmers will receive information for data monitoring to support their decision-making. Moreover, they can control the irrigation system via the LINE chatbot. Furthermore, farmers can ask questions relevant to the crop environment via a chat box. After implementing our proposed chatbot, farmers are very satisfied with the application, scoring a 96% satisfaction score. However, in terms of asking questions via chat box, this LINE chatbot application is a rule-based bot or script bot. Farmers have to type in the correct keywords as prescribed, otherwise they won't get a response from the chatbots. In the future, we will enhance the asking function of our LINE chatbot to be an intelligent bot.
Can Self-Supervised Representation Learning Methods Withstand Distribution Shifts and Corruptions?
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Self-supervised learning in computer vision aims to leverage the inherent structure and relationships within data to learn meaningful representations without explicit human annotation, enabling a holistic understanding of visual scenes. Robustness in vision machine learning ensures reliable and consistent performance, enhancing generalization, adaptability, and resistance to noise, variations, and adversarial attacks. Self-supervised paradigms, namely contrastive learning, knowledge distillation, mutual information maximization, and clustering, have been considered to have shown advances in invariant learning representations. This work investigates the robustness of learned representations of self-supervised learning approaches focusing on distribution shifts and image corruptions in computer vision. Detailed experiments have been conducted to study the robustness of self-supervised learning methods on distribution shifts and image corruptions. The empirical analysis demonstrates a clear relationship between the performance of learned representations within self-supervised paradigms and the severity of distribution shifts and corruptions. Notably, higher levels of shifts and corruptions are found to significantly diminish the robustness of the learned representations. These findings highlight the critical impact of distribution shifts and image corruptions on the performance and resilience of self-supervised learning methods, emphasizing the need for effective strategies to mitigate their adverse effects. The study strongly advocates for future research in the field of self-supervised representation learning to prioritize the key aspects of safety and robustness in order to ensure practical applicability. The source code and results are available on GitHub.
Degeneration-Tuning: Using Scrambled Grid shield Unwanted Concepts from Stable Diffusion
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Owing to the unrestricted nature of the content in the training data, large text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion (SD), are capable of generating images with potentially copyrighted or dangerous content based on corresponding textual concepts information. This includes specific intellectual property (IP), human faces, and various artistic styles. However, Negative Prompt, a widely used method for content removal, frequently fails to conceal this content due to inherent limitations in its inference logic. In this work, we propose a novel strategy named \textbf{Degeneration-Tuning (DT)} to shield contents of unwanted concepts from SD weights. By utilizing Scrambled Grid to reconstruct the correlation between undesired concepts and their corresponding image domain, we guide SD to generate meaningless content when such textual concepts are provided as input. As this adaptation occurs at the level of the model's weights, the SD, after DT, can be grafted onto other conditional diffusion frameworks like ControlNet to shield unwanted concepts. In addition to qualitatively showcasing the effectiveness of our DT method in protecting various types of concepts, a quantitative comparison of the SD before and after DT indicates that the DT method does not significantly impact the generative quality of other contents. The FID and IS scores of the model on COCO-30K exhibit only minor changes after DT, shifting from 12.61 and 39.20 to 13.04 and 38.25, respectively, which clearly outperforms the previous methods.
Large-scale Generative Simulation Artificial Intelligence: the Next Hotspot in Generative AI
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

The concept of GenAI has been developed for decades. Until recently, it has impressed us with substantial breakthroughs in natural language processing and computer vision, actively engaging in industrial scenarios. Noticing the practical challenges, e.g., limited learning resources, and overly dependencies on scientific discovery empiricism, we nominate large-scale generative simulation artificial intelligence (LS-GenAI) as the next hotspot for GenAI to connect.
Adapt and Decompose: Efficient Generalization of Text-to-SQL via Domain Adapted Least-To-Most Prompting
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Cross-domain and cross-compositional generalization of Text-to-SQL semantic parsing is a challenging task. Existing Large Language Model (LLM) based solutions rely on inference-time retrieval of few-shot exemplars from the training set to synthesize a run-time prompt for each Natural Language (NL) test query. In contrast, we devise an algorithm which performs offline sampling of a minimal set-of few-shots from the training data, with complete coverage of SQL clauses, operators and functions, and maximal domain coverage within the allowed token length. This allows for synthesis of a fixed Generic Prompt (GP), with a diverse set-of exemplars common across NL test queries, avoiding expensive test time exemplar retrieval. We further auto-adapt the GP to the target database domain (DA-GP), to better handle cross-domain generalization; followed by a decomposed Least-To-Most-Prompting (LTMP-DA-GP) to handle cross-compositional generalization. The synthesis of LTMP-DA-GP is an offline task, to be performed one-time per new database with minimal human intervention. Our approach demonstrates superior performance on the KaggleDBQA dataset, designed to evaluate generalizability for the Text-to-SQL task. We further showcase consistent performance improvement of LTMP-DA-GP over GP, across LLMs and databases of KaggleDBQA, highlighting the efficacy and model agnostic benefits of our prompt based adapt and decompose approach.
AI exposure predicts unemployment risk
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Is artificial intelligence (AI) disrupting jobs and creating unemployment? Despite many attempts to quantify occupations' exposure to AI, inconsistent validation obfuscates the relative benefits of each approach. A lack of disaggregated labor outcome data, including unemployment data, further exacerbates the issue. Here, we assess which models of AI exposure predict job separations and unemployment risk using new occupation-level unemployment data by occupation from each US state's unemployment insurance office spanning 2010 through 2020. Although these AI exposure scores have been used by governments and industry, we find that individual AI exposure models are not predictive of unemployment rates, unemployment risk, or job separation rates. However, an ensemble of those models exhibits substantial predictive power suggesting that competing models may capture different aspects of AI exposure that collectively account for AI's variable impact across occupations, regions, and time. Our results also call for dynamic, context-aware, and validated methods for assessing AI exposure. Interactive visualizations for this study are available at https://sites.pitt.edu/~mrfrank/uiRiskDemo/.