Researchers have derived many theoretical models for specifying users' insights as they interact with a visualization system. These representations are essential for understanding the insight discovery process, such as when inferring user interaction patterns that lead to insight or assessing the rigor of reported insights. However, theoretical models can be difficult to apply to existing tools and user studies, often due to discrepancies in how insight and its constituent parts are defined. This paper calls attention to the consistent structures that recur across the visualization literature and describes how they connect multiple theoretical representations of insight. We synthesize a unified formalism for insights using these structures, enabling a wider audience of researchers and developers to adopt the corresponding models. Through a series of theoretical case studies, we use our formalism to compare and contrast existing theories, revealing interesting research challenges in reasoning about a user's domain knowledge and leveraging synergistic approaches in data mining and data management research.
Climate models, such as Earth system models (ESMs), are crucial for simulating future climate change based on projected Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. While ESMs are sophisticated and invaluable, machine learning-based emulators trained on existing simulation data can project additional climate scenarios much faster and are computationally efficient. However, they often lack generalizability and interpretability. This work delves into the potential of causal representation learning, specifically the \emph{Causal Discovery with Single-parent Decoding} (CDSD) method, which could render climate model emulation efficient \textit{and} interpretable. We evaluate CDSD on multiple climate datasets, focusing on emissions, temperature, and precipitation. Our findings shed light on the challenges, limitations, and promise of using CDSD as a stepping stone towards more interpretable and robust climate model emulation.
Foundation models, specifically Large Language Models (LLM's), have lately gained wide-spread attention and adoption. Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) involves training a reward model to capture desired behaviors, which is then used to align LLM's. These reward models are additionally used at inference-time to estimate LLM responses' adherence to those desired behaviors. However, there is little work measuring how robust these reward models are to distribution shifts. In this work, we evaluate how reward model performance - measured via accuracy and calibration (i.e. alignment between accuracy and confidence) - is affected by distribution shift. We show novel calibration patterns and accuracy drops due to OOD prompts and responses, and that the reward model is more sensitive to shifts in responses than prompts. Additionally, we adapt an OOD detection technique commonly used in classification to the reward model setting to detect these distribution shifts in prompts and responses.
Language models (LMs) can generate hallucinations and incoherent outputs, which highlights their weak context dependency. Cache-LMs, which augment LMs with a memory of recent history, can increase context dependency and have shown remarkable performance in diverse language generation tasks. However, we find that even with training, the performance gain stemming from the cache component of current cache-LMs is suboptimal due to the misalignment between the current hidden states and those stored in the memory. In this work, we present HistAlign, a new training approach to ensure good cache alignment such that the model receives useful signals from the history. We first prove our concept on a simple and synthetic task where the memory is essential for correct predictions, and we show that the cache component of HistAlign is better aligned and improves overall performance. Next, we evaluate HistAlign on diverse downstream language generation tasks, including prompt continuation, abstractive summarization, and data-to-text. We demonstrate that HistAlign improves text coherence and faithfulness in open-ended and conditional generation settings respectively. HistAlign is also generalizable across different model families, showcasing its strength in improving context dependency of LMs in diverse scenarios. Our code is publicly available at //github.com/meetdavidwan/histalign
The Internet is used by billions of users every day because it offers fast and free communication tools and platforms. Nevertheless, with this significant increase in usage, huge amounts of spam are generated every second, which wastes internet resources and, more importantly, users' time. This study investigates the use of machine learning models to classify URLs as spam or nonspam. We first extract the features from the URL as it has only one feature, and then we compare the performance of several models, including k nearest neighbors, bagging, random forest, logistic regression, and others. Experimental results demonstrate that bagging outperformed other models and achieved the highest accuracy of 98.64%. In addition, bagging outperformed the current state-of-the-art approaches which emphasize its effectiveness in addressing spam-related challenges on the Internet. This suggests that bagging is a promising approach for URL spam classification.
Chat models, such as ChatGPT, have shown impressive capabilities and have been rapidly adopted across numerous domains. However, these models are only accessible through a restricted API, creating barriers for new research and progress in the field. We propose a pipeline that can automatically generate a high-quality multi-turn chat corpus by leveraging ChatGPT to engage in a conversation with itself. Subsequently, we employ parameter-efficient tuning to enhance LLaMA, an open-source large language model. The resulting model, named Baize, demonstrates good performance in multi-turn dialogues with guardrails that minimize potential risks. Furthermore, we propose a new technique called Self-Distill with Feedback, to further improve the performance of the Baize models with feedback from ChatGPT. The Baize models and data are released for research purposes only at //github.com/project-baize/baize-chatbot. An online demo is also available at //huggingface.co/spaces/project-baize/chat-with-baize.
