Non-cognitive skills are crucial for personal and social life well-being, and such skill development can be supported by narrative-based (e.g., storytelling) technologies. While generative AI enables interactive and role-playing storytelling, little is known about how users engage with and perceive the use of AI in social life simulation for non-cognitive skills learning. To this end, we introduced SimuLife++, an interactive platform enabled by a large language model (LLM). The system allows users to act as protagonists, creating stories with one or multiple AI-based characters in diverse social scenarios. In particular, we expanded the Human-AI interaction to a Human-AI-AI collaboration by including a sage agent, who acts as a bystander to provide users with more insightful perspectives on their choices and conversations. Through a within-subject user study, we found that the inclusion of the sage agent significantly enhanced narrative immersion, according to the narrative transportation scale, leading to more messages, particularly in group chats. Participants' interactions with the sage agent were also associated with significantly higher scores in their perceived motivation, self-perceptions, and resilience and coping, indicating positive impacts on non-cognitive skills reflection. Participants' interview results further explained the sage agent's aid in decision-making, solving ethical dilemmas, and problem-solving; on the other hand, they suggested improvements in user control and balanced responses from multiple characters. We provide design implications on the application of generative AI in narrative solutions for non-cognitive skill development in broader social contexts.

Unlike traditional educational chatbots that rely on pre-programmed responses, large-language model-driven chatbots, such as ChatGPT, demonstrate remarkable versatility and have the potential to serve as a dynamic resource for addressing student needs from understanding advanced concepts to solving complex problems. This work explores the impact of such technology on student learning in an interdisciplinary, project-oriented data visualization course. Throughout the semester, students engaged with ChatGPT across four distinct projects, including data visualizations and implementing them using a variety of tools including Tableau, D3, and Vega-lite. We collected conversation logs and reflection surveys from the students after each assignment. In addition, we conducted interviews with selected students to gain deeper insights into their overall experiences with ChatGPT. Our analysis examined the advantages and barriers of using ChatGPT, students' querying behavior, the types of assistance sought, and its impact on assignment outcomes and engagement. Based on the findings, we discuss design considerations for an educational solution that goes beyond the basic interface of ChatGPT, specifically tailored for data visualization education.

By adopting a more flexible definition of unlearning and adjusting the model distribution to simulate training without the targeted data, approximate machine unlearning provides a less resource-demanding alternative to the more laborious exact unlearning methods. Yet, the unlearning completeness of target samples-even when the approximate algorithms are executed faithfully without external threats-remains largely unexamined, raising questions about those approximate algorithms' ability to fulfill their commitment of unlearning during the lifecycle. In this paper, we introduce the task of Lifecycle Unlearning Commitment Management (LUCM) for approximate unlearning and outline its primary challenges. We propose an efficient metric designed to assess the sample-level unlearning completeness. Our empirical results demonstrate its superiority over membership inference techniques in two key areas: the strong correlation of its measurements with unlearning completeness across various unlearning tasks, and its computational efficiency, making it suitable for real-time applications. Additionally, we show that this metric is able to serve as a tool for monitoring unlearning anomalies throughout the unlearning lifecycle, including both under-unlearning and over-unlearning. We apply this metric to evaluate the unlearning commitments of current approximate algorithms. Our analysis, conducted across multiple unlearning benchmarks, reveals that these algorithms inconsistently fulfill their unlearning commitments due to two main issues: 1) unlearning new data can significantly affect the unlearning utility of previously requested data, and 2) approximate algorithms fail to ensure equitable unlearning utility across different groups. These insights emphasize the crucial importance of LUCM throughout the unlearning lifecycle. We will soon open-source our newly developed benchmark.

In this paper, we explore the challenges associated with establishing an end-to-end fact-checking pipeline in a real-world context, covering over 90 languages. Our real-world experimental benchmarks demonstrate that fine-tuning Transformer models specifically for fact-checking tasks, such as claim detection and veracity prediction, provide superior performance over large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, GPT-3.5-Turbo, and Mistral-7b. However, we illustrate that LLMs excel in generative tasks such as question decomposition for evidence retrieval. Through extensive evaluation, we show the efficacy of fine-tuned models for fact-checking in a multilingual setting and complex claims that include numerical quantities.

In patent prosecution, image-based retrieval systems for identifying similarities between current patent images and prior art are pivotal to ensure the novelty and non-obviousness of patent applications. Despite their growing popularity in recent years, existing attempts, while effective at recognizing images within the same patent, fail to deliver practical value due to their limited generalizability in retrieving relevant prior art. Moreover, this task inherently involves the challenges posed by the abstract visual features of patent images, the skewed distribution of image classifications, and the semantic information of image descriptions. Therefore, we propose a language-informed, distribution-aware multimodal approach to patent image feature learning, which enriches the semantic understanding of patent image by integrating Large Language Models and improves the performance of underrepresented classes with our proposed distribution-aware contrastive losses. Extensive experiments on DeepPatent2 dataset show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art or comparable performance in image-based patent retrieval with mAP +53.3%, Recall@10 +41.8%, and MRR@10 +51.9%. Furthermore, through an in-depth user analysis, we explore our model in aiding patent professionals in their image retrieval efforts, highlighting the model's real-world applicability and effectiveness.

