The application of large language models to provide relevance assessments presents exciting opportunities to advance information retrieval, natural language processing, and beyond, but to date many unknowns remain. This paper reports on the results of a large-scale evaluation (the TREC 2024 RAG Track) where four different relevance assessment approaches were deployed in situ: the "standard" fully manual process that NIST has implemented for decades and three different alternatives that take advantage of LLMs to different extents using the open-source UMBRELA tool. This setup allows us to correlate system rankings induced by the different approaches to characterize tradeoffs between cost and quality. We find that in terms of nDCG@20, nDCG@100, and Recall@100, system rankings induced by automatically generated relevance assessments from UMBRELA correlate highly with those induced by fully manual assessments across a diverse set of 77 runs from 19 teams. Our results suggest that automatically generated UMBRELA judgments can replace fully manual judgments to accurately capture run-level effectiveness. Surprisingly, we find that LLM assistance does not appear to increase correlation with fully manual assessments, suggesting that costs associated with human-in-the-loop processes do not bring obvious tangible benefits. Overall, human assessors appear to be stricter than UMBRELA in applying relevance criteria. Our work validates the use of LLMs in academic TREC-style evaluations and provides the foundation for future studies.

Quality control of structures segmentation in volumetric medical images is important for identifying segmentation errors in clinical practice and for facilitating model development by enhancing network performance in semi-supervised and active learning setups. This paper introduces SegQC, a novel framework for segmentation quality estimation and segmentation error detection. SegQC computes an estimate measure of the quality of a segmentation in volumetric scans and in their individual slices and identifies possible segmentation error regions within a slice. The key components include: 1) SegQC-Net, a deep network that inputs a scan and its segmentation mask and outputs segmentation error probabilities for each voxel in the scan; 2) three new segmentation quality metrics, two overlap metrics and a structure size metric, computed from the segmentation error probabilities; 3) a new method for detecting possible segmentation errors in scan slices computed from the segmentation error probabilities. We introduce a new evaluation scheme to measure segmentation error discrepancies based on an expert radiologist corrections of automatically produced segmentations that yields smaller observer variability and is closer to actual segmentation errors. We demonstrate SegQC on three fetal structures in 198 fetal MRI scans - fetal brain, fetal body and the placenta. To assess the benefits of SegQC, we compare it to the unsupervised Test Time Augmentation (TTA)-based quality estimation. Our studies indicate that SegQC outperforms TTA-based quality estimation in terms of Pearson correlation and MAE for fetal body and fetal brain structures segmentation. Our segmentation error detection method achieved recall and precision rates of 0.77 and 0.48 for fetal body, and 0.74 and 0.55 for fetal brain segmentation error detection respectively. SegQC enhances segmentation metrics estimation for whole scans and individual slices, as well as provides error regions detection. Introduction The segmentation of structures in volumetric medical images is increasingly used in clinical practice for a variety of diagnostic and prognostic tasks. Since manual delineation of structures' contours is time-consuming and requires expertise, a variety of automatic segmentation methods have been developed.

Network function virtualization enables network operators to implement new services through a process called service function chain mapping. The concept of Service Function Chain (SFC) is introduced to provide complex services, which is an ordered set of Network Functions (NF). The network functions of an SFC can be decomposed in several ways into some Virtual Network Functions (VNF). Additionally, the decomposed NFs can be placed (mapped) as VNFs on different machines on the underlying physical infrastructure. Selecting good decompositions and good placements among the possible options greatly affects both costs and service quality metrics. Previous research has addressed NF decomposition and VNF placement as separate problems. However, in this paper, we address both NF decomposition and VNF placement simultaneously as a single problem. Since finding an optimal solution is NP-hard, we have employed heuristic algorithms to solve the problem. Specifically, we have introduced a multiobjective decomposition and mapping VNFs (MODMVNF) method based on the non-dominated sorting genetic multi-objective algorithm (NSGAII) to solve the problem. The goal is to find near-optimal decomposition and mapping on the physical network at the same time to minimize the mapping cost and communication latency of SFC. The comparison of the results of the proposed method with the results obtained by solving ILP formulation of the problem as well as the results obtained from the multi-objective particle swarm algorithm shows the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of cost and communication latency.

Significant advances have been made in natural language processing in recent years. However, our current deep learning approach to language modeling requires substantial resources in terms of data and computation. One of the side effects of this data-hungry paradigm is the current schism between languages, separating those considered high-resource, where most of the development happens and resources are available, and the low-resource ones, which struggle to attain the same level of performance and autonomy. This study aims to introduce a new set of resources to stimulate the future development of neural text generation in Portuguese. In this work, we document the development of GigaVerbo, a concatenation of deduplicated Portuguese text corpora amounting to 200 billion tokens. Via this corpus, we trained a series of decoder-transformers named Tucano. Our models perform equal or superior to other Portuguese and multilingual language models of similar size in several Portuguese benchmarks. The evaluation of our models also reveals that model performance on many currently available benchmarks used by the Portuguese NLP community has little to no correlation with the scaling of token ingestion during training, highlighting the limitations of such evaluations when it comes to the assessment of Portuguese generative language models. All derivatives of our study are openly released on GitHub and Hugging Face. See https://nkluge-correa.github.io/Tucano/

This work addresses the challenge of capturing the complexities of legal knowledge by proposing a multi-layered embedding-based retrieval method for legal and legislative texts. Creating embeddings not only for individual articles but also for their components (paragraphs, clauses) and structural groupings (books, titles, chapters, etc), we seek to capture the subtleties of legal information through the use of dense vectors of embeddings, representing it at varying levels of granularity. Our method meets various information needs by allowing the Retrieval Augmented Generation system to provide accurate responses, whether for specific segments or entire sections, tailored to the user's query. We explore the concepts of aboutness, semantic chunking, and inherent hierarchy within legal texts, arguing that this method enhances the legal information retrieval. Despite the focus being on Brazil's legislative methods and the Brazilian Constitution, which follow a civil law tradition, our findings should in principle be applicable across different legal systems, including those adhering to common law traditions. Furthermore, the principles of the proposed method extend beyond the legal domain, offering valuable insights for organizing and retrieving information in any field characterized by information encoded in hierarchical text.

