Sentiment analysis (SA), is an approach of natural language processing (NLP) for determining a text's emotional tone by analyzing subjective information such as views, feelings, and attitudes toward specific topics, products, services, events, or experiences. This study attempts to develop an advanced deep learning (DL) model for SA to understand global audience emotions through tweets in the context of the Olympic Games. The findings represent global attitudes around the Olympics and contribute to advancing the SA models. We have used NLP for tweet pre-processing and sophisticated DL models for arguing with SA, this research enhances the reliability and accuracy of sentiment classification. The study focuses on data selection, preprocessing, visualization, feature extraction, and model building, featuring a baseline Na\"ive Bayes (NB) model and three advanced DL models: Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM), and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). The results of the experiments show that the BERT model can efficiently classify sentiments related to the Olympics, achieving the highest accuracy of 99.23%.

The interpretability of random forest (RF) models is a research topic of growing interest in the machine learning (ML) community. In the state of the art, RF is considered a powerful learning ensemble given its predictive performance, flexibility, and ease of use. Furthermore, the inner process of the RF model is understandable because it uses an intuitive and intelligible approach for building the RF decision tree ensemble. However, the RF resulting model is regarded as a "black box" because of its numerous deep decision trees. Gaining visibility over the entire process that induces the final decisions by exploring each decision tree is complicated, if not impossible. This complexity limits the acceptance and implementation of RF models in several fields of application. Several papers have tackled the interpretation of RF models. This paper aims to provide an extensive review of methods used in the literature to interpret RF resulting models. We have analyzed these methods and classified them based on different axes. Although this review is not exhaustive, it provides a taxonomy of various techniques that should guide users in choosing the most appropriate tools for interpreting RF models, depending on the interpretability aspects sought. It should also be valuable for researchers who aim to focus their work on the interpretability of RF or ML black boxes in general.

Although the spread of behaviors is influenced by many social factors, existing literature tends to study the effects of single factors -- most often, properties of the social network -- on the final cascade. In order to move towards a more integrated view of cascades, this paper offers the first comprehensive investigation into the role of two social factors in the diffusion of 1,337 popular hashtags representing the production of novel culture on Twitter: 1) the topology of the Twitter social network and 2) performance of each user's probable demographic identity. Here, we show that cascades are best modeled using a combination of network and identity, rather than either factor alone. This combined model best reproduces a composite index of ten cascade properties across all 1,337 hashtags. However, there is important heterogeneity in what social factors are required to reproduce different properties of hashtag cascades. For instance, while a combined network+identity model best predicts the popularity of cascades, a network-only model has better performance in predicting cascade growth and an identity-only model in adopter composition. We are able to predict what type of hashtag is best modeled by each combination of features and use this to further improve performance. Additionally, consistent with prior literature on the combined network+identity model most outperforms the single-factor counterfactuals among hashtags used for expressing racial or regional identity, stance-taking, talking about sports, or variants of existing cultural trends with very slow- or fast-growing communicative need. In sum, our results imply the utility of multi-factor models in predicting cascades, in order to account for the varied ways in which network, identity, and other social factors play a role in the diffusion of hashtags on Twitter.

Multi-modal embeddings form the foundation for vision-language models, such as CLIP embeddings, the most widely used text-image embeddings. However, these embeddings are vulnerable to subtle misalignment of cross-modal features, resulting in decreased model performance and diminished generalization. To address this problem, we design ModalChorus, an interactive system for visual probing and alignment of multi-modal embeddings. ModalChorus primarily offers a two-stage process: 1) embedding probing with Modal Fusion Map (MFM), a novel parametric dimensionality reduction method that integrates both metric and nonmetric objectives to enhance modality fusion; and 2) embedding alignment that allows users to interactively articulate intentions for both point-set and set-set alignments. Quantitative and qualitative comparisons for CLIP embeddings with existing dimensionality reduction (e.g., t-SNE and MDS) and data fusion (e.g., data context map) methods demonstrate the advantages of MFM in showcasing cross-modal features over common vision-language datasets. Case studies reveal that ModalChorus can facilitate intuitive discovery of misalignment and efficient re-alignment in scenarios ranging from zero-shot classification to cross-modal retrieval and generation.

The advances of large foundation models necessitate wide-coverage, low-cost, and zero-contamination benchmarks. Despite continuous exploration of language model evaluations, comprehensive studies on the evaluation of Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) remain limited. In this work, we introduce LMMS-EVAL, a unified and standardized multimodal benchmark framework with over 50 tasks and more than 10 models to promote transparent and reproducible evaluations. Although LMMS-EVAL offers comprehensive coverage, we find it still falls short in achieving low cost and zero contamination. To approach this evaluation trilemma, we further introduce LMMS-EVAL LITE, a pruned evaluation toolkit that emphasizes both coverage and efficiency. Additionally, we present Multimodal LIVEBENCH that utilizes continuously updating news and online forums to assess models' generalization abilities in the wild, featuring a low-cost and zero-contamination evaluation approach. In summary, our work highlights the importance of considering the evaluation trilemma and provides practical solutions to navigate the trade-offs in evaluating large multi-modal models, paving the way for more effective and reliable benchmarking of LMMs. We opensource our codebase and maintain leaderboard of LIVEBENCH at https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/lmms-eval and https://huggingface.co/spaces/lmms-lab/LiveBench.

