Canada

Artificial Intelligence is undoubtedly becoming pervasive in everyday life of everyone.
In this setting, developing correct AI conception since childhood is not only a need to 
be addressed in educational curricula, but is also a children right.

Accordingly, several initiatives at national and international levels aim at promoting AI
and emerging technology literacy, supported also by a proliferation in the literature 
of learning courses covering a variety of topics, learning objectives and targeted ages.
Schools are therefore pushed to introduce innovative activities for children in their
curricula.

In this paper, we report the results of a case study where we tested the contribution 
of an AI block-based course in developing computational thinking, and human 
and AI minds understanding in fifth and sixth grade children.

AAAI 2024

Does Any AI-Based Activity Contribute to Develop AI Conception? A Case Study with Italian Fifth and Sixth Grade Classes

ai conception; ai teaching; computational thinking

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. 

Optimizing multiple conflicting black-box objectives simultaneously is a prevalent occurrence in many real-world applications, such as neural architecture search, and machine learning. These problems are known as expensive multi-objective optimization problems (EMOPs) when the function evaluations are computationally or financially costly. Multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MOBO) offers an efficient approach to discovering a set of Pareto optimal solutions. However, the data deficiency issue caused by limited function evaluations has posed a great challenge to current optimization methods. Moreover, most current methods tend to prioritize the quality of candidate solutions, while ignoring the quantity of promising samples. In order to tackle these issues, our paper proposes a novel multi-objective Bayesian optimization algorithm with a data augmentation strategy that provides ample high-quality samples for Pareto set learning (PSL). Specifically, it utilizes Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to enrich data and a dominance prediction model to screen out high-quality samples, mitigating the predicament of limited function evaluations in EMOPs. Additionally, we adopt the regularity model to expensive multi-objective Bayesian optimization for PSL. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world problems demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms several state-of-the-art and classical algorithms.

Are You Concerned about Limited Function Evaluations: Data-Augmented Pareto Set Learning for Expensive Multi-Objective Optimization

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are rich in spatio-temporal dynamics and are suitable for processing event-based neuromorphic data.  However, event-based datasets are usually less annotated than static datasets. This small data scale makes SNNs prone to overfitting and limits their performance. In order to improve the generalization ability of SNNs on event-based datasets, we use static images to assist SNN training on event data. In this paper, we first discuss the domain mismatch problem encountered when directly transferring networks trained on static datasets to event data. We argue that the inconsistency of feature distributions becomes a major factor hindering the effective transfer of knowledge from static images to event data. To address this problem, we propose solutions in terms of two aspects: feature distribution and training strategy. Firstly, we propose a knowledge transfer loss, which consists of domain alignment loss and spatio-temporal regularization. The domain alignment loss learns domain-invariant spatial features by reducing the marginal distribution distance between the static image and the event data. Spatio-temporal regularization provides dynamically learnable coefficients for domain alignment loss by using the output features of the event data at each time step as a regularization term. In addition, we propose a sliding training strategy, which gradually replaces static image inputs probabilistically with event data, resulting in a smoother and more stable training for the network. We validate our method on neuromorphic datasets, including N-Caltech101, CEP-DVS, and N-Omniglot. The experimental results show that our proposed method achieves better performance on all datasets compared to the current state-of-the-art methods. 
Code is available at https://github.com/BrainCog-X/Brain-Cog/tree/main/examples/Perception_and_Learning/img_cls/transfer_for_dvs.

An Efficient Knowledge Transfer Strategy for Spiking Neural Networks from Static to Event Domain

Large language models contain noisy general knowledge of the world, yet are hard to train or fine-tune. In contrast cognitive architectures have excellent interpretability and are flexible to update but require a lot of manual work to instantiate. In this work, we combine the best of both worlds: bootstrapping a cognitive-based model with the noisy knowledge encoded in large language models. Through an embodied agent doing kitchen tasks, we show that our proposed framework yields better efficiency compared to an agent entirely based on large language models. Our experiments also indicate that the cognitive agent bootstrapped using this framework can generalize to novel environments and be scaled to complex tasks.

Bootstrapping Cognitive Agents with a Large Language Model | VIDEO

Toddlers evolve from free exploration with sparse feedback to exploiting prior experiences for goal-directed learning with denser rewards. Drawing inspiration from this Toddler-Inspired Reward Transition, we set out to explore the implications of varying reward transitions when incorporated into Reinforcement Learning (RL) tasks. Central to our inquiry is the transition from sparse to potential-based dense rewards, which share optimal strategies regardless of reward changes. Through various experiments, including those in egocentric navigation and robotic arm manipulation tasks, we found that proper reward transitions significantly influence sample efficiency and success rates. Of particular note is the efficacy of the toddler-inspired Sparse-to-Dense (S2D) transition. Beyond these performance metrics, using Cross-Density Visualizer technique, we observed that transitions, especially the S2D, smooth the policy loss landscape, promoting wide minima that enhance generalization in RL models.

Unveiling the Significance of Toddler-Inspired Reward Transition in Goal-Oriented Reinforcement Learning | VIDEO

Large language models (LLMs) offer significant promise as a knowledge source for task learning. Prompt engineering has been shown to be effective for eliciting knowledge from an LLM, but alone it is insufficient for acquiring relevant, situationally grounded knowledge for an embodied agent learning novel tasks. We describe a cognitive-agent approach, STARS, that extends and complements prompt engineering, mitigating its limitations and thus enabling an agent to acquire new task knowledge matched to its native language capabilities, embodiment, environment, and user preferences. The STARS approach is to increase the response space of LLMs and deploy general strategies, embedded within the autonomous agent, to evaluate, repair, and select among candidate responses produced by the LLM. We describe the approach and experiments that show how an agent, by retrieving and evaluating a breadth of responses from the LLM, can achieve 77-94% task completion in one-shot learning without user oversight. The approach achieves 100% task completion when human oversight (such as an indication of preference) is provided. Further, the type of oversight largely shifts from explicit, natural language instruction to simple confirmation/discomfirmation of high-quality responses that have been vetted by the agent before presentation to a user.

Improving Knowledge Extraction from LLMs for Task Learning through Agent Analysis | VIDEO

In this paper, we introduce a fresh perspective on the challenges of credit assignment and policy evaluation.
First, we delve into the nuances of eligibility traces and explore instances where their updates may result in unexpected credit assignment to preceding states. 
From this investigation emerges the concept of a novel value function, which we refer to as the \emph{bidirectional value function}.
Unlike traditional state value functions, bidirectional value functions account for both future expected returns (rewards anticipated from the current state onward) and past expected returns (cumulative rewards from the episode's start to the present).
We derive principled update equations to learn this value function and, through experimentation, demonstrate its efficacy in enhancing the process of policy evaluation. In particular, our results indicate that the proposed learning approach can, in certain challenging contexts, perform policy evaluation more rapidly than TD($\lambda$)---a method that learns forward value functions, $v^\pi$, \emph{directly}. Overall, our findings present a new perspective on eligibility traces and potential advantages associated with the novel value function it inspires, especially for policy evaluation.

From Past to Future: Rethinking Eligibility Traces

Question generation (QG) is a natural language processing task with an abundance of potential benefits and use cases in the educational domain. In order for this potential to be realized, QG systems must be designed and validated with pedagogical needs in mind. However, little research has assessed or designed QG approaches with the input of real teachers or students. This paper applies a large language model-based QG approach where questions are generated with learning goals derived from Bloom's taxonomy. The automatically generated questions are used in multiple experiments designed to assess how teachers use them in practice. The results demonstrate that teachers prefer to write quizzes with automatically generated questions, and that such quizzes have no loss in quality compared to handwritten versions. Further, several metrics indicate that automatically generated questions can even improve the quality of the quizzes created, showing the promise for large scale use of QG in the classroom setting.

