OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fair collaborative vehicle routing: A deep multi-agent reinforcement learning approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Collaborative vehicle routing occurs when carriers collaborate through sharing their transportation requests and performing transportation requests on behalf of each other. This achieves economies of scale, thus reducing cost, greenhouse gas emissions and road congestion. But which carrier should partner with whom, and how much should each carrier be compensated? Traditional game theoretic solution concepts are expensive to calculate as the characteristic function scales exponentially with the number of agents. This would require solving the vehicle routing problem (NP-hard) an exponential number of times. We therefore propose to model this problem as a coalitional bargaining game solved using deep multi-agent reinforcement learning, where - crucially - agents are not given access to the characteristic function. Instead, we implicitly reason about the characteristic function; thus, when deployed in production, we only need to evaluate the expensive post-collaboration vehicle routing problem once. Our contribution is that we are the first to consider both the route allocation problem and gain sharing problem simultaneously - without access to the expensive characteristic function. Through decentralised machine learning, our agents bargain with each other and agree to outcomes that correlate well with the Shapley value - a fair profit allocation mechanism. Importantly, we are able to achieve a reduction in run-time of 88%.
Learning Regularized Graphon Mean-Field Games with Unknown Graphons
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

We design and analyze reinforcement learning algorithms for Graphon Mean-Field Games (GMFGs). In contrast to previous works that require the precise values of the graphons, we aim to learn the Nash Equilibrium (NE) of the regularized GMFGs when the graphons are unknown. Our contributions are threefold. First, we propose the Proximal Policy Optimization for GMFG (GMFG-PPO) algorithm and show that it converges at a rate of $O(T^{-1/3})$ after $T$ iterations with an estimation oracle, improving on a previous work by Xie et al. (ICML, 2021). Second, using kernel embedding of distributions, we design efficient algorithms to estimate the transition kernels, reward functions, and graphons from sampled agents. Convergence rates are then derived when the positions of the agents are either known or unknown. Results for the combination of the optimization algorithm GMFG-PPO and the estimation algorithm are then provided. These algorithms are the first specifically designed for learning graphons from sampled agents. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed algorithms are corroborated through simulations. These simulations demonstrate that learning the unknown graphons reduces the exploitability effectively.
Unpacking the Ethical Value Alignment in Big Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Big models have greatly advanced AI's ability to understand, generate, and manipulate information and content, enabling numerous applications. However, as these models become increasingly integrated into everyday life, their inherent ethical values and potential biases pose unforeseen risks to society. This paper provides an overview of the risks and challenges associated with big models, surveys existing AI ethics guidelines, and examines the ethical implications arising from the limitations of these models. Taking a normative ethics perspective, we propose a reassessment of recent normative guidelines, highlighting the importance of collaborative efforts in academia to establish a unified and universal AI ethics framework. Furthermore, we investigate the moral inclinations of current mainstream LLMs using the Moral Foundation theory, analyze existing alignment algorithms, and outline the unique challenges encountered in aligning ethical values within them. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel conceptual paradigm for aligning the ethical values of big models and discuss promising research directions for alignment criteria, evaluation, and method, representing an initial step towards the interdisciplinary construction of the ethically aligned AI This paper is a modified English version of our Chinese paper https://crad.ict.ac.cn/cn/article/doi/10.7544/issn1000-1239.202330553, intended to help non-Chinese native speakers better understand our work.
1D-Touch: NLP-Assisted Coarse Text Selection via a Semi-Direct Gesture
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Existing text selection techniques on touchscreen focus on improving the control for moving the carets. Coarse-grained text selection on word and phrase levels has not received much support beyond word-snapping and entity recognition. We introduce 1D-Touch, a novel text selection method that complements the carets-based sub-word selection by facilitating the selection of semantic units of words and above. This method employs a simple vertical slide gesture to expand and contract a selection area from a word. The expansion can be by words or by semantic chunks ranging from sub-phrases to sentences. This technique shifts the concept of text selection, from defining a range by locating the first and last words, towards a dynamic process of expanding and contracting a textual semantic entity. To understand the effects of our approach, we prototyped and tested two variants: WordTouch, which offers a straightforward word-by-word expansion, and ChunkTouch, which leverages NLP to chunk text into syntactic units, allowing the selection to grow by semantically meaningful units in response to the sliding gesture. Our evaluation, focused on the coarse-grained selection tasks handled by 1D-Touch, shows a 20% improvement over the default word-snapping selection method on Android.
