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We present a decentralized reinforcement learning (RL) approach to address the multi-agent shepherding control problem, departing from the conventional assumption of cohesive target groups. Our two-layer control architecture consists of a low-level controller that guides each herder to contain a specific target within a goal region, while a high-level layer dynamically selects from multiple targets the one an herder should aim at corralling and containing. Cooperation emerges naturally, as herders autonomously choose distinct targets to expedite task completion. We further extend this approach to large-scale systems, where each herder applies a shared policy, trained with few agents, while managing a fixed subset of agents.

GPT-4o is an autoregressive omni model that accepts as input any combination of text, audio, image, and video, and generates any combination of text, audio, and image outputs. It's trained end-to-end across text, vision, and audio, meaning all inputs and outputs are processed by the same neural network. GPT-4o can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time in conversation. It matches GPT-4 Turbo performance on text in English and code, with significant improvement on text in non-English languages, while also being much faster and 50\% cheaper in the API. GPT-4o is especially better at vision and audio understanding compared to existing models. In line with our commitment to building AI safely and consistent with our voluntary commitments to the White House, we are sharing the GPT-4o System Card, which includes our Preparedness Framework evaluations. In this System Card, we provide a detailed look at GPT-4o's capabilities, limitations, and safety evaluations across multiple categories, focusing on speech-to-speech while also evaluating text and image capabilities, and measures we've implemented to ensure the model is safe and aligned. We also include third-party assessments on dangerous capabilities, as well as discussion of potential societal impacts of GPT-4o's text and vision capabilities.

Social-emotional learning (SEL) skills are essential for children to develop to provide a foundation for future relational and academic success. Using art as a medium for creation or as a topic to provoke conversation is a well-known method of SEL learning. Similarly, social robots have been used to teach SEL competencies like empathy, but the combination of art and social robotics has been minimally explored. In this paper, we present a novel child-robot interaction designed to foster empathy and promote SEL competencies via a conversation about art scaffolded by a social robot. Participants (N=11, age range: 7-11) conversed with a social robot about emotional and neutral art. Analysis of video and speech data demonstrated that this interaction design successfully engaged children in the practice of SEL skills, like emotion recognition and self-awareness, and greater rates of empathetic reasoning were observed when children engaged with the robot about emotional art. This study demonstrated that art-based reflection with a social robot, particularly on emotional art, can foster empathy in children, and interactions with a social robot help alleviate discomfort when sharing deep or vulnerable emotions., Comment: Copyright protected by IEEE, 8 pages, 7 figures, 1 table, in proceedings of 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2024)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled at language understanding and generating human-level text. However, even with supervised training and human alignment, these LLMs are susceptible to adversarial attacks where malicious users can prompt the model to generate undesirable text. LLMs also inherently encode potential biases that can cause various harmful effects during interactions. Bias evaluation metrics lack standards as well as consensus and existing methods often rely on human-generated templates and annotations which are expensive and labor intensive. In this work, we train models to automatically create adversarial prompts to elicit biased responses from target LLMs. We present LLM- based bias evaluation metrics and also analyze several existing automatic evaluation methods and metrics. We analyze the various nuances of model responses, identify the strengths and weaknesses of model families, and assess where evaluation methods fall short. We compare these metrics to human evaluation and validate that the LLM-as-a-Judge metric aligns with human judgement on bias in response generation., Comment: 6 pages paper content, 17 pages of appendix

Rapid progress in general-purpose AI has sparked significant interest in "red teaming," a practice of adversarial testing originating in military and cybersecurity applications. AI red teaming raises many questions about the human factor, such as how red teamers are selected, biases and blindspots in how tests are conducted, and harmful content's psychological effects on red teamers. A growing body of HCI and CSCW literature examines related practices-including data labeling, content moderation, and algorithmic auditing. However, few, if any have investigated red teaming itself. Future studies may explore topics ranging from fairness to mental health and other areas of potential harm. We aim to facilitate a community of researchers and practitioners who can begin to meet these challenges with creativity, innovation, and thoughtful reflection., Comment: Updated with camera-ready version

