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Jul 29

A Multi-Dimensional Constraint Framework for Evaluating and Improving Instruction Following in Large Language Models

Instruction following evaluates large language models (LLMs) on their ability to generate outputs that adhere to user-defined constraints. However, existing benchmarks often rely on templated constraint prompts, which lack the diversity of real-world usage and limit fine-grained performance assessment. To fill this gap, we propose a multi-dimensional constraint framework encompassing three constraint patterns, four constraint categories, and four difficulty levels. Building on this framework, we develop an automated instruction generation pipeline that performs constraint expansion, conflict detection, and instruction rewriting, yielding 1,200 code-verifiable instruction-following test samples. We evaluate 19 LLMs across seven model families and uncover substantial variation in performance across constraint forms. For instance, average performance drops from 77.67% at Level I to 32.96% at Level IV. Furthermore, we demonstrate the utility of our approach by using it to generate data for reinforcement learning, achieving substantial gains in instruction following without degrading general performance. In-depth analysis indicates that these gains stem primarily from modifications in the model's attention modules parameters, which enhance constraint recognition and adherence. Code and data are available in https://github.com/Junjie-Ye/MulDimIF.

RTV-Bench: Benchmarking MLLM Continuous Perception, Understanding and Reasoning through Real-Time Video

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) increasingly excel at perception, understanding, and reasoning. However, current benchmarks inadequately evaluate their ability to perform these tasks continuously in dynamic, real-world environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce RTV-Bench, a fine-grained benchmark for MLLM real-time video analysis. RTV-Bench uses three key principles: (1) Multi-Timestamp Question Answering (MTQA), where answers evolve with scene changes; (2) Hierarchical Question Structure, combining basic and advanced queries; and (3) Multi-dimensional Evaluation, assessing the ability of continuous perception, understanding, and reasoning. RTV-Bench contains 552 diverse videos (167.2 hours) and 4,631 high-quality QA pairs. We evaluated leading MLLMs, including proprietary (GPT-4o, Gemini 2.0), open-source offline (Qwen2.5-VL, VideoLLaMA3), and open-source real-time (VITA-1.5, InternLM-XComposer2.5-OmniLive) models. Experiment results show open-source real-time models largely outperform offline ones but still trail top proprietary models. Our analysis also reveals that larger model size or higher frame sampling rates do not significantly boost RTV-Bench performance, sometimes causing slight decreases. This underscores the need for better model architectures optimized for video stream processing and long sequences to advance real-time video analysis with MLLMs. Our benchmark toolkit is available at: https://github.com/LJungang/RTV-Bench.

Cross-D Conv: Cross-Dimensional Transferable Knowledge Base via Fourier Shifting Operation

In biomedical imaging analysis, the dichotomy between 2D and 3D data presents a significant challenge. While 3D volumes offer superior real-world applicability, they are less available for each modality and not easy to train in large scale, whereas 2D samples are abundant but less comprehensive. This paper introduces the Cross-D Conv operation, a novel approach that bridges the dimensional gap by learning the phase shifting in the Fourier domain. Our method enables seamless weight transfer between 2D and 3D convolution operations, effectively facilitating cross-dimensional learning. The proposed architecture leverages the abundance of 2D training data to enhance 3D model performance, offering a practical solution to the multimodal data scarcity challenge in 3D medical model pretraining. Experimental validation on the RadImagenet (2D) and multimodal (3D) sets demonstrates that our approach achieves comparable or superior performance in feature quality assessment comparable to conventional methods. The enhanced convolution operation presents new opportunities for developing efficient classification and segmentation models in medical imaging. This work represents an advancement in cross-dimensional and multi-modal medical image analysis, offering a robust framework for utilizing 2D priors in 3D model pretraining or vice versa while maintaining computational efficiency.

WaveMix: A Resource-efficient Neural Network for Image Analysis

We propose WaveMix -- a novel neural architecture for computer vision that is resource-efficient yet generalizable and scalable. WaveMix networks achieve comparable or better accuracy than the state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks, vision transformers, and token mixers for several tasks, establishing new benchmarks for segmentation on Cityscapes; and for classification on Places-365, five EMNIST datasets, and iNAT-mini. Remarkably, WaveMix architectures require fewer parameters to achieve these benchmarks compared to the previous state-of-the-art. Moreover, when controlled for the number of parameters, WaveMix requires lesser GPU RAM, which translates to savings in time, cost, and energy. To achieve these gains we used multi-level two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform (2D-DWT) in WaveMix blocks, which has the following advantages: (1) It reorganizes spatial information based on three strong image priors -- scale-invariance, shift-invariance, and sparseness of edges, (2) in a lossless manner without adding parameters, (3) while also reducing the spatial sizes of feature maps, which reduces the memory and time required for forward and backward passes, and (4) expanding the receptive field faster than convolutions do. The whole architecture is a stack of self-similar and resolution-preserving WaveMix blocks, which allows architectural flexibility for various tasks and levels of resource availability. Our code and trained models are publicly available.

Multi-Layer Deep xVA: Structural Credit Models, Measure Changes and Convergence Analysis

We propose a structural default model for portfolio-wide valuation adjustments (xVAs) and represent it as a system of coupled backward stochastic differential equations. The framework is divided into four layers, each capturing a key component: (i) clean values, (ii) initial margin and Collateral Valuation Adjustment (ColVA), (iii) Credit/Debit Valuation Adjustments (CVA/DVA) together with Margin Valuation Adjustment (MVA), and (iv) Funding Valuation Adjustment (FVA). Because these layers depend on one another through collateral and default effects, a naive Monte Carlo approach would require deeply nested simulations, making the problem computationally intractable. To address this challenge, we use an iterative deep BSDE approach, handling each layer sequentially so that earlier outputs serve as inputs to the subsequent layers. Initial margin is computed via deep quantile regression to reflect margin requirements over the Margin Period of Risk. We also adopt a change-of-measure method that highlights rare but significant defaults of the bank or counterparty, ensuring that these events are accurately captured in the training process. We further extend Han and Long's (2020) a posteriori error analysis to BSDEs on bounded domains. Due to the random exit from the domain, we obtain an order of convergence of O(h^{1/4-epsilon}) rather than the usual O(h^{1/2}). Numerical experiments illustrate that this method drastically reduces computational demands and successfully scales to high-dimensional, non-symmetric portfolios. The results confirm its effectiveness and accuracy, offering a practical alternative to nested Monte Carlo simulations in multi-counterparty xVA analyses.

Convolutional Neural Networks and Volcano Plots: Screening and Prediction of Two-Dimensional Single-Atom Catalysts

Single-atom catalysts (SACs) have emerged as frontiers for catalyzing chemical reactions, yet the diverse combinations of active elements and support materials, the nature of coordination environments, elude traditional methodologies in searching optimal SAC systems with superior catalytic performance. Herein, by integrating multi-branch Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) analysis models to hybrid descriptor based activity volcano plot, 2D SAC system composed of diverse metallic single atoms anchored on six type of 2D supports, including graphitic carbon nitride, nitrogen-doped graphene, graphene with dual-vacancy, black phosphorous, boron nitride, and C2N, are screened for efficient CO2RR. Starting from establishing a correlation map between the adsorption energies of intermediates and diverse electronic and elementary descriptors, sole singular descriptor lost magic to predict catalytic activity. Deep learning method utilizing multi-branch CNN model therefore was employed, using 2D electronic density of states as input to predict adsorption energies. Hybrid-descriptor enveloping both C- and O-types of CO2RR intermediates was introduced to construct volcano plots and limiting potential periodic table, aiming for intuitive screening of catalyst candidates for efficient CO2 reduction to CH4. The eDOS occlusion experiments were performed to unravel individual orbital contribution to adsorption energy. To explore the electronic scale principle governing practical engineering catalytic CO2RR activity, orbitalwise eDOS shifting experiments based on CNN model were employed. The study involves examining the adsorption energy and, consequently, catalytic activities while varying supported single atoms. This work offers a tangible framework to inform both theoretical screening and experimental synthesis, thereby paving the way for systematically designing efficient SACs.

TaxoAdapt: Aligning LLM-Based Multidimensional Taxonomy Construction to Evolving Research Corpora

The rapid evolution of scientific fields introduces challenges in organizing and retrieving scientific literature. While expert-curated taxonomies have traditionally addressed this need, the process is time-consuming and expensive. Furthermore, recent automatic taxonomy construction methods either (1) over-rely on a specific corpus, sacrificing generalizability, or (2) depend heavily on the general knowledge of large language models (LLMs) contained within their pre-training datasets, often overlooking the dynamic nature of evolving scientific domains. Additionally, these approaches fail to account for the multi-faceted nature of scientific literature, where a single research paper may contribute to multiple dimensions (e.g., methodology, new tasks, evaluation metrics, benchmarks). To address these gaps, we propose TaxoAdapt, a framework that dynamically adapts an LLM-generated taxonomy to a given corpus across multiple dimensions. TaxoAdapt performs iterative hierarchical classification, expanding both the taxonomy width and depth based on corpus' topical distribution. We demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of computer science conferences over the years to showcase its ability to structure and capture the evolution of scientific fields. As a multidimensional method, TaxoAdapt generates taxonomies that are 26.51% more granularity-preserving and 50.41% more coherent than the most competitive baselines judged by LLMs.

Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Advancing Big Data Analytics and Management

Advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning have catalyzed the transformation of big data analytics and management into pivotal domains for research and application. This work explores the theoretical foundations, methodological advancements, and practical implementations of these technologies, emphasizing their role in uncovering actionable insights from massive, high-dimensional datasets. The study presents a systematic overview of data preprocessing techniques, including data cleaning, normalization, integration, and dimensionality reduction, to prepare raw data for analysis. Core analytics methodologies such as classification, clustering, regression, and anomaly detection are examined, with a focus on algorithmic innovation and scalability. Furthermore, the text delves into state-of-the-art frameworks for data mining and predictive modeling, highlighting the role of neural networks, support vector machines, and ensemble methods in tackling complex analytical challenges. Special emphasis is placed on the convergence of big data with distributed computing paradigms, including cloud and edge computing, to address challenges in storage, computation, and real-time analytics. The integration of ethical considerations, including data privacy and compliance with global standards, ensures a holistic perspective on data management. Practical applications across healthcare, finance, marketing, and policy-making illustrate the real-world impact of these technologies. Through comprehensive case studies and Python-based implementations, this work equips researchers, practitioners, and data enthusiasts with the tools to navigate the complexities of modern data analytics. It bridges the gap between theory and practice, fostering the development of innovative solutions for managing and leveraging data in the era of artificial intelligence.

Multimodal Deep Learning of Word-of-Mouth Text and Demographics to Predict Customer Rating: Handling Consumer Heterogeneity in Marketing

In the marketing field, understanding consumer heterogeneity, which is the internal or psychological difference among consumers that cannot be captured by behavioral logs, has long been a critical challenge. However, a number of consumers today usually post their evaluation on the specific product on the online platform, which can be the valuable source of such unobservable differences among consumers. Several previous studies have shown the validity of the analysis on text modality, but on the other hand, such analyses may not necessarily demonstrate sufficient predictive accuracy for text alone, as they may not include information readily available from cross-sectional data, such as consumer profile data. In addition, recent advances in machine learning techniques, such as large-scale language models (LLMs) and multimodal learning have made it possible to deal with the various kind of dataset simultaneously, including textual data and the traditional cross-sectional data, and the joint representations can be effectively obtained from multiple modalities. Therefore, this study constructs a product evaluation model that takes into account consumer heterogeneity by multimodal learning of online product reviews and consumer profile information. We also compare multiple models using different modalities or hyper-parameters to demonstrate the robustness of multimodal learning in marketing analysis.

