South America
Meet the real-life Indiana Jones! Explorer Albert Lin has discovered lost cities in Mexico, Sudan and Scotland - and was almost crushed by a BOULDER while searching for a mysterious civilization in Israel
Albert Lin might hunt for lost cities, and occasionally wear a wide-brimmed hat, but he and Indiana Jones couldn't be more different in their methods. While Indy had to make do with nothing more high-tech than his whip, this real-life explorer is bringing the best tech out there. Using cutting-edge tools, Albert has uncovered hidden cities of the past everywhere from Scotland to Sudan. Speaking to MailOnline, Albert revealed how he was inches away from being crushed by a boulder while searching for a mysterious civilization in Israel - surviving only thanks to his prosthetic leg. Albert and Indiana Jones might share a taste in hats and adventure but their techniques couldn't be more different Albert Lin is a National Geographic Explorer who uses technology to rediscover lost cities.
From Google Gemini to OpenAI Q* (Q-Star): A Survey of Reshaping the Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Landscape
McIntosh, Timothy R., Susnjak, Teo, Liu, Tong, Watters, Paul, Halgamuge, Malka N.
This comprehensive survey explored the evolving landscape of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a specific focus on the transformative impacts of Mixture of Experts (MoE), multimodal learning, and the speculated advancements towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). It critically examined the current state and future trajectory of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), exploring how innovations like Google's Gemini and the anticipated OpenAI Q* project are reshaping research priorities and applications across various domains, including an impact analysis on the generative AI research taxonomy. It assessed the computational challenges, scalability, and real-world implications of these technologies while highlighting their potential in driving significant progress in fields like healthcare, finance, and education. It also addressed the emerging academic challenges posed by the proliferation of both AI-themed and AI-generated preprints, examining their impact on the peer-review process and scholarly communication. The study highlighted the importance of incorporating ethical and human-centric methods in AI development, ensuring alignment with societal norms and welfare, and outlined a strategy for future AI research that focuses on a balanced and conscientious use of MoE, multimodality, and AGI in generative AI.
GINN-LP: A Growing Interpretable Neural Network for Discovering Multivariate Laurent Polynomial Equations
Ranasinghe, Nisal, Senanayake, Damith, Seneviratne, Sachith, Premaratne, Malin, Halgamuge, Saman
Traditional machine learning is generally treated as a black-box optimization problem and does not typically produce interpretable functions that connect inputs and outputs. However, the ability to discover such interpretable functions is desirable. In this work, we propose GINN-LP, an interpretable neural network to discover the form and coefficients of the underlying equation of a dataset, when the equation is assumed to take the form of a multivariate Laurent Polynomial. This is facilitated by a new type of interpretable neural network block, named the "power-term approximator block", consisting of logarithmic and exponential activation functions. GINN-LP is end-to-end differentiable, making it possible to use backpropagation for training. We propose a neural network growth strategy that will enable finding the suitable number of terms in the Laurent polynomial that represents the data, along with sparsity regularization to promote the discovery of concise equations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model that can discover arbitrary multivariate Laurent polynomial terms without any prior information on the order. Our approach is first evaluated on a subset of data used in SRBench, a benchmark for symbolic regression. We first show that GINN-LP outperforms the state-of-the-art symbolic regression methods on datasets generated using 48 real-world equations in the form of multivariate Laurent polynomials. Next, we propose an ensemble method that combines our method with a high-performing symbolic regression method, enabling us to discover non-Laurent polynomial equations. We achieve state-of-the-art results in equation discovery, showing an absolute improvement of 7.1% over the best contender, by applying this ensemble method to 113 datasets within SRBench with known ground-truth equations.
