This study compares the performance of a causal and a predictive model in modeling travel mode choice in three neighborhoods in Chicago. A causal discovery algorithm and a causal inference technique were used to extract the causal relationships in the mode choice decision making process and to estimate the quantitative causal effects between the variables both directly from observational data. The model results reveal that trip distance and vehicle ownership are the direct causes of mode choice in the three neighborhoods. Artificial neural network models were estimated to predict mode choice. Their accuracy was over 70%, and the SHAP values obtained measure the importance of each variable. We find that both the causal and predictive modeling approaches are useful for the purpose they serve. We also note that the study of mode choice behavior through causal modeling is mostly unexplored, yet it could transform our understanding of the mode choice behavior. Further research is needed to realize the full potential of these techniques in modeling mode choice.
We discuss the emerging new opportunity for building feedback-rich computational models of social systems using generative artificial intelligence. Referred to as Generative Agent-Based Models (GABMs), such individual-level models utilize large language models such as ChatGPT to represent human decision-making in social settings. We provide a GABM case in which human behavior can be incorporated in simulation models by coupling a mechanistic model of human interactions with a pre-trained large language model. This is achieved by introducing a simple GABM of social norm diffusion in an organization. For educational purposes, the model is intentionally kept simple. We examine a wide range of scenarios and the sensitivity of the results to several changes in the prompt. We hope the article and the model serve as a guide for building useful diffusion models that include realistic human reasoning and decision-making.
This paper addresses the multi-faceted problem of robot grasping, where multiple criteria may conflict and differ in importance. We introduce Grasp Ranking and Criteria Evaluation (GRaCE), a novel approach that employs hierarchical rule-based logic and a rank-preserving utility function to optimize grasps based on various criteria such as stability, kinematic constraints, and goal-oriented functionalities. Additionally, we propose GRaCE-OPT, a hybrid optimization strategy that combines gradient-based and gradient-free methods to effectively navigate the complex, non-convex utility function. Experimental results in both simulated and real-world scenarios show that GRaCE requires fewer samples to achieve comparable or superior performance relative to existing methods. The modular architecture of GRaCE allows for easy customization and adaptation to specific application needs.
The Butterfly Effect, a concept originating from chaos theory, underscores how small changes can have significant and unpredictable impacts on complex systems. In the context of AI fairness and bias, the Butterfly Effect can stem from a variety of sources, such as small biases or skewed data inputs during algorithm development, saddle points in training, or distribution shifts in data between training and testing phases. These seemingly minor alterations can lead to unexpected and substantial unfair outcomes, disproportionately affecting underrepresented individuals or groups and perpetuating pre-existing inequalities. Moreover, the Butterfly Effect can amplify inherent biases within data or algorithms, exacerbate feedback loops, and create vulnerabilities for adversarial attacks. Given the intricate nature of AI systems and their societal implications, it is crucial to thoroughly examine any changes to algorithms or input data for potential unintended consequences. In this paper, we envision both algorithmic and empirical strategies to detect, quantify, and mitigate the Butterfly Effect in AI systems, emphasizing the importance of addressing these challenges to promote fairness and ensure responsible AI development.
World models, especially in autonomous driving, are trending and drawing extensive attention due to their capacity for comprehending driving environments. The established world model holds immense potential for the generation of high-quality driving videos, and driving policies for safe maneuvering. However, a critical limitation in relevant research lies in its predominant focus on gaming environments or simulated settings, thereby lacking the representation of real-world driving scenarios. Therefore, we introduce DriveDreamer, a pioneering world model entirely derived from real-world driving scenarios. Regarding that modeling the world in intricate driving scenes entails an overwhelming search space, we propose harnessing the powerful diffusion model to construct a comprehensive representation of the complex environment. Furthermore, we introduce a two-stage training pipeline. In the initial phase, DriveDreamer acquires a deep understanding of structured traffic constraints, while the subsequent stage equips it with the ability to anticipate future states. The proposed DriveDreamer is the first world model established from real-world driving scenarios. We instantiate DriveDreamer on the challenging nuScenes benchmark, and extensive experiments verify that DriveDreamer empowers precise, controllable video generation that faithfully captures the structural constraints of real-world traffic scenarios. Additionally, DriveDreamer enables the generation of realistic and reasonable driving policies, opening avenues for interaction and practical applications.
This study investigates the outage performance of an under-laying wireless-powered secondary system that reuses the primary users (PU) spectrum in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) cognitive radio (CR) network. Each secondary user (SU) harvests energy and receives information simultaneously by applying power splitting (PS) protocol. The communication between SUs is aided by a two-way (TW) decode and forward (DF) relay. We formulate a problem to design the PS ratios at SUs, the power control factor at the secondary relay, and beamforming matrices at all nodes to minimize the secondary network's outage probability. To address this problem, we propose a two-step solution. The first step establishes closedform expressions for the PS ratios at each SU and secondary relay's power control factor. Furthermore, in the second step, interference alignment (IA) is used to design proper precoding and decoding matrices for managing the interference between secondary and primary networks. We choose IA matrices based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) iterative algorithm. The simulation results demonstrate a significant decrease in the outage probability for the proposed scheme compared to the benchmark schemes, with an average reduction of more than two orders of magnitude achieved.
