Education
Resolving Memorization in Empirical Diffusion Model for Manifold Data in High-Dimensional Spaces
Lyu, Yang, Qian, Yuchun, Nguyen, Tan Minh, Tong, Xin T.
Diffusion models is a popular computational tool to generate new data samples. It utilizes a forward diffusion process that add noise to the data distribution and then use a reverse process to remove noises to produce samples from the data distribution. However, when the empirical data distribution consists of $n$ data point, using the empirical diffusion model will necessarily produce one of the existing data points. This is often referred to as the memorization effect, which is usually resolved by sophisticated machine learning procedures in the current literature. This work shows that the memorization problem can be resolved by a simple inertia update step at the end of the empirical diffusion model simulation. Our inertial diffusion model requires only the empirical diffusion model score function and it does not require any further training. We show that choosing the inertia diffusion model sample distribution is an $O\left(n^{-\frac{2}{d+4}}\right)$ Wasserstein-1 approximation of a data distribution lying on a $C^2$ manifold of dimension $d$. Since this estimate is significant smaller the Wasserstein1 distance between population and empirical distributions, it rigorously shows the inertial diffusion model produces new data samples. Remarkably, this upper bound is completely free of the ambient space dimension, since there is no training involved. Our analysis utilizes the fact that the inertial diffusion model samples are approximately distributed as the Gaussian kernel density estimator on the manifold. This reveals an interesting connection between diffusion model and manifold learning.
Validating the Effectiveness of a Large Language Model-based Approach for Identifying Children's Development across Various Free Play Settings in Kindergarten
Yang, Yuanyuan, Shen, Yuan, Sun, Tianchen, Xie, Yangbin
Free play is a fundamental aspect of early childhood education, supporting children's cognitive, social, emotional, and motor development. However, assessing children's development during free play poses significant challenges due to the unstructured and spontaneous nature of the activity. Traditional assessment methods often rely on direct observations by teachers, parents, or researchers, which may fail to capture comprehensive insights from free play and provide timely feedback to educators. This study proposes an innovative approach combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with learning analytics to analyze children's self-narratives of their play experiences. The LLM identifies developmental abilities, while performance scores across different play settings are calculated using learning analytics techniques. We collected 2,224 play narratives from 29 children in a kindergarten, covering four distinct play areas over one semester. According to the evaluation results from eight professionals, the LLM-based approach achieved high accuracy in identifying cognitive, motor, and social abilities, with accuracy exceeding 90% in most domains. Moreover, significant differences in developmental outcomes were observed across play settings, highlighting each area's unique contributions to specific abilities. These findings confirm that the proposed approach is effective in identifying children's development across various free play settings. This study demonstrates the potential of integrating LLMs and learning analytics to provide child-centered insights into developmental trajectories, offering educators valuable data to support personalized learning and enhance early childhood education practices.
Survey of Abstract Meaning Representation: Then, Now, Future
This paper presents a survey of Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), a semantic representation framework that captures the meaning of sentences through a graph-based structure. AMR represents sentences as rooted, directed acyclic graphs, where nodes correspond to concepts and edges denote relationships, effectively encoding the meaning of complex sentences. This survey investigates AMR and its extensions, focusing on AMR capabilities. It then explores the parsing (text-to-AMR) and generation (AMR-to-text) tasks by showing traditional, current, and possible futures approaches. It also reviews various applications of AMR including text generation, text classification, and information extraction and information seeking. By analyzing recent developments and challenges in the field, this survey provides insights into future directions for research and the potential impact of AMR on enhancing machine understanding of human language.
Improving the Reproducibility of Deep Learning Software: An Initial Investigation through a Case Study Analysis
Ravi, Nikita, Goel, Abhinav, Davis, James C., Thiruvathukal, George K.
