State-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models are trained on massive training corpora, and report a superlative performance on evaluation datasets. This survey delves into an important attribute of these datasets: the dialect of a language. Motivated by the performance degradation of NLP models for dialectic datasets and its implications for the equity of language technologies, we survey past research in NLP for dialects in terms of datasets, and approaches. We describe a wide range of NLP tasks in terms of two categories: natural language understanding (NLU) (for tasks such as dialect classification, sentiment analysis, parsing, and NLU benchmarks) and natural language generation (NLG) (for summarisation, machine translation, and dialogue systems). The survey is also broad in its coverage of languages which include English, Arabic, German among others. We observe that past work in NLP concerning dialects goes deeper than mere dialect classification, and . This includes early approaches that used sentence transduction that lead to the recent approaches that integrate hypernetworks into LoRA. We expect that this survey will be useful to NLP researchers interested in building equitable language technologies by rethinking LLM benchmarks and model architectures.

In this paper, we introduce Concise Chain-of-Thought (CCoT) prompting. We compared standard CoT and CCoT prompts to see how conciseness impacts response length and correct-answer accuracy. We evaluated this using GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 with a multiple-choice question-and-answer (MCQA) benchmark. CCoT reduced average response length by 48.70% for both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 while having a negligible impact on problem-solving performance. However, on math problems, GPT-3.5 with CCoT incurs a performance penalty of 27.69%. Overall, CCoT leads to an average per-token cost reduction of 22.67%. These results have practical implications for AI systems engineers using LLMs to solve real-world problems with CoT prompt-engineering techniques. In addition, these results provide more general insight for AI researchers studying the emergent behavior of step-by-step reasoning in LLMs.

We study and quantify the problem of forgetting when fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a downstream task. We find that parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) strategies, such as Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA), still suffer from catastrophic forgetting. In particular, we identify a strong inverse linear relationship between the fine-tuning performance and the amount of forgetting when fine-tuning LLMs with LoRA. We further obtain precise scaling laws that show forgetting increases as a shifted power law in the number of parameters fine-tuned and the number of update steps. We also examine the impact of forgetting on knowledge, reasoning, and the safety guardrails trained into Llama 2 7B chat. Our study suggests that forgetting cannot be avoided through early stopping or by varying the number of parameters fine-tuned. We believe this opens up an important safety-critical direction for future research to evaluate and develop fine-tuning schemes which mitigate forgetting.

This paper introduces CADgpt, an innovative plugin integrating Natural Language Processing (NLP) with Rhino3D for enhancing 3D modelling in computer-aided design (CAD) environments. Leveraging OpenAI's GPT-4, CADgpt simplifies the CAD interface, enabling users, particularly beginners, to perform complex 3D modelling tasks through intuitive natural language commands. This approach significantly reduces the learning curve associated with traditional CAD software, fostering a more inclusive and engaging educational environment. The paper discusses CADgpt's technical architecture, including its integration within Rhino3D and the adaptation of GPT-4 capabilities for CAD tasks. It presents case studies demonstrating CADgpt's efficacy in various design scenarios, highlighting its potential to democratise design education by making sophisticated design tools accessible to a broader range of students. The discussion further explores CADgpt's implications for pedagogy and curriculum development, emphasising its role in enhancing creative exploration and conceptual thinking in design education. Keywords: Natural Language Processing, Computer-Aided Design, 3D Modelling, Design Automation, Design Education, Architectural Education

The recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the creation of many modular AI agents. These agents employ LLMs as zero-shot learners to perform sub-tasks in order to solve complex tasks set forth by human users. We propose an approach to enhance the robustness and performance of modular AI agents that utilize LLMs as zero-shot learners. Our iterative machine teaching method offers an efficient way to teach AI agents over time with limited human feedback, addressing the limit posed by the quality of zero-shot learning. We advocate leveraging the data traces from initial deployments and outputs or annotations from the zero-shot learners to train smaller and task-specific substitute models which can reduce both the monetary costs and environmental impact. Our machine teaching process avails human expertise to correct examples with a high likelihood of misannotations. Results on three tasks, common to conversational AI agents, show that close-to-oracle performance can be achieved with supervision on 20-70% of the dataset depending upon the complexity of the task and performance of zero-shot learners.

