Africa
On Local Overfitting and Forgetting in Deep Neural Networks
Stern, Uri, Yaacoby, Tomer, Weinshall, Daphna
The infrequent occurrence of overfitting in deep neural networks is perplexing: contrary to theoretical expectations, increasing model size often enhances performance in practice. But what if overfitting does occur, though restricted to specific sub-regions of the data space? In this work, we propose a novel score that captures the forgetting rate of deep models on validation data. We posit that this score quantifies local overfitting: a decline in performance confined to certain regions of the data space. We then show empirically that local overfitting occurs regardless of the presence of traditional overfitting. Using the framework of deep over-parametrized linear models, we offer a certain theoretical characterization of forgotten knowledge, and show that it correlates with knowledge forgotten by real deep models. Finally, we devise a new ensemble method that aims to recover forgotten knowledge, relying solely on the training history of a single network. When combined with self-distillation, this method enhances the performance of any trained model without adding inference costs. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of our method across multiple datasets, contemporary neural network architectures, and training protocols.
Dialectal and Low-Resource Machine Translation for Aromanian
Jerpelea, Alexandru-Iulius, Rădoi, Alina, Nisioi, Sergiu
This paper presents the process of building a neural machine translation system with support for English, Romanian, and Aromanian - an endangered Eastern Romance language. The primary contribution of this research is twofold: (1) the creation of the most extensive Aromanian-Romanian parallel corpus to date, consisting of 79,000 sentence pairs, and (2) the development and comparative analysis of several machine translation models optimized for Aromanian. To accomplish this, we introduce a suite of auxiliary tools, including a language-agnostic sentence embedding model for text mining and automated evaluation, complemented by a diacritics conversion system for different writing standards. This research brings contributions to both computational linguistics and language preservation efforts by establishing essential resources for a historically under-resourced language. All datasets, trained models, and associated tools are public: https://huggingface.co/aronlp and https://arotranslate.com
NesTools: A Dataset for Evaluating Nested Tool Learning Abilities of Large Language Models
Han, Han, Zhu, Tong, Zhang, Xiang, Wu, Mengsong, Xiong, Hao, Chen, Wenliang
Large language models (LLMs) combined with tool learning have gained impressive results in real-world applications. During tool learning, LLMs may call multiple tools in nested orders, where the latter tool call may take the former response as its input parameters. However, current research on the nested tool learning capabilities is still under-explored, since the existing benchmarks lack relevant data instances. To address this problem, we introduce NesTools to bridge the current gap in comprehensive nested tool learning evaluations. NesTools comprises a novel automatic data generation method to construct large-scale nested tool calls with different nesting structures. With manual review and refinement, the dataset is in high quality and closely aligned with real-world scenarios. Therefore, NesTools can serve as a new benchmark to evaluate the nested tool learning abilities of LLMs. We conduct extensive experiments on 22 LLMs, and provide in-depth analyses with NesTools, which shows that current LLMs still suffer from the complex nested tool learning task.
Language and Planning in Robotic Navigation: A Multilingual Evaluation of State-of-the-Art Models
Mansour, Malak, Aly, Ahmed, Tharwat, Bahey, Hashmi, Sarim, An, Dong, Reid, Ian
Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4, trained on huge amount of datasets spanning multiple domains, exhibit significant reasoning, understanding, and planning capabilities across various tasks. This study presents the first-ever work in Arabic language integration within the Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) domain in robotics, an area that has been notably underexplored in existing research. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art multi-lingual Small Language Models (SLMs), including GPT-4o mini, Llama 3 8B, and Phi-3 medium 14B, alongside the Arabic-centric LLM, Jais. Our approach utilizes the NavGPT framework, a pure LLM-based instruction-following navigation agent, to assess the impact of language on navigation reasoning through zero-shot sequential action prediction using the R2R dataset. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our framework is capable of high-level planning for navigation tasks when provided with instructions in both English and Arabic. However, certain models struggled with reasoning and planning in the Arabic language due to inherent limitations in their capabilities, sub-optimal performance, and parsing issues. These findings highlight the importance of enhancing planning and reasoning capabilities in language models for effective navigation, emphasizing this as a key area for further development while also unlocking the potential of Arabic-language models for impactful real-world applications.
Machine learning applications in archaeological practices: a review
Bellat, Mathias, Figueroa, Jordy D. Orellana, Reeves, Jonathan S., Taghizadeh-Mehrjardi, Ruhollah, Tennie, Claudio, Scholten, Thomas
Artificial intelligence and machine learning applications in archaeology have increased significantly in recent years, and these now span all subfields, geographical regions, and time periods. The prevalence and success of these applications have remained largely unexamined, as recent reviews on the use of machine learning in archaeology have only focused only on specific subfields of archaeology. Our review examined an exhaustive corpus of 135 articles published between 1997 and 2022. We observed a significant increase in the number of relevant publications from 2019 onwards. Automatic structure detection and artefact classification were the most represented tasks in the articles reviewed, followed by taphonomy, and archaeological predictive modelling. From the review, clustering and unsupervised methods were underrepresented compared to supervised models. Artificial neural networks and ensemble learning account for two thirds of the total number of models used. However, if machine learning is gaining in popularity it remains subject to misunderstanding. We observed, in some cases, poorly defined requirements and caveats of the machine learning methods used. Furthermore, the goals and the needs of machine learning applications for archaeological purposes are in some cases unclear or poorly expressed. To address this, we proposed a workflow guide for archaeologists to develop coherent and consistent methodologies adapted to their research questions, project scale and data. As in many other areas, machine learning is rapidly becoming an important tool in archaeological research and practice, useful for the analyses of large and multivariate data, although not without limitations. This review highlights the importance of well-defined and well-reported structured methodologies and collaborative practices to maximise the potential of applications of machine learning methods in archaeology.
