OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Floating-floating point: a highly accurate number representation with flexible Counting ranges
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2024
Year: 2024

Efficient number representation is essential for federated learning, natural language processing, and network measurement solutions. Due to timing, area, and power constraints, such applications use narrow bit-width (e.g., 8-bit) number systems. The widely used floating-point systems exhibit a trade-off between the counting range and accuracy. This paper introduces Floating-Floating-Point (F2P) - a floating point number that varies the partition between mantissa and exponent. Such flexibility leads to a large counting range combined with improved accuracy over a selected sub-range. Our evaluation demonstrates that moving to F2P from the state-of-the-art improves network measurement accuracy and federated learning.
Improving Emotion Recognition Accuracy with Personalized Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Emotion recognition through artificial intelligence and smart sensing of physical and physiological signals (Affective Computing) is achieving very interesting results in terms of accuracy, inference times, and user-independent models. In this sense, there are applications related to the safety and well-being of people (sexual aggressions, gender-based violence, children and elderly abuse, mental health, etc.) that require even more improvements. Emotion detection should be done with fast, discrete, and non-luxurious systems working in real-time and real life (wearable devices, wireless communications, battery-powered). Furthermore, emotional reactions to violence are not equal in all people. Then, large general models cannot be applied to a multiuser system for people protection, and customized and simple AI models would be welcomed by health and social workers and law enforcement agents. These customized models will be applicable to clusters of subjects sharing similarities in their emotional reactions to external stimuli. This customization requires several steps: creating clusters of subjects with similar behaviors, creating AI models for every cluster, continually updating these models with new data, and enrolling new subjects in clusters when required. A methodology for clustering data compiled (physical and physiological data, together with emotional labels) is presented in this work, as well as the method for including new subjects once the AI model is generated. Experimental results demonstrate an improvement of 4% in accuracy and 3% in f1-score w.r.t. the general model, along with a 14% reduction in variability.
PAGE: A Modern Measure of Emotion Perception for Teamwork and Management Research
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a new measure of emotional perceptiveness called PAGE: Perceiving AI Generated Emotions. The test includes a broad range of emotions, expressed by ethnically diverse faces, spanning a wide range of ages. We created stimuli with Generative AI, demonstrating the potential to build customizable assessments of emotional intelligence at relatively low cost. Study 1 describes the validation of the image set and test construction. Study 2 reports the psychometric properties of the test. Despite its brevity - 8 minutes on average - PAGE has strong convergent validity and moderately higher internal consistency than comparable measures. Study 3 explores predictive validity using a lab experiment in which we causally identify the contributions managers make to teams. PAGE scores strongly predict managers causal contributions to group success, a finding which is robust to controlling for personality and demographic characteristics. We also discussed the potential of Generative AI to automate development of non-cognitive skill assessments.
Topological Foundations of Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The goal of this work is to serve as a foundation for deep studies of the topology of state, action, and policy spaces in reinforcement learning. By studying these spaces from a mathematical perspective, we expect to gain more insight into how to build better algorithms to solve decision problems. Therefore, we focus on presenting the connection between the Banach fixed point theorem and the convergence of reinforcement learning algorithms, and we illustrate how the insights gained from this can practically help in designing more efficient algorithms. Before doing so, however, we first introduce relevant concepts such as metric spaces, normed spaces and Banach spaces for better understanding, before expressing the entire reinforcement learning problem in terms of Markov decision processes. This allows us to properly introduce the Banach contraction principle in a language suitable for reinforcement learning, and to write the Bellman equations in terms of operators on Banach spaces to show why reinforcement learning algorithms converge. Finally, we show how the insights gained from the mathematical study of convergence are helpful in reasoning about the best ways to make reinforcement learning algorithms more efficient.
Queering AI: Undoing the Self in the Algorithmic Borderlands
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

This paper challenges fixed orientations towards the self in human-AI entanglements. It offers queering as a strategy to subvert the individuation and fixing of identities within algorithmic systems and the loss of futurity that it brings about. By exploring queerness, the paper examines how one's sense of self and futurity are interpellated within the algorithmic borderlands of human-AI entanglements. The study discusses an embodied experiment called "Undoing Gracia," a Digital Twin simulation where the first author Grace and their AI twins (Lex and Tortugi) interact within the fictional world of Gracia. The experiment probes into Grace's multifaceted subjectivities by conceiving themselves as interdependent entities evolving through their interactions within Gracia. The paper outlines the process of creating and implementing the simulation and examines how the agents co-perform and become-with alongside Gracia's making. The findings illuminate queer gestures for navigating human-AI entanglements in HCI research and practice, highlighting the importance of fluid identities in shaping human-AI relations.
