Authors: Yiwei Qin, Xuefeng Li, Haoyang Zou, Yixiu Liu, Shijie Xia, Zhen Huang, Yixin Ye, Weizhe Yuan, Hector Liu, Yuanzhi Li, Pengfei Liu
Abstract: This paper introduces a pioneering approach to artificial intelligence research, embodied in our O1 Replication Journey. In response to the announcement of OpenAI's groundbreaking O1 model, we embark on a transparent, real-time exploration to replicate its capabilities while reimagining the process of conducting and communicating AI research. Our methodology addresses critical challenges in modern AI research, including the insularity of prolonged team-based projects, delayed information sharing, and the lack of recognition for diverse contributions. By providing comprehensive, real-time documentation of our replication efforts, including both successes and failures, we aim to foster open science, accelerate collective advancement, and lay the groundwork for AI-driven scientific discovery. Our research progress report diverges significantly from traditional research papers, offering continuous updates, full process transparency, and active community engagement throughout the research journey. Technologically, we proposed the journey learning paradigm, which encourages models to learn not just shortcuts, but the complete exploration process, including trial and error, reflection, and backtracking. With only 327 training samples and without any additional tricks, journey learning outperformed conventional supervised learning by over 8\% on the MATH dataset, demonstrating its extremely powerful potential. We believe this to be the most crucial component of O1 technology that we have successfully decoded. We share valuable resources including technical hypotheses and insights, cognitive exploration maps, custom-developed tools, etc at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/O1-Journey.
Authors: Revanth Gangi Reddy, Sagnik Mukherjee, Jeonghwan Kim, Zhenhailong Wang, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Heng Ji
Abstract: Despite seemingly performant web agents on the task-completion benchmarks, most existing methods evaluate the agents based on a presupposition: the web navigation task consists of linear sequence of actions with an end state that marks task completion. In contrast, our work focuses on web navigation for information aggregation, wherein the agent must explore different websites to gather information for a complex query. We consider web information aggregation from two different perspectives: (i) Direct API-driven Access relies on a text-only view of the Web, leveraging external tools such as Google Search API to navigate the web and a scraper to extract website contents. (ii) Interactive Visual Access uses screenshots of the webpages and requires interaction with the browser to navigate and access information. Motivated by these diverse information access settings, we introduce Infogent, a novel modular framework for web information aggregation involving three distinct components: Navigator, Extractor and Aggregator. Experiments on different information access settings demonstrate Infogent beats an existing SOTA multi-agent search framework by 7% under Direct API-Driven Access on FRAMES, and improves over an existing information-seeking web agent by 4.3% under Interactive Visual Access on AssistantBench.
Authors: Xiaodong Yu, Ben Zhou, Hao Cheng, Dan Roth
Abstract: Existing math datasets evaluate the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) by either using the final answer or the intermediate reasoning steps derived from static examples. However, the former approach fails to surface model's uses of shortcuts and wrong reasoning while the later poses challenges in accommodating alternative solutions. In this work, we seek to use symbolic programs as a means for automated evaluation if a model can consistently produce correct final answers across various inputs to the program. We begin by extracting programs for popular math datasets (GSM8K and MATH) using GPT4-o. For those executable programs verified using the original input-output pairs, they are found to encapsulate the proper reasoning required to solve the original text questions. We then prompt GPT4-o to generate new questions using alternative input-output pairs based the extracted program. We apply the resulting datasets to evaluate a collection of LLMs. In our experiments, we observe significant accuracy drops using our proposed evaluation compared with original static examples, suggesting the fragility of math reasoning in state-of-the-art LLMs.
Authors: Yifan Wang, Vera Demberg
Abstract: Despite significant advancements in natural language generation, controlling language models to produce texts with desired attributes remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we introduce RSA-Control, a training-free controllable text generation framework grounded in pragmatics. RSA-Control directs the generation process by recursively reasoning between imaginary speakers and listeners, enhancing the likelihood that target attributes are correctly interpreted by listeners amidst distractors. Additionally, we introduce a self-adjustable rationality parameter, which allows for automatic adjustment of control strength based on context. Our experiments, conducted with two task types and two types of language models, demonstrate that RSA-Control achieves strong attribute control while maintaining language fluency and content consistency. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ewanwong/RSA-Control.
Authors: Mandana Vaziri, Louis Mandel, Claudio Spiess, Martin Hirzel
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have taken the world by storm by making many previously difficult uses of AI feasible. LLMs are controlled via highly expressive textual prompts and return textual answers. Unfortunately, this unstructured text as input and output makes LLM-based applications brittle. This motivates the rise of prompting frameworks, which mediate between LLMs and the external world. However, existing prompting frameworks either have a high learning curve or take away control over the exact prompts from the developer. To overcome this dilemma, this paper introduces the Prompt Declaration Language (PDL). PDL is a simple declarative data-oriented language that puts prompts at the forefront, based on YAML. PDL works well with many LLM platforms and LLMs. It supports writing interactive applications that call LLMs and tools, and makes it easy to implement common use-cases such as chatbots, RAG, or agents. We hope PDL will make prompt programming simpler, less brittle, and more enjoyable.
Authors: Chenhan Zhang, Weiqi Wang, Zhiyi Tian, James Jianqiao Yu, Mohamed Ali Kaafar, An Liu, Shui Yu
Abstract: Although recent advancements in end-to-end learning-based link prediction (LP) methods have shown remarkable capabilities, the significance of traditional similarity-based LP methods persists in unsupervised scenarios where there are no known link labels. However, the selection of node features for similarity computation in similarity-based LP can be challenging. Less informative node features can result in suboptimal LP performance. To address these challenges, we integrate self-supervised graph learning techniques into similarity-based LP and propose a novel method: Self-Supervised Similarity-based LP (3SLP). 3SLP is suitable for the unsupervised condition of similarity-based LP without the assistance of known link labels. Specifically, 3SLP introduces a dual-view contrastive node representation learning (DCNRL) with crafted data augmentation and node representation learning. DCNRL is dedicated to developing more informative node representations, replacing the node attributes as inputs in the similarity-based LP backbone. Extensive experiments over benchmark datasets demonstrate the salient improvement of 3SLP, outperforming the baseline of traditional similarity-based LP by up to 21.2% (AUC).
Authors: Danyal Aftab, Steven Davy
Abstract: Large language models demonstrate impressive proficiency in language understanding and generation. Nonetheless, training these models from scratch, even the least complex billion-parameter variant demands significant computational resources rendering it economically impractical for many organizations. With large language models functioning as general-purpose task solvers, this paper investigates their task-specific fine-tuning. We employ task-specific datasets and prompts to fine-tune two pruned LLaMA models having 5 billion and 4 billion parameters. This process utilizes the pre-trained weights and focuses on a subset of weights using the LoRA method. One challenge in fine-tuning the LLaMA model is crafting a precise prompt tailored to the specific task. To address this, we propose a novel approach to fine-tune the LLaMA model under two primary constraints: task specificity and prompt effectiveness. Our approach, Tailored LLaMA initially employs structural pruning to reduce the model sizes from 7B to 5B and 4B parameters. Subsequently, it applies a carefully designed prompt specific to the task and utilizes the LoRA method to accelerate the fine-tuning process. Moreover, fine-tuning a model pruned by 50\% for less than one hour restores the mean accuracy of classification tasks to 95.68\% at a 20\% compression ratio and to 86.54\% at a 50\% compression ratio through few-shot learning with 50 shots. Our validation of Tailored LLaMA on these two pruned variants demonstrates that even when compressed to 50\%, the models maintain over 65\% of the baseline model accuracy in few-shot classification and generation tasks. These findings highlight the efficacy of our tailored approach in maintaining high performance with significantly reduced model sizes.
