OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
On Computational Mechanisms for Shared Intentionality, and Speculation on Rationality and Consciousness
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

A singular attribute of humankind is our ability to undertake novel, cooperative behavior, or teamwork. This requires that we can communicate goals, plans, and ideas between the brains of individuals to create shared intentionality. Using the information processing model of David Marr, I derive necessary characteristics of basic mechanisms to enable shared intentionality between prelinguistic computational agents and indicate how these could be implemented in present-day AI-based robots. More speculatively, I suggest the mechanisms derived by this thought experiment apply to humans and extend to provide explanations for human rationality and aspects of intentional and phenomenal consciousness that accord with observation. This yields what I call the Shared Intentionality First Theory (SIFT) for rationality and consciousness. The significance of shared intentionality has been recognized and advocated previously, but typically from a sociological or behavioral point of view. SIFT complements prior work by applying a computer science perspective to the underlying mechanisms.
Taming the Exponential Action Set: Sublinear Regret and Fast Convergence to Nash Equilibrium in Online Congestion Games
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

The congestion game is a powerful model that encompasses a range of engineering systems such as traffic networks and resource allocation. It describes the behavior of a group of agents who share a common set of $F$ facilities and take actions as subsets with $k$ facilities. In this work, we study the online formulation of congestion games, where agents participate in the game repeatedly and observe feedback with randomness. We propose CongestEXP, a decentralized algorithm that applies the classic exponential weights method. By maintaining weights on the facility level, the regret bound of CongestEXP avoids the exponential dependence on the size of possible facility sets, i.e., $\binom{F}{k} \approx F^k$, and scales only linearly with $F$. Specifically, we show that CongestEXP attains a regret upper bound of $O(kF\sqrt{T})$ for every individual player, where $T$ is the time horizon. On the other hand, exploiting the exponential growth of weights enables CongestEXP to achieve a fast convergence rate. If a strict Nash equilibrium exists, we show that CongestEXP can converge to the strict Nash policy almost exponentially fast in $O(F\exp(-t^{1-α}))$, where $t$ is the number of iterations and $α\in (1/2, 1)$.
Intersectionality and Testimonial Injustice in Medical Records
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Detecting testimonial injustice is an essential element of addressing inequities and promoting inclusive healthcare practices, many of which are life-critical. However, using a single demographic factor to detect testimonial injustice does not fully encompass the nuanced identities that contribute to a patient's experience. Further, some injustices may only be evident when examining the nuances that arise through the lens of intersectionality. Ignoring such injustices can result in poor quality of care or life-endangering events. Thus, considering intersectionality could result in more accurate classifications and just decisions. To illustrate this, we use real-world medical data to determine whether medical records exhibit words that could lead to testimonial injustice, employ fairness metrics (e.g. demographic parity, differential intersectional fairness, and subgroup fairness) to assess the severity to which subgroups are experiencing testimonial injustice, and analyze how the intersectionality of demographic features (e.g. gender and race) make a difference in uncovering testimonial injustice. From our analysis, we found that with intersectionality we can better see disparities in how subgroups are treated and there are differences in how someone is treated based on the intersection of their demographic attributes. This has not been previously studied in clinical records, nor has it been proven through empirical study.
Rigid3D: a hybrid multi-sphere DEM framework for simulation of non-spherical particles in multi-phase flow
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2023
Year: 2023

This article presents the development and validation of a hybrid multi-sphere discrete element framework - Rigid3D, for the simulation of granular systems with arbitrarily shaped particles in 3D space. In this DEM framework, a non-spherical particle is approximated by three different geometric models: (1) multi-sphere model with overlapping spheres (MS model), (2) particle surface with triangle mesh (surface model), and (3) discretized particle body with polyhedral cells (cell model). The multi-sphere approach will be the "engine" for efficient DEM simulations, while the particle's mesh and cell models will be updated simultaneously according to the position and orientation of their associated MS model, for use in particle-related inter-phase couplings in a multi-phase flow. In this sense, Rigid3D tries to combine the best of both worlds in multi-sphere and polyhedral DEMs: multi-sphere method for the efficiency and acceptable accuracy in the DEM simulation of granular flows, while the surface and cell models for the couplings between particles and other phases (continuous or dispersed phases) without affecting the performance of DEM simulations.
Model Families for Multi-Criteria Decision Support: A COVID-19 Case Study
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Continued model-based decision support is associated with particular challenges, especially in long-term projects. Due to the regularly changing questions and the often changing understanding of the underlying system, the models used must be regularly re-evaluated, -modelled and -implemented with respect to changing modelling purpose, system boundaries and mapped causalities. Usually, this leads to models with continuously growing complexity and volume. In this work we aim to reevaluate the idea of the model family, dating back to the 1990s, and use it to promote this as a mindset in the creation of decision support frameworks in large research projects. The idea is to generally not develop and enhance a single standalone model, but to divide the research tasks into interacting smaller models which specifically correspond to the research question. This strategy comes with many advantages, which we explain using the example of a family of models for decision support in the COVID-19 crisis and corresponding success stories. We describe the individual models, explain their role within the family, and how they are used - individually and with each other.
Exploring the Potential of AI-Generated Synthetic Datasets: A Case Study on Telematics Data with ChatGPT
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

