bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
HarvestNet: A Dataset for Detecting Smallholder Farming Activity Using Harvest Piles and Remote Sensing
Authors: Xu Jonathan , Elmustafa Amna , Weldegebriel Liya , Negash Emnet , Lee Richard , Meng Chenlin , Ermon Stefano , Lobell David
Published: March 2024

Small farms contribute to a large share of the productive land in developing countries. In regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, where 80% of farms are small (under 2 ha in size), the task of mapping smallholder cropland is an important part of tracking sustainability measures such as crop productivity. However, the visually diverse and nuanced appearance of small farms has limited the effectiveness of traditional approaches to cropland mapping. Here we introduce a new approach based on the detection of harvest piles characteristic of many smallholder systems throughout the world. We present HarvestNet, a dataset for mapping the presence of farms in the Ethiopian regions of Tigray and Amhara during 2020-2023, collected using expert knowledge and satellite images, totalling 7k hand-labeled images and 2k ground-collected labels. We also benchmark a set of baselines, including SOTA models in remote sensing, with our best models having around 80% classification performance on hand labelled data and 90% and 98% accuracy on ground truth data for Tigray and Amhara, respectively. We also perform a visual comparison with a widely used pre-existing coverage map and show that our model detects an extra 56,621 hectares of cropland in Tigray. We conclude that remote sensing of harvest piles can contribute to more timely and accurate cropland assessments in food insecure regions. The dataset can be accessed through https://figshare.com/s/45a7b45556b90a9a11d2, while the code for the dataset and benchmarks is publicly available at https://github.com/jonxuxu/harvest-piles
Mixed Fair Division: A Survey
Authors: Liu Shengxin , Lu Xinhang , Suzuki Mashbat , Walsh Toby
Published: March 2024

The fair allocation of resources to agents is a fundamental problem in society and has received significant attention and rapid developments from the game theory and artificial intelligence communities in recent years. The majority of the fair division literature can be divided along at least two orthogonal directions: goods versus chores, and divisible versus indivisible resources. In this survey, besides describing the state of the art, we outline a number of interesting open questions in three mixed fair division settings: (i) indivisible goods and chores, (ii) divisible and indivisible goods (i.e., mixed goods), and (iii) fair division of indivisible goods with subsidy.
Making Natural Language Reasoning Explainable and Faithful
Authors: Du Xinya
Published: March 2024

Neural models, including large language models (LLMs), achieve superior performance on logical reasoning tasks such as question answering. To elicit reasoning capabilities from LLMs, recent works propose using the chain-of-thought (CoT) mechanism to generate both the reasoning chain and the answer, which enhances the model’s capabilities in conducting reasoning. However, due to LLM’s uninterpretable nature and the extreme flexibility of free-form explanations, several challenges remain: such as struggling with inaccurate reasoning, hallucinations, and not aligning with human preferences. In this talk, we will focus on (1) our design of leveraging structured information (that is grounded to the context), for the explainable complex question answering and reasoning; (2) our multi-module interpretable framework for inductive reasoning, which conducts step-wise faithful reasoning with iterative feedback.
Towards Trustworthy Deep Learning
Authors: Weng Tsui-Wei (Lily)
Published: March 2024

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved unprecedented success across many scientific and engineering fields in the last decades. Despite its empirical success, unfortunately, recent studies have shown that there are various failure modes and blindspots in DNN models which may result in unexpected serious failures and potential harms, e.g. the existence of adversarial examples and small perturbations. This is not acceptable especially for safety critical and high stakes applications in the real-world, including healthcare, self-driving cars, aircraft control systems, hiring and malware detection protocols. Moreover, it has been challenging to understand why and when DNNs will fail due to their complicated structures and black-box behaviors. Lacking interpretability is one critical issue that may seriously hinder the deployment of DNNs in high-stake applications, which need interpretability to trust the prediction, to understand potential failures, and to be able to mitigate harms and eliminate biases in the model.

To make DNNs trustworthy and reliable for deployment, it is necessary and urgent to develop methods and tools that can (i) quantify and improve their robustness against adversarial and natural perturbations, and (ii) understand their underlying behaviors and further correct errors to prevent injuries and damages. These are the important first steps to enable Trustworthy AI and Trustworthy Machine Learning. In this talk, I will survey a series of research efforts in my lab contributed to tackling the grand challenges in (i) and (ii). In the first part of my talk, I will overview our research effort in Robust Machine Learning since 2017, where we have proposed the first attack-agnostic robustness evaluation metric, the first efficient robustness certification algorithms for various types of perturbations, and efficient robust learning algorithms across supervised learning to deep reinforcement learning.

