pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models in Biomedical NLP: Application, Robustness, and Self-Awareness
Authors: Mingchen Li, Zaifu Zhan, Han Yang, Yongkang Xiao, Jiatan Huang, Rui Zhang
Date: 2024-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, counterfactual, Hallucination, Link Prediction, Natural Language Inference, Question Answering, Retrieval

Large language models (LLM) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various biomedical natural language processing (NLP) tasks, leveraging the demonstration within the input context to adapt to new tasks. However, LLM is sensitive to the selection of demonstrations. To address the hallucination issue inherent in LLM, retrieval-augmented LLM (RAL) offers a solution by retrieving pertinent information from an established database. Nonetheless, existing research work lacks rigorous evaluation of the impact of retrieval-augmented large language models on different biomedical NLP tasks. This deficiency makes it challenging to ascertain the capabilities of RAL within the biomedical domain. Moreover, the outputs from RAL are affected by retrieving the unlabeled, counterfactual, or diverse knowledge that is not well studied in the biomedical domain. However, such knowledge is common in the real world. Finally, exploring the self-awareness ability is also crucial for the RAL system. So, in this paper, we systematically investigate the impact of RALs on 5 different biomedical tasks (triple extraction, link prediction, classification, question answering, and natural language inference). We analyze the performance of RALs in four fundamental abilities, including unlabeled robustness, counterfactual robustness, diverse robustness, and negative awareness. To this end, we proposed an evaluation framework to assess the RALs' performance on different biomedical NLP tasks and establish four different testbeds based on the aforementioned fundamental abilities. Then, we evaluate 3 representative LLMs with 3 different retrievers on 5 tasks over 9 datasets.
Discursive objection strategies in online comments: Developing a classification schema and validating its training
Authors: Ashley L. Shea, Aspen K. B. Omapang, Ji Yong Cho, Miryam Y. Ginsparg, Natalie Bazarova, Winice Hui, René F. Kizilcec, Chau Tong, Drew Margolin
Date: 2024-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Misinformation

Most Americans agree that misinformation, hate speech and harassment are harmful and inadequately curbed on social media through current moderation practices. In this paper, we aim to understand the discursive strategies employed by people in response to harmful speech in news comments. We conducted a content analysis of more than 6500 comment replies to trending news videos on YouTube and Twitter and identified seven distinct discursive objection strategies (Study 1). We examined the frequency of each strategy's occurrence from the 6500 comment replies, as well as from a second sample of 2004 replies (Study 2). Together, these studies show that people deploy a diversity of discursive strategies when objecting to speech, and reputational attacks are the most common. The resulting classification scheme accounts for different theoretical approaches for expressing objections and offers a comprehensive perspective on grassroots efforts aimed at stopping offensive or problematic speech on campus.
Many-Shot Regurgitation (MSR) Prompting
Authors: Shashank Sonkar, Richard G. Baraniuk
Date: 2024-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Inference Attack, Language Modelling, Membership Inference Attack

We introduce Many-Shot Regurgitation (MSR) prompting, a new black-box membership inference attack framework for examining verbatim content reproduction in large language models (LLMs). MSR prompting involves dividing the input text into multiple segments and creating a single prompt that includes a series of faux conversation rounds between a user and a language model to elicit verbatim regurgitation. We apply MSR prompting to diverse text sources, including Wikipedia articles and open educational resources (OER) textbooks, which provide high-quality, factual content and are continuously updated over time. For each source, we curate two dataset types: one that LLMs were likely exposed to during training ($D_{\rm pre}$) and another consisting of documents published after the models' training cutoff dates ($D_{\rm post}$). To quantify the occurrence of verbatim matches, we employ the Longest Common Substring algorithm and count the frequency of matches at different length thresholds. We then use statistical measures such as Cliff's delta, Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) distance, and Kruskal-Wallis H test to determine whether the distribution of verbatim matches differs significantly between $D_{\rm pre}$ and $D_{\rm post}$. Our findings reveal a striking difference in the distribution of verbatim matches between $D_{\rm pre}$ and $D_{\rm post}$, with the frequency of verbatim reproduction being significantly higher when LLMs (e.g. GPT models and LLaMAs) are prompted with text from datasets they were likely trained on. For instance, when using GPT-3.5 on Wikipedia articles, we observe a substantial effect size (Cliff's delta $= -0.984$) and a large KS distance ($0.875$) between the distributions of $D_{\rm pre}$ and $D_{\rm post}$. Our results provide compelling evidence that LLMs are more prone to reproducing verbatim content when the input text is likely sourced from their training data.
KET-QA: A Dataset for Knowledge Enhanced Table Question Answering
Authors: Mengkang Hu, Haoyu Dong, Ping Luo, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
Date: 2024-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Due to the concise and structured nature of tables, the knowledge contained therein may be incomplete or missing, posing a significant challenge for table question answering (TableQA) and data analysis systems. Most existing datasets either fail to address the issue of external knowledge in TableQA or only utilize unstructured text as supplementary information for tables. In this paper, we propose to use a knowledge base (KB) as the external knowledge source for TableQA and construct a dataset KET-QA with fine-grained gold evidence annotation. Each table in the dataset corresponds to a sub-graph of the entire KB, and every question requires the integration of information from both the table and the sub-graph to be answered. To extract pertinent information from the vast knowledge sub-graph and apply it to TableQA, we design a retriever-reasoner structured pipeline model. Experimental results demonstrate that our model consistently achieves remarkable relative performance improvements ranging from 1.9 to 6.5 times and absolute improvements of 11.66% to 44.64% on EM scores across three distinct settings (fine-tuning, zero-shot, and few-shot), in comparison with solely relying on table information in the traditional TableQA manner. However, even the best model achieves a 60.23% EM score, which still lags behind the human-level performance, highlighting the challenging nature of KET-QA for the question-answering community. We also provide a human evaluation of error cases to analyze further the aspects in which the model can be improved. Project page: https://ketqa.github.io/.
Robot Detection System 1: Front-Following
Authors: Jinwei Lin
Date: 2024-05-11 00:00:00

