We present Meena, a multi-turn open-domain chatbot trained end-to-end on data mined and filtered from public domain social media conversations. This 2.6B parameter neural network is simply trained to minimize perplexity of the next token. We also propose a human evaluation metric called Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA), which captures key elements of a human-like multi-turn conversation. Our experiments show strong correlation between perplexity and SSA. The fact that the best perplexity end-to-end trained Meena scores high on SSA (72% on multi-turn evaluation) suggests that a human-level SSA of 86% is potentially within reach if we can better optimize perplexity. Additionally, the full version of Meena (with a filtering mechanism and tuned decoding) scores 79% SSA, 23% higher in absolute SSA than the existing chatbots we evaluated.

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The Machine Recognition of Crystallization Outcomes (MARCO) initiative has assembled roughly half a million annotated images of macromolecular crystallization experiments from various sources and setups. Here, state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms are trained and tested on different parts of this data set. We find that more than 94% of the test images can be correctly labeled, irrespective of their experimental origin. Because crystal recognition is key to high-density screening and the systematic analysis of crystallization experiments, this approach opens the door to both industrial and fundamental research applications.

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<div> <div> <div> <p>Machine Learning (ML) workloads have rapidly grown in importance, but raised concerns about their carbon footprint. Four best practices can reduce ML training energy by up to 100x and CO2 emissions up to 1000x. By following best practices, overall ML energy use (across research, development, and production) held steady at <15% of Google’s total energy use for the past three years. If the whole ML field were to adopt best practices, total carbon emissions from training would reduce. Hence, we recommend that ML papers include emissions explicitly to foster competition on more than just model quality. As estimates of emissions in papers that omitted them have been off 100x–100,000x, publishing emissions has the added benefit of ensuring accurate accounting. Given the importance of climate change, we must get the numbers right to make certain that we work on its biggest challenges.<br></p> </div> </div> </div>