Africa
CHAINSFORMER: Numerical Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs from a Chain Perspective
Zhao, Ze, Lu, Bin, Gan, Xiaoying, Tang, Gu, Fu, Luoyi, Wang, Xinbing
Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs (KGs) plays a pivotal role in knowledge graph completion or question answering systems, providing richer and more accurate triples and attributes. As numerical attributes become increasingly essential in characterizing entities and relations in KGs, the ability to reason over these attributes has gained significant importance. Existing graph-based methods such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGEs), primarily focus on aggregating homogeneous local neighbors and implicitly embedding diverse triples. However, these approaches often fail to fully leverage the potential of logical paths within the graph, limiting their effectiveness in exploiting the reasoning process. To address these limitations, we propose ChainsFormer, a novel chain-based framework designed to support numerical reasoning. Chainsformer not only explicitly constructs logical chains but also expands the reasoning depth to multiple hops. Specially, we introduces Relation-Attribute Chains (RA-Chains), a specialized logic chain, to model sequential reasoning patterns. ChainsFormer captures the step-by-step nature of multi-hop reasoning along RA-Chains by employing sequential in-context learning. To mitigate the impact of noisy chains, we propose a hyperbolic affinity scoring mechanism that selects relevant logic chains in a variable-resolution space. Furthermore, ChainsFormer incorporates an attention-based numerical reasoner to identify critical reasoning paths, enhancing both reasoning accuracy and transparency. Experimental results demonstrate that ChainsFormer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to a 20.0% improvement in performance. The implementations are available at https://github.com/zhaodazhuang2333/ChainsFormer.
Amplify Initiative: Building A Localized Data Platform for Globalized AI
Rashid, Qazi Mamunur, van Liemt, Erin, Shih, Tiffany, Ebinama, Amber, Ramos, Karla Barrios, Maji, Madhurima, Verma, Aishwarya, Kalia, Charu, Smith-Loud, Jamila, Nakatumba-Nabende, Joyce, Baguma, Rehema, Katumba, Andrew, Mutebi, Chodrine, Marvin, Jagen, Wairagala, Eric Peter, Bruce, Mugizi, Oketta, Peter, Nderu, Lawrence, Obiajunwa, Obichi, Oppong, Abigail, Zimba, Michael, Authors, Data
Current AI models often fail to account for local context and language, given the predominance of English and Western internet content in their training data. This hinders the global relevance, usefulness, and safety of these models as they gain more users around the globe. Amplify Initiative, a data platform and methodology, leverages expert communities to collect diverse, high-quality data to address the limitations of these models. The platform is designed to enable co-creation of datasets, provide access to high-quality multilingual datasets, and offer recognition to data authors. This paper presents the approach to co-creating datasets with domain experts (e.g., health workers, teachers) through a pilot conducted in Sub-Saharan Africa (Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda). In partnership with local researchers situated in these countries, the pilot demonstrated an end-to-end approach to co-creating data with 155 experts in sensitive domains (e.g., physicians, bankers, anthropologists, human and civil rights advocates). This approach, implemented with an Android app, resulted in an annotated dataset of 8,091 adversarial queries in seven languages (e.g., Luganda, Swahili, Chichewa), capturing nuanced and contextual information related to key themes such as misinformation and public interest topics. This dataset in turn can be used to evaluate models for their safety and cultural relevance within the context of these languages.
Bayesian information theoretic model-averaging stochastic item selection for computer adaptive testing: compromise-free item exposure
Chang, Joshua C., Choe, Edison
The goal of Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT) is to reliably estimate an individual's ability as modeled by an item response theory (IRT) instrument using only a subset of the instrument's items. A secondary goal is to vary the items presented across different testing sessions so that the sequence of items does not become overly stereotypical -- we want all items to have an exposure rate sufficiently far from zero. We formulate the optimization problem for CAT in terms of Bayesian information theory, where one chooses the item at each step based on the criterion of the ability model discrepancy -- the statistical distance between the ability estimate at the next step and the full-test ability estimate. This viewpoint of CAT naturally motivates a stochastic selection procedure that equates choosing the next item to sampling from a model-averaging ensemble ability model. Using the NIH Work Disability Functional Assessment Battery (WD-FAB), we evaluate our new methods in comparison to pre-existing methods found in the literature. We find that our stochastic selector has superior properties in terms of both item exposure and test accuracy/efficiency.
