共找到 20 条结果
Diversity has been gaining interest in the NLP community in recent years. At the same time, state-of-the-art transformer models such as ModernBERT use very large pre-training datasets, which are driven by size rather than by diversity. This summons for an investigation of the impact of diversity on the ModernBERT pre-training. We do so in this study, with the express intent of reducing pre-training dataset size, while retaining at least comparable performance. We compare diversity-driven sampling algorithms, so as to pick the best one. We find that diversity-driven sampling allows in some tasks to gain 10 points relative to randomly-sampled pre-training data of commensurate size. We also see that a model pre-trained for 483h on a diversity-driven dataset of 150M tokens can yield a commensurate performance to a model pre-trained for 1,775h on a randomly-driven dataset of 2.4B tokens.
Over the last decade a wave of U.S. states began reimbursing doula services through Medicaid, hoping to improve infant health and narrow stark racial gaps in birth outcomes. I evaluate these mandates using the staggered 2021-2024 rollout, a panel of 32.1 million births from CDC WONDER (2016-2024), and a newly assembled measure of the state doula workforce drawn from the national provider registry. Identification comes from the policy's timing rather than from comparing doula users to non-users, addressing the selection problem that limits the existing observational literature. On average I find no detectable effect on low birth weight (LBW). Consistent with the heterogeneity emphasized by Peet (2022) and the maternal-health-disparities literature, however, the effect concentrates among the group at greatest risk: Black mothers, for whom LBW falls by roughly half a percentage point (about 5% of the baseline) in the states with the longest exposure, with flat pre-trends and a coherent upward shift in the birth-weight distribution. The estimate is marginal once I use inference valid for few treated clusters, and the binding constraint is statistical power: most mandates took effect in
Large language models (LLMs) achieve promising results on medical question answering benchmarks, yet their use in public health is constrained by hallucinations and the rapid evolution of official guidance. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these risks by grounding responses in an explicitly maintained corpus, but end-to-end performance depends critically on retrieval configuration and on evaluation beyond multiple-choice formats. We extend PubHealthBench, a question answering (QA) benchmark of 7,929 questions derived from UK Government public health guidance, into a retrieval-augmented setting and systematically evaluate retrieval and generation choices. We compare dense, sparse, and hybrid retrieval across multiple embedding models and corpus variants, and show that hybrid retrieval consistently improves recall and ranking quality, with chunk length and topic interacting with ranking performance. Providing retrieved context substantially increases multiple-choice accuracy across a diverse set of LLMs, enabling smaller open-weight models to match or outperform larger models used without retrieval, with gains primarily driven by retrieval quality and careful context se
Semiclassical gravity couples classical gravity to the quantized matter in meanfield approximation. The meanfield coupling is problematic for two reasons. First, it ignores the quantum fluctuation of matter distribution. Second, it violates the linearity of the quantum dynamics. The first problem can be mitigated by allowing stochastic fluctuations of the geometry but the second problem lies deep in quantum foundations. Restoration of quantum linearity requires a conceptual approach to hybrid classical-quantum coupling. Studies of the measurement problem and the quantum-classical transition point to the solution. It is based on a postulated mechanism of spontaneous quantum monitoring plus feedback. This approach eliminates Schrödinger cat states, takes quantum fluctuations into account, and restores the linearity of quantum dynamics. Such a captivating conceptionally `healthier' semiclassical theory exists in the Newtonian limit, but its relativistic covariance hits a wall. Here we will briefly recapitulate the concept and its realization in the nonrelativistic limit. We emphasize that the long-known obstacles to the relativistic extension lie in quantum foundations.
The recent emergence of extreme climate events has significantly raised awareness about sustainable living. In addition to developing energy-saving materials and technologies, existing research mainly relies on traditional methods that encourage behavioral shifts towards sustainability, which can be overly demanding or only passively engaging. In this work, we propose to employ recommendation systems to actively nudge users toward more sustainable choices. We introduce Green Recommender Aligned with Personalized Eating (GRAPE), which is designed to prioritize and recommend sustainable food options that align with users' evolving preferences. We also design two innovative Green Loss functions that cater to green indicators with either uniform or differentiated priorities, thereby enhancing adaptability across a range of scenarios. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our GRAPE.
Social media platforms increasingly employ proactive moderation techniques, such as detecting and curbing toxic and uncivil comments, to prevent the spread of harmful content. Despite these efforts, such approaches are often criticized for creating a climate of censorship and failing to address the underlying causes of uncivil behavior. Our work makes both theoretical and practical contributions by proposing and evaluating two types of emotion monitoring dashboards to users' emotional awareness and mitigate hate speech. In a study involving 211 participants, we evaluate the effects of the two mechanisms on user commenting behavior and emotional experiences. The results reveal that these interventions effectively increase users' awareness of their emotional states and reduce hate speech. However, our findings also indicate potential unintended effects, including increased expression of negative emotions (Angry, Fear, and Sad) when discussing sensitive issues. These insights provide a basis for further research on integrating proactive emotion regulation tools into social media platforms to foster healthier digital interactions.
