The use of AI assistants, along with the challenges they present, has sparked significant debate within the community of computer science education. While these tools demonstrate the potential to support students' learning and instructors' teaching, they also raise concerns about enabling unethical uses by students. Previous research has suggested various strategies aimed at addressing these issues. However, they concentrate on the introductory programming courses and focus on one specific type of problem. The present research evaluated the performance of ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art AI assistant, at solving 187 problems spanning three distinct types that were collected from six undergraduate computer science. The selected courses covered different topics and targeted different program levels. We then explored methods to modify these problems to adapt them to ChatGPT's capabilities to reduce potential misuse by students. Finally, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 computer science instructors. The aim was to gather their opinions on our problem modification methods, understand their perspectives on the impact of AI assistants on computer science education, and learn their strategies for adapting their courses to leverage these AI capabilities for educational improvement. The results revealed issues ranging from academic fairness to long-term impact on students' mental models. From our results, we derived design implications and recommended tools to help instructors design and create future course material that could more effectively adapt to AI assistants' capabilities.
Large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) have been used in some of the most widely deployed AI models to date, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude. % , or Meta's LLaMA-2. While there has been significant work developing these methods, our understanding of the benefits and downsides of each stage in RLHF is still limited. To fill this gap, we present an extensive analysis of how each stage of the process (i.e.~supervised fine-tuning (SFT), reward modelling, and RLHF) affects two key properties: out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation and output diversity. OOD generalisation is crucial given the wide range of real-world scenarios in which these models are being used, while output diversity refers to the model's ability to generate varied outputs and is important for a variety of use cases. We perform our analysis across two base models on both summarisation and instruction following tasks, the latter being highly relevant for current LLM use cases. We find that RLHF generalises better than SFT to new inputs, particularly as the distribution shift between train and test becomes larger. However, RLHF significantly reduces output diversity compared to SFT across a variety of measures, implying a tradeoff in current LLM fine-tuning methods between generalisation and diversity. Our results provide guidance on which fine-tuning method should be used depending on the application, and show that more research is needed to improve the tradeoff between generalisation and diversity.
The characteristics and interpretability of data become more abstract and complex as the dimensionality increases. Common patterns and relationships that hold in in low-dimensional space may fail to hold in higher-dimensional space. This phenomenon leads to a decreasing performance for the regression, classification or clustering models or algorithms, which is known as curse of dimensionality. Curse of dimensionality can be attributed to many causes. In this paper, we first summarize five challenges associated with manipulating high-dimensional data, and explains the potential causes for the failure of regression, classification or clustering tasks. Subsequently, we delve into two major causes of the curse of dimensionality, distance concentration and manifold effect, by performing theoretical and empirical analyses. The results demonstrate that nearest neighbor search (NNS) using three typical distance measurements, Minkowski distance, Chebyshev distance, and cosine distance, becomes meaningless as the dimensionality increases. Meanwhile, the data incorporates more redundant features, and the variance contribution of principal component analysis (PCA) is skewed towards a few dimensions. By interpreting the causes of the curse of dimensionality, we can better understand the limitations of current models and algorithms, and drive to improve the performance of data analysis and machine learning tasks in high-dimensional space.
Supervised deep learning models require significant amount of labeled data to achieve an acceptable performance on a specific task. However, when tested on unseen data, the models may not perform well. Therefore, the models need to be trained with additional and varying labeled data to improve the generalization. In this work, our goal is to understand the models, their performance and generalization. We establish image-image, dataset-dataset, and image-dataset distances to gain insights into the model's behavior. Our proposed distance metric when combined with model performance can help in selecting an appropriate model/architecture from a pool of candidate architectures. We have shown that the generalization of these models can be improved by only adding a small number of unseen images (say 1, 3 or 7) into the training set. Our proposed approach reduces training and annotation costs while providing an estimate of model performance on unseen data in dynamic environments.
Despite the benefits of personalizing items and information tailored to users' needs, it has been found that recommender systems tend to introduce biases that favor popular items or certain categories of items, and dominant user groups. In this study, we aim to characterize the systematic errors of a recommendation system and how they manifest in various accountability issues, such as stereotypes, biases, and miscalibration. We propose a unified framework that distinguishes the sources of prediction errors into a set of key measures that quantify the various types of system-induced effects, both at the individual and collective levels. Based on our measuring framework, we examine the most widely adopted algorithms in the context of movie recommendation. Our research reveals three important findings: (1) Differences between algorithms: recommendations generated by simpler algorithms tend to be more stereotypical but less biased than those generated by more complex algorithms. (2) Disparate impact on groups and individuals: system-induced biases and stereotypes have a disproportionate effect on atypical users and minority groups (e.g., women and older users). (3) Mitigation opportunity: using structural equation modeling, we identify the interactions between user characteristics (typicality and diversity), system-induced effects, and miscalibration. We further investigate the possibility of mitigating system-induced effects by oversampling underrepresented groups and individuals, which was found to be effective in reducing stereotypes and improving recommendation quality. Our research is the first systematic examination of not only system-induced effects and miscalibration but also the stereotyping issue in recommender systems.
