pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning Similarity among Users for Personalized Session-Based Recommendation from hierarchical structure of User-Session-Item
Authors: Jisoo Cha, Haemin Jeong, Wooju Kim
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Session-Based Recommendations

The task of the session-based recommendation is to predict the next interaction of the user based on the anonymized user's behavior pattern. And personalized version of this system is a promising research field due to its availability to deal with user information. However, there's a problem that the user's preferences and historical sessions were not considered in the typical session-based recommendation since it concentrates only on user-item interaction. In addition, the existing personalized session-based recommendation model has a limited capability in that it only considers the preference of the current user without considering those of similar users. It means there can be the loss of information included within the hierarchical data structure of the user-session-item. To tackle with this problem, we propose USP-SBR(abbr. of User Similarity Powered - Session Based Recommender). To model global historical sessions of users, we propose UserGraph that has two types of nodes - ItemNode and UserNode. We then connect the nodes with three types of edges. The first type of edges connects ItemNode as chronological order, and the second connects ItemNode to UserNode, and the last connects UserNode to ItemNode. With these user embeddings, we propose additional contrastive loss, that makes users with similar intention be close to each other in the vector space. we apply graph neural network on these UserGraph and update nodes. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms some state-of-the-art approaches.
Tackling Cooperative Incompatibility for Zero-Shot Human-AI Coordination
Authors: Yang Li, Shao Zhang, Jichen Sun, WenHao Zhang, Yali Du, Ying Wen, Xinbing Wang, Wei Pan
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent

Securing coordination between AI agent and teammates (human players or AI agents) in contexts involving unfamiliar humans continues to pose a significant challenge in Zero-Shot Coordination. The issue of cooperative incompatibility becomes particularly prominent when an AI agent is unsuccessful in synchronizing with certain previously unknown partners. Traditional algorithms have aimed to collaborate with partners by optimizing fixed objectives within a population, fostering diversity in strategies and behaviors. However, these techniques may lead to learning loss and an inability to cooperate with specific strategies within the population, a phenomenon named cooperative incompatibility in learning. In order to solve cooperative incompatibility in learning and effectively address the problem in the context of ZSC, we introduce the Cooperative Open-ended LEarning (COLE) framework, which formulates open-ended objectives in cooperative games with two players using perspectives of graph theory to evaluate and pinpoint the cooperative capacity of each strategy. We present two practical algorithms, specifically \algo and \algoR, which incorporate insights from game theory and graph theory. We also show that COLE could effectively overcome the cooperative incompatibility from theoretical and empirical analysis. Subsequently, we created an online Overcooked human-AI experiment platform, the COLE platform, which enables easy customization of questionnaires, model weights, and other aspects. Utilizing the COLE platform, we enlist 130 participants for human experiments. Our findings reveal a preference for our approach over state-of-the-art methods using a variety of subjective metrics. Moreover, objective experimental outcomes in the Overcooked game environment indicate that our method surpasses existing ones when coordinating with previously unencountered AI agents and the human proxy model.
Classification of Edge-dependent Labels of Nodes in Hypergraphs
Authors: Minyoung Choe, Sunwoo Kim, Jaemin Yoo, Kijung Shin
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Node Clustering

A hypergraph is a data structure composed of nodes and hyperedges, where each hyperedge is an any-sized subset of nodes. Due to the flexibility in hyperedge size, hypergraphs represent group interactions (e.g., co-authorship by more than two authors) more naturally and accurately than ordinary graphs. Interestingly, many real-world systems modeled as hypergraphs contain edge-dependent node labels, i.e., node labels that vary depending on hyperedges. For example, on co-authorship datasets, the same author (i.e., a node) can be the primary author in a paper (i.e., a hyperedge) but the corresponding author in another paper (i.e., another hyperedge). In this work, we introduce a classification of edge-dependent node labels as a new problem. This problem can be used as a benchmark task for hypergraph neural networks, which recently have attracted great attention, and also the usefulness of edge-dependent node labels has been verified in various applications. To tackle this problem, we propose WHATsNet, a novel hypergraph neural network that represents the same node differently depending on the hyperedges it participates in by reflecting its varying importance in the hyperedges. To this end, WHATsNet models the relations between nodes within each hyperedge, using their relative centrality as positional encodings. In our experiments, we demonstrate that WHATsNet significantly and consistently outperforms ten competitors on six real-world hypergraphs, and we also show successful applications of WHATsNet to (a) ranking aggregation, (b) node clustering, and (c) product return prediction.
Quantification of Uncertainties in Deep Learning-based Environment Perception
Authors: Marco Braun, Moritz Luszek, Jan Siegemund, Kevin Kollek, Anton Kummert
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

