pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Equity in Healthcare: Analyzing Disparities in Machine Learning Predictions of Diabetic Patient Readmissions
Authors: Zainab Al-Zanbouri, Gauri Sharma, Shaina Raza
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

This study investigates how machine learning (ML) models can predict hospital readmissions for diabetic patients fairly and accurately across different demographics (age, gender, race). We compared models like Deep Learning, Generalized Linear Models, Gradient Boosting Machines (GBM), and Naive Bayes. GBM stood out with an F1-score of 84.3% and accuracy of 82.2%, accurately predicting readmissions across demographics. A fairness analysis was conducted across all the models. GBM minimized disparities in predictions, achieving balanced results across genders and races. It showed low False Discovery Rates (FDR) (6-7%) and False Positive Rates (FPR) (5%) for both genders. Additionally, FDRs remained low for racial groups, such as African Americans (8%) and Asians (7%). Similarly, FPRs were consistent across age groups (4%) for both patients under 40 and those above 40, indicating its precision and ability to reduce bias. These findings emphasize the importance of choosing ML models carefully to ensure both accuracy and fairness for all patients. By showcasing effectiveness of various models with fairness metrics, this study promotes personalized medicine and the need for fair ML algorithms in healthcare. This can ultimately reduce disparities and improve outcomes for diabetic patients of all backgrounds.
Uncovering Temporal Patterns in Visualizations of High-Dimensional Data
Authors: Pavlin G. Poličar, Blaž Zupan
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

With the increasing availability of high-dimensional data, analysts often rely on exploratory data analysis to understand complex data sets. A key approach to exploring such data is dimensionality reduction, which embeds high-dimensional data in two dimensions to enable visual exploration. However, popular embedding techniques, such as t-SNE and UMAP, typically assume that data points are independent. When this assumption is violated, as in time-series data, the resulting visualizations may fail to reveal important temporal patterns and trends. To address this, we propose a formal extension to existing dimensionality reduction methods that incorporates two temporal loss terms that explicitly highlight temporal progression in the embedded visualizations. Through a series of experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our approach effectively uncovers temporal patterns and improves the interpretability of the visualizations. Furthermore, the method improves temporal coherence while preserving the fidelity of the embeddings, providing a robust tool for dynamic data analysis.
Thelxinoë: Recognizing Human Emotions Using Pupillometry and Machine Learning
Authors: Darlene Barker, Haim Levkowitz
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Ensemble Learning, Feature Engineering, feature selection

In this study, we present a method for emotion recognition in Virtual Reality (VR) using pupillometry. We analyze pupil diameter responses to both visual and auditory stimuli via a VR headset and focus on extracting key features in the time-domain, frequency-domain, and time-frequency domain from VR generated data. Our approach utilizes feature selection to identify the most impactful features using Maximum Relevance Minimum Redundancy (mRMR). By applying a Gradient Boosting model, an ensemble learning technique using stacked decision trees, we achieve an accuracy of 98.8% with feature engineering, compared to 84.9% without it. This research contributes significantly to the Thelxino\"e framework, aiming to enhance VR experiences by integrating multiple sensor data for realistic and emotionally resonant touch interactions. Our findings open new avenues for developing more immersive and interactive VR environments, paving the way for future advancements in virtual touch technology.
Sequential Inference of Hospitalization Electronic Health Records Using Probabilistic Models
Authors: Alan D. Kaplan, Priyadip Ray, John D. Greene, Vincent X. Liu
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00

In the dynamic hospital setting, decision support can be a valuable tool for improving patient outcomes. Data-driven inference of future outcomes is challenging in this dynamic setting, where long sequences such as laboratory tests and medications are updated frequently. This is due in part to heterogeneity of data types and mixed-sequence types contained in variable length sequences. In this work we design a probabilistic unsupervised model for multiple arbitrary-length sequences contained in hospitalization Electronic Health Record (EHR) data. The model uses a latent variable structure and captures complex relationships between medications, diagnoses, laboratory tests, neurological assessments, and medications. It can be trained on original data, without requiring any lossy transformations or time binning. Inference algorithms are derived that use partial data to infer properties of the complete sequences, including their length and presence of specific values. We train this model on data from subjects receiving medical care in the Kaiser Permanente Northern California integrated healthcare delivery system. The results are evaluated against held-out data for predicting the length of sequences and presence of Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in hospitalization bed sequences. Our method outperforms a baseline approach, showing that in these experiments the trained model captures information in the sequences that is informative of their future values.
Towards Sustainable SecureML: Quantifying Carbon Footprint of Adversarial Machine Learning
Authors: Syed Mhamudul Hasan, Abdur R. Shahid, Ahmed Imteaj
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

