Instructional Material
MelissaDL x Breed: Towards Data-Efficient On-line Supervised Training of Multi-parametric Surrogates with Active Learning
Dymchenko, Sofya, Purandare, Abhishek, Raffin, Bruno
Artificial intelligence is transforming scientific computing with deep neural network surrogates that approximate solutions to partial differential equations (PDEs). Traditional off-line training methods face issues with storage and I/O efficiency, as the training dataset has to be computed with numerical solvers up-front. Our previous work, the Melissa framework, addresses these problems by enabling data to be created "on-the-fly" and streamed directly into the training process. In this paper we introduce a new active learning method to enhance data-efficiency for on-line surrogate training. The surrogate is direct and multi-parametric, i.e., it is trained to predict a given timestep directly with different initial and boundary conditions parameters. Our approach uses Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling guided by training loss statistics, in order to focus NN training on the difficult areas of the parameter space. Preliminary results for 2D heat PDE demonstrate the potential of this method, called Breed, to improve the generalization capabilities of surrogates while reducing computational overhead.
Towards an Operational Responsible AI Framework for Learning Analytics in Higher Education
Tirado, Alba Morales, Mulholland, Paul, Fernandez, Miriam
Universities are increasingly adopting data-driven strategies to enhance student success, with AI applications like Learning Analytics (LA) and Predictive Learning Analytics (PLA) playing a key role in identifying at-risk students, personalising learning, supporting teachers, and guiding educational decision-making. However, concerns are rising about potential harms these systems may pose, such as algorithmic biases leading to unequal support for minority students. While many have explored the need for Responsible AI in LA, existing works often lack practical guidance for how institutions can operationalise these principles. In this paper, we propose a novel Responsible AI framework tailored specifically to LA in Higher Education (HE). We started by mapping 11 established Responsible AI frameworks, including those by leading tech companies, to the context of LA in HE. This led to the identification of seven key principles such as transparency, fairness, and accountability. We then conducted a systematic review of the literature to understand how these principles have been applied in practice. Drawing from these findings, we present a novel framework that offers practical guidance to HE institutions and is designed to evolve with community input, ensuring its relevance as LA systems continue to develop.
HW-TSC's Submission to the CCMT 2024 Machine Translation Tasks
Wu, Zhanglin, Luo, Yuanchang, Wei, Daimeng, Zheng, Jiawei, Wei, Bin, Li, Zongyao, Shang, Hengchao, Guo, Jiaxin, Li, Shaojun, Zhang, Weidong, Xie, Ning, Yang, Hao
This paper presents the submission of Huawei Translation Services Center (HW-TSC) to machine translation tasks of the 20th China Conference on Machine Translation (CCMT 2024). We participate in the bilingual machine translation task and multi-domain machine translation task. For these two translation tasks, we use training strategies such as regularized dropout, bidirectional training, data diversification, forward translation, back translation, alternated training, curriculum learning, and transductive ensemble learning to train neural machine translation (NMT) models based on the deep Transformerbig architecture. Furthermore, to explore whether large language model (LLM) can effectively improve the translation quality of NMT models, we use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to train llama2-13b as an Automatic post-editing (APE) model to improve the translation results of the NMT model on the multi-domain machine translation task. By using these plyometric strategies, our submission achieves a competitive result in the final evaluation.
Understanding the Therapeutic Relationship between Counselors and Clients in Online Text-based Counseling using LLMs
Li, Anqi, Lu, Yu, Song, Nirui, Zhang, Shuai, Ma, Lizhi, Lan, Zhenzhong
Robust therapeutic relationships between counselors and clients are fundamental to counseling effectiveness. The assessment of therapeutic alliance is well-established in traditional face-to-face therapy but may not directly translate to text-based settings. With millions of individuals seeking support through online text-based counseling, understanding the relationship in such contexts is crucial. In this paper, we present an automatic approach using large language models (LLMs) to understand the development of therapeutic alliance in text-based counseling. We adapt a theoretically grounded framework specifically to the context of online text-based counseling and develop comprehensive guidelines for characterizing the alliance. We collect a comprehensive counseling dataset and conduct multiple expert evaluations on a subset based on this framework. Our LLM-based approach, combined with guidelines and simultaneous extraction of supportive evidence underlying its predictions, demonstrates effectiveness in identifying the therapeutic alliance. Through further LLM-based evaluations on additional conversations, our findings underscore the challenges counselors face in cultivating strong online relationships with clients. Furthermore, we demonstrate the potential of LLM-based feedback mechanisms to enhance counselors' ability to build relationships, supported by a small-scale proof-of-concept.
