Digital Commons Network^™

Safety-Centric Analysis Of Grounding Systems For Substations In Distribution Grids, Fazel Mohammadi, Mahmood Mirhashemi

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

The safety of grounding systems for substations in distribution grids is paramount to ensuring operational reliability, protecting personnel and equipment, and maintaining the stability of distribution grids while complying with regulatory standards. This paper explores essential safety aspects of grounding systems, including fault current handling strategies, the interdependence between protective devices and grounding systems, and maintenance practices. The integration of grounding systems design with overall substation layout and design considerations by focusing on mitigating Ground Potential Rise (GPR) and optimizing bonding techniques, is examined. Additionally, advanced techniques, such as high-frequency grounding and Transient Ground Potential Rise (TGPR) management, are presented …

Ai And Creativity: Effects Of Culture And Task Emotiveness In Human-Ai Collaboration, Choon Ngee Tan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Creativity is the driving force behind innovation, propelling individuals and societies toward progress by generating novel ideas and groundbreaking solutions. The emergence of generative AI models, exemplified by GPT-3, offers opportunities to enhance human creativity. This paper explores the potential for unprecedented breakthroughs through the synergy between human intuition and AI-driven creativity, providing practical guidance on leveraging AI to amplify creative capacities. Study 1 finds that AI models trained on data from the U.S. and Chinese cultures exhibit cultural norms, values and cognition of those cultures. Study 2 finds that when humans and AI models of the same culture collaborate …

Towards Trustworthy Recommendation Systems: Beyond Collaborative Filtering, Zhongzhou Liu, Zhongzhou

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Recommendation systems have been widely deployed in various scenarios and applications, such as e-commerce, social media, and streaming services. Recommendation systems have significantly influenced how we interact with various items in a wide range of platforms. They help users discover their preferred items and provide efficient and enjoyable experiences. They also help item providers and platforms to quickly find their potential customers, thus increasing the total revenue and user engagement.

The majority of existing recommendation systems merely focus on the matching between users and items, aiming for higher recommendation accuracy. Collaborative filtering is regarded as one of the most successful …

Contactless And Scalable Approaches For Human Health And Performance Sensing, Ngoc Doan Thu Tran

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Human health and performance sensing has been extensively studied, from physiology to mental health and movement analytics. However, typical approaches rely on invasive and contact sensors or require professional practitioners, limiting their scalability. For example, the gold standard for measuring heart rate is through an electrocardiogram (ECG), which requires multiple probes attached to the skin and is impractical for individuals with skin issues. Additionally, it typically needs to be performed in a hospital setting under the supervision of a trained cardiac physiologist. Depression detection often relies on the expertise of psychologists or psychiatrists. However, there is a shortage of these …

Food Computing: Domain Adaptation And Causal Inference, Qing Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation addresses two challenges in food computing: food recognition and food image-to-recipe retrieval. The main research ideas are: (1) leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to augment food image representations to mitigate the combined challenges of domain gaps and data imbalance in fine-grained food recognition; (2) proposing a causal-theory inspired cross-modal representation learning formulation for reducing the bias caused by the emphasis on certain ingredients for cross-modal recipe retrieval; and (3) extending the framework to incorporate multiple confounding factors, particularly ingredients and cooking actions, allows for more comprehensive modeling of the food image-torecipe retrieval problem.

We first explore the challenges …

Against The Substitutive Approach To Ai In Healthcare, Rand Hirmiz

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Paul Bloom has famously argued against the need for empathy in clinicians, while Sally Dalton-Brown has argued that AI need not be capable of empathy to be a good carer. In this paper, the capacity for AI to substitute for human clinicians is assessed from a bioethical perspective, primarily through the evaluation of the arguments put forth by Dalton-Brown and Bloom concerning empathy in healthcare. In opposition to both Bloom and Dalton-Brown, this paper argues that (1) empathy is essential to providing good care or deep care (that is, care that goes beyond the mere fulfilment of medical tasks), (2) …

Uncovering Merchants’ Willingness To Wait In On-Demand Food Delivery Markets, Jian Liang, Ya Zhao, Hai Wang, Zuopeng Xiao, Jintao Ke

