Mortgages account for the largest portion of household debt in the United States, totaling around \$12 trillion nationwide. In times of financial hardship, alleviating mortgage burdens is essential for supporting affected households. The mortgage servicing industry plays a vital role in offering this assistance, yet there has been limited research modelling the complex relationship between households and servicers. To bridge this gap, we developed an agent-based model that explores household behavior and the effectiveness of relief measures during financial distress. Our model represents households as adaptive learning agents with realistic financial attributes. These households experience exogenous income shocks, which may influence their ability to make mortgage payments. Mortgage servicers provide relief options to these households, who then choose the most suitable relief based on their unique financial circumstances and individual preferences. We analyze the impact of various external shocks and the success of different mortgage relief strategies on specific borrower subgroups. Through this analysis, we show that our model can not only replicate real-world mortgage studies but also act as a tool for conducting a broad range of what-if scenario analyses. Our approach offers fine-grained insights that can inform the development of more effective and inclusive mortgage relief solutions.

Traditional deep learning often overlooks bytes, the basic units of the digital world, where all forms of information and operations are encoded and manipulated in binary format. Inspired by the success of next token prediction in natural language processing, we introduce bGPT, a model with next byte prediction to simulate the digital world. bGPT matches specialized models in performance across various modalities, including text, audio, and images, and offers new possibilities for predicting, simulating, and diagnosing algorithm or hardware behaviour. It has almost flawlessly replicated the process of converting symbolic music data, achieving a low error rate of 0.0011 bits per byte in converting ABC notation to MIDI format. In addition, bGPT demonstrates exceptional capabilities in simulating CPU behaviour, with an accuracy exceeding 99.99% in executing various operations. Leveraging next byte prediction, models like bGPT can directly learn from vast binary data, effectively simulating the intricate patterns of the digital world.

Open-set graph learning is a practical task that aims to classify the known class nodes and to identify unknown class samples as unknowns. Conventional node classification methods usually perform unsatisfactorily in open-set scenarios due to the complex data they encounter, such as out-of-distribution (OOD) data and in-distribution (IND) noise. OOD data are samples that do not belong to any known classes. They are outliers if they occur in training (OOD noise), and open-set samples if they occur in testing. IND noise are training samples which are assigned incorrect labels. The existence of IND noise and OOD noise is prevalent, which usually cause the ambiguity problem, including the intra-class variety problem and the inter-class confusion problem. Thus, to explore robust open-set learning methods is necessary and difficult, and it becomes even more difficult for non-IID graph data.To this end, we propose a unified framework named ROG$_{PL}$ to achieve robust open-set learning on complex noisy graph data, by introducing prototype learning. In specific, ROG$_{PL}$ consists of two modules, i.e., denoising via label propagation and open-set prototype learning via regions. The first module corrects noisy labels through similarity-based label propagation and removes low-confidence samples, to solve the intra-class variety problem caused by noise. The second module learns open-set prototypes for each known class via non-overlapped regions and remains both interior and border prototypes to remedy the inter-class confusion problem.The two modules are iteratively updated under the constraints of classification loss and prototype diversity loss. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed ROG$_{PL}$ is the first robust open-set node classification method for graph data with complex noise.

In many generation tasks, the data involved often exhibit inherent "structures" that result in their distributions remaining invariant - or the mappings between them being equivariant - under a set of transformations. For example, it is commonly assumed that the distribution of photographic images remains invariant under horizontal flipping. In tasks such as image denoising or inpainting, where the orientation of an image is not provided, it is natural to require the denoised or inpainted image to retain the same orientation as the input. Namely, the denoising or inpainting processes should exhibit equivariance under rotations and flipping. Importantly, in certain critical applications, these properties are not merely desired but should be theoretically guaranteed to ensure consistency of the given model outputs or to prevent the introduction of additional biases or errors. A prime example can be found in the field of medical imaging analysis, where X-ray images are used to achieve diagnostic results. However, obtaining high-resolution X-ray scans often requires subjecting patients to higher doses of radiation, which presents a risk to patient safety (Goldman 2007; Huda 2002). Consequently, in order to improve patient safety, noise reduction techniques are critical to the use of lower resolution X-ray images by preserving image quality (Siemund et al. 2012).

In today's digital age, characterized by rapid news consumption and increasing vulnerability to propaganda, fostering citizens' critical thinking is crucial for stable democracies. This paper introduces the design of ClarifAI, a novel automated propaganda detection tool designed to nudge readers towards more critical news consumption by activating the analytical mode of thinking, following Kahneman's dual-system theory of cognition. Using Large Language Models, ClarifAI detects propaganda in news articles and provides context-rich explanations, enhancing users' understanding and critical thinking. Our contribution is threefold: first, we propose the design of ClarifAI; second, in an online experiment, we demonstrate that this design effectively encourages news readers to engage in more critical reading; and third, we emphasize the value of explanations for fostering critical thinking. The study thus offers both a practical tool and useful design knowledge for mitigating propaganda in digital news.

