Artificial intelligence is gaining traction in more ways than ever before. The popularity of language models and AI-based businesses has soared since ChatGPT was made available to the general public via OpenAI. It is becoming increasingly common for people to use ChatGPT both professionally and personally. Considering the widespread use of ChatGPT and the reliance people place on it, this study determined how reliable ChatGPT can be for answering complex medical and clinical questions. Harvard University gross anatomy along with the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) questionnaire were used to accomplish the objective. The paper evaluated the obtained results using a 2-way ANOVA and posthoc analysis. Both showed systematic covariation between format and prompt. Furthermore, the physician adjudicators independently rated the outcome's accuracy, concordance, and insight. As a result of the analysis, ChatGPT-generated answers were found to be more context-oriented and represented a better model for deductive reasoning than regular Google search results. Furthermore, ChatGPT obtained 58.8% on logical questions and 60% on ethical questions. This means that the ChatGPT is approaching the passing range for logical questions and has crossed the threshold for ethical questions. The paper believes ChatGPT and other language learning models can be invaluable tools for e-learners; however, the study suggests that there is still room to improve their accuracy. In order to improve ChatGPT's performance in the future, further research is needed to better understand how it can answer different types of questions.

In argumentative writing, writers must brainstorm hierarchical writing goals, ensure the persuasiveness of their arguments, and revise and organize their plans through drafting. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made interactive text generation through a chat interface (e.g., ChatGPT) possible. However, this approach often neglects implicit writing context and user intent, lacks support for user control and autonomy, and provides limited assistance for sensemaking and revising writing plans. To address these challenges, we introduce VISAR, an AI-enabled writing assistant system designed to help writers brainstorm and revise hierarchical goals within their writing context, organize argument structures through synchronized text editing and visual programming, and enhance persuasiveness with argumentation spark recommendations. VISAR allows users to explore, experiment with, and validate their writing plans using automatic draft prototyping. A controlled lab study confirmed the usability and effectiveness of VISAR in facilitating the argumentative writing planning process.

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 have recently demonstrated impressive results across a wide range of tasks. LLMs are still limited, however, in that they frequently fail at complex reasoning, their reasoning processes are opaque, they are prone to 'hallucinate' facts, and there are concerns about their underlying biases. Letting models verbalize reasoning steps as natural language, a technique known as chain-of-thought prompting, has recently been proposed as a way to address some of these issues. Here we present ThoughtSource, a meta-dataset and software library for chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. The goal of ThoughtSource is to improve future artificial intelligence systems by facilitating qualitative understanding of CoTs, enabling empirical evaluations, and providing training data. This first release of ThoughtSource integrates seven scientific/medical, three general-domain and five math word question answering datasets.

Historical interactions are the default choice for recommender model training, which typically exhibit high sparsity, i.e., most user-item pairs are unobserved missing data. A standard choice is treating the missing data as negative training samples and estimating interaction likelihood between user-item pairs along with the observed interactions. In this way, some potential interactions are inevitably mislabeled during training, which will hurt the model fidelity, hindering the model to recall the mislabeled items, especially the long-tail ones. In this work, we investigate the mislabeling issue from a new perspective of aleatoric uncertainty, which describes the inherent randomness of missing data. The randomness pushes us to go beyond merely the interaction likelihood and embrace aleatoric uncertainty modeling. Towards this end, we propose a new Aleatoric Uncertainty-aware Recommendation (AUR) framework that consists of a new uncertainty estimator along with a normal recommender model. According to the theory of aleatoric uncertainty, we derive a new recommendation objective to learn the estimator. As the chance of mislabeling reflects the potential of a pair, AUR makes recommendations according to the uncertainty, which is demonstrated to improve the recommendation performance of less popular items without sacrificing the overall performance. We instantiate AUR on three representative recommender models: Matrix Factorization (MF), LightGCN, and VAE from mainstream model architectures. Extensive results on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of AUR w.r.t. better recommendation results, especially on long-tail items.

Motivated by the wide range of modern applications of the Erlang-B blocking model beyond communication networks and call centers to sizing and pricing in design production systems, messaging systems, and app-based parking systems, we study admission control for such a system but with unknown arrival and service rates. In our model, at every job arrival, a dispatcher decides to assign the job to an available server or block it. Every served job yields a fixed reward for the dispatcher, but it also results in a cost per unit time of service. Our goal is to design a dispatching policy that maximizes the long-term average reward for the dispatcher based on observing only the arrival times and the state of the system at each arrival that reflects a realistic sampling of such systems. Critically, the dispatcher observes neither the service times nor departure times so that standard reinforcement learning-based approaches that use reward signals do not apply. Hence, we develop our learning-based dispatch scheme as a parametric learning problem a'la self-tuning adaptive control. In our problem, certainty equivalent control switches between an always admit if room policy (explore infinitely often) and a never admit policy (immediately terminate learning), which is distinct from the adaptive control literature. Hence, our learning scheme judiciously uses the always admit if room policy so that learning doesn't stall. We prove that for all service rates, the proposed policy asymptotically learns to take the optimal action and present finite-time regret guarantees. The extreme contrast in the certainty equivalent optimal control policies leads to difficulties in learning that show up in our regret bounds for different parameter regimes: constant regret in one regime versus regret growing logarithmically in the other.

