BERT-NAR-BERT: A Non-Autoregressive Pre-Trained Sequence-to-Sequence Model Leveraging BERT Checkpoints
We introduce BERT-NAR-BERT (BnB) – a pre-trained non-autoregressive sequence-to-sequence model, which employs BERT as the backbone for the encoder and decoder for natural language understanding and generation tasks. During the pre-training and fine-tuning with BERT-NAR-BERT, two challenging aspects are considered by adopting the length classification and connectionist temporal classification models to control the output length of BnB. We evaluate it using a standard natural language understanding benchmark GLUE and three generation tasks – abstractive summarization, question generation, and machine translation. Our results show substantial improvements in inference speed (on average 10x faster) with only little deficiency in output quality when compared to our direct autoregressive baseline BERT2BERT model. Our code is publicly released on GitHub ( https://github.com/aistairc/BERT-NAR-BERT ) under the Apache 2.0 License.
View this article on IEEE Xplore
MCQGen: A Large Language Model-Driven MCQ Generator for Personalized Learning
In the dynamic landscape of contemporary education, the evolution of teaching strategies such as blended learning and flipped classrooms has highlighted the need for efficient and effective generation of multiple-choice questions (MCQs). To address this, we introduce MCQGen, a novel generative artificial intelligence framework designed for the automated creation of MCQs. MCQGen uniquely integrates a large language model (LLM) with retrieval-augmented generation and advanced prompt engineering techniques, drawing from an extensive external knowledge base. This integration significantly enhances the ability of the LLM to produce educationally relevant questions that align with both the goals of educators and the diverse learning needs of students. The framework employs innovative prompt engineering, combining chain-of-thought and self-refine prompting techniques, to enhance the performance of the LLM. This process leads to the generation of questions that are not only contextually relevant and challenging but also reflective of common student misconceptions, contributing effectively to personalized learning experiences and enhancing student engagement and understanding. Our extensive evaluations showcase the effectiveness of MCQGen in producing high-quality MCQs for various educational needs and learning styles. The framework demonstrates its potential to significantly reduce the time and expertise required for MCQ creation, marking its practical utility in modern education. In essence, MCQGen offers an innovative and robust solution for the automated generation of MCQs, enhancing personalized learning in the digital era.
View this article on IEEE Xplore
Robust Contact-Rich Task Learning With Reinforcement Learning and Curriculum-Based Domain Randomization
We propose a framework for contact-rich path following with reinforcement learning based on a mixture of visual and tactile feedback to achieve path following on unknown environments. We employ a curriculum-based domain randomisation approach with a time-varying sampling distribution, rendering our approach is robust to parametric uncertainties in the robot-environment system. Based on evaluation in simulation for compliant path-following case studies with a random uncertain environment, and comparison with LBMPC and FDM methods, the robustness of the obtained policy over a stiffness range 104 – 109 N/m and friction range 0.1–1.2 is demonstrated. We extend this concept to unknown surfaces with various surface curvatures to enhance the robustness of the trained policy in terms of changes in surfaces. We demonstrate ∼15× improvement in trajectory accuracy compared to the previous LBMPC method and ∼18× improvement compared to using the FDM approach. We suggest the applications of the proposed method for learning more challenging tasks such as milling, which are difficult to model and dependent on a wide range of process variables.
View this article on IEEE Xplore
Chat2VIS: Generating Data Visualizations via Natural Language Using ChatGPT, Codex and GPT-3 Large Language Models
The field of data visualisation has long aimed to devise solutions for generating visualisations directly from natural language text. Research in Natural Language Interfaces (NLIs) has contributed towards the development of such techniques. However, the implementation of workable NLIs has always been challenging due to the inherent ambiguity of natural language, as well as in consequence of unclear and poorly written user queries which pose problems for existing language models in discerning user intent. Instead of pursuing the usual path of developing new iterations of language models, this study uniquely proposes leveraging the advancements in pre-trained large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-3 to convert free-form natural language directly into code for appropriate visualisations. This paper presents a novel system, Chat2VIS, which takes advantage of the capabilities of LLMs and demonstrates how, with effective prompt engineering, the complex problem of language understanding can be solved more efficiently, resulting in simpler and more accurate end-to-end solutions than prior approaches. Chat2VIS shows that LLMs together with the proposed prompts offer a reliable approach to rendering visualisations from natural language queries, even when queries are highly misspecified and underspecified. This solution also presents a significant reduction in costs for the development of NLI systems, while attaining greater visualisation inference abilities compared to traditional NLP approaches that use hand-crafted grammar rules and tailored models. This study also presents how LLM prompts can be constructed in a way that preserves data security and privacy while being generalisable to different datasets. This work compares the performance of GPT-3, Codex and ChatGPT across several case studies and contrasts the performances with prior studies.
View this article on IEEE Xplore
Code Generation Using Machine Learning: A Systematic Review
Recently, machine learning (ML) methods have been used to create powerful language models for a broad range of natural language processing tasks. An important subset of this field is that of generating code of programming languages for automatic software development. This review provides a broad and detailed overview of studies for code generation using ML. We selected 37 publications indexed in arXiv and IEEE Xplore databases that train ML models on programming language data to generate code. The three paradigms of code generation we identified in these studies are description-to-code, code-to-description, and code-to-code. The most popular applications that work in these paradigms were found to be code generation from natural language descriptions, documentation generation, and automatic program repair, respectively. The most frequently used ML models in these studies include recurrent neural networks, transformers, and convolutional neural networks. Other neural network architectures, as well as non-neural techniques, were also observed. In this review, we have summarized the applications, models, datasets, results, limitations, and future work of 37 publications. Additionally, we include discussions on topics general to the literature reviewed. This includes comparing different model types, comparing tokenizers, the volume and quality of data used, and methods for evaluating synthesized code. Furthermore, we provide three suggestions for future work for code generation using ML.
