South America
Sentiment and Emotion-aware Multi-criteria Fuzzy Group Decision Making System
Yerkin, Adilet, Shamoi, Pakizar, Kadyrgali, Elnara
In today's world, making decisions as a group is common, whether choosing a restaurant or deciding on a holiday destination. Group decision-making (GDM) systems play a crucial role by facilitating consensus among participants with diverse preferences. Discussions are one of the main tools people use to make decisions. When people discuss alternatives, they use natural language to express their opinions. Traditional GDM systems generally require participants to provide explicit opinion values to the system. However, in real-life scenarios, participants often express their opinions through some text (e.g., in comments, social media, messengers, etc.). This paper introduces a sentiment and emotion-aware multi-criteria fuzzy GDM system designed to enhance consensus-reaching effectiveness in group settings. This system incorporates natural language processing to analyze sentiments and emotions expressed in textual data, enabling an understanding of participant opinions besides the explicit numerical preference inputs. Once all the experts have provided their preferences for the alternatives, the individual preferences are aggregated into a single collective preference matrix. This matrix represents the collective expert opinion regarding the other options. Then, sentiments, emotions, and preference scores are inputted into a fuzzy inference system to get the overall score. The proposed system was used for a small decision-making process - choosing the hotel for a vacation by a group of friends. Our findings demonstrate that integrating sentiment and emotion analysis into GDM systems allows everyone's feelings and opinions to be considered during discussions and significantly improves consensus among participants.
Against All Odds: Overcoming Typology, Script, and Language Confusion in Multilingual Embedding Inversion Attacks
Chen, Yiyi, Biswas, Russa, Lent, Heather, Bjerva, Johannes
Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to malicious influence by cyber attackers through intrusions such as adversarial, backdoor, and embedding inversion attacks. In response, the burgeoning field of LLM Security aims to study and defend against such threats. Thus far, the majority of works in this area have focused on monolingual English models, however, emerging research suggests that multilingual LLMs may be more vulnerable to various attacks than their monolingual counterparts. While previous work has investigated embedding inversion over a small subset of European languages, it is challenging to extrapolate these findings to languages from different linguistic families and with differing scripts. To this end, we explore the security of multilingual LLMs in the context of embedding inversion attacks and investigate cross-lingual and cross-script inversion across 20 languages, spanning over 8 language families and 12 scripts. Our findings indicate that languages written in Arabic script and Cyrillic script are particularly vulnerable to embedding inversion, as are languages within the Indo-Aryan language family. We further observe that inversion models tend to suffer from language confusion, sometimes greatly reducing the efficacy of an attack. Accordingly, we systematically explore this bottleneck for inversion models, uncovering predictable patterns which could be leveraged by attackers. Ultimately, this study aims to further the field's understanding of the outstanding security vulnerabilities facing multilingual LLMs and raise awareness for the languages most at risk of negative impact from these attacks.
Selective Prompt Anchoring for Code Generation
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) such as Copilot and ChatGPT have transformed software development by automating coding tasks. Despite these advancements, challenges remain in reducing error rates and fully meeting user expectations. Our empirical study reveals LLMs tend to dilute their self-attention on the initial prompt as more code tokens are generated. We hypothesize this self-attention dilution issue is one of the root causes of inaccuracies in LLM-generated code. To mitigate this issue, we propose Selective Prompt Anchoring (SPA). SPA amplifies the influence of the selected parts in the initial prompt, which we refer to as ``anchored text'', during code generation. Specifically, SPA calculates the logit distribution difference with and without the anchored text. We prove this difference approximates the anchored text's contextual contribution to the output logits. SPA creates an augmented logit distribution by linearly combining the original logit distribution and the logit difference. We evaluate SPA with five LLMs on four benchmarks. Our results demonstrate that using SPA can consistently improve Pass@1 rates by up to 9.7% in all settings. Notably, with selective text anchoring, a small version of DeepSeek-Coder (6.7B) can achieve better performance than an original much larger version (33B). Our code is available at https://github.com/magic-YuanTian/Selective-Prompt-Anchoring.
Generative AI in Industrial Machine Vision -- A Review
Zhou, Hans Aoyang, Wolfschläger, Dominik, Florides, Constantinos, Werheid, Jonas, Behnen, Hannes, Woltersmann, Jan-Henrick, Pinto, Tiago C., Kemmerling, Marco, Abdelrazeq, Anas, Schmitt, Robert H.
