bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Equivariant Message Passing Neural Network for Crystal Material Discovery
Authors: Klipfel Astrid , Bouraoui Zied , Peltre Olivier , Fregier Yaël , Harrati Najwa , Sayede Adlane
Published: June 2023

Automatic material discovery with desired properties is a fundamental challenge for material sciences. Considerable attention has recently been devoted to generating stable crystal structures. While existing work has shown impressive success on supervised tasks such as property prediction, the progress on unsupervised tasks such as material generation is still hampered by the limited extent to which the equivalent geometric representations of the same crystal are considered. To address this challenge, we propose EPGNN a periodic equivariant message-passing neural network that learns crystal lattice deformation in an unsupervised fashion. Our model equivalently acts on lattice according to the deformation action that must be performed, making it suitable for crystal generation, relaxation and optimisation. We present experimental evaluations that demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
SimFair: A Unified Framework for Fairness-Aware Multi-Label Classification
Authors: Liu Tianci , Wang Haoyu , Wang Yaqing , Wang Xiaoqian , Su Lu , Gao Jing
Published: June 2023

Recent years have witnessed increasing concerns towards unfair decisions made by machine learning algorithms. To improve fairness in model decisions, various fairness notions have been proposed and many fairness-aware methods are developed. However, most of existing definitions and methods focus only on single-label classification. Fairness for multi-label classification, where each instance is associated with more than one labels, is still yet to establish. To fill this gap, we study fairness-aware multi-label classification in this paper. We start by extending Demographic Parity (DP) and Equalized Opportunity (EOp), two popular fairness notions, to multi-label classification scenarios. Through a systematic study, we show that on multi-label data, because of unevenly distributed labels, EOp usually fails to construct a reliable estimate on labels with few instances. We then propose a new framework named Similarity s-induced Fairness (sγ -SimFair). This new framework utilizes data that have similar labels when estimating fairness on a particular label group for better stability, and can unify DP and EOp. Theoretical analysis and experimental results on real-world datasets together demonstrate the advantage of sγ -SimFair over existing methods on multi-label classification tasks.
Practical Disruption of Image Translation Deepfake Networks
Authors: Ruiz Nataniel , Bargal Sarah Adel , Xie Cihang , Sclaroff Stan
Published: June 2023

By harnessing the latest advances in deep learning, image-to-image translation architectures have recently achieved impressive capabilities. Unfortunately, the growing representational power of these architectures has prominent unethical uses. Among these, the threats of (1) face manipulation ("DeepFakes") used for misinformation or pornographic use (2) "DeepNude" manipulations of body images to remove clothes from individuals, etc. Several works tackle the task of disrupting such image translation networks by inserting imperceptible adversarial attacks into the input image. Nevertheless, these works have limitations that may result in disruptions that are not practical in the real world. Specifically, most works generate disruptions in a white-box scenario, assuming perfect knowledge about the image translation network. The few remaining works that assume a black-box scenario require a large number of queries to successfully disrupt the adversary's image translation network. In this work we propose Leaking Transferable Perturbations (LTP), an algorithm that significantly reduces the number of queries needed to disrupt an image translation network by dynamically re-purposing previous disruptions into new query efficient disruptions.
Daycare Matching in Japan: Transfers and Siblings
Authors: Sun Zhaohong , Takenami Yoshihiro , Moriwaki Daisuke , Tomita Yoji , Yokoo Makoto
Published: June 2023

In this paper, we study a daycare matching problem in Japan and report the design and implementation of a new centralized algorithm, which is going to be deployed in one municipality in the Tokyo metropolis. There are two features that make this market different from the classical hospital-doctor matching problem: i) some children are initially enrolled and prefer to be transferred to other daycare centers; ii) one family may be associated with two or more children and is allowed to submit preferences over combinations of daycare centers. We revisit some well-studied properties including individual rationality, non-wastefulness, as well as stability, and generalize them to this new setting. We design an algorithm based on integer programming (IP) that captures these properties and conduct experiments on five real-life data sets provided by three municipalities. Experimental results show that i) our algorithm performs at least as well as currently used methods in terms of numbers of matched children and blocking coalition; ii) we can find a stable outcome for all instances, although the existence of such an outcome is not guaranteed in theory.
Everyone’s Voice Matters: Quantifying Annotation Disagreement Using Demographic Information
Authors: Wan Ruyuan , Kim Jaehyung , Kang Dongyeop
Published: June 2023

