Umeå University's logo

The field of hybrid human-artificial intelligence (HHAI), although primarily driven by developments in AI, also requires fundamentally new approaches and solutions. Multidisciplinary in nature, it calls for collaboration across various research domains, such as AI, HCI, the cognitive and social sciences, philosophy and ethics, and complex systems, to name but a few.

This book presents the proceedings of HHAI 2024, the 3rd International Conference on Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence, held from 10-14 June 2024 in Malmö, Sweden. The focus of HHAI 2024 was on artificially-intelligent systems that cooperate synergistically, proactively and purposefully with humans, amplifying rather than replacing human intelligence. A total of 62 submissions were received for the main track of the conference, of which 31 were accepted for presentation after a thorough double blind review process. These comprised 9 full papers, 5 blue sky papers, and 17 working papers, making the final acceptance rate for full papers 29%. Acceptance rate across all tracks of the main program was 50%. This book contains all submissions accepted for the main track, as well as the proposals for the Doctoral Consortium and extended abstracts from the Posters and Demos track. Topics covered include human-AI interaction and collaboration; learning, reasoning and planning with humans and machines in the loop; fair, ethical, responsible, and trustworthy AI; societal awareness of AI; and the role of design and compositionality of AI systems in interpretable/collaborative AI, among others.

Providing a current overview of research and development, the book will be of interest to all those working in the field and facilitate the ongoing exchange and development of ideas across a range of disciplines.

We humans learn language and how to interact with the world through our different senses, grounding our language in what we can see, touch, hear, and smell. We call these streams of information different modalities, and our efficient processing and synthesis of the interactions between different modalities is a cornerstone of our intelligence. Therefore, it is important to study how we can build multimodal language models, where machine learning models learn from more than just text. This is particularly important in the era of large language models (LLMs), where their general capabilities are unclear and unreliable. This thesis investigates learning and reasoning in multimodal language models, and their capabilities to compositionally generalise in visual question answering tasks. Compositional generalisation is the process in which we produce and understand novel sentences, by systematically combining words and sentences to uncover the meaning in language, and has proven a challenge for neural networks. Previously, the literature has focused on compositional generalisation in text-only language models. One of the main contributions of this work is the extensive investigation of text-image language models. The experiments in this thesis compare three neural network-based models, and one neuro-symbolic method, and operationalise language grounding as the ability to reason with relevant functions over object affordances.

In order to better understand the capabilities of multimodal models, this thesis introduces CLEVR-Math as a synthetic benchmark of visual mathematical reasoning. The CLEVR-Math dataset involve tasks such as adding and removing objects from 3D scenes based on textual instructions, such as \emph{Remove all blue cubes. How many objects are left?}, and is given as a curriculum of tasks of increasing complexity. The evaluation set of CLEVR-Math includes extensive testing of different functional and object attribute generalisations. We open up the internal representations of these models using a technique called probing, where linear classifiers are trained to recover concepts such as colours or named entities from the internal embeddings of input data. The results show that while models are fairly good at generalisation with attributes (i.e.~solving tasks involving never before seen objects), it is a big challenge to generalise over functions and to learn abstractions such as categories. The results also show that complexity in the training data is a driver of generalisation, where an extended curriculum improves the general performance across tasks and generalisation tests. Furthermore, it is shown that training from scratch versus transfer learning has significant effects on compositional generalisation in models.

The results identify several aspects of how current methods can be improved in the future, and highlight general challenges in multimodal language models. A thorough investigation of compositional generalisation suggests that the pre-training of models allow models access to inductive biases that can be useful to solve new tasks. Contrastingly, models trained from scratch show much lower overall performance on the synthetic tasks at hand, but show lower relative generalisation gaps. In the conclusions and outlook, we discuss the implications of these results as well as future research directions.

This paper explores the integration of mixed-initiative systems in human-AI teams to improve coordination and communication in Search and Rescue (SAR) scenarios, leveraging dynamic control sharing to enhance operational effectiveness.

