pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
No Strong Feelings One Way or Another: Re-operationalizing Neutrality in Natural Language Inference
Authors: Animesh Nighojkar, Antonio Laverghetta Jr., John Licato
Date: 2023-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference

Natural Language Inference (NLI) has been a cornerstone task in evaluating language models' inferential reasoning capabilities. However, the standard three-way classification scheme used in NLI has well-known shortcomings in evaluating models' ability to capture the nuances of natural human reasoning. In this paper, we argue that the operationalization of the neutral label in current NLI datasets has low validity, is interpreted inconsistently, and that at least one important sense of neutrality is often ignored. We uncover the detrimental impact of these shortcomings, which in some cases leads to annotation datasets that actually decrease performance on downstream tasks. We compare approaches of handling annotator disagreement and identify flaws in a recent NLI dataset that designs an annotator study based on a problematic operationalization. Our findings highlight the need for a more refined evaluation framework for NLI, and we hope to spark further discussion and action in the NLP community.
Is Self-Repair a Silver Bullet for Code Generation?
Authors: Theo X. Olausson, Jeevana Priya Inala, Chenglong Wang, Jianfeng Gao, Armando Solar-Lezama
Date: 2023-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, HumanEval

Large language models have shown remarkable aptitude in code generation, but still struggle to perform complex tasks. Self-repair -- in which the model debugs and repairs its own code -- has recently become a popular way to boost performance in these settings. However, despite its increasing popularity, existing studies of self-repair have been limited in scope; in many settings, its efficacy thus remains poorly understood. In this paper, we analyze Code Llama, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4's ability to perform self-repair on problems taken from HumanEval and APPS. We find that when the cost of carrying out repair is taken into account, performance gains are often modest, vary a lot between subsets of the data, and are sometimes not present at all. We hypothesize that this is because self-repair is bottlenecked by the model's ability to provide feedback on its own code; using a stronger model to artificially boost the quality of the feedback, we observe substantially larger performance gains. Similarly, a small-scale study in which we provide GPT-4 with feedback from human participants suggests that even for the strongest models, self-repair still lags far behind what can be achieved with human-level debugging.
Jumanji: a Diverse Suite of Scalable Reinforcement Learning Environments in JAX
Authors: Clément Bonnet, Daniel Luo, Donal Byrne, Shikha Surana, Sasha Abramowitz, Paul Duckworth, Vincent Coyette, Laurence I. Midgley, Elshadai Tegegn, Tristan Kalloniatis, Omayma Mahjoub, Matthew Macfarlane, Andries P. Smit, Nathan Grinsztajn, Raphael Boige, Cemlyn N. Waters, Mohamed A. Mimouni, Ulrich A. Mbou Sob, Ruan de Kock, Siddarth Singh, Daniel Furelos-Blanco, Victor Le, Arnu Pretorius, Alexandre Laterre
Date: 2023-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Open-source reinforcement learning (RL) environments have played a crucial role in driving progress in the development of AI algorithms. In modern RL research, there is a need for simulated environments that are performant, scalable, and modular to enable their utilization in a wider range of potential real-world applications. Therefore, we present Jumanji, a suite of diverse RL environments specifically designed to be fast, flexible, and scalable. Jumanji provides a suite of environments focusing on combinatorial problems frequently encountered in industry, as well as challenging general decision-making tasks. By leveraging the efficiency of JAX and hardware accelerators like GPUs and TPUs, Jumanji enables rapid iteration of research ideas and large-scale experimentation, ultimately empowering more capable agents. Unlike existing RL environment suites, Jumanji is highly customizable, allowing users to tailor the initial state distribution and problem complexity to their needs. Furthermore, we provide actor-critic baselines for each environment, accompanied by preliminary findings on scaling and generalization scenarios. Jumanji aims to set a new standard for speed, adaptability, and scalability of RL environments.
Going public: the role of public participation approaches in commercial AI labs
Authors: Lara Groves, Aidan Peppin, Andrew Strait, Jenny Brennan
Date: 2023-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

