This paper introduces Precipitation Attention-based U-Net (PAUNet), a deep learning architecture for predicting precipitation from satellite radiance data, addressing the challenges of the Weather4cast 2023 competition. PAUNet is a variant of U-Net and Res-Net, designed to effectively capture the large-scale contextual information of multi-band satellite images in visible, water vapor, and infrared bands through encoder convolutional layers with center cropping and attention mechanisms. We built upon the Focal Precipitation Loss including an exponential component (e-FPL), which further enhanced the importance across different precipitation categories, particularly medium and heavy rain. Trained on a substantial dataset from various European regions, PAUNet demonstrates notable accuracy with a higher Critical Success Index (CSI) score than the baseline model in predicting rainfall over multiple time slots.

Geographic location is essential for modeling tasks in fields ranging from ecology to epidemiology to the Earth system sciences. However, extracting relevant and meaningful characteristics of a location can be challenging, often entailing expensive data fusion or data distillation from global imagery datasets. To address this challenge, we introduce Satellite Contrastive Location-Image Pretraining (SatCLIP), a global, general-purpose geographic location encoder that learns an implicit representation of locations from openly available satellite imagery. Trained location encoders provide vector embeddings summarizing the characteristics of any given location for convenient usage in diverse downstream tasks. We show that SatCLIP embeddings, pretrained on globally sampled multi-spectral Sentinel-2 satellite data, can be used in various predictive tasks that depend on location information but not necessarily satellite imagery, including temperature prediction, animal recognition in imagery, and population density estimation. Across tasks, SatCLIP embeddings consistently outperform embeddings from existing pretrained location encoders, ranging from models trained on natural images to models trained on semantic context. SatCLIP embeddings also help to improve geographic generalization. This demonstrates the potential of general-purpose location encoders and opens the door to learning meaningful representations of our planet from the vast, varied, and largely untapped modalities of geospatial data.

Imitation Learning (IL) holds great promise for enabling agile locomotion in embodied agents. However, many existing locomotion benchmarks primarily focus on simplified toy tasks, often failing to capture the complexity of real-world scenarios and steering research toward unrealistic domains. To advance research in IL for locomotion, we present a novel benchmark designed to facilitate rigorous evaluation and comparison of IL algorithms. This benchmark encompasses a diverse set of environments, including quadrupeds, bipeds, and musculoskeletal human models, each accompanied by comprehensive datasets, such as real noisy motion capture data, ground truth expert data, and ground truth sub-optimal data, enabling evaluation across a spectrum of difficulty levels. To increase the robustness of learned agents, we provide an easy interface for dynamics randomization and offer a wide range of partially observable tasks to train agents across different embodiments. Finally, we provide handcrafted metrics for each task and ship our benchmark with state-of-the-art baseline algorithms to ease evaluation and enable fast benchmarking.

Some of the most powerful language models currently are proprietary systems, accessible only via (typically restrictive) web or software programming interfaces. This is the Language-Models-as-a-Service (LMaaS) paradigm. In contrast with scenarios where full model access is available, as in the case of open-source models, such closed-off language models present specific challenges for evaluating, benchmarking, and testing them. This paper has two goals: on the one hand, we delineate how the aforementioned challenges act as impediments to the accessibility, replicability, reliability, and trustworthiness of LMaaS. We systematically examine the issues that arise from a lack of information about language models for each of these four aspects. We conduct a detailed analysis of existing solutions and put forth a number of considered recommendations, and highlight the directions for future advancements. On the other hand, it serves as a comprehensive resource for existing knowledge on current, major LMaaS, offering a synthesized overview of the licences and capabilities their interfaces offer.

Vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained on web-scale datasets have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on downstream tasks when fine-tuned with minimal data. However, many VLMs rely on proprietary data and are not open-source, which restricts the use of white-box approaches for fine-tuning. As such, we aim to develop a black-box approach to optimize VLMs through natural language prompts, thereby avoiding the need to access model parameters, feature embeddings, or even output logits. We propose employing chat-based LLMs to search for the best text prompt for VLMs. Specifically, we adopt an automatic hill-climbing procedure that converges to an effective prompt by evaluating the performance of current prompts and asking LLMs to refine them based on textual feedback, all within a conversational process without human-in-the-loop. In a challenging 1-shot image classification setup, our simple approach surpasses the white-box continuous prompting method (CoOp) by an average of 1.5% across 11 datasets including ImageNet. Our approach also outperforms both human-engineered and LLM-generated prompts. We highlight the advantage of conversational feedback that incorporates both positive and negative prompts, suggesting that LLMs can utilize the implicit gradient direction in textual feedback for a more efficient search. In addition, we find that the text prompts generated through our strategy are not only more interpretable but also transfer well across different VLM architectures in a black-box manner. Lastly, we demonstrate our framework on a state-of-the-art black-box VLM (DALL-E 3) for text-to-image optimization.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, gathering high-quality human preference labels can be a time-consuming and expensive endeavor. RL from AI Feedback (RLAIF), introduced by Bai et al., offers a promising alternative that leverages a powerful off-the-shelf LLM to generate preferences in lieu of human annotators. Across the tasks of summarization, helpful dialogue generation, and harmless dialogue generation, RLAIF achieves comparable or superior performance to RLHF, as rated by human evaluators. Furthermore, RLAIF demonstrates the ability to outperform a supervised fine-tuned baseline even when the LLM preference labeler is the same size as the policy. In another experiment, directly prompting the LLM for reward scores achieves superior performance to the canonical RLAIF setup, where LLM preference labels are first distilled into a reward model. Finally, we conduct extensive studies on techniques for generating aligned AI preferences. Our results suggest that RLAIF can achieve human-level performance, offering a potential solution to the scalability limitations of RLHF.

Bug reports are an essential aspect of software development, and it is crucial to identify and resolve them quickly to ensure the consistent functioning of software systems. Retrieving similar bug reports from an existing database can help reduce the time and effort required to resolve bugs. In this paper, we compared the effectiveness of semantic textual similarity methods for retrieving similar bug reports based on a similarity score. We explored several embedding models such as TF-IDF (Baseline), FastText, Gensim, BERT, and ADA. We used the Software Defects Data containing bug reports for various software projects to evaluate the performance of these models. Our experimental results showed that BERT generally outperformed the rest of the models regarding recall, followed by ADA, Gensim, FastText, and TFIDF. Our study provides insights into the effectiveness of different embedding methods for retrieving similar bug reports and highlights the impact of selecting the appropriate one for this task. Our code is available on GitHub.

As the deployment of computer vision technology becomes increasingly common in science, the need for explanations of the system and its output has become a focus of great concern. Driven by the pressing need for interpretable models in science, we propose the use of Explainable Boosting Machines (EBMs) for scientific image data. Inspired by an important application underpinning the development of quantum technologies, we apply EBMs to cold-atom soliton image data tabularized using Gabor Wavelet Transform-based techniques that preserve the spatial structure of the data. In doing so, we demonstrate the use of EBMs for image data for the first time and show that our approach provides explanations that are consistent with human intuition about the data.

Text simplification (TS) systems rewrite text to make it more readable while preserving its content. However, what makes a text easy to read depends on the intended readers. Recent work has shown that pre-trained language models can simplify text using a wealth of techniques to control output simplicity, ranging from specifying only the desired reading grade level, to directly specifying low-level edit operations. Yet it remains unclear how to set these control parameters in practice. Existing approaches set them at the corpus level, disregarding the complexity of individual inputs and considering only one level of output complexity. In this work, we conduct an empirical study to understand how different control mechanisms impact the adequacy and simplicity of text simplification systems. Based on these insights, we introduce a simple method that predicts the edit operations required for simplifying a text for a specific grade level on an instance-per-instance basis. This approach improves the quality of the simplified outputs over corpus-level search-based heuristics.

Many real-world applications (e.g., note taking, search) require extracting a sentence or paragraph from a document and showing that snippet to a human outside of the source document. Yet, users may find snippets difficult to understand as they lack context from the original document. In this work, we use language models to rewrite snippets from scientific documents to be read on their own. First, we define the requirements and challenges for this user-facing decontextualization task, such as clarifying where edits occur and handling references to other documents. Second, we propose a framework that decomposes the task into three stages: question generation, question answering, and rewriting. Using this framework, we collect gold decontextualizations from experienced scientific article readers. We then conduct a range of experiments across state-of-the-art commercial and open-source language models to identify how to best provide missing-but-relevant information to models for our task. Finally, we develop QaDecontext, a simple prompting strategy inspired by our framework that improves over end-to-end prompting. We conclude with analysis that finds, while rewriting is easy, question generation and answering remain challenging for today's models.