Controlling and coordinating urban traffic flow through robot vehicles is emerging as a novel transportation paradigm for the future. While this approach garners growing attention from researchers and practitioners, effectively managing and coordinating large-scale mixed traffic remains a challenge. We introduce an effective framework for large-scale mixed traffic control via privacy-preserving crowdsourcing and dynamic vehicle routing. Our framework consists of three modules: a privacy-protecting crowdsensing method, a graph propagation-based traffic forecasting method, and a privacy-preserving route selection mechanism. We evaluate our framework using a real-world road network. The results show that our framework accurately forecasts traffic flow, efficiently mitigates network-wide RV shortage issue, and coordinates large-scale mixed traffic. Compared to other baseline methods, our framework not only reduces the RV shortage issue up to 69.4% but also reduces the average waiting time of all vehicles in the network up to 27%.

Scarcity of domain-specific data in the Portuguese financial domain has disfavored the development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. To address this limitation, the present study advocates for the utilization of synthetic data generated through data augmentation techniques. The investigation focuses on the augmentation of a dataset sourced from the Central Bank of Brazil FAQ, employing techniques that vary in semantic similarity. Supervised and unsupervised tasks are conducted to evaluate the impact of augmented data on both low and high semantic similarity scenarios. Additionally, the resultant dataset will be publicly disseminated on the Hugging Face Datasets platform, thereby enhancing accessibility and fostering broader engagement within the NLP research community.

Deep learning has shown promising performance in submeter-level mapping tasks; however, the annotation cost of submeter-level imagery remains a challenge, especially when applied on a large scale. In this paper, we present the first submeter-level land cover mapping of Japan with eight classes, at a relatively low annotation cost. We introduce a human-in-the-loop deep learning framework leveraging OpenEarthMap, a recently introduced benchmark dataset for global submeter-level land cover mapping, with a U-Net model that achieves national-scale mapping with a small amount of additional labeled data. By adding a small amount of labeled data of areas or regions where a U-Net model trained on OpenEarthMap clearly failed and retraining the model, an overall accuracy of 80\% was achieved, which is a nearly 16 percentage point improvement after retraining. Using aerial imagery provided by the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan, we create land cover classification maps of eight classes for the entire country of Japan. Our framework, with its low annotation cost and high-accuracy mapping results, demonstrates the potential to contribute to the automatic updating of national-scale land cover mapping using submeter-level optical remote sensing data. The mapping results will be made publicly available.

Machine learning models for medical images can help physicians diagnose and manage diseases. However, due to the fact that medical image annotation requires a great deal of manpower and expertise, as well as the fact that clinical departments perform image annotation based on task orientation, there is the problem of having fewer medical image annotation data with more unlabeled data and having many datasets that annotate only a single organ. In this paper, we present UniMOS, the first universal framework for achieving the utilization of fully and partially labeled images as well as unlabeled images. Specifically, we construct a Multi-Organ Segmentation (MOS) module over fully/partially labeled data as the basenet and designed a new target adaptive loss. Furthermore, we incorporate a semi-supervised training module that combines consistent regularization and pseudolabeling techniques on unlabeled data, which significantly improves the segmentation of unlabeled data. Experiments show that the framework exhibits excellent performance in several medical image segmentation tasks compared to other advanced methods, and also significantly improves data utilization and reduces annotation cost. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/lw8807001/UniMOS.

The rise of online social networks has facilitated the evolution of social recommender systems, which incorporate social relations to enhance users' decision-making process. With the great success of Graph Neural Networks in learning node representations, GNN-based social recommendations have been widely studied to model user-item interactions and user-user social relations simultaneously. Despite their great successes, recent studies have shown that these advanced recommender systems are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, in which attackers can inject well-designed fake user profiles to disrupt recommendation performances. While most existing studies mainly focus on targeted attacks to promote target items on vanilla recommender systems, untargeted attacks to degrade the overall prediction performance are less explored on social recommendations under a black-box scenario. To perform untargeted attacks on social recommender systems, attackers can construct malicious social relationships for fake users to enhance the attack performance. However, the coordination of social relations and item profiles is challenging for attacking black-box social recommendations. To address this limitation, we first conduct several preliminary studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of cross-community connections and cold-start items in degrading recommendations performance. Specifically, we propose a novel framework Multiattack based on multi-agent reinforcement learning to coordinate the generation of cold-start item profiles and cross-community social relations for conducting untargeted attacks on black-box social recommendations. Comprehensive experiments on various real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed attacking framework under the black-box setting.

Structure determination is necessary to identify unknown organic molecules, such as those in natural products, forensic samples, the interstellar medium, and laboratory syntheses. Rotational spectroscopy enables structure determination by providing accurate 3D information about small organic molecules via their moments of inertia. Using these moments, Kraitchman analysis determines isotopic substitution coordinates, which are the unsigned $|x|,|y|,|z|$ coordinates of all atoms with natural isotopic abundance, including carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. While unsigned substitution coordinates can verify guesses of structures, the missing $+/-$ signs make it challenging to determine the actual structure from the substitution coordinates alone. To tackle this inverse problem, we develop KREED (Kraitchman REflection-Equivariant Diffusion), a generative diffusion model that infers a molecule's complete 3D structure from its molecular formula, moments of inertia, and unsigned substitution coordinates of heavy atoms. KREED's top-1 predictions identify the correct 3D structure with >98% accuracy on the QM9 and GEOM datasets when provided with substitution coordinates of all heavy atoms with natural isotopic abundance. When substitution coordinates are restricted to only a subset of carbons, accuracy is retained at 91% on QM9 and 32% on GEOM. On a test set of experimentally measured substitution coordinates gathered from the literature, KREED predicts the correct all-atom 3D structure in 25 of 33 cases, demonstrating experimental applicability for context-free 3D structure determination with rotational spectroscopy.

