Despite the predominance of English in their training data, English-centric Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3 and LLaMA display a remarkable ability to perform multilingual tasks, raising questions about the depth and nature of their cross-lingual capabilities. This paper introduces the decomposed prompting approach to probe the linguistic structure understanding of these LLMs in sequence labeling tasks. Diverging from the single text-to-text prompt, our method generates for each token of the input sentence an individual prompt which asks for its linguistic label. We assess our method on the Universal Dependencies part-of-speech tagging dataset for 38 languages, utilizing both English-centric and multilingual LLMs. Our findings show that decomposed prompting surpasses the iterative prompting baseline in efficacy and efficiency under zero- and few-shot settings. Further analysis reveals the influence of evaluation methods and the use of instructions in prompts. Our multilingual investigation shows that English-centric language models perform better on average than multilingual models. Our study offers insights into the multilingual transferability of English-centric LLMs, contributing to the understanding of their multilingual linguistic knowledge.

Doha, Qatar – Under blocks of flashing lights, entrepreneurs, investors and business leaders converged in central Doha on Monday as Web Summit, one of the world's biggest tech conferences, opened in Qatar's capital. The event, held in the Middle East for the first time, brings together participants from dozens of countries who, over four days, will be hoping to establish new connections, share insights and secure funds. Kicking off proceedings, Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani announced that the Gulf state's sovereign wealth fund would invest more than 1bn in international and regional venture capital funds. Dubbed "Fund of Funds", the programme aims to foster innovation by attracting top international venture capital funds and entrepreneurs both to Qatar and the wider Gulf region. The commitment to boost the start-up sector builds on Qatar's aspiration to be a regional IT hub.

The US military has ramped up its use of artificial intelligence tools after the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, based on a new report by Bloomberg. Schuyler Moore, US Central Command's chief technology officer, told the news organization that machine learning algorithms helped the Pentagon identify targets for more than 85 air strikes in the Middle East this month. US bombers and fighter aircraft carried out those air strikes against seven facilities in Iraq and Syria on February 2, fully destroying or at least damaging rockets, missiles, drone storage facilities and militia operations centers. The Pentagon had also used AI systems to find rocket launchers in Yemen and surface combatants in the Red Sea, which it had then destroyed through multiple air strikes in the same month. The machine learning algorithms used to narrow down targets were developed under Project Maven, Google's now-defunct partnership the Pentagon.

The static synaptic connectivity of neuronal circuits stands in direct contrast to the dynamics of their function. As in changing community interactions, different neurons can participate actively in various combinations to effect behaviors at different times. We introduce an unsupervised approach to learn the dynamic affinities between neurons in live, behaving animals, and to reveal which communities form among neurons at different times. The inference occurs in two major steps. First, pairwise non-linear affinities between neuronal traces from brain-wide calcium activity are organized by non-negative tensor factorization (NTF). Each factor specifies which groups of neurons are most likely interacting for an inferred interval in time, and for which animals. Finally, a generative model that allows for weighted community detection is applied to the functional motifs produced by NTF to reveal a dynamic functional connectome. Since time codes the different experimental variables (e.g., application of chemical stimuli), this provides an atlas of neural motifs active during separate stages of an experiment (e.g., stimulus application or spontaneous behaviors). Results from our analysis are experimentally validated, confirming that our method is able to robustly predict causal interactions between neurons to generate behavior. Code is available at https://github.com/dyballa/dynamic-connectomes.

Offline safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to train a constraint satisfaction policy from a fixed dataset. Current state-of-the-art approaches are based on supervised learning with a conditioned policy. However, these approaches fall short in real-world applications that involve complex tasks with rich temporal and logical structures. In this paper, we propose temporal logic Specification-conditioned Decision Transformer (SDT), a novel framework that harnesses the expressive power of signal temporal logic (STL) to specify complex temporal rules that an agent should follow and the sequential modeling capability of Decision Transformer (DT). Empirical evaluations on the DSRL benchmarks demonstrate the better capacity of SDT in learning safe and high-reward policies compared with existing approaches. In addition, SDT shows good alignment with respect to different desired degrees of satisfaction of the STL specification that it is conditioned on.

