We study the hidden-action principal-agent problem in an online setting. In each round, the principal posts a contract that specifies the payment to the agent based on each outcome. The agent then makes a strategic choice of action that maximizes her own utility, but the action is not directly observable by the principal. The principal observes the outcome and receives utility from the agent's choice of action. Based on past observations, the principal dynamically adjusts the contracts with the goal of maximizing her utility. We introduce an online learning algorithm and provide an upper bound on its Stackelberg regret. We show that when the contract space is $[0,1]^m$, the Stackelberg regret is upper bounded by $\widetilde O(\sqrt{m} \cdot T^{1-1/(2m+1)})$, and lower bounded by $\Omega(T^{1-1/(m+2)})$, where $\widetilde O$ omits logarithmic factors. This result shows that exponential-in-$m$ samples are sufficient and necessary to learn a near-optimal contract, resolving an open problem on the hardness of online contract design. Moreover, when contracts are restricted to some subset $\mathcal{F} \subset [0,1]^m$, we define an intrinsic dimension of $\mathcal{F}$ that depends on the covering number of the spherical code in the space and bound the regret in terms of this intrinsic dimension. When $\mathcal{F}$ is the family of linear contracts, we show that the Stackelberg regret grows exactly as $\Theta(T^{2/3})$. The contract design problem is challenging because the utility function is discontinuous. Bounding the discretization error in this setting has been an open problem. In this paper, we identify a limited set of directions in which the utility function is continuous, allowing us to design a new discretization method and bound its error. This approach enables the first upper bound with no restrictions on the contract and action space.

Creating Computer Vision (CV) models remains a complex and taxing practice for end-users to build, inspect, and improve these models. Interactive ML perspectives have helped address some of these issues by considering a teacher-in-the-loop where planning, teaching, and evaluating tasks take place. To improve the experience of end-users with various levels of ML expertise, we designed and evaluated two interactive visualizations in the context of Sprite, a system for creating CV classification and detection models for images originating from videos. We study how these visualizations, as part of the machine teaching loop, help users identify (evaluate) and select (plan) images where a model is struggling and improve the model being trained. We found that users who had used the visualizations found more images across a wider set of potential types of model errors, as well as in assessing and contrasting the prediction behavior of one or more models, thus reducing the potential effort required to improve a model.

Model selection is a strategy aimed at creating accurate and robust models. A key challenge in designing these algorithms is identifying the optimal model for classifying any particular input sample. This paper addresses this challenge and proposes a novel framework for differentiable model selection integrating machine learning and combinatorial optimization. The framework is tailored for ensemble learning, a strategy that combines the outputs of individually pre-trained models, and learns to select appropriate ensemble members for a particular input sample by transforming the ensemble learning task into a differentiable selection program trained end-to-end within the ensemble learning model. Tested on various tasks, the proposed framework demonstrates its versatility and effectiveness, outperforming conventional and advanced consensus rules across a variety of settings and learning tasks.

Finding an agreement among diverse opinions is a challenging topic in multiagent systems. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in addressing this challenge due to their remarkable capabilities in comprehending human opinions and generating human-like text. However, they typically rely on extensive human-annotated data. In this paper, we propose Self-Agreement, a novel framework for fine-tuning LLMs to autonomously find agreement using data generated by LLM itself. Specifically, our approach employs the generative pre-trained transformer-3 (GPT-3) to generate multiple opinions for each question in a question dataset and create several agreement candidates among these opinions. Then, a bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT)-based model evaluates the agreement score of each agreement candidate and selects the one with the highest agreement score. This process yields a dataset of question-opinion-agreements, which we use to fine-tune a pre-trained LLM for discovering agreements among diverse opinions. Remarkably, a pre-trained LLM fine-tuned by our Self-Agreement framework achieves comparable performance to GPT-3 with only 1/25 of its parameters, showcasing its ability to identify agreement among various opinions without the need for human-annotated data.

The recognition of dataset names is a critical task for automatic information extraction in scientific literature, enabling researchers to understand and identify research opportunities. However, existing corpora for dataset mention detection are limited in size and naming diversity. In this paper, we introduce the Dataset Mentions Detection Dataset (DMDD), the largest publicly available corpus for this task. DMDD consists of the DMDD main corpus, comprising 31,219 scientific articles with over 449,000 dataset mentions weakly annotated in the format of in-text spans, and an evaluation set, which comprises of 450 scientific articles manually annotated for evaluation purposes. We use DMDD to establish baseline performance for dataset mention detection and linking. By analyzing the performance of various models on DMDD, we are able to identify open problems in dataset mention detection. We invite the community to use our dataset as a challenge to develop novel dataset mention detection models.

