Query-document relevance prediction is a critical problem in Information Retrieval systems. This problem has increasingly been tackled using (pretrained) transformer-based models which are finetuned using large collections of labeled data. However, in specialized domains such as e-commerce and healthcare, the viability of this approach is limited by the dearth of large in-domain data. To address this paucity, recent methods leverage these powerful models to generate high-quality task and domain-specific synthetic data. Prior work has largely explored synthetic data generation or query generation (QGen) for Question-Answering (QA) and binary (yes/no) relevance prediction, where for instance, the QGen models are given a document, and trained to generate a query relevant to that document. However in many problems, we have a more fine-grained notion of relevance than a simple yes/no label. Thus, in this work, we conduct a detailed study into how QGen approaches can be leveraged for nuanced relevance prediction. We demonstrate that -- contrary to claims from prior works -- current QGen approaches fall short of the more conventional cross-domain transfer-learning approaches. Via empirical studies spanning 3 public e-commerce benchmarks, we identify new shortcomings of existing QGen approaches -- including their inability to distinguish between different grades of relevance. To address this, we introduce label-conditioned QGen models which incorporates knowledge about the different relevance. While our experiments demonstrate that these modifications help improve performance of QGen techniques, we also find that QGen approaches struggle to capture the full nuance of the relevance label space and as a result the generated queries are not faithful to the desired relevance label.

Steve Bowen and Woody Hoburg's venture will add power capacity to the ISS lab. NASA astronauts Woody Hoburg and Steve Bowen on Thursday upgraded the International Space Station's power supply by installing a new roll-out solar array. Hoburg and Bowen, flight engineers on Expedition 69, completed their spacewalk just before 2:30 p.m. EDT, after 5 hours and 35 minutes. Their main objective, per NASA, was to install an ISS Roll-Out Array, or IROSA, to augment power generation for the 1B power channel on the station's starboard truss structure. Arrays are collections of solar panels wired together to capture sunlight and produce power for the space station.

Anker, which made its name building device batteries and chargers, is now making gear for all of the devices you own. Or at least all of the devices in your home, since it just unveiled its Solix home energy system, which can be bolted onto existing or new domestic solar setups. Like many other home battery companies out there, Solix is scalable, with the smallest unit sized at 5kWh – enough for a few hours backup power – all the way up to 180kWh. It won't arrive until 2024 but, when it does, it'll be paired with an EV charging system Anker is presently cooking up. The company is no stranger to this world, since it already builds small solar and battery sets for off-road types. But it's pleasing to see it also entering the home battery market which, Tesla aside, is full of companies that don't have as big a presence in the consumer space.

Communication scheduling has been shown to be effective in accelerating distributed training, which enables all-reduce communications to be overlapped with backpropagation computations. This has been commonly adopted in popular distributed deep learning frameworks. However, there exist two fundamental problems: (1) excessive startup latency proportional to the number of workers for each all-reduce operation; (2) it only achieves sub-optimal training performance due to the dependency and synchronization requirement of the feed-forward computation in the next iteration. We propose a novel scheduling algorithm, DeAR, that decouples the all-reduce primitive into two continuous operations, which overlaps with both backpropagation and feed-forward computations without extra communications. We further design a practical tensor fusion algorithm to improve the training performance. Experimental results with five popular models show that DeAR achieves up to 83% and 15% training speedup over the state-of-the-art solutions on a 64-GPU cluster with 10Gb/s Ethernet and 100Gb/s InfiniBand interconnects, respectively.

We propose a hybrid neural network (NN) and PDE approach for learning generalizable PDE dynamics from motion observations. Many NN approaches learn an end-to-end model that implicitly models both the governing PDE and constitutive models (or material models). Without explicit PDE knowledge, these approaches cannot guarantee physical correctness and have limited generalizability. We argue that the governing PDEs are often well-known and should be explicitly enforced rather than learned. Instead, constitutive models are particularly suitable for learning due to their data-fitting nature. To this end, we introduce a new framework termed "Neural Constitutive Laws" (NCLaw), which utilizes a network architecture that strictly guarantees standard constitutive priors, including rotation equivariance and undeformed state equilibrium. We embed this network inside a differentiable simulation and train the model by minimizing a loss function based on the difference between the simulation and the motion observation. We validate NCLaw on various large-deformation dynamical systems, ranging from solids to fluids. After training on a single motion trajectory, our method generalizes to new geometries, initial/boundary conditions, temporal ranges, and even multi-physics systems. On these extremely out-of-distribution generalization tasks, NCLaw is orders-of-magnitude more accurate than previous NN approaches. Real-world experiments demonstrate our method's ability to learn constitutive laws from videos.