The widespread adoption of machine learning (ML) across various industries has raised sustainability concerns due to its substantial energy usage and carbon emissions. This issue becomes more pressing in adversarial ML, which focuses on enhancing model security against different network-based attacks. Implementing defenses in ML systems often necessitates additional computational resources and network security measures, exacerbating their environmental impacts. In this paper, we pioneer the first investigation into adversarial ML's carbon footprint, providing empirical evidence connecting greater model robustness to higher emissions. Addressing the critical need to quantify this trade-off, we introduce the Robustness Carbon Trade-off Index (RCTI). This novel metric, inspired by economic elasticity principles, captures the sensitivity of carbon emissions to changes in adversarial robustness. We demonstrate the RCTI through an experiment involving evasion attacks, analyzing the interplay between robustness against attacks, performance, and carbon emissions.
Causal-StoNet: Causal Inference for High-Dimensional Complex Data
Authors: Yaxin Fang, Faming Liang
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Econometrics, Learning Theory, Missing Values

With the advancement of data science, the collection of increasingly complex datasets has become commonplace. In such datasets, the data dimension can be extremely high, and the underlying data generation process can be unknown and highly nonlinear. As a result, the task of making causal inference with high-dimensional complex data has become a fundamental problem in many disciplines, such as medicine, econometrics, and social science. However, the existing methods for causal inference are frequently developed under the assumption that the data dimension is low or that the underlying data generation process is linear or approximately linear. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel causal inference approach for dealing with high-dimensional complex data. The proposed approach is based on deep learning techniques, including sparse deep learning theory and stochastic neural networks, that have been developed in recent literature. By using these techniques, the proposed approach can address both the high dimensionality and unknown data generation process in a coherent way. Furthermore, the proposed approach can also be used when missing values are present in the datasets. Extensive numerical studies indicate that the proposed approach outperforms existing ones.
Moderating Illicit Online Image Promotion for Unsafe User-Generated Content Games Using Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Keyan Guo, Ayush Utkarsh, Wenbo Ding, Isabelle Ondracek, Ziming Zhao, Guo Freeman, Nishant Vishwamitra, Hongxin Hu
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Online user generated content games (UGCGs) are increasingly popular among children and adolescents for social interaction and more creative online entertainment. However, they pose a heightened risk of exposure to explicit content, raising growing concerns for the online safety of children and adolescents. Despite these concerns, few studies have addressed the issue of illicit image-based promotions of unsafe UGCGs on social media, which can inadvertently attract young users. This challenge arises from the difficulty of obtaining comprehensive training data for UGCG images and the unique nature of these images, which differ from traditional unsafe content. In this work, we take the first step towards studying the threat of illicit promotions of unsafe UGCGs. We collect a real-world dataset comprising 2,924 images that display diverse sexually explicit and violent content used to promote UGCGs by their game creators. Our in-depth studies reveal a new understanding of this problem and the urgent need for automatically flagging illicit UGCG promotions. We additionally create a cutting-edge system, UGCG-Guard, designed to aid social media platforms in effectively identifying images used for illicit UGCG promotions. This system leverages recently introduced large vision-language models (VLMs) and employs a novel conditional prompting strategy for zero-shot domain adaptation, along with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning for contextual identification. UGCG-Guard achieves outstanding results, with an accuracy rate of 94% in detecting these images used for the illicit promotion of such games in real-world scenarios.
Targeted Visualization of the Backbone of Encoder LLMs
Authors: Isaac Roberts, Alexander Schulz, Luca Hermes, Barbara Hammer
Date: 2024-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, image-classification, Image Classification

