Cross-lingual named entity recognition (CrossNER) faces challenges stemming from uneven performance due to the scarcity of multilingual corpora, especially for non-English data. While prior efforts mainly focus on data-driven transfer methods, a significant aspect that has not been fully explored is aligning both semantic and token-level representations across diverse languages. In this paper, we propose Multi-view Contrastive Learning for Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (mCL-NER). Specifically, we reframe the CrossNER task into a problem of recognizing relationships between pairs of tokens. This approach taps into the inherent contextual nuances of token-to-token connections within entities, allowing us to align representations across different languages. A multi-view contrastive learning framework is introduced to encompass semantic contrasts between source, codeswitched, and target sentences, as well as contrasts among token-to-token relations. By enforcing agreement within both semantic and relational spaces, we minimize the gap between source sentences and their counterparts of both codeswitched and target sentences. This alignment extends to the relationships between diverse tokens, enhancing the projection of entities across languages. We further augment CrossNER by combining self-training with labeled source data and unlabeled target data. Our experiments on the XTREME benchmark, spanning 40 languages, demonstrate the superiority of mCL-NER over prior data-driven and model-based approaches. It achieves a substantial increase of nearly +2.0 $F_1$ scores across a broad spectrum and establishes itself as the new state-of-the-art performer.

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as an appealing machine learning approach to deal with massive raw data generated at multiple mobile devices, {which needs to aggregate the training model parameter of every mobile device at one base station (BS) iteratively}. For parameter aggregating in FL, over-the-air computation is a spectrum-efficient solution, which allows all mobile devices to transmit their parameter-mapped signals concurrently to a BS. Due to heterogeneous channel fading and noise, there exists difference between the BS's received signal and its desired signal, measured as the mean-squared error (MSE). To minimize the MSE, we propose to jointly optimize the signal amplification factors at the BS and the mobile devices as well as the data size (the number of data samples involved in local training) at every mobile device. The formulated problem is challenging to solve due to its non-convexity. To find the optimal solution, with some simplification on cost function and variable replacement, which still preserves equivalence, we transform the changed problem to be a bi-level problem equivalently. For the lower-level problem, optimal solution is found by enumerating every candidate solution from the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) condition. For the upper-level problem, the optimal solution is found by exploring its piecewise convexity. Numerical results show that our proposed method can greatly reduce the MSE and can help to improve the training performance of FL compared with benchmark methods.

The role of a Dungeon Master, or DM, in the game Dungeons & Dragons is to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. The DM must digest information about the game setting and monsters, synthesize scenes to present to other players, and respond to the players' interactions with the scene. Doing all of these tasks while maintaining consistency within the narrative and story world is no small feat of human cognition, making the task tiring and unapproachable to new players. Large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and ChatGPT have shown remarkable abilities to generate coherent natural language text. In this paper, we conduct a formative evaluation with DMs to establish the use cases of LLMs in D&D and tabletop gaming generally. We introduce CALYPSO, a system of LLM-powered interfaces that support DMs with information and inspiration specific to their own scenario. CALYPSO distills game context into bite-sized prose and helps brainstorm ideas without distracting the DM from the game. When given access to CALYPSO, DMs reported that it generated high-fidelity text suitable for direct presentation to players, and low-fidelity ideas that the DM could develop further while maintaining their creative agency. We see CALYPSO as exemplifying a paradigm of AI-augmented tools that provide synchronous creative assistance within established game worlds, and tabletop gaming more broadly.

Our test sets were too small and too haphazard to support statistically valid conclusions, but they were suggestive of a number of conclusions. We summarize these here, and discuss them at greater length in section 7. Over the kinds of problems tested, GPT-4 with either plug-in is significantly stronger than GPT-4 by itself, or, almost certainly, than any AI that existed a year ago. However it is still far from reliable; it often outputs a wrong answer or fails to output any answer. In terms of overall score, we would judge that these systems performs on the level of a middling undergraduate student. However, their capacities and weaknesses do not align with a human student; the systems solve some problems that even capable students would find challenging, whereas they fail on some problems that even middling high school students would find easy.

