Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Can Large Language Models emulate an inductive Thematic Analysis of semi-structured interviews? An exploration and provocation on the limits of the approach and the model

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful generative Artificial Intelligence solutions which can be applied to several fields and areas of work. This paper presents results and reflection of an experiment done to use the model GPT 3.5-Turbo to emulate some aspects of an inductive Thematic Analysis. Previous research on this subject has largely worked on conducting deductive analysis. Thematic Analysis is a qualitative method for analysis commonly used in social sciences and it is based on interpretations made by the human analyst(s) and the identification of explicit and latent meanings in qualitative data. Attempting an analysis based on human interpretation with an LLM clearly is a provocation but also a way to learn something about how these systems can or cannot be used in qualitative research. The paper presents the motivations for attempting this emulation, it reflects on how the six steps to a Thematic Analysis proposed by Braun and Clarke can at least partially be reproduced with the LLM and it also reflects on what are the outputs produced by the model. The paper used two existing datasets of open access semi-structured interviews, previously analysed with Thematic Analysis by other researchers. It used the previously produced analysis (and the related themes) to compare with the results produced by the LLM. The results show that the model can infer at least partially some of the main Themes. The objective of the paper is not to replace human analysts in qualitative analysis but to learn if some elements of LLM data manipulation can to an extent be of support for qualitative research.
Robust Dynamic Operating Envelopes for Flexibility Operation Using Only Local Voltage Measurement

With growing intermittency and uncertainty in distribution networks around the world, ensuring operational integrity is becoming challenging. Recent use cases of dynamic operating envelopes (DOEs) indicate that they can be utilized for network awareness for autonomous operation of flexibility, maximizing distributed generation integration, coordinating flexibility in different power networks and in resource planning. To this end, a novel framework is presented for generating decentralized DOEs in realtime using only the nodal voltage measurement and partially de-centralized, risk-averse, robust DOEs in a time-ahead setting using voltage forecast scenarios. Chance constraint level is analytically implemented for avoiding extremely restrictive time-ahead DOEs with insufficient feasible regions for local energy optimization. Since the proposed DOE calculation framework uses none or limited centralized feedback, it is resilient to cyberattacks, communication failures, missing data and errors in network layout information. Numerical results showcase the DOE calculation framework in realtime using voltage magnitude measurements and in day-ahead timeframe using forecasted voltage scenarios. Furthermore, the DOEs are extended to form P-Q charts while considering power factor and converter capacity limits.
GPT-SW3: An Autoregressive Language Model for the Nordic Languages

This paper details the process of developing the first native large generative language model for the Nordic languages, GPT-SW3. We cover all parts of the development process, from data collection and processing, training configuration and instruction finetuning, to evaluation and considerations for release strategies. We hope that this paper can serve as a guide and reference for other researchers that undertake the development of large generative models for smaller languages.
Contextualized End-to-End Speech Recognition with Contextual Phrase Prediction Network

Contextual information plays a crucial role in speech recognition technologies and incorporating it into the end-to-end speech recognition models has drawn immense interest recently. However, previous deep bias methods lacked explicit supervision for bias tasks. In this study, we introduce a contextual phrase prediction network for an attention-based deep bias method. This network predicts context phrases in utterances using contextual embeddings and calculates bias loss to assist in the training of the contextualized model. Our method achieved a significant word error rate (WER) reduction across various end-to-end speech recognition models. Experiments on the LibriSpeech corpus show that our proposed model obtains a 12.1% relative WER improvement over the baseline model, and the WER of the context phrases decreases relatively by 40.5%. Moreover, by applying a context phrase filtering strategy, we also effectively eliminate the WER degradation when using a larger biasing list.
PRODIGY: Enabling In-context Learning Over Graphs

In-context learning is the ability of a pretrained model to adapt to novel and diverse downstream tasks by conditioning on prompt examples, without optimizing any parameters. While large language models have demonstrated this ability, how in-context learning could be performed over graphs is unexplored. In this paper, we develop \textbf{Pr}etraining \textbf{O}ver \textbf{D}iverse \textbf{I}n-Context \textbf{G}raph S\textbf{y}stems (PRODIGY), the first pretraining framework that enables in-context learning over graphs. The key idea of our framework is to formulate in-context learning over graphs with a novel \emph{prompt graph} representation, which connects prompt examples and queries. We then propose a graph neural network architecture over the prompt graph and a corresponding family of in-context pretraining objectives. With PRODIGY, the pretrained model can directly perform novel downstream classification tasks on unseen graphs via in-context learning. We provide empirical evidence of the effectiveness of our framework by showcasing its strong in-context learning performance on tasks involving citation networks and knowledge graphs. Our approach outperforms the in-context learning accuracy of contrastive pretraining baselines with hard-coded adaptation by 18\% on average across all setups. Moreover, it also outperforms standard finetuning with limited data by 33\% on average with in-context learning.
Attentive Graph-based Text-aware Preference Modeling for Top-N Recommendation

