Scientists are increasingly leveraging advances in instruments, automation, and collaborative tools to scale up their experiments and research goals, leading to new bursts of discovery. Various scientific disciplines, including neuroscience, have adopted key technologies to enhance collaboration, reproducibility, and automation. Drawing inspiration from advancements in the software industry, we present a roadmap to enhance the reliability and scalability of scientific operations for diverse research teams tackling large and complex projects. We introduce a five-level Capability Maturity Model describing the principles of rigorous scientific operations in projects ranging from small-scale exploratory studies to large-scale, multi-disciplinary research endeavors. Achieving higher levels of operational maturity necessitates the adoption of new, technology-enabled methodologies, which we refer to as SciOps. This concept is derived from the DevOps methodologies that have revolutionized the software industry. SciOps involves digital research environments that seamlessly integrate computational, automation, and AI-driven efforts throughout the research cycle-from experimental design and data collection to analysis and dissemination, ultimately leading to closed-loop discovery. This maturity model offers a framework for assessing and improving operational practices in multidisciplinary research teams, guiding them towards greater efficiency and effectiveness in scientific inquiry.
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As the outputs of generative AI (GenAI) techniques improve in quality, it becomes increasingly challenging to distinguish them from human-created content. Watermarking schemes are a promising approach to address the problem of distinguishing between AI and human-generated content. These schemes embed hidden signals within AI-generated content to enable reliable detection. While watermarking is not a silver bullet for addressing all risks associated with GenAI, it can play a crucial role in enhancing AI safety and trustworthiness by combating misinformation and deception. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of watermarking techniques for GenAI, beginning with the need for watermarking from historical and regulatory perspectives. We formalize the definitions and desired properties of watermarking schemes and examine the key objectives and threat models for existing approaches. Practical evaluation strategies are also explored, providing insights into the development of robust watermarking techniques capable of resisting various attacks. Additionally, we review recent representative works, highlight open challenges, and discuss potential directions for this emerging field. By offering a thorough understanding of watermarking in GenAI, this work aims to guide researchers in advancing watermarking methods and applications, and support policymakers in addressing the broader implications of GenAI.
Recent advances in Information Retrieval have leveraged high-dimensional embedding spaces to improve the retrieval of relevant documents. Moreover, the Manifold Clustering Hypothesis suggests that despite these high-dimensional representations, documents relevant to a query reside on a lower-dimensional, query-dependent manifold. While this hypothesis has inspired new retrieval methods, existing approaches still face challenges in effectively separating non-relevant information from relevant signals. We propose a novel methodology that addresses these limitations by leveraging information from both relevant and non-relevant documents. Our method, ECLIPSE, computes a centroid based on irrelevant documents as a reference to estimate noisy dimensions present in relevant ones, enhancing retrieval performance. Extensive experiments on three in-domain and one out-of-domain benchmarks demonstrate an average improvement of up to 19.50% (resp. 22.35%) in mAP(AP) and 11.42% (resp. 13.10%) in nDCG@10 w.r.t. the DIME-based baseline (resp. the baseline using all dimensions). Our results pave the way for more robust, pseudo-irrelevance-based retrieval systems in future IR research.
Recent advancements in language modeling have enabled the translation of natural language into code, and the use of execution feedback to improve code generation. However, these methods often rely heavily on pre-existing test cases, which may not always be available or comprehensive. In this work, we propose a novel approach that concurrently trains a code generation model and a test generation model, utilizing execution feedback to refine and enhance the performance of both. We introduce two strategies for test and code data augmentation and a new scoring function for code and test ranking. We experiment on the APPS dataset and demonstrate that our approach can effectively generate and augment test cases, filter and synthesize correct code solutions, and rank the quality of generated code and tests. The results demonstrate that our models, when iteratively trained with an increasing number of test cases and code solutions, outperform those trained on the original dataset.
The effective training and evaluation of retrieval systems require a substantial amount of relevance judgments, which are traditionally collected from human assessors -- a process that is both costly and time-consuming. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating relevance labels for search tasks, offering a potential alternative to manual assessments. Current approaches often rely on a single LLM, such as GPT-4, which, despite being effective, are expensive and prone to intra-model biases that can favour systems leveraging similar models. In this work, we introduce JudgeBlender, a framework that employs smaller, open-source models to provide relevance judgments by combining evaluations across multiple LLMs (LLMBlender) or multiple prompts (PromptBlender). By leveraging the LLMJudge benchmark [18], we compare JudgeBlender with state-of-the-art methods and the top performers in the LLMJudge challenge. Our results show that JudgeBlender achieves competitive performance, demonstrating that very large models are often unnecessary for reliable relevance assessments.
