Livestock feeding behavior is an influential research area for those involved in animal husbandry and agriculture. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in automated systems for monitoring the behavior of ruminants. Despite the developments accomplished in the last decade, there is still much to do and learn about the methods for measuring and analyzing livestock feeding behavior. Automated monitoring systems mainly use motion, acoustic, and image sensors to collect animal behavioral data. The performance evaluation of existing methods is a complex task and direct comparisons between studies are difficult. Several factors prevent a direct comparison, starting from the diversity of data and performance metrics used in the experiments. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first tutorial-style review on the analysis of the feeding behavior of ruminants, emphasizing the relationship between sensing methodologies, signal processing and computational intelligence methods. It assesses the main sensing methodologies (i.e. based on movement, sound, images/videos and pressure) and the main techniques to measure and analyze the signals associated with feeding behavior, evaluating their use in different settings and situations. It also highlights the potentiality of automated monitoring systems to provide valuable information that improves our understanding of livestock feeding behavior. The relevance of these systems is increasingly important due to their impact on production systems and research. Finally, the paper closes by discussing future challenges and opportunities in livestock feeding behavior monitoring.

Models for text-to-image synthesis, such as DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, have recently drawn a lot of interest from academia and the general public. These models are capable of producing high-quality images that depict a variety of concepts and styles when conditioned on textual descriptions. However, these models adopt cultural characteristics associated with specific Unicode scripts from their vast amount of training data, which may not be immediately apparent. We show that by simply inserting single non-Latin characters in the textual description, common models reflect cultural biases in their generated images. We analyze this behavior both qualitatively and quantitatively and identify a model's text encoder as the root cause of the phenomenon. Such behavior can be interpreted as a model feature, offering users a simple way to customize the image generation and reflect their own cultural background. Yet, malicious users or service providers may also try to intentionally bias the image generation. One goal might be to create racist stereotypes by replacing Latin characters with similarly-looking characters from non-Latin scripts, so-called homoglyphs. To mitigate such unnoticed script attacks, we propose a novel homoglyph unlearning method to fine-tune a text encoder, making it robust against homoglyph manipulations.

This paper studies ML systems that interactively learn from users across multiple subpopulations with heterogeneous data distributions. The primary objective is to provide specialized services for different user groups while also predicting user preferences. Once the users select a service based on how well the service anticipated their preference, the services subsequently adapt and refine themselves based on the user data they accumulate, resulting in an iterative, alternating minimization process between users and services (learning dynamics). Employing such tailored approaches has two main challenges: (i) Unknown user preferences: Typically, data on user preferences are unavailable without interaction, and uniform data collection across a large and diverse user base can be prohibitively expensive. (ii) Suboptimal Local Solutions: The total loss (sum of loss functions across all users and all services) landscape is not convex even if the individual losses on a single service are convex, making it likely for the learning dynamics to get stuck in local minima. The final outcome of the aforementioned learning dynamics is thus strongly influenced by the initial set of services offered to users, and is not guaranteed to be close to the globally optimal outcome. In this work, we propose a randomized algorithm to adaptively select very few users to collect preference data from, while simultaneously initializing a set of services. We prove that under mild assumptions on the loss functions, the expected total loss achieved by the algorithm right after initialization is within a factor of the globally optimal total loss with complete user preference data, and this factor scales only logarithmically in the number of services. Our theory is complemented by experiments on real as well as semi-synthetic datasets.

Optical character recognition (OCR) is a vital process that involves the extraction of handwritten or printed text from scanned or printed images, converting it into a format that can be understood and processed by machines. This enables further data processing activities such as searching and editing. The automatic extraction of text through OCR plays a crucial role in digitizing documents, enhancing productivity, improving accessibility, and preserving historical records. This paper seeks to offer an exhaustive review of contemporary applications, methodologies, and challenges associated with Arabic Optical Character Recognition (OCR). A thorough analysis is conducted on prevailing techniques utilized throughout the OCR process, with a dedicated effort to discern the most efficacious approaches that demonstrate enhanced outcomes. To ensure a thorough evaluation, a meticulous keyword-search methodology is adopted, encompassing a comprehensive analysis of articles relevant to Arabic OCR, including both backward and forward citation reviews. In addition to presenting cutting-edge techniques and methods, this paper critically identifies research gaps within the realm of Arabic OCR. By highlighting these gaps, we shed light on potential areas for future exploration and development, thereby guiding researchers toward promising avenues in the field of Arabic OCR. The outcomes of this study provide valuable insights for researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders involved in Arabic OCR, ultimately fostering advancements in the field and facilitating the creation of more accurate and efficient OCR systems for the Arabic language.

