The recruitment process is crucial to an organization's ability to position itself for success, from finding qualified and well-fitting job candidates to impacting its output and culture. Therefore, over the past century, human resources experts and industrial-organizational psychologists have established hiring practices such as attracting candidates with job ads, gauging a candidate's skills with assessments, and using interview questions to assess organizational fit. However, the advent of big data and machine learning has led to a rapid transformation in the traditional recruitment process as many organizations have moved to using artificial intelligence (AI). Given the prevalence of AI-based recruitment, there is growing concern that human biases may carry over to decisions made by these systems, which can amplify the effect through systematic application. Empirical studies have identified prevalent biases in candidate ranking software and chatbot interactions, catalyzing a growing body of research dedicated to AI fairness over the last decade. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of this emerging field by discussing the types of biases encountered in AI-driven recruitment, exploring various fairness metrics and mitigation methods, and examining tools for auditing these systems. We highlight current challenges and outline future directions for developing fair AI recruitment applications, ensuring equitable candidate treatment and enhancing organizational outcomes.
Communication network engineering in enterprise environments is traditionally a complex, time-consuming, and error-prone manual process. Most research on network engineering automation has concentrated on configuration synthesis, often overlooking changes in the physical network topology. This paper introduces GeNet, a multimodal co-pilot for enterprise network engineers. GeNet is a novel framework that leverages a large language model (LLM) to streamline network design workflows. It uses visual and textual modalities to interpret and update network topologies and device configurations based on user intents. GeNet was evaluated on enterprise network scenarios adapted from Cisco certification exercises. Our results demonstrate GeNet's ability to interpret network topology images accurately, potentially reducing network engineers' efforts and accelerating network design processes in enterprise environments. Furthermore, we show the importance of precise topology understanding when handling intents that require modifications to the network's topology.
An elusive goal in navigation research is to build an intelligent agent that can understand multimodal instructions including natural language and image, and perform useful navigation. To achieve this, we study a widely useful category of navigation tasks we call Multimodal Instruction Navigation with demonstration Tours (MINT), in which the environment prior is provided through a previously recorded demonstration video. Recent advances in Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown a promising path in achieving this goal as it demonstrates capabilities in perceiving and reasoning about multimodal inputs. However, VLMs are typically trained to predict textual output and it is an open research question about how to best utilize them in navigation. To solve MINT, we present Mobility VLA, a hierarchical Vision-Language-Action (VLA) navigation policy that combines the environment understanding and common sense reasoning power of long-context VLMs and a robust low-level navigation policy based on topological graphs. The high-level policy consists of a long-context VLM that takes the demonstration tour video and the multimodal user instruction as input to find the goal frame in the tour video. Next, a low-level policy uses the goal frame and an offline constructed topological graph to generate robot actions at every timestep. We evaluated Mobility VLA in a 836m^2 real world environment and show that Mobility VLA has a high end-to-end success rates on previously unsolved multimodal instructions such as "Where should I return this?" while holding a plastic bin.
Semantic communication (SemCom) is expected to be a core paradigm in future communication networks, yielding significant benefits in terms of spectrum resource saving and information interaction efficiency. However, the existing SemCom structure is limited by the lack of context-reasoning ability and background knowledge provisioning, which, therefore, motivates us to seek the potential of incorporating generative artificial intelligence (GAI) technologies with SemCom. Recognizing GAI's powerful capability in automating and creating valuable, diverse, and personalized multimodal content, this article first highlights the principal characteristics of the combination of GAI and SemCom along with their pertinent benefits and challenges. To tackle these challenges, we further propose a novel GAI-integrated SemCom network (GAI-SCN) framework in a cloud-edge-mobile design. Specifically, by employing global and local GAI models, our GAI-SCN enables multimodal semantic content provisioning, semantic-level joint-source-channel coding, and AIGC acquisition to maximize the efficiency and reliability of semantic reasoning and resource utilization. Afterward, we present a detailed implementation workflow of GAI-SCN, followed by corresponding initial simulations for performance evaluation in comparison with two benchmarks. Finally, we discuss several open issues and offer feasible solutions to unlock the full potential of GAI-SCN.
A promising way to overcome the scalability limitations of the current blockchain is to use sharding, which is to split the transaction processing among multiple, smaller groups of nodes. A well-performed blockchain sharding system requires both high performance and high security in both intra- and cross-shard perspectives. However, existing protocols either have issues on protecting security or trade off great performance for security. In this paper, we propose SP-Chain, a blockchain sharding system with enhanced Security and Performance for both intra- and cross-shard perspectives. For intra-shard aspect, we design a two-phase concurrent voting scheme to provide high system throughput and low transaction confirmation latency. Moreover, we propose an efficient unbiased leader rotation scheme to ensure high performance under malicious behavior. For cross-shard aspect, a proof-assisted efficient cross-shard transaction processing mechanism is proposed to guard the cross-shard transactions with low overhead. We implement SP-Chain based on Harmony, and evaluate its performance via large-scale deployment. Extensive evaluations suggest that SP-Chain can process more than 10,000 tx/sec under malicious behaviors with a confirmation latency of 7.6s in a network of 4,000 nodes.
