Document retrieval techniques form the foundation for the development of large-scale information systems. The prevailing methodology is to construct a bi-encoder and compute the semantic similarity. However, such scalar similarity is difficult to reflect enough information and impedes our comprehension of the retrieval results. In addition, this computational process mainly emphasizes the global semantics and ignores the fine-grained semantic relationship between the query and the complex text in the document. In this paper, we propose a new method called $\textbf{Ge}$neration $\textbf{A}$ugmented $\textbf{R}$etrieval ($\textbf{GeAR}$) that incorporates well-designed fusion and decoding modules. This enables GeAR to generate the relevant text from documents based on the fused representation of the query and the document, thus learning to "focus on" the fine-grained information. Also when used as a retriever, GeAR does not add any computational burden over bi-encoders. To support the training of the new framework, we have introduced a pipeline to efficiently synthesize high-quality data by utilizing large language models. GeAR exhibits competitive retrieval and localization performance across diverse scenarios and datasets. Moreover, the qualitative analysis and the results generated by GeAR provide novel insights into the interpretation of retrieval results. The code, data, and models will be released after completing technical review to facilitate future research.

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare is revolutionizing medical diagnostics, personalized medicine, and operational efficiency. However, alongside these advancements, significant challenges arise concerning patient data privacy, ethical considerations, and regulatory compliance. This paper examines the dual impact of AI on healthcare, highlighting its transformative potential and the critical need for safeguarding sensitive health information. It explores the role of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as a regulatory framework for ensuring data privacy and security, emphasizing the importance of robust safeguards and ethical standards in AI-driven healthcare. Through case studies, including AI applications in diabetic retinopathy, oncology, and the controversies surrounding data sharing, this study underscores the ethical and legal complexities of AI implementation. A balanced approach that fosters innovation while maintaining patient trust and privacy is imperative. The findings emphasize the importance of continuous education, transparency, and adherence to regulatory frameworks to harness AI's full potential responsibly and ethically in healthcare.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated significant potential in the field of time series forecasting, offering impressive capabilities in handling complex temporal data. However, their robustness and reliability in real-world applications remain under-explored, particularly concerning their susceptibility to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we introduce a targeted adversarial attack framework for LLM-based time series forecasting. By employing both gradient-free and black-box optimization methods, we generate minimal yet highly effective perturbations that significantly degrade the forecasting accuracy across multiple datasets and LLM architectures. Our experiments, which include models like TimeGPT and LLM-Time with GPT-3.5, GPT-4, LLaMa, and Mistral, show that adversarial attacks lead to much more severe performance degradation than random noise, and demonstrate the broad effectiveness of our attacks across different LLMs. The results underscore the critical vulnerabilities of LLMs in time series forecasting, highlighting the need for robust defense mechanisms to ensure their reliable deployment in practical applications.

Modeling strong gravitational lenses is computationally expensive for the complex data from modern and next-generation cosmic surveys. Deep learning has emerged as a promising approach for finding lenses and predicting lensing parameters, such as the Einstein radius. Mean-variance Estimators (MVEs) are a common approach for obtaining aleatoric (data) uncertainties from a neural network prediction. However, neural networks have not been demonstrated to perform well on out-of-domain target data successfully -- e.g., when trained on simulated data and applied to real, observational data. In this work, we perform the first study of the efficacy of MVEs in combination with unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) on strong lensing data. The source domain data is noiseless, and the target domain data has noise mimicking modern cosmology surveys. We find that adding UDA to MVE increases the accuracy on the target data by a factor of about two over an MVE model without UDA. Including UDA also permits much more well-calibrated aleatoric uncertainty predictions. Advancements in this approach may enable future applications of MVE models to real observational data.

