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Towards Robust Speech Recognition for Jamaican Patois Music Transcription

Madden, Jordan, Stone, Matthew, Johnson, Dimitri, Geddez, Daniel

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Although Jamaican Patois is a widely spoken language, current speech recognition systems perform poorly on Patois music, producing inaccurate captions that limit accessibility and hinder downstream applications. In this work, we take a data-centric approach to this problem by curating more than 40 hours of manually transcribed Patois music. We use this dataset to fine-tune state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, and use the results to develop scaling laws for the performance of Whisper models on Jamaican Patois audio. We hope that this work will have a positive impact on the accessibility of Jamaican Patois music and the future of Jamaican Patois language modeling.


A Closer Look at Machine Unlearning for Large Language Models

Yuan, Xiaojian, Pang, Tianyu, Du, Chao, Chen, Kejiang, Zhang, Weiming, Lin, Min

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Due to the high cost of retraining from scratch, researchers attempt to employ machine unlearning to remove specific content from LLMs while preserving the overall performance. In this paper, we discuss several issues in machine unlearning for LLMs and provide our insights on possible approaches. To address the issue of inadequate evaluation of model outputs after unlearning, we introduce three additional metrics to evaluate token diversity, sentence semantics, and factual correctness. We then categorize unlearning methods into untargeted and targeted, and discuss their issues respectively. Specifically, the behavior that untargeted unlearning attempts to approximate is unpredictable and may involve hallucinations, and existing regularization is insufficient for targeted unlearning. To alleviate these issues, we propose using the objective of maximizing entropy (ME) for untargeted unlearning and incorporate answer preservation (AP) loss as regularization for targeted unlearning. Experimental results across three scenarios, i.e., fictitious unlearning, continual unlearning, and real-world unlearning, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have undergone rapid development, demonstrating impressive capabilities across a wide range of applications, from natural language processing to complex problem-solving. These concerns are particularly relevant within legal and regulatory frameworks, such as the Right to be Forgotten (Dang, 2021), which aims to empower individuals to have unauthorized data erased from digital records. Addressing these issues is crucial for ensuring the responsible deployment of LLMs in real-world applications. Due to the high cost of retraining LLMs, researchers have explored machine unlearning techniques, namely LLM unlearning (Cao & Yang, 2015; Bourtoule et al., 2021; Yao et al., 2023). The typical paradigm involves fine-tuning the target LLM on a specified set, known as the forget set, to obtain an unlearned model. As described in (Maini et al., 2024; Jin et al., 2024), the unlearned model should meet two primary goals: 1) it should not reveal any information contained in the forget set, and 2) it should maintain performance on the neighbor set, which has a distribution similar to the forget set but is not the target of unlearning, as well as on other tasks with general knowledge. While the first goal is generally easier to achieve, the main challenge lies in meeting the second goal (Liu et al., 2024b; Maini et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2024a; Ji et al., 2024; Shi et al., 2024a; Wang et al., 2024c). In this paper, we have a closer look at machine unlearning for LLMs. We note that most prior studies (Maini et al., 2024; Ji et al., 2024; Jia et al., 2024; Jin et al., 2024; Shi et al., 2024a) primarily rely on ROUGE (Lin, 2004) as the sole metric for evaluating the output of unlearned models.


Keeping Teams in the Game: Predicting Dropouts in Online Problem-Based Learning Competition

Panwar, Aditya, S, Ashwin T, Rajendran, Ramkumar, Arya, Kavi

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Online learning and MOOCs have become increasingly popular in recent years, and the trend will continue, given the technology boom. There is a dire need to observe learners' behavior in these online courses, similar to what instructors do in a face-to-face classroom. Learners' strategies and activities become crucial to understanding their behavior. One major challenge in online courses is predicting and preventing dropout behavior. While several studies have tried to perform such analysis, there is still a shortage of studies that employ different data streams to understand and predict the drop rates. Moreover, studies rarely use a fully online team-based collaborative environment as their context. Thus, the current study employs an online longitudinal problem-based learning (PBL) collaborative robotics competition as the testbed. Through methodological triangulation, the study aims to predict dropout behavior via the contributions of Discourse discussion forum 'activities' of participating teams, along with a self-reported Online Learning Strategies Questionnaire (OSLQ). The study also uses Qualitative interviews to enhance the ground truth and results. The OSLQ data is collected from more than 4000 participants. Furthermore, the study seeks to establish the reliability of OSLQ to advance research within online environments. Various Machine Learning algorithms are applied to analyze the data. The findings demonstrate the reliability of OSLQ with our substantial sample size and reveal promising results for predicting the dropout rate in online competition.


Testing GPT-4 with Wolfram Alpha and Code Interpreter plug-ins on math and science problems

Davis, Ernest, Aaronson, Scott

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Our test sets were too small and too haphazard to support statistically valid conclusions, but they were suggestive of a number of conclusions. We summarize these here, and discuss them at greater length in section 7. Over the kinds of problems tested, GPT-4 with either plug-in is significantly stronger than GPT-4 by itself, or, almost certainly, than any AI that existed a year ago. However it is still far from reliable; it often outputs a wrong answer or fails to output any answer. In terms of overall score, we would judge that these systems performs on the level of a middling undergraduate student. However, their capacities and weaknesses do not align with a human student; the systems solve some problems that even capable students would find challenging, whereas they fail on some problems that even middling high school students would find easy.


