The goal of this work was to compute the semantic similarity among publicly available health survey questions in order to facilitate the standardization of survey-based Person-Generated Health Data (PGHD). We compiled various health survey questions authored in both English and Korean from the NIH CDE Repository, PROMIS, Korean public health agencies, and academic publications. Questions were drawn from various health lifelog domains. A randomized question pairing scheme was used to generate a Semantic Text Similarity (STS) dataset consisting of 1758 question pairs. Similarity scores between each question pair were assigned by two human experts. The tagged dataset was then used to build three classifiers featuring: Bag-of-Words, SBERT with BERT-based embeddings, and SBRET with LaBSE embeddings. The algorithms were evaluated using traditional contingency statistics. Among the three algorithms, SBERT-LaBSE demonstrated the highest performance in assessing question similarity across both languages, achieving an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) and Precision-Recall Curves of over 0.99. Additionally, it proved effective in identifying cross-lingual semantic similarities.The SBERT-LaBSE algorithm excelled at aligning semantically equivalent sentences across both languages but encountered challenges in capturing subtle nuances and maintaining computational efficiency. Future research should focus on testing with larger multilingual datasets and on calibrating and normalizing scores across the health lifelog domains to improve consistency. This study introduces the SBERT-LaBSE algorithm for calculating semantic similarity across two languages, showing it outperforms BERT-based models and the Bag of Words approach, highlighting its potential to improve semantic interoperability of survey-based PGHD across language barriers.

Sepsis is a severe condition that causes the body to respond incorrectly to an infection. This reaction can subsequently cause organ failure, a major one being acute kidney injury (AKI). For septic patients, approximately 50% develop AKI, with a mortality rate above 40%. Creating models that can accurately predict AKI based on specific qualities of septic patients is crucial for early detection and intervention. Using medical data from septic patients during intensive care unit (ICU) admission from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care 3 (MIMIC-III) database, we extracted 3301 patients with sepsis, with 73% of patients developing AKI. The data was randomly divided into a training set (n = 1980, 40%), a test set (n = 661, 10%), and a validation set (n = 660, 50%). The proposed model was logistic regression, and it was compared against five baseline models: XGBoost, K Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forest (RF), and LightGBM. Area Under the Curve (AUC), Accuracy, F1-Score, and Recall were calculated for each model. After analysis, we were able to select 23 features to include in our model, the top features being urine output, maximum bilirubin, minimum bilirubin, weight, maximum blood urea nitrogen, and minimum estimated glomerular filtration rate. The logistic regression model performed the best, achieving an AUC score of 0.887 (95% CI: [0.861-0.915]), an accuracy of 0.817, an F1 score of 0.866, a recall score of 0.827, and a Brier score of 0.13. Compared to the best existing literature in this field, our model achieved an 8.57% improvement in AUC while using 13 fewer variables, showcasing its effectiveness in determining AKI in septic patients. While the features selected for predicting AKI in septic patients are similar to previous literature, the top features that influenced our model's performance differ.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used in complex natural language processing tasks but raise privacy and security concerns due to the lack of identity recognition. This paper proposes a multi-party credible watermarking framework (CredID) involving a trusted third party (TTP) and multiple LLM vendors to address these issues. In the watermark embedding stage, vendors request a seed from the TTP to generate watermarked text without sending the user's prompt. In the extraction stage, the TTP coordinates each vendor to extract and verify the watermark from the text. This provides a credible watermarking scheme while preserving vendor privacy. Furthermore, current watermarking algorithms struggle with text quality, information capacity, and robustness, making it challenging to meet the diverse identification needs of LLMs. Thus, we propose a novel multi-bit watermarking algorithm and an open-source toolkit to facilitate research. Experiments show our CredID enhances watermark credibility and efficiency without compromising text quality. Additionally, we successfully utilized this framework to achieve highly accurate identification among multiple LLM vendors.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically trained to predict in the forward direction of time. However, recent works have shown that prompting these models to look back and critique their own generations can produce useful feedback. Motivated by this, we explore the question of whether LLMs can be empowered to think (predict and score) backwards to provide unsupervised feedback that complements forward LLMs. Towards this, we introduce Time Reversed Language Models (TRLMs), which can score and generate queries when conditioned on responses, effectively functioning in the reverse direction of time. Further, to effectively infer in the response to query direction, we pre-train and fine-tune a language model (TRLM-Ba) in the reverse token order from scratch. We show empirically (and theoretically in a stylized setting) that time-reversed models can indeed complement forward model predictions when used to score the query given response for re-ranking multiple forward generations. We obtain up to 5\% improvement on the widely used AlpacaEval Leaderboard over the competent baseline of best-of-N re-ranking using self log-perplexity scores. We further show that TRLM scoring outperforms conventional forward scoring of response given query, resulting in significant gains in applications such as citation generation and passage retrieval. We next leverage the generative ability of TRLM to augment or provide unsupervised feedback to input safety filters of LLMs, demonstrating a drastic reduction in false negative rate with negligible impact on false positive rates against several attacks published on the popular JailbreakBench leaderboard.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are rapidly improving to handle increasingly complex web-based tasks. Most of these agents rely on general-purpose, proprietary models like GPT-4 and focus on designing better prompts to improve their planning abilities. However, general-purpose LLMs are not specifically trained to understand specialized web contexts such as HTML, and they often struggle with long-horizon planning. We explore an alternative approach that fine-tunes open-source LLMs using production-scale workflow data collected from over 250 domains corresponding to 6 billion tokens. This simple yet effective approach shows substantial gains over prompting-based agents on existing benchmarks -- ScribeAgent achieves state-of-the-art direct generation performance on Mind2Web and improves the task success rate by 7.3% over the previous best text-only web agents on WebArena. We further perform detailed ablation studies on various fine-tuning design choices and provide insights into LLM selection, training recipes, context window optimization, and effect of dataset sizes.

