Leveraging Machine Learning Models to Predict the Outcome of Digital Medical Triage Interviews

Many existing digital triage systems are questionnaire-based, guiding patients to appropriate care levels based on information (e.g., symptoms, medical history, and urgency) provided by the patients answering questionnaires. Such a system often uses a deterministic model with predefined rules to determine care levels. It faces challenges with incomplete triage interviews since it can only assist patients who finish the process. In this study, we explore the use of machine learning (ML) to predict outcomes of unfinished interviews, aiming to enhance patient care and service quality. Predicting triage outcomes from incomplete data is crucial for patient safety and healthcare efficiency. Our findings show that decision-tree models, particularly LGBMClassifier and CatBoostClassifier, achieve over 80\% accuracy in predicting outcomes from complete interviews while having a linear correlation between the prediction accuracy and interview completeness degree. For example, LGBMClassifier achieves 88,2\% prediction accuracy for interviews with 100\% completeness, 79,6\% accuracy for interviews with 80\% completeness, 58,9\% accuracy for 60\% completeness, and 45,7\% accuracy for 40\% completeness. The TabTransformer model demonstrated exceptional accuracy of over 80\% for all degrees of completeness but required extensive training time, indicating a need for more powerful computational resources. The study highlights the linear correlation between interview completeness and predictive power of the decision-tree models.

Masked Vector Quantization

Generative models with discrete latent representations have recently demonstrated an impressive ability to learn complex high-dimensional data distributions. However, their performance relies on a long sequence of tokens per instance and a large number of codebook entries, resulting in long sampling times and considerable computation to fit the categorical posterior. To address these issues, we propose the Masked Vector Quantization (MVQ) framework which increases the representational capacity of each code vector by learning mask configurations via a stochastic winner-takes-all training regime called Multiple Hypothese Dropout (MH-Dropout). On ImageNet 64$\times$64, MVQ reduces FID in existing vector quantization architectures by up to $68\%$ at 2 tokens per instance and $57\%$ at 5 tokens. These improvements widen as codebook entries is reduced and allows for $7\textit{--}45\times$ speed-up in token sampling during inference. As an additional benefit, we find that smaller latent spaces lead to MVQ identifying transferable visual representations where multiple can be smoothly combined.

Towards responsible AI for education: Hybrid human-AI to confront the Elephant in the room

Despite significant advancements in AI-driven educational systems and ongoing calls for responsible AI for education, several critical issues remain unresolved -- acting as the elephant in the room within AI in education, learning analytics, educational data mining, learning sciences, and educational psychology communities. This critical analysis identifies and examines nine persistent challenges that continue to undermine the fairness, transparency, and effectiveness of current AI methods and applications in education. These include: (1) the lack of clarity around what AI for education truly means -- often ignoring the distinct purposes, strengths, and limitations of different AI families -- and the trend of equating it with domain-agnostic, company-driven large language models; (2) the widespread neglect of essential learning processes such as motivation, emotion, and (meta)cognition in AI-driven learner modelling and their contextual nature; (3) limited integration of domain knowledge and lack of stakeholder involvement in AI design and development; (4) continued use of non-sequential machine learning models on temporal educational data; (5) misuse of non-sequential metrics to evaluate sequential models; (6) use of unreliable explainable AI methods to provide explanations for black-box models; (7) ignoring ethical guidelines in addressing data inconsistencies during model training; (8) use of mainstream AI methods for pattern discovery and learning analytics without systematic benchmarking; and (9) overemphasis on global prescriptions while overlooking localised, student-specific recommendations. Supported by theoretical and empirical research, we demonstrate how hybrid AI methods -- specifically neural-symbolic AI -- can address the elephant in the room and serve as the foundation for responsible, trustworthy AI systems in education.

VayuBuddy: an LLM-Powered Chatbot to Democratize Air Quality Insights

Nearly 6.7 million lives are lost due to air pollution every year. While policymakers are working on the mitigation strategies, public awareness can help reduce the exposure to air pollution. Air pollution data from government-installed sensors is often publicly available in raw format, but there is a non-trivial barrier for various stakeholders in deriving meaningful insights from that data. In this work, we present VayuBuddy, a Large Language Model (LLM)-powered chatbot system to reduce the barrier between the stakeholders and air quality sensor data. VayuBuddy receives the questions in natural language, analyses the structured sensory data with a LLM-generated Python code and provides answers in natural language. We use the data from Indian government air quality sensors. We benchmark the capabilities of 7 LLMs on 45 diverse question-answer pairs prepared by us. Additionally, VayuBuddy can also generate visual analysis such as line-plots, map plot, bar charts and many others from the sensory data as we demonstrate in this work.

Contamination Report for Multilingual Benchmarks

Benchmark contamination refers to the presence of test datasets in Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training or post-training data. Contamination can lead to inflated scores on benchmarks, compromising evaluation results and making it difficult to determine the capabilities of models. In this work, we study the contamination of popular multilingual benchmarks in LLMs that support multiple languages. We use the Black Box test to determine whether $7$ frequently used multilingual benchmarks are contaminated in $7$ popular open and closed LLMs and find that almost all models show signs of being contaminated with almost all the benchmarks we test. Our findings can help the community determine the best set of benchmarks to use for multilingual evaluation.

