Most governments employ a set of quasi-standard measures to fight COVID-19 including wearing masks, social distancing, virus testing, contact tracing, and vaccination. However, combining these measures into an efficient holistic pandemic response instrument is even more involved than anticipated. We argue that some non-trivial factors behind the varying effectiveness of these measures are selfish decision making and the differing national implementations of the response mechanism. In this paper, through simple games, we show the effect of individual incentives on the decisions made with respect to mask wearing, social distancing and vaccination, and how these may result in sub-optimal outcomes. We also demonstrate the responsibility of national authorities in designing these games properly regarding data transparency, the chosen policies and their influence on the preferred outcome. We promote a mechanism design approach: it is in the best interest of every government to carefully balance social good and response costs when implementing their respective pandemic response mechanism; moreover, there is no one-size-fits-all solution when designing an effective solution.
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The problem of scheduling unrelated machines has been studied since the inception of algorithmic mechanism design \cite{NR99}. It is a resource allocation problem that entails assigning $m$ tasks to $n$ machines for execution. Machines are regarded as strategic agents who may lie about their execution costs so as to minimize their allocated workload. To address the situation when monetary payment is not an option to compensate the machines' costs, \citeauthor{DBLP:journals/mst/Koutsoupias14} [2014] devised two \textit{truthful} mechanisms, K and P respectively, that achieve an approximation ratio of $\frac{n+1}{2}$ and $n$, for social cost minimization. In addition, no truthful mechanism can achieve an approximation ratio better than $\frac{n+1}{2}$. Hence, mechanism K is optimal. While approximation ratio provides a strong worst-case guarantee, it also limits us to a comprehensive understanding of mechanism performance on various inputs. This paper investigates these two scheduling mechanisms beyond the worst case. We first show that mechanism K achieves a smaller social cost than mechanism P on every input. That is, mechanism K is pointwise better than mechanism P. Next, for each task $j$, when machines' execution costs $t_i^j$ are independent and identically drawn from a task-specific distribution $F^j(t)$, we show that the average-case approximation ratio of mechanism K converges to a constant. This bound is tight for mechanism K. For a better understanding of this distribution dependent constant, on the one hand, we estimate its value by plugging in a few common distributions; on the other, we show that this converging bound improves a known bound \cite{DBLP:conf/aaai/Zhang18} which only captures the single-task setting. Last, we find that the average-case approximation ratio of mechanism P converges to the same constant.
Interacting agents receive public information at no cost and flexibly acquire private information at a cost proportional to entropy reduction. When a policymaker provides more public information, agents acquire less private information, thus lowering information costs. Does more public information raise or reduce uncertainty faced by agents? Is it beneficial or detrimental to welfare? To address these questions, we examine the impacts of public information on flexible information acquisition in a linear-quadratic-Gaussian game with arbitrary quadratic material welfare. More public information raises uncertainty if and only if the game exhibits strategic complementarity, which can be harmful to welfare. However, when agents acquire a large amount of information, more provision of public information increases welfare through a substantial reduction in the cost of information. We give a necessary and sufficient condition for welfare to increase with public information and identify optimal public information disclosure, which is either full or partial disclosure depending upon the welfare function and the slope of the best response.
Community detection refers to the problem of clustering the nodes of a network into groups. Existing inferential methods for community structure mainly focus on unweighted (binary) networks. Many real-world networks are nonetheless weighted and a common practice is to dichotomize a weighted network to an unweighted one which is known to result in information loss. Literature on hypothesis testing in the latter situation is still missing. In this paper, we study the problem of testing the existence of community structure in weighted networks. Our contributions are threefold: (a). We use the (possibly infinite-dimensional) exponential family to model the weights and derive the sharp information-theoretic limit for the existence of consistent test. Within the limit, any test is inconsistent; and beyond the limit, we propose a useful consistent test. (b). Based on the information-theoretic limits, we provide the first formal way to quantify the loss of information incurred by dichotomizing weighted graphs into unweighted graphs in the context of hypothesis testing. (c). We propose several new and practically useful test statistics. Simulation study show that the proposed tests have good performance. Finally, we apply the proposed tests to an animal social network.
The COVID-19 pandemic is accompanied by a massive "infodemic" that makes it hard to identify concise and credible information for COVID-19-related questions, like incubation time, infection rates, or the effectiveness of vaccines. As a novel solution, our paper is concerned with designing a question-answering system based on modern technologies from natural language processing to overcome information overload and misinformation in pandemic situations. To carry out our research, we followed a design science research approach and applied Ingwersen's cognitive model of information retrieval interaction to inform our design process from a socio-technical lens. On this basis, we derived prescriptive design knowledge in terms of design requirements and design principles, which we translated into the construction of a prototypical instantiation. Our implementation is based on the comprehensive CORD-19 dataset, and we demonstrate our artifact's usefulness by evaluating its answer quality based on a sample of COVID-19 questions labeled by biomedical experts.
