Tur[k]ingBench: A Challenge Benchmark for Web Agents

Recent chatbots have demonstrated impressive ability to understand and communicate in raw-text form. However, there is more to the world than raw text. For example, humans spend long hours of their time on web pages, where text is intertwined with other modalities and tasks are accomplished in the form of various complex interactions. Can state-of-the-art multi-modal models generalize to such complex domains? To address this question, we introduce TurkingBench, a benchmark of tasks formulated as web pages containing textual instructions with multi-modal context. Unlike existing work which employs artificially synthesized web pages, here we use natural HTML pages that were originally designed for crowdsourcing workers for various annotation purposes. The HTML instructions of each task are also instantiated with various values (obtained from the crowdsourcing tasks) to form new instances of the task. This benchmark contains 32.2K instances distributed across 158 tasks. Additionally, to facilitate the evaluation on TurkingBench, we develop an evaluation framework that connects the responses of chatbots to modifications on web pages (modifying a text box, checking a radio, etc.). We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art models, including language-only, vision-only, and layout-only models, and their combinations, on this benchmark. Our findings reveal that these models perform significantly better than random chance, yet considerable room exists for improvement. We hope this benchmark will help facilitate the evaluation and development of web-based agents.

Open Data on GitHub: Unlocking the Potential of AI

GitHub is the world's largest platform for collaborative software development, with over 100 million users. GitHub is also used extensively for open data collaboration, hosting more than 800 million open data files, totaling 142 terabytes of data. This study highlights the potential of open data on GitHub and demonstrates how it can accelerate AI research. We analyze the existing landscape of open data on GitHub and the patterns of how users share datasets. Our findings show that GitHub is one of the largest hosts of open data in the world and has experienced an accelerated growth of open data assets over the past four years. By examining the open data landscape on GitHub, we aim to empower users and organizations to leverage existing open datasets and improve their discoverability -- ultimately contributing to the ongoing AI revolution to help address complex societal issues. We release the three datasets that we have collected to support this analysis as open datasets at https://github.com/github/open-data-on-github.

THC: Accelerating Distributed Deep Learning Using Tensor Homomorphic Compression

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are the de-facto standard for essential use cases, such as image classification, computer vision, and natural language processing. As DNNs and datasets get larger, they require distributed training on increasingly larger clusters. A main bottleneck is then the resulting communication overhead where workers exchange model updates (i.e., gradients) on a per-round basis. To address this bottleneck and accelerate training, a widely-deployed approach is compression. However, previous deployments often apply bi-directional compression schemes by simply using a uni-directional gradient compression scheme in each direction. This results in significant computational overheads at the parameter server and increased compression error, leading to longer training and lower accuracy. We introduce Tensor Homomorphic Compression (THC), a novel bi-directional compression framework that enables the direct aggregation of compressed values while optimizing the bandwidth to accuracy tradeoff, thus eliminating the aforementioned overheads. Moreover, THC is compatible with in-network aggregation (INA), which allows for further acceleration. Evaluation over a testbed shows that THC improves time-to-accuracy in comparison to alternatives by up to 1.32x with a software PS and up to 1.51x using INA. Finally, we demonstrate that THC is scalable and tolerant for acceptable packet-loss rates.

Predicting housing prices and analyzing real estate market in the Chicago suburbs using Machine Learning

The pricing of housing properties is determined by a variety of factors. However, post-pandemic markets have experienced volatility in the Chicago suburb area, which have affected house prices greatly. In this study, analysis was done on the Naperville/Bolingbrook real estate market to predict property prices based on these housing attributes through machine learning models, and to evaluate the effectiveness of such models in a volatile market space. Gathering data from Redfin, a real estate website, sales data from 2018 up until the summer season of 2022 were collected for research. By analyzing these sales in this range of time, we can also look at the state of the housing market and identify trends in price. For modeling the data, the models used were linear regression, support vector regression, decision tree regression, random forest regression, and XGBoost regression. To analyze results, comparison was made on the MAE, RMSE, and R-squared values for each model. It was found that the XGBoost model performs the best in predicting house prices despite the additional volatility sponsored by post-pandemic conditions. After modeling, Shapley Values (SHAP) were used to evaluate the weights of the variables in constructing models.