In NLP annotation, it is common to have multiple annotators label the text and then obtain the ground truth labels based on major annotators’ agreement. However, annotators are individuals with different backgrounds and various voices. When annotation tasks become subjective, such as detecting politeness, offense, and social norms, annotators’ voices differ and vary. Their diverse voices may represent the true distribution of people’s opinions on subjective matters. Therefore, it is crucial to study the disagreement from annotation to understand which content is controversial from the annotators. In our research, we extract disagreement labels from five subjective datasets, then fine-tune language models to predict annotators’ disagreement. Our results show that knowing annotators’ demographic information (e.g., gender, ethnicity, education level), in addition to the task text, helps predict the disagreement. To investigate the effect of annotators’ demographics on their disagreement level, we simulate different combinations of their artificial demographics and explore the variance of the prediction to distinguish the disagreement from the inherent controversy from text content and the disagreement in the annotators’ perspective. Overall, we propose an innovative disagreement prediction mechanism for better design of the annotation process that will achieve more accurate and inclusive results for NLP systems. Our code and dataset are publicly available.
MixFairFace: Towards Ultimate Fairness via MixFair Adapter in Face Recognition
Authors: Wang Fu-En , Wang Chien-Yi , Sun Min , Lai Shang-Hong
Published: June 2023

Although significant progress has been made in face recognition, demographic bias still exists in face recognition systems. For instance, it usually happens that the face recognition performance for a certain demographic group is lower than the others. In this paper, we propose MixFairFace framework to improve the fairness in face recognition models. First of all, we argue that the commonly used attribute-based fairness metric is not appropriate for face recognition. A face recognition system can only be considered fair while every person has a close performance. Hence, we propose a new evaluation protocol to fairly evaluate the fairness performance of different approaches. Different from previous approaches that require sensitive attribute labels such as race and gender for reducing the demographic bias, we aim at addressing the identity bias in face representation, i.e., the performance inconsistency between different identities, without the need for sensitive attribute labels. To this end, we propose MixFair Adapter to determine and reduce the identity bias of training samples. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our MixFairFace approach achieves state-of-the-art fairness performance on all benchmark datasets.
Test Time Augmentation Meets Post-hoc Calibration: Uncertainty Quantification under Real-World Conditions
Authors: Hekler Achim , Brinker Titus J. , Buettner Florian
Published: June 2023

Communicating the predictive uncertainty of deep neural networks transparently and reliably is important in many safety-critical applications such as medicine. However, modern neural networks tend to be poorly calibrated, resulting in wrong predictions made with a high confidence. While existing post-hoc calibration methods like temperature scaling or isotonic regression yield strongly calibrated predictions in artificial experimental settings, their efficiency can significantly reduce in real-world applications, where scarcity of labeled data or domain drifts are commonly present. In this paper, we first investigate the impact of these characteristics on post-hoc calibration and introduce an easy-to-implement extension of common post-hoc calibration methods based on test time augmentation. In extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach results in substantially better calibration on various architectures. We demonstrate the robustness of our proposed approach on a real-world application for skin cancer classification and show that it facilitates safe decision-making under real-world uncertainties.
Rethinking Label Refurbishment: Model Robustness under Label Noise
Authors: Lu Yangdi , Xu Zhiwei , He Wenbo
Published: June 2023

A family of methods that generate soft labels by mixing the hard labels with a certain distribution, namely label refurbishment, are widely used to train deep neural networks. However, some of these methods are still poorly understood in the presence of label noise. In this paper, we revisit four label refurbishment methods and reveal the strong connection between them. We find that they affect the neural network models in different manners. Two of them smooth the estimated posterior for regularization effects, and the other two force the model to produce high-confidence predictions. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate related methods and observe that both effects improve the model generalization under label noise. Furthermore, we theoretically show that both effects lead to generalization guarantees on the clean distribution despite being trained with noisy labels.
Toward Robust Uncertainty Estimation with Random Activation Functions
Authors: Stoyanova Yana , Ghandi Soroush , Tavakol Maryam
Published: June 2023

Deep neural networks are in the limelight of machine learning with their excellent performance in many data-driven applications. However, they can lead to inaccurate predictions when queried in out-of-distribution data points, which can have detrimental effects especially in sensitive domains, such as healthcare and transportation, where erroneous predictions can be very costly and/or dangerous. Subsequently, quantifying the uncertainty of the output of a neural network is often leveraged to evaluate the confidence of its predictions, and ensemble models have proved to be effective in measuring the uncertainty by utilizing the variance of predictions over a pool of models. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for uncertainty quantification via ensembles, called Random Activation Functions (RAFs) Ensemble, that aims at improving the ensemble diversity toward a more robust estimation, by accommodating each neural network with a different (random) activation function. Extensive empirical study demonstrates that RAFs Ensemble outperforms state-of-the-art ensemble uncertainty quantification methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets in a series of regression tasks.
Multimodal Propaganda Processing
Authors: Ng Vincent , Li Shengjie
Published: June 2023

