The development of fair and ethical AI systems requires careful consideration of bias mitigation, an area often overlooked or ignored. In this study, we introduce a novel and efficient approach for addressing biases called Targeted Data Augmentation (TDA), which leverages classical data augmentation techniques to tackle the pressing issue of bias in data and models. Unlike the laborious task of removing biases, our method proposes to insert biases instead, resulting in improved performance. To identify biases, we annotated two diverse datasets: a dataset of clinical skin lesions and a dataset of male and female faces. These bias annotations are published for the first time in this study, providing a valuable resource for future research. Through Counterfactual Bias Insertion, we discovered that biases associated with the frame, ruler, and glasses had a significant impact on models. By randomly introducing biases during training, we mitigated these biases and achieved a substantial decrease in bias measures, ranging from two-fold to more than 50-fold, while maintaining a negligible increase in the error rate.
With the emergence of Transformer architectures and their powerful understanding of textual data, a new horizon has opened up to predict the molecular properties based on text description. While SMILES are the most common form of representation, they are lacking robustness, rich information and canonicity, which limit their effectiveness in becoming generalizable representations. Here, we present GPT-MolBERTa, a self-supervised large language model (LLM) which uses detailed textual descriptions of molecules to predict their properties. A text based description of 326000 molecules were collected using ChatGPT and used to train LLM to learn the representation of molecules. To predict the properties for the downstream tasks, both BERT and RoBERTa models were used in the finetuning stage. Experiments show that GPT-MolBERTa performs well on various molecule property benchmarks, and approaching state of the art performance in regression tasks. Additionally, further analysis of the attention mechanisms show that GPT-MolBERTa is able to pick up important information from the input textual data, displaying the interpretability of the model.
Historical behaviors have shown great effect and potential in various prediction tasks, including recommendation and information retrieval. The overall historical behaviors are various but noisy while search behaviors are always sparse. Most existing approaches in personalized search ranking adopt the sparse search behaviors to learn representation with bottleneck, which do not sufficiently exploit the crucial long-term interest. In fact, there is no doubt that user long-term interest is various but noisy for instant search, and how to exploit it well still remains an open problem. To tackle this problem, in this work, we propose a novel model named Query-dominant user Interest Network (QIN), including two cascade units to filter the raw user behaviors and reweigh the behavior subsequences. Specifically, we propose a relevance search unit (RSU), which aims to search a subsequence relevant to the query first and then search the sub-subsequences relevant to the target item. These items are then fed into an attention unit called Fused Attention Unit (FAU). It should be able to calculate attention scores from the ID field and attribute field separately, and then adaptively fuse the item embedding and content embedding based on the user engagement of past period. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over state-of-the-art methods. The QIN now has been successfully deployed on Kuaishou search, an online video search platform, and obtained 7.6% improvement on CTR.
Transferability estimation aims to provide heuristics for quantifying how suitable a pre-trained model is for a specific downstream task, without fine-tuning them all. Prior studies have revealed that well-trained models exhibit the phenomenon of Neural Collapse. Based on a widely used neural collapse metric in existing literature, we observe a strong correlation between the neural collapse of pre-trained models and their corresponding fine-tuned models. Inspired by this observation, we propose a novel method termed Fair Collapse (FaCe) for transferability estimation by comprehensively measuring the degree of neural collapse in the pre-trained model. Typically, FaCe comprises two different terms: the variance collapse term, which assesses the class separation and within-class compactness, and the class fairness term, which quantifies the fairness of the pre-trained model towards each class. We investigate FaCe on a variety of pre-trained classification models across different network architectures, source datasets, and training loss functions. Results show that FaCe yields state-of-the-art performance on different tasks including image classification, semantic segmentation, and text classification, which demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our method.
Decentralization initiatives like Solid enable data owners to control who has access to their data and to stimulate innovation by creating both application and data markets. Once data owners share their data with others, though, it is no longer possible for them to control how their data are used. To address this issue, we propose a usage control architecture to monitor compliance with usage control policies. To this end, our solution relies on blockchain and trusted execution environments. We demonstrate the potential of the architecture by describing the various workflows needed to realize a motivating use case scenario for data markets. Additionally, we discuss the merits of the approach from privacy, security, integrateability, and affordability perspectives.