In the second part of my talk, I will survey a series of exciting results in my lab on accelerating interpretable machine learning and explainable AI. Specifically, I will show how we could bring interpretability into deep learning by leveraging recent advances in multi-modal models. I'll present recent works in our group on automatically dissecting neural networks with open vocabulary concepts, designing interpretable neural networks without concept labels, and briefly overview our recent efforts on demystifying black-box DNN training process, automated neuron explanations for Large Language Models and the first robustness evaluation of a family of neuron-level interpretation techniques.
Towards Reproducible, Automated, and Scalable Anomaly Detection
Authors: Zhao Yue
Published: March 2024

Anomaly detection (AD), often termed outlier detection, is a key machine learning (ML) task, aiming to identify uncommon yet crucial patterns in data. With the increasing complexity of the modern world, the applications of AD span wide—from NASA's spacecraft monitoring to early patient prioritization at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Technology giants like Google and Amazon also leverage AD for service disruption identification. Here, I will traverse my AD works with promising new directions, particularly emphasizing reproducible benchmarks (Part 1), automated algorithms (Part 2), and scalable systems (Part 3).
Select and Augment: Enhanced Dense Retrieval Knowledge Graph Augmentation (Abstract Reprint)
Authors: Abaho Micheal , Alfaifi Yousef H.
Published: March 2024

Injecting textual information into knowledge graph (KG) entity representations has
been a worthwhile expedition in terms of improving performance in KG oriented tasks
within the NLP community. External knowledge often adopted to enhance KG embeddings
ranges from semantically rich lexical dependency parsed features to a set of relevant key
words to entire text descriptions supplied from an external corpus such as wikipedia and
many more. Despite the gains this innovation (Text-enhanced KG embeddings) has made,
the proposal in this work suggests that it can be improved even further. Instead of using
a single text description (which would not sufficiently represent an entity because of the
inherent lexical ambiguity of text), we propose a multi-task framework that jointly selects a
set of text descriptions relevant to KG entities as well as align or augment KG embeddings
with text descriptions. Different from prior work that plugs formal entity descriptions
declared in knowledge bases, this framework leverages a retriever model to selectively identify
richer or highly relevant text descriptions to use in augmenting entities. Furthermore, the
framework treats the number of descriptions to use in augmentation process as a parameter,
which allows the flexibility of enumerating across several numbers before identifying an
appropriate number. Experiment results for Link Prediction demonstrate a 5.5% and 3.5%
percentage increase in the Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) and Hits@10 scores respectively,
in comparison to text-enhanced knowledge graph augmentation methods using traditional
CNNs.
Post-trained Convolution Networks for Single Image Super-resolution (Abstract Reprint)
Authors: Zandavi Seid Miad
Published: March 2024

A new method is proposed to increase the accuracy of the state-of-the-art single image super-resolution (SISR) using novel training procedure. The proposed method, named post-trained convolutional neural network (CNN), is carried out stochastic dual simplex algorithm (SDSA) in the last reconstruction layer. The method utilizes contextual information to update the last reconstruction layer of CNN. The extracted contextual information is projected to the last reconstructed layer by optimized weights and the bias is managed through SDSA. Post-trained CNN is applied to the very deep super-resolution (VDSR) method to show its performance. The quantitative and visual results demonstrate that the proposed post-trained VDSR (PTVDSR) exhibits excellent and competitive performance when compared with the VDSR and other super-resolution methods.
DCV2I: A Practical Approach for Supporting Geographers’ Visual Interpretation in Dune Segmentation with Deep Vision Models
Authors: Lu Anqi , Wu Zifeng , Jiang Zheng , Wang Wei , Hasi Eerdun , Wang Yi
Published: March 2024

Visual interpretation is extremely important in human geography as the primary technique for geographers to use photograph data in identifying, classifying, and quantifying geographic and topological objects or regions. However, it is also time-consuming and requires overwhelming manual effort from professional geographers. This paper describes our interdisciplinary team's efforts in integrating computer vision models with geographers' visual image interpretation process to reduce their workload in interpreting images. Focusing on the dune segmentation task, we proposed an approach featuring a deep dune segmentation model to identify dunes and label their ranges in an automated way. By developing a tool to connect our model with ArcGIS, one of the most popular workbenches for visual interpretation, geographers can further refine the automatically-generated dune segmentation on images without learning any CV or deep learning techniques. Our approach thus realized a non-invasive change to geographers' visual interpretation routines, reducing their manual efforts while incurring minimal interruptions to their work routines and tools they are familiar with. Deployment with a leading Chinese geography research institution demonstrated the potential of our approach in supporting geographers in researching and solving drylands desertification.
The Virtual Driving Instructor: Multi-Agent System Collaborating via Knowledge Graph for Scalable Driver Education
Authors: Rehm Johannes , Reshodko Irina , Børresen Stian Zimmermann , Gundersen Odd Erik
Published: March 2024

