OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Towards Human-centered Design of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): A Survey of Empirical Studies
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

With the advances of AI research, AI has been increasingly adopted in numerous domains, ranging from low-stakes daily tasks such as movie recommendations to high-stakes tasks such as medicine, and criminal justice decision-making. Explainability is becoming an essential requirement for people to understand, trust and adopt AI applications. Despite a vast collection of explainable AI (XAI) algorithms produced by the AI research community, successful examples of XAI are still relatively scarce in real-world AI applications. This can be due to the gap between what the XAI is designed for and how the XAI is actually perceived by end-users. As explainability is an inherently human-centered property, in recent years, the XAI field is starting to embrace human-centered approaches and increasingly realizing the importance of empirical studies of XAI design by involving human subjects. To move a step towards a systematic review of empirical study for human-centered XAI design, in this survey, we first brief the technical landscape of commonly used XAI algorithms in existing empirical studies. Then we analyze the diverse stakeholders and needs-finding approaches. Next, we provide an overview of the design space explored in the current human-centered XAI design. Further, we summarize the evaluation metrics based on evaluation goals. Afterward, we analyze the common findings and pitfalls derived from existing studies. For each chapter, we provide a summary of current challenges and research opportunities. Finally, we conclude the survey with a framework for human-centered XAI design with empirical studies.
Belief in the Machine: Investigating Epistemological Blind Spots of Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

As language models (LMs) become integral to fields like healthcare, law, and journalism, their ability to differentiate between fact, belief, and knowledge is essential for reliable decision-making. Failure to grasp these distinctions can lead to significant consequences in areas such as medical diagnosis, legal judgments, and dissemination of fake news. Despite this, current literature has largely focused on more complex issues such as theory of mind, overlooking more fundamental epistemic challenges. This study systematically evaluates the epistemic reasoning capabilities of modern LMs, including GPT-4, Claude-3, and Llama-3, using a new dataset, KaBLE, consisting of 13,000 questions across 13 tasks. Our results reveal key limitations. First, while LMs achieve 86% accuracy on factual scenarios, their performance drops significantly with false scenarios, particularly in belief-related tasks. Second, LMs struggle with recognizing and affirming personal beliefs, especially when those beliefs contradict factual data, which raises concerns for applications in healthcare and counseling, where engaging with a person's beliefs is critical. Third, we identify a salient bias in how LMs process first-person versus third-person beliefs, performing better on third-person tasks (80.7%) compared to first-person tasks (54.4%). Fourth, LMs lack a robust understanding of the factive nature of knowledge, namely, that knowledge inherently requires truth. Fifth, LMs rely on linguistic cues for fact-checking and sometimes bypass the deeper reasoning. These findings highlight significant concerns about current LMs' ability to reason about truth, belief, and knowledge while emphasizing the need for advancements in these areas before broad deployment in critical sectors.
HoPE: A Novel Positional Encoding Without Long-Term Decay for Enhanced Context Awareness and Extrapolation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Many positional encodings (PEs) are designed to exhibit long-term decay, based on an entrenched and long-standing inductive opinion: tokens farther away from the current position carry less relevant information. We argue that long-term decay is outdated in the era of LLMs, as LLMs are now applied to tasks demanding precise retrieval of in-context information from arbitrary positions. Firstly, we present empirical analyses on various PEs, demonstrating that models inherently learn attention with only a local-decay pattern while forming a U-shape pattern globally, contradicting the principle of long-term decay. Furthermore, we conduct a detailed analysis of rotary position encoding (RoPE, a prevalent relative positional encoding in LLMs), and found that the U-shape attention is caused by some learned components, which are also the key factor limiting RoPE's expressiveness and extrapolation.Inspired by these insights, we propose High-frequency rotary Position Encoding (HoPE). HoPE replaces the specific components in RoPE with position-independent ones, retaining only high-frequency signals, which also breaks the principle of long-term decay in theory. HoPE achieves two major advantages: (1) Without constraints imposed by long-term decay, contradictory factors that limit spontaneous attention optimization and model extrapolation performance are removed. (2) Components representing positions and semantics are are optimized. These enhances model's context awareness and extrapolation, as validated by extensive experiments.
Fine-Grained Clustering-Based Power Identification for Multicores
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2024
Year: 2024