Comprehensive summaries of sessions enable an effective continuity in mental health counseling, facilitating informed therapy planning. Yet, manual summarization presents a significant challenge, diverting experts' attention from the core counseling process. This study evaluates the effectiveness of state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) in selectively summarizing various components of therapy sessions through aspect-based summarization, aiming to benchmark their performance. We introduce MentalCLOUDS, a counseling-component guided summarization dataset consisting of 191 counseling sessions with summaries focused on three distinct counseling components (aka counseling aspects). Additionally, we assess the capabilities of 11 state-of-the-art LLMs in addressing the task of component-guided summarization in counseling. The generated summaries are evaluated quantitatively using standard summarization metrics and verified qualitatively by mental health professionals. Our findings demonstrate the superior performance of task-specific LLMs such as MentalLlama, Mistral, and MentalBART in terms of standard quantitative metrics such as Rouge-1, Rouge-2, Rouge-L, and BERTScore across all aspects of counseling components. Further, expert evaluation reveals that Mistral supersedes both MentalLlama and MentalBART based on six parameters -- affective attitude, burden, ethicality, coherence, opportunity costs, and perceived effectiveness. However, these models share the same weakness by demonstrating a potential for improvement in the opportunity costs and perceived effectiveness metrics.

In this paper, we develop upon the topic of loss function learning, an emergent meta-learning paradigm that aims to learn loss functions that significantly improve the performance of the models trained under them. Specifically, we propose a new meta-learning framework for task and model-agnostic loss function learning via a hybrid search approach. The framework first uses genetic programming to find a set of symbolic loss functions. Second, the set of learned loss functions is subsequently parameterized and optimized via unrolled differentiation. The versatility and performance of the proposed framework are empirically validated on a diverse set of supervised learning tasks. Results show that the learned loss functions bring improved convergence, sample efficiency, and inference performance on tabulated, computer vision, and natural language processing problems, using a variety of task-specific neural network architectures.

With the increasing prevalence and diversity of robots interacting in the real world, there is need for flexible, on-the-fly planning and cooperation. Large Language Models are starting to be explored in a multimodal setup for communication, coordination, and planning in robotics. Existing approaches generally use a single agent building a plan, or have multiple homogeneous agents coordinating for a simple task. We present a decentralised, dialogical approach in which a team of agents with different abilities plans solutions through peer-to-peer and human-robot discussion. We suggest that argument-style dialogues are an effective way to facilitate adaptive use of each agent's abilities within a cooperative team. Two robots discuss how to solve a cleaning problem set by a human, define roles, and agree on paths they each take. Each step can be interrupted by a human advisor and agents check their plans with the human. Agents then execute this plan in the real world, collecting rubbish from people in each room. Our implementation uses text at every step, maintaining transparency and effective human-multi-robot interaction.

Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the performance of Vision and Language tasks. Foundational Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have been leveraged in multiple settings and demonstrated remarkable performance across several tasks. Such models excel at object-centric recognition yet learn text representations that seem invariant to word order, failing to compose known concepts in novel ways. However, no evidence exists that any VLM, including large-scale single-stream models such as GPT-4V, identifies compositions successfully. In this paper, we introduce a framework to significantly improve the ability of existing models to encode compositional language, with over 10% absolute improvement on compositionality benchmarks, while maintaining or improving the performance on standard object-recognition and retrieval benchmarks. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/netflix/clove.

The battery energy storage system (BESS) has immense potential for enhancing grid reliability and security through its participation in the electricity market. BESS often seeks various revenue streams by taking part in multiple markets to unlock its full potential, but effective algorithms for joint-market participation under price uncertainties are insufficiently explored in the existing research. To bridge this gap, we develop a novel BESS joint bidding strategy that utilizes deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to bid in the spot and contingency frequency control ancillary services (FCAS) markets. Our approach leverages a transformer-based temporal feature extractor to effectively respond to price fluctuations in seven markets simultaneously and helps DRL learn the best BESS bidding strategy in joint-market participation. Additionally, unlike conventional "black-box" DRL model, our approach is more interpretable and provides valuable insights into the temporal bidding behavior of BESS in the dynamic electricity market. We validate our method using realistic market prices from the Australian National Electricity Market. The results show that our strategy outperforms benchmarks, including both optimization-based and other DRL-based strategies, by substantial margins. Our findings further suggest that effective temporal-aware bidding can significantly increase profits in the spot and contingency FCAS markets compared to individual market participation.