Generative AI Enhances Team Performance and Reduces Need for Traditional Teams

Recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have transformed collaborative work processes, yet the impact on team performance remains underexplored. Here we examine the role of generative AI in enhancing or replacing traditional team dynamics using a randomized controlled experiment with 435 participants across 122 teams. We show that teams augmented with generative AI significantly outperformed those relying solely on human collaboration across various performance measures. Interestingly, teams with multiple AIs did not exhibit further gains, indicating diminishing returns with increased AI integration. Our analysis suggests that centralized AI usage by a few team members is more effective than distributed engagement. Additionally, individual-AI pairs matched the performance of conventional teams, suggesting a reduced need for traditional team structures in some contexts. However, despite this capability, individual-AI pairs still fell short of the performance levels achieved by AI-assisted teams. These findings underscore that while generative AI can replace some traditional team functions, more comprehensively integrating AI within team structures provides superior benefits, enhancing overall effectiveness beyond individual efforts.

Look into the Future: Deep Contextualized Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation focuses on mining useful patterns from the user behavior history to better estimate his preference on the candidate items. Previous solutions adopt recurrent networks or retrieval methods to obtain the user's profile representation so as to perform the preference estimation. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of sequential recommendation called Look into the Future (LIFT), which builds and leverages the contexts of sequential recommendation. The context in LIFT refers to a user's current profile that can be represented based on both past and future behaviors. As such, the learned context will be more effective in predicting the user's behaviors in sequential recommendation. Apparently, it is impossible to use real future information to predict the current behavior, we thus propose a novel retrieval-based framework to use the most similar interaction's future information as the future context of the target interaction without data leakage. Furthermore, in order to exploit the intrinsic information embedded within the context itself, we introduce an innovative pretraining methodology incorporating behavior masking. This approach is designed to facilitate the efficient acquisition of context representations. We demonstrate that finding relevant contexts from the global user pool via retrieval methods will greatly improve preference estimation performance. In our extensive experiments over real-world datasets, LIFT demonstrates significant performance improvement on click-through rate prediction tasks in sequential recommendation over strong baselines.

4DBInfer: A 4D Benchmarking Toolbox for Graph-Centric Predictive Modeling on Relational DBs

Although RDBs store vast amounts of rich, informative data spread across interconnected tables, the progress of predictive machine learning models as applied to such tasks arguably falls well behind advances in other domains such as computer vision or natural language processing. This deficit stems, at least in part, from the lack of established/public RDB benchmarks as needed for training and evaluation purposes. As a result, related model development thus far often defaults to tabular approaches trained on ubiquitous single-table benchmarks, or on the relational side, graph-based alternatives such as GNNs applied to a completely different set of graph datasets devoid of tabular characteristics. To more precisely target RDBs lying at the nexus of these two complementary regimes, we explore a broad class of baseline models predicated on: (i) converting multi-table datasets into graphs using various strategies equipped with efficient subsampling, while preserving tabular characteristics; and (ii) trainable models with well-matched inductive biases that output predictions based on these input subgraphs. Then, to address the dearth of suitable public benchmarks and reduce siloed comparisons, we assemble a diverse collection of (i) large-scale RDB datasets and (ii) coincident predictive tasks. From a delivery standpoint, we operationalize the above four dimensions (4D) of exploration within a unified, scalable open-source toolbox called 4DBInfer. We conclude by presenting evaluations using 4DBInfer, the results of which highlight the importance of considering each such dimension in the design of RDB predictive models, as well as the limitations of more naive approaches such as simply joining adjacent tables. Our source code is released at https://github.com/awslabs/multi-table-benchmark .

Retrieval and Distill: A Temporal Data Shift-Free Paradigm for Online Recommendation System

Current recommendation systems are significantly affected by a serious issue of temporal data shift, which is the inconsistency between the distribution of historical data and that of online data. Most existing models focus on utilizing updated data, overlooking the transferable, temporal data shift-free information that can be learned from shifting data. We propose the Temporal Invariance of Association theorem, which suggests that given a fixed search space, the relationship between the data and the data in the search space keeps invariant over time. Leveraging this principle, we designed a retrieval-based recommendation system framework that can train a data shift-free relevance network using shifting data, significantly enhancing the predictive performance of the original model in the recommendation system. However, retrieval-based recommendation models face substantial inference time costs when deployed online. To address this, we further designed a distill framework that can distill information from the relevance network into a parameterized module using shifting data. The distilled model can be deployed online alongside the original model, with only a minimal increase in inference time. Extensive experiments on multiple real datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the performance of the original model by utilizing shifting data.

Quantum-activated neural reservoirs on-chip open up large hardware security models for resilient authentication

Quantum artificial intelligence is a frontier of artificial intelligence research, pioneering quantum AI-powered circuits to address problems beyond the reach of deep learning with classical architectures. This work implements a large-scale quantum-activated recurrent neural network possessing more than 3 trillion hardware nodes/cm$^2$, originating from repeatable atomic-scale nucleation dynamics in an amorphous material integrated on-chip, controlled with 0.07 nW electric power per readout channel. Compared to the best-performing reservoirs currently reported, this implementation increases the scale of the network by two orders of magnitude and reduces the power consumption by six, reaching power efficiencies in the range of the human brain, dissipating 0.2 nW/neuron. When interrogated by a classical input, the chip implements a large-scale hardware security model, enabling dictionary-free authentication secure against statistical inference attacks, including AI's present and future development, even for an adversary with a copy of all the classical components available. Experimental tests report 99.6% reliability, 100% user authentication accuracy, and an ideal 50% key uniqueness. Due to its quantum nature, the chip supports a bit density per feature size area three times higher than the best technology available, with the capacity to store more than $2^{1104}$ keys in a footprint of 1 cm$^2$. Such a quantum-powered platform could help counteract the emerging form of warfare led by the cybercrime industry in breaching authentication to target small to large-scale facilities, from private users to intelligent energy grids.

