Computer Sciences Commons^™

Learning: Human Versus Machine, Sanjay Sarma

Asian Management Insights

Outdated education paradigms must be revamped to reclaim the all-important human quality: agency.

Sanjay Sarma, CEO, President, and Dean of the Asia School of Business, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and the Fred Fort Flowers (1941) and Daniel Fort Flowers (1941) Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), shares insights on the artificial intelligence (AI)-agency revolution and how the human brain works.

The Ethics Of Ai Nudges: How Ai Influences Decision-Making, Seema Chokshi

Asian Management Insights

And why decision-makers should care about it. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, through mechanisms like nudges and choice architecture, actively, yet often subtly, shape human decision-making in everyday life and professional settings. AI systems can prioritise profit or efficiency at the expense of human agency, fairness, and well-being, highlighting the need to balance AI’s capabilities with ethical considerations. The EU AI Act is a landmark framework designed to curb manipulative AI practices, emphasising the protection of human autonomy and accountability in decision-making.

Standardizing Canine Breed Data In Veterinary Records Is Challenging, But Computer Vision Offers An Alternative Perspective On Breed Assignment, Glenvelis Perez, Yixuan He, Zihan Lyu, Yilin Chen, Nicholas Howe, Halie M. Rando

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Dog breed is fundamental health information, especially in the context of breed-linked diseases. The standard-ization of breed terminology across health records is necessary to leverage the big data revolution for veterinary research. Breed can also inform clinical decision making. However, client-reported breeds vary in their reliability depending on how breed was determined. Surprisingly, research in computer science reports that AI can assign breed to dogs with over 90% accuracy from a photograph. Here, we explore the extent to which current research in AI is relevant to breed assignment or validation in veterinary contexts. This review provides a primer on approaches …

Exploring Ai Technology In Grammar Performance Testing For Children With Learning Disabilities, Dimitra V. Katsarou, Evangelos Mantsos, Soultana Papadopoulou, Maria Sofologi, Efthymia Efthymiou, Ilias Vasileiou, Kalliopi Megari, Maria Theodoratou, Georgios A. Kougioumtzis

All Works

The study explores the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in addressing grammar challenges among children with learning disabilities, aiming to assess the efficacy of an AI-driven tool for personalized interventions. A sample of 100 children aged 8–12, diagnosed with learning disabilities, was recruited from special education programs. Participants were divided into an experimental group (n = 50), which used an AI-based grammar assessment tool with personalized feedback, and a control group (n = 50), which completed conventional paper-based grammar tests without feedback. The AI tool administered adaptive grammar tasks, including sentence correction and verb conjugation, and performance was evaluated over …

Stimulating Environmental And Health Protection Through Utilizing Statistical Methods For Climate Resilience And Policy Integration, Sanaa Kaddoura, Rafiq Hijazi, Nadia Dahmani, Reem Nassar

All Works

Climate change, a critical global challenge, is evident in rising global temperatures, shifting precipitation trends, and extreme weather events, including floods, heatwaves, and rising sea levels. The impacts of climate change not only endanger physical health but also affect mental well-being, particularly among populations experiencing frequent or severe climate-related events. Understanding individual perceptions of climate risks and adaptive capacities is crucial for developing strategies that promote health resilience and environmental protection. This paper examines how risk perceptions, direct experiences with extreme weather, and perceived adaptive capacities influence climate change protection measures and support for relevant policies. Data were gathered from …

Exploring The Dynamics Of Lotka-Volterra Systems: Efficiency, Extinction Order, And Predictive Machine Learning, Sepideh Vafaie, Deepak Bal, Michael A.S. Thorne, Eric Forgoston

School of Computing Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

For years, a main focus of ecological research has been to better understand the complex dynamical interactions between species that comprise food webs. Using the connectance properties of a widely explored synthetic food web called the cascade model, we explore the behavior of dynamics on Lotka-Volterra ecological systems. We show how trophic efficiency, a staple assumption in mathematical ecology, affects species extinction. With clustering analysis, we show how straightforward inequalities of the summed values of birth, death, self-regulation, and interaction strengths provide insight into which food webs are more enduring or stable. Through these simplified summed values, we develop a …