Fine-grained power estimation in multicore Systems on Chips (SoCs) is crucial for efficient thermal management. BPI (Blind Power Identification) is a recent approach that determines the power consumption of different cores and the thermal model of the chip using only thermal sensor measurements and total power consumption. BPI relies on steady-state thermal data along with a naive initialization in its Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) process, which negatively impacts the power estimation accuracy of BPI. This paper proposes a two-fold approach to reduce these impacts on BPI. First, this paper introduces an innovative approach for NMF initializing, i.e., density-oriented spatial clustering to identify centroid data points of active cores as initial values. This enhances BPI accuracy by focusing on dense regions in the dataset and excluding outlier data points. Second, it proposes the utilization of steady-state temperature data points to enhance the power estimation accuracy by leveraging the physical relationship between temperature and power consumption. Our extensive simulations of real-world cases demonstrate that our approach enhances BPI accuracy in estimating the power per core with no performance cost. For instance, in a four-core processor, the proposed approach reduces the error rate by 76% compared to BPI and by 24% compared to the state of the art in the literature, namely, Blind Power Identification Steady State (BPISS). The results underline the potential of integrating advanced clustering techniques in thermal model identification, paving the way for more accurate and reliable thermal management in multicores and SoCs.
OpenCity: A Scalable Platform to Simulate Urban Activities with Massive LLM Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2024
Year: 2024

Agent-based models (ABMs) have long been employed to explore how individual behaviors aggregate into complex societal phenomena in urban space. Unlike black-box predictive models, ABMs excel at explaining the micro-macro linkages that drive such emergent behaviors. The recent rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to the development of LLM agents capable of simulating urban activities with unprecedented realism. However, the extreme high computational cost of LLMs presents significant challenges for scaling up the simulations of LLM agents. To address this problem, we propose OpenCity, a scalable simulation platform optimized for both system and prompt efficiencies. Specifically, we propose a LLM request scheduler to reduce communication overhead by parallelizing requests through IO multiplexing. Besides, we deisgn a "group-and-distill" prompt optimization strategy minimizes redundancy by clustering agents with similar static attributes. Through experiments on six global cities, OpenCity achieves a 600-fold acceleration in simulation time per agent, a 70% reduction in LLM requests, and a 50% reduction in token usage. These improvements enable the simulation of 10,000 agents' daily activities in 1 hour on commodity hardware. Besides, the substantial speedup of OpenCity allows us to establish a urban simulation benchmark for LLM agents for the first time, comparing simulated urban activities with real-world data in 6 major cities around the globe. We believe our OpenCity platform provides a critical infrastructure to harness the power of LLMs for interdisciplinary studies in urban space, fostering the collective efforts of broader research communities. Code repo is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Anonymous-OpenCity-42BD.
Large-scale Multi-objective Feature Selection: A Multi-phase Search Space Shrinking Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2024
Year: 2024

Feature selection is a crucial step in machine learning, especially for high-dimensional datasets, where irrelevant and redundant features can degrade model performance and increase computational costs. This paper proposes a novel large-scale multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on the search space shrinking, termed LMSSS, to tackle the challenges of feature selection particularly as a sparse optimization problem. The method includes a shrinking scheme to reduce dimensionality of the search space by eliminating irrelevant features before the main evolutionary process. This is achieved through a ranking-based filtering method that evaluates features based on their correlation with class labels and frequency in an initial, cost-effective evolutionary process. Additionally, a smart crossover scheme based on voting between parent solutions is introduced, giving higher weight to the parent with better classification accuracy. An intelligent mutation process is also designed to target features prematurely excluded from the population, ensuring they are evaluated in combination with other features. These integrated techniques allow the evolutionary process to explore the search space more efficiently and effectively, addressing the sparse and high-dimensional nature of large-scale feature selection problems. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated through comprehensive experiments on 15 large-scale datasets, showcasing its potential to identify more accurate feature subsets compared to state-of-the-art large-scale feature selection algorithms. These results highlight LMSSS's capability to improve model performance and computational efficiency, setting a new benchmark in the field.
Contrastive Learning with Auxiliary User Detection for Identifying Activities
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is essential in ubiquitous computing, with far-reaching real-world applications. While recent SOTA HAR research has demonstrated impressive performance, some key aspects remain under-explored. Firstly, HAR can be both highly contextualized and personalized. However, prior work has predominantly focused on being Context-Aware (CA) while largely ignoring the necessity of being User-Aware (UA). We argue that addressing the impact of innate user action-performing differences is equally crucial as considering external contextual environment settings in HAR tasks. Secondly, being user-aware makes the model acknowledge user discrepancies but does not necessarily guarantee mitigation of these discrepancies, i.e., unified predictions under the same activities. There is a need for a methodology that explicitly enforces closer (different user, same activity) representations. To bridge this gap, we introduce CLAUDIA, a novel framework designed to address these issues. Specifically, we expand the contextual scope of the CA-HAR task by integrating User Identification (UI) within the CA-HAR framework, jointly predicting both CA-HAR and UI in a new task called User and Context-Aware HAR (UCA-HAR). This approach enriches personalized and contextual understanding by jointly learning user-invariant and user-specific patterns. Inspired by SOTA designs in the visual domain, we introduce a supervised contrastive loss objective on instance-instance pairs to enhance model efficacy and improve learned feature quality. Evaluation across three real-world CA-HAR datasets reveals substantial performance enhancements, with average improvements ranging from 5.8% to 14.1% in Matthew's Correlation Coefficient and 3.0% to 7.2% in Macro F1 score.
GraphLSS: Integrating Lexical, Structural, and Semantic Features for Long Document Extractive Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Heterogeneous graph neural networks have recently gained attention for long document summarization, modeling the extraction as a node classification task. Although effective, these models often require external tools or additional machine learning models to define graph components, producing highly complex and less intuitive structures. We present GraphLSS, a heterogeneous graph construction for long document extractive summarization, incorporating Lexical, Structural, and Semantic features. It defines two levels of information (words and sentences) and four types of edges (sentence semantic similarity, sentence occurrence order, word in sentence, and word semantic similarity) without any need for auxiliary learning models. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that GraphLSS is competitive with top-performing graph-based methods, outperforming recent non-graph models. We release our code on GitHub.
User-Aware Multilingual Abusive Content Detection in Social Media
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2024
Year: 2024

