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Jul 13

Interpreting Black-box Machine Learning Models for High Dimensional Datasets

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to outperform traditional machine learning algorithms in a broad variety of application domains due to their effectiveness in modeling complex problems and handling high-dimensional datasets. Many real-life datasets, however, are of increasingly high dimensionality, where a large number of features may be irrelevant for both supervised and unsupervised learning tasks. The inclusion of such features would not only introduce unwanted noise but also increase computational complexity. Furthermore, due to high non-linearity and dependency among a large number of features, DNN models tend to be unavoidably opaque and perceived as black-box methods because of their not well-understood internal functioning. Their algorithmic complexity is often simply beyond the capacities of humans to understand the interplay among myriads of hyperparameters. A well-interpretable model can identify statistically significant features and explain the way they affect the model's outcome. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to improve the interpretability of black-box models for classification tasks in the case of high-dimensional datasets. First, we train a black-box model on a high-dimensional dataset to learn the embeddings on which the classification is performed. To decompose the inner working principles of the black-box model and to identify top-k important features, we employ different probing and perturbing techniques. We then approximate the behavior of the black-box model by means of an interpretable surrogate model on the top-k feature space. Finally, we derive decision rules and local explanations from the surrogate model to explain individual decisions. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods like TabNet and XGboost when tested on different datasets with varying dimensionality between 50 and 20,000 w.r.t metrics and explainability.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 29, 2022

Forecasting Lithium-Ion Battery Longevity with Limited Data Availability: Benchmarking Different Machine Learning Algorithms

As the use of Lithium-ion batteries continues to grow, it becomes increasingly important to be able to predict their remaining useful life. This work aims to compare the relative performance of different machine learning algorithms, both traditional machine learning and deep learning, in order to determine the best-performing algorithms for battery cycle life prediction based on minimal data. We investigated 14 different machine learning models that were fed handcrafted features based on statistical data and split into 3 feature groups for testing. For deep learning models, we tested a variety of neural network models including different configurations of standard Recurrent Neural Networks, Gated Recurrent Units, and Long Short Term Memory with and without attention mechanism. Deep learning models were fed multivariate time series signals based on the raw data for each battery across the first 100 cycles. Our experiments revealed that the machine learning algorithms on handcrafted features performed particularly well, resulting in 10-20% average mean absolute percentage error. The best-performing algorithm was the Random Forest Regressor, which gave a minimum 9.8% mean absolute percentage error. Traditional machine learning models excelled due to their capability to comprehend general data set trends. In comparison, deep learning models were observed to perform particularly poorly on raw, limited data. Algorithms like GRU and RNNs that focused on capturing medium-range data dependencies were less adept at recognizing the gradual, slow trends critical for this task. Our investigation reveals that implementing machine learning models with hand-crafted features proves to be more effective than advanced deep learning models for predicting the remaining useful Lithium-ion battery life with limited data availability.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 9, 2023

Confronting LLMs with Traditional ML: Rethinking the Fairness of Large Language Models in Tabular Classifications

Recent literature has suggested the potential of using large language models (LLMs) to make classifications for tabular tasks. However, LLMs have been shown to exhibit harmful social biases that reflect the stereotypes and inequalities present in society. To this end, as well as the widespread use of tabular data in many high-stake applications, it is important to explore the following questions: what sources of information do LLMs draw upon when making classifications for tabular tasks; whether and to what extent are LLM classifications for tabular data influenced by social biases and stereotypes; and what are the consequential implications for fairness? Through a series of experiments, we delve into these questions and show that LLMs tend to inherit social biases from their training data which significantly impact their fairness in tabular classification tasks. Furthermore, our investigations show that in the context of bias mitigation, though in-context learning and finetuning have a moderate effect, the fairness metric gap between different subgroups is still larger than that in traditional machine learning models, such as Random Forest and shallow Neural Networks. This observation emphasizes that the social biases are inherent within the LLMs themselves and inherited from their pretraining corpus, not only from the downstream task datasets. Besides, we demonstrate that label-flipping of in-context examples can significantly reduce biases, further highlighting the presence of inherent bias within LLMs.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 23, 2023

Reasoning-Enhanced Large Language Models for Molecular Property Prediction

Molecular property prediction is crucial for drug discovery and materials science, yet existing approaches suffer from limited interpretability, poor cross-task generalization, and lack of chemical reasoning capabilities. Traditional machine learning models struggle with task transferability, while specialized molecular language models provide little insight into their decision-making processes. To address these limitations, we propose MPPReasoner, a multimodal large language model that incorporates chemical reasoning for molecular property prediction. Our approach, built upon Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, integrates molecular images with SMILES strings to enable comprehensive molecular understanding. We develop a two-stage training strategy: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using 16,000 high-quality reasoning trajectories generated through expert knowledge and multiple teacher models, followed by Reinforcement Learning from Principle-Guided Rewards (RLPGR). RLPGR employs verifiable, rule-based rewards that systematically evaluate chemical principle application, molecular structure analysis, and logical consistency through computational verification. Extensive experiments across 8 datasets demonstrate significant performance improvements, with MPPReasoner outperforming the best baselines by 7.91\% and 4.53\% on in-distribution and out-of-distribution tasks respectively. MPPReasoner exhibits exceptional cross-task generalization and generates chemically sound reasoning paths that provide valuable insights into molecular property analysis, substantially enhancing both interpretability and practical utility for chemists. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MPPReasoner-12687.

  • 12 authors
·
Oct 11, 2025

Enhancing Few-Shot Learning with Integrated Data and GAN Model Approaches

This paper presents an innovative approach to enhancing few-shot learning by integrating data augmentation with model fine-tuning in a framework designed to tackle the challenges posed by small-sample data. Recognizing the critical limitations of traditional machine learning models that require large datasets-especially in fields such as drug discovery, target recognition, and malicious traffic detection-this study proposes a novel strategy that leverages Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and advanced optimization techniques to improve model performance with limited data. Specifically, the paper addresses the noise and bias issues introduced by data augmentation methods, contrasting them with model-based approaches, such as fine-tuning and metric learning, which rely heavily on related datasets. By combining Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling and discriminative model ensemble strategies within a GAN framework, the proposed model adjusts generative and discriminative distributions to simulate a broader range of relevant data. Furthermore, it employs MHLoss and a reparameterized GAN ensemble to enhance stability and accelerate convergence, ultimately leading to improved classification performance on small-sample images and structured datasets. Results confirm that the MhERGAN algorithm developed in this research is highly effective for few-shot learning, offering a practical solution that bridges data scarcity with high-performing model adaptability and generalization.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 25, 2024

Anomaly detection optimization using big data and deep learning to reduce false-positive

Anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) has been a hot research topic because of its ability to detect new threats rather than only memorized signatures threats of signature-based IDS. Especially after the availability of advanced technologies that increase the number of hacking tools and increase the risk impact of an attack. The problem of any anomaly-based model is its high false-positive rate. The high false-positive rate is the reason why anomaly IDS is not commonly applied in practice. Because anomaly-based models classify an unseen pattern as a threat where it may be normal but not included in the training dataset. This type of problem is called overfitting where the model is not able to generalize. Optimizing Anomaly-based models by having a big training dataset that includes all possible normal cases may be an optimal solution but could not be applied in practice. Although we can increase the number of training samples to include much more normal cases, still we need a model that has more ability to generalize. In this research paper, we propose applying deep model instead of traditional models because it has more ability to generalize. Thus, we will obtain less false-positive by using big data and deep model. We made a comparison between machine learning and deep learning algorithms in the optimization of anomaly-based IDS by decreasing the false-positive rate. We did an experiment on the NSL-KDD benchmark and compared our results with one of the best used classifiers in traditional learning in IDS optimization. The experiment shows 10% lower false-positive by using deep learning instead of traditional learning.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 28, 2022

QuakeSet: A Dataset and Low-Resource Models to Monitor Earthquakes through Sentinel-1

Earthquake monitoring is necessary to promptly identify the affected areas, the severity of the events, and, finally, to estimate damages and plan the actions needed for the restoration process. The use of seismic stations to monitor the strength and origin of earthquakes is limited when dealing with remote areas (we cannot have global capillary coverage). Identification and analysis of all affected areas is mandatory to support areas not monitored by traditional stations. Using social media images in crisis management has proven effective in various situations. However, they are still limited by the possibility of using communication infrastructures in case of an earthquake and by the presence of people in the area. Moreover, social media images and messages cannot be used to estimate the actual severity of earthquakes and their characteristics effectively. The employment of satellites to monitor changes around the globe grants the possibility of exploiting instrumentation that is not limited by the visible spectrum, the presence of land infrastructures, and people in the affected areas. In this work, we propose a new dataset composed of images taken from Sentinel-1 and a new series of tasks to help monitor earthquakes from a new detailed view. Coupled with the data, we provide a series of traditional machine learning and deep learning models as baselines to assess the effectiveness of ML-based models in earthquake analysis.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 26, 2024

Guarded Query Routing for Large Language Models

Query routing, the task to route user queries to different large language model (LLM) endpoints, can be considered as a text classification problem. However, out-of-distribution queries must be handled properly, as those could be about unrelated domains, queries in other languages, or even contain unsafe text. Here, we thus study a guarded query routing problem, for which we first introduce the Guarded Query Routing Benchmark (GQR-Bench, released as Python package gqr), covers three exemplary target domains (law, finance, and healthcare), and seven datasets to test robustness against out-of-distribution queries. We then use GQR-Bench to contrast the effectiveness and efficiency of LLM-based routing mechanisms (GPT-4o-mini, Llama-3.2-3B, and Llama-3.1-8B), standard LLM-based guardrail approaches (LlamaGuard and NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails), continuous bag-of-words classifiers (WideMLP, fastText), and traditional machine learning models (SVM, XGBoost). Our results show that WideMLP, enhanced with out-of-domain detection capabilities, yields the best trade-off between accuracy (88%) and speed (<4ms). The embedding-based fastText excels at speed (<1ms) with acceptable accuracy (80%), whereas LLMs yield the highest accuracy (91%) but are comparatively slow (62ms for local Llama-3.1:8B and 669ms for remote GPT-4o-mini calls). Our findings challenge the automatic reliance on LLMs for (guarded) query routing and provide concrete recommendations for practical applications. Source code is available: https://github.com/williambrach/gqr.

