The recent surge in generative AI technologies, such as large language models and diffusion models, has boosted the development of AI applications in various domains, including science, finance, and education. Concurrently, adaptive learning, a concept that has gained substantial interest in the educational sphere, has proven its efficacy in enhancing students' learning efficiency. In this position paper, we aim to shed light on the intersectional studies of these two methods, which combine generative AI with adaptive learning concepts. By presenting discussions about the benefits, challenges, and potentials in this field, we argue that this union will contribute significantly to the development of the next-stage learning format in education.

Large language models (LLMs) have marked a significant milestone in the advancement of natural language processing (Radford et al., 2019; Brown et al., 2020; Ouyang et al., 2022; Bubeck et al., 2023), showcasing remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating human-like text. However, one pressing issue for the LLMs is their propensity to hallucinate (Rawte et al., 2023) and generate misleading or entirely fabricated information that can significantly undermine their trustworthiness and reliability. The task of uncertainty estimation has then emerged to be an important problem that aims to determine the confidence levels of LLMs' outputs. While the problem of uncertainty estimation and calibration has seen considerable development within the general machine learning and deep learning domains (Abdar et al., 2021; Gawlikowski et al., 2023), we see less development in the domain of LLMs. One of the major challenges is the difference in the format of the output: while machine learning and deep learning typically involve fixed-dimensional outputs, natural language generation (NLG) tasks central to LLM applications require handling variable outputs that carry semantic meanings. Existing uncertainty estimation approaches for LLMs usually involve designing uncertainty metrics for their outputs. For black-box LLMs, these metrics are computed by examining aspects like the generated outputs' consistency, similarity, entropy, and other relevant characteristics (Lin et al., 2023; Manakul et al., 2023; Kuhn et al., 2023; Hou et al., 2023; Farquhar et al., 2024). Given the complexity of LLMs' underlying architectures, semantic information may be diluted when processing through self-attention mechanisms and during token encoding/decoding. To address this issue, a growing stream of literature argues that hidden layers' activation values within the LLMs offer insights into the LLMs' knowledge and confidence (Slobodkin et al., 2023; Ahdritz et al., 2024; Duan et al., 2024).

Recent studies indicated GPT-4 outperforms online crowd workers in data labeling accuracy, notably workers from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). However, these studies were criticized for deviating from standard crowdsourcing practices and emphasizing individual workers' performances over the whole data-annotation process. This paper compared GPT-4 and an ethical and well-executed MTurk pipeline, with 415 workers labeling 3,177 sentence segments from 200 scholarly articles using the CODA-19 scheme. Two worker interfaces yielded 127,080 labels, which were then used to infer the final labels through eight label-aggregation algorithms. Our evaluation showed that despite best practices, MTurk pipeline's highest accuracy was 81.5%, whereas GPT-4 achieved 83.6%. Interestingly, when combining GPT-4's labels with crowd labels collected via an advanced worker interface for aggregation, 2 out of the 8 algorithms achieved an even higher accuracy (87.5%, 87.0%). Further analysis suggested that, when the crowd's and GPT-4's labeling strengths are complementary, aggregating them could increase labeling accuracy.

Existing domain generalization (DG) methods for cross-person generalization tasks often face challenges in capturing intra- and inter-domain style diversity, resulting in domain gaps with the target domain. In this study, we explore a novel perspective to tackle this problem, a process conceptualized as domain padding. This proposal aims to enrich the domain diversity by synthesizing intra- and inter-domain style data while maintaining robustness to class labels. We instantiate this concept using a conditional diffusion model and introduce a style-fused sampling strategy to enhance data generation diversity. In contrast to traditional condition-guided sampling, our style-fused sampling strategy allows for the flexible use of one or more random styles to guide data synthesis. This feature presents a notable advancement: it allows for the maximum utilization of possible permutations and combinations among existing styles to generate a broad spectrum of new style instances. Empirical evaluations on a broad range of datasets demonstrate that our generated data achieves remarkable diversity within the domain space. Both intra- and inter-domain generated data have proven to be significant and valuable, contributing to varying degrees of performance enhancements. Notably, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art DG methods in all human activity recognition tasks.

Generative modeling of complex behaviors from labeled datasets has been a longstanding problem in decision making. Unlike language or image generation, decision making requires modeling actions - continuous-valued vectors that are multimodal in their distribution, potentially drawn from uncurated sources, where generation errors can compound in sequential prediction. A recent class of models called Behavior Transformers (BeT) addresses this by discretizing actions using k-means clustering to capture different modes. However, k-means struggles to scale for high-dimensional action spaces or long sequences, and lacks gradient information, and thus BeT suffers in modeling long-range actions. In this work, we present Vector-Quantized Behavior Transformer (VQ-BeT), a versatile model for behavior generation that handles multimodal action prediction, conditional generation, and partial observations. VQ-BeT augments BeT by tokenizing continuous actions with a hierarchical vector quantization module. Across seven environments including simulated manipulation, autonomous driving, and robotics, VQ-BeT improves on state-of-the-art models such as BeT and Diffusion Policies. Importantly, we demonstrate VQ-BeT's improved ability to capture behavior modes while accelerating inference speed 5x over Diffusion Policies. Videos and code can be found https://sjlee.cc/vq-bet

