In the village of Ndodo, 40 kilometers south of the Malawian capital Lilongwe, farmers gather in the shade of an acacia tree as a voice over a smartphone tells them how to get rid of a weevil that's destroying their sweet potato crops. The tips offered by the app in the local language Chichewa is one of the first examples of how artificial intelligence is being used to aid subsistence farmers in some of the poorest parts of the world. Piloted by a Chicago-based nonprofit organization Opportunity International, the app called Ulangizi -- which translates as "Advice" -- works on WhatsApp and uses data from ChatGPT and the Malawian government's English-language agricultural manual to answer questions or diagnose crop and farm animal diseases. "The majority of our people do not know how to read or write," said Anna Chimalizeni, a 36-year-old mother of three, who as a government farmer-support agent demonstrates the app to farmers. "I am there to help them write issues they have at their farms and read the response on their behalf. They also have a chance to listen to the response through voice notes which come in our own local language."

Artificial intelligence (AI) as a disruptive technology is not new. However, its recent evolution, engineered by technological transformation, big data analytics, and quantum computing, produces conversational and generative AI (CGAI/GenAI) and human-like chatbots that disrupt conventional operations and methods in different fields. This study investigates the scientific landscape of CGAI and human-chatbot interaction/collaboration and evaluates use cases, benefits, challenges, and policy implications for multidisciplinary education and allied industry operations. The publications trend showed that just 4% (n=75) occurred during 2006-2018, while 2019-2023 experienced astronomical growth (n=1763 or 96%). The prominent use cases of CGAI (e.g., ChatGPT) for teaching, learning, and research activities occurred in computer science [multidisciplinary and AI] (32%), medical/healthcare (17%), engineering (7%), and business fields (6%). The intellectual structure shows strong collaboration among eminent multidisciplinary sources in business, Information Systems, and other areas. The thematic structure of SLP highlights prominent CGAI use cases, including improved user experience in human-computer interaction, computer programs/code generation, and systems creation. Widespread CGAI usefulness for teachers, researchers, and learners includes syllabi/course content generation, testing aids, and academic writing. The concerns about abuse and misuse (plagiarism, academic integrity, privacy violations) and issues about misinformation, danger of self-diagnoses, and patient privacy in medical/healthcare applications are prominent. Formulating strategies and policies to address potential CGAI challenges in teaching/learning and practice are priorities. Developing discipline-based automatic detection of GenAI contents to check abuse is proposed.

Text-to-image generation models often struggle with key element loss or semantic confusion in tasks involving Chinese classical poetry.Addressing this issue through fine-tuning models needs considerable training costs. Additionally, manual prompts for re-diffusion adjustments need professional knowledge. To solve this problem, we propose Poetry2Image, an iterative correction framework for images generated from Chinese classical poetry. Utilizing an external poetry dataset, Poetry2Image establishes an automated feedback and correction loop, which enhances the alignment between poetry and image through image generation models and subsequent re-diffusion modifications suggested by large language models (LLM). Using a test set of 200 sentences of Chinese classical poetry, the proposed method--when integrated with five popular image generation models--achieves an average element completeness of 70.63%, representing an improvement of 25.56% over direct image generation. In tests of semantic correctness, our method attains an average semantic consistency of 80.09%. The study not only promotes the dissemination of ancient poetry culture but also offers a reference for similar non-fine-tuning methods to enhance LLM generation.

There is an ongoing debate on balancing the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence (AI) as AI is becoming critical to improving healthcare delivery and patient outcomes. Such improvements are essential in resource-constrained settings where millions lack access to adequate healthcare services, such as in Africa. AI in such a context can potentially improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and accessibility of healthcare services. Nevertheless, the development and use of AI-driven healthcare systems raise numerous ethical, legal, and socio-economic issues. Justice is a major concern in AI that has implications for amplifying social inequities. This paper discusses these implications and related justice concepts such as solidarity, Common Good, sustainability, AI bias, and fairness. For Africa to effectively benefit from AI, these principles should align with the local context while balancing the risks. Compared to mainstream ethical debates on justice, this perspective offers context-specific considerations for equitable healthcare AI development in Africa.

Improving user experience and providing personalized search results in E-commerce platforms heavily rely on understanding purchase intention. However, existing methods for acquiring large-scale intentions bank on distilling large language models with human annotation for verification. Such an approach tends to generate product-centric intentions, overlook valuable visual information from product images, and incurs high costs for scalability. To address these issues, we introduce MIND, a multimodal framework that allows Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to infer purchase intentions from multimodal product metadata and prioritize human-centric ones. Using Amazon Review data, we apply MIND and create a multimodal intention knowledge base, which contains 1,264,441 million intentions derived from 126,142 co-buy shopping records across 107,215 products. Extensive human evaluations demonstrate the high plausibility and typicality of our obtained intentions and validate the effectiveness of our distillation framework and filtering mechanism. Additional experiments reveal that our obtained intentions significantly enhance large language models in two intention comprehension tasks.