Bpen: Brain Posterior Evidential Network For Trustworthy Brain Imaging Analysis, Kai Ye, Haoteng Tang, Siyuan Dai, Igor Fortel, Paul M. Thompson, R. Scott Mackin, Alex Leow, Heng Huang, Liang Zhan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The application of deep learning techniques to analyze brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data has led to significant advancements in identifying prospective biomarkers associated with various clinical phenotypes and neurological conditions. Despite these achievements, the aspect of prediction uncertainty has been relatively underexplored in brain fMRI data analysis. Accurate uncertainty estimation is essential for trustworthy learning, given the challenges associated with brain fMRI data acquisition and the potential diagnostic implications for patients. To address this gap, we introduce a novel posterior evidential network, named the Brain Posterior Evidential Network (BPEN), designed to capture both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty in …

Artificial Intelligence In Surgical Coding: Evaluating Large Language Models For Current Procedural Terminology Accuracy In Hand Surgery, Emily Isch, Jamie Lee, D. Mitchell Self, Abhijeet Sambangi, Theodore E. Habarth-Morales, John R. Vaile, E. J. Caterson

Department of Surgery Faculty Papers

PURPOSE: The advent of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT has introduced notable advancements in various surgical disciplines. These developments have led to an increased interest in the use of LLMs for Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) coding in surgery. With CPT coding being a complex and time-consuming process, often exacerbated by the scarcity of professional coders, there is a pressing need for innovative solutions to enhance coding efficiency and accuracy.

METHODS: This observational study evaluated the effectiveness of five publicly available large language models-Perplexity.AI, Bard, BingAI, ChatGPT 3.5, and ChatGPT 4.0-in accurately identifying CPT codes for hand surgery procedures. A …

Reimagining Education: Keeping The Human In The Loop, Pradeep Varakantham, Sidney Tio

Asian Management Insights

How educators can work with generative artificial intelligence models to improve learning. Artificial intelligence (AI) helps break the mould of one-size-fits-all education by creating personalised learning paths that adapt to each student’s pace and style. By combining human expertise with AI capabilities, educators can create learning experiences that are both structured and flexible, thus getting the best of both worlds. While promising, AI used in educational contexts must carefully navigate privacy concerns, ensure fairness across all student groups, and support appropriate learning progression.

Generalization Analysis For Deep Contrastive Representation Learning, Minh Hieu Nong, Antoine Ledent, Yunwen Lei, Cheng Yeaw Ku

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present generalization bounds for the unsupervised risk in the Deep Contrastive Representation Learning framework, which employs deep neural networks as representation functions. We approach this problem from two angles. On the one hand, we derive a parameter-counting bound that scales with the overall size of the neural networks. On the other hand, we provide a norm-based bound that scales with the norms of neural networks’ weight matrices. Ignoring logarithmic factors, the bounds are independent of k, the size of the tuples provided for contrastive learning. To the best of our knowledge, this property is only shared …

How To Securely Delegate And Revoke Partial Authorization Credentials, Meng Sun, Junzuo Lai, Wei Wu, Ye Yang, Cheng-Kang Chu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An attribute-based credential (ABC) system allows a user, obtaining a credential on a set of attributes from an issuer, to anonymously prove a subset of attributes to a service provider. Nowadays, delegation is an important requirement of ABC, which allows a user to delegate his credentials to other users. However, traditional delegatable ABC systems only support delegating a credential with all attributes. In many scenarios, an appropriate delegation is a user can delegate his credential on parts of attributes to others. Another requirement is revocation of credentials in case of unexpected events. In this article, we propose a delegatable and …

Exploring Intelligent Manufacturing: How Artificial Intelligence Affects Productivity And Labor Demand At The Enterprise Level, Jie Gu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Manufacturing is a cornerstone of national economic health and social stability, yet it faces challenges such as declining profits, rising labor costs, and an aging workforce. In China, the manufacturing sector is undergoing a critical transformation, driven by technological advancements like artificial intelligence (AI) and the push for intelligent manufacturing. This study explores how AI revitalizes the manufacturing sector by enhancing enterprise productivity and reshaping labor demand, with a focus on quality inspection processes. Using a leading bearing factory as a case study, the research employs econometric models, A/B testing, and interviews to quantify AI’s impact on production efficiency, costs, …