Factoring the Matrix of Domination: A Critical Review and Reimagination of Intersectionality in AI Fairness

Ovalle, Anaelia, Subramonian, Arjun, Gautam, Vagrant, Gee, Gilbert, Chang, Kai-Wei

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

These notions vary across conceptualization Intersectionality is a critical framework that, through inquiry and (e.g., group, individual fairness [8]) and operationalization (e.g., praxis, allows us to examine how social inequalities persist through pre/in/post-processing [2]) [54]; nevertheless, the literature generally domains of structure and discipline. Given AI fairness' raison d'être agrees on the goal of minimizing negative outcomes across of "fairness," we argue that adopting intersectionality as an analytical demographic groups, including groups associated with multiple, framework is pivotal to effectively operationalizing fairness. "intersectional" demographic attributes (e.g., Black women) [92]. Through a critical review of how intersectionality is discussed in However, Kong [66] observes that AI fairness papers often narrowly 30 papers from the AI fairness literature, we deductively and inductively: interpret intersectional subgroup fairness as intersectionality, the 1) map how intersectionality tenets operate within the critical framework from which the term originates [29, 67]. This AI fairness paradigm and 2) uncover gaps between the conceptualization myopic conceptualization of intersectionality has non-trivial consequences and operationalization of intersectionality. We find that for just AI design and epistemology (i.e., ways of knowing).


Machine Learning: Algorithms, Models, and Applications

Sen, Jaydip, Mehtab, Sidra, Sen, Rajdeep, Dutta, Abhishek, Kherwa, Pooja, Ahmed, Saheel, Berry, Pranay, Khurana, Sahil, Singh, Sonali, Cadotte, David W. W, Anderson, David W., Ost, Kalum J., Akinbo, Racheal S., Daramola, Oladunni A., Lainjo, Bongs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent times are witnessing rapid development in machine learning algorithm systems, especially in reinforcement learning, natural language processing, computer and robot vision, image processing, speech, and emotional processing and understanding. In tune with the increasing importance and relevance of machine learning models, algorithms, and their applications, and with the emergence of more innovative uses cases of deep learning and artificial intelligence, the current volume presents a few innovative research works and their applications in real world, such as stock trading, medical and healthcare systems, and software automation. The chapters in the book illustrate how machine learning and deep learning algorithms and models are designed, optimized, and deployed. The volume will be useful for advanced graduate and doctoral students, researchers, faculty members of universities, practicing data scientists and data engineers, professionals, and consultants working on the broad areas of machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence.


Exploring Common and Individual Characteristics of Students via Matrix Recovering

Wang, Zhen, Teng, Ben, Zhou, Yun, Tong, Hanshuang, Liu, Guangtong

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Balancing group teaching and individual mentoring is an important issue in education area. The nature behind this issue is to explore common characteristics shared by multiple students and individual characteristics for each student. Biclustering methods have been proved successful for detecting meaningful patterns with the goal of driving group instructions based on students' characteristics. However, these methods ignore the individual characteristics of students as they only focus on common characteristics of students. In this article, we propose a framework to detect both group characteristics and individual characteristics of students simultaneously. We assume that the characteristics matrix of students' is composed of two parts: one is a low-rank matrix representing the common characteristics of students; the other is a sparse matrix representing individual characteristics of students. Thus, we treat the balancing issue as a matrix recovering problem. The experiment results show the effectiveness of our method. Firstly, it can detect meaningful biclusters that are comparable with the state-of-the-art biclutering algorithms. Secondly, it can identify individual characteristics for each student simultaneously. Both the source code of our algorithm and the real datasets are available upon request.



A Bayesian Network approach to County-Level Corn Yield Prediction using historical data and expert knowledge

Chawla, Vikas, Naik, Hsiang Sing, Akintayo, Adedotun, Hayes, Dermot, Schnable, Patrick, Ganapathysubramanian, Baskar, Sarkar, Soumik

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Crop yield forecasting is the methodology of predicting crop yields prior to harvest. The availability of accurate yield prediction frameworks have enormous implications from multiple standpoints, including impact on the crop commodity futures markets, formulation of agricultural policy, as well as crop insurance rating. The focus of this work is to construct a corn yield predictor at the county scale. Corn yield (forecasting) depends on a complex, interconnected set of variables that include economic, agricultural, management and meteorological factors. Conventional forecasting is either knowledge-based computer programs (that simulate plant-weather-soil-management interactions) coupled with targeted surveys or statistical model based. The former is limited by the need for painstaking calibration, while the latter is limited to univariate analysis or similar simplifying assumptions that fail to capture the complex interdependencies affecting yield. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach that is "gray box" i.e. that seamlessly utilizes expert knowledge in constructing a statistical network model for corn yield forecasting. Our multivariate gray box model is developed on Bayesian network analysis to build a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) between predictors and yield. Starting from a complete graph connecting various carefully chosen variables and yield, expert knowledge is used to prune or strengthen edges connecting variables. Subsequently the structure (connectivity and edge weights) of the DAG that maximizes the likelihood of observing the training data is identified via optimization. We curated an extensive set of historical data (1948-2012) for each of the 99 counties in Iowa as data to train the model.


Photos: FIRST Robotics Championship Brings Students to St. Louis

U.S. News

The Dome at America's Center in St. Louis is the site of the FIRST Championship opening ceremonies on Wednesday, April 28, 2016. Team 9915: Robo Thunder from Bellevue, Wash., left, and team 6899: Blue Bots from Kingston, Jamaica, participate in the FIRST qualification matches in St. Louis. Team 2881: Lady Cans from Austin, Texas, is an all-girl team of 24. Dean Kamen stands in the Dome at America's Center in St. Louis before the STRONGHOLD games begin on Wednesday, April 28, 2016. Team 1011: CRUSH from Tucson, Ariz., takes part in its qualifying match.