pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ChatCollab: Exploring Collaboration Between Humans and AI Agents in Software Teams
Authors: Benjamin Klieger, Charis Charitsis, Miroslav Suzara, Sierra Wang, Nick Haber, John C. Mitchell
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00

We explore the potential for productive team-based collaboration between humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI) by presenting and conducting initial tests with a general framework that enables multiple human and AI agents to work together as peers. ChatCollab's novel architecture allows agents - human or AI - to join collaborations in any role, autonomously engage in tasks and communication within Slack, and remain agnostic to whether their collaborators are human or AI. Using software engineering as a case study, we find that our AI agents successfully identify their roles and responsibilities, coordinate with other agents, and await requested inputs or deliverables before proceeding. In relation to three prior multi-agent AI systems for software development, we find ChatCollab AI agents produce comparable or better software in an interactive game development task. We also propose an automated method for analyzing collaboration dynamics that effectively identifies behavioral characteristics of agents with distinct roles, allowing us to quantitatively compare collaboration dynamics in a range of experimental conditions. For example, in comparing ChatCollab AI agents, we find that an AI CEO agent generally provides suggestions 2-4 times more often than an AI product manager or AI developer, suggesting agents within ChatCollab can meaningfully adopt differentiated collaborative roles. Our code and data can be found at: https://github.com/ChatCollab.
Real-Time Multilingual Sign Language Processing
Authors: Amit Moryossef
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Sign Language Translation, Translation

Sign Language Processing (SLP) is an interdisciplinary field comprised of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision. It is focused on the computational understanding, translation, and production of signed languages. Traditional approaches have often been constrained by the use of gloss-based systems that are both language-specific and inadequate for capturing the multidimensional nature of sign language. These limitations have hindered the development of technology capable of processing signed languages effectively. This thesis aims to revolutionize the field of SLP by proposing a simple paradigm that can bridge this existing technological gap. We propose the use of SignWiring, a universal sign language transcription notation system, to serve as an intermediary link between the visual-gestural modality of signed languages and text-based linguistic representations. We contribute foundational libraries and resources to the SLP community, thereby setting the stage for a more in-depth exploration of the tasks of sign language translation and production. These tasks encompass the translation of sign language from video to spoken language text and vice versa. Through empirical evaluations, we establish the efficacy of our transcription method as a pivot for enabling faster, more targeted research, that can lead to more natural and accurate translations across a range of languages. The universal nature of our transcription-based paradigm also paves the way for real-time, multilingual applications in SLP, thereby offering a more inclusive and accessible approach to language technology. This is a significant step toward universal accessibility, enabling a wider reach of AI-driven language technologies to include the deaf and hard-of-hearing community.
Human-centred test and evaluation of military AI
Authors: David Helmer, Michael Boardman, S. Kate Conroy, Adam J. Hepworth, Manoj Harjani
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00

The REAIM 2024 Blueprint for Action states that AI applications in the military domain should be ethical and human-centric and that humans must remain responsible and accountable for their use and effects. Developing rigorous test and evaluation, verification and validation (TEVV) frameworks will contribute to robust oversight mechanisms. TEVV in the development and deployment of AI systems needs to involve human users throughout the lifecycle. Traditional human-centred test and evaluation methods from human factors need to be adapted for deployed AI systems that require ongoing monitoring and evaluation. The language around AI-enabled systems should be shifted to inclusion of the human(s) as a component of the system. Standards and requirements supporting this adjusted definition are needed, as are metrics and means to evaluate them. The need for dialogue between technologists and policymakers on human-centred TEVV will be evergreen, but dialogue needs to be initiated with an objective in mind for it to be productive. Development of TEVV throughout system lifecycle is critical to support this evolution including the issue of human scalability and impact on scale of achievable testing. Communication between technical and non technical communities must be improved to ensure operators and policy-makers understand risk assumed by system use and to better inform research and development. Test and evaluation in support of responsible AI deployment must include the effect of the human to reflect operationally realised system performance. Means of communicating the results of TEVV to those using and making decisions regarding the use of AI based systems will be key in informing risk based decisions regarding use.
Learning a Filtered Backprojection Reconstruction Method for Photoacoustic Computed Tomography with Hemispherical Measurement Geometries
Authors: Panpan Chen, Seonyeong Park, Refik Mert Cam, Hsuan-Kai Huang, Alexander A. Oraevsky, Umberto Villa, Mark A. Anastasio
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Form

