We introduce VARM, variant relationship matcher strategy, to identify pairs of variant products in e-commerce catalogs. Traditional definitions of entity resolution are concerned with whether product mentions refer to the same underlying product. However, this fails to capture product relationships that are critical for e-commerce applications, such as having similar, but not identical, products listed on the same webpage or share reviews. Here, we formulate a new type of entity resolution in variant product relationships to capture these similar e-commerce product links. In contrast with the traditional definition, the new definition requires both identifying if two products are variant matches of each other and what are the attributes that vary between them. To satisfy these two requirements, we developed a strategy that leverages the strengths of both encoding and generative AI models. First, we construct a dataset that captures webpage product links, and therefore variant product relationships, to train an encoding LLM to predict variant matches for any given pair of products. Second, we use RAG prompted generative LLMs to extract variation and common attributes amongst groups of variant products. To validate our strategy, we evaluated model performance using real data from one of the world's leading e-commerce retailers. The results showed that our strategy outperforms alternative solutions and paves the way to exploiting these new type of product relationships.

Navigating towards fully open language goals and exploring open scenes in a manner akin to human exploration have always posed significant challenges. Recently, Vision Large Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning with both language and visual data. While many works have focused on leveraging VLMs for navigation in open scenes and with open vocabularies, these efforts often fall short of fully utilizing the potential of VLMs or require substantial computational resources. We introduce Navigation with VLM (NavVLM), a framework that harnesses equipment-level VLMs to enable agents to navigate towards any language goal specific or non-specific in open scenes, emulating human exploration behaviors without any prior training. The agent leverages the VLM as its cognitive core to perceive environmental information based on any language goal and constantly provides exploration guidance during navigation until it reaches the target location or area. Our framework not only achieves state-of-the-art performance in Success Rate (SR) and Success weighted by Path Length (SPL) in traditional specific goal settings but also extends the navigation capabilities to any open-set language goal. We evaluate NavVLM in richly detailed environments from the Matterport 3D (MP3D), Habitat Matterport 3D (HM3D), and Gibson datasets within the Habitat simulator. With the power of VLMs, navigation has entered a new era.

Access to mental health support remains limited, particularly in marginalized communities where structural and cultural barriers hinder timely care. This paper explores the potential of AI-enabled chatbots as a scalable solution, focusing on advanced large language models (LLMs)-GPT v4, Mistral Large, and LLama V3.1-and assessing their ability to deliver empathetic, meaningful responses in mental health contexts. While these models show promise in generating structured responses, they fall short in replicating the emotional depth and adaptability of human therapists. Additionally, trustworthiness, bias, and privacy challenges persist due to unreliable datasets and limited collaboration with mental health professionals. To address these limitations, we propose a federated learning framework that ensures data privacy, reduces bias, and integrates continuous validation from clinicians to enhance response quality. This approach aims to develop a secure, evidence-based AI chatbot capable of offering trustworthy, empathetic, and bias-reduced mental health support, advancing AI's role in digital mental health care.

Quantum computers represent a transformative frontier in computational technology, promising exponential speedups beyond classical computing limits. IBM Quantum has led significant advancements in both hardware and software, providing access to quantum hardware via IBM Cloud since 2016, achieving a milestone with the world's first accessible quantum computer. This article explores IBM's quantum computing journey, focusing on the development of practical quantum computers. We summarize the evolution and advancements of IBM Quantum's processors across generations, including their recent breakthrough surpassing the 1,000-qubit barrier. The paper reviews detailed performance metrics across various hardware, tracing their evolution over time and highlighting IBM Quantum's transition from the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing era towards fault-tolerant quantum computing capabilities.

Goal recognition (GR) involves inferring an agent's unobserved goal from a sequence of observations. This is a critical problem in AI with diverse applications. Traditionally, GR has been addressed using 'inference to the best explanation' or abduction, where hypotheses about the agent's goals are generated as the most plausible explanations for observed behavior. Alternatively, some approaches enhance interpretability by ensuring that an agent's behavior aligns with an observer's expectations or by making the reasoning behind decisions more transparent. In this work, we tackle a different challenge: explaining the GR process in a way that is comprehensible to humans. We introduce and evaluate an explainable model for goal recognition (GR) agents, grounded in the theoretical framework and cognitive processes underlying human behavior explanation. Drawing on insights from two human-agent studies, we propose a conceptual framework for human-centered explanations of GR. Using this framework, we develop the eXplainable Goal Recognition (XGR) model, which generates explanations for both why and why not questions. We evaluate the model computationally across eight GR benchmarks and through three user studies. The first study assesses the efficiency of generating human-like explanations within the Sokoban game domain, the second examines perceived explainability in the same domain, and the third evaluates the model's effectiveness in aiding decision-making in illegal fishing detection. Results demonstrate that the XGR model significantly enhances user understanding, trust, and decision-making compared to baseline models, underscoring its potential to improve human-agent collaboration.

