Avatar technology can offer accessibility possibilities and improve the Deaf-and-Hard of Hearing sign language users access to communication, education and services, such as the healthcare system. However, sign language users acceptance of signing avatars as well as their attitudes towards them vary and depend on many factors. Furthermore, research on avatar technology is mostly done by researchers who are not Deaf. The study examines the extent to which intrinsic or extrinsic factors contribute to predict the attitude towards avatars across cultures. Intrinsic factors include the characteristics of the avatar, such as appearance, movements and facial expressions. Extrinsic factors include users technology experience, their hearing status, age and their sign language fluency. This work attempts to answer questions such as, if lower attitude ratings are related to poor technology experience with ASL users, for example, is that also true for Moroccan Sign Language (MSL) users? For the purposes of the study, we designed a questionnaire to understand MSL users attitude towards avatars. Three groups of participants were surveyed: Deaf (57), Hearing (20) and Hard-of-Hearing (3). The results of our study were then compared with those reported in other relevant studies.

Advances in mobile applications providing image classification enabled by Deep Learning require innovative User Experience solutions in order to assure their adequate use by users. To aid the design process, usability heuristics are typically customized for a specific kind of application. Therefore, based on a literature review and analyzing existing mobile applications with image classification, we propose an initial set of AIX heuristics for Deep Learning powered mobile applications with image classification decomposed into a checklist. In order to facilitate the usage of the checklist we also developed an online course presenting the concepts and heuristics as well as a web-based tool in order to support an evaluation using these heuristics. These results of this research can be used to guide the design of the interfaces of such applications as well as support the conduction of heuristic evaluations supporting practitioners to develop image classification apps that people can understand, trust, and can engage with effectively.

In information retrieval (IR), domain adaptation is the process of adapting a retrieval model to a new domain whose data distribution is different from the source domain. Existing methods in this area focus on unsupervised domain adaptation where they have access to the target document collection or supervised (often few-shot) domain adaptation where they additionally have access to (limited) labeled data in the target domain. There also exists research on improving zero-shot performance of retrieval models with no adaptation. This paper introduces a new category of domain adaptation in IR that is as-yet unexplored. Here, similar to the zero-shot setting, we assume the retrieval model does not have access to the target document collection. In contrast, it does have access to a brief textual description that explains the target domain. We define a taxonomy of domain attributes in retrieval tasks to understand different properties of a source domain that can be adapted to a target domain. We introduce a novel automatic data construction pipeline that produces a synthetic document collection, query set, and pseudo relevance labels, given a textual domain description. Extensive experiments on five diverse target domains show that adapting dense retrieval models using the constructed synthetic data leads to effective retrieval performance on the target domain.

Lecture notes from the course given by Professor Julia Kempe at the summer school "Statistical physics of Machine Learning" in Les Houches. The notes discuss the so-called NTK approach to problems in machine learning, which consists of gaining an understanding of generally unsolvable problems by finding a tractable kernel formulation. The notes are mainly focused on practical applications such as data distillation and adversarial robustness, examples of inductive bias are also discussed.

The recent surge of large language models (LLMs) highlights their ability to perform in-context learning, i.e., "learning" to perform a task from a few demonstrations in the context without any parameter updates. However, their capabilities of in-context learning are limited by the model architecture: 1) the use of demonstrations is constrained by a maximum sentence length due to positional embeddings; 2) the quadratic complexity of attention hinders users from using more demonstrations efficiently; 3) LLMs are shown to be sensitive to the order of the demonstrations. In this work, we tackle these challenges by proposing a better architectural design for in-context learning. We propose SAICL (Structured Attention for In-Context Learning), which replaces the full-attention by a structured attention mechanism designed for in-context learning, and removes unnecessary dependencies between individual demonstrations, while making the model invariant to the permutation of demonstrations. We evaluate SAICL in a meta-training framework and show that SAICL achieves comparable or better performance than full attention while obtaining up to 3.4x inference speed-up. SAICL also consistently outperforms a strong Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD) baseline which processes each demonstration independently. Finally, thanks to its linear nature, we demonstrate that SAICL can easily scale to hundreds of demonstrations with continuous performance gains with scaling.

This article is a short introduction to AI4OPT, the NSF AI Institute for Advances in Optimization. AI4OPT fuses AI and Optimization, inspired by end-use cases in supply chains, energy systems, chip design and manufacturing, and sustainable food systems. AI4OPT also applies its "teaching the teachers" philosophy to provide longitudinal educational pathways in AI for engineering.

