Many enthusiasts and experts publish forecasts of the order players are drafted into professional sports leagues, known as mock drafts. Using a novel dataset of mock drafts for the National Basketball Association (NBA), we analyze authors' mock draft accuracy over time and ask how we can reasonably use information from multiple authors. To measure how accurate mock drafts are, we assume that both mock drafts and the actual draft are ranked lists, and we propose that rank-biased distance (RBD) of Webber et al. (2010) is the appropriate error metric for mock draft accuracy. This is because RBD allows mock drafts to have a different length than the actual draft, accounts for players not appearing in both lists, and weights errors early in the draft more than errors later on. We validate that mock drafts, as expected, improve in accuracy over the course of a season, and that accuracy of the mock drafts produced right before their drafts is fairly stable across seasons. To be able to combine information from multiple mock drafts into a single consensus mock draft, we also propose a ranked-list combination method based on the ideas of ranked-choice voting. We show that our method provides improved forecasts over the standard Borda count combination method used for most similar analyses in sports, and that either combination method provides a more accurate forecast over time than any single author.
Pilot studies are an essential cornerstone of the design of crowdsourcing campaigns, yet they are often only mentioned in passing in the scholarly literature. A lack of details surrounding pilot studies in crowdsourcing research hinders the replication of studies and the reproduction of findings, stalling potential scientific advances. We conducted a systematic literature review on the current state of pilot study reporting at the intersection of crowdsourcing and HCI research. Our review of ten years of literature included 171 articles published in the proceedings of the Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (AAAI HCOMP) and the ACM Digital Library. We found that pilot studies in crowdsourcing research (i.e., crowd pilot studies) are often under-reported in the literature. Important details, such as the number of workers and rewards to workers, are often not reported. On the basis of our findings, we reflect on the current state of practice and formulate a set of best practice guidelines for reporting crowd pilot studies in crowdsourcing research. We also provide implications for the design of crowdsourcing platforms and make practical suggestions for supporting crowd pilot study reporting.
Fairness in AI is a growing concern for high-stakes decision making. Engaging stakeholders, especially lay users, in fair AI development is promising yet overlooked. Recent efforts explore enabling lay users to provide AI fairness-related feedback, but there is still a lack of understanding of how to integrate users' feedback into an AI model and the impacts of doing so. To bridge this gap, we collected feedback from 58 lay users on the fairness of a XGBoost model trained on the Home Credit dataset, and conducted offline experiments to investigate the effects of retraining models on accuracy, and individual and group fairness. Our work contributes baseline results of integrating user fairness feedback in XGBoost, and a dataset and code framework to bootstrap research in engaging stakeholders in AI fairness. Our discussion highlights the challenges of employing user feedback in AI fairness and points the way to a future application area of interactive machine learning.
Human actions in egocentric videos are often hand-object interactions composed from a verb (performed by the hand) applied to an object. Despite their extensive scaling up, egocentric datasets still face two limitations - sparsity of action compositions and a closed set of interacting objects. This paper proposes a novel open vocabulary action recognition task. Given a set of verbs and objects observed during training, the goal is to generalize the verbs to an open vocabulary of actions with seen and novel objects. To this end, we decouple the verb and object predictions via an object-agnostic verb encoder and a prompt-based object encoder. The prompting leverages CLIP representations to predict an open vocabulary of interacting objects. We create open vocabulary benchmarks on the EPIC-KITCHENS-100 and Assembly101 datasets; whereas closed-action methods fail to generalize, our proposed method is effective. In addition, our object encoder significantly outperforms existing open-vocabulary visual recognition methods in recognizing novel interacting objects.
One of the motivations for explainable AI is to allow humans to make better and more informed decisions regarding the use and deployment of AI models. But careful evaluations are needed to assess whether this expectation has been fulfilled. Current evaluations mainly focus on algorithmic properties of explanations, and those that involve human subjects often employ subjective questions to test human's perception of explanation usefulness, without being grounded in objective metrics and measurements. In this work, we evaluate whether explanations can improve human decision-making in practical scenarios of machine learning model development. We conduct a mixed-methods user study involving image data to evaluate saliency maps generated by SmoothGrad, GradCAM, and an oracle explanation on two tasks: model selection and counterfactual simulation. To our surprise, we did not find evidence of significant improvement on these tasks when users were provided with any of the saliency maps, even the synthetic oracle explanation designed to be simple to understand and highly indicative of the answer. Nonetheless, explanations did help users more accurately describe the models. These findings suggest caution regarding the usefulness and potential for misunderstanding in saliency-based explanations.
We study parallel repetition of k-player games where the constraints satisfy the projection property. We prove exponential decay in the value of a parallel repetition of projection games with value less than 1.
The concept of causality plays an important role in human cognition . In the past few decades, causal inference has been well developed in many fields, such as computer science, medicine, economics, and education. With the advancement of deep learning techniques, it has been increasingly used in causal inference against counterfactual data. Typically, deep causal models map the characteristics of covariates to a representation space and then design various objective optimization functions to estimate counterfactual data unbiasedly based on the different optimization methods. This paper focuses on the survey of the deep causal models, and its core contributions are as follows: 1) we provide relevant metrics under multiple treatments and continuous-dose treatment; 2) we incorporate a comprehensive overview of deep causal models from both temporal development and method classification perspectives; 3) we assist a detailed and comprehensive classification and analysis of relevant datasets and source code.
AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.
Recent years have seen important advances in the quality of state-of-the-art models, but this has come at the expense of models becoming less interpretable. This survey presents an overview of the current state of Explainable AI (XAI), considered within the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP). We discuss the main categorization of explanations, as well as the various ways explanations can be arrived at and visualized. We detail the operations and explainability techniques currently available for generating explanations for NLP model predictions, to serve as a resource for model developers in the community. Finally, we point out the current gaps and encourage directions for future work in this important research area.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a special type of Neural Networks, which have shown state-of-the-art results on various competitive benchmarks. The powerful learning ability of deep CNN is largely achieved with the use of multiple non-linear feature extraction stages that can automatically learn hierarchical representation from the data. Availability of a large amount of data and improvements in the hardware processing units have accelerated the research in CNNs and recently very interesting deep CNN architectures are reported. The recent race in deep CNN architectures for achieving high performance on the challenging benchmarks has shown that the innovative architectural ideas, as well as parameter optimization, can improve the CNN performance on various vision-related tasks. In this regard, different ideas in the CNN design have been explored such as use of different activation and loss functions, parameter optimization, regularization, and restructuring of processing units. However, the major improvement in representational capacity is achieved by the restructuring of the processing units. Especially, the idea of using a block as a structural unit instead of a layer is gaining substantial appreciation. This survey thus focuses on the intrinsic taxonomy present in the recently reported CNN architectures and consequently, classifies the recent innovations in CNN architectures into seven different categories. These seven categories are based on spatial exploitation, depth, multi-path, width, feature map exploitation, channel boosting and attention. Additionally, it covers the elementary understanding of the CNN components and sheds light on the current challenges and applications of CNNs.