Fine-grained sentiment analysis (FSA) aims to extract and summarize user opinions from vast opinionated text. Recent studies demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) possess exceptional sentiment understanding capabilities. However, directly deploying LLMs for FSA applications incurs high inference costs. Therefore, this paper investigates the distillation of fine-grained sentiment understanding from LLMs into small language models (SLMs). We prompt LLMs to examine and interpret the sentiments of given reviews and then utilize the generated content to pretrain SLMs. Additionally, we develop a comprehensive FSA benchmark to evaluate both SLMs and LLMs. Extensive experiments on this benchmark reveal that: (1) distillation significantly enhances the performance of SLMs in FSA tasks, achieving a 6.00\% improvement in $F_1$-score, and the distilled model can outperform Llama-2-7b with only 220M parameters; (2) distillation equips SLMs with excellent zero-shot sentiment classification capabilities, enabling them to match or even exceed their teacher models. These results suggest that distillation from LLMs is a highly promising direction for FSA. We will release our code, data, and pretrained model weights at https://github.com/HITSZ-HLT/FSA-Distillation.

With rapid advances in large language models (LLMs), there has been an increasing application of LLMs in creative content ideation and generation. A critical question emerges: can current LLMs provide ideas that are diverse enough to truly bolster the collective creativity? We examine two state-of-the-art LLMs, GPT-4 and LLaMA-3, on story generation and discover that LLM-generated stories often consist of plot elements that are echoed across a number of generations. To quantify this phenomenon, we introduce the Sui Generis score, which estimates how unlikely a plot element is to appear in alternative storylines generated by the same LLM. Evaluating on 100 short stories, we find that LLM-generated stories often contain combinations of idiosyncratic plot elements echoed frequently across generations, while the original human-written stories are rarely recreated or even echoed in pieces. Moreover, our human evaluation shows that the ranking of Sui Generis scores among story segments correlates moderately with human judgment of surprise level, even though score computation is completely automatic without relying on human judgment.

Anomaly detection (AD) plays a crucial role in time series applications, primarily because time series data is employed across real-world scenarios. Detecting anomalies poses significant challenges since anomalies take diverse forms making them hard to pinpoint accurately. Previous research has explored different AD models, making specific assumptions with varying sensitivity toward particular anomaly types. To address this issue, we propose a novel model selection for unsupervised AD using a combination of time series forest (TSF) and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches that dynamically chooses an AD technique. Our approach allows for effective AD without explicitly depending on ground truth labels that are often scarce and expensive to obtain. Results from the real-time series dataset demonstrate that the proposed model selection approach outperforms all other AD models in terms of the F1 score metric. For the synthetic dataset, our proposed model surpasses all other AD models except for KNN, with an impressive F1 score of 0.989. The proposed model selection framework also exceeded the performance of GPT-4 when prompted to act as an anomaly detector on the synthetic dataset. Exploring different reward functions revealed that the original reward function in our proposed AD model selection approach yielded the best overall scores. We evaluated the performance of the six AD models on an additional three datasets, having global, local, and clustered anomalies respectively, showing that each AD model exhibited distinct performance depending on the type of anomalies. This emphasizes the significance of our proposed AD model selection framework, maintaining high performance across all datasets, and showcasing superior performance across different anomaly types.

The scaling capability has been widely validated in neural language models with respect to the number of parameters and the size of training data. One important question is that does the scaling capability also exists similarly with respect to the number of vision tokens in large vision language Model? This study fills the gap by investigating the relationship between the number of vision tokens and the performance on vision-language models. Our theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations demonstrate that the model exhibits scalable performance \(S(N_l)\) with respect to the number of vision tokens \(N_l\), characterized by the relationship \(S(N_l) \approx (c/N_l)^{\alpha}\). Furthermore, we also investigate the impact of a fusion mechanism that integrates the user's question with vision tokens. The results reveal two key findings. First, the scaling capability remains intact with the incorporation of the fusion mechanism. Second, the fusion mechanism enhances model performance, particularly when the user's question is task-specific and relevant. The analysis, conducted on fifteen diverse benchmarks spanning a broad range of tasks and domains, validates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Q-learning is a powerful tool for network control and policy optimization in wireless networks, but it struggles with large state spaces. Recent advancements, like multi-environment mixed Q-learning (MEMQ), improves performance and reduces complexity by integrating multiple Q-learning algorithms across multiple related environments so-called digital cousins. However, MEMQ is designed for centralized single-agent networks and is not suitable for decentralized or multi-agent networks. To address this challenge, we propose a novel multi-agent MEMQ algorithm for partially decentralized wireless networks with multiple mobile transmitters (TXs) and base stations (BSs), where TXs do not have access to each other's states and actions. In uncoordinated states, TXs act independently to minimize their individual costs. In coordinated states, TXs use a Bayesian approach to estimate the joint state based on local observations and share limited information with leader TX to minimize joint cost. The cost of information sharing scales linearly with the number of TXs and is independent of the joint state-action space size. The proposed scheme is 50% faster than centralized MEMQ with only a 20% increase in average policy error (APE) and is 25% faster than several advanced decentralized Q-learning algorithms with 40% less APE. The convergence of the algorithm is also demonstrated.