  • 5 authors
·
May 20, 2025

Local-Cloud Inference Offloading for LLMs in Multi-Modal, Multi-Task, Multi-Dialogue Settings

Compared to traditional machine learning models, recent large language models (LLMs) can exhibit multi-task-solving capabilities through multiple dialogues and multi-modal data sources. These unique characteristics of LLMs, together with their large model size, make their deployment more challenging. Specifically, (i) deploying LLMs on local devices faces computational, memory, and energy resource issues, while (ii) deploying them in the cloud cannot guarantee real-time service and incurs communication/usage costs. In this paper, we design TMO, a local-cloud LLM inference system with Three-M Offloading: Multi-modal, Multi-task, and Multi-dialogue. TMO incorporates (i) a lightweight local LLM that can process simple tasks at high speed and (ii) a large-scale cloud LLM that can handle multi-modal data sources. We develop a resource-constrained reinforcement learning (RCRL) strategy for TMO that optimizes the inference location (i.e., local vs. cloud) and multi-modal data sources to use for each task/dialogue, aiming to maximize the long-term reward (response quality, latency, and usage cost) while adhering to resource constraints. We also contribute M4A1, a new dataset we curated that contains reward and cost metrics across multiple modality, task, dialogue, and LLM configurations, enabling evaluation of offloading decisions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TMO compared to several exploration-decision and LLM-as-Agent baselines, showing significant improvements in latency, cost, and response quality.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 29, 2025

Interpreting Agentic Systems: Beyond Model Explanations to System-Level Accountability

Agentic systems have transformed how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be leveraged to create autonomous systems with goal-directed behaviors, consisting of multi-step planning and the ability to interact with different environments. These systems differ fundamentally from traditional machine learning models, both in architecture and deployment, introducing unique AI safety challenges, including goal misalignment, compounding decision errors, and coordination risks among interacting agents, that necessitate embedding interpretability and explainability by design to ensure traceability and accountability across their autonomous behaviors. Current interpretability techniques, developed primarily for static models, show limitations when applied to agentic systems. The temporal dynamics, compounding decisions, and context-dependent behaviors of agentic systems demand new analytical approaches. This paper assesses the suitability and limitations of existing interpretability methods in the context of agentic systems, identifying gaps in their capacity to provide meaningful insight into agent decision-making. We propose future directions for developing interpretability techniques specifically designed for agentic systems, pinpointing where interpretability is required to embed oversight mechanisms across the agent lifecycle from goal formation, through environmental interaction, to outcome evaluation. These advances are essential to ensure the safe and accountable deployment of agentic AI systems.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 23

MixAT: Combining Continuous and Discrete Adversarial Training for LLMs

Despite recent efforts in Large Language Models (LLMs) safety and alignment, current adversarial attacks on frontier LLMs are still able to force harmful generations consistently. Although adversarial training has been widely studied and shown to significantly improve the robustness of traditional machine learning models, its strengths and weaknesses in the context of LLMs are less understood. Specifically, while existing discrete adversarial attacks are effective at producing harmful content, training LLMs with concrete adversarial prompts is often computationally expensive, leading to reliance on continuous relaxations. As these relaxations do not correspond to discrete input tokens, such latent training methods often leave models vulnerable to a diverse set of discrete attacks. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by introducing MixAT, a novel method that combines stronger discrete and faster continuous attacks during training. We rigorously evaluate MixAT across a wide spectrum of state-of-the-art attacks, proposing the At Least One Attack Success Rate (ALO-ASR) metric to capture the worst-case vulnerability of models. We show MixAT achieves substantially better robustness (ALO-ASR < 20%) compared to prior defenses (ALO-ASR > 50%), while maintaining a runtime comparable to methods based on continuous relaxations. We further analyze MixAT in realistic deployment settings, exploring how chat templates, quantization, low-rank adapters, and temperature affect both adversarial training and evaluation, revealing additional blind spots in current methodologies. Our results demonstrate that MixAT's discrete-continuous defense offers a principled and superior robustness-accuracy tradeoff with minimal computational overhead, highlighting its promise for building safer LLMs. We provide our code and models at https://github.com/insait-institute/MixAT.

  • 5 authors
·
May 22, 2025

Giving AI Personalities Leads to More Human-Like Reasoning

In computational cognitive modeling, capturing the full spectrum of human judgment and decision-making processes, beyond just optimal behaviors, is a significant challenge. This study explores whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can emulate the breadth of human reasoning by predicting both intuitive, fast System 1 and deliberate, slow System 2 processes. We investigate the potential of AI to mimic diverse reasoning behaviors across a human population, addressing what we call the "full reasoning spectrum problem". We designed reasoning tasks using a novel generalization of the Natural Language Inference (NLI) format to evaluate LLMs' ability to replicate human reasoning. The questions were crafted to elicit both System 1 and System 2 responses. Human responses were collected through crowd-sourcing and the entire distribution was modeled, rather than just the majority of the answers. We used personality-based prompting inspired by the Big Five personality model to elicit AI responses reflecting specific personality traits, capturing the diversity of human reasoning, and exploring how personality traits influence LLM outputs. Combined with genetic algorithms to optimize the weighting of these prompts, this method was tested alongside traditional machine learning models. The results show that LLMs can mimic human response distributions, with open-source models like Llama and Mistral outperforming proprietary GPT models. Personality-based prompting, especially when optimized with genetic algorithms, significantly enhanced LLMs' ability to predict human response distributions, suggesting that capturing suboptimal, naturalistic reasoning may require modeling techniques incorporating diverse reasoning styles and psychological profiles. The study concludes that personality-based prompting combined with genetic algorithms is promising for enhancing AI's 'human-ness' in reasoning.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 19, 2025

Failure Modes in LLM Systems: A System-Level Taxonomy for Reliable AI Applications

Large language models (LLMs) are being rapidly integrated into decision-support tools, automation workflows, and AI-enabled software systems. However, their behavior in production environments remains poorly understood, and their failure patterns differ fundamentally from those of traditional machine learning models. This paper presents a system-level taxonomy of fifteen hidden failure modes that arise in real-world LLM applications, including multi-step reasoning drift, latent inconsistency, context-boundary degradation, incorrect tool invocation, version drift, and cost-driven performance collapse. Using this taxonomy, we analyze the growing gap in evaluation and monitoring practices: existing benchmarks measure knowledge or reasoning but provide little insight into stability, reproducibility, drift, or workflow integration. We further examine the production challenges associated with deploying LLMs - including observability limitations, cost constraints, and update-induced regressions - and outline high-level design principles for building reliable, maintainable, and cost-aware LLM systems. Finally, we outline high-level design principles for building reliable, maintainable, and cost-aware LLM-based systems. By framing LLM reliability as a system-engineering problem rather than a purely model-centric one, this work provides an analytical foundation for future research on evaluation methodology, AI system robustness, and dependable LLM deployment.

  • 1 authors
·
Nov 25, 2025

MAG-V: A Multi-Agent Framework for Synthetic Data Generation and Verification

Extending the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with functions or tools for environment interaction has led to the emergence of the agent paradigm. In industry, training an LLM is not always feasible because of the scarcity of domain data, legal holds on proprietary customer data, rapidly changing business requirements, and the need to prototype new assistants. Agents provide an elegant solution to the above by relying on the zero-shot reasoning abilities of the underlying LLM and utilizing tools to explore and reason over customer data and respond to user requests. However, there are two concerns here: (I) acquiring large scale customer queries for agent testing is time-consuming, and (II) high reliance on the tool call sequence (or trajectory) followed by the agent to respond to user queries may lead to unexpected or incorrect behavior. To address this, we propose MAG-V, a multi-agent framework to first generate a dataset of questions that mimic customer queries; and second, reverse-engineer alternate questions from the responses for trajectory verification. Initial results indicate that our synthetic data can improve agent performance on actual customer queries. Furthermore, our trajectory verification methodology, inspired by distant supervision and using traditional machine learning (ML) models, outperforms a GPT-4o judge baseline by 11% accuracy and matches the performance of a GPT-4 judge on our constructed dataset. Overall, our approach is a step towards unifying diverse task agents into a cohesive framework for achieving an aligned objective.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 28, 2024

Inductive-bias Learning: Generating Code Models with Large Language Model

Large Language Models(LLMs) have been attracting attention due to a ability called in-context learning(ICL). ICL, without updating the parameters of a LLM, it is possible to achieve highly accurate inference based on rules ``in the context'' by merely inputting a training data into the prompt. Although ICL is a developing field with many unanswered questions, LLMs themselves serves as a inference model, seemingly realizing inference without explicitly indicate ``inductive bias''. On the other hand, a code generation is also a highlighted application of LLMs. The accuracy of code generation has dramatically improved, enabling even non-engineers to generate code to perform the desired tasks by crafting appropriate prompts. In this paper, we propose a novel ``learning'' method called an ``Inductive-Bias Learning (IBL)'', which combines the techniques of ICL and code generation. An idea of IBL is straightforward. Like ICL, IBL inputs a training data into the prompt and outputs a code with a necessary structure for inference (we referred to as ``Code Model'') from a ``contextual understanding''. Despite being a seemingly simple approach, IBL encompasses both a ``property of inference without explicit inductive bias'' inherent in ICL and a ``readability and explainability'' of the code generation. Surprisingly, generated Code Models have been found to achieve predictive accuracy comparable to, and in some cases surpassing, ICL and representative machine learning models. Our IBL code is open source: https://github.com/fuyu-quant/IBLM

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 18, 2023

Evaluating Machine Learning Models with NERO: Non-Equivariance Revealed on Orbits

Proper evaluations are crucial for better understanding, troubleshooting, interpreting model behaviors and further improving model performance. While using scalar-based error metrics provides a fast way to overview model performance, they are often too abstract to display certain weak spots and lack information regarding important model properties, such as robustness. This not only hinders machine learning models from being more interpretable and gaining trust, but also can be misleading to both model developers and users. Additionally, conventional evaluation procedures often leave researchers unclear about where and how model fails, which complicates model comparisons and further developments. To address these issues, we propose a novel evaluation workflow, named Non-Equivariance Revealed on Orbits (NERO) Evaluation. The goal of NERO evaluation is to turn focus from traditional scalar-based metrics onto evaluating and visualizing models equivariance, closely capturing model robustness, as well as to allow researchers quickly investigating interesting or unexpected model behaviors. NERO evaluation is consist of a task-agnostic interactive interface and a set of visualizations, called NERO plots, which reveals the equivariance property of the model. Case studies on how NERO evaluation can be applied to multiple research areas, including 2D digit recognition, object detection, particle image velocimetry (PIV), and 3D point cloud classification, demonstrate that NERO evaluation can quickly illustrate different model equivariance, and effectively explain model behaviors through interactive visualizations of the model outputs. In addition, we propose consensus, an alternative to ground truths, to be used in NERO evaluation so that model equivariance can still be evaluated with new, unlabeled datasets.

