A reliable and accurate knowledge of the ridership in public transportation networks is crucial for public transport operators and public authorities to be aware of their network's use and optimize transport offering. Several techniques to estimate ridership exist nowadays, some of them in an automated manner. Among them, Automatic Passenger Counting (APC) systems detect passengers entering and leaving the vehicle at each station of its course. However, data resulting from these systems are often noisy or even biased, resulting in under or overestimation of onboard occupancy. In this work, we propose a denoising algorithm for APC data to improve their robustness and ease their analyzes. The proposed approach consists in a constrained integer linear optimization, taking advantage of ticketing data and historical ridership data to further constrain and guide the optimization. The performances are assessed and compared to other denoising methods on several public transportation networks in France, to manual counts available on one of these networks, and on simulated data.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have a natural role in answering complex queries about data streams, but the high computational cost of LLM inference makes them infeasible in many such tasks. We propose online cascade learning, the first approach to addressing this challenge. The objective here is to learn a "cascade" of models, starting with lower-capacity models (such as logistic regressors) and ending with a powerful LLM, along with a deferral policy that determines the model that is used on a given input. We formulate the task of learning cascades online as an imitation-learning problem and give a no-regret algorithm for the problem. Experimental results across four benchmarks show that our method parallels LLMs in accuracy while cutting down inference costs by as much as 90%, underscoring its efficacy and adaptability in stream processing.

This survey article has grown out of the GAIED (pronounced "guide") workshop organized by the authors at the NeurIPS 2023 conference. We organized the GAIED workshop as part of a community-building effort to bring together researchers, educators, and practitioners to explore the potential of generative AI for enhancing education. This article aims to provide an overview of the workshop activities and highlight several future research directions in the area of GAIED.

This study explores the application of Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically GPT-4, in the analysis of classroom dialogue, a crucial research task for both teaching diagnosis and quality improvement. Recognizing the knowledge-intensive and labor-intensive nature of traditional qualitative methods in educational research, this study investigates the potential of LLM to streamline and enhance the analysis process. The study involves datasets from a middle school, encompassing classroom dialogues across mathematics and Chinese classes. These dialogues were manually coded by educational experts and then analyzed using a customised GPT-4 model. This study focuses on comparing manual annotations with the outputs of GPT-4 to evaluate its efficacy in analyzing educational dialogues. Time efficiency, inter-coder agreement, and inter-coder reliability between human coders and GPT-4 are evaluated. Results indicate substantial time savings with GPT-4, and a high degree of consistency in coding between the model and human coders, with some discrepancies in specific codes. These findings highlight the strong potential of LLM in teaching evaluation and facilitation.

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of latent variable models is often recast as an optimization problem over the extended space of parameters and probability distributions. For example, the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm can be interpreted as coordinate descent applied to a suitable free energy functional over this space. Recently, this perspective has been combined with insights from optimal transport and Wasserstein gradient flows to develop particle-based algorithms applicable to wider classes of models than standard EM. Drawing inspiration from prior works which interpret `momentum-enriched' optimisation algorithms as discretizations of ordinary differential equations, we propose an analogous dynamical systems-inspired approach to minimizing the free energy functional over the extended space of parameters and probability distributions. The result is a dynamic system that blends elements of Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient method, the underdamped Langevin diffusion, and particle methods. Under suitable assumptions, we establish quantitative convergence of the proposed system to the unique minimiser of the functional in continuous time. We then propose a numerical discretization of this system which enables its application to parameter estimation in latent variable models. Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate that the resulting algorithm converges faster than existing methods and compares favourably with other (approximate) MLE algorithms.

Despite remarkable success in various applications, large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to adversarial jailbreaks that make the safety guardrails void. However, previous studies for jailbreaks usually resort to brute-force optimization or extrapolations of a high computation cost, which might not be practical or effective. In this paper, inspired by the Milgram experiment w.r.t. the authority power for inciting harmfulness, we disclose a lightweight method, termed DeepInception, which can easily hypnotize LLM to be a jailbreaker. Specifically, DeepInception leverages the personification ability of LLM to construct a novel nested scene to behave, which realizes an adaptive way to escape the usage control in a normal scenario. Empirically, our DeepInception can achieve competitive jailbreak success rates with previous counterparts and realize a continuous jailbreak in subsequent interactions, which reveals the critical weakness of self-losing on both open and closed-source LLMs like Falcon, Vicuna-v1.5, Llama-2, and GPT-3.5-turbo/4. Our investigation appeals to people to pay more attention to the safety aspects of LLMs and develop a stronger defense against their misuse risks. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/DeepInception.

We focus on learning the smoothing distribution, i.e. the joint distribution of the latent states given the observations, using a variational approach together with Monte Carlo importance sampling. We propose an efficient algorithm for computing the gradient of the evidence lower bound (ELBO) in the context of streaming data, where observations arrive sequentially. Our contributions include a computationally efficient online ELBO estimator, demonstrated performance in offline and true online settings, and adaptability for computing general expectations under joint smoothing distributions.

Despite large neural networks demonstrating remarkable abilities to complete different tasks, they require excessive memory usage to store the optimization states for training. To alleviate this, the low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is proposed to reduce the optimization states by training fewer parameters. However, LoRA restricts overall weight update matrices to be low-rank, limiting the model performance. In this work, we investigate the dynamics of LoRA and identify that it can be approximated by a random projection. Based on this observation, we propose Flora, which is able to achieve high-rank updates by resampling the projection matrices while enjoying the sublinear space complexity of optimization states. We conduct experiments across different tasks and model architectures to verify the effectiveness of our approach.

Real-world interpretability for neural networks is a tradeoff between three concerns: 1) it requires humans to trust the explanation approximation (e.g. post-hoc approaches), 2) it compromises the understandability of the explanation (e.g. automatically identified feature masks), and 3) it compromises the model performance (e.g. decision trees). These shortcomings are unacceptable for human-facing domains, like education, healthcare, or natural language, which require trustworthy explanations, actionable interpretations, and accurate predictions. In this work, we present InterpretCC (interpretable conditional computation), a family of interpretable-by-design neural networks that guarantee human-centric interpretability while maintaining comparable performance to state-of-the-art models by adaptively and sparsely activating features before prediction. We extend this idea into an interpretable mixture-of-experts model, that allows humans to specify topics of interest, discretely separates the feature space for each data point into topical subnetworks, and adaptively and sparsely activates these topical subnetworks. We demonstrate variations of the InterpretCC architecture for text and tabular data across several real-world benchmarks: six online education courses, news classification, breast cancer diagnosis, and review sentiment.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are providing new ways to maximize productivity and efficiency these days, but only if you really know how to use them. ChatGPT is one of the most popular AI tools on the market and this ChatGPT & Automation E-Degree will help you learn how to use it like an expert. This 25-hour course is taught by Eduonix Learning Solutions (4.4/5-star instructor rating) and covers the basics as well as more advanced topics. You'll explore a variety of practical, real-world applications of ChatGPT and learn how to tailor your queries to get the exact results you want. Whether you're looking to streamline business processes through automation, gather data insights, scale your content output, or just improve your communication skills, this course will help you tap into ChatGPT to meet all of your needs.