Daily Papers

Exploratory data analytics (EDA) is a sequential decision making process where analysts choose subsequent queries that might lead to some interesting insights based on the previous queries and corresponding results. Data processing systems often execute the queries on samples to produce results with low latency. Different downsampling strategy preserves different statistics of the data and have different magnitude of latency reductions. The optimum choice of sampling strategy often depends on the particular context of the analysis flow and the hidden intent of the analyst. In this paper, we are the first to consider the impact of sampling in interactive data exploration settings as they introduce approximation errors. We propose a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based framework which can optimize the sample selection in order to keep the analysis and insight generation flow intact. Evaluations with 3 real datasets show that our technique can preserve the original insight generation flow while improving the interaction latency, compared to baseline methods.

Breast cancer is one of the most threatening diseases in women's life; thus, the early and accurate diagnosis plays a key role in reducing the risk of death in a patient's life. Mammography stands as the reference technique for breast cancer screening; nevertheless, many countries still lack access to mammograms due to economic, social, and cultural issues. Latest advances in computational tools, infrared cameras and devices for bio-impedance quantification, have given a chance to emerge other reference techniques like thermography, infrared thermography, electrical impedance tomography and biomarkers found in blood tests, therefore being faster, reliable and cheaper than other methods. In the last two decades, the techniques mentioned above have been considered as parallel and extended approaches for breast cancer diagnosis, as well many authors concluded that false positives and false negatives rates are significantly reduced. Moreover, when a screening method works together with a computational technique, it generates a "computer-aided diagnosis" system. The present work aims to review the last breakthroughs about the three techniques mentioned earlier, suggested machine learning techniques to breast cancer diagnosis, thus, describing the benefits of some methods in relation with other ones, such as, logistic regression, decision trees, random forest, deep and convolutional neural networks. With this, we studied several hyperparameters optimization approaches with parzen tree optimizers to improve the performance of baseline models. An exploratory data analysis for each database and a benchmark of convolutional neural networks for the database of thermal images are presented. The benchmark process, reviews image classification techniques with convolutional neural networks, like, Resnet50, NasNetmobile, InceptionResnet and Xception.

Agentic systems built on large language models (LLMs) offer promising capabilities for automating complex workflows in healthcare AI. We introduce mAIstro, an open-source, autonomous multi-agentic framework for end-to-end development and deployment of medical AI models. The system orchestrates exploratory data analysis, radiomic feature extraction, image segmentation, classification, and regression through a natural language interface, requiring no coding from the user. Built on a modular architecture, mAIstro supports both open- and closed-source LLMs, and was evaluated using a large and diverse set of prompts across 16 open-source datasets, covering a wide range of imaging modalities, anatomical regions, and data types. The agents successfully executed all tasks, producing interpretable outputs and validated models. This work presents the first agentic framework capable of unifying data analysis, AI model development, and inference across varied healthcare applications, offering a reproducible and extensible foundation for clinical and research AI integration. The code is available at: https://github.com/eltzanis/mAIstro

This paper introduces SINGA:PURA, a strongly labelled polyphonic urban sound dataset with spatiotemporal context. The data were collected via several recording units deployed across Singapore as a part of a wireless acoustic sensor network. These recordings were made as part of a project to identify and mitigate noise sources in Singapore, but also possess a wider applicability to sound event detection, classification, and localization. This paper introduces an accompanying hierarchical label taxonomy, which has been designed to be compatible with other existing datasets for urban sound tagging while also able to capture sound events unique to the Singaporean context. This paper details the data collection, annotation, and processing methodologies for the creation of the dataset. We further perform exploratory data analysis and include the performance of a baseline model on the dataset as a benchmark.

Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) KPIs assess an organization's performance on issues such as climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, waste management, human rights, diversity, and policies. ESG reports convey this valuable quantitative information through tables. Unfortunately, extracting this information is difficult due to high variability in the table structure as well as content. We propose Statements, a novel domain agnostic data structure for extracting quantitative facts and related information. We propose translating tables to statements as a new supervised deep-learning universal information extraction task. We introduce SemTabNet - a dataset of over 100K annotated tables. Investigating a family of T5-based Statement Extraction Models, our best model generates statements which are 82% similar to the ground-truth (compared to baseline of 21%). We demonstrate the advantages of statements by applying our model to over 2700 tables from ESG reports. The homogeneous nature of statements permits exploratory data analysis on expansive information found in large collections of ESG reports.

This paper introduces GLARE an Arabic Apps Reviews dataset collected from Saudi Google PlayStore. It consists of 76M reviews, 69M of which are Arabic reviews of 9,980 Android Applications. We present the data collection methodology, along with a detailed Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) and Feature Engineering on the gathered reviews. We also highlight possible use cases and benefits of the dataset.

Analyzing large datasets requires responsive query execution, but executing SQL queries on massive datasets can be slow. This paper explores whether query execution can begin even before the user has finished typing, allowing results to appear almost instantly. We propose SpeQL, a system that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to predict likely queries based on the database schema, the user's past queries, and their incomplete query. Since exact query prediction is infeasible, SpeQL speculates on partial queries in two ways: 1) it predicts the query structure to compile and plan queries in advance, and 2) it precomputes smaller temporary tables that are much smaller than the original database, but are still predicted to contain all information necessary to answer the user's final query. Additionally, SpeQL continuously displays results for speculated queries and subqueries in real time, aiding exploratory analysis. A utility/user study showed that SpeQL improved task completion time, and participants reported that its speculative display of results helped them discover patterns in the data more quickly. In the study, SpeQL improves user's query latency by up to 289times and kept the overhead reasonable, at 4$ per hour.

Puzzlehunts are a genre of complex, multi-step puzzles lacking well-defined problem definitions. In contrast to conventional reasoning benchmarks consisting of tasks with clear instructions, puzzlehunts require models to discover the underlying problem structure from multimodal evidence and iterative reasoning, mirroring real-world domains such as scientific discovery, exploratory data analysis, or investigative problem-solving. Despite recent progress in foundation models, their performance on such open-ended settings remains largely untested. In this paper, we introduce PuzzleWorld, a large-scale benchmark of 667 puzzlehunt-style problems designed to assess step-by-step, open-ended, and creative multimodal reasoning. Each puzzle is annotated with the final solution, detailed reasoning traces, and cognitive skill labels, enabling holistic benchmarking and fine-grained diagnostic analysis. Most state-of-the-art models achieve only 1-2% final answer accuracy, with the best model solving only 14% of puzzles and reaching 40% stepwise accuracy. To demonstrate the value of our reasoning annotations, we show that fine-tuning a small model on reasoning traces improves stepwise reasoning from 4% to 11%, while training on final answers alone degrades performance to near zero. Our error analysis reveals that current models exhibit myopic reasoning, are bottlenecked by the limitations of language-based inference, and lack sketching capabilities crucial for visual and spatial reasoning. We release PuzzleWorld at https://github.com/MIT-MI/PuzzleWorld to support future work on building more general, open-ended, and creative reasoning systems.

How can we better organize code in computational notebooks? Notebooks have become a popular tool among data scientists, as they seamlessly weave text and code together, supporting users to rapidly iterate and document code experiments. However, it is often challenging to organize code in notebooks, partially because there is a mismatch between the linear presentation of code and the non-linear process of exploratory data analysis. We present StickyLand, a notebook extension for empowering users to freely organize their code in non-linear ways. With sticky cells that are always shown on the screen, users can quickly access their notes, instantly observe experiment results, and easily build interactive dashboards that support complex visual analytics. Case studies highlight how our tool can enhance notebook users's productivity and identify opportunities for future notebook designs. StickyLand is available at https://github.com/xiaohk/stickyland.

Real-world enterprise data intelligence workflows encompass data engineering that turns raw sources into analytical-ready tables and data analysis that convert those tables into decision-oriented insights. We introduce DAComp, a benchmark of 210 tasks that mirrors these complex workflows. Data engineering (DE) tasks require repository-level engineering on industrial schemas, including designing and building multi-stage SQL pipelines from scratch and evolving existing systems under evolving requirements. Data analysis (DA) tasks pose open-ended business problems that demand strategic planning, exploratory analysis through iterative coding, interpretation of intermediate results, and the synthesis of actionable recommendations. Engineering tasks are scored through execution-based, multi-metric evaluation. Open-ended tasks are assessed by a reliable, experimentally validated LLM-judge, which is guided by hierarchical, meticulously crafted rubrics. Our experiments reveal that even state-of-the-art agents falter on DAComp. Performance on DE tasks is particularly low, with success rates under 20%, exposing a critical bottleneck in holistic pipeline orchestration, not merely code generation. Scores on DA tasks also average below 40%, highlighting profound deficiencies in open-ended reasoning and demonstrating that engineering and analysis are distinct capabilities. By clearly diagnosing these limitations, DAComp provides a rigorous and realistic testbed to drive the development of truly capable autonomous data agents for enterprise settings. Our data and code are available at https://da-comp.github.io

Learning disorders are neurological conditions that affect the brain's ability to interconnect communication areas. Dyslexic students experience problems with reading, memorizing, and exposing concepts; however the magnitude of these can be mitigated through both therapies and the creation of compensatory mechanisms. Several efforts have been made to mitigate these issues, leading to the creation of digital resources for students with specific learning disorders attending primary and secondary education levels. Conversely, a standard approach is still missed in higher education. The VRAIlexia project has been created to tackle this issue by proposing two different tools: a mobile application integrating virtual reality (VR) to collect data quickly and easily, and an artificial intelligencebased software (AI) to analyze the collected data for customizing the supporting methodology for each student. The first one has been created and is being distributed among dyslexic students in Higher Education Institutions, for the conduction of specific psychological and psychometric tests. The second tool applies specific artificial intelligence algorithms to the data gathered via the application and other surveys. These AI techniques have allowed us to identify the most relevant difficulties faced by the students' cohort. Our different models have obtained around 90\% mean accuracy for predicting the support tools and learning strategies.

Data-analytic agents are emerging as a key catalyst for automated scientific discovery and for the vision of Innovating AI. Current approaches, however, rely heavily on prompt engineering over proprietary models, while open-source models struggle to face diverse-format, large-scale data files and long-horizon, multi-step reasoning that real-world analytics demands. This paper introduces DataMind, a scalable data synthesis and agent training recipe designed to build generalist data-analytic agents. DataMind tackles three key challenges in building open-source data-analytic agents, including insufficient data resources, improper training strategy, and unstable code-based multi-turn rollout. Concretely, DataMind applies 1) a fine-grained task taxonomy and a recursive easy-to-hard task composition mechanism to increase the diversity and difficulty of synthesized queries; 2) a knowledge-augmented trajectory sampling strategy followed by model-based and rule-based filtering; 3) a dynamically adjustable training objective combining both SFT and RL losses; 4) a memory-frugal and stable code-based multi-turn rollout framework. Built on DataMind, we curate DataMind-12K, a high-quality trajectory set spanning diverse domains, task categories, and data file formats for data-analytic tasks. Trained on DataMind-12K, our DataMind-14B achieves state-of-the-art with an average score of 71.16% on multiple data analysis benchmarks, outperforming the strongest proprietary baselines DeepSeek-V3.1 and GPT-5. Our DataMind-7B also performs best among all open-source models with a score of 68.10%. We also incorporate some empirical insights gained from our exploratory trials into the analysis experiments, aiming to provide actionable insights about agentic training for the community. We will release DataMind-12K and DataMind-7B,14B for the community's future research.

Social media has become a popular means for people to consume news. Meanwhile, it also enables the wide dissemination of fake news, i.e., news with intentionally false information, which brings significant negative effects to the society. Thus, fake news detection is attracting increasing attention. However, fake news detection is a non-trivial task, which requires multi-source information such as news content, social context, and dynamic information. First, fake news is written to fool people, which makes it difficult to detect fake news simply based on news contents. In addition to news contents, we need to explore social contexts such as user engagements and social behaviors. For example, a credible user's comment that "this is a fake news" is a strong signal for detecting fake news. Second, dynamic information such as how fake news and true news propagate and how users' opinions toward news pieces are very important for extracting useful patterns for (early) fake news detection and intervention. Thus, comprehensive datasets which contain news content, social context, and dynamic information could facilitate fake news propagation, detection, and mitigation; while to the best of our knowledge, existing datasets only contains one or two aspects. Therefore, in this paper, to facilitate fake news related researches, we provide a fake news data repository FakeNewsNet, which contains two comprehensive datasets that includes news content, social context, and dynamic information. We present a comprehensive description of datasets collection, demonstrate an exploratory analysis of this data repository from different perspectives, and discuss the benefits of FakeNewsNet for potential applications on fake news study on social media.

