Italy

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become commonplace in addressing major challenges in computer vision. Researchers are not only coming up with new CNN architectures but are also researching different techniques to improve the performance of existing architectures. However, there is a tendency to over-emphasize performance improvement while neglecting certain important variables such as simplicity, versatility, the fairness of comparisons, and energy efficiency. Overlooking these variables in architectural design and evaluation has led to research bias and a significantly negative environmental impact. Furthermore, this can undermine the positive impact of research in using deep learning models to tackle climate change. Here, we perform an extensive and fair empirical study of a number of proposed techniques to gauge the utility of each technique for segmentation and classification. Our findings restate the importance of favoring simplicity over complexity in model design (Occam&#39;s Razor). Furthermore, our results indicate that simple standardized practices can lead to a significant reduction in environmental impact with little drop in performance. We highlight that there is a need to rethink the design and evaluation of CNNs to alleviate the issue of research bias and carbon emissions.

AIxIA 2021

Highlighting the Importance of Reducing Research Bias and Carbon Emissions in CNNs

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The 20th International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (**AIxIA 2021**) is organized by AIxIA (Associazione Italiana per l’Intelligenza Artificiale), which is a non-profit scientific society founded in 1988 and devoted to the promotion of Artificial Intelligence. The society aims to increase the public awareness of AI, encourage the teaching of it and promote research in the field.

 
 



**General Chair**

Stefania Bandini, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italyand RCAST - The University of Tokyo, Japan


**Program Chairs**

Viviana Mascardi, University of Genova, Italy; Matteo Palmonari, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy; Giuseppe Vizzari, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

**Organizing Committee**

Francesca Gasparini, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy (**Chair**); Stefano Ferilli, University of Bari, Italy; Marta Giltri, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy; Daniela Briola, University of Insubria, Italy


**Publicity and Communication Committee**

Elisabetta Fersini, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy (**Chair**); Angelo Ferrando, University of Genova, Italy; Francesca Alessandra Lisi, University of Bari, Italy; Giovanni Stilo, University of L'Aquila, Italy; Marco Viviani, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy


**Workshop Chairs**

Gabriella Cortellessa, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy; Silvia Rossi, University of Naples Federico II, Italy; Fabio Stella, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy


**PC Members**

Fulvio Mastrogiovanni, University of Genova, Italy; Roberto Basili, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy; Nicola Gatti, Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy; Stefano Bistarelli, University of Perugia, Italy; Piero Poccianti, Consorzio Operativo Gruppo MPS, Italy; Francesco Scarcello, University of Calabria, Italy; Flavio S. Correa Da Silva, University of São Paulo, Brazil; Elena Cabrio, Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS, Inria, I3S, France; Antonio Lieto, University of Turin, Italy; Diego Calvanese, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy; Alessio Micheli, University of Pisa, Italy; Francesca A. Lisi University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy; Mauro Vallati, University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom; Bernardo Magnini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Italy; Luigia C. Aiello, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy; Rafael H. Bordini, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil; Chiara Ghidini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Italy; Federico Bergenti, University of Parma, Italy; Francesco Ricca, University of Calabria, Italy; Andrea Burattin, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark; Angelo Oddi, ISTC-CNR, Italian National Research Council, Italy; Farshad Badie, Aalborg University, Denmark; Emanuel Sallinger, University of Oxford, United Kingdom; Marin Lujak, University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain; Giancarlo Fortino, University of Calabria, Italy; Salvatore Gaglio, University of Palermo, Italy; Johannes K. Fichte, TU Dresden, Germany; Matteo Baldoni, University of Turin, Italy; Fabrizio Riguzzi, Univeristy of Ferrara, Italy; Ivana Dusparic, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland; Serena Villata, CNRS - Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux et Systèmes de Sophia-Antipolis, France; Paolo Rosso, Technical University of Valencia, Spain; Ana L. C. Bazzan, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil; Gianluigi Greco, University of Calabria, Italy; Stefano Cagnoni, University of Parma, Italy; Gian Luca Pozzato, University of Turin, Italy; Salvatore Ruggieri, University of Turin, Italy; Claudio Di Ciccio, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy; Eloisa Vargiu, Cetaqua, Water Technology Center, Spain; Marco Maratea, University of Genova, Italy; Andrea Roli, University of Bologna, Italy; Viviana Patti, University of Turin, Italy; Stefania Costantini, University of L'Aquila, Italy; Antonius Weinzierl, Vienna University of Technology, Austria; Silvia Rossi, University of Naples Federico II, Italy; Giovanni Semeraro, University of Bari, Italy; Luciano Serafini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Italy; Laura Giordano, University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy; Ernesto Jimenez-Ruiz, City, University of London, United Kingdom; Marco Gavanelli, University of Ferrara, Italy; Federico Chesani, University of Bologna, Italy

