Students' Perceptions and Preferences of Generative Artificial Intelligence Feedback for Programming

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI), specifically large language models (LLMs), has opened opportunities for various educational applications. This paper explored the feasibility of utilizing ChatGPT, one of the most popular LLMs, for automating feedback for Java programming assignments in an introductory computer science (CS1) class. Specifically, this study focused on three questions: 1) To what extent do students view LLM-generated feedback as formative? 2) How do students see the comparative affordances of feedback prompts that include their code, vs. those that exclude it? 3) What enhancements do students suggest for improving AI-generated feedback? To address these questions, we generated automated feedback using the ChatGPT API for four lab assignments in the CS1 class. The survey results revealed that students perceived the feedback as aligning well with formative feedback guidelines established by Shute. Additionally, students showed a clear preference for feedback generated by including the students' code as part of the LLM prompt, and our thematic study indicated that the preference was mainly attributed to the specificity, clarity, and corrective nature of the feedback. Moreover, this study found that students generally expected specific and corrective feedback with sufficient code examples, but had diverged opinions on the tone of the feedback. This study demonstrated that ChatGPT could generate Java programming assignment feedback that students perceived as formative. It also offered insights into the specific improvements that would make the ChatGPT-generated feedback useful for students.

Federated Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach via Physics-Informed Reward for Multi-Microgrid Energy Management

The utilization of large-scale distributed renewable energy promotes the development of the multi-microgrid (MMG), which raises the need of developing an effective energy management method to minimize economic costs and keep self energy-sufficiency. The multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (MADRL) has been widely used for the energy management problem because of its real-time scheduling ability. However, its training requires massive energy operation data of microgrids (MGs), while gathering these data from different MGs would threaten their privacy and data security. Therefore, this paper tackles this practical yet challenging issue by proposing a federated multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (F-MADRL) algorithm via the physics-informed reward. In this algorithm, the federated learning (FL) mechanism is introduced to train the F-MADRL algorithm thus ensures the privacy and the security of data. In addition, a decentralized MMG model is built, and the energy of each participated MG is managed by an agent, which aims to minimize economic costs and keep self energy-sufficiency according to the physics-informed reward. At first, MGs individually execute the self-training based on local energy operation data to train their local agent models. Then, these local models are periodically uploaded to a server and their parameters are aggregated to build a global agent, which will be broadcasted to MGs and replace their local agents. In this way, the experience of each MG agent can be shared and the energy operation data is not explicitly transmitted, thus protecting the privacy and ensuring data security. Finally, experiments are conducted on Oak Ridge national laboratory distributed energy control communication lab microgrid (ORNL-MG) test system, and the comparisons are carried out to verify the effectiveness of introducing the FL mechanism and the outperformance of our proposed F-MADRL.

Meta-Shop: Improving Item Advertisement For Small Businesses

In this paper, we study item advertisements for small businesses. This application recommends prospective customers to specific items requested by businesses. From analysis, we found that the existing Recommender Systems (RS) were ineffective for small/new businesses with a few sales history. Training samples in RS can be highly biased toward popular businesses with sufficient sales and can decrease advertising performance for small businesses. We propose a meta-learning-based RS to improve advertising performance for small/new businesses and shops: Meta-Shop. Meta-Shop leverages an advanced meta-learning optimization framework and builds a model for a shop-level recommendation. It also integrates and transfers knowledge between large and small shops, consequently learning better features in small shops. We conducted experiments on a real-world E-commerce dataset and a public benchmark dataset. Meta-Shop outperformed a production baseline and the state-of-the-art RS models. Specifically, it achieved up to 16.6% relative improvement of Recall@1M and 40.4% relative improvement of nDCG@3 for user recommendations to new shops compared to the other RS models.

Policy Learning for Nonlinear Model Predictive Control with Application to USVs

The unaffordable computation load of nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) has prevented it for being used in robots with high sampling rates for decades. This paper is concerned with the policy learning problem for nonlinear MPC with system constraints, and its applications to unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), where the nonlinear MPC policy is learned offline and deployed online to resolve the computational complexity issue. A deep neural networks (DNN) based policy learning MPC (PL-MPC) method is proposed to avoid solving nonlinear optimal control problems online. The detailed policy learning method is developed and the PL-MPC algorithm is designed. The strategy to ensure the practical feasibility of policy implementation is proposed, and it is theoretically proved that the closed-loop system under the proposed method is asymptotically stable in probability. In addition, we apply the PL-MPC algorithm successfully to the motion control of USVs. It is shown that the proposed algorithm can be implemented at a sampling rate up to $5 Hz$ with high-precision motion control. The experiment video is available via:\url{https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTkwMTM0NzM5Ng==.html

Code-DKT: A Code-based Knowledge Tracing Model for Programming Tasks

Knowledge tracing (KT) models are a popular approach for predicting students' future performance at practice problems using their prior attempts. Though many innovations have been made in KT, most models including the state-of-the-art Deep KT (DKT) mainly leverage each student's response either as correct or incorrect, ignoring its content. In this work, we propose Code-based Deep Knowledge Tracing (Code-DKT), a model that uses an attention mechanism to automatically extract and select domain-specific code features to extend DKT. We compared the effectiveness of Code-DKT against Bayesian and Deep Knowledge Tracing (BKT and DKT) on a dataset from a class of 50 students attempting to solve 5 introductory programming assignments. Our results show that Code-DKT consistently outperforms DKT by 3.07-4.00% AUC across the 5 assignments, a comparable improvement to other state-of-the-art domain-general KT models over DKT. Finally, we analyze problem-specific performance through a set of case studies for one assignment to demonstrate when and how code features improve Code-DKT's predictions.

