Africa
Predicting Accident Severity: An Analysis Of Factors Affecting Accident Severity Using Random Forest Model
Adefabi, Adekunle, Olisah, Somtobe, Obunadike, Callistus, Oyetubo, Oluwatosin, Taiwo, Esther, Tella, Edward
Road accidents have significant economic and societal costs, with a small number of severe accidents accounting for a large portion of these costs. Predicting accident severity can help in the proactive approach to road safety by identifying potential unsafe road conditions and taking well-informed actions to reduce the number of severe accidents. This study investigates the effectiveness of the Random Forest machine learning algorithm for predicting the severity of an accident. The model is trained on a dataset of accident records from a large metropolitan area and evaluated using various metrics. Hyperparameters and feature selection are optimized to improve the model's performance. The results show that the Random Forest model is an effective tool for predicting accident severity with an accuracy of over 80%. The study also identifies the top six most important variables in the model, which include wind speed, pressure, humidity, visibility, clear conditions, and cloud cover. The fitted model has an Area Under the Curve of 80%, a recall of 79.2%, a precision of 97.1%, and an F1 score of 87.3%. These results suggest that the proposed model has higher performance in explaining the target variable, which is the accident severity class. Overall, the study provides evidence that the Random Forest model is a viable and reliable tool for predicting accident severity and can be used to help reduce the number of fatalities and injuries due to road accidents in the United States
A Review of the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and its Applications in the United States
Taiwo, Esther, Akinsola, Ahmed, Tella, Edward, Makinde, Kolade, Akinwande, Mayowa
This study is focused on the ethics of Artificial Intelligence and its application in the United States, the paper highlights the impact AI has in every sector of the US economy and multiple facets of the technological space and the resultant effect on entities spanning businesses, government, academia, and civil society. There is a need for ethical considerations as these entities are beginning to depend on AI for delivering various crucial tasks, which immensely influence their operations, decision-making, and interactions with each other. The adoption of ethical principles, guidelines, and standards of work is therefore required throughout the entire process of AI development, deployment, and usage to ensure responsible and ethical AI practices. Our discussion explores eleven fundamental'ethical principles' structured as overarching themes. These encompass Transparency, Justice, Fairness, Equity, Non-Maleficence, Responsibility, Accountability, Privacy, Beneficence, Freedom, Autonomy, Trust, Dignity, Sustainability, and Solidarity. These principles collectively serve as a guiding framework, directing the ethical path for the responsible development, deployment, and utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies across diverse sectors and entities within the United States. The paper also discusses the revolutionary impact of AI applications, such as Machine Learning, and explores various approaches used to implement AI ethics. This examination is crucial to address the growing concerns surrounding the inherent risks associated with the widespread use of artificial intelligence. NTRODUCTION Since the advent of artificial intelligence, various applications have been developed that have assisted human productivity and alleviated human effort, resulting in efficient time management. Artificial intelligence has aided businesses, healthcare, information technology, banking, transportation, and robots. The term "artificial intelligence" refers to reproducing human intelligence processes using machines, specifically computer systems[1].Artificial intelligence allows the United States of America to run more efficiently, produce cleaner products, reduce adverse environmental impacts, promote public safety, and improve human health. Until recently, conversations around "AI ethics" were limited to academic institutions and non-profit organizations.
Combining recurrent and residual learning for deforestation monitoring using multitemporal SAR images
Neves, Carla Nascimento, Feitosa, Raul Queiroz, Adarme, Mabel X. Ortega, Giraldi, Gilson Antonio
With its vast expanse, exceeding that of Western Europe by twice, the Amazon rainforest stands as the largest forest of the Earth, holding immense importance in global climate regulation. Yet, deforestation detection from remote sensing data in this region poses a critical challenge, often hindered by the persistent cloud cover that obscures optical satellite data for much of the year. Addressing this need, this paper proposes three deep-learning models tailored for deforestation monitoring, utilizing SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) multitemporal data moved by its independence on atmospheric conditions. Specifically, the study proposes three novel recurrent fully convolutional network architectures-namely, RRCNN-1, RRCNN-2, and RRCNN-3, crafted to enhance the accuracy of deforestation detection. Additionally, this research explores replacing a bitemporal with multitemporal SAR sequences, motivated by the hypothesis that deforestation signs quickly fade in SAR images over time. A comprehensive assessment of the proposed approaches was conducted using a Sentinel-1 multitemporal sequence from a sample site in the Brazilian rainforest. The experimental analysis confirmed that analyzing a sequence of SAR images over an observation period can reveal deforestation spots undetectable in a pair of images. Notably, experimental results underscored the superiority of the multitemporal approach, yielding approximately a five percent enhancement in F1-Score across all tested network architectures. Particularly the RRCNN-1 achieved the highest accuracy and also boasted half the processing time of its closest counterpart.
