The mainstream media has much leeway in what it chooses to cover and how it covers it. These choices have real-world consequences on what people know and their subsequent behaviors. However, the lack of objective measures to evaluate editorial choices makes research in this area particularly difficult. In this paper, we argue that there are newsworthy topics where objective measures exist in the form of supporting data and propose a computational framework to analyze editorial choices in this setup. We focus on the economy because the reporting of economic indicators presents us with a relatively easy way to determine both the selection and framing of various publications. Their values provide a ground truth of how the economy is doing relative to how the publications choose to cover it. To do this, we define frame prediction as a set of interdependent tasks. At the article level, we learn to identify the reported stance towards the general state of the economy. Then, for every numerical quantity reported in the article, we learn to identify whether it corresponds to an economic indicator and whether it is being reported in a positive or negative way. To perform our analysis, we track six American publishers and each article that appeared in the top 10 slots of their landing page between 2015 and 2023.

Web agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in planning and executing multi-step interactions within complex web-based environments, fulfilling a wide range of web navigation tasks. Despite these advancements, the potential for LLM-powered agents to effectively engage with sequential user instructions in real-world scenarios has not been fully explored. In this work, we introduce a new task of Conversational Web Navigation, which necessitates sophisticated interactions that span multiple turns with both the users and the environment, supported by a specially developed dataset named Multi-Turn Mind2Web (MT-Mind2Web). To tackle the limited context length of LLMs and the context-dependency issue of the conversational tasks, we further propose a novel framework, named self-reflective memory-augmented planning (Self-MAP), which employs memory utilization and self-reflection techniques. Extensive experiments are conducted to benchmark the MT-Mind2Web dataset, and validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) play a pivotal role as infrastructures, encompassing both stationary and mobile sensors. These sensors self-organize and establish multi-hop connections for communication, collectively sensing, gathering, processing, and transmitting data about their surroundings. Despite their significance, WSNs face rapid and detrimental attacks that can disrupt functionality. Existing intrusion detection methods for WSNs encounter challenges such as low detection rates, computational overhead, and false alarms. These issues stem from sensor node resource constraints, data redundancy, and high correlation within the network. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative intrusion detection approach that integrates Machine Learning (ML) techniques with the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique Tomek Link (SMOTE-TomekLink) algorithm. This blend synthesizes minority instances and eliminates Tomek links, resulting in a balanced dataset that significantly enhances detection accuracy in WSNs. Additionally, we incorporate feature scaling through standardization to render input features consistent and scalable, facilitating more precise training and detection. To counteract imbalanced WSN datasets, we employ the SMOTE-Tomek resampling technique, mitigating overfitting and underfitting issues. Our comprehensive evaluation, using the WSN Dataset (WSN-DS) containing 374,661 records, identifies the optimal model for intrusion detection in WSNs. The standout outcome of our research is the remarkable performance of our model. In binary, it achieves an accuracy rate of 99.78% and in multiclass, it attains an exceptional accuracy rate of 99.92%. These findings underscore the efficiency and superiority of our proposal in the context of WSN intrusion detection, showcasing its effectiveness in detecting and mitigating intrusions in WSNs.

Domain adaption has been widely adapted for cross-domain sentiment analysis to transfer knowledge from the source domain to the target domain. Whereas, most methods are proposed under the assumption that the target (test) domain is known, making them fail to generalize well on unknown test data that is not always available in practice. In this paper, we focus on the problem of domain generalization for cross-domain sentiment analysis. Specifically, we propose a backdoor adjustment-based causal model to disentangle the domain-specific and domain-invariant representations that play essential roles in tackling domain shift. First, we rethink the cross-domain sentiment analysis task in a causal view to model the causal-and-effect relationships among different variables. Then, to learn an invariant feature representation, we remove the effect of domain confounders (e.g., domain knowledge) using the backdoor adjustment. A series of experiments over many homologous and diverse datasets show the great performance and robustness of our model by comparing it with the state-of-the-art domain generalization baselines.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of computing a sequence of rankings with the guarantee of the Pareto-optimal balance between (1) maximizing the utility of the consumers and (2) minimizing unfairness between producers of the items. Such a multi-objective optimization problem is typically solved using a combination of a scalarization method and linear programming on bi-stochastic matrices, representing the distribution of possible rankings of items. However, the above-mentioned approach relies on Birkhoff-von Neumann (BvN) decomposition, of which the computational complexity is $\mathcal{O}(n^5)$ with $n$ being the number of items, making it impractical for large-scale systems. To address this drawback, we introduce a novel approach to the above problem by using the Expohedron - a permutahedron whose points represent all achievable exposures of items. On the Expohedron, we profile the Pareto curve which captures the trade-off between group fairness and user utility by identifying a finite number of Pareto optimal solutions. We further propose an efficient method by relaxing our optimization problem on the Expohedron's circumscribed $n$-sphere, which significantly improve the running time. Moreover, the approximate Pareto curve is asymptotically close to the real Pareto optimal curve as the number of substantial solutions increases. Our methods are applicable with different ranking merits that are non-decreasing functions of item relevance. The effectiveness of our methods are validated through experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Task embedding, a meta-learning technique that captures task-specific information, has become prevalent, especially in areas such as multi-task learning, model editing, and interpretability. However, it faces challenges with the emergence of prompt-guided Large Language Models (LLMs) operating in a gradientfree manner. Existing task embedding methods rely on fine-tuned, task-specific language models, which hinders the adaptability of task embeddings across diverse models, especially prompt-based LLMs. To unleash the power of task embedding in the era of LLMs, we propose a framework for unified task embeddings (FUTE), harmonizing task embeddings from various models, including smaller language models and LLMs with varied prompts, within a single vector space. Such uniformity enables the comparison and analysis of similarities amongst different models, extending the scope and utility of existing task embedding methods in addressing multi-model scenarios, whilst maintaining their performance to be comparable to architecture-specific methods.

