Designing dialog tutors has been challenging as it involves modeling the diverse and complex pedagogical strategies employed by human tutors. Although there have been significant recent advances in neural conversational systems using large language models (LLMs) and growth in available dialog corpora, dialog tutoring has largely remained unaffected by these advances. In this paper, we rigorously analyze various generative language models on two dialog tutoring datasets for language learning using automatic and human evaluations to understand the new opportunities brought by these advances as well as the challenges we must overcome to build models that would be usable in real educational settings. We find that although current approaches can model tutoring in constrained learning scenarios when the number of concepts to be taught and possible teacher strategies are small, they perform poorly in less constrained scenarios. Our human quality evaluation shows that both models and ground-truth annotations exhibit low performance in terms of equitable tutoring, which measures learning opportunities for students and how engaging the dialog is. To understand the behavior of our models in a real tutoring setting, we conduct a user study using expert annotators and find a significantly large number of model reasoning errors in 45% of conversations. Finally, we connect our findings to outline future work.
With the explosive growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, it has become vitally important to organize and represent the enormous volume of knowledge appropriately. As graph data, knowledge graphs accumulate and convey knowledge of the real world. It has been well-recognized that knowledge graphs effectively represent complex information; hence, they rapidly gain the attention of academia and industry in recent years. Thus to develop a deeper understanding of knowledge graphs, this paper presents a systematic overview of this field. Specifically, we focus on the opportunities and challenges of knowledge graphs. We first review the opportunities of knowledge graphs in terms of two aspects: (1) AI systems built upon knowledge graphs; (2) potential application fields of knowledge graphs. Then, we thoroughly discuss severe technical challenges in this field, such as knowledge graph embeddings, knowledge acquisition, knowledge graph completion, knowledge fusion, and knowledge reasoning. We expect that this survey will shed new light on future research and the development of knowledge graphs.
Few-shot learning (FSL) has emerged as an effective learning method and shows great potential. Despite the recent creative works in tackling FSL tasks, learning valid information rapidly from just a few or even zero samples still remains a serious challenge. In this context, we extensively investigated 200+ latest papers on FSL published in the past three years, aiming to present a timely and comprehensive overview of the most recent advances in FSL along with impartial comparisons of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing works. For the sake of avoiding conceptual confusion, we first elaborate and compare a set of similar concepts including few-shot learning, transfer learning, and meta-learning. Furthermore, we propose a novel taxonomy to classify the existing work according to the level of abstraction of knowledge in accordance with the challenges of FSL. To enrich this survey, in each subsection we provide in-depth analysis and insightful discussion about recent advances on these topics. Moreover, taking computer vision as an example, we highlight the important application of FSL, covering various research hotspots. Finally, we conclude the survey with unique insights into the technology evolution trends together with potential future research opportunities in the hope of providing guidance to follow-up research.
Federated learning (FL) has been developed as a promising framework to leverage the resources of edge devices, enhance customers' privacy, comply with regulations, and reduce development costs. Although many methods and applications have been developed for FL, several critical challenges for practical FL systems remain unaddressed. This paper provides an outlook on FL development, categorized into five emerging directions of FL, namely algorithm foundation, personalization, hardware and security constraints, lifelong learning, and nonstandard data. Our unique perspectives are backed by practical observations from large-scale federated systems for edge devices.
Training machines to understand natural language and interact with humans is an elusive and essential task of artificial intelligence. A diversity of dialogue systems has been designed with the rapid development of deep learning techniques, especially the recent pre-trained language models (PrLMs). Among these studies, the fundamental yet challenging type of task is dialogue comprehension whose role is to teach the machines to read and comprehend the dialogue context before responding. In this paper, we review the previous methods from the technical perspective of dialogue modeling for the dialogue comprehension task. We summarize the characteristics and challenges of dialogue comprehension in contrast to plain-text reading comprehension. Then, we discuss three typical patterns of dialogue modeling. In addition, we categorize dialogue-related pre-training techniques which are employed to enhance PrLMs in dialogue scenarios. Finally, we highlight the technical advances in recent years and point out the lessons from the empirical analysis and the prospects towards a new frontier of researches.
AI in finance broadly refers to the applications of AI techniques in financial businesses. This area has been lasting for decades with both classic and modern AI techniques applied to increasingly broader areas of finance, economy and society. In contrast to either discussing the problems, aspects and opportunities of finance that have benefited from specific AI techniques and in particular some new-generation AI and data science (AIDS) areas or reviewing the progress of applying specific techniques to resolving certain financial problems, this review offers a comprehensive and dense roadmap of the overwhelming challenges, techniques and opportunities of AI research in finance over the past decades. The landscapes and challenges of financial businesses and data are firstly outlined, followed by a comprehensive categorization and a dense overview of the decades of AI research in finance. We then structure and illustrate the data-driven analytics and learning of financial businesses and data. The comparison, criticism and discussion of classic vs. modern AI techniques for finance are followed. Lastly, open issues and opportunities address future AI-empowered finance and finance-motivated AI research.