Authors: Xinran Wang, Qi Le, Ammar Ahmed, Enmao Diao, Yi Zhou, Nathalie Baracaldo, Jie Ding, Ali Anwar
Abstract: Ensuring that generative AI systems align with human values is essential but challenging, especially when considering multiple human values and their potential trade-offs. Since human values can be personalized and dynamically change over time, the desirable levels of value alignment vary across different ethnic groups, industry sectors, and user cohorts. Within existing frameworks, it is hard to define human values and align AI systems accordingly across different directions simultaneously, such as harmlessness, helpfulness, and positiveness. To address this, we develop a novel, first-principle approach called Multi-Human-Value Alignment Palette (MAP), which navigates the alignment across multiple human values in a structured and reliable way. MAP formulates the alignment problem as an optimization task with user-defined constraints, which define human value targets. It can be efficiently solved via a primal-dual approach, which determines whether a user-defined alignment target is achievable and how to achieve it. We conduct a detailed theoretical analysis of MAP by quantifying the trade-offs between values, the sensitivity to constraints, the fundamental connection between multi-value alignment and sequential alignment, and proving that linear weighted rewards are sufficient for multi-value alignment. Extensive experiments demonstrate MAP's ability to align multiple values in a principled manner while delivering strong empirical performance across various tasks.
Authors: Mingyu Zong, Arvin Hekmati, Michael Guastalla, Yiyi Li, Bhaskar Krishnamachari
Abstract: This paper identifies and analyzes applications in which Large Language Models (LLMs) can make Internet of Things (IoT) networks more intelligent and responsive through three case studies from critical topics: DDoS attack detection, macroprogramming over IoT systems, and sensor data processing. Our results reveal that the GPT model under few-shot learning achieves 87.6% detection accuracy, whereas the fine-tuned GPT increases the value to 94.9%. Given a macroprogramming framework, the GPT model is capable of writing scripts using high-level functions from the framework to handle possible incidents. Moreover, the GPT model shows efficacy in processing a vast amount of sensor data by offering fast and high-quality responses, which comprise expected results and summarized insights. Overall, the model demonstrates its potential to power a natural language interface. We hope that researchers will find these case studies inspiring to develop further.
Authors: Muhua Huang, Xijuan Zhang, Christopher Soto, James Evans
Abstract: This research introduces a novel methodology for assigning quantifiable, controllable and psychometrically validated personalities to Large Language Models-Based Agents (Agents) using the Big Five personality framework. It seeks to overcome the constraints of human subject studies, proposing Agents as an accessible tool for social science inquiry. Through a series of four studies, this research demonstrates the feasibility of assigning psychometrically valid personality traits to Agents, enabling them to replicate complex human-like behaviors. The first study establishes an understanding of personality constructs and personality tests within the semantic space of an LLM. Two subsequent studies -- using empirical and simulated data -- illustrate the process of creating Agents and validate the results by showing strong correspondence between human and Agent answers to personality tests. The final study further corroborates this correspondence by using Agents to replicate known human correlations between personality traits and decision-making behaviors in scenarios involving risk-taking and ethical dilemmas, thereby validating the effectiveness of the psychometric approach to design Agents and its applicability to social and behavioral research.
Authors: Reachsak Ly, Alireza Shojaei
Abstract: Current autonomous building research primarily focuses on energy efficiency and automation. While traditional artificial intelligence has advanced autonomous building research, it often relies on predefined rules and struggles to adapt to complex, evolving building operations. Moreover, the centralized organizational structures of facilities management hinder transparency in decision-making, limiting true building autonomy. Research on decentralized governance and adaptive building infrastructure, which could overcome these challenges, remains relatively unexplored. This paper addresses these limitations by introducing a novel Decentralized Autonomous Building Cyber-Physical System framework that integrates Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, Large Language Models, and digital twins to create a smart, self-managed, operational, and financially autonomous building infrastructure. This study develops a full-stack decentralized application to facilitate decentralized governance of building infrastructure. An LLM-based artificial intelligence assistant is developed to provide intuitive human-building interaction for blockchain and building operation management-related tasks and enable autonomous building operation. Six real-world scenarios were tested to evaluate the autonomous building system's workability, including building revenue and expense management, AI-assisted facility control, and autonomous adjustment of building systems. Results indicate that the prototype successfully executes these operations, confirming the framework's suitability for developing building infrastructure with decentralized governance and autonomous operation.
Authors: Hadi Vafaii, Dekel Galor, Jacob L. Yates
Abstract: The Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) is a widely used objective for training deep generative models, such as Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). In the neuroscience literature, an identical objective is known as the variational free energy, hinting at a potential unified framework for brain function and machine learning. Despite its utility in interpreting generative models, including diffusion models, ELBO maximization is often seen as too broad to offer prescriptive guidance for specific architectures in neuroscience or machine learning. In this work, we show that maximizing ELBO under Poisson assumptions for general sequence data leads to a spiking neural network that performs Bayesian posterior inference through its membrane potential dynamics. The resulting model, the iterative Poisson VAE (iP-VAE), has a closer connection to biological neurons than previous brain-inspired predictive coding models based on Gaussian assumptions. Compared to amortized and iterative VAEs, iP-VAElearns sparser representations and exhibits superior generalization to out-of-distribution samples. These findings suggest that optimizing ELBO, combined with Poisson assumptions, provides a solid foundation for developing prescriptive theories in NeuroAI.
Authors: Zhijie Chen, Xinglin Zhang
Abstract: This paper proposes a novel approach for designing Single-Parameterized Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (SKAN) by utilizing a Single-Parameterized Function (SFunc) constructed from trigonometric functions. Three new SKAN variants are developed: LSin-SKAN, LCos-SKAN, and LArctan-SKAN. Experimental validation on the MNIST dataset demonstrates that LArctan-SKAN excels in both accuracy and computational efficiency. Specifically, LArctan-SKAN significantly improves test set accuracy over existing models, outperforming all pure KAN variants compared, including FourierKAN, LSS-SKAN, and Spl-KAN. It also surpasses mixed MLP-based models such as MLP+rKAN and MLP+fKAN in accuracy. Furthermore, LArctan-SKAN exhibits remarkable computational efficiency, with a training speed increase of 535.01% and 49.55% compared to MLP+rKAN and MLP+fKAN, respectively. These results confirm the effectiveness and potential of SKANs constructed with trigonometric functions. The experiment code is available at https://github.com/chikkkit/LArctan-SKAN .
