Daily Papers

Given the rapid adoption of generative AI and its potential to impact a wide range of tasks, understanding the effects of AI on the economy is one of society's most important questions. In this work, we take a step toward that goal by analyzing the work activities people do with AI, how successfully and broadly those activities are done, and combine that with data on what occupations do those activities. We analyze a dataset of 200k anonymized and privacy-scrubbed conversations between users and Microsoft Bing Copilot, a publicly available generative AI system. We find the most common work activities people seek AI assistance for involve gathering information and writing, while the most common activities that AI itself is performing are providing information and assistance, writing, teaching, and advising. Combining these activity classifications with measurements of task success and scope of impact, we compute an AI applicability score for each occupation. We find the highest AI applicability scores for knowledge work occupation groups such as computer and mathematical, and office and administrative support, as well as occupations such as sales whose work activities involve providing and communicating information. Additionally, we characterize the types of work activities performed most successfully, how wage and education correlate with AI applicability, and how real-world usage compares to predictions of occupational AI impact.

Many practical applications of dialogue technology require the generation of responses according to a particular developer-specified persona. While a variety of personas can be elicited from recent large language models, the opaqueness and unpredictability of these models make it desirable to be able to specify personas in an explicit form. In previous work, personas have typically been represented as sets of one-off pieces of self-knowledge that are retrieved by the dialogue system for use in generation. However, in realistic human conversations, personas are often revealed through story-like narratives that involve rich habitual knowledge -- knowledge about kinds of events that an agent often participates in (e.g., work activities, hobbies, sporting activities, favorite entertainments, etc.), including typical goals, sub-events, preconditions, and postconditions of those events. We capture such habitual knowledge using an explicit schema representation, and propose an approach to dialogue generation that retrieves relevant schemas to condition a large language model to generate persona-based responses. Furthermore, we demonstrate a method for bootstrapping the creation of such schemas by first generating generic passages from a set of simple facts, and then inducing schemas from the generated passages.

The ISO 26262 standard from 2016 represents the state of the art for a safety-guided development of safety-critical electric/electronic vehicle systems. These vehicle systems include advanced driver assistance systems and vehicle guidance systems. The development process proposed in the ISO 26262 standard is based upon multiple V-models, and defines activities and work products for each process step. In many of these process steps, scenario based approaches can be applied to achieve the defined work products for the development of automated driving functions. To accomplish the work products of different process steps, scenarios have to focus on various aspects like a human understandable notation or a description via time-space variables. This leads to contradictory requirements regarding the level of detail and way of notation for the representation of scenarios. In this paper, the authors present requirements for the representation of scenarios in different process steps defined by the ISO 26262 standard, propose a consistent terminology based on prior publications for the identified levels of abstraction, and demonstrate how scenarios can be systematically evolved along the phases of the development process outlined in the ISO 26262 standard.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown state-of-the-art performance in a variety of tasks, including arithmetic and reasoning; however, to gauge the intellectual capabilities of LLMs, causal reasoning has become a reliable proxy for validating a general understanding of the mechanics and intricacies of the world similar to humans. Previous works in natural language processing (NLP) have either focused on open-ended causal reasoning via causal commonsense reasoning (CCR) or framed a symbolic representation-based question answering for theoretically backed-up analysis via a causal inference engine. The former adds an advantage of real-world grounding but lacks theoretically backed-up analysis/validation, whereas the latter is far from real-world grounding. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing the COLD (Causal reasOning in cLosed Daily activities) framework, which is built upon human understanding of daily real-world activities to reason about the causal nature of events. We show that the proposed framework facilitates the creation of enormous causal queries (~ 9 million) and comes close to the mini-turing test, simulating causal reasoning to evaluate the understanding of a daily real-world task. We evaluate multiple LLMs on the created causal queries and find that causal reasoning is challenging even for activities trivial to humans. We further explore (the causal reasoning abilities of LLMs) using the backdoor criterion to determine the causal strength between events.

This work explores the problem of generating task graphs of real-world activities. Different from prior formulations, we consider a setting where text transcripts of instructional videos performing a real-world activity (e.g., making coffee) are provided and the goal is to identify the key steps relevant to the task as well as the dependency relationship between these key steps. We propose a novel task graph generation approach that combines the reasoning capabilities of instruction-tuned language models along with clustering and ranking components to generate accurate task graphs in a completely unsupervised manner. We show that the proposed approach generates more accurate task graphs compared to a supervised learning approach on tasks from the ProceL and CrossTask datasets.

