Driven by advancements in sensing and computing, deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based methods have demonstrated significant potential in effectively tackling distribution system restoration (DSR) challenges under uncertain operational scenarios. However, the data-intensive nature of DRL poses obstacles in achieving satisfactory DSR solutions for large-scale, complex distribution systems. Inspired by the transformative impact of emerging foundation models, including large language models (LLMs), across various domains, this paper explores an innovative approach harnessing LLMs' powerful computing capabilities to address scalability challenges inherent in conventional DRL methods for solving DSR. To our knowledge, this study represents the first exploration of foundation models, including LLMs, in revolutionizing conventional DRL applications in power system operations. Our contributions are twofold: 1) introducing a novel LLM-powered Physics-Informed Decision Transformer (PIDT) framework that leverages LLMs to transform conventional DRL methods for DSR operations, and 2) conducting comparative studies to assess the performance of the proposed LLM-powered PIDT framework at its initial development stage for solving DSR problems. While our primary focus in this paper is on DSR operations, the proposed PIDT framework can be generalized to optimize sequential decision-making across various power system operations.

The interpretability of machine learning models has gained increasing attention, particularly in scientific domains where high precision and accountability are crucial. This research focuses on distinguishing between two critical data patterns -- sensitive patterns (model-related) and decisive patterns (task-related) -- which are commonly used as model interpretations but often lead to confusion. Specifically, this study compares the effectiveness of two main streams of interpretation methods: post-hoc methods and self-interpretable methods, in detecting these patterns. Recently, geometric deep learning (GDL) has shown superior predictive performance in various scientific applications, creating an urgent need for principled interpretation methods. Therefore, we conduct our study using several representative GDL applications as case studies. We evaluate thirteen interpretation methods applied to three major GDL backbone models, using four scientific datasets to assess how well these methods identify sensitive and decisive patterns. Our findings indicate that post-hoc methods tend to provide interpretations better aligned with sensitive patterns, whereas certain self-interpretable methods exhibit strong and stable performance in detecting decisive patterns. Additionally, our study offers valuable insights into improving the reliability of these interpretation methods. For example, ensembling post-hoc interpretations from multiple models trained on the same task can effectively uncover the task's decisive patterns.

Differential Privacy (DP) can be applied to raw text by exploiting the spatial arrangement of words in an embedding space. We investigate the implications of such text privatization on Language Models (LMs) and their tendency towards stereotypical associations. Since previous studies documented that linguistic proficiency correlates with stereotypical bias, one could assume that techniques for text privatization, which are known to degrade language modeling capabilities, would cancel out undesirable biases. By testing BERT models trained on texts containing biased statements primed with varying degrees of privacy, our study reveals that while stereotypical bias generally diminishes when privacy is tightened, text privatization does not uniformly equate to diminishing bias across all social domains. This highlights the need for careful diagnosis of bias in LMs that undergo text privatization.

Grounding DINO and the Segment Anything Model (SAM) have achieved impressive performance in zero-shot object detection and image segmentation, respectively. Together, they have a great potential to revolutionize applications in zero-shot semantic segmentation or data annotation. Yet, in specialized domains like medical image segmentation, objects of interest (e.g., organs, tissues, and tumors) may not fall in existing class names. To address this problem, the referring expression comprehension (REC) ability of Grounding DINO is leveraged to detect arbitrary targets by their language descriptions. However, recent studies have highlighted severe limitation of the REC framework in this application setting owing to its tendency to make false positive predictions when the target is absent in the given image. And, while this bottleneck is central to the prospect of open-set semantic segmentation, it is still largely unknown how much improvement can be achieved by studying the prediction errors. To this end, we perform empirical studies on six publicly available datasets across different domains and reveal that these errors consistently follow a predictable pattern and can, thus, be mitigated by a simple strategy. Specifically, we show that false positive detections with appreciable confidence scores generally occupy large image areas and can usually be filtered by their relative sizes. More importantly, we expect these observations to inspire future research in improving REC-based detection and automated segmentation. Meanwhile, we evaluate the performance of SAM on multiple datasets from various specialized domains and report significant improvements in segmentation performance and annotation time savings over manual approaches.

Clinical trials are pivotal for developing new medical treatments, yet they typically pose some risks such as patient mortality, adverse events, and enrollment failure that waste immense efforts spanning over a decade. Applying artificial intelligence (AI) to forecast or simulate key events in clinical trials holds great potential for providing insights to guide trial designs. However, complex data collection and question definition requiring medical expertise and a deep understanding of trial designs have hindered the involvement of AI thus far. This paper tackles these challenges by presenting a comprehensive suite of meticulously curated AIready datasets covering multi-modal data (e.g., drug molecule, disease code, text, categorical/numerical features) and 8 crucial prediction challenges in clinical trial design, encompassing prediction of trial duration, patient dropout rate, serious adverse event, mortality rate, trial approval outcome, trial failure reason, drug dose finding, design of eligibility criteria. Furthermore, we provide basic validation methods for each task to ensure the datasets' usability and reliability. We anticipate that the availability of such open-access datasets will catalyze the development of advanced AI approaches for clinical trial design, ultimately advancing clinical trial research and accelerating medical solution development.