Authors: Diana Pfau, Alexander Jung
Abstract: AI systems increasingly shape critical decisions across personal and societal domains. While empirical risk minimization (ERM) drives much of the AI success, it typically prioritizes accuracy over trustworthiness, often resulting in biases, opacity, and other adverse effects. This paper discusses how key requirements for trustworthy AI can be translated into design choices for the components of ERM. We hope to provide actionable guidance for building AI systems that meet emerging standards for trustworthiness of AI.
Authors: Ryota Maruo, Koh Takeuchi, Hisashi Kashima
Abstract: Designing effective two-sided matching mechanisms is a major problem in mechanism design, and the goodness of matching cannot always be formulated. The existing work addresses this issue by searching over a parameterized family of mechanisms with certain properties by learning to fit a human-crafted dataset containing examples of preference profiles and matching results. However, this approach does not consider a strategy-proof mechanism, implicitly assumes the number of agents to be a constant, and does not consider the public contextual information of the agents. In this paper, we propose a new parametric family of strategy-proof matching mechanisms by extending the serial dictatorship (SD). We develop a novel attention-based neural network called NeuralSD, which can learn a strategy-proof mechanism from a human-crafted dataset containing public contextual information. NeuralSD is constructed by tensor operations that make SD differentiable and learns a parameterized mechanism by estimating an order of SD from the contextual information. We conducted experiments to learn a strategy-proof matching from matching examples with different numbers of agents. We demonstrated that our method shows the superiority of learning with context-awareness over a baseline in terms of regression performance and other metrics.
Authors: Yige Li, Hanxun Huang, Jiaming Zhang, Xingjun Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang
Abstract: Backdoor attacks covertly implant triggers into deep neural networks (DNNs) by poisoning a small portion of the training data with pre-designed backdoor triggers. This vulnerability is exacerbated in the era of large models, where extensive (pre-)training on web-crawled datasets is susceptible to compromise. In this paper, we introduce a novel two-step defense framework named Expose Before You Defend (EBYD). EBYD unifies existing backdoor defense methods into a comprehensive defense system with enhanced performance. Specifically, EBYD first exposes the backdoor functionality in the backdoored model through a model preprocessing step called backdoor exposure, and then applies detection and removal methods to the exposed model to identify and eliminate the backdoor features. In the first step of backdoor exposure, we propose a novel technique called Clean Unlearning (CUL), which proactively unlearns clean features from the backdoored model to reveal the hidden backdoor features. We also explore various model editing/modification techniques for backdoor exposure, including fine-tuning, model sparsification, and weight perturbation. Using EBYD, we conduct extensive experiments on 10 image attacks and 6 text attacks across 2 vision datasets (CIFAR-10 and an ImageNet subset) and 4 language datasets (SST-2, IMDB, Twitter, and AG's News). The results demonstrate the importance of backdoor exposure for backdoor defense, showing that the exposed models can significantly benefit a range of downstream defense tasks, including backdoor label detection, backdoor trigger recovery, backdoor model detection, and backdoor removal. We hope our work could inspire more research in developing advanced defense frameworks with exposed models. Our code is available at: https://github.com/bboylyg/Expose-Before-You-Defend.
Authors: Hai Zhong, Xun Wang, Zhuoran Li, Longbo Huang
Abstract: Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm, leveraging offline data for initialization and online fine-tuning to enhance both sample efficiency and performance. However, most existing research has focused on single-agent settings, with limited exploration of the multi-agent extension, i.e., Offline-to-Online Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (O2O MARL). In O2O MARL, two critical challenges become more prominent as the number of agents increases: (i) the risk of unlearning pre-trained Q-values due to distributional shifts during the transition from offline-to-online phases, and (ii) the difficulty of efficient exploration in the large joint state-action space. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel O2O MARL framework called Offline Value Function Memory with Sequential Exploration (OVMSE). First, we introduce the Offline Value Function Memory (OVM) mechanism to compute target Q-values, preserving knowledge gained during offline training, ensuring smoother transitions, and enabling efficient fine-tuning. Second, we propose a decentralized Sequential Exploration (SE) strategy tailored for O2O MARL, which effectively utilizes the pre-trained offline policy for exploration, thereby significantly reducing the joint state-action space to be explored. Extensive experiments on the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) demonstrate that OVMSE significantly outperforms existing baselines, achieving superior sample efficiency and overall performance.
Authors: Xuetian Chen, Hangcheng Li, Jiaqing Liang, Sihang Jiang, Deqing Yang
Abstract: Autonomous agents operating on the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of various applications hold immense practical value. Unlike the large language model (LLM)-based methods which rely on structured texts and customized backends, the approaches using large vision-language models (LVLMs) are more intuitive and adaptable as they can visually perceive and directly interact with screens, making them indispensable in general scenarios without text metadata and tailored backends. Given the lack of high-quality training data for GUI-related tasks in existing work, this paper aims to enhance the GUI understanding and interacting capabilities of LVLMs through a data-driven approach. We propose EDGE, a general data synthesis framework that automatically generates large-scale, multi-granularity training data from webpages across the Web. Evaluation results on various GUI and agent benchmarks demonstrate that the model trained with the dataset generated through EDGE exhibits superior webpage understanding capabilities, which can then be easily transferred to previously unseen desktop and mobile environments. Our approach significantly reduces the dependence on manual annotations, empowering researchers to harness the vast public resources available on the Web to advance their work. Our source code, the dataset and the model are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EDGE-1CDB.
Authors: Antonia W\"ust, Tim Tobiasch, Lukas Helff, Devendra S. Dhami, Constantin A. Rothkopf, Kristian Kersting
Abstract: Recently, newly developed Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as OpenAI's GPT-4o, have emerged, seemingly demonstrating advanced reasoning capabilities across text and image modalities. Yet, the depth of these advances in language-guided perception and abstract reasoning remains underexplored, and it is unclear whether these models can truly live up to their ambitious promises. To assess the progress and identify shortcomings, we enter the wonderland of Bongard problems, a set of classical visual reasoning puzzles that require human-like abilities of pattern recognition and abstract reasoning. While VLMs occasionally succeed in identifying discriminative concepts and solving some of the problems, they frequently falter, failing to understand and reason about visual concepts. Surprisingly, even elementary concepts that may seem trivial to humans, such as simple spirals, pose significant challenges. Moreover, even when asked to explicitly focus on and analyze these concepts, they continue to falter, suggesting not only a lack of understanding of these elementary visual concepts but also an inability to generalize to unseen concepts. These observations underscore the current limitations of VLMs, emphasize that a significant gap remains between human-like visual reasoning and machine cognition, and highlight the ongoing need for innovation in this area.
Authors: Inbal Avraham, Reuth Mirsky
Abstract: Shared control problems involve a robot learning to collaborate with a human. When learning a shared control policy, short communication between the agents can often significantly reduce running times and improve the system's accuracy. We extend the shared control problem to include the ability to directly query a cooperating agent. We consider two types of potential responses to a query, namely oracles: one that can provide the learner with the best action they should take, even when that action might be myopically wrong, and one with a bounded knowledge limited to its part of the system. Given this additional information channel, this work further presents three heuristics for choosing when to query: reinforcement learning-based, utility-based, and entropy-based. These heuristics aim to reduce a system's overall learning cost. Empirical results on two environments show the benefits of querying to learn a better control policy and the tradeoffs between the proposed heuristics.
