We present a multi-temporal, multi-modal remote-sensing dataset for predicting how active wildfires will spread at a resolution of 24 hours. The dataset consists of 13 607 images across 607 fire events in the United States from January 2018 to October 2021. For each fire event, the dataset contains a full time series of daily observations, containing detected active fires and variables related to fuel, topography and weather conditions. The dataset is challenging due to: a) its inputs being multi-temporal, b) the high number of 23 multi-modal input channels, c) highly imbalanced labels and d) noisy labels, due to smoke, clouds, and inaccuracies in the active fire detection.

Artificial intelligence methods are increasingly being explored for managing wildfires and other natural hazards. In particular, reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising path towards improving outcomes in such uncertain decision-making scenarios and moving beyond reactive strategies. However, training RL agents requires many environment interactions, and the speed of existing wildfire simulators is a severely limiting factor. We introduce $\texttt{JaxWildfire}$, a simulator underpinned by a principled probabilistic fire spread model based on cellular automata. It is implemented in JAX and enables vectorized simulations using $\texttt{vmap}$, allowing high throughput of simulations on GPUs. We demonstrate that $\texttt{JaxWildfire}$ achieves 6-35x speedup over existing software and enables gradient-based optimization of simulator parameters. Furthermore, we show that $\texttt{JaxWildfire}$ can be used to train RL agents to learn wildfire suppression policies. Our work is an important step towards enabling the advancement of RL techniques for managing natural hazards.

Predicting the spread of wildfires is essential for effective fire management and risk assessment. With the fast advancements of artificial intelligence (AI), various deep learning models have been developed and utilized for wildfire spread prediction. However, there is limited understanding of the advantages and limitations of these models, and it is also unclear how deep learning-based fire spread models can be compared with existing non-AI fire models. In this work, we assess the ability of five typical deep learning models integrated with weather and environmental variables for wildfire spread prediction based on over ten years of wildfire data in the state of Hawaii. We further use the 2023 Maui fires as a case study to compare the best deep learning models with a widely-used fire spread model, FARSITE. The results show that two deep learning models, i.e., ConvLSTM and ConvLSTM with attention, perform the best among the five tested AI models. FARSITE shows higher precision, lower recall, and higher F1-score than the best AI models, while the AI models offer higher flexibility for the input data. By integrating AI models with an explainable AI method, we further identify important weather and environmental factors associated with the 2023 Maui wildfires.

Fairness in machine learning (ML) has a critical importance for building trustworthy machine learning system as artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly impact various aspects of society, including healthcare decisions and legal judgments. Moreover, numerous studies demonstrate evidence of unfair outcomes in ML and the need for more robust fairness-aware methods. However, the data we use to train and develop debiasing techniques often contains biased and noisy labels. As a result, the label bias in the training data affects model performance and misrepresents the fairness of classifiers during testing. To tackle this problem, our paper presents Graph-based Fairness-aware Label Correction (GFLC), an efficient method for correcting label noise while preserving demographic parity in datasets. In particular, our approach combines three key components: prediction confidence measure, graph-based regularization through Ricci-flow-optimized graph Laplacians, and explicit demographic parity incentives. Our experimental findings show the effectiveness of our proposed approach and show significant improvements in the trade-off between performance and fairness metrics compared to the baseline.

Wildfire monitoring and prediction are essential for understanding wildfire behaviour. With extensive Earth observation data, these tasks can be integrated and enhanced through multi-task deep learning models. We present a comprehensive multi-temporal remote sensing dataset for active fire detection, daily wildfire monitoring, and next-day wildfire prediction. Covering wildfire events in the contiguous U.S. from January 2017 to October 2021, the dataset includes 3552 surface reflectance images and auxiliary data such as weather, topography, land cover, and fuel information, totalling 71 GB. The lifecycle of each wildfire is documented, with labels for active fires (AF) and burned areas (BA), supported by manual quality assurance of AF and BA test labels. The dataset supports three tasks: a) active fire detection, b) daily burned area mapping, and c) wildfire progression prediction. Detection tasks use pixel-wise classification of multi-spectral, multi-temporal images, while prediction tasks integrate satellite and auxiliary data to model fire dynamics. This dataset and its benchmarks provide a foundation for advancing wildfire research using deep learning.