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While traditional on-demand food delivery services help restaurants reach more customers and enable doorstep deliveries, they also come with drawbacks, such as high commission fees and limited control over the delivery process. White-label food delivery services have emerged as an alternative, ready-to-use platform for restaurants to arrange delivery for customer orders received through their applications or websites, without the constraints imposed by traditional on-demand food delivery platforms or the need to develop an in-house delivery operation. Although several studies have investigated consumer behavior when using traditional on-demand food delivery services, there is limited research on merchants’ behavior when adopting white-label …

Class Name Guided Out-Of-Scope Intent Classification, Chandan Gautam, Sethupathy Parameswaran, Aditya Kane, Yuan Fang, Savitha Ramasamy, Suresh Sundaram, Sunil Kumar Sahu, Xiaoli Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The paper introduces Semantics of Class Labelbased Unsupervised Out of Scope Intent Detection (SCOOS), a novel method aimed at enhancing out-of-scope (OOS) intent classification in task-oriented dialogue systems. Unlike prior approaches that rely solely on indomain (ID) data features, SCOOS leverages semantic cues embedded in class labels to improve classification accuracy. The method entails forming a compact feature space centered around the semantics of class labels by minimizing losses between ID features and class names. SCOOS achieves this by creating a compact feature space centered around class label semantics, achieved through minimizing losses between in-domain (ID) features and class names. …

Ultra-High Resolution Image Segmentation Via Locality-Aware Context Fusion And Alternating Local Enhancement, Wenxi Liu, Qi Li, Xindai Lin, Weixiang Yang, Shengfeng He, Yuanlong Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ultra-high resolution image segmentation has raised increasing interests in recent years due to its realistic applications. In this paper, we innovate the widely used high-resolution image segmentation pipeline, in which an ultra-high resolution image is partitioned into regular patches for local segmentation and then the local results are merged into a high-resolution semantic mask. In particular, we introduce a novel locality-aware context fusion based segmentation model to process local patches, where the relevance between local patch and its various contexts are jointly and complementarily utilized to handle the semantic regions with large variations. Additionally, we present the alternating local enhancement …

Lr-Auth: Towards Practical Implementation Of Implicit User Authentication On Earbuds, Changshuo Hu, Xiao Ma, Xinger Huang, Yiran Shen, Dong Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The increasing use of earbuds in applications like immersive entertainment and health monitoring necessitates effective implicit user authentication systems to preserve the privacy of sensitive data and provide personalized experiences. Existing approaches, which leverage physiological cues (e.g., jawbone structure) and behavioral cues (e.g., gait), face challenges such as limited usability, high delay and energy overhead, and significant computational demands, rendering them impractical for resource-constrained earbuds. To address these issues, we present LR-Auth, a lightweight, user-friendly implicit authentication system designed for various earbud usage scenarios. LR-Auth utilizes the modulation of sound frequencies by the user's unique occluded ear canal, generating user-specific …

Hi3d: Pursuing High-Resolution Image-To-3d Generation With Video Diffusion Models, Haibo Yang, Yang Chen, Yingwei Pan, Ting Yao, Zhineng Chen, Chong-Wah Ngo, Tao Mei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite having tremendous progress in image-to-3D generation, existing methods still struggle to produce multi-view consistent images with high-resolution textures in detail, especially in the paradigm of 2D diffusion that lacks 3D awareness. In this work, we present High-resolution Image-to-3D model (Hi3D), a new video diffusion based paradigm that redefines a single image to multi-view images as 3D-aware sequential image generation (i.e., orbital video generation). This methodology delves into the underlying temporal consistency knowledge in video diffusion model that generalizes well to geometry consistency across multiple views in 3D generation. Technically, Hi3D first empowers the pre-trained video diffusion model with 3D-aware …

Revisiting Conversation Discourse For Dialogue Disentanglement, Bobo Li, Hao Fei, Fei Li, Shengqiong Wu, Lizi Liao, Yinwei Wei, Tat-Seng Chua, Donghong Ji

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Dialogue disentanglement aims to detach the chronologically ordered utterances into several independent sessions. Conversation utterances are essentially organized and described by the underlying discourse, and thus dialogue disentanglement requires the full understanding and harnessing of the intrinsic discourse attribute. In this article, we propose enhancing dialogue disentanglement by taking full advantage of the dialogue discourse characteristics. First of all, in feature encoding stage, we construct the heterogeneous graph representations to model the various dialogue-specific discourse structural features, including the static speaker-role structures (i.e., speaker-utterance and speaker-mentioning structure) and the dynamic contextual structures (i.e., the utterance-distance and partial-replying structure). We then …

