If sentiment analysis tools were valid classifiers, one would expect them to provide comparable results for sentiment classification on different kinds of corpora and for different languages. In line with results of previous studies we show that sentiment analysis tools disagree on the same dataset. Going beyond previous studies we show that the sentiment tool used for sentiment annotation can even be predicted from its outcome, revealing an algorithmic bias of sentiment analysis. Based on Twitter, Wikipedia and different news corpora from the English, German and French languages, our classifiers separate sentiment tools with an averaged F1-score of 0.89 (for the English corpora). We therefore warn against taking sentiment annotations as face value and argue for the need of more and systematic NLP evaluation studies.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have traditionally been evaluated using English datasets, with the word error rate (WER) serving as the predominant metric. WER's simplicity and ease of interpretation have contributed to its widespread adoption, particularly for English. However, as ASR systems expand to multilingual contexts, WER fails in various ways, particularly with morphologically complex languages or those without clear word boundaries. Our work documents the limitations of WER as an evaluation metric and advocates for the character error rate (CER) as the primary metric in multilingual ASR evaluation. We show that CER avoids many of the challenges WER faces and exhibits greater consistency across writing systems. We support our proposition by conducting human evaluations of ASR transcriptions in three languages: Malayalam, English, and Arabic, which exhibit distinct morphological characteristics. We show that CER correlates more closely with human judgments than WER, even for English. To facilitate further research, we release our human evaluation dataset for future benchmarking of ASR metrics. Our findings suggest that CER should be prioritized, or at least supplemented, in multilingual ASR evaluations to account for the varying linguistic characteristics of different languages.

Graph anomaly detection (GAD), which aims to identify nodes in a graph that significantly deviate from normal patterns, plays a crucial role in broad application domains. Existing GAD methods, whether supervised or unsupervised, are onemodel-for-one-dataset approaches, i.e., training a separate model for each graph dataset. This limits their applicability in real-world scenarios where training on the target graph data is not possible due to issues like data privacy. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel zero-shot generalist GAD approach UNPrompt that trains a one-for-all detection model, requiring the training of one GAD model on a single graph dataset and then effectively generalizing to detect anomalies in other graph datasets without any retraining or fine-tuning. The key insight in UNPrompt is that i) the predictability of latent node attributes can serve as a generalized anomaly measure and ii) highly generalized normal and abnormal graph patterns can be learned via latent node attribute prediction in a properly normalized node attribute space. UNPrompt achieves generalist GAD through two main modules: one module aligns the dimensionality and semantics of node attributes across different graphs via coordinate-wise normalization in a projected space, while another module learns generalized neighborhood prompts that support the use of latent node attribute predictability as an anomaly score across different datasets. Extensive experiments on real-world GAD datasets show that UNPrompt significantly outperforms diverse competing methods under the generalist GAD setting, and it also has strong superiority under the one-model-for-one-dataset setting. Graph anomaly detection (GAD) aims to identify anomalous nodes that exhibit significant deviations from the majority of nodes in a graph. GAD has attracted extensive research attention in recent years (Ma et al., 2021; Pang et al., 2021; Qiao et al., 2024) due to the board applications in various domains such as spam review detection in online shopping networks (McAuley & Leskovec, 2013; Rayana & Akoglu, 2015) and malicious user detection in social networks (Yang et al., 2019). To handle high-dimensional node attributes and complex structural relations between nodes, graph neural networks (GNNs) (Kipf & Welling, 2016; Wu et al., 2020) have been widely exploited for GAD due to their strong ability to integrate the node attributes and graph structures. These methods can be roughly divided into two categories, i.e., supervised and unsupervised methods. One category formulates GAD as a binary classification problem and aims to capture anomaly patterns under the guidance of labels (Tang et al., 2022; Peng et al., 2018; Gao et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023b).

This paper introduces a scalar numerical differentiator, represented as a system of nonlinear differential equations of any high order. We derive the explicit solution for this system and demonstrate that, with a suitable choice of differentiator order, the error converges to zero for polynomial signals with additive white noise. In more general cases, the error remains bounded, provided that the highest estimated derivative is also bounded. A notable advantage of this numerical differentiation method is that it does not require tuning parameters based on the specific characteristics of the signal being differentiated. We propose a discretization method for the equations that implements a cumulative smoothing algorithm for time series. This algorithm operates online, without the need for data accumulation, and it solves both interpolation and extrapolation problems without fitting any coefficients to the data.

Although pre-trained language models can generate executable plans (e.g., programmatic policies) for solving robot tasks, the generated plans may violate task-relevant logical specifications due to the models' black-box nature. A significant gap remains between the language models' outputs and verifiable executions of plans. We develop a method to generate executable plans and formally verify them against task-relevant safety specifications. Given a high-level task description in natural language, the proposed method queries a language model to generate plans in the form of executable robot programs. It then converts the generated plan into an automaton-based representation, allowing formal verification of the automaton against the specifications. We prove that given a set of verified plans, the composition of these plans also satisfies the safety specifications. This proof ensures the safety of complex, multi-component plans, obviating the computation complexity of verifying the composed plan. We then propose an automated fine-tuning process that refines the language model to generate specification-compliant plans without the need for human labeling. The empirical results show a 30 percent improvement in the probability of generating plans that meet task specifications after fine-tuning.

