Effective labeled data collection plays a critical role in developing and fine-tuning robust streaming analytics systems. However, continuously labeling documents to filter relevant information poses significant challenges like limited labeling budget or lack of high-quality labels. There is a need for efficient human-in-the-loop machine learning (HITL-ML) design to improve streaming analytics systems. One particular HITL- ML approach is online active learning, which involves iteratively selecting a small set of the most informative documents for labeling to enhance the ML model performance. The performance of such algorithms can get affected due to human errors in labeling. To address these challenges, we propose ORIS, a method to perform Online active learning using Reinforcement learning-based Inclusive Sampling of documents for labeling. ORIS aims to create a novel Deep Q-Network-based strategy to sample incoming documents that minimize human errors in labeling and enhance the ML model performance. We evaluate the ORIS method on emotion recognition tasks, and it outperforms traditional baselines in terms of both human labeling performance and the ML model performance.

LLMs can now act as autonomous agents that interact with digital environments and complete specific objectives (e.g., arranging an online meeting). However, accuracy is still far from satisfactory, partly due to a lack of large-scale, direct demonstrations for digital tasks. Obtaining supervised data from humans is costly, and automatic data collection through exploration or reinforcement learning relies on complex environmental and content setup, resulting in datasets that lack comprehensive coverage of various scenarios. On the other hand, there is abundant knowledge that may indirectly assist task completion, such as online tutorials that were created for human consumption. In this work, we present Synatra, an approach that effectively transforms this indirect knowledge into direct supervision at scale. We define different types of indirect knowledge, and carefully study the available sources to obtain it, methods to encode the structure of direct demonstrations, and finally methods to transform indirect knowledge into direct demonstrations. We use 100k such synthetically-created demonstrations to finetune a 7B CodeLlama, and demonstrate that the resulting agent surpasses all comparably sized models on three web-based task benchmarks Mind2Web, MiniWoB++ and WebArena, as well as surpassing GPT-3.5 on WebArena and Mind2Web. In addition, while synthetic demonstrations prove to be only 3% the cost of human demonstrations (at $0.031 each), we show that the synthetic demonstrations can be more effective than an identical number of human demonstrations collected from limited domains.

I've always been interested in coding, but I've never had the time to sit down and actually learn how it works. That's why I'm really happy I found this two-part deal that has Microsoft Visual Studio Pro and the Premium Learn to Code Bundle. It gave me some much-needed beginner-friendly coding lessons and the software to actually use what I learned. I do wish I'd waited a few days to buy it though. Then I'd have caught the Early Black Friday Sale and been able to get the whole thing for 55.97.

AI2T is an interactively teachable AI for authoring intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs). Authors tutor AI2T by providing a few step-by-step solutions and then grading AI2T's own problem-solving attempts. From just 20-30 minutes of interactive training, AI2T can induce robust rules for step-by-step solution tracking (i.e., model-tracing). As AI2T learns it can accurately estimate its certainty of performing correctly on unseen problem steps using STAND: a self-aware precondition learning algorithm that outperforms state-of-the-art methods like XGBoost. Our user study shows that authors can use STAND's certainty heuristic to estimate when AI2T has been trained on enough diverse problems to induce correct and complete model-tracing programs. AI2T-induced programs are more reliable than hallucination-prone LLMs and prior authoring-by-tutoring approaches. With its self-aware induction of hierarchical rules, AI2T offers a path toward trustable data-efficient authoring-by-tutoring for complex ITSs that normally require as many as 200-300 hours of programming per hour of instruction.

PAC-Bayes learning is a comprehensive setting for (i) studying the generalisation ability of learning algorithms and (ii) deriving new learning algorithms by optimising a generalisation bound. However, optimising generalisation bounds might not always be viable for tractable or computational reasons, or both. For example, iteratively querying the empirical risk might prove computationally expensive. In response, we introduce a novel principled strategy for building an iterative learning algorithm via the optimisation of a sequence of surrogate training objectives, inherited from PAC-Bayes generalisation bounds. The key argument is to replace the empirical risk (seen as a function of hypotheses) in the generalisation bound by its projection onto a constructible low dimensional functional space: these projections can be queried much more efficiently than the initial risk. On top of providing that generic recipe for learning via surrogate PAC-Bayes bounds, we (i) contribute theoretical results establishing that iteratively optimising our surrogates implies the optimisation of the original generalisation bounds, (ii) instantiate this strategy to the framework of meta-learning, introducing a meta-objective offering a closed form expression for meta-gradient, (iii) illustrate our approach with numerical experiments inspired by an industrial biochemical problem.

