We consider the diffusion of two alternatives in social networks using a game-theoretic approach. Each individual plays a coordination game with its neighbors repeatedly and decides which to adopt. As products are used in conjunction with others and through repeated interactions, individuals are more interested in their long-term benefits and tend to show trust to others to maximize their long-term utility by choosing a suboptimal option with respect to instantaneous payoff. To capture such trust behavior, we deploy limited-trust equilibrium (LTE) in diffusion process. We analyze the convergence of emerging dynamics to equilibrium points using mean-field approximation and study the equilibrium state and the convergence rate of diffusion using absorption probability and expected absorption time of a reduced-size absorbing Markov chain. We also show that the diffusion model on LTE under the best-response strategy can be converted to the well-known linear threshold model. Simulation results show that when agents behave trustworthy, their long-term utility will increase significantly compared to the case when they are solely self-interested. Moreover, the Markov chain analysis provides a good estimate of convergence properties over random networks.
Computational imaging plays a pivotal role in determining hidden information from sparse measurements. A robust inverse solver is crucial to fully characterize the uncertainty induced by these measurements, as it allows for the estimation of the complete posterior of unrecoverable targets. This, in turn, facilitates a probabilistic interpretation of observational data for decision-making. In this study, we propose a deep variational framework that leverages a deep generative model to learn an approximate posterior distribution to effectively quantify image reconstruction uncertainty without the need for training data. We parameterize the target posterior using a flow-based model and minimize their Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence to achieve accurate uncertainty estimation. To bolster stability, we introduce a robust flow-based model with bi-directional regularization and enhance expressivity through gradient boosting. Additionally, we incorporate a space-filling design to achieve substantial variance reduction on both latent prior space and target posterior space. We validate our method on several benchmark tasks and two real-world applications, namely fastMRI and black hole image reconstruction. Our results indicate that our method provides reliable and high-quality image reconstruction with robust uncertainty estimation.
In this critical survey, we analyze typical claims on the relationship between explainable AI (XAI) and fairness to disentangle the multidimensional relationship between these two concepts. Based on a systematic literature review and a subsequent qualitative content analysis, we identify seven archetypal claims from 175 papers on the alleged fairness benefits of XAI. We present crucial caveats with respect to these claims and provide an entry point for future discussions around the potentials and limitations of XAI for specific fairness desiderata. While the literature often suggests XAI to be an enabler for several fairness desiderata, we notice a divide between these desiderata and the capabilities of XAI. We encourage to conceive XAI as one of many tools to approach the multidimensional, sociotechnical challenge of algorithmic fairness and to be more specific about how exactly what kind of XAI method enables whom to address which fairness desideratum.
Machine Translation (MT) continues to improve in quality and adoption, yet the inadvertent perpetuation of gender bias remains a significant concern. Despite numerous studies into gender bias in translations from gender-neutral languages such as Turkish into more strongly gendered languages like English, there are no benchmarks for evaluating this phenomenon or for assessing mitigation strategies. To address this gap, we introduce GATE X-E, an extension to the GATE (Rarrick et al., 2023) corpus, that consists of human translations from Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, and Persian into English. Each translation is accompanied by feminine, masculine, and neutral variants for each possible gender interpretation. The dataset, which contains between 1250 and 1850 instances for each of the four language pairs, features natural sentences with a wide range of sentence lengths and domains, challenging translation rewriters on various linguistic phenomena. Additionally, we present an English gender rewriting solution built on GPT-3.5 Turbo and use GATE X-E to evaluate it. We open source our contributions to encourage further research on gender debiasing.
