Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have the potential to provide numerous societal benefits, such as decreased road accidents and increased overall transportation efficiency. However, quantifying the risk associated with AVs is challenging due to the lack of historical data and the rapidly evolving technology. This paper presents a data-driven framework for comparing the risk of different AVs' behaviors in various operational design domains (ODDs), based on counterfactual simulations of "misbehaving" road users. We introduce the concept of counterfactual safety margin, which represents the minimum deviation from normal behavior that could lead to a collision. This concept helps to find the most critical scenarios but also to assess the frequency and severity of risk of AVs. We show that the proposed methodology is applicable even when the AV's behavioral policy is unknown -- through worst- and best-case analyses -- making the method useful also to external third-party risk assessors. Our experimental results demonstrate the correlation between the safety margin, the driving policy quality, and the ODD shedding light on the relative risk associated with different AV providers. This work contributes to AV safety assessment and aids in addressing legislative and insurance concerns surrounding this emerging technology.
Even though Google Research Football (GRF) was initially benchmarked and studied as a single-agent environment in its original paper, recent years have witnessed an increasing focus on its multi-agent nature by researchers utilizing it as a testbed for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). However, the absence of standardized environment settings and unified evaluation metrics for multi-agent scenarios hampers the consistent understanding of various studies. Furthermore, the challenging 5-vs-5 and 11-vs-11 full-game scenarios have received limited thorough examination due to their substantial training complexities. To address these gaps, this paper extends the original environment by not only standardizing the environment settings and benchmarking cooperative learning algorithms across different scenarios, including the most challenging full-game scenarios, but also by discussing approaches to enhance football AI from diverse perspectives and introducing related research tools. Specifically, we provide a distributed and asynchronous population-based self-play framework with diverse pre-trained policies for faster training, two football-specific analytical tools for deeper investigation, and an online leaderboard for broader evaluation. The overall expectation of this work is to advance the study of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning on Google Research Football environment, with the ultimate goal of benefiting real-world sports beyond virtual games.
Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) is a discipline focused on predicting the point at which systems or components will cease to perform as intended, typically measured as Remaining Useful Life (RUL). RUL serves as a vital decision-making tool for contingency planning, guiding the timing and nature of system maintenance. Historically, PHM has primarily been applied to hardware systems, with its application to software only recently explored. In a recent study we introduced a methodology and demonstrated how changes in software can impact the RUL of software. However, in practical software development, real-time performance is also influenced by various environmental attributes, including operating systems, clock speed, processor performance, RAM, machine core count and others. This research extends the analysis to assess how changes in environmental attributes, such as operating system and clock speed, affect RUL estimation in software. Findings are rigorously validated using real performance data from controlled test beds and compared with predictive model-generated data. Statistical validation, including regression analysis, supports the credibility of the results. The controlled test bed environment replicates and validates faults from real applications, ensuring a standardized assessment platform. This exploration yields actionable knowledge for software maintenance and optimization strategies, addressing a significant gap in the field of software health management.
Maintaining factual consistency is a critical issue in abstractive text summarisation, however, it cannot be assessed by traditional automatic metrics used for evaluating text summarisation, such as ROUGE scoring. Recent efforts have been devoted to developing improved metrics for measuring factual consistency using pre-trained language models, but these metrics have restrictive token limits, and are therefore not suitable for evaluating long document text summarisation. Moreover, there is limited research evaluating whether existing automatic evaluation metrics are fit for purpose when applied to long document data sets. In this work, we evaluate the efficacy of automatic metrics at assessing factual consistency in long document text summarisation and propose a new evaluation framework LongDocFACTScore. This framework allows metrics to be extended to any length document. This framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art metrics in its ability to correlate with human measures of factuality when used to evaluate long document summarisation data sets. Furthermore, we show LongDocFACTScore has performance comparable to state-of-the-art metrics when evaluated against human measures of factual consistency on short document data sets. We make our code and annotated data publicly available: //github.com/jbshp/LongDocFACTScore.
