The fast pace of advances in AI promises to revolutionize various aspects of knowledge work, extending its influence to daily life and professional fields alike. We advocate for a paradigm where AI is seen as a collaborative co-pilot, working under human guidance rather than as a mere tool. Drawing from relevant research and literature in the disciplines of Human-Computer Interaction and Human Factors Engineering, we highlight the criticality of maintaining human oversight in AI interactions. Reflecting on lessons from aviation, we address the dangers of over-relying on automation, such as diminished human vigilance and skill erosion. Our paper proposes a design approach that emphasizes active human engagement, control, and skill enhancement in the AI partnership, aiming to foster a harmonious, effective, and empowering human-AI relationship. We particularly call out the critical need to design AI interaction capabilities and software applications to enable and celebrate the primacy of human agency. This calls for designs for human-AI partnership that cede ultimate control and responsibility to the human user as pilot, with the AI co-pilot acting in a well-defined supporting role.
This work presents Depth Anything, a highly practical solution for robust monocular depth estimation. Without pursuing novel technical modules, we aim to build a simple yet powerful foundation model dealing with any images under any circumstances. To this end, we scale up the dataset by designing a data engine to collect and automatically annotate large-scale unlabeled data (~62M), which significantly enlarges the data coverage and thus is able to reduce the generalization error. We investigate two simple yet effective strategies that make data scaling-up promising. First, a more challenging optimization target is created by leveraging data augmentation tools. It compels the model to actively seek extra visual knowledge and acquire robust representations. Second, an auxiliary supervision is developed to enforce the model to inherit rich semantic priors from pre-trained encoders. We evaluate its zero-shot capabilities extensively, including six public datasets and randomly captured photos. It demonstrates impressive generalization ability. Further, through fine-tuning it with metric depth information from NYUv2 and KITTI, new SOTAs are set. Our better depth model also results in a better depth-conditioned ControlNet. Our models are released at //github.com/LiheYoung/Depth-Anything.
Motion capture systems, used across various domains, make body representations concrete through technical processes. We argue that the measurement of bodies and the validation of measurements for motion capture systems can be understood as social practices. By analyzing the findings of a systematic literature review (N=278) through the lens of social practice theory, we show how these practices, and their varying attention to errors, become ingrained in motion capture design and innovation over time. Moreover, we show how contemporary motion capture systems perpetuate assumptions about human bodies and their movements. We suggest that social practices of measurement and validation are ubiquitous in the development of data- and sensor-driven systems more broadly, and provide this work as a basis for investigating hidden design assumptions and their potential negative consequences in human-computer interaction.
The robustness of critical infrastructure systems is contingent upon the integrity and transparency of their software supply chains. A Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) is pivotal in this regard, offering an exhaustive inventory of components and dependencies crucial to software development. However, prevalent challenges in SBOM sharing, such as data tampering risks and vendors' reluctance to fully disclose sensitive information, significantly hinder its effective implementation. These challenges pose a notable threat to the security of critical infrastructure and systems where transparency and trust are paramount, underscoring the need for a more secure and flexible mechanism for SBOM sharing. To bridge the gap, this study introduces a blockchain-empowered architecture for SBOM sharing, leveraging verifiable credentials to allow for selective disclosure. This strategy not only heightens security but also offers flexibility. Furthermore, this paper broadens the remit of SBOM to encompass AI systems, thereby coining the term AI Bill of Materials (AIBOM). The advent of AI and its application in critical infrastructure necessitates a nuanced understanding of AI software components, including their origins and interdependencies. The evaluation of our solution indicates the feasibility and flexibility of the proposed SBOM sharing mechanism, positing a solution for safeguarding (AI) software supply chains, which is essential for the resilience and reliability of modern critical infrastructure systems.
As large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have gained traction, an increasing number of news websites have begun utilizing them to generate articles. However, not only can these language models produce factually inaccurate articles on reputable websites but disreputable news sites can utilize LLMs to mass produce misinformation. To begin to understand this phenomenon, we present one of the first large-scale studies of the prevalence of synthetic articles within online news media. To do this, we train a DeBERTa-based synthetic news detector and classify over 15.90 million articles from 3,074 misinformation and mainstream news websites. We find that between January 1, 2022, and May 1, 2023, the relative number of synthetic news articles increased by 55.4% on mainstream websites while increasing by 457% on misinformation sites. We find that this increase is largely driven by smaller less popular websites. Analyzing the impact of the release of ChatGPT using an interrupted-time-series, we show that while its release resulted in a marked increase in synthetic articles on small sites as well as misinformation news websites, there was not a corresponding increase on large mainstream news websites.