Dynamic Retrieval Augmented Generation of Ontologies using Artificial Intelligence (DRAGON-AI)
Toro, Sabrina, Anagnostopoulos, Anna V, Bello, Sue, Blumberg, Kai, Cameron, Rhiannon, Carmody, Leigh, Diehl, Alexander D, Dooley, Damion, Duncan, William, Fey, Petra, Gaudet, Pascale, Harris, Nomi L, Joachimiak, Marcin, Kiani, Leila, Lubiana, Tiago, Munoz-Torres, Monica C, O'Neil, Shawn, Osumi-Sutherland, David, Puig, Aleix, Reese, Justin P, Reiser, Leonore, Robb, Sofia, Ruemping, Troy, Seager, James, Sid, Eric, Stefancsik, Ray, Weber, Magalie, Wood, Valerie, Haendel, Melissa A, Mungall, Christopher J
Ontologies are fundamental components of informatics infrastructure in domains such as biomedical, environmental, and food sciences, representing consensus knowledge in an accurate and computable form. However, their construction and maintenance demand substantial resources, necessitating substantial collaborative efforts of domain experts, curators, and ontology experts. We present Dynamic Retrieval Augmented Generation of Ontologies using AI (DRAGON-AI), an ontology generation method employing Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). This method can generate textual and logical ontology components, drawing from existing knowledge in multiple ontologies, as well as unstructured textual sources. We assessed DRAGON-AI across ten diverse ontologies, making use of extensive manual evaluation of results. We demonstrate high precision for relationship generation, close to but lower than precision from logic-based reasoning. We also demonstrate definition generation comparable with but lower than human-generated definitions. Notably, expert evaluators were better able to discern subtle flaws in AI-generated definitions. We also demonstrated the ability of DRAGON-AI to incorporate natural language instructions in the form of GitHub issues. These findings suggest DRAGON-AI's potential to substantially aid the manual ontology construction process. However, our results also underscore the importance of having expert curators and ontology editors drive the ontology generation process.
Revealing Networks: Understanding Effective Teacher Practices in AI-Supported Classrooms using Transmodal Ordered Network Analysis
Borchers, Conrad, Wang, Yeyu, Karumbaiah, Shamya, Ashiq, Muhammad, Shaffer, David Williamson, Aleven, Vincent
Learning analytics research increasingly studies classroom learning with AI-based systems through rich contextual data from outside these systems, especially student-teacher interactions. One key challenge in leveraging such data is generating meaningful insights into effective teacher practices. Quantitative ethnography bears the potential to close this gap by combining multimodal data streams into networks of co-occurring behavior that drive insight into favorable learning conditions. The present study uses transmodal ordered network analysis to understand effective teacher practices in relationship to traditional metrics of in-system learning in a mathematics classroom working with AI tutors. Incorporating teacher practices captured by position tracking and human observation codes into modeling significantly improved the inference of how efficiently students improved in the AI tutor beyond a model with tutor log data features only. Comparing teacher practices by student learning rates, we find that students with low learning rates exhibited more hint use after monitoring. However, after an extended visit, students with low learning rates showed learning behavior similar to their high learning rate peers, achieving repeated correct attempts in the tutor. Observation notes suggest conceptual and procedural support differences can help explain visit effectiveness. Taken together, offering early conceptual support to students with low learning rates could make classroom practice with AI tutors more effective. This study advances the scientific understanding of effective teacher practice in classrooms learning with AI tutors and methodologies to make such practices visible.
The Conditioning Bias in Binary Decision Trees and Random Forests and Its Elimination
Decision tree and random forest classification and regression are some of the most widely used in machine learning approaches. Binary decision tree implementations commonly use conditioning in the form 'feature $\leq$ (or $<$) threshold', with the threshold being the midpoint between two observed feature values. In this paper, we investigate the bias introduced by the choice of conditioning operator (an intrinsic property of implementations) in the presence of features with lattice characteristics. We propose techniques to eliminate this bias, requiring an additional prediction with decision trees and incurring no cost for random forests. Using 20 classification and 20 regression datasets, we demonstrate that the bias can lead to statistically significant differences in terms of AUC and $r^2$ scores. The proposed techniques successfully mitigate the bias, compared to the worst-case scenario, statistically significant improvements of up to 0.1-0.2 percentage points of AUC and $r^2$ scores were achieved and the improvement of 1.5 percentage points of $r^2$ score was measured in the most sensitive case of random forest regression. The implementation of the study is available on GitHub at the following repository: \url{https://github.com/gykovacs/conditioning_bias}.
