The advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as ChatGPT have gained popularity in recent days. The integration of ChatGPT in educational contexts has already created attractions due to a wide range of applications. However, the automatic generation of human-like texts also poses potential risks to academic integrity, especially when faced with writing-intensive language courses. Considering the ongoing debates, this study aims to investigate the academic policies and guidelines established by US universities regarding the use of ChatGPT in teaching and learning. The data sources include academic policies, statements, guidelines as well as relevant resources that were provided by the top 50 universities in the United States, according to U.S. News. Thematic analysis and qualitative analysis were employed in the analysis and showed that most top 50 universities were open but cautious towards the integration of generative AI in teaching and learning and also expressed their concerns on ethical usage, accuracy, and data privacy. Most universities also provided a variety of resources and guidelines, including syllabus templates/samples, workshops and discussions, shared articles, and one-on-one consultations, with focuses on general technical introduction, ethical concerns, pedagogical applications, preventive strategies, data privacy, limitations, and detective tools. The findings will inform future policy-making regarding the integration of ChatGPT in college-level education and influence the provision of supportive resources by universities for the appropriate application of ChatGPT in education.

Despite their tremendous success in many applications, large language models often fall short of consistent reasoning and planning in various (language, embodied, and social) scenarios, due to inherent limitations in their inference, learning, and modeling capabilities. In this position paper, we present a new perspective of machine reasoning, LAW, that connects the concepts of Language models, Agent models, and World models, for more robust and versatile reasoning capabilities. In particular, we propose that world and agent models are a better abstraction of reasoning, that introduces the crucial elements of deliberate human-like reasoning, including beliefs about the world and other agents, anticipation of consequences, goals/rewards, and strategic planning. Crucially, language models in LAW serve as a backend to implement the system or its elements and hence provide the computational power and adaptability. We review the recent studies that have made relevant progress and discuss future research directions towards operationalizing the LAW framework.

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks can greatly improve model quality, however serving many different fine-tuned LLMs concurrently for users in multi-tenant environments is challenging. Dedicating GPU memory for each model is prohibitively expensive and naively swapping large model weights in and out of GPU memory is slow. Our key insight is that fine-tuned models can be quickly swapped in and out of GPU memory by extracting and compressing the delta between each model and its pre-trained base model. We propose DeltaZip, an LLM serving system that efficiently serves multiple full-parameter fine-tuned models concurrently by aggressively compressing model deltas by a factor of $6\times$ to $8\times$ while maintaining high model quality. DeltaZip increases serving throughput by $1.5\times$ to $3\times$ and improves SLO attainment compared to a vanilla HuggingFace serving system.

The ecosystem of artificial intelligence competitions is a diverse and multifaceted landscape, encompassing a variety of platforms that each host numerous competitions annually, alongside a plethora of specialized websites dedicated to singular contests. These platforms adeptly manage the overarching administrative responsibilities inherent in orchestrating competitions, thus affording organizers the liberty to allocate greater attention to other facets of their contests. Notably, these platforms exhibit considerable diversity in their operational functionalities, economic models, and community dynamics. This chapter conducts an extensive review of the foremost services in this realm and elucidates several alternative methodologies that facilitate the independent hosting of such challenges. Keywords: competition platform, challenge hosting services, comparison.

Communication networks able to withstand hostile environments are critically important for disaster relief operations. In this paper, we consider a challenging scenario where drones have been compromised in the supply chain, during their manufacture, and harbour malicious software capable of wide-ranging and infectious disruption. We investigate multi-agent deep reinforcement learning as a tool for learning defensive strategies that maximise communications bandwidth despite continual adversarial interference. Using a public challenge for learning network resilience strategies, we propose a state-of-the-art expert technique and study its superiority over deep reinforcement learning agents. Correspondingly, we identify three specific methods for improving the performance of our learning-based agents: (1) ensuring each observation contains the necessary information, (2) using expert agents to provide a curriculum for learning, and (3) paying close attention to reward. We apply our methods and present a new mixed strategy enabling expert and learning-based agents to work together and improve on all prior results.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its associated applications are ubiquitous in today's world, making it imperative that students and their teachers understand how it works and the ramifications arising from its usage. In this study, we investigate the experiences of seven teachers following their implementation of modules from the MIT RAICA (Responsible AI for Computational Action) curriculum. Through semi-structured interviews, we investigated their instructional strategies as they engaged with the AI curriculum in their classroom, how their teaching and learning beliefs about AI evolved with the curriculum as well as how those beliefs impacted their implementation of the curriculum. Our analysis suggests that the AI modules not only expanded our teachers' knowledge in the field, but also prompted them to recognize its daily applications and their ethical and societal implications, so that they could better engage with the content they deliver to students. Teachers were able to leverage their own interdisciplinary backgrounds to creatively introduce foundational AI topics to students to maximize engagement and playful learning. Our teachers advocated their need for better external support when navigating technological resources, additional time for preparation given the novelty of the curriculum, more flexibility within curriculum timelines, and additional accommodations for students of determination. Our findings provide valuable insights for enhancing future iterations of AI literacy curricula and teacher professional development (PD) resources.

