Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in code generation and problem solving. Current approaches employ external tool-based iterative debuggers that use compiler or other tool-based runtime feedback to refine coarse programs generated by various methods. However, the effectiveness of these approaches heavily relies on the quality of the initial code generation, which remains an open challenge. In this paper, we introduce CodeSim, a novel multi-agent code generation framework that comprehensively addresses the stages of program synthesis-planning, coding, and debugging-through a human-like perception approach. As human verifies their understanding of any algorithms through visual simulation, CodeSim uniquely features a method of plan verification and internal debugging through the step-by-step simulation of input/output. Extensive experiments across seven challenging competitive problem-solving and program synthesis benchmarks demonstrate CodeSim's remarkable code generation capabilities. Our framework achieves new state-of-the-art (pass@1) results-(HumanEval 95.1%, MBPP 90.7%, APPS 22%, and CodeContests 29.1%). Furthermore, our method shows potential for even greater enhancement when cascaded with external debuggers. To facilitate further research and development in this area, we have open-sourced our framework in this link (https://kagnlp.github.io/codesim.github.io/).

Recent advancements in foundation models have enhanced AI systems' capabilities in autonomous tool usage and reasoning. However, their ability in location or map-based reasoning - which improves daily life by optimizing navigation, facilitating resource discovery, and streamlining logistics - has not been systematically studied. To bridge this gap, we introduce MapEval, a benchmark designed to assess diverse and complex map-based user queries with geo-spatial reasoning. MapEval features three task types (textual, API-based, and visual) that require collecting world information via map tools, processing heterogeneous geo-spatial contexts (e.g., named entities, travel distances, user reviews or ratings, images), and compositional reasoning, which all state-of-the-art foundation models find challenging. Comprising 700 unique multiple-choice questions about locations across 180 cities and 54 countries, MapEval evaluates foundation models' ability to handle spatial relationships, map infographics, travel planning, and navigation challenges. Using MapEval, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation of 28 prominent foundation models. While no single model excelled across all tasks, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, GPT-4o, and Gemini-1.5-Pro achieved competitive performance overall. However, substantial performance gaps emerged, particularly in MapEval, where agents with Claude-3.5-Sonnet outperformed GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5-Pro by 16% and 21%, respectively, and the gaps became even more amplified when compared to open-source LLMs. Our detailed analyses provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of current models, though all models still fall short of human performance by more than 20% on average, struggling with complex map images and rigorous geo-spatial reasoning. This gap highlights MapEval's critical role in advancing general-purpose foundation models with stronger geo-spatial understanding.

Mapping and navigation services like Google Maps, Apple Maps, Openstreet Maps, are essential for accessing various location-based data, yet they often struggle to handle natural language geospatial queries. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in question answering (QA), but creating reliable geospatial QA datasets from map services remains challenging. We introduce MapQaTor, a web application that streamlines the creation of reproducible, traceable map-based QA datasets. With its plug-and-play architecture, MapQaTor enables seamless integration with any maps API, allowing users to gather and visualize data from diverse sources with minimal setup. By caching API responses, the platform ensures consistent ground truth, enhancing the reliability of the data even as real-world information evolves. MapQaTor centralizes data retrieval, annotation, and visualization within a single platform, offering a unique opportunity to evaluate the current state of LLM-based geospatial reasoning while advancing their capabilities for improved geospatial understanding. Evaluation metrics show that, MapQaTor speeds up the annotation process by at least 30 times compared to manual methods, underscoring its potential for developing geospatial resources, such as complex map reasoning datasets. The website is live at: https://mapqator.github.io/ and a demo video is available at: https://youtu.be/7_aV9Wmhs6Q.

Code synthesis, which requires a deep understanding of complex natural language problem descriptions, generation of code instructions for complex algorithms and data structures, and the successful execution of comprehensive unit tests, presents a significant challenge. While large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive proficiency in natural language processing, their performance in code generation tasks remains limited. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to code generation tasks leveraging multi-agent prompting that uniquely replicates the full cycle of program synthesis as observed in human developers. Our framework, MapCoder, consists of four LLM agents specifically designed to emulate the stages of this cycle: recalling relevant examples, planning, code generation, and debugging. After conducting thorough experiments, with multiple LLM ablations and analyses across eight challenging competitive problem-solving and program synthesis benchmarks, MapCoder showcases remarkable code generation capabilities, achieving new state-of-the-art results (pass@1) on HumanEval (93.9%), MBPP (83.1%), APPS (22.0%), CodeContests (28.5%), and xCodeEval (45.3%). Moreover, our method consistently delivers superior performance across various programming languages and varying problem difficulties. We open-source our framework at https://github.com/Md-Ashraful-Pramanik/MapCoder.

