Performance Analysis
Few-shot text-based emotion detection
Marchitan, Teodor-George, Creanga, Claudiu, Dinu, Liviu P.
This paper describes the approach of the Unibuc - NLP team in tackling the SemEval 2025 Workshop, Task 11: Bridging the Gap in Text-Based Emotion Detection. We mainly focused on experiments using large language models (Gemini, Qwen, DeepSeek) with either few-shot prompting or fine-tuning. With our final system, for the multi-label emotion detection track (track A), we got an F1-macro of $0.7546$ (26/96 teams) for the English subset, $0.1727$ (35/36 teams) for the Portuguese (Mozambican) subset and $0.325$ (\textbf{1}/31 teams) for the Emakhuwa subset.
Robotic System with AI for Real Time Weed Detection, Canopy Aware Spraying, and Droplet Pattern Evaluation
Rasool, Inayat, Yadav, Pappu Kumar, Parmar, Amee, Mirzakhaninafchi, Hasan, Budhathoki, Rikesh, Usmani, Zain Ul Abideen, Paudel, Supriya, Olivera, Ivan Perez, Jone, Eric
Uniform and excessive herbicide application in modern agriculture contributes to increased input costs, environmental pollution, and the emergence of herbicide resistant weeds. To address these challenges, we developed a vision guided, AI-driven variable rate sprayer system capable of detecting weed presence, estimating canopy size, and dynamically adjusting nozzle activation in real time. The system integrates lightweight YOLO11n and YOLO11n-seg deep learning models, deployed on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano for onboard inference, and uses an Arduino Uno-based relay interface to control solenoid actuated nozzles based on canopy segmentation results. Indoor trials were conducted using 15 potted Hibiscus rosa sinensis plants of varying canopy sizes to simulate a range of weed patch scenarios. The YOLO11n model achieved a mean average precision (mAP@50) of 0.98, with a precision of 0.99 and a recall close to 1.0. The YOLO11n-seg segmentation model achieved a mAP@50 of 0.48, precision of 0.55, and recall of 0.52. System performance was validated using water sensitive paper, which showed an average spray coverage of 24.22% in zones where canopy was present. An upward trend in mean spray coverage from 16.22% for small canopies to 21.46% and 21.65% for medium and large canopies, respectively, demonstrated the system's capability to adjust spray output based on canopy size in real time. These results highlight the potential of combining real time deep learning with low-cost embedded hardware for selective herbicide application. Future work will focus on expanding the detection capabilities to include three common weed species in South Dakota: water hemp (Amaranthus tuberculatus), kochia (Bassia scoparia), and foxtail (Setaria spp.), followed by further validation in both indoor and field trials within soybean and corn production systems.
Robust Learning on Noisy Graphs via Latent Space Constraints with External Knowledge
Gu, Chunhui, Nasr, Mohammad Sadegh, Long, James P., Do, Kim-Anh, Irajizad, Ehsan
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) often struggle with noisy edges. We propose Latent Space Constrained Graph Neural Networks (LSC-GNN) to incorporate external "clean" links and guide embeddings of a noisy target graph. We train two encoders--one on the full graph (target plus external edges) and another on a regularization graph excluding the target's potentially noisy links--then penalize discrepancies between their latent representations. This constraint steers the model away from overfitting spurious edges. Experiments on benchmark datasets show LSC-GNN outperforms standard and noise-resilient GNNs in graphs subjected to moderate noise. We extend LSC-GNN to heterogeneous graphs and validate it on a small protein-metabolite network, where metabolite-protein interactions reduce noise in protein co-occurrence data. Our results highlight LSC-GNN's potential to boost predictive performance and interpretability in settings with noisy relational structures.
An autonomous agent for auditing and improving the reliability of clinical AI models
Kuhn, Lukas, Buettner, Florian
The deployment of AI models in clinical practice faces a critical challenge: models achieving expert-level performance on benchmarks can fail catastrophically when confronted with real-world variations in medical imaging. Minor shifts in scanner hardware, lighting or demographics can erode accuracy, but currently reliability auditing to identify such catastrophic failure cases before deployment is a bespoke and time-consuming process. Practitioners lack accessible and interpretable tools to expose and repair hidden failure modes. Here we introduce ModelAuditor, a self-reflective agent that converses with users, selects task-specific metrics, and simulates context-dependent, clinically relevant distribution shifts. ModelAuditor then generates interpretable reports explaining how much performance likely degrades during deployment, discussing specific likely failure modes and identifying root causes and mitigation strategies. Our comprehensive evaluation across three real-world clinical scenarios - inter-institutional variation in histopathology, demographic shifts in dermatology, and equipment heterogeneity in chest radiography - demonstrates that ModelAuditor is able correctly identify context-specific failure modes of state-of-the-art models such as the established SIIM-ISIC melanoma classifier. Its targeted recommendations recover 15-25% of performance lost under real-world distribution shift, substantially outperforming both baseline models and state-of-the-art augmentation methods. These improvements are achieved through a multi-agent architecture and execute on consumer hardware in under 10 minutes, costing less than US$0.50 per audit.
