bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
CariesXrays: Enhancing Caries Detection in Hospital-Scale Panoramic Dental X-rays via Feature Pyramid Contrastive Learning
Authors: Chen Bingzhi , Fu Sisi , Liu Yishu , Pan Jiahui , Lu Guangming , Zhang Zheng
Published: March 2024

Dental caries has been widely recognized as one of the most prevalent chronic diseases in the field of public health. Despite advancements in automated diagnosis across various medical domains, it remains a substantial challenge for dental caries detection due to its inherent variability and intricacies. To bridge this gap, we release a hospital-scale panoramic dental X-ray benchmark, namely “CariesXrays”, to facilitate the advancements in high-precision computer-aided diagnosis for dental caries. It comprises 6,000 panoramic dental X-ray images, with a total of 13,783 instances of dental caries, all meticulously annotated by dental professionals. In this paper, we propose a novel Feature Pyramid Contrastive Learning (FPCL) framework, that jointly incorporates feature pyramid learning and contrastive learning within a unified diagnostic paradigm for automated dental caries detection. Specifically, a robust dual-directional feature pyramid network (D2D-FPN) is designed to adaptively capture rich and informative contextual information from multi-level feature maps, thus enhancing the generalization ability of caries detection across different scales. Furthermore, our model is augmented with an effective proposals-prototype contrastive regularization learning (P2P-CRL) mechanism, which can flexibly bridge the semantic gaps among diverse dental caries with varying appearances, resulting in high-quality dental caries proposals. Extensive experiments on our newly-established CariesXrays benchmark demonstrate the potential of FPCL to make a significant social impact on caries diagnosis.
Blind-Touch: Homomorphic Encryption-Based Distributed Neural Network Inference for Privacy-Preserving Fingerprint Authentication
Authors: Choi Hyunmin , Woo Simon S. , Kim Hyoungshick
Published: March 2024

Fingerprint authentication is a popular security mechanism for smartphones and laptops. However, its adoption in web and cloud environments has been limited due to privacy concerns over storing and processing biometric data on servers. This paper introduces Blind-Touch, a novel machine learning-based fingerprint authentication system leveraging homomorphic encryption to address these privacy concerns. Homomorphic encryption allows computations on encrypted data without decrypting. Thus, Blind-Touch can keep fingerprint data encrypted on the server while performing machine learning operations. Blind-Touch combines three strategies to efficiently utilize homomorphic encryption in machine learning: (1) It optimizes the feature vector for a distributed architecture, processing the first fully connected layer (FC-16) in plaintext on the client side and the subsequent layer (FC-1) post-encryption on the server, thereby minimizing encrypted computations; (2) It employs a homomorphic encryption-compatible data compression technique capable of handling 8,192 authentication results concurrently; and (3) It utilizes a clustered server architecture to simultaneously process authentication results, thereby enhancing scalability with increasing user numbers. Blind-Touch achieves high accuracy on two benchmark fingerprint datasets, with a 93.6% F1- score for the PolyU dataset and a 98.2% F1-score for the SOKOTO dataset. Moreover, Blind-Touch can match a fingerprint among 5,000 in about 0.65 seconds. With its privacy-focused design, high accuracy, and efficiency, Blind-Touch is a promising alternative to conventional fingerprint authentication for web and cloud applications.
MedAlign: A Clinician-Generated Dataset for Instruction Following with Electronic Medical Records
Authors: Fleming Scott L. , Lozano Alejandro , Haberkorn William J. , Jindal Jenelle A. , Reis Eduardo , Thapa Rahul , Blankemeier Louis , Genkins Julian Z. , Steinberg Ethan , Nayak Ashwin , Patel Birju , Chiang Chia-Chun , Callahan Alison , Huo Zepeng , Gatidis Sergios , Adams Scott , Fayanju Oluseyi , Shah Shreya J. , Savage Thomas , Goh Ethan , Chaudhari Akshay S. , Aghaeepour Nima , Sharp Christopher , Pfeffer Michael A. , Liang Percy , Chen Jonathan H. , Morse Keith E. , Brunskill Emma P. , Fries Jason A. , Shah Nigam H.
Published: March 2024

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow natural language instructions with human-level fluency suggests many opportunities in healthcare to reduce administrative burden and improve quality of care. However, evaluating LLMs on realistic text generation tasks for healthcare remains challenging. Existing question answering datasets for electronic health record (EHR) data fail to capture the complexity of information needs and documentation burdens experienced by clinicians. To address these challenges, we introduce MedAlign, a benchmark dataset of 983 natural language instructions for EHR data. MedAlign is curated by 15 clinicians (7 specialities), includes clinician-written reference responses for 303 instructions, and provides 276 longitudinal EHRs for grounding instruction-response pairs. We used MedAlign to evaluate 6 general domain LLMs, having clinicians rank the accuracy and quality of each LLM response. We found high error rates, ranging from 35% (GPT-4) to 68% (MPT-7B-Instruct), and 8.3% drop in accuracy moving from 32k to 2k context lengths for GPT-4. Finally, we report correlations between clinician rankings and automated natural language generation metrics as a way to rank LLMs without human review. We make MedAlign available under a research data use agreement to enable LLM evaluations on tasks aligned with clinician needs and preferences.
Combining Deep Learning and Street View Imagery to Map Smallholder Crop Types
Authors: Laguarta Soler Jordi , Friedel Thomas , Wang Sherrie
Published: March 2024

