The winners of three International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) awards have been announced. These three distinctions are: the Award for Research Excellence, the Computers and Thought Award and the John McCarthy Award. The Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality throughout an entire career yielding several substantial results. The winner of the 2024 Award for Research Excellence is Thomas Dietterich, Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) and Director of Intelligent Systems, Institute for Collaborative Robotics and Intelligence Systems (CoRIS), Oregon State University, USA. Thomas is recognized for his pioneering work in machine learning, sequential decision-making, safe deployment of machine learning systems, applications to real-world problems in ecosystem management, and for his decades of intellectual leadership in machine learning.

Despite extensive efforts to create fairer machine learning (ML) datasets, there remains a limited understanding of the practical aspects of dataset curation. Drawing from interviews with 30 ML dataset curators, we present a comprehensive taxonomy of the challenges and trade-offs encountered throughout the dataset curation lifecycle. Our findings underscore overarching issues within the broader fairness landscape that impact data curation. We conclude with recommendations aimed at fostering systemic changes to better facilitate fair dataset curation practices.

The capability of large language models (LLMs) to generate, debug, and explain code has sparked the interest of researchers and educators in undergraduate programming, with many anticipating their transformative potential in programming education. However, decisions about why and how to use LLMs in programming education may involve more than just the assessment of an LLM's technical capabilities. Using the social shaping of technology theory as a guiding framework, our study explores how students' social perceptions influence their own LLM usage. We then examine the correlation of self-reported LLM usage with students' self-efficacy and midterm performances in an undergraduate programming course. Triangulating data from an anonymous end-of-course student survey (n = 158), a mid-course self-efficacy survey (n=158), student interviews (n = 10), self-reported LLM usage on homework, and midterm performances, we discovered that students' use of LLMs was associated with their expectations for their future careers and their perceptions of peer usage. Additionally, early self-reported LLM usage in our context correlated with lower self-efficacy and lower midterm scores, while students' perceived over-reliance on LLMs, rather than their usage itself, correlated with decreased self-efficacy later in the course.

Psychiatric evaluation nowadays is heavily dependent on the patient's verbal report about disturbed feelings, thoughts, behaviors and their changes over time. Accordingly, evaluation hinges on two main components: unstructured interviews, which allow patients to express themselves freely under the guidance of open questions, and structured questionnaires, aimed at standardizing the assessment. These methods are outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) series, which attempts to assign universal scores to individual experiences of mental disorders [1]. However, the inherent complexity of mental health conditions, characterized by a known positive manifold of symptoms and compounded by the subjective nature and potential unreliability of self-reported data (especially from one session to another), along with interviewer biases, make accurate diagnosis challenging. The overlapping symptoms and the instability of mental state, especially in pathological conditions, further complicate the need for precision, precluding an objective and quantitative account of a critical element in the psychiatric evaluation process; the subjective self-experience [2, 3, 4]. The evolution of psychiatric practice is increasingly shaped by the integration of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning within traditional diagnostic approaches.

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable adaptability across domains, these models often fall short in structured knowledge extraction tasks such as named entity recognition (NER). This paper explores an innovative, cost-efficient strategy to harness LLMs with modest NER capabilities for producing superior NER datasets. Our approach diverges from the basic class-conditional prompts by instructing LLMs to self-reflect on the specific domain, thereby generating domain-relevant attributes (such as category and emotions for movie reviews), which are utilized for creating attribute-rich training data. Furthermore, we preemptively generate entity terms and then develop NER context data around these entities, effectively bypassing the LLMs' challenges with complex structures. Our experiments across both general and niche domains reveal significant performance enhancements over conventional data generation methods while being more cost-effective than existing alternatives.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide variety of natural language tasks. However, they have been shown to suffer from a critical limitation pertinent to 'hallucination' in their output. Recent research has focused on investigating and addressing this problem for a variety of tasks such as biography generation, question answering, abstractive summarization, and dialogue generation. However, the crucial aspect pertaining to 'negation' has remained considerably underexplored. Negation is important because it adds depth and nuance to the understanding of language and is also crucial for logical reasoning and inference. In this work, we address the above limitation and particularly focus on studying the impact of negation in LLM hallucinations. Specifically, we study four tasks with negation: 'false premise completion', 'constrained fact generation', 'multiple choice question answering', and 'fact generation'. We show that open-source state-of-the-art LLMs such as LLaMA-2-chat, Vicuna, and Orca-2 hallucinate considerably on all these tasks involving negation which underlines a critical shortcoming of these models. Addressing this problem, we further study numerous strategies to mitigate these hallucinations and demonstrate their impact.

