pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Safeguarding Marketing Research: The Generation, Identification, and Mitigation of AI-Fabricated Disinformation
Authors: Anirban Mukherjee
Date: 2024-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics, Marketing

Generative AI has ushered in the ability to generate content that closely mimics human contributions, introducing an unprecedented threat: Deployed en masse, these models can be used to manipulate public opinion and distort perceptions, resulting in a decline in trust towards digital platforms. This study contributes to marketing literature and practice in three ways. First, it demonstrates the proficiency of AI in fabricating disinformative user-generated content (UGC) that mimics the form of authentic content. Second, it quantifies the disruptive impact of such UGC on marketing research, highlighting the susceptibility of analytics frameworks to even minimal levels of disinformation. Third, it proposes and evaluates advanced detection frameworks, revealing that standard techniques are insufficient for filtering out AI-generated disinformation. We advocate for a comprehensive approach to safeguarding marketing research that integrates advanced algorithmic solutions, enhanced human oversight, and a reevaluation of regulatory and ethical frameworks. Our study seeks to serve as a catalyst, providing a foundation for future research and policy-making aimed at navigating the intricate challenges at the nexus of technology, ethics, and marketing.
Use of recommendation models to provide support to dyslexic students
Authors: Gianluca Morciano, José Manuel Alcalde-Llergo, Andrea Zingoni, Enrique Yeguas-Bolivar, Juri Taborri, Giuseppe Calabrò
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering

Dyslexia is the most widespread specific learning disorder and significantly impair different cognitive domains. This, in turn, negatively affects dyslexic students during their learning path. Therefore, specific support must be given to these students. In addition, such a support must be highly personalized, since the problems generated by the disorder can be very different from one to another. In this work, we explored the possibility of using AI to suggest the most suitable supporting tools for dyslexic students, so as to provide a targeted help that can be of real utility. To do this, we relied on recommendation algorithms, which are a branch of machine learning, that aim to detect personal preferences and provide the most suitable suggestions. We hence implemented and trained three collaborative-filtering recommendation models, namely an item-based, a user-based and a weighted-hybrid model, and studied their performance on a large database of 1237 students' information, collected with a self-evaluating questionnaire regarding all the most used supporting strategies and digital tools. Each recommendation model was tested with three different similarity metrics, namely Pearson correlation, Euclidean distance and Cosine similarity. The obtained results showed that a recommendation system is highly effective in suggesting the optimal help tools/strategies for everyone. This demonstrates that the proposed approach is successful and can be used as a new and effective methodology to support students with dyslexia.
AI for bureaucratic productivity: Measuring the potential of AI to help automate 143 million UK government transactions
Authors: Vincent J. Straub, Youmna Hashem, Jonathan Bright, Satyam Bhagwanani, Deborah Morgan, John Francis, Saba Esnaashari, Helen Margetts
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

There is currently considerable excitement within government about the potential of artificial intelligence to improve public service productivity through the automation of complex but repetitive bureaucratic tasks, freeing up the time of skilled staff. Here, we explore the size of this opportunity, by mapping out the scale of citizen-facing bureaucratic decision-making procedures within UK central government, and measuring their potential for AI-driven automation. We estimate that UK central government conducts approximately one billion citizen-facing transactions per year in the provision of around 400 services, of which approximately 143 million are complex repetitive transactions. We estimate that 84% of these complex transactions are highly automatable, representing a huge potential opportunity: saving even an average of just one minute per complex transaction would save the equivalent of approximately 1,200 person-years of work every year. We also develop a model to estimate the volume of transactions a government service undertakes, providing a way for government to avoid conducting time consuming transaction volume measurements. Finally, we find that there is high turnover in the types of services government provide, meaning that automation efforts should focus on general procedures rather than services themselves which are likely to evolve over time. Overall, our work presents a novel perspective on the structure and functioning of modern government, and how it might evolve in the age of artificial intelligence.
Latent Diffusion Models for Attribute-Preserving Image Anonymization
Authors: Luca Piano, Pietro Basci, Fabrizio Lamberti, Lia Morra
Date: 2024-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Generative techniques for image anonymization have great potential to generate datasets that protect the privacy of those depicted in the images, while achieving high data fidelity and utility. Existing methods have focused extensively on preserving facial attributes, but failed to embrace a more comprehensive perspective that considers the scene and background into the anonymization process. This paper presents, to the best of our knowledge, the first approach to image anonymization based on Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs). Every element of a scene is maintained to convey the same meaning, yet manipulated in a way that makes re-identification difficult. We propose two LDMs for this purpose: CAMOUFLaGE-Base exploits a combination of pre-trained ControlNets, and a new controlling mechanism designed to increase the distance between the real and anonymized images. CAMOFULaGE-Light is based on the Adapter technique, coupled with an encoding designed to efficiently represent the attributes of different persons in a scene. The former solution achieves superior performance on most metrics and benchmarks, while the latter cuts the inference time in half at the cost of fine-tuning a lightweight module. We show through extensive experimental comparison that the proposed method is competitive with the state-of-the-art concerning identity obfuscation whilst better preserving the original content of the image and tackling unresolved challenges that current solutions fail to address.
Particip-AI: A Democratic Surveying Framework for Anticipating Future AI Use Cases, Harms and Benefits
Authors: Jimin Mun, Liwei Jiang, Jenny Liang, Inyoung Cheong, Nicole DeCario, Yejin Choi, Tadayoshi Kohno, Maarten Sap
Date: 2024-03-21 00:00:00

