This research paper presents an analysis of how well three artificial intelligence chatbots, Bing, ChatGPT, and GPT-4, perform when answering questions from standardized tests. The Graduate Record Examination (GRE) is used in this paper as a case study. A total of 137 questions with different forms of quantitative reasoning and 157 questions with verbal categories were used to assess their capabilities. This paper presents the performance of each chatbot across various skills and styles tested in the exam. This paper also explores the proficiency of these chatbots in addressing image-based questions and illustrates the uncertainty level of each chatbot. The results show varying degrees of success across the chatbots, where GPT-4 served as the most proficient, especially in complex language understanding tasks and image-based questions. Results highlight the ability of these chatbots to pass the GRE with a high score, which encourages the use of these chatbots in test preparation. The results also show how important it is to ensure that, if the test is administered online, as it was during COVID, the test taker is segregated from these resources for a fair competition on higher education opportunities.

Large-scale self-supervised pre-trained speech encoders outperform conventional approaches in speech recognition and translation tasks. Due to the high cost of developing these large models, building new encoders for new tasks and deploying them to on-device applications are infeasible. Prior studies propose model compression methods to address this issue, but those works focus on smaller models and less realistic tasks. Thus, we propose Contrastive Layer-to-layer Distillation (CoLLD), a novel knowledge distillation method to compress pre-trained speech encoders by leveraging masked prediction and contrastive learning to train student models to copy the behavior of a large teacher model. CoLLD outperforms prior methods and closes the gap between small and large models on multilingual speech-to-text translation and recognition benchmarks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing tasks and beyond. This success of LLMs has led to a large influx of research contributions in this direction. These works encompass diverse topics such as architectural innovations, better training strategies, context length improvements, fine-tuning, multi-modal LLMs, robotics, datasets, benchmarking, efficiency, and more. With the rapid development of techniques and regular breakthroughs in LLM research, it has become considerably challenging to perceive the bigger picture of the advances in this direction. Considering the rapidly emerging plethora of literature on LLMs, it is imperative that the research community is able to benefit from a concise yet comprehensive overview of the recent developments in this field. This article provides an overview of the existing literature on a broad range of LLM-related concepts. Our self-contained comprehensive overview of LLMs discusses relevant background concepts along with covering the advanced topics at the frontier of research in LLMs. This review article is intended to not only provide a systematic survey but also a quick comprehensive reference for the researchers and practitioners to draw insights from extensive informative summaries of the existing works to advance the LLM research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong abilities in natural language processing tasks have emerged and have been applied in various kinds of areas such as science, finance and software engineering. However, the capability of LLMs to advance the field of chemistry remains unclear. In this paper, rather than pursuing state-of-the-art performance, we aim to evaluate capabilities of LLMs in a wide range of tasks across the chemistry domain. We identify three key chemistry-related capabilities including understanding, reasoning and explaining to explore in LLMs and establish a benchmark containing eight chemistry tasks. Our analysis draws on widely recognized datasets facilitating a broad exploration of the capacities of LLMs within the context of practical chemistry. Five LLMs (GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Davinci-003, Llama and Galactica) are evaluated for each chemistry task in zero-shot and few-shot in-context learning settings with carefully selected demonstration examples and specially crafted prompts. Our investigation found that GPT-4 outperformed other models and LLMs exhibit different competitive levels in eight chemistry tasks. In addition to the key findings from the comprehensive benchmark analysis, our work provides insights into the limitation of current LLMs and the impact of in-context learning settings on LLMs' performance across various chemistry tasks. The code and datasets used in this study are available at https://github.com/ChemFoundationModels/ChemLLMBench.

Discontinuities can be fairly arbitrary but also cause a significant impact on outcomes in larger systems. Indeed, their arbitrariness is why they have been used to infer causal relationships among variables in numerous settings. Regression discontinuity from econometrics assumes the existence of a discontinuous variable that splits the population into distinct partitions to estimate the causal effects of a given phenomenon. Here we consider the design of partitions for a given discontinuous variable to optimize a certain effect previously studied using regression discontinuity. To do so, we propose a quantization-theoretic approach to optimize the effect of interest, first learning the causal effect size of a given discontinuous variable and then applying dynamic programming for optimal quantization design of discontinuities to balance the gain and loss in that effect size. We also develop a computationally-efficient reinforcement learning algorithm for the dynamic programming formulation of optimal quantization. We demonstrate our approach by designing optimal time zone borders for counterfactuals of social capital, social mobility, and health. This is based on regression discontinuity analyses we perform on novel data, which may be of independent empirical interest.