  • 5 authors
·
May 31, 2023

Trusted Machine Learning Models Unlock Private Inference for Problems Currently Infeasible with Cryptography

We often interact with untrusted parties. Prioritization of privacy can limit the effectiveness of these interactions, as achieving certain goals necessitates sharing private data. Traditionally, addressing this challenge has involved either seeking trusted intermediaries or constructing cryptographic protocols that restrict how much data is revealed, such as multi-party computations or zero-knowledge proofs. While significant advances have been made in scaling cryptographic approaches, they remain limited in terms of the size and complexity of applications they can be used for. In this paper, we argue that capable machine learning models can fulfill the role of a trusted third party, thus enabling secure computations for applications that were previously infeasible. In particular, we describe Trusted Capable Model Environments (TCMEs) as an alternative approach for scaling secure computation, where capable machine learning model(s) interact under input/output constraints, with explicit information flow control and explicit statelessness. This approach aims to achieve a balance between privacy and computational efficiency, enabling private inference where classical cryptographic solutions are currently infeasible. We describe a number of use cases that are enabled by TCME, and show that even some simple classic cryptographic problems can already be solved with TCME. Finally, we outline current limitations and discuss the path forward in implementing them.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 15, 2025 2

An Integrated Optimization and Machine Learning Models to Predict the Admission Status of Emergency Patients

This work proposes a framework for optimizing machine learning algorithms. The practicality of the framework is illustrated using an important case study from the healthcare domain, which is predicting the admission status of emergency department (ED) patients (e.g., admitted vs. discharged) using patient data at the time of triage. The proposed framework can mitigate the crowding problem by proactively planning the patient boarding process. A large retrospective dataset of patient records is obtained from the electronic health record database of all ED visits over three years from three major locations of a healthcare provider in the Midwest of the US. Three machine learning algorithms are proposed: T-XGB, T-ADAB, and T-MLP. T-XGB integrates extreme gradient boosting (XGB) and Tabu Search (TS), T-ADAB integrates Adaboost and TS, and T-MLP integrates multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and TS. The proposed algorithms are compared with the traditional algorithms: XGB, ADAB, and MLP, in which their parameters are tunned using grid search. The three proposed algorithms and the original ones are trained and tested using nine data groups that are obtained from different feature selection methods. In other words, 54 models are developed. Performance was evaluated using five measures: Area under the curve (AUC), sensitivity, specificity, F1, and accuracy. The results show that the newly proposed algorithms resulted in high AUC and outperformed the traditional algorithms. The T-ADAB performs the best among the newly developed algorithms. The AUC, sensitivity, specificity, F1, and accuracy of the best model are 95.4%, 99.3%, 91.4%, 95.2%, 97.2%, respectively.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 18, 2022

Creating and Evaluating Code-Mixed Nepali-English and Telugu-English Datasets for Abusive Language Detection Using Traditional and Deep Learning Models

With the growing presence of multilingual users on social media, detecting abusive language in code-mixed text has become increasingly challenging. Code-mixed communication, where users seamlessly switch between English and their native languages, poses difficulties for traditional abuse detection models, as offensive content may be context-dependent or obscured by linguistic blending. While abusive language detection has been extensively explored for high-resource languages like English and Hindi, low-resource languages such as Telugu and Nepali remain underrepresented, leaving gaps in effective moderation. In this study, we introduce a novel, manually annotated dataset of 2 thousand Telugu-English and 5 Nepali-English code-mixed comments, categorized as abusive and non-abusive, collected from various social media platforms. The dataset undergoes rigorous preprocessing before being evaluated across multiple Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), and Large Language Models (LLMs). We experimented with models including Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Support Vector Machines (SVM), Neural Networks (NN), LSTM, CNN, and LLMs, optimizing their performance through hyperparameter tuning, and evaluate it using 10-fold cross-validation and statistical significance testing (t-test). Our findings provide key insights into the challenges of detecting abusive language in code-mixed settings and offer a comparative analysis of computational approaches. This study contributes to advancing NLP for low-resource languages by establishing benchmarks for abusive language detection in Telugu-English and Nepali-English code-mixed text. The dataset and insights can aid in the development of more robust moderation strategies for multilingual social media environments.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 23, 2025

Deep learning in business analytics and operations research: Models, applications and managerial implications

Business analytics refers to methods and practices that create value through data for individuals, firms, and organizations. This field is currently experiencing a radical shift due to the advent of deep learning: deep neural networks promise improvements in prediction performance as compared to models from traditional machine learning. However, our research into the existing body of literature reveals a scarcity of research works utilizing deep learning in our discipline. Accordingly, the objectives of this overview article are as follows: (1) we review research on deep learning for business analytics from an operational point of view. (2) We motivate why researchers and practitioners from business analytics should utilize deep neural networks and review potential use cases, necessary requirements, and benefits. (3) We investigate the added value to operations research in different case studies with real data from entrepreneurial undertakings. All such cases demonstrate improvements in operational performance over traditional machine learning and thus direct value gains. (4) We provide guidelines and implications for researchers, managers and practitioners in operations research who want to advance their capabilities for business analytics with regard to deep learning. (5) Our computational experiments find that default, out-of-the-box architectures are often suboptimal and thus highlight the value of customized architectures by proposing a novel deep-embedded network.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 28, 2018

A Comprehensive Overview and Comparative Analysis on Deep Learning Models: CNN, RNN, LSTM, GRU

Deep learning (DL) has emerged as a powerful subset of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), outperforming traditional ML methods, especially in handling unstructured and large datasets. Its impact spans across various domains, including speech recognition, healthcare, autonomous vehicles, cybersecurity, predictive analytics, and more. However, the complexity and dynamic nature of real-world problems present challenges in designing effective deep learning models. Consequently, several deep learning models have been developed to address different problems and applications. In this article, we conduct a comprehensive survey of various deep learning models, including Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), Transformer, Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KAN), Generative Models, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), and Deep Transfer Learning. We examine the structure, applications, benefits, and limitations of each model. Furthermore, we perform an analysis using three publicly available datasets: IMDB, ARAS, and Fruit-360. We compared the performance of six renowned deep learning models: CNN, RNN, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM, Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), and Bidirectional GRU alongside two newer models, TCN and Transformer, using the IMDB and ARAS datasets. Additionally, we evaluated the performance of eight CNN-based models, including VGG (Visual Geometry Group), Inception, ResNet (Residual Network), InceptionResNet, Xception (Extreme Inception), MobileNet, DenseNet (Dense Convolutional Network), and NASNet (Neural Architecture Search Network), for image classification tasks using the Fruit-360 dataset.

  • 4 authors
·
May 27, 2023

CELLM: An Efficient Communication in Large Language Models Training for Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) is a recent model training paradigm in which client devices collaboratively train a model without ever aggregating their data. Crucially, this scheme offers users potential privacy and security benefits by only ever communicating updates to the model weights to a central server as opposed to traditional machine learning (ML) training which directly communicates and aggregates data. However, FL training suffers from statistical heterogeneity as clients may have differing local data distributions. Large language models (LLMs) offer a potential solution to this issue of heterogeneity given that they have consistently been shown to be able to learn on vast amounts of noisy data. While LLMs are a promising development for resolving the consistent issue of non-I.I.D. Clients in federated settings exacerbate two other bottlenecks in FL: limited local computing and expensive communication. This thesis aims to develop efficient training methods for LLMs in FL. To this end, we employ two critical techniques in enabling efficient training. First, we use low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to reduce the computational load of local model training. Second, we communicate sparse updates throughout training to significantly cut down on communication costs. Taken together, our method reduces communication costs by up to 10x over vanilla LoRA and up to 5x over more complex sparse LoRA baselines while achieving greater utility. We emphasize the importance of carefully applying sparsity and picking effective rank and sparsity configurations for federated LLM training.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 30, 2024

Hierarchical Text Classification Using Black Box Large Language Models

Hierarchical Text Classification (HTC) aims to assign texts to structured label hierarchies; however, it faces challenges due to data scarcity and model complexity. This study explores the feasibility of using black box Large Language Models (LLMs) accessed via APIs for HTC, as an alternative to traditional machine learning methods that require extensive labeled data and computational resources. We evaluate three prompting strategies -- Direct Leaf Label Prediction (DL), Direct Hierarchical Label Prediction (DH), and Top-down Multi-step Hierarchical Label Prediction (TMH) -- in both zero-shot and few-shot settings, comparing the accuracy and cost-effectiveness of these strategies. Experiments on two datasets show that a few-shot setting consistently improves classification accuracy compared to a zero-shot setting. While a traditional machine learning model achieves high accuracy on a dataset with a shallow hierarchy, LLMs, especially DH strategy, tend to outperform the machine learning model on a dataset with a deeper hierarchy. API costs increase significantly due to the higher input tokens required for deeper label hierarchies on DH strategy. These results emphasize the trade-off between accuracy improvement and the computational cost of prompt strategy. These findings highlight the potential of black box LLMs for HTC while underscoring the need to carefully select a prompt strategy to balance performance and cost.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 6, 2025

Multimodal Large Language Models for Image, Text, and Speech Data Augmentation: A Survey

