The task of Information Retrieval (IR) requires a system to identify relevant documents based on users' information needs. In real-world scenarios, retrievers are expected to not only rely on the semantic relevance between the documents and the queries but also recognize the nuanced intents or perspectives behind a user query. For example, when asked to verify a claim, a retrieval system is expected to identify evidence from both supporting vs. contradicting perspectives, for the downstream system to make a fair judgment call. In this work, we study whether retrievers can recognize and respond to different perspectives of the queries -- beyond finding relevant documents for a claim, can retrievers distinguish supporting vs. opposing documents? We reform and extend six existing tasks to create a benchmark for retrieval, where we have diverse perspectives described in free-form text, besides root, neutral queries. We show that current retrievers covered in our experiments have limited awareness of subtly different perspectives in queries and can also be biased toward certain perspectives. Motivated by the observation, we further explore the potential to leverage geometric features of retriever representation space to improve the perspective awareness of retrievers in a zero-shot manner. We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our projection-based methods on the same set of tasks. Further analysis also shows how perspective awareness improves performance on various downstream tasks, with 4.2% higher accuracy on AmbigQA and 29.9% more correlation with designated viewpoints on essay writing, compared to non-perspective-aware baselines.

Autonomous robots for gathering information on objects of interest has numerous real-world applications because of they improve efficiency, performance and safety. Realizing autonomy demands online planning algorithms to solve sequential decision making problems under uncertainty; because, objects of interest are often dynamic, object state, such as location is not directly observable and are obtained from noisy measurements. Such planning problems are notoriously difficult due to the combinatorial nature of predicting the future to make optimal decisions. For information theoretic planning algorithms, we develop a computationally efficient and effective approximation for the difficult problem of predicting the likely sensor measurements from uncertain belief states}. The approach more accurately predicts information gain from information gathering actions. Our theoretical analysis proves the proposed formulation achieves a lower prediction error than the current efficient-method. We demonstrate improved performance gains in radio-source tracking and localization problems using extensive simulated and field experiments with a multirotor aerial robot.

The vast collection of Holocaust survivor testimonies presents invaluable historical insights but poses challenges for manual analysis. This paper leverages advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to explore the USC Shoah Foundation Holocaust testimony corpus. By treating testimonies as structured question-and-answer sections, we apply topic modeling to identify key themes. We experiment with BERTopic, which leverages recent advances in language modeling technology. We align testimony sections into fixed parts, revealing the evolution of topics across the corpus of testimonies. This highlights both a common narrative schema and divergences between subgroups based on age and gender. We introduce a novel method to identify testimonies within groups that exhibit atypical topic distributions resembling those of other groups. This study offers unique insights into the complex narratives of Holocaust survivors, demonstrating the power of NLP to illuminate historical discourse and identify potential deviations in survivor experiences.

In this study, we address one of the challenges of developing NER models for scholarly domains, namely the scarcity of suitable labeled data. We experiment with an approach using predictions from a fine-tuned LLM model to aid non-domain experts in annotating scientific entities within astronomy literature, with the goal of uncovering whether such a collaborative process can approximate domain expertise. Our results reveal moderate agreement between a domain expert and the LLM-assisted non-experts, as well as fair agreement between the domain expert and the LLM model's predictions. In an additional experiment, we compare the performance of finetuned and default LLMs on this task. We have also introduced a specialized scientific entity annotation scheme for astronomy, validated by a domain expert. Our approach adopts a scholarly research contribution-centric perspective, focusing exclusively on scientific entities relevant to the research theme. The resultant dataset, containing 5,000 annotated astronomy article titles, is made publicly available.

Molecular property prediction is a key component of AI-driven drug discovery and molecular characterization learning. Despite recent advances, existing methods still face challenges such as limited ability to generalize, and inadequate representation of learning from unlabeled data, especially for tasks specific to molecular structures. To address these limitations, we introduce DIG-Mol, a novel self-supervised graph neural network framework for molecular property prediction. This architecture leverages the power of contrast learning with dual interaction mechanisms and unique molecular graph enhancement strategies. DIG-Mol integrates a momentum distillation network with two interconnected networks to efficiently improve molecular characterization. The framework's ability to extract key information about molecular structure and higher-order semantics is supported by minimizing loss of contrast. We have established DIG-Mol's state-of-the-art performance through extensive experimental evaluation in a variety of molecular property prediction tasks. In addition to demonstrating superior transferability in a small number of learning scenarios, our visualizations highlight DIG-Mol's enhanced interpretability and representation capabilities. These findings confirm the effectiveness of our approach in overcoming challenges faced by traditional methods and mark a significant advance in molecular property prediction.

