Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have highlighted the risk of misuse, raising concerns about accurately detecting LLM-generated content. A viable solution for the detection problem is to inject imperceptible identifiers into LLMs, known as watermarks. Previous work demonstrates that unbiased watermarks ensure unforgeability and preserve text quality by maintaining the expectation of the LLM output probability distribution. However, previous unbiased watermarking methods are impractical for local deployment because they rely on accesses to white-box LLMs and input prompts during detection. Moreover, these methods fail to provide statistical guarantees for the type II error of watermark detection. This study proposes the Sampling One Then Accepting (STA-1) method, an unbiased watermark that does not require access to LLMs nor prompts during detection and has statistical guarantees for the type II error. Moreover, we propose a novel tradeoff between watermark strength and text quality in unbiased watermarks. We show that in low-entropy scenarios, unbiased watermarks face a tradeoff between watermark strength and the risk of unsatisfactory outputs. Experimental results on low-entropy and high-entropy datasets demonstrate that STA-1 achieves text quality and watermark strength comparable to existing unbiased watermarks, with a low risk of unsatisfactory outputs. Implementation codes for this study are available online.
With the recent success of large language models, particularly foundation models with generalization abilities, applying foundation models for recommendations becomes a new paradigm to improve existing recommendation systems. It becomes a new open challenge to enable the foundation model to capture user preference changes in a timely manner with reasonable communication and computation costs while preserving privacy. This paper proposes a novel federated adaptation mechanism to enhance the foundation model-based recommendation system in a privacy-preserving manner. Specifically, each client will learn a lightweight personalized adapter using its private data. The adapter then collaborates with pre-trained foundation models to provide recommendation service efficiently with fine-grained manners. Importantly, users' private behavioral data remains secure as it is not shared with the server. This data localization-based privacy preservation is embodied via the federated learning framework. The model can ensure that shared knowledge is incorporated into all adapters while simultaneously preserving each user's personal preferences. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate our method's superior performance. Implementation code is available to ease reproducibility.
Low-light image enhancement aims to improve the perception of images collected in dim environments and provide high-quality data support for image recognition tasks. When dealing with photos captured under non-uniform illumination, existing methods cannot adaptively extract the differentiated luminance information, which will easily cause over-exposure and under-exposure. From the perspective of unsupervised learning, we propose a multi-scale attention Transformer named MSATr, which sufficiently extracts local and global features for light balance to improve the visual quality. Specifically, we present a multi-scale window division scheme, which uses exponential sequences to adjust the window size of each layer. Within different-sized windows, the self-attention computation can be refined, ensuring the pixel-level feature processing capability of the model. For feature interaction across windows, a global transformer branch is constructed to provide comprehensive brightness perception and alleviate exposure problems. Furthermore, we propose a loop training strategy, using the diverse images generated by weighted mixing and a luminance consistency loss to improve the model's generalization ability effectively. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets quantitatively and qualitatively prove that our MSATr is superior to state-of-the-art low-light image enhancement methods, and the enhanced images have more natural brightness and outstanding details. The code is released at https://github.com/fang001021/MSATr.
Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to transform our lives and work through the content they generate, known as AI-Generated Content (AIGC). To harness this transformation, we need to understand the limitations of LLMs. Here, we investigate the bias of AIGC produced by seven representative LLMs, including ChatGPT and LLaMA. We collect news articles from The New York Times and Reuters, both known for their dedication to provide unbiased news. We then apply each examined LLM to generate news content with headlines of these news articles as prompts, and evaluate the gender and racial biases of the AIGC produced by the LLM by comparing the AIGC and the original news articles. We further analyze the gender bias of each LLM under biased prompts by adding gender-biased messages to prompts constructed from these news headlines. Our study reveals that the AIGC produced by each examined LLM demonstrates substantial gender and racial biases. Moreover, the AIGC generated by each LLM exhibits notable discrimination against females and individuals of the Black race. Among the LLMs, the AIGC generated by ChatGPT demonstrates the lowest level of bias, and ChatGPT is the sole model capable of declining content generation when provided with biased prompts.
Disaster response is critical to save lives and reduce damages in the aftermath of a disaster. Fundamental to disaster response operations is the management of disaster relief resources. To this end, a local agency (e.g., a local emergency resource distribution center) collects demands from local communities affected by a disaster, dispatches available resources to meet the demands, and requests more resources from a central emergency management agency (e.g., Federal Emergency Management Agency in the U.S.). Prior resource management research for disaster response overlooks the problem of deciding optimal quantities of resources requested by a local agency. In response to this research gap, we define a new resource management problem that proactively decides optimal quantities of requested resources by considering both currently unfulfilled demands and future demands. To solve the problem, we take salient characteristics of the problem into consideration and develop a novel deep learning method for future demand prediction. We then formulate the problem as a stochastic optimization model, analyze key properties of the model, and propose an effective solution method to the problem based on the analyzed properties. We demonstrate the superior performance of our method over prevalent existing methods using both real world and simulated data. We also show its superiority over prevalent existing methods in a multi-stakeholder and multi-objective setting through simulations.
