Indian Ocean
Responsible Emergent Multi-Agent Behavior
Responsible AI has risen to the forefront of the AI research community. As neural network-based learning algorithms continue to permeate real-world applications, the field of Responsible AI has played a large role in ensuring that such systems maintain a high-level of human-compatibility. Despite this progress, the state of the art in Responsible AI has ignored one crucial point: human problems are multi-agent problems. Predominant approaches largely consider the performance of a single AI system in isolation, but human problems are, by their very nature, multi-agent. From driving in traffic to negotiating economic policy, human problem-solving involves interaction and the interplay of the actions and motives of multiple individuals. This dissertation develops the study of responsible emergent multi-agent behavior, illustrating how researchers and practitioners can better understand and shape multi-agent learning with respect to three pillars of Responsible AI: interpretability, fairness, and robustness. First, I investigate multi-agent interpretability, presenting novel techniques for understanding emergent multi-agent behavior at multiple levels of granularity. With respect to low-level interpretability, I examine the extent to which implicit communication emerges as an aid to coordination in multi-agent populations. I introduce a novel curriculum-driven method for learning high-performing policies in difficult, sparse reward environments and show through a measure of position-based social influence that multi-agent teams that learn sophisticated coordination strategies exchange significantly more information through implicit signals than lesser-coordinated agents. Then, at a high-level, I study concept-based interpretability in the context of multi-agent learning. I propose a novel method for learning intrinsically interpretable, concept-based policies and show that it enables...
Yemen's Houthi Militia Says It Launched Missiles and Drones Toward Israel
Yemen's Houthi militia claimed an attempted attack on southern Israel on Tuesday, saying it had launched a "large batch" of ballistic and cruise missiles as well as drones toward Israeli targets. The Iran-backed militia carried out the attempted assault in response to what it called "brutal Israeli-American aggression" in Gaza, the Houthi military spokesman, Yahya Sarea, said on the social media platform X. Mr. Sarea said the attack was the third operation conducted by the Houthis "in support of our persecuted brothers in Palestine," and threatened further missile and drone assaults. The Times could not independently verify the Houthi claims. On Tuesday, the Israeli military said its aerial defense system had intercepted a surface-to-surface missile fired toward Israel "from the area of the Red Sea."
A Review and Roadmap of Deep Causal Model from Different Causal Structures and Representations
Chen, Hang, Du, Keqing, Li, Chenguang, Yang, Xinyu
The fusion of causal models with deep learning introducing increasingly intricate data sets, such as the causal associations within images or between textual components, has surfaced as a focal research area. Nonetheless, the broadening of original causal concepts and theories to such complex, non-statistical data has been met with serious challenges. In response, our study proposes redefinitions of causal data into three distinct categories from the standpoint of causal structure and representation: definite data, semi-definite data, and indefinite data. Definite data chiefly pertains to statistical data used in conventional causal scenarios, while semi-definite data refers to a spectrum of data formats germane to deep learning, including time-series, images, text, and others. Indefinite data is an emergent research sphere inferred from the progression of data forms by us. To comprehensively present these three data paradigms, we elaborate on their formal definitions, differences manifested in datasets, resolution pathways, and development of research. We summarize key tasks and achievements pertaining to definite and semi-definite data from myriad research undertakings, present a roadmap for indefinite data, beginning with its current research conundrums. Lastly, we classify and scrutinize the key datasets presently utilized within these three paradigms.
Forecasting Tropical Cyclones with Cascaded Diffusion Models
Nath, Pritthijit, Shukla, Pancham, Quilodrรกn-Casas, Cรฉsar
As cyclones become more intense due to climate change, the rise of AI-based modelling provides a more affordable and accessible approach compared to traditional methods based on mathematical models. This work leverages diffusion models to forecast cyclone trajectories and precipitation patterns by integrating satellite imaging, remote sensing, and atmospheric data, employing a cascaded approach that incorporates forecasting, super-resolution, and precipitation modelling, with training on a dataset of 51 cyclones from six major basins. Experiments demonstrate that the final forecasts from the cascaded models show accurate predictions up to a 36-hour rollout, with SSIM and PSNR values exceeding 0.5 and 20 dB, respectively, for all three tasks. This work also highlights the promising efficiency of AI methods such as diffusion models for high-performance needs, such as cyclone forecasting, while remaining computationally affordable, making them ideal for highly vulnerable regions with critical forecasting needs and financial limitations.
Disentangling Structure and Style: Political Bias Detection in News by Inducing Document Hierarchy
Hong, Jiwoo, Cho, Yejin, Jung, Jaemin, Han, Jiyoung, Thorne, James
We address an important gap in detecting political bias in news articles. Previous works that perform document classification can be influenced by the writing style of each news outlet, leading to overfitting and limited generalizability. Our approach overcomes this limitation by considering both the sentence-level semantics and the document-level rhetorical structure, resulting in a more robust and style-agnostic approach to detecting political bias in news articles. We introduce a novel multi-head hierarchical attention model that effectively encodes the structure of long documents through a diverse ensemble of attention heads. While journalism follows a formalized rhetorical structure, the writing style may vary by news outlet. We demonstrate that our method overcomes this domain dependency and outperforms previous approaches for robustness and accuracy. Further analysis and human evaluation demonstrate the ability of our model to capture common discourse structures in journalism. Our code is available at: https://github.com/xfactlab/emnlp2023-Document-Hierarchy
U.S. Shoots Down Several Missiles and Drones Launched From Yemen
A U.S. Navy warship in the northern Red Sea on Thursday shot down three cruise missiles and several drones launched from Yemen that the Pentagon said might have been headed toward Israel. "We cannot say for certain what these missiles and drones were targeting, but they were launched from Yemen heading north along the Red Sea, potentially towards targets in Israel," Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, told reporters. The missiles and drones were launched by pro-Iranian Houthi rebels in Yemen amid a flurry of drone attacks against American troops in Iraq and Syria over the past three days, General Ryder said. The incidents underscored the risks that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas could spiral into a wider war.