User-generated reviews significantly influence consumer decisions, particularly in the travel domain when selecting accommodations. This paper contribution comprising two main elements. Firstly, we present a novel dataset of authentic guest reviews sourced from a prominent online travel platform, totaling over two million reviews from 50,000 distinct accommodations. Secondly, we propose an innovative approach for personalized review ranking. Our method employs contrastive learning to intricately capture the relationship between a review and the contextual information of its respective reviewer. Through a comprehensive experimental study, we demonstrate that our approach surpasses several baselines across all reported metrics. Augmented by a comparative analysis, we showcase the efficacy of our method in elevating personalized review ranking. The implications of our research extend beyond the travel domain, with potential applications in other sectors where personalized review ranking is paramount, such as online e-commerce platforms.

Real-time Advisory (RTA) systems, such as navigational and eco-driving assistants, are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in vehicles due to their benefits for users and society. Until autonomous vehicles mature, such advisory systems will continue to expand their ability to cooperate with drivers, enabling safer and more eco-friendly driving practices while improving user experience. However, the interactions between these systems and drivers have not been studied extensively. To this end, we conduct a driving simulator study (N=16) to capture driver reactions to a Cooperative RTA system. Through a case study with a congestion mitigation assistant, we qualitatively analyze the sentiments of drivers towards advisory systems and discuss driver preferences for various aspects of the interaction. We comment on how the advice should be communicated, the effects of the advice on driver trust, and how drivers adapt to the system. We present recommendations to inform the future design of Cooperative RTA systems.

In this paper, we delve into the pedestrian behavior understanding problem from the perspective of three different tasks: intention estimation, action prediction, and event risk assessment. We first define the tasks and discuss how these tasks are represented and annotated in two widely used pedestrian datasets, JAAD and PIE. We then propose a new benchmark based on these definitions, available annotations, and three new classes of metrics, each designed to assess different aspects of the model performance. We apply the new evaluation approach to examine four SOTA prediction models on each task and compare their performance w.r.t. metrics and input modalities. In particular, we analyze the differences between intention estimation and action prediction tasks by considering various scenarios and contextual factors. Lastly, we examine model agreement across these two tasks to show their complementary role. The proposed benchmark reveals new facts about the role of different data modalities, the tasks, and relevant data properties. We conclude by elaborating on our findings and proposing future research directions.

The shift towards efficient and automated data analysis through Machine Learning (ML) has notably impacted healthcare systems, particularly Radiomics. Radiomics leverages ML to analyze medical images accurately and efficiently for precision medicine. Current methods rely on Deep Learning (DL) to improve performance and accuracy (Deep Radiomics). Given the sensitivity of medical images, ensuring privacy throughout the Deep Radiomics pipeline-from data generation and collection to model training and inference-is essential, especially when outsourced. Thus, Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are crucial tools for Deep Radiomics. Previous studies and systematization efforts have either broadly overviewed PETs and their applications or mainly focused on subsets of PETs for ML algorithms. In Deep Radiomics, where efficiency, accuracy, and privacy are crucial, many PETs, while theoretically applicable, may not be practical without specialized optimizations or hybrid designs. Additionally, not all DL models are suitable for Radiomics. Consequently, there is a need for specialized studies that investigate and systematize the effective and practical integration of PETs into the Deep Radiomics pipeline. This work addresses this research gap by (1) classifying existing PETs, presenting practical hybrid PETS constructions, and a taxonomy illustrating their potential integration with the Deep Radiomics pipeline, with comparative analyses detailing assumptions, architectural suitability, and security, (2) Offering technical insights, describing potential challenges and means of combining PETs into the Deep Radiomics pipeline, including integration strategies, subtilities, and potential challenges, (3) Proposing potential research directions, identifying challenges, and suggesting solutions to enhance the PETs in Deep Radiomics.

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is an important task with broad applications, while few-shot HTC has gained increasing interest recently. While in-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs) has achieved significant success in few-shot learning, it is not as effective for HTC because of the expansive hierarchical label sets and extremely-ambiguous labels. In this work, we introduce the first ICL-based framework with LLM for few-shot HTC. We exploit a retrieval database to identify relevant demonstrations, and an iterative policy to manage multi-layer hierarchical labels. Particularly, we equip the retrieval database with HTC label-aware representations for the input texts, which is achieved by continual training on a pretrained language model with masked language modeling (MLM), layer-wise classification (CLS, specifically for HTC), and a novel divergent contrastive learning (DCL, mainly for adjacent semantically-similar labels) objective. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate superior performance of our method, and we can achieve state-of-the-art results in few-shot HTC.