Age verification, which is a mandatory legal requirement for delivering certain age-appropriate services or products, has recently been emphasized around the globe to ensure online safety for children. The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has facilitated the recent development of some cutting-edge age-verification technologies, particularly using biometrics. However, successful deployment and mass acceptance of these technologies are significantly dependent on the corresponding socio-economic and regulatory context. This paper reviews such key dynamics for improvising age-verification technologies in Canada. It is particularly essential for such technologies to be inclusive, transparent, adaptable, privacy-preserving, and secure. Effective collaboration between academia, government, and industry entities can help to meet the growing demands for age-verification services in Canada while maintaining a user-centric approach.
Chain-of-thought reasoning, a cognitive process fundamental to human intelligence, has garnered significant attention in the realm of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. However, there still remains a lack of a comprehensive survey for this arena. To this end, we take the first step and present a thorough survey of this research field carefully and widely. We use X-of-Thought to refer to Chain-of-Thought in a broad sense. In detail, we systematically organize the current research according to the taxonomies of methods, including XoT construction, XoT structure variants, and enhanced XoT. Additionally, we describe XoT with frontier applications, covering planning, tool use, and distillation. Furthermore, we address challenges and discuss some future directions, including faithfulness, multi-modal, and theory. We hope this survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers seeking to innovate within the domain of chain-of-thought reasoning.
Human intelligence thrives on the concept of cognitive synergy, where collaboration and information integration among different cognitive processes yield superior outcomes compared to individual cognitive processes in isolation. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising performance as general task-solving agents, they still struggle with tasks that require intensive domain knowledge and complex reasoning. In this work, we propose Solo Performance Prompting (SPP), which transforms a single LLM into a cognitive synergist by engaging in multi-turn self-collaboration with multiple personas. A cognitive synergist refers to an intelligent agent that collaborates with multiple minds, combining their individual strengths and knowledge, to enhance problem-solving and overall performance in complex tasks. By dynamically identifying and simulating different personas based on task inputs, SPP unleashes the potential of cognitive synergy in LLMs. We have discovered that assigning multiple, fine-grained personas in LLMs elicits better problem-solving abilities compared to using a single or fixed number of personas. We evaluate SPP on three challenging tasks: Trivia Creative Writing, Codenames Collaborative, and Logic Grid Puzzle, encompassing both knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive types. Unlike previous works, such as Chain-of-Thought, that solely enhance the reasoning abilities in LLMs, SPP effectively elicits internal knowledge acquisition abilities, reduces hallucination, and maintains strong reasoning capabilities. Code, data, and prompts can be found at: //github.com/MikeWangWZHL/Solo-Performance-Prompting.git.
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.
A fundamental goal of scientific research is to learn about causal relationships. However, despite its critical role in the life and social sciences, causality has not had the same importance in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which has traditionally placed more emphasis on predictive tasks. This distinction is beginning to fade, with an emerging area of interdisciplinary research at the convergence of causal inference and language processing. Still, research on causality in NLP remains scattered across domains without unified definitions, benchmark datasets and clear articulations of the remaining challenges. In this survey, we consolidate research across academic areas and situate it in the broader NLP landscape. We introduce the statistical challenge of estimating causal effects, encompassing settings where text is used as an outcome, treatment, or as a means to address confounding. In addition, we explore potential uses of causal inference to improve the performance, robustness, fairness, and interpretability of NLP models. We thus provide a unified overview of causal inference for the computational linguistics community.
With the advances of data-driven machine learning research, a wide variety of prediction problems have been tackled. It has become critical to explore how machine learning and specifically deep learning methods can be exploited to analyse healthcare data. A major limitation of existing methods has been the focus on grid-like data; however, the structure of physiological recordings are often irregular and unordered which makes it difficult to conceptualise them as a matrix. As such, graph neural networks have attracted significant attention by exploiting implicit information that resides in a biological system, with interactive nodes connected by edges whose weights can be either temporal associations or anatomical junctions. In this survey, we thoroughly review the different types of graph architectures and their applications in healthcare. We provide an overview of these methods in a systematic manner, organized by their domain of application including functional connectivity, anatomical structure and electrical-based analysis. We also outline the limitations of existing techniques and discuss potential directions for future research.
Learning disentanglement aims at finding a low dimensional representation which consists of multiple explanatory and generative factors of the observational data. The framework of variational autoencoder (VAE) is commonly used to disentangle independent factors from observations. However, in real scenarios, factors with semantics are not necessarily independent. Instead, there might be an underlying causal structure which renders these factors dependent. We thus propose a new VAE based framework named CausalVAE, which includes a Causal Layer to transform independent exogenous factors into causal endogenous ones that correspond to causally related concepts in data. We further analyze the model identifiabitily, showing that the proposed model learned from observations recovers the true one up to a certain degree. Experiments are conducted on various datasets, including synthetic and real word benchmark CelebA. Results show that the causal representations learned by CausalVAE are semantically interpretable, and their causal relationship as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is identified with good accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed CausalVAE model is able to generate counterfactual data through "do-operation" to the causal factors.
Explainable recommendation attempts to develop models that generate not only high-quality recommendations but also intuitive explanations. The explanations may either be post-hoc or directly come from an explainable model (also called interpretable or transparent model in some context). Explainable recommendation tries to address the problem of why: by providing explanations to users or system designers, it helps humans to understand why certain items are recommended by the algorithm, where the human can either be users or system designers. Explainable recommendation helps to improve the transparency, persuasiveness, effectiveness, trustworthiness, and satisfaction of recommendation systems. In this survey, we review works on explainable recommendation in or before the year of 2019. We first highlight the position of explainable recommendation in recommender system research by categorizing recommendation problems into the 5W, i.e., what, when, who, where, and why. We then conduct a comprehensive survey of explainable recommendation on three perspectives: 1) We provide a chronological research timeline of explainable recommendation, including user study approaches in the early years and more recent model-based approaches. 2) We provide a two-dimensional taxonomy to classify existing explainable recommendation research: one dimension is the information source (or display style) of the explanations, and the other dimension is the algorithmic mechanism to generate explainable recommendations. 3) We summarize how explainable recommendation applies to different recommendation tasks, such as product recommendation, social recommendation, and POI recommendation. We also devote a section to discuss the explanation perspectives in broader IR and AI/ML research. We end the survey by discussing potential future directions to promote the explainable recommendation research area and beyond.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.
Object detection typically assumes that training and test data are drawn from an identical distribution, which, however, does not always hold in practice. Such a distribution mismatch will lead to a significant performance drop. In this work, we aim to improve the cross-domain robustness of object detection. We tackle the domain shift on two levels: 1) the image-level shift, such as image style, illumination, etc, and 2) the instance-level shift, such as object appearance, size, etc. We build our approach based on the recent state-of-the-art Faster R-CNN model, and design two domain adaptation components, on image level and instance level, to reduce the domain discrepancy. The two domain adaptation components are based on H-divergence theory, and are implemented by learning a domain classifier in adversarial training manner. The domain classifiers on different levels are further reinforced with a consistency regularization to learn a domain-invariant region proposal network (RPN) in the Faster R-CNN model. We evaluate our newly proposed approach using multiple datasets including Cityscapes, KITTI, SIM10K, etc. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for robust object detection in various domain shift scenarios.