In this work, we introduce a novel Deep Learning-based method to perceive the environment of a vehicle based on radar scans while accounting for uncertainties in its predictions. The environment of the host vehicle is segmented into equally sized grid cells which are classified individually. Complementary to the segmentation output, our Deep Learning-based algorithm is capable of differentiating uncertainties in its predictions as being related to an inadequate model (epistemic uncertainty) or noisy data (aleatoric uncertainty). To this end, weights are described as probability distributions accounting for uncertainties in the model parameters. Distributions are learned in a supervised fashion using gradient descent. We prove that uncertainties in the model output correlate with the precision of its predictions. Compared to previous concepts, we show superior performance of our approach to reliably perceive the environment of a vehicle.
Interval Load Forecasting for Individual Households in the Presence of Electric Vehicle Charging
Authors: Raiden Skala, Mohamed Ahmed T. A. Elgalhud, Katarina Grolinger, Syed Mir
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Load Forecasting, Prediction, Prediction Intervals

The transition to Electric Vehicles (EV) in place of traditional internal combustion engines is increasing societal demand for electricity. The ability to integrate the additional demand from EV charging into forecasting electricity demand is critical for maintaining the reliability of electricity generation and distribution. Load forecasting studies typically exclude households with home EV charging, focusing on offices, schools, and public charging stations. Moreover, they provide point forecasts which do not offer information about prediction uncertainty. Consequently, this paper proposes the Long Short-Term Memory Bayesian Neural Networks (LSTM-BNNs) for household load forecasting in presence of EV charging. The approach takes advantage of the LSTM model to capture the time dependencies and uses the dropout layer with Bayesian inference to generate prediction intervals. Results show that the proposed LSTM-BNNs achieve accuracy similar to point forecasts with the advantage of prediction intervals. Moreover, the impact of lockdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic on the load forecasting model is examined, and the analysis shows that there is no major change in the model performance as, for the considered households, the randomness of the EV charging outweighs the change due to pandemic.
KNOW How to Make Up Your Mind! Adversarially Detecting and Alleviating Inconsistencies in Natural Language Explanations
Authors: Myeongjun Jang, Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Julian McAuley, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Oana-Maria Camburu
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

While recent works have been considerably improving the quality of the natural language explanations (NLEs) generated by a model to justify its predictions, there is very limited research in detecting and alleviating inconsistencies among generated NLEs. In this work, we leverage external knowledge bases to significantly improve on an existing adversarial attack for detecting inconsistent NLEs. We apply our attack to high-performing NLE models and show that models with higher NLE quality do not necessarily generate fewer inconsistencies. Moreover, we propose an off-the-shelf mitigation method to alleviate inconsistencies by grounding the model into external background knowledge. Our method decreases the inconsistencies of previous high-performing NLE models as detected by our attack.
The Chai Platform's AI Safety Framework
Authors: Xiaoding Lu, Aleksey Korshuk, Zongyi Liu, William Beauchamp
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

Chai empowers users to create and interact with customized chatbots, offering unique and engaging experiences. Despite the exciting prospects, the work recognizes the inherent challenges of a commitment to modern safety standards. Therefore, this paper presents the integrated AI safety principles into Chai to prioritize user safety, data protection, and ethical technology use. The paper specifically explores the multidimensional domain of AI safety research, demonstrating its application in Chai's conversational chatbot platform. It presents Chai's AI safety principles, informed by well-established AI research centres and adapted for chat AI. This work proposes the following safety framework: Content Safeguarding; Stability and Robustness; and Operational Transparency and Traceability. The subsequent implementation of these principles is outlined, followed by an experimental analysis of Chai's AI safety framework's real-world impact. We emphasise the significance of conscientious application of AI safety principles and robust safety measures. The successful implementation of the safe AI framework in Chai indicates the practicality of mitigating potential risks for responsible and ethical use of AI technologies. The ultimate vision is a transformative AI tool fostering progress and innovation while prioritizing user safety and ethical standards.
Which Argumentative Aspects of Hate Speech in Social Media can be reliably identified?
Authors: Damián Furman, Pablo Torres, José A. Rodríguez, Diego Letzen, Vanina Martínez, Laura Alonso Alemany
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

