Large-scale disasters can often result in catastrophic consequences on people and infrastructure. Situation awareness about such disaster impacts generated by authoritative data from in-situ sensors, remote sensing imagery, and/or geographic data is often limited due to atmospheric opacity, satellite revisits, and time limitations. This often results in geo-temporal information gaps. In contrast, impact-related social media posts can act as "geo-sensors" during a disaster, where people describe specific impacts and locations. However, not all locations mentioned in disaster-related social media posts relate to an impact. Only the impacted locations are critical for directing resources effectively. e.g., "The death toll from a fire which ripped through the Greek coastal town of #Mati stood at 80, with dozens of people unaccounted for as forensic experts tried to identify victims who were burned alive #Greecefires #AthensFires #Athens #Greece." contains impacted location "Mati" and non-impacted locations "Greece" and "Athens". This research uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify all locations, impacts and impacted locations mentioned in disaster-related social media posts. In the process, LLMs are fine-tuned to identify only impacts and impacted locations (as distinct from other, non-impacted locations), including locations mentioned in informal expressions, abbreviations, and short forms. Our fine-tuned model demonstrates efficacy, achieving an F1-score of 0.69 for impact and 0.74 for impacted location extraction, substantially outperforming the pre-trained baseline. These robust results confirm the potential of fine-tuned language models to offer a scalable solution for timely decision-making in resource allocation, situational awareness, and post-disaster recovery planning for responders.

This article presents a systematic review of relation extraction (RE) research since the advent of Transformer-based models. Using an automated framework to collect and annotate publications, we analyze 34 surveys, 64 datasets, and 104 models published between 2019 and 2024. The review highlights methodological advances, benchmark resources, and the integration of semantic web technologies. By consolidating results across multiple dimensions, the study identifies current trends, limitations, and open challenges, offering researchers and practitioners a comprehensive reference for understanding the evolution and future directions of RE.

Entity Linking (EL) has traditionally relied on large annotated datasets and extensive model fine-tuning. While recent few-shot methods leverage large language models (LLMs) through prompting to reduce training requirements, they often suffer from inefficiencies due to expensive LLM-based reasoning. ARTER (Adaptive Routing and Targeted Entity Reasoning) presents a structured pipeline that achieves high performance without deep fine-tuning by strategically combining candidate generation, context-based scoring, adaptive routing, and selective reasoning. ARTER computes a small set of complementary signals(both embedding and LLM-based) over the retrieved candidates to categorize contextual mentions into easy and hard cases. The cases are then handled by a low-computational entity linker (e.g. ReFinED) and more expensive targeted LLM-based reasoning respectively. On standard benchmarks, ARTER outperforms ReFinED by up to +4.47%, with an average gain of +2.53% on 5 out of 6 datasets, and performs comparably to pipelines using LLM-based reasoning for all mentions, while being as twice as efficient in terms of the number of LLM tokens.

Interpretability is crucial for building safe, reliable, and controllable language models, yet existing interpretability pipelines remain costly and difficult to scale. Interpreting a new model typically requires costly training of model-specific sparse autoencoders, manual or semi-automated labeling of SAE components, and their subsequent validation. We introduce Atlas-Alignment, a framework for transferring interpretability across language models by aligning unknown latent spaces to a Concept Atlas - a labeled, human-interpretable latent space - using only shared inputs and lightweight representational alignment techniques. Once aligned, this enables two key capabilities in previously opaque models: (1) semantic feature search and retrieval, and (2) steering generation along human-interpretable atlas concepts. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we show that simple representational alignment methods enable robust semantic retrieval and steerable generation without the need for labeled concept data. Atlas-Alignment thus amortizes the cost of explainable AI and mechanistic interpretability: by investing in one high-quality Concept Atlas, we can make many new models transparent and controllable at minimal marginal cost.

Radio remains a pervasive medium for mass information dissemination, with AM/FM stations reaching more Americans than either smartphone-based social networking or live television. Increasingly, radio broadcasts are also streamed online and accessed over the Internet. We present WavePulse, a framework that records, documents, and analyzes radio content in real-time. While our framework is generally applicable, we showcase the efficacy of WavePulse in a collaborative project with a team of political scientists focusing on the 2024 Presidential Elections. We use WavePulse to monitor livestreams of 396 news radio stations over a period of three months, processing close to 500,000 hours of audio streams. These streams were converted into time-stamped, diarized transcripts and analyzed to track answer key political science questions at both the national and state levels. Our analysis revealed how local issues interacted with national trends, providing insights into information flow. Our results demonstrate WavePulse's efficacy in capturing and analyzing content from radio livestreams sourced from the Web. Code and dataset can be accessed at \url{https://wave-pulse.io}.

Despite the significant strides made by generative AI in just a few short years, its future progress is constrained by the challenge of building modular and robust systems. This capability has been a cornerstone of past technological revolutions, which relied on combining components to create increasingly sophisticated and reliable systems. Cars, airplanes, computers, and software consist of components-such as engines, wheels, CPUs, and libraries-that can be assembled, debugged, and replaced. A key tool for building such reliable and modular systems is specification: the precise description of the expected behavior, inputs, and outputs of each component. However, the generality of LLMs and the inherent ambiguity of natural language make defining specifications for LLM-based components (e.g., agents) both a challenging and urgent problem. In this paper, we discuss the progress the field has made so far-through advances like structured outputs, process supervision, and test-time compute-and outline several future directions for research to enable the development of modular and reliable LLM-based systems through improved specifications.

