The proliferation of radical content on online platforms poses significant risks, including inciting violence and spreading extremist ideologies. Despite ongoing research, existing datasets and models often fail to address the complexities of multilingual and diverse data. To bridge this gap, we introduce a publicly available multilingual dataset annotated with radicalization levels, calls for action, and named entities in English, French, and Arabic. This dataset is pseudonymized to protect individual privacy while preserving contextual information. Beyond presenting our freely available dataset, we analyze the annotation process, highlighting biases and disagreements among annotators and their implications for model performance. Additionally, we use synthetic data to investigate the influence of socio-demographic traits on annotation patterns and model predictions. Our work offers a comprehensive examination of the challenges and opportunities in building robust datasets for radical content detection, emphasizing the importance of fairness and transparency in model development.
Believable proxies of human behavior can empower interactive applications ranging from immersive environments to rehearsal spaces for interpersonal communication to prototyping tools. In this paper, we introduce generative agents--computational software agents that simulate believable human behavior. Generative agents wake up, cook breakfast, and head to work; artists paint, while authors write; they form opinions, notice each other, and initiate conversations; they remember and reflect on days past as they plan the next day. To enable generative agents, we describe an architecture that extends a large language model to store a complete record of the agent's experiences using natural language, synthesize those memories over time into higher-level reflections, and retrieve them dynamically to plan behavior. We instantiate generative agents to populate an interactive sandbox environment inspired by The Sims, where end users can interact with a small town of twenty five agents using natural language. In an evaluation, these generative agents produce believable individual and emergent social behaviors: for example, starting with only a single user-specified notion that one agent wants to throw a Valentine's Day party, the agents autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two days, make new acquaintances, ask each other out on dates to the party, and coordinate to show up for the party together at the right time. We demonstrate through ablation that the components of our agent architecture--observation, planning, and reflection--each contribute critically to the believability of agent behavior. By fusing large language models with computational, interactive agents, this work introduces architectural and interaction patterns for enabling believable simulations of human behavior.
The advent of large language models marks a revolutionary breakthrough in artificial intelligence. With the unprecedented scale of training and model parameters, the capability of large language models has been dramatically improved, leading to human-like performances in understanding, language synthesizing, and common-sense reasoning, etc. Such a major leap-forward in general AI capacity will change the pattern of how personalization is conducted. For one thing, it will reform the way of interaction between humans and personalization systems. Instead of being a passive medium of information filtering, large language models present the foundation for active user engagement. On top of such a new foundation, user requests can be proactively explored, and user's required information can be delivered in a natural and explainable way. For another thing, it will also considerably expand the scope of personalization, making it grow from the sole function of collecting personalized information to the compound function of providing personalized services. By leveraging large language models as general-purpose interface, the personalization systems may compile user requests into plans, calls the functions of external tools to execute the plans, and integrate the tools' outputs to complete the end-to-end personalization tasks. Today, large language models are still being developed, whereas the application in personalization is largely unexplored. Therefore, we consider it to be the right time to review the challenges in personalization and the opportunities to address them with LLMs. In particular, we dedicate this perspective paper to the discussion of the following aspects: the development and challenges for the existing personalization system, the newly emerged capabilities of large language models, and the potential ways of making use of large language models for personalization.
Understanding causality helps to structure interventions to achieve specific goals and enables predictions under interventions. With the growing importance of learning causal relationships, causal discovery tasks have transitioned from using traditional methods to infer potential causal structures from observational data to the field of pattern recognition involved in deep learning. The rapid accumulation of massive data promotes the emergence of causal search methods with brilliant scalability. Existing summaries of causal discovery methods mainly focus on traditional methods based on constraints, scores and FCMs, there is a lack of perfect sorting and elaboration for deep learning-based methods, also lacking some considers and exploration of causal discovery methods from the perspective of variable paradigms. Therefore, we divide the possible causal discovery tasks into three types according to the variable paradigm and give the definitions of the three tasks respectively, define and instantiate the relevant datasets for each task and the final causal model constructed at the same time, then reviews the main existing causal discovery methods for different tasks. Finally, we propose some roadmaps from different perspectives for the current research gaps in the field of causal discovery and point out future research directions.
Graph neural networks generalize conventional neural networks to graph-structured data and have received widespread attention due to their impressive representation ability. In spite of the remarkable achievements, the performance of Euclidean models in graph-related learning is still bounded and limited by the representation ability of Euclidean geometry, especially for datasets with highly non-Euclidean latent anatomy. Recently, hyperbolic space has gained increasing popularity in processing graph data with tree-like structure and power-law distribution, owing to its exponential growth property. In this survey, we comprehensively revisit the technical details of the current hyperbolic graph neural networks, unifying them into a general framework and summarizing the variants of each component. More importantly, we present various HGNN-related applications. Last, we also identify several challenges, which potentially serve as guidelines for further flourishing the achievements of graph learning in hyperbolic spaces.
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question answering or machine translation). However, it builds upon the assumption that the data distribution is stationary, ie. that the data is sampled from a fixed distribution both at training and test time. This way of training is inconsistent with how we as humans are able to learn from and operate within a constantly changing stream of information. Moreover, it is ill-adapted to real-world use cases where the data distribution is expected to shift over the course of a model's lifetime. The first goal of this thesis is to characterize the different forms this shift can take in the context of natural language processing, and propose benchmarks and evaluation metrics to measure its effect on current deep learning architectures. We then proceed to take steps to mitigate the effect of distributional shift on NLP models. To this end, we develop methods based on parametric reformulations of the distributionally robust optimization framework. Empirically, we demonstrate that these approaches yield more robust models as demonstrated on a selection of realistic problems. In the third and final part of this thesis, we explore ways of efficiently adapting existing models to new domains or tasks. Our contribution to this topic takes inspiration from information geometry to derive a new gradient update rule which alleviate catastrophic forgetting issues during adaptation.
