A conversation corpus is essential to build interactive AI applications. However, the demographic information of the participants in such corpora is largely underexplored mainly due to the lack of individual data in many corpora. In this work, we analyze a Korean nationwide daily conversation corpus constructed by the National Institute of Korean Language (NIKL) to characterize the participation of different demographic (age and sex) groups in the corpus.
Deep neural networks (DNN) have made impressive progress in the interpretation of image data, so that it is conceivable and to some degree realistic to use them in safety critical applications like automated driving. From an ethical standpoint, the AI algorithm should take into account the vulnerability of objects or subjects on the street that ranges from "not at all", e.g. the road itself, to "high vulnerability" of pedestrians. One way to take this into account is to define the cost of confusion of one semantic category with another and use cost-based decision rules for the interpretation of probabilities, which are the output of DNNs. However, it is an open problem how to define the cost structure, who should be in charge to do that, and thereby define what AI-algorithms will actually "see". As one possible answer, we follow a participatory approach and set up an online survey to ask the public to define the cost structure. We present the survey design and the data acquired along with an evaluation that also distinguishes between perspective (car passenger vs. external traffic participant) and gender. Using simulation based $F$-tests, we find highly significant differences between the groups. These differences have consequences on the reliable detection of pedestrians in a safety critical distance to the self-driving car. We discuss the ethical problems that are related to this approach and also discuss the problems emerging from human-machine interaction through the survey from a psychological point of view. Finally, we include comments from industry leaders in the field of AI safety on the applicability of survey based elements in the design of AI functionalities in automated driving.
An important goal of self-supervised learning is to enable model pre-training to benefit from almost unlimited data. However, one method that has recently become popular, namely masked image modeling (MIM), is suspected to be unable to benefit from larger data. In this work, we break this misconception through extensive experiments, with data scales ranging from 10\% of ImageNet-1K to full ImageNet-22K, model sizes ranging from 49 million to 1 billion, and training lengths ranging from 125K iterations to 500K iterations. Our study reveals that: (i) Masked image modeling is also demanding on larger data. We observed that very large models got over-fitted with relatively small data; (ii) The length of training matters. Large models trained with masked image modeling can benefit from more data with longer training; (iii) The validation loss in pre-training is a good indicator to measure how well the model performs for fine-tuning on multiple tasks. This observation allows us to pre-evaluate pre-trained models in advance without having to make costly trial-and-error assessments of downstream tasks. We hope that our findings will advance the understanding of masked image modeling in terms of scaling ability.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly present in many family homes, yet it is unclear precisely how well families understand the cyber security threats and risks of using such devices, and how possible it is for them to educate themselves on these topics. Using a survey of 553 parents and interviews with 25 families in the UK, we find that families do not consider home IoT devices to be significantly different in terms of threats than more traditional home computers, and believe the major risks to be largely mitigated through consumer protection regulation. As a result, parents focus on teaching being careful with devices to prolong device life use, exposing their families to additional security risks and modeling incorrect security behaviors to their children. This is a risk for the present and also one for the future, as children are not taught about the IoT, and appropriate cyber security management of such devices, at school. We go on to suggest that steps must be taken by manufacturers and governments or appropriate trusted institutions to improve the cyber security knowledge and behaviors of both adults and children in relation to the use of home IoT devices.
Despite the popularity of deep neural networks in various domains, the extraction of digital terrain models (DTMs) from airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds is still challenging. This might be due to the lack of dedicated large-scale annotated dataset and the data-structure discrepancy between point clouds and DTMs. To promote data-driven DTM extraction, this paper collects from open sources a large-scale dataset of ALS point clouds and corresponding DTMs with various urban, forested, and mountainous scenes. A baseline method is proposed as the first attempt to train a Deep neural network to extract digital Terrain models directly from ALS point clouds via Rasterization techniques, coined DeepTerRa. Extensive studies with well-established methods are performed to benchmark the dataset and analyze the challenges in learning to extract DTM from point clouds. The experimental results show the interest of the agnostic data-driven approach, with sub-metric error level compared to methods designed for DTM extraction. The data and source code is provided at //lhoangan.github.io/deepterra/ for reproducibility and further similar research.
Standard pretrained language models operate on sequences of subword tokens without direct access to the characters that compose each token's string representation. We probe the embedding layer of pretrained language models and show that models learn the internal character composition of whole word and subword tokens to a surprising extent, without ever seeing the characters coupled with the tokens. Our results show that the embedding layer of RoBERTa holds enough information to accurately spell up to a third of the vocabulary and reach high average character ngram overlap on all token types. We further test whether enriching subword models with additional character information can improve language modeling, and observe that this method has a near-identical learning curve as training without spelling-based enrichment. Overall, our results suggest that language modeling objectives incentivize the model to implicitly learn some notion of spelling, and that explicitly teaching the model how to spell does not appear to enhance its performance on such tasks.
Image inpainting is the task of filling masked or unknown regions of an image with visually realistic contents, which has been remarkably improved by Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) recently. Essentially, as an inverse problem, the inpainting has the underlying challenges of reconstructing semantically coherent results without texture artifacts. Many previous efforts have been made via exploiting attention mechanisms and prior knowledge, such as edges and semantic segmentation. However, these works are still limited in practice by an avalanche of learnable prior parameters and prohibitive computational burden. To this end, we propose a novel model -- Wavelet prior attention learning in Axial Inpainting Network (WAIN), whose generator contains the encoder, decoder, as well as two key components of Wavelet image Prior Attention (WPA) and stacked multi-layer Axial-Transformers (ATs). Particularly, the WPA guides the high-level feature aggregation in the multi-scale frequency domain, alleviating the textual artifacts. Stacked ATs employ unmasked clues to help model reasonable features along with low-level features of horizontal and vertical axes, improving the semantic coherence. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on Celeba-HQ and Places2 datasets are conducted to validate that our WAIN can achieve state-of-the-art performance over the competitors. The codes and models will be released.
Federated learning (FL) is an emerging, privacy-preserving machine learning paradigm, drawing tremendous attention in both academia and industry. A unique characteristic of FL is heterogeneity, which resides in the various hardware specifications and dynamic states across the participating devices. Theoretically, heterogeneity can exert a huge influence on the FL training process, e.g., causing a device unavailable for training or unable to upload its model updates. Unfortunately, these impacts have never been systematically studied and quantified in existing FL literature. In this paper, we carry out the first empirical study to characterize the impacts of heterogeneity in FL. We collect large-scale data from 136k smartphones that can faithfully reflect heterogeneity in real-world settings. We also build a heterogeneity-aware FL platform that complies with the standard FL protocol but with heterogeneity in consideration. Based on the data and the platform, we conduct extensive experiments to compare the performance of state-of-the-art FL algorithms under heterogeneity-aware and heterogeneity-unaware settings. Results show that heterogeneity causes non-trivial performance degradation in FL, including up to 9.2% accuracy drop, 2.32x lengthened training time, and undermined fairness. Furthermore, we analyze potential impact factors and find that device failure and participant bias are two potential factors for performance degradation. Our study provides insightful implications for FL practitioners. On the one hand, our findings suggest that FL algorithm designers consider necessary heterogeneity during the evaluation. On the other hand, our findings urge system providers to design specific mechanisms to mitigate the impacts of heterogeneity.