Small-group tutoring in Computer Science (CS) is effective, but presents the challenge of providing a dedicated tutor for each group and encouraging collaboration among group members at scale. We present Pensieve Discuss, a software platform that integrates synchronous editing for scaffolded programming problems with online human and AI tutors, designed to improve student collaboration and experience during group tutoring sessions. Our semester-long deployment to 800 students in a CS1 course demonstrated consistently high collaboration rates, positive feedback about the AI tutor's helpfulness and correctness, increased satisfaction with the group tutoring experience, and a substantial increase in question volume. The use of our system was preferred over an interface lacking AI tutors and synchronous editing capabilities. Our experiences suggest that small-group tutoring sessions are an important avenue for future research in educational AI.

Social media posts provide valuable insight into the narrative of users and their intentions, including providing an opportunity to automatically model whether a social media user is depressed or not. The challenge lies in faithfully modelling user narratives from their online social media posts, which could potentially be useful in several different applications. We have developed a novel and effective model called \texttt{NarrationDep}, which focuses on detecting narratives associated with depression. By analyzing a user's tweets, \texttt{NarrationDep} accurately identifies crucial narratives. \texttt{NarrationDep} is a deep learning framework that jointly models individual user tweet representations and clusters of users' tweets. As a result, \texttt{NarrationDep} is characterized by a novel two-layer deep learning model: the first layer models using social media text posts, and the second layer learns semantic representations of tweets associated with a cluster. To faithfully model these cluster representations, the second layer incorporates a novel component that hierarchically learns from users' posts. The results demonstrate that our framework outperforms other comparative models including recently developed models on a variety of datasets.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various domains. However, the enormous number of model parameters makes fine-tuning challenging, significantly limiting their application and deployment. Existing solutions combine parameter quantization with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), greatly reducing memory usage but resulting in noticeable performance degradation. In this paper, we identify an imbalance in fine-tuning quantized pre-trained models: overly complex adapter inputs and outputs versus low effective trainability of the adaptation. We propose Quantized LLMs with Balanced-rank Adaptation (Q-BaRA), which simplifies the adapter inputs and outputs while increasing the adapter's rank to achieve a more suitable balance for fine-tuning quantized LLMs. Additionally, for scenarios where fine-tuned LLMs need to be deployed as low-precision inference models, we introduce Quantization-Aware Fine-tuning with Higher Rank Adaptation (QA-HiRA), which simplifies the adapter inputs and outputs to align with the pre-trained model's block-wise quantization while employing a single matrix to achieve a higher rank. Both Q-BaRA and QA-HiRA are easily implemented and offer the following optimizations: (i) Q-BaRA consistently achieves the highest accuracy compared to baselines and other variants, requiring the same number of trainable parameters and computational effort; (ii) QA-HiRA naturally merges adapter parameters into the block-wise quantized model after fine-tuning, achieving the highest accuracy compared to other methods. We apply our Q-BaRA and QA-HiRA to the LLaMA and LLaMA2 model families and validate their effectiveness across different fine-tuning datasets and downstream scenarios. Code will be made available at \href{https://github.com/xiaocaigou/qbaraqahira}{https://github.com/xiaocaigou/qbaraqahira}

Unsupervised domain adaptive segmentation aims to improve the segmentation accuracy of models on target domains without relying on labeled data from those domains. This approach is crucial when labeled target domain data is scarce or unavailable. It seeks to align the feature representations of the source domain (where labeled data is available) and the target domain (where only unlabeled data is present), thus enabling the model to generalize well to the target domain. Current image- and video-level domain adaptation have been addressed using different and specialized frameworks, training strategies and optimizations despite their underlying connections. In this paper, we propose a unified framework PiPa++, which leverages the core idea of ``comparing'' to (1) explicitly encourage learning of discriminative pixel-wise features with intraclass compactness and inter-class separability, (2) promote the robust feature learning of the identical patch against different contexts or fluctuations, and (3) enable the learning of temporal continuity under dynamic environments. With the designed task-smart contrastive sampling strategy, PiPa++ enables the mining of more informative training samples according to the task demand. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both image-level and video-level domain adaption benchmarks. Moreover, the proposed method is compatible with other UDA approaches to further improve the performance without introducing extra parameters.

