To advance the evaluation of multimodal math reasoning in large multimodal models (LMMs), this paper introduces a novel benchmark, MM-MATH. MM-MATH consists of 5,929 open-ended middle school math problems with visual contexts, with fine-grained classification across difficulty, grade level, and knowledge points. Unlike existing benchmarks relying on binary answer comparison, MM-MATH incorporates both outcome and process evaluations. Process evaluation employs LMM-as-a-judge to automatically analyze solution steps, identifying and categorizing errors into specific error types. Extensive evaluation of ten models on MM-MATH reveals significant challenges for existing LMMs, highlighting their limited utilization of visual information and struggles with higher-difficulty problems. The best-performing model achieves only 31% accuracy on MM-MATH, compared to 82% for humans. This highlights the challenging nature of our benchmark for existing models and the significant gap between the multimodal reasoning capabilities of current models and humans. Our process evaluation reveals that diagram misinterpretation is the most common error, accounting for more than half of the total error cases, underscoring the need for improved image comprehension in multimodal reasoning.

MLKD-BERT conducts a (Liu et al., 2019). The PLM usually has large number two-stage distillation for feature-level as well as of parameters and long inference time, making relation-level knowledge, with 6 distillation loss it inapplicable to resource-limited devices and realtime functions designed for embedding layer, Transformer scenarios. Therefore, it is crucial to reduce layers, and prediction layer. Compared with PLM's storage and computation overhead while previous works, we have made two main contributions: retaining its performance. Knowledge distillation (Hinton et al., 2015) is an effective technique for PLM compression. In knowledge distillation, a In addition to feature-level knowledge, our smaller compact student model is trained, under student model learns valuable relation-level the guidance of a larger complicated teacher model, knowledge (relation among tokens and relation to keep similar model performance.

While major languages often enjoy substantial attention and resources, the linguistic diversity across the globe encompasses a multitude of smaller, indigenous, and regional languages that lack the same level of computational support. One such region is the Caribbean. While commonly labeled as "English speaking", the ex-British Caribbean region consists of a myriad of Creole languages thriving alongside English. In this paper, we present Guylingo: a comprehensive corpus designed for advancing NLP research in the domain of Creolese (Guyanese English-lexicon Creole), the most widely spoken language in the culturally rich nation of Guyana. We first outline our framework for gathering and digitizing this diverse corpus, inclusive of colloquial expressions, idioms, and regional variations in a low-resource language. We then demonstrate the challenges of training and evaluating NLP models for machine translation in Creole. Lastly, we discuss the unique opportunities presented by recent NLP advancements for accelerating the formal adoption of Creole languages as official languages in the Caribbean.

Recent work has explored the capability of large language models (LLMs) to identify and correct errors in LLM-generated responses. These refinement approaches frequently evaluate what sizes of models are able to do refinement for what problems, but less attention is paid to what effective feedback for refinement looks like. In this work, we propose looking at refinement with feedback as a composition of three distinct LLM competencies: (1) identification of bad generations; (2) fine-grained natural language feedback generation; (3) refining with fine-grained feedback. The first step can be implemented with a high-performing discriminative model and steps 2 and 3 can be implemented either via prompted or fine-tuned LLMs. A key property of this approach is that the step 2 critique model can give fine-grained feedback about errors, made possible by offloading the discrimination to a separate model in step 1. We show that models of different capabilities benefit from refining with this approach on the task of improving factual consistency of document grounded summaries. Overall, our proposed method consistently outperforms existing end-to-end refinement approaches and current trained models not fine-tuned for factuality critiquing.

Online kernel selection is a fundamental problem of online kernel methods.In this paper,we study online kernel selection with memory constraint in which the memory of kernel selection and online prediction procedures is limited to a fixed budget. An essential question is what is the intrinsic relationship among online learnability, memory constraint, and data complexity? To answer the question,it is necessary to show the trade-offs between regret and memory constraint.Previous work gives a worst-case lower bound depending on the data size,and shows learning is impossible within a small memory constraint.In contrast, we present distinct results by offering data-dependent upper bounds that rely on two data complexities:kernel alignment and the cumulative losses of competitive hypothesis.We propose an algorithmic framework giving data-dependent upper bounds for two types of loss functions.For the hinge loss function,our algorithm achieves an expected upper bound depending on kernel alignment.For smooth loss functions,our algorithm achieves a high-probability upper bound depending on the cumulative losses of competitive hypothesis.We also prove a matching lower bound for smooth loss functions.Our results show that if the two data complexities are sub-linear,then learning is possible within a small memory constraint.Our algorithmic framework depends on a new buffer maintaining framework and a reduction from online kernel selection to prediction with expert advice. Finally,we empirically verify the prediction performance of our algorithms on benchmark datasets.

