Self-Agreement: A Framework for Fine-tuning Language Models to Find Agreement among Diverse Opinions

Finding an agreement among diverse opinions is a challenging topic in multiagent systems. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in addressing this challenge due to their remarkable capabilities in comprehending human opinions and generating human-like text. However, they typically rely on extensive human-annotated data. In this paper, we propose Self-Agreement, a novel framework for fine-tuning LLMs to autonomously find agreement using data generated by LLM itself. Specifically, our approach employs the generative pre-trained transformer-3 (GPT-3) to generate multiple opinions for each question in a question dataset and create several agreement candidates among these opinions. Then, a bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT)-based model evaluates the agreement score of each agreement candidate and selects the one with the highest agreement score. This process yields a dataset of question-opinion-agreements, which we use to fine-tune a pre-trained LLM for discovering agreements among diverse opinions. Remarkably, a pre-trained LLM fine-tuned by our Self-Agreement framework achieves comparable performance to GPT-3 with only 1/25 of its parameters, showcasing its ability to identify agreement among various opinions without the need for human-annotated data.

Best-Answer Prediction in Q&A Sites Using User Information

Community Question Answering (CQA) sites have spread and multiplied significantly in recent years. Sites like Reddit, Quora, and Stack Exchange are becoming popular amongst people interested in finding answers to diverse questions. One practical way of finding such answers is automatically predicting the best candidate given existing answers and comments. Many studies were conducted on answer prediction in CQA but with limited focus on using the background information of the questionnaires. We address this limitation using a novel method for predicting the best answers using the questioner's background information and other features, such as the textual content or the relationships with other participants. Our answer classification model was trained using the Stack Exchange dataset and validated using the Area Under the Curve (AUC) metric. The experimental results show that the proposed method complements previous methods by pointing out the importance of the relationships between users, particularly throughout the level of involvement in different communities on Stack Exchange. Furthermore, we point out that there is little overlap between user-relation information and the information represented by the shallow text features and the meta-features, such as time differences.

Fairness based Multi-Preference Resource Allocation in Decentralised Open Markets

In this work, we focus on resource allocation in a decentralised open market. In decentralised open markets consists of multiple vendors and multiple dynamically-arriving buyers, thus makes the market complex and dynamic. Because, in these markets, negotiations among vendors and buyers take place over multiple conflicting issues such as price, scalability, robustness, delay, etc. As a result, optimising the resource allocation in such open markets becomes directly dependent on two key decisions, which are; incorporating a different kind of buyers' preferences, and fairness based vendor elicitation strategy. Towards this end, in this work, we propose a three-step resource allocation approach that employs a reverse-auction paradigm. At the first step, priority label is attached to each bidding vendor based on the proposed priority mechanism. Then, at the second step, the preference score is calculated for all the different kinds of preferences of the buyers. Finally, at the third step, based on the priority label of the vendor and the preference score winner is determined. Finally, we compare the proposed approach with two state-of-the-art resource pricing and allocation strategies. The experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms the other two resource allocation approaches in terms of the independent utilities of buyers and the overall utility of the open market.

Federated Learning Versus Classical Machine Learning: A Convergence Comparison

In the past few decades, machine learning has revolutionized data processing for large scale applications. Simultaneously, increasing privacy threats in trending applications led to the redesign of classical data training models. In particular, classical machine learning involves centralized data training, where the data is gathered, and the entire training process executes at the central server. Despite significant convergence, this training involves several privacy threats on participants' data when shared with the central cloud server. To this end, federated learning has achieved significant importance over distributed data training. In particular, the federated learning allows participants to collaboratively train the local models on local data without revealing their sensitive information to the central cloud server. In this paper, we perform a convergence comparison between classical machine learning and federated learning on two publicly available datasets, namely, logistic-regression-MNIST dataset and image-classification-CIFAR-10 dataset. The simulation results demonstrate that federated learning achieves higher convergence within limited communication rounds while maintaining participants' anonymity. We hope that this research will show the benefits and help federated learning to be implemented widely.

Relational Argumentation Semantics

In this paper, we propose a fresh perspective on argumentation semantics, to view them as a relational database. It offers encapsulation of the underlying argumentation graph, and allows us to understand argumentation semantics under a single, relational perspective, leading to the concept of relational argumentation semantics. This is a direction to understand argumentation semantics through a common formal language. We show that many existing semantics such as explanation semantics, multi-agent semantics, and more typical semantics, that have been proposed for specific purposes, are understood in the relational perspective.