Machine vision enhances automation, quality control, and operational efficiency in industrial applications by enabling machines to interpret and act on visual data. While traditional computer vision algorithms and approaches remain widely utilized, machine learning has become pivotal in current research activities. In particular, generative AI demonstrates promising potential by improving pattern recognition capabilities, through data augmentation, increasing image resolution, and identifying anomalies for quality control. However, the application of generative AI in machine vision is still in its early stages due to challenges in data diversity, computational requirements, and the necessity for robust validation methods. A comprehensive literature review is essential to understand the current state of generative AI in industrial machine vision, focusing on recent advancements, applications, and research trends. Thus, a literature review based on the PRISMA guidelines was conducted, analyzing over 1,200 papers on generative AI in industrial machine vision. Our findings reveal various patterns in current research, with the primary use of generative AI being data augmentation, for machine vision tasks such as classification and object detection. Furthermore, we gather a collection of application challenges together with data requirements to enable a successful application of generative AI in industrial machine vision. This overview aims to provide researchers with insights into the different areas and applications within current research, highlighting significant advancements and identifying opportunities for future work.
Open-FinLLMs: Open Multimodal Large Language Models for Financial Applications
Xie, Qianqian, Li, Dong, Xiao, Mengxi, Jiang, Zihao, Xiang, Ruoyu, Zhang, Xiao, Chen, Zhengyu, He, Yueru, Han, Weiguang, Yang, Yuzhe, Chen, Shunian, Zhang, Yifei, Shen, Lihang, Kim, Daniel, Liu, Zhiwei, Luo, Zheheng, Yu, Yangyang, Cao, Yupeng, Deng, Zhiyang, Yao, Zhiyuan, Li, Haohang, Feng, Duanyu, Dai, Yongfu, Somasundaram, VijayaSai, Lu, Peng, Zhao, Yilun, Long, Yitao, Xiong, Guojun, Smith, Kaleb, Yu, Honghai, Lai, Yanzhao, Peng, Min, Nie, Jianyun, Suchow, Jordan W., Liu, Xiao-Yang, Wang, Benyou, Lopez-Lira, Alejandro, Huang, Jimin, Ananiadou, Sophia
Large language models (LLMs) have advanced financial applications, yet they often lack sufficient financial knowledge and struggle with tasks involving multi-modal inputs like tables and time series data. To address these limitations, we introduce \textit{Open-FinLLMs}, a series of Financial LLMs. We begin with FinLLaMA, pre-trained on a 52 billion token financial corpus, incorporating text, tables, and time-series data to embed comprehensive financial knowledge. FinLLaMA is then instruction fine-tuned with 573K financial instructions, resulting in FinLLaMA-instruct, which enhances task performance. Finally, we present FinLLaVA, a multimodal LLM trained with 1.43M image-text instructions to handle complex financial data types. Extensive evaluations demonstrate FinLLaMA's superior performance over LLaMA3-8B, LLaMA3.1-8B, and BloombergGPT in both zero-shot and few-shot settings across 19 and 4 datasets, respectively. FinLLaMA-instruct outperforms GPT-4 and other Financial LLMs on 15 datasets. FinLLaVA excels in understanding tables and charts across 4 multimodal tasks. Additionally, FinLLaMA achieves impressive Sharpe Ratios in trading simulations, highlighting its robust financial application capabilities. We will continually maintain and improve our models and benchmarks to support ongoing innovation in academia and industry.
Experimentation, deployment and monitoring Machine Learning models: Approaches for applying MLOps
Nogare, Diego, Silveira, Ismar Frango
In recent years, especially since 2010, Data Science has proven to be a fundamental discipline and a support tool for the industry to improve its decision-making supported by data. With the increased relevance of this area, the challenges of publishing the developed models into production to deliver the proposed value to end-users have become more prominent To address these challenges, the MLOps discipline has proven to be a promising approach, enabling the automation and governance of the processes of experimenting, publishing and monitoring Machine Learning models. The creation of MLOps pipelines is one of the main strategies to ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of these processes. This work is expected to contribute to the advancement of AI, promoting more efficient and transparent methodologies for end-to-end Machine Learning project development, looking for to answer the investigative question "What are the main challenges faced by companies when publishing Machine Learning models into production, and how can the discipline of MLOps helps overcome them?" and more specific questions like "Why is it necessary to carry out continuous monitoring throughout the entire development lifecycle of machine learning models?" and "What are the essential steps to ensure an automated, efficient, and secure environment for publishing machine learning models?". The remainder of the paper is organised as follow: in section 2 - MLOps pipeline, which explains the concepts and challenges of MLOps pipelines, in section 3 - Application and Case Study, applications and the benefits of implementing a solution with the stages of experimentation, publication and monitoring and three case studies from different fields of the industry that benefited from the implementation of MLOps are presented, and, in section 4 - Conclusion, the views of each of the three major areas explored are exposed.
