Large language models (LLMs) exhibit emerging geospatial capabilities, stemming from their pre-training on vast unlabelled text datasets that are often derived from the Common Crawl corpus. However, the geospatial content within CC remains largely unexplored, impacting our understanding of LLMs' spatial reasoning. This paper investigates the prevalence of geospatial data in recent Common Crawl releases using Gemini, a powerful language model. By analyzing a sample of documents and manually revising the results, we estimate that between 1 in 5 and 1 in 6 documents contain geospatial information such as coordinates and street addresses. Our findings provide quantitative insights into the nature and extent of geospatial data within Common Crawl, and web crawl data in general. Furthermore, we formulate questions to guide future investigations into the geospatial content of available web crawl datasets and its influence on LLMs.

Today's distributed and pervasive computing addresses large-scale cyber-physical ecosystems, characterised by dense and large networks of devices capable of computation, communication and interaction with the environment and people. While most research focusses on treating these systems as "composites" (i.e., heterogeneous functional complexes), recent developments in fields such as self-organising systems and swarm robotics have opened up a complementary perspective: treating systems as "collectives" (i.e., uniform, collaborative, and self-organising groups of entities). This article explores the motivations, state of the art, and implications of this "collective computing paradigm" in software engineering, discusses its peculiar challenges, and outlines a path for future research, touching on aspects such as macroprogramming, collective intelligence, self-adaptive middleware, learning, synthesis, and experimentation of collective behaviour.

This paper explores the concept formation and alignment within the realm of language models (LMs). We propose a mechanism for identifying concepts and their hierarchical organization within the semantic representations learned by various LMs, encompassing a spectrum from early models like Glove to the transformer-based language models like ALBERT and T5. Our approach leverages the inherent structure present in the semantic embeddings generated by these models to extract a taxonomy of concepts and their hierarchical relationships. This investigation sheds light on how LMs develop conceptual understanding and opens doors to further research to improve their ability to reason and leverage real-world knowledge. We further conducted experiments and observed the possibility of isolating these extracted conceptual representations from the reasoning modules of the transformer-based LMs. The observed concept formation along with the isolation of conceptual representations from the reasoning modules can enable targeted token engineering to open the door for potential applications in knowledge transfer, explainable AI, and the development of more modular and conceptually grounded language models.

Using feature attributions for post-hoc explanations is a common practice to understand and verify the predictions of opaque machine learning models. Despite the numerous techniques available, individual methods often produce inconsistent and unstable results, putting their overall reliability into question. In this work, we aim to systematically improve the quality of feature attributions by combining multiple explanations across distinct methods or their variations. For this purpose, we propose a novel approach to derive optimal convex combinations of feature attributions that yield provable improvements of desired quality criteria such as robustness or faithfulness to the model behavior. Through extensive experiments involving various model architectures and popular feature attribution techniques, we demonstrate that our combination strategy consistently outperforms individual methods and existing baselines.

Pseudocode in a scholarly paper provides a concise way to express the algorithms implemented therein. Pseudocode can also be thought of as an intermediary representation that helps bridge the gap between programming languages and natural languages. Having access to a large collection of pseudocode can provide various benefits ranging from enhancing algorithmic understanding, facilitating further algorithmic design, to empowering NLP or computer vision based models for tasks such as automated code generation and optical character recognition (OCR). We have created a large pseudocode collection by extracting nearly 320,000 pseudocode examples from arXiv papers. This process involved scanning over $2.2$ million scholarly papers, with 1,000 of them being manually inspected and labeled. Our approach encompasses an extraction mechanism tailored to optimize the coverage and a validation mechanism based on random sampling to check its accuracy and reliability, given the inherent heterogeneity of the collection. In addition, we offer insights into common pseudocode structures, supported by clustering and statistical analyses. Notably, these analyses indicate an exponential-like growth in the usage of pseudocodes, highlighting their increasing significance.

