MTL is a learning paradigm that effectively leverages both task-specific and shared information to address multiple related tasks simultaneously. In contrast to STL, MTL offers a suite of benefits that enhance both the training process and the inference efficiency. MTL's key advantages encompass streamlined model architecture, performance enhancement, and cross-domain generalizability. Over the past twenty years, MTL has become widely recognized as a flexible and effective approach in various fields, including CV, NLP, recommendation systems, disease prognosis and diagnosis, and robotics. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of MTL, encompassing the technical aspects of cutting-edge methods from traditional approaches to deep learning and the latest trend of pretrained foundation models. Our survey methodically categorizes MTL techniques into five key areas: regularization, relationship learning, feature propagation, optimization, and pre-training. This categorization not only chronologically outlines the development of MTL but also dives into various specialized strategies within each category. Furthermore, the survey reveals how the MTL evolves from handling a fixed set of tasks to embracing a more flexible approach free from task or modality constraints. It explores the concepts of task-promptable and -agnostic training, along with the capacity for ZSL, which unleashes the untapped potential of this historically coveted learning paradigm. Overall, we hope this survey provides the research community with a comprehensive overview of the advancements in MTL from its inception in 1997 to the present in 2023. We address present challenges and look ahead to future possibilities, shedding light on the opportunities and potential avenues for MTL research in a broad manner. This project is publicly available at https://github.com/junfish/Awesome-Multitask-Learning.

This paper explores the effectiveness of using large language models (LLMs) for personalized movie recommendations from users' perspectives in an online field experiment. Our study involves a combination of between-subject prompt and historic consumption assessments, along with within-subject recommendation scenario evaluations. By examining conversation and survey response data from 160 active users, we find that LLMs offer strong recommendation explainability but lack overall personalization, diversity, and user trust. Our results also indicate that different personalized prompting techniques do not significantly affect user-perceived recommendation quality, but the number of movies a user has watched plays a more significant role. Furthermore, LLMs show a greater ability to recommend lesser-known or niche movies. Through qualitative analysis, we identify key conversational patterns linked to positive and negative user interaction experiences and conclude that providing personal context and examples is crucial for obtaining high-quality recommendations from LLMs.

Recent research in dialogue systems and corpora has focused on two main categories: task-oriented (TOD) and open-domain (chit-chat) dialogues. TOD systems help users accomplish specific tasks, while open-domain systems aim to create engaging conversations. However, in real-world scenarios, user intents are often revealed during interactions. A recent study introduced SalesBot, which simulates dialogues transitioning from chit-chat to task-oriented scenarios to train sales agents. Unfortunately, the initial data lacked smooth transitions and coherent long-turn dialogues, resulting in poor naturalness in sales-customer interactions. To address these issues, this paper presents SalesBot 2.0, an improved dataset. It leverages commonsense knowledge from large language models (LLMs) through strategic prompting. Additionally, we introduce a novel model called SalesAgent, trained on salesperson's interactions, using chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. This model excels in transitioning topics, understanding user intents, and selecting appropriate strategies. Experiments using diverse user simulations validate the effectiveness of our method in controlling dialogue strategies in LLMs. Furthermore, SalesBot 2.0 enhances coherence and reduces aggression, facilitating better model learning for sales-customer interactions.

Human-created works represent critical data inputs to artificial intelligence (AI). Strategic behavior can play a major role for AI training datasets, be it in limiting access to existing works or in deciding which types of new works to create or whether to create new works at all. We examine creators' behavioral change when their works become training data for AI. Specifically, we focus on contributors on Unsplash, a popular stock image platform with about 6 million high-quality photos and illustrations. In the summer of 2020, Unsplash launched an AI research program by releasing a dataset of 25,000 images for commercial use. We study contributors' reactions, comparing contributors whose works were included in this dataset to contributors whose works were not included. Our results suggest that treated contributors left the platform at a higher-than-usual rate and substantially slowed down the rate of new uploads. Professional and more successful photographers react stronger than amateurs and less successful photographers. We also show that affected users changed the variety and novelty of contributions to the platform, with long-run implications for the stock of works potentially available for AI training. Taken together, our findings highlight the trade-off between interests of rightsholders and promoting innovation at the technological frontier. We discuss implications for copyright and AI policy.

Automated fact-checking (AFC) is garnering increasing attention by researchers aiming to help fact-checkers combat the increasing spread of misinformation online. While many existing AFC methods incorporate external information from the Web to help examine the veracity of claims, they often overlook the importance of verifying the source and quality of collected "evidence". One overlooked challenge involves the reliance on "leaked evidence", information gathered directly from fact-checking websites and used to train AFC systems, resulting in an unrealistic setting for early misinformation detection. Similarly, the inclusion of information from unreliable sources can undermine the effectiveness of AFC systems. To address these challenges, we present a comprehensive approach to evidence verification and filtering. We create the "CREDible, Unreliable or LEaked" (CREDULE) dataset, which consists of 91,632 articles classified as Credible, Unreliable and Fact checked (Leaked). Additionally, we introduce the EVidence VERification Network (EVVER-Net), trained on CREDULE to detect leaked and unreliable evidence in both short and long texts. EVVER-Net can be used to filter evidence collected from the Web, thus enhancing the robustness of end-to-end AFC systems. We experiment with various language models and show that EVVER-Net can demonstrate impressive performance of up to 91.5% and 94.4% accuracy, while leveraging domain credibility scores along with short or long texts, respectively. Finally, we assess the evidence provided by widely-used fact-checking datasets including LIAR-PLUS, MOCHEG, FACTIFY, NewsCLIPpings+ and VERITE, some of which exhibit concerning rates of leaked and unreliable evidence.

