Daily Papers

Narrow bit-width data formats are key to reducing the computational and storage costs of modern deep learning applications. This paper evaluates Microscaling (MX) data formats that combine a per-block scaling factor with narrow floating-point and integer types for individual elements.MX formats balance the competing needs of hardware efficiency, model accuracy, and user friction. Empirical results on over two dozen benchmarks demonstrate practicality of MX data formats as a drop-in replacement for baseline FP32 for AI inference and training with low user friction. We also show the first instance of training generative language models at sub-8-bit weights, activations, and gradients with minimal accuracy loss and no modifications to the training recipe.

Recent advances in deep learning methods such as LLMs and Diffusion models have created a need for improved quantization methods that can meet the computational demands of these modern architectures while maintaining accuracy. Towards this goal, we study the advantages of FP8 data formats for post-training quantization across 75 unique network architectures covering a wide range of tasks, including machine translation, language modeling, text generation, image classification, generation, and segmentation. We examine three different FP8 representations (E5M2, E4M3, and E3M4) to study the effects of varying degrees of trade-off between dynamic range and precision on model accuracy. Based on our extensive study, we developed a quantization workflow that generalizes across different network architectures. Our empirical results show that FP8 formats outperform INT8 in multiple aspects, including workload coverage (92.64% vs. 65.87%), model accuracy and suitability for a broader range of operations. Furthermore, our findings suggest that E4M3 is better suited for NLP models, whereas E3M4 performs marginally better than E4M3 on computer vision tasks. The code is publicly available on Intel Neural Compressor: https://github.com/intel/neural-compressor.

Seam carving is an image editing method that enable content-aware resizing, including operations like removing objects. However, the seam-finding strategy based on dynamic programming or graph-cut limits its applications to broader visual data formats and degrees of freedom for editing. Our observation is that describing the editing and retargeting of images more generally by a displacement field yields a generalisation of content-aware deformations. We propose to learn a deformation with a neural network that keeps the output plausible while trying to deform it only in places with low information content. This technique applies to different kinds of visual data, including images, 3D scenes given as neural radiance fields, or even polygon meshes. Experiments conducted on different visual data show that our method achieves better content-aware retargeting compared to previous methods.

Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) is an emerging technology for earthquake monitoring and subsurface imaging. The recorded seismic signals by DAS have several distinct characteristics, such as unknown coupling effects, strong anthropogenic noise, and ultra-dense spatial sampling. These aspects differ from conventional seismic data recorded by seismic networks, making it challenging to utilize DAS at present for seismic monitoring. New data analysis algorithms are needed to extract useful information from DAS data. Previous studies on conventional seismic data demonstrated that deep learning models could achieve performance close to human analysts in picking seismic phases. However, phase picking on DAS data is still a difficult problem due to the lack of manual labels. Further, the differences in mathematical structure between these two data formats, i.e., ultra-dense DAS arrays and sparse seismic networks, make model fine-tuning or transfer learning difficult to implement on DAS data. In this work, we design a new approach using semi-supervised learning to solve the phase-picking task on DAS arrays. We use a pre-trained PhaseNet model as a teacher network to generate noisy labels of P and S arrivals on DAS data and apply the Gaussian mixture model phase association (GaMMA) method to refine these noisy labels to build training datasets. We develop a new deep learning model, PhaseNet-DAS, to process the 2D spatial-temporal data of DAS arrays and train the model on DAS data. The new deep learning model achieves high picking accuracy and good earthquake detection performance. We then apply the model to process continuous data and build earthquake catalogs directly from DAS recording. Our approach using semi-supervised learning provides a way to build effective deep learning models for DAS, which have the potential to improve earthquake monitoring using large-scale fiber networks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) pre-trained on massive corpora have exhibited remarkable performance on various NLP tasks. However, applying these models to specific domains still poses significant challenges, such as lack of domain knowledge, limited capacity to leverage domain knowledge and inadequate adaptation to domain-specific data formats. Considering the exorbitant cost of training LLMs from scratch and the scarcity of annotated data within particular domains, in this work, we focus on domain-specific continual pre-training of LLMs using E-commerce domain as an exemplar. Specifically, we explore the impact of continual pre-training on LLMs employing unlabeled general and E-commercial corpora. Furthermore, we design a mixing strategy among different data sources to better leverage E-commercial semi-structured data. We construct multiple tasks to assess LLMs' few-shot In-context Learning ability and their zero-shot performance after instruction tuning in E-commerce domain. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of continual pre-training of E-commerce LLMs and the efficacy of our devised data mixing strategy.

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of various LLMs in interpreting tabular data through different prompting strategies and data formats. Our analysis extends across six benchmarks for table-related tasks such as question-answering and fact-checking. We introduce for the first time the assessment of LLMs' performance on image-based table representations. Specifically, we compare five text-based and three image-based table representations, demonstrating the influence of representation and prompting on LLM performance. Our study provides insights into the effective use of LLMs on table-related tasks.

Line art colorization plays a crucial role in hand-drawn animation production, where digital artists manually colorize segments using a paint bucket tool, guided by RGB values from character color design sheets. This process, often called paint bucket colorization, involves two main tasks: keyframe colorization, where colors are applied according to the character's color design sheet, and consecutive frame colorization, where these colors are replicated across adjacent frames. Current automated colorization methods primarily focus on reference-based and segment-matching approaches. However, reference-based methods often fail to accurately assign specific colors to each region, while matching-based methods are limited to consecutive frame colorization and struggle with issues like significant deformation and occlusion. In this work, we introduce inclusion matching, which allows the network to understand the inclusion relationships between segments, rather than relying solely on direct visual correspondences. By integrating this approach with segment parsing and color warping modules, our inclusion matching pipeline significantly improves performance in both keyframe colorization and consecutive frame colorization. To support our network's training, we have developed a unique dataset named PaintBucket-Character, which includes rendered line arts alongside their colorized versions and shading annotations for various 3D characters. To replicate industry animation data formats, we also created color design sheets for each character, with semantic information for each color and standard pose reference images. Experiments highlight the superiority of our method, demonstrating accurate and consistent colorization across both our proposed benchmarks and hand-drawn animations.

PDF is one of the most prominent data formats, making PDF parsing crucial for information extraction and retrieval, particularly with the rise of RAG systems. While various PDF parsing tools exist, their effectiveness across different document types remains understudied, especially beyond academic papers. Our research aims to address this gap by comparing 10 popular PDF parsing tools across 6 document categories using the DocLayNet dataset. These tools include PyPDF, pdfminer.six, PyMuPDF, pdfplumber, pypdfium2, Unstructured, Tabula, Camelot, as well as the deep learning-based tools Nougat and Table Transformer(TATR). We evaluated both text extraction and table detection capabilities. For text extraction, PyMuPDF and pypdfium generally outperformed others, but all parsers struggled with Scientific and Patent documents. For these challenging categories, learning-based tools like Nougat demonstrated superior performance. In table detection, TATR excelled in the Financial, Patent, Law & Regulations, and Scientific categories. Table detection tool Camelot performed best for tender documents, while PyMuPDF performed superior in the Manual category. Our findings highlight the importance of selecting appropriate parsing tools based on document type and specific tasks, providing valuable insights for researchers and practitioners working with diverse document sources.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable advancements in natural language processing, showcasing exceptional performance across various tasks. However, the expensive memory and computational requirements present significant challenges for their practical deployment. Low-bit quantization has emerged as a critical approach to mitigate these challenges by reducing the bit-width of model parameters, activations, and gradients, thus decreasing memory usage and computational demands. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of low-bit quantization methods tailored for LLMs, covering the fundamental principles, system implementations, and algorithmic strategies. An overview of basic concepts and new data formats specific to low-bit LLMs is first introduced, followed by a review of frameworks and systems that facilitate low-bit LLMs across various hardware platforms. Then, we categorize and analyze techniques and toolkits for efficient low-bit training and inference of LLMs. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of future trends and potential advancements of low-bit LLMs. Our systematic overview from basic, system, and algorithm perspectives can offer valuable insights and guidelines for future works to enhance the efficiency and applicability of LLMs through low-bit quantization.

The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) hinges on the quality and accessibility of data, yet the current fragmentation and variability of data sources hinder efficient data utilization. The dispersion of data sources and diversity of data formats often lead to inefficiencies in data retrieval and processing, significantly impeding the progress of AI research and applications. To address these challenges, this paper introduces OpenDataLab, a platform designed to bridge the gap between diverse data sources and the need for unified data processing. OpenDataLab integrates a wide range of open-source AI datasets and enhances data acquisition efficiency through intelligent querying and high-speed downloading services. The platform employs a next-generation AI Data Set Description Language (DSDL), which standardizes the representation of multimodal and multi-format data, improving interoperability and reusability. Additionally, OpenDataLab optimizes data processing through tools that complement DSDL. By integrating data with unified data descriptions and smart data toolchains, OpenDataLab can improve data preparation efficiency by 30\%. We anticipate that OpenDataLab will significantly boost artificial general intelligence (AGI) research and facilitate advancements in related AI fields. For more detailed information, please visit the platform's official website: https://opendatalab.com.

Real-world multi-modal problems are rarely solved by a single machine learning model, and often require multi-step computational plans that involve stitching several models. Tool-augmented LLMs hold tremendous promise for automating the generation of such computational plans. However, the lack of standardized benchmarks for evaluating LLMs as planners for multi-step multi-modal tasks has prevented a systematic study of planner design decisions. Should LLMs generate a full plan in a single shot or step-by-step? Should they invoke tools directly with Python code or through structured data formats like JSON? Does feedback improve planning? To answer these questions and more, we introduce m&m's: a benchmark containing 4K+ multi-step multi-modal tasks involving 33 tools that include multi-modal models, (free) public APIs, and image processing modules. For each of these task queries, we provide automatically generated plans using this realistic toolset. We further provide a high-quality subset of 1,565 task plans that are human-verified and correctly executable. With m&m's, we evaluate 6 popular LLMs with 2 planning strategies (multi-step vs. step-by-step planning), 2 plan formats (JSON vs. code), and 3 types of feedback (parsing/verification/execution). Finally, we summarize takeaways from our extensive experiments. Our dataset and code are available on HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/zixianma/mnms) and Github (https://github.com/RAIVNLab/mnms).

Replicating the innate human ability to detect all objects based on free-form texts at any granularity remains a formidable challenge for Vision-Language models. Current Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) are predominantly constrained to grounding a single, pre-existing object, relying solely on data from Referring Expression Comprehension tasks. The limitation leads to a compromise in model design, necessitating the introduction of visual expert models or the integration of customized head structures. Beyond these constraints, our research delves into the untapped potential of LVLMs and uncover their inherent capability for basic object perception, allowing them to accurately identify and locate objects of interest. Building on this insight, we introduce a novel language-prompted localization dataset designed to fully unleash the capabilities of LVLMs in integrating fine-grained object perception with precise location awareness. More importantly, we present Griffon, a purely LVLM-based baseline, which does not require the introduction of any special tokens, expert models, or additional detection modules. It simply maintains a consistent structure with popular LVLMs by unifying data formats across various localization-related scenarios and is trained end-to-end through a well-designed pipeline. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Griffon not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on the fine-grained RefCOCO series but also approaches the capabilities of the expert model Faster RCNN on the detection benchmark MSCOCO.

In this paper, we explore FP8 low-bit data formats for efficient training of large language models (LLMs). Our key insight is that most variables, such as gradients and optimizer states, in LLM training can employ low-precision data formats without compromising model accuracy and requiring no changes to hyper-parameters. Specifically, we propose a new FP8 automatic mixed-precision framework for training LLMs. This framework offers three levels of FP8 utilization to streamline mixed-precision and distributed parallel training for LLMs. It gradually incorporates 8-bit gradients, optimizer states, and distributed learning in an incremental manner. Experiment results show that, during the training of GPT-175B model on H100 GPU platform, our FP8 mixed-precision training framework not only achieved a remarkable 42% reduction in real memory usage but also ran 64% faster than the widely adopted BF16 framework (i.e., Megatron-LM), surpassing the speed of Nvidia Transformer Engine by 17%. This largely reduces the training costs for large foundation models. Furthermore, our FP8 mixed-precision training methodology is generic. It can be seamlessly applied to other tasks such as LLM instruction tuning and reinforcement learning with human feedback, offering savings in fine-tuning expenses. Our FP8 low-precision training framework is open-sourced at {https://github.com/Azure/MS-AMP}{aka.ms/MS.AMP}.

Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for many applications. Can such a consolidation happen in robotics? Conventionally, robotic learning methods train a separate model for every application, every robot, and even every environment. Can we instead train generalist X-robot policy that can be adapted efficiently to new robots, tasks, and environments? In this paper, we provide datasets in standardized data formats and models to make it possible to explore this possibility in the context of robotic manipulation, alongside experimental results that provide an example of effective X-robot policies. We assemble a dataset from 22 different robots collected through a collaboration between 21 institutions, demonstrating 527 skills (160266 tasks). We show that a high-capacity model trained on this data, which we call RT-X, exhibits positive transfer and improves the capabilities of multiple robots by leveraging experience from other platforms. More details can be found on the project website https://robotics-transformer-x.github.io{robotics-transformer-x.github.io}.

Sharing knowledge between information extraction tasks has always been a challenge due to the diverse data formats and task variations. Meanwhile, this divergence leads to information waste and increases difficulties in building complex applications in real scenarios. Recent studies often formulate IE tasks as a triplet extraction problem. However, such a paradigm does not support multi-span and n-ary extraction, leading to weak versatility. To this end, we reorganize IE problems into unified multi-slot tuples and propose a universal framework for various IE tasks, namely Mirror. Specifically, we recast existing IE tasks as a multi-span cyclic graph extraction problem and devise a non-autoregressive graph decoding algorithm to extract all spans in a single step. It is worth noting that this graph structure is incredibly versatile, and it supports not only complex IE tasks, but also machine reading comprehension and classification tasks. We manually construct a corpus containing 57 datasets for model pretraining, and conduct experiments on 30 datasets across 8 downstream tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that our model has decent compatibility and outperforms or reaches competitive performance with SOTA systems under few-shot and zero-shot settings. The code, model weights, and pretraining corpus are available at https://github.com/Spico197/Mirror .

Insufficient data is a long-standing challenge for Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) to build a high-performance deep learning model. Though numerous research groups and institutes collect a multitude of EEG datasets for the same BCI task, sharing EEG data from multiple sites is still challenging due to the heterogeneity of devices. The significance of this challenge cannot be overstated, given the critical role of data diversity in fostering model robustness. However, existing works rarely discuss this issue, predominantly centering their attention on model training within a single dataset, often in the context of inter-subject or inter-session settings. In this work, we propose a hierarchical personalized Federated Learning EEG decoding (FLEEG) framework to surmount this challenge. This innovative framework heralds a new learning paradigm for BCI, enabling datasets with disparate data formats to collaborate in the model training process. Each client is assigned a specific dataset and trains a hierarchical personalized model to manage diverse data formats and facilitate information exchange. Meanwhile, the server coordinates the training procedure to harness knowledge gleaned from all datasets, thus elevating overall performance. The framework has been evaluated in Motor Imagery (MI) classification with nine EEG datasets collected by different devices but implementing the same MI task. Results demonstrate that the proposed frame can boost classification performance up to 16.7% by enabling knowledge sharing between multiple datasets, especially for smaller datasets. Visualization results also indicate that the proposed framework can empower the local models to put a stable focus on task-related areas, yielding better performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first end-to-end solution to address this important challenge.

The development of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) with the ability to perceive data formats beyond text, significantly advancing a range of downstream applications, such as visual question answering and image captioning. However, the substantial computational costs associated with processing high-resolution images and videos pose a barrier to their broader adoption. To address this challenge, compressing vision tokens in MLLMs has emerged as a promising approach to reduce inference costs. While existing methods conduct token reduction in the feature alignment phase. In this paper, we introduce VisToG, a novel grouping mechanism that leverages the capabilities of pre-trained vision encoders to group similar image segments without the need for segmentation masks. Specifically, we concatenate semantic tokens to represent image semantic segments after the linear projection layer before feeding into the vision encoder. Besides, with the isolated attention we adopt, VisToG can identify and eliminate redundant visual tokens utilizing the prior knowledge in the pre-trained vision encoder, which effectively reduces computational demands. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of VisToG, maintaining 98.1% of the original performance while achieving a reduction of over 27\% inference time.

Despite the remarkable progress in the development of predictive models for healthcare, applying these algorithms on a large scale has been challenging. Algorithms trained on a particular task, based on specific data formats available in a set of medical records, tend to not generalize well to other tasks or databases in which the data fields may differ. To address this challenge, we propose General Healthcare Predictive Framework (GenHPF), which is applicable to any EHR with minimal preprocessing for multiple prediction tasks. GenHPF resolves heterogeneity in medical codes and schemas by converting EHRs into a hierarchical textual representation while incorporating as many features as possible. To evaluate the efficacy of GenHPF, we conduct multi-task learning experiments with single-source and multi-source settings, on three publicly available EHR datasets with different schemas for 12 clinically meaningful prediction tasks. Our framework significantly outperforms baseline models that utilize domain knowledge in multi-source learning, improving average AUROC by 1.2%P in pooled learning and 2.6%P in transfer learning while also showing comparable results when trained on a single EHR dataset. Furthermore, we demonstrate that self-supervised pretraining using multi-source datasets is effective when combined with GenHPF, resulting in a 0.6%P AUROC improvement compared to models without pretraining. By eliminating the need for preprocessing and feature engineering, we believe that this work offers a solid framework for multi-task and multi-source learning that can be leveraged to speed up the scaling and usage of predictive algorithms in healthcare.

External knowledge (a.k.a. side information) plays a critical role in zero-shot learning (ZSL) which aims to predict with unseen classes that have never appeared in training data. Several kinds of external knowledge, such as text and attribute, have been widely investigated, but they alone are limited with incomplete semantics. Some very recent studies thus propose to use Knowledge Graph (KG) due to its high expressivity and compatibility for representing kinds of knowledge. However, the ZSL community is still in short of standard benchmarks for studying and comparing different external knowledge settings and different KG-based ZSL methods. In this paper, we proposed six resources covering three tasks, i.e., zero-shot image classification (ZS-IMGC), zero-shot relation extraction (ZS-RE), and zero-shot KG completion (ZS-KGC). Each resource has a normal ZSL benchmark and a KG containing semantics ranging from text to attribute, from relational knowledge to logical expressions. We have clearly presented these resources including their construction, statistics, data formats and usage cases w.r.t. different ZSL methods. More importantly, we have conducted a comprehensive benchmarking study, with two general and state-of-the-art methods, two setting-specific methods and one interpretable method. We discussed and compared different ZSL paradigms w.r.t. different external knowledge settings, and found that our resources have great potential for developing more advanced ZSL methods and more solutions for applying KGs for augmenting machine learning. All the resources are available at https://github.com/China-UK-ZSL/Resources_for_KZSL.

The field of trajectory forecasting has grown significantly in recent years, partially owing to the release of numerous large-scale, real-world human trajectory datasets for autonomous vehicles (AVs) and pedestrian motion tracking. While such datasets have been a boon for the community, they each use custom and unique data formats and APIs, making it cumbersome for researchers to train and evaluate methods across multiple datasets. To remedy this, we present trajdata: a unified interface to multiple human trajectory datasets. At its core, trajdata provides a simple, uniform, and efficient representation and API for trajectory and map data. As a demonstration of its capabilities, in this work we conduct a comprehensive empirical evaluation of existing trajectory datasets, providing users with a rich understanding of the data underpinning much of current pedestrian and AV motion forecasting research, and proposing suggestions for future datasets from these insights. trajdata is permissively licensed (Apache 2.0) and can be accessed online at https://github.com/NVlabs/trajdata

The development of 2D foundation models for image segmentation has been significantly advanced by the Segment Anything Model (SAM). However, achieving similar success in 3D models remains a challenge due to issues such as non-unified data formats, lightweight models, and the scarcity of labeled data with diverse masks. To this end, we propose a 3D promptable segmentation model (Point-SAM) focusing on point clouds. Our approach utilizes a transformer-based method, extending SAM to the 3D domain. We leverage part-level and object-level annotations and introduce a data engine to generate pseudo labels from SAM, thereby distilling 2D knowledge into our 3D model. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art models on several indoor and outdoor benchmarks and demonstrates a variety of applications, such as 3D annotation. Codes and demo can be found at https://github.com/zyc00/Point-SAM.

Scientific documents record research findings and valuable human knowledge, comprising a vast corpus of high-quality data. Leveraging multi-modality data extracted from these documents and assessing large models' abilities to handle scientific document-oriented tasks is therefore meaningful. Despite promising advancements, large models still perform poorly on multi-page scientific document extraction and understanding tasks, and their capacity to process within-document data formats such as charts and equations remains under-explored. To address these issues, we present DocGenome, a structured document benchmark constructed by annotating 500K scientific documents from 153 disciplines in the arXiv open-access community, using our custom auto-labeling pipeline. DocGenome features four key characteristics: 1) Completeness: It is the first dataset to structure data from all modalities including 13 layout attributes along with their LaTeX source codes. 2) Logicality: It provides 6 logical relationships between different entities within each scientific document. 3) Diversity: It covers various document-oriented tasks, including document classification, visual grounding, document layout detection, document transformation, open-ended single-page QA and multi-page QA. 4) Correctness: It undergoes rigorous quality control checks conducted by a specialized team. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the advantages of DocGenome and objectively evaluate the performance of large models on our benchmark.

The crux of learning vision-language models is to extract semantically aligned information from visual and linguistic data. Existing attempts usually face the problem of coarse alignment, e.g., the vision encoder struggles in localizing an attribute-specified object. In this work, we propose an embarrassingly simple approach to better align image and text features with no need of additional data formats other than image-text pairs. Concretely, given an image and its paired text, we manage to parse objects (e.g., cat) and attributes (e.g., black) from the description, which are highly likely to exist in the image. It is noteworthy that the parsing pipeline is fully automatic and thus enjoys good scalability. With these parsed semantics as supervision signals, we can complement the commonly used image-text contrastive loss with the multi-tag classification loss. Extensive experimental results on a broad suite of semantic segmentation datasets substantiate the average 3.65\% improvement of our framework over existing alternatives. Furthermore, the visualization results indicate that attribute supervision makes vision-language models accurately localize attribute-specified objects. Project page and code can be found at https://qinying-liu.github.io/Tag-Align.

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) converts visual scenes into structured graph representations, providing deeper scene understanding for complex vision tasks. However, existing SGG models often overlook essential spatial relationships and struggle with generalization in open-vocabulary contexts. To address these limitations, we propose LLaVA-SpaceSGG, a multimodal large language model (MLLM) designed for open-vocabulary SGG with enhanced spatial relation modeling. To train it, we collect the SGG instruction-tuning dataset, named SpaceSGG. This dataset is constructed by combining publicly available datasets and synthesizing data using open-source models within our data construction pipeline. It combines object locations, object relations, and depth information, resulting in three data formats: spatial SGG description, question-answering, and conversation. To enhance the transfer of MLLMs' inherent capabilities to the SGG task, we introduce a two-stage training paradigm. Experiments show that LLaVA-SpaceSGG outperforms other open-vocabulary SGG methods, boosting recall by 8.6% and mean recall by 28.4% compared to the baseline. Our codebase, dataset, and trained models are publicly accessible on GitHub at the following URL: https://github.com/Endlinc/LLaVA-SpaceSGG.

Battery degradation remains a pivotal concern in the energy storage domain, with machine learning emerging as a potent tool to drive forward insights and solutions. However, this intersection of electrochemical science and machine learning poses complex challenges. Machine learning experts often grapple with the intricacies of battery science, while battery researchers face hurdles in adapting intricate models tailored to specific datasets. Beyond this, a cohesive standard for battery degradation modeling, inclusive of data formats and evaluative benchmarks, is conspicuously absent. Recognizing these impediments, we present BatteryML - a one-step, all-encompass, and open-source platform designed to unify data preprocessing, feature extraction, and the implementation of both traditional and state-of-the-art models. This streamlined approach promises to enhance the practicality and efficiency of research applications. BatteryML seeks to fill this void, fostering an environment where experts from diverse specializations can collaboratively contribute, thus elevating the collective understanding and advancement of battery research.The code for our project is publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/microsoft/BatteryML.

In this paper, we explore the question of whether large language models can support cost-efficient information extraction from tables. We introduce schema-driven information extraction, a new task that transforms tabular data into structured records following a human-authored schema. To assess various LLM's capabilities on this task, we present a benchmark comprised of tables from four diverse domains: machine learning papers, chemistry literature, material science journals, and webpages. We use this collection of annotated tables to evaluate the ability of open-source and API-based language models to extract information from tables covering diverse domains and data formats. Our experiments demonstrate that surprisingly competitive performance can be achieved without requiring task-specific pipelines or labels, achieving F1 scores ranging from 74.2 to 96.1, while maintaining cost efficiency. Moreover, through detailed ablation studies and analyses, we investigate the factors contributing to model success and validate the practicality of distilling compact models to reduce API reliance.

LLMs are widely used in complex AI applications. These applications underscore the need for LLM outputs to adhere to a specific format, for their integration with other components in the systems. Typically the format rules e.g., for data serialization formats such as JSON, YAML, or Code in Programming Language are expressed as context-free grammar (CFG). Due to the hallucinations and unreliability of LLMs, instructing LLMs to adhere to specified syntax becomes an increasingly important challenge. We present SynCode, a novel framework for efficient and general syntactical decoding with LLMs, to address this challenge. SynCode leverages the CFG of a formal language, utilizing an offline-constructed efficient lookup table called DFA mask store based on the discrete finite automaton (DFA) of the language grammar terminals. We demonstrate SynCode's soundness and completeness given the CFG of the formal language, presenting its ability to retain syntactically valid tokens while rejecting invalid ones. SynCode seamlessly integrates with any language defined by CFG, as evidenced by experiments focusing on generating JSON, Python, and Go outputs. Our experiments evaluating the effectiveness of SynCode for JSON generation demonstrate that SynCode eliminates all syntax errors and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, our results underscore how SynCode significantly reduces 96.07% of syntax errors in generated Python and Go code, showcasing its substantial impact on enhancing syntactical precision in LLM generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/uiuc-focal-lab/syncode

Language-image pre-training faces significant challenges due to limited data in specific formats and the constrained capacities of text encoders. While prevailing methods attempt to address these issues through data augmentation and architecture modifications, they continue to struggle with processing long-form text inputs, and the inherent limitations of traditional CLIP text encoders lead to suboptimal downstream generalization. In this paper, we propose FLAME (Frozen Large lAnguage Models Enable data-efficient language-image pre-training) that leverages frozen large language models as text encoders, naturally processing long text inputs and demonstrating impressive multilingual generalization. FLAME comprises two key components: 1) a multifaceted prompt distillation technique for extracting diverse semantic representations from long captions, which better aligns with the multifaceted nature of images, and 2) a facet-decoupled attention mechanism, complemented by an offline embedding strategy, to ensure efficient computation. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate FLAME's superior performance. When trained on CC3M, FLAME surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by 4.9\% in ImageNet top-1 accuracy. On YFCC15M, FLAME surpasses the WIT-400M-trained CLIP by 44.4\% in average image-to-text recall@1 across 36 languages, and by 34.6\% in text-to-image recall@1 for long-context retrieval on Urban-1k. Code is available at https://github.com/MIV-XJTU/FLAME.

