Social telehealth has revolutionized healthcare by enabling patients to share symptoms and receive medical consultations remotely. Users frequently post symptoms on social media and online health platforms, generating a vast repository of medical data that can be leveraged for disease classification and symptom severity assessment. Large language models (LLMs), such as LLAMA3, GPT-3.5 Turbo, and BERT, process complex medical data to enhance disease classification. This study explores three Arabic medical text preprocessing techniques: text summarization, text refinement, and Named Entity Recognition (NER). Evaluating CAMeL-BERT, AraBERT, and Asafaya-BERT with LoRA, the best performance was achieved using CAMeL-BERT with NER-augmented text (83% type classification, 69% severity assessment). Non-fine-tuned models performed poorly (13%-20% type classification, 40%-49% severity assessment). Integrating LLMs into social telehealth systems enhances diagnostic accuracy and treatment outcomes.

The increasing size and complexity of pre-trained language models have demonstrated superior performance in many applications, but they usually require large training datasets to be adequately trained. Insufficient training sets could unexpectedly make the model overfit and fail to cope with complex tasks. Large language models (LLMs) trained on extensive corpora have prominent text generation capabilities, which improve the quality and quantity of data and play a crucial role in data augmentation. Specifically, distinctive prompt templates are given in personalised tasks to guide LLMs in generating the required content. Recent promising retrieval-based techniques further improve the expressive performance of LLMs in data augmentation by introducing external knowledge to enable them to produce more grounded-truth data. This survey provides an in-depth analysis of data augmentation in LLMs, classifying the techniques into Simple Augmentation, Prompt-based Augmentation, Retrieval-based Augmentation and Hybrid Augmentation. We summarise the post-processing approaches in data augmentation, which contributes significantly to refining the augmented data and enabling the model to filter out unfaithful content. Then, we provide the common tasks and evaluation metrics. Finally, we introduce existing challenges and future opportunities that could bring further improvement to data augmentation.

Text-to-image diffusion models show remarkable generation performance following text prompts, but risk generating Not Safe For Work (NSFW) contents from unsafe prompts. Existing approaches, such as prompt filtering or concept unlearning, fail to defend against adversarial attacks while maintaining benign image quality. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Distorting Embedding Space (DES), a text encoder-based defense mechanism that effectively tackles these issues through innovative embedding space control. DES transforms unsafe embeddings, extracted from a text encoder using unsafe prompts, toward carefully calculated safe embedding regions to prevent unsafe contents generation, while reproducing the original safe embeddings. DES also neutralizes the nudity embedding, extracted using prompt ``nudity", by aligning it with neutral embedding to enhance robustness against adversarial attacks. These methods ensure both robust defense and high-quality image generation. Additionally, DES can be adopted in a plug-and-play manner and requires zero inference overhead, facilitating its deployment. Extensive experiments on diverse attack types, including black-box and white-box scenarios, demonstrate DES's state-of-the-art performance in both defense capability and benign image generation quality. Our model is available at https://github.com/aei13/DES.

Vision-language model (VLM) fine-tuning for application-specific visual grounding based on natural language instructions has become one of the most popular approaches for learning-enabled autonomous systems. However, such fine-tuning relies heavily on high-quality datasets to achieve successful performance in various downstream tasks. Additionally, VLMs often encounter limitations due to insufficient and imbalanced fine-tuning data. To address these issues, we propose a new generalizable framework to improve VLM fine-tuning by integrating it with a reinforcement learning (RL) agent. Our method utilizes the RL agent to manipulate objects within an indoor setting to create synthetic data for fine-tuning to address certain vulnerabilities of the VLM. Specifically, we use the performance of the VLM to provide feedback to the RL agent to generate informative data that efficiently fine-tune the VLM over the targeted task (e.g. spatial reasoning). The key contribution of this work is developing a framework where the RL agent serves as an informative data sampling tool and assists the VLM in order to enhance performance and address task-specific vulnerabilities. By targeting the data sampling process to address the weaknesses of the VLM, we can effectively train a more context-aware model. In addition, generating synthetic data allows us to have precise control over each scene and generate granular ground truth captions. Our results show that the proposed data generation approach improves the spatial reasoning performance of VLMs, which demonstrates the benefits of using RL-guided data generation in vision-language tasks.

We investigate whether artificial intelligence can address the peer review crisis in economics by analyzing 27,090 evaluations of 9,030 unique submissions using a large language model (LLM). The experiment systematically varies author characteristics (e.g., affiliation, reputation, gender) and publication quality (e.g., top-tier, mid-tier, low-tier, AI generated papers). The results indicate that LLMs effectively distinguish paper quality but exhibit biases favoring prominent institutions, male authors, and renowned economists. Additionally, LLMs struggle to differentiate high-quality AI-generated papers from genuine top-tier submissions. While LLMs offer efficiency gains, their susceptibility to bias necessitates cautious integration and hybrid peer review models to balance equity and accuracy.

Training of large language models (LLMs) is typically distributed across a large number of accelerators to reduce training time. Since internal states and parameter gradients need to be exchanged at each and every single gradient step, all devices need to be co-located using low-latency high-bandwidth communication links to support the required high volume of exchanged bits. Recently, distributed algorithms like DiLoCo have relaxed such co-location constraint: accelerators can be grouped into ``workers'', where synchronizations between workers only occur infrequently. This in turn means that workers can afford being connected by lower bandwidth communication links without affecting learning quality. However, in these methods, communication across workers still requires the same peak bandwidth as before, as the synchronizations require all parameters to be exchanged across all workers. In this paper, we improve DiLoCo in three ways. First, we synchronize only subsets of parameters in sequence, rather than all at once, which greatly reduces peak bandwidth. Second, we allow workers to continue training while synchronizing, which decreases wall clock time. Third, we quantize the data exchanged by workers, which further reduces bandwidth across workers. By properly combining these modifications, we show experimentally that we can distribute training of billion-scale parameters and reach similar quality as before, but reducing required bandwidth by two orders of magnitude.

