Difference-Masking: Choosing What to Mask in Continued Pretraining

The self-supervised objective of masking-and-predicting has led to promising performance gains on a variety of downstream tasks. However, while most approaches randomly mask tokens, there is strong intuition that deciding what to mask can substantially improve learning outcomes. We investigate this in continued pretraining setting in which pretrained models continue to pretrain on domain-specific data before performing some downstream task. We introduce Difference-Masking, a masking strategy that automatically chooses what to mask during continued pretraining by considering what makes a task domain different from the pretraining domain. Empirically, we find that Difference-Masking outperforms baselines on continued pretraining settings across four diverse language-only and multimodal video tasks

SOTOPIA: Interactive Evaluation for Social Intelligence in Language Agents

Humans are social beings; we pursue social goals in our daily interactions, which is a crucial aspect of social intelligence. Yet, AI systems' abilities in this realm remain elusive. We present SOTOPIA, an open-ended environment to simulate complex social interactions between artificial agents and evaluate their social intelligence. In our environment, agents role-play and interact under a wide variety of scenarios; they coordinate, collaborate, exchange, and compete with each other to achieve complex social goals. We simulate the role-play interaction between LLM-based agents and humans within this task space and evaluate their performance with a holistic evaluation framework called SOTOPIA-Eval. With SOTOPIA, we find significant differences between these models in terms of their social intelligence, and we identify a subset of SOTOPIA scenarios, SOTOPIA-hard, that is generally challenging for all models. We find that on this subset, GPT-4 achieves a significantly lower goal completion rate than humans and struggles to exhibit social commonsense reasoning and strategic communication skills. These findings demonstrate SOTOPIA's promise as a general platform for research on evaluating and improving social intelligence in artificial agents.Comment: Preprint, 43 pages. The first two authors contribute equall

India’s Energy Security

The paper examines teh current energy demand of India and the implications of future levels and patterns of energy use in India. [FES Briefing Paper 14 ]: India, energy, trends in demand and supply, environmental impact, energy consumption, reforms, climate change, Petersburg Declaration

Perceptions of Dental Students Towards Learning Environment in an Indian Scenario

Background: Dental students constitute a stakeholder group that is able to provide unique information concerning the effectiveness of the dental curriculum. The purpose of this study was to determine students′ perceptions of the learning environment, intellectual climate and teacher student relationships in dental school. Methods : This study was conducted among 341 dental students of two dental college of Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. Response rate was 85%. In this study, the dental version of Medical Student Learning Environment Survey has been used. The questionnaires were divided in to 7 subscales like flexibility, student to student interaction, emotional climate, meaningful experience, organization, supportiveness, and breadth of interest. The students were divided in to two groups of preclinical and clinical for the purpose of comparison. The data were analyzed using ANOVA and t-test. Results: The results were statistically analyzed and differentiated in to preclinical and clinical phases. The preclinical and clinical students rated the student to student interaction as the most favorable whereas the lowest score was given to flexibility by both preclinical and clinical students. Preclinical students rated emotional climate as the lowest after flexibility whereas clinical students rated breadth of interest and meaningful experience as the lowest score after flexibility. Conclusion: This study emphasized the areas of improvement in dental school learning environment based on students′ perspective by making these required and much needed changes in the curriculum. Students′ satisfaction with their dental education can be increased

Knowledge, attitude and practice towards droplet and airborne isolation precautions among dental health care professionals in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India

Aims and Objective- The purpose of this study is to obtain comprehensive information about the knowledge, attitude and practices in regard to droplet and airborne infection related precautions among faculty member and the undergraduate students in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. Material and Methods- A cross sectional survey was conducted among 311 dental faculty and the undergraduate students under clinical training in Udaipur, Rajasthan. A self-assessment questionnaire composed of queries on three levels, namely knowledge, attitude and practices with respect to airborne and droplet isolation precautions was used. The data was collected and analyzed by using SPSS software. Results- Frequency distribution scores of knowledge, attitude and practice in relation to droplet and airborne isolation precautions were revealed that even the students under training along with the faculty member were quite aware of the precautions and the principles of airborne and droplet isolation. Mean score for knowledge was 9.17±2.07; Mean scores for attitude and practice were 48.65±7.47 and 6.88±3.51 respectively. There were no significant difference in all groups regarding knowledge, attitude and practice. In addition, a positive linear correlation was found between two items of survey including knowledge- attitude, knowledgepractice and attitude- practice (P<0.01). Conclusion- The results highlighted that though the professionals had good knowledge and attitude but the practice levels for the same were low. The study confirms from the findings that the infection control measures among the health care professionals are fairly good and an educational programme on isolation precautions can further enhance these levels and thereby, reducing the risk of infection transmission risks