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Concerns about the environmental footprint of machine learning are increasing. While studies of energy use and emissions of ML models are a growing subfield, most ML researchers and developers still do not incorporate energy measurement as part of their work practices. While measuring energy is a crucial step towards reducing carbon footprint, it is also not straightforward. This paper introduces the main considerations necessary for making sound use of energy measurement tools and interpreting energy estimates, including the use of at-the-wall versus on-device measurements, sampling strategies and best practices, common sources of error, and proxy measures. It also contains practical tips and real-world scenarios that illustrate how these considerations come into play. It concludes with a call to action for improving the state of the art of measurement methods and standards for facilitating robust comparisons between diverse hardware and software environments., Comment: Released as NREL Tech Report

In this work we explore utilizing LLMs for data augmentation for manufacturing task guidance system. The dataset consists of representative samples of interactions with technicians working in an advanced manufacturing setting. The purpose of this work to explore the task, data augmentation for the supported tasks and evaluating the performance of the existing LLMs. We observe that that task is complex requiring understanding from procedure specification documents, actions and objects sequenced temporally. The dataset consists of 200,000+ question/answer pairs that refer to the spec document and are grounded in narrations and/or video demonstrations. We compared the performance of several popular open-sourced LLMs by developing a baseline using each LLM and then compared the responses in a reference-free setting using LLM-as-a-judge and compared the ratings with crowd-workers whilst validating the ratings with experts.

In this work we explore the application of AI to robotic welding. Robotic welding is a widely used technology in many industries, but robots currently do not have the capability to detect welding defects which get introduced due to various reasons in the welding process. We describe how deep-learning methods can be applied to detect weld defects in real-time by recording the welding process with microphones and a camera. Our findings are based on a large database with more than 4000 welding samples we collected which covers different weld types, materials and various defect categories. All deep learning models are trained in an unsupervised fashion because the space of possible defects is large and the defects in our data may contain biases. We demonstrate that a reliable real-time detection of most categories of weld defects is feasible both from audio and video, with improvements achieved by combining both modalities. Specifically, the multi-modal approach achieves an average Area-under-ROC-Curve (AUC) of 0.92 over all eleven defect types in our data. We conclude the paper with an analysis of the results by defect type and a discussion of future work., Comment: 21 pages

Development of task guidance systems for aiding humans in a situated task remains a challenging problem. The role of search (information retrieval) and conversational systems for task guidance has immense potential to help the task performers achieve various goals. However, there are several technical challenges that need to be addressed to deliver such conversational systems, where common supervised approaches fail to deliver the expected results in terms of overall performance, user experience and adaptation to realistic conditions. In this preliminary work we first highlight some of the challenges involved during the development of such systems. We then provide an overview of existing datasets available and highlight their limitations. We finally develop a model-in-the-loop wizard-of-oz based data collection tool and perform a pilot experiment., Comment: SCAI @ SIGIR

Recent temporal action segmentation approaches need frame annotations during training to be effective. These annotations are very expensive and time-consuming to obtain. This limits their performances when only limited annotated data is available. In contrast, we can easily collect a large corpus of in-domain unannotated videos by scavenging through the internet. Thus, this paper proposes an approach for the temporal action segmentation task that can simultaneously leverage knowledge from annotated and unannotated video sequences. Our approach uses multi-stream distillation that repeatedly refines and finally combines their frame predictions. Our model also predicts the action order, which is later used as a temporal constraint while estimating frames labels to counter the lack of supervision for unannotated videos. In the end, our evaluation of the proposed approach on two different datasets demonstrates its capability to achieve comparable performance to the full supervision despite limited annotation.

In this paper, we propose an approach that spatially localizes the activities in a video frame where each person can perform multiple activities at the same time. Our approach takes the temporal scene context as well as the relations of the actions of detected persons into account. While the temporal context is modeled by a temporal recurrent neural network (RNN), the relations of the actions are modeled by a graph RNN. Both networks are trained together and the proposed approach achieves state of the art results on the AVA dataset., Comment: Accepted at ICIP 2019

Since collecting and annotating data for spatio-temporal action detection is very expensive, there is a need to learn approaches with less supervision. Weakly supervised approaches do not require any bounding box annotations and can be trained only from labels that indicate whether an action occurs in a video clip. Current approaches, however, cannot handle the case when there are multiple persons in a video that perform multiple actions at the same time. In this work, we address this very challenging task for the first time. We propose a baseline based on multi-instance and multi-label learning. Furthermore, we propose a novel approach that uses sets of actions as representation instead of modeling individual action classes. Since computing, the probabilities for the full power set becomes intractable as the number of action classes increases, we assign an action set to each detected person under the constraint that the assignment is consistent with the annotation of the video clip. We evaluate the proposed approach on the challenging AVA dataset where the proposed approach outperforms the MIML baseline and is competitive to fully supervised approaches., Comment: Accepted in ACCV 2020

A group of persons can be analyzed at various semantic levels such as individual actions, their interactions, and the activity of the entire group. In this paper, we propose a structural recurrent neural network (SRNN) that uses a series of interconnected RNNs to jointly capture the actions of individuals, their interactions, as well as the group activity. While previous structural recurrent neural networks assumed that the number of nodes and edges is constant, we use a grid pooling layer to address the fact that the number of individuals in a group can vary. We evaluate two variants of the structural recurrent neural network on the Volleyball Dataset., Comment: Accepted in WACV 2018

Teaching in formal academic environments typically follows a curriculum that specifies learning objectives that need to be met at each phase of a student's academic progression. In this paper, we address the novel task of identifying document "segments" in educational material that are relevant for different learning objectives. Using a dynamic programming algorithm based on a vector space representation of sentences in a document, we automatically segment and then label document segments with learning objectives. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a real-world education data set. We further demonstrate how our system is useful for related tasks of document passage retrieval and QA using a large publicly available dataset. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to attempt the task of segmenting and labeling education materials with academic learning objectives. [For the full proceedings, see ED592609.]

Glycans play a central role as mediators in most biological processes, but their structures are complicated by isomerism. Epimers and anomers, regioisomers, and branched sequences contribute to a structural variability that dwarfs those of nucleic acids and proteins, challenging even the most sophisticated analytical tools, such as NMR and mass spectrometry. Here, we introduce an electron tunneling technique that is label-free and can identify carbohydrates at the single-molecule level, offering significant benefits over existing technology. It is capable of analyzing sub-picomole quantities of sample, counting the number of individual molecules in each subset in a population of coexisting isomers, and is quantitative over more than four orders of magnitude of concentration. It resolves epimers not well separated by ion-mobility and can be implemented on a silicon chip. It also provides a readout mechanism for direct single-molecule sequencing of linear oligosaccharides.