We consider the problem of third-person imitation learning with the additional challenge that the learner must select the perspective from which they observe the expert. In our setting, each perspective provides only limited information about the expert's behavior, and the learning agent must carefully select and combine information from different perspectives to achieve competitive performance. This setting is inspired by real-world imitation learning applications, e.g., in robotics, a robot might observe a human demonstrator via camera and receive information from different perspectives depending on the camera's position. We formalize the aforementioned active third-person imitation learning problem, theoretically analyze its characteristics, and propose a generative adversarial network-based active learning approach. Empirically, we demstrate that our proposed approach can effectively learn from expert demonstrations and explore the importance of different architectural choices for the learner's performance.

Online learning and MOOCs have become increasingly popular in recent years, and the trend will continue, given the technology boom. There is a dire need to observe learners' behavior in these online courses, similar to what instructors do in a face-to-face classroom. Learners' strategies and activities become crucial to understanding their behavior. One major challenge in online courses is predicting and preventing dropout behavior. While several studies have tried to perform such analysis, there is still a shortage of studies that employ different data streams to understand and predict the drop rates. Moreover, studies rarely use a fully online team-based collaborative environment as their context. Thus, the current study employs an online longitudinal problem-based learning (PBL) collaborative robotics competition as the testbed. Through methodological triangulation, the study aims to predict dropout behavior via the contributions of Discourse discussion forum 'activities' of participating teams, along with a self-reported Online Learning Strategies Questionnaire (OSLQ). The study also uses Qualitative interviews to enhance the ground truth and results. The OSLQ data is collected from more than 4000 participants. Furthermore, the study seeks to establish the reliability of OSLQ to advance research within online environments. Various Machine Learning algorithms are applied to analyze the data. The findings demonstrate the reliability of OSLQ with our substantial sample size and reveal promising results for predicting the dropout rate in online competition.

Large language models (LLMs) have become phenomenally surging, since 2018--two decades after introducing context-awareness into computing systems. Through taking into account the situations of ubiquitous devices, users and the societies, context-aware computing has enabled a wide spectrum of innovative applications, such as assisted living, location-based social network services and so on. To recognize contexts and make decisions for actions accordingly, various artificial intelligence technologies, such as Ontology and OWL, have been adopted as representations for context modeling and reasoning. Recently, with the rise of LLMs and their improved natural language understanding and reasoning capabilities, it has become feasible to model contexts using natural language and perform context reasoning by interacting with LLMs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. In this tutorial, we demonstrate the use of texts, prompts, and autonomous agents (AutoAgents) that enable LLMs to perform context modeling and reasoning without requiring fine-tuning of the model. We organize and introduce works in the related field, and name this computing paradigm as the LLM-driven Context-aware Computing (LCaC). In the LCaC paradigm, users' requests, sensors reading data, and the command to actuators are supposed to be represented as texts. Given the text of users' request and sensor data, the AutoAgent models the context by prompting and sends to the LLM for context reasoning. LLM generates a plan of actions and responds to the AutoAgent, which later follows the action plan to foster context-awareness. To prove the concepts, we use two showcases--(1) operating a mobile z-arm in an apartment for assisted living, and (2) planning a trip and scheduling the itinerary in a context-aware and personalized manner.

The way of understanding online higher education has greatly changed due to the worldwide pandemic situation. Teaching is undertaken remotely, and the faculty incorporate lecture audio recordings as part of the teaching material. This new online teaching-learning setting has largely impacted university classes. While online teaching technology that enriches virtual classrooms has been abundant over the past two years, the same has not occurred in supporting students during online learning. {To overcome this limitation, our aim is to work toward enabling students to easily access the piece of the lesson recording in which the teacher explains a theoretical concept, solves an exercise, or comments on organizational issues of the course. To that end, we present a multimodal classification algorithm that identifies the type of activity that is being carried out at any time of the lesson by using a transformer-based language model that exploits features from the audio file and from the automated lecture transcription. The experimental results will show that some academic activities are more easily identifiable with the audio signal while resorting to the text transcription is needed to identify others. All in all, our contribution aims to recognize the academic activities of a teacher during a lesson.

