Africa
Advancing Green AI: Efficient and Accurate Lightweight CNNs for Rice Leaf Disease Identification
Saddami, Khairun, Nurdin, Yudha, Zahramita, Mutia, Safiruz, Muhammad Shahreeza
Rice plays a vital role as a primary food source for over half of the world's population, and its production is critical for global food security. Nevertheless, rice cultivation is frequently affected by various diseases that can severely decrease yield and quality. Therefore, early and accurate detection of rice diseases is necessary to prevent their spread and minimize crop losses. In this research, we explore three mobile-compatible CNN architectures, namely ShuffleNet, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNet-B0, for rice leaf disease classification. These models are selected due to their compatibility with mobile devices, as they demand less computational power and memory compared to other CNN models. To enhance the performance of the three models, we added two fully connected layers separated by a dropout layer. We used early stop creation to prevent the model from being overfiting. The results of the study showed that the best performance was achieved by the EfficientNet-B0 model with an accuracy of 99.8%. Meanwhile, MobileNetV2 and ShuffleNet only achieved accuracies of 84.21% and 66.51%, respectively. This study shows that EfficientNet-B0 when combined with the proposed layer and early stop, can produce a high-accuracy model. Keywords: rice leaf detection; green AI; smart agriculture; EfficientNet;
Preference-Based Abstract Argumentation for Case-Based Reasoning (with Appendix)
Gould, Adam, Paulino-Passos, Guilherme, Dadhania, Seema, Williams, Matthew, Toni, Francesca
In the pursuit of enhancing the efficacy and flexibility of interpretable, data-driven classification models, this work introduces a novel incorporation of user-defined preferences with Abstract Argumentation and Case-Based Reasoning (CBR). Specifically, we introduce Preference-Based Abstract Argumentation for Case-Based Reasoning (which we call AA-CBR-P), allowing users to define multiple approaches to compare cases with an ordering that specifies their preference over these comparison approaches. We prove that the model inherently follows these preferences when making predictions and show that previous abstract argumentation for case-based reasoning approaches are insufficient at expressing preferences over constituents of an argument. We then demonstrate how this can be applied to a real-world medical dataset sourced from a clinical trial evaluating differing assessment methods of patients with a primary brain tumour. We show empirically that our approach outperforms other interpretable machine learning models on this dataset.
Cross-layer Attention Sharing for Large Language Models
Mu, Yongyu, Wu, Yuzhang, Fan, Yuchun, Wang, Chenglong, Li, Hengyu, He, Qiaozhi, Yang, Murun, Xiao, Tong, Zhu, Jingbo
As large language models (LLMs) evolve, the increase in model depth and parameter number leads to substantial redundancy. To enhance the efficiency of the attention mechanism, previous works primarily compress the KV cache or group attention heads, while largely overlooking redundancy between layers. Our comprehensive analyses across various LLMs show that highly similar attention patterns persist within most layers. It's intuitive to save the computation by sharing attention weights across layers. However, further analysis reveals two challenges: (1) Directly sharing the weight matrix without carefully rearranging the attention heads proves to be ineffective; (2) Shallow layers are vulnerable to small deviations in attention weights. Driven by these insights, we introduce LiSA, a lightweight substitute for self-attention in well-trained LLMs. LiSA employs tiny feed-forward networks to align attention heads between adjacent layers and low-rank matrices to approximate differences in layer-wise attention weights. Evaluations encompassing 13 typical benchmarks demonstrate that LiSA maintains high response quality in terms of accuracy and perplexity while reducing redundant attention calculations within 53-84% of the total layers. Our implementations of LiSA achieve a 6X compression of Q and K, with maximum throughput improvements of 19.5% for LLaMA3-8B and 32.3% for LLaMA2-7B.
Do Generative AI Models Output Harm while Representing Non-Western Cultures: Evidence from A Community-Centered Approach
Ghosh, Sourojit, Venkit, Pranav Narayanan, Gautam, Sanjana, Wilson, Shomir, Caliskan, Aylin
Our research investigates the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) models, specifically text-to-image generators (T2Is), on the representation of non-Western cultures, with a focus on Indian contexts. Despite the transformative potential of T2Is in content creation, concerns have arisen regarding biases that may lead to misrepresentations and marginalizations. Through a community-centered approach and grounded theory analysis of 5 focus groups from diverse Indian subcultures, we explore how T2I outputs to English prompts depict Indian culture and its subcultures, uncovering novel representational harms such as exoticism and cultural misappropriation. These findings highlight the urgent need for inclusive and culturally sensitive T2I systems. We propose design guidelines informed by a sociotechnical perspective, aiming to address these issues and contribute to the development of more equitable and representative GAI technologies globally. Our work also underscores the necessity of adopting a community-centered approach to comprehend the sociotechnical dynamics of these models, complementing existing work in this space while identifying and addressing the potential negative repercussions and harms that may arise when these models are deployed on a global scale.
Revealed: What AI thinks the Olympic teams from 40 nations look like - with shocking results
If you were asked to picture an Australian Olympian, swimmer Emma McKeon, cyclist Grace Brown, or equestrian Chris Burton might spring to mind. But ask the same question to an AI bot, and the answer is very different. Amid the Olympic excitement, researchers from Edith Cowan University asked the AI-driven image generation platform, Midjourney, to create images of the Olympic teams from 40 nations. Bizarrely, the AI tool depicts the Australian team with kangaroo bodies and koala heads, while the Greek team is depicted wearing ancient armour. So, what do you think of AI's depiction of your favourite team?
