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Mar 14

EAIRA: Establishing a Methodology for Evaluating AI Models as Scientific Research Assistants

Recent advancements have positioned AI, and particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), as transformative tools for scientific research, capable of addressing complex tasks that require reasoning, problem-solving, and decision-making. Their exceptional capabilities suggest their potential as scientific research assistants but also highlight the need for holistic, rigorous, and domain-specific evaluation to assess effectiveness in real-world scientific applications. This paper describes a multifaceted methodology for Evaluating AI models as scientific Research Assistants (EAIRA) developed at Argonne National Laboratory. This methodology incorporates four primary classes of evaluations. 1) Multiple Choice Questions to assess factual recall; 2) Open Response to evaluate advanced reasoning and problem-solving skills; 3) Lab-Style Experiments involving detailed analysis of capabilities as research assistants in controlled environments; and 4) Field-Style Experiments to capture researcher-LLM interactions at scale in a wide range of scientific domains and applications. These complementary methods enable a comprehensive analysis of LLM strengths and weaknesses with respect to their scientific knowledge, reasoning abilities, and adaptability. Recognizing the rapid pace of LLM advancements, we designed the methodology to evolve and adapt so as to ensure its continued relevance and applicability. This paper describes the methodology state at the end of February 2025. Although developed within a subset of scientific domains, the methodology is designed to be generalizable to a wide range of scientific domains.

Artificial intelligence in cyber physical systems

This article conducts a literature review of current and future challenges in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in cyber physical systems. The literature review is focused on identifying a conceptual framework for increasing resilience with AI through automation supporting both, a technical and human level. The methodology applied resembled a literature review and taxonomic analysis of complex internet of things (IoT) interconnected and coupled cyber physical systems. There is an increased attention on propositions on models, infrastructures and frameworks of IoT in both academic and technical papers. These reports and publications frequently represent a juxtaposition of other related systems and technologies (e.g. Industrial Internet of Things, Cyber Physical Systems, Industry 4.0 etc.). We review academic and industry papers published between 2010 and 2020. The results determine a new hierarchical cascading conceptual framework for analysing the evolution of AI decision-making in cyber physical systems. We argue that such evolution is inevitable and autonomous because of the increased integration of connected devices (IoT) in cyber physical systems. To support this argument, taxonomic methodology is adapted and applied for transparency and justifications of concepts selection decisions through building summary maps that are applied for designing the hierarchical cascading conceptual framework.

Exploring the sustainable scaling of AI dilemma: A projective study of corporations' AI environmental impacts

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), has raised concerns regarding its global environmental impact that extends beyond greenhouse gas emissions to include consideration of hardware fabrication and end-of-life processes. The opacity from major providers hinders companies' abilities to evaluate their AI-related environmental impacts and achieve net-zero targets. In this paper, we propose a methodology to estimate the environmental impact of a company's AI portfolio, providing actionable insights without necessitating extensive AI and Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) expertise. Results confirm that large generative AI models consume up to 4600x more energy than traditional models. Our modelling approach, which accounts for increased AI usage, hardware computing efficiency, and changes in electricity mix in line with IPCC scenarios, forecasts AI electricity use up to 2030. Under a high adoption scenario, driven by widespread Generative AI and agents adoption associated to increasingly complex models and frameworks, AI electricity use is projected to rise by a factor of 24.4. Mitigating the environmental impact of Generative AI by 2030 requires coordinated efforts across the AI value chain. Isolated measures in hardware efficiency, model efficiency, or grid improvements alone are insufficient. We advocate for standardized environmental assessment frameworks, greater transparency from the all actors of the value chain and the introduction of a "Return on Environment" metric to align AI development with net-zero goals.

What are the best systems? New perspectives on NLP Benchmarking

In Machine Learning, a benchmark refers to an ensemble of datasets associated with one or multiple metrics together with a way to aggregate different systems performances. They are instrumental in (i) assessing the progress of new methods along different axes and (ii) selecting the best systems for practical use. This is particularly the case for NLP with the development of large pre-trained models (e.g. GPT, BERT) that are expected to generalize well on a variety of tasks. While the community mainly focused on developing new datasets and metrics, there has been little interest in the aggregation procedure, which is often reduced to a simple average over various performance measures. However, this procedure can be problematic when the metrics are on a different scale, which may lead to spurious conclusions. This paper proposes a new procedure to rank systems based on their performance across different tasks. Motivated by the social choice theory, the final system ordering is obtained through aggregating the rankings induced by each task and is theoretically grounded. We conduct extensive numerical experiments (on over 270k scores) to assess the soundness of our approach both on synthetic and real scores (e.g. GLUE, EXTREM, SEVAL, TAC, FLICKR). In particular, we show that our method yields different conclusions on state-of-the-art systems than the mean-aggregation procedure while being both more reliable and robust.