Large Language Models (LLMs) perpetuate social biases, reflecting prejudices in their training data and reinforcing societal stereotypes and inequalities. Our work explores the potential of the Contact Hypothesis, a concept from social psychology for debiasing LLMs. We simulate various forms of social contact through LLM prompting to measure their influence on the model's biases, mirroring how intergroup interactions can reduce prejudices in social contexts. We create a dataset of 108,000 prompts following a principled approach replicating social contact to measure biases in three LLMs (LLaMA 2, Tulu, and NousHermes) across 13 social bias dimensions. We propose a unique debiasing technique, Social Contact Debiasing (SCD), that instruction-tunes these models with unbiased responses to prompts. Our research demonstrates that LLM responses exhibit social biases when subject to contact probing, but more importantly, these biases can be significantly reduced by up to 40% in 1 epoch of instruction tuning LLaMA 2 following our SCD strategy. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/chahatraj/breakingbias.

End of semester student evaluations of teaching are the dominant mechanism for providing feedback to academics on their teaching practice. For large classes, however, the volume of feedback makes these tools impractical for this purpose. This paper explores the use of open-source generative AI to synthesise factual, actionable and appropriate summaries of student feedback from these survey responses. In our setup, we have 742 student responses ranging over 75 courses in a Computer Science department. For each course, we synthesise a summary of the course evaluations and actionable items for the instructor. Our results reveal a promising avenue for enhancing teaching practices in the classroom setting. Our contribution lies in demonstrating the feasibility of using generative AI to produce insightful feedback for teachers, thus providing a cost-effective means to support educators' development. Overall, our work highlights the possibility of using generative AI to produce factual, actionable, and appropriate feedback for teachers in the classroom setting.

The agency problem emerges in today's large scale machine learning tasks, where the learners are unable to direct content creation or enforce data collection. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for aligning economic interests of different stakeholders in the online learning problems through contract design. The problem, termed \emph{contractual reinforcement learning}, naturally arises from the classic model of Markov decision processes, where a learning principal seeks to optimally influence the agent's action policy for their common interests through a set of payment rules contingent on the realization of next state. For the planning problem, we design an efficient dynamic programming algorithm to determine the optimal contracts against the far-sighted agent. For the learning problem, we introduce a generic design of no-regret learning algorithms to untangle the challenges from robust design of contracts to the balance of exploration and exploitation, reducing the complexity analysis to the construction of efficient search algorithms. For several natural classes of problems, we design tailored search algorithms that provably achieve $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret. We also present an algorithm with $\tilde{O}(T^{2/3})$ for the general problem that improves the existing analysis in online contract design with mild technical assumptions.

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to adapt a pretrained model to ever-changing environments during the test time under continuous domain shifts. Most existing CTTA approaches are based on the Mean Teacher (MT) structure, which contains a student and a teacher model, where the student is updated using the pseudo-labels from the teacher model, and the teacher is then updated by exponential moving average strategy. However, these methods update the MT model indiscriminately on all parameters of the model. That is, some critical parameters involving sharing knowledge across different domains may be erased, intensifying error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we introduce Parameter-Selective Mean Teacher (PSMT) method, which is capable of effectively updating the critical parameters within the MT network under domain shifts. First, we introduce a selective distillation mechanism in the student model, which utilizes past knowledge to regularize novel knowledge, thereby mitigating the impact of error accumulation. Second, to avoid catastrophic forgetting, in the teacher model, we create a mask through Fisher information to selectively update parameters via exponential moving average, with preservation measures applied to crucial parameters. Extensive experimental results verify that PSMT outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmark datasets. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/JiaxuTian/PSMT}.

Knowledge Tracing (KT) is a critical task in online education systems, aiming to monitor students' knowledge states throughout a learning period. Common KT approaches involve predicting the probability of a student correctly answering the next question based on their exercise history. However, these methods often suffer from performance degradation when faced with the scarcity of student interactions in new education systems. To address this, we leverage student interactions from existing education systems to mitigate performance degradation caused by limited training data. Nevertheless, these interactions exhibit significant differences since they are derived from different education systems. To address this issue, we propose a domain generalization approach for knowledge tracing, where existing education systems are considered source domains, and new education systems with limited data are considered target domains. Additionally, we design a domain-generalizable knowledge tracing framework (DGKT) that can be applied to any KT model. Specifically, we present a concept aggregation approach designed to reduce conceptual disparities within sequences of student interactions from diverse domains. To further mitigate domain discrepancies, we introduce a novel normalization module called Sequence Instance Normalization (SeqIN). Moreover, to fully leverage exercise information, we propose a new knowledge tracing model tailored for the domain generalization KT task, named Domain-Generalizable Relation-based Knowledge Tracing (DGRKT). Extensive experiments across five benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs well despite limited training data.