Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) technology uses satellite radar to detect surface deformation patterns and monitor earthquake impacts on buildings. While vital for emergency response planning, extracting multi-class building damage classifications from InSAR data faces challenges: overlapping damage signatures with environmental noise, computational complexity in multi-class scenarios, and the need for rapid regional-scale processing. Our novel multi-class variational causal Bayesian inference framework with quadratic variational bounds provides rigorous approximations while ensuring efficiency. By integrating InSAR observations with USGS ground failure models and building fragility functions, our approach separates building damage signals while maintaining computational efficiency through strategic pruning. Evaluation across five major earthquakes (Haiti 2021, Puerto Rico 2020, Zagreb 2020, Italy 2016, Ridgecrest 2019) shows improved damage classification accuracy (AUC: 0.94-0.96), achieving up to 35.7% improvement over existing methods. Our approach maintains high accuracy (AUC > 0.93) across all damage categories while reducing computational overhead by over 40% without requiring extensive ground truth data.

Standard practice within Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) involves optimizing against a Reward Model (RM), which itself is trained to reflect human preferences for desirable generations. A notable subject that is understudied is the (in-)consistency of RMs -- whether they can recognize the semantic changes to different prompts and appropriately adapt their reward assignments -- and their impact on the downstream RLHF model. In this paper, we visit a series of research questions relevant to RM inconsistency: (1) How can we measure the consistency of reward models? (2) How consistent are the existing RMs and how can we improve them? (3) In what ways does reward inconsistency influence the chatbots resulting from the RLHF model training? We propose Contrast Instructions -- a benchmarking strategy for the consistency of RM. Each example in Contrast Instructions features a pair of lexically similar instructions with different ground truth responses. A consistent RM is expected to rank the corresponding instruction and response higher than other combinations. We observe that current RMs trained with the standard ranking objective fail miserably on Contrast Instructions compared to average humans. To show that RM consistency can be improved efficiently without using extra training budget, we propose two techniques ConvexDA and RewardFusion, which enhance reward consistency through extrapolation during the RM training and inference stage, respectively. We show that RLHF models trained with a more consistent RM yield more useful responses, suggesting that reward inconsistency exhibits a trickle-down effect on the downstream RLHF process.

We introduce OpenEarthMap, a benchmark dataset, for global high-resolution land cover mapping. OpenEarthMap consists of 2.2 million segments of 5000 aerial and satellite images covering 97 regions from 44 countries across 6 continents, with manually annotated 8-class land cover labels at a 0.25--0.5m ground sampling distance. Semantic segmentation models trained on the OpenEarthMap generalize worldwide and can be used as off-the-shelf models in a variety of applications. We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art methods for unsupervised domain adaptation and present challenging problem settings suitable for further technical development. We also investigate lightweight models using automated neural architecture search for limited computational resources and fast mapping. The dataset is available at https://open-earth-map.org.

Recent years, typhoon damages has become social problem owing to climate change. Especially, 9 September 2019, Typhoon Faxai passed on the south Chiba prefecture in Japan, whose damages included with electric and water provision stop and house roof break because of strong wind recorded on the maximum 45 meter per second. A large amount of tree fell down, and the neighbor electric poles also fell down at the same time. These disaster features have caused that it took eighteen days for recovery longer than past ones. Initial responses are important for faster recovery. As long as we can, aerial survey for global screening of devastated region would be required for decision support to respond where to recover ahead. This paper proposes a practical method to visualize the damaged areas focused on the typhoon disaster features using aerial photography. This method can classify eight classes which contains land covers without damages and areas with disaster, where an aerial photograph is partitioned into 4,096 grids that is 64 by 64, with each unit image of 48 meter square. Using target feature class probabilities, we can visualize disaster features map to scale the color range from blue to red or yellow. Furthermore, we can realize disaster feature mapping on each unit grid images to compute the convolutional activation map using Grad-CAM based on deep neural network layers for classification. This paper demonstrates case studies applied to aerial photographs recorded at the south Chiba prefecture in Japan after typhoon disaster.

Using Facebook Geoinsights, UNICEF was able to confirm internet connectivity was still functioning in the affected area which opened up a new opportunity by working with WhatsApp in the aftermath of... Using Facebook Geoinsights, UNICEF was able to confirm internet connectivity was still functioning in the affected area which opened up a new opportunity by working with WhatsApp in the aftermath of the tsunami to quickly collect needs and provide information to stay alive. Photo credit to UNICEF/UN0240792/Wilander. Rido Saputra, 10 years old, stands in front of his home which was destroyed by a tsunami in Donggala Regency, Central Sulawesi.