United States

This paper considers the challenges Large Language Models (LLMs) face when reasoning over text that includes information involving uncertainty explicitly quantified via probability values. This type of reasoning is relevant to a variety of contexts ranging from everyday conversations to medical decision-making. Despite improvements in the mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLMs, they still exhibit significant difficulties when it comes to probabilistic reasoning. To deal with this problem, we introduce the Bayesian Linguistic Inference Dataset (BLInD), a new dataset specifically designed to test the probabilistic reasoning capabilities of LLMs. We use BLInD to find out the limitations of LLMs for tasks involving probabilistic reasoning. In addition, we present several prompting strategies that map the problem to different formal representations, including Python code, probabilistic algorithms, and probabilistic logical programming. We conclude by providing an evaluation of our methods on BLInD and an adaptation of a causal reasoning question-answering dataset. Our empirical results highlight the effectiveness of our proposed strategies for multiple LLMs.

AAAI 2025

Reasoning over Uncertain Text by Generative Large Language Models

snlp

question answering

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25), which will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Pennsylvania Convention Center from February 25 to March 4, 2025.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

### [Invited Speakers](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-invited-speakers/)

Register [here](https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-25 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.



Text readability assessment involves categorizing texts based on readers' comprehension levels. Hybrid automatic readability assessment (ARA) models, combining deep and linguistic features, have recently attracted rising attention due to their impressive performance. 
However, existing hybrid ARA models generally ignore the specific-intrinsic information of deep and linguistic representations, and cannot fully explore their common-intrinsic information.
In this paper, we introduce a self-supervised collaborative information bottleneck (SCIB) module for ARA to address these issues. 
Specifically, we collaboratively consider both specific-intrinsic and common-intrinsic information of the linguistic representation and various levels of deep representations including the document-, sentence- and word-level deep representations, and yield their refined representations via a self-supervised information bottleneck scheme. 
Extensive experiments are conducted on four English and two Chinese corpora to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of four important evaluation metrics, and the suggested SCIB module can effectively capture the specific- and common-intrinsic information.

Self-Supervised Collaborative Information Bottleneck for Text Readability Assessment

Existing cross-modal retrieval methods typically rely on large-scale vision-language pair data. This makes it challenging to efficiently develop a cross-modal retrieval model for under-resourced languages of interest. Therefore, Cross-lingual Cross-modal Retrieval (CCR), which aims to align vision and the low-resource language (the $\textit{target language}$) without using any human-labeled target-language data, has gained increasing attention. As a general parameter-efficient way, a common solution is to utilize adapter modules to transfer the vision-language alignment ability of Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) models from a source language to a target language. However, these adapters are usually $\textit{static}$ once learned,  making it difficult to adapt to target-language captions with $\textit{varied}$ expressions. To alleviate it, we propose $\textit{\textbf{D}ynamic}$ $\textit{\textbf{A}dapter}$ with $\textit{\textbf{S}emantics}$ $\textit{\textbf{D}isentangling}$ (DASD), whose parameters are dynamically generated conditioned on the characteristics of the input captions. Considering that the semantics and expression styles of the input caption largely influence how to encode it, we propose a semantic disentangling module to extract the semantic-related and semantic-agnostic features from the input, ensuring that generated adapters are well-suited to the characteristics of input caption. Extensive experiments on two image-text datasets and one video-text dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model for cross-lingual cross-modal retrieval, as well as its good compatibility with various VLP models. Our source code is anonymously released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DASD-BB8B/.

Dynamic Adapter with Semantics Disentangling for Cross-lingual Cross-modal Retrieval

