bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Fewer Steps, Better Performance: Efficient Cross-Modal Clip Trimming for Video Moment Retrieval Using Language
Authors: Fang Xiang , Liu Daizong , Fang Wanlong , Zhou Pan , Xu Zichuan , Xu Wenzheng , Chen Junyang , Li Renfu
Published: March 2024

Given an untrimmed video and a sentence query, video moment retrieval using language (VMR) aims to locate a target query-relevant moment. Since the untrimmed video is overlong, almost all existing VMR methods first sparsely down-sample each untrimmed video into multiple fixed-length video clips and then conduct multi-modal interactions with the query feature and expensive clip features for reasoning, which is infeasible for long real-world videos that span hours. Since the video is downsampled into fixed-length clips, some query-related frames may be filtered out, which will blur the specific boundary of the target moment, take the adjacent irrelevant frames as new boundaries, easily leading to cross-modal misalignment and introducing both boundary-bias and reasoning-bias. To this end, in this paper, we propose an efficient approach, SpotVMR, to trim the query-relevant clip. Besides, our proposed SpotVMR can serve as plug-and-play module, which achieves efficiency for state-of-the-art VMR methods while maintaining good retrieval performance. Especially, we first design a novel clip search model that learns to identify promising video regions to search conditioned on the language query. Then, we introduce a set of low-cost semantic indexing features to capture the context of objects and interactions that suggest where to search the query-relevant moment. Also, the distillation loss is utilized to address the optimization issues arising from end-to-end joint training of the clip selector and VMR model.
Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets demonstrate its effectiveness.
Benchmarking Cyber Harassment Dialogue Comprehension through Emotion-Informed Manifestations-Determinants Demarcation
Authors: Ghosh Soumitra , Singh Gopendra Vikram , Arora Jashn , Ekbal Asif
Published: March 2024

In the digital age, cybercrimes, particularly cyber harassment, have become pressing issues, targeting vulnerable individuals like children, teenagers, and women. Understanding the experiences and needs of the victims is crucial for effective support and intervention. Online conversations between victims and virtual harassment counselors (chatbots) offer valuable insights into cyber harassment manifestations (CHMs) and determinants (CHDs). However, the distinction between CHMs and CHDs remains unclear. This research is the first to introduce concrete definitions for CHMs and CHDs, investigating their distinction through automated methods to enable efficient cyber-harassment dialogue comprehension. We present a novel dataset, Cyber-MaD that contains Cyber harassment dialogues manually annotated with Manifestations and Determinants. Additionally, we design an Emotion-informed Contextual Dual attention Convolution Transformer (E-ConDuCT) framework to extract CHMs and CHDs from cyber harassment dialogues. The framework primarily: a) utilizes inherent emotion features through adjective-noun pairs modeled by an autoencoder, b) employs a unique Contextual Dual attention Convolution Transformer to learn contextual insights; and c) incorporates a demarcation module leveraging task-specific emotional knowledge and a discriminator loss function to differentiate manifestations and determinants. E-ConDuCT outperforms the state-of-the-art systems on the Cyber-MaD corpus, showcasing its potential in the extraction of CHMs and CHDs. Furthermore, its robustness is demonstrated on the emotion cause extraction task using the CARES_CEASE-v2.0 dataset of suicide notes, confirming its efficacy across diverse cause extraction objectives. Access the code and data at 1. https://www.iitp.ac.in/~ai-nlp-ml/resources.html#E-ConDuCT-on-Cyber-MaD, 2. https://github.com/Soumitra816/Manifestations-Determinants.
CityPulse: Fine-Grained Assessment of Urban Change with Street View Time Series
Authors: Huang Tianyuan , Wu Zejia , Wu Jiajun , Hwang Jackelyn , Rajagopal Ram
Published: March 2024

Urban transformations have profound societal impact on both individuals and communities at large. Accurately assessing these shifts is essential for understanding their underlying causes and ensuring sustainable urban planning. Traditional measurements often encounter constraints in spatial and temporal granularity, failing to capture real-time physical changes. While street view imagery, capturing the heartbeat of urban spaces in a pedestrian point of view, can add as a high-definition, up-to-date, and on-the-ground visual proxy of urban change. We curate the largest street view time series dataset to date, and propose an end-to-end change detection model to effectively capture physical alterations in the built environment at scale. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method by benchmark comparisons with previous literature and implementing it at the city-wide level. Our approach has the potential to supplement existing dataset and serve as a fine-grained and accurate assessment of urban change.
IndicCONAN: A Multilingual Dataset for Combating Hate Speech in Indian Context
Authors: Sahoo Nihar Ranja , Beria Gyana Prakash , Bhattacharyya Pushpak
Published: March 2024

