In recent years, financial analysts have been trying to develop models to predict the movement of a stock price index. The task becomes challenging in vague economic, social, and political situations like in Pakistan. In this study, we employed efficient models of machine learning such as long short-term memory (LSTM) and quantum long short-term memory (QLSTM) to predict the Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) 100 index by taking monthly data of twenty-six economic, social, political, and administrative indicators from February 2004 to December 2020. The comparative results of LSTM and QLSTM predicted values of the KSE 100 index with the actual values suggested QLSTM a potential technique to predict stock market trends.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) for health has the potential to significantly change and improve healthcare. However in most African countries, identifying culturally and contextually attuned approaches for deploying these solutions is not well understood. To bridge this gap, we conduct a qualitative study to investigate the best practices, fairness indicators, and potential biases to mitigate when deploying AI for health in African countries, as well as explore opportunities where artificial intelligence could make a positive impact in health. We used a mixed methods approach combining in-depth interviews (IDIs) and surveys. We conduct 1.5-2 hour long IDIs with 50 experts in health, policy, and AI across 17 countries, and through an inductive approach we conduct a qualitative thematic analysis on expert IDI responses. We administer a blinded 30-minute survey with case studies to 672 general population participants across 5 countries in Africa and analyze responses on quantitative scales, statistically comparing responses by country, age, gender, and level of familiarity with AI. We thematically summarize open-ended responses from surveys. Our results find generally positive attitudes, high levels of trust, accompanied by moderate levels of concern among general population participants for AI usage for health in Africa. This contrasts with expert responses, where major themes revolved around trust/mistrust, ethical concerns, and systemic barriers to integration, among others. This work presents the first-of-its-kind qualitative research study of the potential of AI for health in Africa from an algorithmic fairness angle, with perspectives from both experts and the general population. We hope that this work guides policymakers and drives home the need for further research and the inclusion of general population perspectives in decision-making around AI usage.

We propose misogyny detection as an Argumentative Reasoning task and we investigate the capacity of large language models (LLMs) to understand the implicit reasoning used to convey misogyny in both Italian and English. The central aim is to generate the missing reasoning link between a message and the implied meanings encoding the misogyny. Our study uses argumentation theory as a foundation to form a collection of prompts in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. These prompts integrate different techniques, including chain-of-thought reasoning and augmented knowledge. Our findings show that LLMs fall short on reasoning capabilities about misogynistic comments and that they mostly rely on their implicit knowledge derived from internalized common stereotypes about women to generate implied assumptions, rather than on inductive reasoning.

In order to accurately identify the performance status of mobile devices and finely adjust the user experience, a real-time performance perception evaluation method based on TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) combined with entropy weighting method and time series model construction was studied. After collecting the performance characteristics of various mobile devices, the device performance profile was fitted by using PCA (principal component analysis) dimensionality reduction and feature engineering methods such as descriptive time series analysis. The ability of performance features and profiles to describe the real-time performance status of devices was understood and studied by applying the TOPSIS method and multi-level weighting processing. A time series model was constructed for the feature set under objective weighting, and multiple sensitivity (real-time, short-term, long-term) performance status perception results were provided to obtain real-time performance evaluation data and long-term stable performance prediction data. Finally, by configuring dynamic AB experiments and overlaying fine-grained power reduction strategies, the usability of the method was verified, and the accuracy of device performance status identification and prediction was compared with the performance of the profile features including dimensionality reduction time series modeling, TOPSIS method and entropy weighting method, subjective weighting, HMA method. The results show that accurate real-time performance perception results can greatly enhance business value, and this research has application effectiveness and certain forward-looking significance.

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), long-context information understanding and processing have become a hot topic in academia and industry. However, benchmarks for evaluating the ability of LLMs to handle long-context information do not seem to have kept pace with the development of LLMs. Despite the emergence of various long-context evaluation benchmarks, the types of capability assessed are still limited, without new capability dimensions. In this paper, we introduce DetectiveQA, a narrative reasoning benchmark featured with an average context length of over 100K tokens. DetectiveQA focuses on evaluating the long-context reasoning ability of LLMs, which not only requires a full understanding of context but also requires extracting important evidences from the context and reasoning according to extracted evidences to answer the given questions. This is a new dimension of capability evaluation, which is more in line with the current intelligence level of LLMs. We use detective novels as data sources, which naturally have various reasoning elements. Finally, we manually annotated 600 questions in Chinese and then also provided an English edition of the context information and questions. We evaluate many long-context LLMs on DetectiveQA, including commercial and open-sourced models, and the results indicate that existing long-context LLMs still require significant advancements to effectively process true long-context dependency questions.

