Education
NegativePrompt: Leveraging Psychology for Large Language Models Enhancement via Negative Emotional Stimuli
Wang, Xu, Li, Cheng, Chang, Yi, Wang, Jindong, Wu, Yuan
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become integral to a wide spectrum of applications, ranging from traditional computing tasks to advanced artificial intelligence (AI) applications. This widespread adoption has spurred extensive research into LLMs across various disciplines, including the social sciences. Notably, studies have revealed that LLMs possess emotional intelligence, which can be further developed through positive emotional stimuli. This discovery raises an intriguing question: can negative emotions similarly influence LLMs, potentially enhancing their performance? In response to this question, we introduce NegativePrompt, a novel approach underpinned by psychological principles, involving ten specifically designed negative emotional stimuli. We embark on rigorous experimental evaluations of five LLMs including Flan-T5-Large, Vicuna, Llama 2, ChatGPT, and GPT-4, across a set of 45 tasks. The results are revealing: NegativePrompt markedly enhances the performance of LLMs, evidenced by relative improvements of 12.89% in Instruction Induction tasks and 46.25% in BIG-Bench tasks. Moreover, we conduct attention visualization experiments to decipher the underlying mechanisms of NegativePrompt's influence. Our research contributes significantly to the understanding of LLMs and emotion interaction, demonstrating the practical efficacy of NegativePrompt as an emotion-driven method and offering novel insights for the enhancement of LLMs in real-world applications. The code is available at https://github.com/wangxu0820/NegativePrompt.
Compressed Online Learning of Conditional Mean Embedding
Hou, Boya, Sanjari, Sina, Koppel, Alec, Bose, Subhonmesh
The conditional mean embedding (CME) encodes Markovian stochastic kernels through their actions on probability distributions embedded within the reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS). The CME plays a key role in several well-known machine learning tasks such as reinforcement learning, analysis of dynamical systems, etc. We present an algorithm to learn the CME incrementally from data via an operator-valued stochastic gradient descent. As is well-known, function learning in RKHS suffers from scalability challenges from large data. We utilize a compression mechanism to counter the scalability challenge. The core contribution of this paper is a finite-sample performance guarantee on the last iterate of the online compressed operator learning algorithm with fast-mixing Markovian samples, when the target CME may not be contained in the hypothesis space. We illustrate the efficacy of our algorithm by applying it to the analysis of an example dynamical system.
Memory-Maze: Scenario Driven Benchmark and Visual Language Navigation Model for Guiding Blind People
Kuribayashi, Masaki, Uehara, Kohei, Wang, Allan, Sato, Daisuke, Chu, Simon, Morishima, Shigeo
Visual Language Navigation (VLN) powered navigation robots have the potential to guide blind people by understanding and executing route instructions provided by sighted passersby. This capability allows robots to operate in environments that are often unknown a priori. Existing VLN models are insufficient for the scenario of navigation guidance for blind people, as they need to understand routes described from human memory, which frequently contain stutters, errors, and omission of details as opposed to those obtained by thinking out loud, such as in the Room-to-Room dataset. However, currently, there is no benchmark that simulates instructions that were obtained from human memory in environments where blind people navigate. To this end, we present our benchmark, Memory-Maze, which simulates the scenario of seeking route instructions for guiding blind people. Our benchmark contains a maze-like structured virtual environment and novel route instruction data from human memory. To collect natural language instructions, we conducted two studies from sighted passersby onsite and annotators online. Our analysis demonstrates that instructions data collected onsite were more lengthy and contained more varied wording. Alongside our benchmark, we propose a VLN model better equipped to handle the scenario. Our proposed VLN model uses Large Language Models (LLM) to parse instructions and generate Python codes for robot control. We further show that the existing state-of-the-art model performed suboptimally on our benchmark. In contrast, our proposed method outperformed the state-of-the-art model by a fair margin. We found that future research should exercise caution when considering VLN technology for practical applications, as real-world scenarios have different characteristics than ones collected in traditional settings.
The Silent Curriculum: How Does LLM Monoculture Shape Educational Content and Its Accessibility?
Priyanshu, Aman, Vijay, Supriti
As Large Language Models (LLMs) ascend in popularity, offering information with unprecedented convenience compared to traditional search engines, we delve into the intriguing possibility that a new, singular perspective is being propagated. We call this the "Silent Curriculum," where our focus shifts towards a particularly impressionable demographic: children, who are drawn to the ease and immediacy of acquiring knowledge through these digital oracles. In this exploration, we delve into the sociocultural ramifications of LLMs, which, through their nuanced responses, may be subtly etching their own stereotypes, an algorithmic or AI monoculture. We hypothesize that the convergence of pre-training data, fine-tuning datasets, and analogous guardrails across models may have birthed a distinct cultural lens. We unpack this concept through a short experiment navigating children's storytelling, occupational-ethnic biases, and self-diagnosed annotations, to find that there exists strong cosine similarity (0.87) of biases across these models, suggesting a similar perspective of ethnic stereotypes in occupations. This paper invites a reimagining of LLMs' societal role, especially as the new information gatekeepers, advocating for a paradigm shift towards diversity-rich landscapes over unintended monocultures.
Large Language Models for Education: A Survey
Xu, Hanyi, Gan, Wensheng, Qi, Zhenlian, Wu, Jiayang, Yu, Philip S.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has a profound impact on traditional education. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly used in various applications such as natural language processing, computer vision, speech recognition, and autonomous driving. LLMs have also been applied in many fields, including recommendation, finance, government, education, legal affairs, and finance. As powerful auxiliary tools, LLMs incorporate various technologies such as deep learning, pre-training, fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. The use of LLMs for smart education (LLMEdu) has been a significant strategic direction for countries worldwide. While LLMs have shown great promise in improving teaching quality, changing education models, and modifying teacher roles, the technologies are still facing several challenges. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of LLMEdu, focusing on current technologies, challenges, and future developments. We first summarize the current state of LLMEdu and then introduce the characteristics of LLMs and education, as well as the benefits of integrating LLMs into education. We also review the process of integrating LLMs into the education industry, as well as the introduction of related technologies. Finally, we discuss the challenges and problems faced by LLMEdu, as well as prospects for future optimization of LLMEdu.