AACP: Aesthetics assessment of children's paintings based on self-supervised learning

The Aesthetics Assessment of Children's Paintings (AACP) is an important branch of the image aesthetics assessment (IAA), playing a significant role in children's education. This task presents unique challenges, such as limited available data and the requirement for evaluation metrics from multiple perspectives. However, previous approaches have relied on training large datasets and subsequently providing an aesthetics score to the image, which is not applicable to AACP. To solve this problem, we construct an aesthetics assessment dataset of children's paintings and a model based on self-supervised learning. 1) We build a novel dataset composed of two parts: the first part contains more than 20k unlabeled images of children's paintings; the second part contains 1.2k images of children's paintings, and each image contains eight attributes labeled by multiple design experts. 2) We design a pipeline that includes a feature extraction module, perception modules and a disentangled evaluation module. 3) We conduct both qualitative and quantitative experiments to compare our model's performance with five other methods using the AACP dataset. Our experiments reveal that our method can accurately capture aesthetic features and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

OkayPlan: Obstacle Kinematics Augmented Dynamic Real-time Path Planning via Particle Swarm Optimization

Existing Global Path Planning (GPP) algorithms predominantly presume planning in a static environment. This assumption immensely limits their applications to Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) that typically navigate in dynamic environments. To address this limitation, we present OkayPlan, a GPP algorithm capable of generating safe and short paths in dynamic scenarios at a real-time executing speed (125 Hz on a desktop-class computer). Specifically, we approach the challenge of dynamic obstacle avoidance by formulating the path planning problem as an obstacle kinematics augmented optimization problem, which can be efficiently resolved through a PSO-based optimizer at a real-time speed. Meanwhile, a Dynamic Prioritized Initialization (DPI) mechanism that adaptively initializes potential solutions for the optimization problem is established to further ameliorate the solution quality. Additionally, a relaxation strategy that facilitates the autonomous tuning of OkayPlan's hyperparameters in dynamic environments is devised. Comparative experiments involving canonical and contemporary GPP algorithms, along with ablation studies, have been conducted to substantiate the efficacy of our approach. Results indicate that OkayPlan outstrips existing methods in terms of path safety, length optimality, and computational efficiency, establishing it as a potent GPP technique for dynamic environments. The video and code associated with this paper are accessible at https://github.com/XinJingHao/OkayPlan.

Content-Conditioned Generation of Stylized Free hand Sketches

In recent years, the recognition of free-hand sketches has remained a popular task. However, in some special fields such as the military field, free-hand sketches are difficult to sample on a large scale. Common data augmentation and image generation techniques are difficult to produce images with various free-hand sketching styles. Therefore, the recognition and segmentation tasks in related fields are limited. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial generative network that can accurately generate realistic free-hand sketches with various styles. We explore the performance of the model, including using styles randomly sampled from a prior normal distribution to generate images with various free-hand sketching styles, disentangling the painters' styles from known free-hand sketches to generate images with specific styles, and generating images of unknown classes that are not in the training set. We further demonstrate with qualitative and quantitative evaluations our advantages in visual quality, content accuracy, and style imitation on SketchIME.

A multimodal gesture recognition dataset for desktop human-computer interaction

Gesture recognition is an indispensable component of natural and efficient human-computer interaction technology, particularly in desktop-level applications, where it can significantly enhance people's productivity. However, the current gesture recognition community lacks a suitable desktop-level (top-view perspective) dataset for lightweight gesture capture devices. In this study, we have established a dataset named GR4DHCI. What distinguishes this dataset is its inherent naturalness, intuitive characteristics, and diversity. Its primary purpose is to serve as a valuable resource for the development of desktop-level portable applications. GR4DHCI comprises over 7,000 gesture samples and a total of 382,447 frames for both Stereo IR and skeletal modalities. We also address the variances in hand positioning during desktop interactions by incorporating 27 different hand positions into the dataset. Building upon the GR4DHCI dataset, we conducted a series of experimental studies, the results of which demonstrate that the fine-grained classification blocks proposed in this paper can enhance the model's recognition accuracy. Our dataset and experimental findings presented in this paper are anticipated to propel advancements in desktop-level gesture recognition research.

Explicit Visual Prompts for Visual Object Tracking

How to effectively exploit spatio-temporal information is crucial to capture target appearance changes in visual tracking. However, most deep learning-based trackers mainly focus on designing a complicated appearance model or template updating strategy, while lacking the exploitation of context between consecutive frames and thus entailing the \textit{when-and-how-to-update} dilemma. To address these issues, we propose a novel explicit visual prompts framework for visual tracking, dubbed \textbf{EVPTrack}. Specifically, we utilize spatio-temporal tokens to propagate information between consecutive frames without focusing on updating templates. As a result, we cannot only alleviate the challenge of \textit{when-to-update}, but also avoid the hyper-parameters associated with updating strategies. Then, we utilize the spatio-temporal tokens to generate explicit visual prompts that facilitate inference in the current frame. The prompts are fed into a transformer encoder together with the image tokens without additional processing. Consequently, the efficiency of our model is improved by avoiding \textit{how-to-update}. In addition, we consider multi-scale information as explicit visual prompts, providing multiscale template features to enhance the EVPTrack's ability to handle target scale changes. Extensive experimental results on six benchmarks (i.e., LaSOT, LaSOT\rm $_{ext}$, GOT-10k, UAV123, TrackingNet, and TNL2K.) validate that our EVPTrack can achieve competitive performance at a real-time speed by effectively exploiting both spatio-temporal and multi-scale information. Code and models are available at https://github.com/GXNU-ZhongLab/EVPTrack.