We explore the applications of random matrix theory (RMT) in the training of deep neural networks (DNNs), focusing on layer pruning that is reducing the number of DNN parameters (weights). Our numerical results show that this pruning leads to a drastic reduction of parameters while not reducing the accuracy of DNNs and CNNs. Moreover, pruning the fully connected DNNs actually increases the accuracy and decreases the variance for random initializations. Our numerics indicate that this enhancement in accuracy is due to the simplification of the loss landscape. We next provide rigorous mathematical underpinning of these numerical results by proving the RMT-based Pruning Theorem. Our results offer valuable insights into the practical application of RMT for the creation of more efficient and accurate deep-learning models.

Deep learning technology has developed unprecedentedly in the last decade and has become the primary choice in many application domains. This progress is mainly attributed to a systematic collaboration in which rapidly growing computing resources encourage advanced algorithms to deal with massive data. However, it has gradually become challenging to handle the unlimited growth of data with limited computing power. To this end, diverse approaches are proposed to improve data processing efficiency. Dataset distillation, a dataset reduction method, addresses this problem by synthesizing a small typical dataset from substantial data and has attracted much attention from the deep learning community. Existing dataset distillation methods can be taxonomized into meta-learning and data matching frameworks according to whether they explicitly mimic the performance of target data. Although dataset distillation has shown surprising performance in compressing datasets, there are still several limitations such as distilling high-resolution data or data with complex label spaces. This paper provides a holistic understanding of dataset distillation from multiple aspects, including distillation frameworks and algorithms, factorized dataset distillation, performance comparison, and applications. Finally, we discuss challenges and promising directions to further promote future studies on dataset distillation.

Understanding Transformer-based models has attracted significant attention, as they lie at the heart of recent technological advances across machine learning. While most interpretability methods rely on running models over inputs, recent work has shown that a zero-pass approach, where parameters are interpreted directly without a forward/backward pass is feasible for some Transformer parameters, and for two-layer attention networks. In this work, we present a theoretical analysis where all parameters of a trained Transformer are interpreted by projecting them into the embedding space, that is, the space of vocabulary items they operate on. We derive a simple theoretical framework to support our arguments and provide ample evidence for its validity. First, an empirical analysis showing that parameters of both pretrained and fine-tuned models can be interpreted in embedding space. Second, we present two applications of our framework: (a) aligning the parameters of different models that share a vocabulary, and (b) constructing a classifier without training by ``translating'' the parameters of a fine-tuned classifier to parameters of a different model that was only pretrained. Overall, our findings open the door to interpretation methods that, at least in part, abstract away from model specifics and operate in the embedding space only.

Although large language models (LLMs) often produce impressive outputs, it remains unclear how they perform in real-world scenarios requiring strong reasoning skills and expert domain knowledge. We set out to investigate whether close- and open-source models (GPT-3.5, LLama-2, etc.) can be applied to answer and reason about difficult real-world-based questions. We focus on three popular medical benchmarks (MedQA-USMLE, MedMCQA, and PubMedQA) and multiple prompting scenarios: Chain-of-Thought (CoT, think step-by-step), few-shot and retrieval augmentation. Based on an expert annotation of the generated CoTs, we found that InstructGPT can often read, reason and recall expert knowledge. Last, by leveraging advances in prompt engineering (few-shot and ensemble methods), we demonstrated that GPT-3.5 not only yields calibrated predictive distributions, but also reaches the passing score on three datasets: MedQA-USMLE 60.2%, MedMCQA 62.7% and PubMedQA 78.2%. Open-source models are closing the gap: Llama-2 70B also passed the MedQA-USMLE with 62.5% accuracy.

Transformers with linear attention allow for efficient parallel training but can simultaneously be formulated as an RNN with 2D (matrix-valued) hidden states, thus enjoying linear (with respect to output length) inference complexity. Recent works such as RetNet (Sun et al., 2023) and TransNormerLLM (Qin et al., 2023a) observe that adding a global decay term to the additive RNN update rule greatly improves performance, sometimes outperforming standard Transformers with softmax attention when trained at scale. In this work we show that adding a data-dependent gating mechanism further improves performance. We derive a parallel form of this gated linear attention layer that enables efficient training. However, a straightforward, numerically stable implementation of this parallel form requires generalized matrix multiplications in log-space for numerical stability, and thus cannot take advantage of tensor cores on modern GPUs which are optimized for standard matrix multiplications. We develop a hardware-efficient version of the parallel form that can still make use of tensor cores through block-parallel computations over sequence chunks. Experiments on moderate-scale language modeling (340M-parameter models trained on 15B tokens, 1.3B-parameter models trained on 100B tokens) show that gated linear attention (GLA) Transformers perform competitively against a strong LLaMA-architecture Transformer baseline (Touvron et al., 2023) as well as Mamba (Gu & Dao, 2023), a recently introduced state-space model with a data-dependent state transition mechanism. For training speed, our Triton-based implementation performs comparably to CUDA-optimized FlashAttention-2 (Dao, 2023) under the regular 2048 training length setting, while outperforming FlashAttention-2 when training on longer sequences beyond 4096.

