Education
Online Prediction in Sub-linear Space
We provide the first sub-linear space and sub-linear regret algorithm for online learning with expert advice (against an oblivious adversary), addressing an open question raised recently by Srinivas, Woodruff, Xu and Zhou (STOC 2022). We also demonstrate a separation between oblivious and (strong) adaptive adversaries by proving a linear memory lower bound of any sub-linear regret algorithm against an adaptive adversary. Our algorithm is based on a novel pool selection procedure that bypasses the traditional wisdom of leader selection for online learning, and a generic reduction that transforms any weakly sub-linear regret $o(T)$ algorithm to $T^{1-\alpha}$ regret algorithm, which may be of independent interest. Our lower bound utilizes the connection of no-regret learning and equilibrium computation in zero-sum games, leading to a proof of a strong lower bound against an adaptive adversary.
Learning Semantic Textual Similarity via Topic-informed Discrete Latent Variables
Yu, Erxin, Du, Lan, Jin, Yuan, Wei, Zhepei, Chang, Yi
Recently, discrete latent variable models have received a surge of interest in both Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV), attributed to their comparable performance to the continuous counterparts in representation learning, while being more interpretable in their predictions. In this paper, we develop a topic-informed discrete latent variable model for semantic textual similarity, which learns a shared latent space for sentence-pair representation via vector quantization. Compared with previous models limited to local semantic contexts, our model can explore richer semantic information via topic modeling. We further boost the performance of semantic similarity by injecting the quantized representation into a transformer-based language model with a well-designed semantic-driven attention mechanism. We demonstrate, through extensive experiments across various English language datasets, that our model is able to surpass several strong neural baselines in semantic textual similarity tasks.
End-to-End Evaluation of a Spoken Dialogue System for Learning Basic Mathematics
Okur, Eda, Sahay, Saurav, Alba, Roddy Fuentes, Nachman, Lama
The advances in language-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies applied to build educational applications can present AI for social-good opportunities with a broader positive impact. Across many disciplines, enhancing the quality of mathematics education is crucial in building critical thinking and problem-solving skills at younger ages. Conversational AI systems have started maturing to a point where they could play a significant role in helping students learn fundamental math concepts. This work presents a task-oriented Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) built to support play-based learning of basic math concepts for early childhood education. The system has been evaluated via real-world deployments at school while the students are practicing early math concepts with multimodal interactions. We discuss our efforts to improve the SDS pipeline built for math learning, for which we explore utilizing MathBERT representations for potential enhancement to the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) module. We perform an end-to-end evaluation using real-world deployment outputs from the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Intent Recognition, and Dialogue Manager (DM) components to understand how error propagation affects the overall performance in real-world scenarios.
Automatic Creativity Measurement in Scratch Programs Across Modalities
Kovalkov, Anastasia, Paaรen, Benjamin, Segal, Avi, Pinkwart, Niels, Gal, Kobi
Promoting creativity is considered an important goal of education, but creativity is notoriously hard to measure.In this paper, we make the journey fromdefining a formal measure of creativity that is efficientlycomputable to applying the measure in a practical domain. The measure is general and relies on coretheoretical concepts in creativity theory, namely fluency, flexibility, and originality, integratingwith prior cognitive science literature. We adapted the general measure for projects in the popular visual programming language Scratch.We designed a machine learning model for predicting the creativity of Scratch projects, trained and evaluated on human expert creativity assessments in an extensive user study. Our results show that opinions about creativity in Scratch varied widely across experts. The automatic creativity assessment aligned with the assessment of the human experts more than the experts agreed with each other. This is a first step in providing computational models for measuring creativity that can be applied to educational technologies, and to scale up the benefit of creativity education in schools.
Pretraining in Deep Reinforcement Learning: A Survey
Xie, Zhihui, Lin, Zichuan, Li, Junyou, Li, Shuai, Ye, Deheng
The past few years have seen rapid progress in combining reinforcement learning (RL) with deep learning. Various breakthroughs ranging from games to robotics have spurred the interest in designing sophisticated RL algorithms and systems. However, the prevailing workflow in RL is to learn tabula rasa, which may incur computational inefficiency. This precludes continuous deployment of RL algorithms and potentially excludes researchers without large-scale computing resources. In many other areas of machine learning, the pretraining paradigm has shown to be effective in acquiring transferable knowledge, which can be utilized for a variety of downstream tasks. Recently, we saw a surge of interest in Pretraining for Deep RL with promising results. However, much of the research has been based on different experimental settings. Due to the nature of RL, pretraining in this field is faced with unique challenges and hence requires new design principles. In this survey, we seek to systematically review existing works in pretraining for deep reinforcement learning, provide a taxonomy of these methods, discuss each sub-field, and bring attention to open problems and future directions.
