Paul Rad

Brandon Lwowski, Paul Rad, Anthony Rios

Text classifiers are applied at scale in the form of one-size-fits-all solutions. Nevertheless, many studies show that classifiers are biased regarding different languages and dialects. When measuring and discovering these biases, some gaps present themselves and should be addressed. First, ``Does language, dialect, and topical content vary across geographical regions?'' and secondly ``If there are differences across the regions, do they impact model performance?''. We introduce a novel dataset called GeoOLID with more than 14 thousand examples across 15 geographically and demographically diverse cities to address these questions. We perform a comprehensive analysis of geographical-related content and their impact on performance disparities of offensive language detection models. Overall, we find that current models do not generalize across locations. Likewise, we show that while offensive language models produce false positives on African American English, model performance is not correlated with each city's minority population proportions. Warning: This paper contains offensive language.

Dan Schumacher, Fatemeh Haji, Tara Grey et al.

Temporal question answering (TQA) remains a challenge for large language models (LLMs), particularly when retrieved content may be irrelevant, outdated, or temporally inconsistent. This is especially critical in applications like clinical event ordering, and policy tracking, which require reliable temporal reasoning even under noisy or outdated information. To address this challenge, we introduce RASTeR: \textbf{R}obust, \textbf{A}gentic, and \textbf{S}tructured, \textbf{Te}mporal \textbf{R}easoning, a prompting framework that separates context evaluation from answer generation. RASTeR first assesses the relevance and temporal coherence of the retrieved context, then constructs a temporal knolwedge graph (TKG) to better facilitate reasoning. When inconsistencies are detected, RASTeR selectively corrects or discards context before generating an answer. Across multiple datasets and LLMs, RASTeR consistently improves robustness\footnote{\ Some TQA work defines robustness as handling diverse temporal phenomena. Here, we define it as the ability to answer correctly despite suboptimal context}. We further validate our approach through a ``needle-in-the-haystack'' study, in which relevant context is buried among distractors. With forty distractors, RASTeR achieves 75\% accuracy, over 12\% ahead of the runner up

Shadi Ghafghazi, Amarie Carnett, Leslie Neely et al.

Autism spectrum disorder is a developmental disorder characterized by significant social, communication, and behavioral challenges. Individuals diagnosed with autism, intellectual, and developmental disabilities (AUIDD) typically require long-term care and targeted treatment and teaching. Effective treatment of AUIDD relies on efficient and careful behavioral observations done by trained applied behavioral analysts (ABAs). However, this process overburdens ABAs by requiring the clinicians to collect and analyze data, identify the problem behaviors, conduct pattern analysis to categorize and predict categorical outcomes, hypothesize responsiveness to treatments, and detect the effects of treatment plans. Successful integration of digital technologies into clinical decision-making pipelines and the advancements in automated decision-making using Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms highlights the importance of augmenting teaching and treatments using novel algorithms and high-fidelity sensors. In this article, we present an AI-Augmented Learning and Applied Behavior Analytics (AI-ABA) platform to provide personalized treatment and learning plans to AUIDD individuals. By defining systematic experiments along with automated data collection and analysis, AI-ABA can promote self-regulative behavior using reinforcement-based augmented or virtual reality and other mobile platforms. Thus, AI-ABA could assist clinicians to focus on making precise data-driven decisions and increase the quality of individualized interventions for individuals with AUIDD.

Henry D. Chacon, Paul Rad

The input space complexity determines the model's capabilities to extract their knowledge and translate the space of attributes into a function which is assumed in general, as a concatenation of non-linear functions between layers. In the presence of backdoor attacks, the space complexity changes, and induces similarities between classes that directly affect the model's training. As a consequence, the model tends to overfit the input set. In this research, we suggest the D-vine Copula Auto-Encoder (VCAE) as a tool to estimate the latent space distribution under the presence of backdoor triggers. Since no assumptions are made on the distribution estimation, like in Variational Autoencoders (VAE). It is possible to observe the backdoor stamp in non-attacked categories randomly generated. We exhibit the differences between a clean model (baseline) and the attacked one (backdoor) in a pairwise representation of the distribution. The idea is to illustrate the dependency structure change in the input space induced by backdoor features. Finally, we quantify the entropy's changes and the Kullback-Leibler divergence between models. In our results, we found the entropy in the latent space increases by around 27\% due to the backdoor trigger added to the input

Arun Das, Paul Rad

Nowadays, deep neural networks are widely used in mission critical systems such as healthcare, self-driving vehicles, and military which have direct impact on human lives. However, the black-box nature of deep neural networks challenges its use in mission critical applications, raising ethical and judicial concerns inducing lack of trust. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is a field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that promotes a set of tools, techniques, and algorithms that can generate high-quality interpretable, intuitive, human-understandable explanations of AI decisions. In addition to providing a holistic view of the current XAI landscape in deep learning, this paper provides mathematical summaries of seminal work. We start by proposing a taxonomy and categorizing the XAI techniques based on their scope of explanations, methodology behind the algorithms, and explanation level or usage which helps build trustworthy, interpretable, and self-explanatory deep learning models. We then describe the main principles used in XAI research and present the historical timeline for landmark studies in XAI from 2007 to 2020. After explaining each category of algorithms and approaches in detail, we then evaluate the explanation maps generated by eight XAI algorithms on image data, discuss the limitations of this approach, and provide potential future directions to improve XAI evaluation.

Nihar Bendre, Nima Ebadi, John J Prevost et al.

A great number of computer vision publications have focused on distinguishing between human action recognition and classification rather than the intensity of actions performed. Indexing the intensity which determines the performance of human actions is a challenging task due to the uncertainty and information deficiency that exists in the video inputs. To remedy this uncertainty, in this paper we coupled fuzzy logic rules with the neural-based action recognition model to rate the intensity of a human action as intense or mild. In our approach, we used a Spatio-Temporal LSTM to generate the weights of the fuzzy-logic model, and then demonstrate through experiments that indexing of the action intensity is possible. We analyzed the integrated model by applying it to videos of human actions with different action intensities and were able to achieve an accuracy of 89.16% on our intensity indexing generated dataset. The integrated model demonstrates the ability of a neuro-fuzzy inference module to effectively estimate the intensity index of human actions.

Sharaj Panwar, Paul Rad, Tzyy-Ping Jung et al.

Electroencephalography (EEG) data are difficult to obtain due to complex experimental setups and reduced comfort with prolonged wearing. This poses challenges to train powerful deep learning model with the limited EEG data. Being able to generate EEG data computationally could address this limitation. We propose a novel Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network with gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) to synthesize EEG data. This network addresses several modeling challenges of simulating time-series EEG data including frequency artifacts and training instability. We further extended this network to a class-conditioned variant that also includes a classification branch to perform event-related classification. We trained the proposed networks to generate one and 64-channel data resembling EEG signals routinely seen in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) experiment and demonstrated the validity of the generated samples. We also tested intra-subject cross-session classification performance for classifying the RSVP target events and showed that class-conditioned WGAN-GP can achieve improved event-classification performance over EEGNet.