A Framework for Fast and Stable Representations of Multiparameter Persistent Homology Decompositions

Topological data analysis (TDA) is an area of data science that focuses on using invariants from algebraic topology to provide multiscale shape descriptors for geometric data sets such as point clouds. One of the most important such descriptors is {\em persistent homology}, which encodes the change in shape as a filtration parameter changes; a typical parameter is the feature scale. For many data sets, it is useful to simultaneously vary multiple filtration parameters, for example feature scale and density. While the theoretical properties of single parameter persistent homology are well understood, less is known about the multiparameter case. In particular, a central question is the problem of representing multiparameter persistent homology by elements of a vector space for integration with standard machine learning algorithms. Existing approaches to this problem either ignore most of the multiparameter information to reduce to the one-parameter case or are heuristic and potentially unstable in the face of noise. In this article, we introduce a new general representation framework that leverages recent results on {\em decompositions} of multiparameter persistent homology. This framework is rich in information, fast to compute, and encompasses previous approaches. Moreover, we establish theoretical stability guarantees under this framework as well as efficient algorithms for practical computation, making this framework an applicable and versatile tool for analyzing geometric and point cloud data. We validate our stability results and algorithms with numerical experiments that demonstrate statistical convergence, prediction accuracy, and fast running times on several real data sets.

UniHDSA: A Unified Relation Prediction Approach for Hierarchical Document Structure Analysis

Document structure analysis, aka document layout analysis, is crucial for understanding both the physical layout and logical structure of documents, serving information retrieval, document summarization, knowledge extraction, etc. Hierarchical Document Structure Analysis (HDSA) specifically aims to restore the hierarchical structure of documents created using authoring software with hierarchical schemas. Previous research has primarily followed two approaches: one focuses on tackling specific subtasks of HDSA in isolation, such as table detection or reading order prediction, while the other adopts a unified framework that uses multiple branches or modules, each designed to address a distinct task. In this work, we propose a unified relation prediction approach for HDSA, called UniHDSA, which treats various HDSA sub-tasks as relation prediction problems and consolidates relation prediction labels into a unified label space. This allows a single relation prediction module to handle multiple tasks simultaneously, whether at a page-level or document-level structure analysis. To validate the effectiveness of UniHDSA, we develop a multimodal end-to-end system based on Transformer architectures. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on a hierarchical document structure analysis benchmark, Comp-HRDoc, and competitive results on a large-scale document layout analysis dataset, DocLayNet, effectively illustrating the superiority of our method across all sub-tasks. The Comp-HRDoc benchmark and UniHDSA's configurations are publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/CompHRDoc.

Multi-LexSum: Real-World Summaries of Civil Rights Lawsuits at Multiple Granularities

With the advent of large language models, methods for abstractive summarization have made great strides, creating potential for use in applications to aid knowledge workers processing unwieldy document collections. One such setting is the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse (CRLC) (https://clearinghouse.net),which posts information about large-scale civil rights lawsuits, serving lawyers, scholars, and the general public. Today, summarization in the CRLC requires extensive training of lawyers and law students who spend hours per case understanding multiple relevant documents in order to produce high-quality summaries of key events and outcomes. Motivated by this ongoing real-world summarization effort, we introduce Multi-LexSum, a collection of 9,280 expert-authored summaries drawn from ongoing CRLC writing. Multi-LexSum presents a challenging multi-document summarization task given the length of the source documents, often exceeding two hundred pages per case. Furthermore, Multi-LexSum is distinct from other datasets in its multiple target summaries, each at a different granularity (ranging from one-sentence "extreme" summaries to multi-paragraph narrations of over five hundred words). We present extensive analysis demonstrating that despite the high-quality summaries in the training data (adhering to strict content and style guidelines), state-of-the-art summarization models perform poorly on this task. We release Multi-LexSum for further research in summarization methods as well as to facilitate development of applications to assist in the CRLC's mission at https://multilexsum.github.io.

Labor Space: A Unifying Representation of the Labor Market via Large Language Models

The labor market is a complex ecosystem comprising diverse, interconnected entities, such as industries, occupations, skills, and firms. Due to the lack of a systematic method to map these heterogeneous entities together, each entity has been analyzed in isolation or only through pairwise relationships, inhibiting comprehensive understanding of the whole ecosystem. Here, we introduce Labor Space, a vector-space embedding of heterogeneous labor market entities, derived through applying a large language model with fine-tuning. Labor Space exposes the complex relational fabric of various labor market constituents, facilitating coherent integrative analysis of industries, occupations, skills, and firms, while retaining type-specific clustering. We demonstrate its unprecedented analytical capacities, including positioning heterogeneous entities on an economic axes, such as `Manufacturing--Healthcare'. Furthermore, by allowing vector arithmetic of these entities, Labor Space enables the exploration of complex inter-unit relations, and subsequently the estimation of the ramifications of economic shocks on individual units and their ripple effect across the labor market. We posit that Labor Space provides policymakers and business leaders with a comprehensive unifying framework for labor market analysis and simulation, fostering more nuanced and effective strategic decision-making.

Meta-rater: A Multi-dimensional Data Selection Method for Pre-training Language Models

The composition of pre-training datasets for large language models (LLMs) remains largely undisclosed, hindering transparency and efforts to optimize data quality, a critical driver of model performance. Current data selection methods, such as natural language quality assessments, diversity-based filters, and classifier-based approaches, are limited by single-dimensional evaluation or redundancy-focused strategies. To address these gaps, we propose four dimensions to evaluate data quality: professionalism, readability, reasoning, and cleanliness. We further introduce Meta-rater,a multi-dimensional data selection method that integrates these dimensions with existing quality metrics through learned optimal weightings. Meta-rater employs proxy models to train a regression model that predicts validation loss, enabling the identification of optimal combinations of quality scores. Experiments demonstrate that Meta-rater doubles convergence speed for 1.3B parameter models and improves downstream task performance by 3.23, with advantages that scale to models as large as 7.2B parameters. Our work establishes that holistic, multi-dimensional quality integration significantly outperforms conventional single-dimension approaches, offering a scalable paradigm for enhancing pre-training efficiency and model capability. To advance future research, we release scripts, data, and models at https://github.com/opendatalab/Meta-rater.

Science Hierarchography: Hierarchical Organization of Science Literature

Scientific knowledge is growing rapidly, making it challenging to track progress and high-level conceptual links across broad disciplines. While existing tools like citation networks and search engines make it easy to access a few related papers, they fundamentally lack the flexible abstraction needed to represent the density of activity in various scientific subfields. We motivate SCIENCE HIERARCHOGRAPHY, the goal of organizing scientific literature into a high-quality hierarchical structure that allows for the categorization of scientific work across varying levels of abstraction, from very broad fields to very specific studies. Such a representation can provide insights into which fields are well-explored and which are under-explored. To achieve the goals of SCIENCE HIERARCHOGRAPHY, we develop a range of algorithms. Our primary approach combines fast embedding-based clustering with LLM-based prompting to balance the computational efficiency of embedding methods with the semantic precision offered by LLM prompting. We demonstrate that this approach offers the best trade-off between quality and speed compared to methods that heavily rely on LLM prompting, such as iterative tree construction with LLMs. To better reflect the interdisciplinary and multifaceted nature of research papers, our hierarchy captures multiple dimensions of categorization beyond simple topic labels. We evaluate the utility of our framework by assessing how effectively an LLM-based agent can locate target papers using the hierarchy. Results show that this structured approach enhances interpretability, supports trend discovery, and offers an alternative pathway for exploring scientific literature beyond traditional search methods. Code, data and demo: https://github.com/JHU-CLSP/science-hierarchography{https://github.com/JHU-CLSP/science-hierarchography}

MultiMed: Massively Multimodal and Multitask Medical Understanding

Biomedical data is inherently multimodal, consisting of electronic health records, medical imaging, digital pathology, genome sequencing, wearable sensors, and more. The application of artificial intelligence tools to these multifaceted sensing technologies has the potential to revolutionize the prognosis, diagnosis, and management of human health and disease. However, current approaches to biomedical AI typically only train and evaluate with one or a small set of medical modalities and tasks. This limitation hampers the development of comprehensive tools that can leverage the rich interconnected information across many heterogeneous biomedical sensors. To address this challenge, we present MultiMed, a benchmark designed to evaluate and enable large-scale learning across a wide spectrum of medical modalities and tasks. MultiMed consists of 2.56 million samples across ten medical modalities such as medical reports, pathology, genomics, and protein data, and is structured into eleven challenging tasks, including disease prognosis, protein structure prediction, and medical question answering. Using MultiMed, we conduct comprehensive experiments benchmarking state-of-the-art unimodal, multimodal, and multitask models. Our analysis highlights the advantages of training large-scale medical models across many related modalities and tasks. Moreover, MultiMed enables studies of generalization across related medical concepts, robustness to real-world noisy data and distribution shifts, and novel modality combinations to improve prediction performance. MultiMed will be publicly available and regularly updated and welcomes inputs from the community.

Linking Datasets on Organizations Using Half A Billion Open Collaborated Records

Scholars studying organizations often work with multiple datasets lacking shared unique identifiers or covariates. In such situations, researchers may turn to approximate string matching methods to combine datasets. String matching, although useful, faces fundamental challenges. Even when two strings appear similar to humans, fuzzy matching often does not work because it fails to adapt to the informativeness of the character combinations presented. Worse, many entities have multiple names that are dissimilar (e.g., "Fannie Mae" and "Federal National Mortgage Association"), a case where string matching has little hope of succeeding. This paper introduces data from a prominent employment-related networking site (LinkedIn) as a tool to address these problems. We propose interconnected approaches to leveraging the massive amount of information from LinkedIn regarding organizational name-to-name links. The first approach builds a machine learning model for predicting matches from character strings, treating the trillions of user-contributed organizational name pairs as a training corpus: this approach constructs a string matching metric that explicitly maximizes match probabilities. A second approach identifies relationships between organization names using network representations of the LinkedIn data. A third approach combines the first and second. We document substantial improvements over fuzzy matching in applications, making all methods accessible in open-source software ("LinkOrgs").

Qilin: A Multimodal Information Retrieval Dataset with APP-level User Sessions

User-generated content (UGC) communities, especially those featuring multimodal content, improve user experiences by integrating visual and textual information into results (or items). The challenge of improving user experiences in complex systems with search and recommendation (S\&R) services has drawn significant attention from both academia and industry these years. However, the lack of high-quality datasets has limited the research progress on multimodal S\&R. To address the growing need for developing better S\&R services, we present a novel multimodal information retrieval dataset in this paper, namely Qilin. The dataset is collected from Xiaohongshu, a popular social platform with over 300 million monthly active users and an average search penetration rate of over 70\%. In contrast to existing datasets, Qilin offers a comprehensive collection of user sessions with heterogeneous results like image-text notes, video notes, commercial notes, and direct answers, facilitating the development of advanced multimodal neural retrieval models across diverse task settings. To better model user satisfaction and support the analysis of heterogeneous user behaviors, we also collect extensive APP-level contextual signals and genuine user feedback. Notably, Qilin contains user-favored answers and their referred results for search requests triggering the Deep Query Answering (DQA) module. This allows not only the training \& evaluation of a Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline, but also the exploration of how such a module would affect users' search behavior. Through comprehensive analysis and experiments, we provide interesting findings and insights for further improving S\&R systems. We hope that Qilin will significantly contribute to the advancement of multimodal content platforms with S\&R services in the future.

Improved Robustness for Deep Learning-based Segmentation of Multi-Center Myocardial Perfusion MRI Datasets Using Data Adaptive Uncertainty-guided Space-time Analysis

Background. Fully automatic analysis of myocardial perfusion MRI datasets enables rapid and objective reporting of stress/rest studies in patients with suspected ischemic heart disease. Developing deep learning techniques that can analyze multi-center datasets despite limited training data and variations in software and hardware is an ongoing challenge. Methods. Datasets from 3 medical centers acquired at 3T (n = 150 subjects) were included: an internal dataset (inD; n = 95) and two external datasets (exDs; n = 55) used for evaluating the robustness of the trained deep neural network (DNN) models against differences in pulse sequence (exD-1) and scanner vendor (exD-2). A subset of inD (n = 85) was used for training/validation of a pool of DNNs for segmentation, all using the same spatiotemporal U-Net architecture and hyperparameters but with different parameter initializations. We employed a space-time sliding-patch analysis approach that automatically yields a pixel-wise "uncertainty map" as a byproduct of the segmentation process. In our approach, a given test case is segmented by all members of the DNN pool and the resulting uncertainty maps are leveraged to automatically select the "best" one among the pool of solutions. Results. The proposed DAUGS analysis approach performed similarly to the established approach on the internal dataset (p = n.s.) whereas it significantly outperformed on the external datasets (p < 0.005 for exD-1 and exD-2). Moreover, the number of image series with "failed" segmentation was significantly lower for the proposed vs. the established approach (4.3% vs. 17.1%, p < 0.0005). Conclusions. The proposed DAUGS analysis approach has the potential to improve the robustness of deep learning methods for segmentation of multi-center stress perfusion datasets with variations in the choice of pulse sequence, site location or scanner vendor.

