The process of developing theories and models and testing them with experiments is fundamental to the scientific method. Automating the entire scientific method then requires not only automation of the induction of theories from data, but also experimentation from design to implementation. This is the idea behind a robot scientist -- a coupled system of AI and laboratory robotics that has agency to test hypotheses with real-world experiments. In this chapter we explore some of the fundamentals of robot scientists in the philosophy of science. We also map the activities of a robot scientist to machine learning paradigms, and argue that the scientific method shares an analogy with active learning. We demonstrate these concepts using examples from previous robot scientists, and also from Genesis: a next generation robot scientist designed for research in systems biology, comprising a micro-fluidic system with 1000 computer-controlled micro-bioreactors and interpretable models based in controlled vocabularies and logic.

Training Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on large graphs presents unique challenges due to the large memory and computing requirements. Distributed GNN training, where the graph is partitioned across multiple machines, is a common approach to training GNNs on large graphs. However, as the graph cannot generally be decomposed into small non-interacting components, data communication between the training machines quickly limits training speeds. Compressing the communicated node activations by a fixed amount improves the training speeds, but lowers the accuracy of the trained GNN. In this paper, we introduce a variable compression scheme for reducing the communication volume in distributed GNN training without compromising the accuracy of the learned model. Based on our theoretical analysis, we derive a variable compression method that converges to a solution equivalent to the full communication case, for all graph partitioning schemes. Our empirical results show that our method attains a comparable performance to the one obtained with full communication. We outperform full communication at any fixed compression ratio for any communication budget.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) traditionally assumes known domains, but adding data from a new domain raises concerns about computational inefficiencies linked to retraining models on both existing and new domains. Fine-tuning solely on new domain risks Catastrophic Forgetting (CF). To address this, Lifelong Learning (LLL) algorithms have been proposed for ASR. Prior research has explored techniques such as Elastic Weight Consolidation, Knowledge Distillation, and Replay, all of which necessitate either additional parameters or access to prior domain data. We propose Sequential Model Editing as a novel method to continually learn new domains in ASR systems. Different than previous methods, our approach does not necessitate access to prior datasets or the introduction of extra parameters. Our study demonstrates up to 15% Word Error Rate Reduction (WERR) over fine-tuning baseline, and superior efficiency over other LLL techniques on CommonVoice English multi-accent dataset.

The performance of a large language model (LLM) depends heavily on the quality and size of its pretraining dataset. However, the pretraining datasets for state-of-the-art open LLMs like Llama 3 and Mixtral are not publicly available and very little is known about how they were created. In this work, we introduce FineWeb, a 15-trillion token dataset derived from 96 Common Crawl snapshots that produces better-performing LLMs than other open pretraining datasets. To advance the understanding of how best to curate high-quality pretraining datasets, we carefully document and ablate all of the design choices used in FineWeb, including in-depth investigations of deduplication and filtering strategies. In addition, we introduce FineWeb-Edu, a 1.3-trillion token collection of educational text filtered from FineWeb. LLMs pretrained on FineWeb-Edu exhibit dramatically better performance on knowledge- and reasoning-intensive benchmarks like MMLU and ARC. Along with our datasets, we publicly release our data curation codebase and all of the models trained during our ablation experiments.

While state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on many tasks, there has been extensive research on undesirable model behavior such as hallucinations and bias. In this work, we investigate how the quality of LLM responses changes in terms of information accuracy, truthfulness, and refusals depending on three user traits: English proficiency, education level, and country of origin. We present extensive experimentation on three state-of-the-art LLMs and two different datasets targeting truthfulness and factuality. Our findings suggest that undesirable behaviors in state-of-the-art LLMs occur disproportionately more for users with lower English proficiency, of lower education status, and originating from outside the US, rendering these models unreliable sources of information towards their most vulnerable users.

Knowledge distillation (KD) is known as a promising solution to compress large language models (LLMs) via transferring their knowledge to smaller models. During this process, white-box KD methods usually minimize the distance between the output distributions of the two models so that more knowledge can be transferred. However, in the current white-box KD framework, the output distributions are from the respective output spaces of the two models, using their own prediction heads. We argue that the space discrepancy will lead to low similarity between the teacher model and the student model on both representation and distribution levels. Furthermore, this discrepancy also hinders the KD process between models with different vocabularies, which is common for current LLMs. To address these issues, we propose a dual-space knowledge distillation (DSKD) framework that unifies the output spaces of the two models for KD. On the basis of DSKD, we further develop a cross-model attention mechanism, which can automatically align the representations of the two models with different vocabularies. Thus, our framework is not only compatible with various distance functions for KD (e.g., KL divergence) like the current framework, but also supports KD between any two LLMs regardless of their vocabularies. Experiments on task-agnostic instruction-following benchmarks show that DSKD significantly outperforms the current white-box KD framework with various distance functions, and also surpasses existing KD methods for LLMs with different vocabularies.