Counterfactual Explanations (CEs) help address the question: How can the factors that influence the prediction of a predictive model be changed to achieve a more favorable outcome from a user's perspective? Thus, they bear the potential to guide the user's interaction with AI systems since they represent easy-to-understand explanations. To be applicable, CEs need to be realistic and actionable. In the literature, various methods have been proposed to generate CEs. However, the majority of research on CEs focuses on classification problems where questions like ``What should I do to get my rejected loan approved?" are raised. In practice, answering questions like ``What should I do to increase my salary?" are of a more regressive nature. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to generate CEs for a pre-trained regressor by first disentangling the label-relevant from the label-irrelevant dimensions in the latent space. CEs are then generated by combining the label-irrelevant dimensions and the predefined output. The intuition behind this approach is that the ideal counterfactual search should focus on the label-irrelevant characteristics of the input and suggest changes toward target-relevant characteristics. Searching in the latent space could help achieve this goal. We show that our method maintains the characteristics of the query sample during the counterfactual search. In various experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method is competitive based on different quality measures on image and tabular datasets in regression problem settings. It efficiently returns results closer to the original data manifold compared to three state-of-the-art methods, which is essential for realistic high-dimensional machine learning applications. Our code will be made available as an open-source package upon the publication of this work.
We investigate a formalism for the conditions of a successful explanation of AI. We consider "success" to depend not only on what information the explanation contains, but also on what information the human explainee understands from it. Theory of mind literature discusses the folk concepts that humans use to understand and generalize behavior. We posit that folk concepts of behavior provide us with a "language" that humans understand behavior with. We use these folk concepts as a framework of social attribution by the human explainee - the information constructs that humans are likely to comprehend from explanations - by introducing a blueprint for an explanatory narrative (Figure 1) that explains AI behavior with these constructs. We then demonstrate that many XAI methods today can be mapped to folk concepts of behavior in a qualitative evaluation. This allows us to uncover their failure modes that prevent current methods from explaining successfully - i.e., the information constructs that are missing for any given XAI method, and whose inclusion can decrease the likelihood of misunderstanding AI behavior.
The surprisingly likely criterion in the seminal work of Prelec (the Bayesian Truth Serum) guarantees truthfulness in a game-theoretic multi-agent setting, by rewarding rational agents to maximise the expected information gain with their answers w.r.t. their probabilistic beliefs. We investigate the relevance of a similar criterion for responses of LLMs. We hypothesize that if the surprisingly likely criterion works in LLMs, under certain conditions, the responses that maximize the reward under this criterion should be more accurate than the responses that only maximize the posterior probability. Using benchmarks including the TruthfulQA benchmark and using openly available LLMs: GPT-2 and LLaMA-2, we show that the method indeed improves the accuracy significantly (for example, upto 24 percentage points aggregate improvement on TruthfulQA and upto 70 percentage points improvement on individual categories of questions).
The concept of causality plays an important role in human cognition . In the past few decades, causal inference has been well developed in many fields, such as computer science, medicine, economics, and education. With the advancement of deep learning techniques, it has been increasingly used in causal inference against counterfactual data. Typically, deep causal models map the characteristics of covariates to a representation space and then design various objective optimization functions to estimate counterfactual data unbiasedly based on the different optimization methods. This paper focuses on the survey of the deep causal models, and its core contributions are as follows: 1) we provide relevant metrics under multiple treatments and continuous-dose treatment; 2) we incorporate a comprehensive overview of deep causal models from both temporal development and method classification perspectives; 3) we assist a detailed and comprehensive classification and analysis of relevant datasets and source code.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
We investigate the problem of automatically determining what type of shoe left an impression found at a crime scene. This recognition problem is made difficult by the variability in types of crime scene evidence (ranging from traces of dust or oil on hard surfaces to impressions made in soil) and the lack of comprehensive databases of shoe outsole tread patterns. We find that mid-level features extracted by pre-trained convolutional neural nets are surprisingly effective descriptors for this specialized domains. However, the choice of similarity measure for matching exemplars to a query image is essential to good performance. For matching multi-channel deep features, we propose the use of multi-channel normalized cross-correlation and analyze its effectiveness. Our proposed metric significantly improves performance in matching crime scene shoeprints to laboratory test impressions. We also show its effectiveness in other cross-domain image retrieval problems: matching facade images to segmentation labels and aerial photos to map images. Finally, we introduce a discriminatively trained variant and fine-tune our system through our proposed metric, obtaining state-of-the-art performance.