Africa
AI and Semantic Communication for Infrastructure Monitoring in 6G-Driven Drone Swarms
Ahmed, Tasnim, Choudhury, Salimur
--The adoption of unmanned aerial vehicles to monitor critical infrastructure is gaining momentum in various industrial domains. Organizational imperatives drive this progression to minimize expenses, accelerate processes, and mitigate hazards faced by inspection personnel. However, traditional infrastructure monitoring systems face critical bottlenecks--5G networks lack the latency and reliability for large-scale drone coordination, while manual inspections remain costly and slow. We propose a 6G-enabled drone swarm system that integrates ultra-reliable, low-latency communications, edge AI, and semantic communication to automate inspections. By adopting LLMs for structured output and report generation, our framework is hypothesized to reduce inspection costs and improve fault detection speed compared to existing methods. I NTRODUCTION Drones, key components of the unmanned aerial system, have been widely used over the past decade for various applications, including inspections, surveillance, delivery, search and rescue, etc. [1].
Spectral Analysis of Representational Similarity with Limited Neurons
Kang, Hyunmo, Canatar, Abdulkadir, Chung, SueYeon
Measuring representational similarity between neural recordings and computational models is challenging due to constraints on the number of neurons that can be recorded simultaneously. In this work, we investigate how such limitations affect similarity measures, focusing on Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) and Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA). Leveraging tools from Random Matrix Theory, we develop a predictive spectral framework for these measures and demonstrate that finite neuron sampling systematically underestimates similarity due to eigenvector delocalization. To overcome this, we introduce a denoising method to infer population-level similarity, enabling accurate analysis even with small neuron samples. Our theory is validated on synthetic and real datasets, offering practical strategies for interpreting neural data under finite sampling constraints.
Treatment Non-Adherence Bias in Clinical Machine Learning: A Real-World Study on Hypertension Medication
Liang, Zhongyuan, Suresh, Arvind, Chen, Irene Y.
Machine learning systems trained on electronic health records (EHRs) increasingly guide treatment decisions, but their reliability depends on the critical assumption that patients follow the prescribed treatments recorded in EHRs. Using EHR data from 3,623 hypertension patients, we investigate how treatment non-adherence introduces implicit bias that can fundamentally distort both causal inference and predictive modeling. By extracting patient adherence information from clinical notes using a large language model, we identify 786 patients (21.7%) with medication non-adherence. We further uncover key demographic and clinical factors associated with non-adherence, as well as patient-reported reasons including side effects and difficulties obtaining refills. Our findings demonstrate that this implicit bias can not only reverse estimated treatment effects, but also degrade model performance by up to 5% while disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations by exacerbating disparities in decision outcomes and model error rates. This highlights the importance of accounting for treatment non-adherence in developing responsible and equitable clinical machine learning systems.
Where Are We? Evaluating LLM Performance on African Languages
Adebara, Ife, Toyin, Hawau Olamide, Ghebremichael, Nahom Tesfu, Elmadany, AbdelRahim, Abdul-Mageed, Muhammad
Africa's rich linguistic heritage remains underrepresented in NLP, largely due to historical policies that favor foreign languages and create significant data inequities. In this paper, we integrate theoretical insights on Africa's language landscape with an empirical evaluation using Sahara - a comprehensive benchmark curated from large-scale, publicly accessible datasets capturing the continent's linguistic diversity. By systematically assessing the performance of leading large language models (LLMs) on Sahara, we demonstrate how policy-induced data variations directly impact model effectiveness across African languages. Our findings reveal that while a few languages perform reasonably well, many Indigenous languages remain marginalized due to sparse data. Leveraging these insights, we offer actionable recommendations for policy reforms and inclusive data practices. Overall, our work underscores the urgent need for a dual approach - combining theoretical understanding with empirical evaluation - to foster linguistic diversity in AI for African communities.