The field of deep learning has witnessed significant breakthroughs, spanning various applications, and fundamentally transforming current software capabilities. However, alongside these advancements, there have been increasing concerns about reproducing the results of these deep learning methods. This is significant because reproducibility is the foundation of reliability and validity in software development, particularly in the rapidly evolving domain of deep learning. The difficulty of reproducibility may arise due to several reasons, including having differences from the original execution environment, incompatible software libraries, proprietary data and source code, lack of transparency, and the stochastic nature in some software. A study conducted by the Nature journal reveals that more than 70% of researchers failed to reproduce other researchers experiments and over 50% failed to reproduce their own experiments. Irreproducibility of deep learning poses significant challenges for researchers and practitioners. To address these concerns, this paper presents a systematic approach at analyzing and improving the reproducibility of deep learning models by demonstrating these guidelines using a case study. We illustrate the patterns and anti-patterns involved with these guidelines for improving the reproducibility of deep learning models. These guidelines encompass establishing a methodology to replicate the original software environment, implementing end-to-end training and testing algorithms, disclosing architectural designs, and enhancing transparency in data processing and training pipelines. We also conduct a sensitivity analysis to understand the model performance across diverse conditions. By implementing these strategies, we aim to bridge the gap between research and practice, so that innovations in deep learning can be effectively reproduced and deployed within software.
Generating Narrated Lecture Videos from Slides with Synchronized Highlights
Turning static slides into engaging video lectures takes considerable time and effort, requiring presenters to record explanations and visually guide their audience through the material. We introduce an end-to-end system designed to automate this process entirely. Given a slide deck, this system synthesizes a video lecture featuring AI-generated narration synchronized precisely with dynamic visual highlights. These highlights automatically draw attention to the specific concept being discussed, much like an effective presenter would. The core technical contribution is a novel highlight alignment module. This module accurately maps spoken phrases to locations on a given slide using diverse strategies (e.g., Levenshtein distance, LLM-based semantic analysis) at selectable granularities (line or word level) and utilizes timestamp-providing Text-to-Speech (TTS) for timing synchronization. We demonstrate the system's effectiveness through a technical evaluation using a manually annotated slide dataset with 1000 samples, finding that LLM-based alignment achieves high location accuracy (F1 > 92%), significantly outperforming simpler methods, especially on complex, math-heavy content. Furthermore, the calculated generation cost averages under $1 per hour of video, offering potential savings of two orders of magnitude compared to conservative estimates of manual production costs. This combination of high accuracy and extremely low cost positions this approach as a practical and scalable tool for transforming static slides into effective, visually-guided video lectures.
The Art of Repair: Optimizing Iterative Program Repair with Instruction-Tuned Models
Ruiz, Fernando Vallecillos, Hort, Max, Moonen, Leon
Automatic program repair (APR) aims to reduce the manual efforts required to identify and fix errors in source code. Before the rise of LLM-based agents, a common strategy was to increase the number of generated patches, sometimes to the thousands, to achieve better repair results on benchmarks. More recently, self-iterative capabilities enabled LLMs to refine patches over multiple rounds guided by feedback. However, literature often focuses on many iterations and disregards different numbers of outputs. We investigate an APR pipeline that balances these two approaches, the generation of multiple outputs and multiple rounds of iteration, while imposing a limit of 10 total patches per bug. We apply three SOTA instruction-tuned LLMs - DeepSeekCoder-Instruct, Codellama-Instruct, Llama3.1-Instruct - to the APR task. We further fine-tune each model on an APR dataset with three sizes (1K, 30K, 65K) and two techniques (Full Fine-Tuning and LoRA), allowing us to assess their repair capabilities on two APR benchmarks: HumanEval-Java and Defects4J. Our results show that by using only a fraction (<1%) of the fine-tuning dataset, we can achieve improvements of up to 78% in the number of plausible patches generated, challenging prior studies that reported limited gains using Full Fine-Tuning. However, we find that exceeding certain thresholds leads to diminishing outcomes, likely due to overfitting. Moreover, we show that base models greatly benefit from creating patches in an iterative fashion rather than generating them all at once. In addition, the benefit of iterative strategies becomes more pronounced in complex benchmarks. Even fine-tuned models, while benefiting less from iterations, still gain advantages, particularly on complex benchmarks. The research underscores the need for balanced APR strategies that combine multi-output generation and iterative refinement.
