With the rise of large language models (LLMs), researchers are increasingly exploring their applications in var ious vertical domains, such as software engineering. LLMs have achieved remarkable success in areas including code generation and vulnerability detection. However, they also exhibit numerous limitations and shortcomings. LLM-based agents, a novel tech nology with the potential for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), combine LLMs as the core for decision-making and action-taking, addressing some of the inherent limitations of LLMs such as lack of autonomy and self-improvement. Despite numerous studies and surveys exploring the possibility of using LLMs in software engineering, it lacks a clear distinction between LLMs and LLM based agents. It is still in its early stage for a unified standard and benchmarking to qualify an LLM solution as an LLM-based agent in its domain. In this survey, we broadly investigate the current practice and solutions for LLMs and LLM-based agents for software engineering. In particular we summarise six key topics: requirement engineering, code generation, autonomous decision-making, software design, test generation, and software maintenance. We review and differentiate the work of LLMs and LLM-based agents from these six topics, examining their differences and similarities in tasks, benchmarks, and evaluation metrics. Finally, we discuss the models and benchmarks used, providing a comprehensive analysis of their applications and effectiveness in software engineering. We anticipate this work will shed some lights on pushing the boundaries of LLM-based agents in software engineering for future research.

Systematic literature reviews are the highest quality of evidence in research. However, the review process is hindered by significant resource and data constraints. The Literature Review Network (LRN) is the first of its kind explainable AI platform adhering to PRISMA 2020 standards, designed to automate the entire literature review process. LRN was evaluated in the domain of surgical glove practices using 3 search strings developed by experts to query PubMed. A non-expert trained all LRN models. Performance was benchmarked against an expert manual review. Explainability and performance metrics assessed LRN's ability to replicate the experts' review. Concordance was measured with the Jaccard index and confusion matrices. Researchers were blinded to the other's results until study completion. Overlapping studies were integrated into an LRN-generated systematic review. LRN models demonstrated superior classification accuracy without expert training, achieving 84.78% and 85.71% accuracy. The highest performance model achieved high interrater reliability (k = 0.4953) and explainability metrics, linking 'reduce', 'accident', and 'sharp' with 'double-gloving'. Another LRN model covered 91.51% of the relevant literature despite diverging from the non-expert's judgments (k = 0.2174), with the terms 'latex', 'double' (gloves), and 'indication'. LRN outperformed the manual review (19,920 minutes over 11 months), reducing the entire process to 288.6 minutes over 5 days. This study demonstrates that explainable AI does not require expert training to successfully conduct PRISMA-compliant systematic literature reviews like an expert. LRN summarized the results of surgical glove studies and identified themes that were nearly identical to the clinical researchers' findings. Explainable AI can accurately expedite our understanding of clinical practices, potentially revolutionizing healthcare research.

Sarcasm is a type of irony, characterized by an inherent mismatch between the literal interpretation and the intended connotation. Though sarcasm detection in text has been extensively studied, there are situations in which textual input alone might be insufficient to perceive sarcasm. The inclusion of additional contextual cues, such as images, is essential to recognize sarcasm in social media data effectively. This study presents a novel framework for multimodal sarcasm detection that can process input triplets. Two components of these triplets comprise the input text and its associated image, as provided in the datasets. Additionally, a supplementary modality is introduced in the form of descriptive image captions. The motivation behind incorporating this visual semantic representation is to more accurately capture the discrepancies between the textual and visual content, which are fundamental to the sarcasm detection task. The primary contributions of this study are: (1) a robust textual feature extraction branch that utilizes a cross-lingual language model; (2) a visual feature extraction branch that incorporates a self-regulated residual ConvNet integrated with a lightweight spatially aware attention module; (3) an additional modality in the form of image captions generated using an encoder-decoder architecture capable of reading text embedded in images; (4) distinct attention modules to effectively identify the incongruities between the text and two levels of image representations; (5) multi-level cross-domain semantic incongruity representation achieved through feature fusion. Compared with cutting-edge baselines, the proposed model achieves the best accuracy of 92.89% and 64.48%, respectively, on the Twitter multimodal sarcasm and MultiBully datasets.

Most machine learning classifiers are designed to output posterior probabilities for the classes given the input sample. These probabilities may be used to make the categorical decision on the class of the sample; provided as input to a downstream system; or provided to a human for interpretation. Evaluating the quality of the posteriors generated by these system is an essential problem which was addressed decades ago with the invention of proper scoring rules (PSRs). Unfortunately, much of the recent machine learning literature uses calibration metrics -- most commonly, the expected calibration error (ECE) -- as a proxy to assess posterior performance. The problem with this approach is that calibration metrics reflect only one aspect of the quality of the posteriors, ignoring the discrimination performance. For this reason, we argue that calibration metrics should play no role in the assessment of posterior quality. Expected PSRs should instead be used for this job, preferably normalized for ease of interpretation. In this work, we first give a brief review of PSRs from a practical perspective, motivating their definition using Bayes decision theory. We discuss why expected PSRs provide a principled measure of the quality of a system's posteriors and why calibration metrics are not the right tool for this job. We argue that calibration metrics, while not useful for performance assessment, may be used as diagnostic tools during system development. With this purpose in mind, we discuss a simple and practical calibration metric, called calibration loss, derived from a decomposition of expected PSRs. We compare this metric with the ECE and with the expected score divergence calibration metric from the PSR literature and argue, using theoretical and empirical evidence, that calibration loss is superior to these two metrics.

