Jorge Poco

Raphaël Tinarrage, Henrique Ennes, Lucas Resck et al. · cambridge

Binding precedents (súmulas vinculantes) constitute a juridical instrument unique to the Brazilian legal system and whose objectives include the protection of the Federal Supreme Court against repetitive demands. Studies of the effectiveness of these instruments in decreasing the Court's exposure to similar cases, however, indicate that they tend to fail in such a direction, with some of the binding precedents seemingly creating new demands. We empirically assess the legal impact of five binding precedents, 11, 14, 17, 26, and 37, at the highest Court level through their effects on the legal subjects they address. This analysis is only possible through the comparison of the Court's ruling about the precedents' themes before they are created, which means that these decisions should be detected through techniques of Similar Case Retrieval, which we tackle from the angle of Case Classification. The contributions of this article are therefore twofold: on the mathematical side, we compare the use of different methods of Natural Language Processing -- TF-IDF, LSTM, Longformer, and regex -- for Case Classification, whereas on the legal side, we contrast the inefficiency of these binding precedents with a set of hypotheses that may justify their repeated usage. We observe that the TF-IDF models performed slightly better than LSTM and Longformer when compared through common metrics; however, the deep learning models were able to detect certain important legal events that TF-IDF missed. On the legal side, we argue that the reasons for binding precedents to fail in responding to repetitive demand are heterogeneous and case-dependent, making it impossible to single out a specific cause. We identify five main hypotheses, which are found in different combinations in each of the precedents studied.

Felipe Moreno-Vera, Edgar Medina, Jorge Poco

Currently, style augmentation is capturing attention due to convolutional neural networks (CNN) being strongly biased toward recognizing textures rather than shapes. Most existing styling methods either perform a low-fidelity style transfer or a weak style representation in the embedding vector. This paper outlines a style augmentation algorithm using stochastic-based sampling with noise addition to improving randomization on a general linear transformation for style transfer. With our augmentation strategy, all models not only present incredible robustness against image stylizing but also outperform all previous methods and surpass the state-of-the-art performance for the STL-10 dataset. In addition, we present an analysis of the model interpretations under different style variations. At the same time, we compare comprehensive experiments demonstrating the performance when applied to deep neural architectures in training settings.

Ethan Brewer, Giovani Valdrighi, Parikshit Solunke et al.

Many areas of the world are without basic information on the socioeconomic well-being of the residing population due to limitations in existing data collection methods. Overhead images obtained remotely, such as from satellite or aircraft, can help serve as windows into the state of life on the ground and help "fill in the gaps" where community information is sparse, with estimates at smaller geographic scales requiring higher resolution sensors. Concurrent with improved sensor resolutions, recent advancements in machine learning and computer vision have made it possible to quickly extract features from and detect patterns in image data, in the process correlating these features with other information. In this work, we explore how well two approaches, a supervised convolutional neural network and semi-supervised clustering based on bag-of-visual-words, estimate population density, median household income, and educational attainment of individual neighborhoods from publicly available high-resolution imagery of cities throughout the United States. Results and analyses indicate that features extracted from the imagery can accurately estimate the density (R$^2$ up to 0.81) of neighborhoods, with the supervised approach able to explain about half the variation in a population's income and education. In addition to the presented approaches serving as a basis for further geographic generalization, the novel semi-supervised approach provides a foundation for future work seeking to estimate fine-scale information from aerial imagery without the need for label data.

Joel Perca, Luis Sante, Juanpablo Heredia et al.

Extracting actionable insights from long-duration urban videos is often labor-intensive: analysts must manually sift through raw footage to pinpoint target events or uncover broader behavioral trends. In this work, we present URBANCLIPATLAS, a visual analytics system for exploring long urban videos recorded at street intersections. URBANCLIPATLAS combines retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), taxonomy-aware entity extraction, and video grounding to support event retrieval and interpretation. The system segments extended recordings into short clips, generates textual descriptions with a vision-language model, and indexes them for semantic retrieval. A knowledge graph maps entities and relations from LLM answers onto a domain-specific taxonomy and aligns them with detected objects and trajectories to support visual grounding and verification. URBANCLIPATLAS supports scene retrieval through an augmented chat-based interface and improves scene interpretation by tightly aligning textual outputs with video evidence. This design strengthens the connection between textual reasoning and visual evidence, reducing the effort required to validate model outputs and refine hypotheses. We demonstrate the usefulness of URBANCLIPATLAS on the StreetAware dataset through two case studies involving hazardous scenarios and crossing dynamics at street intersections. URBANCLIPATLAS helps analysts reason about safety- and mobility-related patterns across large urban video collections.

Lucas E. Resck, Marcos M. Raimundo, Jorge Poco · cambridge

Saliency post-hoc explainability methods are important tools for understanding increasingly complex NLP models. While these methods can reflect the model's reasoning, they may not align with human intuition, making the explanations not plausible. In this work, we present a methodology for incorporating rationales, which are text annotations explaining human decisions, into text classification models. This incorporation enhances the plausibility of post-hoc explanations while preserving their faithfulness. Our approach is agnostic to model architectures and explainability methods. We introduce the rationales during model training by augmenting the standard cross-entropy loss with a novel loss function inspired by contrastive learning. By leveraging a multi-objective optimization algorithm, we explore the trade-off between the two loss functions and generate a Pareto-optimal frontier of models that balance performance and plausibility. Through extensive experiments involving diverse models, datasets, and explainability methods, we demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the quality of model explanations without causing substantial (sometimes negligible) degradation in the original model's performance.

Joao Pinheiro, Jorge Poco

Recent works show that interactive documents connecting text with visualizations facilitate reading comprehension. However, creating this type of content requires specialized knowledge. We present ChartText, a method that links text with visualizations in this work. Our approach supports documents that include bar charts, line charts, and scatter plots. ChartText receives the visual encoding of the visualization and its associated text as input. It then performs the linking in two stages: The matching stage creates individual links relating simple phrases between the text and the chart. Then, it combines the individual links according to the visual channels in the grouping stage, building more meaningful connections. We use two datasets to design and evaluate our method; the first comes from web documents (24 bar charts and texts) and the second from academic documents (25 bar charts, 25 line charts, and 25 scatter plots with their texts). Our experiments show that our method obtains F1 scores of 0.50 and 0.66 on both datasets. We can also use a semi-automatic approach correcting individual links; in this case, the scores rise to 0.68 and 0.84, respectively. To show the usefulness of our technique, we implement two proofs of concept. We create interactive documents using graphic overlays in the first one, facilitating the reading experience. We use voice instead of text to annotate charts in real-time in the second. For example, in a videoconference, our technique can automatically annotate a chart following the presenter's description.