Simulation is a widely used tool in robotics to reduce hardware consumption and gather large-scale data. Despite previous efforts to simulate optical tactile sensors, there remain challenges in efficiently synthesizing images and replicating marker motion under different contact loads. In this work, we propose a fast optical tactile simulator, named FOTS, for simulating optical tactile sensors. We utilize multi-layer perceptron mapping and planar shadow generation to simulate the optical response, while employing marker distribution approximation to simulate the motion of surface markers caused by the elastomer deformation. Experimental results demonstrate that FOTS outperforms other methods in terms of image generation quality and rendering speed, achieving 28.6 fps for optical simulation and 326.1 fps for marker motion simulation on a single CPU without GPU acceleration. In addition, we integrate the FOTS simulation model with physical engines like MuJoCo, and the peg-in-hole task demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in achieving zero-shot Sim2Real learning of tactile-motor robot manipulation skills. Our code is available at https://github.com/Rancho-zhao/FOTS.

The African continent lacks enough qualified teachers which hampers the provision of adequate learning support. An AI could potentially augment the efforts of the limited number of teachers, leading to better learning outcomes. Towards that end, this work describes and evaluates the first key output for the NSMQ AI Grand Challenge, which proposes a robust, real-world benchmark for such an AI: "Build an AI to compete live in Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz (NSMQ) competition and win -- performing better than the best contestants in all rounds and stages of the competition". The NSMQ is an annual live science and mathematics competition for senior secondary school students in Ghana in which 3 teams of 2 students compete by answering questions across biology, chemistry, physics, and math in 5 rounds over 5 progressive stages until a winning team is crowned for that year. In this work, we built Brilla AI, an AI contestant that we deployed to unofficially compete remotely and live in the Riddles round of the 2023 NSMQ Grand Finale, the first of its kind in the 30-year history of the competition. Brilla AI is currently available as a web app that livestreams the Riddles round of the contest, and runs 4 machine learning systems: (1) speech to text (2) question extraction (3) question answering and (4) text to speech that work together in real-time to quickly and accurately provide an answer, and then say it with a Ghanaian accent. In its debut, our AI answered one of the 4 riddles ahead of the 3 human contesting teams, unofficially placing second (tied). Improvements and extensions of this AI could potentially be deployed to offer science tutoring to students and eventually enable millions across Africa to have one-on-one learning interactions, democratizing science education.

Every year, plant parasitic nematodes, one of the major groups of plant pathogens, cause a significant loss of crops worldwide. To mitigate crop yield losses caused by nematodes, an efficient nematode monitoring method is essential for plant and crop disease management. In other respects, efficient nematode detection contributes to medical research and drug discovery, as nematodes are model organisms. With the rapid development of computer technology, computer vision techniques provide a feasible solution for quantifying nematodes or nematode infections. In this paper, we survey and categorise the studies and available datasets on nematode detection through deep-learning models. To stimulate progress in related research, this survey presents the potential state-of-the-art object detection models, training techniques, optimisation techniques, and evaluation metrics for deep learning beginners. Moreover, seven state-of-the-art object detection models are validated on three public datasets and the AgriNema dataset for plant parasitic nematodes to construct a baseline for nematode detection.

Naija is the Nigerian-Pidgin spoken by approx. 120M speakers in Nigeria and it is a mixed language (e.g., English, Portuguese and Indigenous languages). Although it has mainly been a spoken language until recently, there are currently two written genres (BBC and Wikipedia) in Naija. Through statistical analyses and Machine Translation experiments, we prove that these two genres do not represent each other (i.e., there are linguistic differences in word order and vocabulary) and Generative AI operates only based on Naija written in the BBC genre. In other words, Naija written in Wikipedia genre is not represented in Generative AI.

Non-cognitive skills are crucial for personal and social life well-being, and such skill development can be supported by narrative-based (e.g., storytelling) technologies. While generative AI enables interactive and role-playing storytelling, little is known about how users engage with and perceive the use of AI in social life simulation for non-cognitive skills learning. To this end, we introduced SimuLife++, an interactive platform enabled by a large language model (LLM). The system allows users to act as protagonists, creating stories with one or multiple AI-based characters in diverse social scenarios. In particular, we expanded the Human-AI interaction to a Human-AI-AI collaboration by including a sage agent, who acts as a bystander to provide users with more insightful perspectives on their choices and conversations. Through a within-subject user study, we found that the inclusion of the sage agent significantly enhanced narrative immersion, according to the narrative transportation scale, leading to more messages, particularly in group chats. Participants' interactions with the sage agent were also associated with significantly higher scores in their perceived motivation, self-perceptions, and resilience and coping, indicating positive impacts on non-cognitive skills reflection. Participants' interview results further explained the sage agent's aid in decision-making, solving ethical dilemmas, and problem-solving; on the other hand, they suggested improvements in user control and balanced responses from multiple characters. We provide design implications on the application of generative AI in narrative solutions for non-cognitive skill development in broader social contexts.

