Africa
A Survey of Neural Code Intelligence: Paradigms, Advances and Beyond
Sun, Qiushi, Chen, Zhirui, Xu, Fangzhi, Cheng, Kanzhi, Ma, Chang, Yin, Zhangyue, Wang, Jianing, Han, Chengcheng, Zhu, Renyu, Yuan, Shuai, Guo, Qipeng, Qiu, Xipeng, Yin, Pengcheng, Li, Xiaoli, Yuan, Fei, Kong, Lingpeng, Li, Xiang, Wu, Zhiyong
Neural Code Intelligence -- leveraging deep learning to understand, generate, and optimize code -- holds immense potential for transformative impacts on the whole society. Bridging the gap between Natural Language and Programming Language, this domain has drawn significant attention from researchers in both research communities over the past few years. This survey presents a systematic and chronological review of the advancements in code intelligence, encompassing over 50 representative models and their variants, more than 20 categories of tasks, and an extensive coverage of over 680 related works. We follow the historical progression to trace the paradigm shifts across different research phases (e.g., from modeling code with recurrent neural networks to the era of Large Language Models). Concurrently, we highlight the major technical transitions in models, tasks, and evaluations spanning through different stages. For applications, we also observe a co-evolving shift. It spans from initial endeavors to tackling specific scenarios, through exploring a diverse array of tasks during its rapid expansion, to currently focusing on tackling increasingly complex and varied real-world challenges. Building on our examination of the developmental trajectories, we further investigate the emerging synergies between code intelligence and broader machine intelligence, uncovering new cross-domain opportunities and illustrating the substantial influence of code intelligence across various domains. Finally, we delve into both the opportunities and challenges associated with this field, alongside elucidating our insights on the most promising research directions. An ongoing, dynamically updated project and resources associated with this survey have been released at https://github.com/QiushiSun/NCISurvey.
EthioLLM: Multilingual Large Language Models for Ethiopian Languages with Task Evaluation
Tonja, Atnafu Lambebo, Azime, Israel Abebe, Belay, Tadesse Destaw, Yigezu, Mesay Gemeda, Mehamed, Moges Ahmed, Ayele, Abinew Ali, Jibril, Ebrahim Chekol, Woldeyohannis, Michael Melese, Kolesnikova, Olga, Slusallek, Philipp, Klakow, Dietrich, Xiong, Shengwu, Yimam, Seid Muhie
Large language models (LLMs) have gained popularity recently due to their outstanding performance in various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, low-resource languages are still lagging behind current state-of-the-art (SOTA) developments in the field of NLP due to insufficient resources to train LLMs. Ethiopian languages exhibit remarkable linguistic diversity, encompassing a wide array of scripts, and are imbued with profound religious and cultural significance. This paper introduces EthioLLM -- multilingual large language models for five Ethiopian languages (Amharic, Ge'ez, Afan Oromo, Somali, and Tigrinya) and English, and Ethiobenchmark -- a new benchmark dataset for various downstream NLP tasks. We evaluate the performance of these models across five downstream NLP tasks. We open-source our multilingual language models, new benchmark datasets for various downstream tasks, and task-specific fine-tuned language models and discuss the performance of the models. Our dataset and models are available at the https://huggingface.co/EthioNLP repository.
Classification Under Strategic Self-Selection
Horowitz, Guy, Sommer, Yonatan, Koren, Moran, Rosenfeld, Nir
When users stand to gain from certain predictive outcomes, they are prone to act strategically to In this work we study classification of strategic agents that obtain predictions that are favorable. Most current choose whether to apply or not in response to the learned works consider strategic behavior that manifests classifier. Strategic candidates apply only if the expected as users modifying their features; instead, we utility from passing screening outweighs associated costs; study a novel setting in which users decide thus, application choices derive from beliefs regarding classification whether to even participate (or not), this in response outcomes. Since these choices in aggregate determine to the learned classifier. Considering learning the test-time distribution, learning becomes susceptible approaches of increasing strategic awareness, to self-selection--namely selection that is carried out by the we investigate the effects of user self-selection agents which predictions target. Our goal in this paper is to on learning, and the implications of learning on study learning under such self-selective behavior, which we the composition of the self-selected population.
Reinterpreting Economic Complexity: A co-clustering approach
Bottai, Carlo, Di Iorio, Jacopo, Iori, Martina
The Economic and Product Complexity Indices, introduced as an attempt to measure these capabilities from a country's basket of exported products, have become popular to study economic development, the geography of innovation, and industrial policies. Despite this reception, the interpretation of these indicators proved difficult. Although the original Method of Reflections suggested a direct interconnection between country and product metrics, it has been proved that the Economic and Product Complexity Indices result from a spectral clustering algorithm that separately groups similar countries or similar products, respectively. This recent approach to economic and product complexity conflicts with the original one and treats separately countries and products. However, building on previous interpretations of the indices and the recent evolution in spectral clustering, we show that these indices simultaneously identify two co-clusters of similar countries and products. This viewpoint reconciles the spectral clustering interpretation of the indices with the original Method of Reflections interpretation. By proving the often neglected intimate relationship between country and product complexity, this approach emphasizes the role of a selected set of products in determining economic development while extending the range of applications of these indicators in economics.