Front-following is more technically difficult to implement than the other two human following technologies, but front-following technology is more practical and can be applied in more areas to solve more practical problems. Front-following technology has many advantages not found in back-following and side-by-side technologies. In this paper, we will discuss basic and significant principles and general design idea of this technology. Besides, various of novel and special useful methods will be presented and provided. We use enough beautiful figures to display our novel design idea. Our research result is open source in 2018, and this paper is just to expand the research result propagation granularity. Abundant magic design idea are included in this paper, more idea and analyzing can sear and see other paper naming with a start of Robot Design System with Jinwei Lin, the only author of this series papers.
Neuromorphic Robust Estimation of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Applied to Satellite Rendezvous
Authors: Reza Ahmadvand, Sarah Safura Sharif, Yaser Mike Banad
Date: 2024-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, State Estimation

State estimation of nonlinear dynamical systems has long aimed to balance accuracy, computational efficiency, robustness, and reliability. The rapid evolution of various industries has amplified the demand for estimation frameworks that satisfy all these factors. This study introduces a neuromorphic approach for robust filtering of nonlinear dynamical systems: SNN-EMSIF (spiking neural network-extended modified sliding innovation filter). SNN-EMSIF combines the computational efficiency and scalability of SNNs with the robustness of EMSIF, an estimation framework designed for nonlinear systems with zero-mean Gaussian noise. Notably, the weight matrices are designed according to the system model, eliminating the need for a learning process. The framework's efficacy is evaluated through comprehensive Monte Carlo simulations, comparing SNN-EMSIF with EKF and EMSIF. Additionally, it is compared with SNN-EKF in the presence of modeling uncertainties and neuron loss, using RMSEs as a metric. The results demonstrate the superior accuracy and robustness of SNN-EMSIF. Further analysis of runtimes and spiking patterns reveals an impressive reduction of 85% in emitted spikes compared to possible spikes, highlighting the computational efficiency of SNN-EMSIF. This framework offers a promising solution for robust estimation in nonlinear dynamical systems, opening new avenues for efficient and reliable estimation in various industries that can benefit from neuromorphic computing.
Future Trends in the Design of Memetic Algorithms: the Case of the Linear Ordering Problem
Authors: Lázaro Lugo, Carlos Segura, Gara Miranda
Date: 2024-05-14 00:00:00

The way heuristic optimizers are designed has evolved over the decades, as computing power has increased. Such has been the case for the Linear Ordering Problem (LOP), a field in which trajectory-based strategies led the way during the 1990s, but which have now been surpassed by memetic schemes.This paper focuses on understanding how the design of LOP optimizers will change in the future, as computing power continues to increase, yielding two main contributions.On the one hand, a metaheuristic was designed that is capable of effectively exploiting a large amount of computational resources, specifically, computing power equivalent to what a recent core can output during runs lasting over four months.Our analyses show that as the power of the computational resources increases, it will be necessary to boost the capacities of the intensification methods applied in the memetic algorithms to keep the population from stagnating.And on the other, the best-known results for today's most challenging set of instances (xLOLIB2) were significantly outperformed. New bounds were established in this benchmark, which provides a new frame of reference for future research.
Simplifying debiased inference via automatic differentiation and probabilistic programming
Authors: Alex Luedtke
Date: 2024-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Probabilistic Programming

