Africa
Leveraging Old Knowledge to Continually Learn New Classes in Medical Images
Chee, Evelyn, Lee, Mong Li, Hsu, Wynne
Class-incremental continual learning is a core step towards developing artificial intelligence systems that can continuously adapt to changes in the environment by learning new concepts without forgetting those previously learned. This is especially needed in the medical domain where continually learning from new incoming data is required to classify an expanded set of diseases. In this work, we focus on how old knowledge can be leveraged to learn new classes without catastrophic forgetting. We propose a framework that comprises of two main components: (1) a dynamic architecture with expanding representations to preserve previously learned features and accommodate new features; and (2) a training procedure alternating between two objectives to balance the learning of new features while maintaining the model's performance on old classes. Experiment results on multiple medical datasets show that our solution is able to achieve superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of class accuracy and forgetting.
Viable Futuristic Sustainable AI Restaurant by Marwa EL Nahas
Marwa El Nahas An Architect, Interior Designer & 3d Visualizer from Egypt, I Have been Using the power of Artificial Intelligence tool Midjourney integrated with my concepts to create this powerful design for a sustainable futuristic Restaurant, In this project I want to create a zero waste, recycled Viable Restaurant I used the newest techniques of farming that is more efficient & powerful one So I decided to use the Aeroponics vertical Farming System. Aeroponics is an advanced form of hydroponics, it is the process of growing plants with only water & nutrients. Plants grow in a soilless medium even the fabric that nutrients grow on it was made of recycled materials. It's controlled by a timer, low wattage pump propels the nutrient solution.
Movate Expands its Operations in Mauritius with a New Delivery Center
Movate (formerly CSS Corp), a digital technology and customer experience (CX) services provider, announced the launch of its new global delivery center in Atal Bihari Vajpayee Tower, Ébène, Mauritius. It will leverage highly skilled local talent with multilingual capabilities, especially in French and English, to deliver high-tech and high-touch services in Customer Experience Management and Enterprise Product Services. Movate plans to employ over 200 Mauritian skilled technology professionals and this move is a part of its global expansion strategy to address the growing client portfolios and their business needs globally. Movate expands its operations in Mauritius with a new delivery center; plans to employ over 200 Mauritian skilled technology professionals in the next one year. The new state-of-the-art facility at the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Tower is a 300-seater workspace.
Fairness: from the ethical principle to the practice of Machine Learning development as an ongoing agreement with stakeholders
Curto, Georgina, Comim, Flavio
This paper clarifies why bias cannot be completely mitigated in Machine Learning (ML) and proposes an end-to-end methodology to translate the ethical principle of justice and fairness into the practice of ML development as an ongoing agreement with stakeholders. The pro-ethical iterative process presented in the paper aims to challenge asymmetric power dynamics in the fairness decision making within ML design and support ML development teams to identify, mitigate and monitor bias at each step of ML systems development. The process also provides guidance on how to explain the always imperfect trade-offs in terms of bias to users.
Enhanced Sampling of Configuration and Path Space in a Generalized Ensemble by Shooting Point Exchange
Falkner, Sebastian, Coretti, Alessandro, Dellago, Christoph
The computer simulation of many molecular processes is complicated by long time scales caused by rare transitions between long-lived states. Here, we propose a new approach to simulate such rare events, which combines transition path sampling with enhanced exploration of configuration space. The method relies on exchange moves between configuration and trajectory space, carried out based on a generalized ensemble. This scheme substantially enhances the efficiency of the transition path sampling simulations, particularly for systems with multiple transition channels, and yields information on thermodynamics, kinetics and reaction coordinates of molecular processes without distorting their dynamics. The method is illustrated using the isomerization of proline in the KPTP tetrapeptide.
GesGPT: Speech Gesture Synthesis With Text Parsing from GPT
Gao, Nan, Zhao, Zeyu, Zeng, Zhi, Zhang, Shuwu, Weng, Dongdong
Gesture synthesis has gained significant attention as a critical research area, focusing on producing contextually appropriate and natural gestures corresponding to speech or textual input. Although deep learning-based approaches have achieved remarkable progress, they often overlook the rich semantic information present in the text, leading to less expressive and meaningful gestures. We propose GesGPT, a novel approach to gesture generation that leverages the semantic analysis capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT. By capitalizing on the strengths of LLMs for text analysis, we design prompts to extract gesture-related information from textual input. Our method entails developing prompt principles that transform gesture generation into an intention classification problem based on GPT, and utilizing a curated gesture library and integration module to produce semantically rich co-speech gestures. Experimental results demonstrate that GesGPT effectively generates contextually appropriate and expressive gestures, offering a new perspective on semantic co-speech gesture generation.
