College students with ADHD respond positively to simple socially assistive robots (SARs) that monitor attention and provide nonverbal feedback, but studies have been done only in brief in-lab sessions. We present an initial design and evaluation of an in-dorm SAR study companion for college students with ADHD. This work represents the introductory stages of an ongoing user-centered, participatory design process. In a three-week within-subjects user study, university students (N=11) with self-reported symptoms of adult ADHD had a SAR study companion in their dorm room for two weeks and a computer-based system for one week. Toward Figure 1: Blossom and the study system, including the tripodmounted developing SARs for long-term, in-dorm use, we focus on 1) evaluating webcam and touch screen interface the usability and desire for SAR study companions by college students with ADHD, and 2) collecting participant feedback about the SAR design and functionality. Participants responded positively to the robot; after one week of regular use, 91% (10 of 11) chose to continue using the robot voluntarily in the second week.

In machine learning (ML), a widespread adage is that the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) is a superior metric for model comparison to the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) for binary classification tasks with class imbalance. This paper challenges this notion through novel mathematical analysis, illustrating that AUROC and AUPRC can be concisely related in probabilistic terms. We demonstrate that AUPRC, contrary to popular belief, is not superior in cases of class imbalance and might even be a harmful metric, given its inclination to unduly favor model improvements in subpopulations with more frequent positive labels. This bias can inadvertently heighten algorithmic disparities. Prompted by these insights, a thorough review of existing ML literature was conducted, utilizing large language models to analyze over 1.5 million papers from arXiv. Our investigation focused on the prevalence and substantiation of the purported AUPRC superiority. The results expose a significant deficit in empirical backing and a trend of misattributions that have fuelled the widespread acceptance of AUPRC's supposed advantages. Our findings represent a dual contribution: a significant technical advancement in understanding metric behaviors and a stark warning about unchecked assumptions in the ML community. All experiments are accessible at https://github.com/mmcdermott/AUC_is_all_you_need.

This paper focuses on the construction of non-intrusive Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) Reduced-Order Models (ROMs) for nonlinear, chaotic plasma turbulence simulations. In particular, we propose using Operator Inference (OpInf) to build low-cost physics-based ROMs from data for such simulations. As a representative example, we focus on the Hasegawa-Wakatani (HW) equations used for modeling two-dimensional electrostatic drift-wave plasma turbulence. For a comprehensive perspective of the potential of OpInf to construct accurate ROMs for this model, we consider a setup for the HW equations that leads to the formation of complex, nonlinear, and self-driven dynamics, and perform two sets of experiments. We first use the data obtained via a direct numerical simulation of the HW equations starting from a specific initial condition and train OpInf ROMs for predictions beyond the training time horizon. In the second, more challenging set of experiments, we train ROMs using the same dataset as before but this time perform predictions for six other initial conditions. Our results show that the OpInf ROMs capture the important features of the turbulent dynamics and generalize to new and unseen initial conditions while reducing the evaluation time of the high-fidelity model by up to five orders of magnitude in single-core performance. In the broader context of fusion research, this shows that non-intrusive SciML ROMs have the potential to drastically accelerate numerical studies, which can ultimately enable tasks such as the design and real-time control of optimized fusion devices.

With the remarkable development and widespread applications of large language models (LLMs), the use of machine-generated text (MGT) is becoming increasingly common. This trend brings potential risks, particularly to the quality and completeness of information in fields such as news and education. Current research predominantly addresses the detection of pure MGT without adequately addressing mixed scenarios including AI-revised Human-Written Text (HWT) or human-revised MGT. To confront this challenge, we introduce mixcase, a novel concept representing a hybrid text form involving both machine-generated and human-generated content. We collected mixcase instances generated from multiple daily text-editing scenarios and composed MixSet, the first dataset dedicated to studying these mixed modification scenarios. We conduct experiments to evaluate the efficacy of popular MGT detectors, assessing their effectiveness, robustness, and generalization performance. Our findings reveal that existing detectors struggle to identify mixcase as a separate class or MGT, particularly in dealing with subtle modifications and style adaptability. This research underscores the urgent need for more fine-grain detectors tailored for mixcase, offering valuable insights for future research. Code and Models are available at https://github.com/Dongping-Chen/MixSet.

When deploying machine learning algorithms in the real world, guaranteeing safety is an essential asset. Existing safe learning approaches typically consider continuous variables, i.e., regression tasks. However, in practice, robotic systems are also subject to discrete, external environmental changes, e.g., having to carry objects of certain weights or operating on frozen, wet, or dry surfaces. Such influences can be modeled as discrete context variables. In the existing literature, such contexts are, if considered, mostly assumed to be known. In this work, we drop this assumption and show how we can perform safe learning when we cannot directly measure the context variables. To achieve this, we derive frequentist guarantees for multi-class classification, allowing us to estimate the current context from measurements. Further, we propose an approach for identifying contexts through experiments. We discuss under which conditions we can retain theoretical guarantees and demonstrate the applicability of our algorithm on a Furuta pendulum with camera measurements of different weights that serve as contexts.