Repurposing the scientific literature with vision-language models
Alyakin, Anton, Stryker, Jaden, Alber, Daniel Alexander, Sangwon, Karl L., Duderstadt, Brandon, Save, Akshay, Kurland, David, Frome, Spencer, Singh, Shrutika, Zhang, Jeff, Yang, Eunice, Park, Ki Yun, Orillac, Cordelia, Valliani, Aly A., Neifert, Sean, Liu, Albert, Patel, Aneek, Livia, Christopher, Lau, Darryl, Laufer, Ilya, Rozman, Peter A., Hidalgo, Eveline Teresa, Riina, Howard, Feng, Rui, Hollon, Todd, Aphinyanaphongs, Yindalon, Golfinos, John G., Snyder, Laura, Leuthardt, Eric, Kondziolka, Douglas, Oermann, Eric Karl
Research in AI for Science often focuses on using AI technologies to augment components of the scientific process, or in some cases, the entire scientific method; how about AI for scientific publications? Peer-reviewed journals are foundational repositories of specialized knowledge, written in discipline-specific language that differs from general Internet content used to train most large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). We hypothesized that by combining a family of scientific journals with generative AI models, we could invent novel tools for scientific communication, education, and clinical care. We converted 23,000 articles from Neurosurgery Publications into a multimodal database - NeuroPubs - of 134 million words and 78,000 image-caption pairs to develop six datasets for building AI models. We showed that the content of NeuroPubs uniquely represents neurosurgery-specific clinical contexts compared with broader datasets and PubMed. For publishing, we employed generalist VLMs to automatically generate graphical abstracts from articles. Editorial board members rated 70% of these as ready for publication without further edits. For education, we generated 89,587 test questions in the style of the ABNS written board exam, which trainee and faculty neurosurgeons found indistinguishable from genuine examples 54% of the time. We used these questions alongside a curriculum learning process to track knowledge acquisition while training our 34 billion-parameter VLM (CNS-Obsidian). In a blinded, randomized controlled trial, we demonstrated the non-inferiority of CNS-Obsidian to GPT-4o (p = 0.1154) as a diagnostic copilot for a neurosurgical service. Our findings lay a novel foundation for AI with Science and establish a framework to elevate scientific communication using state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence while maintaining rigorous quality standards.
Winning Big with Small Models: Knowledge Distillation vs. Self-Training for Reducing Hallucination in QA Agents
Lewis, Ashley, White, Michael, Liu, Jing, Koike-Akino, Toshiaki, Parsons, Kieran, Wang, Ye
The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in customer support is constrained by hallucination-generating false information-and the high cost of proprietary models. To address these challenges, we propose a retrieval-augmented question-answering (QA) pipeline and explore how to balance human input and automation. Using a dataset of questions about a Samsung Smart TV user manual, we demonstrate that synthetic data generated by LLMs outperforms crowdsourced data in reducing hallucination in finetuned models. We also compare self-training (fine-tuning models on their own outputs) and knowledge distillation (fine-tuning on stronger models' outputs, e.g., GPT-4o), and find that self-training achieves comparable hallucination reduction. We conjecture that this surprising finding can be attributed to increased exposure bias issues in the knowledge distillation case and support this conjecture with post hoc analysis. We also improve robustness to unanswerable questions and retrieval failures with contextualized "I don't know" responses. These findings show that scalable, cost-efficient QA systems can be built using synthetic data and self-training with open-source models, reducing reliance on proprietary tools or costly human annotations.
Do LLMs exhibit demographic parity in responses to queries about Human Rights?
Javed, Rafiya, Kay, Jackie, Yanni, David, Zaini, Abdullah, Sheikh, Anushe, Rauh, Maribeth, Comanescu, Ramona, Gabriel, Iason, Weidinger, Laura
This research describes a novel approach to evaluating hedging behaviour in large language models (LLMs), specifically in the context of human rights as defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Hedging and non-affirmation are behaviours that express ambiguity or a lack of clear endorsement on specific statements. These behaviours are undesirable in certain contexts, such as queries about whether different groups are entitled to specific human rights; since all people are entitled to human rights. Here, we present the first systematic attempt to measure these behaviours in the context of human rights, with a particular focus on between-group comparisons. To this end, we design a novel prompt set on human rights in the context of different national or social identities. We develop metrics to capture hedging and non-affirmation behaviours and then measure whether LLMs exhibit demographic parity when responding to the queries. We present results on three leading LLMs and find that all models exhibit some demographic disparities in how they attribute human rights between different identity groups. Futhermore, there is high correlation between different models in terms of how disparity is distributed amongst identities, with identities that have high disparity in one model also facing high disparity in both the other models. While baseline rates of hedging and non-affirmation differ, these disparities are consistent across queries that vary in ambiguity and they are robust across variations of the precise query wording. Our findings highlight the need for work to explicitly align LLMs to human rights principles, and to ensure that LLMs endorse the human rights of all groups equally.
