Oceania
Deep Learning Meets Oversampling: A Learning Framework to Handle Imbalanced Classification
Kishanthan, Sukumar, Hevapathige, Asela
This disproportion often leads to biased model training, making the classifier inclined towards predicting the majority class in the inference phase[1, 2]. The class imbalance problem cannot be readily overlooked, as many real-world datasets related to critical tasks, such as those used in the medical field for disease identification, the finance sector for fraud detection, and network intrusion datasets used in cyber security, exhibit such asymmetric class distributions [3, 4, 5]. Existing machine learning and deep learning approaches primarily utilize resampling techniques to tackle class imbalance which involves adjustment techniques to balance the class distribution in datasets [6, 7]. Among diverse resampling techniques, Oversampling approaches are commonly preferred for addressing class imbalance mainly due to their inherent ability to equalize the class distribution while preserving data semantics and achieving superior performance. There has been a plethora of different oversampling techniques proposed in the literature, ranging from traditional approaches [8, 9, 10, 11, 12] to those based on deep learning [13, 14, 15].
Implicit Communication of Contextual Information in Human-Robot Collaboration
Implicit communication is crucial in human-robot collaboration (HRC), where contextual information, such as intentions, is conveyed as implicatures, forming a natural part of human interaction. However, enabling robots to appropriately use implicit communication in cooperative tasks remains challenging. My research addresses this through three phases: first, exploring the impact of linguistic implicatures on collaborative tasks; second, examining how robots' implicit cues for backchanneling and proactive communication affect team performance and perception, and how they should adapt to human teammates; and finally, designing and evaluating a multi-LLM robotics system that learns from human implicit communication. This research aims to enhance the natural communication abilities of robots and facilitate their integration into daily collaborative activities.
Improving Environment Novelty Quantification for Effective Unsupervised Environment Design
Teoh, Jayden, Li, Wenjun, Varakantham, Pradeep
Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) formalizes the problem of autocurricula through interactive training between a teacher agent and a student agent. The teacher generates new training environments with high learning potential, curating an adaptive curriculum that strengthens the student's ability to handle unseen scenarios. Existing UED methods mainly rely on regret, a metric that measures the difference between the agent's optimal and actual performance, to guide curriculum design. Regret-driven methods generate curricula that progressively increase environment complexity for the student but overlook environment novelty -- a critical element for enhancing an agent's generalizability. Measuring environment novelty is especially challenging due to the underspecified nature of environment parameters in UED, and existing approaches face significant limitations. To address this, this paper introduces the Coverage-based Evaluation of Novelty In Environment (CENIE) framework. CENIE proposes a scalable, domain-agnostic, and curriculum-aware approach to quantifying environment novelty by leveraging the student's state-action space coverage from previous curriculum experiences. We then propose an implementation of CENIE that models this coverage and measures environment novelty using Gaussian Mixture Models. By integrating both regret and novelty as complementary objectives for curriculum design, CENIE facilitates effective exploration across the state-action space while progressively increasing curriculum complexity. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that augmenting existing regret-based UED algorithms with CENIE achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, underscoring the effectiveness of novelty-driven autocurricula for robust generalization.
Mechanistic Interpretability of Emotion Inference in Large Language Models
Tak, Ala N., Banayeeanzade, Amin, Bolourani, Anahita, Kian, Mina, Jia, Robin, Gratch, Jonathan
Large language models (LLMs) show promising capabilities in predicting human emotions from text. However, the mechanisms through which these models process emotional stimuli remain largely unexplored. Our study addresses this gap by investigating how autoregressive LLMs infer emotions, showing that emotion representations are functionally localized to specific regions in the model. Our evaluation includes diverse model families and sizes and is supported by robustness checks. We then show that the identified representations are psychologically plausible by drawing on cognitive appraisal theory, a well-established psychological framework positing that emotions emerge from evaluations (appraisals) of environmental stimuli. By causally intervening on construed appraisal concepts, we steer the generation and show that the outputs align with theoretical and intuitive expectations. This work highlights a novel way to causally intervene and precisely shape emotional text generation, potentially benefiting safety and alignment in sensitive affective domains.
OntoTune: Ontology-Driven Self-training for Aligning Large Language Models
Liu, Zhiqiang, Gan, Chengtao, Wang, Junjie, Zhang, Yichi, Bo, Zhongpu, Sun, Mengshu, Chen, Huajun, Zhang, Wen
Existing domain-specific Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically developed by fine-tuning general-purposed LLMs with large-scale domain-specific corpora. However, training on large-scale corpora often fails to effectively organize domain knowledge of LLMs, leading to fragmented understanding. Inspired by how humans connect concepts and organize knowledge through mind maps, we aim to emulate this approach by using ontology with hierarchical conceptual knowledge to reorganize LLM's domain knowledge. From this perspective, we propose an ontology-driven self-training framework called OntoTune, which aims to align LLMs with ontology through in-context learning, enabling the generation of responses guided by the ontology. We leverage in-context learning to identify whether the LLM has acquired the specific concept's ontology knowledge, and select the entries not yet mastered by LLM as the training set to further align the LLM with ontology. Compared to existing domain LLMs based on newly collected large-scale domain-specific corpora, our OntoTune, which relies on the existing, long-term developed ontology and LLM itself, significantly reduces data maintenance costs and offers improved generalization ability. We conduct our study in the medical domain to evaluate the effectiveness of OntoTune, utilizing a standardized medical ontology, SNOMED CT as our ontology source. Experimental results demonstrate that OntoTune achieves state-of-the-art performance in both in-ontology task hypernym discovery and out-of-ontology task medical domain QA. Moreover, compared to the latest direct ontology injection method TaxoLLaMA, our OntoTune better preserves original knowledge of LLM. The code and data are available at https://github.com/zjukg/OntoTune.
