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Segmentation models for brain lesions in MRI are commonly developed for a specific disease and trained on data with a predefined set of MRI modalities. Each such model cannot segment the disease using data with a different set of MRI modalities, nor can it segment any other type of disease. Moreover, this training paradigm does not allow a model to benefit from learning from heterogeneous databases that may contain scans and segmentation labels for different types of brain pathologies and diverse sets of MRI modalities. Additionally, the sensitivity of patient data often prevents centrally aggregating data, necessitating a decentralized approach. Is it feasible to use Federated Learning (FL) to train a single model on client databases that contain scans and labels of different brain pathologies and diverse sets of MRI modalities? We demonstrate promising results by combining appropriate, simple, and practical modifications to the model and training strategy: Designing a model with input channels that cover the whole set of modalities available across clients, training with random modality drop, and exploring the effects of feature normalization methods. Evaluation on 7 brain MRI databases with 5 different diseases shows that such FL framework can train a single model that is shown to be very promising in segmenting all disease types seen during training. Importantly, it is able to segment these diseases in new databases that contain sets of modalities different from those in training clients. These results demonstrate, for the first time, the feasibility and effectiveness of using Federated Learning to train a single 3D segmentation model on decentralised data with diverse brain diseases and MRI modalities, a necessary step towards leveraging heterogeneous real-world databases. Code will be made available at: https://github.com/FelixWag/FL-MultiDisease-MRI

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region rich in linguistic diversity and cultural variety, with over 1,300 indigenous languages and a population of 671 million people. However, prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA, compromising the quality of AI models for SEA languages. Evaluating models for SEA languages is challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality datasets, compounded by the dominance of English training data, raising concerns about potential cultural misrepresentation. To address these challenges, we introduce SEACrowd, a collaborative initiative that consolidates a comprehensive resource hub that fills the resource gap by providing standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. Through our SEACrowd benchmarks, we assess the quality of AI models on 36 indigenous languages across 13 tasks, offering valuable insights into the current AI landscape in SEA. Furthermore, we propose strategies to facilitate greater AI advancements, maximizing potential utility and resource equity for the future of AI in SEA., Comment: https://github.com/SEACrowd

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is an important task in multimodal AI, and it is often used to test the ability of vision-language models to understand and reason on knowledge present in both visual and textual data. However, most of the current VQA models use datasets that are primarily focused on English and a few major world languages, with images that are typically Western-centric. While recent efforts have tried to increase the number of languages covered on VQA datasets, they still lack diversity in low-resource languages. More importantly, although these datasets often extend their linguistic range via translation or some other approaches, they usually keep images the same, resulting in narrow cultural representation. To address these limitations, we construct CVQA, a new Culturally-diverse multilingual Visual Question Answering benchmark, designed to cover a rich set of languages and cultures, where we engage native speakers and cultural experts in the data collection process. As a result, CVQA includes culturally-driven images and questions from across 28 countries on four continents, covering 26 languages with 11 scripts, providing a total of 9k questions. We then benchmark several Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on CVQA, and show that the dataset is challenging for the current state-of-the-art models. This benchmark can serve as a probing evaluation suite for assessing the cultural capability and bias of multimodal models and hopefully encourage more research efforts toward increasing cultural awareness and linguistic diversity in this field.

We study homotopy theory of the category of spectral sequences with respect to the class of weak equivalences given by maps which are quasi-isomorphisms on a fixed page. We introduce the category of extended spectral sequences and show that this is bicomplete by analysis of a certain linear presheaf category modelled on discs. We endow the category of extended spectral sequences with various model category structures, restricting to give the almost Brown category structures on spectral sequences of our earlier work. One of these has the property that spectral sequences is a homotopically full subcategory. By results of Meier, this exhibits the category of spectral sequences as a fibrant object in the Barwick-Kan model structure on relative categories, that is, it gives a model for an infinity category of spectral sequences. We also use the presheaf approach to define two d\'ecalage functors on spectral sequences, left and right adjoint to a shift functor, thereby clarifying prior use of the term d\'ecalage in connection with spectral sequences., Comment: 46 pages

