Abstract-- Companies across the globe are keen on targeting potential high-value customers in an attempt to expand revenue and this could be achieved only by understanding the customers more. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the total monetary value of transactions/purchases made by a customer with the business over an intended period of time and is used as means to estimate future customer interactions. CLV finds application in a number of distinct business domains such as Banking, Insurance, Online-entertainment, Gaming, and E-Commerce. The existing distribution-based and basic (recency, frequency & monetary) based models face a limitation in terms of handling a wide variety of input features. Moreover, the more advanced Deep learning approaches could be superfluous and add an undesirable element of complexity in certain application areas. We, therefore, propose a system which is able to qualify both as effective, and comprehensive yet simple and interpretable. With that in mind, we develop a meta-learning-based stacked regression model which combines the predictions from bagging and boosting models that each is found to perform well individually. Empirical tests have been carried out on an openly available Online Retail dataset to evaluate various models and show the efficacy of the proposed approach. The key to flourishing businesses lies in understanding the customers using various aspects of their interactions with the businesses.

Given a pre-trained language model, how can we efficiently compress it without retraining? Retraining-free structured pruning algorithms are crucial in pre-trained language model compression due to their significantly reduced pruning cost and capability to prune large language models. However, existing retraining-free algorithms encounter severe accuracy degradation, as they fail to preserve the useful knowledge of pre-trained models. In this paper, we propose K-pruning (Knowledge-preserving pruning), an accurate retraining-free structured pruning algorithm for pre-trained language models. K-pruning identifies and prunes attention heads and neurons deemed to be superfluous, based on the amount of their inherent knowledge. K-pruning applies an iterative process of pruning followed by knowledge reconstruction for each sub-layer to preserve the knowledge of the pre-trained models. Consequently, K-pruning shows up to 58.02%p higher F1 score than existing retraining-free pruning algorithms under a high compression rate of 80% on the SQuAD benchmark.

Growing apprehensions surrounding public safety have captured the attention of numerous governments and security agencies across the globe. These entities are increasingly acknowledging the imperative need for reliable and secure crowd-monitoring systems to address these concerns. Effectively managing human gatherings necessitates proactive measures to prevent unforeseen events or complications, ensuring a safe and well-coordinated environment. The scarcity of research focusing on crowd monitoring systems and their security implications has given rise to a burgeoning area of investigation, exploring potential approaches to safeguard human congregations effectively. Crowd monitoring systems depend on a bifurcated approach, encompassing vision-based and non-vision-based technologies. An in-depth analysis of these two methodologies will be conducted in this research. The efficacy of these approaches is contingent upon the specific environment and temporal context in which they are deployed, as they each offer distinct advantages. This paper endeavors to present an in-depth analysis of the recent incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and models into automated systems, emphasizing their contemporary applications and effectiveness in various contexts.

We present an alternating least squares type numerical optimization scheme to estimate conditionally-independent mixture models in $\mathbb{R}^n$, without parameterizing the distributions. Following the method of moments, we tackle an incomplete tensor decomposition problem to learn the mixing weights and componentwise means. Then we compute the cumulative distribution functions, higher moments and other statistics of the component distributions through linear solves. Crucially for computations in high dimensions, the steep costs associated with high-order tensors are evaded, via the development of efficient tensor-free operations. Numerical experiments demonstrate the competitive performance of the algorithm, and its applicability to many models and applications. Furthermore we provide theoretical analyses, establishing identifiability from low-order moments of the mixture and guaranteeing local linear convergence of the ALS algorithm.

The research explores the steerability of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly OpenAI's ChatGPT iterations. By employing a behavioral psychology framework called OCEAN (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism), we quantitatively gauged the model's responsiveness to tailored prompts. When asked to generate text mimicking an extroverted personality, OCEAN scored the language alignment to that behavioral trait. In our analysis, while "openness" presented linguistic ambiguity, "conscientiousness" and "neuroticism" were distinctly evoked in the OCEAN framework, with "extroversion" and "agreeableness" showcasing a notable overlap yet distinct separation from other traits. Our findings underscore GPT's versatility and ability to discern and adapt to nuanced instructions. Furthermore, historical figure simulations highlighted the LLM's capacity to internalize and project instructible personas, precisely replicating their philosophies and dialogic styles. However, the rapid advancements in LLM capabilities and the opaque nature of some training techniques make metric proposals degrade rapidly. Our research emphasizes a quantitative role to describe steerability in LLMs, presenting both its promise and areas for further refinement in aligning its progress to human intentions.

