GPT-4 as an Agronomist Assistant? Answering Agriculture Exams Using Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding across various domains, including healthcare and finance. For some tasks, LLMs achieve similar or better performance than trained human beings, therefore it is reasonable to employ human exams (e.g., certification tests) to assess the performance of LLMs. We present a comprehensive evaluation of popular LLMs, such as Llama 2 and GPT, on their ability to answer agriculture-related questions. In our evaluation, we also employ RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and ER (Ensemble Refinement) techniques, which combine information retrieval, generation capabilities, and prompting strategies to improve the LLMs' performance. To demonstrate the capabilities of LLMs, we selected agriculture exams and benchmark datasets from three of the largest agriculture producer countries: Brazil, India, and the USA. Our analysis highlights GPT-4's ability to achieve a passing score on exams to earn credits for renewing agronomist certifications, answering 93% of the questions correctly and outperforming earlier general-purpose models, which achieved 88% accuracy. On one of our experiments, GPT-4 obtained the highest performance when compared to human subjects. This performance suggests that GPT-4 could potentially pass on major graduate education admission tests or even earn credits for renewing agronomy certificates. We also explore the models' capacity to address general agriculture-related questions and generate crop management guidelines for Brazilian and Indian farmers, utilizing robust datasets from the Brazilian Agency of Agriculture (Embrapa) and graduate program exams from India. The results suggest that GPT-4, ER, and RAG can contribute meaningfully to agricultural education, assessment, and crop management practice, offering valuable insights to farmers and agricultural professionals.

Strength in Diversity: Multi-Branch Representation Learning for Vehicle Re-Identification

This paper presents an efficient and lightweight multi-branch deep architecture to improve vehicle re-identification (V-ReID). While most V-ReID work uses a combination of complex multi-branch architectures to extract robust and diversified embeddings towards re-identification, we advocate that simple and lightweight architectures can be designed to fulfill the Re-ID task without compromising performance. We propose a combination of Grouped-convolution and Loss-Branch-Split strategies to design a multi-branch architecture that improve feature diversity and feature discriminability. We combine a ResNet50 global branch architecture with a BotNet self-attention branch architecture, both designed within a Loss-Branch-Split (LBS) strategy. We argue that specialized loss-branch-splitting helps to improve re-identification tasks by generating specialized re-identification features. A lightweight solution using grouped convolution is also proposed to mimic the learning of loss-splitting into multiple embeddings while significantly reducing the model size. In addition, we designed an improved solution to leverage additional metadata, such as camera ID and pose information, that uses 97% less parameters, further improving re-identification performance. In comparison to state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods, our approach outperforms competing solutions in Veri-776 by achieving 85.6% mAP and 97.7% CMC1 and obtains competitive results in Veri-Wild with 88.1% mAP and 96.3% CMC1. Overall, our work provides important insights into improving vehicle re-identification and presents a strong basis for other retrieval tasks. Our code is available at the https://github.com/videturfortuna/vehicle_reid_itsc2023.

A Comprehensive Modeling Approach for Crop Yield Forecasts using AI-based Methods and Crop Simulation Models

Numerous solutions for yield estimation are either based on data-driven models, or on crop-simulation models (CSMs). Researchers tend to build data-driven models using nationwide crop information databases provided by agencies such as the USDA. On the opposite side of the spectrum, CSMs require fine data that may be hard to generalize from a handful of fields. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive approach for yield forecasting that combines data-driven solutions, crop simulation models, and model surrogates to support multiple user-profiles and needs when dealing with crop management decision-making. To achieve this goal, we have developed a solution to calibrate CSMs at scale, a surrogate model of a CSM assuring faster execution, and a neural network-based approach that performs efficient risk assessment in such settings. Our data-driven modeling approach outperforms previous works with yield correlation predictions close to 91\%. The crop simulation modeling architecture achieved 6% error; the proposed crop simulation model surrogate performs predictions almost 100 times faster than the adopted crop simulator with similar accuracy levels.