Accurate crop type maps are an essential source of information for monitoring yield progress at scale, projecting global crop production, and planning effective policies. To date, however, crop type maps remain challenging to create in low- and middle-income countries due to a lack of ground truth labels for training machine learning models. Field surveys are the gold standard in terms of accuracy but require an often-prohibitively large amount of time, money, and statistical capacity.
In recent years, street-level imagery, such as Google Street View, KartaView, and Mapillary, has become available around the world. Such imagery contains rich information about crop types grown at particular locations and times.
In this work, we develop an automated system to generate crop type ground references using deep learning and Google Street View imagery. The method efficiently curates a set of street-view images containing crop fields, trains a model to predict crop types using either weakly-labeled images from disparate out-of-domain sources or zero-shot labeled street view images with GPT-4V, and combines the predicted labels with remote sensing time series to create a wall-to-wall crop type map. We show that, in Thailand, the resulting country-wide map of rice, cassava, maize, and sugarcane achieves an accuracy of 93%. We publicly release the first-ever crop type map for all of Thailand 2022 at 10m-resolution with no gaps. To our knowledge, this is the first time a 10m-resolution, multi-crop map has been created for any smallholder country. As the availability of roadside imagery expands, our pipeline provides a way to map crop types at scale around the globe, especially in underserved smallholder regions.
Promoting Fair Vaccination Strategies through Influence Maximization: A Case Study on COVID-19 Spread
Authors: Neophytou Nicola , Taik Afaf , Farnadi Golnoosh
Published: March 2024

The aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic saw more severe outcomes for racial minority groups and economically-deprived communities. Such disparities can be explained by several factors, including unequal access to healthcare, as well as the inability of low income groups to reduce their mobility due to work or social obligations. Moreover, senior citizens were found to be more susceptible to severe symptoms, largely due to age-related health reasons. Adapting vaccine distribution strategies to consider a range of demographics is therefore essential to address these disparities. In this study, we propose a novel approach that utilizes influence maximization (IM) on mobility networks to develop vaccination strategies which incorporate demographic fairness. By considering factors such as race, social status, age, and associated risk factors, we aim to optimize vaccine distribution to achieve various fairness definitions for one or more protected attributes at a time. Through extensive experiments conducted on Covid-19 spread in three major metropolitan areas across the United States, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in reducing disease transmission and promoting fairness in vaccination distribution.
Discretionary Trees: Understanding Street-Level Bureaucracy via Machine Learning
Authors: Pokharel Gaurab , Das Sanmay , Fowler Patrick
Published: March 2024

Street-level bureaucrats interact directly with people on behalf of government agencies to perform a wide range of functions, including, for example, administering social services and policing. A key feature of street-level bureaucracy is that the civil servants, while tasked with implementing agency policy, are also granted significant discretion in how they choose to apply that policy in individual cases. Using that discretion could be beneficial, as it allows for exceptions to policies based on human interactions and evaluations, but it could also allow biases and inequities to seep into important domains of societal resource allocation. In this paper, we use machine learning techniques to understand street-level bureaucrats' behavior. We leverage a rich dataset that combines demographic and other information on households with information on which homelessness interventions they were assigned during a period when assignments were not formulaic. We find that caseworker decisions in this time are highly predictable overall, and some, but not all of this predictivity can be captured by simple decision rules. We theorize that the decisions not captured by the simple decision rules can be considered applications of caseworker discretion. These discretionary decisions are far from random in both the characteristics of such households and in terms of the outcomes of the decisions. Caseworkers typically only apply discretion to households that would be considered less vulnerable. When they do apply discretion to assign households to more intensive interventions, the marginal benefits to those households are significantly higher than would be expected if the households were chosen at random; there is no similar reduction in marginal benefit to households that are discretionarily allocated less intensive interventions, suggesting that caseworkers are using their knowledge and experience to improve outcomes for households experiencing homelessness.
Nowcasting Temporal Trends Using Indirect Surveys
Authors: Srivastava Ajitesh , Ramirez Juan Marcos , Díaz-Aranda Sergio , Aguilar Jose , Fernández Anta Antonio , Ortega Antonio , Lillo Rosa Elvira
Published: March 2024

