Daily Papers

As AIGC has impacted our society profoundly in the past years, ethical issues have received tremendous attention. The most urgent one is the AIGC copyright dilemma, which can immensely stifle the development of AIGC and greatly cost the entire society. Given the complexity of AIGC copyright governance and the fact that no perfect solution currently exists, previous work advocated copyleft on AI governance but without substantive analysis. In this paper, we take a step further to explore the feasibility of copyleft to alleviate the AIGC copyright dilemma. We conduct a mixed-methods study from two aspects: qualitatively, we use a formal what-if analysis to clarify the dilemma and provide case studies to show the feasibility of copyleft; quantitatively, we perform a carefully designed survey to find out how the public feels about copylefting AIGC. The key findings include: a) people generally perceive the dilemma, b) they prefer to use authorized AIGC under loose restriction, and c) they are positive to copyleft in AIGC and willing to use it in the future.

Skilled employees are the most important pillars of an organization. Despite this, most organizations face high attrition and turnover rates. While several machine learning models have been developed to analyze attrition and its causal factors, the interpretations of those models remain opaque. In this paper, we propose the HR-DSS approach, which stands for Human Resource (HR) Decision Support System, and uses explainable AI for employee attrition problems. The system is designed to assist HR departments in interpreting the predictions provided by machine learning models. In our experiments, we employ eight machine learning models to provide predictions. We further process the results achieved by the best-performing model by the SHAP explainability process and use the SHAP values to generate natural language explanations which can be valuable for HR. Furthermore, using "What-if-analysis", we aim to observe plausible causes for attrition of an individual employee. The results show that by adjusting the specific dominant features of each individual, employee attrition can turn into employee retention through informative business decisions.

We propose the concept of Intra-Query Runtime Elasticity (IQRE) for cloud-native data analysis. IQRE enables a cloud-native OLAP engine to dynamically adjust a query's Degree of Parallelism (DOP) during execution. This capability allows users to utilize cloud computing resources more cost-effectively. We present Accordion, the first IQRE query engine. Accordion can adjust the parallelism of a query at any point during query execution without pausing data processing. It features a user-friendly interface and an auto-tuner backed by a "what-if" service to allow users to adjust the DOP according to their query latency constraints. The design of Accordion follows the execution model in Presto, an open-source distributed SQL query engine developed at Meta. We present the implementation of Accordion and demonstrate its ease of use, showcasing how it enables users to minimize compute resource consumption while meeting their query time constraints.

We look critically at popular self-supervision techniques for learning deep convolutional neural networks without manual labels. We show that three different and representative methods, BiGAN, RotNet and DeepCluster, can learn the first few layers of a convolutional network from a single image as well as using millions of images and manual labels, provided that strong data augmentation is used. However, for deeper layers the gap with manual supervision cannot be closed even if millions of unlabelled images are used for training. We conclude that: (1) the weights of the early layers of deep networks contain limited information about the statistics of natural images, that (2) such low-level statistics can be learned through self-supervision just as well as through strong supervision, and that (3) the low-level statistics can be captured via synthetic transformations instead of using a large image dataset.

Automated Essay Score (AES) is proven to be one of the cutting-edge technologies. Scoring techniques are used for various purposes. Reliable scores are calculated based on influential variables. Such variables can be computed by different methods based on the domain. The research is concentrated on the user's understanding of a given topic. The analysis is based on a scoring index by using Large Language Models. The user can then compare and contrast the understanding of a topic that they recently learned. The results are then contributed towards learning analytics and progression is made for enhancing the learning ability. In this research, the focus is on summarizing a PDF document and gauging a user's understanding of its content. The process involves utilizing a Langchain tool to summarize the PDF and extract the essential information. By employing this technique, the research aims to determine how well the user comprehends the summarized content.

In the last decade, several organizations have produced documents intended to standardize, in the normative sense, and promote guidance to our recent and rapid AI development. However, the full spectrum of ideas presented in these documents has not yet been analyzed, except for a few meta-analyses and critical reviews of the field. In this work, we seek to expand on the work done by past researchers and create a tool for better data visualization of the contents and nature of these documents, to understand whether there is consensus or similarity between the principles espoused by various institutions, which may inspire debates on future regulations. We also provide some preliminary thoughts and questions that could guide the continuity of the research through a critical analysis of the results acquired by our methodology into a sample size of 200 documents.