Attention based Large Language Models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art in natural language processing (NLP). The two most common architectures are encoders such as BERT, and decoders like the GPT models. Despite the success of encoder models, on which we focus in this work, they also bear several risks, including issues with bias or their susceptibility for adversarial attacks, signifying the necessity for explainable AI to detect such issues. While there does exist various local explainability methods focusing on the prediction of single inputs, global methods based on dimensionality reduction for classification inspection, which have emerged in other domains and that go further than just using t-SNE in the embedding space, are not widely spread in NLP. To reduce this gap, we investigate the application of DeepView, a method for visualizing a part of the decision function together with a data set in two dimensions, to the NLP domain. While in previous work, DeepView has been used to inspect deep image classification models, we demonstrate how to apply it to BERT-based NLP classifiers and investigate its usability in this domain, including settings with adversarially perturbed input samples and pre-trained, fine-tuned, and multi-task models.
Clinical Domain Knowledge-Derived Template Improves Post Hoc AI Explanations in Pneumothorax Classification
Authors: Han Yuan, Chuan Hong, PengTao Jiang, Gangming Zhao, Nguyen Tuan Anh Tran, Xinxing Xu, Yet Yen Yan, Nan Liu
Date: 2024-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Clinical Knowledge, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Background: Pneumothorax is an acute thoracic disease caused by abnormal air collection between the lungs and chest wall. To address the opaqueness often associated with deep learning (DL) models, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods have been introduced to outline regions related to pneumothorax diagnoses made by DL models. However, these explanations sometimes diverge from actual lesion areas, highlighting the need for further improvement. Method: We propose a template-guided approach to incorporate the clinical knowledge of pneumothorax into model explanations generated by XAI methods, thereby enhancing the quality of these explanations. Utilizing one lesion delineation created by radiologists, our approach first generates a template that represents potential areas of pneumothorax occurrence. This template is then superimposed on model explanations to filter out extraneous explanations that fall outside the template's boundaries. To validate its efficacy, we carried out a comparative analysis of three XAI methods with and without our template guidance when explaining two DL models in two real-world datasets. Results: The proposed approach consistently improved baseline XAI methods across twelve benchmark scenarios built on three XAI methods, two DL models, and two datasets. The average incremental percentages, calculated by the performance improvements over the baseline performance, were 97.8% in Intersection over Union (IoU) and 94.1% in Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) when comparing model explanations and ground-truth lesion areas. Conclusions: In the context of pneumothorax diagnoses, we proposed a template-guided approach for improving AI explanations. We anticipate that our template guidance will forge a fresh approach to elucidating AI models by integrating clinical domain expertise.
SugarcaneNet: An Optimized Ensemble of LASSO-Regularized Pre-trained Models for Accurate Disease Classification
Authors: Md. Simul Hasan Talukder, Sharmin Akter, Abdullah Hafez Nur, Mohammad Aljaidi, Rejwan Bin Sulaiman, Ali Fayez Alkoradees
Date: 2024-03-26 00:00:00

Sugarcane, a key crop for the world's sugar industry, is prone to several diseases that have a substantial negative influence on both its yield and quality. To effectively manage and implement preventative initiatives, diseases must be detected promptly and accurately. In this study, we present a unique model called sugarcaneNet2024 that outperforms previous methods for automatically and quickly detecting sugarcane disease through leaf image processing. Our proposed model consolidates an optimized weighted average ensemble of seven customized and LASSO-regularized pre-trained models, particularly InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2, DenseNet201, DenseNet169, Xception, and ResNet152V2. Initially, we added three more dense layers with 0.0001 LASSO regularization, three 30% dropout layers, and three batch normalizations with renorm enabled at the bottom of these pre-trained models to improve the performance. The accuracy of sugarcane leaf disease classification was greatly increased by this addition. Following this, several comparative studies between the average ensemble and individual models were carried out, indicating that the ensemble technique performed better. The average ensemble of all modified pre-trained models produced outstanding outcomes: 100%, 99%, 99%, and 99.45% for f1 score, precision, recall, and accuracy, respectively. Performance was further enhanced by the implementation of an optimized weighted average ensemble technique incorporated with grid search. This optimized sugarcaneNet2024 model performed the best for detecting sugarcane diseases, having achieved accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score of 99.67%, 100%, 100%, and 100% , respectively.
Asymmetric and trial-dependent modeling: the contribution of LIA to SdSV Challenge Task 2
Authors: Pierre-Michel Bousquet, Mickael Rouvier
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Recognition, Speaker Verification, Task 2, Text-Independent Speaker Verification

The SdSv challenge Task 2 provided an opportunity to assess efficiency and robustness of modern text-independent speaker verification systems. But it also made it possible to test new approaches, capable of taking into account the main issues of this challenge (duration, language, ...). This paper describes the contributions of our laboratory to the speaker recognition field. These contributions highlight two other challenges in addition to short-duration and language: the mismatch between enrollment and test data and the one between subsets of the evaluation trial dataset. The proposed approaches experimentally show their relevance and efficiency on the SdSv evaluation, and could be of interest in many real-life applications.
Improving Adversarial Data Collection by Supporting Annotators: Lessons from GAHD, a German Hate Speech Dataset
Authors: Janis Goldzycher, Paul Röttger, Gerold Schneider
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Hate Speech Detection