Indirect surveys, in which respondents provide information about other people they know, have been proposed for estimating (nowcasting) the size of a hidden population where privacy is important or the hidden population is hard to reach. Examples include estimating casualties in an earthquake, conditions among female sex workers, and the prevalence of drug use and infectious diseases. The Network Scale-up Method (NSUM) is the classical approach to developing estimates from indirect surveys, but it was designed for one-shot surveys. Further, it requires certain assumptions and asking for or estimating the number of individuals in each respondent's network. In recent years, surveys have been increasingly deployed online and can collect data continuously (e.g., COVID-19 surveys on Facebook during much of the pandemic). Conventional NSUM can be applied to these scenarios by analyzing the data independently at each point in time, but this misses the opportunity of leveraging the temporal dimension. We propose to use the responses from indirect surveys collected over time and develop analytical tools (i) to prove that indirect surveys can provide better estimates for the trends of the hidden population over time, as compared to direct surveys and (ii) to identify appropriate temporal aggregations to improve the estimates. We demonstrate through extensive simulations that our approach outperforms traditional NSUM and direct surveying methods. We also empirically demonstrate the superiority of our approach on a real indirect survey dataset of COVID-19 cases.
Harnessing Network Effect for Fake News Mitigation: Selecting Debunkers via Self-Imitation Learning
Authors: Xu Xiaofei , Deng Ke , Dann Michael , Zhang Xiuzhen
Published: March 2024

This study aims to minimize the influence of fake news on social networks by deploying debunkers to propagate true news. This is framed as a reinforcement learning problem, where, at each stage, one user is selected to propagate true news. A challenging issue is episodic reward where the "net" effect of selecting individual debunkers cannot be discerned from the interleaving information propagation on social networks, and only the collective effect from mitigation efforts can be observed. Existing Self-Imitation Learning (SIL) methods have shown promise in learning from episodic rewards, but are ill-suited to the real-world application of fake news mitigation because of their poor sample efficiency. To learn a more effective debunker selection policy for fake news mitigation, this study proposes NAGASIL - Negative sampling and state Augmented Generative Adversarial Self-Imitation Learning, which consists of two improvements geared towards fake news mitigation: learning from negative samples, and an augmented state representation to capture the "real" environment state by integrating the current observed state with the previous state-action pairs from the same campaign. Experiments on two social networks show that NAGASIL yields superior performance to standard GASIL and state-of-the-art fake news mitigation models.
Spatial-Logic-Aware Weakly Supervised Learning for Flood Mapping on Earth Imagery
Authors: Xu Zelin , Xiao Tingsong , He Wenchong , Wang Yu , Jiang Zhe , Chen Shigang , Xie Yiqun , Jia Xiaowei , Yan Da , Zhou Yang
Published: March 2024

Flood mapping on Earth imagery is crucial for disaster management, but its efficacy is hampered by the lack of high-quality training labels. Given high-resolution Earth imagery with coarse and noisy training labels, a base deep neural network model, and a spatial knowledge base with label constraints, our problem is to infer the true high-resolution labels while training neural network parameters. Traditional methods are largely based on specific physical properties and thus fall short of capturing the rich domain constraints expressed by symbolic logic. Neural-symbolic models can capture rich domain knowledge, but existing methods do not address the unique spatial challenges inherent in flood mapping on high-resolution imagery. To fill this gap, we propose a spatial-logic-aware weakly supervised learning framework. Our framework integrates symbolic spatial logic inference into probabilistic learning in a weakly supervised setting. To reduce the time costs of logic inference on vast high-resolution pixels, we propose a multi-resolution spatial reasoning algorithm to infer true labels while training neural network parameters. Evaluations of real-world flood datasets show that our model outperforms several baselines in prediction accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/spatialdatasciencegroup/SLWSL.
Unveiling the Tapestry of Automated Essay Scoring: A Comprehensive Investigation of Accuracy, Fairness, and Generalizability
Authors: Yang Kaixun , Raković Mladen , Li Yuyang , Guan Quanlong , Gašević Dragan , Chen Guangliang
Published: March 2024

Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) is a well-established educational pursuit that employs machine learning to evaluate student-authored essays. While much effort has been made in this area, current research primarily focuses on either (i) boosting the predictive accuracy of an AES model for a specific prompt (i.e., developing prompt-specific models), which often heavily relies on the use of the labeled data from the same target prompt; or (ii) assessing the applicability of AES models developed on non-target prompts to the intended target prompt (i.e., developing the AES models in a cross-prompt setting). Given the inherent bias in machine learning and its potential impact on marginalized groups, it is imperative to investigate whether such bias exists in current AES methods and, if identified, how it intervenes with an AES model's accuracy and generalizability. Thus, our study aimed to uncover the intricate relationship between an AES model's accuracy, fairness, and generalizability, contributing practical insights for developing effective AES models in real-world education. To this end, we meticulously selected nine prominent AES methods and evaluated their performance using seven distinct metrics on an open-sourced dataset, which contains over 25,000 essays and various demographic information about students such as gender, English language learner status, and economic status. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrated that: (1) prompt-specific models tend to outperform their cross-prompt counterparts in terms of predictive accuracy; (2) prompt-specific models frequently exhibit a greater bias towards students of different economic statuses compared to cross-prompt models; (3) in the pursuit of generalizability, traditional machine learning models (e.g., SVM) coupled with carefully engineered features hold greater potential for achieving both high accuracy and fairness than complex neural network models.
Pre-trained Online Contrastive Learning for Insurance Fraud Detection
Authors: Zhang Rui , Cheng Dawei , Yang Jie , Ouyang Yi , Wu Xian , Zheng Yefeng , Jiang Changjun
Published: March 2024

