With the widespread adoption of advanced generative models such as Gemini and GPT, there has been a notable increase in the incorporation of such models into sociotechnical systems, categorized under AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS). Despite their versatility across diverse sectors, concerns persist regarding discriminatory tendencies within these models, particularly favoring selected `majority' demographics across various sociodemographic dimensions. Despite widespread calls for diversification of media representations, marginalized racial and ethnic groups continue to face persistent distortion, stereotyping, and neglect within the AIaaS context. In this work, we provide a critical summary of the state of research in the context of social harms to lead the conversation to focus on their implications. We also present open-ended research questions, guided by our discussion, to help define future research pathways.
Mixture models are traditionally represented and learned by adding several distributions as components. Allowing mixtures to subtract probability mass or density can drastically reduce the number of components needed to model complex distributions. However, learning such subtractive mixtures while ensuring they still encode a non-negative function is challenging. We investigate how to learn and perform inference on deep subtractive mixtures by squaring them. We do this in the framework of probabilistic circuits, which enable us to represent tensorized mixtures and generalize several other subtractive models. We theoretically prove that the class of squared circuits allowing subtractions can be exponentially more expressive than traditional additive mixtures; and, we empirically show this increased expressiveness on a series of real-world distribution estimation tasks.
New Radio (NR) Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) Sidelink (SL), an integral part of the 5G NR standard, is expected to revolutionize the automotive and rail industries by enabling direct and low-latency exchange of critical information between traffic participants independently of cellular networks. However, this advancement depends primarily on efficient SL resource allocation. Mode 2(a) is a well-known method for this purpose, where each node autonomously selects resources. However, this method is prone to packet collisions due to the hidden-node problem. In this paper, we propose a cooperative scheduling method that could potentially address this issue. We describe an extension of Mode 2(a) that allows nodes to share resource allocation information at two hops. Initial simulation results show a promising improvement over Mode 2(a).
Multi-modal foundation models such as CLIP have showcased impressive zero-shot capabilities. However, their applicability in resource-constrained environments is limited due to their large number of parameters and high inference time. While existing approaches have scaled down the entire CLIP architecture, we focus on training smaller variants of the image encoder, which suffices for efficient zero-shot classification. The use of synthetic data has shown promise in distilling representations from larger teachers, resulting in strong few-shot and linear probe performance. However, we find that this approach surprisingly fails in true zero-shot settings when using contrastive losses. We identify the exploitation of spurious features as being responsible for poor generalization between synthetic and real data. However, by using the image feature-based L2 distillation loss, we mitigate these problems and train students that achieve zero-shot performance which on four domain-specific datasets is on-par with a ViT-B/32 teacher model trained on DataCompXL, while featuring up to 92% fewer parameters.
It has been found that Transformer-based language models have the ability to perform basic quantitative reasoning. In this paper, we propose a method for studying how these models internally represent numerical data, and use our proposal to analyze the ALBERT family of language models. Specifically, we extract the learned embeddings these models use to represent tokens that correspond to numbers and ordinals, and subject these embeddings to Principal Component Analysis (PCA). PCA results reveal that ALBERT models of different sizes, trained and initialized separately, consistently learn to use the axes of greatest variation to represent the approximate ordering of various numerical concepts. Numerals and their textual counterparts are represented in separate clusters, but increase along the same direction in 2D space. Our findings illustrate that language models, trained purely to model text, can intuit basic mathematical concepts, opening avenues for NLP applications that intersect with quantitative reasoning.
Procedural noise is a fundamental component of computer graphics pipelines, offering a flexible way to generate textures that exhibit "natural" random variation. Many different types of noise exist, each produced by a separate algorithm. In this paper, we present a single generative model which can learn to generate multiple types of noise as well as blend between them. In addition, it is capable of producing spatially-varying noise blends despite not having access to such data for training. These features are enabled by training a denoising diffusion model using a novel combination of data augmentation and network conditioning techniques. Like procedural noise generators, the model's behavior is controllable via interpretable parameters and a source of randomness. We use our model to produce a variety of visually compelling noise textures. We also present an application of our model to improving inverse procedural material design; using our model in place of fixed-type noise nodes in a procedural material graph results in higher-fidelity material reconstructions without needing to know the type of noise in advance.
As technology advances, the use of Machine Learning (ML) in cybersecurity is becoming increasingly crucial to tackle the growing complexity of cyber threats. While traditional ML models can enhance cybersecurity, their high energy and resource demands limit their applications, leading to the emergence of Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) as a more suitable solution for resource-constrained environments. TinyML is widely applied in areas such as smart homes, healthcare, and industrial automation. TinyML focuses on optimizing ML algorithms for small, low-power devices, enabling intelligent data processing directly on edge devices. This paper provides a comprehensive review of common challenges of TinyML techniques, such as power consumption, limited memory, and computational constraints; it also explores potential solutions to these challenges, such as energy harvesting, computational optimization techniques, and transfer learning for privacy preservation. On the other hand, this paper discusses TinyML's applications in advancing cybersecurity for Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructures (EVCIs) as a representative use case. It presents an experimental case study that enhances cybersecurity in EVCI using TinyML, evaluated against traditional ML in terms of reduced delay and memory usage, with a slight trade-off in accuracy. Additionally, the study includes a practical setup using the ESP32 microcontroller in the PlatformIO environment, which provides a hands-on assessment of TinyML's application in cybersecurity for EVCI.
The success of AI models relies on the availability of large, diverse, and high-quality datasets, which can be challenging to obtain due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution by generating artificial data that mimics real-world patterns. This paper provides an overview of synthetic data research, discussing its applications, challenges, and future directions. We present empirical evidence from prior art to demonstrate its effectiveness and highlight the importance of ensuring its factuality, fidelity, and unbiasedness. We emphasize the need for responsible use of synthetic data to build more powerful, inclusive, and trustworthy language models.
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
Interpretability methods are developed to understand the working mechanisms of black-box models, which is crucial to their responsible deployment. Fulfilling this goal requires both that the explanations generated by these methods are correct and that people can easily and reliably understand them. While the former has been addressed in prior work, the latter is often overlooked, resulting in informal model understanding derived from a handful of local explanations. In this paper, we introduce explanation summary (ExSum), a mathematical framework for quantifying model understanding, and propose metrics for its quality assessment. On two domains, ExSum highlights various limitations in the current practice, helps develop accurate model understanding, and reveals easily overlooked properties of the model. We also connect understandability to other properties of explanations such as human alignment, robustness, and counterfactual minimality and plausibility.