Hate speech (HS) is a growing concern in many parts of
the world, including India, where it has led to numerous instances of violence and discrimination. The development of
effective counter-narratives (CNs) is a critical step in combating hate speech, but there is a lack of research in this
area, especially in non-English languages. In this paper, we
introduce a new dataset, IndicCONAN, of counter-narratives
against hate speech in Hindi and Indian English. We propose a scalable human-in-the-loop approach for generating counter-narratives by an auto-regressive language model
through machine generation - human correction cycle, where
the model uses augmented data from previous cycles to generate new training samples. These newly generated samples
are then reviewed and edited by annotators, leading to further
model refnement. The dataset consists of over 2,500 exam- ˜
ples of counter-narratives each in both English and Hindi corresponding to various hate speeches in the Indian context. We
also present a framework for generating CNs conditioned on
specifc CN type with a mean perplexity of 3.85 for English
and 3.70 for Hindi, a mean toxicity score of 0.04 for English
and 0.06 for Hindi, and a mean diversity of 0.08 for English
and 0.14 for Hindi. Our dataset and framework provide valuable resources for researchers and practitioners working to
combat hate speech in the Indian context.
Evaluating Pre-trial Programs Using Interpretable Machine Learning Matching Algorithms for Causal Inference
Authors: Seale-Carlisle Travis , Jain Saksham , Lee Courtney , Levenson Caroline , Ramprasad Swathi , Garrett Brandon , Roy Sudeepa , Rudin Cynthia , Volfovsky Alexander
Published: March 2024

After a person is arrested and charged with a crime, they may be released on bail and required to participate in a community supervision program while awaiting trial. These 'pre-trial programs' are common throughout the United States, but very little research has demonstrated their effectiveness. Researchers have emphasized the need for more rigorous program evaluation methods, which we introduce in this article. We describe a program evaluation pipeline that uses recent interpretable machine learning techniques for observational causal inference, and demonstrate these techniques in a study of a pre-trial program in Durham, North Carolina. Our findings show no evidence that the program either significantly increased or decreased the probability of new criminal charges. If these findings replicate, the criminal-legal system needs to either improve pre-trial programs or consider alternatives to them. The simplest option is to release low-risk individuals back into the community without subjecting them to any restrictions or conditions. Another option is to assign individuals to pre-trial programs that incentivize pro-social behavior. We believe that the techniques introduced here can provide researchers the rigorous tools they need to evaluate these programs.
Stable Matchings in Practice: A Constraint Programming Approach
Authors: Sun Zhaohong , Yamada Naoyuki , Takenami Yoshihiro , Moriwaki Daisuke , Yokoo Makoto
Published: March 2024

We study a practical two-sided matching problem of allocating children to daycare centers, which has significant social implications. We are cooperating with several municipalities in Japan and our goal is to devise a reliable and trustworthy clearing algorithm to deal with the problem. In this paper, we describe the design of our new algorithm that minimizes the number of unmatched children while ensuring stability. We evaluate our algorithm using real-life data sets, and experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm surpasses the commercial software that currently dominates the market in terms of both the number of matched children and the number of blocking coalitions (measuring stability). Our findings have been reported to local governments, and some are considering adopting our proposed algorithm in the near future, instead of the existing solution. Moreover, our model and algorithm have broader applicability to other important matching markets, such as hospital-doctor matching with couples and school choice with siblings.
Preventing Eviction-Caused Homelessness through ML-Informed Distribution of Rental Assistance
Authors: Vajiac Catalina , Frey Arun , Baumann Joachim , Smith Abigail , Amarasinghe Kasun , Lai Alice , Rodolfa Kit T. , Ghani Rayid
Published: March 2024

Rental assistance programs provide individuals with financial assistance to prevent housing instabilities caused by evictions and avert homelessness. Since these programs operate under resource constraints, they must decide who to prioritize. Typically, funding is distributed by a reactive allocation process that does not systematically consider risk of future homelessness. We partnered with Anonymous County (PA) to explore a proactive and preventative allocation approach that prioritizes individuals facing eviction based on their risk of future homelessness. Our ML models, trained on state and county administrative data accurately identify at-risk individuals, outperforming simpler prioritization approaches by at least 20% while meeting our equity and fairness goals across race and gender. Furthermore, our approach would reach 28% of individuals who are overlooked by the current process and end up homeless. Beyond improvements to the rental assistance program in Anonymous County, this study can inform the development of evidence-based decision support tools in similar contexts, including lessons about data needs, model design, evaluation, and field validation.
SimFair: Physics-Guided Fairness-Aware Learning with Simulation Models
Authors: Wang Zhihao , Xie Yiqun , Li Zhili , Jia Xiaowei , Jiang Zhe , Jia Aolin , Xu Shuo
Published: March 2024

