ORGANA: A Robotic Assistant for Automated Chemistry Experimentation and Characterization

Chemistry experimentation is often resource- and labor-intensive. Despite the many benefits incurred by the integration of advanced and special-purpose lab equipment, many aspects of experimentation are still manually conducted by chemists, for example, polishing an electrode in electrochemistry experiments. Traditional lab automation infrastructure faces challenges when it comes to flexibly adapting to new chemistry experiments. To address this issue, we propose a human-friendly and flexible robotic system, ORGANA, that automates a diverse set of chemistry experiments. It is capable of interacting with chemists in the lab through natural language, using Large Language Models (LLMs). ORGANA keeps scientists informed by providing timely reports that incorporate statistical analyses. Additionally, it actively engages with users when necessary for disambiguation or troubleshooting. ORGANA can reason over user input to derive experiment goals, and plan long sequences of both high-level tasks and low-level robot actions while using feedback from the visual perception of the environment. It also supports scheduling and parallel execution for experiments that require resource allocation and coordination between multiple robots and experiment stations. We show that ORGANA successfully conducts a diverse set of chemistry experiments, including solubility assessment, pH measurement, recrystallization, and electrochemistry experiments. For the latter, we show that ORGANA robustly executes a long-horizon plan, comprising 19 steps executed in parallel, to characterize the electrochemical properties of quinone derivatives, a class of molecules used in rechargeable flow batteries. Our user study indicates that ORGANA significantly improves many aspects of user experience while reducing their physical workload. More details about ORGANA can be found at https://ac-rad.github.io/organa/.

Revealing the structure of language model capabilities

Building a theoretical understanding of the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is vital for our ability to predict and explain the behavior of these systems. Here, we investigate the structure of LLM capabilities by extracting latent capabilities from patterns of individual differences across a varied population of LLMs. Using a combination of Bayesian and frequentist factor analysis, we analyzed data from 29 different LLMs across 27 cognitive tasks. We found evidence that LLM capabilities are not monolithic. Instead, they are better explained by three well-delineated factors that represent reasoning, comprehension and core language modeling. Moreover, we found that these three factors can explain a high proportion of the variance in model performance. These results reveal a consistent structure in the capabilities of different LLMs and demonstrate the multifaceted nature of these capabilities. We also found that the three abilities show different relationships to model properties such as model size and instruction tuning. These patterns help refine our understanding of scaling laws and indicate that changes to a model that improve one ability might simultaneously impair others. Based on these findings, we suggest that benchmarks could be streamlined by focusing on tasks that tap into each broad model ability.

One-shot recognition of any material anywhere using contrastive learning with physics-based rendering

We present MatSim: a synthetic dataset, a benchmark, and a method for computer vision based recognition of similarities and transitions between materials and textures, focusing on identifying any material under any conditions using one or a few examples (one-shot learning). The visual recognition of materials is essential to everything from examining food while cooking to inspecting agriculture, chemistry, and industrial products. In this work, we utilize giant repositories used by computer graphics artists to generate a new CGI dataset for material similarity. We use physics-based rendering (PBR) repositories for visual material simulation, assign these materials random 3D objects, and render images with a vast range of backgrounds and illumination conditions (HDRI). We add a gradual transition between materials to support applications with a smooth transition between states (like gradually cooked food). We also render materials inside transparent containers to support beverage and chemistry lab use cases. We then train a contrastive learning network to generate a descriptor that identifies unfamiliar materials using a single image. We also present a new benchmark for a few-shot material recognition that contains a wide range of real-world examples, including the state of a chemical reaction, rotten/fresh fruits, states of food, different types of construction materials, types of ground, and many other use cases involving material states, transitions and subclasses. We show that a network trained on the MatSim synthetic dataset outperforms state-of-the-art models like Clip on the benchmark, despite being tested on material classes that were not seen during training. The dataset, benchmark, code and trained models are available online.

TOSE: A Fast Capacity Estimation Algorithm Based on Spike Approximations

Capacity is one of the most important performance metrics for wireless communication networks. It describes the maximum rate at which the information can be transmitted of a wireless communication system. To support the growing demand for wireless traffic, wireless networks are becoming more dense and complicated, leading to a higher difficulty to derive the capacity. Unfortunately, most existing methods for the capacity calculation take a polynomial time complexity. This will become unaffordable for future ultra-dense networks, where both the number of base stations (BSs) and the number of users are extremely large. In this paper, we propose a fast algorithm TOSE to estimate the capacity for ultra-dense wireless networks. Based on the spiked model of random matrix theory (RMT), our algorithm can avoid the exact eigenvalue derivations of large dimensional matrices, which are complicated and inevitable in conventional capacity calculation methods. Instead, fast eigenvalue estimations can be realized based on the spike approximations in our TOSE algorithm. Our simulation results show that TOSE is an accurate and fast capacity approximation algorithm. Its estimation error is below 5%, and it runs in linear time, which is much lower than the polynomial time complexity of existing methods. In addition, TOSE has superior generality, since it is independent of the distributions of BSs and users, and the shape of network areas.