This study presents an innovative AI-driven tool for diagnosing Peyronie's Disease (PD), a condition that affects between 0.3% and 13.1% of men worldwide. Our method uses key point detection on both images and videos to measure penile curvature angles, utilizing advanced computer vision techniques. This tool has demonstrated high accuracy in identifying anatomical landmarks, validated against conventional goniometer measurements. Traditional PD diagnosis often involves subjective and invasive methods, which can lead to patient discomfort and inaccuracies. Our approach offers a precise, reliable, and non-invasive diagnostic tool to address these drawbacks. The model distinguishes between PD and normal anatomical changes with a sensitivity of 96.7% and a specificity of 100%. This advancement represents a significant improvement in urological diagnostics, greatly enhancing the efficacy and convenience of PD assessment for healthcare providers and patients.

These constraint of fact, linguistic resources are mostly available can be expressed in what we call conll-c for the morphosyntactic level of analysis and the format, a newly introduced convention to maximize UD infrastructure represents the de facto standard compatibility with conll-u. Cxns formalized in this area, providing a framework which has been in conll-c can be translated into a set of employed to represent the most diverse set of languages grew queries and be used to automatically match (both typologically as well as in terms of UD-parsed sentences in order to find cxn instances.

Bitumen extraction for the production of synthetic crude oil in Canada's Athabasca Oil Sands industry has recently come under spotlight for being a significant source of greenhouse gas emission. A major cause of concern is methane, a greenhouse gas produced by the anaerobic biodegradation of hydrocarbons in oil sands residues, or tailings, stored in settle basins commonly known as oil sands tailing ponds. In order to determine the methane emitting potential of these tailing ponds and have future methane projections, we use real-time weather data, mechanistic models developed from laboratory controlled experiments, and industrial reports to train a physics constrained machine learning model. Our trained model can successfully identify the directions of active ponds and estimate their emission levels, which are generally hard to obtain due to data sampling restrictions. We found that each active oil sands tailing pond could emit between 950 to 1500 tonnes of methane per year, whose environmental impact is equivalent to carbon dioxide emissions from at least 6000 gasoline powered vehicles. Although abandoned ponds are often presumed to have insignificant emissions, our findings indicate that these ponds could become active over time and potentially emit up to 1000 tonnes of methane each year. Taking an average over all datasets that was used in model training, we estimate that emissions around major oil sands regions would need to be reduced by approximately 12% over a year, to reduce the average methane concentrations to 2005 levels.

Federated learning (FL) is an appealing approach to training machine learning models without sharing raw data. However, standard FL algorithms are iterative and thus induce a significant communication cost. One-shot federated learning (OFL) trades the iterative exchange of models between clients and the server with a single round of communication, thereby saving substantially on communication costs. Not surprisingly, OFL exhibits a performance gap in terms of accuracy with respect to FL, especially under high data heterogeneity. We introduce FENS, a novel federated ensembling scheme that approaches the accuracy of FL with the communication efficiency of OFL. Learning in FENS proceeds in two phases: first, clients train models locally and send them to the server, similar to OFL; second, clients collaboratively train a lightweight prediction aggregator model using FL. We showcase the effectiveness of FENS through exhaustive experiments spanning several datasets and heterogeneity levels. In the particular case of heterogeneously distributed CIFAR-10 dataset, FENS achieves up to a 26.9% higher accuracy over state-of-the-art (SOTA) OFL, being only 3.1% lower than FL. At the same time, FENS incurs at most 4.3x more communication than OFL, whereas FL is at least 10.9x more communication-intensive than FENS.

Traffic accidents pose a significant threat to public safety, resulting in numerous fatalities, injuries, and a substantial economic burden each year. The development of predictive models capable of real-time forecasting of post-accident impact using readily available data can play a crucial role in preventing adverse outcomes and enhancing overall safety. However, existing accident predictive models encounter two main challenges: first, reliance on either costly or non-real-time data, and second the absence of a comprehensive metric to measure post-accident impact accurately. To address these limitations, this study proposes a deep neural network model known as the cascade model. It leverages readily available real-world data from Los Angeles County to predict post-accident impacts. The model consists of two components: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The LSTM model captures temporal patterns, while the CNN extracts patterns from the sparse accident dataset. Furthermore, an external traffic congestion dataset is incorporated to derive a new feature called the "accident impact" factor, which quantifies the influence of an accident on surrounding traffic flow. Extensive experiments were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid machine learning method in predicting the post-accident impact compared to state-of-the-art baselines. The results reveal a higher precision in predicting minimal impacts (i.e., cases with no reported accidents) and a higher recall in predicting more significant impacts (i.e., cases with reported accidents).