AI Avatar Arbitrage

AI Avatar Arbitrage — independent reviews, comparisons, pricing and step-by-step guides on Aizhi.

  • G'MIC

    G'MIC

    G'MIC (GREYC's Magic for Image Computing) is a free and open-source framework for image processing. It defines a script language that allows the creation of complex macros. Originally usable only through a command line interface, it is currently mostly popular as a GIMP plugin, and is also included in Krita. G'MIC is dual-licensed under CECILL-2.1 or CECILL-C. == Features == G'MIC's graphical interface is notable for its noise removal filters, which came from an earlier project called GREYCstoration by the same authors. G'MIC offers many built-in commands for image processing, including basic mathematical manipulations, look up tables, and filtering operations. More complex macros and pipelines built out of those commands are defined in its library files. == Interpreters == === Command line === G'MIC is primarily a script language callable from a shell. For example, to display an image: This command displays the image contained in the file image.jpg and allows zooming in to examine values. Several filters can be applied in succession. For example, to crop and resize an image: === Graphical interface === G'MIC comes with a Qt-based graphical interface, which may be integrated as a Gimp or Krita plugin. It contains several hundred filters written in the G'MIC language, dynamically updated through an internet feed. The interface provides a preview and setting sliders for each filter. G'MIC is one of the most popular Gimp plugins. === G'MIC Online === Most of the filters available for the graphical interface are also available online. === ZArt === ZArt is a graphical interface for real-time manipulation of webcam images. === libgmic === Libgmic is a C++ library that can be linked to third-party applications. It sees integration in Flowblade and Veejay.

    Read more →
  • The Best Free AI Video Generator for Beginners

    The Best Free AI Video Generator for Beginners

    Trying to pick the best AI video generator? An AI video generator is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it scales effortlessly from a single task to thousands. The best picks balance beginner-friendly simplicity with the depth power users need, and they ship updates often. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI video generator slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. Read on for hands-on impressions, pricing tiers, and the standout features that matter.

    Read more →
  • Georgetown–IBM experiment

    Georgetown–IBM experiment

    The Georgetown–IBM experiment was an influential demonstration of machine translation, which was performed on January 7, 1954. Developed jointly by Georgetown University and IBM, the experiment involved completely automatic translation of more than sixty Russian sentences into English. == Background == Conceived and performed primarily in order to attract governmental and public interest and funding by showing the possibilities of machine translation, it was by no means a fully featured system: It had only six grammar rules and 250 lexical items in its vocabulary (of stems and endings). Words in the vocabulary were in the fields of politics, law, mathematics, chemistry, metallurgy, communications and military affairs. Vocabulary was punched onto punch cards. This complete dictionary was never fully shown (only the extended one from Garvin's article). Apart from general topics, the system was specialized in the domain of organic chemistry. The translation was carried out using an IBM 701 mainframe computer (launched in April 1953). The Georgetown-IBM experiment is the best-known result of the MIT conference in June 1952 to which all active researchers in the machine translation field were invited. At the conference, Duncan Harkin from US Department of Defense suggested that his department would finance a new machine translation project. Jerome Weisner supported the idea and offered finance from the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. Leon Dostert had been invited to the project for his previous experience with the automatic correction of translations (back then 'mechanical translation'); his interpretation system had a strong impact on the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. The linguistics part of the demonstration was carried out for the most part by linguist Paul Garvin who had also good knowledge of Russian. Over 60 Romanized Russian statements from a wide range of political, legal, mathematical, and scientific topics were entered into the machine by a computer operator who knew no Russian, and the resulting English translations appeared on a printer. The sentences to be translated were carefully selected. Many operations for the demonstration were fitted to specific words and sentences. In addition, there was no relational or sentence analysis which could recognize the sentence structure. The approach was mostly 'lexicographical' based on a dictionary where a specific word had a connection with specific rules and steps. == Algorithm == The algorithm first translates Russian words into numerical codes, then performs the following case-analysis on each numerical code to choose between possible English word translations, reorder the English words, or omit some English words. The flowchart of the algorithm is reproduced in (see Table 1 for the 6 rules). == Translation examples == How it analyzes Vyelyichyina ugla opryedyelyayetsya otnoshyenyiyem dlyini dugi k radyiusu (figure 2 of ). == Reception == Well publicized by journalists and perceived as a success, the experiment did encourage governments to invest in computational linguistics. The authors claimed that within three or five years, machine translation could well be a solved problem. However, the real progress was much slower, and after the ALPAC report in 1966, which found that the ten years of long research had failed to fulfill the expectations, funding was reduced dramatically. The demonstration was given widespread coverage in the foreign press, but only a small fraction of journalists drew attention to previous machine translation attempts.

    Read more →
  • NovelAI

    NovelAI

    NovelAI is an online cloud-based, SaaS model, and a paid subscription service for AI-assisted storywriting and text-to-image synthesis, originally launched in beta on June 15, 2021, with the image generation feature being implemented later on October 3, 2022. NovelAI is owned and operated by Anlatan, which is headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware. == Features == NovelAI uses GPT-based large language models (LLMs) to generate storywriting and prose. It has several models, such as Calliope, Sigurd, Euterpe, Krake, and Genji, with Genji being a Japanese-language model. The service also offers encrypted servers and customizable editors. For AI art generation, which generates images from text prompts, NovelAI uses a custom version of the source-available Stable Diffusion text-to-image diffusion model called NovelAI Diffusion, which is trained on a Danbooru-based dataset. NovelAI is also capable of generating a new image based on an existing image. The NovelAI terms of service states that all generated content belongs to the user, regardless if the user is an individual or a corporation. Anlatan states that generated images are not stored locally on their servers. == History == On April 28, 2021, Anlatan officially launched NovelAI. On June 15, 2021, Anlatan released their finetuned GPT-Neo-2.7B model from EleutherAI named Calliope, after the Greek Muses. A day later, they released their Opus-exclusive GPT-J-6B finetuned model named Sigurd, after the Norse/Germanic hero. On March 21, 2023, Nvidia and CoreWeave announced Anlatan being one of the first CoreWeave customers to deploy NVIDIA's H100 Tensor Core GPUs for new LLM model inferencing and training. On April 1, 2023, Anlatan added ControlNet features to their text-to-image NovelAI Diffusion model. On May 16, 2023, Anlatan announced that they named their H100 cluster Shoggy, a reference to H.P. Lovecraft's Shoggoths, which was used to pre-train an undisclosed 8192 token context LLM in-house model. == Reception and controversy == Following the implementation of image generation, NovelAI became a widely-discussed topic in Japan, with some online commentators noting that its image synthesis features are very adept at producing close impressions of anime characters, including lolicon and shotacon imagery, while others have expressed concern that it is a paid service reliant on a diffusion model, while the original machine learning training data consists of images used without the consent of the original artists. Attorney Kosuke Terauchi notes that, since a revision of the law in 2018, it is no longer illegal in Japan for machine learning models to scrape copyrighted content from the internet to use as training data; meanwhile, in the United States where NovelAI is based, there is no specific legal framework which regulates machine learning, and thus the fair use doctrine of US copyright law applies instead. Danbooru has posted an official statement in regards to NovelAI's use of the site's content for AI training, expressing that Danbooru is not affiliated with NovelAI, and does not endorse nor condone NovelAI's use of artists' artworks for machine learning. FayerWayer described NovelAI as a service capable of generating hentai. Manga artist Izumi Ū commented that while the manga style art generated by NovelAI is highly accurate, there are still imperfections in the output, although he views these as human-like in a favourable light nonetheless. In response to the topic of NovelAI, Narugami, founder of the Japanese freelance artist commissioning website Skeb, stated on October 5, 2022 that the use of AI image generation is prohibited on the platform since 2018. Illustrations using NovelAI have been posted on social media and illustration posting sites, and by October 13, 2,111 works tagged with #NovelAI were posted on Pixiv. Pixiv has stated that it is not considering a complete elimination of creations that use AI, though it requires AI-generated posts to be marked as such and allows users to filter them out. == Incidents == On October 6, 2022, NovelAI experienced a data breach where its software's source code was leaked.

