Farmer.Chat: Scaling AI-Powered Agricultural Services for Smallholder Farmers

Small and medium-sized agricultural holders face challenges like limited access to localized, timely information, impacting productivity and sustainability. Traditional extension services, which rely on in-person agents, struggle with scalability and timely delivery, especially in remote areas. We introduce Farmer.Chat, a generative AI-powered chatbot designed to address these issues. Leveraging Generative AI, Farmer.Chat offers personalized, reliable, and contextually relevant advice, overcoming limitations of previous chatbots in deterministic dialogue flows, language support, and unstructured data processing. Deployed in four countries, Farmer.Chat has engaged over 15,000 farmers and answered over 300,000 queries. This paper highlights how Farmer.Chat's innovative use of GenAI enhances agricultural service scalability and effectiveness. Our evaluation, combining quantitative analysis and qualitative insights, highlights Farmer.Chat's effectiveness in improving farming practices, enhancing trust, response quality, and user engagement.

TorchSpatial: A Location Encoding Framework and Benchmark for Spatial Representation Learning

Spatial representation learning (SRL) aims at learning general-purpose neural network representations from various types of spatial data (e.g., points, polylines, polygons, networks, images, etc.) in their native formats. Learning good spatial representations is a fundamental problem for various downstream applications such as species distribution modeling, weather forecasting, trajectory generation, geographic question answering, etc. Even though SRL has become the foundation of almost all geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) research, we have not yet seen significant efforts to develop an extensive deep learning framework and benchmark to support SRL model development and evaluation. To fill this gap, we propose TorchSpatial, a learning framework and benchmark for location (point) encoding, which is one of the most fundamental data types of spatial representation learning. TorchSpatial contains three key components: 1) a unified location encoding framework that consolidates 15 commonly recognized location encoders, ensuring scalability and reproducibility of the implementations; 2) the LocBench benchmark tasks encompassing 7 geo-aware image classification and 4 geo-aware image regression datasets; 3) a comprehensive suite of evaluation metrics to quantify geo-aware models' overall performance as well as their geographic bias, with a novel Geo-Bias Score metric. Finally, we provide a detailed analysis and insights into the model performance and geographic bias of different location encoders. We believe TorchSpatial will foster future advancement of spatial representation learning and spatial fairness in GeoAI research. The TorchSpatial model framework, LocBench, and Geo-Bias Score evaluation framework are available at https://github.com/seai-lab/TorchSpatial.

Multimodal Needle in a Haystack: Benchmarking Long-Context Capability of Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant promise in various applications, leading to broad interest from researchers and practitioners alike. However, a comprehensive evaluation of their long-context capabilities remains underexplored. To address these gaps, we introduce the MultiModal Needle-in-a-haystack (MMNeedle) benchmark, specifically designed to assess the long-context capabilities of MLLMs. Besides multi-image input, we employ image stitching to further increase the input context length, and develop a protocol to automatically generate labels for sub-image level retrieval. Essentially, MMNeedle evaluates MLLMs by stress-testing their capability to locate a target sub-image (needle) within a set of images (haystack) based on textual instructions and descriptions of image contents. This setup necessitates an advanced understanding of extensive visual contexts and effective information retrieval within long-context image inputs. With this benchmark, we evaluate state-of-the-art MLLMs, encompassing both API-based and open-source models. The findings reveal that GPT-4o consistently surpasses other models in long-context scenarios, but suffers from hallucination problems in negative samples, i.e., when needles are not in the haystacks. Our comprehensive long-context evaluation of MLLMs also sheds lights on the considerable performance gap between API-based and open-source models. All the code, data, and instructions required to reproduce the main results are available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/multimodal-needle-in-a-haystack.

Exposing the Achilles' Heel: Evaluating LLMs Ability to Handle Mistakes in Mathematical Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been applied to Math Word Problems (MWPs) with transformative impacts, revolutionizing how these complex problems are approached and solved in various domains including educational settings. However, the evaluation of these models often prioritizes final accuracy, overlooking the crucial aspect of reasoning capabilities. This work addresses this gap by focusing on the ability of LLMs to detect and correct reasoning mistakes. We introduce a novel dataset MWP-MISTAKE, incorporating MWPs with both correct and incorrect reasoning steps generated through rule-based methods and smaller language models. Our comprehensive benchmarking reveals significant insights into the strengths and weaknesses of state-of-the-art models, such as GPT-4o, GPT-4, GPT-3.5Turbo, and others. We highlight GPT-$o's superior performance in mistake detection and rectification and the persistent challenges faced by smaller models. Additionally, we identify issues related to data contamination and memorization, impacting the reliability of LLMs in real-world applications. Our findings emphasize the importance of rigorous evaluation of reasoning processes and propose future directions to enhance the generalization and robustness of LLMs in mathematical problem-solving.

