An Image-Guided Robotic System for Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation: System Development and Experimental Evaluation

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a noninvasive medical procedure that can modulate brain activity, and it is widely used in neuroscience and neurology research. Compared to manual operators, robots may improve the outcome of TMS due to their superior accuracy and repeatability. However, there has not been a widely accepted standard protocol for performing robotic TMS using fine-segmented brain images, resulting in arbitrary planned angles with respect to the true boundaries of the modulated cortex. Given that the recent study in TMS simulation suggests a noticeable difference in outcomes when using different anatomical details, cortical shape should play a more significant role in deciding the optimal TMS coil pose. In this work, we introduce an image-guided robotic system for TMS that focuses on (1) establishing standardized planning methods and heuristics to define a reference (true zero) for the coil poses and (2) solving the issue that the manual coil placement requires expert hand-eye coordination which often leading to low repeatability of the experiments. To validate the design of our robotic system, a phantom study and a preliminary human subject study were performed. Our results show that the robotic method can half the positional error and improve the rotational accuracy by up to two orders of magnitude. The accuracy is proven to be repeatable because the standard deviation of multiple trials is lowered by an order of magnitude. The improved actuation accuracy successfully translates to the TMS application, with a higher and more stable induced voltage in magnetic field sensors.

LibEER: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Algorithm Library for EEG-based Emotion Recognition

EEG-based emotion recognition (EER) is garnering increasing attention due to its potential in understanding and analyzing human emotions. Recently, significant advancements have been achieved using various deep learning-based techniques to address the EER problem. However, the absence of a convincing benchmark and open-source codebase complicates fair comparisons between different models and poses reproducibility challenges for practitioners. These issues considerably impede progress in this field. In light of this, we propose a comprehensive benchmark and algorithm library (LibEER) for fair comparisons in EER by making most of the implementation details of different methods consistent and using the same single codebase in PyTorch. In response to these challenges, we propose LibEER, a comprehensive benchmark and algorithm library for fair comparisons in EER, by ensuring consistency in the implementation details of various methods and utilizing a single codebase in PyTorch. LibEER establishes a unified evaluation framework with standardized experimental settings, enabling unbiased evaluations of over ten representative deep learning-based EER models across the four most commonly used datasets. Additionally, we conduct an exhaustive and reproducible comparison of the performance and efficiency of popular models, providing valuable insights for researchers in selecting and designing EER models. We aspire for our work to not only lower the barriers for beginners entering the field of EEG-based emotion recognition but also promote the standardization of research in this domain, thereby fostering steady development. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/ButterSen/LibEER}.

LRQ-Fact: LLM-Generated Relevant Questions for Multimodal Fact-Checking

Human fact-checkers have specialized domain knowledge that allows them to formulate precise questions to verify information accuracy. However, this expert-driven approach is labor-intensive and is not scalable, especially when dealing with complex multimodal misinformation. In this paper, we propose a fully-automated framework, LRQ-Fact, for multimodal fact-checking. Firstly, the framework leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate comprehensive questions and answers for probing multimodal content. Next, a rule-based decision-maker module evaluates both the original content and the generated questions and answers to assess the overall veracity. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks show that LRQ-Fact improves detection accuracy for multimodal misinformation. Moreover, we evaluate its generalizability across different model backbones, offering valuable insights for further refinement.

Introducing CausalBench: A Flexible Benchmark Framework for Causal Analysis and Machine Learning

While witnessing the exceptional success of machine learning (ML) technologies in many applications, users are starting to notice a critical shortcoming of ML: correlation is a poor substitute for causation. The conventional way to discover causal relationships is to use randomized controlled experiments (RCT); in many situations, however, these are impractical or sometimes unethical. Causal learning from observational data offers a promising alternative. While being relatively recent, causal learning aims to go far beyond conventional machine learning, yet several major challenges remain. Unfortunately, advances are hampered due to the lack of unified benchmark datasets, algorithms, metrics, and evaluation service interfaces for causal learning. In this paper, we introduce {\em CausalBench}, a transparent, fair, and easy-to-use evaluation platform, aiming to (a) enable the advancement of research in causal learning by facilitating scientific collaboration in novel algorithms, datasets, and metrics and (b) promote scientific objectivity, reproducibility, fairness, and awareness of bias in causal learning research. CausalBench provides services for benchmarking data, algorithms, models, and metrics, impacting the needs of a broad of scientific and engineering disciplines.

Exploring Large Language Models for Feature Selection: A Data-centric Perspective

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly influenced various domains, leveraging their exceptional few-shot and zero-shot learning capabilities. In this work, we aim to explore and understand the LLMs-based feature selection methods from a data-centric perspective. We begin by categorizing existing feature selection methods with LLMs into two groups: data-driven feature selection which requires samples values to do statistical inference and text-based feature selection which utilizes prior knowledge of LLMs to do semantical associations using descriptive context. We conduct extensive experiments in both classification and regression tasks with LLMs in various sizes (e.g., GPT-4, ChatGPT and LLaMA-2). Our findings emphasize the effectiveness and robustness of text-based feature selection methods and showcase their potentials using a real-world medical application. We also discuss the challenges and future opportunities in employing LLMs for feature selection, offering insights for further research and development in this emerging field.

C2P-CLIP: Injecting Category Common Prompt in CLIP to Enhance Generalization in Deepfake Detection

This work focuses on AIGC detection to develop universal detectors capable of identifying various types of forgery images. Recent studies have found large pre-trained models, such as CLIP, are effective for generalizable deepfake detection along with linear classifiers. However, two critical issues remain unresolved: 1) understanding why CLIP features are effective on deepfake detection through a linear classifier; and 2) exploring the detection potential of CLIP. In this study, we delve into the underlying mechanisms of CLIP's detection capabilities by decoding its detection features into text and performing word frequency analysis. Our finding indicates that CLIP detects deepfakes by recognizing similar concepts (Fig. \ref{fig:fig1} a). Building on this insight, we introduce Category Common Prompt CLIP, called C2P-CLIP, which integrates the category common prompt into the text encoder to inject category-related concepts into the image encoder, thereby enhancing detection performance (Fig. \ref{fig:fig1} b). Our method achieves a 12.41\% improvement in detection accuracy compared to the original CLIP, without introducing additional parameters during testing. Comprehensive experiments conducted on two widely-used datasets, encompassing 20 generation models, validate the efficacy of the proposed method, demonstrating state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/chuangchuangtan/C2P-CLIP-DeepfakeDetection}

Model Attribution in Machine-Generated Disinformation: A Domain Generalization Approach with Supervised Contrastive Learning

Model attribution for machine-generated disinformation poses a significant challenge in understanding its origins and mitigating its spread. This task is especially challenging because modern large language models (LLMs) produce disinformation with human-like quality. Additionally, the diversity in prompting methods used to generate disinformation complicates accurate source attribution. These methods introduce domain-specific features that can mask the fundamental characteristics of the models. In this paper, we introduce the concept of model attribution as a domain generalization problem, where each prompting method represents a unique domain. We argue that an effective attribution model must be invariant to these domain-specific features. It should also be proficient in identifying the originating models across all scenarios, reflecting real-world detection challenges. To address this, we introduce a novel approach based on Supervised Contrastive Learning. This method is designed to enhance the model's robustness to variations in prompts and focuses on distinguishing between different source LLMs. We evaluate our model through rigorous experiments involving three common prompting methods: ``open-ended'', ``rewriting'', and ``paraphrasing'', and three advanced LLMs: ``llama 2'', ``chatgpt'', and ``vicuna''. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in model attribution tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across diverse and unseen datasets.

BlueTempNet: A Temporal Multi-network Dataset of Social Interactions in Bluesky Social

Decentralized social media platforms like Bluesky Social (Bluesky) have made it possible to publicly disclose some user behaviors with millisecond-level precision. Embracing Bluesky's principles of open-source and open-data, we present the first collection of the temporal dynamics of user-driven social interactions. BlueTempNet integrates multiple types of networks into a single multi-network, including user-to-user interactions (following and blocking users) and user-to-community interactions (creating and joining communities). Communities are user-formed groups in custom Feeds, where users subscribe to posts aligned with their interests. Following Bluesky's public data policy, we collect existing Bluesky Feeds, including the users who liked and generated these Feeds, and provide tools to gather users' social interactions within a date range. This data-collection strategy captures past user behaviors and supports the future data collection of user behavior.

Mindful-RAG: A Study of Points of Failure in Retrieval Augmented Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are proficient at generating coherent and contextually relevant text but face challenges when addressing knowledge-intensive queries in domain-specific and factual question-answering tasks. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems mitigate this by incorporating external knowledge sources, such as structured knowledge graphs (KGs). However, LLMs often struggle to produce accurate answers despite access to KG-extracted information containing necessary facts. Our study investigates this dilemma by analyzing error patterns in existing KG-based RAG methods and identifying eight critical failure points. We observed that these errors predominantly occur due to insufficient focus on discerning the question's intent and adequately gathering relevant context from the knowledge graph facts. Drawing on this analysis, we propose the Mindful-RAG approach, a framework designed for intent-based and contextually aligned knowledge retrieval. This method explicitly targets the identified failures and offers improvements in the correctness and relevance of responses provided by LLMs, representing a significant step forward from existing methods.

Catching Chameleons: Detecting Evolving Disinformation Generated using Large Language Models

Despite recent advancements in detecting disinformation generated by large language models (LLMs), current efforts overlook the ever-evolving nature of this disinformation. In this work, we investigate a challenging yet practical research problem of detecting evolving LLM-generated disinformation. Disinformation evolves constantly through the rapid development of LLMs and their variants. As a consequence, the detection model faces significant challenges. First, it is inefficient to train separate models for each disinformation generator. Second, the performance decreases in scenarios when evolving LLM-generated disinformation is encountered in sequential order. To address this problem, we propose DELD (Detecting Evolving LLM-generated Disinformation), a parameter-efficient approach that jointly leverages the general fact-checking capabilities of pre-trained language models (PLM) and the independent disinformation generation characteristics of various LLMs. In particular, the learned characteristics are concatenated sequentially to facilitate knowledge accumulation and transformation. DELD addresses the issue of label scarcity by integrating the semantic embeddings of disinformation with trainable soft prompts to elicit model-specific knowledge. Our experiments show that \textit{DELD} significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, our method provides critical insights into the unique patterns of disinformation generation across different LLMs, offering valuable perspectives in this line of research.