Few-shot learning for open domain multi-hop question answering typically relies on large language models (LLMs). While powerful, LLMs are inefficient at the inference time. We propose a data synthesis framework for multi-hop question answering that allows for improving smaller language models with less than 10 human-annotated question answer pairs. The framework is built upon the data generation functions parameterized by LLMs and prompts, which requires minimal hand-crafted features. Empirically, we synthesize millions of multi-hop questions and claims. After finetuning language models on the synthetic data, we evaluate the models on popular benchmarks on multi-hop question answering and fact verification. Our experimental results show that finetuning on the synthetic data improves model performance significantly, allowing our finetuned models to be competitive with prior models while being almost one-third the size in terms of parameter counts.

Contrary to Google Search's mission of delivering information from "many angles so you can form your own understanding of the world," we find that Google and its most prominent returned results - Wikipedia and YouTube - simply reflect a narrow set of cultural stereotypes tied to the search language for complex topics like "Buddhism," "Liberalism," "colonization," "Iran" and "America." Simply stated, they present, to varying degrees, distinct information across the same search in different languages, a phenomenon we call 'language bias.' This paper presents evidence and analysis of language bias and discusses its larger social implications. Instead of presenting a global picture of a complex topic, our online searches and emerging tools like ChatGPT turn us into the proverbial blind person touching a small portion of an elephant, ignorant of the existence of other cultural perspectives. Piecing together a genuine depiction of the elephant is a challenging and important endeavor that will require collaborative efforts from scholars in both the humanities and technology.

Multi-task learning (MTL) aims at achieving a better model by leveraging data and knowledge from multiple tasks. However, MTL does not always work -- sometimes negative transfer occurs between tasks, especially when aggregating loosely related skills, leaving it an open question when MTL works. Previous studies show that MTL performance can be improved by algorithmic tricks. However, what tasks and skills should be included is less well explored. In this work, we conduct a case study in Financial NLP where multiple datasets exist for skills relevant to the domain, such as numeric reasoning and sentiment analysis. Due to the task difficulty and data scarcity in the Financial NLP domain, we explore when aggregating such diverse skills from multiple datasets with MTL can work. Our findings suggest that the key to MTL success lies in skill diversity, relatedness between tasks, and choice of aggregation size and shared capacity. Specifically, MTL works well when tasks are diverse but related, and when the size of the task aggregation and the shared capacity of the model are balanced to avoid overwhelming certain tasks.

Deep generative models (DGMs) and their conditional counterparts provide a powerful ability for general-purpose generative modeling of data distributions. However, it remains challenging for existing methods to address advanced conditional generative problems without annotations, which can enable multiple applications like image-to-image translation and image editing. We present a unified Bayesian framework for such problems, which introduces an inference stage on latent variables within the learning process. In particular, we propose a variational Bayesian image translation network (VBITN) that enables multiple image translation and editing tasks. Comprehensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method on unsupervised image-to-image translation, and demonstrate the novel advanced capabilities for semantic editing and mixed domain translation.

Transformer encoder-decoder models have achieved great performance in dialogue generation tasks, however, their inability to process long dialogue history often leads to truncation of the context To address this problem, we propose a novel memory-augmented transformer that is compatible with existing pre-trained encoder-decoder models and enables efficient preservation of the dialogue history information. By incorporating a separate memory module alongside the pre-trained transformer, the model can effectively interchange information between the memory states and the current input context. We evaluate our model on three dialogue datasets and two language modeling datasets. Experimental results show that our method has achieved superior efficiency and performance compared to other pre-trained Transformer baselines.

In this paper we present the Process-To-Text (P2T) framework for the automatic generation of textual descriptive explanations of processes. P2T integrates three AI paradigms: process mining for extracting temporal and structural information from a process, fuzzy linguistic protoforms for modelling uncertain terms, and natural language generation for building the explanations. A real use-case in the cardiology domain is presented, showing the potential of P2T for providing natural language explanations addressed to specialists.

Radio frequency (RF)-based techniques are widely adopted for indoor localization despite the challenges in extracting sufficient information from measurements. Soft range information (SRI) offers a promising alternative for highly accurate localization that gives all probable range values rather than a single estimate of distance. We propose a deep learning approach to generate accurate SRI from RF measurements. In particular, the proposed approach is implemented by a network with two neural modules and conducts the generation directly from raw data. Extensive experiments on a case study with two public datasets are conducted to quantify the efficiency in different indoor localization tasks. The results show that the proposed approach can generate highly accurate SRI, and significantly outperforms conventional techniques in both non-line-of-sight (NLOS) detection and ranging error mitigation.

The Image Signal Processor (ISP) is a component of digital cameras capable of performing various tasks to improve image quality, as demosaicing, denoising, and white balance. The set of tasks performed by the ISP is called ISP pipeline, divided in preproccessing and postprocessing steps, and may differ from manufacturer to manufacturer [1]. Nowadays, Machine Learning is used to replace partially or the entire ISP pipeline. Particulary, Deep Learning is employed to replace ISP tasks, working on noise removal or some image feaure that hinders processing over the network. Deep Learning network provides an improvement in relation to computational efficiency and processing time. This survey paper aims to analyze recent studies, 27 research papers, that implemented Deep Learning based ISP pipeline.

Introduction: The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the importance of making epidemiological data and scientific insights easily accessible and explorable for public health agencies, the general public, and researchers. State-of-the-art approaches for sharing data and insights included regularly updated reports and web dashboards. However, they face a trade-off between the simplicity and flexibility of data exploration. With the capabilities of recent large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, this trade-off can be overcome. Results: We developed the chatbot "GenSpectrum Chat" (https://cov-spectrum.org/chat) which uses GPT-4 as the underlying large language model (LLM) to explore SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequencing data. Out of 500 inputs from real-world users, the chatbot provided a correct answer for 453 prompts; an incorrect answer for 13 prompts, and no answer although the question was within scope for 34 prompts. We also tested the chatbot with inputs from 10 different languages, and despite being provided solely with English instructions and examples, it successfully processed prompts in all tested languages. Conclusion: LLMs enable new ways of interacting with information systems. In the field of public health, GenSpectrum Chat can facilitate the analysis of real-time pathogen genomic data. With our chatbot supporting interactive exploration in different languages, we envision quick and direct access to the latest evidence for policymakers around the world.

Vulnerability identification constitutes a task of high importance for cyber security. It is quite helpful for locating and fixing vulnerable functions in large applications. However, this task is rather challenging owing to the absence of reliable and adequately managed datasets and learning models. Existing solutions typically rely on human expertise to annotate datasets or specify features, which is prone to error. In addition, the learning models have a high rate of false positives. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we present a properly curated C/C++ source code vulnerability dataset, denoted as CVEFunctionGraphEmbeddings (CVEFGE), to aid in developing models. CVEFGE is automatically crawled from the CVE database, which contains authentic and publicly disclosed source code vulnerabilities. We also propose a learning framework based on graph neural networks, denoted SEquential Graph Neural Network (SEGNN) for learning a large number of code semantic representations. SEGNN consists of a sequential learning module, graph convolution, pooling, and fully connected layers. Our evaluations on two datasets and four baseline methods in a graph classification setting demonstrate state-of-the-art results.