Estimates of causal parameters such as conditional average treatment effects and conditional quantile treatment effects play an important role in real-world decision making. Given this importance, one should ensure these estimators are calibrated. While there is a rich literature on calibrating estimators of non-causal parameters, very few methods have been derived for calibrating estimators of causal parameters, or more generally estimators of quantities involving nuisance parameters. In this work, we provide a general framework for calibrating predictors involving nuisance estimation. We consider a notion of calibration defined with respect to an arbitrary, nuisance-dependent loss $\ell$, under which we say an estimator $\theta$ is calibrated if its predictions cannot be changed on any level set to decrease loss. We prove generic upper bounds on the calibration error of any causal parameter estimate $\theta$ with respect to any loss $\ell$ using a concept called Neyman Orthogonality. Our bounds involve two decoupled terms - one measuring the error in estimating the unknown nuisance parameters, and the other representing the calibration error in a hypothetical world where the learned nuisance estimates were true. We use our bound to analyze the convergence of two sample splitting algorithms for causal calibration. One algorithm, which applies to universally orthogonalizable loss functions, transforms the data into generalized pseudo-outcomes and applies an off-the-shelf calibration procedure. The other algorithm, which applies to conditionally orthogonalizable loss functions, extends the classical uniform mass binning algorithm to include nuisance estimation. Our results are exceedingly general, showing that essentially any existing calibration algorithm can be used in causal settings, with additional loss only arising from errors in nuisance estimation., Comment: 44 pages

Online experimentation with interference is a common challenge in modern applications such as e-commerce and adaptive clinical trials in medicine. For example, in online marketplaces, the revenue of a good depends on discounts applied to competing goods. Statistical inference with interference is widely studied in the offline setting, but far less is known about how to adaptively assign treatments to minimize regret. We address this gap by studying a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem where a learner (e-commerce platform) sequentially assigns one of possible $\mathcal{A}$ actions (discounts) to $N$ units (goods) over $T$ rounds to minimize regret (maximize revenue). Unlike traditional MAB problems, the reward of each unit depends on the treatments assigned to other units, i.e., there is interference across the underlying network of units. With $\mathcal{A}$ actions and $N$ units, minimizing regret is combinatorially difficult since the action space grows as $\mathcal{A}^N$. To overcome this issue, we study a sparse network interference model, where the reward of a unit is only affected by the treatments assigned to $s$ neighboring units. We use tools from discrete Fourier analysis to develop a sparse linear representation of the unit-specific reward $r_n: [\mathcal{A}]^N \rightarrow \mathbb{R} $, and propose simple, linear regression-based algorithms to minimize regret. Importantly, our algorithms achieve provably low regret both when the learner observes the interference neighborhood for all units and when it is unknown. This significantly generalizes other works on this topic which impose strict conditions on the strength of interference on a known network, and also compare regret to a markedly weaker optimal action. Empirically, we corroborate our theoretical findings via numerical simulations.

Models for segmentation of brain lesions in multi-modal MRI are commonly trained for a specific pathology using a single database with a predefined set of MRI modalities, determined by a protocol for the specific disease. This work explores the following open questions: Is it feasible to train a model using multiple databases that contain varying sets of MRI modalities and annotations for different brain pathologies? Will this joint learning benefit performance on the sets of modalities and pathologies available during training? Will it enable analysis of new databases with different sets of modalities and pathologies? We develop and compare different methods and show that promising results can be achieved with appropriate, simple and practical alterations to the model and training framework. We experiment with 7 databases containing 5 types of brain pathologies and different sets of MRI modalities. Results demonstrate, for the first time, that joint training on multi-modal MRI databases with different brain pathologies and sets of modalities is feasible and offers practical benefits. It enables a single model to segment pathologies encountered during training in diverse sets of modalities, while facilitating segmentation of new types of pathologies such as via follow-up fine-tuning. The insights this study provides into the potential and limitations of this paradigm should prove useful for guiding future advances in the direction. Code and pretrained models: https://github.com/WenTXuL/MultiUnet, Comment: Accepted to MIDL 2024

We present the results and the main findings of SemEval-2024 Task 8: Multigenerator, Multidomain, and Multilingual Machine-Generated Text Detection. The task featured three subtasks. Subtask A is a binary classification task determining whether a text is written by a human or generated by a machine. This subtask has two tracks: a monolingual track focused solely on English texts and a multilingual track. Subtask B is to detect the exact source of a text, discerning whether it is written by a human or generated by a specific LLM. Subtask C aims to identify the changing point within a text, at which the authorship transitions from human to machine. The task attracted a large number of participants: subtask A monolingual (126), subtask A multilingual (59), subtask B (70), and subtask C (30). In this paper, we present the task, analyze the results, and discuss the system submissions and the methods they used. For all subtasks, the best systems used LLMs., Comment: 23 pages, 12 tables