The importance of addressing fairness and bias in artificial intelligence (AI) systems cannot be over-emphasized. Mainstream media has been awashed with news of incidents around stereotypes and other types of bias in many of these systems in recent years. In this survey, we fill a gap with regards to the relatively minimal study of fairness and bias in Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) compared to Large Language Models (LLMs), providing 50 examples of datasets and models related to both types of AI along with the challenges of bias affecting them. We discuss the less-mentioned category of mitigating bias, preprocessing (with particular attention on the first part of it, which we call preuse). The method is less-mentioned compared to the two well-known ones in the literature: intrinsic and extrinsic mitigation methods. We critically discuss the various ways researchers are addressing these challenges. Our method involved two slightly different search queries on two reputable search engines, Google Scholar and Web of Science (WoS), which revealed that for the queries 'Fairness and bias in Large Multimodal Models' and 'Fairness and bias in Large Language Models', 33,400 and 538,000 links are the initial results, respectively, for Scholar while 4 and 50 links are the initial results, respectively, for WoS. For reproducibility and verification, we provide links to the search results and the citations to all the final reviewed papers. We believe this work contributes to filling this gap and providing insight to researchers and other stakeholders on ways to address the challenges of fairness and bias in multimodal and language AI., Comment: 12 pages

Biomechanical biofeedback may enhance rehabilitation and provide clinicians with more objective task evaluation. These feedbacks often rely on expensive motion capture systems, which restricts their widespread use, leading to the development of computer vision-based methods. These methods are subject to large joint angle errors, considering the upper limb, and exclude the scapula and clavicle motion in the analysis. Our open-source approach offers a user-friendly solution for high-fidelity upper-limb kinematics using a single low-cost RGBD camera and includes semi-automatic skin marker labeling. Real-time biomechanical analysis, ranging from kinematics to muscle force estimation, was conducted on eight participants performing a hand-cycling motion to demonstrate the applicability of our approach on the upper limb. Markers were recorded by the RGBD camera and an optoelectronic camera system, considered as a reference. Muscle activity and external load were recorded using eight EMG and instrumented hand pedals, respectively. Bland-Altman analysis revealed significant agreements in the 3D markers' positions between the two motion capture methods, with errors averaging 3.3$\pm$3.9 mm. For the biomechanical analysis, the level of agreement was sensitive to whether the same marker set was used. For example, joint angle differences averaging 2.3$\pm$2.8{\deg} when using the same marker set, compared to 4.5$\pm$2.9{\deg} otherwise. Biofeedback from the RGBD camera was provided at 63 Hz. Our study introduces a novel method for using an RGBD camera as a low-cost motion capture solution, emphasizing its potential for accurate kinematic reconstruction and comprehensive upper-limb biomechanical studies.

Model evaluations are central to understanding the safety, risks, and societal impacts of AI systems. While most real-world AI applications involve human-AI interaction, most current evaluations (e.g., common benchmarks) of AI models do not. Instead, they incorporate human factors in limited ways, assessing the safety of models in isolation, thereby falling short of capturing the complexity of human-model interactions. In this paper, we discuss and operationalize a definition of an emerging category of evaluations -- "human interaction evaluations" (HIEs) -- which focus on the assessment of human-model interactions or the process and the outcomes of humans using models. First, we argue that HIEs can be used to increase the validity of safety evaluations, assess direct human impact and interaction-specific harms, and guide future assessments of models' societal impact. Second, we propose a safety-focused HIE design framework -- containing a human-LLM interaction taxonomy -- with three stages: (1) identifying the risk or harm area, (2) characterizing the use context, and (3) choosing the evaluation parameters. Third, we apply our framework to two potential evaluations for overreliance and persuasion risks. Finally, we conclude with tangible recommendations for addressing concerns over costs, replicability, and unrepresentativeness of HIEs., Comment: revised figure