    Read more →
  • Outline of natural language processing

    Outline of natural language processing

    Natural language processing is computer activity in which computers are entailed to analyze, understand, alter, or generate natural language. This includes the automation of any or all linguistic forms, activities, or methods of communication, such as conversation, correspondence, reading, written composition, dictation, publishing, translation, lip reading, and so on. Natural-language processing is also the name of the branch of computer science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics concerned with enabling computers to engage in communication using natural language(s) in all forms, including but not limited to speech, print, writing, and signing. The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to natural-language processing: == Natural-language processing == Natural-language processing can be described as all of the following: A field of science – systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. An applied science – field that applies human knowledge to build or design useful things. A field of computer science – scientific and practical approach to computation and its applications. A branch of artificial intelligence – intelligence of machines and robots and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. A subfield of computational linguistics – interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. An application of engineering – science, skill, and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and also build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes. An application of software engineering – application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the design, development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software. A subfield of computer programming – process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages (such as Java, C++, C#, Python, etc.). The purpose of programming is to create a set of instructions that computers use to perform specific operations or to exhibit desired behaviors. A subfield of artificial intelligence programming – A type of system – set of interacting or interdependent components forming an integrated whole or a set of elements (often called 'components' ) and relationships which are different from relationships of the set or its elements to other elements or sets. A system that includes software – software is a collection of computer programs and related data that provides the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it. Software refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of the computer. In other words, software is a set of programs, procedures, algorithms and its documentation concerned with the operation of a data processing system. A type of technology – making, modification, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems, methods of organization, in order to solve a problem, improve a preexisting solution to a problem, achieve a goal, handle an applied input/output relation or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, modifications, arrangements and procedures. Technologies significantly affect human as well as other animal species' ability to control and adapt to their natural environments. A form of computer technology – computers and their application. NLP makes use of computers, image scanners, microphones, and many types of software programs. Language technology – consists of natural-language processing (NLP) and computational linguistics (CL) on the one hand, and speech technology on the other. It also includes many application oriented aspects of these. It is often called human language technology (HLT). == Prerequisite technologies == The following technologies make natural-language processing possible: Communication – the activity of a source sending a message to a receiver Language – Speech – Writing – Computing – Computers – Computer programming – Information extraction – User interface – Software – Text editing – program used to edit plain text files Word processing – piece of software used for composing, editing, formatting, printing documents Input devices – pieces of hardware for sending data to a computer to be processed Computer keyboard – typewriter style input device whose input is converted into various data depending on the circumstances Image scanners – == Subfields of natural-language processing == Information extraction (IE) – field concerned in general with the extraction of semantic information from text. This covers tasks such as named-entity recognition, coreference resolution, relationship extraction, etc. Ontology engineering – field that studies the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, which are formal representations of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. Speech processing – field that covers speech recognition, text-to-speech and related tasks. Statistical natural-language processing – Statistical semantics – a subfield of computational semantics that establishes semantic relations between words to examine their contexts. Distributional semantics – a subfield of statistical semantics that examines the semantic relationship of words across a corpora or in large samples of data. == Related fields == Natural-language processing contributes to, and makes use of (the theories, tools, and methodologies from), the following fields: Automated reasoning – area of computer science and mathematical logic dedicated to understanding various aspects of reasoning, and producing software which allows computers to reason completely, or nearly completely, automatically. A sub-field of artificial intelligence, automatic reasoning is also grounded in theoretical computer science and philosophy of mind. Linguistics – scientific study of human language. Natural-language processing requires understanding of the structure and application of language, and therefore it draws heavily from linguistics. Applied linguistics – interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems. Some of the academic fields related to applied linguistics are education, linguistics, psychology, computer science, anthropology, and sociology. Some of the subfields of applied linguistics relevant to natural-language processing are: Bilingualism / Multilingualism – Computer-mediated communication (CMC) – any communicative transaction that occurs through the use of two or more networked computers. Research on CMC focuses largely on the social effects of different computer-supported communication technologies. Many recent studies involve Internet-based social networking supported by social software. Contrastive linguistics – practice-oriented linguistic approach that seeks to describe the differences and similarities between a pair of languages. Conversation analysis (CA) – approach to the study of social interaction, embracing both verbal and non-verbal conduct, in situations of everyday life. Turn-taking is one aspect of language use that is studied by CA. Discourse analysis – various approaches to analyzing written, vocal, or sign language use or any significant semiotic event. Forensic linguistics – application of linguistic knowledge, methods and insights to the forensic context of law, language, crime investigation, trial, and judicial procedure. Interlinguistics – study of improving communications between people of different first languages with the use of ethnic and auxiliary languages (lingua franca). For instance by use of intentional international auxiliary languages, such as Esperanto or Interlingua, or spontaneous interlanguages known as pidgin languages. Language assessment – assessment of first, second or other language in the school, college, or university context; assessment of language use in the workplace; and assessment of language in the immigration, citizenship, and asylum contexts. The assessment may include analyses of listening, speaking, reading, writing or cultural understanding, with respect to understanding how the language works theoretically and the ability to use the language practically. Language pedagogy – science and art of language education, including approaches and methods of language teaching and study. Natural-language processing is used in programs designed to teach language, including first- and second-language training. Language planning – Language policy – Lexicography – Literacies – Pragmatics – Second-language acquisition – Stylistics – Translation – Comp

