Improvements in the area of large language models have shifted towards the construction of models capable of using external tools and interpreting their outputs. These so-called web agents have the ability to interact autonomously with the internet. This allows them to become powerful daily assistants handling time-consuming, repetitive tasks while supporting users in their daily activities. While web agent research is thriving, the sustainability aspect of this research direction remains largely unexplored. We provide an initial exploration of the energy and CO2 cost associated with web agents. Our results show how different philosophies in web agent creation can severely impact the associated expended energy. We highlight lacking transparency regarding the disclosure of model parameters and processes used for some web agents as a limiting factor when estimating energy consumption. As such, our work advocates a change in thinking when evaluating web agents, warranting dedicated metrics for energy consumption and sustainability.

Drone-based remote sensing combined with AI-driven methodologies has shown great potential for accurate mapping and monitoring of coral reef ecosystems. This study presents a novel multi-scale approach to coral reef monitoring, integrating fine-scale underwater imagery with medium-scale aerial imagery. Underwater images are captured using an Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV), while aerial images are acquired with an aerial drone. A transformer-based deep-learning model is trained on underwater images to detect the presence of 31 classes covering various coral morphotypes, associated fauna, and habitats. These predictions serve as annotations for training a second model applied to aerial images. The transfer of information across scales is achieved through a weighted footprint method that accounts for partial overlaps between underwater image footprints and aerial image tiles. The results show that the multi-scale methodology successfully extends fine-scale classification to larger reef areas, achieving a high degree of accuracy in predicting coral morphotypes and associated habitats. The method showed a strong alignment between underwater-derived annotations and ground truth data, reflected by an AUC (Area Under the Curve) score of 0.9251. This shows that the integration of underwater and aerial imagery, supported by deep-learning models, can facilitate scalable and accurate reef assessments. This study demonstrates the potential of combining multi-scale imaging and AI to facilitate the monitoring and conservation of coral reefs. Our approach leverages the strengths of underwater and aerial imagery, ensuring the precision of fine-scale analysis while extending it to cover a broader reef area.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks due to large training datasets and powerful transformer architecture. However, the reliability of responses from LLMs remains a question. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) of LLMs is crucial for ensuring their reliability, especially in areas such as healthcare, finance, and decision-making. Existing UQ methods primarily focus on semantic similarity, overlooking the deeper knowledge dimensions embedded in responses. We introduce a multi-dimensional UQ framework that integrates semantic and knowledge-aware similarity analysis. By generating multiple responses and leveraging auxiliary LLMs to extract implicit knowledge, we construct separate similarity matrices and apply tensor decomposition to derive a comprehensive uncertainty representation. This approach disentangles overlapping information from both semantic and knowledge dimensions, capturing both semantic variations and factual consistency, leading to more accurate UQ. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms existing techniques in identifying uncertain responses, offering a more robust framework for enhancing LLM reliability in high-stakes applications.

Hutchinson estimators are widely employed in training divergence-based likelihoods for diffusion models to ensure optimal transport (OT) properties. However, this estimator often suffers from high variance and scalability concerns. To address these challenges, we investigate Hutch++, an optimal stochastic trace estimator for generative models, designed to minimize training variance while maintaining transport optimality. Hutch++ is particularly effective for handling ill-conditioned matrices with large condition numbers, which commonly arise when high-dimensional data exhibits a low-dimensional structure. To mitigate the need for frequent and costly QR decompositions, we propose practical schemes that balance frequency and accuracy, backed by theoretical guarantees. Our analysis demonstrates that Hutch++ leads to generations of higher quality. Furthermore, this method exhibits effective variance reduction in various applications, including simulations, conditional time series forecasts, and image generation.

Neural population activity exhibits complex, nonlinear dynamics, varying in time, over trials, and across experimental conditions. Here, we develop Conditionally Linear Dynamical System (CLDS) models as a general-purpose method to characterize these dynamics. These models use Gaussian Process (GP) priors to capture the nonlinear dependence of circuit dynamics on task and behavioral variables. Conditioned on these covariates, the data is modeled with linear dynamics. This allows for transparent interpretation and tractable Bayesian inference. We find that CLDS models can perform well even in severely data-limited regimes (e.g. one trial per condition) due to their Bayesian formulation and ability to share statistical power across nearby task conditions. In example applications, we apply CLDS to model thalamic neurons that nonlinearly encode heading direction and to model motor cortical neurons during a cued reaching task

In multi-task learning (MTL) with each task involving graph-dependent data, generalization results of existing theoretical analyses yield a sub-optimal risk bound of $O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}})$, where $n$ is the number of training samples.This is attributed to the lack of a foundational sharper concentration inequality for multi-graph dependent random variables. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a new corresponding Bennett inequality, enabling the derivation of a sharper risk bound of $O(\frac{\log n}{n})$. Specifically, building on the proposed Bennett inequality, we propose a new corresponding Talagrand inequality for the empirical process and further develop an analytical framework of the local Rademacher complexity to enhance theoretical generalization analyses in MTL with multi-graph dependent data. Finally, we apply the theoretical advancements to applications such as Macro-AUC Optimization, demonstrating the superiority of our theoretical results over previous work, which is also corroborated by experimental results.