Autonomous agent applications powered by large language models (LLMs) have recently risen to prominence as effective tools for addressing complex real-world tasks. At their core, agentic workflows rely on LLMs to plan and execute the use of tools and external Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in sequence to arrive at the answer to a user's request. Various benchmarks and leaderboards have emerged to evaluate an LLM's capabilities for tool and API use; however, most of these evaluations only track single or multiple isolated API calling capabilities. In this paper, we present NESTFUL, a benchmark to evaluate LLMs on nested sequences of API calls, i.e., sequences where the output of one API call is passed as input to a subsequent call. NESTFUL has a total of 300 human annotated samples divided into two types - executable and non-executable. The executable samples are curated manually by crawling Rapid-APIs whereas the non-executable samples are hand picked by human annotators from data synthetically generated using an LLM. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs with function calling abilities on NESTFUL. Our results show that most models do not perform well on nested APIs in NESTFUL as compared to their performance on the simpler problem settings available in existing benchmarks.

Skeletal sequences, as well-structured representations of human behaviors, are crucial in Human Activity Recognition (HAR). The transferability of adversarial skeletal sequences enables attacks in real-world HAR scenarios, such as autonomous driving, intelligent surveillance, and human-computer interactions. However, existing Skeleton-based HAR (S-HAR) attacks exhibit weak adversarial transferability and, therefore, cannot be considered true transfer-based S-HAR attacks. More importantly, the reason for this failure remains unclear. In this paper, we study this phenomenon through the lens of loss surface, and find that its sharpness contributes to the poor transferability in S-HAR. Inspired by this observation, we assume and empirically validate that smoothening the rugged loss landscape could potentially improve adversarial transferability in S-HAR. To this end, we propose the first Transfer-based Attack on Skeletal Action Recognition, TASAR. TASAR explores the smoothed model posterior without re-training the pre-trained surrogates, which is achieved by a new post-train Dual Bayesian optimization strategy. Furthermore, unlike previous transfer-based attacks that treat each frame independently and overlook temporal coherence within sequences, TASAR incorporates motion dynamics into the Bayesian attack gradient, effectively disrupting the spatial-temporal coherence of S-HARs. To exhaustively evaluate the effectiveness of existing methods and our method, we build the first large-scale robust S-HAR benchmark, comprising 7 S-HAR models, 10 attack methods, 3 S-HAR datasets and 2 defense models. Extensive results demonstrate the superiority of TASAR. Our benchmark enables easy comparisons for future studies, with the code available in the supplementary material.

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a popular research topic for generative modeling of discrete data, thanks to their superior performance over other discrete diffusion models, and are rivaling the auto-regressive models (ARMs) for language modeling tasks. The recent effort in simplifying the masked diffusion framework further leads to alignment with continuous-space diffusion models and more principled training and sampling recipes. In this paper, however, we reveal that both training and sampling of MDMs are theoretically free from the time variable, arguably the key signature of diffusion models, and are instead equivalent to masked models. The connection on the sampling aspect is drawn by our proposed first-hitting sampler (FHS). Specifically, we show that the FHS is theoretically equivalent to MDMs' original generation process while significantly alleviating the time-consuming categorical sampling and achieving a 20$\times$ speedup. In addition, our investigation challenges previous claims that MDMs can surpass ARMs in generative perplexity. We identify, for the first time, an underlying numerical issue, even with the 32-bit floating-point precision, which results in inaccurate categorical sampling. We show that the numerical issue lowers the effective temperature both theoretically and empirically, leading to unfair assessments of MDMs' generation results in the previous literature.

Poverty map inference is a critical area of research, with growing interest in both traditional and modern techniques, ranging from regression models to convolutional neural networks applied to tabular data, images, and networks. Despite extensive focus on the validation of training phases, the scrutiny of final predictions remains limited. Here, we compare the Relative Wealth Index (RWI) inferred by Chi et al. (2022) with the International Wealth Index (IWI) inferred by Lee and Braithwaite (2022) and Esp\'in-Noboa et al. (2023) across six Sub-Saharan African countries. Our analysis focuses on identifying trends and discrepancies in wealth predictions over time. Our results show that the predictions by Chi et al. and Esp\'in-Noboa et al. align with general GDP trends, with differences expected due to the distinct time-frames of the training sets. However, predictions by Lee and Braithwaite diverge significantly, indicating potential issues with the validity of the model. These discrepancies highlight the need for policymakers and stakeholders in Africa to rigorously audit models that predict wealth, especially those used for decision-making on the ground. These and other techniques require continuous verification and refinement to enhance their reliability and ensure that poverty alleviation strategies are well-founded.

Model extraction attacks (MEAs) on large language models (LLMs) have received increasing research attention lately. Existing attack methods on LLMs inherit the extraction strategies from those designed for deep neural networks (DNNs) yet neglect the inconsistency of training tasks between MEA and LLMs' alignments. As such, they result in poor attack performances. To tackle this issue, we present Locality Reinforced Distillation (LoRD), a novel model extraction attack algorithm specifically for LLMs. In particular, we design a policy-gradient-style training task, which utilizes victim models' responses as a signal to guide the crafting of preference for the local model. Theoretical analysis has shown that i) LoRD's convergence procedure in MEAs is consistent with the alignments of LLMs, and ii) LoRD can reduce query complexity while mitigating watermark protection through exploration-based stealing. Extensive experiments on domain-specific extractions demonstrate the superiority of our method by examining the extraction of various state-of-the-art commercial LLMs.