Machine learning has revolutionized materials design, yet predicting complex properties like alloy ductility remains challenging due to the influence of processing conditions and microstructural features that resist quantification through traditional reductionist approaches. Here, we present an innovative information fusion architecture that integrates domain-specific texts from materials science literature with quantitative physical descriptors to overcome these limitations. Our framework employs MatSciBERT for advanced textual comprehension and incorporates contrastive learning to automatically extract implicit knowledge regarding processing parameters and microstructural characteristics. Through rigorous ablation studies and comparative experiments, the model demonstrates superior performance, achieving coefficient of determination (R2) values of 0.849 and 0.680 on titanium alloy validation set and refractory multi-principal-element alloy test set. This systematic approach provides a holistic framework for property prediction in complex material systems where quantitative descriptors are incomplete and establishes a foundation for knowledge-guided materials design and informatics-driven materials discovery.

Sense and Sensibility: What makes a social robot convincing to high-school students? Abstract --This study with 40 high-school students demonstrates the high influence of a social educational robot on students' decision-making for a set of eight true-false questions on electric circuits, for which the theory had been covered in the students' courses. The robot argued for the correct answer on six questions and the wrong on two, and 75% of the students were persuaded by the robot to perform beyond their expected capacity, positively when the robot was correct and negatively when it was wrong. Students with more experience of using large language models were even more likely to be influenced by the robot's stance - in particular for the two easiest questions on which the robot was wrong - suggesting that familiarity with AI can increase susceptibility to misinformation by AI. We further examined how three different levels of portrayed robot certainty, displayed using semantics, prosody and facial signals, affected how the students aligned with the robot's answer on specific questions and how convincing they perceived the robot to be on these questions. The students aligned with the robot's answers in 94.4% of the cases when the robot was portrayed as Certain, 82.6% when it was Neutral and 71.4% when it was Uncertain. The alignment was thus high for all conditions, highlighting students' general susceptibility to accept the robot's stance, but alignment in the Uncertain condition was significantly lower than in the Certain. Post-test questionnaire answers further show that students found the robot most convincing when it was portrayed as Certain. These findings highlight the need for educational robots to adjust their display of certainty based on the reliability of the information they convey, to promote students' critical thinking and reduce undue influence. Educational robots are becoming more common and they have significant potential in, e.g., STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education [46, 69, 17], offering students realistic and natural interactions, not the least by employing Large Language Models (LLMs), as demonstrated in several recent studies [41, 68, 67]. However, it is also well-known that while the LLMs' linguistic proficiency is often astonishing, their factual "knowledge" in STEM subjects is flawed, and incorrect statements occur frequently [34, 60]. Since robots can exert high informational social influence [38, 24, 25, 55, 56] and students will align with the robot's views to large extents [27], the positive as well as negative effects of learning with a social robot need to be considered: Students need to use critical thinking to decide if they should accept the robot's propositions [63]. Educators need to understand which students are more at risk of being misled by a robot presenting incorrect STEM facts, to provide in-time support.

Numerous studies have proposed computational methods to detect hate speech online, yet most focus on the English language and emphasize model development. In this study, we evaluate the counterfactual fairness of hate speech detection models in the Dutch language, specifically examining the performance and fairness of transformer-based models. We make the following key contributions. First, we curate a list of Dutch Social Group Terms that reflect social context. Second, we generate counterfactual data for Dutch hate speech using LLMs and established strategies like Manual Group Substitution (MGS) and Sentence Log-Likelihood (SLL). Through qualitative evaluation, we highlight the challenges of generating realistic counterfactuals, particularly with Dutch grammar and contextual coherence. Third, we fine-tune baseline transformer-based models with counterfactual data and evaluate their performance in detecting hate speech. Fourth, we assess the fairness of these models using Counterfactual Token Fairness (CTF) and group fairness metrics, including equality of odds and demographic parity. Our analysis shows that models perform better in terms of hate speech detection, average counterfactual fairness and group fairness. This work addresses a significant gap in the literature on counterfactual fairness for hate speech detection in Dutch and provides practical insights and recommendations for improving both model performance and fairness.

