We evaluated the capability of a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT-4) to automatically generate high-quality learning objectives (LOs) in the context of a practically oriented university course on Artificial Intelligence. Discussions of opportunities (e.g., content generation, explanation) and risks (e.g., cheating) of this emerging technology in education have intensified, but to date there has not been a study of the models' capabilities in supporting the course design and authoring of LOs. LOs articulate the knowledge and skills learners are intended to acquire by engaging with a course. To be effective, LOs must focus on what students are intended to achieve, focus on specific cognitive processes, and be measurable. Thus, authoring high-quality LOs is a challenging and time consuming (i.e., expensive) effort. We evaluated 127 LOs that were automatically generated based on a carefully crafted prompt (detailed guidelines on high-quality LOs authoring) submitted to GPT-4 for conceptual modules and projects of an AI Practitioner course. We analyzed the generated LOs if they follow certain best practices such as beginning with action verbs from Bloom's taxonomy in regards to the level of sophistication intended. Our analysis showed that the generated LOs are sensible, properly expressed (e.g., starting with an action verb), and that they largely operate at the appropriate level of Bloom's taxonomy, respecting the different nature of the conceptual modules (lower levels) and projects (higher levels). Our results can be leveraged by instructors and curricular designers wishing to take advantage of the state-of-the-art generative models to support their curricular and course design efforts.
We study a fundamental transfer learning process from source to target linear regression tasks, including overparameterized settings where there are more learned parameters than data samples. The target task learning is addressed by using its training data together with the parameters previously computed for the source task. We define a transfer learning approach to the target task as a linear regression optimization with a regularization on the distance between the to-be-learned target parameters and the already-learned source parameters. We analytically characterize the generalization performance of our transfer learning approach and demonstrate its ability to resolve the peak in generalization errors in double descent phenomena of the minimum L2-norm solution to linear regression. Moreover, we show that for sufficiently related tasks, the optimally tuned transfer learning approach can outperform the optimally tuned ridge regression method, even when the true parameter vector conforms to an isotropic Gaussian prior distribution. Namely, we demonstrate that transfer learning can beat the minimum mean square error (MMSE) solution of the independent target task. Our results emphasize the ability of transfer learning to extend the solution space to the target task and, by that, to have an improved MMSE solution. We formulate the linear MMSE solution to our transfer learning setting and point out its key differences from the common design philosophy to transfer learning.
Results from the TinyML community demonstrate that, it is possible to execute machine learning models directly on the terminals themselves, even if these are small microcontroller-based devices. However, to date, practitioners in the domain lack convenient all-in-one toolkits to help them evaluate the feasibility of executing arbitrary models on arbitrary low-power IoT hardware. To this effect, we present in this paper U-TOE, a universal toolkit we designed to facilitate the task of IoT designers and researchers, by combining functionalities from a low-power embedded OS, a generic model transpiler and compiler, an integrated performance measurement module, and an open-access remote IoT testbed. We provide an open source implementation of U-TOE and we demonstrate its use to experimentally evaluate the performance of various models, on a wide variety of low-power IoT boards, based on popular microcontroller architectures. U-TOE allows easily reproducible and customizable comparative evaluation experiments on a wide variety of IoT hardware all-at-once. The availability of a toolkit such as U-TOE is desirable to accelerate research combining Artificial Intelligence and IoT towards fully exploiting the potential of edge computing.
Building artificial intelligence (AI) systems on top of a set of foundation models (FMs) is becoming a new paradigm in AI research. Their representative and generative abilities learnt from vast amounts of data can be easily adapted and transferred to a wide range of downstream tasks without extra training from scratch. However, leveraging FMs in cross-modal generation remains under-researched when audio modality is involved. On the other hand, automatically generating semantically-relevant sound from visual input is an important problem in cross-modal generation studies. To solve this vision-to-audio (V2A) generation problem, existing methods tend to design and build complex systems from scratch using modestly sized datasets. In this paper, we propose a lightweight solution to this problem by leveraging foundation models, specifically CLIP, CLAP, and AudioLDM. We first investigate the domain gap between the latent space of the visual CLIP and the auditory CLAP models. Then we propose a simple yet effective mapper mechanism (V2A-Mapper) to bridge the domain gap by translating the visual input between CLIP and CLAP spaces. Conditioned on the translated CLAP embedding, pretrained audio generative FM AudioLDM is adopted to produce high-fidelity and visually-aligned sound. Compared to previous approaches, our method only requires a quick training of the V2A-Mapper. We further analyze and conduct extensive experiments on the choice of the V2A-Mapper and show that a generative mapper is better at fidelity and variability (FD) while a regression mapper is slightly better at relevance (CS). Both objective and subjective evaluation on two V2A datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared to current state-of-the-art approaches - trained with 86% fewer parameters but achieving 53% and 19% improvement in FD and CS, respectively.
