Search

Responding to the rapid roll-out and large-scale commercialization of foundation models, large language models, and generative AI, an emerging body of work is shedding light on the myriad impacts these technologies are having across society. Such research is expansive, ranging from the production of discriminatory, fake and toxic outputs, and privacy and copyright violations, to the unjust extraction of labor and natural resources. The same has not been the case in some of the most prominent AI governance initiatives in the global north like the UK's AI Safety Summit and the G7's Hiroshima process, which have influenced much of the international dialogue around AI governance. Despite the wealth of cautionary tales and evidence of algorithmic harm, there has been an ongoing over-emphasis within the AI governance discourse on technical matters of safety and global catastrophic or existential risks. This narrowed focus has tended to draw attention away from very pressing social and ethical challenges posed by the current brute-force industrialization of AI applications. To address such a visibility gap between real-world consequences and speculative risks, this paper offers a critical framework to account for the social, political, and environmental dimensions of foundation models and generative AI. We identify 14 categories of risks and harms and map them according to their individual, social, and biospheric impacts. We argue that this novel typology offers an integrative perspective to address the most urgent negative impacts of foundation models and their downstream applications. We conclude with recommendations on how this typology could be used to inform technical and normative interventions to advance responsible AI., Comment: ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 776-796

AI systems may have transformative and long-term effects on individuals and society. To manage these impacts responsibly and direct the development of AI systems toward optimal public benefit, considerations of AI ethics and governance must be a first priority. In this workbook, we introduce and describe our PBG Framework, a multi-tiered governance model that enables project teams to integrate ethical values and practical principles into their innovation practices and to have clear mechanisms for demonstrating and documenting this.

The sustainability of AI systems depends on the capacity of project teams to proceed with a continuous sensitivity to their potential real-world impacts and transformative effects. Stakeholder Impact Assessments (SIAs) are governance mechanisms that enable this kind of responsiveness. They are tools that create a procedure for, and a means of documenting, the collaborative evaluation and reflective anticipation of the possible harms and benefits of AI innovation projects. SIAs are not one-off governance actions. They require project teams to pay continuous attention to the dynamic and changing character of AI production and use and to the shifting conditions of the real-world environments in which AI technologies are embedded. This workbook is part two of two workbooks on AI Sustainability. It provides a template of the SIA and activities that allow a deeper dive into crucial parts of it. It discusses methods for weighing values and considering trade-offs during the SIA. And, it highlights the need to treat the SIA as an end-to-end process of responsive evaluation and re-assessment.

Reaching consensus on a commonly accepted definition of AI Fairness has long been a central challenge in AI ethics and governance. There is a broad spectrum of views across society on what the concept of fairness means and how it should best be put to practice. In this workbook, we tackle this challenge by exploring how a context-based and society-centred approach to understanding AI Fairness can help project teams better identify, mitigate, and manage the many ways that unfair bias and discrimination can crop up across the AI project workflow. We begin by exploring how, despite the plurality of understandings about the meaning of fairness, priorities of equality and non-discrimination have come to constitute the broadly accepted core of its application as a practical principle. We focus on how these priorities manifest in the form of equal protection from direct and indirect discrimination and from discriminatory harassment. These elements form ethical and legal criteria based upon which instances of unfair bias and discrimination can be identified and mitigated across the AI project workflow. We then take a deeper dive into how the different contexts of the AI project lifecycle give rise to different fairness concerns. This allows us to identify several types of AI Fairness (Data Fairness, Application Fairness, Model Design and Development Fairness, Metric-Based Fairness, System Implementation Fairness, and Ecosystem Fairness) that form the basis of a multi-lens approach to bias identification, mitigation, and management. Building on this, we discuss how to put the principle of AI Fairness into practice across the AI project workflow through Bias Self-Assessment and Bias Risk Management as well as through the documentation of metric-based fairness criteria in a Fairness Position Statement.

Sustainable AI projects are continuously responsive to the transformative effects as well as short-, medium-, and long-term impacts on individuals and society that the design, development, and deployment of AI technologies may have. Projects, which centre AI Sustainability, ensure that values-led, collaborative, and anticipatory reflection both guides the assessment of potential social and ethical impacts and steers responsible innovation practices. This workbook is the first part of a pair that provides the concepts and tools needed to put AI Sustainability into practice. It introduces the SUM Values, which help AI project teams to assess the potential societal impacts and ethical permissibility of their projects. It then presents a Stakeholder Engagement Process (SEP), which provides tools to facilitate proportionate engagement of and input from stakeholders with an emphasis on equitable and meaningful participation and positionality awareness.