    Read more →
  • Markov chain Monte Carlo

    Markov chain Monte Carlo

    In statistics, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a class of algorithms used to draw samples from a probability distribution. Given a probability distribution, one can construct a Markov chain whose elements' distribution approximates it, i.e. the Markov chain's equilibrium distribution matches the target distribution. The more steps that are included, the more closely the distribution of the sample matches the actual desired distribution. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are used to study probability distributions that are too complex or too high dimensional to study with analytic techniques alone. Various algorithms exist for constructing such Markov chains, including the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm. == General explanation == Markov chain Monte Carlo methods create samples from a continuous random variable, with probability density proportional to a known function. These samples can be used to evaluate an integral over that variable, as its expected value or variance. Practically, an ensemble of chains is generally developed, starting from a set of points arbitrarily chosen and sufficiently distant from each other. These chains are stochastic processes of "walkers" which move around randomly according to an algorithm that looks for places with a reasonably high contribution to the integral to move into next, assigning them higher probabilities. Random walk Monte Carlo methods are a kind of random simulation or Monte Carlo method. However, whereas the random samples of the integrand used in a conventional Monte Carlo integration are statistically independent, those used in MCMC are autocorrelated. Correlations of samples introduces the need to use the Markov chain central limit theorem when estimating the error of mean values. These algorithms create Markov chains such that they have an equilibrium distribution which is proportional to the function given. == History == The development of MCMC methods is deeply rooted in the early exploration of Monte Carlo (MC) techniques in the mid-20th century, particularly in physics. These developments were marked by the Metropolis algorithm proposed by Nicholas Metropolis, Arianna W. Rosenbluth, Marshall Rosenbluth, Augusta H. Teller, and Edward Teller in 1953, which was designed to tackle high-dimensional integration problems using early computers. Then in 1970, W. K. Hastings generalized this algorithm and inadvertently introduced the component-wise updating idea, later known as Gibbs sampling. Simultaneously, the theoretical foundations for Gibbs sampling were being developed, such as the Hammersley–Clifford theorem from Julian Besag's 1974 paper. Although the seeds of MCMC were sown earlier, including the formal naming of Gibbs sampling in image processing by Stuart Geman and Donald Geman (1984) and the data augmentation method by Martin A. Tanner and Wing Hung Wong (1987), its "revolution" in mainstream statistics largely followed demonstrations of the universality and ease of implementation of sampling methods (especially Gibbs sampling) for complex statistical (particularly Bayesian) problems, spurred by increasing computational power and software like BUGS. This transformation was accompanied by significant theoretical advancements, such as Luke Tierney's (1994) rigorous treatment of MCMC convergence, and Jun S. Liu, Wong, and Augustine Kong's (1994, 1995) analysis of Gibbs sampler structure. Subsequent developments further expanded the MCMC toolkit, including particle filters (Sequential Monte Carlo) for sequential problems, Perfect sampling aiming for exact simulation (Jim Propp and David B. Wilson, 1996), RJMCMC (Peter J. Green, 1995) for handling variable-dimension models, and deeper investigations into convergence diagnostics and the central limit theorem. Overall, the evolution of MCMC represents a paradigm shift in statistical computation, enabling the analysis of numerous previously intractable complex models and continually expanding the scope and impact of statistics. == Mathematical setting == Suppose (Xn) is a Markov Chain in the general state space X {\displaystyle {\mathcal {X}}} with specific properties. We are interested in the limiting behavior of the partial sums: S n ( h ) = 1 n ∑ i = 1 n h ( X i ) {\displaystyle S_{n}(h)={\dfrac {1}{n}}\sum _{i=1}^{n}h(X_{i})} as n goes to infinity. Particularly, we hope to establish the Law of Large Numbers and the Central Limit Theorem for MCMC. In the following, we state some definitions and theorems necessary for the important convergence results. In short, we need the existence of invariant measure and Harris recurrent to establish the Law of Large Numbers of MCMC (Ergodic Theorem). And we need aperiodicity, irreducibility and extra conditions such as reversibility to ensure the Central Limit Theorem holds in MCMC. === Irreducibility and aperiodicity === Recall that in the discrete setting, a Markov chain is said to be irreducible if it is possible to reach any state from any other state in a finite number of steps with positive probability. However, in the continuous setting, point-to-point transitions have zero probability. In this case, φ-irreducibility generalizes irreducibility by using a reference measure φ on the measurable space ( X , B ( X ) ) {\displaystyle ({\mathcal {X}},{\mathcal {B}}({\mathcal {X}}))} . Definition (φ-irreducibility) Given a measure φ {\displaystyle \varphi } defined on ( X , B ( X ) ) {\displaystyle ({\mathcal {X}},{\mathcal {B}}({\mathcal {X}}))} , the Markov chain ( X n ) {\displaystyle (X_{n})} with transition kernel K ( x , y ) {\displaystyle K(x,y)} is φ-irreducible if, for every A ∈ B ( X ) {\displaystyle A\in {\mathcal {B}}({\mathcal {X}})} with φ ( A ) > 0 {\displaystyle \varphi (A)>0} , there exists n {\displaystyle n} such that K n ( x , A ) > 0 {\displaystyle K^{n}(x,A)>0} for all x ∈ X {\displaystyle x\in {\mathcal {X}}} (Equivalently, P x ( τ A < ∞ ) > 0 {\displaystyle P_{x}(\tau _{A}<\infty )>0} , here τ A = inf { n ≥ 1 ; X n ∈ A } {\displaystyle \tau _{A}=\inf\{n\geq 1;X_{n}\in A\}} is the first n {\displaystyle n} for which the chain enters the set A {\displaystyle A} ). This is a more general definition for irreducibility of a Markov chain in non-discrete state space. In the discrete case, an irreducible Markov chain is said to be aperiodic if it has period 1. Formally, the period of a state ω ∈ X {\displaystyle \omega \in {\mathcal {X}}} is defined as: d ( ω ) := g c d { m ≥ 1 ; K m ( ω , ω ) > 0 } {\displaystyle d(\omega ):=\mathrm {gcd} \{m\geq 1\,;\,K^{m}(\omega ,\omega )>0\}} For the general (non-discrete) case, we define aperiodicity in terms of small sets: Definition (Cycle length and small sets) A φ-irreducible Markov chain ( X n ) {\displaystyle (X_{n})} has a cycle of length d if there exists a small set C {\displaystyle C} , an associated integer M {\displaystyle M} , and a probability distribution ν M {\displaystyle \nu _{M}} such that d is the greatest common divisor of: { m ≥ 1 ; ∃ δ m > 0 such that C is small for ν m ≥ δ m ν M } . {\displaystyle \{m\geq 1\,;\,\exists \,\delta _{m}>0{\text{ such that }}C{\text{ is small for }}\nu _{m}\geq \delta _{m}\nu _{M}\}.} A set C {\displaystyle C} is called small if there exists m ∈ N ∗ {\displaystyle m\in \mathbb {N} ^{}} and a nonzero measure ν m {\displaystyle \nu _{m}} such that: K m ( x , A ) ≥ ν m ( A ) , ∀ x ∈ C , ∀ A ∈ B ( X ) . {\displaystyle K^{m}(x,A)\geq \nu _{m}(A),\quad \forall x\in C,\,\forall A\in {\mathcal {B}}({\mathcal {X}}).} === Harris recurrent === Definition (Harris recurrence) A set A {\displaystyle A} is Harris recurrent if P x ( η A = ∞ ) = 1 {\displaystyle P_{x}(\eta _{A}=\infty )=1} for all x ∈ A {\displaystyle x\in A} , where η A = ∑ n = 1 ∞ I A ( X n ) {\displaystyle \eta _{A}=\sum _{n=1}^{\infty }\mathbb {I} _{A}(X_{n})} is the number of visits of the chain ( X n ) {\displaystyle (X_{n})} to the set A {\displaystyle A} . The chain ( X n ) {\displaystyle (X_{n})} is said to be Harris recurrent if there exists a measure ψ {\displaystyle \psi } such that the chain is ψ {\displaystyle \psi } -irreducible and every measurable set A {\displaystyle A} with ψ ( A ) > 0 {\displaystyle \psi (A)>0} is Harris recurrent. A useful criterion for verifying Harris recurrence is the following: Proposition If for every A ∈ B ( X ) {\displaystyle A\in {\mathcal {B}}({\mathcal {X}})} , we have P x ( τ A < ∞ ) = 1 {\displaystyle P_{x}(\tau _{A}<\infty )=1} for every x ∈ A {\displaystyle x\in A} , then P x ( η A = ∞ ) = 1 {\displaystyle P_{x}(\eta _{A}=\infty )=1} for all x ∈ X {\displaystyle x\in {\mathcal {X}}} , and the chain ( X n ) {\displaystyle (X_{n})} is Harris recurrent. This definition is only needed when the state space X {\displaystyle {\mathcal {X}}} is uncountable. In the countable case, recurrence corresponds to E x [ η x ] = ∞ {\displaystyle \mathbb {E} _{x}[\eta _{x}]=\infty } , which is equivalent to P x ( τ x < ∞ ) = 1 {\displaystyle P_{x}(\tau _{x}<\infty )=1} for all x ∈ X {\displaystyle x\i