Most large language models are fine-tuned using either expensive human-annotated data or GPT-4 generated data which cannot guarantee performance in certain domains. We argue that although the web-crawled data often has formatting errors causing semantic inaccuracies, it can still serve as a valuable source for high-quality supervised fine-tuning in specific domains without relying on advanced models like GPT-4. To this end, we create a paired training dataset automatically by aligning web-crawled data with a smaller set of high-quality data. By training a language model on this dataset, we can convert web data with irregular formats into high-quality ones. Our experiments show that training with the model-transformed data yields better results, surpassing training with only high-quality data by an average score of 9.4% in Chinese math problems. Additionally, our 7B model outperforms several open-source models larger than 32B and surpasses well-known closed-source models such as GPT-3.5, highlighting the efficacy of our approach.

We analyze the behaviors of open large language models (LLMs) on the task of data-to-text (D2T) generation, i.e., generating coherent and relevant text from structured data. To avoid the issue of LLM training data contamination with standard benchmarks, we design Quintd - a tool for collecting novel structured data records from public APIs. We find that open LLMs (Llama 2, Mistral, and Zephyr) can generate fluent and coherent texts in zero-shot settings from data in common formats collected with Quintd. However, we show that the semantic accuracy of the outputs is a major issue: both according to human annotators and our reference-free metric based on GPT-4, more than 80% of the outputs of open LLMs contain at least one semantic error. We publicly release the code, data, and model outputs.

Information Extraction (IE) is crucial for converting unstructured data into structured formats like Knowledge Graphs (KGs). A key task within IE is Relation Extraction (RE), which identifies relationships between entities in text. Various RE methods exist, including supervised, unsupervised, weakly supervised, and rule-based approaches. Recent studies leveraging pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown significant success in this area. In the current era dominated by Large Language Models (LLMs), fine-tuning these models can overcome limitations associated with zero-shot LLM prompting-based RE methods, especially regarding domain adaptation challenges and identifying implicit relations between entities in sentences. These implicit relations, which cannot be easily extracted from a sentence's dependency tree, require logical inference for accurate identification. This work explores the performance of fine-tuned LLMs and their integration into the Retrieval Augmented-based (RAG) RE approach to address the challenges of identifying implicit relations at the sentence level, particularly when LLMs act as generators within the RAG framework. Empirical evaluations on the TACRED, TACRED-Revisited (TACREV), Re-TACRED, and SemEVAL datasets show significant performance improvements with fine-tuned LLMs, including Llama2-7B, Mistral-7B, and T5 (Large). Notably, our approach achieves substantial gains on SemEVAL, where implicit relations are common, surpassing previous results on this dataset. Additionally, our method outperforms previous works on TACRED, TACREV, and Re-TACRED, demonstrating exceptional performance across diverse evaluation scenarios.

The current state of adoption of well-structured electronic health records and integration of digital methods for storing medical patient data in structured formats can often considered as inferior compared to the use of traditional, unstructured text based patient data documentation. Data mining in the field of medical data analysis often needs to rely solely on processing of unstructured data to retrieve relevant data. In natural language processing (NLP), statistical models have been shown successful in various tasks like part-of-speech tagging, relation extraction (RE) and named entity recognition (NER). In this work, we present GERNERMED, the first open, neural NLP model for NER tasks dedicated to detect medical entity types in German text data. Here, we avoid the conflicting goals of protection of sensitive patient data from training data extraction and the publication of the statistical model weights by training our model on a custom dataset that was translated from publicly available datasets in foreign language by a pretrained neural machine translation model. The sample code and the statistical model is available at: https://github.com/frankkramer-lab/GERNERMED

Deep learning models are increasingly data-hungry, requiring significant resources to collect and compile the datasets needed to train them, with Earth Observation (EO) models being no exception. However, the landscape of datasets in EO is relatively atomised, with interoperability made difficult by diverse formats and data structures. If ever larger datasets are to be built, and duplication of effort minimised, then a shared framework that allows users to combine and access multiple datasets is needed. Here, Major TOM (Terrestrial Observation Metaset) is proposed as this extensible framework. Primarily, it consists of a geographical indexing system based on a set of grid points and a metadata structure that allows multiple datasets with different sources to be merged. Besides the specification of Major TOM as a framework, this work also presents a large, open-access dataset, MajorTOM-Core, which covers the vast majority of the Earth's land surface. This dataset provides the community with both an immediately useful resource, as well as acting as a template for future additions to the Major TOM ecosystem. Access: https://huggingface.co/Major-TOM

The Russian Financial Statements Database (RFSD) is an open, harmonized collection of annual unconsolidated financial statements of the universe of Russian firms in 2011-2023. It is the first open data set with information on every active firm in the country, including non-filing firms. With 56.6 million geolocated firm-year observations gathered from two official sources, the RFSD features multiple end-user quality-of-life improvements such as data imputation, statement articulation, harmonization across data providers and formats, and data enrichment. Extensive internal and external validation shows that most statements articulate well while their aggregates display higher correlation with the regional GDP than the previous gridded GDP data products. We also examine the direction and magnitude of the reporting bias by comparing the universe of firms that are required to file with the actual filers. The RFSD can be used in various economic applications as diverse as calibration of micro-founded models, estimation of markups and productivity, or assessing industry organization and market power.

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced autonomous agents, particularly in zero-shot tool usage, also known as function calling. This research delves into enhancing the function-calling capabilities of LLMs by exploring different approaches, including prompt formats for integrating function descriptions, blending function-calling and instruction-following data, introducing a novel Decision Token for conditional prompts, leveraging chain-of-thought reasoning, and overcoming multilingual challenges with a translation pipeline. Our key findings and contributions are as follows: (1) Instruction-following data improves both function-calling accuracy and relevance detection. (2) The use of the newly proposed Decision Token, combined with synthetic non-function-call data, enhances relevance detection. (3) A tailored translation pipeline effectively overcomes multilingual limitations, demonstrating significant improvements in Traditional Chinese. These insights highlight the potential for improved function-calling capabilities and multilingual applications in LLMs.

In the dynamic landscape of generative NLP, traditional text processing pipelines limit research flexibility and reproducibility, as they are tailored to specific dataset, task, and model combinations. The escalating complexity, involving system prompts, model-specific formats, instructions, and more, calls for a shift to a structured, modular, and customizable solution. Addressing this need, we present Unitxt, an innovative library for customizable textual data preparation and evaluation tailored to generative language models. Unitxt natively integrates with common libraries like HuggingFace and LM-eval-harness and deconstructs processing flows into modular components, enabling easy customization and sharing between practitioners. These components encompass model-specific formats, task prompts, and many other comprehensive dataset processing definitions. The Unitxt-Catalog centralizes these components, fostering collaboration and exploration in modern textual data workflows. Beyond being a tool, Unitxt is a community-driven platform, empowering users to build, share, and advance their pipelines collaboratively. Join the Unitxt community at https://github.com/IBM/unitxt!

Columnar storage is a core component of a modern data analytics system. Although many database management systems (DBMSs) have proprietary storage formats, most provide extensive support to open-source storage formats such as Parquet and ORC to facilitate cross-platform data sharing. But these formats were developed over a decade ago, in the early 2010s, for the Hadoop ecosystem. Since then, both the hardware and workload landscapes have changed. In this paper, we revisit the most widely adopted open-source columnar storage formats (Parquet and ORC) with a deep dive into their internals. We designed a benchmark to stress-test the formats' performance and space efficiency under different workload configurations. From our comprehensive evaluation of Parquet and ORC, we identify design decisions advantageous with modern hardware and real-world data distributions. These include using dictionary encoding by default, favoring decoding speed over compression ratio for integer encoding algorithms, making block compression optional, and embedding finer-grained auxiliary data structures. We also point out the inefficiencies in the format designs when handling common machine learning workloads and using GPUs for decoding. Our analysis identified important considerations that may guide future formats to better fit modern technology trends.

The rapid advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) tightly associate with the expansion of the training data size. However, the unchecked ultra-large-scale training sets introduce a series of potential risks like data contamination, i.e. the benchmark data is used for training. In this work, we propose a holistic method named Polarized Augment Calibration (PAC) along with a new to-be-released dataset to detect the contaminated data and diminish the contamination effect. PAC extends the popular MIA (Membership Inference Attack) -- from machine learning community -- by forming a more global target at detecting training data to Clarify invisible training data. As a pioneering work, PAC is very much plug-and-play that can be integrated with most (if not all) current white- and black-box LLMs. By extensive experiments, PAC outperforms existing methods by at least 4.5%, towards data contamination detection on more 4 dataset formats, with more than 10 base LLMs. Besides, our application in real-world scenarios highlights the prominent presence of contamination and related issues.

Open-sourced Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved great success in various NLP tasks, however, they are still far inferior to API-based models when acting as agents. How to integrate agent ability into general LLMs becomes a crucial and urgent problem. This paper first delivers three key observations: (1) the current agent training corpus is entangled with both formats following and agent reasoning, which significantly shifts from the distribution of its pre-training data; (2) LLMs exhibit different learning speeds on the capabilities required by agent tasks; and (3) current approaches have side-effects when improving agent abilities by introducing hallucinations. Based on the above findings, we propose Agent-FLAN to effectively Fine-tune LANguage models for Agents. Through careful decomposition and redesign of the training corpus, Agent-FLAN enables Llama2-7B to outperform prior best works by 3.5\% across various agent evaluation datasets. With comprehensively constructed negative samples, Agent-FLAN greatly alleviates the hallucination issues based on our established evaluation benchmark. Besides, it consistently improves the agent capability of LLMs when scaling model sizes while slightly enhancing the general capability of LLMs. The code will be available at https://github.com/InternLM/Agent-FLAN.

Recent advancements in multimodal models highlight the value of rewritten captions for improving performance, yet key challenges remain. For example, while synthetic captions often provide superior quality and image-text alignment, it is not clear whether they can fully replace AltTexts: the role of synthetic captions and their interaction with original web-crawled AltTexts in pre-training is still not well understood. Moreover, different multimodal foundation models may have unique preferences for specific caption formats, but efforts to identify the optimal captions for each model remain limited. In this work, we propose a novel, controllable, and scalable captioning pipeline designed to generate diverse caption formats tailored to various multimodal models. By examining Short Synthetic Captions (SSC) towards Dense Synthetic Captions (DSC+) as case studies, we systematically explore their effects and interactions with AltTexts across models such as CLIP, multimodal LLMs, and diffusion models. Our findings reveal that a hybrid approach that keeps both synthetic captions and AltTexts can outperform the use of synthetic captions alone, improving both alignment and performance, with each model demonstrating preferences for particular caption formats. This comprehensive analysis provides valuable insights into optimizing captioning strategies, thereby advancing the pre-training of multimodal foundation models.

We introduce TableLLM, a robust large language model (LLM) with 13 billion parameters, purpose-built for proficiently handling tabular data manipulation tasks, whether they are embedded within documents or spreadsheets, catering to real-world office scenarios. We propose a distant supervision method for training, which comprises a reasoning process extension strategy, aiding in training LLMs to understand reasoning patterns more effectively as well as a cross-way validation strategy, ensuring the quality of the automatically generated data. To evaluate the performance of TableLLM, we have crafted a benchmark tailored to address both document and spreadsheet formats as well as constructed a well-organized evaluation pipeline capable of handling both scenarios. Thorough evaluations underscore the advantages of TableLLM when compared to various existing general-purpose and tabular data-focused LLMs. We have publicly released the model checkpoint, source code, benchmarks, and a web application for user interaction.

In the evolving field of corporate sustainability, analyzing unstructured Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reports is a complex challenge due to their varied formats and intricate content. This study introduces an innovative methodology utilizing the "Unstructured Core Library", specifically tailored to address these challenges by transforming ESG reports into structured, analyzable formats. Our approach significantly advances the existing research by offering high-precision text cleaning, adept identification and extraction of text from images, and standardization of tables within these reports. Emphasizing its capability to handle diverse data types, including text, images, and tables, the method adeptly manages the nuances of differing page layouts and report styles across industries. This research marks a substantial contribution to the fields of industrial ecology and corporate sustainability assessment, paving the way for the application of advanced NLP technologies and large language models in the analysis of corporate governance and sustainability. Our code is available at https://github.com/linancn/TianGong-AI-Unstructure.git.

Modern language models are trained on large, unstructured datasets consisting of trillions of tokens and obtained by crawling the web. The unstructured nature makes it difficult to reason about their contents and develop systematic approaches to data curation. In this paper, we unpack monolithic web corpora by developing taxonomies of their contents and organizing them into domains. We introduce WebOrganizer, a framework for organizing web pages in terms of both their topic and format. Using these two complementary notions of domains, we automatically annotate pre-training data by distilling annotations from a large language model into efficient classifiers. This allows us to study how data from different domains should be mixed to improve models on downstream tasks, and we show that we can combine insights about effective topics and formats to further boost performance. We demonstrate that our domain mixing also improves existing methods that select data based on quality. Furthermore, we study and compare how quality-based methods will implicitly change the domain mixture. Overall, our work demonstrates that constructing and mixing domains provides a valuable complement to quality-based data curation methods, opening new avenues for effective and insightful pre-training data curation.

Machine learning (ML) has the potential to revolutionize various domains, but its adoption is often hindered by the disconnect between the needs of domain experts and translating these needs into robust and valid ML tools. Despite recent advances in LLM-based co-pilots to democratize ML for non-technical domain experts, these systems remain predominantly focused on model-centric aspects while overlooking critical data-centric challenges. This limitation is problematic in complex real-world settings where raw data often contains complex issues, such as missing values, label noise, and domain-specific nuances requiring tailored handling. To address this we introduce CliMB-DC, a human-guided, data-centric framework for LLM co-pilots that combines advanced data-centric tools with LLM-driven reasoning to enable robust, context-aware data processing. At its core, CliMB-DC introduces a novel, multi-agent reasoning system that combines a strategic coordinator for dynamic planning and adaptation with a specialized worker agent for precise execution. Domain expertise is then systematically incorporated to guide the reasoning process using a human-in-the-loop approach. To guide development, we formalize a taxonomy of key data-centric challenges that co-pilots must address. Thereafter, to address the dimensions of the taxonomy, we integrate state-of-the-art data-centric tools into an extensible, open-source architecture, facilitating the addition of new tools from the research community. Empirically, using real-world healthcare datasets we demonstrate CliMB-DC's ability to transform uncurated datasets into ML-ready formats, significantly outperforming existing co-pilot baselines for handling data-centric challenges. CliMB-DC promises to empower domain experts from diverse domains -- healthcare, finance, social sciences and more -- to actively participate in driving real-world impact using ML.

The rapid advancements in generative AI and large language models (LLMs) have opened up new avenues for producing synthetic data, particularly in the realm of structured tabular formats, such as product reviews. Despite the potential benefits, concerns regarding privacy leakage have surfaced, especially when personal information is utilized in the training datasets. In addition, there is an absence of a comprehensive evaluation framework capable of quantitatively measuring the quality of the generated synthetic data and their utility for downstream tasks. In response to this gap, we introduce SynEval, an open-source evaluation framework designed to assess the fidelity, utility, and privacy preservation of synthetically generated tabular data via a suite of diverse evaluation metrics. We validate the efficacy of our proposed framework - SynEval - by applying it to synthetic product review data generated by three state-of-the-art LLMs: ChatGPT, Claude, and Llama. Our experimental findings illuminate the trade-offs between various evaluation metrics in the context of synthetic data generation. Furthermore, SynEval stands as a critical instrument for researchers and practitioners engaged with synthetic tabular data,, empowering them to judiciously determine the suitability of the generated data for their specific applications, with an emphasis on upholding user privacy.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) aims to enhance large language models (LLMs) to generate more accurate and reliable answers with the help of the retrieved context from external knowledge sources, thereby reducing the incidence of hallucinations. Despite the advancements, evaluating these systems remains a crucial research area due to the following issues: (1) Limited data diversity: The insufficient diversity of knowledge sources and query types constrains the applicability of RAG systems; (2) Obscure problems location: Existing evaluation methods have difficulty in locating the stage of the RAG pipeline where problems occur; (3) Unstable retrieval evaluation: These methods often fail to effectively assess retrieval performance, particularly when the chunking strategy changes. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Comprehensive Full-chain Evaluation (CoFE-RAG) framework to facilitate thorough evaluation across the entire RAG pipeline, including chunking, retrieval, reranking, and generation. To effectively evaluate the first three phases, we introduce multi-granularity keywords, including coarse-grained and fine-grained keywords, to assess the retrieved context instead of relying on the annotation of golden chunks. Moreover, we release a holistic benchmark dataset tailored for diverse data scenarios covering a wide range of document formats and query types. We demonstrate the utility of the CoFE-RAG framework by conducting experiments to evaluate each stage of RAG systems. Our evaluation method provides unique insights into the effectiveness of RAG systems in handling diverse data scenarios, offering a more nuanced understanding of their capabilities and limitations.

In recent years, large-scale data collection efforts have prioritized the amount of data collected in order to improve the modeling capabilities of large language models. This prioritization, however, has resulted in concerns with respect to the rights of data subjects represented in data collections, particularly when considering the difficulty in interrogating these collections due to insufficient documentation and tools for analysis. Mindful of these pitfalls, we present our methodology for a documentation-first, human-centered data collection project as part of the BigScience initiative. We identified a geographically diverse set of target language groups (Arabic, Basque, Chinese, Catalan, English, French, Indic languages, Indonesian, Niger-Congo languages, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese, as well as programming languages) for which to collect metadata on potential data sources. To structure this effort, we developed our online catalogue as a supporting tool for gathering metadata through organized public hackathons. We present our development process; analyses of the resulting resource metadata, including distributions over languages, regions, and resource types; and our lessons learned in this endeavor.

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the data preparation pipeline developed for the OpenGPT-X project, a large-scale initiative aimed at creating open and high-performance multilingual large language models (LLMs). The project goal is to deliver models that cover all major European languages, with a particular focus on real-world applications within the European Union. We explain all data processing steps, starting with the data selection and requirement definition to the preparation of the final datasets for model training. We distinguish between curated data and web data, as each of these categories is handled by distinct pipelines, with curated data undergoing minimal filtering and web data requiring extensive filtering and deduplication. This distinction guided the development of specialized algorithmic solutions for both pipelines. In addition to describing the processing methodologies, we provide an in-depth analysis of the datasets, increasing transparency and alignment with European data regulations. Finally, we share key insights and challenges faced during the project, offering recommendations for future endeavors in large-scale multilingual data preparation for LLMs.

There is a compelling necessity from enterprises for fine tuning LLMs (Large Language Models) o get them trained on proprietary domain knowledge. The challenge is to imbibe the LLMs with domain specific knowledge using the most optimial resource and cost and in the best possible time. Many enterprises rely on RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) which does not need LLMs to be ine-tuned but they are limited by the quality of vector databases and their retrieval capabilities rather than the intrinsic capabilities of the LLMs themselves. In our current work we focus on fine tuning LLaMA, an open source LLM using proprietary documents and code from an enterprise repository and use the fine tuned models to evaluate the quality of responses. As part of this work, we aim to guide beginners on how to start with fine tuning an LLM for documentation and code by making educated guesses on size of GPU required and options that are available for formatting the data. We also propose pre processing recipes for both documentation and code to prepare dataset in different formats. The proposed methods of data preparation for document datasets are forming paragraph chunks, forming question and answer pairs and forming keyword and paragraph chunk pairs. For code dataset we propose forming summary and function pairs. Further, we qualitatively evaluate the results of the models for domain specific queries. Finally, we also propose practical guidelines and recommendations for fine tuning LLMs.

The machine learning community currently has no standardized process for documenting datasets, which can lead to severe consequences in high-stakes domains. To address this gap, we propose datasheets for datasets. In the electronics industry, every component, no matter how simple or complex, is accompanied with a datasheet that describes its operating characteristics, test results, recommended uses, and other information. By analogy, we propose that every dataset be accompanied with a datasheet that documents its motivation, composition, collection process, recommended uses, and so on. Datasheets for datasets will facilitate better communication between dataset creators and dataset consumers, and encourage the machine learning community to prioritize transparency and accountability.

Data plays a fundamental role in the training of Large Language Models (LLMs). Effective data management, particularly in the formulation of a well-suited training dataset, holds significance for enhancing model performance and improving training efficiency during pretraining and supervised fine-tuning phases. Despite the considerable importance of data management, the current research community still falls short in providing a systematic analysis of the rationale behind management strategy selection, its consequential effects, methodologies for evaluating curated datasets, and the ongoing pursuit of improved strategies. Consequently, the exploration of data management has attracted more and more attention among the research community. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of current research in data management within both the pretraining and supervised fine-tuning stages of LLMs, covering various noteworthy aspects of data management strategy design: data quantity, data quality, domain/task composition, etc. Looking toward the future, we extrapolate existing challenges and outline promising directions for development in this field. Therefore, this survey serves as a guiding resource for practitioners aspiring to construct powerful LLMs through effective data management practices. The collection of the latest papers is available at https://github.com/ZigeW/data_management_LLM.

In many use-cases, information is stored in text but not available in structured data. However, extracting data from natural language text to precisely fit a schema, and thus enable querying, is a challenging task. With the rise of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs), there is now an effective solution to store and use information extracted from massive corpora of text documents. Thus, we envision the use of SQL queries to cover a broad range of data that is not captured by traditional databases by tapping the information in LLMs. To ground this vision, we present Galois, a prototype based on a traditional database architecture, but with new physical operators for querying the underlying LLM. The main idea is to execute some operators of the the query plan with prompts that retrieve data from the LLM. For a large class of SQL queries, querying LLMs returns well structured relations, with encouraging qualitative results. Preliminary experimental results make pre-trained LLMs a promising addition to the field of database systems, introducing a new direction for hybrid query processing. However, we pinpoint several research challenges that must be addressed to build a DBMS that exploits LLMs. While some of these challenges necessitate integrating concepts from the NLP literature, others offer novel research avenues for the DB community.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) stands as an indispensable sensor for Earth observation, owing to its unique capability for all-day imaging. Nevertheless, in a data-driven era, the scarcity of large-scale datasets poses a significant bottleneck to advancing SAR automatic target recognition (ATR) technology. This paper introduces NUDT4MSTAR, a large-scale SAR dataset for vehicle target recognition in the wild, including 40 target types and a wide array of imaging conditions across 5 different scenes. NUDT4MSTAR represents a significant leap forward in dataset scale, containing over 190,000 images-tenfold the size of its predecessors. To enhance the utility of this dataset, we meticulously annotate each image with detailed target information and imaging conditions. We also provide data in both processed magnitude images and original complex formats. Then, we construct a comprehensive benchmark consisting of 7 experiments with 15 recognition methods focusing on the stable and effective ATR issues. Besides, we conduct transfer learning experiments utilizing various models trained on NUDT4MSTAR and applied to three other target datasets, thereby demonstrating its substantial potential to the broader field of ground objects ATR. Finally, we discuss this dataset's application value and ATR's significant challenges. To the best of our knowledge, this work marks the first-ever endeavor to create a large-scale dataset benchmark for fine-grained SAR recognition in the wild, featuring an extensive collection of exhaustively annotated vehicle images. We expect that the open source of NUDT4MSTAR will facilitate the development of SAR ATR and attract a wider community of researchers.

Machine Learning (ML) has the potential to revolutionise the field of automotive aerodynamics, enabling split-second flow predictions early in the design process. However, the lack of open-source training data for realistic road cars, using high-fidelity CFD methods, represents a barrier to their development. To address this, a high-fidelity open-source (CC-BY-SA) public dataset for automotive aerodynamics has been generated, based on 500 parametrically morphed variants of the widely-used DrivAer notchback generic vehicle. Mesh generation and scale-resolving CFD was executed using consistent and validated automatic workflows representative of the industrial state-of-the-art. Geometries and rich aerodynamic data are published in open-source formats. To our knowledge, this is the first large, public-domain dataset for complex automotive configurations generated using high-fidelity CFD.

Reward models are critical for aligning models to follow instructions, and are typically trained following one of two popular paradigms: Bradley-Terry style or Regression style. However, there is a lack of evidence that either approach is better than the other, when adequately matched for data. This is primarily because these approaches require data collected in different (but incompatible) formats, meaning that adequately matched data is not available in existing public datasets. To tackle this problem, we release preference annotations (designed for Bradley-Terry training) to complement existing ratings (designed for Regression style training) in the HelpSteer2 dataset. To improve data interpretability, preference annotations are accompanied with human-written justifications. Using this data, we conduct the first head-to-head comparison of Bradley-Terry and Regression models when adequately matched for data. Based on insights derived from such a comparison, we propose a novel approach to combine Bradley-Terry and Regression reward modeling. A Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct model tuned with this approach scores 94.1 on RewardBench, emerging top of more than 140 reward models as of 1 Oct 2024. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of this reward model at aligning models to follow instructions in RLHF. We open-source this dataset (CC-BY-4.0 license) at https://huggingface.co/datasets/nvidia/HelpSteer2 and openly release the trained Reward Model at https://huggingface.co/nvidia/Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Reward

Tabular data, as a crucial form of data representation, exists in diverse formats on the Web. When confronted with complex and irregular tables, manual modification becomes a laborious task. This paper investigates the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the context of table editing tasks. Existing research mainly focuses on regular-shaped tables, wherein instructions are used to generate code in SQL, Python, or Excel Office-script for manipulating the tables. Nevertheless, editing tables with irregular structures, particularly those containing merged cells spanning multiple rows, poses a challenge when using code. To address this, we introduce the WikiTableEdit dataset. Leveraging 26,531 tables from the WikiSQL dataset, we automatically generate natural language instructions for six distinct basic operations and the corresponding outcomes, resulting in over 200,000 instances. Subsequently, we evaluate several representative large language models on the WikiTableEdit dataset to demonstrate the challenge of this task. The dataset will be released to the community to promote related researches.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) trained via contrastive learning have achieved notable success in natural image tasks. However, their application in the medical domain remains limited due to the scarcity of openly accessible, large-scale medical image-text datasets. Existing medical VLMs either train on closed-source proprietary or relatively small open-source datasets that do not generalize well. Similarly, most models remain specific to a single or limited number of medical imaging domains, again restricting their applicability to other modalities. To address this gap, we introduce UniMed, a large-scale, open-source multi-modal medical dataset comprising over 5.3 million image-text pairs across six diverse imaging modalities: X-ray, CT, MRI, Ultrasound, Pathology, and Fundus. UniMed is developed using a data-collection framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to transform modality-specific classification datasets into image-text formats while incorporating existing image-text data from the medical domain, facilitating scalable VLM pretraining. Using UniMed, we trained UniMed-CLIP, a unified VLM for six modalities that significantly outperforms existing generalist VLMs and matches modality-specific medical VLMs, achieving notable gains in zero-shot evaluations. For instance, UniMed-CLIP improves over BiomedCLIP (trained on proprietary data) by an absolute gain of +12.61, averaged over 21 datasets, while using 3x less training data. To facilitate future research, we release UniMed dataset, training codes, and models at https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/UniMed-CLIP.

