Daily Papers

As computational demands continue to rise, assessing the environmental footprint of AI requires moving beyond energy and water consumption to include the material demands of specialized hardware. This study quantifies the material footprint of AI training by linking computational workloads to physical hardware needs. The elemental composition of the Nvidia A100 SXM 40 GB graphics processing unit (GPU) was analyzed using inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy, which identified 32 elements. The results show that AI hardware consists of about 90% heavy metals and only trace amounts of precious metals. The elements copper, iron, tin, silicon, and nickel dominate the GPU composition by mass. In a multi-step methodology, we integrate these measurements with computational throughput per GPU across varying lifespans, accounting for the computational requirements of training specific AI models at different training efficiency regimes. Scenario-based analyses reveal that, depending on Model FLOPs Utilization (MFU) and hardware lifespan, training GPT-4 requires between 1,174 and 8,800 A100 GPUs, corresponding to the extraction and eventual disposal of up to 7 tons of toxic elements. Combined software and hardware optimization strategies can reduce material demands: increasing MFU from 20% to 60% lowers GPU requirements by 67%, while extending lifespan from 1 to 3 years yields comparable savings; implementing both measures together reduces GPU needs by up to 93%. Our findings highlight that incremental performance gains, such as those observed between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, come at disproportionately high material costs. The study underscores the necessity of incorporating material resource considerations into discussions of AI scalability, emphasizing that future progress in AI must align with principles of resource efficiency and environmental responsibility.

Getting the most out of limited resources allows advances in natural language processing (NLP) research and practice while being conservative with resources. Those resources may be data, time, storage, or energy. Recent work in NLP has yielded interesting results from scaling; however, using only scale to improve results means that resource consumption also scales. That relationship motivates research into efficient methods that require less resources to achieve similar results. This survey relates and synthesises methods and findings in those efficiencies in NLP, aiming to guide new researchers in the field and inspire the development of new methods.

Material selection plays a pivotal role in many industries, from manufacturing to construction. Material selection is usually carried out after several cycles of conceptual design, during which designers iteratively refine the design solution and the intended manufacturing approach. In design research, material selection is typically treated as an optimization problem with a single correct answer. Moreover, it is also often restricted to specific types of objects or design functions, which can make the selection process computationally expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we introduce MSEval, a novel dataset which is comprised of expert material evaluations across a variety of design briefs and criteria. This data is designed to serve as a benchmark to facilitate the evaluation and modification of machine learning models in the context of material selection for conceptual design.

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has enabled a comprehensive exploration of materials for various applications. However, AI models often prioritize frequently encountered materials in the scientific literature, limiting the selection of suitable candidates based on inherent physical and chemical properties. To address this imbalance, we have generated a dataset of 1,494,017 natural language-material paragraphs based on combined OQMD, Materials Project, JARVIS, COD and AFLOW2 databases, which are dominated by ab initio calculations and tend to be much more evenly distributed on the periodic table. The generated text narratives were then polled and scored by both human experts and ChatGPT-4, based on three rubrics: technical accuracy, language and structure, and relevance and depth of content, showing similar scores but with human-scored depth of content being the most lagging. The merger of multi-modality data sources and large language model (LLM) holds immense potential for AI frameworks to help the exploration and discovery of solid-state materials for specific applications.

We introduce MatSynth, a dataset of 4,000+ CC0 ultra-high resolution PBR materials. Materials are crucial components of virtual relightable assets, defining the interaction of light at the surface of geometries. Given their importance, significant research effort was dedicated to their representation, creation and acquisition. However, in the past 6 years, most research in material acquisiton or generation relied either on the same unique dataset, or on company-owned huge library of procedural materials. With this dataset we propose a significantly larger, more diverse, and higher resolution set of materials than previously publicly available. We carefully discuss the data collection process and demonstrate the benefits of this dataset on material acquisition and generation applications. The complete data further contains metadata with each material's origin, license, category, tags, creation method and, when available, descriptions and physical size, as well as 3M+ renderings of the augmented materials, in 1K, under various environment lightings. The MatSynth dataset is released through the project page at: https://www.gvecchio.com/matsynth.

