Instructional Material
Extended Reality System for Robotic Learning from Human Demonstration
Ngui, Isaac, McBeth, Courtney, He, Grace, Santos, André Corrêa, Soares, Luciano, Morales, Marco, Amato, Nancy M.
Figure 1: A human user interacting with a virtual UR5e robot to provide a trajectory demonstration as the robot carries a coffee mug over a table with a laptop on top. Extended reality provides a natural setting for demonstrating robotic trajectories while bypassing safety Many real-world tasks are intuitive for a human to perform, but difficult concerns and providing a broader range of interaction modalities. In these scenarios, robotic systems can benefit from expert (RADER) system, a generic extended reality interface for learning demonstrations, wherein human operators physically move the from demonstration. We additionally present its application to an robot along trajectories, to learn how to perform each task. In many existing state-of-the-art learning from demonstration approach and settings, it may be difficult or unsafe to use a physical robot to provide show comparable results between demonstrations given on a physical these demonstrations, for example, considering cooking tasks robot and those given using our extended reality system.
Edu-Values: Towards Evaluating the Chinese Education Values of Large Language Models
Zhang, Peiyi, Zhang, Yazhou, Wang, Bo, Rong, Lu, Qin, Jing
With the recent evolution of large language models (LLMs), concerns about aligning such models with human values have grown. Previous research has primarily focused on assessing LLMs' performance in terms of the Helpful, Honest, Harmless (3H) basic principles, while often overlooking their alignment with educational values in the Chinese context. To fill this gap, we present Edu-Values, the first Chinese education values evaluation benchmark designed to measure LLMs' alignment ability across seven dimensions: professional ideology, cultural literacy, educational knowledge and skills, education laws and regulations, teachers' professional ethics, basic competencies, and subject knowledge. We meticulously design and compile 1,418 questions, including multiple-choice, multi-modal question answering, subjective analysis, adversarial prompts, and questions on traditional Chinese culture. We conduct both human evaluation and automatic evaluation over 11 state-of-the-art (SoTA) LLMs, and highlight three main findings: (1) due to differences in educational culture, Chinese LLMs significantly outperform English LLMs, with Qwen 2 ranking the first with a score of 81.37; (2) LLMs perform well in subject knowledge and teaching skills but struggle with teachers' professional ethics and basic competencies; (3) LLMs excel at multiple-choice questions but perform poorly on subjective analysis and multi-modal tasks. This demonstrates the effectiveness and potential of the proposed benchmark. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/zhangpeii/Edu-Values.git.
Curricula for Learning Robust Policies with Factored State Representations in Changing Environments
Panayiotou, Panayiotis, Şimşek, Özgür
Robust policies enable reinforcement learning agents to effectively adapt to and operate in unpredictable, dynamic, and ever-changing real-world environments. Factored representations, which break down complex state and action spaces into distinct components, can improve generalization and sample efficiency in policy learning. In this paper, we explore how the curriculum of an agent using a factored state representation affects the robustness of the learned policy. We experimentally demonstrate three simple curricula, such as varying only the variable of highest regret between episodes, that can significantly enhance policy robustness, offering practical insights for reinforcement learning in complex environments.
Online Proximal ADMM for Graph Learning from Streaming Smooth Signals
Chahuara, Hector, Mateos, Gonzalo
Graph signal processing deals with algorithms and signal representations that leverage graph structures for multivariate data analysis. Often said graph topology is not readily available and may be time-varying, hence (dynamic) graph structure learning from nodal (e.g., sensor) observations becomes a critical first step. In this paper, we develop a novel algorithm for online graph learning using observation streams, assumed to be smooth on the latent graph. Unlike batch algorithms for topology identification from smooth signals, our modus operandi is to process graph signals sequentially and thus keep memory and computational costs in check. To solve the resulting smoothness-regularized, time-varying inverse problem, we develop online and lightweight iterations built upon the proximal variant of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), well known for its fast convergence in batch settings. The proximal term in the topology updates seamlessly implements a temporal-variation regularization, and we argue the online procedure exhibits sublinear static regret under some simplifying assumptions. Reproducible experiments with synthetic and real graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in adapting to streaming signals and tracking slowly-varying network connectivity. The proposed approach also exhibits better tracking performance (in terms of suboptimality), when compared to state-of-the-art online graph learning baselines.
Enhancing 3D Robotic Vision Robustness by Minimizing Adversarial Mutual Information through a Curriculum Training Approach
Darabi, Nastaran, Jayasuriya, Dinithi, Naik, Devashri, Tulabandhula, Theja, Trivedi, Amit Ranjan
Adversarial attacks exploit vulnerabilities in a model's decision boundaries through small, carefully crafted perturbations that lead to significant mispredictions. In 3D vision, the high dimensionality and sparsity of data greatly expand the attack surface, making 3D vision particularly vulnerable for safety-critical robotics. To enhance 3D vision's adversarial robustness, we propose a training objective that simultaneously minimizes prediction loss and mutual information (MI) under adversarial perturbations to contain the upper bound of misprediction errors. This approach simplifies handling adversarial examples compared to conventional methods, which require explicit searching and training on adversarial samples. However, minimizing prediction loss conflicts with minimizing MI, leading to reduced robustness and catastrophic forgetting. To address this, we integrate curriculum advisors in the training setup that gradually introduce adversarial objectives to balance training and prevent models from being overwhelmed by difficult cases early in the process. The advisors also enhance robustness by encouraging training on diverse MI examples through entropy regularizers. We evaluated our method on ModelNet40 and KITTI using PointNet, DGCNN, SECOND, and PointTransformers, achieving 2-5% accuracy gains on ModelNet40 and a 5-10% mAP improvement in object detection. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/nstrndrbi/Mine-N-Learn.
