Based on the principles of information theory, measure theory, and theoretical computer science, we introduce a univariate signal deconvolution method with a wide range of applications to coding theory, particularly in zero-knowledge one-way communication channels, such as in deciphering messages from unknown generating sources about which no prior knowledge is available and to which no return message can be sent. Our multidimensional space reconstruction method from an arbitrary received signal is proven to be agnostic vis-a-vis the encoding-decoding scheme, computation model, programming language, formal theory, the computable (or semi-computable) method of approximation to algorithmic complexity, and any arbitrarily chosen (computable) probability measure of the events. The method derives from the principles of an approach to Artificial General Intelligence capable of building a general-purpose model of models independent of any arbitrarily assumed prior probability distribution. We argue that this optimal and universal method of decoding non-random data has applications to signal processing, causal deconvolution, topological and geometric properties encoding, cryptography, and bio- and technosignature detection.

Attention mechanisms play a crucial role in the neural revolution of Natural Language Processing (NLP). With the growth of attention-based models, several pruning techniques have been developed to identify and exploit sparseness, making these models more efficient. Most efforts focus on hard-coding attention patterns or pruning attention weights based on training data. We propose Attention Pruning (AP), a framework that observes attention patterns in a fixed dataset and generates a global sparseness mask. AP saves 90% of attention computation for language modeling and about 50% for machine translation and GLUE tasks, maintaining result quality. Our method reveals important distinctions between self- and cross-attention patterns, guiding future NLP research. Our framework can reduce both latency and memory requirements for any attention-based model, aiding in the development of improved models for existing or new NLP applications. We have demonstrated this with encoder and autoregressive transformer models using Triton GPU kernels and make our code publicly available at https://github.com/irugina/AP.

Time series data analysis is a critical component in various domains such as finance, healthcare, and meteorology. Despite the progress in deep learning for time series analysis, there remains a challenge in addressing the non-stationary nature of time series data. Traditional models, which are built on the assumption of constant statistical properties over time, often struggle to capture the temporal dynamics in realistic time series, resulting in bias and error in time series analysis. This paper introduces the Adaptive Wavelet Network (AdaWaveNet), a novel approach that employs Adaptive Wavelet Transformation for multi-scale analysis of non-stationary time series data. AdaWaveNet designed a lifting scheme-based wavelet decomposition and construction mechanism for adaptive and learnable wavelet transforms, which offers enhanced flexibility and robustness in analysis. We conduct extensive experiments on 10 datasets across 3 different tasks, including forecasting, imputation, and a newly established super-resolution task. The evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of AdaWaveNet over existing methods in all three tasks, which illustrates its potential in various real-world applications.

The European legislature has proposed the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) to regulate platforms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) products. We review to what extent third-party audits are part of both laws and to what extent access to models and data is provided. By considering the value of third-party audits and third-party data access in an audit ecosystem, we identify a regulatory gap in that the Artificial Intelligence Act does not provide access to data for researchers and civil society. Our contributions to the literature include: (1) Defining an AI audit ecosystem that incorporates compliance and oversight. (2) Highlighting a regulatory gap within the DSA and AIA regulatory framework, preventing the establishment of an AI audit ecosystem. (3) Emphasizing that third-party audits by research and civil society must be part of that ecosystem and demand that the AIA include data and model access for certain AI products. We call for the DSA to provide NGOs and investigative journalists with data access to platforms by delegated acts and for adaptions and amendments of the AIA to provide third-party audits and data and model access at least for high-risk systems to close the regulatory gap. Regulations modeled after European Union AI regulations should enable data access and third-party audits, fostering an AI audit ecosystem that promotes compliance and oversight mechanisms.

In this paper, we introduce the first comprehensive multilingual sign language dataset named Prompt2Sign, which builds from public data including American Sign Language (ASL) and seven others. Our dataset transforms a vast array of videos into a streamlined, model-friendly format, optimized for training with translation models like seq2seq and text2text. Building on this new dataset, we propose SignLLM, the first multilingual Sign Language Production (SLP) model, which includes two novel multilingual SLP modes that allow for the generation of sign language gestures from input text or prompt. Both of the modes can use a new loss and a module based on reinforcement learning, which accelerates the training by enhancing the model's capability to autonomously sample high-quality data. We present benchmark results of SignLLM, which demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on SLP tasks across eight sign languages. More code and materials are available at https://signllm.github.io/.

