With the climate change context, many prospective studies, generally encompassing all areas of society, imagine possible futures to expand the range of options. The role of digital technologies within these possible futures is rarely specifically targeted. Which digital technologies and methodologies do these studies envision in a world that has mitigated and adapted to climate change? In this paper, we propose a typology for scenarios to survey digital technologies and their applications in 14 prospective studies and their corresponding 35 future scenarios. Our finding is that all the scenarios consider digital technology to be present in the future. We observe that only a few of them question our relationship with digital technology and all aspects related to its materiality, and none of the general studies envision breakthroughs concerning technologies used today. Our result demonstrates the lack of a systemic view of information and communication technologies. We therefore argue for new prospective studies to envision the future of ICT.
Bridging the gap between diffusion models and human preferences is crucial for their integration into practical generative workflows. While optimizing downstream reward models has emerged as a promising alignment strategy, concerns arise regarding the risk of excessive optimization with learned reward models, which potentially compromises ground-truth performance. In this work, we confront the reward overoptimization problem in diffusion model alignment through the lenses of both inductive and primacy biases. We first identify the divergence of current methods from the temporal inductive bias inherent in the multi-step denoising process of diffusion models as a potential source of overoptimization. Then, we surprisingly discover that dormant neurons in our critic model act as a regularization against overoptimization, while active neurons reflect primacy bias in this setting. Motivated by these observations, we propose Temporal Diffusion Policy Optimization with critic active neuron Reset (TDPO-R), a policy gradient algorithm that exploits the temporal inductive bias of intermediate timesteps, along with a novel reset strategy that targets active neurons to counteract the primacy bias. Empirical results demonstrate the superior efficacy of our algorithms in mitigating reward overoptimization.
Prompting is the primary way to utilize the multitask capabilities of language models (LMs), but prompts occupy valuable space in the input context window, and repeatedly encoding the same prompt is computationally inefficient. Finetuning and distillation methods allow for specialization of LMs without prompting, but require retraining the model for each task. To avoid this trade-off entirely, we present gisting, which trains an LM to compress prompts into smaller sets of "gist" tokens which can be cached and reused for compute efficiency. Gist models can be trained with no additional cost over standard instruction finetuning by simply modifying Transformer attention masks to encourage prompt compression. On decoder (LLaMA-7B) and encoder-decoder (FLAN-T5-XXL) LMs, gisting enables up to 26x compression of prompts, resulting in up to 40% FLOPs reductions, 4.2% wall time speedups, and storage savings, all with minimal loss in output quality.
The evaluation of explainable artificial intelligence is challenging, because automated and human-centred metrics of explanation quality may diverge. To clarify their relationship, we investigated whether human and artificial image classification will benefit from the same visual explanations. In three experiments, we analysed human reaction times, errors, and subjective ratings while participants classified image segments. These segments either reflected human attention (eye movements, manual selections) or the outputs of two attribution methods explaining a ResNet (Grad-CAM, XRAI). We also had this model classify the same segments. Humans and the model largely agreed on the interpretability of attribution methods: Grad-CAM was easily interpretable for indoor scenes and landscapes, but not for objects, while the reverse pattern was observed for XRAI. Conversely, human and model performance diverged for human-generated segments. Our results caution against general statements about interpretability, as it varies with the explanation method, the explained images, and the agent interpreting them.
In the field of domain generalization, the task of constructing a predictive model capable of generalizing to a target domain without access to target data remains challenging. This problem becomes further complicated when considering evolving dynamics between domains. While various approaches have been proposed to address this issue, a comprehensive understanding of the underlying generalization theory is still lacking. In this study, we contribute novel theoretic results that aligning conditional distribution leads to the reduction of generalization bounds. Our analysis serves as a key motivation for solving the Temporal Domain Generalization (TDG) problem through the application of Koopman Neural Operators, resulting in Temporal Koopman Networks (TKNets). By employing Koopman Operators, we effectively address the time-evolving distributions encountered in TDG using the principles of Koopman theory, where measurement functions are sought to establish linear transition relations between evolving domains. Through empirical evaluations conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets, we validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
We consider the task of constructing confidence intervals with differential privacy. We propose two private variants of the non-parametric bootstrap, which privately compute the median of the results of multiple ``little'' bootstraps run on partitions of the data and give asymptotic bounds on the coverage error of the resulting confidence intervals. For a fixed differential privacy parameter $\epsilon$, our methods enjoy the same error rates as that of the non-private bootstrap to within logarithmic factors in the sample size $n$. We empirically validate the performance of our methods for mean estimation, median estimation, and logistic regression with both real and synthetic data. Our methods achieve similar coverage accuracy to existing methods (and non-private baselines) while providing notably shorter ($\gtrsim 10$ times) confidence intervals than previous approaches.