In everyday life, humans often plan their actions by following step-by-step instructions in the form of goal-oriented scripts. Previous work has exploited language models (LMs) to plan for abstract goals of stereotypical activities (e.g., "make a cake"), but leaves more specific goals with multi-facet constraints understudied (e.g., "make a cake for diabetics"). In this paper, we define the task of constrained language planning for the first time. We propose an overgenerate-then-filter approach to improve large language models (LLMs) on this task, and use it to distill a novel constrained language planning dataset, CoScript, which consists of 55,000 scripts. Empirical results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the constrained language planning ability of LLMs, especially on constraint faithfulness. Furthermore, CoScript is demonstrated to be quite effective in endowing smaller LMs with constrained language planning ability.

In this work, we describe strategies and provide case-study activities that can be used to examine the properties of superposition, entanglement, tagging, complementarity, and measurement in quantum curricula geared for teacher training. Having a solid foundation in these conceptual ideas is critical for educators who will be adopting quantum ideas within the classroom. Yet they are some of the most difficult concepts to master. We show how one can systematically develop these conceptual foundations with thought experiments on light and with thought experiments that employ the Stern-Gerlach experiment. We emphasize the importance of computer animations in aiding the instruction on these concepts.

Grounding natural language in physical 3D environments is essential for the advancement of embodied artificial intelligence. Current datasets and models for 3D visual grounding predominantly focus on identifying and localizing objects from static, object-centric descriptions. These approaches do not adequately address the dynamic and sequential nature of task-oriented grounding necessary for practical applications. In this work, we propose a new task: Task-oriented Sequential Grounding in 3D scenes, wherein an agent must follow detailed step-by-step instructions to complete daily activities by locating a sequence of target objects in indoor scenes. To facilitate this task, we introduce SG3D, a large-scale dataset containing 22,346 tasks with 112,236 steps across 4,895 real-world 3D scenes. The dataset is constructed using a combination of RGB-D scans from various 3D scene datasets and an automated task generation pipeline, followed by human verification for quality assurance. We adapted three state-of-the-art 3D visual grounding models to the sequential grounding task and evaluated their performance on SG3D. Our results reveal that while these models perform well on traditional benchmarks, they face significant challenges with task-oriented sequential grounding, underscoring the need for further research in this area.

Long-Term Person Re-Identification (LT-ReID) has become increasingly crucial in computer vision and biometrics. In this work, we aim to extend LT-ReID beyond pedestrian recognition to include a wider range of real-world human activities while still accounting for cloth-changing scenarios over large time gaps. This setting poses additional challenges due to the geometric misalignment and appearance ambiguity caused by the diversity of human pose and clothing. To address these challenges, we propose a new approach 3DInvarReID for (i) disentangling identity from non-identity components (pose, clothing shape, and texture) of 3D clothed humans, and (ii) reconstructing accurate 3D clothed body shapes and learning discriminative features of naked body shapes for person ReID in a joint manner. To better evaluate our study of LT-ReID, we collect a real-world dataset called CCDA, which contains a wide variety of human activities and clothing changes. Experimentally, we show the superior performance of our approach for person ReID.

Rapid spread of false images and videos on online platforms is an emerging problem. Anyone may add, delete, clone or modify people and entities from an image using various editing software which are readily available. This generates false and misleading proof to hide the crime. Now-a-days, these false and counterfeit images and videos are flooding on the internet. These spread false information. Many methods are available in literature for detecting those counterfeit contents but new methods of counterfeiting are also evolving. Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are observed to be one effective method as it modifies the context and definition of images producing plausible results via image-to-image translation. This work uses an independent discriminant network that can identify GAN generated image or video. A discriminant network has been created using a convolutional neural network based on InceptionResNetV2. The article also proposes a platform where users can detect forged images and videos. This proposed work has the potential to help the forensics domain to detect counterfeit videos and hidden criminal evidence towards the identification of criminal activities.

Emotions (e.g., Joy, Anger) are prevalent in daily software engineering (SE) activities, and are known to be significant indicators of work productivity (e.g., bug fixing efficiency). Recent studies have shown that directly applying general purpose emotion classification tools to SE corpora is not effective. Even within the SE domain, tool performance degrades significantly when trained on one communication channel and evaluated on another (e.g, StackOverflow vs. GitHub comments). Retraining a tool with channel-specific data takes significant effort since manually annotating large datasets of ground truth data is expensive. In this paper, we address this data scarcity problem by automatically creating new training data using a data augmentation technique. Based on an analysis of the types of errors made by popular SE-specific emotion recognition tools, we specifically target our data augmentation strategy in order to improve the performance of emotion recognition. Our results show an average improvement of 9.3% in micro F1-Score for three existing emotion classification tools (ESEM-E, EMTk, SEntiMoji) when trained with our best augmentation strategy.

