Given the broad adoption of artificial intelligence, it is essential to provide evidence that AI models are reliable, trustable, and fair. To this end, the emerging field of eXplainable AI develops techniques to probe such requirements, counterbalancing the hype pushing the pervasiveness of this technology. Among the many facets of this issue, this paper focuses on baseline attribution methods, aiming at deriving a feature attribution map at the network input relying on a "neutral" stimulus usually called "baseline". The choice of the baseline is crucial as it determines the explanation of the network behavior. In this framework, this paper has the twofold goal of shedding light on the implications of the choice of the baseline and providing a simple yet effective method for identifying the best baseline for the task. To achieve this, we propose a decision boundary sampling method, since the baseline, by definition, lies on the decision boundary, which naturally becomes the search domain. Experiments are performed on synthetic examples and validated relying on state-of-the-art methods. Despite being limited to the experimental scope, this contribution is relevant as it offers clear guidelines and a simple proxy for baseline selection, reducing ambiguity and enhancing deep models' reliability and trust.

Taxonomy inference for tabular data is a critical task of schema inference, aiming at discovering entity types (i.e., concepts) of the tables and building their hierarchy. It can play an important role in data management, data exploration, ontology learning, and many data-centric applications. Existing schema inference systems focus more on XML, JSON or RDF data, and often rely on lexical formats and structures of the data for calculating similarities, with limited exploitation of the semantics of the text across a table. Motivated by recent works on taxonomy completion and construction using Large Language Models (LLMs), this paper presents two LLM-based methods for taxonomy inference for tables: (i) EmTT which em beds columns by fine-tuning with contrastive learning encoder-alone LLMs like BERT and utilises clustering for hierarchy construction, and (ii) GeTT which ge nerates table entity types and their hierarchy by iterative prompting using a decoder-alone LLM like GPT-4. Extensive evaluation on three real-world datasets with six metrics covering different aspects of the output taxonomies has demonstrated that EmTT and GeTT can both produce taxonomies with strong consistency relative to the Ground Truth.

Reinforcement learning often faces challenges with reward misalignment, where agents optimize for given rewards but fail to exhibit the desired behaviors. This occurs when the reward function incentivizes proxy behaviors that diverge from the true objective. While human-in-the-loop (HIL) methods can help, they may exacerbate the problem, as humans are prone to biases that lead to inconsistent, subjective, or misaligned feedback, complicating the learning process. To address these issues, we propose two key contributions. First, we extend the use of zero-shot, off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs) for reward shaping beyond natural language processing (NLP) to continuous control tasks. By leveraging LLMs as direct feedback providers, we replace surrogate models trained on human feedback, which often suffer from the bias inherent in the feedback data it is trained on. Second, we introduce a hybrid framework (LLM-HFBF) that enables LLMs to identify and correct biases in human feedback while incorporating this feedback into the reward shaping process. The LLM-HFBF framework creates a more balanced and reliable system by addressing both the limitations of LLMs (e.g., lack of domain-specific knowledge) and human supervision (e.g., inherent biases). By enabling human feedback bias flagging and correction, our approach improves reinforcement learning performance and reduces reliance on potentially biased human guidance. Empirical experiments show that biased human feedback significantly reduces performance, with average episodic reward (AER) dropping from 28.472 in (unbiased approaches) to 7.039 (biased with conservative bias). In contrast, LLM-based approaches maintain a matching AER like unbiased feedback, even in custom edge case scenarios.

Coral reefs are declining worldwide due to climate change and local stressors. To inform effective conservation or restoration, monitoring at the highest possible spatial and temporal resolution is necessary. Conventional coral reef surveying methods are limited in scalability due to their reliance on expert labor time, motivating the use of computer vision tools to automate the identification and abundance estimation of live corals from images. However, the design and evaluation of such tools has been impeded by the lack of large high quality datasets. We release the Coralscapes dataset, the first general-purpose dense semantic segmentation dataset for coral reefs, covering 2075 images, 39 benthic classes, and 174k segmentation masks annotated by experts. Coralscapes has a similar scope and the same structure as the widely used Cityscapes dataset for urban scene segmentation, allowing benchmarking of semantic segmentation models in a new challenging domain which requires expert knowledge to annotate. We benchmark a wide range of semantic segmentation models, and find that transfer learning from Coralscapes to existing smaller datasets consistently leads to state-of-the-art performance. Coralscapes will catalyze research on efficient, scalable, and standardized coral reef surveying methods based on computer vision, and holds the potential to streamline the development of underwater ecological robotics.

Recent advancements in AI-driven conversational agents have exhibited immense potential of AI applications. Effective response generation is crucial to the success of these agents. While extensive research has focused on leveraging multiple auxiliary data sources (e.g., knowledge bases and personas) to enhance response generation, existing methods often struggle to efficiently extract relevant information from these sources. There are still clear limitations in the ability to combine versatile conversational capabilities with adherence to known facts and adaptation to large variations in user preferences and belief systems, which continues to hinder the wide adoption of conversational AI tools. This paper introduces a novel method, Conversational Agent for Multi-Source Auxiliary Context with Sparse and Symmetric Latent Interactions ( CoMAC), for conversation generation, which employs specialized encoding streams and post-fusion grounding networks for multiple data sources to identify relevant persona and knowledge information for the conversation. CoMAC also leverages a novel text similarity metric that allows bi-directional information sharing among multiple sources and focuses on a selective subset of meaningful words. Our experiments show that CoMAC improves the relevant persona and knowledge prediction accuracies and response generation quality significantly over two state-of-the-art methods.

