We're seeing AI projects shift from hype to impact, largely because the right roles are getting involved to provide the business context that has been missing previously. Domain expertise is key; machines don't have the depth of context that people have, and people need to know the business and data well enough to understand which actions to take based on any insights or recommendations that are surfaced. When it comes to scaling AI, many leaders think they have a people problem--specifically, not enough data scientists. But not every business problem is a data science problem. Or at least, not every business challenge should be thrown at your data science team.

E system, which takes user-submitted passages as input and automatically generates grammar practice exercises that can be completed while reading. Multiplechoice practice items are generated for a variety of different grammar constructs: punctuation, articles, conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, verbs, and nouns. We also conducted a large-scale human evaluation with around Figure 1: The components of a grammar question are: 4,500 multiple-choice practice items. We notice source sentence, target, and distractors. The contextual for 95% of items, a majority of raters out log probability score from BERT is shown to the right of five were able to identify the correct answer of each choice. In the actual task the target word is and for 85% of cases, raters agree that there is replaced by a blank.

Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) aims to generate a correct sentence from an erroneous sequence, where different kinds of errors are mixed. This paper divides the CGEC task into two steps, namely spelling error correction and grammatical error correction. Specifically, we propose a novel zero-shot approach for spelling error correction, which is simple but effective, obtaining a high precision to avoid error accumulation of the pipeline structure. To handle grammatical error correction, we design part-of-speech (POS) features and semantic class features to enhance the neural network model, and propose an auxiliary task to predict the POS sequence of the target sentence. Our proposed framework achieves a 42.11 F0.5 score on CGEC dataset without using any synthetic data or data augmentation methods, which outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by a wide margin of 1.30 points. Moreover, our model produces meaningful POS representations that capture different POS words and convey reasonable POS transition rules.

TREs are widely, and increasingly used to support statistical analysis of sensitive data across a range of sectors (e.g., health, police, tax and education) as they enable secure and transparent research whilst protecting data confidentiality. There is an increasing desire from academia and industry to train AI models in TREs. The field of AI is developing quickly with applications including spotting human errors, streamlining processes, task automation and decision support. These complex AI models require more information to describe and reproduce, increasing the possibility that sensitive personal data can be inferred from such descriptions. TREs do not have mature processes and controls against these risks. This is a complex topic, and it is unreasonable to expect all TREs to be aware of all risks or that TRE researchers have addressed these risks in AI-specific training. GRAIMATTER has developed a draft set of usable recommendations for TREs to guard against the additional risks when disclosing trained AI models from TREs. The development of these recommendations has been funded by the GRAIMATTER UKRI DARE UK sprint research project. This version of our recommendations was published at the end of the project in September 2022. During the course of the project, we have identified many areas for future investigations to expand and test these recommendations in practice. Therefore, we expect that this document will evolve over time.

The bottleneck of distributed edge learning (DEL) over wireless has shifted from computing to communication, primarily the aggregation-averaging (Agg-Avg) process of DEL. The existing transmission control protocol (TCP)-based data networking schemes for DEL are application-agnostic and fail to deliver adjustments according to application layer requirements. As a result, they introduce massive excess time and undesired issues such as unfairness and stragglers. Other prior mitigation solutions have significant limitations as they balance data flow rates from workers across paths but often incur imbalanced backlogs when the paths exhibit variance, causing stragglers. To facilitate a more productive DEL, we develop a hybrid multipath TCP (MPTCP) by combining model-based and deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based MPTCP for DEL that strives to realize quicker iteration of DEL and better fairness (by ameliorating stragglers). Hybrid MPTCP essentially integrates two radical TCP developments: i) successful existing model-based MPTCP control strategies and ii) advanced emerging DRL-based techniques, and introduces a novel hybrid MPTCP data transport for easing the communication of the Agg-Avg process. Extensive emulation results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid MPTCP can overcome excess time consumption and ameliorate the application layer unfairness of DEL effectively without injecting additional inconstancy and stragglers.

Question-answering datasets require a broad set of reasoning skills. We show how to use question decompositions to teach language models these broad reasoning skills in a robust fashion. Specifically, we use widely available QDMR representations to programmatically create hard-to-cheat synthetic contexts for real questions in six multi-step reasoning datasets. These contexts are carefully designed to avoid reasoning shortcuts prevalent in real contexts that prevent models from learning the right skills. This results in a pretraining dataset, named TeaBReaC, containing 525K multi-step questions (with associated formal programs) covering about 900 reasoning patterns. We show that pretraining standard language models (LMs) on TeaBReaC before fine-tuning them on target datasets improves their performance by up to 13 F1 points across 4 multi-step QA datasets, with up to 21 point gain on more complex questions. The resulting models also demonstrate higher robustness, with a 5-8 F1 point improvement on two contrast sets. Furthermore, TeaBReaC pretraining substantially improves model performance and robustness even when starting with numerate LMs pretrained using recent methods (e.g., PReasM, POET). Our work thus shows how to effectively use decomposition-guided contexts to robustly teach multi-step reasoning.

