Instructional Material
Faculty Perspectives on the Potential of RAG in Computer Science Higher Education
The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly impacted the field of Natural Language Processing and has transformed conversational tasks across various domains because of their widespread integration in applications and public access. The discussion surrounding the application of LLMs in education has raised ethical concerns, particularly concerning plagiarism and policy compliance. Despite the prowess of LLMs in conversational tasks, the limitations of reliability and hallucinations exacerbate the need to guardrail conversations, motivating our investigation of RAG in computer science higher education. We developed Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) applications for the two tasks of virtual teaching assistants and teaching aids. In our study, we collected the ratings and opinions of faculty members in undergraduate and graduate computer science university courses at various levels, using our personalized RAG systems for each course. This study is the first to gather faculty feedback on the application of LLM-based RAG in education. The investigation revealed that while faculty members acknowledge the potential of RAG systems as virtual teaching assistants and teaching aids, certain barriers and features are suggested for their full-scale deployment. These findings contribute to the ongoing discussion on the integration of advanced language models in educational settings, highlighting the need for careful consideration of ethical implications and the development of appropriate safeguards to ensure responsible and effective implementation.
Interactive Learning in Computer Science Education Supported by a Discord Chatbot
Berrezueta-Guzman, Santiago, Parmacli, Ivan, Krusche, Stephan, Wagner, Stefan
Enhancing interaction and feedback collection in a first-semester computer science course poses a significant challenge due to students' diverse needs and engagement levels. To address this issue, we created and integrated a command-based chatbot on the course communication server on Discord. The DiscordBot enables students to provide feedback on course activities through short surveys, such as exercises, quizzes, and lectures, facilitating stress-free communication with instructors. It also supports attendance tracking and introduces lectures before they start. The research demonstrates the effectiveness of the DiscordBot as a communication tool. The ongoing feedback allowed course instructors to dynamically adjust and improve the difficulty level of upcoming activities and promote discussion in subsequent tutor sessions. The data collected reveal that students can accurately perceive the activities' difficulty and expected results, providing insights not possible through traditional end-of-semester surveys. Students reported that interaction with the DiscordBot was easy and expressed a desire to continue using it in future semesters. This responsive approach ensures the course meets the evolving needs of students, thereby enhancing their overall learning experience.
Constructing Enhanced Mutual Information for Online Class-Incremental Learning
Zhang, Huan, Lyu, Fan, Fan, Shenghua, Zheng, Yujin, Wang, Dingwen
Online Class-Incremental continual Learning (OCIL) addresses the challenge of continuously learning from a single-channel data stream, adapting to new tasks while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Recently, Mutual Information (MI)-based methods have shown promising performance in OCIL. However, existing MI-based methods treat various knowledge components in isolation, ignoring the knowledge confusion across tasks. This narrow focus on simple MI knowledge alignment may lead to old tasks being easily forgotten with the introduction of new tasks, risking the loss of common parts between past and present knowledge.To address this, we analyze the MI relationships from the perspectives of diversity, representativeness, and separability, and propose an Enhanced Mutual Information (EMI) method based on knwoledge decoupling. EMI consists of Diversity Mutual Information (DMI), Representativeness Mutual Information (RMI) and Separability Mutual Information (SMI). DMI diversifies intra-class sample features by considering the similarity relationships among inter-class sample features to enable the network to learn more general knowledge. RMI summarizes representative features for each category and aligns sample features with these representative features, making the intra-class sample distribution more compact. SMI establishes MI relationships for inter-class representative features, enhancing the stability of representative features while increasing the distinction between inter-class representative features, thus creating clear boundaries between class. Extensive experimental results on widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of EMI over state-of-the-art baseline methods.
FairAIED: Navigating Fairness, Bias, and Ethics in Educational AI Applications
Chinta, Sribala Vidyadhari, Wang, Zichong, Yin, Zhipeng, Hoang, Nhat, Gonzalez, Matthew, Quy, Tai Le, Zhang, Wenbin
The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into education has transformative potential, providing tailored learning experiences and creative instructional approaches. However, the inherent biases in AI algorithms hinder this improvement by unintentionally perpetuating prejudice against specific demographics, especially in human-centered applications like education. This survey delves deeply into the developing topic of algorithmic fairness in educational contexts, providing a comprehensive evaluation of the diverse literature on fairness, bias, and ethics in AI-driven educational applications. It identifies the common forms of biases, such as data-related, algorithmic, and user-interaction, that fundamentally undermine the accomplishment of fairness in AI teaching aids. By outlining existing techniques for mitigating these biases, ranging from varied data gathering to algorithmic fairness interventions, the survey emphasizes the critical role of ethical considerations and legal frameworks in shaping a more equitable educational environment. Furthermore, it guides readers through the complexities of fairness measurements, methods, and datasets, shedding light on the way to bias reduction. Despite these gains, this survey highlights long-standing issues, such as achieving a balance between fairness and accuracy, as well as the need for diverse datasets. Overcoming these challenges and ensuring the ethical and fair use of AI's promise in education call for a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach.
