Based on Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), event coreference resolution (ECR) systems have demonstrated outstanding performance in clustering coreferential events across documents. However, the state-of-the-art system exhibits an excessive reliance on the'triggers lexical matching' spurious pattern in the input mention pair text. We formalize the decision-making process of the baseline ECR system using a Structural Causal Model (SCM), aiming to identify spurious and causal associations (i.e., rationales) within the ECR task. Leveraging the debiasing capability of counterfactual data augmentation, we develop a rationale-centric counterfactual data augmentation method with LLM-in-the-loop. This method is specialized for pairwise input in the Figure 1: The distribution of'triggers lexical matching' ECR system, where we conduct direct interventions in mention pairs from ECB+ training set, along with a on triggers and context to mitigate the false negative example from Held et al.'s system which spurious association while emphasizing the causation.

This paper introduces a novel uncertainty quantification framework for regression models where the response takes values in a separable metric space, and the predictors are in a Euclidean space. The proposed algorithms can efficiently handle large datasets and are agnostic to the predictive base model used. Furthermore, the algorithms possess asymptotic consistency guarantees and, in some special homoscedastic cases, we provide non-asymptotic guarantees. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed uncertainty quantification framework, we use a linear regression model for metric responses (known as the global Fr\'echet model) in various clinical applications related to precision and digital medicine. The different clinical outcomes analyzed are represented as complex statistical objects, including multivariate Euclidean data, Laplacian graphs, and probability distributions.

We explore the capabilities of an augmented democracy system built on off-the-shelf LLMs fine-tuned on data summarizing individual preferences across 67 policy proposals collected during the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections. We use a train-test cross-validation setup to estimate the accuracy with which the LLMs predict both: a subject's individual political choices and the aggregate preferences of the full sample of participants. At the individual level, the accuracy of the out of sample predictions lie in the range 69%-76% and are significantly better at predicting the preferences of liberal and college educated participants. At the population level, we aggregate preferences using an adaptation of the Borda score and compare the ranking of policy proposals obtained from a probabilistic sample of participants and from data augmented using LLMs. We find that the augmented data predicts the preferences of the full population of participants better than probabilistic samples alone when these represent less than 30% to 40% of the total population. These results indicate that LLMs are potentially useful for the construction of systems of augmented democracy.

In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the metaverse, envisioned as a transformative dimension of next-generation Internet technologies. This study not only outlines the structural components of our survey but also makes a substantial scientific contribution by elucidating the foundational concepts underlying the emergence of the metaverse. We analyze its architecture by defining key characteristics and requirements, thereby illuminating the nascent reality set to revolutionize digital interactions. Our analysis emphasizes the importance of collaborative efforts in developing metaverse standards, thereby fostering a unified understanding among industry stakeholders, organizations, and regulatory bodies. We extend our scrutiny to critical technologies integral to the metaverse, including interactive experiences, communication technologies, ubiquitous computing, digital twins, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity measures. For each technological domain, we rigorously assess current contributions, principal techniques, and representative use cases, providing a nuanced perspective on their potential impacts. Furthermore, we delve into the metaverse's diverse applications across education, healthcare, business, social interactions, industrial sectors, defense, and mission-critical operations, highlighting its extensive utility. Each application is thoroughly analyzed, demonstrating its value and addressing associated challenges. The survey concludes with an overview of persistent challenges and future directions, offering insights into essential considerations and strategies necessary to harness the full potential of the metaverse. Through this detailed investigation, our goal is to articulate the scientific contributions of this survey paper, transcending a mere structural overview to highlight the transformative implications of the metaverse.

Automatic perception of image quality is a challenging problem that impacts billions of Internet and social media users daily. To advance research in this field, we propose a no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) method termed Cross-IQA based on vision transformer(ViT) model. The proposed Cross-IQA method can learn image quality features from unlabeled image data. We construct the pretext task of synthesized image reconstruction to unsupervised extract the image quality information based ViT block. The pretrained encoder of Cross-IQA is used to fine-tune a linear regression model for score prediction. Experimental results show that Cross-IQA can achieve state-of-the-art performance in assessing the low-frequency degradation information (e.g., color change, blurring, etc.) of images compared with the classical full-reference IQA and NR-IQA under the same datasets.

