Reasoning about time is essential for understanding the nuances of events described in natural language. Previous research on this topic has been limited in scope, characterized by a lack of standardized benchmarks that would allow for consistent evaluations across different studies. In this paper, we introduce TRAM, a temporal reasoning benchmark composed of ten datasets, encompassing various temporal aspects of events such as order, arithmetic, frequency, and duration, designed to facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of the temporal reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). We conduct an extensive evaluation using popular LLMs, such as GPT-4 and Llama2, in both zero-shot and few-shot learning scenarios. Additionally, we employ BERT-based models to establish the baseline evaluations. Our findings indicate that these models still trail human performance in temporal reasoning tasks. It is our aspiration that TRAM will spur further progress in enhancing the temporal reasoning abilities of LLMs.

We introduce Jais and Jais-chat, new state-of-the-art Arabic-centric foundation and instruction-tuned open generative large language models (LLMs). The models are based on the GPT-3 decoder-only architecture and are pretrained on a mixture of Arabic and English texts, including source code in various programming languages. With 13 billion parameters, they demonstrate better knowledge and reasoning capabilities in Arabic than any existing open Arabic and multilingual models by a sizable margin, based on extensive evaluation. Moreover, the models are competitive in English compared to English-centric open models of similar size, despite being trained on much less English data. We provide a detailed description of the training, the tuning, the safety alignment, and the evaluation of the models. We release two open versions of the model -- the foundation Jais model, and an instruction-tuned Jais-chat variant -- with the aim of promoting research on Arabic LLMs. Available at https://huggingface.co/inception-mbzuai/jais-13b-chat

Many real-world processes have complex tail dependence structures that cannot be characterized using classical Gaussian processes. More flexible spatial extremes models exhibit appealing extremal dependence properties but are often exceedingly prohibitive to fit and simulate from in high dimensions. In this paper, we develop a new spatial extremes model that has flexible and non-stationary dependence properties, and we integrate it in the encoding-decoding structure of a variational autoencoder (XVAE), whose parameters are estimated via variational Bayes combined with deep learning. The XVAE can be used as a spatio-temporal emulator that characterizes the distribution of potential mechanistic model output states and produces outputs that have the same statistical properties as the inputs, especially in the tail. As an aside, our approach also provides a novel way of making fast inference with complex extreme-value processes. Through extensive simulation studies, we show that our XVAE is substantially more time-efficient than traditional Bayesian inference while also outperforming many spatial extremes models with a stationary dependence structure. To further demonstrate the computational power of the XVAE, we analyze a high-resolution satellite-derived dataset of sea surface temperature in the Red Sea, which includes 30 years of daily measurements at 16703 grid cells. We find that the extremal dependence strength is weaker in the interior of Red Sea and it has decreased slightly over time.

Accurate long-term predictions are the foundations for many machine learning applications and decision-making processes. However, building accurate long-term prediction models remains challenging due to the limitations of existing temporal models like recurrent neural networks (RNNs), as they capture only the statistical connections in the training data and may fail to learn the underlying dynamics of the target system. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel machine learning model based on Koopman operator theory, which we call Koopman Invertible Autoencoders (KIA), that captures the inherent characteristic of the system by modeling both forward and backward dynamics in the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space. This enables us to efficiently learn low-dimensional representations, resulting in more accurate predictions of long-term system behavior. Moreover, our method's invertibility design guarantees reversibility and consistency in both forward and inverse operations. We illustrate the utility of KIA on pendulum and climate datasets, demonstrating 300% improvements in long-term prediction capability for pendulum while maintaining robustness against noise. Additionally, our method excels in long-term climate prediction, further validating our method's effectiveness.

Machine-learning-based parameterizations (i.e. representation of sub-grid processes) of global climate models or turbulent simulations have recently been proposed as a powerful alternative to physical, but empirical, representations, offering a lower computational cost and higher accuracy. Yet, those approaches still suffer from a lack of generalization and extrapolation beyond the training data, which is however critical to projecting climate change or unobserved regimes of turbulence. Here we show that a multi-fidelity approach, which integrates datasets of different accuracy and abundance, can provide the best of both worlds: the capacity to extrapolate leveraging the physically-based parameterization and a higher accuracy using the machine-learning-based parameterizations. In an application to climate modeling, the multi-fidelity framework yields more accurate climate projections without requiring major increase in computational resources. Our multi-fidelity randomized prior networks (MF-RPNs) combine physical parameterization data as low-fidelity and storm-resolving historical run's data as high-fidelity. To extrapolate beyond the training data, the MF-RPNs are tested on high-fidelity warming scenarios, $+4K$, data. We show the MF-RPN's capacity to return much more skillful predictions compared to either low- or high-fidelity (historical data) simulations trained only on one regime while providing trustworthy uncertainty quantification across a wide range of scenarios. Our approach paves the way for the use of machine-learning based methods that can optimally leverage historical observations or high-fidelity simulations and extrapolate to unseen regimes such as climate change.