The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak quickly spread around the world, resulting in over 240 million infections and 4 million deaths by Oct 2021. While the virus is spreading from person to person silently, fear has also been spreading around the globe. The COVID-19 information from the Australian Government is convincing but not timely or detailed, and there is much information on social networks with both facts and rumors. As software engineers, we have spontaneously and rapidly constructed a COVID-19 information dashboard aggregating reliable information semi-automatically checked from different sources for providing one-stop information sharing site about the latest status in Australia. Inspired by the John Hopkins University COVID-19 Map, our dashboard contains the case statistics, case distribution, government policy, latest news, with interactive visualization. In this paper, we present a participant's in-person observations in which the authors acted as founders of //covid-19-au.com/ serving more than 830K users with 14M page views since March 2020. According to our first-hand experience, we summarize 9 lessons for developers, researchers and instructors. These lessons may inspire the development, research and teaching in software engineer aspects for coping with similar public crises in the future.
Embodied AI is a recent research area that aims at creating intelligent agents that can move and operate inside an environment. Existing approaches in this field demand the agents to act in completely new and unexplored scenes. However, this setting is far from realistic use cases that instead require executing multiple tasks in the same environment. Even if the environment changes over time, the agent could still count on its global knowledge about the scene while trying to adapt its internal representation to the current state of the environment. To make a step towards this setting, we propose Spot the Difference: a novel task for Embodied AI where the agent has access to an outdated map of the environment and needs to recover the correct layout in a fixed time budget. To this end, we collect a new dataset of occupancy maps starting from existing datasets of 3D spaces and generating a number of possible layouts for a single environment. This dataset can be employed in the popular Habitat simulator and is fully compliant with existing methods that employ reconstructed occupancy maps during navigation. Furthermore, we propose an exploration policy that can take advantage of previous knowledge of the environment and identify changes in the scene faster and more effectively than existing agents. Experimental results show that the proposed architecture outperforms existing state-of-the-art models for exploration on this new setting.
Existing approaches in disfluency detection focus on solving a token-level classification task for identifying and removing disfluencies in text. Moreover, most works focus on leveraging only contextual information captured by the linear sequences in text, thus ignoring the structured information in text which is efficiently captured by dependency trees. In this paper, building on the span classification paradigm of entity recognition, we propose a novel architecture for detecting disfluencies in transcripts from spoken utterances, incorporating both contextual information through transformers and long-distance structured information captured by dependency trees, through graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Experimental results show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on the widely used English Switchboard for disfluency detection and outperforms prior-art by a significant margin. We make all our codes publicly available on GitHub (//github.com/Sreyan88/Disfluency-Detection-with-Span-Classification)
The best neural architecture for a given machine learning problem depends on many factors: not only the complexity and structure of the dataset, but also on resource constraints including latency, compute, energy consumption, etc. Neural architecture search (NAS) for tabular datasets is an important but under-explored problem. Previous NAS algorithms designed for image search spaces incorporate resource constraints directly into the reinforcement learning rewards. In this paper, we argue that search spaces for tabular NAS pose considerable challenges for these existing reward-shaping methods, and propose a new reinforcement learning (RL) controller to address these challenges. Motivated by rejection sampling, when we sample candidate architectures during a search, we immediately discard any architecture that violates our resource constraints. We use a Monte-Carlo-based correction to our RL policy gradient update to account for this extra filtering step. Results on several tabular datasets show TabNAS, the proposed approach, efficiently finds high-quality models that satisfy the given resource constraints.
We recall some of the history of the information-theoretic approach to deriving core results in probability theory and indicate parts of the recent resurgence of interest in this area with current progress along several interesting directions. Then we give a new information-theoretic proof of a finite version of de Finetti's classical representation theorem for finite-valued random variables. We derive an upper bound on the relative entropy between the distribution of the first $k$ in a sequence of $n$ exchangeable random variables, and an appropriate mixture over product distributions. The mixing measure is characterised as the law of the empirical measure of the original sequence, and de Finetti's result is recovered as a corollary. The proof is nicely motivated by the Gibbs conditioning principle in connection with statistical mechanics, and it follows along an appealing sequence of steps. The technical estimates required for these steps are obtained via the use of a collection of combinatorial tools known within information theory as `the method of types.'
Proactive dialogue system is able to lead the conversation to a goal topic and has advantaged potential in bargain, persuasion and negotiation. Current corpus-based learning manner limits its practical application in real-world scenarios. To this end, we contribute to advance the study of the proactive dialogue policy to a more natural and challenging setting, i.e., interacting dynamically with users. Further, we call attention to the non-cooperative user behavior -- the user talks about off-path topics when he/she is not satisfied with the previous topics introduced by the agent. We argue that the targets of reaching the goal topic quickly and maintaining a high user satisfaction are not always converge, because the topics close to the goal and the topics user preferred may not be the same. Towards this issue, we propose a new solution named I-Pro that can learn Proactive policy in the Interactive setting. Specifically, we learn the trade-off via a learned goal weight, which consists of four factors (dialogue turn, goal completion difficulty, user satisfaction estimation, and cooperative degree). The experimental results demonstrate I-Pro significantly outperforms baselines in terms of effectiveness and interpretability.
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