Anomaly Detection in Complex Dynamical Systems: A Systematic Framework Using Embedding Theory and Physics-Inspired Consistency
Somma, Michael, Gallien, Thomas, Stojanovic, Branka
TU Graz, Institute for Technical Informatics, Inffeldgasse 16/I, Graz, Austria, 8010 AI AUSTRIA, RL Community, Wollzeile 24/12, Vienna, Austria, 1010 Abstract --Anomaly detection in complex dynamical systems is essential for ensuring reliability, safety, and efficiency in industrial and cyber-physical infrastructures. Predictive maintenance helps prevent costly failures, while cybersecurity monitoring has become critical as digitized systems face growing threats. Many of these systems exhibit oscillatory behaviors and bounded motion, requiring anomaly detection methods that capture structured temporal dependencies while adhering to physical consistency principles. In this work, we propose a system-theoretic approach to anomaly detection, grounded in classical embedding theory and physics-inspired consistency principles . We build upon the Fractal Whitney Embedding Prevalence Theorem, extending traditional embedding techniques to complex system dynamics. Additionally, we introduce state-derivative pairs as an embedding strategy to capture system evolution. T o enforce temporal coherence, we develop a T emporal Differential Consistency Autoencoder (TDC-AE), incorporating a TDC-Loss that aligns the approximated derivatives of latent variables with their dynamic representations. We evaluate our method on the C-MAPSS dataset, a benchmark for turbofan aeroengine degradation . TDC-AE outperforms LSTMs and Transformers while achieving a 200x reduction in MAC operations, making it particularly suited for lightweight edge computing . Our findings support the hypothesis that anomalies disrupt stable system dynamics, providing a robust, interpretable signal for anomaly detection. I NTRODUCTION Anomaly detection in complex physical dynamical systems is a critical research area as industrial and engineered systems become more sophisticated. Identifying deviations from expected behavior is essential for ensuring reliability, safety, and efficiency.
CritiQ: Mining Data Quality Criteria from Human Preferences
Guo, Honglin, Lv, Kai, Guo, Qipeng, Liang, Tianyi, Xi, Zhiheng, Song, Demin, Zhang, Qiuyinzhe, Sun, Yu, Chen, Kai, Qiu, Xipeng, Gui, Tao
Language model heavily depends on high-quality data for optimal performance. Existing approaches rely on manually designed heuristics, the perplexity of existing models, training classifiers, or careful prompt engineering, which require significant expert experience and human annotation effort while introduce biases. We introduce CritiQ, a novel data selection method that automatically mines criteria from human preferences for data quality with only $\sim$30 human-annotated pairs and performs efficient data selection. The main component, CritiQ Flow, employs a manager agent to evolve quality criteria and worker agents to make pairwise judgments. We build a knowledge base that extracts quality criteria from previous work to boost CritiQ Flow. Compared to perplexity- and classifier- based methods, verbal criteria are more interpretable and possess reusable value. After deriving the criteria, we train the CritiQ Scorer to give quality scores and perform efficient data selection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in the code, math, and logic domains, achieving high accuracy on human-annotated test sets. To validate the quality of the selected data, we continually train Llama 3.1 models and observe improved performance on downstream tasks compared to uniform sampling. Ablation studies validate the benefits of the knowledge base and the reflection process. We analyze how criteria evolve and the effectiveness of majority voting.
FaithUn: Toward Faithful Forgetting in Language Models by Investigating the Interconnectedness of Knowledge
Yang, Nakyeong, Kim, Minsung, Yoon, Seunghyun, Shin, Joongbo, Jung, Kyomin
Various studies have attempted to remove sensitive or private knowledge from a language model to prevent its unauthorized exposure. However, prior studies have overlooked the complex and interconnected nature of knowledge, where related knowledge must be carefully examined. Specifically, they have failed to evaluate whether an unlearning method faithfully erases interconnected knowledge that should be removed, retaining knowledge that appears relevant but exists in a completely different context. To resolve this problem, we first define a new concept called superficial unlearning, which refers to the phenomenon where an unlearning method either fails to erase the interconnected knowledge it should remove or unintentionally erases irrelevant knowledge. Based on the definition, we introduce a new benchmark, FaithUn, to analyze and evaluate the faithfulness of unlearning in real-world knowledge QA settings. Furthermore, we propose a novel unlearning method, KLUE, which updates only knowledge-related neurons to achieve faithful unlearning. KLUE identifies knowledge neurons using an explainability method and updates only those neurons using selected unforgotten samples. Experimental results demonstrate that widely-used unlearning methods fail to ensure faithful unlearning, while our method shows significant effectiveness in real-world QA unlearning.