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in diverse applications necessitates an assurance of safety without compromising the contextual integrity of the generated content. Traditional approaches, including safety-specific fine-tuning or adversarial testing, often yield safe outputs at the expense of contextual meaning. This can result in a diminished capacity to handle nuanced aspects of bias and toxicity, such as underrepresentation or negative portrayals across various demographics. To address these challenges, we introduce MBIAS, an LLM framework carefully instruction fine-tuned on a custom dataset designed specifically for safety interventions. MBIAS is designed to significantly reduce biases and toxic elements in LLM outputs while preserving the main information. This work also details our further use of LLMs: as annotator under human supervision and as evaluator of generated content. Empirical analysis reveals that MBIAS achieves a reduction in bias and toxicity by over 30\% in standard evaluations, and by more than 90\% in diverse demographic tests, highlighting the robustness of our approach. We make the dataset and the fine-tuned model available to the research community for further investigation and ensure reproducibility. The code for this project can be accessed here https://github.com/shainarazavi/MBIAS/tree/main. Warning: This paper contains examples that may be offensive or upsetting.

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a popular approach that allows humans to teach robots new skills by showing the correct way(s) of performing the desired skill. Human-provided demonstrations, however, are not always optimal and the teacher usually addresses this issue by discarding or replacing sub-optimal (noisy or faulty) demonstrations. We propose a novel LfD representation that learns from both successful and failed demonstrations of a skill. Our approach encodes the two subsets of captured demonstrations (labeled by the teacher) into a statistical skill model, constructs a set of quadratic costs, and finds an optimal reproduction of the skill under novel problem conditions (i.e. constraints). The optimal reproduction balances convergence towards successful examples and divergence from failed examples. We evaluate our approach through several 2D and 3D experiments in real-world using a UR5e manipulator arm and also show that it can reproduce a skill from only failed demonstrations. The benefits of exploiting both failed and successful demonstrations are shown through comparison with two existing LfD approaches. We also compare our approach against an existing skill refinement method and show its capabilities in a multi-coordinate setting.

Accurate occupancy information helps to improve building energy efficiency and occupant comfort. Occupancy detection methods based on CO2 sensors have received attention due to their low cost and low intrusiveness. In naturally ventilated buildings, the accuracy of CO2-based occupancy detection is generally low in related studies due to the complex ventilation behavior and the difficulty in measuring the actual air exchange through windows. In this study, we present two novel features for occupancy detection based on the spatial distribution of the CO2 concentration. After a quantitative analysis with Support Vector Machine (SVM) as classifier, it was found that the accuracy of occupancy state detection in naturally ventilated rooms could be improved by up to 14.8 percentage points compared to the baseline, reaching 83.2 % (F1 score 0.84) without any ventilation information. With ventilation information, the accuracy reached 87.6 % (F1 score 0.89). The performance of occupancy quantity detection was significantly improved by up to 25.3 percentage points versus baseline, reaching 56 %, with root mean square error (RMSE) of 11.44 occupants, using only CO2-related features. Additional ventilation information further enhanced the performance to 61.8 % (RMSE 9.02 occupants). By incorporating spatial features, the model using only CO2-related features revealed similar performance as the model containing additional ventilation information, resulting in a better low-cost occupancy detection method for naturally ventilated buildings.

Many recent language models (LMs) are capable of in-context learning (ICL), manifested in the LMs' ability to perform a new task solely from natural-language instruction. Previous work curating in-context learners assumes that ICL emerges from a vast over-parametrization or the scale of multi-task training. However, recent theoretical work attributes the ICL ability to concept-dependent training data and creates functional in-context learners even in small-scale, synthetic settings. In this work, we practically explore this newly identified axis of ICL quality. We propose Concept-aware Training (CoAT), a framework for constructing training scenarios that make it beneficial for the LM to learn to utilize the analogical reasoning concepts from demonstrations. We find that by using CoAT, pre-trained transformers can learn to better utilise new latent concepts from demonstrations and that such ability makes ICL more robust to the functional deficiencies of the previous models. Finally, we show that concept-aware in-context learning is more effective for a majority of new tasks when compared to traditional instruction tuning, resulting in a performance comparable to the previous in-context learners using magnitudes of more training data.

Utilizing large language models (LLMs) for transforming natural language questions into SQL queries (text-to-SQL) is a promising yet challenging approach, particularly when applied to real-world databases with complex and extensive schemas. In particular, effectively incorporating data catalogs and database values for SQL generation remains an obstacle, leading to suboptimal solutions. We address this problem by proposing a new pipeline that effectively retrieves relevant data and context, selects an efficient schema, and synthesizes correct and efficient SQL queries. To increase retrieval precision, our pipeline introduces a hierarchical retrieval method leveraging model-generated keywords, locality-sensitive hashing indexing, and vector databases. Additionally, we have developed an adaptive schema pruning technique that adjusts based on the complexity of the problem and the model's context size. Our approach generalizes to both frontier proprietary models like GPT-4 and open-source models such as Llama-3-70B. Through a series of ablation studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of each component of our pipeline and its impact on the end-to-end performance. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the cross-domain challenging BIRD dataset.