In this paper, we present the Logically submissions to De-Factify 2 challenge (DE-FACTIFY 2023) on the task 1 of Multi-Modal Fact Checking. We describes our submissions to this challenge including explored evidence retrieval and selection techniques, pre-trained cross-modal and unimodal models, and a cross-modal veracity model based on the well established Transformer Encoder (TE) architecture which is heavily relies on the concept of self-attention. Exploratory analysis is also conducted on this Factify 2 data set that uncovers the salient multi-modal patterns and hypothesis motivating the architecture proposed in this work. A series of preliminary experiments were done to investigate and benchmarking different pre-trained embedding models, evidence retrieval settings and thresholds. The final system, a standard two-stage evidence based veracity detection system, yields weighted avg. 0.79 on both val set and final blind test set on the task 1, which achieves 3rd place with a small margin to the top performing system on the leaderboard among 9 participants.

This paper describes our participant system for the multi-modal fact verification (Factify) challenge at AAAI 2022. Despite the recent advance in text based verification techniques and large pre-trained multimodal models cross vision and language, very limited work has been done in applying multimodal techniques to automate fact checking process, particularly considering the increasing prevalence of claims and fake news about images and videos on social media. In our work, the challenge is treated as multimodal entailment task and framed as multi-class classification. Two baseline approaches are proposed and explored including an ensemble model (combining two uni-modal models) and a multi-modal attention network (modeling the interaction between image and text pair from claim and evidence document). We conduct several experiments investigating and benchmarking different SoTA pre-trained transformers and vision models in this work. Our best model is ranked first in leaderboard which obtains a weighted average F-measure of 0.77 on both validation and test set. Exploratory analysis of dataset is also carried out on the Factify data set and uncovers salient patterns and issues (e.g., word overlapping, visual entailment correlation, source bias) that motivates our hypothesis. Finally, we highlight challenges of the task and multimodal dataset for future research.

Recent work has demonstrated that increased training dataset diversity improves general cross-domain knowledge and downstream generalization capability for large-scale language models. With this in mind, we present the Pile: an 825 GiB English text corpus targeted at training large-scale language models. The Pile is constructed from 22 diverse high-quality subsets -- both existing and newly constructed -- many of which derive from academic or professional sources. Our evaluation of the untuned performance of GPT-2 and GPT-3 on the Pile shows that these models struggle on many of its components, such as academic writing. Conversely, models trained on the Pile improve significantly over both Raw CC and CC-100 on all components of the Pile, while improving performance on downstream evaluations. Through an in-depth exploratory analysis, we document potentially concerning aspects of the data for prospective users. We make publicly available the code used in its construction.

Online sexism has become an increasing concern in social media platforms as it has affected the healthy development of the Internet and can have negative effects in society. While research in the sexism detection domain is growing, most of this research focuses on English as the language and on Twitter as the platform. Our objective here is to broaden the scope of this research by considering the Chinese language on Sina Weibo. We propose the first Chinese sexism dataset -- Sina Weibo Sexism Review (SWSR) dataset --, as well as a large Chinese lexicon SexHateLex made of abusive and gender-related terms. We introduce our data collection and annotation process, and provide an exploratory analysis of the dataset characteristics to validate its quality and to show how sexism is manifested in Chinese. The SWSR dataset provides labels at different levels of granularity including (i) sexism or non-sexism, (ii) sexism category and (iii) target type, which can be exploited, among others, for building computational methods to identify and investigate finer-grained gender-related abusive language. We conduct experiments for the three sexism classification tasks making use of state-of-the-art machine learning models. Our results show competitive performance, providing a benchmark for sexism detection in the Chinese language, as well as an error analysis highlighting open challenges needing more research in Chinese NLP. The SWSR dataset and SexHateLex lexicon are publicly available.

This article presents Individual Conditional Expectation (ICE) plots, a tool for visualizing the model estimated by any supervised learning algorithm. Classical partial dependence plots (PDPs) help visualize the average partial relationship between the predicted response and one or more features. In the presence of substantial interaction effects, the partial response relationship can be heterogeneous. Thus, an average curve, such as the PDP, can obfuscate the complexity of the modeled relationship. Accordingly, ICE plots refine the partial dependence plot by graphing the functional relationship between the predicted response and the feature for individual observations. Specifically, ICE plots highlight the variation in the fitted values across the range of a covariate, suggesting where and to what extent heterogeneities might exist. In addition to providing a plotting suite for exploratory analysis, we include a visual test for additive structure in the data generating model. Through simulated examples and real data sets, we demonstrate how ICE plots can shed light on estimated models in ways PDPs cannot. Procedures outlined are available in the R package ICEbox.

Dehumanization is a mental process that enables the exclusion and ill treatment of a group of people. In this paper, we present two data sets of dehumanizing text, a large, automatically collected corpus and a smaller, manually annotated data set. Both data sets include a combination of political discourse and dialogue from movie subtitles. Our methods give us a broad and varied amount of dehumanization data to work with, enabling further exploratory analysis and automatic classification of dehumanization patterns. Both data sets will be publicly released.

Personality and demographics are important variables in social sciences, while in NLP they can aid in interpretability and removal of societal biases. However, datasets with both personality and demographic labels are scarce. To address this, we present PANDORA, the first large-scale dataset of Reddit comments labeled with three personality models (including the well-established Big 5 model) and demographics (age, gender, and location) for more than 10k users. We showcase the usefulness of this dataset on three experiments, where we leverage the more readily available data from other personality models to predict the Big 5 traits, analyze gender classification biases arising from psycho-demographic variables, and carry out a confirmatory and exploratory analysis based on psychological theories. Finally, we present benchmark prediction models for all personality and demographic variables.

The ability to measure and track the speed and trajectory of a community's post-disaster recovery is essential to inform resource allocation and prioritization. The current survey-based approaches to examining community recovery, however, have significant lags and put the burden of data collection on affected people. Also, the existing literature lacks quantitative measures for important milestones to inform the assessment of recovery trajectory. Recognizing these gaps, this study uses location-based data related to visitation patterns and credit card transactions to specify critical recovery milestones related to population activity recovery. Using data from 2017 Hurricane Harvey in Harris County (Texas), the study specifies four critical post-disaster recovery milestones and calculates quantitative measurements of the length of time between the end of a hazard event and when the spatial areas (census tracts) reached these milestones based on fluctuations in visits to essential and non-essential facilities, and essential and non-essential credit card transactions. Accordingly, an integrated recovery metric is created for an overall measurement of each spatial area's recovery progression. Exploratory statistical analyses were conducted to examine whether variations in community recovery progression in achieving the critical milestones is correlated to its flood status, socioeconomic characteristics, and demographic composition. Finally, the extent of spatial inequality is examined. The results show the presence of moderate spatial inequality in population activity recovery in Hurricane Harvey, based upon which the inequality of recovery is measured. Results of this study can benefit post-disaster recovery resource allocation as well as improve community resilience towards future natural hazards.

Autoregressively trained transformers have brought a profound revolution to the world, especially with their in-context learning (ICL) ability to address downstream tasks. Recently, several studies suggest that transformers learn a mesa-optimizer during autoregressive (AR) pretraining to implement ICL. Namely, the forward pass of the trained transformer is equivalent to optimizing an inner objective function in-context. However, whether the practical non-convex training dynamics will converge to the ideal mesa-optimizer is still unclear. Towards filling this gap, we investigate the non-convex dynamics of a one-layer linear causal self-attention model autoregressively trained by gradient flow, where the sequences are generated by an AR process x_{t+1} = W x_t. First, under a certain condition of data distribution, we prove that an autoregressively trained transformer learns W by implementing one step of gradient descent to minimize an ordinary least squares (OLS) problem in-context. It then applies the learned W for next-token prediction, thereby verifying the mesa-optimization hypothesis. Next, under the same data conditions, we explore the capability limitations of the obtained mesa-optimizer. We show that a stronger assumption related to the moments of data is the sufficient and necessary condition that the learned mesa-optimizer recovers the distribution. Besides, we conduct exploratory analyses beyond the first data condition and prove that generally, the trained transformer will not perform vanilla gradient descent for the OLS problem. Finally, our simulation results verify the theoretical results.

This article focuses on the development and evaluation of Small-sized Czech sentence embedding models. Small models are important components for real-time industry applications in resource-constrained environments. Given the limited availability of labeled Czech data, alternative approaches, including pre-training, knowledge distillation, and unsupervised contrastive fine-tuning, are investigated. Comprehensive intrinsic and extrinsic analyses are conducted, showcasing the competitive performance of our models compared to significantly larger counterparts, with approximately 8 times smaller size and 5 times faster speed than conventional Base-sized models. To promote cooperation and reproducibility, both the models and the evaluation pipeline are made publicly accessible. Ultimately, this article presents practical applications of the developed sentence embedding models in Seznam.cz, the Czech search engine. These models have effectively replaced previous counterparts, enhancing the overall search experience for instance, in organic search, featured snippets, and image search. This transition has yielded improved performance.

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.

Formulating effective search queries remains a challenging task, particularly when users lack expertise in a specific domain or are not proficient in the language of the content. Providing example documents of interest might be easier for a user. However, such query-by-example scenarios are prone to concept drift, and the retrieval effectiveness is highly sensitive to the query generation method, without a clear way to incorporate user feedback. To enable exploration and to support Human-In-The-Loop experiments we propose QueryExplorer -- an interactive query generation, reformulation, and retrieval interface with support for HuggingFace generation models and PyTerrier's retrieval pipelines and datasets, and extensive logging of human feedback. To allow users to create and modify effective queries, our demo supports complementary approaches of using LLMs interactively, assisting the user with edits and feedback at multiple stages of the query formulation process. With support for recording fine-grained interactions and user annotations, QueryExplorer can serve as a valuable experimental and research platform for annotation, qualitative evaluation, and conducting Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) experiments for complex search tasks where users struggle to formulate queries.

A research division plays an important role of driving innovation in an organization. Drawing insights, following trends, keeping abreast of new research, and formulating strategies are increasingly becoming more challenging for both researchers and executives as the amount of information grows in both velocity and volume. In this paper we present a use case of how a corporate research community, IBM Research, utilizes Semantic Web technologies to induce a unified Knowledge Graph from both structured and textual data obtained by integrating various applications used by the community related to research projects, academic papers, datasets, achievements and recognition. In order to make the Knowledge Graph more accessible to application developers, we identified a set of common patterns for exploiting the induced knowledge and exposed them as APIs. Those patterns were born out of user research which identified the most valuable use cases or user pain points to be alleviated. We outline two distinct scenarios: recommendation and analytics for business use. We will discuss these scenarios in detail and provide an empirical evaluation on entity recommendation specifically. The methodology used and the lessons learned from this work can be applied to other organizations facing similar challenges.

Data-driven scientific discovery requires the iterative integration of scientific domain knowledge, statistical expertise, and an understanding of data semantics to make nuanced analytical decisions, e.g., about which variables, transformations, and statistical models to consider. LM-based agents equipped with planning, memory, and code execution capabilities have the potential to support data-driven science. However, evaluating agents on such open-ended tasks is challenging due to multiple valid approaches, partially correct steps, and different ways to express the same decisions. To address these challenges, we present BLADE, a benchmark to automatically evaluate agents' multifaceted approaches to open-ended research questions. BLADE consists of 12 datasets and research questions drawn from existing scientific literature, with ground truth collected from independent analyses by expert data scientists and researchers. To automatically evaluate agent responses, we developed corresponding computational methods to match different representations of analyses to this ground truth. Though language models possess considerable world knowledge, our evaluation shows that they are often limited to basic analyses. However, agents capable of interacting with the underlying data demonstrate improved, but still non-optimal, diversity in their analytical decision making. Our work enables the evaluation of agents for data-driven science and provides researchers deeper insights into agents' analysis approaches.

