Objective: Scientific publications play a crucial role in uncovering insights, testing novel drugs, and shaping healthcare policies. Accessing the quality of publications requires evaluating their Risk of Bias (RoB), a process typically conducted by human reviewers. In this study, we introduce a new dataset for machine reading comprehension and RoB assessment and present RoBIn (Risk of Bias Inference), an innovative model crafted to automate such evaluation. The model employs a dual-task approach, extracting evidence from a given context and assessing the RoB based on the gathered evidence. Methods: We use data from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) as ground truth to label open-access clinical trial publications from PubMed. This process enabled us to develop training and test datasets specifically for machine reading comprehension and RoB inference. Additionally, we created extractive (RoBInExt) and generative (RoBInGen) Transformer-based approaches to extract relevant evidence and classify the RoB effectively. Results: RoBIn is evaluated across various settings and benchmarked against state-of-the-art methods for RoB inference, including large language models in multiple scenarios. In most cases, the best-performing RoBIn variant surpasses traditional machine learning and LLM-based approaches, achieving an ROC AUC of 0.83. Conclusion: Based on the evidence extracted from clinical trial reports, RoBIn performs a binary classification to decide whether the trial is at a low RoB or a high/unclear RoB. We found that both RoBInGen and RoBInExt are robust and have the best results in many settings.

The performance of Large language models (LLMs) across a broad range of domains has been impressive but have been critiqued as not being able to reason about their process and conclusions derived. This is to explain the conclusions draw, and also for determining a plan or strategy for their approach. This paper explores the current research in investigating symbolic reasoning and LLMs, and whether an LLM can inherently provide some form of reasoning or whether supporting components are necessary, and, if there is evidence for a reasoning capability, is this evident in a specific domain or is this a general capability? In addition, this paper aims to identify the current research gaps and future trends of LLM explainability, presenting a review of the literature, identifying current research into this topic and suggests areas for future work.

The growing demand for surveillance in public spaces presents significant challenges due to the shortage of human resources. Current AI-based video surveillance systems heavily rely on core computer vision models that require extensive finetuning, which is particularly difficult in surveillance settings due to limited datasets and difficult setting (viewpoint, low quality, etc.). In this work, we propose leveraging Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), known for their strong zero and few-shot generalization, to tackle video understanding tasks in surveillance. Specifically, we explore VideoLLaMA2, a state-of-the-art LVLM, and an improved token-level sampling method, Self-Reflective Sampling (Self-ReS). Our experiments on the UCF-Crime dataset show that VideoLLaMA2 represents a significant leap in zero-shot performance, with 20% boost over the baseline. Self-ReS additionally increases zero-shot action recognition performance to 44.6%. These results highlight the potential of LVLMs, paired with improved sampling techniques, for advancing surveillance video analysis in diverse scenarios.

Traffic prediction is a vital component of intelligent transportation systems. By reasoning about traffic patterns in both the spatial and temporal dimensions, accurate and interpretable predictions can be provided. A considerable challenge in traffic prediction lies in handling the diverse data distributions caused by vastly different traffic conditions occurring at different locations. LLMs have been a dominant solution due to their remarkable capacity to adapt to new datasets with very few labeled data samples, i.e., few-shot adaptability. However, existing forecasting techniques mainly focus on extracting local graph information and forming a text-like prompt, leaving LLM- based traffic prediction an open problem. This work presents a probabilistic LLM for traffic forecasting with three highlights. We propose a graph-aware LLM for traffic prediction that considers proximal traffic information. Specifically, by considering the traffic of neighboring nodes as covariates, our model outperforms the corresponding time-series LLM. Furthermore, we adopt a lightweight approach for efficient domain adaptation when facing new data distributions in few-shot fashion. The comparative experiment demonstrates the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art LLM-based methods and the traditional GNN- based supervised approaches. Furthermore, Strada-LLM can be easily adapted to different LLM backbones without a noticeable performance drop.

Designing optimization approaches, whether heuristic or meta-heuristic, usually demands extensive manual intervention and has difficulty generalizing across diverse problem domains. The combination of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) offers a promising new approach to overcome these limitations and make optimization more automated. In this setup, LLMs act as dynamic agents that can generate, refine, and interpret optimization strategies, while EAs efficiently explore complex solution spaces through evolutionary operators. Since this synergy enables a more efficient and creative search process, we first conduct an extensive review of recent research on the application of LLMs in optimization. We focus on LLMs' dual functionality as solution generators and algorithm designers. Then, we summarize the common and valuable designs in existing work and propose a novel LLM-EA paradigm for automated optimization. Furthermore, centered on this paradigm, we conduct an in-depth analysis of innovative methods for three key components: individual representation, variation operators, and fitness evaluation. We address challenges related to heuristic generation and solution exploration, especially from the LLM prompts' perspective. Our systematic review and thorough analysis of the paradigm can assist researchers in better understanding the current research and promoting the development of combining LLMs with EAs for automated optimization.