The exponential growth of scientific literature has resulted in information overload, challenging researchers to effectively synthesize relevant publications. This paper explores the integration of traditional reference management software with advanced computational techniques, including Large Language Models and Retrieval-Augmented Generation. We introduce PyZoBot, an AI-driven platform developed in Python, incorporating Zoteros reference management with OpenAIs sophisticated LLMs. PyZoBot streamlines knowledge extraction and synthesis from extensive human-curated scientific literature databases. It demonstrates proficiency in handling complex natural language queries, integrating data from multiple sources, and meticulously presenting references to uphold research integrity and facilitate further exploration. By leveraging LLMs, RAG, and human expertise through a curated library, PyZoBot offers an effective solution to manage information overload and keep pace with rapid scientific advancements. The development of such AI-enhanced tools promises significant improvements in research efficiency and effectiveness across various disciplines., Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. The code is provided in github and the link to the repository is provided at the end of the publication

Thermal imaging plays a crucial role in various applications, but the inherent low resolution of commonly available infrared (IR) cameras limits its effectiveness. Conventional super-resolution (SR) methods often struggle with thermal images due to their lack of high-frequency details. Guided SR leverages information from a high-resolution image, typically in the visible spectrum, to enhance the reconstruction of a high-res IR image from the low-res input. Inspired by SwinFusion, we propose SwinFuSR, a guided SR architecture based on Swin transformers. In real world scenarios, however, the guiding modality (e.g. RBG image) may be missing, so we propose a training method that improves the robustness of the model in this case. Our method has few parameters and outperforms state of the art models in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural SIMilarity (SSIM). In Track 2 of the PBVS 2024 Thermal Image Super-Resolution Challenge, it achieves 3rd place in the PSNR metric. Our code and pretained weights are available at https://github.com/VisionICLab/SwinFuSR., Comment: Accepted at 20th IEEE Workshop on Perception Beyond the Visible Spectrum, CVPR 2024

Image classification is a fundamental task in computer vision, and the quest to enhance DNN accuracy without inflating model size or latency remains a pressing concern. We make a couple of advances in this regard, leading to a novel EncodeNet design and training framework. The first advancement involves Converting Autoencoders, a novel approach that transforms images into an easy-to-classify image of its class. Our prior work that applied the Converting Autoencoder and a simple classifier in tandem achieved moderate accuracy over simple datasets, such as MNIST and FMNIST. However, on more complex datasets like CIFAR-10, the Converting Autoencoder has a large reconstruction loss, making it unsuitable for enhancing DNN accuracy. To address these limitations, we generalize the design of Converting Autoencoders by leveraging a larger class of DNNs, those with architectures comprising feature extraction layers followed by classification layers. We incorporate a generalized algorithmic design of the Converting Autoencoder and intraclass clustering to identify representative images, leading to optimized image feature learning. Next, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our EncodeNet design and training framework, improving the accuracy of well-trained baseline DNNs while maintaining the overall model size. EncodeNet's building blocks comprise the trained encoder from our generalized Converting Autoencoders transferring knowledge to a lightweight classifier network - also extracted from the baseline DNN. Our experimental results demonstrate that EncodeNet improves the accuracy of VGG16 from 92.64% to 94.05% on CIFAR-10 and RestNet20 from 74.56% to 76.04% on CIFAR-100. It outperforms state-of-the-art techniques that rely on knowledge distillation and attention mechanisms, delivering higher accuracy for models of comparable size., Comment: 15 pages

