The growing interest in developing smart diagnostic systems to help medical experts process extensive data for treating incurable diseases has been notable. In particular, the challenge of identifying thyroid cancer (TC) has seen progress with the use of machine learning (ML) and big data analysis, incorporating transformers to evaluate TC prognosis and determine the risk of malignancy in individuals. This review article presents a summary of various studies on AIbased approaches, especially those employing transformers, for diagnosing TC. It introduces a new categorization system for these methods based on artifcial intelligence (AI) algorithms, the goals of the framework, and the computing environments used. Additionally, it scrutinizes and contrasts the available TC datasets by their features. The paper highlights the importance of AI instruments in aiding the diagnosis and treatment of TC through supervised, unsupervised, or mixed approaches, with a special focus on the ongoing importance of transformers in medical diagnostics and disease management. It further discusses the progress made and the continuing obstacles in this area. Lastly, it explores future directions and focuses within this research feld.

Brain-Computer interfaces (BCIs) are typically designed to be lightweight and responsive in real-time to provide users timely feedback. Classical feature engineering is computationally efficient but has low accuracy, whereas the recent neural networks (DNNs) improve accuracy but are computationally expensive and incur high latency. As a promising alternative, the low-dimensional computing (LDC) classifier based on vector symbolic architecture (VSA), achieves small model size yet higher accuracy than classical feature engineering methods. However, its accuracy still lags behind that of modern DNNs, making it challenging to process complex brain signals. To improve the accuracy of a small model, knowledge distillation is a popular method. However, maintaining a constant level of distillation between the teacher and student models may not be the best way for a growing student during its progressive learning stages. In this work, we propose a simple scheduled knowledge distillation method based on curriculum data order to enable the student to gradually build knowledge from the teacher model, controlled by an $\alpha$ scheduler. Meanwhile, we employ the LDC/VSA as the student model to enhance the on-device inference efficiency for tiny BCI devices that demand low latency. The empirical results have demonstrated that our approach achieves better tradeoff between accuracy and hardware efficiency compared to other methods.

This paper presents a comprehensive examination of the impact of tokenization strategies and vocabulary sizes on the performance of Arabic language models in downstream natural language processing tasks. Our investigation focused on the effectiveness of four tokenizers across various tasks, including News Classification, Hate Speech Detection, Sentiment Analysis, and Natural Language Inference. Leveraging a diverse set of vocabulary sizes, we scrutinize the intricate interplay between tokenization approaches and model performance. The results reveal that Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) with Farasa outperforms other strategies in multiple tasks, underscoring the significance of morphological analysis in capturing the nuances of the Arabic language. However, challenges arise in sentiment analysis, where dialect specific segmentation issues impact model efficiency. Computational efficiency analysis demonstrates the stability of BPE with Farasa, suggesting its practical viability. Our study uncovers limited impacts of vocabulary size on model performance while keeping the model size unchanged. This is challenging the established beliefs about the relationship between vocabulary, model size, and downstream tasks, emphasizing the need for the study of models' size and their corresponding vocabulary size to generalize across domains and mitigate biases, particularly in dialect based datasets. Paper's recommendations include refining tokenization strategies to address dialect challenges, enhancing model robustness across diverse linguistic contexts, and expanding datasets to encompass the rich dialect based Arabic. This work not only advances our understanding of Arabic language models but also lays the foundation for responsible and ethical developments in natural language processing technologies tailored to the intricacies of the Arabic language.

In this paper, we discuss the development of an annotation schema to build datasets for evaluating the offline harm potential of social media texts. We define "harm potential" as the potential for an online public post to cause real-world physical harm (i.e., violence). Understanding that real-world violence is often spurred by a web of triggers, often combining several online tactics and pre-existing intersectional fissures in the social milieu, to result in targeted physical violence, we do not focus on any single divisive aspect (i.e., caste, gender, religion, or other identities of the victim and perpetrators) nor do we focus on just hate speech or mis/dis-information. Rather, our understanding of the intersectional causes of such triggers focuses our attempt at measuring the harm potential of online content, irrespective of whether it is hateful or not. In this paper, we discuss the development of a framework/annotation schema that allows annotating the data with different aspects of the text including its socio-political grounding and intent of the speaker (as expressed through mood and modality) that together contribute to it being a trigger for offline harm. We also give a comparative analysis and mapping of our framework with some of the existing frameworks.

Conversational search provides a more convenient interface for users to search by allowing multi-turn interaction with the search engine. However, the effectiveness of the conversational dense retrieval methods is limited by the scarcity of training data required for their fine-tuning. Thus, generating more training conversational sessions with relevant labels could potentially improve search performance. Based on the promising capabilities of large language models (LLMs) on text generation, we propose ConvSDG, a simple yet effective framework to explore the feasibility of boosting conversational search by using LLM for session data generation. Within this framework, we design dialogue/session-level and query-level data generation with unsupervised and semi-supervised learning, according to the availability of relevance judgments. The generated data are used to fine-tune the conversational dense retriever. Extensive experiments on four widely used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and broad applicability of our ConvSDG framework compared with several strong baselines.

