This is especially true in environmental sciences that are rapidly transitioning from being data-poor to data-rich, e.g., with the ever-increasing volumes of environmental data being collected by Earth observing satellites, in-situ sensors, and those generated by model simulations (e.g., climate model runs [113]). Similar to how recent developments in ML has transformed how we interact with the information on the Internet, it is befitting to ask how ML advances can enable Earth system scientists to transform a fundamental goal in science, which is to build better models of physical, biological, and environmental systems. The conventional approach for modeling relationships between input drivers and response variables is to use process-based models rooted in scientific equations. Despite their ability to leverage the mechanistic understanding of scientific phenomena, process-based models suffer from several shortcomings limiting their adoption in complex real-world settings, e.g., due to imperfections in model formulations (or modeling bias), incorrect choices of parameter values in equations, and high computational costs in running high-fidelity simulations. In response to these challenges, ML methods offer a promising alternative to capture statistical relationships between inputs and outputs directly from data. However, "black-box" ML models, that solely rely on the supervision contained in data, show limited generalizability in scientific problems, especially when applied to out-of-distribution data. One of the reasons for this lack of generalizability is the limited scale of data in scientific disciplines in contrast to mainstream applications of AI and ML where large-scale datasets in computer vision and natural language modeling have been instrumental in the success of state-of-the-art AI/ML models. Another fundamental deficiency in black-box ML models is their tendency to produce results that are inconsistent with existing scientific theories and their inability to provide a mechanistic understanding of discovered patterns and relationships from data, limiting their usefulness in science.

Dynamic Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) combine temporal information with GNNs to capture structural, temporal, and contextual relationships in dynamic graphs simultaneously, leading to enhanced performance in various applications. As the demand for dynamic GNNs continues to grow, numerous models and frameworks have emerged to cater to different application needs. There is a pressing need for a comprehensive survey that evaluates the performance, strengths, and limitations of various approaches in this domain. This paper aims to fill this gap by offering a thorough comparative analysis and experimental evaluation of dynamic GNNs. It covers 81 dynamic GNN models with a novel taxonomy, 12 dynamic GNN training frameworks, and commonly used benchmarks. We also conduct experimental results from testing representative nine dynamic GNN models and three frameworks on six standard graph datasets. Evaluation metrics focus on convergence accuracy, training efficiency, and GPU memory usage, enabling a thorough comparison of performance across various models and frameworks. From the analysis and evaluation results, we identify key challenges and offer principles for future research to enhance the design of models and frameworks in the dynamic GNNs field.

The rapid progress of research aimed at interpreting the inner workings of advanced language models has highlighted a need for contextualizing the insights gained from years of work in this area. This primer provides a concise technical introduction to the current techniques used to interpret the inner workings of Transformer-based language models, focusing on the generative decoder-only architecture. We conclude by presenting a comprehensive overview of the known internal mechanisms implemented by these models, uncovering connections across popular approaches and active research directions in this area.

Natural language generation tools are powerful and effective for generating content. However, language models are known to display bias and fairness issues, making them impractical to deploy for many use cases. We here focus on how fairness issues impact automatically generated test content, which can have stringent requirements to ensure the test measures only what it was intended to measure. Specifically, we review test content generated for a large-scale standardized English proficiency test with the goal of identifying content that only pertains to a certain subset of the test population as well as content that has the potential to be upsetting or distracting to some test takers. Issues like these could inadvertently impact a test taker's score and thus should be avoided. This kind of content does not reflect the more commonly-acknowledged biases, making it challenging even for modern models that contain safeguards. We build a dataset of 601 generated texts annotated for fairness and explore a variety of methods for classification: fine-tuning, topic-based classification, and prompting, including few-shot and self-correcting prompts. We find that combining prompt self-correction and few-shot learning performs best, yielding an F1 score of 0.79 on our held-out test set, while much smaller BERT- and topic-based models have competitive performance on out-of-domain data.

The field of efficient Large Language Model (LLM) inference is rapidly evolving, presenting a unique blend of opportunities and challenges. Although the field has expanded and is vibrant, there hasn't been a concise framework that analyzes the various methods of LLM Inference to provide a clear understanding of this domain. Our survey stands out from traditional literature reviews by not only summarizing the current state of research but also by introducing a framework based on roofline model for systematic analysis of LLM inference techniques. This framework identifies the bottlenecks when deploying LLMs on hardware devices and provides a clear understanding of practical problems, such as why LLMs are memory-bound, how much memory and computation they need, and how to choose the right hardware. We systematically collate the latest advancements in efficient LLM inference, covering crucial areas such as model compression (e.g., Knowledge Distillation and Quantization), algorithm improvements (e.g., Early Exit and Mixture-of-Expert), and both hardware and system-level enhancements. Our survey stands out by analyzing these methods with roofline model, helping us understand their impact on memory access and computation. This distinctive approach not only showcases the current research landscape but also delivers valuable insights for practical implementation, positioning our work as an indispensable resource for researchers new to the field as well as for those seeking to deepen their understanding of efficient LLM deployment. The analyze tool, LLM-Viewer, is open-sourced.