Ensuring fairness in Recommendation Systems (RSs) across demographic groups is critical due to the increased integration of RSs in applications such as personalized healthcare, finance, and e-commerce. Graph-based RSs play a crucial role in capturing intricate higher-order interactions among entities. However, integrating these graph models into the Federated Learning (FL) paradigm with fairness constraints poses formidable challenges as this requires access to the entire interaction graph and sensitive user information (such as gender, age, etc.) at the central server. This paper addresses the pervasive issue of inherent bias within RSs for different demographic groups without compromising the privacy of sensitive user attributes in FL environment with the graph-based model. To address the group bias, we propose F2PGNN (Fair Federated Personalized Graph Neural Network), a novel framework that leverages the power of Personalized Graph Neural Network (GNN) coupled with fairness considerations. Additionally, we use differential privacy techniques to fortify privacy protection. Experimental evaluation on three publicly available datasets showcases the efficacy of F2PGNN in mitigating group unfairness by 47% - 99% compared to the state-of-the-art while preserving privacy and maintaining the utility. The results validate the significance of our framework in achieving equitable and personalized recommendations using GNN within the FL landscape., Comment: To appear as a full paper in AAAI 2024

Information extraction and textual comprehension from materials literature are vital for developing an exhaustive knowledge base that enables accelerated materials discovery. Language models have demonstrated their capability to answer domain-specific questions and retrieve information from knowledge bases. However, there are no benchmark datasets in the materials domain that can evaluate the understanding of the key concepts by these language models. In this work, we curate a dataset of 650 challenging questions from the materials domain that require the knowledge and skills of a materials student who has cleared their undergraduate degree. We classify these questions based on their structure and the materials science domain-based subcategories. Further, we evaluate the performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models on solving these questions via zero-shot and chain of thought prompting. It is observed that GPT-4 gives the best performance (~62% accuracy) as compared to GPT-3.5. Interestingly, in contrast to the general observation, no significant improvement in accuracy is observed with the chain of thought prompting. To evaluate the limitations, we performed an error analysis, which revealed conceptual errors (~64%) as the major contributor compared to computational errors (~36%) towards the reduced performance of LLMs. We hope that the dataset and analysis performed in this work will promote further research in developing better materials science domain-specific LLMs and strategies for information extraction.

The time evolution of physical systems is described by differential equations, which depend on abstract quantities like energy and force. Traditionally, these quantities are derived as functionals based on observables such as positions and velocities. Discovering these governing symbolic laws is the key to comprehending the interactions in nature. Here, we present a Hamiltonian graph neural network (HGNN), a physics-enforced GNN that learns the dynamics of systems directly from their trajectory. We demonstrate the performance of HGNN on n-springs, n-pendulums, gravitational systems, and binary Lennard Jones systems; HGNN learns the dynamics in excellent agreement with the ground truth from small amounts of data. We also evaluate the ability of HGNN to generalize to larger system sizes, and to hybrid spring-pendulum system that is a combination of two original systems (spring and pendulum) on which the models are trained independently. Finally, employing symbolic regression on the learned HGNN, we infer the underlying equations relating the energy functionals, even for complex systems such as the binary Lennard-Jones liquid. Our framework facilitates the interpretable discovery of interaction laws directly from physical system trajectories. Furthermore, this approach can be extended to other systems with topology-dependent dynamics, such as cells, polydisperse gels, or deformable bodies.

