This paper investigates the industrial setting of real-time classification of early media exchanged during the initialization phase of voice calls. We explore the application of state-of-the-art audio tagging models and highlight some limitations when applied to the classification of early media. While most existing approaches leverage convolutional neural networks, we propose a novel approach for low-resource requirements based on gradient-boosted trees. Our approach not only demonstrates a substantial improvement in runtime performance, but also exhibits a comparable accuracy. We show that leveraging knowledge distillation and class aggregation techniques to train a simpler and smaller model accelerates the classification of early media in voice calls. We provide a detailed analysis of the results on a proprietary and publicly available dataset, regarding accuracy and runtime performance. We additionally report a case study of the achieved performance improvements at a regional data center in India.

In robotics, ensuring that autonomous systems are comprehensible and accountable to users is essential for effective human-robot interaction. This paper introduces a novel approach that integrates user-centered design principles directly into the core of robot path planning processes. We propose a probabilistic framework for automated planning of explanations for robot navigation, where the preferences of different users regarding explanations are probabilistically modeled to tailor the stochasticity of the real-world human-robot interaction and the communication of decisions of the robot and its actions towards humans. This approach aims to enhance the transparency of robot path planning and adapt to diverse user explanation needs by anticipating the types of explanations that will satisfy individual users.

Forecasting stock market prices remains a complex challenge for traders, analysts, and engineers due to the multitude of factors that influence price movements. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) have significantly enhanced stock price prediction capabilities. AI's ability to process vast and intricate data sets has led to more sophisticated forecasts. However, achieving consistently high accuracy in stock price forecasting remains elusive. In this paper, we leverage 30 years of historical data from national banks in India, sourced from the National Stock Exchange, to forecast stock prices. Our approach utilizes state-of-the-art deep learning models, including multivariate multi-step Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Facebook Prophet with LightGBM optimized through Optuna, and Seasonal Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA). We further integrate sentiment analysis from tweets and reliable financial sources such as Business Standard and Reuters, acknowledging their crucial influence on stock price fluctuations.

In the field of telecommunications and cloud communications, accurately and in real-time detecting whether a human or an answering machine has answered an outbound call is of paramount importance. This problem is of particular significance during campaigns as it enhances service quality, efficiency and cost reduction through precise caller identification. Despite the significance of the field, it remains inadequately explored in the existing literature. This paper presents an innovative approach to answering machine detection that leverages transfer learning through the YAMNet model for feature extraction. The YAMNet architecture facilitates the training of a recurrent-based classifier, enabling real-time processing of audio streams, as opposed to fixed-length recordings. The results demonstrate an accuracy of over 96% on the test set. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth analysis of misclassified samples and reveal that an accuracy exceeding 98% can be achieved with the integration of a silence detection algorithm, such as the one provided by FFmpeg.

Prompt and accurate detection is crucial for the efficient management and mitigation of plant diseases. This study investigates advanced techniques in plant disease detection, emphasizing the integration of image processing, machine learning, deep learning methods, and mobile technologies. High-resolution images of plant leaves were captured and analyzed using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to detect symptoms of various diseases, such as blight, mildew, and rust. This study explores 14 classes of plants and diagnoses 26 unique plant diseases. We focus on common diseases affecting various crops. The model was trained on a diverse dataset encompassing multiple crops and disease types, achieving 98.14% accuracy in disease diagnosis. Finally integrated this model into mobile apps for real-time disease diagnosis.

Psychological trauma can manifest following various distressing events and is captured in diverse online contexts. However, studies traditionally focus on a single aspect of trauma, often neglecting the transferability of findings across different scenarios. We address this gap by training language models with progressing complexity on trauma-related datasets, including genocide-related court data, a Reddit dataset on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), counseling conversations, and Incel forum posts. Our results show that the fine-tuned RoBERTa model excels in predicting traumatic events across domains, slightly outperforming large language models like GPT-4. Additionally, SLALOM-feature scores and conceptual explanations effectively differentiate and cluster trauma-related language, highlighting different trauma aspects and identifying sexual abuse and experiences related to death as a common traumatic event across all datasets. This transferability is crucial as it allows for the development of tools to enhance trauma detection and intervention in diverse populations and settings.