Abstractive Summarization of Large Document Collections Using GPT
Liu, Sengjie, Healey, Christopher G.
This paper proposes a method of abstractive summarization designed to scale to document collections instead of individual documents. Our approach applies a combination of semantic clustering, document size reduction within topic clusters, semantic chunking of a cluster's documents, GPT-based summarization and concatenation, and a combined sentiment and text visualization of each topic to support exploratory data analysis. Statistical comparison of our results to existing state-of-the-art systems BART, BRIO, PEGASUS, and MoCa using ROGUE summary scores showed statistically equivalent performance with BART and PEGASUS on the CNN/Daily Mail test dataset, and with BART on the Gigaword test dataset. This finding is promising since we view document collection summarization as more challenging than individual document summarization. We conclude with a discussion of how issues of scale are
Sentence-level Prompts Benefit Composed Image Retrieval
Bai, Yang, Xu, Xinxing, Liu, Yong, Khan, Salman, Khan, Fahad, Zuo, Wangmeng, Goh, Rick Siow Mong, Feng, Chun-Mei
Composed image retrieval (CIR) is the task of retrieving specific images by using a query that involves both a reference image and a relative caption. Most existing CIR models adopt the late-fusion strategy to combine visual and language features. Besides, several approaches have also been suggested to generate a pseudo-word token from the reference image, which is further integrated into the relative caption for CIR. However, these pseudo-word-based prompting methods have limitations when target image encompasses complex changes on reference image, e.g., object removal and attribute modification. In this work, we demonstrate that learning an appropriate sentence-level prompt for the relative caption (SPRC) is sufficient for achieving effective composed image retrieval. Instead of relying on pseudo-word-based prompts, we propose to leverage pretrained V-L models, e.g., BLIP-2, to generate sentence-level prompts. By concatenating the learned sentence-level prompt with the relative caption, one can readily use existing text-based image retrieval models to enhance CIR performance. Furthermore, we introduce both image-text contrastive loss and text prompt alignment loss to enforce the learning of suitable sentence-level prompts. Experiments show that our proposed method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art CIR methods on the Fashion-IQ and CIRR datasets. The source code and pretrained model are publicly available at https://github.com/chunmeifeng/SPRC
Reward-Consistent Dynamics Models are Strongly Generalizable for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Luo, Fan-Ming, Xu, Tian, Cao, Xingchen, Yu, Yang
Learning a precise dynamics model can be crucial for offline reinforcement learning, which, unfortunately, has been found to be quite challenging. Dynamics models that are learned by fitting historical transitions often struggle to generalize to unseen transitions. In this study, we identify a hidden but pivotal factor termed dynamics reward that remains consistent across transitions, offering a pathway to better generalization. Therefore, we propose the idea of reward-consistent dynamics models: any trajectory generated by the dynamics model should maximize the dynamics reward derived from the data. We implement this idea as the MOREC (Model-based Offline reinforcement learning with Reward Consistency) method, which can be seamlessly integrated into previous offline model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) methods. MOREC learns a generalizable dynamics reward function from offline data, which is subsequently employed as a transition filter in any offline MBRL method: when generating transitions, the dynamics model generates a batch of transitions and selects the one with the highest dynamics reward value. On a synthetic task, we visualize that MOREC has a strong generalization ability and can surprisingly recover some distant unseen transitions. On 21 offline tasks in D4RL and NeoRL benchmarks, MOREC improves the previous state-of-the-art performance by a significant margin, i.e., 4.6% on D4RL tasks and 25.9% on NeoRL tasks. Notably, MOREC is the first method that can achieve above 95% online RL performance in 6 out of 12 D4RL tasks and 3 out of 9 NeoRL tasks.
mBBC: Exploring the Multilingual Maze
Nezhad, Sina Bagheri, Agrawal, Ameeta
Multilingual language models have gained significant attention in recent years, enabling the development of applications that cater to diverse linguistic contexts. In this paper, we present a comprehensive evaluation of three prominent multilingual language models: mBERT, XLM-R, and GPT-3. Using the self-supervised task of next token prediction, we assess their performance across a diverse set of languages, with a focus on understanding the impact of resource availability, word order, language family, and script type on model accuracy. Our findings reveal that resource availability plays a crucial role in model performance, with higher resource levels leading to improved accuracy. We also identify the complex relationship between resource availability, language families, and script types, highlighting the need for further investigation into language-specific characteristics and structural variations. Additionally, our statistical inference analysis identifies significant features contributing to model performance, providing insights for model selection and deployment. Our study contributes to a deeper understanding of multilingual language models and informs future research and development to enhance their performance and generalizability across languages and linguistic contexts.
Meta predictive learning model of languages in neural circuits
Li, Chan, Qiu, Junbin, Huang, Haiping
Large language models based on self-attention mechanisms have achieved astonishing performances not only in natural language itself, but also in a variety of tasks of different nature. However, regarding processing language, our human brain may not operate using the same principle. Then, a debate is established on the connection between brain computation and artificial self-supervision adopted in large language models. One of most influential hypothesis in brain computation is the predictive coding framework, which proposes to minimize the prediction error by local learning. However, the role of predictive coding and the associated credit assignment in language processing remains unknown. Here, we propose a mean-field learning model within the predictive coding framework, assuming that the synaptic weight of each connection follows a spike and slab distribution, and only the distribution, rather than specific weights, is trained. This meta predictive learning is successfully validated on classifying handwritten digits where pixels are input to the network in sequence, and moreover on the toy and real language corpus. Our model reveals that most of the connections become deterministic after learning, while the output connections have a higher level of variability. The performance of the resulting network ensemble changes continuously with data load, further improving with more training data, in analogy with the emergent behavior of large language models. Therefore, our model provides a starting point to investigate the connection among brain computation, next-token prediction and general intelligence.
Enhancing Deep Learning Models through Tensorization: A Comprehensive Survey and Framework
The burgeoning growth of public domain data and the increasing complexity of deep learning model architectures have underscored the need for more efficient data representation and analysis techniques. This paper is motivated by the work of (Helal, 2023) and aims to present a comprehensive overview of tensorization. This transformative approach bridges the gap between the inherently multidimensional nature of data and the simplified 2-dimensional matrices commonly used in linear algebra-based machine learning algorithms. This paper explores the steps involved in tensorization, multidimensional data sources, various multiway analysis methods employed, and the benefits of these approaches. A small example of Blind Source Separation (BSS) is presented comparing 2-dimensional algorithms and a multiway algorithm in Python. Results indicate that multiway analysis is more expressive. Contrary to the intuition of the dimensionality curse, utilising multidimensional datasets in their native form and applying multiway analysis methods grounded in multilinear algebra reveal a profound capacity to capture intricate interrelationships among various dimensions while, surprisingly, reducing the number of model parameters and accelerating processing. A survey of the multi-away analysis methods and integration with various Deep Neural Networks models is presented using case studies in different application domains.
Is Imitation All You Need? Generalized Decision-Making with Dual-Phase Training
Wei, Yao, Sun, Yanchao, Zheng, Ruijie, Vemprala, Sai, Bonatti, Rogerio, Chen, Shuhang, Madaan, Ratnesh, Ba, Zhongjie, Kapoor, Ashish, Ma, Shuang
We introduce DualMind, a generalist agent designed to tackle various decision-making tasks that addresses challenges posed by current methods, such as overfitting behaviors and dependence on task-specific fine-tuning. DualMind uses a novel "Dual-phase" training strategy that emulates how humans learn to act in the world. The model first learns fundamental common knowledge through a self-supervised objective tailored for control tasks and then learns how to make decisions based on different contexts through imitating behaviors conditioned on given prompts. DualMind can handle tasks across domains, scenes, and embodiments using just a single set of model weights and can execute zero-shot prompting without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. We evaluate DualMind on MetaWorld and Habitat through extensive experiments and demonstrate its superior generalizability compared to previous techniques, outperforming other generalist agents by over 50$\%$ and 70$\%$ on Habitat and MetaWorld, respectively. On the 45 tasks in MetaWorld, DualMind achieves over 30 tasks at a 90$\%$ success rate.