This paper considers a compressive multi-spectral light field camera model that utilizes a one-hot spectralcoded mask and a microlens array to capture spatial, angular, and spectral information using a single monochrome sensor. We propose a model that employs compressed sensing techniques to reconstruct the complete multi-spectral light field from undersampled measurements. Unlike previous work where a light field is vectorized to a 1D signal, our method employs a 5D basis and a novel 5D measurement model, hence, matching the intrinsic dimensionality of multispectral light fields. We mathematically and empirically show the equivalence of 5D and 1D sensing models, and most importantly that the 5D framework achieves orders of magnitude faster reconstruction while requiring a small fraction of the memory. Moreover, our new multidimensional sensing model opens new research directions for designing efficient visual data acquisition algorithms and hardware.

In this paper we hope to identify how the typical or standard artificial intelligence development process encourages or facilitates the creation of racialized technologies. We begin by understanding Sylvia Wynter's definition of the biocentric Man genre and its exclusion of Blackness from humanness. We follow this with outlining what we consider to be the typical steps for developing an AI-based technology, which we have broken down into 6 stages: identifying a problem, development process and management tool selection, dataset development and data processing, model development, deployment and risk assessment, and integration and monitoring. The goal of this paper is to better understand how Wynter's biocentric Man is being represented and reinforced by the technologies we are producing in the AI lifecycle and by the lifecycle itself; we hope to identify ways in which the distinction of Blackness from the "ideal" human leads to perpetual punishment at the hands of these technologies. By deconstructing this development process, we can potentially identify ways in which humans in general have not been prioritized and how those affects are disproportionately affecting marginalized people. We hope to offer solutions that will encourage changes in the AI development cycle.

Foundation models are powerful technologies: how they are released publicly directly shapes their societal impact. In this position paper, we focus on open foundation models, defined here as those with broadly available model weights (e.g. Llama 2, Stable Diffusion XL). We identify five distinctive properties (e.g. greater customizability, poor monitoring) of open foundation models that lead to both their benefits and risks. Open foundation models present significant benefits, with some caveats, that span innovation, competition, the distribution of decision-making power, and transparency. To understand their risks of misuse, we design a risk assessment framework for analyzing their marginal risk. Across several misuse vectors (e.g. cyberattacks, bioweapons), we find that current research is insufficient to effectively characterize the marginal risk of open foundation models relative to pre-existing technologies. The framework helps explain why the marginal risk is low in some cases, clarifies disagreements about misuse risks by revealing that past work has focused on different subsets of the framework with different assumptions, and articulates a way forward for more constructive debate. Overall, our work helps support a more grounded assessment of the societal impact of open foundation models by outlining what research is needed to empirically validate their theoretical benefits and risks.

Modern neural network architectures still struggle to learn algorithmic procedures that require to systematically apply compositional rules to solve out-of-distribution problem instances. In this work, we propose an original approach to learn algorithmic tasks inspired by rewriting systems, a classic framework in symbolic artificial intelligence. We show that a rewriting system can be implemented as a neural architecture composed by specialized modules: the Selector identifies the target sub-expression to process, the Solver simplifies the sub-expression by computing the corresponding result, and the Combiner produces a new version of the original expression by replacing the sub-expression with the solution provided. We evaluate our model on three types of algorithmic tasks that require simplifying symbolic formulas involving lists, arithmetic, and algebraic expressions. We test the extrapolation capabilities of the proposed architecture using formulas involving a higher number of operands and nesting levels than those seen during training, and we benchmark its performance against the Neural Data Router, a recent model specialized for systematic generalization, and a state-of-the-art large language model (GPT-4) probed with advanced prompting strategies.

Advances in bioinformatics are primarily due to new algorithms for processing diverse biological data sources. While sophisticated alignment algorithms have been pivotal in analyzing biological sequences, deep learning has substantially transformed bioinformatics, addressing sequence, structure, and functional analyses. However, these methods are incredibly data-hungry, compute-intensive and hard to interpret. Hyperdimensional computing (HDC) has recently emerged as an intriguing alternative. The key idea is that random vectors of high dimensionality can represent concepts such as sequence identity or phylogeny. These vectors can then be combined using simple operators for learning, reasoning or querying by exploiting the peculiar properties of high-dimensional spaces. Our work reviews and explores the potential of HDC for bioinformatics, emphasizing its efficiency, interpretability, and adeptness in handling multimodal and structured data. HDC holds a lot of potential for various omics data searching, biosignal analysis and health applications.