Realtime, multimodal invasive ventilation risk monitoring using language models and BoXHED
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Objective: realtime monitoring of invasive ventilation (iV) in intensive care units (ICUs) plays a crucial role in ensuring prompt interventions and better patient outcomes. However, conventional methods often overlook valuable insights embedded within clinical notes, relying solely on tabular data. In this study, we propose an innovative approach to enhance iV risk monitoring by incorporating clinical notes into the monitoring pipeline through using language models for text summarization. Results: We achieve superior performance in all metrics reported by the state-of-the-art in iV risk monitoring, namely: an AUROC of 0.86, an AUC-PR of 0.35, and an AUCt of up to 0.86. We also demonstrate that our methodology allows for more lead time in flagging iV for certain time buckets. Conclusion: Our study underscores the potential of integrating clinical notes and language models into realtime iV risk monitoring, paving the way for improved patient care and informed clinical decision-making in ICU settings.
Evaluating the Effects of AI Directors for Quest Selection
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Modern commercial games are designed for mass appeal, not for individual players, but there is a unique opportunity in video games to better fit the individual through adapting game elements. In this paper, we focus on AI Directors, systems which can dynamically modify a game, that personalize the player experience to match the player's preference. In the past, some AI Director studies have provided inconclusive results, so their effect on player experience is not clear. We take three AI Directors and directly compare them in a human subject study to test their effectiveness on quest selection. Our results show that a non-random AI Director provides a better player experience than a random AI Director.
SQFT: Low-cost Model Adaptation in Low-precision Sparse Foundation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Large pre-trained models (LPMs), such as large language models, have become ubiquitous and are employed in many applications. These models are often adapted to a desired domain or downstream task through a fine-tuning stage. This paper proposes SQFT, an end-to-end solution for low-precision sparse parameter-efficient fine-tuning of LPMs, allowing for effective model manipulation in resource-constrained environments. Additionally, an innovative strategy enables the merging of sparse weights with low-rank adapters without losing sparsity and accuracy, overcoming the limitations of previous approaches. SQFT also addresses the challenge of having quantized weights and adapters with different numerical precisions, enabling merging in the desired numerical format without sacrificing accuracy. Multiple adaptation scenarios, models, and comprehensive sparsity levels demonstrate the effectiveness of SQFT. Models and code are available at https://github.com/IntelLabs/Hardware-Aware-Automated-Machine-Learning.
Words that Represent Peace
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We used data from LexisNexis to determine the words in news media that best classifies countries as higher or lower peace. We found that higher peace news is characterized by themes of finance, daily actitivities, and health and that lower peace news is characterized by themes of politics, government, and legal issues. This work provides a starting point to measure levels of peace and identify the social processes that underly those words.
Dynamic Evidence Decoupling for Trusted Multi-view Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Multi-view learning methods often focus on improving decision accuracy, while neglecting the decision uncertainty, limiting their suitability for safety-critical applications. To mitigate this, researchers propose trusted multi-view learning methods that estimate classification probabilities and uncertainty by learning the class distributions for each instance. However, these methods assume that the data from each view can effectively differentiate all categories, ignoring the semantic vagueness phenomenon in real-world multi-view data. Our findings demonstrate that this phenomenon significantly suppresses the learning of view-specific evidence in existing methods. We propose a Consistent and Complementary-aware trusted Multi-view Learning (CCML) method to solve this problem. We first construct view opinions using evidential deep neural networks, which consist of belief mass vectors and uncertainty estimates. Next, we dynamically decouple the consistent and complementary evidence. The consistent evidence is derived from the shared portions across all views, while the complementary evidence is obtained by averaging the differing portions across all views. We ensure that the opinion constructed from the consistent evidence strictly aligns with the ground-truth category. For the opinion constructed from the complementary evidence, we allow it for potential vagueness in the evidence. We compare CCML with state-of-the-art baselines on one synthetic and six real-world datasets. The results validate the effectiveness of the dynamic evidence decoupling strategy and show that CCML significantly outperforms baselines on accuracy and reliability. The code is released at https://github.com/Lihong-Liu/CCML.