This paper introduces the design, development, and deployment of a Virtual Driving Instructor (VDI) for enhanced driver education.
The VDI provides personalized, real-time feedback to students in a driving simulator, addressing some of the limitations of traditional driver instruction.
Employing a hybrid AI system, the VDI combines rule-based agents, learning-based agents, knowledge graphs, and Bayesian networks to assess and monitor student performance in a comprehensive manner.
Implemented in multiple simulators at a driving school in Norway, the system aims to leverage AI and driving simulation to improve both the learning experience and the efficiency of instruction.
Initial feedback from students has been largely positive, highlighting the effectiveness of this integration while also pointing to areas for further improvement.
This work marks a significant stride in infusing technology into driver education, offering a scalable and efficient approach to instruction.
ETDPC: A Multimodality Framework for Classifying Pages in Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Authors: Choudhury Muntabir Hasan , Salsabil Lamia , Ingram William A. , Fox Edward A. , Wu Jian
Published: March 2024

Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) have been proposed, advocated, and generated for more than 25 years. Although ETDs are hosted by commercial or institutional digital library repositories, they are still an understudied type of scholarly big data, partially because they are usually longer than conference and journal papers. Segmenting ETDs will allow researchers to study sectional content. Readers can navigate to particular pages of interest, to discover and explore the content buried in these long documents. Most existing frameworks on document page classification are designed for classifying general documents, and perform poorly on ETDs. In this paper, we propose ETDPC. Its backbone is a two-stream multimodal model with a cross-attention network to classify ETD pages into 13 categories. To overcome the challenge of imbalanced labeled samples, we augmented data for minority categories and employed a hierarchical classifier. ETDPC outperforms the state-of-the-art models in all categories, achieving an F1 of 0.84 -- 0.96 for 9 out of 13 categories. We also demonstrated its data efficiency. The code and data can be found on GitHub (https://github.com/lamps-lab/ETDMiner/tree/master/etd_segmentation).
Pharmacokinetics-Informed Neural Network for Predicting Opioid Administration Moments with Wearable Sensors
Authors: Gullapalli Bhanu Teja , Carreiro Stephanie , Chapman Brittany P , Garland Eric L , Rahman Tauhidur
Published: March 2024

Long-term and high-dose prescription opioid use places individuals at risk for opioid misuse, opioid use disorder (OUD), and overdose. Existing methods for monitoring opioid use and detecting misuse rely on self-reports, which are prone to reporting bias, and toxicology testing, which may be infeasible in outpatient settings. Although wearable technologies for monitoring day-to-day health metrics have gained significant traction in recent years due to their ease of use, flexibility, and advancements in sensor technology, their application within the opioid use space remains underexplored. In the current work, we demonstrate that oral opioid administrations can be detected using physiological signals collected from a wrist sensor. More importantly, we show that models informed by opioid pharmacokinetics increase reliability in predicting the timing of opioid administrations. Forty-two individuals who were prescribed opioids as a part of their medical treatment in-hospital and after discharge were enrolled. Participants wore a wrist sensor throughout the study, while opioid administrations were tracked using electronic medical records and self-reports. We collected 1,983 hours of sensor data containing 187 opioid administrations from the inpatient setting and 927 hours of sensor data containing 40 opioid administrations from the outpatient setting. We demonstrate that a self-supervised pre-trained model, capable of learning the canonical time series of plasma concentration of the drug derived from opioid pharmacokinetics, can reliably detect opioid administration in both settings. Our work suggests the potential of pharmacokinetic-informed, data-driven models to objectively detect opioid use in daily life.
Improving Health Information Access in the World’s Largest Maternal Mobile Health Program via Bandit Algorithms
Authors: Lalan Arshika , Verma Shresth , Rodriguez Diaz Paula , Danassis Panayiotis , Mahale Amrita , Madhu Sudan Kumar , Hegde Aparna , Tambe Milind , Taneja Aparna
Published: March 2024

Harnessing the wide-spread availability of cell phones, many nonprofits have launched mobile health (mHealth) programs to deliver information via voice or text to beneficiaries in underserved communities, with maternal and infant health being a key area of such mHealth programs. Unfortunately, dwindling listenership is a major challenge, requiring targeted interventions using limited resources. This paper focuses on Kilkari, the world's largest mHealth program for maternal and child care -- with over 3 million active subscribers at a time -- launched by India's Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) and run by the non-profit ARMMAN. We present a system called CHAHAK that aims to reduce automated dropouts as well as boost engagement with the program through the strategic allocation of interventions to beneficiaries. Past work in a similar domain has focused on a much smaller scale mHealth program and used markovian restless multiarmed bandits to optimize a single limited intervention resource. However this paper demonstrates the challenges in adopting a markovian approach in Kilkari; therefore CHAHAK instead relies on non-markovian time-series restless bandits, and optimizes a layered set of multiple interventions to improve listenership. We use real Kilkari data from the Odisha state in India to show CHAHAK's effectiveness in harnessing multiple interventions to boost listenership, benefiting marginalized communities. When deployed CHAHAK will assist the largest maternal mHealth program to date.
Symbol Description Reading
Authors: Lynch Karol , Eck Bradley , Ploennigs Joern
Published: March 2024