Dr.Academy: A Benchmark for Evaluating Questioning Capability in Education for Large Language Models
Chen, Yuyan, Wu, Chenwei, Yan, Songzhou, Liu, Panjun, Zhou, Haoyu, Xiao, Yanghua
Teachers are important to imparting knowledge and guiding learners, and the role of large language models (LLMs) as potential educators is emerging as an important area of study. Recognizing LLMs' capability to generate educational content can lead to advances in automated and personalized learning. While LLMs have been tested for their comprehension and problem-solving skills, their capability in teaching remains largely unexplored. In teaching, questioning is a key skill that guides students to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize core concepts and principles. Therefore, our research introduces a benchmark to evaluate the questioning capability in education as a teacher of LLMs through evaluating their generated educational questions, utilizing Anderson and Krathwohl's taxonomy across general, monodisciplinary, and interdisciplinary domains. We shift the focus from LLMs as learners to LLMs as educators, assessing their teaching capability through guiding them to generate questions. We apply four metrics, including relevance, coverage, representativeness, and consistency, to evaluate the educational quality of LLMs' outputs. Our results indicate that GPT-4 demonstrates significant potential in teaching general, humanities, and science courses; Claude2 appears more apt as an interdisciplinary teacher. Furthermore, the automatic scores align with human perspectives.
Newton-Raphson Flow for Aggressive Quadrotor Tracking Control
Morales-Cuadrado, Evanns, Llanes, Christian, Wardi, Yorai, Coogan, Samuel
We apply the Newton-Raphson flow tracking controller to aggressive quadrotor flight and demonstrate that it achieves good tracking performance over a suite of benchmark trajectories, beating the native trajectory tracking controller in the popular PX4 Autopilot. The Newton-Raphson flow tracking controller is a recently proposed integrator-type controller that aims to drive to zero the error between a future predicted system output and the reference trajectory. This controller is computationally lightweight, requiring only an imprecise predictor, and achieves guaranteed asymptotic error bounds under certain conditions. We show that these theoretical advantages are realizable on a quadrotor hardware platform. Our experiments are conducted on a Holybrox x500v2 quadrotor using a Pixhawk 6x flight controller and a Rasbperry Pi 4 companion computer which receives location information from an OptiTrack motion capture system and sends input commands through the ROS2 API for the PX4 software stack.
NLP for The Greek Language: A Longer Survey
Papantoniou, Katerina, Tzitzikas, Yannis
There is a wide variety of methods, tools and resources for processing text in the English language. However this is not the case for the Greek language even though it has a long documented history spanning at least 3,400 years of written records (including texts in syllabic script), and 28 centuries (Archaic period - new) of written text with alphabet [1, 2]. The over 2500 years literary tradition of Greek is also notable. To aid those that are interested in using, developing or advancing the techniques for Greek processing, in this paper we survey related works and resources organized in categories. We hope this collection and categorization of works to be useful for students and researchers interested in NLP tasks, Information Retrieval and Knowledge Management for the Greek language.
KAN4TSF: Are KAN and KAN-based models Effective for Time Series Forecasting?
Han, Xiao, Zhang, Xinfeng, Wu, Yiling, Zhang, Zhenduo, Wu, Zhe
Time series forecasting is a crucial task that predicts the future values of variables based on historical data. Time series forecasting techniques have been developing in parallel with the machine learning community, from early statistical learning methods to current deep learning methods. Although existing methods have made significant progress, they still suffer from two challenges. The mathematical theory of mainstream deep learning-based methods does not establish a clear relation between network sizes and fitting capabilities, and these methods often lack interpretability. To this end, we introduce the Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) into time series forecasting research, which has better mathematical properties and interpretability. First, we propose the Reversible Mixture of KAN experts (RMoK) model, which is a KAN-based model for time series forecasting. RMoK uses a mixture-of-experts structure to assign variables to KAN experts. Then, we compare performance, integration, and speed between RMoK and various baselines on real-world datasets, and the experimental results show that RMoK achieves the best performance in most cases. And we find the relationship between temporal feature weights and data periodicity through visualization, which roughly explains RMoK's mechanism. Thus, we conclude that KAN and KAN-based models (RMoK) are effective in time series forecasting. Code is available at KAN4TSF: https://github.com/2448845600/KAN4TSF.