AGBD: A Global-scale Biomass Dataset

Accurate estimates of Above Ground Biomass (AGB) are essential in addressing two of humanity's biggest challenges, climate change and biodiversity loss. Existing datasets for AGB estimation from satellite imagery are limited. Either they focus on specific, local regions at high resolution, or they offer global coverage at low resolution. There is a need for a machine learning-ready, globally representative, high-resolution benchmark. Our findings indicate significant variability in biomass estimates across different vegetation types, emphasizing the necessity for a dataset that accurately captures global diversity. To address these gaps, we introduce a comprehensive new dataset that is globally distributed, covers a range of vegetation types, and spans several years. This dataset combines AGB reference data from the GEDI mission with data from Sentinel-2 and PALSAR-2 imagery. Additionally, it includes pre-processed high-level features such as a dense canopy height map, an elevation map, and a land-cover classification map. We also produce a dense, high-resolution (10m) map of AGB predictions for the entire area covered by the dataset. Rigorously tested, our dataset is accompanied by several benchmark models and is publicly available. It can be easily accessed using a single line of code, offering a solid basis for efforts towards global AGB estimation. The GitHub repository github.com/ghjuliasialelli/AGBD serves as a one-stop shop for all code and data.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for ESG financial portfolio management

This paper investigates the application of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) financial portfolio management, with a specific focus on the potential benefits of ESG score-based market regulation. We leveraged an Advantage Actor-Critic (A2C) agent and conducted our experiments using environments encoded within the OpenAI Gym, adapted from the FinRL platform. The study includes a comparative analysis of DRL agent performance under standard Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) market conditions and a scenario where returns are regulated in line with company ESG scores. In the ESG-regulated market, grants were proportionally allotted to portfolios based on their returns and ESG scores, while taxes were assigned to portfolios below the mean ESG score of the index. The results intriguingly reveal that the DRL agent within the ESG-regulated market outperforms the standard DJIA market setup. Furthermore, we considered the inclusion of ESG variables in the agent state space, and compared this with scenarios where such data were excluded. This comparison adds to the understanding of the role of ESG factors in portfolio management decision-making. We also analyze the behaviour of the DRL agent in IBEX 35 and NASDAQ-100 indexes. Both the A2C and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithms were applied to these additional markets, providing a broader perspective on the generalization of our findings. This work contributes to the evolving field of ESG investing, suggesting that market regulation based on ESG scoring can potentially improve DRL-based portfolio management, with significant implications for sustainable investing strategies.

A Methodology for Evaluating RAG Systems: A Case Study On Configuration Dependency Validation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is an umbrella of different components, design decisions, and domain-specific adaptations to enhance the capabilities of large language models and counter their limitations regarding hallucination and outdated and missing knowledge. Since it is unclear which design decisions lead to a satisfactory performance, developing RAG systems is often experimental and needs to follow a systematic and sound methodology to gain sound and reliable results. However, there is currently no generally accepted methodology for RAG evaluation despite a growing interest in this technology. In this paper, we propose a first blueprint of a methodology for a sound and reliable evaluation of RAG systems and demonstrate its applicability on a real-world software engineering research task: the validation of configuration dependencies across software technologies. In summary, we make two novel contributions: (i) A novel, reusable methodological design for evaluating RAG systems, including a demonstration that represents a guideline, and (ii) a RAG system, which has been developed following this methodology, that achieves the highest accuracy in the field of dependency validation. For the blueprint's demonstration, the key insights are the crucial role of choosing appropriate baselines and metrics, the necessity for systematic RAG refinements derived from qualitative failure analysis, as well as the reporting practices of key design decision to foster replication and evaluation.

Efficient and Green Large Language Models for Software Engineering: Vision and the Road Ahead

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown remarkable capabilities in various software engineering tasks, spurring the rapid growth of the Large Language Models for Software Engineering (LLM4SE) area. However, limited attention has been paid to developing efficient LLM4SE techniques that demand minimal computational cost, time, and memory resources, as well as green LLM4SE solutions that reduce energy consumption, water usage, and carbon emissions. This paper aims to redirect the focus of the research community towards the efficiency and greenness of LLM4SE, while also sharing potential research directions to achieve this goal. It commences with a brief overview of the significance of LLM4SE and highlights the need for efficient and green LLM4SE solutions. Subsequently, the paper presents a vision for a future where efficient and green LLM4SE revolutionizes the LLM-based software engineering tool landscape, benefiting various stakeholders, including industry, individual practitioners, and society. The paper then delineates a roadmap for future research, outlining specific research paths and potential solutions for the research community to pursue. While not intended to be a definitive guide, the paper aims to inspire further progress, with the ultimate goal of establishing efficient and green LLM4SE as a central element in the future of software engineering.

EmTract: Investor Emotions and Market Behavior

We develop a tool that extracts emotions from social media text data. Our methodology has three main advantages. First, it is tailored for financial context; second, it incorporates key aspects of social media data, such as non-standard phrases, emojis and emoticons; and third, it operates by sequentially learning a latent representation that includes features such as word order, word usage, and local context. This tool, along with a user guide is available at: https://github.com/dvamossy/EmTract. Using EmTract, we explore the relationship between investor emotions expressed on social media and asset prices. We document a number of interesting insights. First, we confirm some of the findings of controlled laboratory experiments relating investor emotions to asset price movements. Second, we show that investor emotions are predictive of daily price movements. These impacts are larger when volatility or short interest are higher, and when institutional ownership or liquidity are lower. Third, increased investor enthusiasm prior to the IPO contributes to the large first-day return and long-run underperformance of IPO stocks. To corroborate our results, we provide a number of robustness checks, including using an alternative emotion model. Our findings reinforce the intuition that emotions and market dynamics are closely related, and highlight the importance of considering investor emotions when assessing a stock's short-term value.

