Fine-tuning language models in a downstream task is the standard approach for many state-of-the-art methodologies in the field of NLP. However, when the distribution between the source task and target task drifts, \textit{e.g.}, conversational environments, these gains tend to be diminished. This article proposes a sequence of pre-training steps (a curriculum) guided by "data hacking" and grammar analysis that allows further gradual adaptation between pre-training distributions. In our experiments, we acquire a considerable improvement from our method compared to other known pre-training approaches for the MultiWoZ task.

21st Century war is increasing in speed, with conventional forces combined with massed use of autonomous systems and human-machine integration. However, a significant challenge is how humans can ensure moral and legal responsibility for systems operating outside of normal temporal parameters. This chapter considers whether humans can stand outside of real time and authorise actions for autonomous systems by the prior establishment of a contract, for actions to occur in a future context particularly in faster than real time or in very slow operations where human consciousness and concentration could not remain well informed. The medical legal precdent found in 'advance care directives' suggests how the time-consuming, deliberative process required for accountability and responsibility of weapons systems may be achievable outside real time captured in an 'advance control driective' (ACD). The chapter proposes 'autonomy command' scaffolded and legitimised through the construction of ACD ahead of the deployment of autonomous systems.

We deal with a general distributed constrained online learning problem with privacy over time-varying networks, where a class of nondecomposable objectives are considered. Under this setting, each node only controls a part of the global decision, and the goal of all nodes is to collaboratively minimize the global cost over a time horizon $T$ while guarantees the security of the transmitted information. For such problems, we first design a novel generic algorithm framework, named as DPSDA, of differentially private distributed online learning using the Laplace mechanism and the stochastic variants of dual averaging method. Note that in the dual updates, all nodes of DPSDA employ the noise-corrupted gradients for more generality. Then, we propose two algorithms, named as DPSDA-C and DPSDA-PS, under this framework. In DPSDA-C, the nodes implement a circulation-based communication in the primal updates so as to alleviate the disagreements over time-varying undirected networks. In addition, for the extension to time-varying directed ones, the nodes implement the broadcast-based push-sum dynamics in DPSDA-PS, which can achieve average consensus over arbitrary directed networks. Theoretical results show that both algorithms attain an expected regret upper bound in $\mathcal{O}( \sqrt{T} )$ when the objective function is convex, which matches the best utility achievable by cutting-edge algorithms. Finally, numerical experiment results on both synthetic and real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of our algorithms.

By calling into question the implicit structural rules that are taken for granted in classical logic, substructural logics have brought to the fore new forms of reasoning with applications in many interdisciplinary areas of interest. Modalities, in the substructural setting, provide the tools to control and finetune the logical resource management. The focus of the workshop is on applications in the areas of interest to the ESSLLI community, in particular logical approaches to natural language syntax and semantics and the dynamics of reasoning. The workshop is held with the support of the Horizon 2020 MSCA-Rise project MOSAIC .

The performance of a lifelong learning (L3) model degrades when it is trained on a series of tasks, as the geometrical formation of the embedding space changes while learning novel concepts sequentially. The majority of existing L3 approaches operate on a fixed-curvature (e.g., zero-curvature Euclidean) space that is not necessarily suitable for modeling the complex geometric structure of data. Furthermore, the distillation strategies apply constraints directly on low-dimensional embeddings, discouraging the L3 model from learning new concepts by making the model highly stable. To address the problem, we propose a distillation strategy named L3DMC that operates on mixed-curvature spaces to preserve the already-learned knowledge by modeling and maintaining complex geometrical structures. We propose to embed the projected low dimensional embedding of fixed-curvature spaces (Euclidean and hyperbolic) to higher-dimensional Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) using a positive-definite kernel function to attain rich representation. Afterward, we optimize the L3 model by minimizing the discrepancies between the new sample representation and the subspace constructed using the old representation in RKHS. L3DMC is capable of adapting new knowledge better without forgetting old knowledge as it combines the representation power of multiple fixed-curvature spaces and is performed on higher-dimensional RKHS. Thorough experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed distillation strategy for medical image classification in L3 settings. Our code implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/csiro-robotics/L3DMC.

