Design generation requires tight integration of neural and symbolic reasoning, as good design must meet explicit user needs and honor implicit rules for aesthetics, utility, and convenience. Current automated design tools driven by neural networks produce appealing designs, but cannot satisfy user specifications and utility requirements. Symbolic reasoning tools, such as constraint programming, cannot perceive low-level visual information in images or capture subtle aspects such as aesthetics. We introduce Spatial Reasoning Integrated Generator (SPRING) for design generation. SPRING embeds a neural and symbolic integrated spatial reasoning module inside the deep generative network. The spatial reasoning module samples the set of locations of objects to be generated from a backtrack-free distribution. This distribution modifies the implicit preference distribution, which is learned by a recursive neural network to capture utility and aesthetics. Sampling from the backtrack-free distribution is accomplished by a symbolic reasoning approach, SampleSearch, which zeros out the probability of sampling spatial locations violating explicit user specifications. Embedding symbolic reasoning into neural generation guarantees that the output of SPRING satisfies user requirements. Furthermore, SPRING offers interpretability, allowing users to visualize and diagnose the generation process through the bounding boxes. SPRING also handles novel user specifications not encountered during its training with zero-shot constraint transfer. Quantitative evaluations and a human study show that SPRING outperforms baseline generative models, delivering high design quality and better meeting user specifications.
论文检索
输入标题、作者或关键词，从 7,537 篇学术成果中精准定位
From Large Language Models to Large Action Models: Reasoning and Planning with Physical World Knowledge
PDF ↗While Large Language Models excel in language processing, Large Agent Models are designed to interact with the environment. This transition poses significant challenges in understanding lower-level visual details, and long-horizon reasoning for effective goal interpretation and decision-making. Despite the impressive performance of LLMs/VLMs on various benchmarks, these models perceive images as bags of words (semantic concepts). In detail, they use semantic understanding as a shortcut but lack the ability to recognize geometric structures or solve spatial problems such as mazes. To interact with the physical world, we focus on two dimensions: (1) From high-level semantic to low-level geometric understanding: We introduce a low-level visual description language that serves as geometric tokens, allowing the abstraction of multimodal low-level geometric structures. (2) From fast-thinking to slow-thinking: We propose to quantify long-horizon reasoning by incorporating Markov Decision Process (MDP) based decision-making. The key difference between language models and agent models lies in their decision-making capabilities. This fundamental difference necessitates a shift in how we approach the development of large agent models, focusing on both geometric understanding and long-term planning to create more capable embodied AI agents.
Artificial intelligence has made remarkable progress in reasoning over complex, structured, multimodal, and multilingual data, addressing critical challenges in domains such as finance and healthcare. This abstract underscores key advancements in tabular reasoning, temporal analysis, and structured multimodal reasoning. Key contributions include the development of TempTabQA, a benchmark for temporal question answering, along with novel methods for enhancing temporal reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Additionally, a framework for evaluating mathematical reasoning in financial documents has been introduced, establishing robust techniques for interpreting time-sensitive and quantitative data. Building on these foundations, we have developed hybrid SQL-text adaptive reasoning models (H-STAR) and knowledge-aware reasoning techniques for semi-structured tables (MMTabQA), enabling precise and efficient handling of complex queries. In the vision-language domain, our contributions include advancements in spatial reasoning for geographic data (MAPWise), methods to improve robustness in chart interpretation (FlowVQA), and evaluations of LLMs’ ability to understand visual data, such as charts. Furthermore, we have addressed challenges in multilingual and cross-modal robustness through innovations such as multilingual table synchronization (InfoSync), concurrent robustness evaluations across languages and modalities, and numerical reasoning in tabular data. Our work aims to enhance reasoning on dynamically evolving data using hybrid LLM-SQL queries, symbolic query generation, and multi-table retrieval techniques. We also plan to tackle challenges in interpreting hierarchical table structures, analyzing multiple complex chart types, and exploring diverse map types, while advancing real-world multimodal data analysis. Additionally, we plan to improve table generation in both closed/open-book scenarios and refine evaluation frameworks for structured tasks. These advancements demonstrate the potential of AI in tackling complex, multimodal data and delivering impactful real-world solutions.
Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed vision and language modeling, Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) complements data-driven AI via a knowledge-driven approach, enhancing our understanding of the physical world. My work focuses on: 1) automating scientific reasoning with language models, 2) improving geometric interpretation, 3) developing foundation models for multiphysics.