This paper introduces a novel human pose estimation approach using sparse inertial sensors, addressing the shortcomings of previous methods reliant on synthetic data. It leverages a diverse array of real inertial motion capture data from different skeleton formats to improve motion diversity and model generalization. This method features two innovative components: a pseudo-velocity regression model for dynamic motion capture with inertial sensors, and a part-based model dividing the body and sensor data into three regions, each focusing on their unique characteristics. The approach demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art models across five public datasets, notably reducing pose error by 19\% on the DIP-IMU dataset, thus representing a significant improvement in inertial sensor-based human pose estimation. Our codes are available at {https://github.com/dx118/dynaip}.

We introduce KodCode, a synthetic dataset that addresses the persistent challenge of acquiring high-quality, verifiable training data across diverse difficulties and domains for training Large Language Models for coding. Existing code-focused resources typically fail to ensure either the breadth of coverage (e.g., spanning simple coding tasks to advanced algorithmic problems) or verifiable correctness (e.g., unit tests). In contrast, KodCode comprises question-solution-test triplets that are systematically validated via a self-verification procedure. Our pipeline begins by synthesizing a broad range of coding questions, then generates solutions and test cases with additional attempts allocated to challenging problems. Finally, post-training data synthesis is done by rewriting questions into diverse formats and generating responses under a test-based reject sampling procedure from a reasoning model (DeepSeek R1). This pipeline yields a large-scale, robust and diverse coding dataset. KodCode is suitable for supervised fine-tuning and the paired unit tests also provide great potential for RL tuning. Fine-tuning experiments on coding benchmarks (HumanEval(+), MBPP(+), BigCodeBench, and LiveCodeBench) demonstrate that KodCode-tuned models achieve state-of-the-art performance, surpassing models like Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B.

The blooming of virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR) technologies has driven an increasing demand for the creation of high-quality, immersive, and dynamic environments. However, existing generative techniques either focus solely on dynamic objects or perform outpainting from a single perspective image, failing to meet the needs of VR/AR applications. In this work, we tackle the challenging task of elevating a single panorama to an immersive 4D experience. For the first time, we demonstrate the capability to generate omnidirectional dynamic scenes with 360-degree views at 4K resolution, thereby providing an immersive user experience. Our method introduces a pipeline that facilitates natural scene animations and optimizes a set of 4D Gaussians using efficient splatting techniques for real-time exploration. To overcome the lack of scene-scale annotated 4D data and models, especially in panoramic formats, we propose a novel Panoramic Denoiser that adapts generic 2D diffusion priors to animate consistently in 360-degree images, transforming them into panoramic videos with dynamic scenes at targeted regions. Subsequently, we elevate the panoramic video into a 4D immersive environment while preserving spatial and temporal consistency. By transferring prior knowledge from 2D models in the perspective domain to the panoramic domain and the 4D lifting with spatial appearance and geometry regularization, we achieve high-quality Panorama-to-4D generation at a resolution of (4096 times 2048) for the first time. See the project website at https://4k4dgen.github.io.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) enable exciting LLM-integrated applications, which perform text-based tasks by utilizing their advanced language understanding capabilities. However, as LLMs have improved, so have the attacks against them. Prompt injection attacks are an important threat: they trick the model to deviate from the original application's instructions and instead follow user directives. These attacks rely on the LLM's ability to follow instructions and inability to separate the prompts and user data. We introduce structured queries, a general approach to tackle this problem. Structured queries separate prompts and data into two channels. We implement a system that supports structured queries. This system is made of (1) a secure front-end that formats a prompt and user data into a special format, and (2) a specially trained LLM that can produce high-quality outputs from these inputs. The LLM is trained using a novel fine-tuning strategy: we convert a base (non-instruction-tuned) LLM to a structured instruction-tuned model that will only follow instructions in the prompt portion of a query. To do so, we augment standard instruction tuning datasets with examples that also include instructions in the data portion of the query, and fine-tune the model to ignore these. Our system significantly improves resistance to prompt injection attacks, with little or no impact on utility. Our code is released at https://github.com/Sizhe-Chen/PromptInjectionDefense.

Human motion generation, a cornerstone technique in animation and video production, has widespread applications in various tasks like text-to-motion and music-to-dance. Previous works focus on developing specialist models tailored for each task without scalability. In this work, we present Large Motion Model (LMM), a motion-centric, multi-modal framework that unifies mainstream motion generation tasks into a generalist model. A unified motion model is appealing since it can leverage a wide range of motion data to achieve broad generalization beyond a single task. However, it is also challenging due to the heterogeneous nature of substantially different motion data and tasks. LMM tackles these challenges from three principled aspects: 1) Data: We consolidate datasets with different modalities, formats and tasks into a comprehensive yet unified motion generation dataset, MotionVerse, comprising 10 tasks, 16 datasets, a total of 320k sequences, and 100 million frames. 2) Architecture: We design an articulated attention mechanism ArtAttention that incorporates body part-aware modeling into Diffusion Transformer backbone. 3) Pre-Training: We propose a novel pre-training strategy for LMM, which employs variable frame rates and masking forms, to better exploit knowledge from diverse training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our generalist LMM achieves competitive performance across various standard motion generation tasks over state-of-the-art specialist models. Notably, LMM exhibits strong generalization capabilities and emerging properties across many unseen tasks. Additionally, our ablation studies reveal valuable insights about training and scaling up large motion models for future research.

LiDAR and Radar are two complementary sensing approaches in that LiDAR specializes in capturing an object's 3D shape while Radar provides longer detection ranges as well as velocity hints. Though seemingly natural, how to efficiently combine them for improved feature representation is still unclear. The main challenge arises from that Radar data are extremely sparse and lack height information. Therefore, directly integrating Radar features into LiDAR-centric detection networks is not optimal. In this work, we introduce a bi-directional LiDAR-Radar fusion framework, termed Bi-LRFusion, to tackle the challenges and improve 3D detection for dynamic objects. Technically, Bi-LRFusion involves two steps: first, it enriches Radar's local features by learning important details from the LiDAR branch to alleviate the problems caused by the absence of height information and extreme sparsity; second, it combines LiDAR features with the enhanced Radar features in a unified bird's-eye-view representation. We conduct extensive experiments on nuScenes and ORR datasets, and show that our Bi-LRFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance for detecting dynamic objects. Notably, Radar data in these two datasets have different formats, which demonstrates the generalizability of our method. Codes are available at https://github.com/JessieW0806/BiLRFusion.

Adapting a language model into a specific domain, a.k.a `domain adaption', is a common practice when specialized knowledge, e.g. medicine, is not encapsulated in a general language model like Llama2. The challenge lies in the heterogeneity of data across the two training stages, as it varies in languages, genres, or formats. To tackle this and simplify the learning protocol, we propose to transform heterogeneous data, from the both pre-training and supervised stages, into a unified, simple input-output pair format. We validate the new protocol in the domains where proprietary LLMs like ChatGPT perform relatively poorly, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine. The developed model, HuatuoGPT-II, has shown state-of-the-art performance in Chinese medicine domain on a number of benchmarks, e.g. medical licensing exams. It even outperforms proprietary models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 in some aspects, especially in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Expert manual evaluations further validate HuatuoGPT-II's advantages over existing LLMs. Notably, HuatuoGPT-II was benchmarked in a fresh Chinese National Medical Licensing Examination where it achieved the best performance, showcasing not only its effectiveness but also its generalization capabilities.

Visual preference alignment involves training Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to predict human preferences between visual inputs. This is typically achieved by using labeled datasets of chosen/rejected pairs and employing optimization algorithms like direct preference optimization (DPO). Existing visual alignment methods, primarily designed for single-image scenarios, struggle to effectively handle the complexity of multi-image tasks due to the scarcity of diverse training data and the high cost of annotating chosen/rejected pairs. We present Multi-Image Augmented Direct Preference Optimization (MIA-DPO), a visual preference alignment approach that effectively handles multi-image inputs. MIA-DPO mitigates the scarcity of diverse multi-image training data by extending single-image data with unrelated images arranged in grid collages or pic-in-pic formats, significantly reducing the costs associated with multi-image data annotations. Our observation reveals that attention values of LVLMs vary considerably across different images. We use attention values to identify and filter out rejected responses the model may have mistakenly focused on. Our attention-aware selection for constructing the chosen/rejected pairs without relying on (i) human annotation, (ii) extra data, and (iii) external models or APIs. MIA-DPO is compatible with various architectures and outperforms existing methods on five multi-image benchmarks, achieving an average performance boost of 3.0% on LLaVA-v1.5 and 4.3% on the recent InternLM-XC2.5. Moreover, MIA-DPO has a minimal effect on the model's ability to understand single images.

Reproducibility remains a significant challenge in machine learning (ML) for healthcare. In this field, datasets, model pipelines, and even task/cohort definitions are often private, leading to a significant barrier in sharing, iterating, and understanding ML results on electronic health record (EHR) datasets. In this paper, we address a significant part of this problem by introducing the Automatic Cohort Extraction System for Event-Stream Datasets (ACES). This tool is designed to simultaneously simplify the development of task/cohorts for ML in healthcare and enable the reproduction of these cohorts, both at an exact level for single datasets and at a conceptual level across datasets. To accomplish this, ACES provides (1) a highly intuitive and expressive configuration language for defining both dataset-specific concepts and dataset-agnostic inclusion/exclusion criteria, and (2) a pipeline to automatically extract patient records that meet these defined criteria from real-world data. ACES can be automatically applied to any dataset in either the Medical Event Data Standard (MEDS) or EventStreamGPT (ESGPT) formats, or to *any* dataset for which the necessary task-specific predicates can be extracted in an event-stream form. ACES has the potential to significantly lower the barrier to entry for defining ML tasks, redefine the way researchers interact with EHR datasets, and significantly improve the state of reproducibility for ML studies in this modality. ACES is available at https://github.com/justin13601/aces.

Extraction and interpretation of intricate information from unstructured text data arising in financial applications, such as earnings call transcripts, present substantial challenges to large language models (LLMs) even using the current best practices to use Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) (referred to as VectorRAG techniques which utilize vector databases for information retrieval) due to challenges such as domain specific terminology and complex formats of the documents. We introduce a novel approach based on a combination, called HybridRAG, of the Knowledge Graphs (KGs) based RAG techniques (called GraphRAG) and VectorRAG techniques to enhance question-answer (Q&A) systems for information extraction from financial documents that is shown to be capable of generating accurate and contextually relevant answers. Using experiments on a set of financial earning call transcripts documents which come in the form of Q&A format, and hence provide a natural set of pairs of ground-truth Q&As, we show that HybridRAG which retrieves context from both vector database and KG outperforms both traditional VectorRAG and GraphRAG individually when evaluated at both the retrieval and generation stages in terms of retrieval accuracy and answer generation. The proposed technique has applications beyond the financial domain

In this paper, we present the LingOly benchmark, a novel benchmark for advanced reasoning abilities in large language models. Using challenging Linguistic Olympiad puzzles, we evaluate (i) capabilities for in-context identification and generalisation of linguistic patterns in very low-resource or extinct languages, and (ii) abilities to follow complex task instructions. The LingOly benchmark covers more than 90 mostly low-resource languages, minimising issues of data contamination, and contains 1,133 problems across 6 formats and 5 levels of human difficulty. We assess performance with both direct accuracy and comparison to a no-context baseline to penalise memorisation. Scores from 11 state-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate the benchmark to be challenging, and models perform poorly on the higher difficulty problems. On harder problems, even the top model only achieved 35.3% accuracy, 21.7% improvement over the no-context baseline. Large closed models typically outperform open models, and in general, the higher resource the language, the better the scores. These results indicate, in absence of memorisation, true multi-step out-of-domain reasoning remains a challenge for current language models.

Even for a conservative estimate, 80% of enterprise data reside in unstructured files, stored in data lakes that accommodate heterogeneous formats. Classical search engines can no longer meet information seeking needs, especially when the task is to browse and explore for insight formulation. In other words, there are no obvious search keywords to use. Knowledge graphs, due to their natural visual appeals that reduce the human cognitive load, become the winning candidate for heterogeneous data integration and knowledge representation. In this paper, we introduce Docs2KG, a novel framework designed to extract multimodal information from diverse and heterogeneous unstructured documents, including emails, web pages, PDF files, and Excel files. Dynamically generates a unified knowledge graph that represents the extracted key information, Docs2KG enables efficient querying and exploration of document data lakes. Unlike existing approaches that focus on domain-specific data sources or pre-designed schemas, Docs2KG offers a flexible and extensible solution that can adapt to various document structures and content types. The proposed framework unifies data processing supporting a multitude of downstream tasks with improved domain interpretability. Docs2KG is publicly accessible at https://docs2kg.ai4wa.com, and a demonstration video is available at https://docs2kg.ai4wa.com/Video.

Logging is a critical function in modern distributed applications, but the lack of standardization in log query languages and formats creates significant challenges. Developers currently must write ad hoc queries in platform-specific languages, requiring expertise in both the query language and application-specific log details -- an impractical expectation given the variety of platforms and volume of logs and applications. While generating these queries with large language models (LLMs) seems intuitive, we show that current LLMs struggle with log-specific query generation due to the lack of exposure to domain-specific knowledge. We propose a novel natural language (NL) interface to address these inconsistencies and aide log query generation, enabling developers to create queries in a target log query language by providing NL inputs. We further introduce ~NL2QL, a manually annotated, real-world dataset of natural language questions paired with corresponding LogQL queries spread across three log formats, to promote the training and evaluation of NL-to-loq query systems. Using NL2QL, we subsequently fine-tune and evaluate several state of the art LLMs, and demonstrate their improved capability to generate accurate LogQL queries. We perform further ablation studies to demonstrate the effect of additional training data, and the transferability across different log formats. In our experiments, we find up to 75\% improvement of finetuned models to generate LogQL queries compared to non finetuned models.

This paper presents Audio-Visual LLM, a Multimodal Large Language Model that takes both visual and auditory inputs for holistic video understanding. A key design is the modality-augmented training, which involves the integration of modality-specific tokens engineered to activate the appropriate visual and/or auditory encoder selectively. This mechanism is pivotal in enabling end-to-end joint training with video data at different modalities, including visual-only, audio-only, and audio-visual formats. Moreover, we introduce a high-quality video instruction dataset, derived from GPT-4. This dataset allows Audio-Visual LLM to adeptly process a variety of task-oriented video instructions, ranging from multi-turn conversations and audio-visual narratives to complex reasoning tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Audio-Visual LLM impressively achieves strong zero-shot results across a range of video understanding tasks. For example, Audio-Visual LLM achieves an accuracy of 53.7% on MSRVTT-QA, outperforming non-LLM-based InterVideo by 6.6% and LLM-based Valley by 4.4%, respectively. Additionally, our Audio-Visual LLM also achieves competitive performance on audio tasks (e.g., AudioCaps).

Large language models are trained in two stages: (1) unsupervised pretraining from raw text, to learn general-purpose representations, and (2) large scale instruction tuning and reinforcement learning, to better align to end tasks and user preferences. We measure the relative importance of these two stages by training LIMA, a 65B parameter LLaMa language model fine-tuned with the standard supervised loss on only 1,000 carefully curated prompts and responses, without any reinforcement learning or human preference modeling. LIMA demonstrates remarkably strong performance, learning to follow specific response formats from only a handful of examples in the training data, including complex queries that range from planning trip itineraries to speculating about alternate history. Moreover, the model tends to generalize well to unseen tasks that did not appear in the training data. In a controlled human study, responses from LIMA are either equivalent or strictly preferred to GPT-4 in 43% of cases; this statistic is as high as 58% when compared to Bard and 65% versus DaVinci003, which was trained with human feedback. Taken together, these results strongly suggest that almost all knowledge in large language models is learned during pretraining, and only limited instruction tuning data is necessary to teach models to produce high quality output.

The use of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has improved Large Language Models (LLMs) in collaborating with external data, yet significant challenges exist in real-world scenarios. In areas such as academic literature and finance question answering, data are often found in raw text and tables in HTML or PDF formats, which can be lengthy and highly unstructured. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark suite, namely Unstructured Document Analysis (UDA), that involves 2,965 real-world documents and 29,590 expert-annotated Q&A pairs. We revisit popular LLM- and RAG-based solutions for document analysis and evaluate the design choices and answer qualities across multiple document domains and diverse query types. Our evaluation yields interesting findings and highlights the importance of data parsing and retrieval. We hope our benchmark can shed light and better serve real-world document analysis applications. The benchmark suite and code can be found at https://github.com/qinchuanhui/UDA-Benchmark.

Despite vision-language models' (VLMs) remarkable capabilities as versatile visual assistants, two substantial challenges persist within the existing VLM frameworks: (1) lacking task diversity in pretraining and visual instruction tuning, and (2) annotation error and bias in GPT-4 synthesized instruction tuning data. Both challenges lead to issues such as poor generalizability, hallucination, and catastrophic forgetting. To address these challenges, we construct Vision-Flan, the most diverse publicly available visual instruction tuning dataset to date, comprising 187 diverse tasks and 1,664,261 instances sourced from academic datasets, and each task is accompanied by an expert-written instruction. In addition, we propose a two-stage instruction tuning framework, in which VLMs are firstly finetuned on Vision-Flan and further tuned on GPT-4 synthesized data. We find this two-stage tuning framework significantly outperforms the traditional single-stage visual instruction tuning framework and achieves the state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of multi-modal evaluation benchmarks. Finally, we conduct in-depth analyses to understand visual instruction tuning and our findings reveal that: (1) GPT-4 synthesized data does not substantially enhance VLMs' capabilities but rather modulates the model's responses to human-preferred formats; (2) A minimal quantity (e.g., 1,000) of GPT-4 synthesized data can effectively align VLM responses with human-preference; (3) Visual instruction tuning mainly helps large-language models (LLMs) to understand visual features.

The S{\o}rensen--Dice Coefficient has recently seen rising popularity as a loss function (also known as Dice loss) due to its robustness in tasks where the number of negative samples significantly exceeds that of positive samples, such as semantic segmentation, natural language processing, and sound event detection. Conventional training of polyphonic sound event detection systems with binary cross-entropy loss often results in suboptimal detection performance as the training is often overwhelmed by updates from negative samples. In this paper, we investigated the effect of the Dice loss, intra- and inter-modal transfer learning, data augmentation, and recording formats, on the performance of polyphonic sound event detection systems with multichannel inputs. Our analysis showed that polyphonic sound event detection systems trained with Dice loss consistently outperformed those trained with cross-entropy loss across different training settings and recording formats in terms of F1 score and error rate. We achieved further performance gains via the use of transfer learning and an appropriate combination of different data augmentation techniques.

3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) aims to locate objects in 3D scenes based on textual descriptions, which is essential for applications like augmented reality and robotics. Traditional 3DVG approaches rely on annotated 3D datasets and predefined object categories, limiting scalability and adaptability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SeeGround, a zero-shot 3DVG framework leveraging 2D Vision-Language Models (VLMs) trained on large-scale 2D data. We propose to represent 3D scenes as a hybrid of query-aligned rendered images and spatially enriched text descriptions, bridging the gap between 3D data and 2D-VLMs input formats. We propose two modules: the Perspective Adaptation Module, which dynamically selects viewpoints for query-relevant image rendering, and the Fusion Alignment Module, which integrates 2D images with 3D spatial descriptions to enhance object localization. Extensive experiments on ScanRefer and Nr3D demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing zero-shot methods by large margins. Notably, we exceed weakly supervised methods and rival some fully supervised ones, outperforming previous SOTA by 7.7% on ScanRefer and 7.1% on Nr3D, showcasing its effectiveness.

The process of annotating data within the legal sector is filled with distinct challenges that differ from other fields, primarily due to the inherent complexities of legal language and documentation. The initial task usually involves selecting an appropriate raw dataset that captures the intricate aspects of legal texts. Following this, extracting text becomes a complicated task, as legal documents often have complex structures, footnotes, references, and unique terminology. The importance of data cleaning is magnified in this context, ensuring that redundant information is eliminated while maintaining crucial legal details and context. Creating comprehensive yet straightforward annotation guidelines is imperative, as these guidelines serve as the road map for maintaining uniformity and addressing the subtle nuances of legal terminology. Another critical aspect is the involvement of legal professionals in the annotation process. Their expertise is valuable in ensuring that the data not only remains contextually accurate but also adheres to prevailing legal standards and interpretations. This paper provides an expanded view of these challenges and aims to offer a foundational understanding and guidance for researchers and professionals engaged in legal data annotation projects. In addition, we provide links to our created and fine-tuned datasets and language models. These resources are outcomes of our discussed projects and solutions to challenges faced while working on them.

Important information that relates to a specific topic in a document is often organized in tabular format to assist readers with information retrieval and comparison, which may be difficult to provide in natural language. However, tabular data in unstructured digital documents, e.g., Portable Document Format (PDF) and images, are difficult to parse into structured machine-readable format, due to complexity and diversity in their structure and style. To facilitate image-based table recognition with deep learning, we develop the largest publicly available table recognition dataset PubTabNet (https://github.com/ibm-aur-nlp/PubTabNet), containing 568k table images with corresponding structured HTML representation. PubTabNet is automatically generated by matching the XML and PDF representations of the scientific articles in PubMed Central Open Access Subset (PMCOA). We also propose a novel attention-based encoder-dual-decoder (EDD) architecture that converts images of tables into HTML code. The model has a structure decoder which reconstructs the table structure and helps the cell decoder to recognize cell content. In addition, we propose a new Tree-Edit-Distance-based Similarity (TEDS) metric for table recognition, which more appropriately captures multi-hop cell misalignment and OCR errors than the pre-established metric. The experiments demonstrate that the EDD model can accurately recognize complex tables solely relying on the image representation, outperforming the state-of-the-art by 9.7% absolute TEDS score.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems function as digital assistants, guiding users through various tasks such as booking flights or finding restaurants. Existing toolkits for building TOD systems often fall short of in delivering comprehensive arrays of data, models, and experimental environments with a user-friendly experience. We introduce ConvLab-3: a multifaceted dialogue system toolkit crafted to bridge this gap. Our unified data format simplifies the integration of diverse datasets and models, significantly reducing complexity and cost for studying generalization and transfer. Enhanced with robust reinforcement learning (RL) tools, featuring a streamlined training process, in-depth evaluation tools, and a selection of user simulators, ConvLab-3 supports the rapid development and evaluation of robust dialogue policies. Through an extensive study, we demonstrate the efficacy of transfer learning and RL and showcase that ConvLab-3 is not only a powerful tool for seasoned researchers but also an accessible platform for newcomers.

With advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), a major use case that has emerged is querying databases in plain English, translating user questions into executable database queries, which has improved significantly. However, real-world datasets often feature a vast array of attributes and complex values, complicating the LLMs task of accurately identifying relevant columns or values from natural language queries. Traditional methods cannot fully relay the datasets size and complexity to the LLM. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework that leverages Full-Text Search (FTS) on the input table. This approach not only enables precise detection of specific values and columns but also narrows the search space for language models, thereby enhancing query accuracy. Additionally, it supports a custom auto-complete feature that suggests queries based on the data in the table. This integration significantly refines the interaction between the user and complex datasets, offering a sophisticated solution to the limitations faced by current table querying capabilities. This work is accompanied by an application for both Mac and Windows platforms, which readers can try out themselves on their own data.

Recent breakthroughs in large language modeling have facilitated rigorous exploration of their application in diverse tasks related to tabular data modeling, such as prediction, tabular data synthesis, question answering, and table understanding. Each task presents unique challenges and opportunities. However, there is currently a lack of comprehensive review that summarizes and compares the key techniques, metrics, datasets, models, and optimization approaches in this research domain. This survey aims to address this gap by consolidating recent progress in these areas, offering a thorough survey and taxonomy of the datasets, metrics, and methodologies utilized. It identifies strengths, limitations, unexplored territories, and gaps in the existing literature, while providing some insights for future research directions in this vital and rapidly evolving field. It also provides relevant code and datasets references. Through this comprehensive review, we hope to provide interested readers with pertinent references and insightful perspectives, empowering them with the necessary tools and knowledge to effectively navigate and address the prevailing challenges in the field.

New capabilities in foundation models are owed in large part to massive, widely-sourced, and under-documented training data collections. Existing practices in data collection have led to challenges in documenting data transparency, tracing authenticity, verifying consent, privacy, representation, bias, copyright infringement, and the overall development of ethical and trustworthy foundation models. In response, regulation is emphasizing the need for training data transparency to understand foundation models' limitations. Based on a large-scale analysis of the foundation model training data landscape and existing solutions, we identify the missing infrastructure to facilitate responsible foundation model development practices. We examine the current shortcomings of common tools for tracing data authenticity, consent, and documentation, and outline how policymakers, developers, and data creators can facilitate responsible foundation model development by adopting universal data provenance standards.

Enterprises often own large collections of structured data in the form of large databases or an enterprise data lake. Such data collections come with limited metadata and strict access policies that could limit access to the data contents and, therefore, limit the application of classic retrieval and analysis solutions. As a result, there is a need for solutions that can effectively utilize the available metadata. In this paper, we study the problem of matching table metadata to a business glossary containing data labels and descriptions. The resulting matching enables the use of an available or curated business glossary for retrieval and analysis without or before requesting access to the data contents. One solution to this problem is to use manually-defined rules or similarity measures on column names and glossary descriptions (or their vector embeddings) to find the closest match. However, such approaches need to be tuned through manual labeling and cannot handle many business glossaries that contain a combination of simple as well as complex and long descriptions. In this work, we leverage the power of large language models (LLMs) to design generic matching methods that do not require manual tuning and can identify complex relations between column names and glossaries. We propose methods that utilize LLMs in two ways: a) by generating additional context for column names that can aid with matching b) by using LLMs to directly infer if there is a relation between column names and glossary descriptions. Our preliminary experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

The Land Matrix initiative (https://landmatrix.org) and its global observatory aim to provide reliable data on large-scale land acquisitions to inform debates and actions in sectors such as agriculture, extraction, or energy in low- and middle-income countries. Although these data are recognized in the academic world, they remain underutilized in public policy, mainly due to the complexity of access and exploitation, which requires technical expertise and a good understanding of the database schema. The objective of this work is to simplify access to data from different database systems. The methods proposed in this article are evaluated using data from the Land Matrix. This work presents various comparisons of Large Language Models (LLMs) as well as combinations of LLM adaptations (Prompt Engineering, RAG, Agents) to query different database systems (GraphQL and REST queries). The experiments are reproducible, and a demonstration is available online: https://github.com/tetis-nlp/landmatrix-graphql-python.

Large datasets underlying much of current machine learning raise serious issues concerning inappropriate content such as offensive, insulting, threatening, or might otherwise cause anxiety. This calls for increased dataset documentation, e.g., using datasheets. They, among other topics, encourage to reflect on the composition of the datasets. So far, this documentation, however, is done manually and therefore can be tedious and error-prone, especially for large image datasets. Here we ask the arguably "circular" question of whether a machine can help us reflect on inappropriate content, answering Question 16 in Datasheets. To this end, we propose to use the information stored in pre-trained transformer models to assist us in the documentation process. Specifically, prompt-tuning based on a dataset of socio-moral values steers CLIP to identify potentially inappropriate content, therefore reducing human labor. We then document the inappropriate images found using word clouds, based on captions generated using a vision-language model. The documentations of two popular, large-scale computer vision datasets -- ImageNet and OpenImages -- produced this way suggest that machines can indeed help dataset creators to answer Question 16 on inappropriate image content.

