Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Imagine a large firm with multiple departments that plans a large recruitment. Candidates arrive one-by-one, and for each candidate the firm decides, based on her data (CV, skills, experience, etc), whether to summon her for an interview.

The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is activated during stress, which can have negative effects on cardiovascular health, sleep, the immune system, and mental health. While there are ways to quantify ANS activity in laboratories, there is a paucity of methods that have been validated in real-world contexts. We present the Fitbit Body Response Algorithm, an approach to continuous remote measurement of ANS activation through widely available remote wrist-based sensors. The design was validated via two experiments, a Trier Social Stress Test (n = 45) and ecological momentary assessments (EMA) of perceived stress (n=87), providing both controlled and ecologically valid test data. Model performance predicting perceived stress when using all available sensor modalities was consistent with expectations (accuracy=0.85) and outperformed models with access to only a subset of the signals. We discuss and address challenges to sensing that arise in real world settings that do not present in conventional lab environments.

Evaluation of policies in recommender systems typically involves A/B testing using live experiments on real users to assess a new policy's impact on relevant metrics. This ``gold standard'' comes at a high cost, however, in terms of cycle time, user cost, and potential user retention. In developing policies for ``onboarding'' new users, these costs can be especially problematic, since on-boarding occurs only once. In this work, we describe a simulation methodology used to augment (and reduce) the use of live experiments. We illustrate its deployment for the evaluation of ``preference elicitation'' algorithms used to onboard new users of the YouTube Music platform. By developing counterfactually robust user behavior models, and a simulation service that couples such models with production infrastructure, we are able to test new algorithms in a way that reliably predicts their performance on key metrics when deployed live. We describe our domain, our simulation models and platform, results of experiments and deployment, and suggest future steps needed to further realistic simulation as a powerful complement to live experiments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have rapidly increased in size and apparent capabilities in the last three years, but their training data is largely English text. There is growing interest in multilingual LLMs, and various efforts are striving for models to accommodate languages of communities outside of the Global North, which include many languages that have been historically underrepresented in digital realms. These languages have been coined as "low resource languages" or "long-tail languages", and LLMs performance on these languages is generally poor. While expanding the use of LLMs to more languages may bring many potential benefits, such as assisting cross-community communication and language preservation, great care must be taken to ensure that data collection on these languages is not extractive and that it does not reproduce exploitative practices of the past. Collecting data from languages spoken by previously colonized people, indigenous people, and non-Western languages raises many complex sociopolitical and ethical questions, e.g., around consent, cultural safety, and data sovereignty. Furthermore, linguistic complexity and cultural nuances are often lost in LLMs. This position paper builds on recent scholarship, and our own work, and outlines several relevant social, cultural, and ethical considerations and potential ways to mitigate them through qualitative research, community partnerships, and participatory design approaches. We provide twelve recommendations for consideration when collecting language data on underrepresented language communities outside of the Global North.

Text-driven image generation methods have shown impressive results recently, allowing casual users to generate high quality images by providing textual descriptions. However, similar capabilities for editing existing images are still out of reach. Text-driven image editing methods usually need edit masks, struggle with edits that require significant visual changes and cannot easily keep specific details of the edited portion. In this paper we make the observation that image-generation models can be converted to image-editing models simply by fine-tuning them on a single image. We also show that initializing the stochastic sampler with a noised version of the base image before the sampling and interpolating relevant details from the base image after sampling further increase the quality of the edit operation. Combining these observations, we propose UniTune, a novel image editing method. UniTune gets as input an arbitrary image and a textual edit description, and carries out the edit while maintaining high fidelity to the input image. UniTune does not require additional inputs, like masks or sketches, and can perform multiple edits on the same image without retraining. We test our method using the Imagen model in a range of different use cases. We demonstrate that it is broadly applicable and can perform a surprisingly wide range of expressive editing operations, including those requiring significant visual changes that were previously impossible.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in generalizing to new tasks in a zero-shot or few-shot manner. However, the extent to which LLMs can comprehend user preferences based on their previous behavior remains an emerging and still unclear research question. Traditionally, Collaborative Filtering (CF) has been the most effective method for these tasks, predominantly relying on the extensive volume of rating data. In contrast, LLMs typically demand considerably less data while maintaining an exhaustive world knowledge about each item, such as movies or products. In this paper, we conduct a thorough examination of both CF and LLMs within the classic task of user rating prediction, which involves predicting a user's rating for a candidate item based on their past ratings. We investigate various LLMs in different sizes, ranging from 250M to 540B parameters and evaluate their performance in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning scenarios. We conduct comprehensive analysis to compare between LLMs and strong CF methods, and find that zero-shot LLMs lag behind traditional recommender models that have the access to user interaction data, indicating the importance of user interaction data. However, through fine-tuning, LLMs achieve comparable or even better performance with only a small fraction of the training data, demonstrating their potential through data efficiency.

Through exploiting a high level of parallelism enabled by graphics processing units, transformer architectures have enabled tremendous strides forward in the field of natural language processing. In a traditional masked language model, special MASK tokens are used to prompt our model to gather contextual information from surrounding words to restore originally hidden information. In this paper, we explore a task-specific masking framework for pre-trained large language models that enables superior performance on particular downstream tasks on the datasets in the GLUE benchmark. We develop our own masking algorithm, Typhoon, based on token input gradients, and compare this with other standard baselines. We find that Typhoon offers performance competitive with whole-word masking on the MRPC dataset. Our implementation can be found in a public Github Repository.

Artificial-intelligence systems that can churn out fluent text, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, are the newest darlings of the technology industry. But when faced with mathematical queries that require reasoning to answer, these large language models (LLMs) often stumble. A line parallel to y 4x 6 passes through (5, 10). What is the y-coordinate of the point where this line crosses the y-axis? Although LLMs can sometimes answer these types of question correctly, they more often get them wrong. In one early test of its reasoning abilities, ChatGPT scored just 26% when faced with a sample of questions from the'MATH' data set of secondary-school-level mathematical problems1. This is to be expected: given input text, an LLM simply generates new text in accordance with statistical regularities in the words, symbols and sentences that make up the model's training data.

Google's focus on AI stems from the conviction that this transformational technology will benefit society through its capacity to assist, complement, and empower people in almost every field and sector. In no area is the magnitude of this opportunity greater than in the spheres of healthcare and medicine. Commensurate with our mission to demonstrate these societal benefits, Google Research's programs in applied machine learning (ML) have helped place Alphabet among the top five most impactful corporate research institutions in the health and life sciences publications on the Nature Impact Index in every year from 2019 through 2022. Our Health research publications have had broad impact, spanning the fields of biomarkers, consumer sensors, dermatology, endoscopy, epidemiology, medicine, genomics, oncology, ophthalmology, pathology, public & environmental health, and radiology. In each section, we emphasize the importance of a measured and collaborative approach to innovation in health. Unlike the "launch and iterate" approach typical in consumer product development, applying ML to health requires thoughtful assessment, ecosystem awareness, and rigorous testing.