Global Voices, Local Biases: Socio-Cultural Prejudices across Languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Human biases are ubiquitous but not uniform: disparities exist across linguistic, cultural, and societal borders. As large amounts of recent literature suggest, language models (LMs) trained on human data can reflect and often amplify the effects of these social biases. However, the vast majority of existing studies on bias are heavily skewed towards Western and European languages. In this work, we scale the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) to 24 languages, enabling broader studies and yielding interesting findings about LM bias. We additionally enhance this data with culturally relevant information for each language, capturing local contexts on a global scale. Further, to encompass more widely prevalent societal biases, we examine new bias dimensions across toxicity, ableism, and more. Moreover, we delve deeper into the Indian linguistic landscape, conducting a comprehensive regional bias analysis across six prevalent Indian languages. Finally, we highlight the significance of these social biases and the new dimensions through an extensive comparison of embedding methods, reinforcing the need to address them in pursuit of more equitable language models. All code, data and results are available here: https://github.com/iamshnoo/weathub.
Drive Anywhere: Generalizable End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Multi-modal Foundation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

As autonomous driving technology matures, end-to-end methodologies have emerged as a leading strategy, promising seamless integration from perception to control via deep learning. However, existing systems grapple with challenges such as unexpected open set environments and the complexity of black-box models. At the same time, the evolution of deep learning introduces larger, multimodal foundational models, offering multi-modal visual and textual understanding. In this paper, we harness these multimodal foundation models to enhance the robustness and adaptability of autonomous driving systems, enabling out-of-distribution, end-to-end, multimodal, and more explainable autonomy. Specifically, we present an approach to apply end-to-end open-set (any environment/scene) autonomous driving that is capable of providing driving decisions from representations queryable by image and text. To do so, we introduce a method to extract nuanced spatial (pixel/patch-aligned) features from transformers to enable the encapsulation of both spatial and semantic features. Our approach (i) demonstrates unparalleled results in diverse tests while achieving significantly greater robustness in out-of-distribution situations, and (ii) allows the incorporation of latent space simulation (via text) for improved training (data augmentation via text) and policy debugging. We encourage the reader to check our explainer video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4n-DJf8vXxo&feature=youtu.be and to view the code and demos on our project webpage at https://drive-anywhere.github.io/.
6-DoF Stability Field via Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

A core capability for robot manipulation is reasoning over where and how to stably place objects in cluttered environments. Traditionally, robots have relied on object-specific, hand-crafted heuristics in order to perform such reasoning, with limited generalizability beyond a small number of object instances and object interaction patterns. Recent approaches instead learn notions of physical interaction, namely motion prediction, but require supervision in the form of labeled object information or come at the cost of high sample complexity, and do not directly reason over stability or object placement. We present 6-DoFusion, a generative model capable of generating 3D poses of an object that produces a stable configuration of a given scene. Underlying 6-DoFusion is a diffusion model that incrementally refines a randomly initialized SE(3) pose to generate a sample from a learned, context-dependent distribution over stable poses. We evaluate our model on different object placement and stacking tasks, demonstrating its ability to construct stable scenes that involve novel object classes as well as to improve the accuracy of state-of-the-art 3D pose estimation methods.
A Coarse-to-Fine Pseudo-Labeling (C2FPL) Framework for Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Detection of anomalous events in videos is an important problem in applications such as surveillance. Video anomaly detection (VAD) is well-studied in the one-class classification (OCC) and weakly supervised (WS) settings. However, fully unsupervised (US) video anomaly detection methods, which learn a complete system without any annotation or human supervision, have not been explored in depth. This is because the lack of any ground truth annotations significantly increases the magnitude of the VAD challenge. To address this challenge, we propose a simple-but-effective two-stage pseudo-label generation framework that produces segment-level (normal/anomaly) pseudo-labels, which can be further used to train a segment-level anomaly detector in a supervised manner. The proposed coarse-to-fine pseudo-label (C2FPL) generator employs carefully-designed hierarchical divisive clustering and statistical hypothesis testing to identify anomalous video segments from a set of completely unlabeled videos. The trained anomaly detector can be directly applied on segments of an unseen test video to obtain segment-level, and subsequently, frame-level anomaly predictions. Extensive studies on two large-scale public-domain datasets, UCF-Crime and XD-Violence, demonstrate that the proposed unsupervised approach achieves superior performance compared to all existing OCC and US methods , while yielding comparable performance to the state-of-the-art WS methods.