This research delves into the construction and utilization of synthetic datasets, specifically within the telematics sphere, leveraging OpenAI's powerful language model, ChatGPT. Synthetic datasets present an effective solution to challenges pertaining to data privacy, scarcity, and control over variables - characteristics that make them particularly valuable for research pursuits. The utility of these datasets, however, largely depends on their quality, measured through the lenses of diversity, relevance, and coherence. To illustrate this data creation process, a hands-on case study is conducted, focusing on the generation of a synthetic telematics dataset. The experiment involved an iterative guidance of ChatGPT, progressively refining prompts and culminating in the creation of a comprehensive dataset for a hypothetical urban planning scenario in Columbus, Ohio. Upon generation, the synthetic dataset was subjected to an evaluation, focusing on the previously identified quality parameters and employing descriptive statistics and visualization techniques for a thorough analysis. Despite synthetic datasets not serving as perfect replacements for actual world data, their potential in specific use-cases, when executed with precision, is significant. This research underscores the potential of AI models like ChatGPT in enhancing data availability for complex sectors like telematics, thus paving the way for a myriad of new research opportunities.
Use case cards: a use case reporting framework inspired by the European AI Act
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Despite recent efforts by the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community to move towards standardised procedures for documenting models, methods, systems or datasets, there is currently no methodology focused on use cases aligned with the risk-based approach of the European AI Act (AI Act). In this paper, we propose a new framework for the documentation of use cases, that we call "use case cards", based on the use case modelling included in the Unified Markup Language (UML) standard. Unlike other documentation methodologies, we focus on the intended purpose and operational use of an AI system. It consists of two main parts. Firstly, a UML-based template, tailored to allow implicitly assessing the risk level of the AI system and defining relevant requirements. Secondly, a supporting UML diagram designed to provide information about the system-user interactions and relationships. The proposed framework is the result of a co-design process involving a relevant team of EU policy experts and scientists. We have validated our proposal with 11 experts with different backgrounds and a reasonable knowledge of the AI Act as a prerequisite. We provide the 5 "use case cards" used in the co-design and validation process. "Use case cards" allows framing and contextualising use cases in an effective way, and we hope this methodology can be a useful tool for policy makers and providers for documenting use cases, assessing the risk level, adapting the different requirements and building a catalogue of existing usages of AI.
How to Efficiently Adapt Large Segmentation Model(SAM) to Medical Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The emerging scale segmentation model, Segment Anything (SAM), exhibits impressive capabilities in zero-shot segmentation for natural images. However, when applied to medical images, SAM suffers from noticeable performance drop. To make SAM a real ``foundation model" for the computer vision community, it is critical to find an efficient way to customize SAM for medical image dataset. In this work, we propose to freeze SAM encoder and finetune a lightweight task-specific prediction head, as most of weights in SAM are contributed by the encoder. In addition, SAM is a promptable model, while prompt is not necessarily available in all application cases, and precise prompts for multiple class segmentation are also time-consuming. Therefore, we explore three types of prompt-free prediction heads in this work, include ViT, CNN, and linear layers. For ViT head, we remove the prompt tokens in the mask decoder of SAM, which is named AutoSAM. AutoSAM can also generate masks for different classes with one single inference after modification. To evaluate the label-efficiency of our finetuning method, we compare the results of these three prediction heads on a public medical image segmentation dataset with limited labeled data. Experiments demonstrate that finetuning SAM significantly improves its performance on medical image dataset, even with just one labeled volume. Moreover, AutoSAM and CNN prediction head also has better segmentation accuracy than training from scratch and self-supervised learning approaches when there is a shortage of annotations.
Incremental Profit per Conversion: a Response Transformation for Uplift Modeling in E-Commerce Promotions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Promotions play a crucial role in e-commerce platforms, and various cost structures are employed to drive user engagement. This paper focuses on promotions with response-dependent costs, where expenses are incurred only when a purchase is made. Such promotions include discounts and coupons. While existing uplift model approaches aim to address this challenge, these approaches often necessitate training multiple models, like meta-learners, or encounter complications when estimating profit due to zero-inflated values stemming from non-converted individuals with zero cost and profit. To address these challenges, we introduce Incremental Profit per Conversion (IPC), a novel uplift measure of promotional campaigns' efficiency in unit economics. Through a proposed response transformation, we demonstrate that IPC requires only converted data, its propensity, and a single model to be estimated. As a result, IPC resolves the issues mentioned above while mitigating the noise typically associated with the class imbalance in conversion datasets and biases arising from the many-to-one mapping between search and purchase data. Lastly, we validate the efficacy of our approach by presenting results obtained from a synthetic simulation of a discount coupon campaign.
BatchGNN: Efficient CPU-Based Distributed GNN Training on Very Large Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We present BatchGNN, a distributed CPU system that showcases techniques that can be used to efficiently train GNNs on terabyte-sized graphs. It reduces communication overhead with macrobatching in which multiple minibatches' subgraph sampling and feature fetching are batched into one communication relay to reduce redundant feature fetches when input features are static. BatchGNN provides integrated graph partitioning and native GNN layer implementations to improve runtime, and it can cache aggregated input features to further reduce sampling overhead. BatchGNN achieves an average $3\times$ speedup over DistDGL on three GNN models trained on OGBN graphs, outperforms the runtimes reported by distributed GPU systems $P^3$ and DistDGLv2, and scales to a terabyte-sized graph.
DEKGCI: A double-sided recommendation model for integrating knowledge graph and user-item interaction graph
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Both knowledge graphs and user-item interaction graphs are frequently used in recommender systems due to their ability to provide rich information for modeling users and items. However, existing studies often focused on one of these sources (either the knowledge graph or the user-item interaction graph), resulting in underutilization of the benefits that can be obtained by integrating both sources of information. In this paper, we propose DEKGCI, a novel double-sided recommendation model. In DEKGCI, we use the high-order collaborative signals from the user-item interaction graph to enrich the user representations on the user side. Additionally, we utilize the high-order structural and semantic information from the knowledge graph to enrich the item representations on the item side. DEKGCI simultaneously learns the user and item representations to effectively capture the joint interactions between users and items. Three real-world datasets are adopted in the experiments to evaluate DEKGCI's performance, and experimental results demonstrate its high effectiveness compared to seven state-of-the-art baselines in terms of AUC and ACC.
Action Q-Transformer: Visual Explanation in Deep Reinforcement Learning with Encoder-Decoder Model using Action Query
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

