There is growing excitement about the potential of Language Models (LMs) to accelerate scientific discovery. Falsifying hypotheses is key to scientific progress, as it allows claims to be iteratively refined over time. This process requires significant researcher effort, reasoning, and ingenuity. Yet current benchmarks for LMs predominantly assess their ability to generate solutions rather than challenge them. We advocate for developing benchmarks that evaluate this inverse capability - creating counterexamples for subtly incorrect solutions. To demonstrate this approach, we start with the domain of algorithmic problem solving, where counterexamples can be evaluated automatically using code execution. Specifically, we introduce REFUTE, a dynamically updating benchmark that includes recent problems and incorrect submissions from programming competitions, where human experts successfully identified counterexamples. Our analysis finds that the best reasoning agents, even OpenAI o3-mini (high) with code execution feedback, can create counterexamples for only <9% of incorrect solutions in REFUTE, even though ratings indicate its ability to solve up to 48% of these problems from scratch. We hope our work spurs progress in evaluating and enhancing LMs' ability to falsify incorrect solutions - a capability that is crucial for both accelerating research and making models self-improve through reliable reflective reasoning.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), unlocking unprecedented capabilities. This rapid advancement has spurred research into various aspects of LLMs, their text generation & reasoning capability, and potential misuse, fueling the necessity for robust detection methods. While numerous prior research has focused on detecting LLM-generated text (AI text) and thus checkmating them, our study investigates a relatively unexplored territory: portraying the nuanced distinctions between human and AI texts across text segments. Whether LLMs struggle with or excel at incorporating linguistic ingenuity across different text segments carries substantial implications for determining their potential as effective creative assistants to humans. Through an analogy with the structure of chess games-comprising opening, middle, and end games-we analyze text segments (introduction, body, and conclusion) to determine where the most significant distinctions between human and AI texts exist. While AI texts can approximate the body segment better due to its increased length, a closer examination reveals a pronounced disparity, highlighting the importance of this segment in AI text detection. Additionally, human texts exhibit higher cross-segment differences compared to AI texts. Overall, our research can shed light on the intricacies of human-AI text distinctions, offering novel insights for text detection and understanding.
With the recent Nobel Prize awarded for radical advances in protein discovery, foundation models (FMs) for exploring large combinatorial spaces promise to revolutionize many scientific fields. Artificial Life (ALife) has not yet integrated FMs, thus presenting a major opportunity for the field to alleviate the historical burden of relying chiefly on manual design and trial-and-error to discover the configurations of lifelike simulations. This paper presents, for the first time, a successful realization of this opportunity using vision-language FMs. The proposed approach, called Automated Search for Artificial Life (ASAL), (1) finds simulations that produce target phenomena, (2) discovers simulations that generate temporally open-ended novelty, and (3) illuminates an entire space of interestingly diverse simulations. Because of the generality of FMs, ASAL works effectively across a diverse range of ALife substrates including Boids, Particle Life, Game of Life, Lenia, and Neural Cellular Automata. A major result highlighting the potential of this technique is the discovery of previously unseen Lenia and Boids lifeforms, as well as cellular automata that are open-ended like Conway's Game of Life. Additionally, the use of FMs allows for the quantification of previously qualitative phenomena in a human-aligned way. This new paradigm promises to accelerate ALife research beyond what is possible through human ingenuity alone.
Reconstruction of 3D scenes from 2D images is a technical challenge that impacts domains from Earth and planetary sciences and space exploration to augmented and virtual reality. Typically, reconstruction algorithms first identify common features across images and then minimize reconstruction errors after estimating the shape of the terrain. This bundle adjustment (BA) step optimizes around a single, simplifying scalar value that obfuscates many possible causes of reconstruction errors (e.g., initial estimate of the position and orientation of the camera, lighting conditions, ease of feature detection in the terrain). Reconstruction errors can lead to inaccurate scientific inferences or endanger a spacecraft exploring a remote environment. To address this challenge, we present VECTOR, a visual analysis tool that improves error inspection for stereo reconstruction BA. VECTOR provides analysts with previously unavailable visibility into feature locations, camera pose, and computed 3D points. VECTOR was developed in partnership with the Perseverance Mars Rover and Ingenuity Mars Helicopter terrain reconstruction team at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We report on how this tool was used to debug and improve terrain reconstruction for the Mars 2020 mission.
