To mitigate forgetting, existing lifelong event detection methods typically maintain a memory module and replay the stored memory data during the learning of a new task. However, the simple combination of memory data and new-task samples can still result in substantial forgetting of previously acquired knowledge, which may occur due to the potential overlap between the feature distribution of new data and the previously learned embedding space. Moreover, the model suffers from overfitting on the few memory samples rather than effectively remembering learned patterns. To address the challenges of forgetting and overfitting, we propose a novel method based on embedding space separation and compaction. Our method alleviates forgetting of previously learned tasks by forcing the feature distribution of new data away from the previous embedding space. It also mitigates overfitting by a memory calibration mechanism that encourages memory data to be close to its prototype to enhance intra-class compactness. In addition, the learnable parameters of the new task are initialized by drawing upon acquired knowledge from the previously learned task to facilitate forward knowledge transfer. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method can significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art approaches.

Vision Transformer (ViT) has emerged as a prominent architecture for various computer vision tasks. In ViT, we divide the input image into patch tokens and process them through a stack of self attention blocks. However, unlike Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), ViTs simple architecture has no informative inductive bias (e.g., locality,etc. ). Due to this, ViT requires a large amount of data for pre-training. Various data efficient approaches (DeiT) have been proposed to train ViT on balanced datasets effectively. However, limited literature discusses the use of ViT for datasets with long-tailed imbalances. In this work, we introduce DeiT-LT to tackle the problem of training ViTs from scratch on long-tailed datasets. In DeiT-LT, we introduce an efficient and effective way of distillation from CNN via distillation DIST token by using out-of-distribution images and re-weighting the distillation loss to enhance focus on tail classes. This leads to the learning of local CNN-like features in early ViT blocks, improving generalization for tail classes. Further, to mitigate overfitting, we propose distilling from a flat CNN teacher, which leads to learning low-rank generalizable features for DIST tokens across all ViT blocks. With the proposed DeiT-LT scheme, the distillation DIST token becomes an expert on the tail classes, and the classifier CLS token becomes an expert on the head classes. The experts help to effectively learn features corresponding to both the majority and minority classes using a distinct set of tokens within the same ViT architecture. We show the effectiveness of DeiT-LT for training ViT from scratch on datasets ranging from small-scale CIFAR-10 LT to large-scale iNaturalist-2018.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Llama2 have revolutionized natural language processing and search engine dynamics. However, these models incur exceptionally high computational costs. For instance, GPT-3 consists of 175 billion parameters where inference demands billions of floating-point operations. Caching is a natural solution to reduce LLM inference costs on repeated queries which constitute about 31% of the total queries. However, existing caching methods are incapable of finding semantic similarities among LLM queries, leading to unacceptable false hit-and-miss rates. This paper introduces MeanCache, a user-centric semantic cache for LLMs that identifies semantically similar queries to determine cache hit or miss. Using MeanCache, the response to a user's semantically similar query can be retrieved from a local cache rather than re-querying the LLM, thus reducing costs, service provider load, and environmental impact. Existing caching solutions for LLMs raise privacy and scalability concerns and perform wasteful query requests. MeanCache leverages Federated Learning (FL) to collaboratively train a query similarity model across LLM users without violating privacy. By placing a local cache in each user's device and using FL, MeanCache reduces the latency and costs and enhances model performance, resulting in lower false hit rates. MeanCache compresses the embedding dimensions to minimize cache storage and also finds the optimal cosine similarity threshold. Our experiments benchmarked against the state-of-the-art caching method, reveal that MeanCache attains an approximately 17% higher F-score and a 20% increase in precision during semantic cache hit-and-miss decisions. It also reduces the storage requirement by 83% and accelerates semantic cache hit-and-miss decisions by 11%.

Assessing instruction quality is a fundamental component of any improvement efforts in the education system. However, traditional manual assessments are expensive, subjective, and heavily dependent on observers' expertise and idiosyncratic factors, preventing teachers from getting timely and frequent feedback. Different from prior research that mostly focuses on low-inference instructional practices on a singular basis, this paper presents the first study that leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to assess multiple high-inference instructional practices in two distinct educational settings: in-person K-12 classrooms and simulated performance tasks for pre-service teachers. This is also the first study that applies NLP to measure a teaching practice that is widely acknowledged to be particularly effective for students with special needs. We confront two challenges inherent in NLP-based instructional analysis, including noisy and long input data and highly skewed distributions of human ratings. Our results suggest that pretrained Language Models (PLMs) demonstrate performances comparable to the agreement level of human raters for variables that are more discrete and require lower inference, but their efficacy diminishes with more complex teaching practices. Interestingly, using only teachers' utterances as input yields strong results for student-centered variables, alleviating common concerns over the difficulty of collecting and transcribing high-quality student speech data in in-person teaching settings. Our findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of current NLP techniques in the education domain, opening avenues for further exploration.