"It Might be Technically Impressive, But It's Practically Useless to Us": Practices, Challenges, and Opportunities for Cross-Functional Collaboration around AI within the News Industry
Xiao, Qing, Fan, Xianzhe, Simon, Felix M., Zhang, Bingbing, Eslami, Motahhare
Recently, an increasing number of news organizations have integrated artificial intelligence (AI) into their workflows, leading to a further influx of AI technologists and data workers into the news industry. This has initiated cross-functional collaborations between these professionals and journalists. While prior research has explored the impact of AI-related roles entering the news industry, there is a lack of studies on how cross-functional collaboration unfolds between AI professionals and journalists. Through interviews with 17 journalists, 6 AI technologists, and 3 AI workers with cross-functional experience from leading news organizations, we investigate the current practices, challenges, and opportunities for cross-functional collaboration around AI in today's news industry. We first study how journalists and AI professionals perceive existing cross-collaboration strategies. We further explore the challenges of cross-functional collaboration and provide recommendations for enhancing future cross-functional collaboration around AI in the news industry.
LLMs in Education: Novel Perspectives, Challenges, and Opportunities
Alhafni, Bashar, Vajjala, Sowmya, Bannò, Stefano, Maurya, Kaushal Kumar, Kochmar, Ekaterina
The role of large language models (LLMs) in education is an increasing area of interest today, considering the new opportunities they offer for teaching, learning, and assessment. This cutting-edge tutorial provides an overview of the educational applications of NLP and the impact that the recent advances in LLMs have had on this field. We will discuss the key challenges and opportunities presented by LLMs, grounding them in the context of four major educational applications: reading, writing, and speaking skills, and intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). This COLING 2025 tutorial is designed for researchers and practitioners interested in the educational applications of NLP and the role LLMs have to play in this area. It is the first of its kind to address this timely topic.
The 1st InterAI Workshop: Interactive AI for Human-centered Robotics
Zhang, Yuchong, Yadollahi, Elmira, Ma, Yong, Fu, Di, Leite, Iolanda, Kragic, Danica
Her research, at the intersection of machine and challenges in human-centered interactive artificial learning and human-robot interaction, explores intelligence (AI) within the field of human-robot interaction two broad questions through an interdisciplinary lens: (HRI). It will focus on the integration of AI technologies that how to learn human behavior from multimodal data, and enhance human-robot collaboration, ensuring these interactions how to transfer this knowledge to robots for learning, are intuitive, efficient, and tailored to human needs and action, and interaction. Her work has been supported behaviors [1].
Versatile Incremental Learning: Towards Class and Domain-Agnostic Incremental Learning
Park, Min-Yeong, Lee, Jae-Ho, Park, Gyeong-Moon
Incremental Learning (IL) aims to accumulate knowledge from sequential input tasks while overcoming catastrophic forgetting. Existing IL methods typically assume that an incoming task has only increments of classes or domains, referred to as Class IL (CIL) or Domain IL (DIL), respectively. In this work, we consider a more challenging and realistic but under-explored IL scenario, named Versatile Incremental Learning (VIL), in which a model has no prior of which of the classes or domains will increase in the next task. In the proposed VIL scenario, the model faces intra-class domain confusion and inter-domain class confusion, which makes the model fail to accumulate new knowledge without interference with learned knowledge. To address these issues, we propose a simple yet effective IL framework, named Incremental Classifier with Adaptation Shift cONtrol (ICON). Based on shifts of learnable modules, we design a novel regularization method called Cluster-based Adaptation Shift conTrol (CAST) to control the model to avoid confusion with the previously learned knowledge and thereby accumulate the new knowledge more effectively. Moreover, we introduce an Incremental Classifier (IC) which expands its output nodes to address the overwriting issue from different domains corresponding to a single class while maintaining the previous knowledge. We conducted extensive experiments on three benchmarks, showcasing the effectiveness of our method across all the scenarios, particularly in cases where the next task can be randomly altered. Our implementation code is available at https://github.com/KHU-AGI/VIL.
Deep Learning with CNNs: A Compact Holistic Tutorial with Focus on Supervised Regression (Preprint)
Tejeda, Yansel Gonzalez, Mayer, Helmut A.
In this tutorial, we present a compact and holistic discussion of Deep Learning with a focus on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and supervised regression. While there are numerous books and articles on the individual topics we cover, comprehensive and detailed tutorials that address Deep Learning from a foundational yet rigorous and accessible perspective are rare. Most resources on CNNs are either too advanced, focusing on cutting-edge architectures, or too narrow, addressing only specific applications like image classification.This tutorial not only summarizes the most relevant concepts but also provides an in-depth exploration of each, offering a complete yet agile set of ideas. Moreover, we highlight the powerful synergy between learning theory, statistic, and machine learning, which together underpin the Deep Learning and CNN frameworks. We aim for this tutorial to serve as an optimal resource for students, professors, and anyone interested in understanding the foundations of Deep Learning. Upon acceptance we will provide an accompanying repository under \href{https://github.com/neoglez/deep-learning-tutorial}{https://github.com/neoglez/deep-learning-tutorial} Keywords: Tutorial, Deep Learning, Convolutional Neural Networks, Machine Learning.