We study the effects of data size and quality on the performance on Automated Essay Scoring (AES) engines that are designed in accordance with three different paradigms; A frequency and hand-crafted feature-based model, a recurrent neural network model, and a pretrained transformer-based language model that is fine-tuned for classification. We expect that each type of model benefits from the size and the quality of the training data in very different ways. Standard practices for developing training data for AES engines were established with feature-based methods in mind, however, since neural networks are increasingly being considered in a production setting, this work seeks to inform us as to how to establish better training data for neural networks that will be used in production.

Graph neural networks (GNNs), which learn the node representations by recursively aggregating information from its neighbors, have become a predominant computational tool in many domains. To handle large-scale graphs, most of the existing methods partition the input graph into multiple sub-graphs (e.g., through node clustering) and apply batch training to save memory cost. However, such batch training will lead to label bias within each batch, and then result in over-confidence in model predictions. Since the connected nodes with positively related labels tend to be assigned together, the traditional cross-entropy minimization process will attend on the predictions of biased classes in the batch, and may intensify the overfitting issue. To overcome the label bias problem, we propose the adaptive label smoothing (ALS) method to replace the one-hot hard labels with smoothed ones, which learns to allocate label confidences from the biased classes to the others. Specifically, ALS propagates node labels to aggregate the neighborhood label distribution in a pre-processing step, and then updates the optimal smoothed labels online to adapt to specific graph structure. Experiments on the real-world datasets demonstrate that ALS can be generally applied to the main scalable learning frameworks to calibrate the biased labels and improve generalization performances.

Novel technologies in automated machine learning ease the complexity of algorithm selection and hyperparameter optimization. Hyperparameters are important for machine learning models as they significantly influence the performance of machine learning models. Many optimization techniques have achieved notable success in hyperparameter tuning and surpassed the performance of human experts. However, depending on such techniques as blackbox algorithms can leave machine learning practitioners without insight into the relative importance of different hyperparameters. In this paper, we consider building the relationship between the performance of the machine learning models and their hyperparameters to discover the trend and gain insights, with empirical results based on six classifiers and 200 datasets. Our results enable users to decide whether it is worth conducting a possibly time-consuming tuning strategy, to focus on the most important hyperparameters, and to choose adequate hyperparameter spaces for tuning. The results of our experiments show that gradient boosting and Adaboost outperform other classifiers across 200 problems. However, they need tuning to boost their performance. Overall, the results obtained from this study provide a quantitative basis to focus efforts toward guided automated hyperparameter optimization and contribute toward the development of better-automated machine learning frameworks.

I compete on Kaggle to learn and enhance my skills, earning 2 silver medals and 1 gold medal. A few years ago, I became interested in mathematics and started learning more advanced topics than those taught in school on my own. Not long after, I started looking into programming since I was fascinated with computer science from a young age. My search for online courses led me to several courses that taught Python and basic coding concepts. Before long, I was programming on my own, making small projects such as a Sudoku solver using the backtracking algorithm.

Machine Learning is a hot topic! Python Developers who understand how to work with Machine Learning are in high demand. But how do you get started? Maybe you tried to get started with Machine Learning, but couldn't find decent tutorials online to bring you up to speed, fast. Maybe the information you found was too basic, and didn't give you the real-world Machine learning skills using Python that you needed.

Scientist, writer, policy advocate, YouTuber – before Jordan Harrod established her many successful career identities, her first role was as a student athlete. While she enjoyed competing in everything from figure skating to fencing, she also sustained injuries that left her with chronic pain. These experiences as a patient laid the groundwork for an interest in biomedical research and engineering. "I knew I wanted to make tools that would help people with health issues similar to myself," she says. Harrod went on to pursue her BS in biomedical engineering at Cornell University.

Learning requires both study and curiosity. A good learner is not only good at extracting information from the data given to it, but also skilled at finding the right new information to learn from. This is especially true when a human operator is required to provide the ground truth - such a source should only be queried sparingly. In this work, we address the problem of curiosity as it relates to online, real-time, human-in-the-loop training of an object detection algorithm onboard a robotic platform, one where motion produces new views of the subject. We propose a deep reinforcement learning approach that decides when to ask the human user for ground truth, and when to move. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate that our agent learns a movement and request policy that is at least 3x more effective at using human user interactions to train an object detector than untrained approaches, and is generalizable to a variety of subjects and environments.

In education, open-ended quiz questions have become an important tool for assessing the knowledge of students. Yet, manually preparing such questions is a tedious task, and thus automatic question generation has been proposed as a possible alternative. So far, the vast majority of research has focused on generating the question text, relying on question answering datasets with readily picked answers, and the problem of how to come up with answer candidates in the first place has been largely ignored. Here, we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we propose a model that can generate a specified number of answer candidates for a given passage of text, which can then be used by instructors to write questions manually or can be passed as an input to automatic answer-aware question generators. Our experiments show that our proposed answer candidate generation model outperforms several baselines.

In recent years, near-term noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computing devices have become available. One of the most promising application areas to leverage such NISQ quantum computer prototypes is quantum machine learning. While quantum neural networks are widely studied for supervised learning, quantum reinforcement learning is still just an emerging field of this area. To solve a classical continuous control problem, we use a continuous-variable quantum machine learning approach. We introduce proximal policy optimization for photonic variational quantum agents and also study the effect of the data re-uploading. We present performance assessment via empirical study using Strawberry Fields, a photonic simulator Fock backend and a hybrid training framework connected to an OpenAI Gym environment and TensorFlow. For the restricted CartPole problem, the two variations of the photonic policy learning achieve comparable performance levels and a faster convergence than the baseline classical neural network of same number of trainable parameters.

The global surgical robotics market is expanding rapidly and may soon be worth $120B. But is the medical training ecosystem ready for the shift to robot-assisted surgeries? As more surgeons use robots in the OR, the approach for training on them and using them needs to be standardized. The truth is that all surgeons aren't approaching this innovative tech the same way. Standardized best practices are what set surgeons and patients up for success, and will help to make robotic surgery safer in the future.