GNN-based approaches for learning general policies across planning domains are limited by the expressive power of $C_2$, namely; first-order logic with two variables and counting. This limitation can be overcomed by transitioning to $k$-GNNs, for $k=3$, wherein object embeddings are substituted with triplet embeddings. Yet, while $3$-GNNs have the expressive power of $C_3$, unlike $1$- and $2$-GNNs that are confined to $C_2$, they require quartic time for message exchange and cubic space to store embeddings, rendering them infeasible. In this work, we introduce a parameterized version R-GNN[$t$] (with parameter $t$) of Relational GNNs. Unlike GNNs, that are designed to perform computation on graphs, Relational GNNs are desgined to do computation on relational structures. When $t=\infty$, R-GNN[$t$] approximates $3$-GNNs over graphs, but  using only quadratic space for embeddings. For lower values of $t$, such as $t=1$ and $t=2$, R-GNN[$t$] achieves a weaker approximation by exchanging fewer messages, yet interestingly, often yield the expressivity required in several planning domains. Furthermore, the new R-GNN[$t$] architecture is the original R-GNN architecture with a suitable transformation applied to the inputs only. Experimental results illustrate the clear performance gains of R-GNN[$1$] and R-GNN[$2$] over the plain R-GNNs, and also over Edge Transformers that also approximate $3$-GNNs.

Learning More Expressive General Policies for Classical Planning Domains

In forecasting competitions, the traditional mechanism scores the predictions of each contestant against the outcome of each event, and the contestant with the highest total score wins. While it is well-known that this traditional mechanism can suffer from incentive issues, it is folklore that contestants will still be roughly truthful as the number of events grows. Yet thus far the literature lacks a formal analysis of this traditional mechanism. This paper gives the first such analysis. We first demonstrate that the ``long-run truthfulness'' folklore is false: even for arbitrary numbers of events, the best forecaster can have an incentive to hedge, reporting more moderate beliefs to increase their win probability. On the positive side, however, we show that two contestants will be approximately truthful when they have sufficient uncertainty over the relative quality of their opponent and the outcomes of the events, a case which may arise in practice.

Hedging and Approximate Truthfulness in Traditional Forecasting Competitions

Label polysemy, where an instance can be associated with multiple labels, is common in real-world tasks.
LDL (label distribution learning) is an effective learning paradigm for handling label polysemy, where each instance is associated with a label distribution. Although numerous LDL algorithms have been proposed and achieved satisfactory performance on most existing datasets, they are typically trained directly on the collected label distributions which often lack quality guarantees in real-world tasks due to annotator subjectivity and algorithm assumptions. Consequently, direct learning from such uncertain label distributions can lead to unpredictable generalization performance.
To address this problem, we propose an adaptive-grained label distribution learning framework whose main idea is to extract relatively reliable supervision information from unreliable label distributions, and thus the label distribution learning task can be decomposed into three subtasks: coarsening label distributions, learning coarse-grained labels and refining coarse-grained labels.
In this framework, we design an adaptive label coarsening algorithm to extract an optimal coarsen-grained labels and a label refining function to enhance the coarse-grained label into the final label distributions.
Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets to demonstrate the advantages of our proposal.

Adaptive-Grained Label Distribution Learning

Diffusion models have received wide attention in generation tasks. However, the expensive computation cost prevents the application of diffusion models in resource-constrained scenarios. Quantization emerges as a practical solution that significantly saves storage and computation by reducing the bit-width of parameters. However, the existing quantization methods for diffusion models still cause severe degradation in performance, especially under extremely low bit-widths (2-4 bit). The primary decrease in performance comes from the significant discretization of activation values at low bit quantization. Too few activation candidates are unfriendly for outlier significant weight channel quantization, and the discretized features prevent stable learning over different time steps of the diffusion model. This paper presents MPQ-DM, a Mixed-Precision Quantization method for Diffusion Models.  The proposed MPQ-DM mainly relies on two techniques: (1) To mitigate the quantization error caused by outlier severe weight channels, we propose an Outlier-Driven Mixed Quantization (OMQ) technique that uses Kurtosis to quantify outlier salient channels and apply optimized intra-layer mixed-precision bit-width allocation to recover accuracy performance within target efficiency. (2) To robustly learn representations crossing time steps, we construct a Time-Smoothed Relation Distillation (TRD) scheme between the quantized diffusion model and its full-precision counterpart, transferring discrete and continuous latent to a unified relation space to reduce the representation inconsistency. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MPQ-DM achieves significant accuracy gains under extremely low bit-widths compared with SOTA quantization methods. MPQ-DM achieves a 58% FID decrease under W2A4 setting compared with baseline, while all other methods even collapse.

