Number-focused headline generation is a summarization task requiring both high textual quality and precise numerical accuracy, which poses a unique challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing studies in the literature focus only on either textual quality or numerical reasoning and thus are inadequate to address this challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel chain-of-thought framework for using rationales comprising key elements of the Topic, Entities, and Numerical reasoning (TEN) in news articles to enhance the capability for LLMs to generate topic-aligned high-quality texts with precise numerical accuracy. Specifically, a teacher LLM is employed to generate TEN rationales as supervision data, which are then used to teach and fine-tune a student LLM. Our approach teaches the student LLM automatic generation of rationales with enhanced capability for numerical reasoning and topic-aligned numerical headline generation. Experiments show that our approach achieves superior performance in both textual quality and numerical accuracy.

Unsupervised graph domain adaptation (UGDA) focuses on transferring knowledge from labeled source graph to unlabeled target graph under domain discrepancies. Most existing UGDA methods are designed to adapt information from a single source domain, which cannot effectively exploit the complementary knowledge from multiple source domains. Furthermore, their assumptions that the labeled source graphs are accessible throughout the training procedure might not be practical due to privacy, regulation, and storage concerns. In this paper, we investigate multi-source-free unsupervised graph domain adaptation, i.e., adapting knowledge from multiple source domains to an unlabeled target domain without utilizing labeled source graphs but relying solely on source pre-trained models. Unlike previous multi-source domain adaptation approaches that aggregate predictions at model level, we introduce a novel model named GraphATA which conducts adaptation at node granularity. Specifically, we parameterize each node with its own graph convolutional matrix by automatically aggregating weight matrices from multiple source models according to its local context, thus realizing dynamic adaptation over graph structured data. We also demonstrate the capability of GraphATA to generalize to both model-centric and layer-centric methods. Comprehensive experiments on various public datasets show that our GraphATA can consistently surpass recent state-of-the-art baselines with different gains.

The foundation model has heralded a new era in artificial intelligence, pretraining a single model to offer cross-domain transferability on different datasets. Graph neural networks excel at learning graph data, the omnipresent non-Euclidean structure, but often lack the generalization capacity. Hence, graph foundation model is drawing increasing attention, and recent efforts have been made to leverage Large Language Models. On the one hand, existing studies primarily focus on text-attributed graphs, while a wider range of real graphs do not contain fruitful textual attributes. On the other hand, the sequential graph description tailored for the Large Language Model neglects the structural complexity, which is a predominant characteristic of the graph. Such limitations motivate an important question: Can we go beyond Large Language Models, and pretrain a universal model to learn the structural knowledge for any graph? The answer in the language or vision domain is a shared vocabulary. We observe the fact that there also exist shared substructures underlying graph domain, and thereby open a new opportunity of graph foundation model with structural vocabulary. The key innovation is the discovery of a simple yet effective structural vocabulary of trees and cycles, and we explore its inherent connection to Riemannian geometry. Herein, we present a universal pretraining model, RiemannGFM. Concretely, we first construct a novel product bundle to incorporate the diverse geometries of the vocabulary. Then, on this constructed space, we stack Riemannian layers where the structural vocabulary, regardless of specific graph, is learned in Riemannian manifold offering cross-domain transferability. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of RiemannGFM on a diversity of real graphs.

Online communities play a critical role in shaping societal discourse and influencing collective behavior in the real world. The tendency for people to connect with others who share similar characteristics and views, known as homophily, plays a key role in the formation of echo chambers which further amplify polarization and division. Existing works examining homophily in online communities traditionally infer it using content- or adjacency-based approaches, such as constructing explicit interaction networks or performing topic analysis. These methods fall short for platforms where interaction networks cannot be easily constructed and fail to capture the complex nature of user interactions across the platform. This work introduces a novel approach for quantifying user homophily. We first use an Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) framework to infer users' policies, then use these policies as a measure of behavioral homophily. We apply our method to Reddit, conducting a case study across 5.9 million interactions over six years, demonstrating how this approach uncovers distinct behavioral patterns and user roles that vary across different communities. We further validate our behavioral homophily measure against traditional content-based homophily, offering a powerful method for analyzing social media dynamics and their broader societal implications. We find, among others, that users can behave very similarly (high behavioral homophily) when discussing entirely different topics like soccer vs e-sports (low topical homophily), and that there is an entire class of users on Reddit whose purpose seems to be to disagree with others.

Large Language Models (LLMs) contain large amounts of facts about the world. These facts can become outdated over time, which has led to the development of knowledge editing methods (KEs) that can change specific facts in LLMs with limited side effects. This position paper argues that editing LLMs poses serious safety risks that have been largely overlooked. First, we note the fact that KEs are widely available, computationally inexpensive, highly performant, and stealthy makes them an attractive tool for malicious actors. Second, we discuss malicious use cases of KEs, showing how KEs can be easily adapted for a variety of malicious purposes. Third, we highlight vulnerabilities in the AI ecosystem that allow unrestricted uploading and downloading of updated models without verification. Fourth, we argue that a lack of social and institutional awareness exacerbates this risk, and discuss the implications for different stakeholders. We call on the community to (i) research tamper-resistant models and countermeasures against malicious model editing, and (ii) actively engage in securing the AI ecosystem.