Causal inference across multiple data sources has the potential to improve the generalizability, transportability, and replicability of scientific findings. However, data integration methods for time-to-event outcomes -- common in medical contexts such as clinical trials -- remain underdeveloped. Existing data fusion methods focus on binary or continuous outcomes, neglecting the distinct challenges of survival analysis, including right-censoring and the unification of discrete and continuous time frameworks. To address these gaps, we propose two novel approaches for multi-source causal survival analysis. First, considering a target site-specific causal effect, we introduce a semiparametric efficient estimator for scenarios where data-sharing is feasible. Second, we develop a federated learning framework tailored to privacy-constrained environments. This framework dynamically adjusts source site-specific contributions, downweighting biased sources and upweighting less biased ones relative to the target population. Both approaches incorporate nonparametric machine learning models to enhance robustness and efficiency, with theoretical guarantees applicable to both continuous and discrete time-to-event outcomes. We demonstrate the practical utility of our methods through extensive simulations and an application to two randomized trials of a monoclonal neutralizing antibody for HIV-1 prevention: HVTN 704/HPTN 085 (cisgender men and transgender persons in the Americas and Switzerland) and HVTN 703/HPTN 081 (women in sub-Saharan Africa). The results highlight the potential of our approaches to efficiently estimate causal effects while addressing heterogeneity across data sources and adhering to privacy and robustness constraints.

The International Semantic Web Research School (ISWS) is a week-long intensive program designed to immerse participants in the field. This document reports a collaborative effort performed by ten teams of students, each guided by a senior researcher as their mentor, attending ISWS 2023. Each team provided a different perspective to the topic of creative AI, substantiated by a set of research questions as the main subject of their investigation. The 2023 edition of ISWS focuses on the intersection of Semantic Web technologies and Creative AI. ISWS 2023 explored various intersections between Semantic Web technologies and creative AI. A key area of focus was the potential of LLMs as support tools for knowledge engineering. Participants also delved into the multifaceted applications of LLMs, including legal aspects of creative content production, humans in the loop, decentralised approaches to multimodal generative AI models, nanopublications and AI for personal scientific knowledge graphs, commonsense knowledge in automatic story and narrative completion, generative AI for art critique, prompt engineering, automatic music composition, commonsense prototyping and conceptual blending, and elicitation of tacit knowledge. As Large Language Models and semantic technologies continue to evolve, new exciting prospects are emerging: a future where the boundaries between creative expression and factual knowledge become increasingly permeable and porous, leading to a world of knowledge that is both informative and inspiring.

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values and away from undesirable behaviors (such as hallucination) has become increasingly important. Recently, steering LLMs towards a desired behavior via activation editing has emerged as an effective method to mitigate harmful generations at inference-time. Activation editing modifies LLM representations by preserving information from positive demonstrations (e.g., truthful) and minimising information from negative demonstrations (e.g., hallucinations). When these demonstrations come from a private dataset, the aligned LLM may leak private information contained in those private samples. In this work, we present the first study of aligning LLM behavior with private datasets. Our work proposes the Private Steering for LLM Alignment (PSA) algorithm to edit LLM activations with differential privacy (DP) guarantees. We conduct extensive experiments on seven different benchmarks with opensource LLMs of different sizes (0.5B to 7B) and model families (LlaMa, Qwen, Mistral and Gemma). Our results show that PSA achieves DP guarantees for LLM alignment with minimal loss in performance, including alignment metrics, openended text generation quality, and general-purpose reasoning. We also develop the first Membership Inference Attack (MIA) for evaluating and auditing the empirical privacy for the problem of LLM steering via activation editing. Our attack is tailored for activation editing and relies solely on the generated texts without their associated probabilities. Our experiments support the theoretical guarantees by showing improved guarantees for our PSA algorithm compared to several existing non-private techniques. LLMs often generate inaccurate, biased or even harmful information that violates human values and preferences (Rawte et al., 2023). In response, recent research has increasingly focused on aligning LLMs towards certain desired behaviors (Konen et al., 2024) while preventing potentially harmful and unsafe outcomes. This has led to the development of several techniques for aligning LLMs, such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) (Ouyang et al., 2022), instruction tuning (Wei et al., 2022), In-Context Learning (ICL) (Dong et al., 2022), and prompt engineering (Cheng et al., 2024). Nevertheless, several challenges remain, including the lack of diverse and representative datasets for alignment (Liu et al., 2024c), difficulties in addressing out-of-distribution issues (Liu et al., 2024a), the choice of alignment strategy (Ivison et al., 2024) and the lack of interpretability in traditional alignment methods (Lee et al., 2024). The linear representation hypothesis (Park et al., 2024b) suggests that high-level concepts are linearly represented as directions in the representation space of LLMs.

This paper presents an exploratory study that harnesses the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to mine key ecological entities from invasion biology literature. Specifically, we focus on extracting species names, their locations, associated habitats, and ecosystems, information that is critical for understanding species spread, predicting future invasions, and informing conservation efforts. Traditional text mining approaches often struggle with the complexity of ecological terminology and the subtle linguistic patterns found in these texts. By applying general-purpose LLMs without domain-specific fine-tuning, we uncover both the promise and limitations of using these models for ecological entity extraction. In doing so, this study lays the groundwork for more advanced, automated knowledge extraction tools that can aid researchers and practitioners in understanding and managing biological invasions.