This paper introduces v0.5 of the AI Safety Benchmark, which has been created by the MLCommons AI Safety Working Group. The AI Safety Benchmark has been designed to assess the safety risks of AI systems that use chat-tuned language models. We introduce a principled approach to specifying and constructing the benchmark, which for v0.5 covers only a single use case (an adult chatting to a general-purpose assistant in English), and a limited set of personas (i.e., typical users, malicious users, and vulnerable users). We created a new taxonomy of 13 hazard categories, of which 7 have tests in the v0.5 benchmark. We plan to release version 1.0 of the AI Safety Benchmark by the end of 2024. The v1.0 benchmark will provide meaningful insights into the safety of AI systems. However, the v0.5 benchmark should not be used to assess the safety of AI systems. We have sought to fully document the limitations, flaws, and challenges of v0.5. This release of v0.5 of the AI Safety Benchmark includes (1) a principled approach to specifying and constructing the benchmark, which comprises use cases, types of systems under test (SUTs), language and context, personas, tests, and test items; (2) a taxonomy of 13 hazard categories with definitions and subcategories; (3) tests for seven of the hazard categories, each comprising a unique set of test items, i.e., prompts. There are 43,090 test items in total, which we created with templates; (4) a grading system for AI systems against the benchmark; (5) an openly available platform, and downloadable tool, called ModelBench that can be used to evaluate the safety of AI systems on the benchmark; (6) an example evaluation report which benchmarks the performance of over a dozen openly available chat-tuned language models; (7) a test specification for the benchmark.

We introduce new large labeled datasets on bias in 3 languages and show in experiments that bias exists in all 10 datasets of 5 languages evaluated, including benchmark datasets on the English GLUE/SuperGLUE leaderboards. The 3 new languages give a total of almost 6 million labeled samples and we benchmark on these datasets using SotA multilingual pretrained models: mT5 and mBERT. The challenge of social bias, based on prejudice, is ubiquitous, as recent events with AI and large language models (LLMs) have shown. Motivated by this challenge, we set out to estimate bias in multiple datasets. We compare some recent bias metrics and use bipol, which has explainability in the metric. We also confirm the unverified assumption that bias exists in toxic comments by randomly sampling 200 samples from a toxic dataset population using the confidence level of 95% and error margin of 7%. Thirty gold samples were randomly distributed in the 200 samples to secure the quality of the annotation. Our findings confirm that many of the datasets have male bias (prejudice against women), besides other types of bias. We publicly release our new datasets, lexica, models, and codes., Comment: Presented at ICNLSP

In this work, we provide insight into one important limitation of large language models (LLMs), i.e. false attribution, and introduce a new hallucination metric - Simple Hallucination Index (SHI). The task of automatic author attribution for relatively small chunks of text is an important NLP task but can be challenging. We empirically evaluate the power of 3 open SotA LLMs in zero-shot setting (LLaMA-2-13B, Mixtral 8x7B, and Gemma-7B), especially as human annotation can be costly. We collected the top 10 most popular books, according to Project Gutenberg, divided each one into equal chunks of 400 words, and asked each LLM to predict the author. We then randomly sampled 162 chunks for human evaluation from each of the annotated books, based on the error margin of 7% and a confidence level of 95% for the book with the most chunks (Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, having 922 chunks). The average results show that Mixtral 8x7B has the highest prediction accuracy, the lowest SHI, and a Pearson's correlation (r) of 0.737, 0.249, and -0.9996, respectively, followed by LLaMA-2-13B and Gemma-7B. However, Mixtral 8x7B suffers from high hallucinations for 3 books, rising as high as an SHI of 0.87 (in the range 0-1, where 1 is the worst). The strong negative correlation of accuracy and SHI, given by r, demonstrates the fidelity of the new hallucination metric, which is generalizable to other tasks. We publicly release the annotated chunks of data and our codes to aid the reproducibility and evaluation of other models., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures

There has been significant progress in implementing deep learning models in disease diagnosis using chest X- rays. Despite these advancements, inherent biases in these models can lead to disparities in prediction accuracy across protected groups. In this study, we propose a framework to achieve accurate diagnostic outcomes and ensure fairness across intersectional groups in high-dimensional chest X- ray multi-label classification. Transcending traditional protected attributes, we consider complex interactions within social determinants, enabling a more granular benchmark and evaluation of fairness. We present a simple and robust method that involves retraining the last classification layer of pre-trained models using a balanced dataset across groups. Additionally, we account for fairness constraints and integrate class-balanced fine-tuning for multi-label settings. The evaluation of our method on the MIMIC-CXR dataset demonstrates that our framework achieves an optimal tradeoff between accuracy and fairness compared to baseline methods., Comment: ICCV CVAMD 2023