Existing Maximum-Entropy (MaxEnt) Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods for continuous action spaces are typically formulated based on actor-critic frameworks and optimized through alternating steps of policy evaluation and policy improvement. In the policy evaluation steps, the critic is updated to capture the soft Q-function. In the policy improvement steps, the actor is adjusted in accordance with the updated soft Q-function. In this paper, we introduce a new MaxEnt RL framework modeled using Energy-Based Normalizing Flows (EBFlow). This framework integrates the policy evaluation steps and the policy improvement steps, resulting in a single objective training process. Our method enables the calculation of the soft value function used in the policy evaluation target without Monte Carlo approximation. Moreover, this design supports the modeling of multi-modal action distributions while facilitating efficient action sampling. To evaluate the performance of our method, we conducted experiments on the MuJoCo benchmark suite and a number of high-dimensional robotic tasks simulated by Omniverse Isaac Gym. The evaluation results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance compared to widely-adopted representative baselines.
Progress in designing channel codes has been driven by human ingenuity and, fittingly, has been sporadic. Polar codes, developed on the foundation of Arikan's polarization kernel, represent the latest breakthrough in coding theory and have emerged as the state-of-the-art error-correction code for short-to-medium block length regimes. In an effort to automate the invention of good channel codes, especially in this regime, we explore a novel, non-linear generalization of Polar codes, which we call DeepPolar codes. DeepPolar codes extend the conventional Polar coding framework by utilizing a larger kernel size and parameterizing these kernels and matched decoders through neural networks. Our results demonstrate that these data-driven codes effectively leverage the benefits of a larger kernel size, resulting in enhanced reliability when compared to both existing neural codes and conventional Polar codes.
Because "out-of-the-box" large language models are capable of generating a great deal of objectionable content, recent work has focused on aligning these models in an attempt to prevent undesirable generation. While there has been some success at circumventing these measures -- so-called "jailbreaks" against LLMs -- these attacks have required significant human ingenuity and are brittle in practice. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective attack method that causes aligned language models to generate objectionable behaviors. Specifically, our approach finds a suffix that, when attached to a wide range of queries for an LLM to produce objectionable content, aims to maximize the probability that the model produces an affirmative response (rather than refusing to answer). However, instead of relying on manual engineering, our approach automatically produces these adversarial suffixes by a combination of greedy and gradient-based search techniques, and also improves over past automatic prompt generation methods. Surprisingly, we find that the adversarial prompts generated by our approach are quite transferable, including to black-box, publicly released LLMs. Specifically, we train an adversarial attack suffix on multiple prompts (i.e., queries asking for many different types of objectionable content), as well as multiple models (in our case, Vicuna-7B and 13B). When doing so, the resulting attack suffix is able to induce objectionable content in the public interfaces to ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude, as well as open source LLMs such as LLaMA-2-Chat, Pythia, Falcon, and others. In total, this work significantly advances the state-of-the-art in adversarial attacks against aligned language models, raising important questions about how such systems can be prevented from producing objectionable information. Code is available at github.com/llm-attacks/llm-attacks.