Fairness-awareness has emerged as an essential building block for the responsible use of artificial intelligence in real applications. In many cases, inequity in performance is due to the change in distribution over different regions. While techniques have been developed to improve the transferability of fairness, a solution to the problem is not always feasible with no samples from the new regions, which is a bottleneck for pure data-driven attempts. Fortunately, physics-based mechanistic models have been studied for many problems with major social impacts. We propose SimFair, a physics-guided fairness-aware learning framework, which bridges the data limitation by integrating physical-rule-based simulation and inverse modeling into the training design. Using temperature prediction as an example, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SimFair in fairness preservation.
Fairness-Aware Structured Pruning in Transformers
Authors: Zayed Abdelrahman , Mordido Gonçalo , Shabanian Samira , Baldini Ioana , Chandar Sarath
Published: March 2024

The increasing size of large language models (LLMs) has introduced challenges in their training and inference. Removing model components is perceived as a solution to tackle the large model sizes, however, existing pruning methods solely focus on performance, without considering an essential aspect for the responsible use of LLMs: model fairness. It is crucial to address the fairness of LLMs towards diverse groups, such as women, Black people, LGBTQ+, Jewish communities, among others, as they are being deployed and available to a wide audience. In this work, first, we investigate how attention heads impact fairness and performance in pre-trained transformer-based language models. We then propose a novel method to prune the attention heads that negatively impact fairness while retaining the heads critical for performance, i.e. language modeling capabilities. Our approach is practical in terms of time and resources, as it does not require fine-tuning the final pruned, and fairer, model. Our findings demonstrate a reduction in gender bias by 19%, 19.5%, 39.5%, 34.7%, 23%, and 8% for DistilGPT-2, GPT-2, GPT-Neo of two different sizes, GPT-J, and Llama 2 models, respectively, in comparison to the biased model, with only a slight decrease in performance. WARNING: This work uses language that is offensive in nature.
Multiple-Source Localization from a Single-Snapshot Observation Using Graph Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Zhang Zonghan , Zhang Zijian , Chen Zhiqian
Published: March 2024

Due to the significance of its various applications, source localization has garnered considerable attention as one of the most important means to confront diffusion hazards. Multi-source localization from a single-snapshot observation is especially relevant due to its prevalence. However, the inherent complexities of this problem, such as limited information, interactions among sources, and dependence on diffusion models, pose challenges to resolution. Current methods typically utilize heuristics and greedy selection, and they are usually bonded with one diffusion model. Consequently, their effectiveness is constrained.
To address these limitations, we propose a simulation-based method termed BOSouL. Bayesian optimization (BO) is adopted to approximate the results for its sample efficiency. A surrogate function models uncertainty from the limited information. It takes sets of nodes as the input instead of individual nodes. BOSouL can incorporate any diffusion model in the data acquisition process through simulations. Empirical studies demonstrate that its performance is robust across graph structures and diffusion models. The code is available at https://github.com/XGraph-Team/BOSouL.
Towards a More Burkean Approach to Computational Social Choice
Authors: Lev Omer
Published: March 2024

In the last few years, a lot of the activity of the computational social choice community has focused on novel mechanisms for reaching decisions by large groups of people. While this research makes meaningful scientific contributions, many of these mechanisms are not quite useful in realistic decision-making settings. Moreover, their radicalism ignores the centuries-old experience we have with large-scale human decision-making, and what it teaches us about what works. We believe it is important the community engage with mechanisms which are widely-used in the real world, as they may hold a key to a deeper understanding of how people reach decisions and the way that helps them do that productively. Moreover, letting the community bring its analysis and understanding to these will allow for algorithmic suggestions that have some chance of being implemented (and, thus, can contribute to the public debate on these topics). In particular, we highlight the relatively less-investigated role of parties and grouping of voters and candidates, and the role of executive capacity in analyzing decision-making structures.
Towards Robust Visual Understanding: from Recognition to Reasoning
Authors: Gokhale Tejas
Published: March 2024

Models that learn from data are widely and rapidly being deployed today for real-world use, but they suffer from unforeseen failures due to distribution shift, adversarial attacks, noise and corruption, and data scarcity. But many failures also occur because many modern AI tasks require reasoning beyond pattern matching -- and such reasoning abilities are difficult to formulate as data-based input-output function fitting. The reliability problem has become increasingly important under the new paradigm of semantic ``multimodal'' learning. My research provides avenues to develop robust and reliable computer vision systems, particularly by leveraging the interactions between vision and language. In this AAAI New Faculty highlights talk, I will cover three thematic areas of my research, ranging from robustness in computer vision, open-domain reliability in visual reasoning, and challenges and opportunities in evaluation of generative models. Readers are encouraged to refer to my website (www.tejasgokhale.com) for more details and updates from my lab's activities towards the goal of robust visual understanding.
Scaling Offline Evaluation of Reinforcement Learning Agents through Abstraction
Authors: Hanna Josiah P.
Published: March 2024

