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Can LLM Already Serve as A Database Interface? A BIg Bench for Large-Scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQLs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Text-to-SQL parsing, which aims at converting natural language instructions into executable SQLs, has gained increasing attention in recent years. In particular, Codex and ChatGPT have shown impressive results in this task. However, most of the prevalent benchmarks, i.e., Spider, and WikiSQL, focus on database schema with few rows of database contents leaving the gap between academic study and real-world applications. To mitigate this gap, we present Bird, a big benchmark for large-scale database grounded in text-to-SQL tasks, containing 12,751 pairs of text-to-SQL data and 95 databases with a total size of 33.4 GB, spanning 37 professional domains. Our emphasis on database values highlights the new challenges of dirty database contents, external knowledge between NL questions and database contents, and SQL efficiency, particularly in the context of massive databases. To solve these problems, text-to-SQL models must feature database value comprehension in addition to semantic parsing. The experimental results demonstrate the significance of database values in generating accurate text-to-SQLs for big databases. Furthermore, even the most effective text-to-SQL models, i.e. ChatGPT, only achieves 40.08% in execution accuracy, which is still far from the human result of 92.96%, proving that challenges still stand. Besides, we also provide an efficiency analysis to offer insights into generating text-to-efficient-SQLs that are beneficial to industries. We believe that BIRD will contribute to advancing real-world applications of text-to-SQL research. The leaderboard and source code are available: https://bird-bench.github.io/.


Reward is not Necessary: How to Create a Modular & Compositional Self-Preserving Agent for Life-Long Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reinforcement Learning views the maximization of rewards and avoidance of punishments as central to explaining goal-directed behavior. However, over a life, organisms will need to learn about many different aspects of the world's structure: the states of the world and state-vector transition dynamics. The number of combinations of states grows exponentially as an agent incorporates new knowledge, and there is no obvious weighted combination of pre-existing rewards or costs defined for a given combination of states, as such a weighting would need to encode information about good and bad combinations prior to an agent's experience in the world. Therefore, we must develop more naturalistic accounts of behavior and motivation in large state-spaces. We show that it is possible to use only the intrinsic motivation metric of empowerment, which measures the agent's capacity to realize many possible futures under a transition operator. We propose to scale empowerment to hierarchical state-spaces by using Operator Bellman Equations. These equations produce state-time feasibility functions, which are compositional hierarchical state-time transition operators that map an initial state and time when an agent begins a policy to the final states and times of completing a goal. Because these functions are hierarchical operators we can define hierarchical empowerment measures on them. An agent can then optimize plans to distant states and times to maximize its hierarchical empowerment-gain, allowing it to discover goals that bring about a more favorable coupling of its internal structure (physiological states) to its external environment (world structure & spatial state). Life-long agents could therefore be primarily animated by principles of compositionality and empowerment, exhibiting self-concern for the growth & maintenance of their own structural integrity without recourse to reward-maximization.


Ruffle&Riley: Towards the Automated Induction of Conversational Tutoring Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Conversational tutoring systems (CTSs) offer learning experiences driven by natural language interaction. They are known to promote high levels of cognitive engagement and benefit learning outcomes, particularly in reasoning tasks. Nonetheless, the time and cost required to author CTS content is a major obstacle to widespread adoption. In this paper, we introduce a novel type of CTS that leverages the recent advances in large language models (LLMs) in two ways: First, the system induces a tutoring script automatically from a lesson text. Second, the system automates the script orchestration via two LLM-based agents (Ruffle&Riley) with the roles of a student and a professor in a learning-by-teaching format. The system allows a free-form conversation that follows the ITS-typical inner and outer loop structure. In an initial between-subject online user study (N = 100) comparing Ruffle&Riley to simpler QA chatbots and reading activity, we found no significant differences in post-test scores. Nonetheless, in the learning experience survey, Ruffle&Riley users expressed higher ratings of understanding and remembering and further perceived the offered support as more helpful and the conversation as coherent. Our study provides insights for a new generation of scalable CTS technologies.


UniFormaly: Towards Task-Agnostic Unified Framework for Visual Anomaly Detection

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Visual anomaly detection aims to learn normality from normal images, but existing approaches are fragmented across various tasks: defect detection, semantic anomaly detection, multi-class anomaly detection, and anomaly clustering. This one-task-one-model approach is resource-intensive and incurs high maintenance costs as the number of tasks increases. We present UniFormaly, a universal and powerful anomaly detection framework. We emphasize the necessity of our off-the-shelf approach by pointing out a suboptimal issue in online encoder-based methods. We introduce Back Patch Masking (BPM) and top k-ratio feature matching to achieve unified anomaly detection. BPM eliminates irrelevant background regions using a self-attention map from self-supervised ViTs. This operates in a task-agnostic manner and alleviates memory storage consumption, scaling to tasks with large-scale datasets. Top k-ratio feature matching unifies anomaly levels and tasks by casting anomaly scoring into multiple instance learning. Finally, UniFormaly achieves outstanding results on various tasks and datasets. Codes are available at https://github.com/YoojLee/Uniformaly.


Can Language Models Teach Weaker Agents? Teacher Explanations Improve Students via Personalization

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A hallmark property of explainable AI models is the ability to teach other agents, communicating knowledge of how to perform a task. While Large Language Models perform complex reasoning by generating explanations for their predictions, it is unclear whether they also make good teachers for weaker agents. To address this, we consider a student-teacher framework between two LLM agents and study if, when, and how the teacher should intervene with natural language explanations to improve the student's performance. Since communication is expensive, we define a budget such that the teacher only communicates explanations for a fraction of the data, after which the student should perform well on its own. We decompose the teaching problem along four axes: (1) if teacher's test time intervention improve student predictions, (2) when it is worth explaining a data point, (3) how the teacher should personalize explanations to better teach the student, and (4) if teacher explanations also improve students on future unexplained data. We first show that teacher LLMs can indeed intervene on student reasoning to improve their performance. Next, inspired by the Theory of Mind abilities of effective teachers, we propose building two few-shot mental models of the student. The first model defines an Intervention Function that simulates the utility of an intervention, allowing the teacher to intervene when this utility is the highest and improving student performance at lower budgets. The second model enables the teacher to personalize explanations for a particular student and outperform unpersonalized teachers. We also demonstrate that in multi-turn interactions, teacher explanations generalize and learning from explained data improves student performance on future unexplained data. Finally, we verify that misaligned teachers can lower student performance to random chance by intentionally misleading them.


Towards ethical multimodal systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Generative AI systems (ChatGPT, DALL-E, etc) are expanding into multiple areas of our lives, from art Rombach et al. [2021] to mental health Rob Morris and Kareem Kouddous [2022]; their rapidly growing societal impact opens new opportunities, but also raises ethical concerns. The emerging field of AI alignment aims to make AI systems reflect human values. This paper focuses on evaluating the ethics of multimodal AI systems involving both text and images - a relatively under-explored area, as most alignment work is currently focused on language models. We first create a multimodal ethical database from human feedback on ethicality. Then, using this database, we develop algorithms, including a RoBERTa-large classifier and a multilayer perceptron, to automatically assess the ethicality of system responses.


Variational Temporal IRT: Fast, Accurate, and Explainable Inference of Dynamic Learner Proficiency

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Such assessments are Response Theory (IRT) to capture temporal dynamics in referred to as formative assessments and are used not only learner ability. While these models have the potential to allow to track student learning and make appropriate instructional instructional systems to actively monitor the evolution interventions, but also to allow learners to practice their of learner proficiency in real time, existing dynamic item response knowledge and skills, and make necessary self-corrections models rely on expensive inference algorithms that [17]. When learning occurs alongside assessment, learner scale poorly to massive datasets. In this work, we propose proficiency is longitudinal rather than inert, and the assumption Variational Temporal IRT (VTIRT) for fast and accurate of static proficiency makes standard IRT less suitable inference of dynamic learner proficiency. VTIRT offers orders as a model of proficiency measurement. of magnitude speedup in inference runtime while still providing accurate inference. Moreover, the proposed algorithm Dynamic Item Response models [14, 11] mitigate this issue is intrinsically interpretable by virtue of its modular by removing the assumptions of static ability and instead allowing design. When applied to 9 real student datasets, VTIRT it to stochastically change over time, but existing inference consistently yields improvements in predicting future learner methods rely on expensive iterative algorithms with performance over other learner proficiency models.