Large Language Models For Software Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review, Xinyi Hou, Yanjie Zhao, Yue Liu, Zhou Yang, Kailong Wang, Li Li, Xiapu Luo, David Lo, John Grundy, Haoyu Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted numerous domains, including Software Engineering (SE). Many recent publications have explored LLMs applied to various SE tasks. Nevertheless, a comprehensive understanding of the application, effects, and possible limitations of LLMs on SE is still in its early stages. To bridge this gap, we conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on LLM4SE, with a particular focus on understanding how LLMs can be exploited to optimize processes and outcomes. We selected and analyzed 395 research articles from January 2017 to January 2024 to answer four key Research Questions (RQs). In RQ1, we categorize different LLMs …

Cirp: Cross‑Item Relational Pre‑Training For Multimodal Product Bundling, Yunshan Ma, Yingzhi He, Wenjun Zhong, Xiang Wang, Roger Zimmermann, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Product bundling has been a prevailing marketing strategy that is beneficial in the online shopping scenario. Effective product bundling methods depend on high-quality item representations capturing both the individual items' semantics and cross-item relations. However, previous item representation learning methods, either feature fusion or graph learning, suffer from inadequate cross-modal alignment and struggle to capture the cross-item relations for cold-start items. Multimodal pre-train models could be the potential solutions given their promising performance on various multimodal downstream tasks. However, the cross-item relations have been under-explored in the current multimodal pre-train models.To bridge this gap, we propose a novel and simple …

Badfl: Backdoor Attack Defense In Federated Learning From Local Model Perspective, Haiyan Zhang, Xinghua Li, Mengfan Xu, Ximeng Liu, Tong Wu, Jian Weng, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There is substantial attention to federated learning with its ability to train a powerful global model collaboratively while protecting data privacy. Despite its many advantages, federated learning is vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where an adversary injects malicious weights into the global model, making the global model's targeted predictions incorrect. Existing defenses based on identifying and eliminating malicious weights ignore the similarity variation of the local weights during iterations in the malicious model detection and the presence of benign weights in the malicious model during the malicious local weight elimination, resulting in a poor defense and a degradation of global model …

Strength Lies In Differences! Improving Strategy Planning For Non-Collaborative Dialogues Via Diversified User Simulation, Tong Zhang, Chen Huang, Yang Deng, Hongru Liang, Jia Liu, Zujie Wen, Wenqiang Lei, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We investigate non-collaborative dialogue agents, which are expected to engage in strategic conversations with diverse users, for securing a mutual agreement that leans favorably towards the system’s objectives. This poses two main challenges for existing dialogue agents: 1) The inability to integrate user-specific characteristics into the strategic planning, and 2) The difficulty of training strategic planners that can be generalized to diverse users. To address these challenges, we propose TRIP to enhance the capability in tailored strategic planning, incorporating a user-aware strategic planning module and a population-based training paradigm. Through experiments on benchmark non-collaborative dialogue tasks, we demonstrate the effectiveness …

Thoughts To Target: Enhance Planning For Target-Driven Conversation, Zhonghua Zheng, Lizi Liao, Yang Deng, Ee-Peng Lim, Minlie Huang, Liqiang Nie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In conversational AI, large-scale models excel in various tasks but struggle with target-driven conversation planning. Current methods, such as chain-of-thought reasoning and tree-search policy learning techniques, either neglect plan rationality or require extensive human simulation procedures. Addressing this, we propose a novel two-stage framework, named EnPL, to improve the LLMs’ capability in planning conversations towards designated targets, including (1) distilling natural language plans from target-driven conversation corpus and (2) generating new plans with demonstration-guided in-context learning. Specifically, we first propose a filter approach to distill a high-quality plan dataset, ConvPlan1. With the aid of corresponding conversational data and support from …

