Daily Papers

Assessing sampling uncertainty in extremum estimation can be challenging when the asymptotic variance is not analytically tractable. Bootstrap inference offers a feasible solution but can be computationally costly especially when the model is complex. This paper uses iterates of a specially designed stochastic optimization algorithm as draws from which both point estimates and bootstrap standard errors can be computed in a single run. The draws are generated by the gradient and Hessian computed from batches of data that are resampled at each iteration. We show that these draws yield consistent estimates and asymptotically valid frequentist inference for a large class of regular problems. The algorithm provides accurate standard errors in simulation examples and empirical applications at low computational costs. The draws from the algorithm also provide a convenient way to detect data irregularities.

The bootstrap is a popular data-driven method to quantify statistical uncertainty, but for modern high-dimensional problems, it could suffer from huge computational costs due to the need to repeatedly generate resamples and refit models. We study the use of bootstraps in high-dimensional environments with a small number of resamples. In particular, we show that with a recent "cheap" bootstrap perspective, using a number of resamples as small as one could attain valid coverage even when the dimension grows closely with the sample size, thus strongly supporting the implementability of the bootstrap for large-scale problems. We validate our theoretical results and compare the performance of our approach with other benchmarks via a range of experiments.

In natural language processing, a recently popular line of work explores how to best report the experimental results of neural networks. One exemplar publication, titled "Show Your Work: Improved Reporting of Experimental Results," advocates for reporting the expected validation effectiveness of the best-tuned model, with respect to the computational budget. In the present work, we critically examine this paper. As far as statistical generalizability is concerned, we find unspoken pitfalls and caveats with this approach. We analytically show that their estimator is biased and uses error-prone assumptions. We find that the estimator favors negative errors and yields poor bootstrapped confidence intervals. We derive an unbiased alternative and bolster our claims with empirical evidence from statistical simulation. Our codebase is at http://github.com/castorini/meanmax.

The correct use of model evaluation, model selection, and algorithm selection techniques is vital in academic machine learning research as well as in many industrial settings. This article reviews different techniques that can be used for each of these three subtasks and discusses the main advantages and disadvantages of each technique with references to theoretical and empirical studies. Further, recommendations are given to encourage best yet feasible practices in research and applications of machine learning. Common methods such as the holdout method for model evaluation and selection are covered, which are not recommended when working with small datasets. Different flavors of the bootstrap technique are introduced for estimating the uncertainty of performance estimates, as an alternative to confidence intervals via normal approximation if bootstrapping is computationally feasible. Common cross-validation techniques such as leave-one-out cross-validation and k-fold cross-validation are reviewed, the bias-variance trade-off for choosing k is discussed, and practical tips for the optimal choice of k are given based on empirical evidence. Different statistical tests for algorithm comparisons are presented, and strategies for dealing with multiple comparisons such as omnibus tests and multiple-comparison corrections are discussed. Finally, alternative methods for algorithm selection, such as the combined F-test 5x2 cross-validation and nested cross-validation, are recommended for comparing machine learning algorithms when datasets are small.

Monitoring machine learning models once they are deployed is challenging. It is even more challenging to decide when to retrain models in real-case scenarios when labeled data is beyond reach, and monitoring performance metrics becomes unfeasible. In this work, we use non-parametric bootstrapped uncertainty estimates and SHAP values to provide explainable uncertainty estimation as a technique that aims to monitor the deterioration of machine learning models in deployment environments, as well as determine the source of model deterioration when target labels are not available. Classical methods are purely aimed at detecting distribution shift, which can lead to false positives in the sense that the model has not deteriorated despite a shift in the data distribution. To estimate model uncertainty we construct prediction intervals using a novel bootstrap method, which improves upon the work of Kumar & Srivastava (2012). We show that both our model deterioration detection system as well as our uncertainty estimation method achieve better performance than the current state-of-the-art. Finally, we use explainable AI techniques to gain an understanding of the drivers of model deterioration. We release an open source Python package, doubt, which implements our proposed methods, as well as the code used to reproduce our experiments.

Noise plagues many numerical datasets, where the recorded values in the data may fail to match the true underlying values due to reasons including: erroneous sensors, data entry/processing mistakes, or imperfect human estimates. We consider general regression settings with covariates and a potentially corrupted response whose observed values may contain errors. By accounting for various uncertainties, we introduced veracity scores that distinguish between genuine errors and natural data fluctuations, conditioned on the available covariate information in the dataset. We propose a simple yet efficient filtering procedure for eliminating potential errors, and establish theoretical guarantees for our method. We also contribute a new error detection benchmark involving 5 regression datasets with real-world numerical errors (for which the true values are also known). In this benchmark and additional simulation studies, our method identifies incorrect values with better precision/recall than other approaches.

Experiments with pre-trained models such as BERT are often based on a single checkpoint. While the conclusions drawn apply to the artifact tested in the experiment (i.e., the particular instance of the model), it is not always clear whether they hold for the more general procedure which includes the architecture, training data, initialization scheme, and loss function. Recent work has shown that repeating the pre-training process can lead to substantially different performance, suggesting that an alternate strategy is needed to make principled statements about procedures. To enable researchers to draw more robust conclusions, we introduce the MultiBERTs, a set of 25 BERT-Base checkpoints, trained with similar hyper-parameters as the original BERT model but differing in random weight initialization and shuffling of training data. We also define the Multi-Bootstrap, a non-parametric bootstrap method for statistical inference designed for settings where there are multiple pre-trained models and limited test data. To illustrate our approach, we present a case study of gender bias in coreference resolution, in which the Multi-Bootstrap lets us measure effects that may not be detected with a single checkpoint. We release our models and statistical library along with an additional set of 140 intermediate checkpoints captured during pre-training to facilitate research on learning dynamics.

Rigorous statistical evaluations of large language models (LLMs), including valid error bars and significance testing, are essential for meaningful and reliable performance assessment. Currently, when such statistical measures are reported, they typically rely on the Central Limit Theorem (CLT). In this position paper, we argue that while CLT-based methods for uncertainty quantification are appropriate when benchmarks consist of thousands of examples, they fail to provide adequate uncertainty estimates for LLM evaluations that rely on smaller, highly specialized benchmarks. In these small-data settings, we demonstrate that CLT-based methods perform very poorly, usually dramatically underestimating uncertainty (i.e. producing error bars that are too small). We give recommendations for alternative frequentist and Bayesian methods that are both easy to implement and more appropriate in these increasingly common scenarios. We provide a simple Python library for these Bayesian methods at https://github.com/sambowyer/bayes_evals .

Recent advances in machine learning have significantly improved prediction accuracy in various applications. However, ensuring the calibration of probabilistic predictions remains a significant challenge. Despite efforts to enhance model calibration, the rigorous statistical evaluation of model calibration remains less explored. In this work, we develop confidence intervals the ell_2 Expected Calibration Error (ECE). We consider top-1-to-k calibration, which includes both the popular notion of confidence calibration as well as full calibration. For a debiased estimator of the ECE, we show asymptotic normality, but with different convergence rates and asymptotic variances for calibrated and miscalibrated models. We develop methods to construct asymptotically valid confidence intervals for the ECE, accounting for this behavior as well as non-negativity. Our theoretical findings are supported through extensive experiments, showing that our methods produce valid confidence intervals with shorter lengths compared to those obtained by resampling-based methods.

We estimate ([M/H], [alpha/M]) for 48 million giants and dwarfs in low-dust extinction regions from the Gaia DR3 XP spectra by using tree-based machine-learning models trained on APOGEE DR17 and metal-poor star sample from Li et al. The root mean square error of our estimation is 0.0890 dex for [M/H] and 0.0436 dex for [alpha/M], when we evaluate our models on the test data that are not used in training the models. Because the training data is dominated by giants, our estimation is most reliable for giants. The high-[alpha/M] stars and low-[alpha/M] stars selected by our ([M/H], [alpha/M]) show different kinematical properties for giants and low-temperature dwarfs. We further investigate how our machine-learning models extract information on ([M/H], [alpha/M]). Intriguingly, we find that our models seem to extract information on [alpha/M] from Na D lines (589 nm) and Mg I line (516 nm). This result is understandable given the observed correlation between Na and Mg abundances in the literature. The catalog of ([M/H], [alpha/M]) as well as their associated uncertainties are publicly available online.

We present an efficient algorithm for simultaneously training sparse generalized linear models across many related problems, which may arise from bootstrapping, cross-validation and nonparametric permutation testing. Our approach leverages the redundancies across problems to obtain significant computational improvements relative to solving the problems sequentially by a conventional algorithm. We demonstrate our fast simultaneous training of generalized linear models (FaSTGLZ) algorithm on a number of real-world datasets, and we run otherwise computationally intensive bootstrapping and permutation test analyses that are typically necessary for obtaining statistically rigorous classification results and meaningful interpretation. Code is freely available at http://liinc.bme.columbia.edu/fastglz.

We identify label errors in the test sets of 10 of the most commonly-used computer vision, natural language, and audio datasets, and subsequently study the potential for these label errors to affect benchmark results. Errors in test sets are numerous and widespread: we estimate an average of at least 3.3% errors across the 10 datasets, where for example label errors comprise at least 6% of the ImageNet validation set. Putative label errors are identified using confident learning algorithms and then human-validated via crowdsourcing (51% of the algorithmically-flagged candidates are indeed erroneously labeled, on average across the datasets). Traditionally, machine learning practitioners choose which model to deploy based on test accuracy - our findings advise caution here, proposing that judging models over correctly labeled test sets may be more useful, especially for noisy real-world datasets. Surprisingly, we find that lower capacity models may be practically more useful than higher capacity models in real-world datasets with high proportions of erroneously labeled data. For example, on ImageNet with corrected labels: ResNet-18 outperforms ResNet-50 if the prevalence of originally mislabeled test examples increases by just 6%. On CIFAR-10 with corrected labels: VGG-11 outperforms VGG-19 if the prevalence of originally mislabeled test examples increases by just 5%. Test set errors across the 10 datasets can be viewed at https://labelerrors.com and all label errors can be reproduced by https://github.com/cleanlab/label-errors.

Calibrated uncertainty estimates in machine learning are crucial to many fields such as autonomous vehicles, medicine, and weather and climate forecasting. While there is extensive literature on uncertainty calibration for classification, the classification findings do not always translate to regression. As a result, modern models for predicting uncertainty in regression settings typically produce uncalibrated and overconfident estimates. To address these gaps, we present a calibration method for regression settings that does not assume a particular uncertainty distribution over the error: Calibrating Regression Uncertainty Distributions Empirically (CRUDE). CRUDE makes the weaker assumption that error distributions have a constant arbitrary shape across the output space, shifted by predicted mean and scaled by predicted standard deviation. We detail a theoretical connection between CRUDE and conformal inference. Across an extensive set of regression tasks, CRUDE demonstrates consistently sharper, better calibrated, and more accurate uncertainty estimates than state-of-the-art techniques.

Earth system models suffer from various structural and parametric errors in their representation of nonlinear, multi-scale processes, leading to uncertainties in their long-term projections. The effects of many of these errors (particularly those due to fast physics) can be quantified in short-term simulations, e.g., as differences between the predicted and observed states (analysis increments). With the increase in the availability of high-quality observations and simulations, learning nudging from these increments to correct model errors has become an active research area. However, most studies focus on using neural networks, which while powerful, are hard to interpret, are data-hungry, and poorly generalize out-of-distribution. Here, we show the capabilities of Model Error Discovery with Interpretability and Data Assimilation (MEDIDA), a general, data-efficient framework that uses sparsity-promoting equation-discovery techniques to learn model errors from analysis increments. Using two-layer quasi-geostrophic turbulence as the test case, MEDIDA is shown to successfully discover various linear and nonlinear structural/parametric errors when full observations are available. Discovery from spatially sparse observations is found to require highly accurate interpolation schemes. While NNs have shown success as interpolators in recent studies, here, they are found inadequate due to their inability to accurately represent small scales, a phenomenon known as spectral bias. We show that a general remedy, adding a random Fourier feature layer to the NN, resolves this issue enabling MEDIDA to successfully discover model errors from sparse observations. These promising results suggest that with further development, MEDIDA could be scaled up to models of the Earth system and real observations.

In a recent paper Juodis and Reese (2022) (JR) show that the application of the CD test proposed by Pesaran (2004) to residuals from panels with latent factors results in over-rejection. They propose a randomized test statistic to correct for over-rejection, and add a screening component to achieve power. This paper considers the same problem but from a different perspective, and shows that the standard CD test remains valid if the latent factors are weak in the sense the strength is less than half. In the case where latent factors are strong, we propose a bias-corrected version, CD*, which is shown to be asymptotically standard normal under the null of error cross-sectional independence and have power against network type alternatives. This result is shown to hold for pure latent factor models as well as for panel regression models with latent factors. The case where the errors are serially correlated is also considered. Small sample properties of the CD* test are investigated by Monte Carlo experiments and are shown to have the correct size for strong and weak factors as well as for Gaussian and non-Gaussian errors. In contrast, it is found that JR's test tends to over-reject in the case of panels with non-Gaussian errors, and has low power against spatial network alternatives. In an empirical application, using the CD* test, it is shown that there remains spatial error dependence in a panel data model for real house price changes across 377 Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the U.S., even after the effects of latent factors are filtered out.

We use tools from geometric statistics to analyze the usual estimation procedure of a template shape. This applies to shapes from landmarks, curves, surfaces, images etc. We demonstrate the asymptotic bias of the template shape estimation using the stratified geometry of the shape space. We give a Taylor expansion of the bias with respect to a parameter sigma describing the measurement error on the data. We propose two bootstrap procedures that quantify the bias and correct it, if needed. They are applicable for any type of shape data. We give a rule of thumb to provide intuition on whether the bias has to be corrected. This exhibits the parameters that control the bias' magnitude. We illustrate our results on simulated and real shape data.

Obesity, the leading cause of many non-communicable diseases, occurs mainly for eating more than our body requirements and lack of proper activity. So, being healthy requires heathy diet plans, especially for patients with comorbidities. But it is difficult to figure out the exact quantity of each nutrient because nutrients requirement varies based on physical and disease conditions. In our study we proposed a novel machine learning based system to predict the amount of nutrients one individual requires for being healthy. We applied different machine learning algorithms: linear regression, support vector machine (SVM), decision tree, random forest, XGBoost, LightGBM on fluid and 3 other major micronutrients: carbohydrate, protein, fat consumption prediction. We achieved high accuracy with low root mean square error (RMSE) by using linear regression in fluid prediction, random forest in carbohydrate prediction and LightGBM in protein and fat prediction. We believe our diet recommender system, OBESEYE, is the only of its kind which recommends diet with the consideration of comorbidities and physical conditions and promote encouragement to get rid of obesity.

