Training task-oriented dialogue systems typically requires turn-level annotations for interacting with their APIs: e.g. a dialogue state and the system actions taken at each step. These annotations can be costly to produce, error-prone, and require both domain and annotation expertise. With advances in LLMs, we hypothesize unlabelled data and a schema definition are sufficient for building a working task-oriented dialogue system, completely unsupervised. Using only (1) a well-defined API schema (2) a set of unlabelled dialogues between a user and agent, we develop a novel approach for inferring turn-level annotations as latent variables using a noisy channel model. We iteratively improve these pseudo-labels with expectation-maximization (EM), and use the inferred labels to train an end-to-end dialogue agent. Evaluating our approach on the MultiWOZ benchmark, our method more than doubles the dialogue success rate of a strong GPT-3.5 baseline.

Many data distributions in the real world are hardly uniform. Instead, skewed and long-tailed distributions of various kinds are commonly observed. This poses an interesting problem for machine learning, where most algorithms assume or work well with uniformly distributed data. The problem is further exacerbated by current state-of-the-art deep learning models requiring large volumes of training data. As such, learning from imbalanced data remains a challenging research problem and a problem that must be solved as we move towards more real-world applications of deep learning. In the context of class imbalance, state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracies on standard benchmark datasets for classification typically fall less than 75%, even for less challenging datasets such as CIFAR100. Nonetheless, there has been progress in this niche area of deep learning. To this end, in this survey, we provide a taxonomy of various methods proposed for addressing the problem of long-tail classification, focusing on works that happened in the last few years under a single mathematical framework. We also discuss standard performance metrics, convergence studies, feature distribution and classifier analysis. We also provide a quantitative comparison of the performance of different SOTA methods and conclude the survey by discussing the remaining challenges and future research direction.

Molecule-and-text cross-modal representation learning has emerged as a promising direction for enhancing the quality of molecular representation, thereby improving performance in various scientific fields, including drug discovery and materials science. Existing studies adopt a global alignment approach to learn the knowledge from different modalities. These global alignment approaches fail to capture fine-grained information, such as molecular fragments and their corresponding textual description, which is crucial for downstream tasks. Furthermore, it is incapable to model such information using a similar global alignment strategy due to data scarcity of paired local part annotated data from existing datasets. In this paper, we propose Atomas, a multi-modal molecular representation learning framework to jointly learn representations from SMILES string and text. We design a Hierarchical Adaptive Alignment model to concurrently learn the fine-grained fragment correspondence between two modalities and align these representations of fragments in three levels. Additionally, Atomas's end-to-end training framework incorporates the tasks of understanding and generating molecule, thereby supporting a wider range of downstream tasks. In the retrieval task, Atomas exhibits robust generalization ability and outperforms the baseline by 30.8% of recall@1 on average. In the generation task, Atomas achieves state-of-the-art results in both molecule captioning task and molecule generation task. Moreover, the visualization of the Hierarchical Adaptive Alignment model further confirms the chemical significance of our approach. Our codes can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Atomas-03C3.

The rise of deep learning has marked significant progress in fields such as computer vision, natural language processing, and medical imaging, primarily through the adaptation of pre-trained models for specific tasks. Traditional fine-tuning methods, involving adjustments to all parameters, face challenges due to high computational and memory demands. This has led to the development of Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques, which selectively update parameters to balance computational efficiency with performance. This review examines PEFT approaches, offering a detailed comparison of various strategies highlighting applications across different domains, including text generation, medical imaging, protein modeling, and speech synthesis. By assessing the effectiveness of PEFT methods in reducing computational load, speeding up training, and lowering memory usage, this paper contributes to making deep learning more accessible and adaptable, facilitating its wider application and encouraging innovation in model optimization. Ultimately, the paper aims to contribute towards insights into PEFT's evolving landscape, guiding researchers and practitioners in overcoming the limitations of conventional fine-tuning approaches.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful candidates to inform clinical decision-making processes. While these models play an increasingly prominent role in shaping the digital landscape, two growing concerns emerge in healthcare applications: 1) to what extent do LLMs exhibit social bias based on patients' protected attributes (like race), and 2) how do design choices (like architecture design and prompting strategies) influence the observed biases? To answer these questions rigorously, we evaluated eight popular LLMs across three question-answering (QA) datasets using clinical vignettes (patient descriptions) standardized for bias evaluations. We employ red-teaming strategies to analyze how demographics affect LLM outputs, comparing both general-purpose and clinically-trained models. Our extensive experiments reveal various disparities (some significant) across protected groups. We also observe several counter-intuitive patterns such as larger models not being necessarily less biased and fined-tuned models on medical data not being necessarily better than the general-purpose models. Furthermore, our study demonstrates the impact of prompt design on bias patterns and shows that specific phrasing can influence bias patterns and reflection-type approaches (like Chain of Thought) can reduce biased outcomes effectively. Consistent with prior studies, we call on additional evaluations, scrutiny, and enhancement of LLMs used in clinical decision support applications.