We're gearing up to cover Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) next week! In this episode, Cherlynn and Devindra dive into everything they expect at WWDC: Tons of AI announcements; more on iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS 15; and hopefully some improvements for Vision Pro and visionOS. In addition, we chat about what we expect to see at Summer Game Fest and demonstrate how we used an AI editing tool to clear up some awful podcast audio. Devindra also talks with Justin Samuels, the founder of Render ATL, about why he started a massive tech conference in Atlanta. Listen below or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcast, Engadget News! Humane AI warns users its battery case "may pose a fire risk" – 34:36 Welcome back to the Engadget podcast. This week we are getting ready for WWDC 2024 happening in a couple of days.

For years, Chromebooks have served as the loyal opposition to PCs. Google's laptops offer many of the same Google services as you can find via the Web, but integrated into an inexpensive package for consumers and students. I sat down with John Solomon, vice president of ChromeOS and education at Google, to ask about the new wave of AI PCs and how Google responds. We talk about how "generic" Chromebooks survive as Google pushes Chromebook Plus, how kids can be encouraged to game on Chromebooks as well as learn, and what Google is cooking up in response to Microsoft's Recall for Copilot PCs. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Mark Hachman, PCWorld: I saw your presentation at Computex as a way to remind people that there are more than just AI PCs. So, in light of those products, what is the value proposition of a Chromebook these days? John Solomon, Google: As you know, we have Chromebook and Chromebook Plus. In Chromebook, it has always been about and continues to be about delivering really great value, the best place to experience access to Google services. Whether it's Google Workspace, or more broadly, Chrome, we work very hard to make sure that first-party products as well as the Play Store work well on Chromebook.

We present ABEX, a novel and effective generative data augmentation methodology for low-resource Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. ABEX is based on ABstract-and-EXpand, a novel paradigm for generating diverse forms of an input document -- we first convert a document into its concise, abstract description and then generate new documents based on expanding the resultant abstraction. To learn the task of expanding abstract descriptions, we first train BART on a large-scale synthetic dataset with abstract-document pairs. Next, to generate abstract descriptions for a document, we propose a simple, controllable, and training-free method based on editing AMR graphs. ABEX brings the best of both worlds: by expanding from abstract representations, it preserves the original semantic properties of the documents, like style and meaning, thereby maintaining alignment with the original label and data distribution. At the same time, the fundamental process of elaborating on abstract descriptions facilitates diverse generations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of ABEX on 4 NLU tasks spanning 12 datasets and 4 low-resource settings. ABEX outperforms all our baselines qualitatively with improvements of 0.04% - 38.8%. Qualitatively, ABEX outperforms all prior methods from literature in terms of context and length diversity.

This study explores the sycophantic tendencies of Large Language Models (LLMs), where these models tend to provide answers that match what users want to hear, even if they are not entirely correct. The motivation behind this exploration stems from the common behavior observed in individuals searching the internet for facts with partial or misleading knowledge. Similar to using web search engines, users may recall fragments of misleading keywords and submit them to an LLM, hoping for a comprehensive response. Our empirical analysis of several LLMs shows the potential danger of these models amplifying misinformation when presented with misleading keywords. Additionally, we thoroughly assess four existing hallucination mitigation strategies to reduce LLMs sycophantic behavior. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of these strategies for generating factually correct statements. Furthermore, our analyses delve into knowledge-probing experiments on factual keywords and different categories of sycophancy mitigation.