The understanding of visual analytics process can benefit visualization researchers from multiple aspects, including improving visual designs and developing advanced interaction functions. However, the log files of user behaviors are still hard to analyze due to the complexity of sensemaking and our lack of knowledge on the related user behaviors. This work presents a study on a comprehensive data collection of user behaviors, and our analysis approach with time-series classification methods. We have chosen a classical visualization application, Covid-19 data analysis, with common analysis tasks covering geo-spatial, time-series and multi-attributes. Our user study collects user behaviors on a diverse set of visualization tasks with two comparable systems, desktop and immersive visualizations. We summarize the classification results with three time-series machine learning algorithms at two scales, and explore the influences of behavior features. Our results reveal that user behaviors can be distinguished during the process of visual analytics and there is a potentially strong association between the physical behaviors of users and the visualization tasks they perform. We also demonstrate the usage of our models by interpreting open sessions of visual analytics, which provides an automatic way to study sensemaking without tedious manual annotations.
Software Quality Assurance (SQA) Engineers are responsible for assessing a product during every phase of the software development process to ensure that the outcomes of each phase and the final product possess the desired qualities. In general, a great SQA engineer needs to have a different set of abilities from development engineers to effectively oversee the entire product development process from beginning to end. Recent empirical studies identified important attributes of software engineers and managers, but the quality assurance role is overlooked. As software quality aspects have become more of a priority in the life cycle of software development, employers seek professionals that best suit the company's objectives and new graduates desire to make a valuable contribution through their job as an SQA engineer, but what makes them great? We addressed this knowledge gap by conducting 25 semi-structured interviews and 363 survey respondents with software quality assurance engineers from different companies around the world. We use the data collected from these activities to derive a comprehensive set of attributes that are considered important. As a result of the interviews, twenty-five attributes were identified and grouped into five main categories: personal, social, technical, management, and decision-making attributes. Through a rating survey, we confirmed that the distinguishing characteristics of great SQA engineers are curiosity, the ability to communicate effectively, and critical thinking skills. This work will guide further studies with SQA practitioners, by considering contextual factors and providing some implications for research and practice.
Customizing machine translation models to comply with desired attributes (e.g., formality or grammatical gender) is a well-studied topic. However, most current approaches rely on (semi-)supervised data with attribute annotations. This data scarcity bottlenecks democratizing such customization possibilities to a wider range of languages, particularly lower-resource ones. This gap is out of sync with recent progress in pretrained massively multilingual translation models. In response, we transfer the attribute controlling capabilities to languages without attribute-annotated data with an NLLB-200 model as a foundation. Inspired by techniques from controllable generation, we employ a gradient-based inference-time controller to steer the pretrained model. The controller transfers well to zero-shot conditions, as it operates on pretrained multilingual representations and is attribute -- rather than language-specific. With a comprehensive comparison to finetuning-based control, we demonstrate that, despite finetuning's clear dominance in supervised settings, the gap to inference-time control closes when moving to zero-shot conditions, especially with new and distant target languages. The latter also shows stronger domain robustness. We further show that our inference-time control complements finetuning. A human evaluation on a real low-resource language, Bengali, confirms our findings. Our code is //github.com/dannigt/attribute-controller-transfer
Recently, interpretable machine learning has re-explored concept bottleneck models (CBM), comprising step-by-step prediction of the high-level concepts from the raw features and the target variable from the predicted concepts. A compelling advantage of this model class is the user's ability to intervene on the predicted concept values, affecting the model's downstream output. In this work, we introduce a method to perform such concept-based interventions on already-trained neural networks, which are not interpretable by design, given an annotated validation set. Furthermore, we formalise the model's intervenability as a measure of the effectiveness of concept-based interventions and leverage this definition to fine-tune black-box models. Empirically, we explore the intervenability of black-box classifiers on synthetic tabular and natural image benchmarks. We demonstrate that fine-tuning improves intervention effectiveness and often yields better-calibrated predictions. To showcase the practical utility of the proposed techniques, we apply them to deep chest X-ray classifiers and show that fine-tuned black boxes can be as intervenable and more performant than CBMs.
