Multimodal deep learning methods capture synergistic features from multiple modalities and have the potential to improve accuracy for stress detection compared to unimodal methods. However, this accuracy gain typically comes from high computational cost due to the high-dimensional feature spaces, especially for intermediate fusion. Dimensionality reduction is one way to optimize multimodal learning by simplifying data and making the features more amenable to processing and analysis, thereby reducing computational complexity. This paper introduces an intermediate multimodal fusion network with manifold learning-based dimensionality reduction. The multimodal network generates independent representations from biometric signals and facial landmarks through 1D-CNN and 2D-CNN. Finally, these features are fused and fed to another 1D-CNN layer, followed by a fully connected dense layer. We compared various dimensionality reduction techniques for different variations of unimodal and multimodal networks. We observe that the intermediate-level fusion with the Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) manifold method showed promising results with an accuracy of 96.00\% in a Leave-One-Subject-Out Cross-Validation (LOSO-CV) paradigm over other dimensional reduction methods. MDS had the highest computational cost among manifold learning methods. However, while outperforming other networks, it managed to reduce the computational cost of the proposed networks by 25\% when compared to six well-known conventional feature selection methods used in the preprocessing step.

Artificial intelligence (AI) ethics has emerged as a burgeoning yet pivotal area of scholarly research. This study conducts a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the AI ethics literature over the past two decades. The analysis reveals a discernible tripartite progression, characterized by an incubation phase, followed by a subsequent phase focused on imbuing AI with human-like attributes, culminating in a third phase emphasizing the development of human-centric AI systems. After that, they present seven key AI ethics issues, encompassing the Collingridge dilemma, the AI status debate, challenges associated with AI transparency and explainability, privacy protection complications, considerations of justice and fairness, concerns about algocracy and human enfeeblement, and the issue of superintelligence. Finally, they identify two notable research gaps in AI ethics regarding the large ethics model (LEM) and AI identification and extend an invitation for further scholarly research.

Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) enables machine learning systems to expand their inference capabilities to new classes using only a few labeled examples, without forgetting the previously learned classes. Classical backpropagation-based learning and its variants are often unsuitable for battery-powered, memory-constrained systems at the extreme edge. In this work, we introduce Online Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (O-FSCIL), based on a lightweight model consisting of a pretrained and metalearned feature extractor and an expandable explicit memory storing the class prototypes. The architecture is pretrained with a novel feature orthogonality regularization and metalearned with a multi-margin loss. For learning a new class, our approach extends the explicit memory with novel class prototypes, while the remaining architecture is kept frozen. This allows learning previously unseen classes based on only a few examples with one single pass (hence online). O-FSCIL obtains an average accuracy of 68.62% on the FSCIL CIFAR100 benchmark, achieving state-of-the-art results. Tailored for ultra-low-power platforms, we implement O-FSCIL on the 60 mW GAP9 microcontroller, demonstrating online learning capabilities within just 12 mJ per new class.

The past few years have witnessed the flourishing of large-scale deep neural network models with ever-growing parameter numbers. Training such large-scale models typically requires massive memory and computing resources that exceed those of a single GPU, necessitating distributed training. As GPU performance has rapidly evolved in recent years, computation time has shrunk, thereby increasing the proportion of communication in the overall training time. Therefore, optimizing communication for distributed training has become an urgent issue. In this article, we briefly introduce the general architecture of distributed deep neural network training and analyze relationships among Parallelization Strategy, Collective Communication Library, and Network from the perspective of communication optimization, which forms a three-layer paradigm. We then review current representative research advances with this three-layer paradigm. We find that layers in the current three-layer paradigm are relatively independent, but there is a rich design space for cross-layer collaborative optimization in distributed training scenarios. Therefore, we further advocate a communication-efficient five-layer paradigm underlining opportunities for collaboration designs and look forward to the perspectives of "Vertical", "Horizontal", "Intra-Inter" and "Host-Net" collaboration designs. We hope this article can shed some light on future research on communication optimization for distributed training.

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN), as a crucial research problem of Embodied AI, requires an embodied agent to navigate through complex 3D environments following natural language instructions. Recent research has highlighted the promising capacity of large language models (LLMs) in VLN by improving navigational reasoning accuracy and interpretability. However, their predominant use in an offline manner usually suffers from substantial domain gap between the VLN task and the LLM training corpus. This paper introduces a novel strategy called Navigational Chain-of-Thought (NavCoT), where we fulfill parameter-efficient in-domain training to enable self-guided navigational decision, leading to a significant mitigation of the domain gap in a cost-effective manner. Specifically, at each timestep, the LLM is prompted to forecast the navigational chain-of-thought by: 1) acting as a world model to imagine the next observation according to the instruction, 2) selecting the candidate observation that best aligns with the imagination, and 3) determining the action based on the reasoning from the prior steps. Through constructing formalized labels for training, the LLM can learn to generate desired and reasonable chain-of-thought outputs for improving the action decision. Experimental results across various training settings and popular VLN benchmarks (e.g., Room-to-Room (R2R), Room-across-Room (RxR), Room-for-Room (R4R)) show the significant superiority of NavCoT over the direct action prediction variants. Through simple parameter-efficient finetuning, our NavCoT outperforms a recent GPT4-based approach with ~7% relative improvement on the R2R dataset. We believe that NavCoT will help unlock more task-adaptive and scalable LLM-based embodied agents, which are helpful for developing real-world robotics applications. Code is available at https://github.com/expectorlin/NavCoT.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an important branch of artificial intelligence that studies how to enable computers to understand, process, and generate human language. Text classification is a fundamental task in NLP, which aims to classify text into different predefined categories. Text classification is the most basic and classic task in natural language processing, and most of the tasks in natural language processing can be regarded as classification tasks. In recent years, deep learning has achieved great success in many research fields, and today, it has also become a standard technology in the field of NLP, which is widely integrated into text classification tasks. Unlike numbers and images, text processing emphasizes fine-grained processing ability. Traditional text classification methods generally require preprocessing the input model's text data. Additionally, they also need to obtain good sample features through manual annotation and then use classical machine learning algorithms for classification. Therefore, this paper analyzes the application status of deep learning in the three core tasks of NLP (including text representation, word order modeling, and knowledge representation). This content explores the improvement and synergy achieved through natural language processing in the context of text classification, while also taking into account the challenges posed by adversarial techniques in text generation, text classification, and semantic parsing. An empirical study on text classification tasks demonstrates the effectiveness of interactive integration training, particularly in conjunction with TextCNN, highlighting the significance of these advancements in text classification augmentation and enhancement.