Medical image segmentation is a fundamental task in the community of medical image analysis. In this paper, a novel network architecture, referred to as Convolution, Transformer, and Operator (CTO), is proposed. CTO employs a combination of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Vision Transformer (ViT), and an explicit boundary detection operator to achieve high recognition accuracy while maintaining an optimal balance between accuracy and efficiency. The proposed CTO follows the standard encoder-decoder segmentation paradigm, where the encoder network incorporates a popular CNN backbone for capturing local semantic information, and a lightweight ViT assistant for integrating long-range dependencies. To enhance the learning capacity on boundary, a boundary-guided decoder network is proposed that uses a boundary mask obtained from a dedicated boundary detection operator as explicit supervision to guide the decoding learning process. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on six challenging medical image segmentation datasets, demonstrating that CTO achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with a competitive model complexity.
The advent of Vision Transformer (ViT) has brought substantial advancements in 3D volumetric benchmarks, particularly in 3D medical image segmentation. Concurrently, Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) networks have regained popularity among researchers due to their comparable results to ViT, albeit with the exclusion of the heavy self-attention module. This paper introduces a permutable hybrid network for volumetric medical image segmentation, named PHNet, which exploits the advantages of convolution neural network (CNN) and MLP. PHNet addresses the intrinsic isotropy problem of 3D volumetric data by utilizing both 2D and 3D CNN to extract local information. Besides, we propose an efficient Multi-Layer Permute Perceptron module, named MLPP, which enhances the original MLP by obtaining long-range dependence while retaining positional information. Extensive experimental results validate that PHNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two public datasets, namely, COVID-19-20 and Synapse. Moreover, the ablation study demonstrates the effectiveness of PHNet in harnessing the strengths of both CNN and MLP. The code will be accessible to the public upon acceptance.
Health sensing for chronic disease management creates immense benefits for social welfare. Existing health sensing studies primarily focus on the prediction of physical chronic diseases. Depression, a widespread complication of chronic diseases, is however understudied. We draw on the medical literature to support depression prediction using motion sensor data. To connect human expertise in the decision-making, safeguard trust for this high-stake prediction, and ensure algorithm transparency, we develop an interpretable deep learning model: Temporal Prototype Network (TempPNet). TempPNet is built upon the emergent prototype learning models. To accommodate the temporal characteristic of sensor data and the progressive property of depression, TempPNet differs from existing prototype learning models in its capability of capturing the temporal progression of depression. Extensive empirical analyses using real-world motion sensor data show that TempPNet outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in depression prediction. Moreover, TempPNet interprets its predictions by visualizing the temporal progression of depression and its corresponding symptoms detected from sensor data. We further conduct a user study to demonstrate its superiority over the benchmarks in interpretability. This study offers an algorithmic solution for impactful social good - collaborative care of chronic diseases and depression in health sensing. Methodologically, it contributes to extant literature with a novel interpretable deep learning model for depression prediction from sensor data. Patients, doctors, and caregivers can deploy our model on mobile devices to monitor patients' depression risks in real-time. Our model's interpretability also allows human experts to participate in the decision-making by reviewing the interpretation of prediction outcomes and making informed interventions.
Industry assignment, which assigns firms to industries according to a predefined Industry Classification System (ICS), is fundamental to a large number of critical business practices, ranging from operations and strategic decision making by firms to economic analyses by government agencies. Three types of expert knowledge are essential to effective industry assignment: definition-based knowledge (i.e., expert definitions of each industry), structure-based knowledge (i.e., structural relationships among industries as specified in an ICS), and assignment-based knowledge (i.e., prior firm-industry assignments performed by domain experts). Existing industry assignment methods utilize only assignment-based knowledge to learn a model that classifies unassigned firms to industries, and overlook definition-based and structure-based knowledge. Moreover, these methods only consider which industry a firm has been assigned to, but ignore the time-specificity of assignment-based knowledge, i.e., when the assignment occurs. To address the limitations of existing methods, we propose a novel deep learning-based method that not only seamlessly integrates the three types of knowledge for industry assignment but also takes the time-specificity of assignment-based knowledge into account. Methodologically, our method features two innovations: dynamic industry representation and hierarchical assignment. The former represents an industry as a sequence of time-specific vectors by integrating the three types of knowledge through our proposed temporal and spatial aggregation mechanisms. The latter takes industry and firm representations as inputs, computes the probability of assigning a firm to different industries, and assigns the firm to the industry with the highest probability.
Customer Life Time Value (LTV) is the expected total revenue that a single user can bring to a business. It is widely used in a variety of business scenarios to make operational decisions when acquiring new customers. Modeling LTV is a challenging problem, due to its complex and mutable data distribution. Existing approaches either directly learn from posterior feature distributions or leverage statistical models that make strong assumption on prior distributions, both of which fail to capture those mutable distributions. In this paper, we propose a complete set of industrial-level LTV modeling solutions. Specifically, we introduce an Order Dependency Monotonic Network (ODMN) that models the ordered dependencies between LTVs of different time spans, which greatly improves model performance. We further introduce a Multi Distribution Multi Experts (MDME) module based on the Divide-and-Conquer idea, which transforms the severely imbalanced distribution modeling problem into a series of relatively balanced sub-distribution modeling problems hence greatly reduces the modeling complexity. In addition, a novel evaluation metric Mutual Gini is introduced to better measure the distribution difference between the estimated value and the ground-truth label based on the Lorenz Curve. The ODMN framework has been successfully deployed in many business scenarios of Kuaishou, and achieved great performance. Extensive experiments on real-world industrial data demonstrate the superiority of the proposed methods compared to state-of-the-art baselines including ZILN and Two-Stage XGBoost models.