The pre-trained language models are continually fine-tuned to better support downstream applications. However, this operation may result in significant performance degeneration on general tasks beyond the targeted domain. To overcome this problem, we propose LM-Cocktail which enables the fine-tuned model to stay resilient in general perspectives. Our method is conducted in the form of model merging, where the fine-tuned language model is merged with the pre-trained base model or the peer models from other domains through weighted average. Despite simplicity, LM-Cocktail is surprisingly effective: the resulted model is able to achieve a strong empirical performance in the whole scope of general tasks while preserving a superior capacity in its targeted domain. We conduct comprehensive experiments with LLama and BGE model on popular benchmarks, including FLAN, MMLU, MTEB, whose results validate the efficacy of our proposed method. The code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding/tree/master/LM_Cocktail.

Knowledge tracing (KT) aims to monitor students' evolving knowledge states through their learning interactions with concept-related questions, and can be indirectly evaluated by predicting how students will perform on future questions. In this paper, we observe that there is a common phenomenon of answer bias, i.e., a highly unbalanced distribution of correct and incorrect answers for each question. Existing models tend to memorize the answer bias as a shortcut for achieving high prediction performance in KT, thereby failing to fully understand students' knowledge states. To address this issue, we approach the KT task from a causality perspective. A causal graph of KT is first established, from which we identify that the impact of answer bias lies in the direct causal effect of questions on students' responses. A novel COunterfactual REasoning (CORE) framework for KT is further proposed, which separately captures the total causal effect and direct causal effect during training, and mitigates answer bias by subtracting the latter from the former in testing. The CORE framework is applicable to various existing KT models, and we implement it based on the prevailing DKT, DKVMN, and AKT models, respectively. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CORE in making the debiased inference for KT. We have released our code at https://github.com/lucky7-code/CORE.

Knowledge Distillation (KD) [13, 3] is a standard tool for transferring information between a machine learning model of lower representational capacity-usually called the student-and a more accurate and powerful teacher model. In the context of classification using neural networks, it is common to consider the student to be a smaller network [2], whereas the teacher is a network that is larger and more computationally-heavy, but also more accurate. Assuming a supervised classification task, distillation consists in training the student to minimize the cross-entropy with respect to the teacher's logits on every given sample, in addition to minimizing the standard cross-entropy loss with respect to the ground truth labels. Since its introduction [3], distillation has been developed and applied in a wide variety of settings, from obtaining compact high-accuracy encodings of model ensembles [13], to boosting the accuracy of compressed models [49, 38, 31], to reinforcement learning [50, 42, 35, 5, 7, 45] and learning with privileged information [51]. Given its apparent simplicity, there has been significant interest in finding explanations for the effectiveness of distillation [2, 13, 37]. For instance, one hypothesis [2, 13] is that the smoothed labels resulting from distillation present the student with a decision surface that is easier to learn than the one presented by the categorical (one-hot) outputs. Another hypothesis [2, 13, 51] starts from the observation that the teacher's outputs have higher entropy than the ground truth labels, and therefore, higher information content. Despite this work, we still have a limited analytical understanding regarding why knowledge distillation is so effective [37].

Hamilton-Jacobi partial differential equations (HJ PDEs) have deep connections with a wide range of fields, including optimal control, differential games, and imaging sciences. By considering the time variable to be a higher dimensional quantity, HJ PDEs can be extended to the multi-time case. In this paper, we establish a novel theoretical connection between specific optimization problems arising in machine learning and the multi-time Hopf formula, which corresponds to a representation of the solution to certain multi-time HJ PDEs. Through this connection, we increase the interpretability of the training process of certain machine learning applications by showing that when we solve these learning problems, we also solve a multi-time HJ PDE and, by extension, its corresponding optimal control problem. As a first exploration of this connection, we develop the relation between the regularized linear regression problem and the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR). We then leverage our theoretical connection to adapt standard LQR solvers (namely, those based on the Riccati ordinary differential equations) to design new training approaches for machine learning. Finally, we provide some numerical examples that demonstrate the versatility and possible computational advantages of our Riccati-based approach in the context of continual learning, post-training calibration, transfer learning, and sparse dynamics identification.