While much of the rapidly growing literature on fair decision-making focuses on metrics for one-shot decisions, recent work has raised the intriguing possibility of designing sequential decision-making to positively impact long-term social fairness. In selection processes such as college admissions or hiring, biasing slightly towards applicants from under-represented groups is hypothesized to provide positive feedback that increases the pool of under-represented applicants in future selection rounds, thus enhancing fairness in the long term. In this paper, we examine this hypothesis and its consequences in a setting in which multiple agents are selecting from a common pool of applicants. We propose the Multi-agent Fair-Greedy policy, that balances greedy score maximization and fairness. Under this policy, we prove that the resource pool and the admissions converge to a long-term fairness target set by the agents when the score distributions across the groups in the population are identical. We provide empirical evidence of existence of equilibria under non-identical score distributions through synthetic and adapted real-world datasets. We then sound a cautionary note for more complex applicant pool evolution models, under which uncoordinated behavior by the agents can cause negative reinforcement, leading to a reduction in the fraction of under-represented applicants. Our results indicate that, while positive reinforcement is a promising mechanism for long-term fairness, policies must be designed carefully to be robust to variations in the evolution model, with a number of open issues that remain to be explored by algorithm designers, social scientists, and policymakers.

Large language models (LLMs) can spend extra compute during inference to generate intermediate thoughts, which helps to produce better final responses. Since Chain-of-Thought (Wei et al., 2022), many such System 2 techniques have been proposed such as Rephrase and Respond (Deng et al., 2023a), System 2 Attention (Weston and Sukhbaatar, 2023) and Branch-Solve-Merge (Saha et al., 2023). In this work we investigate self-supervised methods to ``compile'' (distill) higher quality outputs from System 2 techniques back into LLM generations without intermediate reasoning token sequences, as this reasoning has been distilled into System 1. We show that several such techniques can be successfully distilled, resulting in improved results compared to the original System 1 performance, and with less inference cost than System 2. We posit that such System 2 distillation will be an important feature of future continually learning AI systems, enabling them to focus System 2 capabilities on the reasoning tasks that they cannot yet do well.

While preliminary findings indicate that multilingual LLMs exhibit reduced bias compared to monolingual ones, a comprehensive understanding of the effect of multilingual training on bias mitigation, is lacking. This study addresses this gap by systematically training six LLMs of identical size (2.6B parameters) and architecture: five monolingual models (English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish) and one multilingual model trained on an equal distribution of data across these languages, all using publicly available data. To ensure robust evaluation, standard bias benchmarks were automatically translated into the five target languages and verified for both translation quality and bias preservation by human annotators. Our results consistently demonstrate that multilingual training effectively mitigates bias. Moreover, we observe that multilingual models achieve not only lower bias but also superior prediction accuracy when compared to monolingual models with the same amount of training data, model architecture, and size.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in working environments with individuals, known as Human-AI Collaboration (HAIC), has become essential in a variety of domains, boosting decision-making, efficiency, and innovation. Despite HAIC's wide potential, evaluating its effectiveness remains challenging due to the complex interaction of components involved. This paper provides a detailed analysis of existing HAIC evaluation approaches and develops a fresh paradigm for more effectively evaluating these systems. Our framework includes a structured decision tree which assists to select relevant metrics based on distinct HAIC modes (AI-Centric, Human-Centric, and Symbiotic). By including both quantitative and qualitative metrics, the framework seeks to represent HAIC's dynamic and reciprocal nature, enabling the assessment of its impact and success. This framework's practicality can be examined by its application in an array of domains, including manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and education, each of which has unique challenges and requirements. Our hope is that this study will facilitate further research on the systematic evaluation of HAIC in real-world applications.

A central goal of both knowledge tracing and traditional assessment is to quantify student knowledge and skills at a given point in time. Deep knowledge tracing flexibly considers a student's response history but does not quantify epistemic uncertainty, while IRT and CDM compute measurement error but only consider responses to individual tests in isolation from a student's past responses. Elo and BKT could bridge this divide, but the simplicity of the underlying models limits information sharing across skills and imposes strong inductive biases. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Dynamic LENS, a modeling paradigm that combines the flexible uncertainty-preserving properties of variational autoencoders with the principled information integration of Bayesian state-space models. Dynamic LENS allows information from student responses to be collected across time, while treating responses from the same test as exchangeable observations generated by a shared latent state. It represents student knowledge as Gaussian distributions in high-dimensional space and combines estimates both within tests and across time using Bayesian updating. We show that Dynamic LENS has similar predictive performance to competing models, while preserving the epistemic uncertainty - the deep learning analogue to measurement error - that DKT models lack. This approach provides a conceptual bridge across an important divide between models designed for formative practice and summative assessment.

