ESGSenticNet: A Neurosymbolic Knowledge Base for Corporate Sustainability Analysis

Evaluating corporate sustainability performance is essential to drive sustainable business practices, amid the need for a more sustainable economy. However, this is hindered by the complexity and volume of corporate sustainability data (i.e. sustainability disclosures), not least by the effectiveness of the NLP tools used to analyse them. To this end, we identify three primary challenges - immateriality, complexity, and subjectivity, that exacerbate the difficulty of extracting insights from sustainability disclosures. To address these issues, we introduce ESGSenticNet, a publicly available knowledge base for sustainability analysis. ESGSenticNet is constructed from a neurosymbolic framework that integrates specialised concept parsing, GPT-4o inference, and semi-supervised label propagation, together with a hierarchical taxonomy. This approach culminates in a structured knowledge base of 44k knowledge triplets - ('halve carbon emission', supports, 'emissions control'), for effective sustainability analysis. Experiments indicate that ESGSenticNet, when deployed as a lexical method, more effectively captures relevant and actionable sustainability information from sustainability disclosures compared to state of the art baselines. Besides capturing a high number of unique ESG topic terms, ESGSenticNet outperforms baselines on the ESG relatedness and ESG action orientation of these terms by 26% and 31% respectively. These metrics describe the extent to which topic terms are related to ESG, and depict an action toward ESG. Moreover, when deployed as a lexical method, ESGSenticNet does not require any training, possessing a key advantage in its simplicity for non-technical stakeholders.

Gender Bias in Text-to-Video Generation Models: A case study of Sora

The advent of text-to-video generation models has revolutionized content creation as it produces high-quality videos from textual prompts. However, concerns regarding inherent biases in such models have prompted scrutiny, particularly regarding gender representation. Our study investigates the presence of gender bias in OpenAI's Sora, a state-of-the-art text-to-video generation model. We uncover significant evidence of bias by analyzing the generated videos from a diverse set of gender-neutral and stereotypical prompts. The results indicate that Sora disproportionately associates specific genders with stereotypical behaviors and professions, which reflects societal prejudices embedded in its training data.

Towards Rich Emotions in 3D Avatars: A Text-to-3D Avatar Generation Benchmark

Producing emotionally dynamic 3D facial avatars with text derived from spoken words (Emo3D) has been a pivotal research topic in 3D avatar generation. While progress has been made in general-purpose 3D avatar generation, the exploration of generating emotional 3D avatars remains scarce, primarily due to the complexities of identifying and rendering rich emotions from spoken words. This paper reexamines Emo3D generation and draws inspiration from human processes, breaking down Emo3D into two cascading steps: Text-to-3D Expression Mapping (T3DEM) and 3D Avatar Rendering (3DAR). T3DEM is the most crucial step in determining the quality of Emo3D generation and encompasses three key challenges: Expression Diversity, Emotion-Content Consistency, and Expression Fluidity. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel benchmark to advance research in Emo3D generation. First, we present EmoAva, a large-scale, high-quality dataset for T3DEM, comprising 15,000 text-to-3D expression mappings that characterize the aforementioned three challenges in Emo3D generation. Furthermore, we develop various metrics to effectively evaluate models against these identified challenges. Next, to effectively model the consistency, diversity, and fluidity of human expressions in the T3DEM step, we propose the Continuous Text-to-Expression Generator, which employs an autoregressive Conditional Variational Autoencoder for expression code generation, enhanced with Latent Temporal Attention and Expression-wise Attention mechanisms. Finally, to further enhance the 3DAR step on rendering higher-quality subtle expressions, we present the Globally-informed Gaussian Avatar (GiGA) model. GiGA incorporates a global information mechanism into 3D Gaussian representations, enabling the capture of subtle micro-expressions and seamless transitions between emotional states.