    Read more →
  • Deepset

    Deepset

    deepset is an enterprise software vendor that provides developers with the tools to build production-ready Artificial Intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) systems, using architectures such as agents, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and multimodal AI. It was founded in 2018 in Berlin by Milos Rusic, Malte Pietsch, and Timo Möller. deepset authored and maintains the open source software Haystack and its commercial SaaS and self-hosted (VPC, on-prem, air gapped) offering, Haystack Enterprise Platform. (formerly known as deepset Cloud and deepset AI Platform) == History == In June 2018, Milos Rusic, Malte Pietsch, and Timo Möller co-founded deepset in Berlin, Germany. In the same year, the company served first customers who wanted to implement NLP services by tailoring BERT language models to their domain. In July 2019, the company released the initial version of the open source software FARM. In November 2019, the company released the initial version of the open source software Haystack. Throughout 2020 and 2021 deepset published several applied research papers at EMNLP, COLING and ACL, the leading conferences in the area of NLP. In 2020, the research contributions comprised German language models named GBERT and GELECTRA, and a question answering dataset addressing the COVID-19 pandemic called COVID-QA, which was created in collaboration with Intel and has been annotated by biomedical experts. In 2021, the research contributions comprised German models and datasets for question answering and passage retrieval named GermanQuAD and GermanDPR, a semantic answer similarity metric, and an approach for multimodal retrieval of texts and tables to enable question answering on tabular data. Haystack contains implementations of all three contributions, enabling the use of the research through the open source framework. In November 2021, the development of the FARM framework was discontinued and its main features were integrated into the Haystack framework. In April 2022, the company announced its commercial SaaS offering deepset Cloud, which was rebranded in 2025 as Haystack Enterprise Platform supporting SaaS and on-premise deployment options. As of August 2023, the most popular finetuned language model created by deepset was downloaded more than 52 million times. In 2024, deepset was named a Gartner Cool Vendor in AI Engineering. In 2025, deepset was recognized for its growth by WirtschaftsWoche and Sifted and shared partnership integrations and announcements with Meta Llama Stack, MongoDB, NVIDIA, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and PwC. As of September 2025, the Haystack open source AI orchestration framework has more than 24,000 GitHub stars. == Products and applications == Haystack is an open source Python AI Orchestration framework for building custom AI agents and applications with large language models. With its modular building block components, software developers and AI engineers can implement pipelines to build and customize various AI architectures over large document and multimodal data collections, such as agents, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), intelligent document processing (IDP), text-to-SQL as well as document retrieval, semantic search, text generation, question answering, or summarization. Haystack emphasizes context engineering, an approach to AI system design that focuses on explicit control over how contextual information is retrieved, structured, routed to language models, and evaluated after generation. This allows developers to build AI systems with transparent data flow, tool usage, and configurable reasoning processes. Haystack integrates with 90+ model and technology providers including Hugging Face Transformers, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, OpenAI, Cohere, Anthropic, Mistral and others. Developers can extend these integrations with their own custom components. The framework has an active community on Discord with more than 4k members and GitHub, where so far more than 300 people have contributed to its continuous development, and engage on Meetup. Thousands of organizations use the framework, including public sector leaders like the European Commission and Global 500 enterprises like Airbus, Intel, NVIDIA, Lufthansa, Netflix, Apple, Infineon, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, BetterUp, Etalab, Sooth.ai, and Lego. On top of the Haystack open source framework, deepset offers two enterprise offerings to organizations. Haystack Enterprise Starter provides enterprise support on the open source framework from the Haystack engineering team as well as a private GitHub repository with production use case templates and Kubernetes deployment guides. The Haystack Enterprise Platform supports customers at building scalable AI applications by covering the entire process of prototyping, experimentation, deployment, monitoring, and governance. It is built on the Haystack open source framework and is available for hosting in the cloud and self-hosted via VPC, on-premise, or air gapped environments. deepset's enterprise tools are used by organizations including The European Commission, The Economist, Oxford University Press, the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space (BMFTR), Manz Verlag, and the German Armed Forces. FARM was an earlier framework for adapting representation models. One of its core concepts was the implementation of adaptive models, which comprised language models and an arbitrary number of prediction heads. FARM supported domain-adaptation and finetuning of these models with advanced options, for example gradient accumulation, cross-validation or automatic mixed-precision training. Its main features were integrated into Haystack in November 2021, and its development was discontinued at that time. == Funding == On August 9, 2023, deepset announced a Series B investment round of $30 million led by Balderton Capital and including participation from existing investors GV, System.One, Lunar Ventures and Harpoon Ventures. On April 28, 2022, deepset announced a Series A investment round of $14 million led by GV, with the participation of Harpoon Ventures, Acequia Capital and a team of experienced commercial open source software and machine learning founders, such as Alex Ratner (Snorkel AI), Mustafa Suleyman (Deepmind), Spencer Kimball (Cockroach Labs), Jeff Hammerbacher (Cloudera) and Emil Eifrem (Neo4j). A previous pre-seed investment round of $1.6 million on March 8, 2021, was led by System.One and Lunar Ventures, who also participated in the subsequent Series A round.

    Read more →
  • Associative classifier

    Associative classifier

    An associative classifier (AC) is a kind of supervised learning model that uses association rules to assign a target value. The term associative classification was coined by Bing Liu et al., in which the authors defined a model made of rules "whose right-hand side are restricted to the classification class attribute". == Model == The model generated by an AC and used to label new records consists of association rules, where the consequent corresponds to the class label. As such, they can also be seen as a list of "if-then" clauses: if the record matches some criteria (expressed in the left side of the rule, also called antecedent), it is then labeled accordingly to the class on the right side of the rule (or consequent). Most ACs read the list of rules in order, and apply the first matching rule to label the new record. == Metrics == The rules of an AC inherit some of the metrics of association rules, like the support or the confidence. Metrics can be used to order or filter the rules in the model and to evaluate their quality. == Implementations == The first proposal of a classification model made of association rules was FBM. The approach was popularized by CBA, although other authors had also previously proposed the mining of association rules for classification. Other authors have since then proposed multiple changes to the initial model, like the addition of a redundant rule pruning phase or the exploitation of Emerging Patterns. Notable implementations include: CMAR CPAR L3 CAEP GARC ADT.

