(Im)balance in the representation of news has always been a topic of debate in political circles. The concept of balance has often been discussed and studied in the context of the social responsibility theory and the prestige press in the USA. While various qualitative, as well as quantitative measures of balance, have been suggested in the literature, a comprehensive analysis of all these measures across a large dataset of the post-truth era comprising different popular news media houses and over a sufficiently long temporal scale in a non-US democratic setting is lacking. We use this concept of balance to measure and understand the evolution of imbalance in Indian media on various journalistic metrics on a month-by-month basis. For this study, we amass a huge dataset of over four million political articles from India for 9+ years and analyze the extent and quality of coverage given to issues and political parties in the context of contemporary influential events for three leading newspapers. We use several state-of-the-art NLP tools to effectively understand political polarization (if any) manifesting in these articles over time. We find that two out of the three news outlets are more strongly clustered in their imbalance metrics. We also observe that only a few locations are extensively covered across all the news outlets and the situation is only slightly getting better for one of the three news outlets. Cloze tests show that the changing landscape of events get reflected in all the news outlets with border and terrorism issues dominating in around 2010 while economic aspects like unemployment, GST, demonetization, etc. became more dominant in the period 2014 -- 2018. Further, cloze tests clearly portray the changing popularity profile of the political parties over time.
In 2019, the UK's Immigration and Asylum Chamber of the Upper Tribunal dismissed an asylum appeal basing the decision on the output of a biometric system, alongside other discrepancies. The fingerprints of the asylum seeker were found in a biometric database which contradicted the appellant's account. The Tribunal found this evidence unequivocal and denied the asylum claim. Nowadays, the proliferation of biometric systems is shaping public debates around its political, social and ethical implications. Yet whilst concerns towards the racialised use of this technology for migration control have been on the rise, investment in the biometrics industry and innovation is increasing considerably. Moreover, fairness has also been recently adopted by biometrics to mitigate bias and discrimination on biometrics. However, algorithmic fairness cannot distribute justice in scenarios which are broken or intended purpose is to discriminate, such as biometrics deployed at the border. In this paper, we offer a critical reading of recent debates about biometric fairness and show its limitations drawing on research in fairness in machine learning and critical border studies. Building on previous fairness demonstrations, we prove that biometric fairness criteria are mathematically mutually exclusive. Then, the paper moves on illustrating empirically that a fair biometric system is not possible by reproducing experiments from previous works. Finally, we discuss the politics of fairness in biometrics by situating the debate at the border. We claim that bias and error rates have different impact on citizens and asylum seekers. Fairness has overshadowed the elephant in the room of biometrics, focusing on the demographic biases and ethical discourses of algorithms rather than examine how these systems reproduce historical and political injustices.
AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.
Deep Learning has implemented a wide range of applications and has become increasingly popular in recent years. The goal of multimodal deep learning is to create models that can process and link information using various modalities. Despite the extensive development made for unimodal learning, it still cannot cover all the aspects of human learning. Multimodal learning helps to understand and analyze better when various senses are engaged in the processing of information. This paper focuses on multiple types of modalities, i.e., image, video, text, audio, body gestures, facial expressions, and physiological signals. Detailed analysis of past and current baseline approaches and an in-depth study of recent advancements in multimodal deep learning applications has been provided. A fine-grained taxonomy of various multimodal deep learning applications is proposed, elaborating on different applications in more depth. Architectures and datasets used in these applications are also discussed, along with their evaluation metrics. Last, main issues are highlighted separately for each domain along with their possible future research directions.
Deep learning techniques have received much attention in the area of image denoising. However, there are substantial differences in the various types of deep learning methods dealing with image denoising. Specifically, discriminative learning based on deep learning can ably address the issue of Gaussian noise. Optimization models based on deep learning are effective in estimating the real noise. However, there has thus far been little related research to summarize the different deep learning techniques for image denoising. In this paper, we offer a comparative study of deep techniques in image denoising. We first classify the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for additive white noisy images; the deep CNNs for real noisy images; the deep CNNs for blind denoising and the deep CNNs for hybrid noisy images, which represents the combination of noisy, blurred and low-resolution images. Then, we analyze the motivations and principles of the different types of deep learning methods. Next, we compare the state-of-the-art methods on public denoising datasets in terms of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Finally, we point out some potential challenges and directions of future research.
