Adnan Mahmood

Yang Zhang, Yufei Wang, Kai Wang et al.

Citations in scholarly work serve the essential purpose of acknowledging and crediting the original sources of knowledge that have been incorporated or referenced. Depending on their surrounding textual context, these citations are used for different motivations and purposes. Large Language Models (LLMs) could be helpful in capturing these fine-grained citation information via the corresponding textual context, thereby enabling a better understanding towards the literature. Furthermore, these citations also establish connections among scientific papers, providing high-quality inter-document relationships and human-constructed knowledge. Such information could be incorporated into LLMs pre-training and improve the text representation in LLMs. Therefore, in this paper, we offer a preliminary review of the mutually beneficial relationship between LLMs and citation analysis. Specifically, we review the application of LLMs for in-text citation analysis tasks, including citation classification, citation-based summarization, and citation recommendation. We then summarize the research pertinent to leveraging citation linkage knowledge to improve text representations of LLMs via citation prediction, network structure information, and inter-document relationship. We finally provide an overview of these contemporary methods and put forth potential promising avenues in combining LLMs and citation analysis for further investigation.

Munazza Zaib, Wei Emma Zhang, Quan Z. Sheng et al.

The increasing demand for the web-based digital assistants has given a rapid rise in the interest of the Information Retrieval (IR) community towards the field of conversational question answering (ConvQA). However, one of the critical aspects of ConvQA is the effective selection of conversational history turns to answer the question at hand. The dependency between relevant history selection and correct answer prediction is an intriguing but under-explored area. The selected relevant context can better guide the system so as to where exactly in the passage to look for an answer. Irrelevant context, on the other hand, brings noise to the system, thereby resulting in a decline in the model's performance. In this paper, we propose a framework, DHS-ConvQA (Dynamic History Selection in Conversational Question Answering), that first generates the context and question entities for all the history turns, which are then pruned on the basis of similarity they share in common with the question at hand. We also propose an attention-based mechanism to re-rank the pruned terms based on their calculated weights of how useful they are in answering the question. In the end, we further aid the model by highlighting the terms in the re-ranked conversational history using a binary classification task and keeping the useful terms (predicted as 1) and ignoring the irrelevant terms (predicted as 0). We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed framework with extensive experimental results on CANARD and QuAC -- the two popularly utilized datasets in ConvQA. We demonstrate that selecting relevant turns works better than rewriting the original question. We also investigate how adding the irrelevant history turns negatively impacts the model's performance and discuss the research challenges that demand more attention from the IR community.

Munazza Zaib, Quan Z. Sheng, Wei Emma Zhang et al.

Having an intelligent dialogue agent that can engage in conversational question answering (ConvQA) is now no longer limited to Sci-Fi movies only and has, in fact, turned into a reality. These intelligent agents are required to understand and correctly interpret the sequential turns provided as the context of the given question. However, these sequential questions are sometimes left implicit and thus require the resolution of some natural language phenomena such as anaphora and ellipsis. The task of question rewriting has the potential to address the challenges of resolving dependencies amongst the contextual turns by transforming them into intent-explicit questions. Nonetheless, the solution of rewriting the implicit questions comes with some potential challenges such as resulting in verbose questions and taking conversational aspect out of the scenario by generating self-contained questions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, CONVSR (CONVQA using Structured Representations) for capturing and generating intermediate representations as conversational cues to enhance the capability of the QA model to better interpret the incomplete questions. We also deliberate how the strengths of this task could be leveraged in a bid to design more engaging and eloquent conversational agents. We test our model on the QuAC and CANARD datasets and illustrate by experimental results that our proposed framework achieves a better F1 score than the standard question rewriting model.

Behnaz Soltani, Venus Haghighi, Adnan Mahmood et al.