In the past five years, research has shifted from traditional Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) approaches to leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) , including multimodality, for data augmentation to enhance generalization, and combat overfitting in training deep convolutional neural networks. However, while existing surveys predominantly focus on ML and DL techniques or limited modalities (text or images), a gap remains in addressing the latest advancements and multi-modal applications of LLM-based methods. This survey fills that gap by exploring recent literature utilizing multimodal LLMs to augment image, text, and audio data, offering a comprehensive understanding of these processes. We outlined various methods employed in the LLM-based image, text and speech augmentation, and discussed the limitations identified in current approaches. Additionally, we identified potential solutions to these limitations from the literature to enhance the efficacy of data augmentation practices using multimodal LLMs. This survey serves as a foundation for future research, aiming to refine and expand the use of multimodal LLMs in enhancing dataset quality and diversity for deep learning applications. (Surveyed Paper GitHub Repo: https://github.com/WSUAgRobotics/data-aug-multi-modal-llm. Keywords: LLM data augmentation, Grok text data augmentation, DeepSeek image data augmentation, Grok speech data augmentation, GPT audio augmentation, voice augmentation, DeepSeek for data augmentation, DeepSeek R1 text data augmentation, DeepSeek R1 image augmentation, Image Augmentation using LLM, Text Augmentation using LLM, LLM data augmentation for deep learning applications)

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 29, 2025

Comparison of biomedical relationship extraction methods and models for knowledge graph creation

Biomedical research is growing at such an exponential pace that scientists, researchers, and practitioners are no more able to cope with the amount of published literature in the domain. The knowledge presented in the literature needs to be systematized in such a way that claims and hypotheses can be easily found, accessed, and validated. Knowledge graphs can provide such a framework for semantic knowledge representation from literature. However, in order to build a knowledge graph, it is necessary to extract knowledge as relationships between biomedical entities and normalize both entities and relationship types. In this paper, we present and compare few rule-based and machine learning-based (Naive Bayes, Random Forests as examples of traditional machine learning methods and DistilBERT, PubMedBERT, T5 and SciFive-based models as examples of modern deep learning transformers) methods for scalable relationship extraction from biomedical literature, and for the integration into the knowledge graphs. We examine how resilient are these various methods to unbalanced and fairly small datasets. Our experiments show that transformer-based models handle well both small (due to pre-training on a large dataset) and unbalanced datasets. The best performing model was the PubMedBERT-based model fine-tuned on balanced data, with a reported F1-score of 0.92. DistilBERT-based model followed with F1-score of 0.89, performing faster and with lower resource requirements. BERT-based models performed better then T5-based generative models.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 5, 2022

Finetuning AI Foundation Models to Develop Subgrid-Scale Parameterizations: A Case Study on Atmospheric Gravity Waves

Global climate models parameterize a range of atmospheric-oceanic processes like gravity waves, clouds, moist convection, and turbulence that cannot be sufficiently resolved. These subgrid-scale closures for unresolved processes are a leading source of model uncertainty. Here, we present a new approach to developing machine learning parameterizations of small-scale climate processes by fine-tuning a pre-trained AI foundation model (FM). FMs are largely unexplored in climate research. A pre-trained encoder-decoder from a 2.3 billion parameter FM (NASA and IBM Research's Prithvi WxC) -- which contains a latent probabilistic representation of atmospheric evolution -- is fine-tuned (or reused) to create a deep learning parameterization for atmospheric gravity waves (GWs). The parameterization captures GW effects for a coarse-resolution climate model by learning the fluxes from an atmospheric reanalysis with 10 times finer resolution. A comparison of monthly averages and instantaneous evolution with a machine learning model baseline (an Attention U-Net) reveals superior predictive performance of the FM parameterization throughout the atmosphere, even in regions excluded from pre-training. This performance boost is quantified using the Hellinger distance, which is 0.11 for the baseline and 0.06 for the fine-tuned model. Our findings emphasize the versatility and reusability of FMs, which could be used to accomplish a range of atmosphere- and climate-related applications, leading the way for the creation of observations-driven and physically accurate parameterizations for more earth-system processes.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 3, 2025

SpectraFM: Tuning into Stellar Foundation Models

Machine learning models in astrophysics are often limited in scope and cannot adapt to data from new instruments or tasks. We introduce SpectraFM, a Transformer-based foundation model architecture that can be pre-trained on stellar spectra from any wavelength range and instrument. SpectraFM excels in generalization by combining flexibility with knowledge transfer from pre-training, allowing it to outperform traditional machine learning methods, especially in scenarios with limited training data. Our model is pre-trained on approximately 90k examples of synthetic spectra to predict the chemical abundances (Fe, Mg, O), temperature, and specific gravity of stars. We then fine-tune the model on real spectra to adapt it to observational data before fine-tuning it further on a restricted 100-star training set in a different wavelength range to predict iron abundance. Despite a small iron-rich training set of real spectra, transfer learning from the synthetic spectra pre-training enables the model to perform well on iron-poor stars. In contrast, a neural network trained from scratch fails at this task. We investigate the Transformer attention mechanism and find that the wavelengths receiving attention carry physical information about chemical composition. By leveraging the knowledge from pre-training and its ability to handle non-spectra inputs, SpectraFM reduces the need for large training datasets and enables cross-instrument and cross-domain research. Its adaptability makes it well-suited for tackling emerging challenges in astrophysics, like extracting insights from multi-modal datasets.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 6, 2024

When Prices Double in a Week: Forecasting of Agricultural Volatility in Import-Isolated Markets

Vegetable prices in Sri Lanka are highly volatile because the market is largely import-isolated, so supply disruptions quickly drive prices up. This study develops a machine learning framework to forecast such volatility by incorporating supply-chain-aware features and explicitly modelling the country's two cultivation seasons, Maha (October-April) and Yala (May-September). An integrated dataset was constructed by combining retail and farmer-gate prices with origin-aligned weather variables, diesel costs, and exchange rates across 12 vegetable varieties and 14 market centres from 2013 to 2019. A gradient-boosted ensemble model (XGBoost and LightGBM) was trained and optimised using Optuna, and unified and season-specific configurations were compared. Results show that season-specific models improve within-season fit, with the Yala-specific model achieving the highest R2 of 0.9420 (95% CI [0.690, 1.000]), while the unified model delivers the best overall predictive accuracy of 90.84% (95% CI [88.34%, 91.52%]) and an R2 of 0.9281 (95% CI [0.760, 1.000]). Notably, the unified model maintains 85.96% accuracy on a completely unseen 2024 hyperinflationary period without retraining, successfully tracking major price surges. These findings suggest that agricultural price movements in import-constrained markets are meaningfully predictable when models capture supply-chain dynamics, offering practical value for early warning and decision making by farmers, traders, and policymakers. Existing studies on Sri Lankan vegetable prices are confined to Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) and Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (GARCH) applied to single markets, with no supply-chain features, seasonal segmentation, or cross-regime validation.

  • 9 authors
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Jun 27

Harnessing Earnings Reports for Stock Predictions: A QLoRA-Enhanced LLM Approach

Accurate stock market predictions following earnings reports are crucial for investors. Traditional methods, particularly classical machine learning models, struggle with these predictions because they cannot effectively process and interpret extensive textual data contained in earnings reports and often overlook nuances that influence market movements. This paper introduces an advanced approach by employing Large Language Models (LLMs) instruction fine-tuned with a novel combination of instruction-based techniques and quantized low-rank adaptation (QLoRA) compression. Our methodology integrates 'base factors', such as financial metric growth and earnings transcripts, with 'external factors', including recent market indices performances and analyst grades, to create a rich, supervised dataset. This comprehensive dataset enables our models to achieve superior predictive performance in terms of accuracy, weighted F1, and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), especially evident in the comparison with benchmarks such as GPT-4. We specifically highlight the efficacy of the llama-3-8b-Instruct-4bit model, which showcases significant improvements over baseline models. The paper also discusses the potential of expanding the output capabilities to include a 'Hold' option and extending the prediction horizon, aiming to accommodate various investment styles and time frames. This study not only demonstrates the power of integrating cutting-edge AI with fine-tuned financial data but also paves the way for future research in enhancing AI-driven financial analysis tools.

  • 10 authors
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Aug 13, 2024

Abjad-Kids: An Arabic Speech Classification Dataset for Primary Education

Speech-based AI educational applications have gained significant interest in recent years, particularly for children. However, children speech research remains limited due to the lack of publicly available datasets, especially for low-resource languages such as Arabic.This paper presents Abjad-Kids, an Arabic speech dataset designed for kindergarten and primary education, focusing on fundamental learning of alphabets, numbers, and colors. The dataset consists of 46397 audio samples collected from children aged 3 - 12 years, covering 141 classes. All samples were recorded under controlled specifications to ensure consistency in duration, sampling rate, and format. To address high intra-class similarity among Arabic phonemes and the limited samples per class, we propose a hierarchical audio classification based on CNN-LSTM architectures. Our proposed methodology decomposes alphabet recognition into a two-stage process: an initial grouping classification model followed by specialized classifiers for each group. Both strategies: static linguistic-based grouping and dynamic clustering-based grouping, were evaluated. Experimental results demonstrate that static linguistic-based grouping achieves superior performance. Comparisons between traditional machine learning with deep learning approaches, highlight the effectiveness of CNN-LSTM models combined with data augmentation. Despite achieving promising results, most of our experiments indicate a challenge with overfitting, which is likely due to the limited number of samples, even after data augmentation and model regularization. Thus, future work may focus on collecting additional data to address this issue. Abjad-Kids will be publicly available. We hope that Abjad-Kids enrich children representation in speech dataset, and be a good resource for future research in Arabic speech classification for kids.

  • 7 authors
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Mar 10

multiMentalRoBERTa: A Fine-tuned Multiclass Classifier for Mental Health Disorder

The early detection of mental health disorders from social media text is critical for enabling timely support, risk assessment, and referral to appropriate resources. This work introduces multiMentalRoBERTa, a fine-tuned RoBERTa model designed for multiclass classification of common mental health conditions, including stress, anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suicidal ideation, and neutral discourse. Drawing on multiple curated datasets, data exploration is conducted to analyze class overlaps, revealing strong correlations between depression and suicidal ideation as well as anxiety and PTSD, while stress emerges as a broad, overlapping category. Comparative experiments with traditional machine learning methods, domain-specific transformers, and prompting-based large language models demonstrate that multiMentalRoBERTa achieves superior performance, with macro F1-scores of 0.839 in the six-class setup and 0.870 in the five-class setup (excluding stress), outperforming both fine-tuned MentalBERT and baseline classifiers. Beyond predictive accuracy, explainability methods, including Layer Integrated Gradients and KeyBERT, are applied to identify lexical cues that drive classification, with a particular focus on distinguishing depression from suicidal ideation. The findings emphasize the effectiveness of fine-tuned transformers for reliable and interpretable detection in sensitive contexts, while also underscoring the importance of fairness, bias mitigation, and human-in-the-loop safety protocols. Overall, multiMentalRoBERTa is presented as a lightweight, robust, and deployable solution for enhancing support in mental health platforms.

