Oceania
MST5 -- Multilingual Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs
Srivastava, Nikit, Ma, Mengshi, Vollmers, Daniel, Zahera, Hamada, Moussallem, Diego, Ngomo, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga
Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) simplifies querying vast amounts of knowledge stored in a graph-based model using natural language. However, the research has largely concentrated on English, putting non-English speakers at a disadvantage. Meanwhile, existing multilingual KGQA systems face challenges in achieving performance comparable to English systems, highlighting the difficulty of generating SPARQL queries from diverse languages. In this research, we propose a simplified approach to enhance multilingual KGQA systems by incorporating linguistic context and entity information directly into the processing pipeline of a language model. Unlike existing methods that rely on separate encoders for integrating auxiliary information, our strategy leverages a single, pretrained multilingual transformer-based language model to manage both the primary input and the auxiliary data. Our methodology significantly improves the language model's ability to accurately convert a natural language query into a relevant SPARQL query. It demonstrates promising results on the most recent QALD datasets, namely QALD-9-Plus and QALD-10. Furthermore, we introduce and evaluate our approach on Chinese and Japanese, thereby expanding the language diversity of the existing datasets.
A Review of Differentiable Simulators
Newbury, Rhys, Collins, Jack, He, Kerry, Pan, Jiahe, Posner, Ingmar, Howard, David, Cosgun, Akansel
Differentiable simulators continue to push the state of the art across a range of domains including computational physics, robotics, and machine learning. Their main value is the ability to compute gradients of physical processes, which allows differentiable simulators to be readily integrated into commonly employed gradient-based optimization schemes. To achieve this, a number of design decisions need to be considered representing trade-offs in versatility, computational speed, and accuracy of the gradients obtained. This paper presents an in-depth review of the evolving landscape of differentiable physics simulators. We introduce the foundations and core components of differentiable simulators alongside common design choices. This is followed by a practical guide and overview of open-source differentiable simulators that have been used across past research. Finally, we review and contextualize prominent applications of differentiable simulation. By offering a comprehensive review of the current state-of-the-art in differentiable simulation, this work aims to serve as a resource for researchers and practitioners looking to understand and integrate differentiable physics within their research. We conclude by highlighting current limitations as well as providing insights into future directions for the field.
Replication in Visual Diffusion Models: A Survey and Outlook
Wang, Wenhao, Sun, Yifan, Yang, Zongxin, Hu, Zhengdong, Tan, Zhentao, Yang, Yi
Abstract--Visual diffusion models have revolutionized the field of creative AI, producing high-quality and diverse content. However, they inevitably memorize training images or videos, subsequently replicating their concepts, content, or styles during inference. In this survey, we provide the first comprehensive review of replication in visual diffusion models, marking a novel contribution to the field by systematically categorizing the existing studies into unveiling, understanding, and mitigating this phenomenon. Specifically, unveiling mainly refers to the methods used to detect replication instances. Understanding involves analyzing the underlying mechanisms and factors that contribute to this phenomenon. Mitigation focuses on developing strategies to reduce or eliminate replication. Beyond these aspects, we also review papers focusing on its real-world influence. For instance, in the context of healthcare, replication is critically worrying due to privacy concerns related to patient data. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of the ongoing challenges, such as the difficulty in detecting and benchmarking replication, and outlines future directions including the development of more robust mitigation techniques. By synthesizing insights from diverse studies, this paper aims to equip researchers and practitioners with a deeper understanding at the intersection between AI technology and social good. Compared to traditional Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) [3] and Variational Autoencoders (VAE) [4], visual diffusion models excel in producing high-quality, diverse, and stable images.