Over the years, various approaches have been employed to enhance the productivity of knowledge workers, from addressing psychological well-being to the development of personal knowledge assistants. A significant challenge in this research area has been the absence of a comprehensive, publicly accessible dataset that mirrors real-world knowledge work. Although a handful of datasets exist, many are restricted in access or lack vital information dimensions, complicating meaningful comparison and benchmarking in the domain. This paper presents RLKWiC, a novel dataset of Real-Life Knowledge Work in Context, derived from monitoring the computer interactions of eight participants over a span of two months. As the first publicly available dataset offering a wealth of essential information dimensions (such as explicated contexts, textual contents, and semantics), RLKWiC seeks to address the research gap in the personal information management domain, providing valuable insights for modeling user behavior.

There has been growing interest in utilizing occupational data mining and analysis. In today's job market, occupational data mining and analysis is growing in importance as it enables companies to predict employee turnover, model career trajectories, screen through resumes and perform other human resource tasks. A key requirement to facilitate these tasks is the need for an occupation-related dataset. However, most research use proprietary datasets or do not make their dataset publicly available, thus impeding development in this area. To solve this issue, we present the Industrial and Professional Occupation Dataset (IPOD), which comprises 192k job titles belonging to 56k LinkedIn users. In addition to making IPOD publicly available, we also: (i) manually annotate each job title with its associated level of seniority, domain of work and location; and (ii) provide embedding for job titles and discuss various use cases. This dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/junhua/ipod.

This paper presents teaching materials, particularly assignments and ideas for classroom activities, from a new course on large language models (LLMs) taught at Charles University. The assignments include experiments with LLM inference for weather report generation and machine translation. The classroom activities include class quizzes, focused research on downstream tasks and datasets, and an interactive "best paper" session aimed at reading and comprehension of research papers.

We describe the SemEval task of extracting keyphrases and relations between them from scientific documents, which is crucial for understanding which publications describe which processes, tasks and materials. Although this was a new task, we had a total of 26 submissions across 3 evaluation scenarios. We expect the task and the findings reported in this paper to be relevant for researchers working on understanding scientific content, as well as the broader knowledge base population and information extraction communities.

We study the use of large language model-based agents for interacting with software via web browsers. Unlike prior work, we focus on measuring the agents' ability to perform tasks that span the typical daily work of knowledge workers utilizing enterprise software systems. To this end, we propose WorkArena, a remote-hosted benchmark of 29 tasks based on the widely-used ServiceNow platform. We also introduce BrowserGym, an environment for the design and evaluation of such agents, offering a rich set of actions as well as multimodal observations. Our empirical evaluation reveals that while current agents show promise on WorkArena, there remains a considerable gap towards achieving full task automation. Notably, our analysis uncovers a significant performance disparity between open and closed-source LLMs, highlighting a critical area for future exploration and development in the field.

Every day, humans perform many closely related activities that involve subtle discriminative motions, such as putting on a shirt vs. putting on a jacket, or shaking hands vs. giving a high five. Activity recognition by ethical visual AI could provide insights into our patterns of daily life, however existing activity recognition datasets do not capture the massive diversity of these human activities around the world. To address this limitation, we introduce Collector, a free mobile app to record video while simultaneously annotating objects and activities of consented subjects. This new data collection platform was used to curate the Consented Activities of People (CAP) dataset, the first large-scale, fine-grained activity dataset of people worldwide. The CAP dataset contains 1.45M video clips of 512 fine grained activity labels of daily life, collected by 780 subjects in 33 countries. We provide activity classification and activity detection benchmarks for this dataset, and analyze baseline results to gain insight into how people around with world perform common activities. The dataset, benchmarks, evaluation tools, public leaderboards and mobile apps are available for use at visym.github.io/cap.

Purpose: Surgical performance depends not only on surgeons' technical skills but also on team communication within and across the different professional groups present during the operation. Therefore, automatically identifying team communication in the OR is crucial for patient safety and advances in the development of computer-assisted surgical workflow analysis and intra-operative support systems. To take the first step, we propose a new task of detecting communication briefings involving all OR team members, i.e. the team Time-out and the StOP?-protocol, by localizing their start and end times in video recordings of surgical operations. Methods: We generate an OR dataset of real surgeries, called Team-OR, with more than one hundred hours of surgical videos captured by the multi-view camera system in the OR. The dataset contains temporal annotations of 33 Time-out and 22 StOP?-protocol activities in total. We then propose a novel group activity detection approach, where we encode both scene context and action features, and use an efficient neural network model to output the results. Results: The experimental results on the Team-OR dataset show that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art temporal action detection approaches. It also demonstrates the lack of research on group activities in the OR, proving the significance of our dataset. Conclusion: We investigate the Team Time-Out and the StOP?-protocol in the OR, by presenting the first OR dataset with temporal annotations of group activities protocols, and introducing a novel group activity detection approach that outperforms existing approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/CAMMA-public/Team-OR.