We identify the task of measuring data to quantitatively characterize the composition of machine learning data and datasets. Similar to an object's height, width, and volume, data measurements quantify different attributes of data along common dimensions that support comparison. Several lines of research have proposed what we refer to as measurements, with differing terminology; we bring some of this work together, particularly in fields of computer vision and language, and build from it to motivate measuring data as a critical component of responsible AI development. Measuring data aids in systematically building and analyzing machine learning (ML) data towards specific goals and gaining better control of what modern ML systems will learn. We conclude with a discussion of the many avenues of future work, the limitations of data measurements, and how to leverage these measurement approaches in research and practice.

The extraction of a small number of relevant insights from vast amounts of data is a crucial component of data-driven decision-making. However, accomplishing this task requires considerable technical skills, domain expertise, and human labor. This study explores the potential of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the discovery of insights in data, leveraging recent advances in reasoning and code generation techniques. We propose a new evaluation methodology based on a "capture the flag" principle, measuring the ability of such models to recognize meaningful and pertinent information (flags) in a dataset. We further propose two proof-of-concept agents, with different inner workings, and compare their ability to capture such flags in a real-world sales dataset. While the work reported here is preliminary, our results are sufficiently interesting to mandate future exploration by the community.

Evaluations are critical for understanding the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Fundamentally, evaluations are experiments; but the literature on evaluations has largely ignored the literature from other sciences on experiment analysis and planning. This article shows researchers with some training in statistics how to think about and analyze data from language model evaluations. Conceptualizing evaluation questions as having been drawn from an unseen super-population, we present formulas for analyzing evaluation data, measuring differences between two models, and planning an evaluation experiment. We make a number of specific recommendations for running language model evaluations and reporting experiment results in a way that minimizes statistical noise and maximizes informativeness.

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.

Data scarcity is a common obstacle in medical research due to the high costs associated with data collection and the complexity of gaining access to and utilizing data. Synthesizing health data may provide an efficient and cost-effective solution to this shortage, enabling researchers to explore distributions and populations that are not represented in existing observations or difficult to access due to privacy considerations. To that end, we have developed a multi-task self-attention model that produces realistic wearable activity data. We examine the characteristics of the generated data and quantify its similarity to genuine samples with both quantitative and qualitative approaches.

The surge of LLM studies makes synthesizing their findings challenging. Meta-analysis can uncover important trends across studies, but its use is limited by the time-consuming nature of manual data extraction. Our study presents a semi-automated approach for meta-analysis that accelerates data extraction using LLMs. It automatically identifies relevant arXiv papers, extracts experimental results and related attributes, and organizes them into a structured dataset. We conduct a comprehensive meta-analysis of frontier LLMs using an automatically extracted dataset, reducing the effort of paper surveying and data extraction by more than 93\% compared to manual approaches. We validate our dataset by showing that it reproduces key findings from a recent manual meta-analysis about Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and also uncovers new insights that go beyond it, showing for example that in-context examples benefit multimodal tasks but offer limited gains in mathematical tasks compared to CoT. Our automatically updatable dataset enables continuous tracking of target models by extracting evaluation studies as new data becomes available. Through our scientific artifacts and empirical analysis, we provide novel insights into LLMs while facilitating ongoing meta-analyses of their behavior.

The exponential growth of scientific literature necessitates advanced tools for effective knowledge exploration. We present Knowledge Navigator, a system designed to enhance exploratory search abilities by organizing and structuring the retrieved documents from broad topical queries into a navigable, two-level hierarchy of named and descriptive scientific topics and subtopics. This structured organization provides an overall view of the research themes in a domain, while also enabling iterative search and deeper knowledge discovery within specific subtopics by allowing users to refine their focus and retrieve additional relevant documents. Knowledge Navigator combines LLM capabilities with cluster-based methods to enable an effective browsing method. We demonstrate our approach's effectiveness through automatic and manual evaluations on two novel benchmarks, CLUSTREC-COVID and SCITOC. Our code, prompts, and benchmarks are made publicly available.

Given the complexity and lack of transparency in deep neural networks (DNNs), extensive efforts have been made to make these systems more interpretable or explain their behaviors in accessible terms. Unlike most reviews, which focus on algorithmic and model-centric perspectives, this work takes a "data-centric" view, examining how data collection, processing, and analysis contribute to explainable AI (XAI). We categorize existing work into three categories subject to their purposes: interpretations of deep models, referring to feature attributions and reasoning processes that correlate data points with model outputs; influences of training data, examining the impact of training data nuances, such as data valuation and sample anomalies, on decision-making processes; and insights of domain knowledge, discovering latent patterns and fostering new knowledge from data and models to advance social values and scientific discovery. Specifically, we distill XAI methodologies into data mining operations on training and testing data across modalities, such as images, text, and tabular data, as well as on training logs, checkpoints, models and other DNN behavior descriptors. In this way, our study offers a comprehensive, data-centric examination of XAI from a lens of data mining methods and applications.

As large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their powerful capabilities in plenty of domains and tasks, including context understanding, code generation, language generation, data storytelling, etc., many data analysts may raise concerns if their jobs will be replaced by AI. This controversial topic has drawn a lot of attention in public. However, we are still at a stage of divergent opinions without any definitive conclusion. Motivated by this, we raise the research question of "is GPT-4 a good data analyst?" in this work and aim to answer it by conducting head-to-head comparative studies. In detail, we regard GPT-4 as a data analyst to perform end-to-end data analysis with databases from a wide range of domains. We propose a framework to tackle the problems by carefully designing the prompts for GPT-4 to conduct experiments. We also design several task-specific evaluation metrics to systematically compare the performance between several professional human data analysts and GPT-4. Experimental results show that GPT-4 can achieve comparable performance to humans. We also provide in-depth discussions about our results to shed light on further studies before we reach the conclusion that GPT-4 can replace data analysts.

Instruction-tuning can be substantially optimized through enhanced diversity, resulting in models capable of handling a broader spectrum of tasks. However, existing data employed for such tuning often exhibit an inadequate coverage of individual domains, limiting the scope for nuanced comprehension and interactions within these areas. To address this deficiency, we propose Explore-Instruct, a novel approach to enhance the data coverage to be used in domain-specific instruction-tuning through active exploration via Large Language Models (LLMs). Built upon representative domain use cases, Explore-Instruct explores a multitude of variations or possibilities by implementing a search algorithm to obtain diversified and domain-focused instruction-tuning data. Our data-centric analysis validates the effectiveness of this proposed approach in improving domain-specific instruction coverage. Moreover, our model's performance demonstrates considerable advancements over multiple baselines, including those utilizing domain-specific data enhancement. Our findings offer a promising opportunity to improve instruction coverage, especially in domain-specific contexts, thereby advancing the development of adaptable language models. Our code, model weights, and data are public at https://github.com/fanqiwan/Explore-Instruct.

We present a system using Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) to analyze a large database with tens of millions of images captured at different times, with the aim of discovering patterns in temporal changes. Specifically, we aim to capture frequent co-occurring changes ("trends") across a city over a certain period. Unlike previous visual analyses, our analysis answers open-ended queries (e.g., "what are the frequent types of changes in the city?") without any predetermined target subjects or training labels. These properties cast prior learning-based or unsupervised visual analysis tools unsuitable. We identify MLLMs as a novel tool for their open-ended semantic understanding capabilities. Yet, our datasets are four orders of magnitude too large for an MLLM to ingest as context. So we introduce a bottom-up procedure that decomposes the massive visual analysis problem into more tractable sub-problems. We carefully design MLLM-based solutions to each sub-problem. During experiments and ablation studies with our system, we find it significantly outperforms baselines and is able to discover interesting trends from images captured in large cities (e.g., "addition of outdoor dining,", "overpass was painted blue," etc.). See more results and interactive demos at https://boyangdeng.com/visual-chronicles.

Scientific literature searches are often exploratory, whereby users are not yet familiar with a particular field or concept but are interested in learning more about it. However, existing systems for scientific literature search are typically tailored to keyword-based lookup searches, limiting the possibilities for exploration. We propose NLP-KG, a feature-rich system designed to support the exploration of research literature in unfamiliar natural language processing (NLP) fields. In addition to a semantic search, NLP-KG allows users to easily find survey papers that provide a quick introduction to a field of interest. Further, a Fields of Study hierarchy graph enables users to familiarize themselves with a field and its related areas. Finally, a chat interface allows users to ask questions about unfamiliar concepts or specific articles in NLP and obtain answers grounded in knowledge retrieved from scientific publications. Our system provides users with comprehensive exploration possibilities, supporting them in investigating the relationships between different fields, understanding unfamiliar concepts in NLP, and finding relevant research literature. Demo, video, and code are available at: https://github.com/NLP-Knowledge-Graph/NLP-KG-WebApp.

Large language models (LLMs) have grown in their usage to provide support for question answering across numerous disciplines. The models on their own have already shown promise for answering basic questions, however fail quickly where expert domain knowledge is required or the question is nuanced. Scientific research often involves searching for relevant literature, distilling pertinent information from that literature and analysing how the findings support or contradict one another. The information is often encapsulated in the full text body of research articles, rather than just in the abstracts. Statements within these articles frequently require the wider article context to be fully understood. We have built an LLM-based system that performs such search and distillation of information encapsulated in scientific literature, and we evaluate our keyword based search and information distillation system against a set of biology related questions from previously released literature benchmarks. We demonstrate sparse retrieval methods exhibit results close to state of the art without the need for dense retrieval, with its associated infrastructure and complexity overhead. We also show how to increase the coverage of relevant documents for literature review generation.

This research explores the integration of large language models (LLMs) into scientific data assimilation, focusing on combustion science as a case study. Leveraging foundational models integrated with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, the study introduces an approach to process diverse combustion research data, spanning experimental studies, simulations, and literature. The multifaceted nature of combustion research emphasizes the critical role of knowledge processing in navigating and extracting valuable information from a vast and diverse pool of sources. The developed approach minimizes computational and economic expenses while optimizing data privacy and accuracy. It incorporates prompt engineering and offline open-source LLMs, offering user autonomy in selecting base models. The study provides a thorough examination of text segmentation strategies, conducts comparative studies between LLMs, and explores various optimized prompts to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework. By incorporating an external database, the framework outperforms a conventional LLM in generating accurate responses and constructing robust arguments. Additionally, the study delves into the investigation of optimized prompt templates for the purpose of efficient extraction of scientific literature. The research addresses concerns related to hallucinations and false research articles by introducing a custom workflow developed with a detection algorithm to filter out inaccuracies. Despite identified areas for improvement, the framework consistently delivers accurate domain-specific responses with minimal human oversight. The prompt-agnostic approach introduced holds promise for future deliberations. The study underscores the significance of integrating LLMs and knowledge processing techniques in scientific research, providing a foundation for advancements in data assimilation and utilization.

Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise in automating data analysis tasks, yet open-source models face significant limitations in these kinds of reasoning-intensive scenarios. In this work, we investigate strategies to enhance the data analysis capabilities of open-source LLMs. By curating a seed dataset of diverse, realistic scenarios, we evaluate models across three dimensions: data understanding, code generation, and strategic planning. Our analysis reveals three key findings: (1) Strategic planning quality serves as the primary determinant of model performance; (2) Interaction design and task complexity significantly influence reasoning capabilities; (3) Data quality demonstrates a greater impact than diversity in achieving optimal performance. We leverage these insights to develop a data synthesis methodology, demonstrating significant improvements in open-source LLMs' analytical reasoning capabilities.