  • 3 authors
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Oct 31, 2025

Empirical Study of Market Impact Conditional on Order-Flow Imbalance

In this research, we have empirically investigated the key drivers affecting liquidity in equity markets. We illustrated how theoretical models, such as Kyle's model, of agents' interplay in the financial markets, are aligned with the phenomena observed in publicly available trades and quotes data. Specifically, we confirmed that for small signed order-flows, the price impact grows linearly with increase in the order-flow imbalance. We have, further, implemented a machine learning algorithm to forecast market impact given a signed order-flow. Our findings suggest that machine learning models can be used in estimation of financial variables; and predictive accuracy of such learning algorithms can surpass the performance of traditional statistical approaches. Understanding the determinants of price impact is crucial for several reasons. From a theoretical stance, modelling the impact provides a statistical measure of liquidity. Practitioners adopt impact models as a pre-trade tool to estimate expected transaction costs and optimize the execution of their strategies. This further serves as a post-trade valuation benchmark as suboptimal execution can significantly deteriorate a portfolio performance. More broadly, the price impact reflects the balance of liquidity across markets. This is of central importance to regulators as it provides an all-encompassing explanation of the correlation between market design and systemic risk, enabling regulators to design more stable and efficient markets.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 17, 2020

Fine-Tuning Video Transformers for Word-Level Bangla Sign Language: A Comparative Analysis for Classification Tasks

Sign Language Recognition (SLR) involves the automatic identification and classification of sign gestures from images or video, converting them into text or speech to improve accessibility for the hearing-impaired community. In Bangladesh, Bangla Sign Language (BdSL) serves as the primary mode of communication for many individuals with hearing impairments. This study fine-tunes state-of-the-art video transformer architectures -- VideoMAE, ViViT, and TimeSformer -- on BdSLW60 (arXiv:2402.08635), a small-scale BdSL dataset with 60 frequent signs. We standardized the videos to 30 FPS, resulting in 9,307 user trial clips. To evaluate scalability and robustness, the models were also fine-tuned on BdSLW401 (arXiv:2503.02360), a large-scale dataset with 401 sign classes. Additionally, we benchmark performance against public datasets, including LSA64 and WLASL. Data augmentation techniques such as random cropping, horizontal flipping, and short-side scaling were applied to improve model robustness. To ensure balanced evaluation across folds during model selection, we employed 10-fold stratified cross-validation on the training set, while signer-independent evaluation was carried out using held-out test data from unseen users U4 and U8. Results show that video transformer models significantly outperform traditional machine learning and deep learning approaches. Performance is influenced by factors such as dataset size, video quality, frame distribution, frame rate, and model architecture. Among the models, the VideoMAE variant (MCG-NJU/videomae-base-finetuned-kinetics) achieved the highest accuracies of 95.5% on the frame rate corrected BdSLW60 dataset and 81.04% on the front-facing signs of BdSLW401 -- demonstrating strong potential for scalable and accurate BdSL recognition.

  • 3 authors
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Jun 4, 2025

AI for Explosive Ordnance Detection in Clearance Operations: The State of Research

The detection and clearance of explosive ordnance (EO) continues to be a predominantly manual and high-risk process that can benefit from advances in technology to improve its efficiency and effectiveness. Research on artificial intelligence (AI) for EO detection in clearance operations has grown significantly in recent years. However, this research spans a wide range of fields, making it difficult to gain a comprehensive understanding of current trends and developments. Therefore, this article provides a literature review of academic research on AI for EO detection in clearance operations. It finds that research can be grouped into two main streams: AI for EO object detection and AI for EO risk prediction, with the latter being much less studied than the former. From the literature review, we develop three opportunities for future research. These include a call for renewed efforts in the use of AI for EO risk prediction, the combination of different AI systems and data sources, and novel approaches to improve EO risk prediction performance, such as pattern-based predictions. Finally, we provide a perspective on the future of AI for EO detection in clearance operations. We emphasize the role of traditional machine learning (ML) for this task, the need to dynamically incorporate expert knowledge into the models, and the importance of effectively integrating AI systems with real-world operations.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 31, 2024

Decentralised Traffic Incident Detection via Network Lasso

Traffic incident detection plays a key role in intelligent transportation systems, which has gained great attention in transport engineering. In the past, traditional machine learning (ML) based detection methods achieved good performance under a centralised computing paradigm, where all data are transmitted to a central server for building ML models therein. Nowadays, deep neural networks based federated learning (FL) has become a mainstream detection approach to enable the model training in a decentralised manner while warranting local data governance. Such neural networks-centred techniques, however, have overshadowed the utility of well-established ML-based detection methods. In this work, we aim to explore the potential of potent conventional ML-based detection models in modern traffic scenarios featured by distributed data. We leverage an elegant but less explored distributed optimisation framework named Network Lasso, with guaranteed global convergence for convex problem formulations, integrate the potent convex ML model with it, and compare it with centralised learning, local learning, and federated learning methods atop a well-known traffic incident detection dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed network lasso-based approach provides a promising alternative to the FL-based approach in data-decentralised traffic scenarios, with a strong convergence guarantee while rekindling the significance of conventional ML-based detection methods.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 28, 2024

Natively neuromorphic LMU architecture for encoding-free SNN-based HAR on commercial edge devices

Neuromorphic models take inspiration from the human brain by adopting bio-plausible neuron models to build alternatives to traditional Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) solutions. The scarce availability of dedicated hardware able to actualize the emulation of brain-inspired computation, which is otherwise only simulated, yet still hinders the wide adoption of neuromorphic computing for edge devices and embedded systems. With this premise, we adopt the perspective of neuromorphic computing for conventional hardware and we present the L2MU, a natively neuromorphic Legendre Memory Unit (LMU) which entirely relies on Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neurons. Specifically, the original recurrent architecture of LMU has been redesigned by modelling every constituent element with neural populations made of LIF or Current-Based (CuBa) LIF neurons. To couple neuromorphic computing and off-the-shelf edge devices, we equipped the L2MU with an input module for the conversion of real values into spikes, which makes it an encoding-free implementation of a Recurrent Spiking Neural Network (RSNN) able to directly work with raw sensor signals on non-dedicated hardware. As a use case to validate our network, we selected the task of Human Activity Recognition (HAR). We benchmarked our L2MU on smartwatch signals from hand-oriented activities, deploying it on three different commercial edge devices in compressed versions too. The reported results remark the possibility of considering neuromorphic models not only in an exclusive relationship with dedicated hardware but also as a suitable choice to work with common sensors and devices.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 4, 2024

Tabular LLMs for Interpretable Few-Shot Alzheimer's Disease Prediction with Multimodal Biomedical Data

Accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) requires handling tabular biomarker data, yet such data are often small and incomplete, where deep learning models frequently fail to outperform classical methods. Pretrained large language models (LLMs) offer few-shot generalization, structured reasoning, and interpretable outputs, providing a powerful paradigm shift for clinical prediction. We propose TAP-GPT Tabular Alzheimer's Prediction GPT, a domain-adapted tabular LLM framework built on TableGPT2 and fine-tuned for few-shot AD classification using tabular prompts rather than plain texts. We evaluate TAP-GPT across four ADNI-derived datasets, including QT-PAD biomarkers and region-level structural MRI, amyloid PET, and tau PET for binary AD classification. Across multimodal and unimodal settings, TAP-GPT improves upon its backbone models and outperforms traditional machine learning baselines in the few-shot setting while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art general-purpose LLMs. We show that feature selection mitigates degradation in high-dimensional inputs and that TAP-GPT maintains stable performance under simulated and real-world missingness without imputation. Additionally, TAP-GPT produces structured, modality-aware reasoning aligned with established AD biology and shows greater stability under self-reflection, supporting its use in iterative multi-agent systems. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic application of a tabular-specialized LLM to multimodal biomarker-based AD prediction, demonstrating that such pretrained models can effectively address structured clinical prediction tasks and laying the foundation for tabular LLM-driven multi-agent clinical decision-support systems. The source code is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/sophie-kearney/TAP-GPT.

ComProScanner: A multi-agent based framework for composition-property structured data extraction from scientific literature

Since the advent of various pre-trained large language models, extracting structured knowledge from scientific text has experienced a revolutionary change compared with traditional machine learning or natural language processing techniques. Despite these advances, accessible automated tools that allow users to construct, validate, and visualise datasets from scientific literature extraction remain scarce. We therefore developed ComProScanner, an autonomous multi-agent platform that facilitates the extraction, validation, classification, and visualisation of machine-readable chemical compositions and properties, integrated with synthesis data from journal articles for comprehensive database creation. We evaluated our framework using 100 journal articles against 10 different LLMs, including both open-source and proprietary models, to extract highly complex compositions associated with ceramic piezoelectric materials and corresponding piezoelectric strain coefficients (d33), motivated by the lack of a large dataset for such materials. DeepSeek-V3-0324 outperformed all models with a significant overall accuracy of 0.82. This framework provides a simple, user-friendly, readily-usable package for extracting highly complex experimental data buried in the literature to build machine learning or deep learning datasets.