Mathematical formulas give concise representations of a document's key ideas in many natural sciences and engineering domains. The symbols that make up formulas carry semantic meaning that may differ by document or equation. What does ? mean in a given paper? Interpreting the symbols that comprise formulas requires identifying descriptions from the surrounding text. We approach this task of symbol description reading as an application of current AI technologies targeting the tuning of large language models for particular domains and automation of machine learning. Our pipeline integrates AI question answering and natural language processing to read symbol descriptions. We consider extractive and generative AI model variations and apply our pipeline on two example tasks of symbol description reading. Promising results provide motivation for wider deployment for which we describe a microservice architecture and related challenges.
Redefining the Laparoscopic Spatial Sense: AI-Based Intra- and Postoperative Measurement from Stereoimages
Authors: Müller Leopold , Hemmer Patrick , Queisner Moritz , Sauer Igor , Allmendinger Simeon , Jakubik Johannes , Vössing Michael , Kühl Niklas
Published: March 2024

A significant challenge in image-guided surgery is the accurate measurement task of relevant structures such as vessel segments, resection margins, or bowel lengths. While this task is an essential component of many surgeries, it involves substantial human effort and is prone to inaccuracies. In this paper, we develop a novel human-AI-based method for laparoscopic measurements utilizing stereo vision that has been guided by practicing surgeons. Based on a holistic qualitative requirements analysis, this work proposes a comprehensive measurement method, which comprises state-of-the-art machine learning architectures, such as RAFT-Stereo and YOLOv8. The developed method is assessed in various realistic experimental evaluation environments. Our results outline the potential of our method achieving high accuracies in distance measurements with errors below 1 mm. Furthermore, on-surface measurements demonstrate robustness when applied in challenging environments with textureless regions. Overall, by addressing the inherent challenges of image-guided surgery, we lay the foundation for a more robust and accurate solution for intra- and postoperative measurements, enabling more precise, safe, and efficient surgical procedures.
BERTground: A Transformer-Based Model of Background Spectra on the ISS-Based NICER Space Telescope
Authors: Nhu Anh N. , Zoghbi Abderahmen
Published: March 2024

The Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) is an International Space Station (ISS)-based Space Telescope developed by NASA and devoted to the study of high-energy X-Ray sources in the universe, including but not limited to neutron stars, pulsars, and black holes in stellar systems and active galactic nuclei (AGN). One prominent problem with NICER observations is the highly variable background spectra, obscuring actual signals of astrophysical sources and negatively affecting scientific analysis of the targets. Therefore, obtaining accurate estimations of the background spectra is crucial to filter the noise and facilitate better scientific discoveries of new astronomical objects. In this paper, we propose the very first Deep Neural Network architecture to model the NICER background spectra variation using information about the spacecraft and telescope associated with each observation. In particular, we develop a BERT-based architecture with tokenizers applied to different groups of features in our tabular dataset. We also introduce an adapted Tabular Deep Residual Network architecture as the predictor following the Transformer modules in our network. We show that our model outperforms the current state-of-the-art background model developed by the NICER team in most evaluation metrics. Finally, we discuss pathways and future work for the deployment of this model on NASA’s next versions of HEASARC Software packages.
Building Higher-Order Abstractions from the Components of Recommender Systems
Authors: Kadıoğlu Serdar , Kleynhans Bernard
Published: March 2024

We present a modular recommender system framework that tightly integrates yet maintains the independence of individual components, thus satisfying two of the most critical aspects of industrial applications, generality and specificity. On the one hand, we ensure that each component remains self-contained and is ready to serve in other applications beyond recommender systems. On the other hand, when these components are combined, a unified theme emerges for recommender systems. We present the details of each component in the context of recommender systems and other applications. We release each component as an open-source library, and most importantly, we release their integration under MAB2REC, an industry-strength open-source software for building bandit-based recommender systems. By bringing standalone components together, Mab2Rec realizes a powerful and scalable toolchain to build and deploy business-relevant personalization applications. Finally, we share our experience and best practices for user training, adoption, performance evaluation, deployment, and model governance within the enterprise and the broader community.
A Generalizable Theory-Driven Agent-Based Framework to Study Conflict-Induced Forced Migration
Authors: Mehrab Zakaria , Stundal Logan , Venkatramanan Srinivasan , Swarup Samarth , Lewis Bryan Leroy , Mortveit Henning S. , Barrett Christopher L. , Pandey Abhishek , Wells Chad R. , Galvani Alison P. , Singer Burton H. , Moghadas Seyed M. , Leblang David , Colwell Rita R. , Marathe Madhav V.
Published: March 2024