Text-based AI system optimization typically involves a feedback loop scheme where a single LLM generates an evaluation in natural language of the current output to improve the next iteration's output. However, in this work, we empirically demonstrate that for a practical and complex task (code generation) with multiple criteria to evaluate, utilizing only one LLM evaluator tends to let errors in generated code go undetected, thus leading to incorrect evaluations and ultimately suboptimal test case performance. Motivated by this failure case, we assume there exists an optimal evaluation policy that samples an evaluation between response and ground truth. We then theoretically prove that a linear combination of multiple evaluators can approximate this optimal policy. From this insight, we propose AI system optimization via Multiple LLM Evaluators (AIME). AIME is an evaluation protocol that utilizes multiple LLMs that each independently generate an evaluation on separate criteria and then combine them via concatenation. We provide an extensive empirical study showing AIME outperforming baseline methods in code generation tasks, with up to 62% higher error detection rate and up to 16% higher success rate than a single LLM evaluation protocol on LeetCodeHard and HumanEval datasets. We also show that the selection of the number of evaluators and which criteria to utilize is non-trivial as it can impact pact success rate by up to 12%. Pre-trained foundation models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), have developed rapidly over the recent years (Achiam et al., 2023; Touvron et al., 2023). As the application complexity increases, the shift to AI systems containing multiple components such as LLM-based agents and web search (Xiong et al., 2024), will continue (Zaharia et al., 2024; Yuksekgonul et al., 2024).

Multimodal information extraction (MIE) is crucial for scientific literature, where valuable data is often spread across text, figures, and tables. In materials science, extracting structured information from research articles can accelerate the discovery of new materials. However, the multimodal nature and complex interconnections of scientific content present challenges for traditional text-based methods. We introduce \textsc{MatViX}, a benchmark consisting of $324$ full-length research articles and $1,688$ complex structured JSON files, carefully curated by domain experts. These JSON files are extracted from text, tables, and figures in full-length documents, providing a comprehensive challenge for MIE. We introduce an evaluation method to assess the accuracy of curve similarity and the alignment of hierarchical structures. Additionally, we benchmark vision-language models (VLMs) in a zero-shot manner, capable of processing long contexts and multimodal inputs, and show that using a specialized model (DePlot) can improve performance in extracting curves. Our results demonstrate significant room for improvement in current models. Our dataset and evaluation code are available\footnote{\url{https://matvix-bench.github.io/}}.

The complexity of text-embedded images presents a formidable challenge in machine learning given the need for multimodal understanding of multiple aspects of expression conveyed by them. While previous research in multimodal analysis has primarily focused on singular aspects such as hate speech and its subclasses, this study expands this focus to encompass multiple aspects of linguistics: hate, targets of hate, stance, and humor. We introduce a novel dataset PrideMM comprising 5,063 text-embedded images associated with the LGBTQ+ Pride movement, thereby addressing a serious gap in existing resources. We conduct extensive experimentation on PrideMM by using unimodal and multimodal baseline methods to establish benchmarks for each task. Additionally, we propose a novel framework MemeCLIP for efficient downstream learning while preserving the knowledge of the pre-trained CLIP model. The results of our experiments show that MemeCLIP achieves superior performance compared to previously proposed frameworks on two real-world datasets. We further compare the performance of MemeCLIP and zero-shot GPT-4 on the hate classification task. Finally, we discuss the shortcomings of our model by qualitatively analyzing misclassified samples. Our code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/SiddhantBikram/MemeCLIP.

Fact-checking is extensively studied in the context of misinformation and disinformation, addressing objective inaccuracies. However, a softer form of misinformation involves responses that are factually correct but lack certain features such as clarity and relevance. This challenge is prevalent in formal Question-Answer (QA) settings such as press conferences in finance, politics, sports, and other domains, where subjective answers can obscure transparency. Despite this, there is a lack of manually annotated datasets for subjective features across multiple dimensions. To address this gap, we introduce SubjECTive-QA, a human annotated dataset on Earnings Call Transcripts' (ECTs) QA sessions as the answers given by company representatives are often open to subjective interpretations and scrutiny. The dataset includes 49,446 annotations for long-form QA pairs across six features: Assertive, Cautious, Optimistic, Specific, Clear, and Relevant. These features are carefully selected to encompass the key attributes that reflect the tone of the answers provided during QA sessions across different domain. Our findings are that the best-performing Pre-trained Language Model (PLM), RoBERTa-base, has similar weighted F1 scores to Llama-3-70b-Chat on features with lower subjectivity, such as Relevant and Clear, with a mean difference of 2.17% in their weighted F1 scores. The models perform significantly better on features with higher subjectivity, such as Specific and Assertive, with a mean difference of 10.01% in their weighted F1 scores. Furthermore, testing SubjECTive-QA's generalizability using QAs from White House Press Briefings and Gaggles yields an average weighted F1 score of 65.97% using our best models for each feature, demonstrating broader applicability beyond the financial domain. SubjECTive-QA is publicly available under the CC BY 4.0 license

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) focuses on identifying emotional states from spoken language. The 2024 IEEE SLT-GenSEC Challenge on Post Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Emotion Recognition tasks participants to explore the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for emotion recognition using only text data. We propose a novel approach that first refines all available transcriptions to ensure data reliability. We then segment each complete conversation into smaller dialogues and use these dialogues as context to predict the emotion of the target utterance within the dialogue. Finally, we investigated different context lengths and prompting techniques to improve prediction accuracy. Our best submission exceeded the baseline by 20% in unweighted accuracy, achieving the best performance in the challenge. All our experiments' codes, prediction results, and log files are publicly available.