Integration, composition, mechanization, and AI assisted development are the driving themes in the future of software development. At their core these concepts are rooted in the increasingly important role of computing in our world, the desire to deliver functionality faster, with higher quality, and to empower more people to benefit from programmatic automation. These themes, and how they impact the human developers driving them, are the foundations for the next generation of programming languages. At first glance the needs of mechanization tools, AI agents, and human developers along with the various goals around development velocity, software quality, and software democratization are a broad and seemingly diverse set of needs. However, at their core is a single challenge that, once resolved, enables us to make radical progress in all of these areas. Our hypothesis is that, fundamentally, software development is a problem of reasoning about code and semantics. This is true for human developers implementing a feature, symbolic tools building models of application behavior, and even for language based AI agents as they perform tasks. While the particular aspects of reasoning that each agent struggles with varies to some degree, they share many common themes and, surprisingly, most mainstream languages extensively employ (anti)features that make this task harder or infeasible! This paper proposes a novel approach to this challenge -- instead of new language features or logical constructs, that add more complexity to what is already a problem of complexity, we propose radical simplification in the form of the Bosque platform and language.
Graph clustering, which aims to divide the nodes in the graph into several distinct clusters, is a fundamental and challenging task. In recent years, deep graph clustering methods have been increasingly proposed and achieved promising performance. However, the corresponding survey paper is scarce and it is imminent to make a summary in this field. From this motivation, this paper makes the first comprehensive survey of deep graph clustering. Firstly, the detailed definition of deep graph clustering and the important baseline methods are introduced. Besides, the taxonomy of deep graph clustering methods is proposed based on four different criteria including graph type, network architecture, learning paradigm, and clustering method. In addition, through the careful analysis of the existing works, the challenges and opportunities from five perspectives are summarized. At last, the applications of deep graph clustering in four domains are presented. It is worth mentioning that a collection of state-of-the-art deep graph clustering methods including papers, codes, and datasets is available on GitHub. We hope this work will serve as a quick guide and help researchers to overcome challenges in this vibrant field.
The study of network robustness is a critical tool in the characterization and sense making of complex interconnected systems such as infrastructure, communication and social networks. While significant research has been conducted in all of these areas, gaps in the surveying literature still exist. Answers to key questions are currently scattered across multiple scientific fields and numerous papers. In this survey, we distill key findings across numerous domains and provide researchers crucial access to important information by--(1) summarizing and comparing recent and classical graph robustness measures; (2) exploring which robustness measures are most applicable to different categories of networks (e.g., social, infrastructure; (3) reviewing common network attack strategies, and summarizing which attacks are most effective across different network topologies; and (4) extensive discussion on selecting defense techniques to mitigate attacks across a variety of networks. This survey guides researchers and practitioners in navigating the expansive field of network robustness, while summarizing answers to key questions. We conclude by highlighting current research directions and open problems.
A fundamental goal of scientific research is to learn about causal relationships. However, despite its critical role in the life and social sciences, causality has not had the same importance in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which has traditionally placed more emphasis on predictive tasks. This distinction is beginning to fade, with an emerging area of interdisciplinary research at the convergence of causal inference and language processing. Still, research on causality in NLP remains scattered across domains without unified definitions, benchmark datasets and clear articulations of the remaining challenges. In this survey, we consolidate research across academic areas and situate it in the broader NLP landscape. We introduce the statistical challenge of estimating causal effects, encompassing settings where text is used as an outcome, treatment, or as a means to address confounding. In addition, we explore potential uses of causal inference to improve the performance, robustness, fairness, and interpretability of NLP models. We thus provide a unified overview of causal inference for the computational linguistics community.
With the advances of data-driven machine learning research, a wide variety of prediction problems have been tackled. It has become critical to explore how machine learning and specifically deep learning methods can be exploited to analyse healthcare data. A major limitation of existing methods has been the focus on grid-like data; however, the structure of physiological recordings are often irregular and unordered which makes it difficult to conceptualise them as a matrix. As such, graph neural networks have attracted significant attention by exploiting implicit information that resides in a biological system, with interactive nodes connected by edges whose weights can be either temporal associations or anatomical junctions. In this survey, we thoroughly review the different types of graph architectures and their applications in healthcare. We provide an overview of these methods in a systematic manner, organized by their domain of application including functional connectivity, anatomical structure and electrical-based analysis. We also outline the limitations of existing techniques and discuss potential directions for future research.
Most existing works in visual question answering (VQA) are dedicated to improving the accuracy of predicted answers, while disregarding the explanations. We argue that the explanation for an answer is of the same or even more importance compared with the answer itself, since it makes the question and answering process more understandable and traceable. To this end, we propose a new task of VQA-E (VQA with Explanation), where the computational models are required to generate an explanation with the predicted answer. We first construct a new dataset, and then frame the VQA-E problem in a multi-task learning architecture. Our VQA-E dataset is automatically derived from the VQA v2 dataset by intelligently exploiting the available captions. We have conducted a user study to validate the quality of explanations synthesized by our method. We quantitatively show that the additional supervision from explanations can not only produce insightful textual sentences to justify the answers, but also improve the performance of answer prediction. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin on the VQA v2 dataset.