Education
Model-sharing Games: Analyzing Federated Learning Under Voluntary Participation
Federated learning is a setting where agents, each with access to their own data source, combine models learned from local data to create a global model. If agents are drawing their data from different distributions, though, federated learning might produce a biased global model that is not optimal for each agent. This means that agents face a fundamental question: should they join the global model or stay with their local model? In this work, we show how this situation can be naturally analyzed through the framework of coalitional game theory. Motivated by these considerations, we propose the following game: there are heterogeneous players with different model parameters governing their data distribution and different amounts of data they have noisily drawn from their own distribution. Each player's goal is to obtain a model with minimal expected mean squared error (MSE) on their own distribution. They have a choice of fitting a model based solely on their own data, or combining their learned parameters with those of some subset of the other players. Combining models reduces the variance component of their error through access to more data, but increases the bias because of the heterogeneity of distributions. In this work, we derive exact expected MSE values for problems in linear regression and mean estimation. We use these values to analyze the resulting game in the framework of hedonic game theory; we study how players might divide into coalitions, where each set of players within a coalition jointly constructs a single model. In a case with arbitrarily many players that each have either a "small" or "large" amount of data, we constructively show that there always exists a stable partition of players into coalitions.
ARCADe: A Rapid Continual Anomaly Detector
Frikha, Ahmed, Krompaß, Denis, Tresp, Volker
Although continual learning and anomaly detection have separately been well-studied in previous works, their intersection remains rather unexplored. The present work addresses a learning scenario where a model has to incrementally learn a sequence of anomaly detection tasks, i.e. tasks from which only examples from the normal (majority) class are available for training. We define this novel learning problem of continual anomaly detection (CAD) and formulate it as a meta-learning problem. Moreover, we propose A Rapid Continual Anomaly Detector (ARCADe), an approach to train neural networks to be robust against the major challenges of this new learning problem, namely catastrophic forgetting and overfitting to the majority class. The results of our experiments on three datasets show that, in the CAD problem setting, ARCADe substantially outperforms baselines from the continual learning and anomaly detection literature. Finally, we provide deeper insights into the learning strategy yielded by the proposed meta-learning algorithm.
SAINT+: Integrating Temporal Features for EdNet Correctness Prediction
Shin, Dongmin, Shim, Yugeun, Yu, Hangyeol, Lee, Seewoo, Kim, Byungsoo, Choi, Youngduck
We propose SAINT+, a successor of SAINT which is a Transformer based knowledge tracing model that separately processes exercise information and student response information. Following the architecture of SAINT, SAINT+ has an encoder-decoder structure where the encoder applies self-attention layers to a stream of exercise embeddings, and the decoder alternately applies self-attention layers and encoder-decoder attention layers to streams of response embeddings and encoder output. Moreover, SAINT+ incorporates two temporal feature embeddings into the response embeddings: elapsed time, the time taken for a student to answer, and lag time, the time interval between adjacent learning activities. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of SAINT+ on EdNet, the largest publicly available benchmark dataset in the education domain. Experimental results show that SAINT+ achieves state-of-the-art performance in knowledge tracing with an improvement of 1.25% in area under receiver operating characteristic curve compared to SAINT, the current state-of-the-art model in EdNet dataset.
Towards Interpreting BERT for Reading Comprehension Based QA
Ramnath, Sahana, Nema, Preksha, Sahni, Deep, Khapra, Mitesh M.
BERT and its variants have achieved state-of-the-art performance in various NLP tasks. Since then, various works have been proposed to analyze the linguistic information being captured in BERT. However, the current works do not provide an insight into how BERT is able to achieve near human-level performance on the task of Reading Comprehension based Question Answering. In this work, we attempt to interpret BERT for RCQA. Since BERT layers do not have predefined roles, we define a layer's role or functionality using Integrated Gradients. Based on the defined roles, we perform a preliminary analysis across all layers. We observed that the initial layers focus on query-passage interaction, whereas later layers focus more on contextual understanding and enhancing the answer prediction. Specifically for quantifier questions (how much/how many), we notice that BERT focuses on confusing words (i.e., on other numerical quantities in the passage) in the later layers, but still manages to predict the answer correctly. The fine-tuning and analysis scripts will be publicly available at https://github.com/iitmnlp/BERT-Analysis-RCQA .
