The traditional formulation of machine learning is in terms of a system that improves its predictive and decision-making performance by interacting with an environment. Such a formulation is overly narrow in emerging applications--it lumps the social context of a learning system into the undifferentiated concept of an "environment" and provides no special consideration of the collective nature of learning. Such social context includes notions of scarcity and conflict, as well as goals such as social norms and collaborative work that are best formulated at the level of social collectives. The neglect of such considerations in traditional machine learning leads to undesirable outcomes in real-world deployments of machine learning systems, including outcomes that favor particular groups of people over others [44, 7, 31, 10, 38, 51], the amplification of social biases and stereotypes [28, 14, 47], and an ongoing lack of clarity regarding issues of communication, trust, and fairness. Our focus is the current paper is fairness, and we take a perspective on fairness that blends learning methodology with economic mechanisms. The current favored methodology for addressing fairness recognizes that it is not a one-size-fits-all concept--different fairness notions are appropriate for different social settings [49, 32, 50]--and treats fairness via meta-learning ideas. Meta-learning is implemented algorithmically with the tools of bi-level optimization. Specifically, fairness-aware metalearning employs outer optimization to align with a specific fairness goal over a small, demographically balanced validation set to adjust a set of hyperparameters, while the inner optimization minimizes the hyperparameter-adjusted training loss [43, 52, 53].

World models can foresee the outcomes of different actions, which is of paramount importance for autonomous driving. Nevertheless, existing driving world models still have limitations in generalization to unseen environments, prediction fidelity of critical details, and action controllability for flexible application. In this paper, we present Vista, a generalizable driving world model with high fidelity and versatile controllability. Based on a systematic diagnosis of existing methods, we introduce several key ingredients to address these limitations. To accurately predict real-world dynamics at high resolution, we propose two novel losses to promote the learning of moving instances and structural information. We also devise an effective latent replacement approach to inject historical frames as priors for coherent long-horizon rollouts. For action controllability, we incorporate a versatile set of controls from high-level intentions (command, goal point) to low-level maneuvers (trajectory, angle, and speed) through an efficient learning strategy. After large-scale training, the capabilities of Vista can seamlessly generalize to different scenarios. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show that Vista outperforms the most advanced general-purpose video generator in over 70% of comparisons and surpasses the best-performing driving world model by 55% in FID and 27% in FVD. Moreover, for the first time, we utilize the capacity of Vista itself to establish a generalizable reward for real-world action evaluation without accessing the ground truth actions.

Representation learning approaches for robotic manipulation have boomed in recent years. Due to the scarcity of in-domain robot data, prevailing methodologies tend to leverage large-scale human video datasets to extract generalizable features for visuomotor policy learning. Despite the progress achieved, prior endeavors disregard the interactive dynamics that capture behavior patterns and physical interaction during the manipulation process, resulting in an inadequate understanding of the relationship between objects and the environment. To this end, we propose a general pre-training pipeline that learns Manipulation by Predicting the Interaction (MPI) and enhances the visual representation.Given a pair of keyframes representing the initial and final states, along with language instructions, our algorithm predicts the transition frame and detects the interaction object, respectively. These two learning objectives achieve superior comprehension towards "how-to-interact" and "where-to-interact". We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of several challenging robotic tasks.The experimental results demonstrate that MPI exhibits remarkable improvement by 10% to 64% compared with previous state-of-the-art in real-world robot platforms as well as simulation environments. Code and checkpoints are publicly shared at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/MPI.

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) enable users to articulate their preferences and provide feedback through natural language. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), the potential to enhance user engagement with CRS and augment the recommendation process with LLM-generated content has received increasing attention. However, the efficacy of LLM-powered CRS is contingent upon the use of prompts, and the subjective perception of recommendation quality can differ across various recommendation domains. Therefore, we have developed a ChatGPT-based CRS to investigate the impact of these two factors, prompt guidance (PG) and recommendation domain (RD), on the overall user experience of the system. We conducted an online empirical study (N = 100) by employing a mixed-method approach that utilized a between-subjects design for the variable of PG (with vs. without) and a within-subjects design for RD (book recommendations vs. job recommendations). The findings reveal that PG can substantially enhance the system's explainability, adaptability, perceived ease of use, and transparency. Moreover, users are inclined to perceive a greater sense of novelty and demonstrate a higher propensity to engage with and try recommended items in the context of book recommendations as opposed to job recommendations. Furthermore, the influence of PG on certain user experience metrics and interactive behaviors appears to be modulated by the recommendation domain, as evidenced by the interaction effects between the two examined factors. This work contributes to the user-centered evaluation of ChatGPT-based CRS by investigating two prominent factors and offers practical design guidance.

Deep learning methods have been exerting their strengths in long-term time series forecasting. However, they often struggle to strike a balance between expressive power and computational efficiency. Resorting to multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) provides a compromising solution, yet they suffer from two critical problems caused by the intrinsic point-wise mapping mode, in terms of deficient contextual dependencies and inadequate information bottleneck. Here, we propose the Coarsened Perceptron Network (CP-Net), featured by a coarsening strategy that alleviates the above problems associated with the prototype MLPs by forming information granules in place of solitary temporal points. The CP-Net utilizes primarily a two-stage framework for extracting semantic and contextual patterns, which preserves correlations over larger timespans and filters out volatile noises. This is further enhanced by a multi-scale setting, where patterns of diverse granularities are fused towards a comprehensive prediction. Based purely on convolutions of structural simplicity, CP-Net is able to maintain a linear computational complexity and low runtime, while demonstrates an improvement of 4.1% compared with the SOTA method on seven forecasting benchmarks.

The integration of ChatGPT as a supportive tool in education, notably in programming courses, addresses the unique challenges of programming education by providing assistance with debugging, code generation, and explanations. Despite existing research validating ChatGPT's effectiveness, its application in university-level programming education and a detailed understanding of student interactions and perspectives remain limited. This paper explores ChatGPT's impact on learning in a Python programming course tailored for first-year students over eight weeks. By analyzing responses from surveys, open-ended questions, and student-ChatGPT dialog data, we aim to provide a comprehensive view of ChatGPT's utility and identify both its advantages and limitations as perceived by students. Our study uncovers a generally positive reception toward ChatGPT and offers insights into its role in enhancing the programming education experience. These findings contribute to the broader discourse on AI's potential in education, suggesting paths for future research and application.

Federated learning (FL) is an emerging distributed machine learning paradigm enabling collaborative model training on decentralized devices without exposing their local data. A key challenge in FL is the uneven data distribution across client devices, violating the well-known assumption of independent-and-identically-distributed (IID) training samples in conventional machine learning. Clustered federated learning (CFL) addresses this challenge by grouping clients based on the similarity of their data distributions. However, existing CFL approaches require a large number of communication rounds for stable cluster formation and rely on a predefined number of clusters, thus limiting their flexibility and adaptability. This paper proposes FedClust, a novel CFL approach leveraging correlations between local model weights and client data distributions. FedClust groups clients into clusters in a one-shot manner using strategically selected partial model weights and dynamically accommodates newcomers in real-time. Experimental results demonstrate FedClust outperforms baseline approaches in terms of accuracy and communication costs.

Music-based reminiscence has the potential to positively impact the psychological well-being of older adults. However, the aging process and physiological changes, such as memory decline and limited verbal communication, may impede the ability of older adults to recall their memories and life experiences. Given the advanced capabilities of generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as generated conversations and images, and their potential to facilitate the reminiscing process, this study aims to explore the design of generative AI to support music-based reminiscence in older adults. This study follows a user-centered design approach incorporating various stages, including detailed interviews with two social workers and two design workshops (involving ten older adults). Our work contributes to an in-depth understanding of older adults' attitudes toward utilizing generative AI for supporting music-based reminiscence and identifies concrete design considerations for the future design of generative AI to enhance the reminiscence experience of older adults.

Generative AI image models may inadvertently generate problematic representations of people. Past research has noted that millions of users engage daily across the world with these models and that the models, including through problematic representations of people, have the potential to compound and accelerate real-world discrimination and other harms (Bianchi et al, 2023). In this paper, we focus on addressing the generation of problematic associations between demographic groups and semantic concepts that may reflect and reinforce negative narratives embedded in social data. Building on sociological literature (Blumer, 1958) and mapping representations to model behaviors, we have developed a taxonomy to study problematic associations in image generation models. We explore the effectiveness of fine tuning at the model level as a method to address these associations, identifying a potential reduction in visual quality as a limitation of traditional fine tuning. We also propose a new methodology with twice-human-in-the-loop (T-HITL) that promises improvements in both reducing problematic associations and also maintaining visual quality. We demonstrate the effectiveness of T-HITL by providing evidence of three problematic associations addressed by T-HITL at the model level. Our contributions to scholarship are two-fold. By defining problematic associations in the context of machine learning models and generative AI, we introduce a conceptual and technical taxonomy for addressing some of these associations. Finally, we provide a method, T-HITL, that addresses these associations and simultaneously maintains visual quality of image model generations. This mitigation need not be a tradeoff, but rather an enhancement.

Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging paradigm in machine learning without exposing clients' raw data. In practical scenarios with numerous clients, encouraging fair and efficient client participation in federated learning is of utmost importance, which is also challenging given the heterogeneity in data distribution and device properties. Existing works have proposed different client-selection methods that consider fairness; however, they fail to select clients with high utilities while simultaneously achieving fair accuracy levels. In this paper, we propose a fair client-selection approach that unlocks threefold fairness in federated learning. In addition to having a fair client-selection strategy, we enforce an equitable number of rounds for client participation and ensure a fair accuracy distribution over the clients. The experimental results demonstrate that FedFair^3, in comparison to the state-of-the-art baselines, achieves 18.15% less accuracy variance on the IID data and 54.78% on the non-IID data, without decreasing the global accuracy. Furthermore, it shows 24.36% less wall-clock training time on average.