Large-scale population displacements arising from conflict-induced forced migration generate uncertainty and introduce several policy challenges. Addressing these concerns requires an interdisciplinary approach that integrates knowledge from both computational modeling and social sciences. We propose a generalized computational agent-based modeling framework grounded by Theory of Planned Behavior to model conflict-induced migration outflows within Ukraine during the start of that conflict in 2022. Existing migration modeling frameworks that attempt to address policy implications primarily focus on destination while leaving absent a generalized computational framework grounded by social theory focused on the conflict-induced region. We propose an agent-based framework utilizing a spatiotemporal gravity model and a Bi-threshold model over a Graph Dynamical System to update migration status of agents in conflict-induced regions at fine temporal and spatial granularity. This approach significantly outperforms previous work when examining the case of Russian invasion in Ukraine. Policy implications of the proposed framework are demonstrated by modeling the migration behavior of Ukrainian civilians attempting to flee from regions encircled by Russian forces. We also showcase the generalizability of the model by simulating a past conflict in Burundi, an alternative conflict setting. Results demonstrate the utility of the framework for assessing conflict-induced migration in varied settings as well as identifying vulnerable civilian populations.
Addressing Digital and AI Skills Gaps in European Living Areas: A Comparative Analysis of Small and Large Communities
Authors: Pham Long , O'Sullivan Barry , Scantamburlo Teresa , Mai Tai
Published: March 2024

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to permeate various aspects of societies, understanding the disparities in AI knowledge and skills across different living areas becomes imperative. Small living areas have emerged as significant contributors to Europe's economy, offering an alternative to the bustling environment of larger cities for those seeking an improved quality of life. Nonetheless, they often encounter challenges related to digital infrastructure, access to financial resources, and digital skills gaps, limiting their economic and social growth prospects. This study investigates the digital and AI skills gaps in the context of small and large European living areas, shedding light on the potential hindrances to unleashing the full economic and social potentials of these regions in an AI-enabled economy. Drawing from a comprehensive dataset encompassing 4,006 respondents across eight EU countries, this research examines the current perceptions and understandings of AI and digital skills within two distinct population groups: residents of smaller living areas and their counterparts in larger communities. Through bivariate analysis, notable insights are revealed concerning trust in AI solutions and entities, self-assessed digital skills, AI Awareness, AI Attitudes and demography variables in both population groups. These insights may refer to the significance of addressing digital and AI skills gaps in fostering growth and preparedness for the AI-driven future. As AI becomes increasingly integral to various aspects of society, targeted interventions and policies are essential to bridge these gaps and enable individuals and communities to harness the transformative potential of AI-enabled economies.
Build Your Own Robot Friend: An Open-Source Learning Module for Accessible and Engaging AI Education
Authors: Shi Zhonghao , O'Connell Amy , Li Zongjian , Liu Siqi , Ayissi Jennifer , Hoffman Guy , Soleymani Mohammad , Matarić Maja J.
Published: March 2024

As artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role in our society and global economy, AI education and literacy have become necessary components in college and K-12 education to prepare students for an AI-powered society. However, current AI curricula have not yet been made accessible and engaging enough for students and schools from all socio-economic backgrounds with different educational goals. In this work, we developed an open-source learning module for college and high school students, which allows students to build their own robot companion from the ground up. This open platform can be used to provide hands-on experience and introductory knowledge about various aspects of AI, including robotics, machine learning (ML), software engineering, and mechanical engineering. Because of the social and personal nature of a socially assistive robot companion, this module also puts a special emphasis on human-centered AI, enabling students to develop a better understanding of human-AI interaction and AI ethics through hands-on learning activities. With open-source documentation, assembling manuals and affordable materials, students from different socio-economic backgrounds can personalize their learning experience based on their individual educational goals. To evaluate the student-perceived quality of our module, we conducted a usability testing workshop with 15 college students recruited from a minority-serving institution. Our results indicate that our AI module is effective, easy-to-follow, and engaging, and it increases student interest in studying AI/ML and robotics in the future. We hope that this work will contribute toward accessible and engaging AI education in human-AI interaction for college and high school students.
RetLLM-E: Retrieval-Prompt Strategy for Question-Answering on Student Discussion Forums
Authors: Mitra Chancharik , Miroyan Mihran , Jain Rishi , Kumud Vedant , Ranade Gireeja , Norouzi Narges
Published: March 2024

This paper focuses on using Large Language Models to support teaching assistants in answering questions on large student forums such as Piazza and EdSTEM. Since student questions on these forums are often closely tied to specific aspects of the institution, instructor, and course delivery, general-purpose LLMs do not directly do well on this task.
We introduce RetLLM-E, a method that combines text-retrieval and prompting approaches to enable LLMs to provide precise and high-quality answers to student questions. When presented with a student question, our system initiates a two-step process. First, it retrieves relevant context from (i) a dataset of student questions addressed by course instructors
(Q&A Retrieval) and (ii) relevant segments of course materials (Document Retrieval). RetLLM-E then prompts LLM using the retrieved text and an engineered prompt structure to
yield an answer optimized for the student question.
We present a set of quantitative and human evaluation experiments, comparing our method to ground truth answers to questions in a test set of actual student questions. Our results demonstrate that our approach provides higher-quality responses to course-related questions than an LLM operating without context or relying solely on retrieval-based context. RetLLM-E can easily be adopted in different courses, providing instructors and students with context-aware automatic responses.
From Consumers to Critical Users: Prompty, an AI Literacy Tool for High School Students
Authors: Varuvel Dennison Deepak , Garcia Raycelle C. C. , Sarin Parth , Wolf Jacob , Bywater Christine , Xie Benjamin , Lee Victor R.
Published: March 2024

