We present RICHES, a novel approach that interleaves retrieval with sequence generation tasks. RICHES offers an alternative to conventional RAG systems by eliminating the need for separate retriever and generator. It retrieves documents by directly decoding their contents, constrained on the corpus. Unifying retrieval with generation allows us to adapt to diverse new tasks via prompting alone. RICHES can work with any Instruction-tuned model, without additional training. It provides attributed evidence, supports multi-hop retrievals and interleaves thoughts to plan on what to retrieve next, all within a single decoding pass of the LLM. We demonstrate the strong performance of RICHES across ODQA tasks including attributed and multi-hop QA.

In the current landscape of automatic language generation, there is a need to understand, evaluate, and mitigate demographic biases as existing models are becoming increasingly multilingual. To address this, we present the initial eight languages from the MASSIVE MULTILINGUAL HOLISTICBIAS (MMHB) dataset and benchmark consisting of approximately 6 million sentences representing 13 demographic axes. We propose an automatic construction methodology to further scale up MMHB sentences in terms of both language coverage and size, leveraging limited human annotation. Our approach utilizes placeholders in multilingual sentence construction and employs a systematic method to independently translate sentence patterns, nouns, and descriptors. Combined with human translation, this technique carefully designs placeholders to dynamically generate multiple sentence variations and significantly reduces the human translation workload. The translation process has been meticulously conducted to avoid an English-centric perspective and include all necessary morphological variations for languages that require them, improving from the original English HOLISTICBIAS. Finally, we utilize MMHB to report results on gender bias and added toxicity in machine translation tasks. On the gender analysis, MMHB unveils: (1) a lack of gender robustness showing almost +4 chrf points in average for masculine semantic sentences compared to feminine ones and (2) a preference to overgeneralize to masculine forms by reporting more than +12 chrf points in average when evaluating with masculine compared to feminine references. MMHB triggers added toxicity up to 2.3%.

Recent studies indicate that leveraging off-the-shelf or fine-tuned retrievers, capable of retrieving relevant in-context examples tailored to the input query, enhances few-shot in-context learning of English. However, adapting these methods to other languages, especially low-resource ones, poses challenges due to the scarcity of cross-lingual retrievers and annotated data. Thus, we introduce XAMPLER: Cross-Lingual Example Retrieval, a method tailored to tackle the challenge of cross-lingual in-context learning using only annotated English data. XAMPLER first trains a retriever based on Glot500, a multilingual small language model, using positive and negative English examples constructed from the predictions of a multilingual large language model, i.e., MaLA500. Leveraging the cross-lingual capacity of the retriever, it can directly retrieve English examples as few-shot examples for in-context learning of target languages. Experiments on the multilingual text classification benchmark SIB200 with 176 languages show that XAMPLER substantially improves the in-context learning performance across languages. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/cisnlp/XAMPLER}.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) give the UN a road map for development with Agenda 2030 as a target. SDG3 "Good Health and Well-Being" ensures healthy lives and promotes well-being for all ages. Digital technologies can support SDG3. Burnout and even depression could be reduced by encouraging better preventive health. Due to the lack of patient knowledge and focus to take care of their health, it is necessary to help patients before it is too late. New trends such as positive psychology and mindfulness are highly encouraged in the USA. Digital Twin (DT) can help with the continuous monitoring of emotion using physiological signals (e.g., collected via wearables). Digital twins facilitate monitoring and provide constant health insight to improve quality of life and well-being with better personalization. Healthcare DT challenges are standardizing data formats, communication protocols, and data exchange mechanisms. To achieve those data integration and knowledge challenges, we designed the Mental Health Knowledge Graph (ontology and dataset) to boost mental health. The Knowledge Graph (KG) acquires knowledge from ontology-based mental health projects classified within the LOV4IoT ontology catalog (Emotion, Depression, and Mental Health). Furthermore, the KG is mapped to standards (e.g., ontologies) when possible. Standards from ETSI SmartM2M, ITU/WHO, ISO, W3C, NIST, and IEEE are relevant to mental health.

Deep state-space models (DSSMs) have gained popularity in recent years due to their potent modeling capacity for dynamic systems. However, existing DSSM works are limited to single-task modeling, which requires retraining with historical task data upon revisiting a forepassed task. To address this limitation, we propose continual learning DSSMs (CLDSSMs), which are capable of adapting to evolving tasks without catastrophic forgetting. Our proposed CLDSSMs integrate mainstream regularization-based continual learning (CL) methods, ensuring efficient updates with constant computational and memory costs for modeling multiple dynamic systems. We also conduct a comprehensive cost analysis of each CL method applied to the respective CLDSSMs, and demonstrate the efficacy of CLDSSMs through experiments on real-world datasets. The results corroborate that while various competing CL methods exhibit different merits, the proposed CLDSSMs consistently outperform traditional DSSMs in terms of effectively addressing catastrophic forgetting, enabling swift and accurate parameter transfer to new tasks.

