The true power of computational research typically can lay in either what it accomplishes or what it enables others to accomplish. In this work, both avenues are simultaneously embraced across several distinct efforts existing at three general scales of abstractions of what a material is - atomistic, physical, and design. At each, an efficient materials informatics infrastructure is being built from the ground up based on (1) the fundamental understanding of the underlying prior knowledge, including the data, (2) deployment routes that take advantage of it, and (3) pathways to extend it in an autonomous or semi-autonomous fashion, while heavily relying on artificial intelligence (AI) to guide well-established DFT-based ab initio and CALPHAD-based thermodynamic methods. The resulting multi-level discovery infrastructure is highly generalizable as it focuses on encoding problems to solve them easily rather than looking for an existing solution. To showcase it, this dissertation discusses the design of multi-alloy functionally graded materials (FGMs) incorporating ultra-high temperature refractory high entropy alloys (RHEAs) towards gas turbine and jet engine efficiency increase reducing CO2 emissions, as well as hypersonic vehicles. It leverages a new graph representation of underlying mathematical space using a newly developed algorithm based on combinatorics, not subject to many problems troubling the community. Underneath, property models and phase relations are learned from optimized samplings of the largest and highest quality dataset of HEA in the world, called ULTERA. At the atomistic level, a data ecosystem optimized for machine learning (ML) from over 4.5 million relaxed structures, called MPDD, is used to inform experimental observations and improve thermodynamic models by providing stability data enabled by a new efficient featurization framework.

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) has been a long-standing field to answer questions based on knowledge bases. Recently, the evolving dynamics of knowledge have attracted a growing interest in Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA), an emerging task to answer temporal questions. However, this field grapples with ambiguities in defining temporal questions and lacks a systematic categorization of existing methods for TKGQA. In response, this paper provides a thorough survey from two perspectives: the taxonomy of temporal questions and the methodological categorization for TKGQA. Specifically, we first establish a detailed taxonomy of temporal questions engaged in prior studies. Subsequently, we provide a comprehensive review of TKGQA techniques of two categories: semantic parsing-based and TKG embedding-based. Building on this review, the paper outlines potential research directions aimed at advancing the field of TKGQA. This work aims to serve as a comprehensive reference for TKGQA and to stimulate further research.

The process of annotating data within the legal sector is filled with distinct challenges that differ from other fields, primarily due to the inherent complexities of legal language and documentation. The initial task usually involves selecting an appropriate raw dataset that captures the intricate aspects of legal texts. Following this, extracting text becomes a complicated task, as legal documents often have complex structures, footnotes, references, and unique terminology. The importance of data cleaning is magnified in this context, ensuring that redundant information is eliminated while maintaining crucial legal details and context. Creating comprehensive yet straightforward annotation guidelines is imperative, as these guidelines serve as the road map for maintaining uniformity and addressing the subtle nuances of legal terminology. Another critical aspect is the involvement of legal professionals in the annotation process. Their expertise is valuable in ensuring that the data not only remains contextually accurate but also adheres to prevailing legal standards and interpretations. This paper provides an expanded view of these challenges and aims to offer a foundational understanding and guidance for researchers and professionals engaged in legal data annotation projects. In addition, we provide links to our created and fine-tuned datasets and language models. These resources are outcomes of our discussed projects and solutions to challenges faced while working on them.

Emerging technologies drive the ongoing transformation of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). This transformation has given rise to cybersecurity concerns, among which data poisoning attack emerges as a new threat as ITS increasingly relies on data. In data poisoning attacks, attackers inject malicious perturbations into datasets, potentially leading to inaccurate results in offline learning and real-time decision-making processes. This paper concentrates on data poisoning attack models against ITS. We identify the main ITS data sources vulnerable to poisoning attacks and application scenarios that enable staging such attacks. A general framework is developed following rigorous study process from cybersecurity but also considering specific ITS application needs. Data poisoning attacks against ITS are reviewed and categorized following the framework. We then discuss the current limitations of these attack models and the future research directions. Our work can serve as a guideline to better understand the threat of data poisoning attacks against ITS applications, while also giving a perspective on the future development of trustworthy ITS.

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach that protects user data privacy by training models locally on clients and aggregating them on a parameter server. While effective at preserving privacy, FL systems face limitations such as single points of failure, lack of incentives, and inadequate security. To address these challenges, blockchain technology is integrated into FL systems to provide stronger security, fairness, and scalability. However, blockchain-empowered FL (BC-FL) systems introduce additional demands on network, computing, and storage resources. This survey provides a comprehensive review of recent research on BC-FL systems, analyzing the benefits and challenges associated with blockchain integration. We explore why blockchain is applicable to FL, how it can be implemented, and the challenges and existing solutions for its integration. Additionally, we offer insights on future research directions for the BC-FL system.