Quantum-Inspired Stacked Integrated Concept Graph Model (QISICGM) for Diabetes Risk Prediction

The Quantum-Inspired Stacked Integrated Concept Graph Model (QISICGM) is an innovative machine learning framework that harnesses quantum-inspired techniques to predict diabetes risk with exceptional accuracy and efficiency. Utilizing the PIMA Indians Diabetes dataset augmented with 2,000 synthetic samples to mitigate class imbalance (total: 2,768 samples, 1,949 positives), QISICGM integrates a self-improving concept graph with a stacked ensemble comprising Random Forests (RF), Extra Trees (ET), transformers, convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and feed-forward neural networks (FFNNs). This approach achieves an out-of-fold (OOF) F1 score of 0.8933 and an AUC of 0.8699, outperforming traditional methods. Quantum inspired elements, such as phase feature mapping and neighborhood sequence modeling, enrich feature representations, enabling CPU-efficient inference at 8.5 rows per second. This paper presents a detailed architecture, theoretical foundations, code insights, and performance evaluations, including visualizations from the outputs subfolder. The open-source implementation (v1.0.0) is available at https://github.com/keninayoung/QISICGM, positioning QISICGM as a potential benchmark for AI-assisted clinical triage in diabetes and beyond. Ultimately, this work emphasizes trustworthy AI through calibration, interpretability, and open-source reproducibility.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 12, 2025

Your Spending Needs Attention: Modeling Financial Habits with Transformers

Predictive models play a crucial role in the financial industry, enabling risk prediction, fraud detection, and personalized recommendations, where slight changes in core model performance can result in billions of dollars in revenue or losses. While financial institutions have access to enormous amounts of user data (e.g., bank transactions, in-app events, and customer support logs), leveraging this data effectively remains challenging due to its complexity and scale. Thus, in many financial institutions, most production models follow traditional machine learning (ML) approaches by converting unstructured data into manually engineered tabular features. Conversely, other domains (e.g., natural language processing) have effectively utilized self-supervised learning (SSL) to learn rich representations from raw data, removing the need for manual feature extraction. In this paper, we investigate using transformer-based representation learning models for transaction data, hypothesizing that these models, trained on massive data, can provide a novel and powerful approach to understanding customer behavior. We propose a new method enabling the use of SSL with transaction data by adapting transformer-based models to handle both textual and structured attributes. Our approach, denoted nuFormer, includes an end-to-end fine-tuning method that integrates user embeddings with existing tabular features. Our experiments demonstrate improvements for large-scale recommendation problems at Nubank. Notably, these gains are achieved solely through enhanced representation learning rather than incorporating new data sources.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 30, 2025

Foundation Model of Electronic Medical Records for Adaptive Risk Estimation

Hospitals struggle to predict critical outcomes. Traditional early warning systems, like NEWS and MEWS, rely on static variables and fixed thresholds, limiting their adaptability, accuracy, and personalization. We previously developed the Enhanced Transformer for Health Outcome Simulation (ETHOS), an AI model that tokenizes patient health timelines (PHTs) from EHRs and uses transformer-based architectures to predict future PHTs. ETHOS is a versatile framework for developing a wide range of applications. In this work, we develop the Adaptive Risk Estimation System (ARES) that leverages ETHOS to compute dynamic, personalized risk probabilities for clinician-defined critical events. ARES also features a personalized explainability module that highlights key clinical factors influencing risk estimates. We evaluated ARES using the MIMIC-IV v2.2 dataset together with its Emergency Department (ED) extension and benchmarked performance against both classical early warning systems and contemporary machine learning models. The entire dataset was tokenized resulting in 285,622 PHTs, comprising over 360 million tokens. ETHOS outperformed benchmark models in predicting hospital admissions, ICU admissions, and prolonged stays, achieving superior AUC scores. Its risk estimates were robust across demographic subgroups, with calibration curves confirming model reliability. The explainability module provided valuable insights into patient-specific risk factors. ARES, powered by ETHOS, advances predictive healthcare AI by delivering dynamic, real-time, personalized risk estimation with patient-specific explainability. Although our results are promising, the clinical impact remains uncertain. Demonstrating ARES's true utility in real-world settings will be the focus of our future work. We release the source code to facilitate future research.

  • 12 authors
·
Feb 9, 2025

Sort & Slice: A Simple and Superior Alternative to Hash-Based Folding for Extended-Connectivity Fingerprints

Extended-connectivity fingerprints (ECFPs) are a ubiquitous tool in current cheminformatics and molecular machine learning, and one of the most prevalent molecular feature extraction techniques used for chemical prediction. Atom features learned by graph neural networks can be aggregated to compound-level representations using a large spectrum of graph pooling methods; in contrast, sets of detected ECFP substructures are by default transformed into bit vectors using only a simple hash-based folding procedure. We introduce a general mathematical framework for the vectorisation of structural fingerprints via a formal operation called substructure pooling that encompasses hash-based folding, algorithmic substructure-selection, and a wide variety of other potential techniques. We go on to describe Sort & Slice, an easy-to-implement and bit-collision-free alternative to hash-based folding for the pooling of ECFP substructures. Sort & Slice first sorts ECFP substructures according to their relative prevalence in a given set of training compounds and then slices away all but the L most frequent substructures which are subsequently used to generate a binary fingerprint of desired length, L. We computationally compare the performance of hash-based folding, Sort & Slice, and two advanced supervised substructure-selection schemes (filtering and mutual-information maximisation) for ECFP-based molecular property prediction. Our results indicate that, despite its technical simplicity, Sort & Slice robustly (and at times substantially) outperforms traditional hash-based folding as well as the other investigated methods across prediction tasks, data splitting techniques, machine-learning models and ECFP hyperparameters. We thus recommend that Sort & Slice canonically replace hash-based folding as the default substructure-pooling technique to vectorise ECFPs for supervised molecular machine learning.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 10, 2024

Efficient Massive Black Hole Binary parameter estimation for LISA using Sequential Neural Likelihood

The inspiral, merger, and ringdown of Massive Black Hole Binaries (MBHBs) is one the main sources of Gravitational Waves (GWs) for the future Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), an ESA-led mission in the implementation phase. It is expected that LISA will detect these systems throughout the entire observable universe. Robust and efficient data analysis algorithms are necessary to detect and estimate physical parameters for these systems. In this work, we explore the application of Sequential Neural Likelihood, a simulation-based inference algorithm, to detect and characterize MBHB GW signals in synthetic LISA data. We describe in detail the different elements of the method, their performance and possible alternatives that can be used to enhance the performance. Instead of sampling from the conventional likelihood function, which requires a forward simulation for each evaluation, this method constructs a surrogate likelihood that is ultimately described by a neural network trained from a dataset of simulations of the MBHB signals and noise. One important advantage of this method is that, given that the likelihood is independent of the priors, we can iteratively train models that target specific observations in a fraction of the time and computational cost that other traditional and machine learning-based strategies would require. Because of the iterative nature of the method, we are able to train models to obtain qualitatively similar posteriors with less than 2\% of the simulator calls that Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods would require. We compare these posteriors with those obtained from Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques and discuss the differences that appear, in particular in relation with the important role that data compression has in the modular implementation of the method that we present. We also discuss different strategies to improve the performance of the algorithms.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 1, 2024

FastNet: Improving the physical consistency of machine-learning weather prediction models through loss function design

Machine learning weather prediction (MLWP) models have demonstrated remarkable potential in delivering accurate forecasts at significantly reduced computational cost compared to traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems. However, challenges remain in ensuring the physical consistency of MLWP outputs, particularly in deterministic settings. This study presents FastNet, a graph neural network (GNN)-based global prediction model, and investigates the impact of alternative loss function designs on improving the physical realism of its forecasts. We explore three key modifications to the standard mean squared error (MSE) loss: (1) a modified spherical harmonic (MSH) loss that penalises spectral amplitude errors to reduce blurring and enhance small-scale structure retention; (2) inclusion of horizontal gradient terms in the loss to suppress non-physical artefacts; and (3) an alternative wind representation that decouples speed and direction to better capture extreme wind events. Results show that while the MSH and gradient-based losses alone may slightly degrade RMSE scores, when trained in combination the model exhibits very similar MSE performance to an MSE-trained model while at the same time significantly improving spectral fidelity and physical consistency. The alternative wind representation further improves wind speed accuracy and reduces directional bias. Collectively, these findings highlight the importance of loss function design as a mechanism for embedding domain knowledge into MLWP models and advancing their operational readiness.

  • 34 authors
·
Sep 21, 2025

Machine Learning Workflow to Explain Black-box Models for Early Alzheimer's Disease Classification Evaluated for Multiple Datasets

Purpose: Hard-to-interpret Black-box Machine Learning (ML) were often used for early Alzheimer's Disease (AD) detection. Methods: To interpret eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Random Forest (RF), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) black-box models a workflow based on Shapley values was developed. All models were trained on the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset and evaluated for an independent ADNI test set, as well as the external Australian Imaging and Lifestyle flagship study of Ageing (AIBL), and Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS) datasets. Shapley values were compared to intuitively interpretable Decision Trees (DTs), and Logistic Regression (LR), as well as natural and permutation feature importances. To avoid the reduction of the explanation validity caused by correlated features, forward selection and aspect consolidation were implemented. Results: Some black-box models outperformed DTs and LR. The forward-selected features correspond to brain areas previously associated with AD. Shapley values identified biologically plausible associations with moderate to strong correlations with feature importances. The most important RF features to predict AD conversion were the volume of the amygdalae, and a cognitive test score. Good cognitive test performances and large brain volumes decreased the AD risk. The models trained using cognitive test scores significantly outperformed brain volumetric models (p<0.05). Cognitive Normal (CN) vs. AD models were successfully transferred to external datasets. Conclusion: In comparison to previous work, improved performances for ADNI and AIBL were achieved for CN vs. Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) classification using brain volumes. The Shapley values and the feature importances showed moderate to strong correlations.

