Classical Out-of-Distribution Detection Methods Benchmark in Text Classification Tasks

State-of-the-art models can perform well in controlled environments, but they often struggle when presented with out-of-distribution (OOD) examples, making OOD detection a critical component of NLP systems. In this paper, we focus on highlighting the limitations of existing approaches to OOD detection in NLP. Specifically, we evaluated eight OOD detection methods that are easily integrable into existing NLP systems and require no additional OOD data or model modifications. One of our contributions is providing a well-structured research environment that allows for full reproducibility of the results. Additionally, our analysis shows that existing OOD detection methods for NLP tasks are not yet sufficiently sensitive to capture all samples characterized by various types of distributional shifts. Particularly challenging testing scenarios arise in cases of background shift and randomly shuffled word order within in domain texts. This highlights the need for future work to develop more effective OOD detection approaches for the NLP problems, and our work provides a well-defined foundation for further research in this area.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, Association for Computational Linguistic

Design thinking in public management

Design thinking is a relatively new method which changes the way organisations are managed and problems are solved all over the world. Increasingly often it is used also in public management, but its potential has not been well recognised. The outlined proposition of the framework is the first step in that direction. In particular, the strong focus of actions on the human being, cooperation, interdisciplinarity, and creativity create the foundation for generating innovation and long-term change of the organisational culture. All these aspects create grounds for increasing the responsiveness of instruments of public management to its challenges and key problems. A significant constraint of the present analysis is the focus only on selected problems of public management, and certain advantages of design thinking. Expanding the theoretical framework should be one of the next stages of the conceptualisation of the role of design thinking in the public sector. Furthermore, what seems to be particularly necessary are systematic reviews of the literature in all of the described areas, as well as exploratory research, especially concerning the role of design thinking in the evolution of performance management, in shaping dominant models of public management and in preventing and combating social exclusion

Does spatial navigation have a blind-spot? Visiocentrism is not enough to explain the navigational behavior comprehensively

Preparation of the manuscript was supported by the research grant 2015/19/B/HS1/03310 “Mechanisms of geometric cognition” funded by National Science Centre, Poland.In this paper, we argue that the issues described arise not because of the lack of theoretical inspiration, but rather due to an insufficient understanding of the subtleties of insect behavior. In our view, implementation of the insects’ models of navigation in the explanation of the vertebrates’ spatial behavior omits some important aspects, i.e., multimodal integration. Thus, we want to ask again the initial question posed by Wystrach and Graham (2012b) pointing out that significant progress in insects’ research, which suggests that we might have had underestimated insects’ cognitive abilities (Loukola et al., 2017; Peng and Chittka, 2017). Those results demonstrated insects’ capacity to obtain abstract information from multimodal input during complex tasks. Movement through a real environment provides a variety of cues, not only visual ones, thus in the following article we argue that multimodal integration is crucial to navigation.National Science Centre, Polan

Domain-Agnostic Neural Architecture for Class Incremental Continual Learning in Document Processing Platform

Production deployments in complex systems require ML architectures to be highly efficient and usable against multiple tasks. Particularly demanding are classification problems in which data arrives in a streaming fashion and each class is presented separately. Recent methods with stochastic gradient learning have been shown to struggle in such setups or have limitations like memory buffers, and being restricted to specific domains that disable its usage in real-world scenarios. For this reason, we present a fully differentiable architecture based on the Mixture of Experts model, that enables the training of high-performance classifiers when examples from each class are presented separately. We conducted exhaustive experiments that proved its applicability in various domains and ability to learn online in production environments. The proposed technique achieves SOTA results without a memory buffer and clearly outperforms the reference methods.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2211.1496