The beauty pageant industry isn't what it used to be. Miss Universe, which has been around since 1952, has suffered a dramatic ratings decline in the last five years. In May, the reigning Miss USA and Miss Teen USA gave back their crowns, sparking fresh controversy in the community. Yet, a new kind of beauty pageant has emerged. This pageant is similar in many ways to the traditional experience, except for one important detail: the women are not real. The World AI Creators Awards (WAICAS) has gathered 10 finalists in their quest to find "Miss AI," the winner of a beauty pageant for women generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

Advances in generative models have led to significant interest in image synthesis, demonstrating the ability to generate high-quality images for a diverse range of text prompts. Despite this progress, most studies ignore the presence of bias. In this paper, we examine several text-to-image models not only by qualitatively assessing their performance in generating accurate images of human faces, groups, and specified numbers of objects but also by presenting a social bias analysis. As expected, models with larger capacity generate higher-quality images. However, we also document the inherent gender or social biases these models possess, offering a more complete understanding of their impact and limitations.

Cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) are designed to learn students' mastery levels using their response logs. CDMs play a fundamental role in online education systems since they significantly influence downstream applications such as teachers' guidance and computerized adaptive testing. Despite the success achieved by existing CDMs, we find that they suffer from a thorny issue that the learned students' mastery levels are too similar. This issue, which we refer to as oversmoothing, could diminish the CDMs' effectiveness in downstream tasks. CDMs comprise two core parts: learning students' mastery levels and assessing mastery levels by fitting the response logs. This paper contends that the oversmoothing issue arises from that existing CDMs seldom utilize response signals on exercises in the learning part but only use them as labels in the assessing part. To this end, this paper proposes an oversmoothing-resistant cognitive diagnosis framework (ORCDF) to enhance existing CDMs by utilizing response signals in the learning part. Specifically, ORCDF introduces a novel response graph to inherently incorporate response signals as types of edges. Then, ORCDF designs a tailored response-aware graph convolution network (RGC) that effectively captures the crucial response signals within the response graph. Via ORCDF, existing CDMs are enhanced by replacing the input embeddings with the outcome of RGC, allowing for the consideration of response signals on exercises in the learning part. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that ORCDF not only helps existing CDMs alleviate the oversmoothing issue but also significantly enhances the models' prediction and interpretability performance. Moreover, the effectiveness of ORCDF is validated in the downstream task of computerized adaptive testing.

Enterprises have a growing need to identify relevant tables in data lakes; e.g. tables that are unionable, joinable, or subsets of each other. Tabular neural models can be helpful for such data discovery tasks. In this paper, we present TabSketchFM, a neural tabular model for data discovery over data lakes. First, we propose a novel pre-training sketch-based approach to enhance the effectiveness of data discovery techniques in neural tabular models. Second, to further finetune the pretrained model for several downstream tasks, we develop LakeBench, a collection of 8 benchmarks to help with different data discovery tasks such as finding tasks that are unionable, joinable, or subsets of each other. We then show on these finetuning tasks that TabSketchFM achieves state-of-the art performance compared to existing neural models. Third, we use these finetuned models to search for tables that are unionable, joinable, or can be subsets of each other. Our results demonstrate improvements in F1 scores for search compared to state-of-the-art techniques (even up to 70% improvement in a joinable search benchmark). Finally, we show significant transfer across datasets and tasks establishing that our model can generalize across different tasks over different data lakes

Maintaining accurate, up-to-date maps is important in any dynamic urban landscape, supporting various aspects of modern society, such as urban planning, navigation, and emergency response. However, traditional (i.e. largely manual) map production and crowdsourced mapping methods still struggle to keep pace with rapid changes in the built environment. Such manual mapping workflows are time-consuming and prone to human errors, leading to early obsolescence and/or the need for extensive auditing. The current map updating process in OpenStreetMap provides an example of this limitation, relying on numerous manual steps in its online map updating workflow. To address this, there is a need to explore automating the entire end-to-end map up-dating process. Tech giants such as Google and Microsoft have already started investigating Machine Learning (ML) techniques to tackle this contemporary mapping problem. This paper offers an analysis of these ML approaches, focusing on their application to updating Open-StreetMap in particular. By analysing the current state-of-the-art in this field, this study identi-fies some key research gaps and introduces DeepMapper as a practical solution for advancing the automatic online map updating process in the future.