We present COCOLA (Coherence-Oriented Contrastive Learning for Audio), a contrastive learning method for musical audio representations that captures the harmonic and rhythmic coherence between samples. Our method operates at the level of stems (or their combinations) composing music tracks and allows the objective evaluation of compositional models for music in the task of accompaniment generation. We also introduce a new baseline for compositional music generation called CompoNet, based on ControlNet, generalizing the tasks of MSDM, and quantify it against the latter using COCOLA. We release all models trained on public datasets containing separate stems (MUSDB18-HQ, MoisesDB, Slakh2100, and CocoChorales).

Explanatory inference is the creation and evaluation of hypotheses that provide explanations, and is sometimes known as abduction or abductive inference. Generative AI is a new set of artificial intelligence models based on novel algorithms for generating text, images, and sounds. This paper proposes a set of benchmarks for assessing the ability of AI programs to perform explanatory inference, and uses them to determine the extent to which ChatGPT, a leading generative AI model, is capable of making explanatory inferences. Tests on the benchmarks reveal that ChatGPT performs creative and evaluative inferences in many domains, although it is limited to verbal and visual modalities. Claims that ChatGPT and similar models are incapable of explanation, understanding, causal reasoning, meaning, and creativity are rebutted.

Generative large-scale language models create the fifth paradigm of scientific research, organically combine data science and computational intelligence, transform the research paradigm of natural language processing and multimodal information processing, promote the new trend of AI-enabled social science research, and provide new ideas for digital humanities research and application. This article profoundly explores the application of large-scale language models in digital humanities research, revealing their significant potential in ancient book protection, intelligent processing, and academic innovation. The article first outlines the importance of ancient book resources and the necessity of digital preservation, followed by a detailed introduction to developing large-scale language models, such as ChatGPT, and their applications in document management, content understanding, and cross-cultural research. Through specific cases, the article demonstrates how AI can assist in the organization, classification, and content generation of ancient books. Then, it explores the prospects of AI applications in artistic innovation and cultural heritage preservation. Finally, the article explores the challenges and opportunities in the interaction of technology, information, and society in the digital humanities triggered by AI technologies.

In ad-hoc retrieval, evaluation relies heavily on user actions, including implicit feedback. In a conversational setting such signals are usually unavailable due to the nature of the interactions, and, instead, the evaluation often relies on crowdsourced evaluation labels. The role of user feedback in annotators' assessment of turns in a conversational perception has been little studied. We focus on how the evaluation of task-oriented dialogue systems (TDSs), is affected by considering user feedback, explicit or implicit, as provided through the follow-up utterance of a turn being evaluated. We explore and compare two methodologies for assessing TDSs: one includes the user's follow-up utterance and one without. We use both crowdworkers and large language models (LLMs) as annotators to assess system responses across four aspects: relevance, usefulness, interestingness, and explanation quality. Our findings indicate that there is a distinct difference in ratings assigned by both annotator groups in the two setups, indicating user feedback does influence system evaluation. Workers are more susceptible to user feedback on usefulness and interestingness compared to LLMs on interestingness and relevance. User feedback leads to a more personalized assessment of usefulness by workers, aligning closely with the user's explicit feedback. Additionally, in cases of ambiguous or complex user requests, user feedback improves agreement among crowdworkers. These findings emphasize the significance of user feedback in refining system evaluations and suggest the potential for automated feedback integration in future research. We publicly release the annotated data to foster research in this area.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are large datasets with specific structures representing large knowledge bases (KB) where each node represents a key entity and relations amongst them are typed edges. Natural language queries formed to extract information from a KB entail starting from specific nodes and reasoning over multiple edges of the corresponding KG to arrive at the correct set of answer nodes. Traditional approaches of question answering on KG are based on (a) semantic parsing (SP), where a logical form (e.g., S-expression, SPARQL query, etc.) is generated using node and edge embeddings and then reasoning over these representations or tuning language models to generate the final answer directly, or (b) information-retrieval based that works by extracting entities and relations sequentially. In this work, we evaluate the capability of (LLMs) to answer questions over KG that involve multiple hops. We show that depending upon the size and nature of the KG we need different approaches to extract and feed the relevant information to an LLM since every LLM comes with a fixed context window. We evaluate our approach on six KGs with and without the availability of example-specific sub-graphs and show that both the IR and SP-based methods can be adopted by LLMs resulting in an extremely competitive performance.