Modern code review is a ubiquitous software quality assurance process aimed at identifying potential issues within newly written code. Despite its effectiveness, the process demands large amounts of effort from the human reviewers involved. To help alleviate this workload, researchers have trained deep learning models to imitate human reviewers in providing natural language code reviews. Formally, this task is known as code review comment generation. Prior work has demonstrated improvements in this task by leveraging machine learning techniques and neural models, such as transfer learning and the transformer architecture. However, the quality of the model generated reviews remain sub-optimal due to the quality of the open-source code review data used in model training. This is in part due to the data obtained from open-source projects where code reviews are conducted in a public forum, and reviewers possess varying levels of software development experience, potentially affecting the quality of their feedback. To accommodate for this variation, we propose a suite of experience-aware training methods that utilise the reviewers' past authoring and reviewing experiences as signals for review quality. Specifically, we propose experience-aware loss functions (ELF), which use the reviewers' authoring and reviewing ownership of a project as weights in the model's loss function. Through this method, experienced reviewers' code reviews yield larger influence over the model's behaviour. Compared to the SOTA model, ELF was able to generate higher quality reviews in terms of accuracy, informativeness, and comment types generated. The key contribution of this work is the demonstration of how traditional software engineering concepts such as reviewer experience can be integrated into the design of AI-based automated code review models.

Hierarchical and complex Mathematical Expression Recognition (MER) is challenging due to multiple possible interpretations of a formula, complicating both parsing and evaluation. In this paper, we introduce the Hierarchical Detail-Focused Recognition dataset (HDR), the first dataset specifically designed to address these issues. It consists of a large-scale training set, HDR-100M, offering an unprecedented scale and diversity with one hundred million training instances. And the test set, HDR-Test, includes multiple interpretations of complex hierarchical formulas for comprehensive model performance evaluation. Additionally, the parsing of complex formulas often suffers from errors in fine-grained details. To address this, we propose the Hierarchical Detail-Focused Recognition Network (HDNet), an innovative framework that incorporates a hierarchical sub-formula module, focusing on the precise handling of formula details, thereby significantly enhancing MER performance. Experimental results demonstrate that HDNet outperforms existing MER models across various datasets.

A pandemic is the spread of a disease across large regions, and can have devastating costs to the society in terms of health, economic and social. As such, the study of effective pandemic mitigation strategies can yield significant positive impact on the society. A pandemic can be mathematically described using a compartmental model, such as the Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) model. In this paper, we extend the solution equations of the SIR model to a state transition model with lockdowns. We formalize a metric hybrid planning problem based on this state transition model, and solve it using a metric hybrid planner. We improve the run-time effectiveness of the metric hybrid planner with the addition of valid inequalities, and demonstrate the success of our approach both theoretically and experimentally under various challenging settings.

Quantifying axon and myelin properties (e.g., axon diameter, myelin thickness, g-ratio) in histology images can provide useful information about microstructural changes caused by neurodegenerative diseases. Automatic tissue segmentation is an important tool for these datasets, as a single stained section can contain up to thousands of axons. Advances in deep learning have made this task quick and reliable with minimal overhead, but a deep learning model trained by one research group will hardly ever be usable by other groups due to differences in their histology training data. This is partly due to subject diversity (different body parts, species, genetics, pathologies) and also to the range of modern microscopy imaging techniques resulting in a wide variability of image features (i.e., contrast, resolution). There is a pressing need to make AI accessible to neuroscience researchers to facilitate and accelerate their workflow, but publicly available models are scarce and poorly maintained. Our approach is to aggregate data from multiple imaging modalities (bright field, electron microscopy, Raman spectroscopy) and species (mouse, rat, rabbit, human), to create an open-source, durable tool for axon and myelin segmentation. Our generalist model makes it easier for researchers to process their data and can be fine-tuned for better performance on specific domains. We study the benefits of different aggregation schemes. This multi-domain segmentation model performs better than single-modality dedicated learners (p=0.03077),

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a type of neural network capable of learning on graph-structured data. However, training GNNs on large-scale graphs is challenging due to iterative aggregations of high-dimensional features from neighboring vertices within sparse graph structures combined with neural network operations. The sparsity of graphs frequently results in suboptimal memory access patterns and longer training time. Graph reordering is an optimization strategy aiming to improve the graph data layout. It has shown to be effective to speed up graph analytics workloads, but its effect on the performance of GNN training has not been investigated yet. The generalization of reordering to GNN performance is nontrivial, as multiple aspects must be considered: GNN hyper-parameters such as the number of layers, the number of hidden dimensions, and the feature size used in the GNN model, neural network operations, large intermediate vertex states, and GPU acceleration. In our work, we close this gap by performing an empirical evaluation of 12 reordering strategies in two state-of-the-art GNN systems, PyTorch Geometric and Deep Graph Library. Our results show that graph reordering is effective in reducing training time for CPU- and GPU-based training, respectively. Further, we find that GNN hyper-parameters influence the effectiveness of reordering, that reordering metrics play an important role in selecting a reordering strategy, that lightweight reordering performs better for GPU-based than for CPU-based training, and that invested reordering time can in many cases be amortized.