Can AI Agents simulate real-world trading environments to investigate the impact of external factors on stock trading activities (e.g., macroeconomics, policy changes, company fundamentals, and global events)? These factors, which frequently influence trading behaviors, are critical elements in the quest for maximizing investors' profits. Our work attempts to solve this problem through large language model based agents. We have developed a multi-agent AI system called StockAgent, driven by LLMs, designed to simulate investors' trading behaviors in response to the real stock market. The StockAgent allows users to evaluate the impact of different external factors on investor trading and to analyze trading behavior and profitability effects. Additionally, StockAgent avoids the test set leakage issue present in existing trading simulation systems based on AI Agents. Specifically, it prevents the model from leveraging prior knowledge it may have acquired related to the test data. We evaluate different LLMs under the framework of StockAgent in a stock trading environment that closely resembles real-world conditions. The experimental results demonstrate the impact of key external factors on stock market trading, including trading behavior and stock price fluctuation rules. This research explores the study of agents' free trading gaps in the context of no prior knowledge related to market data. The patterns identified through StockAgent simulations provide valuable insights for LLM-based investment advice and stock recommendation. The code is available at https://github.com/MingyuJ666/Stockagent.

Entity alignment (EA) is to identify equivalent entities across different knowledge graphs (KGs), which can help fuse these KGs into a more comprehensive one. Previous EA methods mainly focus on aligning a pair of KGs, and to the best of our knowledge, no existing EA method considers aligning multiple (more than two) KGs. To fill this research gap, in this work, we study a novel problem of aligning multiple KGs and propose an effective framework named MultiEA to solve the problem. First, we embed the entities of all the candidate KGs into a common feature space by a shared KG encoder. Then, we explore three alignment strategies to minimize the distances among pre-aligned entities. In particular, we propose an innovative inference enhancement technique to improve the alignment performance by incorporating high-order similarities. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of MultiEA, we construct two new real-world benchmark datasets and conduct extensive experiments on them. The results show that our MultiEA can effectively and efficiently align multiple KGs in a single pass.

Scene text retrieval aims to find all images containing the query text from an image gallery. Current efforts tend to adopt an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) pipeline, which requires complicated text detection and/or recognition processes, resulting in inefficient and inflexible retrieval. Different from them, in this work we propose to explore the intrinsic potential of Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) for OCR-free scene text retrieval. Through empirical analysis, we observe that the main challenges of CLIP as a text retriever are: 1) limited text perceptual scale, and 2) entangled visual-semantic concepts. To this end, a novel model termed FDP (Focus, Distinguish, and Prompt) is developed. FDP first focuses on scene text via shifting the attention to the text area and probing the hidden text knowledge, and then divides the query text into content word and function word for processing, in which a semantic-aware prompting scheme and a distracted queries assistance module are utilized. Extensive experiments show that FDP significantly enhances the inference speed while achieving better or competitive retrieval accuracy compared to existing methods. Notably, on the IIIT-STR benchmark, FDP surpasses the state-of-the-art model by 4.37% with a 4 times faster speed. Furthermore, additional experiments under phrase-level and attribute-aware scene text retrieval settings validate FDP's particular advantages in handling diverse forms of query text. The source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/Gyann-z/FDP.

Equivariant neural networks are neural networks with symmetry. Motivated by the theory of group representations, we decompose the layers of an equivariant neural network into simple representations. The nonlinear activation functions lead to interesting nonlinear equivariant maps between simple representations. For example, the rectified linear unit (ReLU) gives rise to piecewise linear maps. We show that these considerations lead to a filtration of equivariant neural networks, generalizing Fourier series. This observation might provide a useful tool for interpreting equivariant neural networks.