Skill-based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy to leverage prior knowledge for accelerated robot learning. Skills are typically extracted from expert demonstrations and are embedded into a latent space from which they can be sampled as actions by a high-level RL agent. However, this skill space is expansive, and not all skills are relevant for a given robot state, making exploration difficult. Furthermore, the downstream RL agent is limited to learning structurally similar tasks to those used to construct the skill space. We firstly propose accelerating exploration in the skill space using state-conditioned generative models to directly bias the high-level agent towards only sampling skills relevant to a given state based on prior experience. Next, we propose a low-level residual policy for fine-grained skill adaptation enabling downstream RL agents to adapt to unseen task variations. Finally, we validate our approach across four challenging manipulation tasks that differ from those used to build the skill space, demonstrating our ability to learn across task variations while significantly accelerating exploration, outperforming prior works. Code and videos are available on our project website: https://krishanrana.github.io/reskill.

Active learning with strong and weak labelers considers a practical setting where we have access to both costly but accurate strong labelers and inaccurate but cheap predictions provided by weak labelers. We study this problem in the streaming setting, where decisions must be taken \textit{online}. We design a novel algorithmic template, Weak Labeler Active Cover (WL-AC), that is able to robustly leverage the lower quality weak labelers to reduce the query complexity while retaining the desired level of accuracy. Prior active learning algorithms with access to weak labelers learn a difference classifier which predicts where the weak labels differ from strong labelers; this requires the strong assumption of realizability of the difference classifier (Zhang and Chaudhuri,2015). WL-AC bypasses this \textit{realizability} assumption and thus is applicable to many real-world scenarios such as random corrupted weak labels and high dimensional family of difference classifiers (\textit{e.g.,} deep neural nets). Moreover, WL-AC cleverly trades off evaluating the quality with full exploitation of weak labelers, which allows to convert any active learning strategy to one that can leverage weak labelers. We provide an instantiation of this template that achieves the optimal query complexity for any given weak labeler, without knowing its accuracy a-priori. Empirically, we propose an instantiation of the WL-AC template that can be efficiently implemented for large-scale models (\textit{e.g}., deep neural nets) and show its effectiveness on the corrupted-MNIST dataset by significantly reducing the number of labels while keeping the same accuracy as in passive learning.

Self-supervised pre-training recently demonstrates success on large-scale multimodal data, and state-of-the-art contrastive learning methods often enforce the feature consistency from cross-modality inputs, such as video/audio or video/text pairs. Despite its convenience to formulate and leverage in practice, such cross-modality alignment (CMA) is only a weak and noisy supervision, since two modalities can be semantically misaligned even they are temporally aligned. For example, even in the (often adopted) instructional videos, a speaker can sometimes refer to something that is not visually present in the current frame; and the semantic misalignment would only be more unpredictable for the raw videos collected from unconstrained internet sources. We conjecture that might cause conflicts and biases among modalities, and may hence prohibit CMA from scaling up to training with larger and more heterogeneous data. This paper first verifies our conjecture by observing that, even in the latest VATT pre-training using only narrated videos, there exist strong gradient conflicts between different CMA losses within the same sample triplet (video, audio, text), indicating them as the noisy source of supervision. We then propose to harmonize such gradients during pre-training, via two techniques: (i) cross-modality gradient realignment: modifying different CMA loss gradients for one sample triplet, so that their gradient directions are in more agreement; and (ii) gradient-based curriculum learning: leveraging the gradient conflict information on an indicator of sample noisiness, to develop a curriculum learning strategy to prioritize training with less noisy sample triplets. Applying those gradient harmonization techniques to pre-training VATT on the HowTo100M dataset, we consistently improve its performance on different downstream tasks. Moreover, we are able to scale VATT pre-training to more complicated non-narrative Youtube8M dataset to further improve the state-of-the-arts.

The high cost of acquiring and annotating samples has made the `few-shot' learning problem of prime importance. Existing works mainly focus on improving performance on clean data and overlook robustness concerns on the data perturbed with adversarial noise. Recently, a few efforts have been made to combine the few-shot problem with the robustness objective using sophisticated Meta-Learning techniques. These methods rely on the generation of adversarial samples in every episode of training, which further adds a computational burden. To avoid such time-consuming and complicated procedures, we propose a simple but effective alternative that does not require any adversarial samples. Inspired by the cognitive decision-making process in humans, we enforce high-level feature matching between the base class data and their corresponding low-frequency samples in the pretraining stage via self distillation. The model is then fine-tuned on the samples of novel classes where we additionally improve the discriminability of low-frequency query set features via cosine similarity. On a 1-shot setting of the CIFAR-FS dataset, our method yields a massive improvement of $60.55\%$ & $62.05\%$ in adversarial accuracy on the PGD and state-of-the-art Auto Attack, respectively, with a minor drop in clean accuracy compared to the baseline. Moreover, our method only takes $1.69\times$ of the standard training time while being $\approx$ $5\times$ faster than state-of-the-art adversarial meta-learning methods. The code is available at https://github.com/vcl-iisc/robust-few-shot-learning.