pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Hatred Stems from Ignorance! Distillation of the Persuasion Modes in Countering Conversational Hate Speech
Authors: Ghadi Alyahya, Abeer Aldayel
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00

Examining the factors that the counterspeech uses are at the core of understanding the optimal methods for confronting hate speech online. Various studies have assessed the emotional base factors used in counter speech, such as emotional empathy, offensiveness, and hostility. To better understand the counterspeech used in conversations, this study distills persuasion modes into reason, emotion, and credibility and evaluates their use in two types of conversation interactions: closed (multi-turn) and open (single-turn) concerning racism, sexism, and religious bigotry. The evaluation covers the distinct behaviors seen with human-sourced as opposed to machine-generated counterspeech. It also assesses the interplay between the stance taken and the mode of persuasion seen in the counterspeech. Notably, we observe nuanced differences in the counterspeech persuasion modes used in open and closed interactions, especially in terms of the topic, with a general tendency to use reason as a persuasion mode to express the counterpoint to hate comments. The machine-generated counterspeech tends to exhibit an emotional persuasion mode, while human counters lean toward reason. Furthermore, our study shows that reason tends to obtain more supportive replies than other persuasion modes. The findings highlight the potential for incorporating persuasion modes into studies about countering hate speech, as they can serve as an optimal means of explainability and pave the way for the further adoption of the reply's stance and the role it plays in assessing what comprises the optimal counterspeech.
What Are Tools Anyway? A Survey from the Language Model Perspective
Authors: Zhiruo Wang, Zhoujun Cheng, Hao Zhu, Daniel Fried, Graham Neubig
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation

Language models (LMs) are powerful yet mostly for text generation tasks. Tools have substantially enhanced their performance for tasks that require complex skills. However, many works adopt the term "tool" in different ways, raising the question: What is a tool anyway? Subsequently, where and how do tools help LMs? In this survey, we provide a unified definition of tools as external programs used by LMs, and perform a systematic review of LM tooling scenarios and approaches. Grounded on this review, we empirically study the efficiency of various tooling methods by measuring their required compute and performance gains on various benchmarks, and highlight some challenges and potential future research in the field.
Span-Oriented Information Extraction -- A Unifying Perspective on Information Extraction
Authors: Yifan Ding, Michael Yankoski, Tim Weninger
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00

Information Extraction refers to a collection of tasks within Natural Language Processing (NLP) that identifies sub-sequences within text and their labels. These tasks have been used for many years to link extract relevant information and to link free text to structured data. However, the heterogeneity among information extraction tasks impedes progress in this area. We therefore offer a unifying perspective centered on what we define to be spans in text. We then re-orient these seemingly incongruous tasks into this unified perspective and then re-present the wide assortment of information extraction tasks as variants of the same basic Span-Oriented Information Extraction task.
Bi-objective Optimization in Role Mining
Authors: Jason Crampton, Eduard Eiben, Gregory Gutin, Daniel Karapetyan, Diptapriyo Majumdar
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation

Role mining is a technique used to derive a role-based authorization policy from an existing policy. Given a set of users $U$, a set of permissions $P$ and a user-permission authorization relation $\mahtit{UPA}\subseteq U\times P$, a role mining algorithm seeks to compute a set of roles $R$, a user-role authorization relation $\mathit{UA}\subseteq U\times R$ and a permission-role authorization relation $\mathit{PA}\subseteq R\times P$, such that the composition of $\mathit{UA}$ and $\mathit{PA}$ is close (in some appropriate sense) to $\mathit{UPA}$. In this paper, we first introduce the Generalized Noise Role Mining problem (GNRM) -- a generalization of the MinNoise Role Mining problem -- which we believe has considerable practical relevance. Extending work of Fomin et al., we show that GNRM is fixed parameter tractable, with parameter $r + k$, where $r$ is the number of roles in the solution and $k$ is the number of discrepancies between $\mathit{UPA}$ and the relation defined by the composition of $\mathit{UA}$ and $\mathit{PA}$. We further introduce a bi-objective optimization variant of GNRM, where we wish to minimize both $r$ and $k$ subject to upper bounds $r\le \bar{r}$ and $k\le \bar{k}$, where $\bar{r}$ and $\bar{k}$ are constants. We show that the Pareto front of this bi-objective optimization problem (BO-GNRM) can be computed in fixed-parameter tractable time with parameter $\bar{r}+\bar{k}$. We then report the results of our experimental work using the integer programming solver Gurobi to solve instances of BO-GNRM. Our key findings are that (a) we obtained strong support that Gurobi's performance is fixed-parameter tractable, (b) our results suggest that our techniques may be useful for role mining in practice, based on our experiments in the context of three well-known real-world authorization policies.
As Good As A Coin Toss: Human detection of AI-generated images, videos, audio, and audiovisual stimuli
Authors: Di Cooke, Abigail Edwards, Sophia Barkoff, Kathryn Kelly
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Detection

