Education
Cross-lingual Lifelong Learning
M'hamdi, Meryem, Ren, Xiang, May, Jonathan
The longstanding goal of multi-lingual learning has been to develop a universal cross-lingual model that can withstand the changes in multilingual data distributions. There has been a large amount of work to adapt such multilingual models to unseen target languages. However, the majority of work in this direction focuses on the standard one-hop transfer learning pipeline from source to target languages, Figure 1: An overview of CCL: We use an example whereas in realistic scenarios, new languages of a non-stationary datastream moving from high to can be incorporated at any time in a sequential low resource languages. Each bold and dashed box manner. In this paper, we present a principled represents either a training or test data instance being Cross-lingual Continual Learning (CCL) evaluation fine-tuned or evaluated on, respectively. To support this paradigm, where we analyze different categories problem setup, we evaluate the cross-lingual capabilities of approaches used to continually adapt of continual approaches. Those capabilities include to emerging data from different languages. We knowledge preservation on old languages, accumulation provide insights into what makes multilingual to the current language, and generalization to sequential learning particularly challenging.
EvHandPose: Event-based 3D Hand Pose Estimation with Sparse Supervision
Jiang, Jianping, Li, Jiahe, Zhang, Baowen, Deng, Xiaoming, Shi, Boxin
Event camera shows great potential in 3D hand pose estimation, especially addressing the challenges of fast motion and high dynamic range in a low-power way. However, due to the asynchronous differential imaging mechanism, it is challenging to design event representation to encode hand motion information especially when the hands are not moving (causing motion ambiguity), and it is infeasible to fully annotate the temporally dense event stream. In this paper, we propose EvHandPose with novel hand flow representations in Event-to-Pose module for accurate hand pose estimation and alleviating the motion ambiguity issue. To solve the problem under sparse annotation, we design contrast maximization and hand-edge constraints in Pose-to-IWE (Image with Warped Events) module and formulate EvHandPose in a weakly-supervision framework. We further build EvRealHands, the first large-scale real-world event-based hand pose dataset on several challenging scenes to bridge the real-synthetic domain gap. Experiments on EvRealHands demonstrate that EvHandPose outperforms previous event-based methods under all evaluation scenes, achieves accurate and stable hand pose estimation with high temporal resolution in fast motion and strong light scenes compared with RGB-based methods, generalizes well to outdoor scenes and another type of event camera, and shows the potential for the hand gesture recognition task.
Cumulative Regret Analysis of the Piyavskii--Shubert Algorithm and Its Variants for Global Optimization
We study the problem of global optimization, where we analyze the performance of the Piyavskii-Shubert algorithm and its variants. For any given time duration T, instead of the extensively studied simple regret (which is the difference of the losses between the best estimate up to T and the global minimum), we study the cumulative regret up to time T. For L-Lipschitz continuous functions, we show that the cumulative regret is O(L log T). For H-Lipschitz smooth functions, we show that the cumulative regret is O(H). We analytically extend our results for functions with Holder continuous derivatives, which cover both the Lipschitz continuous and the Lipschitz smooth functions, individually. We further show that a simpler variant of the Piyavskii-Shubert algorithm performs just as well as the traditional variants for the Lipschitz continuous or the Lipschitz smooth functions. We further extend our results to broader classes of functions, and show that, our algorithm efficiently determines its queries; and achieves nearly minimax optimal (up to log factors) cumulative regret, for general convex or even concave regularity conditions on the extrema of the objective (which encompasses many preceding regularities). We consider further extensions by investigating the performance of the Piyavskii-Shubert variants in the scenarios with unknown regularity, noisy evaluation and multivariate domain. In many applications such as hyper-parameter tuning for learning algorithms and complex system design, the goal is to optimize an unknown function with as few evaluations as possible and use that optimal point in the design [1], [2].