An Experience Report on Machine Learning Reproducibility: Guidance for Practitioners and TensorFlow Model Garden Contributors

Machine learning techniques are becoming a fundamental tool for scientific and engineering progress. These techniques are applied in contexts as diverse as astronomy and spam filtering. However, correctly applying these techniques requires careful engineering. Much attention has been paid to the technical potential; relatively little attention has been paid to the software engineering process required to bring research-based machine learning techniques into practical utility. Technology companies have supported the engineering community through machine learning frameworks such as TensorFLow and PyTorch, but the details of how to engineer complex machine learning models in these frameworks have remained hidden. To promote best practices within the engineering community, academic institutions and Google have partnered to launch a Special Interest Group on Machine Learning Models (SIGMODELS) whose goal is to develop exemplary implementations of prominent machine learning models in community locations such as the TensorFlow Model Garden (TFMG). The purpose of this report is to define a process for reproducing a state-of-the-art machine learning model at a level of quality suitable for inclusion in the TFMG. We define the engineering process and elaborate on each step, from paper analysis to model release. We report on our experiences implementing the YOLO model family with a team of 26 student researchers, share the tools we developed, and describe the lessons we learned along the way.

The Responsible Foundation Model Development Cheatsheet: A Review of Tools & Resources

Foundation model development attracts a rapidly expanding body of contributors, scientists, and applications. To help shape responsible development practices, we introduce the Foundation Model Development Cheatsheet: a growing collection of 250+ tools and resources spanning text, vision, and speech modalities. We draw on a large body of prior work to survey resources (e.g. software, documentation, frameworks, guides, and practical tools) that support informed data selection, processing, and understanding, precise and limitation-aware artifact documentation, efficient model training, advance awareness of the environmental impact from training, careful model evaluation of capabilities, risks, and claims, as well as responsible model release, licensing and deployment practices. We hope this curated collection of resources helps guide more responsible development. The process of curating this list, enabled us to review the AI development ecosystem, revealing what tools are critically missing, misused, or over-used in existing practices. We find that (i) tools for data sourcing, model evaluation, and monitoring are critically under-serving ethical and real-world needs, (ii) evaluations for model safety, capabilities, and environmental impact all lack reproducibility and transparency, (iii) text and particularly English-centric analyses continue to dominate over multilingual and multi-modal analyses, and (iv) evaluation of systems, rather than just models, is needed so that capabilities and impact are assessed in context.

Detecting Fallacies in Climate Misinformation: A Technocognitive Approach to Identifying Misleading Argumentation

Misinformation about climate change is a complex societal issue requiring holistic, interdisciplinary solutions at the intersection between technology and psychology. One proposed solution is a "technocognitive" approach, involving the synthesis of psychological and computer science research. Psychological research has identified that interventions in response to misinformation require both fact-based (e.g., factual explanations) and technique-based (e.g., explanations of misleading techniques) content. However, little progress has been made on documenting and detecting fallacies in climate misinformation. In this study, we apply a previously developed critical thinking methodology for deconstructing climate misinformation, in order to develop a dataset mapping different types of climate misinformation to reasoning fallacies. This dataset is used to train a model to detect fallacies in climate misinformation. Our study shows F1 scores that are 2.5 to 3.5 better than previous works. The fallacies that are easiest to detect include fake experts and anecdotal arguments, while fallacies that require background knowledge, such as oversimplification, misrepresentation, and slothful induction, are relatively more difficult to detect. This research lays the groundwork for development of solutions where automatically detected climate misinformation can be countered with generative technique-based corrections.

Evaluating and Mitigating Discrimination in Language Model Decisions

As language models (LMs) advance, interest is growing in applying them to high-stakes societal decisions, such as determining financing or housing eligibility. However, their potential for discrimination in such contexts raises ethical concerns, motivating the need for better methods to evaluate these risks. We present a method for proactively evaluating the potential discriminatory impact of LMs in a wide range of use cases, including hypothetical use cases where they have not yet been deployed. Specifically, we use an LM to generate a wide array of potential prompts that decision-makers may input into an LM, spanning 70 diverse decision scenarios across society, and systematically vary the demographic information in each prompt. Applying this methodology reveals patterns of both positive and negative discrimination in the Claude 2.0 model in select settings when no interventions are applied. While we do not endorse or permit the use of language models to make automated decisions for the high-risk use cases we study, we demonstrate techniques to significantly decrease both positive and negative discrimination through careful prompt engineering, providing pathways toward safer deployment in use cases where they may be appropriate. Our work enables developers and policymakers to anticipate, measure, and address discrimination as language model capabilities and applications continue to expand. We release our dataset and prompts at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Anthropic/discrim-eval

ESPORT: Electronic Sports Professionals Observations and Reflections on Training

Esports and high performance human-computer interaction are on the forefront of applying new hardware and software technologies in practice. Despite that, there is a paucity of research on how semi-professional and professional championship level players approach aspects of their preparation. To address that, we have performed, transcribed, and analyzed interviews with top-tournament players, coaches, and managers across multiple game titles. The interviews range from competitive events occuring between 2015-2020. Initial processing included transcription and manual verification. The pre-processed interview data were then organized and structured into relevant categories, touching on psychological, physical, and nutritional aspects of esports preparation. Further, where applicable, interview responses where rated and quantified via consensus judgement by a panel of experts. The results indicate that physical training was most often mentioned as a relevant or consistent activity, while nutrition was indicated as relatively unimportant. Qualitative analysis also indicated that consistency and resiliency were noted as the most key factors recommended for upcoming esports competitors. It is also clear that many players put emphasis on balancing their gameplay time and with activities. Lastly, we identified important areas of inquiry towards a deeper understanding of the mental and physical demands of professional esports players.

