Creativity, i.e., the process of generating and developing fresh and original ideas or products that are useful or effective, is a valuable skill in a variety of domains. Creativity is called an essential 21st-century skill that should be taught in schools. The use of educational technology to promote creativity is an active study field, as evidenced by several studies linking creativity in the classroom to beneficial learning outcomes. Despite the burgeoning body of research on adaptive technology for education, mining creative thinking patterns from educational data remains a challenging task. In this paper, to address this challenge, we put the first step towards formalizing educational knowledge by constructing a domain-specific Knowledge Base to identify essential concepts, facts, and assumptions in identifying creative patterns. We then introduce a pipeline to contextualize the raw educational data, such as assessments and class activities. Finally, we present a rule-based approach to learning from the Knowledge Base, and facilitate mining creative thinking patterns from contextualized data and knowledge. We evaluate our approach with real-world datasets and highlight how the proposed pipeline can help instructors understand creative thinking patterns from students' activities and assessment tasks.

Learning the underlying equation from data is a fundamental problem in many disciplines. Recent advances rely on Neural Networks (NNs) but do not provide theoretical guarantees in obtaining the exact equations owing to the non-convexity of NNs. In this paper, we propose Convex Neural Symbolic Learning (CoNSoLe) to seek convexity under mild conditions. The main idea is to decompose the recovering process into two steps and convexify each step. In the first step of searching for right symbols, we convexify the deep Q-learning. The key is to maintain double convexity for both the negative Q-function and the negative reward function in each iteration, leading to provable convexity of the negative optimal Q function to learn the true symbol connections. Conditioned on the exact searching result, we construct a Locally Convex equation Learner (LoCaL) neural network to convexify the estimation of symbol coefficients. With such a design, we quantify a large region with strict convexity in the loss surface of LoCaL for commonly used physical functions. Finally, we demonstrate the superior performance of the CoNSoLe framework over the state-of-the-art on a diverse set of datasets.

Video-Language Pretraining (VLP), which aims to learn transferable representation to advance a wide range of video-text downstream tasks, has recently received increasing attention. Best performing works rely on large-scale, 3rd-person video-text datasets, such as HowTo100M. In this work, we exploit the recently released Ego4D dataset to pioneer Egocentric VLP along three directions. (i) We create EgoClip, a 1st-person video-text pretraining dataset comprising 3.8M clip-text pairs well-chosen from Ego4D, covering a large variety of human daily activities. (ii) We propose a novel pretraining objective, dubbed EgoNCE, which adapts video-text contrastive learning to the egocentric domain by mining egocentric-aware positive and negative samples. (iii) We introduce EgoMCQ, a development benchmark that is close to EgoClip and hence can support effective validation and fast exploration of our design decisions in EgoClip and EgoNCE. Furthermore, we demonstrate strong performance on five egocentric downstream tasks across three datasets: video-text retrieval on EPIC-KITCHENS-100; action recognition on Charades-Ego; natural language query, moment query, and object state change classification on Ego4D challenge benchmarks. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/showlab/EgoVLP.

Efficient transformer variants with linear time complexity have been developed to mitigate the quadratic computational overhead of the vanilla transformer. Among them are low-rank projection methods such as Linformer and kernel-based Transformers. Despite their unique merits, they usually suffer from a performance drop comparing with the vanilla transformer on many sequence generation tasks, and often fail to obtain computation gain when the generation is short. We propose MemSizer, an approach towards closing the performance gap while improving the efficiency even with short generation. It projects the source sequences into lower dimension representations like Linformer, while enjoying efficient recurrent-style incremental computation similar to kernel-based transformers. This yields linear computation time and constant memory complexity at inference time. MemSizer also employs a lightweight multi-head mechanism which renders the computation as light as a single-head model. We demonstrate that MemSizer provides an improved balance between efficiency and accuracy over the vanilla transformer and other efficient transformer variants in three typical sequence generation tasks, including machine translation, abstractive text summarization, and language modeling.

In this paper, we explore the use of large language models to assess human interpretations of real world events. To do so, we use a language model trained prior to 2020 to artificially generate news articles concerning COVID-19 given the headlines of actual articles written during the pandemic. We then compare stylistic qualities of our artificially generated corpus with a news corpus, in this case 5,082 articles produced by CBC News between January 23 and May 5, 2020. We find our artificially generated articles exhibits a considerably more negative attitude towards COVID and a significantly lower reliance on geopolitical framing. Our methods and results hold importance for researchers seeking to simulate large scale cultural processes via recent breakthroughs in text generation.

With the rapid spread of COVID-19 worldwide, viral genomic data is available in the order of millions of sequences on public databases such as GISAID. This Big Data creates a unique opportunity for analysis towards the research of effective vaccine development for current pandemics, and avoiding or mitigating future pandemics. One piece of information that comes with every such viral sequence is the geographical location where it was collected -- the patterns found between viral variants and geographical location surely being an important part of this analysis. One major challenge that researchers face is processing such huge, highly dimensional data to obtain useful insights as quickly as possible. Most of the existing methods face scalability issues when dealing with the magnitude of such data. In this paper, we propose an approach that first computes a numerical representation of the spike protein sequence of SARS-CoV-2 using $k$-mers (substrings) and then uses several machine learning models to classify the sequences based on geographical location. We show that our proposed model significantly outperforms the baselines. We also show the importance of different amino acids in the spike sequences by computing the information gain corresponding to the true class labels.

Well-designed diagnostic tasks have played a key role in studying the failure of neural nets (NNs) to generalize systematically. Famous examples include SCAN and Compositional Table Lookup (CTL). Here we introduce CTL++, a new diagnostic dataset based on compositions of unary symbolic functions. While the original CTL is used to test length generalization or productivity, CTL++ is designed to test systematicity of NNs, that is, their capability to generalize to unseen compositions of known functions. CTL++ splits functions into groups and tests performance on group elements composed in a way not seen during training. We show that recent CTL-solving Transformer variants fail on CTL++. The simplicity of the task design allows for fine-grained control of task difficulty, as well as many insightful analyses. For example, we measure how much overlap between groups is needed by tested NNs for learning to compose. We also visualize how learned symbol representations in outputs of functions from different groups are compatible in case of success but not in case of failure. These results provide insights into failure cases reported on more complex compositions in the natural language domain. Our code is public.

Electroencephalography (EEG) provides access to neuronal dynamics non-invasively with millisecond resolution, rendering it a viable method in neuroscience and healthcare. However, its utility is limited as current EEG technology does not generalize well across domains (i.e., sessions and subjects) without expensive supervised re-calibration. Contemporary methods cast this transfer learning (TL) problem as a multi-source/-target unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) problem and address it with deep learning or shallow, Riemannian geometry aware alignment methods. Both directions have, so far, failed to consistently close the performance gap to state-of-the-art domain-specific methods based on tangent space mapping (TSM) on the symmetric positive definite (SPD) manifold. Here, we propose a theory-based machine learning framework that enables, for the first time, learning domain-invariant TSM models in an end-to-end fashion. To achieve this, we propose a new building block for geometric deep learning, which we denote SPD domain-specific momentum batch normalization (SPDDSMBN). A SPDDSMBN layer can transform domain-specific SPD inputs into domain-invariant SPD outputs, and can be readily applied to multi-source/-target and online UDA scenarios. In extensive experiments with 6 diverse EEG brain-computer interface (BCI) datasets, we obtain state-of-the-art performance in inter-session and -subject TL with a simple, intrinsically interpretable network architecture, which we denote TSMNet.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected countries across the world, demanding drastic public health policies to mitigate the spread of infection, leading to economic crisis as a collateral damage. In this work, we investigated the impact of human mobility (described via international commercial flights) on COVID-19 infection dynamics at the global scale. For this, we developed a graph neural network-based framework referred to as Dynamic Connectivity GraphSAGE (DCSAGE), which operates over spatiotemporal graphs and is well-suited for dynamically changing adjacency information. To obtain insights on the relative impact of different geographical locations, due to their associated air traffic, on the evolution of the pandemic, we conducted local sensitivity analysis on our model through node perturbation experiments. From our analyses, we identified Western Europe, North America, and Middle East as the leading geographical locations fueling the pandemic, attributed to the enormity of air traffic originating or transiting through these regions. We used these observations to identify tangible air traffic reduction strategies that can have a high impact on controlling the pandemic, with minimal interference to human mobility. Our work provides a robust deep learning-based tool to study global pandemics and is of key relevance to policy makers to take informed decisions regarding air traffic restrictions during future outbreaks.

We introduce a high-quality dataset that contains 3,397 samples comprising (i) multiple choice questions, (ii) answers (including distractors), and (iii) their source documents, from the educational domain. Each question is phrased in two forms, normal and close. Correct answers are linked to source documents with sentence-level annotations. Thus, our versatile dataset can be used for both question and distractor generation, as well as to explore new challenges such as question format conversion. Furthermore, 903 questions are accompanied by their cognitive complexity level as per Bloom's taxonomy. All questions have been generated by educational experts rather than crowd workers to ensure they are maintaining educational and learning standards. Our analysis and experiments suggest distinguishable differences between our dataset and commonly used ones for question generation for educational purposes. We believe this new dataset can serve as a valuable resource for research and evaluation in the educational domain. The dataset and baselines will be released to support further research in question generation.