Authors: Taicheng Guo, Chaochun Liu, Hai Wang, Varun Mannam, Fang Wang, Xin Chen, Xiangliang Zhang, Chandan K. Reddy
Abstract: Language agents have recently been used to simulate human behavior and user-item interactions for recommendation systems. However, current language agent simulations do not understand the relationships between users and items, leading to inaccurate user profiles and ineffective recommendations. In this work, we explore the utility of Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which contain extensive and reliable relationships between users and items, for recommendation. Our key insight is that the paths in a KG can capture complex relationships between users and items, eliciting the underlying reasons for user preferences and enriching user profiles. Leveraging this insight, we propose Knowledge Graph Enhanced Language Agents(KGLA), a framework that unifies language agents and KG for recommendation systems. In the simulated recommendation scenario, we position the user and item within the KG and integrate KG paths as natural language descriptions into the simulation. This allows language agents to interact with each other and discover sufficient rationale behind their interactions, making the simulation more accurate and aligned with real-world cases, thus improving recommendation performance. Our experimental results show that KGLA significantly improves recommendation performance (with a 33%-95% boost in NDCG@1 among three widely used benchmarks) compared to the previous best baseline method.
Authors: Liu Yunhao, Ding Hong, Zhang Ziming, Wang Huixin, Liu Jinzhao, Xi Suyang
Abstract: Autonomous driving technology has seen significant advancements, but existing models often fail to fully capture the complexity of multi-agent environments, where interactions between dynamic agents are critical. To address this, we propose the Planning-Integrated Forecasting Model (PIFM), a novel framework inspired by neural mechanisms governing decision-making and multi-agent coordination in the brain. PIFM leverages rich contextual information, integrating road structures, traffic rules, and the behavior of surrounding vehicles to improve both the accuracy and interpretability of predictions. By adopting a diffusion-based architecture, akin to neural diffusion processes involved in predicting and planning, PIFM is able to forecast future trajectories of all agents within a scenario. This architecture enhances model transparency, as it parallels the brain's method of dynamically adjusting predictions based on external stimuli and other agents'behaviors. Extensive experiments validate PIFM's capacity to provide interpretable, neuroscience-driven solutions for safer and more efficient autonomous driving systems, with an extremely low number of parameters.
Authors: Pranav Gupta, Pratham Gohil, Sridhar S
Abstract: The accurate prediction of danger levels in video content is critical for enhancing safety and security systems, particularly in environments where quick and reliable assessments are essential. In this study, we perform a comparative analysis of various machine learning and deep learning models to predict danger ratings in a custom dataset of 100 videos, each containing 50 frames, annotated with human-rated danger scores ranging from 0 to 10. The danger ratings are further classified into three categories: no alert (less than 7)and high alert (greater than equal to 7). Our evaluation covers classical machine learning models, such as Support Vector Machines, as well as Neural Networks, and transformer-based models. Model performance is assessed using standard metrics such as accuracy, F1-score, and mean absolute error (MAE), and the results are compared to identify the most robust approach. This research contributes to developing a more accurate and generalizable danger assessment framework for video-based risk detection.
Authors: Nicole Cho, Nishan Srishankar, Lucas Cecchi, William Watson
Abstract: Financial intelligence generation from vast data sources has typically relied on traditional methods of knowledge-graph construction or database engineering. Recently, fine-tuned financial domain-specific Large Language Models (LLMs), have emerged. While these advancements are promising, limitations such as high inference costs, hallucinations, and the complexity of concurrently analyzing high-dimensional financial data, emerge. This motivates our invention FISHNET (Financial Intelligence from Sub-querying, Harmonizing, Neural-Conditioning, Expert swarming, and Task planning), an agentic architecture that accomplishes highly complex analytical tasks for more than 98,000 regulatory filings that vary immensely in terms of semantics, data hierarchy, or format. FISHNET shows remarkable performance for financial insight generation (61.8% success rate over 5.0% Routing, 45.6% RAG R-Precision). We conduct rigorous ablations to empirically prove the success of FISHNET, each agent's importance, and the optimized performance of assembling all agents. Our modular architecture can be leveraged for a myriad of use-cases, enabling scalability, flexibility, and data integrity that are critical for financial tasks.
Authors: Zilong Wang, Nan Chen, Luna K. Qiu, Ling Yue, Geli Guo, Yang Ou, Shiqi Jiang, Yuqing Yang, Lili Qiu
Abstract: In recent years, the rapid aging of the global population has led to an increase in cognitive disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease, presenting significant public health challenges. Although no effective treatments currently exist to reverse Alzheimer's, prevention and early intervention, including cognitive training, are critical. This report explores the potential of AI chatbots in enhancing personalized cognitive training. We introduce ReMe, a web-based framework designed to create AI chatbots that facilitate cognitive training research, specifically targeting episodic memory tasks derived from personal life logs. By leveraging large language models, ReMe provides enhanced user-friendly, interactive, and personalized training experiences. Case studies demonstrate ReMe's effectiveness in engaging users through life recall and open-ended language puzzles, highlighting its potential to improve cognitive training design. Despite promising results, further research is needed to validate training effectiveness through large-scale studies that include cognitive ability evaluations. Overall, ReMe offers a promising approach to personalized cognitive training, utilizing AI capabilities to meet the growing demand for non-pharmacological interventions in cognitive health, with future research aiming to expand its applications and efficacy.
Authors: Howe Tissue, Venus Wang, Lu Wang
Abstract: We find that the cross-entropy loss curves of neural language models empirically adhere to a scaling law with learning rate (LR) annealing over training steps: $$L(s) = L_0 + A\cdot S_1^{-\alpha} - C\cdot S_2,$$ where $L(s)$ is the validation loss at step $s$, $S_1$ is the area under the LR curve, $S_2$ is the LR annealing area, and $L_0$, $A$, $C$, $\alpha$ are constant parameters. This formulation takes into account two factors: (1) power-law scaling over data size, and (2) the additional loss reduction during LR annealing. Therefore, this formulation can describe the full loss curve at each step, rather than the single loss point at the end of training. Applying the scaling law with LR annealing and fitting only one or two training curves, we can accurately predict the loss at any given step across any learning rate scheduler (LRS). This approach significantly reduces computational cost in formulating scaling laws while providing more accuracy and expressiveness for training dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our findings hold across a range of hyper-parameters and model architectures, and our equation can extend to scaling effect of model sizes. Moreover, our formulation provides accurate theoretical verification and explanation for empirical results observed in numerous previous studies, particularly those focusing on LR schedule and annealing. We believe that this work is promising to enhance the understanding of LLM training dynamics while greatly democratizing scaling laws, and it can guide researchers in refining training strategies (e.g. critical LRS) for further LLMs.