Despite its popularity in sentence-level relation extraction, distantly supervised data is rarely utilized by existing work in document-level relation extraction due to its noisy nature and low information density. Among its current applications, distantly supervised data is mostly used as a whole for pertaining, which is of low time efficiency. To fill in the gap of efficient and robust utilization of distantly supervised training data, we propose Efficient Multi-Supervision for document-level relation extraction, in which we first select a subset of informative documents from the massive dataset by combining distant supervision with expert supervision, then train the model with Multi-Supervision Ranking Loss that integrates the knowledge from multiple sources of supervision to alleviate the effects of noise. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in improving the model performance with higher time efficiency than existing baselines.

Language models (LMs) are trained on web text originating from many points in time and, in general, without any explicit temporal grounding. This work investigates the temporal chaos of pretrained LMs and explores various methods to align their internal knowledge to a target time, which we call "temporal alignment." To do this, we first automatically construct a dataset containing 20K time-sensitive questions and their answers for each year from 2000 to 2023. Based on this dataset, we empirically show that pretrained LMs (e.g., LLaMa2), despite having a recent pretraining cutoff (e.g., 2022), mostly answer questions using earlier knowledge (e.g., in 2019). We then develop several methods, from prompting to finetuning, to align LMs to use their most recent knowledge when answering questions, and investigate various factors in this alignment. Our experiments demonstrate that aligning LLaMa2 to the year 2022 can enhance its performance by up to 62% according to that year's answers. This improvement occurs even without explicitly mentioning time information, indicating the possibility of aligning models' internal sense of time after pretraining. Finally, we find that alignment to a historical time is also possible, with up to 2.8$\times$ the performance of the unaligned LM in 2010 if finetuning models to that year. These findings hint at the sophistication of LMs' internal knowledge organization and the necessity of tuning them properly.

Heuristic search is often used for motion planning and pathfinding problems, for finding the shortest path in a graph while also promising completeness and optimal efficiency. The drawback is it's space complexity, specifically storing all expanded child nodes in memory and sorting large lists of active nodes, which can be a problem in real-time scenarios with limited on-board computation. To combat this, we present the Search with Learned Optimal Pruning-based Expansion (SLOPE), which, learns the distance of a node from a possible optimal path, unlike other approaches that learn a cost-to-go value. The unfavored nodes are then pruned according to the said distance, which in turn reduces the size of the open list. This ensures that the search explores only the region close to optimal paths while lowering memory and computational costs. Unlike traditional learning methods, our approach is orthogonal to estimating cost-to-go heuristics, offering a complementary strategy for improving search efficiency. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach evaluating it as a standalone search method and in conjunction with learned heuristic functions, achieving comparable-or-better node expansion metrics, while lowering the number of child nodes in the open list. Our code is available at https://github.com/dbokan1/SLOPE.

To bring robots into human everyday life, their capacity for social interaction must increase. One way for robots to acquire social skills is by assigning them the concept of identity. This research focuses on the concept of \textit{Explanation Identity} within the broader context of robots' roles in society, particularly their ability to interact socially and explain decisions. Explanation Identity refers to the combination of characteristics and approaches robots use to justify their actions to humans. Drawing from different technical and social disciplines, we introduce Explanation Identity as a multidisciplinary concept and discuss its importance in Human-Robot Interaction. Our theoretical framework highlights the necessity for robots to adapt their explanations to the user's context, demonstrating empathy and ethical integrity. This research emphasizes the dynamic nature of robot identity and guides the integration of explanation capabilities in social robots, aiming to improve user engagement and acceptance.