This study presents a dual-mode interface design concept for social media platforms aimed at reducing social comparison in health-related content among Korean MZ (Millennials and Gen-Z) users. The proposed "Inspiration" and "Reality" modes allow users to toggle between curated, idealized posts and more realistic, candid content. This approach aims to alleviate negative psychological effects, such as decreased self-esteem and body dissatisfaction. The pre-study outlines the design framework and discusses potential implications for user satisfaction, perceived authenticity, and mental well-being.
With the increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, smart contracts have become a prominent feature in developing decentralized applications. However, these smart contracts are susceptible to vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit, resulting in significant financial losses. In response to this growing concern, various initiatives have emerged. Notably, the SWC vulnerability list played an important role in raising awareness and understanding of smart contract weaknesses. However, the SWC list lacks maintenance and has not been updated with new vulnerabilities since 2020. To address this gap, this paper introduces the Smart Contract Weakness Enumeration (SWE), a comprehensive and practical vulnerability list up until 2023. We collect 273 vulnerability descriptions from 86 top conference papers and journal papers, employing open card sorting techniques to deduplicate and categorize these descriptions. This process results in the identification of 40 common contract weaknesses, which are further classified into 20 sub-research fields through thorough discussion and analysis. SWE provides a systematic and comprehensive list of smart contract vulnerabilities,
The physical environment you navigate strongly determines which communities and people matter most to individuals. These effects drive both personal access to opportunities and the social capital of communities, and can often be observed in the personal mobility traces of individuals. Traditional social media feeds underutilize these mobility-based features, or do so in a privacy exploitative manner. Here we propose a consent-first private information sharing paradigm for driving social feeds from users' personal private data, specifically using mobility traces. This approach designs the feed to explicitly optimize for integrating the user into the local community and for social capital building through leveraging mobility trace overlaps as a proxy for existing or potential real-world social connections, creating proportionality between whom a user sees in their feed, and whom the user is likely to see in person. These claims are validated against existing social-mobility data, and a reference implementation of the proposed algorithm is built for demonstration. In total, this work presents a novel technique for designing feeds that represent real offline social connections through
A global shift toward healthier diets could sharply reduce livestock farming, free up agricultural land, and cut emissions from land-use change by 85% by 2050。 At the same time, fruit, vegetable, nut, and legume production could soar, creating a sweeping transformation of what the world grows and eats
Misleading or unnecessary data can have out-sized impacts on the health or accuracy of Machine Learning (ML) models. We present a Bayesian sequential selection method, akin to Bayesian experimental design, that identifies critically important information within a dataset, while ignoring data that is either misleading or brings unnecessary complexity to the surrogate model of choice. Our method improves sample-wise error convergence and eliminates instances where more data leads to worse performance and instabilities of the surrogate model, often termed sample-wise ``double descent''. We find these instabilities are a result of the complexity of the underlying map and linked to extreme events and heavy tails. Our approach has two key features. First, the selection algorithm dynamically couples the chosen model and data. Data is chosen based on its merits towards improving the selected model, rather than being compared strictly against other data. Second, a natural convergence of the method removes the need for dividing the data into training, testing, and validation sets. Instead, the selection metric inherently assesses testing and validation error through global statistics of the
In the last ten years, medical robotics has moved from the margins to the mainstream. Since the Engineering Research Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology was Launched in 1998 with National Science Foundation funding, medical robots have been promoted from handling routine tasks to performing highly sophisticated interventions and related assignments. The CISST ERC has played a significant role in this transformation. And thanks to NSF support, the ERC has built the professional infrastructure that will continue our mission: bringing data and technology together in clinical systems that will dramatically change how surgery and other procedures are done. The enhancements we envision touch virtually every aspect of the delivery of care: - More accurate procedures - More consistent, predictable results from one patient to the next - Improved clinical outcomes - Greater patient safety - Reduced liability for healthcare providers - Lower costs for everyone - patients, facilities, insurers, government - Easier, faster recovery for patients - Effective new ways to treat health problems - Healthier patients, and a healthier system The basic science and engineering
Framing theory posits that how information is presented shapes audience responses, but computational work has largely ignored audience reactions. While recent work showed that article framing systematically shapes the content of reader responses, this paper asks: does framing also affect response quality? Analyzing 1M comments across 2.7K news articles, we operationalize quality as comment health. We find that article frames significantly predict comment health while controlling for topic, and that comments that adopt the article frame are healthier than those that depart from it. Further, unhealthy top-level comments tend to generate more unhealthy responses, independent of the frame being used in the comment. Our results establish a link between framing theory and discourse quality, laying the groundwork for downstream applications. We illustrate this potential with a pro-active frame-aware LLM- based system to mitigate unhealthy discourse.
Selection bias is pervasive in observational studies. For example, large scale biobanks data can exhibit ``healthy volunteer bias'' when respondents are healthier and of higher socio-economic status than the population they are meant to represent. Recovering causal effects from such sub-population is an important problem in causal inference, as estimating average treatment effects (ATE) from selected populations can result in a severely biased estimate of the ATE from the whole population. In this paper, we investigate the identifiability of the ATE under selection bias. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for ATE identifiability, leveraging weak assumptions on probability classes to characterize propensity score and selection probability. Compared to previous works, our results extend existing graphical identifiability criteria and offer a more comprehensive understanding of causal effect identification with strictly weaker conditions in the presence of selection bias.
