A reliable yet inexpensive tool for the estimation of flood water spread is conducive for efficient disaster management. The application of optical and SAR imagery in tandem provides a means of extended availability and enhanced reliability of flood mapping. We propose a methodology to merge these two types of imagery into a common data space and demonstrate its use in the identification of affected populations and infrastructure for the 2022 floods in Pakistan. The merging of optical and SAR data provides us with improved observations in cloud-prone regions; that is then used to gain additional insights into flood mapping applications. The use of open source datasets from WorldPop and OSM for population and roads respectively makes the exercise globally replicable. The integration of flood maps with spatial data on population and infrastructure facilitates informed policy design. We have shown that within the top five flood-affected districts in Sindh province, Pakistan, the affected population accounts for 31 %, while the length of affected roads measures 1410.25 km out of a total of 7537.96 km.

Combinational creativity, also sometimes combinatorial network models for music generation have arisen, trained creativity, is a type of creative problem solving on massive datasets and requiring significant computation in which two conceptual spaces are combined to represent (Civit et al. 2022). While these approaches have proven a third or new conceptual space (Boden 2009). While different successful at replicating genres of music like those in their musical genres may vary in terms of their local features training sets, due to the nature of large-scale neural network (e.g., melodies), they are all still music. As such, we models we expect this may not prove true for dissimilar genres.

Generating music from text descriptions is a user-friendly mode since the text is a relatively easy interface for user engagement. While some approaches utilize texts to control music audio generation, editing musical elements in generated audio is challenging for users. In contrast, symbolic music offers ease of editing, making it more accessible for users to manipulate specific musical elements. In this paper, we propose MuseCoco, which generates symbolic music from text descriptions with musical attributes as the bridge to break down the task into text-to-attribute understanding and attribute-to-music generation stages. MuseCoCo stands for Music Composition Copilot that empowers musicians to generate music directly from given text descriptions, offering a significant improvement in efficiency compared to creating music entirely from scratch. The system has two main advantages: Firstly, it is data efficient. In the attribute-to-music generation stage, the attributes can be directly extracted from music sequences, making the model training self-supervised. In the text-to-attribute understanding stage, the text is synthesized and refined by ChatGPT based on the defined attribute templates. Secondly, the system can achieve precise control with specific attributes in text descriptions and offers multiple control options through attribute-conditioned or text-conditioned approaches. MuseCoco outperforms baseline systems in terms of musicality, controllability, and overall score by at least 1.27, 1.08, and 1.32 respectively. Besides, there is a notable enhancement of about 20% in objective control accuracy. In addition, we have developed a robust large-scale model with 1.2 billion parameters, showcasing exceptional controllability and musicality.

"I believe that in 50 years' time it will be possible to make computers play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will have no more than 70% chance of making the right identification after 5 minutes of questioning." Over the course of a month, the game was played by over 1.5 million users who engaged in anonymous two-minute chat sessions with either another human or an AI language model which was prompted to behave like humans. The task of the players was to correctly guess whether they spoke to a person or to an AI. This largest scale Turing-style test conducted to date revealed some interesting facts. For example, overall users guessed the identity of their partners correctly in only 68% of the games. In the subset of the games in which users faced an AI bot, users had even lower correct guess rates of 60% (that is, not much higher than chance). While this experiment calls for many extensions and refinements, these findings already begin to shed light on the inevitable near future which will commingle humans and AI. The famous Turing test, originally proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 as "the imitation game" (Turing, 1950), was proposed as an operational test of intelligence, namely, testing a machine's ability to exhibit behavior indistinguishable from that of a human. In this proposed test, a human evaluator engages in a natural language conversation with both another human and a machine, and tries to distinguish between them. If the evaluator is unable to tell which is which, the machine is said to have passed the test.

