In the last decade, Deep Reinforcement Learning has evolved into a powerful tool for complex sequential decision-making problems. It combines deep learning's proficiency in processing rich input signals with reinforcement learning's adaptability across diverse control tasks. At its core, an RL agent seeks to maximize its cumulative reward, enabling AI algorithms to uncover novel solutions previously unknown to experts. However, this focus on reward maximization also introduces a significant difficulty: improper reward specification can result in unexpected, misaligned agent behavior and inefficient learning. The complexity of accurately specifying the reward function is further amplified by the sequential nature of the task, the sparsity of learning signals, and the multifaceted aspects of the desired behavior. In this thesis, we survey the literature on effective reward specification strategies, identify core challenges relating to each of these approaches, and propose original contributions addressing the issue of sample efficiency and alignment in deep reinforcement learning. Reward specification represents one of the most challenging aspects of applying reinforcement learning in real-world domains. Our work underscores the absence of a universal solution to this complex and nuanced challenge; solving it requires selecting the most appropriate tools for the specific requirements of each unique application.

Mental health disorders are increasingly prevalent worldwide, creating an urgent need for innovative tools to support early diagnosis and intervention. This study explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in multimodal mental health diagnostics, specifically for detecting depression and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder through text and audio modalities. Using the E-DAIC dataset, we compare text and audio modalities to investigate whether LLMs can perform equally well or better with audio inputs. We further examine the integration of both modalities to determine if this can enhance diagnostic accuracy, which generally results in improved performance metrics. Our analysis specifically utilizes custom-formulated metrics; Modal Superiority Score and Disagreement Resolvement Score to evaluate how combined modalities influence model performance. The Gemini 1.5 Pro model achieves the highest scores in binary depression classification when using the combined modality, with an F1 score of 0.67 and a Balanced Accuracy (BA) of 77.4%, assessed across the full dataset. These results represent an increase of 3.1% over its performance with the text modality and 2.7% over the audio modality, highlighting the effectiveness of integrating modalities to enhance diagnostic accuracy. Notably, all results are obtained in zero-shot inferring, highlighting the robustness of the models without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. To explore the impact of different configurations on model performance, we conduct binary, severity, and multiclass tasks using both zero-shot and few-shot prompts, examining the effects of prompt variations on performance. The results reveal that models such as Gemini 1.5 Pro in text and audio modalities, and GPT-4o mini in the text modality, often surpass other models in balanced accuracy and F1 scores across multiple tasks.

Human emotion synthesis is a crucial aspect of affective computing. It involves using computational methods to mimic and convey human emotions through various modalities, with the goal of enabling more natural and effective human-computer interactions. Recent advancements in generative models, such as Autoencoders, Generative Adversarial Networks, Diffusion Models, Large Language Models, and Sequence-to-Sequence Models, have significantly contributed to the development of this field. However, there is a notable lack of comprehensive reviews in this field. To address this problem, this paper aims to address this gap by providing a thorough and systematic overview of recent advancements in human emotion synthesis based on generative models. Specifically, this review will first present the review methodology, the emotion models involved, the mathematical principles of generative models, and the datasets used. Then, the review covers the application of different generative models to emotion synthesis based on a variety of modalities, including facial images, speech, and text. It also examines mainstream evaluation metrics. Additionally, the review presents some major findings and suggests future research directions, providing a comprehensive understanding of the role of generative technology in the nuanced domain of emotion synthesis.

This paper introduces a novel approach to stock data analysis by employing a Hierarchical Graph Neural Network (HGNN) model that captures multi-level information and relational structures in the stock market. The HGNN model integrates stock relationship data and hierarchical attributes to predict stock types effectively. The paper discusses the construction of a stock industry relationship graph and the extraction of temporal information from historical price sequences. It also highlights the design of a graph convolution operation and a temporal attention aggregator to model the macro market state. The integration of these features results in a comprehensive stock prediction model that addresses the challenges of utilizing stock relationship data and modeling hierarchical attributes in the stock market.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been combined with generative adversarial networks (GANs) to create deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (DCGANs) with great success. DCGANs have been used for generating images and videos from creative domains such as fashion design and painting. A common critique of the use of DCGANs in creative applications is that they are limited in their ability to generate creative products because the generator simply learns to copy the training distribution. We explore an extension of DCGANs, creative adversarial networks (CANs). Using CANs, we generate novel, creative portraits, using the WikiArt dataset to train the network. Moreover, we introduce our extension of CANs, conditional creative adversarial networks (CCANs), and demonstrate their potential to generate creative portraits conditioned on a style label. We argue that generating products that are conditioned, or inspired, on a style label closely emulates real creative processes in which humans produce imaginative work that is still rooted in previous styles.