dynoGP: Deep Gaussian Processes for dynamic system identification
Benavoli, Alessio, Piga, Dario, Forgione, Marco, Zaffalon, Marco
In this work, we present a novel approach to system identification for dynamical systems, based on a specific class of Deep Gaussian Processes (Deep GPs). These models are constructed by interconnecting linear dynamic GPs (equivalent to stochastic linear time-invariant dynamical systems) and static GPs (to model static nonlinearities). Our approach combines the strengths of data-driven methods, such as those based on neural network architectures, with the ability to output a probability distribution. This offers a more comprehensive framework for system identification that includes uncertainty quantification. Using both simulated and real-world data, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
CODESIM: Multi-Agent Code Generation and Problem Solving through Simulation-Driven Planning and Debugging
Islam, Md. Ashraful, Ali, Mohammed Eunus, Parvez, Md Rizwan
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in code generation and problem solving. Current approaches employ external tool-based iterative debuggers that use compiler or other tool-based runtime feedback to refine coarse programs generated by various methods. However, the effectiveness of these approaches heavily relies on the quality of the initial code generation, which remains an open challenge. In this paper, we introduce CodeSim, a novel multi-agent code generation framework that comprehensively addresses the stages of program synthesis-planning, coding, and debugging-through a human-like perception approach. As human verifies their understanding of any algorithms through visual simulation, CodeSim uniquely features a method of plan verification and internal debugging through the step-by-step simulation of input/output. Extensive experiments across seven challenging competitive problem-solving and program synthesis benchmarks demonstrate CodeSim's remarkable code generation capabilities. Our framework achieves new state-of-the-art (pass@1) results-(HumanEval 95.1%, MBPP 90.7%, APPS 22%, and CodeContests 29.1%). Furthermore, our method shows potential for even greater enhancement when cascaded with external debuggers. To facilitate further research and development in this area, we have open-sourced our framework in this link (https://kagnlp.github.io/codesim.github.io/).
Transfer Learning of Surrogate Models via Domain Affine Transformation Across Synthetic and Real-World Benchmarks
Pan, Shuaiqun, Vermetten, Diederick, López-Ibáñez, Manuel, Bäck, Thomas, Wang, Hao
Surrogate models are frequently employed as efficient substitutes for the costly execution of real-world processes. However, constructing a high-quality surrogate model often demands extensive data acquisition. A solution to this issue is to transfer pre-trained surrogate models for new tasks, provided that certain invariances exist between tasks. This study focuses on transferring non-differentiable surrogate models (e.g., random forest) from a source function to a target function, where we assume their domains are related by an unknown affine transformation, using only a limited amount of transfer data points evaluated on the target. Previous research attempts to tackle this challenge for differentiable models, e.g., Gaussian process regression, which minimizes the empirical loss on the transfer data by tuning the affine transformations. In this paper, we extend the previous work to the random forest model and assess its effectiveness on a widely-used artificial problem set - Black-Box Optimization Benchmark (BBOB) testbed, and on four real-world transfer learning problems. The results highlight the significant practical advantages of the proposed method, particularly in reducing both the data requirements and computational costs of training surrogate models for complex real-world scenarios.
PINGS: Gaussian Splatting Meets Distance Fields within a Point-Based Implicit Neural Map
Pan, Yue, Zhong, Xingguang, Jin, Liren, Wiesmann, Louis, Popović, Marija, Behley, Jens, Stachniss, Cyrill
Robots require high-fidelity reconstructions of their environment for effective operation. Such scene representations should be both, geometrically accurate and photorealistic to support downstream tasks. While this can be achieved by building distance fields from range sensors and radiance fields from cameras, the scalable incremental mapping of both fields consistently and at the same time with high quality remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel map representation that unifies a continuous signed distance field and a Gaussian splatting radiance field within an elastic and compact point-based implicit neural map. By enforcing geometric consistency between these fields, we achieve mutual improvements by exploiting both modalities. We devise a LiDAR-visual SLAM system called PINGS using the proposed map representation and evaluate it on several challenging large-scale datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that PINGS can incrementally build globally consistent distance and radiance fields encoded with a compact set of neural points. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, PINGS achieves superior photometric and geometric rendering at novel views by leveraging the constraints from the distance field. Furthermore, by utilizing dense photometric cues and multi-view consistency from the radiance field, PINGS produces more accurate distance fields, leading to improved odometry estimation and mesh reconstruction.
Football Manager 25 cancelled after two delays
The latest update in the popular Football Manager series has been cancelled, its makers have announced. Fans of the long-running video game began to speculate about its fate when an update due to be unveiled late last month did not arrive. In a blog post, developer Sports Interactive told players it had made the "difficult decision" to cancel the 2025 edition as it was "too far away from the standards you deserve". It said it would now shift focus to the 2026 version of the game and fans who had preordered the cancelled release could obtain a refund. Football Manager, first launched in 2004, allows fans to step into the shoes of a gaffer and guide a chosen team through a season.