One of the most significant problems in cuneiform pedagogy is the process of looking up unknown signs, which often involves a tedious page-by-page search through a sign list. This paper proposes a new "recursive encoding" for signs, which represents the arrangement of strokes in a way a computer can process. A series of new algorithms then offers students a new way to look up signs by any distinctive component, as well as providing new ways to render signs and tablets electronically.

As large language models (LLMs) appear to behave increasingly human-like in text-based interactions, more and more researchers become interested in investigating personality in LLMs. However, the diversity of psychological personality research and the rapid development of LLMs have led to a broad yet fragmented landscape of studies in this interdisciplinary field. Extensive studies across different research focuses, different personality psychometrics, and different LLMs make it challenging to have a holistic overview and further pose difficulties in applying findings to real-world applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review by categorizing current studies into three research problems: self-assessment, exhibition, and recognition, based on the intrinsic characteristics and external manifestations of personality in LLMs. For each problem, we provide a thorough analysis and conduct in-depth comparisons of their corresponding solutions. Besides, we summarize research findings and open challenges from current studies and further discuss their underlying causes. We also collect extensive publicly available resources to facilitate interested researchers and developers. Lastly, we discuss the potential future research directions and application scenarios. Our paper is the first comprehensive survey of up-to-date literature on personality in LLMs. By presenting a clear taxonomy, in-depth analysis, promising future directions, and extensive resource collections, we aim to provide a better understanding and facilitate further advancements in this emerging field.

Deep neural networks learn increasingly complex functions over the course of training. Here, we show both empirically and theoretically that learning of the target function is preceded by an early phase in which networks learn the optimal constant solution (OCS) - that is, initial model responses mirror the distribution of target labels, while entirely ignoring information provided in the input. Using a hierarchical category learning task, we derive exact solutions for learning dynamics in deep linear networks trained with bias terms. Even when initialized to zero, this simple architectural feature induces substantial changes in early dynamics. We identify hallmarks of this early OCS phase and illustrate how these signatures are observed in deep linear networks and larger, more complex (and nonlinear) convolutional neural networks solving a hierarchical learning task based on MNIST and CIFAR10. We explain these observations by proving that deep linear networks necessarily learn the OCS during early learning. To further probe the generality of our results, we train human learners over the course of three days on the category learning task. We then identify qualitative signatures of this early OCS phase in terms of the dynamics of true negative (correct-rejection) rates. Surprisingly, we find the same early reliance on the OCS in the behaviour of human learners. Finally, we show that learning of the OCS can emerge even in the absence of bias terms and is equivalently driven by generic correlations in the input data. Overall, our work suggests the OCS as a universal learning principle in supervised, error-corrective learning, and the mechanistic reasons for its prevalence.

's interface consists of six coordinated views: (a) The configuration view provides an overview of the dataset and teacher model being distilled, while (b) the student performance view displays a summary of each student model's performance and highlights subsets where student and teacher models misalign. Abstract-- The emergence of large-scale pretrained models has heightened their application in various downstream tasks, yet deployment is a challenge in environments with limited computational resources. Knowledge distillation has emerged as a solution in such scenarios, whereby knowledge from large teacher models is transferred into smaller student' models, but this is a non-trivial process that traditionally requires technical expertise in AI/ML. We develop a novel knowledge distillation pipeline based on extracting text-aligned visual concepts from a concept corpus using multimodal models, and construct highly interpretable linear student models based on visual concepts that mimic a teacher model in a response-based manner. 's interface allows users to interactively fine-tune the student model by manipulating concept influences directly in the user interface. 's human-in-the-loop and visualization-driven approach enables users to effectively create and analyze student models, understand how knowledge is transferred, and efficiently perform fine-tuning operations. We discuss how this work highlights the potential of interactive and visual methods in making knowledge distillation and subsequent no-code fine-tuning more accessible and adaptable to a wider range of users with domain-specific demands. Jinbin Huang and Chris Bryan are with Arizona State Uiversity. Importantly, to serve as new initializations to fine-tune the student model for a few KD has been shown as effective even when the teacher and student epochs, effectively adapting the model based on user instructions. In particular, we are inspired by recent efforts This section provides a brief overview of knowledge distillation, and in KD interpretability that leverage visual concepts---a technique then discusses relevant related work at the intersection of visual analytics originally designed to explain model behaviors [21, 38, 43]. While 2.1 Knowledge Distillation such methods can improve KD interpretability, they primarily rely on Knowledge distillation (KD) [23] is the process of transferring knowledge automated concept extraction pipelines that generate large ensembles of from a large'teacher' PTM to a more compact'student' model.