Motivated by recent advances in operational weather forecasting, we study the efficacy of low-precision arithmetic for climate simulations. We develop a framework to measure rounding error in a climate model which provides a stress-test for a low-precision version of the model, and we apply our method to a variety of models including the Lorenz system; a shallow water approximation for flow over a ridge; and a coarse resolution global atmospheric model with simplified parameterisations (SPEEDY). Although double precision (52 significant bits) is standard across operational climate models, in our experiments we find that single precision (23 sbits) is more than enough and that as low as half precision (10 sbits) is often sufficient. For example, SPEEDY can be run with 12 sbits across the entire code with negligible rounding error and this can be lowered to 10 sbits if very minor errors are accepted, amounting to less than 0.1 mm/6hr for the average grid-point precipitation, for example. Our test is based on the Wasserstein metric and this provides stringent non-parametric bounds on rounding error accounting for annual means as well as extreme weather events. In addition, by testing models using both round-to-nearest (RN) and stochastic rounding (SR) we find that SR can mitigate rounding error across a range of applications. Thus our results also provide evidence that SR could be relevant to next-generation climate models. While many studies have shown that low-precision arithmetic can be suitable on short-term weather forecasting timescales, our results give the first evidence that a similar low precision level can be suitable for climate.

Using a 100-day symmetric window around the January 2025 U.S. presidential inauguration, non-parametric statistical methods with bootstrap resampling (10,000 iterations) analyze distributional properties and anomalies. Results indicate a statistically significant 3.61\% Indonesian rupiah depreciation post-inauguration, with a large effect size (Cliff's Delta = -0.9224, CI: [-0.9727, -0.8571]). Central tendency shifted markedly, yet volatility remained stable (variance ratio = 0.9061, p = 0.504). Four significant anomalies exhibiting temporal clustering are detected. These findings provide quantitative evidence of political transition effects on emerging market currencies, highlighting implications for monetary policy and currency risk management.

In the era of mega-constellations, the need for accurate and publicly available information has become fundamental for satellite operators to guarantee the safety of spacecrafts and the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) space environment. This study critically evaluates the accuracy and reliability of publicly available ephemeris data for a LEO mega-constellation - Starlink. The goal of this work is twofold: (i) compare and analyze the quality of the data against high-precision numerical propagation. (ii) Leverage Physics-Informed Machine Learning to extract relevant satellite quantities, such as non-conservative forces, during the decay process. By analyzing two months of real orbital data for approximately 1500 Starlink satellites, we identify discrepancies between high precision numerical algorithms and the published ephemerides, recognizing the use of simplified dynamics at fixed thresholds, planned maneuvers, and limitations in uncertainty propagations. Furthermore, we compare data obtained from multiple sources to track and analyze deorbiting satellites over the same period. Empirically, we extract the acceleration profile of satellites during deorbiting and provide insights relating to the effects of non-conservative forces during reentry. For non-deorbiting satellites, the position Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) was approximately 300 m, while for deorbiting satellites it increased to about 600 m. Through this in-depth analysis, we highlight potential limitations in publicly available data for accurate and robust Space Situational Awareness (SSA), and importantly, we propose a data-driven model of satellite decay in mega-constellations.

In this study, we aimed to determine if fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) can generate accurate, personalized impressions for whole-body PET reports. Twelve language models were trained on a corpus of PET reports using the teacher-forcing algorithm, with the report findings as input and the clinical impressions as reference. An extra input token encodes the reading physician's identity, allowing models to learn physician-specific reporting styles. Our corpus comprised 37,370 retrospective PET reports collected from our institution between 2010 and 2022. To identify the best LLM, 30 evaluation metrics were benchmarked against quality scores from two nuclear medicine (NM) physicians, with the most aligned metrics selecting the model for expert evaluation. In a subset of data, model-generated impressions and original clinical impressions were assessed by three NM physicians according to 6 quality dimensions (3-point scale) and an overall utility score (5-point scale). Each physician reviewed 12 of their own reports and 12 reports from other physicians. Bootstrap resampling was used for statistical analysis. Of all evaluation metrics, domain-adapted BARTScore and PEGASUSScore showed the highest Spearman's rank correlations (0.568 and 0.563) with physician preferences. Based on these metrics, the fine-tuned PEGASUS model was selected as the top LLM. When physicians reviewed PEGASUS-generated impressions in their own style, 89% were considered clinically acceptable, with a mean utility score of 4.08 out of 5. Physicians rated these personalized impressions as comparable in overall utility to the impressions dictated by other physicians (4.03, P=0.41). In conclusion, personalized impressions generated by PEGASUS were clinically useful, highlighting its potential to expedite PET reporting.

With the increasing volume of high-frequency data in the information age, both challenges and opportunities arise in the prediction of stock volatility. On one hand, the outcome of prediction using tradition method combining stock technical and macroeconomic indicators still leaves room for improvement; on the other hand, macroeconomic indicators and peoples' search record on those search engines affecting their interested topics will intuitively have an impact on the stock volatility. For the convenience of assessment of the influence of these indicators, macroeconomic indicators and stock technical indicators are then grouped into objective factors, while Baidu search indices implying people's interested topics are defined as subjective factors. To align different frequency data, we introduce GARCH-MIDAS model. After mixing all the above data, we then feed them into Transformer model as part of the training data. Our experiments show that this model outperforms the baselines in terms of mean square error. The adaption of both types of data under Transformer model significantly reduces the mean square error from 1.00 to 0.86.

We present Natural Gradient Boosting (NGBoost), an algorithm for generic probabilistic prediction via gradient boosting. Typical regression models return a point estimate, conditional on covariates, but probabilistic regression models output a full probability distribution over the outcome space, conditional on the covariates. This allows for predictive uncertainty estimation -- crucial in applications like healthcare and weather forecasting. NGBoost generalizes gradient boosting to probabilistic regression by treating the parameters of the conditional distribution as targets for a multiparameter boosting algorithm. Furthermore, we show how the Natural Gradient is required to correct the training dynamics of our multiparameter boosting approach. NGBoost can be used with any base learner, any family of distributions with continuous parameters, and any scoring rule. NGBoost matches or exceeds the performance of existing methods for probabilistic prediction while offering additional benefits in flexibility, scalability, and usability. An open-source implementation is available at github.com/stanfordmlgroup/ngboost.

Self-alignment is an effective way to reduce the cost of human annotation while ensuring promising model capability. However, most current methods complete the data collection and training steps in a single round, which may overlook the continuously improving ability of self-aligned models. This gives rise to a key query: What if we do multi-time bootstrapping self-alignment? Does this strategy enhance model performance or lead to rapid degradation? In this paper, our pioneering exploration delves into the impact of bootstrapping self-alignment on large language models. Our findings reveal that bootstrapping self-alignment markedly surpasses the single-round approach, by guaranteeing data diversity from in-context learning. To further exploit the capabilities of bootstrapping, we investigate and adjust the training order of data, which yields improved performance of the model. Drawing on these findings, we propose Step-On-Feet Tuning (SOFT) which leverages model's continuously enhanced few-shot ability to boost zero or one-shot performance. Based on easy-to-hard training recipe, we propose SOFT+ which further boost self-alignment's performance. Our experiments demonstrate the efficiency of SOFT (SOFT+) across various classification and generation tasks, highlighting the potential of bootstrapping self-alignment on continually enhancing model alignment performance.

Learning causal graphs from multivariate time series is a ubiquitous challenge in all application domains dealing with time-dependent systems, such as in Earth sciences, biology, or engineering, to name a few. Recent developments for this causal discovery learning task have shown considerable skill, notably the specific time-series adaptations of the popular conditional independence-based learning framework. However, uncertainty estimation is challenging for conditional independence-based methods. Here, we introduce a novel bootstrap approach designed for time series causal discovery that preserves the temporal dependencies and lag structure. It can be combined with a range of time series causal discovery methods and provides a measure of confidence for the links of the time series graphs. Furthermore, next to confidence estimation, an aggregation, also called bagging, of the bootstrapped graphs by majority voting results in bagged causal discovery methods. In this work, we combine this approach with the state-of-the-art conditional-independence-based algorithm PCMCI+. With extensive numerical experiments we empirically demonstrate that, in addition to providing confidence measures for links, Bagged-PCMCI+ improves in precision and recall as compared to its base algorithm PCMCI+, at the cost of higher computational demands. These statistical performance improvements are especially pronounced in the more challenging settings (short time sample size, large number of variables, high autocorrelation). Our bootstrap approach can also be combined with other time series causal discovery algorithms and can be of considerable use in many real-world applications.

This paper presents a new approach for assessing uncertainty in machine translation by simultaneously evaluating translation quality and providing a reliable confidence score. Our approach utilizes conformal predictive distributions to produce prediction intervals with guaranteed coverage, meaning that for any given significance level epsilon, we can expect the true quality score of a translation to fall out of the interval at a rate of 1-epsilon. In this paper, we demonstrate how our method outperforms a simple, but effective baseline on six different language pairs in terms of coverage and sharpness. Furthermore, we validate that our approach requires the data exchangeability assumption to hold for optimal performance.

We introduce a few-shot learning framework for error detection. We show that data augmentation (a form of weak supervision) is key to training high-quality, ML-based error detection models that require minimal human involvement. Our framework consists of two parts: (1) an expressive model to learn rich representations that capture the inherent syntactic and semantic heterogeneity of errors; and (2) a data augmentation model that, given a small seed of clean records, uses dataset-specific transformations to automatically generate additional training data. Our key insight is to learn data augmentation policies from the noisy input dataset in a weakly supervised manner. We show that our framework detects errors with an average precision of ~94% and an average recall of ~93% across a diverse array of datasets that exhibit different types and amounts of errors. We compare our approach to a comprehensive collection of error detection methods, ranging from traditional rule-based methods to ensemble-based and active learning approaches. We show that data augmentation yields an average improvement of 20 F1 points while it requires access to 3x fewer labeled examples compared to other ML approaches.

We study the problem of optimizing biological sequences, e.g., proteins, DNA, and RNA, to maximize a black-box score function that is only evaluated in an offline dataset. We propose a novel solution, bootstrapped training of score-conditioned generator (BootGen) algorithm. Our algorithm repeats a two-stage process. In the first stage, our algorithm trains the biological sequence generator with rank-based weights to enhance the accuracy of sequence generation based on high scores. The subsequent stage involves bootstrapping, which augments the training dataset with self-generated data labeled by a proxy score function. Our key idea is to align the score-based generation with a proxy score function, which distills the knowledge of the proxy score function to the generator. After training, we aggregate samples from multiple bootstrapped generators and proxies to produce a diverse design. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms competitive baselines on biological sequential design tasks. We provide reproducible source code: https://github.com/kaist-silab/bootgen{https://github.com/kaist-silab/bootgen}.

Despite the popularity of guitar effects, there is very little existing research on classification and parameter estimation of specific plugins or effect units from guitar recordings. In this paper, convolutional neural networks were used for classification and parameter estimation for 13 overdrive, distortion and fuzz guitar effects. A novel dataset of processed electric guitar samples was assembled, with four sub-datasets consisting of monophonic or polyphonic samples and discrete or continuous settings values, for a total of about 250 hours of processed samples. Results were compared for networks trained and tested on the same or on a different sub-dataset. We found that discrete datasets could lead to equally high performance as continuous ones, whilst being easier to design, analyse and modify. Classification accuracy was above 80\%, with confusion matrices reflecting similarities in the effects timbre and circuits design. With parameter values between 0.0 and 1.0, the mean absolute error is in most cases below 0.05, while the root mean square error is below 0.1 in all cases but one.

Quantile regression is a fundamental problem in statistical learning motivated by a need to quantify uncertainty in predictions, or to model a diverse population without being overly reductive. For instance, epidemiological forecasts, cost estimates, and revenue predictions all benefit from being able to quantify the range of possible values accurately. As such, many models have been developed for this problem over many years of research in statistics, machine learning, and related fields. Rather than proposing yet another (new) algorithm for quantile regression we adopt a meta viewpoint: we investigate methods for aggregating any number of conditional quantile models, in order to improve accuracy and robustness. We consider weighted ensembles where weights may vary over not only individual models, but also over quantile levels, and feature values. All of the models we consider in this paper can be fit using modern deep learning toolkits, and hence are widely accessible (from an implementation point of view) and scalable. To improve the accuracy of the predicted quantiles (or equivalently, prediction intervals), we develop tools for ensuring that quantiles remain monotonically ordered, and apply conformal calibration methods. These can be used without any modification of the original library of base models. We also review some basic theory surrounding quantile aggregation and related scoring rules, and contribute a few new results to this literature (for example, the fact that post sorting or post isotonic regression can only improve the weighted interval score). Finally, we provide an extensive suite of empirical comparisons across 34 data sets from two different benchmark repositories.

Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation evolve rapidly through fine-tuning, merging, or new model releases. However, such updates can introduce regressions, not only in correctness but also in code quality and performance. To address this, we present ReCatcher, a regression testing framework for Python code generation. ReCatcher systematically compares two LLMs, typically a current model and a candidate update, across three dimensions: logical correctness, static code quality, and execution performance. We apply ReCatcher to assess regressions across three update scenarios, fine-tuning, merging, and model release, using CodeLlama, DeepSeek-Coder, and GPT-4o. Our evaluation shows that fine-tuning with cross-language datasets increases syntax errors by up to 12%. Merging with general-purpose models like Llama2 leads to regressions in correctness by up to 18%. GPT-4o introduces regressions of up to 50% in handling missing imports compared to GPT-3.5-turbo, while GPT-4o-mini suffers up to 80% performance degradation in execution time versus GPT-4o. Overall, logical correctness, performance, and error handling (e.g., syntax errors and missing imports) are the most regression-prone areas. Comparing ReCatcher with baseline solutions, it presents better and consistent accuracy across logical and performance aspects. ReCatcher highlights the importance of systematic regression evaluation before adopting new models, while assisting researchers and practitioners in making more informed update decisions.

The fundamental theorem behind financial markets is that stock prices are intrinsically complex and stochastic. One of the complexities is the volatility associated with stock prices. Volatility is a tendency for prices to change unexpectedly [1]. Price volatility is often detrimental to the return economics, and thus, investors should factor it in whenever making investment decisions, choices, and temporal or permanent moves. It is, therefore, crucial to make necessary and regular short and long-term stock price volatility forecasts for the safety and economics of investors returns. These forecasts should be accurate and not misleading. Different models and methods, such as ARCH GARCH models, have been intuitively implemented to make such forecasts. However, such traditional means fail to capture the short-term volatility forecasts effectively. This paper, therefore, investigates and implements a combination of numeric and probabilistic models for short-term volatility and return forecasting for high-frequency trades. The essence is that one-day-ahead volatility forecasts were made with Gaussian Processes (GPs) applied to the outputs of a Numerical market prediction (NMP) model. Firstly, the stock price data from NMP was corrected by a GP. Since it is not easy to set price limits in a market due to its free nature and randomness, a Censored GP was used to model the relationship between the corrected stock prices and returns. Forecasting errors were evaluated using the implied and estimated data.

