In this work, we provide a recipe for training machine translation models in a limited resource setting by leveraging synthetic target data generated using a large pre-trained model. We show that consistently across different benchmarks in bilingual, multilingual, and speech translation setups, training models on synthetic targets outperforms training on the actual ground-truth data. This performance gap grows bigger with increasing limits on the amount of available resources in the form of the size of the dataset and the number of parameters in the model. We also provide preliminary analysis into whether this boost in performance is linked to ease of optimization or more deterministic nature of the predictions, and whether this paradigm leads to better out-of-distribution performance across different testing domains.

The agent learns to organize decision behavior to achieve a behavioral goal, such as reward maximization, and reinforcement learning is often used for this optimization. Learning an optimal behavioral strategy is difficult under the uncertainty that events necessary for learning are only partially observable, called as Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). However, the real-world environment also gives many events irrelevant to reward delivery and an optimal behavioral strategy. The conventional methods in POMDP, which attempt to infer transition rules among the entire observations, including irrelevant states, are ineffective in such an environment. Supposing Redundantly Observable Markov Decision Process (ROMDP), here we propose a method for goal-oriented reinforcement learning to efficiently learn state transition rules among reward-related "core states'' from redundant observations. Starting with a small number of initial core states, our model gradually adds new core states to the transition diagram until it achieves an optimal behavioral strategy consistent with the Bellman equation. We demonstrate that the resultant inference model outperforms the conventional method for POMDP. We emphasize that our model only containing the core states has high explainability. Furthermore, the proposed method suits online learning as it suppresses memory consumption and improves learning speed.

Camera images are ubiquitous in machine learning research. They also play a central role in the delivery of important services spanning medicine and environmental surveying. However, the application of machine learning models in these domains has been limited because of robustness concerns. A primary failure mode are performance drops due to differences between the training and deployment data. While there are methods to prospectively validate the robustness of machine learning models to such dataset drifts, existing approaches do not account for explicit models of the primary object of interest: the data. This limits our ability to study and understand the relationship between data generation and downstream machine learning model performance in a physically accurate manner. In this study, we demonstrate how to overcome this limitation by pairing traditional machine learning with physical optics to obtain explicit and differentiable data models. We demonstrate how such data models can be constructed for image data and used to control downstream machine learning model performance related to dataset drift. The findings are distilled into three applications. First, drift synthesis enables the controlled generation of physically faithful drift test cases to power model selection and targeted generalization. Second, the gradient connection between machine learning task model and data model allows advanced, precise tolerancing of task model sensitivity to changes in the data generation. These drift forensics can be used to precisely specify the acceptable data environments in which a task model may be run. Third, drift optimization opens up the possibility to create drifts that can help the task model learn better faster, effectively optimizing the data generating process itself. A guide to access the open code and datasets is available at https://github.com/aiaudit-org/raw2logit.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a series of natural language understanding tasks. However, these LLMs might rely on dataset bias and artifacts as shortcuts for prediction. This has significantly affected their generalizability and adversarial robustness. In this paper, we provide a review of recent developments that address the shortcut learning and robustness challenge of LLMs. We first introduce the concepts of shortcut learning of language models. We then introduce methods to identify shortcut learning behavior in language models, characterize the reasons for shortcut learning, as well as introduce mitigation solutions. Finally, we discuss key research challenges and potential research directions in order to advance the field of LLMs.

In this paper, we explore the following question: Are synonym substitution attacks really synonym substitution attacks (SSAs)? We approach this question by examining how SSAs replace words in the original sentence and show that there are still unresolved obstacles that make current SSAs generate invalid adversarial samples. We reveal that four widely used word substitution methods generate a large fraction of invalid substitution words that are ungrammatical or do not preserve the original sentence's semantics. Next, we show that the semantic and grammatical constraints used in SSAs for detecting invalid word replacements are highly insufficient in detecting invalid adversarial samples.

This paper introduces Enactive Artificial Intelligence (eAI) as an intersectional gender-inclusive stance towards AI. AI design is an enacted human sociocultural practice that reflects human culture and values. Unrepresentative AI design could lead to social marginalisation. Section 1, drawing from radical enactivism, outlines embodied cultural practices. In Section 2, explores how intersectional gender intertwines with technoscience as a sociocultural practice. Section 3 focuses on subverting gender norms in the specific case of Robot-Human Interaction in AI. Finally, Section 4 identifies four vectors of ethics: explainability, fairness, transparency, and auditability for adopting an intersectionality-inclusive stance in developing gender-inclusive AI and subverting existing gender norms in robot design.

