Daily Papers

In material sciences, characterizing faults in periodic structures is vital for understanding material properties. To characterize magnetic labyrinthine patterns, it is necessary to accurately identify junctions and terminals, often featuring over a thousand closely packed defects per image. This study introduces a new technique called TM-CNN (Template Matching - Convolutional Neural Network) designed to detect a multitude of small objects in images, such as defects in magnetic labyrinthine patterns. TM-CNN was used to identify these structures in 444 experimental images, and the results were explored to deepen the understanding of magnetic materials. It employs a two-stage detection approach combining template matching, used in initial detection, with a convolutional neural network, used to eliminate incorrect identifications. To train a CNN classifier, it is necessary to create a large number of training images. This difficulty prevents the use of CNN in many practical applications. TM-CNN significantly reduces the manual workload for creating training images by automatically making most of the annotations and leaving only a small number of corrections to human reviewers. In testing, TM-CNN achieved an impressive F1 score of 0.988, far outperforming traditional template matching and CNN-based object detection algorithms.

Equivariant neural networks have shown improved performance, expressiveness and sample complexity on symmetrical domains. But for some specific symmetries, representations, and choice of coordinates, the most common point-wise activations, such as ReLU, are not equivariant, hence they cannot be employed in the design of equivariant neural networks. The theorem we present in this paper describes all possible combinations of finite-dimensional representations, choice of coordinates and point-wise activations to obtain an exactly equivariant layer, generalizing and strengthening existing characterizations. Notable cases of practical relevance are discussed as corollaries. Indeed, we prove that rotation-equivariant networks can only be invariant, as it happens for any network which is equivariant with respect to connected compact groups. Then, we discuss implications of our findings when applied to important instances of exactly equivariant networks. First, we completely characterize permutation equivariant networks such as Invariant Graph Networks with point-wise nonlinearities and their geometric counterparts, highlighting a plethora of models whose expressive power and performance are still unknown. Second, we show that feature spaces of disentangled steerable convolutional neural networks are trivial representations.

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) stands as a cornerstone optimization algorithm with proven real-world empirical successes but relatively limited theoretical understanding. Recent research has illuminated a key factor contributing to its practical efficacy: the implicit regularization it instigates. Several studies have investigated the linear stability property of SGD in the vicinity of a stationary point as a predictive proxy for sharpness and generalization error in overparameterized neural networks (Wu et al., 2022; Jastrzebski et al., 2019; Cohen et al., 2021). In this paper, we delve deeper into the relationship between linear stability and sharpness. More specifically, we meticulously delineate the necessary and sufficient conditions for linear stability, contingent on hyperparameters of SGD and the sharpness at the optimum. Towards this end, we introduce a novel coherence measure of the loss Hessian that encapsulates pertinent geometric properties of the loss function that are relevant to the linear stability of SGD. It enables us to provide a simplified sufficient condition for identifying linear instability at an optimum. Notably, compared to previous works, our analysis relies on significantly milder assumptions and is applicable for a broader class of loss functions than known before, encompassing not only mean-squared error but also cross-entropy loss.

In recent years, the demand for hyperspectral imaging devices has grown significantly, driven by their ability of capturing high-resolution spectral information. Among the several possible optical designs for acquiring hyperspectral images, there is a growing interest in interferometric spectral imaging systems based on division of aperture. These systems have the advantage of capturing snapshot acquisitions while maintaining a compact design. However, they require a careful calibration to operate properly. In this work, we present the interferometer response characterization algorithm (IRCA), a robust three-step procedure designed to characterize the transmittance response of multi-aperture imaging spectrometers based on the interferometry of Fabry-Perot. Additionally, we propose a formulation of the image formation model for such devices suitable to estimate the parameters of interest by considering the model under various regimes of finesse. The proposed algorithm processes the image output obtained from a set of monochromatic light sources and refines the results using nonlinear regression after an ad-hoc initialization. Through experimental analysis conducted on four different prototypes from the Image SPectrometer On Chip (ImSPOC) family, we validate the performance of our approach for characterization. The associated source code for this paper is available at https://github.com/danaroth83/irca.

Current Deep Network (DN) visualization and interpretability methods rely heavily on data space visualizations such as scoring which dimensions of the data are responsible for their associated prediction or generating new data features or samples that best match a given DN unit or representation. In this paper, we go one step further by developing the first provably exact method for computing the geometry of a DN's mapping - including its decision boundary - over a specified region of the data space. By leveraging the theory of Continuous Piece-Wise Linear (CPWL) spline DNs, SplineCam exactly computes a DNs geometry without resorting to approximations such as sampling or architecture simplification. SplineCam applies to any DN architecture based on CPWL nonlinearities, including (leaky-)ReLU, absolute value, maxout, and max-pooling and can also be applied to regression DNs such as implicit neural representations. Beyond decision boundary visualization and characterization, SplineCam enables one to compare architectures, measure generalizability and sample from the decision boundary on or off the manifold. Project Website: bit.ly/splinecam.

With information consumption via online video streaming becoming increasingly popular, misinformation video poses a new threat to the health of the online information ecosystem. Though previous studies have made much progress in detecting misinformation in text and image formats, video-based misinformation brings new and unique challenges to automatic detection systems: 1) high information heterogeneity brought by various modalities, 2) blurred distinction between misleading video manipulation and ubiquitous artistic video editing, and 3) new patterns of misinformation propagation due to the dominant role of recommendation systems on online video platforms. To facilitate research on this challenging task, we conduct this survey to present advances in misinformation video detection research. We first analyze and characterize the misinformation video from three levels including signals, semantics, and intents. Based on the characterization, we systematically review existing works for detection from features of various modalities to techniques for clue integration. We also introduce existing resources including representative datasets and widely used tools. Besides summarizing existing studies, we discuss related areas and outline open issues and future directions to encourage and guide more research on misinformation video detection. Our corresponding public repository is available at https://github.com/ICTMCG/Awesome-Misinfo-Video-Detection.

Solid-state quantum emitters have emerged as a leading quantum memory for quantum networking applications. However, standard optical characterization techniques are neither efficient nor repeatable at scale. In this work, we introduce and demonstrate spectroscopic techniques that enable large-scale, automated characterization of color centers. We first demonstrate the ability to track color centers by registering them to a fabricated machine-readable global coordinate system, enabling systematic comparison of the same color center sites over many experiments. We then implement resonant photoluminescence excitation in a widefield cryogenic microscope to parallelize resonant spectroscopy, achieving two orders of magnitude speed-up over confocal microscopy. Finally, we demonstrate automated chip-scale characterization of color centers and devices at room temperature, imaging thousands of microscope fields of view. These tools will enable accelerated identification of useful quantum emitters at chip-scale, enabling advances in scaling up color center platforms for quantum information applications, materials science, and device design and characterization.

We rigorously state the connection between the EHZ-capacity of convex Lagrangian products Ktimes TsubsetR^ntimesR^n and the minimal length of closed (K,T)-Minkowski billiard trajectories. This connection was made explicit for the first time by Artstein-Avidan and Ostrover under the assumption of smoothness and strict convexity of both K and T. We prove this connection in its full generality, i.e., without requiring any conditions on the convex bodies K and T. This prepares the computation of the EHZ-capacity of convex Lagrangian products of two convex polytopes by using discrete computational methods.

Recently, there have been breakthroughs in computer vision ("CV") models that are more generalizable with the advent of models such as CLIP and ALIGN. In this paper, we analyze CLIP and highlight some of the challenges such models pose. CLIP reduces the need for task specific training data, potentially opening up many niche tasks to automation. CLIP also allows its users to flexibly specify image classification classes in natural language, which we find can shift how biases manifest. Additionally, through some preliminary probes we find that CLIP can inherit biases found in prior computer vision systems. Given the wide and unpredictable domain of uses for such models, this raises questions regarding what sufficiently safe behaviour for such systems may look like. These results add evidence to the growing body of work calling for a change in the notion of a 'better' model--to move beyond simply looking at higher accuracy at task-oriented capability evaluations, and towards a broader 'better' that takes into account deployment-critical features such as different use contexts, and people who interact with the model when thinking about model deployment.

Complex networks provide a means to describe cities through their street mesh, expressing characteristics that refer to the structure and organization of an urban zone. Although other studies have used complex networks to model street meshes, we observed a lack of methods to characterize the relationship between cities by using their topological features. Accordingly, this paper aims to describe interactions between cities by using vectors of topological features extracted from their street meshes represented as complex networks. The methodology of this study is based on the use of digital maps. Over the computational representation of such maps, we extract global complex-network features that embody the characteristics of the cities. These vectors allow for the use of multidimensional projection and clustering techniques, enabling a similarity-based comparison of the street meshes. We experiment with 645 cities from the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo. Our results show how the joint of global features describes urban indicators that are deep-rooted in the network's topology and how they reveal characteristics and similarities among sets of cities that are separated from each other.

In recent years, offensive, abusive and hateful language, sexism, racism and other types of aggressive and cyberbullying behavior have been manifesting with increased frequency, and in many online social media platforms. In fact, past scientific work focused on studying these forms in popular media, such as Facebook and Twitter. Building on such work, we present an 8-month study of the various forms of abusive behavior on Twitter, in a holistic fashion. Departing from past work, we examine a wide variety of labeling schemes, which cover different forms of abusive behavior, at the same time. We propose an incremental and iterative methodology, that utilizes the power of crowdsourcing to annotate a large scale collection of tweets with a set of abuse-related labels. In fact, by applying our methodology including statistical analysis for label merging or elimination, we identify a reduced but robust set of labels. Finally, we offer a first overview and findings of our collected and annotated dataset of 100 thousand tweets, which we make publicly available for further scientific exploration.