SurgT challenge: Benchmark of Soft-Tissue Trackers for Robotic Surgery

This paper introduces the "SurgT: Surgical Tracking" challenge which was organised in conjunction with the 25th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2022). There were two purposes for the creation of this challenge: (1) the establishment of the first standardised benchmark for the research community to assess soft-tissue trackers; and (2) to encourage the development of unsupervised deep learning methods, given the lack of annotated data in surgery. A dataset of 157 stereo endoscopic videos from 20 clinical cases, along with stereo camera calibration parameters, have been provided. The participants were tasked with the development of algorithms to track a bounding box on stereo endoscopic videos. At the end of the challenge, the developed methods were assessed on a previously hidden test subset. This assessment uses benchmarking metrics that were purposely developed for this challenge and are now available online. The teams were ranked according to their Expected Average Overlap (EAO) score, which is a weighted average of the Intersection over Union (IoU) scores. The performance evaluation study verifies the efficacy of unsupervised deep learning algorithms in tracking soft-tissue. The best-performing method achieved an EAO score of 0.583 in the test subset. The dataset and benchmarking tool created for this challenge have been made publicly available. This challenge is expected to contribute to the development of autonomous robotic surgery and other digital surgical technologies.

SurgT: Soft-Tissue Tracking for Robotic Surgery, Benchmark and Challenge

This paper introduces the SurgT MICCAI 2022 challenge and its first results. There were two purposes for the creation of this challenge: (1) the establishment of the first standardised benchmark for the research community to assess soft-tissue trackers; and (2) to encourage the development of unsupervised deep learning methods, given the lack of annotated data in surgery. A dataset of 157 stereo endoscopic videos from 20 clinical cases, along with stereo camera calibration parameters, are provided. The participants were tasked with the development of algorithms to track a bounding box on each stereo endoscopic video. At the end of the challenge, the developed methods were assessed on a previously hidden test subset. This assessment uses benchmarking metrics that were purposely developed for this challenge and are now available online. The teams were ranked according to their Expected Average Overlap (EAO) score, which is a weighted average of Intersection over Union (IoU) scores. The top team achieved an EAO score of 0.583 in the test subset. Tracking soft-tissue using unsupervised algorithms was found to be achievable. The dataset and benchmarking tool have been successfully created and made publicly available online. This challenge is expected to contribute to the development of autonomous robotic surgery, and other digital surgical technologies.

Context-aware Execution Migration Tool for Data Science Jupyter Notebooks on Hybrid Clouds

Interactive computing notebooks, such as Jupyter notebooks, have become a popular tool for developing and improving data-driven models. Such notebooks tend to be executed either in the user's own machine or in a cloud environment, having drawbacks and benefits in both approaches. This paper presents a solution developed as a Jupyter extension that automatically selects which cells, as well as in which scenarios, such cells should be migrated to a more suitable platform for execution. We describe how we reduce the execution state of the notebook to decrease migration time and we explore the knowledge of user interactivity patterns with the notebook to determine which blocks of cells should be migrated. Using notebooks from Earth science (remote sensing), image recognition, and hand written digit identification (machine learning), our experiments show notebook state reductions of up to 55x and migration decisions leading to performance gains of up to 3.25x when the user interactivity with the notebook is taken into consideration.

Estimating crop yields with remote sensing and deep learning

Increasing the accuracy of crop yield estimates may allow improvements in the whole crop production chain, allowing farmers to better plan for harvest, and for insurers to better understand risks of production, to name a few advantages. To perform their predictions, most current machine learning models use NDVI data, which can be hard to use, due to the presence of clouds and their shadows in acquired images, and due to the absence of reliable crop masks for large areas, especially in developing countries. In this paper, we present a deep learning model able to perform pre-season and in-season predictions for five different crops. Our model uses crop calendars, easy-to-obtain remote sensing data and weather forecast information to provide accurate yield estimates.

A Scalable Machine Learning System for Pre-Season Agriculture Yield Forecast

Yield forecast is essential to agriculture stakeholders and can be obtained with the use of machine learning models and data coming from multiple sources. Most solutions for yield forecast rely on NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) data, which is time-consuming to be acquired and processed. To bring scalability for yield forecast, in the present paper we describe a system that incorporates satellite-derived precipitation and soil properties datasets, seasonal climate forecasting data from physical models and other sources to produce a pre-season prediction of soybean/maize yield---with no need of NDVI data. This system provides significantly useful results by the exempting the need for high-resolution remote-sensing data and allowing farmers to prepare for adverse climate influence on the crop cycle. In our studies, we forecast the soybean and maize yields for Brazil and USA, which corresponded to 44% of the world's grain production in 2016. Results show the error metrics for soybean and maize yield forecasts are comparable to similar systems that only provide yield forecast information in the first weeks to months of the crop cycle.