We introduce an algorithm that simplifies the construction of efficient estimators, making them accessible to a broader audience. 'Dimple' takes as input computer code representing a parameter of interest and outputs an efficient estimator. Unlike standard approaches, it does not require users to derive a functional derivative known as the efficient influence function. Dimple avoids this task by applying automatic differentiation to the statistical functional of interest. Doing so requires expressing this functional as a composition of primitives satisfying a novel differentiability condition. Dimple also uses this composition to determine the nuisances it must estimate. In software, primitives can be implemented independently of one another and reused across different estimation problems. We provide a proof-of-concept Python implementation and showcase through examples how it allows users to go from parameter specification to efficient estimation with just a few lines of code.
Treatment Effect Estimation for User Interest Exploration on Recommender Systems
Authors: Jiaju Chen, Wenjie Wang, Chongming Gao, Peng Wu, Jianxiong Wei, Qingsong Hua
Date: 2024-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Recommendation Systems, Scheduling

Recommender systems learn personalized user preferences from user feedback like clicks. However, user feedback is usually biased towards partially observed interests, leaving many users' hidden interests unexplored. Existing approaches typically mitigate the bias, increase recommendation diversity, or use bandit algorithms to balance exploration-exploitation trade-offs. Nevertheless, they fail to consider the potential rewards of recommending different categories of items and lack the global scheduling of allocating top-N recommendations to categories, leading to suboptimal exploration. In this work, we propose an Uplift model-based Recommender (UpliftRec) framework, which regards top-N recommendation as a treatment optimization problem. UpliftRec estimates the treatment effects, i.e., the click-through rate (CTR) under different category exposure ratios, by using observational user feedback. UpliftRec calculates group-level treatment effects to discover users' hidden interests with high CTR rewards and leverages inverse propensity weighting to alleviate confounder bias. Thereafter, UpliftRec adopts a dynamic programming method to calculate the optimal treatment for overall CTR maximization. We implement UpliftRec on different backend models and conduct extensive experiments on three datasets. The empirical results validate the effectiveness of UpliftRec in discovering users' hidden interests while achieving superior recommendation accuracy.
Human fall detection on embedded platform using depth maps and wireless accelerometer
Authors: Bogdan Kwolek, Michal Kepski
Date: 2014-10-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine 2014 10

Since falls are a major public health problem in an ageing society, there is considerable demand for low-cost fall
detection systems. One of the main reasons for non-acceptance of the currently available solutions by seniors is
that the fall detectors using only inertial sensors generate too much false alarms. This means that some daily
activities are erroneously signaled as fall, which in turn leads to frustration of the users. In this paper we
present how to design and implement a low-cost system for reliable fall detection with very low false alarm
ratio. The detection of the fall is done on the basis of accelerometric data and depth maps. A tri-axial
accelerometer is used to indicate the potential fall as well as to indicate whether the person is in motion. If the
measured acceleration is higher than an assumed threshold value, the algorithm extracts the person, calculates
the features and then executes the SVM-based classifier to authenticate the fall alarm. It is a 365/7/24
embedded system permitting unobtrusive fall detection as well as preserving privacy of the user.
Parameter-Efficient Instruction Tuning of Large Language Models For Extreme Financial Numeral Labelling
Authors: Subhendu Khatuya, Rajdeep Mukherjee, Akash Ghosh, Manjunath Hegde, Koustuv Dasgupta, Niloy Ganguly, Saptarshi Ghosh, Pawan Goyal
Date: 2024-05-03 00:00:00