New Natural Langauge Process (NLP) benchmarks are urgently needed to align with the rapid development of large language models (LLMs). We present Xiezhi, the most comprehensive evaluation suite designed to assess holistic domain knowledge. Xiezhi comprises multiple-choice questions across 516 diverse disciplines ranging from 13 different subjects with 249,587 questions and accompanied by Xiezhi-Specialty and Xiezhi-Interdiscipline, both with 15k questions. We conduct evaluation of the 47 cutting-edge LLMs on Xiezhi. Results indicate that LLMs exceed average performance of humans in science, engineering, agronomy, medicine, and art, but fall short in economics, jurisprudence, pedagogy, literature, history, and management.

More than 3.5 billion people live in rural areas, where water and water energy resources play an important role in ensuring sustainable and productive rural economies. This article reviews and critically analyses the recent advances in the field of analogue and reservoir computing that have been driven by unique physical properties and energy of water waves. It also demonstrates that analogue and reservoir computing hold the potential to bring artificial intelligence closer to people living outside large cities, thus enabling them to enjoy the benefits of novel technologies that already work in large cities but are not readily available and suitable for regional communities.

Artificial intelligence for scientific discovery has recently generated significant interest within the machine learning and scientific communities, particularly in the domains of chemistry, biology, and material discovery. For these scientific problems, molecules serve as the fundamental building blocks, and machine learning has emerged as a highly effective and powerful tool for modeling their geometric structures. Nevertheless, due to the rapidly evolving process of the field and the knowledge gap between science (e.g., physics, chemistry, & biology) and machine learning communities, a benchmarking study on geometrical representation for such data has not been conducted. To address such an issue, in this paper, we first provide a unified view of the current symmetry-informed geometric methods, classifying them into three main categories: invariance, equivariance with spherical frame basis, and equivariance with vector frame basis. Then we propose a platform, coined Geom3D, which enables benchmarking the effectiveness of geometric strategies. Geom3D contains 16 advanced symmetry-informed geometric representation models and 14 geometric pretraining methods over 46 diverse datasets, including small molecules, proteins, and crystalline materials. We hope that Geom3D can, on the one hand, eliminate barriers for machine learning researchers interested in exploring scientific problems; and, on the other hand, provide valuable guidance for researchers in computational chemistry, structural biology, and materials science, aiding in the informed selection of representation techniques for specific applications. The source code is available on the GitHub repository.

Adaptive sampling and planning in robotic environmental monitoring are challenging when the target environmental process varies over space and time. The underlying environmental dynamics require the planning module to integrate future environmental changes so that action decisions made earlier do not quickly become outdated. We propose a Monte Carlo tree search method which not only well balances the environment exploration and exploitation in space, but also catches up to the temporal environmental dynamics. This is achieved by incorporating multi-objective optimization and a look-ahead model-predictive rewarding mechanism. We show that by allowing the robot to leverage the simulated and predicted spatiotemporal environmental process, the proposed informative planning approach achieves a superior performance after comparing with other baseline methods in terms of the root mean square error of the environment model and the distance to the ground truth.

Humans navigate in their environment by learning a mental model of the world through passive observation and active interaction. Their world model allows them to anticipate what might happen next and act accordingly with respect to an underlying objective. Such world models hold strong promises for planning in complex environments like in autonomous driving. A human driver, or a self-driving system, perceives their surroundings with their eyes or their cameras. They infer an internal representation of the world which should: (i) have spatial memory (e.g. occlusions), (ii) fill partially observable or noisy inputs (e.g. when blinded by sunlight), and (iii) be able to reason about unobservable events probabilistically (e.g. predict different possible futures). They are embodied intelligent agents that can predict, plan, and act in the physical world through their world model. In this thesis we present a general framework to train a world model and a policy, parameterised by deep neural networks, from camera observations and expert demonstrations. We leverage important computer vision concepts such as geometry, semantics, and motion to scale world models to complex urban driving scenes. First, we propose a model that predicts important quantities in computer vision: depth, semantic segmentation, and optical flow. We then use 3D geometry as an inductive bias to operate in the bird's-eye view space. We present for the first time a model that can predict probabilistic future trajectories of dynamic agents in bird's-eye view from 360{\deg} surround monocular cameras only. Finally, we demonstrate the benefits of learning a world model in closed-loop driving. Our model can jointly predict static scene, dynamic scene, and ego-behaviour in an urban driving environment.