Recent advancements in robotics, including applications like self-driving cars, unmanned systems, and medical robots, have had a significant impact on the job market. On one hand, big robotics companies offer training programs based on the job requirements. However, these training programs may not be as beneficial as general robotics programs offered by universities or community colleges. On the other hand, community colleges and universities face challenges with required resources, especially qualified instructors, to offer students advanced robotics education. Furthermore, the diverse backgrounds of undergraduate students present additional challenges. Some students bring extensive industry experiences, while others are newcomers to the field. To address these challenges, we propose a student-centered personalized learning framework for robotics. This framework allows a general instructor to teach undergraduate-level robotics courses by breaking down course topics into smaller components with well-defined topic dependencies, structured as a graph. This modular approach enables students to choose their learning path, catering to their unique preferences and pace. Moreover, our framework's flexibility allows for easy customization of teaching materials to meet the specific needs of host institutions. In addition to teaching materials, a frequently-asked-questions document would be prepared for a general instructor. If students' robotics questions cannot be answered by the instructor, the answers to these questions may be included in this document. For questions not covered in this document, we can gather and address them through collaboration with the robotics community and course content creators. Our user study results demonstrate the promise of this method in delivering undergraduate-level robotics education tailored to individual learning outcomes and preferences.

Our ongoing development and deployment of an online robotics education platform highlighted a gap in providing an interactive, feedback-rich learning environment essential for mastering programming concepts in robotics, which they were not getting with the traditional code-simulate-turn in workflow. Since teaching resources are limited, students would benefit from feedback in real-time to find and fix their mistakes in the programming assignments. To address these concerns, this paper will focus on creating a system for unit testing while integrating it into the course workflow. We facilitate this real-time feedback by including unit testing in the design of programming assignments so students can understand and fix their errors on their own and without the prior help of instructors/TAs serving as a bottleneck. In line with the framework's personalized student-centered approach, this method makes it easier for students to revise, and debug their programming work, encouraging hands-on learning. The course workflow updated to include unit tests will strengthen the learning environment and make it more interactive so that students can learn how to program robots in a self-guided fashion.

Recent advancements in generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have been remarkable, however, the quality of the text generated by these models often reveals persistent issues. Evaluating the quality of text generated by these models, especially in open-ended text, has consistently presented a significant challenge. Addressing this, recent work has explored the possibility of using LLMs as evaluators. While using a single LLM as an evaluation agent shows potential, it is filled with significant uncertainty and instability. To address these issues, we propose the MATEval: A "Multi-Agent Text Evaluation framework" where all agents are played by LLMs like GPT-4. The MATEval framework emulates human collaborative discussion methods, integrating multiple agents' interactions to evaluate open-ended text. Our framework incorporates self-reflection and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) strategies, along with feedback mechanisms, enhancing the depth and breadth of the evaluation process and guiding discussions towards consensus, while the framework generates comprehensive evaluation reports, including error localization, error types and scoring. Experimental results show that our framework outperforms existing open-ended text evaluation methods and achieves the highest correlation with human evaluation, which confirms the effectiveness and advancement of our framework in addressing the uncertainties and instabilities in evaluating LLMs-generated text. Furthermore, our framework significantly improves the efficiency of text evaluation and model iteration in industrial scenarios.

Automatic methods for evaluating machine-generated texts hold significant importance due to the expanding applications of generative systems. Conventional methods tend to grapple with a lack of explainability, issuing a solitary numerical score to signify the assessment outcome. Recent advancements have sought to mitigate this limitation by incorporating large language models (LLMs) to offer more detailed error analyses, yet their applicability remains constrained, particularly in industrial contexts where comprehensive error coverage and swift detection are paramount. To alleviate these challenges, we introduce DEE, a Dual-stage Explainable Evaluation method for estimating the quality of text generation. Built upon Llama 2, DEE follows a dual-stage principle guided by stage-specific instructions to perform efficient identification of errors in generated texts in the initial stage and subsequently delves into providing comprehensive diagnostic reports in the second stage. DEE is fine-tuned on our elaborately assembled dataset AntEval, which encompasses 15K examples from 4 real-world applications of Alipay that employ generative systems. The dataset concerns newly emerged issues like hallucination and toxicity, thereby broadening the scope of DEE's evaluation criteria.

Transformers have achieved remarkable performance in multivariate time series(MTS) forecasting due to their capability to capture long-term dependencies. However, the canonical attention mechanism has two key limitations: (1) its quadratic time complexity limits the sequence length, and (2) it generates future values from the entire historical sequence. To address this, we propose a Dozer Attention mechanism consisting of three sparse components: (1) Local, each query exclusively attends to keys within a localized window of neighboring time steps. (2) Stride, enables each query to attend to keys at predefined intervals. (3) Vary, allows queries to selectively attend to keys from a subset of the historical sequence. Notably, the size of this subset dynamically expands as forecasting horizons extend. Those three components are designed to capture essential attributes of MTS data, including locality, seasonality, and global temporal dependencies. Additionally, we present the Dozerformer Framework, incorporating the Dozer Attention mechanism for the MTS forecasting task. We evaluated the proposed Dozerformer framework with recent state-of-the-art methods on nine benchmark datasets and confirmed its superior performance. The code will be released after the manuscript is accepted.

