Canada

Recently, serious concerns have been raised about the privacy issues related to training datasets in machine learning algorithms when including personal data. Various regulations in different countries, including the GDPR grant individuals to have personal data erased, known as ‘the right to be forgotten’ or ‘the right to erasure’. However, there has been less research on effectively and practically deleting the requested personal data from the training set while not jeopardizing the overall machine learning performance. In this work, we propose a fast and novel machine unlearning paradigm at the layer level called layer attack unlearning, which is highly accurate and fast compared to existing machine unlearning algorithms. We introduce the Partial-PGD algorithm to locate the samples to forget efficiently. In addition, we only use the last layer of the model inspired by the Forward-Forward algorithm for unlearning process. Lastly, we use Knowledge Distillation (KD) to reliably learn the decision boundaries from the teacher using soft label information to improve accuracy performance. We conducted extensive experiments with SOTA machine unlearning models and demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach for accuracy and end-to-end unlearning performance.

AAAI 2024

Layer Attack Unlearning: Fast and Accurate Machine Unlearning via Layer Level Attack and Knowledge Distillation

layer attack unlearning

partial pgd

machine unlearning

knowledge distillation

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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.

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. 

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

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.

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

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.

Build Your Own Robot Friend: An Open-Source Learning Module for Accessible and Engaging AI Education

Rescaling the backpropagated gradient of contrastive loss has made significant progress in descriptor learning. However, current gradient modulation strategies have no regard for the varying distribution of global gradients, so they would suffer from changes in training phases or datasets. In this paper, we propose a dynamic gradient modulation, named SDGMNet, for contrastive local descriptor learning. The core of our method is formulating modulation functions with dynamically estimated statistical characteristics. Firstly, we introduce angle for distance measure after deep analysis on backpropagation of pair-wise loss. On this basis, auto-focus modulation is employed to moderate the impact of statistically uncommon individual pairs in stochastic gradient descent optimization; probabilistic margin cuts off the gradients of proportional triplets that have achieved enough optimization; power adjustment balances the total weights of negative pairs and positive pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our novel descriptor surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods in several tasks including patch verification, retrieval, pose estimation, and 3D reconstruction.

SDGMNet: Statistic-Based Dynamic Gradient Modulation for Local Descriptor Learning

The classical approach to AI was to design systems that were rational at run-time: they had explicit representations of beliefs, goals, and plans and ran inference algorithms, online, to select actions. The rational approach was criticized (by the behaviorists) and modified (by the probabilists) but persisted in some form. Now the overwhelming success of the connectionist approach in so many areas presents evidence that the rational view may no longer have a role to play in AI. I will examine this question from several perspectives, including whether the rationality is present at design-time and/or at run-time, and whether systems with run-time rationality might be useful from the perspectives of computational efficiency, cognitive modeling and safety. I will present some current research focused on understanding the roles of learning in runtime-rational systems with the ultimate aim of constructing general-purpose human-level intelligent robots.

The Role of Rationality in Modern AI

At AAAI 2024, we honour the legacy of Doug Lenat, a pioneering figure in artificial intelligence who founded Cycorp and profoundly impacted AI research by scaling both the extent and the ambition of logic-based and common-sense reasoning. This memorial and retrospective session brings together a distinguished panel of speakers close to Doug and the Cyc project, to reflect on Doug’s contributions to AI, particularly through his work on the Cyc project. Panelists, including Blake Shepard, Francesca Rossi, Gary Marcus, and Michael Witbrock, will discuss Lenat’s vision for AI, his groundbreaking approaches to knowledge representation and reasoning, and the enduring influence of his ideas on current and future AI research. We’ll explore how Lenat’s work on Cyc laid foundational principles for building intelligent systems and his advocacy for a comprehensive, inferentially powerful, AI knowledge base. Attendees will gain insights into Lenat’s impact on AI’s past, present, and its trajectory towards more sophisticated and human-like reasoning capabilities.

Doug Lenat, CYC, and future directions in reasoning and knowledge representation

Generative AI models such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion have greatly accelerated the development and adoption of AI applications. However, one of the key challenges today is AI hallucination – generative models tend to confabulate plausible even authoritative sounding responses that are incorrect and non-factual, leading to downstream harm if not mitigated. Some findings showed that close to 30% of chatbot responses are hallucinations. Why do they hallucinate? And why popular methods such as RLHF and safety fine-tuning cannot completely mitigate this problem? In this talk, I will give an overview of the known causes of hallucination and methods to mitigate them, including in multimodal and multilingual scenarios. I will also talk about the remaining challenges and future directions in AI hallucination research.

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

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