In certain three-dimensional (3D) applications of photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT), including \textit{in vivo} breast imaging, hemispherical measurement apertures that enclose the object within their convex hull are employed for data acquisition. Data acquired with such measurement geometries are referred to as \textit{half-scan} data, as only half of a complete spherical measurement aperture is employed. Although previous studies have demonstrated that half-scan data can uniquely and stably reconstruct the sought-after object, no closed-form reconstruction formula for use with half-scan data has been reported. To address this, a semi-analytic reconstruction method in the form of filtered backprojection (FBP), referred to as the half-scan FBP method, is developed in this work. Because the explicit form of the filtering operation in the half-scan FBP method is not currently known, a learning-based method is proposed to approximate it. The proposed method is systematically investigated by use of virtual imaging studies of 3D breast PACT that employ ensembles of numerical breast phantoms and a physics-based model of the data acquisition process. The method is subsequently applied to experimental data acquired in an \textit{in vivo} breast PACT study. The results confirm that the half-scan FBP method can accurately reconstruct 3D images from half-scan data. Importantly, because the sought-after inverse mapping is well-posed, the reconstruction method remains accurate even when applied to data that differ considerably from those employed to learn the filtering operation.
Enhancing Deep Learning Model Robustness through Metamorphic Re-Training
Authors: Said Togru, Youssef Sameh Mostafa, Karim Lotfy
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

This paper evaluates the use of metamorphic relations to enhance the robustness and real-world performance of machine learning models. We propose a Metamorphic Retraining Framework, which applies metamorphic relations to data and utilizes semi-supervised learning algorithms in an iterative and adaptive multi-cycle process. The framework integrates multiple semi-supervised retraining algorithms, including FixMatch, FlexMatch, MixMatch, and FullMatch, to automate the retraining, evaluation, and testing of models with specified configurations. To assess the effectiveness of this approach, we conducted experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and MNIST datasets using a variety of image processing models, both pretrained and non-pretrained. Our results demonstrate the potential of metamorphic retraining to significantly improve model robustness as we show in our results that each model witnessed an increase of an additional flat 17 percent on average in our robustness metric.
Usage Governance Advisor: From Intent to AI Governance
Authors: Elizabeth M. Daly, Sean Rooney, Seshu Tirupathi, Luis Garces-Erice, Inge Vejsbjerg, Frank Bagehorn, Dhaval Salwala, Christopher Giblin, Mira L. Wolf-Bauwens, Ioana Giurgiu, Michael Hind, Peter Urbanetz
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Evaluating the safety of AI Systems is a pressing concern for organizations deploying them. In addition to the societal damage done by the lack of fairness of those systems, deployers are concerned about the legal repercussions and the reputational damage incurred by the use of models that are unsafe. Safety covers both what a model does; e.g., can it be used to reveal personal information from its training set, and how a model was built; e.g., was it only trained on licensed data sets. Determining the safety of an AI system requires gathering information from a wide set of heterogeneous sources including safety benchmarks and technical documentation for the set of models used in that system. In addition, responsible use is encouraged through mechanisms that advise and help the user to take mitigating actions where safety risks are detected. We present Usage Governance Advisor which creates semi-structured governance information, identifies and prioritizes risks according to the intended use case, recommends appropriate benchmarks and risk assessments and importantly proposes mitigation strategies and actions.
The use of large language models to enhance cancer clinical trial educational materials
Authors: Mingye Gao, Aman Varshney, Shan Chen, Vikram Goddla, Jack Gallifant, Patrick Doyle, Claire Novack, Maeve Dillon-Martin, Teresia Perkins, Xinrong Correia, Erik Duhaime, Howard Isenstein, Elad Sharon, Lisa Soleymani Lehmann, David Kozono, Brian Anthony, Dmitriy Dligach, Danielle S. Bitterman
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation, Multiple-choice, One-Shot Learning, Zero-Shot Learning

