pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Nano-ESG: Extracting Corporate Sustainability Information from News Articles
Authors: Fabian Billert, Stefan Conrad
Date: 2024-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

Determining the sustainability impact of companies is a highly complex subject which has garnered more and more attention over the past few years. Today, investors largely rely on sustainability-ratings from established rating-providers in order to analyze how responsibly a company acts. However, those ratings have recently been criticized for being hard to understand and nearly impossible to reproduce. An independent way to find out about the sustainability practices of companies lies in the rich landscape of news article data. In this paper, we explore a different approach to identify key opportunities and challenges of companies in the sustainability domain. We present a novel dataset of more than 840,000 news articles which were gathered for major German companies between January 2023 and September 2024. By applying a mixture of Natural Language Processing techniques, we first identify relevant articles, before summarizing them and extracting their sustainability-related sentiment and aspect using Large Language Models (LLMs). Furthermore, we conduct an evaluation of the obtained data and determine that the LLM-produced answers are accurate. We release both datasets at https://github.com/Bailefan/Nano-ESG.
Spectrum-based Modality Representation Fusion Graph Convolutional Network for Multimodal Recommendation
Authors: Rongqing Kenneth Ong, Andy W. H. Khong
Date: 2024-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Multimodal Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

Incorporating multi-modal features as side information has recently become a trend in recommender systems. To elucidate user-item preferences, recent studies focus on fusing modalities via concatenation, element-wise sum, or attention mechanisms. Despite having notable success, existing approaches do not account for the modality-specific noise encapsulated within each modality. As a result, direct fusion of modalities will lead to the amplification of cross-modality noise. Moreover, the variation of noise that is unique within each modality results in noise alleviation and fusion being more challenging. In this work, we propose a new Spectrum-based Modality Representation (SMORE) fusion graph recommender that aims to capture both uni-modal and fusion preferences while simultaneously suppressing modality noise. Specifically, SMORE projects the multi-modal features into the frequency domain and leverages the spectral space for fusion. To reduce dynamic contamination that is unique to each modality, we introduce a filter to attenuate and suppress the modality noise adaptively while capturing the universal modality patterns effectively. Furthermore, we explore the item latent structures by designing a new multi-modal graph learning module to capture associative semantic correlations and universal fusion patterns among similar items. Finally, we formulate a new modality-aware preference module, which infuses behavioral features and balances the uni- and multi-modal features for precise preference modeling. This empowers SMORE with the ability to infer both user modality-specific and fusion preferences more accurately. Experiments on three real-world datasets show the efficacy of our proposed model. The source code for this work has been made publicly available at https://github.com/kennethorq/SMORE.
ECLIPSE: Contrastive Dimension Importance Estimation with Pseudo-Irrelevance Feedback for Dense Retrieval
Authors: Giulio D'Erasmo, Giovanni Trappolini, Nicola Tonellotto, Fabrizio Silvestri
Date: 2024-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Recent advances in Information Retrieval have leveraged high-dimensional embedding spaces to improve the retrieval of relevant documents. Moreover, the Manifold Clustering Hypothesis suggests that despite these high-dimensional representations, documents relevant to a query reside on a lower-dimensional, query-dependent manifold. While this hypothesis has inspired new retrieval methods, existing approaches still face challenges in effectively separating non-relevant information from relevant signals. We propose a novel methodology that addresses these limitations by leveraging information from both relevant and non-relevant documents. Our method, ECLIPSE, computes a centroid based on irrelevant documents as a reference to estimate noisy dimensions present in relevant ones, enhancing retrieval performance. Extensive experiments on three in-domain and one out-of-domain benchmarks demonstrate an average improvement of up to 19.50% (resp. 22.35%) in mAP(AP) and 11.42% (resp. 13.10%) in nDCG@10 w.r.t. the DIME-based baseline (resp. the baseline using all dimensions). Our results pave the way for more robust, pseudo-irrelevance-based retrieval systems in future IR research.
Moving Beyond LDA: A Comparison of Unsupervised Topic Modelling Techniques for Qualitative Data Analysis of Online Communities
Authors: Amandeep Kaur, James R. Wallace
Date: 2024-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Social media constitutes a rich and influential source of information for qualitative researchers. Although computational techniques like topic modelling assist with managing the volume and diversity of social media content, qualitative researcher's lack of programming expertise creates a significant barrier to their adoption. In this paper we explore how BERTopic, an advanced Large Language Model (LLM)-based topic modelling technique, can support qualitative data analysis of social media. We conducted interviews and hands-on evaluations in which qualitative researchers compared topics from three modelling techniques: LDA, NMF, and BERTopic. BERTopic was favoured by 8 of 12 participants for its ability to provide detailed, coherent clusters for deeper understanding and actionable insights. Participants also prioritised topic relevance, logical organisation, and the capacity to reveal unexpected relationships within the data. Our findings underscore the potential of LLM-based techniques for supporting qualitative analysis.
HEC-GCN: Hypergraph Enhanced Cascading Graph Convolution Network for Multi-Behavior Recommendation
Authors: Yabo Yin, Xiaofei Zhu, Wenshan Wang, Yihao Zhang, Pengfei Wang, Yixing Fan, Jiafeng Guo
Date: 2024-12-19 00:00:00

