Pharmacies are critical in healthcare systems, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Procuring pharmacists with the right behavioral interventions or nudges can enhance their skills, public health awareness, and pharmacy inventory management, ensuring access to essential medicines that ultimately benefit their patients. We introduce a reinforcement learning operational system to deliver personalized behavioral interventions through mobile health applications. We illustrate its potential by discussing a series of initial experiments run with SwipeRx, an all-in-one app for pharmacists, including B2B e-commerce, in Indonesia. The proposed method has broader applications extending beyond pharmacy operations to optimize healthcare delivery.

Introduction: Poor educational quality in Secondary Schools is still regarded as one of the major struggles in 21st century Uganda - especially in rural areas. Research identifies several problems, including low quality or absent teacher lesson planning. As the government pushes towards the implementation of a new curriculum, exiting lesson plans become obsolete and the problem is worsened. Using a Retrieval Augmented Generation approach, we developed a prototype that generates customized lesson plans based on the government-accredited textbooks. This helps teachers create lesson plans more efficiently and with better quality, ensuring they are fully aligned the new curriculum and the competence-based learning approach. Methods: The prototype was created using Cohere LLM and Sentence Embeddings, and LangChain Framework - and thereafter made available on a public website. Vector stores were trained for three new curriculum textbooks (ICT, Mathematics, History), all at Secondary 1 Level. Twenty-four lessons plans were generated following a pseudo-random generation protocol, based on the suggested periods in the textbooks. The lesson plans were analyzed regarding their technical quality by three independent raters following the Lesson Plan Analysis Protocol (LPAP) by Ndihokubwayo et al. (2022) that is specifically designed for East Africa and competence-based curriculums. Results: Evaluation of 24 lesson plans using the LPAP resulted in an average quality of between 75 and 80%, corresponding to "very good lesson plan". None of the lesson plans scored below 65%, although one lesson plan could be argued to have been missing the topic. In conclusion, the quality of the generated lesson plans is at least comparable, if not better, than those created by humans, as demonstrated in a study in Rwanda, whereby no lesson plan even reached the benchmark of 50%.

Human biases have been shown to influence the performance of models and algorithms in various fields, including Natural Language Processing. While the study of this phenomenon is garnering focus in recent years, the available resources are still relatively scarce, often focusing on different forms or manifestations of biases. The aim of our work is twofold: 1) gather publicly-available datasets and determine how to better combine them to effectively train models in the task of hate speech detection and classification; 2) analyse the main issues with these datasets, such as scarcity, skewed resources, and reliance on non-persistent data. We discuss these issues in tandem with the development of our experiments, in which we show that the combinations of different datasets greatly impact the models' performance.

Warning: This paper may contain texts with uncomfortable content. Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in various tasks, including those involving multimodal data like speech. However, these models often exhibit biases due to the nature of their training data. Recently, more Speech Large Language Models (SLLMs) have emerged, underscoring the urgent need to address these biases. This study introduces Spoken Stereoset, a dataset specifically designed to evaluate social biases in SLLMs. By examining how different models respond to speech from diverse demographic groups, we aim to identify these biases. Our experiments reveal significant insights into their performance and bias levels. The findings indicate that while most models show minimal bias, some still exhibit slightly stereotypical or anti-stereotypical tendencies.

Data visualization (DV) is the fundamental and premise tool to improve the efficiency in conveying the insights behind the big data, which has been widely accepted in existing data-driven world. Task automation in DV, such as converting natural language queries to visualizations (i.e., text-to-vis), generating explanations from visualizations (i.e., vis-to-text), answering DV-related questions in free form (i.e. FeVisQA), and explicating tabular data (i.e., table-to-text), is vital for advancing the field. Despite their potential, the application of pre-trained language models (PLMs) like T5 and BERT in DV has been limited by high costs and challenges in handling cross-modal information, leading to few studies on PLMs for DV. We introduce \textbf{DataVisT5}, a novel PLM tailored for DV that enhances the T5 architecture through a hybrid objective pre-training and multi-task fine-tuning strategy, integrating text and DV datasets to effectively interpret cross-modal semantics. Extensive evaluations on public datasets show that DataVisT5 consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art models on various DV-related tasks. We anticipate that DataVisT5 will not only inspire further research on vertical PLMs but also expand the range of applications for PLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful conversational interfaces, and their application in process mining (PM) tasks has shown promising results. However, state-of-the-art LLMs struggle with complex scenarios that demand advanced reasoning capabilities. In the literature, two primary approaches have been proposed for implementing PM using LLMs: providing textual insights based on a textual abstraction of the process mining artifact, and generating code executable on the original artifact. This paper proposes utilizing the AI-Based Agents Workflow (AgWf) paradigm to enhance the effectiveness of PM on LLMs. This approach allows for: i) the decomposition of complex tasks into simpler workflows, and ii) the integration of deterministic tools with the domain knowledge of LLMs. We examine various implementations of AgWf and the types of AI-based tasks involved. Additionally, we discuss the CrewAI implementation framework and present examples related to process mining.

A good understanding of player preferences is crucial for increasing content relevancy, especially in mobile games. This paper illustrates the use of attentive models for producing item recommendations in a mobile game scenario. The methodology comprises a combination of supervised and unsupervised approaches to create user-level recommendations while introducing a novel scale-invariant approach to the prediction. The methodology is subsequently applied to a bundle recommendation in Candy Crush Saga. The strategy of deployment, maintenance, and monitoring of ML models that are scaled up to serve millions of users is presented, along with the best practices and design patterns adopted to minimize technical debt typical of ML systems. The recommendation approach is evaluated both offline and online, with a focus on understanding the increase in engagement, click- and take rates, novelty effects, recommendation diversity, and the impact of degenerate feedback loops. We have demonstrated that the recommendation enhances user engagement by 30% concerning click rate and by more than 40% concerning take rate. In addition, we empirically quantify the diminishing effects of recommendation accuracy on user engagement.

We study carbon-aware spatiotemporal workload management, which seeks to address the growing environmental impact of data centers. We formalize this as an online problem called spatiotemporal online allocation with deadline constraints ($\mathsf{SOAD}$), in which an online player completes a workload (e.g., a batch compute job) by moving and scheduling the workload across a network subject to a deadline $T$. At each time step, a service cost function is revealed, representing, e.g., the carbon intensity of servicing a workload at each location, and the player must irrevocably decide the current allocation. Furthermore, whenever the player moves the allocation, it incurs a movement cost defined by a metric space $(X,d)$ that captures, e.g., the overhead of migrating a compute job. $\mathsf{SOAD}$ formalizes the open problem of combining general metrics and deadline constraints in the online algorithms literature, unifying problems such as metrical task systems and online search. We propose a competitive algorithm for $\mathsf{SOAD}$ along with a matching lower bound that proves it is optimal. Our main algorithm, ${\rm C{\scriptsize ARBON}C{\scriptsize LIPPER}}$, is a learning-augmented algorithm that takes advantage of predictions (e.g., carbon intensity forecasts) and achieves an optimal consistency-robustness trade-off. We evaluate our proposed algorithms for carbon-aware spatiotemporal workload management on a simulated global data center network, showing that ${\rm C{\scriptsize ARBON}C{\scriptsize LIPPER}}$ significantly improves performance compared to baseline methods and delivers meaningful carbon reductions.

Direct preference optimization (DPO), a widely adopted offline preference optimization algorithm, aims to align large language models (LLMs) with human-desired behaviors using pairwise preference data. However, the winning response and the losing response within pairwise data are generated isolatedly, leading to weak correlations between them as well as suboptimal alignment performance. To address this issue, we propose an effective framework named BMC, for bridging and modeling correlations in pairwise data. Firstly, we increase the consistency and informativeness of the pairwise preference signals by targeted modifications, synthesizing a pseudo winning response through improving the losing response based on the winning response. Secondly, we identify that DPO alone is insufficient to model these correlations and capture nuanced variations. Therefore, we propose learning token-level correlations by dynamically leveraging the policy model's confidence during training. Comprehensive experiments on QA, math, and instruction-following tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, significantly surpassing competitive baselines, including DPO. Additionally, our in-depth quantitative analysis reveals the reasons behind our method's superior performance over DPO and showcases its versatility to other DPO variants.

Graph Transformers (GTs) have recently achieved significant success in the graph domain by effectively capturing both long-range dependencies and graph inductive biases. However, these methods face two primary challenges: (1) multi-view chaos, which results from coupling multi-view information (positional, structural, attribute), thereby impeding flexible usage and the interpretability of the propagation process. (2) local-global chaos, which arises from coupling local message passing with global attention, leading to issues of overfitting and over-globalizing. To address these challenges, we propose a high-level decoupled perspective of GTs, breaking them down into three components and two interaction levels: positional attention, structural attention, and attribute attention, alongside local and global interaction. Based on this decoupled perspective, we design a decoupled graph triple attention network named DeGTA, which separately computes multi-view attentions and adaptively integrates multi-view local and global information. This approach offers three key advantages: enhanced interpretability, flexible design, and adaptive integration of local and global information. Through extensive experiments, DeGTA achieves state-of-the-art performance across various datasets and tasks, including node classification and graph classification. Comprehensive ablation studies demonstrate that decoupling is essential for improving performance and enhancing interpretability. Our code is available at: https://github.com/wangxiaotang0906/DeGTA