Adequately generating and evaluating prediction models based on supervised machine learning (ML) is often challenging, especially for less experienced users in applied research areas. Special attention is required in settings where the model generation process involves hyperparameter tuning, i.e. data-driven optimization of different types of hyperparameters to improve the predictive performance of the resulting model. Discussions about tuning typically focus on the hyperparameters of the ML algorithm (e.g., the minimum number of observations in each terminal node for a tree-based algorithm). In this context, it is often neglected that hyperparameters also exist for the preprocessing steps that are applied to the data before it is provided to the algorithm (e.g., how to handle missing feature values in the data). As a consequence, users experimenting with different preprocessing options to improve model performance may be unaware that this constitutes a form of hyperparameter tuning - albeit informal and unsystematic - and thus may fail to report or account for this optimization. To illuminate this issue, this paper reviews and empirically illustrates different procedures for generating and evaluating prediction models, explicitly addressing the different ways algorithm and preprocessing hyperparameters are typically handled by applied ML users. By highlighting potential pitfalls, especially those that may lead to exaggerated performance claims, this review aims to further improve the quality of predictive modeling in ML applications.

Advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning have catalyzed the transformation of big data analytics and management into pivotal domains for research and application. This work explores the theoretical foundations, methodological advancements, and practical implementations of these technologies, emphasizing their role in uncovering actionable insights from massive, high-dimensional datasets. The study presents a systematic overview of data preprocessing techniques, including data cleaning, normalization, integration, and dimensionality reduction, to prepare raw data for analysis. Core analytics methodologies such as classification, clustering, regression, and anomaly detection are examined, with a focus on algorithmic innovation and scalability. Furthermore, the text delves into state-of-the-art frameworks for data mining and predictive modeling, highlighting the role of neural networks, support vector machines, and ensemble methods in tackling complex analytical challenges. Special emphasis is placed on the convergence of big data with distributed computing paradigms, including cloud and edge computing, to address challenges in storage, computation, and real-time analytics. The integration of ethical considerations, including data privacy and compliance with global standards, ensures a holistic perspective on data management. Practical applications across healthcare, finance, marketing, and policy-making illustrate the real-world impact of these technologies. Through comprehensive case studies and Python-based implementations, this work equips researchers, practitioners, and data enthusiasts with the tools to navigate the complexities of modern data analytics. It bridges the gap between theory and practice, fostering the development of innovative solutions for managing and leveraging data in the era of artificial intelligence.

