The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the emergence of novel abilities with scale have necessitated the construction of holistic, diverse and challenging benchmarks such as HELM and BIG-bench. However, at the moment, most of these benchmarks focus only on performance in English and evaluations that include Southeast Asian (SEA) languages are few in number. We therefore propose BHASA, a holistic linguistic and cultural evaluation suite for LLMs in SEA languages. It comprises three components: (1) a NLP benchmark covering eight tasks across Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Generation (NLG) and Reasoning (NLR) tasks, (2) LINDSEA, a linguistic diagnostic toolkit that spans the gamut of linguistic phenomena including syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and (3) a cultural diagnostics dataset that probes for both cultural representation and sensitivity. For this preliminary effort, we implement the NLP benchmark only for Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai and Tamil, and we only include Indonesian and Tamil for LINDSEA and the cultural diagnostics dataset. As GPT-4 is purportedly one of the best-performing multilingual LLMs at the moment, we use it as a yardstick to gauge the capabilities of LLMs in the context of SEA languages. Our initial experiments on GPT-4 with BHASA find it lacking in various aspects of linguistic capabilities, cultural representation and sensitivity in the targeted SEA languages. BHASA is a work in progress and will continue to be improved and expanded in the future. The repository for this paper can be found at: //github.com/aisingapore/BHASA
Submarine cables constitute the backbone of the Internet. However, these critical infrastructure components are vulnerable to several natural and man-made threats, and during failures, are difficult to repair in their remote oceanic environments. In spite of their crucial role, we have a limited understanding of the impact of submarine cable failures on global connectivity, particularly on the higher layers of the Internet. In this paper, we present Nautilus, a framework for cross-layer cartography of submarine cables and IP links. Using a corpus of public datasets and Internet cartographic techniques, Nautilus identifies IP links that are likely traversing submarine cables and maps them to one or more potential cables. Nautilus also gives each IP to cable assignment a prediction score that reflects the confidence in the mapping. Nautilus generates a mapping for 3.05 million and 1.43 million IPv4 and IPv6 links respectively, covering 91% of all active cables. In the absence of ground truth data, we validate Nautilus mapping using three techniques: analyzing past cable failures, using targeted traceroute measurements, and comparing with public network maps of two operators.
Delivery of items from the producer to the consumer has experienced significant growth over the past decade and has been greatly fueled by the recent pandemic. Amazon Fresh, Shopify, UberEats, InstaCart, and DoorDash are rapidly growing and are sharing the same business model of consumer items or food delivery. Existing food delivery methods are sub-optimal because each delivery is individually optimized to go directly from the producer to the consumer via the shortest time path. We observe a significant scope for reducing the costs associated with completing deliveries under the current model. We model our food delivery problem as a multi-objective optimization, where consumer satisfaction and delivery costs, both, need to be optimized. Taking inspiration from the success of ride-sharing in the taxi industry, we propose DeliverAI - a reinforcement learning-based path-sharing algorithm. Unlike previous attempts for path-sharing, DeliverAI can provide real-time, time-efficient decision-making using a Reinforcement learning-enabled agent system. Our novel agent interaction scheme leverages path-sharing among deliveries to reduce the total distance traveled while keeping the delivery completion time under check. We generate and test our methodology vigorously on a simulation setup using real data from the city of Chicago. Our results show that DeliverAI can reduce the delivery fleet size by 12\%, the distance traveled by 13%, and achieve 50% higher fleet utilization compared to the baselines.
Current methods based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) significantly lack the capacity to quantify uncertainty in their predictions, particularly on the unseen space including the occluded and outside scene content. This limitation hinders their extensive applications in robotics, where the reliability of model predictions has to be considered for tasks such as robotic exploration and planning in unknown environments. To address this, we propose a novel approach to estimate a 3D Uncertainty Field based on the learned incomplete scene geometry, which explicitly identifies these unseen regions. By considering the accumulated transmittance along each camera ray, our Uncertainty Field infers 2D pixel-wise uncertainty, exhibiting high values for rays directly casting towards occluded or outside the scene content. To quantify the uncertainty on the learned surface, we model a stochastic radiance field. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach is the only one that can explicitly reason about high uncertainty both on 3D unseen regions and its involved 2D rendered pixels, compared with recent methods. Furthermore, we illustrate that our designed uncertainty field is ideally suited for real-world robotics tasks, such as next-best-view selection.
Recent advances in implicit neural representations have achieved impressive results by sampling and fusing individual points along sampling rays in the sampling space. However, due to the explosively growing sampling space, finely representing and synthesizing detailed textures remains a challenge for unbounded large-scale outdoor scenes. To alleviate the dilemma of using individual points to perceive the entire colossal space, we explore learning the surface distribution of the scene to provide structural priors and reduce the samplable space and propose a Point Diffusion implicit Function, PDF, for large-scale scene neural representation. The core of our method is a large-scale point cloud super-resolution diffusion module that enhances the sparse point cloud reconstructed from several training images into a dense point cloud as an explicit prior. Then in the rendering stage, only sampling points with prior points within the sampling radius are retained. That is, the sampling space is reduced from the unbounded space to the scene surface. Meanwhile, to fill in the background of the scene that cannot be provided by point clouds, the region sampling based on Mip-NeRF 360 is employed to model the background representation. Expensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method for large-scale scene novel view synthesis, which outperforms relevant state-of-the-art baselines.