A critical challenge for the widescale adoption of reinforcement learning (RL) is the need to give domain experts assurance that learned policies will improve decision-making -- and not lead to unacceptable behavior. To meet this challenge, my work aims to develop new methods for offline policy evaluation in real world RL domains. There has been much recent interest in offline evaluation and many advances. However, recent benchmarking efforts have also shown that there remains a substantial gap between current state-of-the-art methods and real world domains such as robotics. Towards scalable offline evaluation, my group is investigating the use of methods for abstraction and representation learning. In this new faculty highlight, I will present our recent results that show the promise of this direction for scaling offline evaluation in RL domains. I will then describe future directions in this line of that work which will further realize the promise of offline policy evaluation for increasing confidence in deployed RL.
Deep Learning on Graphs: A Data-Centric Exploration
Authors: Jin Wei
Published: March 2024

Many learning tasks in Artificial Intelligence (AI) require dealing with graph data, ranging from biology and chemistry to finance and education. As powerful deep learning tools for graphs, graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various graph-related applications. Despite the significant accomplishments of GNNs, recent studies have highlighted that their efficiency and effectiveness face significant challenges such as adversarial robustness and scalability, which are fundamentally linked to data. While major attention has been devoted to improving GNNs from the model perspective, the potential of directly enhancing data has often been overlooked. It underscores a critical gap in GNN research---while model improvements are undoubtedly important, we also need to recognize and address the data-related factors contributing to the challenges. Hence, my research is to investigate solutions for these challenges from the data perspective, employing strategies such as data characterization, reduction, augmentation, transformation, and detection.
The Role of Over-Parameterization in Machine Learning – the Good, the Bad, the Ugly
Authors: Liu Fanghui
Published: March 2024

The conventional wisdom of simple models in machine learning misses the bigger picture, especially over-parameterized neural networks (NNs), where the number of parameters are much larger than the number of training data. Our goal is to explore the mystery behind over-parameterized models from a theoretical side.

In this talk, I will discuss the role of over-parameterization in neural networks, to theoretically understand why they can perform well. First, I will discuss the role of over-parameterization in neural networks from the perspective of models, to theoretically understand why they can genralize well. Second, the effects of over-parameterization in robustness, privacy are discussed. Third, I will talk about the over-parameterization from kernel methods to neural networks in a function space theory view. Besides, from classical statistical learning to sequential decision making, I will talk about the benefits of over-parameterization on how deep reinforcement learning works well for function approximation. Potential future directions on theory of over-parameterization ML will also be discussed.
From Statistical Relational to Neuro-Symbolic Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Marra Giuseppe
Published: March 2024

The integration of learning and reasoning is one of the key challenges in artificial intelligence and machine learning today. The area of Neuro-Symbolic AI (NeSy) tackles this challenge by integrating symbolic reasoning with neural networks. In our recent work, we provided an introduction to NeSy by drawing several parallels to another field that has a rich tradition in integrating learning and reasoning, namely Statistical Relational Artificial Intelligence (StarAI).
Harmonious Mobility for Robots that Work with and around People
Authors: Mavrogiannis Christoforos
Published: March 2024

The integration of advances from machine learning and computer vision with the classical autonomy stack has brought successful robot deployments in fulfilment, manufacturing, and transportation. However, unstructured and dynamic environments such as pedestrian spaces and streets, workplaces, and homes pose additional challenges such as modeling human behavior, understanding user perceptions, and ensuring human safety and comfort. My work addresses such challenges to enable robots to fluently work with and around people to increase productivity and assist users.
Program Synthesis with Best-First Bottom-Up Search (Abstract Reprint)
Authors: Ameen Saqib , Lelis Levi H. S.
Published: March 2024

Cost-guided bottom-up search (BUS) algorithms use a cost function to guide the search to solve program synthesis tasks. In this paper, we show that current state-of-the-art cost-guided BUS algorithms suffer from a common problem: they can lose useful information given by the model and fail to perform the search in a best-first order according to a cost function. We introduce a novel best-first bottom-up search algorithm, which we call Bee Search, that does not suffer information loss and is able to perform cost-guided bottom-up synthesis in a best-first manner. Importantly, Bee Search performs best-first search with respect to the generation of programs, i.e., it does not even create in memory programs that are more expensive than the solution program. It attains best-first ordering with respect to generation by performing a search in an abstract space of program costs. We also introduce a new cost function that better uses the information provided by an existing cost model. Empirical results on string manipulation and bit-vector tasks show that Bee Search can outperform existing cost-guided BUS approaches when employing more complex domain-specific languages (DSLs); Bee Search and previous approaches perform equally well with simpler DSLs. Furthermore, our new cost function with Bee Search outperforms previous cost functions on string manipulation tasks.
Mimicking Behaviors in Separated Domains (Abstract Reprint)
Authors: De Giacomo Giuseppe , Fried Dror , Patrizi Fabio , Zhu Shufang
Published: March 2024

