In this work, we introduce EyeDentify, a dataset specifically designed for pupil diameter estimation based on webcam images. EyeDentify addresses the lack of available datasets for pupil diameter estimation, a crucial domain for understanding physiological and psychological states traditionally dominated by highly specialized sensor systems such as Tobii. Unlike these advanced sensor systems and associated costs, webcam images are more commonly found in practice. Yet, deep learning models that can estimate pupil diameters using standard webcam data are scarce. By providing a dataset of cropped eye images alongside corresponding pupil diameter information, EyeDentify enables the development and refinement of models designed specifically for less-equipped environments, democratizing pupil diameter estimation by making it more accessible and broadly applicable, which in turn contributes to multiple domains of understanding human activity and supporting healthcare. Our dataset is available at https://vijulshah.github.io/eyedentify/.

Generative Artificial Intelligence has grown exponentially as a result of Large Language Models (LLMs). This has been possible because of the impressive performance of deep learning methods created within the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and its subfield Natural Language Generation (NLG), which is the focus of this paper. Within the growing LLM family are the popular GPT-4, Bard and more specifically, tools such as ChatGPT have become a benchmark for other LLMs when solving most of the tasks involved in NLG research. This scenario poses new questions about the next steps for NLG and how the field can adapt and evolve to deal with new challenges in the era of LLMs. To address this, the present paper conducts a review of a representative sample of surveys recently published in NLG. By doing so, we aim to provide the scientific community with a research roadmap to identify which NLG aspects are still not suitably addressed by LLMs, as well as suggest future lines of research that should be addressed going forward.

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently hallucinate, impeding their reliability in mission-critical situations. One approach to address this issue is to provide citations to relevant sources alongside generated content, enhancing the verifiability of generations. However, citing passages accurately in answers remains a substantial challenge. This paper proposes a weakly-supervised fine-tuning method leveraging factual consistency models (FCMs). Our approach alternates between generating texts with citations and supervised fine-tuning with FCM-filtered citation data. Focused learning is integrated into the objective, directing the fine-tuning process to emphasise the factual unit tokens, as measured by an FCM. Results on the ALCE few-shot citation benchmark with various instruction-tuned LLMs demonstrate superior performance compared to in-context learning, vanilla supervised fine-tuning, and state-of-the-art methods, with an average improvement of $34.1$, $15.5$, and $10.5$ citation F$_1$ points, respectively. Moreover, in a domain transfer setting we show that the obtained citation generation ability robustly transfers to unseen datasets. Notably, our citation improvements contribute to the lowest factual error rate across baselines.

This paper analyzes the features of monotonic translations, which follow the word order of the source language, in simultaneous interpreting (SI). Word order differences are one of the biggest challenges in SI, especially for language pairs with significant structural differences like English and Japanese. We analyzed the characteristics of chunk-wise monotonic translation (CMT) sentences using the NAIST English-to-Japanese Chunk-wise Monotonic Translation Evaluation Dataset and identified some grammatical structures that make monotonic translation difficult in English-Japanese SI. We further investigated the features of CMT sentences by evaluating the output from the existing speech translation (ST) and simultaneous speech translation (simulST) models on the NAIST English-to-Japanese Chunk-wise Monotonic Translation Evaluation Dataset as well as on existing test sets. The results indicate the possibility that the existing SI-based test set underestimates the model performance. The results also suggest that using CMT sentences as references gives higher scores to simulST models than ST models, and that using an offline-based test set to evaluate the simulST models underestimates the model performance.

Compositional generalization is an important ability of language models and has many different manifestations. For data-to-text generation, previous research on this ability is limited to a single manifestation called Systematicity and lacks consideration of large language models (LLMs), which cannot fully cover practical application scenarios. In this work, we propose SPOR, a comprehensive and practical evaluation method for compositional generalization in data-to-text generation. SPOR includes four aspects of manifestations (Systematicity, Productivity, Order invariance, and Rule learnability) and allows high-quality evaluation without additional manual annotations based on existing datasets. We demonstrate SPOR on two different datasets and evaluate some existing language models including LLMs. We find that the models are deficient in various aspects of the evaluation and need further improvement. Our work shows the necessity for comprehensive research on different manifestations of compositional generalization in data-to-text generation and provides a framework for evaluation.