A Heterogeneous Graph-Based Multi-Task Learning For Fault Event Diagnosis In Smart Grid, Dibaloke Chanda, Nasim Yahyasoltani

Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

Precise and timely fault diagnosis is a prerequisite for a distribution system to ensure minimum downtime and maintain reliable operation. This necessitates access to a comprehensive procedure that can provide the grid operators with insightful information in the case of a fault event. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous multi-task learning graph neural network (MTL-GNN) capable of detecting, locating and classifying faults in addition to providing an estimate of the fault resistance and current. Using a graph neural network (GNN) allows for learning the topological representation of the distribution system as well as feature learning through a message-passing scheme. …

Adversarial Attacks And Defense Methods In Robotic Systems, Thanh D. Le

Shelby Hall Graduate Research Forum Presentations

Presentation slides for a presentation given at the 1st annual Shelby Hall Graduate Research Forum at the University of South Alabama.

Choosing Robust Leadership: Encompassing The Best-Of-N Model And Swarm Intelligence Optimization For Heterogeneous Multiple Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems, Kudamuhandiramlage Harith Kolitha Warnakulasooriya

Shelby Hall Graduate Research Forum Presentations

Presentation slides for a presentation given at the 1st annual Shelby Hall Graduate Research Forum at the University of South Alabama.

Learning To Identify Seen, Unseen And Unknown In The Open World: A Practical Setting For Zero-Shot Learning, Sethupathy Parameswaran, Yuan Fang, Chandan Gautam, Savitha Ramasamy, Xiaoli Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As vision-language models advance, addressing the Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) problem in the open world becomes increasingly crucial. Specifically, a robust model must handle three types of samples during inference: seen classes with visual and semantic information provided in training, unseen classes with only the semantic information in training, and unknown samples with no prior information from training. Existing methods either handle seen and unseen classes together (ZSL) or seen and unknown classes (known as Open-Set Recognition, OSR). However, none addresses the simultaneous handling of all three, which we term Open-Set Zero-Shot Learning (OZSL). To address this problem, we propose a …

Divide-And-Conquer: Confluent Triple-Flow Network For Rgb-T Salient Object Detection, Hao Tang, Zechao Li, Dong Zhang, Shengfeng He, Jinhui Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

RGB-Thermal Salient Object Detection (RGB-T SOD) aims to pinpoint prominent objects within aligned pairs of visible and thermal infrared images. A key challenge lies in bridging the inherent disparities between RGB and Thermal modalities for effective saliency map prediction. Traditional encoder-decoder architectures, while designed for cross-modality feature interactions, may not have adequately considered the robustness against noise originating from defective modalities, thereby leading to suboptimal performance in complex scenarios. Inspired by hierarchical human visual systems, we propose the ConTriNet, a robust Confluent Triple-Flow Network employing a "Divide-and-Conquer"strategy. This framework utilizes a unified encoder with specialized decoders, each addressing different subtasks …

Selecting Comparative Sets Of Reviews Across Multiple Items, Trung Hoang Le, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While choosing among several products, users may look up reviews from each product they are considering. Due to the large number of reviews of products, selecting representative reviews from one product alone is already a challenging problem. In this work, we further aim to conduct review selection for multiple products simultaneously for comparative purposes. We formulate objective functions that synchronize the review selection and design efficient algorithms to optimize for the objective functions. To narrow down the potentially long list of comparison items into a shorter list of more similar items, we construct a graph representing items’ similarity and design …

Mimic: Ai And Ar-Enhanced Multi-Modal, Immersive, Relative Instruction Comprehension, Dhanuja Wanniarachchi, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present a multimodal instruction comprehension framework, called MImIC, that utilizes visual sensing (including LIDAR and 2D RGB sensing) & AI spatial reasoning capabilities to support more seamless and immersive interaction between humans and AI-driven situated assistive agents. MImIC's key new capability is to support disambiguation of a wider set of relative spatial references that users naturally employ while issuing spatially-situated instructions. To support enhanced visual grounding via a combination of both fully-qualified and relative attribute references, MImIC uses (a) a fine-tuned transformer-based language translation DNN to accurately convert natural verbal commands into a structured set of machine understandable constraints …