Many organizations rely on data from government and third-party sources, and those sources rarely follow the same data formatting. This introduces challenges in integrating data from multiple sources or aligning external sources with internal databases. Commercial database systems do not offer adequate support for integrating data from heterogeneous sources, and manual integration is both time-consuming and inefficient. State-of-the-art data integration approaches that rely on similarity functions and textual transformations often fail to handle challenging cases where multiple mappings are required, or the mappings go beyond simple textual transformations. In this paper, we study the potentials of deep neural models for transforming tables for joinability. In particular, we cast the problem as a prediction task and develop a framework that leverages large deep-learning language models to transform tabular data from a source formatting to a desired target representation. Our framework can efficiently learn the patterns for mapping a source formatting into an expected target using just a few examples, which can then be used for tasks such as table joining, filling in missing values, and error detection. Compared to state-of-the-art mapping and joining approaches, our framework delivers noticeably more accurate and scalable performance on both real-world and synthetic datasets. Our experimental evaluation also shows that the performance of the proposed framework using our fine-tuned model is at par or better than large language models such as GPT-3, despite the significant difference in size, and that using large language models within our framework improves their performance.

The race to train language models on vast, diverse, and inconsistently documented datasets has raised pressing concerns about the legal and ethical risks for practitioners. To remedy these practices threatening data transparency and understanding, we convene a multi-disciplinary effort between legal and machine learning experts to systematically audit and trace 1800+ text datasets. We develop tools and standards to trace the lineage of these datasets, from their source, creators, series of license conditions, properties, and subsequent use. Our landscape analysis highlights the sharp divides in composition and focus of commercially open vs closed datasets, with closed datasets monopolizing important categories: lower resource languages, more creative tasks, richer topic variety, newer and more synthetic training data. This points to a deepening divide in the types of data that are made available under different license conditions, and heightened implications for jurisdictional legal interpretations of copyright and fair use. We also observe frequent miscategorization of licenses on widely used dataset hosting sites, with license omission of 72%+ and error rates of 50%+. This points to a crisis in misattribution and informed use of the most popular datasets driving many recent breakthroughs. As a contribution to ongoing improvements in dataset transparency and responsible use, we release our entire audit, with an interactive UI, the Data Provenance Explorer, which allows practitioners to trace and filter on data provenance for the most popular open source finetuning data collections: www.dataprovenance.org.

In the rapidly evolving digital era, there is an increasing demand for concise information as individuals seek to distil key insights from various sources. Recent attention from researchers on Multi-document Summarisation (MDS) has resulted in diverse datasets covering customer reviews, academic papers, medical and legal documents, and news articles. However, the English-centric nature of these datasets has created a conspicuous void for multilingual datasets in today's globalised digital landscape, where linguistic diversity is celebrated. Media platforms such as British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) have disseminated news in 20+ languages for decades. With only 380 million people speaking English natively as their first language, accounting for less than 5% of the global population, the vast majority primarily relies on other languages. These facts underscore the need for inclusivity in MDS research, utilising resources from diverse languages. Recognising this gap, we present the Multilingual Dataset for Multi-document Summarisation (M2DS), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first dataset of its kind. It includes document-summary pairs in five languages from BBC articles published during the 2010-2023 period. This paper introduces M2DS, emphasising its unique multilingual aspect, and includes baseline scores from state-of-the-art MDS models evaluated on our dataset.

The aim of the Prague Relational Learning Repository is to support machine learning research with multi-relational data. The repository currently contains 148 SQL databases hosted on a public MySQL server located at https://relational-data.org. The server is provided by getML to support the relational machine learning community (www.getml.com). A searchable meta-database provides metadata (e.g., the number of tables in the database, the number of rows and columns in the tables, the number of self-relationships).

The rise in popularity of ChatGPT and GPT-4 has significantly accelerated the development of large models, leading to the creation of numerous impressive large language models(LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). These cutting-edge models owe their remarkable performance to high-quality data. However, the details of the training data used in leading paradigms are often kept confidential. This lack of transparency, coupled with the scarcity of open-source data, impedes further developments within the community. As a response, this paper presents "Wan Juan", a large-scale multimodal dataset composed of both Chinese and English data, collected from a wide range of web sources. The dataset incorporates text, image-text, and video modalities, with a total volume exceeding 2TB. It was utilized in the training of InternLM, a model that demonstrated significant advantages in multi-dimensional evaluations when compared to models of a similar scale. All data can be accessed at https://opendatalab.org.cn/WanJuan1.0.

Despite the considerable advancements in English LLMs, the progress in building comparable models for other languages has been hindered due to the scarcity of tailored resources. Our work aims to bridge this divide by introducing an expansive suite of resources specifically designed for the development of Indic LLMs, covering 22 languages, containing a total of 251B tokens and 74.8M instruction-response pairs. Recognizing the importance of both data quality and quantity, our approach combines highly curated manually verified data, unverified yet valuable data, and synthetic data. We build a clean, open-source pipeline for curating pre-training data from diverse sources, including websites, PDFs, and videos, incorporating best practices for crawling, cleaning, flagging, and deduplication. For instruction-fine tuning, we amalgamate existing Indic datasets, translate/transliterate English datasets into Indian languages, and utilize LLaMa2 and Mixtral models to create conversations grounded in articles from Indian Wikipedia and Wikihow. Additionally, we address toxicity alignment by generating toxic prompts for multiple scenarios and then generate non-toxic responses by feeding these toxic prompts to an aligned LLaMa2 model. We hope that the datasets, tools, and resources released as a part of this work will not only propel the research and development of Indic LLMs but also establish an open-source blueprint for extending such efforts to other languages. The data and other artifacts created as part of this work are released with permissive licenses.

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing tasks and demonstrate considerable potential in the legal domain. However, legal applications demand high standards of accuracy, reliability, and fairness. Applying existing LLMs to legal systems without careful evaluation of their potential and limitations could pose significant risks in legal practice. To this end, we introduce a standardized comprehensive Chinese legal benchmark LexEval. This benchmark is notable in the following three aspects: (1) Ability Modeling: We propose a new taxonomy of legal cognitive abilities to organize different tasks. (2) Scale: To our knowledge, LexEval is currently the largest Chinese legal evaluation dataset, comprising 23 tasks and 14,150 questions. (3) Data: we utilize formatted existing datasets, exam datasets and newly annotated datasets by legal experts to comprehensively evaluate the various capabilities of LLMs. LexEval not only focuses on the ability of LLMs to apply fundamental legal knowledge but also dedicates efforts to examining the ethical issues involved in their application. We evaluated 38 open-source and commercial LLMs and obtained some interesting findings. The experiments and findings offer valuable insights into the challenges and potential solutions for developing Chinese legal systems and LLM evaluation pipelines. The LexEval dataset and leaderboard are publicly available at https://github.com/CSHaitao/LexEval and will be continuously updated.

Corpora that contain tabular data such as WebTables are a vital resource for the academic community. Essentially, they are the backbone of any modern research in information management. They are used for various tasks of data extraction, knowledge base construction, question answering, column semantic type detection and many other. Such corpora are useful not only as a source of data, but also as a base for building test datasets. So far, there were no such corpora for the Russian language and this seriously hindered research in the aforementioned areas. In this paper, we present the first corpus of Web tables created specifically out of Russian language material. It was built via a special toolkit we have developed to crawl the Russian Wikipedia. Both the corpus and the toolkit are open-source and publicly available. Finally, we present a short study that describes Russian Wikipedia tables and their statistics.

One of the limitations of large language models is that they do not have access to up-to-date, proprietary or personal data. As a result, there are multiple efforts to extend language models with techniques for accessing external data. In that sense, LLMs share the vision of data integration systems whose goal is to provide seamless access to a large collection of heterogeneous data sources. While the details and the techniques of LLMs differ greatly from those of data integration, this paper shows that some of the lessons learned from research on data integration can elucidate the research path we are conducting today on language models.

In this paper, we introduce a dataset of multilingual news articles covering the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. A total of 10,940 news articles were gathered from 1,918 different publishers, covering 1,350 sub-events of the 2021 Olympics, and published between July 1, 2021, and August 14, 2021. These articles are written in nine languages from different language families and in different scripts. To create the dataset, the raw news articles were first retrieved via a service that collects and analyzes news articles. Then, the articles were grouped using an online clustering algorithm, with each group containing articles reporting on the same sub-event. Finally, the groups were manually annotated and evaluated. The development of this dataset aims to provide a resource for evaluating the performance of multilingual news clustering algorithms, for which limited datasets are available. It can also be used to analyze the dynamics and events of the 2021 Tokyo Olympics from different perspectives. The dataset is available in CSV format and can be accessed from the CLARIN.SI repository.

This research delves into the construction and utilization of synthetic datasets, specifically within the telematics sphere, leveraging OpenAI's powerful language model, ChatGPT. Synthetic datasets present an effective solution to challenges pertaining to data privacy, scarcity, and control over variables - characteristics that make them particularly valuable for research pursuits. The utility of these datasets, however, largely depends on their quality, measured through the lenses of diversity, relevance, and coherence. To illustrate this data creation process, a hands-on case study is conducted, focusing on the generation of a synthetic telematics dataset. The experiment involved an iterative guidance of ChatGPT, progressively refining prompts and culminating in the creation of a comprehensive dataset for a hypothetical urban planning scenario in Columbus, Ohio. Upon generation, the synthetic dataset was subjected to an evaluation, focusing on the previously identified quality parameters and employing descriptive statistics and visualization techniques for a thorough analysis. Despite synthetic datasets not serving as perfect replacements for actual world data, their potential in specific use-cases, when executed with precision, is significant. This research underscores the potential of AI models like ChatGPT in enhancing data availability for complex sectors like telematics, thus paving the way for a myriad of new research opportunities.

Existing Text-to-SQL generators require the entire schema to be encoded with the user text. This is expensive or impractical for large databases with tens of thousands of columns. Standard dense retrieval techniques are inadequate for schema subsetting of a large structured database, where the correct semantics of retrieval demands that we rank sets of schema elements rather than individual elements. In response, we propose a two-stage process for effective coverage during retrieval. First, we instruct an LLM to hallucinate a minimal DB schema deemed adequate to answer the query. We use the hallucinated schema to retrieve a subset of the actual schema, by composing the results from multiple dense retrievals. Remarkably, hallucination x2013 generally considered a nuisance x2013 turns out to be actually useful as a bridging mechanism. Since no existing benchmarks exist for schema subsetting on large databases, we introduce three benchmarks. Two semi-synthetic datasets are derived from the union of schemas in two well-known datasets, SPIDER and BIRD, resulting in 4502 and 798 schema elements respectively. A real-life benchmark called SocialDB is sourced from an actual large data warehouse comprising 17844 schema elements. We show that our method1 leads to significantly higher recall than SOTA retrieval-based augmentation methods.

This article documents a dataset of sentence pairs between Faroese and Danish, produced at ITU Copenhagen. The data covers tranlsation from both source languages, and is intended for use as training data for machine translation systems in this language pair.

The rise in loosely-structured data available through text, images, and other modalities has called for new ways of querying them. Multimedia Information Retrieval has filled this gap and has witnessed exciting progress in recent years. Tasks such as search and retrieval of extensive multimedia archives have undergone massive performance improvements, driven to a large extent by recent developments in multimodal deep learning. However, methods in this field remain limited in the kinds of queries they support and, in particular, their inability to answer database-like queries. For this reason, inspired by recent work on neural databases, we propose a new framework, which we name Multimodal Neural Databases (MMNDBs). MMNDBs can answer complex database-like queries that involve reasoning over different input modalities, such as text and images, at scale. In this paper, we present the first architecture able to fulfill this set of requirements and test it with several baselines, showing the limitations of currently available models. The results show the potential of these new techniques to process unstructured data coming from different modalities, paving the way for future research in the area. Code to replicate the experiments will be released at https://github.com/GiovanniTRA/MultimodalNeuralDatabases

Multimodal learning is a rapidly growing research field that has revolutionized multitasking and generative modeling in AI. While much of the research has focused on dealing with unstructured data (e.g., language, images, audio, or video), structured data (e.g., tabular data, time series, or signals) has received less attention. However, many industry-relevant use cases involve or can be benefited from both types of data. In this work, we propose a modular, end-to-end multimodal learning method called MAGNUM, which can natively handle both structured and unstructured data. MAGNUM is flexible enough to employ any specialized unimodal module to extract, compress, and fuse information from all available modalities.

Large-scale data sets on scholarly publications are the basis for a variety of bibliometric analyses and natural language processing (NLP) applications. Especially data sets derived from publication's full-text have recently gained attention. While several such data sets already exist, we see key shortcomings in terms of their domain and time coverage, citation network completeness, and representation of full-text content. To address these points, we propose a new version of the data set unarXive. We base our data processing pipeline and output format on two existing data sets, and improve on each of them. Our resulting data set comprises 1.9 M publications spanning multiple disciplines and 32 years. It furthermore has a more complete citation network than its predecessors and retains a richer representation of document structure as well as non-textual publication content such as mathematical notation. In addition to the data set, we provide ready-to-use training/test data for citation recommendation and IMRaD classification. All data and source code is publicly available at https://github.com/IllDepence/unarXive.

E-commerce search and recommendation usually operate on structured data such as product catalogs and taxonomies. However, creating better search and recommendation systems often requires a large variety of unstructured data including customer reviews and articles on the web. Traditionally, the solution has always been converting unstructured data into structured data through information extraction, and conducting search over the structured data. However, this is a costly approach that often has low quality. In this paper, we envision a solution that does entirely the opposite. Instead of converting unstructured data (web pages, customer reviews, etc) to structured data, we instead convert structured data (product inventory, catalogs, taxonomies, etc) into textual data, which can be easily integrated into the text corpus that trains LLMs. Then, search and recommendation can be performed through a Q/A mechanism through an LLM instead of using traditional information retrieval methods over structured data.

Vectors are universal mathematical objects that can represent text, images, speech, or a mix of these data modalities. That happens regardless of whether data is represented by hand-crafted features or learnt embeddings. Collect a large enough quantity of such vectors and the question of retrieval becomes urgently relevant: Finding vectors that are more similar to a query vector. This monograph is concerned with the question above and covers fundamental concepts along with advanced data structures and algorithms for vector retrieval. In doing so, it recaps this fascinating topic and lowers barriers of entry into this rich area of research.

This paper embarks on an exploration into the Large Language Model (LLM) datasets, which play a crucial role in the remarkable advancements of LLMs. The datasets serve as the foundational infrastructure analogous to a root system that sustains and nurtures the development of LLMs. Consequently, examination of these datasets emerges as a critical topic in research. In order to address the current lack of a comprehensive overview and thorough analysis of LLM datasets, and to gain insights into their current status and future trends, this survey consolidates and categorizes the fundamental aspects of LLM datasets from five perspectives: (1) Pre-training Corpora; (2) Instruction Fine-tuning Datasets; (3) Preference Datasets; (4) Evaluation Datasets; (5) Traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) Datasets. The survey sheds light on the prevailing challenges and points out potential avenues for future investigation. Additionally, a comprehensive review of the existing available dataset resources is also provided, including statistics from 444 datasets, covering 8 language categories and spanning 32 domains. Information from 20 dimensions is incorporated into the dataset statistics. The total data size surveyed surpasses 774.5 TB for pre-training corpora and 700M instances for other datasets. We aim to present the entire landscape of LLM text datasets, serving as a comprehensive reference for researchers in this field and contributing to future studies. Related resources are available at: https://github.com/lmmlzn/Awesome-LLMs-Datasets.

Despite Portuguese being one of the most spoken languages in the world, there is a lack of high-quality information retrieval datasets in that language. We present Quati, a dataset specifically designed for the Brazilian Portuguese language. It comprises a collection of queries formulated by native speakers and a curated set of documents sourced from a selection of high-quality Brazilian Portuguese websites. These websites are frequented more likely by real users compared to those randomly scraped, ensuring a more representative and relevant corpus. To label the query-document pairs, we use a state-of-the-art LLM, which shows inter-annotator agreement levels comparable to human performance in our assessments. We provide a detailed description of our annotation methodology to enable others to create similar datasets for other languages, providing a cost-effective way of creating high-quality IR datasets with an arbitrary number of labeled documents per query. Finally, we evaluate a diverse range of open-source and commercial retrievers to serve as baseline systems. Quati is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/unicamp-dl/quati and all scripts at https://github.com/unicamp-dl/quati .

The way in which data are shared can affect their utility and reusability. Here, we demonstrate how data that we had previously shared in bulk can be mobilized further through a knowledge graph that allows for much more granular exploration and interrogation. The original dataset is about the computational reproducibility of GitHub-hosted Jupyter notebooks associated with biomedical publications. It contains rich metadata about the publications, associated GitHub repositories and Jupyter notebooks, and the notebooks' reproducibility. We took this dataset, converted it into semantic triples and loaded these into a triple store to create a knowledge graph, FAIR Jupyter, that we made accessible via a web service. This enables granular data exploration and analysis through queries that can be tailored to specific use cases. Such queries may provide details about any of the variables from the original dataset, highlight relationships between them or combine some of the graph's content with materials from corresponding external resources. We provide a collection of example queries addressing a range of use cases in research and education. We also outline how sets of such queries can be used to profile specific content types, either individually or by class. We conclude by discussing how such a semantically enhanced sharing of complex datasets can both enhance their FAIRness, i.e., their findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability, and help identify and communicate best practices, particularly with regards to data quality, standardization, automation and reproducibility.

The increasing volume of data stored in relational databases has led to the need for efficient querying and utilization of this data in various sectors. However, writing SQL queries requires specialized knowledge, which poses a challenge for non-professional users trying to access and query databases. Text-to-SQL parsing solves this issue by converting natural language queries into SQL queries, thus making database access more accessible for non-expert users. To take advantage of the recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs), a range of new methods have emerged, with a primary focus on prompt engineering and fine-tuning. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of LLMs in text-to-SQL tasks, discussing benchmark datasets, prompt engineering, fine-tuning methods, and future research directions. We hope this review will enable readers to gain a broader understanding of the recent advances in this field and offer some insights into its future trajectory.

We present MEGA-Bench, an evaluation suite that scales multimodal evaluation to over 500 real-world tasks, to address the highly heterogeneous daily use cases of end users. Our objective is to optimize for a set of high-quality data samples that cover a highly diverse and rich set of multimodal tasks, while enabling cost-effective and accurate model evaluation. In particular, we collected 505 realistic tasks encompassing over 8,000 samples from 16 expert annotators to extensively cover the multimodal task space. Instead of unifying these problems into standard multi-choice questions (like MMMU, MMBench, and MMT-Bench), we embrace a wide range of output formats like numbers, phrases, code, \LaTeX, coordinates, JSON, free-form, etc. To accommodate these formats, we developed over 40 metrics to evaluate these tasks. Unlike existing benchmarks, MEGA-Bench offers a fine-grained capability report across multiple dimensions (e.g., application, input type, output format, skill), allowing users to interact with and visualize model capabilities in depth. We evaluate a wide variety of frontier vision-language models on MEGA-Bench to understand their capabilities across these dimensions.

In the proposed demo, we will present a new software - Linguistic Field Data Management and Analysis System - LiFE (https://github.com/kmi-linguistics/life) - an open-source, web-based linguistic data management and analysis application that allows for systematic storage, management, sharing and usage of linguistic data collected from the field. The application allows users to store lexical items, sentences, paragraphs, audio-visual content with rich glossing / annotation; generate interactive and print dictionaries; and also train and use natural language processing tools and models for various purposes using this data. Since its a web-based application, it also allows for seamless collaboration among multiple persons and sharing the data, models, etc with each other. The system uses the Python-based Flask framework and MongoDB in the backend and HTML, CSS and Javascript at the frontend. The interface allows creation of multiple projects that could be shared with the other users. At the backend, the application stores the data in RDF format so as to allow its release as Linked Data over the web using semantic web technologies - as of now it makes use of the OntoLex-Lemon for storing the lexical data and Ligt for storing the interlinear glossed text and then internally linking it to the other linked lexicons and databases such as DBpedia and WordNet. Furthermore it provides support for training the NLP systems using scikit-learn and HuggingFace Transformers libraries as well as make use of any model trained using these libraries - while the user interface itself provides limited options for tuning the system, an externally-trained model could be easily incorporated within the application; similarly the dataset itself could be easily exported into a standard machine-readable format like JSON or CSV that could be consumed by other programs and pipelines.

Modern machine learning relies on datasets to develop and validate research ideas. Given the growth of publicly available data, finding the right dataset to use is increasingly difficult. Any research question imposes explicit and implicit constraints on how well a given dataset will enable researchers to answer this question, such as dataset size, modality, and domain. We operationalize the task of recommending datasets given a short natural language description of a research idea, to help people find relevant datasets for their needs. Dataset recommendation poses unique challenges as an information retrieval problem; datasets are hard to directly index for search and there are no corpora readily available for this task. To facilitate this task, we build the DataFinder Dataset which consists of a larger automatically-constructed training set (17.5K queries) and a smaller expert-annotated evaluation set (392 queries). Using this data, we compare various information retrieval algorithms on our test set and present a superior bi-encoder retriever for text-based dataset recommendation. This system, trained on the DataFinder Dataset, finds more relevant search results than existing third-party dataset search engines. To encourage progress on dataset recommendation, we release our dataset and models to the public.

The NLP pipeline has evolved dramatically in the last few years. The first step in the pipeline is to find suitable annotated datasets to evaluate the tasks we are trying to solve. Unfortunately, most of the published datasets lack metadata annotations that describe their attributes. Not to mention, the absence of a public catalogue that indexes all the publicly available datasets related to specific regions or languages. When we consider low-resource dialectical languages, for example, this issue becomes more prominent. In this paper we create Masader, the largest public catalogue for Arabic NLP datasets, which consists of 200 datasets annotated with 25 attributes. Furthermore, We develop a metadata annotation strategy that could be extended to other languages. We also make remarks and highlight some issues about the current status of Arabic NLP datasets and suggest recommendations to address them.

This paper introduces the open-source dataset WanJuanSiLu, designed to provide high-quality training corpora for low-resource languages, thereby advancing the research and development of multilingual models. To achieve this, we have developed a systematic data processing framework tailored for low-resource languages. This framework encompasses key stages such as data extraction, corpus cleaning, content deduplication, security filtering, quality evaluation, and theme classification. Through the implementation of this framework, we have significantly improved both the quality and security of the dataset, while maintaining its linguistic diversity. As of now, data for all five languages have been fully open-sourced. The dataset can be accessed at https://opendatalab.com/applyMultilingualCorpus, and GitHub repository is available at https://github.com/opendatalab/WanJuan3.0

The recent emergence and adoption of Machine Learning technology, and specifically of Large Language Models, has drawn attention to the need for systematic and transparent management of language data. This work proposes an approach to global language data governance that attempts to organize data management amongst stakeholders, values, and rights. Our proposal is informed by prior work on distributed governance that accounts for human values and grounded by an international research collaboration that brings together researchers and practitioners from 60 countries. The framework we present is a multi-party international governance structure focused on language data, and incorporating technical and organizational tools needed to support its work.

Currently, a substantial volume of document data exists in an unstructured format, encompassing Portable Document Format (PDF) files and images. Extracting information from these documents presents formidable challenges due to diverse table styles, complex forms, and the inclusion of different languages. Several open-source toolkits, such as Camelot, Plumb a PDF (pdfnumber), and Paddle Paddle Structure V2 (PP-StructureV2), have been developed to facilitate table extraction from PDFs or images. However, each toolkit has its limitations. Camelot and pdfnumber can solely extract tables from digital PDFs and cannot handle image-based PDFs and pictures. On the other hand, PP-StructureV2 can comprehensively extract image-based PDFs and tables from pictures. Nevertheless, it lacks the ability to differentiate between diverse application scenarios, such as wired tables and wireless tables, digital PDFs, and image-based PDFs. To address these issues, we have introduced the PDF table extraction (PdfTable) toolkit. This toolkit integrates numerous open-source models, including seven table recognition models, four Optical character recognition (OCR) recognition tools, and three layout analysis models. By refining the PDF table extraction process, PdfTable achieves adaptability across various application scenarios. We substantiate the efficacy of the PdfTable toolkit through verification on a self-labeled wired table dataset and the open-source wireless Publicly Table Reconition Dataset (PubTabNet). The PdfTable code will available on Github: https://github.com/CycloneBoy/pdf_table.

Machine learning is now used in many applications thanks to its ability to predict, generate, or discover patterns from large quantities of data. However, the process of collecting and transforming data for practical use is intricate. Even in today's digital era, where substantial data is generated daily, it is uncommon for it to be readily usable; most often, it necessitates meticulous manual data preparation. The haste in developing new models can frequently result in various shortcomings, potentially posing risks when deployed in real-world scenarios (eg social discrimination, critical failures), leading to the failure or substantial escalation of costs in AI-based projects. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of established methodological tools, enriched by our practical experience, in the development of datasets for machine learning. Initially, we develop the tasks involved in dataset development and offer insights into their effective management (including requirements, design, implementation, evaluation, distribution, and maintenance). Then, we provide more details about the implementation process which includes data collection, transformation, and quality evaluation. Finally, we address practical considerations regarding dataset distribution and maintenance.

Language-molecule models have emerged as an exciting direction for molecular discovery and understanding. However, training these models is challenging due to the scarcity of molecule-language pair datasets. At this point, datasets have been released which are 1) small and scraped from existing databases, 2) large but noisy and constructed by performing entity linking on the scientific literature, and 3) built by converting property prediction datasets to natural language using templates. In this document, we detail the L+M-24 dataset, which has been created for the Language + Molecules Workshop shared task at ACL 2024. In particular, L+M-24 is designed to focus on three key benefits of natural language in molecule design: compositionality, functionality, and abstraction.

In the current data driven era, synthetic data, artificially generated data that resembles the characteristics of real world data without containing actual personal information, is gaining prominence. This is due to its potential to safeguard privacy, increase the availability of data for research, and reduce bias in machine learning models. This paper investigates the policies governing the creation, utilization, and dissemination of synthetic data. Synthetic data can be a powerful instrument for protecting the privacy of individuals, but it also presents challenges, such as ensuring its quality and authenticity. A well crafted synthetic data policy must strike a balance between privacy concerns and the utility of data, ensuring that it can be utilized effectively without compromising ethical or legal standards. Organizations and institutions must develop standardized guidelines and best practices in order to capitalize on the benefits of synthetic data while addressing its inherent challenges.

We present a new text-to-SQL dataset for electronic health records (EHRs). The utterances were collected from 222 hospital staff members, including physicians, nurses, and insurance review and health records teams. To construct the QA dataset on structured EHR data, we conducted a poll at a university hospital and used the responses to create seed questions. We then manually linked these questions to two open-source EHR databases, MIMIC-III and eICU, and included various time expressions and held-out unanswerable questions in the dataset, which were also collected from the poll. Our dataset poses a unique set of challenges: the model needs to 1) generate SQL queries that reflect a wide range of needs in the hospital, including simple retrieval and complex operations such as calculating survival rate, 2) understand various time expressions to answer time-sensitive questions in healthcare, and 3) distinguish whether a given question is answerable or unanswerable. We believe our dataset, EHRSQL, can serve as a practical benchmark for developing and assessing QA models on structured EHR data and take a step further towards bridging the gap between text-to-SQL research and its real-life deployment in healthcare. EHRSQL is available at https://github.com/glee4810/EHRSQL.