Visual Spatial Reasoning
Liu, Fangyu, Emerson, Guy, Collier, Nigel
Spatial relations are a basic part of human cognition. However, they are expressed in natural language in a variety of ways, and previous work has suggested that current vision-and-language models (VLMs) struggle to capture relational information. In this paper, we present Visual Spatial Reasoning (VSR), a dataset containing more than 10k natural text-image pairs with 66 types of spatial relations in English (such as: under, in front of, and facing). While using a seemingly simple annotation format, we show how the dataset includes challenging linguistic phenomena, such as varying reference frames. We demonstrate a large gap between human and model performance: the human ceiling is above 95%, while state-of-the-art models only achieve around 70%. We observe that VLMs' by-relation performances have little correlation with the number of training examples and the tested models are in general incapable of recognising relations concerning the orientations of objects.
Benchmarking the Reliability of Post-training Quantization: a Particular Focus on Worst-case Performance
Yuan, Zhihang, Liu, Jiawei, Wu, Jiaxiang, Yang, Dawei, Wu, Qiang, Sun, Guangyu, Liu, Wenyu, Wang, Xinggang, Wu, Bingzhe
Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a popular method for compressing deep neural networks (DNNs) without modifying their original architecture or training procedures. Despite its effectiveness and convenience, the reliability of PTQ methods in the presence of some extrem cases such as distribution shift and data noise remains largely unexplored. This paper first investigates this problem on various commonly-used PTQ methods. We aim to answer several research questions related to the influence of calibration set distribution variations, calibration paradigm selection, and data augmentation or sampling strategies on PTQ reliability. A systematic evaluation process is conducted across a wide range of tasks and commonly-used PTQ paradigms. The results show that most existing PTQ methods are not reliable enough in term of the worst-case group performance, highlighting the need for more robust methods. Our findings provide insights for developing PTQ methods that can effectively handle distribution shift scenarios and enable the deployment of quantized DNNs in real-world applications.
Guiding Online Reinforcement Learning with Action-Free Offline Pretraining
Zhu, Deyao, Wang, Yuhui, Schmidhuber, Jürgen, Elhoseiny, Mohamed
Offline RL methods have been shown to reduce the need for environment interaction by training agents using offline collected episodes. However, these methods typically require action information to be logged during data collection, which can be difficult or even impossible in some practical cases. In this paper, we investigate the potential of using action-free offline datasets to improve online reinforcement learning, name this problem Reinforcement Learning with Action-Free Offline Pretraining (AFP-RL). We introduce Action-Free Guide (AF-Guide), a method that guides online training by extracting knowledge from action-free offline datasets. AF-Guide consists of an Action-Free Decision Transformer (AFDT) implementing a variant of Upside-Down Reinforcement Learning. It learns to plan the next states from the offline dataset, and a Guided Soft Actor-Critic (Guided SAC) that learns online with guidance from AFDT. Experimental results show that AF-Guide can improve sample efficiency and performance in online training thanks to the knowledge from the action-free offline dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/Vision-CAIR/AF-Guide.
ExpressivE: A Spatio-Functional Embedding For Knowledge Graph Completion
Pavlović, Aleksandar, Sallinger, Emanuel
Knowledge graphs are inherently incomplete. Therefore substantial research has been directed toward knowledge graph completion (KGC), i.e., predicting missing triples from the information represented in the knowledge graph (KG). KG embedding models (KGEs) have yielded promising results for KGC, yet any current KGE is incapable of: (1) fully capturing vital inference patterns (e.g., composition), (2) capturing prominent patterns jointly (e.g., hierarchy and composition), and (3) providing an intuitive interpretation of captured patterns. In this work, we propose ExpressivE, a fully expressive spatio-functional KGE that solves all these challenges simultaneously. ExpressivE embeds pairs of entities as points and relations as hyper-parallelograms in the virtual triple space $\mathbb{R}^{2d}$. This model design allows ExpressivE not only to capture a rich set of inference patterns jointly but additionally to display any supported inference pattern through the spatial relation of hyper-parallelograms, offering an intuitive and consistent geometric interpretation of ExpressivE embeddings and their captured patterns. Experimental results on standard KGC benchmarks reveal that ExpressivE is competitive with state-of-the-art KGEs and even significantly outperforms them on WN18RR.