In this work, we propose a novel generative model for mapping inputs to structured, high-dimensional outputs using structured conditional normalizing flows and Gaussian process regression. The model is motivated by the need to characterize uncertainty in the input/output relationship when making inferences on new data. In particular, in the physical sciences, limited training data may not adequately characterize future observed data; it is critical that models adequately indicate uncertainty, particularly when they may be asked to extrapolate. In our proposed model, structured conditional normalizing flows provide parsimonious latent representations that relate to the inputs through a Gaussian process, providing exact likelihood calculations and uncertainty that naturally increases away from the training data inputs. We demonstrate the methodology on laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy data from the ChemCam instrument onboard the Mars rover Curiosity. ChemCam was designed to recover the chemical composition of rock and soil samples by measuring the spectral properties of plasma atomic emissions induced by a laser pulse. We show that our model can generate realistic spectra conditional on a given chemical composition and that we can use the model to perform uncertainty quantification of chemical compositions for new observed spectra. Based on our results, we anticipate that our proposed modeling approach may be useful in other scientific domains with high-dimensional, complex structure where it is important to quantify predictive uncertainty.

Machine Translation (MT) system generally aims at automatic representation of source language into target language retaining the originality of context using various Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Among various NLP methods, Statistical Machine Translation(SMT). SMT uses probabilistic and statistical techniques to analyze information and conversion. This paper canvasses about the development of bilingual SMT models for translating English to fifteen low-resource Indian Languages (ILs) and vice versa. At the outset, all 15 languages are briefed with a short description related to our experimental need. Further, a detailed analysis of Samanantar and OPUS dataset for model building, along with standard benchmark dataset (Flores-200) for fine-tuning and testing, is done as a part of our experiment. Different preprocessing approaches are proposed in this paper to handle the noise of the dataset. To create the system, MOSES open-source SMT toolkit is explored. Distance reordering is utilized with the aim to understand the rules of grammar and context-dependent adjustments through a phrase reordering categorization framework. In our experiment, the quality of the translation is evaluated using standard metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and RIBES

Pre-training is an effective technique for ensuring robust performance on a variety of machine learning tasks. It typically depends on large-scale crawled corpora that can result in toxic or biased models. Such data can also be problematic with respect to copyright, attribution, and privacy. Pre-training with synthetic tasks and data is a promising way of alleviating such concerns since no real-world information is ingested by the model. Our goal in this paper is to understand what makes for a good pre-trained model when using synthetic resources. We answer this question in the context of neural machine translation by considering two novel approaches to translation model pre-training. Our first approach studies the effect of pre-training on obfuscated data derived from a parallel corpus by mapping words to a vocabulary of 'nonsense' tokens. Our second approach explores the effect of pre-training on procedurally generated synthetic parallel data that does not depend on any real human language corpus. Our empirical evaluation on multiple language pairs shows that, to a surprising degree, the benefits of pre-training can be realized even with obfuscated or purely synthetic parallel data. In our analysis, we consider the extent to which obfuscated and synthetic pre-training techniques can be used to mitigate the issue of hallucinated model toxicity.

Selective classification involves identifying the subset of test samples that a model can classify with high accuracy, and is important for applications such as automated medical diagnosis. We argue that this capability of identifying uncertain samples is valuable for training classifiers as well, with the aim of building more accurate classifiers. We unify these dual roles by training a single auxiliary meta-network to output an importance weight as a function of the instance. This measure is used at train time to reweight training data, and at test-time to rank test instances for selective classification. A second, key component of our proposal is the meta-objective of minimizing dropout variance (the variance of classifier output when subjected to random weight dropout) for training the metanetwork. We train the classifier together with its metanetwork using a nested objective of minimizing classifier loss on training data and meta-loss on a separate meta-training dataset. We outperform current state-of-the-art on selective classification by substantial margins--for instance, upto 1.9% AUC and 2% accuracy on a real-world diabetic retinopathy dataset. Finally, our meta-learning framework extends naturally to unsupervised domain adaptation, given our unsupervised variance minimization meta-objective. We show cumulative absolute gains of 3.4% / 3.3% accuracy and AUC over the other baselines in domain shift settings on the Retinopathy dataset using unsupervised domain adaptation.