Multi-behavior recommendation (MBR) has garnered growing attention recently due to its ability to mitigate the sparsity issue by inferring user preferences from various auxiliary behaviors to improve predictions for the target behavior. Although existing research on MBR has yielded impressive results, they still face two major limitations. First, previous methods mainly focus on modeling fine-grained interaction information between users and items under each behavior, which may suffer from sparsity issue. Second, existing models usually concentrate on exploiting dependencies between two consecutive behaviors, leaving intra- and inter-behavior consistency largely unexplored. To the end, we propose a novel approach named Hypergraph Enhanced Cascading Graph Convolution Network for multi-behavior recommendation (HEC-GCN). To be specific, we first explore both fine- and coarse-grained correlations among users or items of each behavior by simultaneously modeling the behavior-specific interaction graph and its corresponding hypergraph in a cascaded manner. Then, we propose a behavior consistency-guided alignment strategy that ensures consistent representations between the interaction graph and its associated hypergraph for each behavior, while also maintaining representation consistency across different behaviors. Extensive experiments and analyses on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach is consistently superior to previous state-of-the-art methods due to its capability to effectively attenuate the sparsity issue as well as preserve both intra- and inter-behavior consistencies. The code is available at https://github.com/marqu22/HEC-GCN.git.
VISA: Retrieval Augmented Generation with Visual Source Attribution
Authors: Xueguang Ma, Shengyao Zhuang, Bevan Koopman, Guido Zuccon, Wenhu Chen, Jimmy Lin
Date: 2024-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Answer Generation, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Generation with source attribution is important for enhancing the verifiability of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. However, existing approaches in RAG primarily link generated content to document-level references, making it challenging for users to locate evidence among multiple content-rich retrieved documents. To address this challenge, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Visual Source Attribution (VISA), a novel approach that combines answer generation with visual source attribution. Leveraging large vision-language models (VLMs), VISA identifies the evidence and highlights the exact regions that support the generated answers with bounding boxes in the retrieved document screenshots. To evaluate its effectiveness, we curated two datasets: Wiki-VISA, based on crawled Wikipedia webpage screenshots, and Paper-VISA, derived from PubLayNet and tailored to the medical domain. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of VISA for visual source attribution on documents' original look, as well as highlighting the challenges for improvement. Code, data, and model checkpoints will be released.
ChainRank-DPO: Chain Rank Direct Preference Optimization for LLM Rankers
Authors: Haowei Liu, Xuyang Wu, Guohao Sun, Zhiqiang Tao, Yi Fang
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: MMLU, Reranking, Text Reranking