Teacher-Student Curriculum Learning (TSCL) is a curriculum learning framework that draws inspiration from human cultural transmission and learning. It involves a teacher algorithm shaping the learning process of a learner algorithm by exposing it to controlled experiences. Despite its success, understanding the conditions under which TSCL is effective remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a data-centric perspective to analyze the underlying mechanics of the teacher-student interactions in TSCL. We leverage cooperative game theory to describe how the composition of the set of experiences presented by the teacher to the learner, as well as their order, influences the performance of the curriculum that are found by TSCL approaches. To do so, we demonstrate that for every TSCL problem, there exists an equivalent cooperative game, and several key components of the TSCL framework can be reinterpreted using game-theoretic principles. Through experiments covering supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and classical games, we estimate the cooperative values of experiences and use value-proportional curriculum mechanisms to construct curricula, even in cases where TSCL struggles. The framework and experimental setup we present in this work represent a novel foundation for a deeper exploration of TSCL, shedding light on its underlying mechanisms and providing insights into its broader applicability in machine learning.

Laguna Beach High School administrators have launched an investigation after a student allegedly created and circulated "inappropriate images" of other students using artificial intelligence. It is not clear how many students are involved in the scandal, what specifically the images contained or how they were distributed. In an email to parents on March 25, Principal Jason Allemann wrote that school leadership is "taking steps to investigate and directly address this issue with those involved, while also using this situation as a teachable moment for our students, reinforcing the importance of responsible behavior and mutual respect." The Laguna Beach Police Department is assisting with the investigation, but a department spokesperson declined to provide any details on the probe because the individuals involved are minors. The Orange County high school joins a growing number of educational institutions grappling with the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom and in social settings.

Colleges across the US have added AI courses to their curriculum as companies scramble to find skilled employees and students look for higher paying fields. While much of the world sees the tech as the way of the future, some people have cautioned students to not gamble tens of thousands of dollars on technology that seems to evolve each day. Tiffany Hsieh, who works in the development of AI told, DailyMail.com: 'While there is plenty of data telling us about the number of skills that will be affected by Generative AI, much of that data doesn't tell us about the nature of the impact on those skills. But a graduate student majoring in the tech at New York's Yeshiva University said he believes AI is here to stay and the degree would be necessary for him to become a machine language engineer, which pays at least 160,000 a year.

With ChatGPT and Bard both becoming more and more popular, many students are being tempted to use AI chatbots to cheat on their essays. But one teacher has come up with a clever trick dubbed the'Trojan Horse' to catch them out. In a TikTok video, Daina Petronis, an English language teacher from Toronto, shows how she can easily spot AI essays. By putting a hidden prompt into her assignments, Ms Petronis tricks the AI into including unusual words which she can quickly find. 'Since no plagiarism detector is 100% accurate, this method is one of the few ways we can locate concrete evidence and extend our help to students who need guidance with AI,' Ms Petronis said.

Instruction tuning is an important step in making language models useful for direct user interaction. However, many legal tasks remain out of reach for most open LLMs and there do not yet exist any large scale instruction datasets for the domain. This critically limits research in this application area. In this work, we curate LawInstruct, a large legal instruction dataset, covering 17 jurisdictions, 24 languages and a total of 12M examples. We present evidence that domain-specific pretraining and instruction tuning improve performance on LegalBench, including improving Flan-T5 XL by 8 points or 16\% over the baseline. However, the effect does not generalize across all tasks, training regimes, model sizes, and other factors. LawInstruct is a resource for accelerating the development of models with stronger information processing and decision making capabilities in the legal domain.

Large Language Models are growing in size, and we expect them to continue to do so, as larger models train quicker. However, this increase in size will severely impact inference costs. Therefore model compression is important, to retain the performance of larger models, but with a reduced cost of running them. In this thesis we explore the methods of model compression, and we empirically demonstrate that the simple method of skipping latter attention sublayers in Transformer LLMs is an effective method of model compression, as these layers prove to be redundant, whilst also being incredibly computationally expensive. We observed a 21% speed increase in one-token generation for Llama 2 7B [1], whilst surprisingly and unexpectedly improving performance over several common benchmarks.