Continuum robots, made from flexible materials with continuous backbones, have several advantages over traditional rigid robots. Some of them are the ability to navigate through narrow or confined spaces, adapt to irregular or changing environments, and perform tasks in proximity to humans. However, one of the challenges in using continuum robots is the difficulty in accurately estimating their state, such as their tip position and curvature. This is due to the complexity of their kinematics and the inherent uncertainty in their measurement and control. This paper proposes a moving horizon estimation (MHE) approach for estimating the robot's state, including its tip position and shape parameters. Our approach involves minimizing the error between measurement samples from an IMU attached to the robot's tip and the estimated state along the estimation horizon using an inline optimization problem. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through simulation and experimental results. Our approach can potentially improve the accuracy and robustness of state estimation and control for continuum robots. It can be applied to various applications such as surgery, manufacturing, and inspection.

This paper presents a state-of-the-art model for transcribing speech in any language into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Transcription of spoken languages into IPA is an essential yet time-consuming process in language documentation, and even partially automating this process has the potential to drastically speed up the documentation of endangered languages. Like the previous best speech-to-IPA model (Wav2Vec2Phoneme), our model is based on wav2vec 2.0 and is fine-tuned to predict IPA from audio input. We use training data from seven languages from CommonVoice 11.0, transcribed into IPA semi-automatically. Although this training dataset is much smaller than Wav2Vec2Phoneme's, its higher quality lets our model achieve comparable or better results. Furthermore, we show that the quality of our universal speech-to-IPA models is close to that of human annotators.

Despite speculation that recent large language models (LLMs) are likely to be used maliciously to improve the quality or scale of influence operations, uncertainty persists regarding the economic value that LLMs offer propagandists. This research constructs a model of costs facing propagandists for content generation at scale and analyzes (1) the potential savings that LLMs could offer propagandists, (2) the potential deterrent effect of monitoring controls on API-accessible LLMs, and (3) the optimal strategy for propagandists choosing between multiple private and/or open source LLMs when conducting influence operations. Primary results suggest that LLMs need only produce usable outputs with relatively low reliability (roughly 25%) to offer cost savings to propagandists, that the potential reduction in content generation costs can be quite high (up to 70% for a highly reliable model), and that monitoring capabilities have sharply limited cost imposition effects when alternative open source models are available. In addition, these results suggest that nation-states -- even those conducting many large-scale influence operations per year -- are unlikely to benefit economically from training custom LLMs specifically for use in influence operations.

For a machine learning model to generalize effectively to unseen data within a particular problem domain, it is well-understood that the data needs to be of sufficient size and representative of real-world scenarios. Nonetheless, real-world datasets frequently have overrepresented and underrepresented groups. One solution to mitigate bias in machine learning is to leverage a diverse and representative dataset. Training a model on a dataset that covers all demographics is crucial to reducing bias in machine learning. However, collecting and labeling large-scale datasets has been challenging, prompting the use of synthetic data generation and active labeling to decrease the costs of manual labeling. The focus of this study was to generate a robust face image dataset using the StyleGAN model. In order to achieve a balanced distribution of the dataset among different demographic groups, a synthetic dataset was created by controlling the generation process of StyleGaN and annotated for different downstream tasks.

Implicit graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a potential approach to enable GNNs to capture long-range dependencies effectively. However, poorly designed implicit GNN layers can experience over-smoothing or may have limited adaptability to learn data geometry, potentially hindering their performance in graph learning problems. To address these issues, we introduce a geometric framework to design implicit graph diffusion layers based on a parameterized graph Laplacian operator. Our framework allows learning the geometry of vertex and edge spaces, as well as the graph gradient operator from data. We further show how implicit GNN layers can be viewed as the fixed-point solution of a Dirichlet energy minimization problem and give conditions under which it may suffer from over-smoothing. To overcome the over-smoothing problem, we design our implicit graph diffusion layer as the solution of a Dirichlet energy minimization problem with constraints on vertex features, enabling it to trade off smoothing with the preservation of node feature information. With an appropriate hyperparameter set to be larger than the largest eigenvalue of the parameterized graph Laplacian, our framework guarantees a unique equilibrium and quick convergence. Our models demonstrate better performance than leading implicit and explicit GNNs on benchmark datasets for node and graph classification tasks, with substantial accuracy improvements observed for some datasets.