Devising a strategy to make a system mimic behaviors from another system is a problem that naturally arises in many areas of Computer Science. In this work, we interpret this problem in the context of intelligent agents, from the perspective of LTLf, a formalism commonly used in AI for expressing finite-trace properties. Our model consists of two separated dynamic domains, D_A and D_B, and an LTLf specification that formalizes the notion of mimicking by mapping properties on behaviors (traces) of D_A into properties on behaviors of D_B. The goal is to synthesize a strategy that step-by-step maps every behavior of D_A into a behavior of D_B so that the specification is met. We consider several forms of mapping specifications, ranging from simple ones to full LTLf, and for each, we study synthesis algorithms and computational properties.
Reasoning about Causality in Games (Abstract Reprint)
Authors: Hammond Lewis , Fox James , Everitt Tom , Carey Ryan , Abate Alessandro , Wooldridge Michael
Published: March 2024

Causal reasoning and game-theoretic reasoning are fundamental topics in artificial intelligence, among many other disciplines: this paper is concerned with their intersection. Despite their importance, a formal framework that supports both these forms of reasoning has, until now, been lacking. We offer a solution in the form of (structural) causal games, which can be seen as extending Pearl's causal hierarchy to the game-theoretic domain, or as extending Koller and Milch's multi-agent influence diagrams to the causal domain. We then consider three key questions:
i)
How can the (causal) dependencies in games – either between variables, or between strategies – be modelled in a uniform, principled manner?

ii)
How may causal queries be computed in causal games, and what assumptions does this require?

iii)
How do causal games compare to existing formalisms?

To address question i), we introduce mechanised games, which encode dependencies between agents' decision rules and the distributions governing the game. In response to question ii), we present definitions of predictions, interventions, and counterfactuals, and discuss the assumptions required for each. Regarding question iii), we describe correspondences between causal games and other formalisms, and explain how causal games can be used to answer queries that other causal or game-theoretic models do not support. Finally, we highlight possible applications of causal games, aided by an extensive open-source Python library.
Discovering Agents (Abstract Reprint)
Authors: Kenton Zachary , Kumar Ramana , Farquhar Sebastian , Richens Jonathan , MacDermott Matt , Everitt Tom
Published: March 2024

Causal models of agents have been used to analyse the safety aspects of machine learning systems. But identifying agents is non-trivial – often the causal model is just assumed by the modeller without much justification – and modelling failures can lead to mistakes in the safety analysis. This paper proposes the first formal causal definition of agents – roughly that agents are systems that would adapt their policy if their actions influenced the world in a different way. From this we derive the first causal discovery algorithm for discovering the presence of agents from empirical data, given a set of variables and under certain assumptions. We also provide algorithms for translating between causal models and game-theoretic influence diagrams. We demonstrate our approach by resolving some previous confusions caused by incorrect causal modelling of agents.
Sequential Model-Based Diagnosis by Systematic Search (Abstract Reprint)
Authors: Rodler Patrick
Published: March 2024

Model-based diagnosis aims at identifying the real cause of a system's malfunction based on a formal system model and observations of the system behavior. To discriminate between multiple fault hypotheses (diagnoses), sequential diagnosis approaches iteratively pose queries to an oracle to acquire additional knowledge about the diagnosed system. Depending on the system type, queries can capture, e.g., system tests, probes, measurements, or expert questions.

As the determination of optimal queries is NP-hard, state-of-the-art sequential diagnosis methods rely on a myopic one-step-lookahead analysis which has proven to constitute a particularly favorable trade-off between computational efficiency and diagnostic effectivity. Yet, this solves only a part of the problem, as various sources of complexity, such as the reliance on costly reasoning services and large numbers of or not explicitly given query candidates, remain.

To deal with such issues, existing approaches often make assumptions about the (i) type of diagnosed system, (ii) formalism to describe the system, (iii) inference engine, (iv) type of query to be of interest, (v) query quality criterion to be adopted, or (vi) diagnosis computation algorithm to be employed. Moreover, they (vii) often cannot deal with large or implicit query spaces or with expressive logics, or (viii) require inputs that cannot always be provided.

As a remedy, we propose a novel one-step lookahead query computation technique for sequential diagnosis that overcomes the said issues of existing methods. Our approach (1) is based on a solid theory, (2) involves a systematic search for optimal queries, (3) can operate on implicit and huge query spaces, (4) allows for a two-stage optimization of queries (wrt. their number and cost), (5) is designed to reduce expensive logical inferences to a minimum, and (6) is generally applicable. The latter means that it can deal with any type of diagnosis problem as per Reiter's theory, is applicable with any monotonic knowledge representation language, can interact with a multitude of diagnosis engines and logical reasoners, and allows for a quality optimization of queries based on any of the common criteria in the literature.