We present results from Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) spectral line-scan observations at 3-mm and 2-mm bands of three near-infrared-dark (NIR-dark) galaxies behind two massive lensing clusters MACS J0417.5-1154 and RXC J0032.1+1808. Each of these three sources is a faint (de-lensed S_{1.2 mm} < 1 mJy) triply lensed system originally discovered in the ALMA Lensing Cluster Survey. We have successfully detected CO and [C I] emission lines and confirmed that their spectroscopic redshifts are z=3.652, 2.391, and 2.985. By utilizing a rich multi-wavelength data set, we find that the NIR-dark galaxies are located on the star formation main sequence in the intrinsic stellar mass range of log (M_*/M_odot) = 9.8 - 10.4, which is about one order of magnitude lower than that of typical submillimeter galaxies (SMGs). These NIR-dark galaxies show a variety in gas depletion times and spatial extent of dust emission. One of the three is a normal star-forming galaxy with gas depletion time consistent with a scaling relation, and its infrared surface brightness is an order of magnitude smaller than that of typical SMGs. Since this galaxy has an elongated axis ratio of sim 0.17, we argue that normal star-forming galaxies in an edge-on configuration can be heavily dust-obscured. This implies that existing deep WFC3/F160W surveys may miss a fraction of typical star-forming main-sequence galaxies due to their edge-on orientation.

Spatial reasoning is a crucial component of both biological and artificial intelligence. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of the capability of current state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) on spatial reasoning. To support our study, we created and contribute a novel Spatial Reasoning Characterization (SpaRC) framework and Spatial Reasoning Paths (SpaRP) datasets, to enable an in-depth understanding of the spatial relations and compositions as well as the usefulness of spatial reasoning chains. We found that all the state-of-the-art LLMs do not perform well on the datasets -- their performances are consistently low across different setups. The spatial reasoning capability improves substantially as model sizes scale up. Finetuning both large language models (e.g., Llama-2-70B) and smaller ones (e.g., Llama-2-13B) can significantly improve their F1-scores by 7--32 absolute points. We also found that the top proprietary LLMs still significantly outperform their open-source counterparts in topological spatial understanding and reasoning.

Characterizing samples that are difficult to learn from is crucial to developing highly performant ML models. This has led to numerous Hardness Characterization Methods (HCMs) that aim to identify "hard" samples. However, there is a lack of consensus regarding the definition and evaluation of "hardness". Unfortunately, current HCMs have only been evaluated on specific types of hardness and often only qualitatively or with respect to downstream performance, overlooking the fundamental quantitative identification task. We address this gap by presenting a fine-grained taxonomy of hardness types. Additionally, we propose the Hardness Characterization Analysis Toolkit (H-CAT), which supports comprehensive and quantitative benchmarking of HCMs across the hardness taxonomy and can easily be extended to new HCMs, hardness types, and datasets. We use H-CAT to evaluate 13 different HCMs across 8 hardness types. This comprehensive evaluation encompassing over 14K setups uncovers strengths and weaknesses of different HCMs, leading to practical tips to guide HCM selection and future development. Our findings highlight the need for more comprehensive HCM evaluation, while we hope our hardness taxonomy and toolkit will advance the principled evaluation and uptake of data-centric AI methods.

Despite the advancement of machine learning techniques in recent years, state-of-the-art systems lack robustness to "real world" events, where the input distributions and tasks encountered by the deployed systems will not be limited to the original training context, and systems will instead need to adapt to novel distributions and tasks while deployed. This critical gap may be addressed through the development of "Lifelong Learning" systems that are capable of 1) Continuous Learning, 2) Transfer and Adaptation, and 3) Scalability. Unfortunately, efforts to improve these capabilities are typically treated as distinct areas of research that are assessed independently, without regard to the impact of each separate capability on other aspects of the system. We instead propose a holistic approach, using a suite of metrics and an evaluation framework to assess Lifelong Learning in a principled way that is agnostic to specific domains or system techniques. Through five case studies, we show that this suite of metrics can inform the development of varied and complex Lifelong Learning systems. We highlight how the proposed suite of metrics quantifies performance trade-offs present during Lifelong Learning system development - both the widely discussed Stability-Plasticity dilemma and the newly proposed relationship between Sample Efficient and Robust Learning. Further, we make recommendations for the formulation and use of metrics to guide the continuing development of Lifelong Learning systems and assess their progress in the future.

We present a low-cost ultraviolet to infrared absolute quantum efficiency detector characterization system developed using commercial off-the-shelf components. The key components of the experiment include a light source,a regulated power supply, a monochromator, an integrating sphere, and a calibrated photodiode. We provide a step-by-step procedure to construct the photon and quantum efficiency transfer curves of imaging sensors. We present results for the GSENSE 2020 BSI CMOS sensor and the Sony IMX 455 BSI CMOS sensor. As a reference for similar characterizations, we provide a list of parts and associated costs along with images of our setup.

Loneliness has been associated with negative outcomes for physical and mental health. Understanding how people express and cope with various forms of loneliness is critical for early screening and targeted interventions to reduce loneliness, particularly among vulnerable groups such as young adults. To examine how different forms of loneliness and coping strategies manifest in loneliness self-disclosure, we built a dataset, FIG-Loneliness (FIne-Grained Loneliness) by using Reddit posts in two young adult-focused forums and two loneliness related forums consisting of a diverse age group. We provided annotations by trained human annotators for binary and fine-grained loneliness classifications of the posts. Trained on FIG-Loneliness, two BERT-based models were used to understand loneliness forms and authors' coping strategies in these forums. Our binary loneliness classification achieved an accuracy above 97%, and fine-grained loneliness category classification reached an average accuracy of 77% across all labeled categories. With FIG-Loneliness and model predictions, we found that loneliness expressions in the young adults related forums were distinct from other forums. Those in young adult-focused forums were more likely to express concerns pertaining to peer relationship, and were potentially more sensitive to geographical isolation impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Also, we showed that different forms of loneliness have differential use in coping strategies.

"Forward-only" algorithms, which train neural networks while avoiding a backward pass, have recently gained attention as a way of solving the biologically unrealistic aspects of backpropagation. Here, we first address compelling challenges related to the "forward-only" rules, which include reducing the performance gap with backpropagation and providing an analytical understanding of their dynamics. To this end, we show that the forward-only algorithm with top-down feedback is well-approximated by an "adaptive-feedback-alignment" algorithm, and we analytically track its performance during learning in a prototype high-dimensional setting. Then, we compare different versions of forward-only algorithms, focusing on the Forward-Forward and PEPITA frameworks, and we show that they share the same learning principles. Overall, our work unveils the connections between three key neuro-inspired learning rules, providing a link between "forward-only" algorithms, i.e., Forward-Forward and PEPITA, and an approximation of backpropagation, i.e., Feedback Alignment.

We have witnessed lately a rapid proliferation of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) capable of generating high-quality text. While these LLMs have revolutionized text generation across various domains, they also pose significant risks to the information ecosystem, such as the potential for generating convincing propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation at scale. This paper offers a review of AI-generated text forensic systems, an emerging field addressing the challenges of LLM misuses. We present an overview of the existing efforts in AI-generated text forensics by introducing a detailed taxonomy, focusing on three primary pillars: detection, attribution, and characterization. These pillars enable a practical understanding of AI-generated text, from identifying AI-generated content (detection), determining the specific AI model involved (attribution), and grouping the underlying intents of the text (characterization). Furthermore, we explore available resources for AI-generated text forensics research and discuss the evolving challenges and future directions of forensic systems in an AI era.

Ultracold gases of highly magnetic lanthanide atoms have enabled the realisation of dipolar quantum droplets and supersolids. However, future studies could be limited by the achievable atom numbers and hindered by high three-body loss rates. Here we study density-dependent atom loss in an ultracold gas of {}^{166}Er for magnetic fields below 4 G, identifying six previously unknown features which display both a strong temperature dependence and also sensitivity to the polarisation and intensity of the light used to optically trap the atoms. This detailed knowledge of the loss landscape allows us to optimise the production of dipolar BECs with more than 2 times 10^5 atoms and points towards optimal strategies for the study of large-atom-number dipolar gases in the droplet and supersolid regimes.

A central question for neuroscience is how to characterize brain representations of perceptual and cognitive content. An ideal characterization should distinguish different functional regions with robustness to noise and idiosyncrasies of individual brains that do not correspond to computational differences. Previous studies have characterized brain representations by their representational geometry, which is defined by the representational dissimilarity matrix (RDM), a summary statistic that abstracts from the roles of individual neurons (or responses channels) and characterizes the discriminability of stimuli. Here we explore a further step of abstraction: from the geometry to the topology of brain representations. We propose topological representational similarity analysis (tRSA), an extension of representational similarity analysis (RSA) that uses a family of geo-topological summary statistics that generalizes the RDM to characterize the topology while de-emphasizing the geometry. We evaluate this new family of statistics in terms of the sensitivity and specificity for model selection using both simulations and functional MRI (fMRI) data. In the simulations, the ground truth is a data-generating layer representation in a neural network model and the models are the same and other layers in different model instances (trained from different random seeds). In fMRI, the ground truth is a visual area and the models are the same and other areas measured in different subjects. Results show that topology-sensitive characterizations of population codes are robust to noise and interindividual variability and maintain excellent sensitivity to the unique representational signatures of different neural network layers and brain regions.

We identify the task of measuring data to quantitatively characterize the composition of machine learning data and datasets. Similar to an object's height, width, and volume, data measurements quantify different attributes of data along common dimensions that support comparison. Several lines of research have proposed what we refer to as measurements, with differing terminology; we bring some of this work together, particularly in fields of computer vision and language, and build from it to motivate measuring data as a critical component of responsible AI development. Measuring data aids in systematically building and analyzing machine learning (ML) data towards specific goals and gaining better control of what modern ML systems will learn. We conclude with a discussion of the many avenues of future work, the limitations of data measurements, and how to leverage these measurement approaches in research and practice.