In recent years, discussions of responsible AI practices have seen growing support for "participatory AI" approaches, intended to involve members of the public in the design and development of AI systems. Prior research has identified a lack of standardised methods or approaches for how to use participatory approaches in the AI development process. At present, there is a dearth of evidence on attitudes to and approaches for participation in the sites driving major AI developments: commercial AI labs. Through 12 semi-structured interviews with industry practitioners and subject-matter experts, this paper explores how commercial AI labs understand participatory AI approaches and the obstacles they have faced implementing these practices in the development of AI systems and research. We find that while interviewees view participation as a normative project that helps achieve "societally beneficial" AI systems, practitioners face numerous barriers to embedding participatory approaches in their companies: participation is expensive and resource intensive, it is "atomised" within companies, there is concern about exploitation, there is no incentive to be transparent about its adoption, and it is complicated by a lack of clear context. These barriers result in a piecemeal approach to participation that confers no decision-making power to participants and has little ongoing impact for AI labs. This papers contribution is to provide novel empirical research on the implementation of public participation in commercial AI labs, and shed light on the current challenges of using participatory approaches in this context.
DoubleAdapt: A Meta-learning Approach to Incremental Learning for Stock Trend Forecasting
Authors: Lifan Zhao, Shuming Kong, Yanyan Shen
Date: 2023-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning, Meta-Learning

Stock trend forecasting is a fundamental task of quantitative investment where precise predictions of price trends are indispensable. As an online service, stock data continuously arrive over time. It is practical and efficient to incrementally update the forecast model with the latest data which may reveal some new patterns recurring in the future stock market. However, incremental learning for stock trend forecasting still remains under-explored due to the challenge of distribution shifts (a.k.a. concept drifts). With the stock market dynamically evolving, the distribution of future data can slightly or significantly differ from incremental data, hindering the effectiveness of incremental updates. To address this challenge, we propose DoubleAdapt, an end-to-end framework with two adapters, which can effectively adapt the data and the model to mitigate the effects of distribution shifts. Our key insight is to automatically learn how to adapt stock data into a locally stationary distribution in favor of profitable updates. Complemented by data adaptation, we can confidently adapt the model parameters under mitigated distribution shifts. We cast each incremental learning task as a meta-learning task and automatically optimize the adapters for desirable data adaptation and parameter initialization. Experiments on real-world stock datasets demonstrate that DoubleAdapt achieves state-of-the-art predictive performance and shows considerable efficiency.
Are Large Language Models Really Good Logical Reasoners? A Comprehensive Evaluation and Beyond
Authors: Fangzhi Xu, Qika Lin, Jiawei Han, Tianzhe Zhao, Jun Liu, Erik Cambria
Date: 2023-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Evidence Selection, Hallucination, Logical Reasoning, Mathematical Reasoning

Logical reasoning consistently plays a fundamental and significant role in the domains of knowledge engineering and artificial intelligence. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a noteworthy innovation in natural language processing (NLP). However, the question of whether LLMs can effectively address the task of logical reasoning, which requires gradual cognitive inference similar to human intelligence, remains unanswered. To this end, we aim to bridge this gap and provide comprehensive evaluations in this paper. Firstly, to offer systematic evaluations, we select fifteen typical logical reasoning datasets and organize them into deductive, inductive, abductive and mixed-form reasoning settings. Considering the comprehensiveness of evaluations, we include 3 early-era representative LLMs and 4 trending LLMs. Secondly, different from previous evaluations relying only on simple metrics (e.g., \emph{accuracy}), we propose fine-level evaluations in objective and subjective manners, covering both answers and explanations, including \emph{answer correctness}, \emph{explain correctness}, \emph{explain completeness} and \emph{explain redundancy}. Additionally, to uncover the logical flaws of LLMs, problematic cases will be attributed to five error types from two dimensions, i.e., \emph{evidence selection process} and \emph{reasoning process}. Thirdly, to avoid the influences of knowledge bias and concentrate purely on benchmarking the logical reasoning capability of LLMs, we propose a new dataset with neutral content. Based on the in-depth evaluations, this paper finally forms a general evaluation scheme of logical reasoning capability from six dimensions (i.e., \emph{Correct}, \emph{Rigorous}, \emph{Self-aware}, \emph{Active}, \emph{Oriented} and \emph{No hallucination}). It reflects the pros and cons of LLMs and gives guiding directions for future works.
Subset Selection Based On Multiple Rankings in the Presence of Bias: Effectiveness of Fairness Constraints for Multiwinner Voting Score Functions
Authors: Niclas Boehmer, L. Elisa Celis, Lingxiao Huang, Anay Mehrotra, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi
Date: 2023-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

