The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have opened up new opportunities for transforming patient engagement in healthcare through conversational AI. This paper presents an overview of the current landscape of LLMs in healthcare, specifically focusing on their applications in analyzing and generating conversations for improved patient engagement. We showcase the power of LLMs in handling unstructured conversational data through four case studies: (1) analyzing mental health discussions on Reddit, (2) developing a personalized chatbot for cognitive engagement in seniors, (3) summarizing medical conversation datasets, and (4) designing an AI-powered patient engagement system. These case studies demonstrate how LLMs can effectively extract insights and summarizations from unstructured dialogues and engage patients in guided, goal-oriented conversations. Leveraging LLMs for conversational analysis and generation opens new doors for many patient-centered outcomes research opportunities. However, integrating LLMs into healthcare raises important ethical considerations regarding data privacy, bias, transparency, and regulatory compliance. We discuss best practices and guidelines for the responsible development and deployment of LLMs in healthcare settings. Realizing the full potential of LLMs in digital health will require close collaboration between the AI and healthcare professionals communities to address technical challenges and ensure these powerful tools' safety, efficacy, and equity.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can potentially transform the industry, enhancing the production process and minimizing manual, repetitive tasks. Accordingly, the synergy between high-performance computing and powerful mathematical models enables the application of sophisticated data analysis procedures like Machine Learning. However, challenges exist regarding effective, efficient, and flexible processing to generate valuable knowledge. Consequently, this work comprehensively describes industrial challenges where AI can be exploited, focusing on the dairy industry. The conclusions presented can help researchers apply novel approaches for cattle monitoring and farmers by proposing advanced technological solutions to their needs.

Open Domain Question Answering (ODQA) within natural language processing involves building systems that answer factual questions using large-scale knowledge corpora. Recent advances stem from the confluence of several factors, such as large-scale training datasets, deep learning techniques, and the rise of large language models. High-quality datasets are used to train models on realistic scenarios and enable the evaluation of the system on potentially unseen data. Standardized metrics facilitate comparisons between different ODQA systems, allowing researchers to objectively track advancements in the field. Our study presents a thorough examination of the current landscape of ODQA benchmarking by reviewing 52 datasets and 20 evaluation techniques across textual and multimodal modalities. We introduce a novel taxonomy for ODQA datasets that incorporates both the modality and difficulty of the question types. Additionally, we present a structured organization of ODQA evaluation metrics along with a critical analysis of their inherent trade-offs. Our study aims to empower researchers by providing a framework for the robust evaluation of modern question-answering systems. We conclude by identifying the current challenges and outlining promising avenues for future research and development.

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced various natural language processing tasks, but deploying them remains computationally expensive. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a promising solution, enabling the transfer of capabilities from larger teacher LLMs to more compact student models. Particularly, sequence-level KD, which distills rationale-based reasoning processes instead of merely final outcomes, shows great potential in enhancing students' reasoning capabilities. However, current methods struggle with sequence level KD under long-tailed data distributions, adversely affecting generalization on sparsely represented domains. We introduce the Multi-Stage Balanced Distillation (BalDistill) framework, which iteratively balances training data within a fixed computational budget. By dynamically selecting representative head domain examples and synthesizing tail domain examples, BalDistill achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse long-tailed datasets, enhancing both the efficiency and efficacy of the distilled models.

The critical inquiry pervading the realm of Philosophy, and perhaps extending its influence across all Humanities disciplines, revolves around the intricacies of morality and normativity. Surprisingly, in recent years, this thematic thread has woven its way into an unexpected domain, one not conventionally associated with pondering "what ought to be": the field of artificial intelligence (AI) research. Central to morality and AI, we find "alignment", a problem related to the challenges of expressing human goals and values in a manner that artificial systems can follow without leading to unwanted adversarial effects. More explicitly and with our current paradigm of AI development in mind, we can think of alignment as teaching human values to non-anthropomorphic entities trained through opaque, gradient-based learning techniques. This work addresses alignment as a technical-philosophical problem that requires solid philosophical foundations and practical implementations that bring normative theory to AI system development. To accomplish this, we propose two sets of necessary and sufficient conditions that, we argue, should be considered in any alignment process. While necessary conditions serve as metaphysical and metaethical roots that pertain to the permissibility of alignment, sufficient conditions establish a blueprint for aligning AI systems under a learning-based paradigm. After laying such foundations, we present implementations of this approach by using state-of-the-art techniques and methods for aligning general-purpose language systems. We call this framework Dynamic Normativity. Its central thesis is that any alignment process under a learning paradigm that cannot fulfill its necessary and sufficient conditions will fail in producing aligned systems.