In an age where Large Language Models (LLMs) expedite the generation of text, the skills for critically evaluating and creating meaningful text using these models are often lacking. To help classroom teachers address this, we introduce Prompty, a specialized teaching tool co-designed to facilitate both critical and effective use of LLMs. Prompty serves multiple learning goals: it allows students to critically evaluate text generated by LLMs, aids in their writing practice, and provides a deeper understanding of how LLMs function—all within a student-friendly environment secured by essential guardrails. Prompty was co-designed in collaboration with high school teachers as part of CRAFT, an initiative by Stanford University to promote AI literacy. It was pilot-tested in a high school English class to serve as an AI writing assistant, focusing on the critical evaluation of machine-generated text. This trial yielded preliminary evidence that attests to the tool's effectiveness in fulfilling its educational goals. The findings from the pilot study indicate that easy-to-use tools like Prompty have great potential. These tools can be adapted to fit the goals of individual teachers. They can help in achieving subject-specific learning goals while serving as an effective way to teach AI concepts in high school.
Does Robin Hood Use a Lightsaber?: Automated Planning for Storytelling
Authors: Simon Nisha
Published: March 2024

Humans have been using stories to entertain, educate, and persuade audiences for centuries. The advent of modern AI tools in the form of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as chatGPT continues to fulfill this purpose. However while recent work has shown that LLMs can successfully be used for narrative generation, they lack coherence and can be prone to repetition and stilted language. Automated Planning can therefore be combined with Natural Language text generation to create narratives (stories) that are logical, coherent, and believable. A planning model provides scaffolding to an LLM so that the LLM's language generation is context-dependent, in order to allow users to create more coherent, logical, and believable stories in a variety of domains.
Autonomous Policy Explanations for Effective Human-Machine Teaming
Authors: Tabrez Aaquib
Published: March 2024

Policy explanation, a process for describing the behavior of an autonomous system, plays a crucial role in effectively conveying an agent's decision-making rationale to human collaborators and is essential for safe real-world deployments. It becomes even more critical in effective human-robot teaming, where good communication allows teams to adapt and improvise successfully during uncertain situations by enabling value alignment within the teams. This thesis proposal focuses on improving human-machine teaming by developing novel human-centered explainable AI (xAI) techniques that empower autonomous agents to communicate their capabilities and limitations via multiple modalities, teach and influence human teammates' behavior as decision-support systems, and effectively build and manage trust in HRI systems.
Preference-Aware Constrained Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization (Student Abstract)
Authors: Ahmadianshalchi Alaleh , Belakaria Syrine , Doppa Janardhan Rao
Published: March 2024

We consider the problem of constrained multi-objective optimization over black-box objectives, with user-defined preferences, with a largely infeasible input space. Our goal is to approximate the optimal Pareto set from the small fraction of feasible inputs. The main challenges include huge design space, multiple objectives, numerous constraints, and rare feasible inputs identified only through expensive experiments. We present PAC-MOO, a novel preference-aware multi-objective Bayesian optimization algorithm to solve this problem. It leverages surrogate models for objectives and constraints to intelligently select the sequence of inputs for evaluation to achieve the target goal.
Incorporating Serverless Computing into P2P Networks for ML Training: In-Database Tasks and Their Scalability Implications (Student Abstract)
Authors: Barrak Amine
Published: March 2024

Distributed ML addresses challenges from increasing data and model complexities. Peer to peer (P2P) networks in distributed ML offer scalability and fault tolerance. However, they also encounter challenges related to resource consumption, and communication overhead as the number of participating peers grows. This research introduces a novel architecture that combines serverless computing with P2P networks for distributed training. Serverless computing enhances this model with parallel processing and cost effective scalability, suitable for resource-intensive tasks. Preliminary results show that peers can offload expensive computational tasks to serverless platforms. However, their inherent statelessness necessitates strong communication methods, suggesting a pivotal role for databases. To this end, we have enhanced an in memory database to support ML training tasks.
JoLT: Jointly Learned Representations of Language and Time-Series for Clinical Time-Series Interpretation (Student Abstract)
Authors: Cai Yifu , Srinivasan Arvind , Goswami Mononito , Choudhry Arjun , Dubrawski Artur
Published: March 2024

