pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Machine Learning Driven Website Platform and Browser Extension for Real-time Scoring and Fraud Detection for Website Legitimacy Verification and Consumer Protection
Authors: Md Kamrul Hasan Chy, Obed Nana Buadi
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Fraud Detection, Navigate

This paper introduces a Machine Learning-Driven website Platform and Browser Extension designed to quickly enhance online security by providing real-time risk scoring and fraud detection for website legitimacy verification and consumer protection. The platform works seamlessly in the background to analyze website behavior, network traffic, and user interactions, offering immediate feedback and alerts when potential threats are detected. By integrating this system into a user-friendly browser extension, the platform empowers individuals to navigate the web safely, reducing the risk of engaging with fraudulent websites. Its real-time functionality is crucial in e-commerce and everyday browsing, where quick, actionable insights can prevent financial losses, identity theft, and exposure to malicious sites. This paper explores how this solution offers a practical, fast-acting tool for enhancing online consumer protection, underscoring its potential to play a critical role in safeguarding users and maintaining trust in digital transactions. The platform's focus on speed and efficiency makes it an essential asset for preventing fraud in today's increasingly digital world.
ADAPT: A Game-Theoretic and Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Automated Distributed Adaptive Penetration Testing
Authors: Haozhe Lei, Yunfei Ge, Quanyan Zhu
Date: 2024-10-31 00:00:00

The integration of AI into modern critical infrastructure systems, such as healthcare, has introduced new vulnerabilities that can significantly impact workflow, efficiency, and safety. Additionally, the increased connectivity has made traditional human-driven penetration testing insufficient for assessing risks and developing remediation strategies. Consequently, there is a pressing need for a distributed, adaptive, and efficient automated penetration testing framework that not only identifies vulnerabilities but also provides countermeasures to enhance security posture. This work presents ADAPT, a game-theoretic and neuro-symbolic framework for automated distributed adaptive penetration testing, specifically designed to address the unique cybersecurity challenges of AI-enabled healthcare infrastructure networks. We use a healthcare system case study to illustrate the methodologies within ADAPT. The proposed solution enables a learning-based risk assessment. Numerical experiments are used to demonstrate effective countermeasures against various tactical techniques employed by adversarial AI.
Meta-Sealing: A Revolutionizing Integrity Assurance Protocol for Transparent, Tamper-Proof, and Trustworthy AI System
Authors: Mahesh Vaijainthymala Krishnamoorthy
Date: 2024-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

The Artificial intelligence in critical sectors-healthcare, finance, and public safety-has made system integrity paramount for maintaining societal trust. Current verification methods for AI systems lack comprehensive lifecycle assurance, creating significant vulnerabilities in deployment of both powerful and trustworthy AI. This research introduces Meta-Sealing, a cryptographic framework that fundamentally changes integrity verification in AI systems throughout their operational lifetime. Meta-Sealing surpasses traditional integrity protocols through its implementation of cryptographic seal chains, establishing verifiable, immutable records for all system decisions and transformations. The framework combines advanced cryptography with distributed verification, delivering tamper-evident guarantees that achieve both mathematical rigor and computational efficiency. Our implementation addresses urgent regulatory requirements for AI system transparency and auditability. The framework integrates with current AI governance standards, specifically the EU's AI Act and FDA's healthcare AI guidelines, enabling organizations to maintain operational efficiency while meeting compliance requirements. Testing on financial institution data demonstrated Meta-Sealing's capability to reduce audit timeframes by 62% while enhancing stakeholder confidence by 47%. Results can establish a new benchmark for integrity assurance in enterprise AI deployments. This research presents Meta-Sealing not merely as a technical solution, but as a foundational framework ensuring AI system integrity aligns with human values and regulatory requirements. As AI continues to influence critical decisions, provides the necessary bridge between technological advancement and verifiable trust. Meta-Sealing serves as a guardian of trust, ensuring that the AI systems we depend on are as reliable and transparent as they are powerful.
Towards evaluations-based safety cases for AI scheming
Authors: Mikita Balesni, Marius Hobbhahn, David Lindner, Alexander Meinke, Tomek Korbak, Joshua Clymer, Buck Shlegeris, Jérémy Scheurer, Charlotte Stix, Rusheb Shah, Nicholas Goldowsky-Dill, Dan Braun, Bilal Chughtai, Owain Evans, Daniel Kokotajlo, Lucius Bushnaq
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00