On the digital map of history, when will big tech's USSR moment finally come? Alex Hern
I was born two years before the USSR ceased to exist. The largest country in the world disappeared overnight, replaced by the new largest country in the world, Russia. But the footprint it left took longer to be washed away. I grew up with a duvet cover printed with a world map prominently featuring the ex-nation, reading books and atlases that were published after I was born but before it vanished, and voraciously consuming science fiction that assumed the Soviets would continue to exist far into the future. Randall Munroe, author of the webcomic XKCD, once put together a flow chart to date almost any world map made since the 19th century to within a few years by answering some simple questions.
Do elephants really call to each other by name?
In a remarkable experiment of artificial intelligence meets elephants, researchers have successfully demonstrated how the giant mammals call to each other using individual names. According to a new study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, African savannah elephants in Kenya were observed and listened to, using machine learning software called Elephant Voices which analysed calls being made between two herds of elephants. The research took place in Samburu National Reserve and Amboseli National Park over four years including 14 months of fieldwork, in which elephants were tracked and observed and their "calls" recorded. Some 469 unique calls or "rumbles" were captured from the African elephants in the experiment. It has long been known that elephants are highly social animals.
Probabilistic Programming with Programmable Variational Inference
Becker, McCoy R., Lew, Alexander K., Wang, Xiaoyan, Ghavami, Matin, Huot, Mathieu, Rinard, Martin C., Mansinghka, Vikash K.
Compared to the wide array of advanced Monte Carlo methods supported by modern probabilistic programming languages (PPLs), PPL support for variational inference (VI) is less developed: users are typically limited to a predefined selection of variational objectives and gradient estimators, which are implemented monolithically (and without formal correctness arguments) in PPL backends. In this paper, we propose a more modular approach to supporting variational inference in PPLs, based on compositional program transformation. In our approach, variational objectives are expressed as programs, that may employ first-class constructs for computing densities of and expected values under user-defined models and variational families. We then transform these programs systematically into unbiased gradient estimators for optimizing the objectives they define. Our design enables modular reasoning about many interacting concerns, including automatic differentiation, density accumulation, tracing, and the application of unbiased gradient estimation strategies. Additionally, relative to existing support for VI in PPLs, our design increases expressiveness along three axes: (1) it supports an open-ended set of user-defined variational objectives, rather than a fixed menu of options; (2) it supports a combinatorial space of gradient estimation strategies, many not automated by today's PPLs; and (3) it supports a broader class of models and variational families, because it supports constructs for approximate marginalization and normalization (previously introduced only for Monte Carlo inference). We implement our approach in an extension to the Gen probabilistic programming system (genjax.vi, implemented in JAX), and evaluate on several deep generative modeling tasks, showing minimal performance overhead vs. hand-coded implementations and performance competitive with well-established open-source PPLs.
Knowledge Conflicts for LLMs: A Survey
Xu, Rongwu, Qi, Zehan, Guo, Zhijiang, Wang, Cunxiang, Wang, Hongru, Zhang, Yue, Xu, Wei
This survey provides an in-depth analysis of knowledge conflicts for large language models (LLMs), highlighting the complex challenges they encounter when blending contextual and parametric knowledge. Our focus is on three categories of knowledge conflicts: context-memory, inter-context, and intra-memory conflict. These conflicts can significantly impact the trustworthiness and performance of LLMs, especially in real-world applications where noise and misinformation are common. By categorizing these conflicts, exploring the causes, examining the behaviors of LLMs under such conflicts, and reviewing available solutions, this survey aims to shed light on strategies for improving the robustness of LLMs, thereby serving as a valuable resource for advancing research in this evolving area.
Synergistic Deep Graph Clustering Network
Wu, Benyu, Ding, Shifei, Xu, Xiao, Guo, Lili, Ding, Ling, Wu, Xindong
Employing graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn cohesive and discriminative node representations for clustering has shown promising results in deep graph clustering. However, existing methods disregard the reciprocal relationship between representation learning and structure augmentation. This study suggests that enhancing embedding and structure synergistically becomes imperative for GNNs to unleash their potential in deep graph clustering. A reliable structure promotes obtaining more cohesive node representations, while high-quality node representations can guide the augmentation of the structure, enhancing structural reliability in return. Moreover, the generalization ability of existing GNNs-based models is relatively poor. While they perform well on graphs with high homogeneity, they perform poorly on graphs with low homogeneity. To this end, we propose a graph clustering framework named Synergistic Deep Graph Clustering Network (SynC). In our approach, we design a Transform Input Graph Auto-Encoder (TIGAE) to obtain high-quality embeddings for guiding structure augmentation. Then, we re-capture neighborhood representations on the augmented graph to obtain clustering-friendly embeddings and conduct self-supervised clustering. Notably, representation learning and structure augmentation share weights, significantly reducing the number of model parameters. Additionally, we introduce a structure fine-tuning strategy to improve the model's generalization. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our method. The code is released on GitHub and Code Ocean.
Fair Clustering: Critique, Caveats, and Future Directions
Dickerson, John, Esmaeili, Seyed A., Morgenstern, Jamie, Zhang, Claire Jie
Clustering is a fundamental problem in machine learning and operations research. Therefore, given the fact that fairness considerations have become of paramount importance in algorithm design, fairness in clustering has received significant attention from the research community. The literature on fair clustering has resulted in a collection of interesting fairness notions and elaborate algorithms. In this paper, we take a critical view of fair clustering, identifying a collection of ignored issues such as the lack of a clear utility characterization and the difficulty in accounting for the downstream effects of a fair clustering algorithm in machine learning settings. In some cases, we demonstrate examples where the application of a fair clustering algorithm can have significant negative impacts on social welfare. We end by identifying a collection of steps that would lead towards more impactful research in fair clustering.