Electoral Agitation Data Set: The Use Case of the Polish Election

The popularity of social media makes politicians use it for political advertisement. Therefore, social media is full of electoral agitation (electioneering), especially during the election campaigns. The election administration cannot track the spread and quantity of messages that count as agitation under the election code. It addresses a crucial problem, while also uncovering a niche that has not been effectively targeted so far. Hence, we present the first publicly open data set for detecting electoral agitation in the Polish language. It contains 6,112 human-annotated tweets tagged with four legally conditioned categories. We achieved a 0.66 inter-annotator agreement (Cohen's kappa score). An additional annotator resolved the mismatches between the first two improving the consistency and complexity of the annotation process. The newly created data set was used to fine-tune a Polish Language Model called HerBERT (achieving a 68% F1 score). We also present a number of potential use cases for such data sets and models, enriching the paper with an analysis of the Polish 2020 Presidential Election on Twitter.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Language Resources and Evaluation Conferenc

PRINCIPAL GEODESIC ANALYSIS BOUNDARY DELINEATION WITH SUPERPIXEL-BASED CONSTRAINTS

In this paper an algorithm for accurate delineation of object boundaries is proposed. The method employs a superpixel algorithm to obtain an oversegmentation of the input image, used as a constraint in the task. A shape model is built by applying Principal Geodesic Analysis on angular representation of automatically placed uniformly distant landmark points. The shape model is used to detect the boundaries of an object on a given image by iterative elongation of a partial boundary along borders of superpixels. Contrary to many state-of-the-art methods, the proposed approach does not need an initial boundary. The algorithm was tested on two natural and two synthetic sets of images. Mean Dice coefficients between 0.91 and 0.97 were obtained. In almost all cases the object was found. In areas of relatively high gradient magnitude the borders are delineated very accurately, though further research is needed to improve the accuracy in areas of low gradient magnitude and automatically select the parameters of the proposed error function

Manifolds.jl: An Extensible Julia Framework for Data Analysis on Manifolds

For data given on a nonlinear space, like angles, symmetric positive matrices, the sphere, or the hyperbolic space, there is often enough structure to form a Riemannian manifold. We present the Julia package Manifolds.jl, providing a fast and easy to use library of Riemannian manifolds and Lie groups. We introduce a common interface, available in ManifoldsBase.jl, with which new manifolds, applications, and algorithms can be implemented. We demonstrate the utility of Manifolds.jl using B\'ezier splines, an optimization task on manifolds, and a principal component analysis on nonlinear data. In a benchmark, Manifolds.jl outperforms existing packages in Matlab or Python by several orders of magnitude and is about twice as fast as a comparable package implemented in C++

MHC influences infection with parasites and winter survival in the root vole Microtus oeconomus

Selective pressure from parasites is thought to maintain the polymorphism of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes. Although a number of studies have shown a relationship between the MHC and parasitic infections, the fitness consequences of such associations are less well documented. In the present paper, we characterised the variation in exon 2 of MHC class II DRB gene in the root vole and examined the effects of that gene on parasite prevalence and winter survival. We identified 18 unique exon 2 sequences, which translated into 10 unique amino acid sequences. Phylogenetic analysis revealed the presence of three distinct clusters, and allele distributions among these individuals suggested that the clusters correspond to three different loci. Although the rate of synonymous substitutions (dS) exceeded the rate of nonsynonymous substitutions (dN) across sequences, implying purifying selection, dN was significantly elevated at antigen-binding sites, suggesting that these sites could be under positive selection. Screening for parasites revealed a moderate prevalence of infection with gastrointestinal parasites (24 % infected), but a high infection rate for blood parasites (56 % infected). Infection with the blood parasite Babesia ssp. decreased survival almost twofold (25.7 vs. 13.9 %). Animals possessing the amino acid sequence AA*08 survived better than others (44.9 vs. 22 %), and they were infected with Babesia ssp. less often (13.9 vs 25.7 %). In contrast, individuals carrying allele AA*05 were infected more often (31.7 vs. 15.3 %). Heterozygosity at one of the putative loci was associated with a lower probability of infection with Babesia ssp., but at the other locus, the association was reversed. The unexpected latter result could be at least partly explained by the increased frequency of the susceptible allele AA*05 among heterozygotes. Overall, we demonstrate that infection with Babesia ssp. is a strong predictor of winter survival and that MHC genes are important predictors of infection status as well as survival in the root vole

Repellent effect of volatile fatty acids on lesser mealworm (Alphitobius diaperinus)

