This study examines the effects of macroeconomic policies on financial markets using a novel approach that combines Machine Learning (ML) techniques and causal inference. It focuses on the effect of interest rate changes made by the US Federal Reserve System (FRS) on the returns of fixed income and equity funds between January 1986 and December 2021. The analysis makes a distinction between actively and passively managed funds, hypothesizing that the latter are less susceptible to changes in interest rates. The study contrasts gradient boosting and linear regression models using the Double Machine Learning (DML) framework, which supports a variety of statistical learning techniques. Results indicate that gradient boosting is a useful tool for predicting fund returns; for example, a 1% increase in interest rates causes an actively managed fund's return to decrease by -11.97%. This understanding of the relationship between interest rates and fund performance provides opportunities for additional research and insightful, data-driven advice for fund managers and investors

Explainability in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is a new field growing in the last few years. In this publication we address the problem of determining how important is each neighbor for the GNN when classifying a node and how to measure the performance for this specific task. To do this, various known explainability methods are reformulated to get the neighbor importance and four new metrics are presented. Our results show that there is almost no difference between the explanations provided by gradient-based techniques in the GNN domain. In addition, many explainability techniques failed to identify important neighbors when GNNs without self-loops are used.

Language agents that interact with the world on their own have great potential for automating digital tasks. While large language model (LLM) agents have made progress in understanding and executing tasks such as textual games and webpage control, many real-world tasks also require collaboration with humans or other LLMs in equal roles, which involves intent understanding, task coordination, and communication. To test LLM's ability to collaborate, we design a blocks-world environment, where two agents, each having unique goals and skills, build a target structure together. To complete the goals, they can act in the world and communicate in natural language. Under this environment, we design increasingly challenging settings to evaluate different collaboration perspectives, from independent to more complex, dependent tasks. We further adopt chain-of-thought prompts that include intermediate reasoning steps to model the partner's state and identify and correct execution errors. Both human-machine and machine-machine experiments show that LLM agents have strong grounding capacities, and our approach significantly improves the evaluation metric.

The troubling rise of hallucination presents perhaps the most significant impediment to the advancement of responsible AI. In recent times, considerable research has focused on detecting and mitigating hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, it's worth noting that hallucination is also quite prevalent in Vision-Language models (VLMs). In this paper, we offer a fine-grained discourse on profiling VLM hallucination based on two tasks: i) image captioning, and ii) Visual Question Answering (VQA). We delineate eight fine-grained orientations of visual hallucination: i) Contextual Guessing, ii) Identity Incongruity, iii) Geographical Erratum, iv) Visual Illusion, v) Gender Anomaly, vi) VLM as Classifier, vii) Wrong Reading, and viii) Numeric Discrepancy. We curate Visual HallucInation eLiciTation (VHILT), a publicly available dataset comprising 2,000 samples generated using eight VLMs across two tasks of captioning and VQA along with human annotations for the categories as mentioned earlier.

Recent studies have put into question the belief that emergent abilities in language models are exclusive to large models. This skepticism arises from two observations: 1) smaller models can also exhibit high performance on emergent abilities and 2) there is doubt on the discontinuous metrics used to measure these abilities. In this paper, we propose to study emergent abilities in the lens of pre-training loss, instead of model size or training compute. We demonstrate that the models with the same pre-training loss, but different model and data sizes, generate the same performance on various downstream tasks. We also discover that a model exhibits emergent abilities on certain tasks -- regardless of the continuity of metrics -- when its pre-training loss falls below a specific threshold. Before reaching this threshold, its performance remains at the level of random guessing. This inspires us to redefine emergent abilities as those that manifest in models with lower pre-training losses, highlighting that these abilities cannot be predicted by merely extrapolating the performance trends of models with higher pre-training losses.

