In online education, innovative tools are crucial for enhancing learning outcomes. SAM (Study with AI Mentor) is an advanced platform that integrates educational videos with a context-aware chat interface powered by large language models. SAM encourages students to ask questions and explore unclear concepts in real-time, offering personalized, context-specific assistance, including explanations of formulas, slides, and images. In a crowdsourced user study involving 140 participants, SAM was evaluated through pre- and post-knowledge tests, comparing a group using SAM with a control group. The results demonstrated that SAM users achieved greater knowledge gains, with a 96.8% answer accuracy. Participants also provided positive feedback on SAM's usability and effectiveness. SAM's proactive approach to learning not only enhances learning outcomes but also empowers students to take full ownership of their educational experience, representing a promising future direction for online learning tools.

A growing research explores the usage of AI explanations on user's decision phases for human-AI collaborative decision-making. However, previous studies found the issues of overreliance on `wrong' AI outputs. In this paper, we propose interactive example-based explanations to improve health professionals' onboarding with AI for their better reliance on AI during AI-assisted decision-making. We implemented an AI-based decision support system that utilizes a neural network to assess the quality of post-stroke survivors' exercises and interactive example-based explanations that systematically surface the nearest neighborhoods of a test/task sample from the training set of the AI model to assist users' onboarding with the AI model. To investigate the effect of interactive example-based explanations, we conducted a study with domain experts, health professionals to evaluate their performance and reliance on AI. Our interactive example-based explanations during onboarding assisted health professionals in having a better reliance on AI and making a higher ratio of making `right' decisions and a lower ratio of `wrong' decisions than providing only feature-based explanations during the decision-support phase. Our study discusses new challenges of assisting user's onboarding with AI for human-AI collaborative decision-making.

As various types of crime continue to threaten public safety and economic development, predicting the occurrence of multiple types of crimes becomes increasingly vital for effective prevention measures. Although extensive efforts have been made, most of them overlook the heterogeneity of different crime categories and fail to address the issue of imbalanced spatial distribution. In this work, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Mixture-of-Graph-Experts (ST-MoGE) framework for collective multiple-type crime prediction. To enhance the model's ability to identify diverse spatial-temporal dependencies and mitigate potential conflicts caused by spatial-temporal heterogeneity of different crime categories, we introduce an attentive-gated Mixture-of-Graph-Experts (MGEs) module to capture the distinctive and shared crime patterns of each crime category. Then, we propose Cross-Expert Contrastive Learning(CECL) to update the MGEs and force each expert to focus on specific pattern modeling, thereby reducing blending and redundancy. Furthermore, to address the issue of imbalanced spatial distribution, we propose a Hierarchical Adaptive Loss Re-weighting (HALR) approach to eliminate biases and insufficient learning of data-scarce regions. To evaluate the effectiveness of our methods, we conduct comprehensive experiments on two real-world crime datasets and compare our results with twelve advanced baselines. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our methods.

An approach to improve network interpretability is via clusterability, i.e., splitting a model into disjoint clusters that can be studied independently. We find pretrained models to be highly unclusterable and thus train models to be more modular using an ``enmeshment loss'' function that encourages the formation of non-interacting clusters. Using automated interpretability measures, we show that our method finds clusters that learn different, disjoint, and smaller circuits for CIFAR-10 labels. Our approach provides a promising direction for making neural networks easier to interpret.

In many real-world scenarios, such as meetings, multiple speakers are present with an unknown number of participants, and their utterances often overlap. We address these multi-speaker challenges by a novel attention-based encoder-decoder method augmented with special speaker class tokens obtained by speaker clustering. During inference, we select multiple recognition hypotheses conditioned on predicted speaker cluster tokens, and these hypotheses are merged by agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) based on the normalized edit distance. The clustered hypotheses result in the multi-speaker transcriptions with the appropriate number of speakers determined by AHC. Our experiments on the LibriMix dataset demonstrate that our proposed method was particularly effective in complex 3-mix environments, achieving a 55% relative error reduction on clean data and a 36% relative error reduction on noisy data compared with conventional serialized output training.

Capitalizing on the intuitive premise that shape characteristics are more robust to perturbations, we bridge adversarial graph learning with the emerging tools from computational topology, namely, persistent homology representations of graphs. We introduce the concept of witness complex to adversarial analysis on graphs, which allows us to focus only on the salient shape characteristics of graphs, yielded by the subset of the most essential nodes (i.e., landmarks), with minimal loss of topological information on the whole graph. The remaining nodes are then used as witnesses, governing which higher-order graph substructures are incorporated into the learning process. Armed with the witness mechanism, we design Witness Graph Topological Layer (WGTL), which systematically integrates both local and global topological graph feature representations, the impact of which is, in turn, automatically controlled by the robust regularized topological loss. Given the attacker's budget, we derive the important stability guarantees of both local and global topology encodings and the associated robust topological loss. We illustrate the versatility and efficiency of WGTL by its integration with five GNNs and three existing non-topological defense mechanisms. Our extensive experiments across six datasets demonstrate that WGTL boosts the robustness of GNNs across a range of perturbations and against a range of adversarial attacks, leading to relative gains of up to 18%.