We sketch how developers of frontier AI systems could construct a structured rationale -- a 'safety case' -- that an AI system is unlikely to cause catastrophic outcomes through scheming. Scheming is a potential threat model where AI systems could pursue misaligned goals covertly, hiding their true capabilities and objectives. In this report, we propose three arguments that safety cases could use in relation to scheming. For each argument we sketch how evidence could be gathered from empirical evaluations, and what assumptions would need to be met to provide strong assurance. First, developers of frontier AI systems could argue that AI systems are not capable of scheming (Scheming Inability). Second, one could argue that AI systems are not capable of posing harm through scheming (Harm Inability). Third, one could argue that control measures around the AI systems would prevent unacceptable outcomes even if the AI systems intentionally attempted to subvert them (Harm Control). Additionally, we discuss how safety cases might be supported by evidence that an AI system is reasonably aligned with its developers (Alignment). Finally, we point out that many of the assumptions required to make these safety arguments have not been confidently satisfied to date and require making progress on multiple open research problems.
Using Large Language Models for a standard assessment mapping for sustainable communities
Authors: Luc Jonveaux
Date: 2024-10-31 00:00:00

This paper presents a new approach to urban sustainability assessment through the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to streamline the use of the ISO 37101 framework to automate and standardise the assessment of urban initiatives against the six "sustainability purposes" and twelve "issues" outlined in the standard. The methodology includes the development of a custom prompt based on the standard definitions and its application to two different datasets: 527 projects from the Paris Participatory Budget and 398 activities from the PROBONO Horizon 2020 project. The results show the effectiveness of LLMs in quickly and consistently categorising different urban initiatives according to sustainability criteria. The approach is particularly promising when it comes to breaking down silos in urban planning by providing a holistic view of the impact of projects. The paper discusses the advantages of this method over traditional human-led assessments, including significant time savings and improved consistency. However, it also points out the importance of human expertise in interpreting results and ethical considerations. This study hopefully can contribute to the growing body of work on AI applications in urban planning and provides a novel method for operationalising standardised sustainability frameworks in different urban contexts.
What Makes An Expert? Reviewing How ML Researchers Define "Expert"
Authors: Mark Díaz, Angela DR Smith
Date: 2024-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Specificity

Human experts are often engaged in the development of machine learning systems to collect and validate data, consult on algorithm development, and evaluate system performance. At the same time, who counts as an 'expert' and what constitutes 'expertise' is not always explicitly defined. In this work, we review 112 academic publications that explicitly reference 'expert' and 'expertise' and that describe the development of machine learning (ML) systems to survey how expertise is characterized and the role experts play. We find that expertise is often undefined and forms of knowledge outside of formal education and professional certification are rarely sought, which has implications for the kinds of knowledge that are recognized and legitimized in ML development. Moreover, we find that expert knowledge tends to be utilized in ways focused on mining textbook knowledge, such as through data annotation. We discuss the ways experts are engaged in ML development in relation to deskilling, the social construction of expertise, and implications for responsible AI development. We point to a need for reflection and specificity in justifications of domain expert engagement, both as a matter of documentation and reproducibility, as well as a matter of broadening the range of recognized expertise.
Advancing Crime Linkage Analysis with Machine Learning: A Comprehensive Review and Framework for Data-Driven Approaches
Authors: Vinicius Lima, Umit Karabiyik
Date: 2024-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Sociology

Crime linkage is the process of analyzing criminal behavior data to determine whether a pair or group of crime cases are connected or belong to a series of offenses. This domain has been extensively studied by researchers in sociology, psychology, and statistics. More recently, it has drawn interest from computer scientists, especially with advances in artificial intelligence. Despite this, the literature indicates that work in this latter discipline is still in its early stages. This study aims to understand the challenges faced by machine learning approaches in crime linkage and to support foundational knowledge for future data-driven methods. To achieve this goal, we conducted a comprehensive survey of the main literature on the topic and developed a general framework for crime linkage processes, thoroughly describing each step. Our goal was to unify insights from diverse fields into a shared terminology to enhance the research landscape for those intrigued by this subject.
End-to-end Graph Learning Approach for Cognitive Diagnosis of Student Tutorial
Authors: Fulai Yang, Di wu, Yi He, Li Tao, Xin Luo
Date: 2024-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: cognitive diagnosis, Graph Learning