One of the current principal defenses against weaponized synthetic media continues to be the ability of the targeted individual to visually or auditorily recognize AI-generated content when they encounter it. However, as the realism of synthetic media continues to rapidly improve, it is vital to have an accurate understanding of just how susceptible people currently are to potentially being misled by convincing but false AI generated content. We conducted a perceptual study with 1276 participants to assess how capable people were at distinguishing between authentic and synthetic images, audio, video, and audiovisual media. We find that on average, people struggled to distinguish between synthetic and authentic media, with the mean detection performance close to a chance level performance of 50%. We also find that accuracy rates worsen when the stimuli contain any degree of synthetic content, features foreign languages, and the media type is a single modality. People are also less accurate at identifying synthetic images when they feature human faces, and when audiovisual stimuli have heterogeneous authenticity. Finally, we find that higher degrees of prior knowledgeability about synthetic media does not significantly impact detection accuracy rates, but age does, with older individuals performing worse than their younger counterparts. Collectively, these results highlight that it is no longer feasible to rely on the perceptual capabilities of people to protect themselves against the growing threat of weaponized synthetic media, and that the need for alternative countermeasures is more critical than ever before.
DeepKnowledge: Generalisation-Driven Deep Learning Testing
Authors: Sondess Missaoui, Simos Gerasimou, Nikolaos Matragkas
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, DNN Testing

Despite their unprecedented success, DNNs are notoriously fragile to small shifts in data distribution, demanding effective testing techniques that can assess their dependability. Despite recent advances in DNN testing, there is a lack of systematic testing approaches that assess the DNN's capability to generalise and operate comparably beyond data in their training distribution. We address this gap with DeepKnowledge, a systematic testing methodology for DNN-based systems founded on the theory of knowledge generalisation, which aims to enhance DNN robustness and reduce the residual risk of 'black box' models. Conforming to this theory, DeepKnowledge posits that core computational DNN units, termed Transfer Knowledge neurons, can generalise under domain shift. DeepKnowledge provides an objective confidence measurement on testing activities of DNN given data distribution shifts and uses this information to instrument a generalisation-informed test adequacy criterion to check the transfer knowledge capacity of a test set. Our empirical evaluation of several DNNs, across multiple datasets and state-of-the-art adversarial generation techniques demonstrates the usefulness and effectiveness of DeepKnowledge and its ability to support the engineering of more dependable DNNs. We report improvements of up to 10 percentage points over state-of-the-art coverage criteria for detecting adversarial attacks on several benchmarks, including MNIST, SVHN, and CIFAR.
The Anatomy of Adversarial Attacks: Concept-based XAI Dissection
Authors: Georgii Mikriukov, Gesina Schwalbe, Franz Motzkus, Korinna Bade
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Adversarial attacks (AAs) pose a significant threat to the reliability and robustness of deep neural networks. While the impact of these attacks on model predictions has been extensively studied, their effect on the learned representations and concepts within these models remains largely unexplored. In this work, we perform an in-depth analysis of the influence of AAs on the concepts learned by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) using eXplainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques. Through an extensive set of experiments across various network architectures and targeted AA techniques, we unveil several key findings. First, AAs induce substantial alterations in the concept composition within the feature space, introducing new concepts or modifying existing ones. Second, the adversarial perturbation itself can be linearly decomposed into a set of latent vector components, with a subset of these being responsible for the attack's success. Notably, we discover that these components are target-specific, i.e., are similar for a given target class throughout different AA techniques and starting classes. Our findings provide valuable insights into the nature of AAs and their impact on learned representations, paving the way for the development of more robust and interpretable deep learning models, as well as effective defenses against adversarial threats.
Enhancing Neural Network Representations with Prior Knowledge-Based Normalization
Authors: Bilal Faye, Hanane Azzag, Mustapha Lebbah, Djamel Bouchaffra
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Domain Adaptation, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Generation

Deep learning models face persistent challenges in training, particularly due to internal covariate shift and label shift. While single-mode normalization methods like Batch Normalization partially address these issues, they are constrained by batch size dependencies and limiting distributional assumptions. Multi-mode normalization techniques mitigate these limitations but struggle with computational demands when handling diverse Gaussian distributions. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to multi-mode normalization that leverages prior knowledge to improve neural network representations. Our method organizes data into predefined structures, or "contexts", prior to training and normalizes based on these contexts, with two variants: Context Normalization (CN) and Context Normalization - Extended (CN-X). When contexts are unavailable, we introduce Adaptive Context Normalization (ACN), which dynamically builds contexts in the latent space during training. Across tasks in image classification, domain adaptation, and image generation, our methods demonstrate superior convergence and performance.
An LLM-Based Digital Twin for Optimizing Human-in-the Loop Systems
Authors: Hanqing Yang, Marie Siew, Carlee Joe-Wong
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00