Imitation learning aims to extract knowledge from human experts' demonstrations or artificially created agents in order to replicate their behaviors. Its success has been demonstrated in areas such as video games, autonomous driving, robotic simulations and object manipulation. However, this replicating process could be problematic, such as the performance is highly dependent on the demonstration quality, and most trained agents are limited to perform well in task-specific environments. In this survey, we provide a systematic review on imitation learning. We first introduce the background knowledge from development history and preliminaries, followed by presenting different taxonomies within Imitation Learning and key milestones of the field. We then detail challenges in learning strategies and present research opportunities with learning policy from suboptimal demonstration, voice instructions and other associated optimization schemes.
In humans, Attention is a core property of all perceptual and cognitive operations. Given our limited ability to process competing sources, attention mechanisms select, modulate, and focus on the information most relevant to behavior. For decades, concepts and functions of attention have been studied in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and computing. For the last six years, this property has been widely explored in deep neural networks. Currently, the state-of-the-art in Deep Learning is represented by neural attention models in several application domains. This survey provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of developments in neural attention models. We systematically reviewed hundreds of architectures in the area, identifying and discussing those in which attention has shown a significant impact. We also developed and made public an automated methodology to facilitate the development of reviews in the area. By critically analyzing 650 works, we describe the primary uses of attention in convolutional, recurrent networks and generative models, identifying common subgroups of uses and applications. Furthermore, we describe the impact of attention in different application domains and their impact on neural networks' interpretability. Finally, we list possible trends and opportunities for further research, hoping that this review will provide a succinct overview of the main attentional models in the area and guide researchers in developing future approaches that will drive further improvements.
Due to the significance and value in human-computer interaction and natural language processing, task-oriented dialog systems are attracting more and more attention in both academic and industrial communities. In this paper, we survey recent advances and challenges in an issue-specific manner. We discuss three critical topics for task-oriented dialog systems: (1) improving data efficiency to facilitate dialog system modeling in low-resource settings, (2) modeling multi-turn dynamics for dialog policy learning to achieve better task-completion performance, and (3) integrating domain ontology knowledge into the dialog model in both pipeline and end-to-end models. We also review the recent progresses in dialog evaluation and some widely-used corpora. We believe that this survey can shed a light on future research in task-oriented dialog systems.
In the last years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has achieved a notable momentum that may deliver the best of expectations over many application sectors across the field. For this to occur, the entire community stands in front of the barrier of explainability, an inherent problem of AI techniques brought by sub-symbolism (e.g. ensembles or Deep Neural Networks) that were not present in the last hype of AI. Paradigms underlying this problem fall within the so-called eXplainable AI (XAI) field, which is acknowledged as a crucial feature for the practical deployment of AI models. This overview examines the existing literature in the field of XAI, including a prospect toward what is yet to be reached. We summarize previous efforts to define explainability in Machine Learning, establishing a novel definition that covers prior conceptual propositions with a major focus on the audience for which explainability is sought. We then propose and discuss about a taxonomy of recent contributions related to the explainability of different Machine Learning models, including those aimed at Deep Learning methods for which a second taxonomy is built. This literature analysis serves as the background for a series of challenges faced by XAI, such as the crossroads between data fusion and explainability. Our prospects lead toward the concept of Responsible Artificial Intelligence, namely, a methodology for the large-scale implementation of AI methods in real organizations with fairness, model explainability and accountability at its core. Our ultimate goal is to provide newcomers to XAI with a reference material in order to stimulate future research advances, but also to encourage experts and professionals from other disciplines to embrace the benefits of AI in their activity sectors, without any prior bias for its lack of interpretability.
There is a resurgent interest in developing intelligent open-domain dialog systems due to the availability of large amounts of conversational data and the recent progress on neural approaches to conversational AI. Unlike traditional task-oriented bots, an open-domain dialog system aims to establish long-term connections with users by satisfying the human need for communication, affection, and social belonging. This paper reviews the recent works on neural approaches that are devoted to addressing three challenges in developing such systems: semantics, consistency, and interactiveness. Semantics requires a dialog system to not only understand the content of the dialog but also identify user's social needs during the conversation. Consistency requires the system to demonstrate a consistent personality to win users trust and gain their long-term confidence. Interactiveness refers to the system's ability to generate interpersonal responses to achieve particular social goals such as entertainment, conforming, and task completion. The works we select to present here is based on our unique views and are by no means complete. Nevertheless, we hope that the discussion will inspire new research in developing more intelligent dialog systems.