This paper introduces PRobELM (Plausibility Ranking Evaluation for Language Models), a benchmark designed to assess language models' ability to discern more plausible from less plausible scenarios through their parametric knowledge. While benchmarks such as TruthfulQA emphasise factual accuracy or truthfulness, and others such as COPA explore plausible scenarios without explicitly incorporating world knowledge, PRobELM seeks to bridge this gap by evaluating models' capabilities to prioritise plausible scenarios that leverage world knowledge over less plausible alternatives. This design allows us to assess the potential of language models for downstream use cases such as literature-based discovery where the focus is on identifying information that is likely but not yet known. Our benchmark is constructed from a dataset curated from Wikidata edit histories, tailored to align the temporal bounds of the training data for the evaluated models. PRobELM facilitates the evaluation of language models across multiple prompting types, including statement, text completion, and question-answering. Experiments with 10 models of various sizes and architectures on the relationship between model scales, training recency, and plausibility performance, reveal that factual accuracy does not directly correlate with plausibility performance and that up-to-date training data enhances plausibility assessment across different model architectures.

This thesis investigates how natural language understanding and generation with transformer models can benefit from grounding the models with knowledge representations and addresses the following key research questions: (i) Can knowledge of entities extend its benefits beyond entity-centric tasks, such as entity linking? (ii) How can we faithfully and effectively extract such structured knowledge from raw text, especially noisy web text? (iii) How do other types of knowledge, beyond structured knowledge, contribute to improving NLP tasks? Studies in this thesis find that incorporating relevant and up-to-date knowledge of entities benefits fake news detection, and entity-focused code-switching significantly enhances zero-shot cross-lingual transfer on entity-centric tasks. In terms of effective and faithful approaches to extracting structured knowledge, it is observed that integrating negative examples and training with entity planning significantly improves performance. Additionally, it is established that other general forms of knowledge, such as parametric and distilled knowledge, enhance multimodal and multilingual knowledge-intensive tasks. This research shows the tangible benefits of diverse knowledge integration and motivates further exploration in this direction., Comment: PhD Thesis

Adapting pretrained large language models (LLMs) to various downstream tasks in tens or hundreds of human languages is computationally expensive. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) significantly reduces the adaptation cost, by tuning only a small amount of parameters. However, common PEFT methods LoRA (Hu et al., 2022) suffer from suboptimal performance on diverse dataset mixtures, due to aggressive parameter tying and negative interference among different datasets. In this work, we propose Featurized Low-rank Mixtures (FLix), a novel PEFT method designed for effective multitask multilingual adaptation. FLix associates each unique dataset feature, such as the dataset's language or task, with its own low-rank weight update parameters. By composing feature-specific parameters for each dataset, FLix can accommodate diverse dataset mixtures and generalize better to unseen datasets. Our experiments show that FLix leads to significant improvements over a variety of tasks for both supervised learning and zero-shot settings with gains of up to $14.2$ inexact match points in zero-shot semantic parsing., Comment: Revised version

This paper presents a groundbreaking comparison between Large Language Models and traditional legal contract reviewers, Junior Lawyers and Legal Process Outsourcers. We dissect whether LLMs can outperform humans in accuracy, speed, and cost efficiency during contract review. Our empirical analysis benchmarks LLMs against a ground truth set by Senior Lawyers, uncovering that advanced models match or exceed human accuracy in determining legal issues. In speed, LLMs complete reviews in mere seconds, eclipsing the hours required by their human counterparts. Cost wise, LLMs operate at a fraction of the price, offering a staggering 99.97 percent reduction in cost over traditional methods. These results are not just statistics, they signal a seismic shift in legal practice. LLMs stand poised to disrupt the legal industry, enhancing accessibility and efficiency of legal services. Our research asserts that the era of LLM dominance in legal contract review is upon us, challenging the status quo and calling for a reimagined future of legal workflows., Comment: 16 pages