We consider the problem of subset selection where one is given multiple rankings of items and the goal is to select the highest ``quality'' subset. Score functions from the multiwinner voting literature have been used to aggregate rankings into quality scores for subsets. We study this setting of subset selection problems when, in addition, rankings may contain systemic or unconscious biases toward a group of items. For a general model of input rankings and biases, we show that requiring the selected subset to satisfy group fairness constraints can improve the quality of the selection with respect to unbiased rankings. Importantly, we show that for fairness constraints to be effective, different multiwinner score functions may require a drastically different number of rankings: While for some functions, fairness constraints need an exponential number of rankings to recover a close-to-optimal solution, for others, this dependency is only polynomial. This result relies on a novel notion of ``smoothness'' of submodular functions in this setting that quantifies how well a function can ``correctly'' assess the quality of items in the presence of bias. The results in this paper can be used to guide the choice of multiwinner score functions for the subset selection setting considered here; we additionally provide a tool to empirically enable this.
Process Knowledge-infused Learning for Clinician-friendly Explanations
Authors: Kaushik Roy, Yuxin Zi, Manas Gaur, Jinendra Malekar, Qi Zhang, Vignesh Narayanan, Amit Sheth
Date: 2023-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Language models have the potential to assess mental health using social media data. By analyzing online posts and conversations, these models can detect patterns indicating mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts. They examine keywords, language markers, and sentiment to gain insights into an individual's mental well-being. This information is crucial for early detection, intervention, and support, improving mental health care and prevention strategies. However, using language models for mental health assessments from social media has two limitations: (1) They do not compare posts against clinicians' diagnostic processes, and (2) It's challenging to explain language model outputs using concepts that the clinician can understand, i.e., clinician-friendly explanations. In this study, we introduce Process Knowledge-infused Learning (PK-iL), a new learning paradigm that layers clinical process knowledge structures on language model outputs, enabling clinician-friendly explanations of the underlying language model predictions. We rigorously test our methods on existing benchmark datasets, augmented with such clinical process knowledge, and release a new dataset for assessing suicidality. PK-iL performs competitively, achieving a 70% agreement with users, while other XAI methods only achieve 47% agreement (average inter-rater agreement of 0.72). Our evaluations demonstrate that PK-iL effectively explains model predictions to clinicians.
Amortized Inference for Gaussian Process Hyperparameters of Structured Kernels
Authors: Matthias Bitzer, Mona Meister, Christoph Zimmer
Date: 2023-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Bayesian Optimization, Gaussian Processes

Learning the kernel parameters for Gaussian processes is often the computational bottleneck in applications such as online learning, Bayesian optimization, or active learning. Amortizing parameter inference over different datasets is a promising approach to dramatically speed up training time. However, existing methods restrict the amortized inference procedure to a fixed kernel structure. The amortization network must be redesigned manually and trained again in case a different kernel is employed, which leads to a large overhead in design time and training time. We propose amortizing kernel parameter inference over a complete kernel-structure-family rather than a fixed kernel structure. We do that via defining an amortization network over pairs of datasets and kernel structures. This enables fast kernel inference for each element in the kernel family without retraining the amortization network. As a by-product, our amortization network is able to do fast ensembling over kernel structures. In our experiments, we show drastically reduced inference time combined with competitive test performance for a large set of kernels and datasets.
Inspire creativity with ORIBA: Transform Artists' Original Characters into Chatbots through Large Language Model
Authors: Yuqian Sun, Xingyu Li, Ze Gao
Date: 2023-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

This research delves into the intersection of illustration art and artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on how illustrators engage with AI agents that embody their original characters (OCs). We introduce 'ORIBA', a customizable AI chatbot that enables illustrators to converse with their OCs. This approach allows artists to not only receive responses from their OCs but also to observe their inner monologues and behavior. Despite the existing tension between artists and AI, our study explores innovative collaboration methods that are inspiring to illustrators. By examining the impact of AI on the creative process and the boundaries of authorship, we aim to enhance human-AI interactions in creative fields, with potential applications extending beyond illustration to interactive storytelling and more.
Politeness Stereotypes and Attack Vectors: Gender Stereotypes in Japanese and Korean Language Models
Authors: Victor Steinborn, Antonis Maronikolakis, Hinrich Schütze
Date: 2023-06-16 00:00:00