Propaganda campaigns have long been used to influence public opinion via disseminating biased and/or misleading information. Despite the increasing prevalence of propaganda content on the Internet, few attempts have been made by AI researchers to analyze such content. We introduce the task of multimodal propaganda processing, where the goal is to automatically analyze propaganda content. We believe that this task presents a long-term challenge to AI researchers and that successful processing of propaganda could bring machine understanding one important step closer to human understanding. We discuss the technical challenges associated with this task and outline the steps that need to be taken to address it.
QA Is the New KR: Question-Answer Pairs as Knowledge Bases
Authors: Cohen William W. , Chen Wenhu , De Jong Michiel , Gupta Nitish , Presta Alessandro , Verga Pat , Wieting John
Published: June 2023

We propose a new knowledge representation (KR) based on knowledge bases (KBs) derived from text, based on question generation and entity linking. We argue that the proposed type of KB has many of the key advantages of a traditional symbolic KB: in particular, it consists of small modular components, which can be combined compositionally to answer complex queries, including relational queries and queries involving ``multi-hop'' inferences. However, unlike a traditional KB, this information store is well-aligned with common user information needs. We present one such KB, called a QEDB, and give qualitative evidence that the atomic components are high-quality and meaningful, and that atomic components can be combined in ways similar to the triples in a symbolic KB. We also show experimentally that questions reflective of typical user questions are more easily answered with a QEDB than a symbolic KB.
Food Information Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review
Authors: Jiomekong Azanzi
Published: June 2023

In recent years, the research on food information gave rise to the food information engineering domain. The goal of this paper is to provide to the research community with a systematic literature review of methodologies, methods and tools used in this domain.
Recent Developments in Data-Driven Algorithms for Discrete Optimization
Authors: Khalil Elias B.
Published: June 2023

The last few years have witnessed a renewed interest in “data-driven algorithm design” (Balcan 2020), the use of Machine Learning (ML) to tailor an algorithm to a distribution of instances. More than a decade ago, advances in algorithm configuration (Hoos 2011) paved the way for the use of historical data to modify an algorithm’s (typically fixed, static) parameters. In discrete optimization (e.g., satisfiability, integer programming, etc.), exact and inexact algorithms for NP-Hard problems often involve heuristic search decisions (Lodi 2013), abstracted as parameters, that can demonstrably benefit from tuning on historical instances from the application of interest.

While useful, algorithm configuration may be insufficient: setting the parameters of an algorithm upfront of solving the input instance is still a static, high-level decision. In contrast, we have been exploring a suite of ML and Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches that tune iterative optimization algorithms, such as branch-and-bound for integer programming or construction heuristics, at the iteration-level (Khalil et al. 2016, 2017; Dai et al. 2017; Chmiela et al. 2021; Gupta et al. 2022; Chi et al. 2022; Khalil, Vaezipoor, and Dilkina 2022; Khalil, Morris, and Lodi 2022; Alomrani, Moravej, and Khalil 2022; Cappart et al. 2021; Gupta et al. 2020).

We will survey our most recent work in this area:
1. New methods for learning in MILP branch-and-bound (Gupta et al. 2020, 2022; Chmiela et al. 2021; Khalil, Vaezipoor, and Dilkina 2022; Khalil, Morris, and Lodi 2022);

2. RL for online combinatorial optimization and largescale linear programming (Alomrani, Moravej, and Khalil 2022; Chi et al. 2022);

3. Neural network approximations for stochastic programming (Dumouchelle et al. 2022).
Robust and Adaptive Deep Learning via Bayesian Principles
Authors: Li Yingzhen
Published: June 2023

Deep learning models have achieved tremendous successes in accurate predictions for computer vision, natural language processing and speech recognition applications. However, to succeed in high-risk and safety-critical domains such as healthcare and finance, these deep learning models need to be made reliable and trustworthy. Specifically, they need to be robust and adaptive to real-world environments which can be drastically different from the training settings. In this talk, I will advocate for Bayesian principles to achieve the goal of building robust and adaptive deep learning models. I will introduce a suite of uncertainty quantification methods for Bayesian deep learning, and demonstrate applications en- abled by accurate uncertainty estimates, e.g., robust predic- tion, continual learning and repairing model failures. I will conclude by discussing the research challenges and potential impact for robust and adaptive deep learning models.

This paper is part of the AAAI-23 New Faculty Highlights.
Combining Runtime Monitoring and Machine Learning with Human Feedback
Authors: Lukina Anna
Published: June 2023

State-of-the-art machine-learned controllers for autonomous systems demonstrate unbeatable performance in scenarios known from training. However, in evolving environments---changing weather or unexpected anomalies---, safety and interpretability remain the greatest challenges for autonomous systems to be reliable and are the urgent scientific challenges.

Existing machine-learning approaches focus on recovering lost performance but leave the system open to potential safety violations. Formal methods address this problem by rigorously analysing a smaller representation of the system but they rarely prioritize performance of the controller.

