FuXi-2.0: Advancing machine learning weather forecasting model for practical applications

Machine learning (ML) models have become increasingly valuable in weather forecasting, providing forecasts that not only lower computational costs but often match or exceed the accuracy of traditional numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. Despite their potential, ML models typically suffer from limitations such as coarse temporal resolution, typically 6 hours, and a limited set of meteorological variables, limiting their practical applicability. To overcome these challenges, we introduce FuXi-2.0, an advanced ML model that delivers 1-hourly global weather forecasts and includes a comprehensive set of essential meteorological variables, thereby expanding its utility across various sectors like wind and solar energy, aviation, and marine shipping. Our study conducts comparative analyses between ML-based 1-hourly forecasts and those from the high-resolution forecast (HRES) of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for various practical scenarios. The results demonstrate that FuXi-2.0 consistently outperforms ECMWF HRES in forecasting key meteorological variables relevant to these sectors. In particular, FuXi-2.0 shows superior performance in wind power forecasting compared to ECMWF HRES, further validating its efficacy as a reliable tool for scenarios demanding precise weather forecasts. Additionally, FuXi-2.0 also integrates both atmospheric and oceanic components, representing a significant step forward in the development of coupled atmospheric-ocean models. Further comparative analyses reveal that FuXi-2.0 provides more accurate forecasts of tropical cyclone intensity than its predecessor, FuXi-1.0, suggesting that there are benefits of an atmosphere-ocean coupled model over atmosphere-only models.

Modified Meta-Thompson Sampling for Linear Bandits and Its Bayes Regret Analysis

Meta-learning is characterized by its ability to learn how to learn, enabling the adaptation of learning strategies across different tasks. Recent research introduced the Meta-Thompson Sampling (Meta-TS), which meta-learns an unknown prior distribution sampled from a meta-prior by interacting with bandit instances drawn from it. However, its analysis was limited to Gaussian bandit. The contextual multi-armed bandit framework is an extension of the Gaussian Bandit, which challenges agent to utilize context vectors to predict the most valuable arms, optimally balancing exploration and exploitation to minimize regret over time. This paper introduces Meta-TSLB algorithm, a modified Meta-TS for linear contextual bandits. We theoretically analyze Meta-TSLB and derive an $ O((m+\log(m))\sqrt{n\log(n)})$ bound on its Bayes regret, in which $m$ represents the number of bandit instances, and $n$ the number of rounds of Thompson Sampling. Additionally, our work complements the analysis of Meta-TS for linear contextual bandits. The performance of Meta-TSLB is evaluated experimentally under different settings, and we experimente and analyze the generalization capability of Meta-TSLB, showcasing its potential to adapt to unseen instances.

Attention-Based Beamformer For Multi-Channel Speech Enhancement

Minimum Variance Distortionless Response (MVDR) is a classical adaptive beamformer that theoretically ensures the distortionless transmission of signals in the target direction. Its performance in noise reduction actually depends on the accuracy of the noise spatial covariance matrix (SCM) estimate. Although recent deep learning has shown remarkable performance in multi-channel speech enhancement, the property of distortionless response still makes MVDR highly popular in real applications. In this paper, we propose an attention-based mechanism to calculate the speech and noise SCM and then apply MVDR to obtain the enhanced speech. Moreover, a deep learning architecture using the inplace convolution operator and frequency-independent LSTM has proven effective in facilitating SCM estimation. The model is optimized in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is extremely effective in tracking moving or stationary speakers under non-causal and causal conditions, outperforming other baselines. It is worth mentioning that our model has only 0.35 million parameters, making it easy to be deployed on edge devices.

