Federated Learning (FL) has gained significant attention as it facilitates collaborative machine learning among multiple clients without centralizing their data on a server. FL ensures the privacy of participating clients by locally storing their data, which creates new challenges in fairness. Traditional debiasing methods assume centralized access to sensitive information, rendering them impractical for the FL setting. Additionally, FL is more susceptible to fairness issues than centralized machine learning due to the diverse client data sources that may be associated with group information. Therefore, training a fair model in FL without access to client local data is important and challenging. This paper presents AFed, a straightforward yet effective framework for promoting group fairness in FL. The core idea is to circumvent restricted data access by learning the global data distribution. This paper proposes two approaches: AFed-G, which uses a conditional generator trained on the server side, and AFed-GAN, which improves upon AFed-G by training a conditional GAN on the client side. We augment the client data with the generated samples to help remove bias. Our theoretical analysis justifies the proposed methods, and empirical results on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate a substantial improvement in AFed over several baselines.

Large language models (LLMs) hold promise for addressing healthcare challenges but often generate hallucinations due to limited integration of medical knowledge. Incorporating external medical knowledge is therefore critical, especially considering the breadth and complexity of medical content, which necessitates effective multi-source knowledge acquisition. We address this challenge by framing it as a source planning problem, where the task is to formulate context-appropriate queries tailored to the attributes of diverse knowledge sources. Existing approaches either overlook source planning or fail to achieve it effectively due to misalignment between the model's expectation of the sources and their actual content. To bridge this gap, we present MedOmniKB, a comprehensive repository comprising multigenre and multi-structured medical knowledge sources. Leveraging these sources, we propose the Source Planning Optimisation (SPO) method, which enhances multi-source utilisation through explicit planning optimisation. Our approach involves enabling an expert model to explore and evaluate potential plans while training a smaller model to learn source alignment using positive and negative planning samples. Experimental results demonstrate that our method substantially improves multi-source planning performance, enabling the optimised small model to achieve state-of-the-art results in leveraging diverse medical knowledge sources.

Skeleton-based action recognition has gained significant attention for its ability to efficiently represent spatiotemporal information in a lightweight format. Most existing approaches use graph-based models to process skeleton sequences, where each pose is represented as a skeletal graph structured around human physical connectivity. Among these, the Spatiotemporal Graph Convolutional Network (ST-GCN) has become a widely used framework. Alternatively, hypergraph-based models, such as the Hyperformer, capture higher-order correlations, offering a more expressive representation of complex joint interactions. A recent advancement, termed Taylor Videos, introduces motion-enhanced skeleton sequences by embedding motion concepts, providing a fresh perspective on interpreting human actions in skeleton-based action recognition. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of both traditional skeleton sequences and Taylor-transformed skeletons using ST-GCN and Hyperformer models on the NTU-60 and NTU-120 datasets. We compare skeletal graph and hypergraph representations, analyzing static poses against motion-injected poses. Our findings highlight the strengths and limitations of Taylor-transformed skeletons, demonstrating their potential to enhance motion dynamics while exposing current challenges in fully using their benefits. This study underscores the need for innovative skeletal modelling techniques to effectively handle motion-rich data and advance the field of action recognition.

Metaphors play a crucial role in human communication, yet their comprehension remains a significant challenge for natural language processing (NLP) due to the cognitive complexity involved. According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), metaphors map a target domain onto a source domain, and understanding this mapping is essential for grasping the nature of metaphors. While existing NLP research has focused on tasks like metaphor detection and sentiment analysis of metaphorical expressions, there has been limited attention to the intricate process of identifying the mappings between source and target domains. Moreover, non-English multimodal metaphor resources remain largely neglected in the literature, hindering a deeper understanding of the key elements involved in metaphor interpretation. To address this gap, we developed a Chinese multimodal metaphor advertisement dataset (namely CM3D) that includes annotations of specific target and source domains. This dataset aims to foster further research into metaphor comprehension, particularly in non-English languages. Furthermore, we propose a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting-based Metaphor Mapping Identification Model (CPMMIM), which simulates the human cognitive process for identifying these mappings. Drawing inspiration from CoT reasoning and Bi-Level Optimization (BLO), we treat the task as a hierarchical identification problem, enabling more accurate and interpretable metaphor mapping. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of CPMMIM, highlighting its potential for advancing metaphor comprehension in NLP. Our dataset and code are both publicly available to encourage further advancements in this field.

