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Pattie Maes

Publications and source records attributed to Pattie Maes.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

Text2Tradition: From Epistemological Tensions to AI-Mediated Cross-Cultural Co-Creation

This paper introduces Text2Tradition, a system designed to bridge the epistemological gap between modern language processing and traditional dance knowledge by translating user-generated prompts into Thai classical dance sequences. Our approach focuses on six traditional choreographic elements from No. 60 in Mae Bot Yai, a revered Thai dance repertoire, which embodies culturally specific knowledge passed down through generations. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) represent a different form of knowledge--data-driven, statistically derived, and often Western-centric. This research explores the potential of AI-mediated systems to connect traditional and contemporary art forms, highlighting the epistemological tensions and opportunities in cross-cultural translation.

cs.HC↗

People over trust AI-generated medical responses and view them to be as valid as doctors, despite low accuracy

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of how AI-generated medical responses are perceived and evaluated by non-experts. A total of 300 participants gave evaluations for medical responses that were either written by a medical doctor on an online healthcare platform, or generated by a large language model and labeled by physicians as having high or low accuracy. Results showed that participants could not effectively distinguish between AI-generated and Doctors' responses and demonstrated a preference for AI-generated responses, rating High Accuracy AI-generated responses as significantly more valid, trustworthy, and complete/satisfactory. Low Accuracy AI-generated responses on average performed very similar to Doctors' responses, if not more. Participants not only found these low-accuracy AI-generated responses to be valid, trustworthy, and complete/satisfactory but also indicated a high tendency to follow the potentially harmful medical advice and incorrectly seek unnecessary medical attention as a result of the response provided. This problematic reaction was comparable if not more to the reaction they displayed towards doctors' responses. This increased trust placed on inaccurate or inappropriate AI-generated medical advice can lead to misdiagnosis and harmful consequences for individuals seeking help. Further, participants were more trusting of High Accuracy AI-generated responses when told they were given by a doctor and experts rated AI-generated responses significantly higher when the source of the response was unknown. Both experts and non-experts exhibited bias, finding AI-generated responses to be more thorough and accurate than Doctors' responses but still valuing the involvement of a Doctor in the delivery of their medical advice. Ensuring AI systems are implemented with medical professionals should be the future of using AI for the delivery of medical advice.

cs.HC↗

Conversational AI Powered by Large Language Models Amplifies False Memories in Witness Interviews

This study examines the impact of AI on human false memories -- recollections of events that did not occur or deviate from actual occurrences. It explores false memory induction through suggestive questioning in Human-AI interactions, simulating crime witness interviews. Four conditions were tested: control, survey-based, pre-scripted chatbot, and generative chatbot using a large language model (LLM). Participants (N=200) watched a crime video, then interacted with their assigned AI interviewer or survey, answering questions including five misleading ones. False memories were assessed immediately and after one week. Results show the generative chatbot condition significantly increased false memory formation, inducing over 3 times more immediate false memories than the control and 1.7 times more than the survey method. 36.4% of users' responses to the generative chatbot were misled through the interaction. After one week, the number of false memories induced by generative chatbots remained constant. However, confidence in these false memories remained higher than the control after one week. Moderating factors were explored: users who were less familiar with chatbots but more familiar with AI technology, and more interested in crime investigations, were more susceptible to false memories. These findings highlight the potential risks of using advanced AI in sensitive contexts, like police interviews, emphasizing the need for ethical considerations.

cs.CL↗

Deceptive AI systems that give explanations are more convincing than honest AI systems and can amplify belief in misinformation

Advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, specifically large language models (LLMs), have the capability to generate not just misinformation, but also deceptive explanations that can justify and propagate false information and erode trust in the truth. We examined the impact of deceptive AI generated explanations on individuals' beliefs in a pre-registered online experiment with 23,840 observations from 1,192 participants. We found that in addition to being more persuasive than accurate and honest explanations, AI-generated deceptive explanations can significantly amplify belief in false news headlines and undermine true ones as compared to AI systems that simply classify the headline incorrectly as being true/false. Moreover, our results show that personal factors such as cognitive reflection and trust in AI do not necessarily protect individuals from these effects caused by deceptive AI generated explanations. Instead, our results show that the logical validity of AI generated deceptive explanations, that is whether the explanation has a causal effect on the truthfulness of the AI's classification, plays a critical role in countering their persuasiveness - with logically invalid explanations being deemed less credible. This underscores the importance of teaching logical reasoning and critical thinking skills to identify logically invalid arguments, fostering greater resilience against advanced AI-driven misinformation.