Burst Image Quality Assessment: A New Benchmark and Unified Framework for Multiple Downstream Tasks

In recent years, the development of burst imaging technology has improved the capture and processing capabilities of visual data, enabling a wide range of applications. However, the redundancy in burst images leads to the increased storage and transmission demands, as well as reduced efficiency of downstream tasks. To address this, we propose a new task of Burst Image Quality Assessment (BuIQA), to evaluate the task-driven quality of each frame within a burst sequence, providing reasonable cues for burst image selection. Specifically, we establish the first benchmark dataset for BuIQA, consisting of $7,346$ burst sequences with $45,827$ images and $191,572$ annotated quality scores for multiple downstream scenarios. Inspired by the data analysis, a unified BuIQA framework is proposed to achieve an efficient adaption for BuIQA under diverse downstream scenarios. Specifically, a task-driven prompt generation network is developed with heterogeneous knowledge distillation, to learn the priors of the downstream task. Then, the task-aware quality assessment network is introduced to assess the burst image quality based on the task prompt. Extensive experiments across 10 downstream scenarios demonstrate the impressive BuIQA performance of the proposed approach, outperforming the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, it can achieve $0.33$ dB PSNR improvement in the downstream tasks of denoising and super-resolution, by applying our approach to select the high-quality burst frames.

PLAID: An Efficient Engine for Late Interaction Retrieval

Pre-trained language models are increasingly important components across multiple information retrieval (IR) paradigms. Late interaction, introduced with the ColBERT model and recently refined in ColBERTv2, is a popular paradigm that holds state-of-the-art status across many benchmarks. To dramatically speed up the search latency of late interaction, we introduce the Performance-optimized Late Interaction Driver (PLAID). Without impacting quality, PLAID swiftly eliminates low-scoring passages using a novel centroid interaction mechanism that treats every passage as a lightweight bag of centroids. PLAID uses centroid interaction as well as centroid pruning, a mechanism for sparsifying the bag of centroids, within a highly-optimized engine to reduce late interaction search latency by up to 7$\times$ on a GPU and 45$\times$ on a CPU against vanilla ColBERTv2, while continuing to deliver state-of-the-art retrieval quality. This allows the PLAID engine with ColBERTv2 to achieve latency of tens of milliseconds on a GPU and tens or just few hundreds of milliseconds on a CPU at large scale, even at the largest scales we evaluate with 140M passages.

A Melting Pot of Evolution and Learning

We survey eight recent works by our group, involving the successful blending of evolutionary algorithms with machine learning and deep learning: 1. Binary and Multinomial Classification through Evolutionary Symbolic Regression, 2. Classy Ensemble: A Novel Ensemble Algorithm for Classification, 3. EC-KitY: Evolutionary Computation Tool Kit in Python, 4. Evolution of Activation Functions for Deep Learning-Based Image Classification, 5. Adaptive Combination of a Genetic Algorithm and Novelty Search for Deep Neuroevolution, 6. An Evolutionary, Gradient-Free, Query-Efficient, Black-Box Algorithm for Generating Adversarial Instances in Deep Networks, 7. Foiling Explanations in Deep Neural Networks, 8. Patch of Invisibility: Naturalistic Black-Box Adversarial Attacks on Object Detectors.

Analysis of Various Manipulator Configurations Based on Multi-Objective Black-Box Optimization

Various 6-degree-of-freedom (DOF) and 7-DOF manipulators have been developed to date. Over a long history, their joint configurations and link length ratios have been determined empirically. In recent years, the development of robotic foundation models has become increasingly active, leading to the continuous proposal of various manipulators to support these models. However, none of these manipulators share exactly the same structure, as the order of joints and the ratio of link lengths differ among robots. Therefore, in order to discuss the optimal structure of a manipulator, we performed multi-objective optimization from the perspectives of end-effector reachability and joint torque. We analyze where existing manipulator structures stand within the sampling results of the optimization and provide insights for future manipulator design.

GPT-4 Jailbreaks Itself with Near-Perfect Success Using Self-Explanation

Research on jailbreaking has been valuable for testing and understanding the safety and security issues of large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we introduce Iterative Refinement Induced Self-Jailbreak (IRIS), a novel approach that leverages the reflective capabilities of LLMs for jailbreaking with only black-box access. Unlike previous methods, IRIS simplifies the jailbreaking process by using a single model as both the attacker and target. This method first iteratively refines adversarial prompts through self-explanation, which is crucial for ensuring that even well-aligned LLMs obey adversarial instructions. IRIS then rates and enhances the output given the refined prompt to increase its harmfulness. We find IRIS achieves jailbreak success rates of 98% on GPT-4 and 92% on GPT-4 Turbo in under 7 queries. It significantly outperforms prior approaches in automatic, black-box and interpretable jailbreaking, while requiring substantially fewer queries, thereby establishing a new standard for interpretable jailbreaking methods.