Informative path planning (IPP) is an important planning paradigm for various real-world robotic applications such as environment monitoring. IPP involves planning a path that can learn an accurate belief of the quantity of interest, while adhering to planning constraints. Traditional IPP methods typically require high computation time during execution, giving rise to reinforcement learning (RL) based IPP methods. However, the existing RL-based methods do not consider spatio-temporal environments which involve their own challenges due to variations in environment characteristics. In this paper, we propose DyPNIPP, a robust RL-based IPP framework, designed to operate effectively across spatio-temporal environments with varying dynamics. To achieve this, DyPNIPP incorporates domain randomization to train the agent across diverse environments and introduces a dynamics prediction model to capture and adapt the agent actions to specific environment dynamics. Our extensive experiments in a wildfire environment demonstrate that DyPNIPP outperforms existing RL-based IPP algorithms by significantly improving robustness and performing across diverse environment conditions.

Individuals with suspected rare genetic disorders often undergo multiple clinical evaluations, imaging studies, laboratory tests and genetic tests, to find a possible answer over a prolonged period of multiple years. Addressing this diagnostic odyssey thus have substantial clinical, psychosocial, and economic benefits. Many rare genetic diseases have distinctive facial features, which can be used by artificial intelligence algorithms to facilitate clinical diagnosis, in prioritizing candidate diseases to be further examined by lab tests or genetic assays, or in helping the phenotype-driven reinterpretation of genome/exome sequencing data. However, existing methods using frontal facial photo were built on conventional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), rely exclusively on facial images, and cannot capture non-facial phenotypic traits and demographic information essential for guiding accurate diagnoses. Here we introduce GestaltMML, a multimodal machine learning (MML) approach solely based on the Transformer architecture. It integrates the facial images, demographic information (age, sex, ethnicity), and clinical notes of patients to improve prediction accuracy. Furthermore, we also introduce GestaltGPT, a GPT-based methodology with few-short learning capacities that exclusively harnesses textual inputs using a range of large language models (LLMs) including Llama 2, GPT-J and Falcon. We evaluated these methods on a diverse range of datasets, including 449 diseases from the GestaltMatcher Database, several in-house datasets on Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome, Sotos syndrome, NAA10-related syndrome (neurodevelopmental syndrome) and others. Our results suggest that GestaltMML/GestaltGPT effectively incorporate multiple modalities of data, greatly narrow down candidate genetic diagnosis of rare diseases, and may facilitate the reinterpretation of genome/exome sequencing data.

The problem of firebreak placement is crucial for fire prevention, and its effectiveness at landscape scale will depend on their ability to impede the progress of future wildfires. To provide an adequate response, it is therefore necessary to consider the stochastic nature of fires, which are highly unpredictable from ignition to extinction. Thus, the placement of firebreaks can be considered a stochastic optimization problem where: (1) the objective function is to minimize the expected cells burnt of the landscape; (2) the decision variables being the location of firebreaks; and (3) the random variable being the spatial propagation/behavior of fires. In this paper, we propose a solution approach for the problem from the perspective of simulation-based optimization (SbO), where the objective function is not available (a black-box function), but can be computed (and/or approximated) by wildfire simulations. For this purpose, Genetic Algorithm and GRASP are implemented. The final implementation yielded favorable results for the Genetic Algorithm, demonstrating strong performance in scenarios with medium to high operational capacity, as well as medium levels of stochasticity

To mitigate the potential misuse of large language models (LLMs), recent research has developed watermarking algorithms, which restrict the generation process to leave an invisible trace for watermark detection. Due to the two-stage nature of the task, most studies evaluate the generation and detection separately, thereby presenting a challenge in unbiased, thorough, and applicable evaluations. In this paper, we introduce WaterBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for LLM watermarks, in which we design three crucial factors: (1) For \textbf{benchmarking procedure}, to ensure an apples-to-apples comparison, we first adjust each watermarking method's hyper-parameter to reach the same watermarking strength, then jointly evaluate their generation and detection performance. (2) For \textbf{task selection}, we diversify the input and output length to form a five-category taxonomy, covering $9$ tasks. (3) For \textbf{evaluation metric}, we adopt the GPT4-Judge for automatically evaluating the decline of instruction-following abilities after watermarking. We evaluate $4$ open-source watermarks on $2$ LLMs under $2$ watermarking strengths and observe the common struggles for current methods on maintaining the generation quality. The code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/THU-KEG/WaterBench}.