As climate change issues become more pressing, their impact in Africa calls for urgent, innovative solutions tailored to the continent's unique challenges. While Artificial Intelligence (AI) emerges as a critical and valuable tool for climate change adaptation and mitigation, its effectiveness and potential are contingent upon overcoming significant challenges such as data scarcity, infrastructure gaps, and limited local AI development. This position paper explores the role of AI in climate change adaptation and mitigation in Africa. It advocates for a collaborative approach to build capacity, develop open-source data repositories, and create context-aware, robust AI-driven climate solutions that are culturally and contextually relevant.

While the field of medical image analysis has undergone a transformative shift with the integration of machine learning techniques, the main challenge of these techniques is often the scarcity of large, diverse, and well-annotated datasets. Medical images vary in format, size, and other parameters and therefore require extensive preprocessing and standardization, for usage in machine learning. Addressing these challenges, we introduce the Medical Imaging Meta-Dataset (MedIMeta), a novel multi-domain, multi-task meta-dataset. MedIMeta contains 19 medical imaging datasets spanning 10 different domains and encompassing 54 distinct medical tasks, all of which are standardized to the same format and readily usable in PyTorch or other ML frameworks. We perform a technical validation of MedIMeta, demonstrating its utility through fully supervised and cross-domain few-shot learning baselines.

The awareness of multi-cultural human values is critical to the ability of language models (LMs) to generate safe and personalized responses. However, this awareness of LMs has been insufficiently studied, since the computer science community lacks access to the large-scale real-world data about multi-cultural values. In this paper, we present WorldValuesBench, a globally diverse, large-scale benchmark dataset for the multi-cultural value prediction task, which requires a model to generate a rating response to a value question based on demographic contexts. Our dataset is derived from an influential social science project, World Values Survey (WVS), that has collected answers to hundreds of value questions (e.g., social, economic, ethical) from 94,728 participants worldwide. We have constructed more than 20 million examples of the type "(demographic attributes, value question) $\rightarrow$ answer" from the WVS responses. We perform a case study using our dataset and show that the task is challenging for strong open and closed-source models. On merely $11.1\%$, $25.0\%$, $72.2\%$, and $75.0\%$ of the questions, Alpaca-7B, Vicuna-7B-v1.5, Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1, and GPT-3.5 Turbo can respectively achieve $<0.2$ Wasserstein 1-distance from the human normalized answer distributions. WorldValuesBench opens up new research avenues in studying limitations and opportunities in multi-cultural value awareness of LMs.

Analyzing volumetric data with rotational invariance or equivariance is an active topic in current research. Existing deep-learning approaches utilize either group convolutional networks limited to discrete rotations or steerable convolutional networks with constrained filter structures. This work proposes a novel equivariant neural network architecture that achieves analytical Equivariance to Local Pattern Orientation on the continuous SO(3) group while allowing unconstrained trainable filters - EquiLoPO Network. Our key innovations are a group convolutional operation leveraging irreducible representations as the Fourier basis and a local activation function in the SO(3) space that provides a well-defined mapping from input to output functions, preserving equivariance. By integrating these operations into a ResNet-style architecture, we propose a model that overcomes the limitations of prior methods. A comprehensive evaluation on diverse 3D medical imaging datasets from MedMNIST3D demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, which consistently outperforms state of the art. This work suggests the benefits of true rotational equivariance on SO(3) and flexible unconstrained filters enabled by the local activation function, providing a flexible framework for equivariant deep learning on volumetric data with potential applications across domains. Our code is publicly available at \url{https://gricad-gitlab.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/GruLab/ILPO/-/tree/main/EquiLoPO}.

Effective recognition of spatial patterns and learning their hierarchy is crucial in modern spatial data analysis. Volumetric data applications seek techniques ensuring invariance not only to shifts but also to pattern rotations. While traditional methods can readily achieve translational invariance, rotational invariance possesses multiple challenges and remains an active area of research. Here, we present ILPO-Net (Invariant to Local Patterns Orientation Network), a novel approach that handles arbitrarily shaped patterns with the convolutional operation inherently invariant to local spatial pattern orientations using the Wigner matrix expansions. Our architecture seamlessly integrates the new convolution operator and, when benchmarked on diverse volumetric datasets such as MedMNIST and CATH, demonstrates superior performance over the baselines with significantly reduced parameter counts - up to 1000 times fewer in the case of MedMNIST. Beyond these demonstrations, ILPO-Net's rotational invariance paves the way for other applications across multiple disciplines. Our code is publicly available at https://gricad-gitlab.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/GruLab/ILPO/-/tree/main/ILPONet.