Estimating prevalence with precision and accuracy
Igiraneza, Aime Bienfait, Fraser, Christophe, Hinch, Robert
Unlike classification, whose goal is to estimate the class of each data point in a dataset, prevalence estimation or quantification is a task that aims to estimate the distribution of classes in a dataset. The two main tasks in prevalence estimation are to adjust for bias, due to the prevalence in the training dataset, and to quantify the uncertainty in the estimate. The standard methods used to quantify uncertainty in prevalence estimates are bootstrapping and Bayesian quantification methods. It is not clear which approach is ideal in terms of precision (i.e. the width of confidence intervals) and coverage (i.e. the confidence intervals being well-calibrated). Here, we propose Precise Quantifier (PQ), a Bayesian quantifier that is more precise than existing quantifiers and with well-calibrated coverage. We discuss the theory behind PQ and present experiments based on simulated and real-world datasets. Through these experiments, we establish the factors which influence quantification precision: the discriminatory power of the underlying classifier; the size of the labeled dataset used to train the quantifier; and the size of the unlabeled dataset for which prevalence is estimated. Our analysis provides deep insights into uncertainty quantification for quantification learning.
Bridging Prediction and Intervention Problems in Social Systems
Liu, Lydia T., Raji, Inioluwa Deborah, Zhou, Angela, Guerdan, Luke, Hullman, Jessica, Malinsky, Daniel, Wilder, Bryan, Zhang, Simone, Adam, Hammaad, Coston, Amanda, Laufer, Ben, Nwankwo, Ezinne, Zanger-Tishler, Michael, Ben-Michael, Eli, Barocas, Solon, Feller, Avi, Gerchick, Marissa, Gillis, Talia, Guha, Shion, Ho, Daniel, Hu, Lily, Imai, Kosuke, Kapoor, Sayash, Loftus, Joshua, Nabi, Razieh, Narayanan, Arvind, Recht, Ben, Perdomo, Juan Carlos, Salganik, Matthew, Sendak, Mark, Tolbert, Alexander, Ustun, Berk, Venkatasubramanian, Suresh, Wang, Angelina, Wilson, Ashia
Many automated decision systems (ADS) are designed to solve prediction problems -- where the goal is to learn patterns from a sample of the population and apply them to individuals from the same population. In reality, these prediction systems operationalize holistic policy interventions in deployment. Once deployed, ADS can shape impacted population outcomes through an effective policy change in how decision-makers operate, while also being defined by past and present interactions between stakeholders and the limitations of existing organizational, as well as societal, infrastructure and context. In this work, we consider the ways in which we must shift from a prediction-focused paradigm to an interventionist paradigm when considering the impact of ADS within social systems. We argue this requires a new default problem setup for ADS beyond prediction, to instead consider predictions as decision support, final decisions, and outcomes. We highlight how this perspective unifies modern statistical frameworks and other tools to study the design, implementation, and evaluation of ADS systems, and point to the research directions necessary to operationalize this paradigm shift. Using these tools, we characterize the limitations of focusing on isolated prediction tasks, and lay the foundation for a more intervention-oriented approach to developing and deploying ADS.
OpenFActScore: Open-Source Atomic Evaluation of Factuality in Text Generation
Lage, Lucas Fonseca, Ostermann, Simon
We introduce OpenFActScore, an open-source implementation of the FActScore framework for evaluating the factuality of text generated by large language models (LLMs). FActScore evaluates the factual accuracy of long-form text by using Atomic Fact Generation (AFG) to extract individual factual claims and Atomic Fact Validation (AFV) to verify each claim against a trusted knowledge source. While the original FActScore relies on closed-source and commercial models such as InstructGPT and ChatGPT, OpenFActScore enables the use of any Hugging Face-compatible model for both AFG and AFV. We provide a detailed technical overview of our implementation, highlighting design choices and modifications made to support open models. We evaluate multiple open-source LLMs on both AFG and AFV using the original FActScore benchmark, reporting BERTScore-F1 for AFG and Error Rate relative to human annotations for AFV. Our results show that open models can approximate the performance of closed-source systems, with Gemma achieving the best overall performance, and our final setup obtains a 0.99 Pearson correlation with the original FActScore experiments. OpenFActScore promotes transparency, reproducibility, and cost-effective evaluation, and is available at: https://github.com/lflage/OpenFActScore.