Continual learning in computer vision faces the critical challenge of catastrophic forgetting, where models struggle to retain prior knowledge while adapting to new tasks. Although recent studies have attempted to leverage the generalization capabilities of pre-trained models to mitigate overfitting on current tasks, models still tend to forget details of previously learned categories as tasks progress, leading to misclassification. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel Knowledge Graph Enhanced Generative Multi-modal model (KG-GMM) that builds an evolving knowledge graph throughout the learning process. Our approach utilizes relationships within the knowledge graph to augment the class labels and assigns different relations to similar categories to enhance model differentiation. During testing, we propose a Knowledge Graph Augmented Inference method that locates specific categories by analyzing relationships within the generated text, thereby reducing the loss of detailed information about old classes when learning new knowledge and alleviating forgetting. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively leverages relational information to help the model correct mispredictions, achieving state-of-the-art results in both conventional CIL and few-shot CIL settings, confirming the efficacy of knowledge graphs at preserving knowledge in the continual learning scenarios.

Neural network-based emulators for the inference of stellar parameters and elemental abundances represent an increasingly popular methodology in modern spectroscopic surveys. However, these approaches are often constrained by their emulation precision and domain transfer capabilities. Greater generalizability has previously been achieved only with significantly larger model architectures, as demonstrated by Transformer-based models in natural language processing. This observation aligns with neural scaling laws, where model performance predictably improves with increased model size, computational resources allocated to model training, and training data volume. In this study, we demonstrate that these scaling laws also apply to Transformer-based spectral emulators in astronomy. Building upon our previous work with TransformerPayne and incorporating Maximum Update Parametrization techniques from natural language models, we provide training guidelines for scaling models to achieve optimal performance. Our results show that within the explored parameter space, clear scaling relationships emerge. These findings suggest that optimal computational resource allocation requires balanced scaling. Specifically, given a tenfold increase in training compute, achieving an optimal seven-fold reduction in mean squared error necessitates an approximately 2.5-fold increase in dataset size and a 3.8-fold increase in model size. This study establishes a foundation for developing spectral foundational models with enhanced domain transfer capabilities.

Large language models (LLMs) are the foundation of many AI applications today. However, despite their remarkable proficiency in generating coherent text, questions linger regarding their ability to perform fine-grained linguistic annotation tasks, such as detecting nouns or verbs, or identifying more complex syntactic structures like clauses in input texts. These tasks require precise syntactic and semantic understanding of input text, and when LLMs underperform on specific linguistic structures, it raises concerns about their reliability for detailed linguistic analysis and whether their (even correct) outputs truly reflect an understanding of the inputs. In this paper, we empirically study the performance of recent LLMs on fine-grained linguistic annotation tasks. Through a series of experiments, we find that recent LLMs show limited efficacy in addressing linguistic queries and often struggle with linguistically complex inputs. We show that the most capable LLM (Llama3-70b) makes notable errors in detecting linguistic structures, such as misidentifying embedded clauses, failing to recognize verb phrases, and confusing complex nominals with clauses. Our results provide insights to inform future advancements in LLM design and development.

The study investigates the efficacy of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in analyzing argumentative moves in a longitudinal learner corpus. Prior studies on argumentative moves often rely on qualitative analysis and manual coding, limiting their efficiency and generalizability. The study aims to: 1) to assess the reliability of PLMs in analyzing argumentative moves; 2) to utilize PLM-generated annotations to illustrate developmental patterns and predict writing quality. A longitudinal corpus of 1643 argumentative texts from 235 English learners in China is collected and annotated into six move types: claim, data, counter-claim, counter-data, rebuttal, and non-argument. The corpus is divided into training, validation, and application sets annotated by human experts and PLMs. We use BERT as one of the implementations of PLMs. The results indicate a robust reliability of PLMs in analyzing argumentative moves, with an overall F1 score of 0.743, surpassing existing models in the field. Additionally, PLM-labeled argumentative moves effectively capture developmental patterns and predict writing quality. Over time, students exhibit an increase in the use of data and counter-claims and a decrease in non-argument moves. While low-quality texts are characterized by a predominant use of claims and data supporting only oneside position, mid- and high-quality texts demonstrate an integrative perspective with a higher ratio of counter-claims, counter-data, and rebuttals. This study underscores the transformative potential of integrating artificial intelligence into language education, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of evaluating students' writing. The successful application of PLMs can catalyze the development of educational technology, promoting a more data-driven and personalized learning environment that supports diverse educational needs.

While safety mechanisms have significantly progressed in filtering harmful text inputs, MLLMs remain vulnerable to multimodal jailbreaks that exploit their cross-modal reasoning capabilities. We present MIRAGE, a novel multimodal jailbreak framework that exploits narrative-driven context and role immersion to circumvent safety mechanisms in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). By systematically decomposing the toxic query into environment, role, and action triplets, MIRAGE constructs a multi-turn visual storytelling sequence of images and text using Stable Diffusion, guiding the target model through an engaging detective narrative. This process progressively lowers the model's defences and subtly guides its reasoning through structured contextual cues, ultimately eliciting harmful responses. In extensive experiments on the selected datasets with six mainstream MLLMs, MIRAGE achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving attack success rates by up to 17.5% over the best baselines. Moreover, we demonstrate that role immersion and structured semantic reconstruction can activate inherent model biases, facilitating the model's spontaneous violation of ethical safeguards. These results highlight critical weaknesses in current multimodal safety mechanisms and underscore the urgent need for more robust defences against cross-modal threats.