We present PyThaiNLP, a free and open-source natural language processing (NLP) library for Thai language implemented in Python. It provides a wide range of software, models, and datasets for Thai language. We first provide a brief historical context of tools for Thai language prior to the development of PyThaiNLP. We then outline the functionalities it provided as well as datasets and pre-trained language models. We later summarize its development milestones and discuss our experience during its development. We conclude by demonstrating how industrial and research communities utilize PyThaiNLP in their work. The library is freely available at https://github.com/pythainlp/pythainlp.

Modeling spatial-temporal interactions among neighboring agents is at the heart of multi-agent problems such as motion forecasting and crowd navigation. Despite notable progress, it remains unclear to which extent modern representations can capture the causal relationships behind agent interactions. In this work, we take an in-depth look at the causal awareness of these representations, from computational formalism to real-world practice. First, we cast doubt on the notion of non-causal robustness studied in the recent CausalAgents benchmark. We show that recent representations are already partially resilient to perturbations of non-causal agents, and yet modeling indirect causal effects involving mediator agents remains challenging. To address this challenge, we introduce a metric learning approach that regularizes latent representations with causal annotations. Our controlled experiments show that this approach not only leads to higher degrees of causal awareness but also yields stronger out-of-distribution robustness. To further operationalize it in practice, we propose a sim-to-real causal transfer method via cross-domain multi-task learning. Experiments on pedestrian datasets show that our method can substantially boost generalization, even in the absence of real-world causal annotations. We hope our work provides a new perspective on the challenges and potential pathways towards causally-aware representations of multi-agent interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/socialcausality.

Code provides a general syntactic structure to build complex programs and perform precise computations when paired with a code interpreter - we hypothesize that language models (LMs) can leverage code-writing to improve Chain of Thought reasoning not only for logic and arithmetic tasks, but also for semantic ones (and in particular, those that are a mix of both). For example, consider prompting an LM to write code that counts the number of times it detects sarcasm in an essay: the LM may struggle to write an implementation for "detect_sarcasm(string)" that can be executed by the interpreter (handling the edge cases would be insurmountable). However, LMs may still produce a valid solution if they not only write code, but also selectively "emulate" the interpreter by generating the expected output of "detect_sarcasm(string)" and other lines of code that cannot be executed. In this work, we propose Chain of Code (CoC), a simple yet surprisingly effective extension that improves LM code-driven reasoning. The key idea is to encourage LMs to format semantic sub-tasks in a program as flexible pseudocode that the interpreter can explicitly catch undefined behaviors and hand off to simulate with an LM (as an "LMulator"). Experiments demonstrate that Chain of Code outperforms Chain of Thought and other baselines across a variety of benchmarks; on BIG-Bench Hard, Chain of Code achieves 84%, a gain of 12% over Chain of Thought. CoC scales well with large and small models alike, and broadens the scope of reasoning questions that LMs can correctly answer by "thinking in code". Project webpage: https://chain-of-code.github.io.

The performance of automatic summarization models has improved dramatically in recent years. Yet, there is still a gap in meeting specific information needs of users in real-world scenarios, particularly when a targeted summary is sought, such as in the useful aspect-based summarization setting targeted in this paper. Previous datasets and studies for this setting have predominantly concentrated on a limited set of pre-defined aspects, focused solely on single document inputs, or relied on synthetic data. To advance research on more realistic scenarios, we introduce OpenAsp, a benchmark for multi-document \textit{open} aspect-based summarization. This benchmark is created using a novel and cost-effective annotation protocol, by which an open aspect dataset is derived from existing generic multi-document summarization datasets. We analyze the properties of OpenAsp showcasing its high-quality content. Further, we show that the realistic open-aspect setting realized in OpenAsp poses a challenge for current state-of-the-art summarization models, as well as for large language models.

Humans seek information regarding a specific topic through performing a conversation containing a series of questions and answers. In the pursuit of conversational question answering research, we introduce the PCoQA, the first \textbf{P}ersian \textbf{Co}nversational \textbf{Q}uestion \textbf{A}nswering dataset, a resource comprising information-seeking dialogs encompassing a total of 9,026 contextually-driven questions. Each dialog involves a questioner, a responder, and a document from the Wikipedia; The questioner asks several inter-connected questions from the text and the responder provides a span of the document as the answer for each question. PCoQA is designed to present novel challenges compared to previous question answering datasets including having more open-ended non-factual answers, longer answers, and fewer lexical overlaps. This paper not only presents the comprehensive PCoQA dataset but also reports the performance of various benchmark models. Our models include baseline models and pre-trained models, which are leveraged to boost the performance of the model. The dataset and benchmarks are available at our Github page.

Pesticides serve as a common tool in agricultural pest control but significantly contribute to the climate crisis. To combat this, Integrated Pest Management (IPM) stands as a climate-smart alternative. Despite its potential, IPM faces low adoption rates due to farmers' skepticism about its effectiveness. To address this challenge, we introduce an advanced data analysis framework tailored to enhance IPM adoption. Our framework provides i) robust pest population predictions across diverse environments with invariant and causal learning, ii) interpretable pest presence predictions using transparent models, iii) actionable advice through counterfactual explanations for in-season IPM interventions, iv) field-specific treatment effect estimations, and v) assessments of the effectiveness of our advice using causal inference. By incorporating these features, our framework aims to alleviate skepticism and encourage wider adoption of IPM practices among farmers.