    Read more →
  • QF-Test

    QF-Test

    QF-Test from Quality First Software is a cross-platform software tool for automated testing of programs via the graphical user interface (GUI) test automation). The program is specialized on (Java/Swing, Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT), Eclipse plug-ins and rich client platform (RCP) applications, ULC and JavaFX) cross-web browser test automation of static and dynamic web applications (HTML and web frameworks like Angular, Ext JS, Fluent UI React, Google Web Toolkit (GWT), jQuery UI, jQueryEasyUI Remote Application Platform (RAP), Qooxdoo, RichFaces, Vaadin, React, Smart GWT, Vue.js, ICEfaces and ZK). Version 4.1 added support for macOS and the Apple Safari and Microsoft Edge browsers via the Selenium WebDriver. Representational State Transfer (RESTful) web service testing. From version 5.0, Windows applications can also be tested (classic Win32 applications, .NET framework applications (often developed in C#) based on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) or Windows Forms, Windows apps and Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications using Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) controls) and modern C++ applications (such as Qt applications). Version 5.3 added support for the Chrome DevTools protocol, which allows browsers to be controlled using CDP drivers. Since then, mobile testing for iOS and Android, accessibility testing of web applications and SmartID, a new approach for more flexible and robust component recognition, have been introduced. Powerful enhancements such as WebAPI testing and AI-assisted validation complement the test automation tool. == Overview == QF-Test (the successor of qftestJUI, available since 2001) enables regression and load testing and runs on Windows, Unix and macOS. It is mainly used commercially by testers, developers or business analysts (modelling, low code approaches) with or without programming knowledge as part of software Quality Assurance. Since December 2008, a webtest add-on is available which allows test automation of browser-based GUIs (such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Microsoft Edge) along with extant Java GUI test functions, which was extended to include JavaFX in July 2014. From 2018, QF-Test version 4.2 can test PDF documents, from 2020 native desktop applications (QF-Test version 5) and in 2022, mobile application testing will be added. The basis for efficient use in test automation is stable component recognition (IDs, logical screen elements, labels, CustomWebResolver, SmartID, ...) with low maintenance effort. == Features == General – QF-Test's capture/replay function enables recording of tests for beginners, while modular programming (modularizing) allows creating large test suites in a concise arrangement. For the advanced user who requires even more control over his application, the tool offers access to internal program structures through the standard scripting languages Jython, the Java implementation of the popular Python language, JavaScript, and Groovy. The tool also offers a batch processing mode, allowing to run tests unattended and then generate XML, HTML and JUnit reports. Thus the tool can be integrated into existing build/test frameworks like Jenkins, Ant or Maven. Another mode is the so-called Daemon mode for distributed test execution. A specific integration with many test management tools exists. There is a test debugger (enabling arbitrary stepping and editing variables at runtime) and a fully automated dependency management that takes care of pre- and postconditions and helps isolating test cases. Data-driven testing with no need for scripting is possible. Web testing: cross-browser on Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Edge (including Chromium-based), Opera and Safari for static and dynamic websites (HTML5, Ajax, DOM). A headless browser can also be used for testing. QF-Test fully supports frameworks like Angular, React and Vue.js, but also many specific UI toolkits like Smart (GWT), GXT/ExtGWT, ExtJS, ICEfaces, jQuery UI, Kendo UI, PrimeFaces, Qooxdoo, RAP, RichFaces, Vaadin and ZK. Easy integration with Selenium makes it easy to balance development and functional testing. Electron applications can also be tested. Other (e.g., SAP UI5, Siebel Open UI, Salesforce) and future web toolkits can be integrated with little effort. Short-term and individual customisations (CustomWebResolver) are possible via an optimised interface JavaFX, Java Swing, SWT, Eclipse plug-ins and RCP applications and ULC. Support for testing when migrating from JavaSwing or JavaFX to web applications (e.g. via Webswing). Hybrid applications based on multiple technologies are also supported, e.g. applications that integrate HTML content into Java applications using JxBrowser. Windows-based applications (Win32, .NET, Windows Forms, WPF, Windows apps, Qt). Android applications can be tested on real devices and with the Android Studio emulator. iOS applications can also be tested on real devices and with the Xcode Simulator. Testing of PDF documents (document comparisons, checking content, texts, images/graphic objects, layouts, "invisible" or partially hidden objects). QF-Test 9 introduces web accessibility testing to automatically check compliance with WCAG and other standards. QF-Test 10 introduces powerful enhancements for WebAPI testing and AI-assisted validation.

    Read more →
  • Bernard Vauquois

    Bernard Vauquois

    Bernard Vauquois ((1929-06-14)June 14, 1929 — (1985-09-30)September 30, 1985) was a French mathematician and computer scientist. He was a pioneer of computer science and machine translation (MT) in France. An astronomer-turned-computer scientist, he is known for his work on the programming language ALGOL 60, and later for extensive work on the theoretical and practical problems of MT, of which the eponymous Vauquois triangle is one of the most widely-known contributions. He was a professor at what would become the Grenoble Alpes University. == Biography == Bernard Vauquois was initially a researcher at French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) from 1952 to 1958 at the Astrophysics Institute of the Meudon Observatory, after completing studies in mathematics, physics, and astronomy. Since 1957, his research program has also focused on methods applied to physics from the perspective of electronic computers, and he has taught programming to physicists. This double interest in astrophysics and electronic computers is reflected in the subject of his thesis and that of the complementary thesis in physical sciences that he defended in 1958. In 1960, at 31 years old, he was appointed professor of computer science at Grenoble University, where, alongside professors Jean Kuntzmann and Noël Gastinel, he began work in the field. At that time, he was also contributing to the definition of the language ALGOL 60. Also in 1960, he founded the Centre d'Étude pour la Traduction Automatique (CETA), later renamed as Groupe d'Étude pour la Traduction Automatique (GETA) and currently known as GETALP, a team at the Laboratoire d'informatique de Grenoble, and soon showed his gift for rapid understanding, synthesis, and innovation, and his taste for personal communication across linguistic borders and barriers. After visiting a number of centers, mainly in the United States, where machine translation research was conducted, he analyzed the shortcomings of the "first-generation" approach and evaluated the potential of a new generation based on grammar and formal language theory, and proposed a new approach based on a representational "pivot" and the use of (declarative) rule systems that transform a sequential sentence from one level of representation to another. He led the GETA in constructing the first large second-generation system, applied to Russian–French, from 1962 to 1971. At the end of this period, the accumulated experience led him to correct some defects of the "pure" declarative and interlingual approach, and to use heuristic programming methods, implemented with procedural grammars written in LSPLs ("specialized languages for linguistic programming", langages spécialisés pour la programmation linguistique) that were developed under his direction, and integrated into the ARIANE-78 machine translation system. In 1974, when he cofounded the Leibniz laboratory, he proposed "multilevel structure descriptors" (descripteurs de structures multiniveaux) for units larger than sentence translation. This idea, premonitory of later theoretical work (Ray Jackendoff, Gerald Gazdar) is still the cornerstone of all machine translation software built by GETA and the French national TA project. Bernard Vauquois' last contribution was "static grammar" (grammaire statique) in 1982–83, during the ESOPE project, the preparatory phase of the French national MT project. He was a key figure in the field of computational linguistics in France. At CNRS, he was a member of section 22 of the National Committee in 1963: "General Linguistics, Modern Languages and Comparative Literature", and then, in 1969, of section 28: "General Linguistics, Foreign Languages and Literature". Since 1965, he has been vice-president of the Association for Natural Language Processing (ATALA). He was its president from 1966 to 1971. He was also one of the founders, in 1965, of the ICCL (International Committee on Computational Linguistics), which organizes COLING conferences. He was its president from 1969 to 1984. From France, he often collaborated with other countries (notably Canada, the United States, the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Japan, China, Brazil, Malaysia, and Thailand), working on the specification and implementation of grammars and dictionaries. He began cooperating with Malaysia, for example, in 1979, which led to the creation of the Automatic Terjemaan Project, with a first prototype of an English-Malay MT system demonstrated in 1980. == Vauquois triangle == The Vauquois triangle is a conceptual model and diagram illustrating possible approaches to the design of machine translation systems, first proposed in 1968. == Legacy == Bernard Vauquois is regarded as a pioneer of machine translation in France. He played a key role in developing the first large-scale second-generation machine translation system, and his work influenced the field of machine translation for many years. He supervised some twenty doctoral theses, most of them concerning formal aspects of natural and artificial languages, with an emphasis on machine translation. The Center for Studies on Automatic Translation, which Vauquois founded in 1960, later became the Group for the Study of Machine Translation and Automated Processing of Languages and Speech (GETALP). It is still a research institution in natural language processing. Vauquois was a prolific writer and speaker, disseminating knowledge about machine translation and related topics. His papers and presentations were instrumental in establishing the field of machine translation in France and beyond. == Publications == Vauquois, Bernard (1973). Traduction automatique (in French). Paris: Gauthier-Villars. Vauquois, Bernard (1967). Introduction à la traduction automatique (in French). Paris: Gauthier-Villars.