Ensuring that AI systems do what we, as humans, actually want them to do, is one of the biggest open research challenges in AI alignment and safety. My research seeks to directly address this challenge by enabling AI systems to interact with humans to learn aligned and robust behaviors. The way in which robots and other AI systems behave is often the result of optimizing a reward function. However, manually designing good reward functions is highly challenging and error prone, even for domain experts. Consider trying to write down a reward function that describes good driving behavior or how you like your bed made in the morning. While reward functions for these tasks are difficult to manually specify, human feedback in the form of demonstrations or preferences are often much easier to obtain. However, human data is often difficult to interpret, due to ambiguity and noise. Thus, it is critical that AI systems take into account epistemic uncertainty over the human's true intent. My talk will give an overview of my lab's progress along the following fundamental research areas: (1) efficiently maintaining uncertainty over human intent, (2) directly optimizing behavior to be robust to uncertainty over human intent, and (3) actively querying for additional human input to reduce uncertainty over human intent.
Biophysical models offer valuable insights into climate-phenology relationships in both natural and agricultural settings. However, there are substantial structural discrepancies across models which require site-specific recalibration, often yielding inconsistent predictions under similar climate scenarios. Machine learning methods offer data-driven solutions, but often lack interpretability and alignment with existing knowledge. We present a phenology model describing dormancy in fruit trees, integrating conventional biophysical models with a neural network to address their structural disparities. We evaluate our hybrid model in an extensive case study predicting cherry tree phenology in Japan, South Korea and Switzerland. Our approach consistently outperforms both traditional biophysical and machine learning models in predicting blooming dates across years. Additionally, the neural network's adaptability facilitates parameter learning for specific tree varieties, enabling robust generalization to new sites without site-specific recalibration. This hybrid model leverages both biophysical constraints and data-driven flexibility, offering a promising avenue for accurate and interpretable phenology modeling.
Drought is one of the most destructive and expensive natural disasters, severely impacting natural resources and risks by depleting water resources and diminishing agricultural yields. Under climate change, accurately predicting drought is critical for mitigating drought-induced risks. However, the intricate interplay among the physical and biological drivers that regulate droughts limits the predictability and understanding of drought, particularly at a subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) time scale. While deep learning has demonstrated the potential to address climate forecasting challenges, its application to drought prediction has received relatively less attention. In this work, we propose a new dataset, DroughtSet, which integrates relevant predictive features and three drought indices from multiple remote sensing and reanalysis datasets across the contiguous United States (CONUS). DroughtSet specifically provides the machine learning community with a new real-world dataset to benchmark drought prediction models and more generally, time-series forecasting methods. Furthermore, we propose a spatial-temporal model SPDrought to predict and interpret S2S droughts. Our model learns from the spatial and temporal information of physical and biological features to predict three types of droughts simultaneously. Multiple strategies are employed to quantify the importance of physical and biological features for drought prediction. Our results provide insights for researchers to better understand the predictability and sensitivity of drought to biological and physical conditions. We aim to contribute to the climate field by proposing a new tool to predict and understand the occurrence of droughts and provide the AI community with a new benchmark to study deep learning applications in climate science.
Rapidly changing climate conditions and the increase in extreme events are posing severe challenges to human life and infrastructure, requiring sophisticated analytical capabilities for hazard prediction and disaster risk management. Earth System Data Cubes (ESDCs) have become an essential tool in Earth System Sciences (ESS) by organizing large-scale, multivariate environmental datasets into a structured, scalable and analysis-ready format. However, modern machine learning techniques are not yet being utilized to their full potential on ESDCs. This is due to the lack of proper tooling, domain-specific challenges, and high barriers of entry for practitioners. We introduce ml4xcube, an open-source Python framework designed to assist ESS domain experts in applying ML techniques on ESDCs for advanced analysis and prediction of environmental variables and impacts. Through a comprehensive suite of tools, it addresses specific challenges associated with the nature of ESS data, such as the non-uniform data distribution due to dynamic gaps, or spatio-temporal autocorrelation of environmental variables. Due to its modular architecture, it covers the complete analysis process, from data exploration, and preparation, to model development, result interpretation and evaluation. With support for distributed computing, it handles large ESDC datasets efficiently. In order to ease the adoption it includes extensive documentation and tutorial notebooks. We demonstrate ml4xcube's capabilities through three examples, showcasing its potential and capabilities for integrating machine learning with ESDC data.