The Unit Commitment (UC) problem is a classic challenge in the optimal scheduling of power systems. Years of research and practice have shown that formulating reasonable unit commitment plans can significantly improve the economic efficiency of power systems' operations. In recent years, with the introduction of technologies such as machine learning and the Lagrangian relaxation method, the solution methods for the UC problem have become increasingly diversified, but still face challenges in terms of accuracy and robustness. This paper proposes a Function Space Search (FunSearch) method based on large language models. This method combines pre-trained large language models and evaluators to creatively generate solutions through the program search and evolution process while ensuring their rationality. In simulation experiments, a case of unit commitment with \(10\) units is used mainly. Compared to the genetic algorithm, the results show that FunSearch performs better in terms of sampling time, evaluation time, and total operating cost of the system, demonstrating its great potential as an effective tool for solving the UC problem.

Large language models (LLMs) are prone to three types of hallucination: Input-Conflicting, Context-Conflicting and Fact-Conflicting hallucinations. The purpose of this study is to mitigate the different types of hallucination by exploiting the interdependence between them. For this purpose, we propose a Multi-Information Adapter for Large Language Models (MALM). This framework employs a tailored multi-graph learning approach designed to elucidate the interconnections between original inputs, contextual information, and external factual knowledge, thereby alleviating the three categories of hallucination within a cohesive framework. Experiments were carried out on four benchmarking datasets: HaluEval, TruthfulQA, Natural Questions, and TriviaQA. We evaluated the proposed framework in two aspects: (1) adaptability to different base LLMs on HaluEval and TruthfulQA, to confirm if MALM is effective when applied on 7 typical LLMs. MALM showed significant improvements over LLaMA-2; (2) generalizability to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) by combining MALM with three representative retrievers (BM25, Spider and DPR) separately. Furthermore, automated and human evaluations were conducted to substantiate the correctness of experimental results, where GPT-4 and 3 human volunteers judged which response was better between LLaMA-2 and MALM. The results showed that both GPT-4 and human preferred MALM in 79.4% and 65.6% of cases respectively. The results validate that incorporating the complex interactions between the three types of hallucination through a multilayered graph attention network into the LLM generation process is effective to mitigate the them. The adapter design of the proposed approach is also proven flexible and robust across different base LLMs.

--T est-time adaptation (TT A) aims to boost the generalization capability of a trained model by conducting self- /unsupervised learning during the testing phase. While most existing TT A methods for video primarily utilize visual supervisory signals, they often overlook the potential contribution of inherent audio data. T o address this gap, we propose a novel approach that incorporates audio information into video TT A. Our method capitalizes on the rich semantic content of audio to generate audio-assisted pseudo-labels, a new concept in the context of video TT A. Specifically, we propose an audio-to-video label mapping method by first employing pre-trained audio models to classify audio signals extracted from videos and then mapping the audio-based predictions to video label spaces through large language models, thereby establishing a connection between the audio categories and video labels. T o effectively leverage the generated pseudo-labels, we present a flexible adaptation cycle that determines the optimal number of adaptation iterations for each sample, based on changes in loss and consistency across different views. This enables a customized adaptation process for each sample. Experimental results on two widely used datasets (UCF101-C and Kinetics-Sounds-C), as well as on two newly constructed audio-video TT A datasets (A VE-C and A VMIT -C) with various corruption types, demonstrate the superiority of our approach. EEP neural networks have achieved significant success in various video analysis tasks [1]-[4], but most methods assume that training and testing data come from the same distribution. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant Nos. Qi Deng, Ronghao Zhang and Jian Chen are with School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510000, China. Shuaicheng Niu is with College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, 639798, Singapore. Existing video test-time adaptation methods rely on visual supervision, overlooking the rich information inherent in audio. We propose a novel approach that involves extracting audio from videos and mapping the results of an open-source audio model to the video label space.