Unlike traditional educational chatbots that rely on pre-programmed responses, large-language model-driven chatbots, such as ChatGPT, demonstrate remarkable versatility and have the potential to serve as a dynamic resource for addressing student needs from understanding advanced concepts to solving complex problems. This work explores the impact of such technology on student learning in an interdisciplinary, project-oriented data visualization course. Throughout the semester, students engaged with ChatGPT across four distinct projects, including data visualizations and implementing them using a variety of tools including Tableau, D3, and Vega-lite. We collected conversation logs and reflection surveys from the students after each assignment. In addition, we conducted interviews with selected students to gain deeper insights into their overall experiences with ChatGPT. Our analysis examined the advantages and barriers of using ChatGPT, students' querying behavior, the types of assistance sought, and its impact on assignment outcomes and engagement. Based on the findings, we discuss design considerations for an educational solution that goes beyond the basic interface of ChatGPT, specifically tailored for data visualization education.

By adopting a more flexible definition of unlearning and adjusting the model distribution to simulate training without the targeted data, approximate machine unlearning provides a less resource-demanding alternative to the more laborious exact unlearning methods. Yet, the unlearning completeness of target samples-even when the approximate algorithms are executed faithfully without external threats-remains largely unexamined, raising questions about those approximate algorithms' ability to fulfill their commitment of unlearning during the lifecycle. In this paper, we introduce the task of Lifecycle Unlearning Commitment Management (LUCM) for approximate unlearning and outline its primary challenges. We propose an efficient metric designed to assess the sample-level unlearning completeness. Our empirical results demonstrate its superiority over membership inference techniques in two key areas: the strong correlation of its measurements with unlearning completeness across various unlearning tasks, and its computational efficiency, making it suitable for real-time applications. Additionally, we show that this metric is able to serve as a tool for monitoring unlearning anomalies throughout the unlearning lifecycle, including both under-unlearning and over-unlearning. We apply this metric to evaluate the unlearning commitments of current approximate algorithms. Our analysis, conducted across multiple unlearning benchmarks, reveals that these algorithms inconsistently fulfill their unlearning commitments due to two main issues: 1) unlearning new data can significantly affect the unlearning utility of previously requested data, and 2) approximate algorithms fail to ensure equitable unlearning utility across different groups. These insights emphasize the crucial importance of LUCM throughout the unlearning lifecycle. We will soon open-source our newly developed benchmark.

In this paper, we explore the challenges associated with establishing an end-to-end fact-checking pipeline in a real-world context, covering over 90 languages. Our real-world experimental benchmarks demonstrate that fine-tuning Transformer models specifically for fact-checking tasks, such as claim detection and veracity prediction, provide superior performance over large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, GPT-3.5-Turbo, and Mistral-7b. However, we illustrate that LLMs excel in generative tasks such as question decomposition for evidence retrieval. Through extensive evaluation, we show the efficacy of fine-tuned models for fact-checking in a multilingual setting and complex claims that include numerical quantities.

In patent prosecution, image-based retrieval systems for identifying similarities between current patent images and prior art are pivotal to ensure the novelty and non-obviousness of patent applications. Despite their growing popularity in recent years, existing attempts, while effective at recognizing images within the same patent, fail to deliver practical value due to their limited generalizability in retrieving relevant prior art. Moreover, this task inherently involves the challenges posed by the abstract visual features of patent images, the skewed distribution of image classifications, and the semantic information of image descriptions. Therefore, we propose a language-informed, distribution-aware multimodal approach to patent image feature learning, which enriches the semantic understanding of patent image by integrating Large Language Models and improves the performance of underrepresented classes with our proposed distribution-aware contrastive losses. Extensive experiments on DeepPatent2 dataset show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art or comparable performance in image-based patent retrieval with mAP +53.3%, Recall@10 +41.8%, and MRR@10 +51.9%. Furthermore, through an in-depth user analysis, we explore our model in aiding patent professionals in their image retrieval efforts, highlighting the model's real-world applicability and effectiveness.

Gender-neutral pronouns are increasingly being introduced across Western languages. Recent evaluations have however demonstrated that English NLP systems are unable to correctly process gender-neutral pronouns, with the risk of erasing and misgendering non-binary individuals. This paper examines a Dutch coreference resolution system's performance on gender-neutral pronouns, specifically hen and die. In Dutch, these pronouns were only introduced in 2016, compared to the longstanding existence of singular they in English. We additionally compare two debiasing techniques for coreference resolution systems in non-binary contexts: Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA) and delexicalisation. Moreover, because pronoun performance can be hard to interpret from a general evaluation metric like LEA, we introduce an innovative evaluation metric, the pronoun score, which directly represents the portion of correctly processed pronouns. Our results reveal diminished performance on gender-neutral pronouns compared to gendered counterparts. Nevertheless, although delexicalisation fails to yield improvements, CDA substantially reduces the performance gap between gendered and gender-neutral pronouns. We further show that CDA remains effective in low-resource settings, in which a limited set of debiasing documents is used. This efficacy extends to previously unseen neopronouns, which are currently infrequently used but may gain popularity in the future, underscoring the viability of effective debiasing with minimal resources and low computational costs.