Subtitling plays a crucial role in enhancing the accessibility of audiovisual content and encompasses three primary subtasks: translating spoken dialogue, segmenting translations into concise textual units, and estimating timestamps that govern their on-screen duration. Past attempts to automate this process rely, to varying degrees, on automatic transcripts, employed diversely for the three subtasks. In response to the acknowledged limitations associated with this reliance on transcripts, recent research has shifted towards transcription-free solutions for translation and segmentation, leaving the direct generation of timestamps as uncharted territory. To fill this gap, we introduce the first direct model capable of producing automatic subtitles, entirely eliminating any dependence on intermediate transcripts also for timestamp prediction. Experimental results, backed by manual evaluation, showcase our solution's new state-of-the-art performance across multiple language pairs and diverse conditions.

Drought is a complex environmental phenomenon that affects millions of people and communities all over the globe and is too elusive to be accurately predicted. This is mostly due to the scalability and variability of the web of environmental parameters that directly/indirectly causes the onset of different categories of drought. Since the dawn of man, efforts have been made to uniquely understand the natural indicators that provide signs of likely environmental events. These indicators/signs in the form of indigenous knowledge system have been used for generations. The intricate complexity of drought has, however, always been a major stumbling block for accurate drought prediction and forecasting systems. Recently, scientists in the field of agriculture and environmental monitoring have been discussing the integration of indigenous knowledge and scientific knowledge for a more accurate environmental forecasting system in order to incorporate diverse environmental information for a reliable drought forecast. Hence, in this research, the core objective is the development of a semantics-based data integration middleware that encompasses and integrates heterogeneous data models of local indigenous knowledge and sensor data towards an accurate drought forecasting system for the study areas. The local indigenous knowledge on drought gathered from the domain experts is transformed into rules to be used for performing deductive inference in conjunction with sensors data for determining the onset of drought through an automated inference generation module of the middleware. The semantic middleware incorporates, inter alia, a distributed architecture that consists of a streaming data processing engine based on Apache Kafka for real-time stream processing; a rule-based reasoning module; an ontology module for semantic representation of the knowledge bases.

Transformer-based encoder-decoder models have demonstrated impressive results in chemical reaction prediction tasks. However, these models typically rely on pretraining using tens of millions of unlabelled molecules, which can be time-consuming and GPU-intensive. One of the central questions we aim to answer in this work is: Can FlanT5 and ByT5, the encode-decoder models pretrained solely on language data, be effectively specialised for organic reaction prediction through task-specific fine-tuning? We conduct a systematic empirical study on several key issues of the process, including tokenisation, the impact of (SMILES-oriented) pretraining, fine-tuning sample efficiency, and decoding algorithms at inference. Our key findings indicate that although being pretrained only on language tasks, FlanT5 and ByT5 provide a solid foundation to fine-tune for reaction prediction, and thus become `chemistry domain compatible' in the process. This suggests that GPU-intensive and expensive pretraining on a large dataset of unlabelled molecules may be useful yet not essential to leverage the power of language models for chemistry. All our models achieve comparable Top-1 and Top-5 accuracy although some variation across different models does exist. Notably, tokenisation and vocabulary trimming slightly affect final performance but can speed up training and inference; The most efficient greedy decoding strategy is very competitive while only marginal gains can be achieved from more sophisticated decoding algorithms. In summary, we evaluate FlanT5 and ByT5 across several dimensions and benchmark their impact on organic reaction prediction, which may guide more effective use of these state-of-the-art language models for chemistry-related tasks in the future.

Over the last few years, 360{\deg} video traffic on the network has grown significantly. A key challenge of 360{\deg} video playback is ensuring a high quality of experience (QoE) with limited network bandwidth. Currently, most studies focus on tile-based adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming based on single viewport prediction to reduce bandwidth consumption. However, the performance of models for single-viewpoint prediction is severely limited by the inherent uncertainty in head movement, which can not cope with the sudden movement of users very well. This paper first presents a multimodal spatial-temporal attention transformer to generate multiple viewpoint trajectories with their probabilities given a historical trajectory. The proposed method models viewpoint prediction as a classification problem and uses attention mechanisms to capture the spatial and temporal characteristics of input video frames and viewpoint trajectories for multi-viewpoint prediction. After that, a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL)-based ABR algorithm utilizing multi-viewpoint prediction for 360{\deg} video streaming is proposed for maximizing different QoE objectives under various network conditions. We formulate the ABR problem as a decentralized partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP) problem and present a MAPPO algorithm based on centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) framework to solve the problem. The experimental results show that our proposed method improves the defined QoE metric by up to 85.5% compared to existing ABR methods.