One-minute behavior change interventions might seem too brief to matter. Could something so short really help people build healthier routines? This work explores this question through two studies examining how ultra-brief prompts might encourage meaningful actions in daily life. In a formative study, we explored how participants engaged with one-minute prompts across four domains: physical activity, eating, screen use, and mental well-being. This revealed two common design approaches: Immediate Action prompts (simple, directive tasks) and Reflection-First prompts (self-awareness before action). We then conducted a 14-day, within-subjects study comparing these two flows with 28 participants. Surprisingly, most participants did not notice differences in structure -- but responded positively when prompts felt timely, relevant, or emotionally supportive. Engagement was not shaped by flow type, but by content fit, tone, and momentary readiness. Participants also co-designed messages, favoring those with step-by-step guidance, personal meaning, or sensory detail. These results suggest that one-minute interventions, while easily dismissed, may serve as meaningful gateways into healthier r
Escapism in games can support recovery or lead to harmful avoidance. Self-regulation, understood as combining autonomy with positive outcomes, is key to this distinction. We argue that audio, often overlooked, plays a central role in regulation. It can modulate arousal, mark transitions, and provide closure, yet its contribution to well-being remains underexplored. This paper identifies methodological and accessibility gaps that limit recognition of audio's potential and outlines ways to address them. We aim to encourage researchers and developers to integrate audio more deliberately into the design and study of healthier escapist play.
Few studies quantify how traffic management dynamically reshapes modal split and emission-exposure outcomes over pollution severities. This paper proposes a novel day-to-day assignment model integrating exposure cost, which includes exposure perception and emissions-dispersion-exposure algorithm. Numerical experiments reveal that and various levels of traffic-related measures have an air pollution scenario-dependent effect on the MT system. In light pollution scenarios, vehicle restrictions and reduced fares for buses or ridesharing help lower car usage and reduce emissions and exposure. However, under heavy pollution, higher-level restrictions and ridesharing fares paradoxically increase travelers' exposure by 18% and 6.3%, respectively, due to modal shift. Furthermore, timely pollution information updates could plausibly encourage healthier travel. This paper also proposes practical strategies for both routine and emergency traffic management, considering the trade-offs among travel cost, emission, and exposure, and emphasizes the need for measures tailored to different air pollution contexts to offer deeper insights for urban traffic policies.
Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) can foster social interaction and relationship formation, but they pose specific privacy and safety challenges, especially in the context of mediating intimate interpersonal connections. To explore the potential risks, we conducted a case study on Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV) players intimate partner seeking posts on social media. We analyzed 1,288 posts from a public Weibo account using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling and thematic analysis. Our findings reveal that players disclose sensitive personal information and share vulnerabilities to establish trust but face difficulties in managing identity and privacy across multiple platforms. We also found that players expectations regarding intimate partner are diversified, and mismatch of expectations may leads to issues like privacy leakage or emotional exploitation. Based on our findings, we propose design implications for reducing privacy and safety risks and fostering healthier social interactions in virtual worlds.
Background: Transitions towards healthier, more environmentally sustainable diets would require large shifts in consumption patterns. Cost and affordability can be barriers to consuming healthy, sustainable diets. Objective: This study provides the first worldwide test of how retail food prices relate to empirically estimated environmental footprints and nutritional profile scores between and within food groups. Methods: We use 48,316 prices for 860 retail food items commonly sold in 181 countries during 2011 and 2017, matched to estimated carbon and water footprints and nutritional profiles, to test whether healthier and more sustainable foods are more expensive between and within food groups. Results: Prices, environmental footprints, and nutritional profiles differ between food groups. Within almost all groups, more expensive items have significantly larger carbon and water footprints. Associations are strongest for animal source foods, where each 10% increment in price is associated with 21 grams higher carbon footprint and 5 liters higher water footprint per 100kcal of food. There is no such gradient for price and nutritional profile, as more expensive items are sometimes heal
The nutritional quality of diets has significantly deteriorated over the past two to three decades, a decline often underestimated by the people. This deterioration, coupled with a hectic lifestyle, has contributed to escalating health concerns. Recognizing this issue, researchers at Harvard have advocated for a balanced nutritional plate model to promote health. Inspired by this research, our paper introduces an innovative Image-Based Dietary Assessment system aimed at evaluating the healthiness of meals through image analysis. Our system employs advanced image segmentation and classification techniques to analyze food items on a plate, assess their proportions, and calculate meal adherence to Harvard's healthy eating recommendations. This approach leverages machine learning and nutritional science to empower individuals with actionable insights for healthier eating choices. Our four-step framework involves segmenting the image, classifying the items, conducting a nutritional assessment based on the Harvard Healthy Eating Plate research, and offering tailored recommendations. The prototype system has shown promising results in promoting healthier eating habits by providing an acce