Misinformation is a global concern and limiting its spread is critical for protecting democracy, public health, and consumers. We propose that consumers' own social media post-histories are an underutilized data source to study what leads them to share links to fake-news. In Study 1, we explore how textual cues extracted from post-histories distinguish fake-news sharers from random social media users and others in the misinformation ecosystem. Among other results, we find across two datasets that fake-news sharers use more words related to anger, religion and power. In Study 2, we show that adding textual cues from post-histories improves the accuracy of models to predict who is likely to share fake-news. In Study 3, we provide a preliminary test of two mitigation strategies deduced from Study 1 - activating religious values and reducing anger - and find that they reduce fake-news sharing and sharing more generally. In Study 4, we combine survey responses with users' verified Twitter post-histories and show that using empowering language in a fact-checking browser extension ad increases download intentions. Our research encourages marketers, misinformation scholars, and practitioners to use post-histories to develop theories and test interventions to reduce the spread of misinformation.
While multi-exit neural networks are regarded as a promising solution for making efficient inference via early exits, combating adversarial attacks remains a challenging problem. In multi-exit networks, due to the high dependency among different submodels, an adversarial example targeting a specific exit not only degrades the performance of the target exit but also reduces the performance of all other exits concurrently. This makes multi-exit networks highly vulnerable to simple adversarial attacks. In this paper, we propose NEO-KD, a knowledge-distillation-based adversarial training strategy that tackles this fundamental challenge based on two key contributions. NEO-KD first resorts to neighbor knowledge distillation to guide the output of the adversarial examples to tend to the ensemble outputs of neighbor exits of clean data. NEO-KD also employs exit-wise orthogonal knowledge distillation for reducing adversarial transferability across different submodels. The result is a significantly improved robustness against adversarial attacks. Experimental results on various datasets/models show that our method achieves the best adversarial accuracy with reduced computation budgets, compared to the baselines relying on existing adversarial training or knowledge distillation techniques for multi-exit networks.
As language technologies gain prominence in real-world settings, it is important to understand how changes to language affect reader perceptions. This can be formalized as the causal effect of varying a linguistic attribute (e.g., sentiment) on a reader's response to the text. In this paper, we introduce Text-Transport, a method for estimation of causal effects from natural language under any text distribution. Current approaches for valid causal effect estimation require strong assumptions about the data, meaning the data from which one can estimate valid causal effects often is not representative of the actual target domain of interest. To address this issue, we leverage the notion of distribution shift to describe an estimator that transports causal effects between domains, bypassing the need for strong assumptions in the target domain. We derive statistical guarantees on the uncertainty of this estimator, and we report empirical results and analyses that support the validity of Text-Transport across data settings. Finally, we use Text-Transport to study a realistic setting--hate speech on social media--in which causal effects do shift significantly between text domains, demonstrating the necessity of transport when conducting causal inference on natural language.
Food security, a global concern, necessitates precise and diverse data-driven solutions to address its multifaceted challenges. This paper explores the integration of AI foundation models across various food security applications, leveraging distinct data types, to overcome the limitations of current deep and machine learning methods. Specifically, we investigate their utilization in crop type mapping, cropland mapping, field delineation and crop yield prediction. By capitalizing on multispectral imagery, meteorological data, soil properties, historical records, and high-resolution satellite imagery, AI foundation models offer a versatile approach. The study demonstrates that AI foundation models enhance food security initiatives by providing accurate predictions, improving resource allocation, and supporting informed decision-making. These models serve as a transformative force in addressing global food security limitations, marking a significant leap toward a sustainable and secure food future.
Public opinion is shaped by the information news media provide, and that information in turn may be shaped by the ideological preferences of media outlets. But while much attention has been devoted to media bias via overt ideological language or topic selection, a more unobtrusive way in which the media shape opinion is via the strategic inclusion or omission of partisan events that may support one side or the other. We develop a latent variable-based framework to predict the ideology of news articles by comparing multiple articles on the same story and identifying partisan events whose inclusion or omission reveals ideology. Our experiments first validate the existence of partisan event selection, and then show that article alignment and cross-document comparison detect partisan events and article ideology better than competitive baselines. Our results reveal the high-level form of media bias, which is present even among mainstream media with strong norms of objectivity and nonpartisanship. Our codebase and dataset are available at //github.com/launchnlp/ATC.
