This is the first year of the TREC Product search track. The focus this year was the creation of a reusable collection and evaluation of the impact of the use of metadata and multi-modal data on retrieval accuracy. This year we leverage the new product search corpus, which includes contextual metadata. Our analysis shows that in the product search domain, traditional retrieval systems are highly effective and commonly outperform general-purpose pretrained embedding models. Our analysis also evaluates the impact of using simplified and metadata-enhanced collections, finding no clear trend in the impact of the expanded collection. We also see some surprising outcomes; despite their widespread adoption and competitive performance on other tasks, we find single-stage dense retrieval runs can commonly be noncompetitive or generate low-quality results both in the zero-shot and fine-tuned domain.
The proliferation of low-quality online information in today's era has underscored the need for robust and automatic mechanisms to evaluate the trustworthiness of online news publishers. In this paper, we analyse the trustworthiness of online news media outlets by leveraging a dataset of 4033 news stories from 40 different sources. We aim to infer the trustworthiness level of the source based on the classification of individual articles' content. The trust labels are obtained from NewsGuard, a journalistic organization that evaluates news sources using well-established editorial and publishing criteria. The results indicate that the classification model is highly effective in classifying the trustworthiness levels of the news articles. This research has practical applications in alerting readers to potentially untrustworthy news sources, assisting journalistic organizations in evaluating new or unfamiliar media outlets and supporting the selection of articles for their trustworthiness assessment.
We describe team ielab from CSIRO and The University of Queensland's approach to the 2023 TREC Clinical Trials Track. Our approach was to use neural rankers but to utilise Large Language Models to overcome the issue of lack of training data for such rankers. Specifically, we employ ChatGPT to generate relevant patient descriptions for randomly selected clinical trials from the corpus. This synthetic dataset, combined with human-annotated training data from previous years, is used to train both dense and sparse retrievers based on PubmedBERT. Additionally, a cross-encoder re-ranker is integrated into the system. To further enhance the effectiveness of our approach, we prompting GPT-4 as a TREC annotator to provide judgments on our run files. These judgments are subsequently employed to re-rank the results. This architecture tightly integrates strong PubmedBERT-based rankers with the aid of SOTA Large Language Models, demonstrating a new approach to clinical trial retrieval.
Compared to the generations up to 4G, whose main focus was on broadband and coverage aspects, 5G has expanded the scope of wireless cellular systems towards embracing two new types of connectivity: massive machine-type communication (mMTC) and ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). This paper will discuss the possible evolution of these two types of connectivity within the umbrella of 6G wireless systems. The paper consists of three parts. The first part deals with the connectivity for a massive number of devices. While mMTC research in 5G was predominantly focused on the problem of uncoordinated access in the uplink for a large number of devices, the traffic patterns in 6G may become more symmetric, leading to closed-loop massive connectivity. One of the drivers for this is distributed learning/inference. The second part of the paper will discuss the evolution of wireless connectivity for critical services. While latency and reliability are tightly coupled in 5G, 6G will support a variety of safety critical control applications with different types of timing requirements, as evidenced by the emergence of metrics related to information freshness and information value. Additionally, ensuring ultra-high reliability for safety critical control applications requires modeling and estimation of the tail statistics of the wireless channel, queue length, and delay. The fulfillment of these stringent requirements calls for the development of novel AI-based techniques, incorporating optimization theory, explainable AI, generative AI and digital twins. The third part will analyze the coexistence of massive connectivity and critical services. We will consider scenarios in which a massive number of devices need to support traffic patterns of mixed criticality. This will be followed by a discussion about the management of wireless resources shared by services with different criticality.
This review paper explores Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), which integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 to handle multimodal data such as text and vision. MLLMs demonstrate capabilities like generating image narratives and answering image-based questions, bridging the gap towards real-world human-computer interactions and hinting at a potential pathway to artificial general intelligence. However, MLLMs still face challenges in processing the semantic gap in multimodality, which may lead to erroneous generation, posing potential risks to society. Choosing the appropriate modality alignment method is crucial, as improper methods might require more parameters with limited performance improvement. This paper aims to explore modality alignment methods for LLMs and their existing capabilities. Implementing modality alignment allows LLMs to address environmental issues and enhance accessibility. The study surveys existing modal alignment methods in MLLMs into four groups: (1) Multimodal Converters that change data into something LLMs can understand; (2) Multimodal Perceivers to improve how LLMs perceive different types of data; (3) Tools Assistance for changing data into one common format, usually text; and (4) Data-Driven methods that teach LLMs to understand specific types of data in a dataset. This field is still in a phase of exploration and experimentation, and we will organize and update various existing research methods for multimodal information alignment.
