OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Landscape of Generative AI in Global News: Topics, Sentiments, and Spatiotemporal Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

Generative AI has exhibited considerable potential to transform various industries and public life. The role of news media coverage of generative AI is pivotal in shaping public perceptions and judgments about this significant technological innovation. This paper provides in-depth analysis and rich insights into the temporal and spatial distribution of topics, sentiment, and substantive themes within global news coverage focusing on the latest emerging technology --generative AI. We collected a comprehensive dataset of news articles (January 2018 to November 2023, N = 24,827). For topic modeling, we employed the BERTopic technique and combined it with qualitative coding to identify semantic themes. Subsequently, sentiment analysis was conducted using the RoBERTa-base model. Analysis of temporal patterns in the data reveals notable variability in coverage across key topics--business, corporate technological development, regulation and security, and education--with spikes in articles coinciding with major AI developments and policy discussions. Sentiment analysis shows a predominantly neutral to positive media stance, with the business-related articles exhibiting more positive sentiment, while regulation and security articles receive a reserved, neutral to negative sentiment. Our study offers a valuable framework to investigate global news discourse and evaluate news attitudes and themes related to emerging technologies.
A Context-Contrastive Inference Approach To Partial Diacritization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Diacritization plays a pivotal role in improving readability and disambiguating the meaning of Arabic texts. Efforts have so far focused on marking every eligible character (Full Diacritization). Comparatively overlooked, Partial Diacritzation (PD) is the selection of a subset of characters to be marked to aid comprehension where needed. Research has indicated that excessive diacritic marks can hinder skilled readers -- reducing reading speed and accuracy. We conduct a behavioral experiment and show that partially marked text is often easier to read than fully marked text, and sometimes easier than plain text. In this light, we introduce Context-Contrastive Partial Diacritization (CCPD) -- a novel approach to PD which integrates seamlessly with existing Arabic diacritization systems. CCPD processes each word twice, once with context and once without, and diacritizes only the characters with disparities between the two inferences. Further, we introduce novel indicators for measuring partial diacritization quality, essential for establishing this as a machine learning task. Lastly, we introduce TD2, a Transformer-variant of an established model which offers a markedly different performance profile on our proposed indicators compared to all other known systems.
CEL: A Continual Learning Model for Disease Outbreak Prediction by Leveraging Domain Adaptation via Elastic Weight Consolidation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Continual learning, the ability of a model to learn over time without forgetting previous knowledge and, therefore, be adaptive to new data, is paramount in dynamic fields such as disease outbreak prediction. Deep neural networks, i.e., LSTM, are prone to error due to catastrophic forgetting. This study introduces a novel CEL model for continual learning by leveraging domain adaptation via Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC). This model aims to mitigate the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon in a domain incremental setting. The Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) is constructed with EWC to develop a regularization term that penalizes changes to important parameters, namely, the important previous knowledge. CEL's performance is evaluated on three distinct diseases, Influenza, Mpox, and Measles, with different metrics. The high R-squared values during evaluation and reevaluation outperform the other state-of-the-art models in several contexts, indicating that CEL adapts to incremental data well. CEL's robustness and reliability are underscored by its minimal 65% forgetting rate and 18% higher memory stability compared to existing benchmark studies. This study highlights CEL's versatility in disease outbreak prediction, addressing evolving data with temporal patterns. It offers a valuable model for proactive disease control with accurate, timely predictions.
Evidence-centered Assessment for Writing with Generative AI
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