The increasing prevalence of Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things (CPS-IoT) applications and Foundation Models are enabling new applications that leverage real-time control of the environment. For example, real-time control of Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems can reduce its usage when not needed for the comfort of human occupants, hence reducing energy consumption. Collecting real-time feedback on human preferences in such human-in-the-loop (HITL) systems, however, is difficult in practice. We propose the use of large language models (LLMs) to deal with the challenges of dynamic environments and difficult-to-obtain data in CPS optimization. In this paper, we present a case study that employs LLM agents to mimic the behaviors and thermal preferences of various population groups (e.g. young families, the elderly) in a shopping mall. The aggregated thermal preferences are integrated into an agent-in-the-loop based reinforcement learning algorithm AitL-RL, which employs the LLM as a dynamic simulation of the physical environment to learn how to balance between energy savings and occupant comfort. Our results show that LLMs are capable of simulating complex population movements within large open spaces. Besides, AitL-RL demonstrates superior performance compared to the popular existing policy of set point control, suggesting that adaptive and personalized decision-making is critical for efficient optimization in CPS-IoT applications. Through this case study, we demonstrate the potential of integrating advanced Foundation Models like LLMs into CPS-IoT to enhance system adaptability and efficiency. The project's code can be found on our GitHub repository.
Towards Human-AI Deliberation: Design and Evaluation of LLM-Empowered Deliberative AI for AI-Assisted Decision-Making
Authors: Shuai Ma, Qiaoyi Chen, Xinru Wang, Chengbo Zheng, Zhenhui Peng, Ming Yin, Xiaojuan Ma
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

In AI-assisted decision-making, humans often passively review AI's suggestion and decide whether to accept or reject it as a whole. In such a paradigm, humans are found to rarely trigger analytical thinking and face difficulties in communicating the nuances of conflicting opinions to the AI when disagreements occur. To tackle this challenge, we propose Human-AI Deliberation, a novel framework to promote human reflection and discussion on conflicting human-AI opinions in decision-making. Based on theories in human deliberation, this framework engages humans and AI in dimension-level opinion elicitation, deliberative discussion, and decision updates. To empower AI with deliberative capabilities, we designed Deliberative AI, which leverages large language models (LLMs) as a bridge between humans and domain-specific models to enable flexible conversational interactions and faithful information provision. An exploratory evaluation on a graduate admissions task shows that Deliberative AI outperforms conventional explainable AI (XAI) assistants in improving humans' appropriate reliance and task performance. Based on a mixed-methods analysis of participant behavior, perception, user experience, and open-ended feedback, we draw implications for future AI-assisted decision tool design.
Convergence of a model-free entropy-regularized inverse reinforcement learning algorithm
Authors: Titouan Renard, Andreas Schlaginhaufen, Tingting Ni, Maryam Kamgarpour
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00

Given a dataset of expert demonstrations, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward for which the expert is optimal. This work proposes a model-free algorithm to solve entropy-regularized IRL problem. In particular, we employ a stochastic gradient descent update for the reward and a stochastic soft policy iteration update for the policy. Assuming access to a generative model, we prove that our algorithm is guaranteed to recover a reward for which the expert is $\varepsilon$-optimal using $\mathcal{O}(1/\varepsilon^{2})$ samples of the Markov decision process (MDP). Furthermore, with $\mathcal{O}(1/\varepsilon^{4})$ samples we prove that the optimal policy corresponding to the recovered reward is $\varepsilon$-close to the expert policy in total variation distance.
UrbanVLP: Multi-Granularity Vision-Language Pretraining for Urban Socioeconomic Indicator Prediction
Authors: Xixuan Hao, Wei Chen, Yibo Yan, Siru Zhong, Kun Wang, Qingsong Wen, Yuxuan Liang
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Text Generation