View this article on IEEE Xplore
Energy Optimization in Massive MIMO UAV-Aided MEC-Enabled Vehicular Networks
This paper presents a novel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-aided mobile edge computing (MEC) architecture for vehicular networks. It is considered that the vehicles should complete latency-critical computation-intensive tasks either locally with on-board computation units or by offloading part of their tasks to road side units (RSUs) with collocated MEC servers. In this direction, a hovering UAV can serve as an aerial RSU (ARSU) for task processing or act as an aerial relay and further offload the computation tasks to a ground RSU (GRSU). To significantly reduce the delay during data offloading and downloading, this architecture relies on the benefits of line-of-sight (LoS) massive multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO). Therefore, it is considered that the vehicles, the ARSU, and the GRSU employ large-scale antennas. A three-dimensional (3-D) geometrical representation of the MEC-enabled network is introduced and an optimization method is proposed that minimizes the computation-based and communication-based weighted total energy consumption (WTEC) of vehicles and ARSU subject to transmit power allocation, task allocation, and time slot scheduling. The results verify the theoretical derivations, emphasize on the effectiveness of the LoS massive MIMO transmission, and provide useful engineering insights.
*Published in the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society Section within IEEE Access.
View this article on IEEE Xplore
Robots and Wizards: An Investigation Into Natural Human–Robot Interaction
The goal of the study was to research different communication modalities needed for intuitive Human-Robot Interaction. This study utilizes a Wizard of Oz prototyping method to enable a restriction-free, intuitive interaction with an industrial robot. The data from 36 test subjects suggests a high preference for speech input, automatic path planning and pointing gestures. The catalogue developed during this experiment contains intrinsic gestures suggesting that the two most popular gestures per action can be sufficient to cover the majority of users. The system scored an average of 74% in different user interface experience questionnaires, while containing forced flaws. These findings allow a future development of an intuitive Human-Robot interaction system with high user acceptance.
*The video published with this article received a promotional prize for the 2020 IEEE Access Best Multimedia Award (Part 2).
View this article on IEEE Xplore
Network Representation Learning: From Traditional Feature Learning to Deep Learning
Network representation learning (NRL) is an effective graph analytics technique and promotes users to deeply understand the hidden characteristics of graph data. It has been successfully applied in many real-world tasks related to network science, such as social network data processing, biological information processing, and recommender systems. Deep Learning is a powerful tool to learn data features. However, it is non-trivial to generalize deep learning to graph-structured data since it is different from the regular data such as pictures having spatial information and sounds having temporal information. Recently, researchers proposed many deep learning-based methods in the area of NRL. In this survey, we investigate classical NRL from traditional feature learning method to the deep learning-based model, analyze relationships between them, and summarize the latest progress. Finally, we discuss open issues considering NRL and point out the future directions in this field.
View this article on IEEE Xplore
State-Based Decoding of Force Signals From Multi-Channel Local Field Potentials
The functional use of brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) in everyday tasks requires the accurate decoding of both movement and force information. In real-word tasks such as reach-to-grasp movements, a prosthetic hand should be switched between reaching and grasping modes, depending on the detection of the user intents in the decoder part of the BMI. Therefore, it is important to detect the rest or active states of different actions in the decoder to produce the corresponding continuous command output during the estimated state. In this study, we demonstrated that the resting and force-generating time-segments in a key pressing task could be accurately detected from local field potentials (LFPs) in rat’s primary motor cortex. Common spatial pattern (CSP) algorithm was applied on different spectral LFP sub-bands to maximize the difference between the two classes of force and rest. We also showed that combining a discrete state decoder with linear or non-linear continuous force variable decoders could lead to a higher force decoding performance compared with the case we use a continuous variable decoder only. Moreover, the results suggest that gamma LFP signals (50-100 Hz) could be used successfully for decoding the discrete rest/force states as well as continuous values of the force variable. The results of this study can offer substantial benefits for the implementation of a self-paced, force-related command generator in BMI experiments without the need for manual external signals to select the state of the decoder.
View this article on IEEE Xplore
Machine Learning Empowered Spectrum Sharing in Intelligent Unmanned Swarm Communication Systems: Challenges, Requirements and Solutions
The unmanned swarm system (USS) has been seen as a promising technology, and will play an extremely important role in both the military and civilian fields such as military strikes, disaster relief and transportation business. As the “nerve center” of USS, the unmanned swarm communication system (USCS) provides the necessary information transmission medium so as to ensure the system stability and mission implementation. However, challenges caused by multiple tasks, distributed collaboration, high dynamics, ultra-dense and jamming threat make it hard for USCS to manage limited spectrum resources. To tackle with such problems, the machine learning (ML) empowered intelligent spectrum management technique is introduced in this paper. First, based on the challenges of the spectrum resource management in USCS, the requirement of spectrum sharing is analyzed from the perspective of spectrum collaboration and spectrum confrontation. We found that suitable multi-agent collaborative decision making is promising to realize effective spectrum sharing in both two perspectives. Therefore, a multi-agent learning framework is proposed which contains mobile-computing-assisted and distributed structures. Based on the framework, we provide case studies. Finally, future research directions are discussed.
Follow us: