Instructional Material
Bayesian Design Principles for Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning
Hu, Hao, Yang, Yiqin, Ye, Jianing, Wu, Chengjie, Mai, Ziqing, Hu, Yujing, Lv, Tangjie, Fan, Changjie, Zhao, Qianchuan, Zhang, Chongjie
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for real-world applications where exploration can be costly or unsafe. However, offline learned policies are often suboptimal, and further online fine-tuning is required. In this paper, we tackle the fundamental dilemma of offline-to-online fine-tuning: if the agent remains pessimistic, it may fail to learn a better policy, while if it becomes optimistic directly, performance may suffer from a sudden drop. We show that Bayesian design principles are crucial in solving such a dilemma. Instead of adopting optimistic or pessimistic policies, the agent should act in a way that matches its belief in optimal policies. Such a probability-matching agent can avoid a sudden performance drop while still being guaranteed to find the optimal policy. Based on our theoretical findings, we introduce a novel algorithm that outperforms existing methods on various benchmarks, demonstrating the efficacy of our approach. Overall, the proposed approach provides a new perspective on offline-to-online RL that has the potential to enable more effective learning from offline data.
Goals as Reward-Producing Programs
Davidson, Guy, Todd, Graham, Togelius, Julian, Gureckis, Todd M., Lake, Brenden M.
People are remarkably capable of generating their own goals, beginning with child's play and continuing into adulthood. Despite considerable empirical and computational work on goals and goal-oriented behavior, models are still far from capturing the richness of everyday human goals. Here, we bridge this gap by collecting a dataset of human-generated playful goals, modeling them as reward-producing programs, and generating novel human-like goals through program synthesis. Reward-producing programs capture the rich semantics of goals through symbolic operations that compose, add temporal constraints, and allow for program execution on behavioral traces to evaluate progress. To build a generative model of goals, we learn a fitness function over the infinite set of possible goal programs and sample novel goals with a quality-diversity algorithm. Human evaluators found that model-generated goals, when sampled from partitions of program space occupied by human examples, were indistinguishable from human-created games. We also discovered that our model's internal fitness scores predict games that are evaluated as more fun to play and more human-like.
Lifelong learning challenges in the era of artificial intelligence: a computational thinking perspective
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought significant challenges to the education and workforce skills required to take advantage of AI for human-AI collaboration in the workplace. As AI continues to reshape industries and job markets, the need to define how AI literacy can be considered in lifelong learning has become increasingly critical (Cetindamar et al., 2022; Laupichler et al., 2022; Romero et al., 2023). Like any new technology, AI is the subject of both hopes and fears, and what it entails today presents major challenges (Cugurullo \& Acheampong, 2023; Villani et al., 2018). It also raises profound questions about our own humanity. Will the machine surpass the intelligence of the humans who designed it? What will be the relationship between so-called AI and our human intelligences? How could human-AI collaboration be regulated in a way that serves the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)? This paper provides a review of the challenges of lifelong learning in the era of AI from a computational thinking, critical thinking, and creative competencies perspective, highlighting the implications for management and leadership in organizations.
Multi-label Class Incremental Emotion Decoding with Augmented Emotional Semantics Learning
Fu, Kaicheng, Du, Changde, Chen, Xiaoyu, Peng, Jie, He, Huiguang
Emotion decoding plays an important role in affective human-computer interaction. However, previous studies ignored the dynamic real-world scenario, where human experience a blend of multiple emotions which are incrementally integrated into the model, leading to the multi-label class incremental learning (MLCIL) problem. Existing methods have difficulty in solving MLCIL issue due to notorious catastrophic forgetting caused by partial label problem and inadequate label semantics mining. In this paper, we propose an augmented emotional semantics learning framework for multi-label class incremental emotion decoding. Specifically, we design an augmented emotional relation graph module with label disambiguation to handle the past-missing partial label problem. Then, we leverage domain knowledge from affective dimension space to alleviate future-missing partial label problem by knowledge distillation. Besides, an emotional semantics learning module is constructed with a graph autoencoder to obtain emotion embeddings in order to guide the semantic-specific feature decoupling for better multi-label learning. Extensive experiments on three datasets show the superiority of our method for improving emotion decoding performance and mitigating forgetting on MLCIL problem.
Grade Like a Human: Rethinking Automated Assessment with Large Language Models
Xie, Wenjing, Niu, Juxin, Xue, Chun Jason, Guan, Nan
While large language models (LLMs) have been used for automated grading, they have not yet achieved the same level of performance as humans, especially when it comes to grading complex questions. Existing research on this topic focuses on a particular step in the grading procedure: grading using predefined rubrics. However, grading is a multifaceted procedure that encompasses other crucial steps, such as grading rubrics design and post-grading review. There has been a lack of systematic research exploring the potential of LLMs to enhance the entire grading~process. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based grading system that addresses the entire grading procedure, including the following key components: 1) Developing grading rubrics that not only consider the questions but also the student answers, which can more accurately reflect students' performance. 2) Under the guidance of grading rubrics, providing accurate and consistent scores for each student, along with customized feedback. 3) Conducting post-grading review to better ensure accuracy and fairness. Additionally, we collected a new dataset named OS from a university operating system course and conducted extensive experiments on both our new dataset and the widely used Mohler dataset. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, providing some new insights for developing automated grading systems based on LLMs.