This paper describes our winning contribution to SemEval 2018 Task 4: Character Identification on Multiparty Dialogues. It is a simple, standard model with one key innovation, an entity library. Our results show that this innovation greatly facilitates the identification of infrequent characters. Because of the generic nature of our model, this finding is potentially relevant to any task that requires effective learning from sparse or unbalanced data.

The idea of personality in descriptive psychology, traditionally defined through observable behavior, has now been extended to Large Language Models (LLMs) to better understand their behavior. This raises a question: do LLMs exhibit distinct and consistent personality traits, similar to humans? Existing self-assessment personality tests, while applicable, lack the necessary validity and reliability for precise personality measurements. To address this, we introduce TRAIT, a new tool consisting of 8K multi-choice questions designed to assess the personality of LLMs with validity and reliability. TRAIT is built on the psychometrically validated human questionnaire, Big Five Inventory (BFI) and Short Dark Triad (SD-3), enhanced with the ATOMIC10X knowledge graph for testing personality in a variety of real scenarios. TRAIT overcomes the reliability and validity issues when measuring personality of LLM with self-assessment, showing the highest scores across three metrics: refusal rate, prompt sensitivity, and option order sensitivity. It reveals notable insights into personality of LLM: 1) LLMs exhibit distinct and consistent personality, which is highly influenced by their training data (i.e., data used for alignment tuning), and 2) current prompting techniques have limited effectiveness in eliciting certain traits, such as high psychopathy or low conscientiousness, suggesting the need for further research in this direction.

Empathy is a cognitive and emotional reaction to an observed situation of others. Empathy has recently attracted interest because it has numerous applications in psychology and AI, but it is unclear how different forms of empathy (e.g., self-report vs counterpart other-report, concern vs. distress) interact with other affective phenomena or demographics like gender and age. To better understand this, we created the {\it Empathic Conversations} dataset of annotated negative, empathy-eliciting dialogues in which pairs of participants converse about news articles. People differ in their perception of the empathy of others. These differences are associated with certain characteristics such as personality and demographics. Hence, we collected detailed characterization of the participants' traits, their self-reported empathetic response to news articles, their conversational partner other-report, and turn-by-turn third-party assessments of the level of self-disclosure, emotion, and empathy expressed. This dataset is the first to present empathy in multiple forms along with personal distress, emotion, personality characteristics, and person-level demographic information. We present baseline models for predicting some of these features from conversations.

Specialised pre-trained language models are becoming more frequent in NLP since they can potentially outperform models trained on generic texts. BioBERT and BioClinicalBERT are two examples of such models that have shown promise in medical NLP tasks. Many of these models are overparametrised and resource-intensive, but thanks to techniques like Knowledge Distillation (KD), it is possible to create smaller versions that perform almost as well as their larger counterparts. In this work, we specifically focus on development of compact language models for processing clinical texts (i.e. progress notes, discharge summaries etc). We developed a number of efficient lightweight clinical transformers using knowledge distillation and continual learning, with the number of parameters ranging from 15 million to 65 million. These models performed comparably to larger models such as BioBERT and ClinicalBioBERT and significantly outperformed other compact models trained on general or biomedical data. Our extensive evaluation was done across several standard datasets and covered a wide range of clinical text-mining tasks, including Natural Language Inference, Relation Extraction, Named Entity Recognition, and Sequence Classification. To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive study specifically focused on creating efficient and compact transformers for clinical NLP tasks. The models and code used in this study can be found on our Huggingface profile at https://huggingface.co/nlpie and Github page at https://github.com/nlpie-research/Lightweight-Clinical-Transformers, respectively, promoting reproducibility of our results.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being utilized by both candidates and employers in the recruitment context. However, with this comes numerous ethical concerns, particularly related to the lack of transparency in these "black-box" models. Although previous studies have sought to increase the transparency of these models by investigating the personality traits of LLMs, many of the previous studies have provided them with personality assessments to complete. On the other hand, this study seeks to obtain a better understanding of such models by examining their output variations based on different input prompts. Specifically, we use a novel elicitation approach using prompts derived from common interview questions, as well as prompts designed to elicit particular Big Five personality traits to examine whether the models were susceptible to trait-activation like humans are, to measure their personality based on the language used in their outputs. To do so, we repeatedly prompted multiple LMs with different parameter sizes, including Llama-2, Falcon, Mistral, Bloom, GPT, OPT, and XLNet (base and fine tuned versions) and examined their personality using classifiers trained on the myPersonality dataset. Our results reveal that, generally, all LLMs demonstrate high openness and low extraversion. However, whereas LMs with fewer parameters exhibit similar behaviour in personality traits, newer and LMs with more parameters exhibit a broader range of personality traits, with increased agreeableness, emotional stability, and openness. Furthermore, a greater number of parameters is positively associated with openness and conscientiousness. Moreover, fine-tuned models exhibit minor modulations in their personality traits, contingent on the dataset. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

While the problem of hallucinations in neural machine translation has long been recognized, so far the progress on its alleviation is very little. Indeed, recently it turned out that without artificially encouraging models to hallucinate, previously existing methods fall short and even the standard sequence log-probability is more informative. It means that characteristics internal to the model can give much more information than we expect, and before using external models and measures, we first need to ask: how far can we go if we use nothing but the translation model itself ? We propose to use a method that evaluates the percentage of the source contribution to a generated translation. Intuitively, hallucinations are translations "detached" from the source, hence they can be identified by low source contribution. This method improves detection accuracy for the most severe hallucinations by a factor of 2 and is able to alleviate hallucinations at test time on par with the previous best approach that relies on external models. Next, if we move away from internal model characteristics and allow external tools, we show that using sentence similarity from cross-lingual embeddings further improves these results.

In domains with high stakes such as law, recruitment, and healthcare, learning models frequently rely on sensitive user data for inference, necessitating the complete set of features. This not only poses significant privacy risks for individuals but also demands substantial human effort from organizations to verify information accuracy. This paper asks whether it is necessary to use all input features for accurate predictions at inference time. The paper demonstrates that, in a personalized setting, individuals may only need to disclose a small subset of their features without compromising decision-making accuracy. The paper also provides an efficient sequential algorithm to determine the appropriate attributes for each individual to provide. Evaluations across various learning tasks show that individuals can potentially report as little as 10\% of their information while maintaining the same accuracy level as a model that employs the full set of user information.

Recently, efficient fine-tuning of large-scale pre-trained models has attracted increasing research interests, where linear probing (LP) as a fundamental module is involved in exploiting the final representations for task-dependent classification. However, most of the existing methods focus on how to effectively introduce a few of learnable parameters, and little work pays attention to the commonly used LP module. In this paper, we propose a novel Moment Probing (MP) method to further explore the potential of LP. Distinguished from LP which builds a linear classification head based on the mean of final features (e.g., word tokens for ViT) or classification tokens, our MP performs a linear classifier on feature distribution, which provides the stronger representation ability by exploiting richer statistical information inherent in features. Specifically, we represent feature distribution by its characteristic function, which is efficiently approximated by using first- and second-order moments of features. Furthermore, we propose a multi-head convolutional cross-covariance (MHC^3) to compute second-order moments in an efficient and effective manner. By considering that MP could affect feature learning, we introduce a partially shared module to learn two recalibrating parameters (PSRP) for backbones based on MP, namely MP_{+}. Extensive experiments on ten benchmarks using various models show that our MP significantly outperforms LP and is competitive with counterparts at less training cost, while our MP_{+} achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Generative models have enabled the creation of contents that are indistinguishable from those taken from nature. Open-source development of such models raised concerns about the risks of their misuse for malicious purposes. One potential risk mitigation strategy is to attribute generative models via fingerprinting. Current fingerprinting methods exhibit a significant tradeoff between robust attribution accuracy and generation quality while lacking design principles to improve this tradeoff. This paper investigates the use of latent semantic dimensions as fingerprints, from where we can analyze the effects of design variables, including the choice of fingerprinting dimensions, strength, and capacity, on the accuracy-quality tradeoff. Compared with previous SOTA, our method requires minimum computation and is more applicable to large-scale models. We use StyleGAN2 and the latent diffusion model to demonstrate the efficacy of our method.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across a broad range of tasks involving question answering and the generation of coherent text and code. Comprehensively understanding the strengths and weaknesses of LLMs is beneficial for safety, downstream applications and improving performance. In this work, we investigate the degree to which GPT-4 has acquired factual geographic knowledge and is capable of using this knowledge for interpretative reasoning, which is especially important for applications that involve geographic data, such as geospatial analysis, supply chain management, and disaster response. To this end, we design and conduct a series of diverse experiments, starting from factual tasks such as location, distance and elevation estimation to more complex questions such as generating country outlines and travel networks, route finding under constraints and supply chain analysis. We provide a broad characterisation of what GPT-4 (without plugins or Internet access) knows about the world, highlighting both potentially surprising capabilities but also limitations.

This paper proposes PuRL - a deep reinforcement learning (RL) based algorithm for pruning neural networks. Unlike current RL based model compression approaches where feedback is given only at the end of each episode to the agent, PuRL provides rewards at every pruning step. This enables PuRL to achieve sparsity and accuracy comparable to current state-of-the-art methods, while having a much shorter training cycle. PuRL achieves more than 80% sparsity on the ResNet-50 model while retaining a Top-1 accuracy of 75.37% on the ImageNet dataset. Through our experiments we show that PuRL is also able to sparsify already efficient architectures like MobileNet-V2. In addition to performance characterisation experiments, we also provide a discussion and analysis of the various RL design choices that went into the tuning of the Markov Decision Process underlying PuRL. Lastly, we point out that PuRL is simple to use and can be easily adapted for various architectures.

For the evolutionary Stokes problem with dynamic boundary condition we show maximal regularity of weak solutions in time. Due to the characteriation of R-sectorial operators on Hilbert spaces, the proof reduces to finding the correct functional analytic setting and proving that an operator is sectorial, i.e. generates an analytic semigroup.