With advancement of robotics and artificial intelligence, applications for robotics are flourishing. Human-robot interaction (HRI) is an important area of robotics as it allows robots to work closer to humans (with them or for them). One crucial factor for the success of HRI research is transferability, which refers to the ability of research outputs to be adopted by industry and provide benefits to society. In this paper, we explore the potentials and challenges of transferability in HRI research. Firstly, we examine the current state of HRI research and identify various types of contributions that could lead to successful outcomes. Secondly, we discuss the potential benefits for each type of contribution and identify factors that could facilitate industry adoption of HRI research. However, we also recognize that there are several challenges associated with transferability, such as the diversity of well-defined job/skill-sets required from HRI practitioners, the lack of industry-led research, and the lack of standardization in HRI research methods. We discuss these challenges and propose potential solutions to bridge the gap between industry expectations and academic research in HRI.

Large language models (LLMs) have strong capabilities in solving diverse natural language processing tasks. However, the safety and security issues of LLM systems have become the major obstacle to their widespread application. Many studies have extensively investigated risks in LLM systems and developed the corresponding mitigation strategies. Leading-edge enterprises such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic have also made lots of efforts on responsible LLMs. Therefore, there is a growing need to organize the existing studies and establish comprehensive taxonomies for the community. In this paper, we delve into four essential modules of an LLM system, including an input module for receiving prompts, a language model trained on extensive corpora, a toolchain module for development and deployment, and an output module for exporting LLM-generated content. Based on this, we propose a comprehensive taxonomy, which systematically analyzes potential risks associated with each module of an LLM system and discusses the corresponding mitigation strategies. Furthermore, we review prevalent benchmarks, aiming to facilitate the risk assessment of LLM systems. We hope that this paper can help LLM participants embrace a systematic perspective to build their responsible LLM systems.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been prevailing in state-of-the-art methods for natural language processing, and knowledge-enhanced PLMs are further proposed to promote model performance in knowledge-intensive tasks. However, conceptual knowledge, one essential kind of knowledge for human cognition, still remains understudied in this line of research. This limits PLMs' performance in scenarios requiring human-like cognition, such as understanding long-tail entities with concepts. In this paper, we propose ConcEPT, which stands for Concept-Enhanced Pre-Training for language models, to infuse conceptual knowledge into PLMs. ConcEPT exploits external taxonomies with entity concept prediction, a novel pre-training objective to predict the concepts of entities mentioned in the pre-training contexts. Unlike previous concept-enhanced methods, ConcEPT can be readily adapted to various downstream applications without entity linking or concept mapping. Results of extensive experiments show the effectiveness of ConcEPT in four tasks such as entity typing, which validates that our model gains improved conceptual knowledge with concept-enhanced pre-training.

This paper presents three open-source reinforcement learning environments developed on the MuJoCo physics engine with the Franka Emika Panda arm in MuJoCo Menagerie. Three representative tasks, push, slide, and pick-and-place, are implemented through the Gymnasium Robotics API, which inherits from the core of Gymnasium. Both the sparse binary and dense rewards are supported, and the observation space contains the keys of desired and achieved goals to follow the Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning framework. Three different off-policy algorithms are used to validate the simulation attributes to ensure the fidelity of all tasks, and benchmark results are also given. Each environment and task are defined in a clean way, and the main parameters for modifying the environment are preserved to reflect the main difference. The repository, including all environments, is available at https://github.com/zichunxx/panda_mujoco_gym.

Hyperparameter optimization (HPO) is important to leverage the full potential of machine learning (ML). In practice, users are often interested in multi-objective (MO) problems, i.e., optimizing potentially conflicting objectives, like accuracy and energy consumption. To tackle this, the vast majority of MO-ML algorithms return a Pareto front of non-dominated machine learning models to the user. Optimizing the hyperparameters of such algorithms is non-trivial as evaluating a hyperparameter configuration entails evaluating the quality of the resulting Pareto front. In literature, there are known indicators that assess the quality of a Pareto front (e.g., hypervolume, R2) by quantifying different properties (e.g., volume, proximity to a reference point). However, choosing the indicator that leads to the desired Pareto front might be a hard task for a user. In this paper, we propose a human-centered interactive HPO approach tailored towards multi-objective ML leveraging preference learning to extract desiderata from users that guide the optimization. Instead of relying on the user guessing the most suitable indicator for their needs, our approach automatically learns an appropriate indicator. Concretely, we leverage pairwise comparisons of distinct Pareto fronts to learn such an appropriate quality indicator. Then, we optimize the hyperparameters of the underlying MO-ML algorithm towards this learned indicator using a state-of-the-art HPO approach. In an experimental study targeting the environmental impact of ML, we demonstrate that our approach leads to substantially better Pareto fronts compared to optimizing based on a wrong indicator pre-selected by the user, and performs comparable in the case of an advanced user knowing which indicator to pick.