When conducting literature reviews, scientists often create literature review tables - tables whose rows are publications and whose columns constitute a schema, a set of aspects used to compare and contrast the papers. Can we automatically generate these tables using language models (LMs)? In this work, we introduce a framework that leverages LMs to perform this task by decomposing it into separate schema and value generation steps. To enable experimentation, we address two main challenges: First, we overcome a lack of high-quality datasets to benchmark table generation by curating and releasing arxivDIGESTables, a new dataset of 2,228 literature review tables extracted from ArXiv papers that synthesize a total of 7,542 research papers. Second, to support scalable evaluation of model generations against human-authored reference tables, we develop DecontextEval, an automatic evaluation method that aligns elements of tables with the same underlying aspects despite differing surface forms. Given these tools, we evaluate LMs' abilities to reconstruct reference tables, finding this task benefits from additional context to ground the generation (e.g. table captions, in-text references). Finally, through a human evaluation study we find that even when LMs fail to fully reconstruct a reference table, their generated novel aspects can still be useful.

Small Language Models (SLMs) have become increasingly important due to their efficiency and performance to perform various language tasks with minimal computational resources, making them ideal for various settings including on-device, mobile, edge devices, among many others. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on SLMs, focusing on their architectures, training techniques, and model compression techniques. We propose a novel taxonomy for categorizing the methods used to optimize SLMs, including model compression, pruning, and quantization techniques. We summarize the benchmark datasets that are useful for benchmarking SLMs along with the evaluation metrics commonly used. Additionally, we highlight key open challenges that remain to be addressed. Our survey aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners interested in developing and deploying small yet efficient language models.

Shared control problems involve a robot learning to collaborate with a human. When learning a shared control policy, short communication between the agents can often significantly reduce running times and improve the system's accuracy. We extend the shared control problem to include the ability to directly query a cooperating agent. We consider two types of potential responses to a query, namely oracles: one that can provide the learner with the best action they should take, even when that action might be myopically wrong, and one with a bounded knowledge limited to its part of the system. Given this additional information channel, this work further presents three heuristics for choosing when to query: reinforcement learning-based, utility-based, and entropy-based. These heuristics aim to reduce a system's overall learning cost. Empirical results on two environments show the benefits of querying to learn a better control policy and the tradeoffs between the proposed heuristics.

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in civil engineering presents a transformative approach to enhancing design quality and safety. This paper investigates the potential of the advanced LLM GPT4 Turbo vision model in detecting architectural flaws during the design phase, with a specific focus on identifying missing doors and windows. The study evaluates the model's performance through metrics such as precision, recall, and F1 score, demonstrating AI's effectiveness in accurately detecting flaws compared to human-verified data. Additionally, the research explores AI's broader capabilities, including identifying load-bearing issues, material weaknesses, and ensuring compliance with building codes. The findings highlight how AI can significantly improve design accuracy, reduce costly revisions, and support sustainable practices, ultimately revolutionizing the civil engineering field by ensuring safer, more efficient, and aesthetically optimized structures.

Time series forecasting is a critical task that provides key information for decision-making across various fields. Recently, various fundamental deep learning architectures such as MLPs, CNNs, RNNs, and GNNs have been developed and applied to solve time series forecasting problems. However, the structural limitations caused by the inductive biases of each deep learning architecture constrained their performance. Transformer models, which excel at handling long-term dependencies, have become significant architectural components for time series forecasting. However, recent research has shown that alternatives such as simple linear layers can outperform Transformers. These findings have opened up new possibilities for using diverse architectures. In this context of exploration into various models, the architectural modeling of time series forecasting has now entered a renaissance. This survey not only provides a historical context for time series forecasting but also offers comprehensive and timely analysis of the movement toward architectural diversification. By comparing and re-examining various deep learning models, we uncover new perspectives and presents the latest trends in time series forecasting, including the emergence of hybrid models, diffusion models, Mamba models, and foundation models. By focusing on the inherent characteristics of time series data, we also address open challenges that have gained attention in time series forecasting, such as channel dependency, distribution shift, causality, and feature extraction. This survey explores vital elements that can enhance forecasting performance through diverse approaches. These contributions lead to lowering the entry barriers for newcomers to the field of time series forecasting, while also offering seasoned researchers broad perspectives, new opportunities, and deep insights.

