Education
Are chat bots changing the face of religion? Three faith leaders on grappling with AI
"Write a sermon in the voice of a rabbi of about 1,000 words that relates the Torah portion Vayigash to intimacy and vulnerability. That was the prompt rabbi Joshua Franklin put in ChatGPT, the results of which he used to deliver a sermon to congregants of the Jewish Center of the Hamptons in December 2022. The sermon the chatbot came up with spoke of Joseph, the son of Jacob and a prophet in the Abrahamic faiths. It quoted from a book by Brown, a professor who specializes on topics of intimacy, to define vulnerability as "the willingness to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome". Being vulnerable could mean "we are able to form deeper, more meaningful bonds with those around us", the chat bot wrote. It wasn't the greatest sermon, Franklin thought, but it was passable. And that was his point. The irony of the AI-written speech about vulnerability and human connection was that it lacked exactly what it preached: human vulnerability and emotion. "It actually had a little bit of content to it," he said. "And the congregation thought it was written by some other famous rabbis.
This economist won every bet he made on the future. Then he tested ChatGPT
The economist Bryan Caplan was sure the artificial intelligence baked into ChatGPT wasn't as smart as it was cracked up to be. Caplan, of George Mason University in Virginia, seemed in a good position to judge. He has made a name for himself by placing bets on a range of newsworthy topics, from Donald Trump's electoral chances in 2016 to future US college attendance rates. And he nearly always wins, often by betting against predictions he views as hyperbolic. That was the case with wild claims about ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that's become a worldwide phenomenon.
Data, AI and automation will never replace humans. Fact - TechNative
Weโve all heard the scare stories. The availability of endless data will allow organisations to become less reliant on the human workforce. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to be smarter than humans. And automation will take away lots of our jobs. How much of this is really true though? Despite advances in these technologies, like conversational AI, theyโre just tools to be used in the endeavour of making our lives easier and organisations more productive. But even a tool with contextual and conversational capabilities canโt provide the unique flexibility of human touch and true ingenuity that we all desire and
AutoQNN: An End-to-End Framework for Automatically Quantizing Neural Networks
Gong, Cheng, Lu, Ye, Dai, Surong, Qian, Deng, Du, Chenkun, Li, Tao
Exploring the expected quantizing scheme with suitable mixed-precision policy is the key point to compress deep neural networks (DNNs) in high efficiency and accuracy. This exploration implies heavy workloads for domain experts, and an automatic compression method is needed. However, the huge search space of the automatic method introduces plenty of computing budgets that make the automatic process challenging to be applied in real scenarios. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end framework named AutoQNN, for automatically quantizing different layers utilizing different schemes and bitwidths without any human labor. AutoQNN can seek desirable quantizing schemes and mixed-precision policies for mainstream DNN models efficiently by involving three techniques: quantizing scheme search (QSS), quantizing precision learning (QPL), and quantized architecture generation (QAG). QSS introduces five quantizing schemes and defines three new schemes as a candidate set for scheme search, and then uses the differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) algorithm to seek the layer- or model-desired scheme from the set. QPL is the first method to learn mixed-precision policies by reparameterizing the bitwidths of quantizing schemes, to the best of our knowledge. QPL optimizes both classification loss and precision loss of DNNs efficiently and obtains the relatively optimal mixed-precision model within limited model size and memory footprint. QAG is designed to convert arbitrary architectures into corresponding quantized ones without manual intervention, to facilitate end-to-end neural network quantization. We have implemented AutoQNN and integrated it into Keras. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AutoQNN can consistently outperform state-of-the-art quantization.
On Efficient Training of Large-Scale Deep Learning Models: A Literature Review
Shen, Li, Sun, Yan, Yu, Zhiyuan, Ding, Liang, Tian, Xinmei, Tao, Dacheng
The field of deep learning has witnessed significant progress, particularly in computer vision (CV), natural language processing (NLP), and speech. The use of large-scale models trained on vast amounts of data holds immense promise for practical applications, enhancing industrial productivity and facilitating social development. With the increasing demands on computational capacity, though numerous studies have explored the efficient training, a comprehensive summarization on acceleration techniques of training deep learning models is still much anticipated. In this survey, we present a detailed review for training acceleration. We consider the fundamental update formulation and split its basic components into five main perspectives: (1) data-centric: including dataset regularization, data sampling, and data-centric curriculum learning techniques, which can significantly reduce the computational complexity of the data samples; (2) model-centric, including acceleration of basic modules, compression training, model initialization and model-centric curriculum learning techniques, which focus on accelerating the training via reducing the calculations on parameters; (3) optimization-centric, including the selection of learning rate, the employment of large batchsize, the designs of efficient objectives, and model average techniques, which pay attention to the training policy and improving the generality for the large-scale models; (4) budgeted training, including some distinctive acceleration methods on source-constrained situations; (5) system-centric, including some efficient open-source distributed libraries/systems which provide adequate hardware support for the implementation of acceleration algorithms. By presenting this comprehensive taxonomy, our survey presents a comprehensive review to understand the general mechanisms within each component and their joint interaction.