We provide a full characterisation of all of the possible alternating group (A_n) equivariant neural networks whose layers are some tensor power of R^{n}. In particular, we find a basis of matrices for the learnable, linear, A_n-equivariant layer functions between such tensor power spaces in the standard basis of R^{n}. We also describe how our approach generalises to the construction of neural networks that are equivariant to local symmetries.

We provide a full characterisation of all of the possible group equivariant neural networks whose layers are some tensor power of R^{n} for three symmetry groups that are missing from the machine learning literature: O(n), the orthogonal group; SO(n), the special orthogonal group; and Sp(n), the symplectic group. In particular, we find a spanning set of matrices for the learnable, linear, equivariant layer functions between such tensor power spaces in the standard basis of R^{n} when the group is O(n) or SO(n), and in the symplectic basis of R^{n} when the group is Sp(n).

Lay summarisation aims to jointly summarise and simplify a given text, thus making its content more comprehensible to non-experts. Automatic approaches for lay summarisation can provide significant value in broadening access to scientific literature, enabling a greater degree of both interdisciplinary knowledge sharing and public understanding when it comes to research findings. However, current corpora for this task are limited in their size and scope, hindering the development of broadly applicable data-driven approaches. Aiming to rectify these issues, we present two novel lay summarisation datasets, PLOS (large-scale) and eLife (medium-scale), each of which contains biomedical journal articles alongside expert-written lay summaries. We provide a thorough characterisation of our lay summaries, highlighting differing levels of readability and abstractiveness between datasets that can be leveraged to support the needs of different applications. Finally, we benchmark our datasets using mainstream summarisation approaches and perform a manual evaluation with domain experts, demonstrating their utility and casting light on the key challenges of this task.

We present semantic correctness proofs of automatic differentiation (AD). We consider a forward-mode AD method on a higher order language with algebraic data types, and we characterise it as the unique structure preserving macro given a choice of derivatives for basic operations. We describe a rich semantics for differentiable programming, based on diffeological spaces. We show that it interprets our language, and we phrase what it means for the AD method to be correct with respect to this semantics. We show that our characterisation of AD gives rise to an elegant semantic proof of its correctness based on a gluing construction on diffeological spaces. We explain how this is, in essence, a logical relations argument. Throughout, we show how the analysis extends to AD methods for computing higher order derivatives using a Taylor approximation.

We present semantic correctness proofs of Automatic Differentiation (AD). We consider a forward-mode AD method on a higher order language with algebraic data types, and we characterise it as the unique structure preserving macro given a choice of derivatives for basic operations. We describe a rich semantics for differentiable programming, based on diffeological spaces. We show that it interprets our language, and we phrase what it means for the AD method to be correct with respect to this semantics. We show that our characterisation of AD gives rise to an elegant semantic proof of its correctness based on a gluing construction on diffeological spaces. We explain how this is, in essence, a logical relations argument. Finally, we sketch how the analysis extends to other AD methods by considering a continuation-based method.

Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory explains how the appearance of purposive design in the sophisticated adaptations of living organisms can have come about without their intentionally being designed. The explanation relies crucially on the possibility of certain physical processes: mainly, gene replication and natural selection. In this paper I show that for those processes to be possible without the design of biological adaptations being encoded in the laws of physics, those laws must have certain other properties. The theory of what these properties are is not part of evolution theory proper, and has not been developed, yet without it the neo-Darwinian theory does not fully achieve its purpose of explaining the appearance of design. To this end I apply Constructor Theory's new mode of explanation to provide an exact formulation of the appearance of design, of no-design laws, and of the logic of self-reproduction and natural selection, within fundamental physics. I conclude that self-reproduction, replication and natural selection are possible under no-design laws, the only non-trivial condition being that they allow digital information to be physically instantiated. This has an exact characterisation in the constructor theory of information. I also show that under no-design laws an accurate replicator requires the existence of a "vehicle" constituting, together with the replicator, a self-reproducer.

Large participatory biomedical studies, studies that recruit individuals to join a dataset, are gaining popularity and investment, especially for analysis by modern AI methods. Because they purposively recruit participants, these studies are uniquely able to address a lack of historical representation, an issue that has affected many biomedical datasets. In this work, we define representativeness as the similarity to a target population distribution of a set of attributes and our goal is to mirror the U.S. population across distributions of age, gender, race, and ethnicity. Many participatory studies recruit at several institutions, so we introduce a computational approach to adaptively allocate recruitment resources among sites to improve representativeness. In simulated recruitment of 10,000-participant cohorts from medical centers in the STAR Clinical Research Network, we show that our approach yields a more representative cohort than existing baselines. Thus, we highlight the value of computational modeling in guiding recruitment efforts.

In Marius von Senden's Space and Sight, a newly sighted blind patient describes the experience of a corner as lemon-like, because corners "prick" sight like lemons prick the tongue. Prickliness, here, is a dimension in the feature space of sensory experience, an effect of the perceived on the perceiver that arises where the two interact. In the account of the newly sighted, an effect familiar from one interaction translates to a novel context. Perception serves as the vehicle for generalization, in that an effect shared across different experiences produces a concrete abstraction grounded in those experiences. Cezanne and the post-impressionists, fluent in the language of experience translation, realized that the way to paint a concrete form that best reflected reality was to paint not what they saw, but what it was like to see. We envision a future of creation using AI where what it is like to see is replicable, transferrable, manipulable - part of the artist's palette that is both grounded in a particular context, and generalizable beyond it. An active line of research maps human-interpretable features onto directions in GAN latent space. Supervised and self-supervised approaches that search for anticipated directions or use off-the-shelf classifiers to drive image manipulation in embedding space are limited in the variety of features they can uncover. Unsupervised approaches that discover useful new directions show that the space of perceptually meaningful directions is nowhere close to being fully mapped. As this space is broad and full of creative potential, we want tools for direction discovery that capture the richness and generalizability of human perception. Our approach puts creators in the discovery loop during real-time tool use, in order to identify directions that are perceptually meaningful to them, and generate interpretable image translations along those directions.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes ubiquitous, the need for Explainable AI (XAI) has become critical for transparency and trust among users. A significant challenge in XAI is catering to diverse users, such as data scientists, domain experts, and end-users. Recent research has started to investigate how users' characteristics impact interactions with and user experience of explanations, with a view to personalizing XAI. However, are we heading down a rabbit hole by focusing on unimportant details? Our research aimed to investigate how user characteristics are related to using, understanding, and trusting an AI system that provides explanations. Our empirical study with 149 participants who interacted with an XAI system that flagged inappropriate comments showed that very few user characteristics mattered; only age and the personality trait openness influenced actual understanding. Our work provides evidence to reorient user-focused XAI research and question the pursuit of personalized XAI based on fine-grained user characteristics.

In disentangling the heterogeneity observed in psychopathology, personality of the patients is considered crucial. While it has been demonstrated that personality traits are reflected in the language used by a patient, we hypothesize that this enables automatic inference of the personality type directly from speech utterances, potentially more accurately than through a traditional questionnaire-based approach explicitly designed for personality classification. To validate this hypothesis, we adopt natural language processing (NLP) and standard machine learning tools for classification. We test this on a dataset of recorded clinical diagnostic interviews (CDI) on a sample of 79 patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD) -- a condition for which differentiated treatment based on personality styles has been advocated -- and classified into anaclitic and introjective personality styles. We start by analyzing the interviews to see which linguistic features are associated with each style, in order to gain a better understanding of the styles. Then, we develop automatic classifiers based on (a) standardized questionnaire responses; (b) basic text features, i.e., TF-IDF scores of words and word sequences; (c) more advanced text features, using LIWC (linguistic inquiry and word count) and context-aware features using BERT (bidirectional encoder representations from transformers); (d) audio features. We find that automated classification with language-derived features (i.e., based on LIWC) significantly outperforms questionnaire-based classification models. Furthermore, the best performance is achieved by combining LIWC with the questionnaire features. This suggests that more work should be put into developing linguistically based automated techniques for characterizing personality, however questionnaires still to some extent complement such methods.

Privacy-enhancing technologies are technologies that implement fundamental data protection principles. With respect to biometric recognition, different types of privacy-enhancing technologies have been introduced for protecting stored biometric data which are generally classified as sensitive. In this regard, various taxonomies and conceptual categorizations have been proposed and standardization activities have been carried out. However, these efforts have mainly been devoted to certain sub-categories of privacy-enhancing technologies and therefore lack generalization. This work provides an overview of concepts of privacy-enhancing technologies for biometrics in a unified framework. Key aspects and differences between existing concepts are highlighted in detail at each processing step. Fundamental properties and limitations of existing approaches are discussed and related to data protection techniques and principles. Moreover, scenarios and methods for the assessment of privacy-enhancing technologies for biometrics are presented. This paper is meant as a point of entry to the field of biometric data protection and is directed towards experienced researchers as well as non-experts.

In order to properly train a machine learning model, data must be properly collected. To guarantee a proper data collection, verifying that the collected data set holds certain properties is a possible solution. For example, guaranteeing that the data set contains samples across the whole input space, or that the data set is balanced w.r.t. different classes. We present a formal approach for verifying a set of arbitrarily stated properties over a data set. The proposed approach relies on the transformation of the data set into a first order logic formula, which can be later verified w.r.t. the different properties also stated in the same logic. A prototype tool, which uses the z3 solver, has been developed; the prototype can take as an input a set of properties stated in a formal language and formally verify a given data set w.r.t. to the given set of properties. Preliminary experimental results show the feasibility and performance of the proposed approach, and furthermore the flexibility for expressing properties of interest.