Self-Powered LLM Modality Expansion for Large Speech-Text Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable performance across diverse tasks, indicating their potential for expansion into large speech-text models (LSMs) by integrating speech capabilities. Although unified speech-text pre-training and multimodal data instruction-tuning offer considerable benefits, these methods generally entail significant resource demands and tend to overfit specific tasks. This study aims to refine the use of speech datasets for LSM training by addressing the limitations of vanilla instruction tuning. We explore the instruction-following dynamics within LSMs, identifying a critical issue termed speech anchor bias-a tendency for LSMs to over-rely on speech inputs, mistakenly interpreting the entire speech modality as directives, thereby neglecting textual instructions. To counteract this bias, we introduce a self-powered LSM that leverages augmented automatic speech recognition data generated by the model itself for more effective instruction tuning. Our experiments across a range of speech-based tasks demonstrate that self-powered LSM mitigates speech anchor bias and improves the fusion of speech and text modalities in LSMs. Data, code and scripts are freely available at https://github.com/ytf-philp/Self-powered-LSM.
Text-guided Diffusion Model for 3D Molecule Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The de novo generation of molecules with targeted properties is crucial in biology, chemistry, and drug discovery. Current generative models are limited to using single property values as conditions, struggling with complex customizations described in detailed human language. To address this, we propose the text guidance instead, and introduce TextSMOG, a new Text-guided Small Molecule Generation Approach via 3D Diffusion Model which integrates language and diffusion models for text-guided small molecule generation. This method uses textual conditions to guide molecule generation, enhancing both stability and diversity. Experimental results show TextSMOG's proficiency in capturing and utilizing information from textual descriptions, making it a powerful tool for generating 3D molecular structures in response to complex textual customizations.
FaithCAMERA: Construction of a Faithful Dataset for Ad Text Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In ad text generation (ATG), desirable ad text is both faithful and informative. That is, it should be faithful to the input document, while at the same time containing important information that appeals to potential customers. The existing evaluation data, CAMERA (arXiv:2309.12030), is suitable for evaluating informativeness, as it consists of reference ad texts created by ad creators. However, these references often include information unfaithful to the input, which is a notable obstacle in promoting ATG research. In this study, we collaborate with in-house ad creators to refine the CAMERA references and develop an alternative ATG evaluation dataset called FaithCAMERA, in which the faithfulness of references is guaranteed. Using FaithCAMERA, we can evaluate how well existing methods for improving faithfulness can generate informative ad text while maintaining faithfulness. Our experiments show that removing training data that contains unfaithful entities improves the faithfulness and informativeness at the entity level, but decreases both at the sentence level. This result suggests that for future ATG research, it is essential not only to scale the training data but also to ensure their faithfulness. Our dataset will be publicly available.
Identification of Anomalous Geospatial Trajectories via Persistent Homology
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2024
Year: 2024

We present a novel method for analyzing geospatial trajectory data using topological data analysis (TDA) to identify a specific class of anomalies, commonly referred to as crop circles, in AIS data. This approach is the first of its kind to be applied to spatiotemporal data. By embedding $2+1$-dimensional spatiotemporal data into $\mathbb{R}^3$, we utilize persistent homology to detect loops within the trajectories in $\mathbb{R}^2$. Our research reveals that, under normal conditions, trajectory data embedded in $\mathbb{R}^3$ over time do not form loops. Consequently, we can effectively identify anomalies characterized by the presence of loops within the trajectories. This method is robust and capable of detecting loops that are invariant to small perturbations, variations in geometric shape, and local coordinate projections. Additionally, our approach provides a novel perspective on anomaly detection, offering enhanced sensitivity and specificity in identifying atypical patterns in geospatial data. This approach has significant implications for various applications, including maritime navigation, environmental monitoring, and surveillance.
Human-aligned Chess with a Bit of Search
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Chess has long been a testbed for AI's quest to match human intelligence, and in recent years, chess AI systems have surpassed the strongest humans at the game. However, these systems are not human-aligned; they are unable to match the skill levels of all human partners or model human-like behaviors beyond piece movement. In this paper, we introduce Allie, a chess-playing AI designed to bridge the gap between artificial and human intelligence in this classic game. Allie is trained on log sequences of real chess games to model the behaviors of human chess players across the skill spectrum, including non-move behaviors such as pondering times and resignations In offline evaluations, we find that Allie exhibits humanlike behavior: it outperforms the existing state-of-the-art in human chess move prediction and "ponders" at critical positions. The model learns to reliably assign reward at each game state, which can be used at inference as a reward function in a novel time-adaptive Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) procedure, where the amount of search depends on how long humans would think in the same positions. Adaptive search enables remarkable skill calibration; in a large-scale online evaluation against players with ratings from 1000 to 2600 Elo, our adaptive search method leads to a skill gap of only 49 Elo on average, substantially outperforming search-free and standard MCTS baselines. Against grandmaster-level (2500 Elo) opponents, Allie with adaptive search exhibits the strength of a fellow grandmaster, all while learning exclusively from humans.
