Fair decision making has largely been studied with respect to a single decision. In this paper we investigate the notion of fairness in the context of sequential decision making where multiple stakeholders can be affected by the outcomes of decisions, and where decision making may be informed by additional constraints and criteria beyond the requirement of fairness. In this setting, we observe that fairness often depends on the history of the sequential decision-making process and not just on the current state. To advance our understanding of this class of fairness problems, we define the notion of non-Markovian fairness in the context of sequential decision making. We identify properties of non-Markovian fairness, including notions of long-term, anytime, periodic, and bounded fairness. We further explore the interplay between non-Markovian fairness and memory, and how this can support construction of fair policies in sequential decision-making settings.
The work of neural retrieval so far focuses on ranking short texts and is challenged with long documents. There are many cases where the users want to find a relevant passage within a long document from a huge corpus, e.g. Wikipedia articles, research papers, etc. We propose and name this task \emph{Document-Aware Passage Retrieval} (DAPR). While analyzing the errors of the State-of-The-Art (SoTA) passage retrievers, we find the major errors (53.5\%) are due to missing document context. This drives us to build a benchmark for this task including multiple datasets from heterogeneous domains. In the experiments, we extend the SoTA passage retrievers with document context via (1) hybrid retrieval with BM25 and (2) contextualized passage representations, which inform the passage representation with document context. We find despite that hybrid retrieval performs the strongest on the mixture of the easy and the hard queries, it completely fails on the hard queries that require document-context understanding. On the other hand, contextualized passage representations (e.g. prepending document titles) achieve good improvement on these hard queries, but overall they also perform rather poorly. Our created benchmark enables future research on developing and comparing retrieval systems for the new task. The code and the data are available at //github.com/UKPLab/arxiv2023-dapr.
In this paper, we present a novel framework for enhancing the performance of Quanvolutional Neural Networks (QuNNs) by introducing trainable quanvolutional layers and addressing the critical challenges associated with them. Traditional quanvolutional layers, although beneficial for feature extraction, have largely been static, offering limited adaptability. Unlike state-of-the-art, our research overcomes this limitation by enabling training within these layers, significantly increasing the flexibility and potential of QuNNs. However, the introduction of multiple trainable quanvolutional layers induces complexities in gradient-based optimization, primarily due to the difficulty in accessing gradients across these layers. To resolve this, we propose a novel architecture, Residual Quanvolutional Neural Networks (ResQuNNs), leveraging the concept of residual learning, which facilitates the flow of gradients by adding skip connections between layers. By inserting residual blocks between quanvolutional layers, we ensure enhanced gradient access throughout the network, leading to improved training performance. Moreover, we provide empirical evidence on the strategic placement of these residual blocks within QuNNs. Through extensive experimentation, we identify an efficient configuration of residual blocks, which enables gradients across all the layers in the network that eventually results in efficient training. Our findings suggest that the precise location of residual blocks plays a crucial role in maximizing the performance gains in QuNNs. Our results mark a substantial step forward in the evolution of quantum deep learning, offering new avenues for both theoretical development and practical quantum computing applications.
The advancement of generative AI has given rise to pressing copyright challenges, particularly in music industry. This paper focuses on the economic aspects of these challenges, emphasizing that the economic impact constitutes a central issue in the copyright arena. The complexity of the black-box generative AI technologies not only suggests but necessitates algorithmic solutions. However, such solutions have been largely missing, leading to regulatory challenges in this landscape. We aim to bridge the gap in current approaches by proposing potential royalty models for revenue sharing on AI music generation platforms. Our methodology involves a detailed analysis of existing royalty models in platforms like Spotify and YouTube, and adapting these to the unique context of AI-generated music. A significant challenge we address is the attribution of AI-generated music to influential copyrighted content in the training data. To this end, we present algorithmic solutions employing data attribution techniques. Our experimental results verify the effectiveness of these solutions. This research represents a pioneering effort in integrating technical advancements with economic and legal considerations in the field of generative AI, offering a computational copyright solution for the challenges posed by the opaque nature of AI technologies.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success with their billion-level parameters, yet they incur high inference overheads. The emergence of activation sparsity in LLMs provides a natural approach to reduce this cost by involving only parts of the parameters for inference. Existing methods only focus on utilizing this naturally formed activation sparsity, overlooking the potential for further amplifying this inherent sparsity. In this paper, we hypothesize that LLMs can learn to be efficient by achieving more structured activation sparsity. To achieve this, we introduce a novel algorithm, Learn-To-be-Efficient (LTE), designed to train efficiency-aware LLMs to learn to activate fewer neurons and achieve a better trade-off between sparsity and performance. Furthermore, unlike SOTA MoEfication methods, which mainly focus on ReLU-based models, LTE can also be applied to LLMs like GPT and LLaMA with soft activation functions. We evaluate LTE on four models and eleven datasets. The experiments show that LTE achieves a better trade-off between sparsity and task performance. For instance, LTE with LLaMA provides a 1.83x-2.59x FLOPs speed-up on language generation tasks, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods.
One-shot imitation is to learn a new task from a single demonstration, yet it is a challenging problem to adopt it for complex tasks with the high domain diversity inherent in a non-stationary environment. To tackle the problem, we explore the compositionality of complex tasks, and present a novel skill-based imitation learning framework enabling one-shot imitation and zero-shot adaptation; from a single demonstration for a complex unseen task, a semantic skill sequence is inferred and then each skill in the sequence is converted into an action sequence optimized for environmental hidden dynamics that can vary over time. Specifically, we leverage a vision-language model to learn a semantic skill set from offline video datasets, where each skill is represented on the vision-language embedding space, and adapt meta-learning with dynamics inference to enable zero-shot skill adaptation. We evaluate our framework with various one-shot imitation scenarios for extended multi-stage Meta-world tasks, showing its superiority in learning complex tasks, generalizing to dynamics changes, and extending to different demonstration conditions and modalities, compared to other baselines.
