OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Prior-free Balanced Replay: Uncertainty-guided Reservoir Sampling for Long-Tailed Continual Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Even in the era of large models, one of the well-known issues in continual learning (CL) is catastrophic forgetting, which is significantly challenging when the continual data stream exhibits a long-tailed distribution, termed as Long-Tailed Continual Learning (LTCL). Existing LTCL solutions generally require the label distribution of the data stream to achieve re-balance training. However, obtaining such prior information is often infeasible in real scenarios since the model should learn without pre-identifying the majority and minority classes. To this end, we propose a novel Prior-free Balanced Replay (PBR) framework to learn from long-tailed data stream with less forgetting. Concretely, motivated by our experimental finding that the minority classes are more likely to be forgotten due to the higher uncertainty, we newly design an uncertainty-guided reservoir sampling strategy to prioritize rehearsing minority data without using any prior information, which is based on the mutual dependence between the model and samples. Additionally, we incorporate two prior-free components to further reduce the forgetting issue: (1) Boundary constraint is to preserve uncertain boundary supporting samples for continually re-estimating task boundaries. (2) Prototype constraint is to maintain the consistency of learned class prototypes along with training. Our approach is evaluated on three standard long-tailed benchmarks, demonstrating superior performance to existing CL methods and previous SOTA LTCL approach in both task- and class-incremental learning settings, as well as ordered- and shuffled-LTCL settings.
Measuring publication relatedness using controlled vocabularies
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Measuring the relatedness between scientific publications has important applications in many areas of bibliometrics and science policy. Controlled vocabularies provide a promising basis for measuring relatedness because they address issues that arise when using citation or textual similarity to measure relatedness. While several controlled-vocabulary-based relatedness measures have been developed, there exists no comprehensive and direct test of their accuracy and suitability for different types of research questions. This paper reviews existing measures, develops a new measure, and benchmarks the measures using TREC Genomics data as a ground truth of topics. The benchmark test show that the new measure and the measure proposed by Ahlgren et al. (2020) have differing strengths and weaknesses. These results inform a discussion of which method to choose when studying interdisciplinarity, information retrieval, clustering of science, and researcher topic switching.
Essentials of Petri nets
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

This contribution highlights some concepts and aspects of Petri nets that are frequently neglected, but that the authors consider important or interesting, or that Carl Adam Petri emphasized.
Self-supervised Topic Taxonomy Discovery in the Box Embedding Space
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Topic taxonomy discovery aims at uncovering topics of different abstraction levels and constructing hierarchical relations between them. Unfortunately, most of prior work can hardly model semantic scopes of words and topics by holding the Euclidean embedding space assumption. What's worse, they infer asymmetric hierarchical relations by symmetric distances between topic embeddings. As a result, existing methods suffer from problems of low-quality topics at high abstraction levels and inaccurate hierarchical relations. To alleviate these problems, this paper develops a Box embedding-based Topic Model (BoxTM) that maps words and topics into the box embedding space, where the asymmetric metric is defined to properly infer hierarchical relations among topics. Additionally, our BoxTM explicitly infers upper-level topics based on correlation between specific topics through recursive clustering on topic boxes. Finally, extensive experiments validate high-quality of the topic taxonomy learned by BoxTM.
Interactive dense pixel visualizations for time series and model attribution explanations
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

The field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) for Deep Neural Network models has developed significantly, offering numerous techniques to extract explanations from models. However, evaluating explanations is often not trivial, and differences in applied metrics can be subtle, especially with non-intelligible data. Thus, there is a need for visualizations tailored to explore explanations for domains with such data, e.g., time series. We propose DAVOTS, an interactive visual analytics approach to explore raw time series data, activations of neural networks, and attributions in a dense-pixel visualization to gain insights into the data, models' decisions, and explanations. To further support users in exploring large datasets, we apply clustering approaches to the visualized data domains to highlight groups and present ordering strategies for individual and combined data exploration to facilitate finding patterns. We visualize a CNN trained on the FordA dataset to demonstrate the approach.