    Read more →
  • Karl Steinbuch

    Karl Steinbuch

    Karl W. Steinbuch (June 15, 1917 in Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt – June 4, 2005 in Ettlingen) was a German computer scientist, cyberneticist, and electrical engineer. He was an early and influential researcher in German computer science, and was the developer of the Lernmatrix, an early implementation of artificial neural networks. From the late 1960s onwards the focus of his activity shifted from scientific research to right-wing political activism supporting the Neue Rechte. == Biography == Steinbuch joined the National Socialist German Students' League (NSDStB) and the Nazi Party. Steinbuch studied at the University of Stuttgart and in 1944 he received his PhD in physics. In 1948 he joined Standard Elektrik Lorenz (SEL, part of the ITT group) in Stuttgart, as a computer design engineer and later as a director of research and development, where he filed more than 70 patents. Steinbuch completed the first European fully transistorized computer, the ER 56 marketed by SEL. In 1958 he became professor and director of the Institute of Technology for information processing (ITIV) of the University of Karlsruhe, where he retired in 1980. In 1967 he began publishing books, in which he tried to influence German education policy. Together with books from colleagues like Jean Ziegler from Switzerland, Eric J. Hobsbawm from the UK, and John Naisbitt his books predicted what he regarded as the coming education disaster of the emerging civic lobby society. In 1957, together with Helmut Gröttrup, Steinbuch coined the term Informatik, the German word for computer science, which gave informatics, and the term kybernetische Anthropologie. == Awards and recognition == Wilhelm-Boelsche award - medal in Gold German non-fiction book award Gold medal award of the XXI. International Congresses on Aerospace Medicine Konrad Adenauer award of science Jakob Fugger award medal Medal of merit of the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg member, German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina member, International Academy of Science, Munich. grants from a state government grants program, named "Karl-Steinbuch-Stipendium" Steinbuch Centre for Computing at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology named after him == Books == Steinbuch wrote several books and articles, including: 1957 Informatik: Automatische Informationsverarbeitung ("Informatics: automatic information processing"). 1963 Learning matrices and their applications (together with U. A. W. Piske) 1965 A critical comparison of two kinds of adaptive classification networks (together with Bernard Widrow) 1966 (1969): Die informierte Gesellschaft. Geschichte und Zukunft der Nachrichtentechnik (The informed society. History and Future of telecommunications) 1989: Die desinformierte Gesellschaft (The disinformed society) 1968: Falsch programmiert. Über das Versagen unserer Gesellschaft in der Gegenwart und vor der Zukunft und was eigentlich geschehen müßte. (as a bestseller listet in: Der Spiegel) (Programmed falsely. About our society's failure in the present and with respect to the future and what should be done.) 1969: Programm 2000. (as a bestseller listet in: Der Spiegel) 1971: Automat und Mensch. Auf dem Weg zu einer kybernetischen Anthropologie (Machine and Man. On the way to a cybernetic anthropology; 4th revised edition) 1971: Mensch Technik Zukunft. Probleme von Morgen (German non-fiction book award) (Man Technology Future. Problems of Tomorrow) 1973: Kurskorrektur (Correcting the Course) 1978: Maßlos informiert. Die Enteignung des Denkens (Excessively informed. The Deprivation of Thinking) 1984: Unsere manipulierte Demokratie. Müssen wir mit der linken Lüge leben? (Our Thought-controlled Democracy. Do we have to live with the leftist lie?)

    Read more →
  • Alberto Broggi

    Alberto Broggi

    Alberto Broggi is General Manager at VisLab srl (spinoff of the University of Parma acquired by Silicon-Valley company Ambarella Inc. in June 2015) and a professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Parma in Italy. == Research in computer vision, hardware, and AV == Broggi's research activities started in 1991–1994. His group together with the Dipartimento di Elettronica, Politecnico di Torino, Italy, built their own hardware architecture (named PAPRICA, for PArallel PRocessor for Image Checking and Analysis, based on 256 single-bit processing elements working in SIMD fashion) and installed it on board of a mobile laboratory (Mob-Lab) to develop and test some initial concepts in the field of intelligent vehicles. In 1996, Broggi's group worked to develop a real vehicle prototype (named ARGO, a Lancia Thema passenger car which was equipped with vision sensors, processing systems, and vehicle actuators) and developed the necessary software and hardware that made it able to drive autonomously on standard roads. Broggi's research group (called VisLab from then on) gathered all their findings in a book, which was then also translated in Chinese. When Broggi was with the University of Pavia, his research was extended and applied to extreme conditions (automatic driving on snow and ice): in 2001, VisLab led the research effort of providing a vehicle (RAS, Robot Antartico di Superficie) with sensing capabilities so that it was able to automatically follow the vehicle in front. In 2010 Broggi's group embarked on driving 4 vehicles autonomously from Italy to China with no human intervention. This challenge is called VIAC, for VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge . Soon after this, Broggi was awarded a second ERC grant (Proof of concept) to industrialize some of the results obtained and successfully tested on the VIAC vehicles. On July 12, 2013, VisLab tested the BRAiVE vehicle in downtown Parma, negotiating two-way narrow rural roads, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights, artificial bumps, pedestrian areas, and tight roundabouts. The vehicle traveled from Parma University Campus up to Piazza della Pilotta (downtown Parma): a 20 minutes run in a real environment, together with real traffic at 11am on a working day, that required absolutely no human intervention. Part of this test was driven with nobody in the driver seat, for the first time ever on public roads.

    Read more →
  • Olio (app)

    Olio (app)

    Olio is a mobile app for sharing by giving away, getting, borrowing or lending things in your community for free, aiming to reduce household and food waste. It does this by connecting neighbours with spare food or household items to others nearby who wish to pick up those items. The food must be edible; it can be raw or cooked, sealed or open. Non-food items often listed on Olio include books, clothes and furniture. Those donating surplus food can be individuals or companies such as food retailers, restaurants, corporate canteens, food photographers etc., and donations can take place on an ad-hoc or recurrent basis. For example, some supermarket chains in the UK, including Tesco, the Midcounties Co-operative, Morrisons, Sainsbury's and Iceland have piloted Olio as an 'online food bank' to donate food and to reduce their waste. In March 2022, Olio partnered with Pandamart in Singapore. First launched in early 2015 by Tessa Clarke and Saasha Celestial-One, by October 2017 the company had raised $2.2 million in funding. Olio subsequently performed a series A funding round of $6 million in 2018 and a Series B of $43 million. Notable investors include Accel, Octopus Ventures and VNV Global. The Olio app had around 7 million registered users as of May 2023.