This paper addresses the critical challenge of vehicle detection in the harsh winter conditions in the Nordic regions, characterized by heavy snowfall, reduced visibility, and low lighting. Due to their susceptibility to environmental distortions and occlusions, traditional vehicle detection methods have struggled in these adverse conditions. The advanced proposed deep learning architectures brought promise, yet the unique difficulties of detecting vehicles in Nordic winters remain inadequately addressed. This study uses the Nordic Vehicle Dataset (NVD), which has UAV images from northern Sweden, to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art vehicle detection algorithms under challenging weather conditions. Our methodology includes a comprehensive evaluation of single-stage, two-stage, and transformer-based detectors against the NVD. We propose a series of enhancements tailored to each detection framework, including data augmentation, hyperparameter tuning, transfer learning, and novel strategies designed explicitly for the DETR model. Our findings not only highlight the limitations of current detection systems in the Nordic environment but also offer promising directions for enhancing these algorithms for improved robustness and accuracy in vehicle detection amidst the complexities of winter landscapes. The code and the dataset are available at https://nvd.ltu-ai.dev, Comment: submitted to ICPR2024

Reducing inference time and energy usage while maintaining prediction accuracy has become a significant concern for deep neural networks (DNN) inference on resource-constrained edge devices. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach based on "converting" autoencoder and lightweight DNNs. This improves upon recent work such as early-exiting framework and DNN partitioning. Early-exiting frameworks spend different amounts of computation power for different input data depending upon their complexity. However, they can be inefficient in real-world scenarios that deal with many hard image samples. On the other hand, DNN partitioning algorithms that utilize the computation power of both the cloud and edge devices can be affected by network delays and intermittent connections between the cloud and the edge. We present CBNet, a low-latency and energy-efficient DNN inference framework tailored for edge devices. It utilizes a "converting" autoencoder to efficiently transform hard images into easy ones, which are subsequently processed by a lightweight DNN for inference. To the best of our knowledge, such autoencoder has not been proposed earlier. Our experimental results using three popular image-classification datasets on a Raspberry Pi 4, a Google Cloud instance, and an instance with Nvidia Tesla K80 GPU show that CBNet achieves up to 4.8x speedup in inference latency and 79% reduction in energy usage compared to competing techniques while maintaining similar or higher accuracy., Comment: 8 Pages, 8 Figures

Unmanned ground vehicle obstacle crossing generally relies on two strategies: (i) applying a wheel torque for climbing and (ii) modifying the vehicle shape by using a wheel-leg or wheel-paddle to lift the wheel on top of the obstacle. However, most of those strategies sacrifice speed in order to have a longer contact duration between the wheels and the obstacle. This paper investigates the behaviour of a 4WD high-speed vehicle while crossing a step obstacle using a design of experiment (DoE). A 3D multibody vehicle model is equipped with a novel 2-DoF suspension system, which horizontal damping coefficient is modify to dampen wheel motion in longitudinal and vertical directions in relation to the chassis, for a given speed and obstacle height. The DoE results allow to propose a novel high-speed obstacle crossing strategy based on three metrics: (i) the kinetic energy variation of the vehicle, (ii) the contact duration between the wheel and the obstacle, and (iii) the pitch rate at the start of the ballistic phase. Experimental function are proposed to be able modify these metric in real time.

