WIRED loved 2023's DJI Air 3 (9/10, WIRED Recommends). The midrange consumer drone was easy and safe to fly and compact enough to carry almost anywhere, but I found the most appealing feature to be its innovative dual-camera setup. CMOS sensor), it expanded my creative options for aerial photos and video. I could shoot wide vistas one moment, then switch to the telephoto lens to get closer to a particular feature of the landscape or compress it against the background for more dramatic framing. The new DJI Air 3S takes the concept a step further by increasing the sensor size of the wide-angle camera to a full inch, which improves dynamic range and low-light image quality.

The majority of online continual learning (CL) advocates single-epoch training and imposes restrictions on the size of replay memory. However, single-epoch training would incur a different amount of computations per CL algorithm, and the additional storage cost to store logit or model in addition to replay memory is largely ignored in calculating the storage budget. Arguing different computational and storage budgets hinder fair comparison among CL algorithms in practice, we propose to use floating point operations (FLOPs) and total memory size in Byte as a metric for computational and memory budgets, respectively, to compare and develop CL algorithms in the same 'total resource budget.' To improve a CL method in a limited total budget, we propose adaptive layer freezing that does not update the layers for less informative batches to reduce computational costs with a negligible loss of accuracy. In addition, we propose a memory retrieval method that allows the model to learn the same amount of knowledge as using random retrieval in fewer iterations. Empirical validations on the CIFAR-10/100, CLEAR-10/100, and ImageNet-1K datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods within the same total budget

Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) has recently garnered attention as a prominent research focus. By harnessing powerful LLM, it facilitates a transition of conversational generative AI from unimodal text to performing multimodal tasks. This boom begins to significantly impact medical field. However, general visual language model (VLM) lacks sophisticated comprehension for medical visual question answering (Med-VQA). Even models specifically tailored for medical domain tend to produce vague answers with weak visual relevance. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained adaptive VLM architecture for Chinese medical visual conversations through parameter-efficient tuning. Specifically, we devise a fusion module with fine-grained vision encoders to achieve enhancement for subtle medical visual semantics. Then we note data redundancy common to medical scenes is ignored in most prior works. In cases of a single text paired with multiple figures, we utilize weighted scoring with knowledge distillation to adaptively screen valid images mirroring text descriptions. For execution, we leverage a large-scale multimodal Chinese ultrasound dataset obtained from the hospital. We create instruction-following data based on text from professional doctors, which ensures effective tuning. With enhanced model and quality data, our Large Chinese Language and Vision Assistant for Ultrasound (LLaVA-Ultra) shows strong capability and robustness to medical scenarios. On three Med-VQA datasets, LLaVA-Ultra surpasses previous state-of-the-art models on various metrics.

The advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) have decentralized the responsibility for the transparency of AI usage. Specifically, LLM users are now encouraged or required to disclose the use of LLM-generated content for varied types of real-world tasks. However, an emerging phenomenon, users' secret use of LLM, raises challenges in ensuring end users adhere to the transparency requirement. Our study used mixed-methods with an exploratory survey (125 real-world secret use cases reported) and a controlled experiment among 300 users to investigate the contexts and causes behind the secret use of LLMs. We found that such secretive behavior is often triggered by certain tasks, transcending demographic and personality differences among users. Task types were found to affect users' intentions to use secretive behavior, primarily through influencing perceived external judgment regarding LLM usage. Our results yield important insights for future work on designing interventions to encourage more transparent disclosure of the use of LLMs or other AI technologies.

This paper presents the development of a dashboard designed specifically for teachers in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing education. Leveraging LLMs, the dashboard facilitates the analysis of student interactions with an essay writing system, which integrates ChatGPT for real-time feedback. The dashboard aids teachers in monitoring student behavior, identifying noneducational interaction with ChatGPT, and aligning instructional strategies with learning objectives. By combining insights from NLP and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), this study demonstrates how a human-centered approach can enhance the effectiveness of teacher dashboards, particularly in ChatGPT-integrated learning.

Accurate time-series forecasting is essential across a multitude of scientific and industrial domains, yet deep learning models often struggle with challenges such as capturing long-term dependencies and adapting to drift in data distributions over time. We introduce Future-Guided Learning, an approach that enhances time-series event forecasting through a dynamic feedback mechanism inspired by predictive coding. Our approach involves two models: a detection model that analyzes future data to identify critical events and a forecasting model that predicts these events based on present data. When discrepancies arise between the forecasting and detection models, the forecasting model undergoes more substantial updates, effectively minimizing surprise and adapting to shifts in the data distribution by aligning its predictions with actual future outcomes. This feedback loop, drawing upon principles of predictive coding, enables the forecasting model to dynamically adjust its parameters, improving accuracy by focusing on features that remain relevant despite changes in the underlying data. We validate our method on a variety of tasks such as seizure prediction in biomedical signal analysis and forecasting in dynamical systems, achieving a 40\% increase in the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) and a 10\% reduction in mean absolute error (MAE), respectively. By incorporating a predictive feedback mechanism that adapts to data distribution drift, Future-Guided Learning offers a promising avenue for advancing time-series forecasting with deep learning.

