With the rise of foundation models, there is growing concern about their potential social impacts. Social science has a long history of studying the social impacts of transformative technologies in terms of pre-existing systems of power and how these systems are disrupted or reinforced by new technologies. In this position paper, we build on prior work studying the social impacts of earlier technologies to propose a conceptual framework studying foundation models as sociotechnical systems, incorporating social science expertise to better understand how these models affect systems of power, anticipate the impacts of deploying these models in various applications, and study the effectiveness of technical interventions intended to mitigate social harms. We advocate for an interdisciplinary and collaborative research paradigm between AI and social science across all stages of foundation model research and development to promote socially responsible research practices and use cases, and outline several strategies to facilitate such research.

Objective. Demographic groups are often represented at different rates in medical datasets. These differences can create bias in machine learning algorithms, with higher levels of performance for better-represented groups. One promising solution to this problem is to generate synthetic data to mitigate potential adverse effects of non-representative data sets. Methods. We build on recent advances in LLM-based synthetic data generation to create a pipeline where the synthetic data is generated separately for each demographic group. We conduct our study using MIMIC-IV and Framingham "Offspring and OMNI-1 Cohorts" datasets. We prompt GPT4-Turbo to create group-specific data, providing training examples and the dataset context. An exploratory analysis is conducted to ascertain the quality of the generated data. We then evaluate the utility of the synthetic data for augmentation of a training dataset in a downstream machine learning task, focusing specifically on model performance metrics across groups. Results. The performance of GPT4-Turbo augmentation is generally superior but not always. In the majority of experiments our method outperforms standard modeling baselines, however, prompting GPT-4-Turbo to produce data specific to a group provides little to no additional benefit over a prompt that does not specify the group. Conclusion. We developed a method for using LLMs out-of-the-box to synthesize group-specific data to address imbalances in demographic representation in medical datasets. As another "tool in the toolbox", this method can improve model fairness and thus health equity. More research is needed to understand the conditions under which LLM generated synthetic data is useful for non-representative medical data sets.

Given a semi-structured knowledge base (SKB), where text documents are interconnected by relations, how can we effectively retrieve relevant information to answer user questions? Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) retrieves documents to assist large language models (LLMs) in question answering; while Graph RAG (GRAG) uses structured knowledge bases as its knowledge source. However, many questions require both textual and relational information from SKB - referred to as "hybrid" questions - which complicates the retrieval process and underscores the need for a hybrid retrieval method that leverages both information. In this paper, through our empirical analysis, we identify key insights that show why existing methods may struggle with hybrid question answering (HQA) over SKB. Based on these insights, we propose HybGRAG for HQA consisting of a retriever bank and a critic module, with the following advantages: (1) Agentic, it automatically refines the output by incorporating feedback from the critic module, (2) Adaptive, it solves hybrid questions requiring both textual and relational information with the retriever bank, (3) Interpretable, it justifies decision making with intuitive refinement path, and (4) Effective, it surpasses all baselines on HQA benchmarks. In experiments on the STaRK benchmark, HybGRAG achieves significant performance gains, with an average relative improvement in Hit@1 of 51%.

LLMs have transformed the execution of numerous tasks, including those in the medical domain. Among these, summarizing patient-reported outcomes (PROs) into concise natural language reports is of particular interest to clinicians, as it enables them to focus on critical patient concerns and spend more time in meaningful discussions. While existing work with LLMs like GPT-4 has shown impressive results, real breakthroughs could arise from leveraging SLMs as they offer the advantage of being deployable locally, ensuring patient data privacy and compliance with healthcare regulations. This study benchmarks several SLMs against LLMs for summarizing patient-reported Q\&A forms in the context of radiotherapy. Using various metrics, we evaluate their precision and reliability. The findings highlight both the promise and limitations of SLMs for high-stakes medical tasks, fostering more efficient and privacy-preserving AI-driven healthcare solutions.

During a virus's evolution,various regions of the genome are subjected to distinct levels of functional constraints.Combined with factors like codon bias and DNA repair efficiency,these constraints contribute to unique mutation patterns within the genome or a specific gene. In this project, we harnessed the power of Large Language Models(LLMs) to predict the evolution of SARS-CoV-2. By treating the mutation process from one generation to the next as a translation task, we trained a transformer model, called VirusT5, to capture the mutation patterns underlying SARS-CoV-2 evolution. We evaluated the VirusT5's ability to detect these mutation patterns including its ability to identify mutation hotspots and explored the potential of using VirusT5 to predict future virus variants. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of using a large language model to model viral evolution as a translation process. This study establishes the groundbreaking concept of "mutation-as-translation," paving the way for new methodologies and tools for combating virus threats

Digital agents for automating tasks across different platforms by directly manipulating the GUIs are increasingly important. For these agents, grounding from language instructions to target elements remains a significant challenge due to reliance on HTML or AXTree inputs. In this paper, we introduce Aria-UI, a large multimodal model specifically designed for GUI grounding. Aria-UI adopts a pure-vision approach, eschewing reliance on auxiliary inputs. To adapt to heterogeneous planning instructions, we propose a scalable data pipeline that synthesizes diverse and high-quality instruction samples for grounding. To handle dynamic contexts in task performing, Aria-UI incorporates textual and text-image interleaved action histories, enabling robust context-aware reasoning for grounding. Aria-UI sets new state-of-the-art results across offline and online agent benchmarks, outperforming both vision-only and AXTree-reliant baselines. We release all training data and model checkpoints to foster further research at https://ariaui.github.io.