This work presents the first quantitative study of alignment errors between small uncrewed aerial systems (sUAS) geospatial imagery and a priori building polygons and finds that alignment errors are non-uniform and irregular. The work also introduces a publicly available dataset of imagery, building polygons, and human-generated and curated adjustments that can be used to evaluate existing strategies for aligning building polygons with sUAS imagery. There are no efforts that have aligned pre-existing spatial data with sUAS imagery, and thus, there is no clear state of practice. However, this effort and analysis show that the translational alignment errors present in this type of data, averaging 82px and an intersection over the union of 0.65, which would induce further errors and biases in downstream machine learning systems unless addressed. This study identifies and analyzes the translational alignment errors of 21,619 building polygons in fifty-one orthomosaic images, covering 16787.2 Acres (26.23 square miles), constructed from sUAS raw imagery from nine wide-area disasters (Hurricane Ian, Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Michael, Hurricane Ida, Hurricane Idalia, Hurricane Laura, the Mayfield Tornado, the Musset Bayou Fire, and the Kilauea Eruption). The analysis finds no uniformity among the angle and distance metrics of the building polygon alignments as they present an average degree variance of 0.4 and an average pixel distance variance of 0.45. This work alerts the sUAS community to the problem of spatial alignment and that a simple linear transform, often used to align satellite imagery, will not be sufficient to align spatial data in sUAS orthomosaic imagery.

The Kov\'ats Retention index (RI) is a quantity measured using gas chromatography and commonly used in the identification of chemical structures. Creating libraries of observed RI values is a laborious task, so we explore the use of a deep neural network for predicting RI values from structure for standard semipolar columns. This network generated predictions with a mean absolute error of 15.1 and, in a quantification of the tail of the error distribution, a 95th percentile absolute error of 46.5. Because of the Artificial Intelligence Retention Indices (AIRI) network's accuracy, it was used to predict RI values for the NIST EI-MS spectral libraries. These RI values are used to improve chemical identification methods and the quality of the library. Estimating uncertainty is an important practical need when using prediction models. To quantify the uncertainty of our network for each individual prediction, we used the outputs of an ensemble of 8 networks to calculate a predicted standard deviation for each RI value prediction. This predicted standard deviation was corrected to follow the error between observed and predicted RI values. The Z scores using these predicted standard deviations had a standard deviation of 1.52 and a 95th percentile absolute Z score corresponding to a mean RI value of 42.6.

Conformal prediction is a theoretically grounded framework for constructing predictive intervals. We study conformal prediction with missing values in the covariates -- a setting that brings new challenges to uncertainty quantification. We first show that the marginal coverage guarantee of conformal prediction holds on imputed data for any missingness distribution and almost all imputation functions. However, we emphasize that the average coverage varies depending on the pattern of missing values: conformal methods tend to construct prediction intervals that under-cover the response conditionally to some missing patterns. This motivates our novel generalized conformalized quantile regression framework, missing data augmentation, which yields prediction intervals that are valid conditionally to the patterns of missing values, despite their exponential number. We then show that a universally consistent quantile regression algorithm trained on the imputed data is Bayes optimal for the pinball risk, thus achieving valid coverage conditionally to any given data point. Moreover, we examine the case of a linear model, which demonstrates the importance of our proposal in overcoming the heteroskedasticity induced by missing values. Using synthetic and data from critical care, we corroborate our theory and report improved performance of our methods.

Air pollution constitutes a global problem of paramount importance that affects not only human health, but also the environment. The existence of spatial and temporal data regarding the concentrations of pollutants is crucial for performing air pollution studies and monitor emissions. However, although observation data presents great temporal coverage, the number of stations is very limited and they are usually built in more populated areas. The main objective of this work is to create models capable of inferring pollutant concentrations in locations where no observation data exists. A machine learning model, more specifically the random forest model, was developed for predicting concentrations in the Iberian Peninsula in 2019 for five selected pollutants: NO_2, O_3 SO_2, PM10, and PM2.5. Model features include satellite measurements, meteorological variables, land use classification, temporal variables (month, day of year), and spatial variables (latitude, longitude, altitude). The models were evaluated using various methods, including station 10-fold cross-validation, in which in each fold observations from 10\% of the stations are used as testing data and the rest as training data. The R^2, RMSE and mean bias were determined for each model. The NO_2 and O_3 models presented good values of R^2, 0.5524 and 0.7462, respectively. However, the SO_2, PM10, and PM2.5 models performed very poorly in this regard, with R^2 values of -0.0231, 0.3722, and 0.3303, respectively. All models slightly overestimated the ground concentrations, except the O_3 model. All models presented acceptable cross-validation RMSE, except the O_3 and PM10 models where the mean value was a little higher (12.5934 mu g/m^3 and 10.4737 mu g/m^3, respectively).

Despite its crucial role in research experiments, code correctness is often presumed only on the basis of the perceived quality of results. This assumption comes with the risk of erroneous outcomes and potentially misleading findings. To address this issue, we posit that the current focus on reproducibility should go hand in hand with the emphasis on software quality. We present a case study in which we identify and fix three bugs in widely used implementations of the state-of-the-art Conformer architecture. Through experiments on speech recognition and translation in various languages, we demonstrate that the presence of bugs does not prevent the achievement of good and reproducible results, which however can lead to incorrect conclusions that potentially misguide future research. As a countermeasure, we propose a Code-quality Checklist and release pangoliNN, a library dedicated to testing neural models, with the goal of promoting coding best practices and improving research software quality within the NLP community.

We present a comprehensive evaluation of proprietary and open-weights large language models using the first astronomy-specific benchmarking dataset. This dataset comprises 4,425 multiple-choice questions curated from the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics, covering a broad range of astrophysical topics. Our analysis examines model performance across various astronomical subfields and assesses response calibration, crucial for potential deployment in research environments. Claude-3.5-Sonnet outperforms competitors by up to 4.6 percentage points, achieving 85.0% accuracy. For proprietary models, we observed a universal reduction in cost every 3-to-12 months to achieve similar score in this particular astronomy benchmark. Open-source models have rapidly improved, with LLaMA-3-70b (80.6%) and Qwen-2-72b (77.7%) now competing with some of the best proprietary models. We identify performance variations across topics, with non-English-focused models generally struggling more in exoplanet-related fields, stellar astrophysics, and instrumentation related questions. These challenges likely stem from less abundant training data, limited historical context, and rapid recent developments in these areas. This pattern is observed across both open-weights and proprietary models, with regional dependencies evident, highlighting the impact of training data diversity on model performance in specialized scientific domains. Top-performing models demonstrate well-calibrated confidence, with correlations above 0.9 between confidence and correctness, though they tend to be slightly underconfident. The development for fast, low-cost inference of open-weights models presents new opportunities for affordable deployment in astronomy. The rapid progress observed suggests that LLM-driven research in astronomy may become feasible in the near future.

Motion artefacts in magnetic resonance brain images can have a strong impact on diagnostic confidence. The assessment of MR image quality is fundamental before proceeding with the clinical diagnosis. Motion artefacts can alter the delineation of structures such as the brain, lesions or tumours and may require a repeat scan. Otherwise, an inaccurate (e.g. correct pathology but wrong severity) or incorrect diagnosis (e.g. wrong pathology) may occur. "Image quality assessment" as a fast, automated step right after scanning can assist in deciding if the acquired images are diagnostically sufficient. An automated image quality assessment based on the structural similarity index (SSIM) regression through a residual neural network is proposed in this work. Additionally, a classification into different groups - by subdividing with SSIM ranges - is evaluated. Importantly, this method predicts SSIM values of an input image in the absence of a reference ground truth image. The networks were able to detect motion artefacts, and the best performance for the regression and classification task has always been achieved with ResNet-18 with contrast augmentation. The mean and standard deviation of residuals' distribution were mu=-0.0009 and sigma=0.0139, respectively. Whilst for the classification task in 3, 5 and 10 classes, the best accuracies were 97, 95 and 89\%, respectively. The results show that the proposed method could be a tool for supporting neuro-radiologists and radiographers in evaluating image quality quickly.

We develop a data-driven deep neural operator framework to approximate multiple output states for a diesel engine and generate real-time predictions with reasonable accuracy. As emission norms become more stringent, the need for fast and accurate models that enable analysis of system behavior have become an essential requirement for system development. The fast transient processes involved in the operation of a combustion engine make it difficult to develop accurate physics-based models for such systems. As an alternative to physics based models, we develop an operator-based regression model (DeepONet) to learn the relevant output states for a mean-value gas flow engine model using the engine operating conditions as input variables. We have adopted a mean-value model as a benchmark for comparison, simulated using Simulink. The developed approach necessitates using the initial conditions of the output states to predict the accurate sequence over the temporal domain. To this end, a sequence-to-sequence approach is embedded into the proposed framework. The accuracy of the model is evaluated by comparing the prediction output to ground truth generated from Simulink model. The maximum mathcal L_2 relative error observed was approximately 6.5%. The sensitivity of the DeepONet model is evaluated under simulated noise conditions and the model shows relatively low sensitivity to noise. The uncertainty in model prediction is further assessed by using a mean ensemble approach. The worst-case error at the (mu + 2sigma) boundary was found to be 12%. The proposed framework provides the ability to predict output states in real-time and enables data-driven learning of complex input-output operator mapping. As a result, this model can be applied during initial development stages, where accurate models may not be available.

The paper studies the linear model for Bitcoin price which includes regression features based on Bitcoin currency statistics, mining processes, Google search trends, Wikipedia pages visits. The pattern of deviation of regression model prediction from real prices is simpler comparing to price time series. It is assumed that this pattern can be predicted by an experienced expert. In such a way, using the combination of the regression model and expert correction, one can receive better results than with either regression model or expert opinion only. It is shown that Bayesian approach makes it possible to utilize the probabilistic approach using distributions with fat tails and take into account the outliers in Bitcoin price time series.

The ROC curve is the major tool for assessing not only the performance but also the fairness properties of a similarity scoring function. In order to draw reliable conclusions based on empirical ROC analysis, accurately evaluating the uncertainty level related to statistical versions of the ROC curves of interest is absolutely necessary, especially for applications with considerable societal impact such as Face Recognition. In this article, we prove asymptotic guarantees for empirical ROC curves of similarity functions as well as for by-product metrics useful to assess fairness. We also explain that, because the false acceptance/rejection rates are of the form of U-statistics in the case of similarity scoring, the naive bootstrap approach may jeopardize the assessment procedure. A dedicated recentering technique must be used instead. Beyond the theoretical analysis carried out, various experiments using real face image datasets provide strong empirical evidence of the practical relevance of the methods promoted here, when applied to several ROC-based measures such as popular fairness metrics.

The commitment to single-precision floating-point arithmetic is widespread in the deep learning community. To evaluate whether this commitment is justified, the influence of computing precision (single and double precision) on the optimization performance of the Conjugate Gradient (CG) method (a second-order optimization algorithm) and RMSprop (a first-order algorithm) has been investigated. Tests of neural networks with one to five fully connected hidden layers and moderate or strong nonlinearity with up to 4 million network parameters have been optimized for Mean Square Error (MSE). The training tasks have been set up so that their MSE minimum was known to be zero. Computing experiments have disclosed that single-precision can keep up (with superlinear convergence) with double-precision as long as line search finds an improvement. First-order methods such as RMSprop do not benefit from double precision. However, for moderately nonlinear tasks, CG is clearly superior. For strongly nonlinear tasks, both algorithm classes find only solutions fairly poor in terms of mean square error as related to the output variance. CG with double floating-point precision is superior whenever the solutions have the potential to be useful for the application goal.

Quality estimation models have been developed to assess the corrections made by grammatical error correction (GEC) models when the reference or gold-standard corrections are not available. An ideal quality estimator can be utilized to combine the outputs of multiple GEC systems by choosing the best subset of edits from the union of all edits proposed by the GEC base systems. However, we found that existing GEC quality estimation models are not good enough in differentiating good corrections from bad ones, resulting in a low F0.5 score when used for system combination. In this paper, we propose GRECO, a new state-of-the-art quality estimation model that gives a better estimate of the quality of a corrected sentence, as indicated by having a higher correlation to the F0.5 score of a corrected sentence. It results in a combined GEC system with a higher F0.5 score. We also propose three methods for utilizing GEC quality estimation models for system combination with varying generality: model-agnostic, model-agnostic with voting bias, and model-dependent method. The combined GEC system outperforms the state of the art on the CoNLL-2014 test set and the BEA-2019 test set, achieving the highest F0.5 scores published to date.

Text generation models are notoriously vulnerable to errors in the training data. With the wide-spread availability of massive amounts of web-crawled data becoming more commonplace, how can we enhance the robustness of models trained on a massive amount of noisy web-crawled text? In our work, we propose Error Norm Truncation (ENT), a robust enhancement method to the standard training objective that truncates noisy data. Compared to methods that only uses the negative log-likelihood loss to estimate data quality, our method provides a more accurate estimation by considering the distribution of non-target tokens, which is often overlooked by previous work. Through comprehensive experiments across language modeling, machine translation, and text summarization, we show that equipping text generation models with ENT improves generation quality over standard training and previous soft and hard truncation methods. Furthermore, we show that our method improves the robustness of models against two of the most detrimental types of noise in machine translation, resulting in an increase of more than 2 BLEU points over the MLE baseline when up to 50% of noise is added to the data.

We present a new distribution-free conformal prediction algorithm for sequential data (e.g., time series), called the sequential predictive conformal inference (SPCI). We specifically account for the nature that time series data are non-exchangeable, and thus many existing conformal prediction algorithms are not applicable. The main idea is to adaptively re-estimate the conditional quantile of non-conformity scores (e.g., prediction residuals), upon exploiting the temporal dependence among them. More precisely, we cast the problem of conformal prediction interval as predicting the quantile of a future residual, given a user-specified point prediction algorithm. Theoretically, we establish asymptotic valid conditional coverage upon extending consistency analyses in quantile regression. Using simulation and real-data experiments, we demonstrate a significant reduction in interval width of SPCI compared to other existing methods under the desired empirical coverage.

Recent research has generated hope that inference scaling could allow weaker language models to match or exceed the accuracy of stronger models, such as by repeatedly sampling solutions to a coding problem until it passes unit tests. The central thesis of this paper is that there is no free lunch for inference scaling: indefinite accuracy improvement through resampling can only be realized if the "verifier" (in this case, a set of unit tests) is perfect. When the verifier is imperfect, as it almost always is in domains such as reasoning or coding (for example, unit tests have imperfect coverage), there is a nonzero probability of false positives: incorrect solutions that pass the verifier. Resampling cannot decrease this probability, so it imposes an upper bound to the accuracy of resampling-based inference scaling even with an infinite compute budget. We find that there is a very strong correlation between the model's single-sample accuracy (i.e. accuracy without unit tests) and its false positive rate on coding benchmarks HumanEval and MBPP, whose unit tests have limited coverage. Therefore, no amount of inference scaling of weaker models can enable them to match the single-sample accuracy of a sufficiently strong model (Fig. 1a). When we consider that false positives have a negative utility compared to abstaining from producing a solution, it bends the inference scaling curve further downward. Empirically, we find that the optimal number of samples can be less than 10 under realistic assumptions (Fig. 1b). Finally, we show that beyond accuracy, false positives may have other undesirable qualities, such as poor adherence to coding style conventions.