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in text reranking through works like RankGPT, leveraging their human-like reasoning about relevance. However, supervised fine-tuning for ranking often diminishes these models' general-purpose capabilities, including the crucial reasoning abilities that make them valuable for ranking. We introduce a novel approach integrating Chain-of-Thought prompting with an SFT-DPO (Supervised Fine-Tuning followed by Direct Preference Optimization) pipeline to preserve these capabilities while improving ranking performance. Our experiments on TREC 2019 and 2020 Deep Learning datasets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art RankZephyr while maintaining strong performance on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark, demonstrating effective preservation of general-purpose capabilities through thoughtful fine-tuning strategies. Our code and data will be publicly released upon the acceptance of the paper.
Whom do Explanations Serve? A Systematic Literature Survey of User Characteristics in Explainable Recommender Systems Evaluation
Authors: Kathrin Wardatzky, Oana Inel, Luca Rossetto, Abraham Bernstein
Date: 2024-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Adding explanations to recommender systems is said to have multiple benefits, such as increasing user trust or system transparency. Previous work from other application areas suggests that specific user characteristics impact the users' perception of the explanation. However, we rarely find this type of evaluation for recommender systems explanations. This paper addresses this gap by surveying 124 papers in which recommender systems explanations were evaluated in user studies. We analyzed their participant descriptions and study results where the impact of user characteristics on the explanation effects was measured. Our findings suggest that the results from the surveyed studies predominantly cover specific users who do not necessarily represent the users of recommender systems in the evaluation domain. This may seriously hamper the generalizability of any insights we may gain from current studies on explanations in recommender systems. We further find inconsistencies in the data reporting, which impacts the reproducibility of the reported results. Hence, we recommend actions to move toward a more inclusive and reproducible evaluation.
BlenderLLM: Training Large Language Models for Computer-Aided Design with Self-improvement
Authors: Yuhao Du, Shunian Chen, Wenbo Zan, Peizhao Li, Mingxuan Wang, Dingjie Song, Bo Li, Yan Hu, Benyou Wang
Date: 2024-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Script Generation, Text to 3D

The application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Computer-Aided Design (CAD) remains an underexplored area, despite their remarkable advancements in other domains. In this paper, we present BlenderLLM, a novel framework for training LLMs specifically for CAD tasks leveraging a self-improvement methodology. To support this, we developed a bespoke training dataset, BlendNet, and introduced a comprehensive evaluation suite, CADBench. Our results reveal that existing models demonstrate significant limitations in generating accurate CAD scripts. However, through minimal instruction-based fine-tuning and iterative self-improvement, BlenderLLM significantly surpasses these models in both functionality and accuracy of CAD script generation. This research establishes a strong foundation for the application of LLMs in CAD while demonstrating the transformative potential of self-improving models in advancing CAD automation. We encourage further exploration and adoption of these methodologies to drive innovation in the field. The dataset, model, benchmark, and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/BlenderLLM
Jimmy Ofuoyan
Authors: Jimmy Ofuoyan
Date: 1998-08-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: 2024 1998 8

Jimmy Ofuoyan is a celebrity hairstylist, the Nigerian-born celebrity barber and entrepreneur, widely recognized for his exceptional contributions to the barbering industry. In 2024, he received the Influential Barber of the Year award at the Coolwealth Awards in Nigeria, acknowledging his global influence and dedication to his craft as a young Nigerian living in Italy. His work has earned him a reputation worldwide, particularly among top athletes and models across Europe and America.

Jimmy Ofuoyan born August 15 1998, professionally known as 360Kuts and Khalilimages , is a Nigerian-born celebrity barber and the founder of the international grooming brand 360Kuts. He is renowned for his expertise in luxury hairstyling and precision cuts, gaining recognition in the fashion and entertainment industries.

