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Article 5 of the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act is intended to regulate AI use to prevent potentially harmful consequences. Nevertheless, applying this legislation practically is likely to be challenging because of ambiguously used terminologies and because it fails to specify which manipulation techniques may be invoked by AI, potentially leading to significant harm. This paper aims to bridge this gap by defining key terms and demonstrating how AI may invoke these techniques, drawing from insights in psychology and behavioural economics. First, this paper provides definitions of the terms “subliminal techniques”, “manipulative techniques” and “deceptive techniques”. Secondly, we identified from the literature in cognitive psychology and behavioural economics three subliminal and five manipulative techniques and exemplify how AI might implement these techniques to manipulate users in real-world case scenarios. These illustrations may serve as a practical guide for stakeholders to detect cases of AI manipulation and consequently devise preventive measures. Article 5 has also been criticised for offering inadequate protection. We critically assess the protection offered by Article 5, proposing specific revisions to paragraph 1, points (a) and (b) of Article 5 to increase its protective effectiveness.

AAAI 2024

Regulating AI: Applying Insights from Behavioural Economics and Psychology to the Application of Article 5 of the EU AI Act

psychology and behavioural economics

ai manipulation

eu ai-act article 5

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

Many inductive logic programming approaches struggle to learn programs from noisy data. To overcome this limitation, we introduce an approach that learns minimal description length programs from noisy data, including recursive programs. Our experiments on several domains, including drug design, game playing, and program synthesis, show that our approach can outperform existing approaches in terms of predictive accuracies and scale to moderate amounts of noise.

Learning MDL Logic Programs from Noisy Data

We study the problem of agent selection in causal strategic learning under multiple decision makers and address two key challenges that come with it. 
Firstly, while much of prior work focuses on studying a fixed pool of agents that remains static regardless of their evaluations, we consider the impact of selection procedure by which agents are not only evaluated, but also selected.
When each decision maker unilaterally selects agents by maximising their own utility, we show that the optimal selection rule is a trade-off between selecting the best agents and providing incentives to maximise the agents' improvement. 
Furthermore, this optimal selection rule relies on incorrect predictions of agents' outcomes. 
Hence, we study the conditions under which a decision maker's optimal selection rule will not lead to deterioration of agents' outcome nor cause unjust reduction in agents' selection chance. 
To that end, we provide an analytical form of the optimal selection rule and a mechanism to retrieve the causal parameters from observational data, under certain assumptions on agents' behaviour. 
Secondly, when there are multiple decision makers, the interference between selection rules introduces another source of biases in estimating the underlying causal parameters. 
To address this problem, we provide a cooperative protocol which all decision makers must collectively adopt to recover the true causal parameters. 
Lastly, we complement our theoretical results with simulation studies.
Our results highlight not only the importance of causal modeling as a strategy to mitigate the effect of gaming, as suggested by previous work, but also the need of a benevolent regulator to enable it.

Causal Strategic Learning with Competitive Selection

Domain-independent dynamic programming (DIDP), a model-based paradigm based on dynamic programming, has shown promising performance on multiple combinatorial optimization problems compared with mixed integer programming (MIP) and constraint programming (CP). The current DIDP solvers are based on heuristic search, and the state-of-the-art solver, complete anytime beam search (CABS), uses beam search. However, the current DIDP solvers cannot utilize multiple threads, unlike state-of-the-art MIP and CP solvers. In this paper, we propose three parallel beam search algorithms and develop multi-thread implementations of CABS. With 32 threads, our multi-thread DIDP solvers achieve 9 to 39 times speedup on average and significant performance improvement over the sequential solver, finding the new best solutions for two instances of the traveling salesperson problem with time windows. In addition, our solvers outperform multi-thread MIP and CP solvers in four of the six combinatorial optimization problems evaluated.

Parallel Beam Search Algorithms for Domain-Independent Dynamic Programming | VIDEO

Instant runoff voting (IRV) has recently gained popularity as an alternative to plurality voting for political elections, with advocates claiming a range of advantages, including that it produces more moderate winners than plurality and could thus help address polarization. However, there is little theoretical backing for this claim, with existing evidence focused on case studies and simulations. In this work, we prove that IRV has a moderating effect relative to plurality voting in a precise sense, developed in a 1-dimensional Euclidean model of voter preferences.  We develop a theory of exclusion zones, derived from properties of the voter distribution, which serve to show how moderate and extreme candidates interact during IRV vote tabulation. The theory allows us to prove that if voters are symmetrically distributed and not too concentrated at the extremes, IRV cannot elect an extreme candidate over a moderate. In contrast, we show plurality can and validate our results computationally. Our methods provide new frameworks for the analysis of voting systems, deriving exact winner distributions geometrically and establishing a connection between plurality voting and stick-breaking processes.

The Moderating Effect of Instant Runoff Voting | VIDEO

Graphs are typical non-Euclidean data of complex structures. Recently, Riemannian graph representation learning emerges as an exciting alternative to the traditional Euclidean ones. However, Riemannian graph methods are still in an early stage: most of them present a single curvature (radius) regardless of structural complexity, suffer from numerical instability due to the exponential/logarithmic map, and lack the ability to capture motif regularity. In light of the issues above, we propose the problem of Motif-aware Riemannian Graph Representation Learning, seeking a numerically stable encoder to capture motif regularity in a diverse-curvature manifold without labels. To this end, we present a novel Motif-aware Riemannian model with Generative-Contrastive learning (MotifRGC), which conducts a minmax game in Riemannian manifold in a self-supervised manner. First, we propose a new type of Riemannian GCN (D-GCN), in which we construct a diverse-curvature manifold by a product layer with a diversified factor, and replace the exponential/logarithmic map by a stable kernel layer proved to be isometric invariant. Second, we introduce a motif-aware Riemannian generative-contrastive learning to capture motif regularity in the manifold and learn motif-aware node representation without external labels. Extensive empirical results show the superiority of MofitRGC against prior Riemannian methods.

