Text Simplification is a task that has been minimally explored for low-resource languages. Consequently, there are only a few manually curated datasets. In this paper, we present a human curated sentence-level text simplification dataset for the Sinhala language. Our evaluation dataset contains 1,000 complex sentences and corresponding 3,000 simplified sentences produced by three different human annotators. We model the text simplification task as a zero-shot and zero resource sequence-to-sequence (seq-seq) task on the multilingual language models mT5 and mBART. We exploit auxiliary data from related seq-seq tasks and explore the possibility of using intermediate task transfer learning (ITTL). Our analysis shows that ITTL outperforms the previously proposed zero-resource methods for text simplification. Our findings also highlight the challenges in evaluating text simplification systems, and support the calls for improved metrics for measuring the quality of automated text simplification systems that would suit low-resource languages as well. Our code and data are publicly available: https://github.com/brainsharks-fyp17/Sinhala-Text-Simplification-Dataset-and-Evaluation

This study investigates crash severity risk modeling strategies for work zones involving large vehicles (i.e., trucks, buses, and vans) when there are crash data imbalance between low-severity (LS) and high-severity (HS) crashes. We utilized crash data, involving large vehicles in South Carolina work zones for the period between 2014 and 2018, which included 4 times more LS crashes compared to HS crashes. The objective of this study is to explore crash severity prediction performance of various models under different feature selection and data balancing techniques. The findings of this study highlight a disparity between LS and HS predictions, with less-accurate prediction of HS crashes compared to LS crashes due to class imbalance and feature overlaps between LS and HS crashes. Combining features from multiple feature selection techniques: statistical correlation, feature importance, recursive elimination, statistical tests, and mutual information, slightly improves HS crash prediction performance. Data balancing techniques such as NearMiss-1 and RandomUnderSampler, maximize HS recall when paired with certain prediction models, such as Bayesian Mixed Logit (BML), NeuralNet, and RandomForest, making them suitable for HS crash prediction. Conversely, RandomOverSampler, HS Class Weighting, and Kernel-based Synthetic Minority Oversampling (K-SMOTE), used with certain prediction models such as BML, CatBoost, and LightGBM, achieve a balanced performance, defined as achieving an equitable trade-off between LS and HS prediction performance metrics. These insights provide safety analysts with guidance to select models, feature selection techniques, and data balancing techniques that align with their specific safety objectives, offering a robust foundation for enhancing work-zone crash severity prediction.

In the fast-evolving field of information retrieval (IR), the integration of generative AI technologies such as large language models (LLMs) is transforming how users search for and interact with information. Recognizing this paradigm shift at the intersection of IR and generative AI (IR-GenAI), a visioning workshop supported by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) was held in July 2024 to discuss the future of IR in the age of generative AI. This workshop convened 44 experts in information retrieval, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence from academia, industry, and government to explore how generative AI can enhance IR and vice versa, and to identify the major challenges and opportunities in this rapidly advancing field. This report contains a summary of discussions as potentially important research topics and contains a list of recommendations for academics, industry practitioners, institutions, evaluation campaigns, and funding agencies.

With the intensification of global aging, health management of the elderly has become a focus of social attention. This study designs and implements a smart elderly care service model to address issues such as data diversity, health status complexity, long-term dependence and data loss, sudden changes in behavior, and data privacy in the prediction of health behaviors of the elderly. The model achieves accurate prediction and dynamic management of health behaviors of the elderly through modules such as multimodal data fusion, data loss processing, nonlinear prediction, emergency detection, and privacy protection. In the experimental design, based on multi-source data sets and market research results, the model demonstrates excellent performance in health behavior prediction, emergency detection, and personalized services. The experimental results show that the model can effectively improve the accuracy and robustness of health behavior prediction and meet the actual application needs in the field of smart elderly care. In the future, with the integration of more data and further optimization of technology, the model will provide more powerful technical support for smart elderly care services.

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) has increased significantly recently, with individuals frequently interacting with chatbots to receive answers to a wide range of questions. In an era where information is readily accessible, it is crucial to stimulate and preserve human cognitive abilities and maintain strong reasoning skills. This paper addresses such challenges by promoting the use of hints as an alternative or a supplement to direct answers. We first introduce a manually constructed hint dataset, WIKIHINT, which includes 5,000 hints created for 1,000 questions. We then finetune open-source LLMs such as LLaMA-3.1 for hint generation in answer-aware and answer-agnostic contexts. We assess the effectiveness of the hints with human participants who try to answer questions with and without the aid of hints. Additionally, we introduce a lightweight evaluation method, HINTRANK, to evaluate and rank hints in both answer-aware and answer-agnostic settings. Our findings show that (a) the dataset helps generate more effective hints, (b) including answer information along with questions generally improves hint quality, and (c) encoder-based models perform better than decoder-based models in hint ranking.

