In the dynamic landscape of online businesses, recommender systems are pivotal in enhancing user experiences. While traditional approaches have relied on static supervised learning, the quest for adaptive, user-centric recommendations has led to the emergence of the formulation of contextual bandits. This tutorial investigates the contextual bandits as a powerful framework for personalized recommendations. We delve into the challenges, advanced algorithms and theories, collaborative strategies, and open challenges and future prospects within this field. Different from existing related tutorials, (1) we focus on the exploration perspective of contextual bandits to alleviate the ``Matthew Effect'' in the recommender systems, i.e., the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, concerning the popularity of items; (2) in addition to the conventional linear contextual bandits, we will also dedicated to neural contextual bandits which have emerged as an important branch in recent years, to investigate how neural networks benefit contextual bandits for personalized recommendation both empirically and theoretically; (3) we will cover the latest topic, collaborative neural contextual bandits, to incorporate both user heterogeneity and user correlations customized for recommender system; (4) we will provide and discuss the new emerging challenges and open questions for neural contextual bandits with applications in the personalized recommendation, especially for large neural models.

Neural finite-state transducers (NFSTs) form an expressive family of neurosymbolic sequence transduction models. An NFST models each string pair as having been generated by a latent path in a finite-state transducer. As they are deep generative models, both training and inference of NFSTs require inference networks that approximate posterior distributions over such latent variables. In this paper, we focus on the resulting challenge of imputing the latent alignment path that explains a given pair of input and output strings (e.g., during training). We train three autoregressive approximate models for amortized inference of the path, which can then be used as proposal distributions for importance sampling. All three models perform lookahead. Our most sophisticated (and novel) model leverages the FST structure to consider the graph of future paths; unfortunately, we find that it loses out to the simpler approaches -- except on an artificial task that we concocted to confuse the simpler approaches.

Researchers have developed an AI-powered robot they claim can beat the physical marble game Labyrinth faster than humans are capable of. Thomas Bi and Raffaello D'Andrea of ETH Zurich created CyberRunner, which combines model-based reinforcement with the dexterity required to beat a game that requires physical skill, coordination and precision. For the uninitiated, the aim of the game is to guide a marble through a maze without falling into any holes. The player controls the movement of the ball by rotating two dials, which tilt the board. A camera observes the game and an algorithm learns more about it from each attempt.

This volume contains revised versions of the papers selected for the fourth volume of the Online Handbook of Argumentation for AI (OHAAI). Previously, formal theories of argument and argument interaction have been proposed and studied, and this has led to the more recent study of computational models of argument. Argumentation, as a field within artificial intelligence (AI), is highly relevant for researchers interested in symbolic representations of knowledge and defeasible reasoning. The purpose of this handbook is to provide an open access and curated anthology for the argumentation research community. OHAAI is designed to serve as a research hub to keep track of the latest and upcoming PhD-driven research on the theory and application of argumentation in all areas related to AI.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have been applied in various domains, including early childhood education (ECE). Integration of AI educational technology is a recent significant trend in ECE. Currently, there are more and more studies of AI in ECE. To date, there is a lack of survey articles that discuss the studies of AI in ECE. In this paper, we provide an up-to-date and in-depth overview of the key AI technologies in ECE that provides a historical perspective, summarizes the representative works, outlines open questions, discusses the trends and challenges through a detailed bibliometric analysis, and provides insightful recommendations for future research. We mainly discuss the studies that apply AI-based robots and AI technologies to ECE, including improving the social interaction of children with an autism spectrum disorder. This paper significantly contributes to provide an up-to-date and in-depth survey that is suitable as introductory material for beginners to AI in ECE, as well as supplementary material for advanced users.

Interpretability for machine learning models in medical imaging (MLMI) is an important direction of research. However, there is a general sense of murkiness in what interpretability means. Why does the need for interpretability in MLMI arise? What goals does one actually seek to address when interpretability is needed? To answer these questions, we identify a need to formalize the goals and elements of interpretability in MLMI. By reasoning about real-world tasks and goals common in both medical image analysis and its intersection with machine learning, we identify five core elements of interpretability: localization, visual recognizability, physical attribution, model transparency, and actionability. From this, we arrive at a framework for interpretability in MLMI, which serves as a step-by-step guide to approaching interpretability in this context. Overall, this paper formalizes interpretability needs in the context of medical imaging, and our applied perspective clarifies concrete MLMI-specific goals and considerations in order to guide method design and improve real-world usage. Our goal is to provide practical and didactic information for model designers and practitioners, inspire developers of models in the medical imaging field to reason more deeply about what interpretability is achieving, and suggest future directions of interpretability research.