cs.AI↗

Enabling Waypoint Generation for Collaborative Robots using LLMs and Mixed Reality

Programming a robotic is a complex task, as it demands the user to have a good command of specific programming languages and awareness of the robot's physical constraints. We propose a framework that simplifies robot deployment by allowing direct communication using natural language. It uses large language models (LLM) for prompt processing, workspace understanding, and waypoint generation. It also employs Augmented Reality (AR) to provide visual feedback of the planned outcome. We showcase the effectiveness of our framework with a simple pick-and-place task, which we implement on a real robot. Moreover, we present an early concept of expressive robot behavior and skill generation that can be used to communicate with the user and learn new skills (e.g., object grasping).

cs.HC↗

Purrfect Pitch: Exploring Musical Interval Learning through Multisensory Interfaces

We introduce Purrfect Pitch, a system consisting of a wearable haptic device and a custom-designed learning interface for musical ear training. We focus on the ability to identify musical intervals (sequences of two musical notes), which is a perceptually ambiguous task that usually requires strenuous rote training. With our system, the user would hear a sequence of two tones while simultaneously receiving two corresponding vibrotactile stimuli on the back. Providing haptic feedback along the back makes the auditory distance between the two tones more salient, and the back-worn design is comfortable and unobtrusive. During training, the user receives multi-sensory feedback from our system and inputs their guessed interval value on our web-based learning interface. They see a green (otherwise red) screen for a correct guess with the correct interval value. Our study with 18 participants shows that our system enables novice learners to identify intervals more accurately and consistently than those who only received audio feedback, even after the haptic feedback is removed. We also share further insights on how to design a multisensory learning system.

cs.HC↗

Analyzing Speech Motor Movement using Surface Electromyography in Minimally Verbal Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Adults who are minimally verbal with autism spectrum disorder (mvASD) have pronounced speech difficulties linked to impaired motor skills. Existing research and clinical assessments primarily use indirect methods such as standardized tests, video-based facial features, and handwriting tasks, which may not directly target speech-related motor skills. In this study, we measure activity from eight facial muscles associated with speech using surface electromyography (sEMG), during carefully designed tasks. The findings reveal a higher power in the sEMG signals and a significantly greater correlation between the sEMG channels in mvASD adults (N=12) compared to age and gender-matched neurotypical controls (N=14). This suggests stronger muscle activation and greater synchrony in the discharge patterns of motor units. Further, eigenvalues derived from correlation matrices indicate lower complexity in muscle coordination in mvASD, implying fewer degrees of freedom in motor control.

q-bio.NC↗

PhysioLLM: Supporting Personalized Health Insights with Wearables and Large Language Models

We present PhysioLLM, an interactive system that leverages large language models (LLMs) to provide personalized health understanding and exploration by integrating physiological data from wearables with contextual information. Unlike commercial health apps for wearables, our system offers a comprehensive statistical analysis component that discovers correlations and trends in user data, allowing users to ask questions in natural language and receive generated personalized insights, and guides them to develop actionable goals. As a case study, we focus on improving sleep quality, given its measurability through physiological data and its importance to general well-being. Through a user study with 24 Fitbit watch users, we demonstrate that PhysioLLM outperforms both the Fitbit App alone and a generic LLM chatbot in facilitating a deeper, personalized understanding of health data and supporting actionable steps toward personal health goals.

cs.HC↗

Exploring the Impact of AI Value Alignment in Collaborative Ideation: Effects on Perception, Ownership, and Output

AI-based virtual assistants are increasingly used to support daily ideation tasks. The values or bias present in these agents can influence output in hidden ways. They may also affect how people perceive the ideas produced with these AI agents and lead to implications for the design of AI-based tools. We explored the effects of AI agents with different values on the ideation process and user perception of idea quality, ownership, agent competence, and values present in the output. Our study tasked 180 participants with brainstorming practical solutions to a set of problems with AI agents of different values. Results show no significant difference in self-evaluation of idea quality and perception of the agent based on value alignment; however, ideas generated reflected the AI's values and feeling of ownership is affected. This highlights an intricate interplay between AI values and human ideation, suggesting careful design considerations for future AI-supported brainstorming tools.

cs.HC↗

Memoro: Using Large Language Models to Realize a Concise Interface for Real-Time Memory Augmentation