Most semi-supervised learning (SSL) models entail complex structures and iterative training processes as well as face difficulties in interpreting their predictions to users. To address these issues, this paper proposes a new interpretable SSL model using the supervised and unsupervised Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) family of networks, which is denoted as SSL-ART. Firstly, SSL-ART adopts an unsupervised fuzzy ART network to create a number of prototype nodes using unlabeled samples. Then, it leverages a supervised fuzzy ARTMAP structure to map the established prototype nodes to the target classes using labeled samples. Specifically, a one-to-many (OtM) mapping scheme is devised to associate a prototype node with more than one class label. The main advantages of SSL-ART include the capability of: (i) performing online learning, (ii) reducing the number of redundant prototype nodes through the OtM mapping scheme and minimizing the effects of noisy samples, and (iii) providing an explanation facility for users to interpret the predicted outcomes. In addition, a weighted voting strategy is introduced to form an ensemble SSL-ART model, which is denoted as WESSL-ART. Every ensemble member, i.e., SSL-ART, assigns {\color{black}a different weight} to each class based on its performance pertaining to the corresponding class. The aim is to mitigate the effects of training data sequences on all SSL-ART members and improve the overall performance of WESSL-ART. The experimental results on eighteen benchmark data sets, three artificially generated data sets, and a real-world case study indicate the benefits of the proposed SSL-ART and WESSL-ART models for tackling pattern classification problems.

Synthesis prediction is a key accelerator for the rapid design of advanced materials. However, determining synthesis variables such as the choice of precursor materials is challenging for inorganic materials because the sequence of reactions during heating is not well understood. In this work, we use a knowledge base of 29,900 solid-state synthesis recipes, text-mined from the scientific literature, to automatically learn which precursors to recommend for the synthesis of a novel target material. The data-driven approach learns chemical similarity of materials and refers the synthesis of a new target to precedent synthesis procedures of similar materials, mimicking human synthesis design. When proposing five precursor sets for each of 2,654 unseen test target materials, the recommendation strategy achieves a success rate of at least 82%. Our approach captures decades of heuristic synthesis data in a mathematical form, making it accessible for use in recommendation engines and autonomous laboratories.

Peer review constitutes a core component of scholarly publishing; yet it demands substantial expertise and training, and is susceptible to errors and biases. Various applications of NLP for peer reviewing assistance aim to support reviewers in this complex process, but the lack of clearly licensed datasets and multi-domain corpora prevent the systematic study of NLP for peer review. To remedy this, we introduce NLPeer -- the first ethically sourced multidomain corpus of more than 5k papers and 11k review reports from five different venues. In addition to the new datasets of paper drafts, camera-ready versions and peer reviews from the NLP community, we establish a unified data representation and augment previous peer review datasets to include parsed and structured paper representations, rich metadata and versioning information. We complement our resource with implementations and analysis of three reviewing assistance tasks, including a novel guided skimming task. Our work paves the path towards systematic, multi-faceted, evidence-based study of peer review in NLP and beyond. The data and code are publicly available.

In response to concerns in the classroom, a fleet of companies have released products claiming they can flag AI generated text. A Post examination showed it can wrongly flag human generated text as written by AI. In January, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said it created a tool that can distinguish between human and AI-generated text, but noted that it "is not fully reliable" and is wrong 9 percent of the time.

President of MBZUAI Eric Xing said current metrics to grade student's intelligence will be very quickly disrupted by artificial intelligence. The president of the world's first artificial intelligence (AI) university said the educational system's current quantifiers of "intelligence" will face disruption from the new technology, allowing students to focus on solving problems rather than simply recalling information. Eric Xing, the president of Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in Abu Dhabi, said many of the ways the current education system qualifies student intelligence are questionable, wherein it is not necessarily focusing on solving problems but rather how much knowledge one can remember. He said that because AI technologies bring about vast amounts of highly accessible knowledge easily gleaned from a textbook, current "intelligence" metrics, such as the medical or legal bar examinations, will be quickly disrupted. EXPERTS SAY AI COULD RADICALLY CHANGE'BROKEN' US EDUCATION SYSTEM FOR THE BETTER: 'READY TO BE DISRUPTED' Prior to his appointment as President of MBZUAI in Abu Dhabi, Eric Xing was a professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.