Joint commitment was argued to "make our social world" (Gilbert, 2014) and to separate us from other primates. 'Joint' entails that neither of us promises anything, unless the other promises as well. When we need to coordinate for the best mutual outcome, any commitment is beneficial. However, when we are tempted to free-ride (i.e. in social dilemmas), commitment serves no obvious purpose. We show that a reputation system, which judges action in social dilemmas only after joint commitment, can prevent free-riding. Keeping commitments builds trust. We can selectively enter joint commitments with trustworthy individuals to ensure their cooperation (since they will now be judged). We simply do not commit to cooperate with those we do not trust, and hence can freely defect without losing the trust of others. This principle might be the reason for pointedly public joint commitments, such as marriage. It is especially relevant to our evolutionary past, in which no mechanisms existed to enforce commitments reliably and impartially (e.g. via a powerful and accountable government). Much research from anthropology, philosophy and psychology made the assumption that past collaborations were mutually beneficial and had little possibilities to free-ride, for which there is little support. Our evolutionary game theory approach proves that this assumption is not necessary, because free-riding could have been dealt with joint commitments and reputation.
In recent years, there have been remarkable advancements in the performance of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) across various domains. As these LLMs are deployed for increasingly complex tasks, they often face the need to conduct longer reasoning processes or understand larger contexts. In these situations, the length generalization failure of LLMs on long sequences becomes more prominent. Most pre-training schemes truncate training sequences to a fixed length. LLMs often struggle to generate fluent and coherent texts, let alone carry out downstream tasks, after longer contexts, even with relative positional encoding designed to cope with this problem. Common solutions such as finetuning on longer corpora often involve daunting hardware and time costs and require careful training process design. To more efficiently leverage the generation capacity of existing LLMs, we theoretically and empirically investigate the main out-of-distribution (OOD) factors contributing to this problem. Inspired by this diagnosis, we propose a simple yet effective solution for on-the-fly length generalization, LM-Infinite. It involves only a $\Lambda$-shaped attention mask (to avoid excessive attended tokens) and a distance limit (to avoid unseen distances) while requiring no parameter updates or learning. We find it applicable to a variety of LLMs using relative-position encoding methods. LM-Infinite is computationally efficient with $O(n)$ time and space, and demonstrates consistent text generation fluency and quality to as long as 32k tokens on ArXiv and OpenWebText2 datasets, with 2.72x decoding speedup. On downstream tasks such as passkey retrieval, it continues to work on inputs much longer than training lengths where vanilla models fail immediately.
This paper explores using generative AI and aesthetics to promote cultural creativity in rural China amidst COVID-19's impact. Through literature reviews, case studies, surveys, and text analysis, it examines art and technology applications in rural contexts and identifies key challenges. The study finds artworks often fail to resonate locally, while reliance on external artists limits sustainability. Hence, nurturing grassroots "artist villagers" through AI is proposed. Our approach involves training machine learning on subjective aesthetics to generate culturally relevant content. Interactive AI media can also boost tourism while preserving heritage. This pioneering research puts forth original perspectives on the intersection of AI and aesthetics to invigorate rural culture. It advocates holistic integration of technology and emphasizes AI's potential as a creative enabler versus replacement. Ultimately, it lays the groundwork for further exploration of leveraging AI innovations to empower rural communities. This timely study contributes to growing interest in emerging technologies to address critical issues facing rural China.
This study looked into how effective a Musical Brain-Computer Interface (MBCI) can be in providing feedback about synchrony between two people. Using a double EEG setup, we compared two types of musical feedback; one that adapted in real-time based on the inter-brain synchrony between participants (Neuroadaptive condition), and another music that was randomly generated (Random condition). We evaluated how these two conditions were perceived by 8 dyads (n = 16) and whether the generated music could influence the perceived connection and EEG synchrony between them. The findings indicated that Neuroadaptive musical feedback could potentially boost synchrony levels between people compared to Random feedback, as seen by a significant increase in EEG phase-locking values. Additionally, the real-time measurement of synchrony was successfully validated and musical neurofeedback was generally well-received by the participants. However, more research is needed for conclusive results due to the small sample size. This study is a stepping stone towards creating music that can audibly reflect the level of synchrony between individuals.
Mobile Internet has profoundly reshaped modern lifestyles in various aspects. Encrypted Traffic Classification (ETC) naturally plays a crucial role in managing mobile Internet, especially with the explosive growth of mobile apps using encrypted communication. Despite some existing learning-based ETC methods showing promising results, three-fold limitations still remain in real-world network environments, 1) label bias caused by traffic class imbalance, 2) traffic homogeneity caused by component sharing, and 3) training with reliance on sufficient labeled traffic. None of the existing ETC methods can address all these limitations. In this paper, we propose a novel Pre-trAining Semi-Supervised ETC framework, dubbed PASS. Our key insight is to resample the original train dataset and perform contrastive pre-training without using individual app labels directly to avoid label bias issues caused by class imbalance, while obtaining a robust feature representation to differentiate overlapping homogeneous traffic by pulling positive traffic pairs closer and pushing negative pairs away. Meanwhile, PASS designs a semi-supervised optimization strategy based on pseudo-label iteration and dynamic loss weighting algorithms in order to effectively utilize massive unlabeled traffic data and alleviate manual train dataset annotation workload. PASS outperforms state-of-the-art ETC methods and generic sampling approaches on four public datasets with significant class imbalance and traffic homogeneity, remarkably pushing the F1 of Cross-Platform215 with 1.31%, ISCX-17 with 9.12%. Furthermore, we validate the generality of the contrastive pre-training and pseudo-label iteration components of PASS, which can adaptively benefit ETC methods with diverse feature extractors.
