Establishing the chronology of the Vedas has interested scholars for the last two centuries. The oldest among them is Rig-Veda which has ten Mandalas, each composed separately. In this paper, we look at deciphering plausible pointers to the internal chronology of the Mandalas, by focusing on Gods and Goddesses worshiped in different Mandalas. We apply text analysis to the Mandalas using Clustering Techniques based on Cosine Similarity. Then we represent the association of deities with Mandalas using a grid-based Social Network that is amenable to chronological analysis and demonstrates the benefits of using Social Network Analysis for the problem at hand. Further, we analyze references to rivers to arrive at additional correlations. The approach used can be deployed generically to analyze other kinds of references and mentions and arrive at more substantive inferences.

Large language models present opportunities for innovative Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (KGQA). However, they are not inherently designed for query generation. To bridge this gap, solutions have been proposed that rely on fine-tuning or ad-hoc architectures, achieving good results but limited out-of-domain distribution generalization. In this study, we introduce a novel approach called Dynamic Few-Shot Learning (DFSL). DFSL integrates the efficiency of in-context learning and semantic similarity and provides a generally applicable solution for KGQA with state-of-the-art performance. We run an extensive evaluation across multiple benchmark datasets and architecture configurations.

Hyperspectral pansharpening consists of fusing a high-resolution panchromatic band and a low-resolution hyperspectral image to obtain a new image with high resolution in both the spatial and spectral domains. These remote sensing products are valuable for a wide range of applications, driving ever growing research efforts. Nonetheless, results still do not meet application demands. In part, this comes from the technical complexity of the task: compared to multispectral pansharpening, many more bands are involved, in a spectral range only partially covered by the panchromatic component and with overwhelming noise. However, another major limiting factor is the absence of a comprehensive framework for the rapid development and accurate evaluation of new methods. This paper attempts to address this issue. We started by designing a dataset large and diverse enough to allow reliable training (for data-driven methods) and testing of new methods. Then, we selected a set of state-of-the-art methods, following different approaches, characterized by promising performance, and reimplemented them in a single PyTorch framework. Finally, we carried out a critical comparative analysis of all methods, using the most accredited quality indicators. The analysis highlights the main limitations of current solutions in terms of spectral/spatial quality and computational efficiency, and suggests promising research directions. To ensure full reproducibility of the results and support future research, the framework (including codes, evaluation procedures and links to the dataset) is shared on https://github.com/matciotola/hyperspectral_pansharpening_toolbox, as a single Python-based reference benchmark toolbox.

AI agents are an exciting new research direction, and agent development is driven by benchmarks. Our analysis of current agent benchmarks and evaluation practices reveals several shortcomings that hinder their usefulness in real-world applications. First, there is a narrow focus on accuracy without attention to other metrics. As a result, SOTA agents are needlessly complex and costly, and the community has reached mistaken conclusions about the sources of accuracy gains. Our focus on cost in addition to accuracy motivates the new goal of jointly optimizing the two metrics. We design and implement one such optimization, showing its potential to greatly reduce cost while maintaining accuracy. Second, the benchmarking needs of model and downstream developers have been conflated, making it hard to identify which agent would be best suited for a particular application. Third, many agent benchmarks have inadequate holdout sets, and sometimes none at all. This has led to agents that are fragile because they take shortcuts and overfit to the benchmark in various ways. We prescribe a principled framework for avoiding overfitting. Finally, there is a lack of standardization in evaluation practices, leading to a pervasive lack of reproducibility. We hope that the steps we introduce for addressing these shortcomings will spur the development of agents that are useful in the real world and not just accurate on benchmarks.

Counterfactual thinking is a critical yet challenging topic for artificial intelligence to learn knowledge from data and ultimately improve their performances for new scenarios. Many research works, including Potential Outcome Model and Structural Causal Model, have been proposed to realize it. However, their modelings, theoretical foundations and application approaches are usually different. Moreover, there is a lack of graphical approach to infer spatio-temporal counterfactuals, that considers spatial and temporal interactions between multiple units. Thus, in this work, our aim is to investigate a survey to compare and discuss different counterfactual models, theories and approaches, and further build a unified graphical causal frameworks to infer the spatio-temporal counterfactuals.