Model Evaluation, Model Selection, and Algorithm Selection in Machine Learning

The correct use of model evaluation, model selection, and algorithm selection techniques is vital in academic machine learning research as well as in many industrial settings. This article reviews different techniques that can be used for each of these three subtasks and discusses the main advantages and disadvantages of each technique with references to theoretical and empirical studies. Further, recommendations are given to encourage best yet feasible practices in research and applications of machine learning. Common methods such as the holdout method for model evaluation and selection are covered, which are not recommended when working with small datasets. Different flavors of the bootstrap technique are introduced for estimating the uncertainty of performance estimates, as an alternative to confidence intervals via normal approximation if bootstrapping is computationally feasible. Common cross-validation techniques such as leave-one-out cross-validation and k-fold cross-validation are reviewed, the bias-variance trade-off for choosing k is discussed, and practical tips for the optimal choice of k are given based on empirical evidence. Different statistical tests for algorithm comparisons are presented, and strategies for dealing with multiple comparisons such as omnibus tests and multiple-comparison corrections are discussed. Finally, alternative methods for algorithm selection, such as the combined F-test 5x2 cross-validation and nested cross-validation, are recommended for comparing machine learning algorithms when datasets are small.

The impact of internal variability on benchmarking deep learning climate emulators

Full-complexity Earth system models (ESMs) are computationally very expensive, limiting their use in exploring the climate outcomes of multiple emission pathways. More efficient emulators that approximate ESMs can directly map emissions onto climate outcomes, and benchmarks are being used to evaluate their accuracy on standardized tasks and datasets. We investigate a popular benchmark in data-driven climate emulation, ClimateBench, on which deep learning-based emulators are currently achieving the best performance. We implement a linear regression-based emulator, akin to pattern scaling, and find that it outperforms the incumbent 100M-parameter deep learning foundation model, ClimaX, on 3 out of 4 regionally-resolved surface-level climate variables. While emulating surface temperature is expected to be predominantly linear, this result is surprising for emulating precipitation. We identify that this outcome is a result of high levels of internal variability in the benchmark targets. To address internal variability, we update the benchmark targets with ensemble averages from the MPI-ESM1.2-LR model that contain 50 instead of 3 climate simulations per emission pathway. Using the new targets, we show that linear pattern scaling continues to be more accurate on temperature, but can be outperformed by a deep learning-based model for emulating precipitation. We publish our code, data, and an interactive tutorial at github.com/blutjens/climate-emulator.

Prithvi-EO-2.0: A Versatile Multi-Temporal Foundation Model for Earth Observation Applications

This technical report presents Prithvi-EO-2.0, a new geospatial foundation model that offers significant improvements over its predecessor, Prithvi-EO-1.0. Trained on 4.2M global time series samples from NASA's Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 data archive at 30m resolution, the new 300M and 600M parameter models incorporate temporal and location embeddings for enhanced performance across various geospatial tasks. Through extensive benchmarking with GEO-Bench, the 600M version outperforms the previous Prithvi-EO model by 8\% across a range of tasks. It also outperforms six other geospatial foundation models when benchmarked on remote sensing tasks from different domains and resolutions (i.e. from 0.1m to 15m). The results demonstrate the versatility of the model in both classical earth observation and high-resolution applications. Early involvement of end-users and subject matter experts (SMEs) are among the key factors that contributed to the project's success. In particular, SME involvement allowed for constant feedback on model and dataset design, as well as successful customization for diverse SME-led applications in disaster response, land use and crop mapping, and ecosystem dynamics monitoring. Prithvi-EO-2.0 is available on Hugging Face and IBM terratorch, with additional resources on GitHub. The project exemplifies the Trusted Open Science approach embraced by all involved organizations.

A standardized Project Gutenberg corpus for statistical analysis of natural language and quantitative linguistics

The use of Project Gutenberg (PG) as a text corpus has been extremely popular in statistical analysis of language for more than 25 years. However, in contrast to other major linguistic datasets of similar importance, no consensual full version of PG exists to date. In fact, most PG studies so far either consider only a small number of manually selected books, leading to potential biased subsets, or employ vastly different pre-processing strategies (often specified in insufficient details), raising concerns regarding the reproducibility of published results. In order to address these shortcomings, here we present the Standardized Project Gutenberg Corpus (SPGC), an open science approach to a curated version of the complete PG data containing more than 50,000 books and more than 3 times 10^9 word-tokens. Using different sources of annotated metadata, we not only provide a broad characterization of the content of PG, but also show different examples highlighting the potential of SPGC for investigating language variability across time, subjects, and authors. We publish our methodology in detail, the code to download and process the data, as well as the obtained corpus itself on 3 different levels of granularity (raw text, timeseries of word tokens, and counts of words). In this way, we provide a reproducible, pre-processed, full-size version of Project Gutenberg as a new scientific resource for corpus linguistics, natural language processing, and information retrieval.