FedMKGC: Privacy-Preserving Federated Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion
Tang, Wei, Wu, Zhiqian, Cao, Yixin, Liao, Yong, Zhou, Pengyuan
Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to predict missing facts in knowledge graphs (KGs), which is crucial as modern KGs remain largely incomplete. While training KGC models on multiple aligned KGs can improve performance, previous methods that rely on transferring raw data among KGs raise privacy concerns. To address this challenge, we propose a new federated learning framework that implicitly aggregates knowledge from multiple KGs without demanding raw data exchange and entity alignment. We treat each KG as a client that trains a local language model through textbased knowledge representation learning. A central server then aggregates the model weights from clients. As natural language provides a universal representation, the same knowledge thus has similar semantic representations across KGs. As such, the aggregated language model can leverage complementary knowledge from multilingual KGs without demanding raw user data sharing. Extensive experiments on a benchmark dataset demonstrate that our method substantially improves KGC on multilingual KGs, achieving comparable performance to state-of-the-art alignment-based models without requiring any labeled alignments or raw user data sharing. Our codes will be publicly available.
Unit Test Generation using Generative AI : A Comparative Performance Analysis of Autogeneration Tools
Bhatia, Shreya, Gandhi, Tarushi, Kumar, Dhruv, Jalote, Pankaj
Generating unit tests is a crucial task in software development, demanding substantial time and effort from programmers. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) introduces a novel avenue for unit test script generation. This research aims to experimentally investigate the effectiveness of LLMs, specifically exemplified by ChatGPT, for generating unit test scripts for Python programs, and how the generated test cases compare with those generated by an existing unit test generator (Pynguin). For experiments, we consider three types of code units: 1) Procedural scripts, 2) Function-based modular code, and 3) Class-based code. The generated test cases are evaluated based on criteria such as coverage, correctness, and readability. Our results show that ChatGPT's performance is comparable with Pynguin in terms of coverage. At the same time, ChatGPT's ability to generate tests is superior to Pynguin, as the latter is not able to generate test cases for Category 1. We also find that about 39% and 28% of assertions generated by ChatGPT for Category 2 and 3, respectively, were incorrect. Our results also show that there is minimal overlap in missed statements between ChatGPT and Pynguin, thus, suggesting that a combination of both tools may enhance unit test generation performance. Finally, prompt engineering improved ChatGPT's performance, achieving an average 28% coverage improvement in Category 2 and 15% improvement in Category 3 after about 4 iterations.
Do LLMs Work on Charts? Designing Few-Shot Prompts for Chart Question Answering and Summarization
Do, Xuan Long, Hassanpour, Mohammad, Masry, Ahmed, Kavehzadeh, Parsa, Hoque, Enamul, Joty, Shafiq
A number of tasks have been proposed recently to facilitate easy access to charts such as chart QA and summarization. The dominant paradigm to solve these tasks has been to fine-tune a pretrained model on the task data. However, this approach is not only expensive but also not generalizable to unseen tasks. On the other hand, large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive generalization capabilities to unseen tasks with zero- or few-shot prompting. However, their application to chart-related tasks is not trivial as these tasks typically involve considering not only the underlying data but also the visual features in the chart image. We propose PromptChart, a multimodal few-shot prompting framework with LLMs for chart-related applications. By analyzing the tasks carefully, we have come up with a set of prompting guidelines for each task to elicit the best few-shot performance from LLMs. We further propose a strategy to inject visual information into the prompts. Our experiments on three different chart-related information consumption tasks show that with properly designed prompts LLMs can excel on the benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art.
T-SciQ: Teaching Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Mixed Large Language Model Signals for Science Question Answering
Wang, Lei, Hu, Yi, He, Jiabang, Xu, Xing, Liu, Ning, Liu, Hui, Shen, Heng Tao
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated exceptional performance in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. They have also shown the ability to perform chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex problems. Recent studies have explored CoT reasoning in complex multimodal scenarios, such as the science question answering task, by fine-tuning multimodal models with high-quality human-annotated CoT rationales. However, collecting high-quality COT rationales is usually time-consuming and costly. Besides, the annotated rationales are hardly accurate due to the external essential information missed. To address these issues, we propose a novel method termed T-SciQ that aims at teaching science question answering with LLM signals. The T-SciQ approach generates high-quality CoT rationales as teaching signals and is advanced to train much smaller models to perform CoT reasoning in complex modalities. Additionally, we introduce a novel data mixing strategy to produce more effective teaching data samples for simple and complex science question answer problems. Extensive experimental results show that our T-SciQ method achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on the ScienceQA benchmark, with an accuracy of 96.18%. Moreover, our approach outperforms the most powerful fine-tuned baseline by 4.5%. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/T-SciQ/T-SciQ.