arXiv subjects

Ophelia Deroy

Publications and source records attributed to Ophelia Deroy.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Just aware enough: Evaluating awareness across artificial systems

Recent debates on artificial intelligence increasingly emphasise questions of AI consciousness and moral status, yet there remains little agreement on how such properties should be evaluated. In this paper, we argue that awareness offers a more productive and methodologically tractable alternative. We introduce a practical method for evaluating awareness across diverse systems, where awareness is understood as encompassing a system's abilities to process, store and use information in the service of goal-directed action. Central to this approach is the claim that any evaluation aiming to capture the diversity of artificial systems must be domain-sensitive, deployable at any scale, multidimensional, and enable the prediction of task performance, while generalising to the level of abilities for the sake of comparison. Given these four desiderata, we outline a structured approach to evaluating and comparing awareness profiles across artificial systems with differing architectures, scales, and operational domains. By shifting the focus from artificial consciousness to being just aware enough, this approach aims to facilitate principled assessment, support design and oversight, and enable more constructive scientific and public discourse.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

A recommender network perspective on the informational value of critics and crowds

How do the ratings of critics and amateurs compare and how should they be combined? Previous research has produced mixed results about the first question, while the second remains unanswered. We have created a new, unique dataset, with wine ratings from critics and amateurs, and simulated a recommender system using the k-nearest-neighbor algorithm. We then formalized the advice seeking network spanned by that algorithm and studied people's relative influence. We find that critics are more consistent than amateurs, and thus their advice is more predictive than advice from amateurs. Getting advice from both groups can further boost performance. Our network theoretic approach allows us to identify influential critics, talented amateurs, and the information flow between groups. Our results provide evidence about the informational function of critics, while our framework is broadly applicable and can be leveraged to devise good decision strategies and more transparent recommender systems.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2024

The impact of labeling automotive AI as "trustworthy" or "reliable" on user evaluation and technology acceptance

This study explores whether labeling AI as "trustworthy" or "reliable" influences user perceptions and acceptance of automotive AI technologies. Using a one-way between-subjects design, the research involved 478 online participants who were presented with guidelines for either trustworthy or reliable AI. Participants then evaluated three vignette scenarios and completed a modified version of the Technology Acceptance Model, which included variables such as perceived ease of use, human-like trust, and overall attitude. Although labeling AI as "trustworthy" did not significantly influence judgments on specific scenarios, it increased perceived ease of use and human-like trust, particularly benevolence. This suggests a positive impact on usability and an anthropomorphic effect on user perceptions. The study provides insights into how specific labels can influence attitudes toward AI technology.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Mining Reasons For And Against Vaccination From Unstructured Data Using Nichesourcing and AI Data Augmentation

We present Reasons For and Against Vaccination (RFAV), a dataset for predicting reasons for and against vaccination, and scientific authorities used to justify them, annotated through nichesourcing and augmented using GPT4 and GPT3.5-Turbo. We show how it is possible to mine these reasons in non-structured text, under different task definitions, despite the high level of subjectivity involved and explore the impact of artificially augmented data using in-context learning with GPT4 and GPT3.5-Turbo. We publish the dataset and the trained models along with the annotation manual used to train annotators and define the task.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Awareness in robotics: An early perspective from the viewpoint of the EIC Pathfinder Challenge "Awareness Inside''

Consciousness has been historically a heavily debated topic in engineering, science, and philosophy. On the contrary, awareness had less success in raising the interest of scholars in the past. However, things are changing as more and more researchers are getting interested in answering questions concerning what awareness is and how it can be artificially generated. The landscape is rapidly evolving, with multiple voices and interpretations of the concept being conceived and techniques being developed. The goal of this paper is to summarize and discuss the ones among these voices connected with projects funded by the EIC Pathfinder Challenge called ``Awareness Inside'', a nonrecurring call for proposals within Horizon Europe designed specifically for fostering research on natural and synthetic awareness. In this perspective, we dedicate special attention to challenges and promises of applying synthetic awareness in robotics, as the development of mature techniques in this new field is expected to have a special impact on generating more capable and trustworthy embodied systems.

cs.RO↗