SlepNet: Spectral Subgraph Representation Learning for Neural Dynamics
Siddharth Viswanath
Rahul Singh
Yanlei Zhang
J. Adam Noah
Joy Hirsch
Graph neural networks have been useful in machine learning on graph-structured data, particularly for node classification and some types of … (voir plus)graph classification tasks. However, they have had limited use in representing patterning of signals over graphs. Patterning of signals over graphs and in subgraphs carries important information in many domains including neuroscience. Neural signals are spatiotemporally patterned, high dimensional and difficult to decode. Graph signal processing and associated GCN models utilize the graph Fourier transform and are unable to efficiently represent spatially or spectrally localized signal patterning on graphs. Wavelet transforms have shown promise here, but offer non-canonical representations and cannot be tightly confined to subgraphs. Here we propose SlepNet, a novel GCN architecture that uses Slepian bases rather than graph Fourier harmonics. In SlepNet, the Slepian harmonics optimally concentrate signal energy on specifically relevant subgraphs that are automatically learned with a mask. Thus, they can produce canonical and highly resolved representations of neural activity, focusing energy of harmonics on areas of the brain which are activated. We evaluated SlepNet across three fMRI datasets, spanning cognitive and visual tasks, and two traffic dynamics datasets, comparing its performance against conventional GNNs and graph signal processing constructs. SlepNet outperforms the baselines in all datasets. Moreover, the extracted representations of signal patterns from SlepNet offers more resolution in distinguishing between similar patterns, and thus represent brain signaling transients as informative trajectories. Here we have shown that these extracted trajectory representations can be used for other downstream untrained tasks. Thus we establish that SlepNet is useful both for prediction and representation learning in spatiotemporal data.
Veracity: An Open-Source AI Fact-Checking System
Maximilian Puelma Touzel
William Garneau
Manon Gruaz
Mike Pinder
Li Wei Wang
Sukanya Krishna
Luda Cohen
The proliferation of misinformation poses a significant threat to society, exacerbated by the capabilities of generative AI. This demo paper… (voir plus) introduces Veracity, an open-source AI system designed to empower individuals to combat misinformation through transparent and accessible fact-checking. Veracity leverages the synergy between Large Language Models (LLMs) and web retrieval agents to analyze user-submitted claims and provide grounded veracity assessments with intuitive explanations. Key features include multilingual support, numerical scoring of claim veracity, and an interactive interface inspired by familiar messaging applications. This paper will showcase Veracity's ability to not only detect misinformation but also explain its reasoning, fostering media literacy and promoting a more informed society.
Veracity: An Open-Source AI Fact-Checking System
Maximilian Puelma Touzel
William Garneau
Manon Gruaz
Mike Pinder
Li Wei Wang
Sukanya Krishna
Luda Cohen
The proliferation of misinformation poses a significant threat to society, exacerbated by the capabilities of generative AI. This demo paper… (voir plus) introduces Veracity, an open-source AI system designed to empower individuals to combat misinformation through transparent and accessible fact-checking. Veracity leverages the synergy between Large Language Models (LLMs) and web retrieval agents to analyze user-submitted claims and provide grounded veracity assessments with intuitive explanations. Key features include multilingual support, numerical scoring of claim veracity, and an interactive interface inspired by familiar messaging applications. This paper will showcase Veracity's ability to not only detect misinformation but also explain its reasoning, fostering media literacy and promoting a more informed society.
POCO: Scalable Neural Forecasting through Population Conditioning
Yu Duan
Hamza Tahir Chaudhry
Misha B. Ahrens
Christopher D Harvey
Karl Deisseroth
Kanaka Rajan
Rigor in AI: Doing Rigorous AI Work Requires a Broader, Responsible AI-Informed Conception of Rigor
Su Lin Blodgett
Agathe Balayn
Angelina Wang
F. Calmon
Margaret Mitchell
Michael Ekstrand
Reuben Daniel Binns
Solon Barocas
In AI research and practice, rigor remains largely understood in terms of methodological rigor -- such as whether mathematical, statistical,… (voir plus) or computational methods are correctly applied. We argue that this narrow conception of rigor has contributed to the concerns raised by the responsible AI community, including overblown claims about AI capabilities. Our position is that a broader conception of what rigorous AI research and practice should entail is needed. We believe such a conception -- in addition to a more expansive understanding of (1) methodological rigor -- should include aspects related to (2) what background knowledge informs what to work on (epistemic rigor); (3) how disciplinary, community, or personal norms, standards, or beliefs influence the work (normative rigor); (4) how clearly articulated the theoretical constructs under use are (conceptual rigor); (5) what is reported and how (reporting rigor); and (6) how well-supported the inferences from existing evidence are (interpretative rigor). In doing so, we also aim to provide useful language and a framework for much-needed dialogue about the AI community's work by researchers, policymakers, journalists, and other stakeholders.
Scalable Tree Search over Graphs with Learned Action Pruning for Power Grid Control
Cyrus Neary
Adriana Hugessen
Viktor Todosijević
As real-world infrastructure systems become increasingly complex and large-scale, there is a growing need for learning-based control strateg… (voir plus)ies that can make informed decisions in complex and dynamic environments. However, large-scale problems — such as power grid control — introduce high-dimensional action spaces and necessitate transferability across varying grid topologies. We introduce **H**ierarchical **E**xpert-Guided **R**econfiguration **O**ptimization for **G**raph **T**opologies, **HERO-GT**, a model-based planning approach that combines a pretrained graph neural network (GNN) for topology-aware action pruning with a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) planner for targeted, structured exploration. More specifically, the high-level GNN predicts a promising subset of actions, which the low-level MCTS agent uses to focus its search and reduce computational overhead while remaining adaptable to unseen graph structures. Furthermore, the MCTS planner leverages a given *default policy*---which may be defined, for example, by heuristics, problem relaxations, or rule-based methods---to bias the search and prioritize actions that are expected to improve performance over the default. We deploy HERO-GT in power grid environments, demonstrating that it not only improves over a strong default policy, but also scales to a realistic operational setting where exhaustive search becomes computationally infeasible.
Discovering Temporal Structure: An Overview of Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Akhil Bagaria
Ziyan Luo
George Konidaris
Marlos C. Machado
Developing agents capable of exploring, planning and learning in complex open-ended environments is a grand challenge in artificial intellig… (voir plus)ence (AI). Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) offers a promising solution to this challenge by discovering and exploiting the temporal structure within a stream of experience. The strong appeal of the HRL framework has led to a rich and diverse body of literature attempting to discover a useful structure. However, it is still not clear how one might define what constitutes good structure in the first place, or the kind of problems in which identifying it may be helpful. This work aims to identify the benefits of HRL from the perspective of the fundamental challenges in decision-making, as well as highlight its impact on the performance trade-offs of AI agents. Through these benefits, we then cover the families of methods that discover temporal structure in HRL, ranging from learning directly from online experience to offline datasets, to leveraging large language models (LLMs). Finally, we highlight the challenges of temporal structure discovery and the domains that are particularly well-suited for such endeavours.
Meta-learning how to Share Credit among Macro-Actions
Ionel-Alexandru Hosu
Traian Rebedea
Can GPT4 Generate Effective Feedback on Code Readability?
Xiaotian Su
Yajie Song
Marcus Messer
Jaromir Savelka
April Wang
Detecting High-Stakes Interactions with Activation Probes
Alex McKenzie
Urja Pawar
Phil Blandfort
William Bankes
Ekdeep Singh Lubana
Dmitrii Krasheninnikov
Monitoring is an important aspect of safely deploying Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper examines activation probes for detecting"high… (voir plus)-stakes"interactions -- where the text indicates that the interaction might lead to significant harm -- as a critical, yet underexplored, target for such monitoring. We evaluate several probe architectures trained on synthetic data, and find them to exhibit robust generalization to diverse, out-of-distribution, real-world data. Probes' performance is comparable to that of prompted or finetuned medium-sized LLM monitors, while offering computational savings of six orders-of-magnitude. Our experiments also highlight the potential of building resource-aware hierarchical monitoring systems, where probes serve as an efficient initial filter and flag cases for more expensive downstream analysis. We release our novel synthetic dataset and codebase to encourage further study.
Detecting High-Stakes Interactions with Activation Probes
Alex McKenzie
Urja Pawar
Phil Blandfort
William Bankes
Ekdeep Singh Lubana
Dmitrii Krasheninnikov
Monitoring is an important aspect of safely deploying Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper examines activation probes for detecting "hig… (voir plus)h-stakes" interactions -- where the text indicates that the interaction might lead to significant harm -- as a critical, yet underexplored, target for such monitoring. We evaluate several probe architectures trained on synthetic data, and find them to exhibit robust generalization to diverse, out-of-distribution, real-world data. Probes' performance is comparable to that of prompted or finetuned medium-sized LLM monitors, while offering computational savings of six orders-of-magnitude. Our experiments also highlight the potential of building resource-aware hierarchical monitoring systems, where probes serve as an efficient initial filter and flag cases for more expensive downstream analysis. We release our novel synthetic dataset and codebase to encourage further study.
Discrete Audio Tokens: More Than a Survey!
Gallil Maimon
Adel Moumen
Darius Petermann
Jiatong Shi
Haibin Wu
Haici Yang
Anastasia Kuznetsova
Ricard Marxer
Bhuvana Ramabhadran
Benjamin Elizalde
Loren Lugosch
Jinyu Li
Phil Woodland
Minje Kim
Hung-yi Lee
Shinji Watanabe
Yossi Adi … (voir 1 de plus)
Discrete audio tokens are compact representations that aim to preserve perceptual quality, phonetic content, and speaker characteristics whi… (voir plus)le enabling efficient storage and inference, as well as competitive performance across diverse downstream tasks. They provide a practical alternative to continuous features, enabling the integration of speech and audio into modern large language models (LLMs). As interest in token-based audio processing grows, various tokenization methods have emerged, and several surveys have reviewed the latest progress in the field. However, existing studies often focus on specific domains or tasks and lack a unified comparison across various benchmarks. This paper presents a systematic review and benchmark of discrete audio tokenizers, covering three domains: speech, music, and general audio. We propose a taxonomy of tokenization approaches based on encoder-decoder, quantization techniques, training paradigm, streamability, and application domains. We evaluate tokenizers on multiple benchmarks for reconstruction, downstream performance, and acoustic language modeling, and analyze trade-offs through controlled ablation studies. Our findings highlight key limitations, practical considerations, and open challenges, providing insight and guidance for future research in this rapidly evolving area. For more information, including our main results and tokenizer database, please refer to our website: https://poonehmousavi.github.io/dates-website/.