Explainable Neural Networks With Guarantee: A Sparse Estimation Approach, Antoine Ledent, Peng Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Balancing predictive power and interpretability has long been a challenging research area, particularly in powerful yet complex models like neural networks, where nonlinearity obstructs direct interpretation. This paper introduces a novel approach to constructing an explainable neural network that harmonizes predictiveness and explainability. Our model is designed as a linear combination of a sparse set of jointly learned features, each derived from a different trainable function applied to a single 1-dimensional input feature. Leveraging the ability to learn arbitrarily complex relationships, our neural network architecture enables automatic selection of a sparse set of important features, with the final prediction being …

Multisfl: Towards Accurate Split Federated Learning Via Multi-Model Aggregation And Knowledge Replay, Zeke Xia, Ming Hu, Dengke Yan, Ruixuan Liu, Anran Li, Xiaofei Xie, Mingsong Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Although Split Federated Learning (SFL) effectively enables knowledge sharing among resource-constrained clients, it suffers from low training performance due to the neglect of data heterogeneity and catastrophic forgetting problems. To address these issues, we propose a novel SFL approach named MultiSFL, which adopts i) an effective multimodel aggregation mechanism to alleviate gradient divergence caused by heterogeneous data and ii) a novel knowledge replay strategy to deal with the catastrophic forgetting problem. MultiSFL adopts two servers (i.e., the fed server and main server) to maintain multiple branch models for local training and an aggregated master model for knowledge sharing among branch …

Understanding Individual Agent Importance In Multi-Agent System Via Counterfactual Reasoning, Jianming Chen, Yawen Wang, Junjie Wang, Xiaofei Xie, Jun Hu, Qing Wang, Fanjiang Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Explaining multi-agent systems (MAS) is urgent as these systems become increasingly prevalent in various applications. Previous work has provided explanations for the actions or states of agents, yet falls short in understanding the black-boxed agent's importance within a MAS and the overall team strategy. To bridge this gap, we propose EMAI, a novel agent-level explanation approach that evaluates the individual agent's importance. Inspired by counterfactual reasoning, a larger change in reward caused by the randomized action of agent indicates its higher importance. We model it as a MARL problem to capture interactions across agents. Utilizing counterfactual reasoning, EMAI learns the …

Lightprof: A Lightweight Reasoning Framework For Large Language Model On Knowledge Graph, Tu Ao, Yanhua Yu, Yuling Wang, Yang Deng, Zirui Guo, Liang Pang, Pinghui Wang, Tat-Seng Chua, Xiao Zhang, Zhen Cai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities in text understanding and zero-shot reasoning. However, delays in knowledge updates may cause them to reason incorrectly or produce harmful results. Knowledge Graphs (KGs) provide rich and reliable contextual information for the reasoning process of LLMs by structurally organizing and connecting a wide range of entities and relations. Existing KG-based LLM reasoning methods only inject KGs’ knowledge into prompts in a textual form, ignoring its structural information. Moreover, they mostly rely on close-source models or open-source models with large parameters, which poses challenges to high resource consumption. To address this, we propose a …

Aligning Large Language Models For Faithful Integrity Against Opposing Argument, Yong Zhao, Yang Deng, See-Kiong Ng, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, they can be easily misled by unfaithful arguments during conversations, even when their original statements are correct. To this end, we investigate the problem of maintaining faithful integrity in LLMs. This involves ensuring that LLMs adhere to their faithful statements in the face of opposing arguments and are able to correct their incorrect statements when presented with faithful arguments. In this work, we propose a novel framework, named Alignment for Faithful Integrity with Confidence Estimation (AFICE), which aims to align the LLM responses with faithful integrity. Specifically, …

Fully Selective Opening Secure Ibe From Lwe, Dingding Jia, Haiyang Xue, Bao Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Selective opening security ensures that, when an adversary is given multiple ciphertexts and corrupts a subset of the senders (thereby obtaining the plaintexts and the senders’ randomness), the privacy of the remaining ciphertexts is still preserved. Previous selective opening secure IBE schemes encrypt messages bit-by-bit, or only achieve selective-id security. In this paper, we present the first adaptive-id, selective opening secure identity-based encryption (IBE) tightly from LWE. To achieve this, we introduce a new primitive called delegatable all-but-many lossy trapdoor functions (DABM-LTDF) and provide a generic construction that converts DABM-LTDF into an adaptive-id, selective opening secure IBE through a tight …