The paradigm of Large Language Models (LLMs) has increasingly shifted toward agentic applications, where web browsing capabilities are fundamental for retrieving information from diverse online sources. However, existing open-source web agents either demonstrate limited information-seeking abilities on complex tasks or lack transparent implementations. In this work, we identify that the key challenge lies in the scarcity of challenging data for information seeking. To address this limitation, we introduce WebExplorer: a systematic data generation approach using model-based exploration and iterative, long-to-short query evolution. This method creates challenging query-answer pairs that require multi-step reasoning and complex web navigation. By leveraging our curated high-quality dataset, we successfully develop advanced web agent WebExplorer-8B through supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning. Our model supports 128K context length and up to 100 tool calling turns, enabling long-horizon problem solving. Across diverse information-seeking benchmarks, WebExplorer-8B achieves the state-of-the-art performance at its scale. Notably, as an 8B-sized model, WebExplorer-8B is able to effectively search over an average of 16 turns after RL training, achieving higher accuracy than WebSailor-72B on BrowseComp-en/zh and attaining the best performance among models up to 100B parameters on WebWalkerQA and FRAMES. Beyond these information-seeking tasks, our model also achieves strong generalization on the HLE benchmark even though it is only trained on knowledge-intensive QA data. These results highlight our approach as a practical path toward long-horizon web agents.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in real-world applications. The capability of in-context learning (ICL) allows us to adapt an LLM to downstream tasks by including input-label exemplars in the prompt without model fine-tuning. However, the quality of these exemplars in the prompt greatly impacts performance, highlighting the need for an effective automated exemplar selection method. Recent studies have explored retrieval-based approaches to select exemplars tailored to individual test queries, which can be undesirable due to extra test-time computation and an increased risk of data exposure. Moreover, existing methods fail to adequately account for the impact of exemplar ordering on the performance. On the other hand, the impact of the instruction, another essential component in the prompt given to the LLM, is often overlooked in existing exemplar selection methods. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method named EASE, which leverages the hidden embedding from a pre-trained language model to represent ordered sets of exemplars and uses a neural bandit algorithm to optimize the sets of exemplars while accounting for exemplar ordering. Our EASE can efficiently find an ordered set of exemplars that performs well for all test queries from a given task, thereby eliminating test-time computation. Importantly, EASE can be readily extended to jointly optimize both the exemplars and the instruction. Through extensive empirical evaluations (including novel tasks), we demonstrate the superiority of EASE over existing methods, and reveal practical insights about the impact of exemplar selection on ICL, which may be of independent interest. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhaoxuanWu/EASE-Prompt-Optimization.

We introduce Trove, an easy-to-use open-source retrieval toolkit that simplifies research experiments without sacrificing flexibility or speed. For the first time, we introduce efficient data management features that load and process (filter, select, transform, and combine) retrieval datasets on the fly, with just a few lines of code. This gives users the flexibility to easily experiment with different dataset configurations without the need to compute and store multiple copies of large datasets. Trove is highly customizable: in addition to many built-in options, it allows users to freely modify existing components or replace them entirely with user-defined objects. It also provides a low-code and unified pipeline for evaluation and hard negative mining, which supports multi-node execution without any code changes. Trove's data management features reduce memory consumption by a factor of 2.6. Moreover, Trove's easy-to-use inference pipeline incurs no overhead, and inference times decrease linearly with the number of available nodes. Most importantly, we demonstrate how Trove simplifies retrieval experiments and allows for arbitrary customizations, thus facilitating exploratory research.

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

DBLP is the largest open-access repository of scientific articles on computer science and provides metadata associated with publications, authors, and venues. We retrieved more than 6 million publications from DBLP and extracted pertinent metadata (e.g., abstracts, author affiliations, citations) from the publication texts to create the DBLP Discovery Dataset (D3). D3 can be used to identify trends in research activity, productivity, focus, bias, accessibility, and impact of computer science research. We present an initial analysis focused on the volume of computer science research (e.g., number of papers, authors, research activity), trends in topics of interest, and citation patterns. Our findings show that computer science is a growing research field (approx. 15% annually), with an active and collaborative researcher community. While papers in recent years present more bibliographical entries in comparison to previous decades, the average number of citations has been declining. Investigating papers' abstracts reveals that recent topic trends are clearly reflected in D3. Finally, we list further applications of D3 and pose supplemental research questions. The D3 dataset, our findings, and source code are publicly available for research purposes.

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.

A common use of NLP is to facilitate the understanding of large document collections, with a shift from using traditional topic models to Large Language Models. Yet the effectiveness of using LLM for large corpus understanding in real-world applications remains under-explored. This study measures the knowledge users acquire with unsupervised, supervised LLM-based exploratory approaches or traditional topic models on two datasets. While LLM-based methods generate more human-readable topics and show higher average win probabilities than traditional models for data exploration, they produce overly generic topics for domain-specific datasets that do not easily allow users to learn much about the documents. Adding human supervision to the LLM generation process improves data exploration by mitigating hallucination and over-genericity but requires greater human effort. In contrast, traditional. models like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) remain effective for exploration but are less user-friendly. We show that LLMs struggle to describe the haystack of large corpora without human help, particularly domain-specific data, and face scaling and hallucination limitations due to context length constraints. Dataset available at https://huggingface. co/datasets/zli12321/Bills.

Data driven activism attempts to collect, analyze and visualize data to foster social change. However, during media censorship it is often impossible to collect such data. Here we demonstrate that data from personal stories can also help us to gain insights about protests and activism which can work as a voice for the activists. We analyze protest story data by extracting location network from the stories and perform emotion mining to get insight about the protest.

We introduce a pattern mining framework that operates on semi-structured datasets and exploits the dichotomy between outcomes. Our approach takes advantage of constraint reasoning to find sequential patterns that occur frequently and exhibit desired properties. This allows the creation of novel pattern embeddings that are useful for knowledge extraction and predictive modeling. Finally, we present an application on customer intent prediction from digital clickstream data. Overall, we show that pattern embeddings play an integrator role between semi-structured data and machine learning models, improve the performance of the downstream task and retain interpretability.

There has recently been a surge of work in explanatory artificial intelligence (XAI). This research area tackles the important problem that complex machines and algorithms often cannot provide insights into their behavior and thought processes. XAI allows users and parts of the internal system to be more transparent, providing explanations of their decisions in some level of detail. These explanations are important to ensure algorithmic fairness, identify potential bias/problems in the training data, and to ensure that the algorithms perform as expected. However, explanations produced by these systems is neither standardized nor systematically assessed. In an effort to create best practices and identify open challenges, we provide our definition of explainability and show how it can be used to classify existing literature. We discuss why current approaches to explanatory methods especially for deep neural networks are insufficient. Finally, based on our survey, we conclude with suggested future research directions for explanatory artificial intelligence.

Open data repositories hold potential for evidence-based decision-making, yet are inaccessible to non-experts lacking expertise in dataset discovery, schema mapping, and statistical analysis. Large language models show promise for individual tasks, but end-to-end analytical workflows expose fundamental limitations: attention dilutes across growing contexts, specialized reasoning patterns interfere, and errors propagate undetected. We present PublicAgent, a multi-agent framework that addresses these limitations through decomposition into specialized agents for intent clarification, dataset discovery, analysis, and reporting. This architecture maintains focused attention within agent contexts and enables validation at each stage. Evaluation across five models and 50 queries derives five design principles for multi-agent LLM systems. First, specialization provides value independent of model strength--even the strongest model shows 97.5% agent win rates, with benefits orthogonal to model scale. Second, agents divide into universal (discovery, analysis) and conditional (report, intent) categories. Universal agents show consistent effectiveness (std dev 12.4%) while conditional agents vary by model (std dev 20.5%). Third, agents mitigate distinct failure modes--removing discovery or analysis causes catastrophic failures (243-280 instances), while removing report or intent causes quality degradation. Fourth, architectural benefits persist across task complexity with stable win rates (86-92% analysis, 84-94% discovery), indicating workflow management value rather than reasoning enhancement. Fifth, wide variance in agent effectiveness across models (42-96% for analysis) requires model-aware architecture design. These principles guide when and why specialization is necessary for complex analytical workflows while enabling broader access to public data through natural language interfaces.

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex domains such as logical reasoning and experimental coding. Motivated by these advancements, numerous studies have explored the application of AI in the innovation process, particularly in the context of scientific research. These AI technologies primarily aim to develop systems that can autonomously conduct research processes across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Despite these significant strides, a comprehensive survey on AI for Research (AI4Research) remains absent, which hampers our understanding and impedes further development in this field. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive survey and offer a unified perspective on AI4Research. Specifically, the main contributions of our work are as follows: (1) Systematic taxonomy: We first introduce a systematic taxonomy to classify five mainstream tasks in AI4Research. (2) New frontiers: Then, we identify key research gaps and highlight promising future directions, focusing on the rigor and scalability of automated experiments, as well as the societal impact. (3) Abundant applications and resources: Finally, we compile a wealth of resources, including relevant multidisciplinary applications, data corpora, and tools. We hope our work will provide the research community with quick access to these resources and stimulate innovative breakthroughs in AI4Research.

In this paper, we introduce the idea of decomposing the residuals of regression with respect to the data instances instead of features. This allows us to determine the effects of each individual instance on the model and each other, and in doing so makes for a model-agnostic method of identifying instances of interest. In doing so, we can also determine the appropriateness of the model and data in the wider context of a given study. The paper focuses on the possible applications that such a framework brings to the relatively unexplored field of instance analysis in the context of Explainable AI tasks.

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.

In this time when biased information, deep fakes, and propaganda proliferate, the accessibility of reliable data sources is more important than ever. National statistical institutes provide curated data that contain quantitative information on a wide range of topics. However, that information is typically spread across many tables and the plain numbers may be arduous to process. Hence, this open data may be practically inaccessible. We ask the question "Are current Generative AI models capable of facilitating the identification of the right data and the fully-automatic creation of charts to provide information in visual form, corresponding to user queries?". We present a structured evaluation of recent large language models' (LLMs) capabilities to generate charts from complex data in response to user queries. Working with diverse public data from Statistics Netherlands, we assessed multiple LLMs on their ability to identify relevant data tables, perform necessary manipulations, and generate appropriate visualizations autonomously. We propose a new evaluation framework spanning three dimensions: data retrieval & pre-processing, code quality, and visual representation. Results indicate that locating and processing the correct data represents the most significant challenge. Additionally, LLMs rarely implement visualization best practices without explicit guidance. When supplemented with information about effective chart design, models showed marked improvement in representation scores. Furthermore, an agentic approach with iterative self-evaluation led to excellent performance across all evaluation dimensions. These findings suggest that LLMs' effectiveness for automated chart generation can be enhanced through appropriate scaffolding and feedback mechanisms, and that systems can already reach the necessary accuracy across the three evaluation dimensions.

The profusion of user generated content caused by the rise of social media platforms has enabled a surge in research relating to fields such as information retrieval, recommender systems, data mining and machine learning. However, the lack of comprehensive baseline data sets to allow a thorough evaluative comparison has become an important issue. In this paper we present a large data set of news items from well-known aggregators such as Google News and Yahoo! News, and their respective social feedback on multiple platforms: Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. The data collected relates to a period of 8 months, between November 2015 and July 2016, accounting for about 100,000 news items on four different topics: economy, microsoft, obama and palestine. This data set is tailored for evaluative comparisons in predictive analytics tasks, although allowing for tasks in other research areas such as topic detection and tracking, sentiment analysis in short text, first story detection or news recommendation.

Language models and specialized table embedding models have recently demonstrated strong performance on many tasks over tabular data. Researchers and practitioners are keen to leverage these models in many new application contexts; but limited understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of these models, and the table representations they generate, makes the process of finding a suitable model for a given task reliant on trial and error. There is an urgent need to gain a comprehensive understanding of these models to minimize inefficiency and failures in downstream usage. To address this need, we propose Observatory, a formal framework to systematically analyze embedding representations of relational tables. Motivated both by invariants of the relational data model and by statistical considerations regarding data distributions, we define eight primitive properties, and corresponding measures to quantitatively characterize table embeddings for these properties. Based on these properties, we define an extensible framework to evaluate language and table embedding models. We collect and synthesize a suite of datasets and use Observatory to analyze nine such models. Our analysis provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of learned representations over tables. We find, for example, that some models are sensitive to table structure such as column order, that functional dependencies are rarely reflected in embeddings, and that specialized table embedding models have relatively lower sample fidelity. Such insights help researchers and practitioners better anticipate model behaviors and select appropriate models for their downstream tasks, while guiding researchers in the development of new models.