    Read more →
  • Language model

    Language model

    A language model is a computational model that predicts sequences in natural language. Language models are useful for a variety of tasks, including speech recognition, machine translation, natural language generation (generating more human-like text), optical character recognition, route optimization, handwriting recognition, grammar induction, information retrieval and disaster response. Large language models (LLMs), currently their most advanced form as of 2026, are predominantly based on transformers trained on larger datasets (frequently using texts scraped from the public internet). They have superseded recurrent neural network-based models, which had previously superseded the purely statistical models, such as the word n-gram language model. == History == Noam Chomsky did pioneering work on language models in the 1950s by developing a theory of formal grammars. In 1980, statistical approaches were explored and found to be more useful for many purposes than rule-based formal grammars. Discrete representations like word n-gram language models, with probabilities for discrete combinations of words, made significant advances. In the 2000s, continuous representations for words, such as word embeddings, began to replace discrete representations. Typically, the representation is a real-valued vector that encodes a word’s meaning such that words closer in vector space are similar in meaning and common relationships between words, such as plurality or gender, are preserved. == Pure statistical models == In 1980, the first significant statistical language model was proposed, and during the decade IBM performed 'Shannon-style' experiments, in which potential sources for language modeling improvement were identified by observing and analyzing the performance of human subjects in predicting or correcting text. === Models based on word n-grams === === Exponential === Maximum entropy language models encode the relationship between a word and the n-gram history using feature functions. The equation is P ( w m ∣ w 1 , … , w m − 1 ) = 1 Z ( w 1 , … , w m − 1 ) exp ⁡ ( a T f ( w 1 , … , w m ) ) {\displaystyle P(w_{m}\mid w_{1},\ldots ,w_{m-1})={\frac {1}{Z(w_{1},\ldots ,w_{m-1})}}\exp(a^{T}f(w_{1},\ldots ,w_{m}))} where Z ( w 1 , … , w m − 1 ) {\displaystyle Z(w_{1},\ldots ,w_{m-1})} is the partition function, a {\displaystyle a} is the parameter vector, and f ( w 1 , … , w m ) {\displaystyle f(w_{1},\ldots ,w_{m})} is the feature function. In the simplest case, the feature function is just an indicator of the presence of a certain n-gram. It is helpful to use a prior on a {\displaystyle a} or some form of regularization. The log-bilinear model is another example of an exponential language model. === Skip-gram model === == Neural models == === Recurrent neural network === Continuous representations or embeddings of words are produced in recurrent neural network-based language models (known also as continuous space language models). Such continuous space embeddings help to alleviate the curse of dimensionality, which is the consequence of the number of possible sequences of words increasing exponentially with the size of the vocabulary, further causing a data sparsity problem. Neural networks avoid this problem by representing words as non-linear combinations of weights in a neural net. === Large language models === Although sometimes matching human performance, it is not clear whether they are plausible cognitive models. At least for recurrent neural networks, it has been shown that they sometimes learn patterns that humans do not, but fail to learn patterns that humans typically do. == Evaluation and benchmarks == Evaluation of the quality of language models is mostly done by comparison to human created sample benchmarks created from typical language-oriented tasks. Other, less established, quality tests examine the intrinsic character of a language model or compare two such models. Since language models are typically intended to be dynamic and to learn from data they see, some proposed models investigate the rate of learning, e.g., through inspection of learning curves. Various data sets have been developed for use in evaluating language processing systems. These include: Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability GLUE benchmark Microsoft Research Paraphrase Corpus Multi-Genre Natural Language Inference Question Natural Language Inference Quora Question Pairs Recognizing Textual Entailment Semantic Textual Similarity Benchmark SQuAD question answering Test Stanford Sentiment Treebank Winograd NLI BoolQ, PIQA, SIQA, HellaSwag, WinoGrande, ARC, OpenBookQA, NaturalQuestions, TriviaQA, RACE, BIG-bench hard, GSM8k, RealToxicityPrompts, WinoGender, CrowS-Pairs