Learning Similarity Preserving Binary Codes for Recommender Systems

Hashing-based Recommender Systems (RSs) are widely studied to provide scalable services. The existing methods for the systems combine three modules to achieve efficiency: feature extraction, interaction modeling, and binarization. In this paper, we study an unexplored module combination for the hashing-based recommender systems, namely Compact Cross-Similarity Recommender (CCSR). Inspired by cross-modal retrieval, CCSR utilizes Maximum a Posteriori similarity instead of matrix factorization and rating reconstruction to model interactions between users and items. We conducted experiments on MovieLens1M, Amazon product review, Ichiba purchase dataset and confirmed CCSR outperformed the existing matrix factorization-based methods. On the Movielens1M dataset, the absolute performance improvements are up to 15.69% in NDCG and 4.29% in Recall. In addition, we extensively studied three binarization modules: $sign$, scaled tanh, and sign-scaled tanh. The result demonstrated that although differentiable scaled tanh is popular in recent discrete feature learning literature, a huge performance drop occurs when outputs of scaled $tanh$ are forced to be binary.

Efficient Cross-Modal Retrieval via Deep Binary Hashing and Quantization

Cross-modal retrieval aims to search for data with similar semantic meanings across different content modalities. However, cross-modal retrieval requires huge amounts of storage and retrieval time since it needs to process data in multiple modalities. Existing works focused on learning single-source compact features such as binary hash codes that preserve similarities between different modalities. In this work, we propose a jointly learned deep hashing and quantization network (HQ) for cross-modal retrieval. We simultaneously learn binary hash codes and quantization codes to preserve semantic information in multiple modalities by an end-to-end deep learning architecture. At the retrieval step, binary hashing is used to retrieve a subset of items from the search space, then quantization is used to re-rank the retrieved items. We theoretically and empirically show that this two-stage retrieval approach provides faster retrieval results while preserving accuracy. Experimental results on the NUS-WIDE, MIR-Flickr, and Amazon datasets demonstrate that HQ achieves boosts of more than 7% in precision compared to supervised neural network-based compact coding models.

Achieving Model Fairness in Vertical Federated Learning

Vertical federated learning (VFL), which enables multiple enterprises possessing non-overlapped features to strengthen their machine learning models without disclosing their private data and model parameters, has received increasing attention lately. Similar to other machine learning algorithms, VFL suffers from fairness issues, i.e., the learned model may be unfairly discriminatory over the group with sensitive attributes. To tackle this problem, we propose a fair VFL framework in this work. First, we systematically formulate the problem of training fair models in VFL, where the learning task is modeled as a constrained optimization problem. To solve it in a federated manner, we consider its equivalent dual form and develop an asynchronous gradient coordinate-descent ascent algorithm, where each data party performs multiple parallelized local updates per communication round to effectively reduce the number of communication rounds. We prove that the algorithm finds a $\delta$-stationary point of the dual objective in $\mathcal{O}(\delta^{-4})$ communication rounds under mild conditions. Finally, extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method in training fair models.

A Survey on Federated Learning and its Applications for Accelerating Industrial Internet of Things

Federated learning (FL) brings collaborative intelligence into industries without centralized training data to accelerate the process of Industry 4.0 on the edge computing level. FL solves the dilemma in which enterprises wish to make the use of data intelligence with security concerns. To accelerate industrial Internet of things with the further leverage of FL, existing achievements on FL are developed from three aspects: 1) define terminologies and elaborate a general framework of FL for accommodating various scenarios; 2) discuss the state-of-the-art of FL on fundamental researches including data partitioning, privacy preservation, model optimization, local model transportation, personalization, motivation mechanism, platform & tools, and benchmark; 3) discuss the impacts of FL from the economic perspective. To attract more attention from industrial academia and practice, a FL-transformed manufacturing paradigm is presented, and future research directions of FL are given and possible immediate applications in Industry 4.0 domain are also proposed.

Toward Semi-Automatic Misconception Discovery Using Code Embeddings

Understanding students' misconceptions is important for effective teaching and assessment. However, discovering such misconceptions manually can be time-consuming and laborious. Automated misconception discovery can address these challenges by highlighting patterns in student data, which domain experts can then inspect to identify misconceptions. In this work, we present a novel method for the semi-automated discovery of problem-specific misconceptions from students' program code in computing courses, using a state-of-the-art code classification model. We trained the model on a block-based programming dataset and used the learned embedding to cluster incorrect student submissions. We found these clusters correspond to specific misconceptions about the problem and would not have been easily discovered with existing approaches. We also discuss potential applications of our approach and how these misconceptions inform domain-specific insights into students' learning processes.