  • 2 authors
·
May 12, 2022

Enhancing Traffic Incident Management with Large Language Models: A Hybrid Machine Learning Approach for Severity Classification

This research showcases the innovative integration of Large Language Models into machine learning workflows for traffic incident management, focusing on the classification of incident severity using accident reports. By leveraging features generated by modern language models alongside conventional data extracted from incident reports, our research demonstrates improvements in the accuracy of severity classification across several machine learning algorithms. Our contributions are threefold. First, we present an extensive comparison of various machine learning models paired with multiple large language models for feature extraction, aiming to identify the optimal combinations for accurate incident severity classification. Second, we contrast traditional feature engineering pipelines with those enhanced by language models, showcasing the superiority of language-based feature engineering in processing unstructured text. Third, our study illustrates how merging baseline features from accident reports with language-based features can improve the severity classification accuracy. This comprehensive approach not only advances the field of incident management but also highlights the cross-domain application potential of our methodology, particularly in contexts requiring the prediction of event outcomes from unstructured textual data or features translated into textual representation. Specifically, our novel methodology was applied to three distinct datasets originating from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Queensland, Australia. This cross-continental application underlines the robustness of our approach, suggesting its potential for widespread adoption in improving incident management processes globally.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 20, 2024

A Fuzzy Logic-Based Framework for Explainable Machine Learning in Big Data Analytics

The growing complexity of machine learning (ML) models in big data analytics, especially in domains such as environmental monitoring, highlights the critical need for interpretability and explainability to promote trust, ethical considerations, and regulatory adherence (e.g., GDPR). Traditional "black-box" models obstruct transparency, whereas post-hoc explainable AI (XAI) techniques like LIME and SHAP frequently compromise accuracy or fail to deliver inherent insights. This paper presents a novel framework that combines type-2 fuzzy sets, granular computing, and clustering to boost explainability and fairness in big data environments. When applied to the UCI Air Quality dataset, the framework effectively manages uncertainty in noisy sensor data, produces linguistic rules, and assesses fairness using silhouette scores and entropy. Key contributions encompass: (1) A type-2 fuzzy clustering approach that enhances cohesion by about 4% compared to type-1 methods (silhouette 0.365 vs. 0.349) and improves fairness (entropy 0.918); (2) Incorporation of fairness measures to mitigate biases in unsupervised scenarios; (3) A rule-based component for intrinsic XAI, achieving an average coverage of 0.65; (4) Scalable assessments showing linear runtime (roughly 0.005 seconds for sampled big data sizes). Experimental outcomes reveal superior performance relative to baselines such as DBSCAN and Agglomerative Clustering in terms of interpretability, fairness, and efficiency. Notably, the proposed method achieves a 4% improvement in silhouette score over type-1 fuzzy clustering and outperforms baselines in fairness (entropy reduction by up to 1%) and efficiency.

  • 2 authors
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Sep 28, 2025

Towards Automatic Translation of Machine Learning Visual Insights to Analytical Assertions

We present our vision for developing an automated tool capable of translating visual properties observed in Machine Learning (ML) visualisations into Python assertions. The tool aims to streamline the process of manually verifying these visualisations in the ML development cycle, which is critical as real-world data and assumptions often change post-deployment. In a prior study, we mined 54,070 Jupyter notebooks from Github and created a catalogue of 269 semantically related visualisation-assertion (VA) pairs. Building on this catalogue, we propose to build a taxonomy that organises the VA pairs based on ML verification tasks. The input feature space comprises of a rich source of information mined from the Jupyter notebooks -- visualisations, Python source code, and associated markdown text. The effectiveness of various AI models, including traditional NLP4Code models and modern Large Language Models, will be compared using established machine translation metrics and evaluated through a qualitative study with human participants. The paper also plans to address the challenge of extending the existing VA pair dataset with additional pairs from Kaggle and to compare the tool's effectiveness with commercial generative AI models like ChatGPT. This research not only contributes to the field of ML system validation but also explores novel ways to leverage AI for automating and enhancing software engineering practices in ML.

  • 3 authors
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Jan 15, 2024

Machine Learning and Deep Learning -- A review for Ecologists

1. The popularity of Machine learning (ML), Deep learning (DL), and Artificial intelligence (AI) has risen sharply in recent years. Despite this spike in popularity, the inner workings of ML and DL algorithms are often perceived as opaque, and their relationship to classical data analysis tools remains debated. 2. Although it is often assumed that ML and DL excel primarily at making predictions, ML and DL can also be used for analytical tasks traditionally addressed with statistical models. Moreover, most recent discussions and reviews on ML focus mainly on DL, missing out on synthesizing the wealth of ML algorithms with different advantages and general principles. 3. Here, we provide a comprehensive overview of the field of ML and DL, starting by summarizing its historical developments, existing algorithm families, differences to traditional statistical tools, and universal ML principles. We then discuss why and when ML and DL models excel at prediction tasks and where they could offer alternatives to traditional statistical methods for inference, highlighting current and emerging applications for ecological problems. Finally, we summarize emerging trends such as scientific and causal ML, explainable AI, and responsible AI that may significantly impact ecological data analysis in the future. 4. We conclude that ML and DL are powerful new tools for predictive modeling and data analysis. The superior performance of ML and DL algorithms compared to statistical models can be explained by their higher flexibility and automatic data-dependent complexity optimization. However, their use for causal inference is still disputed as the focus of ML and DL methods on predictions creates challenges for the interpretation of these models. Nevertheless, we expect ML and DL to become an indispensable tool in E&E, comparable to other traditional statistical tools.

  • 2 authors
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Apr 11, 2022

FuXi-ENS: A machine learning model for medium-range ensemble weather forecasting

Ensemble forecasting is crucial for improving weather predictions, especially for forecasts of extreme events. Constructing an ensemble prediction system (EPS) based on conventional NWP models is highly computationally expensive. ML models have emerged as valuable tools for deterministic weather forecasts, providing forecasts with significantly reduced computational requirements and even surpassing the forecast performance of traditional NWP models. However, challenges arise when applying ML models to ensemble forecasting. Recent ML models, such as GenCast and SEEDS model, rely on the ERA5 EDA or operational NWP ensemble members for forecast generation. Their spatial resolution is also considered too coarse for many applications. To overcome these limitations, we introduce FuXi-ENS, an advanced ML model designed to deliver 6-hourly global ensemble weather forecasts up to 15 days. This model runs at a significantly increased spatial resolution of 0.25\textdegree, incorporating 5 atmospheric variables at 13 pressure levels, along with 13 surface variables. By leveraging the inherent probabilistic nature of Variational AutoEncoder (VAE), FuXi-ENS optimizes a loss function that combines the CRPS and the KL divergence between the predicted and target distribution, facilitating the incorporation of flow-dependent perturbations in both initial conditions and forecast. This innovative approach makes FuXi-ENS an advancement over the traditional ones that use L1 loss combined with the KL loss in standard VAE models for ensemble weather forecasting. Results demonstrate that FuXi-ENS outperforms ensemble forecasts from the ECMWF, a world leading NWP model, in the CRPS of 98.1% of 360 variable and forecast lead time combinations. This achievement underscores the potential of the FuXi-ENS model to enhance ensemble weather forecasts, offering a promising direction for further development in this field.

  • 10 authors
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May 9, 2024

PDEBENCH: An Extensive Benchmark for Scientific Machine Learning

Machine learning-based modeling of physical systems has experienced increased interest in recent years. Despite some impressive progress, there is still a lack of benchmarks for Scientific ML that are easy to use but still challenging and representative of a wide range of problems. We introduce PDEBench, a benchmark suite of time-dependent simulation tasks based on Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). PDEBench comprises both code and data to benchmark the performance of novel machine learning models against both classical numerical simulations and machine learning baselines. Our proposed set of benchmark problems contribute the following unique features: (1) A much wider range of PDEs compared to existing benchmarks, ranging from relatively common examples to more realistic and difficult problems; (2) much larger ready-to-use datasets compared to prior work, comprising multiple simulation runs across a larger number of initial and boundary conditions and PDE parameters; (3) more extensible source codes with user-friendly APIs for data generation and baseline results with popular machine learning models (FNO, U-Net, PINN, Gradient-Based Inverse Method). PDEBench allows researchers to extend the benchmark freely for their own purposes using a standardized API and to compare the performance of new models to existing baseline methods. We also propose new evaluation metrics with the aim to provide a more holistic understanding of learning methods in the context of Scientific ML. With those metrics we identify tasks which are challenging for recent ML methods and propose these tasks as future challenges for the community. The code is available at https://github.com/pdebench/PDEBench.

  • 7 authors
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Oct 13, 2022

Synthetic Lagrangian Turbulence by Generative Diffusion Models

Lagrangian turbulence lies at the core of numerous applied and fundamental problems related to the physics of dispersion and mixing in engineering, bio-fluids, atmosphere, oceans, and astrophysics. Despite exceptional theoretical, numerical, and experimental efforts conducted over the past thirty years, no existing models are capable of faithfully reproducing statistical and topological properties exhibited by particle trajectories in turbulence. We propose a machine learning approach, based on a state-of-the-art diffusion model, to generate single-particle trajectories in three-dimensional turbulence at high Reynolds numbers, thereby bypassing the need for direct numerical simulations or experiments to obtain reliable Lagrangian data. Our model demonstrates the ability to reproduce most statistical benchmarks across time scales, including the fat-tail distribution for velocity increments, the anomalous power law, and the increased intermittency around the dissipative scale. Slight deviations are observed below the dissipative scale, particularly in the acceleration and flatness statistics. Surprisingly, the model exhibits strong generalizability for extreme events, producing events of higher intensity and rarity that still match the realistic statistics. This paves the way for producing synthetic high-quality datasets for pre-training various downstream applications of Lagrangian turbulence.