Federated Learning (FL) is an efficient distributed machine learning paradigm that employs private datasets in a privacy-preserving manner. The main challenges of FL is that end devices usually possess various computation and communication capabilities and their training data are not independent and identically distributed (non-IID). Due to limited communication bandwidth and unstable availability of such devices in a mobile network, only a fraction of end devices (also referred to as the participants or clients in a FL process) can be selected in each round. Hence, it is of paramount importance to utilize an efficient participant selection scheme to maximize the performance of FL including final model accuracy and training time. In this paper, we provide a review of participant selection techniques for FL. First, we introduce FL and highlight the main challenges during participant selection. Then, we review the existing studies and categorize them based on their solutions. Finally, we provide some future directions on participant selection for FL based on our analysis of the state-of-the-art in this topic area.

Venus Haghighi, Behnaz Soltani, Adnan Mahmood et al.

Anomaly detection in attributed networks has received a considerable attention in recent years due to its applications in a wide range of domains such as finance, network security, and medicine. Traditional approaches cannot be adopted on attributed networks' settings to solve the problem of anomaly detection. The main limitation of such approaches is that they inherently ignore the relational information between data features. With a rapid explosion in deep learning- and graph neural networks-based techniques, spotting rare objects on attributed networks has significantly stepped forward owing to the potentials of deep techniques in extracting complex relationships. In this paper, we propose a new architecture on anomaly detection. The main goal of designing such an architecture is to utilize multi-task learning which would enhance the detection performance. Multi-task learning-based anomaly detection is still in its infancy and only a few studies in the existing literature have catered to the same. We incorporate both community detection and multi-view representation learning techniques for extracting distinct and complementary information from attributed networks and subsequently fuse the captured information for achieving a better detection result. The mutual collaboration between two main components employed in this architecture, i.e., community-specific learning and multi-view representation learning, exhibits a promising solution to reach more effective results.

Manoj Madushanka Perera, Adnan Mahmood, Kasun Eranda Wijethilake et al.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved their ability to process extended conversational contexts, yet fine-tuning and evaluating short- and long-term memories remain difficult due to the absence of datasets that encode both short- and long-term conversational history. Existing conversational datasets lack memory grounding, overlook topic continuity, or rely on costly human annotation. To address these gaps, we introduce AgenticAI-DialogGen, a modular agent-based framework that generates persona-grounded and topic-guided conversations without human supervision. The framework uses LLM agents to extract knowledge graphs, identify topics, build speaker personas, and simulate topic-guided conversations from unstructured conversations. A QA module generates memory-grounded Question Answer (QA) pairs drawn from short- and long-term conversational histories. We also generated a new dataset entitled, TopicGuidedChat (TGC), where long-term memory is encoded as speaker-specific knowledge graphs and short-term memory as newly generated topic-guided conversations. Evaluations depict that AgenticAI-DialogGen yields higher conversational quality and LLMs fine-tuned on TGC dataset achieve improved performance on memory-grounded QA tasks.

Noorain Mukhtiar, Adnan Mahmood, Quan Z. Sheng

At the intersection of the cutting-edge technologies and privacy concerns, Federated Learning (FL) with its distributed architecture, stands at the forefront in a bid to facilitate collaborative model training across multiple clients while preserving data privacy. However, the applicability of FL systems is hindered by fairness concerns arising from numerous sources of heterogeneity that can result in biases and undermine a system's effectiveness, with skewed predictions, reduced accuracy, and inefficient model convergence. This survey thus explores the diverse sources of bias, including but not limited to, data, client, and model biases, and thoroughly discusses the strengths and limitations inherited within the array of the state-of-the-art techniques utilized in the literature to mitigate such disparities in the FL training process. We delineate a comprehensive overview of the several notions, theoretical underpinnings, and technical aspects associated with fairness and their adoption in FL-based multidisciplinary environments. Furthermore, we examine salient evaluation metrics leveraged to measure fairness quantitatively. Finally, we envisage exciting open research directions that have the potential to drive future advancements in achieving fairer FL frameworks, in turn, offering a strong foundation for future research in this pivotal area.