Existing score-distilling text-to-3D generation techniques, despite their considerable promise, often encounter the view inconsistency problem. One of the most notable issues is the Janus problem, where the most canonical view of an object (\textit{e.g}., face or head) appears in other views. In this work, we explore existing frameworks for score-distilling text-to-3D generation and identify the main causes of the view inconsistency problem -- the embedded bias of 2D diffusion models. Based on these findings, we propose two approaches to debias the score-distillation frameworks for view-consistent text-to-3D generation. Our first approach, called score debiasing, involves cutting off the score estimated by 2D diffusion models and gradually increasing the truncation value throughout the optimization process. Our second approach, called prompt debiasing, identifies conflicting words between user prompts and view prompts using a language model, and adjusts the discrepancy between view prompts and the viewing direction of an object. Our experimental results show that our methods improve the realism of the generated 3D objects by significantly reducing artifacts and achieve a good trade-off between faithfulness to the 2D diffusion models and 3D consistency with little overhead. Our project page is available at~\url{//susunghong.github.io/Debiased-Score-Distillation-Sampling/}.
Observations from dynamical systems often exhibit irregularities, such as censoring, where values are recorded only if they fall within a certain range. Censoring is ubiquitous in practice, due to saturating sensors, limit-of-detection effects, and image-frame effects. In light of recent developments on learning linear dynamical systems (LDSs), and on censored statistics with independent data, we revisit the decades-old problem of learning an LDS, from censored observations (Lee and Maddala (1985); Zeger and Brookmeyer (1986)). Here, the learner observes the state $x_t \in \mathbb{R}^d$ if and only if $x_t$ belongs to some set $S_t \subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$. We develop the first computationally and statistically efficient algorithm for learning the system, assuming only oracle access to the sets $S_t$. Our algorithm, Stochastic Online Newton with Switching Gradients, is a novel second-order method that builds on the Online Newton Step (ONS) of Hazan et al. (2007). Our Switching-Gradient scheme does not always use (stochastic) gradients of the function we want to optimize, which we call "censor-aware" function. Instead, in each iteration, it performs a simple test to decide whether to use the censor-aware, or another "censor-oblivious" function, for getting a stochastic gradient. In our analysis, we consider a "generic" Online Newton method, which uses arbitrary vectors instead of gradients, and we prove an error-bound for it. This can be used to appropriately design these vectors, leading to our Switching-Gradient scheme. This framework significantly deviates from the recent long line of works on censored statistics (e.g., Daskalakis et al. (2018); Kontonis et al. (2019); Daskalakis et al. (2019)), which apply Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), and their analysis reduces to establishing conditions for off-the-shelf SGD-bounds.
As the adoption of IoT-based smart homes continues to grow, the importance of addressing potential conflicts becomes increasingly vital for ensuring seamless functionality and user satisfaction. In this survey, we introduce a novel conflict taxonomy, complete with formal definitions of each conflict type that may arise within the smart home environment. We design an advanced conflict model to effectively categorize these conflicts, setting the stage for our in-depth review of recent research in the field. By employing our proposed model, we systematically classify conflicts and present a comprehensive overview of cutting-edge conflict detection approaches. This extensive analysis allows us to highlight similarities, clarify significant differences, and uncover prevailing trends in conflict detection techniques. In conclusion, we shed light on open issues and suggest promising avenues for future research to foster accelerated development and deployment of IoT-based smart homes, ultimately enhancing their overall performance and user experience.
Recently, graph neural networks have been gaining a lot of attention to simulate dynamical systems due to their inductive nature leading to zero-shot generalizability. Similarly, physics-informed inductive biases in deep-learning frameworks have been shown to give superior performance in learning the dynamics of physical systems. There is a growing volume of literature that attempts to combine these two approaches. Here, we evaluate the performance of thirteen different graph neural networks, namely, Hamiltonian and Lagrangian graph neural networks, graph neural ODE, and their variants with explicit constraints and different architectures. We briefly explain the theoretical formulation highlighting the similarities and differences in the inductive biases and graph architecture of these systems. We evaluate these models on spring, pendulum, gravitational, and 3D deformable solid systems to compare the performance in terms of rollout error, conserved quantities such as energy and momentum, and generalizability to unseen system sizes. Our study demonstrates that GNNs with additional inductive biases, such as explicit constraints and decoupling of kinetic and potential energies, exhibit significantly enhanced performance. Further, all the physics-informed GNNs exhibit zero-shot generalizability to system sizes an order of magnitude larger than the training system, thus providing a promising route to simulate large-scale realistic systems.
The new era of technology has brought us to the point where it is convenient for people to share their opinions over an abundance of platforms. These platforms have a provision for the users to express themselves in multiple forms of representations, including text, images, videos, and audio. This, however, makes it difficult for users to obtain all the key information about a topic, making the task of automatic multi-modal summarization (MMS) essential. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the existing research in the area of MMS.
Graphical causal inference as pioneered by Judea Pearl arose from research on artificial intelligence (AI), and for a long time had little connection to the field of machine learning. This article discusses where links have been and should be established, introducing key concepts along the way. It argues that the hard open problems of machine learning and AI are intrinsically related to causality, and explains how the field is beginning to understand them.