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Hierarchical Multi-Graphs Learning for Robust Group Re-Identification

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Group Re-identification (G-ReID) faces greater complexity than individual Re-identification (ReID) due to challenges like mutual occlusion, dynamic member interactions, and evolving group structures. Prior graph-based approaches have aimed to capture these dynamics by modeling the group as a single topological structure. However, these methods struggle to generalize across diverse group compositions, as they fail to fully represent the multifaceted relationships within the group. In this study, we introduce a Hierarchical Multi-Graphs Learning (HMGL) framework to address these challenges. Our approach models the group as a collection of multi-relational graphs, leveraging both explicit features (such as occlusion, appearance, and foreground information) and implicit dependencies between members. This hierarchical representation, encoded via a Multi-Graphs Neural Network (MGNN), allows us to resolve ambiguities in member relationships, particularly in complex, densely populated scenes. To further enhance matching accuracy, we propose a Multi-Scale Matching (MSM) algorithm, which mitigates issues of member information ambiguity and sensitivity to hard samples, improving robustness in challenging scenarios. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two standard benchmarks, CSG and RoadGroup, with Rank-1/mAP scores of 95.3%/94.4% and 93.9%/95.4%, respectively. These results mark notable improvements of 1.7% and 2.5% in Rank-1 accuracy over existing approaches.


Exploring Graph Mamba: A Comprehensive Survey on State-Space Models for Graph Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Graph Mamba, a powerful graph embedding technique, has emerged as a cornerstone in various domains, including bioinformatics, social networks, and recommendation systems. This survey represents the first comprehensive study devoted to Graph Mamba, to address the critical gaps in understanding its applications, challenges, and future potential. We start by offering a detailed explanation of the original Graph Mamba architecture, highlighting its key components and underlying mechanisms. Subsequently, we explore the most recent modifications and enhancements proposed to improve its performance and applicability. To demonstrate the versatility of Graph Mamba, we examine its applications across diverse domains. A comparative analysis of Graph Mamba and its variants is conducted to shed light on their unique characteristics and potential use cases. Furthermore, we identify potential areas where Graph Mamba can be applied in the future, highlighting its potential to revolutionize data analysis in these fields. Finally, we address the current limitations and open research questions associated with Graph Mamba. By acknowledging these challenges, we aim to stimulate further research and development in this promising area. This survey serves as a valuable resource for both newcomers and experienced researchers seeking to understand and leverage the power of Graph Mamba.


From Trump to Bitcoin, inflation and China: the big economic trends of 2024

Al Jazeera

The year 2024 saw the global economy stabilise following the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, even as growth in many countries lagged pre-2020 levels. Amid a patchy recovery, more than 2 billion people were eligible to vote this year, and economic issues, particularly rising living costs, were a top concern for voters around the world. Meanwhile, governments grappled with how to regulate potentially transformational technology such as artificial intelligence, and Donald Trump's victory in the United States' presidential election heralded a sharp turn towards protectionism. Trump has indicated that he will pursue an even more aggressive version of the "America First" protectionism that fuelled his rise to power during his second stint in the White House. On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to impose tariffs of 60 percent or higher on Chinese goods and a blanket 20 percent tariff on all other imports.


Hands-On Tutorial: Labeling with LLM and Human-in-the-Loop

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Training and deploying machine learning models relies on a large amount of human-annotated data. As human labeling becomes increasingly expensive and time-consuming, recent research has developed multiple strategies to speed up annotation and reduce costs and human workload: generating synthetic training data, active learning, and hybrid labeling. This tutorial is oriented toward practical applications: we will present the basics of each strategy, highlight their benefits and limitations, and discuss in detail real-life case studies. Additionally, we will walk through best practices for managing human annotators and controlling the quality of the final dataset. The tutorial includes a hands-on workshop, where attendees will be guided in implementing a hybrid annotation setup. This tutorial is designed for NLP practitioners from both research and industry backgrounds who are involved in or interested in optimizing data labeling projects.


Unpacking Political Bias in Large Language Models: Insights Across Topic Polarization

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used to generate responses on social topics due to their world knowledge and generative capabilities. Beyond reasoning and generation performance, political bias is an essential issue that warrants attention. Political bias, as a universal phenomenon in human society, may be transferred to LLMs and distort LLMs' behaviors of information acquisition and dissemination with humans, leading to unequal access among different groups of people. To prevent LLMs from reproducing and reinforcing political biases, and to encourage fairer LLM-human interactions, comprehensively examining political bias in popular LLMs becomes urgent and crucial. In this study, we systematically measure the political biases in a wide range of LLMs, using a curated set of questions addressing political bias in various contexts. Our findings reveal distinct patterns in how LLMs respond to political topics. For highly polarized topics, most LLMs exhibit a pronounced left-leaning bias. Conversely, less polarized topics elicit greater consensus, with similar response patterns across different LLMs. Additionally, we analyze how LLM characteristics, including release date, model scale, and region of origin affect political bias. The results indicate political biases evolve with model scale and release date, and are also influenced by regional factors of LLMs.