Warmongers and authoritarians are "suffocating" human rights across the world, the chief of the United Nations has warned. Speaking at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres depicted a world where human rights were "on the ropes and being pummelled hard". Highlighting the devastating effects of conflicts, including in the Middle East, Ukraine and Congo, Guterres noted abuses linked to economics, technology, climate change, migration, and gender. Guterres called out a "morally bankrupt global financial system" that favours profits over planet protections. He also spoke of those who might exploit artificial intelligence to harm people, and leaders who seek to demonise migrants or restrict women's rights.

Understanding the effects of economic shocks on firms is critical for analyzing economic growth and resilience. We introduce a Web-Based Affectedness Indicator (W AI), a general-purpose tool for real-time monitoring of economic disruptions across diverse contexts. By leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) assisted classification and information extraction on texts from over five million company websites, W AI quantifies the degree and nature of firms' responses to external shocks. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a specific application, we show that W AI is highly correlated with pandemic containment measures and reliably predicts firm performance. Unlike traditional data sources, W AI provides timely firm-level information across industries and geographies worldwide that would otherwise be unavailable due to institutional and data availability constraints. This methodology offers significant potential for monitoring and mitigating the impact of technological, political, financial, health or environmental crises, and represents a transformative tool for adaptive policy-making and economic resilience. Economic shocks, whether driven by public health crises, technological disruptions, geopolitical conflicts, or climate events, pose significant challenges to businesses and policymakers alike. Timely and accurate monitoring of these shocks is critical for crafting effective responses and enhancing economic resilience. However, traditional methods for measuring the impacts of such disruptions - such as surveys and administrative data - are often limited by costs, time lags, and coverage. In this study, we introduce the Web-Based Affectedness Indicator (W AI), a scalable and cost-effective tool for real-time monitoring of economic disruptions at the firm level. By analyzing textual data from millions of company websites, W AI provides granular insights into how firms experience and respond to external shocks. This 1 methodology overcomes traditional limitations by leveraging ubiquitous online content and state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models to generate a dynamic and comprehensive view of economic affectedness. W AI can provide information on a wide range of challenges, including supply chain disruptions, financial crises, and climate-related shocks.

Unlearning has been proposed to remove copyrighted and privacy-sensitive data from Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing approaches primarily rely on fine-tuning-based methods, which can be categorized into gradient ascent-based (GA-based) and suppression-based methods. However, they often degrade model utility (the ability to respond to normal prompts). In this work, we aim to develop a general framework that enhances the utility of fine-tuning-based unlearning methods. To achieve this goal, we first investigate the common property between GA-based and suppression-based methods. We unveil that GA-based methods unlearn by distinguishing the target data (i.e., the data to be removed) and suppressing related generations, which is essentially the same strategy employed by suppression-based methods. Inspired by this finding, we introduce Gated Representation UNlearning (GRUN) which has two components: a soft gate function for distinguishing target data and a suppression module using Representation Fine-tuning (ReFT) to adjust representations rather than model parameters. Experiments show that GRUN significantly improves the unlearning and utility. Meanwhile, it is general for fine-tuning-based methods, efficient and promising for sequential unlearning.

As large vision language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as automated evaluators, understanding their ability to effectively compare data pairs as instructed in the prompt becomes essential. To address this, we present PairBench, a low-cost framework that systematically evaluates VLMs as customizable similarity tools across various modalities and scenarios. Through PairBench, we introduce four metrics that represent key desiderata of similarity scores: alignment with human annotations, consistency for data pairs irrespective of their order, smoothness of similarity distributions, and controllability through prompting. Our analysis demonstrates that no model, whether closed- or open-source, is superior on all metrics; the optimal choice depends on an auto evaluator's desired behavior (e.g., a smooth vs. a sharp judge), highlighting risks of widespread adoption of VLMs as evaluators without thorough assessment. For instance, the majority of VLMs struggle with maintaining symmetric similarity scores regardless of order. Additionally, our results show that the performance of VLMs on the metrics in PairBench closely correlates with popular benchmarks, showcasing its predictive power in ranking models.