This paper proposes the innovative concept of "human factors science" to characterize engineering psychology, human factors engineering, human-computer interaction, and other similar fields. Although the perspectives in these fields differ, they share a common approach: "human-centered design." In the AI era, the human-machine relationship presents a trans-era evolution to "human-AI teaming." The change has raised challenges for human factors science, compelling us to re-examine current research paradigms and agendas. Based on our previous work, this paper proposes three research paradigms: (1) human-AI joint cognitive systems: this regards an intelligent agent as a cognitive agent with a certain level of cognitive capabilities. A human-AI system can be characterized as a joint cognitive system in which humans and intelligent agents work as teammates for collaboration; (2) human-AI joint cognitive ecosystems: an intelligent ecosystem with multiple human-AI systems can be represented as a human-AI joint cognitive ecosystem. The overall performance of the ecosystem depends on optima collaboration and design across the multiple human-AI systems; (3) intelligent sociotechnical systems (iSTS): human-AI systems are design, developed, and deployed in an iSTS environment. The successful design, development, and deployment of a human-AI system within an iSTS environment depends on the synergistic optimization between the subsystems. This paper looks forward to the future research agenda of human factors science from three aspects: human-AI interaction, intelligent human-machine interface, and human-AI teaming. Analyses show that the three new research paradigms will benefit future research in human factors science. We believe the proposed research paradigms and the future research agenda will mutually promote each other, further advancing human factors science in the AI era.
This paper presents a critical analysis of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) detection tools in higher education assessments. The rapid advancement and widespread adoption of generative AI, particularly in education, necessitates a reevaluation of traditional academic integrity mechanisms. We explore the effectiveness, vulnerabilities, and ethical implications of AI detection tools in the context of preserving academic integrity. Our study synthesises insights from various case studies, newspaper articles, and student testimonies to scrutinise the practical and philosophical challenges associated with AI detection. We argue that the reliance on detection mechanisms is misaligned with the educational landscape, where AI plays an increasingly widespread role. This paper advocates for a strategic shift towards robust assessment methods and educational policies that embrace generative AI usage while ensuring academic integrity and authenticity in assessments.
Developing robust and effective artificial intelligence (AI) models in medicine requires access to large amounts of patient data. The use of AI models solely trained on large multi-institutional datasets can help with this, yet the imperative to ensure data privacy remains, particularly as membership inference risks breaching patient confidentiality. As a proposed remedy, we advocate for the integration of differential privacy (DP). We specifically investigate the performance of models trained with DP as compared to models trained without DP on data from institutions that the model had not seen during its training (i.e., external validation) - the situation that is reflective of the clinical use of AI models. By leveraging more than 590,000 chest radiographs from five institutions, we evaluated the efficacy of DP-enhanced domain transfer (DP-DT) in diagnosing cardiomegaly, pleural effusion, pneumonia, atelectasis, and in identifying healthy subjects. We juxtaposed DP-DT with non-DP-DT and examined diagnostic accuracy and demographic fairness using the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) as the main metric, as well as accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. Our results show that DP-DT, even with exceptionally high privacy levels (epsilon around 1), performs comparably to non-DP-DT (P>0.119 across all domains). Furthermore, DP-DT led to marginal AUC differences - less than 1% - for nearly all subgroups, relative to non-DP-DT. Despite consistent evidence suggesting that DP models induce significant performance degradation for on-domain applications, we show that off-domain performance is almost not affected. Therefore, we ardently advocate for the adoption of DP in training diagnostic medical AI models, given its minimal impact on performance.
We present a novel clustering algorithm, visClust, that is based on lower dimensional data representations and visual interpretation. Thereto, we design a transformation that allows the data to be represented by a binary integer array enabling the use of image processing methods to select a partition. Qualitative and quantitative analyses measured in accuracy and an adjusted Rand-Index show that the algorithm performs well while requiring low runtime and RAM. We compare the results to 6 state-of-the-art algorithms with available code, confirming the quality of visClust by superior performance in most experiments. Moreover, the algorithm asks for just one obligatory input parameter while allowing optimization via optional parameters. The code is made available on GitHub and straightforward to use.
Current approaches to generic segmentation start by creating a hierarchy of nested image partitions and then specifying a segmentation from it. Our first contribution is to describe several ways, most of them new, for specifying segmentations using the hierarchy elements. Then, we consider the best hierarchy-induced segmentation specified by a limited number of hierarchy elements. We focus on a common quality measure for binary segmentations, the Jaccard index (also known as IoU). Optimizing the Jaccard index is highly non-trivial, and yet we propose an efficient approach for doing exactly that. This way we get algorithm-independent upper bounds on the quality of any segmentation created from the hierarchy. We found that the obtainable segmentation quality varies significantly depending on the way that the segments are specified by the hierarchy elements, and that representing a segmentation with only a few hierarchy elements is often possible. (Code is available).