In neural network training, RMSProp and ADAM remain widely favoured optimization algorithms. One of the keys to their performance lies in selecting the correct step size, which can significantly influence their effectiveness. It is worth noting that these algorithms performance can vary considerably, depending on the chosen step sizes. Additionally, questions about their theoretical convergence properties continue to be a subject of interest. In this paper, we theoretically analyze a constant stepsize version of ADAM in the non-convex setting. We show sufficient conditions for the stepsize to achieve almost sure asymptotic convergence of the gradients to zero with minimal assumptions. We also provide runtime bounds for deterministic ADAM to reach approximate criticality when working with smooth, non-convex functions.
Due to the imbalanced nature of networked observational data, the causal effect predictions for some individuals can severely violate the positivity/overlap assumption, rendering unreliable estimations. Nevertheless, this potential risk of individual-level treatment effect estimation on networked data has been largely under-explored. To create a more trustworthy causal effect estimator, we propose the uncertainty-aware graph deep kernel learning (GraphDKL) framework with Lipschitz constraint to model the prediction uncertainty with Gaussian process and identify unreliable estimations. To the best of our knowledge, GraphDKL is the first framework to tackle the violation of positivity assumption when performing causal effect estimation with graphs. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in uncertainty-aware causal effect estimation on networked data.
Over the past few years, the rapid development of deep learning technologies for computer vision has greatly promoted the performance of medical image segmentation (MedISeg). However, the recent MedISeg publications usually focus on presentations of the major contributions (e.g., network architectures, training strategies, and loss functions) while unwittingly ignoring some marginal implementation details (also known as "tricks"), leading to a potential problem of the unfair experimental result comparisons. In this paper, we collect a series of MedISeg tricks for different model implementation phases (i.e., pre-training model, data pre-processing, data augmentation, model implementation, model inference, and result post-processing), and experimentally explore the effectiveness of these tricks on the consistent baseline models. Compared to paper-driven surveys that only blandly focus on the advantages and limitation analyses of segmentation models, our work provides a large number of solid experiments and is more technically operable. With the extensive experimental results on both the representative 2D and 3D medical image datasets, we explicitly clarify the effect of these tricks. Moreover, based on the surveyed tricks, we also open-sourced a strong MedISeg repository, where each of its components has the advantage of plug-and-play. We believe that this milestone work not only completes a comprehensive and complementary survey of the state-of-the-art MedISeg approaches, but also offers a practical guide for addressing the future medical image processing challenges including but not limited to small dataset learning, class imbalance learning, multi-modality learning, and domain adaptation. The code has been released at: //github.com/hust-linyi/MedISeg
Influenced by the stunning success of deep learning in computer vision and language understanding, research in recommendation has shifted to inventing new recommender models based on neural networks. In recent years, we have witnessed significant progress in developing neural recommender models, which generalize and surpass traditional recommender models owing to the strong representation power of neural networks. In this survey paper, we conduct a systematic review on neural recommender models, aiming to summarize the field to facilitate future progress. Distinct from existing surveys that categorize existing methods based on the taxonomy of deep learning techniques, we instead summarize the field from the perspective of recommendation modeling, which could be more instructive to researchers and practitioners working on recommender systems. Specifically, we divide the work into three types based on the data they used for recommendation modeling: 1) collaborative filtering models, which leverage the key source of user-item interaction data; 2) content enriched models, which additionally utilize the side information associated with users and items, like user profile and item knowledge graph; and 3) context enriched models, which account for the contextual information associated with an interaction, such as time, location, and the past interactions. After reviewing representative works for each type, we finally discuss some promising directions in this field, including benchmarking recommender systems, graph reasoning based recommendation models, and explainable and fair recommendations for social good.
Large knowledge graphs often grow to store temporal facts that model the dynamic relations or interactions of entities along the timeline. Since such temporal knowledge graphs often suffer from incompleteness, it is important to develop time-aware representation learning models that help to infer the missing temporal facts. While the temporal facts are typically evolving, it is observed that many facts often show a repeated pattern along the timeline, such as economic crises and diplomatic activities. This observation indicates that a model could potentially learn much from the known facts appeared in history. To this end, we propose a new representation learning model for temporal knowledge graphs, namely CyGNet, based on a novel timeaware copy-generation mechanism. CyGNet is not only able to predict future facts from the whole entity vocabulary, but also capable of identifying facts with repetition and accordingly predicting such future facts with reference to the known facts in the past. We evaluate the proposed method on the knowledge graph completion task using five benchmark datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CyGNet for predicting future facts with repetition as well as de novo fact prediction.