Time-series and text data are prevalent in healthcare and frequently co-exist, yet they are typically modeled in isolation. Even studies that jointly model time-series and text, do so by converting time-series to images or graphs. We hypothesize that explicitly modeling time-series jointly with text can improve tasks such as summarization and question answering for time-series data, which have received little attention so far. To address this gap, we introduce JoLT to jointly learn desired representations from pre-trained time-series and text models. JoLT utilizes a Querying Transformer (Q-Former) to align the time-series and text representations. Our experiments on a large real-world electrocardiography dataset for medical time-series summarization show that JoLT outperforms state-of-the-art image captioning approaches.
Dual Mapping of 2D StyleGAN for 3D-Aware Image Generation and Manipulation (Student Abstract)
Authors: Chen Zhuo , Zhao Haimei , Wang Chaoyue , Yuan Bo , Li Xiu
Published: March 2024

3D-aware GANs successfully solve the problem of 3D-consistency generation and furthermore provide a 3D shape of the generated object. However, the application of the volume renderer disturbs the disentanglement of the latent space, which makes it difficult to manipulate 3D-aware GANs and lowers the image quality of style-based generators. In this work, we devise a dual-mapping framework to make the generated images of pretrained 2D StyleGAN consistent in 3D space. We utilize a tri-plane representation to estimate the 3D shape of the generated object and two mapping networks to bridge the latent space of StyleGAN and the 3D tri-plane space. Our method does not alter the parameters of the pretrained generator, which means the interpretability of latent space is preserved for various image manipulations. Experiments show that our method lifts the 3D awareness of pretrained 2D StyleGAN to 3D-aware GANs and outperforms the 3D-aware GANs in controllability and image quality.
Simple Orthogonal Graph Representation Learning (Student Abstract)
Authors: Cui Taoyong , Dong Yuhan
Published: March 2024

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted significant interest recently since they can effectively process and analyze graph-structured data commonly found in real-world applications. However, the predicament that GNNs are difficult to train becomes worse as the layers increase. The essence of this problem is that stacking layers will reduce the stability of forward propagation and gradient back-propagation. And as the increasing scale of models (measured by the number of parameters), how to efficiently and effectively adapt it to particular downstream tasks becomes an intriguing research issue. In this work, motivated by the effect of orthogonality constraints, we propose a simple orthogonal training framework to impose the orthogonality constraints on GNNs, which can help models find a solution vector in a specific low dimensional subspace and stabilize the signaling processes at both the forward and backward directions. Specifically, we propose a novel polar decomposition-based orthogonal initialization (PDOI-R) algorithm, which can identify the low intrinsic dimension within the Stiefel Manifold and stabilize the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in multiple downstream tasks, showcasing its generality. The simple method can help existing state-of-the-art models achieve better performance.
Strategic Recommendation: Revenue Optimal Matching for Online Platforms (Student Abstract)
Authors: D'Amico-Wong Luca , Ma Gary Qiurui , Parkes David
Published: March 2024

We consider a platform in a two-sided market with unit-supply sellers and unit-demand buyers. Each buyer can transact with a subset of sellers it knows off platform and another seller that the platform recommends. Given the choice of sellers, transactions and prices form a competitive equilibrium. The platform selects one seller for each buyer, and charges a fixed percentage of prices to all transactions that it recommends. The platform seeks to maximize total revenue.

We show that the platform's problem is NP-hard, even when each buyer knows at most two buyers off platform. Finally, when each buyer values all sellers equally and knows only one buyer off platform, we provide a polynomial time algorithm that optimally solves the problem.
PICSR: Prototype-Informed Cross-Silo Router for Federated Learning (Student Abstract)
Authors: Enouen Eric , Caldas Sebastian , Goswami Mononito , Dubrawski Artur
Published: March 2024

Federated Learning is an effective approach for learning from data distributed across multiple institutions. While most existing studies are aimed at improving predictive accuracy of models, little work has been done to explain knowledge differences between institutions and the benefits of collaboration. Understanding these differences is critical in cross-silo federated learning domains, e.g., in healthcare or banking, where each institution or silo has a different underlying distribution and stakeholders want to understand how their institution compares to their partners. We introduce Prototype-Informed Cross-Silo Router (PICSR) which utilizes a mixture of experts approach to combine local models derived from multiple silos. Furthermore, by computing data similarity to prototypical samples from each silo, we are able to ground the router’s predictions in the underlying dataset distributions. Experiments on a real-world heart disease prediction dataset show that PICSR retains high performance while enabling further explanations on the differences among institutions compared to a single black-box model.
Spatial-Temporal Augmentation for Crime Prediction (Student Abstract)
Authors: Fu Hongzhu , Zhou Fan , Guo Qing , Gao Qiang
Published: March 2024