We extensively study the performance of the novel technique using a benchmark of real-world diagnosis problems. Our findings are that our approach enables the computation of optimal queries with hardly any delay, independently of the size and complexity of the considered benchmark problem. Moreover, it proves to be highly scalable, and it outperforms the state-of-the-art method in the domain of our benchmarks by orders of magnitude in terms of computation time while always returning a qualitatively as good or better query.
Accurate Parameter Estimation for Safety-Critical Systems with Unmodeled Dynamics (Abstract Reprint)
Authors: Sarker Arnab , Fisher Peter , Gaudio Joseph , Annaswamy Anuradha
Published: March 2024

Analysis and synthesis of safety-critical autonomous systems are carried out using models which are often dynamic. Two central features of these dynamic systems are parameters and unmodeled dynamics. Much of feedback control design is parametric in nature and as such, accurate and fast estimation of the parameters in the modeled part of the dynamic system is a crucial property for designing risk-aware autonomous systems. This paper addresses the use of a spectral lines-based approach for estimating parameters of the dynamic model of an autonomous system. Existing literature has treated all unmodeled components of the dynamic system as sub-Gaussian noise and proposed parameter estimation using Gaussian noise-based exogenous signals. In contrast, we allow the unmodeled part to have deterministic unmodeled dynamics, which are almost always present in physical systems, in addition to sub-Gaussian noise. In addition, we propose a deterministic construction of the exogenous signal in order to carry out parameter estimation. We introduce a new tool kit which employs the theory of spectral lines, retains the stochastic setting, and leads to non-asymptotic bounds on the parameter estimation error. Unlike the existing stochastic approach, these bounds are tunable through an optimal choice of the spectrum of the exogenous signal leading to accurate parameter estimation. We also show that this estimation is robust to unmodeled dynamics, a property that is not assured by the existing approach. Finally, we show that under ideal conditions with no deterministic unmodeled dynamics, the proposed approach can ensure a Õ(√t) Regret, matching existing literature. Experiments are provided to support all theoretical derivations, which show that the spectral lines-based approach outperforms the Gaussian noise-based method when unmodeled dynamics are present, in terms of both parameter estimation error and Regret obtained using the parameter estimates with a Linear Quadratic Regulator in feedback.
Some Like It Small: Czech Semantic Embedding Models for Industry Applications
Authors: Bednář Jiří , Náplava Jakub , Barančíková Petra , Lisický Ondřej
Published: March 2024

This article focuses on the development and evaluation of Small-sized Czech sentence embedding models. Small models are important components for real-time industry applications in resource-constrained environments. Given the limited availability of labeled Czech data, alternative approaches, including pre-training, knowledge distillation, and unsupervised contrastive fine-tuning, are investigated. Comprehensive intrinsic and extrinsic analyses are conducted, showcasing the competitive performance of our models compared to significantly larger counterparts, with approximately 8 times smaller size and 5 times faster speed than conventional Base-sized models. To promote cooperation and reproducibility, both the models and the evaluation pipeline are made publicly accessible. Ultimately, this article presents practical applications of the developed sentence embedding models in Seznam.cz, the Czech search engine. These models have effectively replaced previous counterparts, enhancing the overall search experience for instance, in organic search, featured snippets, and image search. This transition has yielded improved performance.
Check-In Desk Scheduling Optimisation at CDG International Airport
Authors: Falque Thibault , Audemard Gilles , Lecoutre Christophe , Mazure Bertrand
Published: March 2024

More than ever, air transport players (i.e., airline and airport companies) in an intensely competitive climate need to benefit from a carefully optimized management of airport resources to improve the quality of service and control the induced costs.
In this paper, we investigate the Airport Check-in Desk Assignment Problem.
We propose a Constraint Programming (CP) model for this problem, and present some promising experimental results from data coming from ADP (Aéroport de Paris).
Our works are deployed in a preprod environment since 1 year.
Knowledge Distillation from Single-Task Teachers to Multi-Task Student for End-to-End Autonomous Driving
Authors: Agand Pedram
Published: March 2024

In the domain of end-to-end autonomous driving, conventional sensor fusion techniques exhibit inadequacies, particularly when facing challenging scenarios with numerous dynamic agents. Imitation learning hampers the performance by the expert and encounters issues with out-of-distribution challenges. To overcome these limitations, we propose a transformer-based algorithm designed to fuse diverse representations from RGB-D cameras through knowledge distillation. This approach leverages insights from multi-task teachers to enhance the learning capabilities of single-task students, particularly in a Reinforcement Learning (RL) setting. Our model consists of two primary modules: the perception module, responsible for encoding observation data acquired from RGB-D cameras and performing tasks such as semantic segmentation, semantic depth cloud mapping (SDC), ego vehicle speed estimation, and traffic light state recognition. Subsequently, the control module decodes these features, incorporating additional data, including a rough simulator for static and dynamic environments, to anticipate waypoints within a latent feature space. Vehicular controls (e.g., steering, throttle, and brake) are obtained directly from measurement features and environmental states using the RL agent and are further refined by a PID algorithm that dynamically follows waypoints. The model undergoes rigorous evaluation and comparative analysis on the CARLA simulator across various scenarios, encompassing normal to adversarial conditions. Our code is available at https://github.com/pagand/e2etransfuser/ to facilitate future studies.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Communication Networks
Authors: Galliera Raffaele
Published: March 2024