The ANA Avatar XPRIZE was a four-year competition to develop a robotic "avatar" system to allow a human operator to sense, communicate, and act in a remote environment as though physically present. The competition featured a unique requirement that judges would operate the avatars after less than one hour of training on the human-machine interfaces, and avatar systems were judged on both objective and subjective scoring metrics. This paper presents a unified summary and analysis of the competition from technical, judging, and organizational perspectives. We study the use of telerobotics technologies and innovations pursued by the competing teams in their avatar systems, and correlate the use of these technologies with judges' task performance and subjective survey ratings. It also summarizes perspectives from team leads, judges, and organizers about the competition's execution and impact to inform the future development of telerobotics and telepresence.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in various reasoning benchmarks with the emergence of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and its derivative methods, particularly in tasks involving multi-choice questions (MCQs). However, current works all process data uniformly without considering the problem-solving difficulty, which means an excessive focus on simple questions while insufficient to intricate ones. To address this challenge, we inspired by humans using heuristic strategies to categorize tasks and handle them individually, propose to apply the Divide and Conquer to LLMs reasoning. First, we divide questions into different subsets based on the statistical confidence score ($\mathcal{CS}$), then fix nearly resolved sets and conquer demanding nuanced process ones with elaborately designed methods, including Prior Knowledge based Reasoning (PKR) and Filter Choices based Reasoning (FCR), as well as their integration variants. Our experiments demonstrate that this proposed strategy significantly boosts the models' reasoning abilities across nine datasets involving arithmetic, commonsense, and logic tasks. For instance, compared to baseline, we make a striking improvement on low confidence subsets of 8.72\% for AQuA, 15.07\% for ARC Challenge and 7.71\% for RiddleSense. In addition, through extensive analysis on length of rationale and number of options, we verify that longer reasoning paths in PKR could prevent models from referring infer-harmful shortcuts, and also find that removing irrelevant choices in FCR would substantially avoid models' confusion. The code is at \url{https://github.com/AiMijie/Divide-and-Conquer}

We study computationally efficient methods for finding equilibria in n-player general-sum games, specifically ones that afford complex visuomotor skills. We show how existing methods would struggle in this setting, either computationally or in theory. We then introduce NeuPL-JPSRO, a neural population learning algorithm that benefits from transfer learning of skills and converges to a Coarse Correlated Equilibrium (CCE) of the game. We show empirical convergence in a suite of OpenSpiel games, validated rigorously by exact game solvers. We then deploy NeuPL-JPSRO to complex domains, where our approach enables adaptive coordination in a MuJoCo control domain and skill transfer in capture-the-flag. Our work shows that equilibrium convergent population learning can be implemented at scale and in generality, paving the way towards solving real-world games between heterogeneous players with mixed motives.

This paper aims to develop a semi-formal design space for Human-AI interactions, by building a set of interaction primitives which specify the communication between users and AI systems during their interaction. We show how these primitives can be combined into a set of interaction patterns which can provide an abstract specification for exchanging messages between humans and AI/ML models to carry out purposeful interactions. The motivation behind this is twofold: firstly, to provide a compact generalisation of existing practices, that highlights the similarities and differences between systems in terms of their interaction behaviours; and secondly, to support the creation of new systems, in particular by opening the space of possibilities for interactions with models. We present a short literature review on frameworks, guidelines and taxonomies related to the design and implementation of HAI interactions, including human-in-the-loop, explainable AI, as well as hybrid intelligence and collaborative learning approaches. From the literature review, we define a vocabulary for describing information exchanges in terms of providing and requesting particular model-specific data types. Based on this vocabulary, a message passing model for interactions between humans and models is presented, which we demonstrate can account for existing systems and approaches. Finally, we build this into design patterns as mid-level constructs that capture common interactional structures. We discuss how this approach can be used towards a design space for Human-AI interactions that creates new possibilities for designs as well as keeping track of implementation issues and concerns.

In a pre-post experiment (n = 41), we test the impact of an AI Coach's explanatory communications modeled after the instructions of human driving experts. Participants were divided into four (4) groups to assess two (2) dimensions of the AI coach's explanations: information type ('what' and 'why'-type explanations) and presentation modality (auditory and visual). We directly compare how AI Coaching sessions employing these techniques impact driving performance, cognitive load, confidence, expertise, and trust in an observation learning context. Through interviews, we delineate the learning process of our participants. Results show that an AI driving coach can be useful for teaching performance driving skills to novices. Comparing between groups, we find the type and modality of information influences performance outcomes. We attribute differences to how information directed attention, mitigated uncertainty, and influenced overload experienced by participants. These, in turn, affected how successfully participants were able to learn. Results suggest efficient, modality-appropriate explanations should be opted for when designing effective HMI communications that can instruct without overwhelming. Further, they support the need to align communications with human learning and cognitive processes. Results are synthesized into eight design implications for future autonomous vehicle HMI and AI coach design.