The excellent performance of Transformer in supervised learning has led to growing interest in its potential application to deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to achieve high performance on a wide variety of problems. However, the decision making of a DRL agent is a black box, which greatly hinders the application of the agent to real-world problems. To address this problem, we propose the Action Q-Transformer (AQT), which introduces a transformer encoder-decoder structure to Q-learning based DRL methods. In AQT, the encoder calculates the state value function and the decoder calculates the advantage function to promote the acquisition of different attentions indicating the agent's decision-making. The decoder in AQT utilizes action queries, which represent the information of each action, as queries. This enables us to obtain the attentions for the state value and for each action. By acquiring and visualizing these attentions that detail the agent's decision-making, we achieve a DRL model with high interpretability. In this paper, we show that visualization of attention in Atari 2600 games enables detailed analysis of agents' decision-making in various game tasks. Further, experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve higher performance than the baseline in some games.
Can GPT-4 Support Analysis of Textual Data in Tasks Requiring Highly Specialized Domain Expertise?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We evaluated the capability of generative pre-trained transformers~(GPT-4) in analysis of textual data in tasks that require highly specialized domain expertise. Specifically, we focused on the task of analyzing court opinions to interpret legal concepts. We found that GPT-4, prompted with annotation guidelines, performs on par with well-trained law student annotators. We observed that, with a relatively minor decrease in performance, GPT-4 can perform batch predictions leading to significant cost reductions. However, employing chain-of-thought prompting did not lead to noticeably improved performance on this task. Further, we demonstrated how to analyze GPT-4's predictions to identify and mitigate deficiencies in annotation guidelines, and subsequently improve the performance of the model. Finally, we observed that the model is quite brittle, as small formatting related changes in the prompt had a high impact on the predictions. These findings can be leveraged by researchers and practitioners who engage in semantic/pragmatic annotations of texts in the context of the tasks requiring highly specialized domain expertise.
Tuning structure learning algorithms with out-of-sample and resampling strategies
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