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The 20th International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA 2021) is organized by AIxIA (Associazione Italiana per l’Intelligenza Artificiale), which is a non-profit scientific society founded in 1988 and devoted to the promotion of Artificial Intelligence. The society aims to increase the public awareness of AI, encourage the teaching of it and promote research in the field.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become commonplace in addressing major challenges in computer vision. Researchers are not only coming up with new CNN architectures but are also researching different techniques to improve the performance of existing architectures. However, there is a tendency to over-emphasize performance improvement while neglecting certain important variables such as simplicity, versatility, the fairness of comparisons, and energy efficiency. Overlooking these variables in architectural design and evaluation has led to research bias and a significantly negative environmental impact. Furthermore, this can undermine the positive impact of research in using deep learning models to tackle climate change. Here, we perform an extensive and fair empirical study of a number of proposed techniques to gauge the utility of each technique for segmentation and classification. Our findings restate the importance of favoring simplicity over complexity in model design (Occam's Razor). Furthermore, our results indicate that simple standardized practices can lead to a significant reduction in environmental impact with little drop in performance. We highlight that there is a need to rethink the design and evaluation of CNNs to alleviate the issue of research bias and carbon emissions.

technical paper

Sparse-reward environments are famously challenging for deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms. Yet, the prospect of solving intrinsically sparse tasks in an end-to-end fashion without any extra reward engineering is highly appealing. Such aspiration has recently led to the development of numerous DRL algorithms able to handle sparse-reward environments to some extent. Some methods have even gone one step further and have tackled sparse tasks involving different kinds of distractors (e.g. broken TV, self-moving phantom objects and many more). In this work, we put forward two motivating new sparse-reward environments containing the so-far largely overlooked class of exploration-intensive distractors. Furthermore, we conduct a benchmarking which reveals that state-of-the-art algorithms are not yet all-around suitable for solving the proposed environments.

Exploration-Intensive Distractors: Two Environment Proposals and a Benchmarking

Generating textual explanations for CNNs using knowledge graphs

The recent success of deep learning models in solving complex problems and in different domains has increased interest in understanding what they learn. Therefore, different approaches have been employed to explain these models, one of which uses human-understandable concepts as explanations. Two examples of methods that use this approach are Network Dissection and Compositional explanations. The former explains units using atomic concepts, while the latter makes explanations more expressive, replacing atomic concepts with logical forms. While intuitively, logical forms are more informative than atomic concepts, it is not clear how to quantify this improvement, and their evaluation is often based on the same metric that is optimized during the search-process and on the usage of hyper-parameters to be tuned. In this paper, we propose to use as evaluation metric the Detection Accuracy, which measures units' consistency of detection of their assigned explanations. We show that this metric (1) evaluates explanations of different lengths effectively, (2) can be used as a stopping criterion for the compositional explanation search, eliminating the explanation length hyper-parameter, and (3) exposes new specialized units whose length 1 explanations are the perceptual abstractions of their longer explanations.

Detection Accuracy for Evaluating Compositional Explanations of Units

Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Technology Policy Making Using Attribution Networks

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems have been shown to perform impressively on many language pairs compared to Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). However, these systems are data-intensive, which is problematic for the majority of language pairs, and especially for low-resource languages. In this work, we address this issue in the case of certain Arabic dialects, those variants of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) that are spelling non-standard, morphologically rich, and yet resource-poor variants. Here, we have experimented with several multitasking learning strategies to take advantage of the relationships between these dialects. Despite the simplicity of this idea, empirical results show that several multitasking learning strategies are capable of achieving remarkable performance compared to statistical machine translation. For instance, we obtained the BLUE scores for the Algerian → Modern-Standard-Arabic and the Moroccan → Palestinian of 35.06 and 27.55, respectively, while the scores obtained with a statistical method are 15.1 and 18.91 respectively. We show that on 42 machine translation experiments, and despite the use of a small corpus, multitasking learning achieves better performance than statistical machine translation in 88% of cases.

Improving Machine Translation of Arabic Dialects through Multi-Task Learning

In this paper, we present the results of an empirical evaluation investigating how recommendation algorithms are affected by popularity bias. Popularity bias makes more popular items to be recommended more frequently than less popular ones, thus it is one of the most relevant issues that limits the fairness of recommender systems. In particular, we define an experimental protocol based on two state-of-theart datasets containing users’ preferences on movies and books and three different recommendation paradigms, i.e., collaborative filtering, content-based filtering and graph-based algorithms. In order to evaluate the overall fairness of the recommendations we use well-known metrics such as Catalogue Coverage, Gini Index and Group Average Popularity (ΔGAP). The goal of this paper is: (i) to provide a clear picture of how recommendation techniques are affected by popularity bias; (ii) to trigger further research in the area aimed to introduce methods to mitigate or reduce biases in order to provide fairer recommendations.

Fairness and Popularity Bias in Recommender Systems: an Empirical Evaluation

On the Impact of Social Media Recommendations on Opinion Consensus

Misogynous MEME Recognition: A Preliminary Study

Symbolic knowledge representation and reasoning and deep learning are fundamentally different approaches to artificial intelligence with complementary capabilities. The former are transparent and data-efficient, but they are sensitive to noise and cannot be applied to non-symbolic domains where the data is ambiguous. The latter can learn complex tasks from examples, are robust to noise, but are black boxes; require large amounts of - not necessarily easily obtained - data, and are slow to learn and prone to adversarial examples. Either paradigm excels at certain types of problems where the other paradigm performs poorly. In order to develop stronger AI systems, integrated neuro-symbolic systems that combine artificial neural networks and symbolic reasoning are being sought. In this context, one of the fundamental open problems is how to perform logic-based deductive reasoning over knowledge bases by means of trainable artificial neural networks. In this talk we will present and discuss recent advances made on this topic, and concrete pointers to open research questions.

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