pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Procedural Fairness Through Decoupling Objectionable Data Generating Components
Authors: Zeyu Tang, Jialu Wang, Yang Liu, Peter Spirtes, Kun Zhang
Date: 2023-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fairness

We reveal and address the frequently overlooked yet important issue of disguised procedural unfairness, namely, the potentially inadvertent alterations on the behavior of neutral (i.e., not problematic) aspects of data generating process, and/or the lack of procedural assurance of the greatest benefit of the least advantaged individuals. Inspired by John Rawls's advocacy for pure procedural justice, we view automated decision-making as a microcosm of social institutions, and consider how the data generating process itself can satisfy the requirements of procedural fairness. We propose a framework that decouples the objectionable data generating components from the neutral ones by utilizing reference points and the associated value instantiation rule. Our findings highlight the necessity of preventing disguised procedural unfairness, drawing attention not only to the objectionable data generating components that we aim to mitigate, but also more importantly, to the neutral components that we intend to keep unaffected.
Does Explainable AI Have Moral Value?
Authors: Joshua L. M. Brand, Luca Nannini
Date: 2023-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Explainable AI (XAI) aims to bridge the gap between complex algorithmic systems and human stakeholders. Current discourse often examines XAI in isolation as either a technological tool, user interface, or policy mechanism. This paper proposes a unifying ethical framework grounded in moral duties and the concept of reciprocity. We argue that XAI should be appreciated not merely as a right, but as part of our moral duties that helps sustain a reciprocal relationship between humans affected by AI systems. This is because, we argue, explanations help sustain constitutive symmetry and agency in AI-led decision-making processes. We then assess leading XAI communities and reveal gaps between the ideal of reciprocity and practical feasibility. Machine learning offers useful techniques but overlooks evaluation and adoption challenges. Human-computer interaction provides preliminary insights but oversimplifies organizational contexts. Policies espouse accountability but lack technical nuance. Synthesizing these views exposes barriers to implementable, ethical XAI. Still, positioning XAI as a moral duty transcends rights-based discourse to capture a more robust and complete moral picture. This paper provides an accessible, detailed analysis elucidating the moral value of explainability.
Causal Models Applied to the Patterns of Human Migration due to Climate Change
Authors: Kenneth Lai, Svetlana Yanushkevich
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Management

The impacts of mass migration, such as crisis induced by climate change, extend beyond environmental concerns and can greatly affect social infrastructure and public services, such as education, healthcare, and security. These crises exacerbate certain elements like cultural barriers, and discrimination by amplifying the challenges faced by these affected communities. This paper proposes an innovative approach to address migration crises in the context of crisis management through a combination of modeling and imbalance assessment tools. By employing deep learning for forecasting and integrating causal reasoning via Bayesian networks, this methodology enables the evaluation of imbalances and risks in the socio-technological landscape, providing crucial insights for informed decision-making. Through this framework, critical systems can be analyzed to understand how fluctuations in migration levels may impact them, facilitating effective crisis governance strategies.
Comprehensive Assessment of Toxicity in ChatGPT
Authors: Boyang Zhang, Xinyue Shen, Wai Man Si, Zeyang Sha, Zeyuan Chen, Ahmed Salem, Yun Shen, Michael Backes, Yang Zhang
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00

Moderating offensive, hateful, and toxic language has always been an important but challenging topic in the domain of safe use in NLP. The emerging large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, can potentially further accentuate this threat. Previous works have discovered that ChatGPT can generate toxic responses using carefully crafted inputs. However, limited research has been done to systematically examine when ChatGPT generates toxic responses. In this paper, we comprehensively evaluate the toxicity in ChatGPT by utilizing instruction-tuning datasets that closely align with real-world scenarios. Our results show that ChatGPT's toxicity varies based on different properties and settings of the prompts, including tasks, domains, length, and languages. Notably, prompts in creative writing tasks can be 2x more likely than others to elicit toxic responses. Prompting in German and Portuguese can also double the response toxicity. Additionally, we discover that certain deliberately toxic prompts, designed in earlier studies, no longer yield harmful responses. We hope our discoveries can guide model developers to better regulate these AI systems and the users to avoid undesirable outputs.
The risks of risk-based AI regulation: taking liability seriously
Authors: Martin Kretschmer, Tobias Kretschmer, Alexander Peukert, Christian Peukert
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00

