We study politeness phenomena in nine typologically diverse languages. Politeness is an important facet of communication and is sometimes argued to be cultural-specific, yet existing computational linguistic study is limited to English. We create TyDiP, a dataset containing three-way politeness annotations for 500 examples in each language, totaling 4.5K examples. We evaluate how well multilingual models can identify politeness levels -- they show a fairly robust zero-shot transfer ability, yet fall short of estimated human accuracy significantly. We further study mapping the English politeness strategy lexicon into nine languages via automatic translation and lexicon induction, analyzing whether each strategy's impact stays consistent across languages. Lastly, we empirically study the complicated relationship between formality and politeness through transfer experiments. We hope our dataset will support various research questions and applications, from evaluating multilingual models to constructing polite multilingual agents.

灵巧的操纵仍然是机器人技术中的一个空缺问题。为了协调研究界为解决这个问题的努力，我们提出了共同的基准。我们设计和构建了机器人平台，该平台托管在MPI上供智能系统托管，可以远程访问。每个平台由三个能够敏捷物体操纵的机器人手指组成。用户能够通过提交自动执行的代码（类似于计算群集）来远程控制平台。使用此设置，i）我们举办机器人竞赛，来自世界任何地方的团队访问我们的平台以应对具有挑战性的任务ii）我们发布了在这些比赛中收集的数据集（包括数百个机器人小时），而我们为研究人员提供了访问自己项目的这些平台。

Applying Machine learning to domains like Earth Sciences is impeded by the lack of labeled data, despite a large corpus of raw data available in such domains. For instance, training a wildfire classifier on satellite imagery requires curating a massive and diverse dataset, which is an expensive and time-consuming process that can span from weeks to months. Searching for relevant examples in over 40 petabytes of unlabelled data requires researchers to manually hunt for such images, much like finding a needle in a haystack. We present a no-code end-to-end pipeline, Curator, which dramatically minimizes the time taken to curate an exhaustive labeled dataset. Curator is able to search massive amounts of unlabelled data by combining self-supervision, scalable nearest neighbor search, and active learning to learn and differentiate image representations. The pipeline can also be readily applied to solve problems across different domains. Overall, the pipeline makes it practical for researchers to go from just one reference image to a comprehensive dataset in a diminutive span of time.

Several self-supervised representation learning methods have been proposed for reinforcement learning (RL) with rich observations. For real-world applications of RL, recovering underlying latent states is crucial, particularly when sensory inputs contain irrelevant and exogenous information. In this work, we study how information bottlenecks can be used to construct latent states efficiently in the presence of task-irrelevant information. We propose architectures that utilize variational and discrete information bottlenecks, coined as RepDIB, to learn structured factorized representations. Exploiting the expressiveness bought by factorized representations, we introduce a simple, yet effective, bottleneck that can be integrated with any existing self-supervised objective for RL. We demonstrate this across several online and offline RL benchmarks, along with a real robot arm task, where we find that compressed representations with RepDIB can lead to strong performance improvements, as the learned bottlenecks help predict only the relevant state while ignoring irrelevant information.

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large pre-trained language models on a collection of tasks described via instructions, a.k.a. instruction-tuning, improves their zero and few-shot generalization to unseen tasks. However, there is a limited understanding of the performance trade-offs of different decisions made during the instruction-tuning process. These decisions include the scale and diversity of the instruction-tuning benchmark, different task sampling strategies, fine-tuning with and without demonstrations, training using specialized datasets for reasoning and dialogue, and finally, the fine-tuning objectives themselves. In this paper, we characterize the effect of instruction-tuning decisions on downstream task performance when scaling both model and benchmark sizes. To this end, we create OPT-IML Bench: a large benchmark for Instruction Meta-Learning (IML) of 2000 NLP tasks consolidated into task categories from 8 existing benchmarks, and prepare an evaluation framework to measure three types of model generalizations: to tasks from fully held-out categories, to held-out tasks from seen categories, and to held-out instances from seen tasks. Through the lens of this framework, we first present insights about instruction-tuning decisions as applied to OPT-30B and further exploit these insights to train OPT-IML 30B and 175B, which are instruction-tuned versions of OPT. OPT-IML demonstrates all three generalization abilities at both scales on four different evaluation benchmarks with diverse tasks and input formats -- PromptSource, FLAN, Super-NaturalInstructions, and UnifiedSKG. Not only does it significantly outperform OPT on all benchmarks but is also highly competitive with existing models fine-tuned on each specific benchmark. We release OPT-IML at both scales, together with the OPT-IML Bench evaluation framework.

