Safety assurance is of paramount importance across various domains, including automotive, aerospace, and nuclear energy, where the reliability and acceptability of mission-critical systems are imperative. This assurance is effectively realized through the utilization of Safety Assurance Cases. The use of safety assurance cases allows for verifying the correctness of the created systems capabilities, preventing system failure. The latter may result in loss of life, severe injuries, large-scale environmental damage, property destruction, and major economic loss. Still, the emergence of complex technologies such as cyber-physical systems (CPSs), characterized by their heterogeneity, autonomy, machine learning capabilities, and the uncertainty of their operational environments poses significant challenges for safety assurance activities. Several papers have tried to propose solutions to tackle these challenges, but to the best of our knowledge, no secondary study investigates the trends, patterns, and relationships characterizing the safety case scientific literature. This makes it difficult to have a holistic view of the safety case landscape and to identify the most promising future research directions. In this paper, we, therefore, rely on state-of-the-art bibliometric tools(e.g., VosViewer) to conduct a bibliometric analysis that allows us to generate valuable insights, identify key authors and venues, and gain a birds eye view of the current state of research in the safety assurance area. By revealing knowledge gaps and highlighting potential avenues for future research, our analysis provides an essential foundation for researchers, corporate safety analysts, and regulators seeking to embrace or enhance safety practices that align with their specific needs and objectives.
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have permeated various disciplinary domains, ranging from bioinformatics to financial analytics, where their application has become an indispensable facet of contemporary scientific research endeavors. However, the inherent limitations of traditional neural networks arise due to their relatively fixed network structures and activation functions. 1, The type of activation function is single and relatively fixed, which leads to poor "unit representation ability" of the network, and it is often used to solve simple problems with very complex networks; 2, the network structure is not adaptive, it is easy to cause network structure redundant or insufficient. To address the aforementioned issues, this study proposes a novel neural network called X-Net. By utilizing our designed Alternating Backpropagation mechanism, X-Net dynamically selects appropriate activation functions based on derivative information during training to enhance the network's representation capability for specific tasks. Simultaneously, it accurately adjusts the network structure at the neuron level to accommodate tasks of varying complexities and reduce computational costs. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate the dual advantages of X-Net in terms of reducing model size and improving representation power. Specifically, in terms of the number of parameters, X-Net is only 3$\%$ of baselines on average, and only 1.4$\%$ under some tasks. In terms of representation ability, X-Net can achieve an average $R^2$=0.985 on the fitting task by only optimizing the activation function without introducing any parameters. Finally, we also tested the ability of X-Net to help scientific discovery on data from multiple disciplines such as society, energy, environment, and aerospace, and achieved concise and good results.
The exponential growth of social media has profoundly transformed how information is created, disseminated, and absorbed, exceeding any precedent in the digital age. Regrettably, this explosion has also spawned a significant increase in the online abuse of memes. Evaluating the negative impact of memes is notably challenging, owing to their often subtle and implicit meanings, which are not directly conveyed through the overt text and imagery. In light of this, large multimodal models (LMMs) have emerged as a focal point of interest due to their remarkable capabilities in handling diverse multimodal tasks. In response to this development, our paper aims to thoroughly examine the capacity of various LMMs (e.g. GPT-4V) to discern and respond to the nuanced aspects of social abuse manifested in memes. We introduce the comprehensive meme benchmark, GOAT-Bench, comprising over 6K varied memes encapsulating themes such as implicit hate speech, sexism, and cyberbullying, etc. Utilizing GOAT-Bench, we delve into the ability of LMMs to accurately assess hatefulness, misogyny, offensiveness, sarcasm, and harmful content. Our extensive experiments across a range of LMMs reveal that current models still exhibit a deficiency in safety awareness, showing insensitivity to various forms of implicit abuse. We posit that this shortfall represents a critical impediment to the realization of safe artificial intelligence. The GOAT-Bench and accompanying resources are publicly accessible at //goatlmm.github.io/, contributing to ongoing research in this vital field.
Teleoperation of mobile manipulators within a home environment can significantly enhance the independence of individuals with severe motor impairments, allowing them to regain the ability to perform self-care and household tasks. There is a critical need for novel teleoperation interfaces to offer effective alternatives for individuals with impairments who may encounter challenges in using existing interfaces due to physical limitations. In this work, we iterate on one such interface, HAT (Head-Worn Assistive Teleoperation), an inertial-based wearable integrated into any head-worn garment. We evaluate HAT through a 7-day in-home study with Henry Evans, a non-speaking individual with quadriplegia who has participated extensively in assistive robotics studies. We additionally evaluate HAT with a proposed shared control method for mobile manipulators termed Driver Assistance and demonstrate how the interface generalizes to other physical devices and contexts. Our results show that HAT is a strong teleoperation interface across key metrics including efficiency, errors, learning curve, and workload. Code and videos are located on our project website.
