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Diffusion Augmented Agents: A Framework for Efficient Exploration and Transfer Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce Diffusion Augmented Agents (DAAG), a novel framework that leverages large language models, vision language models, and diffusion models to improve sample efficiency and transfer learning in reinforcement learning for embodied agents. DAAG hindsight relabels the agent's past experience by using diffusion models to transform videos in a temporally and geometrically consistent way to align with target instructions with a technique we call Hindsight Experience Augmentation. The framework reduces the amount of rewardlabeled data needed to 1) finetune a vision language model that acts as a reward detector, and 2) train RL agents on new tasks. We demonstrate the sample efficiency gains of DAAG in simulated robotics environments involving manipulation and navigation. Our results show that DAAG improves learning of reward detectors, transferring past experience, and acquiring new tasks - key abilities for developing efficient lifelong learning agents. The most recent notable breakthroughs in AI have come from the combination of large models trained on enormous datasets (Firoozi et al., 2023; Brown et al., 2020; Hoffmann et al., 2022; Reed et al., 2022; Gemini-Team, 2023). However, despite efforts to scale up data collection (Collaboration, 2023; Reed et al., 2022; Bousmalis et al., 2023), data in embodied AI settings is still prohibitively scarce because such agents need to interact with physical environments where sensors and actuators present major bottlenecks (Cabi et al., 2020; Lee et al., 2022). This data scarcity issue is especially pronounced in reinforcement learning scenarios, where rewards are often sparse or completely absent in realistic settings (Ecoffet et al., 2021).


The Responsible Development of Automated Student Feedback with Generative AI

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Abstract--Contribution: This paper identifies four critical ethical considerations for implementing generative AI tools to provide automated feedback to students. Background: Providing rich feedback to students is essential for supporting student learning. Recent advances in generative AI, particularly with large language models (LLMs), provide the opportunity to deliver repeatable, scalable and instant automatically generated feedback to students, making abundant a previously scarce and expensive learning resource. A visualisation of Bloom's revised taxonomy, modified from [6]. Intended Outcomes: The goal of this work is to enable the use of AI systems to automate mundane assessment and feedback tasks, without introducing a "tyranny of the majority", where HE release of powerful language technology tools based on generative language modelling (e.g., ChatGPT, GPT-are going to use AI tools in their working lives, we should 4(o), Claude, Gemini, Llama; [1]-[3]), marked a significant aim to train them in their use. For example, While assessment is a clear space of development for days after the release of ChatGPT, students, educators, and this type of educational technology, we argue that the real the public alike discovered the potential of the application potential of generative language modelling can be found in for assisting with a range of teaching and learning tasks, but student feedback. E. D. Lindsay is with the UNESCO Centre for Problem Based Learning M. Zhang is with the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, A.C. Meyers Vรฆnge 15, 2450 Kรธbenhavn SV, Denmark. A. Johri is the Director of the Technocritical Research on AI, Learning J. Bjerva is with the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Manuscript revised on July 31, 2024. Hence, this current state has common patterns of student answers and standardize responses effectively locked some engineering courses into a focus, to them, rather than having to make bespoke responses to where a particular set of questions are iterated over.


Effects of a Prompt Engineering Intervention on Undergraduate Students' AI Self-Efficacy, AI Knowledge and Prompt Engineering Ability: A Mixed Methods Study

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Prompt engineering is critical for effective interaction with large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. However, efforts to teach this skill to students have been limited. This study designed and implemented a prompt engineering intervention, examining its influence on undergraduate students' AI self-efficacy, AI knowledge, and proficiency in creating effective prompts. The intervention involved 27 students who participated in a 100-minute workshop conducted during their history course at a university in Hong Kong. During the workshop, students were introduced to prompt engineering strategies, which they applied to plan the course's final essay task. Multiple data sources were collected, including students' responses to pre- and post-workshop questionnaires, pre- and post-workshop prompt libraries, and written reflections. The study's findings revealed that students demonstrated a higher level of AI self-efficacy, an enhanced understanding of AI concepts, and improved prompt engineering skills because of the intervention. These findings have implications for AI literacy education, as they highlight the importance of prompt engineering training for specific higher education use cases. This is a significant shift from students haphazardly and intuitively learning to engineer prompts. Through prompt engineering education, educators can faciitate students' effective navigation and leverage of LLMs to support their coursework.


AxiomVision: Accuracy-Guaranteed Adaptive Visual Model Selection for Perspective-Aware Video Analytics

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rapid evolution of multimedia and computer vision technologies requires adaptive visual model deployment strategies to effectively handle diverse tasks and varying environments. This work introduces AxiomVision, a novel framework that can guarantee accuracy by leveraging edge computing to dynamically select the most efficient visual models for video analytics under diverse scenarios. Utilizing a tiered edge-cloud architecture, AxiomVision enables the deployment of a broad spectrum of visual models, from lightweight to complex DNNs, that can be tailored to specific scenarios while considering camera source impacts. In addition, AxiomVision provides three core innovations: (1) a dynamic visual model selection mechanism utilizing continual online learning, (2) an efficient online method that efficiently takes into account the influence of the camera's perspective, and (3) a topology-driven grouping approach that accelerates the model selection process. With rigorous theoretical guarantees, these advancements provide a scalable and effective solution for visual tasks inherent to multimedia systems, such as object detection, classification, and counting. Empirically, AxiomVision achieves a 25.7\% improvement in accuracy.