The GLEU metric was proposed for evaluating grammatical error corrections using n-gram overlap with a set of reference sentences, as opposed to precision/recall of specific annotated errors (Napoles et al., 2015). This paper describes improvements made to the GLEU metric that address problems that arise when using an increasing number of reference sets. Unlike the originally presented metric, the modified metric does not require tuning. We recommend that this version be used instead of the original version.

Natural language processing (NLP) utilizes text data augmentation to overcome sample size constraints. Increasing the sample size is a natural and widely used strategy for alleviating these challenges. In this study, we chose Arabic to increase the sample size and correct grammatical errors. Arabic is considered one of the languages with limited resources for grammatical error correction (GEC). Furthermore, QALB-14 and QALB-15 are the only datasets used in most Arabic grammatical error correction research, with approximately 20,500 parallel examples, which is considered low compared with other languages. Therefore, this study aims to develop an Arabic corpus called "Tibyan" for grammatical error correction using ChatGPT. ChatGPT is used as a data augmenter tool based on a pair of Arabic sentences containing grammatical errors matched with a sentence free of errors extracted from Arabic books, called guide sentences. Multiple steps were involved in establishing our corpus, including the collection and pre-processing of a pair of Arabic texts from various sources, such as books and open-access corpora. We then used ChatGPT to generate a parallel corpus based on the text collected previously, as a guide for generating sentences with multiple types of errors. By engaging linguistic experts to review and validate the automatically generated sentences, we ensured that they were correct and error-free. The corpus was validated and refined iteratively based on feedback provided by linguistic experts to improve its accuracy. Finally, we used the Arabic Error Type Annotation tool (ARETA) to analyze the types of errors in the Tibyan corpus. Our corpus contained 49 of errors, including seven types: orthography, morphology, syntax, semantics, punctuation, merge, and split. The Tibyan corpus contains approximately 600 K tokens.

Text-to-SQL, which involves translating natural language into Structured Query Language (SQL), is crucial for enabling broad access to structured databases without expert knowledge. However, designing models for such tasks is challenging due to numerous factors, including the presence of 'noise,' such as ambiguous questions and syntactical errors. This study provides an in-depth analysis of the distribution and types of noise in the widely used BIRD-Bench benchmark and the impact of noise on models. While BIRD-Bench was created to model dirty and noisy database values, it was not created to contain noise and errors in the questions and gold queries. We found that noise in questions and gold queries are prevalent in the dataset, with varying amounts across domains, and with an uneven distribution between noise types. The presence of incorrect gold SQL queries, which then generate incorrect gold answers, has a significant impact on the benchmark's reliability. Surprisingly, when evaluating models on corrected SQL queries, zero-shot baselines surpassed the performance of state-of-the-art prompting methods. We conclude that informative noise labels and reliable benchmarks are crucial to developing new Text-to-SQL methods that can handle varying types of noise. All datasets, annotations, and code are available at https://github.com/niklaswretblad/the-effects-of-noise-in-text-to-SQL.

We consider the task of mapping pseudocode to long programs that are functionally correct. Given test cases as a mechanism to validate programs, we search over the space of possible translations of the pseudocode to find a program that passes the validation. However, without proper credit assignment to localize the sources of program failures, it is difficult to guide search toward more promising programs. We propose to perform credit assignment based on signals from compilation errors, which constitute 88.7% of program failures. Concretely, we treat the translation of each pseudocode line as a discrete portion of the program, and whenever a synthesized program fails to compile, an error localization method tries to identify the portion of the program responsible for the failure. We then focus search over alternative translations of the pseudocode for those portions. For evaluation, we collected the SPoC dataset (Search-based Pseudocode to Code) containing 18,356 programs with human-authored pseudocode and test cases. Under a budget of 100 program compilations, performing search improves the synthesis success rate over using the top-one translation of the pseudocode from 25.6% to 44.7%.

Null Hypothesis Significance Testing is the de facto tool for assessing effectiveness differences between Information Retrieval systems. Researchers use statistical tests to check whether those differences will generalise to online settings or are just due to the samples observed in the laboratory. Much work has been devoted to studying which test is the most reliable when comparing a pair of systems, but most of the IR real-world experiments involve more than two. In the multiple comparisons scenario, testing several systems simultaneously may inflate the errors committed by the tests. In this paper, we use a new approach to assess the reliability of multiple comparison procedures using simulated and real TREC data. Experiments show that Wilcoxon plus the Benjamini-Hochberg correction yields Type I error rates according to the significance level for typical sample sizes while being the best test in terms of statistical power.

Benchmark quality is critical for meaningful evaluation and sustained progress in time series forecasting, particularly given the recent rise of pretrained models. Existing benchmarks often have narrow domain coverage or overlook important real-world settings, such as tasks with covariates. Additionally, their aggregation procedures often lack statistical rigor, making it unclear whether observed performance differences reflect true improvements or random variation. Many benchmarks also fail to provide infrastructure for consistent evaluation or are too rigid to integrate into existing pipelines. To address these gaps, we propose fev-bench, a benchmark comprising 100 forecasting tasks across seven domains, including 46 tasks with covariates. Supporting the benchmark, we introduce fev, a lightweight Python library for benchmarking forecasting models that emphasizes reproducibility and seamless integration with existing workflows. Usingfev, fev-bench employs principled aggregation methods with bootstrapped confidence intervals to report model performance along two complementary dimensions: win rates and skill scores. We report results on fev-bench for various pretrained, statistical and baseline models, and identify promising directions for future research.

We study the connection between multicalibration and boosting for squared error regression. First we prove a useful characterization of multicalibration in terms of a ``swap regret'' like condition on squared error. Using this characterization, we give an exceedingly simple algorithm that can be analyzed both as a boosting algorithm for regression and as a multicalibration algorithm for a class H that makes use only of a standard squared error regression oracle for H. We give a weak learning assumption on H that ensures convergence to Bayes optimality without the need to make any realizability assumptions -- giving us an agnostic boosting algorithm for regression. We then show that our weak learning assumption on H is both necessary and sufficient for multicalibration with respect to H to imply Bayes optimality. We also show that if H satisfies our weak learning condition relative to another class C then multicalibration with respect to H implies multicalibration with respect to C. Finally we investigate the empirical performance of our algorithm experimentally using an open source implementation that we make available. Our code repository can be found at https://github.com/Declancharrison/Level-Set-Boosting.

A Neural Process (NP) estimates a stochastic process implicitly defined with neural networks given a stream of data, rather than pre-specifying priors already known, such as Gaussian processes. An ideal NP would learn everything from data without any inductive biases, but in practice, we often restrict the class of stochastic processes for the ease of estimation. One such restriction is the use of a finite-dimensional latent variable accounting for the uncertainty in the functions drawn from NPs. Some recent works show that this can be improved with more "data-driven" source of uncertainty such as bootstrapping. In this work, we take a different approach based on the martingale posterior, a recently developed alternative to Bayesian inference. For the martingale posterior, instead of specifying prior-likelihood pairs, a predictive distribution for future data is specified. Under specific conditions on the predictive distribution, it can be shown that the uncertainty in the generated future data actually corresponds to the uncertainty of the implicitly defined Bayesian posteriors. Based on this result, instead of assuming any form of the latent variables, we equip a NP with a predictive distribution implicitly defined with neural networks and use the corresponding martingale posteriors as the source of uncertainty. The resulting model, which we name as Martingale Posterior Neural Process (MPNP), is demonstrated to outperform baselines on various tasks.

Text Normalization is an integral part of any text-to-speech synthesis system. In a natural language text, there are elements such as numbers, dates, abbreviations, etc. that belong to other semiotic classes. They are called non-standard words (NSW) and need to be expanded into ordinary words. For this purpose, it is necessary to identify the semiotic class of each NSW. The taxonomy of semiotic classes adapted to the Lithuanian language is presented in the work. Sets of rules are created for detecting and expanding NSWs based on regular expressions. Experiments with three completely different data sets were performed and the accuracy was assessed. Causes of errors are explained and recommendations are given for the development of text normalization rules.

We introduce the submissions of the NJUNLP team to the WMT 2023 Quality Estimation (QE) shared task. Our team submitted predictions for the English-German language pair on all two sub-tasks: (i) sentence- and word-level quality prediction; and (ii) fine-grained error span detection. This year, we further explore pseudo data methods for QE based on NJUQE framework (https://github.com/NJUNLP/njuqe). We generate pseudo MQM data using parallel data from the WMT translation task. We pre-train the XLMR large model on pseudo QE data, then fine-tune it on real QE data. At both stages, we jointly learn sentence-level scores and word-level tags. Empirically, we conduct experiments to find the key hyper-parameters that improve the performance. Technically, we propose a simple method that covert the word-level outputs to fine-grained error span results. Overall, our models achieved the best results in English-German for both word-level and fine-grained error span detection sub-tasks by a considerable margin.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred the development of coding agents for real-world code generation. As a widely used benchmark for evaluating the code generation capabilities of these agents, SWE-Bench uses real-world problems based on GitHub issues and their corresponding pull requests. However, the manually written test cases included in these pull requests are often insufficient, allowing generated patches to pass the tests without resolving the underlying issue. To address this challenge, we introduce UTGenerator, an LLM-driven test case generator that automatically analyzes codebases and dependencies to generate test cases for real-world Python projects. Building on UTGenerator, we propose UTBoost, a comprehensive framework for test case augmentation. In our evaluation, we identified 36 task instances with insufficient test cases and uncovered 345 erroneous patches incorrectly labeled as passed in the original SWE Bench. These corrections, impacting 40.9% of SWE-Bench Lite and 24.4% of SWE-Bench Verified leaderboard entries, yield 18 and 11 ranking changes, respectively.

To enable building and testing models on long-document comprehension, we introduce QuALITY, a multiple-choice QA dataset with context passages in English that have an average length of about 5,000 tokens, much longer than typical current models can process. Unlike in prior work with passages, our questions are written and validated by contributors who have read the entire passage, rather than relying on summaries or excerpts. In addition, only half of the questions are answerable by annotators working under tight time constraints, indicating that skimming and simple search are not enough to consistently perform well. Our baseline models perform poorly on this task (55.4%) and significantly lag behind human performance (93.5%).

We investigate the problem of determining the predictive confidence (or, conversely, uncertainty) of a neural classifier through the lens of low-resource languages. By training models on sub-sampled datasets in three different languages, we assess the quality of estimates from a wide array of approaches and their dependence on the amount of available data. We find that while approaches based on pre-trained models and ensembles achieve the best results overall, the quality of uncertainty estimates can surprisingly suffer with more data. We also perform a qualitative analysis of uncertainties on sequences, discovering that a model's total uncertainty seems to be influenced to a large degree by its data uncertainty, not model uncertainty. All model implementations are open-sourced in a software package.

A database of images of approximately 960 unique plants belonging to 12 species at several growth stages is made publicly available. It comprises annotated RGB images with a physical resolution of roughly 10 pixels per mm. To standardise the evaluation of classification results obtained with the database, a benchmark based on f_{1} scores is proposed. The dataset is available at https://vision.eng.au.dk/plant-seedlings-dataset

Machine learning for time-series forecasting remains a key area of research. Despite successful application of many machine learning techniques, relating computational efficiency to forecast error remains an under-explored domain. This paper addresses this topic through a series of real-time experiments to quantify the relationship between computational cost and forecast error using meteorological nowcasting as an example use-case. We employ a variety of popular regression techniques (XGBoost, FC-MLP, Transformer, and LSTM) for multi-horizon, short-term forecasting of three variables (temperature, wind speed, and cloud cover) for multiple locations. During a 5-day live experiment, 4000 data sources were streamed for training and inferencing 144 models per hour. These models were parameterized to explore forecast error for two computational cost minimization methods: a novel auto-adaptive data reduction technique (Variance Horizon) and a performance-based concept drift-detection mechanism. Forecast error of all model variations were benchmarked in real-time against a state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction model. Performance was assessed using classical and novel evaluation metrics. Results indicate that using the Variance Horizon reduced computational usage by more than 50\%, while increasing between 0-15\% in error. Meanwhile, performance-based retraining reduced computational usage by up to 90\% while also improving forecast error by up to 10\%. Finally, the combination of both the Variance Horizon and performance-based retraining outperformed other model configurations by up to 99.7\% when considering error normalized to computational usage.

Hoffmann et al. (2022) propose three methods for estimating a compute-optimal scaling law. We attempt to replicate their third estimation procedure, which involves fitting a parametric loss function to a reconstruction of data from their plots. We find that the reported estimates are inconsistent with their first two estimation methods, fail at fitting the extracted data, and report implausibly narrow confidence intervals--intervals this narrow would require over 600,000 experiments, while they likely only ran fewer than 500. In contrast, our rederivation of the scaling law using the third approach yields results that are compatible with the findings from the first two estimation procedures described by Hoffmann et al.

When deploying machine learning models in high-stakes real-world environments such as health care, it is crucial to accurately assess the uncertainty concerning a model's prediction on abnormal inputs. However, there is a scarcity of literature analyzing this problem on medical data, especially on mixed-type tabular data such as Electronic Health Records. We close this gap by presenting a series of tests including a large variety of contemporary uncertainty estimation techniques, in order to determine whether they are able to identify out-of-distribution (OOD) patients. In contrast to previous work, we design tests on realistic and clinically relevant OOD groups, and run experiments on real-world medical data. We find that almost all techniques fail to achieve convincing results, partly disagreeing with earlier findings.

Software engineers develop, fine-tune, and deploy deep learning (DL) models. They use and re-use models in a variety of development frameworks and deploy them on a range of runtime environments. In this diverse ecosystem, engineers use DL model converters to move models from frameworks to runtime environments. However, errors in converters can compromise model quality and disrupt deployment. The failure frequency and failure modes of DL model converters are unknown. In this paper, we conduct the first failure analysis on DL model converters. Specifically, we characterize failures in model converters associated with ONNX (Open Neural Network eXchange). We analyze past failures in the ONNX converters in two major DL frameworks, PyTorch and TensorFlow. The symptoms, causes, and locations of failures (for N=200 issues), and trends over time are also reported. We also evaluate present-day failures by converting 8,797 models, both real-world and synthetically generated instances. The consistent result from both parts of the study is that DL model converters commonly fail by producing models that exhibit incorrect behavior: 33% of past failures and 8% of converted models fell into this category. Our results motivate future research on making DL software simpler to maintain, extend, and validate.