Towards Data Distillation for End-to-end Spoken Conversational Question Answering
You, Chenyu, Chen, Nuo, Liu, Fenglin, Yang, Dongchao, Zou, Yuexian
In spoken question answering, QA systems are designed to answer questions from contiguous text spans within the related speech transcripts. However, the most natural way that human seek or test their knowledge is via human conversations. Therefore, we propose a new Spoken Conversational Question Answering task (SCQA), aiming at enabling QA systems to model complex dialogues flow given the speech utterances and text corpora. In this task, our main objective is to build a QA system to deal with conversational questions both in spoken and text forms, and to explore the plausibility of providing more cues in spoken documents with systems in information gathering. To this end, instead of adopting automatically generated speech transcripts with highly noisy data, we propose a novel unified data distillation approach, DDNet, which directly fuse audio-text features to reduce the misalignment between automatic speech recognition hypotheses and the reference transcriptions. In addition, to evaluate the capacity of QA systems in a dialogue-style interaction, we assemble a Spoken Conversational Question Answering (Spoken-CoQA) dataset with more than 120k question-answer pairs. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior performance in spoken conversational question answering.
The Python Programming v3.9 Comprehensive Bootcamp
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20 Free Online Books to Learn R and Data Science - Python and R Tips
If you are interested in learning Data Science with R, but not interested in spending money on books, you are definitely in a very good space. There are a number of fantastic R/Data Science books and resources available online for free from top most creators and scientists. Here are such 13 free 20 free (so […]
How I'd study machine learning -- if I'd be starting out today
I'm underground, back where it all started. Sitting at the hidden cafe where I first met Mike. I'd been studying in my bedroom for the past 9-months and decided to step out of the cave. Half of me was concerned about having to pay $19 for breakfast (unless it's Christmas, driving Uber on the weekends isn't very lucrative), the other half about whether any of this study I'd been doing online meant anything. In 2017, I left Apple, tried to build a web startup, failed, discovered machine learning, fell in love, signed up to a deep learning course with zero coding experience, emailed the support team asking what the refund policy was, didn't get a refund, spent the next 3-months handing in the assignments four to six days late, somehow passed, decided to keep going and created my own AI Masters Degree.
How can artificial intelligence promote inclusive prosperity for all?
While AI is poised to disrupt our work and lives, these technologies can be harnessed through wise regulation. So rather than replacing individuals, much AI should assist them in completing tasks that are more fulfilling, or by augmenting work that is often classified as professional. "Artificial intelligence (AI) has a proper substitutive role – it can ensure that difficult, dirty and dangerous work is done more and more by machines and less and less by human beings," says Professor Frank Pasquale from Brooklyn Law School."But Should people be taking more courses like computer science or technical fields that will help them understand AI better? "Yes, but I don't think they should replace existing courses.
MESA: Boost Ensemble Imbalanced Learning with MEta-SAmpler
Liu, Zhining, Wei, Pengfei, Jiang, Jing, Cao, Wei, Bian, Jiang, Chang, Yi
Imbalanced learning (IL), i.e., learning unbiased models from class-imbalanced data, is a challenging problem. Typical IL methods including resampling and reweighting were designed based on some heuristic assumptions. They often suffer from unstable performance, poor applicability, and high computational cost in complex tasks where their assumptions do not hold. In this paper, we introduce a novel ensemble IL framework named MESA. It adaptively resamples the training set in iterations to get multiple classifiers and forms a cascade ensemble model. MESA directly learns the sampling strategy from data to optimize the final metric beyond following random heuristics. Moreover, unlike prevailing meta-learning-based IL solutions, we decouple the model-training and meta-training in MESA by independently train the meta-sampler over task-agnostic meta-data. This makes MESA generally applicable to most of the existing learning models and the meta-sampler can be efficiently applied to new tasks. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world tasks demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and transferability of MESA. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhiningLiu1998/mesa.