Education
Foundation Models for Education: Promises and Prospects
Xu, Tianlong, Tong, Richard, Liang, Jing, Fan, Xing, Li, Haoyang, Wen, Qingsong
With the advent of foundation models like ChatGPT, educators are excited about the transformative role that AI might play in propelling the next education revolution. The developing speed and the profound impact of foundation models in various industries force us to think deeply about the changes they will make to education, a domain that is critically important for the future of humans. In this paper, we discuss the strengths of foundation models, such as personalized learning, education inequality, and reasoning capabilities, as well as the development of agent architecture tailored for education, which integrates AI agents with pedagogical frameworks to create adaptive learning environments. Furthermore, we highlight the risks and opportunities of AI overreliance and creativity. Lastly, we envision a future where foundation models in education harmonize human and AI capabilities, fostering a dynamic, inclusive, and adaptive educational ecosystem.
Data Readiness for AI: A 360-Degree Survey
Hiniduma, Kaveen, Byna, Suren, Bez, Jean Luca
Data are the critical fuel for Artificial Intelligence (AI) models. Poor quality data produces inaccurate and ineffective AI models that may lead to incorrect or unsafe use. Checking for data readiness is a crucial step in improving data quality. Numerous R&D efforts have been spent on improving data quality. However, standardized metrics for evaluating data readiness for use in AI training are still evolving. In this study, we perform a comprehensive survey of metrics used for verifying AI's data readiness. This survey examines more than 120 papers that are published by ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, other reputable journals, and articles published on the web by prominent AI experts. This survey aims to propose a taxonomy of data readiness for AI (DRAI) metrics for structured and unstructured datasets. We anticipate that this taxonomy can lead to new standards for DRAI metrics that would be used for enhancing the quality and accuracy of AI training and inference.
Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning Beyond Accuracy
Xia, Shijie, Li, Xuefeng, Liu, Yixin, Wu, Tongshuang, Liu, Pengfei
The leaderboard of Large Language Models (LLMs) in mathematical tasks has been continuously updated. However, the majority of evaluations focus solely on the final results, neglecting the quality of the intermediate steps. This oversight can mask underlying problems, such as logical errors or unnecessary steps in the reasoning process. To measure reasoning beyond final-answer accuracy, we introduce ReasonEval, a new methodology for evaluating the quality of reasoning steps. ReasonEval employs $\textit{validity}$ and $\textit{redundancy}$ to characterize the reasoning quality, as well as accompanying LLMs to assess them automatically. Instantiated by base models that possess strong mathematical knowledge and trained with high-quality labeled data, ReasonEval achieves state-of-the-art performance on human-labeled datasets and can accurately detect different types of errors generated by perturbation. When applied to evaluate LLMs specialized in math, we find that an increase in final-answer accuracy does not necessarily guarantee an improvement in the overall quality of the reasoning steps for challenging mathematical problems. Additionally, we observe that ReasonEval can play a significant role in data selection. We release the best-performing model, meta-evaluation script, and all evaluation results at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/ReasonEval.
Teaching Higher-Order Logic Using Isabelle
Lund, Simon Tobias, Villadsen, Jรธrgen
Higher-order logic, also known as simple type theory [3], has been described as the combination of functional programming and logic [9], and has proved a very powerful tool for the formalization of mathematics and computer science. It is an expressive enough logic to cover a wide array of fields, while still being built on relatively simple principles, and a number of proof assistants based on higher-order logic are available. We consider formal reasoning in the generic proof assistant Isabelle [10, 11]. In the present paper we are taking advantage of the genericity of Isabelle, but we also find that Isabelle is at least as user-friendly and intuitive as other proof assistants of comparable power. Although Isabelle is generic and comes with a number of object logics like first-order logic (FOL) and axiomatic set theory (ZF), the default object logic is higher-order logic, called Isabelle/HOL.
Enhancing Metaphor Detection through Soft Labels and Target Word Prediction
Metaphors play a significant role in our everyday communication, yet detecting them presents a challenge. Traditional methods often struggle with improper application of language rules and a tendency to overlook data sparsity. To address these issues, we integrate knowledge distillation and prompt learning into metaphor detection. Our approach revolves around a tailored prompt learning framework specifically designed for metaphor detection. By strategically masking target words and providing relevant prompt data, we guide the model to accurately predict the contextual meanings of these words. This approach not only mitigates confusion stemming from the literal meanings of the words but also ensures effective application of language rules for metaphor detection. Furthermore, we've introduced a teacher model to generate valuable soft labels. These soft labels provide a similar effect to label smoothing and help prevent the model from becoming over confident and effectively addresses the challenge of data sparsity. Experimental results demonstrate that our model has achieved state-of-the-art performance, as evidenced by its remarkable results across various datasets.
Responsible Generative AI: What to Generate and What Not
In recent years, generative AI (GenAI), like large language models and text-to-image models, has received significant attention across various domains. However, ensuring the responsible generation of content by these models is crucial for their real-world applicability. This raises an interesting question: \textit{What should responsible GenAI generate, and what should it not?} To answer the question, this paper investigates the practical responsible requirements of both textual and visual generative models, outlining five key considerations: generating truthful content, avoiding toxic content, refusing harmful instruction, leaking no training data-related content, and ensuring generated content identifiable. Specifically, we review recent advancements and challenges in addressing these requirements. Besides, we discuss and emphasize the importance of responsible GenAI across healthcare, education, finance, and artificial general intelligence domains. Through a unified perspective on both textual and visual generative models, this paper aims to provide insights into practical safety-related issues and further benefit the community in building responsible GenAI.
