Learning Management
Estimation and Control of Motor Core Temperature with Online Learning of Thermal Model Parameters: Application to Musculoskeletal Humanoids
Kawaharazuka, Kento, Hiraoka, Naoki, Tsuzuki, Kei, Onitsuka, Moritaka, Asano, Yuki, Okada, Kei, Kawasaki, Koji, Inaba, Masayuki
The estimation and management of motor temperature are important for the continuous movements of robots. In this study, we propose an online learning method of thermal model parameters of motors for an accurate estimation of motor core temperature. Also, we propose a management method of motor core temperature using the updated model and anomaly detection method of motors. Finally, we apply this method to the muscles of the musculoskeletal humanoid and verify the ability of continuous movements.
Ramsey Theorems for Trees and a General 'Private Learning Implies Online Learning' Theorem
Fioravanti, Simone, Hanneke, Steve, Moran, Shay, Schefler, Hilla, Tsubari, Iska
This work continues to investigate the link between differentially private (DP) and online learning. Alon, Livni, Malliaris, and Moran (2019) showed that for binary concept classes, DP learnability of a given class implies that it has a finite Littlestone dimension (equivalently, that it is online learnable). Their proof relies on a model-theoretic result by Hodges (1997), which demonstrates that any binary concept class with a large Littlestone dimension contains a large subclass of thresholds. In a follow-up work, Jung, Kim, and Tewari (2020) extended this proof to multiclass PAC learning with a bounded number of labels. Unfortunately, Hodges's result does not apply in other natural settings such as multiclass PAC learning with an unbounded label space, and PAC learning of partial concept classes. This naturally raises the question of whether DP learnability continues to imply online learnability in more general scenarios: indeed, Alon, Hanneke, Holzman, and Moran (2021) explicitly leave it as an open question in the context of partial concept classes, and the same question is open in the general multiclass setting. In this work, we give a positive answer to these questions showing that for general classification tasks, DP learnability implies online learnability. Our proof reasons directly about Littlestone trees, without relying on thresholds. We achieve this by establishing several Ramsey-type theorems for trees, which might be of independent interest.
A Fair Post-Processing Method based on the MADD Metric for Predictive Student Models
Verger, Mélina, Fan, Chunyang, Lallé, Sébastien, Bouchet, François, Luengo, Vanda
Predictive student models are increasingly used in learning environments. However, due to the rising social impact of their usage, it is now all the more important for these models to be both sufficiently accurate and fair in their predictions. To evaluate algorithmic fairness, a new metric has been developed in education, namely the Model Absolute Density Distance (MADD). This metric enables us to measure how different a predictive model behaves regarding two groups of students, in order to quantify its algorithmic unfairness. In this paper, we thus develop a post-processing method based on this metric, that aims at improving the fairness while preserving the accuracy of relevant predictive models' results. We experiment with our approach on the task of predicting student success in an online course, using both simulated and real-world educational data, and obtain successful results.
Nash Incentive-compatible Online Mechanism Learning via Weakly Differentially Private Online Learning
Huh, Joon Suk, Kandasamy, Kirthevasan
We study a multi-round mechanism design problem, where we interact with a set of agents over a sequence of rounds. We wish to design an incentive-compatible (IC) online learning scheme to maximize an application-specific objective within a given class of mechanisms, without prior knowledge of the agents' type distributions. Even if each mechanism in this class is IC in a single round, if an algorithm naively chooses from this class on each round, the entire learning process may not be IC against non-myopic buyers who appear over multiple rounds. On each round, our method randomly chooses between the recommendation of a weakly differentially private online learning algorithm (e.g., Hedge), and a commitment mechanism which penalizes non-truthful behavior. Our method is IC and achieves $O(T^{\frac{1+h}{2}})$ regret for the application-specific objective in an adversarial setting, where $h$ quantifies the long-sightedness of the agents. When compared to prior work, our approach is conceptually simpler,it applies to general mechanism design problems (beyond auctions), and its regret scales gracefully with the size of the mechanism class.
RAMO: Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Enhancing MOOCs Recommendations
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have significantly enhanced educational accessibility by offering a wide variety of courses and breaking down traditional barriers related to geography, finance, and time. However, students often face difficulties navigating the vast selection of courses, especially when exploring new fields of study. Driven by this challenge, researchers have been exploring course recommender systems to offer tailored guidance that aligns with individual learning preferences and career aspirations. These systems face particular challenges in effectively addressing the ``cold start'' problem for new users. Recent advancements in recommender systems suggest integrating large language models (LLMs) into the recommendation process to enhance personalized recommendations and address the ``cold start'' problem. Motivated by these advancements, our study introduces RAMO (Retrieval-Augmented Generation for MOOCs), a system specifically designed to overcome the ``cold start'' challenges of traditional course recommender systems. The RAMO system leverages the capabilities of LLMs, along with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-facilitated contextual understanding, to provide course recommendations through a conversational interface, aiming to enhance the e-learning experience.
Koopman Spectrum Nonlinear Regulators and Efficient Online Learning
Ohnishi, Motoya, Ishikawa, Isao, Lowrey, Kendall, Ikeda, Masahiro, Kakade, Sham, Kawahara, Yoshinobu
Most modern reinforcement learning algorithms optimize a cumulative single-step cost along a trajectory. The optimized motions are often 'unnatural', representing, for example, behaviors with sudden accelerations that waste energy and lack predictability. In this work, we present a novel paradigm of controlling nonlinear systems via the minimization of the Koopman spectrum cost: a cost over the Koopman operator of the controlled dynamics. This induces a broader class of dynamical behaviors that evolve over stable manifolds such as nonlinear oscillators, closed loops, and smooth movements. We demonstrate that some dynamics characterizations that are not possible with a cumulative cost are feasible in this paradigm, which generalizes the classical eigenstructure and pole assignments to nonlinear decision making. Moreover, we present a sample efficient online learning algorithm for our problem that enjoys a sub-linear regret bound under some structural assumptions.