The art of mathematical reasoning stands as a fundamental pillar of intellectual progress and is a central catalyst in cultivating human ingenuity. Researchers have recently published a plethora of works centered around the task of solving Math Word Problems (MWP) $-$ a crucial stride towards general AI. These existing models are susceptible to dependency on shallow heuristics and spurious correlations to derive the solution expressions. In order to ameliorate this issue, in this paper, we propose a framework for MWP solvers based on the generation of linguistic variants of the problem text. The approach involves solving each of the variant problems and electing the predicted expression with the majority of the votes. We use DeBERTa (Decoding-enhanced BERT with disentangled attention) as the encoder to leverage its rich textual representations and enhanced mask decoder to construct the solution expressions. Furthermore, we introduce a challenging dataset, $\mathrm{P\small{ARA}\normalsize{MAWPS}}$, consisting of paraphrased, adversarial, and inverse variants of selectively sampled MWPs from the benchmark $\mathrm{M\small{AWPS}}$ dataset. We extensively experiment on this dataset along with other benchmark datasets using some baseline MWP solver models. We show that training on linguistic variants of problem statements and voting on candidate predictions improve the mathematical reasoning and robustness of the model. We make our code and data publicly available.
The aim of this work is to introduce MaRF, a novel framework able to synthesize the Martian environment using several collections of images from rover cameras. The idea is to generate a 3D scene of Mars' surface to address key challenges in planetary surface exploration such as: planetary geology, simulated navigation and shape analysis. Although there exist different methods to enable a 3D reconstruction of Mars' surface, they rely on classical computer graphics techniques that incur high amounts of computational resources during the reconstruction process, and have limitations with generalizing reconstructions to unseen scenes and adapting to new images coming from rover cameras. The proposed framework solves the aforementioned limitations by exploiting Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), a method that synthesize complex scenes by optimizing a continuous volumetric scene function using a sparse set of images. To speed up the learning process, we replaced the sparse set of rover images with their neural graphics primitives (NGPs), a set of vectors of fixed length that are learned to preserve the information of the original images in a significantly smaller size. In the experimental section, we demonstrate the environments created from actual Mars datasets captured by Curiosity rover, Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter, all of which are available on the Planetary Data System (PDS).
Rover localization is one of the perquisites for large scale rover exploration. In NASA's Mars 2020 mission, the Ingenuity helicopter is carried together with the rover, which is capable of obtaining high-resolution imagery of Mars terrain, and it is possible to perform localization based on aerial-to-ground (A2G) imagery correspondence. However, considering the low-texture nature of the Mars terrain, and large perspective changes between UAV and rover imagery, traditional image matching methods will struggle to obtain valid image correspondence. In this paper we propose a novel pipeline for Mars rover localization. An algorithm combing image-based rock detection and rock distribution pattern matching is used to acquire A2G imagery correspondence, thus establishing the rover position in a UAV-generated ground map. Feasibility of this method is evaluated on sample data from a Mars analogue environment. The proposed method can serve as a reliable assist in future Mars missions.
Solving symbolic mathematics has always been of in the arena of human ingenuity that needs compositional reasoning and recurrence. However, recent studies have shown that large-scale language models such as transformers are universal and surprisingly can be trained as a sequence-to-sequence task to solve complex mathematical equations. These large transformer models need humongous amounts of training data to generalize to unseen symbolic mathematics problems. In this paper, we present a sample efficient way of solving the symbolic tasks by first pretraining the transformer model with language translation and then fine-tuning the pretrained transformer model to solve the downstream task of symbolic mathematics. We achieve comparable accuracy on the integration task with our pretrained model while using around $1.5$ orders of magnitude less number of training samples with respect to the state-of-the-art deep learning for symbolic mathematics. The test accuracy on differential equation tasks is considerably lower comparing with integration as they need higher order recursions that are not present in language translations. We propose the generalizability of our pretrained language model from Anna Karenina Principle (AKP). We pretrain our model with different pairs of language translations. Our results show language bias in solving symbolic mathematics tasks. Finally, we study the robustness of the fine-tuned model on symbolic math tasks against distribution shift, and our approach generalizes better in distribution shift scenarios for the function integration.