We introduce Instruction Document Visual Question Answering (iDocVQA) dataset and Large Language Document (LLaDoc) model, for training Language-Vision (LV) models for document analysis and predictions on document images, respectively. Usually, deep neural networks for the DocVQA task are trained on datasets lacking instructions. We show that using instruction-following datasets improves performance. We compare performance across document-related datasets using the recent state-of-the-art (SotA) Large Language and Vision Assistant (LLaVA)1.5 as the base model. We also evaluate the performance of the derived models for object hallucination using the Polling-based Object Probing Evaluation (POPE) dataset. The results show that instruction-tuning performance ranges from 11X to 32X of zero-shot performance and from 0.1% to 4.2% over non-instruction (traditional task) finetuning. Despite the gains, these still fall short of human performance (94.36%), implying there's much room for improvement., Comment: Accepted at the 16th IAPR International Workshop On Document Analysis Systems (DAS)

Dengue fever presents a substantial challenge in developing countries where sanitation infrastructure is inadequate. The absence of comprehensive healthcare systems exacerbates the severity of dengue infections, potentially leading to life-threatening circumstances. Rapid response to dengue outbreaks is also challenging due to limited information exchange and integration. While timely dengue outbreak forecasts have the potential to prevent such outbreaks, the majority of dengue prediction studies have predominantly relied on data that impose significant burdens on individual countries for collection. In this study, our aim is to improve health equity in resource-constrained countries by exploring the effectiveness of high-resolution satellite imagery as a nontraditional and readily accessible data source. By leveraging the wealth of publicly available and easily obtainable satellite imagery, we present a scalable satellite extraction framework based on Sentinel Hub, a cloud-based computing platform. Furthermore, we introduce DengueNet, an innovative architecture that combines Vision Transformer, Radiomics, and Long Short-term Memory to extract and integrate spatiotemporal features from satellite images. This enables dengue predictions on an epi-week basis. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conducted experiments on five municipalities in Colombia. We utilized a dataset comprising 780 high-resolution Sentinel-2 satellite images for training and evaluation. The performance of DengueNet was assessed using the mean absolute error (MAE) metric. Across the five municipalities, DengueNet achieved an average MAE of 43.92. Our findings strongly support the efficacy of satellite imagery as a valuable resource for dengue prediction, particularly in informing public health policies within countries where manually collected data is scarce and dengue virus prevalence is severe., Comment: Published at the IJCAI 2023 Workshop on Bridge-AI: from Climate Change to Health Equity (BridgeAICCHE)., Macao, S.A.R

We introduce a novel writing method called Probing Chain-of-Thought (ProCoT), which potentially prevents students from cheating using a Large Language Model (LLM), such as ChatGPT, while enhancing their active learning. LLMs have disrupted education and many other fields. For fear of students cheating, many have resorted to banning their use. These LLMs are also known for hallucinations. We conduct studies with ProCoT in two different courses with 65 students. The students in each course were asked to prompt an LLM of their choice with one question from a set of four and required to affirm or refute statements in the LLM output by using peer-reviewed references. The results show two things: (1) ProCoT stimulates creative/critical thinking and writing of students through engagement with LLMs when we compare the LLM-only output to ProCoT output and (2) ProCoT can prevent cheating because of clear limitations in existing LLMs, particularly ChatGPT, when we compare students' ProCoT output to LLM ProCoT output. We also discover that most students prefer to give answers in fewer words than LLMs, which are typically verbose. The average word counts for students in the first course, ChatGPT (v3.5), and Phind (v8) are 208, 391 and 383, respectively., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

This paper presents novel prompting techniques to improve the performance of automatic summarization systems for scientific articles. Scientific article summarization is highly challenging due to the length and complexity of these documents. We conceive, implement, and evaluate prompting techniques that provide additional contextual information to guide summarization systems. Specifically, we feed summarizers with lists of key terms extracted from articles, such as author keywords or automatically generated keywords. Our techniques are tested with various summarization models and input texts. Results show performance gains, especially for smaller models summarizing sections separately. This evidences that prompting is a promising approach to overcoming the limitations of less powerful systems. Our findings introduce a new research direction of using prompts to aid smaller models., Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures