Constructing states from sequences of observations is an important component of reinforcement learning agents. One solution for state construction is to use recurrent neural networks. Back-propagation through time (BPTT), and real-time recurrent learning (RTRL) are two popular gradient-based methods for recurrent learning. BPTT requires complete trajectories of observations before it can compute the gradients and is unsuitable for online updates. RTRL can do online updates but scales poorly to large networks. In this paper, we propose two constraints that make RTRL scalable. We show that by either decomposing the network into independent modules or learning the network in stages, we can make RTRL scale linearly with the number of parameters. Unlike prior scalable gradient estimation algorithms, such as UORO and Truncated-BPTT, our algorithms do not add noise or bias to the gradient estimate. Instead, they trade off the functional capacity of the network for computationally efficient learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach over Truncated-BPTT on a prediction benchmark inspired by animal learning and by doing policy evaluation of pre-trained policies for Atari 2600 games.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great promise with algorithms learning in environments with large state and action spaces purely from scalar reward signals. A crucial challenge for current deep RL algorithms is that they require a tremendous amount of environment interactions for learning. This can be infeasible in situations where such interactions are expensive; such as in robotics. Offline RL algorithms try to address this issue by bootstrapping the learning process from existing logged data without needing to interact with the environment from the very beginning. While online RL algorithms are typically evaluated as a function of the number of environment interactions, there exists no single established protocol for evaluating offline RL methods.In this paper, we propose a sequential approach to evaluate offline RL algorithms as a function of the training set size and thus by their data efficiency. Sequential evaluation provides valuable insights into the data efficiency of the learning process and the robustness of algorithms to distribution changes in the dataset while also harmonizing the visualization of the offline and online learning phases. Our approach is generally applicable and easy to implement. We compare several existing offline RL algorithms using this approach and present insights from a variety of tasks and offline datasets.

People rely heavily on context to enrich meaning beyond what is literally said, enabling concise but effective communication. To interact successfully and naturally with people, user-facing artificial intelligence systems will require similar skills in pragmatics: relying on various types of context -- from shared linguistic goals and conventions, to the visual and embodied world -- to use language effectively. We survey existing grounded settings and pragmatic modeling approaches and analyze how the task goals, environmental contexts, and communicative affordances in each work enrich linguistic meaning. We present recommendations for future grounded task design to naturally elicit pragmatic phenomena, and suggest directions that focus on a broader range of communicative contexts and affordances.

Standardized, validated questionnaires are vital tools in HCI research and healthcare, offering dependable self-report data. However, their repeated use in longitudinal or pre-post studies can induce respondent fatigue, impacting data quality via response biases and decreased response rates. We propose utilizing large language models (LLMs) to generate diverse questionnaire versions while retaining good psychometric properties. In a longitudinal study, participants engaged with our agent system and responded daily for two weeks to either a standardized depression questionnaire or one of two LLM-generated questionnaire variants, alongside a validated depression questionnaire. Psychometric testing revealed consistent covariation between the external criterion and the focal measure administered across the three conditions, demonstrating the reliability and validity of the LLM-generated variants. Participants found the repeated administration of the standardized questionnaire significantly more repetitive compared to the variants. Our findings highlight the potential of LLM-generated variants to invigorate questionnaires, fostering engagement and interest without compromising validity.

MathGloss is a project to create a knowledge graph (KG) for undergraduate mathematics from text, automatically, using modern natural language processing (NLP) tools and resources already available on the web. MathGloss is a linked database of undergraduate concepts in mathematics. So far, it combines five resources: (i) Wikidata, a collaboratively edited, multilingual knowledge graph hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, (ii) terms covered in mathematics courses at the University of Chicago, (iii) the syllabus of the French undergraduate mathematics curriculum which includes hyperlinks to the automated theorem prover Lean 4, (iv) MuLiMa, a multilingual dictionary of mathematics curated by mathematicians, and (v) the nLab, a wiki for category theory also curated by mathematicians. MathGloss's goal is to bring together resources for learning mathematics and to allow every mathematician to tailor their learning to their own preferences. Moreover, by organizing different resources for learning undergraduate mathematics alongside those for learning formal mathematics, we hope to make it easier for mathematicians and formal tools (theorem provers, computer algebra systems, etc) experts to "understand" each other and break down some of the barriers to formal math.

Auction-based Federated Learning (AFL) has emerged as an important research field in recent years. The prevailing strategies for FL model users (MUs) assume that the entire team of the required data owners (DOs) for an FL task must be assembled before training can commence. In practice, an MU can trigger the FL training process multiple times. DOs can thus be gradually recruited over multiple FL model training sessions. Existing bidding strategies for AFL MUs are not designed to handle such scenarios. Therefore, the problem of multi-session AFL remains open. To address this problem, we propose the Multi-session Budget Optimization Strategy for forward Auction-based Federated Learning (MultiBOS-AFL). Based on hierarchical reinforcement learning, MultiBOS-AFL jointly optimizes inter-session budget pacing and intra-session bidding for AFL MUs, with the objective of maximizing the total utility. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets show that it significantly outperforms seven state-of-the-art approaches. On average, MultiBOS-AFL achieves 12.28% higher utility, 14.52% more data acquired through auctions for a given budget, and 1.23% higher test accuracy achieved by the resulting FL model compared to the best baseline. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first budget optimization decision support method with budget pacing capability designed for MUs in multi-session forward auction-based federated learning

Data is one of the most critical elements in building a large language model. However, existing systems either fail to customize a corpus curation pipeline or neglect to leverage comprehensive corpus assessment for iterative optimization of the curation. To this end, we present a pretraining corpus curation and assessment platform called Oasis -- a one-stop system for data quality improvement and quantification with user-friendly interactive interfaces. Specifically, the interactive modular rule filter module can devise customized rules according to explicit feedback. The debiased neural filter module builds the quality classification dataset in a negative-centric manner to remove the undesired bias. The adaptive document deduplication module could execute large-scale deduplication with limited memory resources. These three parts constitute the customized data curation module. And in the holistic data assessment module, a corpus can be assessed in local and global views, with three evaluation means including human, GPT-4, and heuristic metrics. We exhibit a complete process to use Oasis for the curation and assessment of pretraining data. In addition, an 800GB bilingual corpus curated by Oasis is publicly released.

Continual learning is a sub-field of machine learning, which aims to allow machine learning models to continuously learn on new data, by accumulating knowledge without forgetting what was learned in the past. In this work, we take a step back, and ask: "Why should one care about continual learning in the first place?". We set the stage by surveying recent continual learning papers published at three major machine learning conferences, and show that memory-constrained settings dominate the field. Then, we discuss five open problems in machine learning, and even though they seem unrelated to continual learning at first sight, we show that continual learning will inevitably be part of their solution. These problems are model-editing, personalization, on-device learning, faster (re-)training and reinforcement learning. Finally, by comparing the desiderata from these unsolved problems and the current assumptions in continual learning, we highlight and discuss four future directions for continual learning research. We hope that this work offers an interesting perspective on the future of continual learning, while displaying its potential value and the paths we have to pursue in order to make it successful. This work is the result of the many discussions the authors had at the Dagstuhl seminar on Deep Continual Learning, in March 2023.

Deep learning models often suffer from forgetting previously learned information when trained on new data. This problem is exacerbated in federated learning (FL), where the data is distributed and can change independently for each user. Many solutions are proposed to resolve this catastrophic forgetting in a centralized setting. However, they do not apply directly to FL because of its unique complexities, such as privacy concerns and resource limitations. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents a framework for $\textbf{federated class incremental learning}$ that utilizes a generative model to synthesize samples from past distributions. This data can be later exploited alongside the training data to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. To preserve privacy, the generative model is trained on the server using data-free methods at the end of each task without requesting data from clients. Moreover, our solution does not demand the users to store old data or models, which gives them the freedom to join/leave the training at any time. Additionally, we introduce SuperImageNet, a new regrouping of the ImageNet dataset specifically tailored for federated continual learning. We demonstrate significant improvements compared to existing baselines through extensive experiments on multiple datasets.

Do neural networks, trained on well-understood algorithmic tasks, reliably rediscover known algorithms for solving those tasks? Several recent studies, on tasks ranging from group arithmetic to in-context linear regression, have suggested that the answer is yes. Using modular addition as a prototypical problem, we show that algorithm discovery in neural networks is sometimes more complex. Small changes to model hyperparameters and initializations can induce discovery of qualitatively different algorithms from a fixed training set, and even parallel implementations of multiple such algorithms. Some networks trained to perform modular addition implement a familiar Clock algorithm (previously described by Nanda et al. [1]); others implement a previously undescribed, less intuitive, but comprehensible procedure we term the Pizza algorithm, or a variety of even more complex procedures. Our results show that even simple learning problems can admit a surprising diversity of solutions, motivating the development of new tools for characterizing the behavior of neural networks across their algorithmic phase space.