England women's head coach Jon Lewis says he is using artificial intelligence to help with marginal selection decisions. Lewis, who has named his squad for the two white-ball series against Pakistan later this month, says the use of technology in team selection is something which started in franchise cricket but is becoming increasingly common in the international game. The technology which England use runs match simulations - about 250,000 per team - to try to work out how line-ups might fare against each other. However, Lewis said he still uses a "people-first approach" to squad selection, with data playing a supportive role. "What data can do is give you a really objective view of what could happen and what has happened previously. I think it will help with borderline decisions in terms of selection and match-ups. "I suppose there's one selection particularly last year, one period of the Ashes, that we targeted as a team.

We apply multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (RL) to train end-to-end robot soccer policies with fully onboard computation and sensing via egocentric RGB vision. This setting reflects many challenges of real-world robotics, including active perception, agile full-body control, and long-horizon planning in a dynamic, partially-observable, multi-agent domain. We rely on large-scale, simulation-based data generation to obtain complex behaviors from egocentric vision which can be successfully transferred to physical robots using low-cost sensors. To achieve adequate visual realism, our simulation combines rigid-body physics with learned, realistic rendering via multiple Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). We combine teacher-based multi-agent RL and cross-experiment data reuse to enable the discovery of sophisticated soccer strategies. We analyze active-perception behaviors including object tracking and ball seeking that emerge when simply optimizing perception-agnostic soccer play. The agents display equivalent levels of performance and agility as policies with access to privileged, ground-truth state. To our knowledge, this paper constitutes a first demonstration of end-to-end training for multi-agent robot soccer, mapping raw pixel observations to joint-level actions, that can be deployed in the real world. Videos of the game-play and analyses can be seen on our website https://sites.google.com/view/vision-soccer .

Predicting the minimum operating voltage ($V_{min}$) of chips is one of the important techniques for improving the manufacturing testing flow, as well as ensuring the long-term reliability and safety of in-field systems. Current $V_{min}$ prediction methods often provide only point estimates, necessitating additional techniques for constructing prediction confidence intervals to cover uncertainties caused by different sources of variations. While some existing techniques offer region predictions, but they rely on certain distributional assumptions and/or provide no coverage guarantees. In response to these limitations, we propose a novel distribution-free $V_{min}$ interval estimation methodology possessing a theoretical guarantee of coverage. Our approach leverages conformalized quantile regression and on-chip monitors to generate reliable prediction intervals. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on an industrial 5nm automotive chip dataset. Moreover, we show that the use of on-chip monitors can reduce the interval length significantly for $V_{min}$ prediction.

Healthcare monitoring is crucial, especially for the daily care of elderly individuals living alone. It can detect dangerous occurrences, such as falls, and provide timely alerts to save lives. Non-invasive millimeter wave (mmWave) radar-based healthcare monitoring systems using advanced human activity recognition (HAR) models have recently gained significant attention. However, they encounter challenges in handling sparse point clouds, achieving real-time continuous classification, and coping with limited monitoring ranges when statically mounted. To overcome these limitations, we propose RobHAR, a movable robot-mounted mmWave radar system with lightweight deep neural networks for real-time monitoring of human activities. Specifically, we first propose a sparse point cloud-based global embedding to learn the features of point clouds using the light-PointNet (LPN) backbone. Then, we learn the temporal pattern with a bidirectional lightweight LSTM model (BiLiLSTM). In addition, we implement a transition optimization strategy, integrating the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) to improve the accuracy and robustness of the continuous HAR. Our experiments on three datasets indicate that our method significantly outperforms the previous studies in both discrete and continuous HAR tasks. Finally, we deploy our system on a movable robot-mounted edge computing platform, achieving flexible healthcare monitoring in real-world scenarios.

Explainable Recommender Systems is an important field of study which provides reasons behind the suggested recommendations. Explanations with recommender systems are useful for developers while debugging anomalies within the system and for consumers while interpreting the model's effectiveness in capturing their true preferences towards items. However, most of the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) explainable recommenders could not retain their explanation capability under noisy circumstances and moreover are not generalizable across different datasets. The robustness of the explanations must be ensured so that certain malicious attackers do not manipulate any high-stake decision scenarios to their advantage, which could cause severe consequences affecting large groups of interest. In this work, we present a general framework for feature-aware explainable recommenders that can withstand external attacks and provide robust and generalized explanations. This paper presents a novel framework which could be utilized as an additional defense tool, preserving the global explainability when subject to model-based white box attacks. Our framework is simple to implement and supports different methods regardless of the internal model structure and intrinsic utility within any model. We experimented our framework on two architecturally different feature-based SOTA explainable algorithms by training them on three popular e-commerce datasets of increasing scales. We noticed that both the algorithms displayed an overall improvement in the quality and robustness of the global explainability under normal as well as noisy environments across all the datasets, indicating the flexibility and mutability of our framework.