In this paper, we assess the scientific promise and technology feasibility of distributed instruments for planetary science. A distributed instrument is an instrument designed to collect spatially and temporally correlated data from multiple networked, geographically distributed point sensors. Distributed instruments are ubiquitous in Earth science, where they are routinely employed for weather and climate science, seismic studies and resource prospecting, and detection of industrial emissions. However, to date, their adoption in planetary surface science has been minimal. It is natural to ask whether this lack of adoption is driven by low potential to address high-priority questions in planetary science; immature technology; or both. To address this question, we survey high-priority planetary science questions that are uniquely well-suited to distributed instruments. We identify four areas of research where distributed instruments hold promise to unlock answers that are largely inaccessible to monolithic sensors, namely, weather and climate studies of Mars; localization of seismic events on rocky and icy bodies; localization of trace gas emissions, primarily on Mars; and magnetometry studies of internal composition. Next, we survey enabling technologies for distributed sensors and assess their maturity. We identify sensor placement (including descent and landing on planetary surfaces), power, and instrument autonomy as three key areas requiring further investment to enable future distributed instruments. Overall, this work shows that distributed instruments hold great promise for planetary science, and paves the way for follow-on studies of future distributed instruments for Solar System in-situ science.

Automated answer validation can help improve learning outcomes by providing appropriate feedback to learners, and by making question answering systems and online learning solutions more widely available. There have been some works in science question answering which show that information retrieval methods outperform neural methods, especially in the multiple choice version of this problem. We implement Siamese neural network models and produce a generalised solution to this problem. We compare our supervised model with other text similarity based solutions.

The rising popularity of ChatGPT and other AI-powered large language models (LLMs) has led to increasing studies highlighting their susceptibility to mistakes and biases. However, most of these studies focus on models trained on English texts. Taking an innovative approach, this study investigates political biases in GPT's multilingual models. We posed the same question about high-profile political issues in the United States and China to GPT in both English and simplified Chinese, and our analysis of the bilingual responses revealed that GPT's bilingual models' political "knowledge" (content) and the political "attitude" (sentiment) are significantly more inconsistent on political issues in China. The simplified Chinese GPT models not only tended to provide pro-China information but also presented the least negative sentiment towards China's problems, whereas the English GPT was significantly more negative towards China. This disparity may stem from Chinese state censorship and US-China geopolitical tensions, which influence the training corpora of GPT bilingual models. Moreover, both Chinese and English models tended to be less critical towards the issues of "their own" represented by the language used, than the issues of "the other." This suggests that GPT multilingual models could potentially develop a "political identity" and an associated sentiment bias based on their training language. We discussed the implications of our findings for information transmission and communication in an increasingly divided world.

When answering a question, humans utilize the information available across different modalities to synthesize a consistent and complete chain of thought (CoT). This process is normally a black box in the case of deep learning models like large-scale language models. Recently, science question benchmarks have been used to diagnose the multi-hop reasoning ability and interpretability of an AI system. However, existing datasets fail to provide annotations for the answers, or are restricted to the textual-only modality, small scales, and limited domain diversity. To this end, we present Science Question Answering (ScienceQA), a new benchmark that consists of ~21k multimodal multiple choice questions with a diverse set of science topics and annotations of their answers with corresponding lectures and explanations. We further design language models to learn to generate lectures and explanations as the chain of thought (CoT) to mimic the multi-hop reasoning process when answering ScienceQA questions. ScienceQA demonstrates the utility of CoT in language models, as CoT improves the question answering performance by 1.20% in few-shot GPT-3 and 3.99% in fine-tuned UnifiedQA. We also explore the upper bound for models to leverage explanations by feeding those in the input; we observe that it improves the few-shot performance of GPT-3 by 18.96%. Our analysis further shows that language models, similar to humans, benefit from explanations to learn from fewer data and achieve the same performance with just 40% of the data. The data and code are available at https://scienceqa.github.io.

In recent years, machine learning and pattern recognition methods have become common in Earth and space sciences. This is especially true for remote sensing applications, which often rely on massive archives of noisy data and so are well suited to such artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. As the data science revolution matures, we can assess its impact on specific research disciplines. We focus here on imaging spectroscopy, also known as hyperspectral imaging, as a data-centric remote sensing discipline expected to benefit from machine learning. Imaging spectroscopy involves collecting spectral data from airborne and satellite sensors at hundreds of electromagnetic wavelengths for each pixel in the sensors' viewing area.

