In this work we present an overview of statistical learning, followed by a survey of robust streaming techniques and challenges, culminating in several rigorous results proving the relationship that we motivate and hint at throughout the journey. Furthermore, we unify often disjoint theorems in a shared framework and notation to clarify the deep connections that are discovered. We hope that by approaching these results from a shared perspective, already aware of the technical connections that exist, we can enlighten the study of both fields and perhaps motivate new and previously unconsidered directions of research.
In this work, we introduce a novel approach to programming education - in-IDE courses implemented for IntelliJ-based IDEs via the JetBrains Academy Plugin. The primary objective of this approach is to address the challenge of familiarizing students with industrial technologies by moving all theory and practical materials to a professional IDE. This approach allows students to immediately use modern industrial tools as they are fully integrated into the learning process. We have already applied this approach in over 40 courses, and it successfully educates students across diverse topics such as Plugin Development, Algorithms, Data Analysis, and Language mastery in various programming languages, including Kotlin, Java, C++, and Python. Along with the paper, we are providing the community not only with a new way of learning and a set of ready-made courses but also a collection of helpful resources to assist educators in getting started with the plugin. Finally, we describe in detail an IDE plugin development course that demonstrates how the in-IDE approach covers complex topics easily.
In the dynamic landscape of generative NLP, traditional text processing pipelines limit research flexibility and reproducibility, as they are tailored to specific dataset, task, and model combinations. The escalating complexity, involving system prompts, model-specific formats, instructions, and more, calls for a shift to a structured, modular, and customizable solution. Addressing this need, we present Unitxt, an innovative library for customizable textual data preparation and evaluation tailored to generative language models. Unitxt natively integrates with common libraries like HuggingFace and LM-eval-harness and deconstructs processing flows into modular components, enabling easy customization and sharing between practitioners. These components encompass model-specific formats, task prompts, and many other comprehensive dataset processing definitions. The Unitxt-Catalog centralizes these components, fostering collaboration and exploration in modern textual data workflows. Beyond being a tool, Unitxt is a community-driven platform, empowering users to build, share, and advance their pipelines collaboratively. Join the Unitxt community at //github.com/IBM/unitxt!
In this work, we study the effects of feature-based explanations on distributive fairness of AI-assisted decisions, specifically focusing on the task of predicting occupations from short textual bios. We also investigate how any effects are mediated by humans' fairness perceptions and their reliance on AI recommendations. Our findings show that explanations influence fairness perceptions, which, in turn, relate to humans' tendency to adhere to AI recommendations. However, we see that such explanations do not enable humans to discern correct and incorrect AI recommendations. Instead, we show that they may affect reliance irrespective of the correctness of AI recommendations. Depending on which features an explanation highlights, this can foster or hinder distributive fairness: when explanations highlight features that are task-irrelevant and evidently associated with the sensitive attribute, this prompts overrides that counter AI recommendations that align with gender stereotypes. Meanwhile, if explanations appear task-relevant, this induces reliance behavior that reinforces stereotype-aligned errors. These results imply that feature-based explanations are not a reliable mechanism to improve distributive fairness.
As a critical technology for next-generation communication networks, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) aims to achieve the harmonious coexistence of communication and sensing. The degrees-of-freedom (DoF) of ISAC is limited due to multiple performance metrics used for communication and sensing. Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) composed of metamaterials can enhance the DoF in the spatial domain of ISAC systems. However, the availability of perfect Channel State Information (CSI) is a prerequisite for the gain brought by RIS, which is not realistic in practical environments. Therefore, under the imperfect CSI condition, we propose a decomposition-based large deviation inequality approach to eliminate the impact of CSI error on communication rate and sensing Cram\'er-Rao bound (CRB). Then, an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm based on semi-definite relaxation (SDR) and gradient extrapolated majorization-maximization (GEMM) is proposed to solve the transmit beamforming and discrete RIS beamforming problems. We also analyze the complexity and convergence of the proposed algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can effectively eliminate the influence of CSI error and have good convergence performance. Notably, when CSI error exists, the gain brought by RIS will decrease with the increase of the number of RIS elements. Finally, we summarize and outline future research directions.