Neural networks (NNs) that exploit strong inductive biases based on physical laws and symmetries have shown remarkable success in learning the dynamics of physical systems directly from their trajectory. However, these works focus only on the systems that follow deterministic dynamics, for instance, Newtonian or Hamiltonian dynamics. Here, we propose a framework, namely Brownian graph neural networks (BROGNET), combining stochastic differential equations (SDEs) and GNNs to learn Brownian dynamics directly from the trajectory. We theoretically show that BROGNET conserves the linear momentum of the system, which in turn, provides superior performance on learning dynamics as revealed empirically. We demonstrate this approach on several systems, namely, linear spring, linear spring with binary particle types, and non-linear spring systems, all following Brownian dynamics at finite temperatures. We show that BROGNET significantly outperforms proposed baselines across all the benchmarked Brownian systems. In addition, we demonstrate zero-shot generalizability of BROGNET to simulate unseen system sizes that are two orders of magnitude larger and to different temperatures than those used during training. Altogether, our study contributes to advancing the understanding of the intricate dynamics of Brownian motion and demonstrates the effectiveness of graph neural networks in modeling such complex systems.

Cement is the most used construction material. The performance of cement hydrate depends on the constituent phases, viz. alite, belite, aluminate, and ferrites present in the cement clinker, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Traditionally, clinker phases are analyzed from optical images relying on a domain expert and simple image processing techniques. However, the non-uniformity of the images, variations in the geometry and size of the phases, and variabilities in the experimental approaches and imaging methods make it challenging to obtain the phases. Here, we present a machine learning (ML) approach to detect clinker microstructure phases automatically. To this extent, we create the first annotated dataset of cement clinker by segmenting alite and belite particles. Further, we use supervised ML methods to train models for identifying alite and belite regions. Specifically, we finetune the image detection and segmentation model Detectron-2 on the cement microstructure to develop a model for detecting the cement phases, namely, Cementron. We demonstrate that Cementron, trained only on literature data, works remarkably well on new images obtained from our experiments, demonstrating its generalizability. We make Cementron available for public use.

Due to their disordered structure, glasses present a unique challenge in predicting the composition-property relationships. Recently, several attempts have been made to predict the glass properties using machine learning techniques. However, these techniques have the limitations, namely, (i) predictions are limited to the components that are present in the original dataset, and (ii) predictions towards the extreme values of the properties, important regions for new materials discovery, are not very reliable due to the sparse datapoints in this region. To address these challenges, here we present a low complexity neural network (LCNN) that provides improved performance in predicting the properties of oxide glasses. In addition, we combine the LCNN with physical and chemical descriptors that allow the development of universal models that can provide predictions for components beyond the training set. By training on a large dataset (~50000) of glass components, we show the LCNN outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms such as XGBoost. In addition, we interpret the LCNN models using Shapely additive explanations to gain insights into the role played by the descriptors in governing the property. Finally, we demonstrate the universality of the LCNN models by predicting the properties for glasses with new components that were not present in the original training set. Altogether, the present approach provides a promising direction towards accelerated discovery of novel glass compositions., Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures

ML models are increasingly being used to increase the test coverage and decrease the overall testing time. This field is still in its nascent stage and up till now there were no algorithms that could match or outperform commercial tools in terms of speed and accuracy for large circuits. We propose an ATPG algorithm HybMT in this paper that finally breaks this barrier. Like sister methods, we augment the classical PODEM algorithm that uses recursive backtracking. We design a custom 2-level predictor that predicts the input net of a logic gate whose value needs to be set to ensure that the output is a given value (0 or 1). Our predictor chooses the output from among two first-level predictors, where the most effective one is a bespoke neural network and the other is an SVM regressor. As compared to a popular, state-of-the-art commercial ATPG tool, HybMT shows an overall reduction of 56.6% in the CPU time without compromising on the fault coverage for the EPFL benchmark circuits. HybMT also shows a speedup of 126.4% over the best ML-based algorithm while obtaining an equal or better fault coverage for the EPFL benchmark circuits., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures and 5 tables. Changes from the previous version: We modified our novel neural network model "HybNN" with a skip connection and found a significant improvement in the fault coverage and runtime of our HybMT-based PODEM algorithm. We train on the smaller ISCAS'85 circuits, report the results for the EPFL benchmark circuits (most recent and up to 70X large)