A movie that is thoroughly enjoyed and recommended by an individual might be hated by another. One characteristic of humans is the ability to have feelings which could be positive or negative. To automatically classify and study human feelings, an aspect of natural language processing, sentiment analysis and opinion mining were designed to understand human feelings regarding several issues which could affect a product, a social media platforms, government, or societal discussions or even movies. Several works on sentiment analysis have been done on high resource languages while low resources languages like Yoruba have been sidelined. Due to the scarcity of datasets and linguistic architectures that will suit low resource languages, African languages "low resource languages" have been ignored and not fully explored. For this reason, our attention is placed on Yoruba to explore sentiment analysis on reviews of Nigerian movies. The data comprised 1500 movie reviews that were sourced from IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd, Cinemapointer and Nollyrated. We develop sentiment classification models using the state-of-the-art pre-trained language models like mBERT and AfriBERTa to classify the movie reviews.

The face is a rich source of information that can be utilized to infer a person's biological age, sex, phenotype, genetic defects, and health status. All of these factors are relevant for predicting an individual's remaining lifespan. In this study, we collected a dataset of over 24,000 images (from Wikidata/Wikipedia) of individuals who died of natural causes, along with the number of years between when the image was taken and when the person passed away. We made this dataset publicly available. We fine-tuned multiple Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models on this data, at best achieving a mean absolute error of 8.3 years in the validation data using VGGFace. However, the model's performance diminishes when the person was younger at the time of the image. To demonstrate the potential applications of our remaining lifespan model, we present examples of using it to estimate the average loss of life (in years) due to the COVID-19 pandemic and to predict the increase in life expectancy that might result from a health intervention such as weight loss. Additionally, we discuss the ethical considerations associated with such models.

The development of large language models has instilled widespread interest among the researchers to understand their inherent reasoning and problem-solving capabilities. Despite good amount of research going on to elucidate these capabilities, there is a still an appreciable gap in understanding moral development and judgments of these models. The current approaches of evaluating the ethical reasoning abilities of these models as a classification task pose numerous inaccuracies because of over-simplification. In this study, we built a psychological connection by bridging two disparate fields-human psychology and AI. We proposed an effective evaluation framework which can help to delineate the model's ethical reasoning ability in terms of moral consistency and Kohlberg's moral development stages with the help of Psychometric Assessment Tool-Defining Issues Test.

Research on human spoken language has shown that speech plays an important role in identifying speaker personality traits. In this work, we propose an approach for identifying speaker personality traits using overlap dynamics in multiparty spoken dialogues. We first define a set of novel features representing the overlap dynamics of each speaker. We then investigate the impact of speaker personality traits on these features using ANOVA tests. We find that features of overlap dynamics significantly vary for speakers with different levels of both Extraversion and Conscientiousness. Finally, we find that classifiers using only overlap dynamics features outperform random guessing in identifying Extraversion and Agreeableness, and that the improvements are statistically significant.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), with its multiplier effect and wide applications in multiple areas, could potentially be an important application of quantum computing. Since modern AI systems are often built on neural networks, the design of quantum neural networks becomes a key challenge in integrating quantum computing into AI. To provide a more fine-grained characterisation of the impact of quantum components on the performance of neural networks, we propose a framework where classical neural network layers are gradually replaced by quantum layers that have the same type of input and output while keeping the flow of information between layers unchanged, different from most current research in quantum neural network, which favours an end-to-end quantum model. We start with a simple three-layer classical neural network without any normalisation layers or activation functions, and gradually change the classical layers to the corresponding quantum versions. We conduct numerical experiments on image classification datasets such as the MNIST, FashionMNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets to demonstrate the change of performance brought by the systematic introduction of quantum components. Through this framework, our research sheds new light on the design of future quantum neural network models where it could be more favourable to search for methods and frameworks that harness the advantages from both the classical and quantum worlds.

We investigate novel random graph embeddings that can be computed in expected polynomial time and that are able to distinguish all non-isomorphic graphs in expectation. Previous graph embeddings have limited expressiveness and either cannot distinguish all graphs or cannot be computed efficiently for every graph. To be able to approximate arbitrary functions on graphs, we are interested in efficient alternatives that become arbitrarily expressive with increasing resources. Our approach is based on Lov\'asz' characterisation of graph isomorphism through an infinite dimensional vector of homomorphism counts. Our empirical evaluation shows competitive results on several benchmark graph learning tasks.

We define the bicategory of Graph Convolutional Neural Networks GCNN_n for an arbitrary graph with n nodes. We show it can be factored through the already existing categorical constructions for deep learning called Para and Lens with the base category set to the CoKleisli category of the product comonad. We prove that there exists an injective-on-objects, faithful 2-functor GCNN_n to Para(CoKl(R^{n times n} times -)). We show that this construction allows us to treat the adjacency matrix of a GCNN as a global parameter instead of a a local, layer-wise one. This gives us a high-level categorical characterisation of a particular kind of inductive bias GCNNs possess. Lastly, we hypothesize about possible generalisations of GCNNs to general message-passing graph neural networks, connections to equivariant learning, and the (lack of) functoriality of activation functions.

We propose a framework for classifying the capabilities and behavior of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) models and their precursors. This framework introduces levels of AGI performance, generality, and autonomy. It is our hope that this framework will be useful in an analogous way to the levels of autonomous driving, by providing a common language to compare models, assess risks, and measure progress along the path to AGI. To develop our framework, we analyze existing definitions of AGI, and distill six principles that a useful ontology for AGI should satisfy. These principles include focusing on capabilities rather than mechanisms; separately evaluating generality and performance; and defining stages along the path toward AGI, rather than focusing on the endpoint. With these principles in mind, we propose 'Levels of AGI' based on depth (performance) and breadth (generality) of capabilities, and reflect on how current systems fit into this ontology. We discuss the challenging requirements for future benchmarks that quantify the behavior and capabilities of AGI models against these levels. Finally, we discuss how these levels of AGI interact with deployment considerations such as autonomy and risk, and emphasize the importance of carefully selecting Human-AI Interaction paradigms for responsible and safe deployment of highly capable AI systems.

Biometric identification is a reliable method to verify individuals based on their unique physical or behavioral traits, offering a secure alternative to traditional methods like passwords or PINs. This study focuses on ear biometric identification, exploiting its distinctive features for enhanced accuracy, reliability, and usability. While past studies typically investigate face recognition and fingerprint analysis, our research demonstrates the effectiveness of ear biometrics in overcoming limitations such as variations in facial expressions and lighting conditions. We utilized two datasets: AMI (700 images from 100 individuals) and EarNV1.0 (28,412 images from 164 individuals). To improve the accuracy and robustness of our ear biometric identification system, we applied various techniques including data preprocessing and augmentation. Our models achieved a testing accuracy of 99.35% on the AMI Dataset and 98.1% on the EarNV1.0 dataset, showcasing the effectiveness of our approach in precisely identifying individuals based on ear biometric characteristics.

We initiate the study of proper losses for evaluating generative models in the discrete setting. Unlike traditional proper losses, we treat both the generative model and the target distribution as black-boxes, only assuming ability to draw i.i.d. samples. We define a loss to be black-box proper if the generative distribution that minimizes expected loss is equal to the target distribution. Using techniques from statistical estimation theory, we give a general construction and characterization of black-box proper losses: they must take a polynomial form, and the number of draws from the model and target distribution must exceed the degree of the polynomial. The characterization rules out a loss whose expectation is the cross-entropy between the target distribution and the model. By extending the construction to arbitrary sampling schemes such as Poisson sampling, however, we show that one can construct such a loss.

The quality of face images significantly influences the performance of underlying face recognition algorithms. Face image quality assessment (FIQA) estimates the utility of the captured image in achieving reliable and accurate recognition performance. In this work, we propose a novel learning paradigm that learns internal network observations during the training process. Based on that, our proposed CR-FIQA uses this paradigm to estimate the face image quality of a sample by predicting its relative classifiability. This classifiability is measured based on the allocation of the training sample feature representation in angular space with respect to its class center and the nearest negative class center. We experimentally illustrate the correlation between the face image quality and the sample relative classifiability. As such property is only observable for the training dataset, we propose to learn this property from the training dataset and utilize it to predict the quality measure on unseen samples. This training is performed simultaneously while optimizing the class centers by an angular margin penalty-based softmax loss used for face recognition model training. Through extensive evaluation experiments on eight benchmarks and four face recognition models, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposed CR-FIQA over state-of-the-art (SOTA) FIQA algorithms.

We develop techniques to quantify the degree to which a given (training or testing) example is an outlier in the underlying distribution. We evaluate five methods to score examples in a dataset by how well-represented the examples are, for different plausible definitions of "well-represented", and apply these to four common datasets: MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet. Despite being independent approaches, we find all five are highly correlated, suggesting that the notion of being well-represented can be quantified. Among other uses, we find these methods can be combined to identify (a) prototypical examples (that match human expectations); (b) memorized training examples; and, (c) uncommon submodes of the dataset. Further, we show how we can utilize our metrics to determine an improved ordering for curriculum learning, and impact adversarial robustness. We release all metric values on training and test sets we studied.

Artificial neural networks are being proposed as models of parts of the brain. The networks are compared to recordings of biological neurons, and good performance in reproducing neural responses is considered to support the model's validity. A key question is how much this system identification approach tells us about brain computation. Does it validate one model architecture over another? We evaluate the most commonly used comparison techniques, such as a linear encoding model and centered kernel alignment, to correctly identify a model by replacing brain recordings with known ground truth models. System identification performance is quite variable; it also depends significantly on factors independent of the ground truth architecture, such as stimuli images. In addition, we show the limitations of using functional similarity scores in identifying higher-level architectural motifs.

The ability to have the same experience for different user groups (i.e., accessibility) is one of the most important characteristics of Web-based systems. The same is true for Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) systems that provide the access to Semantic Web data via natural language interface. While following our research agenda on the multilingual aspect of accessibility of KGQA systems, we identified several ongoing challenges. One of them is the lack of multilingual KGQA benchmarks. In this work, we extend one of the most popular KGQA benchmarks - QALD-9 by introducing high-quality questions' translations to 8 languages provided by native speakers, and transferring the SPARQL queries of QALD-9 from DBpedia to Wikidata, s.t., the usability and relevance of the dataset is strongly increased. Five of the languages - Armenian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Bashkir and Belarusian - to our best knowledge were never considered in KGQA research community before. The latter two of the languages are considered as "endangered" by UNESCO. We call the extended dataset QALD-9-plus and made it available online https://github.com/Perevalov/qald_9_plus.

This work presents AnyDoor, a diffusion-based image generator with the power to teleport target objects to new scenes at user-specified locations in a harmonious way. Instead of tuning parameters for each object, our model is trained only once and effortlessly generalizes to diverse object-scene combinations at the inference stage. Such a challenging zero-shot setting requires an adequate characterization of a certain object. To this end, we complement the commonly used identity feature with detail features, which are carefully designed to maintain texture details yet allow versatile local variations (e.g., lighting, orientation, posture, etc.), supporting the object in favorably blending with different surroundings. We further propose to borrow knowledge from video datasets, where we can observe various forms (i.e., along the time axis) of a single object, leading to stronger model generalizability and robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing alternatives as well as its great potential in real-world applications, such as virtual try-on and object moving. Project page is https://damo-vilab.github.io/AnyDoor-Page/.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across a variety of tasks (e.g., image captioning, visual question answering). While broad, their knowledge remains generic (e.g., recognizing a dog), and they are unable to handle personalized subjects (e.g., recognizing a user's pet dog). Human reasoning, in contrast, typically operates within the context of specific subjects in our surroundings. For example, one might ask, "What should I buy for my dog's birthday?"; as opposed to a generic inquiry about "What should I buy for a dog's birthday?". Similarly, when looking at a friend's image, the interest lies in seeing their activities (e.g., "my friend is holding a cat"), rather than merely observing generic human actions (e.g., "a man is holding a cat"). In this paper, we introduce the novel task of personalizing LMMs, so that they can have conversations about a specific subject. We propose Yo'LLaVA, which learns to embed a personalized subject into a set of latent tokens given a handful of example images of the subject. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses reveal that Yo'LLaVA can learn the concept more efficiently using fewer tokens and more effectively encode the visual attributes compared to strong prompting baselines (e.g., LLaVA).

As mental health care systems worldwide struggle to meet demand, there is increasing focus on using language models to infer neuropsychiatric conditions or psychopathological traits from language production. Yet, so far, this research has only delivered solutions with limited clinical applicability, due to insufficient consideration of ethical questions crucial to ensuring the synergy between possible applications and model design. To accelerate progress towards clinically applicable models, our paper charts the ethical landscape of research on language-based inference of psychopathology and provides a practical tool for researchers to navigate it. We identify seven core ethical principles that should guide model development and deployment in this domain, translate them into ELLIPS, an ethical toolkit operationalizing these principles into questions that can guide researchers' choices with respect to data selection, architectures, evaluation, and model deployment, and provide a case study exemplifying its use. With this, we aim to facilitate the emergence of model technology with concrete potential for real-world applicability.

An empirical investigation into the simulation of the Big Five personality traits by large language models (LLMs), namely Llama2, GPT4, and Mixtral, is presented. We analyze the personality traits simulated by these models and their stability. This contributes to the broader understanding of the capabilities of LLMs to simulate personality traits and the respective implications for personalized human-computer interaction.

Many recently trained neural networks employ large numbers of parameters to achieve good performance. One may intuitively use the number of parameters required as a rough gauge of the difficulty of a problem. But how accurate are such notions? How many parameters are really needed? In this paper we attempt to answer this question by training networks not in their native parameter space, but instead in a smaller, randomly oriented subspace. We slowly increase the dimension of this subspace, note at which dimension solutions first appear, and define this to be the intrinsic dimension of the objective landscape. The approach is simple to implement, computationally tractable, and produces several suggestive conclusions. Many problems have smaller intrinsic dimensions than one might suspect, and the intrinsic dimension for a given dataset varies little across a family of models with vastly different sizes. This latter result has the profound implication that once a parameter space is large enough to solve a problem, extra parameters serve directly to increase the dimensionality of the solution manifold. Intrinsic dimension allows some quantitative comparison of problem difficulty across supervised, reinforcement, and other types of learning where we conclude, for example, that solving the inverted pendulum problem is 100 times easier than classifying digits from MNIST, and playing Atari Pong from pixels is about as hard as classifying CIFAR-10. In addition to providing new cartography of the objective landscapes wandered by parameterized models, the method is a simple technique for constructively obtaining an upper bound on the minimum description length of a solution. A byproduct of this construction is a simple approach for compressing networks, in some cases by more than 100 times.

Precision and Recall are two prominent metrics of generative performance, which were proposed to separately measure the fidelity and diversity of generative models. Given their central role in comparing and improving generative models, understanding their limitations are crucially important. To that end, in this work, we identify a critical flaw in the common approximation of these metrics using k-nearest-neighbors, namely, that the very interpretations of fidelity and diversity that are assigned to Precision and Recall can fail in high dimensions, resulting in very misleading conclusions. Specifically, we empirically and theoretically show that as the number of dimensions grows, two model distributions with supports at equal point-wise distance from the support of the real distribution, can have vastly different Precision and Recall regardless of their respective distributions, hence an emergent asymmetry in high dimensions. Based on our theoretical insights, we then provide simple yet effective modifications to these metrics to construct symmetric metrics regardless of the number of dimensions. Finally, we provide experiments on real-world datasets to illustrate that the identified flaw is not merely a pathological case, and that our proposed metrics are effective in alleviating its impact.

Clinical notes contain information about patients that goes beyond structured data like lab values and medications. However, clinical notes have been underused relative to structured data, because notes are high-dimensional and sparse. This work develops and evaluates representations of clinical notes using bidirectional transformers (ClinicalBERT). ClinicalBERT uncovers high-quality relationships between medical concepts as judged by humans. ClinicalBert outperforms baselines on 30-day hospital readmission prediction using both discharge summaries and the first few days of notes in the intensive care unit. Code and model parameters are available.

Colloids play an important role in fundamental science as well as in nature and technology. They have had a strong impact on the fundamental understanding of statistical physics. For example, colloids have helped to obtain a better understanding of collective phenomena, ranging from phase transitions and glass formation to the swarming of active Brownian particles. Yet the success of colloidal systems hinges crucially on the specific physical and chemical properties of the colloidal particles, i.e. particles with the appropriate characteristics must be available. Here we present an idea to create particles with freely selectable properties. The properties might depend, for example, on the presence of other particles (hence mimicking specific pair or many-body interactions), previous configurations (hence introducing some memory or feedback), or a directional bias (hence changing the dynamics). Without directly interfering with the sample, each particle is fully controlled and can receive external commands through a predefined algorithm that can take into account any input parameters. This is realized with computer-controlled colloids, which we term cybloids - short for cybernetic colloids. The potential of cybloids is illustrated by programming a time-delayed external potential acting on a single colloid and interaction potentials for many colloids. Both an attractive harmonic potential and an annular potential are implemented. For a single particle, this programming can cause subdiffusive behavior or lend activity. For many colloids, the programmed interaction potential allows to select a crystal structure at wish. Beyond these examples, we discuss further opportunities which cybloids offer.

The stability of mine dumps is contingent upon the precise arrangement of spoil piles, taking into account their geological and geotechnical attributes. Yet, on-site characterisation of individual piles poses a formidable challenge. The utilisation of image-based techniques for spoil pile characterisation, employing remotely acquired data through unmanned aerial systems, is a promising complementary solution. Image processing, such as object-based classification and feature extraction, are dependent upon effective segmentation. This study refines and juxtaposes various segmentation approaches, specifically colour-based and morphology-based techniques. The objective is to enhance and evaluate avenues for object-based analysis for spoil characterisation within the context of mining environments. Furthermore, a comparative analysis is conducted between conventional segmentation approaches and those rooted in deep learning methodologies. Among the diverse segmentation approaches evaluated, the morphology-based deep learning segmentation approach, Segment Anything Model (SAM), exhibited superior performance in comparison to other approaches. This outcome underscores the efficacy of incorporating advanced morphological and deep learning techniques for accurate and efficient spoil pile characterisation. The findings of this study contribute valuable insights to the optimisation of segmentation strategies, thereby advancing the application of image-based techniques for the characterisation of spoil piles in mining environments.

The bulk-metallicity determination of giant exoplanets is essential to constrain their formation and evolution pathways and to compare them to the solar system. Previous studies inferred an inverse relation between the mass and bulk metallicity. However, the data almost exclusively contained planets that orbit FGK stars. The recent discoveries of giant exoplanets around M-dwarf stars present an opportunity to probe whether they follow a mass-metallicity trend different from that of their FGK counterparts. Using evolution models we characterised the interiors of giant exoplanets with reliable mass-radius measurements that orbit FGK and M-dwarf stars. We then inferred the mass-metallicity trends for both populations. We found that the bulk metallicity of giant planets around M stars is overall lower compared to those around FGK stars. This yielded mass-metallicity relations for the two populations with similar slopes but significantly different offsets. The lack of metal-rich giant planets around M dwarfs could explain the difference in the inferred offset and be a result of different formation conditions. However, there were only 20 successful bulk-metallicity retrievals for the giant planets around M dwarfs, which resulted in rather large uncertainties. Therefore, it is of great importance to continue detecting these planets with both transit and radial velocities. Additionally, the characterisation of the atmospheres of giant planets around M-stars can further help to constrain their interiors and to investigate the atmosp

Despite the many use cases for large language models (LLMs) in creating personalized chatbots, there has been limited research on evaluating the extent to which the behaviors of personalized LLMs accurately and consistently reflect specific personality traits. We consider studying the behavior of LLM-based agents which we refer to as LLM personas and present a case study with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to investigate whether LLMs can generate content that aligns with their assigned personality profiles. To this end, we simulate distinct LLM personas based on the Big Five personality model, have them complete the 44-item Big Five Inventory (BFI) personality test and a story writing task, and then assess their essays with automatic and human evaluations. Results show that LLM personas' self-reported BFI scores are consistent with their designated personality types, with large effect sizes observed across five traits. Additionally, LLM personas' writings have emerging representative linguistic patterns for personality traits when compared with a human writing corpus. Furthermore, human evaluation shows that humans can perceive some personality traits with an accuracy of up to 80\%. Interestingly, the accuracy drops significantly when the annotators were informed of the AI's authorship.