Cancer clinical trials often face challenges in recruitment and engagement due to a lack of participant-facing informational and educational resources. This study investigated the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically GPT4, in generating patient-friendly educational content from clinical trial informed consent forms. Using data from ClinicalTrials.gov, we employed zero-shot learning for creating trial summaries and one-shot learning for developing multiple-choice questions, evaluating their effectiveness through patient surveys and crowdsourced annotation. Results showed that GPT4-generated summaries were both readable and comprehensive, and may improve patients' understanding and interest in clinical trials. The multiple-choice questions demonstrated high accuracy and agreement with crowdsourced annotators. For both resource types, hallucinations were identified that require ongoing human oversight. The findings demonstrate the potential of LLMs "out-of-the-box" to support the generation of clinical trial education materials with minimal trial-specific engineering, but implementation with a human-in-the-loop is still needed to avoid misinformation risks.
Self-Improvement in Language Models: The Sharpening Mechanism
Authors: Audrey Huang, Adam Block, Dylan J. Foster, Dhruv Rohatgi, Cyril Zhang, Max Simchowitz, Jordan T. Ash, Akshay Krishnamurthy
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Recent work in language modeling has raised the possibility of self-improvement, where a language models evaluates and refines its own generations to achieve higher performance without external feedback. It is impossible for this self-improvement to create information that is not already in the model, so why should we expect that this will lead to improved capabilities? We offer a new perspective on the capabilities of self-improvement through a lens we refer to as sharpening. Motivated by the observation that language models are often better at verifying response quality than they are at generating correct responses, we formalize self-improvement as using the model itself as a verifier during post-training in order to ``sharpen'' the model to one placing large mass on high-quality sequences, thereby amortizing the expensive inference-time computation of generating good sequences. We begin by introducing a new statistical framework for sharpening in which the learner aims to sharpen a pre-trained base policy via sample access, and establish fundamental limits. Then we analyze two natural families of self-improvement algorithms based on SFT and RLHF. We find that (i) the SFT-based approach is minimax optimal whenever the initial model has sufficient coverage, but (ii) the RLHF-based approach can improve over SFT-based self-improvement by leveraging online exploration, bypassing the need for coverage. Finally, we empirically validate the sharpening mechanism via inference-time and amortization experiments. We view these findings as a starting point toward a foundational understanding that can guide the design and evaluation of self-improvement algorithms.
Identifying Key Nodes for the Influence Spread using a Machine Learning Approach
Authors: Mateusz Stolarski, Adam Piróg, Piotr Bródka
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing

The identification of key nodes in complex networks is an important topic in many network science areas. It is vital to a variety of real-world applications, including viral marketing, epidemic spreading and influence maximization. In recent years, machine learning algorithms have proven to outperform the conventional, centrality-based methods in accuracy and consistency, but this approach still requires further refinement. What information about the influencers can be extracted from the network? How can we precisely obtain the labels required for training? Can these models generalize well? In this paper, we answer these questions by presenting an enhanced machine learning-based framework for the influence spread problem. We focus on identifying key nodes for the Independent Cascade model, which is a popular reference method. Our main contribution is an improved process of obtaining the labels required for training by introducing 'Smart Bins' and proving their advantage over known methods. Next, we show that our methodology allows ML models to not only predict the influence of a given node, but to also determine other characteristics of the spreading process-which is another novelty to the relevant literature. Finally, we extensively test our framework and its ability to generalize beyond complex networks of different types and sizes, gaining important insight into the properties of these methods.
The Evolution and Future Perspectives of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content
Authors: Chengzhang Zhu, Luobin Cui, Ying Tang, Jiacun Wang
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Artificial intelligence generated content (AIGC), a rapidly advancing technology, is transforming content creation across domains, such as text, images, audio, and video. Its growing potential has attracted more and more researchers and investors to explore and expand its possibilities. This review traces AIGC's evolution through four developmental milestones-ranging from early rule-based systems to modern transfer learning models-within a unified framework that highlights how each milestone contributes uniquely to content generation. In particular, the paper employs a common example across all milestones to illustrate the capabilities and limitations of methods within each phase, providing a consistent evaluation of AIGC methodologies and their development. Furthermore, this paper addresses critical challenges associated with AIGC and proposes actionable strategies to mitigate them. This study aims to guide researchers and practitioners in selecting and optimizing AIGC models to enhance the quality and efficiency of content creation across diverse domains.
The Reality of AI and Biorisk
Authors: Aidan Peppin, Anka Reuel, Stephen Casper, Elliot Jones, Andrew Strait, Usman Anwar, Anurag Agrawal, Sayash Kapoor, Sanmi Koyejo, Marie Pellat, Rishi Bommasani, Nick Frosst, Sara Hooker
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00

