Education
Personalized Knowledge Tracing through Student Representation Reconstruction and Class Imbalance Mitigation
Chen, Zhiyu, Ji, Wei, Xiao, Jing, Liu, Zitao
Knowledge tracing is a technique that predicts students' future performance by analyzing their learning process through historical interactions with intelligent educational platforms, enabling a precise evaluation of their knowledge mastery. Recent studies have achieved significant progress by leveraging powerful deep neural networks. These models construct complex input representations using questions, skills, and other auxiliary information but overlook individual student characteristics, which limits the capability for personalized assessment. Additionally, the available datasets in the field exhibit class imbalance issues. The models that simply predict all responses as correct without substantial effort can yield impressive accuracy. In this paper, we propose PKT, a novel approach for personalized knowledge tracing. PKT reconstructs representations from sequences of interactions with a tutoring platform to capture latent information about the students. Moreover, PKT incorporates focal loss to improve prioritize minority classes, thereby achieving more balanced predictions. Extensive experimental results on four publicly available educational datasets demonstrate the advanced predictive performance of PKT in comparison with 16 state-of-the-art models. To ensure the reproducibility of our research, the code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PKT.
Adaptive Meta-Domain Transfer Learning (AMDTL): A Novel Approach for Knowledge Transfer in AI
This paper presents Adaptive Meta-Domain Transfer Learning (AMDTL), a novel methodology that combines principles of meta-learning with domain-specific adaptations to enhance the transferability of artificial intelligence models across diverse and unknown domains. AMDTL aims to address the main challenges of transfer learning, such as domain misalignment, negative transfer, and catastrophic forgetting, through a hybrid framework that emphasizes both generalization and contextual specialization. The framework integrates a meta-learner trained on a diverse distribution of tasks, adversarial training techniques for aligning domain feature distributions, and dynamic feature regulation mechanisms based on contextual domain embeddings. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that AMDTL outperforms existing transfer learning methodologies in terms of accuracy, adaptation efficiency, and robustness. This research provides a solid theoretical and practical foundation for the application of AMDTL in various fields, opening new perspectives for the development of more adaptable and inclusive AI systems.
Alleviating Hallucinations in Large Language Models with Scepticism Modeling
Wu, Yetao, Wang, Yihong, Chen, Teng, Liu, Chenxi, Xi, Ningyuan, Gu, Qingqing, Lei, Hongyang, Jiang, Zhonglin, Chen, Yong, Ji, Luo
Hallucinations is a major challenge for large language models (LLMs), prevents adoption in diverse fields. Uncertainty estimation could be used for alleviating the damages of hallucinations. The skeptical emotion of human could be useful for enhancing the ability of self estimation. Inspirited by this observation, we proposed a new approach called Skepticism Modeling (SM). This approach is formalized by combining the information of token and logits for self estimation. We construct the doubt emotion aware data, perform continual pre-training, and then fine-tune the LLMs, improve their ability of self estimation. Experimental results demonstrate this new approach effectively enhances a model's ability to estimate their uncertainty, and validate its generalization ability of other tasks by out-of-domain experiments.
Exploring syntactic information in sentence embeddings through multilingual subject-verb agreement
Nastase, Vivi, Jiang, Chunyang, Samo, Giuseppe, Merlo, Paola
In this paper, our goal is to investigate to what degree multilingual pretrained language models capture cross-linguistically valid abstract linguistic representations. We take the approach of developing curated synthetic data on a large scale, with specific properties, and using them to study sentence representations built using pretrained language models. We use a new multiple-choice task and datasets, Blackbird Language Matrices (BLMs), to focus on a specific grammatical structural phenomenon -- subject-verb agreement across a variety of sentence structures -- in several languages. Finding a solution to this task requires a system detecting complex linguistic patterns and paradigms in text representations. Using a two-level architecture that solves the problem in two steps -- detect syntactic objects and their properties in individual sentences, and find patterns across an input sequence of sentences -- we show that despite having been trained on multilingual texts in a consistent manner, multilingual pretrained language models have language-specific differences, and syntactic structure is not shared, even across closely related languages.
Advancements in Gesture Recognition Techniques and Machine Learning for Enhanced Human-Robot Interaction: A Comprehensive Review
Hussain, Sajjad, Saeed, Khizer, Baimagambetov, Almas, Rab, Shanay, Saad, Md
In recent years robots have become an important part of our day-to-day lives with various applications. Human-robot interaction creates a positive impact in the field of robotics to interact and communicate with the robots. Gesture recognition techniques combined with machine learning algorithms have shown remarkable progress in recent years, particularly in human-robot interaction (HRI). This paper comprehensively reviews the latest advancements in gesture recognition methods and their integration with machine learning approaches to enhance HRI. Furthermore, this paper represents the vision-based gesture recognition for safe and reliable human-robot-interaction with a depth-sensing system, analyses the role of machine learning algorithms such as deep learning, reinforcement learning, and transfer learning in improving the accuracy and robustness of gesture recognition systems for effective communication between humans and robots.