Autonomous driving has achieved a significant milestone in research and development over the last decade. There is increasing interest in the field as the deployment of self-operating vehicles on roads promises safer and more ecologically friendly transportation systems. With the rise of computationally powerful artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, autonomous vehicles can sense their environment with high precision, make safe real-time decisions, and operate more reliably without human interventions. However, intelligent decision-making in autonomous cars is not generally understandable by humans in the current state of the art, and such deficiency hinders this technology from being socially acceptable. Hence, aside from making safe real-time decisions, the AI systems of autonomous vehicles also need to explain how these decisions are constructed in order to be regulatory compliant across many jurisdictions. Our study sheds a comprehensive light on developing explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) approaches for autonomous vehicles. In particular, we make the following contributions. First, we provide a thorough overview of the present gaps with respect to explanations in the state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle industry. We then show the taxonomy of explanations and explanation receivers in this field. Thirdly, we propose a framework for an architecture of end-to-end autonomous driving systems and justify the role of XAI in both debugging and regulating such systems. Finally, as future research directions, we provide a field guide on XAI approaches for autonomous driving that can improve operational safety and transparency towards achieving public approval by regulators, manufacturers, and all engaged stakeholders.
Connecting Vision and Language plays an essential role in Generative Intelligence. For this reason, in the last few years, a large research effort has been devoted to image captioning, i.e. the task of describing images with syntactically and semantically meaningful sentences. Starting from 2015 the task has generally been addressed with pipelines composed of a visual encoding step and a language model for text generation. During these years, both components have evolved considerably through the exploitation of object regions, attributes, and relationships and the introduction of multi-modal connections, fully-attentive approaches, and BERT-like early-fusion strategies. However, regardless of the impressive results obtained, research in image captioning has not reached a conclusive answer yet. This work aims at providing a comprehensive overview and categorization of image captioning approaches, from visual encoding and text generation to training strategies, used datasets, and evaluation metrics. In this respect, we quantitatively compare many relevant state-of-the-art approaches to identify the most impactful technical innovations in image captioning architectures and training strategies. Moreover, many variants of the problem and its open challenges are analyzed and discussed. The final goal of this work is to serve as a tool for understanding the existing state-of-the-art and highlighting the future directions for an area of research where Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing can find an optimal synergy.
In this paper, we introduce a two-level attention schema, Poolingformer, for long document modeling. Its first level uses a smaller sliding window pattern to aggregate information from neighbors. Its second level employs a larger window to increase receptive fields with pooling attention to reduce both computational cost and memory consumption. We first evaluate Poolingformer on two long sequence QA tasks: the monolingual NQ and the multilingual TyDi QA. Experimental results show that Poolingformer sits atop three official leaderboards measured by F1, outperforming previous state-of-the-art models by 1.9 points (79.8 vs. 77.9) on NQ long answer, 1.9 points (79.5 vs. 77.6) on TyDi QA passage answer, and 1.6 points (67.6 vs. 66.0) on TyDi QA minimal answer. We further evaluate Poolingformer on a long sequence summarization task. Experimental results on the arXiv benchmark continue to demonstrate its superior performance.
In the last years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has achieved a notable momentum that may deliver the best of expectations over many application sectors across the field. For this to occur, the entire community stands in front of the barrier of explainability, an inherent problem of AI techniques brought by sub-symbolism (e.g. ensembles or Deep Neural Networks) that were not present in the last hype of AI. Paradigms underlying this problem fall within the so-called eXplainable AI (XAI) field, which is acknowledged as a crucial feature for the practical deployment of AI models. This overview examines the existing literature in the field of XAI, including a prospect toward what is yet to be reached. We summarize previous efforts to define explainability in Machine Learning, establishing a novel definition that covers prior conceptual propositions with a major focus on the audience for which explainability is sought. We then propose and discuss about a taxonomy of recent contributions related to the explainability of different Machine Learning models, including those aimed at Deep Learning methods for which a second taxonomy is built. This literature analysis serves as the background for a series of challenges faced by XAI, such as the crossroads between data fusion and explainability. Our prospects lead toward the concept of Responsible Artificial Intelligence, namely, a methodology for the large-scale implementation of AI methods in real organizations with fairness, model explainability and accountability at its core. Our ultimate goal is to provide newcomers to XAI with a reference material in order to stimulate future research advances, but also to encourage experts and professionals from other disciplines to embrace the benefits of AI in their activity sectors, without any prior bias for its lack of interpretability.
We consider an interesting problem-salient instance segmentation in this paper. Other than producing bounding boxes, our network also outputs high-quality instance-level segments. Taking into account the category-independent property of each target, we design a single stage salient instance segmentation framework, with a novel segmentation branch. Our new branch regards not only local context inside each detection window but also its surrounding context, enabling us to distinguish the instances in the same scope even with obstruction. Our network is end-to-end trainable and runs at a fast speed (40 fps when processing an image with resolution 320x320). We evaluate our approach on a publicly available benchmark and show that it outperforms other alternative solutions. We also provide a thorough analysis of the design choices to help readers better understand the functions of each part of our network. The source code can be found at \url{//github.com/RuochenFan/S4Net}.