MPQ-DM: Mixed Precision Quantization for Extremely Low Bit Diffusion Models

We consider the Online Facility Location (OFL) problem in the framework of learning-augmented online algorithms. In Online Facility Location (OFL), demands arrive one-by-one in a metric space and must be (irrevocably) assigned to an open facility upon arrival, without any knowledge about future demands. We focus on uniform facility opening costs and present an online algorithm for OFL that exploits potentially imperfect predictions on the locations of the optimal facilities. We prove that the competitive ratio decreases from sublogarithmic in the number $n$ of demands to constant as the so-called $\eta_1$ error, i.e., the sum of distances of the predicted locations to the optimal facility locations, decreases towards zero. E.g., our analysis implies that if for some $\varepsilon > 0$, $\eta_1 = \mathrm{opt} / n^\varepsilon$, where $\mathrm{opt}$ is the cost of the optimal solution, the competitive ratio is $O(1/\varepsilon)$. We complement our analysis with a matching lower bound establishing that the dependence of the algorithm's competitive ratio on the $\eta_1$ error is optimal, up to constant factors.

Improved Bounds for Online Facility Location with Predictions

Social recommendation leverages the social connections between users to mitigate the issue of data sparsity and enhance recommendation quality. Although many existing related works show their effectiveness, there remain two critical questions: i) The patterns of preference interactions among users are varied and heterogeneous. Current models struggle to accurately capture preference shifts from user interactions in noisy social environments. ii) Existing methods handle the integration of auxiliary information coarsely, potentially introducing noise and leading to biases in user preferences. To address the limitations above, we introduce a novel framework named Robust Graph Based Social Recommendation through Contrastive Multi-view Learning (RGCML). This framework leverages denoised social relations and global intents as dual auxiliary information sources to provide comprehensive characterization of users. Firstly, RGCML employs the concept of opinion dynamics to simulate how user preferences evolve due to noisy social relations. Then, it utilizes a specifically designed information fusion module to extract critical contextual information from multiple semantic perspectives, thereby achieving efficient personalized information fusion. Finally, it adopts the designed global-local contrastive learning paradigm that untangles and discriminates user preferences from global intents, further addressing the noise problem and enhancing the quality of user representations. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of RGCML compared to several state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines.

Robust Graph Based Social Recommendation Through Contrastive Multi-View Learning

Knowledge tagging for questions is vital in modern intelligent educational applications, including learning progress diagnosis, practice question recommendations, and course content organization. Traditionally, these annotations have been performed by pedagogical experts, as the task demands not only a deep semantic understanding of question stems and knowledge definitions but also a strong ability to link problem-solving logic with relevant knowledge concepts. With the advent of advanced natural language processing (NLP) algorithms, such as pre-trained language models and large language models (LLMs), pioneering studies have explored automating the knowledge tagging process using various machine learning models. In this paper, we investigate the use of a multi-agent system to address the limitations of previous algorithms, particularly in handling complex cases involving intricate knowledge definitions and strict numerical constraints. By demonstrating its superior performance on the publicly available math question knowledge tagging dataset, MathKnowCT, we highlight the significant potential of an LLM-based multi-agent system in overcoming the challenges that previous methods have encountered. Finally, through an in-depth discussion of the implications of automating knowledge tagging, we underscore the promising future of deploying LLM-based algorithms in educational contexts.

Knowledge Tagging with Large Language Model Based Multi-Agent System

Recent advances in vision-language models have shown remarkable potential, yet creating scalable systems that can effectively understand and generate across modalities remains challenging. This talk will present our contributions to advancing scalable vision-language systems, focusing on three key themes: (1) efficient vision-language understanding, including our work on temporal perceiving video-language pre-training and knowledge-enhanced zero-shot retrieval; (2) scalable generation frameworks, encompassing our innovations in zero-shot captioning and co-speech gesture generation; and (3) practical applications and deployments of these technologies. We will discuss how these advances have enabled both better performance and improved efficiency in real-world scenarios, and explore future directions for scalable multimodal systems.

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Self-Supervised Collaborative Information Bottleneck for Text Readability Assessment

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