After OnlyFans, AI 'girlfriends' are tech's next pitch to lonely men
At first glance, "Jenny" looks like a young, attractive Asian-American woman with a penchant for posting flirty photos and captions on her X account. Even if some of her features look a little enhanced – her skin is unnaturally smooth and her bust unusually large for her petite frame – it is easy to look past the slight uncanniness of her appearance in an era of widespread cosmetic procedures and photo editing tools. In fact, Jenny is not a real person, but an artificial intelligence-generated model, available for hire as an online influencer or virtual companion. Jenny is the brainchild of LushAI, a startup that bills itself as the world's first AI-powered modelling agency aiming to rival OnlyFans, the subscription-based website best known for hosting adult content creators. Jenny offers essentially the same services as the human content creators that make up OnlyFans, except she is powered by an algorithm – which means she can work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Deep Learning Meets OBIA: Tasks, Challenges, Strategies, and Perspectives
Ma, Lei, Yan, Ziyun, Li, Mengmeng, Liu, Tao, Tan, Liqin, Wang, Xuan, He, Weiqiang, Wang, Ruikun, He, Guangjun, Lu, Heng, Blaschke, Thomas
Deep learning has gained significant attention in remote sensing, especially in pixel- or patch-level applications. Despite initial attempts to integrate deep learning into object-based image analysis (OBIA), its full potential remains largely unexplored. In this article, as OBIA usage becomes more widespread, we conducted a comprehensive review and expansion of its task subdomains, with or without the integration of deep learning. Furthermore, we have identified and summarized five prevailing strategies to address the challenge of deep learning's limitations in directly processing unstructured object data within OBIA, and this review also recommends some important future research directions. Our goal with these endeavors is to inspire more exploration in this fascinating yet overlooked area and facilitate the integration of deep learning into OBIA processing workflows.
Active Learning for Neural PDE Solvers
Musekamp, Daniel, Kalimuthu, Marimuthu, Holzmüller, David, Takamoto, Makoto, Niepert, Mathias
Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) is a fundamental problem in engineering and science. While neural PDE solvers can be more efficient than established numerical solvers, they often require large amounts of training data that is costly to obtain. Active Learning (AL) could help surrogate models reach the same accuracy with smaller training sets by querying classical solvers with more informative initial conditions and PDE parameters. While AL is more common in other domains, it has yet to be studied extensively for neural PDE solvers. To bridge this gap, we introduce AL4PDE, a modular and extensible active learning benchmark. It provides multiple parametric PDEs and state-of-the-art surrogate models for the solver-in-the-loop setting, enabling the evaluation of existing and the development of new AL methods for PDE solving. We use the benchmark to evaluate batch active learning algorithms such as uncertainty- and feature-based methods. We show that AL reduces the average error by up to 71% compared to random sampling and significantly reduces worst-case errors. Moreover, AL generates similar datasets across repeated runs, with consistent distributions over the PDE parameters and initial conditions. The acquired datasets are reusable, providing benefits for surrogate models not involved in the data generation.
GPUDrive: Data-driven, multi-agent driving simulation at 1 million FPS
Kazemkhani, Saman, Pandya, Aarav, Cornelisse, Daphne, Shacklett, Brennan, Vinitsky, Eugene
Multi-agent learning algorithms have been successful at generating superhuman planning in a wide variety of games but have had little impact on the design of deployed multi-agent planners. A key bottleneck in applying these techniques to multi-agent planning is that they require billions of steps of experience. To enable the study of multi-agent planning at this scale, we present GPUDrive, a GPU-accelerated, multi-agent simulator built on top of the Madrona Game Engine that can generate over a million steps of experience per second. Observation, reward, and dynamics functions are written directly in C++, allowing users to define complex, heterogeneous agent behaviors that are lowered to high-performance CUDA. We show that using GPUDrive we are able to effectively train reinforcement learning agents over many scenes in the Waymo Motion dataset, yielding highly effective goal-reaching agents in minutes for individual scenes and generally capable agents in a few hours.
TrIM: Triangular Input Movement Systolic Array for Convolutional Neural Networks -- Part I: Dataflow and Analytical Modelling
Sestito, Cristian, Agwa, Shady, Prodromakis, Themis
In order to follow the ever-growing computational complexity and data intensity of state-of-the-art AI models, new computing paradigms are being proposed. These paradigms aim at achieving high energy efficiency, by mitigating the Von Neumann bottleneck that relates to the energy cost of moving data between the processing cores and the memory. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are particularly susceptible to this bottleneck, given the massive data they have to manage. Systolic Arrays (SAs) are promising architectures to mitigate the data transmission cost, thanks to high data utilization carried out by an array of Processing Elements (PEs). These PEs continuously exchange and process data locally based on specific dataflows (like weight stationary and row stationary), in turn reducing the number of memory accesses to the main memory. The hardware specialization of SAs can meet different workloads, ranging from matrix multiplications to multi-dimensional convolutions. In this paper, we propose TrIM: a novel dataflow for SAs based on a Triangular Input Movement and compatible with CNN computing. When compared to state-of-the-art SA dataflows, like weight stationary and row stationary, the high data utilization offered by TrIM guarantees ~10x less memory access. Furthermore, considering that PEs continuously overlap multiplications and accumulations, TrIM achieves high throughput (up to 81.8% higher than row stationary), other than requiring a limited number of registers (up to 15.6x fewer registers than row stationary).