Across the dynamic business landscape today, enterprises face an ever-increasing range of challenges. These include the constantly evolving regulatory environment, the growing demand for personalization within software applications, and the heightened emphasis on governance. In response to these multifaceted demands, large enterprises have been adopting automation that spans from the optimization of core business processes to the enhancement of customer experiences. Indeed, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a pivotal element of modern software systems. In this context, data plays an indispensable role. AI-centric software systems based on supervised learning and operating at an industrial scale require large volumes of training data to perform effectively. Moreover, the incorporation of generative AI has led to a growing demand for adequate evaluation benchmarks. Our experience in this field has revealed that the requirement for large datasets for training and evaluation introduces a host of intricate challenges. This book chapter explores the evolving landscape of Software Engineering (SE) in general, and Requirements Engineering (RE) in particular, in this era marked by AI integration. We discuss challenges that arise while integrating Natural Language Processing (NLP) and generative AI into enterprise-critical software systems. The chapter provides practical insights, solutions, and examples to equip readers with the knowledge and tools necessary for effectively building solutions with NLP at their cores. We also reflect on how these text data-centric tasks sit together with the traditional RE process. We also highlight new RE tasks that may be necessary for handling the increasingly important text data-centricity involved in developing software systems.
In the rapidly advancing realm of visual generation, diffusion models have revolutionized the landscape, marking a significant shift in capabilities with their impressive text-guided generative functions. However, relying solely on text for conditioning these models does not fully cater to the varied and complex requirements of different applications and scenarios. Acknowledging this shortfall, a variety of studies aim to control pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) models to support novel conditions. In this survey, we undertake a thorough review of the literature on controllable generation with T2I diffusion models, covering both the theoretical foundations and practical advancements in this domain. Our review begins with a brief introduction to the basics of denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) and widely used T2I diffusion models. We then reveal the controlling mechanisms of diffusion models, theoretically analyzing how novel conditions are introduced into the denoising process for conditional generation. Additionally, we offer a detailed overview of research in this area, organizing it into distinct categories from the condition perspective: generation with specific conditions, generation with multiple conditions, and universal controllable generation. For an exhaustive list of the controllable generation literature surveyed, please refer to our curated repository at \url{//github.com/PRIV-Creation/Awesome-Controllable-T2I-Diffusion-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.
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
Autonomous driving has achieved a significant milestone in research and development over the last decade. There is increasing interest in the field as the deployment of self-operating vehicles on roads promises safer and more ecologically friendly transportation systems. With the rise of computationally powerful artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, autonomous vehicles can sense their environment with high precision, make safe real-time decisions, and operate more reliably without human interventions. However, intelligent decision-making in autonomous cars is not generally understandable by humans in the current state of the art, and such deficiency hinders this technology from being socially acceptable. Hence, aside from making safe real-time decisions, the AI systems of autonomous vehicles also need to explain how these decisions are constructed in order to be regulatory compliant across many jurisdictions. Our study sheds a comprehensive light on developing explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) approaches for autonomous vehicles. In particular, we make the following contributions. First, we provide a thorough overview of the present gaps with respect to explanations in the state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle industry. We then show the taxonomy of explanations and explanation receivers in this field. Thirdly, we propose a framework for an architecture of end-to-end autonomous driving systems and justify the role of XAI in both debugging and regulating such systems. Finally, as future research directions, we provide a field guide on XAI approaches for autonomous driving that can improve operational safety and transparency towards achieving public approval by regulators, manufacturers, and all engaged stakeholders.
Australia is a leading AI nation with strong allies and partnerships. Australia has prioritised robotics, AI, and autonomous systems to develop sovereign capability for the military. Australia commits to Article 36 reviews of all new means and methods of warfare to ensure weapons and weapons systems are operated within acceptable systems of control. Additionally, Australia has undergone significant reviews of the risks of AI to human rights and within intelligence organisations and has committed to producing ethics guidelines and frameworks in Security and Defence. Australia is committed to OECD's values-based principles for the responsible stewardship of trustworthy AI as well as adopting a set of National AI ethics principles. While Australia has not adopted an AI governance framework specifically for Defence; Defence Science has published 'A Method for Ethical AI in Defence' (MEAID) technical report which includes a framework and pragmatic tools for managing ethical and legal risks for military applications of AI.
Object detectors usually achieve promising results with the supervision of complete instance annotations. However, their performance is far from satisfactory with sparse instance annotations. Most existing methods for sparsely annotated object detection either re-weight the loss of hard negative samples or convert the unlabeled instances into ignored regions to reduce the interference of false negatives. We argue that these strategies are insufficient since they can at most alleviate the negative effect caused by missing annotations. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective mechanism, called Co-mining, for sparsely annotated object detection. In our Co-mining, two branches of a Siamese network predict the pseudo-label sets for each other. To enhance multi-view learning and better mine unlabeled instances, the original image and corresponding augmented image are used as the inputs of two branches of the Siamese network, respectively. Co-mining can serve as a general training mechanism applied to most of modern object detectors. Experiments are performed on MS COCO dataset with three different sparsely annotated settings using two typical frameworks: anchor-based detector RetinaNet and anchor-free detector FCOS. Experimental results show that our Co-mining with RetinaNet achieves 1.4%~2.1% improvements compared with different baselines and surpasses existing methods under the same sparsely annotated setting.
This work considers the question of how convenient access to copious data impacts our ability to learn causal effects and relations. In what ways is learning causality in the era of big data different from -- or the same as -- the traditional one? To answer this question, this survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of both traditional and frontier methods in learning causality and relations along with the connections between causality and machine learning. This work points out on a case-by-case basis how big data facilitates, complicates, or motivates each approach.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.
Conversational systems have come a long way after decades of research and development, from Eliza and Parry in the 60's and 70's, to task-completion systems as in the ATIS project, to intelligent personal assistants such as Siri, and to today's social chatbots like XiaoIce. Social chatbots' appeal lies in not only their ability to respond to users' diverse requests, but also in being able to establish an emotional connection with users. The latter is done by satisfying the users' essential needs for communication, affection, and social belonging. The design of social chatbots must focus on user engagement and take both intellectual quotient (IQ) and emotional quotient (EQ) into account. Users should want to engage with the social chatbot; as such, we define the success metric for social chatbots as conversation-turns per session (CPS). Using XiaoIce as an illustrative example, we discuss key technologies in building social chatbots from core chat to visual sense to skills. We also show how XiaoIce can dynamically recognize emotion and engage the user throughout long conversations with appropriate interpersonal responses. As we become the first generation of humans ever living with AI, social chatbots that are well-designed to be both useful and empathic will soon be ubiquitous.