Fairness is central to the ethical and responsible development and use of AI systems, with a large number of frameworks and formal notions of algorithmic fairness being available. However, many of the fairness solutions proposed revolve around technical considerations and not the needs of and consequences for the most impacted communities. We therefore want to take the focus away from definitions and allow for the inclusion of societal and relational aspects to represent how the effects of AI systems impact and are experienced by individuals and social groups. In this paper, we do this by means of proposing the ACROCPoLis framework to represent allocation processes with a modeling emphasis on fairness aspects. The framework provides a shared vocabulary in which the factors relevant to fairness assessments for different situations and procedures are made explicit, as well as their interrelationships. This enables us to compare analogous situations, to highlight the differences in dissimilar situations, and to capture differing interpretations of the same situation by different stakeholders.

We introduce CLEVR-Math, a multi-modal math word problems dataset consisting of simple math word problems involving addition/subtraction, represented partly by a textual description and partly by an image illustrating the scenario. The text describes actions performed on the scene that is depicted in the image. Since the question posed may not be about the scene in the image, but about the state of the scene before or after the actions are applied, the solver envision or imagine the state changes due to these actions. Solving these word problems requires a combination of language, visual and mathematical reasoning. We apply state-of-the-art neural and neuro-symbolic models for visual question answering on CLEVR-Math and empirically evaluate their performances. Our results show how neither method generalise to chains of operations. We discuss the limitations of the two in addressing the task of multi-modal word problem solving.

There is a growing consensus that surface form alone does not enable models to learn meaning and gain language understanding. This warrants an interest in hybrid systems that combine the strengths of neural and symbolic methods. We favour triadic systems consisting of neural networks, knowledge bases, and inference engines. The network provides perception, that is, the interface between the system and its environment. The knowledge base provides explicit memory and thus immediate access to established facts. Finally, inference capabilities are provided by the inference engine which reflects on the perception, supported by memory, to reason and discover new facts. In this work, we probe six popular language models for semantic relations and outline a future line of research to study how the constituent subsystems can be jointly realised and integrated.

We present an ASR based pipeline for Amharic that orchestrates NLP components within a cross media analysis framework (CMAF). One of the major challenges that are inherently associated with CMAFs is effectively addressing multi-lingual issues. As a result, many languages remain under-resourced and fail to leverage out of available media analysis solutions. Although spoken natively by over 22 million people and there is an ever-increasing amount of Amharic multimedia content on the Web, querying them with simple text search is difficult. Searching for, especially audio/video content with simple key words, is even hard as they exist in their raw form. In this study, we introduce a spoken and textual content processing workflow into a CMAF for Amharic. We design an ASR-named entity recognition (NER) pipeline that includes three main components: ASR, a transliterator and NER. We explore various acoustic modeling techniques and develop an OpenNLP-based NER extractor along with a transliterator that interfaces between ASR and NER. The designed ASR-NER pipeline for Amharic promotes the multi-lingual support of CMAFs. Also, the state-of-the art design principles and techniques employed in this study shed light for other less-resourced languages, particularly the Semitic ones.

Semantic embeddings have advanced the state of the art for countless natural language processing tasks, and various extensions to multimodal domains, such as visual-semantic embeddings, have been proposed. While the power of visual-semantic embeddings comes from the distillation and enrichment of information through machine learning, their inner workings are poorly understood and there is a shortage of analysis tools. To address this problem, we generalize the notion of probing tasks to the visual-semantic case. To this end, we (i) discuss the formalization of probing tasks for embeddings of image-caption pairs, (ii) define three concrete probing tasks within our general framework, (iii) train classifiers to probe for those properties, and (iv) compare various state-of-the-art embeddings under the lens of the proposed probing tasks. Our experiments reveal an up to 12% increase in accuracy on visual-semantic embeddings compared to the corresponding unimodal embeddings, which suggest that the text and image dimensions represented in the former do complement each other

MICO is an open-source platform for cross-media analysis, querying, and recommendation. It is the major outcome of the European research project Media in Context, and has been contributed to by academic and industrial partners from Germany, Austria, Sweden, Italy, and the UK. A central idea is to group sets of related media objects into multimodal content items, and to process and store these as logical units. The platform is designed to be easy to extend and adapt, and this makes it a useful building block for a diverse set of multimedia applications. To promote the platform and demonstrate its potential, we describe our work on a Kaldi-based speech-recognition pipeline.