Generative AI tools introduce new and accessible forms of media creation for youth. They also raise ethical concerns about the generation of fake media, data protection, privacy and ownership of AI-generated art. Since generative AI is already being used in products used by youth, it is critical that they understand how these tools work and how they can be used or misused. In this work, we facilitated students' generative AI learning through expression of their imagined future identities. We designed a learning workshop - Dreaming with AI - where students learned about the inner workings of generative AI tools, used text-to-image generation algorithms to create their imaged future dreams, reflected on the potential benefits and harms of generative AI tools and voiced their opinions about policies for the use of these tools in classrooms. In this paper, we present the learning activities and experiences of 34 high school students who engaged in our workshops. Students reached creative learning objectives by using prompt engineering to create their future dreams, gained technical knowledge by learning the abilities, limitations, text-visual mappings and applications of generative AI, and identified most potential societal benefits and harms of generative AI.

Vehicle teleoperation has numerous potential applications, including serving as a backup solution for autonomous vehicles, facilitating remote delivery services, and enabling hazardous remote operations. However, complex urban scenarios, limited situational awareness, and network delay increase the cognitive workload of human operators and degrade teleoperation performance. To address this, the successive reference pose tracking (SRPT) approach was introduced in earlier work, which transmits successive reference poses to the remote vehicle instead of steering commands. The operator generates reference poses online with the help of a joystick steering and an augmented display, potentially mitigating the detrimental effects of delays. However, it is not clear which minimal set of sensors is essential for the SRPT vehicle teleoperation control loop. This paper tests the robustness of the SRPT approach in the presence of state estimation inaccuracies, environmental disturbances, and measurement noises. The simulation environment, implemented in Simulink, features a 14-dof vehicle model and incorporates difficult maneuvers such as tight corners, double-lane changes, and slalom. Environmental disturbances include low adhesion track regions and strong cross-wind gusts. The results demonstrate that the SRPT approach, using either estimated or actual states, performs similarly under various worst-case scenarios, even without a position sensor requirement. Additionally, the designed state estimator ensures sufficient performance with just an inertial measurement unit, wheel speed encoder, and steer encoder, constituting a minimal set of essential sensors for the SRPT vehicle teleoperation control loop.

Answering multi-hop questions over hybrid factual knowledge from the given text and table (TextTableQA) is a challenging task. Existing models mainly adopt a retriever-reader framework, which have several deficiencies, such as noisy labeling in training retriever, insufficient utilization of heterogeneous information over text and table, and deficient ability for different reasoning operations. In this paper, we propose a three-stage TextTableQA framework S3HQA, which comprises of retriever, selector, and reasoner. We use a retriever with refinement training to solve the noisy labeling problem. Then, a hybrid selector considers the linked relationships between heterogeneous data to select the most relevant factual knowledge. For the final stage, instead of adapting a reading comprehension module like in previous methods, we employ a generation-based reasoner to obtain answers. This includes two approaches: a row-wise generator and an LLM prompting generator~(first time used in this task). The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive results in the few-shot setting. When trained on the full dataset, our approach outperforms all baseline methods, ranking first on the HybridQA leaderboard.

A centerpiece of the ever-popular reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) approach to fine-tuning autoregressive language models is the explicit training of a reward model to emulate human feedback, distinct from the language model itself. This reward model is then coupled with policy-gradient methods to dramatically improve the alignment between language model outputs and desired responses. In this work, we adopt a novel perspective wherein a pre-trained language model is itself simultaneously a policy, reward function, and transition function. An immediate consequence of this is that reward learning and language model fine-tuning can be performed jointly and directly, without requiring any further downstream policy optimization. While this perspective does indeed break the traditional agent-environment interface, we nevertheless maintain that there can be enormous statistical benefits afforded by bringing to bear traditional algorithmic concepts from reinforcement learning. Our experiments demonstrate one concrete instance of this through efficient exploration based on the representation and resolution of epistemic uncertainty. In order to illustrate these ideas in a transparent manner, we restrict attention to a simple didactic data generating process and leave for future work extension to systems of practical scale.

This paper presents a community-centered study of cultural limitations of text-to-image (T2I) models in the South Asian context. We theorize these failures using scholarship on dominant media regimes of representations and locate them within participants' reporting of their existing social marginalizations. We thus show how generative AI can reproduce an outsiders gaze for viewing South Asian cultures, shaped by global and regional power inequities. By centering communities as experts and soliciting their perspectives on T2I limitations, our study adds rich nuance into existing evaluative frameworks and deepens our understanding of the culturally-specific ways AI technologies can fail in non-Western and Global South settings. We distill lessons for responsible development of T2I models, recommending concrete pathways forward that can allow for recognition of structural inequalities.

While the increased use of AI in the manufacturing sector has been widely noted, there is little understanding on the risks that it may raise in a manufacturing organisation. Although various high level frameworks and definitions have been proposed to consolidate potential risks, practitioners struggle with understanding and implementing them. This lack of understanding exposes manufacturing to a multitude of risks, including the organisation, its workers, as well as suppliers and clients. In this paper, we explore and interpret the applicability of responsible, ethical, and trustworthy AI within the context of manufacturing. We then use a broadened adaptation of a machine learning lifecycle to discuss, through the use of illustrative examples, how each step may result in a given AI trustworthiness concern. We additionally propose a number of research questions to the manufacturing research community, in order to help guide future research so that the economic and societal benefits envisaged by AI in manufacturing are delivered safely and responsibly.

