Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can rapidly produce large and diverse volumes of content. This lends to it a quality of creativity which can be empowering in the early stages of design. In seeking to understand how creative ways to address practical issues can be conceived between humans and GenAI, we conducted a rapid ideation workshop with 21 participants where they used a large language model (LLM) to brainstorm potential solutions and evaluate them. We found that the LLM produced a greater variety of ideas that were of high quality, though not necessarily of higher quality than human-generated ideas. Participants typically prompted in a straightforward manner with concise instructions. We also observed two collaborative dynamics with the LLM fulfilling a consulting role or an assisting role depending on the goals of the users. Notably, we observed an atypical anti-collaboration dynamic where participants used an antagonistic approach to prompt the LLM.
Owing to their powerful semantic reasoning capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been effectively utilized as recommenders, achieving impressive performance. However, the high inference latency of LLMs significantly restricts their practical deployment. To address this issue, this work investigates knowledge distillation from cumbersome LLM-based recommendation models to lightweight conventional sequential models. It encounters three challenges: 1) the teacher's knowledge may not always be reliable; 2) the capacity gap between the teacher and student makes it difficult for the student to assimilate the teacher's knowledge; 3) divergence in semantic space poses a challenge to distill the knowledge from embeddings. To tackle these challenges, this work proposes a novel distillation strategy, DLLM2Rec, specifically tailored for knowledge distillation from LLM-based recommendation models to conventional sequential models. DLLM2Rec comprises: 1) Importance-aware ranking distillation, which filters reliable and student-friendly knowledge by weighting instances according to teacher confidence and student-teacher consistency; 2) Collaborative embedding distillation integrates knowledge from teacher embeddings with collaborative signals mined from the data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DLLM2Rec, boosting three typical sequential models with an average improvement of 47.97%, even enabling them to surpass LLM-based recommenders in some cases.
With the emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based decision-making, explanations help increase new technology adoption through enhanced trust and reliability. However, our experimental study challenges the notion that every user universally values explanations. We argue that the agreement with AI suggestions, whether accompanied by explanations or not, is influenced by individual differences in personality traits and the users' comfort with technology. We found that people with higher neuroticism and lower technological comfort showed more agreement with the recommendations without explanations. As more users become exposed to eXplainable AI (XAI) and AI-based systems, we argue that the XAI design should not provide explanations for users with high neuroticism and low technology comfort. Prioritizing user personalities in XAI systems will help users become better collaborators of AI systems.
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and mobile networks is regarded as one of the most important scenarios for 6G. In 6G, a major objective is to realize the efficient transmission of task-relevant data. Then a key problem arises, how to design collaborative AI models for the device side and the network side, so that the transmitted data between the device and the network is efficient enough, which means the transmission overhead is low but the AI task result is accurate. In this paper, we propose the multi-link information bottleneck (ML-IB) scheme for such collaborative models design. We formulate our problem based on a novel performance metric, which can evaluate both task accuracy and transmission overhead. Then we introduce a quantizer that is adjustable in the quantization bit depth, amplitudes, and breakpoints. Given the infeasibility of calculating our proposed metric on high-dimensional data, we establish a variational upper bound for this metric. However, due to the incorporation of quantization, the closed form of the variational upper bound remains uncomputable. Hence, we employ the Log-Sum Inequality to derive an approximation and provide a theoretical guarantee. Based on this, we devise the quantized multi-link information bottleneck (QML-IB) algorithm for collaborative AI models generation. Finally, numerical experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our QML-IB algorithm compared to the state-of-the-art algorithm.
Non-consensual Intimate Media (NCIM) refers to the distribution of sexual or intimate content without consent. NCIM is common and causes significant emotional, financial, and reputational harm. We developed Hands-Off, an interaction technique for messaging applications that deters non-consensual screenshots. Hands-Off requires recipients to perform a hand gesture in the air, above the device, to unlock media -- which makes simultaneous screenshotting difficult. A lab study shows that Hands-Off gestures are easy to perform and reduce non-consensual screenshots by 67 percent. We conclude by generalizing this approach and introduce the idea of Feminist Interaction Techniques (FIT), interaction techniques that encode feminist values and speak to societal problems, and reflect on FIT's opportunities and limitations.