To Ask or Not To Ask: Human-in-the-loop Contextual Bandits with Applications in Robot-Assisted Feeding
Banerjee, Rohan, Jenamani, Rajat Kumar, Vasudev, Sidharth, Nanavati, Amal, Dean, Sarah, Bhattacharjee, Tapomayukh
Robot-assisted bite acquisition involves picking up food items that vary in their shape, compliance, size, and texture. A fully autonomous strategy for bite acquisition is unlikely to efficiently generalize to this wide variety of food items. We propose to leverage the presence of the care recipient to provide feedback when the system encounters novel food items. However, repeatedly asking for help imposes cognitive workload on the user. In this work, we formulate human-in-the-loop bite acquisition within a contextual bandit framework and propose a novel method, LinUCB-QG, that selectively asks for help. This method leverages a predictive model of cognitive workload in response to different types and timings of queries, learned using data from 89 participants collected in an online user study. We demonstrate that this method enhances the balance between task performance and cognitive workload compared to autonomous and querying baselines, through experiments in a food dataset-based simulator and a user study with 18 participants without mobility limitations.
Stealthy Imitation: Reward-guided Environment-free Policy Stealing
Zhuang, Zhixiong, Nicolae, Maria-Irina, Fritz, Mario
Deep reinforcement learning policies, which are integral to modern control systems, represent valuable intellectual property. The development of these policies demands considerable resources, such as domain expertise, simulation fidelity, and real-world validation. These policies are potentially vulnerable to model stealing attacks, which aim to replicate their functionality using only black-box access. In this paper, we propose Stealthy Imitation, the first attack designed to steal policies without access to the environment or knowledge of the input range. This setup has not been considered by previous model stealing methods. Lacking access to the victim's input states distribution, Stealthy Imitation fits a reward model that allows to approximate it. We show that the victim policy is harder to imitate when the distribution of the attack queries matches that of the victim. We evaluate our approach across diverse, high-dimensional control tasks and consistently outperform prior data-free approaches adapted for policy stealing. Lastly, we propose a countermeasure that significantly diminishes the effectiveness of the attack.
Finding structure in logographic writing with library learning
Jiang, Guangyuan, Hofer, Matthias, Mao, Jiayuan, Wong, Lionel, Tenenbaum, Joshua B., Levy, Roger P.
One hallmark of human language is its combinatoriality -- reusing a relatively small inventory of building blocks to create a far larger inventory of increasingly complex structures. In this paper, we explore the idea that combinatoriality in language reflects a human inductive bias toward representational efficiency in symbol systems. We develop a computational framework for discovering structure in a writing system. Built on top of state-of-the-art library learning and program synthesis techniques, our computational framework discovers known linguistic structures in the Chinese writing system and reveals how the system evolves towards simplification under pressures for representational efficiency. We demonstrate how a library learning approach, utilizing learned abstractions and compression, may help reveal the fundamental computational principles that underlie the creation of combinatorial structures in human cognition, and offer broader insights into the evolution of efficient communication systems.
A Methodology-Oriented Study of Catastrophic Forgetting in Incremental Deep Neural Networks
Kumar, Ashutosh, Agarwal, Sonali, Hemanth, D Jude
Human being and different species of animals having the skills to gather, transferring knowledge, processing, fine-tune and generating information throughout their lifetime. The ability of learning throughout their lifespan is referred as continuous learning which is using neurocognition mechanism. Consequently, in real world computational system of incremental learning autonomous agents also needs such continuous learning mechanism which provide retrieval of information and long-term memory consolidation. However, the main challenge in artificial intelligence is that the incremental learning of the autonomous agent when new data confronted. In such scenarios, the main concern is catastrophic forgetting(CF), i.e., while learning the sequentially, neural network underfits the old data when it confronted with new data. To tackle this CF problem many numerous studied have been proposed, however it is very difficult to compare their performance due to dissimilarity in their evaluation mechanism. Here we focus on the comparison of all algorithms which are having similar type of evaluation mechanism. Here we are comparing three types of incremental learning methods: (1) Exemplar based methods, (2) Memory based methods, and (3) Network based method. In this survey paper, methodology oriented study for catastrophic forgetting in incremental deep neural network is addressed. Furthermore, it contains the mathematical overview of impact-full methods which can be help researchers to deal with CF.
AdaKD: Dynamic Knowledge Distillation of ASR models using Adaptive Loss Weighting
Ganguly, Shreyan, Nayak, Roshan, Rao, Rakshith, Deb, Ujan, AP, Prathosh
Knowledge distillation, a widely used model compression technique, works on the basis of transferring knowledge from a cumbersome teacher model to a lightweight student model. The technique involves jointly optimizing the task specific and knowledge distillation losses with a weight assigned to them. Despite these weights playing a crucial role in the performance of the distillation process, current methods provide equal weight to both losses, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Knowledge Distillation, a novel technique inspired by curriculum learning to adaptively weigh the losses at instance level. This technique goes by the notion that sample difficulty increases with teacher loss. Our method follows a plug-and-play paradigm that can be applied on top of any task-specific and distillation objectives. Experiments show that our method performs better than conventional knowledge distillation method and existing instance-level loss functions.