We all know ChatGPT gets stuff wrong. While that can be amusing, it's less funny if ChatGPT is mistakenly identifies you as a criminal. And it's less funny still if you were in fact the person who originally uncovered the crime in question. Indeed, you might find it so unfunny, you decide to sue for defamation. Which is exactly what Brian Hood, a Melbourne Australia-based politician is doing.

It all started with an idea at Block in 2013. Initially built to take the pain out of peer-to-peer payments, Cash App has gone from a simple product with a single purpose to a dynamic app, bringing a better way to send, spend, invest, borrow and save to our millions of monthly active users. With a mission to redefine the world's relationship with money by making it more relatable, available and accessible, at Cash App you'll have the opportunity to make a real-world impact with your career. Today, Cash App has thousands of employees around the world with a culture geared toward creativity, collaboration and impact. We've been a distributed team since day one, and continue to value working across time zones and continents both remotely and in our Cash App offices.

In this work we derive the performance achievable by a network of distributed agents that solve, adaptively and in the presence of communication constraints, a regression problem. Agents employ the recently proposed ACTC (adapt-compress-then-combine) diffusion strategy, where the signals exchanged locally by neighboring agents are encoded with randomized differential compression operators. We provide a detailed characterization of the mean-square estimation error, which is shown to comprise a term related to the error that agents would achieve without communication constraints, plus a term arising from compression. The analysis reveals quantitative relationships between the compression loss and fundamental attributes of the distributed regression problem, in particular, the stochastic approximation error caused by the gradient noise and the network topology (through the Perron eigenvector). We show that knowledge of such relationships is critical to allocate optimally the communication resources across the agents, taking into account their individual attributes, such as the quality of their data or their degree of centrality in the network topology. We devise an optimized allocation strategy where the parameters necessary for the optimization can be learned online by the agents. Illustrative examples show that a significant performance improvement, as compared to a blind (i.e., uniform) resource allocation, can be achieved by optimizing the allocation by means of the provided mean-square-error formulas.

Previous work has established that RNNs with an unbounded activation function have the capacity to count exactly. However, it has also been shown that RNNs are challenging to train effectively and generally do not learn exact counting behaviour. In this paper, we focus on this problem by studying the simplest possible RNN, a linear single-cell network. We conduct a theoretical analysis of linear RNNs and identify conditions for the models to exhibit exact counting behaviour. We provide a formal proof that these conditions are necessary and sufficient. We also conduct an empirical analysis using tasks involving a Dyck-1-like Balanced Bracket language under two different settings. We observe that linear RNNs generally do not meet the necessary and sufficient conditions for counting behaviour when trained with the standard approach. We investigate how varying the length of training sequences and utilising different target classes impacts model behaviour during training and the ability of linear RNN models to effectively approximate the indicator conditions.

Autonomous robots are required to reason about the behaviour of dynamic agents in their environment. The creation of models to describe these relationships is typically accomplished through the application of causal discovery techniques. However, as it stands observational causal discovery techniques struggle to adequately cope with conditions such as causal sparsity and non-stationarity typically seen during online usage in autonomous agent domains. Meanwhile, interventional techniques are not always feasible due to domain restrictions. In order to better explore the issues facing observational techniques and promote further discussion of these topics we carry out a benchmark across 10 contemporary observational temporal causal discovery methods in the domain of autonomous driving. By evaluating these methods upon causal scenes drawn from real world datasets in addition to those generated synthetically we highlight where improvements need to be made in order to facilitate the application of causal discovery techniques to the aforementioned use-cases. Finally, we discuss potential directions for future work that could help better tackle the difficulties currently experienced by state of the art techniques.

This research sets out to assess the viability of using game engines to generate synthetic training data for machine learning in the context of pallet segmentation. Using synthetic data has been proven in prior research to be a viable means of training neural networks and saves hours of manual labour due to the reduced need for manual image annotation. Machine vision for pallet detection can benefit from synthetic data as the industry increases the development of autonomous warehousing technologies. As per our methodology, we developed a tool capable of automatically generating large amounts of annotated training data from 3D models at pixel-perfect accuracy and a much faster rate than manual approaches. Regarding image segmentation, a Mask R-CNN pipeline was used, which achieved an AP50 of 86% for individual pallets.