We introduce the framework of the left-hand side restricted promise constraint satisfaction problem, which includes problems like approximating clique number of a graph. We study the parameterized complexity of problems in this class and provide some initial results. The main technical contribution is a sufficient condition for W[1]-hardness which, in particular, covers left-hand side restricted bounded arity CSPs.
Background Urinary incontinence (UI) is a common health problem that affects the life and health quality of millions of people in the US. We aimed to investigate the association between sitting time and UI. Methods Across-sectional survey of adult participants of National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2007-2018 was performed. Weighted multivariable logistic and regression models were conducted to assess the association between sitting time and UI. Results A total of 22916 participants were enrolled. Prolonged sitting time was associated with urgent UI (UUI, Odds ratio [OR] = 1.184, 95% Confidence interval [CI] = 1.076 to 1.302, P = 0.001). Compared with patients with sitting time shorter than 7 hours, moderate activity increased the risk of prolonged sitting time over 7 hours in the fully-adjusted model (OR = 2.537, 95% CI = 1.419 to 4.536, P = 0.002). Sitting time over 7 hours was related to male mixed UI (MUI, OR = 1.581, 95% CI = 1.129 to 2.213, P = 0.010), and female stress UI (SUI, OR = 0.884, 95% CI = 0.795 to 0.983, P = 0.026) in the fully-adjusted model. Conclusions Prolonged sedentary sitting time (> 7 hours) indicated a high risk of UUI in all populations, female SUI and male MUI. Compared with sitting time shorter than 7 hours, the moderate activity could not reverse the risk of prolonged sitting, which warranted further studies for confirmation.
In many complex systems, whether biological or artificial, the thermodynamic costs of communication among their components are large. These systems also tend to split information transmitted between any two components across multiple channels. A common hypothesis is that such inverse multiplexing strategies reduce total thermodynamic costs. So far, however, there have been no physics-based results supporting this hypothesis. This gap existed partially because we have lacked a theoretical framework that addresses the interplay of thermodynamics and information in off-equilibrium systems. Here we present the first study that rigorously combines such a framework, stochastic thermodynamics, with Shannon information theory. We develop a minimal model that captures the fundamental features common to a wide variety of communication systems, and study the relationship between the entropy production of the communication process and the channel capacity, the canonical measure of the communication capability of a channel. In contrast to what is assumed in previous works not based on first principles, we show that the entropy production is not always a convex and monotonically increasing function of the channel capacity. However, those two properties are recovered for sufficiently high channel capacity. These results clarify when and how to split a single communication stream across multiple channels.
Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) as an emerging technique have shown superior capacity of dealing with heterogeneous information network (HIN). However, most HGNNs follow a semi-supervised learning manner, which notably limits their wide use in reality since labels are usually scarce in real applications. Recently, contrastive learning, a self-supervised method, becomes one of the most exciting learning paradigms and shows great potential when there are no labels. In this paper, we study the problem of self-supervised HGNNs and propose a novel co-contrastive learning mechanism for HGNNs, named HeCo. Different from traditional contrastive learning which only focuses on contrasting positive and negative samples, HeCo employs cross-viewcontrastive mechanism. Specifically, two views of a HIN (network schema and meta-path views) are proposed to learn node embeddings, so as to capture both of local and high-order structures simultaneously. Then the cross-view contrastive learning, as well as a view mask mechanism, is proposed, which is able to extract the positive and negative embeddings from two views. This enables the two views to collaboratively supervise each other and finally learn high-level node embeddings. Moreover, two extensions of HeCo are designed to generate harder negative samples with high quality, which further boosts the performance of HeCo. Extensive experiments conducted on a variety of real-world networks show the superior performance of the proposed methods over the state-of-the-arts.
Although measuring held-out accuracy has been the primary approach to evaluate generalization, it often overestimates the performance of NLP models, while alternative approaches for evaluating models either focus on individual tasks or on specific behaviors. Inspired by principles of behavioral testing in software engineering, we introduce CheckList, a task-agnostic methodology for testing NLP models. CheckList includes a matrix of general linguistic capabilities and test types that facilitate comprehensive test ideation, as well as a software tool to generate a large and diverse number of test cases quickly. We illustrate the utility of CheckList with tests for three tasks, identifying critical failures in both commercial and state-of-art models. In a user study, a team responsible for a commercial sentiment analysis model found new and actionable bugs in an extensively tested model. In another user study, NLP practitioners with CheckList created twice as many tests, and found almost three times as many bugs as users without it.