Judgment Sieve: Reducing Uncertainty in Group Judgments through Interventions Targeting Ambiguity versus Disagreement

When groups of people are tasked with making a judgment, the issue of uncertainty often arises. Existing methods to reduce uncertainty typically focus on iteratively improving specificity in the overall task instruction. However, uncertainty can arise from multiple sources, such as ambiguity of the item being judged due to limited context, or disagreements among the participants due to different perspectives and an under-specified task. A one-size-fits-all intervention may be ineffective if it is not targeted to the right source of uncertainty. In this paper we introduce a new workflow, Judgment Sieve, to reduce uncertainty in tasks involving group judgment in a targeted manner. By utilizing measurements that separate different sources of uncertainty during an initial round of judgment elicitation, we can then select a targeted intervention adding context or deliberation to most effectively reduce uncertainty on each item being judged. We test our approach on two tasks: rating word pair similarity and toxicity of online comments, showing that targeted interventions reduced uncertainty for the most uncertain cases. In the top 10% of cases, we saw an ambiguity reduction of 21.4% and 25.7%, and a disagreement reduction of 22.2% and 11.2% for the two tasks respectively. We also found through a simulation that our targeted approach reduced the average uncertainty scores for both sources of uncertainty as opposed to uniform approaches where reductions in average uncertainty from one source came with an increase for the other

Unconventional Superconducting Symmetry in a Checkerboard Antiferromagnet

We use a renormalized mean field theory to study the Gutzwiller projected BCS states of the extended Hubbard model in the large $U$ limit, or the $t$-$t'$-$J$-$J'$ model on a two-dimensional checkerboard lattice. At small $t'/t$, the frustration due to the diagonal terms of $t'$ and $J'$ does not alter the $d_{x^2-y^2}$-wave pairing symmetry, and the negative (positive) $t'/t$ enhances (suppresses) the pairing order parameter. At large $t'/t$, the ground state has an extended s-wave symmetry. At the intermediate $t'/t$, the ground state is $d+id$ or $d+is$-wave with time reversal symmetry broken.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Efficacy of vitreoretinal surgery in the treatment of X-linked retinoschisis with serious complications

AIM: To evaluate the efficacy of vitreoretinal surgery in the treatment of X-linked retinoschisis(XLRS)and its complications. <p>METHODS: A retrospective study was made on all the XLRS patients with severe complications after operation in this hospital. All the 25 patients(31 eyes)present with macular abnormalities with/without peripheral retina split bypreoperative OCT examination. Among the 31 eyes, there were 7 eyes with vitreous hemorrhage, 8 eyes with retinal detachment and vitreous hemorrhage, and 16 eyes with rhegmatogenous retinal detachment. All the 31 eyes were divided into 2 groups: group A included 15 eyes which underwent photocoagulation before the surgery, while the other 16 eyes in group B didn't perform photocoagulation before the surgery. All the patients underwent a pars plana vitrectomy without lensectomy associated with internal limiting membrane peeling. Photocoagulation was done to the retinal holes and degeneration areas in group A. Gas or silicone oil was filled in group B after retinal photocoagulation treatment. Three years later, analysis was made on the results of the visual acuity, postoperative anatomical and functional outcome in these 2 groups. Statistical analysis was made on the results of average visual acuity before and after operation by SPSS software method, the difference was statistically significant(<i>P</i><0.05). The differences of changes of visual acuity in two groups were statistically significant by one-way analysis of variance method. <p>RESULTS: Postoperative anatomical and functional outcome were satisfied at the last visit. A total of 23 eyes'(74.2%)visual acuity were improved with the mean visual acuity increasing from 0.13±0.08 to 0.24±0.16, the difference was statistically significant(<i>t</i>=-5.354,<i>P</i>=0.000). The average visual acuity in group A was improved from 0.11±0.08 to 0.22±0.15 after operation(<i>t</i>=-4.391, <i>P</i>=0.000). While the average visual acuity in group B increased from 0.14±0.08 to 0.26±0.15(<i>t</i>=-4.488, <i>P</i>=0.000). The visual changes in two groups were statistical significance. But when compared the average changes of visual acuity before and after operation between two groups, <i>F</i>=4.055, <i>P</i>=0.069, there was no statistical significance. During the following-up period, the complications were found in three eyes, among which two eyes presented with proliferative vitroretinopathy and traction retinal detachment 10 and 12 months after surgery, and one eye presented with cataract 3 months after surgery. Two eyes belonged to group A while the third eye pertain to group B. After reoperation, all the three eyes have good prognosis and retinoschisis didn't worsen.<p>CONCLUSION: Vitreoretinal surgery can be applied to the treatment of X-linked congenital retinoschisis and its complication, effectively preventing the deterioration of schisis cavity and contributing to the improvement and stabilization of visual acuity and resuming the anatomic structure of retina

Kinetic behavior of the general modifier mechanism of Botts and Morales with non-equilibrium binding

In this paper, we perform a complete analysis of the kinetic behavior of the general modifier mechanism of Botts and Morales in both equilibrium steady states and non-equilibrium steady states (NESS). Enlightened by the non-equilibrium theory of Markov chains, we introduce the net flux into discussion and acquire an expression of product rate in NESS, which has clear biophysical significance. Up till now, it is a general belief that being an activator or an inhibitor is an intrinsic property of the modifier. However, we reveal that this traditional point of view is based on the equilibrium assumption. A modifier may no longer be an overall activator or inhibitor when the reaction system is not in equilibrium. Based on the regulation of enzyme activity by the modifier concentration, we classify the kinetic behavior of the modifier into three categories, which are named hyperbolic behavior, bell-shaped behavior, and switching behavior, respectively. We show that the switching phenomenon, in which a modifier may convert between an activator and an inhibitor when the modifier concentration varies, occurs only in NESS. Effects of drugs on the Pgp ATPase activity, where drugs may convert from activators to inhibitors with the increase of the drug concentration, are taken as a typical example to demonstrate the occurrence of the switching phenomenon.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figure

The Analysis of Chinese Sentence Semantic Chunk Share Based on HNC Theory

PACLIC 20 / Wuhan, China / 1-3 November, 200

Confidence Contours: Uncertainty-Aware Annotation for Medical Semantic Segmentation

Medical image segmentation modeling is a high-stakes task where understanding of uncertainty is crucial for addressing visual ambiguity. Prior work has developed segmentation models utilizing probabilistic or generative mechanisms to infer uncertainty from labels where annotators draw a singular boundary. However, as these annotations cannot represent an individual annotator's uncertainty, models trained on them produce uncertainty maps that are difficult to interpret. We propose a novel segmentation representation, Confidence Contours, which uses high- and low-confidence ``contours'' to capture uncertainty directly, and develop a novel annotation system for collecting contours. We conduct an evaluation on the Lung Image Dataset Consortium (LIDC) and a synthetic dataset. From an annotation study with 30 participants, results show that Confidence Contours provide high representative capacity without considerably higher annotator effort. We also find that general-purpose segmentation models can learn Confidence Contours at the same performance level as standard singular annotations. Finally, from interviews with 5 medical experts, we find that Confidence Contour maps are more interpretable than Bayesian maps due to representation of structural uncertainty.Comment: 10 pages content, 12 pages total. Accepted to HCOMP '2