Self-Adaptive ERP: Embedding NLP into Petri-Net creation and Model Matching
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) consultants play a vital role in customizing systems to meet specific business needs by processing large amounts of data and adapting functionalities. However, the process is resource-intensive, time-consuming, and requires continuous adjustments as business demands evolve. This research introduces a Self-Adaptive ERP Framework that automates customization using enterprise process models and system usage analysis. It leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Petri nets to transform business processes into adaptable models, addressing both structural and functional matching. The framework, built using Design Science Research (DSR) and a Systematic Literature Review (SLR), reduces reliance on manual adjustments, improving ERP customization efficiency and accuracy while minimizing the need for consultants.
AGGA: A Dataset of Academic Guidelines for Generative AI and Large Language Models
Jiao, Junfeng, Afroogh, Saleh, Chen, Kevin, Atkinson, David, Dhurandhar, Amit
This study introduces AGGA, a dataset comprising 80 academic guidelines for the use of Generative AIs (GAIs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) in academic settings, meticulously collected from official university websites. The dataset contains 188,674 words and serves as a valuable resource for natural language processing tasks commonly applied in requirements engineering, such as model synthesis, abstraction identification, and document structure assessment. Additionally, AGGA can be further annotated to function as a benchmark for various tasks, including ambiguity detection, requirements categorization, and the identification of equivalent requirements. Our methodologically rigorous approach ensured a thorough examination, with a selection of universities that represent a diverse range of global institutions, including top-ranked universities across six continents.
Is humanity doomed? Doomsday Clock will be updated this MONTH to determine our fate - as the Russia-Ukraine war rages on and climate disasters continue to wreak havoc
This month, humanity will learn just how close we are to annihilation. Every January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) sets a new time for the Doomsday Clock - the symbolic scale for humanity's proximity to the apocalypse. Last year, scientists left the clock sitting at 90 seconds to midnight - the closest humanity had come to destruction since the creation of the atomic bomb. But with war still raging in Ukraine and chaos across the Middle East, experts say that the risk of nuclear war is now'far too high'. Dr Haydn Belfield, research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, told MailOnline: 'We are probably closer to nuclear war than at any point in the last forty years.'
Textualize Visual Prompt for Image Editing via Diffusion Bridge
Xu, Pengcheng, Fan, Qingnan, Kou, Fei, Qin, Shuai, Gu, Hong, Zhao, Ruoyu, Ling, Charles, Wang, Boyu
Visual prompt, a pair of before-and-after edited images, can convey indescribable imagery transformations and prosper in image editing. However, current visual prompt methods rely on a pretrained text-guided image-to-image generative model that requires a triplet of text, before, and after images for retraining over a text-to-image model. Such crafting triplets and retraining processes limit the scalability and generalization of editing. In this paper, we present a framework based on any single text-to-image model without reliance on the explicit image-to-image model thus enhancing the generalizability and scalability. Specifically, by leveraging the probability-flow ordinary equation, we construct a diffusion bridge to transfer the distribution between before-and-after images under the text guidance. By optimizing the text via the bridge, the framework adaptively textualizes the editing transformation conveyed by visual prompts into text embeddings without other models. Meanwhile, we introduce differential attention control during text optimization, which disentangles the text embedding from the invariance of the before-and-after images and makes it solely capture the delicate transformation and generalize to edit various images. Experiments on real images validate competitive results on the generalization, contextual coherence, and high fidelity for delicate editing with just one image pair as the visual prompt.
DarkFarseer: Inductive Spatio-temporal Kriging via Hidden Style Enhancement and Sparsity-Noise Mitigation
Liang, Zhuoxuan, Li, Wei, Zhang, Dalin, Chen, Yidan, Wang, Zhihong, Zheng, Xiangping, Youssef, Moustafa
With the rapid growth of the Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems, widespread sensor deployment has become essential. However, the high costs of building sensor networks limit their scale and coverage, making fine-grained deployment challenging. Inductive Spatio-Temporal Kriging (ISK) addresses this issue by introducing virtual sensors. Based on graph neural networks (GNNs) extracting the relationships between physical and virtual sensors, ISK can infer the measurements of virtual sensors from physical sensors. However, current ISK methods rely on conventional message-passing mechanisms and network architectures, without effectively extracting spatio-temporal features of physical sensors and focusing on representing virtual sensors. Additionally, existing graph construction methods face issues of sparse and noisy connections, destroying ISK performance. To address these issues, we propose DarkFarseer, a novel ISK framework with three key components. First, we propose the Neighbor Hidden Style Enhancement module with a style transfer strategy to enhance the representation of virtual nodes in a temporal-then-spatial manner to better extract the spatial relationships between physical and virtual nodes. Second, we propose Virtual-Component Contrastive Learning, which aims to enrich the node representation by establishing the association between the patterns of virtual nodes and the regional patterns within graph components. Lastly, we design a Similarity-Based Graph Denoising Strategy, which reduces the connectivity strength of noisy connections around virtual nodes and their neighbors based on their temporal information and regional spatial patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DarkFarseer significantly outperforms existing ISK methods.