Evaluating the Social Impact of Generative AI Systems in Systems and Society

Generative AI systems across modalities, ranging from text, image, audio, and video, have broad social impacts, but there exists no official standard for means of evaluating those impacts and which impacts should be evaluated. We move toward a standard approach in evaluating a generative AI system for any modality, in two overarching categories: what is able to be evaluated in a base system that has no predetermined application and what is able to be evaluated in society. We describe specific social impact categories and how to approach and conduct evaluations in the base technical system, then in people and society. Our framework for a base system defines seven categories of social impact: bias, stereotypes, and representational harms; cultural values and sensitive content; disparate performance; privacy and data protection; financial costs; environmental costs; and data and content moderation labor costs. Suggested methods for evaluation apply to all modalities and analyses of the limitations of existing evaluations serve as a starting point for necessary investment in future evaluations. We offer five overarching categories for what is able to be evaluated in society, each with their own subcategories: trustworthiness and autonomy; inequality, marginalization, and violence; concentration of authority; labor and creativity; and ecosystem and environment. Each subcategory includes recommendations for mitigating harm. We are concurrently crafting an evaluation repository for the AI research community to contribute existing evaluations along the given categories. This version will be updated following a CRAFT session at ACM FAccT 2023.

S2SNet: A Pretrained Neural Network for Superconductivity Discovery

Superconductivity allows electrical current to flow without any energy loss, and thus making solids superconducting is a grand goal of physics, material science, and electrical engineering. More than 16 Nobel Laureates have been awarded for their contribution to superconductivity research. Superconductors are valuable for sustainable development goals (SDGs), such as climate change mitigation, affordable and clean energy, industry, innovation and infrastructure, and so on. However, a unified physics theory explaining all superconductivity mechanism is still unknown. It is believed that superconductivity is microscopically due to not only molecular compositions but also the geometric crystal structure. Hence a new dataset, S2S, containing both crystal structures and superconducting critical temperature, is built upon SuperCon and Material Project. Based on this new dataset, we propose a novel model, S2SNet, which utilizes the attention mechanism for superconductivity prediction. To overcome the shortage of data, S2SNet is pre-trained on the whole Material Project dataset with Masked-Language Modeling (MLM). S2SNet makes a new state-of-the-art, with out-of-sample accuracy of 92% and Area Under Curve (AUC) of 0.92. To the best of our knowledge, S2SNet is the first work to predict superconductivity with only information of crystal structures. This work is beneficial to superconductivity discovery and further SDGs. Code and datasets are available in https://github.com/zjuKeLiu/S2SNet

Group Reasoning Emission Estimation Networks

Accurate greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reporting is critical for governments, businesses, and investors. However, adoption remains limited particularly among small and medium enterprises due to high implementation costs, fragmented emission factor databases, and a lack of robust sector classification methods. To address these challenges, we introduce Group Reasoning Emission Estimation Networks (GREEN), an AI-driven carbon accounting framework that standardizes enterprise-level emission estimation, constructs a large-scale benchmark dataset, and leverages a novel reasoning approach with large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we compile textual descriptions for 20,850 companies with validated North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) labels and align these with an economic model of carbon intensity factors. By reframing sector classification as an information retrieval task, we fine-tune Sentence-BERT models using a contrastive learning loss. To overcome the limitations of single-stage models in handling thousands of hierarchical categories, we propose a Group Reasoning method that ensembles LLM classifiers based on the natural NAICS ontology, decomposing the task into multiple sub-classification steps. We theoretically prove that this approach reduces classification uncertainty and computational complexity. Experiments on 1,114 NAICS categories yield state-of-the-art performance (83.68% Top-1, 91.47% Top-10 accuracy), and case studies on 20 companies report a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 45.88%. The project is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Yvnminc/ExioNAICS.

The DESI PRObabilistic Value-Added Bright Galaxy Survey (PROVABGS) Mock Challenge

The PRObabilistic Value-Added Bright Galaxy Survey (PROVABGS) catalog will provide measurements of galaxy properties, such as stellar mass (M_*), star formation rate ({rm SFR}), stellar metallicity (Z_{rm MW}), and stellar age (t_{rm age, MW}), for >10 million galaxies of the DESI Bright Galaxy Survey. Full posterior distributions of the galaxy properties will be inferred using state-of-the-art Bayesian spectral energy distribution (SED) modeling of DESI spectroscopy and Legacy Surveys photometry. In this work, we present the SED model, Bayesian inference framework, and methodology of PROVABGS. Furthermore, we apply the PROVABGS SED modeling on realistic synthetic DESI spectra and photometry, constructed using the L-GALAXIES semi-analytic model. We compare the inferred galaxy properties to the true galaxy properties of the simulation using a hierarchical Bayesian framework to quantify accuracy and precision. Overall, we accurately infer the true M_*, {rm SFR}, Z_{rm MW}, and t_{rm age, MW} of the simulated galaxies. However, the priors on galaxy properties induced by the SED model have a significant impact on the posteriors. They impose a {rm SFR}{>}10^{-1} M_odot/{rm yr} lower bound on {rm SFR}, a {sim}0.3 dex bias on log Z_{rm MW} for galaxies with low spectral signal-to-noise, and t_{rm age, MW} < 8,{rm Gyr} upper bound on stellar age. This work also demonstrates that a joint analysis of spectra and photometry significantly improves the constraints on galaxy properties over photometry alone and is necessary to mitigate the impact of the priors. With the methodology presented and validated in this work, PROVABGS will maximize information extracted from DESI observations and provide a probabilistic value-added galaxy catalog that will extend current galaxy studies to new regimes and unlock cutting-edge probabilistic analyses.