Towards Faithful Natural Language Explanations: A Study Using Activation Patching in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of generating persuasive Natural Language Explanations (NLEs) to justify their answers. However, the faithfulness of these explanations should not be readily trusted at face value. Recent studies have proposed various methods to measure the faithfulness of NLEs, typically by inserting perturbations at the explanation or feature level. We argue that these approaches are neither comprehensive nor correctly designed according to the established definition of faithfulness. Moreover, we highlight the risks of grounding faithfulness findings on out-of-distribution samples. In this work, we leverage a causal mediation technique called activation patching, to measure the faithfulness of an explanation towards supporting the explained answer. Our proposed metric, Causal Faithfulness quantifies the consistency of causal attributions between explanations and the corresponding model outputs as the indicator of faithfulness. We experimented across models varying from 2B to 27B parameters and found that models that underwent alignment tuning tend to produce more faithful and plausible explanations. We find that Causal Faithfulness is a promising improvement over existing faithfulness tests by taking into account the model's internal computations and avoiding out of distribution concerns that could otherwise undermine the validity of faithfulness assessments. We release the code in \url{https://github.com/wj210/Causal-Faithfulness}

MOOSE-Chem: Large Language Models for Rediscovering Unseen Chemistry Scientific Hypotheses

Scientific discovery contributes largely to human society's prosperity, and recent progress shows that LLMs could potentially catalyze this process. However, it is still unclear whether LLMs can discover novel and valid hypotheses in chemistry. In this work, we investigate this central research question: Can LLMs automatically discover novel and valid chemistry research hypotheses given only a chemistry research background (consisting of a research question and/or a background survey), without limitation on the domain of the research question? After extensive discussions with chemistry experts, we propose an assumption that a majority of chemistry hypotheses can be resulted from a research background and several inspirations. With this key insight, we break the central question into three smaller fundamental questions. In brief, they are: (1) given a background question, whether LLMs can retrieve good inspirations; (2) with background and inspirations, whether LLMs can lead to hypothesis; and (3) whether LLMs can identify good hypotheses to rank them higher. To investigate these questions, we construct a benchmark consisting of 51 chemistry papers published in Nature, Science, or a similar level in 2024 (all papers are only available online since 2024). Every paper is divided by chemistry PhD students into three components: background, inspirations, and hypothesis. The goal is to rediscover the hypothesis, given only the background and a large randomly selected chemistry literature corpus consisting the ground truth inspiration papers, with LLMs trained with data up to 2023. We also develop an LLM-based multi-agent framework that leverages the assumption, consisting of three stages reflecting the three smaller questions. The proposed method can rediscover many hypotheses with very high similarity with the ground truth ones, covering the main innovations.

Negation Blindness in Large Language Models: Unveiling the NO Syndrome in Image Generation

Foundational Large Language Models (LLMs) have changed the way we perceive technology. They have been shown to excel in tasks ranging from poem writing and coding to essay generation and puzzle solving. With the incorporation of image generation capability, they have become more comprehensive and versatile AI tools. At the same time, researchers are striving to identify the limitations of these tools to improve them further. Currently identified flaws include hallucination, biases, and bypassing restricted commands to generate harmful content. In the present work, we have identified a fundamental limitation related to the image generation ability of LLMs, and termed it The NO Syndrome. This negation blindness refers to LLMs inability to correctly comprehend NO related natural language prompts to generate the desired images. Interestingly, all tested LLMs including GPT-4, Gemini, and Copilot were found to be suffering from this syndrome. To demonstrate the generalization of this limitation, we carried out simulation experiments and conducted entropy-based and benchmark statistical analysis tests on various LLMs in multiple languages, including English, Hindi, and French. We conclude that the NO syndrome is a significant flaw in current LLMs that needs to be addressed. A related finding of this study showed a consistent discrepancy between image and textual responses as a result of this NO syndrome. We posit that the introduction of a negation context-aware reinforcement learning based feedback loop between the LLMs textual response and generated image could help ensure the generated text is based on both the LLMs correct contextual understanding of the negation query and the generated visual output.