    Read more →
  • State complexity

    State complexity

    State complexity is an area of theoretical computer science dealing with the size of abstract automata, such as different kinds of finite automata. The classical result in the area is that simulating an n {\displaystyle n} -state nondeterministic finite automaton by a deterministic finite automaton requires exactly 2 n {\displaystyle 2^{n}} states in the worst case. == Transformation between variants of finite automata == Finite automata can be deterministic and nondeterministic, one-way (DFA, NFA) and two-way (2DFA, 2NFA). Other related classes are unambiguous (UFA), self-verifying (SVFA) and alternating (AFA) finite automata. These automata can also be two-way (2UFA, 2SVFA, 2AFA). All these machines can accept exactly the regular languages. However, the size of different types of automata necessary to accept the same language (measured in the number of their states) may be different. For any two types of finite automata, the state complexity tradeoff between them is an integer function f {\displaystyle f} where f ( n ) {\displaystyle f(n)} is the least number of states in automata of the second type sufficient to recognize every language recognized by an n {\displaystyle n} -state automaton of the first type. The following results are known. NFA to DFA: 2 n {\displaystyle 2^{n}} states. This is the subset construction by Rabin and Scott, proved optimal by Lupanov. UFA to DFA: 2 n {\displaystyle 2^{n}} states, see Leung, An earlier lower bound by Schmidt was smaller. NFA to UFA: 2 n − 1 {\displaystyle 2^{n}-1} states, see Leung. There was an earlier smaller lower bound by Schmidt. SVFA to DFA: Θ ( 3 n / 3 ) {\displaystyle \Theta (3^{n/3})} states, see Jirásková and Pighizzini 2DFA to DFA: n ( n n − ( n − 1 ) n ) {\displaystyle n(n^{n}-(n-1)^{n})} states, see Kapoutsis. Earlier construction by Shepherdson used more states, and an earlier lower bound by Moore was smaller. 2DFA to NFA: ( 2 n n + 1 ) = O ( 4 n n ) {\displaystyle {\binom {2n}{n+1}}=O({\frac {4^{n}}{\sqrt {n}}})} , see Kapoutsis. Earlier construction by Birget used more states. 2NFA to NFA: ( 2 n n + 1 ) {\displaystyle {\binom {2n}{n+1}}} , see Kapoutsis. 2NFA to NFA accepting the complement: O ( 4 n ) {\displaystyle O(4^{n})} states, see Vardi. AFA to DFA: 2 2 n {\displaystyle 2^{2^{n}}} states, see Chandra, Kozen and Stockmeyer. AFA to NFA: 2 n {\displaystyle 2^{n}} states, see Fellah, Jürgensen and Yu. 2AFA to DFA: 2 n 2 n {\displaystyle 2^{n2^{n}}} , see Ladner, Lipton and Stockmeyer. 2AFA to NFA: 2 Θ ( n log ⁡ n ) {\displaystyle 2^{\Theta (n\log n)}} , see Geffert and Okhotin. === The 2DFA vs. 2NFA problem and logarithmic space === It is an open problem whether all 2NFAs can be converted to 2DFAs with polynomially many states, i.e. whether there is a polynomial p ( n ) {\displaystyle p(n)} such that for every n {\displaystyle n} -state 2NFA there exists a p ( n ) {\displaystyle p(n)} -state 2DFA. The problem was raised by Sakoda and Sipser, who compared it to the P vs. NP problem in the computational complexity theory. Berman and Lingas discovered a formal relation between this problem and the L vs. NL open problem. This relation was further elaborated by Kapoutsis. == State complexity of operations for finite automata == Given a binary regularity-preserving operation on languages ∘ {\displaystyle \circ } and a family of automata X (DFA, NFA, etc.), the state complexity of ∘ {\displaystyle \circ } is an integer function f ( m , n ) {\displaystyle f(m,n)} such that for each m-state X-automaton A and n-state X-automaton B there is an f ( m , n ) {\displaystyle f(m,n)} -state X-automaton for L ( A ) ∘ L ( B ) {\displaystyle L(A)\circ L(B)} , and for all integers m, n there is an m-state X-automaton A and an n-state X-automaton B such that every X-automaton for L ( A ) ∘ L ( B ) {\displaystyle L(A)\circ L(B)} must have at least f ( m , n ) {\displaystyle f(m,n)} states. Analogous definition applies for operations with any number of arguments. The first results on state complexity of operations for DFAs were published by Maslov and by Yu, Zhuang and Salomaa. Holzer and Kutrib pioneered the state complexity of operations on NFA. The known results for basic operations are listed below. === Union === If language L 1 {\displaystyle L_{1}} requires m states and language L 2 {\displaystyle L_{2}} requires n states, how many states does L 1 ∪ L 2 {\displaystyle L_{1}\cup L_{2}} require? DFA: m n {\displaystyle mn} states, see Maslov and Yu, Zhuang and Salomaa. NFA: m + n + 1 {\displaystyle m+n+1} states, see Holzer and Kutrib. UFA: at least min ( n , m ) Ω ( log ⁡ ( min ( n , m ) ) ) {\displaystyle \min(n,m)^{\Omega (\log(\min(n,m)))}} ; between m n + m + n {\displaystyle mn+m+n} and m + n m 2 0.79 m {\displaystyle m+nm2^{0.79m}} states, see Jirásek, Jirásková and Šebej. SVFA: m n {\displaystyle mn} states, see Jirásek, Jirásková and Szabari. 2DFA: between m + n {\displaystyle m+n} and 4 m + n + 4 {\displaystyle 4m+n+4} states, see Kunc and Okhotin. 2NFA: m + n {\displaystyle m+n} states, see Kunc and Okhotin. === Intersection === How many states does L 1 ∩ L 2 {\displaystyle L_{1}\cap L_{2}} require? DFA: m n {\displaystyle mn} states, see Maslov and Yu, Zhuang and Salomaa. NFA: m n {\displaystyle mn} states, see Holzer and Kutrib. UFA: m n {\displaystyle mn} states, see Jirásek, Jirásková and Šebej. SVFA: m n {\displaystyle mn} states, see Jirásek, Jirásková and Szabari. 2DFA: between m + n {\displaystyle m+n} and m + n + 1 {\displaystyle m+n+1} states, see Kunc and Okhotin. 2NFA: between m + n {\displaystyle m+n} and m + n + 1 {\displaystyle m+n+1} states, see Kunc and Okhotin. === Complementation === If language L requires n states then how many states does its complement require? DFA: n {\displaystyle n} states, by exchanging accepting and rejecting states. NFA: 2 n {\displaystyle 2^{n}} states, see Birget. or Jirásková UFA: at least n Ω ~ ( log ⁡ n ) {\displaystyle n^{{\tilde {\Omega }}(\log n)}} states, see Göös, Kiefer and Yuan, (this follows an earlier bound by Raskin); and at most n + 1 ⋅ 2 0.5 n {\displaystyle {\sqrt {n+1}}\cdot 2^{0.5n}} states, see Indzhev and Kiefer. SVFA: n {\displaystyle n} states, by exchanging accepting and rejecting states. 2DFA: at least n {\displaystyle n} and at most 4 n {\displaystyle 4n} states, see Geffert, Mereghetti and Pighizzini. === Concatenation === How many states does L 1 L 2 = { w 1 w 2 ∣ w 1 ∈ L 1 , w 2 ∈ L 2 } {\displaystyle L_{1}L_{2}=\{w_{1}w_{2}\mid w_{1}\in L_{1},w_{2}\in L_{2}\}} require? DFA: m ⋅ 2 n − 2 n − 1 {\displaystyle m\cdot 2^{n}-2^{n-1}} states, see Maslov and Yu, Zhuang and Salomaa. NFA: m + n {\displaystyle m+n} states, see Holzer and Kutrib. UFA: 3 4 2 m + n − 1 {\displaystyle {\frac {3}{4}}2^{m+n}-1} states, see Jirásek, Jirásková and Šebej. SVFA: Θ ( 3 n / 3 2 m ) {\displaystyle \Theta (3^{n/3}2^{m})} states, see Jirásek, Jirásková and Szabari. 2DFA: at least 2 Ω ( n ) log ⁡ m {\displaystyle {\frac {2^{\Omega (n)}}{\log m}}} and at most 2 m m + 1 ⋅ 2 n n + 1 {\displaystyle 2m^{m+1}\cdot 2^{n^{n+1}}} states, see Jirásková and Okhotin. === Kleene star === DFA: 3 4 2 n {\displaystyle {\frac {3}{4}}2^{n}} states, see Maslov and Yu, Zhuang and Salomaa. NFA: n + 1 {\displaystyle n+1} states, see Holzer and Kutrib. UFA: 3 4 2 n {\displaystyle {\frac {3}{4}}2^{n}} states, see Jirásek, Jirásková and Šebej. SVFA: 3 4 2 n {\displaystyle {\frac {3}{4}}2^{n}} states, see Jirásek, Jirásková and Szabari. 2DFA: at least 1 n 2 n 2 − 1 {\displaystyle {\frac {1}{n}}2^{{\frac {n}{2}}-1}} and at most 2 O ( n n + 1 ) {\displaystyle 2^{O(n^{n+1})}} states, see Jirásková and Okhotin. === Reversal === DFA: 2 n {\displaystyle 2^{n}} states, see Mirkin, Leiss, and Yu, Zhuang and Salomaa. NFA: n + 1 {\displaystyle n+1} states, see Holzer and Kutrib. UFA: n {\displaystyle n} states. SVFA: 2 n + 1 {\displaystyle 2n+1} states, see Jirásek, Jirásková and Szabari. 2DFA: between n + 1 {\displaystyle n+1} and n + 2 {\displaystyle n+2} states, see Jirásková and Okhotin. == Finite automata over a unary alphabet == State complexity of finite automata with a one-letter (unary) alphabet, pioneered by Chrobak, is different from the multi-letter case. Let g ( n ) = e Θ ( n ln ⁡ n ) {\displaystyle g(n)=e^{\Theta ({\sqrt {n\ln n}})}} be Landau's function. === Transformation between models === For a one-letter alphabet, transformations between different types of finite automata are sometimes more efficient than in the general case. NFA to DFA: g ( n ) + O ( n 2 ) {\displaystyle g(n)+O(n^{2})} states, see Chrobak. 2DFA to DFA: g ( n ) + O ( n ) {\displaystyle g(n)+O(n)} states, see Chrobak and Kunc and Okhotin. 2NFA to DFA: O ( g ( n ) ) {\displaystyle O(g(n))} states, see Mereghetti and Pighizzini. and Geffert, Mereghetti and Pighizzini. NFA to 2DFA: at most O ( n 2 ) {\displaystyle O(n^{2})} states, see Chrobak. 2NFA to 2DFA: at most n O ( log ⁡ n ) {\displaystyle n^{O(\log n)}} states, proved by implementing the method of Savitch's theorem, see

    Read more →