Recent approaches to large language model (LLM) alignment typically require millions of human annotations or rely on external aligned models for synthetic data generation. This paper introduces ALMA: Alignment with Minimal Annotation, demonstrating that effective alignment can be achieved using only 9,000 labeled examples -- less than 1% of conventional approaches. ALMA generates large amounts of high-quality synthetic alignment data through new techniques: diverse prompt synthesis via few-shot learning, diverse response generation with multiple model checkpoints, and judge (reward model) enhancement through score aggregation and self-distillation. Using only a pretrained Llama3 base model, 5,000 SFT examples, and 4,000 judge annotations, ALMA achieves performance close to Llama3-Instruct across diverse alignment benchmarks (e.g., 0.1% difference on AlpacaEval 2.0 score). These results are achieved with a multi-round, self-bootstrapped data synthesis and training recipe that continues to improve for 10 rounds, surpassing the typical 3-round ceiling of previous methods. These results suggest that base models already possess sufficient knowledge for effective alignment, and that synthetic data generation methods can expose it.

In the reduced basis method, the evaluation of the a posteriori estimator can become very sensitive to round-off errors. In this note, the origin of the loss of accuracy is revealed, and a solution to this problem is proposed and illustrated on a simple example.

We present a straightforward statistical test to detect certain violations of the assumption that the data are Independent and Identically Distributed (IID). The specific form of violation considered is common across real-world applications: whether the examples are ordered in the dataset such that almost adjacent examples tend to have more similar feature values (e.g. due to distributional drift, or attractive interactions between datapoints). Based on a k-Nearest Neighbors estimate, our approach can be used to audit any multivariate numeric data as well as other data types (image, text, audio, etc.) that can be numerically represented, perhaps with model embeddings. Compared with existing methods to detect drift or auto-correlation, our approach is both applicable to more types of data and also able to detect a wider variety of IID violations in practice. Code: https://github.com/cleanlab/cleanlab

We introduce NaSGEC, a new dataset to facilitate research on Chinese grammatical error correction (CGEC) for native speaker texts from multiple domains. Previous CGEC research primarily focuses on correcting texts from a single domain, especially learner essays. To broaden the target domain, we annotate multiple references for 12,500 sentences from three native domains, i.e., social media, scientific writing, and examination. We provide solid benchmark results for NaSGEC by employing cutting-edge CGEC models and different training data. We further perform detailed analyses of the connections and gaps between our domains from both empirical and statistical views. We hope this work can inspire future studies on an important but under-explored direction--cross-domain GEC.

Error analysis in NLP models is essential to successful model development and deployment. One common approach for diagnosing errors is to identify subpopulations in the dataset where the model produces the most errors. However, existing approaches typically define subpopulations based on pre-defined features, which requires users to form hypotheses of errors in advance. To complement these approaches, we propose iSEA, an Interactive Pipeline for Semantic Error Analysis in NLP Models, which automatically discovers semantically-grounded subpopulations with high error rates in the context of a human-in-the-loop interactive system. iSEA enables model developers to learn more about their model errors through discovered subpopulations, validate the sources of errors through interactive analysis on the discovered subpopulations, and test hypotheses about model errors by defining custom subpopulations. The tool supports semantic descriptions of error-prone subpopulations at the token and concept level, as well as pre-defined higher-level features. Through use cases and expert interviews, we demonstrate how iSEA can assist error understanding and analysis.

We present Azimuth, an open-source and easy-to-use tool to perform error analysis for text classification. Compared to other stages of the ML development cycle, such as model training and hyper-parameter tuning, the process and tooling for the error analysis stage are less mature. However, this stage is critical for the development of reliable and trustworthy AI systems. To make error analysis more systematic, we propose an approach comprising dataset analysis and model quality assessment, which Azimuth facilitates. We aim to help AI practitioners discover and address areas where the model does not generalize by leveraging and integrating a range of ML techniques, such as saliency maps, similarity, uncertainty, and behavioral analyses, all in one tool. Our code and documentation are available at github.com/servicenow/azimuth.

Should prediction models always deliver a prediction? In the pursuit of maximum predictive performance, critical considerations of reliability and fairness are often overshadowed, particularly when it comes to the role of uncertainty. Selective regression, also known as the "reject option," allows models to abstain from predictions in cases of considerable uncertainty. Initially proposed seven decades ago, approaches to selective regression have mostly focused on distribution-based proxies for measuring uncertainty, particularly conditional variance. However, this focus neglects the significant influence of model-specific biases on a model's performance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to selective regression by leveraging conformal prediction, which provides grounded confidence measures for individual predictions based on model-specific biases. In addition, we propose a standardized evaluation framework to allow proper comparison of selective regression approaches. Via an extensive experimental approach, we demonstrate how our proposed approach, conformalized selective regression, demonstrates an advantage over multiple state-of-the-art baselines.

Large-scale data collection is essential for developing personalized training data, mitigating the shortage of training data, and fine-tuning specialized models. However, creating high-quality datasets quickly and accurately remains a challenge due to annotation errors, the substantial time and costs associated with human labor. To address these issues, we propose Automatic Dataset Construction (ADC), an innovative methodology that automates dataset creation with negligible cost and high efficiency. Taking the image classification task as a starting point, ADC leverages LLMs for the detailed class design and code generation to collect relevant samples via search engines, significantly reducing the need for manual annotation and speeding up the data generation process. Despite these advantages, ADC also encounters real-world challenges such as label errors (label noise) and imbalanced data distributions (label bias). We provide open-source software that incorporates existing methods for label error detection, robust learning under noisy and biased data, ensuring a higher-quality training data and more robust model training procedure. Furthermore, we design three benchmark datasets focused on label noise detection, label noise learning, and class-imbalanced learning. These datasets are vital because there are few existing datasets specifically for label noise detection, despite its importance. Finally, we evaluate the performance of existing popular methods on these datasets, thereby facilitating further research in the field.

Models of many engineering and natural systems are imperfect. The discrepancy between the mathematical representations of a true physical system and its imperfect model is called the model error. These model errors can lead to substantial differences between the numerical solutions of the model and the state of the system, particularly in those involving nonlinear, multi-scale phenomena. Thus, there is increasing interest in reducing model errors, particularly by leveraging the rapidly growing observational data to understand their physics and sources. Here, we introduce a framework named MEDIDA: Model Error Discovery with Interpretability and Data Assimilation. MEDIDA only requires a working numerical solver of the model and a small number of noise-free or noisy sporadic observations of the system. In MEDIDA, first the model error is estimated from differences between the observed states and model-predicted states (the latter are obtained from a number of one-time-step numerical integrations from the previous observed states). If observations are noisy, a data assimilation (DA) technique such as ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) is employed to provide the analysis state of the system, which is then used to estimate the model error. Finally, an equation-discovery technique, here the relevance vector machine (RVM), a sparsity-promoting Bayesian method, is used to identify an interpretable, parsimonious, and closed-form representation of the model error. Using the chaotic Kuramoto-Sivashinsky (KS) system as the test case, we demonstrate the excellent performance of MEDIDA in discovering different types of structural/parametric model errors, representing different types of missing physics, using noise-free and noisy observations.

The coupling of the angular jitter of the spacecraft and their sub-assemblies with the optical bench and the telescope into the interferometric length readout will be a major noise source in the LISA mission. We refer to this noise as tilt-to-length (TTL) coupling. It will be reduced directly by realignments, and the residual noise will then be subtracted in post-processing. The success of these mitigation strategies depends on an accurate computation of the TTL coupling coefficients. We present here a thorough analysis of the accuracy of the coefficient estimation under different jitter characteristics, angular readout noise levels, and gravitational wave sources. We analyze in which cases the estimates degrade using two estimators, the common least squares estimator and the instrumental variables estimator. Our investigations show that angular readout noise leads to a bias of the least squares estimator, depending on the TTL coupling coefficients, jitter and readout noise level, while the instrumental variable estimator is not biased. We present an equation that predicts the estimation bias of the least squares method due to angular readout noise.

Grammatical error correction aims to correct ungrammatical sentences automatically. Recently, some work has demonstrated the excellent capabilities of closed-source Large Language Models (LLMs, e.g., ChatGPT) in grammatical error correction. However, the potential of open-source LLMs remains unexplored. In this paper, we introduced GrammarGPT, an open-source LLM, to preliminary explore its potential for native Chinese grammatical error correction. The core recipe of GrammarGPT is to leverage the hybrid dataset of ChatGPT-generated and human-annotated. For grammatical errors with clues, we proposed a heuristic method to guide ChatGPT to generate ungrammatical sentences by providing those clues. For grammatical errors without clues, we collected ungrammatical sentences from publicly available websites and manually corrected them. In addition, we employed an error-invariant augmentation method to enhance the ability of the model to correct native Chinese grammatical errors. We ultimately constructed about 1k parallel data and utilized these data to fine-tune open-source LLMs (e.g., Phoenix, released by The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen) with instruction tuning. The experimental results show that GrammarGPT outperforms the existing SOTA system significantly. Although model parameters are 20x larger than the SOTA baseline, the required amount of data for instruction tuning is 1200x smaller, illustrating the potential of open-source LLMs on native CGEC. Our GrammarGPT ranks 3^{rd} on NLPCC2023 SharedTask1, demonstrating our approach's effectiveness. The code and data are available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/GrammarGPT.

The past two decades have witnessed the rapid development of personalized recommendation techniques. Despite significant progress made in both research and practice of recommender systems, to date, there is a lack of a widely-recognized benchmarking standard in this field. Many existing studies perform model evaluations and comparisons in an ad-hoc manner, for example, by employing their own private data splits or using different experimental settings. Such conventions not only increase the difficulty in reproducing existing studies, but also lead to inconsistent experimental results among them. This largely limits the credibility and practical value of research results in this field. To tackle these issues, we present an initiative project (namely BARS) aiming for open benchmarking for recommender systems. In comparison to some earlier attempts towards this goal, we take a further step by setting up a standardized benchmarking pipeline for reproducible research, which integrates all the details about datasets, source code, hyper-parameter settings, running logs, and evaluation results. The benchmark is designed with comprehensiveness and sustainability in mind. It covers both matching and ranking tasks, and also enables researchers to easily follow and contribute to the research in this field. This project will not only reduce the redundant efforts of researchers to re-implement or re-run existing baselines, but also drive more solid and reproducible research on recommender systems. We would like to call upon everyone to use the BARS benchmark for future evaluation, and contribute to the project through the portal at: https://openbenchmark.github.io/BARS.

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) has been broadly applied in automatic correction and proofreading system recently. However, it is still immature in Chinese GEC due to limited high-quality data from native speakers in terms of category and scale. In this paper, we present FCGEC, a fine-grained corpus to detect, identify and correct the grammatical errors. FCGEC is a human-annotated corpus with multiple references, consisting of 41,340 sentences collected mainly from multi-choice questions in public school Chinese examinations. Furthermore, we propose a Switch-Tagger-Generator (STG) baseline model to correct the grammatical errors in low-resource settings. Compared to other GEC benchmark models, experimental results illustrate that STG outperforms them on our FCGEC. However, there exists a significant gap between benchmark models and humans that encourages future models to bridge it.

We propose a penalized nonparametric approach to estimating the quantile regression process (QRP) in a nonseparable model using rectifier quadratic unit (ReQU) activated deep neural networks and introduce a novel penalty function to enforce non-crossing of quantile regression curves. We establish the non-asymptotic excess risk bounds for the estimated QRP and derive the mean integrated squared error for the estimated QRP under mild smoothness and regularity conditions. To establish these non-asymptotic risk and estimation error bounds, we also develop a new error bound for approximating C^s smooth functions with s >0 and their derivatives using ReQU activated neural networks. This is a new approximation result for ReQU networks and is of independent interest and may be useful in other problems. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is competitive with or outperforms two existing methods, including methods using reproducing kernels and random forests, for nonparametric quantile regression.

Tabular data is a common form of organizing data. Multiple models are available to generate synthetic tabular datasets where observations are independent, but few have the ability to produce relational datasets. Modeling relational data is challenging as it requires modeling both a "parent" table and its relationships across tables. We introduce REaLTabFormer (Realistic Relational and Tabular Transformer), a tabular and relational synthetic data generation model. It first creates a parent table using an autoregressive GPT-2 model, then generates the relational dataset conditioned on the parent table using a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model. We implement target masking to prevent data copying and propose the Q_{delta} statistic and statistical bootstrapping to detect overfitting. Experiments using real-world datasets show that REaLTabFormer captures the relational structure better than a baseline model. REaLTabFormer also achieves state-of-the-art results on prediction tasks, "out-of-the-box", for large non-relational datasets without needing fine-tuning.

We study the problem of online generalized linear regression in the stochastic setting, where the label is generated from a generalized linear model with possibly unbounded additive noise. We provide a sharp analysis of the classical follow-the-regularized-leader (FTRL) algorithm to cope with the label noise. More specifically, for sigma-sub-Gaussian label noise, our analysis provides a regret upper bound of O(sigma^2 d log T) + o(log T), where d is the dimension of the input vector, T is the total number of rounds. We also prove a Omega(sigma^2dlog(T/d)) lower bound for stochastic online linear regression, which indicates that our upper bound is nearly optimal. In addition, we extend our analysis to a more refined Bernstein noise condition. As an application, we study generalized linear bandits with heteroscedastic noise and propose an algorithm based on FTRL to achieve the first variance-aware regret bound.

We present final natural system optical (ugriBV) and near-infrared (YJH) photometry of 134 supernovae (SNe) with probable white dwarf progenitors that were observed in 2004-2009 as part of the first stage of the Carnegie Supernova Project (CSP-I). The sample consists of 123 Type Ia SNe, 5 Type Iax SNe, 2 super-Chandrasekhar SN candidates, 2 Type Ia SNe interacting with circumstellar matter, and 2 SN 2006bt-like events. The redshifts of the objects range from z = 0.0037 to 0.0835; the median redshift is 0.0241. For 120 (90%) of these SNe, near-infrared photometry was obtained. Average optical extinction coefficients and color terms are derived and demonstrated to be stable during the five CSP-I observing campaigns. Measurements of the CSP-I near-infrared bandpasses are also described, and near-infrared color terms are estimated through synthetic photometry of stellar atmosphere models. Optical and near-infrared magnitudes of local sequences of tertiary standard stars for each supernova are given, and a new calibration of Y-band magnitudes of the Persson et al. (1998) standards in the CSP-I natural system is presented.

We present MBXP, an execution-based code completion benchmark in 10+ programming languages. This collection of datasets is generated by our conversion framework that translates prompts and test cases from the original MBPP dataset to the corresponding data in a target language. Based on this benchmark, we are able to evaluate code generation models in a multi-lingual fashion, and in particular discover generalization ability of language models on out-of-domain languages, advantages of large multi-lingual models over mono-lingual, benefits of few-shot prompting, and zero-shot translation abilities. In addition, we use our code generation model to perform large-scale bootstrapping to obtain synthetic canonical solutions in several languages. These solutions can be used for other code-related evaluations such as insertion-based, summarization, or code translation tasks where we demonstrate results and release as part of our benchmark.