Sentiment Analysis on the young people's perception about the mobile Internet costs in Senegal
Mbaye, Derguene, Seye, Madoune Robert, Diallo, Moussa, Ndiaye, Mamadou Lamine, Sow, Djiby, Adjanohoun, Dimitri Samuel, Mbengue, Tatiana, Wade, Cheikh Samba, Pablo, De Roulet, Munyaka, Jean-Claude Baraka, Chenal, Jerome
Internet penetration rates in Africa are rising steadily, and mobile Internet is getting an even bigger boost with the availability of smartphones. Young people are increasingly using the Internet, especially social networks, and Senegal is no exception to this revolution. Social networks have become the main means of expression for young people. Despite this evolution in Internet access, there are few operators on the market, which limits the alternatives available in terms of value for money. In this paper, we will look at how young people feel about the price of mobile Internet in Senegal, in relation to the perceived quality of the service, through their comments on social networks. We scanned a set of Twitter and Facebook comments related to the subject and applied a sentiment analysis model to gather their general feelings.
Advanced Deep Learning and Large Language Models: Comprehensive Insights for Cancer Detection
Habchi, Yassine, Kheddar, Hamza, Himeur, Yassine, Belouchrani, Adel, Serpedin, Erchin, Khelifi, Fouad, Chowdhury, Muhammad E. H.
The rapid advancement of deep learning (DL) has transformed healthcare, particularly in cancer detection and diagnosis. DL surpasses traditional machine learning and human accuracy, making it a critical tool for identifying diseases. Despite numerous reviews on DL in healthcare, a comprehensive analysis of its role in cancer detection remains limited. Existing studies focus on specific aspects, leaving gaps in understanding its broader impact. This paper addresses these gaps by reviewing advanced DL techniques, including transfer learning (TL), reinforcement learning (RL), federated learning (FL), Transformers, and large language models (LLMs). These approaches enhance accuracy, tackle data scarcity, and enable decentralized learning while maintaining data privacy. TL adapts pre-trained models to new datasets, improving performance with limited labeled data. RL optimizes diagnostic pathways and treatment strategies, while FL fosters collaborative model development without sharing sensitive data. Transformers and LLMs, traditionally used in natural language processing, are now applied to medical data for improved interpretability. Additionally, this review examines these techniques' efficiency in cancer diagnosis, addresses challenges like data imbalance, and proposes solutions. It serves as a resource for researchers and practitioners, providing insights into current trends and guiding future research in advanced DL for cancer detection.
Knowledge Distillation and Dataset Distillation of Large Language Models: Emerging Trends, Challenges, and Future Directions
Fang, Luyang, Yu, Xiaowei, Cai, Jiazhang, Chen, Yongkai, Wu, Shushan, Liu, Zhengliang, Yang, Zhenyuan, Lu, Haoran, Gong, Xilin, Liu, Yufang, Ma, Terry, Ruan, Wei, Abbasi, Ali, Zhang, Jing, Wang, Tao, Latif, Ehsan, Liu, Wei, Zhang, Wei, Kolouri, Soheil, Zhai, Xiaoming, Zhu, Dajiang, Zhong, Wenxuan, Liu, Tianming, Ma, Ping
The exponential growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) continues to highlight the need for efficient strategies to meet ever-expanding computational and data demands. This survey provides a comprehensive analysis of two complementary paradigms: Knowledge Distillation (KD) and Dataset Distillation (DD), both aimed at compressing LLMs while preserving their advanced reasoning capabilities and linguistic diversity. We first examine key methodologies in KD, such as task-specific alignment, rationale-based training, and multi-teacher frameworks, alongside DD techniques that synthesize compact, high-impact datasets through optimization-based gradient matching, latent space regularization, and generative synthesis. Building on these foundations, we explore how integrating KD and DD can produce more effective and scalable compression strategies. Together, these approaches address persistent challenges in model scalability, architectural heterogeneity, and the preservation of emergent LLM abilities. We further highlight applications across domains such as healthcare and education, where distillation enables efficient deployment without sacrificing performance. Despite substantial progress, open challenges remain in preserving emergent reasoning and linguistic diversity, enabling efficient adaptation to continually evolving teacher models and datasets, and establishing comprehensive evaluation protocols. By synthesizing methodological innovations, theoretical foundations, and practical insights, our survey charts a path toward sustainable, resource-efficient LLMs through the tighter integration of KD and DD principles.