Language Models (LMs) acquire parametric knowledge from their training process, embedding it within their weights. The increasing scalability of LMs, however, poses significant challenges for understanding a model's inner workings and further for updating or correcting this embedded knowledge without the significant cost of retraining. This underscores the importance of unveiling exactly what knowledge is stored and its association with specific model components. Instance Attribution (IA) and Neuron Attribution (NA) offer insights into this training-acquired knowledge, though they have not been compared systematically. Our study introduces a novel evaluation framework to quantify and compare the knowledge revealed by IA and NA. To align the results of the methods we introduce the attribution method NA-Instances to apply NA for retrieving influential training instances, and IA-Neurons to discover important neurons of influential instances discovered by IA. We further propose a comprehensive list of faithfulness tests to evaluate the comprehensiveness and sufficiency of the explanations provided by both methods. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we demonstrate that NA generally reveals more diverse and comprehensive information regarding the LM's parametric knowledge compared to IA. Nevertheless, IA provides unique and valuable insights into the LM's parametric knowledge, which are not revealed by NA. Our findings further suggest the potential of a synergistic approach of combining the diverse findings of IA and NA for a more holistic understanding of an LM's parametric knowledge.
Prior research on AI-assisted human decision-making has explored several different explainable AI (XAI) approaches. A recent paper has proposed a paradigm shift calling for hypothesis-driven XAI through a conceptual framework called evaluative AI that gives people evidence that supports or refutes hypotheses without necessarily giving a decision-aid recommendation. In this paper, we describe and evaluate an approach for hypothesis-driven XAI based on the Weight of Evidence (WoE) framework, which generates both positive and negative evidence for a given hypothesis. Through human behavioural experiments, we show that our hypothesis-driven approach increases decision accuracy and reduces reliance compared to a recommendation-driven approach and an AI-explanation-only baseline, but with a small increase in under-reliance compared to the recommendation-driven approach. Further, we show that participants used our hypothesis-driven approach in a materially different way to the two baselines.
Connecting text and visual modalities plays an essential role in generative intelligence. For this reason, inspired by the success of large language models, significant research efforts are being devoted to the development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). These models can seamlessly integrate visual and textual modalities, both as input and output, while providing a dialogue-based interface and instruction-following capabilities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of recent visual-based MLLMs, analyzing their architectural choices, multimodal alignment strategies, and training techniques. We also conduct a detailed analysis of these models across a wide range of tasks, including visual grounding, image generation and editing, visual understanding, and domain-specific applications. Additionally, we compile and describe training datasets and evaluation benchmarks, conducting comparisons among existing models in terms of performance and computational requirements. Overall, this survey offers a comprehensive overview of the current state of the art, laying the groundwork for future MLLMs.
Diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential for high-quality image synthesis. However, when it comes to producing images with complex scenes, how to properly describe both image global structures and object details remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present Frido, a Feature Pyramid Diffusion model performing a multi-scale coarse-to-fine denoising process for image synthesis. Our model decomposes an input image into scale-dependent vector quantized features, followed by a coarse-to-fine gating for producing image output. During the above multi-scale representation learning stage, additional input conditions like text, scene graph, or image layout can be further exploited. Thus, Frido can be also applied for conditional or cross-modality image synthesis. We conduct extensive experiments over various unconditioned and conditional image generation tasks, ranging from text-to-image synthesis, layout-to-image, scene-graph-to-image, to label-to-image. More specifically, we achieved state-of-the-art FID scores on five benchmarks, namely layout-to-image on COCO and OpenImages, scene-graph-to-image on COCO and Visual Genome, and label-to-image on COCO. Code is available at //github.com/davidhalladay/Frido.
In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
An in-depth understanding of uncertainty is the first step to making effective decisions under uncertainty. Deep/machine learning (ML/DL) has been hugely leveraged to solve complex problems involved with processing high-dimensional data. However, reasoning and quantifying different types of uncertainties to achieve effective decision-making have been much less explored in ML/DL than in other Artificial Intelligence (AI) domains. In particular, belief/evidence theories have been studied in KRR since the 1960s to reason and measure uncertainties to enhance decision-making effectiveness. We found that only a few studies have leveraged the mature uncertainty research in belief/evidence theories in ML/DL to tackle complex problems under different types of uncertainty. In this survey paper, we discuss several popular belief theories and their core ideas dealing with uncertainty causes and types and quantifying them, along with the discussions of their applicability in ML/DL. In addition, we discuss three main approaches that leverage belief theories in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), including Evidential DNNs, Fuzzy DNNs, and Rough DNNs, in terms of their uncertainty causes, types, and quantification methods along with their applicability in diverse problem domains. Based on our in-depth survey, we discuss insights, lessons learned, limitations of the current state-of-the-art bridging belief theories and ML/DL, and finally, future research directions.