MiWaves Reinforcement Learning Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The escalating prevalence of cannabis use poses a significant public health challenge globally. In the U.S., cannabis use is more prevalent among emerging adults (EAs) (ages 18-25) than any other age group, with legalization in the multiple states contributing to a public perception that cannabis is less risky than in prior decades. To address this growing concern, we developed MiWaves, a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm designed to optimize the delivery of personalized intervention prompts to reduce cannabis use among EAs. MiWaves leverages domain expertise and prior data to tailor the likelihood of delivery of intervention messages. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the algorithm's design, including key decisions and experimental outcomes. The finalized MiWaves RL algorithm was deployed in a clinical trial from March to May 2024.
Quantum Bisimilarity is a Congruence under Physically Admissible Schedulers
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2024
Year: 2024

The development of quantum algorithms and protocols calls for adequate modelling and verification techniques, which requires abstracting and focusing on the basic features of quantum concurrent systems, like CCS and CSP have done for their classical counterparts. So far, an equivalence relation is still missing that is a congruence for parallel composition and adheres to the limited discriminating power implied by quantum theory. In fact, defining an adequate bisimilarity for quantum-capable, concurrent systems proved a difficult task, because unconstrained non-determinism allows to spuriously discriminate indistinguishable quantum systems. We investigate this problem by enriching a linear quantum extension of CCS with simple physically admissible schedulers. We show that our approach suffices for deriving a well-behaved bisimilarity that satisfies the aforementioned desiderata.
Post-processing fairness with minimal changes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we introduce a novel post-processing algorithm that is both model-agnostic and does not require the sensitive attribute at test time. In addition, our algorithm is explicitly designed to enforce minimal changes between biased and debiased predictions; a property that, while highly desirable, is rarely prioritized as an explicit objective in fairness literature. Our approach leverages a multiplicative factor applied to the logit value of probability scores produced by a black-box classifier. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method through empirical evaluations, comparing its performance against other four debiasing algorithms on two widely used datasets in fairness research.
Enhancing License Plate Super-Resolution: A Layout-Aware and Character-Driven Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Despite significant advancements in License Plate Recognition (LPR) through deep learning, most improvements rely on high-resolution images with clear characters. This scenario does not reflect real-world conditions where traffic surveillance often captures low-resolution and blurry images. Under these conditions, characters tend to blend with the background or neighboring characters, making accurate LPR challenging. To address this issue, we introduce a novel loss function, Layout and Character Oriented Focal Loss (LCOFL), which considers factors such as resolution, texture, and structural details, as well as the performance of the LPR task itself. We enhance character feature learning using deformable convolutions and shared weights in an attention module and employ a GAN-based training approach with an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model as the discriminator to guide the super-resolution process. Our experimental results show significant improvements in character reconstruction quality, outperforming two state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative measures. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/valfride/lpsr-lacd
Aligning XAI with EU Regulations for Smart Biomedical Devices: A Methodology for Compliance Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Significant investment and development have gone into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medical and healthcare applications, leading to advanced control systems in medical technology. However, the opacity of AI systems raises concerns about essential characteristics needed in such sensitive applications, like transparency and trustworthiness. Our study addresses these concerns by investigating a process for selecting the most adequate Explainable AI (XAI) methods to comply with the explanation requirements of key EU regulations in the context of smart bioelectronics for medical devices. The adopted methodology starts with categorising smart devices by their control mechanisms (open-loop, closed-loop, and semi-closed-loop systems) and delving into their technology. Then, we analyse these regulations to define their explainability requirements for the various devices and related goals. Simultaneously, we classify XAI methods by their explanatory objectives. This allows for matching legal explainability requirements with XAI explanatory goals and determining the suitable XAI algorithms for achieving them. Our findings provide a nuanced understanding of which XAI algorithms align better with EU regulations for different types of medical devices. We demonstrate this through practical case studies on different neural implants, from chronic disease management to advanced prosthetics. This study fills a crucial gap in aligning XAI applications in bioelectronics with stringent provisions of EU regulations. It provides a practical framework for developers and researchers, ensuring their AI innovations advance healthcare technology and adhere to legal and ethical standards.