We introduce WIQA, the first large-scale dataset of "What if..." questions over procedural text. WIQA contains three parts: a collection of paragraphs each describing a process, e.g., beach erosion; a set of crowdsourced influence graphs for each paragraph, describing how one change affects another; and a large (40k) collection of "What if...?" multiple-choice questions derived from the graphs. For example, given a paragraph about beach erosion, would stormy weather result in more or less erosion (or have no effect)? The task is to answer the questions, given their associated paragraph. WIQA contains three kinds of questions: perturbations to steps mentioned in the paragraph; external (out-of-paragraph) perturbations requiring commonsense knowledge; and irrelevant (no effect) perturbations. We find that state-of-the-art models achieve 73.8% accuracy, well below the human performance of 96.3%. We analyze the challenges, in particular tracking chains of influences, and present the dataset as an open challenge to the community.

Although counterfactual reasoning is a fundamental aspect of intelligence, the lack of large-scale counterfactual open-domain question-answering (QA) benchmarks makes it difficult to evaluate and improve models on this ability. To address this void, we introduce the first such dataset, named IfQA, where each question is based on a counterfactual presupposition via an "if" clause. For example, if Los Angeles was on the east coast of the U.S., what would be the time difference between Los Angeles and Paris? Such questions require models to go beyond retrieving direct factual knowledge from the Web: they must identify the right information to retrieve and reason about an imagined situation that may even go against the facts built into their parameters. The IfQA dataset contains over 3,800 questions that were annotated annotated by crowdworkers on relevant Wikipedia passages. Empirical analysis reveals that the IfQA dataset is highly challenging for existing open-domain QA methods, including supervised retrieve-then-read pipeline methods (EM score 36.2), as well as recent few-shot approaches such as chain-of-thought prompting with GPT-3 (EM score 27.4). The unique challenges posed by the IfQA benchmark will push open-domain QA research on both retrieval and counterfactual reasoning fronts.

Business intelligence (BI) is any knowledge derived from existing data that may be strategically applied within a business. Data mining is a technique or method for extracting BI from data using statistical data modeling. Finding relationships or correlations between the various data items that have been collected can be used to boost business performance or at the very least better comprehend what is going on. Root cause analysis (RCA) is discovering the root causes of problems or events to identify appropriate solutions. RCA can show why an event occurred and this can help in avoiding occurrences of an issue in the future. This paper proposes a new clustering + association rule mining pipeline for getting business insights from data. The results of this pipeline are in the form of association rules having consequents, antecedents, and various metrics to evaluate these rules. The results of this pipeline can help in anchoring important business decisions and can also be used by data scientists for updating existing models or while developing new ones. The occurrence of any event is explained by its antecedents in the generated rules. Hence this output can also help in data-driven root cause analysis.

We describe HypotheSAEs, a general method to hypothesize interpretable relationships between text data (e.g., headlines) and a target variable (e.g., clicks). HypotheSAEs has three steps: (1) train a sparse autoencoder on text embeddings to produce interpretable features describing the data distribution, (2) select features that predict the target variable, and (3) generate a natural language interpretation of each feature (e.g., "mentions being surprised or shocked") using an LLM. Each interpretation serves as a hypothesis about what predicts the target variable. Compared to baselines, our method better identifies reference hypotheses on synthetic datasets (at least +0.06 in F1) and produces more predictive hypotheses on real datasets (~twice as many significant findings), despite requiring 1-2 orders of magnitude less compute than recent LLM-based methods. HypotheSAEs also produces novel discoveries on two well-studied tasks: explaining partisan differences in Congressional speeches and identifying drivers of engagement with online headlines.

To enable quantitative risk assessment of uncontrollable risk states in complex and coupled IoT systems, a new epistemological equation is designed and tested though comparative and empirical analysis. The comparative analysis is conducted on national digital strategies, followed by an empirical analysis of cyber risk assessment approaches. The new epistemological analysis approach enables the assessment of uncontrollable risk states in complex IoT systems, which begin to resemble artificial intelligence, and can be used for a quantitative self-assessment of IoT cyber risk posture.