Born in Nigeria, Jimmy was the youngest in a large family and grew up facing financial challenges. His interest in hairstyling began early, learning braiding at his brother's unisex salon. At a very young age, he had mastered women’s hairstyling and later taught himself modern men’s cuts using online resources.

In 2016 as a teen, Jimmy embarked on a perilous journey for England from Nigeria to Italy in search of better opportunities. Along the way, he was captured by human traffickers in Libya but used his barbering skills as bargaining chip for survival as a captive and gave cuts to fellow prisoners and guards during his captivity. After escaping the horrors of the war torn country, he settled in Italy and began rebuilding his career in Pescara. His big break came when he styled a player from Pescara Football Club, propelling him into the spotlight.
Relational visual representations underlie human social interaction recognition
Authors: Manasi Malik, Leyla Isik
Date: 2023-11-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: Nature Communications 2023 11
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Humans effortlessly recognize social interactions from visual input. Attempts to model this ability have typically relied on generative inverse planning models, which make predictions by inverting a generative model of agents’ interactions based on their inferred goals, suggesting humans use a similar process of mental inference to recognize interactions. However, growing behavioral and neuroscience evidence suggests that recognizing social interactions is a visual process, separate from complex mental state inference. Yet despite their success in other domains, visual neural network models have been unable to reproduce human-like interaction recognition. We hypothesize that humans rely on relational visual information in particular, and develop a relational, graph neural network model, SocialGNN. Unlike prior models, SocialGNN accurately predicts human interaction judgments across both animated and natural videos. These results suggest that humans can make complex social interaction judgments without an explicit model of the social and physical world, and that structured, relational visual representations are key to this behavior.
Temperature-Resilient Analog Neuromorphic Chip in Single-Polysilicon CMOS Technology
Authors: Tommaso Rizzo, Sebastiano Strangio, Alessandro Catania, Giuseppe Iannaccone
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00

In analog neuromorphic chips, designers can embed computing primitives in the intrinsic physical properties of devices and circuits, heavily reducing device count and energy consumption, and enabling high parallelism, because all devices are computing simultaneously. Neural network parameters can be stored in local analog non-volatile memories (NVMs), saving the energy required to move data between memory and logic. However, the main drawback of analog sub-threshold electronic circuits is their dramatic temperature sensitivity. In this paper, we demonstrate that a temperature compensation mechanism can be devised to solve this problem. We have designed and fabricated a chip implementing a two-layer analog neural network trained to classify low-resolution images of handwritten digits with a low-cost single-poly complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process, using unconventional analog NVMs for weight storage. We demonstrate a temperature-resilient analog neuromorphic chip for image recognition operating between 10$^{\circ}$C and 60$^{\circ}$C without loss of classification accuracy, within 2\% of the corresponding software-based neural network in the whole temperature range.
Ontology-Aware RAG for Improved Question-Answering in Cybersecurity Education
Authors: Chengshuai Zhao, Garima Agrawal, Tharindu Kumarage, Zhen Tan, Yuli Deng, Ying-Chih Chen, Huan Liu
Date: 2024-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Integrating AI into education has the potential to transform the teaching of science and technology courses, particularly in the field of cybersecurity. AI-driven question-answering (QA) systems can actively manage uncertainty in cybersecurity problem-solving, offering interactive, inquiry-based learning experiences. Large language models (LLMs) have gained prominence in AI-driven QA systems, offering advanced language understanding and user engagement. However, they face challenges like hallucinations and limited domain-specific knowledge, which reduce their reliability in educational settings. To address these challenges, we propose CyberRAG, an ontology-aware retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach for developing a reliable and safe QA system in cybersecurity education. CyberRAG employs a two-step approach: first, it augments the domain-specific knowledge by retrieving validated cybersecurity documents from a knowledge base to enhance the relevance and accuracy of the response. Second, it mitigates hallucinations and misuse by integrating a knowledge graph ontology to validate the final answer. Experiments on publicly available cybersecurity datasets show that CyberRAG delivers accurate, reliable responses aligned with domain knowledge, demonstrating the potential of AI tools to enhance education.
Lessons From an App Update at Replika AI: Identity Discontinuity in Human-AI Relationships
Authors: Julian De Freitas, Noah Castelo, Ahmet K. Uğuralp, Zeliha Oğuz-Uğuralp
Date: 2024-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: ERP, Marketing