There is a significant gap between our theoretical understanding of optimization algorithms used in deep learning and their practical performance. Theoretical development usually focuses on proving convergence guarantees under a variety of different assumptions, which are themselves often chosen based on a rough combination of intuitive match to practice and analytical convenience. The theory/practice gap may then arise because of the failure to prove a theorem under such assumptions, or because the assumptions do not reflect reality. In this paper, we carefully measure the degree to which these assumptions are capable of explaining modern optimization algorithms by developing new empirical metrics that closely track the key quantities that must be controlled in theoretical analysis. All of our tested assumptions (including typical modern assumptions based on bounds on the Hessian) fail to reliably capture optimization performance. This highlights a need for new empirical verification of analytical assumptions used in theoretical analysis.

Interactions with billion-scale large language models typically yield long-form responses due to their extensive parametric capacities, along with retrieval-augmented features. While detailed responses provide insightful viewpoint of a specific subject, they frequently generate redundant and less engaging content that does not meet user interests. In this work, we focus on the role of query outlining (i.e., selected sequence of queries) in scenarios that users request a specific range of information, namely coverage-conditioned ($C^2$) scenarios. For simulating $C^2$ scenarios, we construct QTree, 10K sets of information-seeking queries decomposed with various perspectives on certain topics. By utilizing QTree, we train QPlanner, a 7B language model generating customized query outlines that follow coverage-conditioned queries. We analyze the effectiveness of generated outlines through automatic and human evaluation, targeting on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Moreover, the experimental results demonstrate that QPlanner with alignment training can further provide outlines satisfying diverse user interests. Our resources are available at https://github.com/youngerous/qtree.

Offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) leverages static datasets of experience to learn optimal multi-agent control. However, learning from static data presents several unique challenges to overcome. In this paper, we focus on coordination failure and investigate the role of joint actions in multi-agent policy gradients with offline data, focusing on a common setting we refer to as the 'Best Response Under Data' (BRUD) approach. By using two-player polynomial games as an analytical tool, we demonstrate a simple yet overlooked failure mode of BRUD-based algorithms, which can lead to catastrophic coordination failure in the offline setting. Building on these insights, we propose an approach to mitigate such failure, by prioritising samples from the dataset based on joint-action similarity during policy learning and demonstrate its effectiveness in detailed experiments. More generally, however, we argue that prioritised dataset sampling is a promising area for innovation in offline MARL that can be combined with other effective approaches such as critic and policy regularisation. Importantly, our work shows how insights drawn from simplified, tractable games can lead to useful, theoretically grounded insights that transfer to more complex contexts. A core dimension of offering is an interactive notebook, from which almost all of our results can be reproduced, in a browser.

Tabular data is prevalent across various domains in machine learning. Although Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based methods have shown promising performance comparable to tree-based ones, in-depth evaluation of these methods is challenging due to varying performance ranks across diverse datasets. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive benchmark comprising 300 tabular datasets, covering a wide range of task types, size distributions, and domains. We perform an extensive comparison between state-of-the-art deep tabular methods and tree-based methods, revealing the average rank of all methods and highlighting the key factors that influence the success of deep tabular methods. Next, we analyze deep tabular methods based on their training dynamics, including changes in validation metrics and other statistics. For each dataset-method pair, we learn a mapping from both the meta-features of datasets and the first part of the validation curve to the final validation set performance and even the evolution of validation curves. This mapping extracts essential meta-features that influence prediction accuracy, helping the analysis of tabular methods from novel aspects. Based on the performance of all methods on this large benchmark, we identify two subsets of 45 datasets each. The first subset contains datasets that favor either tree-based methods or DNN-based methods, serving as effective analysis tools to evaluate strategies (e.g., attribute encoding strategies) for improving deep tabular models. The second subset contains datasets where the ranks of methods are consistent with the overall benchmark, acting as a probe for tabular analysis. These ``tiny tabular benchmarks'' will facilitate further studies on tabular data.

Tables play a crucial role in conveying information in various domains. We propose a Plan-then-Reason framework to answer different types of user queries over tables with sentence context. The framework first plans the reasoning paths over the context, then assigns each step to program-based or textual reasoning to reach the final answer. This framework enhances the table reasoning abilities for both in-context learning and fine-tuning methods. GPT-3.5-Turbo following Plan-then-Reason framework surpasses other prompting baselines without self-consistency while using less API calls and in-context demonstrations. We also construct an instruction tuning set TrixInstruct to evaluate the effectiveness of fine-tuning with this framework. We present ProTrix model family by finetuning models on TrixInstruct. Our experiments show that ProTrix family generalizes to diverse unseen tabular tasks with only 6k training instances. We further demonstrate that ProTrix can generate accurate and faithful explanations to answer complex free-form questions. Our work underscores the importance of the planning and reasoning abilities towards a model over tabular tasks with generalizability and interpretability. We open-source our dataset and models at https://github.com/WilliamZR/ProTrix.