Reading fluency assessment is a critical component of literacy programmes, serving to guide and monitor early education interventions. Given the resource intensive nature of the exercise when conducted by teachers, the development of automatic tools that can operate on audio recordings of oral reading is attractive as an objective and highly scalable solution. Multiple complex aspects such as accuracy, rate and expressiveness underlie human judgements of reading fluency. In this work, we investigate end-to-end modeling on a training dataset of children's audio recordings of story texts labeled by human experts. The pre-trained wav2vec2.0 model is adopted due its potential to alleviate the challenges from the limited amount of labeled data. We report the performance of a number of system variations on the relevant measures, and also probe the learned embeddings for lexical and acoustic-prosodic features known to be important to the perception of reading fluency.
While large language models (LLMs) can already achieve strong performance on standard generic summarization benchmarks, their performance on more complex summarization task settings is less studied. Therefore, we benchmark LLMs on instruction controllable text summarization, where the model input consists of both a source article and a natural language requirement for desired summary characteristics. To this end, we curate an evaluation-only dataset for this task setting and conduct human evaluations of five LLM-based systems to assess their instruction-following capabilities in controllable summarization. We then benchmark LLM-based automatic evaluation for this task with 4 different evaluation protocols and 11 LLMs, resulting in 40 evaluation methods. Our study reveals that instruction controllable text summarization remains a challenging task for LLMs, since (1) all LLMs evaluated still make factual and other types of errors in their summaries; (2) no LLM-based evaluation methods can achieve a strong alignment with human annotators when judging the quality of candidate summaries; (3) different LLMs show large performance gaps in summary generation and evaluation capabilities. We make our collected benchmark InstruSum publicly available to facilitate future research in this direction.
The paper presents a study of methods for extracting information about dialogue participants and evaluating their performance in Russian. To train models for this task, the Multi-Session Chat dataset was translated into Russian using multiple translation models, resulting in improved data quality. A metric based on the F-score concept is presented to evaluate the effectiveness of the extraction models. The metric uses a trained classifier to identify the dialogue participant to whom the persona belongs. Experiments were conducted on MBart, FRED-T5, Starling-7B, which is based on the Mistral, and Encoder2Encoder models. The results demonstrated that all models exhibited an insufficient level of recall in the persona extraction task. The incorporation of the NCE Loss improved the model's precision at the expense of its recall. Furthermore, increasing the model's size led to enhanced extraction of personas.
Large language models (LLMs) present an opportunity to scale high-quality personalized education to all. A promising approach towards this means is to build dialog tutoring models that scaffold students' problem-solving. However, even though existing LLMs perform well in solving reasoning questions, they struggle to precisely detect student's errors and tailor their feedback to these errors. Inspired by real-world teaching practice where teachers identify student errors and customize their response based on them, we focus on verifying student solutions and show how grounding to such verification improves the overall quality of tutor response generation. We collect a dataset of 1K stepwise math reasoning chains with the first error step annotated by teachers. We show empirically that finding the mistake in a student solution is challenging for current models. We propose and evaluate several verifiers for detecting these errors. Using both automatic and human evaluation we show that the student solution verifiers steer the generation model towards highly targeted responses to student errors which are more often correct with less hallucinations compared to existing baselines.
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a declarative problem solving paradigm that can be used to encode a combinatorial problem as a logic program whose stable models correspond to the solutions of the considered problem. ASP has been widely applied to various domains in AI and beyond. The question "What can be said about stable models of a logic program from its static information?" has been investigated and proved useful in many circumstances. In this work, we dive into this direction more deeply by making the connection between a logic program and a Boolean network, which is a prominent modeling framework with applications to various areas. The proposed connection can bring the existing results in the rich history on static analysis of Boolean networks to explore and prove more theoretical results on ASP, making it become a unified and powerful tool to further study the static analysis of ASP. In particular, the newly obtained insights have the potential to benefit many problems in the field of ASP.
Context: To effectively defend against ever-evolving cybersecurity threats, software systems should be made as secure as possible. To achieve this, software developers should understand potential vulnerabilities and apply secure coding practices. To prepare these skilled professionals, it is important that cybersecurity concepts are included in programming courses taught at universities. Objective: To present a comprehensive and unbiased literature review on teaching of cybersecurity concepts in programming courses taught at universities. Method: We perform a Systematic Mapping Study. We present six research questions, define our selection criteria, and develop a classification scheme. Results and Conclusions: We select 24 publications. Our results show a wide range of research contributions. We also outline guidelines and identify opportunities for future studies. The guidelines include coverage of security knowledge categories and evaluation of contributions. We suggest that future studies should cover security issues, negative impacts, and countermeasures, as well as apply evaluation techniques that examine students' knowledge. The opportunities for future studies are related to advanced courses, security knowledge frameworks, and programming environments. Furthermore, there is a need of a holistic security framework that covers the security concepts identified in this study and is suitable for education.