Medical insurance fraud has always been a crucial challenge in the field of healthcare industry. Existing fraud detection models mostly focus on offline learning scenes. However, fraud patterns are constantly evolving, making it difficult for models trained on past data to detect newly emerging fraud patterns, posing a severe challenge in medical fraud detection. Moreover, current incremental learning models are mostly designed to address catastrophic forgetting, but often exhibit suboptimal performance in fraud detection. To address this challenge, this paper proposes an innovative online learning method for medical insurance fraud detection, named POCL. This method combines contrastive learning pre-training with online updating strategies. In the pre-training stage, we leverage contrastive learning pre-training to learn on historical data, enabling deep feature learning and obtaining rich risk representations. In the online learning stage, we adopt a Temporal Memory Aware Synapses online updating strategy, allowing the model to perform incremental learning and optimization based on continuously emerging new data. This ensures timely adaptation to fraud patterns and reduces forgetting of past knowledge. Our model undergoes extensive experiments and evaluations on real-world insurance fraud datasets. The results demonstrate our model has significant advantages in accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art baseline methods, while also exhibiting lower running time and space consumption. Our sources are released at https://github.com/finint/POCL.
UV-SAM: Adapting Segment Anything Model for Urban Village Identification
Authors: Zhang Xin , Liu Yu , Lin Yuming , Liao Qingmin , Li Yong
Published: March 2024

Urban villages, defined as informal residential areas in or around urban centers, are characterized by inadequate infrastructures and poor living conditions, closely related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) on poverty, adequate housing, and sustainable cities. Traditionally, governments heavily depend on field survey methods to monitor the urban villages, which however are time-consuming, labor-intensive, and possibly delayed. Thanks to widely available and timely updated satellite images, recent studies develop computer vision techniques to detect urban villages efficiently. However, existing studies either focus on simple urban village image classification or fail to provide accurate boundary information. To accurately identify urban village boundaries from satellite images, we harness the power of the vision foundation model and adapt the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to urban village segmentation, named UV-SAM. Specifically, UV-SAM first leverages a small-sized semantic segmentation model to produce mixed prompts for urban villages, including mask, bounding box, and image representations, which are then fed into SAM for fine-grained boundary identification. Extensive experimental results on two datasets in China demonstrate that UV-SAM outperforms existing baselines, and identification results over multiple years show that both the number and area of urban villages are decreasing over time, providing deeper insights into the development trends of urban villages and sheds light on the vision foundation models for sustainable cities. The dataset and codes of this study are available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/UV-SAM.
Continual Learning in an Open and Dynamic World
Authors: Guo Yunhui
Published: March 2024

Building autonomous agents that can process massive amounts of real-time sensor-captured data is essential for many real-world applications including autonomous vehicles, robotics and AI in medicine. As the agent often needs to explore in a dynamic environment, it is thus a desirable as well as challenging goal to enable the agent to learn over time without performance degradation. Continual learning aims to build a continual learner which can learn new concepts over the data stream while preserving previously learnt concepts. In the talk, I will survey three pieces of my recent research on continual learning (i) supervised continual learning, (ii) unsupervised continual learning, and (iii) multi-modal continual learning. In the first work, I will discuss a supervised
continual learning algorithm called MEGA which dynamically balances the old tasks and the new task. In the second work, I will discuss unsupervised continual learning algorithms which learn representation continually without access to the labels. In the third work, I will elaborate an efficient continual learning algorithm that can learn multiple modalities continually without forgetting.
When Your AI Becomes a Target: AI Security Incidents and Best Practices
Authors: Grosse Kathrin , Bieringer Lukas , Besold Tarek R. , Biggio Battista , Alahi Alexandre
Published: March 2024

In contrast to vast academic efforts to study AI security, few real-world reports of AI security incidents exist. Released incidents prevent a thorough investigation of the attackers' motives, as crucial information about the company and AI application is missing. As a consequence, it often remains unknown how to avoid incidents.
We tackle this gap and combine previous reports with freshly collected incidents to a small database of 32 AI security incidents. We analyze the attackers' target and goal, influencing factors, causes, and mitigations. Many incidents stem from non-compliance with best practices in security and privacy-enhancing technologies.
In the case of direct AI attacks, access control may provide some mitigation, but there is little scientific work on best practices. Our paper is thus a call for action to address these gaps.
A Framework for Approaching AI Education in Educator Preparation Programs
Authors: Black Nancye Blair , George Stacy , Eguchi Amy , Dempsey J. Camille , Langran Elizabeth , Fraga Lucretia , Brunvand Stein , Howard Nicol
Published: March 2024

