The Argentinian real estate market presents a unique case study characterized by its unstable and rapidly shifting macroeconomic circumstances over the past decades. Despite the existence of a few datasets for price prediction, there is a lack of mixed modality datasets specifically focused on Argentina. In this paper, the first edition of ARED is introduced. A comprehensive real estate price prediction dataset series, designed for the Argentinian market. This edition contains information solely for Jan-Feb 2024. It was found that despite the short time range captured by this zeroth edition (44 days), time dependent phenomena has been occurring mostly on a market level (market as a whole). Nevertheless future editions of this dataset, will most likely contain historical data. Each listing in ARED comprises descriptive features, and variable-length sets of images.

This paper investigates the use of large language models (LLMs) for extracting sample lists of polymer nanocomposites (PNCs) from full-length materials science research papers. The challenge lies in the complex nature of PNC samples, which have numerous attributes scattered throughout the text. The complexity of annotating detailed information on PNCs limits the availability of data, making conventional document-level relation extraction techniques impractical due to the challenge in creating comprehensive named entity span annotations. To address this, we introduce a new benchmark and an evaluation technique for this task and explore different prompting strategies in a zero-shot manner. We also incorporate self-consistency to improve the performance. Our findings show that even advanced LLMs struggle to extract all of the samples from an article. Finally, we analyze the errors encountered in this process, categorizing them into three main challenges, and discuss potential strategies for future research to overcome them.

In this paper, we develop upon the topic of loss function learning, an emergent meta-learning paradigm that aims to learn loss functions that significantly improve the performance of the models trained under them. Specifically, we propose a new meta-learning framework for task and model-agnostic loss function learning via a hybrid search approach. The framework first uses genetic programming to find a set of symbolic loss functions. Second, the set of learned loss functions is subsequently parameterized and optimized via unrolled differentiation. The versatility and performance of the proposed framework are empirically validated on a diverse set of supervised learning tasks. Results show that the learned loss functions bring improved convergence, sample efficiency, and inference performance on tabulated, computer vision, and natural language processing problems, using a variety of task-specific neural network architectures.

Recent years have witnessed a significant increase in the performance of Vision and Language tasks. Foundational Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have been leveraged in multiple settings and demonstrated remarkable performance across several tasks. Such models excel at object-centric recognition yet learn text representations that seem invariant to word order, failing to compose known concepts in novel ways. However, no evidence exists that any VLM, including large-scale single-stream models such as GPT-4V, identifies compositions successfully. In this paper, we introduce a framework to significantly improve the ability of existing models to encode compositional language, with over 10% absolute improvement on compositionality benchmarks, while maintaining or improving the performance on standard object-recognition and retrieval benchmarks. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/netflix/clove.

Iterative combinatorial auctions are widely used in high stakes settings such as spectrum auctions. Such auctions can be hard to understand analytically, making it difficult for bidders to determine how to behave and for designers to optimize auction rules to ensure desirable outcomes such as high revenue or welfare. In this paper, we investigate whether multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms can be used to understand iterative combinatorial auctions, given that these algorithms have recently shown empirical success in several other domains. We find that MARL can indeed benefit auction analysis, but that deploying it effectively is nontrivial. We begin by describing modelling decisions that keep the resulting game tractable without sacrificing important features such as imperfect information or asymmetry between bidders. We also discuss how to navigate pitfalls of various MARL algorithms, how to overcome challenges in verifying convergence, and how to generate and interpret multiple equilibria. We illustrate the promise of our resulting approach by using it to evaluate a specific rule change to a clock auction, finding substantially different auction outcomes due to complex changes in bidders' behavior.

In this paper we present PeLLE, a family of large language models based on the RoBERTa architecture, for Brazilian Portuguese, trained on curated, open data from the Carolina corpus. Aiming at reproducible results, we describe details of the pretraining of the models. We also evaluate PeLLE models against a set of existing multilingual and PT-BR refined pretrained Transformer-based LLM encoders, contrasting performance of large versus smaller-but-curated pretrained models in several downstream tasks. We conclude that several tasks perform better with larger models, but some tasks benefit from smaller-but-curated data in its pretraining.

As the usage of large language models (LLMs) grows, performing efficient inference with these models becomes increasingly important. While speculative decoding has recently emerged as a promising direction for speeding up inference, existing methods are limited in their ability to scale to larger speculation budgets, and adapt to different hyperparameters and hardware. This paper introduces Sequoia, a scalable, robust, and hardware-aware algorithm for speculative decoding. To attain better scalability, Sequoia introduces a dynamic programming algorithm to find the optimal tree structure for the speculated tokens. To achieve robust speculative performance, Sequoia uses a novel sampling and verification method that outperforms prior work across different decoding temperatures. Finally, Sequoia introduces a hardware-aware tree optimizer that maximizes speculative performance by automatically selecting the token tree size and depth for a given hardware platform. Evaluation shows that Sequoia improves the decoding speed of Llama2-7B, Llama2-13B, and Vicuna-33B on an A100 by up to $4.04\times$, $3.73\times$, and $2.27\times$. For offloading setting on L40, Sequoia achieves as low as 0.56 s/token for exact Llama2-70B inference latency, which is $9.96\times$ on our optimized offloading system (5.6 s/token), $9.7\times$ than DeepSpeed-Zero-Inference, $19.5\times$ than Huggingface Accelerate.

Effective communication between humans and collaborative robots is essential for seamless Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC). In noisy industrial settings, nonverbal communication, such as gestures, plays a key role in conveying commands and information to robots efficiently. While existing literature has thoroughly examined gesture recognition and robots' responses to these gestures, there is a notable gap in exploring the design of these gestures. The criteria for creating efficient HRC gestures are scattered across numerous studies. This paper surveys the design principles of HRC gestures, as contained in the literature, aiming to consolidate a set of criteria for HRC gesture design. It also examines the methods used for designing and evaluating HRC gestures to highlight research gaps and present directions for future research in this area.

February 16th started like any typical Friday night. My husband and I decided to stay home, grill chicken and make a salad for dinner. At about 6:45 p.m., we heard some loud rumbling overhead. We walked onto the back patio, and two police helicopters were overhead -- shining lights all over our property, and a recording echoed, "Police. As I looked across the fence, a swarm of armed members of the Phoenix SWAT Team with a few dogs were circling our property. One of the guys said, "Yeah, there's a jammer right here." I leaned over the patio and asked, "What's going on?" A SWAT member said, "Ma'am, A South American gang is targeting homes to steal from.

We introduce AutoVER, an Autoregressive model for Visual Entity Recognition. Our model extends an autoregressive Multi-modal Large Language Model by employing retrieval augmented constrained generation. It mitigates low performance on out-of-domain entities while excelling in queries that require visually-situated reasoning. Our method learns to distinguish similar entities within a vast label space by contrastively training on hard negative pairs in parallel with a sequence-to-sequence objective without an external retriever. During inference, a list of retrieved candidate answers explicitly guides language generation by removing invalid decoding paths. The proposed method achieves significant improvements across different dataset splits in the recently proposed Oven-Wiki benchmark. Accuracy on the Entity seen split rises from 32.7% to 61.5%. It also demonstrates superior performance on the unseen and query splits by a substantial double-digit margin.