Misinformation is a global concern and limiting its spread is critical for protecting democracy, public health, and consumers. We propose that consumers' own social media post-histories are an underutilized data source to study what leads them to share links to fake-news. In Study 1, we explore how textual cues extracted from post-histories distinguish fake-news sharers from random social media users and others in the misinformation ecosystem. Among other results, we find across two datasets that fake-news sharers use more words related to anger, religion and power. In Study 2, we show that adding textual cues from post-histories improves the accuracy of models to predict who is likely to share fake-news. In Study 3, we provide a preliminary test of two mitigation strategies deduced from Study 1 - activating religious values and reducing anger - and find that they reduce fake-news sharing and sharing more generally. In Study 4, we combine survey responses with users' verified Twitter post-histories and show that using empowering language in a fact-checking browser extension ad increases download intentions. Our research encourages marketers, misinformation scholars, and practitioners to use post-histories to develop theories and test interventions to reduce the spread of misinformation.

Understanding when two pieces of text convey the same information is a goal touching many subproblems in NLP, including textual entailment and fact-checking. This problem becomes more complex when those two pieces of text are in different languages. Here, we introduce X-PARADE (Cross-lingual Paragraph-level Analysis of Divergences and Entailments), the first cross-lingual dataset of paragraph-level information divergences. Annotators label a paragraph in a target language at the span level and evaluate it with respect to a corresponding paragraph in a source language, indicating whether a given piece of information is the same, new, or new but can be inferred. This last notion establishes a link with cross-language NLI. Aligned paragraphs are sourced from Wikipedia pages in different languages, reflecting real information divergences observed in the wild. Armed with our dataset, we investigate a diverse set of approaches for this problem, including classic token alignment from machine translation, textual entailment methods that localize their decisions, and prompting of large language models. Our results show that these methods vary in their capability to handle inferable information, but they all fall short of human performance.

This research focuses on the estimation of a non-parametric regression function designed for data with simultaneous time and space dependencies. In such a context, we study the Trend Filtering, a nonparametric estimator introduced by \cite{mammen1997locally} and \cite{rudin1992nonlinear}. For univariate settings, the signals we consider are assumed to have a kth weak derivative with bounded total variation, allowing for a general degree of smoothness. In the multivariate scenario, we study a $K$-Nearest Neighbor fused lasso estimator as in \cite{padilla2018adaptive}, employing an ADMM algorithm, suitable for signals with bounded variation that adhere to a piecewise Lipschitz continuity criterion. By aligning with lower bounds, the minimax optimality of our estimators is validated. A unique phase transition phenomenon, previously uncharted in Trend Filtering studies, emerges through our analysis. Both Simulation studies and real data applications underscore the superior performance of our method when compared with established techniques in the existing literature.

This report describes trade-offs in the design of international governance arrangements for civilian artificial intelligence (AI) and presents one approach in detail. This approach represents the extension of a standards, licensing, and liability regime to the global level. We propose that states establish an International AI Organization (IAIO) to certify state jurisdictions (not firms or AI projects) for compliance with international oversight standards. States can give force to these international standards by adopting regulations prohibiting the import of goods whose supply chains embody AI from non-IAIO-certified jurisdictions. This borrows attributes from models of existing international organizations, such as the International Civilian Aviation Organization (ICAO), the International Maritime Organization (IMO), and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). States can also adopt multilateral controls on the export of AI product inputs, such as specialized hardware, to non-certified jurisdictions. Indeed, both the import and export standards could be required for certification. As international actors reach consensus on risks of and minimum standards for advanced AI, a jurisdictional certification regime could mitigate a broad range of potential harms, including threats to public safety.

Recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models have enabled the generation of diverse and high-quality images. While impressive, the images often fall short of depicting subtle details and are susceptible to errors due to ambiguity in the input text. One way of alleviating these issues is to train diffusion models on class-labeled datasets. This approach has two disadvantages: (i) supervised datasets are generally small compared to large-scale scraped text-image datasets on which text-to-image models are trained, affecting the quality and diversity of the generated images, or (ii) the input is a hard-coded label, as opposed to free-form text, limiting the control over the generated images. In this work, we propose a non-invasive fine-tuning technique that capitalizes on the expressive potential of free-form text while achieving high accuracy through discriminative signals from a pretrained classifier. This is done by iteratively modifying the embedding of an added input token of a text-to-image diffusion model, by steering generated images toward a given target class according to a classifier. Our method is fast compared to prior fine-tuning methods and does not require a collection of in-class images or retraining of a noise-tolerant classifier. We evaluate our method extensively, showing that the generated images are: (i) more accurate and of higher quality than standard diffusion models, (ii) can be used to augment training data in a low-resource setting, and (iii) reveal information about the data used to train the guiding classifier. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/idansc/discriminative_class_tokens}.