We describe HypotheSAEs, a general method to hypothesize interpretable relationships between text data (e.g., headlines) and a target variable (e.g., clicks). HypotheSAEs has three steps: (1) train a sparse autoencoder on text embeddings to produce interpretable features describing the data distribution, (2) select features that predict the target variable, and (3) generate a natural language interpretation of each feature (e.g., "mentions being surprised or shocked") using an LLM. Each interpretation serves as a hypothesis about what predicts the target variable. Compared to baselines, our method better identifies reference hypotheses on synthetic datasets (at least +0.06 in F1) and produces more predictive hypotheses on real datasets (~twice as many significant findings), despite requiring 1-2 orders of magnitude less compute than recent LLM-based methods. HypotheSAEs also produces novel discoveries on two well-studied tasks: explaining partisan differences in Congressional speeches and identifying drivers of engagement with online headlines.

The development of modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, particularly diffusion-based models employed in computer vision and image generation tasks, is undergoing a paradigmatic shift in development methodologies. Traditionally dominated by a "Model Centric" approach, in which performance gains were primarily pursued through increasingly complex model architectures and hyperparameter optimization, the field is now recognizing a more nuanced "Data-Centric" approach. This emergent framework foregrounds the quality, structure, and relevance of training data as the principal driver of model performance. To operationalize this paradigm shift, we introduce the DataSeeds.AI sample dataset (the "DSD"), initially comprised of approximately 10,610 high-quality human peer-ranked photography images accompanied by extensive multi-tier annotations. The DSD is a foundational computer vision dataset designed to usher in a new standard for commercial image datasets. Representing a small fraction of DataSeed.AI's 100 million-plus image catalog, the DSD provides a scalable foundation necessary for robust commercial and multimodal AI development. Through this in-depth exploratory analysis, we document the quantitative improvements generated by the DSD on specific models against known benchmarks and make the code and the trained models used in our evaluation publicly available.

This work delved into the realm of automatic text generation, exploring a variety of techniques ranging from traditional deterministic approaches to more modern stochastic methods. Through analysis of greedy search, beam search, top-k sampling, top-p sampling, contrastive searching, and locally typical searching, this work has provided valuable insights into the strengths, weaknesses, and potential applications of each method. Each text-generating method is evaluated using several standard metrics and a comparative study has been made on the performance of the approaches. Finally, some future directions of research in the field of automatic text generation are also identified.

Recent advancements in the collection and analysis of sequential educational data have brought time series analysis to a pivotal position in educational research, highlighting its essential role in facilitating data-driven decision-making. However, there is a lack of comprehensive summaries that consolidate these advancements. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to provide a comprehensive review of time series analysis techniques specifically within the educational context. We begin by exploring the landscape of educational data analytics, categorizing various data sources and types relevant to education. We then review four prominent time series methods-forecasting, classification, clustering, and anomaly detection-illustrating their specific application points in educational settings. Subsequently, we present a range of educational scenarios and applications, focusing on how these methods are employed to address diverse educational tasks, which highlights the practical integration of multiple time series methods to solve complex educational problems. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on future directions, including personalized learning analytics, multimodal data fusion, and the role of large language models (LLMs) in educational time series. The contributions of this paper include a detailed taxonomy of educational data, a synthesis of time series techniques with specific educational applications, and a forward-looking perspective on emerging trends and future research opportunities in educational analysis. The related papers and resources are available and regularly updated at the project page.

Researchers have long recognized the socio-technical gaps in personal tracking research, where machines can never fully model the complexity of human behavior, making it only able to produce basic rule-based outputs or "black-box" results that lack clear explanations. Real-world deployments rely on experts for this complex translation from sparse data to meaningful insights. In this study, we consider this translation process from data to insights by experts as "sensemaking" and explore how HCI researchers can support it through Vital Insight, an evidence-based 'sensemaking' system that combines direct representation and indirect inference through visualization and Large Language Models. We evaluate Vital Insight in user testing sessions with 14 experts in multi-modal tracking, synthesize design implications, and develop an expert sensemaking model where they iteratively move between direct data representations and AI-supported inferences to explore, retrieve, question, and validate insights.

Deep neural networks have shown excellent performances in many real-world applications. Unfortunately, they may show "Clever Hans"-like behavior---making use of confounding factors within datasets---to achieve high performance. In this work, we introduce the novel learning setting of "explanatory interactive learning" (XIL) and illustrate its benefits on a plant phenotyping research task. XIL adds the scientist into the training loop such that she interactively revises the original model via providing feedback on its explanations. Our experimental results demonstrate that XIL can help avoiding Clever Hans moments in machine learning and encourages (or discourages, if appropriate) trust into the underlying model.

There has been a surge of interest in harnessing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to accelerate scientific discovery. While existing approaches rely on grounding the discovery process within the relevant literature, effectiveness varies significantly with the quality and nature of the retrieved literature. We address the challenge of retrieving prior work whose concepts can inspire solutions for a given research problem, a task we define as Methodology Inspiration Retrieval (MIR). We construct a novel dataset tailored for training and evaluating retrievers on MIR, and establish baselines. To address MIR, we build the Methodology Adjacency Graph (MAG); capturing methodological lineage through citation relationships. We leverage MAG to embed an "intuitive prior" into dense retrievers for identifying patterns of methodological inspiration beyond superficial semantic similarity. This achieves significant gains of +5.4 in Recall@3 and +7.8 in Mean Average Precision (mAP) over strong baselines. Further, we adapt LLM-based re-ranking strategies to MIR, yielding additional improvements of +4.5 in Recall@3 and +4.8 in mAP. Through extensive ablation studies and qualitative analyses, we exhibit the promise of MIR in enhancing automated scientific discovery and outline avenues for advancing inspiration-driven retrieval.

Business intelligence (BI) is any knowledge derived from existing data that may be strategically applied within a business. Data mining is a technique or method for extracting BI from data using statistical data modeling. Finding relationships or correlations between the various data items that have been collected can be used to boost business performance or at the very least better comprehend what is going on. Root cause analysis (RCA) is discovering the root causes of problems or events to identify appropriate solutions. RCA can show why an event occurred and this can help in avoiding occurrences of an issue in the future. This paper proposes a new clustering + association rule mining pipeline for getting business insights from data. The results of this pipeline are in the form of association rules having consequents, antecedents, and various metrics to evaluate these rules. The results of this pipeline can help in anchoring important business decisions and can also be used by data scientists for updating existing models or while developing new ones. The occurrence of any event is explained by its antecedents in the generated rules. Hence this output can also help in data-driven root cause analysis.

Data science aims to extract insights from data to support decision-making processes. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as assistants for data science, by suggesting ideas, techniques and small code snippets, or for the interpretation of results and reporting. Proper automation of some data-science activities is now promised by the rise of LLM agents, i.e., AI systems powered by an LLM equipped with additional affordances--such as code execution and knowledge bases--that can perform self-directed actions and interact with digital environments. In this paper, we survey the evaluation of LLM assistants and agents for data science. We find (1) a dominant focus on a small subset of goal-oriented activities, largely ignoring data management and exploratory activities; (2) a concentration on pure assistance or fully autonomous agents, without considering intermediate levels of human-AI collaboration; and (3) an emphasis on human substitution, therefore neglecting the possibility of higher levels of automation thanks to task transformation.

User-generated content (UGC) communities, especially those featuring multimodal content, improve user experiences by integrating visual and textual information into results (or items). The challenge of improving user experiences in complex systems with search and recommendation (S\&R) services has drawn significant attention from both academia and industry these years. However, the lack of high-quality datasets has limited the research progress on multimodal S\&R. To address the growing need for developing better S\&R services, we present a novel multimodal information retrieval dataset in this paper, namely Qilin. The dataset is collected from Xiaohongshu, a popular social platform with over 300 million monthly active users and an average search penetration rate of over 70\%. In contrast to existing datasets, Qilin offers a comprehensive collection of user sessions with heterogeneous results like image-text notes, video notes, commercial notes, and direct answers, facilitating the development of advanced multimodal neural retrieval models across diverse task settings. To better model user satisfaction and support the analysis of heterogeneous user behaviors, we also collect extensive APP-level contextual signals and genuine user feedback. Notably, Qilin contains user-favored answers and their referred results for search requests triggering the Deep Query Answering (DQA) module. This allows not only the training \& evaluation of a Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline, but also the exploration of how such a module would affect users' search behavior. Through comprehensive analysis and experiments, we provide interesting findings and insights for further improving S\&R systems. We hope that Qilin will significantly contribute to the advancement of multimodal content platforms with S\&R services in the future.

Organizing unstructured image collections into semantic clusters is a long-standing challenge. Traditional deep clustering techniques address this by producing a single data partition, whereas multiple clustering methods uncover diverse alternative partitions-but only when users predefine the clustering criteria. Yet expecting users to specify such criteria a priori for large, unfamiliar datasets is unrealistic. In this work, we introduce the task of Open-ended Semantic Multiple Clustering (OpenSMC), which aims to automatically discover clustering criteria from large, unstructured image collections, revealing interpretable substructures without human input. Our framework, X-Cluster: eXploratory Clustering, treats text as a reasoning proxy: it concurrently scans the entire image collection, proposes candidate criteria in natural language, and groups images into meaningful clusters per criterion. To evaluate progress, we release COCO-4c and Food-4c benchmarks, each annotated with four grouping criteria. Experiments show that X-Cluster effectively reveals meaningful partitions and enables downstream applications such as bias discovery and social media image popularity analysis. We will open-source code and data to encourage reproducibility and further research.

This position paper proposes a data-centric viewpoint of AI research, focusing on large language models (LLMs). We start by making the key observation that data is instrumental in the developmental (e.g., pretraining and fine-tuning) and inferential stages (e.g., in-context learning) of LLMs, and yet it receives disproportionally low attention from the research community. We identify four specific scenarios centered around data, covering data-centric benchmarks and data curation, data attribution, knowledge transfer, and inference contextualization. In each scenario, we underscore the importance of data, highlight promising research directions, and articulate the potential impacts on the research community and, where applicable, the society as a whole. For instance, we advocate for a suite of data-centric benchmarks tailored to the scale and complexity of data for LLMs. These benchmarks can be used to develop new data curation methods and document research efforts and results, which can help promote openness and transparency in AI and LLM research.

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.

Data science, which transforms raw data into actionable insights, is critical for data-driven decision-making. However, these tasks are often complex, involving steps for exploring multiple data sources and synthesizing findings to deliver insightful answers. While large language models (LLMs) show significant promise in automating this process, they often struggle with heterogeneous data formats and generate sub-optimal analysis plans, as verifying plan sufficiency is inherently difficult without ground-truth labels for such open-ended tasks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce DS-STAR, a novel data science agent. Specifically, DS-STAR makes three key contributions: (1) a data file analysis module that automatically explores and extracts context from diverse data formats, including unstructured types; (2) a verification step where an LLM-based judge evaluates the sufficiency of the analysis plan at each stage; and (3) a sequential planning mechanism that starts with a simple, executable plan and iteratively refines it based on the DS-STAR's feedback until its sufficiency is verified. This iterative refinement allows DS-STAR to reliably navigate complex analyses involving diverse data sources. Our experiments show that DS-STAR achieves state-of-the-art performance across three challenging benchmarks: DABStep, KramaBench, and DA-Code. Moreover, DS-STAR particularly outperforms baselines on hard tasks that require processing multiple data files with heterogeneous formats.

Explainable NLP (ExNLP) has increasingly focused on collecting human-annotated textual explanations. These explanations are used downstream in three ways: as data augmentation to improve performance on a predictive task, as supervision to train models to produce explanations for their predictions, and as a ground-truth to evaluate model-generated explanations. In this review, we identify 65 datasets with three predominant classes of textual explanations (highlights, free-text, and structured), organize the literature on annotating each type, identify strengths and shortcomings of existing collection methodologies, and give recommendations for collecting ExNLP datasets in the future.

A great deal of effort has been devoted to reducing the risk of spurious scientific discoveries, from the use of sophisticated validation techniques, to deep statistical methods for controlling the false discovery rate in multiple hypothesis testing. However, there is a fundamental disconnect between the theoretical results and the practice of data analysis: the theory of statistical inference assumes a fixed collection of hypotheses to be tested, or learning algorithms to be applied, selected non-adaptively before the data are gathered, whereas in practice data is shared and reused with hypotheses and new analyses being generated on the basis of data exploration and the outcomes of previous analyses. In this work we initiate a principled study of how to guarantee the validity of statistical inference in adaptive data analysis. As an instance of this problem, we propose and investigate the question of estimating the expectations of m adaptively chosen functions on an unknown distribution given n random samples. We show that, surprisingly, there is a way to estimate an exponential in n number of expectations accurately even if the functions are chosen adaptively. This gives an exponential improvement over standard empirical estimators that are limited to a linear number of estimates. Our result follows from a general technique that counter-intuitively involves actively perturbing and coordinating the estimates, using techniques developed for privacy preservation. We give additional applications of this technique to our question.