The hyper-parameter optimization (HPO) process is imperative for finding the best-performing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The automation process of HPO is characterized by its sizable computational footprint and its lack of transparency; both important factors in a resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) environment. In this paper, we address these problems by proposing a novel approach that combines transformer architecture and actor-critic Reinforcement Learning (RL) model, TRL-HPO, equipped with multi-headed attention that enables parallelization and progressive generation of layers. These assumptions are founded empirically by evaluating TRL-HPO on the MNIST dataset and comparing it with state-of-the-art approaches that build CNN models from scratch. The results show that TRL-HPO outperforms the classification results of these approaches by 6.8% within the same time frame, demonstrating the efficiency of TRL-HPO for the HPO process. The analysis of the results identifies the main culprit for performance degradation attributed to stacking fully connected layers. This paper identifies new avenues for improving RL-based HPO processes in resource-constrained environments.

Despite the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in text understanding and generation, their potential for text clustering tasks remains underexplored. We observed that powerful closed-source LLMs provide good quality clusterings of entity sets but are not scalable due to the massive compute power required and the associated costs. Thus, we propose CACTUS (Context-Aware ClusTering with aUgmented triplet losS), a systematic approach that leverages open-source LLMs for efficient and effective supervised clustering of entity subsets, particularly focusing on text-based entities. Existing text clustering methods fail to effectively capture the context provided by the entity subset. Moreover, though there are several language modeling based approaches for clustering, very few are designed for the task of supervised clustering. This paper introduces a novel approach towards clustering entity subsets using LLMs by capturing context via a scalable inter-entity attention mechanism. We propose a novel augmented triplet loss function tailored for supervised clustering, which addresses the inherent challenges of directly applying the triplet loss to this problem. Furthermore, we introduce a self-supervised clustering task based on text augmentation techniques to improve the generalization of our model. For evaluation, we collect ground truth clusterings from a closed-source LLM and transfer this knowledge to an open-source LLM under the supervised clustering framework, allowing a faster and cheaper open-source model to perform the same task. Experiments on various e-commerce query and product clustering datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms existing unsupervised and supervised baselines under various external clustering evaluation metrics.

Automated software testing is integral to the software development process, streamlining workflows and ensuring product reliability. Visual testing within this context, especially concerning user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) validation, stands as one of crucial determinants of overall software quality. Nevertheless, conventional methods like pixel-wise comparison and region-based visual change detection fall short in capturing contextual similarities, nuanced alterations, and understanding the spatial relationships between UI elements. In this paper, we introduce a novel graph-based method for visual change detection in software test automation. Leveraging a machine learning model, our method accurately identifies UI controls from software screenshots and constructs a graph representing contextual and spatial relationships between the controls. This information is then used to find correspondence between UI controls within screenshots of different versions of a software. The resulting graph encapsulates the intricate layout of the UI and underlying contextual relations, providing a holistic and context-aware model. This model is finally used to detect and highlight visual regressions in the UI. Comprehensive experiments on different datasets showed that our change detector can accurately detect visual software changes in various simple and complex test scenarios. Moreover, it outperformed pixel-wise comparison and region-based baselines by a large margin in more complex testing scenarios. This work not only contributes to the advancement of visual change detection but also holds practical implications, offering a robust solution for real-world software test automation challenges, enhancing reliability, and ensuring the seamless evolution of software interfaces.

The availability of high-quality datasets is crucial for the development of behavior prediction algorithms in autonomous vehicles. This paper highlights the need for standardizing the use of certain datasets for motion forecasting research to simplify comparative analysis and proposes a set of tools and practices to achieve this. Drawing on extensive experience and a comprehensive review of current literature, we summarize our proposals for preprocessing, visualizing, and evaluation in the form of an open-sourced toolbox designed for researchers working on trajectory prediction problems. The clear specification of necessary preprocessing steps and evaluation metrics is intended to alleviate development efforts and facilitate the comparison of results across different studies. The toolbox is available at: https://github.com/westny/dronalize.

Deep learning models have raised privacy and security concerns due to their reliance on large datasets on central servers. As the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices increases, artificial intelligence (AI) will be crucial for resource management, data processing, and knowledge acquisition. To address those issues, federated learning (FL) has introduced a novel approach to building a versatile, large-scale machine learning framework that operates in a decentralized and hardware-agnostic manner. However, FL faces network bandwidth limitations and data breaches. To reduce the central dependency in FL and increase scalability, swarm learning (SL) has been proposed in collaboration with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). SL represents a decentralized machine learning framework that leverages blockchain technology for secure, scalable, and private data management. A blockchain-based network enables the exchange and aggregation of model parameters among participants, thus mitigating the risk of a single point of failure and eliminating communication bottlenecks. To the best of our knowledge, this survey is the first to introduce the principles of Swarm Learning, its architectural design, and its fields of application. In addition, it highlights numerous research avenues that require further exploration by academic and industry communities to unlock the full potential and applications of SL.