283 research outputs found
Maintaining good working experiences in the context of NCEA changes: Enablers and influences
Based on findings from The National Survey of Schools project, this study aimed to examine the interactions between schoolsā professional learning and development cultures, teachersā general attitudes towards NCEA changes, their equity-related attitudes towards NCEA changes, and their working experiences (morale and workload views). The participants were 749 teachers from Years 9-13 and Years 7-13 English medium secondary schools who completed our national surveys. Data were analysed quantitatively through descriptive and exploratory techniques. Results suggested a positive association between a perceived culture of ongoing PLD in schools, and teachersā general attitudes towards NCEA changes. Teachers who reported positive attitudes towards the NCEA changes in general, were more likely to understand how these changes can improve outcomes for MÄori learners, Pacific learners, and those with disabilities and who need learning support. In addition, a strong culture of ongoing PLD was also positively associated with teachersā morale and workload views. The study has practical implications by indicating how teachers can be better supported to enact educational changes in Aotearoa New Zealand
Mixed displacement-pressure-phase field framework for finite strain fracture of nearly incompressible hyperelastic materials
The favored phase field method (PFM) has encountered challenges in the finite
strain fracture modeling of nearly or truly incompressible hyperelastic
materials. We identified that the underlying cause lies in the innate
contradiction between incompressibility and smeared crack opening. Drawing on
the stiffness-degradation idea in PFM, we resolved this contradiction through
loosening incompressible constraint of the damaged phase without affecting the
incompressibility of intact material. By modifying the perturbed Lagrangian
approach, we derived a novel mixed formulation. In numerical aspects, the
finite element discretization uses the classical Q1/P0 and high-order P2/P1
schemes, respectively. To ease the mesh distortion at large strains, an
adaptive mesh deletion technology is also developed. The validity and
robustness of the proposed mixed framework are corroborated by four
representative numerical examples. By comparing the performance of Q1/P0 and
P2/P1, we conclude that the Q1/P0 formulation is a better choice for finite
strain fracture in nearly incompressible cases. Moreover, the numerical
examples also show that the combination of the proposed framework and
methodology has vast potential in simulating complex peeling and tearing
problem
FAIRER: Fairness as Decision Rationale Alignment
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have made significant progress, but often suffer
from fairness issues, as deep models typically show distinct accuracy
differences among certain subgroups (e.g., males and females). Existing
research addresses this critical issue by employing fairness-aware loss
functions to constrain the last-layer outputs and directly regularize DNNs.
Although the fairness of DNNs is improved, it is unclear how the trained
network makes a fair prediction, which limits future fairness improvements. In
this paper, we investigate fairness from the perspective of decision rationale
and define the parameter parity score to characterize the fair decision process
of networks by analyzing neuron influence in various subgroups. Extensive
empirical studies show that the unfair issue could arise from the unaligned
decision rationales of subgroups. Existing fairness regularization terms fail
to achieve decision rationale alignment because they only constrain last-layer
outputs while ignoring intermediate neuron alignment. To address the issue, we
formulate the fairness as a new task, i.e., decision rationale alignment that
requires DNNs' neurons to have consistent responses on subgroups at both
intermediate processes and the final prediction. To make this idea practical
during optimization, we relax the naive objective function and propose
gradient-guided parity alignment, which encourages gradient-weighted
consistency of neurons across subgroups. Extensive experiments on a variety of
datasets show that our method can significantly enhance fairness while
sustaining a high level of accuracy and outperforming other approaches by a
wide margin
A Survey on Fairness in Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) have shown powerful performance and development
prospect and are widely deployed in the real world. However, LLMs can capture
social biases from unprocessed training data and propagate the biases to
downstream tasks. Unfair LLM systems have undesirable social impacts and
potential harms. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of related
research on fairness in LLMs. First, for medium-scale LLMs, we introduce
evaluation metrics and debiasing methods from the perspectives of intrinsic
bias and extrinsic bias, respectively. Then, for large-scale LLMs, we introduce
recent fairness research, including fairness evaluation, reasons for bias, and
debiasing methods. Finally, we discuss and provide insight on the challenges
and future directions for the development of fairness in LLMs.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, 101 reference
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