We demonstrate a Physics-informed Neural Network (PINN) based model for real-time health monitoring of a heat exchanger, that plays a critical role in improving energy efficiency of thermal power plants. A hypernetwork based approach is used to enable the domain-decomposed PINN learn the thermal behavior of the heat exchanger in response to dynamic boundary conditions, eliminating the need to re-train. As a result, we achieve orders of magnitude reduction in inference time in comparison to existing PINNs, while maintaining the accuracy on par with the physics-based simulations. This makes the approach very attractive for predictive maintenance of the heat exchanger in digital twin environments.

Legal contracts, such as employment or lease agreements, are important documents as they govern the obligations and entitlements of the various contracting parties. However, these documents are typically long and written in legalese resulting in lots of manual hours spent in understanding them. In this paper, we address the task of summarizing legal contracts for each of the contracting parties, to enable faster reviewing and improved understanding of them. Specifically, we collect a dataset consisting of pairwise importance comparison annotations by legal experts for ~293K sentence pairs from lease agreements. We propose a novel extractive summarization system to automatically produce a summary consisting of the most important obligations, entitlements, and prohibitions in a contract. It consists of two modules: (1) a content categorize to identify sentences containing each of the categories (i.e., obligation, entitlement, and prohibition) for a party, and (2) an importance ranker to compare the importance among sentences of each category for a party to obtain a ranked list. The final summary is produced by selecting the most important sentences of a category for each of the parties. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed system by comparing it against several text ranking baselines via automatic and human evaluation.

Project Loon is a Google initiated research project from the Google X Lab. The project focuses on providing remote internet access and network connectivity. The connectivity is established in vertical and horizontal space; vertical connectivity between Google Access Point (GAP) and the balloons, and between balloons and antennas installed at land; horizontal connectivity is between the balloons. This research focuses on the connectivity between the balloons in a mesh network. The proposal focuses on implementing graphical methods like convex hull with adhoc communication protocols. The proposed protocol includes content-based multicasting using angular sector division rather than grids, along with dynamic core-based mesh protocol defining certain core active nodes and passive nodes forming the convex hull. The transmission (multicasting and broadcasting) between the nodes will be evaluated using the link probability defining the probability of the link between two nodes failing. Based on the link probability and node features, best path between transmitting and receiver nodes will be evaluated.

Climate change, population growth, and water scarcity present unprecedented challenges for agriculture. This project aims to forecast soil moisture using domain knowledge and machine learning for crop management decisions that enable sustainable farming. Traditional methods for predicting hydrological response features require significant computational time and expertise. Recent work has implemented machine learning models as a tool for forecasting hydrological response features, but these models neglect a crucial component of traditional hydrological modeling that spatially close units can have vastly different hydrological responses. In traditional hydrological modeling, units with similar hydrological properties are grouped together and share model parameters regardless of their spatial proximity. Inspired by this domain knowledge, we have constructed a novel domain-inspired temporal graph convolution neural network. Our approach involves clustering units based on time-varying hydrological properties, constructing graph topologies for each cluster, and forecasting soil moisture using graph convolutions and a gated recurrent neural network. We have trained, validated, and tested our method on field-scale time series data consisting of approximately 99,000 hydrological response units spanning 40 years in a case study in northeastern United States. Comparison with existing models illustrates the effectiveness of using domain-inspired clustering with time series graph neural networks. The framework is being deployed as part of a pro bono social impact program. The trained models are being deployed on small-holding farms in central Texas.

ML-based motion planning is a promising approach to produce agents that exhibit complex behaviors, and automatically adapt to novel environments. In the context of autonomous driving, it is common to treat all available training data equally. However, this approach produces agents that do not perform robustly in safety-critical settings, an issue that cannot be addressed by simply adding more data to the training set - we show that an agent trained using only a 10% subset of the data performs just as well as an agent trained on the entire dataset. We present a method to predict the inherent difficulty of a driving situation given data collected from a fleet of autonomous vehicles deployed on public roads. We then demonstrate that this difficulty score can be used in a zero-shot transfer to generate curricula for an imitation-learning based planning agent. Compared to training on the entire unbiased training dataset, we show that prioritizing difficult driving scenarios both reduces collisions by 15% and increases route adherence by 14% in closed-loop evaluation, all while using only 10% of the training data.