We propose a learning analytics-based methodology for assessing the collaborative writing of humans and generative artificial intelligence. Framed by the evidence-centered design, we used elements of knowledge-telling, knowledge transformation, and cognitive presence to identify assessment claims; we used data collected from the CoAuthor writing tool as potential evidence for these claims; and we used epistemic network analysis to make inferences from the data about the claims. Our findings revealed significant differences in the writing processes of different groups of CoAuthor users, suggesting that our method is a plausible approach to assessing human-AI collaborative writing.
Residual Alignment: Uncovering the Mechanisms of Residual Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The ResNet architecture has been widely adopted in deep learning due to its significant boost to performance through the use of simple skip connections, yet the underlying mechanisms leading to its success remain largely unknown. In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical study of the ResNet architecture in classification tasks by linearizing its constituent residual blocks using Residual Jacobians and measuring their singular value decompositions. Our measurements reveal a process called Residual Alignment (RA) characterized by four properties: (RA1) intermediate representations of a given input are equispaced on a line, embedded in high dimensional space, as observed by Gai and Zhang [2021]; (RA2) top left and right singular vectors of Residual Jacobians align with each other and across different depths; (RA3) Residual Jacobians are at most rank C for fully-connected ResNets, where C is the number of classes; and (RA4) top singular values of Residual Jacobians scale inversely with depth. RA consistently occurs in models that generalize well, in both fully-connected and convolutional architectures, across various depths and widths, for varying numbers of classes, on all tested benchmark datasets, but ceases to occur once the skip connections are removed. It also provably occurs in a novel mathematical model we propose. This phenomenon reveals a strong alignment between residual branches of a ResNet (RA2+4), imparting a highly rigid geometric structure to the intermediate representations as they progress linearly through the network (RA1) up to the final layer, where they undergo Neural Collapse.
Exploring the Diversity of Music Experiences for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Sensory substitution or enhancement techniques have been proposed to enable deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) people to listen to and even compose music. However, little is known about how such techniques enhance DHH people's music experience. Since deafness is a spectrum -- as are DHH people's preferences and perceptions of music -- a more situated understanding of their interaction with music is needed. To understand the music experience of this population, we conducted social media analyses, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in the deaf and hard of hearing Reddit communities. Our content analysis revealed that DHH people leveraged sign language and visual/haptic cues to feel the music and preferred familiar, non-lyrical, instrument-heavy, and loud music. In addition, hearing aids were not customized for music, and the visual/haptic techniques developed were not widely adopted by DHH people, leading to their suboptimal music experiences. The DHH community embodied mutual support among music lovers, evidenced by active information sharing and Q&A around music and hearing loss. We reflect on design justice for DHH people's music experience and propose practical design implications to create a more accessible music experience for them.
LLMs for Relational Reasoning: How Far are We?
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized many areas (e.g. natural language processing, software engineering, etc.) by achieving state-of-the-art performance on extensive downstream tasks. Aiming to achieve robust and general artificial intelligence, there has been a surge of interest in investigating the reasoning ability of the LLMs. Whereas the textual and numerical reasoning benchmarks adopted by previous works are rather shallow and simple, it is hard to conclude that the LLMs possess strong reasoning ability by merely achieving positive results on these benchmarks. Recent efforts have demonstrated that the LLMs are poor at solving sequential decision-making problems that require common-sense planning by evaluating their performance on the reinforcement learning benchmarks. In this work, we conduct an in-depth assessment of several state-of-the-art LLMs' reasoning ability based on the inductive logic programming (ILP) benchmark, which is broadly recognized as a representative and challenging measurement for evaluating logic program induction/synthesis systems as it requires inducing strict cause-effect logic to achieve robust deduction on independent and identically distributed (IID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) test samples. Our evaluations illustrate that compared with the neural program induction systems which are much smaller in model size, the state-of-the-art LLMs are much poorer in terms of reasoning ability by achieving much lower performance and generalization using either natural language prompting or truth-value matrix prompting.
Algorithmic amplification of biases on Google Search
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

The evolution of information-seeking processes, driven by search engines like Google, has transformed the access to information people have. This paper investigates how individuals' preexisting attitudes influence the modern information-seeking process, specifically the results presented by Google Search. Through a comprehensive study involving surveys and information-seeking tasks focusing on the topic of abortion, the paper provides four crucial insights: 1) Individuals with opposing attitudes on abortion receive different search results. 2) Individuals express their beliefs in their choice of vocabulary used in formulating the search queries, shaping the outcome of the search. 3) Additionally, the user's search history contributes to divergent results among those with opposing attitudes. 4) Google Search engine reinforces preexisting beliefs in search results. Overall, this study provides insights into the interplay between human biases and algorithmic processes, highlighting the potential for information polarization in modern information-seeking processes.
Joint Route Selection and Power Allocation in Multi-hop Cache-enabled Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

