Education
CPP-UT-Bench: Can LLMs Write Complex Unit Tests in C++?
Bhargava, Vaishnavi, Ghosh, Rajat, Dutta, Debojyoti
We introduce CPP-UT-Bench, a benchmark dataset to measure C++ unit test generation capability of a large language model (LLM). CPP-UT-Bench aims to reflect a broad and diverse set of C++ codebases found in the real world. The dataset includes 2,653 {code, unit test} pairs drawn from 14 different opensource C++ codebases spanned across nine diverse domains including machine learning, software testing, parsing, standard input-output, data engineering, logging, complete expression evaluation, key value storage, and server protocols. We demonstrated the effectiveness of CPP-UT-Bench as a benchmark dataset through extensive experiments in in-context learning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), and full-parameter fine-tuning. We also discussed the challenges of the dataset compilation and insights we learned from in-context learning and fine-tuning experiments. Besides the CPP-UT-Bench dataset and data compilation code, we are also offering the fine-tuned model weights for further research. For nine out of ten experiments, our fine-tuned LLMs outperformed the corresponding base models by an average of more than 70%.
Bias Analysis of AI Models for Undergraduate Student Admissions
Van Busum, Kelly, Fang, Shiaofen
Bias detection and mitigation is an active area of research in machine learning. This work extends previous research done by the authors to provide a rigorous and more complete analysis of the bias found in AI predictive models. Admissions data spanning six years was used to create an AI model to determine whether a given student would be directly admitted into the School of Science under various scenarios at a large urban research university. During this time, submission of standardized test scores as part of an application became optional which led to interesting questions about the impact of standardized test scores on admission decisions. We developed and analyzed AI models to understand which variables are important in admissions decisions, and how the decision to exclude test scores affects the demographics of the students who are admitted. We then evaluated the predictive models to detect and analyze biases these models may carry with respect to three variables chosen to represent sensitive populations: gender, race, and whether a student was the first in his or her family to attend college. We also extended our analysis to show that the biases detected were persistent. Finally, we included several fairness metrics in our analysis and discussed the uses and limitations of these metrics.
UniGraspTransformer: Simplified Policy Distillation for Scalable Dexterous Robotic Grasping
Wang, Wenbo, Wei, Fangyun, Zhou, Lei, Chen, Xi, Luo, Lin, Yi, Xiaohan, Zhang, Yizhong, Liang, Yaobo, Xu, Chang, Lu, Yan, Yang, Jiaolong, Guo, Baining
We introduce UniGraspTransformer, a universal Transformer-based network for dexterous robotic grasping that simplifies training while enhancing scalability and performance. Unlike prior methods such as UniDexGrasp++, which require complex, multi-step training pipelines, UniGraspTransformer follows a streamlined process: first, dedicated policy networks are trained for individual objects using reinforcement learning to generate successful grasp trajectories; then, these trajectories are distilled into a single, universal network. Our approach enables UniGraspTransformer to scale effectively, incorporating up to 12 self-attention blocks for handling thousands of objects with diverse poses. Additionally, it generalizes well to both idealized and real-world inputs, evaluated in state-based and vision-based settings. Notably, UniGraspTransformer generates a broader range of grasping poses for objects in various shapes and orientations, resulting in more diverse grasp strategies. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art, UniDexGrasp++, across various object categories, achieving success rate gains of 3.5%, 7.7%, and 10.1% on seen objects, unseen objects within seen categories, and completely unseen objects, respectively, in the vision-based setting. Project page: https://dexhand.github.io/UniGraspTransformer.
The effect of priors on Learning with Restricted Boltzmann Machines
Manzan, Gianluca, Tantari, Daniele
Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) are generative models designed to learn from data with a rich underlying structure. In this work, we explore a teacher-student setting where a student RBM learns from examples generated by a teacher RBM, with a focus on the effect of the unit priors on learning efficiency. We consider a parametric class of priors that interpolate between continuous (Gaussian) and binary variables. This approach models various possible choices of visible units, hidden units, and weights for both the teacher and student RBMs. By analyzing the phase diagram of the posterior distribution in both the Bayes optimal and mismatched regimes, we demonstrate the existence of a triple point that defines the critical dataset size necessary for learning through generalization. The critical size is strongly influenced by the properties of the teacher, and thus the data, but is unaffected by the properties of the student RBM. Nevertheless, a prudent choice of student priors can facilitate training by expanding the so-called signal retrieval region, where the machine generalizes effectively.