An application of software known as an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) employs machine algorithms to identify network intrusions. Selective logging, safeguarding privacy, reputation-based defense against numerous attacks, and dynamic response to threats are a few of the problems that intrusion identification is used to solve. The biological system known as IoT has seen a rapid increase in high dimensionality and information traffic. Self-protective mechanisms like intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are essential for defending against a variety of attacks. On the other hand, the functional and physical diversity of IoT IDS systems causes significant issues. These attributes make it troublesome and unrealistic to completely use all IoT elements and properties for IDS self-security. For peculiarity-based IDS, this study proposes and implements a novel component selection and extraction strategy (our strategy). A five-ML algorithm model-based IDS for machine learning-based networks with proper hyperparamater tuning is presented in this paper by examining how the most popular feature selection methods and classifiers are combined, such as K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) Classifier, Decision Tree (DT) Classifier, Random Forest (RF) Classifier, Gradient Boosting Classifier, and Ada Boost Classifier. The Random Forest (RF) classifier had the highest accuracy of 99.39%. The K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classifier exhibited the lowest performance among the evaluated models, achieving an accuracy of 94.84%. This study's models have a significantly higher performance rate than those used in previous studies, indicating that they are more reliable.

We introduce a new framework for analyzing classification datasets based on the ratios of reconstruction errors between autoencoders trained on individual classes. This analysis framework enables efficient characterization of datasets on the sample, class, and entire dataset levels. We define reconstruction error ratios (RERs) that probe classification difficulty and allow its decomposition into (1) finite sample size and (2) Bayes error and decision-boundary complexity. Through systematic study across 19 popular visual datasets, we find that our RER-based dataset difficulty probe strongly correlates with error rate for state-of-the-art (SOTA) classification models. By interpreting sample-level classification difficulty as a label mistakenness score, we further find that RERs achieve SOTA performance on mislabel detection tasks on hard datasets under symmetric and asymmetric label noise. Data is the cornerstone of modern machine learning. As the data-centric AI movement has made increasingly clear, both predictive and generative ML models rely on sufficiently large and diverse high-quality datasets (Deng et al., 2009b; Radford et al., 2018; Kaplan et al., 2020). However, it is well known that even popular visual datasets like CIFAR-100 (Krizhevsky & Hinton, 2009), Caltech-256 (Griffin et al., 2007), and ImageNet (Deng et al., 2009b) can have hundreds or thousands of data quality issues, including up to 10% label errors (Northcutt et al., 2021). Consequently, curating a high-quality dataset requires not only data collection but also data cleaning, characterization, evaluation, and refinement. Nevertheless, existing methods for data quality assessment are inherently limited. Methods that seek to estimate the classification difficulty of a sample or dataset are either model-dependent (Ethayarajh et al., 2021), computationally infeasible (Scheidegger et al., 2021), or break down when applied to challenging datasets (Zhang et al., 2020). Likewise, mislabel detection methods either rely on training a strong classifier on the dataset (Pruthi et al., 2020; Pleiss et al., 2020), which becomes more time and compute-intensive for more complex datasets, or exhibit degraded performance on datasets with complex decision boundaries (Zhu et al., 2021; Northcutt et al., 2021). To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach for characterizing the difficulty of classification datasets by decomposing complex multi-class classification problems into one manifold learning problem for each class.

Most approaches to machine learning evaluation assume that machine and human responses are repeatable enough to be measured against data with unitary, authoritative, "gold standard" responses, via simple metrics such as accuracy, precision, and recall that assume scores are independent given the test item. However, AI models have multiple sources of stochasticity and the human raters who create gold standards tend to disagree with each other, often in meaningful ways, hence a single output response per input item may not provide enough information. We introduce methods for determining whether an (existing or planned) evaluation dataset has enough responses per item to reliably compare the performance of one model to another. We apply our methods to several of very few extant gold standard test sets with multiple disaggregated responses per item and show that there are usually not enough responses per item to reliably compare the performance of one model against another. Our methods also allow us to estimate the number of responses per item for hypothetical datasets with similar response distributions to the existing datasets we study. When two models are very far apart in their predictive performance, fewer raters are needed to confidently compare them, as expected. However, as the models draw closer, we find that a larger number of raters than are currently typical in annotation collection are needed to ensure that the power analysis correctly reflects the difference in performance.