Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Higher Education


Forget AI, these dirty jobs will help you clean up

FOX News

For years, we've been told the future belongs to tech jobs, coding boot camps and college degrees that leave young Americans saddled with debt. But while artificial intelligence is shaking up white-collar professions, there's one sector AI won't be replacing anytime soon: blue-collar skilled trades. Let's face it, when your septic system blows up are you the one who is going to clean up the mess? That's right -- while office workers worry about ChatGPT taking their jobs, the demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, and mechanics is skyrocketing. Companies are desperate for skilled workers, wages are soaring, and many of these careers offer six-figure salaries without the need for a four-year degree.


Amazon's AI-generated summary of popular conservative book accuses it of 'extreme' rhetoric

FOX News

Markowicz previously explained why they wrote the book in a Fox News Digital opinion piece, noting that in 2021, then-Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe said, "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach." "Taken on its own, the comment might even be benign. Sure, parental involvement in education had always been a prediction of student success. A 2010 study called'Parent Involvement and Student Academic Performance: A Multiple Mediational Analysis' by researchers at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro found'children whose parents are more involved in their education have higher levels of academic performance than children whose parents are involved to a lesser degree." But should parents be designing a curriculum?


How Would The Viewer Feel? Estimating Wellbeing From Video Scenarios

Neural Information Processing Systems

In recent years, deep neural networks have demonstrated increasingly strong abilities to recognize objects and activities in videos. However, as video understanding becomes widely used in real-world applications, a key consideration is developing human-centric systems that understand not only the content of the video but also how it would affect the wellbeing and emotional state of viewers. To facilitate research in this setting, we introduce two large-scale datasets with over 60,000 videos manually annotated for emotional response and subjective wellbeing. The Video Cognitive Empathy (VCE) dataset contains annotations for distributions of fine-grained emotional responses, allowing models to gain a detailed understanding of affective states. The Video to Valence (V2V) dataset contains annotations of relative pleasantness between videos, which enables predicting a continuous spectrum of wellbeing. In experiments, we show how video models that are primarily trained to recognize actions and find contours of objects can be repurposed to understand human preferences and the emotional content of videos. Although there is room for improvement, predicting wellbeing and emotional response is on the horizon for state-of-the-art models. We hope our datasets can help foster further advances at the intersection of commonsense video understanding and human preference learning.


AI Identity, Empowerment, and Mindfulness in Mitigating Unethical AI Use

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Emerging artificial intelligence (AI) technology has a pronounced impact on higher education, addressing existing challenges in educational settings such as larger school sizes and the scarcity of elite instructors. In all these areas, it has been noted th at AI has led to massive changes: some estimates suggest that at least 80 percent of workers will have the quantity and quality of at least some of their tasks influenced (for the better) by AI (Canagasuriam & Lukacik, 2024) . This means that, in educational contexts, psychological empowerment has been shown to mitigate the combined enullects of emotional exhaustion and depression, demonstrating that social relationships and leadership can bolster mental health in institutions (Schermuly & Meyer, 2016) . However, this is not to say that AI is without dangers; cybercriminals have also turned to AI to bolster their attacks, for example, in the form of spear phishing or malware installation, showcasing how AI can be abused as a tool to harm enterprises (Mirsky et al., 2023) . Psychological empowerment -- comprising meaning, competence, self - determination, and impact -- has strong enullects on person - environment interactions, which ultimately influence how individuals feel about and perform their jobs (Gregory et al., 2010) .


J&H: Evaluating the Robustness of Large Language Models Under Knowledge-Injection Attacks in Legal Domain

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As the scale and capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) increase, their applications in knowledge-intensive fields such as legal domain have garnered widespread attention. However, it remains doubtful whether these LLMs make judgments based on domain knowledge for reasoning. If LLMs base their judgments solely on specific words or patterns, rather than on the underlying logic of the language, the ''LLM-as-judges'' paradigm poses substantial risks in the real-world applications. To address this question, we propose a method of legal knowledge injection attacks for robustness testing, thereby inferring whether LLMs have learned legal knowledge and reasoning logic. In this paper, we propose J&H: an evaluation framework for detecting the robustness of LLMs under knowledge injection attacks in the legal domain. The aim of the framework is to explore whether LLMs perform deductive reasoning when accomplishing legal tasks. To further this aim, we have attacked each part of the reasoning logic underlying these tasks (major premise, minor premise, and conclusion generation). We have collected mistakes that legal experts might make in judicial decisions in the real world, such as typos, legal synonyms, inaccurate external legal statutes retrieval. However, in real legal practice, legal experts tend to overlook these mistakes and make judgments based on logic. However, when faced with these errors, LLMs are likely to be misled by typographical errors and may not utilize logic in their judgments. We conducted knowledge injection attacks on existing general and domain-specific LLMs. Current LLMs are not robust against the attacks employed in our experiments. In addition we propose and compare several methods to enhance the knowledge robustness of LLMs.


