Assessing instruction quality is a fundamental component of any improvement efforts in the education system. However, traditional manual assessments are expensive, subjective, and heavily dependent on observers' expertise and idiosyncratic factors, preventing teachers from getting timely and frequent feedback. Different from prior research that mostly focuses on low-inference instructional practices on a singular basis, this paper presents the first study that leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to assess multiple high-inference instructional practices in two distinct educational settings: in-person K-12 classrooms and simulated performance tasks for pre-service teachers. This is also the first study that applies NLP to measure a teaching practice that is widely acknowledged to be particularly effective for students with special needs. We confront two challenges inherent in NLP-based instructional analysis, including noisy and long input data and highly skewed distributions of human ratings. Our results suggest that pretrained Language Models (PLMs) demonstrate performances comparable to the agreement level of human raters for variables that are more discrete and require lower inference, but their efficacy diminishes with more complex teaching practices. Interestingly, using only teachers' utterances as input yields strong results for student-centered variables, alleviating common concerns over the difficulty of collecting and transcribing high-quality student speech data in in-person teaching settings. Our findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of current NLP techniques in the education domain, opening avenues for further exploration.

Transformer networks are rapidly becoming SotA in many fields, such as NLP and CV. Similarly to CNN, there is a strong push for deploying Transformer models at the extreme edge, ultimately fitting the tiny power budget and memory footprint of MCUs. However, the early approaches in this direction are mostly ad-hoc, platform, and model-specific. This work aims to enable and optimize the flexible, multi-platform deployment of encoder Tiny Transformers on commercial MCUs. We propose a complete framework to perform end-to-end deployment of Transformer models onto single and multi-core MCUs. Our framework provides an optimized library of kernels to maximize data reuse and avoid unnecessary data marshaling operations into the crucial attention block. A novel MHSA inference schedule, named Fused-Weight Self-Attention, is introduced, fusing the linear projection weights offline to further reduce the number of operations and parameters. Furthermore, to mitigate the memory peak reached by the computation of the attention map, we present a Depth-First Tiling scheme for MHSA. We evaluate our framework on three different MCU classes exploiting ARM and RISC-V ISA, namely the STM32H7, the STM32L4, and GAP9 (RV32IMC-XpulpV2). We reach an average of 4.79x and 2.0x lower latency compared to SotA libraries CMSIS-NN (ARM) and PULP-NN (RISC-V), respectively. Moreover, we show that our MHSA depth-first tiling scheme reduces the memory peak by up to 6.19x, while the fused-weight attention can reduce the runtime by 1.53x, and number of parameters by 25%. We report significant improvements across several Tiny Transformers: for instance, when executing a transformer block for the task of radar-based hand-gesture recognition on GAP9, we achieve a latency of 0.14ms and energy consumption of 4.92 micro-joules, 2.32x lower than the SotA PULP-NN library on the same platform.

Generative image models have emerged as a promising technology to produce realistic images. Despite potential benefits, concerns grow about its misuse, particularly in generating deceptive images that could raise significant ethical, legal, and societal issues. Consequently, there is growing demand to empower users to effectively discern and comprehend patterns of AI-generated images. To this end, we developed ASAP, an interactive visualization system that automatically extracts distinct patterns of AI-generated images and allows users to interactively explore them via various views. To uncover fake patterns, ASAP introduces a novel image encoder, adapted from CLIP, which transforms images into compact "distilled" representations, enriched with information for differentiating authentic and fake images. These representations generate gradients that propagate back to the attention maps of CLIP's transformer block. This process quantifies the relative importance of each pixel to image authenticity or fakeness, exposing key deceptive patterns. ASAP enables the at scale interactive analysis of these patterns through multiple, coordinated visualizations. This includes a representation overview with innovative cell glyphs to aid in the exploration and qualitative evaluation of fake patterns across a vast array of images, as well as a pattern view that displays authenticity-indicating patterns in images and quantifies their impact. ASAP supports the analysis of cutting-edge generative models with the latest architectures, including GAN-based models like proGAN and diffusion models like the latent diffusion model. We demonstrate ASAP's usefulness through two usage scenarios using multiple fake image detection benchmark datasets, revealing its ability to identify and understand hidden patterns in AI-generated images, especially in detecting fake human faces produced by diffusion-based techniques.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have presented impressive performance across several transformative tasks. However, it is non-trivial to efficiently utilize large-scale cluster resources to develop LLMs, often riddled with numerous challenges such as frequent hardware failures, intricate parallelization strategies, and imbalanced resource utilization. In this paper, we present an in-depth characterization study of a six-month LLM development workload trace collected from our GPU datacenter Acme. Specifically, we investigate discrepancies between LLMs and prior task-specific Deep Learning (DL) workloads, explore resource utilization patterns, and identify the impact of various job failures. Our analysis summarizes hurdles we encountered and uncovers potential opportunities to optimize systems tailored for LLMs. Furthermore, we introduce our system efforts: (1) fault-tolerant pretraining, which enhances fault tolerance through LLM-involved failure diagnosis and automatic recovery. (2) decoupled scheduling for evaluation, which achieves timely performance feedback via trial decomposition and scheduling optimization.