The open-world test dataset is often mixed with out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, where the deployed models will struggle to make accurate predictions. Traditional detection methods need to trade off OOD detection and in-distribution (ID) classification performance since they share the same representation learning model. In this work, we propose to detect OOD molecules by adopting an auxiliary diffusion model-based framework, which compares similarities between input molecules and reconstructed graphs. Due to the generative bias towards reconstructing ID training samples, the similarity scores of OOD molecules will be much lower to facilitate detection. Although it is conceptually simple, extending this vanilla framework to practical detection applications is still limited by two significant challenges. First, the popular similarity metrics based on Euclidian distance fail to consider the complex graph structure. Second, the generative model involving iterative denoising steps is time-consuming especially when it runs on the enormous pool of drugs. To address these challenges, our research pioneers an approach of Prototypical Graph Reconstruction for Molecular OOD Detection, dubbed as PGR-MOOD and hinges on three innovations: i) An effective metric to comprehensively quantify the matching degree of input and reconstructed molecules; ii) A creative graph generator to construct prototypical graphs that are in line with ID but away from OOD; iii) An efficient and scalable OOD detector to compare the similarity between test samples and pre-constructed prototypical graphs and omit the generative process on every new molecule. Extensive experiments on ten benchmark datasets and six baselines are conducted to demonstrate our superiority.

Human decision-making often relies on visual information from multiple perspectives or views. In contrast, machine learning-based object recognition utilizes information from a single image of the object. However, the information conveyed by a single image may not be sufficient for accurate decision-making, particularly in complex recognition problems. The utilization of multi-view 3D representations for object recognition has thus far demonstrated the most promising results for achieving state-of-the-art performance. This review paper comprehensively covers recent progress in multi-view 3D object recognition methods for 3D classification and retrieval tasks. Specifically, we focus on deep learning-based and transformer-based techniques, as they are widely utilized and have achieved state-of-the-art performance. We provide detailed information about existing deep learning-based and transformer-based multi-view 3D object recognition models, including the most commonly used 3D datasets, camera configurations and number of views, view selection strategies, pre-trained CNN architectures, fusion strategies, and recognition performance on 3D classification and 3D retrieval tasks. Additionally, we examine various computer vision applications that use multi-view classification. Finally, we highlight key findings and future directions for developing multi-view 3D object recognition methods to provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of the field.

The pace of the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies has led to significant concern in many areas of society, including educational contexts. As a result, research agendas on Generative AI (GenAI) in tertiary education have been established (Lodge et al., 2023); however, to date, no review or research agenda has specifically focused on deepfakes in tertiary education. Deepfakes are GenAI outputs which comprise realistic audio, visual, or media outputs that depict false or inaccurate information (Akhtar, 2023). The major consequence of deepfakes is that they can portray an individual doing something or saying something that they have never done, marking an unprecedented shift in the ability to distort reality (Appel & Prietzel, 2022). As tertiary education institutions are centres of learning, the potential implications of such false information are highly important for students, teachers, and university leadership, thus warranting stakeholder attention.

Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique for developing new robot behaviors. However, typical lack of safety guarantees constitutes a hurdle for its practical application on real robots. To address this issue, safe reinforcement learning aims to incorporate safety considerations, enabling faster transfer to real robots and facilitating lifelong learning. One promising approach within safe reinforcement learning is the use of control barrier functions. These functions provide a framework to ensure that the system remains in a safe state during the learning process. However, synthesizing control barrier functions is not straightforward and often requires ample domain knowledge. This challenge motivates the exploration of data-driven methods for automatically defining control barrier functions, which is highly appealing. We conduct a comprehensive review of the existing literature on safe reinforcement learning using control barrier functions. Additionally, we investigate various techniques for automatically learning the Control Barrier Functions, aiming to enhance the safety and efficacy of Reinforcement Learning in practical robot applications.

Large Generative AI (GAI) models have the unparalleled ability to generate text, images, audio, and other forms of media that are increasingly indistinguishable from human-generated content. As these models often train on publicly available data, including copyrighted materials, art and other creative works, they inadvertently risk violating copyright and misappropriation of intellectual property (IP). Due to the rapid development of generative AI technology and pressing ethical considerations from stakeholders, protective mechanisms and techniques are emerging at a high pace but lack systematisation. In this paper, we study the concerns regarding the intellectual property rights of training data and specifically focus on the properties of generative models that enable misuse leading to potential IP violations. Then we propose a taxonomy that leads to a systematic review of technical solutions for safeguarding the data from intellectual property violations in GAI.