Tabletop exercises are used to train personnel in the efficient mitigation and resolution of incidents. They are applied in practice to support the preparedness of organizations and to highlight inefficient processes. Since tabletop exercises train competencies required in the workplace, they have been introduced into computing courses at universities as an innovation, especially within cybersecurity curricula. To help computing educators adopt this innovative method, we survey academic publications that deal with tabletop exercises. From 140 papers we identified and examined, we selected 14 papers for a detailed review. The results show that the existing research deals predominantly with exercises that follow a linear format and exercises that do not systematically collect data about trainees' learning. Computing education researchers can investigate novel approaches to instruction and assessment in the context of tabletop exercises to maximize the impact of this teaching method. Due to the relatively low number of published papers, the potential for future research is immense. Our review provides researchers, tool developers, and educators with an orientation in the area, a synthesis of trends, and implications for further work.
Technologies adopted by the public sector have transformed the work practices of employees in public agencies by creating different means of communication and decision-making. Although much of the recent research in the future of work domain has concentrated on the effects of technological advancements on public sector employees, the influence on work practices of external stakeholders engaging with this sector remains under-explored. In this paper, we focus on a digital platform called OneStop which is deployed by several building departments across the U.S. and aims to integrate various steps and services into a single point of online contact between public sector employees and the public. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 22 stakeholders, including local business owners, experts involved in the construction process, community representatives, and building department employees, we investigate how this technology transition has impacted the work of these different stakeholders. We observe a multifaceted perspective and experience caused by the adoption of OneStop. OneStop exacerbated inequitable practices for local business owners due to a lack of face-to-face interactions with the department employees. For the public sector employees, OneStop standardized the work practices, representing the building department's priorities and values. Based on our findings, we discuss tensions around standardization, equality, and equity in technology transition, as well as design implications for equitable practices in the public sector.
Understanding how sentences are internally represented in the human brain, as well as in large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, is a major challenge for cognitive science. Classic linguistic theories propose that the brain represents a sentence by parsing it into hierarchically organized constituents. In contrast, LLMs do not explicitly parse linguistic constituents and their latent representations remains poorly explained. Here, we demonstrate that humans and LLMs construct similar latent representations of hierarchical linguistic constituents by analyzing their behaviors during a novel one-shot learning task, in which they infer which words should be deleted from a sentence. Both humans and LLMs tend to delete a constituent, instead of a nonconstituent word string. In contrast, a naive sequence processing model that has access to word properties and ordinal positions does not show this property. Based on the word deletion behaviors, we can reconstruct the latent constituency tree representation of a sentence for both humans and LLMs. These results demonstrate that a latent tree-structured constituency representation can emerge in both the human brain and LLMs.
Preferences are a pivotal component in practical reasoning, especially in tasks that involve decision-making over different options or courses of action that could be pursued. In this work, we focus on repairing and querying inconsistent knowledge bases in the form of graph databases, which involves finding a way to solve conflicts in the knowledge base and considering answers that are entailed from every possible repair, respectively. Without a priori domain knowledge, all possible repairs are equally preferred. Though that may be adequate for some settings, it seems reasonable to establish and exploit some form of preference order among the potential repairs. We study the problem of computing prioritized repairs over graph databases with data values, using a notion of consistency based on GXPath expressions as integrity constraints. We present several preference criteria based on the standard subset repair semantics, incorporating weights, multisets, and set-based priority levels. We show that it is possible to maintain the same computational complexity as in the case where no preference criterion is available for exploitation. Finally, we explore the complexity of consistent query answering in this setting and obtain tight lower and upper bounds for all the preference criteria introduced.
We present a number of first- and second-order extensions to SMT theories specifically aimed at representing and analyzing SQL queries with join, projection, and selection operations. We support reasoning about SQL queries with either bag or set semantics for database tables. We provide the former via an extension of a theory of finite bags and the latter via an extension of the theory of finite relations. Furthermore, we add the ability to reason about tables with null values by introducing a theory of nullable sorts based on an extension of the theory of algebraic datatypes. We implemented solvers for these theories in the SMT solver cvc5 and evaluated them on a set of benchmarks derived from public sets of SQL equivalence problems.
