pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Action Recognition via Self-Ensembling and Conditional Embedding Alignment
Authors: Indrajeet Ghosh, Garvit Chugh, Abu Zaher Md Faridee, Nirmalya Roy
Date: 2024-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Data Augmentation, Domain Adaptation, Pseudo Label, Temporal Action Localization, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Recent advancements in deep learning-based wearable human action recognition (wHAR) have improved the capture and classification of complex motions, but adoption remains limited due to the lack of expert annotations and domain discrepancies from user variations. Limited annotations hinder the model's ability to generalize to out-of-distribution samples. While data augmentation can improve generalizability, unsupervised augmentation techniques must be applied carefully to avoid introducing noise. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) addresses domain discrepancies by aligning conditional distributions with labeled target samples, but vanilla pseudo-labeling can lead to error propagation. To address these challenges, we propose $\mu$DAR, a novel joint optimization architecture comprised of three functions: (i) consistency regularizer between augmented samples to improve model classification generalizability, (ii) temporal ensemble for robust pseudo-label generation and (iii) conditional distribution alignment to improve domain generalizability. The temporal ensemble works by aggregating predictions from past epochs to smooth out noisy pseudo-label predictions, which are then used in the conditional distribution alignment module to minimize kernel-based class-wise conditional maximum mean discrepancy ($k$CMMD) between the source and target feature space to learn a domain invariant embedding. The consistency-regularized augmentations ensure that multiple augmentations of the same sample share the same labels; this results in (a) strong generalization with limited source domain samples and (b) consistent pseudo-label generation in target samples. The novel integration of these three modules in $\mu$DAR results in a range of $\approx$ 4-12% average macro-F1 score improvement over six state-of-the-art UDA methods in four benchmark wHAR datasets
AI, Global Governance, and Digital Sovereignty
Authors: Swati Srivastava, Justin Bullock
Date: 2024-10-23 00:00:00

This essay examines how Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are becoming more integral to international affairs by affecting how global governors exert power and pursue digital sovereignty. We first introduce a taxonomy of multifaceted AI payoffs for governments and corporations related to instrumental, structural, and discursive power in the domains of violence, markets, and rights. We next leverage different institutional and practice perspectives on sovereignty to assess how digital sovereignty is variously implicated in AI-empowered global governance. States both seek sovereign control over AI infrastructures in the institutional approach, while establishing sovereign competence through AI infrastructures in the practice approach. Overall, we present the digital sovereignty stakes of AI as related to entanglements of public and private power. Rather than foreseeing technology companies as replacing states, we argue that AI systems will embed in global governance to create dueling dynamics of public/private cooperation and contestation. We conclude with sketching future directions for IR research on AI and global governance.
Composing Diffusion Policies for Few-shot Learning of Movement Trajectories
Authors: Omkar Patil, Anant Sah, Nakul Gopalan
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning

Humans can perform various combinations of physical skills without having to relearn skills from scratch every single time. For example, we can swing a bat when walking without having to re-learn such a policy from scratch by composing the individual skills of walking and bat swinging. Enabling robots to combine or compose skills is essential so they can learn novel skills and tasks faster with fewer real world samples. To this end, we propose a novel compositional approach called DSE- Diffusion Score Equilibrium that enables few-shot learning for novel skills by utilizing a combination of base policy priors. Our method is based on probabilistically composing diffusion policies to better model the few-shot demonstration data-distribution than any individual policy. Our goal here is to learn robot motions few-shot and not necessarily goal oriented trajectories. Unfortunately we lack a general purpose metric to evaluate the error between a skill or motion and the provided demonstrations. Hence, we propose a probabilistic measure - Maximum Mean Discrepancy on the Forward Kinematics Kernel (MMD-FK), that is task and action space agnostic. By using our few-shot learning approach DSE, we show that we are able to achieve a reduction of over 30% in MMD-FK across skills and number of demonstrations. Moreover, we show the utility of our approach through real world experiments by teaching novel trajectories to a robot in 5 demonstrations.
Do Robot Snakes Dream like Electric Sheep? Investigating the Effects of Architectural Inductive Biases on Hallucination
Authors: Jerry Huang, Prasanna Parthasarathi, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Boxing Chen, Sarath Chandar
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination

