Taking inspiration from natural language embeddings, we present ASTROMER, a transformer-based model to create representations of light curves. ASTROMER was pre-trained in a self-supervised manner, requiring no human-labeled data. We used millions of R-band light sequences to adjust the ASTROMER weights. The learned representation can be easily adapted to other surveys by re-training ASTROMER on new sources. The power of ASTROMER consists of using the representation to extract light curve embeddings that can enhance the training of other models, such as classifiers or regressors. As an example, we used ASTROMER embeddings to train two neural-based classifiers that use labeled variable stars from MACHO, OGLE-III, and ATLAS. In all experiments, ASTROMER-based classifiers outperformed a baseline recurrent neural network trained on light curves directly when limited labeled data was available. Furthermore, using ASTROMER embeddings decreases computational resources needed while achieving state-of-the-art results. Finally, we provide a Python library that includes all the functionalities employed in this work. The library, main code, and pre-trained weights are available at https://github.com/astromer-science

Neural network language model (NNLM) plays an essential role in automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, especially in adaptation tasks when text-only data is available. In practice, an NNLM is typically trained on a combination of data sampled from multiple corpora. Thus, the data sampling strategy is important to the adaptation performance. Most existing works focus on designing static sampling strategies. However, each corpus may show varying impacts at different NNLM training stages. In this paper, we introduce a novel adaptive multi-corpora training algorithm that dynamically learns and adjusts the sampling probability of each corpus along the training process. The algorithm is robust to corpora sizes and domain relevance. Compared with static sampling strategy baselines, the proposed approach yields remarkable improvement by achieving up to relative 7% and 9% word error rate (WER) reductions on in-domain and out-of-domain adaptation tasks, respectively.

Social media has been one of the main information consumption sources for the public, allowing people to seek and spread information more quickly and easily. However, the rise of various social media platforms also enables the proliferation of online misinformation. In particular, misinformation in the health domain has significant impacts on our society such as the COVID-19 infodemic. Therefore, health misinformation in social media has become an emerging research direction that attracts increasing attention from researchers of different disciplines. Compared to misinformation in other domains, the key differences of health misinformation include the potential of causing actual harm to humans' bodies and even lives, the hardness to identify for normal people, and the deep connection with medical science. In addition, health misinformation on social media has distinct characteristics from conventional channels such as television on multiple dimensions including the generation, dissemination, and consumption paradigms. Because of the uniqueness and importance of combating health misinformation in social media, we conduct this survey to further facilitate interdisciplinary research on this problem. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of existing research about online health misinformation in different disciplines. Furthermore, we also systematically organize the related literature from three perspectives: characterization, detection, and intervention. Lastly, we conduct a deep discussion on the pressing open issues of combating health misinformation in social media and provide future directions for multidisciplinary researchers.

Forecasting and decision-making are generally modeled as two sequential steps with no feedback, following an open-loop approach. In this paper, we present application-driven learning, a new closed-loop framework in which the processes of forecasting and decision-making are merged and co-optimized through a bilevel optimization problem. We present our methodology in a general format and prove that the solution converges to the best estimator in terms of the expected cost of the selected application. Then, we propose two solution methods: an exact method based on the KKT conditions of the second-level problem and a scalable heuristic approach suitable for decomposition methods. The proposed methodology is applied to the relevant problem of defining dynamic reserve requirements and conditional load forecasts, offering an alternative approach to current \emph{ad hoc} procedures implemented in industry practices. We benchmark our methodology with the standard sequential least-squares forecast and dispatch planning process. We apply the proposed methodology to an illustrative system and to a wide range of instances, from dozens of buses to large-scale realistic systems with thousands of buses. Our results show that the proposed methodology is scalable and yields consistently better performance than the standard open-loop approach.

Quantum neural networks (QNNs), an interdisciplinary field of quantum computing and machine learning, have attracted tremendous research interests due to the specific quantum advantages. Despite lots of efforts developed in computer vision domain, one has not fully explored QNNs for the real-world graph property classification and evaluated them in the quantum device. To bridge the gap, we propose quantum graph convolutional networks (QuanGCN), which learns the local message passing among nodes with the sequence of crossing-gate quantum operations. To mitigate the inherent noises from modern quantum devices, we apply sparse constraint to sparsify the nodes' connections and relieve the error rate of quantum gates, and use skip connection to augment the quantum outputs with original node features to improve robustness. The experimental results show that our QuanGCN is functionally comparable or even superior than the classical algorithms on several benchmark graph datasets. The comprehensive evaluations in both simulator and real quantum machines demonstrate the applicability of QuanGCN to the future graph analysis problem.