Despite growing efforts to halt distasteful content on social media, multilingualism has added a new dimension to this problem. The scarcity of resources makes the challenge even greater when it comes to low-resource languages. This work focuses on providing a novel method for abusive content detection in multiple low-resource Indic languages. Our observation indicates that a post's tendency to attract abusive comments, as well as features such as user history and social context, significantly aid in the detection of abusive content. The proposed method first learns social and text context features in two separate modules. The integrated representation from these modules is learned and used for the final prediction. To evaluate the performance of our method against different classical and state-of-the-art methods, we have performed extensive experiments on SCIDN and MACI datasets consisting of 1.5M and 665K multilingual comments, respectively. Our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods with an average increase of 4.08% and 9.52% in F1-scores on SCIDN and MACI datasets, respectively.
Heterogeneous Interaction Modeling With Reduced Accumulated Error for Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2024
Year: 2024

Dynamical complex systems composed of interactive heterogeneous agents are prevalent in the world, including urban traffic systems and social networks. Modeling the interactions among agents is the key to understanding and predicting the dynamics of the complex system, e.g., predicting the trajectories of traffic participants in the city. Compared with interaction modeling in homogeneous systems such as pedestrians in a crowded scene, heterogeneous interaction modeling is less explored. Worse still, the error accumulation problem becomes more severe since the interactions are more complex. To tackle the two problems, this paper proposes heterogeneous interaction modeling with reduced accumulated error for multi-agent trajectory prediction. Based on the historical trajectories, our method infers the dynamic interaction graphs among agents, featured by directed interacting relations and interacting effects. A heterogeneous attention mechanism is defined on the interaction graphs for aggregating the influence from heterogeneous neighbors to the target agent. To alleviate the error accumulation problem, this paper analyzes the error sources from the spatial and temporal perspectives, and proposes to introduce the graph entropy and the mixup training strategy for reducing the two types of errors respectively. Our method is examined on three real-world datasets containing heterogeneous agents, and the experimental results validate the superiority of our method.
Causal Interventions on Causal Paths: Mapping GPT-2's Reasoning From Syntax to Semantics
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