Textual data are commonly used as auxiliary information for modeling user preference nowadays. While many prior works utilize user reviews for rating prediction, few focus on top-N recommendation, and even few try to incorporate item textual contents such as title and description. Though delivering promising performance for rating prediction, we empirically find that many review-based models cannot perform comparably well on top-N recommendation. Also, user reviews are not available in some recommendation scenarios, while item textual contents are more prevalent. On the other hand, recent graph convolutional network (GCN) based models demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for top-N recommendation. Thus, in this work, we aim to further improve top-N recommendation by effectively modeling both item textual content and high-order connectivity in user-item graph. We propose a new model named Attentive Graph-based Text-aware Recommendation Model (AGTM). Extensive experiments are provided to justify the rationality and effectiveness of our model design.
SIDAR: Synthetic Image Dataset for Alignment & Restoration

Image alignment and image restoration are classical computer vision tasks. However, there is still a lack of datasets that provide enough data to train and evaluate end-to-end deep learning models. Obtaining ground-truth data for image alignment requires sophisticated structure-from-motion methods or optical flow systems that often do not provide enough data variance, i.e., typically providing a high number of image correspondences, while only introducing few changes of scenery within the underlying image sequences. Alternative approaches utilize random perspective distortions on existing image data. However, this only provides trivial distortions, lacking the complexity and variance of real-world scenarios. Instead, our proposed data augmentation helps to overcome the issue of data scarcity by using 3D rendering: images are added as textures onto a plane, then varying lighting conditions, shadows, and occlusions are added to the scene. The scene is rendered from multiple viewpoints, generating perspective distortions more consistent with real-world scenarios, with homographies closely resembling those of camera projections rather than randomized homographies. For each scene, we provide a sequence of distorted images with corresponding occlusion masks, homographies, and ground-truth labels. The resulting dataset can serve as a training and evaluation set for a multitude of tasks involving image alignment and artifact removal, such as deep homography estimation, dense image matching, 2D bundle adjustment, inpainting, shadow removal, denoising, content retrieval, and background subtraction. Our data generation pipeline is customizable and can be applied to any existing dataset, serving as a data augmentation to further improve the feature learning of any existing method.
Joint Activity-Delay Detection and Channel Estimation for Asynchronous Massive Random Access

Most existing studies on joint activity detection and channel estimation for grant-free massive random access (RA) systems assume perfect synchronization among all active users, which is hard to achieve in practice. Therefore, this paper considers asynchronous grant-free massive RA systems and develops novel algorithms for joint user activity detection, synchronization delay detection, and channel estimation. In particular, the framework of orthogonal approximate message passing (OAMP) is first utilized to deal with the non-independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) pilot matrix in asynchronous grant-free massive RA systems, and an OAMP-based algorithm capable of leveraging the common sparsity among the received pilot signals from multiple base station antennas is developed. To reduce the computational complexity, a memory AMP (MAMP)-based algorithm is further proposed that eliminates the matrix inversions in the OAMP-based algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the two proposed algorithms over the baseline methods. Besides, the MAMP-based algorithm reduces 37% of the computations while maintaining comparable detection/estimation accuracy, compared with the OAMP-based algorithm.
A Minimal Cost Path and Level Set Evolution Approach for Carotid Bifurcation Segmentation

We propose a new approach for semi-automatic segmentation of the carotid bifurcation as part of the Carotid Lumen Segmentation and Stenosis Grading Challenge MICCAI’2009 workshop. Three initial points are provided as input, belonging to the Common, the External and the Internal Carotid Arteries. Our algorithm is divided into two main steps: first, two minimal cost paths are tracked between the CCA and both the ECA and the ICA. The cost functions are based on a multiscale vesselness response. Second, after detecting the junction position and cutting or extending the paths based on the requested lengths, a level set segmentation is initialized as a thin tube around the computed paths and evolves until reaching the vessel wall or a maximal evolution time. Results on training and testing datasets are presented and compared to the manual segmentation by three observers, based on a ground truth and using four quality measures.
Unsupervised Anomaly Detection with Rejection