Kasun Eranda Wijethilake, Adnan Mahmood, Quan Z. Sheng

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning technique that preserves data privacy by sharing only the trained parameters instead of the client data. This makes FL ideal for highly dynamic, heterogeneous, and time-critical applications, in particular, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) networks. However, FL encounters considerable challenges in such networks owing to the high data and device heterogeneity. To address these challenges, we propose FedCLF, i.e., FL with Calibrated Loss and Feedback control, which introduces calibrated loss as a utility in the participant selection process and a feedback control mechanism to dynamically adjust the sampling frequency of the clients. The envisaged approach (a) enhances the overall model accuracy in case of highly heterogeneous data and (b) optimizes the resource utilization for resource constrained IoV networks, thereby leading to increased efficiency in the FL process. We evaluated FedCLF vis-à-vis baseline models, i.e., FedAvg, Newt, and Oort, using CIFAR-10 dataset with varying data heterogeneity. Our results depict that FedCLF significantly outperforms the baseline models by up to a 16% improvement in high data heterogeneity-related scenarios with improved efficiency via reduced sampling frequency.

Manoj Madushanka Perera, Adnan Mahmood, Kasun Eranda Wijethilake et al.

This particular paper introduces an Adaptive Context Management (ACM) framework for the Conversational Question Answering (ConvQA) systems. The key objective of the ACM framework is to optimize the use of the conversation history by dynamically managing context for maximizing the relevant information provided to a ConvQA model within its token limit. Our approach incorporates a Context Manager (CM) Module, a Summarization (SM) Module, and an Entity Extraction (EE) Module in a bid to handle the conversation history efficaciously. The CM Module dynamically adjusts the context size, thereby preserving the most relevant and recent information within a model's token limit. The SM Module summarizes the older parts of the conversation history via a sliding window. When the summarization window exceeds its limit, the EE Module identifies and retains key entities from the oldest conversation turns. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our envisaged framework in generating accurate and contextually appropriate responses, thereby highlighting the potential of the ACM framework to enhance the robustness and scalability of the ConvQA systems.

Fahmida Islam, Adnan Mahmood, Noorain Mukhtiar et al.

Federated Learning (FL) has been extensively employed for a number of applications in machine learning, i.e., primarily owing to its privacy preserving nature and efficiency in mitigating the communication overhead. Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is one of the promising applications, wherein FL can be utilized to train a model more efficiently. Since only a subset of the clients can participate in each FL training round, challenges arise pertinent to fairness in the client selection process. Over the years, a number of researchers from both academia and industry have proposed numerous FL frameworks. However, to the best of our knowledge, none of them have employed fairness for FL-based client selection in a dynamic and heterogeneous IoV environment. Accordingly, in this paper, we envisage a FairEquityFL framework to ensure an equitable opportunity for all the clients to participate in the FL training process. In particular, we have introduced a sampling equalizer module within the selector component for ensuring fairness in terms of fair collaboration opportunity for all the clients in the client selection process. The selector is additionally responsible for both monitoring and controlling the clients' participation in each FL training round. Moreover, an outlier detection mechanism is enforced for identifying malicious clients based on the model performance in terms of considerable fluctuation in either accuracy or loss minimization. The selector flags suspicious clients and temporarily suspend such clients from participating in the FL training process. We further evaluate the performance of FairEquityFL on a publicly available dataset, FEMNIST. Our simulation results depict that FairEquityFL outperforms baseline models to a considerable extent.

Manoj Madushanka Perera, Adnan Mahmood, Kasun Eranda Wijethilake et al.

