Relation extraction (RE) is a standard information extraction task playing a major role in downstream applications such as knowledge discovery and question answering. Although decoder-only large language models are excelling in generative tasks, smaller encoder models are still the go to architecture for RE. In this paper, we revisit fine-tuning such smaller models using a novel dual-encoder architecture with a joint contrastive and cross-entropy loss. Unlike previous methods that employ a fixed linear layer for predicate representations, our approach uses a second encoder to compute instance-specific predicate representations by infusing them with real entity spans from corresponding input instances. We conducted experiments on two biomedical RE datasets and two general domain datasets. Our approach achieved F1 score improvements ranging from 1% to 2% over state-of-the-art methods with a simple but elegant formulation. Ablation studies justify the importance of various components built into the proposed architecture.

Traditional task-oriented dialog (ToD) systems rely heavily on labor-intensive turn-level annotations, such as dialogue states and policy labels, for training. This work explores whether large language models (LLMs) can be fine-tuned solely on natural language dialogs to perform ToD tasks, without requiring such annotations. We evaluate their ability to generalize to unseen domains and compare their performance with models trained on fully annotated data. Through extensive experiments with three open-source LLMs of varying sizes and two diverse ToD datasets, we find that models fine-tuned without turn-level annotations generate coherent and contextually appropriate responses. However, their task completion performance - measured by accurate execution of API calls - remains suboptimal, with the best models achieving only around 53% success in unseen domains. To improve task completion, we propose ZeroToD, a framework that incorporates a schema augmentation mechanism to enhance API call accuracy and overall task completion rates, particularly in out-of-domain settings. We also compare ZeroToD with fine-tuning-free alternatives, such as prompting off-the-shelf LLMs, and find that our framework enables smaller, fine-tuned models that outperform large-scale proprietary LLMs in task completion. Additionally, a human study evaluating informativeness, fluency, and task completion confirms our empirical findings. These findings suggest the feasibility of developing cost-effective, scalable, and zero-shot generalizable ToD systems for real-world applications.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various applications, yet they often struggle to capture long-range dependencies (LRD) effectively. This paper introduces GraphMinNet, a novel GNN architecture that generalizes the idea of minimal Gated Recurrent Units to graph-structured data. Our approach achieves efficient LRD modeling with linear computational complexity while maintaining permutation equivariance and stability. The model incorporates both structural and positional information through a unique combination of feature and positional encodings, leading to provably stronger expressiveness than the 1-WL test. Theoretical analysis establishes that GraphMinNet maintains non-decaying gradients over long distances, ensuring effective long-range information propagation. Extensive experiments on ten diverse datasets, including molecular graphs, image graphs, and synthetic networks, demonstrate that GraphMinNet achieves state-of-the-art performance while being computationally efficient. Our results show superior performance on 6 out of 10 datasets and competitive results on the others, validating the effectiveness of our approach in capturing both local and global graph structures.

Lifelong learning in artificial intelligence (AI) aims to mimic the biological brain's ability to continuously learn and retain knowledge, yet it faces challenges such as catastrophic forgetting. Recent neuroscience research suggests that neural activity in biological systems undergoes representational drift, where neural responses evolve over time, even with consistent inputs and tasks. We hypothesize that representational drift can alleviate catastrophic forgetting in AI during new task acquisition. To test this, we introduce DriftNet, a network designed to constantly explore various local minima in the loss landscape while dynamically retrieving relevant tasks. This approach ensures efficient integration of new information and preserves existing knowledge. Experimental studies in image classification and natural language processing demonstrate that DriftNet outperforms existing models in lifelong learning. Importantly, DriftNet is scalable in handling a sequence of tasks such as sentiment analysis and question answering using large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters on a single Nvidia A100 GPU. DriftNet efficiently updates LLMs using only new data, avoiding the need for full dataset retraining. Tested on GPT-2 and RoBERTa, DriftNet is a robust, cost-effective solution for lifelong learning in LLMs. This study not only advances AI systems to emulate biological learning, but also provides insights into the adaptive mechanisms of biological neural systems, deepening our understanding of lifelong learning in nature.

Administrative documentation is a major driver of rising healthcare costs and is linked to adverse outcomes, including physician burnout and diminished quality of care. This paper introduces a secure system that applies recent advancements in speech-to-text transcription and speaker-labeling (diarization) to patient-provider conversations. This system is optimized to produce accurate transcriptions and highlight potential errors to promote rapid human verification, further reducing the necessary manual effort. Applied to over 40 hours of simulated conversations, this system offers a promising foundation for automating clinical transcriptions. Introduction Accurate and timely documentation is essential in the healthcare sector, but manual transcription of patient-physician interactions is laborious, and errors are common. The extensive burden of documentation placed on clinicians takes away valuable time from patient care.