Multi-hop question answering (MQA) under knowledge editing (KE) has garnered significant attention in the era of large language models. However, existing models for MQA under KE exhibit poor performance when dealing with questions containing explicit temporal contexts. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework, namely TEMPoral knowLEdge augmented Multi-hop Question Answering (TEMPLE-MQA). Unlike previous methods, TEMPLE-MQA first constructs a time-aware graph (TAG) to store edit knowledge in a structured manner. Then, through our proposed inference path, structural retrieval, and joint reasoning stages, TEMPLE-MQA effectively discerns temporal contexts within the question query. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that TEMPLE-MQA significantly outperforms baseline models. Additionally, we contribute a new dataset, namely TKEMQA, which serves as the inaugural benchmark tailored specifically for MQA with temporal scopes.

Twitter has emerged as a global hub for engaging in online conversations and as a research corpus for various disciplines that have recognized the significance of its user-generated content. Argument mining is an important analytical task for processing and understanding online discourse. Specifically, it aims to identify the structural elements of arguments, denoted as information and inference. These elements, however, are not static and may require context within the conversation they are in, yet there is a lack of data and annotation frameworks addressing this dynamic aspect on Twitter. We contribute TACO, the first dataset of Twitter Arguments utilizing 1,814 tweets covering 200 entire conversations spanning six heterogeneous topics annotated with an agreement of 0.718 Krippendorff's alpha among six experts. Second, we provide our annotation framework, incorporating definitions from the Cambridge Dictionary, to define and identify argument components on Twitter. Our transformer-based classifier achieves an 85.06\% macro F1 baseline score in detecting arguments. Moreover, our data reveals that Twitter users tend to engage in discussions involving informed inferences and information. TACO serves multiple purposes, such as training tweet classifiers to manage tweets based on inference and information elements, while also providing valuable insights into the conversational reply patterns of tweets.

The goal of field boundary delineation is to predict the polygonal boundaries and interiors of individual crop fields in overhead remotely sensed images (e.g., from satellites or drones). Automatic delineation of field boundaries is a necessary task for many real-world use cases in agriculture, such as estimating cultivated area in a region or predicting end-of-season yield in a field. Field boundary delineation can be framed as an instance segmentation problem, but presents unique research challenges compared to traditional computer vision datasets used for instance segmentation. The practical applicability of previous work is also limited by the assumption that a sufficiently-large labeled dataset is available where field boundary delineation models will be applied, which is not the reality for most regions (especially under-resourced regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa). We present an approach for segmentation of crop field boundaries in satellite images in regions lacking labeled data that uses multi-region transfer learning to adapt model weights for the target region. We show that our approach outperforms existing methods and that multi-region transfer learning substantially boosts performance for multiple model architectures. Our implementation and datasets are publicly available to enable use of the approach by end-users and serve as a benchmark for future work.

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS)-based positioning plays a crucial role in various applications, including navigation, transportation, logistics, mapping, and emergency services. Traditional GNSS positioning methods are model-based and they utilize satellite geometry and the known properties of satellite signals. However, model-based methods have limitations in challenging environments and often lack adaptability to uncertain noise models. This paper highlights recent advances in Machine Learning (ML) and its potential to address these limitations. It covers a broad range of ML methods, including supervised learning, unsupervised learning, deep learning, and hybrid approaches. The survey provides insights into positioning applications related to GNSS such as signal analysis, anomaly detection, multi-sensor integration, prediction, and accuracy enhancement using ML. It discusses the strengths, limitations, and challenges of current ML-based approaches for GNSS positioning, providing a comprehensive overview of the field.

Short texts are omnipresent in real-time news, social network commentaries, etc. Traditional text representation methods have been successfully applied to self-contained documents of medium size. However, information in short texts is often insufficient, due, for example, to the use of mnemonics, which makes them hard to classify. Therefore, the particularities of specific domains must be exploited. In this article we describe a novel system that combines Natural Language Processing techniques with Machine Learning algorithms to classify banking transaction descriptions for personal finance management, a problem that was not previously considered in the literature. We trained and tested that system on a labelled dataset with real customer transactions that will be available to other researchers on request. Motivated by existing solutions in spam detection, we also propose a short text similarity detector to reduce training set size based on the Jaccard distance. Experimental results with a two-stage classifier combining this detector with a SVM indicate a high accuracy in comparison with alternative approaches, taking into account complexity and computing time. Finally, we present a use case with a personal finance application, CoinScrap, which is available at Google Play and App Store.