在我们不断变化的气候中，使用模型来评估天气和气候对社会和企业的后续后果的风险及其后续后果至关重要。这种模型的操作在历史上是定制的，并限制在特定的计算基础架构，驱动数据集和预定义的配置上。这些约束通过缩放模型运行并将模型掌握在感兴趣的用户手中。在这里，我们提出了一个基于云的模块化框架，用于部署和操作地理空间模型，最初应用于气候影响。气候冲击建模框架（CIMF）可以以动态和灵活的方式部署模块化工作流程。用户可以以简化的方式指定工作流程组件，然后可以轻松地将这些组件组织成不同的配置，以以不同的方式和不同的尺度评估风险。这还可以使不同的模型（物理模拟或机器学习模型）和工作流程连接以产生合并的风险评估。洪水建模被用作端到端的示例，以证明CIMF的操作。

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.

Text classifiers have promising applications in high-stake tasks such as resume screening and content moderation. These classifiers must be fair and avoid discriminatory decisions by being invariant to perturbations of sensitive attributes such as gender or ethnicity. However, there is a gap between human intuition about these perturbations and the formal similarity specifications capturing them. While existing research has started to address this gap, current methods are based on hardcoded word replacements, resulting in specifications with limited expressivity or ones that fail to fully align with human intuition (e.g., in cases of asymmetric counterfactuals). This work proposes novel methods for bridging this gap by discovering expressive and intuitive individual fairness specifications. We show how to leverage unsupervised style transfer and GPT-3's zero-shot capabilities to automatically generate expressive candidate pairs of semantically similar sentences that differ along sensitive attributes. We then validate the generated pairs via an extensive crowdsourcing study, which confirms that a lot of these pairs align with human intuition about fairness in the context of toxicity classification. Finally, we show how limited amounts of human feedback can be leveraged to learn a similarity specification that can be used to train downstream fairness-aware models.

Scaling up language models has led to unprecedented performance gains, but little is understood about how the training dynamics change as models get larger. How do language models of different sizes learn during pre-training? Why do larger language models demonstrate more desirable behaviors? In this paper, we analyze the intermediate training checkpoints of differently sized OPT models (Zhang et al.,2022)--from 125M to 175B parameters--on next-token prediction, sequence-level generation, and downstream tasks. We find that 1) at a given perplexity and independent of model sizes, a similar subset of training tokens see the most significant reduction in loss, with the rest stagnating or showing double-descent behavior; 2) early in training, all models learn to reduce the perplexity of grammatical sequences that contain hallucinations, with small models halting at this suboptimal distribution and larger ones eventually learning to assign these sequences lower probabilities; 3) perplexity is a strong predictor of in-context learning performance on 74 multiple-choice tasks from BIG-Bench, and this holds independent of the model size. Together, these results show that perplexity is more predictive of model behaviors than model size or training computation.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Timely and effective feedback within surgical training plays a critical role in developing the skills required to perform safe and efficient surgery. Feedback from expert surgeons, while especially valuable in this regard, is challenging to acquire due to their typically busy schedules, and may be subject to biases. Formal assessment procedures like OSATS and GEARS attempt to provide objective measures of skill, but remain time-consuming. With advances in machine learning there is an opportunity for fast and objective automated feedback on technical skills. The SimSurgSkill 2021 challenge (hosted as a sub-challenge of EndoVis at MICCAI 2021) aimed to promote and foster work in this endeavor. Using virtual reality (VR) surgical tasks, competitors were tasked with localizing instruments and predicting surgical skill. Here we summarize the winning approaches and how they performed. Using this publicly available dataset and results as a springboard, future work may enable more efficient training of surgeons with advances in surgical data science. The dataset can be accessed from https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/isi-simsurgskill-2021.

Accurate speed estimation of road vehicles is important for several reasons. One is speed limit enforcement, which represents a crucial tool in decreasing traffic accidents and fatalities. Compared with other research areas and domains, the number of available datasets for vehicle speed estimation is still very limited. We present a dataset of on-road audio-video recordings of single vehicles passing by a camera at known speeds, maintained stable by the on-board cruise control. The dataset contains thirteen vehicles, selected to be as diverse as possible in terms of manufacturer, production year, engine type, power and transmission, resulting in a total of $ 400 $ annotated audio-video recordings. The dataset is fully available and intended as a public benchmark to facilitate research in audio-video vehicle speed estimation. In addition to the dataset, we propose a cross-validation strategy which can be used in a machine learning model for vehicle speed estimation. Two approaches to training-validation split of the dataset are proposed.

Novel view synthesis and 3D modeling using implicit neural field representation are shown to be very effective for calibrated multi-view cameras. Such representations are known to benefit from additional geometric and semantic supervision. Most existing methods that exploit additional supervision require dense pixel-wise labels or localized scene priors. These methods cannot benefit from high-level vague scene priors provided in terms of scenes' descriptions. In this work, we aim to leverage the geometric prior of Manhattan scenes to improve the implicit neural radiance field representations. More precisely, we assume that only the knowledge of the scene (under investigation) being Manhattan is known - with no additional information whatsoever - with an unknown Manhattan coordinate frame. Such high-level prior is then used to self-supervise the surface normals derived explicitly in the implicit neural fields. Our modeling allows us to group the derived normals, followed by exploiting their orthogonality constraints for self-supervision. Our exhaustive experiments on datasets of diverse indoor scenes demonstrate the significant benefit of the proposed method over the established baselines.

Tabular biomedical data is often high-dimensional but with a very small number of samples. Although recent work showed that well-regularised simple neural networks could outperform more sophisticated architectures on tabular data, they are still prone to overfitting on tiny datasets with many potentially irrelevant features. To combat these issues, we propose Weight Predictor Network with Feature Selection (WPFS) for learning neural networks from high-dimensional and small sample data by reducing the number of learnable parameters and simultaneously performing feature selection. In addition to the classification network, WPFS uses two small auxiliary networks that together output the weights of the first layer of the classification model. We evaluate on nine real-world biomedical datasets and demonstrate that WPFS outperforms other standard as well as more recent methods typically applied to tabular data. Furthermore, we investigate the proposed feature selection mechanism and show that it improves performance while providing useful insights into the learning task.

Genome-wide studies leveraging recent high-throughput sequencing technologies collect high-dimensional data. However, they usually include small cohorts of patients, and the resulting tabular datasets suffer from the "curse of dimensionality". Training neural networks on such datasets is typically unstable, and the models overfit. One problem is that modern weight initialisation strategies make simplistic assumptions unsuitable for small-size datasets. We propose Graph-Conditioned MLP, a novel method to introduce priors on the parameters of an MLP. Instead of randomly initialising the first layer, we condition it directly on the training data. More specifically, we create a graph for each feature in the dataset (e.g., a gene), where each node represents a sample from the same dataset (e.g., a patient). We then use Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to learn embeddings from these graphs and use the embeddings to initialise the MLP's parameters. Our approach opens the prospect of introducing additional biological knowledge when constructing the graphs. We present early results on 7 classification tasks from gene expression data and show that GC-MLP outperforms an MLP.