Because "out-of-the-box" large language models are capable of generating a great deal of objectionable content, recent work has focused on aligning these models in an attempt to prevent undesirable generation. While there has been some success at circumventing these measures -- so-called "jailbreaks" against LLMs -- these attacks have required significant human ingenuity and are brittle in practice. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective attack method that causes aligned language models to generate objectionable behaviors. Specifically, our approach finds a suffix that, when attached to a wide range of queries for an LLM to produce objectionable content, aims to maximize the probability that the model produces an affirmative response (rather than refusing to answer). However, instead of relying on manual engineering, our approach automatically produces these adversarial suffixes by a combination of greedy and gradient-based search techniques, and also improves over past automatic prompt generation methods. Surprisingly, we find that the adversarial prompts generated by our approach are quite transferable, including to black-box, publicly released LLMs. Specifically, we train an adversarial attack suffix on multiple prompts (i.e., queries asking for many different types of objectionable content), as well as multiple models (in our case, Vicuna-7B and 13B). When doing so, the resulting attack suffix is able to induce objectionable content in the public interfaces to ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude, as well as open source LLMs such as LLaMA-2-Chat, Pythia, Falcon, and others. In total, this work significantly advances the state-of-the-art in adversarial attacks against aligned language models, raising important questions about how such systems can be prevented from producing objectionable information. Code is available at github.com/llm-attacks/llm-attacks.

We tackle the problem of sampling from intractable high-dimensional density functions, a fundamental task that often appears in machine learning and statistics. We extend recent sampling-based approaches that leverage controlled stochastic processes to model approximate samples from these target densities. The main drawback of these approaches is that the training objective requires full trajectories to compute, resulting in sluggish credit assignment issues due to use of entire trajectories and a learning signal present only at the terminal time. In this work, we present Diffusion Generative Flow Samplers (DGFS), a sampling-based framework where the learning process can be tractably broken down into short partial trajectory segments, via parameterizing an additional "flow function". Our method takes inspiration from the theory developed for generative flow networks (GFlowNets), allowing us to make use of intermediate learning signals. Through various challenging experiments, we demonstrate that DGFS achieves more accurate estimates of the normalization constant than closely-related prior methods.

We establish explicit dynamics for neural networks whose training objective has a regularising term that constrains the parameters to remain close to their initial value. This keeps the network in a lazy training regime, where the dynamics can be linearised around the initialisation. The standard neural tangent kernel (NTK) governs the evolution during the training in the infinite-width limit, although the regularisation yields an additional term appears in the differential equation describing the dynamics. This setting provides an appropriate framework to study the evolution of wide networks trained to optimise generalisation objectives such as PAC-Bayes bounds, and hence potentially contribute to a deeper theoretical understanding of such networks.

This research aims to demonstrate that AI can function not only as a tool for learning, but also as an intelligent agent with which humans can engage in collaborative learning (CL) to change epistemic practices in science classrooms. We adopted a design and development research approach, following the Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation (ADDIE) model, to prototype a tangible instructional system called Collaborative Learning with AI Speakers (CLAIS). The CLAIS system is designed to have 3-4 human learners join an AI speaker to form a small group, where humans and AI are considered as peers participating in the Jigsaw learning process. The development was carried out using the NUGU AI speaker platform. The CLAIS system was successfully implemented in a Science Education course session with 15 pre-service elementary science teachers. The participants evaluated the CLAIS system through mixed methods surveys as teachers, learners, peers, and users. Quantitative data showed that the participants' Intelligent-Technological, Pedagogical, And Content Knowledge was significantly increased after the CLAIS session, the perception of the CLAIS learning experience was positive, the peer assessment on AI speakers and human peers was different, and the user experience was ambivalent. Qualitative data showed that the participants anticipated future changes in the epistemic process in science classrooms, while acknowledging technical issues such as speech recognition performance and response latency. This study highlights the potential of Human-AI Collaboration for knowledge co-construction in authentic classroom settings and exemplify how AI could shape the future landscape of epistemic practices in the classroom.