Canada

In the realm of Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL), we address biases in Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) models, which favor seen data. To counter this, we introduce an end-to-end generative GZSL framework called D$^3$GZSL. This framework respects seen and synthesized unseen data as in-distribution and out-of-distribution data, respectively, for a more balanced model. D$^3$GZSL comprises two core modules: in-distribution dual space distillation (ID$^2$SD) and out-of-distribution batch distillation (O$^2$DBD). ID$^2$SD aligns teacher-student outcomes in embedding and label spaces, enhancing learning coherence. O$^2$DBD introduces low-dimensional out-of-distribution representations per batch sample, capturing shared structures between seen and unseen categories. Our approach demonstrates its effectiveness across established GZSL benchmarks, seamlessly integrating into mainstream generative frameworks. Extensive experiments consistently showcase that D$^3$GZSL elevates the performance of existing generative GZSL methods, underscoring its potential to refine zero-shot learning practices.The code is available at: https://github.com/PJBQ/D3GZSL.git

AAAI 2024

Data Distribution Distilled Generative Model for Generalized Zero-Shot Recognition | VIDEO

technical paper

We are pleased to announce the Thirty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), which will be held in Vancouver, British Columbia at the Vancouver Convention Centre – West Building from 20-27 February, 2024.

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. AAAI-24 will feature technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and a range of other activities to be announced.

We expect for AAAI-24 to be an in-person conference – one author of all accepted papers will be expected to present work in person unless there are exceptional circumstances that prevent this.<br><br><br><br>

In order to access the AAAI-24 event page you need to register [here](https://aaai.org/aaai-conference/registration/)

The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. 

Social insurance benefits qualification assessment is an important task to ensure that retirees enjoy their benefits according to the regulations. It also plays a key role in curbing social security frauds. In this paper, we report the deployment of the Intelligent Benefit Certification and Analysis (IBCA) platform, an AI-empowered platform for verifying the status of retirees to ensure proper dispursement of funds in Shandong province, China. Based on an improved Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) neural network, IBCA aggregates missing value interpolation, temporal information, and global and local feature extraction to perform accurate retiree survival rate prediction. Based on the predicted results, a reliability assessment mechanism based on Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) and Monte-Carlo Dropout (MC Dropout) is executed to perform reliability assessment. Deployed since November 2019, the IBCA platform has been adopted by 12 cities across the Shandong province, handling over 50 terabytes of data. It has empowered human resources and social services, civil affairs, and health care institutions to collaboratively provide high-quality public services. Under the IBCA platform, the efficiency of resources utilization as well as the accuracy of benefit qualification assessment have been significantly improved. It has helped Dareway Software Co. Ltd earn over RMB 50 million of revenue.

IBCA: An Intelligent Platform for Social Insurance Benefit Qualification Status Assessment

This article focuses on the development and evaluation of Small-sized Czech sentence embedding models. Small models are important components for real-time industry applications in resource-constrained environments. Given the limited availability of labeled Czech data, alternative approaches, including pre-training, knowledge distillation, and unsupervised contrastive fine-tuning, are investigated. Comprehensive intrinsic and extrinsic analyses are conducted, showcasing the competitive performance of our models compared to significantly larger counterparts, with approximately 8 times smaller size and 5 times faster speed than conventional Base-sized models. To promote cooperation and reproducibility, both the models and the evaluation pipeline are made publicly accessible. Ultimately, this article presents practical applications of the developed sentence embedding models in Seznam.cz, the Czech search engine. These models have effectively replaced previous counterparts, enhancing the overall search experience for instance, in organic search, featured snippets, and image search. This transition has yielded improved performance.

Some Like It Small: Czech Semantic Embedding Models for Industry Applications | VIDEO

With the advancement and utility of Artificial Intelligence (AI), personalising education to a global population could be a cornerstone of new educational systems in the future. This work presents the PEEKC dataset and the TrueLearn Python library, which contains a dataset and a series of online learner state models that are essential to facilitate research on learner engagement modelling. TrueLearn family of models was designed following the "open learner" concept, using humanly-intuitive user representations. This family of scalable, online models also help end-users visualise the learner models, which may in the future facilitate user interaction with their models/recommenders. The extensive documentation and coding examples make the library highly accessible to both machine learning developers and educational data mining and learning analytics practitioners. The experiments show the utility of both the dataset and the library with predictive performance significantly exceeding comparative baseline models. The dataset contains a large amount of AI-related educational videos, which are of interest for building and validating AI-specific educational recommenders.