The scale, variety, and quantity of publicly-available NLP datasets has grown rapidly as researchers propose new tasks, larger models, and novel benchmarks. Datasets is a community library for contemporary NLP designed to support this ecosystem. Datasets aims to standardize end-user interfaces, versioning, and documentation, while providing a lightweight front-end that behaves similarly for small datasets as for internet-scale corpora. The design of the library incorporates a distributed, community-driven approach to adding datasets and documenting usage. After a year of development, the library now includes more than 650 unique datasets, has more than 250 contributors, and has helped support a variety of novel cross-dataset research projects and shared tasks. The library is available at https://github.com/huggingface/datasets.

We present the Knesset Corpus, a corpus of Hebrew parliamentary proceedings containing over 30 million sentences (over 384 million tokens) from all the (plenary and committee) protocols held in the Israeli parliament between 1998 and 2022. Sentences are annotated with morpho-syntactic information and are associated with detailed meta-information reflecting demographic and political properties of the speakers, based on a large database of parliament members and factions that we compiled. We discuss the structure and composition of the corpus and the various processing steps we applied to it. To demonstrate the utility of this novel dataset we present two use cases. We show that the corpus can be used to examine historical developments in the style of political discussions by showing a reduction in lexical richness in the proceedings over time. We also investigate some differences between the styles of men and women speakers. These use cases exemplify the potential of the corpus to shed light on important trends in the Israeli society, supporting research in linguistics, political science, communication, law, etc.

Recent advances in the area of legal information systems have led to a variety of applications that promise support in processing and accessing legal documents. Unfortunately, these applications have various limitations, e.g., regarding scope or extensibility. Furthermore, we do not observe a trend towards open access in digital libraries in the legal domain as we observe in other domains, e.g., economics of computer science. To improve open access in the legal domain, we present our approach for an open source platform to transparently process and access Legal Open Data. This enables the sustainable development of legal applications by offering a single technology stack. Moreover, the approach facilitates the development and deployment of new technologies. As proof of concept, we implemented six technologies and generated metadata for more than 250,000 German laws and court decisions. Thus, we can provide users of our platform not only access to legal documents, but also the contained information.

How should text dataset sizes be compared across languages? Even for content-matched (parallel) corpora, UTF-8 encoded text can require a dramatically different number of bytes for different languages. In our work, we define the byte premium between two languages as the ratio of bytes used to encode content-matched text in those languages. We compute byte premiums for 1155 languages, and we use linear regressions to estimate byte premiums for other languages. We release a tool to obtain byte premiums for any two languages, enabling comparisons of dataset sizes across languages for more equitable multilingual model development and data practices.

This explainer document aims to provide an overview of the current state of the rapidly expanding work on synthetic data technologies, with a particular focus on privacy. The article is intended for a non-technical audience, though some formal definitions have been given to provide clarity to specialists. This article is intended to enable the reader to quickly become familiar with the notion of synthetic data, as well as understand some of the subtle intricacies that come with it. We do believe that synthetic data is a very useful tool, and our hope is that this report highlights that, while drawing attention to nuances that can easily be overlooked in its deployment.

This paper presents a new synthetic dataset of ID and travel documents, called SIDTD. The SIDTD dataset is created to help training and evaluating forged ID documents detection systems. Such a dataset has become a necessity as ID documents contain personal information and a public dataset of real documents can not be released. Moreover, forged documents are scarce, compared to legit ones, and the way they are generated varies from one fraudster to another resulting in a class of high intra-variability. In this paper we trained state-of-the-art models on this dataset and we compare them to the performance achieved in larger, but private, datasets. The creation of this dataset will help to document image analysis community to progress in the task of ID document verification.

The university management is perpetually in the process of innovating policies to improve the quality of service. Intellectual growth of the students, the popularity of university are some of the major areas that management strives to improve upon. Relevant historical data is needed in support of taking any decision. Furthermore, providing data to various university ranking frameworks is a frequent activity in recent years. The format of such requirement changes frequently which requires efficient manual effort. Maintaining a data warehouse can be a solution to this problem. However, both in-house and outsourced implementation of a dedicated data warehouse may not be a cost-effective and smart solution. This work proposes an educational data warehouse as a service (eDWaaS) model to store historical data for multiple universities. The proposed multi-tenant schema facilitates the universities to maintain their data warehouse in a cost-effective solution. It also addresses the scalability issues in implementing such data warehouse as a service model.

Large language models have led to remarkable progress on many NLP tasks, and researchers are turning to ever-larger text corpora to train them. Some of the largest corpora available are made by scraping significant portions of the internet, and are frequently introduced with only minimal documentation. In this work we provide some of the first documentation for the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4; Raffel et al., 2020), a dataset created by applying a set of filters to a single snapshot of Common Crawl. We begin by investigating where the data came from, and find a significant amount of text from unexpected sources like patents and US military websites. Then we explore the content of the text itself, and find machine-generated text (e.g., from machine translation systems) and evaluation examples from other benchmark NLP datasets. To understand the impact of the filters applied to create this dataset, we evaluate the text that was removed, and show that blocklist filtering disproportionately removes text from and about minority individuals. Finally, we conclude with some recommendations for how to created and document web-scale datasets from a scrape of the internet.

Text-to-SQL parsing, which aims at converting natural language instructions into executable SQLs, has gained increasing attention in recent years. In particular, Codex and ChatGPT have shown impressive results in this task. However, most of the prevalent benchmarks, i.e., Spider, and WikiSQL, focus on database schema with few rows of database contents leaving the gap between academic study and real-world applications. To mitigate this gap, we present Bird, a big benchmark for large-scale database grounded in text-to-SQL tasks, containing 12,751 pairs of text-to-SQL data and 95 databases with a total size of 33.4 GB, spanning 37 professional domains. Our emphasis on database values highlights the new challenges of dirty database contents, external knowledge between NL questions and database contents, and SQL efficiency, particularly in the context of massive databases. To solve these problems, text-to-SQL models must feature database value comprehension in addition to semantic parsing. The experimental results demonstrate the significance of database values in generating accurate text-to-SQLs for big databases. Furthermore, even the most effective text-to-SQL models, i.e. ChatGPT, only achieves 40.08% in execution accuracy, which is still far from the human result of 92.96%, proving that challenges still stand. Besides, we also provide an efficiency analysis to offer insights into generating text-to-efficient-SQLs that are beneficial to industries. We believe that BIRD will contribute to advancing real-world applications of text-to-SQL research. The leaderboard and source code are available: https://bird-bench.github.io/.

Utilizing large language models (LLMs) for transforming natural language questions into SQL queries (text-to-SQL) is a promising yet challenging approach, particularly when applied to real-world databases with complex and extensive schemas. In particular, effectively incorporating data catalogs and database values for SQL generation remains an obstacle, leading to suboptimal solutions. We address this problem by proposing a new pipeline that effectively retrieves relevant data and context, selects an efficient schema, and synthesizes correct and efficient SQL queries. To increase retrieval precision, our pipeline introduces a hierarchical retrieval method leveraging model-generated keywords, locality-sensitive hashing indexing, and vector databases. Additionally, we have developed an adaptive schema pruning technique that adjusts based on the complexity of the problem and the model's context size. Our approach generalizes to both frontier proprietary models like GPT-4 and open-source models such as Llama-3-70B. Through a series of ablation studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of each component of our pipeline and its impact on the end-to-end performance. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the cross-domain challenging BIRD dataset.

Tabular data, a prevalent data type across various domains, presents unique challenges due to its heterogeneous nature and complex structural relationships. Achieving high predictive performance and robustness in tabular data analysis holds significant promise for numerous applications. Influenced by recent advancements in natural language processing, particularly transformer architectures, new methods for tabular data modeling have emerged. Early techniques concentrated on pre-training transformers from scratch, often encountering scalability issues. Subsequently, methods leveraging pre-trained language models like BERT have been developed, which require less data and yield enhanced performance. The recent advent of large language models, such as GPT and LLaMA, has further revolutionized the field, facilitating more advanced and diverse applications with minimal fine-tuning. Despite the growing interest, a comprehensive survey of language modeling techniques for tabular data remains absent. This paper fills this gap by providing a systematic review of the development of language modeling for tabular data, encompassing: (1) a categorization of different tabular data structures and data types; (2) a review of key datasets used in model training and tasks used for evaluation; (3) a summary of modeling techniques including widely-adopted data processing methods, popular architectures, and training objectives; (4) the evolution from adapting traditional Pre-training/Pre-trained language models to the utilization of large language models; (5) an identification of persistent challenges and potential future research directions in language modeling for tabular data analysis. GitHub page associated with this survey is available at: https://github.com/lanxiang1017/Language-Modeling-on-Tabular-Data-Survey.git.

Natural language interfaces often require supervised data to translate user requests into programs, database queries, or other structured intent representations. During data collection, it can be difficult to anticipate and formalize the full range of user needs -- for example, in a system designed to handle simple requests (like find my meetings tomorrow or move my meeting with my manager to noon), users may also express more elaborate requests (like swap all my calls on Monday and Tuesday). We introduce an approach for equipping a simple language-to-code model to handle complex utterances via a process of hierarchical natural language decomposition. Our approach uses a pre-trained language model to decompose a complex utterance into a sequence of smaller natural language steps, then interprets each step using the language-to-code model. To test our approach, we collect and release DeCU -- a new NL-to-program benchmark to evaluate Decomposition of Complex Utterances. Experiments show that the proposed approach enables the interpretation of complex utterances with almost no complex training data, while outperforming standard few-shot prompting approaches.

Passage ranking involves two stages: passage retrieval and passage re-ranking, which are important and challenging topics for both academics and industries in the area of Information Retrieval (IR). However, the commonly-used datasets for passage ranking usually focus on the English language. For non-English scenarios, such as Chinese, the existing datasets are limited in terms of data scale, fine-grained relevance annotation and false negative issues. To address this problem, we introduce T2Ranking, a large-scale Chinese benchmark for passage ranking. T2Ranking comprises more than 300K queries and over 2M unique passages from real-world search engines. Expert annotators are recruited to provide 4-level graded relevance scores (fine-grained) for query-passage pairs instead of binary relevance judgments (coarse-grained). To ease the false negative issues, more passages with higher diversities are considered when performing relevance annotations, especially in the test set, to ensure a more accurate evaluation. Apart from the textual query and passage data, other auxiliary resources are also provided, such as query types and XML files of documents which passages are generated from, to facilitate further studies. To evaluate the dataset, commonly used ranking models are implemented and tested on T2Ranking as baselines. The experimental results show that T2Ranking is challenging and there is still scope for improvement. The full data and all codes are available at https://github.com/THUIR/T2Ranking/

Relational databases often suffer from uninformative descriptors of table contents, such as ambiguous columns and hard-to-interpret values, impacting both human users and Text-to-SQL models. This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) to generate informative column descriptions as a semantic layer for relational databases. Using the BIRD-Bench development set, we created ColSQL, a dataset with gold-standard column descriptions generated and refined by LLMs and human annotators. We evaluated several instruction-tuned models, finding that GPT-4o and Command R+ excelled in generating high-quality descriptions. Additionally, we applied an LLM-as-a-judge to evaluate model performance. Although this method does not align well with human evaluations, we included it to explore its potential and to identify areas for improvement. More work is needed to improve the reliability of automatic evaluations for this task. We also find that detailed column descriptions significantly improve Text-to-SQL execution accuracy, especially when columns are uninformative. This study establishes LLMs as effective tools for generating detailed metadata, enhancing the usability of relational databases.

As part of its scholarly data efforts, the Internet Archive (IA) releases a first version of a citation graph dataset, named refcat, derived from scholarly publications and additional data sources. It is composed of data gathered by the fatcat cataloging project (the catalog that underpins IA Scholar), related web-scale crawls targeting primary and secondary scholarly outputs, as well as metadata from the Open Library project and Wikipedia. This first version of the graph consists of over 1.3B citations. We release this dataset under a CC0 Public Domain Dedication, accessible through Internet Archive. The source code used for the derivation process, including exact and fuzzy citation matching, is released under an MIT license. The goal of this report is to describe briefly the current contents and the derivation of the dataset.

Recent significant improvements in speech and language technologies come both from self-supervised approaches over raw language data as well as various types of explicit supervision. To ensure high-quality processing of spoken data, the most useful type of explicit supervision is still the alignment between the speech signal and its corresponding text transcript, which is a data type that is not available for many languages. In this paper, we present our approach to building large and open speech-and-text-aligned datasets of less-resourced languages based on transcripts of parliamentary proceedings and their recordings. Our starting point are the ParlaMint comparable corpora of transcripts of parliamentary proceedings of 26 national European parliaments. In the pilot run on expanding the ParlaMint corpora with aligned publicly available recordings, we focus on three Slavic languages, namely Croatian, Polish, and Serbian. The main challenge of our approach is the lack of any global alignment between the ParlaMint texts and the available recordings, as well as the sometimes varying data order in each of the modalities, which requires a novel approach in aligning long sequences of text and audio in a large search space. The results of this pilot run are three high-quality datasets that span more than 5,000 hours of speech and accompanying text transcripts. Although these datasets already make a huge difference in the availability of spoken and textual data for the three languages, we want to emphasize the potential of the presented approach in building similar datasets for many more languages.

This paper introduces a new suite of question answering datasets for Norwegian; NorOpenBookQA, NorCommonSenseQA, NorTruthfulQA, and NRK-Quiz-QA. The data covers a wide range of skills and knowledge domains, including world knowledge, commonsense reasoning, truthfulness, and knowledge about Norway. Covering both of the written standards of Norwegian - Bokm{\aa}l and Nynorsk - our datasets comprise over 10k question-answer pairs, created by native speakers. We detail our dataset creation approach and present the results of evaluating 11 language models (LMs) in zero- and few-shot regimes. Most LMs perform better in Bokm{\aa}l than Nynorsk, struggle most with commonsense reasoning, and are often untruthful in generating answers to questions. All our datasets and annotation materials are publicly available.

We consider the problem of translating high-level textual descriptions to formal representations in technical documentation as part of an effort to model the meaning of such documentation. We focus specifically on the problem of learning translational correspondences between text descriptions and grounded representations in the target documentation, such as formal representation of functions or code templates. Our approach exploits the parallel nature of such documentation, or the tight coupling between high-level text and the low-level representations we aim to learn. Data is collected by mining technical documents for such parallel text-representation pairs, which we use to train a simple semantic parsing model. We report new baseline results on sixteen novel datasets, including the standard library documentation for nine popular programming languages across seven natural languages, and a small collection of Unix utility manuals.

This paper presents BOUQuET, a multicentric and multi-register/domain dataset and benchmark, and its broader collaborative extension initiative. This dataset is handcrafted in non-English languages first, each of these source languages being represented among the 23 languages commonly used by half of the world's population and therefore having the potential to serve as pivot languages that will enable more accurate translations. The dataset is specially designed to avoid contamination and be multicentric, so as to enforce representation of multilingual language features. In addition, the dataset goes beyond the sentence level, as it is organized in paragraphs of various lengths. Compared with related machine translation (MT) datasets, we show that BOUQuET has a broader representation of domains while simplifying the translation task for non-experts. Therefore, BOUQuET is specially suitable for the open initiative and call for translation participation that we are launching to extend it to a multi-way parallel corpus to any written language.

As research and industry moves towards large-scale models capable of numerous downstream tasks, the complexity of understanding multi-modal datasets that give nuance to models rapidly increases. A clear and thorough understanding of a dataset's origins, development, intent, ethical considerations and evolution becomes a necessary step for the responsible and informed deployment of models, especially those in people-facing contexts and high-risk domains. However, the burden of this understanding often falls on the intelligibility, conciseness, and comprehensiveness of the documentation. It requires consistency and comparability across the documentation of all datasets involved, and as such documentation must be treated as a user-centric product in and of itself. In this paper, we propose Data Cards for fostering transparent, purposeful and human-centered documentation of datasets within the practical contexts of industry and research. Data Cards are structured summaries of essential facts about various aspects of ML datasets needed by stakeholders across a dataset's lifecycle for responsible AI development. These summaries provide explanations of processes and rationales that shape the data and consequently the models, such as upstream sources, data collection and annotation methods; training and evaluation methods, intended use; or decisions affecting model performance. We also present frameworks that ground Data Cards in real-world utility and human-centricity. Using two case studies, we report on desirable characteristics that support adoption across domains, organizational structures, and audience groups. Finally, we present lessons learned from deploying over 20 Data Cards.

This paper provides a taxonomy for the licensing of data in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The paper's goal is to build towards a common framework for data licensing akin to the licensing of open source software. Increased transparency and resolving conceptual ambiguities in existing licensing language are two noted benefits of the approach proposed in the paper. In parallel, such benefits may help foster fairer and more efficient markets for data through bringing about clearer tools and concepts that better define how data can be used in the fields of AI and ML. The paper's approach is summarized in a new family of data license language - the Montreal Data License (MDL). Alongside this new license, the authors and their collaborators have developed a web-based tool to generate license language espousing the taxonomies articulated in this paper.

When re-finding items, users who forget or are uncertain about identifying details often rely on creative strategies for expressing their information needs -- complex queries that describe content elements (e.g., book characters or events), information beyond the document text (e.g., descriptions of book covers), or personal context (e.g., when they read a book). This retrieval setting, called tip of the tongue (TOT), is especially challenging for models heavily reliant on lexical and semantic overlap between query and document text. In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective framework for handling such complex queries by decomposing the query into individual clues, routing those as sub-queries to specialized retrievers, and ensembling the results. This approach allows us to take advantage of off-the-shelf retrievers (e.g., CLIP for retrieving images of book covers) or incorporate retriever-specific logic (e.g., date constraints). We show that our framework incorportating query decompositions into retrievers can improve gold book recall up to 7% relative again for Recall@5 on a new collection of 14,441 real-world query-book pairs from an online community for resolving TOT inquiries.

As the complexity of robot systems increases, it becomes more effective to simulate them before deployment. To do this, a model of the robot's kinematics or dynamics is required, and the most commonly used format is the Unified Robot Description Format (URDF). This article presents, to our knowledge, the first dataset of URDF files from various industrial and research organizations, with metadata describing each robot, its type, manufacturer, and the source of the model. The dataset contains 322 URDF files of which 195 are unique robot models, meaning the excess URDFs are either of a robot that is multiply defined across sources or URDF variants of the same robot. We analyze the files in the dataset, where we, among other things, provide information on how they were generated, which mesh file types are most commonly used, and compare models of multiply defined robots. The intention of this article is to build a foundation of knowledge on URDF and how it is used based on publicly available URDF files. Publishing the dataset, analysis, and the scripts and tools used enables others using, researching or developing URDFs to easily access this data and use it in their own work.

We focus on electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), aiming to improve access and expand their utility, since more than 6 million are publicly available, and they constitute an important corpus to aid research and education across disciplines. The corpus is growing as new born-digital documents are included, and since millions of older theses and dissertations have been converted to digital form to be disseminated electronically in institutional repositories. In ETDs, as with other scholarly works, figures and tables can communicate a large amount of information in a concise way. Although methods have been proposed for extracting figures and tables from born-digital PDFs, they do not work well with scanned ETDs. Considering this problem, our assessment of state-of-the-art figure extraction systems is that the reason they do not function well on scanned PDFs is that they have only been trained on born-digital documents. To address this limitation, we present ScanBank, a new dataset containing 10 thousand scanned page images, manually labeled by humans as to the presence of the 3.3 thousand figures or tables found therein. We use this dataset to train a deep neural network model based on YOLOv5 to accurately extract figures and tables from scanned ETDs. We pose and answer important research questions aimed at finding better methods for figure extraction from scanned documents. One of those concerns the value for training, of data augmentation techniques applied to born-digital documents which are used to train models better suited for figure extraction from scanned documents. To the best of our knowledge, ScanBank is the first manually annotated dataset for figure and table extraction for scanned ETDs. A YOLOv5-based model, trained on ScanBank, outperforms existing comparable open-source and freely available baseline methods by a considerable margin.

The legality of training language models (LMs) on copyrighted or otherwise restricted data is under intense debate. However, as we show, model performance significantly degrades if trained only on low-risk text (e.g., out-of-copyright books or government documents), due to its limited size and domain coverage. We present SILO, a new language model that manages this risk-performance tradeoff during inference. SILO is built by (1) training a parametric LM on Open License Corpus (OLC), a new corpus we curate with 228B tokens of public domain and permissively licensed text and (2) augmenting it with a more general and easily modifiable nonparametric datastore (e.g., containing copyrighted books or news) that is only queried during inference. The datastore allows use of high-risk data without training on it, supports sentence-level data attribution, and enables data producers to opt out from the model by removing content from the store. These capabilities can foster compliance with data-use regulations such as the fair use doctrine in the United States and the GDPR in the European Union. Our experiments show that the parametric LM struggles on domains not covered by OLC. However, access to the datastore greatly improves out of domain performance, closing 90% of the performance gap with an LM trained on the Pile, a more diverse corpus with mostly high-risk text. We also analyze which nonparametric approach works best, where the remaining errors lie, and how performance scales with datastore size. Our results suggest that it is possible to build high quality language models while mitigating their legal risk.

We present a shared data model for enabling data science in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The model captures students interactions with the online platform. The data model is platform agnostic and is based on some basic core actions that students take on an online learning platform. Students usually interact with the platform in four different modes: Observing, Submitting, Collaborating and giving feedback. In observing mode students are simply browsing the online platform, watching videos, reading material, reading book or watching forums. In submitting mode, students submit information to the platform. This includes submissions towards quizzes, homeworks, or any assessment modules. In collaborating mode students interact with other students or instructors on forums, collaboratively editing wiki or chatting on google hangout or other hangout venues. With this basic definitions of activities, and a data model to store events pertaining to these activities, we then create a common terminology to map Coursera and edX data into this shared data model. This shared data model called MOOCdb becomes the foundation for a number of collaborative frameworks that enable progress in data science without the need to share the data.

We here summarize our experience running a challenge with open data for musical genre recognition. Those notes motivate the task and the challenge design, show some statistics about the submissions, and present the results.

I introduce a new large-scale dataset of historical wire articles from U.S. Southern newspapers, spanning 1960-1975 and covering multiple wire services: The Associated Press, United Press International, Newspaper Enterprise Association. Unlike prior work focusing on front-page content, this dataset captures articles across the entire newspaper, offering broader insight into mid-century Southern coverage. The dataset includes a version that has undergone an LLM-based text cleanup pipeline to reduce OCR noise, enhancing its suitability for quantitative text analysis. Additionally, duplicate versions of articles are retained to enable analysis of editorial differences in language and framing across newspapers. Each article is tagged by wire service, facilitating comparative studies of editorial patterns across agencies. This resource opens new avenues for research in computational social science, digital humanities, and historical linguistics, providing a detailed perspective on how Southern newspapers relayed national and international news during a transformative period in American history. The dataset will be made available upon publication or request for research purposes.

Teachers and students are increasingly relying on online learning resources to supplement the ones provided in school. This increase in the breadth and depth of available resources is a great thing for students, but only provided they are able to find answers to their queries. Question-answering and information retrieval systems have benefited from public datasets to train and evaluate their algorithms, but most of these datasets have been in English text written by and for adults. We introduce a new public French question-answering dataset collected from Alloprof, a Quebec-based primary and high-school help website, containing 29 349 questions and their explanations in a variety of school subjects from 10 368 students, with more than half of the explanations containing links to other questions or some of the 2 596 reference pages on the website. We also present a case study of this dataset in an information retrieval task. This dataset was collected on the Alloprof public forum, with all questions verified for their appropriateness and the explanations verified both for their appropriateness and their relevance to the question. To predict relevant documents, architectures using pre-trained BERT models were fine-tuned and evaluated. This dataset will allow researchers to develop question-answering, information retrieval and other algorithms specifically for the French speaking education context. Furthermore, the range of language proficiency, images, mathematical symbols and spelling mistakes will necessitate algorithms based on a multimodal comprehension. The case study we present as a baseline shows an approach that relies on recent techniques provides an acceptable performance level, but more work is necessary before it can reliably be used and trusted in a production setting.

We analyze the growth of dataset sizes used in machine learning for natural language processing and computer vision, and extrapolate these using two methods; using the historical growth rate and estimating the compute-optimal dataset size for future predicted compute budgets. We investigate the growth in data usage by estimating the total stock of unlabeled data available on the internet over the coming decades. Our analysis indicates that the stock of high-quality language data will be exhausted soon; likely before 2026. By contrast, the stock of low-quality language data and image data will be exhausted only much later; between 2030 and 2050 (for low-quality language) and between 2030 and 2060 (for images). Our work suggests that the current trend of ever-growing ML models that rely on enormous datasets might slow down if data efficiency is not drastically improved or new sources of data become available.

We survey clinical document corpora, with focus on German textual data. Due to rigid data privacy legislation in Germany these resources, with only few exceptions, are stored in safe clinical data spaces and locked against clinic-external researchers. This situation stands in stark contrast with established workflows in the field of natural language processing where easy accessibility and reuse of data collections are common practice. Hence, alternative corpus designs have been examined to escape from this data poverty. Besides machine translation of English clinical datasets and the generation of synthetic corpora with fictitious clinical contents, several other types of domain proxies have come up as substitutes for authentic clinical documents. Common instances of close proxies are medical journal publications, clinical therapy guidelines, drug labels, etc., more distant proxies include online encyclopedic medical articles or medical contents from social media channels. After PRISM-conformant screening of 359 hits from four bibliographic systems, 75 relevant documents were finally selected for this review and 59 distinct corpora were determined. We identified 24 real clinical corpora (from 40 publications) out of which only 5 are publicly distributable. 2 translations of real corpora and 3 synthetic ones complement the set of clinical corpora. 14 corpora were categorized as close domain proxies, 16 as distant ones. There is a clear divide between the large number of non-accessible authentic clinical German-language corpora and their publicly accessible substitutes: translated or synthetic, close or more distant proxies. So on first sight, the data bottleneck seems broken. Intuitively yet, differences in genre-specific writing style, wording and medical domain expertise in this typological space are also obvious. This raises the question how valid alternative corpus designs really are.

Open-source large language models are becoming increasingly available and popular among researchers and practitioners. While significant progress has been made on open-weight models, open training data is a practice yet to be adopted by the leading open-weight models creators. At the same time, there researchers are working to make language models safer. We propose a data curation pipeline to reduce harmful outputs by models trained on public domain data. There are unique challenges to working with public domain data, as these sources differ from web text in both form and content. Many sources are historical documents and are the result of Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Consequently, current state-of-the-art approaches to toxicity filtering are often infeasible or inappropriate for open data models. In this paper, we introduce a new fully open-source pipeline for open-data toxicity filtering. Our contributions are threefold. We create a custom training dataset, ToxicCommons, which is composed of texts which have been classified across five different dimensions (racial/origin-based, gender/sex-based, religious, ability-based discrimination, and violence). We use this dataset to train a custom classifier, Celadon, that can be used to detect toxic content in open data more efficiently at a larger scale. Finally, we describe the balanced approach to content filtration that optimizes safety filtering with respect to the filtered data available for training.