There is a growing demand for explainable, transparent, and data-driven models within the domain of fraud detection. Decisions made by fraud detection models need to be explainable in the event of a customer dispute. Additionally, the decision-making process in the model must be transparent to win the trust of regulators and business stakeholders. At the same time, fraud detection solutions can benefit from data due to the noisy, dynamic nature of fraud and the availability of large historical data sets. Finally, fraud detection is notorious for its class imbalance: there are typically several orders of magnitude more legitimate transactions than fraudulent ones. In this paper, we present Deep Symbolic Classification (DSC), an extension of the Deep Symbolic Regression framework to classification problems. DSC casts classification as a search problem in the space of all analytic functions composed of a vocabulary of variables, constants, and operations and optimizes for an arbitrary evaluation metric directly. The search is guided by a deep neural network trained with reinforcement learning. Because the functions are mathematical expressions that are in closed-form and concise, the model is inherently explainable both at the level of a single classification decision and the model's decision process. Furthermore, the class imbalance problem is successfully addressed by optimizing for metrics that are robust to class imbalance such as the F1 score. This eliminates the need for oversampling and undersampling techniques that plague traditional approaches. Finally, the model allows to explicitly balance between the prediction accuracy and the explainability. An evaluation on the PaySim data set demonstrates competitive predictive performance with state-of-the-art models, while surpassing them in terms of explainability. This establishes DSC as a promising model for fraud detection systems.
Although large language models (LLMs) are impressive in solving various tasks, they can quickly be outdated after deployment. Maintaining their up-to-date status is a pressing concern in the current era. This paper provides a comprehensive review of recent advances in aligning LLMs with the ever-changing world knowledge without re-training from scratch. We categorize research works systemically and provide in-depth comparisons and discussion. We also discuss existing challenges and highlight future directions to facilitate research in this field. We release the paper list at //github.com/hyintell/awesome-refreshing-llms
As artificial intelligence (AI) models continue to scale up, they are becoming more capable and integrated into various forms of decision-making systems. For models involved in moral decision-making, also known as artificial moral agents (AMA), interpretability provides a way to trust and understand the agent's internal reasoning mechanisms for effective use and error correction. In this paper, we provide an overview of this rapidly-evolving sub-field of AI interpretability, introduce the concept of the Minimum Level of Interpretability (MLI) and recommend an MLI for various types of agents, to aid their safe deployment in real-world settings.
Recent artificial intelligence (AI) systems have reached milestones in "grand challenges" ranging from Go to protein-folding. The capability to retrieve medical knowledge, reason over it, and answer medical questions comparably to physicians has long been viewed as one such grand challenge. Large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed significant progress in medical question answering; Med-PaLM was the first model to exceed a "passing" score in US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) style questions with a score of 67.2% on the MedQA dataset. However, this and other prior work suggested significant room for improvement, especially when models' answers were compared to clinicians' answers. Here we present Med-PaLM 2, which bridges these gaps by leveraging a combination of base LLM improvements (PaLM 2), medical domain finetuning, and prompting strategies including a novel ensemble refinement approach. Med-PaLM 2 scored up to 86.5% on the MedQA dataset, improving upon Med-PaLM by over 19% and setting a new state-of-the-art. We also observed performance approaching or exceeding state-of-the-art across MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and MMLU clinical topics datasets. We performed detailed human evaluations on long-form questions along multiple axes relevant to clinical applications. In pairwise comparative ranking of 1066 consumer medical questions, physicians preferred Med-PaLM 2 answers to those produced by physicians on eight of nine axes pertaining to clinical utility (p < 0.001). We also observed significant improvements compared to Med-PaLM on every evaluation axis (p < 0.001) on newly introduced datasets of 240 long-form "adversarial" questions to probe LLM limitations. While further studies are necessary to validate the efficacy of these models in real-world settings, these results highlight rapid progress towards physician-level performance in medical question answering.
Sequential recommendation (SR) is to accurately recommend a list of items for a user based on her current accessed ones. While new-coming users continuously arrive in the real world, one crucial task is to have inductive SR that can produce embeddings of users and items without re-training. Given user-item interactions can be extremely sparse, another critical task is to have transferable SR that can transfer the knowledge derived from one domain with rich data to another domain. In this work, we aim to present the holistic SR that simultaneously accommodates conventional, inductive, and transferable settings. We propose a novel deep learning-based model, Relational Temporal Attentive Graph Neural Networks (RetaGNN), for holistic SR. The main idea of RetaGNN is three-fold. First, to have inductive and transferable capabilities, we train a relational attentive GNN on the local subgraph extracted from a user-item pair, in which the learnable weight matrices are on various relations among users, items, and attributes, rather than nodes or edges. Second, long-term and short-term temporal patterns of user preferences are encoded by a proposed sequential self-attention mechanism. Third, a relation-aware regularization term is devised for better training of RetaGNN. Experiments conducted on MovieLens, Instagram, and Book-Crossing datasets exhibit that RetaGNN can outperform state-of-the-art methods under conventional, inductive, and transferable settings. The derived attention weights also bring model explainability.