Complex QA and language models hybrid architectures, Survey
Daull, Xavier, Bellot, Patrice, Bruno, Emmanuel, Martin, Vincent, Murisasco, Elisabeth
This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of language models architectures and strategies for "complex" question-answering (QA, CQA, CPS) with a focus on hybridization. Large Language Models (LLM) are good at leveraging public data on standard problems but once you want to tackle more specific complex questions or problems (e.g. How does the concept of personal freedom vary between different cultures ? What is the best mix of power generation methods to reduce climate change ?) you may need specific architecture, knowledge, skills, methods, sensitive data protection, explainability, human approval and versatile feedback... Recent projects like ChatGPT and GALACTICA have allowed non-specialists to grasp the great potential as well as the equally strong limitations of LLM in complex QA. In this paper, we start by reviewing required skills and evaluation techniques. We integrate findings from the robust community edited research papers BIG, BLOOM and HELM which open source, benchmark and analyze limits and challenges of LLM in terms of tasks complexity and strict evaluation on accuracy (e.g. fairness, robustness, toxicity, ...) as a baseline. We discuss some challenges associated with complex QA, including domain adaptation, decomposition and efficient multi-step QA, long form and non-factoid QA, safety and multi-sensitivity data protection, multimodal search, hallucinations, explainability and truthfulness, temporal reasoning. We analyze current solutions and promising research trends, using elements such as: hybrid LLM architectural patterns, training and prompting strategies, active human reinforcement learning supervised with AI, neuro-symbolic and structured knowledge grounding, program synthesis, iterated decomposition and others.
Towards Automated Urban Planning: When Generative and ChatGPT-like AI Meets Urban Planning
Wang, Dongjie, Lu, Chang-Tien, Fu, Yanjie
The two fields of urban planning and artificial intelligence (AI) arose and developed separately. However, there is now cross-pollination and increasing interest in both fields to benefit from the advances of the other. In the present paper, we introduce the importance of urban planning from the sustainability, living, economic, disaster, and environmental perspectives. We review the fundamental concepts of urban planning and relate these concepts to crucial open problems of machine learning, including adversarial learning, generative neural networks, deep encoder-decoder networks, conversational AI, and geospatial and temporal machine learning, thereby assaying how AI can contribute to modern urban planning. Thus, a central problem is automated land-use configuration, which is formulated as the generation of land uses and building configuration for a target area from surrounding geospatial, human mobility, social media, environment, and economic activities. Finally, we delineate some implications of AI for urban planning and propose key research areas at the intersection of both topics.
Continuous Pseudo-Labeling from the Start
Berrebbi, Dan, Collobert, Ronan, Bengio, Samy, Jaitly, Navdeep, Likhomanenko, Tatiana
Self-training (ST), or pseudo-labeling has sparked significant interest in the automatic speech recognition (ASR) community recently because of its success in harnessing unlabeled data. Unlike prior semi-supervised learning approaches that relied on iteratively regenerating pseudo-labels (PLs) from a trained model and using them to train a new model, recent state-of-the-art methods perform `continuous training' where PLs are generated using a very recent version of the model being trained. Nevertheless, these approaches still rely on bootstrapping the ST using an initial supervised learning phase where the model is trained on labeled data alone. We believe this has the potential for over-fitting to the labeled dataset in low resource settings and that ST from the start of training should reduce over-fitting. In this paper we show how we can do this by dynamically controlling the evolution of PLs during the training process in ASR. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that shows the feasibility of generating PLs from the very start of the training. We are able to achieve this using two techniques that avoid instabilities which lead to degenerate models that do not generalize. Firstly, we control the evolution of PLs through a curriculum that uses the online changes in PLs to control the membership of the cache of PLs and improve generalization. Secondly, we find that by sampling transcriptions from the predictive distribution, rather than only using the best transcription, we can stabilize training further. With these techniques, our ST models match prior works without an external language model.
Representer Theorems for Metric and Preference Learning: A Geometric Perspective
We explore the metric and preference learning problem in Hilbert spaces. We obtain a novel representer theorem for the simultaneous task of metric and preference learning. Our key observation is that the representer theorem can be formulated with respect to the norm induced by the inner product inherent in the problem structure. Additionally, we demonstrate how our framework can be applied to the task of metric learning from triplet comparisons and show that it leads to a simple and self-contained representer theorem for this task. In the case of Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHS), we demonstrate that the solution to the learning problem can be expressed using kernel terms, akin to classical representer theorems.
Neural Operator: Learning Maps Between Function Spaces
Kovachki, Nikola, Li, Zongyi, Liu, Burigede, Azizzadenesheli, Kamyar, Bhattacharya, Kaushik, Stuart, Andrew, Anandkumar, Anima
The classical development of neural networks has primarily focused on learning mappings between finite dimensional Euclidean spaces or finite sets. We propose a generalization of neural networks to learn operators, termed neural operators, that map between infinite dimensional function spaces. We formulate the neural operator as a composition of linear integral operators and nonlinear activation functions. We prove a universal approximation theorem for our proposed neural operator, showing that it can approximate any given nonlinear continuous operator. The proposed neural operators are also discretization-invariant, i.e., they share the same model parameters among different discretization of the underlying function spaces. Furthermore, we introduce four classes of efficient parameterization, viz., graph neural operators, multi-pole graph neural operators, low-rank neural operators, and Fourier neural operators. An important application for neural operators is learning surrogate maps for the solution operators of partial differential equations (PDEs). We consider standard PDEs such as the Burgers, Darcy subsurface flow, and the Navier-Stokes equations, and show that the proposed neural operators have superior performance compared to existing machine learning based methodologies, while being several orders of magnitude faster than conventional PDE solvers.