Education
Need life advice? Scientists create an AI chatbot that lets you talk to your future self
While scientists haven't invented a time machine just yet, there is now a way for you to get some much-needed advice from your older self. Experts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created Future You – an AI-powered chatbot that simulates a version of the user at 60 years old. The researchers say that a quick chat with your future self is just what people need to start thinking more about their decisions in the present. With an aged-up profile picture and a full life's worth of synthetic memories, the chatbot delivers plausible stories about the user's life alongside sage wisdom from the future. And, in a trial of 334 volunteers, just a short conversation with the chatbot left users feeling less anxious and more connected to their future selves.
Interview with AAAI Fellow Mausam: talking information extraction, mentorship, and creativity
Each year the AAAI recognizes a group of individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence by appointing them as Fellows. Over the course of the next few months, we'll be talking to some of the 2024 AAAI Fellows. In the first interview in the series, we met Professor Mausam and found out about his research, career path, mentorship, and why it is important to add some creative pursuits to your life. I am professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, in the Computer Science department. I also have a secondary appointment with the Yardi School of Artificial Intelligence.
Enhancing Sign Language Detection through Mediapipe and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)
Verma, Aditya Raj, Singh, Gagandeep, Meghwal, Karnim, Ramji, Banawath, Dadheech, Praveen Kumar
This research combines MediaPipe and CNNs for the efficient and accurate interpretation of ASL dataset for the real-time detection of sign language. The system presented here captures and processes hands' gestures in real time. the intended purpose was to create a very easy, accurate, and fast way of entering commands without the necessity of touching something.MediaPipe supports one of the powerful frameworks in real-time hand tracking capabilities for the ability to capture and preprocess hand movements, which increases the accuracy of the gesture recognition system. Actually, the integration of CNN with the MediaPipe results in higher efficiency in using the model of real-time processing.The accuracy achieved by the model on ASL datasets is 99.12\%.The model was tested using American Sign Language (ASL) datasets. The results were then compared to those of existing methods to evaluate how well it performed, using established evaluation techniques. The system will have applications in the communication, education, and accessibility domains. Making systems such as described in this paper even better will assist people with hearing impairment and make things accessible to them. We tested the recognition and translation performance on an ASL dataset and achieved better accuracy over previous models.It is meant to the research is to identify the characters that American signs recognize using hand images taken from a web camera by based on mediapipe and CNNs
A Dynamic Model of Performative Human-ML Collaboration: Theory and Empirical Evidence
Sühr, Tom, Samadi, Samira, Farronato, Chiara
Machine learning (ML) models are increasingly used in various applications, from recommendation systems in e-commerce to diagnosis prediction in healthcare. In this paper, we present a novel dynamic framework for thinking about the deployment of ML models in a performative, human-ML collaborative system. In our framework, the introduction of ML recommendations changes the data generating process of human decisions, which are only a proxy to the ground truth and which are then used to train future versions of the model. We show that this dynamic process in principle can converge to different stable points, i.e. where the ML model and the Human+ML system have the same performance. Some of these stable points are suboptimal with respect to the actual ground truth. We conduct an empirical user study with 1,408 participants to showcase this process. In the study, humans solve instances of the knapsack problem with the help of machine learning predictions. This is an ideal setting because we can see how ML models learn to imitate human decisions and how this learning process converges to a stable point. We find that for many levels of ML performance, humans can improve the ML predictions to dynamically reach an equilibrium performance that is around 92% of the maximum knapsack value. We also find that the equilibrium performance could be even higher if humans rationally followed the ML recommendations. Finally, we test whether monetary incentives can increase the quality of human decisions, but we fail to find any positive effect. Our results have practical implications for the deployment of ML models in contexts where human decisions may deviate from the indisputable ground truth.
Touch100k: A Large-Scale Touch-Language-Vision Dataset for Touch-Centric Multimodal Representation
Cheng, Ning, Guan, Changhao, Gao, Jing, Wang, Weihao, Li, You, Meng, Fandong, Zhou, Jie, Fang, Bin, Xu, Jinan, Han, Wenjuan
Touch holds a pivotal position in enhancing the perceptual and interactive capabilities of both humans and robots. Despite its significance, current tactile research mainly focuses on visual and tactile modalities, overlooking the language domain. Inspired by this, we construct Touch100k, a paired touch-language-vision dataset at the scale of 100k, featuring tactile sensation descriptions in multiple granularities (i.e., sentence-level natural expressions with rich semantics, including contextual and dynamic relationships, and phrase-level descriptions capturing the key features of tactile sensations). Based on the dataset, we propose a pre-training method, Touch-Language-Vision Representation Learning through Curriculum Linking (TLV-Link, for short), inspired by the concept of curriculum learning. TLV-Link aims to learn a tactile representation for the GelSight sensor and capture the relationship between tactile, language, and visual modalities. We evaluate our representation's performance across two task categories (namely, material property identification and robot grasping prediction), focusing on tactile representation and zero-shot touch understanding. The experimental evaluation showcases the effectiveness of our representation. By enabling TLV-Link to achieve substantial improvements and establish a new state-of-the-art in touch-centric multimodal representation learning, Touch100k demonstrates its value as a valuable resource for research. Project page: https://cocacola-lab.github.io/Touch100k/.
Multi-Task Inference: Can Large Language Models Follow Multiple Instructions at Once?