We propose a) a Language Agnostic end-to-end Speech Translation model (LAST), and b) a data augmentation strategy to increase code-switching (CS) performance. With increasing globalization, multiple languages are increasingly used interchangeably during fluent speech. Such CS complicates traditional speech recognition and translation, as we must recognize which language was spoken first and then apply a language-dependent recognizer and subsequent translation component to generate the desired target language output. Such a pipeline introduces latency and errors. In this paper, we eliminate the need for that, by treating speech recognition and translation as one unified end-to-end speech translation problem. By training LAST with both input languages, we decode speech into one target language, regardless of the input language. LAST delivers comparable recognition and speech translation accuracy in monolingual usage, while reducing latency and error rate considerably when CS is observed.

Language use changes over time, and this impacts the effectiveness of NLP systems. This phenomenon is even more prevalent in social media data during crisis events where meaning and frequency of word usage may change over the course of days. Contextual language models fail to adapt temporally, emphasizing the need for temporal adaptation in models which need to be deployed over an extended period of time. While existing approaches consider data spanning large periods of time (from years to decades), shorter time spans are critical for crisis data. We quantify temporal degradation for this scenario and propose methods to cope with performance loss by leveraging techniques from domain adaptation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort to explore effects of rapid language change driven by adversarial adaptations, particularly during natural and human-induced disasters. Through extensive experimentation on diverse crisis datasets, we analyze under what conditions our approaches outperform strong baselines while highlighting the current limitations of temporal adaptation methods in scenarios where access to unlabeled data is scarce.

Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a well-established paradigm for simulating complex systems via interactions between constituent entities. Machine learning (ML) refers to approaches whereby statistical algorithms 'learn' from data on their own, without imposing a priori theories of system behavior. Biological systems -- from molecules, to cells, to entire organisms -- consist of vast numbers of entities, governed by complex webs of interactions that span many spatiotemporal scales and exhibit nonlinearity, stochasticity and intricate coupling between entities. The macroscopic properties and collective dynamics of such systems are difficult to capture via continuum modelling and mean-field formalisms. ABM takes a 'bottom-up' approach that obviates these difficulties by enabling one to easily propose and test a set of well-defined 'rules' to be applied to the individual entities (agents) in a system. Evaluating a system and propagating its state over discrete time-steps effectively simulates the system, allowing observables to be computed and system properties to be analyzed. Because the rules that govern an ABM can be difficult to abstract and formulate from experimental data, there is an opportunity to use ML to help infer optimal, system-specific ABM rules. Once such rule-sets are devised, ABM calculations can generate a wealth of data, and ML can be applied there too -- e.g., to probe statistical measures that meaningfully describe a system's stochastic properties. As an example of synergy in the other direction (from ABM to ML), ABM simulations can generate realistic datasets for training ML algorithms (e.g., for regularization, to mitigate overfitting). In these ways, one can envision various synergistic ABM$\rightleftharpoons$ML loops. This review summarizes how ABM and ML have been integrated in contexts that span spatiotemporal scales, from cellular to population-level epidemiology.

Large language models (LLMs) have led to a series of breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP), owing to their excellent understanding and generation abilities. Remarkably, what further sets these models apart is the massive amounts of world knowledge they internalize during pretraining. While many downstream applications provide the model with an informational context to aid its performance on the underlying task, how the model's world knowledge interacts with the factual information presented in the context remains under explored. As a desirable behavior, an LLM should give precedence to the context whenever it contains task-relevant information that conflicts with the model's memorized knowledge. This enables model predictions to be grounded in the context, which can then be used to update or correct specific model predictions without frequent retraining. By contrast, when the context is irrelevant to the task, the model should ignore it and fall back on its internal knowledge. In this paper, we undertake a first joint study of the aforementioned two properties, namely controllability and robustness, in the context of LLMs. We demonstrate that state-of-the-art T5 and PaLM (both pretrained and finetuned) could exhibit poor controllability and robustness, which do not scale with increasing model size. As a solution, we propose a novel method - Knowledge Aware FineTuning (KAFT) - to strengthen both controllability and robustness by incorporating counterfactual and irrelevant contexts to standard supervised datasets. Our comprehensive evaluation showcases the utility of KAFT across model architectures and sizes.

Providing better language tools for low-resource and endangered languages is imperative for equitable growth. Recent progress with massively multilingual pretrained models has proven surprisingly effective at performing zero-shot transfer to a wide variety of languages. However, this transfer is not universal, with many languages not currently understood by multilingual approaches. It is estimated that only 72 languages possess a "small set of labeled datasets" on which we could test a model's performance, the vast majority of languages not having the resources available to simply evaluate performances on. In this work, we attempt to clarify which languages do and do not currently benefit from such transfer. To that end, we develop a general approach that requires only unlabelled text to detect which languages are not well understood by a cross-lingual model. Our approach is derived from the hypothesis that if a model's understanding is insensitive to perturbations to text in a language, it is likely to have a limited understanding of that language. We construct a cross-lingual sentence similarity task to evaluate our approach empirically on 350, primarily low-resource, languages.