Offline planning often struggles with poor sampling efficiency as it tries to learn policies from scratch. Especially with diffusion models, such cold start practices mean that both training and sampling become very expensive. We hypothesize that certain environment constraint priors or cheaply available policies make it unnecessary to learn from scratch, and explore a way to incorporate such priors in the learning process. To achieve that, we borrow a variation of the Schr\"odinger bridge formulation from the image-to-image setting and apply it to planning tasks. We study the performance on some planning tasks and compare the performance against the DDPM formulation. The code for this work is available at https://github.com/adrshsrvstv/bridge_diffusion_planning.

Despite rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), QG remains a challenging problem due to its complicated process, open-ended nature, and the diverse settings in which question generation occurs. A common approach to address these challenges involves fine-tuning smaller, custom models using datasets containing background context, question, and answer. However, obtaining suitable domain-specific datasets with appropriate context is often more difficult than acquiring question-answer pairs. In this paper, we investigate training QG models using synthetic contexts generated by LLMs from readily available question-answer pairs. We conduct a comprehensive study to answer critical research questions related to the performance of models trained on synthetic contexts and their potential impact on QG research and applications. Our empirical results reveal: 1) contexts are essential for QG tasks, even if they are synthetic; 2) fine-tuning smaller language models has the capability of achieving better performances as compared to prompting larger language models; and 3) synthetic context and real context could achieve comparable performances. These findings highlight the effectiveness of synthetic contexts in QG and paves the way for future advancements in the field.

In recent years, predictive maintenance (PMx) has gained prominence for its potential to enhance efficiency, automation, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness while reducing human involvement. Importantly, PMx has evolved in tandem with digital advancements, such as Big Data and the Internet of Things (IOT). These technological strides have enabled Artificial Intelligence (AI) to revolutionize PMx processes, with increasing capacities for real-time automation of monitoring, analysis, and prediction tasks. However, PMx still faces challenges such as poor explainability and sample inefficiency in data-driven methods and high complexity in physics-based models, hindering broader adoption. This paper posits that Digital Twins (DTs) can be integrated into PMx to overcome these challenges, paving the way for more automated PMx applications across various stakeholders. Despite their potential, current DTs have not fully matured to bridge existing gaps. Our paper provides a comprehensive roadmap for DT evolution, addressing current limitations to foster large-scale automated PMx progression. We structure our approach in three stages: First, we reference prior work where we identified and defined the Information Requirements (IRs) and Functional Requirements (FRs) for PMx, forming the blueprint for a unified framework. Second, we conduct a literature review to assess current DT applications integrating these IRs and FRs, revealing standardized DT models and tools that support automated PMx. Lastly, we highlight gaps in current DT implementations, particularly those IRs and FRs not fully supported, and outline the necessary components for a comprehensive, automated PMx system. Our paper concludes with research directions aimed at seamlessly integrating DTs into the PMx paradigm to achieve this ambitious vision.

The development of robust AI models relies heavily on the quality and variety of training data available. In fields where data scarcity is prevalent, synthetic data generation offers a vital solution. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to creating synthetic datasets, grounded in real-world diversity and enriched through strategic diversification. We synthesize data using a comprehensive collection of news articles spanning 12 languages and originating from 125 countries, to ensure a breadth of linguistic and cultural representations. Through enforced topic diversification, translation, and summarization, the resulting dataset accurately mirrors real-world complexities and addresses the issue of underrepresentation in traditional datasets. This methodology, applied initially to Named Entity Recognition (NER), serves as a model for numerous AI disciplines where data diversification is critical for generalizability. Preliminary results demonstrate substantial improvements in performance on traditional NER benchmarks, by up to 7.3%, highlighting the effectiveness of our synthetic data in mimicking the rich, varied nuances of global data sources. This paper outlines the strategies employed for synthesizing diverse datasets and provides such a curated dataset for NER.

The evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been significantly accelerated by advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), gradually showcasing potential cognitive reasoning abilities in problemsolving and scientific discovery (i.e., AI4Science) once exclusive to human intellect. To comprehensively evaluate current models' performance in cognitive reasoning abilities, we introduce OlympicArena, which includes 11,163 bilingual problems across both text-only and interleaved text-image modalities. These challenges encompass a wide range of disciplines spanning seven fields and 62 international Olympic competitions, rigorously examined for data leakage. We argue that the challenges in Olympic competition problems are ideal for evaluating AI's cognitive reasoning due to their complexity and interdisciplinary nature, which are essential for tackling complex scientific challenges and facilitating discoveries. Beyond evaluating performance across various disciplines using answer-only criteria, we conduct detailed experiments and analyses from multiple perspectives. We delve into the models' cognitive reasoning abilities, their performance across different modalities, and their outcomes in process-level evaluations, which are vital for tasks requiring complex reasoning with lengthy solutions. Our extensive evaluations reveal that even advanced models like GPT-4o only achieve a 39.97% overall accuracy (28.67% for mathematics and 29.71% for physics), illustrating current AI limitations in complex reasoning and multimodal integration. Through the OlympicArena, we aim to advance AI towards superintelligence, equipping it to address more complex challenges in science and beyond. We also provide a comprehensive set of resources to support AI research, including a benchmark dataset, an open-source annotation platform, a detailed evaluation tool, and a leaderboard with automatic submission features.