Gender-neutral pronouns are increasingly being introduced across Western languages. Recent evaluations have however demonstrated that English NLP systems are unable to correctly process gender-neutral pronouns, with the risk of erasing and misgendering non-binary individuals. This paper examines a Dutch coreference resolution system's performance on gender-neutral pronouns, specifically hen and die. In Dutch, these pronouns were only introduced in 2016, compared to the longstanding existence of singular they in English. We additionally compare two debiasing techniques for coreference resolution systems in non-binary contexts: Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA) and delexicalisation. Moreover, because pronoun performance can be hard to interpret from a general evaluation metric like LEA, we introduce an innovative evaluation metric, the pronoun score, which directly represents the portion of correctly processed pronouns. Our results reveal diminished performance on gender-neutral pronouns compared to gendered counterparts. Nevertheless, although delexicalisation fails to yield improvements, CDA substantially reduces the performance gap between gendered and gender-neutral pronouns. We further show that CDA remains effective in low-resource settings, in which a limited set of debiasing documents is used. This efficacy extends to previously unseen neopronouns, which are currently infrequently used but may gain popularity in the future, underscoring the viability of effective debiasing with minimal resources and low computational costs.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has highlighted the intricate interplay between public health and economic stability on a global scale. This study proposes a novel reinforcement learning framework designed to optimize health and economic outcomes during pandemics. The framework leverages the SIR model, integrating both lockdown measures (via a stringency index) and vaccination strategies to simulate disease dynamics. The stringency index, indicative of the severity of lockdown measures, influences both the spread of the disease and the economic health of a country. Developing nations, which bear a disproportionate economic burden under stringent lockdowns, are the primary focus of our study. By implementing reinforcement learning, we aim to optimize governmental responses and strike a balance between the competing costs associated with public health and economic stability. This approach also enhances transparency in governmental decision-making by establishing a well-defined reward function for the reinforcement learning agent. In essence, this study introduces an innovative and ethical strategy to navigate the challenge of balancing public health and economic stability amidst infectious disease outbreaks.

Recent advancements in natural language processing have led to the proliferation of large language models (LLMs). These models have been shown to yield good performance, using in-context learning, even on tasks and languages they are not trained on. However, their performance on African languages is largely understudied relative to high-resource languages. We present an analysis of four popular large language models (mT0, Aya, LLaMa 2, and GPT-4) on six tasks (topic classification, sentiment classification, machine translation, summarization, question answering, and named entity recognition) across 60 African languages, spanning different language families and geographical regions. Our results suggest that all LLMs produce lower performance for African languages, and there is a large gap in performance compared to high-resource languages (such as English) for most tasks. We find that GPT-4 has an average to good performance on classification tasks, yet its performance on generative tasks such as machine translation and summarization is significantly lacking. Surprisingly, we find that mT0 had the best overall performance for cross-lingual QA, better than the state-of-the-art supervised model (i.e. fine-tuned mT5) and GPT-4 on African languages. Similarly, we find the recent Aya model to have comparable result to mT0 in almost all tasks except for topic classification where it outperform mT0. Overall, LLaMa 2 showed the worst performance, which we believe is due to its English and code-centric~(around 98%) pre-training corpus. Our findings confirms that performance on African languages continues to remain a hurdle for the current LLMs, underscoring the need for additional efforts to close this gap.

In the ever-evolving landscape of machine learning, seamless translation of natural language descriptions into executable code remains a formidable challenge. This paper introduces Linguacodus, an innovative framework designed to tackle this challenge by deploying a dynamic pipeline that iteratively transforms natural language task descriptions into code through high-level data-shaping instructions. The core of Linguacodus is a fine-tuned large language model (LLM), empowered to evaluate diverse solutions for various problems and select the most fitting one for a given task. This paper details the fine-tuning process, and sheds light on how natural language descriptions can be translated into functional code. Linguacodus represents a substantial leap towards automated code generation, effectively bridging the gap between task descriptions and executable code. It holds great promise for advancing machine learning applications across diverse domains. Additionally, we propose an algorithm capable of transforming a natural description of an ML task into code with minimal human interaction. In extensive experiments on a vast machine learning code dataset originating from Kaggle, we showcase the effectiveness of Linguacodus. The investigations highlight its potential applications across diverse domains, emphasizing its impact on applied machine learning in various scientific fields.

Predicting future trajectories of traffic agents accurately holds substantial importance in various applications such as autonomous driving. Previous methods commonly infer all future steps of an agent either recursively or simultaneously. However, the recursive strategy suffers from the accumulated error, while the simultaneous strategy overlooks the constraints among future steps, resulting in kinematically infeasible predictions. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose G2LTraj, a plug-and-play global-to-local generation approach for trajectory prediction. Specifically, we generate a series of global key steps that uniformly cover the entire future time range. Subsequently, the local intermediate steps between the adjacent key steps are recursively filled in. In this way, we prevent the accumulated error from propagating beyond the adjacent key steps. Moreover, to boost the kinematical feasibility, we not only introduce the spatial constraints among key steps but also strengthen the temporal constraints among the intermediate steps. Finally, to ensure the optimal granularity of key steps, we design a selectable granularity strategy that caters to each predicted trajectory. Our G2LTraj significantly improves the performance of seven existing trajectory predictors across the ETH, UCY and nuScenes datasets. Experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness. Code will be available at https://github.com/Zhanwei-Z/G2LTraj.