In neural architecture search (NAS) methods based on latent space optimization (LSO), a deep generative model is trained to embed discrete neural architectures into a continuous latent space. In this case, different optimization algorithms that operate in the continuous space can be implemented to search neural architectures. However, the optimization of latent variables is challenging for gradient-based LSO since the mapping from the latent space to the architecture performance is generally non-convex. To tackle this problem, this paper develops a convexity regularized latent space optimization (CR-LSO) method, which aims to regularize the learning process of latent space in order to obtain a convex architecture performance mapping. Specifically, CR-LSO trains a graph variational autoencoder (G-VAE) to learn the continuous representations of discrete architectures. Simultaneously, the learning process of latent space is regularized by the guaranteed convexity of input convex neural networks (ICNNs). In this way, the G-VAE is forced to learn a convex mapping from the architecture representation to the architecture performance. Hereafter, the CR-LSO approximates the performance mapping using the ICNN and leverages the estimated gradient to optimize neural architecture representations. Experimental results on three popular NAS benchmarks show that CR-LSO achieves competitive evaluation results in terms of both computational complexity and architecture performance.

Stable Diffusion is a recent open-source image generation model comparable to proprietary models such as DALLE, Imagen, or Parti. Stable Diffusion comes with a safety filter that aims to prevent generating explicit images. Unfortunately, the filter is obfuscated and poorly documented. This makes it hard for users to prevent misuse in their applications, and to understand the filter's limitations and improve it. We first show that it is easy to generate disturbing content that bypasses the safety filter. We then reverse-engineer the filter and find that while it aims to prevent sexual content, it ignores violence, gore, and other similarly disturbing content. Based on our analysis, we argue safety measures in future model releases should strive to be fully open and properly documented to stimulate security contributions from the community.

Obtaining a dynamic population distribution is key to many decision-making processes such as urban planning, disaster management and most importantly helping the government to better allocate socio-technical supply. For the aspiration of these objectives, good population data is essential. The traditional method of collecting population data through the census is expensive and tedious. In recent years, statistical and machine learning methods have been developed to estimate population distribution. Most of the methods use data sets that are either developed on a small scale or not publicly available yet. Thus, the development and evaluation of new methods become challenging. We fill this gap by providing a comprehensive data set for population estimation in 98 European cities. The data set comprises a digital elevation model, local climate zone, land use proportions, nighttime lights in combination with multi-spectral Sentinel-2 imagery, and data from the Open Street Map initiative. We anticipate that it would be a valuable addition to the research community for the development of sophisticated approaches in the field of population estimation.

The continuous increase in global population and the impact of climate change on crop production are expected to affect the food sector significantly. In this context, there is need for timely, large-scale and precise mapping of crops for evidence-based decision making. A key enabler towards this direction are new satellite missions that freely offer big remote sensing data of high spatio-temporal resolution and global coverage. During the previous decade and because of this surge of big Earth observations, deep learning methods have dominated the remote sensing and crop mapping literature. Nevertheless, deep learning models require large amounts of annotated data that are scarce and hard-to-acquire. To address this problem, transfer learning methods can be used to exploit available annotations and enable crop mapping for other regions, crop types and years of inspection. In this work, we have developed and trained a deep learning model for paddy rice detection in South Korea using Sentinel-1 VH time-series. We then fine-tune the model for i) paddy rice detection in France and Spain and ii) barley detection in the Netherlands. Additionally, we propose a modification in the pre-trained weights in order to incorporate extra input features (Sentinel-1 VV). Our approach shows excellent performance when transferring in different areas for the same crop type and rather promising results when transferring in a different area and crop type.

Large language models have been widely adopted but require significant GPU memory for inference. We develop a procedure for Int8 matrix multiplication for feed-forward and attention projection layers in transformers, which cut the memory needed for inference by half while retaining full precision performance. With our method, a 175B parameter 16/32-bit checkpoint can be loaded, converted to Int8, and used immediately without performance degradation. This is made possible by understanding and working around properties of highly systematic emergent features in transformer language models that dominate attention and transformer predictive performance. To cope with these features, we develop a two-part quantization procedure, LLM.int8(). We first use vector-wise quantization with separate normalization constants for each inner product in the matrix multiplication, to quantize most of the features. However, for the emergent outliers, we also include a new mixed-precision decomposition scheme, which isolates the outlier feature dimensions into a 16-bit matrix multiplication while still more than 99.9% of values are multiplied in 8-bit. Using LLM.int8(), we show empirically it is possible to perform inference in LLMs with up to 175B parameters without any performance degradation. This result makes such models much more accessible, for example making it possible to use OPT-175B/BLOOM on a single server with consumer GPUs. We open-source our software.

