Many empirical studies of labor market questions rely on estimating relatively simple predictive models using small, carefully constructed longitudinal survey datasets based on hand-engineered features. Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on massive datasets, encode vast quantities of world knowledge and can be used for the next job prediction problem. However, while an off-the-shelf LLM produces plausible career trajectories when prompted, the probability with which an LLM predicts a particular job transition conditional on career history will not, in general, align with the true conditional probability in a given population. Recently, Vafa et al. (2024) introduced a transformer-based "foundation model", CAREER, trained using a large, unrepresentative resume dataset, that predicts transitions between jobs; it further demonstrated how transfer learning techniques can be used to leverage the foundation model to build better predictive models of both transitions and wages that reflect conditional transition probabilities found in nationally representative survey datasets. This paper considers an alternative where the fine-tuning of the CAREER foundation model is replaced by fine-tuning LLMs. For the task of next job prediction, we demonstrate that models trained with our approach outperform several alternatives in terms of predictive performance on the survey data, including traditional econometric models, CAREER, and LLMs with in-context learning, even though the LLM can in principle predict job titles that are not allowed in the survey data. Further, we show that our fine-tuned LLM-based models' predictions are more representative of the career trajectories of various workforce subpopulations than off-the-shelf LLM models and CAREER. We conduct experiments and analyses that highlight the sources of the gains in the performance of our models for representative predictions.

Foundation models, enhanced by self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques, represent a cutting-edge frontier in biomedical signal analysis, particularly for electrocardiograms (ECGs), crucial for cardiac health monitoring and diagnosis. This study conducts a comprehensive analysis of foundation models for ECGs by employing and refining innovative SSL methodologies - namely, generative and contrastive learning - on a vast dataset of over 1.1 million ECG samples. By customizing these methods to align with the intricate characteristics of ECG signals, our research has successfully developed foundation models that significantly elevate the precision and reliability of cardiac diagnostics. These models are adept at representing the complex, subtle nuances of ECG data, thus markedly enhancing diagnostic capabilities. The results underscore the substantial potential of SSL-enhanced foundation models in clinical settings and pave the way for extensive future investigations into their scalable applications across a broader spectrum of medical diagnostics. This work sets a benchmark in the ECG field, demonstrating the profound impact of tailored, data-driven model training on the efficacy and accuracy of medical diagnostics.

Machine learning has vast potential to improve anomaly detection in satellite telemetry which is a crucial task for spacecraft operations. This potential is currently hampered by a lack of comprehensible benchmarks for multivariate time series anomaly detection, especially for the challenging case of satellite telemetry. The European Space Agency Benchmark for Anomaly Detection in Satellite Telemetry (ESA-ADB) aims to address this challenge and establish a new 1 standard in the domain. It is a result of close cooperation between spacecraft operations engineers from the European Space Agency (ESA) and machine learning experts. The newly introduced ESA Anomalies Dataset contains annotated real-life telemetry from three different ESA missions, out of which two are included in ESA-ADB. Results of typical anomaly detection algorithms assessed in our novel hierarchical evaluation pipeline show that new approaches are necessary to address operators' needs. All elements of ESA-ADB are publicly available to ensure its full reproducibility.

In Explainable AI, rule extraction translates model knowledge into logical rules, such as IF-THEN statements, crucial for understanding patterns learned by black-box models. This could significantly aid in fields like disease diagnosis, disease progression estimation, or drug discovery. However, such application domains often contain imbalanced data, with the class of interest underrepresented. Existing methods inevitably compromise the performance of rules for the minor class to maximise the overall performance. As the first attempt in this field, we propose a model-agnostic approach for extracting rules from specific subgroups of data, featuring automatic rule generation for numerical features. This method enhances the regional explainability of machine learning models and offers wider applicability compared to existing methods. We additionally introduce a new method for selecting features to compose rules, reducing computational costs in high-dimensional spaces. Experiments across various datasets and models demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often trained on vast amounts of undisclosed data, motivating the development of post-hoc Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) to gain insight into their training data composition. However, in this paper, we identify inherent challenges in post-hoc MIA evaluation due to potential distribution shifts between collected member and non-member datasets. Using a simple bag-of-words classifier, we demonstrate that datasets used in recent post-hoc MIAs suffer from significant distribution shifts, in some cases achieving near-perfect distinction between members and non-members. This implies that previously reported high MIA performance may be largely attributable to these shifts rather than model memorization. We confirm that randomized, controlled setups eliminate such shifts and thus enable the development and fair evaluation of new MIAs. However, we note that such randomized setups are rarely available for the latest LLMs, making post-hoc data collection still required to infer membership for real-world LLMs. As a potential solution, we propose a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) approach for post-hoc data collection, which substantially mitigates distribution shifts. Evaluating various MIA methods on this RDD setup yields performance barely above random guessing, in stark contrast to previously reported results. Overall, our findings highlight the challenges in accurately measuring LLM memorization and the need for careful experimental design in (post-hoc) membership inference tasks.

