vrr
AUEB-Archimedes at RIRAG-2025: Is obligation concatenation really all you need?
Chasandras, Ioannis, Chlapanis, Odysseas S., Androutsopoulos, Ion
This paper presents the systems we developed for RIRAG-2025, a shared task that requires answering regulatory questions by retrieving relevant passages. The generated answers are evaluated using RePASs, a reference-free and model-based metric. Our systems use a combination of three retrieval models and a reranker. We show that by exploiting a neural component of RePASs that extracts important sentences ('obligations') from the retrieved passages, we achieve a dubiously high score (0.947), even though the answers are directly extracted from the retrieved passages and are not actually generated answers. We then show that by selecting the answer with the best RePASs among a few generated alternatives and then iteratively refining this answer by reducing contradictions and covering more obligations, we can generate readable, coherent answers that achieve a more plausible and relatively high score (0.639).
Do you need an HDMI 2.1 monitor?
Computer monitors that support HDMI 2.1, the latest HDMI standard, are beginning to trickle into online retailers. They sell at extremely high prices (when they're available at all). Even the most affordable HDMI 2.1 monitors, like the Gigabyte Aorus FI32U and Acer Nitro XV282K KV, are priced near $1,000. The high price of HDMI 2.1 implies it's important, but the truth is more nuanced. HDMI 2.1 brings new features to the table, but they're relevant only to people with specific needs.
Learning Generalizable Behavior via Visual Rewrite Rules
Xie, Yiheng, Li, Mingxuan, Yu, Shangqun, Littman, Michael
Though deep reinforcement learning agents have achieved unprecedented success in recent years, their learned policies can be brittle, failing to generalize to even slight modifications of their environments or unfamiliar situations. The black-box nature of the neural network learning dynamics makes it impossible to audit trained deep agents and recover from such failures. In this paper, we propose a novel representation and learning approach to capture environment dynamics without using neural networks. It originates from the observation that, in games designed for people, the effect of an action can often be perceived in the form of local changes in consecutive visual observations. Our algorithm is designed to extract such vision-based changes and condense them into a set of action-dependent descriptive rules, which we call ''visual rewrite rules'' (VRRs). We also present preliminary results from a VRR agent that can explore, expand its rule set, and solve a game via planning with its learned VRR world model. In several classical games, our non-deep agent demonstrates superior performance, extreme sample efficiency, and robust generalization ability compared with several mainstream deep agents.
Do you need an HDMI 2.1 monitor?
Computer monitors that support HDMI 2.1, the latest HDMI standard, are beginning to trickle into online retailers. They sell at extremely high prices (when they're available at all). Even the most affordable HDMI 2.1 monitors, like the Gigabyte Aorus FI32U and Acer Nitro XV282K KV, are priced near $1,000. The high price of HDMI 2.1 implies it's important, but the truth is more nuanced. HDMI 2.1 brings new features to the table, but they're relevant only to people with specific needs.
Accumulation Bit-Width Scaling For Ultra-Low Precision Training Of Deep Networks
Sakr, Charbel, Wang, Naigang, Chen, Chia-Yu, Choi, Jungwook, Agrawal, Ankur, Shanbhag, Naresh, Gopalakrishnan, Kailash
Efforts to reduce the numerical precision of computations in deep learning training have yielded systems that aggressively quantize weights and activations, yet employ wide high-precision accumulators for partial sums in inner-product operations to preserve the quality of convergence. The absence of any framework to analyze the precision requirements of partial sum accumulations results in conservative design choices. This imposes an upper-bound on the reduction of complexity of multiply-accumulate units. We present a statistical approach to analyze the impact of reduced accumulation precision on deep learning training. Observing that a bad choice for accumulation precision results in loss of information that manifests itself as a reduction in variance in an ensemble of partial sums, we derive a set of equations that relate this variance to the length of accumulation and the minimum number of bits needed for accumulation. We apply our analysis to three benchmark networks: CIFAR-10 ResNet 32, ImageNet ResNet 18 and ImageNet AlexNet. In each case, with accumulation precision set in accordance with our proposed equations, the networks successfully converge to the single precision floating-point baseline. We also show that reducing accumulation precision further degrades the quality of the trained network, proving that our equations produce tight bounds. Overall this analysis enables precise tailoring of computation hardware to the application, yielding area- and power-optimal systems.