A Robust Model for Trust Evaluation during Interactions between Agents in a Sociable Environment

Trust evaluation is an important topic in both research and applications in sociable environments. This paper presents a model for trust evaluation between agents by the combination of direct trust, indirect trust through neighbouring links and the reputation of an agent in the environment (i.e. social network) to provide the robust evaluation. Our approach is typology independent from social network structures and in a decentralized manner without a central controller, so it can be used in broad domains.

Privacy Information Classification: A Hybrid Approach

A large amount of information has been published to online social networks every day. Individual privacy-related information is also possibly disclosed unconsciously by the end-users. Identifying privacy-related data and protecting the online social network users from privacy leakage turn out to be significant. Under such a motivation, this study aims to propose and develop a hybrid privacy classification approach to detect and classify privacy information from OSNs. The proposed hybrid approach employs both deep learning models and ontology-based models for privacy-related information extraction. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the proposed hybrid approach, and the empirical results demonstrate its superiority in assisting online social network users against privacy leakage.

Abstract Interpretation in Formal Argumentation: with a Galois Connection for Abstract Dialectical Frameworks and May-Must Argumentation (First Report)

Labelling-based formal argumentation relies on labelling functions that typically assign one of 3 labels to indicate either acceptance, rejection, or else undecided-to-be-either, to each argument. While a classical labelling-based approach applies globally uniform conditions as to how an argument is to be labelled, they can be determined more locally per argument. Abstract dialectical frameworks (ADF) is a well-known argumentation formalism that belongs to this category, offering a greater labelling flexibility. As the size of an argumentation increases in the numbers of arguments and argument-to-argument relations, however, it becomes increasingly more costly to check whether a labelling function satisfies those local conditions or even whether the conditions are as per the intention of those who had specified them. Some compromise is thus required for reasoning about a larger argumentation. In this context, there is a more recently proposed formalism of may-must argumentation (MMA) that enforces still local but more abstract labelling conditions. We identify how they link to each other in this work. We prove that there is a Galois connection between them, in which ADF is a concretisation of MMA and MMA is an abstraction of ADF. We explore the consequence of abstract interpretation at play in formal argumentation, demonstrating a sound reasoning about the judgement of acceptability/rejectability in ADF from within MMA. As far as we are aware, there is seldom any work that incorporates abstract interpretation into formal argumentation in the literature, and, in the stated context, this work is the first to demonstrate its use and relevance.

Evaluating the Communication Efficiency in Federated Learning Algorithms

In the era of advanced technologies, mobile devices are equipped with computing and sensing capabilities that gather excessive amounts of data. These amounts of data are suitable for training different learning models. Cooperated with advancements in Deep Learning (DL), these learning models empower numerous useful applications, e.g., image processing, speech recognition, healthcare, vehicular network and many more. Traditionally, Machine Learning (ML) approaches require data to be centralised in cloud-based data-centres. However, this data is often large in quantity and privacy-sensitive which prevents logging into these data-centres for training the learning models. In turn, this results in critical issues of high latency and communication inefficiency. Recently, in light of new privacy legislations in many countries, the concept of Federated Learning (FL) has been introduced. In FL, mobile users are empowered to learn a global model by aggregating their local models, without sharing the privacy-sensitive data. Usually, these mobile users have slow network connections to the data-centre where the global model is maintained. Moreover, in a complex and large scale network, heterogeneous devices that have various energy constraints are involved. This raises the challenge of communication cost when implementing FL at large scale. To this end, in this research, we begin with the fundamentals of FL, and then, we highlight the recent FL algorithms and evaluate their communication efficiency with detailed comparisons. Furthermore, we propose a set of solutions to alleviate the existing FL problems both from communication perspective and privacy perspective.

Broadening Label-based Argumentation Semantics with May-Must Scales

The semantics as to which set of arguments in a given argumentation graph may be acceptable (acceptability semantics) can be characterised in a few different ways. Among them, labelling-based approach allows for concise and flexible determination of acceptability statuses of arguments through assignment of a label indicating acceptance, rejection, or undecided to each argument. In this work, we contemplate a way of broadening it by accommodating may- and must- conditions for an argument to be accepted or rejected, as determined by the number(s) of rejected and accepted attacking arguments. We show that the broadened label-based semantics can be used to express more mild indeterminacy than inconsistency for acceptability judgement when, for example, it may be the case that an argument is accepted and when it may also be the case that it is rejected. We identify that finding which conditions a labelling satisfies for every argument can be an undecidable problem, which has an unfavourable implication to semantics. We propose to address this problem by enforcing a labelling to maximally respect the conditions, while keeping the rest that would necessarily cause non-termination labelled undecided.