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 Instructional Material


Federated Learning and Meta Learning: Approaches, Applications, and Directions

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Over the past few years, significant advancements have been made in the field of machine learning (ML) to address resource management, interference management, autonomy, and decision-making in wireless networks. Traditional ML approaches rely on centralized methods, where data is collected at a central server for training. However, this approach poses a challenge in terms of preserving the data privacy of devices. To address this issue, federated learning (FL) has emerged as an effective solution that allows edge devices to collaboratively train ML models without compromising data privacy. In FL, local datasets are not shared, and the focus is on learning a global model for a specific task involving all devices. However, FL has limitations when it comes to adapting the model to devices with different data distributions. In such cases, meta learning is considered, as it enables the adaptation of learning models to different data distributions using only a few data samples. In this tutorial, we present a comprehensive review of FL, meta learning, and federated meta learning (FedMeta). Unlike other tutorial papers, our objective is to explore how FL, meta learning, and FedMeta methodologies can be designed, optimized, and evolved, and their applications over wireless networks. We also analyze the relationships among these learning algorithms and examine their advantages and disadvantages in real-world applications.


Bandit Social Learning: Exploration under Myopic Behavior

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reviews and ratings are pervasive in many online platforms. A customer consults reviews/ratings, then chooses a product and then (often) leaves feedback, which is aggregated by the platform and served to future customers. Collectively, customers face a tradeoff between exploration and exploitation, i.e., between acquiring new information while making potentially suboptimal decisions and making optimal decisions using available information. However, individual customers tend to act myopically and favor exploitation, without regards to exploration for the sake of the others. On a high level, we ask whether/how the myopic behavior interferes with efficient exploration. We are particularly interested in learning failures when only a few agents choose an optimal action.


Safe Online Dynamics Learning with Initially Unknown Models and Infeasible Safety Certificates

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Safety-critical control tasks with high levels of uncertainty are becoming increasingly common. Typically, techniques that guarantee safety during learning and control utilize constraint-based safety certificates, which can be leveraged to compute safe control inputs. However, excessive model uncertainty can render robust safety certification methods or infeasible, meaning no control input satisfies the constraints imposed by the safety certificate. This paper considers a learning-based setting with a robust safety certificate based on a control barrier function (CBF) second-order cone program. If the control barrier function certificate is feasible, our approach leverages it to guarantee safety. Otherwise, our method explores the system dynamics to collect data and recover the feasibility of the control barrier function constraint. To this end, we employ a method inspired by well-established tools from Bayesian optimization. We show that if the sampling frequency is high enough, we recover the feasibility of the robust CBF certificate, guaranteeing safety. Our approach requires no prior model and corresponds, to the best of our knowledge, to the first algorithm that guarantees safety in settings with occasionally infeasible safety certificates without requiring a backup non-learning-based controller.


On some limitations of data-driven weather forecasting models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

As in many other areas of engineering and applied science, Machine Learning (ML) is having a profound impact in the domain of Weather and Climate Prediction. A very recent development in this area has been the emergence of fully data-driven ML prediction models which routinely claim superior performance to that of traditional physics-based models. In this work, we examine some aspects of the forecasts produced by an exemplar of the current generation of ML models, Pangu-Weather, with a focus on the fidelity and physical consistency of those forecasts and how these characteristics relate to perceived forecast performance. The main conclusion is that Pangu-Weather forecasts, and possibly those of similar ML models, do not have the fidelity and physical consistency of physics-based models and their advantage in accuracy on traditional deterministic metrics of forecast skill can be at least partly attributed to these peculiarities. Balancing forecast skill and physical consistency of ML-driven predictions will be an important consideration for future ML models. However, and similarly to other modern post-processing technologies, the current ML models appear to be already able to add value to standard NWP output for specific forecast applications and combined with their extremely low computational cost during deployment, are set to provide an additional, useful source of forecast information. .


"Close...but not as good as an educator." -- Using ChatGPT to provide formative feedback in large-class collaborative learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Delivering personalised, formative feedback to multiple problem-based learning groups in a short time period can be almost impossible. We employed ChatGPT to provide personalised formative feedback in a one-hour Zoom break-out room activity that taught practicing health professionals how to formulate evaluation plans for digital health initiatives. Learners completed an evaluation survey that included Likert scales and open-ended questions that were analysed. Half of the 44 survey respondents had never used ChatGPT before. Overall, respondents found the feedback favourable, described a wide range of group dynamics, and had adaptive responses to the feedback, yet only three groups used the feedback loop to improve their evaluation plans. Future educators can learn from our experience including engineering prompts, providing instructions on how to use ChatGPT, and scaffolding optimal group interactions with ChatGPT. Future researchers should explore the influence of ChatGPT on group dynamics and derive design principles for the use of ChatGPT in collaborative learning.


