Designing domain specific neural networks is a time-consuming, error-prone, and expensive task. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) exists to simplify domain-specific model development but there is a gap in the literature for time series classification on microcontrollers. Therefore, we adapt the concept of differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) to solve the time-series classification problem on resource-constrained microcontrollers (MCUs). We introduce MicroNAS, a domain-specific HW-NAS system integration of DNAS, Latency Lookup Tables, dynamic convolutions and a novel search space specifically designed for time-series classification on MCUs. The resulting system is hardware-aware and can generate neural network architectures that satisfy user-defined limits on the execution latency and peak memory consumption. Our extensive studies on different MCUs and standard benchmark datasets demonstrate that MicroNAS finds MCU-tailored architectures that achieve performance (F1-score) near to state-of-the-art desktop models. We also show that our approach is superior in adhering to memory and latency constraints compared to domain-independent NAS baselines such as DARTS.

Machine learning methods for satellite data have a range of societally relevant applications, but labels used to train models can be difficult or impossible to acquire. Self-supervision is a natural solution in settings with limited labeled data, but current self-supervised models for satellite data fail to take advantage of the characteristics of that data, including the temporal dimension (which is critical for many applications, such as monitoring crop growth) and availability of data from many complementary sensors (which can significantly improve a model's predictive performance). We present Presto (the Pretrained Remote Sensing Transformer), a model pre-trained on remote sensing pixel-timeseries data. By designing Presto specifically for remote sensing data, we can create a significantly smaller but performant model. Presto excels at a wide variety of globally distributed remote sensing tasks and performs competitively with much larger models while requiring far less compute. Presto can be used for transfer learning or as a feature extractor for simple models, enabling efficient deployment at scale.

In the last 5 years, the availability of large audio datasets in African countries has opened unlimited opportunities to build machine intelligence (MI) technologies that are closer to the people and speak, learn, understand, and do businesses in local languages, including for those who cannot read and write. Unfortunately, these audio datasets are not fully exploited by current MI tools, leaving several Africans out of MI business opportunities. Additionally, many state-of-the-art MI models are not culture-aware, and the ethics of their adoption indexes are questionable. The lack thereof is a major drawback in many applications in Africa. This paper summarizes recent developments in machine intelligence in Africa from a multi-layer multiscale and culture-aware ethics perspective, showcasing MI use cases in 54 African countries through 400 articles on MI research, industry, government actions, as well as uses in art, music, the informal economy, and small businesses in Africa. The survey also opens discussions on the reliability of MI rankings and indexes in the African continent as well as algorithmic definitions of unclear terms used in MI.

Crop classification using remote sensing data has emerged as a prominent research area in recent decades. Studies have demonstrated that fusing SAR and optical images can significantly enhance the accuracy of classification. However, a major challenge in this field is the limited availability of training data, which adversely affects the performance of classifiers. In agricultural regions, the dominant crops typically consist of one or two specific types, while other crops are scarce. Consequently, when collecting training samples to create a map of agricultural products, there is an abundance of samples from the dominant crops, forming the majority classes. Conversely, samples from other crops are scarce, representing the minority classes. Addressing this issue requires overcoming several challenges and weaknesses associated with traditional data generation methods. These methods have been employed to tackle the imbalanced nature of the training data. Nevertheless, they still face limitations in effectively handling the minority classes. Overall, the issue of inadequate training data, particularly for minority classes, remains a hurdle that traditional methods struggle to overcome. In this research, We explore the effectiveness of conditional tabular generative adversarial network (CTGAN) as a synthetic data generation method based on a deep learning network, in addressing the challenge of limited training data for minority classes in crop classification using the fusion of SAR-optical data. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed method generates synthetic data with higher quality that can significantly increase the number of samples for minority classes leading to better performance of crop classifiers.

