Authorship Attribution is the task of creating an appropriate characterization of text that captures the authors' writing style to identify the original author of a given piece of text. With increased anonymity on the internet, this task has become increasingly crucial in various security and plagiarism detection fields. Despite significant advancements in other languages such as English, Spanish, and Chinese, Bangla lacks comprehensive research in this field due to its complex linguistic feature and sentence structure. Moreover, existing systems are not scalable when the number of author increases, and the performance drops for small number of samples per author. In this paper, we propose the use of Average-Stochastic Gradient Descent Weight-Dropped Long Short-Term Memory (AWD-LSTM) architecture and an effective transfer learning approach that addresses the problem of complex linguistic features extraction and scalability for authorship attribution in Bangla Literature (AABL). We analyze the effect of different tokenization, such as word, sub-word, and character level tokenization, and demonstrate the effectiveness of these tokenizations in the proposed model. Moreover, we introduce the publicly available Bangla Authorship Attribution Dataset of 16 authors (BAAD16) containing 17,966 sample texts and 13.4+ million words to solve the standard dataset scarcity problem and release six variations of pre-trained language models for use in any Bangla NLP downstream task. For evaluation, we used our developed BAAD16 dataset as well as other publicly available datasets. Empirically, our proposed model outperformed state-of-the-art models and achieved 99.8% accuracy in the BAAD16 dataset. Furthermore, we showed that the proposed system scales much better even with an increasing number of authors, and performance remains steady despite few training samples.

Reflective listening is a fundamental skill that counselors must acquire to achieve proficiency in motivational interviewing (MI). It involves responding in a manner that acknowledges and explores the meaning of what the client has expressed in the conversation. In this work, we introduce the task of counseling response rewriting, which transforms non-reflective statements into reflective responses. We introduce VERVE, a template-based rewriting system with paraphrase-augmented training and adaptive template updating. VERVE first creates a template by identifying and filtering out tokens that are not relevant to reflections and constructs a reflective response using the template. Paraphrase-augmented training allows the model to learn less-strict fillings of masked spans, and adaptive template updating helps discover effective templates for rewriting without significantly removing the original content. Using both automatic and human evaluations, we compare our method against text rewriting baselines and show that our framework is effective in turning non-reflective statements into more reflective responses while achieving a good content preservation-reflection style trade-off.

While chain-of-thought prompting (CoT) has the potential to improve the explainability of language model reasoning, it can systematically misrepresent the factors influencing models' behavior--for example, rationalizing answers in line with a user's opinion without mentioning this bias. To mitigate this biased reasoning problem, we introduce bias-augmented consistency training (BCT), an unsupervised fine-tuning scheme that trains models to give consistent reasoning across prompts with and without biasing features. We construct a suite testing nine forms of biased reasoning on seven question-answering tasks, and find that applying BCT to GPT-3.5-Turbo with one bias reduces the rate of biased reasoning by 86% on held-out tasks. Moreover, this model generalizes to other forms of bias, reducing biased reasoning on held-out biases by an average of 37%. As BCT generalizes to held-out biases and does not require gold labels, this method may hold promise for reducing biased reasoning from as-of-yet unknown biases and on tasks where supervision for ground truth reasoning is unavailable.

In the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), Knowledge Distillation (KD) emerges as a pivotal methodology for transferring advanced capabilities from leading proprietary LLMs, such as GPT-4, to their open-source counterparts like LLaMA and Mistral. Additionally, as open-source LLMs flourish, KD plays a crucial role in both compressing these models, and facilitating their self-improvement by employing themselves as teachers. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of KD's role within the realm of LLM, highlighting its critical function in imparting advanced knowledge to smaller models and its utility in model compression and self-improvement. Our survey is meticulously structured around three foundational pillars: \textit{algorithm}, \textit{skill}, and \textit{verticalization} -- providing a comprehensive examination of KD mechanisms, the enhancement of specific cognitive abilities, and their practical implications across diverse fields. Crucially, the survey navigates the intricate interplay between data augmentation (DA) and KD, illustrating how DA emerges as a powerful paradigm within the KD framework to bolster LLMs' performance. By leveraging DA to generate context-rich, skill-specific training data, KD transcends traditional boundaries, enabling open-source models to approximate the contextual adeptness, ethical alignment, and deep semantic insights characteristic of their proprietary counterparts. This work aims to provide an insightful guide for researchers and practitioners, offering a detailed overview of current methodologies in KD and proposing future research directions. Importantly, we firmly advocate for compliance with the legal terms that regulate the use of LLMs, ensuring ethical and lawful application of KD of LLMs. An associated Github repository is available at https://github.com/Tebmer/Awesome-Knowledge-Distillation-of-LLMs.