A Toolbox for Modelling Engagement with Educational Videos

Sentiment analysis provides a promising tool to automatically assess the emotions voiced in written student feedback such as periodically collected unit-of-study reflections. The commonly used dictionary-based approaches are limited to major languages and fail to capture contextual differences.  Pretrained large language models have been shown to be biased and online versions raise privacy concerns. Hence, we resort to traditional supervised machine learning (ML) approaches which are designed to overcome these issues by learning from domain-specific labeled data. However, these labels are hard to come by -- in our case manually annotating student feedback is prone to bias and time-consuming, especially in high-enrollment courses. In this work, we investigate the use of student crowdsourced labels for supervised sentiment analysis for education. Specifically, we compare crowdsourced and student self-reported labels with human expert annotations and use them in various ML approaches to evaluate the performance on predicting emotions of written student feedback collected from large computer science classes. We find that the random forest model trained with student-crowdsourced labels tremendously improves the identification of reflections with negative sentiment.  In addition to our quantitative study, we describe our crowdsourcing experiment which was intentionally designed to be an educational activity in an introduction to data science course.

Practical Sentiment Analysis for Education: The Power of Student Crowdsourcing

Building a skilled cybersecurity workforce is paramount to building a safer digital world. However, the diverse skill set, constantly emerging vulnerabilities, and deployment of new cyber threats make learning cybersecurity challenging. Traditional education methods struggle to cope with cybersecurity's rapidly evolving landscape and keep students engaged and motivated. Different studies on students' behaviors show that an interactive mode of education by engaging through a question-answering system or dialoguing is one of the most effective learning methodologies. There is a strong need to create advanced AI-enabled education tools to promote interactive learning in cybersecurity. Unfortunately, there are no publicly available standard question-answer datasets to build such systems for students and novice learners to learn cybersecurity concepts, tools, and techniques. The education course material and online question banks are unstructured and need to be validated and updated by domain experts, which is tedious when done manually. In this paper, we propose CyberGen, a novel unification of large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs (KG) to generate the questions and answers for cybersecurity automatically. Augmenting the structured knowledge from knowledge graphs in prompts improves factual reasoning and reduces hallucinations in LLMs. We used the knowledge triples from cybersecurity knowledge graphs (AISecKG) to design prompts for ChatGPT and generate questions and answers using different prompting techniques. Our question-answer dataset, CyberQ, contains around 4k pairs of questions and answers. The domain expert manually evaluated the random samples for consistency and correctness. We train the generative model using the CyberQ dataset for question answering task.

CyberQ: Generating Questions and Answers for Cybersecurity Education Using Knowledge Graph-Augmented LLMs

MineObserver 2.0 is an AI framework that uses Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing for assessing the accuracy of learner-generated descriptions of Minecraft images that include some scientifically relevant content. The system automatically assesses the accuracy of participant observations, written in natural language, made during science learning activities that take place in Minecraft. We demonstrate our system working in real-time and describe a teacher dashboard to showcase observations, both of which advance our previous work. We present the results of a study showing that MineObserver 2.0 improves over its predecessor both in perceived accuracy of the system's generated descriptions as well as in usefulness of the system's feedback. In future work, we intend improve system generated descriptions to give more teacher control and shift the system to perform continuous learning to more rapidly respond to novel observations made by learners.