The combination of visual and textual representations has produced excellent results in tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering, but the inference capabilities of multimodal representations are largely untested. In the case of textual representations, inference tasks such as Textual Entailment and Semantic Textual Similarity have been often used to benchmark the quality of textual representations. The long term goal of our research is to devise multimodal representation techniques that improve current inference capabilities. We thus present a novel task, Visual Semantic Textual Similarity (vSTS), where such inference ability can be tested directly. Given two items comprised each by an image and its accompanying caption, vSTS systems need to assess the degree to which the captions in context are semantically equivalent to each other. Our experiments using simple multimodal representations show that the addition of image representations produces better inference, compared to text-only representations. The improvement is observed both when directly computing the similarity between the representations of the two items, and when learning a siamese network based on vSTS training data. Our work shows, for the first time, the successful contribution of visual information to textual inference, with ample room for benchmarking more complex multimodal representation options.
Deep Learning (DL) is vulnerable to out-of-distribution and adversarial examples resulting in incorrect outputs. To make DL more robust, several posthoc anomaly detection techniques to detect (and discard) these anomalous samples have been proposed in the recent past. This survey tries to provide a structured and comprehensive overview of the research on anomaly detection for DL based applications. We provide a taxonomy for existing techniques based on their underlying assumptions and adopted approaches. We discuss various techniques in each of the categories and provide the relative strengths and weaknesses of the approaches. Our goal in this survey is to provide an easier yet better understanding of the techniques belonging to different categories in which research has been done on this topic. Finally, we highlight the unsolved research challenges while applying anomaly detection techniques in DL systems and present some high-impact future research directions.
Causal inference is a critical research topic across many domains, such as statistics, computer science, education, public policy and economics, for decades. Nowadays, estimating causal effect from observational data has become an appealing research direction owing to the large amount of available data and low budget requirement, compared with randomized controlled trials. Embraced with the rapidly developed machine learning area, various causal effect estimation methods for observational data have sprung up. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of causal inference methods under the potential outcome framework, one of the well known causal inference framework. The methods are divided into two categories depending on whether they require all three assumptions of the potential outcome framework or not. For each category, both the traditional statistical methods and the recent machine learning enhanced methods are discussed and compared. The plausible applications of these methods are also presented, including the applications in advertising, recommendation, medicine and so on. Moreover, the commonly used benchmark datasets as well as the open-source codes are also summarized, which facilitate researchers and practitioners to explore, evaluate and apply the causal inference methods.
We present an analysis of embeddings extracted from different pre-trained models for content-based image retrieval. Specifically, we study embeddings from image classification and object detection models. We discover that even with additional human annotations such as bounding boxes and segmentation masks, the discriminative power of the embeddings based on modern object detection models is significantly worse than their classification counterparts for the retrieval task. At the same time, our analysis also unearths that object detection model can help retrieval task by acting as a hard attention module for extracting object embeddings that focus on salient region from the convolutional feature map. In order to efficiently extract object embeddings, we introduce a simple guided student-teacher training paradigm for learning discriminative embeddings within the object detection framework. We support our findings with strong experimental results.
Generic object detection, aiming at locating object instances from a large number of predefined categories in natural images, is one of the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision. Deep learning techniques have emerged in recent years as powerful methods for learning feature representations directly from data, and have led to remarkable breakthroughs in the field of generic object detection. Given this time of rapid evolution, the goal of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey of the recent achievements in this field brought by deep learning techniques. More than 250 key contributions are included in this survey, covering many aspects of generic object detection research: leading detection frameworks and fundamental subproblems including object feature representation, object proposal generation, context information modeling and training strategies; evaluation issues, specifically benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, and state of the art performance. We finish by identifying promising directions for future research.