General purpose AI, such as ChatGPT, seems to have lowered the barriers for the public to use AI and harness its power. However, the governance and development of AI still remain in the hands of a few, and the pace of development is accelerating without a comprehensive assessment of risks. As a first step towards democratic risk assessment and design of general purpose AI, we introduce PARTICIP-AI, a carefully designed framework for laypeople to speculate and assess AI use cases and their impacts. Our framework allows us to study more nuanced and detailed public opinions on AI through collecting use cases, surfacing diverse harms through risk assessment under alternate scenarios (i.e., developing and not developing a use case), and illuminating tensions over AI development through making a concluding choice on its development. To showcase the promise of our framework towards informing democratic AI development, we run a medium-scale study with inputs from 295 demographically diverse participants. Our analyses show that participants' responses emphasize applications for personal life and society, contrasting with most current AI development's business focus. We also surface diverse set of envisioned harms such as distrust in AI and institutions, complementary to those defined by experts. Furthermore, we found that perceived impact of not developing use cases significantly predicted participants' judgements of whether AI use cases should be developed, and highlighted lay users' concerns of techno-solutionism. We conclude with a discussion on how frameworks like PARTICIP-AI can further guide democratic AI development and governance.
Crowdsourced Multilingual Speech Intelligibility Testing
Authors: Laura Lechler, Kamil Wojcicki
Date: 2024-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Intelligibility Evaluation

With the advent of generative audio features, there is an increasing need for rapid evaluation of their impact on speech intelligibility. Beyond the existing laboratory measures, which are expensive and do not scale well, there has been comparatively little work on crowdsourced assessment of intelligibility. Standards and recommendations are yet to be defined, and publicly available multilingual test materials are lacking. In response to this challenge, we propose an approach for a crowdsourced intelligibility assessment. We detail the test design, the collection and public release of the multilingual speech data, and the results of our early experiments.
Learning Quadruped Locomotion Using Differentiable Simulation
Authors: Yunlong Song, Sangbae Kim, Davide Scaramuzza
Date: 2024-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

This work explores the potential of using differentiable simulation for learning quadruped locomotion. Differentiable simulation promises fast convergence and stable training by computing low-variance first-order gradients using robot dynamics. However, its usage for legged robots is still limited to simulation. The main challenge lies in the complex optimization landscape of robotic tasks due to discontinuous dynamics. This work proposes a new differentiable simulation framework to overcome these challenges. Our approach combines a high-fidelity, non-differentiable simulator for forward dynamics with a simplified surrogate model for gradient backpropagation. This approach maintains simulation accuracy by aligning the robot states from the surrogate model with those of the precise, non-differentiable simulator. Our framework enables learning quadruped walking in simulation in minutes without parallelization. When augmented with GPU parallelization, our approach allows the quadruped robot to master diverse locomotion skills on challenging terrains in minutes. We demonstrate that differentiable simulation outperforms a reinforcement learning algorithm (PPO) by achieving significantly better sample efficiency while maintaining its effectiveness in handling large-scale environments. Our method represents one of the first successful applications of differentiable simulation to real-world quadruped locomotion, offering a compelling alternative to traditional RL methods.
Comprehensive Evaluation and Insights into the Use of Large Language Models in the Automation of Behavior-Driven Development Acceptance Test Formulation
Authors: Shanthi Karpurapu, Sravanthy Myneni, Unnati Nettur, Likhit Sagar Gajja, Dave Burke, Tom Stiehm, Jeffery Payne
Date: 2024-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, In-Context Learning, Large Language Model, Prompt Engineering, software testing, Test Case Creation, test driven development, Zero-Shot Learning

