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Recent innovations in architecture, pre-training, and fine-tuning have led to the remarkable in-context learning and reasoning abilities of … (see more)large auto-regressive language models such as LLaMA and DeepSeek. In contrast, encoders like BERT and RoBERTa have not seen the same level of progress despite being foundational for many downstream NLP applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce NeoBERT, a next-generation encoder that redefines the capabilities of bidirectional models by integrating state-of-the-art advancements in architecture, modern data, and optimized pre-training methodologies. NeoBERT is designed for seamless adoption: it serves as a plug-and-play replacement for existing base models, relies on an optimal depth-to-width ratio, and leverages an extended context length of 4,096 tokens. Despite its compact 250M parameter footprint, it achieves state-of-the-art results on the massive MTEB benchmark, outperforming BERT large, RoBERTa large, NomicBERT, and ModernBERT under identical fine-tuning conditions. In addition, we rigorously evaluate the impact of each modification on GLUE and design a uniform fine-tuning and evaluation framework for MTEB. We release all code, data, checkpoints, and training scripts to accelerate research and real-world adoption.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) for health has the potential to significantly change and improve healthcare. However in most African countries,… (see more) identifying culturally and contextually attuned approaches for deploying these solutions is not well understood. To bridge this gap, we conduct a qualitative study to investigate the best practices, fairness indicators, and potential biases to mitigate when deploying AI for health in African countries, as well as explore opportunities where artificial intelligence could make a positive impact in health. We used a mixed methods approach combining in-depth interviews (IDIs) and surveys. We conduct 1.5-2 hour long IDIs with 50 experts in health, policy, and AI across 17 countries, and through an inductive approach we conduct a qualitative thematic analysis on expert IDI responses. We administer a blinded 30-minute survey with case studies to 672 general population participants across 5 countries in Africa and analyze responses on quantitative scales, statistically comparing responses by country, age, gender, and level of familiarity with AI. We thematically summarize open-ended responses from surveys. Our results find generally positive attitudes, high levels of trust, accompanied by moderate levels of concern among general population participants for AI usage for health in Africa. This contrasts with expert responses, where major themes revolved around trust/mistrust, ethical concerns, and systemic barriers to integration, among others. This work presents the first-of-its-kind qualitative research study of the potential of AI for health in Africa from an algorithmic fairness angle, with perspectives from both experts and the general population. We hope that this work guides policymakers and drives home the need for further research and the inclusion of general population perspectives in decision-making around AI usage.
As large vision language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as automated evaluators, understanding their ability to effectively compare dat… (see more)a pairs as instructed in the prompt becomes essential. To address this, we present PairBench, a low-cost framework that systematically evaluates VLMs as customizable similarity tools across various modalities and scenarios. Through PairBench, we introduce four metrics that represent key desiderata of similarity scores: alignment with human annotations, consistency for data pairs irrespective of their order, smoothness of similarity distributions, and controllability through prompting. Our analysis demonstrates that no model, whether closed- or open-source, is superior on all metrics; the optimal choice depends on an auto evaluator's desired behavior (e.g., a smooth vs. a sharp judge), highlighting risks of widespread adoption of VLMs as evaluators without thorough assessment. For instance, the majority of VLMs struggle with maintaining symmetric similarity scores regardless of order. Additionally, our results show that the performance of VLMs on the metrics in PairBench closely correlates with popular benchmarks, showcasing its predictive power in ranking models.
Reversible architectures have been shown to be capable of performing on par with their non-reversible architectures, being applied in deep l… (see more)earning for memory savings and generative modeling. In this work, we show how reversible architectures can solve challenges in parallelizing deep model training. We introduce PETRA, a novel alternative to backpropagation for parallelizing gradient computations. PETRA facilitates effective model parallelism by enabling stages (i.e., a set of layers) to compute independently on different devices, while only needing to communicate activations and gradients between each other. By decoupling the forward and backward passes and keeping a single updated version of the parameters, the need for weight stashing is also removed. We develop a custom autograd-like training framework for PETRA, and we demonstrate its effectiveness on CIFAR-10, ImageNet32, and ImageNet, achieving competitive accuracies comparable to backpropagation using ResNet-18, ResNet-34, and ResNet-50 models.