In this paper we present a neurosymbolic architecture for coupling language-guided visual reasoning with robot manipulation. A non-expert human user can prompt the robot using unconstrained natural language, providing a referring expression (REF), a question (VQA), or a grasp action instruction. The system tackles all cases in a task-agnostic fashion through the utilization of a shared library of primitive skills. Each primitive handles an independent sub-task, such as reasoning about visual attributes, spatial relation comprehension, logic and enumeration, as well as arm control. A language parser maps the input query to an executable program composed of such primitives, depending on the context. While some primitives are purely symbolic operations (e.g. counting), others are trainable neural functions (e.g. visual grounding), therefore marrying the interpretability and systematic generalization benefits of discrete symbolic approaches with the scalability and representational power of deep networks. We generate a 3D vision-and-language synthetic dataset of tabletop scenes in a simulation environment to train our approach and perform extensive evaluations in both synthetic and real-world scenes. Results showcase the benefits of our approach in terms of accuracy, sample-efficiency, and robustness to the user's vocabulary, while being transferable to real-world scenes with few-shot visual fine-tuning. Finally, we integrate our method with a robot framework and demonstrate how it can serve as an interpretable solution for an interactive object-picking task, both in simulation and with a real robot. We make our datasets available in https://gtziafas.github.io/neurosymbolic-manipulation.

Graph Representation Learning (GRL) methods opened new avenues for addressing complex, real-world problems represented by graphs. However, many graphs used in these applications comprise millions of nodes and billions of edges and are beyond the capabilities of current methods and software implementations. We present GRAPE, a software resource for graph processing and embedding that can scale with big graphs by using specialized and smart data structures, algorithms, and a fast parallel implementation of random walk-based methods. Compared with state-of-the-art software resources, GRAPE shows an improvement of orders of magnitude in empirical space and time complexity, as well as a competitive edge and node label prediction performance. GRAPE comprises about 1.7 million well-documented lines of Python and Rust code and provides 69 node embedding methods, 25 inference models, a collection of efficient graph processing utilities and over 80,000 graphs from the literature and other sources. Standardized interfaces allow seamless integration of third-party libraries, while ready-to-use and modular pipelines permit an easy-to-use evaluation of GRL methods, therefore also positioning GRAPE as a software resource to perform a fair comparison between methods and libraries for graph processing and embedding.

Machine generated text is increasingly difficult to distinguish from human authored text. Powerful open-source models are freely available, and user-friendly tools that democratize access to generative models are proliferating. ChatGPT, which was released shortly after the first edition of this survey, epitomizes these trends. The great potential of state-of-the-art natural language generation (NLG) systems is tempered by the multitude of avenues for abuse. Detection of machine generated text is a key countermeasure for reducing abuse of NLG models, with significant technical challenges and numerous open problems. We provide a survey that includes both 1) an extensive analysis of threat models posed by contemporary NLG systems, and 2) the most complete review of machine generated text detection methods to date. This survey places machine generated text within its cybersecurity and social context, and provides strong guidance for future work addressing the most critical threat models, and ensuring detection systems themselves demonstrate trustworthiness through fairness, robustness, and accountability.

Federated semi-supervised learning (FSSL), facilitates labeled clients and unlabeled clients jointly training a global model without sharing private data. Existing FSSL methods predominantly employ pseudo-labeling and consistency regularization to exploit the knowledge of unlabeled data, achieving notable success in raw data utilization. However, these training processes are hindered by large deviations between uploaded local models of labeled and unlabeled clients, as well as confirmation bias introduced by noisy pseudo-labels, both of which negatively affect the global model's performance. In this paper, we present a novel FSSL method called Dual Class-aware Contrastive Federated Semi-Supervised Learning (DCCFSSL). This method accounts for both the local class-aware distribution of each client's data and the global class-aware distribution of all clients' data within the feature space. By implementing a dual class-aware contrastive module, DCCFSSL establishes a unified training objective for different clients to tackle large deviations and incorporates contrastive information in the feature space to mitigate confirmation bias. Moreover, DCCFSSL introduces an authentication-reweighted aggregation technique to improve the server's aggregation robustness. Our comprehensive experiments show that DCCFSSL outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark datasets and surpasses the FedAvg with relabeled unlabeled clients on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and STL-10 datasets. To our knowledge, we are the first to present an FSSL method that utilizes only 10\% labeled clients, while still achieving superior performance compared to standard federated supervised learning, which uses all clients with labeled data.