Data scientists today search large data lakes to discover and integrate datasets. In order to bring together disparate data sources, dataset discovery methods rely on some form of schema matching: the process of establishing correspondences between datasets. Traditionally, schema matching has been used to find matching pairs of columns between a source and a target schema. However, the use of schema matching in dataset discovery methods differs from its original use. Nowadays schema matching serves as a building block for indicating and ranking inter-dataset relationships. Surprisingly, although a discovery method's success relies highly on the quality of the underlying matching algorithms, the latest discovery methods employ existing schema matching algorithms in an ad-hoc fashion due to the lack of openly-available datasets with ground truth, reference method implementations, and evaluation metrics. In this paper, we aim to rectify the problem of evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of schema matching methods for the specific needs of dataset discovery. To this end, we propose Valentine, an extensible open-source experiment suite to execute and organize large-scale automated matching experiments on tabular data. Valentine includes implementations of seminal schema matching methods that we either implemented from scratch (due to absence of open source code) or imported from open repositories. The contributions of Valentine are: i) the definition of four schema matching scenarios as encountered in dataset discovery methods, ii) a principled dataset fabrication process tailored to the scope of dataset discovery methods and iii) the most comprehensive evaluation of schema matching techniques to date, offering insight on the strengths and weaknesses of existing techniques, that can serve as a guide for employing schema matching in future dataset discovery methods.

We describe a dataset developed for Named Entity Recognition in German federal court decisions. It consists of approx. 67,000 sentences with over 2 million tokens. The resource contains 54,000 manually annotated entities, mapped to 19 fine-grained semantic classes: person, judge, lawyer, country, city, street, landscape, organization, company, institution, court, brand, law, ordinance, European legal norm, regulation, contract, court decision, and legal literature. The legal documents were, furthermore, automatically annotated with more than 35,000 TimeML-based time expressions. The dataset, which is available under a CC-BY 4.0 license in the CoNNL-2002 format, was developed for training an NER service for German legal documents in the EU project Lynx.

Data preparation is the first and a very important step towards any Large Language Model (LLM) development. This paper introduces an easy-to-use, extensible, and scale-flexible open-source data preparation toolkit called Data Prep Kit (DPK). DPK is architected and designed to enable users to scale their data preparation to their needs. With DPK they can prepare data on a local machine or effortlessly scale to run on a cluster with thousands of CPU Cores. DPK comes with a highly scalable, yet extensible set of modules that transform natural language and code data. If the user needs additional transforms, they can be easily developed using extensive DPK support for transform creation. These modules can be used independently or pipelined to perform a series of operations. In this paper, we describe DPK architecture and show its performance from a small scale to a very large number of CPUs. The modules from DPK have been used for the preparation of Granite Models [1] [2]. We believe DPK is a valuable contribution to the AI community to easily prepare data to enhance the performance of their LLM models or to fine-tune models with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).

Accurate and efficient record linkage is an open challenge of particular relevance to Australian Government Agencies, who recognise that so-called wicked social problems are best tackled by forming partnerships founded on large-scale data fusion. Names and addresses are the most common attributes on which data from different government agencies can be linked. In this paper, we focus on the problem of address linking. Linkage is particularly problematic when the data has significant quality issues. The most common approach for dealing with quality issues is to standardise raw data prior to linking. If a mistake is made in standardisation, however, it is usually impossible to recover from it to perform linkage correctly. This paper proposes a novel algorithm for address linking that is particularly practical for linking large disparate sets of addresses, being highly scalable, robust to data quality issues and simple to implement. It obviates the need for labour intensive and problematic address standardisation. We demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithm by matching two large address datasets from two government agencies with good accuracy and computational efficiency.

The field of visually rich document understanding (VRDU) aims to solve a multitude of well-researched NLP tasks in a multi-modal domain. Several datasets exist for research on specific tasks of VRDU such as document classification (DC), key entity extraction (KEE), entity linking, visual question answering (VQA), inter alia. These datasets cover documents like invoices and receipts with sparse annotations such that they support one or two co-related tasks (e.g., entity extraction and entity linking). Unfortunately, only focusing on a single specific of documents or task is not representative of how documents often need to be processed in the wild - where variety in style and requirements is expected. In this paper, we introduce BuDDIE (Business Document Dataset for Information Extraction), the first multi-task dataset of 1,665 real-world business documents that contains rich and dense annotations for DC, KEE, and VQA. Our dataset consists of publicly available business entity documents from US state government websites. The documents are structured and vary in their style and layout across states and types (e.g., forms, certificates, reports, etc.). We provide data variety and quality metrics for BuDDIE as well as a series of baselines for each task. Our baselines cover traditional textual, multi-modal, and large language model approaches to VRDU.

We present Public Domain 12M (PD12M), a dataset of 12.4 million high-quality public domain and CC0-licensed images with synthetic captions, designed for training text-to-image models. PD12M is the largest public domain image-text dataset to date, with sufficient size to train foundation models while minimizing copyright concerns. Through the Source.Plus platform, we also introduce novel, community-driven dataset governance mechanisms that reduce harm and support reproducibility over time.

Dense retrieval has become a prominent method to obtain relevant context or world knowledge in open-domain NLP tasks. When we use a learned dense retriever on a retrieval corpus at inference time, an often-overlooked design choice is the retrieval unit in which the corpus is indexed, e.g. document, passage, or sentence. We discover that the retrieval unit choice significantly impacts the performance of both retrieval and downstream tasks. Distinct from the typical approach of using passages or sentences, we introduce a novel retrieval unit, proposition, for dense retrieval. Propositions are defined as atomic expressions within text, each encapsulating a distinct factoid and presented in a concise, self-contained natural language format. We conduct an empirical comparison of different retrieval granularity. Our results reveal that proposition-based retrieval significantly outperforms traditional passage or sentence-based methods in dense retrieval. Moreover, retrieval by proposition also enhances the performance of downstream QA tasks, since the retrieved texts are more condensed with question-relevant information, reducing the need for lengthy input tokens and minimizing the inclusion of extraneous, irrelevant information.

The translation of natural language questions to SQL queries has attracted growing attention, in particular in connection with transformers and similar language models. A large number of techniques are geared towards the English language; in this work, we thus investigated translation to SQL when input questions are given in the Portuguese language. To do so, we properly adapted state-of-the-art tools and resources. We changed the RAT-SQL+GAP system by relying on a multilingual BART model (we report tests with other language models), and we produced a translated version of the Spider dataset. Our experiments expose interesting phenomena that arise when non-English languages are targeted; in particular, it is better to train with original and translated training datasets together, even if a single target language is desired. This multilingual BART model fine-tuned with a double-size training dataset (English and Portuguese) achieved 83% of the baseline, making inferences for the Portuguese test dataset. This investigation can help other researchers to produce results in Machine Learning in a language different from English. Our multilingual ready version of RAT-SQL+GAP and the data are available, open-sourced as mRAT-SQL+GAP at: https://github.com/C4AI/gap-text2sql

Mathematical reasoning continues to be a critical challenge in large language model (LLM) development with significant interest. However, most of the cutting-edge progress in mathematical reasoning with LLMs has become closed-source due to lack of access to training data. This lack of data access limits researchers from understanding the impact of different choices for synthesizing and utilizing the data. With the goal of creating a high-quality finetuning (SFT) dataset for math reasoning, we conduct careful ablation experiments on data synthesis using the recently released Llama3.1 family of models. Our experiments show that: (a) solution format matters, with excessively verbose solutions proving detrimental to SFT performance, (b) data generated by a strong teacher outperforms on-policy data generated by a weak student model, (c) SFT is robust to low-quality solutions, allowing for imprecise data filtering, and (d) question diversity is crucial for achieving data scaling gains. Based on these insights, we create the OpenMathInstruct-2 dataset, which consists of 14M question-solution pairs (approx 600K unique questions), making it nearly eight times larger than the previous largest open-source math reasoning dataset. Finetuning the Llama-3.1-8B-Base using OpenMathInstruct-2 outperforms Llama3.1-8B-Instruct on MATH by an absolute 15.9\% (51.9\% rightarrow 67.8\%). Finally, to accelerate the open-source efforts, we release the code, the finetuned models, and the OpenMathInstruct-2 dataset under a commercially permissive license.

Foundation models, particularly those that incorporate Transformer architectures, have demonstrated exceptional performance in domains such as natural language processing and image processing. Adapting these models to structured data, like tables, however, introduces significant challenges. These difficulties are even more pronounced when addressing multi-table data linked via foreign key, which is prevalent in the enterprise realm and crucial for empowering business use cases. Despite its substantial impact, research focusing on such linked business tables within enterprise settings remains a significantly important yet underexplored domain. To address this, we introduce a curated dataset sourced from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, featuring extensive linked tables. This dataset is specifically designed to support research endeavors in table representation learning. By providing access to authentic enterprise data, our goal is to potentially enhance the effectiveness and applicability of models for real-world business contexts.

This study constructed a Japanese chat dataset for tuning large language models (LLMs), which consist of about 8.4 million records. Recently, LLMs have been developed and gaining popularity. However, high-performing LLMs are usually mainly for English. There are two ways to support languages other than English by those LLMs: constructing LLMs from scratch or tuning existing models. However, in both ways, datasets are necessary parts. In this study, we focused on supporting Japanese in those LLMs and making a dataset for training or tuning LLMs in Japanese. The dataset we constructed consisted of various tasks, such as translation and knowledge tasks. In our experiment, we tuned an existing LLM using our dataset and evaluated the performance qualitatively. The results suggest that our dataset is possibly beneficial for LLMs. However, we also revealed some difficulties in constructing LLMs in languages other than English.

Although the fairness community has recognized the importance of data, researchers in the area primarily rely on UCI Adult when it comes to tabular data. Derived from a 1994 US Census survey, this dataset has appeared in hundreds of research papers where it served as the basis for the development and comparison of many algorithmic fairness interventions. We reconstruct a superset of the UCI Adult data from available US Census sources and reveal idiosyncrasies of the UCI Adult dataset that limit its external validity. Our primary contribution is a suite of new datasets derived from US Census surveys that extend the existing data ecosystem for research on fair machine learning. We create prediction tasks relating to income, employment, health, transportation, and housing. The data span multiple years and all states of the United States, allowing researchers to study temporal shift and geographic variation. We highlight a broad initial sweep of new empirical insights relating to trade-offs between fairness criteria, performance of algorithmic interventions, and the role of distribution shift based on our new datasets. Our findings inform ongoing debates, challenge some existing narratives, and point to future research directions. Our datasets are available at https://github.com/zykls/folktables.

The task of converting natural language queries into SQL queries is intricate, necessitating a blend of precise techniques for an accurate translation. The DIN-SQL (Decomposed-In-Context SQL) methodology represents a significant development in this domain. This paper introduces DFIN (Decomposed Focused-In-Context), an innovative extension of DIN-SQL that enhances Text-to-SQL conversion by addressing schema linking errors, which are a major source of inaccuracies. DFIN uniquely alternates between prompting techniques and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), adapting to the size and complexity of the database schema. A preprocessing phase embeds database definitions and leverages annotated files, akin to those in the BIRD dataset, facilitating the runtime retrieval of pertinent schema information. This strategy significantly reduces the token count for schema linking prompts, enabling the use of a standard GPT-4 model over its larger context variant, thus handling large-scale databases more effectively and economically. Our evaluation on the BIRD dataset, a challenging real-world benchmark, demonstrates that DFIN not only scales efficiently but also improves accuracy, achieving a score of 51.69. This improvement surpasses DIN-SQL method (the current third-place), which is the highest-ranked model employing in-context learning rather than fine-tuning, previously scoring 50.72. The advancement of DFIN underscores the evolving capabilities of in-context learning methodologies combined with advanced language models, offering a promising avenue for future research in complex Text-to-SQL conversion tasks.

Recent advances in NLP and information retrieval have given rise to a diverse set of question answering tasks that are of different formats (e.g., extractive, abstractive), require different model architectures (e.g., generative, discriminative), and setups (e.g., with or without retrieval). Despite having a large number of powerful, specialized QA pipelines (which we refer to as Skills) that consider a single domain, model or setup, there exists no framework where users can easily explore and compare such pipelines and can extend them according to their needs. To address this issue, we present UKP-SQUARE, an extensible online QA platform for researchers which allows users to query and analyze a large collection of modern Skills via a user-friendly web interface and integrated behavioural tests. In addition, QA researchers can develop, manage, and share their custom Skills using our microservices that support a wide range of models (Transformers, Adapters, ONNX), datastores and retrieval techniques (e.g., sparse and dense). UKP-SQUARE is available on https://square.ukp-lab.de.

Table extraction from document images is a challenging AI problem, and labelled data for many content domains is difficult to come by. Existing table extraction datasets often focus on scientific tables due to the vast amount of academic articles that are readily available, along with their source code. However, there are significant layout and typographical differences between tables found across scientific, financial, and other domains. Current datasets often lack the words, and their positions, contained within the tables, instead relying on unreliable OCR to extract these features for training modern machine learning models on natural language processing tasks. Therefore, there is a need for a more general method of obtaining labelled data. We present SynFinTabs, a large-scale, labelled dataset of synthetic financial tables. Our hope is that our method of generating these synthetic tables is transferable to other domains. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset in training models to extract information from table images, we create FinTabQA, a layout large language model trained on an extractive question-answering task. We test our model using real-world financial tables and compare it to a state-of-the-art generative model and discuss the results. We make the dataset, model, and dataset generation code publicly available.

We present a new dataset, Functional Map of the World (fMoW), which aims to inspire the development of machine learning models capable of predicting the functional purpose of buildings and land use from temporal sequences of satellite images and a rich set of metadata features. The metadata provided with each image enables reasoning about location, time, sun angles, physical sizes, and other features when making predictions about objects in the image. Our dataset consists of over 1 million images from over 200 countries. For each image, we provide at least one bounding box annotation containing one of 63 categories, including a "false detection" category. We present an analysis of the dataset along with baseline approaches that reason about metadata and temporal views. Our data, code, and pretrained models have been made publicly available.

Many AI companies are training their large language models (LLMs) on data without the permission of the copyright owners. The permissibility of doing so varies by jurisdiction: in countries like the EU and Japan, this is allowed under certain restrictions, while in the United States, the legal landscape is more ambiguous. Regardless of the legal status, concerns from creative producers have led to several high-profile copyright lawsuits, and the threat of litigation is commonly cited as a reason for the recent trend towards minimizing the information shared about training datasets by both corporate and public interest actors. This trend in limiting data information causes harm by hindering transparency, accountability, and innovation in the broader ecosystem by denying researchers, auditors, and impacted individuals access to the information needed to understand AI models. While this could be mitigated by training language models on open access and public domain data, at the time of writing, there are no such models (trained at a meaningful scale) due to the substantial technical and sociological challenges in assembling the necessary corpus. These challenges include incomplete and unreliable metadata, the cost and complexity of digitizing physical records, and the diverse set of legal and technical skills required to ensure relevance and responsibility in a quickly changing landscape. Building towards a future where AI systems can be trained on openly licensed data that is responsibly curated and governed requires collaboration across legal, technical, and policy domains, along with investments in metadata standards, digitization, and fostering a culture of openness.

Unequal access to costly datasets essential for empirical research has long hindered researchers from disadvantaged institutions, limiting their ability to contribute to their fields and advance their careers. Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to democratize data access by automating data collection from unstructured sources. We develop and evaluate a novel methodology using GPT-4o-mini within a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework to collect data from corporate disclosures. Our approach achieves human-level accuracy in collecting CEO pay ratios from approximately 10,000 proxy statements and Critical Audit Matters (CAMs) from more than 12,000 10-K filings, with LLM processing times of 9 and 40 minutes respectively, each at a cost under $10. This stands in stark contrast to the hundreds of hours needed for manual collection or the thousands of dollars required for commercial database subscriptions. To foster a more inclusive research community by empowering researchers with limited resources to explore new avenues of inquiry, we share our methodology and the resulting datasets.

We have now entered the era of trillion parameter machine learning models trained on billion-sized datasets scraped from the internet. The rise of these gargantuan datasets has given rise to formidable bodies of critical work that has called for caution while generating these large datasets. These address concerns surrounding the dubious curation practices used to generate these datasets, the sordid quality of alt-text data available on the world wide web, the problematic content of the CommonCrawl dataset often used as a source for training large language models, and the entrenched biases in large-scale visio-linguistic models (such as OpenAI's CLIP model) trained on opaque datasets (WebImageText). In the backdrop of these specific calls of caution, we examine the recently released LAION-400M dataset, which is a CLIP-filtered dataset of Image-Alt-text pairs parsed from the Common-Crawl dataset. We found that the dataset contains, troublesome and explicit images and text pairs of rape, pornography, malign stereotypes, racist and ethnic slurs, and other extremely problematic content. We outline numerous implications, concerns and downstream harms regarding the current state of large scale datasets while raising open questions for various stakeholders including the AI community, regulators, policy makers and data subjects.

Tabular data (or tables) are the most widely used data format in machine learning (ML). However, ML models often assume the table structure keeps fixed in training and testing. Before ML modeling, heavy data cleaning is required to merge disparate tables with different columns. This preprocessing often incurs significant data waste (e.g., removing unmatched columns and samples). How to learn ML models from multiple tables with partially overlapping columns? How to incrementally update ML models as more columns become available over time? Can we leverage model pretraining on multiple distinct tables? How to train an ML model which can predict on an unseen table? To answer all those questions, we propose to relax fixed table structures by introducing a Transferable Tabular Transformer (TransTab) for tables. The goal of TransTab is to convert each sample (a row in the table) to a generalizable embedding vector, and then apply stacked transformers for feature encoding. One methodology insight is combining column description and table cells as the raw input to a gated transformer model. The other insight is to introduce supervised and self-supervised pretraining to improve model performance. We compare TransTab with multiple baseline methods on diverse benchmark datasets and five oncology clinical trial datasets. Overall, TransTab ranks 1.00, 1.00, 1.78 out of 12 methods in supervised learning, feature incremental learning, and transfer learning scenarios, respectively; and the proposed pretraining leads to 2.3% AUC lift on average over the supervised learning.

Augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) for Question Answering (QA) with domain specific data has attracted wide attention. However, domain data often exists in a hybrid format, including text and semi-structured tables, posing challenges for the seamless integration of information. Table-to-Text Generation is a promising solution by facilitating the transformation of hybrid data into a uniformly text-formatted corpus. Although this technique has been widely studied by the NLP community, there is currently no comparative analysis on how corpora generated by different table-to-text methods affect the performance of QA systems. In this paper, we address this research gap in two steps. First, we innovatively integrate table-to-text generation into the framework of enhancing LLM-based QA systems with domain hybrid data. Then, we utilize this framework in real-world industrial data to conduct extensive experiments on two types of QA systems (DSFT and RAG frameworks) with four representative methods: Markdown format, Template serialization, TPLM-based method, and LLM-based method. Based on the experimental results, we draw some empirical findings and explore the underlying reasons behind the success of some methods. We hope the findings of this work will provide a valuable reference for the academic and industrial communities in developing robust QA systems.

Statutory article retrieval plays a crucial role in making legal information more accessible to both laypeople and legal professionals. Multilingual countries like Belgium present unique challenges for retrieval models due to the need for handling legal issues in multiple languages. Building on the Belgian Statutory Article Retrieval Dataset (BSARD) in French, we introduce the bilingual version of this dataset, bBSARD. The dataset contains parallel Belgian statutory articles in both French and Dutch, along with legal questions from BSARD and their Dutch translation. Using bBSARD, we conduct extensive benchmarking of retrieval models available for Dutch and French. Our benchmarking setup includes lexical models, zero-shot dense models, and fine-tuned small foundation models. Our experiments show that BM25 remains a competitive baseline compared to many zero-shot dense models in both languages. We also observe that while proprietary models outperform open alternatives in the zero-shot setting, they can be matched or surpassed by fine-tuning small language-specific models. Our dataset and evaluation code are publicly available.

Recent advancements in the field of natural language processing (NLP) and especially large language models (LLMs) and their numerous applications have brought research attention to design of different document processing tools and enhancements in the process of document archiving, search and retrieval. Domain of official, legal documents is especially interesting due to vast amount of data generated on the daily basis, as well as the significant community of interested practitioners (lawyers, law offices, administrative workers, state institutions and citizens). Providing efficient ways for automation of everyday work involving legal documents is therefore expected to have significant impact in different fields. In this work we present one LLM based solution for Named Entity Recognition (NER) in the case of legal documents written in Serbian language. It leverages on the pre-trained bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), which had been carefully adapted to the specific task of identifying and classifying specific data points from textual content. Besides novel dataset development for Serbian language (involving public court rulings), presented system design and applied methodology, the paper also discusses achieved performance metrics and their implications for objective assessment of the proposed solution. Performed cross-validation tests on the created manually labeled dataset with mean F_1 score of 0.96 and additional results on the examples of intentionally modified text inputs confirm applicability of the proposed system design and robustness of the developed NER solution.

The existing search tools for exploring the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) can be quite rich and empowering (e.g., similar and trending operators), but researchers are not yet allowed to fully leverage semantic search. For example, a query for "results from the Planck mission" should be able to distinguish between all the various meanings of Planck (person, mission, constant, institutions and more) without further clarification from the user. At ADS, we are applying modern machine learning and natural language processing techniques to our dataset of recent astronomy publications to train astroBERT, a deeply contextual language model based on research at Google. Using astroBERT, we aim to enrich the ADS dataset and improve its discoverability, and in particular we are developing our own named entity recognition tool. We present here our preliminary results and lessons learned.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have issues with document question answering (QA) in situations where the document is unable to fit in the small context length of an LLM. To overcome this issue, most existing works focus on retrieving the relevant context from the document, representing them as plain text. However, documents such as PDFs, web pages, and presentations are naturally structured with different pages, tables, sections, and so on. Representing such structured documents as plain text is incongruous with the user's mental model of these documents with rich structure. When a system has to query the document for context, this incongruity is brought to the fore, and seemingly trivial questions can trip up the QA system. To bridge this fundamental gap in handling structured documents, we propose an approach called PDFTriage that enables models to retrieve the context based on either structure or content. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PDFTriage-augmented models across several classes of questions where existing retrieval-augmented LLMs fail. To facilitate further research on this fundamental problem, we release our benchmark dataset consisting of 900+ human-generated questions over 80 structured documents from 10 different categories of question types for document QA.

In this work, we dive into the fundamental challenges of evaluating Text2SQL solutions and highlight potential failure causes and the potential risks of relying on aggregate metrics in existing benchmarks. We identify two largely unaddressed limitations in current open benchmarks: (1) data quality issues in the evaluation data, mainly attributed to the lack of capturing the probabilistic nature of translating a natural language description into a structured query (e.g., NL ambiguity), and (2) the bias introduced by using different match functions as approximations for SQL equivalence. To put both limitations into context, we propose a unified taxonomy of all Text2SQL limitations that can lead to both prediction and evaluation errors. We then motivate the taxonomy by providing a survey of Text2SQL limitations using state-of-the-art Text2SQL solutions and benchmarks. We describe the causes of limitations with real-world examples and propose potential mitigation solutions for each category in the taxonomy. We conclude by highlighting the open challenges encountered when deploying such mitigation strategies or attempting to automatically apply the taxonomy.

Podcasts are a relatively new form of audio media. Episodes appear on a regular cadence, and come in many different formats and levels of formality. They can be formal news journalism or conversational chat; fiction or non-fiction. They are rapidly growing in popularity and yet have been relatively little studied. As an audio format, podcasts are more varied in style and production types than, say, broadcast news, and contain many more genres than typically studied in video research. The medium is therefore a rich domain with many research avenues for the IR and NLP communities. We present the Spotify Podcast Dataset, a set of approximately 100K podcast episodes comprised of raw audio files along with accompanying ASR transcripts. This represents over 47,000 hours of transcribed audio, and is an order of magnitude larger than previous speech-to-text corpora.

We introduce the Free Music Archive (FMA), an open and easily accessible dataset suitable for evaluating several tasks in MIR, a field concerned with browsing, searching, and organizing large music collections. The community's growing interest in feature and end-to-end learning is however restrained by the limited availability of large audio datasets. The FMA aims to overcome this hurdle by providing 917 GiB and 343 days of Creative Commons-licensed audio from 106,574 tracks from 16,341 artists and 14,854 albums, arranged in a hierarchical taxonomy of 161 genres. It provides full-length and high-quality audio, pre-computed features, together with track- and user-level metadata, tags, and free-form text such as biographies. We here describe the dataset and how it was created, propose a train/validation/test split and three subsets, discuss some suitable MIR tasks, and evaluate some baselines for genre recognition. Code, data, and usage examples are available at https://github.com/mdeff/fma

Archives play a crucial role in preserving information and knowledge, and the exponential growth of such data necessitates efficient and automated tools for managing and utilizing archive information resources. Archival applications involve managing massive data that are challenging to process and analyze. Although LLMs have made remarkable progress in diverse domains, there are no publicly available archives tailored LLM. Addressing this gap, we introduce ArcGPT, to our knowledge, the first general-purpose LLM tailored to the archival field. To enhance model performance on real-world archival tasks, ArcGPT has been pre-trained on massive and extensive archival domain data. Alongside ArcGPT, we release AMBLE, a benchmark comprising four real-world archival tasks. Evaluation on AMBLE shows that ArcGPT outperforms existing state-of-the-art models, marking a substantial step forward in effective archival data management. Ultimately, ArcGPT aims to better serve the archival community, aiding archivists in their crucial role of preserving and harnessing our collective information and knowledge.

A major factor in the recent success of large language models is the use of enormous and ever-growing text datasets for unsupervised pre-training. However, naively training a model on all available data may not be optimal (or feasible), as the quality of available text data can vary. Filtering out data can also decrease the carbon footprint and financial costs of training models by reducing the amount of training required. Data selection methods aim to determine which candidate data points to include in the training dataset and how to appropriately sample from the selected data points. The promise of improved data selection methods has caused the volume of research in the area to rapidly expand. However, because deep learning is mostly driven by empirical evidence and experimentation on large-scale data is expensive, few organizations have the resources for extensive data selection research. Consequently, knowledge of effective data selection practices has become concentrated within a few organizations, many of which do not openly share their findings and methodologies. To narrow this gap in knowledge, we present a comprehensive review of existing literature on data selection methods and related research areas, providing a taxonomy of existing approaches. By describing the current landscape of research, this work aims to accelerate progress in data selection by establishing an entry point for new and established researchers. Additionally, throughout this review we draw attention to noticeable holes in the literature and conclude the paper by proposing promising avenues for future research.

Developing documentation guidelines and easy-to-use templates for datasets and models is a challenging task, especially given the variety of backgrounds, skills, and incentives of the people involved in the building of natural language processing (NLP) tools. Nevertheless, the adoption of standard documentation practices across the field of NLP promotes more accessible and detailed descriptions of NLP datasets and models, while supporting researchers and developers in reflecting on their work. To help with the standardization of documentation, we present two case studies of efforts that aim to develop reusable documentation templates -- the HuggingFace data card, a general purpose card for datasets in NLP, and the GEM benchmark data and model cards with a focus on natural language generation. We describe our process for developing these templates, including the identification of relevant stakeholder groups, the definition of a set of guiding principles, the use of existing templates as our foundation, and iterative revisions based on feedback.