Many real-world learning scenarios face the challenge of slow concept drift, where data distributions change gradually over time. In this setting, we pose the problem of learning temporally sensitive importance weights for training data, in order to optimize predictive accuracy. We propose a class of temporal reweighting functions that can capture multiple timescales of change in the data, as well as instance-specific characteristics. We formulate a bi-level optimization criterion, and an associated meta-learning algorithm, by which these weights can be learned. In particular, our formulation trains an auxiliary network to output weights as a function of training instances, thereby compactly representing the instance weights. We validate our temporal reweighting scheme on a large real-world dataset of 39M images spread over a 9 year period. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the necessity of instance-based temporal reweighting in the dataset, and achieve significant improvements to classical batch-learning approaches. Further, our proposal easily generalizes to a streaming setting and shows significant gains compared to recent continual learning methods.

A major direction in differentially private machine learning is differentially private fine-tuning: pretraining a model on a source of "public data" and transferring the extracted features to downstream tasks. This is an important setting because many industry deployments fine-tune publicly available feature extractors on proprietary data for downstream tasks. In this paper, we use features extracted from state-of-the-art open source models to solve benchmark tasks in computer vision and natural language processing using differentially private fine-tuning. Our key insight is that by accelerating training, we can quickly drive the model parameters to regions in parameter space where the impact of noise is minimized. In doing so, we recover the same performance as non-private fine-tuning for realistic values of epsilon in [0.01, 1.0] on benchmark image classification datasets including CIFAR100.

Accurate segmentation of live cell images has broad applications in clinical and research contexts. Deep learning methods have been able to perform cell segmentations with high accuracy; however developing machine learning models to do this requires access to high fidelity images of live cells. This is often not available due to resource constraints like limited accessibility to high performance microscopes or due to the nature of the studied organisms. Segmentation on low resolution images of live cells is a difficult task. This paper proposes a method to perform live cell segmentation with low resolution images by performing super-resolution as a pre-processing step in the segmentation pipeline.

Automation in farming processes is a growing field of research in both academia and industries. A considerable amount of work has been put into this field to develop systems robust enough for farming. Terrace farming, in particular, provides a varying set of challenges, including robust stair climbing methods and stable navigation in unstructured terrains. We propose the design of a novel autonomous terrace farming robot, Aarohi, that can effectively climb steep terraces of considerable heights and execute several farming operations. The design optimisation strategy for the overall mechanical structure is elucidated. Further, the embedded and software architecture along with fail-safe strategies are presented for a working prototype. Algorithms for autonomous traversal over the terrace steps using the scissor lift mechanism and performing various farming operations have also been discussed. The adaptability of the design to specific operational requirements and modular farm tools allow Aarohi to be customised for a wide variety of use cases.

Most existing Spiking Neural Network (SNN) works state that SNNs may utilize temporal information dynamics of spikes. However, an explicit analysis of temporal information dynamics is still missing. In this paper, we ask several important questions for providing a fundamental understanding of SNNs: What are temporal information dynamics inside SNNs? How can we measure the temporal information dynamics? How do the temporal information dynamics affect the overall learning performance? To answer these questions, we estimate the Fisher Information of the weights to measure the distribution of temporal information during training in an empirical manner. Surprisingly, as training goes on, Fisher information starts to concentrate in the early timesteps. After training, we observe that information becomes highly concentrated in earlier few timesteps, a phenomenon we refer to as temporal information concentration. We observe that the temporal information concentration phenomenon is a common learning feature of SNNs by conducting extensive experiments on various configurations such as architecture, dataset, optimization strategy, time constant, and timesteps. Furthermore, to reveal how temporal information concentration affects the performance of SNNs, we design a loss function to change the trend of temporal information. We find that temporal information concentration is crucial to building a robust SNN but has little effect on classification accuracy. Finally, we propose an efficient iterative pruning method based on our observation on temporal information concentration. Code is available at https://github.com/Intelligent-Computing-Lab-Yale/Exploring-Temporal-Information-Dynamics-in-Spiking-Neural-Networks.

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License.