In recent years, the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has fostered an urgent need to better prepare current and future educators to be able to integrate AI technologies in their teaching and to teach AI literacy to PreK-12 students. While many organizations have developed professional learning opportunities for inservice educators, a gap remains for resources specifically designed for those facilitating and enrolled in Educator Preparation Programs (EPPs). In response to this gap, the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) launched its first AI Explorations for EPPs Faculty Fellowship. As a result of the Faculty Fellows’ collaboration, this paper articulates a framework of seven critical strategies with the potential to address the urgent need EPPs have in preparing preservice teachers to effectively integrate AI-powered instructional tools and to teach this new area of content knowledge in PreK-12 classrooms. In addition, we provide a review of literature and an overview of the emerging needs for integrating AI education in EPPs. We demonstrate why support for preservice teachers’ critical examination and application of AI, including a focus on the issues of equity, ethics, and culturally responsive teaching, is essential to their later success in PreK-12 classrooms. Recommendations for further research and learning are also provided to promote community-wide initiatives for supporting the integration of AI in education through Educator Preparation Programs and beyond.
Practical Sentiment Analysis for Education: The Power of Student Crowdsourcing
Authors: Kasumba Robert , Neumman Marion
Published: March 2024

Sentiment analysis provides a promising tool to automatically assess the emotions voiced in written student feedback such as periodically collected unit-of-study reflections. The commonly used dictionary-based approaches are limited to major languages and fail to capture contextual differences. Pretrained large language models have been shown to be biased and online versions raise privacy concerns. Hence, we resort to traditional supervised machine learning (ML) approaches which are designed to overcome these issues by learning from domain-specific labeled data. However, these labels are hard to come by -- in our case manually annotating student feedback is prone to bias and time-consuming, especially in high-enrollment courses. In this work, we investigate the use of student crowdsourced labels for supervised sentiment analysis for education. Specifically, we compare crowdsourced and student self-reported labels with human expert annotations and use them in various ML approaches to evaluate the performance on predicting emotions of written student feedback collected from large computer science classes. We find that the random forest model trained with student-crowdsourced labels tremendously improves the identification of reflections with negative sentiment. In addition to our quantitative study, we describe our crowdsourcing experiment which was intentionally designed to be an educational activity in an introduction to data science course.
Co-designing AI Education Curriculum with Cross-Disciplinary High School Teachers
Authors: Xie Benjamin , Sarin Parth , Wolf Jacob , Garcia Raycelle C. C. , Delaney Victoria , Sieh Isabel , Fuloria Anika , Varuvel Dennison Deepak , Bywater Christine , Lee Victor R.
Published: March 2024

High school teachers from many disciplines have growing interests in teaching about artificial intelligence (AI). This cross-disciplinary interest reflects the prevalence of AI tools across society, such as Generative AI tools built upon Large Language Models (LLM). However, high school classes are unique and complex environments, led by teachers with limited time and resources with priorities that vary by class and the students they serve. Therefore, developing curricula about AI for classes that span many disciplines (e.g. history, art, math) must involve centering the expertise of cross-disciplinary teachers. In this study, we conducted five collaborative curricular co-design sessions with eight teachers who taught high school humanities and STEM classes. We sought to understand how teachers considered AI when it was taught in art, math, and social studies contexts, as well as opportunities and challenges they identified with incorporating AI tools into their instruction. We found that teachers considered technical skills and ethical debates around AI, opportunities for "dual exploration" between AI and disciplinary learning, and limitations of AI tools as supporting engagement and reflection but also potentially distracting. We interpreted our findings relative to co-designing adaptable AI curricula to support teaching about and with AI across high school disciplines.
CyberQ: Generating Questions and Answers for Cybersecurity Education Using Knowledge Graph-Augmented LLMs
Authors: Agrawal Garima , Pal Kuntal , Deng Yuli , Liu Huan , Chen Ying-Chih
Published: March 2024