This paper presents a hidden Markov model designed to investigate the complex nature of earnings persistence. The proposed model assumes that the residuals of log-earnings consist of a persistent component and a transitory component, both following general Markov processes. Nonparametric identification is achieved through spectral decomposition of linear operators, and a modified stochastic EM algorithm is introduced for model estimation. Applying the framework to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) dataset, we find that the earnings process displays nonlinear persistence, conditional skewness, and conditional kurtosis. Additionally, the transitory component is found to possess non-Gaussian properties, resulting in a significantly asymmetric distributional impact when high-earning households face negative shocks or low-earning households encounter positive shocks. Our empirical findings also reveal the presence of ARCH effects in earnings at horizons ranging from 2 to 8 years, further highlighting the complex dynamics of earnings persistence.
With the widespread use of large artificial intelligence (AI) models such as ChatGPT, AI-generated content (AIGC) has garnered increasing attention and is leading a paradigm shift in content creation and knowledge representation. AIGC uses generative large AI algorithms to assist or replace humans in creating massive, high-quality, and human-like content at a faster pace and lower cost, based on user-provided prompts. Despite the recent significant progress in AIGC, security, privacy, ethical, and legal challenges still need to be addressed. This paper presents an in-depth survey of working principles, security and privacy threats, state-of-the-art solutions, and future challenges of the AIGC paradigm. Specifically, we first explore the enabling technologies, general architecture of AIGC, and discuss its working modes and key characteristics. Then, we investigate the taxonomy of security and privacy threats to AIGC and highlight the ethical and societal implications of GPT and AIGC technologies. Furthermore, we review the state-of-the-art AIGC watermarking approaches for regulatable AIGC paradigms regarding the AIGC model and its produced content. Finally, we identify future challenges and open research directions related to AIGC.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained momentum in graph representation learning and boosted the state of the art in a variety of areas, such as data mining (\emph{e.g.,} social network analysis and recommender systems), computer vision (\emph{e.g.,} object detection and point cloud learning), and natural language processing (\emph{e.g.,} relation extraction and sequence learning), to name a few. With the emergence of Transformers in natural language processing and computer vision, graph Transformers embed a graph structure into the Transformer architecture to overcome the limitations of local neighborhood aggregation while avoiding strict structural inductive biases. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of GNNs and graph Transformers in computer vision from a task-oriented perspective. Specifically, we divide their applications in computer vision into five categories according to the modality of input data, \emph{i.e.,} 2D natural images, videos, 3D data, vision + language, and medical images. In each category, we further divide the applications according to a set of vision tasks. Such a task-oriented taxonomy allows us to examine how each task is tackled by different GNN-based approaches and how well these approaches perform. Based on the necessary preliminaries, we provide the definitions and challenges of the tasks, in-depth coverage of the representative approaches, as well as discussions regarding insights, limitations, and future directions.
Deep Learning has revolutionized the fields of computer vision, natural language understanding, speech recognition, information retrieval and more. However, with the progressive improvements in deep learning models, their number of parameters, latency, resources required to train, etc. have all have increased significantly. Consequently, it has become important to pay attention to these footprint metrics of a model as well, not just its quality. We present and motivate the problem of efficiency in deep learning, followed by a thorough survey of the five core areas of model efficiency (spanning modeling techniques, infrastructure, and hardware) and the seminal work there. We also present an experiment-based guide along with code, for practitioners to optimize their model training and deployment. We believe this is the first comprehensive survey in the efficient deep learning space that covers the landscape of model efficiency from modeling techniques to hardware support. Our hope is that this survey would provide the reader with the mental model and the necessary understanding of the field to apply generic efficiency techniques to immediately get significant improvements, and also equip them with ideas for further research and experimentation to achieve additional gains.
In recent years, Face Image Quality Assessment (FIQA) has become an indispensable part of the face recognition system to guarantee the stability and reliability of recognition performance in an unconstrained scenario. For this purpose, the FIQA method should consider both the intrinsic property and the recognizability of the face image. Most previous works aim to estimate the sample-wise embedding uncertainty or pair-wise similarity as the quality score, which only considers the information from partial intra-class. However, these methods ignore the valuable information from the inter-class, which is for estimating to the recognizability of face image. In this work, we argue that a high-quality face image should be similar to its intra-class samples and dissimilar to its inter-class samples. Thus, we propose a novel unsupervised FIQA method that incorporates Similarity Distribution Distance for Face Image Quality Assessment (SDD-FIQA). Our method generates quality pseudo-labels by calculating the Wasserstein Distance (WD) between the intra-class similarity distributions and inter-class similarity distributions. With these quality pseudo-labels, we are capable of training a regression network for quality prediction. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed SDD-FIQA surpasses the state-of-the-arts by an impressive margin. Meanwhile, our method shows good generalization across different recognition systems.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are a hot research topic recently. GANs have been widely studied since 2014, and a large number of algorithms have been proposed. However, there is few comprehensive study explaining the connections among different GANs variants, and how they have evolved. In this paper, we attempt to provide a review on various GANs methods from the perspectives of algorithms, theory, and applications. Firstly, the motivations, mathematical representations, and structure of most GANs algorithms are introduced in details. Furthermore, GANs have been combined with other machine learning algorithms for specific applications, such as semi-supervised learning, transfer learning, and reinforcement learning. This paper compares the commonalities and differences of these GANs methods. Secondly, theoretical issues related to GANs are investigated. Thirdly, typical applications of GANs in image processing and computer vision, natural language processing, music, speech and audio, medical field, and data science are illustrated. Finally, the future open research problems for GANs are pointed out.