Hierarchical Text Spotter for Joint Text Spotting and Layout Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

We propose Hierarchical Text Spotter (HTS), a novel method for the joint task of word-level text spotting and geometric layout analysis. HTS can recognize text in an image and identify its 4-level hierarchical structure: characters, words, lines, and paragraphs. The proposed HTS is characterized by two novel components: (1) a Unified-Detector-Polygon (UDP) that produces Bezier Curve polygons of text lines and an affinity matrix for paragraph grouping between detected lines; (2) a Line-to-Character-to-Word (L2C2W) recognizer that splits lines into characters and further merges them back into words. HTS achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple word-level text spotting benchmark datasets as well as geometric layout analysis tasks.
Sliceformer: Make Multi-head Attention as Simple as Sorting in Discriminative Tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

As one of the most popular neural network modules, Transformer plays a central role in many fundamental deep learning models, e.g., the ViT in computer vision and the BERT and GPT in natural language processing. The effectiveness of the Transformer is often attributed to its multi-head attention (MHA) mechanism. In this study, we discuss the limitations of MHA, including the high computational complexity due to its ``query-key-value'' architecture and the numerical issue caused by its softmax operation. Considering the above problems and the recent development tendency of the attention layer, we propose an effective and efficient surrogate of the Transformer, called Sliceformer. Our Sliceformer replaces the classic MHA mechanism with an extremely simple ``slicing-sorting'' operation, i.e., projecting inputs linearly to a latent space and sorting them along different feature dimensions (or equivalently, called channels). For each feature dimension, the sorting operation implicitly generates an implicit attention map with sparse, full-rank, and doubly-stochastic structures. We consider different implementations of the slicing-sorting operation and analyze their impacts on the Sliceformer. We test the Sliceformer in the Long-Range Arena benchmark, image classification, text classification, and molecular property prediction, demonstrating its advantage in computational complexity and universal effectiveness in discriminative tasks. Our Sliceformer achieves comparable or better performance with lower memory cost and faster speed than the Transformer and its variants. Moreover, the experimental results reveal that applying our Sliceformer can empirically suppress the risk of mode collapse when representing data. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/SDS-Lab/sliceformer}.
The impact of responding to patient messages with large language model assistance
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Documentation burden is a major contributor to clinician burnout, which is rising nationally and is an urgent threat to our ability to care for patients. Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, such as ChatGPT, could reduce clinician burden by assisting with documentation. Although many hospitals are actively integrating such systems into electronic medical record systems, AI chatbots utility and impact on clinical decision-making have not been studied for this intended use. We are the first to examine the utility of large language models in assisting clinicians draft responses to patient questions. In our two-stage cross-sectional study, 6 oncologists responded to 100 realistic synthetic cancer patient scenarios and portal messages developed to reflect common medical situations, first manually, then with AI assistance. We find AI-assisted responses were longer, less readable, but provided acceptable drafts without edits 58% of time. AI assistance improved efficiency 77% of time, with low harm risk (82% safe). However, 7.7% unedited AI responses could severely harm. In 31% cases, physicians thought AI drafts were human-written. AI assistance led to more patient education recommendations, fewer clinical actions than manual responses. Results show promise for AI to improve clinician efficiency and patient care through assisting documentation, if used judiciously. Monitoring model outputs and human-AI interaction remains crucial for safe implementation.
Investigating Multilingual Coreference Resolution by Universal Annotations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Multilingual coreference resolution (MCR) has been a long-standing and challenging task. With the newly proposed multilingual coreference dataset, CorefUD (Nedoluzhko et al., 2022), we conduct an investigation into the task by using its harmonized universal morphosyntactic and coreference annotations. First, we study coreference by examining the ground truth data at different linguistic levels, namely mention, entity and document levels, and across different genres, to gain insights into the characteristics of coreference across multiple languages. Second, we perform an error analysis of the most challenging cases that the SotA system fails to resolve in the CRAC 2022 shared task using the universal annotations. Last, based on this analysis, we extract features from universal morphosyntactic annotations and integrate these features into a baseline system to assess their potential benefits for the MCR task. Our results show that our best configuration of features improves the baseline by 0.9% F1 score.