With the increasing diversity of use cases of large language models, a more informative treatment of texts seems necessary. An argumentative analysis could foster a more reasoned usage of chatbots, text completion mechanisms or other applications. However, it is unclear which aspects of argumentation can be reliably identified and integrated in language models. In this paper, we present an empirical assessment of the reliability with which different argumentative aspects can be automatically identified in hate speech in social media. We have enriched the Hateval corpus (Basile et al. 2019) with a manual annotation of some argumentative components, adapted from Wagemans (2016)'s Periodic Table of Arguments. We show that some components can be identified with reasonable reliability. For those that present a high error ratio, we analyze the patterns of disagreement between expert annotators and errors in automatic procedures, and we propose adaptations of those categories that can be more reliably reproduced.
Time Interpret: a Unified Model Interpretability Library for Time Series
Authors: Joseph Enguehard
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

We introduce $\texttt{time_interpret}$, a library designed as an extension of Captum, with a specific focus on temporal data. As such, this library implements several feature attribution methods that can be used to explain predictions made by any Pytorch model. $\texttt{time_interpret}$ also provides several synthetic and real world time series datasets, various PyTorch models, as well as a set of methods to evaluate feature attributions. Moreover, while being primarily developed to explain predictions based on temporal data, some of its components have a different application, including for instance methods explaining predictions made by language models. In this paper, we give a general introduction of this library. We also present several previously unpublished feature attribution methods, which have been developed along with $\texttt{time_interpret}$.
Adversarial Ink: Componentwise Backward Error Attacks on Deep Learning
Authors: Lucas Beerens, Desmond J. Higham
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Deep Learning

Deep neural networks are capable of state-of-the-art performance in many classification tasks. However, they are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks -- small perturbations to the input that lead to a change in classification. We address this issue from the perspective of backward error and condition number, concepts that have proved useful in numerical analysis. To do this, we build on the work of Beuzeville et al. (2021). In particular, we develop a new class of attack algorithms that use componentwise relative perturbations. Such attacks are highly relevant in the case of handwritten documents or printed texts where, for example, the classification of signatures, postcodes, dates or numerical quantities may be altered by changing only the ink consistency and not the background. This makes the perturbed images look natural to the naked eye. Such ``adversarial ink'' attacks therefore reveal a weakness that can have a serious impact on safety and security. We illustrate the new attacks on real data and contrast them with existing algorithms. We also study the use of a componentwise condition number to quantify vulnerability.
Unsupervised haze removal from underwater images
Authors: Praveen Kandula, A. N. Rajagopalan
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement

Several supervised networks exist that remove haze information from underwater images using paired datasets and pixel-wise loss functions. However, training these networks requires large amounts of paired data which is cumbersome, complex and time-consuming. Also, directly using adversarial and cycle consistency loss functions for unsupervised learning is inaccurate as the underlying mapping from clean to underwater images is one-to-many, resulting in an inaccurate constraint on the cycle consistency loss. To address these issues, we propose a new method to remove haze from underwater images using unpaired data. Our model disentangles haze and content information from underwater images using a Haze Disentanglement Network (HDN). The disentangled content is used by a restoration network to generate a clean image using adversarial losses. The disentangled haze is then used as a guide for underwater image regeneration resulting in a strong constraint on cycle consistency loss and improved performance gains. Different ablation studies show that the haze and content from underwater images are effectively separated. Exhaustive experiments reveal that accurate cycle consistency constraint and the proposed network architecture play an important role in yielding enhanced results. Experiments on UFO-120, UWNet, UWScenes, and UIEB underwater datasets indicate that the results of our method outperform prior art both visually and quantitatively.
Action-Evolution Petri Nets: a Framework for Modeling and Solving Dynamic Task Assignment Problems
Authors: Riccardo Lo Bianco, Remco Dijkman, Wim Nuijten, Willem van Jaarsveld
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Dynamic task assignment involves assigning arriving tasks to a limited number of resources in order to minimize the overall cost of the assignments. To achieve optimal task assignment, it is necessary to model the assignment problem first. While there exist separate formalisms, specifically Markov Decision Processes and (Colored) Petri Nets, to model, execute, and solve different aspects of the problem, there is no integrated modeling technique. To address this gap, this paper proposes Action-Evolution Petri Nets (A-E PN) as a framework for modeling and solving dynamic task assignment problems. A-E PN provides a unified modeling technique that can represent all elements of dynamic task assignment problems. Moreover, A-E PN models are executable, which means they can be used to learn close-to-optimal assignment policies through Reinforcement Learning (RL) without additional modeling effort. To evaluate the framework, we define a taxonomy of archetypical assignment problems. We show for three cases that A-E PN can be used to learn close-to-optimal assignment policies. Our results suggest that A-E PN can be used to model and solve a broad range of dynamic task assignment problems.
Operationalising the Definition of General Purpose AI Systems: Assessing Four Approaches
Authors: Risto Uuk, Carlos Ignacio Gutierrez, Alex Tamkin
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00