We study the problem of Query Performance Prediction (QPP) for open-domain multi-hop Question Answering (QA), where the task is to estimate the difficulty of evaluating a multi-hop question over a corpus. Despite the extensive research on predicting the performance of ad-hoc and QA retrieval models, there has been a lack of study on the estimation of the difficulty of multi-hop questions. The problem is challenging due to the multi-step nature of the retrieval process, potential dependency of the steps and the reasoning involved. To tackle this challenge, we propose multHP, a novel pre-retrieval method for predicting the performance of open-domain multi-hop questions. Our extensive evaluation on the largest multi-hop QA dataset using several modern QA systems shows that the proposed model is a strong predictor of the performance, outperforming traditional single-hop QPP models. Additionally, we demonstrate that our approach can be effectively used to optimize the parameters of QA systems, such as the number of documents to be retrieved, resulting in improved overall retrieval performance.

Multitask learning is a powerful framework that enables one to simultaneously learn multiple related tasks by sharing information between them. Quantifying uncertainty in the estimated tasks is of pivotal importance for many downstream applications, such as online or active learning. In this work, we provide novel multitask confidence intervals in the challenging agnostic setting, i.e., when neither the similarity between tasks nor the tasks' features are available to the learner. The obtained intervals do not require i.i.d. data and can be directly applied to bound the regret in online learning. Through a refined analysis of the multitask information gain, we obtain new regret guarantees that, depending on a task similarity parameter, can significantly improve over treating tasks independently. We further propose a novel online learning algorithm that achieves such improved regret without knowing this parameter in advance, i.e., automatically adapting to task similarity. As a second key application of our results, we introduce a novel multitask active learning setup where several tasks must be simultaneously optimized, but only one of them can be queried for feedback by the learner at each round. For this problem, we design a no-regret algorithm that uses our confidence intervals to decide which task should be queried. Finally, we empirically validate our bounds and algorithms on synthetic and real-world (drug discovery) data.

We propose the LLMs4OL approach, which utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) for Ontology Learning (OL). LLMs have shown significant advancements in natural language processing, demonstrating their ability to capture complex language patterns in different knowledge domains. Our LLMs4OL paradigm investigates the following hypothesis: \textit{Can LLMs effectively apply their language pattern capturing capability to OL, which involves automatically extracting and structuring knowledge from natural language text?} To test this hypothesis, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation using the zero-shot prompting method. We evaluate nine different LLM model families for three main OL tasks: term typing, taxonomy discovery, and extraction of non-taxonomic relations. Additionally, the evaluations encompass diverse genres of ontological knowledge, including lexicosemantic knowledge in WordNet, geographical knowledge in GeoNames, and medical knowledge in UMLS.

IceCube DeepCore is an extension of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory designed to measure GeV scale atmospheric neutrino interactions for the purpose of neutrino oscillation studies. Distinguishing muon neutrinos from other flavors and reconstructing inelasticity are especially difficult tasks at GeV scale energies in IceCube DeepCore due to sparse instrumentation. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been found to have better success at neutrino event reconstruction than conventional likelihood-based methods. In this contribution, we present a new CNN model that exploits time and depth translational symmetry in IceCube DeepCore data and present the model's performance, specifically for flavor identification and inelasticity reconstruction.

Synthetic data is essential for assessing clustering techniques, complementing and extending real data, and allowing for more complete coverage of a given problem's space. In turn, synthetic data generators have the potential of creating vast amounts of data -- a crucial activity when real-world data is at premium -- while providing a well-understood generation procedure and an interpretable instrument for methodically investigating cluster analysis algorithms. Here, we present Clugen, a modular procedure for synthetic data generation, capable of creating multidimensional clusters supported by line segments using arbitrary distributions. Clugen is open source, comprehensively unit tested and documented, and is available for the Python, R, Julia, and MATLAB/Octave ecosystems. We demonstrate that our proposal can produce rich and varied results in various dimensions, is fit for use in the assessment of clustering algorithms, and has the potential to be a widely used framework in diverse clustering-related research tasks.

The IceCube South Pole Neutrino Observatory is a Cherenkov detector instrumented in a cubic kilometer of ice at the South Pole. IceCube's primary scientific goal is the detection of TeV neutrino emissions from astrophysical sources. At the lower center of the IceCube array, there is a subdetector called DeepCore, which has a denser configuration that makes it possible to lower the energy threshold of IceCube and observe GeV-scale neutrinos, opening the window to atmospheric neutrino oscillations studies. Advances in physics sensitivity have recently been achieved by employing Convolutional Neural Networks to reconstruct neutrino interactions in the DeepCore detector. In this contribution, the recent IceCube result from the atmospheric muon neutrino disappearance analysis using the CNN-reconstructed neutrino sample is presented and compared to the existing worldwide measurements.