Anomaly detection aims at detecting unexpected behaviours in the data. Because anomaly detection is usually an unsupervised task, traditional anomaly detectors learn a decision boundary by employing heuristics based on intuitions, which are hard to verify in practice. This introduces some uncertainty, especially close to the decision boundary, that may reduce the user trust in the detector's predictions. A way to combat this is by allowing the detector to reject examples with high uncertainty (Learning to Reject). This requires employing a confidence metric that captures the distance to the decision boundary and setting a rejection threshold to reject low-confidence predictions. However, selecting a proper metric and setting the rejection threshold without labels are challenging tasks. In this paper, we solve these challenges by setting a constant rejection threshold on the stability metric computed by ExCeeD. Our insight relies on a theoretical analysis of such a metric. Moreover, setting a constant threshold results in strong guarantees: we estimate the test rejection rate, and derive a theoretical upper bound for both the rejection rate and the expected prediction cost. Experimentally, we show that our method outperforms some metric-based methods.
SEAHORSE: A Multilingual, Multifaceted Dataset for Summarization Evaluation

Reliable automatic evaluation of summarization systems is challenging due to the multifaceted and subjective nature of the task. This is especially the case for languages other than English, where human evaluations are scarce. In this work, we introduce SEAHORSE, a dataset for multilingual, multifaceted summarization evaluation. SEAHORSE consists of 96K summaries with human ratings along 6 dimensions of text quality: comprehensibility, repetition, grammar, attribution, main ideas, and conciseness, covering 6 languages, 9 systems and 4 datasets. As a result of its size and scope, SEAHORSE can serve both as a benchmark to evaluate learnt metrics, as well as a large-scale resource for training such metrics. We show that metrics trained with SEAHORSE achieve strong performance on the out-of-domain meta-evaluation benchmarks TRUE (Honovich et al., 2022) and mFACE (Aharoni et al., 2022). We make the SEAHORSE dataset and metrics publicly available for future research on multilingual and multifaceted summarization evaluation.
ChatGPT: Understanding Code Syntax and Semantics

ChatGPT demonstrates significant potential to revolutionize software engineering (SE) by exhibiting outstanding performance in SE tasks such as code and document generation. However, the high reliability and risk control requirements in software engineering raise concerns about the lack of interpretability of ChatGPT. To address this concern, we conducted a study to evaluate the capabilities of ChatGPT and its limitations for code analysis in SE. We break down the abilities needed for artificial intelligence (AI) models to address SE tasks related to code analysis into three categories: 1) syntax understanding, 2) static behavior understanding, and 3) dynamic behavior understanding. Our investigation focused on the ability of ChatGPT to comprehend code syntax and semantic structures, which include abstract syntax trees (AST), control flow graphs (CFG), and call graphs (CG). We assessed the performance of ChatGPT on cross-language tasks involving C, Java, Python, and Solidity. Our findings revealed that while ChatGPT has a talent for understanding code syntax, it struggles with comprehending code semantics, particularly dynamic semantics. We conclude that ChatGPT possesses capabilities similar to an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) parser, demonstrating initial competencies in static code analysis. Furthermore, our study highlights that ChatGPT is susceptible to hallucinations when interpreting code semantic structures and fabricating nonexistent facts. These results indicate the need to explore methods to verify the correctness of ChatGPT output to ensure its dependability in SE. More importantly, our study provides an initial answer to why the codes generated by LLM are usually syntax correct but vulnerable.
READMem: Robust Embedding Association for a Diverse Memory in Unconstrained Video Object Segmentation

We present READMem (Robust Embedding Association for a Diverse Memory), a modular framework for semi-automatic video object segmentation (sVOS) methods designed to handle unconstrained videos. Contemporary sVOS works typically aggregate video frames in an ever-expanding memory, demanding high hardware resources for long-term applications. To mitigate memory requirements and prevent near object duplicates (caused by information of adjacent frames), previous methods introduce a hyper-parameter that controls the frequency of frames eligible to be stored. This parameter has to be adjusted according to concrete video properties (such as rapidity of appearance changes and video length) and does not generalize well. Instead, we integrate the embedding of a new frame into the memory only if it increases the diversity of the memory content. Furthermore, we propose a robust association of the embeddings stored in the memory with query embeddings during the update process. Our approach avoids the accumulation of redundant data, allowing us in return, to restrict the memory size and prevent extreme memory demands in long videos. We extend popular sVOS baselines with READMem, which previously showed limited performance on long videos. Our approach achieves competitive results on the Long-time Video dataset (LV1) while not hindering performance on short sequences. Our code is publicly available.
Contrastive inverse regression for dimension reduction