The last few years have witnessed great success on image generation, which has crossed the acceptance thresholds of aesthetics, making it directly applicable to personal and commercial applications. However, images, especially in marketing and advertising applications, are often created as a means to an end as opposed to just aesthetic concerns. The goal can be increasing sales, getting more clicks, likes, or image sales (in the case of stock businesses). Therefore, the generated images need to perform well on these key performance indicators (KPIs), in addition to being aesthetically good. In this paper, we make the first endeavor to answer the question of "How can one infuse the knowledge of the end-goal within the image generation process itself to create not just better-looking images but also "better-performing'' images?''. We propose BoigLLM, an LLM that understands both image content and user behavior. BoigLLM knows how an image should look to get a certain required KPI. We show that BoigLLM outperforms 13x larger models such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 in this task, demonstrating that while these state-of-the-art models can understand images, they lack information on how these images perform in the real world. To generate actual pixels of behavior-conditioned images, we train a diffusion-based model (BoigSD) to align with a proposed BoigLLM-defined reward. We show the performance of the overall pipeline on two datasets covering two different behaviors: a stock dataset with the number of forward actions as the KPI and a dataset containing tweets with the total likes as the KPI, denoted as BoigBench. To advance research in the direction of utility-driven image generation and understanding, we release BoigBench, a benchmark dataset containing 168 million enterprise tweets with their media, brand account names, time of post, and total likes.

The power-law distribution plays a crucial role in complex networks as well as various applied sciences. Investigating whether the degree distribution of a network follows a power-law distribution is an important concern. The commonly used inferential methods for estimating the model parameters often yield biased estimates, which can lead to the rejection of the hypothesis that a model conforms to a power-law. In this paper, we discuss improved methods that utilize Bayesian inference to obtain accurate estimates and precise credibility intervals. The inferential methods are derived for both continuous and discrete distributions. These methods reveal that objective Bayesian approaches return nearly unbiased estimates for the parameters of both models. Notably, in the continuous case, we identify an explicit posterior distribution. This work enhances the power of goodness-of-fit tests, enabling us to accurately discern whether a network or any other dataset adheres to a power-law distribution. We apply the proposed approach to fit degree distributions for more than 5,000 synthetic networks and over 3,000 real networks. The results indicate that our method is more suitable in practice, as it yields a frequency of acceptance close to the specified nominal level.

Artificial Intelligence Impact Assessments ("AIIAs"), a family of tools that provide structured processes to imagine the possible impacts of a proposed AI system, have become an increasingly popular proposal to govern AI systems. Recent efforts from government or private-sector organizations have proposed many diverse instantiations of AIIAs, which take a variety of forms ranging from open-ended questionnaires to graded score-cards. However, to date that has been limited evaluation of existing AIIA instruments. We conduct a classroom study (N = 38) at a large research-intensive university (R1) in an elective course focused on the societal and ethical implications of AI. We assign students to different organizational roles (for example, an ML scientist or product manager) and ask participant teams to complete one of three existing AI impact assessments for one of two imagined generative AI systems. In our thematic analysis of participants' responses to pre- and post-activity questionnaires, we find preliminary evidence that impact assessments can influence participants' perceptions of the potential risks of generative AI systems, and the level of responsibility held by AI experts in addressing potential harm. We also discover a consistent set of limitations shared by several existing AIIA instruments, which we group into concerns about their format and content, as well as the feasibility and effectiveness of the activity in foreseeing and mitigating potential harms. Drawing on the findings of this study, we provide recommendations for future work on developing and validating AIIAs.

Image-to-text radiology report generation aims to automatically produce radiology reports that describe the findings in medical images. Most existing methods focus solely on the image data, disregarding the other patient information accessible to radiologists. In this paper, we present a novel multi-modal deep neural network framework for generating chest X-rays reports by integrating structured patient data, such as vital signs and symptoms, alongside unstructured clinical notes.We introduce a conditioned cross-multi-head attention module to fuse these heterogeneous data modalities, bridging the semantic gap between visual and textual data. Experiments demonstrate substantial improvements from using additional modalities compared to relying on images alone. Notably, our model achieves the highest reported performance on the ROUGE-L metric compared to relevant state-of-the-art models in the literature. Furthermore, we employed both human evaluation and clinical semantic similarity measurement alongside word-overlap metrics to improve the depth of quantitative analysis. A human evaluation, conducted by a board-certified radiologist, confirms the model's accuracy in identifying high-level findings, however, it also highlights that more improvement is needed to capture nuanced details and clinical context.