Reviews: Online Reinforcement Learning in Stochastic Games
The paper considers the problem of online learning in two-player zero-sum stochastic games. The main result is constructing a strategy for player 1 that guarantees that the cumulative rewards will never go below the maximin value of the game by more than a certain bound, no matter what strategy the other player follows. The bound is shown to grow sublinearly in the number of rounds T of the game, and polynomially on other problem parameters such as the diameter, the size of the state and action spaces. The results imply that the proposed algorithm can be used in self-play to compute near-maximin strategies for both players. The algorithm and the analysis are largely based on the UCRL algorithm of Auer and Ortner (2007) and the analysis thereof.
Reviews: Efficient Second-Order Online Kernel Learning with Adaptive Embedding
The paper proposes an efficient second-order online kernel learning mainly by combining KONS and Nystrom method. NOVELTY The novelty is limited on both the methodological and theoretical contributions. The achieved results do not have profound implication for the advancement of theory and practice. WRITING QUALITY The English writing and organization of this paper are relatively good. The reviewer strongly suggests the authors arrange Table 2 in the main paper rather than in Appendix because the experimental results in Table 2 are the core material.
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Reviews: Online Structure Learning for Feed-Forward and Recurrent Sum-Product Networks
This paper proposed an online learning algorithm for static and dynamic sum-product networks (SPNs), a type of probabilistic model with tractable inference. The authors essentially combine local structure search in SPNs with a hard variant of expectation-maximization [1]. The algorithm maintains empirical covariance estimates of product nodes and leverages statistical dependence tests to decide when to replace a product (factorized distribution) with either a new leaf or a mixture (sum node). The algorithm further includes a pruning mechanism in order to trim over-grown structures. The proposed method is called online Structure Learning with Running Average Update (oSLRAU).
Reviews: Multiple-Step Greedy Policies in Approximate and Online Reinforcement Learning
The authors first show a negative result that soft-policy updates using the multi-step greedy policies do not guarantee policy improvement. Then the authors proposed an algorithm that uses cautious soft updates (only update to the kappa greedy policy only when assured to improve, otherwise stay with one-step greedy policy) and show that it converges to the optimal policy. Lastly the authors studied hard updates by extending APIs to multi-step greedy policy setting. Comments: 1. Theorem 2 presents an interesting and surprising result. Though the authors presented the example in the proof sketch, but I wonder if the authors could provide more intuitions behind this? Based on the theorem, for multi-step greedy policy, it seems that h needs to be bigger than 2. So I suspect that h 2 will still work (meaning there could exist small alpha)? Obviously h 1 works, but then why when h 3, the soft-update suddenly stops working unless alpha is exactly equal to 1? I would expect that one would require larger alpha when h gets larger.
Reviews: A Bridging Framework for Model Optimization and Deep Propagation
Paper summary: The paper proposed a learning based hybrid proximal gradient method for composite minimization problems. The iteration is divided into two modules: the learning module does data fidelity minimization with certain network-based priors; consequently the optimization module generates strict convergence propagations by applying proximal gradient feedback on the output of the learning module. The generated iterates were shown to be a Cauchy sequence converging to the critical points of the original objective. The method was applied to image restoration tasks with performance evaluated. Comments: The core idea is to develop a learning based optimization module to incorporate domain knowledge into conventional proximal gradient descent procedure.