Large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's Codex, have demonstrated their potential to generate code from natural language descriptions across a wide range of programming tasks. Several benchmarks have recently emerged to evaluate the ability of LLMs to generate functionally correct code from natural language intent with respect to a set of hidden test cases. This has enabled the research community to identify significant and reproducible advancements in LLM capabilities. However, there is currently a lack of benchmark datasets for assessing the ability of LLMs to generate functionally correct code edits based on natural language descriptions of intended changes. This paper aims to address this gap by motivating the problem NL2Fix of translating natural language descriptions of code changes (namely bug fixes described in Issue reports in repositories) into correct code fixes. To this end, we introduce Defects4J-NL2Fix, a dataset of 283 Java programs from the popular Defects4J dataset augmented with high-level descriptions of bug fixes, and empirically evaluate the performance of several state-of-the-art LLMs for the this task. Results show that these LLMS together are capable of generating plausible fixes for 64.6% of the bugs, and the best LLM-based technique can achieve up to 21.20% top-1 and 35.68% top-5 accuracy on this benchmark.

Sentence completion (SC) questions present a sentence with one or more blanks that need to be filled in, three to five possible words or phrases as options. SC questions are widely used for students learning English as a Second Language (ESL). In this paper, we present a large-scale SC dataset, \textsc{SC-Ques}, which is made up of 289,148 ESL SC questions from real-world standardized English examinations. Furthermore, we build a comprehensive benchmark of automatically solving the SC questions by training the large-scale pre-trained language models on the proposed \textsc{SC-Ques} dataset. We conduct detailed analysis of the baseline models performance, limitations and trade-offs. The data and our code are available for research purposes from: \url{https://github.com/ai4ed/SC-Ques}.

The standard class-incremental continual learning setting assumes a set of tasks seen one after the other in a fixed and predefined order. This is not very realistic in federated learning environments where each client works independently in an asynchronous manner getting data for the different tasks in time-frames and orders totally uncorrelated with the other ones. We introduce a novel federated learning setting (AFCL) where the continual learning of multiple tasks happens at each client with different orderings and in asynchronous time slots. We tackle this novel task using prototype-based learning, a representation loss, fractal pre-training, and a modified aggregation policy. Our approach, called FedSpace, effectively tackles this task as shown by the results on the CIFAR-100 dataset using 3 different federated splits with 50, 100, and 500 clients, respectively. The code and federated splits are available at https://github.com/LTTM/FedSpace.

Parallelizable optimization techniques are applied to the problem of learning in feedforward neural networks. In addition to having supe(cid:173) rior convergence properties, optimization techniques such as the Polak(cid:173) Ribiere method are also significantly more efficient than the Back(cid:173) propagation algorithm. These results are based on experiments per(cid:173) formed on small boolean learning problems and the noisy real-valued learning problem of hand-written character recognition.

We introduce a cost function for learning in feed-forward neural networks which is an explicit function of the internal representa(cid:173) tion in addition to the weights. The learning problem can then be formulated as two simple perceptrons and a search for internal representations. Back-propagation is recovered as a limit. The frequency of successful solutions is better for this algorithm than for back-propagation when weights and hidden units are updated on the same timescale i.e. once every learning step.

Feedback connections are required so that the teacher signal on the output neurons can modify weights during supervised learning. Relaxation methods are needed for learning static patterns with full-time feedback connections. Feedback network learning techniques have not achieved wide popularity because of the still greater computational efficiency of back-propagation. We show by simulation that relaxation networks of the kind we are implementing in VLSI are capable of learning large problems just like back-propagation networks. A microchip incorporates deterministic mean-field theory learning as well as stochastic Boltzmann learning.

The two well known learning algorithms of recurrent neural networks are the back-propagation (Rumelhart & el al., Werbos) and the forward propa(cid:173) gation (Williams and Zipser). The main drawback of back-propagation is its off-line backward path in time for error cumulation. This violates the on-line requirement in many practical applications. Although the forward propaga(cid:173) tion algorithm can be used in an on-line manner, the annoying drawback is the heavy computation load required to update the high dimensional sensitiv(cid:173) ity matrix (0( fir) operations for each time step). Therefore, to develop a fast forward algorithm is a challenging task.

Three methods for improving the performance of (gaussian) radial basis function (RBF) networks were tested on the NETtaik task. In RBF, a new example is classified by computing its Euclidean distance to a set of centers chosen by unsupervised methods. The application of supervised learning to learn a non-Euclidean distance metric was found to reduce the error rate of RBF networks, while supervised learning of each center's vari(cid:173) ance resulted in inferior performance. The best improvement in accuracy was achieved by networks called generalized radial basis function (GRBF) networks. In GRBF, the center locations are determined by supervised learning.

It has been observed in numerical simulations that a weight decay can im(cid:173) prove generalization in a feed-forward neural network. It is proven that a weight decay has two effects in a linear network. First, it suppresses any irrelevant components of the weight vector by choosing the smallest vector that solves the learning problem. Second, if the size is chosen right, a weight decay can suppress some of the effects of static noise on the targets, which improves generalization quite a lot. It is then shown how to extend these results to networks with hidden layers and non-linear units. Finally the theory is confirmed by some numerical simulations using the data from NetTalk.

The Government of India introduced several new policies such as the National Education Policy 2020, the first education policy of the 21st century, "based on the principle that education must develop not only cognitive capacities [...] such as critical thinking and problem solving – but also social, ethical, and emotional capacities and dispositions."