Understanding and making use of audience feedback is important but difficult for journalists, who now face an impractically large volume of audience comments online. We introduce AudienceView, an online tool to help journalists categorize and interpret this feedback by leveraging large language models (LLMs). AudienceView identifies themes and topics, connects them back to specific comments, provides ways to visualize the sentiment and distribution of the comments, and helps users develop ideas for subsequent reporting projects. We consider how such tools can be useful in a journalist's workflow, and emphasize the importance of contextual awareness and human judgment.

We introduce a fast Self-adapting Forward-Forward Network (SaFF-Net) for medical imaging analysis, mitigating power consumption and resource limitations, which currently primarily stem from the prevalent reliance on back-propagation for model training and fine-tuning. Building upon the recently proposed Forward-Forward Algorithm (FFA), we introduce the Convolutional Forward-Forward Algorithm (CFFA), a parameter-efficient reformulation that is suitable for advanced image analysis and overcomes the speed and generalisation constraints of the original FFA. To address hyper-parameter sensitivity of FFAs we are also introducing a self-adapting framework SaFF-Net fine-tuning parameters during warmup and training in parallel. Our approach enables more effective model training and eliminates the previously essential requirement for an arbitrarily chosen Goodness function in FFA. We evaluate our approach on several benchmarking datasets in comparison with standard Back-Propagation (BP) neural networks showing that FFA-based networks with notably fewer parameters and function evaluations can compete with standard models, especially, in one-shot scenarios and large batch sizes. The code will be available at the time of the conference.

Claim verification is a task that involves assessing the truthfulness of a given claim based on multiple evidence pieces. Using large language models (LLMs) for claim verification is a promising way. However, simply feeding all the evidence pieces to an LLM and asking if the claim is factual does not yield good results. The challenge lies in the noisy nature of both the evidence and the claim: evidence passages typically contain irrelevant information, with the key facts hidden within the context, while claims often convey multiple aspects simultaneously. To navigate this "noisy crowd" of information, we propose EACon (Evidence Abstraction and Claim Deconstruction), a framework designed to find key information within evidence and verify each aspect of a claim separately. EACon first finds keywords from the claim and employs fuzzy matching to select relevant keywords for each raw evidence piece. These keywords serve as a guide to extract and summarize critical information into abstracted evidence. Subsequently, EACon deconstructs the original claim into subclaims, which are then verified against both abstracted and raw evidence individually. We evaluate EACon using two open-source LLMs on two challenging datasets. Results demonstrate that EACon consistently and substantially improve LLMs' performance in claim verification.

Instruction-tuned large language models, such as T0, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in following instructions across various domains. However, their proficiency remains notably deficient in many low-resource languages. To address this challenge, we introduce FarsInstruct: a comprehensive instruction dataset designed to enhance the instruction-following ability of large language models specifically for the Persian language, a significant yet underrepresented language globally. FarsInstruct encompasses a wide range of task types and datasets, each containing a mix of straightforward to complex manual written instructions, as well as translations from Public Pool of Prompts, ensuring a rich linguistic and cultural representation. Furthermore, we introduce Co-CoLA, a framework designed to enhance the multi-task adaptability of LoRA-tuned models. Through extensive experimental analyses, our study showcases the effectiveness of FarsInstruct dataset coupled with training by Co-CoLA framework, in improving the performance of large language models within the Persian context. As of the current writing, FarsInstruct comprises more than 200 templates across 21 distinct datasets, and we intend to update it consistently, thus augmenting its applicability.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising advancements in general visual and language understanding. However, the representation of multimodal information using MLLMs remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce a new framework, E5-V, designed to adapt MLLMs for achieving universal multimodal embeddings. Our findings highlight the significant potential of MLLMs in representing multimodal inputs compared to previous approaches. By leveraging MLLMs with prompts, E5-V effectively bridges the modality gap between different types of inputs, demonstrating strong performance in multimodal embeddings even without fine-tuning. We propose a single modality training approach for E5-V, where the model is trained exclusively on text pairs. This method demonstrates significant improvements over traditional multimodal training on image-text pairs, while reducing training costs by approximately 95%. Additionally, this approach eliminates the need for costly multimodal training data collection. Extensive experiments across four types of tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of E5-V. As a universal multimodal model, E5-V not only achieves but often surpasses state-of-the-art performance in each task, despite being trained on a single modality.