Supervised dimension reduction (SDR) has been a topic of growing interest in data science, as it enables the reduction of high-dimensional covariates while preserving the functional relation with certain response variables of interest. However, existing SDR methods are not suitable for analyzing datasets collected from case-control studies. In this setting, the goal is to learn and exploit the low-dimensional structure unique to or enriched by the case group, also known as the foreground group. While some unsupervised techniques such as the contrastive latent variable model and its variants have been developed for this purpose, they fail to preserve the functional relationship between the dimension-reduced covariates and the response variable. In this paper, we propose a supervised dimension reduction method called contrastive inverse regression (CIR) specifically designed for the contrastive setting. CIR introduces an optimization problem defined on the Stiefel manifold with a non-standard loss function. We prove the convergence of CIR to a local optimum using a gradient descent-based algorithm, and our numerical study empirically demonstrates the improved performance over competing methods for high-dimensional data.
Prompt Learning for Action Recognition

We present a new general learning approach, Prompt Learning for Action Recognition (PLAR), which leverages the strengths of prompt learning to guide the learning process. Our approach is designed to predict the action label by helping the models focus on the descriptions or instructions associated with actions in the input videos. Our formulation uses various prompts, including learnable prompts, auxiliary visual information, and large vision models to improve the recognition performance. In particular, we design a learnable prompt method that learns to dynamically generate prompts from a pool of prompt experts under different inputs. By sharing the same objective with the task, our proposed PLAR can optimize prompts that guide the model's predictions while explicitly learning input-invariant (prompt experts pool) and input-specific (data-dependent) prompt knowledge. We evaluate our approach on datasets consisting of both ground camera videos and aerial videos, and scenes with single-agent and multi-agent actions. In practice, we observe a 3.17-10.2% accuracy improvement on the aerial multi-agent dataset Okutamam and a 1.0-3.6% improvement on the ground camera single-agent dataset Something Something V2. We plan to release our code on the WWW.
AudioToken: Adaptation of Text-Conditioned Diffusion Models for Audio-to-Image Generation

In recent years, image generation has shown a great leap in performance, where diffusion models play a central role. Although generating high-quality images, such models are mainly conditioned on textual descriptions. This begs the question:"how can we adopt such models to be conditioned on other modalities? ". In this paper, we propose a novel method utilizing latent diffusion models trained for text-to-image-generation to generate images conditioned on audio recordings. Using a pre-trained audio encoding model, the proposed method encodes audio into a new token, which can be considered as an adaptation layer between the audio and text representations. Such a modeling paradigm requires a small number of trainable parameters, making the proposed approach appealing for lightweight optimization. Results suggest the proposed method is superior to the evaluated baseline methods, considering objective and subjective metrics. Code and samples are available at: https://pages.cs. huji.ac. il/adiyoss-lab/AudioToken.
Covariance Estimation under Missing Observations and $L_4-L_2$ Moment Equivalence

We consider the problem of estimating the covariance matrix of a random vector by observing i.i. d samples and each entry of the sampled vector is missed with probability $p$. Under the standard $L_4-L_2$ moment equivalence assumption, we construct the first estimator that simultaneously achieves optimality with respect to the parameter $p$ and it recovers the optimal convergence rate for the classical covariance estimation problem when $p=1$
Risk Scores, Label Bias, and Everything but the Kitchen Sink

In designing risk assessment algorithms, many scholars promote a"kitchen sink"approach, reasoning that more information yields more accurate predictions. We show, however, that this rationale often fails when algorithms are trained to predict a proxy of the true outcome, as is typically the case. With such"label bias", one should exclude a feature if its correlation with the proxy and its correlation with the true outcome have opposite signs, conditional on the other model features. This criterion is often satisfied when a feature is weakly correlated with the true outcome, and, additionally, that feature and the true outcome are both direct causes of the remaining features. For example, due to patterns of police deployment, criminal behavior and geography may be weakly correlated and direct causes of one's criminal record, suggesting one should exclude geography in criminal risk assessments trained to predict arrest as a proxy for behavior.
A two-way heterogeneity model for dynamic networks

Analysis of networks that evolve dynamically requires the joint modelling of individual snapshots and time dynamics. This paper proposes a new flexible two-way heterogeneity model towards this goal. The new model equips each node of the network with two heterogeneity parameters, one to characterize the propensity to form ties with other nodes statically and the other to differentiate the tendency to retain existing ties over time. With $n$ observed networks each having $p$ nodes, we develop a new asymptotic theory for the maximum likelihood estimation of $2p$ parameters when $np\rightarrow \infty$. We overcome the global non-convexity of the negative log-likelihood function by the virtue of its local convexity, and propose a novel method of moment estimator as the initial value for a simple algorithm that leads to the consistent local maximum likelihood estimator (MLE). To establish the upper bounds for the estimation error of the MLE, we derive a new uniform deviation bound, which is of independent interest. The theory of the model and its usefulness are further supported by extensive simulation and a data analysis examining social interactions of ants.