Authors: Shawn Tan, Yikang Shen, Songlin Yang, Aaron Courville, Rameswar Panda
Abstract: The self-attention mechanism traditionally relies on the softmax operator, necessitating positional embeddings like RoPE, or position biases to account for token order. But current methods using still face length generalisation challenges. We propose an alternative attention mechanism based on the stick-breaking process: For each token before the current, we determine a break point $\beta_{i,j}$, which represents the proportion of the remaining stick to allocate to the current token. We repeat the process until the stick is fully allocated, resulting in a sequence of attention weights. This process naturally incorporates recency bias, which has linguistic motivations for grammar parsing (Shen et. al., 2017). We study the implications of replacing the conventional softmax-based attention mechanism with stick-breaking attention. We then discuss implementation of numerically stable stick-breaking attention and adapt Flash Attention to accommodate this mechanism. When used as a drop-in replacement for current softmax+RoPE attention systems, we find that stick-breaking attention performs competitively with current methods on length generalisation and downstream tasks. Stick-breaking also performs well at length generalisation, allowing a model trained with $2^{11}$ context window to perform well at $2^{14}$ with perplexity improvements.
Authors: Shreya Srivastava, Durgesh Kumar, Jatin Bedi, Sandeep Seth, Deepak Sharma
Abstract: A substantial amount of variability in ECG manifested due to patient characteristics hinders the adoption of automated analysis algorithms in clinical practice. None of the ECG annotators developed till date consider the characteristics of the patients in a multi-modal architecture. We employed the XGBoost model to analyze the UCI Arrhythmia dataset, linking patient characteristics to ECG morphological changes. The model accurately classified patient gender using discriminative ECG features with 87.75% confidence. We propose a novel multi-modal methodology for ECG analysis and arrhythmia classification that can help defy the variability in ECG related to patient-specific conditions. This deep learning algorithm, named rECGnition_v1.0 (robust ECG abnormality detection Version 1), fuses Beat Morphology with Patient Characteristics to create a discriminative feature map that understands the internal correlation between both modalities. A Squeeze and Excitation based Patient characteristic Encoding Network (SEPcEnet) has been introduced, considering the patient's demographics. The trained model outperformed the various existing algorithms by achieving the overall F1-score of 0.986 for the ten arrhythmia class classification in the MITDB and achieved near perfect prediction scores of ~0.99 for LBBB, RBBB, Premature ventricular contraction beat, Atrial premature beat and Paced beat. Subsequently, the methodology was validated across INCARTDB, EDB and different class groups of MITDB using transfer learning. The generalizability test provided F1-scores of 0.980, 0.946, 0.977, and 0.980 for INCARTDB, EDB, MITDB AAMI, and MITDB Normal vs. Abnormal Classification, respectively. Therefore, with a more enhanced and comprehensive understanding of the patient being examined and their ECG for diverse CVD manifestations, the proposed rECGnition_v1.0 algorithm paves the way for its deployment in clinics.
Authors: Nathalie Maria Kirch, Konstantin Hebenstreit, Matthias Samwald
Abstract: We present the TRIAGE Benchmark, a novel machine ethics (ME) benchmark that tests LLMs' ability to make ethical decisions during mass casualty incidents. It uses real-world ethical dilemmas with clear solutions designed by medical professionals, offering a more realistic alternative to annotation-based benchmarks. TRIAGE incorporates various prompting styles to evaluate model performance across different contexts. Most models consistently outperformed random guessing, suggesting LLMs may support decision-making in triage scenarios. Neutral or factual scenario formulations led to the best performance, unlike other ME benchmarks where ethical reminders improved outcomes. Adversarial prompts reduced performance but not to random guessing levels. Open-source models made more morally serious errors, and general capability overall predicted better performance.
Authors: Louis Hickman, Christopher Huynh, Jessica Gass, Brandon Booth, Jason Kuruzovich, Louis Tay
Abstract: Machine learning (ML) models are increasingly used for personnel assessment and selection (e.g., resume screeners, automatically scored interviews). However, concerns have been raised throughout society that ML assessments may be biased and perpetuate or exacerbate inequality. Although organizational researchers have begun investigating ML assessments from traditional psychometric and legal perspectives, there is a need to understand, clarify, and integrate fairness operationalizations and algorithmic bias mitigation methods from the computer science, data science, and organizational research literatures. We present a four-stage model of developing ML assessments and applying bias mitigation methods, including 1) generating the training data, 2) training the model, 3) testing the model, and 4) deploying the model. When introducing the four-stage model, we describe potential sources of bias and unfairness at each stage. Then, we systematically review definitions and operationalizations of algorithmic bias, legal requirements governing personnel selection from the United States and Europe, and research on algorithmic bias mitigation across multiple domains and integrate these findings into our framework. Our review provides insights for both research and practice by elucidating possible mechanisms of algorithmic bias while identifying which bias mitigation methods are legal and effective. This integrative framework also reveals gaps in the knowledge of algorithmic bias mitigation that should be addressed by future collaborative research between organizational researchers, computer scientists, and data scientists. We provide recommendations for developing and deploying ML assessments, as well as recommendations for future research into algorithmic bias and fairness.
Authors: Ruoqi Liu, Yuelin Bai, Xiang Yue, Ping Zhang
Abstract: The electrocardiogram (ECG) is an essential non-invasive diagnostic tool for assessing cardiac conditions. Existing automatic interpretation methods suffer from limited generalizability, focusing on a narrow range of cardiac conditions, and typically depend on raw physiological signals, which may not be readily available in resource-limited settings where only printed or digital ECG images are accessible. Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) present promising opportunities for addressing these challenges. However, the application of MLLMs to ECG image interpretation remains challenging due to the lack of instruction tuning datasets and well-established ECG image benchmarks for quantitative evaluation. To address these challenges, we introduce ECGInstruct, a comprehensive ECG image instruction tuning dataset of over one million samples, covering a wide range of ECG-related tasks from diverse data sources. Using ECGInstruct, we develop PULSE, an MLLM tailored for ECG image comprehension. In addition, we curate ECGBench, a new evaluation benchmark covering four key ECG image interpretation tasks across nine different datasets. Our experiments show that PULSE sets a new state-of-the-art, outperforming general MLLMs with an average accuracy improvement of 15% to 30%. This work highlights the potential of PULSE to enhance ECG interpretation in clinical practice.
Authors: Beka Modrekiladze
Abstract: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have demonstrated remarkable advancements in generative modeling; however, their training is often resource-intensive, requiring extensive computational time and hundreds of thousands of epochs. This paper proposes a novel optimization approach that transforms the training process by operating within a dual space of the initial data using invertible mappings, specifically autoencoders. By training GANs on the encoded representations in the dual space, which encapsulate the most salient features of the data, the generative process becomes significantly more efficient and potentially reveals underlying patterns beyond human recognition. This approach not only enhances training speed and resource usage but also explores the philosophical question of whether models can generate insights that transcend the human intelligence while being limited by the human-generated data.
Authors: Md Khairul Islam, Ayush Karmacharya, Timothy Sue, Judy Fox
Abstract: Considering the difficulty of financial time series forecasting in financial aid, much of the current research focuses on leveraging big data analytics in financial services. One modern approach is to utilize "predictive analysis", analogous to forecasting financial trends. However, many of these time series data in Financial Aid (FA) pose unique challenges due to limited historical datasets and high dimensional financial information, which hinder the development of effective predictive models that balance accuracy with efficient runtime and memory usage. Pre-trained foundation models are employed to address these challenging tasks. We use state-of-the-art time series models including pre-trained LLMs (GPT-2 as the backbone), transformers, and linear models to demonstrate their ability to outperform traditional approaches, even with minimal ("few-shot") or no fine-tuning ("zero-shot"). Our benchmark study, which includes financial aid with seven other time series tasks, shows the potential of using LLMs for scarce financial datasets.