Son, Guijin, Baek, Sangwon, Nam, Sangdae, Jeong, Ilgyun, Kim, Seungone
Large language models (LLMs) are typically prompted to follow a single instruction per inference call. In this work, we analyze whether LLMs also hold the capability to handle multiple instructions simultaneously, denoted as Multi-Task Inference. For this purpose, we introduce the MTI Bench(Multi-Task Inference Benchmark), a comprehensive evaluation benchmark encompassing 5,000 instances across 25 tasks. Each task in the MTI Bench involves 2 to 3 sub-tasks. As expected, we first demonstrate that Multi-Task Inference reduces the total inference time by 1.46 times in average since it does not require multiple inference calls. Interestingly, contrary to the expectation that LLMs would perform better when tasks are divided, we find that state-of-the-art LLMs, such as Llama-2-Chat-70B and GPT-4, show up to 7.3% and 12.4% improved performance with Multi-Task Inference compared to Single-Task Inference on the MTI Bench. We release the MTI Bench dataset and our code at this link https://github.com/guijinSON/MTI-Bench.
Verbalized Machine Learning: Revisiting Machine Learning with Language Models
Xiao, Tim Z., Bamler, Robert, Schölkopf, Bernhard, Liu, Weiyang
Motivated by the large progress made by large language models (LLMs), we introduce the framework of verbalized machine learning (VML). In contrast to conventional machine learning models that are typically optimized over a continuous parameter space, VML constrains the parameter space to be human-interpretable natural language. Such a constraint leads to a new perspective of function approximation, where an LLM with a text prompt can be viewed as a function parameterized by the text prompt. Guided by this perspective, we revisit classical machine learning problems, such as regression and classification, and find that these problems can be solved by an LLM-parameterized learner and optimizer. The major advantages of VML include (1) easy encoding of inductive bias: prior knowledge about the problem and hypothesis class can be encoded in natural language and fed into the LLM-parameterized learner; (2) automatic model class selection: the optimizer can automatically select a concrete model class based on data and verbalized prior knowledge, and it can update the model class during training; and (3) interpretable learner updates: the LLM-parameterized optimizer can provide explanations for why each learner update is performed. We conduct several studies to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of VML, and hope that VML can serve as a stepping stone to stronger interpretability and trustworthiness in ML.
Unintended Impacts of LLM Alignment on Global Representation
Ryan, Michael J., Held, William, Yang, Diyi
Before being deployed for user-facing applications, developers align Large Language Models (LLMs) to user preferences through a variety of procedures, such as Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback (RLHF) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Current evaluations of these procedures focus on benchmarks of instruction following, reasoning, and truthfulness. However, human preferences are not universal, and aligning to specific preference sets may have unintended effects. We explore how alignment impacts performance along three axes of global representation: English dialects, multilingualism, and opinions from and about countries worldwide. Our results show that current alignment procedures create disparities between English dialects and global opinions. We find alignment improves capabilities in several languages. We conclude by discussing design decisions that led to these unintended impacts and recommendations for more equitable preference tuning. We make our code and data publicly available on Github.
A Survey on Multilingual Large Language Models: Corpora, Alignment, and Bias
Xu, Yuemei, Hu, Ling, Zhao, Jiayi, Qiu, Zihan, Ye, Yuqi, Gu, Hanwen
Based on the foundation of Large Language Models (LLMs), Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been developed to address the challenges of multilingual natural language processing tasks, hoping to achieve knowledge transfer from high-resource to low-resource languages. However, significant limitations and challenges still exist, such as language imbalance, multilingual alignment, and inherent bias. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive analysis of MLLMs, delving deeply into discussions surrounding these critical issues. First of all, we start by presenting an overview of MLLMs, covering their evolution, key techniques, and multilingual capacities. Secondly, we explore widely utilized multilingual corpora for MLLMs' training and multilingual datasets oriented for downstream tasks that are crucial for enhancing the cross-lingual capability of MLLMs. Thirdly, we survey the existing studies on multilingual representations and investigate whether the current MLLMs can learn a universal language representation. Fourthly, we discuss bias on MLLMs including its category and evaluation metrics, and summarize the existing debiasing techniques. Finally, we discuss existing challenges and point out promising research directions. By demonstrating these aspects, this paper aims to facilitate a deeper understanding of MLLMs and their potentiality in various domains.
TAXI: Evaluating Categorical Knowledge Editing for Language Models
Powell, Derek, Gerych, Walter, Hartvigsen, Thomas
Humans rarely learn one fact in isolation. Instead, learning a new fact induces knowledge of other facts about the world. For example, in learning a korat is a type of cat, you also infer it is a mammal and has claws, ensuring your model of the world is consistent. Knowledge editing aims to inject new facts into language models to improve their factuality, but current benchmarks fail to evaluate consistency, which is critical to ensure efficient, accurate, and generalizable edits. We manually create TAXI, a new benchmark dataset specifically created to evaluate consistency in categorical knowledge edits. TAXI contains 11,120 multiple-choice queries for 976 edits spanning 41 categories (e.g., Dogs), 164 subjects (e.g., Labrador), and 183 properties (e.g., is a mammal). We then use TAXI to evaluate popular editors' categorical consistency, measuring how often editing a subject's category appropriately edits its properties. We find that 1) the editors achieve marginal, yet non-random consistency, 2) their consistency far underperforms human baselines, and 3) consistency is more achievable when editing atypical subjects Our code and data are available at https://github.com/derekpowell/taxi.