Encoding video content into compact latent tokens has become a fundamental step in video generation and understanding, driven by the need to address the inherent redundancy in pixel-level representations. Consequently, there is a growing demand for high-performance, open-source video tokenizers as video-centric research gains prominence. We introduce VidTok, a versatile video tokenizer that delivers state-of-the-art performance in both continuous and discrete tokenizations. VidTok incorporates several key advancements over existing approaches: 1) model architecture such as convolutional layers and up/downsampling modules; 2) to address the training instability and codebook collapse commonly associated with conventional Vector Quantization (VQ), we integrate Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) into discrete video tokenization; 3) improved training strategies, including a two-stage training process and the use of reduced frame rates. By integrating these advancements, VidTok achieves substantial improvements over existing methods, demonstrating superior performance across multiple metrics, including PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, and FVD, under standardized evaluation settings.
Recent advancements in text-to-speech and speech conversion technologies have enabled the creation of highly convincing synthetic speech. While these innovations offer numerous practical benefits, they also cause significant security challenges when maliciously misused. Therefore, there is an urgent need to detect these synthetic speech signals. Phoneme features provide a powerful speech representation for deepfake detection. However, previous phoneme-based detection approaches typically focused on specific phonemes, overlooking temporal inconsistencies across the entire phoneme sequence. In this paper, we develop a new mechanism for detecting speech deepfakes by identifying the inconsistencies of phoneme-level speech features. We design an adaptive phoneme pooling technique that extracts sample-specific phoneme-level features from frame-level speech data. By applying this technique to features extracted by pre-trained audio models on previously unseen deepfake datasets, we demonstrate that deepfake samples often exhibit phoneme-level inconsistencies when compared to genuine speech. To further enhance detection accuracy, we propose a deepfake detector that uses a graph attention network to model the temporal dependencies of phoneme-level features. Additionally, we introduce a random phoneme substitution augmentation technique to increase feature diversity during training. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method over existing state-of-the-art detection methods.
Model personalization allows a set of individuals, each facing a different learning task, to train models that are more accurate for each person than those they could develop individually. The goals of personalization are captured in a variety of formal frameworks, such as multitask learning and metalearning. Combining data for model personalization poses risks for privacy because the output of an individual's model can depend on the data of other individuals. In this work we undertake a systematic study of differentially private personalized learning. Our first main contribution is to construct a taxonomy of formal frameworks for private personalized learning. This taxonomy captures different formal frameworks for learning as well as different threat models for the attacker. Our second main contribution is to prove separations between the personalized learning problems corresponding to different choices. In particular, we prove a novel separation between private multitask learning and private metalearning.
Causal inference has shown potential in enhancing the predictive accuracy, fairness, robustness, and explainability of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models by capturing causal relationships among variables. The emergence of generative Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly impacted various NLP domains, particularly through their advanced reasoning capabilities. This survey focuses on evaluating and improving LLMs from a causal view in the following areas: understanding and improving the LLMs' reasoning capacity, addressing fairness and safety issues in LLMs, complementing LLMs with explanations, and handling multimodality. Meanwhile, LLMs' strong reasoning capacities can in turn contribute to the field of causal inference by aiding causal relationship discovery and causal effect estimations. This review explores the interplay between causal inference frameworks and LLMs from both perspectives, emphasizing their collective potential to further the development of more advanced and equitable artificial intelligence systems.
Images can convey rich semantics and induce various emotions in viewers. Recently, with the rapid advancement of emotional intelligence and the explosive growth of visual data, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to affective image content analysis (AICA). In this survey, we will comprehensively review the development of AICA in the recent two decades, especially focusing on the state-of-the-art methods with respect to three main challenges -- the affective gap, perception subjectivity, and label noise and absence. We begin with an introduction to the key emotion representation models that have been widely employed in AICA and description of available datasets for performing evaluation with quantitative comparison of label noise and dataset bias. We then summarize and compare the representative approaches on (1) emotion feature extraction, including both handcrafted and deep features, (2) learning methods on dominant emotion recognition, personalized emotion prediction, emotion distribution learning, and learning from noisy data or few labels, and (3) AICA based applications. Finally, we discuss some challenges and promising research directions in the future, such as image content and context understanding, group emotion clustering, and viewer-image interaction.
Most existing works in visual question answering (VQA) are dedicated to improving the accuracy of predicted answers, while disregarding the explanations. We argue that the explanation for an answer is of the same or even more importance compared with the answer itself, since it makes the question and answering process more understandable and traceable. To this end, we propose a new task of VQA-E (VQA with Explanation), where the computational models are required to generate an explanation with the predicted answer. We first construct a new dataset, and then frame the VQA-E problem in a multi-task learning architecture. Our VQA-E dataset is automatically derived from the VQA v2 dataset by intelligently exploiting the available captions. We have conducted a user study to validate the quality of explanations synthesized by our method. We quantitatively show that the additional supervision from explanations can not only produce insightful textual sentences to justify the answers, but also improve the performance of answer prediction. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin on the VQA v2 dataset.
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