We propose to combine insights from formal verification and runtime monitoring with interpretable machine-learning design for guaranteeing reliability of autonomous systems.
Towards Safe and Resilient Autonomy in Multi-Robot Systems
Authors: Luo Wenhao
Published: June 2023

In the near future, autonomous systems such as multi-robot
systems are envisioned to increasingly co-exist with hu-
mans in our daily lives, from household service to large-
scale warehouse logistics, agriculture environment sampling,
and smart city. In these applications, robots and humans as
networked heterogeneous components will frequently inter-
act with each other in a variety of scenarios under uncer-
tain, rapidly-changing, and possibly hostile environment. On
one hand, harmonious interactions among robots, as well as
between robots and humans, would require safe integration
(e.g. collision-free close-proximity interactions) of heteroge-
neous robots, human, and human-robot autonomy. On the
other hand, reliable interactions among autonomous multi-
robot systems often call for resilient system integrity (e.g.
communication capability with potential robot failures) to re-
tain its capability of accomplishing complex tasks through
coordinated behaviors. In the proposed talk, I will discuss our
recent works towards safe autonomy and resilient autonomy
that aim to facilitate correct-by-design robotic behaviors in a
variety of applications.
Information Transfer in Multitask Learning, Data Augmentation, and Beyond
Authors: Zhang Hongyang R.
Published: June 2023

A hallmark of human intelligence is that we continue to learn new information and then extrapolate the learned information onto new tasks and domains (see, e.g., Thrun and Pratt (1998)). While this is a fairly intuitive observation, formulating such ideas has proved to be a challenging research problem and continues to inspire new studies. Recently, there has been increasing interest in AI/ML about building models that generalize across tasks, even when they have some form of distribution shifts. How can we ground this research in a solid framework to develop principled methods for better practice? This talk will present my recent works addressing this research question. My talk will involve three parts: revisiting multitask learning from the lens of deep learning theory, designing principled methods for robust transfer, and algorithmic implications for data augmentation.
AmnioML: Amniotic Fluid Segmentation and Volume Prediction with Uncertainty Quantification
Authors: Csillag Daniel , Monteiro Paes Lucas , Ramos Thiago , Romano João Vitor , Schuller Rodrigo , Seixas Roberto B. , Oliveira Roberto I. , Orenstein Paulo
Published: June 2023

Accurately predicting the volume of amniotic fluid is fundamental to assessing pregnancy risks, though the task usually requires many hours of laborious work by medical experts. In this paper, we present AmnioML, a machine learning solution that leverages deep learning and conformal prediction to output fast and accurate volume estimates and segmentation masks from fetal MRIs with Dice coefficient over 0.9. Also, we make available a novel, curated dataset for fetal MRIs with 853 exams and benchmark the performance of many recent deep learning architectures. In addition, we introduce a conformal prediction tool that yields narrow predictive intervals with theoretically guaranteed coverage, thus aiding doctors in detecting pregnancy risks and saving lives. A successful case study of AmnioML deployed in a medical setting is also reported. Real-world clinical benefits include up to 20x segmentation time reduction, with most segmentations deemed by doctors as not needing any further manual refinement. Furthermore, AmnioML's volume predictions were found to be highly accurate in practice, with mean absolute error below 56mL and tight predictive intervals, showcasing its impact in reducing pregnancy complications.
Developing the Wheel Image Similarity Application with Deep Metric Learning: Hyundai Motor Company Case
Authors: Kang Kyung Pyo , Jeong Ga Hyeon , Eom Jeong Hoon , Kwon Soon Beom , Park Jae Hong
Published: June 2023

The global automobile market experiences quick changes in design preferences. In response to the demand shifts, manufacturers now try to apply new technologies to bring a novel design to market faster. In this paper, we introduce a novel application that performs a similarity verification task of wheel designs using an AI model and cloud computing technology. At Jan 2022, we successfully implemented the application to the wheel design process of Hyundai Motor Company’s design team and shortened the similarity verification time by 90% to a maximum of 10 minutes. We believe that this study is the first to build a wheel image database and empirically prove that the cross-entropy loss does similar tasks as the pairwise losses do in the embedding space. As a result, we successfully automated Hyundai Motor’s verification task of wheel design similarity. With a few clicks, the end-users in Hyundai Motor could take advantage of our application.
Real-Time Detection of Robotic Traffic in Online Advertising
Authors: Muralidhar Anand , Chitlangia Sharad , Agarwal Rajat , Ahmed Muneeb
Published: June 2023

Detecting robotic traffic at scale on online ads needs an approach that is scalable, comprehensive, precise, and can rapidly respond to changing traffic patterns. In this paper we describe SLIDR or SLIce-Level Detection of Robots, a real-time deep neural network model trained with weak supervision to identify invalid clicks on online ads. We ensure fairness across different traffic slices by formulating a convex optimization problem that allows SLIDR to achieve optimal performance on individual traffic slices with a budget on overall false positives. SLIDR has been deployed since 2021 and safeguards advertiser campaigns on Amazon against robots clicking on ads on the e-commerce site. We describe some of the important lessons learned by deploying SLIDR that include guardrails that prevent updates of anomalous models and disaster recovery mechanisms to mitigate or correct decisions made by a faulty model.
Increasing Impact of Mobile Health Programs: SAHELI for Maternal and Child Care
Authors: Verma Shresth , Singh Gargi , Mate Aditya , Verma Paritosh , Gorantla Sruthi , Madhiwalla Neha , Hegde Aparna , Thakkar Divy , Jain Manish , Tambe Milind , Taneja Aparna
Published: June 2023

