Reliable data on economic livelihoods remain scarce in the developing world, hampering efforts to study these outcomes and to design policies that improve them. Here we demonstrate an accurate, inexpensive, and scalable method for estimating consumption expenditure and asset wealth from high-resolution satellite imagery. Using survey and satellite data from five African countries--Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, and Rwanda--we show how a convolutional neural network can be trained to identify image features that can explain up to 75% of the variation in local-level economic outcomes. Our method, which requires only publicly available data, could transform efforts to track and target poverty in developing countries. It also demonstrates how powerful machine learning techniques can be applied in a setting with limited training data, suggesting broad potential application across many scientific domains.

AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles (e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities, and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.

Accurate automated segmentation of remote sensing data could benefit applications from land cover mapping and agricultural monitoring to urban development surveyal and disaster damage assessment. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieve state-of-the-art accuracy when segmenting natural images with huge labeled datasets, their successful translation to remote sensing tasks has been limited by low quantities of ground truth labels, especially fully segmented ones, in the remote sensing domain. In this work, we perform cropland segmentation using two types of labels commonly found in remote sensing datasets that can be considered sources of “weak supervision”: (1) labels comprised of single geotagged points and (2) image-level labels. We demonstrate that (1) a U-Net trained on a single labeled pixel per image and (2) a U-Net image classifier transferred to segmentation can outperform pixel-level algorithms such as logistic regression, support vector machine, and random forest. While the high performance of neural networks is well-established for large datasets, our experiments indicate that U-Nets trained on weak labels outperform baseline methods with as few as 100 labels. Neural networks, therefore, can combine superior classification performance with efficient label usage, and allow pixel-level labels to be obtained from image labels.

While adversarial training can improve robust accuracy (against an adversary), it sometimes hurts standard accuracy (when there is no adversary). Previous work has studied this tradeoff between standard and robust accuracy, but only in the setting where no predictor performs well on both objectives in the infinite data limit. In this paper, we show that even when the optimal predictor with infinite data performs well on both objectives, a tradeoff can still manifest itself with finite data. Furthermore, since our construction is based on a convex learning problem, we rule out optimization concerns, thus laying bare a fundamental tension between robustness and generalization. Finally, we show that robust self-training mostly eliminates this tradeoff by leveraging unlabeled data.

1 This paper proposes a soft range limited K nearest neighbours (SRL-KNN) localization fingerprinting algorithm. The conventional KNN determines the neighbours of a user by calculating and ranking the fingerprint distance measured at the unknown user location and the reference locations in the database. Different from that method, SRL-KNN scales the fingerprint distance by a range factor related to the physical distance between the user's previous position and the reference location in the database to reduce the spatial ambiguity in localization. Although utilizing the prior locations, SRL-KNN does not require knowledge of the exact moving speed and direction of the user. Moreover, to take into account of the temporal fluctuations of the received signal strength indicator (RSSI), RSSI histogram is incorporated into the distance calculation. Actual on-site experiments demonstrate that the new algorithm achieves an average localization error of 0.66 m with 80% of the errors under 0.89 m, which outperforms conventional KNN algorithms by 45% under the same test environment.