Quantum Neural Network (QNN) combines the Deep Learning (DL) principle with the fundamental theory of quantum mechanics to achieve machine learning tasks with quantum acceleration. Recently, QNN systems have been found to manifest robustness issues similar to classical DL systems. There is an urgent need for ways to test their correctness and security. However, QNN systems differ significantly from traditional quantum software and classical DL systems, posing critical challenges for QNN testing. These challenges include the inapplicability of traditional quantum software testing methods, the dependence of quantum test sample generation on perturbation operators, and the absence of effective information in quantum neurons. In this paper, we propose QuanTest, a quantum entanglement-guided adversarial testing framework to uncover potential erroneous behaviors in QNN systems. We design a quantum entanglement adequacy criterion to quantify the entanglement acquired by the input quantum states from the QNN system, along with two similarity metrics to measure the proximity of generated quantum adversarial examples to the original inputs. Subsequently, QuanTest formulates the problem of generating test inputs that maximize the quantum entanglement sufficiency and capture incorrect behaviors of the QNN system as a joint optimization problem and solves it in a gradient-based manner to generate quantum adversarial examples. Experimental results demonstrate that QuanTest possesses the capability to capture erroneous behaviors in QNN systems (generating 67.48%-96.05% more test samples than the random noise under the same perturbation size constraints). The entanglement-guided approach proves effective in adversarial testing, generating more adversarial examples (maximum increase reached 21.32%).

The typical phases of Bayesian network (BN) structured development include specification of purpose and scope, structure development, parameterisation and validation. Structure development is typically focused on qualitative issues and parameterisation quantitative issues, however there are qualitative and quantitative issues that arise in both phases. A common step that occurs after the initial structure has been developed is to perform a rough parameterisation that only captures and illustrates the intended qualitative behaviour of the model. This is done prior to a more rigorous parameterisation, ensuring that the structure is fit for purpose, as well as supporting later development and validation. In our collective experience and in discussions with other modellers, this step is an important part of the development process, but is under-reported in the literature. Since the practice focuses on qualitative issues, despite being quantitative in nature, we call this step qualitative parameterisation and provide an outline of its role in the BN development process.

The copilot framework, which aims to enhance and tailor large language models (LLMs) for specific complex tasks without requiring fine-tuning, is gaining increasing attention from the community. In this paper, we introduce the construction of a Healthcare Copilot designed for medical consultation. The proposed Healthcare Copilot comprises three main components: 1) the Dialogue component, responsible for effective and safe patient interactions; 2) the Memory component, storing both current conversation data and historical patient information; and 3) the Processing component, summarizing the entire dialogue and generating reports. To evaluate the proposed Healthcare Copilot, we implement an auto-evaluation scheme using ChatGPT for two roles: as a virtual patient engaging in dialogue with the copilot, and as an evaluator to assess the quality of the dialogue. Extensive results demonstrate that the proposed Healthcare Copilot significantly enhances the capabilities of general LLMs for medical consultations in terms of inquiry capability, conversational fluency, response accuracy, and safety. Furthermore, we conduct ablation studies to highlight the contribution of each individual module in the Healthcare Copilot. Code will be made publicly available on GitHub.

Due to the rapid pace of research publications, keeping up to date with all the latest related papers is very time-consuming, even with daily feed tools. There is a need for automatically generated, short, customized literature reviews of sets of papers to help researchers decide what to read. While several works in the last decade have addressed the task of explaining a single research paper, usually in the context of another paper citing it, the relationship among multiple papers has been ignored; prior works have focused on generating a single citation sentence in isolation, without addressing the expository and transition sentences needed to connect multiple papers in a coherent story. In this work, we explore a feature-based, LLM-prompting approach to generate richer citation texts, as well as generating multiple citations at once to capture the complex relationships among research papers. We perform an expert evaluation to investigate the impact of our proposed features on the quality of the generated paragraphs and find a strong correlation between human preference and integrative writing style, suggesting that humans prefer high-level, abstract citations, with transition sentences between them to provide an overall story.

The subjective perception of emotion leads to inconsistent labels from human annotators. Typically, utterances lacking majority-agreed labels are excluded when training an emotion classifier, which cause problems when encountering ambiguous emotional expressions during testing. This paper investigates three methods to handle ambiguous emotion. First, we show that incorporating utterances without majority-agreed labels as an additional class in the classifier reduces the classification performance of the other emotion classes. Then, we propose detecting utterances with ambiguous emotions as out-of-domain samples by quantifying the uncertainty in emotion classification using evidential deep learning. This approach retains the classification accuracy while effectively detects ambiguous emotion expressions. Furthermore, to obtain fine-grained distinctions among ambiguous emotions, we propose representing emotion as a distribution instead of a single class label. The task is thus re-framed from classification to distribution estimation where every individual annotation is taken into account, not just the majority opinion. The evidential uncertainty measure is extended to quantify the uncertainty in emotion distribution estimation. Experimental results on the IEMOCAP and CREMA-D datasets demonstrate the superior capability of the proposed method in terms of majority class prediction, emotion distribution estimation, and uncertainty estimation.