Curriculum-style Data Augmentation for LLM-based Metaphor Detection
Jia, Kaidi, Wu, Yanxia, Li, Rongsheng
Recently, utilizing large language models (LLMs) for metaphor detection has achieved promising results. However, these methods heavily rely on the capabilities of closed-source LLMs, which come with relatively high inference costs and latency. To address this, we propose a method for metaphor detection by fine-tuning open-source LLMs, effectively reducing inference costs and latency with a single inference step. Furthermore, metaphor detection suffers from a severe data scarcity problem, which hinders effective fine-tuning of LLMs. To tackle this, we introduce Curriculum-style Data Augmentation (CDA). Specifically, before fine-tuning, we evaluate the training data to identify correctly predicted instances for fine-tuning, while incorrectly predicted instances are used as seed data for data augmentation. This approach enables the model to quickly learn simpler knowledge and progressively acquire more complex knowledge, thereby improving performance incrementally. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all baselines. Additionally, we provide detailed ablation studies to validate the effectiveness of CDA.
Optimizing Large Language Models for Turkish: New Methodologies in Corpus Selection and Training
Kesgin, H. Toprak, Yuce, M. Kaan, Dogan, Eren, Uzun, M. Egemen, Uz, Atahan, Ince, Elif, Erdem, Yusuf, Shbib, Osama, Zeer, Ahmed, Amasyali, M. Fatih
In this study, we develop and assess new corpus selection and training methodologies to improve the effectiveness of Turkish language models. Specifically, we adapted Large Language Model generated datasets and translated English datasets into Turkish, integrating these resources into the training process. This approach led to substantial enhancements in model accuracy for both few-shot and zero-shot learning scenarios. Furthermore, the merging of these adapted models was found to markedly improve their performance. Human evaluative metrics, including task-specific performance assessments, further demonstrated that these adapted models possess a greater aptitude for comprehending the Turkish language and addressing logic-based queries. This research underscores the importance of refining corpus selection strategies to optimize the performance of multilingual models, particularly for under-resourced languages like Turkish.
Class-wise Autoencoders Measure Classification Difficulty And Detect Label Mistakes
Marks, Jacob, Griffin, Brent A., Corso, Jason J.
We introduce a new framework for analyzing classification datasets based on the ratios of reconstruction errors between autoencoders trained on individual classes. This analysis framework enables efficient characterization of datasets on the sample, class, and entire dataset levels. We define reconstruction error ratios (RERs) that probe classification difficulty and allow its decomposition into (1) finite sample size and (2) Bayes error and decision-boundary complexity. Through systematic study across 19 popular visual datasets, we find that our RER-based dataset difficulty probe strongly correlates with error rate for state-of-the-art (SOTA) classification models. By interpreting sample-level classification difficulty as a label mistakenness score, we further find that RERs achieve SOTA performance on mislabel detection tasks on hard datasets under symmetric and asymmetric label noise. Data is the cornerstone of modern machine learning. As the data-centric AI movement has made increasingly clear, both predictive and generative ML models rely on sufficiently large and diverse high-quality datasets (Deng et al., 2009b; Radford et al., 2018; Kaplan et al., 2020). However, it is well known that even popular visual datasets like CIFAR-100 (Krizhevsky & Hinton, 2009), Caltech-256 (Griffin et al., 2007), and ImageNet (Deng et al., 2009b) can have hundreds or thousands of data quality issues, including up to 10% label errors (Northcutt et al., 2021). Consequently, curating a high-quality dataset requires not only data collection but also data cleaning, characterization, evaluation, and refinement. Nevertheless, existing methods for data quality assessment are inherently limited. Methods that seek to estimate the classification difficulty of a sample or dataset are either model-dependent (Ethayarajh et al., 2021), computationally infeasible (Scheidegger et al., 2021), or break down when applied to challenging datasets (Zhang et al., 2020). Likewise, mislabel detection methods either rely on training a strong classifier on the dataset (Pruthi et al., 2020; Pleiss et al., 2020), which becomes more time and compute-intensive for more complex datasets, or exhibit degraded performance on datasets with complex decision boundaries (Zhu et al., 2021; Northcutt et al., 2021). To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach for characterizing the difficulty of classification datasets by decomposing complex multi-class classification problems into one manifold learning problem for each class.