Building a skilled cybersecurity workforce is paramount to building a safer digital world. However, the diverse skill set, constantly emerging vulnerabilities, and deployment of new cyber threats make learning cybersecurity challenging. Traditional education methods struggle to cope with cybersecurity's rapidly evolving landscape and keep students engaged and motivated. Different studies on students' behaviors show that an interactive mode of education by engaging through a question-answering system or dialoguing is one of the most effective learning methodologies. There is a strong need to create advanced AI-enabled education tools to promote interactive learning in cybersecurity. Unfortunately, there are no publicly available standard question-answer datasets to build such systems for students and novice learners to learn cybersecurity concepts, tools, and techniques. The education course material and online question banks are unstructured and need to be validated and updated by domain experts, which is tedious when done manually. In this paper, we propose CyberGen, a novel unification of large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs (KG) to generate the questions and answers for cybersecurity automatically. Augmenting the structured knowledge from knowledge graphs in prompts improves factual reasoning and reduces hallucinations in LLMs. We used the knowledge triples from cybersecurity knowledge graphs (AISecKG) to design prompts for ChatGPT and generate questions and answers using different prompting techniques. Our question-answer dataset, CyberQ, contains around 4k pairs of questions and answers. The domain expert manually evaluated the random samples for consistency and correctness. We train the generative model using the CyberQ dataset for question answering task.
Automatic Short Answer Grading for Finnish with ChatGPT
Authors: Chang Li-Hsin , Ginter Filip
Published: March 2024

Automatic short answer grading (ASAG) seeks to mitigate the burden on teachers by leveraging computational methods to evaluate student-constructed text responses. Large language models (LLMs) have recently gained prominence across diverse applications, with educational contexts being no exception. The sudden rise of ChatGPT has raised expectations that LLMs can handle numerous tasks, including ASAG. This paper aims to shed some light on this expectation by evaluating two LLM-based chatbots, namely ChatGPT built on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, on scoring short-question answers under zero-shot and one-shot settings. Our data consists of 2000 student answers in Finnish from ten undergraduate courses. Multiple perspectives are taken into account during this assessment, encompassing those of grading system developers, teachers, and students. On our dataset, GPT-4 achieves a good QWK score (0.6+) in 44% of one-shot settings, clearly outperforming GPT-3.5 at 21%. We observe a negative association between student answer length and model performance, as well as a correlation between a smaller standard deviation among a set of predictions and lower performance. We conclude that while GPT-4 exhibits signs of being a capable grader, additional research is essential before considering its deployment as a reliable autograder.
Towards Building a Language-Independent Speech Scoring Assessment
Authors: Gupta Shreyansh , Unnam Abhishek , Yadav Kuldeep , Aggarwal Varun
Published: March 2024

Automatic speech scoring is crucial in language learning, providing targeted feedback to language learners by assessing pronunciation, fluency, and other speech qualities. However, the scarcity of human-labeled data for languages beyond English poses a significant challenge in developing such systems. In this work, we propose a Language-Independent scoring approach to evaluate speech without relying on labeled data in the target language. We introduce a multilingual speech scoring system that leverages representations from the wav2vec 2.0 XLSR model and a force-alignment technique based on CTC-Segmentation to construct speech features. These features are used to train a machine learning model to predict pronunciation and fluency scores. We demonstrate the potential of our method by predicting expert ratings on a speech dataset spanning five languages - English, French, Spanish, German and Portuguese, and comparing its performance against Language-Specific models trained individually on each language, as well as a jointly-trained model on all languages. Results indicate that our approach shows promise as an initial step towards a universal language independent speech scoring.
Enhancing Student Performance Prediction on Learnersourced Questions with SGNN-LLM Synergy
Authors: Ni Lin , Wang Sijie , Zhang Zeyu , Li Xiaoxuan , Zheng Xianda , Denny Paul , Liu Jiamou
Published: March 2024

Learnersourcing offers great potential for scalable education through student content creation. However, predicting student performance on learnersourced questions, which is essential for personalizing the learning experience, is challenging due to the inherent noise in student-generated data. Moreover, while conventional graph-based methods can capture the complex network of student and question interactions, they often fall short under cold start conditions where limited student engagement with questions yields sparse data. To address both challenges, we introduce an innovative strategy that synergizes the potential of integrating Signed Graph Neural Networks (SGNNs) and Large Language Model (LLM) embeddings. Our methodology employs a signed bipartite graph to comprehensively model student answers, complemented by a contrastive learning framework that enhances noise resilience. Furthermore, LLM's contribution lies in generating foundational question embeddings, proving especially advantageous in addressing cold start scenarios characterized by limited graph data.
Validation across five real-world datasets sourced from the PeerWise platform underscores our approach's effectiveness. Our method outperforms baselines, showcasing enhanced predictive accuracy and robustness.
The Generalization and Robustness of Transformer-Based Language Models on Commonsense Reasoning
Authors: Shen Ke
Published: March 2024

The advent of powerful transformer-based discriminative language models and, more recently, generative GPT-family models, has led to notable advancements in natural language processing (NLP), particularly in commonsense reasoning tasks. One such task is commonsense reasoning, where performance is usually evaluated through multiple-choice question-answering benchmarks. Till date, many such benchmarks have been proposed and `leaderboards' tracking state-of-the-art performance on those benchmarks suggest that transformer-based models are approaching human-like performance. However, due to documented problems such as hallucination and bias, the research focus is shifting from merely quantifying accuracy on the task to an in-depth, context-sensitive probing of LLMs' generalization and robustness. To gain deeper insight into diagnosing these models' performance in commonsense reasoning scenarios, this thesis addresses three main studies: the generalization ability of transformer-based language models on commonsense reasoning, the trend in confidence distribution of these language models confronted with ambiguous inference tasks, and a proposed risk-centric evaluation framework for both discriminative and generative language models.
Improving Faithfulness in Abstractive Text Summarization with EDUs Using BART (Student Abstract)
Authors: Delpisheh Narjes , Chali Yllias
Published: March 2024

