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Chiral perovskites are emerging semiconducting materials with broken symmetry that can selectively absorb and emit circularly polarized light. However, most of the chiral perovskites are typically low-dimensional structures with limited electrical conductivity and their light absorption occurs in the UV region. In this work, we find doping 2,3,5,6-Tetrafluoro-7,7,8,8-tetracyanoquinodimethane (F4TCNQ) in the chiral perovskite matrix can improve the electrical conductivity with an addition of visible light absorption through the emerging charge-transfer electronic states. The new absorption feature exhibits strong circular dichroism adapted from the chiral matrix, which is indicative of a chirality transfer from the host to the guest via an electronic coupling. The charge transfer state is validated by transient absorption spectroscopy and theory modeling. Quantum-chemical modeling identifies a strong wave function overlap between an electron and a hole of the guest-host in a closely packed crystal configuration forming the charge-transfer absorption state. We then integrate the doped chiral perovskite film in photodetectors and demonstrate a selective detection of circularly polarized light both in the UV and visible range. Our results suggest a universal approach of introducing visible photo absorption states to the chiral matrix to broaden the optical active range and enhance the conductivity.

We present RelCon, a novel self-supervised *Rel*ative *Con*trastive learning approach that uses a learnable distance measure in combination with a softened contrastive loss for training an motion foundation model from wearable sensors. The learnable distance measure captures motif similarity and domain-specific semantic information such as rotation invariance. The learned distance provides a measurement of semantic similarity between a pair of accelerometer time-series segments, which is used to measure the distance between an anchor and various other sampled candidate segments. The self-supervised model is trained on 1 billion segments from 87,376 participants from a large wearables dataset. The model achieves strong performance across multiple downstream tasks, encompassing both classification and regression. To our knowledge, we are the first to show the generalizability of a self-supervised learning model with motion data from wearables across distinct evaluation tasks., Comment: Accepted to ICLR 2025

Effective evaluation of language models remains an open challenge in NLP. Researchers and engineers face methodological issues such as the sensitivity of models to evaluation setup, difficulty of proper comparisons across methods, and the lack of reproducibility and transparency. In this paper we draw on three years of experience in evaluating large language models to provide guidance and lessons for researchers. First, we provide an overview of common challenges faced in language model evaluation. Second, we delineate best practices for addressing or lessening the impact of these challenges on research. Third, we present the Language Model Evaluation Harness (lm-eval): an open source library for independent, reproducible, and extensible evaluation of language models that seeks to address these issues. We describe the features of the library as well as case studies in which the library has been used to alleviate these methodological concerns.

Many recent improvements in NLP stem from the development and use of large pre-trained language models (PLMs) with billions of parameters. Large model sizes makes computational cost one of the main limiting factors for training and evaluating such models; and has raised severe concerns about the sustainability, reproducibility, and inclusiveness for researching PLMs. These concerns are often based on personal experiences and observations. However, there had not been any large-scale surveys that investigate them. In this work, we provide a first attempt to quantify these concerns regarding three topics, namely, environmental impact, equity, and impact on peer reviewing. By conducting a survey with 312 participants from the NLP community, we capture existing (dis)parities between different and within groups with respect to seniority, academia, and industry; and their impact on the peer reviewing process. For each topic, we provide an analysis and devise recommendations to mitigate found disparities, some of which already successfully implemented. Finally, we discuss additional concerns raised by many participants in free-text responses.

While code-mixing is a common linguistic practice in many parts of the world, collecting high-quality and low-cost code-mixed data remains a challenge for natural language processing (NLP) research. The recent proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) compels one to ask: how capable are these systems in generating code-mixed data? In this paper, we explore prompting multilingual LLMs in a zero-shot manner to generate code-mixed data for seven languages in South East Asia (SEA), namely Indonesian, Malay, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Tamil, and Singlish. We find that publicly available multilingual instruction-tuned models such as BLOOMZ and Flan-T5-XXL are incapable of producing texts with phrases or clauses from different languages. ChatGPT exhibits inconsistent capabilities in generating code-mixed texts, wherein its performance varies depending on the prompt template and language pairing. For instance, ChatGPT generates fluent and natural Singlish texts (an English-based creole spoken in Singapore), but for English-Tamil language pair, the system mostly produces grammatically incorrect or semantically meaningless utterances. Furthermore, it may erroneously introduce languages not specified in the prompt. Based on our investigation, existing multilingual LLMs exhibit a wide range of proficiency in code-mixed data generation for SEA languages. As such, we advise against using LLMs in this context without extensive human checks., Comment: Updating Authors