When deploying large language models (LLMs), it is important to ensure that these models are not only capable, but also reliable. Many benchmarks have been created to track LLMs' growing capabilities, however there has been no similar focus on measuring their reliability. To understand the potential ramifications of this gap, we investigate how well current benchmarks quantify model reliability. We find that pervasive label errors can compromise these evaluations, obscuring lingering model failures and hiding unreliable behavior. Motivated by this gap in the evaluation of reliability, we then propose the concept of so-called platinum benchmarks, i.e., benchmarks carefully curated to minimize label errors and ambiguity. As a first attempt at constructing such benchmarks, we revise examples from fifteen existing popular benchmarks. We evaluate a wide range of models on these platinum benchmarks and find that, indeed, frontier LLMs still exhibit failures on simple tasks such as elementary-level math word problems. Analyzing these failures further reveals previously unidentified patterns of problems on which frontier models consistently struggle. We provide code at https://github.com/MadryLab/platinum-benchmarks

Social scientists are now using large language models to create "silicon samples" - synthetic datasets intended to stand in for human respondents, aimed at revolutionising human subjects research. However, there are many analytic choices which must be made to produce these samples. Though many of these choices are defensible, their impact on sample quality is poorly understood. I map out these analytic choices and demonstrate how a very small number of decisions can dramatically change the correspondence between silicon samples and human data. Configurations (N = 252) varied substantially in their capacity to estimate (i) rank ordering of participants, (ii) response distributions, and (iii) between-scale correlations. Most critically, configurations were not consistent in quality: those that performed well on one dimension often performed poorly on another, implying that there is no "one-size-fits-all" configuration that optimises the accuracy of these samples. I call for greater attention to the threat of analytic flexibility in using silicon samples.

Developers rely on code comments to document their work, track issues, and understand the source code. As such, comments provide valuable insights into developers' understanding of their code and describe their various intentions in writing the surrounding code. Recent research leverages natural language processing and deep learning to classify comments based on developers' intentions. However, such labelled data are often imbalanced, causing learning models to perform poorly. This work investigates the use of different weighting strategies of the loss function to mitigate the scarcity of certain classes in the dataset. In particular, various RoBERTa-based transformer models are fine-tuned by means of a hyperparameter search to identify their optimal parameter configurations. Additionally, we fine-tuned the transformers with different weighting strategies for the loss function to address class imbalances. Our approach outperforms the STACC baseline by 8.9 per cent on the NLBSE'25 Tool Competition dataset in terms of the average F1_c score, and exceeding the baseline approach in 17 out of 19 cases with a gain ranging from -5.0 to 38.2. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/moritzmock/NLBSE2025.

Code comments are a key resource for information about software artefacts. Depending on the use case, only some types of comments are useful. Thus, automatic approaches to classify these comments have been proposed. In this work, we address this need by proposing, STACC, a set of SentenceTransformers-based binary classifiers. These lightweight classifiers are trained and tested on the NLBSE Code Comment Classification tool competition dataset, and surpass the baseline by a significant margin, achieving an average F1 score of 0.74 against the baseline of 0.31, which is an improvement of 139%. A replication package, as well as the models themselves, are publicly available.

Many businesses and industries nowadays rely on large quantities of time series data making time series forecasting an important research area. Global forecasting models that are trained across sets of time series have shown a huge potential in providing accurate forecasts compared with the traditional univariate forecasting models that work on isolated series. However, there are currently no comprehensive time series archives for forecasting that contain datasets of time series from similar sources available for the research community to evaluate the performance of new global forecasting algorithms over a wide variety of datasets. In this paper, we present such a comprehensive time series forecasting archive containing 20 publicly available time series datasets from varied domains, with different characteristics in terms of frequency, series lengths, and inclusion of missing values. We also characterise the datasets, and identify similarities and differences among them, by conducting a feature analysis. Furthermore, we present the performance of a set of standard baseline forecasting methods over all datasets across eight error metrics, for the benefit of researchers using the archive to benchmark their forecasting algorithms.

Widely used learned metrics for machine translation evaluation, such as COMET and BLEURT, estimate the quality of a translation hypothesis by providing a single sentence-level score. As such, they offer little insight into translation errors (e.g., what are the errors and what is their severity). On the other hand, generative large language models (LLMs) are amplifying the adoption of more granular strategies to evaluation, attempting to detail and categorize translation errors. In this work, we introduce xCOMET, an open-source learned metric designed to bridge the gap between these approaches. xCOMET integrates both sentence-level evaluation and error span detection capabilities, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance across all types of evaluation (sentence-level, system-level, and error span detection). Moreover, it does so while highlighting and categorizing error spans, thus enriching the quality assessment. We also provide a robustness analysis with stress tests, and show that xCOMET is largely capable of identifying localized critical errors and hallucinations.

The lack of freely available standardized datasets represents an aggravating factor during the development and testing the performance of novel computational techniques in exposure assessment and dosimetry research. This hinders progress as researchers are required to generate numerical data (field, power and temperature distribution) anew using simulation software for each exposure scenario. Other than being time consuming, this approach is highly susceptible to errors that occur during the configuration of the electromagnetic model. To address this issue, in this paper, the limited available data on the incident power density and resultant maximum temperature rise on the skin surface considering various steady-state exposure scenarios at 10-90 GHz have been statistically modeled. The synthetic data have been sampled from the fitted statistical multivariate distribution with respect to predetermined dosimetric constraints. We thus present a comprehensive and open-source dataset compiled of the high-fidelity numerical data considering various exposures to a realistic source. Furthermore, different surrogate models for predicting maximum temperature rise on the skin surface were fitted based on the synthetic dataset. All surrogate models were tested on the originally available data where satisfactory predictive performance has been demonstrated. A simple technique of combining quadratic polynomial and tensor-product spline surrogates, each operating on its own cluster of data, has achieved the lowest mean absolute error of 0.058 {\deg}C. Therefore, overall experimental results indicate the validity of the proposed synthetic dataset.

We show via a combination of mathematical arguments and empirical evidence that data distributions sampled from diffusion models satisfy a Concentration of Measure Property saying that any Lipschitz 1-dimensional projection of a random vector is not too far from its mean with high probability. This implies that such models are quite restrictive and gives an explanation for a fact previously observed in the literature that conventional diffusion models cannot capture "heavy-tailed" data (i.e. data x for which the norm |x|_2 does not possess a sub-Gaussian tail) well. We then proceed to train a generalized linear model using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on the diffusion-generated data for a multiclass classification task and observe empirically that a Gaussian universality result holds for the test error. In other words, the test error depends only on the first and second order statistics of the diffusion-generated data in the linear setting. Results of such forms are desirable because they allow one to assume the data itself is Gaussian for analyzing performance of the trained classifier. Finally, we note that current approaches to proving universality do not apply to this case as the covariance matrices of the data tend to have vanishing minimum singular values for the diffusion-generated data, while the current proofs assume that this is not the case (see Subsection 3.4 for more details). This leaves extending previous mathematical universality results as an intriguing open question.

We present an open-source database of superconducting quantum device designs that may be used as the starting point for customized devices. Each design can be generated programmatically using the open-source Qiskit Metal package, and simulated using finite-element electromagnetic solvers. We present a robust workflow for achieving high accuracy on design simulations. Many designs in the database are experimentally validated, showing excellent agreement between simulated and measured parameters. Our database includes a front-end interface that allows users to generate ``best-guess'' designs based on desired circuit parameters. This project lowers the barrier to entry for research groups seeking to make a new class of devices by providing them a well-characterized starting point from which to refine their designs.

Minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding is a decision rule of text generation tasks that outperforms conventional maximum a posterior (MAP) decoding using beam search by selecting high-quality outputs based on a utility function rather than those with high-probability. Typically, it finds the most suitable hypothesis from the set of hypotheses under the sampled pseudo-references. mbrs is a library of MBR decoding, which can flexibly combine various metrics, alternative expectation estimations, and algorithmic variants. It is designed with a focus on speed measurement and calling count of code blocks, transparency, reproducibility, and extensibility, which are essential for researchers and developers. We published our mbrs as an MIT-licensed open-source project, and the code is available on GitHub. GitHub: https://github.com/naist-nlp/mbrs

This paper introduces misinfo-general, a benchmark dataset for evaluating misinformation models' ability to perform out-of-distribution generalisation. Misinformation changes rapidly, much quicker than moderators can annotate at scale, resulting in a shift between the training and inference data distributions. As a result, misinformation models need to be able to perform out-of-distribution generalisation, an understudied problem in existing datasets. We identify 6 axes of generalisation-time, event, topic, publisher, political bias, misinformation type-and design evaluation procedures for each. We also analyse some baseline models, highlighting how these fail important desiderata.

Introduction: The paper addresses the challenging problem of predicting the short-term realized volatility of the Bitcoin price using order flow information. The inherent stochastic nature and anti-persistence of price pose difficulties in accurate prediction. Methods: To address this, we propose a method that transforms order flow data over a fixed time interval (snapshots) into images. The order flow includes trade sizes, trade directions, and limit order book, and is mapped into image colour channels. These images are then used to train both a simple 3-layer Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and more advanced ResNet-18 and ConvMixer, with additionally supplementing them with hand-crafted features. The models are evaluated against classical GARCH, Multilayer Perceptron trained on raw data, and a naive guess method that considers current volatility as a prediction. Results: The experiments are conducted using price data from January 2021 and evaluate model performance in terms of root mean square error (RMSPE). The results show that our order flow representation with a CNN as a predictive model achieves the best performance, with an RMSPE of 0.85+/-1.1 for the model with aggregated features and 1.0+/-1.4 for the model without feature supplementation. ConvMixer with feature supplementation follows closely. In comparison, the RMSPE for the naive guess method was 1.4+/-3.0.

We build new test sets for the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. Both benchmarks have been the focus of intense research for almost a decade, raising the danger of overfitting to excessively re-used test sets. By closely following the original dataset creation processes, we test to what extent current classification models generalize to new data. We evaluate a broad range of models and find accuracy drops of 3% - 15% on CIFAR-10 and 11% - 14% on ImageNet. However, accuracy gains on the original test sets translate to larger gains on the new test sets. Our results suggest that the accuracy drops are not caused by adaptivity, but by the models' inability to generalize to slightly "harder" images than those found in the original test sets.

Model overconfidence and poor calibration are common in machine learning and difficult to account for when applying standard empirical risk minimization. In this work, we propose a novel method to alleviate these problems that we call odd-k-out learning (OKO), which minimizes the cross-entropy error for sets rather than for single examples. This naturally allows the model to capture correlations across data examples and achieves both better accuracy and calibration, especially in limited training data and class-imbalanced regimes. Perhaps surprisingly, OKO often yields better calibration even when training with hard labels and dropping any additional calibration parameter tuning, such as temperature scaling. We demonstrate this in extensive experimental analyses and provide a mathematical theory to interpret our findings. We emphasize that OKO is a general framework that can be easily adapted to many settings and a trained model can be applied to single examples at inference time, without significant run-time overhead or architecture changes.

In this work we propose an analytical model that reproduces the core-bounds phase of gravitational waves (GW) of Rapidly Rotating (RR) from Core Collapse Supernovae (CCSNe), as a function of three parameters, the arrival time tau, the ratio of the kinetic and potential energy beta and a phenomenological parameter alpha related to rotation and equation of state (EOS). To validate the model we use 126 waveforms from the Richers catalog Richers_2017 selected with the criteria of exploring a range of rotation profiles, and involving EOS. To quantify the degree of accuracy of the proposed model, with a particular focus on the rotation parameter beta, we show that the average Fitting Factor (FF) between the simulated waveforms with the templates is 94.4\%. In order to estimate the parameters we propose a frequentist matched filtering approach in real interferometric noise which does not require assigning any priors. We use the Matched Filter (MF) technique, where we inject a bank of templates considering simulated colored Gaussian noise and the real noise of O3L1. For example for A300w6.00\_BHBLP at 10Kpc we obtain a standar deviation of sigma = 3.34times 10^{-3} for simulated colored Gaussian noise and sigma= 1.46times 10^{-2} for real noise. On the other hand, from the asymptotic expansion of the variance we obtain the theoretical minimum error for beta at 10 kpc and optimal orientation. The estimation error in this case is from 10^{-2} to 10^{-3} as beta increases. We show that the results of the estimation error of beta for the 3-parameter space (3D) is consistent with the single-parameter space (1D), which allows us to conclude that beta is decoupled from the others two parameters.

With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), the quality of training data has become crucial. Among the various types of training data, mathematical data plays a key role in enabling LLMs to acquire strong reasoning abilities. While high-quality open-source data is important, it is often insufficient for pre-training, necessitating the addition of synthetic math problems. However, synthetic math questions and answers can introduce inaccuracies, which may degrade both the training data and web data. Therefore, an effective method for cleaning synthetic math data is essential. In this paper, we propose the MathClean benchmark to evaluate the effectiveness of math data cleaning models. The MathClean benchmark consists of 2,000 correct questions and 2,000 erroneous questions with additional 2,000 correct and erroneous answers sourced from augmented data based on GSM8K and MATH. Moreover, we also annotate error types for each question or answer, since it can assess whether models can correctly identify the error categories for future improvements. Finally, we present comprehensive evaluations using state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. Our results demonstrate that even strong models like GPT-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 perform poorly on this benchmark, highlighting the utility of MathClean. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/YuYingLi0/MathClean.

The inspiral, merger, and ringdown of Massive Black Hole Binaries (MBHBs) is one the main sources of Gravitational Waves (GWs) for the future Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), an ESA-led mission in the implementation phase. It is expected that LISA will detect these systems throughout the entire observable universe. Robust and efficient data analysis algorithms are necessary to detect and estimate physical parameters for these systems. In this work, we explore the application of Sequential Neural Likelihood, a simulation-based inference algorithm, to detect and characterize MBHB GW signals in synthetic LISA data. We describe in detail the different elements of the method, their performance and possible alternatives that can be used to enhance the performance. Instead of sampling from the conventional likelihood function, which requires a forward simulation for each evaluation, this method constructs a surrogate likelihood that is ultimately described by a neural network trained from a dataset of simulations of the MBHB signals and noise. One important advantage of this method is that, given that the likelihood is independent of the priors, we can iteratively train models that target specific observations in a fraction of the time and computational cost that other traditional and machine learning-based strategies would require. Because of the iterative nature of the method, we are able to train models to obtain qualitatively similar posteriors with less than 2\% of the simulator calls that Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods would require. We compare these posteriors with those obtained from Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques and discuss the differences that appear, in particular in relation with the important role that data compression has in the modular implementation of the method that we present. We also discuss different strategies to improve the performance of the algorithms.

We present a novel method of performing spelling correction on short input strings, such as search queries or individual words. At its core lies a procedure for generating artificial typos which closely follow the error patterns manifested by humans. This procedure is used to train the production spelling correction model based on a transformer architecture. This model is currently served in the HubSpot product search. We show that our approach to typo generation is superior to the widespread practice of adding noise, which ignores human patterns. We also demonstrate how our approach may be extended to resource-scarce settings and train spelling correction models for Arabic, Greek, Russian, and Setswana languages, without using any labeled data.