Deep neural networks have revolutionized many machine learning tasks in power systems, ranging from pattern recognition to signal processing. The data in these tasks is typically represented in Euclidean domains. Nevertheless, there is an increasing number of applications in power systems, where data are collected from non-Euclidean domains and represented as the graph-structured data with high dimensional features and interdependency among nodes. The complexity of graph-structured data has brought significant challenges to the existing deep neural networks defined in Euclidean domains. Recently, many studies on extending deep neural networks for graph-structured data in power systems have emerged. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of graph neural networks (GNNs) in power systems is proposed. Specifically, several classical paradigms of GNNs structures (e.g., graph convolutional networks, graph recurrent neural networks, graph attention networks, graph generative networks, spatial-temporal graph convolutional networks, and hybrid forms of GNNs) are summarized, and key applications in power systems such as fault diagnosis, power prediction, power flow calculation, and data generation are reviewed in detail. Furthermore, main issues and some research trends about the applications of GNNs in power systems are discussed.
Ensembles over neural network weights trained from different random initialization, known as deep ensembles, achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and calibration. The recently introduced batch ensembles provide a drop-in replacement that is more parameter efficient. In this paper, we design ensembles not only over weights, but over hyperparameters to improve the state of the art in both settings. For best performance independent of budget, we propose hyper-deep ensembles, a simple procedure that involves a random search over different hyperparameters, themselves stratified across multiple random initializations. Its strong performance highlights the benefit of combining models with both weight and hyperparameter diversity. We further propose a parameter efficient version, hyper-batch ensembles, which builds on the layer structure of batch ensembles and self-tuning networks. The computational and memory costs of our method are notably lower than typical ensembles. On image classification tasks, with MLP, LeNet, and Wide ResNet 28-10 architectures, our methodology improves upon both deep and batch ensembles.
Small data challenges have emerged in many learning problems, since the success of deep neural networks often relies on the availability of a huge amount of labeled data that is expensive to collect. To address it, many efforts have been made on training complex models with small data in an unsupervised and semi-supervised fashion. In this paper, we will review the recent progresses on these two major categories of methods. A wide spectrum of small data models will be categorized in a big picture, where we will show how they interplay with each other to motivate explorations of new ideas. We will review the criteria of learning the transformation equivariant, disentangled, self-supervised and semi-supervised representations, which underpin the foundations of recent developments. Many instantiations of unsupervised and semi-supervised generative models have been developed on the basis of these criteria, greatly expanding the territory of existing autoencoders, generative adversarial nets (GANs) and other deep networks by exploring the distribution of unlabeled data for more powerful representations. While we focus on the unsupervised and semi-supervised methods, we will also provide a broader review of other emerging topics, from unsupervised and semi-supervised domain adaptation to the fundamental roles of transformation equivariance and invariance in training a wide spectrum of deep networks. It is impossible for us to write an exclusive encyclopedia to include all related works. Instead, we aim at exploring the main ideas, principles and methods in this area to reveal where we are heading on the journey towards addressing the small data challenges in this big data era.
Object tracking is challenging as target objects often undergo drastic appearance changes over time. Recently, adaptive correlation filters have been successfully applied to object tracking. However, tracking algorithms relying on highly adaptive correlation filters are prone to drift due to noisy updates. Moreover, as these algorithms do not maintain long-term memory of target appearance, they cannot recover from tracking failures caused by heavy occlusion or target disappearance in the camera view. In this paper, we propose to learn multiple adaptive correlation filters with both long-term and short-term memory of target appearance for robust object tracking. First, we learn a kernelized correlation filter with an aggressive learning rate for locating target objects precisely. We take into account the appropriate size of surrounding context and the feature representations. Second, we learn a correlation filter over a feature pyramid centered at the estimated target position for predicting scale changes. Third, we learn a complementary correlation filter with a conservative learning rate to maintain long-term memory of target appearance. We use the output responses of this long-term filter to determine if tracking failure occurs. In the case of tracking failures, we apply an incrementally learned detector to recover the target position in a sliding window fashion. Extensive experimental results on large-scale benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and robustness.
Many natural language processing tasks solely rely on sparse dependencies between a few tokens in a sentence. Soft attention mechanisms show promising performance in modeling local/global dependencies by soft probabilities between every two tokens, but they are not effective and efficient when applied to long sentences. By contrast, hard attention mechanisms directly select a subset of tokens but are difficult and inefficient to train due to their combinatorial nature. In this paper, we integrate both soft and hard attention into one context fusion model, "reinforced self-attention (ReSA)", for the mutual benefit of each other. In ReSA, a hard attention trims a sequence for a soft self-attention to process, while the soft attention feeds reward signals back to facilitate the training of the hard one. For this purpose, we develop a novel hard attention called "reinforced sequence sampling (RSS)", selecting tokens in parallel and trained via policy gradient. Using two RSS modules, ReSA efficiently extracts the sparse dependencies between each pair of selected tokens. We finally propose an RNN/CNN-free sentence-encoding model, "reinforced self-attention network (ReSAN)", solely based on ReSA. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on both Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) and Sentences Involving Compositional Knowledge (SICK) datasets.