Abstractive text summarization uses the summarizer’s own words to capture the main information of a source document in a summary. While it is more challenging to automate than extractive text summarization, recent advancements in deep learning approaches and pre-trained language models have improved its performance. However, abstractive text summarization still has issues such as unfaithfulness. To address this problem, we propose a new approach that utilizes important Elementary Discourse Units (EDUs) to guide BART-based text summarization. Our approach showed the improvement in truthfulness and source document coverage in comparison to some previous studies.
Rethinking Attention: Exploring Shallow Feed-Forward Neural Networks as an Alternative to Attention Layers in Transformers (Student Abstract)
Authors: Dordevic Danilo , Bozic Vukasin , Thommes Joseph , Coppola Daniele , Pal Singh Sidak
Published: March 2024

This work presents an analysis of the effectiveness of using standard shallow feed-forward networks to mimic the behavior of the attention mechanism in the original Transformer model, a state-of-the-art architecture for sequence-to-sequence tasks. We substitute key elements of the attention mechanism in the Transformer with simple feed-forward networks, trained using the original components via knowledge distillation. Our experiments, conducted on the IWSLT2017 dataset, reveal the capacity of these ”attentionless Transformers” to rival the performance of the original architecture. Through rigorous ablation studies, and experimenting with various replacement network types and sizes, we offer insights that support the viability of our approach. This not only sheds light on the adaptability of shallow feed-forward
networks in emulating attention mechanisms but also underscores their potential to streamline complex architectures for sequence-to-sequence tasks.
BadSAM: Exploring Security Vulnerabilities of SAM via Backdoor Attacks (Student Abstract)
Authors: Guan Zihan , Hu Mengxuan , Zhou Zhongliang , Zhang Jielu , Li Sheng , Liu Ninghao
Published: March 2024

Image segmentation is foundational to computer vision applications, and the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has become a leading base model for these tasks. However, SAM falters in specialized downstream challenges, leading to various customized SAM models. We introduce BadSAM, a backdoor attack tailored for SAM, revealing that customized models can harbor malicious behaviors. Using the CAMO dataset, we confirm BadSAM's efficacy and identify SAM vulnerabilities. This study paves the way for the development of more secure and customizable vision foundation models.
DNIT: Enhancing Day-Night Image-to-Image Translation through Fine-Grained Feature Handling (Student Abstract)
Authors: Liu Hanyue , Cheng Haonan , Ye Long
Published: March 2024

Existing image-to-image translation methods perform less satisfactorily in the "day-night" domain due to insufficient scene feature study. To address this problem, we propose DNIT, which performs fine-grained handling of features by a nighttime image preprocessing (NIP) module and an edge fusion detection (EFD) module. The NIP module enhances brightness while minimizing noise, facilitating extracting content and style features. Meanwhile, the EFD module utilizes two types of edge images as additional constraints to optimize the generator. Experimental results show that we can generate more realistic and higher-quality images compared to other methods, proving the effectiveness of our DNIT.
HyperCube: Implicit Field Representations of Voxelized 3D Models (Student Abstract)
Authors: Proszewska Magdalena , Mazur Marcin , Trzciński Tomasz , Spurek Przemysław
Published: March 2024

Implicit field representations offer an effective way of generating 3D object shapes. They leverage an implicit decoder (IM-NET) trained to take a 3D point coordinate concatenated with a shape encoding and to output a value indicating whether the point is outside the shape. This approach enables the efficient rendering of visually plausible objects but also has some significant limitations, resulting in a cumbersome training procedure and empty spaces within the rendered mesh. In this paper, we introduce a new HyperCube architecture based on interval arithmetic that enables direct processing of 3D voxels, trained using a hypernetwork paradigm to enforce model convergence. The code is available at https://github.com/mproszewska/hypercube.
DQSSA: A Quantum-Inspired Solution for Maximizing Influence in Online Social Networks (Student Abstract)
Authors: Rao Aryaman , Singh Parth , Vishwakarma Dinesh Kumar , Prasad Mukesh
Published: March 2024