Adversarial examples are one critical security threat to various visual applications, where injected human-imperceptible perturbations can confuse the output.Generating transferable adversarial examples in the black-box setting is crucial but challenging in practice. Existing input-diversity-based methods adopt different image transformations, but may be inefficient due to insufficient input diversity and an identical perturbation step size. Motivated by the fact that different image regions have distinctive weights in classification, this paper proposes a black-box adversarial generative framework by jointly designing enhanced input diversity and adaptive step sizes. We design local mixup to randomly mix a group of transformed adversarial images, strengthening the input diversity. For precise adversarial generation, we project the perturbation into the $tanh$ space to relax the boundary constraint. Moreover, the step sizes of different regions can be dynamically adjusted by integrating a second-order momentum.Extensive experiments on ImageNet validate that our framework can achieve superior transferability compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Large Language Models are becoming an increasingly popular tool for software development. Their ability to model and generate source code has been demonstrated in a variety of contexts, including code completion, summarization, translation, and lookup. However, they often struggle to generate code for more complex tasks. In this paper, we explore the ability of state-of-the-art language models to generate parallel code. We propose a benchmark, PCGBench, consisting of a set of 420 tasks for evaluating the ability of language models to generate parallel code, and we evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art open- and closed-source language models on these tasks. We introduce novel metrics for comparing parallel code generation performance and use them to explore how well each LLM performs on various parallel programming models and computational problem types.
Natural language processing has made progress in incorporating human context into its models, but whether it is more effective to use group-wise attributes (e.g., over-45-year-olds) or model individuals remains open. Group attributes are technically easier but coarse: not all 45-year-olds write the same way. In contrast, modeling individuals captures the complexity of each person's identity. It allows for a more personalized representation, but we may have to model an infinite number of users and require data that may be impossible to get. We compare modeling human context via group attributes, individual users, and combined approaches. Combining group and individual features significantly benefits user-level regression tasks like age estimation or personality assessment from a user's documents. Modeling individual users significantly improves the performance of single document-level classification tasks like stance and topic detection. We also find that individual-user modeling does well even without user's historical data.
The emergence of Large language models (LLMs) is expected to have a major impact on education. This paper explores the potential of using ChatGPT, an LLM, as a virtual Teaching Assistant (TA) in an Introductory Programming Course. We evaluate ChatGPT's capabilities by comparing its performance with that of human TAs in some of the important TA functions. The TA functions which we focus on include (1) grading student code submissions, and (2) providing feedback to undergraduate students in an introductory programming course. Firstly, we assess ChatGPT's proficiency in grading student code submissions using a given grading rubric and compare its performance with the grades assigned by human TAs. Secondly, we analyze the quality and relevance of the feedback provided by ChatGPT. This evaluation considers how well ChatGPT addresses mistakes and offers suggestions for improvement in student solutions from both code correctness and code quality perspectives. We conclude with a discussion on the implications of integrating ChatGPT into computing education for automated grading, personalized learning experiences, and instructional support.
Toxicity detection algorithms, originally designed with reactive content moderation in mind, are increasingly being deployed into proactive end-user interventions to moderate content. Through a socio-technical lens and focusing on contexts in which they are applied, we explore the use of these algorithms in proactive moderation systems. Placing a toxicity detection algorithm in an imagined virtual mobile keyboard, we critically explore how such algorithms could be used to proactively reduce the sending of toxic content. We present findings from design workshops conducted with four distinct stakeholder groups and find concerns around how contextual complexities may exasperate inequalities around content moderation processes. Whilst only specific user groups are likely to directly benefit from these interventions, we highlight the potential for other groups to misuse them to circumvent detection, validate and gamify hate, and manipulate algorithmic models to exasperate harm.
In this work, we investigate the controllability of large language models (LLMs) on scientific summarization tasks. We identify key stylistic and content coverage factors that characterize different types of summaries such as paper reviews, abstracts, and lay summaries. By controlling stylistic features, we find that non-fine-tuned LLMs outperform humans in the MuP review generation task, both in terms of similarity to reference summaries and human preferences. Also, we show that we can improve the controllability of LLMs with keyword-based classifier-free guidance (CFG) while achieving lexical overlap comparable to strong fine-tuned baselines on arXiv and PubMed. However, our results also indicate that LLMs cannot consistently generate long summaries with more than 8 sentences. Furthermore, these models exhibit limited capacity to produce highly abstractive lay summaries. Although LLMs demonstrate strong generic summarization competency, sophisticated content control without costly fine-tuning remains an open problem for domain-specific applications.
The LSTM network was proposed to overcome the difficulty in learning long-term dependence, and has made significant advancements in applications. With its success and drawbacks in mind, this paper raises the question - do RNN and LSTM have long memory? We answer it partially by proving that RNN and LSTM do not have long memory from a statistical perspective. A new definition for long memory networks is further introduced, and it requires the model weights to decay at a polynomial rate. To verify our theory, we convert RNN and LSTM into long memory networks by making a minimal modification, and their superiority is illustrated in modeling long-term dependence of various datasets.