Authors: Yuhan Liu, Zirui Song, Xiaoqing Zhang, Xiuying Chen, Rui Yan
Abstract: With the growing spread of misinformation online, research has increasingly focused on detecting and tracking fake news. However, an overlooked issue is that fake news does not naturally exist in social networks -- it often originates from distorted facts or deliberate fabrication by malicious actors. Understanding how true news gradually evolves into fake news is critical for early detection and prevention, reducing its spread and impact. Hence, in this paper, we take the first step toward simulating and revealing this evolution, proposing a Fake News evolUtion Simulation framEwork (FUSE) based on large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we employ LLM as agents to represent individuals in a simulated social network. We define four types of agents commonly observed in daily interactions: spreaders, who propagate information; commentators, who provide opinions and interpretations; verifiers, who check the accuracy of information; and bystanders, who passively observe without engaging. For simulated environments, we model various social network structures, such as high-clustering networks and scale-free networks, to mirror real-world network dynamics. Each day, the agents engage in belief exchanges, reflect on their thought processes, and reintroduce the news accordingly. Given the lack of prior work in this area, we developed a FUSE-EVAL evaluation framework to measure the deviation from true news during the fake news evolution process. The results show that FUSE successfully captures the underlying patterns of how true news transforms into fake news and accurately reproduces previously discovered instances of fake news, aligning closely with human evaluations. Moreover, our work provides insights into the fact that combating fake news should not be delayed until it has fully evolved; instead, prevention in advance is key to achieving better outcomes.
Authors: Serap A. Savari
Abstract: Sampling and quantization are standard practices in signal and image processing, but a theoretical understanding of their impact is incomplete. We consider discrete image registration when the underlying function is a one-dimensional spatially-limited piecewise constant function. For ideal noiseless sampling the number of samples from each region of the support of the function generally depends on the placement of the sampling grid. Therefore, if the samples of the function are noisy, then image registration requires alignment and segmentation of the data sequences. One popular strategy for aligning images is selecting the maximum from cross-correlation template matching. To motivate more robust and accurate approaches which also address segmentation, we provide an example of a one-dimensional spatially-limited piecewise constant function for which the cross-correlation technique can perform poorly on noisy samples. While earlier approaches to improve the method involve normalization, our example suggests a novel strategy in our setting. Difference sequences, thresholding, and dynamic programming are well-known techniques in image processing. We prove that they are tools to correctly align and segment noisy data sequences under some conditions on the noise. We also address some of the potential difficulties that could arise in a more general case.
Authors: Lawrence Jang, Yinheng Li, Charles Ding, Justin Lin, Paul Pu Liang, Dan Zhao, Rogerio Bonatti, Kazuhito Koishida
Abstract: Videos are often used to learn or extract the necessary information to complete tasks in ways different than what text and static imagery alone can provide. However, many existing agent benchmarks neglect long-context video understanding, instead focusing on text or static image inputs. To bridge this gap, we introduce VideoWebArena (VideoWA), a benchmark for evaluating the capabilities of long-context multimodal agents for video understanding. VideoWA consists of 2,021 web agent tasks based on manually crafted video tutorials, which total almost four hours of content. For our benchmark, we define a taxonomy of long-context video-based agent tasks with two main areas of focus: skill retention and factual retention. While skill retention tasks evaluate whether an agent can use a given human demonstration to complete a task efficiently, the factual retention task evaluates whether an agent can retrieve instruction-relevant information from a video to complete a task. We find that the best model achieves 13.3% success on factual retention tasks and 45.8% on factual retention QA pairs, far below human performance at 73.9% and 79.3%, respectively. On skill retention tasks, long-context models perform worse with tutorials than without, exhibiting a 5% performance decrease in WebArena tasks and a 10.3% decrease in VisualWebArena tasks. Our work highlights the need to improve the agentic abilities of long-context multimodal models and provides a testbed for future development with long-context video agents.
Authors: Tianyu Chen, Vansh Bansal, James G. Scott
Abstract: Neural posterior estimation (NPE), a simulation-based computational approach for Bayesian inference, has shown great success in situations where posteriors are intractable or likelihood functions are treated as "black boxes." Existing NPE methods typically rely on normalizing flows, which transform a base distributions into a complex posterior by composing many simple, invertible transformations. But flow-based models, while state of the art for NPE, are known to suffer from several limitations, including training instability and sharp trade-offs between representational power and computational cost. In this work, we demonstrate the effectiveness of conditional diffusions as an alternative to normalizing flows for NPE. Conditional diffusions address many of the challenges faced by flow-based methods. Our results show that, across a highly varied suite of benchmarking problems for NPE architectures, diffusions offer improved stability, superior accuracy, and faster training times, even with simpler, shallower models. These gains persist across a variety of different encoder or "summary network" architectures, as well as in situations where no summary network is required. The code will be publicly available at \url{https://github.com/TianyuCodings/cDiff}.
Authors: Andrew Liu, Axel Elaldi, Nathan Russell, Olivia Viessmann
Abstract: Efficient encoding and representation of large 3D molecular structures with high fidelity is critical for biomolecular design applications. Despite this, many representation learning approaches restrict themselves to modeling smaller systems or use coarse-grained approximations of the systems, for example modeling proteins at the resolution of amino acid residues rather than at the level of individual atoms. To address this, we develop quantized auto-encoders that learn atom-level tokenizations of complete proteins, RNA and small molecule structures with reconstruction accuracies below and around 1 Angstrom. We demonstrate that the Mamba state space model architecture employed is comparatively efficient, requiring a fraction of the training data, parameters and compute needed to reach competitive accuracies and can scale to systems with almost 100,000 atoms. The learned structure tokens of bio2token may serve as the input for all-atom language models in the future.
Authors: Haowei Yang, Mingxiu Sui, Shaobo Liu, Xinyue Qian, Zhaoyang Zhang, Bingying Liu
Abstract: With the rapid development of natural language processing technology, large language models have demonstrated exceptional performance in various application scenarios. However, training these models requires significant computational resources and data processing capabilities. Cross-cloud federated training offers a new approach to addressing the resource bottlenecks of a single cloud platform, allowing the computational resources of multiple clouds to collaboratively complete the training tasks of large models. This study analyzes the key technologies of cross-cloud federated training, including data partitioning and distribution, communication optimization, model aggregation algorithms, and the compatibility of heterogeneous cloud platforms. Additionally, the study examines data security and privacy protection strategies in cross-cloud training, particularly the application of data encryption and differential privacy techniques. Through experimental validation, the proposed technical framework demonstrates enhanced training efficiency, ensured data security, and reduced training costs, highlighting the broad application prospects of cross-cloud federated training.