Bangla typing is mostly performed using English keyboard and can be highly erroneous due to the presence of compound and similarly pronounced letters. Spelling correction of a misspelled word requires understanding of word typing pattern as well as the context of the word usage. A specialized BERT model named BSpell has been proposed in this paper targeted towards word for word correction in sentence level. BSpell contains an end-to-end trainable CNN sub-model named SemanticNet along with specialized auxiliary loss. This allows BSpell to specialize in highly inflected Bangla vocabulary in the presence of spelling errors. Furthermore, a hybrid pretraining scheme has been proposed for BSpell that combines word level and character level masking. Comparison on two Bangla and one Hindi spelling correction dataset shows the superiority of our proposed approach. BSpell is available as a Bangla spell checking tool via GitHub: https://github.com/Hasiburshanto/Bangla-Spell-Checker

Social structures and real-world incidents often influence contemporary literary fiction. Existing research in literary fiction analysis explains these real-world phenomena through the manual critical analysis of stories. Conventional Natural Language Processing (NLP) methodologies, including sentiment analysis, narrative summarization, and topic modeling, have demonstrated substantial efficacy in analyzing and identifying similarities within fictional works. However, the intricate dynamics of character interactions within fiction necessitate a more nuanced approach that incorporates visualization techniques. Character interaction graphs (or networks) emerge as a highly suitable means for visualization and information retrieval from the realm of fiction. Therefore, we leverage character interaction graphs with NLP-derived features to explore a diverse spectrum of societal inquiries about contemporary culture's impact on the landscape of literary fiction. Our study involves constructing character interaction graphs from fiction, extracting relevant graph features, and exploiting these features to resolve various real-life queries. Experimental evaluation of influential Bengali fiction over half a century demonstrates that character interaction graphs can be highly effective in specific assessments and information retrieval from literary fiction. Our data and codebase are available at https://cutt.ly/fbMgGEM

Knowledge Graph (KG)-to-Text generation aims at generating fluent natural-language text that accurately represents the information of a given knowledge graph. While significant progress has been made in this task by exploiting the power of pre-trained language models (PLMs) with appropriate graph structure-aware modules, existing models still fall short of generating faithful text, especially when the ground-truth natural-language text contains additional information that is not present in the graph. In this paper, we develop a KG-to-text generation model that can generate faithful natural-language text from a given graph, in the presence of noisy reference text. Our framework incorporates two core ideas: Firstly, we utilize contrastive learning to enhance the model's ability to differentiate between faithful and hallucinated information in the text, thereby encouraging the decoder to generate text that aligns with the input graph. Secondly, we empower the decoder to control the level of hallucination in the generated text by employing a controllable text generation technique. We evaluate our model's performance through the standard quantitative metrics as well as a ChatGPT-based quantitative and qualitative analysis. Our evaluation demonstrates the superior performance of our model over state-of-the-art KG-to-text models on faithfulness.

In this paper, we propose a novel contrastive learning based deep learning framework for patient similarity search using physiological signals. We use a contrastive learning based approach to learn similar embeddings of patients with similar physiological signal data. We also introduce a number of neighbor selection algorithms to determine the patients with the highest similarity on the generated embeddings. To validate the effectiveness of our framework for measuring patient similarity, we select the detection of Atrial Fibrillation (AF) through photoplethysmography (PPG) signals obtained from smartwatch devices as our case study. We present extensive experimentation of our framework on a dataset of over 170 individuals and compare the performance of our framework with other baseline methods on this dataset.

Real estate contributes significantly to all major economies around the world. In particular, house prices have a direct impact on stakeholders, ranging from house buyers to financing companies. Thus, a plethora of techniques have been developed for real estate price prediction. Most of the existing techniques rely on different house features to build a variety of prediction models to predict house prices. Perceiving the effect of spatial dependence on house prices, some later works focused on introducing spatial regression models for improving prediction performance. However, they fail to take into account the geo-spatial context of the neighborhood amenities such as how close a house is to a train station, or a highly-ranked school, or a shopping center. Such contextual information may play a vital role in users' interests in a house and thereby has a direct influence on its price. In this paper, we propose to leverage the concept of graph neural networks to capture the geo-spatial context of the neighborhood of a house. In particular, we present a novel method, the Geo-Spatial Network Embedding (GSNE), that learns the embeddings of houses and various types of Points of Interest (POIs) in the form of multipartite networks, where the houses and the POIs are represented as attributed nodes and the relationships between them as edges. Extensive experiments with a large number of regression techniques show that the embeddings produced by our proposed GSNE technique consistently and significantly improve the performance of the house price prediction task regardless of the downstream regression model.

Due to the popularity of smartphones, cheap wireless networks and availability of road network data, navigation applications have become a part of our everyday life. Many modern navigation systems and map-based services do not only provide the fastest route from a source location s to a target location t but also provide a few alternative routes to the users as more options to choose from. Consequently, computing alternative paths from a source s to a target t has received significant research attention in the past few years. However, it is not clear which of the existing approaches generates alternative paths of better quality because the quality of these alternatives is mostly subjective. Motivated by this, in this paper, we present the first user study that compares the quality of the alternative routes generated by four of the most popular existing approaches including the routes provided by Google Maps. We also present the details of a web-based demo system that can be accessed using any internet enabled device and allows users to see the alternative routes generated by the four approaches for any pair of source and target selected by the users. Our user study shows that although the mean rating received by Google Maps is slightly lower than the mean ratings received by the other three approaches, the results are not statistically significant. We also discuss the limitations of this user study and recommend the readers to interpret these results with caution because certain factors beyond our control may have affected the participants' ratings.