Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) plays a crucial role in various industries by identifying atypical patterns that deviate from standard trends, thereby maintaining system integrity and enabling prompt response measures. Traditional TSAD models, which often rely on deep learning, require extensive training data and operate as black boxes, lacking interpretability for detected anomalies. To address these challenges, we propose LLMAD, a novel TSAD method that employs Large Language Models (LLMs) to deliver accurate and interpretable TSAD results. LLMAD innovatively applies LLMs for in-context anomaly detection by retrieving both positive and negative similar time series segments, significantly enhancing LLMs' effectiveness. Furthermore, LLMAD employs the Anomaly Detection Chain-of-Thought (AnoCoT) approach to mimic expert logic for its decision-making process. This method further enhances its performance and enables LLMAD to provide explanations for their detections through versatile perspectives, which are particularly important for user decision-making. Experiments on three datasets indicate that our LLMAD achieves detection performance comparable to state-of-the-art deep learning methods while offering remarkable interpretability for detections. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that directly employs LLMs for TSAD.

Text generation has become more accessible than ever, and the increasing interest in these systems, especially those using large language models, has spurred an increasing number of related publications. We provide a systematic literature review comprising 244 selected papers between 2017 and 2024. This review categorizes works in text generation into five main tasks: open-ended text generation, summarization, translation, paraphrasing, and question answering. For each task, we review their relevant characteristics, sub-tasks, and specific challenges (e.g., missing datasets for multi-document summarization, coherence in story generation, and complex reasoning for question answering). Additionally, we assess current approaches for evaluating text generation systems and ascertain problems with current metrics. Our investigation shows nine prominent challenges common to all tasks and sub-tasks in recent text generation publications: bias, reasoning, hallucinations, misuse, privacy, interpretability, transparency, datasets, and computing. We provide a detailed analysis of these challenges, their potential solutions, and which gaps still require further engagement from the community. This systematic literature review targets two main audiences: early career researchers in natural language processing looking for an overview of the field and promising research directions, as well as experienced researchers seeking a detailed view of tasks, evaluation methodologies, open challenges, and recent mitigation strategies.

Grammatical Error Correction has seen significant progress with the recent advancements in deep learning. As those methods require huge amounts of data, synthetic datasets are being built to fill this gap. Unfortunately, synthetic datasets are not organic enough in some cases and even require clean data to start with. Furthermore, most of the work that has been done is focused mostly on English. In this work, we introduce a new organic data-driven approach, clean insertions, to build parallel Turkish Grammatical Error Correction datasets from any organic data, and to clean the data used for training Large Language Models. We achieve state-of-the-art results on two Turkish Grammatical Error Correction test sets out of the three publicly available ones. We also show the effectiveness of our method on the training losses of training language models.

Despite the crucial importance of accelerating text generation in large language models (LLMs) for efficiently producing content, the sequential nature of this process often leads to high inference latency, posing challenges for real-time applications. Various techniques have been proposed and developed to address these challenges and improve efficiency. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of accelerated generation techniques in autoregressive language models, aiming to understand the state-of-the-art methods and their applications. We categorize these techniques into several key areas: speculative decoding, early exiting mechanisms, and non-autoregressive methods. We discuss each category's underlying principles, advantages, limitations, and recent advancements. Through this survey, we aim to offer insights into the current landscape of techniques in LLMs and provide guidance for future research directions in this critical area of natural language processing.

Active learning for imbalanced classification tasks is challenging as the minority classes naturally occur rarely. Gathering a large pool of unlabelled data is thus essential to capture minority instances. Standard pool-based active learning is computationally expensive on large pools and often reaches low accuracy by overfitting the initial decision boundary, thus failing to explore the input space and find minority instances. To address these issues we propose AnchorAL. At each iteration, AnchorAL chooses class-specific instances from the labelled set, or anchors, and retrieves the most similar unlabelled instances from the pool. This resulting subpool is then used for active learning. Using a small, fixed-sized subpool AnchorAL allows scaling any active learning strategy to large pools. By dynamically selecting different anchors at each iteration it promotes class balance and prevents overfitting the initial decision boundary, thus promoting the discovery of new clusters of minority instances. In experiments across different classification tasks, active learning strategies, and model architectures AnchorAL is (i) faster, often reducing runtime from hours to minutes, (ii) trains more performant models, (iii) and returns more balanced datasets than competing methods.