The caching paradigm has been introduced to alleviate backhaul traffic load and to reduce latencies due to massive never ending increase in data traffic. To fully exploit the benefits offered by caching, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and device-to-device (D2D) communication can be further utilized. In contrast to prior works, that strictly limits the content delivery routes up to two hops, we explore a multi-hop communications scenario, where the UAVs, the UEs, or both can relay the content to individual users. In this context, we formulate the problem for joint route selection and power allocation to minimize the overall system content delivery duration. First, motivated by the limitations of existing works, we consider the case where the nodes may transmit content simultaneously rather than sequentially and propose simple yet effective approach to allocate the transmission power. Second, we design a low-complexity greedy algorithm jointly handling route selection and power allocation. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed greedy algorithm outperforms the benchmark algorithm by up to 56.98% in terms of content delivery duration while it achieves close-to-optimal performance.
Remote Sensing ChatGPT: Solving Remote Sensing Tasks with ChatGPT and Visual Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, the flourishing large language models(LLM), especially ChatGPT, have shown exceptional performance in language understanding, reasoning, and interaction, attracting users and researchers from multiple fields and domains. Although LLMs have shown great capacity to perform human-like task accomplishment in natural language and natural image, their potential in handling remote sensing interpretation tasks has not yet been fully explored. Moreover, the lack of automation in remote sensing task planning hinders the accessibility of remote sensing interpretation techniques, especially to non-remote sensing experts from multiple research fields. To this end, we present Remote Sensing ChatGPT, an LLM-powered agent that utilizes ChatGPT to connect various AI-based remote sensing models to solve complicated interpretation tasks. More specifically, given a user request and a remote sensing image, we utilized ChatGPT to understand user requests, perform task planning according to the tasks' functions, execute each subtask iteratively, and generate the final response according to the output of each subtask. Considering that LLM is trained with natural language and is not capable of directly perceiving visual concepts as contained in remote sensing images, we designed visual cues that inject visual information into ChatGPT. With Remote Sensing ChatGPT, users can simply send a remote sensing image with the corresponding request, and get the interpretation results as well as language feedback from Remote Sensing ChatGPT. Experiments and examples show that Remote Sensing ChatGPT can tackle a wide range of remote sensing tasks and can be extended to more tasks with more sophisticated models such as the remote sensing foundation model. The code and demo of Remote Sensing ChatGPT is publicly available at https://github.com/HaonanGuo/Remote-Sensing-ChatGPT .
BibSonomy Meets ChatLLMs for Publication Management: From Chat to Publication Management: Organizing your related work using BibSonomy & LLMs
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