Manifold learning in Wasserstein space

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This paper aims at building the theoretical foundations for manifold learning algorithms in the space of absolutely continuous probability measures on a compact and convex subset of $\mathbb{R}^d$, metrized with the Wasserstein-2 distance $W$. We begin by introducing a natural construction of submanifolds $\Lambda$ of probability measures equipped with metric $W_\Lambda$, the geodesic restriction of $W$ to $\Lambda$. In contrast to other constructions, these submanifolds are not necessarily flat, but still allow for local linearizations in a similar fashion to Riemannian submanifolds of $\mathbb{R}^d$. We then show how the latent manifold structure of $(\Lambda,W_{\Lambda})$ can be learned from samples $\{\lambda_i\}_{i=1}^N$ of $\Lambda$ and pairwise extrinsic Wasserstein distances $W$ only. In particular, we show that the metric space $(\Lambda,W_{\Lambda})$ can be asymptotically recovered in the sense of Gromov--Wasserstein from a graph with nodes $\{\lambda_i\}_{i=1}^N$ and edge weights $W(\lambda_i,\lambda_j)$. In addition, we demonstrate how the tangent space at a sample $\lambda$ can be asymptotically recovered via spectral analysis of a suitable "covariance operator" using optimal transport maps from $\lambda$ to sufficiently close and diverse samples $\{\lambda_i\}_{i=1}^N$. The paper closes with some explicit constructions of submanifolds $\Lambda$ and numerical examples on the recovery of tangent spaces through spectral analysis.


Towards the Fundamental Limits of Knowledge Transfer over Finite Domains

arXiv.org Machine Learning

It has become common sense that transferring intrinsic information from teachers to the greatest extent can expedite a student's learning progress, especially in machine learning given versatile and powerful teacher models. Learning with their assistance has been coined knowledge distillation (KD) (Hinton et al., 2015; Lopez-Paz et al., 2015), a famous paradigm of knowledge transfer leading to remarkable empirical effectiveness in classification tasks across various downstream applications (Gou et al., 2021; Wang and Yoon, 2021; Gu et al., 2023b). The term distillation implies a belief that the inscrutable teacher(s) may possess useful yet complicated structural information, which we should be able to compress and inject into a compact one, i.e., the student model (Breiman and Shang, 1996; Buciluǎ et al., 2006; Li et al., 2014; Ba and Caruana, 2014; Allen-Zhu and Li, 2020). This has guided the community towards a line of knowledge transfer methods featuring the awareness of teacher training details or snapshots, such as the original training set, the intermediate activations, the last-layer logits (for a probabilistic classifier), the first-or second-order derivative or statistical information, and even task-specific knowledge (Hinton et al., 2015; Furlanello et al., 2018; Cho and Hariharan, 2019; Zhao et al., 2022; Romero et al., 2014; Zagoruyko and Komodakis, 2016;


RoboGen: Towards Unleashing Infinite Data for Automated Robot Learning via Generative Simulation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present RoboGen, a generative robotic agent that automatically learns diverse robotic skills at scale via generative simulation. RoboGen leverages the latest advancements in foundation and generative models. Instead of directly using or adapting these models to produce policies or low-level actions, we advocate for a generative scheme, which uses these models to automatically generate diversified tasks, scenes, and training supervisions, thereby scaling up robotic skill learning with minimal human supervision. Our approach equips a robotic agent with a self-guided propose-generate-learn cycle: the agent first proposes interesting tasks and skills to develop, and then generates corresponding simulation environments by populating pertinent objects and assets with proper spatial configurations. Afterwards, the agent decomposes the proposed high-level task into sub-tasks, selects the optimal learning approach (reinforcement learning, motion planning, or trajectory optimization), generates required training supervision, and then learns policies to acquire the proposed skill. Our work attempts to extract the extensive and versatile knowledge embedded in large-scale models and transfer them to the field of robotics. Our fully generative pipeline can be queried repeatedly, producing an endless stream of skill demonstrations associated with diverse tasks and environments.