Hate speech detection models are only as good as the data they are trained on. Datasets sourced from social media suffer from systematic gaps and biases, leading to unreliable models with simplistic decision boundaries. Adversarial datasets, collected by exploiting model weaknesses, promise to fix this problem. However, adversarial data collection can be slow and costly, and individual annotators have limited creativity. In this paper, we introduce GAHD, a new German Adversarial Hate speech Dataset comprising ca.\ 11k examples. During data collection, we explore new strategies for supporting annotators, to create more diverse adversarial examples more efficiently and provide a manual analysis of annotator disagreements for each strategy. Our experiments show that the resulting dataset is challenging even for state-of-the-art hate speech detection models, and that training on GAHD clearly improves model robustness. Further, we find that mixing multiple support strategies is most advantageous. We make GAHD publicly available at https://github.com/jagol/gahd.
WaterJudge: Quality-Detection Trade-off when Watermarking Large Language Models
Authors: Piotr Molenda, Adian Liusie, Mark J. F. Gales
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: nlg evaluation

Watermarking generative-AI systems, such as LLMs, has gained considerable interest, driven by their enhanced capabilities across a wide range of tasks. Although current approaches have demonstrated that small, context-dependent shifts in the word distributions can be used to apply and detect watermarks, there has been little work in analyzing the impact that these perturbations have on the quality of generated texts. Balancing high detectability with minimal performance degradation is crucial in terms of selecting the appropriate watermarking setting; therefore this paper proposes a simple analysis framework where comparative assessment, a flexible NLG evaluation framework, is used to assess the quality degradation caused by a particular watermark setting. We demonstrate that our framework provides easy visualization of the quality-detection trade-off of watermark settings, enabling a simple solution to find an LLM watermark operating point that provides a well-balanced performance. This approach is applied to two different summarization systems and a translation system, enabling cross-model analysis for a task, and cross-task analysis.
Improving Clinical NLP Performance through Language Model-Generated Synthetic Clinical Data
Authors: Shan Chen, Jack Gallifant, Marco Guevara, Yanjun Gao, Majid Afshar, Timothy Miller, Dmitriy Dligach, Danielle S. Bitterman
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Generative models have been showing potential for producing data in mass. This study explores the enhancement of clinical natural language processing performance by utilizing synthetic data generated from advanced language models. Promising results show feasible applications in such a high-stakes domain.
Phonetic Segmentation of the UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive
Authors: Eleanor Chodroff, Blaž Pažon, Annie Baker, Steven Moran
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00

Research in speech technologies and comparative linguistics depends on access to diverse and accessible speech data. The UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive is one of the earliest multilingual speech corpora, with long-form audio recordings and phonetic transcriptions for 314 languages (Ladefoged et al., 2009). Recently, 95 of these languages were time-aligned with word-level phonetic transcriptions (Li et al., 2021). Here we present VoxAngeles, a corpus of audited phonetic transcriptions and phone-level alignments of the UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive, which uses the 95-language CMU re-release as our starting point. VoxAngeles also includes word- and phone-level segmentations from the original UCLA corpus, as well as phonetic measurements of word and phone durations, vowel formants, and vowel f0. This corpus enhances the usability of the original data, particularly for quantitative phonetic typology, as demonstrated through a case study of vowel intrinsic f0. We also discuss the utility of the VoxAngeles corpus for general research and pedagogy in crosslinguistic phonetics, as well as for low-resource and multilingual speech technologies. VoxAngeles is free to download and use under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 license.
JDocQA: Japanese Document Question Answering Dataset for Generative Language Models
Authors: Eri Onami, Shuhei Kurita, Taiki Miyanishi, Taro Watanabe
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Document question answering is a task of question answering on given documents such as reports, slides, pamphlets, and websites, and it is a truly demanding task as paper and electronic forms of documents are so common in our society. This is known as a quite challenging task because it requires not only text understanding but also understanding of figures and tables, and hence visual question answering (VQA) methods are often examined in addition to textual approaches. We introduce Japanese Document Question Answering (JDocQA), a large-scale document-based QA dataset, essentially requiring both visual and textual information to answer questions, which comprises 5,504 documents in PDF format and annotated 11,600 question-and-answer instances in Japanese. Each QA instance includes references to the document pages and bounding boxes for the answer clues. We incorporate multiple categories of questions and unanswerable questions from the document for realistic question-answering applications. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our dataset with text-based large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models. Incorporating unanswerable questions in finetuning may contribute to harnessing the so-called hallucination generation.