Underserved communities face critical health challenges due to lack of access to timely and reliable information. Nongovernmental organizations are leveraging the widespread use of cellphones to combat these healthcare challenges and spread preventative awareness. The health workers at these organizations reach out individually to beneficiaries; however such programs still suffer from declining engagement. We have deployed SAHELI, a system to efficiently utilize the limited availability of health workers for improving maternal and child health in India. SAHELI uses the Restless Multiarmed Bandit (RMAB) framework to identify beneficiaries for outreach. It is the first deployed application for RMABs in public health, and is already in continuous use by our partner NGO, ARMMAN. We have already reached ~100K beneficiaries with SAHELI, and are on track to serve 1 million beneficiaries by the end of 2023. This scale and impact has been achieved through multiple innovations in the RMAB model and its development, in preparation of real world data, and in deployment practices; and through careful consideration of responsible AI practices. Specifically, in this paper, we describe our approach to learn from past data to improve the performance of SAHELI’s RMAB model, the real-world challenges faced during deployment and adoption of SAHELI, and
the end-to-end pipeline.
eForecaster: Unifying Electricity Forecasting with Robust, Flexible, and Explainable Machine Learning Algorithms
Authors: Zhu Zhaoyang , Chen Weiqi , Xia Rui , Zhou Tian , Niu Peisong , Peng Bingqing , Wang Wenwei , Liu Hengbo , Ma Ziqing , Wen Qingsong , Sun Liang
Published: June 2023

Electricity forecasting is crucial in scheduling and planning of future electric load, so as to improve the reliability and safeness of the power grid. Despite recent developments of forecasting algorithms in the machine learning community, there is a lack of general and advanced algorithms specifically considering requirements from the power industry perspective. In this paper, we present eForecaster, a unified AI platform including robust, flexible, and explainable machine learning algorithms for diversified electricity forecasting applications. Since Oct. 2021, multiple commercial bus load, system load, and renewable energy forecasting systems built upon eForecaster have been deployed in seven provinces of China. The deployed systems consistently reduce the average Mean Absolute Error (MAE) by 39.8% to 77.0%, with reduced manual work and explainable guidance. In particular, eForecaster also integrates multiple interpretation methods to uncover the working mechanism of the predictive models, which significantly improves forecasts adoption and user satisfaction.
Embedding a Long Short-Term Memory Network in a Constraint Programming Framework for Tomato Greenhouse Optimisation
Authors: Van Bokkem Dirk , Van den Hemel Max , Dumančić Sebastijan , Yorke-Smith Neil
Published: June 2023

Increasing global food demand, accompanied by the limited number of expert growers, brings the need for more sustainable and efficient horticulture. The controlled environment of greenhouses enable data collection and precise control. For optimally controlling the greenhouse climate, a grower not only looks at crop production, but rather aims at maximising the profit. However this is a complex, long term optimisation task. In this paper, Constraint Programming (CP) is applied to task of optimal greenhouse economic control, by leveraging a learned greenhouse climate model through a CP embedding. In collaboration with an industrial partner, we demonstrate how to model the greenhouse climate with an LSTM model, embed this LSTM into a CP optimisation framework, and optimise the expected profit of the grower. This data-to-decision pipeline is being integrated into a decision support system for multiple greenhouses in the Netherlands.
End-to-End Pipeline for Trigger Detection on Hit and Track Graphs
Authors: Xuan Tingting , Zhu Yimin , Borca-Tasciuc Giorgian , Liu Ming Xiong , Sun Yu , Dean Cameron , Morales Yasser Corrales , Shi Zhaozhong , Yu Dantong
Published: June 2023

There has been a surge of interest in applying deep learning in particle and nuclear physics to replace labor-intensive offline data analysis with automated online machine learning tasks. This paper details a novel AI-enabled triggering solution for physics experiments in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and future Electron-Ion Collider. The triggering system consists of a comprehensive end-to-end pipeline based on Graph Neural Networks that classifies trigger events versus background events, makes online decisions to retain signal data, and enables efficient data acquisition. The triggering system first starts with the coordinates of pixel hits lit up by passing particles in the detector, applies three stages of event processing (hits clustering, track reconstruction, and trigger detection), and labels all processed events with the binary tag of trigger versus background events. By switching among different objective functions, we train the Graph Neural Networks in the pipeline to solve multiple tasks: the edge-level track reconstruction problem, the edge-level track adjacency matrix prediction, and the graph-level trigger detection problem. We propose a novel method to treat the events as track-graphs instead of hit-graphs. This method focuses on intertrack relations and is driven by underlying physics processing. As a result, it attains a solid performance (around 72% accuracy) for trigger detection and outperforms the baseline method using hit-graphs by 2% higher accuracy.
Maestro: A Gamified Platform for Teaching AI Robustness
Authors: Geleta Margarita , Xu Jiacen , Loya Manikanta , Wang Junlin , Singh Sameer , Li Zhou , Gago-Masague Sergio
Published: June 2023