We consider the problem of learning a realization of a partially observed dynamical system with linear state transitions and bilinear observations. Under very mild assumptions on the process and measurement noises, we provide a finite time analysis for learning the unknown dynamics matrices (up to a similarity transform). Our analysis involves a regression problem with heavy-tailed and dependent data. Moreover, each row of our design matrix contains a Kronecker product of current input with a history of inputs, making it difficult to guarantee persistence of excitation. We overcome these challenges, first providing a data-dependent high probability error bound for arbitrary but fixed inputs. Then, we derive a data-independent error bound for inputs chosen according to a simple random design. Our main results provide an upper bound on the statistical error rates and sample complexity of learning the unknown dynamics matrices from a single finite trajectory of bilinear observations.

Neural networks are often regarded as "black boxes" due to their complex functions and numerous parameters, which poses significant challenges for interpretability. This study addresses these challenges by introducing methods to enhance the understanding of neural networks, focusing specifically on models with a single hidden layer. We establish a theoretical framework by demonstrating that the neural network estimator can be interpreted as a nonparametric regression model. Building on this foundation, we propose statistical tests to assess the significance of input neurons and introduce algorithms for dimensionality reduction, including clustering and (PCA), to simplify the network and improve its interpretability and accuracy. The key contributions of this study include the development of a bootstrapping technique for evaluating artificial neural network (ANN) performance, applying statistical tests and logistic regression to analyze hidden neurons, and assessing neuron efficiency. We also investigate the behavior of individual hidden neurons in relation to out-put neurons and apply these methodologies to the IDC and Iris datasets to validate their practical utility. This research advances the field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence by presenting robust statistical frameworks for interpreting neural networks, thereby facilitating a clearer understanding of the relationships between inputs, outputs, and individual network components.

We propose a robust methodology to evaluate the performance and computational efficiency of non-parametric two-sample tests, specifically designed for high-dimensional generative models in scientific applications such as in particle physics. The study focuses on tests built from univariate integral probability measures: the sliced Wasserstein distance and the mean of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistics, already discussed in the literature, and the novel sliced Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic. These metrics can be evaluated in parallel, allowing for fast and reliable estimates of their distribution under the null hypothesis. We also compare these metrics with the recently proposed unbiased Fr\'echet Gaussian Distance and the unbiased quadratic Maximum Mean Discrepancy, computed with a quartic polynomial kernel. We evaluate the proposed tests on various distributions, focusing on their sensitivity to deformations parameterized by a single parameter $\epsilon$. Our experiments include correlated Gaussians and mixtures of Gaussians in 5, 20, and 100 dimensions, and a particle physics dataset of gluon jets from the JetNet dataset, considering both jet- and particle-level features. Our results demonstrate that one-dimensional-based tests provide a level of sensitivity comparable to other multivariate metrics, but with significantly lower computational cost, making them ideal for evaluating generative models in high-dimensional settings. This methodology offers an efficient, standardized tool for model comparison and can serve as a benchmark for more advanced tests, including machine-learning-based approaches.

The emergence of indoor aerial robots holds significant potential for enhancing construction site workers' productivity by autonomously performing inspection and mapping tasks. The key challenge to this application is ensuring navigation safety with human workers. While navigation in static environments has been extensively studied, navigating dynamic environments remains open due to challenges in perception and planning. Payload limitations of unmanned aerial vehicles limit them to using cameras with limited fields of view, resulting in unreliable perception and tracking during collision avoidance. Moreover, the unpredictable nature of the dynamic environments can quickly make the generated optimal trajectory outdated. To address these challenges, this paper presents a comprehensive navigation framework that incorporates both perception and planning, introducing the concept of dynamic obstacle intent prediction. Our perception module detects and tracks dynamic obstacles efficiently and handles tracking loss and occlusion during collision avoidance. The proposed intent prediction module employs a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to forecast potential actions of dynamic obstacles with the possible future trajectories. Finally, a novel intent-based planning algorithm, leveraging model predictive control (MPC), is applied to generate safe navigation trajectories. Simulation and physical experiments demonstrate that our method enables safe navigation in dynamic environments and achieves the fewest collisions compared to benchmarks.