Evaluating the quality of machine-generated natural language content is a challenging task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Recently, large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have been employed for this purpose, but they are computationally expensive due to the extensive token usage required by complex evaluation prompts. In this paper, we propose a prompt optimization approach that uses a smaller, fine-tuned language model to compress input data for evaluation prompt, thus reducing token usage and computational cost when using larger LLMs for downstream evaluation. Our method involves a two-stage fine-tuning process: supervised fine-tuning followed by preference optimization to refine the model's outputs based on human preferences. We focus on Machine Translation (MT) evaluation and utilize the GEMBA-MQM metric as a starting point. Our results show a $2.37\times$ reduction in token usage without any loss in evaluation quality. This work makes state-of-the-art LLM-based metrics like GEMBA-MQM more cost-effective and efficient, enhancing their accessibility for broader use.

Synthetic datasets further enhanced these This study investigates the potential of Large Language Models models by mitigating the scarcity of annotated data for specific (LLMs), particularly GPT-4o, for Optical Character Recognition languages [3, 12] (OCR) in low-resource scripts such as Urdu, Albanian, and Tajik, Progress in low-resource OCR remains limited, with studies focusing with English serving as a benchmark. Using a meticulously curated on Indic scripts, while structurally complex scripts--such as dataset of 2,520 images incorporating controlled variations in text those with ligatures or modified Cyrillic alphabets--remain underrepresented length, font size, background color, and blur, the research simulates [12]. Similarly, few studies have explored OCR pipelines diverse real-world challenges. Results emphasize the limitations of for Urdu and Bengali [1, 2], highlighting the need for customized zero-shot LLM-based OCR, particularly for linguistically complex solutions. LLMs have recently emerged as a promising OCR solution, scripts, highlighting the need for annotated datasets and fine-tuned leveraging multimodal capabilities for dynamic adaptation to models. This work underscores the urgency of addressing accessibility diverse scripts and challenging visual conditions [10, 13]. Studies gaps in text digitization, paving the way for inclusive and have demonstrated LLMs' ability to process textual content from robust OCR solutions for underserved languages.

The integration of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) such as OpenAI's GPT-4 Vision into various sectors has marked a significant evolution in the field of artificial intelligence, particularly in the analysis and interpretation of visual data. This paper explores the practical application of GPT-4 Vision in the construction industry, focusing on its capabilities in monitoring and tracking the progress of construction projects. Utilizing high-resolution aerial imagery of construction sites, the study examines how GPT-4 Vision performs detailed scene analysis and tracks developmental changes over time. The findings demonstrate that while GPT-4 Vision is proficient in identifying construction stages, materials, and machinery, it faces challenges with precise object localization and segmentation. Despite these limitations, the potential for future advancements in this technology is considerable. This research not only highlights the current state and opportunities of using LVLMs in construction but also discusses future directions for enhancing the model's utility through domain-specific training and integration with other computer vision techniques and digital twins.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant success in performing varied natural language tasks such as language translation, question-answering, summarizing, fact-checking, etc. Despite LLMs' impressive ability to generate human-like texts, LLMs are infamous for their inconsistent responses -- a meaning-preserving change in the input query results in an inconsistent response and attributes to vulnerabilities of LLMs such as hallucination, jailbreaking, etc. Consequently, existing research focuses on simple paraphrasing-based consistency assessment of LLMs, and ignores complex queries that necessitates an even better understanding of logical reasoning by an LLM. Our work therefore addresses the logical inconsistency of LLMs under complex logical queries with primitive logical operators, e.g., negation, conjunction, and disjunction. As a test bed, we consider retrieval-augmented LLMs on a fact-checking task involving propositional logic queries from real-world knowledge graphs (KGs). Our contributions are three-fold. Benchmark: We introduce three logical fact-checking datasets over KGs for community development towards logically consistent LLMs. Assessment: We propose consistency measures of LLMs on propositional logic queries as input and demonstrate that existing LLMs lack logical consistency, specially on complex queries. Improvement: We employ supervised fine-tuning to improve the logical consistency of LLMs on the complex fact-checking task with KG contexts.