This research explores optimizing communication tasks with (Multi-Agent) Reinforcement Learning (RL/MARL) in Point-to-Point and Group Communication (GC) networks. The study initially applied RL for Congestion Control in networks with dynamic link properties, yielding competitive results. Then, it focused on the challenge of effective message dissemination in GC networks, by framing a novel game-theoretic formulation and designing methods to solve the task based on MARL and Graph Convolution. Future research will deepen the exploration of MARL in GC. This will contribute to both academic knowledge and practical advancements in the next generation of communication protocols.
To Know the Causes of Things: Text Mining for Causal Relations
Authors: Tan Fiona Anting
Published: March 2024

Causality expresses the relation between two arguments, one of which represents the cause and the other the effect (or consequence). Causal text mining refers to the extraction and usage of causal information from text. Given an input sequence, we are interested to know if and where causal information occurs. My research is focused on the end-to-end challenges of causal text mining. This involves extracting, representing, and applying causal knowledge from unstructured text. The corresponding research questions are: (1) How to extract causal information from unstructured text effectively? (2) How to represent extracted causal relationships in a graph that is interpretable and useful for some application? (3) How can we capitalize on extracted causal knowledge for downstream tasks? What tasks or fields will benefit from such knowledge? In this paper, I outline past and on-going works, and highlight future research challenges.
Data Efficient Paradigms for Personalized Assessment of Black-Box Taskable AI Systems
Authors: Verma Pulkit
Published: March 2024

The vast diversity of internal designs of taskable black-box AI systems and their nuanced zones of safe functionality make it difficult for a layperson to use them without unintended side effects. My dissertation focuses on developing paradigms that enable a user to assess and understand the limits of an AI system's safe operability. We develop a personalized AI assessment module that lets an AI system execute instruction sequences in simulators and answer queries about these executions. Our results show that such a primitive query-response interface is sufficient to efficiently derive a user-interpretable model of a system's capabilities.
Data-Driven Discovery of Design Specifications (Student Abstract)
Authors: Chen Angela , Gisolfi Nicholas , Dubrawski Artur
Published: March 2024

Ensuring a machine learning model’s trustworthiness is crucial to prevent potential harm. One way to foster trust is through the formal verification of the model’s adherence to essential design requirements. However, this approach relies on well-defined, application-domain-centric criteria with which to test the model, and such specifications may be cumbersome to collect in practice. We propose a data-driven approach for creating specifications to evaluate a trained model effectively. Implementing this framework allows us to prove that the model will exhibit safe behavior while minimizing the false-positive prediction rate. This strategy enhances predictive accuracy and safety, providing deeper insight into the model’s strengths and weaknesses, and promotes trust through a systematic approach.
Kepler Light Curve Classification Using Deep Learning and Markov Transition Field (Student Abstract)
Authors: Donnelly Shane , Dutta Ayan
Published: March 2024

An exoplanet is a planet, which is not a part of our solar system.
Whether life exists in one or more of these exoplanets
has fascinated humans for centuries. NASA’s Kepler Space
Telescope has discovered more than 70% of known exoplanets
in our universe. However, manually determining whether a
Kepler light curve indicates an exoplanet or not becomes infeasible
with the large volume of data. Due to this, we propose
a deep learning-based strategy to automatically classify
a Kepler light curve. More specifically, we first convert the
light curve time series into its corresponding Markov Transition
Field (MTF) image and then classify it. Results show
that the accuracy of the proposed technique is 99.39%, which
is higher than all current state-of-the-art approaches.
A SAT + Computer Algebra System Verification of the Ramsey Problem R(3, 8) (Student Abstract)
Authors: Duggan Conor , Li Zhengyu , Bright Curtis , Ganesh Vijay
Published: March 2024

The Ramsey problem R(3,8) asks for the smallest n such that every red/blue coloring of the complete graph on n vertices must contain either a blue triangle or a red 8-clique. We provide the first certifiable proof that R(3,8) = 28, automatically generated by a combination of Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solver and a computer algebra system (CAS). This SAT+CAS combination is significantly faster than a SAT-only approach. While the R(3,8) problem was first computationally solved by McKay and Min in 1992, it was not a verifiable proof. The SAT+CAS method that we use for our proof is very general and can be applied to a wide variety of combinatorial problems.
Sequential Modeling of Complex Marine Navigation: Case Study on a Passenger Vessel (Student Abstract)
Authors: Fan Yimeng , Agand Pedram , Chen Mo , Park Edward J. , Kennedy Allison , Bae Chanwoo
Published: March 2024