's interface consists of six coordinated views: (a) The configuration view provides an overview of the dataset and teacher model being distilled, while (b) the student performance view displays a summary of each student model's performance and highlights subsets where student and teacher models misalign. Abstract-- The emergence of large-scale pretrained models has heightened their application in various downstream tasks, yet deployment is a challenge in environments with limited computational resources. Knowledge distillation has emerged as a solution in such scenarios, whereby knowledge from large teacher models is transferred into smaller student' models, but this is a non-trivial process that traditionally requires technical expertise in AI/ML. We develop a novel knowledge distillation pipeline based on extracting text-aligned visual concepts from a concept corpus using multimodal models, and construct highly interpretable linear student models based on visual concepts that mimic a teacher model in a response-based manner. 's interface allows users to interactively fine-tune the student model by manipulating concept influences directly in the user interface. 's human-in-the-loop and visualization-driven approach enables users to effectively create and analyze student models, understand how knowledge is transferred, and efficiently perform fine-tuning operations. We discuss how this work highlights the potential of interactive and visual methods in making knowledge distillation and subsequent no-code fine-tuning more accessible and adaptable to a wider range of users with domain-specific demands. Jinbin Huang and Chris Bryan are with Arizona State Uiversity. Importantly, to serve as new initializations to fine-tune the student model for a few KD has been shown as effective even when the teacher and student epochs, effectively adapting the model based on user instructions. In particular, we are inspired by recent efforts This section provides a brief overview of knowledge distillation, and in KD interpretability that leverage visual concepts---a technique then discusses relevant related work at the intersection of visual analytics originally designed to explain model behaviors [21, 38, 43]. While 2.1 Knowledge Distillation such methods can improve KD interpretability, they primarily rely on Knowledge distillation (KD) [23] is the process of transferring knowledge automated concept extraction pipelines that generate large ensembles of from a large'teacher' PTM to a more compact'student' model.

Machine learning is more and more applied in critical application areas like health and driver assistance. To minimize the risk of wrong decisions, in such applications it is necessary to consider the certainty of a classification to reject uncertain samples. An established tool for this are reject curves that visualize the trade-off between the number of rejected samples and classification performance metrics. We argue that common reject curves are too abstract and hard to interpret by non-experts. We propose Stacked Confusion Reject Plots (SCORE) that offer a more intuitive understanding of the used data and the classifier's behavior. We present example plots on artificial Gaussian data to document the different options of SCORE and provide the code as a Python package.

The problem of natural language generation, and, more specifically, method name prediction, faces significant difficulties when proposed models need to be evaluated on test data. Such a metric would need to consider the versatility with which a single method can be named, with respect to both semantics and syntax. Measuring the direct overlap between the predicted and reference (true) sequences will not be able to capture these subtleties. Other existing embedding based metrics either do not measure precision and recall or impose strict unrealistic assumptions on both sequences. To address these issues, we propose a new metric that, on the one hand, is very simple and lightweight, and, on the other hand, is able to calculate precision and recall without resorting to any assumptions while obtaining good performance with respect to the human judgement.

In recent years, explainable methods for artificial intelligence (XAI) have tried to reveal and describe models' decision mechanisms in the case of classification tasks. However, XAI for semantic segmentation and in particular for single instances has been little studied to date. Understanding the process underlying automatic segmentation of single instances is crucial to reveal what information was used to detect and segment a given object of interest. In this study, we proposed two instance-level explanation maps for semantic segmentation based on SmoothGrad and Grad-CAM++ methods. Then, we investigated their relevance for the detection and segmentation of white matter lesions (WML), a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) biomarker in multiple sclerosis (MS). 687 patients diagnosed with MS for a total of 4043 FLAIR and MPRAGE MRI scans were collected at the University Hospital of Basel, Switzerland. Data were randomly split into training, validation and test sets to train a 3D U-Net for MS lesion segmentation. We observed 3050 true positive (TP), 1818 false positive (FP), and 789 false negative (FN) cases. We generated instance-level explanation maps for semantic segmentation, by developing two XAI methods based on SmoothGrad and Grad-CAM++. We investigated: 1) the distribution of gradients in saliency maps with respect to both input MRI sequences; 2) the model's response in the case of synthetic lesions; 3) the amount of perilesional tissue needed by the model to segment a lesion. Saliency maps (based on SmoothGrad) in FLAIR showed positive values inside a lesion and negative in its neighborhood. Peak values of saliency maps generated for these four groups of volumes presented distributions that differ significantly from one another, suggesting a quantitative nature of the proposed saliency. Contextual information of 7mm around the lesion border was required for their segmentation.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly prevalent in a wide variety of applications, concerns about the safety of their outputs have become more significant. Most efforts at safety-tuning or moderation today take on a predominantly Western-centric view of safety, especially for toxic, hateful, or violent speech. In this paper, we describe LionGuard, a Singapore-contextualized moderation classifier that can serve as guardrails against unsafe LLM outputs. When assessed on Singlish data, LionGuard outperforms existing widely-used moderation APIs, which are not finetuned for the Singapore context, by 14% (binary) and up to 51% (multi-label). Our work highlights the benefits of localization for moderation classifiers and presents a practical and scalable approach for low-resource languages.