Deep research -- producing comprehensive, citation-grounded reports by searching and synthesizing information from hundreds of live web sources -- marks an important frontier for agentic systems. To rigorously evaluate this ability, four principles are essential: tasks should be (1) user-centric, reflecting realistic information needs, (2) dynamic, requiring up-to-date information beyond parametric knowledge, (3) unambiguous, ensuring consistent interpretation across users, and (4) multi-faceted and search-intensive, requiring search over numerous web sources and in-depth analysis. Existing benchmarks fall short of these principles, often focusing on narrow domains or posing ambiguous questions that hinder fair comparison. Guided by these principles, we introduce LiveResearchBench, a benchmark of 100 expert-curated tasks spanning daily life, enterprise, and academia, each requiring extensive, dynamic, real-time web search and synthesis. Built with over 1,500 hours of human labor, LiveResearchBench provides a rigorous basis for systematic evaluation. To evaluate citation-grounded long-form reports, we introduce DeepEval, a comprehensive suite covering both content- and report-level quality, including coverage, presentation, citation accuracy and association, consistency and depth of analysis. DeepEval integrates four complementary evaluation protocols, each designed to ensure stable assessment and high agreement with human judgments. Using LiveResearchBench and DeepEval, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 17 frontier deep research systems, including single-agent web search, single-agent deep research, and multi-agent systems. Our analysis reveals current strengths, recurring failure modes, and key system components needed to advance reliable, insightful deep research.

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.

Improving the quality of search results can significantly enhance users experience and engagement with search engines. In spite of several recent advancements in the fields of machine learning and data mining, correctly classifying items for a particular user search query has been a long-standing challenge, which still has a large room for improvement. This paper introduces the "Shopping Queries Dataset", a large dataset of difficult Amazon search queries and results, publicly released with the aim of fostering research in improving the quality of search results. The dataset contains around 130 thousand unique queries and 2.6 million manually labeled (query,product) relevance judgements. The dataset is multilingual with queries in English, Japanese, and Spanish. The Shopping Queries Dataset is being used in one of the KDDCup'22 challenges. In this paper, we describe the dataset and present three evaluation tasks along with baseline results: (i) ranking the results list, (ii) classifying product results into relevance categories, and (iii) identifying substitute products for a given query. We anticipate that this data will become the gold standard for future research in the topic of product search.

A growing body of work shows that many problems in fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics in machine learning systems are rooted in decisions surrounding the data collection and annotation process. In spite of its fundamental nature however, data collection remains an overlooked part of the machine learning (ML) pipeline. In this paper, we argue that a new specialization should be formed within ML that is focused on methodologies for data collection and annotation: efforts that require institutional frameworks and procedures. Specifically for sociocultural data, parallels can be drawn from archives and libraries. Archives are the longest standing communal effort to gather human information and archive scholars have already developed the language and procedures to address and discuss many challenges pertaining to data collection such as consent, power, inclusivity, transparency, and ethics & privacy. We discuss these five key approaches in document collection practices in archives that can inform data collection in sociocultural ML. By showing data collection practices from another field, we encourage ML research to be more cognizant and systematic in data collection and draw from interdisciplinary expertise.

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.

Seeking answers to questions within long scientific research articles is a crucial area of study that aids readers in quickly addressing their inquiries. However, existing question-answering (QA) datasets based on scientific papers are limited in scale and focus solely on textual content. To address this limitation, we introduce SPIQA (Scientific Paper Image Question Answering), the first large-scale QA dataset specifically designed to interpret complex figures and tables within the context of scientific research articles across various domains of computer science. Leveraging the breadth of expertise and ability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to understand figures, we employ automatic and manual curation to create the dataset. We craft an information-seeking task involving multiple images that cover a wide variety of plots, charts, tables, schematic diagrams, and result visualizations. SPIQA comprises 270K questions divided into training, validation, and three different evaluation splits. Through extensive experiments with 12 prominent foundational models, we evaluate the ability of current multimodal systems to comprehend the nuanced aspects of research articles. Additionally, we propose a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation strategy with in-context retrieval that allows fine-grained, step-by-step assessment and improves model performance. We further explore the upper bounds of performance enhancement with additional textual information, highlighting its promising potential for future research and the dataset's impact on revolutionizing how we interact with scientific literature.

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/.

Machine learning research, crucial for technological advancements and innovation, often faces significant challenges due to its inherent complexity, slow pace of experimentation, and the necessity for specialized expertise. Motivated by this, we present a new systematic framework, autonomous Machine Learning Research with large language models (MLR-Copilot), designed to enhance machine learning research productivity through the automatic generation and implementation of research ideas using Large Language Model (LLM) agents. The framework consists of three phases: research idea generation, experiment implementation, and implementation execution. First, existing research papers are used to generate hypotheses and experimental plans vis IdeaAgent powered by LLMs. Next, the implementation generation phase translates these plans into executables with ExperimentAgent. This phase leverages retrieved prototype code and optionally retrieves candidate models and data. Finally, the execution phase, also managed by ExperimentAgent, involves running experiments with mechanisms for human feedback and iterative debugging to enhance the likelihood of achieving executable research outcomes. We evaluate our framework on five machine learning research tasks and the experimental results show the framework's potential to facilitate the research progress and innovations.

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.

Dataset summarisation is a fruitful approach to dataset inspection. However, when applied to a single dataset the discovery of visual concepts is restricted to those most prominent. We argue that a comparative approach can expand upon this paradigm to enable richer forms of dataset inspection that go beyond the most prominent concepts. To enable dataset comparison we present a module that learns concept-level prototypes across datasets. We leverage self-supervised learning to discover these prototypes without supervision, and we demonstrate the benefits of our approach in two case-studies. Our findings show that dataset comparison extends dataset inspection and we hope to encourage more works in this direction. Code and usage instructions available at https://github.com/Nanne/ProtoSim

Selecting high-quality and diverse training samples from extensive datasets plays a crucial role in reducing training overhead and enhancing the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing studies fall short in assessing the overall value of selected data, focusing primarily on individual quality, and struggle to strike an effective balance between ensuring diversity and minimizing data point traversals. Therefore, this paper introduces a novel choice-based sample selection framework that shifts the focus from evaluating individual sample quality to comparing the contribution value of different samples when incorporated into the subset. Thanks to the advanced language understanding capabilities of LLMs, we utilize LLMs to evaluate the value of each option during the selection process. Furthermore, we design a greedy sampling process where samples are incrementally added to the subset, thereby improving efficiency by eliminating the need for exhaustive traversal of the entire dataset with the limited budget. Extensive experiments demonstrate that selected data from our method not only surpass the performance of the full dataset but also achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art (SOTA) studies, while requiring fewer selections. Moreover, we validate our approach on a larger medical dataset, highlighting its practical applicability in real-world applications.

Text analysis of social media for sentiment, topic analysis, and other analysis depends initially on the selection of keywords and phrases that will be used to create the research corpora. However, keywords that researchers choose may occur infrequently, leading to errors that arise from using small samples. In this paper, we use the capacity for memorization, interpolation, and extrapolation of Transformer Language Models such as the GPT series to learn the linguistic behaviors of a subgroup within larger corpora of Yelp reviews. We then use prompt-based queries to generate synthetic text that can be analyzed to produce insights into specific opinions held by the populations that the models were trained on. Once learned, more specific sentiment queries can be made of the model with high levels of accuracy when compared to traditional keyword searches. We show that even in cases where a specific keyphrase is limited or not present at all in the training corpora, the GPT is able to accurately generate large volumes of text that have the correct sentiment.

With the rapid growth of research in AI and robotics now producing over 10,000 papers annually it has become increasingly difficult for researchers to stay up to date. Fast evolving trends, the rise of interdisciplinary work, and the need to explore domains beyond one's expertise all contribute to this challenge. To address these issues, we propose a generalizable pipeline capable of systematically analyzing any research area: identifying emerging trends, uncovering cross domain opportunities, and offering concrete starting points for new inquiry. In this work, we present Real Deep Research (RDR) a comprehensive framework applied to the domains of AI and robotics, with a particular focus on foundation models and robotics advancements. We also briefly extend our analysis to other areas of science. The main paper details the construction of the RDR pipeline, while the appendix provides extensive results across each analyzed topic. We hope this work sheds light for researchers working in the field of AI and beyond.

Data analytics is essential for extracting valuable insights from data that can assist organizations in making effective decisions. We introduce InsightBench, a benchmark dataset with three key features. First, it consists of 100 datasets representing diverse business use cases such as finance and incident management, each accompanied by a carefully curated set of insights planted in the datasets. Second, unlike existing benchmarks focusing on answering single queries, InsightBench evaluates agents based on their ability to perform end-to-end data analytics, including formulating questions, interpreting answers, and generating a summary of insights and actionable steps. Third, we conducted comprehensive quality assurance to ensure that each dataset in the benchmark had clear goals and included relevant and meaningful questions and analysis. Furthermore, we implement a two-way evaluation mechanism using LLaMA-3 as an effective, open-source evaluator to assess agents' ability to extract insights. We also propose AgentPoirot, our baseline data analysis agent capable of performing end-to-end data analytics. Our evaluation on InsightBench shows that AgentPoirot outperforms existing approaches (such as Pandas Agent) that focus on resolving single queries. We also compare the performance of open- and closed-source LLMs and various evaluation strategies. Overall, this benchmark serves as a testbed to motivate further development in comprehensive automated data analytics and can be accessed here: https://github.com/ServiceNow/insight-bench.

Information tasks such as writing surveys or analytical reports require complex search and reasoning, and have recently been grouped under the umbrella of deep research -- a term also adopted by recent models targeting these capabilities. Despite growing interest, the scope of the deep research task remains underdefined and its distinction from other reasoning-intensive problems is poorly understood. In this paper, we propose a formal characterization of the deep research (DR) task and introduce a benchmark to evaluate the performance of DR systems. We argue that the core defining feature of deep research is not the production of lengthy report-style outputs, but rather the high fan-out over concepts required during the search process, i.e., broad and reasoning-intensive exploration. To enable objective evaluation, we define DR using an intermediate output representation that encodes key claims uncovered during search-separating the reasoning challenge from surface-level report generation. Based on this formulation, we propose a diverse, challenging benchmark LiveDRBench with 100 challenging tasks over scientific topics (e.g., datasets, materials discovery, prior art search) and public interest events (e.g., flight incidents, movie awards). Across state-of-the-art DR systems, F1 score ranges between 0.02 and 0.72 for any sub-category. OpenAI's model performs the best with an overall F1 score of 0.55. Analysis of reasoning traces reveals the distribution over the number of referenced sources, branching, and backtracking events executed by current DR systems, motivating future directions for improving their search mechanisms and grounding capabilities. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LiveDRBench.

This paper proposes a method for the automatic creation of variables (in the case of regression) that complement the information contained in the initial input vector. The method works as a pre-processing step in which the continuous values of the variable to be regressed are discretized into a set of intervals which are then used to define value thresholds. Then classifiers are trained to predict whether the value to be regressed is less than or equal to each of these thresholds. The different outputs of the classifiers are then concatenated in the form of an additional vector of variables that enriches the initial vector of the regression problem. The implemented system can thus be considered as a generic pre-processing tool. We tested the proposed enrichment method with 5 types of regressors and evaluated it in 33 regression datasets. Our experimental results confirm the interest of the approach.

