Large Language Models are becoming the go-to solution for many natural language processing tasks, including in specialized domains where their few-shot capacities are expected to yield high performance in low-resource settings. Herein, we aim to assess the performance of Large Language Models for few shot clinical entity recognition in multiple languages. We evaluate named entity recognition in English, French and Spanish using 8 in-domain (clinical) and 6 out-domain gold standard corpora. We assess the performance of 10 auto-regressive language models using prompting and 16 masked language models used for text encoding in a biLSTM-CRF supervised tagger. We create a few-shot set-up by limiting the amount of annotated data available to 100 sentences. Our experiments show that although larger prompt-based models tend to achieve competitive F-measure for named entity recognition outside the clinical domain, this level of performance does not carry over to the clinical domain where lighter supervised taggers relying on masked language models perform better, even with the performance drop incurred from the few-shot set-up. In all experiments, the CO2 impact of masked language models is inferior to that of auto-regressive models. Results are consistent over the three languages and suggest that few-shot learning using Large language models is not production ready for named entity recognition in the clinical domain. Instead, models could be used for speeding-up the production of gold standard annotated data.

Many models that leverage knowledge graphs (KGs) have recently demonstrated remarkable success in question answering (QA) tasks. In the real world, many facts contained in KGs are time-constrained thus temporal KGQA has received increasing attention. Despite the fruitful efforts of previous models in temporal KGQA, they still have several limitations. (I) They adopt pre-trained language models (PLMs) to obtain question representations, while PLMs tend to focus on entity information and ignore entity transfer caused by temporal constraints, and finally fail to learn specific temporal representations of entities. (II) They neither emphasize the graph structure between entities nor explicitly model the multi-hop relationship in the graph, which will make it difficult to solve complex multi-hop question answering. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel Question Calibration and Multi-Hop Modeling (QC-MHM) approach. Specifically, We first calibrate the question representation by fusing the question and the time-constrained concepts in KG. Then, we construct the GNN layer to complete multi-hop message passing. Finally, the question representation is combined with the embedding output by the GNN to generate the final prediction. Empirical results verify that the proposed model achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art models in the benchmark dataset. Notably, the Hits@1 and Hits@10 results of QC-MHM on the CronQuestions dataset's complex questions are absolutely improved by 5.1% and 1.2% compared to the best-performing baseline. Moreover, QC-MHM can generate interpretable and trustworthy predictions.

Glaucoma is one of the major eye diseases that leads to progressive optic nerve fiber damage and irreversible blindness, afflicting millions of individuals. Glaucoma forecast is a good solution to early screening and intervention of potential patients, which is helpful to prevent further deterioration of the disease. It leverages a series of historical fundus images of an eye and forecasts the likelihood of glaucoma occurrence in the future. However, the irregular sampling nature and the imbalanced class distribution are two challenges in the development of disease forecasting approaches. To this end, we introduce the Multi-scale Spatio-temporal Transformer Network (MST-former) based on the transformer architecture tailored for sequential image inputs, which can effectively learn representative semantic information from sequential images on both temporal and spatial dimensions. Specifically, we employ a multi-scale structure to extract features at various resolutions, which can largely exploit rich spatial information encoded in each image. Besides, we design a time distance matrix to scale time attention in a non-linear manner, which could effectively deal with the irregularly sampled data. Furthermore, we introduce a temperature-controlled Balanced Softmax Cross-entropy loss to address the class imbalance issue. Extensive experiments on the Sequential fundus Images for Glaucoma Forecast (SIGF) dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed MST-former method, achieving an AUC of 98.6% for glaucoma forecasting. Besides, our method shows excellent generalization capability on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) MRI dataset, with an accuracy of 90.3% for mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease prediction, outperforming the compared method by a large margin.

Although large language models (LLMs) perform impressively on many tasks, overconfidence remains a problem. We hypothesized that on multiple-choice Q&A tasks, wrong answers would be associated with smaller maximum softmax probabilities (MSPs) compared to correct answers. We comprehensively evaluate this hypothesis on ten open-source LLMs and five datasets, and find strong evidence for our hypothesis among models which perform well on the original Q&A task. For the six LLMs with the best Q&A performance, the AUROC derived from the MSP was better than random chance with p < 10^{-4} in 59/60 instances. Among those six LLMs, the average AUROC ranged from 60% to 69%. Leveraging these findings, we propose a multiple-choice Q&A task with an option to abstain and show that performance can be improved by selectively abstaining based on the MSP of the initial model response. We also run the same experiments with pre-softmax logits instead of softmax probabilities and find similar (but not identical) results.

Quantum Neural Network (QNN) combines the Deep Learning (DL) principle with the fundamental theory of quantum mechanics to achieve machine learning tasks with quantum acceleration. Recently, QNN systems have been found to manifest robustness issues similar to classical DL systems. There is an urgent need for ways to test their correctness and security. However, QNN systems differ significantly from traditional quantum software and classical DL systems, posing critical challenges for QNN testing. These challenges include the inapplicability of traditional quantum software testing methods, the dependence of quantum test sample generation on perturbation operators, and the absence of effective information in quantum neurons. In this paper, we propose QuanTest, a quantum entanglement-guided adversarial testing framework to uncover potential erroneous behaviors in QNN systems. We design a quantum entanglement adequacy criterion to quantify the entanglement acquired by the input quantum states from the QNN system, along with two similarity metrics to measure the proximity of generated quantum adversarial examples to the original inputs. Subsequently, QuanTest formulates the problem of generating test inputs that maximize the quantum entanglement sufficiency and capture incorrect behaviors of the QNN system as a joint optimization problem and solves it in a gradient-based manner to generate quantum adversarial examples. Experimental results demonstrate that QuanTest possesses the capability to capture erroneous behaviors in QNN systems (generating 67.48%-96.05% more test samples than the random noise under the same perturbation size constraints). The entanglement-guided approach proves effective in adversarial testing, generating more adversarial examples (maximum increase reached 21.32%).

