Government
Numeracy from Literacy: Data Science as an Emergent Skill from Large Language Models
Previous publicly-available transformer models from eighteen months prior and 1000 times smaller failed to provide basic arithmetic. The statistical analysis of four complex datasets described here combines arithmetic manipulations that cannot be memorized or encoded by simple rules. The work examines whether next-token prediction succeeds from sentence completion into the realm of actual numerical understanding. For example, the work highlights cases for descriptive statistics on in-memory datasets that the LLM initially loads from memory or generates randomly using python libraries. The resulting exploratory data analysis showcases the model's capabilities to group by or pivot categorical sums, infer feature importance, derive correlations, and predict unseen test cases using linear regression. To extend the model's testable range, the research deletes and appends random rows such that recall alone cannot explain emergent numeracy.
Spherical Sliced-Wasserstein
Bonet, Clรฉment, Berg, Paul, Courty, Nicolas, Septier, Franรงois, Drumetz, Lucas, Pham, Minh-Tan
Many variants of the Wasserstein distance have been introduced to reduce its original computational burden. In particular the Sliced-Wasserstein distance (SW), which leverages one-dimensional projections for which a closed-form solution of the Wasserstein distance is available, has received a lot of interest. Yet, it is restricted to data living in Euclidean spaces, while the Wasserstein distance has been studied and used recently on manifolds. We focus more specifically on the sphere, for which we define a novel SW discrepancy, which we call spherical Sliced-Wasserstein, making a first step towards defining SW discrepancies on manifolds. Our construction is notably based on closed-form solutions of the Wasserstein distance on the circle, together with a new spherical Radon transform. Along with efficient algorithms and the corresponding implementations, we illustrate its properties in several machine learning use cases where spherical representations of data are at stake: sampling on the sphere, density estimation on real earth data or hyperspherical auto-encoders.
Crawling the Internal Knowledge-Base of Language Models
Cohen, Roi, Geva, Mor, Berant, Jonathan, Globerson, Amir
Language models are trained on large volumes of text, and as a result their parameters might contain a significant body of factual knowledge. Any downstream task performed by these models implicitly builds on these facts, and thus it is highly desirable to have means for representing this body of knowledge in an interpretable way. However, there is currently no mechanism for such a representation. Here, we propose to address this goal by extracting a knowledge-graph of facts from a given language model. We describe a procedure for ``crawling'' the internal knowledge-base of a language model. Specifically, given a seed entity, we expand a knowledge-graph around it. The crawling procedure is decomposed into sub-tasks, realized through specially designed prompts that control for both precision (i.e., that no wrong facts are generated) and recall (i.e., the number of facts generated). We evaluate our approach on graphs crawled starting from dozens of seed entities, and show it yields high precision graphs (82-92%), while emitting a reasonable number of facts per entity.
Integrating Earth Observation Data into Causal Inference: Challenges and Opportunities
Jerzak, Connor T., Johansson, Fredrik, Daoud, Adel
Observational studies require adjustment for confounding factors that are correlated with both the treatment and outcome. In the setting where the observed variables are tabular quantities such as average income in a neighborhood, tools have been developed for addressing such confounding. However, in many parts of the developing world, features about local communities may be scarce. In this context, satellite imagery can play an important role, serving as a proxy for the confounding variables otherwise unobserved. In this paper, we study confounder adjustment in this non-tabular setting, where patterns or objects found in satellite images contribute to the confounder bias. Using the evaluation of anti-poverty aid programs in Africa as our running example, we formalize the challenge of performing causal adjustment with such unstructured data--what conditions are sufficient to identify causal effects, how to perform estimation, and how to quantify the ways in which certain aspects of the unstructured image object are most predictive of the treatment decision. Via simulation, we also explore the sensitivity of satellite image-based observational inference to image resolution and to misspecification of the image-associated confounder. Finally, we apply these tools in estimating the effect of anti-poverty interventions in African communities from satellite imagery. Keywords: Earth observation; Causal inference; Neighborhood dynamics Word count: 12,207 Note: This work largely subsumes Jerzak, Connor T., Fredrik Johansson, and Adel Daoud.
Deep Learning for Reference-Free Geolocation for Poplar Trees
John, Cai W., Queen, Owen, Muchero, Wellington, Emrich, Scott J.
A core task in precision agriculture is the identification of climatic and ecological conditions that are advantageous for a given crop. The most succinct approach is geolocation, which is concerned with locating the native region of a given sample based on its genetic makeup. Here, we investigate genomic geolocation of Populus trichocarpa, or poplar, which has been identified by the US Department of Energy as a fast-rotation biofuel crop to be harvested nationwide. In particular, we approach geolocation from a reference-free perspective, circumventing the need for compute-intensive processes such as variant calling and alignment. Our model, MashNet, predicts latitude and longitude for poplar trees from randomly-sampled, unaligned sequence fragments. We show that our model performs comparably to Locator, a state-of-the-art method based on aligned whole-genome sequence data. MashNet achieves an error of 34.0 km^2 compared to Locator's 22.1 km^2. MashNet allows growers to quickly and efficiently identify natural varieties that will be most productive in their growth environment based on genotype. This paper explores geolocation for precision agriculture while providing a framework and data source for further development by the machine learning community.