Crime prediction stands as a pivotal concern within the realm of urban management due to its potential threats to public safety. While prior research has predominantly focused on unraveling the intricate dependencies among urban regions and temporal dynamics, the challenges posed by the scarcity and uncertainty of historical crime data have not been thoroughly investigated. This study introduces an innovative spatial-temporal augmented learning framework for crime prediction, namely STAug. In STAug, we devise a CrimeMix to improve the ability of generalization. Furthermore, we harness a spatial-temporal aggregation to capture and incorporate multiple correlations covering the temporal, spatial, and crime-type aspects. Experiments on two real-world datasets underscore the superiority of STAug over several baselines.
Evaluating the Efficacy of Prompting Techniques for Debiasing Language Model Outputs (Student Abstract)
Authors: Furniturewala Shaz , Jandial Surgan , Java Abhinav , Shahid Simra , Banerjee Pragyan , Krishnamurthy Balaji , Bhatia Sumit , Jaidka Kokil
Published: March 2024

Achieving fairness in Large Language Models (LLMs) continues to pose a persistent challenge, as these models are prone to inheriting biases from their training data, which can subsequently impact their performance in various applications. There is a need to systematically explore whether structured prompting techniques can offer opportunities for debiased text generation by LLMs. In this work, we designed an evaluative framework to test the efficacy of different prompting techniques for debiasing text along different dimensions. We aim to devise a general structured prompting approach to achieve fairness that generalizes well to different texts and LLMs.
Novax or Novak? Estimating Social Media Stance towards Celebrity Vaccine Hesitancy (Student Abstract)
Authors: Hota Madhav , Khorramrouz Adel , KhudaBukhsh Ashiqur R.
Published: March 2024

On 15 January 2022, noted tennis player Novak Djokovic was deported from Australia due to his unvaccinated status for the COVID-19 vaccine. This paper presents a stance classifier and evaluates public reaction to this episode and the impact of this behavior on social media discourse on YouTube. We observed a significant spike of individuals who supported and opposed his behavior at the time of the episode. Supporters outnumbered those who opposed this behavior by over 4x. Our study reports a disturbing trend that following every major Djokovic win, even now, vaccine skeptics often conflate his tennis success as a fitting reply to vaccine mandates.
Multi-Scale Dynamic Graph Learning for Time Series Anomaly Detection (Student Abstract)
Authors: Jin Yixuan , Wei Yutao , Cheng Zhangtao , Tai Wenxin , Xiao Chunjing , Zhong Ting
Published: March 2024

The success of graph neural networks (GNNs) has spurred numerous new works leveraging GNNs for modeling multivariate time series anomaly detection. Despite their achieved performance improvements, most of them only consider static graph to describe the spatial-temporal dependencies between time series. Moreover, existing works neglect the time and scale-changing structures of time series. In this work, we propose MDGAD, a novel multi-scale dynamic graph structure learning approach for time series anomaly detection. We design a multi-scale graph structure learning module that captures the complex correlations among time series, constructing an evolving graph at each scale. Meanwhile, an anomaly detector is used to combine bilateral prediction errors to detect abnormal data. Experiments conducted on two time series datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MDGAD.
Effective Data Distillation for Tabular Datasets (Student Abstract)
Authors: Kang Inwon , Ram Parikshit , Zhou Yi , Samulowitz Horst , Seneviratne Oshani
Published: March 2024

Data distillation is a technique of reducing a large dataset into a smaller dataset. The smaller dataset can then be used to train a model which can perform comparably to a model trained on the full dataset. Past works have examined this approach for image datasets, focusing on neural networks as target models. However, tabular datasets pose new challenges not seen in images. A sample in tabular dataset is a one dimensional vector unlike the two (or three) dimensional pixel grid of images, and Non-NN models such as XGBoost can often outperform neural network (NN) based models. Our contribution in this work is two-fold: 1) We show in our work that data distillation methods from images do not translate directly to tabular data; 2) We propose a new distillation method that consistently outperforms the baseline for multiple different models, including non-NN models such as XGBoost.
Decompositions in Compositional Translation of LTLf to DFA (Student Abstract)
Authors: Kankariya Yash , Bansal Suguman
Published: March 2024

Prior compositional methods in LTLf to DFA conversion have focussed on improving the composition phase. In this work, we examine improvements to the decomposition phase that result in overall improvements in LTLf to DFA translation. Our work is based on reducing the structure of the underlying Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) of a formula such that the new AST results in fewer composition operations.
Cluster-Based Sampling in Hindsight Experience Replay for Robotic Tasks (Student Abstract)
Authors: Kim Taeyoung , Har Dongsoo
Published: March 2024

In multi-goal reinforcement learning with a sparse binary reward, training agents is particularly challenging, due to a lack of successful experiences. To solve this problem, hindsight experience replay (HER) generates successful experiences even from unsuccessful ones. However, generating successful experiences from uniformly sampled ones is not an efficient process. In this paper, the impact of exploiting the property of achieved goals in generating successful experiences is investigated and a novel cluster-based sampling strategy is proposed. The proposed sampling strategy groups episodes with different achieved goals by using a cluster model and samples experiences in the manner of HER to create the training batch. The proposed method is validated by experiments with three robotic control tasks of the OpenAI Gym. The results of experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is substantially sample efficient and achieves better performance than baseline approaches.