The logic of information flows (LIF) has recently been proposed as a general framework in the field of knowledge representation. In this framework, tasks of procedural nature can still be modeled in a declarative, logic-based fashion. In this paper, we focus on the task of query processing under limited access patterns, a well-studied problem in the database literature. We show that LIF is well-suited for modeling this task. Toward this goal, we introduce a variant of LIF called "forward" LIF (FLIF), in a first-order setting. FLIF takes a novel graph-navigational approach; it is an XPath-like language that nevertheless turns out to be equivalent to the "executable" fragment of first-order logic defined by Nash and Lud\"ascher. One can also classify the variables in FLIF expressions as inputs and outputs. Expressions where inputs and outputs are disjoint, referred to as io-disjoint FLIF expressions, allow a particularly transparent translation into algebraic query plans that respect the access limitations. Finally, we show that general FLIF expressions can always be put into io-disjoint form.
State-of-the-art rehearsal-free continual learning methods exploit the peculiarities of Vision Transformers to learn task-specific prompts, drastically reducing catastrophic forgetting. However, there is a tradeoff between the number of learned parameters and the performance, making such models computationally expensive. In this work, we aim to reduce this cost while maintaining competitive performance. We achieve this by revisiting and extending a simple transfer learning idea: learning task-specific normalization layers. Specifically, we tune the scale and bias parameters of LayerNorm for each continual learning task, selecting them at inference time based on the similarity between task-specific keys and the output of the pre-trained model. To make the classifier robust to incorrect selection of parameters during inference, we introduce a two-stage training procedure, where we first optimize the task-specific parameters and then train the classifier with the same selection procedure of the inference time. Experiments on ImageNet-R and CIFAR-100 show that our method achieves results that are either superior or on par with {the state of the art} while being computationally cheaper.
Deep Neural Networks are prone to learning spurious correlations embedded in the training data, leading to potentially biased predictions. This poses risks when deploying these models for high-stake decision-making, such as in medical applications. Current methods for post-hoc model correction either require input-level annotations, which are only possible for spatially localized biases, or augment the latent feature space, thereby hoping to enforce the right reasons. We present a novel method ensuring the right reasons on the concept level by reducing the model's sensitivity towards biases through the gradient. When modeling biases via Concept Activation Vectors, we highlight the importance of choosing robust directions, as traditional regression-based approaches such as Support Vector Machines tend to result in diverging directions. We effectively mitigate biases in controlled and real-world settings on the ISIC, Bone Age, ImageNet and CelebA datasets using VGG, ResNet and EfficientNet architectures.
Unsupervised representation learning has recently helped automatic speech recognition (ASR) to tackle tasks with limited labeled data. Following this, hardware limitations and applications give rise to the question how to take advantage of large pre-trained models efficiently and reduce their complexity. In this work, we study a challenging low resource conversational telephony speech corpus from the medical domain in Vietnamese and German. We show the benefits of using unsupervised techniques beyond simple fine-tuning of large pre-trained models, discuss how to adapt them to a practical telephony task including bandwidth transfer and investigate different data conditions for pre-training and fine-tuning. We outperform the project baselines by 22% relative using pretraining techniques. Further gains of 29% can be achieved by refinements of architecture and training and 6% by adding 0.8 h of in-domain adaptation data.
In contrast to batch learning where all training data is available at once, continual learning represents a family of methods that accumulate knowledge and learn continuously with data available in sequential order. Similar to the human learning process with the ability of learning, fusing, and accumulating new knowledge coming at different time steps, continual learning is considered to have high practical significance. Hence, continual learning has been studied in various artificial intelligence tasks. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the recent progress of continual learning in computer vision. In particular, the works are grouped by their representative techniques, including regularization, knowledge distillation, memory, generative replay, parameter isolation, and a combination of the above techniques. For each category of these techniques, both its characteristics and applications in computer vision are presented. At the end of this overview, several subareas, where continuous knowledge accumulation is potentially helpful while continual learning has not been well studied, are discussed.
The notion of uncertainty is of major importance in machine learning and constitutes a key element of machine learning methodology. In line with the statistical tradition, uncertainty has long been perceived as almost synonymous with standard probability and probabilistic predictions. Yet, due to the steadily increasing relevance of machine learning for practical applications and related issues such as safety requirements, new problems and challenges have recently been identified by machine learning scholars, and these problems may call for new methodological developments. In particular, this includes the importance of distinguishing between (at least) two different types of uncertainty, often refereed to as aleatoric and epistemic. In this paper, we provide an introduction to the topic of uncertainty in machine learning as well as an overview of hitherto attempts at handling uncertainty in general and formalizing this distinction in particular.
We introduce a multi-task setup of identifying and classifying entities, relations, and coreference clusters in scientific articles. We create SciERC, a dataset that includes annotations for all three tasks and develop a unified framework called Scientific Information Extractor (SciIE) for with shared span representations. The multi-task setup reduces cascading errors between tasks and leverages cross-sentence relations through coreference links. Experiments show that our multi-task model outperforms previous models in scientific information extraction without using any domain-specific features. We further show that the framework supports construction of a scientific knowledge graph, which we use to analyze information in scientific literature.