Debugging is an essential skill when learning to program, yet its instruction and emphasis often vary widely across introductory courses. In the era of code-generating large language models (LLMs), the ability for students to reason about code and identify errors is increasingly important. However, students frequently resort to trial-and-error methods to resolve bugs without fully understanding the underlying issues. Developing the ability to identify and hypothesize the cause of bugs is crucial but can be time-consuming to teach effectively through traditional means. This paper introduces BugSpotter, an innovative tool that leverages an LLM to generate buggy code from a problem description and verify the synthesized bugs via a test suite. Students interact with BugSpotter by designing failing test cases, where the buggy code's output differs from the expected result as defined by the problem specification. This not only provides opportunities for students to enhance their debugging skills, but also to practice reading and understanding problem specifications. We deployed BugSpotter in a large classroom setting and compared the debugging exercises it generated to exercises hand-crafted by an instructor for the same problems. We found that the LLM-generated exercises produced by BugSpotter varied in difficulty and were well-matched to the problem specifications. Importantly, the LLM-generated exercises were comparable to those manually created by instructors with respect to student performance, suggesting that BugSpotter could be an effective and efficient aid for learning debugging.

This paper explores a new black-box, zero-shot language model inversion problem and proposes an innovative framework for prompt reconstruction using only text outputs from a language model. Leveraging a large language model alongside an optimization algorithm, the proposed method effectively recovers prompts with minimal resources. Experimental results on several datasets derived from public sources indicate that the proposed approach achieves high-quality prompt recovery and generates prompts more similar to the originals than current state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, the use-case study demonstrates the method's strong potential for generating high-quality text data.

Tensor network diagram (graphical notation) is a useful tool that graphically represents multiplications between multiple tensors using nodes and edges. Using the graphical notation, complex multiplications between tensors can be described simply and intuitively, and it also helps to understand the essence of tensor products. In fact, most of matrix/tensor products including inner product, outer product, Hadamard product, Kronecker product, and Khatri-Rao product can be written in graphical notation. These matrix/tensor operations are essential building blocks for the use of matrix/tensor decompositions in signal processing and machine learning. The purpose of this lecture note is to learn the very basics of tensors and how to represent them in mathematical symbols and graphical notation. Many papers using tensors omit these detailed definitions and explanations, which can be difficult for the reader. I hope this note will be of help to such readers.

This tutorial investigates the convergence of statistical mechanics and learning theory, elucidating the potential enhancements in machine learning methodologies through the integration of foundational principles from physics. The tutorial delves into advanced techniques like entropy, free energy, and variational inference which are utilized in machine learning, illustrating their significant contributions to model efficiency and robustness. By bridging these scientific disciplines, we aspire to inspire newer methodologies in researches, demonstrating how an in-depth comprehension of physical systems' behavior can yield more effective and dependable machine learning models, particularly in contexts characterized by uncertainty.

Urban spatio-temporal (ST) forecasting is crucial for various urban applications such as intelligent scheduling and trip planning. Previous studies focus on modeling ST correlations among urban locations in offline settings, which often neglect the non-stationary nature of urban ST data, particularly, distribution shifts over time. This oversight can lead to degraded performance in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we first analyze the distribution shifts in urban ST data, and then introduce DOST, a novel online continual learning framework tailored for ST data characteristics. DOST employs an adaptive ST network equipped with a variable-independent adapter to address the unique distribution shifts at each urban location dynamically. Further, to accommodate the gradual nature of these shifts, we also develop an awake-hibernate learning strategy that intermittently fine-tunes the adapter during the online phase to reduce computational overhead. This strategy integrates a streaming memory update mechanism designed for urban ST sequential data, enabling effective network adaptation to new patterns while preventing catastrophic forgetting. Experimental results confirm DOST's superiority over state-of-the-art models on four real-world datasets, providing online forecasts within an average of 0.1 seconds and achieving a 12.89% reduction in forecast errors compared to baseline models.