Relation extraction (RE) is a well-known NLP application often treated as a sentence- or document-level task. However, a handful of recent efforts explore it across documents or in the cross-document setting (CrossDocRE). This is distinct from the single document case because different documents often focus on disparate themes, while text within a document tends to have a single goal. Linking findings from disparate documents to identify new relationships is at the core of the popular literature-based knowledge discovery paradigm in biomedicine and other domains. Current CrossDocRE efforts do not consider domain knowledge, which are often assumed to be known to the reader when documents are authored. Here, we propose a novel approach, KXDocRE, that embed domain knowledge of entities with input text for cross-document RE. Our proposed framework has three main benefits over baselines: 1) it incorporates domain knowledge of entities along with documents' text; 2) it offers interpretability by producing explanatory text for predicted relations between entities 3) it improves performance over the prior methods.

In the design of tensegrity structures, traditional form-finding methods utilize kinematic and static approaches to identify geometric configurations that achieve equilibrium. However, these methods often fall short when applied to actual physical models due to imperfections in the manufacturing of structural elements, assembly errors, and material non-linearities. In this work, we develop a deep neural network (DNN) approach to predict the geometric configurations and physical properties-such as nodal coordinates, member forces, and natural frequencies-of any tensegrity structures in equilibrium states. First, we outline the analytical governing equations for tensegrity structures, covering statics involving nodal coordinates and member forces, as well as modal information. Next, we propose a data-driven framework for training an appropriate DNN model capable of simultaneously predicting tensegrity forms and physical properties, thereby circumventing the need to solve equilibrium equations. For validation, we analyze three tensegrity structures, including a tensegrity D-bar, prism, and lander, demonstrating that our approach can identify approximation systems with relatively very small output errors. This technique is applicable to a wide range of tensegrity structures, particularly in real-world construction, and can be extended to address additional challenges in identifying structural physics information.

The integration of Internet of Things (IoT) applications in our daily lives has led to a surge in data traffic, posing significant security challenges. IoT applications using cloud and edge computing are at higher risk of cyberattacks because of the expanded attack surface from distributed edge and cloud services, the vulnerability of IoT devices, and challenges in managing security across interconnected systems leading to oversights. This led to the rise of ML-based solutions for intrusion detection systems (IDSs), which have proven effective in enhancing network security and defending against diverse threats. However, ML-based IDS in IoT systems encounters challenges, particularly from noisy, redundant, and irrelevant features in varied IoT datasets, potentially impacting its performance. Therefore, reducing such features becomes crucial to enhance system performance and minimize computational costs. This paper focuses on improving the effectiveness of ML-based IDS at the edge level by introducing a novel method to find a balanced trade-off between cost and accuracy through the creation of informative features in a two-tier edge-user IoT environment. A hybrid Binary Quantum-inspired Artificial Bee Colony and Genetic Programming algorithm is utilized for this purpose. Three IoT intrusion detection datasets, namely NSL-KDD, UNSW-NB15, and BoT-IoT, are used for the evaluation of the proposed approach.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) presents significant challenges in early diagnosis and intervention, impacting children and their families. With prevalence rates rising, there is a critical need for accessible and efficient screening tools. Leveraging machine learning (ML) techniques, in particular Temporal Action Localization (TAL), holds promise for automating ASD screening. This paper introduces a self-attention based TAL model designed to identify ASD-related behaviors in infant videos. Unlike existing methods, our approach simplifies complex modeling and emphasizes efficiency, which is essential for practical deployment in real-world scenarios. Importantly, this work underscores the importance of developing computer vision methods capable of operating in naturilistic environments with little equipment control, addressing key challenges in ASD screening. This study is the first to conduct end-to-end temporal action localization in untrimmed videos of infants with ASD, offering promising avenues for early intervention and support. We report baseline results of behavior detection using our TAL model. We achieve 70% accuracy for look face, 79% accuracy for look object, 72% for smile and 65% for vocalization.

Cutting edge techniques developed in the general NLP domain are often subsequently applied to the high-value, data-rich biomedical domain. The past few years have seen generative language models (LMs), instruction finetuning, and few-shot learning become foci of NLP research. As such, generative LMs pretrained on biomedical corpora have proliferated and biomedical instruction finetuning has been attempted as well, all with the hope that domain specificity improves performance on downstream tasks. Given the nontrivial effort in training such models, we investigate what, if any, benefits they have in the key biomedical NLP task of relation extraction. Specifically, we address two questions: (1) Do LMs trained on biomedical corpora outperform those trained on general domain corpora? (2) Do models instruction finetuned on biomedical datasets outperform those finetuned on assorted datasets or those simply pretrained? We tackle these questions using existing LMs, testing across four datasets. In a surprising result, general-domain models typically outperformed biomedical-domain models. However, biomedical instruction finetuning improved performance to a similar degree as general instruction finetuning, despite having orders of magnitude fewer instructions. Our findings suggest it may be more fruitful to focus research effort on larger-scale biomedical instruction finetuning of general LMs over building domain-specific biomedical LMs