In the current global economy, supply chain transparency plays a pivotal role in ensuring this security by enabling companies to monitor supplier performance and fostering accountability and responsibility. Despite the advancements in supply chain relationship datasets like Bloomberg and FactSet, supply chain transparency remains a significant challenge in emerging economies due to issues such as information asymmetry and institutional gaps in regulation. This study proposes a novel approach to enhance supply chain transparency in emerging economies by leveraging online content and large language models (LLMs). We develop a Supply Chain Knowledge Graph Mining System that integrates advanced LLMs with web crawler technology to automatically collect and analyze supply chain information. The system's effectiveness is validated through a case study focusing on the semiconductor supply chain, a domain that has recently gained significant attention due to supply chain risks. Our results demonstrate that the proposed system provides greater applicability for emerging economies, such as mainland China, complementing the data gaps in existing datasets. However, challenges including the accurate estimation of monetary and material flows, the handling of time series data, synonyms disambiguation, and mitigating biases from online contents still remains. Future research should focus on addressing these issues to further enhance the system's capabilities and broaden its application to other emerging economies and industries.

Despite the recent advancement of Large Langauge Models (LLMs), they struggle with complex queries often involving multiple conditions, common in real-world scenarios. We propose Thinking with Tables, a technique that assists LLMs to leverage tables for intermediate thinking aligning with human cognitive behavior. By introducing a pre-instruction that triggers an LLM to organize information in tables, our approach achieves a 40.29\% average relative performance increase, higher robustness, and show generalizability to different requests, conditions, or scenarios. We additionally show the influence of data structuredness for the model by comparing results from four distinct structuring levels that we introduce.

Unnatural text correction aims to automatically detect and correct spelling errors or adversarial perturbation errors in sentences. Existing methods typically rely on fine-tuning or adversarial training to correct errors, which have achieved significant success. However, these methods exhibit poor generalization performance due to the difference in data distribution between training data and real-world scenarios, known as the exposure bias problem. In this paper, we propose a self-correct adversarial training framework for \textbf{L}earn\textbf{I}ng from \textbf{MI}s\textbf{T}akes (\textbf{LIMIT}), which is a task- and model-independent framework to correct unnatural errors or mistakes. Specifically, we fully utilize errors generated by the model that are actively exposed during the inference phase, i.e., predictions that are inconsistent with the target. This training method not only simulates potential errors in real application scenarios, but also mitigates the exposure bias of the traditional training process. Meanwhile, we design a novel decoding intervention strategy to maintain semantic consistency. Extensive experimental results on Chinese unnatural text error correction datasets show that our proposed method can correct multiple forms of errors and outperforms the state-of-the-art text correction methods. In addition, extensive results on Chinese and English datasets validate that LIMIT can serve as a plug-and-play defense module and can extend to new models and datasets without further training.

The dramatic increase in consumption of ultra-processed food has been associated with numerous adverse health effects. Given the public health consequences linked to ultra-processed food consumption, it is highly relevant to build computational models to predict the processing of food products. We created a range of machine learning, deep learning, and NLP models to predict the extent of food processing by integrating the FNDDS dataset of food products and their nutrient profiles with their reported NOVA processing level. Starting with the full nutritional panel of 102 features, we further implemented coarse-graining of features to 65 and 13 nutrients by dropping flavonoids and then by considering the 13-nutrient panel of FDA, respectively. LGBM Classifier and Random Forest emerged as the best model for 102 and 65 nutrients, respectively, with an F1-score of 0.9411 and 0.9345 and MCC of 0.8691 and 0.8543. For the 13-nutrient panel, Gradient Boost achieved the best F1-score of 0.9284 and MCC of 0.8425. We also implemented NLP based models, which exhibited state-of-the-art performance.

Despite the considerable progress achieved in the long video generation problem, there is still significant room to improve the consistency of the videos, particularly in terms of smoothness and transitions between scenes. We address these issues to enhance the consistency and coherence of videos generated with either single or multiple prompts. We propose the Time-frequency based temporal Attention Reweighting Algorithm (TiARA), which meticulously edits the attention score matrix based on the Discrete Short-Time Fourier Transform. Our method is supported by a theoretical guarantee, the first-of-its-kind for frequency-based methods in diffusion models. For videos generated by multiple prompts, we further investigate key factors affecting prompt interpolation quality and propose PromptBlend, an advanced prompt interpolation pipeline. The efficacy of our proposed method is validated via extensive experimental results, exhibiting consistent and impressive improvements over baseline methods. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Auto-bidding is essential in facilitating online advertising by automatically placing bids on behalf of advertisers. Generative auto-bidding, which generates bids based on an adjustable condition using models like transformers and diffusers, has recently emerged as a new trend due to its potential to learn optimal strategies directly from data and adjust flexibly to preferences. However, generative models suffer from low-quality data leading to a mismatch between condition, return to go, and true action value, especially in long sequential decision-making. Besides, the majority preference in the dataset may hinder models' generalization ability on minority advertisers' preferences. While it is possible to collect high-quality data and retrain multiple models for different preferences, the high cost makes it unaffordable, hindering the advancement of auto-bidding into the era of large foundation models. To address this, we propose a flexible and practical Generative Auto-bidding scheme using post-training Search, termed GAS, to refine a base policy model's output and adapt to various preferences. We use weak-to-strong search alignment by training small critics for different preferences and an MCTS-inspired search to refine the model's output. Specifically, a novel voting mechanism with transformer-based critics trained with policy indications could enhance search alignment performance. Additionally, utilizing the search, we provide a fine-tuning method for high-frequency preference scenarios considering computational efficiency. Extensive experiments conducted on the real-world dataset and online A/B test on the Kuaishou advertising platform demonstrate the effectiveness of GAS, achieving significant improvements, e.g., 1.554% increment of target cost.

