Shiva Pentyala

Sina Mohseni, Fan Yang, Shiva Pentyala et al.

Combating fake news and misinformation propagation is a challenging task in the post-truth era. News feed and search algorithms could potentially lead to unintentional large-scale propagation of false and fabricated information with users being exposed to algorithmically selected false content. Our research investigates the effects of an Explainable AI assistant embedded in news review platforms for combating the propagation of fake news. We design a news reviewing and sharing interface, create a dataset of news stories, and train four interpretable fake news detection algorithms to study the effects of algorithmic transparency on end-users. We present evaluation results and analysis from multiple controlled crowdsourced studies. For a deeper understanding of Explainable AI systems, we discuss interactions between user engagement, mental model, trust, and performance measures in the process of explaining. The study results indicate that explanations helped participants to build appropriate mental models of the intelligent assistants in different conditions and adjust their trust accordingly for model limitations.

Mengnan Du, Shiva Pentyala, Yuening Li et al.

With advancements of deep learning techniques, it is now possible to generate super-realistic images and videos, i.e., deepfakes. These deepfakes could reach mass audience and result in adverse impacts on our society. Although lots of efforts have been devoted to detect deepfakes, their performance drops significantly on previously unseen but related manipulations and the detection generalization capability remains a problem. Motivated by the fine-grained nature and spatial locality characteristics of deepfakes, we propose Locality-Aware AutoEncoder (LAE) to bridge the generalization gap. In the training process, we use a pixel-wise mask to regularize local interpretation of LAE to enforce the model to learn intrinsic representation from the forgery region, instead of capturing artifacts in the training set and learning superficial correlations to perform detection. We further propose an active learning framework to select the challenging candidates for labeling, which requires human masks for less than 3% of the training data, dramatically reducing the annotation efforts to regularize interpretations. Experimental results on three deepfake detection tasks indicate that LAE could focus on the forgery regions to make decisions. The analysis further shows that LAE outperforms the state-of-the-arts by 6.52%, 12.03%, and 3.08% respectively on three deepfake detection tasks in terms of generalization accuracy on previously unseen manipulations.

Shiva Pentyala, Mengwen Liu, Markus Dreyer

We present methods for multi-task learning that take advantage of natural groupings of related tasks. Task groups may be defined along known properties of the tasks, such as task domain or language. Such task groups represent supervised information at the inter-task level and can be encoded into the model. We investigate two variants of neural network architectures that accomplish this, learning different feature spaces at the levels of individual tasks, task groups, as well as the universe of all tasks: (1) parallel architectures encode each input simultaneously into feature spaces at different levels; (2) serial architectures encode each input successively into feature spaces at different levels in the task hierarchy. We demonstrate the methods on natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, where a grouping of tasks into different task domains leads to improved performance on ATIS, Snips, and a large inhouse dataset.