Welcome to our monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, recap recent events, and more. This month, we look back at our week attending NeurIPS, hear about work localising illegal mining sites using machine learning and geospatial data, and discover how a group of agents can minimise their journey length whilst avoiding collisions. We were lucky enough to attend the thirty-eighth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024) which took place in Vancouver, Canada, from Tuesday 10 December to Sunday 15 December. On the first day of the event we held a session on science communication for AI researchers. It was great to see so many people there, and so many thoughtful questions following our presentation.

On New Year's Eve 25 years ago, sane people worried that the modern world was about to melt down. The millennium bug seemed to be threatening to crash the world's computer systems, as technology struggled to distinguish between the years 1900 and 2000. The public, faced with daily predictions of potentially terrible outcomes, braced themselves nervously. Dark jokes prevailed about avoiding being on "a life-support system at midnight on 31 December 1999". In China, Zhao Be, then the head of the country's millennium bug coordination efforts, commanded airline executives to be on a flight on 1 January 2000 to demonstrate any problems had been sorted.

Scoring the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has witnessed growing interest recently. Existing benchmarks have highlighted the impressive performance of LMMs in text recognition; however, their abilities on certain challenging tasks, such as text localization, handwritten content extraction, and logical reasoning, remain underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce OCRBench v2, a large-scale bilingual text-centric benchmark with currently the most comprehensive set of tasks (4x more tasks than the previous multi-scene benchmark OCRBench), the widest coverage of scenarios (31 diverse scenarios including street scene, receipt, formula, diagram, and so on), and thorough evaluation metrics, with a total of 10,000 human-verified question-answering pairs and a high proportion of difficult samples. After carefully benchmarking state-of-the-art LMMs on OCRBench v2, we find that 20 out of 22 LMMs score below 50 (100 in total) and suffer from five-type limitations, including less frequently encountered text recognition, fine-grained perception, layout perception, complex element parsing, and logical reasoning. The benchmark and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/Yuliang-liu/MultimodalOCR.

Approaching Speech-to-Text and Automatic Speech Recognition problems in low-resource languages is notoriously challenging due to the scarcity of validated datasets and the diversity of dialects. Arabic, Russian, and Portuguese exemplify these difficulties, being low-resource languages due to the many dialects of these languages across different continents worldwide. Moreover, the variety of accents and pronunciations of such languages complicate ASR models' success. With the increasing popularity of Deep Learning and Transformers, acoustic models like the renowned Wav2Vec2 have achieved superior performance in the Speech Recognition field compared to state-of-the-art approaches. However, despite Wav2Vec2's improved efficiency over traditional methods, its performance significantly declines for under-represented languages, even though it requires significantly less labeled data. This paper introduces an end-to-end framework that enhances ASR systems fine-tuned on Wav2Vec2 through data augmentation techniques. To validate our framework's effectiveness, we conducted a detailed experimental evaluation using three datasets from Mozilla's Common Voice project in Arabic, Russian, and Portuguese. Additionally, the framework presented in this paper demonstrates robustness to different diacritics. Ultimately, our approach outperforms two previous baseline models, which are the pre-trained Wav2Vec2 and the well-known Whisper ASR model, resulting in an average relative improvement of 33.9\% in Word Error Rate and a 53.2\% relative improvement in Character Error Rate.

This study, our main topic is to devlop a new deep-learning approachs for plant leaf disease identification and detection using leaf image datasets. We also discussed the challenges facing current methods of leaf disease detection and how deep learning may be used to overcome these challenges and enhance the accuracy of disease detection. Therefore, we have proposed a novel method for the detection of various leaf diseases in crops, along with the identification and description of an efficient network architecture that encompasses hyperparameters and optimization methods. The effectiveness of different architectures was compared and evaluated to see the best architecture configuration and to create an effective model that can quickly detect leaf disease. In addition to the work done on pre-trained models, we proposed a new model based on CNN, which provides an efficient method for identifying and detecting plant leaf disease. Furthermore, we evaluated the efficacy of our model and compared the results to those of some pre-trained state-of-the-art architectures.