Due to privacy or patent concerns, a growing number of large models are released without granting access to their training data, making transferring their knowledge inefficient and problematic. In response, Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD) methods have emerged as direct solutions. However, simply adopting models derived from DFKD for real-world applications suffers significant performance degradation, due to the discrepancy between teachers' training data and real-world scenarios (student domain). The degradation stems from the portions of teachers' knowledge that are not applicable to the student domain. They are specific to the teacher domain and would undermine students' performance. Hence, selectively transferring teachers' appropriate knowledge becomes the primary challenge in DFKD. In this work, we propose a simple but effective method AuG-KD. It utilizes an uncertainty-guided and sample-specific anchor to align student-domain data with the teacher domain and leverages a generative method to progressively trade off the learning process between OOD knowledge distillation and domain-specific information learning via mixup learning. Extensive experiments in 3 datasets and 8 settings demonstrate the stability and superiority of our approach. Code available at https://github.com/IshiKura-a/AuG-KD .

No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) focuses on designing methods to measure image quality in alignment with human perception when a high-quality reference image is unavailable. The reliance on annotated Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) in the majority of state-of-the-art NR-IQA approaches limits their scalability and broader applicability to real-world scenarios. To overcome this limitation, we propose QualiCLIP (Quality-aware CLIP), a CLIP-based self-supervised opinion-unaware method that does not require labeled MOS. In particular, we introduce a quality-aware image-text alignment strategy to make CLIP generate representations that correlate with the inherent quality of the images. Starting from pristine images, we synthetically degrade them with increasing levels of intensity. Then, we train CLIP to rank these degraded images based on their similarity to quality-related antonym text prompts, while guaranteeing consistent representations for images with comparable quality. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several datasets with authentic distortions. Moreover, despite not requiring MOS, QualiCLIP outperforms supervised methods when their training dataset differs from the testing one, thus proving to be more suitable for real-world scenarios. Furthermore, our approach demonstrates greater robustness and improved explainability than competing methods. The code and the model are publicly available at https://github.com/miccunifi/QualiCLIP.

KEPLMs are pre-trained models that utilize external knowledge to enhance language understanding. Previous language models facilitated knowledge acquisition by incorporating knowledge-related pre-training tasks learned from relation triples in knowledge graphs. However, these models do not prioritize learning embeddings for entity-related tokens. Moreover, updating the entire set of parameters in KEPLMs is computationally demanding. This paper introduces TRELM, a Robust and Efficient Pre-training framework for Knowledge-Enhanced Language Models. We observe that entities in text corpora usually follow the long-tail distribution, where the representations of some entities are suboptimally optimized and hinder the pre-training process for KEPLMs. To tackle this, we employ a robust approach to inject knowledge triples and employ a knowledge-augmented memory bank to capture valuable information. Furthermore, updating a small subset of neurons in the feed-forward networks (FFNs) that store factual knowledge is both sufficient and efficient. Specifically, we utilize dynamic knowledge routing to identify knowledge paths in FFNs and selectively update parameters during pre-training. Experimental results show that TRELM reduces pre-training time by at least 50% and outperforms other KEPLMs in knowledge probing tasks and multiple knowledge-aware language understanding tasks.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a powerful solution for various structure learning applications due to their strong representation capabilities for graph data. However, traditional GNNs, relying on message-passing mechanisms that gather information exclusively from first-order neighbours (known as positive samples), can lead to issues such as over-smoothing and over-squashing. To mitigate these issues, we propose a layer-diverse negative sampling method for message-passing propagation. This method employs a sampling matrix within a determinantal point process, which transforms the candidate set into a space and selectively samples from this space to generate negative samples. To further enhance the diversity of the negative samples during each forward pass, we develop a space-squeezing method to achieve layer-wise diversity in multi-layer GNNs. Experiments on various real-world graph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving the diversity of negative samples and overall learning performance. Moreover, adding negative samples dynamically changes the graph's topology, thus with the strong potential to improve the expressiveness of GNNs and reduce the risk of over-squashing.

Just-In-Time (JIT) defect prediction aims to automatically predict whether a commit is defective or not, and has been widely studied in recent years. In general, most studies can be classified into two categories: 1) simple models using traditional machine learning classifiers with hand-crafted features, and 2) complex models using deep learning techniques to automatically extract features from commit contents. Hand-crafted features used by simple models are based on expert knowledge but may not fully represent the semantic meaning of the commits. On the other hand, deep learning-based features used by complex models represent the semantic meaning of commits but may not reflect useful expert knowledge. Simple models and complex models seem complementary to each other to some extent. To utilize the advantages of both simple and complex models, we propose a model fusion framework that adopts both early fusions on the feature level and late fusions on the decision level. We propose SimCom++ by adopting the best early and late fusion strategies. The experimental results show that SimCom++ can significantly outperform the baselines by 5.7--26.9\%. In addition, our experimental results confirm that the simple model and complex model are complementary to each other.