Modular deep learning is the state-of-the-art solution for lifting the curse of multilinguality, preventing the impact of negative interference and enabling cross-lingual performance in Multilingual Pre-trained Language Models. However, a trade-off of this approach is the reduction in positive transfer learning from closely related languages. In response, we introduce a novel method called language arithmetic, which enables training-free post-processing to address this limitation. Inspired by the task arithmetic framework, we apply learning via addition to the language adapters, transitioning the framework from a multi-task to a multilingual setup. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is demonstrated on three downstream tasks in a MAD-X-based set of cross-lingual schemes, acting as a post-processing procedure. Language arithmetic consistently improves the baselines with significant gains in the most challenging cases of zero-shot and low-resource applications. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/mklimasz/language-arithmetic .

The pretraining of state-of-the-art large language models now requires trillions of words of text, which is orders of magnitude more than available for the vast majority of languages. While including text in more than one language is an obvious way to acquire more pretraining data, multilinguality is often seen as a curse, and most model training efforts continue to focus near-exclusively on individual large languages. We believe that multilinguality can be a blessing and that it should be possible to substantially improve over the capabilities of monolingual models for small languages through multilingual training. In this study, we introduce Poro 34B, a 34 billion parameter model trained for 1 trillion tokens of Finnish, English, and programming languages, and demonstrate that a multilingual training approach can produce a model that not only substantially advances over the capabilities of existing models for Finnish, but also excels in translation and is competitive in its class in generating English and programming languages. We release the model parameters, scripts, and data under open licenses at https://huggingface.co/LumiOpen/Poro-34B.

Federated learning is an emerging machine learning approach that allows the construction of a model between several participants who hold their own private data. This method is secure and privacy-preserving, suitable for training a machine learning model using sensitive data from different sources, such as hospitals. In this paper, the authors propose two innovative methodologies for Particle Swarm Optimisation-based federated learning of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps in a privacy-preserving way. In addition, one relevant contribution this research includes is the lack of an initial model in the federated learning process, making it effectively blind. This proposal is tested with several open datasets, improving both accuracy and precision.

This study explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automatic evaluation of knowledge graph (KG) completion models. Historically, validating information in KGs has been a challenging task, requiring large-scale human annotation at prohibitive cost. With the emergence of general-purpose generative AI and LLMs, it is now plausible that human-in-the-loop validation could be replaced by a generative agent. We introduce a framework for consistency and validation when using generative models to validate knowledge graphs. Our framework is based upon recent open-source developments for structural and semantic validation of LLM outputs, and upon flexible approaches to fact checking and verification, supported by the capacity to reference external knowledge sources of any kind. The design is easy to adapt and extend, and can be used to verify any kind of graph-structured data through a combination of model-intrinsic knowledge, user-supplied context, and agents capable of external knowledge retrieval.

Symbolic Regression (SR) is a widely studied field of research that aims to infer symbolic expressions from data. A popular approach for SR is the Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems (\sindy) framework, which uses sparse regression to identify governing equations from data. This study introduces an enhanced method, Nested SINDy, that aims to increase the expressivity of the SINDy approach thanks to a nested structure. Indeed, traditional symbolic regression and system identification methods often fail with complex systems that cannot be easily described analytically. Nested SINDy builds on the SINDy framework by introducing additional layers before and after the core SINDy layer. This allows the method to identify symbolic representations for a wider range of systems, including those with compositions and products of functions. We demonstrate the ability of the Nested SINDy approach to accurately find symbolic expressions for simple systems, such as basic trigonometric functions, and sparse (false but accurate) analytical representations for more complex systems. Our results highlight Nested SINDy's potential as a tool for symbolic regression, surpassing the traditional SINDy approach in terms of expressivity. However, we also note the challenges in the optimization process for Nested SINDy and suggest future research directions, including the designing of a more robust methodology for the optimization process. This study proves that Nested SINDy can effectively discover symbolic representations of dynamical systems from data, offering new opportunities for understanding complex systems through data-driven methods.