While western billionaires were busy sending rockets to space only for them to crash and burn, scientists in India were quietly doing something no one had accomplished before. Their Chandrayaan-3 moon lander was the first mission to reach the lunar south pole – an unexplored region where reservoirs of frozen water are believed to exist. I remember my heart soaring when images of the control room in India spread around social media, showing senior female scientists celebrating their incredible achievement. The success of Chandrayaan-3, launched in July 2023, showed the world that not only is India a major player in space, but that a moon lander can be launched successfully for $75m (£60m). This cost is not to be sniffed at but it is much cheaper than most other countries' budgets for a moon mission. July 2023 was an extremely busy month for space firsts.

Fox News anchor Bret Baier takes a look at key shipping routes in the Middle East and breaks down how Iran's actions in the Red Sea could impact global trade on'Special Report.' Oil prices are on the rise amid attacks on ships in the Red Sea. Prices are at around $80 a barrel, which is far lower than prices were when Russia invaded Ukraine. Oil futures had then jumped to more than $100 a barrel. The prices have remained low since June 2022.

Recent progress in self-supervision has shown that pre-training large neural networks on vast amounts of unsupervised data can lead to substantial increases in generalization to downstream tasks. Such models, recently coined foundation models, have been transformational to the field of natural language processing. Variants have also been proposed for image data, but their applicability to remote sensing tasks is limited. To stimulate the development of foundation models for Earth monitoring, we propose a benchmark comprised of six classification and six segmentation tasks, which were carefully curated and adapted to be both relevant to the field and well-suited for model evaluation. We accompany this benchmark with a robust methodology for evaluating models and reporting aggregated results to enable a reliable assessment of progress. Finally, we report results for 20 baselines to gain information about the performance of existing models. We believe that this benchmark will be a driver of progress across a variety of Earth monitoring tasks.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has heightened interest in their potential for multimodal applications that integrate language and vision. This paper explores the capabilities of GPT-4V in the realms of geography, environmental science, agriculture, and urban planning by evaluating its performance across a variety of tasks. Data sources comprise satellite imagery, aerial photos, ground-level images, field images, and public datasets. The model is evaluated on a series of tasks including geo-localization, textual data extraction from maps, remote sensing image classification, visual question answering, crop type identification, disease/pest/weed recognition, chicken behavior analysis, agricultural object counting, urban planning knowledge question answering, and plan generation. The results indicate the potential of GPT-4V in geo-localization, land cover classification, visual question answering, and basic image understanding. However, there are limitations in several tasks requiring fine-grained recognition and precise counting. While zero-shot learning shows promise, performance varies across problem domains and image complexities. The work provides novel insights into GPT-4V's capabilities and limitations for real-world geospatial, environmental, agricultural, and urban planning challenges. Further research should focus on augmenting the model's knowledge and reasoning for specialized domains through expanded training. Overall, the analysis demonstrates foundational multimodal intelligence, highlighting the potential of multimodal foundation models (FMs) to advance interdisciplinary applications at the nexus of computer vision and language.

Environmental hazards like water and air pollution, extreme weather, or chemical exposures can affect human health in a number of ways, and it is a persistent apprehension in communities surrounded by mining operations. The application of modern technologies in the environmental monitoring of these Human-made hazards is critical, because while not immediately health-threatening may turn out detrimental with unwanted negative effects. Enabling technologies needed to realise this concept is multifaceted and most especially involves deploying interconnected Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, existing legacy systems, enterprise networks, multi layered software architecture (middleware), and event processing engines, amongst others. Currently, the integration of several early warning systems has inherent challenges, mostly due to the heterogeneity of components. This paper proposes transversal microservice-based middleware aiming at increasing data integration, interoperability, scalability, high availability, and reusability of adopted systems using a container orchestration framework for a multi-hazard early warning system. Devised within the scope of the ICMHEWS project, the proposed platform aims at improving known challenges.