YEARS of research have led to rapid progress in Artificial Intelligence (AI). On November 2, Google announced three ways people are poised to benefit from the advancements in AI. Jeff Dean, senior vice president of Google Research and Health, presented three transformative areas of AI: first, using AI to make technology accessible in many more languages; second, exploring how AI might bolster creativity; and third, AI for social good, including climate adaptation. The 1,000 Languages Initiative is an ambitious research project to build an AI model that would support the 1,000 most spoken languages of the world. In order to provide AI-based language technology for the world, they need to make sure they also train their models on representative content of the world.

Feature attribution a.k.a. input salience methods which assign an importance score to a feature are abundant but may produce surprisingly different results for the same model on the same input. While differences are expected if disparate definitions of importance are assumed, most methods claim to provide faithful attributions and point at the features most relevant for a model's prediction. Existing work on faithfulness evaluation is not conclusive and does not provide a clear answer as to how different methods are to be compared. Focusing on text classification and the model debugging scenario, our main contribution is a protocol for faithfulness evaluation that makes use of partially synthetic data to obtain ground truth for feature importance ranking. Following the protocol, we do an in-depth analysis of four standard salience method classes on a range of datasets and shortcuts for BERT and LSTM models and demonstrate that some of the most popular method configurations provide poor results even for simplest shortcuts. We recommend following the protocol for each new task and model combination to find the best method for identifying shortcuts.

Social media has been one of the main information consumption sources for the public, allowing people to seek and spread information more quickly and easily. However, the rise of various social media platforms also enables the proliferation of online misinformation. In particular, misinformation in the health domain has significant impacts on our society such as the COVID-19 infodemic. Therefore, health misinformation in social media has become an emerging research direction that attracts increasing attention from researchers of different disciplines. Compared to misinformation in other domains, the key differences of health misinformation include the potential of causing actual harm to humans' bodies and even lives, the hardness to identify for normal people, and the deep connection with medical science. In addition, health misinformation on social media has distinct characteristics from conventional channels such as television on multiple dimensions including the generation, dissemination, and consumption paradigms. Because of the uniqueness and importance of combating health misinformation in social media, we conduct this survey to further facilitate interdisciplinary research on this problem. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of existing research about online health misinformation in different disciplines. Furthermore, we also systematically organize the related literature from three perspectives: characterization, detection, and intervention. Lastly, we conduct a deep discussion on the pressing open issues of combating health misinformation in social media and provide future directions for multidisciplinary researchers.

While there have been a number of remarkable breakthroughs in machine learning (ML), much of the focus has been placed on model development. However, to truly realize the potential of machine learning in real-world settings, additional aspects must be considered across the ML pipeline. Data-centric AI is emerging as a unifying paradigm that could enable such reliable end-to-end pipelines. However, this remains a nascent area with no standardized framework to guide practitioners to the necessary data-centric considerations or to communicate the design of data-centric driven ML systems. To address this gap, we propose DC-Check, an actionable checklist-style framework to elicit data-centric considerations at different stages of the ML pipeline: Data, Training, Testing, and Deployment. This data-centric lens on development aims to promote thoughtfulness and transparency prior to system development. Additionally, we highlight specific data-centric AI challenges and research opportunities. DC-Check is aimed at both practitioners and researchers to guide day-to-day development. As such, to easily engage with and use DC-Check and associated resources, we provide a DC-Check companion website (https://www.vanderschaar-lab.com/dc-check/). The website will also serve as an updated resource as methods and tooling evolve over time.

Writing complete stories is considered a hallmark display of human intelligence, and thus researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language generation (NLG) have long used it as a pinnacle task for their research (Klein et al., 1973; Meehan, 1977; Turner, 1993; Dehn, 1981; Liu and Singh, 2002; McIntyre and Lapata, 2009). Creative writing and storytelling present unique challenges for automatic language generation: story arcs extend over thousands of words, stories typically contain multiple characters with their own distinctive personas and voices, and well-written stories have an authorial voice that is consistent and identifiable. At the same time, lies and fabrications-common generation flaws which are a liability in tasks like machine translation and automatic summarization-can be an asset in the creative domain. In recent years, the field of NLG has progressed by leaps and bounds due to the development of neural language models capable of learning the structure of language by ingesting billions of written words (Chowdhery et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2022; Brown et al., 2020). There has been considerable work in applying these advancements toward the development of AI-powered tools for creative writing, but nearly all previous research in this space has evaluated their methods either with amateur writers or with crowd workers paid to assess performance on narrowly defined tasks (Clark et al., 2018; Roemmele and Gordon, 2015; Nichols et al., 2020). While these sorts of evaluations are valuable as preliminary assessments, we believe it is also crucial to solicit feedback from actual domain experts in creative writing: professional writers, educators, and language experts. Skilled writers comprise a unique user group with a different set of needs and expectations than amateurs.