In recent years, large convolutional neural networks have been widely used as tools for image deblurring, because of their ability in restoring images very precisely. It is well known that image deblurring is mathematically modeled as an ill-posed inverse problem and its solution is difficult to approximate when noise affects the data. Really, one limitation of neural networks for deblurring is their sensitivity to noise and other perturbations, which can lead to instability and produce poor reconstructions. In addition, networks do not necessarily take into account the numerical formulation of the underlying imaging problem, when trained end-to-end. In this paper, we propose some strategies to improve stability without losing to much accuracy to deblur images with deep-learning based methods. First, we suggest a very small neural architecture, which reduces the execution time for training, satisfying a green AI need, and does not extremely amplify noise in the computed image. Second, we introduce a unified framework where a pre-processing step balances the lack of stability of the following, neural network-based, step. Two different pre-processors are presented: the former implements a strong parameter-free denoiser, and the latter is a variational model-based regularized formulation of the latent imaging problem. This framework is also formally characterized by mathematical analysis. Numerical experiments are performed to verify the accuracy and stability of the proposed approaches for image deblurring when unknown or not-quantified noise is present; the results confirm that they improve the network stability with respect to noise. In particular, the model-based framework represents the most reliable trade-off between visual precision and robustness.

Music representation learning is notoriously difficult for its complex human-related concepts contained in the sequence of numerical signals. To excavate better MUsic SEquence Representation from labeled audio, we propose a novel text-supervision pre-training method, namely MUSER. MUSER adopts an audio-spectrum-text tri-modal contrastive learning framework, where the text input could be any form of meta-data with the help of text templates while the spectrum is derived from an audio sequence. Our experiments reveal that MUSER could be more flexibly adapted to downstream tasks compared with the current data-hungry pre-training method, and it only requires 0.056% of pre-training data to achieve the state-of-the-art performance.

Formulating selective information needs results in queries that implicitly specify set operations, such as intersection, union, and difference. For instance, one might search for "shorebirds that are not sandpipers" or "science-fiction films shot in England". To study the ability of retrieval systems to meet such information needs, we construct QUEST, a dataset of 3357 natural language queries with implicit set operations, that map to a set of entities corresponding to Wikipedia documents. The dataset challenges models to match multiple constraints mentioned in queries with corresponding evidence in documents and correctly perform various set operations. The dataset is constructed semi-automatically using Wikipedia category names. Queries are automatically composed from individual categories, then paraphrased and further validated for naturalness and fluency by crowdworkers. Crowdworkers also assess the relevance of entities based on their documents and highlight attribution of query constraints to spans of document text. We analyze several modern retrieval systems, finding that they often struggle on such queries. Queries involving negation and conjunction are particularly challenging and systems are further challenged with combinations of these operations.

Our goal is to develop fine-grained real-image editing methods suitable for real-world applications. In this paper, we first summarize four requirements for these methods and propose a novel diffusion-based image editing framework with pixel-wise guidance that satisfies these requirements. Specifically, we train pixel-classifiers with a few annotated data and then infer the segmentation map of a target image. Users then manipulate the map to instruct how the image will be edited. We utilize a pre-trained diffusion model to generate edited images aligned with the user's intention with pixel-wise guidance. The effective combination of proposed guidance and other techniques enables highly controllable editing with preserving the outside of the edited area, which results in meeting our requirements. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposal outperforms the GAN-based method for editing quality and speed.

Language models (LMs) now excel at many tasks such as few-shot learning, question answering, reasoning, and dialog. However, they sometimes generate unsupported or misleading content. A user cannot easily determine whether their outputs are trustworthy or not, because most LMs do not have any built-in mechanism for attribution to external evidence. To enable attribution while still preserving all the powerful advantages of recent generation models, we propose RARR (Retrofit Attribution using Research and Revision), a system that 1) automatically finds attribution for the output of any text generation model and 2) post-edits the output to fix unsupported content while preserving the original output as much as possible. When applied to the output of several state-of-the-art LMs on a diverse set of generation tasks, we find that RARR significantly improves attribution while otherwise preserving the original input to a much greater degree than previously explored edit models. Furthermore, the implementation of RARR requires only a handful of training examples, a large language model, and standard web search.

In Multi-Document Summarization (MDS), the input can be modeled as a set of documents, and the output is its summary. In this paper, we focus on pretraining objectives for MDS. Specifically, we introduce a novel pretraining objective, which involves selecting the ROUGE-based centroid of each document cluster as a proxy for its summary. Our objective thus does not require human written summaries and can be utilized for pretraining on a dataset consisting solely of document sets. Through zero-shot, few-shot, and fully supervised experiments on multiple MDS datasets, we show that our model Centrum is better or comparable to a state-of-the-art model. We make the pretrained and fine-tuned models freely available to the research community https://github.com/ratishsp/centrum.