Although the prevention of AI vulnerabilities is critical to preserve the safety and privacy of users and businesses, educational tools for robust AI are still underdeveloped worldwide. We present the design, implementation, and assessment of Maestro. Maestro is an effective open-source game-based platform that contributes to the advancement of robust AI education. Maestro provides "goal-based scenarios" where college students are exposed to challenging life-inspired assignments in a "competitive programming" environment. We assessed Maestro's influence on students' engagement, motivation, and learning success in robust AI. This work also provides insights into the design features of online learning tools that promote active learning opportunities in the robust AI domain. We analyzed the reflection responses (measured with Likert scales) of 147 undergraduate students using Maestro in two quarterly college courses in AI. According to the results, students who felt the acquisition of new skills in robust AI tended to appreciate highly Maestro and scored highly on material consolidation, curiosity, and maestry in robust AI. Moreover, the leaderboard, our key gamification element in Maestro, has effectively contributed to students' engagement and learning. Results also indicate that Maestro can be effectively adapted to any course length and depth without losing its educational quality.
Autonomous Agents: An Advanced Course on AI Integration and Deployment
Authors: Rosenthal Stephanie , Simmons Reid
Published: June 2023

A majority of the courses on autonomous systems focus on robotics, despite the growing use of autonomous agents in a wide spectrum of applications, from smart homes to intelligent traffic control. Our goal in designing a new senior-level undergraduate course is to teach the integration of a variety of AI techniques in uncertain environments, without the dependence on topics such as robotic control and localization. We chose the application of an autonomous greenhouse to frame our discussions and our student projects because of the greenhouse's self-contained nature and objective metrics for successfully growing plants. We detail our curriculum design, including lecture topics and assignments, and our iterative process for updating the course over the last four years. Finally, we present some student feedback about the course and opportunities for future improvement.
Beyond Black-Boxes: Teaching Complex Machine Learning Ideas through Scaffolded Interactive Activities
Authors: Broll Brian , Grover Shuchi
Published: June 2023

Existing approaches to teaching artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) often focus on the use of pre-trained models or fine-tuning an existing black-box architecture. We believe ML techniques and core ML topics, such as optimization and adversarial examples, can be designed for high school age students given appropriate support. Our curricular approach focuses on teaching ML ideas by enabling students to develop deep intuition about these complex concepts by first making them accessible to novices through interactive tools, pre-programmed games, and carefully designed programming activities. Then, students are able to engage with the concepts via meaningful, hands-on experiences that span the entire ML process from data collection to model optimization and inspection. This paper describes our 'AI & Cybersecurity for Teens' suite of curricular activities aimed at high school students and teachers.
Topics in Selective Classification
Authors: Pugnana Andrea
Published: June 2023

In recent decades, advancements in information technology allowed Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems to predict future outcomes with unprecedented success. This brought the widespread deployment of these methods in many fields, intending to support decision-making. A pressing question is how to make AI systems robust to common challenges in real-life scenarios and trustworthy.
In my work, I plan to explore ways to enhance the trustworthiness of AI through the selective classification framework. In this setting, the AI system can refrain from predicting whenever it is not confident enough, allowing it to trade off coverage, i.e. the percentage of instances that receive a prediction, for performance.
Meta Learning in Decentralized Neural Networks: Towards More General AI
Authors: Sun Yuwei
Published: June 2023

Meta-learning usually refers to a learning algorithm that learns from other learning algorithms. The problem of uncertainty in the predictions of neural networks shows that the world is only partially predictable and a learned neural network cannot generalize to its ever-changing surrounding environments. Therefore, the question is how a predictive model can represent multiple predictions simultaneously. We aim to provide a fundamental understanding of learning to learn in the contents of Decentralized Neural Networks (Decentralized NNs) and we believe this is one of the most important questions and prerequisites to building an autonomous intelligence machine. To this end, we shall demonstrate several pieces of evidence for tackling the problems above with Meta Learning in Decentralized NNs. In particular, we will present three different approaches to building such a decentralized learning system: (1) learning from many replica neural networks, (2) building the hierarchy of neural networks for different functions, and (3) leveraging different modality experts to learn cross-modal representations.
Privacy-Preserving Representation Learning for Text-Attributed Networks with Simplicial Complexes
Authors: Zhan Huixin , Sheng Victor S.
Published: June 2023