AlphaZero, an approach to reinforcement learning that couples neural networks and Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS), has produced state-of-the-art strategies for traditional board games like chess, Go, shogi, and Hex. While researchers and game commentators have suggested that AlphaZero uses concepts that humans consider important, it is unclear how these concepts are captured in the network. We investigate AlphaZero's internal representations in the game of Hex using two evaluation techniques from natural language processing (NLP): model probing and behavioral tests. In doing so, we introduce new evaluation tools to the RL community and illustrate how evaluations other than task performance can be used to provide a more complete picture of a model's strengths and weaknesses. Our analyses in the game of Hex reveal interesting patterns and generate some testable hypotheses about how such models learn in general. For example, we find that MCTS discovers concepts before the neural network learns to encode them. We also find that concepts related to short-term end-game planning are best encoded in the final layers of the model, whereas concepts related to long-term planning are encoded in the middle layers of the model., Comment: 10 pages, Neural Information Processing Systems 2022

At NeurIPS, American and Chinese institutions cite papers from each other's regions substantially less than they cite endogamously. We build a citation graph to quantify this divide, compare it to European connectivity, and discuss the causes and consequences of the separation., Comment: Workshop on Cultures of AI and AI for Culture @ NeurIPS 2022

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.

Methods for improving the efficiency of deep network training (i.e. the resources required to achieve a given level of model quality) are of immediate benefit to deep learning practitioners. Distillation is typically used to compress models or improve model quality, but it's unclear if distillation actually improves training efficiency. Can the quality improvements of distillation be converted into training speed-ups, or do they simply increase final model quality with no resource savings? We conducted a series of experiments to investigate whether and how distillation can be used to accelerate training using ResNet-50 trained on ImageNet and BERT trained on C4 with a masked language modeling objective and evaluated on GLUE, using common enterprise hardware (8x NVIDIA A100). We found that distillation can speed up training by up to 1.96x in ResNet-50 trained on ImageNet and up to 1.42x on BERT when evaluated on GLUE. Furthermore, distillation for BERT yields optimal results when it is only performed for the first 20-50% of training. We also observed that training with distillation is almost always more efficient than training without distillation, even when using the poorest-quality model as a teacher, in both ResNet-50 and BERT. Finally, we found that it's possible to gain the benefit of distilling from an ensemble of teacher models, which has O(n) runtime cost, by randomly sampling a single teacher from the pool of teacher models on each step, which only has a O(1) runtime cost. Taken together, these results show that distillation can substantially improve training efficiency in both image classification and language modeling, and that a few simple optimizations to distillation protocols can further enhance these efficiency improvements.

Recent work in natural language processing (NLP) has yielded appealing results from scaling model parameters and training data; however, using only scale to improve performance means that resource consumption also grows. Such resources include data, time, storage, or energy, all of which are naturally limited and unevenly distributed. This motivates research into efficient methods that require fewer resources to achieve similar results. This survey synthesizes and relates current methods and findings in efficient NLP. We aim to provide both guidance for conducting NLP under limited resources, and point towards promising research directions for developing more efficient methods., Comment: Accepted at TACL, pre publication version

AI's rapid growth has been felt acutely by scholarly venues, leading to growing pains within the peer review process. These challenges largely center on the inability of specific subareas to identify and evaluate work that is appropriate according to criteria relevant to each subcommunity as determined by stakeholders of that subarea. We set forth a proposal that re-focuses efforts within these subcommunities through a decentralization of the reviewing and publication process. Through this re-centering effort, we hope to encourage each subarea to confront the issues specific to their process of academic publication and incentivization. This model has historically been successful for several subcommunities in AI, and we highlight those instances as examples for how the broader field can continue to evolve despite its continually growing size., Comment: ICLR 2022 ML Evaluation Standards Workshop

In this work, we study two self-play training schemes, Chainer and Pool, and show they lead to improved agent performance in Atari Pong compared to a standard DQN agent -- trained against the built-in Atari opponent. To measure agent performance, we define a robustness metric that captures how difficult it is to learn a strategy that beats the agent's learned policy. Through playing past versions of themselves, Chainer and Pool are able to target weaknesses in their policies and improve their resistance to attack. Agents trained using these methods score well on our robustness metric and can easily defeat the standard DQN agent. We conclude by using linear probing to illuminate what internal structures the different agents develop to play the game. We show that training agents with Chainer or Pool leads to richer network activations with greater predictive power to estimate critical game-state features compared to the standard DQN agent., Comment: RLDM 2022