The growth in prominence of large language models (LLMs) in everyday life can be largely attributed to their generative abilities, yet some of this is also owed to the risks and costs associated with their use. On one front is their tendency to \textit{hallucinate} false or misleading information, limiting their reliability. On another is the increasing focus on the computational limitations associated with traditional self-attention based LLMs, which has brought about new alternatives, in particular recurrent models, meant to overcome them. Yet it remains uncommon to consider these two concerns simultaneously. Do changes in architecture exacerbate/alleviate existing concerns about hallucinations? Do they affect how and where they occur? Through an extensive evaluation, we study how these architecture-based inductive biases affect the propensity to hallucinate. While hallucination remains a general phenomenon not limited to specific architectures, the situations in which they occur and the ease with which specific types of hallucinations can be induced can significantly differ based on the model architecture. These findings highlight the need for better understanding both these problems in conjunction with each other, as well as consider how to design more universal techniques for handling hallucinations.
AdaptoML-UX: An Adaptive User-centered GUI-based AutoML Toolkit for Non-AI Experts and HCI Researchers
Authors: Amr Gomaa, Michael Sargious, Antonio Krüger
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Automated Feature Engineering, AutoML, Feature Engineering, Incremental Learning

The increasing integration of machine learning across various domains has underscored the necessity for accessible systems that non-experts can utilize effectively. To address this need, the field of automated machine learning (AutoML) has developed tools to simplify the construction and optimization of ML pipelines. However, existing AutoML solutions often lack efficiency in creating online pipelines and ease of use for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) applications. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce AdaptoML-UX, an adaptive framework that incorporates automated feature engineering, machine learning, and incremental learning to assist non-AI experts in developing robust, user-centered ML models. Our toolkit demonstrates the capability to adapt efficiently to diverse problem domains and datasets, particularly in HCI, thereby reducing the necessity for manual experimentation and conserving time and resources. Furthermore, it supports model personalization through incremental learning, customizing models to individual user behaviors. HCI researchers can employ AdaptoML-UX (\url{https://github.com/MichaelSargious/AdaptoML_UX}) without requiring specialized expertise, as it automates the selection of algorithms, feature engineering, and hyperparameter tuning based on the unique characteristics of the data.
Decoding Time Series with LLMs: A Multi-Agent Framework for Cross-Domain Annotation
Authors: Minhua Lin, Zhengzhang Chen, Yanchi Liu, Xujiang Zhao, Zongyu Wu, Junxiang Wang, Xiang Zhang, Suhang Wang, Haifeng Chen
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

Time series data is ubiquitous across various domains, including manufacturing, finance, and healthcare. High-quality annotations are essential for effectively understanding time series and facilitating downstream tasks; however, obtaining such annotations is challenging, particularly in mission-critical domains. In this paper, we propose TESSA, a multi-agent system designed to automatically generate both general and domain-specific annotations for time series data. TESSA introduces two agents: a general annotation agent and a domain-specific annotation agent. The general agent captures common patterns and knowledge across multiple source domains, leveraging both time-series-wise and text-wise features to generate general annotations. Meanwhile, the domain-specific agent utilizes limited annotations from the target domain to learn domain-specific terminology and generate targeted annotations. Extensive experiments on multiple synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that TESSA effectively generates high-quality annotations, outperforming existing methods.
Data Obfuscation through Latent Space Projection (LSP) for Privacy-Preserving AI Governance: Case Studies in Medical Diagnosis and Finance Fraud Detection
Authors: Mahesh Vaijainthymala Krishnamoorthy
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Fairness, Federated Learning, Fraud Detection, image-classification, Image Classification, Medical Diagnosis, Privacy Preserving

As AI systems increasingly integrate into critical societal sectors, the demand for robust privacy-preserving methods has escalated. This paper introduces Data Obfuscation through Latent Space Projection (LSP), a novel technique aimed at enhancing AI governance and ensuring Responsible AI compliance. LSP uses machine learning to project sensitive data into a latent space, effectively obfuscating it while preserving essential features for model training and inference. Unlike traditional privacy methods like differential privacy or homomorphic encryption, LSP transforms data into an abstract, lower-dimensional form, achieving a delicate balance between data utility and privacy. Leveraging autoencoders and adversarial training, LSP separates sensitive from non-sensitive information, allowing for precise control over privacy-utility trade-offs. We validate LSP's effectiveness through experiments on benchmark datasets and two real-world case studies: healthcare cancer diagnosis and financial fraud analysis. Our results show LSP achieves high performance (98.7% accuracy in image classification) while providing strong privacy (97.3% protection against sensitive attribute inference), outperforming traditional anonymization and privacy-preserving methods. The paper also examines LSP's alignment with global AI governance frameworks, such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA, highlighting its contribution to fairness, transparency, and accountability. By embedding privacy within the machine learning pipeline, LSP offers a promising approach to developing AI systems that respect privacy while delivering valuable insights. We conclude by discussing future research directions, including theoretical privacy guarantees, integration with federated learning, and enhancing latent space interpretability, positioning LSP as a critical tool for ethical AI advancement.
In Context Learning and Reasoning for Symbolic Regression with Large Language Models
Authors: Samiha Sharlin, Tyler R. Josephson
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Symbolic Regression