Recent advancements in video anomaly understanding (VAU) have opened the door to groundbreaking applications in various fields, such as traffic monitoring and industrial automation. While the current benchmarks in VAU predominantly emphasize the detection and localization of anomalies. Here, we endeavor to delve deeper into the practical aspects of VAU by addressing the essential questions: "what anomaly occurred?", "why did it happen?", and "how severe is this abnormal event?". In pursuit of these answers, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark for Exploring the Causation of Video Anomalies (ECVA). Our benchmark is meticulously designed, with each video accompanied by detailed human annotations. Specifically, each instance of our ECVA involves three sets of human annotations to indicate "what", "why" and "how" of an anomaly, including 1) anomaly type, start and end times, and event descriptions, 2) natural language explanations for the cause of an anomaly, and 3) free text reflecting the effect of the abnormality. Building upon this foundation, we propose a novel prompt-based methodology that serves as a baseline for tackling the intricate challenges posed by ECVA. We utilize "hard prompt" to guide the model to focus on the critical parts related to video anomaly segments, and "soft prompt" to establish temporal and spatial relationships within these anomaly segments. Furthermore, we propose AnomEval, a specialized evaluation metric crafted to align closely with human judgment criteria for ECVA. This metric leverages the unique features of the ECVA dataset to provide a more comprehensive and reliable assessment of various video large language models. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through rigorous experimental analysis and delineate possible avenues for further investigation into the comprehension of video anomaly causation.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in political science tasks such as election prediction, sentiment analysis, policy impact assessment, and misinformation detection. Meanwhile, the need to systematically understand how LLMs can further revolutionize the field also becomes urgent. In this work, we--a multidisciplinary team of researchers spanning computer science and political science--present the first principled framework termed Political-LLM to advance the comprehensive understanding of integrating LLMs into computational political science. Specifically, we first introduce a fundamental taxonomy classifying the existing explorations into two perspectives: political science and computational methodologies. In particular, from the political science perspective, we highlight the role of LLMs in automating predictive and generative tasks, simulating behavior dynamics, and improving causal inference through tools like counterfactual generation; from a computational perspective, we introduce advancements in data preparation, fine-tuning, and evaluation methods for LLMs that are tailored to political contexts. We identify key challenges and future directions, emphasizing the development of domain-specific datasets, addressing issues of bias and fairness, incorporating human expertise, and redefining evaluation criteria to align with the unique requirements of computational political science. Political-LLM seeks to serve as a guidebook for researchers to foster an informed, ethical, and impactful use of Artificial Intelligence in political science. Our online resource is available at: http://political-llm.org/. Corresponding authors: Yushun Dong (yd24f@fsu.edu) is with the Department of Computer Science, Florida State University; Yue Zhao (yzhao010@usc.edu) is with the Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California; Fred Gui (pgui@lsu.edu) is with the Department of Political Science, Louisiana State University; Catherine Chen (catherinechen@lsu.edu) is with the Manship School of Mass Communication and the Department of Political Science, Louisiana State University.

The peer review process is fundamental to scientific progress, determining which papers meet the quality standards for publication. Yet, the rapid growth of scholarly production and increasing specialization in knowledge areas strain traditional scientific feedback mechanisms. In light of this, we introduce Generative Agent Reviewers (GAR), leveraging LLM-empowered agents to simulate faithful peer reviewers. To enable generative reviewers, we design an architecture that extends a large language model with memory capabilities and equips agents with reviewer personas derived from historical data. Central to this approach is a graph-based representation of manuscripts, condensing content and logically organizing information - linking ideas with evidence and technical details. GAR's review process leverages external knowledge to evaluate paper novelty, followed by detailed assessment using the graph representation and multi-round assessment. Finally, a meta-reviewer aggregates individual reviews to predict the acceptance decision. Our experiments demonstrate that GAR performs comparably to human reviewers in providing detailed feedback and predicting paper outcomes. Beyond mere performance comparison, we conduct insightful experiments, such as evaluating the impact of reviewer expertise and examining fairness in reviews. By offering early expert-level feedback, typically restricted to a limited group of researchers, GAR democratizes access to transparent and in-depth evaluation.

The rapid evolution of multimodal foundation models has led to significant advancements in cross-modal understanding and generation across diverse modalities, including text, images, audio, and video. However, these models remain susceptible to jailbreak attacks, which can bypass built-in safety mechanisms and induce the production of potentially harmful content. Consequently, understanding the methods of jailbreak attacks and existing defense mechanisms is essential to ensure the safe deployment of multimodal generative models in real-world scenarios, particularly in security-sensitive applications. To provide comprehensive insight into this topic, this survey reviews jailbreak and defense in multimodal generative models. First, given the generalized lifecycle of multimodal jailbreak, we systematically explore attacks and corresponding defense strategies across four levels: input, encoder, generator, and output. Based on this analysis, we present a detailed taxonomy of attack methods, defense mechanisms, and evaluation frameworks specific to multimodal generative models. Additionally, we cover a wide range of input-output configurations, including modalities such as Any-to-Text, Any-to-Vision, and Any-to-Any within generative systems. Finally, we highlight current research challenges and propose potential directions for future research. The open-source repository corresponding to this work can be found at https://github.com/liuxuannan/Awesome-Multimodal-Jailbreak.

Software defined networking (SDN) represents a transformative shift in network architecture by decoupling the control plane from the data plane, enabling centralized and flexible management of network resources. However, this architectural shift introduces significant security challenges, as SDN's centralized control becomes an attractive target for various types of attacks. While current research has yielded valuable insights into attack detection in SDN, critical gaps remain. Addressing challenges in feature selection, broadening the scope beyond DDoS attacks, strengthening attack decisions based on multi flow analysis, and building models capable of detecting unseen attacks that they have not been explicitly trained on are essential steps toward advancing security in SDN. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the pre trained BERT base model to enhance attack detection in SDN. Our approach transforms network flow data into a format interpretable by language models, allowing BERT to capture intricate patterns and relationships within network traffic. By using Random Forest for feature selection, we optimize model performance and reduce computational overhead, ensuring accurate detection. Attack decisions are made based on several flows, providing stronger and more reliable detection of malicious traffic. Furthermore, our approach is specifically designed to detect previously unseen attacks, offering a solution for identifying threats that the model was not explicitly trained on. To rigorously evaluate our approach, we conducted experiments in two scenarios: one focused on detecting known attacks, achieving 99.96% accuracy, and another on detecting unseen attacks, where our model achieved 99.96% accuracy, demonstrating the robustness of our approach in detecting evolving threats to improve the security of SDN networks.