Large language models (LLMs) and their fine-tuning techniques have demonstrated superior performance in various language understanding and generation tasks. This paper explores fine-tuning LLMs for stock return forecasting with financial newsflow. In quantitative investing, return forecasting is fundamental for subsequent tasks like stock picking, portfolio optimization, etc. We formulate the model to include text representation and forecasting modules. We propose to compare the encoder-only and decoder-only LLMs, considering they generate text representations in distinct ways. The impact of these different representations on forecasting performance remains an open question. Meanwhile, we compare two simple methods of integrating LLMs' token-level representations into the forecasting module. The experiments on real news and investment universes reveal that: (1) aggregated representations from LLMs' token-level embeddings generally produce return predictions that enhance the performance of long-only and long-short portfolios; (2) in the relatively large investment universe, the decoder LLMs-based prediction model leads to stronger portfolios, whereas in the small universes, there are no consistent winners. Among the three LLMs studied (DeBERTa, Mistral, Llama), Mistral performs more robustly across different universes; (3) return predictions derived from LLMs' text representations are a strong signal for portfolio construction, outperforming conventional sentiment scores.

Recently, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising distributed machine learning (ML) technology, owing to the advancing computational and sensing capacities of end-user devices, however with the increasing concerns on users' privacy. As a special architecture in FL, vertical FL (VFL) is capable of constructing a hyper ML model by embracing sub-models from different clients. These sub-models are trained locally by vertically partitioned data with distinct attributes. Therefore, the design of VFL is fundamentally different from that of conventional FL, raising new and unique research issues. In this paper, we aim to discuss key challenges in VFL with effective solutions, and conduct experiments on real-life datasets to shed light on these issues. Specifically, we first propose a general framework on VFL, and highlight the key differences between VFL and conventional FL. Then, we discuss research challenges rooted in VFL systems under four aspects, i.e., security and privacy risks, expensive computation and communication costs, possible structural damage caused by model splitting, and system heterogeneity. Afterwards, we develop solutions to addressing the aforementioned challenges, and conduct extensive experiments to showcase the effectiveness of our proposed solutions.

This paper provides a thorough examination of recent developments in the field of multi-choice Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC). Focused on benchmark datasets, methodologies, challenges, and future trajectories, our goal is to offer researchers a comprehensive overview of the current landscape in multi-choice MRC. The analysis delves into 30 existing cloze-style and multiple-choice MRC benchmark datasets, employing a refined classification method based on attributes such as corpus style, domain, complexity, context style, question style, and answer style. This classification system enhances our understanding of each dataset's diverse attributes and categorizes them based on their complexity. Furthermore, the paper categorizes recent methodologies into Fine-tuned and Prompt-tuned methods. Fine-tuned methods involve adapting pre-trained language models (PLMs) to a specific task through retraining on domain-specific datasets, while prompt-tuned methods use prompts to guide PLM response generation, presenting potential applications in zero-shot or few-shot learning scenarios. By contributing to ongoing discussions, inspiring future research directions, and fostering innovations, this paper aims to propel multi-choice MRC towards new frontiers of achievement.

With the increase in the number of active satellites and space debris in orbit, the problem of initial orbit determination (IOD) becomes increasingly important, demanding a high accuracy. Over the years, different approaches have been presented such as filtering methods (for example, Extended Kalman Filter), differential algebra or solving Lambert's problem. In this work, we consider a setting of three monostatic radars, where all available measurements are taken approximately at the same instant. This follows a similar setting as trilateration, a state-of-the-art approach, where each radar is able to obtain a single measurement of range and range-rate. Differently, and due to advances in Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radars, we assume that each location is able to obtain a larger set of range, angle and Doppler shift measurements. Thus, our method can be understood as an extension of trilateration leveraging more recent technology and incorporating additional data. We formulate the problem as a Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE), which for some number of observations is asymptotically unbiased and asymptotically efficient. Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our method attains the same accuracy as the trilateration method for the same number of measurements and offers an alternative and generalization, returning a more accurate estimation of the satellite's state vector, as the number of available measurements increases.

With the continuous breakthroughs in core technology, the dawn of large-scale integration of robotic systems into daily human life is on the horizon. Multi-robot systems (MRS) built on this foundation are undergoing drastic evolution. The fusion of artificial intelligence technology with robot hardware is seeing broad application possibilities for MRS. This article surveys the state-of-the-art of robot learning in the context of Multi-Robot Cooperation (MRC) of recent. Commonly adopted robot learning methods (or frameworks) that are inspired by humans and animals are reviewed and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed along with the associated technical challenges. The potential trends of robot learning and MRS integration exploiting the merging of these methods with real-world applications is also discussed at length. Specifically statistical methods are used to quantitatively corroborate the ideas elaborated in the article.

There have been many recent advances in the fields of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLM), with the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) model being a leading "chatbot." LLM-based chatbots have become so powerful that it may seem difficult to differentiate between human-written and machine-generated text. To analyze this problem, we have developed a new dataset consisting of more than 750,000 human-written paragraphs, with a corresponding chatbot-generated paragraph for each. Based on this dataset, we apply Machine Learning (ML) techniques to determine the origin of text (human or chatbot). Specifically, we consider two methodologies for tackling this issue: feature analysis and embeddings. Our feature analysis approach involves extracting a collection of features from the text for classification. We also explore the use of contextual embeddings and transformer-based architectures to train classification models. Our proposed solutions offer high classification accuracy and serve as useful tools for textual analysis, resulting in a better understanding of chatbot-generated text in this era of advanced AI technology.