Is English the New Programming Language? How About Pseudo-code Engineering?
Michaelsen, Gian Alexandre, Santos, Renato P. dos
Background: The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into daily life, particularly through chatbots utilizing natural language processing (NLP), presents both revolutionary potential and unique challenges. This intended to investigate how different input forms impact ChatGPT, a leading language model by OpenAI, performance in understanding and executing complex, multi-intention tasks. Design: Employing a case study methodology supplemented by discourse analysis, the research analyzes ChatGPT's responses to inputs varying from natural language to pseudo-code engineering. The study specifically examines the model's proficiency across four categories: understanding of intentions, interpretability, completeness, and creativity. Setting and Participants: As a theoretical exploration of AI interaction, this study focuses on the analysis of structured and unstructured inputs processed by ChatGPT, without direct human participants. Data collection and analysis: The research utilizes synthetic case scenarios, including the organization of a "weekly meal plan" and a "shopping list," to assess ChatGPT's response to prompts in both natural language and pseudo-code engineering. The analysis is grounded in the identification of patterns, contradictions, and unique response elements across different input formats. Results: Findings reveal that pseudo-code engineering inputs significantly enhance the clarity and determinism of ChatGPT's responses, reducing ambiguity inherent in natural language. Enhanced natural language, structured through prompt engineering techniques, similarly improves the model's interpretability and creativity. Conclusions: The study underscores the potential of pseudo-code engineering in refining human-AI interaction and achieving more deterministic, concise, and direct outcomes, advocating for its broader application across disciplines requiring precise AI responses.
Assisting in Writing Wikipedia-like Articles From Scratch with Large Language Models
Shao, Yijia, Jiang, Yucheng, Kanell, Theodore A., Xu, Peter, Khattab, Omar, Lam, Monica S.
We study how to apply large language models to write grounded and organized long-form articles from scratch, with comparable breadth and depth to Wikipedia pages. This underexplored problem poses new challenges at the pre-writing stage, including how to research the topic and prepare an outline prior to writing. We propose STORM, a writing system for the Synthesis of Topic Outlines through Retrieval and Multi-perspective Question Asking. STORM models the pre-writing stage by (1) discovering diverse perspectives in researching the given topic, (2) simulating conversations where writers carrying different perspectives pose questions to a topic expert grounded on trusted Internet sources, (3) curating the collected information to create an outline. For evaluation, we curate FreshWiki, a dataset of recent high-quality Wikipedia articles, and formulate outline assessments to evaluate the pre-writing stage. We further gather feedback from experienced Wikipedia editors. Compared to articles generated by an outline-driven retrieval-augmented baseline, more of STORM's articles are deemed to be organized (by a 25% absolute increase) and broad in coverage (by 10%). The expert feedback also helps identify new challenges for generating grounded long articles, such as source bias transfer and over-association of unrelated facts.
Active Test-Time Adaptation: Theoretical Analyses and An Algorithm
Gui, Shurui, Li, Xiner, Ji, Shuiwang
Test-time adaptation (TTA) addresses distribution shifts for streaming test data in unsupervised settings. Currently, most TTA methods can only deal with minor shifts and rely heavily on heuristic and empirical studies. To advance TTA under domain shifts, we propose the novel problem setting of active test-time adaptation (ATTA) that integrates active learning within the fully TTA setting. We provide a learning theory analysis, demonstrating that incorporating limited labeled test instances enhances overall performances across test domains with a theoretical guarantee. We also present a sample entropy balancing for implementing ATTA while avoiding catastrophic forgetting (CF). We introduce a simple yet effective ATTA algorithm, known as SimATTA, using real-time sample selection techniques. Extensive experimental results confirm consistency with our theoretical analyses and show that the proposed ATTA method yields substantial performance improvements over TTA methods while maintaining efficiency and shares similar effectiveness to the more demanding active domain adaptation (ADA) methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/divelab/ATTA
Skill Transfer and Discovery for Sim-to-Real Learning: A Representation-Based Viewpoint
Ma, Haitong, Ren, Zhaolin, Dai, Bo, Li, Na
We study sim-to-real skill transfer and discovery in the context of robotics control using representation learning. We draw inspiration from spectral decomposition of Markov decision processes. The spectral decomposition brings about representation that can linearly represent the state-action value function induced by any policies, thus can be regarded as skills. The skill representations are transferable across arbitrary tasks with the same transition dynamics. Moreover, to handle the sim-to-real gap in the dynamics, we propose a skill discovery algorithm that learns new skills caused by the sim-to-real gap from real-world data. We promote the discovery of new skills by enforcing orthogonal constraints between the skills to learn and the skills from simulators, and then synthesize the policy using the enlarged skill sets. We demonstrate our methodology by transferring quadrotor controllers from simulators to Crazyflie 2.1 quadrotors. We show that we can learn the skill representations from a single simulator task and transfer these to multiple different real-world tasks including hovering, taking off, landing and trajectory tracking. Our skill discovery approach helps narrow the sim-to-real gap and improve the real-world controller performance by up to 30.2%.