Recent trends have shown that autonomous agents, such as Autonomous Ground Vehicles (AGVs), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and mobile robots, effectively improve human productivity in solving diverse tasks. However, since these agents are typically powered by portable batteries, they require extremely low power/energy consumption to operate in a long lifespan. To solve this challenge, neuromorphic computing has emerged as a promising solution, where bio-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) use spikes from event-based cameras or data conversion pre-processing to perform sparse computations efficiently. However, the studies of SNN deployments for autonomous agents are still at an early stage. Hence, the optimization stages for enabling efficient embodied SNN deployments for autonomous agents have not been defined systematically. Toward this, we propose a novel framework called SNN4Agents that consists of a set of optimization techniques for designing energy-efficient embodied SNNs targeting autonomous agent applications. Our SNN4Agents employs weight quantization, timestep reduction, and attention window reduction to jointly improve the energy efficiency, reduce the memory footprint, optimize the processing latency, while maintaining high accuracy. In the evaluation, we investigate use cases of event-based car recognition, and explore the trade-offs among accuracy, latency, memory, and energy consumption. The experimental results show that our proposed framework can maintain high accuracy (i.e., 84.12% accuracy) with 68.75% memory saving, 3.58x speed-up, and 4.03x energy efficiency improvement as compared to the state-of-the-art work for NCARS dataset. In this manner, our SNN4Agents framework paves the way toward enabling energy-efficient embodied SNN deployments for autonomous agents.

The remote sensing image intelligence understanding model is undergoing a new profound paradigm shift which has been promoted by multi-modal large language model (MLLM), i.e. from the paradigm learning a domain model (LaDM) shifts to paradigm learning a pre-trained general foundation model followed by an adaptive domain model (LaGD). Under the new LaGD paradigm, the old datasets, which have led to advances in RSI intelligence understanding in the last decade, are no longer suitable for fire-new tasks. We argued that a new dataset must be designed to lighten tasks with the following features: 1) Generalization: training model to learn shared knowledge among tasks and to adapt to different tasks; 2) Understanding complex scenes: training model to understand the fine-grained attribute of the objects of interest, and to be able to describe the scene with natural language; 3) Reasoning: training model to be able to realize high-level visual reasoning. In this paper, we designed a high-quality, diversified, and unified multimodal instruction-following dataset for RSI understanding produced by GPT-4V and existing datasets, which we called RS-GPT4V. To achieve generalization, we used a (Question, Answer) which was deduced from GPT-4V via instruction-following to unify the tasks such as captioning and localization; To achieve complex scene, we proposed a hierarchical instruction description with local strategy in which the fine-grained attributes of the objects and their spatial relationships are described and global strategy in which all the local information are integrated to yield detailed instruction descript; To achieve reasoning, we designed multiple-turn QA pair to provide the reasoning ability for a model. The empirical results show that the fine-tuned MLLMs by RS-GPT4V can describe fine-grained information. The dataset is available at: https://github.com/GeoX-Lab/RS-GPT4V.

Optimization problems are ubiquitous in various fields, ranging from computer science and engineering to finance and healthcare. Whether the focus is on minimizing costs or improving efficiency, these challenges frequently involve finding the best outcome from a large pool of feasible solutions within defined constraints. Thanks to its ability to efficiently navigate this search space, Bayesian Optimization (BO) has emerged as a go-to solution to tackle these problems [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10], especially in cases where running the objective function is expensive or time-consuming. In the typical BO setup [11], a surrogate model - often a Gaussian Process (GP) regression - is leveraged to estimate the target response function from given input data. An acquisition function is then used to suggest strategic new test points based on the uncertainty level of this model. If selected carefully, this sampling strategy allows BO to explore the parameter space to uncover promising regions with high uncertainty or exploit known favorable regions to refine the search toward the global optimum.

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Big Tech's appetite for energy is just about visible from the east coast of Scotland. Some 12 miles out to sea sits a wind farm, where each of the 60 giant turbines has blades roughly the length of an American football field. The utility companies behind the Moray West project had promised the site would be capable of generating enough electricity to power 1.3 million homes once completed. That was before Amazon stepped in.

This paper presents the SLEGO (Software-Lego) system, a collaborative analytics platform that bridges the gap between experienced developers and novice users using a cloud-based platform with modular, reusable microservices. These microservices enable developers to share their analytical tools and workflows, while a simple graphical user interface (GUI) allows novice users to build comprehensive analytics pipelines without programming skills. Supported by a knowledge base and a Large Language Model (LLM) powered recommendation system, SLEGO enhances the selection and integration of microservices, increasing the efficiency of analytics pipeline construction. Case studies in finance and machine learning illustrate how SLEGO promotes the sharing and assembly of modular microservices, significantly improving resource reusability and team collaboration. The results highlight SLEGO's role in democratizing data analytics by integrating modular design, knowledge bases, and recommendation systems, fostering a more inclusive and efficient analytical environment.