AETTA: Label-Free Accuracy Estimation for Test-Time Adaptation

Test-time adaptation (TTA) has emerged as a viable solution to adapt pre-trained models to domain shifts using unlabeled test data. However, TTA faces challenges of adaptation failures due to its reliance on blind adaptation to unknown test samples in dynamic scenarios. Traditional methods for out-of-distribution performance estimation are limited by unrealistic assumptions in the TTA context, such as requiring labeled data or re-training models. To address this issue, we propose AETTA, a label-free accuracy estimation algorithm for TTA. We propose the prediction disagreement as the accuracy estimate, calculated by comparing the target model prediction with dropout inferences. We then improve the prediction disagreement to extend the applicability of AETTA under adaptation failures. Our extensive evaluation with four baselines and six TTA methods demonstrates that AETTA shows an average of 19.8%p more accurate estimation compared with the baselines. We further demonstrate the effectiveness of accuracy estimation with a model recovery case study, showcasing the practicality of our model recovery based on accuracy estimation. The source code is available at https://github.com/taeckyung/AETTA.

Time2Stop: Adaptive and Explainable Human-AI Loop for Smartphone Overuse Intervention

Despite a rich history of investigating smartphone overuse intervention techniques, AI-based just-in-time adaptive intervention (JITAI) methods for overuse reduction are lacking. We develop Time2Stop, an intelligent, adaptive, and explainable JITAI system that leverages machine learning to identify optimal intervention timings, introduces interventions with transparent AI explanations, and collects user feedback to establish a human-AI loop and adapt the intervention model over time. We conducted an 8-week field experiment (N=71) to evaluate the effectiveness of both the adaptation and explanation aspects of Time2Stop. Our results indicate that our adaptive models significantly outperform the baseline methods on intervention accuracy (>32.8\% relatively) and receptivity (>8.0\%). In addition, incorporating explanations further enhances the effectiveness by 53.8\% and 11.4\% on accuracy and receptivity, respectively. Moreover, Time2Stop significantly reduces overuse, decreasing app visit frequency by 7.0$\sim$8.9\%. Our subjective data also echoed these quantitative measures. Participants preferred the adaptive interventions and rated the system highly on intervention time accuracy, effectiveness, and level of trust. We envision our work can inspire future research on JITAI systems with a human-AI loop to evolve with users.

FedTherapist: Mental Health Monitoring with User-Generated Linguistic Expressions on Smartphones via Federated Learning

Psychiatrists diagnose mental disorders via the linguistic use of patients. Still, due to data privacy, existing passive mental health monitoring systems use alternative features such as activity, app usage, and location via mobile devices. We propose FedTherapist, a mobile mental health monitoring system that utilizes continuous speech and keyboard input in a privacy-preserving way via federated learning. We explore multiple model designs by comparing their performance and overhead for FedTherapist to overcome the complex nature of on-device language model training on smartphones. We further propose a Context-Aware Language Learning (CALL) methodology to effectively utilize smartphones' large and noisy text for mental health signal sensing. Our IRB-approved evaluation of the prediction of self-reported depression, stress, anxiety, and mood from 46 participants shows higher accuracy of FedTherapist compared with the performance with non-language features, achieving 0.15 AUROC improvement and 8.21% MAE reduction.

SoTTA: Robust Test-Time Adaptation on Noisy Data Streams

Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to address distributional shifts between training and testing data using only unlabeled test data streams for continual model adaptation. However, most TTA methods assume benign test streams, while test samples could be unexpectedly diverse in the wild. For instance, an unseen object or noise could appear in autonomous driving. This leads to a new threat to existing TTA algorithms; we found that prior TTA algorithms suffer from those noisy test samples as they blindly adapt to incoming samples. To address this problem, we present Screening-out Test-Time Adaptation (SoTTA), a novel TTA algorithm that is robust to noisy samples. The key enabler of SoTTA is two-fold: (i) input-wise robustness via high-confidence uniform-class sampling that effectively filters out the impact of noisy samples and (ii) parameter-wise robustness via entropy-sharpness minimization that improves the robustness of model parameters against large gradients from noisy samples. Our evaluation with standard TTA benchmarks with various noisy scenarios shows that our method outperforms state-of-the-art TTA methods under the presence of noisy samples and achieves comparable accuracy to those methods without noisy samples. The source code is available at https://github.com/taeckyung/SoTTA .