To accurately and confidently answer the question 'could an AI model or system increase biorisk', it is necessary to have both a sound theoretical threat model for how AI models or systems could increase biorisk and a robust method for testing that threat model. This paper provides an analysis of existing available research surrounding two AI and biorisk threat models: 1) access to information and planning via large language models (LLMs), and 2) the use of AI-enabled biological tools (BTs) in synthesizing novel biological artifacts. We find that existing studies around AI-related biorisk are nascent, often speculative in nature, or limited in terms of their methodological maturity and transparency. The available literature suggests that current LLMs and BTs do not pose an immediate risk, and more work is needed to develop rigorous approaches to understanding how future models could increase biorisks. We end with recommendations about how empirical work can be expanded to more precisely target biorisk and ensure rigor and validity of findings.
Approximately Optimal Search on a Higher-dimensional Sliding Puzzle
Authors: Nono SC Merleau, Miguel O'Malley, Érika Roldán, Sayan Mukherjee
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Higher-dimensional sliding puzzles are constructed on the vertices of a $d$-dimensional hypercube, where $2^d-l$ vertices are distinctly coloured. Rings with the same colours are initially set randomly on the vertices of the hypercube. The goal of the puzzle is to move each of the $2^d-l$ rings to pre-defined target vertices on the cube. In this setting, the $k$-rule constraint represents a generalisation of edge collision for the movement of colours between vertices, allowing movement only when a hypercube face of dimension $k$ containing a ring is completely free of other rings. Starting from an initial configuration, what is the minimum number of moves needed to make ring colours match the vertex colours? An algorithm that provides us with such a number is called God's algorithm. When such an algorithm exists, it does not have a polynomial time complexity, at least in the case of the 15-puzzle corresponding to $k=1$ in the cubical puzzle. This paper presents a comprehensive computational study of different scenarios of the higher-dimensional puzzle. A benchmark of three computational techniques, an exact algorithm (the A* search) and two approximately optimal search techniques (an evolutionary algorithm (EA) and reinforcement learning (RL)) is presented in this work. The experiments show that all three methods can successfully solve the puzzle of dimension three for different face dimensions and across various difficulty levels. When the dimension increases, the A* search fails, and RL and EA methods can still provide a generally acceptable solution, i.e. a distribution of a number of moves with a median value of less than $30$. Overall, the EA method consistently requires less computational time, while failing in most cases to minimise the number of moves for the puzzle dimensions $d=4$ and $d=5$.
Kernel-Free Universum Quadratic Surface Twin Support Vector Machines for Imbalanced Data
Authors: Hossein Moosaei, Milan Hladík, Ahmad Mousavi, Zheming Gao, Haojie Fu
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Classification, imbalanced classification

Binary classification tasks with imbalanced classes pose significant challenges in machine learning. Traditional classifiers often struggle to accurately capture the characteristics of the minority class, resulting in biased models with subpar predictive performance. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to tackle this issue by leveraging Universum points to support the minority class within quadratic twin support vector machine models. Unlike traditional classifiers, our models utilize quadratic surfaces instead of hyperplanes for binary classification, providing greater flexibility in modeling complex decision boundaries. By incorporating Universum points, our approach enhances classification accuracy and generalization performance on imbalanced datasets. We generated four artificial datasets to demonstrate the flexibility of the proposed methods. Additionally, we validated the effectiveness of our approach through empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets, showing superior performance compared to conventional classifiers and existing methods for imbalanced classification.
Cross Domain Adaptation using Adversarial networks with Cyclic loss
Authors: Manpreet Kaur, Ankur Tomar, Srijan Mishra, Shashwat Verma
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Deep Learning, Domain Adaptation, Translation

Deep Learning methods are highly local and sensitive to the domain of data they are trained with. Even a slight deviation from the domain distribution affects prediction accuracy of deep networks significantly. In this work, we have investigated a set of techniques aimed at increasing accuracy of generator networks which perform translation from one domain to the other in an adversarial setting. In particular, we experimented with activations, the encoder-decoder network architectures, and introduced a Loss called cyclic loss to constrain the Generator network so that it learns effective source-target translation. This machine learning problem is motivated by myriad applications that can be derived from domain adaptation networks like generating labeled data from synthetic inputs in an unsupervised fashion, and using these translation network in conjunction with the original domain network to generalize deep learning networks across domains.
Recurrent Neural Network on PICTURE Model
Authors: Weihan Xu
Date: 2024-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Respiratory Failure

Intensive Care Units (ICUs) provide critical care and life support for most severely ill and injured patients in the hospital. With the need for ICUs growing rapidly and unprecedentedly, especially during COVID-19, accurately identifying the most critical patients helps hospitals to allocate resources more efficiently and save more lives. The Predicting Intensive Care Transfers and Other Unforeseen Events (PICTURE) model predicts patient deterioration by separating those at high risk for imminent intensive care unit transfer, respiratory failure, or death from those at lower risk. This study aims to implement a deep learning model to benchmark the performance from the XGBoost model, an existing model which has competitive results on prediction.