Exploring Partial Multi-Label Learning via Integrating Semantic Co-occurrence Knowledge
Wu, Xin, Teng, Fei, Feng, Yue, Shi, Kaibo, Lin, Zhuosheng, Zhang, Ji, Wang, James
JOURNAL OF L A T EX CLASS FILES, VOL. 18, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2024 1 Exploring Partial Multi-Label Learning via Integrating Semantic Co-occurrence Knowledge Xin Wu, Fei Teng, Y ue Feng, Kaibo Shi, Zhuosheng Lin, Ji Zhang and James Wang Abstract --Partial multi-label learning aims to extract knowledge from incompletely annotated data, which includes known correct labels, known incorrect labels, and unknown labels. The core challenge lies in accurately identifying the ambiguous relationships between labels and instances. In this paper, we emphasize that matching co-occurrence patterns between labels and instances is key to addressing this challenge. T o this end, we propose Semantic Co-occurrence Insight Network (SCINet), a novel and effective framework for partial multi-label learning. Specifically, SCINet introduces a bi-dominant prompter module, which leverages an off-the-shelf multimodal model to capture text-image correlations and enhance semantic alignment. T o reinforce instance-label interdependencies, we develop a cross-modality fusion module that jointly models inter-label correlations, inter-instance relationships, and co-occurrence patterns across instance-label assignments. Moreover, we propose an intrinsic semantic augmentation strategy that enhances the model's understanding of intrinsic data semantics by applying diverse image transformations, thereby fostering a synergistic relationship between label confidence and sample difficulty. Extensive experiments on four widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate that SCINet surpasses state-of-the-art methods. I NTRODUCTION M UL TI-LABEL learning has demonstrated tremendous potential in fields. However, due to the high cost of labeling and the subjectivity of annotators, real-world datasets often suffer from incomplete and noisy labels. This challenge has spurred the exploration of partial multi-label learning methods aimed at addressing these issues more effectively. Consequently, driven by this research need, partial multi-label learning has garnered vibrant attention in machine learning [1], [2]. It represents a new paradigm for multi-label recognition This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.62272398), Sichuan Science and Technology Program (No.2024NSFJQ0019).
Towards a Principled Evaluation of Knowledge Editors
Pohl, Sebastian, Ploner, Max, Akbik, Alan
Model editing has been gaining increasing attention over the past few years. For Knowledge Editing in particular, more challenging evaluation datasets have recently been released. These datasets use different methodologies to score the success of editors. Yet, it remains under-explored how robust these methodologies are and whether they unfairly favor some editors. Moreover, the disruptive impact of these editors on overall model capabilities remains a constant blind spot. We address both of these problems and show that choosing different metrics and evaluation methodologies as well as different edit batch sizes can lead to a different ranking of knowledge editors. Crucially we demonstrate this effect also on general language understanding tasks evaluated alongside the knowledge editing tasks. Further we include a manual assessment of the string matching based evaluation method for knowledge editing that is favored by recently released datasets, revealing a tendency to produce false positive matches.
When Transformers Meet Recommenders: Integrating Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation with Fine-Tuned LLMs
Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation (SASRec) effectively captures long-term user preferences by applying attention mechanisms to historical interactions. Concurrently, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has motivated research into LLM-based recommendation, which leverages their powerful generalization and language understanding capabilities. However, LLMs often lack the domain-specific knowledge and collaborative signals essential for high-quality recommendations when relying solely on textual prompts. To address this limitation, this study proposes SASRecLLM, a novel framework that integrates SASRec as a collaborative encoder with an LLM fine-tuned using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). The components are connected via a mapping layer to align their dimensional spaces, and three targeted training strategies are designed to optimize the hybrid architecture. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that SASRecLLM achieves robust and consistent improvements over strong baselines in both cold-start and warm-start scenarios. This work advances the field of LLM-based recommendation by presenting a modular and effective paradigm for fusing structured collaborative filtering with the semantic power of fine-tuned LLMs. The implementation is available on GitHub: https://github.com/kechenkristin/RecLLM