Scientific discovery concerns finding patterns in data and creating insightful hypotheses that explain these patterns. Traditionally, this process required human ingenuity, but with the galloping advances in artificial intelligence (AI) it becomes feasible to automate some parts of scientific discovery. In this work we leverage AI for strategy discovery for understanding human planning. In the state-of-the-art methods data about the process of human planning is often used to group similar behaviors together and formulate verbal descriptions of the strategies which might underlie those groups. Here, we automate these two steps. Our method utilizes a new algorithm, called Human-Interpret, that performs imitation learning to describe sequences of planning operations in terms of a procedural formula and then translates that formula to natural language. We test our method on a benchmark data set that researchers have previously scrutinized manually. We find that the descriptions of human planning strategies obtained automatically are about as understandable as human-generated descriptions. They also cover a substantial proportion of of relevant types of human planning strategies that had been discovered manually. Our method saves scientists' time and effort as all the reasoning about human planning is done automatically. This might make it feasible to more rapidly scale up the search for yet undiscovered cognitive strategies to many new decision environments, populations, tasks, and domains. Given these results, we believe that the presented work may accelerate scientific discovery in psychology, and due to its generality, extend to problems from other fields.
In the future, extraterrestrial expeditions will not only be conducted by rovers but also by flying robots. The technical demonstration drone Ingenuity, that just landed on Mars, will mark the beginning of a new era of exploration unhindered by terrain traversability. Robust self-localization is crucial for that. Cameras that are lightweight, cheap and information-rich sensors are already used to estimate the ego-motion of vehicles. However, methods proven to work in man-made environments cannot simply be deployed on other planets. The highly repetitive textures present in the wastelands of Mars pose a huge challenge to descriptor matching based approaches. In this paper, we present an advanced robust monocular odometry algorithm that uses efficient optical flow tracking to obtain feature correspondences between images and a refined keyframe selection criterion. In contrast to most other approaches, our framework can also handle rotation-only motions that are particularly challenging for monocular odometry systems. Furthermore, we present a novel approach to estimate the current risk of scale drift based on a principal component analysis of the relative translation information matrix. This way we obtain an implicit measure of uncertainty. We evaluate the validity of our approach on all sequences of a challenging real-world dataset captured in a Mars-like environment and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.
The coronavirus outbreak became a major concern for society worldwide. Technological innovation and ingenuity are essential to fight COVID-19 pandemic and bring us one step closer to overcome it. Researchers over the world are working actively to find available alternatives in different fields, such as the Healthcare System, pharmaceutic, health prevention, among others. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in the last 10 years, IA-based applications have become the prevalent solution in different areas because of its higher capability, being now adopted to help combat against COVID-19. This work provides a fast detection system of COVID-19 characteristics in X-Ray images based on deep learning (DL) techniques. This system is available as a free web deployed service for fast patient classification, alleviating the high demand for standards method for COVID-19 diagnosis. It is constituted of two deep learning models, one to differentiate between X-Ray and non-X-Ray images based on Mobile-Net architecture, and another one to identify chest X-Ray images with characteristics of COVID-19 based on the DenseNet architecture. For real-time inference, it is provided a pair of dedicated GPUs, which reduce the computational time. The whole system can filter out non-chest X-Ray images, and detect whether the X-Ray presents characteristics of COVID-19, highlighting the most sensitive regions.
Coding theory is a central discipline underpinning wireline and wireless modems that are the workhorses of the information age. Progress in coding theory is largely driven by individual human ingenuity with sporadic breakthroughs over the past century. In this paper we study whether it is possible to automate the discovery of decoding algorithms via deep learning. We study a family of sequential codes parameterized by recurrent neural network (RNN) architectures. We show that creatively designed and trained RNN architectures can decode well known sequential codes such as the convolutional and turbo codes with close to optimal performance on the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, which itself is achieved by breakthrough algorithms of our times (Viterbi and BCJR decoders, representing dynamic programing and forward-backward algorithms). We show strong generalizations, i.e., we train at a specific signal to noise ratio and block length but test at a wide range of these quantities, as well as robustness and adaptivity to deviations from the AWGN setting.