We consider the dichotomy conjecture for consistent query answering under primary key constraints. It states that, for every fixed Boolean conjunctive query q, testing whether q is certain (i.e. whether it evaluates to true over all repairs of a given inconsistent database) is either polynomial time or coNP-complete. This conjecture has been verified for self-join-free and path queries. We show that it also holds for queries with two atoms.
Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive language understanding and the capacity to generate responses that follow specific prompts. However, due to the computational demands associated with training these models, their applications often adopt a zero-shot setting. In this paper, we evaluate the zero-shot performance of two publicly accessible LLMs, ChatGPT and OpenAssistant, in the context of six Computational Social Science classification tasks, while also investigating the effects of various prompting strategies. Our experiments investigate the impact of prompt complexity, including the effect of incorporating label definitions into the prompt; use of synonyms for label names; and the influence of integrating past memories during foundation model training. The findings indicate that in a zero-shot setting, current LLMs are unable to match the performance of smaller, fine-tuned baseline transformer models (such as BERT-large). Additionally, we find that different prompting strategies can significantly affect classification accuracy, with variations in accuracy and F1 scores exceeding 10\%.
Gender bias in education gained considerable relevance in the literature over the years. However, while the problem of gender bias in education has been widely addressed from a student perspective, it is still not fully analysed from an academic point of view. In this work, we study the problem of gender bias in academic promotions (i.e., from Researcher to Associated Professor and from Associated to Full Professor) in the informatics (INF) and software engineering (SE) Italian communities. In particular, we first conduct a literature review to assess how the problem of gender bias in academia has been addressed so far. Next, we describe a process to collect and preprocess the INF and SE data needed to analyse gender bias in Italian academic promotions. Subsequently, we apply a formal bias metric to these data to assess the amount of bias and look at its variation over time. From the conducted analysis, we observe how the SE community presents a higher bias in promotions to Associate Professors and a smaller bias in promotions to Full Professors compared to the overall INF community.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained significant attention owing to their ability to handle graph-structured data and the improvement in practical applications. However, many of these models prioritize high utility performance, such as accuracy, with a lack of privacy consideration, which is a major concern in modern society where privacy attacks are rampant. To address this issue, researchers have started to develop privacy-preserving GNNs. Despite this progress, there is a lack of a comprehensive overview of the attacks and the techniques for preserving privacy in the graph domain. In this survey, we aim to address this gap by summarizing the attacks on graph data according to the targeted information, categorizing the privacy preservation techniques in GNNs, and reviewing the datasets and applications that could be used for analyzing/solving privacy issues in GNNs. We also outline potential directions for future research in order to build better privacy-preserving GNNs.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been studied from the lens of expressive power and generalization. However, their optimization properties are less well understood. We take the first step towards analyzing GNN training by studying the gradient dynamics of GNNs. First, we analyze linearized GNNs and prove that despite the non-convexity of training, convergence to a global minimum at a linear rate is guaranteed under mild assumptions that we validate on real-world graphs. Second, we study what may affect the GNNs' training speed. Our results show that the training of GNNs is implicitly accelerated by skip connections, more depth, and/or a good label distribution. Empirical results confirm that our theoretical results for linearized GNNs align with the training behavior of nonlinear GNNs. Our results provide the first theoretical support for the success of GNNs with skip connections in terms of optimization, and suggest that deep GNNs with skip connections would be promising in practice.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently become increasingly popular due to their ability to learn complex systems of relations or interactions arising in a broad spectrum of problems ranging from biology and particle physics to social networks and recommendation systems. Despite the plethora of different models for deep learning on graphs, few approaches have been proposed thus far for dealing with graphs that present some sort of dynamic nature (e.g. evolving features or connectivity over time). In this paper, we present Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs), a generic, efficient framework for deep learning on dynamic graphs represented as sequences of timed events. Thanks to a novel combination of memory modules and graph-based operators, TGNs are able to significantly outperform previous approaches being at the same time more computationally efficient. We furthermore show that several previous models for learning on dynamic graphs can be cast as specific instances of our framework. We perform a detailed ablation study of different components of our framework and devise the best configuration that achieves state-of-the-art performance on several transductive and inductive prediction tasks for dynamic graphs.