Despite the successes of pretrained language models, there are still few high-quality, general-purpose QA systems that are freely available. In response, we present Macaw, a versatile, generative question-answering (QA) system that we are making available to the community. Macaw is built on UnifiedQA, itself built on T5, and exhibits strong performance, zero-shot, on a wide variety of topics, including outperforming GPT-3 by over 10% (absolute) on Challenge300, a suite of 300 challenge questions, despite being an order of magnitude smaller (11 billion vs. 175 billion parameters). In addition, Macaw allows different permutations ("angles") of its inputs and outputs to be used, for example Macaw can take a question and produce an answer; or take an answer and produce a question; or take an answer and question, and produce multiple-choice options. We describe the system, and illustrate a variety of question types where it produces surprisingly good answers, well outside the training setup. We also identify question classes where it still appears to struggle, offering insights into the limitations of pretrained language models. Macaw is freely available, and we hope that it proves useful to the community. Macaw is available at https://github.com/allenai/macaw

We propose a novel approach for answering and explaining multiple-choice science questions by reasoning on grounding and abstract inference chains. This paper frames question answering as an abductive reasoning problem, constructing plausible explanations for each choice and then selecting the candidate with the best explanation as the final answer. Our system, ExplanationLP, elicits explanations by constructing a weighted graph of relevant facts for each candidate answer and extracting the facts that satisfy certain structural and semantic constraints. To extract the explanations, we employ a linear programming formalism designed to select the optimal subgraph. The graphs' weighting function is composed of a set of parameters, which we fine-tune to optimize answer selection performance. We carry out our experiments on the WorldTree and ARC-Challenge corpus to empirically demonstrate the following conclusions: (1) Grounding-Abstract inference chains provides the semantic control to perform explainable abductive reasoning (2) Efficiency and robustness in learning with a fewer number of parameters by outperforming contemporary explainable and transformer-based approaches in a similar setting (3) Generalisability by outperforming SOTA explainable approaches on general science question sets.

The paper presents a framework to reconstruct explanations for multiple choices science questions through explanation-centred corpora. Building upon the notion of unification in science, the framework ranks explanatory facts with respect to question and candidate answer by leveraging a combination of two different scores: (a) A Relevance Score (RS) that represents the extent to which a given fact is specific to the question; (b) A Unification Score (US) that takes into account the explanatory power of a fact, determined according to its frequency in explanations for similar questions. An extensive evaluation of the framework is performed on the Worldtree corpus, adopting IR weighting schemes for its implementation. The following findings are presented: (1) The proposed approach achieves competitive results when compared to state-of-the-art Transformers, yet possessing the property of being scalable to large explanatory knowledge bases; (2) The combined model significantly outperforms IR baselines ( 7.8/8.4 MAP), confirming the complementary aspects of relevance and unification score; (3) The constructed explanations can support downstream models for answer prediction, improving the accuracy of BERT for multiple choices QA on both ARC easy ( 6.92%) and challenge ( 15.69%) questions.

AI has achieved remarkable mastery over games such as Chess, Go, and Poker, and even Jeopardy, but the rich variety of standardized exams has remained a landmark challenge. Even in 2016, the best AI system achieved merely 59.3% on an 8th Grade science exam challenge. This paper reports unprecedented success on the Grade 8 New York Regents Science Exam, where for the first time a system scores more than 90% on the exam's non-diagram, multiple choice (NDMC) questions. In addition, our Aristo system, building upon the success of recent language models, exceeded 83% on the corresponding Grade 12 Science Exam NDMC questions. The results, on unseen test questions, are robust across different test years and different variations of this kind of test. They demonstrate that modern NLP methods can result in mastery on this task. While not a full solution to general question-answering (the questions are multiple choice, and the domain is restricted to 8th Grade science), it represents a significant milestone for the field.

The vast and rapidly increasing supply of new data in the Earth sciences creates many opportunities to gain scientific insights and to answer important questions. Data analysis has always been an integral component of research and education in the Earth sciences, but mainstream Earth scientists may not yet be fully aware of many recently developed methods in computer science, statistics, and math. The fastest way to put these new methods of data analysis to use in the Earth sciences is for Earth scientists and data scientists to collaborate. However, those collaborations can be difficult to initiate and even more difficult to maintain and to guide to successful outcomes. Here we break down the collaboration process into steps and provide some guidelines that we have found useful for efficient collaboration between Earth scientists and data scientists.