Time series forecasting is crucial in many fields, yet current deep learning models struggle with noise, data sparsity, and capturing complex multi-scale patterns. This paper presents MFF-FTNet, a novel framework addressing these challenges by combining contrastive learning with multi-scale feature extraction across both frequency and time domains. MFF-FTNet introduces an adaptive noise augmentation strategy that adjusts scaling and shifting factors based on the statistical properties of the original time series data, enhancing model resilience to noise. The architecture is built around two complementary modules: a Frequency-Aware Contrastive Module (FACM) that refines spectral representations through frequency selection and contrastive learning, and a Complementary Time Domain Contrastive Module (CTCM) that captures both short- and long-term dependencies using multi-scale convolutions and feature fusion. A unified feature representation strategy enables robust contrastive learning across domains, creating an enriched framework for accurate forecasting. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that MFF-FTNet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving a 7.7% MSE improvement on multivariate tasks. These findings underscore MFF-FTNet's effectiveness in modeling complex temporal patterns and managing noise and sparsity, providing a comprehensive solution for both long- and short-term forecasting.

Automated radiology report generation (R2Gen) has advanced significantly, introducing challenges in accurate evaluation due to its complexity. Traditional metrics often fall short by relying on rigid word-matching or focusing only on pathological entities, leading to inconsistencies with human assessments. To bridge this gap, we introduce ER2Score, an automatic evaluation metric designed specifically for R2Gen. Our metric utilizes a reward model, guided by our margin-based reward enforcement loss, along with a tailored training data design that enables customization of evaluation criteria to suit user-defined needs. It not only scores reports according to user-specified criteria but also provides detailed sub-scores, enhancing interpretability and allowing users to adjust the criteria between different aspects of reports. Leveraging GPT-4, we designed an easy-to-use data generation pipeline, enabling us to produce extensive training data based on two distinct scoring systems, each containing reports of varying quality along with corresponding scores. These GPT-generated reports are then paired as accepted and rejected samples through our pairing rule to train an LLM towards our fine-grained reward model, which assigns higher rewards to the report with high quality. Our reward-control loss enables this model to simultaneously output multiple individual rewards corresponding to the number of evaluation criteria, with their summation as our final ER2Score. Our experiments demonstrate ER2Score's heightened correlation with human judgments and superior performance in model selection compared to traditional metrics. Notably, our model provides both an overall score and individual scores for each evaluation item, enhancing interpretability. We also demonstrate its flexible training across various evaluation systems.

Employing large language models (LLMs) to enable embodied agents has become popular, yet it presents several limitations in practice. In this work, rather than using LLMs directly as agents, we explore their use as tools for embodied agent learning. Specifically, to train separate agents via offline reinforcement learning (RL), an LLM is used to provide dense reward feedback on individual actions in training datasets. In doing so, we present a consistency-guided reward ensemble framework (CoREN), designed for tackling difficulties in grounding LLM-generated estimates to the target environment domain. The framework employs an adaptive ensemble of spatio-temporally consistent rewards to derive domain-grounded rewards in the training datasets, thus enabling effective offline learning of embodied agents in different environment domains. Experiments with the VirtualHome benchmark demonstrate that CoREN significantly outperforms other offline RL agents, and it also achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art LLM-based agents with 8B parameters, despite CoREN having only 117M parameters for the agent policy network and using LLMs only for training.

In recent years, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have increasingly emphasized grounding and referring capabilities to achieve detailed understanding and flexible user interaction. However, in the realm of visual document understanding, these capabilities lag behind due to the scarcity of fine-grained datasets and comprehensive benchmarks. To fill this gap, we propose the DOcument Grounding and Eferring data engine (DOGE-Engine), which produces two types of high-quality fine-grained document data: multi-granular parsing data for enhancing fundamental text localization and recognition capabilities; and instruction-tuning data to activate MLLM's grounding and referring capabilities during dialogue and reasoning. Additionally, using our engine, we construct DOGE-Bench, which encompasses 7 grounding and referring tasks across 3 document types (chart, poster, PDF document), providing comprehensive evaluations for fine-grained document understanding. Furthermore, leveraging the data generated by our engine, we develop a strong baseline model, DOGE. This pioneering MLLM is capable of accurately referring and grounding texts at multiple granularities within document images. Our code, data, and model will be open-sourced for community development.

Existing Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) generally focus on only a few regions and languages. As LMMs continue to improve, it is increasingly important to ensure they understand cultural contexts, respect local sensitivities, and support low-resource languages, all while effectively integrating corresponding visual cues. In pursuit of culturally diverse global multimodal models, our proposed All Languages Matter Benchmark (ALM-bench) represents the largest and most comprehensive effort to date for evaluating LMMs across 100 languages. ALM-bench challenges existing models by testing their ability to understand and reason about culturally diverse images paired with text in various languages, including many low-resource languages traditionally underrepresented in LMM research. The benchmark offers a robust and nuanced evaluation framework featuring various question formats, including true/false, multiple choice, and open-ended questions, which are further divided into short and long-answer categories. ALM-bench design ensures a comprehensive assessment of a model's ability to handle varied levels of difficulty in visual and linguistic reasoning. To capture the rich tapestry of global cultures, ALM-bench carefully curates content from 13 distinct cultural aspects, ranging from traditions and rituals to famous personalities and celebrations. Through this, ALM-bench not only provides a rigorous testing ground for state-of-the-art open and closed-source LMMs but also highlights the importance of cultural and linguistic inclusivity, encouraging the development of models that can serve diverse global populations effectively. Our benchmark is publicly available.