How Teachers Can Use Large Language Models and Bloom’s Taxonomy to Create Educational Quizzes | VIDEO

Large language models like ChatGPT can generate human-like code, posing challenges for programming education as students may be tempted to misuse them on assignments. However, there are currently no robust detectors designed specifically to identify AI-generated code. This is an issue that needs to be addressed to maintain academic integrity while allowing proper utilization of language models. Previous work has explored different approaches to detect AI-generated text, including watermarks, feature analysis, and fine-tuning language models. In this paper, we address the challenge of determining whether a student's code assignment was generated by a language model. First, our proposed method identifies AI-generated code by leveraging targeted masking perturbation paired with comperhesive scoring. Rather than applying a random mask, areas of the code with higher perplexity are more intensely masked. Second, we utilize a fine-tuned CodeBERT to fill in the masked portions, producing subtle modified samples. Then, we integrate the overall perplexity, variation of code line perplexity, and burstiness into a unified score. In this scoring scheme, a higher rank for the original code suggests it's more likely to be AI-generated. This approach stems from the observation that AI-generated codes typically have lower perplexity. Therefore, perturbations often exert minimal influence on them. Conversely, sections of human-composed codes that the model struggles to understand can see their perplexity reduced by such perturbations. Our method outperforms current open-source and commercial text detectors. Specifically, it improves detection of code submissions generated by OpenAI's text-davinci-003, raising average AUC from 0.56 (GPTZero baseline) to 0.87 for our detector.

Detecting AI-Generated Code Assignments Using Perplexity of Large Language Models | VIDEO

Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly finding broad application in every sector of society. This rapid expansion of AI has increased the need to cultivate an AI-literate workforce, and it calls for introducing AI education into K-12 classrooms to foster students’ awareness and interest in AI. With rich narratives and opportunities for situated problem solving, story-driven game-based learning offers a promising approach for creating engaging and effective K-12 AI learning experiences. In this paper, we present our ongoing work to iteratively design, develop, and evaluate a story-driven game-based learning environment focused on AI education for upper elementary students (ages 8 to 11). The game features a science inquiry problem centering on an endangered species and incorporates a Use-Modify-Create scaffolding framework to promote student learning. We present findings from an analysis of data collected from 16 students playing the game's quest focused on AI planning. Results suggest that the scaffolding framework provided students with the knowledge they needed to advance through the quest and that overall, students experienced positive learning outcomes.

Supporting Upper Elementary Students in Learning AI Concepts with Story-Driven Game-Based Learning

As artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role in our society and global economy, AI education and literacy have become necessary components in college and K-12 education to prepare students for an AI-powered society. However, current AI curricula have not yet been made accessible and engaging enough for students and schools from all socio-economic backgrounds with different educational goals. In this work, we developed an open-source learning module for college and high school students, which allows students to build their own robot companion from the ground up. This open platform can be used to provide hands-on experience and introductory knowledge about various aspects of AI, including robotics, machine learning (ML), software engineering, and mechanical engineering. Because of the social and personal nature of a socially assistive robot companion, this module also puts a special emphasis on human-centered AI, enabling students to develop a better understanding of human-AI interaction and AI ethics through hands-on learning activities. With open-source documentation, assembling manuals and affordable materials, students from different socio-economic backgrounds can personalize their learning experience based on their individual educational goals. To evaluate the student-perceived quality of our module, we conducted a usability testing workshop with 15 college students recruited from a minority-serving institution. Our results indicate that our AI module is effective, easy-to-follow, and engaging, and it increases student interest in studying AI/ML and robotics in the future. We hope that this work will contribute toward accessible and engaging AI education in human-AI interaction for college and high school students.

Does Any AI-Based Activity Contribute to Develop AI Conception? A Case Study with Italian Fifth and Sixth Grade Classes

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Are You Concerned about Limited Function Evaluations: Data-Augmented Pareto Set Learning for Expensive Multi-Objective Optimization

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Does Any AI-Based Activity Contribute to Develop AI Conception? A Case Study with Italian Fifth and Sixth Grade Classes

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Are You Concerned about Limited Function Evaluations: Data-Augmented Pareto Set Learning for Expensive Multi-Objective Optimization

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RESOURCES

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