We describe a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) dataset from individuals from the African nation of Nigeria. The dataset contains pseudonymized structural MRI (T1w, T2w, FLAIR) data of clinical quality. The dataset contains data from 36 images from healthy control subjects, 32 images from individuals diagnosed with age-related dementia and 20 from individuals with Parkinson's disease. There is currently a paucity of data from the African continent. Given the potential for Africa to contribute to the global neuroscience community, this first MRI dataset represents both an opportunity and benchmark for future studies to share data from the African continent.

We introduce ParaNames, a massively multilingual parallel name resource consisting of 140 million names spanning over 400 languages. Names are provided for 16.8 million entities, and each entity is mapped from a complex type hierarchy to a standard type (PER/LOC/ORG). Using Wikidata as a source, we create the largest resource of this type to date. We describe our approach to filtering and standardizing the data to provide the best quality possible. ParaNames is useful for multilingual language processing, both in defining tasks for name translation/transliteration and as supplementary data for tasks such as named entity recognition and linking. We demonstrate the usefulness of ParaNames on two tasks. First, we perform canonical name translation between English and 17 other languages. Second, we use it as a gazetteer for multilingual named entity recognition, obtaining performance improvements on all 10 languages evaluated.

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

Most available semantic parsing datasets, comprising of pairs of natural utterances and logical forms, were collected solely for the purpose of training and evaluation of natural language understanding systems. As a result, they do not contain any of the richness and variety of natural-occurring utterances, where humans ask about data they need or are curious about. In this work, we release SEDE, a dataset with 12,023 pairs of utterances and SQL queries collected from real usage on the Stack Exchange website. We show that these pairs contain a variety of real-world challenges which were rarely reflected so far in any other semantic parsing dataset, propose an evaluation metric based on comparison of partial query clauses that is more suitable for real-world queries, and conduct experiments with strong baselines, showing a large gap between the performance on SEDE compared to other common datasets.

In this paper, we present the first multilingual FAQ dataset publicly available. We collected around 6M FAQ pairs from the web, in 21 different languages. Although this is significantly larger than existing FAQ retrieval datasets, it comes with its own challenges: duplication of content and uneven distribution of topics. We adopt a similar setup as Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR) and test various bi-encoders on this dataset. Our experiments reveal that a multilingual model based on XLM-RoBERTa achieves the best results, except for English. Lower resources languages seem to learn from one another as a multilingual model achieves a higher MRR than language-specific ones. Our qualitative analysis reveals the brittleness of the model on simple word changes. We publicly release our dataset, model and training script.

This document serves as an overview of the different mechanisms and areas of governance in the BigCode project. It aims to support transparency by providing relevant information about choices that were made during the project to the broader public, and to serve as an example of intentional governance of an open research project that future endeavors can leverage to shape their own approach. The first section, Project Structure, covers the project organization, its stated goals and values, its internal decision processes, and its funding and resources. The second section, Data and Model Governance, covers decisions relating to the questions of data subject consent, privacy, and model release.

We introduce a high-quality dataset that contains 3,397 samples comprising (i) multiple choice questions, (ii) answers (including distractors), and (iii) their source documents, from the educational domain. Each question is phrased in two forms, normal and close. Correct answers are linked to source documents with sentence-level annotations. Thus, our versatile dataset can be used for both question and distractor generation, as well as to explore new challenges such as question format conversion. Furthermore, 903 questions are accompanied by their cognitive complexity level as per Bloom's taxonomy. All questions have been generated by educational experts rather than crowd workers to ensure they are maintaining educational and learning standards. Our analysis and experiments suggest distinguishable differences between our dataset and commonly used ones for question generation for educational purposes. We believe this new dataset can serve as a valuable resource for research and evaluation in the educational domain. The dataset and baselines will be released to support further research in question generation.

The conventional use of the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture has proven effective for retrieving information from diverse documents. However, challenges arise in handling complex table queries, especially within PDF documents containing intricate tabular structures.This research introduces an innovative approach to enhance the accuracy of complex table queries in RAG-based systems. Our methodology involves storing PDFs in the retrieval database and extracting tabular content separately. The extracted tables undergo a process of context enrichment, concatenating headers with corresponding values. To ensure a comprehensive understanding of the enriched data, we employ a fine-tuned version of the Llama-2-chat language model for summarisation within the RAG architecture. Furthermore, we augment the tabular data with contextual sense using the ChatGPT 3.5 API through a one-shot prompt. This enriched data is then fed into the retrieval database alongside other PDFs. Our approach aims to significantly improve the precision of complex table queries, offering a promising solution to a longstanding challenge in information retrieval.

We report the delivery to the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes of target pixel and light curve files for up to 160,000 targets selected from full-frame images (FFI) for each TESS Northern hemisphere observing sector. The data include calibrated target pixels, simple aperture photometry flux time series, and presearch data conditioning corrected flux time series. These data provide TESS users with high quality, uniform pipeline products for a selection of FFI targets, that would otherwise not be readily available. Additionally, we deliver cotrending basis vectors derived from the FFI targets to allow users to perform their own systematic error corrections. The selected targets include all 2-minute targets and additional targets selected from the TESS Input Catalog with a maximum of 10,000 targets per sector on each of the sixteen TESS CCDs. The data products are in the same format as the project-delivered files for the TESS 2-minute targets. All of the TESS-SPOC data products are available at the MAST as a High Level Science Product via https://doi.org/10.17909/t9-wpz1-8s54.

The current digital environment is characterized by the widespread presence of data, particularly unstructured data, which poses many issues in sectors including finance, healthcare, and education. Conventional techniques for data extraction encounter difficulties in dealing with the inherent variety and complexity of unstructured data, hence requiring the adoption of more efficient methodologies. This research investigates the utilization of YOLOv5, a cutting-edge computer vision model, for the purpose of rapidly identifying document layouts and extracting unstructured data. The present study establishes a conceptual framework for delineating the notion of "objects" as they pertain to documents, incorporating various elements such as paragraphs, tables, photos, and other constituent parts. The main objective is to create an autonomous system that can effectively recognize document layouts and extract unstructured data, hence improving the effectiveness of data extraction. In the conducted examination, the YOLOv5 model exhibits notable effectiveness in the task of document layout identification, attaining a high accuracy rate along with a precision value of 0.91, a recall value of 0.971, an F1-score of 0.939, and an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) of 0.975. The remarkable performance of this system optimizes the process of extracting textual and tabular data from document images. Its prospective applications are not limited to document analysis but can encompass unstructured data from diverse sources, such as audio data. This study lays the foundation for future investigations into the wider applicability of YOLOv5 in managing various types of unstructured data, offering potential for novel applications across multiple domains.

We introduce ParaNames, a multilingual parallel name resource consisting of 118 million names spanning across 400 languages. Names are provided for 13.6 million entities which are mapped to standardized entity types (PER/LOC/ORG). Using Wikidata as a source, we create the largest resource of this type to-date. We describe our approach to filtering and standardizing the data to provide the best quality possible. ParaNames is useful for multilingual language processing, both in defining tasks for name translation/transliteration and as supplementary data for tasks such as named entity recognition and linking. We demonstrate an application of ParaNames by training a multilingual model for canonical name translation to and from English. Our resource is released under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0) at https://github.com/bltlab/paranames.

In an era of model and data proliferation in machine learning/AI especially marked by the rapid advancement of open-sourced technologies, there arises a critical need for standardized consistent documentation. Our work addresses the information incompleteness in current human-generated model and data cards. We propose an automated generation approach using Large Language Models (LLMs). Our key contributions include the establishment of CardBench, a comprehensive dataset aggregated from over 4.8k model cards and 1.4k data cards, coupled with the development of the CardGen pipeline comprising a two-step retrieval process. Our approach exhibits enhanced completeness, objectivity, and faithfulness in generated model and data cards, a significant step in responsible AI documentation practices ensuring better accountability and traceability.

Recent advancements in Text-to-SQL (Text2SQL) emphasize stimulating the large language models (LLM) on in-context learning, achieving significant results. Nevertheless, they face challenges when dealing with verbose database information and complex user intentions. This paper presents a two-stage framework to enhance the performance of current LLM-based natural language to SQL systems. We first introduce a novel prompt representation, called reference-enhanced representation, which includes schema information and randomly sampled cell values from tables to instruct LLMs in generating SQL queries. Then, in the first stage, question-SQL pairs are retrieved as few-shot demonstrations, prompting the LLM to generate a preliminary SQL (PreSQL). After that, the mentioned entities in PreSQL are parsed to conduct schema linking, which can significantly compact the useful information. In the second stage, with the linked schema, we simplify the prompt's schema information and instruct the LLM to produce the final SQL. Finally, as the post-refinement module, we propose using cross-consistency across different LLMs rather than self-consistency within a particular LLM. Our methods achieve new SOTA results on the Spider benchmark, with an execution accuracy of 87.6%.

This paper demonstrates how the limitations of pre-trained models and open evaluation datasets factor into assessing the performance of binary semantic similarity classification tasks. As (1) end-user-facing documentation around the curation of these datasets and pre-trained model training regimes is often not easily accessible and (2) given the lower friction and higher demand to quickly deploy such systems in real-world contexts, our study reinforces prior work showing performance disparities across datasets, embedding techniques and distance metrics, while highlighting the importance of understanding how data is collected, curated and analyzed in semantic similarity classification.

Multimodal interleaved datasets featuring free-form interleaved sequences of images and text are crucial for training frontier large multimodal models (LMMs). Despite the rapid progression of open-source LMMs, there remains a pronounced scarcity of large-scale, diverse open-source multimodal interleaved datasets. In response, we introduce MINT-1T, the most extensive and diverse open-source Multimodal INTerleaved dataset to date. MINT-1T comprises one trillion text tokens and three billion images, a 10x scale-up from existing open-source datasets. Additionally, we include previously untapped sources such as PDFs and ArXiv papers. As scaling multimodal interleaved datasets requires substantial engineering effort, sharing the data curation process and releasing the dataset greatly benefits the community. Our experiments show that LMMs trained on MINT-1T rival the performance of models trained on the previous leading dataset, OBELICS. Our data and code will be released at https://github.com/mlfoundations/MINT-1T.

Machine learning based decision-support tools in criminal justice systems are subjects of intense discussions and academic research. There are important open questions about the utility and fairness of such tools. Academic researchers often rely on a few small datasets that are not sufficient to empirically study various real-world aspects of these questions. In this paper, we contribute WCLD, a curated large dataset of 1.5 million criminal cases from circuit courts in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. We used reliable public data from 1970 to 2020 to curate attributes like prior criminal counts and recidivism outcomes. The dataset contains large number of samples from five racial groups, in addition to information like sex and age (at judgment and first offense). Other attributes in this dataset include neighborhood characteristics obtained from census data, detailed types of offense, charge severity, case decisions, sentence lengths, year of filing etc. We also provide pseudo-identifiers for judge, county and zipcode. The dataset will not only enable researchers to more rigorously study algorithmic fairness in the context of criminal justice, but also relate algorithmic challenges with various systemic issues. We also discuss in detail the process of constructing the dataset and provide a datasheet. The WCLD dataset is available at https://clezdata.github.io/wcld/.

Mathematical symbols and descriptions appear in various forms across document section boundaries without explicit markup. In this paper, we present a new large-scale dataset that emphasizes extracting symbols and descriptions in scientific documents. Symlink annotates scientific papers of 5 different domains (i.e., computer science, biology, physics, mathematics, and economics). Our experiments on Symlink demonstrate the challenges of the symbol-description linking task for existing models and call for further research effort in this area. We will publicly release Symlink to facilitate future research.

We present DART, an open domain structured DAta Record to Text generation dataset with over 82k instances (DARTs). Data-to-Text annotations can be a costly process, especially when dealing with tables which are the major source of structured data and contain nontrivial structures. To this end, we propose a procedure of extracting semantic triples from tables that encodes their structures by exploiting the semantic dependencies among table headers and the table title. Our dataset construction framework effectively merged heterogeneous sources from open domain semantic parsing and dialogue-act-based meaning representation tasks by utilizing techniques such as: tree ontology annotation, question-answer pair to declarative sentence conversion, and predicate unification, all with minimum post-editing. We present systematic evaluation on DART as well as new state-of-the-art results on WebNLG 2017 to show that DART (1) poses new challenges to existing data-to-text datasets and (2) facilitates out-of-domain generalization. Our data and code can be found at https://github.com/Yale-LILY/dart.

Background: Natural Language Processing (NLP) is widely used to extract clinical insights from Electronic Health Records (EHRs). However, the lack of annotated data, automated tools, and other challenges hinder the full utilisation of NLP for EHRs. Various Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL) and NLP techniques are studied and compared to understand the limitations and opportunities in this space comprehensively. Methodology: After screening 261 articles from 11 databases, we included 127 papers for full-text review covering seven categories of articles: 1) medical note classification, 2) clinical entity recognition, 3) text summarisation, 4) deep learning (DL) and transfer learning architecture, 5) information extraction, 6) Medical language translation and 7) other NLP applications. This study follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Result and Discussion: EHR was the most commonly used data type among the selected articles, and the datasets were primarily unstructured. Various ML and DL methods were used, with prediction or classification being the most common application of ML or DL. The most common use cases were: the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9) classification, clinical note analysis, and named entity recognition (NER) for clinical descriptions and research on psychiatric disorders. Conclusion: We find that the adopted ML models were not adequately assessed. In addition, the data imbalance problem is quite important, yet we must find techniques to address this underlining problem. Future studies should address key limitations in studies, primarily identifying Lupus Nephritis, Suicide Attempts, perinatal self-harmed and ICD-9 classification.

With the development of data-centric AI, the focus has shifted from model-driven approaches to improving data quality. Academic literature, as one of the crucial types, is predominantly stored in PDF formats and needs to be parsed into texts before further processing. However, parsing diverse structured texts in academic literature remains challenging due to the lack of datasets that cover various text structures. In this paper, we introduce AceParse, the first comprehensive dataset designed to support the parsing of a wide range of structured texts, including formulas, tables, lists, algorithms, and sentences with embedded mathematical expressions. Based on AceParse, we fine-tuned a multimodal model, named AceParser, which accurately parses various structured texts within academic literature. This model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by 4.1% in terms of F1 score and by 5% in Jaccard Similarity, demonstrating the potential of multimodal models in academic literature parsing. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/JHW5981/AceParse.

ROOTS is a 1.6TB multilingual text corpus developed for the training of BLOOM, currently the largest language model explicitly accompanied by commensurate data governance efforts. In continuation of these efforts, we present the ROOTS Search Tool: a search engine over the entire ROOTS corpus offering both fuzzy and exact search capabilities. ROOTS is the largest corpus to date that can be investigated this way. The ROOTS Search Tool is open-sourced and available on Hugging Face Spaces. We describe our implementation and the possible use cases of our tool.

We present a new dataset for form understanding in noisy scanned documents (FUNSD) that aims at extracting and structuring the textual content of forms. The dataset comprises 199 real, fully annotated, scanned forms. The documents are noisy and vary widely in appearance, making form understanding (FoUn) a challenging task. The proposed dataset can be used for various tasks, including text detection, optical character recognition, spatial layout analysis, and entity labeling/linking. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first publicly available dataset with comprehensive annotations to address FoUn task. We also present a set of baselines and introduce metrics to evaluate performance on the FUNSD dataset, which can be downloaded at https://guillaumejaume.github.io/FUNSD/.

Paywalls, licenses and copyright rules often restrict the broad dissemination and reuse of scientific knowledge. We take the position that it is both legally and technically feasible to extract the scientific knowledge in scholarly texts. Current methods, like text embeddings, fail to reliably preserve factual content, and simple paraphrasing may not be legally sound. We urge the community to adopt a new idea: convert scholarly documents into Knowledge Units using LLMs. These units use structured data capturing entities, attributes and relationships without stylistic content. We provide evidence that Knowledge Units: (1) form a legally defensible framework for sharing knowledge from copyrighted research texts, based on legal analyses of German copyright law and U.S. Fair Use doctrine, and (2) preserve most (~95%) factual knowledge from original text, measured by MCQ performance on facts from the original copyrighted text across four research domains. Freeing scientific knowledge from copyright promises transformative benefits for scientific research and education by allowing language models to reuse important facts from copyrighted text. To support this, we share open-source tools for converting research documents into Knowledge Units. Overall, our work posits the feasibility of democratizing access to scientific knowledge while respecting copyright.

We present the Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100 Million Dataset (YFCC100M), the largest public multimedia collection that has ever been released. The dataset contains a total of 100 million media objects, of which approximately 99.2 million are photos and 0.8 million are videos, all of which carry a Creative Commons license. Each media object in the dataset is represented by several pieces of metadata, e.g. Flickr identifier, owner name, camera, title, tags, geo, media source. The collection provides a comprehensive snapshot of how photos and videos were taken, described, and shared over the years, from the inception of Flickr in 2004 until early 2014. In this article we explain the rationale behind its creation, as well as the implications the dataset has for science, research, engineering, and development. We further present several new challenges in multimedia research that can now be expanded upon with our dataset.

In the last decade, several organizations have produced documents intended to standardize, in the normative sense, and promote guidance to our recent and rapid AI development. However, the full spectrum of ideas presented in these documents has not yet been analyzed, except for a few meta-analyses and critical reviews of the field. In this work, we seek to expand on the work done by past researchers and create a tool for better data visualization of the contents and nature of these documents, to understand whether there is consensus or similarity between the principles espoused by various institutions, which may inspire debates on future regulations. We also provide some preliminary thoughts and questions that could guide the continuity of the research through a critical analysis of the results acquired by our methodology into a sample size of 200 documents.

Democratizing access to natural language processing (NLP) technology is crucial, especially for underrepresented and extremely low-resource languages. Previous research has focused on developing labeled and unlabeled corpora for these languages through online scraping and document translation. While these methods have proven effective and cost-efficient, we have identified limitations in the resulting corpora, including a lack of lexical diversity and cultural relevance to local communities. To address this gap, we conduct a case study on Indonesian local languages. We compare the effectiveness of online scraping, human translation, and paragraph writing by native speakers in constructing datasets. Our findings demonstrate that datasets generated through paragraph writing by native speakers exhibit superior quality in terms of lexical diversity and cultural content. In addition, we present the benchmark, encompassing 12 underrepresented and extremely low-resource languages spoken by millions of individuals in Indonesia. Our empirical experiment results using existing multilingual large language models conclude the need to extend these models to more underrepresented languages. We release the NusaWrites dataset at https://github.com/IndoNLP/nusa-writes.

Integrating structured knowledge from tabular formats poses significant challenges within natural language processing (NLP), mainly when dealing with complex, semi-structured tables like those found in the FeTaQA dataset. These tables require advanced methods to interpret and generate meaningful responses accurately. Traditional approaches, such as SQL and SPARQL, often fail to fully capture the semantics of such data, especially in the presence of irregular table structures like web tables. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a novel approach that extracts triples straightforward from tabular data and integrates it with a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model to enhance the accuracy, coherence, and contextual richness of responses generated by a fine-tuned GPT-3.5-turbo-0125 model. Our approach significantly outperforms existing baselines on the FeTaQA dataset, particularly excelling in Sacre-BLEU and ROUGE metrics. It effectively generates contextually accurate and detailed long-form answers from tables, showcasing its strength in complex data interpretation.

Recent text and image foundation models are incredibly impressive, and these models are attracting an ever-increasing portion of research resources. In this position piece we aim to shift the ML research community's priorities ever so slightly to a different modality: tabular data. Tabular data is the dominant modality in many fields, yet it is given hardly any research attention and significantly lags behind in terms of scale and power. We believe the time is now to start developing tabular foundation models, or what we coin a Large Tabular Model (LTM). LTMs could revolutionise the way science and ML use tabular data: not as single datasets that are analyzed in a vacuum, but contextualized with respect to related datasets. The potential impact is far-reaching: from few-shot tabular models to automating data science; from out-of-distribution synthetic data to empowering multidisciplinary scientific discovery. We intend to excite reflections on the modalities we study, and convince some researchers to study large tabular models.

Recent studies show the growing significance of document retrieval in the generation of LLMs, i.e., RAG, within the scientific domain by bridging their knowledge gap. However, dense retrievers often struggle with domain-specific retrieval and complex query-document relationships, particularly when query segments correspond to various parts of a document. To alleviate such prevalent challenges, this paper introduces MixGR, which improves dense retrievers' awareness of query-document matching across various levels of granularity in queries and documents using a zero-shot approach. MixGR fuses various metrics based on these granularities to a united score that reflects a comprehensive query-document similarity. Our experiments demonstrate that MixGR outperforms previous document retrieval by 24.7%, 9.8%, and 6.9% on nDCG@5 with unsupervised, supervised, and LLM-based retrievers, respectively, averaged on queries containing multiple subqueries from five scientific retrieval datasets. Moreover, the efficacy of two downstream scientific question-answering tasks highlights the advantage of MixGR to boost the application of LLMs in the scientific domain. The code and experimental datasets are available.

MIRACL (Multilingual Information Retrieval Across a Continuum of Languages) is a multilingual dataset we have built for the WSDM 2023 Cup challenge that focuses on ad hoc retrieval across 18 different languages, which collectively encompass over three billion native speakers around the world. These languages have diverse typologies, originate from many different language families, and are associated with varying amounts of available resources -- including what researchers typically characterize as high-resource as well as low-resource languages. Our dataset is designed to support the creation and evaluation of models for monolingual retrieval, where the queries and the corpora are in the same language. In total, we have gathered over 700k high-quality relevance judgments for around 77k queries over Wikipedia in these 18 languages, where all assessments have been performed by native speakers hired by our team. Our goal is to spur research that will improve retrieval across a continuum of languages, thus enhancing information access capabilities for diverse populations around the world, particularly those that have been traditionally underserved. This overview paper describes the dataset and baselines that we share with the community. The MIRACL website is live at http://miracl.ai/.

Information retrieval (IR) is the task of finding relevant documents in response to a user query. Although Spanish is the second most spoken native language, current IR benchmarks lack Spanish data, hindering the development of information access tools for Spanish speakers. We introduce MessIRve, a large-scale Spanish IR dataset with around 730 thousand queries from Google's autocomplete API and relevant documents sourced from Wikipedia. MessIRve's queries reflect diverse Spanish-speaking regions, unlike other datasets that are translated from English or do not consider dialectal variations. The large size of the dataset allows it to cover a wide variety of topics, unlike smaller datasets. We provide a comprehensive description of the dataset, comparisons with existing datasets, and baseline evaluations of prominent IR models. Our contributions aim to advance Spanish IR research and improve information access for Spanish speakers.

Despite recent advances in large language models, building dependable and deployable NLP models typically requires abundant, high-quality training data. However, task-specific data is not available for many use cases, and manually curating task-specific data is labor-intensive. Recent work has studied prompt-driven synthetic data generation using large language models, but these generated datasets tend to lack complexity and diversity. To address these limitations, we introduce a method, DataTune, to make better use of existing, publicly available datasets to improve automatic dataset generation. DataTune performs dataset transformation, enabling the repurposing of publicly available datasets into a format that is directly aligned with the specific requirements of target tasks. On a diverse set of language-based tasks from the BIG-Bench benchmark, we find that finetuning language models via DataTune improves over a few-shot prompting baseline by 49\% and improves over existing methods that use synthetic or retrieved training data by 34\%. We find that dataset transformation significantly increases the diversity and difficulty of generated data on many tasks. We integrate DataTune into an open-source repository to make this method accessible to the community: https://github.com/neulab/prompt2model.

Relational databases play an important role in business, science, and more. However, many users cannot fully unleash the analytical power of relational databases, because they are not familiar with database languages such as SQL. Many techniques have been proposed to automatically generate SQL from natural language, but they suffer from two issues: (1) they still make many mistakes, particularly for complex queries, and (2) they do not provide a flexible way for non-expert users to validate and refine incorrect queries. To address these issues, we introduce a new interaction mechanism that allows users to directly edit a step-by-step explanation of a query to fix errors. Our experiments on multiple datasets, as well as a user study with 24 participants, demonstrate that our approach can achieve better performance than multiple SOTA approaches. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/magic-YuanTian/STEPS.

We present INDICVOICES, a dataset of natural and spontaneous speech containing a total of 7348 hours of read (9%), extempore (74%) and conversational (17%) audio from 16237 speakers covering 145 Indian districts and 22 languages. Of these 7348 hours, 1639 hours have already been transcribed, with a median of 73 hours per language. Through this paper, we share our journey of capturing the cultural, linguistic and demographic diversity of India to create a one-of-its-kind inclusive and representative dataset. More specifically, we share an open-source blueprint for data collection at scale comprising of standardised protocols, centralised tools, a repository of engaging questions, prompts and conversation scenarios spanning multiple domains and topics of interest, quality control mechanisms, comprehensive transcription guidelines and transcription tools. We hope that this open source blueprint will serve as a comprehensive starter kit for data collection efforts in other multilingual regions of the world. Using INDICVOICES, we build IndicASR, the first ASR model to support all the 22 languages listed in the 8th schedule of the Constitution of India. All the data, tools, guidelines, models and other materials developed as a part of this work will be made publicly available

To improve the quality and efficiency of research, groups within the scientific community seek to exploit the value of data sharing. Funders, institutions, and specialist organizations are developing and implementing strategies to encourage or mandate data sharing within and across disciplines, with varying degrees of success. Academic journals in ecology and evolution have adopted several types of public data archiving policies requiring authors to make data underlying scholarly manuscripts freely available. Yet anecdotes from the community and studies evaluating data availability suggest that these policies have not obtained the desired effects, both in terms of quantity and quality of available datasets. We conducted a qualitative, interview-based study with journal editorial staff and other stakeholders in the academic publishing process to examine how journals enforce data archiving policies. We specifically sought to establish who editors and other stakeholders perceive as responsible for ensuring data completeness and quality in the peer review process. Our analysis revealed little consensus with regard to how data archiving policies should be enforced and who should hold authors accountable for dataset submissions. Themes in interviewee responses included hopefulness that reviewers would take the initiative to review datasets and trust in authors to ensure the completeness and quality of their datasets. We highlight problematic aspects of these thematic responses and offer potential starting points for improvement of the public data archiving process.

We propose a new shared task for tactical data-to-text generation in the domain of source code libraries. Specifically, we focus on text generation of function descriptions from example software projects. Data is drawn from existing resources used for studying the related problem of semantic parser induction (Richardson and Kuhn, 2017b; Richardson and Kuhn, 2017a), and spans a wide variety of both natural languages and programming languages. In this paper, we describe these existing resources, which will serve as training and development data for the task, and discuss plans for building new independent test sets.