On-device large language models (LLMs), referring to running LLMs on edge devices, have raised considerable interest owing to their superior privacy, reduced latency, and bandwidth saving. Nonetheless, the capabilities of on-device LLMs are intrinsically constrained by the limited capacity of edge devices compared to the much more powerful cloud centers. To bridge the gap between cloud-based and on-device AI, mobile edge intelligence (MEI) presents a viable solution to this problem by provisioning AI capabilities within the edge of mobile networks with improved privacy and latency relative to cloud computing. MEI sits between on-device AI and cloud-based AI, featuring wireless communications and more powerful computing resources than end devices. This article provides a contemporary survey on harnessing MEI for LLMs. We first cover the preliminaries of LLMs, starting with LLMs and MEI, followed by resource-efficient LLM techniques. We then illustrate several killer applications to demonstrate the need for deploying LLMs at the network edge and present an architectural overview of MEI for LLMs (MEI4LLM). Subsequently, we delve into various aspects of MEI4LLM, extensively covering edge LLM caching and delivery, edge LLM training, and edge LLM inference. Finally, we identify future research opportunities. We aim to inspire researchers in the field to leverage mobile edge computing to facilitate LLM deployment in close proximity to users, thereby unleashing the potential of LLMs across various privacy- and delay-sensitive applications.

In recent years, the rapid increase in scientific papers has overwhelmed traditional review mechanisms, resulting in varying quality of publications. Although existing methods have explored the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated scientific reviewing, their generated contents are often generic or partial. To address the issues above, we introduce an automated paper reviewing framework SEA. It comprises of three modules: Standardization, Evaluation, and Analysis, which are represented by models SEA-S, SEA-E, and SEA-A, respectively. Initially, SEA-S distills data standardization capabilities of GPT-4 for integrating multiple reviews for a paper. Then, SEA-E utilizes standardized data for fine-tuning, enabling it to generate constructive reviews. Finally, SEA-A introduces a new evaluation metric called mismatch score to assess the consistency between paper contents and reviews. Moreover, we design a self-correction strategy to enhance the consistency. Extensive experimental results on datasets collected from eight venues show that SEA can generate valuable insights for authors to improve their papers.

According to the global overview report from Digital 2023, nearly 82% of Internet users between 18 and 64 have used a search engine or web portal in the past month. Specifically, IR is the process of finding and providing relevant information in response to the user query from a large collection of data. Recently, with advances in deep learning, neural IR models have witnessed significant progress [51, 53]. With the development of training methodologies such as pre-training [44, 100] and fine-tuning [73, 117, 162], neural IR models have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in learning query-document relevance patterns. Why is robustness important in IR? In real-world deployment of neural IR models, an aspect equally essential as their effectiveness is their robustness. A good IR system must not only exhibit high effectiveness under normal conditions but also demonstrate robustness in the face of abnormal conditions. The natural openness of IR systems makes them vulnerable to intrusion, and the consequences can be severe. For example: (i) Search engines are vulnerable to black hat SEO attacks, necessitating significant efforts to curb these infringements.

Accurately and safely predicting the trajectories of surrounding vehicles is essential for fully realizing autonomous driving (AD). This paper presents the Human-Like Trajectory Prediction model (HLTP++), which emulates human cognitive processes to improve trajectory prediction in AD. HLTP++ incorporates a novel teacher-student knowledge distillation framework. The "teacher" model equipped with an adaptive visual sector, mimics the dynamic allocation of attention human drivers exhibit based on factors like spatial orientation, proximity, and driving speed. On the other hand, the "student" model focuses on real-time interaction and human decision-making, drawing parallels to the human memory storage mechanism. Furthermore, we improve the model's efficiency by introducing a new Fourier Adaptive Spike Neural Network (FA-SNN), allowing for faster and more precise predictions with fewer parameters. Evaluated using the NGSIM, HighD, and MoCAD benchmarks, HLTP++ demonstrates superior performance compared to existing models, which reduces the predicted trajectory error with over 11% on the NGSIM dataset and 25% on the HighD datasets. Moreover, HLTP++ demonstrates strong adaptability in challenging environments with incomplete input data. This marks a significant stride in the journey towards fully AD systems.

Concentric Tube Robots (CTRs) have garnered significant interest within the surgical robotics community because of their flexibility, dexterity, and ease of miniaturization. However, mastering the unique kinematics and design principles of CTRs can be challenging for newcomers to the field. In this paper, we present an educational kit aimed at lowering the barriers to entry into concentric tube robot research. Our goal is to provide accessible learning resources for CTRs, bridging the knowledge gap between traditional robotic arms and these specialized devices. The proposed kit includes (1) An open-source design and assembly instructions for an economical (cost of materials $\approx$ 700 USD) modular CTR; (2) A set of self-study materials to learn the basics of CTR modeling and control, including automatically-graded assignments. To evaluate the effectiveness of our educational kit, we conducted a human subjects study involving first-year graduate students in engineering. Over a four-week period, participants -- none of whom had any prior knowledge of concentric tube robots -- successfully built their first CTR using the provided materials, implemented the robot's kinematics in MATLAB, and conducted a tip-tracking experiment with an optical tracking device. Our findings suggest that the proposed kit facilitates learning and hands-on experience with CTRs, and furthermore, it has the potential to help early-stage graduate students get rapidly started with CTR research. By disseminating these resources, we hope to broaden participation in concentric tube robot research to a wider a more diverse group of researchers.