Recent years have witnessed extensive efforts to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) across various domains, alongside growing attention to their ethical implications. However, a critical challenge remains largely overlooked: LLMs must balance between rejecting harmful requests for safety and accommodating legitimate ones for utility. This paper presents a Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) based alignment framework that achieves better overall performance by addressing this ethical-utility trade-off, using chemical domain applications as a proof-of-concept. Our alignment pipeline starts with a GPT-assisted three-phase data generation scheme, in which we create LibraChemQA, a chemical question-answering dataset comprising 31.6k triplet instances. By incorporating an innovative balanced seed in the data generation process, our framework systematically considers both legitimate and illegitimate requests. The framework also introduces a rephrasing mechanism for efficient data augmentation that enhances the model's chemical comprehension. We further develop a novel hybrid evaluation scheme with LLM judges for precise assessment of both safety and utility. Experimental results demonstrate our model's substantial improvements in overall performance where both safety and utility are considered - our resulting model, LibraChem, outperforms leading LLMs including Claude-3, GPT-4o, and LLaMA-3 by margins of 13.44%, 7.16%, and 7.10% respectively on our released benchmark.

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In the era of Industry 4.0, artificial intelligence (AI) is assuming an increasingly pivotal role within industrial systems. Despite the recent trend within various industries to adopt AI, the actual adoption of AI is not as developed as perceived. A significant factor contributing to this lag is the data issues in AI implementation. How to address these data issues stands as a significant concern confronting both industry and academia. To address data issues, the first step involves mapping out these issues. Therefore, this study conducts a meta-review to explore data issues and methods within the implementation of industrial AI. Seventy-two data issues are identified and categorized into various stages of the data lifecycle, including data source and collection, data access and storage, data integration and interoperation, data pre-processing, data processing, data security and privacy, and AI technology adoption. Subsequently, the study analyzes the data requirements of various AI algorithms. Building on the aforementioned analyses, it proposes a data management framework, addressing how data issues can be systematically resolved at every stage of the data lifecycle. Finally, the study highlights future research directions. In doing so, this study enriches the existing body of knowledge and provides guidelines for professionals navigating the complex landscape of achieving data usability and usefulness in industrial AI.

This study focuses on analyzing dermoscopy images to determine the depth of melanomas, which is a critical factor in diagnosing and treating skin cancer. The Breslow depth, measured from the top of the granular layer to the deepest point of tumor invasion, serves as a crucial parameter for staging melanoma and guiding treatment decisions. This research aims to improve the prediction of the depth of melanoma through the use of machine learning models, specifically deep learning, while also providing an analysis of the possible existance of graduation in the images characteristics which correlates with the depth of the melanomas. Various datasets, including ISIC and private collections, were used, comprising a total of 1162 images. The datasets were combined and balanced to ensure robust model training. The study utilized pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Results indicated that the models achieved significant improvements over previous methods. Additionally, the study conducted a correlation analysis between model's predictions and actual melanoma thickness, revealing a moderate correlation that improves with higher thickness values. Explainability methods such as feature visualization through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) demonstrated the capability of deep features to distinguish between different depths of melanoma, providing insight into the data distribution and model behavior. In summary, this research presents a dual contribution: enhancing the state-of-the-art classification results through advanced training techniques and offering a detailed analysis of the data and model behavior to better understand the relationship between dermoscopy images and melanoma thickness.

The identification of phenotypes within complex diseases or syndromes is a fundamental component of precision medicine, which aims to adapt healthcare to individual patient characteristics. Postoperative delirium (POD) is a complex neuropsychiatric condition with significant heterogeneity in its clinical manifestations and underlying pathophysiology. We hypothesize that POD comprises several distinct phenotypes, which cannot be directly observed in clinical practice. Identifying these phenotypes could enhance our understanding of POD pathogenesis and facilitate the development of targeted prevention and treatment strategies. In this paper, we propose an approach that combines supervised machine learning for personalized POD risk prediction with unsupervised clustering techniques to uncover potential POD phenotypes. We first demonstrate our approach using synthetic data, where we simulate patient cohorts with predefined phenotypes based on distinct sets of informative features. We aim to mimic any clinical disease with our synthetic data generation method. By training a predictive model and applying SHAP, we show that clustering patients in the SHAP feature importance space successfully recovers the true underlying phenotypes, outperforming clustering in the raw feature space. We then present a case study using real-world data from a cohort of elderly surgical patients. The results showcase the utility of our approach in uncovering clinically relevant subtypes of complex disorders like POD, paving the way for more precise and personalized treatment strategies.