Partial Correlations in Compositional Data Analysis

Partial correlations quantify linear association between two variables adjusting for the influence of the remaining variables. They form the backbone for graphical models and are readily obtained from the inverse of the covariance matrix. For compositional data, the covariance structure is specified from log ratios of variables, so unless we try to "open" the data via a normalization, this implies changes in the definition and interpretation of partial correlations. In the present work, we elucidate how results derived by Aitchison (1986) lead to a natural definition of partial correlation that has a number of advantages over current measures of association. For this, we show that the residuals of log-ratios between a variable with a reference, when adjusting for all remaining variables including the reference, are reference-independent. Since the reference itself can be controlled for, correlations between residuals are defined for the variables directly without the necessity to recur to ratios except when specifying which variables are partialled out. Thus, perhaps surprisingly, partial correlations do not have the problems commonly found with measures of pairwise association on compositional data. They are well-defined between two variables, are properly scaled, and allow for negative association. By design, they are subcompositionally incoherent, but they share this property with conventional partial correlations (where results change when adjusting for the influence of fewer variables). We discuss the equivalence with normalization-based approaches whenever the normalizing variables are controlled for. We also discuss the partial variances and correlations we obtain from a previously studied data set of Roman glass cups.

SPIQA: A Dataset for Multimodal Question Answering on Scientific Papers

Seeking answers to questions within long scientific research articles is a crucial area of study that aids readers in quickly addressing their inquiries. However, existing question-answering (QA) datasets based on scientific papers are limited in scale and focus solely on textual content. To address this limitation, we introduce SPIQA (Scientific Paper Image Question Answering), the first large-scale QA dataset specifically designed to interpret complex figures and tables within the context of scientific research articles across various domains of computer science. Leveraging the breadth of expertise and ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to understand figures, we employ automatic and manual curation to create the dataset. We craft an information-seeking task involving multiple images that cover a wide variety of plots, charts, tables, schematic diagrams, and result visualizations. SPIQA comprises 270K questions divided into training, validation, and three different evaluation splits. Through extensive experiments with 12 prominent foundational models, we evaluate the ability of current multimodal systems to comprehend the nuanced aspects of research articles. Additionally, we propose a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation strategy with in-context retrieval that allows fine-grained, step-by-step assessment and improves model performance. We further explore the upper bounds of performance enhancement with additional textual information, highlighting its promising potential for future research and the dataset's impact on revolutionizing how we interact with scientific literature.

AI4Research: A Survey of Artificial Intelligence for Scientific Research

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex domains such as logical reasoning and experimental coding. Motivated by these advancements, numerous studies have explored the application of AI in the innovation process, particularly in the context of scientific research. These AI technologies primarily aim to develop systems that can autonomously conduct research processes across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Despite these significant strides, a comprehensive survey on AI for Research (AI4Research) remains absent, which hampers our understanding and impedes further development in this field. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive survey and offer a unified perspective on AI4Research. Specifically, the main contributions of our work are as follows: (1) Systematic taxonomy: We first introduce a systematic taxonomy to classify five mainstream tasks in AI4Research. (2) New frontiers: Then, we identify key research gaps and highlight promising future directions, focusing on the rigor and scalability of automated experiments, as well as the societal impact. (3) Abundant applications and resources: Finally, we compile a wealth of resources, including relevant multidisciplinary applications, data corpora, and tools. We hope our work will provide the research community with quick access to these resources and stimulate innovative breakthroughs in AI4Research.

From Graphs to Hypergraphs: Hypergraph Projection and its Remediation

We study the implications of the modeling choice to use a graph, instead of a hypergraph, to represent real-world interconnected systems whose constituent relationships are of higher order by nature. Such a modeling choice typically involves an underlying projection process that maps the original hypergraph onto a graph, and is common in graph-based analysis. While hypergraph projection can potentially lead to loss of higher-order relations, there exists very limited studies on the consequences of doing so, as well as its remediation. This work fills this gap by doing two things: (1) we develop analysis based on graph and set theory, showing two ubiquitous patterns of hyperedges that are root to structural information loss in all hypergraph projections; we also quantify the combinatorial impossibility of recovering the lost higher-order structures if no extra help is provided; (2) we still seek to recover the lost higher-order structures in hypergraph projection, and in light of (1)'s findings we propose to relax the problem into a learning-based setting. Under this setting, we develop a learning-based hypergraph reconstruction method based on an important statistic of hyperedge distributions that we find. Our reconstruction method is evaluated on 8 real-world datasets under different settings, and exhibits consistently good performance. We also demonstrate benefits of the reconstructed hypergraphs via use cases of protein rankings and link predictions.

MozzaVID: Mozzarella Volumetric Image Dataset

Influenced by the complexity of volumetric imaging, there is a shortage of established datasets useful for benchmarking volumetric deep-learning models. As a consequence, new and existing models are not easily comparable, limiting the development of architectures optimized specifically for volumetric data. To counteract this trend, we introduce MozzaVID - a large, clean, and versatile volumetric classification dataset. Our dataset contains X-ray computed tomography (CT) images of mozzarella microstructure and enables the classification of 25 cheese types and 149 cheese samples. We provide data in three different resolutions, resulting in three dataset instances containing from 591 to 37,824 images. While being general-purpose, the dataset also facilitates investigating mozzarella structure properties. The structure of food directly affects its functional properties and thus its consumption experience. Understanding food structure helps tune the production and mimicking it enables sustainable alternatives to animal-derived food products. The complex and disordered nature of food structures brings a unique challenge, where a choice of appropriate imaging method, scale, and sample size is not trivial. With this dataset we aim to address these complexities, contributing to more robust structural analysis models. The dataset can be downloaded from: https://archive.compute.dtu.dk/files/public/projects/MozzaVID/.

On building machine learning pipelines for Android malware detection: a procedural survey of practices, challenges and opportunities

As the smartphone market leader, Android has been a prominent target for malware attacks. The number of malicious applications (apps) identified for it has increased continually over the past decade, creating an immense challenge for all parties involved. For market holders and researchers, in particular, the large number of samples has made manual malware detection unfeasible, leading to an influx of research that investigate Machine Learning (ML) approaches to automate this process. However, while some of the proposed approaches achieve high performance, rapidly evolving Android malware has made them unable to maintain their accuracy over time. This has created a need in the community to conduct further research, and build more flexible ML pipelines. Doing so, however, is currently hindered by a lack of systematic overview of the existing literature, to learn from and improve upon the existing solutions. Existing survey papers often focus only on parts of the ML process (e.g., data collection or model deployment), while omitting other important stages, such as model evaluation and explanation. In this paper, we address this problem with a review of 42 highly-cited papers, spanning a decade of research (from 2011 to 2021). We introduce a novel procedural taxonomy of the published literature, covering how they have used ML algorithms, what features they have engineered, which dimensionality reduction techniques they have employed, what datasets they have employed for training, and what their evaluation and explanation strategies are. Drawing from this taxonomy, we also identify gaps in knowledge and provide ideas for improvement and future work.

SESA: Supervised Explicit Semantic Analysis

In recent years supervised representation learning has provided state of the art or close to the state of the art results in semantic analysis tasks including ranking and information retrieval. The core idea is to learn how to embed items into a latent space such that they optimize a supervised objective in that latent space. The dimensions of the latent space have no clear semantics, and this reduces the interpretability of the system. For example, in personalization models, it is hard to explain why a particular item is ranked high for a given user profile. We propose a novel model of representation learning called Supervised Explicit Semantic Analysis (SESA) that is trained in a supervised fashion to embed items to a set of dimensions with explicit semantics. The model learns to compare two objects by representing them in this explicit space, where each dimension corresponds to a concept from a knowledge base. This work extends Explicit Semantic Analysis (ESA) with a supervised model for ranking problems. We apply this model to the task of Job-Profile relevance in LinkedIn in which a set of skills defines our explicit dimensions of the space. Every profile and job are encoded to this set of skills their similarity is calculated in this space. We use RNNs to embed text input into this space. In addition to interpretability, our model makes use of the web-scale collaborative skills data that is provided by users for each LinkedIn profile. Our model provides state of the art result while it remains interpretable.

Orthogonal Matrices for MBAT Vector Symbolic Architectures, and a "Soft" VSA Representation for JSON

Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) give a way to represent a complex object as a single fixed-length vector, so that similar objects have similar vector representations. These vector representations then become easy to use for machine learning or nearest-neighbor search. We review a previously proposed VSA method, MBAT (Matrix Binding of Additive Terms), which uses multiplication by random matrices for binding related terms. However, multiplying by such matrices introduces instabilities which can harm performance. Making the random matrices be orthogonal matrices provably fixes this problem. With respect to larger scale applications, we see how to apply MBAT vector representations for any data expressed in JSON. JSON is used in numerous programming languages to express complex data, but its native format appears highly unsuited for machine learning. Expressing JSON as a fixed-length vector makes it readily usable for machine learning and nearest-neighbor search. Creating such JSON vectors also shows that a VSA needs to employ binding operations that are non-commutative. VSAs are now ready to try with full-scale practical applications, including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and genomics. Keywords: MBAT (Matrix Binding of Additive Terms), VSA (Vector Symbolic Architecture), HDC (Hyperdimensional Computing), Distributed Representations, Binding, Orthogonal Matrices, Recurrent Connections, Machine Learning, Search, JSON, VSA Applications

Neural Natural Language Processing for Long Texts: A Survey of the State-of-the-Art

The adoption of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has greatly benefited Natural Language Processing (NLP) during the past decade. However, the demands of long document analysis are quite different from those of shorter texts, while the ever increasing size of documents uploaded on-line renders automated understanding of lengthy texts a critical issue. Relevant applications include automated Web mining, legal document review, medical records analysis, financial reports analysis, contract management, environmental impact assessment, news aggregation, etc. Despite the relatively recent development of efficient algorithms for analyzing long documents, practical tools in this field are currently flourishing. This article serves as an entry point into this dynamic domain and aims to achieve two objectives. Firstly, it provides an overview of the relevant neural building blocks, serving as a concise tutorial for the field. Secondly, it offers a brief examination of the current state-of-the-art in long document NLP, with a primary focus on two key tasks: document classification and document summarization. Sentiment analysis for long texts is also covered, since it is typically treated as a particular case of document classification. Consequently, this article presents an introductory exploration of document-level analysis, addressing the primary challenges, concerns, and existing solutions. Finally, the article presents publicly available annotated datasets that can facilitate further research in this area.

Unraveling the Key Components of OOD Generalization via Diversification

Supervised learning datasets may contain multiple cues that explain the training set equally well, i.e., learning any of them would lead to the correct predictions on the training data. However, many of them can be spurious, i.e., lose their predictive power under a distribution shift and consequently fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Recently developed "diversification" methods (Lee et al., 2023; Pagliardini et al., 2023) approach this problem by finding multiple diverse hypotheses that rely on different features. This paper aims to study this class of methods and identify the key components contributing to their OOD generalization abilities. We show that (1) diversification methods are highly sensitive to the distribution of the unlabeled data used for diversification and can underperform significantly when away from a method-specific sweet spot. (2) Diversification alone is insufficient for OOD generalization. The choice of the used learning algorithm, e.g., the model's architecture and pretraining, is crucial. In standard experiments (classification on Waterbirds and Office-Home datasets), using the second-best choice leads to an up to 20\% absolute drop in accuracy. (3) The optimal choice of learning algorithm depends on the unlabeled data and vice versa i.e. they are co-dependent. (4) Finally, we show that, in practice, the above pitfalls cannot be alleviated by increasing the number of diverse hypotheses, the major feature of diversification methods. These findings provide a clearer understanding of the critical design factors influencing the OOD generalization abilities of diversification methods. They can guide practitioners in how to use the existing methods best and guide researchers in developing new, better ones.