Cognitive diagnosis (CD) utilizes students' existing studying records to estimate their mastery of unknown knowledge concepts, which is vital for evaluating their learning abilities. Accurate CD is extremely challenging because CD is associated with complex relationships and mechanisms among students, knowledge concepts, studying records, etc. However, existing approaches loosely consider these relationships and mechanisms by a non-end-to-end learning framework, resulting in sub-optimal feature extractions and fusions for CD. Different from them, this paper innovatively proposes an End-to-end Graph Neural Networks-based Cognitive Diagnosis (EGNN-CD) model. EGNN-CD consists of three main parts: knowledge concept network (KCN), graph neural networks-based feature extraction (GNNFE), and cognitive ability prediction (CAP). First, KCN constructs CD-related interaction by comprehensively extracting physical information from students, exercises, and knowledge concepts. Second, a four-channel GNNFE is designed to extract high-order and individual features from the constructed KCN. Finally, CAP employs a multi-layer perceptron to fuse the extracted features to predict students' learning abilities in an end-to-end learning way. With such designs, the feature extractions and fusions are guaranteed to be comprehensive and optimal for CD. Extensive experiments on three real datasets demonstrate that our EGNN-CD achieves significantly higher accuracy than state-of-the-art models in CD.
A Big Data-empowered System for Real-time Detection of Regional Discriminatory Comments on Vietnamese Social Media
Authors: An Nghiep Huynh, Thanh Dat Do, Trong Hop Do
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Regional discrimination is a persistent social issue in Vietnam. While existing research has explored hate speech in the Vietnamese language, the specific issue of regional discrimination remains under-addressed. Previous studies primarily focused on model development without considering practical system implementation. In this work, we propose a task called Detection of Regional Discriminatory Comments on Vietnamese Social Media, leveraging the power of machine learning and transfer learning models. We have built the ViRDC (Vietnamese Regional Discrimination Comments) dataset, which contains comments from social media platforms, providing a valuable resource for further research and development. Our approach integrates streaming capabilities to process real-time data from social media networks, ensuring the system's scalability and responsiveness. We developed the system on the Apache Spark framework to efficiently handle increasing data inputs during streaming. Our system offers a comprehensive solution for the real-time detection of regional discrimination in Vietnam.
CycleResearcher: Improving Automated Research via Automated Review
Authors: Yixuan Weng, Minjun Zhu, Guangsheng Bao, Hongbo Zhang, Jindong Wang, Yue Zhang, Linyi Yang
Date: 2024-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: scientific discovery

The automation of scientific discovery has been a long-standing goal within the research community, driven by the potential to accelerate knowledge creation. While significant progress has been made using commercial large language models (LLMs) as research assistants or idea generators, the possibility of automating the entire research process with open-source LLMs remains largely unexplored. This paper explores the feasibility of using open-source post-trained LLMs as autonomous agents capable of performing the full cycle of automated research and review, from literature review and manuscript preparation to peer review and paper refinement. Our iterative preference training framework consists of CycleResearcher, which conducts research tasks, and CycleReviewer, which simulates the peer review process, providing iterative feedback via reinforcement learning. To train these models, we develop two new datasets, Review-5k and Research-14k, reflecting real-world machine learning research and peer review dynamics. Our results demonstrate that CycleReviewer achieves promising performance with a 26.89\% reduction in mean absolute error (MAE) compared to individual human reviewers in predicting paper scores, indicating the potential of LLMs to effectively assist expert-level research evaluation. In research, the papers generated by the CycleResearcher model achieved a score of 5.36 in simulated peer reviews, showing some competitiveness in terms of simulated review scores compared to the preprint level of 5.24 from human experts, while still having room for improvement compared to the accepted paper level of 5.69. This work represents a significant step toward fully automated scientific inquiry, providing ethical safeguards and exploring AI-driven research capabilities. The code, dataset and model weight are released at https://wengsyx.github.io/Researcher/.
Personality Analysis from Online Short Video Platforms with Multi-domain Adaptation
Authors: Sixu An, Xiangguo Sun, Yicong Li, Yu Yang, Guandong Xu
Date: 2024-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Recommendation Systems, Sentiment Analysis

Personality analysis from online short videos has gained prominence due to its applications in personalized recommendation systems, sentiment analysis, and human-computer interaction. Traditional assessment methods, such as questionnaires based on the Big Five Personality Framework, are limited by self-report biases and are impractical for large-scale or real-time analysis. Leveraging the rich, multi-modal data present in short videos offers a promising alternative for more accurate personality inference. However, integrating these diverse and asynchronous modalities poses significant challenges, particularly in aligning time-varying data and ensuring models generalize well to new domains with limited labeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modal personality analysis framework that addresses these challenges by synchronizing and integrating features from multiple modalities and enhancing model generalization through domain adaptation. We introduce a timestamp-based modality alignment mechanism that synchronizes data based on spoken word timestamps, ensuring accurate correspondence across modalities and facilitating effective feature integration. To capture temporal dependencies and inter-modal interactions, we employ Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory networks and self-attention mechanisms, allowing the model to focus on the most informative features for personality prediction. Furthermore, we develop a gradient-based domain adaptation method that transfers knowledge from multiple source domains to improve performance in target domains with scarce labeled data. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in personality prediction tasks, highlighting its effectiveness in capturing complex behavioral cues and robustness in adapting to new domains.
Satellite monitoring uncovers progress but large disparities in doubling crop yields
Authors: Katie Fankhauser, Evan Thomas, Zia Mehrabi
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00