Human motion prediction (HMP) involves forecasting future human motion based on historical data. Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have garnered widespread attention in this field for their proficiency in capturing relationships among joints in human motion. However, existing GCN-based methods tend to focus on either temporal-domain or spatial-domain features, or they combine spatio-temporal features without fully leveraging the complementarity and cross-dependency of these two features. In this paper, we propose the Spatial-Temporal Multi-Subgraph Graph Convolutional Network (STMS-GCN) to capture complex spatio-temporal dependencies in human motion. Specifically, we decouple the modeling of temporal and spatial dependencies, enabling cross-domain knowledge transfer at multiple scales through a spatio-temporal information consistency constraint mechanism. Besides, we utilize multiple subgraphs to extract richer motion information and enhance the learning associations of diverse subgraphs through a homogeneous information constraint mechanism. Extensive experiments on the standard HMP benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Recent advancements in foundation models have enhanced AI systems' capabilities in autonomous tool usage and reasoning. However, their ability in location or map-based reasoning - which improves daily life by optimizing navigation, facilitating resource discovery, and streamlining logistics - has not been systematically studied. To bridge this gap, we introduce MapEval, a benchmark designed to assess diverse and complex map-based user queries with geo-spatial reasoning. MapEval features three task types (textual, API-based, and visual) that require collecting world information via map tools, processing heterogeneous geo-spatial contexts (e.g., named entities, travel distances, user reviews or ratings, images), and compositional reasoning, which all state-of-the-art foundation models find challenging. Comprising 700 unique multiple-choice questions about locations across 180 cities and 54 countries, MapEval evaluates foundation models' ability to handle spatial relationships, map infographics, travel planning, and navigation challenges. Using MapEval, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation of 28 prominent foundation models. While no single model excelled across all tasks, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, GPT-4o, and Gemini-1.5-Pro achieved competitive performance overall. However, substantial performance gaps emerged, particularly in MapEval, where agents with Claude-3.5-Sonnet outperformed GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5-Pro by 16% and 21%, respectively, and the gaps became even more amplified when compared to open-source LLMs. Our detailed analyses provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of current models, though all models still fall short of human performance by more than 20% on average, struggling with complex map images and rigorous geo-spatial reasoning. This gap highlights MapEval's critical role in advancing general-purpose foundation models with stronger geo-spatial understanding.

Deep learning's preponderance across scientific domains has reshaped high-stakes decision-making, making it essential to follow rigorous operational frameworks that include both Right-to-Privacy (RTP) and Right-to-Explanation (RTE). This paper examines the complexities of combining these two requirements. For RTP, we focus on `Differential privacy' (DP), which is considered the current \textit{gold standard} for privacy-preserving machine learning due to its strong quantitative guarantee of privacy. For RTE, we focus on post-hoc explainers: they are the \textit{go-to} option for model auditing as they operate independently of model training. We formally investigate DP models and various commonly-used post-hoc explainers: how to evaluate these explainers subject to RTP, and analyze the intrinsic interactions between DP models and these explainers. Furthermore, our work throws light on how RTP and RTE can be effectively combined in high-stakes applications. Our study concludes by outlining an industrial software pipeline, with the example of a wildly used use-case, that respects both RTP and RTE requirements.

This report presents a comprehensive response to the United Nation's Interim Report on Governing Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Humanity. It emphasizes the transformative potential of AI in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while acknowledging the need for robust governance to mitigate associated risks. The response highlights opportunities for promoting equitable, secure, and inclusive AI ecosystems, which should be supported by investments in infrastructure and multi-stakeholder collaborations across jurisdictions. It also underscores challenges, including societal inequalities exacerbated by AI, ethical concerns, and environmental impacts. Recommendations advocate for legally binding norms, transparency, and multi-layered data governance models, alongside fostering AI literacy and capacity-building initiatives. Internationally, the report calls for harmonising AI governance frameworks with established laws, human rights standards, and regulatory approaches. The report concludes with actionable principles for fostering responsible AI governance through collaboration among governments, industry, academia, and civil society, ensuring the development of AI aligns with universal human values and the public good.

Recent studies show that diffusion models (DMs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attacks impose unconcealed triggers (e.g., a gray box and eyeglasses) that contain evident patterns, rendering remarkable attack effects yet easy detection upon human inspection and defensive algorithms. While it is possible to improve stealthiness by reducing the strength of the backdoor, doing so can significantly compromise its generality and effectiveness. In this paper, we propose UIBDiffusion, the universal imperceptible backdoor attack for diffusion models, which allows us to achieve superior attack and generation performance while evading state-of-the-art defenses. We propose a novel trigger generation approach based on universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs) and reveal that such perturbations, which are initially devised for fooling pre-trained discriminative models, can be adapted as potent imperceptible backdoor triggers for DMs. We evaluate UIBDiffusion on multiple types of DMs with different kinds of samplers across various datasets and targets. Experimental results demonstrate that UIBDiffusion brings three advantages: 1) Universality, the imperceptible trigger is universal (i.e., image and model agnostic) where a single trigger is effective to any images and all diffusion models with different samplers; 2) Utility, it achieves comparable generation quality (e.g., FID) and even better attack success rate (i.e., ASR) at low poison rates compared to the prior works; and 3) Undetectability, UIBDiffusion is plausible to human perception and can bypass Elijah and TERD, the SOTA defenses against backdoors for DMs. We will release our backdoor triggers and code.