Large Language Models (LLMs) are transformer-based machine learning models that have shown remarkable performance in tasks for which they were not explicitly trained. Here, we explore the potential of LLMs to perform symbolic regression -- a machine-learning method for finding simple and accurate equations from datasets. We prompt GPT-4 to suggest expressions from data, which are then optimized and evaluated using external Python tools. These results are fed back to GPT-4, which proposes improved expressions while optimizing for complexity and loss. Using chain-of-thought prompting, we instruct GPT-4 to analyze the data, prior expressions, and the scientific context (expressed in natural language) for each problem before generating new expressions. We evaluated the workflow in rediscovery of five well-known scientific equations from experimental data, and on an additional dataset without a known equation. GPT-4 successfully rediscovered all five equations, and in general, performed better when prompted to use a scratchpad and consider scientific context. We also demonstrate how strategic prompting improves the model's performance and how the natural language interface simplifies integrating theory with data. Although this approach does not outperform established SR programs where target equations are more complex, LLMs can nonetheless iterate toward improved solutions while following instructions and incorporating scientific context in natural language.
Evaluating AI-Generated Essays with GRE Analytical Writing Assessment
Authors: Yang Zhong, Jiangang Hao, Michael Fauss, Chen Li, YuAn Wang
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00

The recent revolutionary advance in generative AI enables the generation of realistic and coherent texts by large language models (LLMs). Despite many existing evaluation metrics on the quality of the generated texts, there is still a lack of rigorous assessment of how well LLMs perform in complex and demanding writing assessments. This study examines essays generated by ten leading LLMs for the analytical writing assessment of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). We assessed these essays using both human raters and the e-rater automated scoring engine as used in the GRE scoring pipeline. Notably, the top-performing Gemini and GPT-4o received an average score of 4.78 and 4.67, respectively, falling between "generally thoughtful, well-developed analysis of the issue and conveys meaning clearly" and "presents a competent analysis of the issue and conveys meaning with acceptable clarity" according to the GRE scoring guideline. We also evaluated the detection accuracy of these essays, with detectors trained on essays generated by the same and different LLMs.
Interpreting Affine Recurrence Learning in GPT-style Transformers
Authors: Samarth Bhargav, Alexander Gu
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

Understanding the internal mechanisms of GPT-style transformers, particularly their capacity to perform in-context learning (ICL), is critical for advancing AI alignment and interpretability. In-context learning allows transformers to generalize during inference without modifying their weights, yet the precise operations driving this capability remain largely opaque. This paper presents an investigation into the mechanistic interpretability of these transformers, focusing specifically on their ability to learn and predict affine recurrences as an ICL task. To address this, we trained a custom three-layer transformer to predict affine recurrences and analyzed the model's internal operations using both empirical and theoretical approaches. Our findings reveal that the model forms an initial estimate of the target sequence using a copying mechanism in the zeroth layer, which is subsequently refined through negative similarity heads in the second layer. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of transformer behaviors in recursive tasks and offer potential avenues for improving AI alignment through mechanistic interpretability. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results for future work, including extensions to higher-dimensional recurrences and the exploration of polynomial sequences.
Revisiting Technical Bias Mitigation Strategies
Authors: Abdoul Jalil Djiberou Mahamadou, Artem A. Trotsyuk
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Efforts to mitigate bias and enhance fairness in the artificial intelligence (AI) community have predominantly focused on technical solutions. While numerous reviews have addressed bias in AI, this review uniquely focuses on the practical limitations of technical solutions in healthcare settings, providing a structured analysis across five key dimensions affecting their real-world implementation: who defines bias and fairness; which mitigation strategy to use and prioritize among dozens that are inconsistent and incompatible; when in the AI development stages the solutions are most effective; for which populations; and the context in which the solutions are designed. We illustrate each limitation with empirical studies focusing on healthcare and biomedical applications. Moreover, we discuss how value-sensitive AI, a framework derived from technology design, can engage stakeholders and ensure that their values are embodied in bias and fairness mitigation solutions. Finally, we discuss areas that require further investigation and provide practical recommendations to address the limitations covered in the study.
Artificial Intelligence in Brazilian News: A Mixed-Methods Analysis
Authors: Raphael Hernandes, Giulio Corsi
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition

The current surge in Artificial Intelligence (AI) interest, reflected in heightened media coverage since 2009, has sparked significant debate on AI's implications for privacy, social justice, workers' rights, and democracy. The media plays a crucial role in shaping public perception and acceptance of AI technologies. However, research into how AI appears in media has primarily focused on anglophone contexts, leaving a gap in understanding how AI is represented globally. This study addresses this gap by analyzing 3,560 news articles from Brazilian media published between July 1, 2023, and February 29, 2024, from 13 popular online news outlets. Using Computational Grounded Theory (CGT), the study applies Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), BERTopic, and Named-Entity Recognition to investigate the main topics in AI coverage and the entities represented. The findings reveal that Brazilian news coverage of AI is dominated by topics related to applications in the workplace and product launches, with limited space for societal concerns, which mostly focus on deepfakes and electoral integrity. The analysis also highlights a significant presence of industry-related entities, indicating a strong influence of corporate agendas in the country's news. This study underscores the need for a more critical and nuanced discussion of AI's societal impacts in Brazilian media.
End-to-End Optimization and Learning of Fair Court Schedules
Authors: My H Dinh, James Kotary, Lauryn P. Gouldin, William Yeoh, Ferdinando Fioretto
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Scheduling

Criminal courts across the United States handle millions of cases every year, and the scheduling of those cases must accommodate a diverse set of constraints, including the preferences and availability of courts, prosecutors, and defense teams. When criminal court schedules are formed, defendants' scheduling preferences often take the least priority, although defendants may face significant consequences (including arrest or detention) for missed court dates. Additionally, studies indicate that defendants' nonappearances impose costs on the courts and other system stakeholders. To address these issues, courts and commentators have begun to recognize that pretrial outcomes for defendants and for the system would be improved with greater attention to court processes, including \emph{court scheduling practices}. There is thus a need for fair criminal court pretrial scheduling systems that account for defendants' preferences and availability, but the collection of such data poses logistical challenges. Furthermore, optimizing schedules fairly across various parties' preferences is a complex optimization problem, even when such data is available. In an effort to construct such a fair scheduling system under data uncertainty, this paper proposes a joint optimization and learning framework that combines machine learning models trained end-to-end with efficient matching algorithms. This framework aims to produce court scheduling schedules that optimize a principled measure of fairness, balancing the availability and preferences of all parties.
Geometric Graph Neural Network Modeling of Human Interactions in Crowded Environments
Authors: Sara Honarvar, Yancy Diaz-Mercado
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Modeling human trajectories in crowded environments is challenging due to the complex nature of pedestrian behavior and interactions. This paper proposes a geometric graph neural network (GNN) architecture that integrates domain knowledge from psychological studies to model pedestrian interactions and predict future trajectories. Unlike prior studies using complete graphs, we define interaction neighborhoods using pedestrians' field of view, motion direction, and distance-based kernel functions to construct graph representations of crowds. Evaluations across multiple datasets demonstrate improved prediction accuracy through reduced average and final displacement error metrics. Our findings underscore the importance of integrating domain knowledge with data-driven approaches for effective modeling of human interactions in crowds.
Quantum Large Language Models via Tensor Network Disentanglers
Authors: Borja Aizpurua, Saeed S. Jahromi, Sukhbinder Singh, Roman Orus
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00

We propose a method to enhance the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating quantum computing and quantum-inspired techniques. Specifically, our approach involves replacing the weight matrices in the Self-Attention and Multi-layer Perceptron layers with a combination of two variational quantum circuits and a quantum-inspired tensor network, such as a Matrix Product Operator (MPO). This substitution enables the reproduction of classical LLM functionality by decomposing weight matrices through the application of tensor network disentanglers and MPOs, leveraging well-established tensor network techniques. By incorporating more complex and deeper quantum circuits, along with increasing the bond dimensions of the MPOs, our method captures additional correlations within the quantum-enhanced LLM, leading to improved accuracy beyond classical models while maintaining low memory overhead.
A 10.60 $μ$W 150 GOPS Mixed-Bit-Width Sparse CNN Accelerator for Life-Threatening Ventricular Arrhythmia Detection
Authors: Yifan Qin, Zhenge Jia, Zheyu Yan, Jay Mok, Manto Yung, Yu Liu, Xuejiao Liu, Wujie Wen, Luhong Liang, Kwang-Ting Tim Cheng, X. Sharon Hu, Yiyu Shi
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Arrhythmia Detection, Diagnostic

This paper proposes an ultra-low power, mixed-bit-width sparse convolutional neural network (CNN) accelerator to accelerate ventricular arrhythmia (VA) detection. The chip achieves 50% sparsity in a quantized 1D CNN using a sparse processing element (SPE) architecture. Measurement on the prototype chip TSMC 40nm CMOS low-power (LP) process for the VA classification task demonstrates that it consumes 10.60 $\mu$W of power while achieving a performance of 150 GOPS and a diagnostic accuracy of 99.95%. The computation power density is only 0.57 $\mu$W/mm$^2$, which is 14.23X smaller than state-of-the-art works, making it highly suitable for implantable and wearable medical devices.