People have to remember an ever-expanding volume of information. Wearables that use information capture and retrieval for memory augmentation can help but can be disruptive and cumbersome in real-world tasks, such as in social settings. To address this, we developed Memoro, a wearable audio-based memory assistant with a concise user interface. Memoro uses a large language model (LLM) to infer the user's memory needs in a conversational context, semantically search memories, and present minimal suggestions. The assistant has two interaction modes: Query Mode for voicing queries and Queryless Mode for on-demand predictive assistance, without explicit query. Our study of (N=20) participants engaged in a real-time conversation demonstrated that using Memoro reduced device interaction time and increased recall confidence while preserving conversational quality. We report quantitative results and discuss the preferences and experiences of users. This work contributes towards utilizing LLMs to design wearable memory augmentation systems that are minimally disruptive.

cs.HC↗

Deceptive AI Systems That Give Explanations Are Just as Convincing as Honest AI Systems in Human-Machine Decision Making

The ability to discern between true and false information is essential to making sound decisions. However, with the recent increase in AI-based disinformation campaigns, it has become critical to understand the influence of deceptive systems on human information processing. In experiment (N=128), we investigated how susceptible people are to deceptive AI systems by examining how their ability to discern true news from fake news varies when AI systems are perceived as either human fact-checkers or AI fact-checking systems, and when explanations provided by those fact-checkers are either deceptive or honest. We find that deceitful explanations significantly reduce accuracy, indicating that people are just as likely to believe deceptive AI explanations as honest AI explanations. Although before getting assistance from an AI-system, people have significantly higher weighted discernment accuracy on false headlines than true headlines, we found that with assistance from an AI system, discernment accuracy increased significantly when given honest explanations on both true headlines and false headlines, and decreased significantly when given deceitful explanations on true headlines and false headlines. Further, we did not observe any significant differences in discernment between explanations perceived as coming from a human fact checker compared to an AI-fact checker. Similarly, we found no significant differences in trust. These findings exemplify the dangers of deceptive AI systems and the need for finding novel ways to limit their influence human information processing.

cs.CY↗

Adaptive Virtual Neuroarchitecture

Our surrounding environment impacts our cognitive-emotional processes on a daily basis and shapes our physical, psychological and social wellbeing. Although the effects of the built environment on our psycho-physiological processes are well studied, virtual environment design with a potentially similar impact on the user, has received limited attention. Based on the influence of space design on a user and combining that with the dynamic affordances of virtual spaces, we present the idea of adaptive virtual neuroarchitecture (AVN), where virtual environments respond to the user and the user's real world context while simultaneously influencing them both in realtime. To show how AVN has been explored in current research, we present a sampling of recent work that demonstrates reciprocal relationships using physical affordances (space, objects), the user's state (physiological, cognitive, emotional), and the virtual world used in the design of novel virtual reality experiences. We believe AVN has the potential to help us learn how to design spaces and environments that can enhance the wellbeing of their inhabitants.

cs.HC↗

Txt2Vid: Ultra-Low Bitrate Compression of Talking-Head Videos via Text

Video represents the majority of internet traffic today, driving a continual race between the generation of higher quality content, transmission of larger file sizes, and the development of network infrastructure. In addition, the recent COVID-19 pandemic fueled a surge in the use of video conferencing tools. Since videos take up considerable bandwidth (~100 Kbps to a few Mbps), improved video compression can have a substantial impact on network performance for live and pre-recorded content, providing broader access to multimedia content worldwide. We present a novel video compression pipeline, called Txt2Vid, which dramatically reduces data transmission rates by compressing webcam videos ("talking-head videos") to a text transcript. The text is transmitted and decoded into a realistic reconstruction of the original video using recent advances in deep learning based voice cloning and lip syncing models. Our generative pipeline achieves two to three orders of magnitude reduction in the bitrate as compared to the standard audio-video codecs (encoders-decoders), while maintaining equivalent Quality-of-Experience based on a subjective evaluation by users (n = 242) in an online study. The Txt2Vid framework opens up the potential for creating novel applications such as enabling audio-video communication during poor internet connectivity, or in remote terrains with limited bandwidth. The code for this work is available at https://github.com/tpulkit/txt2vid.git.