Graph learning is naturally well suited for use in symbolic, object-centric planning due to its ability to exploit relational structures exhibited in planning domains and to take as input planning instances with arbitrary numbers of objects. Numeric planning is an extension of symbolic planning in which states may now also exhibit numeric variables. In this work, we propose data-efficient and interpretable machine learning models for learning to solve numeric planning tasks. This involves constructing a new graph kernel for graphs with both continuous and categorical attributes, as well as new optimisation methods for learning heuristic functions for numeric planning. Experiments show that our graph kernels are vastly more efficient and generalise better than graph neural networks for numeric planning, and also yield competitive coverage performance compared to domain-independent numeric planners. Code is available at https://github.com/DillonZChen/goose

Forecasts of future events are essential inputs into informed decision-making. Machine learning (ML) systems have the potential to deliver forecasts at scale, but there is no framework for evaluating the accuracy of ML systems on a standardized set of forecasting questions. To address this gap, we introduce ForecastBench: a dynamic benchmark that evaluates the accuracy of ML systems on an automatically generated and regularly updated set of 1,000 forecasting questions. To avoid any possibility of data leakage, ForecastBench is comprised solely of questions about future events that have no known answer at the time of submission. We quantify the capabilities of current ML systems by collecting forecasts from expert (human) forecasters, the general public, and LLMs on a random subset of questions from the benchmark ($N=200$). While LLMs have achieved super-human performance on many benchmarks, they perform less well here: expert forecasters outperform the top-performing LLM (p-value $<0.01$). We display system and human scores in a public leaderboard at www.forecastbench.org.

There has been widespread use of causal inference methods for the rigorous analysis of observational studies and to identify policy evaluations. In this article, we consider coarsened exact matching, developed in Iacus et al. (2011). While they developed some statistical properties, in this article, we study the approach using asymptotics based on a superpopulation inferential framework. This methodology is generalized to what we termed as coarsened confounding, for which we propose two new algorithms. We develop asymptotic results for the average causal effect estimator as well as providing conditions for consistency. In addition, we provide an asymptotic justification for the variance formulae in Iacus et al. (2011). A bias correction technique is proposed, and we apply the proposed methodology to data from two well-known observational studies.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed artificial intelligence by excelling in complex natural language processing tasks. Their ability to generate human-like text has opened new possibilities for market research, particularly in conjoint analysis, where understanding consumer preferences is essential but often resource-intensive. Traditional survey-based methods face limitations in scalability and cost, making LLM-generated data a promising alternative. However, while LLMs have the potential to simulate real consumer behavior, recent studies highlight a significant gap between LLM-generated and human data, with biases introduced when substituting between the two. In this paper, we address this gap by proposing a novel statistical data augmentation approach that efficiently integrates LLM-generated data with real data in conjoint analysis. Our method leverages transfer learning principles to debias the LLM-generated data using a small amount of human data. This results in statistically robust estimators with consistent and asymptotically normal properties, in contrast to naive approaches that simply substitute human data with LLM-generated data, which can exacerbate bias. We validate our framework through an empirical study on COVID-19 vaccine preferences, demonstrating its superior ability to reduce estimation error and save data and costs by 24.9% to 79.8%. In contrast, naive approaches fail to save data due to the inherent biases in LLM-generated data compared to human data. Another empirical study on sports car choices validates the robustness of our results. Our findings suggest that while LLM-generated data is not a direct substitute for human responses, it can serve as a valuable complement when used within a robust statistical framework.

Fox News co-anchor John Roberts has the latest after President-elect Donald Trump nominates Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg to serve as assistant to the president and special envoy to Ukraine and Russia on'America Reports.' In the ancient world, the Pax Romana was a legendary historical period during which the western world, under the influence of the Roman Empire, enjoyed 200 years of relative peace, stability and prosperity. Commencing its founding under Caesar Augustus and ending with the death of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the Pax Romana was marked by lower levels of violence, increasing trade and territorial expansion that saw peak Rome preside over around one-third of the global population. Since that time, there have been a number of eras so similarly named, but none as dynamic as the current one: Pax Americana. Typically dated from the conclusion of World War II in 1945, the Pax Americana is the era of peace, prosperity and progress American power has offered the world since partnering with our allies to slay fascism and confront communism.

"The Ukrainian army launched a drone strike on a civilian car carrying Izvestia's freelance correspondent Alexander Martemyanov," the news outlet reported on its Telegram channel. "The car was located far from the line of contact." The vehicle was returning from covering shelling in the Russian-held city of Gorlivka when it was hit, Russia's state RIA news agency said. Two RIA journalists were wounded in the attack, the agency added. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the incident "deliberate murder".