Personamagic: Stage-Regulated High-Fidelity Face Customization With Tandem Equilibrium, Xinzhe Li, Jiahui Zhan, Shengfeng He, Yangyang Xu, Junyu Dong, Huaidong Zhang, Yong Du

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Personalized image generation has made significant strides in adapting content to novel concepts. However, a persistent challenge remains: balancing the accurate reconstruction of unseen concepts with the need for editability according to the prompt, especially when dealing with the complex nuances of facial features. In this study, we delve into the temporal dynamics of the text-to-image conditioning process, emphasizing the crucial role of stage partitioning in introducing new concepts. We present PersonaMagic, a stage-regulated generative technique designed for high-fidelity face customization. Using a simple MLP network, our method learns a series of embeddings within a specific timestep interval to capture …

An Aspect Performance-Aware Hypergraph Neural Network For Review-Based Recommendation, Junrui Liu, Tong Li, Di Wu, Zifang Tang, Yuan Fang, Zhen Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online reviews allow consumers to provide detailed feedback on various aspects of items. Existing methods utilize these aspects to model users' fine-grained preferences for specific item features through graph neural networks. We argue that the performance of items on different aspects is important for making precise recommendations, which has not been taken into account by existing approaches, due to lack of data. In this paper, we propose an aspect performance-aware hypergraph neural network (APH) for the review-based recommendation, which learns the performance of items from the conflicting sentiment polarity of user reviews. Specifically, APH comprehensively models the relationships among users, …

Simulation-Free Hierarchical Latent Policy Planning For Proactive Dialogues, Tao He, Lizi Liao, Yixin Cao, Yuanxing Liu, Yiheng Sun, Zerui Chen, Ming Liu, Bing Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent advancements in proactive dialogues have garnered significant attention, particularly for more complex objectives (e.g. emotion support and persuasion). Unlike traditional task-oriented dialogues, proactive dialogues demand advanced policy planning and adaptability, requiring rich scenarios and comprehensive policy repositories to develop such systems. However, existing approaches tend to rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) for user simulation and online learning, leading to biases that diverge from realistic scenarios and result in suboptimal efficiency. Moreover, these methods depend on manually defined, context-independent, coarse-grained policies, which not only incur high expert costs but also raise concerns regarding their completeness. In our work, we …

Unlocking The Potential Of Black-Box Pre-Trained Gnns For Graph Few-Shot Learning, Qiannan Zhang, Shichao Pei, Yuan Fang, Xiangliang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Few-shot learning has emerged as an important problem on graphs to combat label scarcity, which can be approached by current trends in pre-trained graph neural networks (GNNs) and meta-learning. Recent efforts integrate both paradigms in a white-box setting, leaving the more realistic black-box setting largely underexplored, where the parameters and gradients in the pre-trained GNNs are inaccessible. In this paper, we study the critical problem: Leveraging black-box pre-trained GNNs for graph few-shot learning. Despite its appeal, two key issues hinder the unlocking of its potential: the inherent task gap between pre-training and downstream stages, which can introduce irrelevant knowledge and …

Dr. Tongue: Sign-Oriented Multi-Label Detection For Remote Tongue Diagnosis, Yiliang Chen, Steven S. C. Ho, Cheng Xu, Yao Jie Xie, Wing Fai Yeung, Shengfeng He, Jing Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Tongue diagnosis is a vital tool in Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine, providing key insights into a patient's health by analyzing tongue attributes. The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the need for accurate remote medical assessments, emphasizing the importance of precise tongue attribute recognition via telehealth. To address this, we propose a Sign-Oriented multi-label Attributes Detection framework. Our approach begins with an adaptive tongue feature extraction module that standardizes tongue images and mitigates environmental factors. This is followed by a Sign-oriented Network (SignNet) that identifies specific tongue attributes, emulating the diagnostic process of experienced practitioners and enabling comprehensive health evaluations. To …