Can consumers form especially deep emotional bonds with AI and be vested in AI identities over time? We leverage a natural app-update event at Replika AI, a popular US-based AI companion, to shed light on these questions. We find that, after the app removed its erotic role play (ERP) feature, preventing intimate interactions between consumers and chatbots that were previously possible, this event triggered perceptions in customers that their AI companion's identity had discontinued. This in turn predicted negative consumer welfare and marketing outcomes related to loss, including mourning the loss, and devaluing the "new" AI relative to the "original". Experimental evidence confirms these findings. Further experiments find that AI companions users feel closer to their AI companion than even their best human friend, and mourn a loss of their AI companion more than a loss of various other inanimate products. In short, consumers are forming human-level relationships with AI companions; disruptions to these relationships trigger real patterns of mourning as well as devaluation of the offering; and the degree of mourning and devaluation are explained by perceived discontinuity in the AIs identity. Our results illustrate that relationships with AI are truly personal, creating unique benefits and risks for consumers and firms alike.
Towards AI-$45^{\circ}$ Law: A Roadmap to Trustworthy AGI
Authors: Chao Yang, Chaochao Lu, Yingchun Wang, BoWen Zhou
Date: 2024-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Ensuring Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) reliably avoids harmful behaviors is a critical challenge, especially for systems with high autonomy or in safety-critical domains. Despite various safety assurance proposals and extreme risk warnings, comprehensive guidelines balancing AI safety and capability remain lacking. In this position paper, we propose the \textit{AI-\textbf{$45^{\circ}$} Law} as a guiding principle for a balanced roadmap toward trustworthy AGI, and introduce the \textit{Causal Ladder of Trustworthy AGI} as a practical framework. This framework provides a systematic taxonomy and hierarchical structure for current AI capability and safety research, inspired by Judea Pearl's ``Ladder of Causation''. The Causal Ladder comprises three core layers: the Approximate Alignment Layer, the Intervenable Layer, and the Reflectable Layer. These layers address the key challenges of safety and trustworthiness in AGI and contemporary AI systems. Building upon this framework, we define five levels of trustworthy AGI: perception, reasoning, decision-making, autonomy, and collaboration trustworthiness. These levels represent distinct yet progressive aspects of trustworthy AGI. Finally, we present a series of potential governance measures to support the development of trustworthy AGI.
Integrating Evidence into the Design of XAI and AI-based Decision Support Systems: A Means-End Framework for End-users in Construction
Authors: Peter . E. D. Love, Jane Matthews, Weili Fang, Hadi Mahamivanan
Date: 2024-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Explainable artificial intelligence

A narrative review is used to develop a theoretical evidence-based means-end framework to build an epistemic foundation to uphold explainable artificial intelligence instruments so that the reliability of outcomes generated from decision support systems can be assured and better explained to end-users. The implications of adopting an evidence-based approach to designing decision support systems in construction are discussed with emphasis placed on evaluating the strength, value, and utility of evidence needed to develop meaningful human explanations for end-users. While the developed means-end framework is focused on end-users, stakeholders can also utilize it to create meaningful human explanations. However, they will vary due to their different epistemic goals. Including evidence in the design and development of explainable artificial intelligence and decision support systems will improve decision-making effectiveness, enabling end-users' epistemic goals to be achieved. The proposed means-end framework is developed from a broad spectrum of literature. Thus, it is suggested that it can be used in construction and other engineering domains where there is a need to integrate evidence into the design of explainable artificial intelligence and decision support systems.