Generative AIBIM, a successful structural design pipeline, has proven its ability to intelligently generate high-quality, diverse, and creative shear wall designs that are tailored to specific physical conditions. However, the current module of Generative AIBIM that generates designs, known as the physics-based conditional diffusion model (PCDM), necessitates 1000 iterations for each generation due to its reliance on the denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) sampling process. This leads to a time-consuming and computationally demanding generation process. To address this issue, this study introduces the denoising diffusion implicit model (DDIM), an accelerated generation method that replaces the DDPM sampling process in PCDM. While the original DDIM was designed for DDPM and the optimization process of PCDM differs from that of DDPM, this paper designs "DDIM sampling for PCDM," which modifies the original DDIM formulations to adapt to the optimization process of PCDM. Experimental results demonstrate that DDIM sampling for PCDM can accelerate the generation process of the original PCDM by a factor of 100 while maintaining the same visual quality in the generated results. This study effectively showcases the effectiveness of DDIM sampling for PCDM in expediting intelligent structural design. Furthermore, this paper reorganizes the contents of DDIM, focusing on the practical usage of DDIM. This change is particularly meaningful for researchers who may not possess a strong background in machine learning theory but are interested in utilizing the tool effectively.

Deep learning has proven to be a suitable alternative to least-squares (LSQ) fitting for parameter estimation in various quantitative MRI (QMRI) models. However, current deep learning implementations are not robust to changes in MR acquisition protocols. In practice, QMRI acquisition protocols differ substantially between different studies and clinical settings. The lack of generalizability and adoptability of current deep learning approaches for QMRI parameter estimation impedes the implementation of these algorithms in clinical trials and clinical practice. Neural Controlled Differential Equations (NCDEs) allow for the sampling of incomplete and irregularly sampled data with variable length, making them ideal for use in QMRI parameter estimation. In this study, we show that NCDEs can function as a generic tool for the accurate prediction of QMRI parameters, regardless of QMRI sequence length, configuration of independent variables and QMRI forward model (variable flip angle T1-mapping, intravoxel incoherent motion MRI, dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI). NCDEs achieved lower mean squared error than LSQ fitting in low-SNR simulations and in vivo in challenging anatomical regions like the abdomen and leg, but this improvement was no longer evident at high SNR. NCDEs reduce estimation error interquartile range without increasing bias, particularly under conditions of high uncertainty. These findings suggest that NCDEs offer a robust approach for reliable QMRI parameter estimation, especially in scenarios with high uncertainty or low image quality. We believe that with NCDEs, we have solved one of the main challenges for using deep learning for QMRI parameter estimation in a broader clinical and research setting.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute towards the near-future privacy-preserving big data analytical healthcare platforms, capable of processing streamed or uploaded timeseries data or videos from patients. The experimental work includes a real-life knee rehabilitation video dataset capturing a set of exercises from simple and personalised to more general and challenging movements aimed for returning to sport. To convert video from mobile into privacy-preserving diagnostic timeseries data, we employed Google MediaPipe pose estimation. The developed proof-of-concept algorithms can augment knee exercise videos by overlaying the patient with stick figure elements while updating generated timeseries plot with knee angle estimation streamed as CSV file format. For patients and physiotherapists, video with side-to-side timeseries visually indicating potential issues such as excessive knee flexion or unstable knee movements or stick figure overlay errors is possible by setting a-priori knee-angle parameters. To address adherence to rehabilitation programme and quantify exercise sets and repetitions, our adaptive algorithm can correctly identify (91.67%-100%) of all exercises from side- and front-view videos. Transparent algorithm design for adaptive visual analysis of various knee exercise patterns contributes towards the interpretable AI and will inform near-future privacy-preserving, non-vendor locking, open-source developments for both end-user computing devices and as on-premises non-proprietary cloud platforms that can be deployed within the national healthcare system.

I arrive in Hermanus, a picturesque South African coastal village an hour-and-a-half from Cape Town, at about 11am on a sunny October morning. Ignoring the restaurants and art galleries on the main drag and the throngs of tourists watching southern right whales from the cliff path, I drive straight to the harbour to meet Els Vermeulen, the Belgium-born scientist who heads up the whale unit for the University of Pretoria's Mammal Research Institute. She is waiting for her colleagues to return from the last whale-tagging sortie of the 2024 season. "I would normally be out on the boat with the team," says Vermeulen, who is dressed in a bold geometric print dress and a denim jacket. "But I had to drop my kids at school and couldn't get down here early enough." The water next to the concrete pier is so clear that I can see a giant orange starfish inching its way along the rocky seabed.

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4.0 have shown significant promise in addressing the semantic complexities of regulatory documents, particularly in detecting inconsistencies and contradictions. This study evaluates GPT-4.0's ability to identify conflicts within regulatory requirements by analyzing a curated corpus with artificially injected ambiguities and contradictions, designed in collaboration with architects and compliance engineers. Using metrics such as precision, recall, and F1 score, the experiment demonstrates GPT-4.0's effectiveness in detecting inconsistencies, with findings validated by human experts. The results highlight the potential of LLMs to enhance regulatory compliance processes, though further testing with larger datasets and domain-specific fine-tuning is needed to maximize accuracy and practical applicability. Future work will explore automated conflict resolution and real-world implementation through pilot projects with industry partners.