Salespeople vs SalesBot: Exploring the Role of Educational Value in Conversational Recommender Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Making big purchases requires consumers to research or consult a salesperson to gain domain expertise. However, existing conversational recommender systems (CRS) often overlook users' lack of background knowledge, focusing solely on gathering preferences. In this work, we define a new problem space for conversational agents that aim to provide both product recommendations and educational value through mixed-type mixed-initiative dialog. We introduce SalesOps, a framework that facilitates the simulation and evaluation of such systems by leveraging recent advancements in large language models (LLMs). We build SalesBot and ShopperBot, a pair of LLM-powered agents that can simulate either side of the framework. A comprehensive human study compares SalesBot against professional salespeople, revealing that although SalesBot approaches professional performance in terms of fluency and informativeness, it lags behind in recommendation quality. We emphasize the distinct limitations both face in providing truthful information, highlighting the challenges of ensuring faithfulness in the CRS context. We release our code and make all data available.
Social Contract AI: Aligning AI Assistants with Implicit Group Norms
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

We explore the idea of aligning an AI assistant by inverting a model of users' (unknown) preferences from observed interactions. To validate our proposal, we run proof-of-concept simulations in the economic ultimatum game, formalizing user preferences as policies that guide the actions of simulated players. We find that the AI assistant accurately aligns its behavior to match standard policies from the economic literature (e.g., selfish, altruistic). However, the assistant's learned policies lack robustness and exhibit limited generalization in an out-of-distribution setting when confronted with a currency (e.g., grams of medicine) that was not included in the assistant's training distribution. Additionally, we find that when there is inconsistency in the relationship between language use and an unknown policy (e.g., an altruistic policy combined with rude language), the assistant's learning of the policy is slowed. Overall, our preliminary results suggest that developing simulation frameworks in which AI assistants need to infer preferences from diverse users can provide a valuable approach for studying practical alignment questions.
"You Are An Expert Linguistic Annotator": Limits of LLMs as Analyzers of Abstract Meaning Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Large language models (LLMs) show amazing proficiency and fluency in the use of language. Does this mean that they have also acquired insightful linguistic knowledge about the language, to an extent that they can serve as an "expert linguistic annotator"? In this paper, we examine the successes and limitations of the GPT-3, ChatGPT, and GPT-4 models in analysis of sentence meaning structure, focusing on the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR; Banarescu et al. 2013) parsing formalism, which provides rich graphical representations of sentence meaning structure while abstracting away from surface forms. We compare models' analysis of this semantic structure across two settings: 1) direct production of AMR parses based on zero- and few-shot prompts, and 2) indirect partial reconstruction of AMR via metalinguistic natural language queries (e.g., "Identify the primary event of this sentence, and the predicate corresponding to that event."). Across these settings, we find that models can reliably reproduce the basic format of AMR, and can often capture core event, argument, and modifier structure -- however, model outputs are prone to frequent and major errors, and holistic analysis of parse acceptability shows that even with few-shot demonstrations, models have virtually 0% success in producing fully accurate parses. Eliciting natural language responses produces similar patterns of errors. Overall, our findings indicate that these models out-of-the-box can capture aspects of semantic structure, but there remain key limitations in their ability to support fully accurate semantic analyses or parses.
OmniFill: Domain-Agnostic Form Filling Suggestions Using Multi-Faceted Context
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Predictive suggestion systems offer contextually-relevant text entry completions. Existing approaches, like autofill, often excel in narrowly-defined domains but fail to generalize to arbitrary workflows. We introduce a conceptual framework to analyze the compound demands of a particular suggestion context, yielding unique opportunities for large language models (LLMs) to infer suggestions for a wide range of domain-agnostic form-filling tasks that were out of reach with prior approaches. We explore these opportunities in OmniFill, a prototype that collects multi-faceted context including browsing and text entry activity to construct an LLM prompt that offers suggestions in situ for arbitrary structured text entry interfaces. Through a user study with 18 participants, we found that OmniFill offered valuable suggestions and we identified four themes that characterize users' behavior and attitudes: an "opportunistic scrapbooking" approach; a trust placed in the system; value in partial success; and a need for visibility into prompt context.
Positional Encoding-based Resident Identification in Multi-resident Smart Homes
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We propose a novel resident identification framework to identify residents in a multi-occupant smart environment. The proposed framework employs a feature extraction model based on the concepts of positional encoding. The feature extraction model considers the locations of homes as a graph. We design a novel algorithm to build such graphs from layout maps of smart environments. The Node2Vec algorithm is used to transform the graph into high-dimensional node embeddings. A Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model is introduced to predict the identities of residents using temporal sequences of sensor events with the node embeddings. Extensive experiments show that our proposed scheme effectively identifies residents in a multi-occupant environment. Evaluation results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves 94.5% and 87.9% accuracy, respectively.