Conversational Question Answering (ConvQA) systems have emerged as a pivotal area within Natural Language Processing (NLP) by driving advancements that enable machines to engage in dynamic and context-aware conversations. These capabilities are increasingly being applied across various domains, i.e., customer support, education, legal, and healthcare where maintaining a coherent and relevant conversation is essential. Building on recent advancements, this survey provides a comprehensive analysis of the state-of-the-art in ConvQA. This survey begins by examining the core components of ConvQA systems, i.e., history selection, question understanding, and answer prediction, highlighting their interplay in ensuring coherence and relevance in multi-turn conversations. It further investigates the use of advanced machine learning techniques, including but not limited to, reinforcement learning, contrastive learning, and transfer learning to improve ConvQA accuracy and efficiency. The pivotal role of large language models, i.e., RoBERTa, GPT-4, Gemini 2.0 Flash, Mistral 7B, and LLaMA 3, is also explored, thereby showcasing their impact through data scalability and architectural advancements. Additionally, this survey presents a comprehensive analysis of key ConvQA datasets and concludes by outlining open research directions. Overall, this work offers a comprehensive overview of the ConvQA landscape and provides valuable insights to guide future advancements in the field.

Subhash Sagar, Adnan Mahmood, Quan Z. Sheng et al.

The next generation of the Internet of Things (IoT) facilitates the integration of the notion of social networking into smart objects (i.e., things) in a bid to establish the social network of interconnected objects. This integration has led to the evolution of a promising and emerging paradigm of Social Internet of Things (SIoT), wherein the smart objects act as social objects and intelligently impersonate the social behaviour similar to that of humans. These social objects are capable of establishing social relationships with the other objects in the network and can utilize these relationships for service discovery. Trust plays a significant role to achieve the common goal of trustworthy collaboration and cooperation among the objects and provide systems' credibility and reliability. In SIoT, an untrustworthy object can disrupt the basic functionality of a service by delivering malicious messages and adversely affect the quality and reliability of the service. In this survey, we present a holistic view of trustworthiness management for SIoT. The essence of trust in various disciplines has been discussed along with the Trust in SIoT followed by a detailed study on trust management components in SIoT. Furthermore, we analyzed and compared the trust management schemes by primarily categorizing them into four groups in terms of their strengths, limitations, trust management components employed in each of the referred trust management schemes, and the performance of these studies vis-a-vis numerous trust evaluation dimensions. Finally, we have discussed the future research directions of the emerging paradigm of SIoT, particularly for trustworthiness management in SIoT.

Munazza Zaib, Wei Emma Zhang, Quan Z. Sheng et al.

Question answering (QA) systems provide a way of querying the information available in various formats including, but not limited to, unstructured and structured data in natural languages. It constitutes a considerable part of conversational artificial intelligence (AI) which has led to the introduction of a special research topic on Conversational Question Answering (CQA), wherein a system is required to understand the given context and then engages in multi-turn QA to satisfy the user's information needs. Whilst the focus of most of the existing research work is subjected to single-turn QA, the field of multi-turn QA has recently grasped attention and prominence owing to the availability of large-scale, multi-turn QA datasets and the development of pre-trained language models. With a good amount of models and research papers adding to the literature every year recently, there is a dire need of arranging and presenting the related work in a unified manner to streamline future research. This survey, therefore, is an effort to present a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research trends of CQA primarily based on reviewed papers from 2016-2021. Our findings show that there has been a trend shift from single-turn to multi-turn QA which empowers the field of Conversational AI from different perspectives. This survey is intended to provide an epitome for the research community with the hope of laying a strong foundation for the field of CQA.

Munazza Zaib, Dai Hoang Tran, Subhash Sagar et al.

As one promising way to inquire about any particular information through a dialog with the bot, question answering dialog systems have gained increasing research interests recently. Designing interactive QA systems has always been a challenging task in natural language processing and used as a benchmark to evaluate a machine's ability of natural language understanding. However, such systems often struggle when the question answering is carried out in multiple turns by the users to seek more information based on what they have already learned, thus, giving rise to another complicated form called Conversational Question Answering (CQA). CQA systems are often criticized for not understanding or utilizing the previous context of the conversation when answering the questions. To address the research gap, in this paper, we explore how to integrate conversational history into the neural machine comprehension system. On one hand, we introduce a framework based on a publically available pre-trained language model called BERT for incorporating history turns into the system. On the other hand, we propose a history selection mechanism that selects the turns that are relevant and contributes the most to answer the current question. Experimentation results revealed that our framework is comparable in performance with the state-of-the-art models on the QuAC leader board. We also conduct a number of experiments to show the side effects of using entire context information which brings unnecessary information and noise signals resulting in a decline in the model's performance.