Authors: Abhirama Subramanyam Penamakuri, Anand Mishra
Abstract: We revisit knowledge-aware text-based visual question answering, also known as Text-KVQA, in the light of modern advancements in large multimodal models (LMMs), and make the following contributions: (i) We propose VisTEL - a principled approach to perform visual text entity linking. The proposed VisTEL module harnesses a state-of-the-art visual text recognition engine and the power of a large multimodal model to jointly reason using textual and visual context obtained using surrounding cues in the image to link the visual text entity to the correct knowledge base entity. (ii) We present KaLMA - a knowledge-aware large multimodal assistant that augments an LMM with knowledge associated with visual text entity in the image to arrive at an accurate answer. Further, we provide a comprehensive experimental analysis and comparison of our approach with traditional visual question answering, pre-large multimodal models, and large multimodal models, as well as prior top-performing approaches. Averaging over three splits of Text-KVQA, our proposed approach surpasses the previous best approach by a substantial 23.3% on an absolute scale and establishes a new state of the art. We make our implementation publicly available.
Authors: Mohit Chandra, Siddharth Sriraman, Gaurav Verma, Harneet Singh Khanuja, Jose Suarez Campayo, Zihang Li, Michael L. Birnbaum, Munmun De Choudhury
Abstract: Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) from psychiatric medications are the leading cause of hospitalizations among mental health patients. With healthcare systems and online communities facing limitations in resolving ADR-related issues, Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to fill this gap. Despite the increasing capabilities of LLMs, past research has not explored their capabilities in detecting ADRs related to psychiatric medications or in providing effective harm reduction strategies. To address this, we introduce the Psych-ADR benchmark and the Adverse Drug Reaction Response Assessment (ADRA) framework to systematically evaluate LLM performance in detecting ADR expressions and delivering expert-aligned mitigation strategies. Our analyses show that LLMs struggle with understanding the nuances of ADRs and differentiating between types of ADRs. While LLMs align with experts in terms of expressed emotions and tone of the text, their responses are more complex, harder to read, and only 70.86% aligned with expert strategies. Furthermore, they provide less actionable advice by a margin of 12.32% on average. Our work provides a comprehensive benchmark and evaluation framework for assessing LLMs in strategy-driven tasks within high-risk domains.
Authors: Samuel Jacob Chacko, Sajib Biswas, Chashi Mahiul Islam, Fatema Tabassum Liza, Xiuwen Liu
Abstract: As powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) are now widely used for numerous practical applications, their safety is of critical importance. While alignment techniques have significantly improved overall safety, LLMs remain vulnerable to carefully crafted adversarial inputs. Consequently, adversarial attack methods are extensively used to study and understand these vulnerabilities. However, current attack methods face significant limitations. Those relying on optimizing discrete tokens suffer from limited efficiency, while continuous optimization techniques fail to generate valid tokens from the model's vocabulary, rendering them impractical for real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for adversarial attacks that overcomes these limitations by leveraging regularized gradients with continuous optimization methods. Our approach is two orders of magnitude faster than the state-of-the-art greedy coordinate gradient-based method, significantly improving the attack success rate on aligned language models. Moreover, it generates valid tokens, addressing a fundamental limitation of existing continuous optimization methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack on five state-of-the-art LLMs using four datasets.
Authors: S Sakshi, Utkarsh Tyagi, Sonal Kumar, Ashish Seth, Ramaneswaran Selvakumar, Oriol Nieto, Ramani Duraiswami, Sreyan Ghosh, Dinesh Manocha
Abstract: The ability to comprehend audio--which includes speech, non-speech sounds, and music--is crucial for AI agents to interact effectively with the world. We present MMAU, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal audio understanding models on tasks requiring expert-level knowledge and complex reasoning. MMAU comprises 10k carefully curated audio clips paired with human-annotated natural language questions and answers spanning speech, environmental sounds, and music. It includes information extraction and reasoning questions, requiring models to demonstrate 27 distinct skills across unique and challenging tasks. Unlike existing benchmarks, MMAU emphasizes advanced perception and reasoning with domain-specific knowledge, challenging models to tackle tasks akin to those faced by experts. We assess 18 open-source and proprietary (Large) Audio-Language Models, demonstrating the significant challenges posed by MMAU. Notably, even the most advanced Gemini Pro v1.5 achieves only 52.97% accuracy, and the state-of-the-art open-source Qwen2-Audio achieves only 52.50%, highlighting considerable room for improvement. We believe MMAU will drive the audio and multimodal research community to develop more advanced audio understanding models capable of solving complex audio tasks.
Authors: Israel Fama, B\'arbara Bueno, Alexandre Alcoforado, Thomas Palmeira Ferraz, Arnold Moya, Anna Helena Reali Costa
Abstract: In a context where the Brazilian judiciary system, the largest in the world, faces a crisis due to the slow processing of millions of cases, it becomes imperative to develop efficient methods for analyzing legal texts. We introduce uBERT, a hybrid model that combines Transformer and Recurrent Neural Network architectures to effectively handle long legal texts. Our approach processes the full text regardless of its length while maintaining reasonable computational overhead. Our experiments demonstrate that uBERT achieves superior performance compared to BERT+LSTM when overlapping input is used and is significantly faster than ULMFiT for processing long legal documents.
Authors: Bruno Croso Cunha da Silva, Thomas Palmeira Ferraz, Roseli De Deus Lopes
Abstract: Disinformation on social media poses both societal and technical challenges. While previous studies have integrated textual information into propagation networks, they have yet to fully leverage the advancements in Transformer-based language models for high-quality contextual text representations. This work investigates the impact of incorporating textual features into Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for fake news detection. Our experiments demonstrate that contextual representations improve performance by 9.3% in Macro F1 over static ones and 33.8% over GNNs without textual features. However, noisy data augmentation degrades performance and increases instability. We expect our methodology to open avenues for further research, and all code is made publicly available.
Authors: Lucas R. C. Farias, Aluizio F. R. Ara\'ujo
Abstract: This paper introduces the inverse modeling constrained multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (IM-C-MOEA/D) for addressing constrained real-world optimization problems. Our research builds upon the advancements made in evolutionary computing-based inverse modeling, and it strategically bridges the gaps in applying inverse models based on decomposition to problem domains with constraints. The proposed approach is experimentally evaluated on diverse real-world problems (RWMOP1-35), showing superior performance to state-of-the-art constrained multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (CMOEAs). The experimental results highlight the robustness of the algorithm and its applicability in real-world constrained optimization scenarios.
Authors: Antesh Upadhyay, Abolfazl Hashemi
Abstract: Federated learning is a prominent distributed learning paradigm that incorporates collaboration among diverse clients, promotes data locality, and thus ensures privacy. These clients have their own technological, cultural, and other biases in the process of data generation. However, the present standard often ignores this bias/heterogeneity, perpetuating bias against certain groups rather than mitigating it. In response to this concern, we propose an equitable clustering-based framework where the clients are categorized/clustered based on how similar they are to each other. We propose a unique way to construct the similarity matrix that uses activation vectors. Furthermore, we propose a client weighing mechanism to ensure that each cluster receives equal importance and establish $O(1/\sqrt{K})$ rate of convergence to reach an $\epsilon-$stationary solution. We assess the effectiveness of our proposed strategy against common baselines, demonstrating its efficacy in terms of reducing the bias existing amongst various client clusters and consequently ameliorating algorithmic bias against specific groups.