There is a growing interest in device-control systems that can interpret human natural language instructions and execute them on a digital device by directly controlling its user interface. We present a dataset for device-control research, Android in the Wild (AITW), which is orders of magnitude larger than current datasets. The dataset contains human demonstrations of device interactions, including the screens and actions, and corresponding natural language instructions. It consists of 715k episodes spanning 30k unique instructions, four versions of Android (v10-13),and eight device types (Pixel 2 XL to Pixel 6) with varying screen resolutions. It contains multi-step tasks that require semantic understanding of language and visual context. This dataset poses a new challenge: actions available through the user interface must be inferred from their visual appearance. And, instead of simple UI element-based actions, the action space consists of precise gestures (e.g., horizontal scrolls to operate carousel widgets). We organize our dataset to encourage robustness analysis of device-control systems, i.e., how well a system performs in the presence of new task descriptions, new applications, or new platform versions. We develop two agents and report performance across the dataset. The dataset is available at //github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/android_in_the_wild.
Mixed Reality (MR) is gaining prominence in manual task skill learning due to its in-situ, embodied, and immersive experience. To teach manual tasks, current methodologies break the task into hierarchies (tasks into subtasks) and visualize the current subtask and future in terms of causality. Existing psychology literature also shows that humans learn tasks by breaking them into hierarchies. In order to understand the design space of information visualized to the learner for better task understanding, we conducted a user study with 48 users. The study was conducted using a complex assembly task, which involves learning of both actions and tool usage. We aim to explore the effect of visualization of causality in the hierarchy for manual task learning in MR by four options: no causality, event level causality, interaction level causality, and gesture level causality. The results show that the user understands and performs best when all the level of causality is shown to the user. Based on the results, we further provide design recommendations and in-depth discussions for future manual task learning systems.
Reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence that plays a crucial role in activities such as problem solving, decision making, and critical thinking. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing, and there is observation that these models may exhibit reasoning abilities when they are sufficiently large. However, it is not yet clear to what extent LLMs are capable of reasoning. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge on reasoning in LLMs, including techniques for improving and eliciting reasoning in these models, methods and benchmarks for evaluating reasoning abilities, findings and implications of previous research in this field, and suggestions on future directions. Our aim is to provide a detailed and up-to-date review of this topic and stimulate meaningful discussion and future work.
Inspired by the human cognitive system, attention is a mechanism that imitates the human cognitive awareness about specific information, amplifying critical details to focus more on the essential aspects of data. Deep learning has employed attention to boost performance for many applications. Interestingly, the same attention design can suit processing different data modalities and can easily be incorporated into large networks. Furthermore, multiple complementary attention mechanisms can be incorporated in one network. Hence, attention techniques have become extremely attractive. However, the literature lacks a comprehensive survey specific to attention techniques to guide researchers in employing attention in their deep models. Note that, besides being demanding in terms of training data and computational resources, transformers only cover a single category in self-attention out of the many categories available. We fill this gap and provide an in-depth survey of 50 attention techniques categorizing them by their most prominent features. We initiate our discussion by introducing the fundamental concepts behind the success of attention mechanism. Next, we furnish some essentials such as the strengths and limitations of each attention category, describe their fundamental building blocks, basic formulations with primary usage, and applications specifically for computer vision. We also discuss the challenges and open questions related to attention mechanism in general. Finally, we recommend possible future research directions for deep attention.
Knowledge is a formal way of understanding the world, providing a human-level cognition and intelligence for the next-generation artificial intelligence (AI). One of the representations of knowledge is the structural relations between entities. An effective way to automatically acquire this important knowledge, called Relation Extraction (RE), a sub-task of information extraction, plays a vital role in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Its purpose is to identify semantic relations between entities from natural language text. To date, there are several studies for RE in previous works, which have documented these techniques based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) become a prevailing technique in this research. Especially, the supervised and distant supervision methods based on DNNs are the most popular and reliable solutions for RE. This article 1)introduces some general concepts, and further 2)gives a comprehensive overview of DNNs in RE from two points of view: supervised RE, which attempts to improve the standard RE systems, and distant supervision RE, which adopts DNNs to design the sentence encoder and the de-noise method. We further 3)cover some novel methods and describe some recent trends and discuss possible future research directions for this task.
Image segmentation is still an open problem especially when intensities of the interested objects are overlapped due to the presence of intensity inhomogeneity (also known as bias field). To segment images with intensity inhomogeneities, a bias correction embedded level set model is proposed where Inhomogeneities are Estimated by Orthogonal Primary Functions (IEOPF). In the proposed model, the smoothly varying bias is estimated by a linear combination of a given set of orthogonal primary functions. An inhomogeneous intensity clustering energy is then defined and membership functions of the clusters described by the level set function are introduced to rewrite the energy as a data term of the proposed model. Similar to popular level set methods, a regularization term and an arc length term are also included to regularize and smooth the level set function, respectively. The proposed model is then extended to multichannel and multiphase patterns to segment colourful images and images with multiple objects, respectively. It has been extensively tested on both synthetic and real images that are widely used in the literature and public BrainWeb and IBSR datasets. Experimental results and comparison with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that advantages of the proposed model in terms of bias correction and segmentation accuracy.