In this work we propose RELDEC, a novel approach for sequential decoding of moderate length low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. The main idea behind RELDEC is that an optimized decoding policy is subsequently obtained via reinforcement learning based on a Markov decision process (MDP). In contrast to our previous work, where an agent learns to schedule only a single check node (CN) within a group (cluster) of CNs per iteration, in this work we train the agent to schedule all CNs in a cluster, and all clusters in every iteration. That is, in each learning step of RELDEC an agent learns to schedule CN clusters sequentially depending on a reward associated with the outcome of scheduling a particular cluster. We also modify the state space representation of the MDP, enabling RELDEC to be suitable for larger block length LDPC codes than those studied in our previous work. Furthermore, to address decoding under varying channel conditions, we propose agile meta-RELDEC (AM-RELDEC) that employs meta-reinforcement learning. The proposed RELDEC scheme significantly outperforms standard flooding and random sequential decoding for a variety of LDPC codes, including codes designed for 5G new radio.

Procedural planning, which entails decomposing a high-level goal into a sequence of temporally ordered steps, is an important yet intricate task for machines. It involves integrating common-sense knowledge to reason about complex contextualized situations that are often counterfactual, e.g. "scheduling a doctor's appointment without a phone". While current approaches show encouraging results using large language models (LLMs), they are hindered by drawbacks such as costly API calls and reproducibility issues. In this paper, we advocate planning using smaller language models. We present PlaSma, a novel two-pronged approach to endow small language models with procedural knowledge and (counterfactual) planning capabilities. More concretely, we develop symbolic procedural knowledge distillation to enhance the implicit knowledge in small language models and an inference-time algorithm to facilitate more structured and accurate reasoning. In addition, we introduce a novel task, Counterfactual Planning, that requires a revision of a plan to cope with a counterfactual situation. In both the original and counterfactual setting, we show that orders-of-magnitude smaller models (770M-11B parameters) can compete and often surpass their larger teacher models' capabilities.

As one of the most pervasive applications of machine learning, recommender systems are playing an important role on assisting human decision making. The satisfaction of users and the interests of platforms are closely related to the quality of the generated recommendation results. However, as a highly data-driven system, recommender system could be affected by data or algorithmic bias and thus generate unfair results, which could weaken the reliance of the systems. As a result, it is crucial to address the potential unfairness problems in recommendation settings. Recently, there has been growing attention on fairness considerations in recommender systems with more and more literature on approaches to promote fairness in recommendation. However, the studies are rather fragmented and lack a systematic organization, thus making it difficult to penetrate for new researchers to the domain. This motivates us to provide a systematic survey of existing works on fairness in recommendation. This survey focuses on the foundations for fairness in recommendation literature. It first presents a brief introduction about fairness in basic machine learning tasks such as classification and ranking in order to provide a general overview of fairness research, as well as introduce the more complex situations and challenges that need to be considered when studying fairness in recommender systems. After that, the survey will introduce fairness in recommendation with a focus on the taxonomies of current fairness definitions, the typical techniques for improving fairness, as well as the datasets for fairness studies in recommendation. The survey also talks about the challenges and opportunities in fairness research with the hope of promoting the fair recommendation research area and beyond.

Machines with human-level intelligence should be able to do most economically valuable work. This aligns a major economic incentive with the scientific grand challenge of building a human-like mind. Here we describe our approach to building and testing such a system. Our approach comprises a physical humanoid robotic system; a software based control system for robots of this type; a performance metric, which we call g+, designed to be a measure of human-like intelligence in humanoid robots; and an evolutionary algorithm for incrementally increasing scores on this performance metric. We introduce and describe the current status of each of these. We report on current and historical measurements of the g+ metric on the systems described here.

This research draws upon cognitive psychology and information systems studies to anticipate user engagement and decision-making on digital platforms. By employing natural language processing (NLP) techniques and insights from cognitive bias research, we delve into user interactions with synonyms within digital content. Our methodology synthesizes four cognitive biasesRepresentativeness, Ease-of-use, Affect, and Distributioninto the READ model. Through a comprehensive user survey, we assess the model's ability to predict user engagement, discovering that synonyms that accurately represent core ideas, are easy to understand, elicit emotional responses, and are commonly encountered, promote greater user engagement. Crucially, our work offers a fresh lens on human-computer interaction, digital behaviors, and decision-making processes. Our results highlight the promise of cognitive biases as potent indicators of user engagement, underscoring their significance in designing effective digital content across fields like education and marketing.