As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies begin to permeate diverse fields--from healthcare to education--consumers, researchers and policymakers are increasingly raising concerns about whether and how AI is regulated. It is therefore reasonable to anticipate that alignment with principles of'ethical' or'responsible' AI, as well as compliance with law and policy, will form an increasingly important part of AI development. Yet, for the most part, the conventional computer science curriculum is ill-equipped to prepare students for these challenges. To this end, we seek to explore how new educational content related to AI ethics and AI policy can be integrated into both ethics-and technical-focused courses. This paper describes a two-lecture AI policy module that was piloted in a graduate-level introductory machine learning course in 2024. The module, which includes an in-class active learning game, is evaluated using data from student surveys before and after the lectures, and pedagogical motivations and considerations are discussed. We find that the module is successful in engaging otherwise technically-oriented students on the topic of AI policy, increasing student awareness of the social impacts of a variety of AI technologies and developing student interest in the field of AI regulation. Introduction The explosive growth of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is widely documented and increasingly evident in everyday life: some responses from the search engine Google now include an "AI Overview" inserted before the first webpage link; companies like Tesla and Waymo have seen success in implementing partial or full autonomous driving in vehicles on live roads; and "Apple Intelligence" was the flagship feature for the launch of Apple's new smartphone in fall 2024. Yet what legal or policy response this technological growth will precipitate is less certain [1, 2]. Nevertheless, it should be expected that the development and enactment of regulatory frameworks for AI will demand AI engineers with a command not only of the technical intricacies of AI models, but also of the policy and regulatory landscape for AI development and compliance [3].

In social robot navigation, traditional metrics like proxemics and behavior naturalness emphasize human comfort and adherence to social norms but often fail to capture an agent's autonomy and adaptability in dynamic environments. This paper introduces human empowerment, an information-theoretic concept that measures a human's ability to influence their future states and observe those changes, as a complementary metric for evaluating social compliance. This metric reveals how robot navigation policies can indirectly impact human empowerment. We present a framework that integrates human empowerment into the evaluation of social performance in navigation tasks. Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate that human empowerment as a metric not only aligns with intuitive social behavior, but also shows statistically significant differences across various robot navigation policies. These results provide a deeper understanding of how different policies affect social compliance, highlighting the potential of human empowerment as a complementary metric for future research in social navigation.

Existing text simplification or paraphrase datasets mainly focus on sentence-level text generation in a general domain. These datasets are typically developed without using domain knowledge. In this paper, we release a novel dataset, VTechAGP, which is the first academic-to-general-audience text paraphrase dataset consisting of 4,938 document-level these and dissertation academic and general-audience abstract pairs from 8 colleges authored over 25 years. We also propose a novel dynamic soft prompt generative language model, DSPT5. For training, we leverage a contrastive-generative loss function to learn the keyword vectors in the dynamic prompt. For inference, we adopt a crowd-sampling decoding strategy at both semantic and structural levels to further select the best output candidate. We evaluate DSPT5 and various state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) from multiple perspectives. Results demonstrate that the SOTA LLMs does not provide satisfactory outcomes, while the lightweight DSPT5 can achieve competitive results. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to build a benchmark dataset and solutions for academic-to-general-audience text paraphrase dataset.

Many real-world problems, such as controlling swarms of drones and urban traffic, naturally lend themselves to modeling as multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) problems. However, existing multi-agent RL methods often suffer from scalability challenges, primarily due to the introduction of communication among agents. Consequently, a key challenge lies in adapting the success of deep learning in single-agent RL to the multi-agent setting. In response to this challenge, we propose an approach that fundamentally reimagines multi-agent environments. Unlike conventional methods that model each agent individually with separate networks, our approach, the Bottom Up Network (BUN), adopts a unique perspective. BUN treats the collective of multi-agents as a unified entity while employing a specialized weight initialization strategy that promotes independent learning. Furthermore, we dynamically establish connections among agents using gradient information, enabling coordination when necessary while maintaining these connections as limited and sparse to effectively manage the computational budget. Our extensive empirical evaluations across a variety of cooperative multi-agent scenarios, including tasks such as cooperative navigation and traffic control, consistently demonstrate BUN's superiority over baseline methods with substantially reduced computational costs.

The goal of few-shot relation extraction is to predict relations between name entities in a sentence when only a few labeled instances are available for training. Existing few-shot relation extraction methods focus on uni-modal information such as text only. This reduces performance when there are no clear contexts between the name entities described in text. We propose a multi-modal few-shot relation extraction model (MFS-HVE) that leverages both textual and visual semantic information to learn a multi-modal representation jointly. The MFS-HVE includes semantic feature extractors and multi-modal fusion components. The MFS-HVE semantic feature extractors are developed to extract both textual and visual features. The visual features include global image features and local object features within the image. The MFS-HVE multi-modal fusion unit integrates information from various modalities using image-guided attention, object-guided attention, and hybrid feature attention to fully capture the semantic interaction between visual regions of images and relevant texts. Extensive experiments conducted on two public datasets demonstrate that semantic visual information significantly improves the performance of few-shot relation prediction.

Temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) have shown promise for reasoning tasks by incorporating a temporal dimension to represent how facts evolve over time. However, existing TKG reasoning (TKGR) models lack explainability due to their black-box nature. Recent work has attempted to address this through customized model architectures that generate reasoning paths, but these recent approaches have limited generalizability and provide sparse explanatory output. To enable interpretability for most TKGR models, we propose GradXKG, a novel two-stage gradient-based approach for explaining Relational Graph Convolution Network (RGCN)-based TKGR models. First, a Grad-CAM-inspired RGCN explainer tracks gradients to quantify each node's contribution across timesteps in an efficient "explain-per-use" fashion. Second, an integrated gradients explainer consolidates importance scores for RGCN outputs, extending compatibility across diverse TKGR architectures based on RGCN. Together, the two explainers highlight the most critical nodes at each timestep for a given prediction. Our extensive experiments demonstrated that, by leveraging gradient information, GradXKG provides insightful explanations grounded in the model's logic in a timely manner for most RGCN-based TKGR models. This helps address the lack of interpretability in existing TKGR models and provides a universal explanation approach applicable across various models.

Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy-enforcing sub-domain of machine learning that brings the model to the user's device for training, avoiding the need to share personal data with a central server. While existing works address data heterogeneity, they overlook other challenges in FL, such as device heterogeneity and communication efficiency. In this paper, we propose RE-FL, a novel approach that tackles computational and communication challenges in resource-constrained devices. Our variable pruning technique optimizes resource utilization by adapting pruning to each client's computational capabilities. We also employ knowledge distillation to reduce bandwidth consumption and communication rounds. Experimental results on image classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in resource-constrained environments, maintaining data privacy and performance while accommodating heterogeneous model architectures.

Existing attribute-value extraction (AVE) models require large quantities of labeled data for training. However, new products with new attribute-value pairs enter the market every day in real-world e-Commerce. Thus, we formulate AVE in multi-label few-shot learning (FSL), aiming to extract unseen attribute value pairs based on a small number of training examples. We propose a Knowledge-Enhanced Attentive Framework (KEAF) based on prototypical networks, leveraging the generated label description and category information to learn more discriminative prototypes. Besides, KEAF integrates with hybrid attention to reduce noise and capture more informative semantics for each class by calculating the label-relevant and query-related weights. To achieve multi-label inference, KEAF further learns a dynamic threshold by integrating the semantic information from both the support set and the query set. Extensive experiments with ablation studies conducted on two datasets demonstrate that KEAF outperforms other SOTA models for information extraction in FSL. The code can be found at: https://github.com/gjiaying/KEAF

In relation triplet extraction (RTE), recognizing unseen (new) relations for which there are no training instances is a challenging task. Efforts have been made to recognize unseen relations based on question-answering models or relation descriptions. However, these approaches miss the semantic information about connections between seen and unseen relations. In this paper, We propose a prompt-based model with semantic knowledge augmentation (ZS-SKA) to recognize unseen relations under the zero-shot setting. We present a new word-level analogy-based sentence translation rule and generate augmented instances with unseen relations from instances with seen relations using that new rule. We design prompts with weighted virtual label construction based on an external knowledge graph to integrate semantic knowledge information learned from seen relations. Instead of using the actual label sets in the prompt template, we construct weighted virtual label words. We learn the representations of both seen and unseen relations with augmented instances and prompts. We then calculate the distance between the generated representations using prototypical networks to predict unseen relations. Extensive experiments conducted on three public datasets FewRel, Wiki-ZSL, and NYT, show that ZS-SKA outperforms state-of-the-art methods under the zero-shot scenarios. Our experimental results also demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of ZS-SKA.

The models of n-ary cross sentence relation extraction based on distant supervision assume that consecutive sentences mentioning n entities describe the relation of these n entities. However, on one hand, this assumption introduces noisy labeled data and harms the models' performance. On the other hand, some non-consecutive sentences also describe one relation and these sentences cannot be labeled under this assumption. In this paper, we relax this strong assumption by a weaker distant supervision assumption to address the second issue and propose a novel sentence distribution estimator model to address the first problem. This estimator selects correctly labeled sentences to alleviate the effect of noisy data is a two-level agent reinforcement learning model. In addition, a novel universal relation extractor with a hybrid approach of attention mechanism and PCNN is proposed such that it can be deployed in any tasks, including consecutive and nonconsecutive sentences. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model can reduce the impact of noisy data and achieve better performance on general n-ary cross sentence relation extraction task compared to baseline models.