Fine-tuning pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) for downstream tasks using First-Order (FO) optimizers presents significant computational challenges. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning(PEFT) methods have been proposed to address these challenges by freezing most model parameters and training only a small subset. While PEFT is efficient, it may not outperform full fine-tuning when high task-specific performance is required. Zeroth-Order (ZO) methods offer an alternative for fine-tuning the entire pre-trained model by approximating gradients using only the forward pass, thus eliminating the computational burden of back-propagation in first-order methods. However, when implementing ZO methods, a hard prompt is crucial, and relying on simple, fixed hard prompts may not be optimal. In this paper, we propose a bilevel optimization framework that complements ZO methods with PEFT to mitigate sensitivity to hard prompts while efficiently and effectively fine-tuning LLMs. Our Bilevel ZOFO (Zeroth-Order-First-Order) method employs a double-loop optimization strategy, where only the gradient of the PEFT model and the forward pass of the base model are required. We provide convergence guarantees for Bilevel ZOFO. Empirically, we demonstrate that Bilevel ZOFO outperforms both PEFT and ZO methods in single-task settings while maintaining similar memory efficiency. Additionally, we show its strong potential for multitask learning. Compared to current first-order meta-training algorithms for multitask learning, our method has significantly lower computational demands while maintaining or improving performance.

Identifying the extent of brain tumors is a significant challenge in brain cancer treatment. The main difficulty is in the approximate detection of tumor size. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has become a critical diagnostic tool. However, manually detecting the boundaries of brain tumors from MRI scans is a labor-intensive task that requires extensive expertise. Deep learning and computer-aided detection techniques have led to notable advances in machine learning for this purpose. In this paper, we propose a modified You Only Look Once (YOLOv8) model to accurately detect the tumors within the MRI images. The proposed model replaced the Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) algorithm with a Real-Time Detection Transformer (RT- DETR) in the detection head. NMS filters out redundant or overlapping bounding boxes in the detected tumors, but they are hand-designed and pre-set. RT-DETR removes hand-designed components. The second improvement was made by replacing the normal convolution block with ghost convolution. Ghost Convolution reduces computational and memory costs while maintaining high accuracy and enabling faster inference, making it ideal for resource-constrained environments and real-time applications. The third improvement was made by introducing a vision transformer block in the backbone of YOLOv8 to extract context-aware features. We used a publicly available dataset of brain tumors in the proposed model. The proposed model performed better than the original YOLOv8 model and also performed better than other object detectors (Faster R- CNN, Mask R-CNN, YOLO, YOLOv3, YOLOv4, YOLOv5, SSD, RetinaNet, EfficientDet, and DETR). The proposed model achieved 0.91 mAP (mean Average Precision)@0.5.

This article describes how technical infrastructure developed by the nonprofit OpenMined enables external scrutiny of AI systems without compromising sensitive information. Independent external scrutiny of AI systems provides crucial transparency into AI development, so it should be an integral component of any approach to AI governance. In practice, external researchers have struggled to gain access to AI systems because of AI companies' legitimate concerns about security, privacy, and intellectual property. But now, privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) have reached a new level of maturity: end-to-end technical infrastructure developed by OpenMined combines several PETs into various setups that enable privacy-preserving audits of AI systems. We showcase two case studies where this infrastructure has been deployed in real-world governance scenarios: "Understanding Social Media Recommendation Algorithms with the Christchurch Call" and "Evaluating Frontier Models with the UK AI Safety Institute." We describe types of scrutiny of AI systems that could be facilitated by current setups and OpenMined's proposed future setups. We conclude that these innovative approaches deserve further exploration and support from the AI governance community. Interested policymakers can focus on empowering researchers on a legal level.

Despite the generative model's groundbreaking success, the need to study its implications for privacy and utility becomes more urgent. Although many studies have demonstrated the privacy threats brought by GANs, no existing survey has systematically categorized the privacy and utility perspectives of GANs and VAEs. In this article, we comprehensively study privacy-preserving generative models, articulating the novel taxonomies for both privacy and utility metrics by analyzing 100 research publications. Finally, we discuss the current challenges and future research directions that help new researchers gain insight into the underlying concepts.

Text-embedding models often exhibit biases arising from the data on which they are trained. In this paper, we examine a hitherto unexplored bias in text-embeddings: bias arising from the presence of $\textit{names}$ such as persons, locations, organizations etc. in the text. Our study shows how the presence of $\textit{name-bias}$ in text-embedding models can potentially lead to erroneous conclusions in assessment of thematic similarity.Text-embeddings can mistakenly indicate similarity between texts based on names in the text, even when their actual semantic content has no similarity or indicate dissimilarity simply because of the names in the text even when the texts match semantically. We first demonstrate the presence of name bias in different text-embedding models and then propose $\textit{text-anonymization}$ during inference which involves removing references to names, while preserving the core theme of the text. The efficacy of the anonymization approach is demonstrated on two downstream NLP tasks, achieving significant performance gains. Our simple and training-optimization-free approach offers a practical and easily implementable solution to mitigate name bias.