Eating disorders (ED) are critical psychiatric problems that have alarmed the mental health community. Mental health professionals are increasingly recognizing the utility of data derived from social media platforms such as Twitter. However, high dimensionality and extensive feature sets of Twitter data present remarkable challenges for ED classification. To overcome these hurdles, we introduce a novel method, an informed branch and bound search technique known as ED-Filter. This strategy significantly improves the drawbacks of conventional feature selection algorithms such as filters and wrappers. ED-Filter iteratively identifies an optimal set of promising features that maximize the eating disorder classification accuracy. In order to adapt to the dynamic nature of Twitter ED data, we enhance the ED-Filter with a hybrid greedy-based deep learning algorithm. This algorithm swiftly identifies sub-optimal features to accommodate the ever-evolving data landscape. Experimental results on Twitter eating disorder data affirm the effectiveness and efficiency of ED-Filter. The method demonstrates significant improvements in classification accuracy and proves its value in eating disorder detection on social media platforms.

We study the problem of optimizing a guidance policy capable of dynamically guiding the agents for lifelong Multi-Agent Path Finding based on real-time traffic patterns. Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) focuses on moving multiple agents from their starts to goals without collisions. Its lifelong variant, LMAPF, continuously assigns new goals to agents. In this work, we focus on improving the solution quality of PIBT, a state-of-the-art rule-based LMAPF algorithm, by optimizing a policy to generate adaptive guidance. We design two pipelines to incorporate guidance in PIBT in two different ways. We demonstrate the superiority of the optimized policy over both static guidance and human-designed policies. Additionally, we explore scenarios where task distribution changes over time, a challenging yet common situation in real-world applications that is rarely explored in the literature.

Follow-the-leader (FTL) motion is essential for continuum robots operating in fragile and confined environments. It allows the robot to exert minimal force on its surroundings, reducing the risk of damage. This paper presents a novel design of a snake-like robot capable of achieving FTL motion by integrating fiber jamming modules (FJMs). The proposed robot can dynamically adjust its stiffness during propagation and interaction with the environment. An algorithm is developed to independently control the tendon and FJM insertion movements, allowing the robot to maintain its shape while minimizing the forces exerted on surrounding structures. To validate the proposed design, comparative tests were conducted between a traditional tendon-driven robot and the novel design under different configurations. The results demonstrate that our design relies significantly less on contact with the surroundings to maintain its shape. This highlights its potential for safer and more effective operations in delicate environments, such as minimally invasive surgery (MIS) or industrial in-situ inspection.

This research aims to investigate the dynamic nature of linguistic style throughout various stages of life, from post teenage to old age. By employing linguistic analysis tools and methodologies, the study will delve into the intricacies of how individuals adapt and modify their language use over time. The research uses a data set of blogs from blogger.com from 2004 and focuses on English for syntactic analysis. The findings of this research can have implications for linguistics, psychology, and communication studies, shedding light on the intricate relationship between age and language.

Meteorological factors (MF) are crucial in day-ahead load forecasting as they significantly influence the electricity consumption behaviors of consumers. Numerous studies have incorporated MF into the load forecasting model to achieve higher accuracy. Selecting MF from one representative location or the averaged MF as the inputs of the forecasting model is a common practice. However, the difference in MF collected in various locations within a region may be significant, which poses a challenge in selecting the appropriate MF from numerous locations. A representation learning framework is proposed to extract geo-distributed MF while considering their spatial relationships. In addition, this paper employs the Shapley value in the graph-based model to reveal connections between MF collected in different locations and loads. To reduce the computational complexity of calculating the Shapley value, an acceleration method is adopted based on Monte Carlo sampling and weighted linear regression. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method improves the day-ahead forecasting accuracy, especially in extreme scenarios such as the "accumulation temperature effect" in summer and "sudden temperature change" in winter. We also find a significant correlation between the importance of MF in different locations and the corresponding area's GDP and mainstay industry.

Missing data imputation, which aims to impute the missing values in the raw datasets to achieve the completeness of datasets, is crucial for modern data-driven models like large language models (LLMs) and has attracted increasing interest over the past decades. Despite its importance, existing solutions for missing data imputation either 1) only support numerical and categorical data or 2) show an unsatisfactory performance due to their design prioritizing text data and the lack of key properties for tabular data imputation. In this paper, we propose UnIMP, a Unified IMPutation framework that leverages LLM and high-order message passing to enhance the imputation of mixed-type data including numerical, categorical, and text data. Specifically, we first introduce a cell-oriented hypergraph to model the table. We then propose BiHMP, an efficient Bidirectional High-order Message-Passing network to aggregate global-local information and high-order relationships on the constructed hypergraph while capturing the inter-column heterogeneity and intra-column homogeneity. To effectively and efficiently align the capacity of the LLM with the information aggregated by BiHMP, we introduce Xfusion, which, together with BiHMP, acts as adapters for the LLM. We follow a pre-training and fine-tuning pipeline to train UnIMP, integrating two optimizations: chunking technique, which divides tables into smaller chunks to enhance efficiency; and progressive masking technique, which gradually adapts the model to learn more complex data patterns. Both theoretical proofs and empirical experiments on 10 real world datasets highlight the superiority of UnIMP over existing techniques.