My research centers on the development of context-adaptive AI systems to improve end-user adoption through the integration of technical methods. I deploy these AI systems across various interaction modalities, including user interfaces and embodied agents like robots, to expand their practical applicability. My research unfolds in three key stages: design, development, and deployment. In the design phase, user-centered approaches were used to understand user experiences with AI systems and create design tools for user participation in crafting AI explanations. In the ongoing development stage, a safety-guaranteed AI system for a robot agent was created to automatically provide adaptive solutions and explanations for unforeseen scenarios. The next steps will involve the implementation and evaluation of context-adaptive AI systems in various interaction forms. I seek to prioritize human needs in technology development, creating AI systems that tangibly benefit end-users in real-world applications and enhance interaction experiences.
In this report we explore the application of the Lagrange-Newton method to the SAM (smoothing-and-mapping) problem in mobile robotics. In Lagrange-Newton SAM, the angular component of each pose vector is expressed by orientation vectors and treated through Lagrange constraints. This is different from the typical Gauss-Newton approach where variations need to be mapped back and forth between Euclidean space and a manifold suitable for rotational components. We derive equations for five different types of measurements between robot poses: translation, distance, and rotation from odometry in the plane, as well as home-vector angle and compass angle from visual homing. We demonstrate the feasibility of the Lagrange-Newton approach for a simple example related to a cleaning robot scenario.
In this study, we introduce an optimization framework aimed at enhancing the efficiency of motion priority design in scenarios involving automated and teleoperated robots within an industrial recovery context. The escalating utilization of industrial robots at manufacturing sites has been instrumental in mitigating human workload. Nevertheless, the challenge persists in achieving effective human-robot collaboration/cooperation where human workers and robots share a workspace for collaborative tasks. In the event of an industrial robot encountering a failure, it necessitates the suspension of the corresponding factory cell for safe recovery. Given the limited capacity of pre-programmed robots to rectify such failures, human intervention becomes imperative, requiring entry into the robot workspace to address the dropped object while the robot system is halted. This non-continuous manufacturing process results in productivity loss. Robotic teleoperation has emerged as a promising technology enabling human workers to undertake high-risk tasks remotely and safely. Our study advocates for the incorporation of robotic teleoperation in the recovery process during manufacturing failure scenarios, which is referred to as "Cooperative Tele-Recovery". Our proposed approach involves the formulation of priority rules designed to facilitate collision avoidance between manufacturing and recovery robots. This, in turn, ensures a continuous manufacturing process with minimal production loss within a configurable risk limitation. We present a comprehensive motion priority optimization framework, encompassing an HRC simulator-based priority optimization and a cooperative multi-robot controller, to identify optimal parameters for the priority function. The framework dynamically adjusts the allocation of motion priorities for manufacturing and recovery robots while adhering to predefined risk limitations.
This work considers the question of how convenient access to copious data impacts our ability to learn causal effects and relations. In what ways is learning causality in the era of big data different from -- or the same as -- the traditional one? To answer this question, this survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of both traditional and frontier methods in learning causality and relations along with the connections between causality and machine learning. This work points out on a case-by-case basis how big data facilitates, complicates, or motivates each approach.
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.
In this paper, we propose the joint learning attention and recurrent neural network (RNN) models for multi-label classification. While approaches based on the use of either model exist (e.g., for the task of image captioning), training such existing network architectures typically require pre-defined label sequences. For multi-label classification, it would be desirable to have a robust inference process, so that the prediction error would not propagate and thus affect the performance. Our proposed model uniquely integrates attention and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) models, which not only addresses the above problem but also allows one to identify visual objects of interests with varying sizes without the prior knowledge of particular label ordering. More importantly, label co-occurrence information can be jointly exploited by our LSTM model. Finally, by advancing the technique of beam search, prediction of multiple labels can be efficiently achieved by our proposed network model.