Recent methods have demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) can solve reasoning tasks better when they are encouraged to solve subtasks of the main task first. In this paper we devise a similar strategy that breaks down reasoning tasks into a problem decomposition phase and a problem solving phase and show that the strategy is able to outperform a single stage solution. Further, we hypothesize that the decomposition should be easier to distill into a smaller model compared to the problem solving because the latter requires large amounts of domain knowledge while the former only requires learning general problem solving strategies. We propose methods to distill these two capabilities and evaluate their impact on reasoning outcomes and inference cost. We find that we can distill the problem decomposition phase and at the same time achieve good generalization across tasks, datasets, and models. However, it is harder to distill the problem solving capability without losing performance and the resulting distilled model struggles with generalization. These results indicate that by using smaller, distilled problem decomposition models in combination with problem solving LLMs we can achieve reasoning with cost-efficient inference and local adaptation.

The paper introduces Hands-Free VR, a voice-based natural-language interface for VR. The user gives a command using their voice, the speech audio data is converted to text using a speech-to-text deep learning model that is fine-tuned for robustness to word phonetic similarity and to spoken English accents, and the text is mapped to an executable VR command using a large language model that is robust to natural language diversity. Hands-Free VR was evaluated in a controlled within-subjects study (N = 22) that asked participants to find specific objects and to place them in various configurations. In the control condition participants used a conventional VR user interface to grab, carry, and position the objects using the handheld controllers. In the experimental condition participants used Hands-Free VR. The results confirm that: (1) Hands-Free VR is robust to spoken English accents, as for 20 of our participants English was not their first language, and to word phonetic similarity, correctly transcribing the voice command 96.71% of the time; (2) Hands-Free VR is robust to natural language diversity, correctly mapping the transcribed command to an executable command in 97.83% of the time; (3) Hands-Free VR had a significant efficiency advantage over the conventional VR interface in terms of task completion time, total viewpoint translation, total view direction rotation, and total left and right hand translations; (4) Hands-Free VR received high user preference ratings in terms of ease of use, intuitiveness, ergonomics, reliability, and desirability.

In the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promise in text-generation tasks. However, their educational applications, particularly for domain-specific queries, remain underexplored. This study investigates LLMs' capabilities in educational scenarios, focusing on concept graph recovery and question-answering (QA). We assess LLMs' zero-shot performance in creating domain-specific concept graphs and introduce TutorQA, a new expert-verified NLP-focused benchmark for scientific graph reasoning and QA. TutorQA consists of five tasks with 500 QA pairs. To tackle TutorQA queries, we present CGLLM, a pipeline integrating concept graphs with LLMs for answering diverse questions. Our results indicate that LLMs' zero-shot concept graph recovery is competitive with supervised methods, showing an average 3% F1 score improvement. In TutorQA tasks, LLMs achieve up to 26% F1 score enhancement. Moreover, human evaluation and analysis show that CGLLM generates answers with more fine-grained concepts.

Sequential Recommendation (SR) captures users' dynamic preferences by modeling how users transit among items. However, SR models that utilize only single type of behavior interaction data encounter performance degradation when the sequences are short. To tackle this problem, we focus on Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation (MBSR) in this paper, which aims to leverage time-evolving heterogeneous behavioral dependencies for better exploring users' potential intents on the target behavior. Solving MBSR is challenging. On the one hand, users exhibit diverse multi-behavior patterns due to personal characteristics. On the other hand, there exists comprehensive co-influence between behavior correlations and item collaborations, the intensity of which is deeply affected by temporal factors. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Personalized Behavior-Aware Transformer framework (PBAT) for MBSR problem, which models personalized patterns and multifaceted sequential collaborations in a novel way to boost recommendation performance. First, PBAT develops a personalized behavior pattern generator in the representation layer, which extracts dynamic and discriminative behavior patterns for sequential learning. Second, PBAT reforms the self-attention layer with a behavior-aware collaboration extractor, which introduces a fused behavior-aware attention mechanism for incorporating both behavioral and temporal impacts into collaborative transitions. We conduct experiments on three benchmark datasets and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and interpretability of our framework. Our implementation code is released at https://github.com/TiliaceaeSU/PBAT.