Using LLMs for Explaining Sets of Counterfactual Examples to Final Users
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Causality is vital for understanding true cause-and-effect relationships between variables within predictive models, rather than relying on mere correlations, making it highly relevant in the field of Explainable AI. In an automated decision-making scenario, causal inference methods can analyze the underlying data-generation process, enabling explanations of a model's decision by manipulating features and creating counterfactual examples. These counterfactuals explore hypothetical scenarios where a minimal number of factors are altered, providing end-users with valuable information on how to change their situation. However, interpreting a set of multiple counterfactuals can be challenging for end-users who are not used to analyzing raw data records. In our work, we propose a novel multi-step pipeline that uses counterfactuals to generate natural language explanations of actions that will lead to a change in outcome in classifiers of tabular data using LLMs. This pipeline is designed to guide the LLM through smaller tasks that mimic human reasoning when explaining a decision based on counterfactual cases. We conducted various experiments using a public dataset and proposed a method of closed-loop evaluation to assess the coherence of the final explanation with the counterfactuals, as well as the quality of the content. Results are promising, although further experiments with other datasets and human evaluations should be carried out.
Measuring text summarization factuality using atomic facts entailment metrics in the context of retrieval augmented generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The use of large language models (LLMs) has significantly increased since the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022, demonstrating their value across various applications. However, a major challenge for enterprise and commercial adoption of LLMs is their tendency to generate inaccurate information, a phenomenon known as "hallucination." This project proposes a method for estimating the factuality of a summary generated by LLMs when compared to a source text. Our approach utilizes Naive Bayes classification to assess the accuracy of the content produced.
AutoGen Studio: A No-Code Developer Tool for Building and Debugging Multi-Agent Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-agent systems, where multiple agents (generative AI models + tools) collaborate, are emerging as an effective pattern for solving long-running, complex tasks in numerous domains. However, specifying their parameters (such as models, tools, and orchestration mechanisms etc,.) and debugging them remains challenging for most developers. To address this challenge, we present AUTOGEN STUDIO, a no-code developer tool for rapidly prototyping, debugging, and evaluating multi-agent workflows built upon the AUTOGEN framework. AUTOGEN STUDIO offers a web interface and a Python API for representing LLM-enabled agents using a declarative (JSON-based) specification. It provides an intuitive drag-and-drop UI for agent workflow specification, interactive evaluation and debugging of workflows, and a gallery of reusable agent components. We highlight four design principles for no-code multi-agent developer tools and contribute an open-source implementation at https://github.com/microsoft/autogen/tree/main/samples/apps/autogen-studio
AI-Powered Camera and Sensors for the Rehabilitation Hand Exoskeleton
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Due to Motor Neurone Diseases, a large population remains disabled worldwide, negatively impacting their independence and quality of life. This typically involves a weakness in the hand and forearm muscles, making it difficult to perform fine motor tasks such as writing, buttoning a shirt, or gripping objects. This project presents a vision-enabled rehabilitation hand exoskeleton to assist disabled persons in their hand movements. The design goal was to create an accessible tool to help with a simple interface requiring no training. This prototype is built on a commercially available glove where a camera and embedded processor were integrated to help open and close the hand, using air pressure, thus grabbing an object. An accelerometer is also implemented to detect the characteristic hand gesture to release the object when desired. This passive vision-based control differs from active EMG-based designs as it does not require individualized training. Continuing the research will reduce the cost, weight, and power consumption to facilitate mass implementation.
Text classification optimization algorithm based on graph neural network
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In the field of natural language processing, text classification, as a basic task, has important research value and application prospects. Traditional text classification methods usually rely on feature representations such as the bag of words model or TF-IDF, which overlook the semantic connections between words and make it challenging to grasp the deep structural details of the text. Recently, GNNs have proven to be a valuable asset for text classification tasks, thanks to their capability to handle non-Euclidean data efficiently. However, the existing text classification methods based on GNN still face challenges such as complex graph structure construction and high cost of model training. This paper introduces a text classification optimization algorithm utilizing graph neural networks. By introducing adaptive graph construction strategy and efficient graph convolution operation, the accuracy and efficiency of text classification are effectively improved. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses traditional approaches and existing GNN models across multiple public datasets, highlighting its superior performance and feasibility for text classification tasks.