Adapting Large Language Models for Education: Foundational Capabilities, Potentials, and Challenges
Li, Qingyao, Fu, Lingyue, Zhang, Weiming, Chen, Xianyu, Yu, Jingwei, Xia, Wei, Zhang, Weinan, Tang, Ruiming, Yu, Yong
Online education platforms, leveraging the internet to distribute education resources, seek to provide convenient education but often fall short in real-time communication with students. They often struggle to offer personalized education resources due to the challenge of addressing the diverse obstacles students encounter throughout their learning journey. Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, offers the possibility for resolving this issue by comprehending individual requests. Although LLMs have been successful in various fields, creating an LLM-based education system is still challenging for the wide range of educational skills required. This paper reviews the recently emerged LLM researches related to educational capabilities, including mathematics, writing, programming, reasoning, and knowledge-based question answering, with the aim to explore their potential in constructing the next-generation intelligent education system. Based on the current development status, we further outline two approaches for an LLM-based education system: a unified approach and a mixture-of-expert (MoE) approach. Finally, we explore the challenges and future directions, providing new research opportunities and perspectives on adapting LLMs for education.
Disentangled Continual Learning: Separating Memory Edits from Model Updates
Dziadzio, Sebastian, Yıldız, Çağatay, van de Ven, Gido M., Trzciński, Tomasz, Tuytelaars, Tinne, Bethge, Matthias
To mitigate this is hindered by catastrophic forgetting, the tendency issue, continual learning methods employ strategies such as of neural networks to overwrite existing knowledge when (i) regularization, which aims to preserve existing knowledge learning a new task. Existing continual learning methods by limiting the plasticity of selected network weights alleviate this problem through regularisation, parameter [15, 17, 26, 36], (ii) parameter isolation or dynamic architectures, isolation, or rehearsal, and are typically evaluated on benchmarks which effectively solve each task with a dedicated consisting of a handful of tasks. We propose a novel model [6, 33], or (iii) replay, which augments the training conceptual approach to continual classification that aims data with stored samples from past tasks [4, 12, 30, 32]. to disentangle class-specific information that needs to be Most continual learning methods are evaluated on image memorised from the class-agnostic knowledge that encapsulates classification benchmarks in which a discriminative model generalization. We store the former in a buffer that is transferred across tasks that typically involve disjoint sets can be easily pruned or updated when new categories arrive, of classes. We argue that this purely discriminative learning while the latter is represented with a neural network that framework is not conducive to positive forward or backward generalizes across tasks. We show that the class-agnostic transfer. Supervised classification networks tend to preserve network does not suffer from catastrophic forgetting and by only the features that are relevant for predicting the output leveraging it to perform classification, we improve accuracy labels in the training data [11, 35].
FairCompass: Operationalising Fairness in Machine Learning
Liu, Jessica, Chen, Huaming, Shen, Jun, Choo, Kim-Kwang Raymond
As artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly becomes an integral part of our societal and individual activities, there is a growing imperative to develop responsible AI solutions. Despite a diverse assortment of machine learning fairness solutions is proposed in the literature, there is reportedly a lack of practical implementation of these tools in real-world applications. Industry experts have participated in thorough discussions on the challenges associated with operationalising fairness in the development of machine learning-empowered solutions, in which a shift toward human-centred approaches is promptly advocated to mitigate the limitations of existing techniques. In this work, we propose a human-in-the-loop approach for fairness auditing, presenting a mixed visual analytical system (hereafter referred to as 'FairCompass'), which integrates both subgroup discovery technique and the decision tree-based schema for end users. Moreover, we innovatively integrate an Exploration, Guidance and Informed Analysis loop, to facilitate the use of the Knowledge Generation Model for Visual Analytics in FairCompass. We evaluate the effectiveness of FairCompass for fairness auditing in a real-world scenario, and the findings demonstrate the system's potential for real-world deployability. We anticipate this work will address the current gaps in research for fairness and facilitate the operationalisation of fairness in machine learning systems.