This paper explores the limits of the current generation of large language models for program synthesis in general purpose programming languages. We evaluate a collection of such models (with between 244M and 137B parameters) on two new benchmarks, MBPP and MathQA-Python, in both the few-shot and fine-tuning regimes. Our benchmarks are designed to measure the ability of these models to synthesize short Python programs from natural language descriptions. The Mostly Basic Programming Problems (MBPP) dataset contains 974 programming tasks, designed to be solvable by entry-level programmers. The MathQA-Python dataset, a Python version of the MathQA benchmark, contains 23914 problems that evaluate the ability of the models to synthesize code from more complex text. On both datasets, we find that synthesis performance scales log-linearly with model size. Our largest models, even without finetuning on a code dataset, can synthesize solutions to 59.6 percent of the problems from MBPP using few-shot learning with a well-designed prompt. Fine-tuning on a held-out portion of the dataset improves performance by about 10 percentage points across most model sizes. On the MathQA-Python dataset, the largest fine-tuned model achieves 83.8 percent accuracy. Going further, we study the model's ability to engage in dialog about code, incorporating human feedback to improve its solutions. We find that natural language feedback from a human halves the error rate compared to the model's initial prediction. Additionally, we conduct an error analysis to shed light on where these models fall short and what types of programs are most difficult to generate. Finally, we explore the semantic grounding of these models by fine-tuning them to predict the results of program execution. We find that even our best models are generally unable to predict the output of a program given a specific input.

We propose a goodness-of-fit measure for probability densities modeling observations with varying dimensionality, such as text documents of differing lengths or variable-length sequences. The proposed measure is an instance of the kernel Stein discrepancy (KSD), which has been used to construct goodness-of-fit tests for unnormalized densities. The KSD is defined by its Stein operator: current operators used in testing apply to fixed-dimensional spaces. As our main contribution, we extend the KSD to the variable-dimension setting by identifying appropriate Stein operators, and propose a novel KSD goodness-of-fit test. As with the previous variants, the proposed KSD does not require the density to be normalized, allowing the evaluation of a large class of models. Our test is shown to perform well in practice on discrete sequential data benchmarks.

With the huge growth in e-commerce domain, product recommendations have become an increasing field of interest amongst e-commerce companies. One of the more difficult tasks in product recommendations is size and fit predictions. There are a lot of size related returns and refunds in e-fashion domain which causes inconvenience to the customers as well as costs the company. Thus having a good size and fit recommendation system, which can predict the correct sizes for the customers will not only reduce size related returns and refunds but also improve customer experience. Early works in this field used traditional machine learning approaches to estimate customer and product sizes from purchase history. These methods suffered from cold start problem due to huge sparsity in the customer-product data. More recently, people have used deep learning to address this problem by embedding customer and product features. But none of them incorporates valuable customer feedback present on product pages along with the customer and product features. We propose a novel approach which can use information from customer reviews along with customer and product features for size and fit predictions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to using just product and customer features on 4 datasets. Our method shows an improvement of 1.37% - 4.31% in F1 (macro) score over the baseline across the 4 different datasets.

With the growing interest on Large Language Models (LLMs) for fault localization and program repair, ensuring the integrity and generalizability of the LLM-based methods becomes paramount. The code in existing widely-adopted benchmarks for these tasks was written before the the bloom of LLMs and may be included in the training data of existing popular LLMs, thereby suffering from the threat of data leakage, leading to misleadingly optimistic performance metrics. To address this issue, we introduce "ConDefects", a novel dataset of real faults meticulously curated to eliminate such overlap. ConDefects contains 1,254 Java faulty programs and 1,625 Python faulty programs. All these programs are sourced from the online competition platform AtCoder and were produced between October 2021 and September 2023. We pair each fault with fault locations and the corresponding repaired code versions, making it tailored for in fault localization and program repair related research. We also provide interfaces for selecting subsets based on different time windows and coding task difficulties. While inspired by LLM-based tasks, ConDefects can be adopted for benchmarking ALL types of fault localization and program repair methods. The dataset is publicly available, and a demo video can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22j15Hj5ONk.

Training a model for grammatical error correction (GEC) requires a set of labeled ungrammatical / grammatical sentence pairs, but manually annotating such pairs can be expensive. Recently, the Break-It-Fix-It (BIFI) framework has demonstrated strong results on learning to repair a broken program without any labeled examples, but this relies on a perfect critic (e.g., a compiler) that returns whether an example is valid or not, which does not exist for the GEC task. In this work, we show how to leverage a pretrained language model (LM) in defining an LM-Critic, which judges a sentence to be grammatical if the LM assigns it a higher probability than its local perturbations. We apply this LM-Critic and BIFI along with a large set of unlabeled sentences to bootstrap realistic ungrammatical / grammatical pairs for training a corrector. We evaluate our approach on GEC datasets across multiple domains (CoNLL-2014, BEA-2019, GMEG-wiki and GMEG-yahoo) and show that it outperforms existing methods in both the unsupervised setting (+7.7 F0.5) and the supervised setting (+0.5 F0.5).

A lot of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) research is of an empirical nature. Nevertheless, statistical significance testing (SST) is still not widely used. This endangers true progress, as seeming improvements over a baseline might be statistical flukes, leading follow-up research astray while wasting human and computational resources. Here, we provide an easy-to-use package containing different significance tests and utility functions specifically tailored towards research needs and usability.

We introduce OpenRAND, a C++17 library aimed at facilitating reproducible scientific research through the generation of statistically robust and yet replicable random numbers. OpenRAND accommodates single and multi-threaded applications on CPUs and GPUs and offers a simplified, user-friendly API that complies with the C++ standard's random number engine interface. It is portable: it functions seamlessly as a lightweight, header-only library, making it adaptable to a wide spectrum of software and hardware platforms. It is statistically robust: a suite of built-in tests ensures no pattern exists within single or multiple streams. Despite the simplicity and portability, it is remarkably performant-matching and sometimes even outperforming native libraries by a significant margin. Our tests, including a Brownian walk simulation, affirm its reproducibility and highlight its computational efficiency, outperforming CUDA's cuRAND by up to 1.8 times.

This paper proposes one of the first clinical applications of multimodal large language models (LLMs) as an assistant for radiologists to check errors in their reports. We created an evaluation dataset from two real-world radiology datasets (MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray), with 1,000 subsampled reports each. A subset of original reports was modified to contain synthetic errors by introducing various type of mistakes. The evaluation contained two difficulty levels: SIMPLE for binary error-checking and COMPLEX for identifying error types. LLaVA (Large Language and Visual Assistant) variant models, including our instruction-tuned model, were used for the evaluation. Additionally, a domain expert evaluation was conducted on a small test set. At the SIMPLE level, the LLaVA v1.5 model outperformed other publicly available models. Instruction tuning significantly enhanced performance by 47.4% and 25.4% on MIMIC-CXR and IU-Xray data, respectively. The model also surpassed the domain experts accuracy in the MIMIC-CXR dataset by 1.67%. Notably, among the subsets (N=21) of the test set where a clinician did not achieve the correct conclusion, the LLaVA ensemble mode correctly identified 71.4% of these cases. This study marks a promising step toward utilizing multi-modal LLMs to enhance diagnostic accuracy in radiology. The ensemble model demonstrated comparable performance to clinicians, even capturing errors overlooked by humans. Nevertheless, future work is needed to improve the model ability to identify the types of inconsistency.

Researchers have been using Neural Networks and other related machine-learning techniques to price options since the early 1990s. After three decades of improvements in machine learning techniques, computational processing power, cloud computing, and data availability, this paper is able to provide a comparison of using Google Cloud's AutoML Regressor, TensorFlow Neural Networks, and XGBoost Gradient Boosting Decision Trees for pricing European Options. All three types of models were able to outperform the Black Scholes Model in terms of mean absolute error. These results showcase the potential of using historical data from an option's underlying asset for pricing European options, especially when using machine learning algorithms that learn complex patterns that traditional parametric models do not take into account.

Recent advancements in Language Models (LMs) have catalyzed the creation of multiple benchmarks, designed to assess these models' general capabilities. A crucial task, however, is assessing the validity of the benchmarks themselves. This is most commonly done via Benchmark Agreement Testing (BAT), where new benchmarks are validated against established ones using some agreement metric (e.g., rank correlation). Despite the crucial role of BAT for benchmark builders and consumers, there are no standardized procedures for such agreement testing. This deficiency can lead to invalid conclusions, fostering mistrust in benchmarks and upending the ability to properly choose the appropriate benchmark to use. By analyzing over 40 prominent benchmarks, we demonstrate how some overlooked methodological choices can significantly influence BAT results, potentially undermining the validity of conclusions. To address these inconsistencies, we propose a set of best practices for BAT and demonstrate how utilizing these methodologies greatly improves BAT robustness and validity. To foster adoption and facilitate future research,, we introduce BenchBench, a python package for BAT, and release the BenchBench-leaderboard, a meta-benchmark designed to evaluate benchmarks using their peers. Our findings underscore the necessity for standardized BAT, ensuring the robustness and validity of benchmark evaluations in the evolving landscape of language model research. BenchBench Package: https://github.com/IBM/BenchBench Leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/per/BenchBench

Grammatical Error Detection (GED) methods rely heavily on human annotated error corpora. However, these annotations are unavailable in many low-resource languages. In this paper, we investigate GED in this context. Leveraging the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer capabilities of multilingual pre-trained language models, we train a model using data from a diverse set of languages to generate synthetic errors in other languages. These synthetic error corpora are then used to train a GED model. Specifically we propose a two-stage fine-tuning pipeline where the GED model is first fine-tuned on multilingual synthetic data from target languages followed by fine-tuning on human-annotated GED corpora from source languages. This approach outperforms current state-of-the-art annotation-free GED methods. We also analyse the errors produced by our method and other strong baselines, finding that our approach produces errors that are more diverse and more similar to human errors.

We present TIGERScore, a Trained metric that follows Instruction Guidance to perform Explainable, and Reference-free evaluation over a wide spectrum of text generation tasks. Different from other automatic evaluation methods that only provide arcane scores, TIGERScore is guided by the natural language instruction to provide error analysis to pinpoint the mistakes in the generated text. Our metric is based on LLaMA, trained on our meticulously curated instruction-tuning dataset MetricInstruct which covers 6 text generation tasks and 23 text generation datasets. The dataset consists of 48K quadruple in the form of (instruction, input, system output rightarrow error analysis). We collected the `system outputs' through diverse channels to cover different types of errors. To quantitatively assess our metric, we evaluate its correlation with human ratings on 5 held-in datasets, 2 held-out datasets and show that TIGERScore can achieve the highest overall Spearman's correlation with human ratings across these datasets and outperforms other metrics significantly. As a reference-free metric, its correlation can even surpass the best existing reference-based metrics. To further qualitatively assess the rationale generated by our metric, we conduct human evaluation on the generated explanations and found that the explanations are 70.8\% accurate. Through these experimental results, we believe TIGERScore demonstrates the possibility of building universal explainable metrics to evaluate any text generation task.

In the past couple of years, various approaches to representing and quantifying different types of predictive uncertainty in machine learning, notably in the setting of classification, have been proposed on the basis of second-order probability distributions, i.e., predictions in the form of distributions on probability distributions. A completely conclusive solution has not yet been found, however, as shown by recent criticisms of commonly used uncertainty measures associated with second-order distributions, identifying undesirable theoretical properties of these measures. In light of these criticisms, we propose a set of formal criteria that meaningful uncertainty measures for predictive uncertainty based on second-order distributions should obey. Moreover, we provide a general framework for developing uncertainty measures to account for these criteria, and offer an instantiation based on the Wasserstein distance, for which we prove that all criteria are satisfied.

Several studies showed that Large Language Models (LLMs) can answer medical questions correctly, even outperforming the average human score in some medical exams. However, to our knowledge, no study has been conducted to assess the ability of language models to validate existing or generated medical text for correctness and consistency. In this paper, we introduce MEDEC (https://github.com/abachaa/MEDEC), the first publicly available benchmark for medical error detection and correction in clinical notes, covering five types of errors (Diagnosis, Management, Treatment, Pharmacotherapy, and Causal Organism). MEDEC consists of 3,848 clinical texts, including 488 clinical notes from three US hospital systems that were not previously seen by any LLM. The dataset has been used for the MEDIQA-CORR shared task to evaluate seventeen participating systems [Ben Abacha et al., 2024]. In this paper, we describe the data creation methods and we evaluate recent LLMs (e.g., o1-preview, GPT-4, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Gemini 2.0 Flash) for the tasks of detecting and correcting medical errors requiring both medical knowledge and reasoning capabilities. We also conducted a comparative study where two medical doctors performed the same task on the MEDEC test set. The results showed that MEDEC is a sufficiently challenging benchmark to assess the ability of models to validate existing or generated notes and to correct medical errors. We also found that although recent LLMs have a good performance in error detection and correction, they are still outperformed by medical doctors in these tasks. We discuss the potential factors behind this gap, the insights from our experiments, the limitations of current evaluation metrics, and share potential pointers for future research.

As researchers and practitioners apply Machine Learning to increasingly more software engineering problems, the approaches they use become more sophisticated. A lot of modern approaches utilize internal code structure in the form of an abstract syntax tree (AST) or its extensions: path-based representation, complex graph combining AST with additional edges. Even though the process of extracting ASTs from code can be done with different parsers, the impact of choosing a parser on the final model quality remains unstudied. Moreover, researchers often omit the exact details of extracting particular code representations. In this work, we evaluate two models, namely Code2Seq and TreeLSTM, in the method name prediction task backed by eight different parsers for the Java language. To unify the process of data preparation with different parsers, we develop SuperParser, a multi-language parser-agnostic library based on PathMiner. SuperParser facilitates the end-to-end creation of datasets suitable for training and evaluation of ML models that work with structural information from source code. Our results demonstrate that trees built by different parsers vary in their structure and content. We then analyze how this diversity affects the models' quality and show that the quality gap between the most and least suitable parsers for both models turns out to be significant. Finally, we discuss other features of the parsers that researchers and practitioners should take into account when selecting a parser along with the impact on the models' quality. The code of SuperParser is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6366591. We also publish Java-norm, the dataset we use to evaluate the models: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6366599.

Putting together an ideal outfit is a process that involves creativity and style intuition. This makes it a particularly difficult task to automate. Existing styling products generally involve human specialists and a highly curated set of fashion items. In this paper, we will describe how we bootstrapped the Complete The Look (CTL) system at Pinterest. This is a technology that aims to learn the subjective task of "style compatibility" in order to recommend complementary items that complete an outfit. In particular, we want to show recommendations from other categories that are compatible with an item of interest. For example, what are some heels that go well with this cocktail dress? We will introduce our outfit dataset of over 1 million outfits and 4 million objects, a subset of which we will make available to the research community, and describe the pipeline used to obtain and refresh this dataset. Furthermore, we will describe how we evaluate this subjective task and compare model performance across multiple training methods. Lastly, we will share our lessons going from experimentation to working prototype, and how to mitigate failure modes in the production environment. Our work represents one of the first examples of an industrial-scale solution for compatibility-based fashion recommendation.