Energy-Based Modelling for Discrete and Mixed Data via Heat Equations on Structured Spaces Imperial College London Imperial College London Yingzhen Li

Neural Information Processing Systems

However, training EBMs on data in discrete or mixed state spaces poses significant challenges due to the lack of robust and fast sampling methods. In this work, we propose to train discrete EBMs with Energy Discrepancy, a loss function which only requires the evaluation of the energy function at data points and their perturbed counterparts, thus eliminating the need for Markov chain Monte Carlo. We introduce perturbations of the data distribution by simulating a diffusion process on the discrete state space endowed with a graph structure. This allows us to inform the choice of perturbation from the structure of the modelled discrete variable, while the continuous time parameter enables fine-grained control of the perturbation. Empirically, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approaches in a wide range of applications, including the estimation of discrete densities with non-binary vocabulary and binary image modelling. Finally, we train EBMs on tabular data sets with applications in synthetic data generation and calibrated classification.


Learning Layer-wise Equivariances Automatically using Gradients Tycho F.A. van der Ouderaa Alexander Immer 2,3 Mark van der Wilk Department of Computing, Imperial College London, United Kingdom

Neural Information Processing Systems

However, symmetries provide fixed hard constraints on the functions a network can represent, need to be specified in advance, and can not be adapted. Our goal is to allow flexible symmetry constraints that can automatically be learned from data using gradients. Learning symmetry and associated weight connectivity structures from scratch is difficult for two reasons. First, it requires efficient and flexible parameterisations of layer-wise equivariances. Secondly, symmetries act as constraints and are therefore not encouraged by training losses measuring data fit. To overcome these challenges, we improve parameterisations of soft equivariance and learn the amount of equivariance in layers by optimising the marginal likelihood, estimated using differentiable Laplace approximations. The objective balances data fit and model complexity enabling layer-wise symmetry discovery in deep networks. We demonstrate the ability to automatically learn layer-wise equivariances on image classification tasks, achieving equivalent or improved performance over baselines with hard-coded symmetry.


On the Limitations of Fractal Dimension as a Measure of Generalization University of Oxford Imperial College London Imperial College London Michael M. Bronstein

Neural Information Processing Systems

Bounding and predicting the generalization gap of overparameterized neural networks remains a central open problem in theoretical machine learning. There is a recent and growing body of literature that proposes the framework of fractals to model optimization trajectories of neural networks, motivating generalization bounds and measures based on the fractal dimension of the trajectory. Notably, the persistent homology dimension has been proposed to correlate with the generalization gap. This paper performs an empirical evaluation of these persistent homology-based generalization measures, with an in-depth statistical analysis. Our study reveals confounding effects in the observed correlation between generalization and topological measures due to the variation of hyperparameters. We also observe that fractal dimension fails to predict generalization of models trained from poor initializations. We lastly reveal the intriguing manifestation of model-wise double descent in these topological generalization measures. Our work forms a basis for a deeper investigation of the causal relationships between fractal geometry, topological data analysis, and neural network optimization.


AlexNet, the AI model that started it all, released in source code form - for all to download

ZDNet

University of Toronto professor Geoffrey Hinton, center, and graduate students Ilya Sutskever, left, and Alex Krizhevsky, right, in 2013. There are many stories of how artificial intelligence came to take over the world, but one of the most important developments is the emergence in 2012 of AlexNet, a neural network that, for the first time, demonstrated a huge jump in a computer's ability to recognize images. Thursday, the Computer History Museum (CHM), in collaboration with Google, released for the first time the AlexNet source code written by University of Toronto graduate student Alex Krizhevsky, placing it on GitHub for all to peruse and download. "CHM is proud to present the source code to the 2012 version of Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffery Hinton's AlexNet, which transformed the field of artificial intelligence," write the Museum organizers in the readme file on GitHub. Krizhevsky's creation would lead to a flood of innovation in the ensuing years, and tons of capital, based on proof that with sufficient data and computing, neural networks could achieve breakthroughs previously viewed as mainly theoretical.


AlexNet, the AI model that started it all, released in source code form

ZDNet

There are many stories of how artificial intelligence came to take over the world, but one of the most important developments is the emergence in 2012 of AlexNet, a neural network that, for the first time, demonstrated a huge jump in a computer's ability to recognize images. Thursday, the Computer History Museum (CHM), in collaboration with Google, released for the first time the AlexNet source code written by University of Toronto graduate student Alex Krizhevsky, placing it on GitHub for all to peruse and download. "CHM is proud to present the source code to the 2012 version of Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever, and Geoffery Hinton's AlexNet, which transformed the field of artificial intelligence," write the Museum organizers in the readme file on GitHub. Krizhevsky's creation would lead to a flood of innovation in the ensuing years, and tons of capital, based on proof that with sufficient data and computing, neural networks could achieve breakthroughs previously viewed as mainly theoretical. The code, which weighs in at a scant 200KB in the source folder, combines Nvidia CUDA code, Python script, and a little bit of C to describe how to make a convolutional neural network parse and categorize image files.