Subhash Sagar, Adnan Mahmood, Quan Z. Sheng et al.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an evolving network of billions of interconnected physical objects, such as numerous sensors, smartphones, wearables, and embedded devices. These physical objects, generally referred to as the smart objects, when deployed in the real-world aggregates useful information from their surrounding environment. As-of-late, this notion of IoT has been extended to incorporate the social networking facets which have led to the promising paradigm of the `Social Internet of Things' (SIoT). In SIoT, the devices operate as an autonomous agent and provide an exchange of information and service discovery in an intelligent manner by establishing social relationships among them with respect to their owners. Trust plays an important role in establishing trustworthy relationships among the physical objects and reduces probable risks in the decision-making process. In this paper, a trust computational model is proposed to extract individual trust features in a SIoT environment. Furthermore, a machine learning-based heuristic is used to aggregate all the trust features in order to ascertain an aggregate trust score. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed trust-based model isolates the trustworthy and untrustworthy nodes within the network in an efficient manner.

Subhash Sagar, Adnan Mahmood, Quan Z. Sheng et al.

The emerging paradigm of the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) has transformed the traditional notion of the Internet of Things (IoT) into a social network of billions of interconnected smart objects by integrating social networking facets into the same. In SIoT, objects can establish social relationships in an autonomous manner and interact with the other objects in the network based on their social behaviour. A fundamental problem that needs attention is establishing of these relationships in a reliable and trusted way, i.e., establishing trustworthy relationships and building trust amongst objects. In addition, it is also indispensable to ascertain and predict an object's behaviour in the SIoT network over a period of time. Accordingly, in this paper, we have proposed an efficient time-aware machine learning-driven trust evaluation model to address this particular issue. The envisaged model deliberates social relationships in terms of friendship and community-interest, and further takes into consideration the working relationships and cooperativeness (object-object interactions) as trust parameters to quantify the trustworthiness of an object. Subsequently, in contrast to the traditional weighted sum heuristics, a machine learning-driven aggregation scheme is delineated to synthesize these trust parameters to ascertain a single trust score. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can efficiently segregates the trustworthy and untrustworthy objects within a network, and further provides the insight on how the trust of an object varies with time along with depicting the effect of each trust parameter on a trust score.

Adnan Mahmood, Bernard Butler, Brendan Jennings

Rapid advances in wireless communication technologies coupled with ongoing massive development in vehicular networking standards and innovations in computing, sensing, and analytics have paved the way for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) to develop rapidly in the near future. ITS provides a complete solution for the efficient and intelligent management of real-time traffic, wherein sensory data is collected from within the vehicles (i.e., via their onboard units) as well as data exchanged between the vehicles, between the vehicles and their supporting roadside infrastructure/network, among the vehicles and vulnerable pedestrians, subsequently paving the way for the realization of the futuristic Internet of Vehicles. The traditional intent of an ITS system is to detect, monitor, control, and subsequently reduce traffic congestion based on a real-time analysis of the data pertinent to certain patterns of the road traffic, including traffic density at a geographical area of interest, precise velocity of vehicles, current and predicted travelling trajectories and times, etc. However, merely relying on an ITS framework is not an optimal solution. In case of dense traffic environments, where communication broadcasts from hundreds of thousands of vehicles could potentially choke the entire network (and so could lead to fatal accidents in the case of autonomous vehicles that depend on reliable communications for their operational safety), a fall back to the traditional decentralized vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) approach becomes necessary. It is therefore of critical importance to enhance the situational awareness of vehicular drivers so as to enable them to make quick but well-founded manual decisions in such safety-critical situations.