Software configurations play a crucial role in determining the behavior of software systems. In order to ensure safe and error-free operation, it is necessary to identify the correct configuration, along with their valid bounds and rules, which are commonly referred to as software specifications. As software systems grow in complexity and scale, the number of configurations and associated specifications required to ensure the correct operation can become large and prohibitively difficult to manipulate manually. Due to the fast pace of software development, it is often the case that correct software specifications are not thoroughly checked or validated within the software itself. Rather, they are frequently discussed and documented in a variety of external sources, including software manuals, code comments, and online discussion forums. Therefore, it is hard for the system administrator to know the correct specifications of configurations due to the lack of clarity, organization, and a centralized unified source to look at. To address this challenge, we propose SpecSyn a framework that leverages a state-of-the-art large language model to automatically synthesize software specifications from natural language sources. Our approach formulates software specification synthesis as a sequence-to-sequence learning problem and investigates the extraction of specifications from large contextual texts. This is the first work that uses a large language model for end-to-end specification synthesis from natural language texts. Empirical results demonstrate that our system outperforms prior the state-of-the-art specification synthesis tool by 21% in terms of F1 score and can find specifications from single as well as multiple sentences.

Deep generative models are becoming increasingly powerful, now generating diverse high fidelity photo-realistic samples given text prompts. Have they reached the point where models of natural images can be used for generative data augmentation, helping to improve challenging discriminative tasks? We show that large-scale text-to image diffusion models can be fine-tuned to produce class conditional models with SOTA FID (1.76 at 256x256 resolution) and Inception Score (239 at 256x256). The model also yields a new SOTA in Classification Accuracy Scores (64.96 for 256x256 generative samples, improving to 69.24 for 1024x1024 samples). Augmenting the ImageNet training set with samples from the resulting models yields significant improvements in ImageNet classification accuracy over strong ResNet and Vision Transformer baselines.

The potential of offline reinforcement learning (RL) is that high-capacity models trained on large, heterogeneous datasets can lead to agents that generalize broadly, analogously to similar advances in vision and NLP. However, recent works argue that offline RL methods encounter unique challenges to scaling up model capacity. Drawing on the learnings from these works, we re-examine previous design choices and find that with appropriate choices: ResNets, cross-entropy based distributional backups, and feature normalization, offline Q-learning algorithms exhibit strong performance that scales with model capacity. Using multi-task Atari as a testbed for scaling and generalization, we train a single policy on 40 games with near-human performance using up-to 80 million parameter networks, finding that model performance scales favorably with capacity. In contrast to prior work, we extrapolate beyond dataset performance even when trained entirely on a large (400M transitions) but highly suboptimal dataset (51% human-level performance). Compared to return-conditioned supervised approaches, offline Q-learning scales similarly with model capacity and has better performance, especially when the dataset is suboptimal. Finally, we show that offline Q-learning with a diverse dataset is sufficient to learn powerful representations that facilitate rapid transfer to novel games and fast online learning on new variations of a training game, improving over existing state-of-the-art representation learning approaches.

Reinforcement learning based recommender systems (RL-based RS) aim at learning a good policy from a batch of collected data, by casting recommendations to multi-step decision-making tasks. However, current RL-based RS research commonly has a large reality gap. In this paper, we introduce the first open-source real-world dataset, RL4RS, hoping to replace the artificial datasets and semi-simulated RS datasets previous studies used due to the resource limitation of the RL-based RS domain. Unlike academic RL research, RL-based RS suffers from the difficulties of being well-validated before deployment. We attempt to propose a new systematic evaluation framework, including evaluation of environment simulation, evaluation on environments, counterfactual policy evaluation, and evaluation on environments built from test set. In summary, the RL4RS (Reinforcement Learning for Recommender Systems), a new resource with special concerns on the reality gaps, contains two real-world datasets, data understanding tools, tuned simulation environments, related advanced RL baselines, batch RL baselines, and counterfactual policy evaluation algorithms. The RL4RS suite can be found at https://github.com/fuxiAIlab/RL4RS. In addition to the RL-based recommender systems, we expect the resource to contribute to research in applied reinforcement learning.