Edge Graph Intelligence: Reciprocally Empowering Edge Networks with Graph Intelligence
Zeng, Liekang, Ye, Shengyuan, Chen, Xu, Zhang, Xiaoxi, Ren, Ju, Tang, Jian, Yang, Yang, Xuemin, null, Shen, null
Recent years have witnessed a thriving growth of computing facilities connected at the network edge, cultivating edge computing networks as a fundamental infrastructure for supporting miscellaneous intelligent services. Meanwhile, Artificial Intelligence frontiers have extrapolated Machine Learning to the graph domain and promoted Graph Intelligence (GI), which unlocks unprecedented ability in learning from massive data in graph structures. Given the inherent relation between graphs and networks, the interdiscipline of graph representation learning and edge networks, i.e., Edge GI or EGI, has revealed a novel interplay between them -- GI models principally open a new door for modeling, understanding, and optimizing edge networks, and conversely, edge networks serve as physical support for training, deploying, and accelerating GI models. Driven by this delicate closed-loop, EGI can be widely recognized as a promising solution to fully unleash the potential of edge computing power and is garnering significant attention. Nevertheless, research on EGI yet remains nascent, and there is a soaring demand within both the communications and AI communities for a dedicated venue to share recent advancements. To this end, this paper promotes the concept of EGI, explores its scope and core principles, and conducts a comprehensive survey concerning recent research efforts on this emerging field and specifically, introduces and discusses: 1) fundamentals of edge computing and graph representation learning, 2) emerging techniques centering on the closed loop between graph intelligence and edge networks, and 3) open challenges and research opportunities of future EGI. By bridging the gap across communication, networking, and graph learning areas, we believe that this survey can garner increased attention, foster meaningful discussions, and inspire further research ideas in EGI.
A Review of AI and Machine Learning Contribution in Predictive Business Process Management (Process Enhancement and Process Improvement Approaches)
Abbasi, Mostafa, Nishat, Rahnuma Islam, Bond, Corey, Graham-Knight, John Brandon, Lasserre, Patricia, Lucet, Yves, Najjaran, Homayoun
Purpose- The significance of business processes has fostered a close collaboration between academia and industry. Moreover, the business landscape has witnessed continuous transformation, closely intertwined with technological advancements. Our main goal is to offer researchers and process analysts insights into the latest developments concerning Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to optimize their processes in an organization and identify research gaps and future directions in the field. Design/methodology/approach- In this study, we perform a systematic review of academic literature to investigate the integration of AI/ML in business process management (BPM). We categorize the literature according to the BPM life-cycle and employ bibliometric and objective-oriented methodology, to analyze related papers. Findings- In business process management and process map, AI/ML has made significant improvements using operational data on process metrics. These developments involve two distinct stages: (1) process enhancement, which emphasizes analyzing process information and adding descriptions to process models, and (2) process improvement, which focuses on redesigning processes based on insights derived from analysis. Research limitations/implications- While this review paper serves to provide an overview of different approaches for addressing process-related challenges, it does not delve deeply into the intricacies of fine-grained technical details of each method. This work focuses on recent papers conducted between 2010 and 2024. Originality/value- This paper adopts a pioneering approach by conducting an extensive examination of the integration of AI/ML techniques across the entire process management lifecycle. Additionally, it presents groundbreaking research and introduces AI/ML-enabled integrated tools, further enhancing the insights for future research.
Synthetic Participatory Planning of Shard Automated Electric Mobility Systems
Mobility systems worldwide confront escalating challenges--aging infrastructure, increasing environmental impacts from transportation emissions, and widening service provision gaps that exacerbate social inequalities. Addressing these challenges demands smart and adaptive planning strategies to effectively leverage both mature and emerging technologies--including autonomous driving, vehicle electrification, low-latency communication, and Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) platforms. Shared Automated Electric Mobility Systems (SAEMS), exemplified by demand-responsive autonomous transit and passenger car services, autonomous electric micro-mobility systems, and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) delivery services, present a conceptual framework for integrating and leveraging these existing and promising technologies and addressing the escalating challenges. However, the full advantages and potential side effects of SAEMS often remain uncertain due to environmental, technological, and socioeconomic factors. This ambiguity underscores the importance of integrating a broad spectrum of domain knowledge and perspectives--ranging from land use zoning to charging infrastructure engineering, and from local business operations to residents' daily experiences-- into coherent planning processes.