Retrieval models are often evaluated on partially-annotated datasets. Each query is mapped to a few relevant texts and the remaining corpus is assumed to be irrelevant. As a result, models that successfully retrieve false negatives are punished in evaluation. Unfortunately, completely annotating all texts for every query is not resource efficient. In this work, we show that using partially-annotated datasets in evaluation can paint a distorted picture. We curate D-MERIT, a passage retrieval evaluation set from Wikipedia, aspiring to contain all relevant passages for each query. Queries describe a group (e.g., ``journals about linguistics'') and relevant passages are evidence that entities belong to the group (e.g., a passage indicating that Language is a journal about linguistics). We show that evaluating on a dataset containing annotations for only a subset of the relevant passages might result in misleading ranking of the retrieval systems and that as more relevant texts are included in the evaluation set, the rankings converge. We propose our dataset as a resource for evaluation and our study as a recommendation for balance between resource-efficiency and reliable evaluation when annotating evaluation sets for text retrieval.

Large text corpora are the backbone of language models. However, we have a limited understanding of the content of these corpora, including general statistics, quality, social factors, and inclusion of evaluation data (contamination). In this work, we propose What's In My Big Data? (WIMBD), a platform and a set of sixteen analyses that allow us to reveal and compare the contents of large text corpora. WIMBD builds on two basic capabilities -- count and search -- at scale, which allows us to analyze more than 35 terabytes on a standard compute node. We apply WIMBD to ten different corpora used to train popular language models, including C4, The Pile, and RedPajama. Our analysis uncovers several surprising and previously undocumented findings about these corpora, including the high prevalence of duplicate, synthetic, and low-quality content, personally identifiable information, toxic language, and benchmark contamination. For instance, we find that about 50% of the documents in RedPajama and LAION-2B-en are duplicates. In addition, several datasets used for benchmarking models trained on such corpora are contaminated with respect to important benchmarks, including the Winograd Schema Challenge and parts of GLUE and SuperGLUE. We open-source WIMBD's code and artifacts to provide a standard set of evaluations for new text-based corpora and to encourage more analyses and transparency around them: github.com/allenai/wimbd.

TableQA is the task of answering questions over tables of structured information, returning individual cells or tables as output. TableQA research has focused primarily on high-resource languages, leaving medium- and low-resource languages with little progress due to scarcity of annotated data and neural models. We address this gap by introducing a fully automatic large-scale tableQA data generation process for low-resource languages with limited budget. We incorporate our data generation method on two Indic languages, Bengali and Hindi, which have no tableQA datasets or models. TableQA models trained on our large-scale datasets outperform state-of-the-art LLMs. We further study the trained models on different aspects, including mathematical reasoning capabilities and zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. Our work is the first on low-resource tableQA focusing on scalable data generation and evaluation procedures. Our proposed data generation method can be applied to any low-resource language with a web presence. We release datasets, models, and code (https://github.com/kolk/Low-Resource-TableQA-Indic-languages).

Schema linking is a crucial step in Text-to-SQL pipelines, which translate natural language queries into SQL. The goal of schema linking is to retrieve relevant tables and columns (signal) while disregarding irrelevant ones (noise). However, imperfect schema linking can often exclude essential columns needed for accurate query generation. In this work, we revisit the need for schema linking when using the latest generation of large language models (LLMs). We find empirically that newer models are adept at identifying relevant schema elements during generation, without the need for explicit schema linking. This allows Text-to-SQL pipelines to bypass schema linking entirely and instead pass the full database schema to the LLM, eliminating the risk of excluding necessary information. Furthermore, as alternatives to schema linking, we propose techniques that improve Text-to-SQL accuracy without compromising on essential schema information. Our approach achieves 71.83\% execution accuracy on the BIRD benchmark, ranking first at the time of submission.

Did you try out the new Bing Search? Or maybe you fiddled around with Google AI~Overviews? These might sound familiar because the modern-day search stack has recently evolved to include retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. They allow searching and incorporating real-time data into large language models (LLMs) to provide a well-informed, attributed, concise summary in contrast to the traditional search paradigm that relies on displaying a ranked list of documents. Therefore, given these recent advancements, it is crucial to have an arena to build, test, visualize, and systematically evaluate RAG-based search systems. With this in mind, we propose the TREC 2024 RAG Track to foster innovation in evaluating RAG systems. In our work, we lay out the steps we've made towards making this track a reality -- we describe the details of our reusable framework, Ragnar\"ok, explain the curation of the new MS MARCO V2.1 collection choice, release the development topics for the track, and standardize the I/O definitions which assist the end user. Next, using Ragnar\"ok, we identify and provide key industrial baselines such as OpenAI's GPT-4o or Cohere's Command R+. Further, we introduce a web-based user interface for an interactive arena allowing benchmarking pairwise RAG systems by crowdsourcing. We open-source our Ragnar\"ok framework and baselines to achieve a unified standard for future RAG systems.

Within the past few decades we have witnessed digital revolution, which moved scholarly communication to electronic media and also resulted in a substantial increase in its volume. Nowadays keeping track with the latest scientific achievements poses a major challenge for the researchers. Scientific information overload is a severe problem that slows down scholarly communication and knowledge propagation across the academia. Modern research infrastructures facilitate studying scientific literature by providing intelligent search tools, proposing similar and related documents, visualizing citation and author networks, assessing the quality and impact of the articles, and so on. In order to provide such high quality services the system requires the access not only to the text content of stored documents, but also to their machine-readable metadata. Since in practice good quality metadata is not always available, there is a strong demand for a reliable automatic method of extracting machine-readable metadata directly from source documents. This research addresses these problems by proposing an automatic, accurate and flexible algorithm for extracting wide range of metadata directly from scientific articles in born-digital form. Extracted information includes basic document metadata, structured full text and bibliography section. Designed as a universal solution, proposed algorithm is able to handle a vast variety of publication layouts with high precision and thus is well-suited for analyzing heterogeneous document collections. This was achieved by employing supervised and unsupervised machine-learning algorithms trained on large, diverse datasets. The evaluation we conducted showed good performance of proposed metadata extraction algorithm. The comparison with other similar solutions also proved our algorithm performs better than competition for most metadata types.

In this work, we tackle the problem of structured text generation, specifically academic paper generation in $, inspired by the surprisingly good results of basic character-level language models. Our motivation is using more recent and advanced methods of language modeling on a more complex dataset of source files to generate realistic academic papers. Our first contribution is preparing a dataset with source files on recent open-source computer vision papers. Our second contribution is experimenting with recent methods of language modeling and text generation such as Transformer and Transformer-XL to generate consistent code. We report cross-entropy and bits-per-character (BPC) results of the trained models, and we also discuss interesting points on some examples of the generated $ code.

This paper presents an overview of a program designed to address the growing need for developing freely available speech resources for under-represented languages. At present we have released 38 datasets for building text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition applications for languages and dialects of South and Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and South America. The paper describes the methodology used for developing such corpora and presents some of our findings that could benefit under-represented language communities.

Several large-scale datasets (e.g., WikiSQL, Spider) for developing natural language interfaces to databases have recently been proposed. These datasets cover a wide breadth of domains but fall short on some essential domains, such as finance and accounting. Given that accounting databases are used worldwide, particularly by non-technical people, there is an imminent need to develop models that could help extract information from accounting databases via natural language queries. In this resource paper, we aim to fill this gap by proposing a new large-scale Text-to-SQL dataset for the accounting and financial domain: BookSQL. The dataset consists of 100k natural language queries-SQL pairs, and accounting databases of 1 million records. We experiment with and analyze existing state-of-the-art models (including GPT-4) for the Text-to-SQL task on BookSQL. We find significant performance gaps, thus pointing towards developing more focused models for this domain.

As a relatively new form of sport, esports offers unparalleled data availability. Despite the vast amounts of data that are generated by game engines, it can be challenging to extract them and verify their integrity for the purposes of practical and scientific use. Our work aims to open esports to a broader scientific community by supplying raw and pre-processed files from StarCraft II esports tournaments. These files can be used in statistical and machine learning modeling tasks and related to various laboratory-based measurements (e.g., behavioral tests, brain imaging). We have gathered publicly available game-engine generated "replays" of tournament matches and performed data extraction and cleanup using a low-level application programming interface (API) parser library. Additionally, we open-sourced and published all the custom tools that were developed in the process of creating our dataset. These tools include PyTorch and PyTorch Lightning API abstractions to load and model the data. Our dataset contains replays from major and premiere StarCraft II tournaments since 2016. To prepare the dataset, we processed 55 tournament "replaypacks" that contained 17930 files with game-state information. Based on initial investigation of available StarCraft II datasets, we observed that our dataset is the largest publicly available source of StarCraft II esports data upon its publication. Analysis of the extracted data holds promise for further Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), psychological, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and sports-related studies in a variety of supervised and self-supervised tasks.

Existing retrieval benchmarks primarily consist of information-seeking queries (e.g., aggregated questions from search engines) where keyword or semantic-based retrieval is usually sufficient. However, many complex real-world queries require in-depth reasoning to identify relevant documents that go beyond surface form matching. For example, finding documentation for a coding question requires understanding the logic and syntax of the functions involved. To better benchmark retrieval on such challenging queries, we introduce BRIGHT, the first text retrieval benchmark that requires intensive reasoning to retrieve relevant documents. BRIGHT is constructed from the 1,398 real-world queries collected from diverse domains (such as economics, psychology, robotics, software engineering, earth sciences, etc.), sourced from naturally occurring or carefully curated human data. Extensive evaluation reveals that even state-of-the-art retrieval models perform poorly on BRIGHT. The leading model on the MTEB leaderboard [38 ], which achieves a score of 59.0 nDCG@10,2 produces a score of nDCG@10 of 18.0 on BRIGHT. We further demonstrate that augmenting queries with Chain-of-Thought reasoning generated by large language models (LLMs) improves performance by up to 12.2 points. Moreover, BRIGHT is robust against data leakage during pretraining of the benchmarked models as we validate by showing similar performance even when documents from the benchmark are included in the training data. We believe that BRIGHT paves the way for future research on retrieval systems in more realistic and challenging settings. Our code and data are available at https://brightbenchmark.github.io.

The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) is inherently linked to the availability of vast, diverse, and high-quality data for training and evaluation. However, the growth rate of high-quality data is significantly outpaced by the expansion of training datasets, leading to a looming data exhaustion crisis. This underscores the urgent need to enhance data efficiency and explore new data sources. In this context, synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution. Currently, data generation primarily consists of two major approaches: data augmentation and synthesis. This paper comprehensively reviews and summarizes data generation techniques throughout the lifecycle of LLMs, including data preparation, pre-training, fine-tuning, instruction-tuning, preference alignment, and applications. Furthermore, We discuss the current constraints faced by these methods and investigate potential pathways for future development and research. Our aspiration is to equip researchers with a clear understanding of these methodologies, enabling them to swiftly identify appropriate data generation strategies in the construction of LLMs, while providing valuable insights for future exploration.

Personalization in Information Retrieval (IR) is a topic studied by the research community since a long time. However, there is still a lack of datasets to conduct large-scale evaluations of personalized IR; this is mainly due to the fact that collecting and curating high-quality user-related information requires significant costs and time investment. Furthermore, the creation of datasets for Personalized IR (PIR) tasks is affected by both privacy concerns and the need for accurate user-related data, which are often not publicly available. Recently, researchers have started to explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate synthetic datasets, which is a possible solution to generate data for low-resource tasks. In this paper, we investigate the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating synthetic documents to train an IR system for a Personalized Community Question Answering task. To study the effectiveness of IR models fine-tuned on LLM-generated data, we introduce a new dataset, named Sy-SE-PQA. We build Sy-SE-PQA based on an existing dataset, SE-PQA, which consists of questions and answers posted on the popular StackExchange communities. Starting from questions in SE-PQA, we generate synthetic answers using different prompt techniques and LLMs. Our findings suggest that LLMs have high potential in generating data tailored to users' needs. The synthetic data can replace human-written training data, even if the generated data may contain incorrect information.

Many users communicate with chatbots and AI assistants in order to help them with various tasks. A key component of the assistant is the ability to understand and answer a user's natural language questions for question-answering (QA). Because data can be usually stored in a structured manner, an essential step involves turning a natural language question into its corresponding query language. However, in order to train most natural language-to-query-language state-of-the-art models, a large amount of training data is needed first. In most domains, this data is not available and collecting such datasets for various domains can be tedious and time-consuming. In this work, we propose a novel method for accelerating the training dataset collection for developing the natural language-to-query-language machine learning models. Our system allows one to generate conversational multi-term data, where multiple turns define a dialogue session, enabling one to better utilize chatbot interfaces. We train two current state-of-the-art NL-to-QL models, on both an SQL and SPARQL-based datasets in order to showcase the adaptability and efficacy of our created data.

After decades of massive digitisation, an unprecedented amount of historical documents is available in digital format, along with their machine-readable texts. While this represents a major step forward with respect to preservation and accessibility, it also opens up new opportunities in terms of content mining and the next fundamental challenge is to develop appropriate technologies to efficiently search, retrieve and explore information from this 'big data of the past'. Among semantic indexing opportunities, the recognition and classification of named entities are in great demand among humanities scholars. Yet, named entity recognition (NER) systems are heavily challenged with diverse, historical and noisy inputs. In this survey, we present the array of challenges posed by historical documents to NER, inventory existing resources, describe the main approaches deployed so far, and identify key priorities for future developments.

Up-to-date and reliable Large Language Models (LLMs) are consistently sought after. Typically, LLMs are trained on a fixed dataset and then deployed. However, the training data continually becomes outdated. Enable automatic training of AI using web data involves significant concerns regarding data quality and safety due to bias, spam, and other unsafe or unwanted text. Pure data is essential for producing reliable models. Training a model on impure data may result in undesirable outcomes. This research proposes a system that collects web data and automatically filters out unwanted text with the assistance of existing trusted AI models. In the experiment, a small sample of web data was collected and filtered, demonstrating the system's effectiveness in purifying the data.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become ubiquitous when deploying Large Language Models (LLMs), as it can address typical limitations such as generating hallucinated or outdated information. However, when building real-world RAG applications, practical issues arise. First, the retrieved information is generally domain-specific. Since it is computationally expensive to fine-tune LLMs, it is more feasible to fine-tune the retriever to improve the quality of the data included in the LLM input. Second, as more applications are deployed in the same real-world system, one cannot afford to deploy separate retrievers. Moreover, these RAG applications normally retrieve different kinds of data. Our solution is to instruction fine-tune a small retriever encoder on a variety of domain-specific tasks to allow us to deploy one encoder that can serve many use cases, thereby achieving low-cost, scalability, and speed. We show how this encoder generalizes to out-of-domain settings as well as to an unseen retrieval task on real-world enterprise use cases.

Data availability limits the scope of any given task. In machine translation, historical models were incapable of handling longer contexts, so the lack of document-level datasets was less noticeable. Now, despite the emergence of long-sequence methods, we remain within a sentence-level paradigm and without data to adequately approach context-aware machine translation. Most large-scale datasets have been processed through a pipeline that discards document-level metadata. In this work, we reconstruct document-level information for three (ParaCrawl, News Commentary, and Europarl) large datasets in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese (paired with English). We then introduce a document-level filtering technique as an alternative to traditional bitext filtering. We present this filtering with analysis to show that this method prefers context-consistent translations rather than those that may have been sentence-level machine translated. Last we train models on these longer contexts and demonstrate improvement in document-level translation without degradation of sentence-level translation. We release our dataset, ParaDocs, and resulting models as a resource to the community.

Yor\`ub\'a is a widely spoken West African language with a writing system rich in orthographic and tonal diacritics. They provide morphological information, are crucial for lexical disambiguation, pronunciation and are vital for any computational Speech or Natural Language Processing tasks. However diacritic marks are commonly excluded from electronic texts due to limited device and application support as well as general education on proper usage. We report on recent efforts at dataset cultivation. By aggregating and improving disparate texts from the web and various personal libraries, we were able to significantly grow our clean Yor\`ub\'a dataset from a majority Bibilical text corpora with three sources to millions of tokens from over a dozen sources. We evaluate updated diacritic restoration models on a new, general purpose, public-domain Yor\`ub\'a evaluation dataset of modern journalistic news text, selected to be multi-purpose and reflecting contemporary usage. All pre-trained models, datasets and source-code have been released as an open-source project to advance efforts on Yor\`ub\'a language technology.

Foundation models are trained on increasingly immense and opaque datasets. Even while these models are now key in AI system building, it can be difficult to answer the straightforward question: has the model already encountered a given example during training? We therefore propose a widespread adoption of Data Portraits: artifacts that record training data and allow for downstream inspection. First we outline the properties of such an artifact and discuss how existing solutions can be used to increase transparency. We then propose and implement a solution based on data sketching, stressing fast and space efficient querying. Using our tools, we document a popular language modeling corpus (The Pile) and a recently released code modeling dataset (The Stack). We show that our solution enables answering questions about test set leakage and model plagiarism. Our tool is lightweight and fast, costing only 3% of the dataset size in overhead. We release a live interface of our tools at https://dataportraits.org/ and call on dataset and model creators to release Data Portraits as a complement to current documentation practices.

We present Multi-EuP, a new multilingual benchmark dataset, comprising 22K multi-lingual documents collected from the European Parliament, spanning 24 languages. This dataset is designed to investigate fairness in a multilingual information retrieval (IR) context to analyze both language and demographic bias in a ranking context. It boasts an authentic multilingual corpus, featuring topics translated into all 24 languages, as well as cross-lingual relevance judgments. Furthermore, it offers rich demographic information associated with its documents, facilitating the study of demographic bias. We report the effectiveness of Multi-EuP for benchmarking both monolingual and multilingual IR. We also conduct a preliminary experiment on language bias caused by the choice of tokenization strategy.

Text retrieval is a long-standing research topic on information seeking, where a system is required to return relevant information resources to user's queries in natural language. From classic retrieval methods to learning-based ranking functions, the underlying retrieval models have been continually evolved with the ever-lasting technical innovation. To design effective retrieval models, a key point lies in how to learn the text representation and model the relevance matching. The recent success of pretrained language models (PLMs) sheds light on developing more capable text retrieval approaches by leveraging the excellent modeling capacity of PLMs. With powerful PLMs, we can effectively learn the representations of queries and texts in the latent representation space, and further construct the semantic matching function between the dense vectors for relevance modeling. Such a retrieval approach is referred to as dense retrieval, since it employs dense vectors (a.k.a., embeddings) to represent the texts. Considering the rapid progress on dense retrieval, in this survey, we systematically review the recent advances on PLM-based dense retrieval. Different from previous surveys on dense retrieval, we take a new perspective to organize the related work by four major aspects, including architecture, training, indexing and integration, and summarize the mainstream techniques for each aspect. We thoroughly survey the literature, and include 300+ related reference papers on dense retrieval. To support our survey, we create a website for providing useful resources, and release a code repertory and toolkit for implementing dense retrieval models. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive, practical reference focused on the major progress for dense text retrieval.

During the development of large language models (LLMs), pre-training data play a critical role in shaping LLMs' capabilities. In recent years several large-scale and high-quality pre-training datasets have been released to accelerate the research of LLMs, including ChineseWebText1.0, C4, Pile, WanJuan, MAPCC and others. However, as LLMs continue to evolve, focus has increasingly shifted to domain-specific capabilities and safety concerns, making those previous coarse-grained texts insufficient for meeting training requirements. Furthermore, fine-grained information, such as quality, domain and toxicity, is becoming increasingly important in building powerful and reliable LLMs for various scenarios. To address these challenges, in this paper we propose a new tool-chain called MDFG-tool for constructing large-scale and high-quality Chinese datasets with multi-dimensional and fine-grained information. First, we employ manually crafted rules to discard explicit noisy texts from raw contents. Second, the quality evaluation model, domain classifier, and toxicity evaluation model are well-designed to assess the remaining cleaned data respectively. Finally, we integrate these three types of fine-grained information for each text. With this approach, we release the largest, high-quality and fine-grained Chinese text ChineseWebText2.0, which consists of 3.8TB and each text is associated with a quality score, domain labels, a toxicity label and a toxicity score, facilitating the LLM researchers to select data based on various types of fine-grained information. The data, codes and the tool-chain are available on this website https://github.com/CASIA-LM/ChineseWebText-2.0

Open-domain extractive question answering works well on textual data by first retrieving candidate texts and then extracting the answer from those candidates. However, some questions cannot be answered by text alone but require information stored in tables. In this paper, we present an approach for retrieving both texts and tables relevant to a question by jointly encoding texts, tables and questions into a single vector space. To this end, we create a new multi-modal dataset based on text and table datasets from related work and compare the retrieval performance of different encoding schemata. We find that dense vector embeddings of transformer models outperform sparse embeddings on four out of six evaluation datasets. Comparing different dense embedding models, tri-encoders with one encoder for each question, text and table, increase retrieval performance compared to bi-encoders with one encoder for the question and one for both text and tables. We release the newly created multi-modal dataset to the community so that it can be used for training and evaluation.

This manual is intended to provide a detailed description of the DIML/CVL RGB-D dataset. This dataset is comprised of 2M color images and their corresponding depth maps from a great variety of natural indoor and outdoor scenes. The indoor dataset was constructed using the Microsoft Kinect v2, while the outdoor dataset was built using the stereo cameras (ZED stereo camera and built-in stereo camera). Table I summarizes the details of our dataset, including acquisition, processing, format, and toolbox. Refer to Section II and III for more details.

It is well-established that large, diverse datasets play a pivotal role in the performance of modern AI systems for text and image modalities. However, there are no datasets for tabular data of comparable size and diversity to those available for text and images. Thus we present "TabLib'', a compilation of 627 million tables totaling 69 TiB, along with 867B tokens of context. TabLib was extracted from numerous file formats, including CSV, HTML, SQLite, PDF, Excel, and others, sourced from GitHub and Common Crawl. The size and diversity of TabLib offer considerable promise in the table modality, reminiscent of the original promise of foundational datasets for text and images, such as The Pile and LAION.

Large language models' (LLMs) abilities are drawn from their pretraining data, and model development begins with data curation. However, decisions around what data is retained or removed during this initial stage is under-scrutinized. In our work, we ground web text, which is a popular pretraining data source, to its social and geographic contexts. We create a new dataset of 10.3 million self-descriptions of website creators, and extract information about who they are and where they are from: their topical interests, social roles, and geographic affiliations. Then, we conduct the first study investigating how ten "quality" and English language identification (langID) filters affect webpages that vary along these social dimensions. Our experiments illuminate a range of implicit preferences in data curation: we show that some quality classifiers act like topical domain filters, and langID can overlook English content from some regions of the world. Overall, we hope that our work will encourage a new line of research on pretraining data curation practices and its social implications.

FUNSD is one of the limited publicly available datasets for information extraction from document im-ages. The information in the FUNSD dataset is defined by text areas of four categories ("key", "value", "header", "other", and "background") and connectivity between areas as key-value relations. In-specting FUNSD, we found several inconsistency in labeling, which impeded its applicability to thekey-value extraction problem. In this report, we described some labeling issues in FUNSD and therevision we made to the dataset. We also reported our implementation of for key-value detection onFUNSD using a UNet model as baseline results and an improved UNet model with Channel-InvariantDeformable Convolution.

While the rise of large language models (LLMs) has created rich new opportunities to learn about digital technology, many on the margins of this technology struggle to gain and maintain competency due to lexical or conceptual barriers that prevent them from asking appropriate questions. Although there have been many efforts to understand factuality of LLM-created content and ability of LLMs to answer questions, it is not well understood how unclear or nonstandard language queries affect the model outputs. We propose the creation of a dataset that captures questions of digital newcomers and outsiders, utilizing data we have compiled from a decade's worth of one-on-one tutoring. In this paper we lay out our planned efforts and some potential uses of this dataset.

In the U.S. historically, local newspapers drew their content largely from newswires like the Associated Press. Historians argue that newswires played a pivotal role in creating a national identity and shared understanding of the world, but there is no comprehensive archive of the content sent over newswires. We reconstruct such an archive by applying a customized deep learning pipeline to hundreds of terabytes of raw image scans from thousands of local newspapers. The resulting dataset contains 2.7 million unique public domain U.S. newswire articles, written between 1878 and 1977. Locations in these articles are georeferenced, topics are tagged using customized neural topic classification, named entities are recognized, and individuals are disambiguated to Wikipedia using a novel entity disambiguation model. To construct the Newswire dataset, we first recognize newspaper layouts and transcribe around 138 millions structured article texts from raw image scans. We then use a customized neural bi-encoder model to de-duplicate reproduced articles, in the presence of considerable abridgement and noise, quantifying how widely each article was reproduced. A text classifier is used to ensure that we only include newswire articles, which historically are in the public domain. The structured data that accompany the texts provide rich information about the who (disambiguated individuals), what (topics), and where (georeferencing) of the news that millions of Americans read over the course of a century. We also include Library of Congress metadata information about the newspapers that ran the articles on their front pages. The Newswire dataset is useful both for large language modeling - expanding training data beyond what is available from modern web texts - and for studying a diversity of questions in computational linguistics, social science, and the digital humanities.

The quality and size of a pretraining dataset significantly influence the performance of large language models (LLMs). While there have been numerous efforts in the curation of such a dataset for English users, there is a relative lack of similar initiatives for Traditional Chinese. Building upon this foundation of FineWeb, we introduce FineWeb-zhtw, a dataset tailored specifically for Traditional Chinese users. We came up with multiple stages of meticulously designed filters to cater to the linguistic difference between English and Traditional Chinese, to ensure comprehensiveness and quality. We determined effectiveness from querying dataset samples with three main objectives. Our code and datasets are publicly available.

The World Health Organization added Disease X to their shortlist of blueprint priority diseases to represent a hypothetical, unknown pathogen that could cause a future epidemic. During different virus outbreaks of the past, such as COVID-19, Influenza, Lyme Disease, and Zika virus, researchers from various disciplines utilized Google Trends to mine multimodal components of web behavior to study, investigate, and analyze the global awareness, preparedness, and response associated with these respective virus outbreaks. As the world prepares for Disease X, a dataset on web behavior related to Disease X would be crucial to contribute towards the timely advancement of research in this field. Furthermore, none of the prior works in this field have focused on the development of a dataset to compile relevant web behavior data, which would help to prepare for Disease X. To address these research challenges, this work presents a dataset of web behavior related to Disease X, which emerged from different geographic regions of the world, between February 2018 and August 2023. Specifically, this dataset presents the search interests related to Disease X from 94 geographic regions. The dataset was developed by collecting data using Google Trends. The relevant search interests for all these regions for each month in this time range are available in this dataset. This paper also discusses the compliance of this dataset with the FAIR principles of scientific data management. Finally, an analysis of this dataset is presented to uphold the applicability, relevance, and usefulness of this dataset for the investigation of different research questions in the interrelated fields of Big Data, Data Mining, Healthcare, Epidemiology, and Data Analysis with a specific focus on Disease X.

Descriptive video service (DVS) provides linguistic descriptions of movies and allows visually impaired people to follow a movie along with their peers. Such descriptions are by design mainly visual and thus naturally form an interesting data source for computer vision and computational linguistics. In this work we propose a novel dataset which contains transcribed DVS, which is temporally aligned to full length HD movies. In addition we also collected the aligned movie scripts which have been used in prior work and compare the two different sources of descriptions. In total the Movie Description dataset contains a parallel corpus of over 54,000 sentences and video snippets from 72 HD movies. We characterize the dataset by benchmarking different approaches for generating video descriptions. Comparing DVS to scripts, we find that DVS is far more visual and describes precisely what is shown rather than what should happen according to the scripts created prior to movie production.