In-situ sensing, in conjunction with learning models, presents a unique opportunity to address persistent defect issues in Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes. However, this integration introduces significant data privacy concerns, such as data leakage, sensor data compromise, and model inversion attacks, revealing critical details about part design, material composition, and machine parameters. Differential Privacy (DP) models, which inject noise into data under mathematical guarantees, offer a nuanced balance between data utility and privacy by obscuring traces of sensing data. However, the introduction of noise into learning models, often functioning as black boxes, complicates the prediction of how specific noise levels impact model accuracy. This study introduces the Differential Privacy-HyperDimensional computing (DP-HD) framework, leveraging the explainability of the vector symbolic paradigm to predict the noise impact on the accuracy of in-situ monitoring, safeguarding sensitive data while maintaining operational efficiency. Experimental results on real-world high-speed melt pool data of AM for detecting overhang anomalies demonstrate that DP-HD achieves superior operational efficiency, prediction accuracy, and robust privacy protection, outperforming state-of-the-art Machine Learning (ML) models. For example, when implementing the same level of privacy protection (with a privacy budget set at 1), our model achieved an accuracy of 94.43%, surpassing the performance of traditional models such as ResNet50 (52.30%), GoogLeNet (23.85%), AlexNet (55.78%), DenseNet201 (69.13%), and EfficientNet B2 (40.81%). Notably, DP-HD maintains high performance under substantial noise additions designed to enhance privacy, unlike current models that suffer significant accuracy declines under high privacy constraints.
Believable proxies of human behavior can empower interactive applications ranging from immersive environments to rehearsal spaces for interpersonal communication to prototyping tools. In this paper, we introduce generative agents--computational software agents that simulate believable human behavior. Generative agents wake up, cook breakfast, and head to work; artists paint, while authors write; they form opinions, notice each other, and initiate conversations; they remember and reflect on days past as they plan the next day. To enable generative agents, we describe an architecture that extends a large language model to store a complete record of the agent's experiences using natural language, synthesize those memories over time into higher-level reflections, and retrieve them dynamically to plan behavior. We instantiate generative agents to populate an interactive sandbox environment inspired by The Sims, where end users can interact with a small town of twenty five agents using natural language. In an evaluation, these generative agents produce believable individual and emergent social behaviors: for example, starting with only a single user-specified notion that one agent wants to throw a Valentine's Day party, the agents autonomously spread invitations to the party over the next two days, make new acquaintances, ask each other out on dates to the party, and coordinate to show up for the party together at the right time. We demonstrate through ablation that the components of our agent architecture--observation, planning, and reflection--each contribute critically to the believability of agent behavior. By fusing large language models with computational, interactive agents, this work introduces architectural and interaction patterns for enabling believable simulations of human behavior.
Mathematical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence and is applicable in various fields, including science, engineering, finance, and everyday life. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of solving math problems and proving theorems has garnered significant interest in the fields of machine learning and natural language processing. For example, mathematics serves as a testbed for aspects of reasoning that are challenging for powerful deep learning models, driving new algorithmic and modeling advances. On the other hand, recent advances in large-scale neural language models have opened up new benchmarks and opportunities to use deep learning for mathematical reasoning. In this survey paper, we review the key tasks, datasets, and methods at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and deep learning over the past decade. We also evaluate existing benchmarks and methods, and discuss future research directions in this domain.
Knowledge graphs represent factual knowledge about the world as relationships between concepts and are critical for intelligent decision making in enterprise applications. New knowledge is inferred from the existing facts in the knowledge graphs by encoding the concepts and relations into low-dimensional feature vector representations. The most effective representations for this task, called Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGE), are learned through neural network architectures. Due to their impressive predictive performance, they are increasingly used in high-impact domains like healthcare, finance and education. However, are the black-box KGE models adversarially robust for use in domains with high stakes? This thesis argues that state-of-the-art KGE models are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, that is, their predictive performance can be degraded by systematically crafted perturbations to the training knowledge graph. To support this argument, two novel data poisoning attacks are proposed that craft input deletions or additions at training time to subvert the learned model's performance at inference time. These adversarial attacks target the task of predicting the missing facts in knowledge graphs using KGE models, and the evaluation shows that the simpler attacks are competitive with or outperform the computationally expensive ones. The thesis contributions not only highlight and provide an opportunity to fix the security vulnerabilities of KGE models, but also help to understand the black-box predictive behaviour of KGE models.
As soon as abstract mathematical computations were adapted to computation on digital computers, the problem of efficient representation, manipulation, and communication of the numerical values in those computations arose. Strongly related to the problem of numerical representation is the problem of quantization: in what manner should a set of continuous real-valued numbers be distributed over a fixed discrete set of numbers to minimize the number of bits required and also to maximize the accuracy of the attendant computations? This perennial problem of quantization is particularly relevant whenever memory and/or computational resources are severely restricted, and it has come to the forefront in recent years due to the remarkable performance of Neural Network models in computer vision, natural language processing, and related areas. Moving from floating-point representations to low-precision fixed integer values represented in four bits or less holds the potential to reduce the memory footprint and latency by a factor of 16x; and, in fact, reductions of 4x to 8x are often realized in practice in these applications. Thus, it is not surprising that quantization has emerged recently as an important and very active sub-area of research in the efficient implementation of computations associated with Neural Networks. In this article, we survey approaches to the problem of quantizing the numerical values in deep Neural Network computations, covering the advantages/disadvantages of current methods. With this survey and its organization, we hope to have presented a useful snapshot of the current research in quantization for Neural Networks and to have given an intelligent organization to ease the evaluation of future research in this area.