Pioneering Explainable Video Fact-Checking with a New Dataset and Multi-role Multimodal Model Approach
PDF ↗Existing video fact-checking datasets often lack detailed evidence and explanations, compromising the reliability and interpretability of fact-checking methods. To address these gaps, we developed a novel dataset featuring comprehensive annotations for each news item, including veracity labels, the rationales behind these labels, and supporting evidence. This dataset significantly enhances models' ability to accurately identify and explain video content. We also present an explainable automatic framework 3MFact, utilizing Multi-role Multimodal Models for video Fact-checking. Our framework iteratively gathers and synthesizes online evidence to progressively determine the veracity label, generating three key outputs: veracity label, rationale, and supported evidence. We aim for this work to be a pioneering effort, providing robust support for the field of video fact-checking.
MCAT: Visual Query-Based Localization of Standard Anatomical Clips in Fetal Ultrasound Videos Using Multi-Tier Class-Aware Token Transformer
PDF ↗Accurate standard plane acquisition in fetal ultrasound (US) videos is crucial for fetal growth assessment, anomaly detection, and adherence to clinical guidelines. However, manually selecting standard frames is time-consuming and prone to intra- and inter-sonographer variability. Existing methods primarily rely on image-based approaches that capture standard frames and then classify the input frames across different anatomies. This ignores the dynamic nature of video acquisition and its interpretation. To address these challenges, we introduce Multi-Tier Class-Aware Token Transformer (MCAT); a visual query-based video clip localization (VQ-VCL) method to assist sonographers by enabling them to capture a quick US sweep. By then providing a visual query of the anatomy they wish to analyze, MCAT returns the video clip containing the standard frames for that anatomy, facilitating thorough screening for potential anomalies. We evaluate MCAT on two ultrasound video datasets and a natural image VQ-VCL dataset based on Ego4D. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 10% and 13% mtIoU on the ultrasound datasets and by 5.35% mtIoU on the Ego4D dataset, using 96% fewer tokens. MCAT’s efficiency and accuracy have significant potential implications for public health, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where it may enhance prenatal care by streamlining standard plane acquisition, simplifying US based screening, diagnosis and allowing sonographers to examine more patients.
How Your Location Relates to Health: Variable Importance and Interpretable Machine Learning for Environmental and Sociodemographic Data
PDF ↗Health outcomes depend on complex environmental and sociodemographic factors whose effects change over location and time. Only recently has fine-grained spatial and temporal data become available to study these effects, namely the MEDSAT dataset of English health, environmental, and sociodemographic information. Leveraging this new resource, we use a variety of variable importance techniques to robustly identify the most informative predictors across multiple health outcomes. We then develop an interpretable machine learning framework based on Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) and Multiscale Geographically Weighted Regression (MGWR) to analyze both local and global spatial dependencies of each variable on various health outcomes. Our findings identify NO2 as a global predictor for asthma, hypertension, and anxiety, alongside other outcome-specific predictors related to occupation, marriage, and vegetation. Regional analyses reveal local variations with air pollution and solar radiation, with notable shifts during COVID. This comprehensive approach provides actionable insights for addressing health disparities, and advocates for the integration of interpretable machine learning in public health.
As artificial intelligence techniques evolve, we are approaching a critical moment for the widespread deployment of autonomous vehicles. Subsequently, the emergence of mixed-autonomy traffic environments presents formidable challenges to autonomous vehicles, especially for the accurate prediction of lane change intentions of their surrounding human-driven vehicles, which is crucial for ensuring the safety of autonomous vehicles. Existing lane change prediction models mainly focus on capturing the temporal variations in the movement dynamics of individual vehicles. However, the neglect to consider inter-vehicle interactions hinders their capability in complex lane change scenarios, resulting in suboptimal prediction performance. Moreover, current interaction-aware approaches for autonomous driving fail to explicitly model future interactions between vehicles, leading to unreasonable prediction results that can cause collisions between vehicles. To address the above issues, we propose to incorporate the concept of perceived safety into future interaction modeling and design a dual-view interaction-aware lane change prediction model. We evaluate the proposed model on two real-world datasets and experimental results show that the proposed model achieves average improvements of 11.7-12.4% in classification ability and 75.6-95.7% in forecast ability over the best-performing baselines across the two datasets. The ablation study and investigation into future interaction modeling demonstrate that our model has advantages in interpreting lane change scenarios from a driving safety perspective.