Natural Language Processing is revolutionizing the way legal professionals and laypersons operate in the legal field. The considerable potential for Natural Language Processing in the legal sector, especially in developing computational tools for various legal processes, has captured the interest of researchers for years. This survey follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses framework, reviewing 148 studies, with a final selection of 127 after manual filtering. It explores foundational concepts related to Natural Language Processing in the legal domain, illustrating the unique aspects and challenges of processing legal texts, such as extensive document length, complex language, and limited open legal datasets. We provide an overview of Natural Language Processing tasks specific to legal text, such as Legal Document Summarization, legal Named Entity Recognition, Legal Question Answering, Legal Text Classification, and Legal Judgment Prediction. In the section on legal Language Models, we analyze both developed Language Models and approaches for adapting general Language Models to the legal domain. Additionally, we identify 15 Open Research Challenges, including bias in Artificial Intelligence applications, the need for more robust and interpretable models, and improving explainability to handle the complexities of legal language and reasoning.

Sarcasm is a rhetorical device that is used to convey the opposite of the literal meaning of an utterance. Sarcasm is widely used on social media and other forms of computer-mediated communication motivating the use of computational models to identify it automatically. While the clear majority of approaches to sarcasm detection have been carried out on text only, sarcasm detection often requires additional information present in tonality, facial expression, and contextual images. This has led to the introduction of multimodal models, opening the possibility to detect sarcasm in multiple modalities such as audio, images, text, and video. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive survey on multimodal sarcasm detection - henceforth MSD - to date. We survey papers published between 2018 and 2023 on the topic, and discuss the models and datasets used for this task. We also present future research directions in MSD.

Narratives are widely recognized as a powerful tool for structuring information and facilitating comprehension of complex ideas in various domains such as science communication. This paper investigates whether incorporating narrative elements can assist Large Language Models (LLMs) in solving complex problems more effectively. We propose a novel approach, Story of Thought (SoT), integrating narrative structures into prompting techniques for problem-solving. This approach involves constructing narratives around problem statements and creating a framework to identify and organize relevant information. Our experiments show that using various LLMs with SoT consistently surpasses using them with other techniques on physics, chemistry, math, and biology questions in both the GPQA and JEEBench datasets. The narrative-based information curation process in SoT enhances problem comprehension by contextualizing critical in-domain information and highlighting causal relationships within the problem space.

Cognitive decline is a natural part of aging, often resulting in reduced cognitive abilities. In some cases, however, this decline is more pronounced, typically due to disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. Early detection of anomalous cognitive decline is crucial, as it can facilitate timely professional intervention. While medical data can help in this detection, it often involves invasive procedures. An alternative approach is to employ non-intrusive techniques such as speech or handwriting analysis, which do not necessarily affect daily activities. This survey reviews the most relevant methodologies that use deep learning techniques to automate the cognitive decline estimation task, including audio, text, and visual processing. We discuss the key features and advantages of each modality and methodology, including state-of-the-art approaches like Transformer architecture and foundation models. In addition, we present works that integrate different modalities to develop multimodal models. We also highlight the most significant datasets and the quantitative results from studies using these resources. From this review, several conclusions emerge. In most cases, the textual modality achieves the best results and is the most relevant for detecting cognitive decline. Moreover, combining various approaches from individual modalities into a multimodal model consistently enhances performance across nearly all scenarios.

This paper introduces Ali-AUG, a novel single-step diffusion model for efficient labeled data augmentation in industrial applications. Our method addresses the challenge of limited labeled data by generating synthetic, labeled images with precise feature insertion. Ali-AUG utilizes a stable diffusion architecture enhanced with skip connections and LoRA modules to efficiently integrate masks and images, ensuring accurate feature placement without affecting unrelated image content. Experimental validation across various industrial datasets demonstrates Ali-AUG's superiority in generating high-quality, defect-enhanced images while maintaining rapid single-step inference. By offering precise control over feature insertion and minimizing required training steps, our technique significantly enhances data augmentation capabilities, providing a powerful tool for improving the performance of deep learning models in scenarios with limited labeled data. Ali-AUG is especially useful for use cases like defective product image generation to train AI-based models to improve their ability to detect defects in manufacturing processes. Using different data preparation strategies, including Classification Accuracy Score (CAS) and Naive Augmentation Score (NAS), we show that Ali-AUG improves model performance by 31% compared to other augmentation methods and by 45% compared to models without data augmentation. Notably, Ali-AUG reduces training time by 32% and supports both paired and unpaired datasets, enhancing flexibility in data preparation.