Solve paint color effect prediction problem in trajectory optimization of spray painting robot using artificial neural network inspired by the Kubelka Munk model

Currently, the spray-painting robot trajectory planning technology aiming at spray painting quality mainly applies to single-color spraying. Conventional methods of optimizing the spray gun trajectory based on simulated thickness can only qualitatively reflect the color distribution, and can not simulate the color effect of spray painting at the pixel level. Therefore, it is not possible to accurately control the area covered by the color and the gradation of the edges of the area, and it is also difficult to deal with the situation where multiple colors of paint are sprayed in combination. To solve the above problems, this paper is inspired by the Kubelka-Munk model and combines the 3D machine vision method and artificial neural network to propose a spray painting color effect prediction method. The method is enabled to predict the execution effect of the spray gun trajectory with pixel-level accuracy from the dimension of the surface color of the workpiece after spray painting. On this basis, the method can be used to replace the traditional thickness simulation method to establish the objective function of the spray gun trajectory optimization problem, and thus solve the difficult problem of spray gun trajectory optimization for multi-color paint combination spraying. In this paper, the mathematical model of the spray painting color effect prediction problem is first determined through the analysis of the Kubelka-Munk paint film color rendering model, and at the same time, the spray painting color effect dataset is established with the help of the depth camera and point cloud processing algorithm. After that, the multilayer perceptron model was improved with the help of gating and residual structure and was used for the color prediction task. To verify ...

NYK-MS: A Well-annotated Multi-modal Metaphor and Sarcasm Understanding Benchmark on Cartoon-Caption Dataset

Metaphor and sarcasm are common figurative expressions in people's communication, especially on the Internet or the memes popular among teenagers. We create a new benchmark named NYK-MS (NewYorKer for Metaphor and Sarcasm), which contains 1,583 samples for metaphor understanding tasks and 1,578 samples for sarcasm understanding tasks. These tasks include whether it contains metaphor/sarcasm, which word or object contains metaphor/sarcasm, what does it satirize and why does it contains metaphor/sarcasm, all of the 7 tasks are well-annotated by at least 3 annotators. We annotate the dataset for several rounds to improve the consistency and quality, and use GUI and GPT-4V to raise our efficiency. Based on the benchmark, we conduct plenty of experiments. In the zero-shot experiments, we show that Large Language Models (LLM) and Large Multi-modal Models (LMM) can't do classification task well, and as the scale increases, the performance on other 5 tasks improves. In the experiments on traditional pre-train models, we show the enhancement with augment and alignment methods, which prove our benchmark is consistent with previous dataset and requires the model to understand both of the two modalities.

GRPose: Learning Graph Relations for Human Image Generation with Pose Priors

Recent methods using diffusion models have made significant progress in human image generation with various additional controls such as pose priors. However, existing approaches still struggle to generate high-quality images with consistent pose alignment, resulting in unsatisfactory outputs. In this paper, we propose a framework delving into the graph relations of pose priors to provide control information for human image generation. The main idea is to establish a graph topological structure between the pose priors and latent representation of diffusion models to capture the intrinsic associations between different pose parts. A Progressive Graph Integrator (PGI) is designed to learn the spatial relationships of the pose priors with the graph structure, adopting a hierarchical strategy within an Adapter to gradually propagate information across different pose parts. A pose perception loss is further introduced based on a pretrained pose estimation network to minimize the pose differences. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments conducted on the Human-Art and LAION-Human datasets demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance, with a 9.98% increase in pose average precision compared to the latest benchmark model. The code is released on *******.

Cascaded Temporal Updating Network for Efficient Video Super-Resolution

Existing video super-resolution (VSR) methods generally adopt a recurrent propagation network to extract spatio-temporal information from the entire video sequences, exhibiting impressive performance. However, the key components in recurrent-based VSR networks significantly impact model efficiency, e.g., the alignment module occupies a substantial portion of model parameters, while the bidirectional propagation mechanism significantly amplifies the inference time. Consequently, developing a compact and efficient VSR method that can be deployed on resource-constrained devices, e.g., smartphones, remains challenging. To this end, we propose a cascaded temporal updating network (CTUN) for efficient VSR. We first develop an implicit cascaded alignment module to explore spatio-temporal correspondences from adjacent frames. Moreover, we propose a unidirectional propagation updating network to efficiently explore long-range temporal information, which is crucial for high-quality video reconstruction. Specifically, we develop a simple yet effective hidden updater that can leverage future information to update hidden features during forward propagation, significantly reducing inference time while maintaining performance. Finally, we formulate all of these components into an end-to-end trainable VSR network. Extensive experimental results show that our CTUN achieves a favorable trade-off between efficiency and performance compared to existing methods. Notably, compared with BasicVSR, our method obtains better results while employing only about 30% of the parameters and running time. The source code and pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/House-Leo/CTUN.