We introduce ComplexTempQA,a large-scale dataset consisting of over 100 million question-answer pairs designed to tackle the challenges in temporal question answering. ComplexTempQA significantly surpasses existing benchmarks like HOTPOTQA, TORQUE, and TEQUILA in scale and scope. Utilizing data from Wikipedia and Wikidata, the dataset covers questions spanning over two decades and offers an unmatched breadth of topics. We introduce a unique taxonomy that categorizes questions as attributes, comparisons, and counting questions, each revolving around events, entities, and time periods. One standout feature of ComplexTempQA is the high complexity of its questions, which demand effective capabilities for answering such as across-time comparison, temporal aggregation, and multi-hop reasoning involving temporal event ordering and entity recognition. Additionally, each question is accompanied by detailed metadata, including specific time scopes, allowing for comprehensive evaluation and enhancement of the temporal reasoning abilities of large language models. ComplexTempQA serves both as a testing ground for developing sophisticated AI models and as a foundation for advancing research in question answering, information retrieval, and language understanding. Dataset and code are freely available at: https://github.com/DataScienceUIBK/ComplexTempQA.

Artificial intelligence has dramatically reshaped our interaction with digital technologies, ushering in an era where advancements in AI algorithms and Large Language Models (LLMs) have natural language processing (NLP) systems like ChatGPT. This study delves into the impact of cutting-edge LLMs, notably OpenAI's ChatGPT, on medical diagnostics, with a keen focus on the dental sector. Leveraging publicly accessible datasets, these models augment the diagnostic capabilities of medical professionals, streamline communication between patients and healthcare providers, and enhance the efficiency of clinical procedures. The advent of ChatGPT-4 is poised to make substantial inroads into dental practices, especially in the realm of oral surgery. This paper sheds light on the current landscape and explores potential future research directions in the burgeoning field of LLMs, offering valuable insights for both practitioners and developers. Furthermore, it critically assesses the broad implications and challenges within various sectors, including academia and healthcare, thus mapping out an overview of AI's role in transforming dental diagnostics for enhanced patient care.

Recent improvements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced natural language processing (NLP) applications. However, these models can also inherit and perpetuate biases from their training data. Addressing this issue is crucial, yet many existing datasets do not offer evaluation across diverse NLP tasks. To tackle this, we introduce the Bias Evaluations Across Domains (BEADs) dataset, designed to support a wide range of NLP tasks, including text classification, bias entity recognition, bias quantification, and benign language generation. BEADs uses AI-driven annotation combined with experts' verification to provide reliable labels. This method overcomes the limitations of existing datasets that typically depend on crowd-sourcing, expert-only annotations with limited bias evaluations, or unverified AI labeling. Our empirical analysis shows that BEADs is effective in detecting and reducing biases across different language models, with smaller models fine-tuned on BEADs often outperforming LLMs in bias classification tasks. However, these models may still exhibit biases towards certain demographics. Fine-tuning LLMs with our benign language data also reduces biases while preserving the models' knowledge. Our findings highlight the importance of comprehensive bias evaluation and the potential of targeted fine-tuning for reducing the bias of LLMs. We are making BEADs publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/shainar/BEAD Warning: This paper contains examples that may be considered offensive.

The evolution of video generation from text, starting with animating MNIST numbers to simulating the physical world with Sora, has progressed at a breakneck speed over the past seven years. While often seen as a superficial expansion of the predecessor text-to-image generation model, text-to-video generation models are developed upon carefully engineered constituents. Here, we systematically discuss these elements consisting of but not limited to core building blocks (vision, language, and temporal) and supporting features from the perspective of their contributions to achieving a world model. We employ the PRISMA framework to curate 97 impactful research articles from renowned scientific databases primarily studying video synthesis using text conditions. Upon minute exploration of these manuscripts, we observe that text-to-video generation involves more intricate technologies beyond the plain extension of text-to-image generation. Our additional review into the shortcomings of Sora-generated videos pinpoints the call for more in-depth studies in various enabling aspects of video generation such as dataset, evaluation metric, efficient architecture, and human-controlled generation. Finally, we conclude that the study of the text-to-video generation may still be in its infancy, requiring contribution from the cross-discipline research community towards its advancement as the first step to realize artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Many interventions in causal inference can be represented as transformations. We identify a local symmetry property satisfied by a large class of causal models under such interventions. Where present, this symmetry can be characterized by a type of map called a cocycle, an object that is central to dynamical systems theory. We show that such cocycles exist under general conditions and are sufficient to identify interventional and counterfactual distributions. We use these results to derive cocycle-based estimators for causal estimands and show they achieve semiparametric efficiency under typical conditions. Since (infinitely) many distributions can share the same cocycle, these estimators make causal inference robust to mis-specification by sidestepping superfluous modelling assumptions. We demonstrate both robustness and state-of-the-art performance in several simulations, and apply our method to estimate the effects of 401(k) pension plan eligibility on asset accumulation using a real dataset.