FIRST ON FOX: A pro-tech advocacy group has released a new report warning of the growing threat posed by China's artificial intelligence technology and its open-source approach that could threaten the national and economic security of the United States. The report, published by American Edge Project, states that "China is rapidly advancing its own open-source ecosystem as an alternative to American technology and using it as a Trojan horse to implant its CCP values into global infrastructure." "Their progress is both significant and concerning: Chinese-developed open-source AI tools are already outperforming Western models on key benchmarks, while operating at dramatically lower costs, accelerating global adoption. Through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which spans more than 155 countries on four continents, and its Digital Silk Road (DSR), China is exporting its technology worldwide, fostering increased global dependence, undermining democratic norms, and threatening U.S. leadership and global security." The report outlines how Chinese AI models censor historical events that could paint China in a bad light, deny or minimize human rights abuses, and filter criticism of Chinese political leaders.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is one of the most common mental disorders, with significant impacts on many daily activities and quality of life. It stands as one of the most common mental disorders globally and ranks as the second leading cause of disability. The current diagnostic approach for MDD primarily relies on clinical observations and patient-reported symptoms, overlooking the diverse underlying causes and pathophysiological factors contributing to depression. Therefore, scientific researchers and clinicians must gain a deeper understanding of the pathophysiological mechanisms involved in MDD. There is growing evidence in neuroscience that depression is a brain network disorder, and the use of neuroimaging, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), plays a significant role in identifying and treating MDD. Rest-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) is among the most popular neuroimaging techniques used to study MDD. Deep learning techniques have been widely applied to neuroimaging data to help with early mental health disorder detection. Recent years have seen a rise in interest in graph neural networks (GNNs), which are deep neural architectures specifically designed to handle graph-structured data like rs-fMRI. This research aimed to develop an ensemble-based GNN model capable of detecting discriminative features from rs-fMRI images for the purpose of diagnosing MDD. Specifically, we constructed an ensemble model by combining features from multiple brain region segmentation atlases to capture brain complexity and detect distinct features more accurately than single atlas-based models. Further, the effectiveness of our model is demonstrated by assessing its performance on a large multi-site MDD dataset. The best performing model among all folds achieved an accuracy of 75.80%, a sensitivity of 88.89%, a specificity of 61.84%, a precision of 71.29%, and an F1-score of 79.12%.

Universal Multimodal Retrieval (UMR) aims to enable search across various modalities using a unified model, where queries and candidates can consist of pure text, images, or a combination of both. Previous work has attempted to adopt multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to realize UMR using only text data. However, our preliminary experiments demonstrate that more diverse multimodal training data can further unlock the potential of MLLMs. Despite its effectiveness, the existing multimodal training data is highly imbalanced in terms of modality, which motivates us to develop a training data synthesis pipeline and construct a large-scale, high-quality fused-modal training dataset. Based on the synthetic training data, we develop the General Multimodal Embedder (GME), an MLLM-based dense retriever designed for UMR. Furthermore, we construct a comprehensive UMR Benchmark (UMRB) to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among existing UMR methods. Last, we provide in-depth analyses of model scaling, training strategies, and perform ablation studies on both the model and synthetic data.

Accurate and timely prediction of heavy rainfall events is crucial for effective flood risk management and disaster preparedness. By monitoring, analysing, and evaluating rainfall data at a local level, it is not only possible to take effective actions to prevent any severe climate variation but also to improve the planning of surface and underground hydrological resources. However, developing countries often lack the weather stations to collect data continuously due to the high cost of installation and maintenance. In light of this, the contribution of the present paper is twofold: first, we propose a low-cost IoT system for automatic recording, monitoring, and prediction of rainfall in rural regions. Second, we propose a novel approach to regional heavy rainfall prediction by implementing graph neural networks (GNNs), which are particularly well-suited for capturing the complex spatial dependencies inherent in rainfall patterns. The proposed approach was tested using a historical dataset spanning 72 months, with daily measurements, and experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method in predicting heavy rainfall events, making this approach particularly attractive for regions with limited resources or where traditional weather radar or station coverage is sparse.