RAZOR: Sharpening Knowledge by Cutting Bias with Unsupervised Text Rewriting

Despite the widespread use of LLMs due to their superior performance in various tasks, their high computational costs often lead potential users to opt for the pretraining-finetuning pipeline. However, biases prevalent in manually constructed datasets can introduce spurious correlations between tokens and labels, creating so-called shortcuts and hindering the generalizability of fine-tuned models. Existing debiasing methods often rely on prior knowledge of specific dataset biases, which is challenging to acquire a priori. We propose RAZOR (Rewriting And Zero-bias Optimization Refinement), a novel, unsupervised, and data-focused debiasing approach based on text rewriting for shortcut mitigation. RAZOR leverages LLMs to iteratively rewrite potentially biased text segments by replacing them with heuristically selected alternatives in a shortcut space defined by token statistics and positional information. This process aims to align surface-level text features more closely with diverse label distributions, thereby promoting the learning of genuine linguistic patterns. Compared with unsupervised SoTA models, RAZOR improves by 3.5% on the FEVER and 6.5% on MNLI and SNLI datasets according to the F1 score. Additionally, RAZOR effectively mitigates specific known biases, reducing bias-related terms by x2 without requiring prior bias information, a result that is on par with SoTA models that leverage prior information. Our work prioritizes data manipulation over architectural modifications, emphasizing the pivotal role of data quality in enhancing model performance and fairness. This research contributes to developing more robust evaluation benchmarks for debiasing methods by incorporating metrics for bias reduction and overall model efficacy.

Seamless Monitoring of Stress Levels Leveraging a Universal Model for Time Sequences

Monitoring the stress level in patients with neurodegenerative diseases can help manage symptoms, improve patient's quality of life, and provide insight into disease progression. In the literature, ECG, actigraphy, speech, voice, and facial analysis have proven effective at detecting patients' emotions. On the other hand, these tools are invasive and do not integrate smoothly into the patient's daily life. HRV has also been proven to effectively indicate stress conditions, especially in combination with other signals. However, when HRV is derived from less invasive devices than the ECG, like smartwatches and bracelets, the quality of measurements significantly degrades. This paper presents a methodology for stress detection from a smartwatch based on a universal model for time series, UniTS, which we fine-tuned for the task. We cast the problem as anomaly detection rather than classification to favor model adaptation to individual patients and allow the clinician to maintain greater control over the system's predictions. We demonstrate that our proposed model considerably surpasses 12 top-performing methods on 3 benchmark datasets. Furthermore, unlike other state-of-the-art systems, UniTS enables seamless monitoring, as it shows comparable performance when using signals from invasive or lightweight devices.

Towards Non-Adversarial Algorithmic Recourse

The streams of research on adversarial examples and counterfactual explanations have largely been growing independently. This has led to several recent works trying to elucidate their similarities and differences. Most prominently, it has been argued that adversarial examples, as opposed to counterfactual explanations, have a unique characteristic in that they lead to a misclassification compared to the ground truth. However, the computational goals and methodologies employed in existing counterfactual explanation and adversarial example generation methods often lack alignment with this requirement. Using formal definitions of adversarial examples and counterfactual explanations, we introduce non-adversarial algorithmic recourse and outline why in high-stakes situations, it is imperative to obtain counterfactual explanations that do not exhibit adversarial characteristics. We subsequently investigate how different components in the objective functions, e.g., the machine learning model or cost function used to measure distance, determine whether the outcome can be considered an adversarial example or not. Our experiments on common datasets highlight that these design choices are often more critical in deciding whether recourse is non-adversarial than whether recourse or attack algorithms are used. Furthermore, we show that choosing a robust and accurate machine learning model results in less adversarial recourse desired in practice.

Robust Stochastic Graph Generator for Counterfactual Explanations

Counterfactual Explanation (CE) techniques have garnered attention as a means to provide insights to the users engaging with AI systems. While extensively researched in domains such as medical imaging and autonomous vehicles, Graph Counterfactual Explanation (GCE) methods have been comparatively under-explored. GCEs generate a new graph similar to the original one, with a different outcome grounded on the underlying predictive model. Among these GCE techniques, those rooted in generative mechanisms have received relatively limited investigation despite demonstrating impressive accomplishments in other domains, such as artistic styles and natural language modelling. The preference for generative explainers stems from their capacity to generate counterfactual instances during inference, leveraging autonomously acquired perturbations of the input graph. Motivated by the rationales above, our study introduces RSGG-CE, a novel Robust Stochastic Graph Generator for Counterfactual Explanations able to produce counterfactual examples from the learned latent space considering a partially ordered generation sequence. Furthermore, we undertake quantitative and qualitative analyses to compare RSGG-CE's performance against SoA generative explainers, highlighting its increased ability to engendering plausible counterfactual candidates.

Adapting to Change: Robust Counterfactual Explanations in Dynamic Data Landscapes

We introduce a novel semi-supervised Graph Counterfactual Explainer (GCE) methodology, Dynamic GRAph Counterfactual Explainer (DyGRACE). It leverages initial knowledge about the data distribution to search for valid counterfactuals while avoiding using information from potentially outdated decision functions in subsequent time steps. Employing two graph autoencoders (GAEs), DyGRACE learns the representation of each class in a binary classification scenario. The GAEs minimise the reconstruction error between the original graph and its learned representation during training. The method involves (i) optimising a parametric density function (implemented as a logistic regression function) to identify counterfactuals by maximising the factual autoencoder's reconstruction error, (ii) minimising the counterfactual autoencoder's error, and (iii) maximising the similarity between the factual and counterfactual graphs. This semi-supervised approach is independent of an underlying black-box oracle. A logistic regression model is trained on a set of graph pairs to learn weights that aid in finding counterfactuals. At inference, for each unseen graph, the logistic regressor identifies the best counterfactual candidate using these learned weights, while the GAEs can be iteratively updated to represent the continual adaptation of the learned graph representation over iterations. DyGRACE is quite effective and can act as a drift detector, identifying distributional drift based on differences in reconstruction errors between iterations. It avoids reliance on the oracle's predictions in successive iterations, thereby increasing the efficiency of counterfactual discovery. DyGRACE, with its capacity for contrastive learning and drift detection, will offer new avenues for semi-supervised learning and explanation generation.