Approximate model counting is the task of approximating the number of solutions to an input Boolean formula. The state-of-the-art approximate model counter for formulas in conjunctive normal form (CNF), ApproxMC, provides a scalable means of obtaining model counts with probably approximately correct (PAC)-style guarantees. Nevertheless, the validity of ApproxMC's approximation relies on a careful theoretical analysis of its randomized algorithm and the correctness of its highly optimized implementation, especially the latter's stateful interactions with an incremental CNF satisfiability solver capable of natively handling parity (XOR) constraints. We present the first certification framework for approximate model counting with formally verified guarantees on the quality of its output approximation. Our approach combines: (i) a static, once-off, formal proof of the algorithm's PAC guarantee in the Isabelle/HOL proof assistant; and (ii) dynamic, per-run, verification of ApproxMC's calls to an external CNF-XOR solver using proof certificates. We detail our general approach to establish a rigorous connection between these two parts of the verification, including our blueprint for turning the formalized, randomized algorithm into a verified proof checker, and our design of proof certificates for both ApproxMC and its internal CNF-XOR solving steps. Experimentally, we show that certificate generation adds little overhead to an approximate counter implementation, and that our certificate checker is able to fully certify $84.7\%$ of instances with generated certificates when given the same time and memory limits as the counter.

Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning have demonstrated transformative capabilities across diverse domains. This progress extends to the field of patent analysis and innovation, where AI-based tools present opportunities to streamline and enhance important tasks in the patent cycle such as classification, retrieval, and valuation prediction. This not only accelerates the efficiency of patent researchers and applicants but also opens new avenues for technological innovation and discovery. Our survey provides a comprehensive summary of recent AI tools in patent analysis from more than 40 papers from 26 venues between 2017 and 2023. Unlike existing surveys, we include methods that work for patent image and text data. Furthermore, we introduce a novel taxonomy for the categorization based on the tasks in the patent life cycle as well as the specifics of the AI methods. This interdisciplinary survey aims to serve as a resource for researchers and practitioners who are working at the intersection of AI and patent analysis as well as the patent offices that are aiming to build efficient patent systems.

Higher-order graph neural networks (HOGNNs) are an important class of GNN models that harness polyadic relations between vertices beyond plain edges. They have been used to eliminate issues such as over-smoothing or over-squashing, to significantly enhance the accuracy of GNN predictions, to improve the expressiveness of GNN architectures, and for numerous other goals. A plethora of HOGNN models have been introduced, and they come with diverse neural architectures, and even with different notions of what the "higher-order" means. This richness makes it very challenging to appropriately analyze and compare HOGNN models, and to decide in what scenario to use specific ones. To alleviate this, we first design an in-depth taxonomy and a blueprint for HOGNNs. This facilitates designing models that maximize performance. Then, we use our taxonomy to analyze and compare the available HOGNN models. The outcomes of our analysis are synthesized in a set of insights that help to select the most beneficial GNN model in a given scenario, and a comprehensive list of challenges and opportunities for further research into more powerful HOGNNs.

This paper's primary goal is to provoke thoughtful discussion about the relationship between bias and fundamental properties of large language models. We do this by seeking to convince the reader that harmful biases are an inevitable consequence arising from the design of any large language model as LLMs are currently formulated. To the extent that this is true, it suggests that the problem of harmful bias cannot be properly addressed without a serious reconsideration of AI driven by LLMs, going back to the foundational assumptions underlying their design.

This study tackles the complexities of global supply chains, which are increasingly vulnerable to disruptions caused by port congestion, material shortages, and inflation. To address these challenges, we explore the application of machine learning methods, which excel in predicting and optimizing solutions based on large datasets. Our focus is on enhancing supply chain security through fraud detection, maintenance prediction, and material backorder forecasting. We introduce an automated machine learning framework that streamlines data analysis, model construction, and hyperparameter optimization for these tasks. By automating these processes, our framework improves the efficiency and effectiveness of supply chain security measures. Our research identifies key factors that influence machine learning performance, including sampling methods, categorical encoding, feature selection, and hyperparameter optimization. We demonstrate the importance of considering these factors when applying machine learning to supply chain challenges. Traditional mathematical programming models often struggle to cope with the complexity of large-scale supply chain problems. Our study shows that machine learning methods can provide a viable alternative, particularly when dealing with extensive datasets and complex patterns. The automated machine learning framework presented in this study offers a novel approach to supply chain security, contributing to the existing body of knowledge in the field. Its comprehensive automation of machine learning processes makes it a valuable contribution to the domain of supply chain management.