Interactive Data Analysis, the collaboration between humans and LLM agents, enables real-time data exploration for informed decision-making. The challenges and costs of collecting realistic interactive logs for data analysis hinder the quantitative evaluation of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in this task. To mitigate this issue, we introduce Tapilot-Crossing, a new benchmark to evaluate LLM agents on interactive data analysis. Tapilot-Crossing contains 1024 interactions, covering 4 practical scenarios: Normal, Action, Private, and Private Action. Notably, Tapilot-Crossing is constructed by an economical multi-agent environment, Decision Company, with few human efforts. We evaluate popular and advanced LLM agents in Tapilot-Crossing, which underscores the challenges of interactive data analysis. Furthermore, we propose Adaptive Interaction Reflection (AIR), a self-generated reflection strategy that guides LLM agents to learn from successful history. Experiments demonstrate that Air can evolve LLMs into effective interactive data analysis agents, achieving a relative performance improvement of up to 44.5%.

This paper addresses the challenge of identifying the paths for vessels with operating routes of repetitive paths, partially repetitive paths, and new paths. We propose a spatial clustering approach for labeling the vessel paths by using only position information. We develop a path clustering framework employing two methods: a distance-based path modeling and a likelihood estimation method. The former enhances the accuracy of path clustering through the integration of unsupervised machine learning techniques, while the latter focuses on likelihood-based path modeling and introduces segmentation for a more detailed analysis. The result findings highlight the superior performance and efficiency of the developed approach, as both methods for clustering vessel paths into five classes achieve a perfect F1-score. The approach aims to offer valuable insights for route planning, ultimately contributing to improving safety and efficiency in maritime transportation.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) facilitates the transfer of discriminative capabilities from an advanced teacher model to a simpler student model, ensuring performance enhancement without compromising accuracy. It is also exploited for model stealing attacks, where adversaries use KD to mimic the functionality of a teacher model. Recent developments in this domain have been influenced by the Stingy Teacher model, which provided empirical analysis showing that sparse outputs can significantly degrade the performance of student models. Addressing the risk of intellectual property leakage, our work introduces an approach to train a teacher model that inherently protects its logits, influenced by the Nasty Teacher concept. Differing from existing methods, we incorporate sparse outputs of adversarial examples with standard training data to strengthen the teacher's defense against student distillation. Our approach carefully reduces the relative entropy between the original and adversarially perturbed outputs, allowing the model to produce adversarial logits with minimal impact on overall performance. The source codes will be made publicly available soon.

We investigate personalizing the explanations that an Intelligent Tutoring System generates to justify the hints it provides to students to foster their learning. The personalization targets students with low levels of two traits, Need for Cognition and Conscientiousness, and aims to enhance these students' engagement with the explanations, based on prior findings that these students do not naturally engage with the explanations but they would benefit from them if they do. To evaluate the effectiveness of the personalization, we conducted a user study where we found that our proposed personalization significantly increases our target users' interaction with the hint explanations, their understanding of the hints and their learning. Hence, this work provides valuable insights into effectively personalizing AI-driven explanations for cognitively demanding tasks such as learning.

Often, a good explanation for a program's unexpected behavior is a bug in the programmer's code. But sometimes, an even better explanation is a bug in the programmer's mental model of the language they are using. Instead of merely debugging our current code ("giving the programmer a fish"), what if our tools could directly debug our mental models ("teaching the programmer to fish")? In this paper, we apply ideas from computational cognitive science to do exactly that. Given a perplexing program, we use program synthesis techniques to automatically infer potential misconceptions that might cause the user to be surprised by the program's behavior. By analyzing these misconceptions, we provide succinct, useful explanations of the program's behavior. Our methods can even be inverted to synthesize pedagogical example programs for diagnosing and correcting misconceptions in students.

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) asks an agent to follow a given language instruction to navigate through a real 3D environment. Despite significant advances, conventional VLN agents are trained typically under disturbance-free environments and may easily fail in real-world scenarios, since they are unaware of how to deal with various possible disturbances, such as sudden obstacles or human interruptions, which widely exist and may usually cause an unexpected route deviation. In this paper, we present a model-agnostic training paradigm, called Progressive Perturbation-aware Contrastive Learning (PROPER) to enhance the generalization ability of existing VLN agents, by requiring them to learn towards deviation-robust navigation. Specifically, a simple yet effective path perturbation scheme is introduced to implement the route deviation, with which the agent is required to still navigate successfully following the original instruction. Since directly enforcing the agent to learn perturbed trajectories may lead to inefficient training, a progressively perturbed trajectory augmentation strategy is designed, where the agent can self-adaptively learn to navigate under perturbation with the improvement of its navigation performance for each specific trajectory. For encouraging the agent to well capture the difference brought by perturbation, a perturbation-aware contrastive learning mechanism is further developed by contrasting perturbation-free trajectory encodings and perturbation-based counterparts. Extensive experiments on R2R show that PROPER can benefit multiple VLN baselines in perturbation-free scenarios. We further collect the perturbed path data to construct an introspection subset based on the R2R, called Path-Perturbed R2R (PP-R2R). The results on PP-R2R show unsatisfying robustness of popular VLN agents and the capability of PROPER in improving the navigation robustness.