This study explores the integration of the ChatGPT API with GPT-4 model and Microsoft Copilot Studio on the Microsoft Teams platform to develop an intelligent tutoring system. Designed to provide instant support to students, the system dynamically adjusts educational content in response to the learners' progress and feedback. Utilizing advancements in natural language processing and machine learning, it interprets student inquiries, offers tailored feedback, and facilitates the educational journey. Initial implementation highlights the system's potential in boosting students' motivation and engagement, while equipping educators with critical insights into the learning process, thus promoting tailored educational experiences and enhancing instructional effectiveness.

In many real-world applications, it is hard to provide a reward signal in each step of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) process and more natural to give feedback when an episode ends. To this end, we study the recently proposed model of RL with Aggregate Bandit Feedback (RL-ABF), where the agent only observes the sum of rewards at the end of an episode instead of each reward individually. Prior work studied RL-ABF only in tabular settings, where the number of states is assumed to be small. In this paper, we extend ABF to linear function approximation and develop two efficient algorithms with near-optimal regret guarantees: a value-based optimistic algorithm built on a new randomization technique with a Q-functions ensemble, and a policy optimization algorithm that uses a novel hedging scheme over the ensemble.

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical when deploying machine learning models in the real world. Outlier exposure methods, which incorporate auxiliary outlier data in the training process, can drastically improve OOD detection performance compared to approaches without advanced training strategies. We introduce Hopfield Boosting, a boosting approach, which leverages modern Hopfield energy (MHE) to sharpen the decision boundary between the in-distribution and OOD data. Hopfield Boosting encourages the model to concentrate on hard-to-distinguish auxiliary outlier examples that lie close to the decision boundary between in-distribution and auxiliary outlier data. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art in OOD detection with outlier exposure, improving the FPR95 metric from 2.28 to 0.92 on CIFAR-10 and from 11.76 to 7.94 on CIFAR-100.

Transformer-based large language models (LLM) have been widely used in language processing applications. However, most of them restrict the context window that permits the model to attend to every token in the inputs. Previous works in recurrent models can memorize past tokens to enable unlimited context and maintain effectiveness. However, they have "flat" memory architectures, which have limitations in selecting and filtering information. Since humans are good at learning and self-adjustment, we speculate that imitating brain memory hierarchy is beneficial for model memorization. We propose the Hierarchical Memory Transformer (HMT), a novel framework that enables and improves models' long-context processing ability by imitating human memorization behavior. Leveraging memory-augmented segment-level recurrence, we organize the memory hierarchy by preserving tokens from early input token segments, passing memory embeddings along the sequence, and recalling relevant information from history. Evaluating general language modeling (Wikitext-103, PG-19) and question-answering tasks (PubMedQA), we show that HMT steadily improves the long-context processing ability of context-constrained and long-context models. With an additional 0.5% - 2% of parameters, HMT can easily plug in and augment future LLMs to handle long context effectively. Our code is open-sourced on Github: https://github.com/OswaldHe/HMT-pytorch.

The superior performance of modern visual backbones usually comes with a costly training procedure. We contribute to this issue by generalizing the idea of curriculum learning beyond its original formulation, i.e., training models using easier-to-harder data. Specifically, we reformulate the training curriculum as a soft-selection function, which uncovers progressively more difficult patterns within each example during training, instead of performing easier-to-harder sample selection. Our work is inspired by an intriguing observation on the learning dynamics of visual backbones: during the earlier stages of training, the model predominantly learns to recognize some 'easier-to-learn' discriminative patterns in the data. These patterns, when observed through frequency and spatial domains, incorporate lower-frequency components, and the natural image contents without distortion or data augmentation. Motivated by these findings, we propose a curriculum where the model always leverages all the training data at every learning stage, yet the exposure to the 'easier-to-learn' patterns of each example is initiated first, with harder patterns gradually introduced as training progresses. To implement this idea in a computationally efficient way, we introduce a cropping operation in the Fourier spectrum of the inputs, enabling the model to learn from only the lower-frequency components. Then we show that exposing the contents of natural images can be readily achieved by modulating the intensity of data augmentation. Finally, we integrate these aspects and design curriculum schedules with tailored search algorithms. The resulting method, EfficientTrain++, is simple, general, yet surprisingly effective. It reduces the training time of a wide variety of popular models by 1.5-3.0x on ImageNet-1K/22K without sacrificing accuracy. It also demonstrates efficacy in self-supervised learning (e.g., MAE).

While the excitement around the capabilities of technological In a recent review that mapped the design space of IIWAs [5], the advancements is giving rise to new AI-based writing assistants, ecosystem dimensions were identified as important, and involve: the overarching ecosystem plays a crucial role in how they are "the overarching sociotechnical context in which the writer and adopted in educational practice. In this paper, we point to key the tool are situated, encompassing a range of complex, ecological aspects for consideration. We draw insights from interdependent actors that frequently play a role in the extensive research integrated with practice on a writing feedback functioning of the writing assistant". However, there was sparse tool over 9 years at a university, and we highlight potential risks empirical evidence in the literature on how this ecosystem when these are overlooked. It informs the design of educational manifests, given the novelty of GenAI IIWAs in particular.

This is a lecture note produced for DS-GA 3001.003 "Special Topics in DS - Causal Inference in Machine Learning" at the Center for Data Science, New York University in Spring, 2024. This course was created to target master's and PhD level students with basic background in machine learning but who were not exposed to causal inference or causal reasoning in general previously. In particular, this course focuses on introducing such students to expand their view and knowledge of machine learning to incorporate causal reasoning, as this aspect is at the core of so-called out-of-distribution generalization (or lack thereof.)

We focus on the online-based active learning (OAL) setting where an agent operates over a stream of observations and trades-off between the costly acquisition of information (labelled observations) and the cost of prediction errors. We propose a novel foundation for OAL tasks based on partial monitoring, a theoretical framework specialized in online learning from partially informative actions. We show that previously studied binary and multi-class OAL tasks are instances of partial monitoring. We expand the real-world potential of OAL by introducing a new class of cost-sensitive OAL tasks. We propose NeuralCBP, the first PM strategy that accounts for predictive uncertainty with deep neural networks. Our extensive empirical evaluation on open source datasets shows that NeuralCBP has favorable performance against state-of-the-art baselines on multiple binary, multi-class and cost-sensitive OAL tasks.

Analogy-making is central to human cognition, allowing us to adapt to novel situations -- an ability that current AI systems still lack. Most analogy datasets today focus on simple analogies (e.g., word analogies); datasets including complex types of analogies are typically manually curated and very small. We believe that this holds back progress in computational analogy. In this work, we design a data generation pipeline, ParallelPARC (Parallel Paragraph Creator) leveraging state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) to create complex, paragraph-based analogies, as well as distractors, both simple and challenging. We demonstrate our pipeline and create ProPara-Logy, a dataset of analogies between scientific processes. We publish a gold-set, validated by humans, and a silver-set, generated automatically. We test LLMs' and humans' analogy recognition in binary and multiple-choice settings, and found that humans outperform the best models (~13% gap) after a light supervision. We demonstrate that our silver-set is useful for training models. Lastly, we show challenging distractors confuse LLMs, but not humans. We hope our pipeline will encourage research in this emerging field.