Relation Extraction (RE) aims to extract semantic relationships in texts from given entity pairs, and has achieved significant improvements. However, in different domains, the RE task can be influenced by various factors. For example, in the financial domain, sentiment can affect RE results, yet this factor has been overlooked by modern RE models. To address this gap, this paper proposes a Sentiment-aware-SDP-Enhanced-Module (SSDP-SEM), a multi-task learning approach for enhancing financial RE. Specifically, SSDP-SEM integrates the RE models with a pluggable auxiliary sentiment perception (ASP) task, enabling the RE models to concurrently navigate their attention weights with the text's sentiment. We first generate detailed sentiment tokens through a sentiment model and insert these tokens into an instance. Then, the ASP task focuses on capturing nuanced sentiment information through predicting the sentiment token positions, combining both sentiment insights and the Shortest Dependency Path (SDP) of syntactic information. Moreover, this work employs a sentiment attention information bottleneck regularization method to regulate the reasoning process. Our experiment integrates this auxiliary task with several prevalent frameworks, and the results demonstrate that most previous models benefit from the auxiliary task, thereby achieving better results. These findings highlight the importance of effectively leveraging sentiment in the financial RE task.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The release of open-source LLMs like LLaMA and Qwen has triggered the development of numerous fine-tuned models tailored for various tasks and languages. In this paper, we explore an important question: is it possible to combine these specialized models to create a unified model with multi-task capabilities. We introduces Hierarchical Iterative Merging (Hi-Merging), a training-free method for unifying different specialized LLMs into a single model. Specifically, Hi-Merging employs model-wise and layer-wise pruning and scaling, guided by contribution analysis, to mitigate parameter conflicts. Extensive experiments on multiple-choice and question-answering tasks in both Chinese and English validate Hi-Merging's ability for multi-task learning. The results demonstrate that Hi-Merging consistently outperforms existing merging techniques and surpasses the performance of models fine-tuned on combined datasets in most scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/Hi-Merging.

Modern AI clusters, which host diverse workloads like data pre-processing, training and inference, often store the large-volume data in cloud storage and employ caching frameworks to facilitate remote data access. To avoid code-intrusion complexity and minimize cache space wastage, it is desirable to maintain a unified cache shared by all the workloads. However, existing cache management strategies, designed for specific workloads, struggle to handle the heterogeneous AI workloads in a cluster -- which usually exhibit heterogeneous access patterns and item storage granularities. In this paper, we propose IGTCache, a unified, high-efficacy cache for modern AI clusters. IGTCache leverages a hierarchical access abstraction, AccessStreamTree, to organize the recent data accesses in a tree structure, facilitating access pattern detection at various granularities. Using this abstraction, IGTCache applies hypothesis testing to categorize data access patterns as sequential, random, or skewed. Based on these detected access patterns and granularities, IGTCache tailors optimal cache management strategies including prefetching, eviction, and space allocation accordingly. Experimental results show that IGTCache increases the cache hit ratio by 55.6% over state-of-the-art caching frameworks, reducing the overall job completion time by 52.2%.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are useful for analyzing social structures, community dynamics, institutional memberships, and other complex relationships across domains from sociology to public health. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have improved the scalability and accessibility of automated KG extraction from large text corpora, the impacts of extraction errors on downstream analyses are poorly understood, especially for applied scientists who depend on accurate KGs for real-world insights. To address this gap, we conducted the first evaluation of KG extraction performance at two levels: (1) micro-level edge accuracy, which is consistent with standard NLP evaluations, and manual identification of common error sources; (2) macro-level graph metrics that assess structural properties such as community detection and connectivity, which are relevant to real-world applications. Focusing on affiliation graphs of person membership in organizations extracted from social register books, our study identifies a range of extraction performance where biases across most downstream graph analysis metrics are near zero. However, as extraction performance declines, we find that many metrics exhibit increasingly pronounced biases, with each metric tending toward a consistent direction of either over- or under-estimation. Through simulations, we further show that error models commonly used in the literature do not capture these bias patterns, indicating the need for more realistic error models for KG extraction. Our findings provide actionable insights for practitioners and underscores the importance of advancing extraction methods and error modeling to ensure reliable and meaningful downstream analyses.