Exploring the Carbon Footprint of Hugging Face's ML Models: A Repository Mining Study

The rise of machine learning (ML) systems has exacerbated their carbon footprint due to increased capabilities and model sizes. However, there is scarce knowledge on how the carbon footprint of ML models is actually measured, reported, and evaluated. In light of this, the paper aims to analyze the measurement of the carbon footprint of 1,417 ML models and associated datasets on Hugging Face, which is the most popular repository for pretrained ML models. The goal is to provide insights and recommendations on how to report and optimize the carbon efficiency of ML models. The study includes the first repository mining study on the Hugging Face Hub API on carbon emissions. This study seeks to answer two research questions: (1) how do ML model creators measure and report carbon emissions on Hugging Face Hub?, and (2) what aspects impact the carbon emissions of training ML models? The study yielded several key findings. These include a stalled proportion of carbon emissions-reporting models, a slight decrease in reported carbon footprint on Hugging Face over the past 2 years, and a continued dominance of NLP as the main application domain. Furthermore, the study uncovers correlations between carbon emissions and various attributes such as model size, dataset size, and ML application domains. These results highlight the need for software measurements to improve energy reporting practices and promote carbon-efficient model development within the Hugging Face community. In response to this issue, two classifications are proposed: one for categorizing models based on their carbon emission reporting practices and another for their carbon efficiency. The aim of these classification proposals is to foster transparency and sustainable model development within the ML community.

How Discriminative Are Your Qrels? How To Study the Statistical Significance of Document Adjudication Methods

Creating test collections for offline retrieval evaluation requires human effort to judge documents' relevance. This expensive activity motivated much work in developing methods for constructing benchmarks with fewer assessment costs. In this respect, adjudication methods actively decide both which documents and the order in which experts review them, in order to better exploit the assessment budget or to lower it. Researchers evaluate the quality of those methods by measuring the correlation between the known gold ranking of systems under the full collection and the observed ranking of systems under the lower-cost one. This traditional analysis ignores whether and how the low-cost judgements impact on the statistically significant differences among systems with respect to the full collection. We fill this void by proposing a novel methodology to evaluate how the low-cost adjudication methods preserve the pairwise significant differences between systems as the full collection. In other terms, while traditional approaches look for stability in answering the question "is system A better than system B?", our proposed approach looks for stability in answering the question "is system A significantly better than system B?", which is the ultimate questions researchers need to answer to guarantee the generalisability of their results. Among other results, we found that the best methods in terms of ranking of systems correlation do not always match those preserving statistical significance.

M3LEO: A Multi-Modal, Multi-Label Earth Observation Dataset Integrating Interferometric SAR and Multispectral Data

Satellite-based remote sensing has revolutionised the way we address global challenges. Huge quantities of Earth Observation (EO) data are generated by satellite sensors daily, but processing these large datasets for use in ML pipelines is technically and computationally challenging. While some preprocessed Earth observation datasets exist, their content is often limited to optical or near-optical wavelength data, which is ineffective at night or in adverse weather conditions. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), an active sensing technique based on microwave length radiation, offers a viable alternative. However, the application of machine learning to SAR has been limited due to a lack of ML-ready data and pipelines, particularly for the full diversity of SAR data, including polarimetry, coherence and interferometry. In this work, we introduce M3LEO, a multi-modal, multi-label Earth observation dataset that includes polarimetric, interferometric, and coherence SAR data derived from Sentinel-1, alongside multispectral Sentinel-2 imagery and auxiliary data describing terrain properties such as land use. M3LEO spans approximately 17M 4x4 km data chips from six diverse geographic regions. The dataset is complemented by a flexible PyTorch Lightning framework configured using Hydra to accommodate its use across diverse ML applications in Earth observation. We provide tools to process any dataset available on popular platforms such as Google Earth Engine for seamless integration with our framework. We show that the distribution shift in self-supervised embeddings is substantial across geographic regions, even when controlling for terrain properties. Data: huggingface.co/M3LEO, Code: github.com/spaceml-org/M3LEO.

Natural Language Processing in Electronic Health Records in Relation to Healthcare Decision-making: A Systematic Review

Background: Natural Language Processing (NLP) is widely used to extract clinical insights from Electronic Health Records (EHRs). However, the lack of annotated data, automated tools, and other challenges hinder the full utilisation of NLP for EHRs. Various Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL) and NLP techniques are studied and compared to understand the limitations and opportunities in this space comprehensively. Methodology: After screening 261 articles from 11 databases, we included 127 papers for full-text review covering seven categories of articles: 1) medical note classification, 2) clinical entity recognition, 3) text summarisation, 4) deep learning (DL) and transfer learning architecture, 5) information extraction, 6) Medical language translation and 7) other NLP applications. This study follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Result and Discussion: EHR was the most commonly used data type among the selected articles, and the datasets were primarily unstructured. Various ML and DL methods were used, with prediction or classification being the most common application of ML or DL. The most common use cases were: the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9) classification, clinical note analysis, and named entity recognition (NER) for clinical descriptions and research on psychiatric disorders. Conclusion: We find that the adopted ML models were not adequately assessed. In addition, the data imbalance problem is quite important, yet we must find techniques to address this underlining problem. Future studies should address key limitations in studies, primarily identifying Lupus Nephritis, Suicide Attempts, perinatal self-harmed and ICD-9 classification.