There are now over 20 commercial vector database management systems (VDBMSs), all produced within the past five years. But embedding-based retrieval has been studied for over ten years, and similarity search a staggering half century and more. Driving this shift from algorithms to systems are new data intensive applications, notably large language models, that demand vast stores of unstructured data coupled with reliable, secure, fast, and scalable query processing capability. A variety of new data management techniques now exist for addressing these needs, however there is no comprehensive survey to thoroughly review these techniques and systems. We start by identifying five main obstacles to vector data management, namely vagueness of semantic similarity, large size of vectors, high cost of similarity comparison, lack of natural partitioning that can be used for indexing, and difficulty of efficiently answering hybrid queries that require both attributes and vectors. Overcoming these obstacles has led to new approaches to query processing, storage and indexing, and query optimization and execution. For query processing, a variety of similarity scores and query types are now well understood; for storage and indexing, techniques include vector compression, namely quantization, and partitioning based on randomization, learning partitioning, and navigable partitioning; for query optimization and execution, we describe new operators for hybrid queries, as well as techniques for plan enumeration, plan selection, and hardware accelerated execution. These techniques lead to a variety of VDBMSs across a spectrum of design and runtime characteristics, including native systems specialized for vectors and extended systems that incorporate vector capabilities into existing systems. We then discuss benchmarks, and finally we outline research challenges and point the direction for future work.
This paper offers a comprehensive review of the research on Natural Language Generation (NLG) over the past two decades, especially in relation to data-to-text generation and text-to-text generation deep learning methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey aims to (a) give the latest synthesis of deep learning research on the NLG core tasks, as well as the architectures adopted in the field; (b) detail meticulously and comprehensively various NLG tasks and datasets, and draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, focusing on different evaluation methods and their relationships; (c) highlight some future emphasis and relatively recent research issues that arise due to the increasing synergy between NLG and other artificial intelligence areas, such as computer vision, text and computational creativity.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are successful in many computer vision tasks. However, the most accurate DNNs require millions of parameters and operations, making them energy, computation and memory intensive. This impedes the deployment of large DNNs in low-power devices with limited compute resources. Recent research improves DNN models by reducing the memory requirement, energy consumption, and number of operations without significantly decreasing the accuracy. This paper surveys the progress of low-power deep learning and computer vision, specifically in regards to inference, and discusses the methods for compacting and accelerating DNN models. The techniques can be divided into four major categories: (1) parameter quantization and pruning, (2) compressed convolutional filters and matrix factorization, (3) network architecture search, and (4) knowledge distillation. We analyze the accuracy, advantages, disadvantages, and potential solutions to the problems with the techniques in each category. We also discuss new evaluation metrics as a guideline for future research.
This is a review of "The Book of Why", by Judea Pearl.
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently achieved great success in many visual recognition tasks. However, existing deep neural network models are computationally expensive and memory intensive, hindering their deployment in devices with low memory resources or in applications with strict latency requirements. Therefore, a natural thought is to perform model compression and acceleration in deep networks without significantly decreasing the model performance. During the past few years, tremendous progress has been made in this area. In this paper, we survey the recent advanced techniques for compacting and accelerating CNNs model developed. These techniques are roughly categorized into four schemes: parameter pruning and sharing, low-rank factorization, transferred/compact convolutional filters, and knowledge distillation. Methods of parameter pruning and sharing will be described at the beginning, after that the other techniques will be introduced. For each scheme, we provide insightful analysis regarding the performance, related applications, advantages, and drawbacks etc. Then we will go through a few very recent additional successful methods, for example, dynamic capacity networks and stochastic depths networks. After that, we survey the evaluation matrix, the main datasets used for evaluating the model performance and recent benchmarking efforts. Finally, we conclude this paper, discuss remaining challenges and possible directions on this topic.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are a special type of Neural Networks, which have shown state-of-the-art results on various competitive benchmarks. The powerful learning ability of deep CNN is largely achieved with the use of multiple non-linear feature extraction stages that can automatically learn hierarchical representation from the data. Availability of a large amount of data and improvements in the hardware processing units have accelerated the research in CNNs and recently very interesting deep CNN architectures are reported. The recent race in deep CNN architectures for achieving high performance on the challenging benchmarks has shown that the innovative architectural ideas, as well as parameter optimization, can improve the CNN performance on various vision-related tasks. In this regard, different ideas in the CNN design have been explored such as use of different activation and loss functions, parameter optimization, regularization, and restructuring of processing units. However, the major improvement in representational capacity is achieved by the restructuring of the processing units. Especially, the idea of using a block as a structural unit instead of a layer is gaining substantial appreciation. This survey thus focuses on the intrinsic taxonomy present in the recently reported CNN architectures and consequently, classifies the recent innovations in CNN architectures into seven different categories. These seven categories are based on spatial exploitation, depth, multi-path, width, feature map exploitation, channel boosting and attention. Additionally, it covers the elementary understanding of the CNN components and sheds light on the current challenges and applications of CNNs.