MiMoTable: A Multi-scale Spreadsheet Benchmark with Meta Operations for Table Reasoning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Extensive research has been conducted to explore the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) for table reasoning and has significantly improved the performance on existing benchmarks. However, tables and user questions in real-world applications are more complex and diverse, presenting an unignorable gap compared to the existing benchmarks. To fill the gap, we propose a \textbf{M}ult\textbf{i}-scale spreadsheet benchmark with \textbf{M}eta \textbf{o}perations for \textbf{Table} reasoning, named as MiMoTable. Specifically, MiMoTable incorporates two key features. First, the tables in MiMoTable are all spreadsheets used in real-world scenarios, which cover seven domains and contain different types. Second, we define a new criterion with six categories of meta operations for measuring the difficulty of each question in MiMoTable, simultaneously as a new perspective for measuring the difficulty of the existing benchmarks. Experimental results show that Claude-3.5-Sonnet achieves the best performance with 77.4\% accuracy, indicating that there is still significant room to improve for LLMs on MiMoTable. Furthermore, we grade the difficulty of existing benchmarks according to our new criteria. Experiments have shown that the performance of LLMs decreases as the difficulty of benchmarks increases, thereby proving the effectiveness of our proposed new criterion.


Emoji Retrieval from Gibberish or Garbled Social Media Text: A Novel Methodology and A Case Study

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Emojis are widely used across social media platforms but are often lost in noisy or garbled text, posing challenges for data analysis and machine learning. Conventional preprocessing approaches recommend removing such text, risking the loss of emojis and their contextual meaning. This paper proposes a three-step reverse-engineering methodology to retrieve emojis from garbled text in social media posts. The methodology also identifies reasons for the generation of such text during social media data mining. To evaluate its effectiveness, the approach was applied to 509,248 Tweets about the Mpox outbreak, a dataset referenced in about 30 prior works that failed to retrieve emojis from garbled text. Our method retrieved 157,748 emojis from 76,914 Tweets. Improvements in text readability and coherence were demonstrated through metrics such as Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, Coleman-Liau Index, Automated Readability Index, Dale-Chall Readability Score, Text Standard, and Reading Time. Additionally, the frequency of individual emojis and their patterns of usage in these Tweets were analyzed, and the results are presented.


CLEAR: Character Unlearning in Textual and Visual Modalities

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Machine Unlearning (MU) is critical for enhancing privacy and security in deep learning models, particularly in large multimodal language models (MLLMs), by removing specific private or hazardous information. While MU has made significant progress in textual and visual modalities, multimodal unlearning (MMU) remains significantly underexplored, partially due to the absence of a suitable open-source benchmark. To address this, we introduce CLEAR, a new benchmark designed to evaluate MMU methods. CLEAR contains 200 fictitious individuals and 3,700 images linked with corresponding question-answer pairs, enabling a thorough evaluation across modalities. We assess 10 MU methods, adapting them for MMU, and highlight new challenges specific to multimodal forgetting. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/therem/CLEAR


Navigating the Cultural Kaleidoscope: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Sensitivity in Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As LLMs are increasingly deployed in global applications, the importance of cultural sensitivity becomes paramount, ensuring that users from diverse backgrounds feel respected and understood. Cultural harm can arise when these models fail to align with specific cultural norms, resulting in misrepresentations or violations of cultural values. This work addresses the challenges of ensuring cultural sensitivity in LLMs, especially in small-parameter models that often lack the extensive training data needed to capture global cultural nuances. We present two key contributions: (1) A cultural harm test dataset, created to assess model outputs across different cultural contexts through scenarios that expose potential cultural insensitivities, and (2) A culturally aligned preference dataset, aimed at restoring cultural sensitivity through fine-tuning based on feedback from diverse annotators. These datasets facilitate the evaluation and enhancement of LLMs, ensuring their ethical and safe deployment across different cultural landscapes. Our results show that integrating culturally aligned feedback leads to a marked improvement in model behavior, significantly reducing the likelihood of generating culturally insensitive or harmful content. Ultimately, this work paves the way for more inclusive and respectful AI systems, fostering a future where LLMs can safely and ethically navigate the complexities of diverse cultural landscapes.


Horizon-Length Prediction: Advancing Fill-in-the-Middle Capabilities for Code Generation with Lookahead Planning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) has become integral to code language models, enabling generation of missing code given both left and right contexts. However, the current FIM training paradigm, which reorders original training sequences and then performs regular next-token prediction (NTP), often leads to models struggling to generate content that aligns smoothly with the surrounding context. Crucially, while existing works rely on rule-based post-processing to circumvent this weakness, such methods are not practically usable in open-domain code completion tasks as they depend on restrictive, dataset-specific assumptions (e.g., generating the same number of lines as in the ground truth). Moreover, model performance on FIM tasks deteriorates significantly without these unrealistic assumptions. We hypothesize that NTP alone is insufficient for models to learn effective planning conditioned on the distant right context, a critical factor for successful code infilling. To overcome this, we propose Horizon-Length Prediction (HLP), a novel training objective that teaches models to predict the number of remaining middle tokens (i.e., horizon length) at each step. HLP advances FIM with lookahead planning, enabling models to inherently learn infilling boundaries for arbitrary left and right contexts without relying on dataset-specific post-processing. Our evaluation across different models and sizes shows that HLP significantly improves FIM performance by up to 24% relatively on diverse benchmarks, across file-level and repository-level, and without resorting to unrealistic post-processing methods. Furthermore, the enhanced planning capability gained through HLP boosts model performance on code reasoning. Importantly, HLP only incurs negligible training overhead and no additional inference cost, ensuring its practicality for real-world scenarios.