Distilling Two-Timed Flow Models by Separately Matching Initial and Terminal Velocities
Khungurn, Pramook, Piyawongwisal, Pratch, Sriswasdi, Sira, Suwajanakorn, Supasorn
A flow matching model learns a time-dependent vector field $v_t(x)$ that generates a probability path $\{ p_t \}_{0 \leq t \leq 1}$ that interpolates between a well-known noise distribution ($p_0$) and the data distribution ($p_1$). It can be distilled into a two-timed flow model (TTFM) $ϕ_{s,x}(t)$ that can transform a sample belonging to the distribution at an initial time $s$ to another belonging to the distribution at a terminal time $t$ in one function evaluation. We present a new loss function for TTFM distillation called the \emph{initial/terminal velocity matching} (ITVM) loss that extends the Lagrangian Flow Map Distillation (LFMD) loss proposed by Boffi et al. by adding redundant terms to match the initial velocities at time $s$, removing the derivative from the terminal velocity term at time $t$, and using a version of the model under training, stabilized by exponential moving averaging (EMA), to compute the target terminal average velocity. Preliminary experiments show that our loss leads to better few-step generation performance on multiple types of datasets and model architectures over baselines.
Investigating the Impact of Personalized AI Tutors on Language Learning Performance
Simon Suh Department of Technology and Society Stony Brook University [Abstract] Driven by the global shift towards online learning prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a pivotal player in the field of education. Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) offer a new method of personalized teaching, replacing the limitations of traditional teaching methods. However, concerns arise about the ability of AI tutors to address skill development and engagement during the learning process. In this paper, I will conduct a quasi-experiment with paired-sample t-test on 34 students pre-and post-use of AI tutors in language learning platforms like Santa and Duolingo to examine the relationship between students' engagement, academic performance, and students' satisfaction during a personalized language learning experience. Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Academic Performance; ITS Education; Student Engagement; Language Learning; Personalized Learning; Student Satisfaction 1. Introduction The educational landscape is undergoing a transformative shift with the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Technologies like Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS), specifically designed to provide individualized instruction and feedback to learners (Sedlmeier, 2002), play a crucial role in this transformation, steering the educational landscape towards the Application of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIEd) (Thomas et al., 2023). As the accessibility and diversity of AI technologies increase, this holds a significant potential to personalize learning experiences and unlock the educational potential of each student by fostering a more efficient and effective learning process (Rane, 2023).
Task-Oriented Semantic Communication in Large Multimodal Models-based Vehicle Networks
Du, Baoxia, Du, Hongyang, Niyato, Dusit, Li, Ruidong
Task-oriented semantic communication has emerged as a fundamental approach for enhancing performance in various communication scenarios. While recent advances in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), such as Large Language Models (LLMs), have been applied to semantic communication designs, the potential of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate an LMM-based vehicle AI assistant using a Large Language and Vision Assistant (LLaVA) and propose a task-oriented semantic communication framework to facilitate efficient interaction between users and cloud servers. To reduce computational demands and shorten response time, we optimize LLaVA's image slicing to selectively focus on areas of utmost interest to users. Additionally, we assess the importance of image patches by combining objective and subjective user attention, adjusting energy usage for transmitting semantic information. This strategy optimizes resource utilization, ensuring precise transmission of critical information. We construct a Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset for traffic scenarios to evaluate effectiveness. Experimental results show that our semantic communication framework significantly increases accuracy in answering questions under the same channel conditions, performing particularly well in environments with poor Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNR). Accuracy can be improved by 13.4% at an SNR of 12dB and 33.1% at 10dB, respectively.
Extended Fiducial Inference for Individual Treatment Effects via Deep Neural Networks
Individual treatment effect estimation has gained significant attention in recent data science literature. This work introduces the Double Neural Network (Double-NN) method to address this problem within the framework of extended fiducial inference (EFI). In the proposed method, deep neural networks are used to model the treatment and control effect functions, while an additional neural network is employed to estimate their parameters. The universal approximation capability of deep neural networks ensures the broad applicability of this method. Numerical results highlight the superior performance of the proposed Double-NN method compared to the conformal quantile regression (CQR) method in individual treatment effect estimation. From the perspective of statistical inference, this work advances the theory and methodology for statistical inference of large models. Specifically, it is theoretically proven that the proposed method permits the model size to increase with the sample size $n$ at a rate of $O(n^ζ)$ for some $0 \leq ζ<1$, while still maintaining proper quantification of uncertainty in the model parameters. This result marks a significant improvement compared to the range $0\leq ζ< \frac{1}{2}$ required by the classical central limit theorem. Furthermore, this work provides a rigorous framework for quantifying the uncertainty of deep neural networks under the neural scaling law, representing a substantial contribution to the statistical understanding of large-scale neural network models.