Background: Some developer activity traditionally performed manually, such as making code commits, opening, managing, or closing issues is increasingly subject to automation in many OSS projects. Specifically, such activity is often performed by tools that react to events or run at specific times. We refer to such automation tools as bots and, in many software mining scenarios related to developer productivity or code quality it is desirable to identify bots in order to separate their actions from actions of individuals. Aim: Find an automated way of identifying bots and code committed by these bots, and to characterize the types of bots based on their activity patterns. Method and Result: We propose BIMAN, a systematic approach to detect bots using author names, commit messages, files modified by the commit, and projects associated with the ommits. For our test data, the value for AUC-ROC was 0.9. We also characterized these bots based on the time patterns of their code commits and the types of files modified, and found that they primarily work with documentation files and web pages, and these files are most prevalent in HTML and JavaScript ecosystems. We have compiled a shareable dataset containing detailed information about 461 bots we found (all of whom have more than 1000 commits) and 13,762,430 commits they created.

Working adults spend nearly one third of their daily time at their jobs. In this paper, we study job-related social media discourse from a community of users. We use both crowdsourcing and local expertise to train a classifier to detect job-related messages on Twitter. Additionally, we analyze the linguistic differences in a job-related corpus of tweets between individual users vs. commercial accounts. The volumes of job-related tweets from individual users indicate that people use Twitter with distinct monthly, daily, and hourly patterns. We further show that the moods associated with jobs, positive and negative, have unique diurnal rhythms.

We present the Twitter Job/Employment Corpus, a collection of tweets annotated by a humans-in-the-loop supervised learning framework that integrates crowdsourcing contributions and expertise on the local community and employment environment. Previous computational studies of job-related phenomena have used corpora collected from workplace social media that are hosted internally by the employers, and so lacks independence from latent job-related coercion and the broader context that an open domain, general-purpose medium such as Twitter provides. Our new corpus promises to be a benchmark for the extraction of job-related topics and advanced analysis and modeling, and can potentially benefit a wide range of research communities in the future.

Existing activity tracker datasets for human activity recognition are typically obtained by having participants perform predefined activities in an enclosed environment under supervision. This results in small datasets with a limited number of activities and heterogeneity, lacking the mixed and nuanced movements normally found in free-living scenarios. As such, models trained on laboratory-style datasets may not generalise out of sample. To address this problem, we introduce a new dataset involving wrist-worn accelerometers, wearable cameras, and sleep diaries, enabling data collection for over 24 hours in a free-living setting. The result is CAPTURE-24, a large activity tracker dataset collected in the wild from 151 participants, amounting to 3883 hours of accelerometer data, of which 2562 hours are annotated. CAPTURE-24 is two to three orders of magnitude larger than existing publicly available datasets, which is critical to developing accurate human activity recognition models.

As unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) continue to integrate into the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS), there is a need to quantify the risk of airborne collisions between unmanned and manned aircraft to support regulation and standards development. Developing and certifying collision avoidance systems often rely on the extensive use of Monte Carlo collision risk analysis simulations using probabilistic models of aircraft flight. To train these models, high performance computing resources are required. We've prototyped a high performance computing workflow designed and deployed on the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center to process billions of observations of aircraft. However, the prototype has various computational and storage bottlenecks that limited rapid or more comprehensive analyses and models. In response, we have developed a novel workflow to take advantage of various job launch and task distribution technologies to improve performance. The workflow was benchmarked using two datasets of observations of aircraft, including a new dataset focused on the environment around aerodromes. Optimizing how the workflow was parallelized drastically reduced the execution time from weeks to days.

Employment contracts are used to agree upon the working conditions between employers and employees all over the world. Understanding and reviewing contracts for void or unfair clauses requires extensive knowledge of the legal system and terminology. Recent advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) hold promise for assisting in these reviews. However, applying NLP techniques on legal text is particularly difficult due to the scarcity of expert-annotated datasets. To address this issue and as a starting point for our effort in assisting lawyers with contract reviews using NLP, we release an anonymized and annotated benchmark dataset for legality and fairness review of German employment contract clauses, alongside with baseline model evaluations.