LLMs are not Zero-Shot Reasoners for Biomedical Information Extraction

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted for applications in healthcare, reaching the performance of domain experts on tasks such as question answering and document summarisation. Despite their success on these tasks, it is unclear how well LLMs perform on tasks that are traditionally pursued in the biomedical domain, such as structured information extration. To breach this gap, in this paper, we systematically benchmark LLM performance in Medical Classification and Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks. We aim to disentangle the contribution of different factors to the performance, particularly the impact of LLMs' task knowledge and reasoning capabilities, their (parametric) domain knowledge, and addition of external knowledge. To this end we evaluate various open LLMs -- including BioMistral and Llama-2 models -- on a diverse set of biomedical datasets, using standard prompting, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Self-Consistency based reasoning as well as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with PubMed and Wikipedia corpora. Counter-intuitively, our results reveal that standard prompting consistently outperforms more complex techniques across both tasks, laying bare the limitations in the current application of CoT, self-consistency and RAG in the biomedical domain. Our findings suggest that advanced prompting methods developed for knowledge- or reasoning-intensive tasks, such as CoT or RAG, are not easily portable to biomedical tasks where precise structured outputs are required. This highlights the need for more effective integration of external knowledge and reasoning mechanisms in LLMs to enhance their performance in real-world biomedical applications.

Dynamic Neural Dowker Network: Approximating Persistent Homology in Dynamic Directed Graphs

Persistent homology, a fundamental technique within Topological Data Analysis (TDA), captures structural and shape characteristics of graphs, yet encounters computational difficulties when applied to dynamic directed graphs. This paper introduces the Dynamic Neural Dowker Network (DNDN), a novel framework specifically designed to approximate the results of dynamic Dowker filtration, aiming to capture the high-order topological features of dynamic directed graphs. Our approach creatively uses line graph transformations to produce both source and sink line graphs, highlighting the shared neighbor structures that Dowker complexes focus on. The DNDN incorporates a Source-Sink Line Graph Neural Network (SSLGNN) layer to effectively capture the neighborhood relationships among dynamic edges. Additionally, we introduce an innovative duality edge fusion mechanism, ensuring that the results for both the sink and source line graphs adhere to the duality principle intrinsic to Dowker complexes. Our approach is validated through comprehensive experiments on real-world datasets, demonstrating DNDN's capability not only to effectively approximate dynamic Dowker filtration results but also to perform exceptionally in dynamic graph classification tasks.

Cross-View Geolocalization and Disaster Mapping with Street-View and VHR Satellite Imagery: A Case Study of Hurricane IAN

Nature disasters play a key role in shaping human-urban infrastructure interactions. Effective and efficient response to natural disasters is essential for building resilience and a sustainable urban environment. Two types of information are usually the most necessary and difficult to gather in disaster response. The first information is about disaster damage perception, which shows how badly people think that urban infrastructure has been damaged. The second information is geolocation awareness, which means how people whereabouts are made available. In this paper, we proposed a novel disaster mapping framework, namely CVDisaster, aiming at simultaneously addressing geolocalization and damage perception estimation using cross-view Street-View Imagery (SVI) and Very High-Resolution satellite imagery. CVDisaster consists of two cross-view models, where CVDisaster-Geoloc refers to a cross-view geolocalization model based on a contrastive learning objective with a Siamese ConvNeXt image encoder, and CVDisaster-Est is a cross-view classification model based on a Couple Global Context Vision Transformer (CGCViT). Taking Hurricane IAN as a case study, we evaluate the CVDisaster framework by creating a novel cross-view dataset (CVIAN) and conducting extensive experiments. As a result, we show that CVDisaster can achieve highly competitive performance (over 80% for geolocalization and 75% for damage perception estimation) with even limited fine-tuning efforts, which largely motivates future cross-view models and applications within a broader GeoAI research community. The data and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/tum-bgd/CVDisaster.