The substance of the symposium addressed the challenges in creating synergistic human and AI-based autonomous systems-of-systems. Recent advances in generative AI techniques (e.g., LLMs) have exacerbated the growing concerns associated with AI, held by researchers and the public alike, such as the risk, trust, ethics, and safety to the users and to the public from the operations of autonomous machines/AI alone in open situations. These concerns present major hurdles in the development of verified and validated engineered systems involving bi-directional pathways across the human-machine barrier; in this context, bi-directionality means understanding the design and operational consequences that the human may have on machine agents and the effects that machine or AI agents may have on humans. Current discussions on human-AI/machine interactions are unresolved or fragmented, focusing either on the impact that AI or machines may have on human stakeholders (including the relevant human factor considerations) or potential ways of involving humans or machines in computational or physical interventions (e.g., data annotations, human-machine behavior interpretations, operator-machine interventions). We believe the challenges associated with human-AI/machine collaborative systems cannot be adequately addressed if the underlying challenges associated with bi-directionality are not fully identified and taken into consideration.

Moreover, the program committee comprised researchers from 12 countries across five continents. The workshop featured six keynote speakers, oral sessions, poster sessions, a panel discussion, and a networking lunch. Of the 20 submitted papers, six were selected for oral and poster presentation, and an additional nine were selected for poster presentation only. The acceptance rate was, therefore, 75%. All accepted papers are published in the open-access workshop's proceedings at https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3649/.

Predicting future values in multivariate time series is vital across various domains. This work explores the use of large language models (LLMs) for this task. However, LLMs typically handle one-dimensional data. We introduce MultiCast, a zero-shot LLM-based approach for multivariate time series forecasting. It allows LLMs to receive multivariate time series as input, through three novel token multiplexing solutions that effectively reduce dimensionality while preserving key repetitive patterns. Additionally, a quantization scheme helps LLMs to better learn these patterns, while significantly reducing token use for practical applications. We showcase the performance of our approach in terms of RMSE and execution time against state-of-the-art approaches on three real-world datasets.

In the era of deep learning (DL), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and large language models (LLMs), machine learning (ML) models are becoming increasingly complex, demanding significant computational resources for both inference and training stages. To address this challenge, distributed learning has emerged as a crucial approach, employing parallelization across various devices and environments. This survey explores the landscape of distributed learning, encompassing cloud and edge settings. We delve into the core concepts of data and model parallelism, examining how models are partitioned across different dimensions and layers to optimize resource utilization and performance. We analyze various partitioning schemes for different layer types, including fully connected, convolutional, and recurrent layers, highlighting the trade-offs between computational efficiency, communication overhead, and memory constraints. This survey provides valuable insights for future research and development in this rapidly evolving field by comparing and contrasting distributed learning approaches across diverse contexts.

Food production is a vital global concern and the potential for an agritech revolution through artificial intelligence (AI) remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a comprehensive review focused on the application of machine learning (ML) in agriculture, aiming to explore its transformative potential in farming practices and efficiency enhancement. To understand the extent of research activity in this field, statistical data have been gathered, revealing a substantial growth trend in recent years. This indicates that it stands out as one of the most dynamic and vibrant research domains. By introducing the concept of ML and delving into the realm of smart agriculture, including Precision Agriculture, Smart Farming, Digital Agriculture, and Agriculture 4.0, we investigate how AI can optimize crop output and minimize environmental impact. We highlight the capacity of ML to analyze and classify agricultural data, providing examples of improved productivity and profitability on farms. Furthermore, we discuss prominent ML models and their unique features that have shown promising results in agricultural applications. Through a systematic review of the literature, this paper addresses the existing literature gap on AI in agriculture and offers valuable information to newcomers and researchers. By shedding light on unexplored areas within this emerging field, our objective is to facilitate a deeper understanding of the significant contributions and potential of AI in agriculture, ultimately benefiting the research community.