Motif-Aware Riemannian Graph Neural Network with Generative-Contrastive Learning

Human values are crucial to human decision-making. \textit{Value pluralism} is the view that multiple correct values may be held in tension with one another (e.g., when considering \textit{lying to a friend to protect their feelings}, how does one balance \textit{honesty} with \textit{friendship}?). As statistical learners, AI systems fit to averages by default, washing out these potentially irreducible value conflicts. To improve AI systems to better reflect value pluralism, the first-order challenge is to explore the extent to which AI systems can model pluralistic human \textit{values}, \textit{rights}, and \textit{duties} as well as their interaction.

We introduce ValuePrism, a large-scale dataset of 218k values, rights, and duties connected to 31k human-written situations. ValuePrism's contextualized values are generated by GPT-4 and deemed high-quality by human annotators 91% of the time. We conduct a large-scale study with annotators across diverse social and demographic backgrounds to try to understand whose values are represented.

With ValuePrism, we build Value Kaleidoscope (or Kaleido), an open, light-weight, and structured language-based multi-task model that generates, explains, and assesses the relevance and valence (i.e., support or oppose) of human values, rights, and duties within a specific context. Humans prefer the sets of values output by our system over the teacher GPT-4, finding them more accurate and with broader coverage. In addition, we demonstrate that Kaleido can help explain variability in human decision-making by outputting contrasting values. Finally, we show that Kaleido's representation transfer to other philosophical frameworks and datasets, confirming the benefit of an explicit, modular, and interpretable approach to value pluralism. We hope that our work will serve as a step to making more explicit the implicit values behind human decision-making and to steering AI systems to make decisions that are more in accordance with them.

Value Kaleidoscope: Engaging AI with Pluralistic Human Values, Rights, and Duties

Decision Trees (DTs) are commonly used for many machine learning tasks due to their high degree of interpretability. However, learning a DT from data is a difficult optimization problem, as it is non-convex and non-differentiable. Therefore, common approaches learn DTs using a greedy growth algorithm that minimizes the impurity locally at each internal node. Unfortunately, this greedy procedure can lead to inaccurate trees. In this paper, we present a novel approach for learning hard, axis-aligned DTs with gradient descent. The proposed method uses backpropagation with a straight-through operator on a dense DT representation, to jointly optimize all tree parameters. Our approach outperforms existing methods on binary classification benchmarks and achieves competitive results for multi-class tasks. The implementation is available under: https://github.com/s-marton/GradTree

GradTree: Learning Axis-Aligned Decision Trees with Gradient Descent

Backpropagation (BP), the standard learning algorithm for artificial neural networks, is often considered biologically implausible. In contrast, the standard learning algorithm for predictive coding (PC) models in neuroscience, known as the inference learning algorithm (IL), is a promising, bio-plausible alternative. However, several challenges and questions hinder IL's application to real-world problems. For example, IL is computationally demanding, and without memory-intensive optimizers like Adam, IL may converge to poor local minima. Moreover, although IL can reduce loss more quickly than BP, the reasons for these speedups or their robustness remains unclear. In this paper, we tackle these challenges by 1) altering the standard implementation of PC circuits to substantially reduce computation, 2) developing a novel optimizer that improves the convergence of IL without increasing memory usage, and 3) establishing theoretical results that help elucidate the conditions under which IL is sensitive to second and higher-order information.

Understanding and Improving Optimization in Predictive Coding Networks

A major limitation for the broader scope of problems solvable by transformers is the quadratic scaling of computational complexity with input size. In this study, we investigate the recurrent memory augmentation of pre-trained transformer models to extend input context length while linearly scaling compute. Our approach demonstrates the capability to store information in memory for sequences of up to an unprecedented two million tokens while maintaining high retrieval accuracy. Experiments with language modeling tasks show perplexity improvement as the number of processed input segments increases. These results underscore the effectiveness of our method, which has significant potential to enhance long-term dependency handling in natural language understanding and generation tasks, as well as enable large-scale context processing for memory-intensive applications.

Beyond Attention: Breaking the Limits of Transformer Context Length with Recurrent Memory | VIDEO

Anomaly detection (AD), also termed outlier detection, is a pivotal technique in machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). In today’s interconnected landscape, AD’s importance is evident across diverse sectors, from national security to healthcare and security. For instance, NASA uses AD algorithms for spacecraft failure detection, the U.S. Navy applies it for enhanced space system autonomy, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center uses AD for early patient prioritization, and companies like Google and Amazon employ AD for service disruption identification. Fundamentally, AD is invaluable in identifying rare yet significant data points in large datasets. My research focuses on using algorithmic and system methods to automate and accelerate AD. The goal is to develop automated, scalable, and reproducible detection algorithms and systems to support high-stakes research and applications. To sum up, my research has produced successful results: (1) Automated algorithms; (2) Scalable AD systems and (3) Reproducible AD benchmarks, which will be covered in the proposed presentation. Please see the attached cover letter and presentation schedule for details.

Regulating AI: Applying Insights from Behavioural Economics and Psychology to the Application of Article 5 of the EU AI Act

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Learning MDL Logic Programs from Noisy Data

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