ML models are ubiquitous in real world applications and are a constant focus of research. At the same time, the community has started to realize the importance of protecting the privacy of ML training data. Differential Privacy (DP) has become a gold standard for making formal statements about data anonymization. However, while some adoption of DP has happened in industry, attempts to apply DP to real world complex ML models are still few and far between. The adoption of DP is hindered by limited practical guidance of what DP protection entails, what privacy guarantees to aim for, and the difficulty of achieving good privacy-utility-computation trade-offs for ML models. Tricks for tuning and maximizing performance are scattered among papers or stored in the heads of practitioners. Furthermore, the literature seems to present conflicting evidence on how and whether to apply architectural adjustments and which components are "safe" to use with DP. This work is a self-contained guide that gives an in-depth overview of the field of DP ML and presents information about achieving the best possible DP ML model with rigorous privacy guarantees. Our target audience is both researchers and practitioners. Researchers interested in DP for ML will benefit from a clear overview of current advances and areas for improvement. We include theory-focused sections that highlight important topics such as privacy accounting and its assumptions, and convergence. For a practitioner, we provide a background in DP theory and a clear step-by-step guide for choosing an appropriate privacy definition and approach, implementing DP training, potentially updating the model architecture, and tuning hyperparameters. For both researchers and practitioners, consistently and fully reporting privacy guarantees is critical, and so we propose a set of specific best practices for stating guarantees.

Modeling and predicting the performance of students in collaborative learning paradigms is an important task. Most of the research presented in literature regarding collaborative learning focuses on the discussion forums and social learning networks. There are only a few works that investigate how students interact with each other in team projects and how such interactions affect their academic performance. In order to bridge this gap, we choose a software engineering course as the study subject. The students who participate in a software engineering course are required to team up and complete a software project together. In this work, we construct an interaction graph based on the activities of students grouped in various teams. Based on this student interaction graph, we present an extended graph transformer framework for collaborative learning (CLGT) for evaluating and predicting the performance of students. Moreover, the proposed CLGT contains an interpretation module that explains the prediction results and visualizes the student interaction patterns. The experimental results confirm that the proposed CLGT outperforms the baseline models in terms of performing predictions based on the real-world datasets. Moreover, the proposed CLGT differentiates the students with poor performance in the collaborative learning paradigm and gives teachers early warnings, so that appropriate assistance can be provided.

With their remarkable ability to generate code, large language models (LLMs) are a transformative technology for computing education practice. They have created an urgent need for educators to rethink pedagogical approaches and teaching strategies for newly emerging skill sets. Traditional approaches to learning programming have focused on frequent and repeated practice at writing code. The ease with which code can now be generated has resulted in a shift in focus towards reading, understanding and evaluating LLM-generated code. In parallel with this shift, a new essential skill is emerging -- the ability to construct good prompts for code-generating models. This paper introduces a novel pedagogical concept known as a `Prompt Problem', designed to help students learn how to craft effective prompts for LLMs. A Prompt Problem challenges a student to create a natural language prompt that leads an LLM to produce the correct code for a specific problem. To support the delivery of Prompt Problems at scale, in this paper we also present a novel tool called Promptly which hosts a repository of Prompt Problems and automates the evaluation of prompt-generated code. We report empirical findings from a field study in which Promptly was deployed in a first-year Python programming course (n=54). We explore student interactions with the tool and their perceptions of the Prompt Problem concept. We found that Promptly was largely well-received by students for its ability to engage their computational thinking skills and expose them to new programming constructs. We also discuss avenues for future work, including variations on the design of Prompt Problems and the need to study their integration into the curriculum and teaching practice.

Welcome to our July 2023 monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, find out about recent events, and more. This month, we report on RoboCup2023, congratulate ICML outstanding paper award winners, find out how machine learning can help in the study of supercooled liquids, and learn about a visually-grounded few-shot word learning method for low-resource languages. RoboCup2023 took place from 4-10 July in Bordeaux, and saw around 2500 participants, from 45 different countries participate in competitions, training sessions and a symposium. You can find out what the attendees got up to in our round-ups: Part 1 Part 2. Roberto Figueiredo took part in the kid-size soccer competition and is also a local representative for Junior Rescue Simulation. We spoke to Roberto about his RoboCup experience this year, and his progression from junior to major league.

This paper presents two self-contained tutorials on stance detection in Twitter data using BERT fine-tuning and prompting large language models (LLMs). The first tutorial explains BERT architecture and tokenization, guiding users through training, tuning, and evaluating standard and domain-specific BERT models with HuggingFace transformers. The second focuses on constructing prompts and few-shot examples to elicit stances from ChatGPT and open-source FLAN-T5 without fine-tuning. Various prompting strategies are implemented and evaluated using confusion matrices and macro F1 scores. The tutorials provide code, visualizations, and insights revealing the strengths of few-shot ChatGPT and FLAN-T5 which outperform fine-tuned BERTs. By covering both model fine-tuning and prompting-based techniques in an accessible, hands-on manner, these tutorials enable learners to gain applied experience with cutting-edge methods for stance detection.