National Use Of Artificial Intelligence For Eye Screening In Singapore, Dinesh Visva Gunasekeran, Steven Miller, Wynne Hsu, Mong Li, Tym Hon Wong, Mun Tuck Lee, Ecosse Lamoureau, Daniel Shu Wei Ting, Gavin Siew Wei Tan, Tien-Yin Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Diabetes is a major health care challenge, affecting 10% of the global population. One third of patients with diabetes have an ocular complication known as diabetic retinopathy (DR). DR progression to manifestations such as vision-threatening diabetic retinopathy (VTDR) remains the leading cause of blindness in working-aged adults. Yearly DR screening is a universally recommended practice in primary care settings for patients with diabetes, but it is often difficult to implement due to a lack of staffing and screening capacity in primary care. This case study highlights our experience with developing a medical artificial intelligence (AI) software-as-a-medical-device (SaMD) solution for DR …

Don’T Just Say “I Don’T Know”! Self-Aligning Large Language Models For Responding To Unknown Questions With Explanations, Yang Deng, Yong Zhao, Moxin Li, See-Kiong Ng, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the remarkable abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to answer questions, they often display a considerable level of overconfidence even when the question does not have a definitive answer. To avoid providing hallucinated answers to these unknown questions, existing studies typically investigate approaches to refusing to answer these questions. In this work, we propose a novel and scalable self-alignment method to utilize the LLM itself to enhance its response-ability to different types of unknown questions, being capable of not only refusing to answer but also providing explanation to the unanswerability of unknown questions. Specifically, the Self-Align method first employ …

Selective Annotation Via Data Allocation: These Data Should Be Triaged To Experts For Annotation Rather Than The Model, Chen Huang, Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, Jiancheng Lv, Ido Dagan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To obtain high-quality annotations under limited budget, semi-automatic annotation methods are commonly used, where a portion of the data is annotated by experts and a model is then trained to complete the annotations for the remaining data. However, these methods mainly focus on selecting informative data for expert annotations to improve the model predictive ability (i.e., triage-to-human data), while the rest of the data is indiscriminately assigned to model annotation (i.e., triage-to-model data). This may lead to inefficiencies in budget allocation for annotations, as easy data that the model could accurately annotate may be unnecessarily assigned to the expert, and …

Beyond Persuasion : Towards Conversational Recommender System With Credible Explanations, Peixin Qin, Chen Huang, Yang Deng, Wenqiang Lei, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the aid of large language models, current conversational recommender system (CRS) has gaining strong abilities to persuade users to accept recommended items. While these CRSs are highly persuasive, they can mislead users by incorporating incredible information in their explanations, ultimately damaging the long-term trust between users and the CRS. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method, called PC-CRS, to enhance the credibility of CRS’s explanations during persuasion. It guides the explanation generation through our proposed credibility-aware persuasive strategies and then gradually refines explanations via post-hoc self-reflection. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of PC-CRS in promoting persuasive …

A Survey Of Ontology Expansion For Conversational Understanding, Jinggui Liang, Yuxia Wu, Yuan Fang, Hao Fei, Lizi Liao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the rapidly evolving field of conversational AI, Ontology Expansion (OnExp) is crucial for enhancing the adaptability and robustness of conversational agents. Traditional models rely on static, predefined ontologies, limiting their ability to handle new and unforeseen user needs. This survey paper provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art techniques in OnExp for conversational understanding. It categorizes the existing literature into three main areas: (1) New Intent Discovery, (2) New Slot-Value Discovery, and (3) Joint OnExp. By examining the methodologies, benchmarks, and challenges associated with these areas, we highlight several emerging frontiers in OnExp to improve agent performance in real-world …

Consecutive Batch Model Editing With Hook Layers, Shuaiyi Li, Yang Deng, Deng Cai, Hongyuan Lu, Liang Chen, Wai Lam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the typical retraining paradigm is unacceptably time- and resource-consuming, researchers are turning to model editing to find an effective way that supports both consecutive and batch scenarios to edit the model behavior directly. Despite all these practical expectations, existing model editing methods fail to realize all of them. Furthermore, the memory demands for such sequential model editing approaches tend to be prohibitive, frequently necessitating an external memory that grows incrementally over time. To cope with these challenges, we propose CoachHooK, a model editing method that simultaneously supports sequential and batch editing. CoachHooK is memory-friendly as it only needs a …