QA-TOOLBOX: Conversational Question-Answering for process task guidance in manufacturing
Manuvinakurike, Ramesh, Watkins, Elizabeth, Savur, Celal, Rhodes, Anthony, Biswas, Sovan, Mejia, Gesem Gudino, Beckwith, Richard, Sahay, Saurav, Raffa, Giuseppe, Nachman, Lama
In this work we explore utilizing LLMs for data augmentation for manufacturing task guidance system. The dataset consists of representative samples of interactions with technicians working in an advanced manufacturing setting. The purpose of this work to explore the task, data augmentation for the supported tasks and evaluating the performance of the existing LLMs. We observe that that task is complex requiring understanding from procedure specification documents, actions and objects sequenced temporally. The dataset consists of 200,000+ question/answer pairs that refer to the spec document and are grounded in narrations and/or video demonstrations. We compared the performance of several popular open-sourced LLMs by developing a "baseline" using each LLM and then compared the responses in a reference-free setting using LLM-as-a-judge and compared the ratings with crowd-workers whilst validating the ratings with experts.
Methods with Local Steps and Random Reshuffling for Generally Smooth Non-Convex Federated Optimization
Demidovich, Yury, Ostroukhov, Petr, Malinovsky, Grigory, Horvรกth, Samuel, Takรกฤ, Martin, Richtรกrik, Peter, Gorbunov, Eduard
Non-convex Machine Learning problems typically do not adhere to the standard smoothness assumption. Based on empirical findings, Zhang et al. (2020b) proposed a more realistic generalized $(L_0, L_1)$-smoothness assumption, though it remains largely unexplored. Many existing algorithms designed for standard smooth problems need to be revised. However, in the context of Federated Learning, only a few works address this problem but rely on additional limiting assumptions. In this paper, we address this gap in the literature: we propose and analyze new methods with local steps, partial participation of clients, and Random Reshuffling without extra restrictive assumptions beyond generalized smoothness. The proposed methods are based on the proper interplay between clients' and server's stepsizes and gradient clipping. Furthermore, we perform the first analysis of these methods under the Polyak-{\L} ojasiewicz condition. Our theory is consistent with the known results for standard smooth problems, and our experimental results support the theoretical insights.
Scaffold or Crutch? Examining College Students' Use and Views of Generative AI Tools for STEM Education
Wang, Karen D., Wu, Zhangyang, Tufts, L'Nard II, Wieman, Carl, Salehi, Shima, Haber, Nick
Developing problem-solving competency is central to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education, yet translating this priority into effective approaches to problem-solving instruction and assessment remain a significant challenge. The recent proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (genAI) tools like ChatGPT in higher education introduces new considerations about how these tools can help or hinder students' development of STEM problem-solving competency. Our research examines these considerations by studying how and why college students use genAI tools in their STEM coursework, focusing on their problem-solving support. We surveyed 40 STEM college students from diverse U.S. institutions and 28 STEM faculty to understand instructor perspectives on effective genAI tool use and guidance in STEM courses. Our findings reveal high adoption rates and diverse applications of genAI tools among STEM students. The most common use cases include finding explanations, exploring related topics, summarizing readings, and helping with problem-set questions. The primary motivation for using genAI tools was to save time. Moreover, over half of student participants reported simply inputting problems for AI to generate solutions, potentially bypassing their own problem-solving processes. These findings indicate that despite high adoption rates, students' current approaches to utilizing genAI tools often fall short in enhancing their own STEM problem-solving competencies. The study also explored students' and STEM instructors' perceptions of the benefits and risks associated with using genAI tools in STEM education. Our findings provide insights into how to guide students on appropriate genAI use in STEM courses and how to design genAI-based tools to foster students' problem-solving competency.