The cross-domain text-to-SQL task aims to build a system that can parse user questions into SQL on complete unseen databases, and the single-domain text-to-SQL task evaluates the performance on identical databases. Both of these setups confront unavoidable difficulties in real-world applications. To this end, we introduce the cross-schema text-to-SQL task, where the databases of evaluation data are different from that in the training data but come from the same domain. Furthermore, we present CSS, a large-scale CrosS-Schema Chinese text-to-SQL dataset, to carry on corresponding studies. CSS originally consisted of 4,340 question/SQL pairs across 2 databases. In order to generalize models to different medical systems, we extend CSS and create 19 new databases along with 29,280 corresponding dataset examples. Moreover, CSS is also a large corpus for single-domain Chinese text-to-SQL studies. We present the data collection approach and a series of analyses of the data statistics. To show the potential and usefulness of CSS, benchmarking baselines have been conducted and reported. Our dataset is publicly available at \url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/zhanghanchong/css}.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities and are an integral part of modern software systems. However, they also suffer from various vulnerabilities such as adversarial attacks and unfairness. Testing deep learning (DL) systems is therefore an important task, to detect and mitigate those vulnerabilities. Motivated by the success of traditional software testing, which often employs diversity heuristics, various diversity measures on DNNs have been proposed to help efficiently expose the buggy behavior of DNNs. In this work, we argue that many DNN testing tasks should be treated as directed testing problems rather than general-purpose testing tasks, because these tasks are specific and well-defined. Hence, the diversity-based approach is less effective. Following our argument based on the semantics of DNNs and the testing goal, we derive $6$ metrics that can be used for DNN testing and carefully analyze their application scopes. We empirically show their efficacy in exposing bugs in DNNs compared to recent diversity-based metrics. Moreover, we also notice discrepancies between the practices of the software engineering (SE) community and the DL community. We point out some of these gaps, and hopefully, this can lead to bridging the SE practice and DL findings.

In this paper, we focus on the distributed set-membership filtering (SMFing) problem for a multi-agent system with absolute (taken from agents themselves) and relative (taken from neighbors) measurements. In the literature, the relative measurements are difficult to deal with, and the SMFs highly rely on specific set descriptions. As a result, establishing the general distributed SMFing framework having relative measurements is still an open problem. To solve this problem, first, we provide the set description based on uncertain variables determined by the relative measurements between two agents as the foundation. Surprisingly, the accurate description requires only a single calculation step rather than multiple iterations, which can effectively reduce computational complexity. Based on the derived set description, called the uncertain range, we propose two distributed SMFing frameworks: one calculates the joint uncertain range of the agent itself and its neighbors, while the other only computes the marginal uncertain range of each local system. Furthermore, we compare the performance of our proposed two distributed SMFing frameworks and the benchmark -- centralized SMFing framework. A rigorous set analysis reveals that the distributed SMF can be essentially considered as the process of computing the marginal uncertain range to outer bound the projection of the uncertain range obtained by the centralized SMF in the corresponding subspace. Simulation results corroborate the effectiveness of our proposed distributed frameworks and verify our theoretical analysis.

Progress in Automated Handwriting Recognition has been hampered by the lack of large training datasets. Nearly all research uses a set of small datasets that often cause models to overfit. We present CENSUS-HWR, a new dataset consisting of full English handwritten words in 1,812,014 gray scale images. A total of 1,865,134 handwritten texts from a vocabulary of 10,711 words in the English language are present in this collection. This dataset is intended to serve handwriting models as a benchmark for deep learning algorithms. This huge English handwriting recognition dataset has been extracted from the US 1930 and 1940 censuses taken by approximately 70,000 enumerators each year. The dataset and the trained model with their weights are freely available to download at https://censustree.org/data.html.

Backdoor attacks are an insidious security threat against machine learning models. Adversaries can manipulate the predictions of compromised models by inserting triggers into the training phase. Various backdoor attacks have been devised which can achieve nearly perfect attack success without affecting model predictions for clean inputs. Means of mitigating such vulnerabilities are underdeveloped, especially in natural language processing. To fill this gap, we introduce IMBERT, which uses either gradients or self-attention scores derived from victim models to self-defend against backdoor attacks at inference time. Our empirical studies demonstrate that IMBERT can effectively identify up to 98.5% of inserted triggers. Thus, it significantly reduces the attack success rate while attaining competitive accuracy on the clean dataset across widespread insertion-based attacks compared to two baselines. Finally, we show that our approach is model-agnostic, and can be easily ported to several pre-trained transformer models.

