Daily Papers

We consider a smart home or smart office environment with a number of IoT devices connected and passing data between one another. The footprints of the data transferred can provide valuable information about the devices, which can be used to (a) identify the IoT devices and (b) in case of failure, to identify the correct replacements for these devices. In this paper, we generate the embeddings for IoT devices in a smart home using Word2Vec, and explore the possibility of having a similar concept for IoT devices, aka IoT2Vec. These embeddings can be used in a number of ways, such as to find similar devices in an IoT device store, or as a signature of each type of IoT device. We show results of a feasibility study on the CASAS dataset of IoT device activity logs, using our method to identify the patterns in embeddings of various types of IoT devices in a household.

Data quality is crucial for the successful training, generalization and performance of artificial intelligence models. Furthermore, it is known that the leading approaches in artificial intelligence are notoriously data-hungry. In this paper, we propose the use of small training datasets towards faster training. Specifically, we provide a novel topological method based on morphisms between persistence modules to measure the training data quality with respect to the complete dataset. This way, we can provide an explanation of why the chosen training dataset will lead to poor performance.

Climate change poses an urgent global threat, needing the rapid identification and deployment of innovative solutions. We hypothesise that many of these solutions already exist within scientific literature but remain underutilised. To address this gap, this study employs a curated dataset sourced from OpenAlex, a comprehensive repository of scientific papers. Utilising Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT4-o from OpenAI, we evaluate title-abstract pairs from scientific papers on seven dimensions, covering climate change mitigation potential, stage of technological development, and readiness for deployment. The outputs of the language models are then compared with human evaluations to assess their effectiveness in identifying promising yet overlooked climate innovations. Our findings suggest that these LLM-based models can effectively augment human expertise, uncovering climate solutions that are potentially impactful but with far greater speed, throughput and consistency. Here, we focused on UK-based solutions, but the workflow is region-agnostic. This work contributes to the discovery of neglected innovations in scientific literature and demonstrates the potential of AI in enhancing climate action strategies.

A shared goal of several machine learning communities like continual learning, meta-learning and transfer learning, is to design algorithms and models that efficiently and robustly adapt to unseen tasks. An even more ambitious goal is to build models that never stop adapting, and that become increasingly more efficient through time by suitably transferring the accrued knowledge. Beyond the study of the actual learning algorithm and model architecture, there are several hurdles towards our quest to build such models, such as the choice of learning protocol, metric of success and data needed to validate research hypotheses. In this work, we introduce the Never-Ending VIsual-classification Stream (NEVIS'22), a benchmark consisting of a stream of over 100 visual classification tasks, sorted chronologically and extracted from papers sampled uniformly from computer vision proceedings spanning the last three decades. The resulting stream reflects what the research community thought was meaningful at any point in time, and it serves as an ideal test bed to assess how well models can adapt to new tasks, and do so better and more efficiently as time goes by. Despite being limited to classification, the resulting stream has a rich diversity of tasks from OCR, to texture analysis, scene recognition, and so forth. The diversity is also reflected in the wide range of dataset sizes, spanning over four orders of magnitude. Overall, NEVIS'22 poses an unprecedented challenge for current sequential learning approaches due to the scale and diversity of tasks, yet with a low entry barrier as it is limited to a single modality and well understood supervised learning problems. Moreover, we provide a reference implementation including strong baselines and an evaluation protocol to compare methods in terms of their trade-off between accuracy and compute.

We introduce TexTile, a novel differentiable metric to quantify the degree upon which a texture image can be concatenated with itself without introducing repeating artifacts (i.e., the tileability). Existing methods for tileable texture synthesis focus on general texture quality, but lack explicit analysis of the intrinsic repeatability properties of a texture. In contrast, our TexTile metric effectively evaluates the tileable properties of a texture, opening the door to more informed synthesis and analysis of tileable textures. Under the hood, TexTile is formulated as a binary classifier carefully built from a large dataset of textures of different styles, semantics, regularities, and human annotations.Key to our method is a set of architectural modifications to baseline pre-train image classifiers to overcome their shortcomings at measuring tileability, along with a custom data augmentation and training regime aimed at increasing robustness and accuracy. We demonstrate that TexTile can be plugged into different state-of-the-art texture synthesis methods, including diffusion-based strategies, and generate tileable textures while keeping or even improving the overall texture quality. Furthermore, we show that TexTile can objectively evaluate any tileable texture synthesis method, whereas the current mix of existing metrics produces uncorrelated scores which heavily hinders progress in the field.