This paper presents a work-in-progress on a learn-ing system that will provide robotics students with a personalized learning environment. This addresses both the scarcity of skilled robotics instructors, particularly in community colleges and the expensive demand for training equipment. The study of robotics at the college level represents a wide range of interests, experiences, and aims. This project works to provide students the flexibility to adapt their learning to their own goals and prior experience. We are developing a system to enable robotics instruction through a web-based interface that is compatible with less expensive hardware. Therefore, the free distribution of teaching materials will empower educators. This project has the potential to increase the number of robotics courses offered at both two- and four-year schools and universities. The course materials are being designed with small units and a hierarchical dependency tree in mind; students will be able to customize their course of study based on the robotics skills they have already mastered. We present an evaluation of a five module mini-course in robotics. Students indicated that they had a positive experience with the online content. They also scored the experience highly on relatedness, mastery, and autonomy perspectives, demonstrating strong motivation potential for this approach.

Multivariate Time Series (MTS) forecasting involves modeling temporal dependencies within historical records. Transformers have demonstrated remarkable performance in MTS forecasting due to their capability to capture long-term dependencies. However, prior work has been confined to modeling temporal dependencies at either a fixed scale or multiple scales that exponentially increase (most with base 2). This limitation hinders their effectiveness in capturing diverse seasonalities, such as hourly and daily patterns. In this paper, we introduce a dimension invariant embedding technique that captures short-term temporal dependencies and projects MTS data into a higher-dimensional space, while preserving the dimensions of time steps and variables in MTS data. Furthermore, we present a novel Multi-scale Transformer Pyramid Network (MTPNet), specifically designed to effectively capture temporal dependencies at multiple unconstrained scales. The predictions are inferred from multi-scale latent representations obtained from transformers at various scales. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed MTPNet outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods.

Recommender systems are fundamental information filtering techniques to recommend content or items that meet users' personalities and potential needs. As a crucial solution to address the difficulty of user identification and unavailability of historical information, session-based recommender systems provide recommendation services that only rely on users' behaviors in the current session. However, most existing studies are not well-designed for modeling heterogeneous user behaviors and capturing the relationships between them in practical scenarios. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a novel graph-based method, namely Heterogeneous Information Crossing on Graphs (HICG). HICG utilizes multiple types of user behaviors in the sessions to construct heterogeneous graphs, and captures users' current interests with their long-term preferences by effectively crossing the heterogeneous information on the graphs. In addition, we also propose an enhanced version, named HICG-CL, which incorporates contrastive learning (CL) technique to enhance item representation ability. By utilizing the item co-occurrence relationships across different sessions, HICG-CL improves the recommendation performance of HICG. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world recommendation datasets, and the results verify that (i) HICG achieves the state-of-the-art performance by utilizing multiple types of behaviors on the heterogeneous graph. (ii) HICG-CL further significantly improves the recommendation performance of HICG by the proposed contrastive learning module.

Recent studies show that hierarchical Vision Transformer with interleaved non-overlapped intra window self-attention \& shifted window self-attention is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance in various visual recognition tasks and challenges CNN's dense sliding window paradigm. Most follow-up works try to replace shifted window operation with other kinds of cross window communication while treating self-attention as the de-facto standard for intra window information aggregation. In this short preprint, we question whether self-attention is the only choice for hierarchical Vision Transformer to attain strong performance, and what makes for hierarchical Vision Transformer? We replace self-attention layers in Swin Transformer and Shuffle Transformer with simple linear mapping and keep other components unchanged. The resulting architecture with 25.4M parameters and 4.2G FLOPs achieves 80.5\% Top-1 accuracy, compared to 81.3\% for Swin Transformer with 28.3M parameters and 4.5G FLOPs. We also experiment with other alternatives to self-attention for context aggregation inside each non-overlapped window, which all give similar competitive results under the same architecture. Our study reveals that the \textbf{macro architecture} of Swin model families (i.e., interleaved intra window \& cross window communications), other than specific aggregation layers or specific means of cross window communication, may be more responsible for its strong performance and is the real challenger to CNN's dense sliding window paradigm.

Can Transformer perform $2\mathrm{D}$ object-level recognition from a pure sequence-to-sequence perspective with minimal knowledge about the $2\mathrm{D}$ spatial structure? To answer this question, we present You Only Look at One Sequence (YOLOS), a series of object detection models based on the na\"ive Vision Transformer with the fewest possible modifications as well as inductive biases. We find that YOLOS pre-trained on the mid-sized ImageNet-$1k$ dataset only can already achieve competitive object detection performance on COCO, \textit{e.g.}, YOLOS-Base directly adopted from BERT-Base can achieve $42.0$ box AP. We also discuss the impacts as well as limitations of current pre-train schemes and model scaling strategies for Transformer in vision through object detection. Code and model weights are available at \url{https://github.com/hustvl/YOLOS}.