Speech technologies rely on capturing a speaker's voice variability while obtaining comprehensive language information. Textual prompts and sentence selection methods have been proposed in the literature to comprise such adequate phonetic data, referred to as a phonetically rich \textit{corpus}. However, they are still insufficient for acoustic modeling, especially critical for languages with limited resources. Hence, this paper proposes a novel approach and outlines the methodological aspects required to create a \textit{corpus} with broad phonetic coverage for a low-resourced language, Brazilian Portuguese. Our methodology includes text dataset collection up to a sentence selection algorithm based on triphone distribution. Furthermore, we propose a new phonemic classification according to acoustic-articulatory speech features since the absolute number of distinct triphones, or low-probability triphones, does not guarantee an adequate representation of every possible combination. Using our algorithm, we achieve a 55.8\% higher percentage of distinct triphones -- for samples of similar size -- while the currently available phonetic-rich corpus, CETUC and TTS-Portuguese, 12.6\% and 12.3\% in comparison to a non-phonetically rich dataset.

The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) in radiology has shed light on the risk of deep learning (DL) models exacerbating clinical biases towards vulnerable patient populations. While prior literature has focused on quantifying biases exhibited by trained DL models, demographically targeted adversarial bias attacks on DL models and its implication in the clinical environment remains an underexplored field of research in medical imaging. In this work, we demonstrate that demographically targeted label poisoning attacks can introduce adversarial underdiagnosis bias in DL models and degrade performance on underrepresented groups without impacting overall model performance. Moreover, our results across multiple performance metrics and demographic groups like sex, age, and their intersectional subgroups indicate that a group's vulnerability to undetectable adversarial bias attacks is directly correlated with its representation in the model's training data.

Misuse of the Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised widespread concern. To address this issue, safeguards have been taken to ensure that LLMs align with social ethics. However, recent findings have revealed an unsettling vulnerability bypassing the safeguards of LLMs, known as jailbreak attacks. By applying techniques, such as employing role-playing scenarios, adversarial examples, or subtle subversion of safety objectives as a prompt, LLMs can produce an inappropriate or even harmful response. While researchers have studied several categories of jailbreak attacks, they have done so in isolation. To fill this gap, we present the first large-scale measurement of various jailbreak attack methods. We concentrate on 13 cutting-edge jailbreak methods from four categories, 160 questions from 16 violation categories, and six popular LLMs. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that the optimized jailbreak prompts consistently achieve the highest attack success rates, as well as exhibit robustness across different LLMs. Some jailbreak prompt datasets, available from the Internet, can also achieve high attack success rates on many LLMs, such as ChatGLM3, GPT-3.5, and PaLM2. Despite the claims from many organizations regarding the coverage of violation categories in their policies, the attack success rates from these categories remain high, indicating the challenges of effectively aligning LLM policies and the ability to counter jailbreak attacks. We also discuss the trade-off between the attack performance and efficiency, as well as show that the transferability of the jailbreak prompts is still viable, becoming an option for black-box models. Overall, our research highlights the necessity of evaluating different jailbreak methods. We hope our study can provide insights for future research on jailbreak attacks and serve as a benchmark tool for evaluating them for practitioners.

Causal inference from observational data presents unique challenges, primarily due to the potential for confounding variables that can affect both outcomes and variables of interest. The unconfoundedness assumption, crucial in this context, posits that all confounding variables are observed and properly accounted for, allowing for an unbiased estimation of causal effects. However, in many real-world scenarios, this assumption is difficult to satisfy. When this is the case, approaches that rely on instrumental variables (IVs) -- quantities that are correlated with the variable of interest (relevance condition), do not affect the outcome in any other way (exclusion condition) and are independent of the unobservable confounders -- offer a way to identify causal effects even when unobserved confounders exist. Moreover, as traditional parametric models often require assumptions about the relationship between variables that may not hold in practice, nonparametric IV (NPIV) models can adapt to the intrinsic structure of the data, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of causal relationships. There has been a recent boost of new algorithms applied to the NPIV estimation problem and its theoretical properties. The challenge is that NPIV estimation is an ill-posed inverse problem (Newey and Powell, 2003; Carrasco et al., 2007; Cavalier, 2011), and recent methods aim to incorporate developments from predictive models, e.g., deep learning, while also accounting for the particular structure of the inverse problem at hand. In this work, we present a novel framework for NPIV estimation that relies on stochastic approximate gradients, allowing it to seamlessly incorporate a variety of machine learning methods, such as those based on Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) and deep learning. Moreover, we demonstrate, under minimal assumptions, finite sample guarantees for the projected populational risk for both continuous and binary responses.