Multi-document summarization is the process of automatically generating a concise summary of multiple documents related to the same topic. This summary can help users quickly understand the key information from a large collection of documents. Multi-document summarization systems are more complex than single-document summarization systems due to the need to identify and combine information from multiple sources. In this paper, we have developed a machine learning model that generates a concise summary of a topic from multiple news documents. The model is designed to be unbiased by sampling its input equally from all the different aspects of the topic, even if the majority of the news sources lean one way.

In recent years, the rapid advancement and impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have been evident across various domains. This paper explores the application, implications, and potential of LLMs in building energy efficiency and decarbonization studies. The wide-ranging capabilities of LLMs are examined in the context of the building energy field, including intelligent control systems, code generation, data infrastructure, knowledge extraction, and education. Despite the promising potential of LLMs, challenges including complex and expensive computation, data privacy, security and copyright, complexity in fine-tuned LLMs, and self-consistency are discussed. The paper concludes with a call for future research focused on the enhancement of LLMs for domain-specific tasks, multi-modal LLMs, and collaborative research between AI and energy experts.

Federated learning has recently emerged as a privacy-preserving distributed machine learning approach. Federated learning enables collaborative training of multiple clients and entire fleets without sharing the involved training datasets. By preserving data privacy, federated learning has the potential to overcome the lack of data sharing in the renewable energy sector which is inhibiting innovation, research and development. Our paper provides an overview of federated learning in renewable energy applications. We discuss federated learning algorithms and survey their applications and case studies in renewable energy generation and consumption. We also evaluate the potential and the challenges associated with federated learning applied in power and energy contexts. Finally, we outline promising future research directions in federated learning for applications in renewable energy.

Nash equilibrium is one of the most influential solution concepts in game theory. With the development of computer science and artificial intelligence, there is an increasing demand on Nash equilibrium computation, especially for Internet economics and multi-agent learning. This paper reviews various algorithms computing the Nash equilibrium and its approximation solutions in finite normal-form games from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. For the theoretical part, we classify algorithms in the literature and present basic ideas on algorithm design and analysis. For the empirical part, we present a comprehensive comparison on the algorithms in the literature over different kinds of games. Based on these results, we provide practical suggestions on implementations and uses of these algorithms. Finally, we present a series of open problems from both theoretical and practical considerations.

Fairness in AI is a growing concern for high-stakes decision making. Engaging stakeholders, especially lay users, in fair AI development is promising yet overlooked. Recent efforts explore enabling lay users to provide AI fairness-related feedback, but there is still a lack of understanding of how to integrate users' feedback into an AI model and the impacts of doing so. To bridge this gap, we collected feedback from 58 lay users on the fairness of a XGBoost model trained on the Home Credit dataset, and conducted offline experiments to investigate the effects of retraining models on accuracy, and individual and group fairness. Our work contributes baseline results of integrating user fairness feedback in XGBoost, and a dataset and code framework to bootstrap research in engaging stakeholders in AI fairness. Our discussion highlights the challenges of employing user feedback in AI fairness and points the way to a future application area of interactive machine learning.

This review paper explores Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), which integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 to handle multimodal data such as text and vision. MLLMs demonstrate capabilities like generating image narratives and answering image-based questions, bridging the gap towards real-world human-computer interactions and hinting at a potential pathway to artificial general intelligence. However, MLLMs still face challenges in processing the semantic gap in multimodality, which may lead to erroneous generation, posing potential risks to society. Choosing the appropriate modality alignment method is crucial, as improper methods might require more parameters with limited performance improvement. This paper aims to explore modality alignment methods for LLMs and their existing capabilities. Implementing modality alignment allows LLMs to address environmental issues and enhance accessibility. The study surveys existing modal alignment methods in MLLMs into four groups: (1) Multimodal Converters that change data into something LLMs can understand; (2) Multimodal Perceivers to improve how LLMs perceive different types of data; (3) Tools Assistance for changing data into one common format, usually text; and (4) Data-Driven methods that teach LLMs to understand specific types of data in a dataset. This field is still in a phase of exploration and experimentation, and we will organize and update various existing research methods for multimodal information alignment.