LLM Task Interference: An Initial Study on the Impact of Task-Switch in Conversational History

With the recent emergence of powerful instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), various helpful conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have been deployed across many applications. When prompted by users, these AI systems successfully perform a wide range of tasks as part of a conversation. To provide some sort of memory and context, such approaches typically condition their output on the entire conversational history. Although this sensitivity to the conversational history can often lead to improved performance on subsequent tasks, we find that performance can in fact also be negatively impacted, if there is a task-switch. To the best of our knowledge, our work makes the first attempt to formalize the study of such vulnerabilities and interference of tasks in conversational LLMs caused by task-switches in the conversational history. Our experiments across 5 datasets with 15 task switches using popular LLMs reveal that many of the task-switches can lead to significant performance degradation.

Survey on AI Ethics: A Socio-technical Perspective

The past decade has observed a great advancement in AI with deep learning-based models being deployed in diverse scenarios including safety-critical applications. As these AI systems become deeply embedded in our societal infrastructure, the repercussions of their decisions and actions have significant consequences, making the ethical implications of AI deployment highly relevant and important. The ethical concerns associated with AI are multifaceted, including challenging issues of fairness, privacy and data protection, responsibility and accountability, safety and robustness, transparency and explainability, and environmental impact. These principles together form the foundations of ethical AI considerations that concern every stakeholder in the AI system lifecycle. In light of the present ethical and future x-risk concerns, governments have shown increasing interest in establishing guidelines for the ethical deployment of AI. This work unifies the current and future ethical concerns of deploying AI into society. While we acknowledge and appreciate the technical surveys for each of the ethical principles concerned, in this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview that not only addresses each principle from a technical point of view but also discusses them from a social perspective.

Auxiliary Losses for Learning Generalizable Concept-based Models

The increasing use of neural networks in various applications has lead to increasing apprehensions, underscoring the necessity to understand their operations beyond mere final predictions. As a solution to enhance model transparency, Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) have gained popularity since their introduction. CBMs essentially limit the latent space of a model to human-understandable high-level concepts. While beneficial, CBMs have been reported to often learn irrelevant concept representations that consecutively damage model performance. To overcome the performance trade-off, we propose cooperative-Concept Bottleneck Model (coop-CBM). The concept representation of our model is particularly meaningful when fine-grained concept labels are absent. Furthermore, we introduce the concept orthogonal loss (COL) to encourage the separation between the concept representations and to reduce the intra-concept distance. This paper presents extensive experiments on real-world datasets for image classification tasks, namely CUB, AwA2, CelebA and TIL. We also study the performance of coop-CBM models under various distributional shift settings. We show that our proposed method achieves higher accuracy in all distributional shift settings even compared to the black-box models with the highest concept accuracy.

Transparent Anomaly Detection via Concept-based Explanations

Advancements in deep learning techniques have given a boost to the performance of anomaly detection. However, real-world and safety-critical applications demand a level of transparency and reasoning beyond accuracy. The task of anomaly detection (AD) focuses on finding whether a given sample follows the learned distribution. Existing methods lack the ability to reason with clear explanations for their outcomes. Hence to overcome this challenge, we propose Transparent {A}nomaly Detection {C}oncept {E}xplanations (ACE). ACE is able to provide human interpretable explanations in the form of concepts along with anomaly prediction. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that proposes interpretable by-design anomaly detection. In addition to promoting transparency in AD, it allows for effective human-model interaction. Our proposed model shows either higher or comparable results to black-box uninterpretable models. We validate the performance of ACE across three realistic datasets - bird classification on CUB-200-2011, challenging histopathology slide image classification on TIL-WSI-TCGA, and gender classification on CelebA. We further demonstrate that our concept learning paradigm can be seamlessly integrated with other classification-based AD methods.

WiCV@CVPR2023: The Eleventh Women In Computer Vision Workshop at the Annual CVPR Conference

In this paper, we present the details of Women in Computer Vision Workshop - WiCV 2023, organized alongside the hybrid CVPR 2023 in Vancouver, Canada. WiCV aims to amplify the voices of underrepresented women in the computer vision community, fostering increased visibility in both academia and industry. We believe that such events play a vital role in addressing gender imbalances within the field. The annual WiCV@CVPR workshop offers a) opportunity for collaboration between researchers from minority groups, b) mentorship for female junior researchers, c) financial support to presenters to alleviate finanacial burdens and d) a diverse array of role models who can inspire younger researchers at the outset of their careers. In this paper, we present a comprehensive report on the workshop program, historical trends from the past WiCV@CVPR events, and a summary of statistics related to presenters, attendees, and sponsorship for the WiCV 2023 workshop.