Gun violence is a pressing and growing human rights issue that affects nearly every dimension of the social fabric, from healthcare and education to psychology and the economy. Reliable data on firearm events is paramount to developing more effective public policy and emergency responses. However, the lack of comprehensive databases and the risks of in-person surveys prevent human rights organizations from collecting needed data in most countries. Here, we partner with a Brazilian human rights organization to conduct a systematic evaluation of language models to assist with monitoring real-world firearm events from social media data. We propose a fine-tuned BERT-based model trained on Twitter (now X) texts to distinguish gun violence reports from ordinary Portuguese texts. Our model achieves a high AUC score of 0.97. We then incorporate our model into a web application and test it in a live intervention. We study and interview Brazilian analysts who continuously fact-check social media texts to identify new gun violence events. Qualitative assessments show that our solution helped all analysts use their time more efficiently and expanded their search capacities. Quantitative assessments show that the use of our model was associated with more analysts' interactions with online users reporting gun violence. Taken together, our findings suggest that modern Natural Language Processing techniques can help support the work of human rights organizations.

In science and medicine, model interpretations may be reported as discoveries of natural phenomena or used to guide patient treatments. In such high-stakes tasks, false discoveries may lead investigators astray. These applications would therefore benefit from control over the finite-sample error rate of interpretations. We reframe black box model interpretability as a multiple hypothesis testing problem. The task is to discover "important" features by testing whether the model prediction is significantly different from what would be expected if the features were replaced with uninformative counterfactuals. We propose two testing methods: one that provably controls the false discovery rate but which is not yet feasible for large-scale applications, and an approximate testing method which can be applied to real-world data sets. In simulation, both tests have high power relative to existing interpretability methods. When applied to state-of-the-art vision and language models, the framework selects features that intuitively explain model predictions. The resulting explanations have the additional advantage that they are themselves easy to interpret.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the capacities of Large Language Models and their evaluation have been in constant discussion and evaluation both in academic research and in the industry. Scenarios and benchmarks have been developed in several areas such as law, medicine and math (Bommasani et al., 2023) and there is continuous evaluation of model variants. One area that has not received sufficient scenario development attention is journalism, and in particular journalistic sourcing and ethics. Journalism is a crucial truth-determination function in democracy (Vincent, 2023), and sourcing is a crucial pillar to all original journalistic output. Evaluating the capacities of LLMs to annotate stories for the different signals of sourcing and how reporters justify them is a crucial scenario that warrants a benchmark approach. It offers potential to build automated systems to contrast more transparent and ethically rigorous forms of journalism with everyday fare. In this paper we lay out a scenario to evaluate LLM performance on identifying and annotating sourcing in news stories on a five-category schema inspired from journalism studies (Gans, 2004). We offer the use case, our dataset and metrics and as the first step towards systematic benchmarking. Our accuracy findings indicate LLM-based approaches have more catching to do in identifying all the sourced statements in a story, and equally, in matching the type of sources. An even harder task is spotting source justifications.

Despite its importance to experimental design, statistical power (the probability that, given a real effect, an experiment will reject the null hypothesis) has largely been ignored by the NLP community. Underpowered experiments make it more difficult to discern the difference between statistical noise and meaningful model improvements, and increase the chances of exaggerated findings. By meta-analyzing a set of existing NLP papers and datasets, we characterize typical power for a variety of settings and conclude that underpowered experiments are common in the NLP literature. In particular, for several tasks in the popular GLUE benchmark, small test sets mean that most attempted comparisons to state of the art models will not be adequately powered. Similarly, based on reasonable assumptions, we find that the most typical experimental design for human rating studies will be underpowered to detect small model differences, of the sort that are frequently studied. For machine translation, we find that typical test sets of 2000 sentences have approximately 75% power to detect differences of 1 BLEU point. To improve the situation going forward, we give an overview of best practices for power analysis in NLP and release a series of notebooks to assist with future power analyses.

The data revolution experienced in recent times has thrown up new challenges and opportunities for businesses of all sizes in diverse industries. Big data analytics is already at the forefront of innovations to help make meaningful business decisions from the abundance of raw data available today. Business intelligence and analytics has become a huge trend in todays IT world as companies of all sizes are looking to improve their business processes and scale up using data driven solutions. This paper aims to demonstrate the data analytical process of deriving business intelligence via the historical data of a fictional bike share company seeking to find innovative ways to convert their casual riders to annual paying registered members. The dataset used is freely available as Chicago Divvy Bicycle Sharing Data on Kaggle. The authors used the RTidyverse library in RStudio to analyse the data and followed the six data analysis steps of ask, prepare, process, analyse, share, and act to recommend some actionable approaches the company could adopt to convert casual riders to paying annual members. The findings from this research serve as a valuable case example, of a real world deployment of BIA technologies in the industry, and a demonstration of the data analysis cycle for data practitioners, researchers, and other potential users.