Behavior-driven development (BDD) is an Agile testing methodology fostering collaboration among developers, QA analysts, and stakeholders. In this manuscript, we propose a novel approach to enhance BDD practices using large language models (LLMs) to automate acceptance test generation. Our study uses zero and few-shot prompts to evaluate LLMs such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Llama-2-13B, and PaLM-2. The paper presents a detailed methodology that includes the dataset, prompt techniques, LLMs, and the evaluation process. The results demonstrate that GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 generate error-free BDD acceptance tests with better performance. The few-shot prompt technique highlights its ability to provide higher accuracy by incorporating examples for in-context learning. Furthermore, the study examines syntax errors, validation accuracy, and comparative analysis of LLMs, revealing their effectiveness in enhancing BDD practices. However, our study acknowledges that there are limitations to the proposed approach. We emphasize that this approach can support collaborative BDD processes and create opportunities for future research into automated BDD acceptance test generation using LLMs.
Multimodal Fusion with Pre-Trained Model Features in Affective Behaviour Analysis In-the-wild
Authors: Zhuofan Wen, Fengyu Zhang, Siyuan Zhang, Haiyang Sun, Mingyu Xu, Licai Sun, Zheng Lian, Bin Liu, JianHua Tao
Date: 2024-03-22 00:00:00

Multimodal fusion is a significant method for most multimodal tasks. With the recent surge in the number of large pre-trained models, combining both multimodal fusion methods and pre-trained model features can achieve outstanding performance in many multimodal tasks. In this paper, we present our approach, which leverages both advantages for addressing the task of Expression (Expr) Recognition and Valence-Arousal (VA) Estimation. We evaluate the Aff-Wild2 database using pre-trained models, then extract the final hidden layers of the models as features. Following preprocessing and interpolation or convolution to align the extracted features, different models are employed for modal fusion. Our code is available at GitHub - FulgenceWen/ABAW6th.
Continual Vision-and-Language Navigation
Authors: Seongjun Jeong, Gi-Cheon Kang, SeongHo Choi, Joochan Kim, Byoung-Tak Zhang
Date: 2024-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Navigate, Sequential Decision Making, Vision and Language Navigation

In developing Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) agents that navigate to a destination using natural language instructions and visual cues, current studies largely assume a \textit{train-once-deploy-once strategy}. We argue that this kind of strategy is less realistic, as deployed VLN agents are expected to encounter novel environments continuously through their lifetime. To facilitate more realistic setting for VLN agents, we propose Continual Vision-and-Language Navigation (CVLN) paradigm for agents to continually learn and adapt to changing environments. In CVLN, the agents are trained and evaluated incrementally across multiple \textit{scene domains} (i.e., environments). We present two CVLN learning setups to consider diverse forms of natural language instructions: Initial-instruction based CVLN, focused on navigation via initial-instruction interpretation, and dialogue-based CVLN, designed for navigation through dialogue with other agents. We introduce two simple yet effective baseline methods, tailored to the sequential decision-making needs of CVLN: Perplexity Replay (PerpR) and Episodic Self-Replay (ESR), both employing a rehearsal mechanism. PerpR selects replay episodes based on episode difficulty, while ESR stores and revisits action logits from individual episode steps during training to refine learning. Experimental results indicate that while existing continual learning methods are insufficient for CVLN, PerpR and ESR outperform the comparison methods by effectively utilizing replay memory.
MM-Diff: High-Fidelity Image Personalization via Multi-Modal Condition Integration
Authors: Zhichao Wei, Qingkun Su, Long Qin, Weizhi Wang
Date: 2024-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Personalized Image Generation

Recent advances in tuning-free personalized image generation based on diffusion models are impressive. However, to improve subject fidelity, existing methods either retrain the diffusion model or infuse it with dense visual embeddings, both of which suffer from poor generalization and efficiency. Also, these methods falter in multi-subject image generation due to the unconstrained cross-attention mechanism. In this paper, we propose MM-Diff, a unified and tuning-free image personalization framework capable of generating high-fidelity images of both single and multiple subjects in seconds. Specifically, to simultaneously enhance text consistency and subject fidelity, MM-Diff employs a vision encoder to transform the input image into CLS and patch embeddings. CLS embeddings are used on the one hand to augment the text embeddings, and on the other hand together with patch embeddings to derive a small number of detail-rich subject embeddings, both of which are efficiently integrated into the diffusion model through the well-designed multimodal cross-attention mechanism. Additionally, MM-Diff introduces cross-attention map constraints during the training phase, ensuring flexible multi-subject image sampling during inference without any predefined inputs (e.g., layout). Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of MM-Diff over other leading methods.
Comprehensive Lipidomic Automation Workflow using Large Language Models
Authors: Connor Beveridge, Sanjay Iyer, Caitlin E. Randolph, Matthew Muhoberac, Palak Manchanda, Amy C. Clingenpeel, Shane Tichy, Gaurav Chopra
Date: 2024-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent, Chatbot, Specificity