The European Union's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act is set to be a landmark legal instrument for regulating AI technology. While stakeholders have primarily focused on the governance of fixed purpose AI applications (also known as narrow AI), more attention is required to understand the nature of highly and broadly capable systems. As of the beginning of 2023, several definitions for General Purpose AI Systems (GPAIS) exist in relation to the AI Act, attempting to distinguish between systems with and without a fixed purpose. In this article, we operationalise these differences through the concept of "distinct tasks" and examine four approaches (quantity, performance, adaptability, and emergence) to determine whether an AI system should be classified as a GPAIS. We suggest that EU stakeholders use the four approaches as a starting point to discriminate between fixed-purpose and GPAIS.
Data-Driven Online Model Selection With Regret Guarantees
Authors: Aldo Pacchiano, Christoph Dann, Claudio Gentile
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, model, Model Selection, Sequential Decision Making

We consider model selection for sequential decision making in stochastic environments with bandit feedback, where a meta-learner has at its disposal a pool of base learners, and decides on the fly which action to take based on the policies recommended by each base learner. Model selection is performed by regret balancing but, unlike the recent literature on this subject, we do not assume any prior knowledge about the base learners like candidate regret guarantees; instead, we uncover these quantities in a data-driven manner. The meta-learner is therefore able to leverage the realized regret incurred by each base learner for the learning environment at hand (as opposed to the expected regret), and single out the best such regret. We design two model selection algorithms operating with this more ambitious notion of regret and, besides proving model selection guarantees via regret balancing, we experimentally demonstrate the compelling practical benefits of dealing with actual regrets instead of candidate regret bounds.
Seizing Serendipity: Exploiting the Value of Past Success in Off-Policy Actor-Critic
Authors: Tianying Ji, Yu Luo, Fuchun Sun, Xianyuan Zhan, Jianwei Zhang, Huazhe Xu
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Learning high-quality $Q$-value functions plays a key role in the success of many modern off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Previous works primarily focus on addressing the value overestimation issue, an outcome of adopting function approximators and off-policy learning. Deviating from the common viewpoint, we observe that $Q$-values are often underestimated in the latter stage of the RL training process, potentially hindering policy learning and reducing sample efficiency. We find that such a long-neglected phenomenon is often related to the use of inferior actions from the current policy in Bellman updates as compared to the more optimal action samples in the replay buffer. To address this issue, our insight is to incorporate sufficient exploitation of past successes while maintaining exploration optimism. We propose the Blended Exploitation and Exploration (BEE) operator, a simple yet effective approach that updates $Q$-value using both historical best-performing actions and the current policy. Based on BEE, the resulting practical algorithm BAC outperforms state-of-the-art methods in over 50 continuous control tasks and achieves strong performance in failure-prone scenarios and real-world robot tasks. Benchmark results and videos are available at https://jity16.github.io/BEE/.
Leveraging Large Language Models for Topic Classification in the Domain of Public Affairs
Authors: Alejandro Peña, Aythami Morales, Julian Fierrez, Ignacio Serna, Javier Ortega-Garcia, Iñigo Puente, Jorge Cordova, Gonzalo Cordova
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Topic Classification

The analysis of public affairs documents is crucial for citizens as it promotes transparency, accountability, and informed decision-making. It allows citizens to understand government policies, participate in public discourse, and hold representatives accountable. This is crucial, and sometimes a matter of life or death, for companies whose operation depend on certain regulations. Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to greatly enhance the analysis of public affairs documents by effectively processing and understanding the complex language used in such documents. In this work, we analyze the performance of LLMs in classifying public affairs documents. As a natural multi-label task, the classification of these documents presents important challenges. In this work, we use a regex-powered tool to collect a database of public affairs documents with more than 33K samples and 22.5M tokens. Our experiments assess the performance of 4 different Spanish LLMs to classify up to 30 different topics in the data in different configurations. The results shows that LLMs can be of great use to process domain-specific documents, such as those in the domain of public affairs.
Interpretable Multimodal Emotion Recognition using Facial Features and Physiological Signals
Authors: Puneet Kumar, Xiaobai Li
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Classification, Emotion Recognition, Feature Importance, Multimodal Emotion Recognition

This paper aims to demonstrate the importance and feasibility of fusing multimodal information for emotion recognition. It introduces a multimodal framework for emotion understanding by fusing the information from visual facial features and rPPG signals extracted from the input videos. An interpretability technique based on permutation feature importance analysis has also been implemented to compute the contributions of rPPG and visual modalities toward classifying a given input video into a particular emotion class. The experiments on IEMOCAP dataset demonstrate that the emotion classification performance improves by combining the complementary information from multiple modalities.