While interpretability research has shed light on some internal algorithms utilized by transformer-based LLMs, reasoning in natural language, with its deep contextuality and ambiguity, defies easy categorization. As a result, formulating clear and motivating questions for circuit analysis that rely on well-defined in-domain and out-of-domain examples required for causal interventions is challenging. Although significant work has investigated circuits for specific tasks, such as indirect object identification (IOI), deciphering natural language reasoning through circuits remains difficult due to its inherent complexity. In this work, we take initial steps to characterize causal reasoning in LLMs by analyzing clear-cut cause-and-effect sentences like "I opened an umbrella because it started raining," where causal interventions may be possible through carefully crafted scenarios using GPT-2 small. Our findings indicate that causal syntax is localized within the first 2-3 layers, while certain heads in later layers exhibit heightened sensitivity to nonsensical variations of causal sentences. This suggests that models may infer reasoning by (1) detecting syntactic cues and (2) isolating distinct heads in the final layers that focus on semantic relationships.
Bayesian Collaborative Bandits with Thompson Sampling for Improved Outreach in Maternal Health Program
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Mobile health (mHealth) programs face a critical challenge in optimizing the timing of automated health information calls to beneficiaries. This challenge has been formulated as a collaborative multi-armed bandit problem, requiring online learning of a low-rank reward matrix. Existing solutions often rely on heuristic combinations of offline matrix completion and exploration strategies. In this work, we propose a principled Bayesian approach using Thompson Sampling for this collaborative bandit problem. Our method leverages prior information through efficient Gibbs sampling for posterior inference over the low-rank matrix factors, enabling faster convergence. We demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines on a real-world dataset from the world's largest maternal mHealth program. Our approach achieves a $16\%$ reduction in the number of calls compared to existing methods and a $47$\% reduction compared to the deployed random policy. This efficiency gain translates to a potential increase in program capacity by $0.5-1.4$ million beneficiaries, granting them access to vital ante-natal and post-natal care information. Furthermore, we observe a $7\%$ and $29\%$ improvement in beneficiary retention (an extremely hard metric to impact) compared to state-of-the-art and deployed baselines, respectively. Synthetic simulations further demonstrate the superiority of our approach, particularly in low-data regimes and in effectively utilizing prior information. We also provide a theoretical analysis of our algorithm in a special setting using Eluder dimension.
AiSciVision: A Framework for Specializing Large Multimodal Models in Scientific Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Trust and interpretability are crucial for the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in scientific research, but current models often operate as black boxes offering limited transparency and justifications for their outputs. We introduce AiSciVision, a framework that specializes Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) into interactive research partners and classification models for image classification tasks in niche scientific domains. Our framework uses two key components: (1) Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (VisRAG) and (2) domain-specific tools utilized in an agentic workflow. To classify a target image, AiSciVision first retrieves the most similar positive and negative labeled images as context for the LMM. Then the LMM agent actively selects and applies tools to manipulate and inspect the target image over multiple rounds, refining its analysis before making a final prediction. These VisRAG and tooling components are designed to mirror the processes of domain experts, as humans often compare new data to similar examples and use specialized tools to manipulate and inspect images before arriving at a conclusion. Each inference produces both a prediction and a natural language transcript detailing the reasoning and tool usage that led to the prediction. We evaluate AiSciVision on three real-world scientific image classification datasets: detecting the presence of aquaculture ponds, diseased eelgrass, and solar panels. Across these datasets, our method outperforms fully supervised models in low and full-labeled data settings. AiSciVision is actively deployed in real-world use, specifically for aquaculture research, through a dedicated web application that displays and allows the expert users to converse with the transcripts. This work represents a crucial step toward AI systems that are both interpretable and effective, advancing their use in scientific research and scientific discovery.
RoBIn: A Transformer-Based Model For Risk Of Bias Inference With Machine Reading Comprehension
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Objective: Scientific publications play a crucial role in uncovering insights, testing novel drugs, and shaping healthcare policies. Accessing the quality of publications requires evaluating their Risk of Bias (RoB), a process typically conducted by human reviewers. In this study, we introduce a new dataset for machine reading comprehension and RoB assessment and present RoBIn (Risk of Bias Inference), an innovative model crafted to automate such evaluation. The model employs a dual-task approach, extracting evidence from a given context and assessing the RoB based on the gathered evidence. Methods: We use data from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) as ground truth to label open-access clinical trial publications from PubMed. This process enabled us to develop training and test datasets specifically for machine reading comprehension and RoB inference. Additionally, we created extractive (RoBInExt) and generative (RoBInGen) Transformer-based approaches to extract relevant evidence and classify the RoB effectively. Results: RoBIn is evaluated across various settings and benchmarked against state-of-the-art methods for RoB inference, including large language models in multiple scenarios. In most cases, the best-performing RoBIn variant surpasses traditional machine learning and LLM-based approaches, achieving an ROC AUC of 0.83. Conclusion: Based on the evidence extracted from clinical trial reports, RoBIn performs a binary classification to decide whether the trial is at a low RoB or a high/unclear RoB. We found that both RoBInGen and RoBInExt are robust and have the best results in many settings.