Influence Maximization is the task of selecting optimal nodes maximising the influence spread in social networks. This study proposes a Discretized Quantum-based Salp Swarm Algorithm (DQSSA) for optimizing influence diffusion in social networks. By discretizing meta-heuristic algorithms and infusing them with quantum-inspired enhancements, we address issues like premature convergence and low efficacy. The proposed method, guided by quantum principles, offers a promising solution for Influence Maximisation. Experiments on four real-world datasets reveal DQSSA's superior performance as compared to established cutting-edge algorithms.
Multi-Expert Distillation for Few-Shot Coordination (Student Abstract)
Authors: Zhu Yujian , Ding Hao , Zhang Zongzhang
Published: March 2024

Ad hoc teamwork is a crucial challenge that aims to design an agent capable of effective collaboration with teammates employing diverse strategies without prior coordination. However, current Population-Based Training (PBT) approaches train the ad hoc agent through interaction with diverse teammates from scratch, which suffer from low efficiency. We introduce Multi-Expert Distillation (MED), a novel approach that directly distills diverse strategies through modeling across-episodic sequences. Experiments show that our algorithm achieves more efficient and stable training and has the ability to improve its behavior using historical contexts. Our code is available at https://github.com/LAMDA-RL/MED.
Securing Billion Bluetooth Devices Leveraging Learning-Based Techniques
Authors: Cai Hanlin
Published: March 2024

As the most popular low-power communication protocol, cybersecurity research on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has garnered significant attention. Due to BLE’s inherent security limitations and firmware vulnerabilities, spoofing attacks can easily compromise BLE devices and tamper with privacy data. In this paper, we proposed BLEGuard, a hybrid detection mechanism combined cyber-physical features with learning-based techniques. We established a physical network testbed to conduct attack simulations and capture advertising packets. Four different network features were utilized to implement detection and classification algorithms. Preliminary results have verified the feasibility of our proposed methods.
Interactive Visual Task Learning for Robots
Authors: Gu Weiwei , Sah Anant , Gopalan Nakul
Published: March 2024

We present a demonstrable framework for robots to learn novel visual concepts and visual tasks via in-situ linguistic interactions with human users. Previous approaches in computer vision have either used large pre-trained visual models to infer novel objects zero-shot, or added novel concepts along with their attributes and representations to a concept hierarchy. We extend the approaches that focus on learning visual concept hierarchies and take this ability one step further to demonstrate novel task solving on robots along with the learned visual concepts.
To enable a visual concept learner to solve robotics tasks one-shot, we developed two distinct techniques.
Firstly, we propose a novel approach, Hi-Viscont(HIerarchical VISual CONcept learner for Task), which augments information of a novel concept, that is being taught, to its parent nodes within a concept hierarchy.
This information propagation allows all concepts in a hierarchy to update as novel concepts are taught in a continual learning setting.
Secondly, we represent a visual task as a scene graph with language annotations, allowing us to create novel permutations of a demonstrated task zero-shot in-situ.
Combining the two techniques, we present a demonstration on a real robot that learns visual task and concepts in one-shot from in-situ interactions with human users, and generalize to perform a novel visual task of the same type in zero-shot.
As shown by the studies in the main conference paper, our system achieves a success rate of 50% on solving the whole task correctly with generalization where the baseline performs at 14% without any ability to generalize to novel tasks and concepts.
We will demonstrate our working interactive learning pipeline at AAAI 2024 in person with our robot and other required hardware.
Visual Language – Let the Product Say What You Want
Authors: Wang Jiaying , Hao Shuailing , Shan Jing , Song Xiaoxu
Published: March 2024

Visual Language is a multitasking on-line system focusing on e-commerce, which involves in generating accurate product descriptions for sellers and providing convenient product retrieval service for customers. To achieve this goal, the system adopts image description technology and multi-modal retrieval technology.
By utilizing cross-modal generation technique, we could help sellers on rapid uploading products and customers on rapid retrieval, which could improve the experience of both sellers and customers.
SoftCLIP: Softer Cross-Modal Alignment Makes CLIP Stronger
Authors: Gao Yuting , Liu Jinfeng , Xu Zihan , Wu Tong , Zhang Enwei , Li Ke , Yang Jie , Liu Wei , Sun Xing
Published: March 2024

During the preceding biennium, vision-language pre-training has achieved noteworthy success on several downstream tasks. Nevertheless, acquiring high-quality image-text pairs, where the pairs are entirely exclusive of each other, remains a challenging task, and noise exists in the commonly used datasets. To address this issue, we propose SoftCLIP, a novel approach that relaxes the strict one-to-one constraint and achieves a soft cross-modal alignment by introducing a softened target, which is generated from the fine-grained intra-modal self-similarity. The intra-modal guidance is indicative to enable two pairs have some local similarities and model many-to-many relationships between the two modalities. Besides, since the positive still dominates in the softened target distribution, we disentangle the negatives in the distribution to further boost the relation alignment with the negatives in the cross-modal learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SoftCLIP. In particular, on ImageNet zero-shot classification task, using CC3M/CC12M as pre-training dataset, SoftCLIP brings a top-1 accuracy improvement of 6.8%/7.2% over the CLIP baseline.