In efforts to keep up with the rapid progress and use of large language models, gender bias research is becoming more prevalent in NLP. Non-English bias research, however, is still in its infancy with most work focusing on English. In our work, we study how grammatical gender bias relating to politeness levels manifests in Japanese and Korean language models. Linguistic studies in these languages have identified a connection between gender bias and politeness levels, however it is not yet known if language models reproduce these biases. We analyze relative prediction probabilities of the male and female grammatical genders using templates and find that informal polite speech is most indicative of the female grammatical gender, while rude and formal speech is most indicative of the male grammatical gender. Further, we find politeness levels to be an attack vector for allocational gender bias in cyberbullying detection models. Cyberbullies can evade detection through simple techniques abusing politeness levels. We introduce an attack dataset to (i) identify representational gender bias across politeness levels, (ii) demonstrate how gender biases can be abused to bypass cyberbullying detection models and (iii) show that allocational biases can be mitigated via training on our proposed dataset. Through our findings we highlight the importance of bias research moving beyond its current English-centrism.
Fedstellar: A Platform for Decentralized Federated Learning
Authors: Enrique Tomás Martínez Beltrán, Ángel Luis Perales Gómez, Chao Feng, Pedro Miguel Sánchez Sánchez, Sergio López Bernal, Gérôme Bovet, Manuel Gil Pérez, Gregorio Martínez Pérez, Alberto Huertas Celdrán
Date: 2023-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

In 2016, Google proposed Federated Learning (FL) as a novel paradigm to train Machine Learning (ML) models across the participants of a federation while preserving data privacy. Since its birth, Centralized FL (CFL) has been the most used approach, where a central entity aggregates participants' models to create a global one. However, CFL presents limitations such as communication bottlenecks, single point of failure, and reliance on a central server. Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) addresses these issues by enabling decentralized model aggregation and minimizing dependency on a central entity. Despite these advances, current platforms training DFL models struggle with key issues such as managing heterogeneous federation network topologies. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents Fedstellar, a platform extended from p2pfl library and designed to train FL models in a decentralized, semi-decentralized, and centralized fashion across diverse federations of physical or virtualized devices. The Fedstellar implementation encompasses a web application with an interactive graphical interface, a controller for deploying federations of nodes using physical or virtual devices, and a core deployed on each device which provides the logic needed to train, aggregate, and communicate in the network. The effectiveness of the platform has been demonstrated in two scenarios: a physical deployment involving single-board devices such as Raspberry Pis for detecting cyberattacks, and a virtualized deployment comparing various FL approaches in a controlled environment using MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. In both scenarios, Fedstellar demonstrated consistent performance and adaptability, achieving F1 scores of 91%, 98%, and 91.2% using DFL for detecting cyberattacks and classifying MNIST and CIFAR-10, respectively, reducing training time by 32% compared to centralized approaches.
Temporal Difference Learning with Experience Replay
Authors: Han-Dong Lim, Donghwan Lee
Date: 2023-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Temporal-difference (TD) learning is widely regarded as one of the most popular algorithms in reinforcement learning (RL). Despite its widespread use, it has only been recently that researchers have begun to actively study its finite time behavior, including the finite time bound on mean squared error and sample complexity. On the empirical side, experience replay has been a key ingredient in the success of deep RL algorithms, but its theoretical effects on RL have yet to be fully understood. In this paper, we present a simple decomposition of the Markovian noise terms and provide finite-time error bounds for TD-learning with experience replay. Specifically, under the Markovian observation model, we demonstrate that for both the averaged iterate and final iterate cases, the error term induced by a constant step-size can be effectively controlled by the size of the replay buffer and the mini-batch sampled from the experience replay buffer.
Meta Generative Flow Networks with Personalization for Task-Specific Adaptation
Authors: Xinyuan Ji, Xu Zhang, Wei Xi, Haozhi Wang, Olga Gadyatskaya, Yinchuan Li
Date: 2023-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning, Meta Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Multi-task reinforcement learning and meta-reinforcement learning have been developed to quickly adapt to new tasks, but they tend to focus on tasks with higher rewards and more frequent occurrences, leading to poor performance on tasks with sparse rewards. To address this issue, GFlowNets can be integrated into meta-learning algorithms (GFlowMeta) by leveraging the advantages of GFlowNets on tasks with sparse rewards. However, GFlowMeta suffers from performance degradation when encountering heterogeneous transitions from distinct tasks. To overcome this challenge, this paper proposes a personalized approach named pGFlowMeta, which combines task-specific personalized policies with a meta policy. Each personalized policy balances the loss on its personalized task and the difference from the meta policy, while the meta policy aims to minimize the average loss of all tasks. The theoretical analysis shows that the algorithm converges at a sublinear rate. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms in discrete environments.