Towards an Integrated Performance Framework for Fire Science and Management Workflows

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reliable performance metrics are necessary prerequisites to building large-scale end-to-end integrated workflows for collaborative scientific research, particularly within context of use-inspired decision making platforms with many concurrent users and when computing real-time and urgent results using large data. This work is a building block for the National Data Platform, which leverages multiple use-cases including the WIFIRE Data and Model Commons for wildfire behavior modeling and the EarthScope Consortium for collaborative geophysical research. This paper presents an artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) approach to performance assessment and optimization of scientific workflows. An associated early AI/ML framework spanning performance data collection, prediction and optimization is applied to wildfire science applications within the WIFIRE BurnPro3D (BP3D) platform for proactive fire management and mitigation.


How Novice Programmers Use and Experience ChatGPT when Solving Programming Exercises in an Introductory Course

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This research paper contributes to the computing education research community's understanding of Generative AI (GenAI) in the context of introductory programming, and specifically, how students utilize related tools, such as ChatGPT. An increased understanding of students' use is mandatory for educators and higher education institutions, as GenAI is here to stay, and its performance is likely to improve rapidly in the near future. Learning about students' use patterns is not only crucial to support their learning, but to develop adequate forms of instruction and assessment. With the rapid advancement of AI, its broad availability, and ubiquitous presence in educational environments, elaborating how AI can enhance learning experiences, especially in courses such as introductory programming is important. To date, most studies have focused on the educator's perspective on GenAI, its performance, characteristics, and limitations. However, the student perspective, and how they actually use GenAI tools in course contexts, has not been subject to a great number of studies. Therefore, this study is guided by the following research questions: (1) What do students report on their use pattern of ChatGPT in the context of introductory programming exercises? and (2) How do students perceive ChatGPT in the context of introductory programming exercises? To address these questions, computing students at a large German university were asked to solve programming tasks with the assistance of ChatGPT as part of their introductory programming course. Students (n=298) provided information regarding the use of ChatGPT, and their evaluation of the tool via an online survey. This research provides a comprehensive evaluation of ChatGPT-3.5's application by novice programmers in a higher education context...


Benchmarks as Microscopes: A Call for Model Metrology

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Modern language models (LMs) pose a new challenge in capability assessment. Static benchmarks inevitably saturate without providing confidence in the deployment tolerances of LM-based systems, but developers nonetheless claim that their models have generalized traits such as reasoning or open-domain language understanding based on these flawed metrics. The science and practice of LMs requires a new approach to benchmarking which measures specific capabilities with dynamic assessments. To be confident in our metrics, we need a new discipline of model metrology -- one which focuses on how to generate benchmarks that predict performance under deployment. Motivated by our evaluation criteria, we outline how building a community of model metrology practitioners -- one focused on building tools and studying how to measure system capabilities -- is the best way to meet these needs to and add clarity to the AI discussion.


PIP: Prototypes-Injected Prompt for Federated Class Incremental Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Federated Class Incremental Learning (FCIL) is a new direction in continual learning (CL) for addressing catastrophic forgetting and non-IID data distribution simultaneously. Existing FCIL methods call for high communication costs and exemplars from previous classes. We propose a novel rehearsal-free method for FCIL named prototypes-injected prompt (PIP) that involves 3 main ideas: a) prototype injection on prompt learning, b) prototype augmentation, and c) weighted Gaussian aggregation on the server side. Our experiment result shows that the proposed method outperforms the current state of the arts (SOTAs) with a significant improvement (up to 33%) in CIFAR100, MiniImageNet and TinyImageNet datasets. Our extensive analysis demonstrates the robustness of PIP in different task sizes, and the advantage of requiring smaller participating local clients, and smaller global rounds. For further study, source codes of PIP, baseline, and experimental logs are shared publicly in https://github.com/anwarmaxsum/PIP.


Decomposed Prompting to Answer Questions on a Course Discussion Board

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We propose and evaluate a question-answering system that uses decomposed prompting to classify and answer student questions on a course discussion board. Our system uses a large language model (LLM) to classify questions into one of four types: conceptual, homework, logistics, and not answerable. This enables us to employ a different strategy for answering questions that fall under different types. Using a variant of GPT-3, we achieve $81\%$ classification accuracy. We discuss our system's performance on answering conceptual questions from a machine learning course and various failure modes.


Efficient Pareto Manifold Learning with Low-Rank Structure

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Multi-task learning, which optimizes performance across multiple tasks, is inherently a multi-objective optimization problem. Various algorithms are developed to provide discrete trade-off solutions on the Pareto front. Recently, continuous Pareto front approximations using a linear combination of base networks have emerged as a compelling strategy. However, it suffers from scalability issues when the number of tasks is large. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach that integrates a main network with several low-rank matrices to efficiently learn the Pareto manifold. It significantly reduces the number of parameters and facilitates the extraction of shared features. We also introduce orthogonal regularization to further bolster performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, especially on datasets with a large number of tasks.