Artificial intelligence, rationalization, and the limits of control in the public sector: the case of tax policy optimization
Mokander, Jakob, Schroeder, Ralph
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the public sector is best understood as a continuation and intensification of long standing rationalization and bureaucratization processes. Drawing on Weber, we take the core of these processes to be the replacement of traditions with instrumental rationality, i.e., the most calculable and efficient way of achieving any given policy objective. In this article, we demonstrate how much of the criticisms, both among the public and in scholarship, directed towards AI systems spring from well known tensions at the heart of Weberian rationalization. To illustrate this point, we introduce a thought experiment whereby AI systems are used to optimize tax policy to advance a specific normative end, reducing economic inequality. Our analysis shows that building a machine-like tax system that promotes social and economic equality is possible. However, it also highlights that AI driven policy optimization (i) comes at the exclusion of other competing political values, (ii) overrides citizens sense of their noninstrumental obligations to each other, and (iii) undermines the notion of humans as self-determining beings. Contemporary scholarship and advocacy directed towards ensuring that AI systems are legal, ethical, and safe build on and reinforce central assumptions that underpin the process of rationalization, including the modern idea that science can sweep away oppressive systems and replace them with a rule of reason that would rescue humans from moral injustices. That is overly optimistic. Science can only provide the means, they cannot dictate the ends. Nonetheless, the use of AI in the public sector can also benefit the institutions and processes of liberal democracies. Most importantly, AI driven policy optimization demands that normative ends are made explicit and formalized, thereby subjecting them to public scrutiny and debate.
LLMBox: A Comprehensive Library for Large Language Models
Tang, Tianyi, Hu, Yiwen, Li, Bingqian, Luo, Wenyang, Qin, Zijing, Sun, Haoxiang, Wang, Jiapeng, Xu, Shiyi, Cheng, Xiaoxue, Guo, Geyang, Peng, Han, Zheng, Bowen, Tang, Yiru, Min, Yingqian, Chen, Yushuo, Chen, Jie, Zhao, Yuanqian, Ding, Luran, Wang, Yuhao, Dong, Zican, Xia, Chunxuan, Li, Junyi, Zhou, Kun, Zhao, Wayne Xin, Wen, Ji-Rong
To facilitate the research on large language models (LLMs), this paper presents a comprehensive and unified library, LLMBox, to ease the development, use, and evaluation of LLMs. This library is featured with three main merits: (1) a unified data interface that supports the flexible implementation of various training strategies, (2) a comprehensive evaluation that covers extensive tasks, datasets, and models, and (3) more practical consideration, especially on user-friendliness and efficiency. With our library, users can easily reproduce existing methods, train new models, and conduct comprehensive performance comparisons. To rigorously test LLMBox, we conduct extensive experiments in a diverse coverage of evaluation settings, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our library in supporting various implementations related to LLMs. The detailed introduction and usage guidance can be found at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LLMBox.
How Effective are State Space Models for Machine Translation?
Pitorro, Hugo, Vasylenko, Pavlo, Treviso, Marcos, Martins, André F. T.
Transformers are the current architecture of choice for NLP, but their attention layers do not scale well to long contexts. Recent works propose to replace attention with linear recurrent layers -- this is the case for state space models, which enjoy efficient training and inference. However, it remains unclear whether these models are competitive with transformers in machine translation (MT). In this paper, we provide a rigorous and comprehensive experimental comparison between transformers and linear recurrent models for MT. Concretely, we experiment with RetNet, Mamba, and hybrid versions of Mamba which incorporate attention mechanisms. Our findings demonstrate that Mamba is highly competitive with transformers on sentence and paragraph-level datasets, where in the latter both models benefit from shifting the training distribution towards longer sequences. Further analysis show that integrating attention into Mamba improves translation quality, robustness to sequence length extrapolation, and the ability to recall named entities.
DSLR: Document Refinement with Sentence-Level Re-ranking and Reconstruction to Enhance Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Hwang, Taeho, Jeong, Soyeong, Cho, Sukmin, Han, SeungYoon, Park, Jong C.
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved their performance across various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, LLMs still struggle with generating non-factual responses due to limitations in their parametric memory. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems address this issue by incorporating external knowledge with a retrieval module. Despite their successes, however, current RAG systems face challenges with retrieval failures and the limited ability of LLMs to filter out irrelevant information. Therefore, in this work, we propose DSLR (Document Refinement with Sentence-Level Re-ranking and Reconstruction), an unsupervised framework that decomposes retrieved documents into sentences, filters out irrelevant sentences, and reconstructs them again into coherent passages. We experimentally validate DSLR on multiple open-domain QA datasets and the results demonstrate that DSLR significantly enhances the RAG performance over conventional fixed-size passage. Furthermore, our DSLR enhances performance in specific, yet realistic scenarios without the need for additional training, providing an effective and efficient solution for refining retrieved documents in RAG systems.