We introduce OmChat, a model designed to excel in handling long contexts and video understanding tasks. OmChat's new architecture standardizes how different visual inputs are processed, making it more efficient and adaptable. It uses a dynamic vision encoding process to effectively handle images of various resolutions, capturing fine details across a range of image qualities. OmChat utilizes an active progressive multimodal pretraining strategy, which gradually increases the model's capacity for long contexts and enhances its overall abilities. By selecting high-quality data during training, OmChat learns from the most relevant and informative data points. With support for a context length of up to 512K, OmChat demonstrates promising performance in tasks involving multiple images and videos, outperforming most open-source models in these benchmarks. Additionally, OmChat proposes a prompting strategy for unifying complex multimodal inputs including single image text, multi-image text and videos, and achieving competitive performance on single-image benchmarks. To further evaluate the model's capabilities, we proposed a benchmark dataset named Temporal Visual Needle in a Haystack. This dataset assesses OmChat's ability to comprehend temporal visual details within long videos. Our analysis highlights several key factors contributing to OmChat's success: support for any-aspect high image resolution, the active progressive pretraining strategy, and high-quality supervised fine-tuning datasets. This report provides a detailed overview of OmChat's capabilities and the strategies that enhance its performance in visual understanding.

Recent advancements in the realm of deep generative models focus on generating samples that satisfy multiple desired properties. However, prevalent approaches optimize these property functions independently, thus omitting the trade-offs among them. In addition, the property optimization is often improperly integrated into the generative models, resulting in an unnecessary compromise on generation quality (i.e., the quality of generated samples). To address these issues, we formulate a constrained optimization problem. It seeks to optimize generation quality while ensuring that generated samples reside at the Pareto front of multiple property objectives. Such a formulation enables the generation of samples that cannot be further improved simultaneously on the conflicting property functions and preserves good quality of generated samples. Building upon this formulation, we introduce the PaRetO-gUided Diffusion model (PROUD), wherein the gradients in the denoising process are dynamically adjusted to enhance generation quality while the generated samples adhere to Pareto optimality. Experimental evaluations on image generation and protein generation tasks demonstrate that our PROUD consistently maintains superior generation quality while approaching Pareto optimality across multiple property functions compared to various baselines.

Their use as a decision support tool in business and OR has been increasing over the years, including case studies in project management (van Dorp, 2020), supply chain (Garvey et al., 2015), marketing (Hosseini, 2021), and logistics (Qazi, 2022), among others. BNs are defined by two components: a directed acyclic graph (DAG) where each node is a variable of interest and edges represent the, possibly causal, relationship between them; a conditional probability table (CPT) for each node of the DAG reporting the probability distribution of the associated variable conditional on its parents. BNs are highly interpretable due to their graphical nature, representing the probabilistic relationships between variables, making it easy for users to understand and trace the influence of one variable on another. With explainability now recognized as critical for the use of AI in applied research (Rudin, 2019), including in OR (De Bock et al., 2023), BNs stand out by providing transparent and intuitive explanations, thereby enhancing trust and clarity in decision-making processes. The underlying DAG and the associated CPTs can be learned from data using machine learning algorithms or elicited using experts' opinions and knowledge. There is now a vast amount of algorithms to learn BN from data (e.g.

This paper studies the continuous-time q-learning in the mean-field jump-diffusion models from the representative agent's perspective. To overcome the challenge when the population distribution may not be directly observable, we introduce the integrated q-function in decoupled form (decoupled Iq-function) and establish its martingale characterization together with the value function, which provides a unified policy evaluation rule for both mean-field game (MFG) and mean-field control (MFC) problems. Moreover, depending on the task to solve the MFG or MFC problem, we can employ the decoupled Iq-function by different means to learn the mean-field equilibrium policy or the mean-field optimal policy respectively. As a result, we devise a unified q-learning algorithm for both MFG and MFC problems by utilizing all test policies stemming from the mean-field interactions. For several examples in the jump-diffusion setting, within and beyond the LQ framework, we can obtain the exact parameterization of the decoupled Iq-functions and the value functions, and illustrate our algorithm from the representative agent's perspective with satisfactory performance.

We present an overview of the second edition of the ArAIEval shared task, organized as part of the ArabicNLP 2024 conference co-located with ACL 2024. In this edition, ArAIEval offers two tasks: (i) detection of propagandistic textual spans with persuasion techniques identification in tweets and news articles, and (ii) distinguishing between propagandistic and non-propagandistic memes. A total of 14 teams participated in the final evaluation phase, with 6 and 9 teams participating in Tasks 1 and 2, respectively. Finally, 11 teams submitted system description papers. Across both tasks, we observed that fine-tuning transformer models such as AraBERT was at the core of the majority of the participating systems. We provide a description of the task setup, including a description of the dataset construction and the evaluation setup. We further provide a brief overview of the participating systems. All datasets and evaluation scripts are released to the research community (https://araieval.gitlab.io/). We hope this will enable further research on these important tasks in Arabic.