Although recent network representation learning (NRL) works in text-attributed networks demonstrated superior performance for various graph inference tasks, learning network representations could always raise privacy concerns when nodes represent people or human-related variables. Moreover, standard NRLs that leverage structural information from a graph proceed by first encoding pairwise relationships into learned representations and then analysing its properties. This approach is fundamentally misaligned with problems where the relationships involve multiple points, and topological structure must be encoded beyond pairwise interactions. Fortunately, the machinery of topological data analysis (TDA) and, in particular, simplicial neural networks (SNNs) offer a mathematically rigorous framework to evaluate not only higher-order interactions, but also global invariant features of the observed graph to systematically learn topological structures. It is critical to investigate if the representation outputs from SNNs are more vulnerable compared to regular representation outputs from graph neural networks (GNNs) via pairwise interactions. In my dissertation, I will first study learning the representations with text attributes for simplicial complexes (RT4SC) via SNNs. Then, I will conduct research on two potential attacks on the representation outputs from SNNs: (1) membership inference attack, which infers whether a certain node of a graph is inside the training data of the GNN model; and (2) graph reconstruction attacks, which infer the confidential edges of a text-attributed network. Finally, I will study a privacy-preserving deterministic differentially private alternating direction method of multiplier to learn secure representation outputs from SNNs that capture multi-scale relationships and facilitate the passage from local structure to global invariant features on text-attributed networks.
Optimal Execution via Multi-Objective Multi-Armed Bandits (Student Abstract)
Authors: Buet-Golfouse Francois , Hill Peter
Published: June 2023

When trying to liquidate a large quantity of a particular stock, the price of that stock is likely to be affected by trades, thus leading to a reduced expected return if we were to sell the entire quantity at once. This leads to the problem of optimal execution, where the aim is to split the sell order into several smaller sell orders over the course of a period of time, to optimally balance stock price with market risk. This problem can be defined in terms of difference equations. Here, we show how we can reformulate this as a multi-objective problem, which we solve with a novel multi-armed bandit algorithm.
Lightweight Transformer for Multi-Modal Object Detection (Student Abstract)
Authors: Cao Yue , Fan Yanshuo , Bin Junchi , Liu Zheng
Published: June 2023

It has become a common practice for many perceptual systems to integrate information from multiple sensors to improve the accuracy of object detection. For example, autonomous vehicles use visible light, and infrared (IR) information to ensure that the car can cope with complex weather conditions. However, the accuracy of the algorithm is usually a trade-off between the computational complexity and memory consumption. In this study, we evaluate the performance and complexity of different fusion operators in multi-modal object detection tasks. On top of that, a Poolformer-based fusion operator (PoolFuser) is proposed to enhance the accuracy of detecting targets without compromising the efficiency of the detection framework.
Know Your Enemy: Identifying Adversarial Behaviours in Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents (Student Abstract)
Authors: Caulfield Curley Seán , Mason Karl , Mannion Patrick
Published: June 2023

It has been shown that an agent can be trained with an adversarial policy which achieves high degrees of success against a state-of-the-art DRL victim despite taking unintuitive actions. This prompts the question: is this adversarial behaviour detectable through the observations of the victim alone? We find that widely used classification methods such as random forests are only able to achieve a maximum of ≈71% test set accuracy when classifying an agent for a single timestep. However, when the classifier inputs are treated as time-series data, test set classification accuracy is increased significantly to ≈98%. This is true for both classification of episodes as a whole, and for “live” classification at each timestep in an episode. These classifications can then be used to “react” to incoming attacks and increase the overall win rate against Adversarial opponents by approximately 17%. Classification of the victim’s own internal activations in response to the adversary is shown to achieve similarly impressive accuracy while also offering advantages like increased transferability to other domains.
Deep Anomaly Detection and Search via Reinforcement Learning (Student Abstract)
Authors: Chen Chao , Wang Dawei , Mao Feng , Zhang Zongzhang , Yu Yang
Published: June 2023

Semi-supervised anomaly detection is a data mining task which aims at learning features from partially-labeled datasets. We propose Deep Anomaly Detection and Search (DADS) with reinforcement learning. During the training process, the agent searches for possible anomalies in unlabeled dataset to enhance performance. Empirically, we compare DADS with several methods in the settings of leveraging known anomalies to detect both other known and unknown anomalies. Results show that DADS achieves good performance.
AlphaSnake: Policy Iteration on a Nondeterministic NP-Hard Markov Decision Process (Student Abstract)
Authors: Du Kevin , Gemp Ian , Wu Yi , Wu Yingying
Published: June 2023