Improving Node Representation by Boosting Target-Aware Contrastive Loss
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Graphs model complex relationships between entities, with nodes and edges capturing intricate connections. Node representation learning involves transforming nodes into low-dimensional embeddings. These embeddings are typically used as features for downstream tasks. Therefore, their quality has a significant impact on task performance. Existing approaches for node representation learning span (semi-)supervised, unsupervised, and self-supervised paradigms. In graph domains, (semi-)supervised learning often only optimizes models based on class labels, neglecting other abundant graph signals, which limits generalization. While self-supervised or unsupervised learning produces representations that better capture underlying graph signals, the usefulness of these captured signals for downstream target tasks can vary. To bridge this gap, we introduce Target-Aware Contrastive Learning (Target-aware CL) which aims to enhance target task performance by maximizing the mutual information between the target task and node representations with a self-supervised learning process. This is achieved through a sampling function, XGBoost Sampler (XGSampler), to sample proper positive examples for the proposed Target-Aware Contrastive Loss (XTCL). By minimizing XTCL, Target-aware CL increases the mutual information between the target task and node representations, such that model generalization is improved. Additionally, XGSampler enhances the interpretability of each signal by showing the weights for sampling the proper positive examples. We show experimentally that XTCL significantly improves the performance on two target tasks: node classification and link prediction tasks, compared to state-of-the-art models.
Distribution Guided Active Feature Acquisition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Human agents routinely reason on instances with incomplete and muddied data (and weigh the cost of obtaining further features). In contrast, much of ML is devoted to the unrealistic, sterile environment where all features are observed and further information on an instance is obviated. Here we extend past static ML and develop an active feature acquisition (AFA) framework that interacts with the environment to obtain new information on-the-fly and can: 1) make inferences on an instance in the face of incomplete features, 2) determine a plan for feature acquisitions to obtain additional information on the instance at hand. We build our AFA framework on a backbone of understanding the information and conditional dependencies that are present in the data. First, we show how to build generative models that can capture dependencies over arbitrary subsets of features and employ these models for acquisitions in a greedy scheme. After, we show that it is possible to guide the training of RL agents for AFA via side-information and auxiliary rewards stemming from our generative models. We also examine two important factors for deploying AFA models in real-world scenarios, namely interpretability and robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our AFA framework.
Multi-Objective Risk Assessment Framework for Exploration Planning Using Terrain and Traversability Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Exploration of unknown, unstructured environments, such as in search and rescue, cave exploration, and planetary missions,presents significant challenges due to their unpredictable nature. This unpredictability can lead to inefficient path planning and potential mission failures. We propose a multi-objective risk assessment method for exploration planning in such unconstrained environments. Our approach dynamically adjusts the weight of various risk factors to prevent the robot from undertaking lethal actions too early in the mission. By gradually increasing the allowable risk as the mission progresses, our method enables more efficient exploration. We evaluate risk based on environmental terrain properties, including elevation, slope, roughness, and traversability, and account for factors like battery life, mission duration, and travel distance. Our method is validated through experiments in various subterranean simulated cave environments. The results demonstrate that our approach ensures consistent exploration without incurring lethal actions, while introducing minimal computational overhead to the planning process.
Symmetry From Scratch: Group Equivariance as a Supervised Learning Task
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In machine learning datasets with symmetries, the paradigm for backward compatibility with symmetry-breaking has been to relax equivariant architectural constraints, engineering extra weights to differentiate symmetries of interest. However, this process becomes increasingly over-engineered as models are geared towards specific symmetries/asymmetries hardwired of a particular set of equivariant basis functions. In this work, we introduce symmetry-cloning, a method for inducing equivariance in machine learning models. We show that general machine learning architectures (i.e., MLPs) can learn symmetries directly as a supervised learning task from group equivariant architectures and retain/break the learned symmetry for downstream tasks. This simple formulation enables machine learning models with group-agnostic architectures to capture the inductive bias of group-equivariant architectures.