The development and regulation of multi-purpose, large "foundation models" of AI seems to have reached a critical stage, with major investments and new applications announced every other day. Some experts are calling for a moratorium on the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. Legislators globally compete to set the blueprint for a new regulatory regime. This paper analyses the most advanced legal proposal, the European Union's AI Act currently in the stage of final "trilogue" negotiations between the EU institutions. This legislation will likely have extra-territorial implications, sometimes called "the Brussels effect". It also constitutes a radical departure from conventional information and communications technology policy by regulating AI ex-ante through a risk-based approach that seeks to prevent certain harmful outcomes based on product safety principles. We offer a review and critique, specifically discussing the AI Act's problematic obligations regarding data quality and human oversight. Our proposal is to take liability seriously as the key regulatory mechanism. This signals to industry that if a breach of law occurs, firms are required to know in particular what their inputs were and how to retrain the system to remedy the breach. Moreover, we suggest differentiating between endogenous and exogenous sources of potential harm, which can be mitigated by carefully allocating liability between developers and deployers of AI technology.
Data Science for Social Good
Authors: Ahmed Abbasi, Roger H. L. Chiang, Jennifer J. Xu
Date: 2023-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, scientific discovery

Data science has been described as the fourth paradigm for scientific discovery. The latest wave of data science research, pertaining to machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), is growing exponentially and garnering millions of annual citations. However, this growth has been accompanied by a diminishing emphasis on social good challenges - our analysis reveals that the proportion of data science research focusing on social good is less than it has ever been. At the same time, the proliferation of machine learning and generative AI have sparked debates about the socio-technical prospects and challenges associated with data science for human flourishing, organizations, and society. Against this backdrop, we present a framework for "data science for social good" (DSSG) research that considers the interplay between relevant data science research genres, social good challenges, and different levels of socio-technical abstraction. We perform an analysis of the literature to empirically demonstrate the paucity of work on DSSG in information systems (and other related disciplines) and highlight current impediments. We then use our proposed framework to introduce the articles appearing in the special issue. We hope that this article and the special issue will spur future DSSG research and help reverse the alarming trend across data science research over the past 30-plus years in which social good challenges are garnering proportionately less attention with each passing day.
Filter bubbles and affective polarization in user-personalized large language model outputs
Authors: Tomo Lazovich
Date: 2023-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Echoing the history of search engines and social media content rankings, the advent of large language models (LLMs) has led to a push for increased personalization of model outputs to individual users. In the past, personalized recommendations and ranking systems have been linked to the development of filter bubbles (serving content that may confirm a user's existing biases) and affective polarization (strong negative sentiment towards those with differing views). In this work, we explore how prompting a leading large language model, ChatGPT-3.5, with a user's political affiliation prior to asking factual questions about public figures and organizations leads to differing results. We observe that left-leaning users tend to receive more positive statements about left-leaning political figures and media outlets, while right-leaning users see more positive statements about right-leaning entities. This pattern holds across presidential candidates, members of the U.S. Senate, and media organizations with ratings from AllSides. When qualitatively evaluating some of these outputs, there is evidence that particular facts are included or excluded based on the user's political affiliation. These results illustrate that personalizing LLMs based on user demographics carry the same risks of affective polarization and filter bubbles that have been seen in other personalized internet technologies. This ``failure mode" should be monitored closely as there are more attempts to monetize and personalize these models.
The Rise of the AI Co-Pilot: Lessons for Design from Aviation and Beyond
Authors: Abigail Sellen, Eric Horvitz
Date: 2023-11-16 00:00:00

The fast pace of advances in AI promises to revolutionize various aspects of knowledge work, extending its influence to daily life and professional fields alike. We advocate for a paradigm where AI is seen as a collaborative co-pilot, working under human guidance rather than as a mere tool. Drawing from relevant research and literature in the disciplines of Human-Computer Interaction and Human Factors Engineering, we highlight the criticality of maintaining human oversight in AI interactions. Reflecting on lessons from aviation, we address the dangers of over-relying on automation, such as diminished human vigilance and skill erosion. Our paper proposes a design approach that emphasizes active human engagement, control, and skill enhancement in the AI partnership, aiming to foster a harmonious, effective, and empowering human-AI relationship. We particularly call out the critical need to design AI interaction capabilities and software applications to enable and celebrate the primacy of human agency. This calls for designs for human-AI partnership that cede ultimate control and responsibility to the human user as pilot, with the AI co-pilot acting in a well-defined supporting role.
Towards Long-term Annotators: A Supervised Label Aggregation Baseline
Authors: Haoyu Liu, Fei Wang, Minmin Lin, Runze Wu, Renyu Zhu, Shiwei Zhao, Kai Wang, Tangjie Lv, Changjie Fan
Date: 2023-11-15 00:00:00