With the increasing size of datasets used for training neural networks, data pruning becomes an attractive field of research. However, most current data pruning algorithms are limited in their ability to preserve accuracy compared to models trained on the full data, especially in high pruning regimes. In this paper we explore the application of data pruning while incorporating knowledge distillation (KD) when training on a pruned subset. That is, rather than relying solely on ground-truth labels, we also use the soft predictions from a teacher network pre-trained on the complete data. By integrating KD into training, we demonstrate significant improvement across datasets, pruning methods, and on all pruning fractions. We first establish a theoretical motivation for employing self-distillation to improve training on pruned data. Then, we empirically make a compelling and highly practical observation: using KD, simple random pruning is comparable or superior to sophisticated pruning methods across all pruning regimes. On ImageNet for example, we achieve superior accuracy despite training on a random subset of only 50% of the data. Additionally, we demonstrate a crucial connection between the pruning factor and the optimal knowledge distillation weight. This helps mitigate the impact of samples with noisy labels and low-quality images retained by typical pruning algorithms. Finally, we make an intriguing observation: when using lower pruning fractions, larger teachers lead to accuracy degradation, while surprisingly, employing teachers with a smaller capacity than the student's may improve results. Our code will be made available.

Continual learning requires a model to adapt to ongoing changes in the data distribution, and often to the set of tasks to be performed. It is rare, however, that the data and task changes are completely unpredictable. Given a description of an overarching goal or data theme, which we call a realm, humans can often guess what concepts are associated with it. We show here that the combination of a large language model and an image generation model can similarly provide useful premonitions as to how a continual learning challenge might develop over time. We use the large language model to generate text descriptions of semantically related classes that might potentially appear in the data stream in future. These descriptions are then rendered using Stable Diffusion to generate new labelled image samples. The resulting synthetic dataset is employed for supervised pre-training, but is discarded prior to commencing continual learning, along with the pre-training classification head. We find that the backbone of our pre-trained networks can learn representations useful for the downstream continual learning problem, thus becoming a valuable input to any existing continual learning method. Although there are complexities arising from the domain gap between real and synthetic images, we show that pre-training models in this manner improves multiple Class Incremenal Learning (CIL) methods on fine-grained image classification benchmarks.

Mixed-media tutorials, which integrate videos, images, text, and diagrams to teach procedural skills, offer more browsable alternatives than timeline-based videos. However, manually creating such tutorials is tedious, and existing automated solutions are often restricted to a particular domain. While AI models hold promise, it is unclear how to effectively harness their powers, given the multi-modal data involved and the vast landscape of models. We present TutoAI, a cross-domain framework for AI-assisted mixed-media tutorial creation on physical tasks. First, we distill common tutorial components by surveying existing work; then, we present an approach to identify, assemble, and evaluate AI models for component extraction; finally, we propose guidelines for designing user interfaces (UI) that support tutorial creation based on AI-generated components. We show that TutoAI has achieved higher or similar quality compared to a baseline model in preliminary user studies.

Despite the effectiveness of data selection for large language models (LLMs) during pretraining and instruction fine-tuning phases, improving data efficiency in supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for specialized domains poses significant challenges due to the complexity of fine-tuning data. To bridge this gap, we introduce an effective and scalable data selection method for SFT, SmallToLarge (S2L), which leverages training trajectories from small models to guide the data selection for larger models. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that S2L significantly improves data efficiency in SFT for mathematical problem-solving, reducing the training data to just 11% of the original MathInstruct dataset (Yue et al., 2023) to match full dataset performance while outperforming state-of-the-art data selection algorithms by an average of 4.7% across 6 in- and out-domain evaluation datasets. Remarkably, selecting only 50K data for SFT, S2L achieves a 32.7% accuracy on the most challenging MATH (Hendrycks et al., 2021) benchmark, improving Phi-2 (Li et al., 2023b) by 16.6%. In clinical text summarization on the MIMIC-III dataset (Johnson et al., 2016), S2L again outperforms training on the full dataset using only 50% of the data. Notably, S2L can perform data selection using a reference model 40x smaller than the target model, proportionally reducing the cost of data selection.