This paper uses the concept of algorithmic efficiency to present a unified theory of intelligence. Intelligence is defined informally, formally, and computationally. We introduce the concept of Dimensional complexity in algorithmic efficiency and deduce that an optimally efficient algorithm has zero Time complexity, zero Space complexity, and an infinite Dimensional complexity. This algorithm is used to generate the number line.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing, enabling the generation of coherent and contextually relevant text. As LLMs increasingly power conversational agents, the synthesized personality embedded in these models by virtue of their training on large amounts of human-generated data draws attention. Since personality is an important factor determining the effectiveness of communication, we present a comprehensive method for administering validated psychometric tests and quantifying, analyzing, and shaping personality traits exhibited in text generated from widely-used LLMs. We find that: 1) personality simulated in the outputs of some LLMs (under specific prompting configurations) is reliable and valid; 2) evidence of reliability and validity of LLM-simulated personality is stronger for larger and instruction fine-tuned models; and 3) personality in LLM outputs can be shaped along desired dimensions to mimic specific personality profiles. We also discuss potential applications and ethical implications of our measurement and shaping framework, especially regarding responsible use of LLMs.

Emerging Metaverse applications demand accessible, accurate, and easy-to-use tools for 3D digital human creations in order to depict different cultures and societies as if in the physical world. Recent large-scale vision-language advances pave the way to for novices to conveniently customize 3D content. However, the generated CG-friendly assets still cannot represent the desired facial traits for human characteristics. In this paper, we present DreamFace, a progressive scheme to generate personalized 3D faces under text guidance. It enables layman users to naturally customize 3D facial assets that are compatible with CG pipelines, with desired shapes, textures, and fine-grained animation capabilities. From a text input to describe the facial traits, we first introduce a coarse-to-fine scheme to generate the neutral facial geometry with a unified topology. We employ a selection strategy in the CLIP embedding space, and subsequently optimize both the details displacements and normals using Score Distillation Sampling from generic Latent Diffusion Model. Then, for neutral appearance generation, we introduce a dual-path mechanism, which combines the generic LDM with a novel texture LDM to ensure both the diversity and textural specification in the UV space. We also employ a two-stage optimization to perform SDS in both the latent and image spaces to significantly provides compact priors for fine-grained synthesis. Our generated neutral assets naturally support blendshapes-based facial animations. We further improve the animation ability with personalized deformation characteristics by learning the universal expression prior using the cross-identity hypernetwork. Notably, DreamFace can generate of realistic 3D facial assets with physically-based rendering quality and rich animation ability from video footage, even for fashion icons or exotic characters in cartoons and fiction movies.

We introduce EQ-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate aspects of emotional intelligence in Large Language Models (LLMs). We assess the ability of LLMs to understand complex emotions and social interactions by asking them to predict the intensity of emotional states of characters in a dialogue. The benchmark is able to discriminate effectively between a wide range of models. We find that EQ-Bench correlates strongly with comprehensive multi-domain benchmarks like MMLU (Hendrycks et al., 2020) (r=0.97), indicating that we may be capturing similar aspects of broad intelligence. Our benchmark produces highly repeatable results using a set of 60 English-language questions. We also provide open-source code for an automated benchmarking pipeline at https://github.com/EQ-bench/EQ-Bench and a leaderboard at https://eqbench.com

Given appropriate representations of the semantic relations between carpenter and wood and between mason and stone (for example, vectors in a vector space model), a suitable algorithm should be able to recognize that these relations are highly similar (carpenter is to wood as mason is to stone; the relations are analogous). Likewise, with representations of dog, house, and kennel, an algorithm should be able to recognize that the semantic composition of dog and house, dog house, is highly similar to kennel (dog house and kennel are synonymous). It seems that these two tasks, recognizing relations and compositions, are closely connected. However, up to now, the best models for relations are significantly different from the best models for compositions. In this paper, we introduce a dual-space model that unifies these two tasks. This model matches the performance of the best previous models for relations and compositions. The dual-space model consists of a space for measuring domain similarity and a space for measuring function similarity. Carpenter and wood share the same domain, the domain of carpentry. Mason and stone share the same domain, the domain of masonry. Carpenter and mason share the same function, the function of artisans. Wood and stone share the same function, the function of materials. In the composition dog house, kennel has some domain overlap with both dog and house (the domains of pets and buildings). The function of kennel is similar to the function of house (the function of shelters). By combining domain and function similarities in various ways, we can model relations, compositions, and other aspects of semantics.

Understanding player shooting profiles is an essential part of basketball analysis: knowing where certain opposing players like to shoot from can help coaches neutralize offensive gameplans from their opponents; understanding where their players are most comfortable can lead them to developing more effective offensive strategies. An automatic tool that can provide these performance profiles in a timely manner can become invaluable for coaches to maximize both the effectiveness of their game plan as well as the time dedicated to practice and other related activities. Additionally, basketball is dictated by many variables, such as playstyle and game dynamics, that can change the flow of the game and, by extension, player performance profiles. It is crucial that the performance profiles can reflect the diverse playstyles, as well as the fast-changing dynamics of the game. We present a tool that can visualize player performance profiles in a timely manner while taking into account factors such as play-style and game dynamics. Our approach generates interpretable heatmaps that allow us to identify and analyze how non-spatial factors, such as game dynamics or playstyle, affect player performance profiles.

Modern foundation models rely heavily on using scaling laws to guide crucial training decisions. Researchers often extrapolate the optimal architecture and hyper parameters settings from smaller training runs by describing the relationship between, loss, or task performance, and scale. All components of this process vary, from the specific equation being fit, to the training setup, to the optimization method. Each of these factors may affect the fitted law, and therefore, the conclusions of a given study. We discuss discrepancies in the conclusions that several prior works reach, on questions such as the optimal token to parameter ratio. We augment this discussion with our own analysis of the critical impact that changes in specific details may effect in a scaling study, and the resulting altered conclusions. Additionally, we survey over 50 papers that study scaling trends: while 45 of these papers quantify these trends using a power law, most under-report crucial details needed to reproduce their findings. To mitigate this, we we propose a checklist for authors to consider while contributing to scaling law research.

The recent wave of generative AI has sparked unprecedented global attention, with both excitement and concern over potentially superhuman levels of artificial intelligence: models now take only seconds to produce outputs that would challenge or exceed the capabilities even of expert humans. At the same time, models still show basic errors in understanding that would not be expected even in non-expert humans. This presents us with an apparent paradox: how do we reconcile seemingly superhuman capabilities with the persistence of errors that few humans would make? In this work, we posit that this tension reflects a divergence in the configuration of intelligence in today's generative models relative to intelligence in humans. Specifically, we propose and test the Generative AI Paradox hypothesis: generative models, having been trained directly to reproduce expert-like outputs, acquire generative capabilities that are not contingent upon -- and can therefore exceed -- their ability to understand those same types of outputs. This contrasts with humans, for whom basic understanding almost always precedes the ability to generate expert-level outputs. We test this hypothesis through controlled experiments analyzing generation vs. understanding in generative models, across both language and image modalities. Our results show that although models can outperform humans in generation, they consistently fall short of human capabilities in measures of understanding, as well as weaker correlation between generation and understanding performance, and more brittleness to adversarial inputs. Our findings support the hypothesis that models' generative capability may not be contingent upon understanding capability, and call for caution in interpreting artificial intelligence by analogy to human intelligence.

The field of large language models (LLMs) has made significant progress, and their knowledge storage capacity is approaching that of human beings. Furthermore, advanced techniques, such as prompt learning and reinforcement learning, are being employed to address ethical concerns and hallucination problems associated with LLMs, bringing them closer to aligning with human values. This situation naturally raises the question of whether LLMs with human-like abilities possess a human-like personality? In this paper, we aim to investigate the feasibility of using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a widespread human personality assessment tool, as an evaluation metric for LLMs. Specifically, extensive experiments will be conducted to explore: 1) the personality types of different LLMs, 2) the possibility of changing the personality types by prompt engineering, and 3) How does the training dataset affect the model's personality. Although the MBTI is not a rigorous assessment, it can still reflect the similarity between LLMs and human personality. In practice, the MBTI has the potential to serve as a rough indicator. Our codes are available at https://github.com/HarderThenHarder/transformers_tasks/tree/main/LLM/llms_mbti.

Organizations cannot address demographic disparities that they cannot see. Recent research on machine learning and fairness has emphasized that awareness of sensitive attributes, such as race and sex, is critical to the development of interventions. However, on the ground, the existence of these data cannot be taken for granted. This paper uses the domains of employment, credit, and healthcare in the United States to surface conditions that have shaped the availability of sensitive attribute data. For each domain, we describe how and when private companies collect or infer sensitive attribute data for antidiscrimination purposes. An inconsistent story emerges: Some companies are required by law to collect sensitive attribute data, while others are prohibited from doing so. Still others, in the absence of legal mandates, have determined that collection and imputation of these data are appropriate to address disparities. This story has important implications for fairness research and its future applications. If companies that mediate access to life opportunities are unable or hesitant to collect or infer sensitive attribute data, then proposed techniques to detect and mitigate bias in machine learning models might never be implemented outside the lab. We conclude that today's legal requirements and corporate practices, while highly inconsistent across domains, offer lessons for how to approach the collection and inference of sensitive data in appropriate circumstances. We urge stakeholders, including machine learning practitioners, to actively help chart a path forward that takes both policy goals and technical needs into account.