High-resolution satellite-based crop yield mapping offers enormous promise for monitoring progress towards the SDGs. Across 15,000 villages in Rwanda we uncover areas that are on and off track to double productivity by 2030. This machine learning enabled analysis is used to design spatially explicit productivity targets that, if met, would simultaneously ensure national goals without leaving anyone behind.
XAI-FUNGI: Dataset resulting from the user study on comprehensibility of explainable AI algorithms
Authors: Szymon Bobek, Paloma Korycińska, Monika Krakowska, Maciej Mozolewski, Dorota Rak, Magdalena Zych, Magdalena Wójcik, Grzegorz J. Nalepa
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

This paper introduces a dataset that is the result of a user study on the comprehensibility of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) algorithms. The study participants were recruited from 149 candidates to form three groups representing experts in the domain of mycology (DE), students with a data science and visualization background (IT) and students from social sciences and humanities (SSH). The main part of the dataset contains 39 transcripts of interviews during which participants were asked to complete a series of tasks and questions related to the interpretation of explanations of decisions of a machine learning model trained to distinguish between edible and inedible mushrooms. The transcripts were complemented with additional data that includes visualizations of explanations presented to the user, results from thematic analysis, recommendations of improvements of explanations provided by the participants, and the initial survey results that allow to determine the domain knowledge of the participant and data analysis literacy. The transcripts were manually tagged to allow for automatic matching between the text and other data related to particular fragments. In the advent of the area of rapid development of XAI techniques, the need for a multidisciplinary qualitative evaluation of explainability is one of the emerging topics in the community. Our dataset allows not only to reproduce the study we conducted, but also to open a wide range of possibilities for the analysis of the material we gathered.
Fairness Evaluation with Item Response Theory
Authors: Ziqi Xu, Sevvandi Kandanaarachchi, Cheng Soon Ong, Eirini Ntoutsi
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Item Response Theory (IRT) has been widely used in educational psychometrics to assess student ability, as well as the difficulty and discrimination of test questions. In this context, discrimination specifically refers to how effectively a question distinguishes between students of different ability levels, and it does not carry any connotation related to fairness. In recent years, IRT has been successfully used to evaluate the predictive performance of Machine Learning (ML) models, but this paper marks its first application in fairness evaluation. In this paper, we propose a novel Fair-IRT framework to evaluate a set of predictive models on a set of individuals, while simultaneously eliciting specific parameters, namely, the ability to make fair predictions (a feature of predictive models), as well as the discrimination and difficulty of individuals that affect the prediction results. Furthermore, we conduct a series of experiments to comprehensively understand the implications of these parameters for fairness evaluation. Detailed explanations for item characteristic curves (ICCs) are provided for particular individuals. We propose the flatness of ICCs to disentangle the unfairness between individuals and predictive models. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework as a fairness evaluation tool. Two real-world case studies illustrate its potential application in evaluating fairness in both classification and regression tasks. Our paper aligns well with the Responsible Web track by proposing a Fair-IRT framework to evaluate fairness in ML models, which directly contributes to the development of a more inclusive, equitable, and trustworthy AI.
From chalkboards to chatbots: SELAR assists teachers in embracing AI in the curriculum
Authors: Hani Alers, Aleksandra Malinowska, Mathis Mourey, Jasper Waaijer
Date: 2024-10-17 00:00:00

This paper introduces SELAR, a framework designed to effectively help teachers integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into their curriculum. The framework was designed by running workshops organized to gather lecturers' feedback. In this paper, we assess the effectiveness of the framework through additional workshops organized with lecturers from the Hague University of Applied Sciences. The workshops tested the application of the framework to adapt existing courses to leverage generative AI technology. Each participant was tasked to apply SELAR to one of their learning goals in order to evaluate AI integration potential and, if successful, to update the teaching methods accordingly. Findings show that teachers were able to effectively use the SELAR to integrate generative AI into their courses. Future work will focus on providing additional guidance and examples to use the framework more effectively.
Improving the accuracy of food security predictions by integrating conflict data
Authors: Marco Bertetti, Paolo Agnolucci, Alvaro Calzadilla, Licia Capra
Date: 2024-10-12 00:00:00

Violence and armed conflicts have emerged as prominent factors driving food crises. However, the extent of their impact remains largely unexplored. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the impact of violent conflicts on food security in Africa. We performed a comprehensive correlation analysis using data from the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWSNET) and the Armed Conflict Location Event Data (ACLED). Our results show that using conflict data to train machine learning models leads to a 1.5% increase in accuracy compared to models that do not incorporate conflict-related information. The key contribution of this study is the quantitative analysis of the impact of conflicts on food security predictions.