Most value function learning algorithms in reinforcement learning are based on the mean squared (projected) Bellman error. However, squared errors are known to be sensitive to outliers, both skewing the solution of the objective and resulting in high-magnitude and high-variance gradients. To control these high-magnitude updates, typical strategies in RL involve clipping gradients, clipping rewards, rescaling rewards, or clipping errors. While these strategies appear to be related to robust losses -- like the Huber loss -- they are built on semi-gradient update rules which do not minimize a known loss. In this work, we build on recent insights reformulating squared Bellman errors as a saddlepoint optimization problem and propose a saddlepoint reformulation for a Huber Bellman error and Absolute Bellman error. We start from a formalization of robust losses, then derive sound gradient-based approaches to minimize these losses in both the online off-policy prediction and control settings. We characterize the solutions of the robust losses, providing insight into the problem settings where the robust losses define notably better solutions than the mean squared Bellman error. Finally, we show that the resulting gradient-based algorithms are more stable, for both prediction and control, with less sensitivity to meta-parameters.

This article is part of our series on big ideas for the Universities Accord. The federal government is calling ideas to "reshape and reimagine higher education, and set it up for the next decade and beyond". A review team is due to finish a draft report in June and a final report in December 2023. Compulsory tests, essays, regular grades and timed exams are considered a given in university life. But the Universities Accord should change this.

Australian universities are split on whether to adopt a new tool which claims to detect AI-generated plagiarism with a near-perfect success rate, citing concerns over out-of-date models and the minimal notice the sector was given to assess the issue. Turnitin's detection tool, launched this month, cites a 98% efficacy rate at picking up the "high probability" of AI. Of almost a dozen universities who responded to Guardian Australia, the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales and Western Sydney University have adopted the tool and several were considering integrating it into their detection programs. But others said the Turnitin tool was rushed and raised concerns over its efficacy. Deakin University associate professor in digital learning, Trish McCluskey, said despite Turnitin's alleged high efficiency rate, it hadn't had the opportunity to test the claim prior to the public release of the tool.

In this course, you will learn about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning as it applies to HR Management. You will explore concepts related to the role of data in machine learning, AI application, limitations of using data in HR decisions, and how bias can be mitigated using blockchain technology. Machine learning powers are becoming faster and more streamlined, and you will gain firsthand knowledge of how to use current and emerging technology to manage the entire employee lifecycle. Through study and analysis, you will learn how to sift through tremendous volumes of data to identify patterns and make predictions that will be in the best interest of your business. By the end of this course, you'll be able to identify how you can incorporate AI to streamline all HR functions and how to work with data to take advantage of the power of machine learning.

AI-powered platforms offer personalized learning experiences tailored to individual needs, interests, and goals. By employing machine learning algorithms, these platforms can analyze your learning patterns, strengths, and weaknesses to deliver a unique learning plan. AI can be used to develop advanced problem-solving skills and foster critical thinking by offering various interactive tools and resources that promote deeper engagement with learning materials. AI-powered learning platforms can leverage gamification techniques to make learning more engaging and fun. By incorporating game elements into the learning experience, users can stay motivated, retain more information, and develop new skills more effectively.

Data science is the field of finding out about that involves the extraction, analysis, and interpretation of data to find insights and support decision-making. It involves a combination of statistics, mathematics, computer science, and domain expertise to perceive patterns and trends in data, and then use that records to inform commercial enterprise decisions, force innovation, and resolve complicated problems. Artificial intelligence or brain (AI), on the other hand, is the field of study that focuses on designing intelligent models that can perform tasks like human intelligence, such as speech detection models, understanding natural language, making predictions using data, and figuring out patterns in data. It includes growing algorithms and laptop packages that can analyze data, make decisions, and enhance over time. Data science and AI are closely related, as AI depends on the processing and analysis of large amounts of facts to analyze and make decisions.