Detect-Order-Construct: A Tree Construction based Approach for Hierarchical Document Structure Analysis

Document structure analysis (aka document layout analysis) is crucial for understanding the physical layout and logical structure of documents, with applications in information retrieval, document summarization, knowledge extraction, etc. In this paper, we concentrate on Hierarchical Document Structure Analysis (HDSA) to explore hierarchical relationships within structured documents created using authoring software employing hierarchical schemas, such as LaTeX, Microsoft Word, and HTML. To comprehensively analyze hierarchical document structures, we propose a tree construction based approach that addresses multiple subtasks concurrently, including page object detection (Detect), reading order prediction of identified objects (Order), and the construction of intended hierarchical structure (Construct). We present an effective end-to-end solution based on this framework to demonstrate its performance. To assess our approach, we develop a comprehensive benchmark called Comp-HRDoc, which evaluates the above subtasks simultaneously. Our end-to-end system achieves state-of-the-art performance on two large-scale document layout analysis datasets (PubLayNet and DocLayNet), a high-quality hierarchical document structure reconstruction dataset (HRDoc), and our Comp-HRDoc benchmark. The Comp-HRDoc benchmark will be released to facilitate further research in this field.

VIGMA: An Open-Access Framework for Visual Gait and Motion Analytics

Gait disorders are commonly observed in older adults, who frequently experience various issues related to walking. Additionally, researchers and clinicians extensively investigate mobility related to gait in typically and atypically developing children, athletes, and individuals with orthopedic and neurological disorders. Effective gait analysis enables the understanding of the causal mechanisms of mobility and balance control of patients, the development of tailored treatment plans to improve mobility, the reduction of fall risk, and the tracking of rehabilitation progress. However, analyzing gait data is a complex task due to the multivariate nature of the data, the large volume of information to be interpreted, and the technical skills required. Existing tools for gait analysis are often limited to specific patient groups (e.g., cerebral palsy), only handle a specific subset of tasks in the entire workflow, and are not openly accessible. To address these shortcomings, we conducted a requirements assessment with gait practitioners (e.g., researchers, clinicians) via surveys and identified key components of the workflow, including (1) data processing and (2) data analysis and visualization. Based on the findings, we designed VIGMA, an open-access visual analytics framework integrated with computational notebooks and a Python library, to meet the identified requirements. Notably, the framework supports analytical capabilities for assessing disease progression and for comparing multiple patient groups. We validated the framework through usage scenarios with experts specializing in gait and mobility rehabilitation. VIGMA is available at https://github.com/komar41/VIGMA.

A Survey on Data Selection for Language Models

A major factor in the recent success of large language models is the use of enormous and ever-growing text datasets for unsupervised pre-training. However, naively training a model on all available data may not be optimal (or feasible), as the quality of available text data can vary. Filtering out data can also decrease the carbon footprint and financial costs of training models by reducing the amount of training required. Data selection methods aim to determine which candidate data points to include in the training dataset and how to appropriately sample from the selected data points. The promise of improved data selection methods has caused the volume of research in the area to rapidly expand. However, because deep learning is mostly driven by empirical evidence and experimentation on large-scale data is expensive, few organizations have the resources for extensive data selection research. Consequently, knowledge of effective data selection practices has become concentrated within a few organizations, many of which do not openly share their findings and methodologies. To narrow this gap in knowledge, we present a comprehensive review of existing literature on data selection methods and related research areas, providing a taxonomy of existing approaches. By describing the current landscape of research, this work aims to accelerate progress in data selection by establishing an entry point for new and established researchers. Additionally, throughout this review we draw attention to noticeable holes in the literature and conclude the paper by proposing promising avenues for future research.

A Reliable Knowledge Processing Framework for Combustion Science using Foundation Models

This research explores the integration of large language models (LLMs) into scientific data assimilation, focusing on combustion science as a case study. Leveraging foundational models integrated with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, the study introduces an approach to process diverse combustion research data, spanning experimental studies, simulations, and literature. The multifaceted nature of combustion research emphasizes the critical role of knowledge processing in navigating and extracting valuable information from a vast and diverse pool of sources. The developed approach minimizes computational and economic expenses while optimizing data privacy and accuracy. It incorporates prompt engineering and offline open-source LLMs, offering user autonomy in selecting base models. The study provides a thorough examination of text segmentation strategies, conducts comparative studies between LLMs, and explores various optimized prompts to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework. By incorporating an external database, the framework outperforms a conventional LLM in generating accurate responses and constructing robust arguments. Additionally, the study delves into the investigation of optimized prompt templates for the purpose of efficient extraction of scientific literature. The research addresses concerns related to hallucinations and false research articles by introducing a custom workflow developed with a detection algorithm to filter out inaccuracies. Despite identified areas for improvement, the framework consistently delivers accurate domain-specific responses with minimal human oversight. The prompt-agnostic approach introduced holds promise for future deliberations. The study underscores the significance of integrating LLMs and knowledge processing techniques in scientific research, providing a foundation for advancements in data assimilation and utilization.

Multi-resolution Networks For Flexible Irregular Time Series Modeling (Multi-FIT)

Missing values, irregularly collected samples, and multi-resolution signals commonly occur in multivariate time series data, making predictive tasks difficult. These challenges are especially prevalent in the healthcare domain, where patients' vital signs and electronic records are collected at different frequencies and have occasionally missing information due to the imperfections in equipment or patient circumstances. Researchers have handled each of these issues differently, often handling missing data through mean value imputation and then using sequence models over the multivariate signals while ignoring the different resolution of signals. We propose a unified model named Multi-resolution Flexible Irregular Time series Network (Multi-FIT). The building block for Multi-FIT is the FIT network. The FIT network creates an informative dense representation at each time step using signal information such as last observed value, time difference since the last observed time stamp and overall mean for the signal. Vertical FIT (FIT-V) is a variant of FIT which also models the relationship between different temporal signals while creating the informative dense representations for the signal. The multi-FIT model uses multiple FIT networks for sets of signals with different resolutions, further facilitating the construction of flexible representations. Our model has three main contributions: a.) it does not impute values but rather creates informative representations to provide flexibility to the model for creating task-specific representations b.) it models the relationship between different signals in the form of support signals c.) it models different resolutions in parallel before merging them for the final prediction task. The FIT, FIT-V and Multi-FIT networks improve upon the state-of-the-art models for three predictive tasks, including the forecasting of patient survival.

Unified Embedding: Battle-Tested Feature Representations for Web-Scale ML Systems

Learning high-quality feature embeddings efficiently and effectively is critical for the performance of web-scale machine learning systems. A typical model ingests hundreds of features with vocabularies on the order of millions to billions of tokens. The standard approach is to represent each feature value as a d-dimensional embedding, introducing hundreds of billions of parameters for extremely high-cardinality features. This bottleneck has led to substantial progress in alternative embedding algorithms. Many of these methods, however, make the assumption that each feature uses an independent embedding table. This work introduces a simple yet highly effective framework, Feature Multiplexing, where one single representation space is used across many different categorical features. Our theoretical and empirical analysis reveals that multiplexed embeddings can be decomposed into components from each constituent feature, allowing models to distinguish between features. We show that multiplexed representations lead to Pareto-optimal parameter-accuracy tradeoffs for three public benchmark datasets. Further, we propose a highly practical approach called Unified Embedding with three major benefits: simplified feature configuration, strong adaptation to dynamic data distributions, and compatibility with modern hardware. Unified embedding gives significant improvements in offline and online metrics compared to highly competitive baselines across five web-scale search, ads, and recommender systems, where it serves billions of users across the world in industry-leading products.

Uni-SMART: Universal Science Multimodal Analysis and Research Transformer

In scientific research and its application, scientific literature analysis is crucial as it allows researchers to build on the work of others. However, the fast growth of scientific knowledge has led to a massive increase in scholarly articles, making in-depth literature analysis increasingly challenging and time-consuming. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has offered a new way to address this challenge. Known for their strong abilities in summarizing texts, LLMs are seen as a potential tool to improve the analysis of scientific literature. However, existing LLMs have their own limits. Scientific literature often includes a wide range of multimodal elements, such as molecular structure, tables, and charts, which are hard for text-focused LLMs to understand and analyze. This issue points to the urgent need for new solutions that can fully understand and analyze multimodal content in scientific literature. To answer this demand, we present Uni-SMART (Universal Science Multimodal Analysis and Research Transformer), an innovative model designed for in-depth understanding of multimodal scientific literature. Through rigorous quantitative evaluation across several domains, Uni-SMART demonstrates superior performance over leading text-focused LLMs. Furthermore, our exploration extends to practical applications, including patent infringement detection and nuanced analysis of charts. These applications not only highlight Uni-SMART's adaptability but also its potential to revolutionize how we interact with scientific literature.

Stable Bias: Analyzing Societal Representations in Diffusion Models

As machine learning-enabled Text-to-Image (TTI) systems are becoming increasingly prevalent and seeing growing adoption as commercial services, characterizing the social biases they exhibit is a necessary first step to lowering their risk of discriminatory outcomes. This evaluation, however, is made more difficult by the synthetic nature of these systems' outputs; since artificial depictions of fictive humans have no inherent gender or ethnicity nor do they belong to socially-constructed groups, we need to look beyond common categorizations of diversity or representation. To address this need, we propose a new method for exploring and quantifying social biases in TTI systems by directly comparing collections of generated images designed to showcase a system's variation across social attributes -- gender and ethnicity -- and target attributes for bias evaluation -- professions and gender-coded adjectives. Our approach allows us to (i) identify specific bias trends through visualization tools, (ii) provide targeted scores to directly compare models in terms of diversity and representation, and (iii) jointly model interdependent social variables to support a multidimensional analysis. We use this approach to analyze over 96,000 images generated by 3 popular TTI systems (DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion v 1.4 and v 2) and find that all three significantly over-represent the portion of their latent space associated with whiteness and masculinity across target attributes; among the systems studied, DALL-E 2 shows the least diversity, followed by Stable Diffusion v2 then v1.4.

Time Series Analysis for Education: Methods, Applications, and Future Directions

Recent advancements in the collection and analysis of sequential educational data have brought time series analysis to a pivotal position in educational research, highlighting its essential role in facilitating data-driven decision-making. However, there is a lack of comprehensive summaries that consolidate these advancements. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to provide a comprehensive review of time series analysis techniques specifically within the educational context. We begin by exploring the landscape of educational data analytics, categorizing various data sources and types relevant to education. We then review four prominent time series methods-forecasting, classification, clustering, and anomaly detection-illustrating their specific application points in educational settings. Subsequently, we present a range of educational scenarios and applications, focusing on how these methods are employed to address diverse educational tasks, which highlights the practical integration of multiple time series methods to solve complex educational problems. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on future directions, including personalized learning analytics, multimodal data fusion, and the role of large language models (LLMs) in educational time series. The contributions of this paper include a detailed taxonomy of educational data, a synthesis of time series techniques with specific educational applications, and a forward-looking perspective on emerging trends and future research opportunities in educational analysis. The related papers and resources are available and regularly updated at the project page.

Navigating Dataset Documentations in AI: A Large-Scale Analysis of Dataset Cards on Hugging Face

Advances in machine learning are closely tied to the creation of datasets. While data documentation is widely recognized as essential to the reliability, reproducibility, and transparency of ML, we lack a systematic empirical understanding of current dataset documentation practices. To shed light on this question, here we take Hugging Face -- one of the largest platforms for sharing and collaborating on ML models and datasets -- as a prominent case study. By analyzing all 7,433 dataset documentation on Hugging Face, our investigation provides an overview of the Hugging Face dataset ecosystem and insights into dataset documentation practices, yielding 5 main findings: (1) The dataset card completion rate shows marked heterogeneity correlated with dataset popularity. (2) A granular examination of each section within the dataset card reveals that the practitioners seem to prioritize Dataset Description and Dataset Structure sections, while the Considerations for Using the Data section receives the lowest proportion of content. (3) By analyzing the subsections within each section and utilizing topic modeling to identify key topics, we uncover what is discussed in each section, and underscore significant themes encompassing both technical and social impacts, as well as limitations within the Considerations for Using the Data section. (4) Our findings also highlight the need for improved accessibility and reproducibility of datasets in the Usage sections. (5) In addition, our human annotation evaluation emphasizes the pivotal role of comprehensive dataset content in shaping individuals' perceptions of a dataset card's overall quality. Overall, our study offers a unique perspective on analyzing dataset documentation through large-scale data science analysis and underlines the need for more thorough dataset documentation in machine learning research.