Urban transformations have profound societal impact on both individuals and communities at large. Accurately assessing these shifts is essential for understanding their underlying causes and ensuring sustainable urban planning. Traditional measurements often encounter constraints in spatial and temporal granularity, failing to capture real-time physical changes. While street view imagery, capturing the heartbeat of urban spaces from a pedestrian point of view, can add as a high-definition, up-to-date, and on-the-ground visual proxy of urban change. We curate the largest street view time series dataset to date, and propose an end-to-end change detection model to effectively capture physical alterations in the built environment at scale. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method by benchmark comparisons with previous literature and implementing it at the city-wide level. Our approach has the potential to supplement existing dataset and serve as a fine-grained and accurate assessment of urban change.
Context. GitHub has introduced a new gamification element through personal achievements, whereby badges are unlocked and displayed on developers' personal profile pages in recognition of their development activities. Objective. In this paper, we present an exploratory analysis using mixed methods to study the diffusion of personal badges in GitHub, in addition to the effects and reactions to their introduction. Method. First, we conduct an observational study by mining longitudinal data from more than 6,000 developers and performed correlation and regression analysis. Then, we conduct a survey and analyze over 300 GitHub community discussions on the topic of personal badges to gauge how the community responded to the introduction of the new feature. Results. We find that most of the developers sampled own at least a badge, but we also observe an increasing number of users who choose to keep their profile private and opt out of displaying badges. Besides, badges are generally poorly correlated with developers' qualities and dispositions such as timeliness and desire to collaborate. We also find that, except for the Starstruck badge (reflecting the number of followers), their introduction does not have an effect. Finally, the reaction of the community has been in general mixed, as developers find them appealing in principle but without a clear purpose and hardly reflecting their abilities in the current form. Conclusions. We provide recommendations to GitHub platform designers on how to improve the current implementation of personal badges as both a gamification mechanism and as sources of reliable cues of ability for developers' assessment
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.
Visual recognition is currently one of the most important and active research areas in computer vision, pattern recognition, and even the general field of artificial intelligence. It has great fundamental importance and strong industrial needs. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have largely boosted their performances on many concrete tasks, with the help of large amounts of training data and new powerful computation resources. Though recognition accuracy is usually the first concern for new progresses, efficiency is actually rather important and sometimes critical for both academic research and industrial applications. Moreover, insightful views on the opportunities and challenges of efficiency are also highly required for the entire community. While general surveys on the efficiency issue of DNNs have been done from various perspectives, as far as we are aware, scarcely any of them focused on visual recognition systematically, and thus it is unclear which progresses are applicable to it and what else should be concerned. In this paper, we present the review of the recent advances with our suggestions on the new possible directions towards improving the efficiency of DNN-related visual recognition approaches. We investigate not only from the model but also the data point of view (which is not the case in existing surveys), and focus on three most studied data types (images, videos and points). This paper attempts to provide a systematic summary via a comprehensive survey which can serve as a valuable reference and inspire both researchers and practitioners who work on visual recognition problems.
User engagement is a critical metric for evaluating the quality of open-domain dialogue systems. Prior work has focused on conversation-level engagement by using heuristically constructed features such as the number of turns and the total time of the conversation. In this paper, we investigate the possibility and efficacy of estimating utterance-level engagement and define a novel metric, {\em predictive engagement}, for automatic evaluation of open-domain dialogue systems. Our experiments demonstrate that (1) human annotators have high agreement on assessing utterance-level engagement scores; (2) conversation-level engagement scores can be predicted from properly aggregated utterance-level engagement scores. Furthermore, we show that the utterance-level engagement scores can be learned from data. These scores can improve automatic evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue systems, as shown by correlation with human judgements. This suggests that predictive engagement can be used as a real-time feedback for training better dialogue models.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.
Image segmentation is still an open problem especially when intensities of the interested objects are overlapped due to the presence of intensity inhomogeneity (also known as bias field). To segment images with intensity inhomogeneities, a bias correction embedded level set model is proposed where Inhomogeneities are Estimated by Orthogonal Primary Functions (IEOPF). In the proposed model, the smoothly varying bias is estimated by a linear combination of a given set of orthogonal primary functions. An inhomogeneous intensity clustering energy is then defined and membership functions of the clusters described by the level set function are introduced to rewrite the energy as a data term of the proposed model. Similar to popular level set methods, a regularization term and an arc length term are also included to regularize and smooth the level set function, respectively. The proposed model is then extended to multichannel and multiphase patterns to segment colourful images and images with multiple objects, respectively. It has been extensively tested on both synthetic and real images that are widely used in the literature and public BrainWeb and IBSR datasets. Experimental results and comparison with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that advantages of the proposed model in terms of bias correction and segmentation accuracy.