We describe the action of the mod $2$ Steenrod algebra on the cohomology of various polyhedral products and related spaces. We carry this out for Davis-Januszkiewicz spaces and their generalizations, for moment-angle complexes as well as for certain polyhedral joins. By studying the combinatorics of underlying simplicial complexes, we deduce some consequences for the lowest cohomological dimension in which non-trivial Steenrod operations can appear. We present a version of cochain-level formulas for Steenrod operations on simplicial complexes. We explain the idea of "propagating" such formulas from a simplicial complex $K$ to polyhedral joins over $K$ and we give examples of this process. We tie the propagation of the Steenrod algebra actions on polyhedral joins to those on moment-angle complexes. Although these are cases where one can understand the Steenrod action via a stable homotopy decomposition, we anticipate applying this method to cases where there is no such decomposition., Comment: 21 pages, v2 minor changes, accepted version to appear in special issue of Topology and its Applications dedicated to proceedings of the Women in Topology 4 workshop

Although the advancements of pre-trained Large Language Models have significantly accelerated recent progress in NLP, their ever-increasing size poses significant challenges for conventional fine-tuning, especially in memory-intensive tasks. We investigate the potential of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning, focusing on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), in the domain of multilingual summarization, a task that is both challenging (due to typically long inputs), and relatively unexplored. We conduct an extensive study across different data availability scenarios, including high- and low-data settings, and cross-lingual transfer, leveraging models of different sizes. Our findings reveal that LoRA is competitive with full fine-tuning when trained with high quantities of data, and excels in low-data scenarios and cross-lingual transfer. We also study different strategies for few-shot cross-lingual transfer, finding that continued LoRA tuning outperforms full fine-tuning and the dynamic composition of language-specific LoRA modules., Comment: Findings of NAACL 2024

Self-normalized processes arise naturally in many statistical tasks. While self-normalized concentration has been extensively studied for scalar-valued processes, there is less work on multidimensional processes outside of the sub-Gaussian setting. In this work, we construct a general, self-normalized inequality for $\mathbb{R}^d$-valued processes that satisfy a simple yet broad "sub-$\psi$" tail condition, which generalizes assumptions based on cumulant generating functions. From this general inequality, we derive an upper law of the iterated logarithm for sub-$\psi$ vector-valued processes, which is tight up to small constants. We demonstrate applications in prototypical statistical tasks, such as parameter estimation in online linear regression and auto-regressive modeling, and bounded mean estimation via a new (multivariate) empirical Bernstein concentration inequality., Comment: 50 pages, 3 figures

In the kernelized bandit problem, a learner aims to sequentially compute the optimum of a function lying in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space given only noisy evaluations at sequentially chosen points. In particular, the learner aims to minimize regret, which is a measure of the suboptimality of the choices made. Arguably the most popular algorithm is the Gaussian Process Upper Confidence Bound (GP-UCB) algorithm, which involves acting based on a simple linear estimator of the unknown function. Despite its popularity, existing analyses of GP-UCB give a suboptimal regret rate, which fails to be sublinear for many commonly used kernels such as the Mat\'ern kernel. This has led to a longstanding open question: are existing regret analyses for GP-UCB tight, or can bounds be improved by using more sophisticated analytical techniques? In this work, we resolve this open question and show that GP-UCB enjoys nearly optimal regret. In particular, our results yield sublinear regret rates for the Mat\'ern kernel, improving over the state-of-the-art analyses and partially resolving a COLT open problem posed by Vakili et al. Our improvements rely on a key technical contribution -- regularizing kernel ridge estimators in proportion to the smoothness of the underlying kernel $k$. Applying this key idea together with a largely overlooked concentration result in separable Hilbert spaces (for which we provide an independent, simplified derivation), we are able to provide a tighter analysis of the GP-UCB algorithm., Comment: 20 pages, 0 figures

Principal component regression (PCR) is a popular technique for fixed-design error-in-variables regression, a generalization of the linear regression setting in which the observed covariates are corrupted with random noise. We provide the first time-uniform finite sample guarantees for (regularized) PCR whenever data is collected adaptively. Since the proof techniques for analyzing PCR in the fixed design setting do not readily extend to the online setting, our results rely on adapting tools from modern martingale concentration to the error-in-variables setting. We demonstrate the usefulness of our bounds by applying them to the domain of panel data, a ubiquitous setting in econometrics and statistics. As our first application, we provide a framework for experiment design in panel data settings when interventions are assigned adaptively. Our framework may be thought of as a generalization of the synthetic control and synthetic interventions frameworks, where data is collected via an adaptive intervention assignment policy. Our second application is a procedure for learning such an intervention assignment policy in a setting where units arrive sequentially to be treated. In addition to providing theoretical performance guarantees (as measured by regret), we show that our method empirically outperforms a baseline which does not leverage error-in-variables regression.