Disentangled Structural and Featural Representation for Task-Agnostic Graph Valuation

With the emergence of data marketplaces, the demand for methods to assess the value of data has increased significantly. While numerous techniques have been proposed for this purpose, none have specifically addressed graphs as the main data modality. Graphs are widely used across various fields, ranging from chemical molecules to social networks. In this study, we break down graphs into two main components: structural and featural, and we focus on evaluating data without relying on specific task-related metrics, making it applicable in practical scenarios where validation requirements may be lacking. We introduce a novel framework called blind message passing, which aligns the seller's and buyer's graphs using a shared node permutation based on graph matching. This allows us to utilize the graph Wasserstein distance to quantify the differences in the structural distribution of graph datasets, called the structural disparities. We then consider featural aspects of buyers' and sellers' graphs for data valuation and capture their statistical similarities and differences, referred to as relevance and diversity, respectively. Our approach ensures that buyers and sellers remain unaware of each other's datasets. Our experiments on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in capturing the relevance, diversity, and structural disparities of seller data for buyers, particularly in graph-based data valuation scenarios.

NESTLE: a No-Code Tool for Statistical Analysis of Legal Corpus

The statistical analysis of large scale legal corpus can provide valuable legal insights. For such analysis one needs to (1) select a subset of the corpus using document retrieval tools, (2) structuralize text using information extraction (IE) systems, and (3) visualize the data for the statistical analysis. Each process demands either specialized tools or programming skills whereas no comprehensive unified "no-code" tools have been available. Especially for IE, if the target information is not predefined in the ontology of the IE system, one needs to build their own system. Here we provide NESTLE, a no code tool for large-scale statistical analysis of legal corpus. With NESTLE, users can search target documents, extract information, and visualize the structured data all via the chat interface with accompanying auxiliary GUI for the fine-level control. NESTLE consists of three main components: a search engine, an end-to-end IE system, and a Large Language Model (LLM) that glues the whole components together and provides the chat interface. Powered by LLM and the end-to-end IE system, NESTLE can extract any type of information that has not been predefined in the IE system opening up the possibility of unlimited customizable statistical analysis of the corpus without writing a single line of code. The use of the custom end-to-end IE system also enables faster and low-cost IE on large scale corpus. We validate our system on 15 Korean precedent IE tasks and 3 legal text classification tasks from LEXGLUE. The comprehensive experiments reveal NESTLE can achieve GPT-4 comparable performance by training the internal IE module with 4 human-labeled, and 192 LLM-labeled examples. The detailed analysis provides the insight on the trade-off between accuracy, time, and cost in building such system.

Preserving Statistical Validity in Adaptive Data Analysis

A great deal of effort has been devoted to reducing the risk of spurious scientific discoveries, from the use of sophisticated validation techniques, to deep statistical methods for controlling the false discovery rate in multiple hypothesis testing. However, there is a fundamental disconnect between the theoretical results and the practice of data analysis: the theory of statistical inference assumes a fixed collection of hypotheses to be tested, or learning algorithms to be applied, selected non-adaptively before the data are gathered, whereas in practice data is shared and reused with hypotheses and new analyses being generated on the basis of data exploration and the outcomes of previous analyses. In this work we initiate a principled study of how to guarantee the validity of statistical inference in adaptive data analysis. As an instance of this problem, we propose and investigate the question of estimating the expectations of m adaptively chosen functions on an unknown distribution given n random samples. We show that, surprisingly, there is a way to estimate an exponential in n number of expectations accurately even if the functions are chosen adaptively. This gives an exponential improvement over standard empirical estimators that are limited to a linear number of estimates. Our result follows from a general technique that counter-intuitively involves actively perturbing and coordinating the estimates, using techniques developed for privacy preservation. We give additional applications of this technique to our question.

Multimodal DeepResearcher: Generating Text-Chart Interleaved Reports From Scratch with Agentic Framework

Visualizations play a crucial part in effective communication of concepts and information. Recent advances in reasoning and retrieval augmented generation have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform deep research and generate comprehensive reports. Despite its progress, existing deep research frameworks primarily focus on generating text-only content, leaving the automated generation of interleaved texts and visualizations underexplored. This novel task poses key challenges in designing informative visualizations and effectively integrating them with text reports. To address these challenges, we propose Formal Description of Visualization (FDV), a structured textual representation of charts that enables LLMs to learn from and generate diverse, high-quality visualizations. Building on this representation, we introduce Multimodal DeepResearcher, an agentic framework that decomposes the task into four stages: (1) researching, (2) exemplar report textualization, (3) planning, and (4) multimodal report generation. For the evaluation of generated multimodal reports, we develop MultimodalReportBench, which contains 100 diverse topics served as inputs along with 5 dedicated metrics. Extensive experiments across models and evaluation methods demonstrate the effectiveness of Multimodal DeepResearcher. Notably, utilizing the same Claude 3.7 Sonnet model, Multimodal DeepResearcher achieves an 82\% overall win rate over the baseline method.

Time-MMD: Multi-Domain Multimodal Dataset for Time Series Analysis

Time series data are ubiquitous across a wide range of real-world domains. While real-world time series analysis (TSA) requires human experts to integrate numerical series data with multimodal domain-specific knowledge, most existing TSA models rely solely on numerical data, overlooking the significance of information beyond numerical series. This oversight is due to the untapped potential of textual series data and the absence of a comprehensive, high-quality multimodal dataset. To overcome this obstacle, we introduce Time-MMD, the first multi-domain, multimodal time series dataset covering 9 primary data domains. Time-MMD ensures fine-grained modality alignment, eliminates data contamination, and provides high usability. Additionally, we develop MM-TSFlib, the first multimodal time-series forecasting (TSF) library, seamlessly pipelining multimodal TSF evaluations based on Time-MMD for in-depth analyses. Extensive experiments conducted on Time-MMD through MM-TSFlib demonstrate significant performance enhancements by extending unimodal TSF to multimodality, evidenced by over 15% mean squared error reduction in general, and up to 40% in domains with rich textual data. More importantly, our datasets and library revolutionize broader applications, impacts, research topics to advance TSA. The dataset and library are available at https://github.com/AdityaLab/Time-MMD and https://github.com/AdityaLab/MM-TSFlib.

Using Sequences of Life-events to Predict Human Lives

Over the past decade, machine learning has revolutionized computers' ability to analyze text through flexible computational models. Due to their structural similarity to written language, transformer-based architectures have also shown promise as tools to make sense of a range of multi-variate sequences from protein-structures, music, electronic health records to weather-forecasts. We can also represent human lives in a way that shares this structural similarity to language. From one perspective, lives are simply sequences of events: People are born, visit the pediatrician, start school, move to a new location, get married, and so on. Here, we exploit this similarity to adapt innovations from natural language processing to examine the evolution and predictability of human lives based on detailed event sequences. We do this by drawing on arguably the most comprehensive registry data in existence, available for an entire nation of more than six million individuals across decades. Our data include information about life-events related to health, education, occupation, income, address, and working hours, recorded with day-to-day resolution. We create embeddings of life-events in a single vector space showing that this embedding space is robust and highly structured. Our models allow us to predict diverse outcomes ranging from early mortality to personality nuances, outperforming state-of-the-art models by a wide margin. Using methods for interpreting deep learning models, we probe the algorithm to understand the factors that enable our predictions. Our framework allows researchers to identify new potential mechanisms that impact life outcomes and associated possibilities for personalized interventions.

Experimental Analysis of Large-scale Learnable Vector Storage Compression

Learnable embedding vector is one of the most important applications in machine learning, and is widely used in various database-related domains. However, the high dimensionality of sparse data in recommendation tasks and the huge volume of corpus in retrieval-related tasks lead to a large memory consumption of the embedding table, which poses a great challenge to the training and deployment of models. Recent research has proposed various methods to compress the embeddings at the cost of a slight decrease in model quality or the introduction of other overheads. Nevertheless, the relative performance of these methods remains unclear. Existing experimental comparisons only cover a subset of these methods and focus on limited metrics. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive comparative analysis and experimental evaluation of embedding compression. We introduce a new taxonomy that categorizes these techniques based on their characteristics and methodologies, and further develop a modular benchmarking framework that integrates 14 representative methods. Under a uniform test environment, our benchmark fairly evaluates each approach, presents their strengths and weaknesses under different memory budgets, and recommends the best method based on the use case. In addition to providing useful guidelines, our study also uncovers the limitations of current methods and suggests potential directions for future research.

EasyNER: A Customizable Easy-to-Use Pipeline for Deep Learning- and Dictionary-based Named Entity Recognition from Medical Text

Medical research generates a large number of publications with the PubMed database already containing >35 million research articles. Integration of the knowledge scattered across this large body of literature could provide key insights into physiological mechanisms and disease processes leading to novel medical interventions. However, it is a great challenge for researchers to utilize this information in full since the scale and complexity of the data greatly surpasses human processing abilities. This becomes especially problematic in cases of extreme urgency like the COVID-19 pandemic. Automated text mining can help extract and connect information from the large body of medical research articles. The first step in text mining is typically the identification of specific classes of keywords (e.g., all protein or disease names), so called Named Entity Recognition (NER). Here we present an end-to-end pipeline for NER of typical entities found in medical research articles, including diseases, cells, chemicals, genes/proteins, and species. The pipeline can access and process large medical research article collections (PubMed, CORD-19) or raw text and incorporates a series of deep learning models fine-tuned on the HUNER corpora collection. In addition, the pipeline can perform dictionary-based NER related to COVID-19 and other medical topics. Users can also load their own NER models and dictionaries to include additional entities. The output consists of publication-ready ranked lists and graphs of detected entities and files containing the annotated texts. An associated script allows rapid inspection of the results for specific entities of interest. As model use cases, the pipeline was deployed on two collections of autophagy-related abstracts from PubMed and on the CORD19 dataset, a collection of 764 398 research article abstracts related to COVID-19.

Datasets for Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey

This paper embarks on an exploration into the Large Language Model (LLM) datasets, which play a crucial role in the remarkable advancements of LLMs. The datasets serve as the foundational infrastructure analogous to a root system that sustains and nurtures the development of LLMs. Consequently, examination of these datasets emerges as a critical topic in research. In order to address the current lack of a comprehensive overview and thorough analysis of LLM datasets, and to gain insights into their current status and future trends, this survey consolidates and categorizes the fundamental aspects of LLM datasets from five perspectives: (1) Pre-training Corpora; (2) Instruction Fine-tuning Datasets; (3) Preference Datasets; (4) Evaluation Datasets; (5) Traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) Datasets. The survey sheds light on the prevailing challenges and points out potential avenues for future investigation. Additionally, a comprehensive review of the existing available dataset resources is also provided, including statistics from 444 datasets, covering 8 language categories and spanning 32 domains. Information from 20 dimensions is incorporated into the dataset statistics. The total data size surveyed surpasses 774.5 TB for pre-training corpora and 700M instances for other datasets. We aim to present the entire landscape of LLM text datasets, serving as a comprehensive reference for researchers in this field and contributing to future studies. Related resources are available at: https://github.com/lmmlzn/Awesome-LLMs-Datasets.

From Single to Multi: How LLMs Hallucinate in Multi-Document Summarization

Although many studies have investigated and reduced hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) for single-document tasks, research on hallucination in multi-document summarization (MDS) tasks remains largely unexplored. Specifically, it is unclear how the challenges arising from handling multiple documents (e.g., repetition and diversity of information) affect models outputs. In this work, we investigate how hallucinations manifest in LLMs when summarizing topic-specific information from multiple documents. Since no benchmarks exist for investigating hallucinations in MDS, we use existing news and conversation datasets, annotated with topic-specific insights, to create two novel multi-document benchmarks. When evaluating 5 LLMs on our benchmarks, we observe that on average, up to 75% of the content in LLM-generated summary is hallucinated, with hallucinations more likely to occur towards the end of the summaries. Moreover, when summarizing non-existent topic-related information, gpt-3.5-turbo and GPT-4o still generate summaries about 79.35% and 44% of the time, raising concerns about their tendency to fabricate content. To understand the characteristics of these hallucinations, we manually evaluate 700+ insights and find that most errors stem from either failing to follow instructions or producing overly generic insights. Motivated by these observations, we investigate the efficacy of simple post-hoc baselines in mitigating hallucinations but find them only moderately effective. Our results underscore the need for more effective approaches to systematically mitigate hallucinations in MDS. We release our dataset and code at github.com/megagonlabs/Hallucination_MDS.