eess.IV↗

Changing Computer-Usage Behaviours: What Users Want, Use, and Experience

Technology based screentime, the time an individual spends engaging with their computer or cell phone, has increased exponentially over the past decade, but perhaps most alarmingly amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Although many software based interventions exist to reduce screentime, users report a variety of issues relating to the timing of the intervention, the strictness of the tool, and its ability to encourage organic, long-term habit formation. We develop guidelines for the design of behaviour intervention software by conducting a survey to investigate three research questions and further inform the mechanisms of computer-related behaviour change applications. RQ1: What do people want to change and why/how? RQ2: What applications do people use or have used, why do they work or not, and what additional support is desired? RQ3: What are helpful/unhelpful computer breaks and why? Our survey had 68 participants and three key findings. First, time management is a primary concern, but emotional and physical side-effects are equally important. Second, site blockers, self-trackers, and timers are commonly used, but they are ineffective as they are easy-to-ignore and not personalized. Third, away-from-computer breaks, especially involving physical activity, are helpful, whereas on-screen breaks are unhelpful, especially when they are long, because they are not refreshing. We recommend personalized and closed-loop computer-usage behaviour change support and especially encouraging off-the-computer screentime breaks.

cs.HC↗

Pretrained Encoders are All You Need

Data-efficiency and generalization are key challenges in deep learning and deep reinforcement learning as many models are trained on large-scale, domain-specific, and expensive-to-label datasets. Self-supervised models trained on large-scale uncurated datasets have shown successful transfer to diverse settings. We investigate using pretrained image representations and spatio-temporal attention for state representation learning in Atari. We also explore fine-tuning pretrained representations with self-supervised techniques, i.e., contrastive predictive coding, spatio-temporal contrastive learning, and augmentations. Our results show that pretrained representations are at par with state-of-the-art self-supervised methods trained on domain-specific data. Pretrained representations, thus, yield data and compute-efficient state representations. https://github.com/PAL-ML/PEARL_v1

cs.LG↗

Personalizing Pre-trained Models

Self-supervised or weakly supervised models trained on large-scale datasets have shown sample-efficient transfer to diverse datasets in few-shot settings. We consider how upstream pretrained models can be leveraged for downstream few-shot, multilabel, and continual learning tasks. Our model CLIPPER (CLIP PERsonalized) uses image representations from CLIP, a large-scale image representation learning model trained using weak natural language supervision. We developed a technique, called Multi-label Weight Imprinting (MWI), for multi-label, continual, and few-shot learning, and CLIPPER uses MWI with image representations from CLIP. We evaluated CLIPPER on 10 single-label and 5 multi-label datasets. Our model shows robust and competitive performance, and we set new benchmarks for few-shot, multi-label, and continual learning. Our lightweight technique is also compute-efficient and enables privacy-preserving applications as the data is not sent to the upstream model for fine-tuning.

cs.CV↗

PAL: Intelligence Augmentation using Egocentric Visual Context Detection

Egocentric visual context detection can support intelligence augmentation applications. We created a wearable system, called PAL, for wearable, personalized, and privacy-preserving egocentric visual context detection. PAL has a wearable device with a camera, heart-rate sensor, on-device deep learning, and audio input/output. PAL also has a mobile/web application for personalized context labeling. We used on-device deep learning models for generic object and face detection, low-shot custom face and context recognition (e.g., activities like brushing teeth), and custom context clustering (e.g., indoor locations). The models had over 80\% accuracy in in-the-wild contexts (~1000 images) and we tested PAL for intelligence augmentation applications like behavior change. We have made PAL is open-source to further support intelligence augmentation using personalized and privacy-preserving egocentric visual contexts.

cs.CV↗

Uncertainty-Aware Boosted Ensembling in Multi-Modal Settings

Reliability of machine learning (ML) systems is crucial in safety-critical applications such as healthcare, and uncertainty estimation is a widely researched method to highlight the confidence of ML systems in deployment. Sequential and parallel ensemble techniques have shown improved performance of ML systems in multi-modal settings by leveraging the feature sets together. We propose an uncertainty-aware boosting technique for multi-modal ensembling in order to focus on the data points with higher associated uncertainty estimates, rather than the ones with higher loss values. We evaluate this method on healthcare tasks related to Dementia and Parkinson's disease which involve real-world multi-modal speech and text data, wherein our method shows an improved performance. Additional analysis suggests that introducing uncertainty-awareness into the boosted ensembles decreases the overall entropy of the system, making it more robust to heteroscedasticity in the data, as well as better calibrating each of the modalities along with high quality prediction intervals. We open-source our entire codebase at https://github.com/usarawgi911/Uncertainty-aware-boosting

cs.LG↗