Relying on crowdsourced workers, data crowdsourcing platforms are able to efficiently provide vast amounts of labeled data. Due to the variability in the annotation quality of crowd workers, modern techniques resort to redundant annotations and subsequent label aggregation to infer true labels. However, these methods require model updating during the inference, posing challenges in real-world implementation. Meanwhile, in recent years, many data labeling tasks have begun to require skilled and experienced annotators, leading to an increasing demand for long-term annotators. These annotators could leave substantial historical annotation records on the crowdsourcing platforms, which can benefit label aggregation, but are ignored by previous works. Hereby, in this paper, we propose a novel label aggregation technique, which does not need any model updating during inference and can extensively explore the historical annotation records. We call it SuperLA, a Supervised Label Aggregation method. Inside this model, we design three types of input features and a straightforward neural network structure to merge all the information together and subsequently produce aggregated labels. Based on comparison experiments conducted on 22 public datasets and 11 baseline methods, we find that SuperLA not only outperforms all those baselines in inference performance but also offers significant advantages in terms of efficiency.
A New Polar-Domain Dictionary Design for the Near-field Region of Extremely Large Aperture Arrays
Authors: Özlem Tuğfe Demir, Emil Björnson
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00

A grid of orthogonal beams with zero column coherence can be easily constructed to cover all prospective user equipments (UEs) in the far-field region of a multiple-antenna base station (BS). However, when the BS is equipped with an extremely large aperture array, the Fraunhofer distance is huge, causing the UEs to be located in the radiative near-field region. This calls for designing a grid of beams based on a near-field dictionary. In the previous work, a polar-domain grid design was proposed to maintain control over the column coherence. A limitation of this approach is identified in this paper, and we propose an enhanced methodology for the design of a polar-domain dictionary specifically tailored for the near-field of an extremely large aperture uniform planar array. Through simulation results, it is demonstrated that the proposed dictionary, employing a non-uniform distance sampling approach, achieves lower column coherence than the benchmark and significantly improves the localization of UEs compared to uniform distance sampling.
Low-Complexity Joint Beamforming for RIS-Assisted MU-MISO Systems Based on Model-Driven Deep Learning
Authors: Weijie Jin, Jing Zhang, Chao-Kai Wen, Shi Jin, Xiao Li, Shuangfeng Han
Date: 2023-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Stochastic Optimization

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) can improve signal propagation environments by adjusting the phase of the incident signal. However, optimizing the phase shifts jointly with the beamforming vector at the access point is challenging due to the non-convex objective function and constraints. In this study, we propose an algorithm based on weighted minimum mean square error optimization and power iteration to maximize the weighted sum rate (WSR) of a RIS-assisted downlink multi-user multiple-input single-output system. To further improve performance, a model-driven deep learning (DL) approach is designed, where trainable variables and graph neural networks are introduced to accelerate the convergence of the proposed algorithm. We also extend the proposed method to include beamforming with imperfect channel state information and derive a two-timescale stochastic optimization algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of complexity and WSR. Specifically, the model-driven DL approach has a runtime that is approximately 3% of the state-of-the-art algorithm to achieve the same performance. Additionally, the proposed algorithm with 2-bit phase shifters outperforms the compared algorithm with continuous phase shift.
Simultaneous Beam Training and Target Sensing in ISAC Systems with RIS
Authors: Kangjian Chen, Chenhao Qi, Octavia A. Dobre, Geoffrey Ye Li
Date: 2023-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Integrated sensing and communication, ISAC

This paper investigates an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system with reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). Our simultaneous beam training and target sensing (SBTTS) scheme enables the base station to perform beam training with the user terminals (UTs) and the RIS, and simultaneously to sense the targets. Based on our findings, the energy of the echoes from the RIS is accumulated in the angle-delay domain while that from the targets is accumulated in the Doppler-delay domain. The SBTTS scheme can distinguish the RIS from the targets with the mixed echoes from the RIS and the targets. Then we propose a positioning and array orientation estimation (PAOE) scheme for both the line-of-sight channels and the non-line-of-sight channels based on the beam training results of SBTTS by developing a low-complexity two-dimensional fast search algorithm. Based on the SBTTS and PAOE schemes, we further compute the angle-of-arrival and angle-of-departure for the channels between the RIS and the UTs by exploiting the geometry relationship to accomplish the beam alignment of the ISAC system. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.
Key Issues in Wireless Transmission for NTN-Assisted Internet of Things
Authors: Chenhao Qi, Jing Wang, Leyi Lyu, Lei Tan, Jinming Zhang, Geoffrey Ye Li
Date: 2023-11-25 00:00:00