Do Datasets Have Politics? Disciplinary Values in Computer Vision Dataset Development

Data is a crucial component of machine learning. The field is reliant on data to train, validate, and test models. With increased technical capabilities, machine learning research has boomed in both academic and industry settings, and one major focus has been on computer vision. Computer vision is a popular domain of machine learning increasingly pertinent to real-world applications, from facial recognition in policing to object detection for autonomous vehicles. Given computer vision's propensity to shape machine learning research and impact human life, we seek to understand disciplinary practices around dataset documentation - how data is collected, curated, annotated, and packaged into datasets for computer vision researchers and practitioners to use for model tuning and development. Specifically, we examine what dataset documentation communicates about the underlying values of vision data and the larger practices and goals of computer vision as a field. To conduct this study, we collected a corpus of about 500 computer vision datasets, from which we sampled 114 dataset publications across different vision tasks. Through both a structured and thematic content analysis, we document a number of values around accepted data practices, what makes desirable data, and the treatment of humans in the dataset construction process. We discuss how computer vision datasets authors value efficiency at the expense of care; universality at the expense of contextuality; impartiality at the expense of positionality; and model work at the expense of data work. Many of the silenced values we identify sit in opposition with social computing practices. We conclude with suggestions on how to better incorporate silenced values into the dataset creation and curation process.

A Framework For Refining Text Classification and Object Recognition from Academic Articles

With the widespread use of the internet, it has become increasingly crucial to extract specific information from vast amounts of academic articles efficiently. Data mining techniques are generally employed to solve this issue. However, data mining for academic articles is challenging since it requires automatically extracting specific patterns in complex and unstructured layout documents. Current data mining methods for academic articles employ rule-based(RB) or machine learning(ML) approaches. However, using rule-based methods incurs a high coding cost for complex typesetting articles. On the other hand, simply using machine learning methods requires annotation work for complex content types within the paper, which can be costly. Furthermore, only using machine learning can lead to cases where patterns easily recognized by rule-based methods are mistakenly extracted. To overcome these issues, from the perspective of analyzing the standard layout and typesetting used in the specified publication, we emphasize implementing specific methods for specific characteristics in academic articles. We have developed a novel Text Block Refinement Framework (TBRF), a machine learning and rule-based scheme hybrid. We used the well-known ACL proceeding articles as experimental data for the validation experiment. The experiment shows that our approach achieved over 95% classification accuracy and 90% detection accuracy for tables and figures.

Automatic assessment of text-based responses in post-secondary education: A systematic review

Text-based open-ended questions in academic formative and summative assessments help students become deep learners and prepare them to understand concepts for a subsequent conceptual assessment. However, grading text-based questions, especially in large courses, is tedious and time-consuming for instructors. Text processing models continue progressing with the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms. Especially after breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLM), there is immense potential to automate rapid assessment and feedback of text-based responses in education. This systematic review adopts a scientific and reproducible literature search strategy based on the PRISMA process using explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria to study text-based automatic assessment systems in post-secondary education, screening 838 papers and synthesizing 93 studies. To understand how text-based automatic assessment systems have been developed and applied in education in recent years, three research questions are considered. All included studies are summarized and categorized according to a proposed comprehensive framework, including the input and output of the system, research motivation, and research outcomes, aiming to answer the research questions accordingly. Additionally, the typical studies of automated assessment systems, research methods, and application domains in these studies are investigated and summarized. This systematic review provides an overview of recent educational applications of text-based assessment systems for understanding the latest AI/NLP developments assisting in text-based assessments in higher education. Findings will particularly benefit researchers and educators incorporating LLMs such as ChatGPT into their educational activities.

Illuminating search spaces by mapping elites

Many fields use search algorithms, which automatically explore a search space to find high-performing solutions: chemists search through the space of molecules to discover new drugs; engineers search for stronger, cheaper, safer designs, scientists search for models that best explain data, etc. The goal of search algorithms has traditionally been to return the single highest-performing solution in a search space. Here we describe a new, fundamentally different type of algorithm that is more useful because it provides a holistic view of how high-performing solutions are distributed throughout a search space. It creates a map of high-performing solutions at each point in a space defined by dimensions of variation that a user gets to choose. This Multi-dimensional Archive of Phenotypic Elites (MAP-Elites) algorithm illuminates search spaces, allowing researchers to understand how interesting attributes of solutions combine to affect performance, either positively or, equally of interest, negatively. For example, a drug company may wish to understand how performance changes as the size of molecules and their cost-to-produce vary. MAP-Elites produces a large diversity of high-performing, yet qualitatively different solutions, which can be more helpful than a single, high-performing solution. Interestingly, because MAP-Elites explores more of the search space, it also tends to find a better overall solution than state-of-the-art search algorithms. We demonstrate the benefits of this new algorithm in three different problem domains ranging from producing modular neural networks to designing simulated and real soft robots. Because MAP- Elites (1) illuminates the relationship between performance and dimensions of interest in solutions, (2) returns a set of high-performing, yet diverse solutions, and (3) improves finding a single, best solution, it will advance science and engineering.

SC2EGSet: StarCraft II Esport Replay and Game-state Dataset

As a relatively new form of sport, esports offers unparalleled data availability. Despite the vast amounts of data that are generated by game engines, it can be challenging to extract them and verify their integrity for the purposes of practical and scientific use. Our work aims to open esports to a broader scientific community by supplying raw and pre-processed files from StarCraft II esports tournaments. These files can be used in statistical and machine learning modeling tasks and related to various laboratory-based measurements (e.g., behavioral tests, brain imaging). We have gathered publicly available game-engine generated "replays" of tournament matches and performed data extraction and cleanup using a low-level application programming interface (API) parser library. Additionally, we open-sourced and published all the custom tools that were developed in the process of creating our dataset. These tools include PyTorch and PyTorch Lightning API abstractions to load and model the data. Our dataset contains replays from major and premiere StarCraft II tournaments since 2016. To prepare the dataset, we processed 55 tournament "replaypacks" that contained 17930 files with game-state information. Based on initial investigation of available StarCraft II datasets, we observed that our dataset is the largest publicly available source of StarCraft II esports data upon its publication. Analysis of the extracted data holds promise for further Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), psychological, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and sports-related studies in a variety of supervised and self-supervised tasks.

Enforcing temporal consistency in Deep Learning segmentation of brain MR images

Longitudinal analysis has great potential to reveal developmental trajectories and monitor disease progression in medical imaging. This process relies on consistent and robust joint 4D segmentation. Traditional techniques are dependent on the similarity of images over time and the use of subject-specific priors to reduce random variation and improve the robustness and sensitivity of the overall longitudinal analysis. This is however slow and computationally intensive as subject-specific templates need to be rebuilt every time. The focus of this work to accelerate this analysis with the use of deep learning. The proposed approach is based on deep CNNs and incorporates semantic segmentation and provides a longitudinal relationship for the same subject. The proposed approach is based on deep CNNs and incorporates semantic segmentation and provides a longitudinal relationship for the same subject. The state of art using 3D patches as inputs to modified Unet provides results around {0.91 pm 0.5} Dice and using multi-view atlas in CNNs provide around the same results. In this work, different models are explored, each offers better accuracy and fast results while increasing the segmentation quality. These methods are evaluated on 135 scans from the EADC-ADNI Harmonized Hippocampus Protocol. Proposed CNN based segmentation approaches demonstrate how 2D segmentation using prior slices can provide similar results to 3D segmentation while maintaining good continuity in the 3D dimension and improved speed. Just using 2D modified sagittal slices provide us a better Dice and longitudinal analysis for a given subject. For the ADNI dataset, using the simple UNet CNN technique gives us {0.84 pm 0.5} and while using modified CNN techniques on the same input yields {0.89 pm 0.5}. Rate of atrophy and RMS error are calculated for several test cases using various methods and analyzed.

U-DIADS-Bib: a full and few-shot pixel-precise dataset for document layout analysis of ancient manuscripts

Document Layout Analysis, which is the task of identifying different semantic regions inside of a document page, is a subject of great interest for both computer scientists and humanities scholars as it represents a fundamental step towards further analysis tasks for the former and a powerful tool to improve and facilitate the study of the documents for the latter. However, many of the works currently present in the literature, especially when it comes to the available datasets, fail to meet the needs of both worlds and, in particular, tend to lean towards the needs and common practices of the computer science side, leading to resources that are not representative of the humanities real needs. For this reason, the present paper introduces U-DIADS-Bib, a novel, pixel-precise, non-overlapping and noiseless document layout analysis dataset developed in close collaboration between specialists in the fields of computer vision and humanities. Furthermore, we propose a novel, computer-aided, segmentation pipeline in order to alleviate the burden represented by the time-consuming process of manual annotation, necessary for the generation of the ground truth segmentation maps. Finally, we present a standardized few-shot version of the dataset (U-DIADS-BibFS), with the aim of encouraging the development of models and solutions able to address this task with as few samples as possible, which would allow for more effective use in a real-world scenario, where collecting a large number of segmentations is not always feasible.

A Review of Deep Learning with Special Emphasis on Architectures, Applications and Recent Trends

Deep learning has solved a problem that as little as five years ago was thought by many to be intractable - the automatic recognition of patterns in data; and it can do so with accuracy that often surpasses human beings. It has solved problems beyond the realm of traditional, hand-crafted machine learning algorithms and captured the imagination of practitioners trying to make sense out of the flood of data that now inundates our society. As public awareness of the efficacy of DL increases so does the desire to make use of it. But even for highly trained professionals it can be daunting to approach the rapidly increasing body of knowledge produced by experts in the field. Where does one start? How does one determine if a particular model is applicable to their problem? How does one train and deploy such a network? A primer on the subject can be a good place to start. With that in mind, we present an overview of some of the key multilayer ANNs that comprise DL. We also discuss some new automatic architecture optimization protocols that use multi-agent approaches. Further, since guaranteeing system uptime is becoming critical to many computer applications, we include a section on using neural networks for fault detection and subsequent mitigation. This is followed by an exploratory survey of several application areas where DL has emerged as a game-changing technology: anomalous behavior detection in financial applications or in financial time-series forecasting, predictive and prescriptive analytics, medical image processing and analysis and power systems research. The thrust of this review is to outline emerging areas of application-oriented research within the DL community as well as to provide a reference to researchers seeking to use it in their work for what it does best: statistical pattern recognition with unparalleled learning capacity with the ability to scale with information.

RoLA: A Real-Time Online Lightweight Anomaly Detection System for Multivariate Time Series

A multivariate time series refers to observations of two or more variables taken from a device or a system simultaneously over time. There is an increasing need to monitor multivariate time series and detect anomalies in real time to ensure proper system operation and good service quality. It is also highly desirable to have a lightweight anomaly detection system that considers correlations between different variables, adapts to changes in the pattern of the multivariate time series, offers immediate responses, and provides supportive information regarding detection results based on unsupervised learning and online model training. In the past decade, many multivariate time series anomaly detection approaches have been introduced. However, they are unable to offer all the above-mentioned features. In this paper, we propose RoLA, a real-time online lightweight anomaly detection system for multivariate time series based on a divide-and-conquer strategy, parallel processing, and the majority rule. RoLA employs multiple lightweight anomaly detectors to monitor multivariate time series in parallel, determine the correlations between variables dynamically on the fly, and then jointly detect anomalies based on the majority rule in real time. To demonstrate the performance of RoLA, we conducted an experiment based on a public dataset provided by the FerryBox of the One Ocean Expedition. The results show that RoLA provides satisfactory detection accuracy and lightweight performance.

DocGenome: An Open Large-scale Scientific Document Benchmark for Training and Testing Multi-modal Large Language Models

Scientific documents record research findings and valuable human knowledge, comprising a vast corpus of high-quality data. Leveraging multi-modality data extracted from these documents and assessing large models' abilities to handle scientific document-oriented tasks is therefore meaningful. Despite promising advancements, large models still perform poorly on multi-page scientific document extraction and understanding tasks, and their capacity to process within-document data formats such as charts and equations remains under-explored. To address these issues, we present DocGenome, a structured document benchmark constructed by annotating 500K scientific documents from 153 disciplines in the arXiv open-access community, using our custom auto-labeling pipeline. DocGenome features four key characteristics: 1) Completeness: It is the first dataset to structure data from all modalities including 13 layout attributes along with their LaTeX source codes. 2) Logicality: It provides 6 logical relationships between different entities within each scientific document. 3) Diversity: It covers various document-oriented tasks, including document classification, visual grounding, document layout detection, document transformation, open-ended single-page QA and multi-page QA. 4) Correctness: It undergoes rigorous quality control checks conducted by a specialized team. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the advantages of DocGenome and objectively evaluate the performance of large models on our benchmark.