The exponential growth of scientific literature requires effective management and extraction of valuable insights. While existing scientific search engines excel at delivering search results based on relational databases, they often neglect the analysis of collaborations between scientific entities and the evolution of ideas, as well as the in-depth analysis of content within scientific publications. The representation of heterogeneous graphs and the effective measurement, analysis, and mining of such graphs pose significant challenges. To address these challenges, we present AceMap, an academic system designed for knowledge discovery through academic graph. We present advanced database construction techniques to build the comprehensive AceMap database with large-scale academic entities that contain rich visual, textual, and numerical information. AceMap also employs innovative visualization, quantification, and analysis methods to explore associations and logical relationships among academic entities. AceMap introduces large-scale academic network visualization techniques centered on nebular graphs, providing a comprehensive view of academic networks from multiple perspectives. In addition, AceMap proposes a unified metric based on structural entropy to quantitatively measure the knowledge content of different academic entities. Moreover, AceMap provides advanced analysis capabilities, including tracing the evolution of academic ideas through citation relationships and concept co-occurrence, and generating concise summaries informed by this evolutionary process. In addition, AceMap uses machine reading methods to generate potential new ideas at the intersection of different fields. Exploring the integration of large language models and knowledge graphs is a promising direction for future research in idea evolution. Please visit https://www.acemap.info for further exploration.

Interpretability is becoming an active research topic as machine learning (ML) models are more widely used to make critical decisions. Tabular data is one of the most commonly used modes of data in diverse applications such as healthcare and finance. Much of the existing interpretability methods used for tabular data only report feature-importance scores -- either locally (per example) or globally (per model) -- but they do not provide interpretation or visualization of how the features interact. We address this limitation by introducing Feature Vectors, a new global interpretability method designed for tabular datasets. In addition to providing feature-importance, Feature Vectors discovers the inherent semantic relationship among features via an intuitive feature visualization technique. Our systematic experiments demonstrate the empirical utility of this new method by applying it to several real-world datasets. We further provide an easy-to-use Python package for Feature Vectors.

With recent dramatic increases in AI system capabilities, there has been growing interest in utilizing machine learning for reasoning-heavy, quantitative tasks, particularly mathematics. While there are many resources capturing mathematics at the high-school, undergraduate, and graduate level, there are far fewer resources available that align with the level of difficulty and open endedness encountered by professional mathematicians working on open problems. To address this, we introduce a new collection of datasets, the Algebraic Combinatorics Dataset Repository (ACD Repo), representing either foundational results or open problems in algebraic combinatorics, a subfield of mathematics that studies discrete structures arising from abstract algebra. Further differentiating our dataset collection is the fact that it aims at the conjecturing process. Each dataset includes an open-ended research-level question and a large collection of examples (up to 10M in some cases) from which conjectures should be generated. We describe all nine datasets, the different ways machine learning models can be applied to them (e.g., training with narrow models followed by interpretability analysis or program synthesis with LLMs), and discuss some of the challenges involved in designing datasets like these.

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.

Data profiling is an essential process in modern data-driven industries. One of its critical components is the discovery and validation of complex statistics, including functional dependencies, data constraints, association rules, and others. However, most existing data profiling systems that focus on complex statistics do not provide proper integration with the tools used by contemporary data scientists. This creates a significant barrier to the adoption of these tools in the industry. Moreover, existing systems were not created with industrial-grade workloads in mind. Finally, they do not aim to provide descriptive explanations, i.e. why a given pattern is not found. It is a significant issue as it is essential to understand the underlying reasons for a specific pattern's absence to make informed decisions based on the data. Because of that, these patterns are effectively rest in thin air: their application scope is rather limited, they are rarely used by the broader public. At the same time, as we are going to demonstrate in this presentation, complex statistics can be efficiently used to solve many classic data quality problems. Desbordante is an open-source data profiler that aims to close this gap. It is built with emphasis on industrial application: it is efficient, scalable, resilient to crashes, and provides explanations. Furthermore, it provides seamless Python integration by offloading various costly operations to the C++ core, not only mining. In this demonstration, we show several scenarios that allow end users to solve different data quality problems. Namely, we showcase typo detection, data deduplication, and data anomaly detection scenarios.

Interpretability and analysis (IA) research is a growing subfield within NLP with the goal of developing a deeper understanding of the behavior or inner workings of NLP systems and methods. Despite growing interest in the subfield, a commonly voiced criticism is that it lacks actionable insights and therefore has little impact on NLP. In this paper, we seek to quantify the impact of IA research on the broader field of NLP. We approach this with a mixed-methods analysis of: (1) a citation graph of 185K+ papers built from all papers published at ACL and EMNLP conferences from 2018 to 2023, and (2) a survey of 138 members of the NLP community. Our quantitative results show that IA work is well-cited outside of IA, and central in the NLP citation graph. Through qualitative analysis of survey responses and manual annotation of 556 papers, we find that NLP researchers build on findings from IA work and perceive it is important for progress in NLP, multiple subfields, and rely on its findings and terminology for their own work. Many novel methods are proposed based on IA findings and highly influenced by them, but highly influential non-IA work cites IA findings without being driven by them. We end by summarizing what is missing in IA work today and provide a call to action, to pave the way for a more impactful future of IA research.

Advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning have catalyzed the transformation of big data analytics and management into pivotal domains for research and application. This work explores the theoretical foundations, methodological advancements, and practical implementations of these technologies, emphasizing their role in uncovering actionable insights from massive, high-dimensional datasets. The study presents a systematic overview of data preprocessing techniques, including data cleaning, normalization, integration, and dimensionality reduction, to prepare raw data for analysis. Core analytics methodologies such as classification, clustering, regression, and anomaly detection are examined, with a focus on algorithmic innovation and scalability. Furthermore, the text delves into state-of-the-art frameworks for data mining and predictive modeling, highlighting the role of neural networks, support vector machines, and ensemble methods in tackling complex analytical challenges. Special emphasis is placed on the convergence of big data with distributed computing paradigms, including cloud and edge computing, to address challenges in storage, computation, and real-time analytics. The integration of ethical considerations, including data privacy and compliance with global standards, ensures a holistic perspective on data management. Practical applications across healthcare, finance, marketing, and policy-making illustrate the real-world impact of these technologies. Through comprehensive case studies and Python-based implementations, this work equips researchers, practitioners, and data enthusiasts with the tools to navigate the complexities of modern data analytics. It bridges the gap between theory and practice, fostering the development of innovative solutions for managing and leveraging data in the era of artificial intelligence.

Literature-Based Discovery (LBD) aims to discover new scientific knowledge by mining papers and generating hypotheses. Standard LBD is limited to predicting pairwise relations between discrete concepts (e.g., drug-disease links), and ignores critical contexts like experimental settings (e.g., a specific patient population where a drug is evaluated) and background motivations (e.g., to find drugs without specific side effects). We address these limitations with a novel formulation of contextualized-LBD (C-LBD): generating scientific hypotheses in natural language, while grounding them in a context that controls the hypothesis search space. We present a modeling framework using retrieval of ``inspirations'' from past scientific papers. Our evaluations reveal that GPT-4 tends to generate ideas with overall low technical depth and novelty, while our inspiration prompting approaches partially mitigate this issue. Our work represents a first step toward building language models that generate new ideas derived from scientific literature.

To be informative, an evaluation must measure how well systems generalize to realistic unseen data. We identify limitations of and propose improvements to current evaluations of text-to-SQL systems. First, we compare human-generated and automatically generated questions, characterizing properties of queries necessary for real-world applications. To facilitate evaluation on multiple datasets, we release standardized and improved versions of seven existing datasets and one new text-to-SQL dataset. Second, we show that the current division of data into training and test sets measures robustness to variations in the way questions are asked, but only partially tests how well systems generalize to new queries; therefore, we propose a complementary dataset split for evaluation of future work. Finally, we demonstrate how the common practice of anonymizing variables during evaluation removes an important challenge of the task. Our observations highlight key difficulties, and our methodology enables effective measurement of future development.

Large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in automatic machine learning research agents. Among them, agents capable of autonomously proposing ideas and conducting machine learning experiments are particularly promising, as they maximize research automation and accelerate scientific progress by iteratively refining ideas based on experimental results. However, comprehensively evaluating such agents remains challenging. Existing benchmarks tend to overemphasize engineering aspects while neglecting academic rigor, creating barriers that obscure a clear assessment of an agent's scientific capabilities in machine learning research. They also suffer from limited task diversity, an overemphasis on application-oriented tasks over fundamental research problems, and limited scalability to realistic research settings. To address these limitations, we introduce FML-bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate automatic machine learning research agents on 8 diverse and fundamental machine learning research problems. It reduces coding burden, emphasizes fundamental problems rather than specific use cases, offers high task diversity, and is extensible to real-world machine learning GitHub repositories. Furthermore, we present a unified evaluation framework with five complementary metrics, designed to comprehensively assess agent performance on our benchmark. We evaluate state-of-the-art automatic research agents on FML-bench, and find that agents employing broad research exploration strategies outperform those focusing on narrow but deep exploration. These findings suggest that emphasizing the breadth of exploration may lead to more effective research outcomes than focusing solely on incremental refinement. Our benchmark is available at https://github.com/qrzou/FML-bench.

Scientific researchers need intensive information about datasets to effectively evaluate and develop theories and methodologies. The information needs regarding datasets are implicitly embedded in particular research tasks, rather than explicitly expressed in search queries. However, existing scientific retrieval and question-answering (QA) datasets typically address straightforward questions, which do not align with the distribution of real-world research inquiries. To bridge this gap, we developed ScIRGen, a dataset generation framework for scientific QA \& retrieval that more accurately reflects the information needs of professional science researchers, and uses it to create a large-scale scientific retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) dataset with realistic queries, datasets and papers. Technically, we designed a dataset-oriented information extraction method that leverages academic papers to augment the dataset representation. We then proposed a question generation framework by employing cognitive taxonomy to ensure the quality of synthesized questions. We also design a method to automatically filter synthetic answers based on the perplexity shift of LLMs, which is highly aligned with human judgment of answers' validity. Collectively, these methodologies culminated in the creation of the 61k QA dataset, ScIRGen-Geo. We benchmarked representative methods on the ScIRGen-Geo dataset for their question-answering and retrieval capabilities, finding out that current methods still suffer from reasoning from complex questions. This work advances the development of more sophisticated tools to support the intricate information needs of the scientific community.

In many real-world scenarios, rewards extrinsic to the agent are extremely sparse, or absent altogether. In such cases, curiosity can serve as an intrinsic reward signal to enable the agent to explore its environment and learn skills that might be useful later in its life. We formulate curiosity as the error in an agent's ability to predict the consequence of its own actions in a visual feature space learned by a self-supervised inverse dynamics model. Our formulation scales to high-dimensional continuous state spaces like images, bypasses the difficulties of directly predicting pixels, and, critically, ignores the aspects of the environment that cannot affect the agent. The proposed approach is evaluated in two environments: VizDoom and Super Mario Bros. Three broad settings are investigated: 1) sparse extrinsic reward, where curiosity allows for far fewer interactions with the environment to reach the goal; 2) exploration with no extrinsic reward, where curiosity pushes the agent to explore more efficiently; and 3) generalization to unseen scenarios (e.g. new levels of the same game) where the knowledge gained from earlier experience helps the agent explore new places much faster than starting from scratch. Demo video and code available at https://pathak22.github.io/noreward-rl/

Generative models such as Large Language Models, Diffusion Models, and generative adversarial networks have recently revolutionized the creation of synthetic data, offering scalable solutions to data scarcity, privacy, and annotation challenges in data mining. This tutorial introduces the foundations and latest advances in synthetic data generation, covers key methodologies and practical frameworks, and discusses evaluation strategies and applications. Attendees will gain actionable insights into leveraging generative synthetic data to enhance data mining research and practice. More information can be found on our website: https://syndata4dm.github.io/.

This work presents the BanglishRev Dataset, the largest e-commerce product review dataset to date for reviews written in Bengali, English, a mixture of both and Banglish, Bengali words written with English alphabets. The dataset comprises of 1.74 million written reviews from 3.2 million ratings information collected from a total of 128k products being sold in online e-commerce platforms targeting the Bengali population. It includes an extensive array of related metadata for each of the reviews including the rating given by the reviewer, date the review was posted and date of purchase, number of likes, dislikes, response from the seller, images associated with the review etc. With sentiment analysis being the most prominent usage of review datasets, experimentation with a binary sentiment analysis model with the review rating serving as an indicator of positive or negative sentiment was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the large amount of data presented in BanglishRev for sentiment analysis tasks. A BanglishBERT model is trained on the data from BanglishRev with reviews being considered labeled positive if the rating is greater than 3 and negative if the rating is less than or equal to 3. The model is evaluated by being testing against a previously published manually annotated dataset for e-commerce reviews written in a mixture of Bangla, English and Banglish. The experimental model achieved an exceptional accuracy of 94\% and F1 score of 0.94, demonstrating the dataset's efficacy for sentiment analysis. Some of the intriguing patterns and observations seen within the dataset and future research directions where the dataset can be utilized is also discussed and explored. The dataset can be accessed through https://huggingface.co/datasets/BanglishRev/bangla-english-and-code-mixed-ecommerce-review-dataset.