Pre-trained graph models (PGMs) aim to capture transferable inherent structural properties and apply them to different downstream tasks. Similar to pre-trained language models, PGMs also inherit biases from human society, resulting in discriminatory behavior in downstream applications. The debiasing process of existing fair methods is generally coupled with parameter optimization of GNNs. However, different downstream tasks may be associated with different sensitive attributes in reality, directly employing existing methods to improve the fairness of PGMs is inflexible and inefficient. Moreover, most of them lack a theoretical guarantee, i.e., provable lower bounds on the fairness of model predictions, which directly provides assurance in a practical scenario. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel adapter-tuning framework that endows pre-trained graph models with provable fairness (called GraphPAR). GraphPAR freezes the parameters of PGMs and trains a parameter-efficient adapter to flexibly improve the fairness of PGMs in downstream tasks. Specifically, we design a sensitive semantic augmenter on node representations, to extend the node representations with different sensitive attribute semantics for each node. The extended representations will be used to further train an adapter, to prevent the propagation of sensitive attribute semantics from PGMs to task predictions. Furthermore, with GraphPAR, we quantify whether the fairness of each node is provable, i.e., predictions are always fair within a certain range of sensitive attribute semantics. Experimental evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that GraphPAR achieves state-of-the-art prediction performance and fairness on node classification task. Furthermore, based on our GraphPAR, around 90\% nodes have provable fairness.

The attention mechanism, a cornerstone of state-of-the-art neural models, faces computational hurdles in processing long sequences due to its quadratic complexity. Consequently, research efforts in the last few years focused on finding more efficient alternatives. Among them, Hyena (Poli et al., 2023) stands out for achieving competitive results in both language modeling and image classification, while offering sub-quadratic memory and computational complexity. Building on these promising results, we propose ConfHyena, a Conformer whose encoder self-attentions are replaced with an adaptation of Hyena for speech processing, where the long input sequences cause high computational costs. Through experiments in automatic speech recognition (for English) and translation (from English into 8 target languages), we show that our best ConfHyena model significantly reduces the training time by 27%, at the cost of minimal quality degradation ( 1%), which, in most cases, is not statistically significant.

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Two months after its release in November 2022, OpenAI's ChatGPT had 100 million active users, and suddenly tech corporations were racing to offer the public more "generative AI" Pundits compared the new technology's impact to the Internet, or electrification, or the Industrial Revolution--or the discovery of fire. Time will sort hype from reality, but one consequence of the explosion of artificial intelligence is clear: this technology's environmental footprint is large and growing. AI use is directly responsible for carbon emissions from non-renewable electricity and for the consumption of millions of gallons of fresh water, and it indirectly boosts impacts from building and maintaining the power-hungry equipment on which AI runs. As tech companies seek to embed high-intensity AI into everything from resume-writing to kidney transplant medicine and from choosing dog food to climate modeling, they cite many ways AI could help reduce humanity's environmental footprint.

Machine learning, with its myriad applications, has become an integral component of numerous technological systems. A common practice in this domain is the use of transfer learning, where a pre-trained model's architecture, readily available to the public, is fine-tuned to suit specific tasks. As Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) platforms increasingly use pre-trained models in their backends, it's crucial to safeguard these architectures and understand their vulnerabilities. In this work, we present an approach based on the observation that the classification patterns of adversarial images can be used as a means to steal the models. Furthermore, the adversarial image classifications in conjunction with timing side channels can lead to a model stealing method. Our approach, designed for typical user-level access in remote MLaaS environments exploits varying misclassifications of adversarial images across different models to fingerprint several renowned Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Vision Transformer (ViT) architectures. We utilize the profiling of remote model inference times to reduce the necessary adversarial images, subsequently decreasing the number of queries required. We have presented our results over 27 pre-trained models of different CNN and ViT architectures using CIFAR-10 dataset and demonstrate a high accuracy of 88.8% while keeping the query budget under 20.

In this study, we investigate the potential of GPT-4 and its advanced iteration, GPT-4 Turbo, in autonomously developing a detailed entity type taxonomy. Our objective is to construct a comprehensive taxonomy, starting from a broad classification of entity types - including objects, time, locations, organizations, events, actions, and subjects - similar to existing manually curated taxonomies. This classification is then progressively refined through iterative prompting techniques, leveraging GPT-4's internal knowledge base. The result is an extensive taxonomy comprising over 5000 nuanced entity types, which demonstrates remarkable quality upon subjective evaluation. We employed a straightforward yet effective prompting strategy, enabling the taxonomy to be dynamically expanded. The practical applications of this detailed taxonomy are diverse and significant. It facilitates the creation of new, more intricate branches through pattern-based combinations and notably enhances information extraction tasks, such as relation extraction and event argument extraction. Our methodology not only introduces an innovative approach to taxonomy creation but also opens new avenues for applying such taxonomies in various computational linguistics and AI-related fields.