Materials discovery and design are essential for advancing technology across various industries by enabling the development of application-specific materials. Recent research has leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) to accelerate this process. We explore the potential of LLMs to generate viable hypotheses that, once validated, can expedite materials discovery. Collaborating with materials science experts, we curated a novel dataset from recent journal publications, featuring real-world goals, constraints, and methods for designing real-world applications. Using this dataset, we test LLM-based agents that generate hypotheses for achieving given goals under specific constraints. To assess the relevance and quality of these hypotheses, we propose a novel scalable evaluation metric that emulates the process a materials scientist would use to evaluate a hypothesis critically. Our curated dataset, proposed method, and evaluation framework aim to advance future research in accelerating materials discovery and design with LLMs.

Artificial intelligence is transforming computational materials science, improving the prediction of material properties, and accelerating the discovery of novel materials. Recently, publicly available material data repositories have grown rapidly. This growth encompasses not only more materials, but also a greater variety and quantity of their associated properties. Existing machine learning efforts in materials science focus primarily on single-modality tasks, i.e., relationships between materials and a single physical property, thus not taking advantage of the rich and multimodal set of material properties. Here, we introduce Multimodal Learning for Materials (MultiMat), which enables self-supervised multi-modality training of foundation models for materials. We demonstrate our framework's potential using data from the Materials Project database on multiple axes: (i) MultiMat achieves state-of-the-art performance for challenging material property prediction tasks; (ii) MultiMat enables novel and accurate material discovery via latent space similarity, enabling screening for stable materials with desired properties; and (iii) MultiMat encodes interpretable emergent features that may provide novel scientific insights.

The design of functional materials with desired properties is essential in driving technological advances in areas like energy storage, catalysis, and carbon capture. Generative models provide a new paradigm for materials design by directly generating entirely novel materials given desired property constraints. Despite recent progress, current generative models have low success rate in proposing stable crystals, or can only satisfy a very limited set of property constraints. Here, we present MatterGen, a model that generates stable, diverse inorganic materials across the periodic table and can further be fine-tuned to steer the generation towards a broad range of property constraints. To enable this, we introduce a new diffusion-based generative process that produces crystalline structures by gradually refining atom types, coordinates, and the periodic lattice. We further introduce adapter modules to enable fine-tuning towards any given property constraints with a labeled dataset. Compared to prior generative models, structures produced by MatterGen are more than twice as likely to be novel and stable, and more than 15 times closer to the local energy minimum. After fine-tuning, MatterGen successfully generates stable, novel materials with desired chemistry, symmetry, as well as mechanical, electronic and magnetic properties. Finally, we demonstrate multi-property materials design capabilities by proposing structures that have both high magnetic density and a chemical composition with low supply-chain risk. We believe that the quality of generated materials and the breadth of MatterGen's capabilities represent a major advancement towards creating a universal generative model for materials design.

These notes are loosely based on lectures given at the CERN Winter School on Supergravity, Strings and Gauge theories, February 2009 and at the IPM String School in Tehran, April 2009. I have focused on a few concrete topics and also on addressing questions that have arisen repeatedly. Background condensed matter physics material is included as motivation and easy reference for the high energy physics community. The discussion of holographic techniques progresses from equilibrium, to transport and to superconductivity.

Developers gain productivity by reusing readily available Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) components. Such practices also bring some difficulties, such as managing licensing, components and related security. One approach to handle those difficulties is to use Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs). While there have been studies on the readiness of practitioners to embrace SBOMs and on the SBOM tools ecosystem, a large scale study on SBOM practices based on SBOM files produced in the wild is still lacking. A starting point for such a study is a large dataset of SBOM files found in the wild. We introduce such a dataset, consisting of over 78 thousand unique SBOM files, deduplicated from those found in over 94 million repositories. We include metadata that contains the standard and format used, quality score generated by the tool sbomqs, number of revisions, filenames and provenance information. Finally, we give suggestions and examples of research that could bring new insights on assessing and improving SBOM real practices.

Materials synthesis is vital for innovations such as energy storage, catalysis, electronics, and biomedical devices. Yet, the process relies heavily on empirical, trial-and-error methods guided by expert intuition. Our work aims to support the materials science community by providing a practical, data-driven resource. We have curated a comprehensive dataset of 17K expert-verified synthesis recipes from open-access literature, which forms the basis of our newly developed benchmark, AlchemyBench. AlchemyBench offers an end-to-end framework that supports research in large language models applied to synthesis prediction. It encompasses key tasks, including raw materials and equipment prediction, synthesis procedure generation, and characterization outcome forecasting. We propose an LLM-as-a-Judge framework that leverages large language models for automated evaluation, demonstrating strong statistical agreement with expert assessments. Overall, our contributions offer a supportive foundation for exploring the capabilities of LLMs in predicting and guiding materials synthesis, ultimately paving the way for more efficient experimental design and accelerated innovation in materials science.

Common-pool resource governance requires users to cooperate and avoid overexploitation, but defection and free-riding often undermine cooperation. We model a human-environmental system that integrates dynamics of resource and users' strategies. The resource follows a logistic function that depends on natural growth rate, carrying capacity, and extraction rates of cooperators and defectors. The users' strategies evolve according to different processes that capture effects of payoff, resource, and noise. We analyze the feedback between resource availability and strategic adaptation, and explores the conditions for the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. We find different processes lead to different regimes of equilibrium solutions and resource levels depending on the parameter configuration and initial conditions. We also show that some processes can enhance the sustainability of the resource by making the users more responsive to the resource scarcity. The paper advances the understanding of human-environmental system and offers insights for resource governance policies and interventions.

This technical report presents a cost-efficient strategy for training a video generation foundation model. We present a mid-sized research model with approximately 7 billion parameters (7B) called Seaweed-7B trained from scratch using 665,000 H100 GPU hours. Despite being trained with moderate computational resources, Seaweed-7B demonstrates highly competitive performance compared to contemporary video generation models of much larger size. Design choices are especially crucial in a resource-constrained setting. This technical report highlights the key design decisions that enhance the performance of the medium-sized diffusion model. Empirically, we make two observations: (1) Seaweed-7B achieves performance comparable to, or even surpasses, larger models trained on substantially greater GPU resources, and (2) our model, which exhibits strong generalization ability, can be effectively adapted across a wide range of downstream applications either by lightweight fine-tuning or continue training. See the project page at https://seaweed.video/

Large Language Models (LLM)-based systems, i.e. interconnected elements that include an LLM as a central component (e.g., conversational agents), are typically monolithic static architectures that rely on a single LLM for all user queries. However, they often require different preprocessing strategies, levels of reasoning, or knowledge. Generalist LLMs (i.e. GPT-4), trained on very large multi-topic corpora, can perform well in a variety of tasks. However, they require significant financial, energy, and hardware resources that may not be justified for basic tasks. This implies potentially investing in unnecessary costs for a given query. To overcome this problem, a routing mechanism routes user queries to the most suitable components, such as smaller LLMs or experts in specific topics. This approach may improve response quality while minimising costs. Routing can be expanded to other components of the conversational agent architecture, such as the selection of optimal embedding strategies. This paper explores key considerations for integrating routing into LLM-based systems, focusing on resource management, cost definition, and strategy selection. Our main contributions include a formalisation of the problem, a novel taxonomy of existing approaches emphasising relevance and resource efficiency, and a comparative analysis of these strategies in relation to industry practices. Finally, we identify critical challenges and directions for future research.

It is desired to equip robots with the capability of interacting with various soft materials as they are ubiquitous in the real world. While physics simulations are one of the predominant methods for data collection and robot training, simulating soft materials presents considerable challenges. Specifically, it is significantly more costly than simulating rigid objects in terms of simulation speed and storage requirements. These limitations typically restrict the scope of studies on soft materials to small and bounded areas, thereby hindering the learning of skills in broader spaces. To address this issue, we introduce UBSoft, a new simulation platform designed to support unbounded soft environments for robot skill acquisition. Our platform utilizes spatially adaptive resolution scales, where simulation resolution dynamically adjusts based on proximity to active robotic agents. Our framework markedly reduces the demand for extensive storage space and computation costs required for large-scale scenarios involving soft materials. We also establish a set of benchmark tasks in our platform, including both locomotion and manipulation tasks, and conduct experiments to evaluate the efficacy of various reinforcement learning algorithms and trajectory optimization techniques, both gradient-based and sampling-based. Preliminary results indicate that sampling-based trajectory optimization generally achieves better results for obtaining one trajectory to solve the task. Additionally, we conduct experiments in real-world environments to demonstrate that advancements made in our UBSoft simulator could translate to improved robot interactions with large-scale soft material. More videos can be found at https://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/ubsoft/.