Source-free Domain Adaptation Requires Penalized Diversity

While neural networks are capable of achieving human-like performance in many tasks such as image classification, the impressive performance of each model is limited to its own dataset. Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) was introduced to address knowledge transfer between different domains in the absence of source data, thus, increasing data privacy. Diversity in representation space can be vital to a model`s adaptability in varied and difficult domains. In unsupervised SFDA, the diversity is limited to learning a single hypothesis on the source or learning multiple hypotheses with a shared feature extractor. Motivated by the improved predictive performance of ensembles, we propose a novel unsupervised SFDA algorithm that promotes representational diversity through the use of separate feature extractors with Distinct Backbone Architectures (DBA). Although diversity in feature space is increased, the unconstrained mutual information (MI) maximization may potentially introduce amplification of weak hypotheses. Thus we introduce the Weak Hypothesis Penalization (WHP) regularizer as a mitigation strategy. Our work proposes Penalized Diversity (PD) where the synergy of DBA and WHP is applied to unsupervised source-free domain adaptation for covariate shift. In addition, PD is augmented with a weighted MI maximization objective for label distribution shift. Empirical results on natural, synthetic, and medical domains demonstrate the effectiveness of PD under different distributional shifts.

Pitfalls of Conditional Batch Normalization for Contextual Multi-Modal Learning

Humans have perfected the art of learning from multiple modalities through sensory organs. Despite their impressive predictive performance on a single modality, neural networks cannot reach human level accuracy with respect to multiple modalities. This is a particularly challenging task due to variations in the structure of respective modalities. Conditional Batch Normalization (CBN) is a popular method that was proposed to learn contextual features to aid deep learning tasks. This technique uses auxiliary data to improve representational power by learning affine transformations for convolutional neural networks. Despite the boost in performance observed by using CBN layers, our work reveals that the visual features learned by introducing auxiliary data via CBN deteriorates. We perform comprehensive experiments to evaluate the brittleness of CBN networks to various datasets, suggesting that learning from visual features alone could often be superior for generalization. We evaluate CBN models on natural images for bird classification and histology images for cancer type classification. We observe that the CBN network learns close to no visual features on the bird classification dataset and partial visual features on the histology dataset. Our extensive experiments reveal that CBN may encourage shortcut learning between the auxiliary data and labels.

Learning Latent Structural Causal Models

Causal learning has long concerned itself with the accurate recovery of underlying causal mechanisms. Such causal modelling enables better explanations of out-of-distribution data. Prior works on causal learning assume that the high-level causal variables are given. However, in machine learning tasks, one often operates on low-level data like image pixels or high-dimensional vectors. In such settings, the entire Structural Causal Model (SCM) -- structure, parameters, \textit{and} high-level causal variables -- is unobserved and needs to be learnt from low-level data. We treat this problem as Bayesian inference of the latent SCM, given low-level data. For linear Gaussian additive noise SCMs, we present a tractable approximate inference method which performs joint inference over the causal variables, structure and parameters of the latent SCM from random, known interventions. Experiments are performed on synthetic datasets and a causally generated image dataset to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. We also perform image generation from unseen interventions, thereby verifying out of distribution generalization for the proposed causal model.

WiCV 2022: The Tenth Women In Computer Vision Workshop

In this paper, we present the details of Women in Computer Vision Workshop - WiCV 2022, organized alongside the hybrid CVPR 2022 in New Orleans, Louisiana. It provides a voice to a minority (female) group in the computer vision community and focuses on increasing the visibility of these researchers, both in academia and industry. WiCV believes that such an event can play an important role in lowering the gender imbalance in the field of computer vision. WiCV is organized each year where it provides a) opportunity for collaboration between researchers from minority groups, b) mentorship to female junior researchers, c) financial support to presenters to overcome monetary burden and d) large and diverse choice of role models, who can serve as examples to younger researchers at the beginning of their careers. In this paper, we present a report on the workshop program, trends over the past years, a summary of statistics regarding presenters, attendees, and sponsorship for the WiCV 2022 workshop.

Latent Variable Models for Bayesian Causal Discovery

Learning predictors that do not rely on spurious correlations involves building causal representations. However, learning such a representation is very challenging. We, therefore, formulate the problem of learning a causal representation from high dimensional data and study causal recovery with synthetic data. This work introduces a latent variable decoder model, Decoder BCD, for Bayesian causal discovery and performs experiments in mildly supervised and unsupervised settings. We present a series of synthetic experiments to characterize important factors for causal discovery and show that using known intervention targets as labels helps in unsupervised Bayesian inference over structure and parameters of linear Gaussian additive noise latent structural causal models.