PromptWizard: Task-Aware Agent-driven Prompt Optimization Framework

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized AI across diverse domains, showcasing remarkable capabilities. Central to their success is the concept of prompting, which guides model output generation. However, manual prompt engineering is labor-intensive and domain-specific, necessitating automated solutions. This paper introduces PromptWizard, a novel framework leveraging LLMs to iteratively synthesize and refine prompts tailored to specific tasks. Unlike existing approaches, PromptWizard optimizes both prompt instructions and in-context examples, maximizing model performance. The framework iteratively refines prompts by mutating instructions and incorporating negative examples to deepen understanding and ensure diversity. It further enhances both instructions and examples with the aid of a critic, synthesizing new instructions and examples enriched with detailed reasoning steps for optimal performance. PromptWizard offers several key features and capabilities, including computational efficiency compared to state-of-the-art approaches, adaptability to scenarios with varying amounts of training data, and effectiveness with smaller LLMs. Rigorous evaluation across 35 tasks on 8 datasets demonstrates PromptWizard's superiority over existing prompt strategies, showcasing its efficacy and scalability in prompt optimization.

Bridging the Gap: Dynamic Learning Strategies for Improving Multilingual Performance in LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) are at the forefront of transforming numerous domains globally. However, their inclusivity and effectiveness remain limited for non-Latin scripts and low-resource languages. This paper tackles the imperative challenge of enhancing the multilingual performance of LLMs without extensive training or fine-tuning. Through systematic investigation and evaluation of diverse languages using popular question-answering (QA) datasets, we present novel techniques that unlock the true potential of LLMs in a polyglot landscape. Our approach encompasses three key strategies that yield significant improvements in multilingual proficiency. First, by meticulously optimizing prompts tailored for polyglot LLMs, we unlock their latent capabilities, resulting in substantial performance boosts across languages. Second, we introduce a new hybrid approach that synergizes LLM Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with multilingual embeddings and achieves improved multilingual task performance. Finally, we introduce a novel learning approach that dynamically selects the optimal prompt strategy, LLM model, and embedding model per query at run-time. This dynamic adaptation maximizes the efficacy of LLMs across languages, outperforming best static and random strategies. Additionally, our approach adapts configurations in both offline and online settings, and can seamlessly adapt to new languages and datasets, leading to substantial advancements in multilingual understanding and generation across diverse languages.

MMCTAgent: Multi-modal Critical Thinking Agent Framework for Complex Visual Reasoning

Recent advancements in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have significantly improved their performance in tasks combining vision and language. However, challenges persist in detailed multi-modal understanding, comprehension of complex tasks, and reasoning over multi-modal information. This paper introduces MMCTAgent, a novel multi-modal critical thinking agent framework designed to address the inherent limitations of current MLLMs in complex visual reasoning tasks. Inspired by human cognitive processes and critical thinking, MMCTAgent iteratively analyzes multi-modal information, decomposes queries, plans strategies, and dynamically evolves its reasoning. Additionally, MMCTAgent incorporates critical thinking elements such as verification of final answers and self-reflection through a novel approach that defines a vision-based critic and identifies task-specific evaluation criteria, thereby enhancing its decision-making abilities. Through rigorous evaluations across various image and video understanding benchmarks, we demonstrate that MMCTAgent (with and without the critic) outperforms both foundational MLLMs and other tool-augmented pipelines.

Breaking Language Barriers with a LEAP: Learning Strategies for Polyglot LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) are at the forefront of transforming numerous domains globally. However, their inclusivity and effectiveness remain limited for non-Latin scripts and low-resource languages. This paper tackles the imperative challenge of enhancing the multilingual performance of LLMs, specifically focusing on Generative models. Through systematic investigation and evaluation of diverse languages using popular question-answering (QA) datasets, we present novel techniques that unlock the true potential of LLMs in a polyglot landscape. Our approach encompasses three key strategies that yield remarkable improvements in multilingual proficiency. First, by meticulously optimizing prompts tailored for polyglot LLMs, we unlock their latent capabilities, resulting in substantial performance boosts across languages. Second, we introduce a new hybrid approach that synergizes GPT generation with multilingual embeddings and achieves significant multilingual performance improvement on critical tasks like QA and retrieval. Finally, to further propel the performance of polyglot LLMs, we introduce a novel learning algorithm that dynamically selects the optimal prompt strategy, LLM model, and embeddings per query. This dynamic adaptation maximizes the efficacy of LLMs across languages, outperforming best static and random strategies. Our results show substantial advancements in multilingual understanding and generation across a diverse range of languages.

Adaptive Streaming Perception using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Executing computer vision models on streaming visual data, or streaming perception is an emerging problem, with applications in self-driving, embodied agents, and augmented/virtual reality. The development of such systems is largely governed by the accuracy and latency of the processing pipeline. While past work has proposed numerous approximate execution frameworks, their decision functions solely focus on optimizing latency, accuracy, or energy, etc. This results in sub-optimum decisions, affecting the overall system performance. We argue that the streaming perception systems should holistically maximize the overall system performance (i.e., considering both accuracy and latency simultaneously). To this end, we describe a new approach based on deep reinforcement learning to learn these tradeoffs at runtime for streaming perception. This tradeoff optimization is formulated as a novel deep contextual bandit problem and we design a new reward function that holistically integrates latency and accuracy into a single metric. We show that our agent can learn a competitive policy across multiple decision dimensions, which outperforms state-of-the-art policies on public datasets.