Writing systems of Indic languages have orthographic syllables, also known as complex graphemes, as unique horizontal units. A prominent feature of these languages is these complex grapheme units that comprise consonants/consonant conjuncts, vowel diacritics, and consonant diacritics, which, together make a unique Language. Unicode-based writing schemes of these languages often disregard this feature of these languages and encode words as linear sequences of Unicode characters using an intricate scheme of connector characters and font interpreters. Due to this way of using a few dozen Unicode glyphs to write thousands of different unique glyphs (complex graphemes), there are serious ambiguities that lead to malformed words. In this paper, we are proposing two libraries: i) a normalizer for normalizing inconsistencies caused by a Unicode-based encoding scheme for Indic languages and ii) a grapheme parser for Abugida text. It deconstructs words into visually distinct orthographic syllables or complex graphemes and their constituents. Our proposed normalizer is a more efficient and effective tool than the previously used IndicNLP normalizer. Moreover, our parser and normalizer are also suitable tools for general Abugida text processing as they performed well in our robust word-based and NLP experiments. We report the pipeline for the scripts of 7 languages in this work and develop the framework for the integration of more scripts.
While a number of promising uncertainty quantification methods have been proposed to address the prevailing shortcomings of deep neural networks like overconfidence and lack of explainability, quantifying predictive uncertainties in the context of joint semantic segmentation and monocular depth estimation has not been explored yet. Since many real-world applications are multi-modal in nature and, hence, have the potential to benefit from multi-task learning, this is a substantial gap in current literature. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive series of experiments to study how multi-task learning influences the quality of uncertainty estimates in comparison to solving both tasks separately.
It has recently been demonstrated that pretraining backbones in a self-supervised manner generally provides better fine-tuned polyp segmentation performance, and that models with ViT-B backbones typically perform better than models with ResNet50 backbones. In this paper, we extend this recent work to consider generalisability. I.e., we assess the performance of models on a different dataset to that used for fine-tuning, accounting for variation in network architecture and pretraining pipeline (algorithm and dataset). This reveals how well models with different pretrained backbones generalise to data of a somewhat different distribution to the training data, which will likely arise in deployment due to different cameras and demographics of patients, amongst other factors. We observe that the previous findings, regarding pretraining pipelines for polyp segmentation, hold true when considering generalisability. However, our results imply that models with ResNet50 backbones typically generalise better, despite being outperformed by models with ViT-B backbones in evaluation on the test set from the same dataset used for fine-tuning.
We consider outlier-robust and sparse estimation of linear regression coefficients, when the covariates and the noises are contaminated by adversarial outliers and noises are sampled from a heavy-tailed distribution. Our results present sharper error bounds under weaker assumptions than prior studies that share similar interests with this study. Our analysis relies on some sharp concentration inequalities resulting from generic chaining.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered considerable attention owing to their remarkable capabilities, leading to an increasing number of companies offering LLMs as services. Different LLMs achieve different performance at different costs. A challenge for users lies in choosing the LLMs that best fit their needs, balancing cost and performance. In this paper, we propose a framework for addressing the cost-effective query allocation problem for LLMs. Given a set of input queries and candidate LLMs, our framework, named OptLLM, provides users with a range of optimal solutions to choose from, aligning with their budget constraints and performance preferences, including options for maximizing accuracy and minimizing cost. OptLLM predicts the performance of candidate LLMs on each query using a multi-label classification model with uncertainty estimation and then iteratively generates a set of non-dominated solutions by destructing and reconstructing the current solution. To evaluate the effectiveness of OptLLM, we conduct extensive experiments on various types of tasks, including text classification, question answering, sentiment analysis, reasoning, and log parsing. Our experimental results demonstrate that OptLLM substantially reduces costs by 2.40% to 49.18% while achieving the same accuracy as the best LLM. Compared to other multi-objective optimization algorithms, OptLLM improves accuracy by 2.94% to 69.05% at the same cost or saves costs by 8.79% and 95.87% while maintaining the highest attainable accuracy.
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.