Recent research has revealed that natural language processing (NLP) models are vulnerable to adversarial examples. However, the current techniques for generating such examples rely on deterministic heuristic rules, which fail to produce optimal adversarial examples. In response, this study proposes a new method called the Fraud's Bargain Attack (FBA), which uses a randomization mechanism to expand the search space and produce high-quality adversarial examples with a higher probability of success. FBA uses the Metropolis-Hasting sampler, a type of Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler, to improve the selection of adversarial examples from all candidates generated by a customized stochastic process called the Word Manipulation Process (WMP). The WMP method modifies individual words in a contextually-aware manner through insertion, removal, or substitution. Through extensive experiments, this study demonstrates that FBA outperforms other methods in terms of attack success rate, imperceptibility and sentence quality.

We consider the problem of third-person imitation learning with the additional challenge that the learner must select the perspective from which they observe the expert. In our setting, each perspective provides only limited information about the expert's behavior, and the learning agent must carefully select and combine information from different perspectives to achieve competitive performance. This setting is inspired by real-world imitation learning applications, e.g., in robotics, a robot might observe a human demonstrator via camera and receive information from different perspectives depending on the camera's position. We formalize the aforementioned active third-person imitation learning problem, theoretically analyze its characteristics, and propose a generative adversarial network-based active learning approach. Empirically, we demstrate that our proposed approach can effectively learn from expert demonstrations and explore the importance of different architectural choices for the learner's performance.

Federated learning (FL) has demonstrated great potential in revolutionizing distributed machine learning, and tremendous efforts have been made to extend it beyond the original focus on supervised learning. Among many directions, federated contextual bandits (FCB), a pivotal integration of FL and sequential decision-making, has garnered significant attention in recent years. Despite substantial progress, existing FCB approaches have largely employed their tailored FL components, often deviating from the canonical FL framework. Consequently, even renowned algorithms like FedAvg remain under-utilized in FCB, let alone other FL advancements. Motivated by this disconnection, this work takes one step towards building a tighter relationship between the canonical FL study and the investigations on FCB. In particular, a novel FCB design, termed FedIGW, is proposed to leverage a regression-based CB algorithm, i.e., inverse gap weighting. Compared with existing FCB approaches, the proposed FedIGW design can better harness the entire spectrum of FL innovations, which is concretely reflected as (1) flexible incorporation of (both existing and forthcoming) FL protocols; (2) modularized plug-in of FL analyses in performance guarantees; (3) seamless integration of FL appendages (such as personalization, robustness, and privacy). We substantiate these claims through rigorous theoretical analyses and empirical evaluations.

This study compared the classification performance of Gemini Pro and GPT-4V in educational settings. Employing visual question answering (VQA) techniques, the study examined both models' abilities to read text-based rubrics and then automatically score student-drawn models in science education. We employed both quantitative and qualitative analyses using a dataset derived from student-drawn scientific models and employing NERIF (Notation-Enhanced Rubrics for Image Feedback) prompting methods. The findings reveal that GPT-4V significantly outperforms Gemini Pro in terms of scoring accuracy and Quadratic Weighted Kappa. The qualitative analysis reveals that the differences may be due to the models' ability to process fine-grained texts in images and overall image classification performance. Even adapting the NERIF approach by further de-sizing the input images, Gemini Pro seems not able to perform as well as GPT-4V. The findings suggest GPT-4V's superior capability in handling complex multimodal educational tasks. The study concludes that while both models represent advancements in AI, GPT-4V's higher performance makes it a more suitable tool for educational applications involving multimodal data interpretation.

Online learning and MOOCs have become increasingly popular in recent years, and the trend will continue, given the technology boom. There is a dire need to observe learners' behavior in these online courses, similar to what instructors do in a face-to-face classroom. Learners' strategies and activities become crucial to understanding their behavior. One major challenge in online courses is predicting and preventing dropout behavior. While several studies have tried to perform such analysis, there is still a shortage of studies that employ different data streams to understand and predict the drop rates. Moreover, studies rarely use a fully online team-based collaborative environment as their context. Thus, the current study employs an online longitudinal problem-based learning (PBL) collaborative robotics competition as the testbed. Through methodological triangulation, the study aims to predict dropout behavior via the contributions of Discourse discussion forum 'activities' of participating teams, along with a self-reported Online Learning Strategies Questionnaire (OSLQ). The study also uses Qualitative interviews to enhance the ground truth and results. The OSLQ data is collected from more than 4000 participants. Furthermore, the study seeks to establish the reliability of OSLQ to advance research within online environments. Various Machine Learning algorithms are applied to analyze the data. The findings demonstrate the reliability of OSLQ with our substantial sample size and reveal promising results for predicting the dropout rate in online competition.