Natural language processing (NLP) has grown significantly since the advent of the Transformer architecture. Transformers have given birth to pre-trained large language models (PLMs). There has been tremendous improvement in the performance of NLP systems across several tasks. NLP systems are on par or, in some cases, better than humans at accomplishing specific tasks. However, it remains the norm that \emph{better quality datasets at the time of pretraining enable PLMs to achieve better performance, regardless of the task.} The need to have quality datasets has prompted NLP researchers to continue creating new datasets to satisfy particular needs. For example, the two top NLP conferences, ACL and EMNLP, accepted ninety-two papers in 2022, introducing new datasets. This work aims to uncover the trends and insights mined within these datasets. Moreover, we provide valuable suggestions to researchers interested in curating datasets in the future.

Robust optimisation is a well-established framework for optimising functions in the presence of uncertainty. The inherent goal of this problem is to identify a collection of inputs whose outputs are both desirable for the decision maker, whilst also being robust to the underlying uncertainties in the problem. In this work, we study the multi-objective case of this problem. We identify that the majority of all robust multi-objective algorithms rely on two key operations: robustification and scalarisation. Robustification refers to the strategy that is used to account for the uncertainty in the problem. Scalarisation refers to the procedure that is used to encode the relative importance of each objective to a scalar-valued reward. As these operations are not necessarily commutative, the order that they are performed in has an impact on the resulting solutions that are identified and the final decisions that are made. The purpose of this work is to give a thorough exposition on the effects of these different orderings and in particular highlight when one should opt for one ordering over the other. As part of our analysis, we showcase how many existing risk concepts can be integrated into the specification and solution of a robust multi-objective optimisation problem. Besides this, we also demonstrate how one can principally define the notion of a robust Pareto front and a robust performance metric based on our ``robustify and scalarise'' methodology. To illustrate the efficacy of these new ideas, we present two insightful case studies which are based on real-world data sets.

Differential Privacy (DP) is the current gold-standard for measuring privacy. Estimation problems under DP constraints appearing in the literature have largely focused on providing equal privacy to all users. We consider the problems of empirical mean estimation for univariate data and frequency estimation for categorical data, two pillars of data analysis in the industry, subject to heterogeneous privacy constraints. Each user, contributing a sample to the dataset, is allowed to have a different privacy demand. The dataset itself is assumed to be worst-case and we study both the problems in two different formulations -- the correlated and the uncorrelated setting. In the former setting, the privacy demand and the user data can be arbitrarily correlated while in the latter setting, there is no correlation between the dataset and the privacy demand. We prove some optimality results, under both PAC error and mean-squared error, for our proposed algorithms and demonstrate superior performance over other baseline techniques experimentally.

A squad of soldiers is under attack and pinned down by rockets in the close quarters of urban combat. One of them makes a call over his radio, and within moments a fleet of small autonomous drones equipped with explosives fly through the town square, entering buildings and scanning for enemies before detonating on command. One by one the suicide drones seek out and kill their targets. A voiceover on the video, a fictional ad for multibillion-dollar Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems, touts the AI-enabled drones' ability to "maximize lethality and combat tempo". While defense companies like Elbit promote their new advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) with sleek dramatizations, the technology they are developing is increasingly entering the real world.

Hand hygiene is one of the most efficient daily actions to prevent infectious diseases, such as Influenza, Malaria, and skin infections. We have been suggested to wash our hands under professional guidelines to prevent virus infection. However, several surveys show that very few people follow this suggestion. Thus we propose UWash, a wearable solution with smartwatches, to assess handwashing procedures for the purpose of raising users' awareness and cultivating habits of high-quality handwashing. We address the task of handwashing assessment from readings of motion sensors similar to the action segmentation problem in computer vision, and propose a simple and lightweight two-stream UNet-like network to achieve it effectively. Experiments over 51 subjects show that UWash achieves an accuracy of 92.27% on handwashing gesture recognition, <0.5 seconds error on onset/offset detection, and <5 points error on gesture scoring in the user-dependent setting, and keeps promising in the user-independent evaluation and the user-independent-location-independent evaluation. UWash even performs well on 10 random passersby in a hospital 9 months later. UWash is the first work that scores the handwashing quality by gesture sequences and is instructive to guide users in promoting hand hygiene in daily life. Code and data are avaliable at https://github.com/aiotgroup/UWash