Real-time detection and prediction of extreme weather protect human lives and infrastructure. Traditional methods rely on numerical threshold setting and manual interpretation of weather heatmaps with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which can be slow and error-prone. Our research redefines Extreme Weather Events Detection (EWED) by framing it as a Visual Question Answering (VQA) problem, thereby introducing a more precise and automated solution. Leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLM) to simultaneously process visual and textual data, we offer an effective aid to enhance the analysis process of weather heatmaps. Our initial assessment of general-purpose VLMs (e.g., GPT-4-Vision) on EWED revealed poor performance, characterized by low accuracy and frequent hallucinations due to inadequate color differentiation and insufficient meteorological knowledge. To address these challenges, we introduce ClimateIQA, the first meteorological VQA dataset, which includes 8,760 wind gust heatmaps and 254,040 question-answer pairs covering four question types, both generated from the latest climate reanalysis data. We also propose Sparse Position and Outline Tracking (SPOT), an innovative technique that leverages OpenCV and K-Means clustering to capture and depict color contours in heatmaps, providing ClimateIQA with more accurate color spatial location information. Finally, we present Climate-Zoo, the first meteorological VLM collection, which adapts VLMs to meteorological applications using the ClimateIQA dataset. Experiment results demonstrate that models from Climate-Zoo substantially outperform state-of-the-art general VLMs, achieving an accuracy increase from 0% to over 90% in EWED verification. The datasets and models in this study are publicly available for future climate science research: https://github.com/AlexJJJChen/Climate-Zoo.

This work presents a large-scale dataset for radar adaptive signal processing (RASP) applications, aimed at supporting the development of data-driven models within the radar community. The dataset, called RASPNet, consists of 100 realistic scenarios compiled over a variety of topographies and land types from across the contiguous United States, designed to reflect a diverse array of real-world environments. Within each scenario, RASPNet consists of 10,000 clutter realizations from an airborne radar setting, which can be utilized for radar algorithm development and evaluation. RASPNet intends to fill a prominent gap in the availability of a large-scale, realistic dataset that standardizes the evaluation of adaptive radar processing techniques. We describe its construction, organization, and several potential applications, which includes a transfer learning example to demonstrate how RASPNet can be leveraged for realistic adaptive radar processing scenarios.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have seen a surge in usage across a multitude of industries, such as aerial photography, military operations, agriculture, mapping, and surveying. The advantages of UAVs over traditional manned aircraft are numerous, including cost-effectiveness, enhanced safety, and superior flexibility. However, the autonomous operation of UAVs, particularly their ability to land on moving platforms like ships, poses a crucial challenge. This capability is of significant importance for industries that depend on maritime transportation or offshore operations. A primary challenge in this context is the estimation of the UAV's relative pose with respect to the ship, which is vital for precise control of the UAV's movements and ensuring a safe landing. Conventionally, the relative pose has been determined using the Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) Global Positioning System (GPS). To receive RTK-GPS, a communication link between the ship and the UAV must be maintained at all times, typically via radio.

Fishing enthusiast Hunter Ham recently captured footage of an alligator on a Texas beach eating a bull redfish. Gators are primarily freshwater creatures. A 21-year-old woman from Georgia recently broke a statewide fishing record, officials say. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources announced the new state record in a press release on June 5. St. Marys resident Lauren E. Harden caught a 33-pound crevalle jack on May 24 while fishing on Cumberland Island.

Techniques for knowledge graph (KGs) enrichment have been increasingly crucial for commercial applications that rely on evolving product catalogues. However, because of the huge search space of potential enrichment, predictions from KG completion (KGC) methods suffer from low precision, making them unreliable for real-world catalogues. Moreover, candidate facts for enrichment have varied relevance to users. While making correct predictions for incomplete triplets in KGs has been the main focus of KGC method, the relevance of when to apply such predictions has been neglected. Motivated by the product search use case, we address the angle of generating relevant completion for a catalogue using user search behaviour and the users property association with a product. In this paper, we present our intuition for identifying enrichable data points and use general-purpose KGs to show-case the performance benefits. In particular, we extract entity-predicate pairs from user queries, which are more likely to be correct and relevant, and use these pairs to guide the prediction of KGC methods. We assess our method on two popular encyclopedia KGs, DBPedia and YAGO 4. Our results from both automatic and human evaluations show that query guidance can significantly improve the correctness and relevance of prediction.