Lipidomics generates large data that makes manual annotation and interpretation challenging. Lipid chemical and structural diversity with structural isomers further complicates annotation. Although, several commercial and open-source software for targeted lipid identification exists, it lacks automated method generation workflows and integration with statistical and bioinformatics tools. We have developed the Comprehensive Lipidomic Automated Workflow (CLAW) platform with integrated workflow for parsing, detailed statistical analysis and lipid annotations based on custom multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) precursor and product ion pair transitions. CLAW contains several modules including identification of carbon-carbon double bond position(s) in unsaturated lipids when combined with ozone electrospray ionization (OzESI)-MRM methodology. To demonstrate the utility of the automated workflow in CLAW, large-scale lipidomics data was collected with traditional and OzESI-MRM profiling on biological and non-biological samples. Specifically, a total of 1497 transitions organized into 10 MRM-based mass spectrometry methods were used to profile lipid droplets isolated from different brain regions of 18-24 month-old Alzheimer's disease mice and age-matched wild-type controls. Additionally, triacyclglycerols (TGs) profiles with carbon-carbon double bond specificity were generated from canola oil samples using OzESI-MRM profiling. We also developed an integrated language user interface with large language models using artificially intelligent (AI) agents that permits users to interact with the CLAW platform using a chatbot terminal to perform statistical and bioinformatic analyses. We envision CLAW pipeline to be used in high-throughput lipid structural identification tasks aiding users to generate automated lipidomics workflows ranging from data acquisition to AI agent-based bioinformatic analysis.
Subequivariant Reinforcement Learning Framework for Coordinated Motion Control
Authors: Haoyu Wang, Xiaoyu Tan, Xihe Qiu, Chao Qu
Date: 2024-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Effective coordination is crucial for motion control with reinforcement learning, especially as the complexity of agents and their motions increases. However, many existing methods struggle to account for the intricate dependencies between joints. We introduce CoordiGraph, a novel architecture that leverages subequivariant principles from physics to enhance coordination of motion control with reinforcement learning. This method embeds the principles of equivariance as inherent patterns in the learning process under gravity influence, which aids in modeling the nuanced relationships between joints vital for motion control. Through extensive experimentation with sophisticated agents in diverse environments, we highlight the merits of our approach. Compared to current leading methods, CoordiGraph notably enhances generalization and sample efficiency.
Solving a Real-World Package Delivery Routing Problem Using Quantum Annealers
Authors: Eneko Osaba, Esther Villar-Rodriguez, Antón Asla
Date: 2024-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Traveling Salesman Problem

Research focused on the conjunction between quantum computing and routing problems has been very prolific in recent years. Most of the works revolve around classical problems such as the Traveling Salesman Problem or the Vehicle Routing Problem. The real-world applicability of these problems is dependent on the objectives and constraints considered. Anyway, it is undeniable that it is often difficult to translate complex requirements into these classical formulations.The main objective of this research is to present a solving scheme for dealing with realistic instances while maintaining all the characteristics and restrictions of the original real-world problem. Thus, a quantum-classical strategy has been developed, coined Q4RPD, that considers a set of real constraints such as a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles, priority deliveries, and capacities characterized by two values: weight and dimensions of the packages. Q4RPD resorts to the Leap Constrained Quadratic Model Hybrid Solver of D-Wave. To demonstrate the application of Q4RPD, an experimentation composed of six different instances has been conducted, aiming to serve as illustrative examples.
Modular Deep Active Learning Framework for Image Annotation: A Technical Report for the Ophthalmo-AI Project
Authors: Md Abdul Kadir, Hasan Md Tusfiqur Alam, Pascale Maul, Hans-Jürgen Profitlich, Moritz Wolf, Daniel Sonntag
Date: 2024-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Image annotation is one of the most essential tasks for guaranteeing proper treatment for patients and tracking progress over the course of therapy in the field of medical imaging and disease diagnosis. However, manually annotating a lot of 2D and 3D imaging data can be extremely tedious. Deep Learning (DL) based segmentation algorithms have completely transformed this process and made it possible to automate image segmentation. By accurately segmenting medical images, these algorithms can greatly minimize the time and effort necessary for manual annotation. Additionally, by incorporating Active Learning (AL) methods, these segmentation algorithms can perform far more effectively with a smaller amount of ground truth data. We introduce MedDeepCyleAL, an end-to-end framework implementing the complete AL cycle. It provides researchers with the flexibility to choose the type of deep learning model they wish to employ and includes an annotation tool that supports the classification and segmentation of medical images. The user-friendly interface allows for easy alteration of the AL and DL model settings through a configuration file, requiring no prior programming experience. While MedDeepCyleAL can be applied to any kind of image data, we have specifically applied it to ophthalmology data in this project.