Non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) have become appealing resolutions for seamless coverage in the next-generation wireless transmission, where a large number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices diversely distributed can be efficiently served. The explosively growing number of IoT devices brings a new challenge for massive connection. The long-distance wireless signal propagation in NTNs leads to severe path loss and large latency, where the accurate acquisition of channel state information (CSI) is another challenge, especially for fast-moving non-terrestrial base stations (NTBSs). Moreover, the scarcity of on-board resources of NTBSs is also a challenge for resource allocation. To this end, we investigate three key issues, where the existing schemes and emerging resolutions for these three key issues have been comprehensively presented. The first issue is to enable the massive connection by designing random access to establish the wireless link and multiple access to transmit data streams. The second issue is to accurately acquire CSI in various channel conditions by channel estimation and beam training, where orthogonal time frequency space modulation and dynamic codebooks are on focus. The third issue is to efficiently allocate the wireless resources, including power allocation, spectrum sharing, beam hopping, and beamforming. At the end of this article, some future research topics are identified.
Hybrid Precoding and Combining for mmWave Full-Duplex Joint Radar and Communication Systems under Self-Interference
Authors: Murat Bayraktar, Nuria González-Prelcic, Hao Chen
Date: 2023-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Integrated sensing and communication, ISAC

In the context of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), a full-duplex (FD) transceiver can operate as a monostatic radar while maintaining communication capabilities. This paper investigates the design of precoders and combiners for a joint radar and communication (JRC) system at mmWave frequencies. The primary goal of the design is to guarantee certain performance in terms of some sensing and communication metrics while minimizing the self-interference (SI) caused by FD operation and taking into account the hardware limitations coming from a hybrid MIMO architecture. Specifically, we introduce a generalized eigenvalue-based precoder design that considers the downlink user rate, the radar gain, and the SI suppression. Since the hybrid analog/digital architecture degrades the SI mitigation capability of the precoder, we further enhance SI suppression with the analog combiner. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed architecture achieves the required radar gain and SI mitigation while incurring a small loss in downlink spectral efficiency. Additionally, the numerical experiments also show that the use of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) radar with the proposed beamforming architecture results in highly accurate range and velocity estimates for the detected targets.
BDD for Complete Characterization of a Safety Violation in Linear Systems with Inputs
Authors: Manish Goyal, David Bergman, Parasara Sridhar Duggirala
Date: 2023-11-26 00:00:00

The control design tools for linear systems typically involves pole placement and computing Lyapunov functions which are useful for ensuring stability. But given higher requirements on control design, a designer is expected to satisfy other specification such as safety or temporal logic specification as well, and a naive control design might not satisfy such specification. A control designer can employ model checking as a tool for checking safety and obtain a counterexample in case of a safety violation. While several scalable techniques for verification have been developed for safety verification of linear dynamical systems, such tools merely act as decision procedures to evaluate system safety and, consequently, yield a counterexample as an evidence to safety violation. However these model checking methods are not geared towards discovering corner cases or re-using verification artifacts for another sub-optimal safety specification. In this paper, we describe a technique for obtaining complete characterization of counterexamples for a safety violation in linear systems. The proposed technique uses the reachable set computed during safety verification for a given temporal logic formula, performs constraint propagation, and represents all modalities of counterexamples using a binary decision diagram (BDD). We introduce an approach to dynamically determine isomorphic nodes for obtaining a considerably reduced (in size) decision diagram. A thorough experimental evaluation on various benchmarks exhibits that the reduction technique achieves up to $67\%$ reduction in the number of nodes and $75\%$ reduction in the width of the decision diagram.
Automated Lane Merging via Game Theory and Branch Model Predictive Control
Authors: Luyao Zhang, Shaohang Han, Sergio Grammatico
Date: 2023-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Model Predictive Control, Motion Planning

We propose an integrated behavior and motion planning framework for the lane-merging problem. The behavior planner combines search-based planning with game theory to model vehicle interactions and plan multi-vehicle trajectories. Inspired by human drivers, we model the lane-merging problem as a gap selection process and determine the appropriate gap by solving a matrix game. Moreover, we introduce a branch model predictive control (BMPC) framework to account for the uncertain equilibrium strategies adopted by the surrounding vehicles, including Nash and Stackelberg strategies. A tailored numerical solver is developed to enhance computational efficiency by exploiting the tree structure inherent in BMPC. Finally, we validate our proposed integrated planner using real traffic data and demonstrate its effectiveness in handling interactions in dense traffic scenarios. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/SailorBrandon/GT-BMPC.