Several studies have shown that speech and language features, automatically extracted from clinical interviews or spontaneous discourse, have diagnostic value for mental disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. They typically make use of a large feature set to train a classifier for distinguishing between two groups of interest, i.e. a clinical and control group. However, a purely data-driven approach runs the risk of overfitting to a particular data set, especially when sample sizes are limited. Here, we first down-select the set of language features to a small subset that is related to a well-validated test of functional ability, the Social Skills Performance Assessment (SSPA). This helps establish the concurrent validity of the selected features. We use only these features to train a simple classifier to distinguish between groups of interest. Linear regression reveals that a subset of language features can effectively model the SSPA, with a correlation coefficient of 0.75. Furthermore, the same feature set can be used to build a strong binary classifier to distinguish between healthy controls and a clinical group (AUC = 0.96) and also between patients within the clinical group with schizophrenia and bipolar I disorder (AUC = 0.83).

The last decade has witnessed a rapid growth of the field of exoplanet discovery and characterisation. However, several big challenges remain, many of which could be addressed using machine learning methodology. For instance, the most prolific method for detecting exoplanets and inferring several of their characteristics, transit photometry, is very sensitive to the presence of stellar spots. The current practice in the literature is to identify the effects of spots visually and correct for them manually or discard the affected data. This paper explores a first step towards fully automating the efficient and precise derivation of transit depths from transit light curves in the presence of stellar spots. The methods and results we present were obtained in the context of the 1st Machine Learning Challenge organized for the European Space Agency's upcoming Ariel mission. We first present the problem, the simulated Ariel-like data and outline the Challenge while identifying best practices for organizing similar challenges in the future. Finally, we present the solutions obtained by the top-5 winning teams, provide their code and discuss their implications. Successful solutions either construct highly non-linear (w.r.t. the raw data) models with minimal preprocessing -deep neural networks and ensemble methods- or amount to obtaining meaningful statistics from the light curves, constructing linear models on which yields comparably good predictive performance.

Diatoms have been described as nanometer-born lithographers because of their ability to create sophisticated three-dimensional amorphous silica exoskeletons. The hierarchical architecture of these structures provides diatoms with mechanical protection and the ability to filter, float, and manipulate light. Therefore, they emerge as an extraordinary model of multifunctional materials from which to draw inspiration. In this paper, we use numerical simulations, analytical models, and experimental tests to unveil the structural and fluid dynamic efficiency of the Coscinodiscus species diatom. Then we propose a novel 3D printable multifunctional biomimetic material for applications such as porous filters, heat exchangers, drug delivery systems, lightweight structures, and robotics. Our results demonstrate the role of Nature as a material designer for efficient and tunable systems and highlight the potential of diatoms for engineering materials innovation. Additionally, the results reported in this paper lay the foundation to extend the structure-property characterization of diatoms.

We introduce a general, flexible, parametric survival modelling framework which encompasses key shapes of hazard function (constant, increasing, decreasing, up-then-down, down-then-up), various common survival distributions (log-logistic, Burr type XII, Weibull, Gompertz), and includes defective distributions (i.e., cure models). This generality is achieved using four basic distributional parameters: two scale-type parameters and two shape parameters. Generalising to covariate dependence, the scale-type regression components correspond to accelerated failure time (AFT) and proportional hazards (PH) models. Therefore, this general formulation unifies the most popular survival models which allows us to consider the practical value of possible modelling choices for survival data. Furthermore, in line with our proposed flexible baseline distribution, we advocate the use of multi-parameter regression in which more than one distributional parameter depends on covariates - rather than the usual convention of having a single covariate-dependent (scale) parameter. While many choices are available, we suggest introducing covariates through just one or other of the two scale parameters, which covers AFT and PH models, in combination with a `power' shape parameter, which allows for more complex non-AFT/non-PH effects, while the other shape parameter remains covariate-independent, and handles automatic selection of the baseline distribution. We explore inferential issues in simulations, both with and without a covariate, with particular focus on evidence concerning the need, or otherwise, to include both AFT and PH parameters. We illustrate the efficacy of our modelling framework by investigating differences between treatment groups using data from a lung cancer study and a melanoma study. Censoring is accommodated throughout.

We present the task of modeling information propagation in literature, in which we seek to identify pieces of information passing from character A to character B to character C, only given a description of their activity in text. We describe a new pipeline for measuring information propagation in this domain and publish a new dataset for speaker attribution, enabling the evaluation of an important component of this pipeline on a wider range of literary texts than previously studied. Using this pipeline, we analyze the dynamics of information propagation in over 5,000 works of fiction, finding that information flows through characters that fill structural holes connecting different communities, and that characters who are women are depicted as filling this role much more frequently than characters who are men.

A neural network with the widely-used ReLU activation has been shown to partition the sample space into many convex polytopes for prediction. However, the parameterized way a neural network and other machine learning models use to partition the space has imperfections, e.g., the compromised interpretability for complex models, the inflexibility in decision boundary construction due to the generic character of the model, and the risk of being trapped into shortcut solutions. In contrast, although the non-parameterized models can adorably avoid or downplay these issues, they are usually insufficiently powerful either due to over-simplification or the failure to accommodate the manifold structures of data. In this context, we first propose a new type of machine learning models referred to as Manifoldron that directly derives decision boundaries from data and partitions the space via manifold structure discovery. Then, we systematically analyze the key characteristics of the Manifoldron such as manifold characterization capability and its link to neural networks. The experimental results on 4 synthetic examples, 20 public benchmark datasets, and 1 real-world application demonstrate that the proposed Manifoldron performs competitively compared to the mainstream machine learning models. We have shared our code in https://github.com/wdayang/Manifoldron for free download and evaluation.

As large language models (LLM) evolve in their capabilities, various recent studies have tried to quantify their behavior using psychological tools created to study human behavior. One such example is the measurement of "personality" of LLMs using self-assessment personality tests developed to measure human personality. Yet almost none of these works verify the applicability of these tests on LLMs. In this paper, we analyze the reliability of LLM personality scores obtained from self-assessment personality tests using two simple experiments. We first introduce the property of prompt sensitivity, where three semantically equivalent prompts representing three intuitive ways of administering self-assessment tests on LLMs are used to measure the personality of the same LLM. We find that all three prompts lead to very different personality scores, a difference that is statistically significant for all traits in a large majority of scenarios. We then introduce the property of option-order symmetry for personality measurement of LLMs. Since most of the self-assessment tests exist in the form of multiple choice question (MCQ) questions, we argue that the scores should also be robust to not just the prompt template but also the order in which the options are presented. This test unsurprisingly reveals that the self-assessment test scores are not robust to the order of the options. These simple tests, done on ChatGPT and three Llama2 models of different sizes, show that self-assessment personality tests created for humans are unreliable measures of personality in LLMs.

Recent advancement in personalized image generation have unveiled the intriguing capability of pre-trained text-to-image models on learning identity information from a collection of portrait images. However, existing solutions are vulnerable in producing truthful details, and usually suffer from several defects such as (i) The generated face exhibit its own unique characteristics, \ie facial shape and facial feature positioning may not resemble key characteristics of the input, and (ii) The synthesized face may contain warped, blurred or corrupted regions. In this paper, we present FaceChain, a personalized portrait generation framework that combines a series of customized image-generation model and a rich set of face-related perceptual understanding models (\eg, face detection, deep face embedding extraction, and facial attribute recognition), to tackle aforementioned challenges and to generate truthful personalized portraits, with only a handful of portrait images as input. Concretely, we inject several SOTA face models into the generation procedure, achieving a more efficient label-tagging, data-processing, and model post-processing compared to previous solutions, such as DreamBooth ~ruiz2023dreambooth , InstantBooth ~shi2023instantbooth , or other LoRA-only approaches ~hu2021lora . Besides, based on FaceChain, we further develop several applications to build a broader playground for better showing its value, including virtual try on and 2D talking head. We hope it can grow to serve the burgeoning needs from the communities. Note that this is an ongoing work that will be consistently refined and improved upon. FaceChain is open-sourced under Apache-2.0 license at https://github.com/modelscope/facechain.

The discovery of novel materials and functional molecules can help to solve some of society's most urgent challenges, ranging from efficient energy harvesting and storage to uncovering novel pharmaceutical drug candidates. Traditionally matter engineering -- generally denoted as inverse design -- was based massively on human intuition and high-throughput virtual screening. The last few years have seen the emergence of significant interest in computer-inspired designs based on evolutionary or deep learning methods. The major challenge here is that the standard strings molecular representation SMILES shows substantial weaknesses in that task because large fractions of strings do not correspond to valid molecules. Here, we solve this problem at a fundamental level and introduce SELFIES (SELF-referencIng Embedded Strings), a string-based representation of molecules which is 100\% robust. Every SELFIES string corresponds to a valid molecule, and SELFIES can represent every molecule. SELFIES can be directly applied in arbitrary machine learning models without the adaptation of the models; each of the generated molecule candidates is valid. In our experiments, the model's internal memory stores two orders of magnitude more diverse molecules than a similar test with SMILES. Furthermore, as all molecules are valid, it allows for explanation and interpretation of the internal working of the generative models.

Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG-bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 442 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood development, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google-internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.

Practitioners prune neural networks for efficiency gains and generalization improvements, but few scrutinize the factors determining the prunability of a neural network the maximum fraction of weights that pruning can remove without compromising the model's test accuracy. In this work, we study the properties of input data that may contribute to the prunability of a neural network. For high dimensional input data such as images, text, and audio, the manifold hypothesis suggests that these high dimensional inputs approximately lie on or near a significantly lower dimensional manifold. Prior work demonstrates that the underlying low dimensional structure of the input data may affect the sample efficiency of learning. In this paper, we investigate whether the low dimensional structure of the input data affects the prunability of a neural network.