Model merging aims to cheaply combine individual task-specific models into a single multitask model. In this work, we view past merging methods as leveraging different notions of a ''task subspace'' in which models are matched before being merged. We connect the task subspace of a given model to its loss landscape and formalize how this approach to model merging can be seen as solving a linear system of equations. While past work has generally been limited to linear systems that have a closed-form solution, we consider using the conjugate gradient method to find a solution. We show that using the conjugate gradient method can outperform closed-form solutions, enables merging via linear systems that are otherwise intractable to solve, and flexibly allows choosing from a wide variety of initializations and estimates for the ''task subspace''. We ultimately demonstrate that our merging framework called ''Matching Models in their Task Subspace'' (MaTS) achieves state-of-the-art results in multitask and intermediate-task model merging. We release all of the code and checkpoints used in our work at https://github.com/r-three/mats.

Satellite imagery solutions are widely used to study and monitor different regions of the Earth. However, a single satellite image can cover only a limited area. In cases where a larger area of interest is studied, several images must be stitched together to create a single larger image, called a mosaic, that can cover the area. Today, with the increasing number of satellite images available for commercial use, selecting the images to build the mosaic is challenging, especially when the user wants to optimize one or more parameters, such as the total cost and the cloud coverage percentage in the mosaic. More precisely, for this problem the input is an area of interest, several satellite images intersecting the area, a list of requirements relative to the image and the mosaic, such as cloud coverage percentage, image resolution, and a list of objectives to optimize. We contribute to the constraint and mixed integer lineal programming formulation of this new problem, which we call the \textit{satellite image mosaic selection problem}, which is a multi-objective extension of the polygon cover problem. We propose a dataset of realistic and challenging instances, where the images were captured by the satellite constellations SPOT, Pl\'eiades and Pl\'eiades Neo. We evaluate and compare the two proposed models and show their efficiency for large instances, up to 200 images.

Abstract--Multivariate time-series data in numerous realworld applications (e.g., healthcare and industry) are informative but challenging due to the lack of labels and high dimensionality. Recent studies in self-supervised learning have shown their potential in learning rich representations without relying on labels, yet they fall short in learning disentangled embeddings and addressing issues of inductive bias (e.g., transformationinvariance). To tackle these challenges, we propose TimeDRL, a generic multivariate time-series representation learning framework with disentangled dual-level embeddings. The first challenge in SSL for time-series data is learning I. Existing approaches Multivariate time-series data are widely used in various focus on deriving either timestamp-level [12], [13] or instancelevel applications, such as forecasting for electric power [1], [2], embeddings [14]-[16], but not both at the same time. These time-series timestamp-level embeddings are effective for anomaly datasets are rich in information, but the patterns within and detection and forecasting, whereas instance-level embeddings across temporal dimensions are not discernible by humans, are suited for classification and clustering tasks [17]. Recently, we can theoretically avoid explicitly deriving instance-level there has been a growing trend among researchers to first learn embeddings by extracting them from timestamp-level embeddings representations/embeddings from a large amount of unlabeled using pooling methods (as illustrated in Figure 1(a)) [12], data using unsupervised representation learning and then to this approach often results in the anisotropy problem [18]- fine-tune these models with a limited amount of labeled data [20], where the embeddings are confined to a narrow cone for specific downstream tasks. Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a prominent method To the best of our knowledge, how to disentangle within unsupervised representation learning, which captures instance-level embeddings from timestamp-level embeddings generalizable representations from unlabeled data with pretext in the time-series domain remains an unexplored problem. The left sections (a) and (c) represent predictive learning, utilizing a single representation to predict inherent data characteristics.

Automated coaching messages for weight control can save time and costs, but their repetitive, generic nature may limit their effectiveness compared to human coaching. Large language model (LLM) based artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, like ChatGPT, could offer more personalized and novel messages to address repetition with their data-processing abilities. While LLM AI demonstrates promise to encourage healthier lifestyles, studies have yet to examine the feasibility and acceptability of LLM-based BWL coaching. 87 adults in a weight-loss trial rated ten coaching messages' helpfulness (five human-written, five ChatGPT-generated) using a 5-point Likert scale, providing additional open-ended feedback to justify their ratings. Participants also identified which messages they believed were AI-generated. The evaluation occurred in two phases: messages in Phase 1 were perceived as impersonal and negative, prompting revisions for Phase 2 messages. In Phase 1, AI-generated messages were rated less helpful than human-written ones, with 66 percent receiving a helpfulness rating of 3 or higher. However, in Phase 2, the AI messages matched the human-written ones regarding helpfulness, with 82% scoring three or above. Additionally, 50% were misidentified as human-written, suggesting AI's sophistication in mimicking human-generated content. A thematic analysis of open-ended feedback revealed that participants appreciated AI's empathy and personalized suggestions but found them more formulaic, less authentic, and too data-focused. This study reveals the preliminary feasibility and acceptability of LLM AIs, like ChatGPT, in crafting potentially effective weight control coaching messages. Our findings also underscore areas for future enhancement.