Language modelling provides a step towards intelligent communication systems by harnessing large repositories of written human knowledge to better predict and understand the world. In this paper, we present an analysis of Transformer-based language model performance across a wide range of model scales -- from models with tens of millions of parameters up to a 280 billion parameter model called Gopher. These models are evaluated on 152 diverse tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across the majority. Gains from scale are largest in areas such as reading comprehension, fact-checking, and the identification of toxic language, but logical and mathematical reasoning see less benefit. We provide a holistic analysis of the training dataset and model's behaviour, covering the intersection of model scale with bias and toxicity. Finally we discuss the application of language models to AI safety and the mitigation of downstream harms.

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have become the mainstream choice for fewshot and zeroshot learning thanks to the universality of text generation. Many users, however, do not need the broad capabilities of generative LLMs when they only want to automate a classification task. Smaller BERT-like models can also learn universal tasks, which allow them to do any text classification task without requiring fine-tuning (zeroshot classification) or to learn new tasks with only a few examples (fewshot), while being significantly more efficient than generative LLMs. This paper (1) explains how Natural Language Inference (NLI) can be used as a universal classification task that follows similar principles as instruction fine-tuning of generative LLMs, (2) provides a step-by-step guide with reusable Jupyter notebooks for building a universal classifier, and (3) shares the resulting universal classifier that is trained on 33 datasets with 389 diverse classes. Parts of the code we share has been used to train our older zeroshot classifiers that have been downloaded more than 55 million times via the Hugging Face Hub as of December 2023. Our new classifier improves zeroshot performance by 9.4%.

Learning world models can teach an agent how the world works in an unsupervised manner. Even though it can be viewed as a special case of sequence modeling, progress for scaling world models on robotic applications such as autonomous driving has been somewhat less rapid than scaling language models with Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT). We identify two reasons as major bottlenecks: dealing with complex and unstructured observation space, and having a scalable generative model. Consequently, we propose a novel world modeling approach that first tokenizes sensor observations with VQVAE, then predicts the future via discrete diffusion. To efficiently decode and denoise tokens in parallel, we recast Masked Generative Image Transformer into the discrete diffusion framework with a few simple changes, resulting in notable improvement. When applied to learning world models on point cloud observations, our model reduces prior SOTA Chamfer distance by more than 65% for 1s prediction, and more than 50% for 3s prediction, across NuScenes, KITTI Odometry, and Argoverse2 datasets. Our results demonstrate that discrete diffusion on tokenized agent experience can unlock the power of GPT-like unsupervised learning for robotic agents.

Cinematic audio source separation (CASS) is a relatively new subtask of audio source separation, concerned with the separation of a mixture into the dialogue, music, and effects stems. To date, only one publicly available dataset exists for CASS, that is, the Divide and Remaster (DnR) dataset, which is currently at version 2. While DnR v2 has been an incredibly useful resource for CASS, several areas of improvement have been identified, particularly through its use in the 2023 Sound Demixing Challenge. In this work, we develop version 3 of the DnR dataset, addressing issues relating to vocal content in non-dialogue stems, loudness distributions, mastering process, and linguistic diversity. In particular, the dialogue stem of DnR v3 includes speech content from more than 30 languages from multiple families including but not limited to the Germanic, Romance, Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Malayo-Polynesian, and Bantu families. Benchmark results using the Bandit model indicated that training on multilingual data yields significant generalizability to the model even in languages with low data availability. Even in languages with high data availability, the multilingual model often performs on par or better than dedicated models trained on monolingual CASS datasets.