We study the problem of automatically annotating relevant numerals (GAAP metrics) occurring in the financial documents with their corresponding XBRL tags. Different from prior works, we investigate the feasibility of solving this extreme classification problem using a generative paradigm through instruction tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs). To this end, we leverage metric metadata information to frame our target outputs while proposing a parameter efficient solution for the task using LoRA. We perform experiments on two recently released financial numeric labeling datasets. Our proposed model, FLAN-FinXC, achieves new state-of-the-art performances on both the datasets, outperforming several strong baselines. We explain the better scores of our proposed model by demonstrating its capability for zero-shot as well as the least frequently occurring tags. Also, even when we fail to predict the XBRL tags correctly, our generated output has substantial overlap with the ground-truth in majority of the cases.
Adversarial Robustness of Deep Learning-Based Malware Detectors via (De)Randomized Smoothing
Authors: Daniel Gibert, Giulio Zizzo, Quan Le, Jordi Planes
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE Access 2024 4
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Deep learning-based malware detectors have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial malware examples, i.e. malware examples that have been deliberately manipulated in order to avoid detection. In light of the vulnerability of deep learning detectors to subtle input file modifications, we propose a practical defense against adversarial malware examples inspired by (de)randomized smoothing. In this work, we reduce the chances of sampling adversarial content injected by malware authors by selecting correlated subsets of bytes, rather than using Gaussian noise to randomize inputs like in the Computer Vision domain. During training, our chunk-based smoothing scheme trains a base classifier to make classifications on a subset of contiguous bytes or chunk of bytes. At test time, a large number of chunks are then classified by a base classifier and the consensus among these classifications is then reported as the final prediction. We propose two strategies to determine the location of the chunks used for classification: 1) randomly selecting the locations of the chunks and 2) selecting contiguous adjacent chunks. To showcase the effectiveness of our approach, we have trained two classifiers with our chunk-based smoothing schemes on the BODMAS dataset. Our findings reveal that the chunk-based smoothing classifiers exhibit greater resilience against adversarial malware examples generated with state-of-the-art evasion attacks, outperforming a non-smoothed classifier and a randomized smoothing-based classifier by a great margin.
LLM Theory of Mind and Alignment: Opportunities and Risks
Authors: Winnie Street
Date: 2024-05-13 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) are transforming human-computer interaction and conceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) with their impressive capacities for conversing and reasoning in natural language. There is growing interest in whether LLMs have theory of mind (ToM); the ability to reason about the mental and emotional states of others that is core to human social intelligence. As LLMs are integrated into the fabric of our personal, professional and social lives and given greater agency to make decisions with real-world consequences, there is a critical need to understand how they can be aligned with human values. ToM seems to be a promising direction of inquiry in this regard. Following the literature on the role and impacts of human ToM, this paper identifies key areas in which LLM ToM will show up in human:LLM interactions at individual and group levels, and what opportunities and risks for alignment are raised in each. On the individual level, the paper considers how LLM ToM might manifest in goal specification, conversational adaptation, empathy and anthropomorphism. On the group level, it considers how LLM ToM might facilitate collective alignment, cooperation or competition, and moral judgement-making. The paper lays out a broad spectrum of potential implications and suggests the most pressing areas for future research.
When factorization meets argumentation: towards argumentative explanations
Authors: Jinfeng Zhong, Elsa Negre
Date: 2024-05-13 00:00:00

Factorization-based models have gained popularity since the Netflix challenge {(2007)}. Since that, various factorization-based models have been developed and these models have been proven to be efficient in predicting users' ratings towards items. A major concern is that explaining the recommendations generated by such methods is non-trivial because the explicit meaning of the latent factors they learn are not always clear. In response, we propose a novel model that combines factorization-based methods with argumentation frameworks (AFs). The integration of AFs provides clear meaning at each stage of the model, enabling it to produce easily understandable explanations for its recommendations. In this model, for every user-item interaction, an AF is defined in which the features of items are considered as arguments, and the users' ratings towards these features determine the strength and polarity of these arguments. This perspective allows our model to treat feature attribution as a structured argumentation procedure, where each calculation is marked with explicit meaning, enhancing its inherent interpretability. Additionally, our framework seamlessly incorporates side information, such as user contexts, leading to more accurate predictions. We anticipate at least three practical applications for our model: creating explanation templates, providing interactive explanations, and generating contrastive explanations. Through testing on real-world datasets, we have found that our model, along with its variants, not only surpasses existing argumentation-based methods but also competes effectively with current context-free and context-aware methods.
From Questions to Insightful Answers: Building an Informed Chatbot for University Resources
Authors: Subash Neupane, Elias Hossain, Jason Keith, Himanshu Tripathi, Farbod Ghiasi, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz, Amin Amirlatifi, Sudip Mittal, Shahram Rahimi
Date: 2024-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

This paper presents BARKPLUG V.2, a Large Language Model (LLM)-based chatbot system built using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines to enhance the user experience and access to information within academic settings.The objective of BARKPLUG V.2 is to provide information to users about various campus resources, including academic departments, programs, campus facilities, and student resources at a university setting in an interactive fashion. Our system leverages university data as an external data corpus and ingests it into our RAG pipelines for domain-specific question-answering tasks. We evaluate the effectiveness of our system in generating accurate and pertinent responses for Mississippi State University, as a case study, using quantitative measures, employing frameworks such as Retrieval Augmented Generation Assessment(RAGAS). Furthermore, we evaluate the usability of this system via subjective satisfaction surveys using the System Usability Scale (SUS). Our system demonstrates impressive quantitative performance, with a mean RAGAS score of 0.96, and experience, as validated by usability assessments.