Toward quantitative fractography using convolutional neural networks

The science of fractography revolves around the correlation between topographic characteristics of the fracture surface and the mechanisms and external conditions leading to their creation. While being a topic of investigation for centuries, it has remained mostly qualitative to date. A quantitative analysis of fracture surfaces is of prime interest for both the scientific community and the industrial sector, bearing the potential for improved understanding on the mechanisms controlling the fracture process and at the same time assessing the reliability of computational models currently being used for material design. With new advances in the field of image analysis, and specifically with machine learning tools becoming more accessible and reliable, it is now feasible to automate the process of extracting meaningful information from fracture surface images. Here, we propose a method of identifying and quantifying the relative appearance of intergranular and transgranular fracture events from scanning electron microscope images. The newly proposed method is based on a convolutional neural network algorithm for semantic segmentation. The proposed method is extensively tested and evaluated against two ceramic material systems (Al_2O_3,MgAl_2O_4) and shows high prediction accuracy, despite being trained on only one material system (MgAl_2O_4). While here attention is focused on brittle fracture characteristics, the method can be easily extended to account for other fracture morphologies, such as dimples, fatigue striations, etc.

Exploring Public Attention in the Circular Economy through Topic Modelling with Twin Hyperparameter Optimisation

To advance the circular economy (CE), it is crucial to gain insights into the evolution of public attention, cognitive pathways of the masses concerning circular products, and to identify primary concerns. To achieve this, we collected data from diverse platforms, including Twitter, Reddit, and The Guardian, and utilised three topic models to analyse the data. Given the performance of topic modelling may vary depending on hyperparameter settings, this research proposed a novel framework that integrates twin (single and multi-objective) hyperparameter optimisation for the CE. We conducted systematic experiments to ensure that topic models are set with appropriate hyperparameters under different constraints, providing valuable insights into the correlations between CE and public attention. In summary, our optimised model reveals that public remains concerned about the economic impacts of sustainability and circular practices, particularly regarding recyclable materials and environmentally sustainable technologies. The analysis shows that the CE has attracted significant attention on The Guardian, especially in topics related to sustainable development and environmental protection technologies, while discussions are comparatively less active on Twitter. These insights highlight the need for policymakers to implement targeted education programs, create incentives for businesses to adopt CE principles, and enforce more stringent waste management policies alongside improved recycling processes.

Feature Learning for Stock Price Prediction Shows a Significant Role of Analyst Rating

To reject the Efficient Market Hypothesis a set of 5 technical indicators and 23 fundamental indicators was identified to establish the possibility of generating excess returns on the stock market. Leveraging these data points and various classification machine learning models, trading data of the 505 equities on the US S&P500 over the past 20 years was analysed to develop a classifier effective for our cause. From any given day, we were able to predict the direction of change in price by 1% up to 10 days in the future. The predictions had an overall accuracy of 83.62% with a precision of 85% for buy signals and a recall of 100% for sell signals. Moreover, we grouped equities by their sector and repeated the experiment to see if grouping similar assets together positively effected the results but concluded that it showed no significant improvements in the performance rejecting the idea of sector-based analysis. Also, using feature ranking we could identify an even smaller set of 6 indicators while maintaining similar accuracies as that from the original 28 features and also uncovered the importance of buy, hold and sell analyst ratings as they came out to be the top contributors in the model. Finally, to evaluate the effectiveness of the classifier in real-life situations, it was backtested on FAANG equities using a modest trading strategy where it generated high returns of above 60% over the term of the testing dataset. In conclusion, our proposed methodology with the combination of purposefully picked features shows an improvement over the previous studies, and our model predicts the direction of 1% price changes on the 10th day with high confidence and with enough buffer to even build a robotic trading system.

The Ethics of ChatGPT in Medicine and Healthcare: A Systematic Review on Large Language Models (LLMs)

With the introduction of ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs) have received enormous attention in healthcare. Despite their potential benefits, researchers have underscored various ethical implications. While individual instances have drawn much attention, the debate lacks a systematic overview of practical applications currently researched and ethical issues connected to them. Against this background, this work aims to map the ethical landscape surrounding the current stage of deployment of LLMs in medicine and healthcare. Electronic databases and preprint servers were queried using a comprehensive search strategy. Studies were screened and extracted following a modified rapid review approach. Methodological quality was assessed using a hybrid approach. For 53 records, a meta-aggregative synthesis was performed. Four fields of applications emerged and testify to a vivid exploration phase. Advantages of using LLMs are attributed to their capacity in data analysis, personalized information provisioning, support in decision-making, mitigating information loss and enhancing information accessibility. However, we also identifies recurrent ethical concerns connected to fairness, bias, non-maleficence, transparency, and privacy. A distinctive concern is the tendency to produce harmful misinformation or convincingly but inaccurate content. A recurrent plea for ethical guidance and human oversight is evident. Given the variety of use cases, it is suggested that the ethical guidance debate be reframed to focus on defining what constitutes acceptable human oversight across the spectrum of applications. This involves considering diverse settings, varying potentials for harm, and different acceptable thresholds for performance and certainty in healthcare. In addition, a critical inquiry is necessary to determine the extent to which the current experimental use of LLMs is necessary and justified.