Recent years have brought significant advances to Natural Language Processing (NLP), which enabled fast progress in the field of computational job market analysis. Core tasks in this application domain are skill extraction and classification from job postings. Because of its quick growth and its interdisciplinary nature, there is no exhaustive assessment of this emerging field. This survey aims to fill this gap by providing a comprehensive overview of deep learning methodologies, datasets, and terminologies specific to NLP-driven skill extraction and classification. Our comprehensive cataloging of publicly available datasets addresses the lack of consolidated information on dataset creation and characteristics. Finally, the focus on terminology addresses the current lack of consistent definitions for important concepts, such as hard and soft skills, and terms relating to skill extraction and classification.

In this chapter we illustrate the use of some Machine Learning techniques in the context of omics data. More precisely, we review and evaluate the use of Random Forest and Penalized Multinomial Logistic Regression for integrative analysis of genomics and immunomics in pancreatic cancer. Furthermore, we propose the use of association rules with predictive purposes to overcome the low predictive power of the previously mentioned models. Finally, we apply the reviewed methods to a real data set from TCGA made of 107 tumoral pancreatic samples and 117,486 germline SNPs, showing the good performance of the proposed methods to predict the immunological infiltration in pancreatic cancer.

Social networks are vital for information sharing, especially in the health sector for discussing diseases and treatments. These platforms, however, often feature posts as brief texts, posing challenges for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in understanding context. We introduce a novel hybrid approach combining community-maintained knowledge graphs (like Wikidata) with deep learning to enhance the categorization of social media posts. This method uses advanced entity recognizers and linkers (like Falcon 2.0) to connect short post entities to knowledge graphs. Knowledge graph embeddings (KGEs) and contextualized word embeddings (like BERT) are then employed to create rich, context-based representations of these posts. Our focus is on the health domain, particularly in identifying posts related to eating disorders (e.g., anorexia, bulimia) to aid healthcare providers in early diagnosis. We tested our approach on a dataset of 2,000 tweets about eating disorders, finding that merging word embeddings with knowledge graph information enhances the predictive models' reliability. This methodology aims to assist health experts in spotting patterns indicative of mental disorders, thereby improving early detection and accurate diagnosis for personalized medicine.

In this work, we investigate to use Large Language Models (LLMs) for rumor detection on social media. However, it is challenging for LLMs to reason over the entire propagation information on social media, which contains news contents and numerous comments, due to LLMs may not concentrate on key clues in the complex propagation information, and have trouble in reasoning when facing massive and redundant information. Accordingly, we propose an LLM-empowered Rumor Detection (LeRuD) approach, in which we design prompts to teach LLMs to reason over important clues in news and comments, and divide the entire propagation information into a Chain-of-Propagation for reducing LLMs' burden. We conduct extensive experiments on the Twitter and Weibo datasets, and LeRuD outperforms several state-of-the-art rumor detection models by 3.2% to 7.7%. Meanwhile, by applying LLMs, LeRuD requires no data for training, and thus shows more promising rumor detection ability in few-shot or zero-shot scenarios.

Ancient rock carvings have been uncovered near the Amazon River amid drought conditions in Brazil. A set of ancient texts burned by the volcanic eruption on Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. have been deciphered thanks to a team of researchers using AI. The nearly 2,000-year-old texts were unreadable after being charred in a villa in Herculaneum, a Roman town near Pompeii. The texts were discovered in an ancient villa in the town of Herculaneum. Believed to have been owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, the texts were carbonized by the heat of the volcanic debris.

This paper investigates the tracking problem of a smooth coordinate-invariant trajectory using dual quaternion algebra. The proposed architecture consists of a cascade structure in which the outer-loop MPC performs real-time smoothing of the manipulator's end-effector twist while an inner-loop kinematic controller ensures tracking of the instantaneous desired end-effector pose. Experiments on a $7$-DoF Franka Emika Panda robotic manipulator validate the proposed method demonstrating its application to constraint the robot twists, accelerations and jerks within prescribed bounds.