Federated Continual Learning via Knowledge Fusion: A Survey
Yang, Xin, Yu, Hao, Gao, Xin, Wang, Hao, Zhang, Junbo, Li, Tianrui
Data privacy and silos are nontrivial and greatly challenging in many real-world applications. Federated learning is a decentralized approach to training models across multiple local clients without the exchange of raw data from client devices to global servers. However, existing works focus on a static data environment and ignore continual learning from streaming data with incremental tasks. Federated Continual Learning (FCL) is an emerging paradigm to address model learning in both federated and continual learning environments. The key objective of FCL is to fuse heterogeneous knowledge from different clients and retain knowledge of previous tasks while learning on new ones. In this work, we delineate federated learning and continual learning first and then discuss their integration, i.e., FCL, and particular FCL via knowledge fusion. In summary, our motivations are four-fold: we (1) raise a fundamental problem called ''spatial-temporal catastrophic forgetting'' and evaluate its impact on the performance using a well-known method called federated averaging (FedAvg), (2) integrate most of the existing FCL methods into two generic frameworks, namely synchronous FCL and asynchronous FCL, (3) categorize a large number of methods according to the mechanism involved in knowledge fusion, and finally (4) showcase an outlook on the future work of FCL.
Visual Spatial Attention and Proprioceptive Data-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Robust Peg-in-Hole Task Under Variable Conditions
Yasutomi, André Yuji, Ichiwara, Hideyuki, Ito, Hiroshi, Mori, Hiroki, Ogata, Tetsuya
Anchor-bolt insertion is a peg-in-hole task performed in the construction field for holes in concrete. Efforts have been made to automate this task, but the variable lighting and hole surface conditions, as well as the requirements for short setup and task execution time make the automation challenging. In this study, we introduce a vision and proprioceptive data-driven robot control model for this task that is robust to challenging lighting and hole surface conditions. This model consists of a spatial attention point network (SAP) and a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policy that are trained jointly end-to-end to control the robot. The model is trained in an offline manner, with a sample-efficient framework designed to reduce training time and minimize the reality gap when transferring the model to the physical world. Through evaluations with an industrial robot performing the task in 12 unknown holes, starting from 16 different initial positions, and under three different lighting conditions (two with misleading shadows), we demonstrate that SAP can generate relevant attention points of the image even in challenging lighting conditions. We also show that the proposed model enables task execution with higher success rate and shorter task completion time than various baselines. Due to the proposed model's high effectiveness even in severe lighting, initial positions, and hole conditions, and the offline training framework's high sample-efficiency and short training time, this approach can be easily applied to construction.
Exploiting the capacity of deep networks only at training stage for nonlinear black-box system identification
Eivaghi, Vahid MohammadZadeh, Shooredeli, Mahdi Aliyari
To benefit from the modeling capacity of deep models in system identification, without worrying about inference time, this study presents a novel training strategy that uses deep models only at the training stage. For this purpose two separate models with different structures and goals are employed. The first one is a deep generative model aiming at modeling the distribution of system output(s), called the teacher model, and the second one is a shallow basis function model, named the student model, fed by system input(s) to predict the system output(s). That means these isolated paths must reach the same ultimate target. As deep models show a great performance in modeling of highly nonlinear systems, aligning the representation space learned by these two models make the student model to inherit the approximation power of the teacher model. The proposed objective function consists of the objective of each student and teacher model adding up with a distance penalty between the learned latent representations. The simulation results on three nonlinear benchmarks show a comparative performance with examined deep architectures applied on the same benchmarks. Algorithmic transparency and structure efficiency are also achieved as byproducts.
A graph-based multimodal framework to predict gentrification
Eshtiyagh, Javad, Zhang, Baotong, Sun, Yujing, Wu, Linhui, Wang, Zhao
Gentrification--the transformation of a low-income urban area caused by the influx of affluent residents--has many revitalizing benefits. However, it also poses extremely concerning challenges to low-income residents. To help policymakers take targeted and early action in protecting low-income residents, researchers have recently proposed several machine learning models to predict gentrification using socioeconomic and image features. Building upon previous studies, we propose a novel graph-based multimodal deep learning framework to predict gentrification based on urban networks of tracts and essential facilities (e.g., schools, hospitals, and subway stations). We train and test the proposed framework using data from Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles. The model successfully predicts census-tract level gentrification with 0.9 precision on average. Moreover, the framework discovers a previously unexamined strong relationship between schools and gentrification, which provides a basis for further exploration of social factors affecting gentrification.