This study investigates GPT-4's assessment of its performance in healthcare applications. A simple prompting technique was used to prompt the LLM with questions taken from the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) questionnaire and it was tasked to evaluate its confidence score before posing the question and after asking the question. The questionnaire was categorized into two groups-questions with feedback (WF) and questions with no feedback(NF) post-question. The model was asked to provide absolute and relative confidence scores before and after each question. The experimental findings were analyzed using statistical tools to study the variability of confidence in WF and NF groups. Additionally, a sequential analysis was conducted to observe the performance variation for the WF and NF groups. Results indicate that feedback influences relative confidence but doesn't consistently increase or decrease it. Understanding the performance of LLM is paramount in exploring its utility in sensitive areas like healthcare. This study contributes to the ongoing discourse on the reliability of AI, particularly of LLMs like GPT-4, within healthcare, offering insights into how feedback mechanisms might be optimized to enhance AI-assisted medical education and decision support.

As machine learning and algorithmic decision making systems are increasingly being leveraged in high-stakes human-in-the-loop settings, there is a pressing need to understand the rationale of their predictions. Researchers have responded to this need with explainable AI (XAI), but often proclaim interpretability axiomatically without evaluation. When these systems are evaluated, they are often tested through offline simulations with proxy metrics of interpretability (such as model complexity). We empirically evaluate the veracity of three common interpretability assumptions through a large scale human-subjects experiment with a simple "placebo explanation" control. We find that feature attribution explanations provide marginal utility in our task for a human decision maker and in certain cases result in worse decisions due to cognitive and contextual confounders. This result challenges the assumed universal benefit of applying these methods and we hope this work will underscore the importance of human evaluation in XAI research. Supplemental materials -- including anonymized data from the experiment, code to replicate the study, an interactive demo of the experiment, and the models used in the analysis -- can be found at: https://doi.pizza/challenging-xai.

The explosion in the use of software in important sociotechnical systems has renewed focus on the study of the way technical constructs reflect policies, norms, and human values. This effort requires the engagement of scholars and practitioners from many disciplines. And yet, these disciplines often conceptualize the operative values very differently while referring to them using the same vocabulary. The resulting conflation of ideas confuses discussions about values in technology at disciplinary boundaries. In the service of improving this situation, this paper examines the value of shared vocabularies, analytics, and other tools that facilitate conversations about values in light of these disciplinary specific conceptualizations, the role such tools play in furthering research and practice, outlines different conceptions of "fairness" deployed in discussions about computer systems, and provides an analytic tool for interdisciplinary discussions and collaborations around the concept of fairness. We use a case study of risk assessments in criminal justice applications to both motivate our effort--describing how conflation of different concepts under the banner of "fairness" led to unproductive confusion--and illustrate the value of the fairness analytic by demonstrating how the rigorous analysis it enables can assist in identifying key areas of theoretical, political, and practical misunderstanding or disagreement, and where desired support alignment or collaboration in the absence of consensus.

The paper analyzes the accuracy of publicly available object-recognition systems on a geographically diverse dataset. This dataset contains household items and was designed to have a more representative geographical coverage than commonly used image datasets in object recognition. We find that the systems perform relatively poorly on household items that commonly occur in countries with a low household income. Qualitative analyses suggest the drop in performance is primarily due to appearance differences within an object class (e.g., dish soap) and due to items appearing in a different context (e.g., toothbrushes appearing outside of bathrooms). The results of our study suggest that further work is needed to make object-recognition systems work equally well for people across different countries and income levels.

Many people are interested in ChatGPT since it has become a prominent AIGC model that provides high-quality responses in various contexts, such as software development and maintenance. Misuse of ChatGPT might cause significant issues, particularly in public safety and education, despite its immense potential. The majority of researchers choose to publish their work on Arxiv. The effectiveness and originality of future work depend on the ability to detect AI components in such contributions. To address this need, this study will analyze a method that can see purposely manufactured content that academic organizations use to post on Arxiv. For this study, a dataset was created using physics, mathematics, and computer science articles. Using the newly built dataset, the following step is to put originality.ai through its paces. The statistical analysis shows that Originality.ai is very accurate, with a rate of 98%.