We investigate to which extent open large language models (LLMs) can generate coherent and relevant text from structured data. To prevent bias from benchmarks leaked into LLM training data, we collect Quintd-1: an ad-hoc benchmark for five data-to-text (D2T) generation tasks, consisting of structured data records in standard formats gathered from public APIs. We leverage reference-free evaluation metrics and LLMs' in-context learning capabilities, allowing us to test the models with no human-written references. Our evaluation focuses on annotating semantic accuracy errors on token-level, combining human annotators and a metric based on GPT-4. Our systematic examination of the models' behavior across domains and tasks suggests that state-of-the-art open LLMs with 7B parameters can generate fluent and coherent text from various standard data formats in zero-shot settings. However, we also show that semantic accuracy of the outputs remains a major issue: on our benchmark, 80% of outputs of open LLMs contain a semantic error according to human annotators (91% according to GPT-4). Our code, data, and model outputs are available at https://d2t-llm.github.io.

Emotion recognition plays a crucial role in various domains of human-robot interaction. In long-term interactions with humans, robots need to respond continuously and accurately, however, the mainstream emotion recognition methods mostly focus on short-term emotion recognition, disregarding the context in which emotions are perceived. Humans consider that contextual information and different contexts can lead to completely different emotional expressions. In this paper, we introduce self context-aware model (SCAM) that employs a two-dimensional emotion coordinate system for anchoring and re-labeling distinct emotions. Simultaneously, it incorporates its distinctive information retention structure and contextual loss. This approach has yielded significant improvements across audio, video, and multimodal. In the auditory modality, there has been a notable enhancement in accuracy, rising from 63.10% to 72.46%. Similarly, the visual modality has demonstrated improved accuracy, increasing from 77.03% to 80.82%. In the multimodal, accuracy has experienced an elevation from 77.48% to 78.93%. In the future, we will validate the reliability and usability of SCAM on robots through psychology experiments.

End-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) methods exhibit remarkable performance. However, since the performance of such methods is intrinsically linked to the context present in the training data, E2E-ASR methods do not perform as desired for unseen user contexts (e.g., technical terms, personal names, and playlists). Thus, E2E-ASR methods must be easily contextualized by the user or developer. This paper proposes an attention-based contextual biasing method that can be customized using an editable phrase list (referred to as a bias list). The proposed method can be trained effectively by combining a bias phrase index loss and special tokens to detect the bias phrases in the input speech data. In addition, to improve the contextualization performance during inference further, we propose a bias phrase boosted (BPB) beam search algorithm based on the bias phrase index probability. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves the word error rate and the character error rate of the target phrases in the bias list on both the Librispeech-960 (English) and our in-house (Japanese) dataset, respectively.

In this work, we investigate the controllability of large language models (LLMs) on scientific summarization tasks. We identify key stylistic and content coverage factors that characterize different types of summaries such as paper reviews, abstracts, and lay summaries. By controlling stylistic features, we find that non-fine-tuned LLMs outperform humans in the MuP review generation task, both in terms of similarity to reference summaries and human preferences. Also, we show that we can improve the controllability of LLMs with keyword-based classifier-free guidance (CFG) while achieving lexical overlap comparable to strong fine-tuned baselines on arXiv and PubMed. However, our results also indicate that LLMs cannot consistently generate long summaries with more than 8 sentences. Furthermore, these models exhibit limited capacity to produce highly abstractive lay summaries. Although LLMs demonstrate strong generic summarization competency, sophisticated content control without costly fine-tuning remains an open problem for domain-specific applications.

Vision is a major component in several digital technologies and tools used in agriculture. The object detector, You Look Only Once (YOLO), has gained popularity in agriculture in a relatively short span due to its state-of-the-art performance. YOLO offers real-time detection with good accuracy and is implemented in various agricultural tasks, including monitoring, surveillance, sensing, automation, and robotics. The research and application of YOLO in agriculture are accelerating rapidly but are fragmented and multidisciplinary. Moreover, the performance characteristics (i.e., accuracy, speed, computation) of the object detector influence the rate of technology implementation and adoption in agriculture. Thus, the study aims to collect extensive literature to document and critically evaluate the advances and application of YOLO for agricultural object recognition. First, we conducted a bibliometric review of 257 articles to understand the scholarly landscape of YOLO in agricultural domain. Secondly, we conducted a systematic review of 30 articles to identify current knowledge, gaps, and modifications in YOLO for specific agricultural tasks. The study critically assesses and summarizes the information on YOLO's end-to-end learning approach, including data acquisition, processing, network modification, integration, and deployment. We also discussed task-specific YOLO algorithm modification and integration to meet the agricultural object or environment-specific challenges. In general, YOLO-integrated digital tools and technologies show the potential for real-time, automated monitoring, surveillance, and object handling to reduce labor, production cost, and environmental impact while maximizing resource efficiency. The study provides detailed documentation and significantly advances the existing knowledge on applying YOLO in agriculture, which can greatly benefit the scientific community.