Artificial Data, Real Insights: Evaluating Opportunities and Risks of Expanding the Data Ecosystem with Synthetic Data
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Synthetic Data is not new, but recent advances in Generative AI have raised interest in expanding the research toolbox, creating new opportunities and risks. This article provides a taxonomy of the full breadth of the Synthetic Data domain. We discuss its place in the research ecosystem by linking the advances in computational social science with the idea of the Fourth Paradigm of scientific discovery that integrates the elements of the evolution from empirical to theoretic to computational models. Further, leveraging the framework of Truth, Beauty, and Justice, we discuss how evaluation criteria vary across use cases as the information is used to add value and draw insights. Building a framework to organize different types of synthetic data, we end by describing the opportunities and challenges with detailed examples of using Generative AI to create synthetic quantitative and qualitative datasets and discuss the broader spectrum including synthetic populations, expert systems, survey data replacement, and personabots.
People over trust AI-generated medical responses and view them to be as valid as doctors, despite low accuracy
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of how AI-generated medical responses are perceived and evaluated by non-experts. A total of 300 participants gave evaluations for medical responses that were either written by a medical doctor on an online healthcare platform, or generated by a large language model and labeled by physicians as having high or low accuracy. Results showed that participants could not effectively distinguish between AI-generated and Doctors' responses and demonstrated a preference for AI-generated responses, rating High Accuracy AI-generated responses as significantly more valid, trustworthy, and complete/satisfactory. Low Accuracy AI-generated responses on average performed very similar to Doctors' responses, if not more. Participants not only found these low-accuracy AI-generated responses to be valid, trustworthy, and complete/satisfactory but also indicated a high tendency to follow the potentially harmful medical advice and incorrectly seek unnecessary medical attention as a result of the response provided. This problematic reaction was comparable if not more to the reaction they displayed towards doctors' responses. This increased trust placed on inaccurate or inappropriate AI-generated medical advice can lead to misdiagnosis and harmful consequences for individuals seeking help. Further, participants were more trusting of High Accuracy AI-generated responses when told they were given by a doctor and experts rated AI-generated responses significantly higher when the source of the response was unknown. Both experts and non-experts exhibited bias, finding AI-generated responses to be more thorough and accurate than Doctors' responses but still valuing the involvement of a Doctor in the delivery of their medical advice. Ensuring AI systems are implemented with medical professionals should be the future of using AI for the delivery of medical advice.
Recent advances in Meta-model of Optimal Prognosis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In real case applications within the virtual prototyping process, it is not always possible to reduce the complexity of the physical models and to obtain numerical models which can be solved quickly. Usually, every single numerical simulation takes hours or even days. Although the progresses in numerical methods and high performance computing, in such cases, it is not possible to explore various model configurations, hence efficient surrogate models are required. Generally the available meta-model techniques show several advantages and disadvantages depending on the investigated problem. In this paper we present an automatic approach for the selection of the optimal suitable meta-model for the actual problem. Together with an automatic reduction of the variable space using advanced filter techniques an efficient approximation is enabled also for high dimensional problems.
A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Scheme for SFC Placement in Edge Computing Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

In the 5G era and beyond, it is favorable to deploy latency-sensitive and reliability-aware services on edge computing networks in which the computing and network resources are more limited compared to cloud and core networks but can respond more promptly. These services can be composed as Service Function Chains (SFCs) which consist of a sequence of ordered Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). To achieve efficient edge resources allocation for SFC requests and optimal profit for edge service providers, we formulate the SFC placement problem in an edge environment and propose a multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (RL) scheme to address the problem. The proposed scheme employs a set of RL agents to collaboratively make SFC placement decisions, such as path selection, VNF configuration, and VNF deployment. Simulation results show our model can improve the profit of edge service providers by 12\% compared with a heuristic solution.
Optimization Solution Functions as Deterministic Policies for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for many control applications but faces challenges such as limited data coverage and value function overestimation. In this paper, we propose an implicit actor-critic (iAC) framework that employs optimization solution functions as a deterministic policy (actor) and a monotone function over the optimal value of optimization as a critic. By encoding optimality in the actor policy, we show that the learned policies are robust to the suboptimality of the learned actor parameters via the exponentially decaying sensitivity (EDS) property. We obtain performance guarantees for the proposed iAC framework and show its benefits over general function approximation schemes. Finally, we validate the proposed framework on two real-world applications and show a significant improvement over state-of-the-art (SOTA) offline RL methods.