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The Download: OpenAI's data disaster, and screens in schools

MIT Technology Review

OpenAI has just over a week to comply with European data protection laws following a temporary ban in Italy, and a slew of investigations in other EU countries. If it fails, it could face hefty fines, be forced to delete data, or even be banned. But experts have told MIT Technology Review that it will be next to impossible for OpenAI to comply with the rules. That's because of the way data used to train its AI models has been collected: by hoovering up content off the internet. Since the pandemic closed schools in 2020, nearly all students have been learning on school-issued laptops or tablets. But many experts suspect that the technology may be changing how they read, as reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading on the page.


Are Screens Stealing My Childhood?

WIRED

"As a 12-year-old, I've spent much of my life on screens, in school and at home, which can definitely be fun. But I also struggle with depression, and sometimes I feel like I haven't done enough'kid' things. When I grow up, will I feel like I wasted my childhood?" For philosophical guidance on encounters with technology, open a support ticket via email; or register and post a comment below. The ability to project oneself into times yet to come, to think about the present as one phase in a much longer life, is a sign of uncommon maturity--though this prudence often comes with burdens of its own.


UT Southwestern teaches med students that 'gender is independent of physical structure, chromosomes, or genes'

FOX News

Nineteen protesters were arrested at the Kentucky Capitol on Wednesday amid a protest against a measure that would ban certain gender care for minors. Documents obtained by Fox News Digital show that University of Texas Southwestern medical students are being taught that gender is independent of physical structure. Fox News Digital obtained the documents via a FOIA request from Do No Harm, a national association of medical professionals that combats "woke" activism in the healthcare system. According to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center's Human Structure curriculum, they "explicitly acknowledge the differentiation between the terms sex and gender." RACHEL LEVINE SAYS CHANGING KIDS' GENDERS WILL SOON BE FULLY EMBRACED: 'WHEELS WILL TURN ON THIS' "The latter is a psychological, social, and cultural construct, including self-identification. Gender is independent of physical structure, chromosomes, or genes," curriculum materials read.


Progressive Transfer Learning for Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation with Multi-Fingered Anthropomorphic Hand

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Dexterous in-hand manipulation for a multi-fingered anthropomorphic hand is extremely difficult because of the high-dimensional state and action spaces, rich contact patterns between the fingers and objects. Even though deep reinforcement learning has made moderate progress and demonstrated its strong potential for manipulation, it is still faced with certain challenges, such as large-scale data collection and high sample complexity. Especially, for some slight change scenes, it always needs to re-collect vast amounts of data and carry out numerous iterations of fine-tuning. Remarkably, humans can quickly transfer learned manipulation skills to different scenarios with little supervision. Inspired by human flexible transfer learning capability, we propose a novel dexterous in-hand manipulation progressive transfer learning framework (PTL) based on efficiently utilizing the collected trajectories and the source-trained dynamics model. This framework adopts progressive neural networks for dynamics model transfer learning on samples selected by a new samples selection method based on dynamics properties, rewards and scores of the trajectories. Experimental results on contact-rich anthropomorphic hand manipulation tasks show that our method can efficiently and effectively learn in-hand manipulation skills with a few online attempts and adjustment learning under the new scene. Compared to learning from scratch, our method can reduce training time costs by 95%.


AI Autonomy : Self-Initiated Open-World Continual Learning and Adaptation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As more and more AI agents are used in practice, it is time to think about how to make these agents fully autonomous so that they can (1) learn by themselves continually in a self-motivated and self-initiated manner rather than being retrained offline periodically on the initiation of human engineers and (2) accommodate or adapt to unexpected or novel circumstances. As the real-world is an open environment that is full of unknowns or novelties, the capabilities of detecting novelties, characterizing them, accommodating/adapting to them, gathering ground-truth training data and incrementally learning the unknowns/novelties become critical in making the AI agent more and more knowledgeable, powerful and self-sustainable over time. The key challenge here is how to automate the process so that it is carried out continually on the agent's own initiative and through its own interactions with humans, other agents and the environment just like human on-the-job learning. This paper proposes a framework (called SOLA) for this learning paradigm to promote the research of building autonomous and continual learning enabled AI agents. To show feasibility, an implemented agent is also described.


On the Robustness of Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis: Rethinking Model, Data, and Training

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims at automatically inferring the specific sentiment polarities toward certain aspects of products or services behind the social media texts or reviews, which has been a fundamental application to the real-world society. Since the early 2010s, ABSA has achieved extraordinarily high accuracy with various deep neural models. However, existing ABSA models with strong in-house performances may fail to generalize to some challenging cases where the contexts are variable, i.e., low robustness to real-world environments. In this study, we propose to enhance the ABSA robustness by systematically rethinking the bottlenecks from all possible angles, including model, data, and training. First, we strengthen the current best-robust syntax-aware models by further incorporating the rich external syntactic dependencies and the labels with aspect simultaneously with a universal-syntax graph convolutional network. In the corpus perspective, we propose to automatically induce high-quality synthetic training data with various types, allowing models to learn sufficient inductive bias for better robustness. Last, we based on the rich pseudo data perform adversarial training to enhance the resistance to the context perturbation and meanwhile employ contrastive learning to reinforce the representations of instances with contrastive sentiments. Extensive robustness evaluations are conducted. The results demonstrate that our enhanced syntax-aware model achieves better robustness performances than all the state-of-the-art baselines. By additionally incorporating our synthetic corpus, the robust testing results are pushed with around 10% accuracy, which are then further improved by installing the advanced training strategies. In-depth analyses are presented for revealing the factors influencing the ABSA robustness.