Satellite remote sensing missions have gained popularity over the past fifteen years due to their ability to cover large swaths of land at regular intervals, making them ideal for monitoring environmental trends. The FINCH mission, a 3U+ CubeSat equipped with a hyperspectral camera, aims to monitor crop residue cover in agricultural fields. Although hyperspectral imaging captures both spectral and spatial information, it is prone to various types of noise, including random noise, stripe noise, and dead pixels. Effective denoising of these images is crucial for downstream scientific tasks. Traditional methods, including hand-crafted techniques encoding strong priors, learned 2D image denoising methods applied across different hyperspectral bands, or diffusion generative models applied independently on bands, often struggle with varying noise strengths across spectral bands, leading to significant spectral distortion. This paper presents a novel approach to hyperspectral image denoising using latent diffusion models that integrate spatial and spectral information. We particularly do so by building a 3D diffusion model and presenting a 3-stage training approach on real and synthetically crafted datasets. The proposed method preserves image structure while reducing noise. Evaluations on both popular hyperspectral denoising datasets and synthetically crafted datasets for the FINCH mission demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.

Technology-driven precision livestock farming (PLF) empowers practitioners to monitor and analyze animal growth and health conditions for improved productivity and welfare. Computer vision (CV) is indispensable in PLF by using cameras and computer algorithms to supplement or supersede manual efforts for livestock data acquisition. Data availability is crucial for developing innovative monitoring and analysis systems through artificial intelligence-based techniques. However, data curation processes are tedious, time-consuming, and resource intensive. This study presents the first systematic survey of publicly available livestock CV datasets (https://github.com/Anil-Bhujel/Public-Computer-Vision-Dataset-A-Systematic-Survey). Among 58 public datasets identified and analyzed, encompassing different species of livestock, almost half of them are for cattle, followed by swine, poultry, and other animals. Individual animal detection and color imaging are the dominant application and imaging modality for livestock. The characteristics and baseline applications of the datasets are discussed, emphasizing the implications for animal welfare advocates. Challenges and opportunities are also discussed to inspire further efforts in developing livestock CV datasets. This study highlights that the limited quantity of high-quality annotated datasets collected from diverse environments, animals, and applications, the absence of contextual metadata, are a real bottleneck in PLF.

This paper pertains to an emerging machine learning paradigm: learning higher-order functions, i.e. functions whose inputs are functions themselves, $\textit{particularly when these inputs are Neural Networks (NNs)}$. With the growing interest in architectures that process NNs, a recurring design principle has permeated the field: adhering to the permutation symmetries arising from the connectionist structure of NNs. $\textit{However, are these the sole symmetries present in NN parameterizations}$? Zooming into most practical activation functions (e.g. sine, ReLU, tanh) answers this question negatively and gives rise to intriguing new symmetries, which we collectively refer to as $\textit{scaling symmetries}$, that is, non-zero scalar multiplications and divisions of weights and biases. In this work, we propose $\textit{Scale Equivariant Graph MetaNetworks - ScaleGMNs}$, a framework that adapts the Graph Metanetwork (message-passing) paradigm by incorporating scaling symmetries and thus rendering neuron and edge representations equivariant to valid scalings. We introduce novel building blocks, of independent technical interest, that allow for equivariance or invariance with respect to individual scalar multipliers or their product and use them in all components of ScaleGMN. Furthermore, we prove that, under certain expressivity conditions, ScaleGMN can simulate the forward and backward pass of any input feedforward neural network. Experimental results demonstrate that our method advances the state-of-the-art performance for several datasets and activation functions, highlighting the power of scaling symmetries as an inductive bias for NN processing.

With the development of artificial intelligence techniques, transportation system optimization is evolving from traditional methods relying on expert experience to simulation and learning-based decision optimization methods. Learning-based optimization methods require extensive interaction with highly realistic microscopic traffic simulators for optimization. However, existing microscopic traffic simulators are computationally inefficient in large-scale scenarios and therefore significantly reduce the efficiency of the data sampling process of optimization algorithms. In addition, the optimization scenarios supported by existing simulators are limited, mainly focusing on the traffic signal control. To address these challenges and limitations, we propose the first open-source GPU-accelerated large-scale microscopic simulator for transportation system simulation. The simulator is able to iterate at 84.09Hz, which achieves 88.92 times computational acceleration in the large-scale scenario with more than a million vehicles compared to the best baseline. Based on the simulator, we implement a set of microscopic and macroscopic controllable objects and metrics to support most typical transportation system optimization scenarios. These controllable objects and metrics are all provided by Python API for ease of use. We choose five important and representative transportation system optimization scenarios and benchmark classical rule-based algorithms, reinforcement learning, and black-box optimization in four cities.

Hallucination in Natural Language Generation (NLG) is like the elephant in the room, obvious but often overlooked until recent achievements significantly improved the fluency and grammaticality of generated text. As the capabilities of text generation models have improved, researchers have begun to pay more attention to the phenomenon of hallucination. Despite significant progress in this field in recent years, the evaluation system for hallucination is complex and diverse, lacking clear organization. We are the first to comprehensively survey how various evaluation methods have evolved with the development of text generation models from three dimensions, including hallucinated fact granularity, evaluator design principles, and assessment facets. This survey aims to help researchers identify current limitations in hallucination evaluation and highlight future research directions.