The thematic fit estimation task measures the compatibility between a predicate (typically a verb), an argument (typically a noun phrase), and a specific semantic role assigned to the argument. Previous state-of-the-art work has focused on modeling thematic fit through distributional or neural models of event representation, trained in a supervised fashion with indirect labels. In this work, we assess whether pre-trained autoregressive LLMs possess consistent, expressible knowledge about thematic fit. We evaluate both closed and open state-of-the-art LLMs on several psycholinguistic datasets, along three axes: (1) Reasoning Form: multi-step logical reasoning (chain-of-thought prompting) vs. simple prompting. (2) Input Form: providing context (generated sentences) vs. raw tuples . (3) Output Form: categorical vs. numeric. Our results show that chain-of-thought reasoning is more effective on datasets with self-explanatory semantic role labels, especially Location. Generated sentences helped only in few settings, and lowered results in many others. Predefined categorical (compared to numeric) output raised GPT's results across the board with few exceptions, but lowered Llama's. We saw that semantically incoherent generated sentences, which the models lack the ability to consistently filter out, hurt reasoning and overall performance too. Our GPT-powered methods set new state-of-the-art on all tested datasets.

As trajectories sampled by policies used by reinforcement learning (RL) and generative flow networks (GFlowNets) grow longer, credit assignment and exploration become more challenging, and the long planning horizon hinders mode discovery and generalization. The challenge is particularly pronounced in entropy-seeking RL methods, such as generative flow networks, where the agent must learn to sample from a structured distribution and discover multiple high-reward states, each of which take many steps to reach. To tackle this challenge, we propose an approach to incorporate the discovery of action abstractions, or high-level actions, into the policy optimization process. Our approach involves iteratively extracting action subsequences commonly used across many high-reward trajectories and `chunking' them into a single action that is added to the action space. In empirical evaluation on synthetic and real-world environments, our approach demonstrates improved sample efficiency performance in discovering diverse high-reward objects, especially on harder exploration problems. We also observe that the abstracted high-order actions are interpretable, capturing the latent structure of the reward landscape of the action space. This work provides a cognitively motivated approach to action abstraction in RL and is the first demonstration of hierarchical planning in amortized sequential sampling.

Machine translation systems for high resource languages perform exceptionally well and produce high quality translations. Unfortunately, the vast majority of languages are not considered high resource and lack the quantity of parallel sentences needed to train such systems. These under-represented languages are not without resources, however, and bilingual dictionaries and grammar books are available as linguistic reference material. With current large language models (LLMs) supporting near book-length contexts, we can begin to use the available material to ensure advancements are shared among all of the world's languages. In this paper, we demonstrate incorporating grammar books in the prompt of GPT-4 to improve machine translation and evaluate the performance on 16 topologically diverse low-resource languages, using a combination of reference material to show that the machine translation performance of LLMs can be improved using this method.

Cognitive diagnosis model (CDM) is a fundamental and upstream component in intelligent education. It aims to infer students' mastery levels based on historical response logs. However, existing CDMs usually follow the ID-based embedding paradigm, which could often diminish the effectiveness of CDMs in open student learning environments. This is mainly because they can hardly directly infer new students' mastery levels or utilize new exercises or knowledge without retraining. Textual semantic information, due to its unified feature space and easy accessibility, can help alleviate this issue. Unfortunately, directly incorporating semantic information may not benefit CDMs, since it does not capture response-relevant features and thus discards the individual characteristics of each student. To this end, this paper proposes a dual-fusion cognitive diagnosis framework (DFCD) to address the challenge of aligning two different modalities, i.e., textual semantic features and response-relevant features. Specifically, in DFCD, we first propose the exercise-refiner and concept-refiner to make the exercises and knowledge concepts more coherent and reasonable via large language models. Then, DFCD encodes the refined features using text embedding models to obtain the semantic information. For response-related features, we propose a novel response matrix to fully incorporate the information within the response logs. Finally, DFCD designs a dual-fusion module to merge the two modal features. The ultimate representations possess the capability of inference in open student learning environments and can be also plugged in existing CDMs. Extensive experiments across real-world datasets show that DFCD achieves superior performance by integrating different modalities and strong adaptability in open student learning environments.