HyperTuner: A Cross-Layer Multi-Objective Hyperparameter Auto-Tuning Framework for Data Analytic Services

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Hyper-parameters optimization (HPO) is vital for machine learning models. Besides model accuracy, other tuning intentions such as model training time and energy consumption are also worthy of attention from data analytic service providers. Hence, it is essential to take both model hyperparameters and system parameters into consideration to execute cross-layer multi-objective hyperparameter auto-tuning. Towards this challenging target, we propose HyperTuner in this paper. To address the formulated high-dimensional black-box multi-objective optimization problem, HyperTuner first conducts multi-objective parameter importance ranking with its MOPIR algorithm and then leverages the proposed ADUMBO algorithm to find the Pareto-optimal configuration set. During each iteration, ADUMBO selects the most promising configuration from the generated Pareto candidate set via maximizing a new well-designed metric, which can adaptively leverage the uncertainty as well as the predicted mean across all the surrogate models along with the iteration times. We evaluate HyperTuner on our local distributed TensorFlow cluster and experimental results show that it is always able to find a better Pareto configuration front superior in both convergence and diversity compared with the other four baseline algorithms. Besides, experiments with different training datasets, different optimization objectives and different machine learning platforms verify that HyperTuner can well adapt to various data analytic service scenarios.


On the Perception of Difficulty: Differences between Humans and AI

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the increased adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in industry and society, effective human-AI interaction systems are becoming increasingly important. A central challenge in the interaction of humans with AI is the estimation of difficulty for human and AI agents for single task instances. These estimations are crucial to evaluate each agent's capabilities and, thus, required to facilitate effective collaboration. So far, research in the field of human-AI interaction estimates the perceived difficulty of humans and AI independently from each other. However, the effective interaction of human and AI agents depends on metrics that accurately reflect each agent's perceived difficulty in achieving valuable outcomes. Research to date has not yet adequately examined the differences in the perceived difficulty of humans and AI. Thus, this work reviews recent research on the perceived difficulty in human-AI interaction and contributing factors to consistently compare each agent's perceived difficulty, e.g., creating the same prerequisites. Furthermore, we present an experimental design to thoroughly examine the perceived difficulty of both agents and contribute to a better understanding of the design of such systems.


Communication-Efficient Adaptive Federated Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Federated learning is a machine learning training paradigm that enables clients to jointly train models without sharing their own localized data. However, the implementation of federated learning in practice still faces numerous challenges, such as the large communication overhead due to the repetitive server-client synchronization and the lack of adaptivity by SGD-based model updates. Despite that various methods have been proposed for reducing the communication cost by gradient compression or quantization, and the federated versions of adaptive optimizers such as FedAdam are proposed to add more adaptivity, the current federated learning framework still cannot solve the aforementioned challenges all at once. In this paper, we propose a novel communication-efficient adaptive federated learning method (FedCAMS) with theoretical convergence guarantees. We show that in the nonconvex stochastic optimization setting, our proposed FedCAMS achieves the same convergence rate of $O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{TKm}})$ as its non-compressed counterparts. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks verify our theoretical analysis.


Event-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping: A Comprehensive Survey

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In recent decades, visual simultaneous localization and mapping (vSLAM) has gained significant interest in both academia and industry. It estimates camera motion and reconstructs the environment concurrently using visual sensors on a moving robot. However, conventional cameras are limited by hardware, including motion blur and low dynamic range, which can negatively impact performance in challenging scenarios like high-speed motion and high dynamic range illumination. Recent studies have demonstrated that event cameras, a new type of bio-inspired visual sensor, offer advantages such as high temporal resolution, dynamic range, low power consumption, and low latency. This paper presents a timely and comprehensive review of event-based vSLAM algorithms that exploit the benefits of asynchronous and irregular event streams for localization and mapping tasks. The review covers the working principle of event cameras and various event representations for preprocessing event data. It also categorizes event-based vSLAM methods into four main categories: feature-based, direct, motion-compensation, and deep learning methods, with detailed discussions and practical guidance for each approach. Furthermore, the paper evaluates the state-of-the-art methods on various benchmarks, highlighting current challenges and future opportunities in this emerging research area. A public repository will be maintained to keep track of the rapid developments in this field at {\url{https://github.com/kun150kun/ESLAM-survey}}.