Embeddings produced by pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely used; however, their efficacy for downstream tasks can vary widely. We study the factors influencing out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of pre-trained DNN embeddings through the lens of the tunnel effect hypothesis, which suggests deeper DNN layers compress representations and hinder OOD performance. Contrary to earlier work, we find the tunnel effect is not universal. Based on 10,584 linear probes, we study the conditions that mitigate the tunnel effect by varying DNN architecture, training dataset, image resolution, and augmentations. We quantify each variable's impact using a novel SHAP analysis. Our results emphasize the danger of generalizing findings from toy datasets to broader contexts.

Recently, directly using large language models (LLMs) has been shown to be the most reliable method to evaluate QA models. However, it suffers from limited interpretability, high cost, and environmental harm. To address these, we propose to use soft exact match (EM) with entitydriven answer set expansion. Our approach expands the gold answer set to include diverse surface forms, based on the observation that the surface forms often follow particular patterns depending on the entity type. The experimental results show that our method outperforms traditional evaluation methods by a large margin. Moreover, the reliability of our evaluation method is comparable to that of LLM-based ones, while offering the benefits of high interpretability and reduced environmental harm.

We study interactive learning of LLM-based language agents based on user edits made to the agent's output. In a typical setting such as writing assistants, the user interacts with a language agent to generate a response given a context, and may optionally edit the agent response to personalize it based on their latent preference, in addition to improving the correctness. The edit feedback is naturally generated, making it a suitable candidate for improving the agent's alignment with the user's preference, and for reducing the cost of user edits over time. We propose a learning framework, PRELUDE that infers a description of the user's latent preference based on historic edit data. The inferred user preference descriptions are used to define prompts for generating responses in the future. This avoids fine-tuning the agent, which is costly, challenging to scale with the number of users, and may even degrade its performance on other tasks. Furthermore, learning descriptive preference improves interpretability, allowing the user to view and modify the learned preference. However, user preference can be complex, subtle, and vary based on context, making it challenging to learn. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective algorithm named CIPHER that leverages the LLM to infer the user preference for a given context based on user edits. In the future, CIPHER retrieves inferred preferences from the k-closest contexts in the history, and forms an aggregate preference for response generation. We introduce two interactive environments -- summarization and email writing, and use a GPT-4 simulated user for evaluation. On both tasks, CIPHER outperforms several baselines by achieving the lowest edit distance cost while only having a small overhead in LLM query cost. Our analysis reports that user preferences learned by CIPHER show significant similarity to the ground truth latent preferences.

Language models (LMs) are trained on web text originating from many points in time and, in general, without any explicit temporal grounding. This work investigates the temporal chaos of pretrained LMs and explores various methods to align their internal knowledge to a target time, which we call "temporal alignment." To do this, we first automatically construct a dataset containing 20K time-sensitive questions and their answers for each year from 2000 to 2023. Based on this dataset, we empirically show that pretrained LMs (e.g., LLaMa2), despite having a recent pretraining cutoff (e.g., 2022), mostly answer questions using earlier knowledge (e.g., in 2019). We then develop several methods, from prompting to finetuning, to align LMs to use their most recent knowledge when answering questions, and investigate various factors in this alignment. Our experiments demonstrate that aligning LLaMa2 to the year 2022 can enhance its performance by up to 62% according to that year's answers. This improvement occurs even without explicitly mentioning time information, indicating the possibility of aligning models' internal sense of time after pretraining. Finally, we find that alignment to a historical time is also possible, with up to 2.8$\times$ the performance of the unaligned LM in 2010 if finetuning models to that year. These findings hint at the sophistication of LMs' internal knowledge organization and the necessity of tuning them properly.

The boardgame Diplomacy is a challenging setting for communicative and cooperative artificial intelligence. The most prominent communicative Diplomacy AI, Cicero, has excellent strategic abilities, exceeding human players. However, the best Diplomacy players master communication, not just tactics, which is why the game has received attention as an AI challenge. This work seeks to understand the degree to which Cicero succeeds at communication. First, we annotate in-game communication with abstract meaning representation to separate in-game tactics from general language. Second, we run two dozen games with humans and Cicero, totaling over 200 human-player hours of competition. While AI can consistently outplay human players, AI-Human communication is still limited because of AI's difficulty with deception and persuasion. This shows that Cicero relies on strategy and has not yet reached the full promise of communicative and cooperative AI.