Accurate MTLF supports informed decision-making across multiple aspects of power system management, including power plant scheduling, infrastructure expansion, market operations, and maintaining grid reliability and security. By anticipating future demand, utilities can optimize maintenance schedules, secure fuel supplies, and plan necessary capacity additions. Additionally, accurate forecasts across various time horizons are crucial for ensuring grid stability by maintaining the balance between supply and demand. Furthermore, precise forecasting enables strategic decision-making in energy markets, guiding the timing of electricity purchases and sales. In summary, load forecasting serves as a cornerstone for efficient, reliable, and resilient power system operations.

The world of artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly penetrating all aspects of our personal and professional lives. This proliferation of AI tools and applications are being met with a mixture of excitement, scepticism and even dread [78]. Excitement at the seemingly endless potential of AI applications such as LLMs, especially when they are integrated "within broader systems" [13], scepticism as the realisation dawns that LLMs are in fact fallible as evidenced by hallucinations and hence not the golden bullet that can solve all problems [19, 21], and a feeling of dread for those who believe that LLMs and AI have the potential to detrimentally impact our lives and make people redundant [78]. The ability of some LLMs to pass Theory of Mind (ToM) [64][32] and Turing Tests [7][42] suggests support for the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM), that cognition may be substrate independent. These findings challenge biological essentialism and open new avenues for creating sophisticated AI systems capable of human-like reasoning and interaction.

We investigate the structure of Kazhdan-Lusztig polynomials of the symmetric group by leveraging computational approaches from big data, including exploratory and topological data analysis, applied to the polynomials for symmetric groups of up to 11 strands.

The emergence of vision-language foundation models, such as CLIP, has revolutionized image-text representation, enabling a broad range of applications via prompt learning. Despite its promise, real-world datasets often contain noisy labels that can degrade prompt learning performance. In this paper, we demonstrate that using mean absolute error (MAE) loss in prompt learning, named PromptMAE, significantly enhances robustness against noisy labels while maintaining high accuracy. Though MAE is straightforward and recognized for its robustness, it is rarely used in noisy-label learning due to its slow convergence and poor performance outside prompt learning scenarios. To elucidate the robustness of PromptMAE, we leverage feature learning theory to show that MAE can suppress the influence of noisy samples, thereby improving the signal-to-noise ratio and enhancing overall robustness. Additionally, we introduce PromptOT, a prompt-based optimal transport data purification method to enhance the robustness further. PromptOT employs text encoder representations in vision-language models as prototypes to construct an optimal transportation matrix. This matrix effectively partitions datasets into clean and noisy subsets, allowing for the application of cross-entropy loss to the clean subset and MAE loss to the noisy subset. Our Noise-Label Prompt Learning method, named NLPrompt, offers a simple and efficient approach that leverages the expressive representation and precise alignment capabilities of vision-language models for robust prompt learning. We validate NLPrompt through extensive experiments across various noise settings, demonstrating significant performance improvements.

In this paper, we present a Neuron Abandoning Attention Flow (NAFlow) method to address the open problem of visually explaining the attention evolution dynamics inside CNNs when making their classification decisions. A novel cascading neuron abandoning back-propagation algorithm is designed to trace neurons in all layers of a CNN that involve in making its prediction to address the problem of significant interference from abandoned neurons. Firstly, a Neuron Abandoning Back-Propagation (NA-BP) module is proposed to generate Back-Propagated Feature Maps (BPFM) by using the inverse function of the intermediate layers of CNN models, on which the neurons not used for decision-making are abandoned. Meanwhile, the cascading NA-BP modules calculate the tensors of importance coefficients which are linearly combined with the tensors of BPFMs to form the NAFlow. Secondly, to be able to visualize attention flow for similarity metric-based CNN models, a new channel contribution weights module is proposed to calculate the importance coefficients via Jacobian Matrix. The effectiveness of the proposed NAFlow is validated on nine widely-used CNN models for various tasks of general image classification, contrastive learning classification, few-shot image classification, and image retrieval.