With the growing integration of AI in daily life, ensuring the robustness of systems to inference-time attacks is crucial. Among the approaches for certifying robustness to such adversarial examples, randomized smoothing has emerged as highly promising due to its nature as a wrapper around arbitrary black-box models. Previous work on randomized smoothing in natural language processing has primarily focused on specific subsets of edit distance operations, such as synonym substitution or word insertion, without exploring the certification of all edit operations. In this paper, we adapt Randomized Deletion (Huang et al., 2023) and propose, CERTified Edit Distance defense (CERT-ED) for natural language classification. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that CERT-ED outperforms the existing Hamming distance method RanMASK (Zeng et al., 2023) in 4 out of 5 datasets in terms of both accuracy and the cardinality of the certificate. By covering various threat models, including 5 direct and 5 transfer attacks, our method improves empirical robustness in 38 out of 50 settings.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) advancements have enabled the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) that can perform a variety of tasks with remarkable semantic understanding and accuracy. ChatGPT is one such LLM that has gained significant attention due to its impressive capabilities for assisting in various knowledge-intensive tasks. Due to the knowledge-intensive nature of engineering secure software, ChatGPT's assistance is expected to be explored for security-related tasks during the development/evolution of software. To gain an understanding of the potential of ChatGPT as an emerging technology for supporting software security, we adopted a two-fold approach. Initially, we performed an empirical study to analyse the perceptions of those who had explored the use of ChatGPT for security tasks and shared their views on Twitter. It was determined that security practitioners view ChatGPT as beneficial for various software security tasks, including vulnerability detection, information retrieval, and penetration testing. Secondly, we designed an experiment aimed at investigating the practicality of this technology when deployed as an oracle in real-world settings. In particular, we focused on vulnerability detection and qualitatively examined ChatGPT outputs for given prompts within this prominent software security task. Based on our analysis, responses from ChatGPT in this task are largely filled with generic security information and may not be appropriate for industry use. To prevent data leakage, we performed this analysis on a vulnerability dataset compiled after the OpenAI data cut-off date from real-world projects covering 40 distinct vulnerability types and 12 programming languages. We assert that the findings from this study would contribute to future research aimed at developing and evaluating LLMs dedicated to software security.

Alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains an unsolved problem. Human preferences are highly distributed and can be captured at multiple levels of abstraction, from the individual to diverse populations. Organisational preferences, represented by standards and principles, are defined to mitigate reputational risk or meet legislative obligations. In this paper, we present ABC Align, a novel alignment methodology for LLMs that enables integration of the standards and preferences of a large media organisation into the LLM itself. We combine a set of data and methods that build on recent breakthroughs in synthetic data generation, preference optimisation, and post-training model quantisation. Our unified approach mitigates bias and improves accuracy, while preserving reasoning capability, as measured against standard benchmarks.

Machine learning (ML) is revolutionising drug discovery by expediting the prediction of small molecule properties essential for developing new drugs. These properties -- including absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion (ADME)-- are crucial in the early stages of drug development since they provide an understanding of the course of the drug in the organism, i.e., the drug's pharmacokinetics. However, existing methods lack personalisation and rely on manually crafted ML algorithms or pipelines, which can introduce inefficiencies and biases into the process. To address these challenges, we propose a novel evolutionary-based automated ML method (AutoML) specifically designed for predicting small molecule properties, with a particular focus on pharmacokinetics. Leveraging the advantages of grammar-based genetic programming, our AutoML method streamlines the process by automatically selecting algorithms and designing predictive pipelines tailored to the particular characteristics of input molecular data. Results demonstrate AutoML's effectiveness in selecting diverse ML algorithms, resulting in comparable or even improved predictive performances compared to conventional approaches. By offering personalised ML-driven pipelines, our method promises to enhance small molecule research in drug discovery, providing researchers with a valuable tool for accelerating the development of novel therapeutic drugs.

The non-profit settlement sector in Canada supports newcomers in achieving successful integration. This sector faces increasing operational pressures amidst rising immigration targets, which highlights a need for enhanced efficiency and innovation, potentially through reliable AI solutions. The ad-hoc use of general-purpose generative AI, such as ChatGPT, might become a common practice among newcomers and service providers to address this need. However, these tools are not tailored for the settlement domain and can have detrimental implications for immigrants and refugees. We explore the risks that these tools might pose on newcomers to first, warn against the unguarded use of generative AI, and second, to incentivize further research and development in creating AI literacy programs as well as customized LLMs that are aligned with the preferences of the impacted communities. Crucially, such technologies should be designed to integrate seamlessly into the existing workflow of the settlement sector, ensuring human oversight, trustworthiness, and accountability.

Canada qualified for the quarter-finals of the Olympics women's football tournament - hours after losing their appeal against a six-point deduction after a drone was used to spy on a rival team's training session. The Canadians were docked six points while coach Bev Priestman and officials Joseph Lombardi and Jasmine Mander were banned from any football-related activity for one year after New Zealand lodged a complaint about drones flying over their training sessions. While Canada accepted the bans for their backroom staff, they argued the points deduction was too severe. But the Court of Arbitration for Sport dismissed the appeal on Wednesday. However, Canada - who won Olympic gold in Tokyo three years ago - won all three matches to advance as Group A runners-up, behind leaders France.