Convex relaxations of the optimal power flow (OPF) problem provide an efficient alternative to solving the intractable alternating current (… (see more)AC) optimal power flow. The conic subset of OPF convex relaxations, in particular, greatly accelerate resolution while leading to high-quality approximations that are exact in several scenarios. However, the sufficient conditions guaranteeing exactness are stringent, e.g., requiring radial topologies. In this short communication, we present two equivalent ex post conditions for the exactness of any conic relaxation of the OPF. These rely on obtaining either a rank-1 voltage matrix or self-coherent cycles. Instead of relying on sufficient conditions a priori, satisfying one of the presented ex post conditions acts as an exactness certificate for the computed solution. The operator can therefore obtain an optimality guarantee when solving a conic relaxation even when a priori exactness requirements are not met. Finally, we present numerical examples from the MATPOWER library where the ex post conditions hold even though the exactness sufficient conditions do not, thereby illustrating the use of the conditions.
Leveraging Dantzig–Wolfe Decomposition in the Original Variable Space for Mixed-Integer Programming Dantzig–Wolfe decomposition has been… (see more) extensively applied to solve large-scale mixed-integer programs with decomposable structures, leading to exact solution approaches, such as branch and price. However, these approaches would require solving the problem in an extended variable space and are not readily present in off-the-shelf solvers. In “Recovering Dantzig–Wolfe Bounds by Cutting Planes,” Chen, Günlük, and Lodi propose a computational effective approach for generating cutting planes from Dantzig–Wolfe decomposition to enhance branch and cut in the space of original variables. The proposed approach requires a relatively small number of cutting planes to recover the strength of the Dantzig–Wolfe dual bound and should be easy to implement in general-purpose mixed-integer programming solvers. The authors show that these cutting planes typically lead to a formulation with lower dual degeneracy and hence, a better computational performance than naïve approaches, such as the objective function cut.
This paper presents a comprehensive study on using deep reinforcement learning (RL) to create dynamic locomotion controllers for bipedal rob… (see more)ots. Going beyond focusing on a single locomotion skill, we develop a general control solution that can be used for a range of dynamic bipedal skills, from periodic walking and running to aperiodic jumping and standing. Our RL-based controller incorporates a novel dual-history architecture, utilizing both a long-term and short-term input/output (I/O) history of the robot. This control architecture, when trained through the proposed end-to-end RL approach, consistently outperforms other methods across a diverse range of skills in both simulation and the real world.The study also delves into the adaptivity and robustness introduced by the proposed RL system in developing locomotion controllers. We demonstrate that the proposed architecture can adapt to both time-invariant dynamics shifts and time-variant changes, such as contact events, by effectively using the robot's I/O history. Additionally, we identify task randomization as another key source of robustness, fostering better task generalization and compliance to disturbances. The resulting control policies can be successfully deployed on Cassie, a torque-controlled human-sized bipedal robot. This work pushes the limits of agility for bipedal robots through extensive real-world experiments. We demonstrate a diverse range of locomotion skills, including: robust standing, versatile walking, fast running with a demonstration of a 400-meter dash, and a diverse set of jumping skills, such as standing long jumps and high jumps.
Positional Encodings (PEs) are a critical component of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs), providing the attention mechanism wit… (see more)h important sequence-position information. One of the most popular types of encoding used today in LLMs are Rotary Positional Encodings (RoPE), that rotate the queries and keys based on their relative distance. A common belief is that RoPE is useful because it helps to decay token dependency as relative distance increases. In this work, we argue that this is unlikely to be the core reason. We study the internals of a trained Gemma 7B model to understand how RoPE is being used at a mechanical level. We find that Gemma learns to use RoPE to construct robust "positional" attention patterns by exploiting the highest frequencies. We also find that, in general, Gemma greatly prefers to use the lowest frequencies of RoPE, which we suspect are used to carry semantic information. We mathematically prove interesting behaviours of RoPE and conduct experiments to verify our findings, proposing a modification of RoPE that fixes some highlighted issues and improves performance. We believe that this work represents an interesting step in better understanding PEs in LLMs, which we believe holds crucial value for scaling LLMs to large sizes and context lengths.