The Advancing Data Justice Research and Practice project aims to broaden understanding of the social, historical, cultural, political, and economic forces that contribute to discrimination and inequity in contemporary ecologies of data collection, governance, and use. This is the consultation draft of a guide for developers and organisations, which are producing, procuring, or using data-intensive technologies.In the first section, we introduce the field of data justice, from its early discussions to more recent proposals to relocate understandings of what data justice means. This section includes a description of the six pillars of data justice around which this guidance revolves. Next, to support developers in designing, developing, and deploying responsible and equitable data-intensive and AI/ML systems, we outline the AI/ML project lifecycle through a sociotechnical lens. To support the operationalisation data justice throughout the entirety of the AI/ML lifecycle and within data innovation ecosystems, we then present five overarching principles of responsible, equitable, and trustworthy data research and innovation practices, the SAFE-D principles-Safety, Accountability, Fairness, Explainability, and Data Quality, Integrity, Protection, and Privacy. The final section presents guiding questions that will help developers both address data justice issues throughout the AI/ML lifecycle and engage in reflective innovation practices that ensure the design, development, and deployment of responsible and equitable data-intensive and AI/ML systems., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2202.02776

The idea of "data justice" is of recent academic vintage. It has arisen over the past decade in Anglo-European research institutions as an attempt to bring together a critique of the power dynamics that underlie accelerating trends of datafication with a normative commitment to the principles of social justice-a commitment to the achievement of a society that is equitable, fair, and capable of confronting the root causes of injustice.However, despite the seeming novelty of such a data justice pedigree, this joining up of the critique of the power imbalances that have shaped the digital and "big data" revolutions with a commitment to social equity and constructive societal transformation has a deeper historical, and more geographically diverse, provenance. As the stories of the data justice initiatives, activism, and advocacy contained in this volume well evidence, practices of data justice across the globe have, in fact, largely preceded the elaboration and crystallisation of the idea of data justice in contemporary academic discourse. In telling these data justice stories, we hope to provide the reader with two interdependent tools of data justice thinking: First, we aim to provide the reader with the critical leverage needed to discern those distortions and malformations of data justice that manifest in subtle and explicit forms of power, domination, and coercion. Second, we aim to provide the reader with access to the historically effective forms of normativity and ethical insight that have been marshalled by data justice activists and advocates as tools of societal transformation-so that these forms of normativity and insight can be drawn on, in turn, as constructive resources to spur future transformative data justice practices.

The Advancing Data Justice Research and Practice (ADJRP) project aims to widen the lens of current thinking around data justice and to provide actionable resources that will help policymakers, practitioners, and impacted communities gain a broader understanding of what equitable, freedom-promoting, and rights-sustaining data collection, governance, and use should look like in increasingly dynamic and global data innovation ecosystems. In this integrated literature review we hope to lay the conceptual groundwork needed to support this aspiration. The introduction motivates the broadening of data justice that is undertaken by the literature review which follows. First, we address how certain limitations of the current study of data justice drive the need for a re-location of data justice research and practice. We map out the strengths and shortcomings of the contemporary state of the art and then elaborate on the challenges faced by our own effort to broaden the data justice perspective in the decolonial context. The body of the literature review covers seven thematic areas. For each theme, the ADJRP team has systematically collected and analysed key texts in order to tell the critical empirical story of how existing social structures and power dynamics present challenges to data justice and related justice fields. In each case, this critical empirical story is also supplemented by the transformational story of how activists, policymakers, and academics are challenging longstanding structures of inequity to advance social justice in data innovation ecosystems and adjacent areas of technological practice.

Due to their excellent optical properties, glasses are used for various applications ranging from smartphone screens to telescopes. Developing compositions with tailored Abbe number (Vd) and refractive index (nd), two crucial optical properties, is a major challenge. To this extent, machine learning (ML) approaches have been successfully used to develop composition-property models. However, these models are essentially black-box in nature and suffer from the lack of interpretability. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of ML models to predict the composition-dependent variations of Vd and n at 587.6 nm (nd). Further, using Shapely Additive exPlanations (SHAP), we interpret the ML models to identify the contribution of each of the input components toward a target prediction. We observe that the glass formers such as SiO2, B2O3, and P2O5, and intermediates like TiO2, PbO, and Bi2O3 play a significant role in controlling the optical properties. Interestingly, components that contribute toward increasing the nd are found to decrease the Vd and vice-versa. Finally, we develop the Abbe diagram, also known as the "glass veil", using the ML models, allowing accelerated discovery of new glasses for optical properties beyond the experimental pareto front. Overall, employing explainable ML, we discover the hidden compositional control on the optical properties of oxide glasses., Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures