Will the Inclusion of Generated Data Amplify Bias Across Generations in Future Image Classification Models?

As the demand for high-quality training data escalates, researchers have increasingly turned to generative models to create synthetic data, addressing data scarcity and enabling continuous model improvement. However, reliance on self-generated data introduces a critical question: Will this practice amplify bias in future models? While most research has focused on overall performance, the impact on model bias, particularly subgroup bias, remains underexplored. In this work, we investigate the effects of the generated data on image classification tasks, with a specific focus on bias. We develop a practical simulation environment that integrates a self-consuming loop, where the generative model and classification model are trained synergistically. Hundreds of experiments are conducted on Colorized MNIST, CIFAR-20/100, and Hard ImageNet datasets to reveal changes in fairness metrics across generations. In addition, we provide a conjecture to explain the bias dynamics when training models on continuously augmented datasets across generations. Our findings contribute to the ongoing debate on the implications of synthetic data for fairness in real-world applications.

Biomedical Visual Instruction Tuning with Clinician Preference Alignment

Recent advancements in multimodal foundation models have showcased impressive capabilities in understanding and reasoning with visual and textual information. Adapting these foundation models trained for general usage to specialized domains like biomedicine requires large-scale domain-specific instruction datasets. While existing works have explored curating such datasets automatically, the resultant datasets are not explicitly aligned with domain expertise. In this work, we propose a data-centric framework, Biomedical Visual Instruction Tuning with Clinician Preference Alignment (BioMed-VITAL), that incorporates clinician preferences into both stages of generating and selecting instruction data for tuning biomedical multimodal foundation models. First, during the generation stage, we prompt the GPT-4V generator with a diverse set of clinician-selected demonstrations for preference-aligned data candidate generation. Then, during the selection phase, we train a separate selection model, which explicitly distills clinician and policy-guided model preferences into a rating function to select high-quality data for medical instruction tuning. Results show that the model tuned with the instruction-following data from our method demonstrates a significant improvement in open visual chat (18.5% relatively) and medical VQA (win rate up to 81.73%). Our instruction-following data and models are available at BioMed-VITAL.github.io.

CR-UTP: Certified Robustness against Universal Text Perturbations

It is imperative to ensure the stability of every prediction made by a language model; that is, a language's prediction should remain consistent despite minor input variations, like word substitutions. In this paper, we investigate the problem of certifying a language model's robustness against Universal Text Perturbations (UTPs), which have been widely used in universal adversarial attacks and backdoor attacks. Existing certified robustness based on random smoothing has shown considerable promise in certifying the input-specific text perturbations (ISTPs), operating under the assumption that any random alteration of a sample's clean or adversarial words would negate the impact of sample-wise perturbations. However, with UTPs, masking only the adversarial words can eliminate the attack. A naive method is to simply increase the masking ratio and the likelihood of masking attack tokens, but it leads to a significant reduction in both certified accuracy and the certified radius due to input corruption by extensive masking. To solve this challenge, we introduce a novel approach, the superior prompt search method, designed to identify a superior prompt that maintains higher certified accuracy under extensive masking. Additionally, we theoretically motivate why ensembles are a particularly suitable choice as base prompts for random smoothing. The method is denoted by superior prompt ensembling technique. We also empirically confirm this technique, obtaining state-of-the-art results in multiple settings. These methodologies, for the first time, enable high certified accuracy against both UTPs and ISTPs. The source code of CR-UTP is available at https://github.com/UCFML-Research/CR-UTP.

FARPLS: A Feature-Augmented Robot Trajectory Preference Labeling System to Assist Human Labelers' Preference Elicitation

Preference-based learning aims to align robot task objectives with human values. One of the most common methods to infer human preferences is by pairwise comparisons of robot task trajectories. Traditional comparison-based preference labeling systems seldom support labelers to digest and identify critical differences between complex trajectories recorded in videos. Our formative study (N = 12) suggests that individuals may overlook non-salient task features and establish biased preference criteria during their preference elicitation process because of partial observations. In addition, they may experience mental fatigue when given many pairs to compare, causing their label quality to deteriorate. To mitigate these issues, we propose FARPLS, a Feature-Augmented Robot trajectory Preference Labeling System. FARPLS highlights potential outliers in a wide variety of task features that matter to humans and extracts the corresponding video keyframes for easy review and comparison. It also dynamically adjusts the labeling order according to users' familiarities, difficulties of the trajectory pair, and level of disagreements. At the same time, the system monitors labelers' consistency and provides feedback on labeling progress to keep labelers engaged. A between-subjects study (N = 42, 105 pairs of robot pick-and-place trajectories per person) shows that FARPLS can help users establish preference criteria more easily and notice more relevant details in the presented trajectories than the conventional interface. FARPLS also improves labeling consistency and engagement, mitigating challenges in preference elicitation without raising cognitive loads significantly

OSSAR: Towards Open-Set Surgical Activity Recognition in Robot-assisted Surgery

In the realm of automated robotic surgery and computer-assisted interventions, understanding robotic surgical activities stands paramount. Existing algorithms dedicated to surgical activity recognition predominantly cater to pre-defined closed-set paradigms, ignoring the challenges of real-world open-set scenarios. Such algorithms often falter in the presence of test samples originating from classes unseen during training phases. To tackle this problem, we introduce an innovative Open-Set Surgical Activity Recognition (OSSAR) framework. Our solution leverages the hyperspherical reciprocal point strategy to enhance the distinction between known and unknown classes in the feature space. Additionally, we address the issue of over-confidence in the closed set by refining model calibration, avoiding misclassification of unknown classes as known ones. To support our assertions, we establish an open-set surgical activity benchmark utilizing the public JIGSAWS dataset. Besides, we also collect a novel dataset on endoscopic submucosal dissection for surgical activity tasks. Extensive comparisons and ablation experiments on these datasets demonstrate the significant outperformance of our method over existing state-of-the-art approaches. Our proposed solution can effectively address the challenges of real-world surgical scenarios. Our code is publicly accessible at https://github.com/longbai1006/OSSAR.

MGARD: A multigrid framework for high-performance, error-controlled data compression and refactoring

We describe MGARD, a software providing MultiGrid Adaptive Reduction for floating-point scientific data on structured and unstructured grids. With exceptional data compression capability and precise error control, MGARD addresses a wide range of requirements, including storage reduction, high-performance I/O, and in-situ data analysis. It features a unified application programming interface (API) that seamlessly operates across diverse computing architectures. MGARD has been optimized with highly-tuned GPU kernels and efficient memory and device management mechanisms, ensuring scalable and rapid operations.

Spatiotemporally adaptive compression for scientific dataset with feature preservation -- a case study on simulation data with extreme climate events analysis

Scientific discoveries are increasingly constrained by limited storage space and I/O capacities. For time-series simulations and experiments, their data often need to be decimated over timesteps to accommodate storage and I/O limitations. In this paper, we propose a technique that addresses storage costs while improving post-analysis accuracy through spatiotemporal adaptive, error-controlled lossy compression. We investigate the trade-off between data precision and temporal output rates, revealing that reducing data precision and increasing timestep frequency lead to more accurate analysis outcomes. Additionally, we integrate spatiotemporal feature detection with data compression and demonstrate that performing adaptive error-bounded compression in higher dimensional space enables greater compression ratios, leveraging the error propagation theory of a transformation-based compressor. To evaluate our approach, we conduct experiments using the well-known E3SM climate simulation code and apply our method to compress variables used for cyclone tracking. Our results show a significant reduction in storage size while enhancing the quality of cyclone tracking analysis, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in comparison to the prevalent timestep decimation approach. Compared to three state-of-the-art lossy compressors lacking feature preservation capabilities, our adaptive compression framework improves perfectly matched cases in TC tracking by 26.4-51.3% at medium compression ratios and by 77.3-571.1% at large compression ratios, with a merely 5-11% computational overhead.

AI Agent as Urban Planner: Steering Stakeholder Dynamics in Urban Planning via Consensus-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

In urban planning, land use readjustment plays a pivotal role in aligning land use configurations with the current demands for sustainable urban development. However, present-day urban planning practices face two main issues. Firstly, land use decisions are predominantly dependent on human experts. Besides, while resident engagement in urban planning can promote urban sustainability and livability, it is challenging to reconcile the diverse interests of stakeholders. To address these challenges, we introduce a Consensus-based Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning framework for real-world land use readjustment. This framework serves participatory urban planning, allowing diverse intelligent agents as stakeholder representatives to vote for preferred land use types. Within this framework, we propose a novel consensus mechanism in reward design to optimize land utilization through collective decision making. To abstract the structure of the complex urban system, the geographic information of cities is transformed into a spatial graph structure and then processed by graph neural networks. Comprehensive experiments on both traditional top-down planning and participatory planning methods from real-world communities indicate that our computational framework enhances global benefits and accommodates diverse interests, leading to improved satisfaction across different demographic groups. By integrating Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, our framework ensures that participatory urban planning decisions are more dynamic and adaptive to evolving community needs and provides a robust platform for automating complex real-world urban planning processes.

SRN-SZ: Deep Leaning-Based Scientific Error-bounded Lossy Compression with Super-resolution Neural Networks

The fast growth of computational power and scales of modern super-computing systems have raised great challenges for the management of exascale scientific data. To maintain the usability of scientific data, error-bound lossy compression is proposed and developed as an essential technique for the size reduction of scientific data with constrained data distortion. Among the diverse datasets generated by various scientific simulations, certain datasets cannot be effectively compressed by existing error-bounded lossy compressors with traditional techniques. The recent success of Artificial Intelligence has inspired several researchers to integrate neural networks into error-bounded lossy compressors. However, those works still suffer from limited compression ratios and/or extremely low efficiencies. To address those issues and improve the compression on the hard-to-compress datasets, in this paper, we propose SRN-SZ, which is a deep learning-based scientific error-bounded lossy compressor leveraging the hierarchical data grid expansion paradigm implemented by super-resolution neural networks. SRN-SZ applies the most advanced super-resolution network HAT for its compression, which is free of time-costing per-data training. In experiments compared with various state-of-the-art compressors, SRN-SZ achieves up to 75% compression ratio improvements under the same error bound and up to 80% compression ratio improvements under the same PSNR than the second-best compressor.

Semi-Supervised Clustering via Dynamic Graph Structure Learning

Most existing semi-supervised graph-based clustering methods exploit the supervisory information by either refining the affinity matrix or directly constraining the low-dimensional representations of data points. The affinity matrix represents the graph structure and is vital to the performance of semi-supervised graph-based clustering. However, existing methods adopt a static affinity matrix to learn the low-dimensional representations of data points and do not optimize the affinity matrix during the learning process. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic graph structure learning method for semi-supervised clustering. In this method, we simultaneously optimize the affinity matrix and the low-dimensional representations of data points by leveraging the given pairwise constraints. Moreover, we propose an alternating minimization approach with proven convergence to solve the proposed nonconvex model. During the iteration process, our method cyclically updates the low-dimensional representations of data points and refines the affinity matrix, leading to a dynamic affinity matrix (graph structure). Specifically, for the update of the affinity matrix, we enforce the data points with remarkably different low-dimensional representations to have an affinity value of 0. Furthermore, we construct the initial affinity matrix by integrating the local distance and global self-representation among data points. Experimental results on eight benchmark datasets under different settings show the advantages of the proposed approach.