GAIA Search: Hugging Face and Pyserini Interoperability for NLP Training Data Exploration

Noticing the urgent need to provide tools for fast and user-friendly qualitative analysis of large-scale textual corpora of the modern NLP, we propose to turn to the mature and well-tested methods from the domain of Information Retrieval (IR) - a research field with a long history of tackling TB-scale document collections. We discuss how Pyserini - a widely used toolkit for reproducible IR research can be integrated with the Hugging Face ecosystem of open-source AI libraries and artifacts. We leverage the existing functionalities of both platforms while proposing novel features further facilitating their integration. Our goal is to give NLP researchers tools that will allow them to develop retrieval-based instrumentation for their data analytics needs with ease and agility. We include a Jupyter Notebook-based walk through the core interoperability features, available on GitHub at https://github.com/huggingface/gaia. We then demonstrate how the ideas we present can be operationalized to create a powerful tool for qualitative data analysis in NLP. We present GAIA Search - a search engine built following previously laid out principles, giving access to four popular large-scale text collections. GAIA serves a dual purpose of illustrating the potential of methodologies we discuss but also as a standalone qualitative analysis tool that can be leveraged by NLP researchers aiming to understand datasets prior to using them in training. GAIA is hosted live on Hugging Face Spaces - https://huggingface.co/spaces/spacerini/gaia.

Towards Generalist Biomedical AI

Medicine is inherently multimodal, with rich data modalities spanning text, imaging, genomics, and more. Generalist biomedical artificial intelligence (AI) systems that flexibly encode, integrate, and interpret this data at scale can potentially enable impactful applications ranging from scientific discovery to care delivery. To enable the development of these models, we first curate MultiMedBench, a new multimodal biomedical benchmark. MultiMedBench encompasses 14 diverse tasks such as medical question answering, mammography and dermatology image interpretation, radiology report generation and summarization, and genomic variant calling. We then introduce Med-PaLM Multimodal (Med-PaLM M), our proof of concept for a generalist biomedical AI system. Med-PaLM M is a large multimodal generative model that flexibly encodes and interprets biomedical data including clinical language, imaging, and genomics with the same set of model weights. Med-PaLM M reaches performance competitive with or exceeding the state of the art on all MultiMedBench tasks, often surpassing specialist models by a wide margin. We also report examples of zero-shot generalization to novel medical concepts and tasks, positive transfer learning across tasks, and emergent zero-shot medical reasoning. To further probe the capabilities and limitations of Med-PaLM M, we conduct a radiologist evaluation of model-generated (and human) chest X-ray reports and observe encouraging performance across model scales. In a side-by-side ranking on 246 retrospective chest X-rays, clinicians express a pairwise preference for Med-PaLM M reports over those produced by radiologists in up to 40.50% of cases, suggesting potential clinical utility. While considerable work is needed to validate these models in real-world use cases, our results represent a milestone towards the development of generalist biomedical AI systems.

Matching Table Metadata with Business Glossaries Using Large Language Models

Enterprises often own large collections of structured data in the form of large databases or an enterprise data lake. Such data collections come with limited metadata and strict access policies that could limit access to the data contents and, therefore, limit the application of classic retrieval and analysis solutions. As a result, there is a need for solutions that can effectively utilize the available metadata. In this paper, we study the problem of matching table metadata to a business glossary containing data labels and descriptions. The resulting matching enables the use of an available or curated business glossary for retrieval and analysis without or before requesting access to the data contents. One solution to this problem is to use manually-defined rules or similarity measures on column names and glossary descriptions (or their vector embeddings) to find the closest match. However, such approaches need to be tuned through manual labeling and cannot handle many business glossaries that contain a combination of simple as well as complex and long descriptions. In this work, we leverage the power of large language models (LLMs) to design generic matching methods that do not require manual tuning and can identify complex relations between column names and glossaries. We propose methods that utilize LLMs in two ways: a) by generating additional context for column names that can aid with matching b) by using LLMs to directly infer if there is a relation between column names and glossary descriptions. Our preliminary experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

Medical Concept Representation Learning from Electronic Health Records and its Application on Heart Failure Prediction

Objective: To transform heterogeneous clinical data from electronic health records into clinically meaningful constructed features using data driven method that rely, in part, on temporal relations among data. Materials and Methods: The clinically meaningful representations of medical concepts and patients are the key for health analytic applications. Most of existing approaches directly construct features mapped to raw data (e.g., ICD or CPT codes), or utilize some ontology mapping such as SNOMED codes. However, none of the existing approaches leverage EHR data directly for learning such concept representation. We propose a new way to represent heterogeneous medical concepts (e.g., diagnoses, medications and procedures) based on co-occurrence patterns in longitudinal electronic health records. The intuition behind the method is to map medical concepts that are co-occuring closely in time to similar concept vectors so that their distance will be small. We also derive a simple method to construct patient vectors from the related medical concept vectors. Results: For qualitative evaluation, we study similar medical concepts across diagnosis, medication and procedure. In quantitative evaluation, our proposed representation significantly improves the predictive modeling performance for onset of heart failure (HF), where classification methods (e.g. logistic regression, neural network, support vector machine and K-nearest neighbors) achieve up to 23% improvement in area under the ROC curve (AUC) using this proposed representation. Conclusion: We proposed an effective method for patient and medical concept representation learning. The resulting representation can map relevant concepts together and also improves predictive modeling performance.

Unified Multi-Modal Interleaved Document Representation for Information Retrieval

Information Retrieval (IR) methods aim to identify relevant documents in response to a given query, which have gained remarkable attention due to their successful application in various natural language tasks. However, existing approaches typically consider only the textual information within the documents, which overlooks the fact that documents can contain multiple modalities, including texts, images, and tables. Further, they often segment each long document into multiple discrete passages for embedding, preventing them from capturing the overall document context and interactions between paragraphs. We argue that these two limitations lead to suboptimal document representations for retrieval. In this work, to address them, we aim to produce more comprehensive and nuanced document representations by holistically embedding documents interleaved with different modalities. Specifically, we achieve this by leveraging the capability of recent vision-language models that enable the processing and integration of text, images, and tables into a unified format and representation. Moreover, to mitigate the information loss from segmenting documents into passages, instead of representing and retrieving passages individually, we further merge the representations of segmented passages into one single document representation, while we additionally introduce a reranking strategy to decouple and identify the relevant passage within the document if necessary. Then, through extensive experiments on diverse information retrieval scenarios considering both the textual and multimodal queries, we show that our approach substantially outperforms relevant baselines, thanks to the consideration of the multimodal information interleaved within the documents in a unified way.

FLoRA: Low-Rank Core Space for N-dimension

Adapting pre-trained foundation models for various downstream tasks has been prevalent in artificial intelligence. Due to the vast number of tasks and high costs, adjusting all parameters becomes unfeasible. To mitigate this, several fine-tuning techniques have been developed to update the pre-trained model weights in a more resource-efficient manner, such as through low-rank adjustments. Yet, almost all of these methods focus on linear weights, neglecting the intricacies of parameter spaces in higher dimensions like 4D. Alternatively, some methods can be adapted for high-dimensional parameter space by compressing changes in the original space into two dimensions and then employing low-rank matrix decomposition. However, these approaches destructs the structural integrity of the involved high-dimensional spaces. To tackle the diversity of dimensional spaces across different foundation models and provide a more precise representation of the changes within these spaces, this paper introduces a generalized parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework, FLoRA, designed for various dimensional parameter space. Specifically, utilizing Tucker decomposition, FLoRA asserts that changes in each dimensional parameter space are based on a low-rank core space which maintains the consistent topological structure with the original space. It then models the changes through this core space alongside corresponding weights to reconstruct alterations in the original space. FLoRA effectively preserves the structural integrity of the change of original N-dimensional parameter space, meanwhile decomposes it via low-rank tensor decomposition. Extensive experiments on computer vision, natural language processing and multi-modal tasks validate FLoRA's effectiveness. Codes are available at https://github.com/SJTU-DeepVisionLab/FLoRA.

DDXPlus: A New Dataset For Automatic Medical Diagnosis

There has been a rapidly growing interest in Automatic Symptom Detection (ASD) and Automatic Diagnosis (AD) systems in the machine learning research literature, aiming to assist doctors in telemedicine services. These systems are designed to interact with patients, collect evidence about their symptoms and relevant antecedents, and possibly make predictions about the underlying diseases. Doctors would review the interactions, including the evidence and the predictions, collect if necessary additional information from patients, before deciding on next steps. Despite recent progress in this area, an important piece of doctors' interactions with patients is missing in the design of these systems, namely the differential diagnosis. Its absence is largely due to the lack of datasets that include such information for models to train on. In this work, we present a large-scale synthetic dataset of roughly 1.3 million patients that includes a differential diagnosis, along with the ground truth pathology, symptoms and antecedents for each patient. Unlike existing datasets which only contain binary symptoms and antecedents, this dataset also contains categorical and multi-choice symptoms and antecedents useful for efficient data collection. Moreover, some symptoms are organized in a hierarchy, making it possible to design systems able to interact with patients in a logical way. As a proof-of-concept, we extend two existing AD and ASD systems to incorporate the differential diagnosis, and provide empirical evidence that using differentials as training signals is essential for the efficiency of such systems or for helping doctors better understand the reasoning of those systems.

Separating common from salient patterns with Contrastive Representation Learning

Contrastive Analysis is a sub-field of Representation Learning that aims at separating common factors of variation between two datasets, a background (i.e., healthy subjects) and a target (i.e., diseased subjects), from the salient factors of variation, only present in the target dataset. Despite their relevance, current models based on Variational Auto-Encoders have shown poor performance in learning semantically-expressive representations. On the other hand, Contrastive Representation Learning has shown tremendous performance leaps in various applications (classification, clustering, etc.). In this work, we propose to leverage the ability of Contrastive Learning to learn semantically expressive representations well adapted for Contrastive Analysis. We reformulate it under the lens of the InfoMax Principle and identify two Mutual Information terms to maximize and one to minimize. We decompose the first two terms into an Alignment and a Uniformity term, as commonly done in Contrastive Learning. Then, we motivate a novel Mutual Information minimization strategy to prevent information leakage between common and salient distributions. We validate our method, called SepCLR, on three visual datasets and three medical datasets, specifically conceived to assess the pattern separation capability in Contrastive Analysis. Code available at https://github.com/neurospin-projects/2024_rlouiset_sep_clr.

Question-Answering Model for Schizophrenia Symptoms and Their Impact on Daily Life using Mental Health Forums Data

In recent years, there is strong emphasis on mining medical data using machine learning techniques. A common problem is to obtain a noiseless set of textual documents, with a relevant content for the research question, and developing a Question Answering (QA) model for a specific medical field. The purpose of this paper is to present a new methodology for building a medical dataset and obtain a QA model for analysis of symptoms and impact on daily life for a specific disease domain. The ``Mental Health'' forum was used, a forum dedicated to people suffering from schizophrenia and different mental disorders. Relevant posts of active users, who regularly participate, were extrapolated providing a new method of obtaining low-bias content and without privacy issues. Furthermore, it is shown how to pre-process the dataset to convert it into a QA dataset. The Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), DistilBERT, RoBERTa, and BioBERT models were fine-tuned and evaluated via F1-Score, Exact Match, Precision and Recall. Accurate empirical experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method for obtaining an accurate dataset for QA model implementation. By fine-tuning the BioBERT QA model, we achieved an F1 score of 0.885, showing a considerable improvement and outperforming the state-of-the-art model for mental disorders domain.