Sensing technologies deployed in the workplace can unobtrusively collect detailed data about individual activities and group interactions that are otherwise difficult to capture. A hopeful application of these technologies is that they can help businesses and workers optimize productivity and wellbeing. However, given the workplace's inherent and structural power dynamics, the prevalent approach of accepting tacit compliance to monitor work activities rather than seeking workers' meaningful consent raises privacy and ethical concerns. This paper unpacks the challenges workers face when consenting to workplace wellbeing technologies. Using a hypothetical case to prompt reflection among six multi-stakeholder focus groups involving 15 participants, we explored participants' expectations and capacity to consent to these technologies. We sketched possible interventions that could better support meaningful consent to workplace wellbeing technologies by drawing on critical computing and feminist scholarship -- which reframes consent from a purely individual choice to a structural condition experienced at the individual level that needs to be freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific (FRIES). The focus groups revealed how workers are vulnerable to "meaningless" consent -- as they may be subject to power dynamics that minimize their ability to withhold consent and may thus experience an erosion of autonomy, also undermining the value of data gathered in the name of "wellbeing." To meaningfully consent, participants wanted changes to the technology and to the policies and practices surrounding the technology. Our mapping of what prevents workers from meaningfully consenting to workplace wellbeing technologies (challenges) and what they require to do so (interventions) illustrates how the lack of meaningful consent is a structural problem requiring socio-technical solutions.

Projection-free online learning has drawn increasing interest due to its efficiency in solving high-dimensional problems with complicated constraints. However, most existing projection-free online methods focus on minimizing the static regret, which unfortunately fails to capture the challenge of changing environments. In this paper, we investigate non-stationary projection-free online learning, and choose dynamic regret and adaptive regret to measure the performance. Specifically, we first provide a novel dynamic regret analysis for an existing projection-free method named $\text{BOGD}_\text{IP}$, and establish an $\mathcal{O}(T^{3/4}(1+P_T))$ dynamic regret bound, where $P_T$ denotes the path-length of the comparator sequence. Then, we improve the upper bound to $\mathcal{O}(T^{3/4}(1+P_T)^{1/4})$ by running multiple $\text{BOGD}_\text{IP}$ algorithms with different step sizes in parallel, and tracking the best one on the fly. Our results are the first general-case dynamic regret bounds for projection-free online learning, and can recover the existing $\mathcal{O}(T^{3/4})$ static regret by setting $P_T = 0$. Furthermore, we propose a projection-free method to attain an $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\tau^{3/4})$ adaptive regret bound for any interval with length $\tau$, which nearly matches the static regret over that interval. The essential idea is to maintain a set of $\text{BOGD}_\text{IP}$ algorithms dynamically, and combine them by a meta algorithm. Moreover, we demonstrate that it is also equipped with an $\mathcal{O}(T^{3/4}(1+P_T)^{1/4})$ dynamic regret bound. Finally, empirical studies verify our theoretical findings.

Energy efficiency is a crucial requirement for enabling powerful artificial intelligence applications at the microedge. Hardware acceleration with frugal architectural allocation is an effective method for reducing energy. Many emerging applications also require the systems design to incorporate interpretable decision models to establish responsibility and transparency. The design needs to provision for additional resources to provide reachable states in real-world data scenarios, defining conflicting design tradeoffs between energy efficiency. is challenging. Recently a new machine learning algorithm, called the Tsetlin machine, has been proposed. The algorithm is fundamentally based on the principles of finite-state automata and benefits from natural logic underpinning rather than arithmetic. In this paper, we investigate methods of energy-frugal artificial intelligence hardware design by suitably tuning the hyperparameters, while maintaining high learning efficacy. To demonstrate interpretability, we use reachability and game-theoretic analysis in two simulation environments: a SystemC model to study the bounded state transitions in the presence of hardware faults and Nash equilibrium between states to analyze the learning convergence. Our analyses provides the first insights into conflicting design tradeoffs involved in energy-efficient and interpretable decision models for this new artificial intelligence hardware architecture. We show that frugal resource allocation coupled with systematic prodigality between randomized reinforcements can provide decisive energy reduction while also achieving robust and interpretable learning.

With contrastive pre-training, sentence encoders are generally optimized to locate semantically similar samples closer to each other in their embedding spaces. In this work, we focus on the potential of their embedding spaces to be readily adapted to zero-shot text classification, as semantically distinct samples are already well-separated. Our framework, RaLP (Retrieval augmented Label Prompts for sentence encoder), encodes prompted label candidates with a sentence encoder, then assigns the label whose prompt embedding has the highest similarity with the input text embedding. In order to compensate for the potentially poorly descriptive labels in their original format, RaLP retrieves sentences that are semantically similar to the original label prompt from external corpora and use them as additional pseudo-label prompts. RaLP achieves competitive or stronger performance than much larger baselines on various closed-set classification and multiple-choice QA datasets under zero-shot settings. We show that the retrieval component plays a pivotal role in RaLP's success, and its results are robustly attained regardless of verbalizer variations.