  • 5 authors
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Apr 27, 2024

Robot Control Stack: A Lean Ecosystem for Robot Learning at Scale

Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) mark a major shift in robot learning. They replace specialized architectures and task-tailored components of expert policies with large-scale data collection and setup-specific fine-tuning. In this machine learning-focused workflow that is centered around models and scalable training, traditional robotics software frameworks become a bottleneck, while robot simulations offer only limited support for transitioning from and to real-world experiments. In this work, we close this gap by introducing Robot Control Stack (RCS), a lean ecosystem designed from the ground up to support research in robot learning with large-scale generalist policies. At its core, RCS features a modular and easily extensible layered architecture with a unified interface for simulated and physical robots, facilitating sim-to-real transfer. Despite its minimal footprint and dependencies, it offers a complete feature set, enabling both real-world experiments and large-scale training in simulation. Our contribution is twofold: First, we introduce the architecture of RCS and explain its design principles. Second, we evaluate its usability and performance along the development cycle of VLA and RL policies. Our experiments also provide an extensive evaluation of Octo, OpenVLA, and Pi Zero on multiple robots and shed light on how simulation data can improve real-world policy performance. Our code, datasets, weights, and videos are available at: https://robotcontrolstack.github.io/

RobotControlStack Robot Control Stack
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Sep 18, 2025

LLM Guided Evolution -- The Automation of Models Advancing Models

In the realm of machine learning, traditional model development and automated approaches like AutoML typically rely on layers of abstraction, such as tree-based or Cartesian genetic programming. Our study introduces "Guided Evolution" (GE), a novel framework that diverges from these methods by utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) to directly modify code. GE leverages LLMs for a more intelligent, supervised evolutionary process, guiding mutations and crossovers. Our unique "Evolution of Thought" (EoT) technique further enhances GE by enabling LLMs to reflect on and learn from the outcomes of previous mutations. This results in a self-sustaining feedback loop that augments decision-making in model evolution. GE maintains genetic diversity, crucial for evolutionary algorithms, by leveraging LLMs' capability to generate diverse responses from expertly crafted prompts and modulate model temperature. This not only accelerates the evolution process but also injects expert like creativity and insight into the process. Our application of GE in evolving the ExquisiteNetV2 model demonstrates its efficacy: the LLM-driven GE autonomously produced variants with improved accuracy, increasing from 92.52% to 93.34%, without compromising model compactness. This underscores the potential of LLMs to accelerate the traditional model design pipeline, enabling models to autonomously evolve and enhance their own designs.

  • 3 authors
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Mar 17, 2024

Multimodal Deep Learning of Word-of-Mouth Text and Demographics to Predict Customer Rating: Handling Consumer Heterogeneity in Marketing

In the marketing field, understanding consumer heterogeneity, which is the internal or psychological difference among consumers that cannot be captured by behavioral logs, has long been a critical challenge. However, a number of consumers today usually post their evaluation on the specific product on the online platform, which can be the valuable source of such unobservable differences among consumers. Several previous studies have shown the validity of the analysis on text modality, but on the other hand, such analyses may not necessarily demonstrate sufficient predictive accuracy for text alone, as they may not include information readily available from cross-sectional data, such as consumer profile data. In addition, recent advances in machine learning techniques, such as large-scale language models (LLMs) and multimodal learning have made it possible to deal with the various kind of dataset simultaneously, including textual data and the traditional cross-sectional data, and the joint representations can be effectively obtained from multiple modalities. Therefore, this study constructs a product evaluation model that takes into account consumer heterogeneity by multimodal learning of online product reviews and consumer profile information. We also compare multiple models using different modalities or hyper-parameters to demonstrate the robustness of multimodal learning in marketing analysis.

  • 1 authors
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Jan 22, 2024

An Empirical Study of Pre-Trained Model Reuse in the Hugging Face Deep Learning Model Registry

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are being adopted as components in software systems. Creating and specializing DNNs from scratch has grown increasingly difficult as state-of-the-art architectures grow more complex. Following the path of traditional software engineering, machine learning engineers have begun to reuse large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs) and fine-tune these models for downstream tasks. Prior works have studied reuse practices for traditional software packages to guide software engineers towards better package maintenance and dependency management. We lack a similar foundation of knowledge to guide behaviors in pre-trained model ecosystems. In this work, we present the first empirical investigation of PTM reuse. We interviewed 12 practitioners from the most popular PTM ecosystem, Hugging Face, to learn the practices and challenges of PTM reuse. From this data, we model the decision-making process for PTM reuse. Based on the identified practices, we describe useful attributes for model reuse, including provenance, reproducibility, and portability. Three challenges for PTM reuse are missing attributes, discrepancies between claimed and actual performance, and model risks. We substantiate these identified challenges with systematic measurements in the Hugging Face ecosystem. Our work informs future directions on optimizing deep learning ecosystems by automated measuring useful attributes and potential attacks, and envision future research on infrastructure and standardization for model registries.

  • 8 authors
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Mar 4, 2023

An Experimental Review on Deep Learning Architectures for Time Series Forecasting

In recent years, deep learning techniques have outperformed traditional models in many machine learning tasks. Deep neural networks have successfully been applied to address time series forecasting problems, which is a very important topic in data mining. They have proved to be an effective solution given their capacity to automatically learn the temporal dependencies present in time series. However, selecting the most convenient type of deep neural network and its parametrization is a complex task that requires considerable expertise. Therefore, there is a need for deeper studies on the suitability of all existing architectures for different forecasting tasks. In this work, we face two main challenges: a comprehensive review of the latest works using deep learning for time series forecasting; and an experimental study comparing the performance of the most popular architectures. The comparison involves a thorough analysis of seven types of deep learning models in terms of accuracy and efficiency. We evaluate the rankings and distribution of results obtained with the proposed models under many different architecture configurations and training hyperparameters. The datasets used comprise more than 50000 time series divided into 12 different forecasting problems. By training more than 38000 models on these data, we provide the most extensive deep learning study for time series forecasting. Among all studied models, the results show that long short-term memory (LSTM) and convolutional networks (CNN) are the best alternatives, with LSTMs obtaining the most accurate forecasts. CNNs achieve comparable performance with less variability of results under different parameter configurations, while also being more efficient.

  • 3 authors
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Mar 22, 2021

A Deep Look into Neural Ranking Models for Information Retrieval

Ranking models lie at the heart of research on information retrieval (IR). During the past decades, different techniques have been proposed for constructing ranking models, from traditional heuristic methods, probabilistic methods, to modern machine learning methods. Recently, with the advance of deep learning technology, we have witnessed a growing body of work in applying shallow or deep neural networks to the ranking problem in IR, referred to as neural ranking models in this paper. The power of neural ranking models lies in the ability to learn from the raw text inputs for the ranking problem to avoid many limitations of hand-crafted features. Neural networks have sufficient capacity to model complicated tasks, which is needed to handle the complexity of relevance estimation in ranking. Since there have been a large variety of neural ranking models proposed, we believe it is the right time to summarize the current status, learn from existing methodologies, and gain some insights for future development. In contrast to existing reviews, in this survey, we will take a deep look into the neural ranking models from different dimensions to analyze their underlying assumptions, major design principles, and learning strategies. We compare these models through benchmark tasks to obtain a comprehensive empirical understanding of the existing techniques. We will also discuss what is missing in the current literature and what are the promising and desired future directions.

  • 9 authors
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Mar 16, 2019

HealDA: Highlighting the importance of initial errors in end-to-end AI weather forecasts

AI weather models now rival leading numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems in medium-range skill. However, almost all still rely on NWP data assimilation (DA) to provide initial conditions, tying them to expensive infrastructure and limiting the practical speed and accuracy gains of ML. More recently, ML-based DA systems have been proposed, which are often trained and evaluated end-to-end with a forecast model, making it difficult to assess the quality of their analysis fields. We introduce HealDA, a global ML-based DA system that maps a short window of satellite and conventional observations directly to a 1° atmospheric state on the HEALPix grid, using a smaller sensor suite than operational NWP and no background forecast at runtime. We treat HealDA strictly as a DA module: its analyses are used to initialize off-the-shelf ML forecast models without any fine-tuning of either. For a variety of off-the-shelf ML forecast models, including FourCastNet3 (FCN3), Aurora, and FengWu, HealDA-initialized forecasts lose less than one day of effective lead time when scored against ERA5. HealDA-initialized FCN3 ensembles similarly trail those of the ECMWF IFS ENS system by < 24 h. We find that forecast error growth in these models i unchanged from HealDA initialization, and the skill gap primarily arises from the larger initial error of the HealDA analysis. Spectral analysis reveals that this stems from overfitting to the large scales and upper-tropospheric fields. We also demonstrate that small changes in the verification setup can shift apparent skill by 12--24h, underscoring the need for consistent scoring. Taken together, these results clarify the current performance of ML-based DA systems and show that a relatively simple, background-free network can already provide initial conditions that are usable by state-of-the-art ML forecast models with only modest loss in medium-range skill.

  • 9 authors
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Jan 24

There is no Artificial General Intelligence

The goal of creating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) -- or in other words of creating Turing machines (modern computers) that can behave in a way that mimics human intelligence -- has occupied AI researchers ever since the idea of AI was first proposed. One common theme in these discussions is the thesis that the ability of a machine to conduct convincing dialogues with human beings can serve as at least a sufficient criterion of AGI. We argue that this very ability should be accepted also as a necessary condition of AGI, and we provide a description of the nature of human dialogue in particular and of human language in general against this background. We then argue that it is for mathematical reasons impossible to program a machine in such a way that it could master human dialogue behaviour in its full generality. This is (1) because there are no traditional explicitly designed mathematical models that could be used as a starting point for creating such programs; and (2) because even the sorts of automated models generated by using machine learning, which have been used successfully in areas such as machine translation, cannot be extended to cope with human dialogue. If this is so, then we can conclude that a Turing machine also cannot possess AGI, because it fails to fulfil a necessary condition thereof. At the same time, however, we acknowledge the potential of Turing machines to master dialogue behaviour in highly restricted contexts, where what is called ``narrow'' AI can still be of considerable utility.

  • 2 authors
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Jun 9, 2019

Artificial Intelligence in Mental Health and Well-Being: Evolution, Current Applications, Future Challenges, and Emerging Evidence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a broad field that is upturning mental health care in many ways, from addressing anxiety, depression, and stress to increasing access, personalization of treatment, and real-time monitoring that enhances patient outcomes. The current paper discusses the evolution, present application, and future challenges in the field of AI for mental health and well-being. From the early chatbot models, such as ELIZA, to modern machine learning systems, the integration of AI in mental health has grown rapidly to augment traditional treatment and open innovative solutions. AI-driven tools provide continuous support, offering personalized interventions and addressing issues such as treatment access and patient stigma. AI also enables early diagnosis through the analysis of complex datasets, including speech patterns and social media behavior, to detect early signs of conditions like depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Ethical challenges persist, however, most notably around privacy, data security, and algorithmic bias. With AI at the core of mental health care, there is a dire need to develop strong ethical frameworks that ensure patient rights are protected, access is equitable, and transparency is maintained in AI applications. Going forward, the role of AI in mental health will continue to evolve, and continued research and policy development will be needed to meet the diverse needs of patients while mitigating associated risks.

  • 1 authors
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Dec 13, 2024