The ever-increasing number of materials science articles makes it hard to infer chemistry-structure-property relations from published literature. We used natural language processing (NLP) methods to automatically extract material property data from the abstracts of polymer literature. As a component of our pipeline, we trained MaterialsBERT, a language model, using 2.4 million materials science abstracts, which outperforms other baseline models in three out of five named entity recognition datasets when used as the encoder for text. Using this pipeline, we obtained ~300,000 material property records from ~130,000 abstracts in 60 hours. The extracted data was analyzed for a diverse range of applications such as fuel cells, supercapacitors, and polymer solar cells to recover non-trivial insights. The data extracted through our pipeline is made available through a web platform at https://polymerscholar.org which can be used to locate material property data recorded in abstracts conveniently. This work demonstrates the feasibility of an automatic pipeline that starts from published literature and ends with a complete set of extracted material property information.

In today's world of marketing, it is necessary to have visually appealing content. Visual material has become an essential area of focus for every company as a result of the widespread availability of gadgets for mass communication and extended visual advancements. Similarly, artificial intelligence is also gaining ground and it is proving to be the most revolutionary technological advancement thus far. The integration of visual content with artificial intelligence is the key to acquiring and retaining loyal customers; its absence from the overarching marketing strategy of any production raises a red flag that could ultimately result in a smaller market share for that company.

Sustainability encompasses three key facets: economic, environmental, and social. However, the nascent discourse that is emerging on sustainable artificial intelligence (AI) has predominantly focused on the environmental sustainability of AI, often neglecting the economic and social aspects. Achieving truly sustainable AI necessitates addressing the tension between its climate awareness and its social sustainability, which hinges on equitable access to AI development resources. The concept of resource awareness advocates for broader access to the infrastructure required to develop AI, fostering equity in AI innovation. Yet, this push for improving accessibility often overlooks the environmental costs of expanding such resource usage. In this position paper, we argue that reconciling climate and resource awareness is essential to realizing the full potential of sustainable AI. We use the framework of base-superstructure to analyze how the material conditions are influencing the current AI discourse. We also introduce the Climate and Resource Aware Machine Learning (CARAML) framework to address this conflict and propose actionable recommendations spanning individual, community, industry, government, and global levels to achieve sustainable AI.

The rapid expansion of AI has intensified concerns about its environmental sustainability. Yet, current assessments predominantly focus on operational carbon emissions using secondary data or estimated values, overlooking environmental impacts in other life cycle stages. This study presents the first comprehensive multi-criteria life cycle assessment (LCA) of AI training, examining 16 environmental impact categories based on detailed primary data collection of the Nvidia A100 SXM 40GB GPU. The LCA results for training BLOOM reveal that the use phase dominates 11 of 16 impact categories including climate change (96\%), while manufacturing dominates the remaining 5 impact categories including human toxicity, cancer (99\%) and mineral and metal depletion (85\%). For training GPT-4, the use phase dominates 10 of 16 impact categories, contributing about 96\% to both the climate change and resource use, fossils category. The manufacturing stage dominates 6 of 16 impact categories including human toxicity, cancer (94\%) and eutrophication, freshwater (81\%). Assessing the cradle-to-gate environmental impact distribution across the GPU components reveals that the GPU chip is the largest contributor across 10 of 16 of impact categories and shows particularly pronounced contributions to climate change (81\%) and resource use, fossils (80\%). While primary data collection results in modest changes in carbon estimates compared to database-derived estimates, substantial variations emerge in other categories. Most notably, minerals and metals depletion increases by 33\%, demonstrating the critical importance of primary data for non-carbon accounting. This multi-criteria analysis expands the Sustainable AI discourse beyond operational carbon emissions, challenging current sustainability narratives and highlighting the need for policy frameworks addressing the full spectrum of AI's environmental impact.

Information extraction and textual comprehension from materials literature are vital for developing an exhaustive knowledge base that enables accelerated materials discovery. Language models have demonstrated their capability to answer domain-specific questions and retrieve information from knowledge bases. However, there are no benchmark datasets in the materials domain that can evaluate the understanding of the key concepts by these language models. In this work, we curate a dataset of 650 challenging questions from the materials domain that require the knowledge and skills of a materials student who has cleared their undergraduate degree. We classify these questions based on their structure and the materials science domain-based subcategories. Further, we evaluate the performance of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models on solving these questions via zero-shot and chain of thought prompting. It is observed that GPT-4 gives the best performance (~62% accuracy) as compared to GPT-3.5. Interestingly, in contrast to the general observation, no significant improvement in accuracy is observed with the chain of thought prompting. To evaluate the limitations, we performed an error analysis, which revealed conceptual errors (~64%) as the major contributor compared to computational errors (~36%) towards the reduced performance of LLMs. We hope that the dataset and analysis performed in this work will promote further research in developing better materials science domain-specific LLMs and strategies for information extraction.