The rapid expansion of the digital world has propelled sentiment analysis into a critical tool across diverse sectors such as marketing, politics, customer service, and healthcare. While there have been significant advancements in sentiment analysis for widely spoken languages, low-resource languages, such as Bangla, remain largely under-researched due to resource constraints. Furthermore, the recent unprecedented performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various applications highlights the need to evaluate them in the context of low-resource languages. In this study, we present a sizeable manually annotated dataset encompassing 33,605 Bangla news tweets and Facebook comments. We also investigate zero- and few-shot in-context learning with several language models, including Flan-T5, GPT-4, and Bloomz, offering a comparative analysis against fine-tuned models. Our findings suggest that monolingual transformer-based models consistently outperform other models, even in zero and few-shot scenarios. To foster continued exploration, we intend to make this dataset and our research tools publicly available to the broader research community. In the spirit of further research, we plan to make this dataset and our experimental resources publicly accessible to the wider research community.

The rapid advancement of large language models has fundamentally shifted the bottleneck in AI development from computational power to data availability-with countless valuable datasets remaining hidden across specialized repositories, research appendices, and domain platforms. As reasoning capabilities and deep research methodologies continue to evolve, a critical question emerges: can AI agents transcend conventional search to systematically discover any dataset that meets specific user requirements, enabling truly autonomous demand-driven data curation? We introduce DatasetResearch, the first comprehensive benchmark evaluating AI agents' ability to discover and synthesize datasets from 208 real-world demands across knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive tasks. Our tri-dimensional evaluation framework reveals a stark reality: even advanced deep research systems achieve only 22% score on our challenging DatasetResearch-pro subset, exposing the vast gap between current capabilities and perfect dataset discovery. Our analysis uncovers a fundamental dichotomy-search agents excel at knowledge tasks through retrieval breadth, while synthesis agents dominate reasoning challenges via structured generation-yet both catastrophically fail on "corner cases" outside existing distributions. These findings establish the first rigorous baseline for dataset discovery agents and illuminate the path toward AI systems capable of finding any dataset in the digital universe. Our benchmark and comprehensive analysis provide the foundation for the next generation of self-improving AI systems and are publicly available at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/DatasetResearch.

This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) as research tools in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS). LLMs are remarkably effective at processing unstructured text and inferring meaning from context, offering new affordances that challenge long-standing divides between computational and interpretive methods. This raises both opportunities and challenges for HPSS, which emphasizes interpretive methodologies and understands meaning as context-dependent, ambiguous, and historically situated. We argue that HPSS is uniquely positioned not only to benefit from LLMs' capabilities but also to interrogate their epistemic assumptions and infrastructural implications. To this end, we first offer a concise primer on LLM architectures and training paradigms tailored to non-technical readers. We frame LLMs not as neutral tools but as epistemic infrastructures that encode assumptions about meaning, context, and similarity, conditioned by their training data, architecture, and patterns of use. We then examine how computational techniques enhanced by LLMs, such as structuring data, detecting patterns, and modeling dynamic processes, can be applied to support interpretive research in HPSS. Our analysis compares full-context and generative models, outlines strategies for domain and task adaptation (e.g., continued pretraining, fine-tuning, and retrieval-augmented generation), and evaluates their respective strengths and limitations for interpretive inquiry in HPSS. We conclude with four lessons for integrating LLMs into HPSS: (1) model selection involves interpretive trade-offs; (2) LLM literacy is foundational; (3) HPSS must define its own benchmarks and corpora; and (4) LLMs should enhance, not replace, interpretive methods.

Keeping track of scientific challenges, advances and emerging directions is a fundamental part of research. However, researchers face a flood of papers that hinders discovery of important knowledge. In biomedicine, this directly impacts human lives. To address this problem, we present a novel task of extraction and search of scientific challenges and directions, to facilitate rapid knowledge discovery. We construct and release an expert-annotated corpus of texts sampled from full-length papers, labeled with novel semantic categories that generalize across many types of challenges and directions. We focus on a large corpus of interdisciplinary work relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, ranging from biomedicine to areas such as AI and economics. We apply a model trained on our data to identify challenges and directions across the corpus and build a dedicated search engine. In experiments with 19 researchers and clinicians using our system, we outperform a popular scientific search engine in assisting knowledge discovery. Finally, we show that models trained on our resource generalize to the wider biomedical domain and to AI papers, highlighting its broad utility. We make our data, model and search engine publicly available. https://challenges.apps.allenai.org/

Background. Fully automatic analysis of myocardial perfusion MRI datasets enables rapid and objective reporting of stress/rest studies in patients with suspected ischemic heart disease. Developing deep learning techniques that can analyze multi-center datasets despite limited training data and variations in software and hardware is an ongoing challenge. Methods. Datasets from 3 medical centers acquired at 3T (n = 150 subjects) were included: an internal dataset (inD; n = 95) and two external datasets (exDs; n = 55) used for evaluating the robustness of the trained deep neural network (DNN) models against differences in pulse sequence (exD-1) and scanner vendor (exD-2). A subset of inD (n = 85) was used for training/validation of a pool of DNNs for segmentation, all using the same spatiotemporal U-Net architecture and hyperparameters but with different parameter initializations. We employed a space-time sliding-patch analysis approach that automatically yields a pixel-wise "uncertainty map" as a byproduct of the segmentation process. In our approach, a given test case is segmented by all members of the DNN pool and the resulting uncertainty maps are leveraged to automatically select the "best" one among the pool of solutions. Results. The proposed DAUGS analysis approach performed similarly to the established approach on the internal dataset (p = n.s.) whereas it significantly outperformed on the external datasets (p < 0.005 for exD-1 and exD-2). Moreover, the number of image series with "failed" segmentation was significantly lower for the proposed vs. the established approach (4.3% vs. 17.1%, p < 0.0005). Conclusions. The proposed DAUGS analysis approach has the potential to improve the robustness of deep learning methods for segmentation of multi-center stress perfusion datasets with variations in the choice of pulse sequence, site location or scanner vendor.

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.

The success of AI models relies on the availability of large, diverse, and high-quality datasets, which can be challenging to obtain due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution by generating artificial data that mimics real-world patterns. This paper provides an overview of synthetic data research, discussing its applications, challenges, and future directions. We present empirical evidence from prior art to demonstrate its effectiveness and highlight the importance of ensuring its factuality, fidelity, and unbiasedness. We emphasize the need for responsible use of synthetic data to build more powerful, inclusive, and trustworthy language models.

In the domain of semantic parsing, significant progress has been achieved in Text-to-SQL and question-answering tasks, both of which focus on extracting information from data sources in their native formats. However, the inherent constraints of their formal meaning representations, such as SQL programming language or basic logical forms, hinder their ability to analyze data from various perspectives, such as conducting statistical analyses. To address this limitation and inspire research in this field, we design SIGMA, a new dataset for Text-to-Code semantic parsing with statistical analysis. SIGMA comprises 6000 questions with corresponding Python code labels, spanning across 160 databases. Half of the questions involve query types, which return information in its original format, while the remaining 50% are statistical analysis questions, which perform statistical operations on the data. The Python code labels in our dataset cover 4 types of query types and 40 types of statistical analysis patterns. We evaluated the SIGMA dataset using three different baseline models: LGESQL, SmBoP, and SLSQL. The experimental results show that the LGESQL model with ELECTRA outperforms all other models, achieving 83.37% structure accuracy. In terms of execution accuracy, the SmBoP model, when combined with GraPPa and T5, reaches 76.38%.

As an efficient approach to understand, generate, and process natural language texts, research in natural language processing (NLP) has exhibited a rapid spread and wide adoption in recent years. Given the increasing research work in this area, several NLP-related approaches have been surveyed in the research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics, identifies trends, and outlines areas for future research remains absent. Contributing to closing this gap, we have systematically classified and analyzed research papers in the ACL Anthology. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of fields of study in NLP, analyze recent developments in NLP, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.

Specializing LLMs in various domain-specific tasks has emerged as a critical step towards achieving high performance. However, the construction and annotation of datasets in specific domains are always very costly. Apart from using superior and expensive closed-source LLM APIs to construct datasets, some open-source models have become strong enough to handle dataset construction in many scenarios. Thus, we present a family of data augmentation models designed to significantly improve the efficiency for model fine-tuning. These models, trained based on sufficiently small LLMs, support key functionalities with low inference costs: instruction expansion, instruction refinement, and instruction-response pair expansion. To fulfill this goal, we first construct an automatic data collection system with seed datasets generated from both public repositories and our in-house datasets. This system leverages powerful LLMs to expand, refine and re-write the instructions and responses, incorporating quality assessment techniques. Following this, we introduce the training process of our models, which effectively distills task-solving and text synthesis abilities from teacher LLMs. Finally, we demonstrate how we integrate these functionalities into a machine learning platform to support low-cost LLM fine-tuning from both dataset preparation and training perspectives for users. Experiments and an application study prove the effectiveness of our approach.

There has been growing interest in utilizing occupational data mining and analysis. In today's job market, occupational data mining and analysis is growing in importance as it enables companies to predict employee turnover, model career trajectories, screen through resumes and perform other human resource tasks. A key requirement to facilitate these tasks is the need for an occupation-related dataset. However, most research use proprietary datasets or do not make their dataset publicly available, thus impeding development in this area. To solve this issue, we present the Industrial and Professional Occupation Dataset (IPOD), which comprises 192k job titles belonging to 56k LinkedIn users. In addition to making IPOD publicly available, we also: (i) manually annotate each job title with its associated level of seniority, domain of work and location; and (ii) provide embedding for job titles and discuss various use cases. This dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/junhua/ipod.

Tracking how data is mentioned and used in research papers provides critical insights for improving data discoverability, quality, and production. However, manually identifying and classifying dataset mentions across vast academic literature is resource-intensive and not scalable. This paper presents a machine learning framework that automates dataset mention detection across research domains by leveraging large language models (LLMs), synthetic data, and a two-stage fine-tuning process. We employ zero-shot extraction from research papers, an LLM-as-a-Judge for quality assessment, and a reasoning agent for refinement to generate a weakly supervised synthetic dataset. The Phi-3.5-mini instruct model is pre-fine-tuned on this dataset, followed by fine-tuning on a manually annotated subset. At inference, a ModernBERT-based classifier efficiently filters dataset mentions, reducing computational overhead while maintaining high recall. Evaluated on a held-out manually annotated sample, our fine-tuned model outperforms NuExtract-v1.5 and GLiNER-large-v2.1 in dataset extraction accuracy. Our results highlight how LLM-generated synthetic data can effectively address training data scarcity, improving generalization in low-resource settings. This framework offers a pathway toward scalable monitoring of dataset usage, enhancing transparency, and supporting researchers, funders, and policymakers in identifying data gaps and strengthening data accessibility for informed decision-making.

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.

In the field of business data analysis, the ability to extract actionable insights from vast and varied datasets is essential for informed decision-making and maintaining a competitive edge. Traditional rule-based systems, while reliable, often fall short when faced with the complexity and dynamism of modern business data. Conversely, Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), offer significant potential in pattern recognition and predictive analytics but can lack the precision necessary for specific business applications. This paper explores the efficacy of hybrid approaches that integrate the robustness of rule-based systems with the adaptive power of LLMs in generating actionable business insights.

We describe the SemEval task of extracting keyphrases and relations between them from scientific documents, which is crucial for understanding which publications describe which processes, tasks and materials. Although this was a new task, we had a total of 26 submissions across 3 evaluation scenarios. We expect the task and the findings reported in this paper to be relevant for researchers working on understanding scientific content, as well as the broader knowledge base population and information extraction communities.