In the era of exponential technology growth, one unexpected guest has claimed a seat in classrooms worldwide, Artificial Intelligence. Generative AI, such as ChatGPT, promises a revolution in education, yet it arrives with a double-edged sword. Its potential for personalized learning is offset by issues of cheating, inaccuracies, and educators struggling to incorporate it effectively into their lesson design. We are standing on the brink of this educational frontier, and it is clear that we need to navigate this terrain with a lot of care. This is a major challenge that could undermine the integrity and value of our educational process. So, how can we turn these challenges into opportunities? When used inappropriately, AI tools can become the perfect tool for the cut copy paste mentality, and quickly begin to corrode critical thinking, creativity, and deep understanding, the most important skills in our rapidly changing world. Teachers feel that they are not equipped to leverage this technology, widening the digital divide among educators and institutions. Addressing these concerns calls for an in depth research approach. We will employ empirical research, drawing on the Technology Acceptance Model, to assess the attitudes toward generative AI among educators and students. Understanding their perceptions, usage patterns, and hurdles is the first crucial step in creating an effective solution. The present study will be used as a process manual for future researchers to apply, running their own data, based on the steps explained here

One of the keys to the success of collaborative learning is balanced participation by all learners, but this does not always happen naturally. Pedagogical robots have the potential to facilitate balance. However, it remains unclear what participation balance robots should aim at; various metrics have been proposed, but it is still an open question whether we should balance human participation in human-human interactions (HHI) or human-robot interactions (HRI) and whether we should consider robots' participation in collaborative learning involving multiple humans and a robot. This paper examines collaborative learning between a pair of students and a teachable robot that acts as a peer tutee to answer the aforementioned question. Through an exploratory study, we hypothesize which balance metrics in the literature and which portions of dialogues (including vs. excluding robots' participation and human participation in HHI vs. HRI) will better predict learning as a group. We test the hypotheses with another study and replicate them with automatically obtained units of participation to simulate the information available to robots when they adaptively fix imbalances in real-time. Finally, we discuss recommendations on which metrics learning science researchers should choose when trying to understand how to facilitate collaboration.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are among the most widely used machine learning models for computer vision tasks, such as image classification. To improve the efficiency of CNNs, many CNNs compressing approaches have been developed. Low-rank methods approximate the original convolutional kernel with a sequence of smaller convolutional kernels, which leads to reduced storage and time complexities. In this study, we propose a novel low-rank CNNs compression method that is based on reduced storage direct tensor ring decomposition (RSDTR). The proposed method offers a higher circular mode permutation flexibility, and it is characterized by large parameter and FLOPS compression rates, while preserving a good classification accuracy of the compressed network. The experiments, performed on the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets, clearly demonstrate the efficiency of RSDTR in comparison to other state-of-the-art CNNs compression approaches.

One way to personalize chatbot interactions is by establishing common ground with the intended reader. A domain where establishing mutual understanding could be particularly impactful is vaccine concerns and misinformation. Vaccine interventions are forms of messaging which aim to answer concerns expressed about vaccination. Tailoring responses in this domain is difficult, since opinions often have seemingly little ideological overlap. We define the task of tailoring vaccine interventions to a Common-Ground Opinion (CGO). Tailoring responses to a CGO involves meaningfully improving the answer by relating it to an opinion or belief the reader holds. In this paper we introduce TAILOR-CGO, a dataset for evaluating how well responses are tailored to provided CGOs. We benchmark several major LLMs on this task; finding GPT-4-Turbo performs significantly better than others. We also build automatic evaluation metrics, including an efficient and accurate BERT model that outperforms finetuned LLMs, investigate how to successfully tailor vaccine messaging to CGOs, and provide actionable recommendations from this investigation. Code and model weights: https://github.com/rickardstureborg/tailor-cgo Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/DukeNLP/tailor-cgo

Generative pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance over a wide range of tasks, thanks to the unprecedented amount of data they have been trained on. As established scaling laws indicate, LLMs' future performance improvement depends on the amount of computing and data sources we can leverage for pre-training. Federated learning (FL) has the potential to unleash the majority of the planet's data and computational resources, which are underutilized by the data-center-focused training methodology of current LLM practice. Our work presents a robust, flexible, reproducible FL approach that enables large-scale collaboration across institutions to train LLMs. This would mobilize more computational and data resources while matching or potentially exceeding centralized performance. We further show the effectiveness of the federated training scales with model size and present our approach for training a billion-scale federated LLM using limited resources. This will help data-rich actors to become the protagonists of LLMs pre-training instead of leaving the stage to compute-rich actors alone.

Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) reasoning focuses on predicting events through historical information within snapshots distributed on a timeline. Existing studies mainly concentrate on two perspectives of leveraging the history of TKGs, including capturing evolution of each recent snapshot or correlations among global historical facts. Despite the achieved significant accomplishments, these models still fall short of (1) investigating the influences of multi-granularity interactions across recent snapshots and (2) harnessing the expressive semantics of significant links accorded with queries throughout the entire history, especially events exerting a profound impact on the future. These inadequacies restrict representation ability to reflect historical dependencies and future trends thoroughly. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose an innovative TKG reasoning approach towards \textbf{His}torically \textbf{R}elevant \textbf{E}vents \textbf{S}tructuring ($\mathsf{HisRES}$). Concretely, $\mathsf{HisRES}$ comprises two distinctive modules excelling in structuring historically relevant events within TKGs, including a multi-granularity evolutionary encoder that captures structural and temporal dependencies of the most recent snapshots, and a global relevance encoder that concentrates on crucial correlations among events relevant to queries from the entire history. Furthermore, $\mathsf{HisRES}$ incorporates a self-gating mechanism for adaptively merging multi-granularity recent and historically relevant structuring representations. Extensive experiments on four event-based benchmarks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of $\mathsf{HisRES}$ and indicate the superiority and effectiveness of structuring historical relevance for TKG reasoning.