AI-assisted Learning for Electronic Engineering Courses in High Education

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract: This study evaluates the efficacy of ChatGPT as an AI teaching and learning support tool in an integrated circuit systems course at a higher education institution in an Asian country. Various question types were completed, and ChatGPT responses were assessed to gain valuable insights for further investigation. The objective is to assess ChatGPT's ability to provide insights, personalized support, and interactive learning experiences in engineering education. The study includes the evaluation and reflection of different stakeholders: students, lecturers, and engineers. The findings of this study shed light on the benefits and limitations of ChatGPT as an AI tool, paving the way for innovative learning approaches in technical disciplines. Furthermore, the study contributes to our understanding of how digital transformation is likely to unfold in the education sector. ChatGPT, Generative AI, Digital transformation, engineering education, tutorial design, peer-assisted learning, AI-assisted learning, integrated circuit education. School of Science, Engineering, and Technology, RMIT University Vietnam e-mail: thanh.pham@rmit.edu.vn 1 BACKGROUND There is a growing interest in using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve teaching and learning [1, 2]. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT understand and generate human-like responses in real-time [3].


A Definition of Open-Ended Learning Problems for Goal-Conditioned Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A lot of recent machine learning research papers have "Open-ended learning" in their title. But very few of them attempt to define what they mean when using the term. Even worse, when looking more closely there seems to be no consensus on what distinguishes open-ended learning from related concepts such as continual learning, lifelong learning or autotelic learning. In this paper, we contribute to fixing this situation. After illustrating the genealogy of the concept and more recent perspectives about what it truly means, we outline that open-ended learning is generally conceived as a composite notion encompassing a set of diverse properties. In contrast with these previous approaches, we propose to isolate a key elementary property of open-ended processes, which is to always produce novel elements from time to time over an infinite horizon. From there, we build the notion of open-ended learning problems and focus in particular on the subset of open-ended goal-conditioned reinforcement learning problems, as this framework facilitates the definition of learning a growing repertoire of skills. Finally, we highlight the work that remains to be performed to fill the gap between our elementary definition and the more involved notions of open-ended learning that developmental AI researchers may have in mind.


Online Continual Learning Without the Storage Constraint

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Traditional online continual learning (OCL) research has primarily focused on mitigating catastrophic forgetting with fixed and limited storage allocation throughout an agent's lifetime. However, a broad range of real-world applications are primarily constrained by computational costs rather than storage limitations. In this paper, we target such applications, investigating the online continual learning problem under relaxed storage constraints and limited computational budgets. We contribute a simple algorithm, which updates a kNN classifier continually along with a fixed, pretrained feature extractor. We selected this algorithm due to its exceptional suitability for online continual learning. It can adapt to rapidly changing streams, has zero stability gap, operates within tiny computational budgets, has low storage requirements by only storing features, and has a consistency property: It never forgets previously seen data. These attributes yield significant improvements, allowing our proposed algorithm to outperform existing methods by over 20% in accuracy on two large-scale OCL datasets: Continual LOCalization (CLOC) with 39M images and 712 classes and Continual Google Landmarks V2 (CGLM) with 580K images and 10,788 classes, even when existing methods retain all previously seen images. Furthermore, we achieve this superior performance with considerably reduced computational and storage expenses. We provide code to reproduce our results at github.com/drimpossible/ACM.


DIN-SQL: Decomposed In-Context Learning of Text-to-SQL with Self-Correction

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

There is currently a significant gap between the performance of fine-tuned models and prompting approaches using Large Language Models (LLMs) on the challenging task of text-to-SQL, as evaluated on datasets such as Spider. To improve the performance of LLMs in the reasoning process, we study how decomposing the task into smaller sub-tasks can be effective. In particular, we show that breaking down the generation problem into sub-problems and feeding the solutions of those sub-problems into LLMs can be an effective approach for significantly improving their performance. Our experiments with three LLMs show that this approach consistently improves their simple few-shot performance by roughly 10%, pushing the accuracy of LLMs towards SOTA or surpassing it. On the holdout test set of Spider, the SOTA, in terms of execution accuracy, was 79.9 and the new SOTA at the time of this writing using our approach is 85.3. Our approach with in-context learning beats many heavily fine-tuned models by at least 5%. Additionally, when evaluated on the BIRD benchmark, our approach achieved an execution accuracy of 55.9%, setting a new SOTA on its holdout test set.


SIESTA: Efficient Online Continual Learning with Sleep

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In supervised continual learning, a deep neural network (DNN) is updated with an ever-growing data stream. Unlike the offline setting where data is shuffled, we cannot make any distributional assumptions about the data stream. Ideally, only one pass through the dataset is needed for computational efficiency. However, existing methods are inadequate and make many assumptions that cannot be made for real-world applications, while simultaneously failing to improve computational efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel continual learning method, SIESTA based on wake/sleep framework for training, which is well aligned to the needs of on-device learning. The major goal of SIESTA is to advance compute efficient continual learning so that DNNs can be updated efficiently using far less time and energy. The principal innovations of SIESTA are: 1) rapid online updates using a rehearsal-free, backpropagation-free, and data-driven network update rule during its wake phase, and 2) expedited memory consolidation using a compute-restricted rehearsal policy during its sleep phase. For memory efficiency, SIESTA adapts latent rehearsal using memory indexing from REMIND. Compared to REMIND and prior arts, SIESTA is far more computationally efficient, enabling continual learning on ImageNet-1K in under 2 hours on a single GPU; moreover, in the augmentation-free setting it matches the performance of the offline learner, a milestone critical to driving adoption of continual learning in real-world applications.