Measuring Large Language Models Capacity to Annotate Journalistic Sourcing

Since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the capacities of Large Language Models and their evaluation have been in constant discussion and evaluation both in academic research and in the industry. Scenarios and benchmarks have been developed in several areas such as law, medicine and math (Bommasani et al., 2023) and there is continuous evaluation of model variants. One area that has not received sufficient scenario development attention is journalism, and in particular journalistic sourcing and ethics. Journalism is a crucial truth-determination function in democracy (Vincent, 2023), and sourcing is a crucial pillar to all original journalistic output. Evaluating the capacities of LLMs to annotate stories for the different signals of sourcing and how reporters justify them is a crucial scenario that warrants a benchmark approach. It offers potential to build automated systems to contrast more transparent and ethically rigorous forms of journalism with everyday fare. In this paper we lay out a scenario to evaluate LLM performance on identifying and annotating sourcing in news stories on a five-category schema inspired from journalism studies (Gans, 2004). We offer the use case, our dataset and metrics and as the first step towards systematic benchmarking. Our accuracy findings indicate LLM-based approaches have more catching to do in identifying all the sourced statements in a story, and equally, in matching the type of sources. An even harder task is spotting source justifications.

Procedural Generation of Grain Orientations using the Wave Function Collapse Algorithm

Statistics of grain sizes and orientations in metals correlate to the material's mechanical properties. Reproducing representative volume elements for further analysis of deformation and failure in metals, like 316L stainless steel, is particularly important due to their wide use in manufacturing goods today. Two approaches, initially created for video games, were considered for the procedural generation of representative grain microstructures. The first is the Wave Function Collapse (WFC) algorithm, and the second is constraint propagation and probabilistic inference through Markov Junior, a free and open-source software. This study aimed to investigate these two algorithms' effectiveness in using reference electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) maps and recreating a statistically similar one that could be used in further research. It utilized two stainless steel EBSD maps as references to test both algorithms. First, the WFC algorithm was too constricting and, thus, incapable of producing images that resembled EBSDs. The second, MarkovJunior, was much more effective in creating a Voronoi tessellation that could be used to create an EBSD map in Python. When comparing the results between the reference and the generated EBSD, we discovered that the orientation and volume fractions were extremely similar. With the study, it was concluded that MarkovJunior is an effective machine learning tool that can reproduce representative grain microstructures.

O1 Replication Journey: A Strategic Progress Report -- Part 1

This paper introduces a pioneering approach to artificial intelligence research, embodied in our O1 Replication Journey. In response to the announcement of OpenAI's groundbreaking O1 model, we embark on a transparent, real-time exploration to replicate its capabilities while reimagining the process of conducting and communicating AI research. Our methodology addresses critical challenges in modern AI research, including the insularity of prolonged team-based projects, delayed information sharing, and the lack of recognition for diverse contributions. By providing comprehensive, real-time documentation of our replication efforts, including both successes and failures, we aim to foster open science, accelerate collective advancement, and lay the groundwork for AI-driven scientific discovery. Our research progress report diverges significantly from traditional research papers, offering continuous updates, full process transparency, and active community engagement throughout the research journey. Technologically, we proposed the journey learning paradigm, which encourages models to learn not just shortcuts, but the complete exploration process, including trial and error, reflection, and backtracking. With only 327 training samples and without any additional tricks, journey learning outperformed conventional supervised learning by over 8\% on the MATH dataset, demonstrating its extremely powerful potential. We believe this to be the most crucial component of O1 technology that we have successfully decoded. We share valuable resources including technical hypotheses and insights, cognitive exploration maps, custom-developed tools, etc at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/O1-Journey.

What are human values, and how do we align AI to them?

There is an emerging consensus that we need to align AI systems with human values (Gabriel, 2020; Ji et al., 2024), but it remains unclear how to apply this to language models in practice. We split the problem of "aligning to human values" into three parts: first, eliciting values from people; second, reconciling those values into an alignment target for training ML models; and third, actually training the model. In this paper, we focus on the first two parts, and ask the question: what are "good" ways to synthesize diverse human inputs about values into a target for aligning language models? To answer this question, we first define a set of 6 criteria that we believe must be satisfied for an alignment target to shape model behavior in accordance with human values. We then propose a process for eliciting and reconciling values called Moral Graph Elicitation (MGE), which uses a large language model to interview participants about their values in particular contexts; our approach is inspired by the philosophy of values advanced by Taylor (1977), Chang (2004), and others. We trial MGE with a representative sample of 500 Americans, on 3 intentionally divisive prompts (e.g. advice about abortion). Our results demonstrate that MGE is promising for improving model alignment across all 6 criteria. For example, almost all participants (89.1%) felt well represented by the process, and (89%) thought the final moral graph was fair, even if their value wasn't voted as the wisest. Our process often results in "expert" values (e.g. values from women who have solicited abortion advice) rising to the top of the moral graph, without defining who is considered an expert in advance.