Large language models optimized with techniques like RLHF have achieved good alignment in being helpful and harmless. However, post-alignment, these language models often exhibit overconfidence, where the expressed confidence does not accurately calibrate with their correctness rate. In this paper, we decompose the language model confidence into the \textit{Uncertainty} about the question and the \textit{Fidelity} to the answer generated by language models. Then, we propose a plug-and-play method to estimate the confidence of language models. Our method has shown good calibration performance by conducting experiments with 6 RLHF-LMs on four MCQA datasets. Moreover, we propose two novel metrics, IPR and CE, to evaluate the calibration of the model, and we have conducted a detailed discussion on \textit{Truly Well-Calibrated Confidence}. Our method could serve as a strong baseline, and we hope that this work will provide some insights into the model confidence calibration.

This paper presents our submission to the SemEval 2024 Task 5: The Legal Argument Reasoning Task in Civil Procedure. We present two approaches to solving the task of legal answer validation, given an introduction to the case, a question and an answer candidate. Firstly, we fine-tuned pre-trained BERT-based models and found that models trained on domain knowledge perform better. Secondly, we performed few-shot prompting on GPT models and found that reformulating the answer validation task to be a multiple-choice QA task remarkably improves the performance of the model. Our best submission is a BERT-based model that achieved the 7th place out of 20.

This paper reveals the phenomenon of parameter heterogeneity in large language models (LLMs). We find that a small subset of ``cherry'' parameters exhibit a disproportionately large influence on model performance, while the vast majority of parameters have minimal impact. This heterogeneity is found to be prevalent across different model families, scales, and types. Motivated by this observation, we propose CherryQ, a novel quantization method that unifies the optimization of mixed-precision parameters. CherryQ identifies and preserves the critical cherry parameters in high precision while aggressively quantizing the remaining parameters to low precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CherryQ. CherryQ outperforms existing quantization approaches in terms of perplexity and downstream task performance. Notably, our 3-bit quantized Vicuna-1.5 exhibits competitive performance compared to their 16-bit counterparts. These findings highlight the potential of CherryQ for enabling efficient deployment of LLMs by taking advantage of parameter heterogeneity.

Individuals with visual impairments, encompassing both partial and total difficulties in visual perception, are referred to as visually impaired (VI) people. An estimated 2.2 billion individuals worldwide are affected by visual impairments. Recent advancements in multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have showcased their extraordinary capabilities across various domains. It is desirable to help VI individuals with MLLMs' great capabilities of visual understanding and reasoning. However, it is challenging for VI people to use MLLMs due to the difficulties in capturing the desirable images to fulfill their daily requests. For example, the target object is not fully or partially placed in the image. This paper explores how to leverage MLLMs for VI individuals to provide visual-question answers. VIAssist can identify undesired images and provide detailed actions. Finally, VIAssist can provide reliable answers to users' queries based on the images. Our results show that VIAssist provides +0.21 and +0.31 higher BERTScore and ROUGE scores than the baseline, respectively.

Language Models (LMs) have shown promising performance in natural language generation. However, as LMs often generate incorrect or hallucinated responses, it is crucial to correctly quantify their uncertainty in responding to given inputs. In addition to verbalized confidence elicited via prompting, many uncertainty measures ($e.g.$, semantic entropy and affinity-graph-based measures) have been proposed. However, these measures can differ greatly, and it is unclear how to compare them, partly because they take values over different ranges ($e.g.$, $[0,\infty)$ or $[0,1]$). In this work, we address this issue by developing a novel and practical framework, termed $Rank$-$Calibration$, to assess uncertainty and confidence measures for LMs. Our key tenet is that higher uncertainty (or lower confidence) should imply lower generation quality, on average. Rank-calibration quantifies deviations from this ideal relationship in a principled manner, without requiring ad hoc binary thresholding of the correctness score ($e.g.$, ROUGE or METEOR). The broad applicability and the granular interpretability of our methods are demonstrated empirically.

Yes, San Francisco is a nexus of artificial intelligence innovation, but it's also one of the queerest cities in America. The Mission District, where ChatGPT maker OpenAI is headquartered, butts up against the Castro, where sidewalk crossings are coated with rainbows, and older nude men are often seen milling about. And queer people are joining the AI revolution. "So many people in this field are gay men, which is something I think few people talk about," says Spencer Kaplan, an anthropologist and PhD student at Yale who moved to San Francisco to study the developers building generative tools. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, is gay; he married his husband last year in a private, beachfront ceremony.