Volatile fatty acids (VFAs) are a group of common metabolites and semiochemicals mediating information transfer between higher organisms and bacteria, either from microbiome or external environment. VFAs commonly occur among various insect orders. There are numerous studies exploring their influence on the behavior of different insect species. In relation to the papers published by J. E. McFarlane in 1985, we assessed the effects of formic, acetic, propionic, butyric and valeric acids on the spatial preference of the lesser mealworm (Alphitobius diaperinus), a common pest of stored food grain products and the poultry industry. The main aim of the presented study was to provide new angles in VFA research, recreating the classical study both with new methods and on economically significant pest species. This paper presents a novel method of continuous, simultaneous assessment of site preference and the travelled distance in a constant-flow olfactometer. All the tested VFAs, except valeric acid, had a significant repellent effect, with formic acid being effective even at the lowest used concentration. Additionally, the VFAs significantly altered the distance travelled by the insects. The obtained results indicate a potential role for VFAs in the olfactory guided behavior of A. diaperinus. It is suspected that the reaction to the presence of VFAs may deviate from the specificity of species’ original habitat

Perioperacijske promjene subpopulacija limfocita u bolesnika operiranih zbog kolorektalnog karcinoma

Surgical procedure has immense impact on the immune balance. However, little is known about perioperative changes in T regulatory and Th17 lymphocyte subpopulations in patients undergoing colorectal resection. Patients with resectable colon cancer were enrolled in the study. Blood samples were obtained on two occasions, i.e. before the procedure and two days after the surgery. We also recruited a control group of young, healthy individuals. Lymphocyte subpopulations were analyzed with the use of flow cytometry. Investigated subpopulations consisted of total lymphocyte count, CD4+, CD8+, T regulatory Foxp3+ (Tregs), Th17 lymphocytes and white blood cell (WBC) count. There were significant differences in immune cell levels before and after the surgery. Reduction was recorded in the CD4+, CD8+, Tregs and total lymphocyte counts (p=0.002, p=0.01, p=0.008 and p=0.001, respectively). Increase was observed in total WBC and Th17 cells, however, Th17 lymphocytes did not reach statistical significance (p=0.01 and p=0.5, respectively). In conclusion, surgical intervention caused changes in all lymphocyte subpopulations investigated in patients undergoing surgery for colorectal cancer. However, it seemed to be an effect of perioperative trauma. Further studies are needed to investigate the impact of surgical intervention on lymphocyte subpopulations.Kirurški zahvat ima golem učinak na ravnotežu imunog sustava. Međutim, malo se zna o perioperacijskim promjenama u subpopulacijama T regulatornih i Th17 limfocita u bolesnika podvrgnutih resekciji kolorektuma. U istraživanje su bili uključeni bolesnici s resektabilnim karcinomom kolona. Uzorci krvi prikupljeni su dva puta: prije zahvata i dva dana nakon operacije. Uključena je bila i kontrolna skupina sastavljena od mladih i zdravih osoba. Subpopulacije limfocita analizirane su protočnom citometrijom. Istraživane su sljedeće subpopulacije: ukupan broj limfocita, CD4+, CD8+, T regulatorni Foxp3+ (Tregs), Th17 i bijela krvna slika. Utvrđene su značajne razlike u razinama imuno stanica prije i nakon operacije. Snižene razine zabilježene su za CD4+, CD8+, Tregs i ukupni broj limfocita (p=0,002, p=0,01, p=0,008 odnosno p=0,001). Povišenje je zapaženo za bijelu krvnu sliku i Th17 stanice, međutim, Th17 limfociti nisu postigli statističku značajnost (p=0,01 odnosno p=0,5). Zaključujemo da je kirurški zahvat uzrokovao promjene u svim istraživanim subpopulacijama limfocita kod bolesnika podvrgnutih operaciji kolorektalnog karcinoma. Međutim, čini se da je to bio učinak perioperacijske traume. Potrebna su daljnja istraživanja kako bi se ispitao utjecaj kirurškog zahvata na subpopulacije limfocita