Numerical lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is an integral part of the modern particle and nuclear theory toolkit [1-9]. In this framework, the discretized path integral is computed using Monte Carlo methods. Computationally, this is very expensive, and grows more so as physical limits of interest are approached [10-12]. Consequently, algorithmic developments are an important driver of progress. For example, resolving topological freezing [12-14]--an issue that arises in sampling gauge field configurations with state-of-the-art Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms like heatbath [15-19] or Hybrid/Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) [20-22]--would provide access to finer lattice spacings than presently affordable. To such ends, recent work has explored how emerging machine learning (ML) techniques may be applied to lattice QCD [23, 24]. Of particular interest has been the possibility of accelerating gauge-field sampling [25-34] using normalizing flows [35-37], a class of generative statistical models with tractable density functions. In this framework, a flow is a learned, invertible (diffeomorphic) map between gauge fields. Abstractly, flows may be thought of as bridges between different distributions over gauge fields (or, equivalently, different theories or choices of action parameters).

Low-resource named entity recognition is still an open problem in NLP. Most state-of-the-art systems require tens of thousands of annotated sentences in order to obtain high performance. However, for most of the world's languages, it is unfeasible to obtain such annotation. In this paper, we present a transfer learning scheme, whereby we train character-level neural CRFs to predict named entities for both high-resource languages and low resource languages jointly. Learning character representations for multiple related languages allows transfer among the languages, improving F1 by up to 9.8 points over a loglinear CRF baseline.

Machine Learning models have many potentially beneficial applications in education settings, but a key barrier to their development is securing enough data to train these models. Labelling educational data has traditionally relied on highly skilled raters using complex, multi-class rubrics, making the process expensive and difficult to scale. An alternative, more scalable approach could be to use non-expert crowdworkers to evaluate student work, however, maintaining sufficiently high levels of accuracy and inter-rater reliability when using non-expert workers is challenging. This paper reports on two experiments investigating using non-expert crowdworkers and comparative judgement to evaluate complex student data. Crowdworkers were hired to evaluate student responses to open-ended reading comprehension questions. Crowdworkers were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: the control, where they were asked to decide whether answers were correct or incorrect (i.e., a categorical judgement), or the treatment, where they were shown the same question and answers, but were instead asked to decide which of two candidate answers was more correct (i.e., a comparative/preference-based judgement). We found that using comparative judgement substantially improved inter-rater reliability on both tasks. These results are in-line with well-established literature on the benefits of comparative judgement in the field of educational assessment, as well as with recent trends in artificial intelligence research, where comparative judgement is becoming the preferred method for providing human feedback on model outputs when working with non-expert crowdworkers. However, to our knowledge, these results are novel and important in demonstrating the beneficial effects of using the combination of comparative judgement and crowdworkers to evaluate educational data.

While artificial intelligence (AI) and other automation technologies might lead to enormous progress in healthcare, they may also have undesired consequences for people working in the field. In this interdisciplinary study, we capture empirical evidence of not only what healthcare work could be automated, but also what should be automated. We quantitatively investigate these research questions by utilizing probabilistic machine learning models trained on thousands of ratings, provided by both healthcare practitioners and automation experts. Based on our findings, we present an analytical tool (Automatability-Desirability Matrix) to support policymakers and organizational leaders in developing practical strategies on how to harness the positive power of automation technologies, while accompanying change and empowering stakeholders in a participatory fashion.