Arabic Dialect Identification under Scrutiny: Limitations of Single-label Classification
Automatic Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI) of text has gained great popularity since it was introduced in the early 2010s. Multiple datasets were developed, and yearly shared tasks have been running since 2018. However, ADI systems are reported to fail in distinguishing between the micro-dialects of Arabic. We argue that the currently adopted framing of the ADI task as a single-label classification problem is one of the main reasons for that. We highlight the limitation of the incompleteness of the Dialect labels and demonstrate how it impacts the evaluation of ADI systems. A manual error analysis for the predictions of an ADI, performed by 7 native speakers of different Arabic dialects, revealed that $\approx$ 66% of the validated errors are not true errors. Consequently, we propose framing ADI as a multi-label classification task and give recommendations for designing new ADI datasets.
MarineGPT: Unlocking Secrets of Ocean to the Public
Zheng, Ziqiang, Zhang, Jipeng, Vu, Tuan-Anh, Diao, Shizhe, Tim, Yue Him Wong, Yeung, Sai-Kit
Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT/GPT-4, have proven to be powerful tools in promoting the user experience as an AI assistant. The continuous works are proposing multi-modal large language models (MLLM), empowering LLMs with the ability to sense multiple modality inputs through constructing a joint semantic space (e.g. visual-text space). Though significant success was achieved in LLMs and MLLMs, exploring LLMs and MLLMs in domain-specific applications that required domain-specific knowledge and expertise has been less conducted, especially for \textbf{marine domain}. Different from general-purpose MLLMs, the marine-specific MLLM is required to yield much more \textbf{sensitive}, \textbf{informative}, and \textbf{scientific} responses. In this work, we demonstrate that the existing MLLMs optimized on huge amounts of readily available general-purpose training data show a minimal ability to understand domain-specific intents and then generate informative and satisfactory responses. To address these issues, we propose \textbf{MarineGPT}, the first vision-language model specially designed for the marine domain, unlocking the secrets of the ocean to the public. We present our \textbf{Marine-5M} dataset with more than 5 million marine image-text pairs to inject domain-specific marine knowledge into our model and achieve better marine vision and language alignment. Our MarineGPT not only pushes the boundaries of marine understanding to the general public but also offers a standard protocol for adapting a general-purpose assistant to downstream domain-specific experts. We pave the way for a wide range of marine applications while setting valuable data and pre-trained models for future research in both academic and industrial communities.
Can LLMs facilitate interpretation of pre-trained language models?
Mousi, Basel, Durrani, Nadir, Dalvi, Fahim
Work done to uncover the knowledge encoded within pre-trained language models rely on annotated corpora or human-in-the-loop methods. However, these approaches are limited in terms of scalability and the scope of interpretation. We propose using a large language model, ChatGPT, as an annotator to enable fine-grained interpretation analysis of pre-trained language models. We discover latent concepts within pre-trained language models by applying agglomerative hierarchical clustering over contextualized representations and then annotate these concepts using ChatGPT. Our findings demonstrate that ChatGPT produces accurate and semantically richer annotations compared to human-annotated concepts. Additionally, we showcase how GPT-based annotations empower interpretation analysis methodologies of which we demonstrate two: probing frameworks and neuron interpretation. To facilitate further exploration and experimentation in the field, we make available a substantial ConceptNet dataset (TCN) comprising 39,000 annotated concepts.
Creative Robot Tool Use with Large Language Models
Xu, Mengdi, Huang, Peide, Yu, Wenhao, Liu, Shiqi, Zhang, Xilun, Niu, Yaru, Zhang, Tingnan, Xia, Fei, Tan, Jie, Zhao, Ding
Tool use is a hallmark of advanced intelligence, exemplified in both animal behavior and robotic capabilities. This paper investigates the feasibility of imbuing robots with the ability to creatively use tools in tasks that involve implicit physical constraints and long-term planning. Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), we develop RoboTool, a system that accepts natural language instructions and outputs executable code for controlling robots in both simulated and real-world environments. RoboTool incorporates four pivotal components: (i) an "Analyzer" that interprets natural language to discern key task-related concepts, (ii) a "Planner" that generates comprehensive strategies based on the language input and key concepts, (iii) a "Calculator" that computes parameters for each skill, and (iv) a "Coder" that translates these plans into executable Python code. Our results show that RoboTool can not only comprehend explicit or implicit physical constraints and environmental factors but also demonstrate creative tool use. Unlike traditional Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) methods that rely on explicit optimization, our LLM-based system offers a more flexible, efficient, and user-friendly solution for complex robotics tasks. Through extensive experiments, we validate that RoboTool is proficient in handling tasks that would otherwise be infeasible without the creative use of tools, thereby expanding the capabilities of robotic systems. Demos are available on our project page: https://creative-robotool.github.io/.