Everyday we increasingly rely on machine learning models to automate and support high-stake tasks and decisions. This growing presence means that humans are now constantly interacting with machine learning-based systems, training and using models everyday. Several different techniques in computer science literature account for the human interaction with machine learning systems, but their classification is sparse and the goals varied. This survey proposes a taxonomy of Hybrid Decision Making Systems, providing both a conceptual and technical framework for understanding how current computer science literature models interaction between humans and machines.
Authorship Analysis, also known as stylometry, has been an essential aspect of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for a long time. Likewise, the recent advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made authorship analysis increasingly crucial for distinguishing between human-written and AI-generated texts. However, these authorship analysis tasks have primarily been focused on written texts, not considering spoken texts. Thus, we introduce the largest benchmark for spoken texts - HANSEN (Human ANd ai Spoken tExt beNchmark). HANSEN encompasses meticulous curation of existing speech datasets accompanied by transcripts, alongside the creation of novel AI-generated spoken text datasets. Together, it comprises 17 human datasets, and AI-generated spoken texts created using 3 prominent LLMs: ChatGPT, PaLM2, and Vicuna13B. To evaluate and demonstrate the utility of HANSEN, we perform Authorship Attribution (AA) & Author Verification (AV) on human-spoken datasets and conducted Human vs. AI spoken text detection using state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. While SOTA methods, such as, character ngram or Transformer-based model, exhibit similar AA & AV performance in human-spoken datasets compared to written ones, there is much room for improvement in AI-generated spoken text detection. The HANSEN benchmark is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/HANSEN-REPO/HANSEN.
The rise of large-scale socio-technical systems in which humans interact with artificial intelligence (AI) systems (including assistants and recommenders, in short AIs) multiplies the opportunity for the emergence of collective phenomena and tipping points, with unexpected, possibly unintended, consequences. For example, navigation systems' suggestions may create chaos if too many drivers are directed on the same route, and personalised recommendations on social media may amplify polarisation, filter bubbles, and radicalisation. On the other hand, we may learn how to foster the "wisdom of crowds" and collective action effects to face social and environmental challenges. In order to understand the impact of AI on socio-technical systems and design next-generation AIs that team with humans to help overcome societal problems rather than exacerbate them, we propose to build the foundations of Social AI at the intersection of Complex Systems, Network Science and AI. In this perspective paper, we discuss the main open questions in Social AI, outlining possible technical and scientific challenges and suggesting research avenues.
Synthetic data generation has been widely adopted in software testing, data privacy, imbalanced learning, and artificial intelligence explanation. In all such contexts, it is crucial to generate plausible data samples. A common assumption of approaches widely used for data generation is the independence of the features. However, typically, the variables of a dataset depend on one another, and these dependencies are not considered in data generation leading to the creation of implausible records. The main problem is that dependencies among variables are typically unknown. In this paper, we design a synthetic dataset generator for tabular data that can discover nonlinear causalities among the variables and use them at generation time. State-of-the-art methods for nonlinear causal discovery are typically inefficient. We boost them by restricting the causal discovery among the features appearing in the frequent patterns efficiently retrieved by a pattern mining algorithm. We design a framework for generating synthetic datasets with known causalities to validate our proposal. Broad experimentation on many synthetic and real datasets with known causalities shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.
We consider dense, associative neural-networks trained by a teacher (i.e., with supervision) and we investigate their computational capabilities analytically, via statistical-mechanics of spin glasses, and numerically, via Monte Carlo simulations. In particular, we obtain a phase diagram summarizing their performance as a function of the control parameters such as quality and quantity of the training dataset, network storage and noise, that is valid in the limit of large network size and structureless datasets: these networks may work in a ultra-storage regime (where they can handle a huge amount of patterns, if compared with shallow neural networks) or in a ultra-detection regime (where they can perform pattern recognition at prohibitive signal-to-noise ratios, if compared with shallow neural networks). Guided by the random theory as a reference framework, we also test numerically learning, storing and retrieval capabilities shown by these networks on structured datasets as MNist and Fashion MNist. As technical remarks, from the analytic side, we implement large deviations and stability analysis within Guerra's interpolation to tackle the not-Gaussian distributions involved in the post-synaptic potentials while, from the computational counterpart, we insert Plefka approximation in the Monte Carlo scheme, to speed up the evaluation of the synaptic tensors, overall obtaining a novel and broad approach to investigate supervised learning in neural networks, beyond the shallow limit, in general.
We consider dense, associative neural-networks trained with no supervision and we investigate their computational capabilities analytically, via a statistical-mechanics approach, and numerically, via Monte Carlo simulations. In particular, we obtain a phase diagram summarizing their performance as a function of the control parameters such as the quality and quantity of the training dataset and the network storage, valid in the limit of large network size and structureless datasets. Moreover, we establish a bridge between macroscopic observables standardly used in statistical mechanics and loss functions typically used in the machine learning. As technical remarks, from the analytic side, we implement large deviations and stability analysis within Guerra's interpolation to tackle the not-Gaussian distributions involved in the post-synaptic potentials while, from the computational counterpart, we insert Plefka approximation in the Monte Carlo scheme, to speed up the evaluation of the synaptic tensors, overall obtaining a novel and broad approach to investigate neural networks in general.
A key issue in critical contexts such as medical diagnosis is the interpretability of the deep learning models adopted in decision-making systems. Research in eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is trying to solve this issue. However, often XAI approaches are only tested on generalist classifier and do not represent realistic problems such as those of medical diagnosis. In this paper, we analyze a case study on skin lesion images where we customize an existing XAI approach for explaining a deep learning model able to recognize different types of skin lesions. The explanation is formed by synthetic exemplar and counter-exemplar images of skin lesion and offers the practitioner a way to highlight the crucial traits responsible for the classification decision. A survey conducted with domain experts, beginners and unskilled people proof that the usage of explanations increases the trust and confidence in the automatic decision system. Also, an analysis of the latent space adopted by the explainer unveils that some of the most frequent skin lesion classes are distinctly separated. This phenomenon could derive from the intrinsic characteristics of each class and, hopefully, can provide support in the resolution of the most frequent misclassifications by human experts.
Peacefulness is a principal dimension of well-being for all humankind and is the way out of inequity and every single form of violence. Thus, its measurement has lately drawn the attention of researchers and policy-makers. During the last years, novel digital data streams have drastically changed the research in this field. In the current study, we exploit information extracted from Global Data on Events, Location, and Tone (GDELT) digital news database, to capture peacefulness through the Global Peace Index (GPI). Applying predictive machine learning models, we demonstrate that news media attention from GDELT can be used as a proxy for measuring GPI at a monthly level. Additionally, we use the SHAP methodology to obtain the most important variables that drive the predictions. This analysis highlights each country's profile and provides explanations for the predictions overall, and particularly for the errors and the events that drive these errors. We believe that digital data exploited by Social Good researchers, policy-makers, and peace-builders, with data science tools as powerful as machine learning, could contribute to maximize the societal benefits and minimize the risks to peacefulness.
The widespread adoption of black-box models in Artificial Intelligence has enhanced the need for explanation methods to reveal how these obscure models reach specific decisions. Retrieving explanations is fundamental to unveil possible biases and to resolve practical or ethical issues. Nowadays, the literature is full of methods with different explanations. We provide a categorization of explanation methods based on the type of explanation returned. We present the most recent and widely used explainers, and we show a visual comparison among explanations and a quantitative benchmarking.