Adversarial Online Learning with Temporal Feedback Graphs
Gatmiry, Khashayar, Schneider, Jon
Prediction with expert advice is one of the most fundamental problems in online learning. In its simplest form, a learner must choose from one of K actions (possibly choosing a randomized mixture of actions) every round for T rounds. An adversary then reveals a loss vector containing the loss for each action to the learner, the learner incurs their appropriate loss, and play proceeds to the next round. The goal of the learner in such settings is usually to minimize their regret: the gap between their total utility at the end of the game and the maximum utility they could have received if they played the best fixed action in hindsight. Notably, it is possible to construct algorithms for the learner which achieve regret sublinear in T against any adversarially chosen sequence of losses. Traditionally, a learner may use the entire history of losses up until round t to decide their action at round t. In this paper, we investigate the question of what happens if we restrict the learner's action at time t to depend on the losses in some subset of these rounds. Formally, we require the learner's (randomized) action at time t to be a function of the losses in some subset of rounds S
ORCDF: An Oversmoothing-Resistant Cognitive Diagnosis Framework for Student Learning in Online Education Systems
Qian, Hong, Liu, Shuo, Li, Mingjia, Li, Bingdong, Liu, Zhi, Zhou, Aimin
Cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) are designed to learn students' mastery levels using their response logs. CDMs play a fundamental role in online education systems since they significantly influence downstream applications such as teachers' guidance and computerized adaptive testing. Despite the success achieved by existing CDMs, we find that they suffer from a thorny issue that the learned students' mastery levels are too similar. This issue, which we refer to as oversmoothing, could diminish the CDMs' effectiveness in downstream tasks. CDMs comprise two core parts: learning students' mastery levels and assessing mastery levels by fitting the response logs. This paper contends that the oversmoothing issue arises from that existing CDMs seldom utilize response signals on exercises in the learning part but only use them as labels in the assessing part. To this end, this paper proposes an oversmoothing-resistant cognitive diagnosis framework (ORCDF) to enhance existing CDMs by utilizing response signals in the learning part. Specifically, ORCDF introduces a novel response graph to inherently incorporate response signals as types of edges. Then, ORCDF designs a tailored response-aware graph convolution network (RGC) that effectively captures the crucial response signals within the response graph. Via ORCDF, existing CDMs are enhanced by replacing the input embeddings with the outcome of RGC, allowing for the consideration of response signals on exercises in the learning part. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that ORCDF not only helps existing CDMs alleviate the oversmoothing issue but also significantly enhances the models' prediction and interpretability performance. Moreover, the effectiveness of ORCDF is validated in the downstream task of computerized adaptive testing.
The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in Educational Measurement: Opportunities and Ethical Challenges
Bulut, Okan, Beiting-Parrish, Maggie, Casabianca, Jodi M., Slater, Sharon C., Jiao, Hong, Song, Dan, Ormerod, Christopher M., Fabiyi, Deborah Gbemisola, Ivan, Rodica, Walsh, Cole, Rios, Oscar, Wilson, Joshua, Yildirim-Erbasli, Seyma N., Wongvorachan, Tarid, Liu, Joyce Xinle, Tan, Bin, Morilova, Polina
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in educational measurement has revolutionized assessment methods, enabling automated scoring, rapid content analysis, and personalized feedback through machine learning and natural language processing. These advancements provide timely, consistent feedback and valuable insights into student performance, thereby enhancing the assessment experience. However, the deployment of AI in education also raises significant ethical concerns regarding validity, reliability, transparency, fairness, and equity. Issues such as algorithmic bias and the opacity of AI decision-making processes pose risks of perpetuating inequalities and affecting assessment outcomes. Responding to these concerns, various stakeholders, including educators, policymakers, and organizations, have developed guidelines to ensure ethical AI use in education. The National Council of Measurement in Education's Special Interest Group on AI in Measurement and Education (AIME) also focuses on establishing ethical standards and advancing research in this area. In this paper, a diverse group of AIME members examines the ethical implications of AI-powered tools in educational measurement, explores significant challenges such as automation bias and environmental impact, and proposes solutions to ensure AI's responsible and effective use in education.
Projection-free Online Learning over Strongly Convex Sets
To efficiently solve online problems with complicated constraints, projection-free algorithms including online frank-wolfe (OFW) and its variants have received significant interest recently. However, in the general case, existing efficient projection-free algorithms only achieved the regret bound of $O(T^{3/4})$, which is worse than the regret of projection-based algorithms, where $T$ is the number of decision rounds. In this paper, we study the special case of online learning over strongly convex sets, for which we first prove that OFW can enjoy a better regret bound of $O(T^{2/3})$ for general convex losses. The key idea is to refine the decaying step-size in the original OFW by a simple line search rule. Furthermore, for strongly convex losses, we propose a strongly convex variant of OFW by redefining the surrogate loss function in OFW. We show that it achieves a regret bound of $O(T^{2/3})$ over general convex sets and a better regret bound of $O(\sqrt{T})$ over strongly convex sets.