Social segregation in cities, spanning racial, residential, and income dimensions, is becoming increasingly diverse and severe. As urban spaces and social dynamics grow more complex, residents experience varying levels of segregation, which, if left unaddressed, could exacerbate crime rates, fuel social tensions, and lead to other societal challenges. Effectively addressing these issues requires a comprehensive analysis of the underlying structures of urban spaces and resident interactions. While previous studies have primarily focused on surface-level indicators of segregation, they often fail to explore the complexity of urban structure and mobility dynamics, leaving gaps in understanding modern segregation patterns. To fill this gap, we propose the Motif-Enhanced Graph Prototype Learning (MotifGPL) framework, offering a novel approach to studying urban segregation. The framework consists of three key modules: prototype-based graph structure extraction, motif distribution discovery, and urban graph reconstruction. Specifically, we use prototype-based learning to extract key urban graph prototypes from both spatial and origin-destination graphs, incorporating attributes such as points of interest, street images, and flow indices. The motif distribution discovery module enhances interpretability by matching each prototype to similar motifs, which represent simplified graph structures that reflect local patterns. These motifs are then used to guide the reconstruction of urban graphs, enabling a more detailed exploration of spatial structures and mobility patterns. By identifying critical motifs influencing urban segregation, MotifGPL offers insights to guide the design of urban environments that can help reduce segregation. Experimental results demonstrate that MotifGPL effectively uncovers these key motifs and provides actionable insights for mitigating segregation.
PersonalizedUS: Interpretable Breast Cancer Risk Assessment with Local Coverage Uncertainty Quantification
PDF ↗Correctly assessing the malignancy of breast lesions identified during ultrasound examinations is crucial for effective clinical decision-making. However, the current "gold standard" relies on manual BI-RADS scoring by clinicians, often leading to unnecessary biopsies and a significant mental health burden on patients and their families. In this paper, we introduce PersonalizedUS, an interpretable machine learning system that leverages recent advances in conformal prediction to provide precise and personalized risk estimates with local coverage guarantees and sensitivity, specificity, and predictive values above 0.9 across various threshold levels. In particular, we identify meaningful lesion subgroups where distribution-free, model-agnostic conditional coverage holds, with approximately 90% of our prediction sets containing only the ground truth in most lesion subgroups, thus explicitly characterizing for which patients the model is most suitably applied. Moreover, we make available a curated tabular dataset of 1936 biopsied breast lesions from a recent observational multicenter study and benchmark the performance of several state-of-the-art learning algorithms. We also report a successful case study of the deployed system in the same multicenter context. Concrete clinical benefits include up to a 65% reduction in requested biopsies among BI-RADS 4a and 4b lesions, with minimal to no missed cancer cases.
Distribution-Free Uncertainty Quantification in Mechanical Ventilation Treatment: A Conformal Deep Q-Learning Framework
PDF ↗Mechanical Ventilation (MV) is a critical life-support intervention in intensive care units (ICUs). However, optimal ventilator settings are challenging to determine because of the complexity of balancing patient-specific physiological needs with the risks of adverse outcomes that impact morbidity, mortality, and healthcare costs. This study introduces ConformalDQN, a novel distribution-free conformal deep Q-learning approach for optimizing mechanical ventilation in intensive care units. By integrating conformal prediction with deep reinforcement learning, our method provides reliable uncertainty quantification, addressing the challenges of Q-value overestimation and out-of-distribution actions in offline settings. We trained and evaluated our model using ICU patient records from the MIMIC-IV database. ConformalDQN extends the Double DQN architecture with a conformal predictor and employs a composite loss function that balances Q-learning with well-calibrated probability estimation. This enables uncertainty-aware action selection, allowing the model to avoid potentially harmful actions in unfamiliar states and handle distribution shifts by being more conservative in out-of-distribution scenarios. Evaluation against baseline models, including physician policies, policy constraint methods, and behavior cloning, demonstrates that ConformalDQN consistently makes recommendations within clinically safe and relevant ranges, outperforming other methods by increasing the 90-day survival rate. Notably, our approach provides an interpretable measure of confidence in its decisions, which is crucial for clinical adoption and potential human-in-the-loop implementations.
