Instructional Material
Online Continual Learning Without the Storage Constraint
Prabhu, Ameya, Cai, Zhipeng, Dokania, Puneet, Torr, Philip, Koltun, Vladlen, Sener, Ozan
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
Pourreza, Mohammadreza, Rafiei, Davood
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
Harun, Md Yousuf, Gallardo, Jhair, Hayes, Tyler L., Kemker, Ronald, Kanan, Christopher
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.
Score-based Data Assimilation for a Two-Layer Quasi-Geostrophic Model
Rozet, François, Louppe, Gilles
Data assimilation addresses the problem of identifying plausible state trajectories of dynamical systems given noisy or incomplete observations. In geosciences, it presents challenges due to the high-dimensionality of geophysical dynamical systems, often exceeding millions of dimensions. This work assesses the scalability of score-based data assimilation (SDA), a novel data assimilation method, in the context of such systems. We propose modifications to the score network architecture aimed at significantly reducing memory consumption and execution time. We demonstrate promising results for a two-layer quasi-geostrophic model.
Measuring Five Accountable Talk Moves to Improve Instruction at Scale
Kupor, Ashlee, Morgan, Candice, Demszky, Dorottya
Providing consistent, individualized feedback to teachers on their instruction can improve student learning outcomes. Such feedback can especially benefit novice instructors who teach on online platforms and have limited access to instructional training. To build scalable measures of instruction, we fine-tune RoBERTa and GPT models to identify five instructional talk moves inspired by accountable talk theory: adding on, connecting, eliciting, probing and revoicing students' ideas. We fine-tune these models on a newly annotated dataset of 2500 instructor utterances derived from transcripts of small group instruction in an online computer science course, Code in Place. Although we find that GPT-3 consistently outperforms RoBERTa in terms of precision, its recall varies significantly. We correlate the instructors' use of each talk move with indicators of student engagement and satisfaction, including students' section attendance, section ratings, and assignment completion rates. We find that using talk moves generally correlates positively with student outcomes, and connecting student ideas has the largest positive impact. These results corroborate previous research on the effectiveness of accountable talk moves and provide exciting avenues for using these models to provide instructors with useful, scalable feedback.
Artificial Intelligence Ethics Education in Cybersecurity: Challenges and Opportunities: a focus group report
Jackson, Diane, Matei, Sorin Adam, Bertino, Elisa
The emergence of AI tools in cybersecurity creates many opportunities and uncertainties. A focus group with advanced graduate students in cybersecurity revealed the potential depth and breadth of the challenges and opportunities. The salient issues are access to open source or free tools, documentation, curricular diversity, and clear articulation of ethical principles for AI cybersecurity education. Confronting the "black box" mentality in AI cybersecurity work is also of the greatest importance, doubled by deeper and prior education in foundational AI work. Systems thinking and effective communication were considered relevant areas of educational improvement. Future AI educators and practitioners need to address these issues by implementing rigorous technical training curricula, clear documentation, and frameworks for ethically monitoring AI combined with critical and system's thinking and communication skills.
Bayes-enhanced Multi-view Attention Networks for Robust POI Recommendation
Xia, Jiangnan, Yang, Yu, Wang, Senzhang, Yin, Hongzhi, Cao, Jiannong, Yu, Philip S.
POI recommendation is practically important to facilitate various Location-Based Social Network services, and has attracted rising research attention recently. Existing works generally assume the available POI check-ins reported by users are the ground-truth depiction of user behaviors. However, in real application scenarios, the check-in data can be rather unreliable due to both subjective and objective causes including positioning error and user privacy concerns, leading to significant negative impacts on the performance of the POI recommendation. To this end, we investigate a novel problem of robust POI recommendation by considering the uncertainty factors of the user check-ins, and proposes a Bayes-enhanced Multi-view Attention Network. Specifically, we construct personal POI transition graph, the semantic-based POI graph and distance-based POI graph to comprehensively model the dependencies among the POIs. As the personal POI transition graph is usually sparse and sensitive to noise, we design a Bayes-enhanced spatial dependency learning module for data augmentation from the local view. A Bayesian posterior guided graph augmentation approach is adopted to generate a new graph with collaborative signals to increase the data diversity. Then both the original and the augmented graphs are used for POI representation learning to counteract the data uncertainty issue. Next, the POI representations of the three view graphs are input into the proposed multi-view attention-based user preference learning module. By incorporating the semantic and distance correlations of POIs, the user preference can be effectively refined and finally robust recommendation results are achieved. The results of extensive experiments show that BayMAN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in POI recommendation when the available check-ins are incomplete and noisy.
Meta-Learning Adversarial Bandit Algorithms
Khodak, Mikhail, Osadchiy, Ilya, Harris, Keegan, Balcan, Maria-Florina, Levy, Kfir Y., Meir, Ron, Wu, Zhiwei Steven
We study online meta-learning with bandit feedback, with the goal of improving performance across multiple tasks if they are similar according to some natural similarity measure. As the first to target the adversarial online-within-online partial-information setting, we design meta-algorithms that combine outer learners to simultaneously tune the initialization and other hyperparameters of an inner learner for two important cases: multi-armed bandits (MAB) and bandit linear optimization (BLO). For MAB, the meta-learners initialize and set hyperparameters of the Tsallis-entropy generalization of Exp3, with the task-averaged regret improving if the entropy of the optima-in-hindsight is small. For BLO, we learn to initialize and tune online mirror descent (OMD) with self-concordant barrier regularizers, showing that task-averaged regret varies directly with an action space-dependent measure they induce. Our guarantees rely on proving that unregularized follow-the-leader combined with two levels of low-dimensional hyperparameter tuning is enough to learn a sequence of affine functions of non-Lipschitz and sometimes non-convex Bregman divergences bounding the regret of OMD.
'Is this an appropriate use of AI or not?': teachers say classrooms are now AI testing labs
In the year since OpenAI released ChatGPT, high school teacher Vicki Davis has been rethinking every single assignment she gives her students. Davis, a computer science teacher at Sherwood Christian Academy in Georgia, was well-positioned to be an early adopter of the technology. She's also the IT director at the school and helped put together an AI policy in March: the school opted to allow the use of AI tools for specific projects so long as students discussed it with their teachers and cited the tool. In Davis' mind, there were good and bad uses of AI, and ignoring its growing popularity was not going to help students unlock the productive uses or understand its dangers. "It's actually changed how I design my projects because there are some times I want my students to use AI, and then there are times I don't want them to," Davis said.
Mathematical Introduction to Deep Learning: Methods, Implementations, and Theory
Jentzen, Arnulf, Kuckuck, Benno, von Wurstemberger, Philippe
This book aims to provide an introduction to the topic of deep learning algorithms. We review essential components of deep learning algorithms in full mathematical detail including different artificial neural network (ANN) architectures (such as fully-connected feedforward ANNs, convolutional ANNs, recurrent ANNs, residual ANNs, and ANNs with batch normalization) and different optimization algorithms (such as the basic stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method, accelerated methods, and adaptive methods). We also cover several theoretical aspects of deep learning algorithms such as approximation capacities of ANNs (including a calculus for ANNs), optimization theory (including Kurdyka-{\L}ojasiewicz inequalities), and generalization errors. In the last part of the book some deep learning approximation methods for PDEs are reviewed including physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and deep Galerkin methods. We hope that this book will be useful for students and scientists who do not yet have any background in deep learning at all and would like to gain a solid foundation as well as for practitioners who would like to obtain a firmer mathematical understanding of the objects and methods considered in deep learning.