Deep learning has demonstrated remarkable achievements in medical image segmentation. However, prevailing deep learning models struggle with poor generalization due to (i) intra-class variations, where the same class appears differently in different samples, and (ii) inter-class independence, resulting in difficulties capturing intricate relationships between distinct objects, leading to higher false negative cases. This paper presents a novel approach that synergies spatial and spectral representations to enhance domain-generalized medical image segmentation. We introduce the innovative Spectral Correlation Coefficient objective to improve the model's capacity to capture middle-order features and contextual long-range dependencies. This objective complements traditional spatial objectives by incorporating valuable spectral information. Extensive experiments reveal that optimizing this objective with existing architectures like UNet and TransUNet significantly enhances generalization, interpretability, and noise robustness, producing more confident predictions. For instance, in cardiac segmentation, we observe a 0.81 pp and 1.63 pp (pp = percentage point) improvement in DSC over UNet and TransUNet, respectively. Our interpretability study demonstrates that, in most tasks, objectives optimized with UNet outperform even TransUNet by introducing global contextual information alongside local details. These findings underscore the versatility and effectiveness of our proposed method across diverse imaging modalities and medical domains.

In general, implicit feedback is easier to obtain than explicit feedback. Thus, making recommendations with only implicit feedback is indispensable. This type of problems are referred to as one-class recommendation [6]. There are several efforts proposed to solve one-class recommendation problems. For example, model-based methods [2, 7] aim to learn a vector representation for each user and item and apply some kernel, such as inner product for matrix factorization (MF) [5], to measure similarity. On the other hand, graph-based methods [11] construct a user-item bipartite graph from historical interactions and utilize random walk on it to explore user interests and make recommendations. In recent years, hybrid approaches [4, 10] combining model-based and graph-based methods have been developed. They explore high-order relationships on the bipartite graph and encode this information into learned entity representations, resulting in remarkable improvements in one-class recommendation tasks. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.

To ensure the fairness and trustworthiness of machine learning (ML) systems, recent legislative initiatives and relevant research in the ML community have pointed out the need to document the data used to train ML models. Besides, data-sharing practices in many scientific domains have evolved in recent years for reproducibility purposes. In this sense, the adoption of these practices by academic institutions has encouraged researchers to publish their data and technical documentation in peer-reviewed publications such as data papers. In this study, we analyze how this scientific data documentation meets the needs of the ML community and regulatory bodies for its use in ML technologies. We examine a sample of 4041 data papers of different domains, assessing their completeness and coverage of the requested dimensions, and trends in recent years, putting special emphasis on the most and least documented dimensions. As a result, we propose a set of recommendation guidelines for data creators and scientific data publishers to increase their data's preparedness for its transparent and fairer use in ML technologies.

Causal and counterfactual reasoning are emerging directions in data science that allow us to reason about hypothetical scenarios. This is particularly useful in domains where experimental data are usually not available. In the context of environmental and ecological sciences, causality enables us, for example, to predict how an ecosystem would respond to hypothetical interventions. A structural causal model is a class of probabilistic graphical models for causality, which, due to its intuitive nature, can be easily understood by experts in multiple fields. However, certain queries, called unidentifiable, cannot be calculated in an exact and precise manner. This paper proposes applying a novel and recent technique for bounding unidentifiable queries within the domain of socioecological systems. Our findings indicate that traditional statistical analysis, including probabilistic graphical models, can identify the influence between variables. However, such methods do not offer insights into the nature of the relationship, specifically whether it involves necessity or sufficiency. This is where counterfactual reasoning becomes valuable.

In this paper, we champion the use of structured and semantic content representation of discourse-based scholarly communication, inspired by tools like Wikipedia infoboxes or structured Amazon product descriptions. These representations provide users with a concise overview, aiding scientists in navigating the dense academic landscape. Our novel automated approach leverages the robust text generation capabilities of LLMs to produce structured scholarly contribution summaries, offering both a practical solution and insights into LLMs' emergent abilities. For LLMs, the prime focus is on improving their general intelligence as conversational agents. We argue that these models can also be applied effectively in information extraction (IE), specifically in complex IE tasks within terse domains like Science. This paradigm shift replaces the traditional modular, pipelined machine learning approach with a simpler objective expressed through instructions. Our results show that finetuned FLAN-T5 with 1000x fewer parameters than the state-of-the-art GPT-davinci is competitive for the task.