One of the challenges practitioners face when applying structure learning algorithms to their data involves determining a set of hyperparameters; otherwise, a set of hyperparameter defaults is assumed. The optimal hyperparameter configuration often depends on multiple factors, including the size and density of the usually unknown underlying true graph, the sample size of the input data, and the structure learning algorithm. We propose a novel hyperparameter tuning method, called the Out-of-sample Tuning for Structure Learning (OTSL), that employs out-of-sample and resampling strategies to estimate the optimal hyperparameter configuration for structure learning, given the input data set and structure learning algorithm. Synthetic experiments show that employing OTSL as a means to tune the hyperparameters of hybrid and score-based structure learning algorithms leads to improvements in graphical accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art. We also illustrate the applicability of this approach to real datasets from different disciplines.
Boost Video Frame Interpolation via Motion Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Video frame interpolation (VFI) is a challenging task that aims to generate intermediate frames between two consecutive frames in a video. Existing learning-based VFI methods have achieved great success, but they still suffer from limited generalization ability due to the limited motion distribution of training datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization-based VFI method that can adapt to unseen motions at test time. Our method is based on a cycle-consistency adaptation strategy that leverages the motion characteristics among video frames. We also introduce a lightweight adapter that can be inserted into the motion estimation module of existing pre-trained VFI models to improve the efficiency of adaptation. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that our method can boost the performance of two-frame VFI models, outperforming the existing state-of-the-art methods, even those that use extra input.
A Dynamic Data Structure for Representing Timed Transitive Closures on Disk
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

Temporal graphs represent interactions between entities over time. These interactions may be direct, a contact between two vertices at some time instant, or indirect, through sequences of contacts called journeys. Deciding whether an entity can reach another through a journey is useful for various applications in complex networks. In this paper, we present a disk-based data structure that maintains temporal reachability information under the addition of new contacts in a non-chronological order. It represents the \emph{timed transitive closure} (TTC) by a set of \emph{expanded} R-tuples of the form $(u, v, t^-, t^+)$, which encodes the existence of journeys from vertex $u$ to vertex $v$ with departure at time $t^-$ and arrival at time $t^+$. Let $n$ be the number of vertices and $τ$ be the number of timestamps in the lifetime of the temporal graph. Our data structure explicitly maintains this information in linear arrays using $O(n^2τ)$ space so that sequential accesses on disk are prioritized. Furthermore, it adds a new unsorted contact $(u, v, t)$ accessing $O\left(\frac{n^2τ}{B}\right)$ sequential pages in the worst-case, where $B$ is the of pages on disk; it answers whether there is of a journey from a vertex $u$ to a vertex $v$ within a time interval $[t_1, t_2]$ accessing a single page; it answers whether all vertices can reach each other in $[t_1, t_2]$; and it reconstructs a valid journey that validates the reachability from a vertex $u$ to a vertex $v$ within $[t_1, t_1]$ accessing $O\left(\frac{nτ}{B}\right)$ pages. Our experiments show that our novel data structure are better that the best known approach for the majority of cases using synthetic and real world datasets.
Artificial intelligence and biological misuse: Differentiating risks of language models and biological design tools
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

As advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) propel progress in the life sciences, they may also enable the weaponisation and misuse of biological agents. This article differentiates two classes of AI tools that could pose such biosecurity risks: large language models (LLMs) and biological design tools (BDTs). LLMs, such as GPT-4 and its successors, might provide dual-use information and thus remove some barriers encountered by historical biological weapons efforts. As LLMs are turned into multi-modal lab assistants and autonomous science tools, this will increase their ability to support non-experts in performing laboratory work. Thus, LLMs may in particular lower barriers to biological misuse. In contrast, BDTs will expand the capabilities of sophisticated actors. Concretely, BDTs may enable the creation of pandemic pathogens substantially worse than anything seen to date and could enable forms of more predictable and targeted biological weapons. In combination, the convergence of LLMs and BDTs could raise the ceiling of harm from biological agents and could make them broadly accessible. A range of interventions would help to manage risks. Independent pre-release evaluations could help understand the capabilities of models and the effectiveness of safeguards. Options for differentiated access to such tools should be carefully weighed with the benefits of openly releasing systems. Lastly, essential for mitigating risks will be universal and enhanced screening of gene synthesis products.