MineObserver 2.0: A Deep Learning & In-Game Framework for Assessing Natural Language Descriptions of Minecraft Imagery

This paper focuses on using Large Language Models to support teaching assistants in answering questions on large student forums such as Piazza and EdSTEM. Since student questions on these forums are often closely tied to specific aspects of the institution, instructor, and course delivery, general-purpose LLMs do not directly do well on this task.
We introduce RetLLM-E, a method that combines text-retrieval and prompting approaches to enable LLMs to provide precise and high-quality answers to student questions. When presented with a student question, our system initiates a two-step process. First, it retrieves relevant context from (i) a dataset of student questions addressed by course instructors
(Q&A Retrieval) and (ii) relevant segments of course materials (Document Retrieval). RetLLM-E then prompts LLM using the retrieved text and an engineered prompt structure to
yield an answer optimized for the student question.
We present a set of quantitative and human evaluation experiments, comparing our method to ground truth answers to questions in a test set of actual student questions. Our results demonstrate that our approach provides higher-quality responses to course-related questions than an LLM operating without context or relying solely on retrieval-based context. RetLLM-E can easily be adopted in different courses, providing instructors and students with context-aware automatic responses.

RetLLM-E: Retrieval-Prompt Strategy for Question-Answering on Student Discussion Forums | VIDEO

Automatic short answer grading (ASAG) seeks to mitigate the burden on teachers by leveraging computational methods to evaluate student-constructed text responses. Large language models (LLMs) have recently gained prominence across diverse applications, with educational contexts being no exception. The sudden rise of ChatGPT has raised expectations that LLMs can handle numerous tasks, including ASAG. This paper aims to shed some light on this expectation by evaluating two LLM-based chatbots, namely ChatGPT built on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, on scoring short-question answers under zero-shot and one-shot settings. Our data consists of 2000 student answers in Finnish from ten undergraduate courses. Multiple perspectives are taken into account during this assessment, encompassing those of grading system developers, teachers, and students. On our dataset, GPT-4 achieves a good QWK score (0.6+) in 44% of one-shot settings, clearly outperforming GPT-3.5 at 21%. We observe a negative association between student answer length and model performance, as well as a correlation between a smaller standard deviation among a set of predictions and lower performance. We conclude that while GPT-4 exhibits signs of being a capable grader, additional research is essential before considering its deployment as a reliable autograder.

Automatic Short Answer Grading for Finnish with ChatGPT | VIDEO

Sign language is a visual and gestural communication system used by deaf and hearing-impaired people. Despite numerous deep learning methods proposed for automatic interpretation, a gap persists in developing applications that effectively utilize these models for assisting sign language studies and inclusion. We introduce LERMO (https://lermo.app/), a web game merging machine learning and gamification to enhance sign language fingerspelling. Inspired by Wordle™, LERMO offers an interactive word-guessing game where users can play using a video camera. We create a new dataset of labeled landmark fingerspelling and design our model to ensure optimal speed and efficiency to run on a web browser. We survey approximately 40 users, which find LERMO user-friendly and innovative. From those, 95% believe LERMO could be used to enhance fingerspelling skills.

LERMO: A Novel Web Game for AI-Enhanced Sign Language Recognition

The Bahnar, a minority ethnic group in Vietnam with ancient roots, hold a language of deep cultural and historical significance. The government is prioritizing the preservation and dissemination of Bahnaric through online availability and cross-generational communication. Recent AI advances, including Neural Machine Translation (NMT), have transformed translation with improved accuracy and fluency, fostering language revitalization through learning, communication, and documentation. In particular, NMT enhances accessibility for Bahnaric speakers, making information and content more available.

However, translating Vietnamese to Bahnaric faces practical hurdles due to resource limitations, particularly in the case of Bahnaric as an extremely low-resource language. These challenges encompass data scarcity, vocabulary constraints, and a lack of fine-tuning data. To address these, we propose transfer learning from selected pre-trained models to optimize translation quality and computational efficiency, capitalizing on linguistic similarities between Vietnamese and Bahnaric. Concurrently, we apply tailored augmentation strategies to adapt machine translation for the Vietnamese-Bahnaric context. Our approach is validated through superior results on bilingual Vietnamese-Bahnaric datasets when compared to baseline models.

Data Distribution Distilled Generative Model for Generalized Zero-Shot Recognition | VIDEO

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Data Distribution Distilled Generative Model for Generalized Zero-Shot Recognition | VIDEO

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IBCA: An Intelligent Platform for Social Insurance Benefit Qualification Status Assessment

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RESOURCES

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