Has Multimodal Learning Delivered Universal Intelligence in Healthcare? A Comprehensive Survey

The rapid development of artificial intelligence has constantly reshaped the field of intelligent healthcare and medicine. As a vital technology, multimodal learning has increasingly garnered interest due to data complementarity, comprehensive modeling form, and great application potential. Currently, numerous researchers are dedicating their attention to this field, conducting extensive studies and constructing abundant intelligent systems. Naturally, an open question arises that has multimodal learning delivered universal intelligence in healthcare? To answer the question, we adopt three unique viewpoints for a holistic analysis. Firstly, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the current progress of medical multimodal learning from the perspectives of datasets, task-oriented methods, and universal foundation models. Based on them, we further discuss the proposed question from five issues to explore the real impacts of advanced techniques in healthcare, from data and technologies to performance and ethics. The answer is that current technologies have NOT achieved universal intelligence and there remains a significant journey to undertake. Finally, in light of the above reviews and discussions, we point out ten potential directions for exploration towards the goal of universal intelligence in healthcare.

PanoSent: A Panoptic Sextuple Extraction Benchmark for Multimodal Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

While existing Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) has received extensive effort and advancement, there are still gaps in defining a more holistic research target seamlessly integrating multimodality, conversation context, fine-granularity, and also covering the changing sentiment dynamics as well as cognitive causal rationales. This paper bridges the gaps by introducing a multimodal conversational ABSA, where two novel subtasks are proposed: 1) Panoptic Sentiment Sextuple Extraction, panoramically recognizing holder, target, aspect, opinion, sentiment, rationale from multi-turn multi-party multimodal dialogue. 2) Sentiment Flipping Analysis, detecting the dynamic sentiment transformation throughout the conversation with the causal reasons. To benchmark the tasks, we construct PanoSent, a dataset annotated both manually and automatically, featuring high quality, large scale, multimodality, multilingualism, multi-scenarios, and covering both implicit and explicit sentiment elements. To effectively address the tasks, we devise a novel Chain-of-Sentiment reasoning framework, together with a novel multimodal large language model (namely Sentica) and a paraphrase-based verification mechanism. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our methods over strong baselines, validating the efficacy of all our proposed methods. The work is expected to open up a new era for the ABSA community, and thus all our codes and data are open at https://PanoSent.github.io/

XAI meets LLMs: A Survey of the Relation between Explainable AI and Large Language Models

In this survey, we address the key challenges in Large Language Models (LLM) research, focusing on the importance of interpretability. Driven by increasing interest from AI and business sectors, we highlight the need for transparency in LLMs. We examine the dual paths in current LLM research and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): enhancing performance through XAI and the emerging focus on model interpretability. Our paper advocates for a balanced approach that values interpretability equally with functional advancements. Recognizing the rapid development in LLM research, our survey includes both peer-reviewed and preprint (arXiv) papers, offering a comprehensive overview of XAI's role in LLM research. We conclude by urging the research community to advance both LLM and XAI fields together.

Prompted Aspect Key Point Analysis for Quantitative Review Summarization

Key Point Analysis (KPA) aims for quantitative summarization that provides key points (KPs) as succinct textual summaries and quantities measuring their prevalence. KPA studies for arguments and reviews have been reported in the literature. A majority of KPA studies for reviews adopt supervised learning to extract short sentences as KPs before matching KPs to review comments for quantification of KP prevalence. Recent abstractive approaches still generate KPs based on sentences, often leading to KPs with overlapping and hallucinated opinions, and inaccurate quantification. In this paper, we propose Prompted Aspect Key Point Analysis (PAKPA) for quantitative review summarization. PAKPA employs aspect sentiment analysis and prompted in-context learning with Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate and quantify KPs grounded in aspects for business entities, which achieves faithful KPs with accurate quantification, and removes the need for large amounts of annotated data for supervised training. Experiments on the popular review dataset Yelp and the aspect-oriented review summarization dataset SPACE show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance. Source code and data are available at: https://github.com/antangrocket1312/PAKPA