Adaptive User-Centered Multimodal Interaction towards Reliable and Trusted Automotive Interfaces
With the recently increasing capabilities of modern vehicles, novel approaches for interaction emerged that go beyond traditional touch-based and voice command approaches. Therefore, hand gestures, head pose, eye gaze, and speech have been extensively investigated in automotive applications for object selection and referencing. Despite these significant advances, existing approaches mostly employ a one-model-fits-all approach unsuitable for varying user behavior and individual differences. Moreover, current referencing approaches either consider these modalities separately or focus on a stationary situation, whereas the situation in a moving vehicle is highly dynamic and subject to safety-critical constraints. In this paper, I propose a research plan for a user-centered adaptive multimodal fusion approach for referencing external objects from a moving vehicle. The proposed plan aims to provide an open-source framework for user-centered adaptation and personalization using user observations and heuristics, multimodal fusion, clustering, transfer-of-learning for model adaptation, and continuous learning, moving towards trusted human-centered artificial intelligence.
Bayesian Disturbance Injection: Robust Imitation Learning of Flexible Policies for Robot Manipulation
Oh, Hanbit, Sasaki, Hikaru, Michael, Brendan, Matsubara, Takamitsu
Humans demonstrate a variety of interesting behavioral characteristics when performing tasks, such as selecting between seemingly equivalent optimal actions, performing recovery actions when deviating from the optimal trajectory, or moderating actions in response to sensed risks. However, imitation learning, which attempts to teach robots to perform these same tasks from observations of human demonstrations, often fails to capture such behavior. Specifically, commonly used learning algorithms embody inherent contradictions between the learning assumptions (e.g., single optimal action) and actual human behavior (e.g., multiple optimal actions), thereby limiting robot generalizability, applicability, and demonstration feasibility. To address this, this paper proposes designing imitation learning algorithms with a focus on utilizing human behavioral characteristics, thereby embodying principles for capturing and exploiting actual demonstrator behavioral characteristics. This paper presents the first imitation learning framework, Bayesian Disturbance Injection (BDI), that typifies human behavioral characteristics by incorporating model flexibility, robustification, and risk sensitivity. Bayesian inference is used to learn flexible non-parametric multi-action policies, while simultaneously robustifying policies by injecting risk-sensitive disturbances to induce human recovery action and ensuring demonstration feasibility. Our method is evaluated through risk-sensitive simulations and real-robot experiments (e.g., table-sweep task, shaft-reach task and shaft-insertion task) using the UR5e 6-DOF robotic arm, to demonstrate the improved characterisation of behavior. Results show significant improvement in task performance, through improved flexibility, robustness as well as demonstration feasibility.
ML Pipelines on Google Cloud
In this course, you will be learning from ML Engineers and Trainers who work with the state-of-the-art development of ML pipelines here at Google Cloud. The first few modules will cover about TensorFlow Extended (or TFX), which is Google's production machine learning platform based on TensorFlow for management of ML pipelines and metadata. You will learn about pipeline components and pipeline orchestration with TFX. You will also learn how you can automate your pipeline through continuous integration and continuous deployment, and how to manage ML metadata. Then we will change focus to discuss how we can automate and reuse ML pipelines across multiple ML frameworks such as tensorflow, pytorch, scikit learn, and xgboost.
100+ Best Coursera Courses, Specializations, Classes & Certifications 2022
Are you looking for Best Free Coursera Courses in 2022? You can earn a Coursera Certificate with Coursera free courses by applying for a Coursera scholarship and by doing Coursera paid courses. You are going to get a 7-day free trial on Coursera when you join and start your very first subscription to do Coursera Specializations for free. If you do not cancel your free trial you will be automatically transferred to paid subscription on the 8th Day. You can continue your Coursera Classes either by using Coursera App on mobile or any other device. This course provides a broad introduction to machine learning, data mining, and statistical pattern recognition. Learn and launch your career in Data Science with these best Coursera courses. A nine-course introduction to data science developed and taught by leading instructors. Develop programs to gather, clean, analyze, and visualize data. You will get new insights into your data. Learn to apply data science methods and techniques, and acquire analytical skills.
Developing Decentralised Resilience to Malicious Influence in Collective Perception Problem
Wise, Chris, Hussein, Aya, El-Fiqi, Heba
In collective decision-making, designing algorithms that use only local information to effect swarm-level behaviour is a non-trivial problem. We used machine learning techniques to teach swarm members to map their local perceptions of the environment to an optimal action. A curriculum inspired by Machine Education approaches was designed to facilitate this learning process and teach the members the skills required for optimal performance in the collective perception problem. We extended upon previous approaches by creating a curriculum that taught agents resilience to malicious influence. The experimental results show that well-designed rules-based algorithms can produce effective agents. When performing opinion fusion, we implemented decentralised resilience by having agents dynamically weight received opinion. We found a non-significant difference between constant and dynamic weights, suggesting that momentum-based opinion fusion is perhaps already a resilience mechanism.