Geometric-Averaged Preference Optimization for Soft Preference Labels
Furuta, Hiroki, Lee, Kuang-Huei, Gu, Shixiang Shane, Matsuo, Yutaka, Faust, Aleksandra, Zen, Heiga, Gur, Izzeddin
Many algorithms for aligning LLMs with human preferences assume that human preferences are binary and deterministic. However, it is reasonable to think that they can vary with different individuals, and thus should be distributional to reflect the fine-grained relationship between the responses. In this work, we introduce the distributional soft preference labels and improve Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with a weighted geometric average of the LLM output likelihood in the loss function. In doing so, the scale of learning loss is adjusted based on the soft labels, and the loss with equally preferred responses would be close to zero. This simple modification can be easily applied to any DPO family and helps the models escape from the over-optimization and objective mismatch prior works suffer from. In our experiments, we simulate the soft preference labels with AI feedback from LLMs and demonstrate that geometric averaging consistently improves performance on standard benchmarks for alignment research. In particular, we observe more preferable responses than binary labels and significant improvements with data where modestly-confident labels are in the majority.
A Primer on Variational Inference for Physics-Informed Deep Generative Modelling
Glyn-Davies, Alex, Vadeboncoeur, Arnaud, Akyildiz, O. Deniz, Kazlauskaite, Ieva, Girolami, Mark
Variational inference (VI) is a computationally efficient and scalable methodology for approximate Bayesian inference. It strikes a balance between accuracy of uncertainty quantification and practical tractability. It excels at generative modelling and inversion tasks due to its built-in Bayesian regularisation and flexibility, essential qualities for physics related problems. Deriving the central learning objective for VI must often be tailored to new learning tasks where the nature of the problems dictates the conditional dependence between variables of interest, such as arising in physics problems. In this paper, we provide an accessible and thorough technical introduction to VI for forward and inverse problems, guiding the reader through standard derivations of the VI framework and how it can best be realized through deep learning. We then review and unify recent literature exemplifying the creative flexibility allowed by VI. This paper is designed for a general scientific audience looking to solve physics-based problems with an emphasis on uncertainty quantification.
A Short Information-Theoretic Analysis of Linear Auto-Regressive Learning
Learning the dynamics of a linear dynamical system is a classical problem in for instance signal processing, system identification and econometrics. It is also arguably one of the simplest examples of an auto-regressive learning problem, thereby rendering it an instance of self-supervised learning. Understanding the sample complexity--and which quantities are of relevance for it--of such learning problems is key in the current era of large language models. The traditional approach for analyzing sequential (self-) supervised learning problems operates via comparison of the empirical and population excess risk functionals. Recently, Jeon and Van Roy [2024] provided an information-theoretic proof approach for learning from dependent data eschewing any such direct comparison. However, their results only apply to the Bayesian setting.
Applied Federated Model Personalisation in the Industrial Domain: A Comparative Study
Siniosoglou, Ilias, Argyriou, Vasileios, Fragulis, George, Fouliras, Panagiotis, Papadopoulos, Georgios Th., Lytos, Anastasios, Sarigiannidis, Panagiotis
The time-consuming nature of training and deploying complicated Machine and Deep Learning (DL) models for a variety of applications continues to pose significant challenges in the field of Machine Learning (ML). These challenges are particularly pronounced in the federated domain, where optimizing models for individual nodes poses significant difficulty. Many methods have been developed to tackle this problem, aiming to reduce training expenses and time while maintaining efficient optimisation. Three suggested strategies to tackle this challenge include Active Learning, Knowledge Distillation, and Local Memorization. These methods enable the adoption of smaller models that require fewer computational resources and allow for model personalization with local insights, thereby improving the effectiveness of current models. The present study delves into the fundamental principles of these three approaches and proposes an advanced Federated Learning System that utilises different Personalisation methods towards improving the accuracy of AI models and enhancing user experience in real-time NG-IoT applications, investigating the efficacy of these techniques in the local and federated domain. The results of the original and optimised models are then compared in both local and federated contexts using a comparison analysis. The post-analysis shows encouraging outcomes when it comes to optimising and personalising the models with the suggested techniques.
Dynamic Decoupling of Placid Terminal Attractor-based Gradient Descent Algorithm
Zhao, Jinwei, Gori, Marco, Betti, Alessandro, Melacci, Stefano, Zhang, Hongtao, Liu, Jiedong, Hei, Xinhong
Gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) have been widely used in a large number of application domains. Therefore, understanding the dynamics of GD and improving its convergence speed is still of great importance. This paper carefully analyzes the dynamics of GD based on the terminal attractor at different stages of its gradient flow. On the basis of the terminal sliding mode theory and the terminal attractor theory, four adaptive learning rates are designed. Their performances are investigated in light of a detailed theoretical investigation, and the running times of the learning procedures are evaluated and compared. The total times of their learning processes are also studied in detail. To evaluate their effectiveness, various simulation results are investigated on a function approximation problem and an image classification problem.