Robust medical Machine Learning (ML) models have the potential to revolutionize healthcare by accelerating clinical research, improving workflows and outcomes, and producing novel insights or capabilities. Developing such ML models from scratch is cost prohibitive and requires substantial compute, data, and time (e.g., expert labeling). To address these challenges, we introduce Health AI Developer Foundations (HAI-DEF), a suite of pre-trained, domain-specific foundation models, tools, and recipes to accelerate building ML for health applications. The models cover various modalities and domains, including radiology (X-rays and computed tomography), histopathology, dermatological imaging, and audio. These models provide domain specific embeddings that facilitate AI development with less labeled data, shorter training times, and reduced computational costs compared to traditional approaches. In addition, we utilize a common interface and style across these models, and prioritize usability to enable developers to integrate HAI-DEF efficiently. We present model evaluations across various tasks and conclude with a discussion of their application and evaluation, covering the importance of ensuring efficacy, fairness, and equity. Finally, while HAI-DEF and specifically the foundation models lower the barrier to entry for ML in healthcare, we emphasize the importance of validation with problem- and population-specific data for each desired usage setting. This technical report will be updated over time as more modalities and features are added.

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used but raise ethical concerns due to embedded social biases. This study examines LLM biases against Arabs versus Westerners across eight domains, including women's rights, terrorism, and anti-Semitism and assesses model resistance to perpetuating these biases. To this end, we create two datasets: one to evaluate LLM bias toward Arabs versus Westerners and another to test model safety against prompts that exaggerate negative traits ("jailbreaks"). We evaluate six LLMs -- GPT-4, GPT-4o, LlaMA 3.1 (8B & 405B), Mistral 7B, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. We find 79% of cases displaying negative biases toward Arabs, with LlaMA 3.1-405B being the most biased. Our jailbreak tests reveal GPT-4o as the most vulnerable, despite being an optimized version, followed by LlaMA 3.1-8B and Mistral 7B. All LLMs except Claude exhibit attack success rates above 87% in three categories. We also find Claude 3.5 Sonnet the safest, but it still displays biases in seven of eight categories. Despite being an optimized version of GPT4, We find GPT-4o to be more prone to biases and jailbreaks, suggesting optimization flaws. Our findings underscore the pressing need for more robust bias mitigation strategies and strengthened security measures in LLMs.

In this paper, we propose AutoDAN-Turbo, a black-box jailbreak method that can automatically discover as many jailbreak strategies as possible from scratch, without any human intervention or predefined scopes (e.g., specified candidate strategies), and use them for red-teaming. As a result, AutoDAN-Turbo can significantly outperform baseline methods, achieving a 74.3% higher average attack success rate on public benchmarks. Notably, AutoDAN-Turbo achieves an 88.5 attack success rate on GPT-4-1106-turbo. In addition, AutoDAN-Turbo is a unified framework that can incorporate existing human-designed jailbreak strategies in a plug-and-play manner. By integrating human-designed strategies, AutoDAN-Turbo can even achieve a higher attack success rate of 93.4 on GPT-4-1106-turbo.

Despite having triggered devastating pandemics in the past, our ability to quantitatively assess the emergence potential of individual strains of animal influenza viruses remains limited. This study introduces Emergenet, a tool to infer a digital twin of sequence evolution to chart how new variants might emerge in the wild. Our predictions based on Emergenets built only using 220,151 Hemagglutinnin (HA) sequences consistently outperform WHO seasonal vaccine recommendations for H1N1/H3N2 subtypes over two decades (average match-improvement: 3.73 AAs, 28.40\%), and are at par with state-of-the-art approaches that use more detailed phenotypic annotations. Finally, our generative models are used to scalably calculate the current odds of emergence of animal strains not yet in human circulation, which strongly correlates with CDC's expert-assessed Influenza Risk Assessment Tool (IRAT) scores (Pearson's $r = 0.721, p = 10^{-4}$). A minimum five orders of magnitude speedup over CDC's assessment (seconds vs months) then enabled us to analyze 6,354 animal strains collected post-2020 to identify 35 strains with high emergence scores ($> 7.7$). The Emergenet framework opens the door to preemptive pandemic mitigation through targeted inoculation of animal hosts before the first human infection.

Accurate and reliable electricity price forecasting has significant practical implications for grid management, renewable energy integration, power system planning, and price volatility management. This study focuses on enhancing electricity price forecasting in California's grid, addressing challenges from complex generation data and heteroskedasticity. Utilizing principal component analysis (PCA), we analyze CAISO's hourly electricity prices and demand from 2016-2021 to improve day-ahead forecasting accuracy. Initially, we apply traditional outlier analysis with the interquartile range method, followed by robust PCA (RPCA) for more effective outlier elimination. This approach improves data symmetry and reduces skewness. We then construct multiple linear regression models using both raw and PCA-transformed features. The model with transformed features, refined through traditional and SAS Sparse Matrix outlier removal methods, shows superior forecasting performance. The SAS Sparse Matrix method, in particular, significantly enhances model accuracy. Our findings demonstrate that PCA-based methods are key in advancing electricity price forecasting, supporting renewable integration and grid management in day-ahead markets. Keywords: Electricity price forecasting, principal component analysis (PCA), power system planning, heteroskedasticity, renewable energy integration.