The last decade has witnessed a rapid growth of the field of exoplanet discovery and characterisation. However, several big challenges remain, many of which could be addressed using machine learning methodology. For instance, the most prolific method for detecting exoplanets and inferring several of their characteristics, transit photometry, is very sensitive to the presence of stellar spots. The current practice in the literature is to identify the effects of spots visually and correct for them manually or discard the affected data. This paper explores a first step towards fully automating the efficient and precise derivation of transit depths from transit light curves in the presence of stellar spots. The methods and results we present were obtained in the context of the 1st Machine Learning Challenge organized for the European Space Agency's upcoming Ariel mission. We first present the problem, the simulated Ariel-like data and outline the Challenge while identifying best practices for organizing similar challenges in the future. Finally, we present the solutions obtained by the top-5 winning teams, provide their code and discuss their implications. Successful solutions either construct highly non-linear (w.r.t. the raw data) models with minimal preprocessing -deep neural networks and ensemble methods- or amount to obtaining meaningful statistics from the light curves, constructing linear models on which yields comparably good predictive performance.

We present the MULTIMODAL UNIVERSE, a large-scale multimodal dataset of scientific astronomical data, compiled specifically to facilitate machine learning research. Overall, the MULTIMODAL UNIVERSE contains hundreds of millions of astronomical observations, constituting 100\,TB of multi-channel and hyper-spectral images, spectra, multivariate time series, as well as a wide variety of associated scientific measurements and "metadata". In addition, we include a range of benchmark tasks representative of standard practices for machine learning methods in astrophysics. This massive dataset will enable the development of large multi-modal models specifically targeted towards scientific applications. All codes used to compile the MULTIMODAL UNIVERSE and a description of how to access the data is available at https://github.com/MultimodalUniverse/MultimodalUniverse

Language models have shown promise in various tasks but can be affected by undesired data during training, fine-tuning, or alignment. For example, if some unsafe conversations are wrongly annotated as safe ones, the model fine-tuned on these samples may be harmful. Therefore, the correctness of annotations, i.e., the credibility of the dataset, is important. This study focuses on the credibility of real-world datasets, including the popular benchmarks Jigsaw Civil Comments, Anthropic Harmless & Red Team, PKU BeaverTails & SafeRLHF, that can be used for training a harmless language model. Given the cost and difficulty of cleaning these datasets by humans, we introduce a systematic framework for evaluating the credibility of datasets, identifying label errors, and evaluating the influence of noisy labels in the curated language data, specifically focusing on unsafe comments and conversation classification. With the framework, we find and fix an average of 6.16% label errors in 11 datasets constructed from the above benchmarks. The data credibility and downstream learning performance can be remarkably improved by directly fixing label errors, indicating the significance of cleaning existing real-world datasets. We provide an open-source tool, Docta, for data cleaning at https://github.com/Docta-ai/docta.

Critical Error Detection (CED) in machine translation aims to determine whether a translation is safe to use or contains unacceptable deviations in meaning. While the WMT21 English-German CED dataset provided the first benchmark, it is limited in scale, label balance, domain coverage, and temporal freshness. We present SynCED-EnDe, a new resource consisting of 1,000 gold-labeled and 8,000 silver-labeled sentence pairs, balanced 50/50 between error and non-error cases. SynCED-EnDe draws from diverse 2024-2025 sources (StackExchange, GOV.UK) and introduces explicit error subclasses, structured trigger flags, and fine-grained auxiliary judgments (obviousness, severity, localization complexity, contextual dependency, adequacy deviation). These enrichments enable systematic analyses of error risk and intricacy beyond binary detection. The dataset is permanently hosted on GitHub and Hugging Face, accompanied by documentation, annotation guidelines, and baseline scripts. Benchmark experiments with XLM-R and related encoders show substantial performance gains over WMT21 due to balanced labels and refined annotations. We envision SynCED-EnDe as a community resource to advance safe deployment of MT in information retrieval and conversational assistants, particularly in emerging contexts such as wearable AI devices.

We introduce a boosting algorithm to pre-process data for fairness. Starting from an initial fair but inaccurate distribution, our approach shifts towards better data fitting while still ensuring a minimal fairness guarantee. To do so, it learns the sufficient statistics of an exponential family with boosting-compliant convergence. Importantly, we are able to theoretically prove that the learned distribution will have a representation rate and statistical rate data fairness guarantee. Unlike recent optimization based pre-processing methods, our approach can be easily adapted for continuous domain features. Furthermore, when the weak learners are specified to be decision trees, the sufficient statistics of the learned distribution can be examined to provide clues on sources of (un)fairness. Empirical results are present to display the quality of result on real-world data.

We evaluate ChatGPT's ability to solve algorithm problems from the CLRS benchmark suite that is designed for GNNs. The benchmark requires the use of a specified classical algorithm to solve a given problem. We find that ChatGPT outperforms specialist GNN models, using Python to successfully solve these problems. This raises new points in the discussion about learning algorithms with neural networks and how we think about what out of distribution testing looks like with web scale training data.

Maybe not. We identify and analyse errors in the popular Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark. Even though MMLU is widely adopted, our analysis demonstrates numerous ground truth errors that obscure the true capabilities of LLMs. For example, we find that 57% of the analysed questions in the Virology subset contain errors. To address this issue, we introduce a comprehensive framework for identifying dataset errors using a novel error taxonomy. Then, we create MMLU-Redux, which is a subset of 3,000 manually re-annotated questions across 30 MMLU subjects. Using MMLU-Redux, we demonstrate significant discrepancies with the model performance metrics that were originally reported. Our results strongly advocate for revising MMLU's error-ridden questions to enhance its future utility and reliability as a benchmark. Therefore, we open up MMLU-Redux for additional annotation https://huggingface.co/datasets/edinburgh-dawg/mmlu-redux.

Grammatical error correction (GEC) is the task of correcting typos, spelling, punctuation and grammatical issues in text. Approaching the problem as a sequence-to-sequence task, we compare the use of a common subword unit vocabulary and byte-level encoding. Initial synthetic training data is created using an error-generating pipeline, and used for finetuning two subword-level models and one byte-level model. Models are then finetuned further on hand-corrected error corpora, including texts written by children, university students, dyslexic and second-language writers, and evaluated over different error types and origins. We show that a byte-level model enables higher correction quality than a subword approach, not only for simple spelling errors, but also for more complex semantic, stylistic and grammatical issues. In particular, initial training on synthetic corpora followed by finetuning on a relatively small parallel corpus of real-world errors helps the byte-level model correct a wide range of commonly occurring errors. Our experiments are run for the Icelandic language but should hold for other similar languages, particularly morphologically rich ones.

This paper introduces MISS-QA, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the ability of models to interpret schematic diagrams within scientific literature. MISS-QA comprises 1,500 expert-annotated examples over 465 scientific papers. In this benchmark, models are tasked with interpreting schematic diagrams that illustrate research overviews and answering corresponding information-seeking questions based on the broader context of the paper. We assess the performance of 18 frontier multimodal foundation models, including o4-mini, Gemini-2.5-Flash, and Qwen2.5-VL. We reveal a significant performance gap between these models and human experts on MISS-QA. Our analysis of model performance on unanswerable questions and our detailed error analysis further highlight the strengths and limitations of current models, offering key insights to enhance models in comprehending multimodal scientific literature.

Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) has recently emerged as a promising approach for tackling the robustness challenge under distribution shifts. However, the lack of consistent settings and systematic studies in prior literature hinders thorough assessments of existing methods. To address this issue, we present TTAB, a test-time adaptation benchmark that encompasses ten state-of-the-art algorithms, a diverse array of distribution shifts, and two evaluation protocols. Through extensive experiments, our benchmark reveals three common pitfalls in prior efforts. First, selecting appropriate hyper-parameters, especially for model selection, is exceedingly difficult due to online batch dependency. Second, the effectiveness of TTA varies greatly depending on the quality and properties of the model being adapted. Third, even under optimal algorithmic conditions, none of the existing methods are capable of addressing all common types of distribution shifts. Our findings underscore the need for future research in the field to conduct rigorous evaluations on a broader set of models and shifts, and to re-examine the assumptions behind the empirical success of TTA. Our code is available at https://github.com/lins-lab/ttab.

We study the problem of detecting the correlation between two Gaussian databases XinR^{ntimes d} and Y^{ntimes d}, each composed of n users with d features. This problem is relevant in the analysis of social media, computational biology, etc. We formulate this as a hypothesis testing problem: under the null hypothesis, these two databases are statistically independent. Under the alternative, however, there exists an unknown permutation sigma over the set of n users (or, row permutation), such that X is rho-correlated with Y^sigma, a permuted version of Y. We determine sharp thresholds at which optimal testing exhibits a phase transition, depending on the asymptotic regime of n and d. Specifically, we prove that if rho^2dto0, as dtoinfty, then weak detection (performing slightly better than random guessing) is statistically impossible, irrespectively of the value of n. This compliments the performance of a simple test that thresholds the sum all entries of X^TY. Furthermore, when d is fixed, we prove that strong detection (vanishing error probability) is impossible for any rho<rho^star, where rho^star is an explicit function of d, while weak detection is again impossible as long as rho^2dto0. These results close significant gaps in current recent related studies.

A collection of robust Mahalanobis distances for multivariate outlier detection is proposed, based on the notion of shrinkage. Robust intensity and scaling factors are optimally estimated to define the shrinkage. Some properties are investigated, such as affine equivariance and breakdown value. The performance of the proposal is illustrated through the comparison to other techniques from the literature, in a simulation study and with a real dataset. The behavior when the underlying distribution is heavy-tailed or skewed, shows the appropriateness of the method when we deviate from the common assumption of normality. The resulting high correct detection rates and low false detection rates in the vast majority of cases, as well as the significantly smaller computation time shows the advantages of our proposal.

Tests that cause spurious failures without any code changes, i.e., flaky tests, hamper regression testing, increase maintenance costs, may shadow real bugs, and decrease trust in tests. While the prevalence and importance of flakiness is well established, prior research focused on Java projects, thus raising the question of how the findings generalize. In order to provide a better understanding of the role of flakiness in software development beyond Java, we empirically study the prevalence, causes, and degree of flakiness within software written in Python, one of the currently most popular programming languages. For this, we sampled 22352 open source projects from the popular PyPI package index, and analyzed their 876186 test cases for flakiness. Our investigation suggests that flakiness is equally prevalent in Python as it is in Java. The reasons, however, are different: Order dependency is a much more dominant problem in Python, causing 59% of the 7571 flaky tests in our dataset. Another 28% were caused by test infrastructure problems, which represent a previously undocumented cause of flakiness. The remaining 13% can mostly be attributed to the use of network and randomness APIs by the projects, which is indicative of the type of software commonly written in Python. Our data also suggests that finding flaky tests requires more runs than are often done in the literature: A 95% confidence that a passing test case is not flaky on average would require 170 reruns.

This study examines the relationship between trade openness, logistics performance, and economic growth within G20 economies. Using a Bootstrap Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model augmented by a dynamic error correction mechanism (ECM), the analysis quantifies both short run and long run effects of trade facilitation and logistics infrastructure, measured via the World Bank's Logistics Performance Index (LPI) from 2007 to 2023, on economic growth. The G20, as a consortium of the world's leading economies, exhibits significant variation in logistics efficiency and degrees of trade openness, providing a robust context for comparative analysis. The ARDL-ECM approach, reinforced by bootstrap resampling, delivers reliable estimates even in the presence of small samples and complex variable linkages. Findings are intended to inform policymakers seeking to enhance trade competitiveness and economic development through targeted investment in infrastructure and regulatory reforms supporting trade facilitation. The results underscore the critical role of efficient logistics specifically customs administration, physical infrastructure, and shipment reliability in driving international trade and fostering sustained economic growth. Improvements in these areas can substantially increase a country's trade capacity and overall economic performance.

In this position paper, we argue that the classical evaluation on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks using annotated benchmarks is in trouble. The worst kind of data contamination happens when a Large Language Model (LLM) is trained on the test split of a benchmark, and then evaluated in the same benchmark. The extent of the problem is unknown, as it is not straightforward to measure. Contamination causes an overestimation of the performance of a contaminated model in a target benchmark and associated task with respect to their non-contaminated counterparts. The consequences can be very harmful, with wrong scientific conclusions being published while other correct ones are discarded. This position paper defines different levels of data contamination and argues for a community effort, including the development of automatic and semi-automatic measures to detect when data from a benchmark was exposed to a model, and suggestions for flagging papers with conclusions that are compromised by data contamination.

Conformal prediction (CP) for regression can be challenging, especially when the output distribution is heteroscedastic, multimodal, or skewed. Some of the issues can be addressed by estimating a distribution over the output, but in reality, such approaches can be sensitive to estimation error and yield unstable intervals.~Here, we circumvent the challenges by converting regression to a classification problem and then use CP for classification to obtain CP sets for regression.~To preserve the ordering of the continuous-output space, we design a new loss function and make necessary modifications to the CP classification techniques.~Empirical results on many benchmarks shows that this simple approach gives surprisingly good results on many practical problems.

We here propose a machine learning approach for monitoring particle detectors in real-time. The goal is to assess the compatibility of incoming experimental data with a reference dataset, characterising the data behaviour under normal circumstances, via a likelihood-ratio hypothesis test. The model is based on a modern implementation of kernel methods, nonparametric algorithms that can learn any continuous function given enough data. The resulting approach is efficient and agnostic to the type of anomaly that may be present in the data. Our study demonstrates the effectiveness of this strategy on multivariate data from drift tube chamber muon detectors.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in code generation. However, current evaluation datasets suffer from issues such as the lack of runnable test cases, deviation from the distribution of real-world code, and the ability to evaluate only the Python language. These limitations undermine the credibility of the evaluation results. To address these limitations, we introduce MRG-Bench (Multi-language Repository-level Code Generation Benchmark), a novel dataset that provides a more accurate evaluation of LLMs in practical repository-level code generation tasks. MRG-Bench has three main features: (1) practical data sourced from real-world code repositories that align to the practical distribution, (2) multiple programming languages support, including Python, Java, and Go, and (3) project-level runnable test cases to assess the quality of the generated code. Based on MRG-Bench, we conducted extensive experiments including large language models, long-context models, and RAG-related methods. These evaluation results demonstrate that current repository-level code generation techniques suffer from significant performance deficiencies. To further investigate why models fail, we designed novel experiments to annotate the underlying causes of generation errors. The results explicitly show that the majority of methods suffer from "difficulty in understanding user requirements," failing to comprehend their assigned tasks accurately. Moreover, the impact of different repository-level contexts on this issue exhibits significant disparities across different programming languages, suggesting that, in practice, specialized contextual information needs to be designed for different languages.