Japanese startup Astroscale Holdings said Monday that it has successfully launched a satellite to survey the state of a jettisoned rocket section in orbit in space, in what it calls a world first as it seeks to develop technology for space debris removal. The satellite aboard Rocket Lab USA's rocket lifted off from New Zealand on Sunday on a mission to monitor a part of the H2A rocket body that Japan launched in 2009 and which is currently orbiting 600 kilometers above Earth's surface at high speed. Space debris has been growing in recent years in line with the increase in launches of satellites and rockets. While such objects as defunct satellites and jettisoned rocket sections raise the risk of crashes with active satellites, there is no established method to remove the debris. The startup's cuboid-shaped demonstration satellite, Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan, or ADRAS-J, measures about 80 centimeters in length and width, 1.2 meters in height and weighs around 150 kilograms.

Queer youth face increased mental health risks, such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. Hindered by negative stigma, they often avoid seeking help and rely on online resources, which may provide incompatible information. Although access to a supportive environment and reliable information is invaluable, many queer youth worldwide have no access to such support. However, this could soon change due to the rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. This paper aims to comprehensively explore the potential of LLMs to revolutionize emotional support for queers. To this end, we conduct a qualitative and quantitative analysis of LLM's interactions with queer-related content. To evaluate response quality, we develop a novel ten-question scale that is inspired by psychological standards and expert input. We apply this scale to score several LLMs and human comments to posts where queer youth seek advice and share experiences. We find that LLM responses are supportive and inclusive, outscoring humans. However, they tend to be generic, not empathetic enough, and lack personalization, resulting in nonreliable and potentially harmful advice. We discuss these challenges, demonstrate that a dedicated prompt can improve the performance, and propose a blueprint of an LLM-supporter that actively (but sensitively) seeks user context to provide personalized, empathetic, and reliable responses. Our annotated dataset is available for further research.

COVID-19 disease has affected almost every country in the world. The large number of infected people and the different mortality rates between countries has given rise to many hypotheses about the key points that make the virus so lethal in some places. In this study, the eating habits of 170 countries were evaluated in order to find correlations between these habits and mortality rates caused by COVID-19 using machine learning techniques that group the countries together according to the different distribution of fat, energy, and protein across 23 different types of food, as well as the amount ingested in kilograms. Results shown how obesity and the high consumption of fats appear in countries with the highest death rates, whereas countries with a lower rate have a higher level of cereal consumption accompanied by a lower total average intake of kilocalories.

In this study, we investigate the potential of GPT-4 and its advanced iteration, GPT-4 Turbo, in autonomously developing a detailed entity type taxonomy. Our objective is to construct a comprehensive taxonomy, starting from a broad classification of entity types - including objects, time, locations, organizations, events, actions, and subjects - similar to existing manually curated taxonomies. This classification is then progressively refined through iterative prompting techniques, leveraging GPT-4's internal knowledge base. The result is an extensive taxonomy comprising over 5000 nuanced entity types, which demonstrates remarkable quality upon subjective evaluation. We employed a straightforward yet effective prompting strategy, enabling the taxonomy to be dynamically expanded. The practical applications of this detailed taxonomy are diverse and significant. It facilitates the creation of new, more intricate branches through pattern-based combinations and notably enhances information extraction tasks, such as relation extraction and event argument extraction. Our methodology not only introduces an innovative approach to taxonomy creation but also opens new avenues for applying such taxonomies in various computational linguistics and AI-related fields.

Continual learning is a process that involves training learning agents to sequentially master a stream of tasks or classes without revisiting past data. The challenge lies in leveraging previously acquired knowledge to learn new tasks efficiently, while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Existing methods primarily focus on single domains, restricting their applicability to specific problems. In this work, we introduce a novel approach called Cross-Domain Continual Learning (CDCL) that addresses the limitations of being limited to single supervised domains. Our method combines inter- and intra-task cross-attention mechanisms within a compact convolutional network. This integration enables the model to maintain alignment with features from previous tasks, thereby delaying the data drift that may occur between tasks, while performing unsupervised cross-domain (UDA) between related domains. By leveraging an intra-task-specific pseudo-labeling method, we ensure accurate input pairs for both labeled and unlabeled samples, enhancing the learning process. To validate our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on public UDA datasets, showcasing its positive performance on cross-domain continual learning challenges. Additionally, our work introduces incremental ideas that contribute to the advancement of this field. We make our code and models available to encourage further exploration and reproduction of our results: \url{https://github.com/Ivsucram/CDCL}