This paper presents a general methodology for deriving information-theoretic generalization bounds for learning algorithms. The main technical tool is a probabilistic decorrelation lemma based on a change of measure and a relaxation of Young's inequality in $L_{\psi_p}$ Orlicz spaces. Using the decorrelation lemma in combination with other techniques, such as symmetrization, couplings, and chaining in the space of probability measures, we obtain new upper bounds on the generalization error, both in expectation and in high probability, and recover as special cases many of the existing generalization bounds, including the ones based on mutual information, conditional mutual information, stochastic chaining, and PAC-Bayes inequalities. In addition, the Fernique-Talagrand upper bound on the expected supremum of a subgaussian process emerges as a special case.
Steepest descent methods combining complex contour deformation with numerical quadrature provide an efficient and accurate approach for the evaluation of highly oscillatory integrals. However, unless the phase function governing the oscillation is particularly simple, their application requires a significant amount of a priori analysis and expert user input, to determine the appropriate contour deformation, and to deal with the non-uniformity in the accuracy of standard quadrature techniques associated with the coalescence of stationary points (saddle points) with each other, or with the endpoints of the original integration contour. In this paper we present a novel algorithm for the numerical evaluation of oscillatory integrals with general polynomial phase functions, which automates the contour deformation process and avoids the difficulties typically encountered with coalescing stationary points and endpoints. The inputs to the algorithm are simply the phase and amplitude functions, the endpoints and orientation of the original integration contour, and a small number of numerical parameters. By a series of numerical experiments we demonstrate that the algorithm is accurate and efficient over a large range of frequencies, even for examples with a large number of coalescing stationary points and with endpoints at infinity. As a particular application, we use our algorithm to evaluate cuspoid canonical integrals from scattering theory. A Matlab implementation of the algorithm is made available and is called PathFinder.
This research investigates the numerical approximation of the two-dimensional convection-dominated singularly perturbed problem on square, circular, and elliptic domains. Singularly perturbed boundary value problems present a significant challenge due to the presence of sharp boundary layers in their solutions. Additionally, the considered domain exhibits characteristic points, giving rise to a degenerate boundary layer problem. The stiffness of the problem is attributed to the sharp singular layers, which can result in substantial computational errors if not appropriately addressed. Traditional numerical methods typically require extensive mesh refinements near the boundary to achieve accurate solutions, which can be computationally expensive. To address the challenges posed by singularly perturbed problems, we employ physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). However, PINNs may struggle with rapidly varying singularly perturbed solutions over a small domain region, leading to inadequate resolution and potentially inaccurate or unstable results. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a semi-analytic method that augments PINNs with singular layers or corrector functions. Through our numerical experiments, we demonstrate significant improvements in both accuracy and stability, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Artificial neural networks thrive in solving the classification problem for a particular rigid task, acquiring knowledge through generalized learning behaviour from a distinct training phase. The resulting network resembles a static entity of knowledge, with endeavours to extend this knowledge without targeting the original task resulting in a catastrophic forgetting. Continual learning shifts this paradigm towards networks that can continually accumulate knowledge over different tasks without the need to retrain from scratch. We focus on task incremental classification, where tasks arrive sequentially and are delineated by clear boundaries. Our main contributions concern 1) a taxonomy and extensive overview of the state-of-the-art, 2) a novel framework to continually determine the stability-plasticity trade-off of the continual learner, 3) a comprehensive experimental comparison of 11 state-of-the-art continual learning methods and 4 baselines. We empirically scrutinize method strengths and weaknesses on three benchmarks, considering Tiny Imagenet and large-scale unbalanced iNaturalist and a sequence of recognition datasets. We study the influence of model capacity, weight decay and dropout regularization, and the order in which the tasks are presented, and qualitatively compare methods in terms of required memory, computation time, and storage.
When and why can a neural network be successfully trained? This article provides an overview of optimization algorithms and theory for training neural networks. First, we discuss the issue of gradient explosion/vanishing and the more general issue of undesirable spectrum, and then discuss practical solutions including careful initialization and normalization methods. Second, we review generic optimization methods used in training neural networks, such as SGD, adaptive gradient methods and distributed methods, and theoretical results for these algorithms. Third, we review existing research on the global issues of neural network training, including results on bad local minima, mode connectivity, lottery ticket hypothesis and infinite-width analysis.
Deep learning constitutes a recent, modern technique for image processing and data analysis, with promising results and large potential. As deep learning has been successfully applied in various domains, it has recently entered also the domain of agriculture. In this paper, we perform a survey of 40 research efforts that employ deep learning techniques, applied to various agricultural and food production challenges. We examine the particular agricultural problems under study, the specific models and frameworks employed, the sources, nature and pre-processing of data used, and the overall performance achieved according to the metrics used at each work under study. Moreover, we study comparisons of deep learning with other existing popular techniques, in respect to differences in classification or regression performance. Our findings indicate that deep learning provides high accuracy, outperforming existing commonly used image processing techniques.