Augmenting LLMs with context leads to improved performance across many applications. Despite much research on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, an open question is whether errors arise because LLMs fail to utilize the context from retrieval or the context itself is insufficient to answer the query. To shed light on this, we develop a new notion of sufficient context, along with a way to classify instances that have enough information to answer the query. We then use sufficient context to analyze several models and datasets. By stratifying errors based on context sufficiency, we find that proprietary LLMs (Gemini, GPT, Claude) excel at answering queries when the context is sufficient, but often output incorrect answers instead of abstaining when the context is not. We further categorize cases when the context is useful, and improves accuracy, even though it does not fully answer the query and the model errs without the context. Building on our findings, we explore ways to reduce hallucinations in RAG systems, including a new selective generation method that leverages sufficient context information for guided abstention. Our method improves the fraction of correct answers among times where the model responds by 2-10% for Gemini, GPT, and Gemma. Providing Large Language Models (LLMs) with additional context, such as in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, has led to major improvements in LLM factuality and verifiability when adapting to new domains (Lewis et al., 2020). In the case of open-domain question answering, a retrieval model provides context at inference time in the form of snippets or long-form text (Zhu et al., 2021). Then, the model synthesizes the query along with this added context to generate the answer. The ideal outcome is for the LLM to output the correct answer if the provided context contains enough information to answer the question when combined with the model's parametric knowledge. Otherwise, the model should abstain from answering and/or ask for more information. One core challenge in achieving this ideal outcome is building models that can use the provided context only when it helps answer the question correctly. Several works have investigated this issue by evaluating models in the presence of irrelevant information in the context (discussed in Section 2). However, "relevant information" can range from directly containing the answer to simply being topically related Work done during an internship at Google. Work done during an internship at Google. Question: Who is Lya L. married to?

The sheer number of research outputs published every year makes systematic reviewing increasingly time- and resource-intensive. This paper explores the use of machine learning techniques to help navigate the systematic review process. ML has previously been used to reliably 'screen' articles for review - that is, identify relevant articles based on reviewers' inclusion criteria. The application of ML techniques to subsequent stages of a review, however, such as data extraction and evidence mapping, is in its infancy. We therefore set out to develop a series of tools that would assist in the profiling and analysis of 1,952 publications on the theme of 'outcomes-based contracting'. Tools were developed for the following tasks: assign publications into 'policy area' categories; identify and extract key information for evidence mapping, such as organisations, laws, and geographical information; connect the evidence base to an existing dataset on the same topic; and identify subgroups of articles that may share thematic content. An interactive tool using these techniques and a public dataset with their outputs have been released. Our results demonstrate the utility of ML techniques to enhance evidence accessibility and analysis within the systematic review processes. These efforts show promise in potentially yielding substantial efficiencies for future systematic reviewing and for broadening their analytical scope. Our work suggests that there may be implications for the ease with which policymakers and practitioners can access evidence. While ML techniques seem poised to play a significant role in bridging the gap between research and policy by offering innovative ways of gathering, accessing, and analysing data from systematic reviews, we also highlight their current limitations and the need to exercise caution in their application, particularly given the potential for errors and biases.

Large language models often necessitate grounding on external knowledge to generate faithful and reliable answers. Yet even with the correct groundings in the reference, they can ignore them and rely on wrong groundings or their inherent biases to hallucinate when users, being largely unaware of the specifics of the stored information, pose questions that might not directly correlate with the retrieved groundings. In this work, we formulate this knowledge alignment problem and introduce MixAlign, a framework that interacts with both the human user and the knowledge base to obtain and integrate clarifications on how the user question relates to the stored information. MixAlign employs a language model to achieve automatic knowledge alignment and, if necessary, further enhances this alignment through human user clarifications. Experimental results highlight the crucial role of knowledge alignment in boosting model performance and mitigating hallucination, with improvements noted up to 22.2% and 27.1% respectively. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of MixAlign in improving knowledge alignment by producing high-quality, user-centered clarifications.

This article presents a comprehensive overview of the digital twin technology and its capability levels, with a specific focus on its applications in the wind energy industry. It consolidates the definitions of digital twin and its capability levels on a scale from 0-5; 0-standalone, 1-descriptive, 2-diagnostic, 3-predictive, 4-prescriptive, 5-autonomous. It then, from an industrial perspective, identifies the current state of the art and research needs in the wind energy sector. The article proposes approaches to the identified challenges from the perspective of research institutes and offers a set of recommendations for diverse stakeholders to facilitate the acceptance of the technology. The contribution of this article lies in its synthesis of the current state of knowledge and its identification of future research needs and challenges from an industry perspective, ultimately providing a roadmap for future research and development in the field of digital twin and its applications in the wind energy industry.