Context-Aware Adapter Tuning For Few-Shot Relation Learning In Knowledge Graphs, Ran Liu, Zhongzhou Liu, Xiaoli Li, Yuan Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are instrumental in various real-world applications, yet they often suffer from incompleteness due to missing relations. To predict instances for novel relations with limited training examples, few-shot relation learning approaches have emerged, utilizing techniques such as meta-learning. However, the assumption is that novel relations in meta-testing and base relations in meta-training are independently and identically distributed, which may not hold in practice. To address the limitation, we propose RelAdapter, a context-aware adapter for few-shot relation learning in KGs designed to enhance the adaptation process in meta-learning. First, RelAdapter is equipped with a lightweight adapter module that facilitates …

Dc-Instruct : An Effective Framework For Generative Multi-Intent Spoken Language Understanding, Bowen Xing, Lizi Liao, Minlie Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the realm of multi-intent spoken language understanding, recent advancements have leveraged the potential of prompt learning frameworks. However, critical gaps exist in these frameworks: the lack of explicit modeling of dual-task dependencies and the oversight of task-specific semantic differences among utterances. To address these shortcomings, we propose DC-Instruct, a novel generative framework based on Dual-task Inter-dependent Instructions (DII) and Supervised Contrastive Instructions (SCI). Specifically, DII guides large language models (LLMs) to generate labels for one task based on the other task’s labels, thereby explicitly capturing dual-task inter-dependencies. Moreover, SCI leverages utterance semantics differences by guiding LLMs to determine whether …

Pcqpr : Proactive Conversational Question Planning With Reflection, Shasha Guo, Lizi Liao, Jing Zhang, Cuiping Li, Hong Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the realm of multi-intent spoken language understanding, recent advancements have leveraged the potential of prompt learning frameworks. However, critical gaps exist in these frameworks: the lack of explicit modeling of dual-task dependencies and the oversight of task-specific semantic differences among utterances. To address these shortcomings, we propose DC-Instruct, a novel generative framework based on Dual-task Inter-dependent Instructions (DII) and Supervised Contrastive Instructions (SCI). Specifically, DII guides large language models (LLMs) to generate labels for one task based on the other task’s labels, thereby explicitly capturing dual-task inter-dependencies. Moreover, SCI leverages utterance semantics differences by guiding LLMs to determine whether …

Effect Of Virtual Reality Technology On Computer Science/Engineering Based Laboratories Education – A Case Study, Mariam A. Al Nuaimi

Theses

Virtual reality (VR) is becoming increasingly popular and essential in education as institutions strive to incorporate technology in education. In Engineering and Computer Science, students face difficulties in comprehending many abstract complex concepts that are typically studied in Labs. This situation worsens with hardware failure and the lack of pedagogical tools. The main goal of this paper is to investigate the impact of VR environments on learning advanced and complex STEM concepts. We also explore the impact of different human-computer interaction (HCI) techniques including gamification on the learning experience of STEM students. To measure such impact, we developed a VR …

Tackling Toxicity And Harassment In Online Environments Through The Use Of Artificial Intelligence, Heba Saleous

Dissertations

With the increase in popularity of online communities, such as social media platforms, online games, and chatroom servers, there is a need to improve chat and content moderation. Platforms have reported an increase in the prevalence of toxic behavior and hate speech. Meanwhile, moderators are reporting difficulties in keeping up with the amount of data to check as well and the type of content they are exposed to, which further harms their own mental health. The main objective of this work is to address the challenges that exist within online communities with the rising prevalence of hate speech. Additionally, some …

Law-Aware Autonomous Driving, Yang Sun

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Autonomous driving systems (ADSs) necessitate comprehensive testing prior to deployment in Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). High-fidelity simulators are crucial for this testing, as they can replicate a wide range of scenarios, including those that are difficult or dangerous to recreate in real-world conditions. While previous approaches have demonstrated that test cases can be generated automatically, they often focus on weak oracles (e.g., reaching the destination without collisions) and fail to assess whether the journey was conducted safely and in compliance with some complex property specifications such as traffic laws. In this dissertation, beyond assessing basic properties like energy consumption and proximity …

An Overview Of Ancillary Services Provided By Vehicle-To-Grid Systems, Fazel Mohammadi, Mahmood Mirhashemi

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) systems are emerging as a pivotal technology in modern power systems, offering a range of ancillary services that enhance the stability and reliability of power systems. This paper provides an overview of the key ancillary services provided by V2G systems, highlighting their role in grid modernization. Technical challenges, economic implications, and policy considerations associated with the deployment of V2G systems are explored to assess their potential impact on advancing a more resilient and sustainable energy infrastructure.