Digital images and videos play a very important role in everyday life. Nowadays, people have access the affordable mobile devices equipped with advanced integrated cameras and powerful image processing applications. Technological development facilitates not only the generation of multimedia content, but also the intentional modification of it, either with recreational or malicious purposes. This is where forensic techniques to detect manipulation of images and videos become essential. This paper proposes a forensic technique by analysing compression algorithms used by the H.264 coding. The presence of recompression uses information of macroblocks, a characteristic of the H.264-MPEG4 standard, and motion vectors. A Vector Support Machine is used to create the model that allows to accurately detect if a video has been recompressed.

In high-stakes systems such as healthcare, it is critical to understand the causal reasons behind unusual events, such as sudden changes in patient's health. Unveiling the causal reasons helps with quick diagnoses and precise treatment planning. In this paper, we propose an automated method for uncovering "if-then" logic rules to explain observational events. We introduce temporal point processes to model the events of interest, and discover the set of latent rules to explain the occurrence of events. To achieve this, we employ an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. In the E-step, we calculate the likelihood of each event being explained by each discovered rule. In the M-step, we update both the rule set and model parameters to enhance the likelihood function's lower bound. Notably, we optimize the rule set in a differential manner. Our approach demonstrates accurate performance in both discovering rules and identifying root causes. We showcase its promising results using synthetic and real healthcare datasets.

-- One of the main challenges in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is real -time processing. High - computational loads linked to data acquisition and processing complicate this task. This article presents an efficient feature extraction approach for mapping structured environments. The proposed methodology, weighted conformal LiDAR-mapping (WCLM), is based on the extraction of polygonal profiles and propagation of uncertainties from raw measurement data. This is achieved using conformal M bius transformation. The algorithm has been validated experimentally using 2 -D data obtained from a low -cost Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) range finder. The results obtained suggest that computational efficiency is significantly improved with reference to other state-of -the -art SLAM approaches.

In this paper, we find that ubiquitous time series (TS) forecasting models are prone to severe overfitting. To cope with this problem, we embrace a de-redundancy approach to progressively reinstate the intrinsic values of TS for future intervals. Specifically, we renovate the vanilla Transformer by reorienting the information aggregation mechanism from addition to subtraction. Then, we incorporate an auxiliary output branch into each block of the original model to construct a highway leading to the ultimate prediction. The output of subsequent modules in this branch will subtract the previously learned results, enabling the model to learn the residuals of the supervision signal, layer by layer. This designing facilitates the learning-driven implicit progressive decomposition of the input and output streams, empowering the model with heightened versatility, interpretability, and resilience against overfitting. Since all aggregations in the model are minus signs, which is called Minusformer. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed method outperform existing state-of-the-art methods, yielding an average performance improvement of 11.9% across various datasets.

Accuracy and efficiency remain challenges for multi-party computation (MPC) frameworks. Spin is a GPU-accelerated MPC framework that supports multiple computation parties and a dishonest majority adversarial setup. We propose optimized protocols for non-linear functions that are critical for machine learning, as well as several novel optimizations specific to attention that is the fundamental unit of Transformer models, allowing Spin to perform non-trivial CNNs training and Transformer inference without sacrificing security. At the backend level, Spin leverages GPU, CPU, and RDMA-enabled smart network cards for acceleration. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that Spin can be up to $2\times$ faster than the state-of-the-art for deep neural network training. For inference on a Transformer model with 18.9 million parameters, our attention-specific optimizations enable Spin to achieve better efficiency, less communication, and better accuracy.

We aim to select data subsets for the fine-tuning of large language models to more effectively follow instructions. Prior work has emphasized the importance of diversity in dataset curation but relied on heuristics such as the number of tasks. In this paper, we use determinantal point processes to capture the diversity and quality of instruction tuning datasets for subset selection. We propose to measure dataset diversity with log determinant distance that is the distance between the dataset of interest and a maximally diverse reference dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed diversity measure in the normalized weight gradient space is correlated with downstream instruction-following performance. Consequently, it can be used to inform when data selection is the most helpful and to analyze dataset curation strategies. We demonstrate the utility of our approach on various instruction tuning datasets.