This work presents a dynamic vocabulary adaptation strategy, MEDVOC, for fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) like BertSumAbs, BART, and PEGASUS for improved medical text summarization. In contrast to existing domain adaptation approaches in summarization, MEDVOC treats vocabulary as an optimizable parameter and optimizes the PLM vocabulary based on fragment score conditioned only on the downstream task's reference summaries. Unlike previous works on vocabulary adaptation (limited only to classification tasks), optimizing vocabulary based on summarization tasks requires an extremely costly intermediate fine-tuning step on large summarization datasets. To that end, our novel fragment score-based hyperparameter search very significantly reduces this fine-tuning time -- from 450 days to less than 2 days on average. Furthermore, while previous works on vocabulary adaptation are often primarily tied to single PLMs, MEDVOC is designed to be deployable across multiple PLMs (with varying model vocabulary sizes, pre-training objectives, and model sizes) -- bridging the limited vocabulary overlap between the biomedical literature domain and PLMs. MEDVOC outperforms baselines by 15.74% in terms of Rouge-L in zero-shot setting and shows gains of 17.29% in high Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) concentrations. Our human evaluation shows MEDVOC generates more faithful medical summaries (88% compared to 59% in baselines). We make the codebase publicly available at https://github.com/gb-kgp/MEDVOC.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated substantial commonsense understanding through numerous benchmark evaluations. However, their understanding of cultural commonsense remains largely unexamined. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive examination of the capabilities and limitations of several state-of-the-art LLMs in the context of cultural commonsense tasks. Using several general and cultural commonsense benchmarks, we find that (1) LLMs have a significant discrepancy in performance when tested on culture-specific commonsense knowledge for different cultures; (2) LLMs' general commonsense capability is affected by cultural context; and (3) The language used to query the LLMs can impact their performance on cultural-related tasks. Our study points to the inherent bias in the cultural understanding of LLMs and provides insights that can help develop culturally aware language models.

The increasing sophistication of cyber threats necessitates proactive measures to identify vulnerabilities and potential exploits. Underground hacking forums serve as breeding grounds for the exchange of hacking techniques and discussions related to exploitation. In this research, we propose an innovative approach using topic modeling to analyze and uncover key themes in vulnerabilities discussed within these forums. The objective of our study is to develop a machine learning-based model that can automatically detect and classify vulnerability-related discussions in underground hacking forums. By monitoring and analyzing the content of these forums, we aim to identify emerging vulnerabilities, exploit techniques, and potential threat actors. To achieve this, we collect a large-scale dataset consisting of posts and threads from multiple underground forums. We preprocess and clean the data to ensure accuracy and reliability. Leveraging topic modeling techniques, specifically Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we uncover latent topics and their associated keywords within the dataset. This enables us to identify recurring themes and prevalent discussions related to vulnerabilities, exploits, and potential targets.

The efficacy of an large language model (LLM) generated text detector depends substantially on the availability of sizable training data. White-box zero-shot detectors, which require no such data, are nonetheless limited by the accessibility of the source model of the LLM-generated text. In this paper, we propose an simple but effective black-box zero-shot detection approach, predicated on the observation that human-written texts typically contain more grammatical errors than LLM-generated texts. This approach entails computing the Grammar Error Correction Score (GECScore) for the given text to distinguish between human-written and LLM-generated text. Extensive experimental results show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) zero-shot and supervised methods, achieving an average AUROC of 98.7% and showing strong robustness against paraphrase and adversarial perturbation attacks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming crucial across various fields, emphasizing the urgency for high-quality models in underrepresented languages. This study explores the unique challenges faced by low-resource languages, such as data scarcity, model selection, evaluation, and computational limitations, with a special focus on Turkish. We conduct an in-depth analysis to evaluate the impact of training strategies, model choices, and data availability on the performance of LLMs designed for underrepresented languages. Our approach includes two methodologies: (i) adapting existing LLMs originally pretrained in English to understand Turkish, and (ii) developing a model from the ground up using Turkish pretraining data, both supplemented with supervised fine-tuning on a novel Turkish instruction-tuning dataset aimed at enhancing reasoning capabilities. The relative performance of these methods is evaluated through the creation of a new leaderboard for Turkish LLMs, featuring benchmarks that assess different reasoning and knowledge skills. Furthermore, we conducted experiments on data and model scaling, both during pretraining and fine-tuning, simultaneously emphasizing the capacity for knowledge transfer across languages and addressing the challenges of catastrophic forgetting encountered during fine-tuning on a different language. Our goal is to offer a detailed guide for advancing the LLM framework in low-resource linguistic contexts, thereby making natural language processing (NLP) benefits more globally accessible.