Towards Explainable AI Writing Assistants for Non-native English Speakers

We highlight the challenges faced by non-native speakers when using AI writing assistants to paraphrase text. Through an interview study with 15 non-native English speakers (NNESs) with varying levels of English proficiency, we observe that they face difficulties in assessing paraphrased texts generated by AI writing assistants, largely due to the lack of explanations accompanying the suggested paraphrases. Furthermore, we examine their strategies to assess AI-generated texts in the absence of such explanations. Drawing on the needs of NNESs identified in our interview, we propose four potential user interfaces to enhance the writing experience of NNESs using AI writing assistants. The proposed designs focus on incorporating explanations to better support NNESs in understanding and evaluating the AI-generated paraphrasing suggestions.

IMG2IMU: Applying Knowledge from Large-Scale Images to IMU Applications via Contrastive Learning

Recent advances in machine learning showed that pre-training representations acquired via self-supervised learning could achieve high accuracy on tasks with small training data. Unlike in vision and natural language processing domains, such pre-training for IMU-based applications is challenging, as there are only a few publicly available datasets with sufficient size and diversity to learn generalizable representations. To overcome this problem, we propose IMG2IMU, a novel approach that adapts pre-train representation from large-scale images to diverse few-shot IMU sensing tasks. We convert the sensor data into visually interpretable spectrograms for the model to utilize the knowledge gained from vision. Further, we apply contrastive learning on an augmentation set we designed to learn representations that are tailored to interpreting sensor data. Our extensive evaluations on five different IMU sensing tasks show that IMG2IMU consistently outperforms the baselines, illustrating that vision knowledge can be incorporated into a few-shot learning environment for IMU sensing tasks.

Robust Continual Test-time Adaptation: Instance-aware BN and Prediction-balanced Memory

Test-time adaptation (TTA) is an emerging paradigm that addresses distributional shifts between training and testing phases without additional data acquisition or labeling cost; only unlabeled test data streams are used for continual model adaptation. Previous TTA schemes assume that the test samples are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), even though they are often temporally correlated (non-i.i.d.) in application scenarios, e.g., autonomous driving. We discover that most existing TTA methods fail dramatically under such scenarios. Motivated by this, we present a new test-time adaptation scheme that is robust against non-i.i.d. test data streams. Our novelty is mainly two-fold: (a) Instance-Aware Batch Normalization (IABN) that corrects normalization for out-of-distribution samples, and (b) Prediction-balanced Reservoir Sampling (PBRS) that simulates i.i.d. data stream from non-i.i.d. stream in a class-balanced manner. Our evaluation with various datasets, including real-world non-i.i.d. streams, demonstrates that the proposed robust TTA not only outperforms state-of-the-art TTA algorithms in the non-i.i.d. setting, but also achieves comparable performance to those algorithms under the i.i.d. assumption.

Sample Selection with Deadline Control for Efficient Federated Learning on Heterogeneous Clients

Federated Learning (FL) trains a machine learning model on distributed clients without exposing individual data. Unlike centralized training that is usually based on carefully-organized data, FL deals with on-device data that are often unfiltered and imbalanced. As a result, conventional FL training protocol that treats all data equally leads to a waste of local computational resources and slows down the global learning process. To this end, we propose FedBalancer, a systematic FL framework that actively selects clients' training samples. Our sample selection strategy prioritizes more "informative" data while respecting privacy and computational capabilities of clients. To better utilize the sample selection to speed up global training, we further introduce an adaptive deadline control scheme that predicts the optimal deadline for each round with varying client train data. Compared with existing FL algorithms with deadline configuration methods, our evaluation on five datasets from three different domains shows that FedBalancer improves the time-to-accuracy performance by 1.22~4.62x while improving the model accuracy by 1.0~3.3%. We also show that FedBalancer is readily applicable to other FL approaches by demonstrating that FedBalancer improves the convergence speed and accuracy when operating jointly with three different FL algorithms.

DAPPER: Performance Estimation of Domain Adaptation in Mobile Sensing

Many applications that utilize sensors in mobile devices and apply machine learning to provide novel services have emerged. However, various factors such as different users, devices, environments, and hyperparameters, affect the performance for such applications, thus making the domain shift (i.e., distribution shift of a target user from the training source dataset) an important problem. Although recent domain adaptation techniques attempt to solve this problem, the complex interplay between the diverse factors often limits their effectiveness. We argue that accurately estimating the performance in untrained domains could significantly reduce performance uncertainty. We present DAPPER (Domain AdaPtation Performance EstimatoR) that estimates the adaptation performance in a target domain with only unlabeled target data. Our intuition is that the outputs of a model on the target data provide clues for the model's actual performance in the target domain. DAPPER does not require expensive labeling costs nor involve additional training after deployment. Our evaluation with four real-world sensing datasets compared against four baselines shows that DAPPER outperforms the baselines by on average 17% in estimation accuracy. Moreover, our on-device experiment shows that DAPPER achieves up to 216X less computation overhead compared with the baselines.