There has been concern about ideological basis and possible discrimination in text generated by Large Language Models (LLMs). We test possible value biases in ChatGPT using a psychological value theory. We designed a simple experiment in which we used a number of different probes derived from the Schwartz basic value theory (items from the revised Portrait Value Questionnaire, the value type definitions, value names). We prompted ChatGPT via the OpenAI API repeatedly to generate text and then analyzed the generated corpus for value content with a theory-driven value dictionary using a bag of words approach. Overall, we found little evidence of explicit value bias. The results showed sufficient construct and discriminant validity for the generated text in line with the theoretical predictions of the psychological model, which suggests that the value content was carried through into the outputs with high fidelity. We saw some merging of socially oriented values, which may suggest that these values are less clearly differentiated at a linguistic level or alternatively, this mixing may reflect underlying universal human motivations. We outline some possible applications of our findings for both applications of ChatGPT for corporate usage and policy making as well as future research avenues. We also highlight possible implications of this relatively high-fidelity replication of motivational content using a linguistic model for the theorizing about human values.

The field of deep learning has witnessed significant progress, particularly in computer vision (CV), natural language processing (NLP), and speech. The use of large-scale models trained on vast amounts of data holds immense promise for practical applications, enhancing industrial productivity and facilitating social development. With the increasing demands on computational capacity, though numerous studies have explored the efficient training, a comprehensive summarization on acceleration techniques of training deep learning models is still much anticipated. In this survey, we present a detailed review for training acceleration. We consider the fundamental update formulation and split its basic components into five main perspectives: (1) data-centric: including dataset regularization, data sampling, and data-centric curriculum learning techniques, which can significantly reduce the computational complexity of the data samples; (2) model-centric, including acceleration of basic modules, compression training, model initialization and model-centric curriculum learning techniques, which focus on accelerating the training via reducing the calculations on parameters; (3) optimization-centric, including the selection of learning rate, the employment of large batchsize, the designs of efficient objectives, and model average techniques, which pay attention to the training policy and improving the generality for the large-scale models; (4) budgeted training, including some distinctive acceleration methods on source-constrained situations; (5) system-centric, including some efficient open-source distributed libraries/systems which provide adequate hardware support for the implementation of acceleration algorithms. By presenting this comprehensive taxonomy, our survey presents a comprehensive review to understand the general mechanisms within each component and their joint interaction.

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of language models architectures and strategies for "complex" question-answering (QA, CQA, CPS) with a focus on hybridization. Large Language Models (LLM) are good at leveraging public data on standard problems but once you want to tackle more specific complex questions or problems (e.g. How does the concept of personal freedom vary between different cultures ? What is the best mix of power generation methods to reduce climate change ?) you may need specific architecture, knowledge, skills, methods, sensitive data protection, explainability, human approval and versatile feedback... Recent projects like ChatGPT and GALACTICA have allowed non-specialists to grasp the great potential as well as the equally strong limitations of LLM in complex QA. In this paper, we start by reviewing required skills and evaluation techniques. We integrate findings from the robust community edited research papers BIG, BLOOM and HELM which open source, benchmark and analyze limits and challenges of LLM in terms of tasks complexity and strict evaluation on accuracy (e.g. fairness, robustness, toxicity, ...) as a baseline. We discuss some challenges associated with complex QA, including domain adaptation, decomposition and efficient multi-step QA, long form and non-factoid QA, safety and multi-sensitivity data protection, multimodal search, hallucinations, explainability and truthfulness, temporal reasoning. We analyze current solutions and promising research trends, using elements such as: hybrid LLM architectural patterns, training and prompting strategies, active human reinforcement learning supervised with AI, neuro-symbolic and structured knowledge grounding, program synthesis, iterated decomposition and others.

Due to the long runtime of Data Science (DS) pipelines, even small programming mistakes can be very costly, if they are not detected statically. However, even basic static type checking of DS pipelines is difficult because most are written in Python. Static typing is available in Python only via external linters. These require static type annotations for parameters or results of functions, which many DS libraries do not provide. In this paper, we show how the wealth of Python DS libraries can be used in a statically safe way via Safe-DS, a domain specific language (DSL) for DS. Safe-DS catches conventional type errors plus errors related to range restrictions, data manipulation, and call order of functions, going well beyond the abilities of current Python linters. Python libraries are integrated into Safe-DS via a stub language for specifying the interface of its declarations, and an API-Editor that is able to extract type information from the code and documentation of Python libraries, and automatically generate suitable stubs. Moreover, Safe-DS complements textual DS pipelines with a graphical representation that eases safe development by preventing syntax errors. The seamless synchronization of textual and graphic view lets developers always choose the one best suited for their skills and current task. We think that Safe-DS can make DS development easier, faster, and more reliable, significantly reducing development costs.