The maritime industry's continuous commitment to sustainability has led to a dedicated exploration of methods to reduce vessel fuel consumption. This paper undertakes this challenge through a machine learning approach, leveraging a real-world dataset spanning two years of a passenger vessel in west coast Canada. Our focus centers on the creation of a time series forecasting model given the dynamic and static states, actions, and disturbances. This model is designed to predict dynamic states based on the actions provided, subsequently serving as an evaluative tool to assess the proficiency of the vessel's operation under the captain's guidance. Additionally, it lays the foundation for future optimization algorithms, providing valuable feedback on decision-making processes. To facilitate future studies, our code is available at https://github.com/pagand/model_optimze_vessel/tree/AAAI.
Digital Twin-Driven Teat Localization and Shape Identification for Dairy Cow (Student Abstract)
Authors: Gupta Aarushi , Hao Yuexing , Yang Yuting , Yuan Tiancheng , Wieland Matthias , Basran Parminder S. , Birman Ken
Published: March 2024

Dairy owners invest heavily to keep their animals healthy. There is good reason to hope that technologies such as computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) could reduce costs, yet obstacles arise when adapting these advanced tools to farming environments. In this work, we applied AI tools to dairy cow teat localization and teat shape classification, obtaining a model that achieves a mean average precision of 0.783. This digital twin-driven approach is intended as a first step towards automating and accelerating the detection and treatment of hyperkeratosis, mastitis, and other medical conditions that significantly burden the dairy industry.
Explainable Earnings Call Representation Learning (Student Abstract)
Authors: Huang Yanlong , Lei Yue , Tai Wenxin , Cheng Zhangtao , Zhong Ting , Zhang Kunpeng
Published: March 2024

Earnings call transcripts hold valuable insights that are vital for investors and analysts when making informed decisions. However, extracting these insights from lengthy and complex transcripts can be a challenging task. The traditional manual examination is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors and biases. Deep learning-based representation learning methods have emerged as promising and automated approaches to tackle this problem. Nevertheless, they may encounter significant challenges, such as the unreliability of the representation encoding process and certain domain-specific requirements in the context of finance. To address these issues, we propose a novel transcript representation learning model. Our model leverages the structural information of transcripts to effectively extract key insights, while endowing model with explainability via variational information bottleneck. Extensive experiments on two downstream financial tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Explainable Artificial Intelligence Approaches (Student Abstract)
Authors: Jung Jinsun , Kim Hyeoneui
Published: March 2024

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), a promising future technology in the field of healthcare, has attracted significant interest. Despite ongoing efforts in the development of XAI approaches, there has been inadequate evaluation of explanation effectiveness and no standardized framework for the evaluation has been established. This study aims to examine the relationship between subjective interpretability and perceived plausibility for various XAI explanations and to determine the factors affecting users' acceptance of the XAI explanation.
Solar Power Generation Forecasting via Multimodal Feature Fusion (Student Abstract)
Authors: Ka Eul , Go Seungeun , Kwak Minjin , Kim Jeong-Hun , Nasridinov Aziz
Published: March 2024

Solar power generation has recently been in the spotlight as global warming continues to worsen. However, two significant problems may hinder solar power generation, considering that solar panels are installed outside. The first is soiling, which accumulates on solar panels, and the second is a decrease in sunlight owing to bad weather.
In this paper, we will demonstrate that the solar power generation forecasting can increase when considering soiling and sunlight information. We first introduce a dataset containing images of clean and soiled solar panels, sky images, and weather information. For accurate solar power generation forecasting, we propose a new multimodal model that aggregates various features related to weather, soiling, and sunlight. The experimental results demonstrated the high accuracy of our proposed multimodal model.
Several Stories about High-Multiplicity EFx Allocation (Student Abstract)
Authors: Morozov Nikita , Ignatiev Artur , Dementiev Yuriy
Published: March 2024

Fair division is a topic that has significant social and industrial value. In this work, we study allocations that simultaneously satisfy definitions of fairness and efficiency: EFx and PO. First, we prove that the problem of finding such allocations is NP-hard for two agents. Then, we propose a concept for an ILP-based solving algorithm, the running time of which depends on the number of EFx allocations. We generate input data and analyze algorithm's running time based on the results obtained.
Target-Free Domain Adaptation through Cross-Adaptation (Student Abstract)
Authors: Obuchowski Aleksander , Klaudel Barbara , Frąckowski Piotr , Krajna Sebastian , Badyra Wasyl , Czubenko Michał , Kowalczuk Zdzisław
Published: March 2024

The population characteristics of the datasets related to the same task may vary significantly and merging them may harm performance. In this paper, we propose a novel method of domain adaptation called "cross-adaptation". It allows for implicit adaptation to the target domain without the need for any labeled examples across this domain. We test our approach on 9 datasets for SARS-CoV-2 detection from complete blood count from different hospitals around the world. Results show that our solution is universal with respect to various classification algorithms and allows for up to a 10pp increase in F1 score on average.