Positional bias in large language models (LLMs) hinders their ability to effectively process long inputs. A prominent example is the "lost in the middle" phenomenon, where LLMs struggle to utilize relevant information situated in the middle of the input. While prior research primarily focuses on single pieces of relevant information, real-world applications often involve multiple relevant information pieces. To bridge this gap, we present LongPiBench, a benchmark designed to assess positional bias involving multiple pieces of relevant information. Thorough experiments are conducted with five commercial and six open-source models. These experiments reveal that while most current models are robust against the "lost in the middle" issue, there exist significant biases related to the spacing of relevant information pieces. These findings highlight the importance of evaluating and reducing positional biases to advance LLM's capabilities.

I implement a prompt-based learning strategy to extract measures of sentiment and other features from confidential reference letters. I show that the contents of reference letters is clearly reflected in the performance of job market candidates in the Economics academic job market. In contrast, applying traditional ``bag-of-words'' approaches produces measures of sentiment that, while positively correlated to my LLM-based measure, are not predictive of job market outcomes. Using a random forest, I show that both letter quality and length are predictive of success in the job market. Letters authored by advisers appear to be as important as those written by other referees.

Training robot policies in the real world can be unsafe, costly, and difficult to scale. Simulation serves as an inexpensive and potentially limitless source of training data, but suffers from the semantics and physics disparity between simulated and real-world environments. These discrepancies can be minimized by training in digital twins, which serve as virtual replicas of a real scene but are expensive to generate and cannot produce cross-domain generalization. To address these limitations, we propose the concept of digital cousins, a virtual asset or scene that, unlike a digital twin, does not explicitly model a real-world counterpart but still exhibits similar geometric and semantic affordances. As a result, digital cousins simultaneously reduce the cost of generating an analogous virtual environment while also facilitating better robustness during sim-to-real domain transfer by providing a distribution of similar training scenes. Leveraging digital cousins, we introduce a novel method for their automated creation, and propose a fully automated real-to-sim-to-real pipeline for generating fully interactive scenes and training robot policies that can be deployed zero-shot in the original scene. We find that digital cousin scenes that preserve geometric and semantic affordances can be produced automatically, and can be used to train policies that outperform policies trained on digital twins, achieving 90% vs. 25% success rates under zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. Additional details are available at https://digital-cousins.github.io/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often augmented with external information as contexts, but this external information can sometimes be inaccurate or even intentionally misleading. We argue that robust LLMs should demonstrate situated faithfulness, dynamically calibrating their trust in external information based on their confidence in the internal knowledge and the external context. To benchmark this capability, we evaluate LLMs across several QA datasets, including a newly created dataset called RedditQA featuring in-the-wild incorrect contexts sourced from Reddit posts. We show that when provided with both correct and incorrect contexts, both open-source and proprietary models tend to overly rely on external information, regardless of its factual accuracy. To enhance situated faithfulness, we propose two approaches: Self-Guided Confidence Reasoning (SCR) and Rule-Based Confidence Reasoning (RCR). SCR enables models to self-access the confidence of external information relative to their own internal knowledge to produce the most accurate answer. RCR, in contrast, extracts explicit confidence signals from the LLM and determines the final answer using predefined rules. Our results show that for LLMs with strong reasoning capabilities, such as GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini, SCR outperforms RCR, achieving improvements of up to 24.2% over a direct input augmentation baseline. Conversely, for a smaller model like Llama-3-8B, RCR outperforms SCR. Fine-tuning SCR with our proposed Confidence Reasoning Direct Preference Optimization (CR-DPO) method improves performance on both seen and unseen datasets, yielding an average improvement of 8.9% on Llama-3-8B. In addition to quantitative results, we offer insights into the relative strengths of SCR and RCR. Our findings highlight promising avenues for improving situated faithfulness in LLMs. The data and code are released.

Joint Multimodal Entity-Relation Extraction (JMERE) is a challenging task that aims to extract entities and their relations from text-image pairs in social media posts. Existing methods for JMERE require large amounts of labeled data. However, gathering and annotating fine-grained multimodal data for JMERE poses significant challenges. Initially, we construct diverse and comprehensive multimodal few-shot datasets fitted to the original data distribution. To address the insufficient information in the few-shot setting, we introduce the \textbf{K}nowledge-\textbf{E}nhanced \textbf{C}ross-modal \textbf{P}rompt \textbf{M}odel (KECPM) for JMERE. This method can effectively address the problem of insufficient information in the few-shot setting by guiding a large language model to generate supplementary background knowledge. Our proposed method comprises two stages: (1) a knowledge ingestion stage that dynamically formulates prompts based on semantic similarity guide ChatGPT generating relevant knowledge and employs self-reflection to refine the knowledge; (2) a knowledge-enhanced language model stage that merges the auxiliary knowledge with the original input and utilizes a transformer-based model to align with JMERE's required output format. We extensively evaluate our approach on a few-shot dataset derived from the JMERE dataset, demonstrating its superiority over strong baselines in terms of both micro and macro F$_1$ scores. Additionally, we present qualitative analyses and case studies to elucidate the effectiveness of our model.