We present a comprehensive, user-centric approach to understand preferences in AI-based productivity agents and develop personalized solutions tailored to users' needs. Utilizing a two-phase method, we first conducted a survey with 363 participants, exploring various aspects of productivity, communication style, agent approach, personality traits, personalization, and privacy. Drawing on the survey insights, we developed a GPT-4 powered personalized productivity agent that utilizes telemetry data gathered via Viva Insights from information workers to provide tailored assistance. We compared its performance with alternative productivity-assistive tools, such as dashboard and narrative, in a study involving 40 participants. Our findings highlight the importance of user-centric design, adaptability, and the balance between personalization and privacy in AI-assisted productivity tools. By building on the insights distilled from our study, we believe that our work can enable and guide future research to further enhance productivity solutions, ultimately leading to optimized efficiency and user experiences for information workers.
Generative AI has exhibited considerable potential to transform various industries and public life. The role of news media coverage of generative AI is pivotal in shaping public perceptions and judgments about this significant technological innovation. This paper provides in-depth analysis and rich insights into the temporal and spatial distribution of topics, sentiment, and substantive themes within global news coverage focusing on the latest emerging technology --generative AI. We collected a comprehensive dataset of news articles (January 2018 to November 2023, N = 24,827). For topic modeling, we employed the BERTopic technique and combined it with qualitative coding to identify semantic themes. Subsequently, sentiment analysis was conducted using the RoBERTa-base model. Analysis of temporal patterns in the data reveals notable variability in coverage across key topics--business, corporate technological development, regulation and security, and education--with spikes in articles coinciding with major AI developments and policy discussions. Sentiment analysis shows a predominantly neutral to positive media stance, with the business-related articles exhibiting more positive sentiment, while regulation and security articles receive a reserved, neutral to negative sentiment. Our study offers a valuable framework to investigate global news discourse and evaluate news attitudes and themes related to emerging technologies.
Chain-of-thought reasoning, a cognitive process fundamental to human intelligence, has garnered significant attention in the realm of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. However, there still remains a lack of a comprehensive survey for this arena. To this end, we take the first step and present a thorough survey of this research field carefully and widely. We use X-of-Thought to refer to Chain-of-Thought in a broad sense. In detail, we systematically organize the current research according to the taxonomies of methods, including XoT construction, XoT structure variants, and enhanced XoT. Additionally, we describe XoT with frontier applications, covering planning, tool use, and distillation. Furthermore, we address challenges and discuss some future directions, including faithfulness, multi-modal, and theory. We hope this survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers seeking to innovate within the domain of chain-of-thought reasoning.
The advent of large language models marks a revolutionary breakthrough in artificial intelligence. With the unprecedented scale of training and model parameters, the capability of large language models has been dramatically improved, leading to human-like performances in understanding, language synthesizing, and common-sense reasoning, etc. Such a major leap-forward in general AI capacity will change the pattern of how personalization is conducted. For one thing, it will reform the way of interaction between humans and personalization systems. Instead of being a passive medium of information filtering, large language models present the foundation for active user engagement. On top of such a new foundation, user requests can be proactively explored, and user's required information can be delivered in a natural and explainable way. For another thing, it will also considerably expand the scope of personalization, making it grow from the sole function of collecting personalized information to the compound function of providing personalized services. By leveraging large language models as general-purpose interface, the personalization systems may compile user requests into plans, calls the functions of external tools to execute the plans, and integrate the tools' outputs to complete the end-to-end personalization tasks. Today, large language models are still being developed, whereas the application in personalization is largely unexplored. Therefore, we consider it to be the right time to review the challenges in personalization and the opportunities to address them with LLMs. In particular, we dedicate this perspective paper to the discussion of the following aspects: the development and challenges for the existing personalization system, the newly emerged capabilities of large language models, and the potential ways of making use of large language models for personalization.
With the advent of 5G commercialization, the need for more reliable, faster, and intelligent telecommunication systems are envisaged for the next generation beyond 5G (B5G) radio access technologies. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are not just immensely popular in the service layer applications but also have been proposed as essential enablers in many aspects of B5G networks, from IoT devices and edge computing to cloud-based infrastructures. However, most of the existing surveys in B5G security focus on the performance of AI/ML models and their accuracy, but they often overlook the accountability and trustworthiness of the models' decisions. Explainable AI (XAI) methods are promising techniques that would allow system developers to identify the internal workings of AI/ML black-box models. The goal of using XAI in the security domain of B5G is to allow the decision-making processes of the security of systems to be transparent and comprehensible to stakeholders making the systems accountable for automated actions. In every facet of the forthcoming B5G era, including B5G technologies such as RAN, zero-touch network management, E2E slicing, this survey emphasizes the role of XAI in them and the use cases that the general users would ultimately enjoy. Furthermore, we presented the lessons learned from recent efforts and future research directions on top of the currently conducted projects involving XAI.
This work considers the question of how convenient access to copious data impacts our ability to learn causal effects and relations. In what ways is learning causality in the era of big data different from -- or the same as -- the traditional one? To answer this question, this survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of both traditional and frontier methods in learning causality and relations along with the connections between causality and machine learning. This work points out on a case-by-case basis how big data facilitates, complicates, or motivates each approach.