Polyp segmentation for colonoscopy images is of vital importance in clinical practice. It can provide valuable information for colorectal cancer diagnosis and surgery. While existing methods have achieved relatively good performance, polyp segmentation still faces the following challenges: (1) Varying lighting conditions in colonoscopy and differences in polyp locations, sizes, and morphologies. (2) The indistinct boundary between polyps and surrounding tissue. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-scale information sharing and selection network (MISNet) for polyp segmentation task. We design a Selectively Shared Fusion Module (SSFM) to enforce information sharing and active selection between low-level and high-level features, thereby enhancing model's ability to capture comprehensive information. We then design a Parallel Attention Module (PAM) to enhance model's attention to boundaries, and a Balancing Weight Module (BWM) to facilitate the continuous refinement of boundary segmentation in the bottom-up process. Experiments on five polyp segmentation datasets demonstrate that MISNet successfully improved the accuracy and clarity of segmentation result, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

We consider the problem of learning low-degree quantum objects up to $\varepsilon$-error in $\ell_2$-distance. We show the following results: $(i)$ unknown $n$-qubit degree-$d$ (in the Pauli basis) quantum channels and unitaries can be learned using $O(1/\varepsilon^d)$ queries (independent of $n$), $(ii)$ polynomials $p:\{-1,1\}^n\rightarrow [-1,1]$ arising from $d$-query quantum algorithms can be classically learned from $O((1/\varepsilon)^d\cdot \log n)$ many random examples $(x,p(x))$ (which implies learnability even for $d=O(\log n)$), and $(iii)$ degree-$d$ polynomials $p:\{-1,1\}^n\to [-1,1]$ can be learned through $O(1/\varepsilon^d)$ queries to a quantum unitary $U_p$ that block-encodes $p$. Our main technical contributions are new Bohnenblust-Hille inequalities for quantum channels and completely bounded~polynomials.

Active learning is designed to minimize annotation efforts by prioritizing instances that most enhance learning. However, many active learning strategies struggle with a 'cold start' problem, needing substantial initial data to be effective. This limitation often reduces their utility for pre-trained models, which already perform well in few-shot scenarios. To address this, we introduce ActiveLLM, a novel active learning approach that leverages large language models such as GPT-4, Llama 3, and Mistral Large for selecting instances. We demonstrate that ActiveLLM significantly enhances the classification performance of BERT classifiers in few-shot scenarios, outperforming both traditional active learning methods and the few-shot learning method SetFit. Additionally, ActiveLLM can be extended to non-few-shot scenarios, allowing for iterative selections. In this way, ActiveLLM can even help other active learning strategies to overcome their cold start problem. Our results suggest that ActiveLLM offers a promising solution for improving model performance across various learning setups.

In this work, we explore idiomatic language processing with Large Language Models (LLMs). We introduce the Idiomatic language Test Suite IdioTS, a new dataset of difficult examples specifically designed by language experts to assess the capabilities of LLMs to process figurative language at sentence level. We propose a comprehensive evaluation methodology based on an idiom detection task, where LLMs are prompted with detecting an idiomatic expression in a given English sentence. We present a thorough automatic and manual evaluation of the results and an extensive error analysis.

One way to personalize chatbot interactions is by establishing common ground with the intended reader. A domain where establishing mutual understanding could be particularly impactful is vaccine concerns and misinformation. Vaccine interventions are forms of messaging which aim to answer concerns expressed about vaccination. Tailoring responses in this domain is difficult, since opinions often have seemingly little ideological overlap. We define the task of tailoring vaccine interventions to a Common-Ground Opinion (CGO). Tailoring responses to a CGO involves meaningfully improving the answer by relating it to an opinion or belief the reader holds. In this paper we introduce TAILOR-CGO, a dataset for evaluating how well responses are tailored to provided CGOs. We benchmark several major LLMs on this task; finding GPT-4-Turbo performs significantly better than others. We also build automatic evaluation metrics, including an efficient and accurate BERT model that outperforms finetuned LLMs, investigate how to successfully tailor vaccine messaging to CGOs, and provide actionable recommendations from this investigation. Code and model weights: https://github.com/rickardstureborg/tailor-cgo Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/DukeNLP/tailor-cgo