Real-Time Community Detection in Large Social Networks on a Laptop

For a broad range of research, governmental and commercial applications it is important to understand the allegiances, communities and structure of key players in society. One promising direction towards extracting this information is to exploit the rich relational data in digital social networks (the social graph). As social media data sets are very large, most approaches make use of distributed computing systems for this purpose. Distributing graph processing requires solving many difficult engineering problems, which has lead some researchers to look at single-machine solutions that are faster and easier to maintain. In this article, we present a single-machine real-time system for large-scale graph processing that allows analysts to interactively explore graph structures. The key idea is that the aggregate actions of large numbers of users can be compressed into a data structure that encapsulates user similarities while being robust to noise and queryable in real-time. We achieve single machine real-time performance by compressing the neighbourhood of each vertex using minhash signatures and facilitate rapid queries through Locality Sensitive Hashing. These techniques reduce query times from hours using industrial desktop machines operating on the full graph to milliseconds on standard laptops. Our method allows exploration of strongly associated regions (i.e. communities) of large graphs in real-time on a laptop. It has been deployed in software that is actively used by social network analysts and offers another channel for media owners to monetise their data, helping them to continue to provide free services that are valued by billions of people globally.

Automated speech- and text-based classification of neuropsychiatric conditions in a multidiagnostic setting

Speech patterns have been identified as potential diagnostic markers for neuropsychiatric conditions. However, most studies only compare a single clinical group to healthy controls, whereas clinical practice often requires differentiating between multiple potential diagnoses (multiclass settings). To address this, we assembled a dataset of repeated recordings from 420 participants (67 with major depressive disorder, 106 with schizophrenia and 46 with autism, as well as matched controls), and tested the performance of a range of conventional machine learning models and advanced Transformer models on both binary and multiclass classification, based on voice and text features. While binary models performed comparably to previous research (F1 scores between 0.54-0.75 for autism spectrum disorder, ASD; 0.67-0.92 for major depressive disorder, MDD; and 0.71-0.83 for schizophrenia); when differentiating between multiple diagnostic groups performance decreased markedly (F1 scores between 0.35-0.44 for ASD, 0.57-0.75 for MDD, 0.15-0.66 for schizophrenia, and 0.38-0.52 macro F1). Combining voice and text-based models yielded increased performance, suggesting that they capture complementary diagnostic information. Our results indicate that models trained on binary classification may learn to rely on markers of generic differences between clinical and non-clinical populations, or markers of clinical features that overlap across conditions, rather than identifying markers specific to individual conditions. We provide recommendations for future research in the field, suggesting increased focus on developing larger transdiagnostic datasets that include more fine-grained clinical features, and that can support the development of models that better capture the complexity of neuropsychiatric conditions and naturalistic diagnostic assessment.

Visual Analytics in Deep Learning: An Interrogative Survey for the Next Frontiers

Deep learning has recently seen rapid development and received significant attention due to its state-of-the-art performance on previously-thought hard problems. However, because of the internal complexity and nonlinear structure of deep neural networks, the underlying decision making processes for why these models are achieving such performance are challenging and sometimes mystifying to interpret. As deep learning spreads across domains, it is of paramount importance that we equip users of deep learning with tools for understanding when a model works correctly, when it fails, and ultimately how to improve its performance. Standardized toolkits for building neural networks have helped democratize deep learning; visual analytics systems have now been developed to support model explanation, interpretation, debugging, and improvement. We present a survey of the role of visual analytics in deep learning research, which highlights its short yet impactful history and thoroughly summarizes the state-of-the-art using a human-centered interrogative framework, focusing on the Five W's and How (Why, Who, What, How, When, and Where). We conclude by highlighting research directions and open research problems. This survey helps researchers and practitioners in both visual analytics and deep learning to quickly learn key aspects of this young and rapidly growing body of research, whose impact spans a diverse range of domains.

FAIR Jupyter: a knowledge graph approach to semantic sharing and granular exploration of a computational notebook reproducibility dataset

The way in which data are shared can affect their utility and reusability. Here, we demonstrate how data that we had previously shared in bulk can be mobilized further through a knowledge graph that allows for much more granular exploration and interrogation. The original dataset is about the computational reproducibility of GitHub-hosted Jupyter notebooks associated with biomedical publications. It contains rich metadata about the publications, associated GitHub repositories and Jupyter notebooks, and the notebooks' reproducibility. We took this dataset, converted it into semantic triples and loaded these into a triple store to create a knowledge graph, FAIR Jupyter, that we made accessible via a web service. This enables granular data exploration and analysis through queries that can be tailored to specific use cases. Such queries may provide details about any of the variables from the original dataset, highlight relationships between them or combine some of the graph's content with materials from corresponding external resources. We provide a collection of example queries addressing a range of use cases in research and education. We also outline how sets of such queries can be used to profile specific content types, either individually or by class. We conclude by discussing how such a semantically enhanced sharing of complex datasets can both enhance their FAIRness, i.e., their findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability, and help identify and communicate best practices, particularly with regards to data quality, standardization, automation and reproducibility.

Pay Attention to Evolution: Time Series Forecasting with Deep Graph-Evolution Learning

Time-series forecasting is one of the most active research topics in artificial intelligence. Applications in real-world time series should consider two factors for achieving reliable predictions: modeling dynamic dependencies among multiple variables and adjusting the model's intrinsic hyperparameters. A still open gap in that literature is that statistical and ensemble learning approaches systematically present lower predictive performance than deep learning methods. They generally disregard the data sequence aspect entangled with multivariate data represented in more than one time series. Conversely, this work presents a novel neural network architecture for time-series forecasting that combines the power of graph evolution with deep recurrent learning on distinct data distributions; we named our method Recurrent Graph Evolution Neural Network (ReGENN). The idea is to infer multiple multivariate relationships between co-occurring time-series by assuming that the temporal data depends not only on inner variables and intra-temporal relationships (i.e., observations from itself) but also on outer variables and inter-temporal relationships (i.e., observations from other-selves). An extensive set of experiments was conducted comparing ReGENN with dozens of ensemble methods and classical statistical ones, showing sound improvement of up to 64.87% over the competing algorithms. Furthermore, we present an analysis of the intermediate weights arising from ReGENN, showing that by looking at inter and intra-temporal relationships simultaneously, time-series forecasting is majorly improved if paying attention to how multiple multivariate data synchronously evolve.

AI in Pharma for Personalized Sequential Decision-Making: Methods, Applications and Opportunities

In the pharmaceutical industry, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) has seen consistent growth over the past decade. This rise is attributed to major advancements in statistical machine learning methodologies, computational capabilities and the increased availability of large datasets. AI techniques are applied throughout different stages of drug development, ranging from drug discovery to post-marketing benefit-risk assessment. Kolluri et al. provided a review of several case studies that span these stages, featuring key applications such as protein structure prediction, success probability estimation, subgroup identification, and AI-assisted clinical trial monitoring. From a regulatory standpoint, there was a notable uptick in submissions incorporating AI components in 2021. The most prevalent therapeutic areas leveraging AI were oncology (27%), psychiatry (15%), gastroenterology (12%), and neurology (11%). The paradigm of personalized or precision medicine has gained significant traction in recent research, partly due to advancements in AI techniques hamburg2010path. This shift has had a transformative impact on the pharmaceutical industry. Departing from the traditional "one-size-fits-all" model, personalized medicine incorporates various individual factors, such as environmental conditions, lifestyle choices, and health histories, to formulate customized treatment plans. By utilizing sophisticated machine learning algorithms, clinicians and researchers are better equipped to make informed decisions in areas such as disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment selection, thereby optimizing health outcomes for each individual.

PTMTorrent: A Dataset for Mining Open-source Pre-trained Model Packages

Due to the cost of developing and training deep learning models from scratch, machine learning engineers have begun to reuse pre-trained models (PTMs) and fine-tune them for downstream tasks. PTM registries known as "model hubs" support engineers in distributing and reusing deep learning models. PTM packages include pre-trained weights, documentation, model architectures, datasets, and metadata. Mining the information in PTM packages will enable the discovery of engineering phenomena and tools to support software engineers. However, accessing this information is difficult - there are many PTM registries, and both the registries and the individual packages may have rate limiting for accessing the data. We present an open-source dataset, PTMTorrent, to facilitate the evaluation and understanding of PTM packages. This paper describes the creation, structure, usage, and limitations of the dataset. The dataset includes a snapshot of 5 model hubs and a total of 15,913 PTM packages. These packages are represented in a uniform data schema for cross-hub mining. We describe prior uses of this data and suggest research opportunities for mining using our dataset. The PTMTorrent dataset (v1) is available at: https://app.globus.org/file-manager?origin_id=55e17a6e-9d8f-11ed-a2a2-8383522b48d9&origin_path=%2F~%2F. Our dataset generation tools are available on GitHub: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7570357.

fastHDMI: Fast Mutual Information Estimation for High-Dimensional Data

In this paper, we introduce fastHDMI, a Python package designed for efficient variable screening in high-dimensional datasets, particularly neuroimaging data. This work pioneers the application of three mutual information estimation methods for neuroimaging variable selection, a novel approach implemented via fastHDMI. These advancements enhance our ability to analyze the complex structures of neuroimaging datasets, providing improved tools for variable selection in high-dimensional spaces. Using the preprocessed ABIDE dataset, we evaluate the performance of these methods through extensive simulations. The tests cover a range of conditions, including linear and nonlinear associations, as well as continuous and binary outcomes. Our results highlight the superiority of the FFTKDE-based mutual information estimation for feature screening in continuous nonlinear outcomes, while binning-based methods outperform others for binary outcomes with nonlinear probability preimages. For linear simulations, both Pearson correlation and FFTKDE-based methods show comparable performance for continuous outcomes, while Pearson excels in binary outcomes with linear probability preimages. A comprehensive case study using the ABIDE dataset further demonstrates fastHDMI's practical utility, showcasing the predictive power of models built from variables selected using our screening techniques. This research affirms the computational efficiency and methodological strength of fastHDMI, significantly enriching the toolkit available for neuroimaging analysis.

SciPIP: An LLM-based Scientific Paper Idea Proposer

The exponential growth of knowledge and the increasing complexity of interdisciplinary research pose significant challenges for researchers, including information overload and difficulties in exploring novel ideas. The advancements in large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, have shown great potential in enhancing idea proposals, but how to effectively utilize large models for reasonable idea proposal has not been thoroughly explored. This paper proposes a scientific paper idea proposer (SciPIP). Based on a user-provided research background, SciPIP retrieves helpful papers from a literature database while leveraging the capabilities of LLMs to generate more novel and feasible ideas. To this end, 1) we construct a literature retrieval database, extracting lots of papers' multi-dimension information for fast access. Then, a literature retrieval method based on semantics, entity, and citation co-occurrences is proposed to search relevant literature from multiple aspects based on the user-provided background. 2) After literature retrieval, we introduce dual-path idea proposal strategies, where one path infers solutions from the retrieved literature and the other path generates original ideas through model brainstorming. We then combine the two to achieve a good balance between feasibility and originality. Through extensive experiments on the natural language processing (NLP) field, we demonstrate that SciPIP can retrieve citations similar to those of existing top conference papers and generate many ideas consistent with them. Additionally, we evaluate the originality of other ideas generated by SciPIP using large language models, further validating the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code and the database are released at https://github.com/cheerss/SciPIP.

InvestLM: A Large Language Model for Investment using Financial Domain Instruction Tuning

We present a new financial domain large language model, InvestLM, tuned on LLaMA-65B (Touvron et al., 2023), using a carefully curated instruction dataset related to financial investment. Inspired by less-is-more-for-alignment (Zhou et al., 2023), we manually curate a small yet diverse instruction dataset, covering a wide range of financial related topics, from Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam questions to SEC filings to Stackexchange quantitative finance discussions. InvestLM shows strong capabilities in understanding financial text and provides helpful responses to investment related questions. Financial experts, including hedge fund managers and research analysts, rate InvestLM's response as comparable to those of state-of-the-art commercial models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and Claude-2). Zero-shot evaluation on a set of financial NLP benchmarks demonstrates strong generalizability. From a research perspective, this work suggests that a high-quality domain specific LLM can be tuned using a small set of carefully curated instructions on a well-trained foundation model, which is consistent with the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis (Zhou et al., 2023). From a practical perspective, this work develops a state-of-the-art financial domain LLM with superior capability in understanding financial texts and providing helpful investment advice, potentially enhancing the work efficiency of financial professionals. We release the model parameters to the research community.