Multimodal Motion Conditioned Diffusion Model for Skeleton-based Video Anomaly Detection

Anomalies are rare and anomaly detection is often therefore framed as One-Class Classification (OCC), i.e. trained solely on normalcy. Leading OCC techniques constrain the latent representations of normal motions to limited volumes and detect as abnormal anything outside, which accounts satisfactorily for the openset'ness of anomalies. But normalcy shares the same openset'ness property, since humans can perform the same action in several ways, which the leading techniques neglect. We propose a novel generative model for video anomaly detection (VAD), which assumes that both normality and abnormality are multimodal. We consider skeletal representations and leverage state-of-the-art diffusion probabilistic models to generate multimodal future human poses. We contribute a novel conditioning on the past motion of people, and exploit the improved mode coverage capabilities of diffusion processes to generate different-but-plausible future motions. Upon the statistical aggregation of future modes, anomaly is detected when the generated set of motions is not pertinent to the actual future. We validate our model on 4 established benchmarks: UBnormal, HR-UBnormal, HR-STC, and HR-Avenue, with extensive experiments surpassing state-of-the-art results.

Unsupervised Detection of Behavioural Drifts with Dynamic Clustering and Trajectory Analysis

Real-time monitoring of human behaviours, especially in e-Health applications, has been an active area of research in the past decades. On top of IoT-based sensing environments, anomaly detection algorithms have been proposed for the early detection of abnormalities. Gradual change procedures, commonly referred to as drift anomalies, have received much less attention in the literature because they represent a much more challenging scenario than sudden temporary changes (point anomalies). In this paper, we propose, for the first time, a fully unsupervised real-time drift detection algorithm named DynAmo, which can identify drift periods as they are happening. DynAmo comprises a dynamic clustering component to capture the overall trends of monitored behaviours and a trajectory generation component, which extracts features from the densest cluster centroids. Finally, we apply an ensemble of divergence tests on sliding reference and detection windows to detect drift periods in the behavioural sequence.

Machine Learning for Visualization Recommendation Systems: Open Challenges and Future Directions

Visualization Recommendation Systems (VRS) are a novel and challenging field of study, whose aim is to automatically generate insightful visualizations from data, to support non-expert users in the process of information discovery. Despite its enormous application potential in the era of big data, progress in this area of research is being held back by several obstacles among which are the absence of standardized datasets to train recommendation algorithms, and the difficulty in defining quantitative criteria to assess the effectiveness of the generated plots. In this paper, we aim not only to summarize the state-of-the-art of VRS, but also to outline promising future research directions.

Are we certain it's anomalous?

The progress in modelling time series and, more generally, sequences of structured-data has recently revamped research in anomaly detection. The task stands for identifying abnormal behaviours in financial series, IT systems, aerospace measurements, and the medical domain, where anomaly detection may aid in isolating cases of depression and attend the elderly. Anomaly detection in time series is a complex task since anomalies are rare due to highly non-linear temporal correlations and since the definition of anomalous is sometimes subjective. Here we propose the novel use of Hyperbolic uncertainty for Anomaly Detection (HypAD). HypAD learns self-supervisedly to reconstruct the input signal. We adopt best practices from the state-of-the-art to encode the sequence by an LSTM, jointly learnt with a decoder to reconstruct the signal, with the aid of GAN critics. Uncertainty is estimated end-to-end by means of a hyperbolic neural network. By using uncertainty, HypAD may assess whether it is certain about the input signal but it fails to reconstruct it because this is anomalous; or whether the reconstruction error does not necessarily imply anomaly, as the model is uncertain, e.g. a complex but regular input signal. The novel key idea is that a detectable anomaly is one where the model is certain but it predicts wrongly. HypAD outperforms the current state-of-the-art for univariate anomaly detection on established benchmarks based on data from NASA, Yahoo, Numenta, Amazon, Twitter. It also yields state-of-the-art performance on a multivariate dataset of anomaly activities in elderly home residences, and it outperforms the baseline on SWaT. Overall, HypAD yields the lowest false alarms at the best performance rate, thanks to successfully identifying detectable anomalies.

Unsupervised Boosting-based Autoencoder Ensembles for Outlier Detection

Autoencoders, as a dimensionality reduction technique, have been recently applied to outlier detection. However, neural networks are known to be vulnerable to overfitting, and therefore have limited potential in the unsupervised outlier detection setting. Current approaches to ensemble-based autoencoders do not generate a sufficient level of diversity to avoid the overfitting issue. To overcome the aforementioned limitations we develop a Boosting-based Autoencoder Ensemble approach (in short, BAE). BAE is an unsupervised ensemble method that, similarly to the boosting approach, builds an adaptive cascade of autoencoders to achieve improved and robust results. BAE trains the autoencoder components sequentially by performing a weighted sampling of the data, aimed at reducing the amount of outliers used during training, and at injecting diversity in the ensemble. We perform extensive experiments and show that the proposed methodology outperforms state-of-the-art approaches under a variety of conditions.