Filmmaker James Cameron on penguins, arctic cold, and lowlight cameras
James Cameron wasn't near the penguins this time around, but he is extremely familiar with their environment. "When I went to Antarctica myself, I had a Nikon still camera adapted to the cold with special lubricants," he tells Popular Science. "I went to the South Pole and the film shattered in my hand when I tried to change it. I took a video camera, I wrapped it in a heating pack and it [died] in two minutes. I have a good sense of what it takes to take conventional equipment into that environment and survive."
Optimal Scheduling of Dynamic Transport
Tsimpos, Panos, Ren, Zhi, Zech, Jakob, Marzouk, Youssef
Flow-based methods for sampling and generative modeling use continuous-time dynamical systems to represent a {transport map} that pushes forward a source measure to a target measure. The introduction of a time axis provides considerable design freedom, and a central question is how to exploit this freedom. Though many popular methods seek straight line (i.e., zero acceleration) trajectories, we show here that a specific class of ``curved'' trajectories can significantly improve approximation and learning. In particular, we consider the unit-time interpolation of any given transport map $T$ and seek the schedule $\tau: [0,1] \to [0,1]$ that minimizes the spatial Lipschitz constant of the corresponding velocity field over all times $t \in [0,1]$. This quantity is crucial as it allows for control of the approximation error when the velocity field is learned from data. We show that, for a broad class of source/target measures and transport maps $T$, the \emph{optimal schedule} can be computed in closed form, and that the resulting optimal Lipschitz constant is \emph{exponentially smaller} than that induced by an identity schedule (corresponding to, for instance, the Wasserstein geodesic). Our proof technique relies on the calculus of variations and $\Gamma$-convergence, allowing us to approximate the aforementioned degenerate objective by a family of smooth, tractable problems.
Microsoft faces growing unrest over role in Israel's war on Gaza: 'Close to a tipping point'
For the second time in the last month, Microsoft employees disrupted high-level executives speaking at an event celebrating the company's 50th anniversary on 4 April, in protest against the company's role in Israel's ongoing siege on Gaza. The two were fired within days. The Microsoft president Brad Smith and the former CEO Steve Ballmer were shouted down at Seattle's Great Hall on 20 March by a current and former employee. The April event was preceded by a rally outside that also included current and former employees of the tech giant. Protesters projected a sign onto the hall's wall saying, "Microsoft powers genocide" – a reference to Israel's extensive use of the company's AI and cloud computing services since 7 October 2023, as "the IDF's insatiable demand for bombs was matched by its need for greater access to cloud computing services," the Guardian reported.
Code Copycat Conundrum: Demystifying Repetition in LLM-based Code Generation
Liu, Mingwei, Li, Juntao, Wang, Ying, Du, Xueying, Ou, Zuoyu, Chen, Qiuyuan, An, Bingxu, Wei, Zhao, Xu, Yong, Zou, Fangming, Peng, Xin, Lou, Yiling
Despite recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation, the quality of LLM-generated code still faces significant challenges. One significant issue is code repetition, which refers to the model's tendency to generate structurally redundant code, resulting in inefficiencies and reduced readability. To address this, we conduct the first empirical study to investigate the prevalence and nature of repetition across 19 state-of-the-art code LLMs using three widely-used benchmarks. Our study includes both quantitative and qualitative analyses, revealing that repetition is pervasive and manifests at various granularities and extents, including character, statement, and block levels. We further summarize a taxonomy of 20 repetition patterns. Building on our findings, we propose DeRep, a rule-based technique designed to detect and mitigate repetition in generated code. We evaluate DeRep using both open-source benchmarks and in an industrial setting. Our results demonstrate that DeRep significantly outperforms baselines in reducing repetition (with an average improvements of 91.3%, 93.5%, and 79.9% in rep-3, rep-line, and sim-line metrics) and enhancing code quality (with a Pass@1 increase of 208.3% over greedy search). Furthermore, integrating DeRep improves the performance of existing repetition mitigation methods, with Pass@1 improvements ranging from 53.7% to 215.7%.