BSSAD: Towards A Novel Bayesian State-Space Approach for Anomaly Detection in Multivariate Time Series
Anjum, Usman, Lin, Samuel, Zhan, Justin
Detecting anomalies in multivariate time series(MTS) data plays an important role in many domains. The abnormal values could indicate events, medical abnormalities,cyber-attacks, or faulty devices which if left undetected could lead to significant loss of resources, capital, or human lives. In this paper, we propose a novel and innovative approach to anomaly detection called Bayesian State-Space Anomaly Detection(BSSAD). The BSSAD consists of two modules: the neural network module and the Bayesian state-space module. The design of our approach combines the strength of Bayesian state-space algorithms in predicting the next state and the effectiveness of recurrent neural networks and autoencoders in understanding the relationship between the data to achieve high accuracy in detecting anomalies. The modular design of our approach allows flexibility in implementation with the option of changing the parameters of the Bayesian state-space models or swap-ping neural network algorithms to achieve different levels of performance. In particular, we focus on using Bayesian state-space models of particle filters and ensemble Kalman filters. We conducted extensive experiments on five different datasets. The experimental results show the superior performance of our model over baselines, achieving an F1-score greater than 0.95. In addition, we also propose using a metric called MatthewCorrelation Coefficient (MCC) to obtain more comprehensive information about the accuracy of anomaly detection.
Can we achieve robustness from data alone?
Tsilivis, Nikolaos, Su, Jingtong, Kempe, Julia
We introduce a meta-learning algorithm for adversarially robust classification. The proposed method tries to be as model agnostic as possible and optimizes a dataset prior to its deployment in a machine learning system, aiming to effectively erase its non-robust features. Once the dataset has been created, in principle no specialized algorithm (besides standard gradient descent) is needed to train a robust model. We formulate the data optimization procedure as a bi-level optimization problem on kernel regression, with a class of kernels that describe infinitely wide neural nets (Neural Tangent Kernels). We present extensive experiments on standard computer vision benchmarks using a variety of different models, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method, while also pointing out its current shortcomings. In parallel, we revisit prior work that also focused on the problem of data optimization for robust classification \citep{Ily+19}, and show that being robust to adversarial attacks after standard (gradient descent) training on a suitable dataset is more challenging than previously thought.
Ontologizing Health Systems Data at Scale: Making Translational Discovery a Reality
Callahan, Tiffany J., Stefanski, Adrianne L., Wyrwa, Jordan M., Zeng, Chenjie, Ostropolets, Anna, Banda, Juan M., Baumgartner, William A. Jr., Boyce, Richard D., Casiraghi, Elena, Coleman, Ben D., Collins, Janine H., Deakyne-Davies, Sara J., Feinstein, James A., Haendel, Melissa A., Lin, Asiyah Y., Martin, Blake, Matentzoglu, Nicolas A., Meeker, Daniella, Reese, Justin, Sinclair, Jessica, Taneja, Sanya B., Trinkley, Katy E., Vasilevsky, Nicole A., Williams, Andrew, Zhang, Xingman A., Denny, Joshua C., Robinson, Peter N., Ryan, Patrick, Hripcsak, George, Bennett, Tellen D., Hunter, Lawrence E., Kahn, Michael G.
Background: Common data models solve many challenges of standardizing electronic health record (EHR) data, but are unable to semantically integrate all the resources needed for deep phenotyping. Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry ontologies provide computable representations of biological knowledge and enable the integration of heterogeneous data. However, mapping EHR data to OBO ontologies requires significant manual curation and domain expertise. Objective: We introduce OMOP2OBO, an algorithm for mapping Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) vocabularies to OBO ontologies. Results: Using OMOP2OBO, we produced mappings for 92,367 conditions, 8611 drug ingredients, and 10,673 measurement results, which covered 68-99% of concepts used in clinical practice when examined across 24 hospitals. When used to phenotype rare disease patients, the mappings helped systematically identify undiagnosed patients who might benefit from genetic testing. Conclusions: By aligning OMOP vocabularies to OBO ontologies our algorithm presents new opportunities to advance EHR-based deep phenotyping.
AI Content Platform MetatronAI.com Announces New Features and Services
DOVER, DE, Jan. 24, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Metatron Inc (OTC: MRNJ), an AI content platform, is pleased to announce the release of new services for content generation. MetatronAI.com is a generative artificial intelligence service based on cutting-edge language processing that sets a new standard in the industry. With its advanced natural language understanding capabilities and ability to generate human-like text, art, and soon video and music, designed for business and individuals to create cost-effective original content at unprecedented levels of quality and speed. New features being added on a regular basis include amazing human-like AI text generation for ads, blogs, essays, social media posts, emails, business plans, resumes, books and any type of creative copywriting. Royalty-Free AI art generation is also now live at MetatronAI.com, with professional digital editing coming soon.
Feds adapting AI used to silence ISIS to combat American dissent on vaccines, elections
The government's campaign to fight "misinformation" has expanded to adapt military-grade artificial intelligence once used to silence the Islamic State (ISIS) to quickly identify and censor American dissent on issues like vaccine safety and election integrity, according to grant documents and cyber experts. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded several million dollars in grants recently to universities and private firms to develop tools eerily similar to those developed in 2011 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program. DARPA said those tools were used "to help identify misinformation or deception campaigns and counter them with truthful information," beginning with the Arab Spring uprisings in the the Middle East that spawned ISIS over a decade ago. The initial idea was to track dissidents who were interested in toppling U.S.-friendly regimes or to follow any potentially radical threats by examining political posts on Big Tech platforms. Mike Benz, executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online has compiled a report detailing how this technology is being developed to manipulate the speech of Americans via the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other organizations.