For real-world applications, robots will need to continually learn in their environments through limited interactions with their users. Toward this, previous works in few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) and active class selection (ACS) have achieved promising results but were tested in constrained setups. Therefore, in this paper, we combine ideas from FSCIL and ACS to develop a novel framework that can allow an autonomous agent to continually learn new objects by asking its users to label only a few of the most informative objects in the environment. To this end, we build on a state-of-the-art (SOTA) FSCIL model and extend it with techniques from ACS literature. We further integrate a potential field-based navigation technique with our model to develop a complete framework that can allow an agent to process and reason on its sensory data through the FIASco model, navigate towards the most informative object in the environment, gather data about the object through its sensors and incrementally update the FIASco model. A primary challenge faced by robots deployed in the real world is continual adaptation to dynamic environments. Central to this challenge is object recognition (Ayub & Wagner, 2020d), a task typically requiring labeled examples. In this work, we address the problem of parsimonious object labelling wherein a robot may request labels for a small number of objects about which it knows least. In recent years, several works have been directed toward the problem of Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning (FSCIL) (Tao et al., 2020; Ayub & Wagner, 2020c) to develop models of incremental object learning that can learn from limited training data for each object class. The literature has made significant progress toward developing robots that can continually learn new objects from limited training data while preserving knowledge of previous objects. However, existing methods make strong assumptions about the training data that are rarely true in the real world. For example, FSCIL assumes that in each increment the robot will receive a fully labeled image dataset for the object classes in that increment, and the robot will not receive more data for these classes again (Tao et al., 2020; Ayub & Wagner, 2020c;d). In real world environments, however, robots will most likely encounter many unlabeled objects in their environment, and they will have to direct their learning toward a smaller subset of those unknown objects. Active learning is a subfield of machine learning that focuses on improving the learning efficiency of models by selectively seeking labels from within a large unlabeled data pool (Settles, 2009; Ayub & Fendley, 2022). Related to active learning is active class selection (ACS) in which a model seeks labels for specific object classes (Lomasky et al., 2007).

Human language acquisition is an efficient, supervised, and continual process. In this work, we took inspiration from how human babies acquire their first language, and developed a computational process for word acquisition through comparative learning. Motivated by cognitive findings, we generated a small dataset that enables the computation models to compare the similarities and differences of various attributes, learn to filter out and extract the common information for each shared linguistic label. We frame the acquisition of words as not only the information filtration process, but also as representation-symbol mapping. This procedure does not involve a fixed vocabulary size, nor a discriminative objective, and allows the models to continually learn more concepts efficiently. Our results in controlled experiments have shown the potential of this approach for efficient continual learning of grounded words.

Large-scale code generation models such as Codex and CodeT5 have achieved impressive performance. However, libraries are upgraded or deprecated very frequently and re-training large-scale language models is computationally expensive. Therefore, Continual Learning (CL) is an important aspect that remains underexplored in the code domain. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark called CodeTask-CL that covers a wide range of tasks, including code generation, translation, summarization, and refinement, with different input and output programming languages. Next, on our CodeTask-CL benchmark, we compare popular CL techniques from NLP and Vision domains. We find that effective methods like Prompt Pooling (PP) suffer from catastrophic forgetting due to the unstable training of the prompt selection mechanism caused by stark distribution shifts in coding tasks. We address this issue with our proposed method, Prompt Pooling with Teacher Forcing (PP-TF), that stabilizes training by enforcing constraints on the prompt selection mechanism and leads to a 21.54% improvement over Prompt Pooling. Along with the benchmark, we establish a training pipeline that can be used for CL on code models, which we believe can motivate further development of CL methods for code models. Our code is available at https://github.com/amazon-science/codetaskcl-pptf

This article presents the results of a study involving the reception of a fictional story by Kurt Vonnegut translated from English into Catalan and Dutch in three conditions: machine-translated (MT), post-edited (PE) and translated from scratch (HT). 223 participants were recruited who rated the reading conditions using three scales: Narrative Engagement, Enjoyment and Translation Reception. The results show that HT presented a higher engagement, enjoyment and translation reception in Catalan if compared to PE and MT. However, the Dutch readers show higher scores in PE than in both HT and MT, and the highest engagement and enjoyments scores are reported when reading the original English version. We hypothesize that when reading a fictional story in translation, not only the condition and the quality of the translations is key to understand its reception, but also the participants reading patterns, reading language, and, perhaps language status in their own societies.