Deep generative models have unlocked another profound realm of human creativity. By capturing and generalizing patterns within data, we have entered the epoch of all-encompassing Artificial Intelligence for General Creativity (AIGC). Notably, diffusion models, recognized as one of the paramount generative models, materialize human ideation into tangible instances across diverse domains, encompassing imagery, text, speech, biology, and healthcare. To provide advanced and comprehensive insights into diffusion, this survey comprehensively elucidates its developmental trajectory and future directions from three distinct angles: the fundamental formulation of diffusion, algorithmic enhancements, and the manifold applications of diffusion. Each layer is meticulously explored to offer a profound comprehension of its evolution. Structured and summarized approaches are presented in https://github.com/chq1155/A-Survey-on-Generative-Diffusion-Model.

User modeling (UM) aims to discover patterns or learn representations from user data about the characteristics of a specific user, such as profile, preference, and personality. The user models enable personalization and suspiciousness detection in many online applications such as recommendation, education, and healthcare. Two common types of user data are text and graph, as the data usually contain a large amount of user-generated content (UGC) and online interactions. The research of text and graph mining is developing rapidly, contributing many notable solutions in the past two decades. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown superior performance on generating, understanding, and even reasoning over text data. The approaches of user modeling have been equipped with LLMs and soon become outstanding. This article summarizes existing research about how and why LLMs are great tools of modeling and understanding UGC. Then it reviews a few categories of large language models for user modeling (LLM-UM) approaches that integrate the LLMs with text and graph-based methods in different ways. Then it introduces specific LLM-UM techniques for a variety of UM applications. Finally, it presents remaining challenges and future directions in the LLM-UM research. We maintain the reading list at: https://github.com/TamSiuhin/LLM-UM-Reading

Operator learning aims to discover properties of an underlying dynamical system or partial differential equation (PDE) from data. Here, we present a step-by-step guide to operator learning. We explain the types of problems and PDEs amenable to operator learning, discuss various neural network architectures, and explain how to employ numerical PDE solvers effectively. We also give advice on how to create and manage training data and conduct optimization. We offer intuition behind the various neural network architectures employed in operator learning by motivating them from the point-of-view of numerical linear algebra.

This study explores the impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) in higher education, focusing on an automated oral examination simulation using a prototype. The design considerations of the prototype are described, and the system is evaluated with a select group of educators and students. Technical and pedagogical observations are discussed. The prototype proved to be effective in simulating oral exams, providing personalized feedback, and streamlining educators' workloads. The promising results of the prototype show the potential for LLMs in democratizing education, inclusion of diverse student populations, and improvement of teaching quality and efficiency.

Epidemic modeling, encompassing deterministic and stochastic approaches, is vital for understanding infectious diseases and informing public health strategies. This research adopts a prescriptive approach, focusing on reinforcement learning (RL) to develop strategies that balance minimizing infections with maximizing in-person interactions in educational settings. We introduce SafeCampus , a novel tool that simulates infection spread and facilitates the exploration of various RL algorithms in response to epidemic challenges. SafeCampus incorporates a custom RL environment, informed by stochastic epidemic models, to realistically represent university campus dynamics during epidemics. We evaluate Q-learning for a discretized state space which resulted in a policy matrix that not only guides occupancy decisions under varying epidemic conditions but also illustrates the inherent trade-off in epidemic management. This trade-off is characterized by the dilemma between stricter measures, which may effectively reduce infections but impose less educational benefit (more in-person interactions), and more lenient policies, which could lead to higher infection rates.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in Metaverse environments to generate dynamic and realistic content and to control the behavior of non-player characters (NPCs). However, the cybersecurity concerns associated with LLMs have become increasingly prominent. Previous research has primarily focused on patching system vulnerabilities to enhance cybersecurity, but these approaches are not well-suited to the Metaverse, where the virtual space is more complex, LLMs are vulnerable, and ethical user interaction is critical. Moreover, the scope of cybersecurity in the Metaverse is expected to expand significantly. This paper proposes a method for enhancing cybersecurity through the simulation of user interaction with LLMs. Our goal is to educate users and strengthen their defense capabilities through exposure to a comprehensive simulation system. This system includes extensive Metaverse cybersecurity Q&A and attack simulation scenarios. By engaging with these, users will improve their ability to recognize and withstand risks. Additionally, to address the ethical implications of user input, we propose using LLMs as evaluators to assess user content across five dimensions. We further adapt the models through vocabulary expansion training to better understand personalized inputs and emoticons. We conduct experiments on multiple LLMs and find that our approach is effective.