Fraudulent shopping websites pose a significant threat to online consumers and legitimate businesses: in 2023, victims of such scams reported $392 million in losses to the Federal Trade Commission. This alarming trend not only impacts individuals but also erodes societal trust in e-commerce, necessitating urgent countermeasures. While previous studies have attempted to identify these fraudulent websites at scale, they face limitations such as potential bias in data collection, overreliance on easily manipulated features, and the lack of explainable results. This study explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in identifying fraudulent shopping websites, revealing that current LLMs underperform compared to existing machine learning models. To address this, we propose ScamNet, a fine-tuned LLM for explainable fraudulent shopping website detection. Our experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate a breakthrough in detection performance from 22.35% detection rate to 95.59%, particularly in identifying subtle deceptive tactics such as using a legitimate-looking website template. ScamNet offers interpretable insights into its decision-making process, enhancing transparency and overcoming a key limitation of previous approaches.
Converting different modalities into generalized text, which then serves as input prompts for large language models (LLMs), is a common approach for aligning multimodal models, particularly when pairwise data is limited. Text-centric alignment method leverages the unique properties of text as a modality space, transforming diverse inputs into a unified textual representation, thereby enabling downstream models to effectively interpret various modal inputs. This study evaluates the quality and robustness of multimodal representations in the face of noise imperfections, dynamic input order permutations, and missing modalities, revealing that current text-centric alignment methods can compromise downstream robustness. To address this issue, we propose a new text-centric adversarial training approach that significantly enhances robustness compared to traditional robust training methods and pre-trained multimodal foundation models. Our findings underscore the potential of this approach to improve the robustness and adaptability of multimodal representations, offering a promising solution for dynamic and real-world applications.
Given that AI systems are set to play a pivotal role in future decision-making processes, their trustworthiness and reliability are of critical concern. Due to their scale and complexity, modern AI systems resist direct interpretation, and alternative ways are needed to establish trust in those systems, and determine how well they align with human values. We argue that good measures of the information processing similarities between AI and humans, may be able to achieve these same ends. While Representational alignment (RA) approaches measure similarity between the internal states of two systems, the associated data can be expensive and difficult to collect for human systems. In contrast, Behavioural alignment (BA) comparisons are cheaper and easier, but questions remain as to their sensitivity and reliability. We propose two new behavioural alignment metrics misclassification agreement which measures the similarity between the errors of two systems on the same instances, and class-level error similarity which measures the similarity between the error distributions of two systems. We show that our metrics correlate well with RA metrics, and provide complementary information to another BA metric, within a range of domains, and set the scene for a new approach to value alignment.
Recent years have witnessed an increase in the parameter size of frontier AI models by multiple orders of magnitude. This trend is driven by empirical observations, known as scaling laws, which show that model performance scales with model size, dataset size, and computational power. Motivated by this, researchers are training ever-larger models in pursuit of unlocking new capabilities. However, the growing complexity of these models makes understanding their inner workings increasingly challenging. Interpretability is crucial not only in fields like medicine and biotechnology, where understanding the internals of these models could lead to new insights but also in super alignment, where it is the goal to ensure that AI is aligned and acts according to human values and interests. We present a generic, scalable first-of-its-kind method for automatically interpreting neural networks. In a proof-of-concept study we establish the viability of converting neural network activations - here for the first layer of a Convolutional Neural Network - into human-readable language. Additionally, we propose modifications to scale this method for understanding neural networks of any size. In anticipation of more capable large language models, this method could enable the monitoring of their internal mechanisms and decisions.
Recent advances in recurrent neural network architectures, such as Mamba and RWKV, have enabled RNNs to match or exceed the performance of equal-size transformers in terms of language modeling perplexity and downstream evaluations, suggesting that future systems may be built on completely new architectures. In this paper, we examine if selected interpretability methods originally designed for transformer language models will transfer to these up-and-coming recurrent architectures. Specifically, we focus on steering model outputs via contrastive activation addition, on eliciting latent predictions via the tuned lens, and eliciting latent knowledge from models fine-tuned to produce false outputs under certain conditions. Our results show that most of these techniques are effective when applied to RNNs, and we show that it is possible to improve some of them by taking advantage of RNNs' compressed state.