Multimodal counterfactual reasoning is a vital yet challenging ability for AI systems. It involves predicting the outcomes of hypothetical circumstances based on vision and language inputs, which enables AI models to learn from failures and explore hypothetical scenarios. Despite its importance, there are only a few datasets targeting the counterfactual reasoning abilities of multimodal models. Among them, they only cover reasoning over synthetic environments or specific types of events (e.g. traffic collisions), making them hard to reliably benchmark the model generalization ability in diverse real-world scenarios and reasoning dimensions. To overcome these limitations, we develop a video question answering dataset, ACQUIRED: it consists of 3.9K annotated videos, encompassing a wide range of event types and incorporating both first and third-person viewpoints, which ensures a focus on real-world diversity. In addition, each video is annotated with questions that span three distinct dimensions of reasoning, including physical, social, and temporal, which can comprehensively evaluate the model counterfactual abilities along multiple aspects. We benchmark our dataset against several state-of-the-art language-only and multimodal models and experimental results demonstrate a significant performance gap (>13%) between models and humans. The findings suggest that multimodal counterfactual reasoning remains an open challenge and ACQUIRED is a comprehensive and reliable benchmark for inspiring future research in this direction.
Humans have the ability to learn novel compositional concepts by recalling and generalizing primitive concepts acquired from past experiences. Inspired by this observation, in this paper, we propose MetaReVision, a retrieval-enhanced meta-learning model to address the visually grounded compositional concept learning problem. The proposed MetaReVision consists of a retrieval module and a meta-learning module which are designed to incorporate retrieved primitive concepts as a supporting set to meta-train vision-anguage models for grounded compositional concept recognition. Through meta-learning from episodes constructed by the retriever, MetaReVision learns a generic compositional representation that can be fast updated to recognize novel compositional concepts. We create CompCOCO and CompFlickr to benchmark the grounded compositional concept learning. Our experimental results show that MetaReVision outperforms other competitive baselines and the retrieval module plays an important role in this compositional learning process.
This article presents the affordances that Generative Artificial Intelligence can have in disinformation context, one of the major threats to our digitalized society. We present a research framework to generate customized agent-based social networks for disinformation simulations that would enable understanding and evaluation of the phenomena whilst discussing open challenges.
Diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential for high-quality image synthesis. However, when it comes to producing images with complex scenes, how to properly describe both image global structures and object details remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present Frido, a Feature Pyramid Diffusion model performing a multi-scale coarse-to-fine denoising process for image synthesis. Our model decomposes an input image into scale-dependent vector quantized features, followed by a coarse-to-fine gating for producing image output. During the above multi-scale representation learning stage, additional input conditions like text, scene graph, or image layout can be further exploited. Thus, Frido can be also applied for conditional or cross-modality image synthesis. We conduct extensive experiments over various unconditioned and conditional image generation tasks, ranging from text-to-image synthesis, layout-to-image, scene-graph-to-image, to label-to-image. More specifically, we achieved state-of-the-art FID scores on five benchmarks, namely layout-to-image on COCO and OpenImages, scene-graph-to-image on COCO and Visual Genome, and label-to-image on COCO. Code is available at //github.com/davidhalladay/Frido.
Over the past few years, the rapid development of deep learning technologies for computer vision has greatly promoted the performance of medical image segmentation (MedISeg). However, the recent MedISeg publications usually focus on presentations of the major contributions (e.g., network architectures, training strategies, and loss functions) while unwittingly ignoring some marginal implementation details (also known as "tricks"), leading to a potential problem of the unfair experimental result comparisons. In this paper, we collect a series of MedISeg tricks for different model implementation phases (i.e., pre-training model, data pre-processing, data augmentation, model implementation, model inference, and result post-processing), and experimentally explore the effectiveness of these tricks on the consistent baseline models. Compared to paper-driven surveys that only blandly focus on the advantages and limitation analyses of segmentation models, our work provides a large number of solid experiments and is more technically operable. With the extensive experimental results on both the representative 2D and 3D medical image datasets, we explicitly clarify the effect of these tricks. Moreover, based on the surveyed tricks, we also open-sourced a strong MedISeg repository, where each of its components has the advantage of plug-and-play. We believe that this milestone work not only completes a comprehensive and complementary survey of the state-of-the-art MedISeg approaches, but also offers a practical guide for addressing the future medical image processing challenges including but not limited to small dataset learning, class imbalance learning, multi-modality learning, and domain adaptation. The code has been released at: //github.com/hust-linyi/MedISeg
Distant supervision can effectively label data for relation extraction, but suffers from the noise labeling problem. Recent works mainly perform soft bag-level noise reduction strategies to find the relatively better samples in a sentence bag, which is suboptimal compared with making a hard decision of false positive samples in sentence level. In this paper, we introduce an adversarial learning framework, which we named DSGAN, to learn a sentence-level true-positive generator. Inspired by Generative Adversarial Networks, we regard the positive samples generated by the generator as the negative samples to train the discriminator. The optimal generator is obtained until the discrimination ability of the discriminator has the greatest decline. We adopt the generator to filter distant supervision training dataset and redistribute the false positive instances into the negative set, in which way to provide a cleaned dataset for relation classification. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly improves the performance of distant supervision relation extraction comparing to state-of-the-art systems.