Human mobility is intricately influenced by urban contexts spatially and temporally, constituting essential domain knowledge in understanding traffic systems. While existing traffic forecasting models primarily rely on raw traffic data and advanced deep learning techniques, incorporating contextual information remains underexplored due to the lack of effective integration frameworks and the complexity of urban contexts. This study proposes a novel context-aware knowledge graph (CKG) framework to enhance traffic speed forecasting by effectively modeling spatial and temporal contexts. Employing a relation-dependent integration strategy, the framework generates context-aware representations from the spatial and temporal units of CKG to capture spatio-temporal dependencies of urban contexts. A CKG-GNN model, combining the CKG, dual-view multi-head self-attention (MHSA), and graph neural network (GNN), is then designed to predict traffic speed using these context-aware representations. Our experiments demonstrate that CKG's configuration significantly influences embedding performance, with ComplEx and KG2E emerging as optimal for embedding spatial and temporal units, respectively. The CKG-GNN model surpasses benchmark models, achieving an average MAE of $3.46\pm0.01$ and a MAPE of $14.76\pm0.09\%$ for traffic speed predictions from 10 to 120 minutes. The dual-view MHSA analysis reveals the crucial role of relation-dependent features from the context-based view and the model's ability to prioritize recent time slots in prediction from the sequence-based view. The CKG framework's model-agnostic nature suggests its potential applicability in various applications of intelligent transportation systems. Overall, this study underscores the importance of incorporating domain-specific contexts into traffic forecasting and merging context-aware knowledge graphs with neural networks to enhance accuracy.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. However, the underlying working mechanism of ICL remains poorly understood. Recent research presents two conflicting views on ICL: One attributes it to LLMs' inherent ability of task recognition, deeming label correctness and shot numbers of demonstrations as not crucial; the other emphasizes the impact of similar examples in the demonstrations, stressing the need for label correctness and more shots. In this work, we provide a Two-Dimensional Coordinate System that unifies both views into a systematic framework. The framework explains the behavior of ICL through two orthogonal variables: whether LLMs can recognize the task and whether similar examples are presented in the demonstrations. We propose the peak inverse rank metric to detect the task recognition ability of LLMs and study LLMs' reactions to different definitions of similarity. Based on these, we conduct extensive experiments to elucidate how ICL functions across each quadrant on multiple representative classification tasks. Finally, we extend our analyses to generation tasks, showing that our coordinate system can also be used to interpret ICL for generation tasks effectively.

Named entity recognition on the in-domain supervised and few-shot settings have been extensively discussed in the NLP community and made significant progress. However, cross-domain NER, a more common task in practical scenarios, still poses a challenge for most NER methods. Previous research efforts in that area primarily focus on knowledge transfer such as correlate label information from source to target domains but few works pay attention to the problem of label conflict. In this study, we introduce a label alignment and reassignment approach, namely LAR, to address this issue for enhanced cross-domain named entity recognition, which includes two core procedures: label alignment between source and target domains and label reassignment for type inference. The process of label reassignment can significantly be enhanced by integrating with an advanced large-scale language model such as ChatGPT. We conduct an extensive range of experiments on NER datasets involving both supervised and zero-shot scenarios. Empirical experimental results demonstrate the validation of our method with remarkable performance under the supervised and zero-shot out-of-domain settings compared to SOTA methods.

The Chinese Communist Party is a geopolitical cancer that will metastasize unless America can contain it with a once-in-a-generation investment in our national defense. Already, the CCP is actively colluding with Russia, prolonging Putin's war against Ukraine by blunting the impact of Western sanctions; it reaffirmed its support for Iran even after the deadly Oct. 7 attacks against Israel; and it has an explicit defense treaty with Kim Jung Un's North Korean dictatorship. To make matters even more dire, Chinese President Xi Jinping has instructed his People's Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Chinese President Xi Jinping has instructed his People's Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. As George Washington counseled Congress in the nation's first ever inaugural address, "to be prepared for war is the most effectual means of preserving the peace."

With advancements in data availability and computing resources, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have showcased capabilities across various fields. However, the quadratic complexity of the vision encoder in MLLMs constrains the resolution of input images. Most current approaches mitigate this issue by cropping high-resolution images into smaller sub-images, which are then processed independently by the vision encoder. Despite capturing sufficient local details, these sub-images lack global context and fail to interact with one another. To address this limitation, we propose a novel MLLM, INF-LLaVA, designed for effective high-resolution image perception. INF-LLaVA incorporates two innovative components. First, we introduce a Dual-perspective Cropping Module (DCM), which ensures that each sub-image contains continuous details from a local perspective and comprehensive information from a global perspective. Second, we introduce Dual-perspective Enhancement Module (DEM) to enable the mutual enhancement of global and local features, allowing INF-LLaVA to effectively process high-resolution images by simultaneously capturing detailed local information and comprehensive global context. Extensive ablation studies validate the effectiveness of these components, and experiments on a diverse set of benchmarks demonstrate that INF-LLaVA outperforms existing MLLMs. Code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/WeihuangLin/INF-LLaVA.

Statistical heterogeneity is a root cause of tension among accuracy, fairness, and robustness of federated learning (FL), and is key in paving a path forward. Personalized FL (PFL) is an approach that aims to reduce the impact of statistical heterogeneity by developing personalized models for individual users, while also inherently providing benefits in terms of fairness and robustness. However, existing PFL frameworks focus on improving the performance of personalized models while neglecting the global model. Moreover, these frameworks achieve sublinear convergence rates and rely on strong assumptions. In this paper, we propose FLAME, an optimization framework by utilizing the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to train personalized and global models. We propose a model selection strategy to improve performance in situations where clients have different types of heterogeneous data. Our theoretical analysis establishes the global convergence and two kinds of convergence rates for FLAME under mild assumptions. We theoretically demonstrate that FLAME is more robust and fair than the state-of-the-art methods on a class of linear problems. Our experimental findings show that FLAME outperforms state-of-the-art methods in convergence and accuracy, and it achieves higher test accuracy under various attacks and performs more uniformly across clients.