Like humans, large language models (LLMs) do not always generate the best output on their first try. Motivated by how humans refine their written text, we introduce Self-Refine, an approach for improving initial outputs from LLMs through iterative feedback and refinement. The main idea is to generate an initial output using an LLMs; then, the same LLMs provides feedback for its output and uses it to refine itself, iteratively. Self-Refine does not require any supervised training data, additional training, or reinforcement learning, and instead uses a single LLM as the generator, refiner, and feedback provider. We evaluate Self-Refine across 7 diverse tasks, ranging from dialog response generation to mathematical reasoning, using state-of-the-art (GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, and GPT-4) LLMs. Across all evaluated tasks, outputs generated with Self-Refine are preferred by humans and automatic metrics over those generated with the same LLM using conventional one-step generation, improving by ~20% absolute on average in task performance. Our work demonstrates that even state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4 can be further improved at test time using our simple, standalone approach.

Demographic and educational factors are essential, influential factors of early childhood development. This study aimed to investigate spatial patterns in the association between attendance at preschool and children's developmental vulnerabilities in one or more domain(s) in their first year of full-time school at a small area level in Queensland, Australia. This was achieved by applying geographically weighted regression (GWR) followed by K-means clustering of the regression coefficients. Three distinct geographical clusters were found in Queensland using the GWR coefficients. The first cluster covered more than half of the state of Queensland, including the Greater Brisbane region, and displays a strong negative association between developmental vulnerabilities and attendance at preschool. That is, areas with high proportions of preschool attendance tended to have lower proportions of children with at least one developmental vulnerability in the first year of full-time school. Clusters two and three were characterized by stronger negative associations between developmental vulnerabilities, English as the mother language, and geographic remoteness, respectively. This research provides evidence of the need for collaboration between health and education sectors in specific regions of Queensland to update current service provision policies and to ensure holistic and appropriate care is available to support children with developmental vulnerabilities.

In Continual Learning (CL), a model is required to learn a stream of tasks sequentially without significant performance degradation on previously learned tasks. Current approaches fail for a long sequence of tasks from diverse domains and difficulties. Many of the existing CL approaches are difficult to apply in practice due to excessive memory cost or training time, or are tightly coupled to a single device. With the intuition derived from the widely applied mini-batch training, we propose Batch Model Consolidation ($\textbf{BMC}$) to support more realistic CL under conditions where multiple agents are exposed to a range of tasks. During a $\textit{regularization}$ phase, BMC trains multiple $\textit{expert models}$ in parallel on a set of disjoint tasks. Each expert maintains weight similarity to a $\textit{base model}$ through a $\textit{stability loss}$, and constructs a $\textit{buffer}$ from a fraction of the task's data. During the $\textit{consolidation}$ phase, we combine the learned knowledge on 'batches' of $\textit{expert models}$ using a $\textit{batched consolidation loss}$ in $\textit{memory}$ data that aggregates all buffers. We thoroughly evaluate each component of our method in an ablation study and demonstrate the effectiveness on standardized benchmark datasets Split-CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and the Stream dataset composed of 71 image classification tasks from diverse domains and difficulties. Our method outperforms the next best CL approach by 70% and is the only approach that can maintain performance at the end of 71 tasks; Our benchmark can be accessed at https://github.com/fostiropoulos/stream_benchmark

Event detection refers to identifying event occurrences in a text and comprises of two subtasks; event identification and classification. We present EDM3, a novel approach for Event Detection that formulates three generative tasks: identification, classification, and combined detection. We show that EDM3 helps to learn transferable knowledge that can be leveraged to perform Event Detection and its subtasks concurrently, mitigating the error propagation inherent in pipelined approaches. Unlike previous dataset- or domain-specific approaches, EDM3 utilizes the existing knowledge of language models, allowing it to be trained over any classification schema. We evaluate EDM3 on multiple event detection datasets: RAMS, WikiEvents, MAVEN, and MLEE, showing that EDM3 outperforms 1) single-task performance by 8.4% on average and 2) multi-task performance without instructional prompts by 2.4% on average. We obtain SOTA results on RAMS (71.3% vs. 65.1% F-1) and competitive performance on other datasets. We analyze our approach to demonstrate its efficacy in low-resource and multi-sentence settings. We also show the effectiveness of this approach on non-standard event configurations such as multi-word and multi-class event triggers. Overall, our results show that EDM3 is a promising approach for Event Detection that has the potential for real-world applications.

Large language models are known to produce output which sounds fluent and convincing, but is also often wrong, e.g. "unfaithful" with respect to a rationale as retrieved from a knowledge base. In this paper, we show that task-based systems which exhibit certain advanced linguistic dialog behaviors, such as lexical alignment (repeating what the user said), are in fact preferred and trusted more, whereas other phenomena, such as pronouns and ellipsis are dis-preferred. We use open-domain question answering systems as our test-bed for task based dialog generation and compare several open- and closed-book models. Our results highlight the danger of systems that appear to be trustworthy by parroting user input while providing an unfaithful response.