The use of transfer learning with deep neural networks has increasingly become widespread for deploying well-tested computer vision systems to newer domains, especially those with limited datasets. We describe a transfer learning use case for a domain with a data-starved regime, having fewer than 100 labeled target samples. We evaluate the effectiveness of convolutional feature extraction and fine-tuning of overparameterized models with respect to the size of target training data, as well as their generalization performance on data with covariate shift, or out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Our experiments demonstrate that both overparameterization and feature reuse contribute to the successful application of transfer learning in training image classifiers in data-starved regimes. We provide visual explanations to support our findings and conclude that transfer learning enhances the performance of CNN architectures in data-starved regimes.
While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a range of downstream tasks, a significant concern revolves around their propensity to exhibit hallucinations: LLMs occasionally generate content that diverges from the user input, contradicts previously generated context, or misaligns with established world knowledge. This phenomenon poses a substantial challenge to the reliability of LLMs in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we survey recent efforts on the detection, explanation, and mitigation of hallucination, with an emphasis on the unique challenges posed by LLMs. We present taxonomies of the LLM hallucination phenomena and evaluation benchmarks, analyze existing approaches aiming at mitigating LLM hallucination, and discuss potential directions for future research.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained significant attention owing to their ability to handle graph-structured data and the improvement in practical applications. However, many of these models prioritize high utility performance, such as accuracy, with a lack of privacy consideration, which is a major concern in modern society where privacy attacks are rampant. To address this issue, researchers have started to develop privacy-preserving GNNs. Despite this progress, there is a lack of a comprehensive overview of the attacks and the techniques for preserving privacy in the graph domain. In this survey, we aim to address this gap by summarizing the attacks on graph data according to the targeted information, categorizing the privacy preservation techniques in GNNs, and reviewing the datasets and applications that could be used for analyzing/solving privacy issues in GNNs. We also outline potential directions for future research in order to build better privacy-preserving GNNs.
Temporal characteristics are prominently evident in a substantial volume of knowledge, which underscores the pivotal role of Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) in both academia and industry. However, TKGs often suffer from incompleteness for three main reasons: the continuous emergence of new knowledge, the weakness of the algorithm for extracting structured information from unstructured data, and the lack of information in the source dataset. Thus, the task of Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (TKGC) has attracted increasing attention, aiming to predict missing items based on the available information. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of TKGC methods and their details. Specifically, this paper mainly consists of three components, namely, 1)Background, which covers the preliminaries of TKGC methods, loss functions required for training, as well as the dataset and evaluation protocol; 2)Interpolation, that estimates and predicts the missing elements or set of elements through the relevant available information. It further categorizes related TKGC methods based on how to process temporal information; 3)Extrapolation, which typically focuses on continuous TKGs and predicts future events, and then classifies all extrapolation methods based on the algorithms they utilize. We further pinpoint the challenges and discuss future research directions of TKGC.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved unprecedented success in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), including computer vision, natural language processing and speech recognition. However, their superior performance comes at the considerable cost of computational complexity, which greatly hinders their applications in many resource-constrained devices, such as mobile phones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Therefore, methods and techniques that are able to lift the efficiency bottleneck while preserving the high accuracy of DNNs are in great demand in order to enable numerous edge AI applications. This paper provides an overview of efficient deep learning methods, systems and applications. We start from introducing popular model compression methods, including pruning, factorization, quantization as well as compact model design. To reduce the large design cost of these manual solutions, we discuss the AutoML framework for each of them, such as neural architecture search (NAS) and automated pruning and quantization. We then cover efficient on-device training to enable user customization based on the local data on mobile devices. Apart from general acceleration techniques, we also showcase several task-specific accelerations for point cloud, video and natural language processing by exploiting their spatial sparsity and temporal/token redundancy. Finally, to support all these algorithmic advancements, we introduce the efficient deep learning system design from both software and hardware perspectives.
Machine reading comprehension (MRC) aims to teach machines to read and comprehend human languages, which is a long-standing goal of natural language processing (NLP). With the burst of deep neural networks and the evolution of contextualized language models (CLMs), the research of MRC has experienced two significant breakthroughs. MRC and CLM, as a phenomenon, have a great impact on the NLP community. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive and comparative review on MRC covering overall research topics about 1) the origin and development of MRC and CLM, with a particular focus on the role of CLMs; 2) the impact of MRC and CLM to the NLP community; 3) the definition, datasets, and evaluation of MRC; 4) general MRC architecture and technical methods in the view of two-stage Encoder-Decoder solving architecture from the insights of the cognitive process of humans; 5) previous highlights, emerging topics, and our empirical analysis, among which we especially focus on what works in different periods of MRC researches. We propose a full-view categorization and new taxonomies on these topics. The primary views we have arrived at are that 1) MRC boosts the progress from language processing to understanding; 2) the rapid improvement of MRC systems greatly benefits from the development of CLMs; 3) the theme of MRC is gradually moving from shallow text matching to cognitive reasoning.