Automated Generation and Tagging of Knowledge Components from Multiple-Choice Questions
Moore, Steven, Schmucker, Robin, Mitchell, Tom, Stamper, John
Knowledge Components (KCs) linked to assessments enhance the measurement of student learning, enrich analytics, and facilitate adaptivity. However, generating and linking KCs to assessment items requires significant effort and domain-specific knowledge. To streamline this process for higher-education courses, we employed GPT-4 to generate KCs for multiple-choice questions (MCQs) in Chemistry and E-Learning. We analyzed discrepancies between the KCs generated by the Large Language Model (LLM) and those made by humans through evaluation from three domain experts in each subject area. This evaluation aimed to determine whether, in instances of non-matching KCs, evaluators showed a preference for the LLM-generated KCs over their human-created counterparts. We also developed an ontology induction algorithm to cluster questions that assess similar KCs based on their content. Our most effective LLM strategy accurately matched KCs for 56% of Chemistry and 35% of E-Learning MCQs, with even higher success when considering the top five KC suggestions. Human evaluators favored LLM-generated KCs, choosing them over human-assigned ones approximately two-thirds of the time, a preference that was statistically significant across both domains. Our clustering algorithm successfully grouped questions by their underlying KCs without needing explicit labels or contextual information. This research advances the automation of KC generation and classification for assessment items, alleviating the need for student data or predefined KC labels.
OpenAI Forms Safety Committee as It Starts Training Latest AI Model
OpenAI says it's setting up a safety and security committee and has begun training a new AI model to supplant the GPT-4 system that underpins its ChatGPT chatbot. The San Francisco startup said in a blog post Tuesday that the committee will advise the full board on "critical safety and security decisions" for its projects and operations. The safety committee arrives as debate swirls around AI safety at the company, which was thrust into the spotlight after a researcher, Jan Leike, resigned and leveled criticism at OpenAI for letting safety "take a backseat to shiny products." OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever also resigned, and the company disbanded the "superalignment" team focused on AI risks that they jointly led. Leike said Tuesday he's joining rival AI company Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI leaders, to "continue the superalignment mission" there.
Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2024
Maslej, Nestor, Fattorini, Loredana, Perrault, Raymond, Parli, Vanessa, Reuel, Anka, Brynjolfsson, Erik, Etchemendy, John, Ligett, Katrina, Lyons, Terah, Manyika, James, Niebles, Juan Carlos, Shoham, Yoav, Wald, Russell, Clark, Jack
The 2024 Index is our most comprehensive to date and arrives at an important moment when AI's influence on society has never been more pronounced. This year, we have broadened our scope to more extensively cover essential trends such as technical advancements in AI, public perceptions of the technology, and the geopolitical dynamics surrounding its development. Featuring more original data than ever before, this edition introduces new estimates on AI training costs, detailed analyses of the responsible AI landscape, and an entirely new chapter dedicated to AI's impact on science and medicine. The AI Index report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence (AI). Our mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data in order for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI. The AI Index is recognized globally as one of the most credible and authoritative sources for data and insights on artificial intelligence. Previous editions have been cited in major newspapers, including the The New York Times, Bloomberg, and The Guardian, have amassed hundreds of academic citations, and been referenced by high-level policymakers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, among other places. This year's edition surpasses all previous ones in size, scale, and scope, reflecting the growing significance that AI is coming to hold in all of our lives.
cryoSPHERE: Single-particle heterogeneous reconstruction from cryo EM
Ducrocq, Gabriel, Grunewald, Lukas, Westenhoff, Sebastian, Lindsten, Fredrik
The three-dimensional structure of a protein plays a key role in determining its function. Methods like AlphaFold have revolutionized protein structure prediction based only on the amino-acid sequence. However, proteins often appear in multiple different conformations, and it is highly relevant to resolve the full conformational distribution. Single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo EM) is a powerful tool for capturing a large number of images of a given protein, frequently in different conformations (referred to as particles). The images are, however, very noisy projections of the protein, and traditional methods for cryo EM reconstruction are limited to recovering a single, or a few, conformations. In this paper, we introduce cryoSPHERE, a deep learning method that takes as input a nominal protein structure, e.g. from AlphaFold, learns how to divide it into segments, and how to move these as approximately rigid bodies to fit the different conformations present in the cryo EM dataset. This formulation is shown to provide enough constraints to recover meaningful reconstructions of single protein structures. This is illustrated in three examples where we show consistent improvements over the current state-of-the-art for heterogeneous reconstruction.
Exploring Fairness in Educational Data Mining in the Context of the Right to be Forgotten
Qian, Wei, Chen, Aobo, Zhao, Chenxu, Li, Yangyi, Huai, Mengdi
Student data, which is a critical component in EDM research, can contain personal information, such as age and gender, as well as academic performance and activity data from online learning systems [24]. By offering valuable insights into student learning, EDM supports the development of more effective educational practices and policies, ultimately improving student outcomes. One of the most popular techniques in the previous works is incorporating machine learning techniques, which has achieved remarkable success in discovering intricate structures within educational datasets. However, in recent years, concerns about the fairness of deploying algorithmic decision-making in the educational context have emerged [2, 22, 27, 49]. Particularly, machine learning models can produce biased and unfair outcomes for certain student groups, significantly affecting their educational opportunities and achievements. Given that the data empowering EDM research can often contain personally identifiable and other sensitive information, there has been increased attention to privacy protection in recent years [37, 43]. Additionally, privacy legislation such as the California Consumer Privacy Act [39] and the former Right to be Forgotten [17] has granted users the right to erase the impact of their sensitive information from the trained models to protect their privacy. One approach to protecting users' privacy involves enabling the trained machine learning model to entirely forget Both authors contributed equally to this research.