Reinforcement learning has been used to approach well-known NP-hard combinatorial problems in graph theory. Among these, Hamiltonian cycle problems are exceptionally difficult to analyze, even when restricted to individual instances of structurally complex graphs. In this paper, we use Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), the search algorithm behind many state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms such as AlphaZero, to create autonomous agents that learn to play the game of Snake, a game centered on properties of Hamiltonian cycles on grid graphs. The game of Snake can be formulated as a single-player discounted Markov Decision Process (MDP), where the agent must behave optimally in a stochastic environment. Determining the optimal policy for Snake, defined as the policy that maximizes the probability of winning -- or win rate -- with higher priority and minimizes the expected number of time steps to win with lower priority, is conjectured to be NP-hard. Performance-wise, compared to prior work in the Snake game, our algorithm is the first to achieve a win rate over 0.5 (a uniform random policy achieves a win rate < 2.57 x 10^{-15}), demonstrating the versatility of AlphaZero in tackling NP-hard problems.
A Reinforcement Learning Badminton Environment for Simulating Player Tactics (Student Abstract)
Authors: Huang Li-Chun , Hsueh Nai-Zen , Chien Yen-Che , Wang Wei-Yao , Wang Kuang-Da , Peng Wen-Chih
Published: June 2023

Recent techniques for analyzing sports precisely has stimulated various approaches to improve player performance and fan engagement.
However, existing approaches are only able to evaluate offline performance since testing in real-time matches requires exhaustive costs and cannot be replicated.
To test in a safe and reproducible simulator, we focus on turn-based sports and introduce a badminton environment by simulating rallies with different angles of view and designing the states, actions, and training procedures.
This benefits not only coaches and players by simulating past matches for tactic investigation, but also researchers from rapidly evaluating their novel algorithms.
Our code is available at https://github.com/wywyWang/CoachAI-Projects/tree/main/Strategic%20Environment.
Cross-Regional Fraud Detection via Continual Learning (Student Abstract)
Authors: Li Yujie , Yang Yuxuan , Gao Qiang , Yang Xin
Published: June 2023

Detecting fraud is an urgent task to avoid transaction risks. Especially when expanding a business to new cities or new countries, developing a totally new model will bring the cost issue and result in forgetting previous knowledge. This study proposes a novel solution based on heterogeneous trade graphs, namely HTG-CFD, to prevent knowledge forgetting of cross-regional fraud detection. Specifically, a novel heterogeneous trade graph is meticulously constructed from original transactions to explore the complex semantics among different types of entities and relationships. Motivated by continual learning, we present a practical and task-oriented forgetting prevention method to alleviate knowledge forgetting in the context of cross-regional detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HTG-CFD promotes performance in both cross-regional and single-regional scenarios.
Debiasing Intrinsic Bias and Application Bias Jointly via Invariant Risk Minimization (Student Abstract)
Authors: Mao Yuzhou , Yu Liu , Yang Yi , Zhou Fan , Zhong Ting
Published: June 2023

Demographic biases and social stereotypes are common in pretrained language models (PLMs), while the fine-tuning in downstream applications can also produce new biases or amplify the impact of the original biases. Existing works separate the debiasing from the fine-tuning procedure, which results in a gap between intrinsic bias and application bias. In this work, we propose a debiasing framework CauDebias to eliminate both biases, which directly combines debiasing with fine-tuning and can be applied for any PLMs in downstream tasks. We distinguish the bias-relevant (non-causal factors) and label-relevant (causal factors) parts in sentences from a causal invariant perspective. Specifically, we perform intervention on non-causal factors in different demographic groups, and then devise an invariant risk minimization loss to trade-off performance between bias mitigation and task accuracy. Experimental results on three downstream tasks show that our CauDebias can remarkably reduce biases in PLMs while minimizing the impact on downstream tasks.
Label Smoothing for Emotion Detection (Student Abstract)
Authors: Maratos George , Sosea Tiberiu , Caragea Cornelia
Published: June 2023

Automatically detecting emotions from text has countless
applications, ranging from large scale opinion mining to
social robots in healthcare and education. However, emotions
are subjective in nature and are often expressed in ambiguous
ways. At the same time, detecting emotions can also require
implicit reasoning, which may not be available as surface-
level, lexical information. In this work, we conjecture that
the overconfidence of pre-trained language models such as
BERT is a critical problem in emotion detection and show
that alleviating this problem can considerably improve the
generalization performance. We carry out comprehensive
experiments on four emotion detection benchmark datasets
and show that calibrating our model predictions leads to an
average improvement of 1.35% in weighted F1 score.
Pre-training with Scientific Text Improves Educational Question Generation (Student Abstract)
Authors: Muse Hamze , Bulathwela Sahan , Yilmaz Emine
Published: June 2023

With the boom of digital educational materials and scalable e-learning systems, the potential for realising AI-assisted personalised learning has skyrocketed. In this landscape, the automatic generation of educational questions will play a key role, enabling scalable self-assessment when a global population is manoeuvring their personalised learning journeys. We develop EduQG, a novel educational question generation model built by adapting a large language model. Our initial experiments demonstrate that EduQG can produce superior educational questions by pre-training on scientific text.