Generative Adversarial Networks for Imputing Sparse Learning Performance
Zhang, Liang, Yeasin, Mohammed, Lin, Jionghao, Havugimana, Felix, Hu, Xiangen
Learning performance data, such as correct or incorrect responses to questions in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) is crucial for tracking and assessing the learners' progress and mastery of knowledge. However, the issue of data sparsity, characterized by unexplored questions and missing attempts, hampers accurate assessment and the provision of tailored, personalized instruction within ITSs. This paper proposes using the Generative Adversarial Imputation Networks (GAIN) framework to impute sparse learning performance data, reconstructed into a three-dimensional (3D) tensor representation across the dimensions of learners, questions and attempts. Our customized GAIN-based method computational process imputes sparse data in a 3D tensor space, significantly enhanced by convolutional neural networks for its input and output layers. This adaptation also includes the use of a least squares loss function for optimization and aligns the shapes of the input and output with the dimensions of the questions-attempts matrices along the learners' dimension. Through extensive experiments on six datasets from various ITSs, including AutoTutor, ASSISTments and MATHia, we demonstrate that the GAIN approach generally outperforms existing methods such as tensor factorization and other generative adversarial network (GAN) based approaches in terms of imputation accuracy. This finding enhances comprehensive learning data modeling and analytics in AI-based education.
Improving Domain-Specific ASR with LLM-Generated Contextual Descriptions
Suh, Jiwon, Na, Injae, Jung, Woohwan
Improving Domain-Specific ASR with LLM-Generated Contextual Descriptions Jiwon Suh, Injae Na, W oohwan Jung Department of Applied Artificial Intelligence, Hanyang University, Republic of Korea {jwsuh0205, suhoij47, whjung}@hanyang.ac.kr Abstract End-to-end automatic speech recognition (E2E ASR) systems have significantly improved speech recognition through training on extensive datasets. Despite these advancements, they still struggle to accurately recognize domain specific words, such as proper nouns and technical terminologies. To address this problem, we propose a method to utilize the state-of-the-art Whisper without modifying its architecture, preserving its generalization performance while enabling it to leverage descriptions effectively. Moreover, we propose two additional training techniques to improve the domain specific ASR: decoder fine-tuning, and context perturbation. We also propose a method to use a Large Language Model (LLM) to generate descriptions with simple metadata, when descriptions are unavailable. Our experiments demonstrate that proposed methods notably enhance domain-specific ASR accuracy on real-life datasets, with LLMgenerated descriptions outperforming human-crafted ones in effectiveness. Introduction Recent advancements in end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, such as Wav2V ec 2.0 [1] and Whisper [2], have significantly improved the capabilities of speech recognition through extensive training on large datasets. However, these systems often encounter difficulties in accurately identifying domain specific terms, such as proper nouns and technical jargon.
Mathematical theory of deep learning
Petersen, Philipp, Zech, Jakob
It is designed to help students and researchers to quickly familiarize themselves with the area and to provide a foundation for the development of university courses on the mathematics of deep learning. Our main goal in the composition of this book was to present various rigorous, but easy to grasp, results that help to build an understanding of fundamental mathematical concepts in deep learning. To achieve this, we prioritize simplicity over generality. As a mathematical introduction to deep learning, this book does not aim to give an exhaustive survey of the entire (and rapidly growing) field, and some important research directions are missing. In particular, we have favored mathematical results over empirical research, even though an accurate account of the theory of deep learning requires both.
Revolutionizing Undergraduate Learning: CourseGPT and Its Generative AI Advancements
Nazar, Ahmad M., Selim, Mohamed Y., Gaffar, Ashraf, Ahmed, Shakil
--Integrating Generative AI (GenAI) into educational contexts presents a transformative potential for enhancing learning experiences. This paper introduces CourseGPT, a generative AI tool designed to support instructors and enhance the educational experiences of undergraduate students. Built on open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) from Mistral AI, CourseGPT offers continuous instructor support and regular updates to course materials, enriching the learning environment. By utilizing course-specific content, such as slide decks and supplementary readings and references, CourseGPT provides precise, dynamically generated responses to student inquiries. Unlike generic AI models, CourseGPT allows instructors to manage and control the responses, thus extending the course scope without overwhelming details. The paper demonstrates the application of CourseGPT using the CPR E 431: Basics of Information System Security course as a pilot. This course, with its large enrollment and diverse curriculum, serves as an ideal testbed for CourseGPT . The tool aims to enhance the learning experience, accelerate feedback processes, and streamline administrative tasks. The study evaluates CourseGPT's impact on student outcomes, focusing on correctness scores, context recall, and faithfulness of responses. Results indicate that the Mixtral-8x7b model, with a higher parameter count, outperforms smaller models, achieving an 88.0% correctness score and a 66.6% faithfulness score. Additionally, feedback from former students and teaching assistants on CourseGPT's accuracy, helpfulness, and overall performance was collected. The outcomes revealed that a significant majority found CourseGPT to be highly accurate and beneficial in addressing their queries, with many praising its ability to provide timely and relevant information.
How Do Students Interact with an LLM-powered Virtual Teaching Assistant in Different Educational Settings?
Maiti, Pratyusha, Goel, Ashok K.
In Jill Watson has been equipped with OpenAI's GPT-this paper, we analyze student interactions with Jill across 3.5 Turbo model, accessed via the OpenAI API, and coupled multiple courses and colleges, focusing on the types and with several other technologies to facilitate more nuanced, complexity of student questions based on Bloom's Revised context-aware, and safe interactions with students. Jill has Taxonomy and tool usage patterns. We find that, by supporting been deployed in both online and offline classrooms[10] across a wide range of cognitive demands, Jill encourages different educational institutes and courses. This paper examines students to engage in sophisticated, higher-order cognitive student interactions with Jill Watson, to understand questions. However, the frequency of usage varies significantly how AI-based educational tools may engage students in meaningful across deployments, and the types of questions asked and deeper learning experiences.
Pensieve Discuss: Scalable Small-Group CS Tutoring System with AI
Yang, Yoonseok, Liu, Jack, Zamfirescu-Pereira, J. D., DeNero, John
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.