Kadek Hendrawan Palgunadi

Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz et al. · cambridge

Southeast Asia (SEA) is a region of extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity, yet it remains significantly underrepresented in vision-language (VL) research. This often results in artificial intelligence (AI) models that fail to capture SEA cultural nuances. To fill this gap, we present SEA-VL, an open-source initiative dedicated to developing high-quality, culturally relevant data for SEA languages. By involving contributors from SEA countries, SEA-VL aims to ensure better cultural relevance and diversity, fostering greater inclusivity of underrepresented languages in VL research. Beyond crowdsourcing, our initiative goes one step further in the exploration of the automatic collection of culturally relevant images through crawling and image generation. First, we find that image crawling achieves approximately ~85% cultural relevance while being more cost- and time-efficient than crowdsourcing. Second, despite the substantial progress in generative vision models, synthetic images remain unreliable in accurately reflecting SEA cultures. The generated images often fail to reflect the nuanced traditions and cultural contexts of the region. Collectively, we gather 1.28M SEA culturally-relevant images, more than 50 times larger than other existing datasets. Through SEA-VL, we aim to bridge the representation gap in SEA, fostering the development of more inclusive AI systems that authentically represent diverse cultures across SEA.

Kadek Hendrawan Palgunadi, Andreas Bergmeister, Andrea Bosisio et al.

Accurate prediction and synthesis of seismic waveforms are crucial for seismic-hazard assessment and earthquake-resistant infrastructure design. Existing prediction methods, such as ground-motion models and physics-based wave-field simulations, often fail to capture the full complexity of seismic wavefields, particularly at higher frequencies. This study introduces HighFEM, a novel, computationally efficient, and scalable (i.e., capable of generating many seismograms simultaneously) generative model for high-frequency seismic-waveform generation. Our approach leverages a spectrogram representation of the seismic-waveform data, which is reduced to a lower-dimensional manifold via an autoencoder. A state-of-the-art diffusion model is trained to generate this latent representation conditioned on key input parameters: earthquake magnitude, recording distance, site conditions, hypocenter depth, and azimuthal gap. The model generates waveforms with frequency content up to 50 Hz. Any scalar ground-motion statistic, such as peak ground-motion amplitudes and spectral accelerations, can be readily derived from the synthesized waveforms. We validate our model using commonly employed seismological metrics and performance metrics from image-generation studies. Our results demonstrate that the openly available model can generate realistic high-frequency seismic waveforms across a wide range of input parameters, even in data-sparse regions. For the scalar ground-motion statistics commonly used in seismic-hazard and earthquake-engineering studies, we show that our model accurately reproduces both the median trends of the real data and their variability. To evaluate and compare the growing number of these and similar Generative Waveform Models (GWMs), we argue that they should be openly available and included in community ground-motion-model evaluation efforts.