The ever-growing corpus of scientific literature presents significant challenges for researchers with respect to discovery, management, and annotation of relevant publications. Traditional platforms like Semantic Scholar, BibSonomy, and Zotero offer tools for literature management, but largely require manual laborious and error-prone input of tags and metadata. Here, we introduce a novel retrieval augmented generation system that leverages chat-based large language models (LLMs) to streamline and enhance the process of publication management. It provides a unified chat-based interface, enabling intuitive interactions with various backends, including Semantic Scholar, BibSonomy, and the Zotero Webscraper. It supports two main use-cases: (1) Explorative Search & Retrieval - leveraging LLMs to search for and retrieve both specific and general scientific publications, while addressing the challenges of content hallucination and data obsolescence; and (2) Cataloguing & Management - aiding in the organization of personal publication libraries, in this case BibSonomy, by automating the addition of metadata and tags, while facilitating manual edits and updates. We compare our system to different LLM models in three different settings, including a user study, and we can show its advantages in different metrics.
Objects With Lighting: A Real-World Dataset for Evaluating Reconstruction and Rendering for Object Relighting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Reconstructing an object from photos and placing it virtually in a new environment goes beyond the standard novel view synthesis task as the appearance of the object has to not only adapt to the novel viewpoint but also to the new lighting conditions and yet evaluations of inverse rendering methods rely on novel view synthesis data or simplistic synthetic datasets for quantitative analysis. This work presents a real-world dataset for measuring the reconstruction and rendering of objects for relighting. To this end, we capture the environment lighting and ground truth images of the same objects in multiple environments allowing to reconstruct the objects from images taken in one environment and quantify the quality of the rendered views for the unseen lighting environments. Further, we introduce a simple baseline composed of off-the-shelf methods and test several state-of-the-art methods on the relighting task and show that novel view synthesis is not a reliable proxy to measure performance. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/isl-org/objects-with-lighting .
Asynchronous Local-SGD Training for Language Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Local stochastic gradient descent (Local-SGD), also referred to as federated averaging, is an approach to distributed optimization where each device performs more than one SGD update per communication. This work presents an empirical study of {\it asynchronous} Local-SGD for training language models; that is, each worker updates the global parameters as soon as it has finished its SGD steps. We conduct a comprehensive investigation by examining how worker hardware heterogeneity, model size, number of workers, and optimizer could impact the learning performance. We find that with naive implementations, asynchronous Local-SGD takes more iterations to converge than its synchronous counterpart despite updating the (global) model parameters more frequently. We identify momentum acceleration on the global parameters when worker gradients are stale as a key challenge. We propose a novel method that utilizes a delayed Nesterov momentum update and adjusts the workers' local training steps based on their computation speed. This approach, evaluated with models up to 150M parameters on the C4 dataset, matches the performance of synchronous Local-SGD in terms of perplexity per update step, and significantly surpasses it in terms of wall clock time.
QAnswer: Towards Question Answering Search over Websites
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Question Answering (QA) is increasingly used by search engines to provide results to their end-users, yet very few websites currently use QA technologies for their search functionality. To illustrate the potential of QA technologies for the website search practitioner, we demonstrate web searches that combine QA over knowledge graphs and QA over free text -- each being usually tackled separately. We also discuss the different benefits and drawbacks of both approaches for web site searches. We use the case studies made of websites hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation (namely Wikipedia and Wikidata). Differently from a search engine (e.g. Google, Bing, etc), the data are indexed integrally, i.e. we do not index only a subset, and they are indexed exclusively, i.e. we index only data available on the corresponding website.
Training-Free Semantic Video Composition via Pre-trained Diffusion Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The video composition task aims to integrate specified foregrounds and backgrounds from different videos into a harmonious composite. Current approaches, predominantly trained on videos with adjusted foreground color and lighting, struggle to address deep semantic disparities beyond superficial adjustments, such as domain gaps. Therefore, we propose a training-free pipeline employing a pre-trained diffusion model imbued with semantic prior knowledge, which can process composite videos with broader semantic disparities. Specifically, we process the video frames in a cascading manner and handle each frame in two processes with the diffusion model. In the inversion process, we propose Balanced Partial Inversion to obtain generation initial points that balance reversibility and modifiability. Then, in the generation process, we further propose Inter-Frame Augmented attention to augment foreground continuity across frames. Experimental results reveal that our pipeline successfully ensures the visual harmony and inter-frame coherence of the outputs, demonstrating efficacy in managing broader semantic disparities.
Data Trading and Monetization: Challenges and Open Research Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2024
Year: 2024

Traditional data monetization approaches face challenges related to data protection and logistics. In response, digital data marketplaces have emerged as intermediaries simplifying data transactions. Despite the growing establishment and acceptance of digital data marketplaces, significant challenges hinder efficient data trading. As a result, few companies can derive tangible value from their data, leading to missed opportunities in understanding customers, pricing decisions, and fraud prevention. In this paper, we explore both technical and organizational challenges affecting data monetization. Moreover, we identify areas in need of further research, aiming to expand the boundaries of current knowledge by emphasizing where research is currently limited or lacking.
Username Squatting on Online Social Networks: A Study on X
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

Adversaries have been targeting unique identifiers to launch typo-squatting, mobile app squatting and even voice squatting attacks. Anecdotal evidence suggest that online social networks (OSNs) are also plagued with accounts that use similar usernames. This can be confusing to users but can also be exploited by adversaries. However, to date no study characterizes this problem on OSNs. In this work, we define the username squatting problem and design the first multi-faceted measurement study to characterize it on X. We develop a username generation tool (UsernameCrazy) to help us analyze hundreds of thousands of username variants derived from celebrity accounts. Our study reveals that thousands of squatted usernames have been suspended by X, while tens of thousands that still exist on the network are likely bots. Out of these, a large number share similar profile pictures and profile names to the original account signalling impersonation attempts. We found that squatted accounts are being mentioned by mistake in tweets hundreds of thousands of times and are even being prioritized in searches by the network's search recommendation algorithm exacerbating the negative impact squatted accounts can have in OSNs. We use our insights and take the first step to address this issue by designing a framework (SQUAD) that combines UsernameCrazy with a new classifier to efficiently detect suspicious squatted accounts. Our evaluation of SQUAD's prototype implementation shows that it can achieve 94% F1-score when trained on a small dataset.