Urban socioeconomic indicator prediction aims to infer various metrics related to sustainable development in diverse urban landscapes using data-driven methods. However, prevalent pretrained models, particularly those reliant on satellite imagery, face dual challenges. Firstly, concentrating solely on macro-level patterns from satellite data may introduce bias, lacking nuanced details at micro levels, such as architectural details at a place. Secondly, the text generated by the precursor work UrbanCLIP, which fully utilizes the extensive knowledge of LLMs, frequently exhibits issues such as hallucination and homogenization, resulting in a lack of reliable quality. In response to these issues, we devise a novel framework entitled UrbanVLP based on Vision-Language Pretraining. Our UrbanVLP seamlessly integrates multi-granularity information from both macro (satellite) and micro (street-view) levels, overcoming the limitations of prior pretrained models. Moreover, it introduces automatic text generation and calibration, providing a robust guarantee for producing high-quality text descriptions of urban imagery. Rigorous experiments conducted across six socioeconomic indicator prediction tasks underscore its superior performance.
Do LLM Agents Have Regret? A Case Study in Online Learning and Games
Authors: Chanwoo Park, Xiangyu Liu, Asuman Ozdaglar, Kaiqing Zhang
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly employed for (interactive) decision-making, via the development of LLM-based autonomous agents. Despite their emerging successes, the performance of LLM agents in decision-making has not been fully investigated through quantitative metrics, especially in the multi-agent setting when they interact with each other, a typical scenario in real-world LLM-agent applications. To better understand the limits of LLM agents in these interactive environments, we propose to study their interactions in benchmark decision-making settings in online learning and game theory, through the performance metric of \emph{regret}. We first empirically study the {no-regret} behaviors of LLMs in canonical (non-stationary) online learning problems, as well as the emergence of equilibria when LLM agents interact through playing repeated games. We then provide some theoretical insights into the no-regret behaviors of LLM agents, under certain assumptions on the supervised pre-training and the rationality model of human decision-makers who generate the data. Notably, we also identify (simple) cases where advanced LLMs such as GPT-4 fail to be no-regret. To promote the no-regret behaviors, we propose a novel \emph{unsupervised} training loss of \emph{regret-loss}, which, in contrast to the supervised pre-training loss, does not require the labels of (optimal) actions. We then establish the statistical guarantee of generalization bound for regret-loss minimization, followed by the optimization guarantee that minimizing such a loss may automatically lead to known no-regret learning algorithms. Our further experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our regret-loss, especially in addressing the above ``regrettable'' cases.
GreeDy and CoDy: Counterfactual Explainers for Dynamic Graphs
Authors: Zhan Qu, Daniel Gomm, Michael Färber
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Explanation, Decision Making

Temporal Graph Neural Networks (TGNNs), crucial for modeling dynamic graphs with time-varying interactions, face a significant challenge in explainability due to their complex model structure. Counterfactual explanations, crucial for understanding model decisions, examine how input graph changes affect outcomes. This paper introduces two novel counterfactual explanation methods for TGNNs: GreeDy (Greedy Explainer for Dynamic Graphs) and CoDy (Counterfactual Explainer for Dynamic Graphs). They treat explanations as a search problem, seeking input graph alterations that alter model predictions. GreeDy uses a simple, greedy approach, while CoDy employs a sophisticated Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm. Experiments show both methods effectively generate clear explanations. Notably, CoDy outperforms GreeDy and existing factual methods, with up to 59\% higher success rate in finding significant counterfactual inputs. This highlights CoDy's potential in clarifying TGNN decision-making, increasing their transparency and trustworthiness in practice.
Can tweets predict article retractions? A comparison between human and LLM labelling
Authors: Er-Te Zheng, Hui-Zhen Fu, Mike Thelwall, Zhichao Fang
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Sentiment Analysis

Quickly detecting problematic research articles is crucial to safeguarding the integrity of scientific research. This study explores whether Twitter mentions of retracted articles can signal potential problems with the articles prior to their retraction, potentially serving as an early warning system for scholars. To investigate this, we analysed a dataset of 4,354 Twitter mentions associated with 504 retracted articles. The effectiveness of Twitter mentions in predicting article retractions was evaluated by both manual and Large Language Model (LLM) labelling. Manual labelling results indicated that 25.7% of tweets signalled problems before retraction. Using the manual labelling results as the baseline, we found that LLMs (GPT-4o-mini, Gemini 1.5 Flash, and Claude-3.5-Haiku) outperformed lexicon-based sentiment analysis tools (e.g., TextBlob) in detecting potential problems, suggesting that automatic detection of problematic articles from social media using LLMs is technically feasible. Nevertheless, since only a small proportion of retracted articles (11.1%) were criticised on Twitter prior to retraction, such automatic systems would detect only a minority of problematic articles. Overall, this study offers insights into how social media data, coupled with emerging generative AI techniques, can support research integrity.
Towards Explainability in Legal Outcome Prediction Models
Authors: Josef Valvoda, Ryan Cotterell
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Current legal outcome prediction models - a staple of legal NLP - do not explain their reasoning. However, to employ these models in the real world, human legal actors need to be able to understand the model's decisions. In the case of common law, legal practitioners reason towards the outcome of a case by referring to past case law, known as precedent. We contend that precedent is, therefore, a natural way of facilitating explainability for legal NLP models. In this paper, we contribute a novel method for identifying the precedent employed by legal outcome prediction models. Furthermore, by developing a taxonomy of legal precedent, we are able to compare human judges and neural models with respect to the different types of precedent they rely on. We find that while the models learn to predict outcomes reasonably well, their use of precedent is unlike that of human judges.