Authors: Changlong Wu, Ananth Grama, Wojciech Szpankowski
Abstract: Generative models have shown impressive capabilities in synthesizing high-quality outputs across various domains. However, a persistent challenge is the occurrence of "hallucinations", where the model produces outputs that are plausible but invalid. While empirical strategies have been explored to mitigate this issue, a rigorous theoretical understanding remains elusive. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework to analyze the learnability of non-hallucinating generative models from a learning-theoretic perspective. Our results reveal that non-hallucinating learning is statistically impossible when relying solely on the training dataset, even for a hypothesis class of size two and when the entire training set is truthful. To overcome these limitations, we show that incorporating inductive biases aligned with the actual facts into the learning process is essential. We provide a systematic approach to achieve this by restricting the facts set to a concept class of finite VC-dimension and demonstrate its effectiveness under various learning paradigms. Although our findings are primarily conceptual, they represent a first step towards a principled approach to addressing hallucinations in learning generative models.
Authors: SeongKu Kang, Yunyi Zhang, Pengcheng Jiang, Dongha Lee, Jiawei Han, Hwanjo Yu
Abstract: Academic paper search is an essential task for efficient literature discovery and scientific advancement. While dense retrieval has advanced various ad-hoc searches, it often struggles to match the underlying academic concepts between queries and documents, which is critical for paper search. To enable effective academic concept matching for paper search, we propose Taxonomy-guided Semantic Indexing (TaxoIndex) framework. TaxoIndex extracts key concepts from papers and organizes them as a semantic index guided by an academic taxonomy, and then leverages this index as foundational knowledge to identify academic concepts and link queries and documents. As a plug-and-play framework, TaxoIndex can be flexibly employed to enhance existing dense retrievers. Extensive experiments show that TaxoIndex brings significant improvements, even with highly limited training data, and greatly enhances interpretability.
Authors: Maithili Patel, Sonia Chernova
Abstract: As service robots become more general-purpose, they will need to adapt to their users' preferences over a large set of all possible tasks that they can perform. This includes preferences regarding which actions the users prefer to delegate to robots as opposed to doing themselves. Existing personalization approaches require task-specific data for each user. To handle diversity across all household tasks and users, and nuances in user preferences across tasks, we propose to learn a task adaptation function independently, which can be used in tandem with any universal robot policy to customize robot behavior. We create Task Adaptation using Abstract Concepts (TAACo) framework. TAACo can learn to predict the user's preferred manner of assistance with any given task, by mediating reasoning through a representation composed of abstract concepts built based on user feedback. TAACo can generalize to an open set of household tasks from small amount of user feedback and explain its inferences through intuitive concepts. We evaluate our model on a dataset we collected of 5 people's preferences, and show that TAACo outperforms GPT-4 by 16% and a rule-based system by 54%, on prediction accuracy, with 40 samples of user feedback.
Authors: Vahid Sadiri Javadi, Johanne R. Trippas, Yash Kumar Lal, Lucie Flek
Abstract: Narratives are widely recognized as a powerful tool for structuring information and facilitating comprehension of complex ideas in various domains such as science communication. This paper investigates whether incorporating narrative elements can assist Large Language Models (LLMs) in solving complex problems more effectively. We propose a novel approach, Story of Thought (SoT), integrating narrative structures into prompting techniques for problem-solving. This approach involves constructing narratives around problem statements and creating a framework to identify and organize relevant information. Our experiments show that using various LLMs with SoT consistently surpasses using them with other techniques on physics, chemistry, math, and biology questions in both the GPQA and JEEBench datasets. The narrative-based information curation process in SoT enhances problem comprehension by contextualizing critical in-domain information and highlighting causal relationships within the problem space.
Authors: Weikai Li, Ding Wang, Zijian Ding, Atefeh Sohrabizadeh, Zongyue Qin, Jason Cong, Yizhou Sun
Abstract: High-level synthesis (HLS) is a widely used tool in designing Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). HLS enables FPGA design with software programming languages by compiling the source code into an FPGA circuit. The source code includes a program (called ``kernel'') and several pragmas that instruct hardware synthesis, such as parallelization, pipeline, etc. While it is relatively easy for software developers to design the program, it heavily relies on hardware knowledge to design the pragmas, posing a big challenge for software developers. Recently, different machine learning algorithms, such as GNNs, have been proposed to automate the pragma design via performance prediction. However, when applying the trained model on new kernels, the significant domain shift often leads to unsatisfactory performance. We propose a more domain-generalizable model structure: a two-level hierarchical Mixture of Experts (MoE), that can be flexibly adapted to any GNN model. Different expert networks can learn to deal with different regions in the representation space, and they can utilize similar patterns between the old kernels and new kernels. In the low-level MoE, we apply MoE on three natural granularities of a program: node, basic block, and graph. The high-level MoE learns to aggregate the three granularities for the final decision. To stably train the hierarchical MoE, we further propose a two-stage training method. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of the hierarchical MoE.
Authors: Menna Fateen, Tsunenori Mine
Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for scalable educational applications, but their use in dialog-based tutoring systems remains challenging due to the need for effective pedagogical strategies and the high costs associated with expert-curated datasets. Our study explores the use of smaller, more affordable LLMs for one-on-one tutoring in the context of solving reading comprehension problems. We developed a synthetic tutoring dialog dataset, evaluated by human teachers, and fine-tuned a smaller LLM using this dataset. Furthermore, we conducted an interactive experiment comparing the performance of the fine-tuned model with a larger model in real-world tutoring scenarios. Our results show that the fine-tuned model performs on par with the larger model but at a lower cost, demonstrating a viable, cost-effective approach for implementing LLM-based tutoring systems in educational settings.
Authors: Malek Aburub, Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez, Tatsuya Kamijo, Masashi Hamaya
Abstract: Robots hold great promise for performing repetitive or hazardous tasks, but achieving human-like dexterity, especially in contact-rich and dynamic environments, remains challenging. Rigid robots, which rely on position or velocity control, often struggle with maintaining stable contact and applying consistent force in force-intensive tasks. Learning from Demonstration has emerged as a solution, but tasks requiring intricate maneuvers, such as powder grinding, present unique difficulties. This paper introduces Diffusion Policies For Compliant Manipulation (DIPCOM), a novel diffusion-based framework designed for compliant control tasks. By leveraging generative diffusion models, we develop a policy that predicts Cartesian end-effector poses and adjusts arm stiffness to maintain the necessary force. Our approach enhances force control through multimodal distribution modeling, improves the integration of diffusion policies in compliance control, and extends our previous work by demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world tasks. We present a detailed comparison between our framework and existing methods, highlighting the advantages and best practices for deploying diffusion-based compliance control.
Authors: Eric Cai, Octavian Donca, Ben Eisner, David Held
Abstract: The task of "relative placement" is to predict the placement of one object in relation to another, e.g. placing a mug onto a mug rack. Through explicit object-centric geometric reasoning, recent methods for relative placement have made tremendous progress towards data-efficient learning for robot manipulation while generalizing to unseen task variations. However, they have yet to represent deformable transformations, despite the ubiquity of non-rigid bodies in real world settings. As a first step towards bridging this gap, we propose ``cross-displacement" - an extension of the principles of relative placement to geometric relationships between deformable objects - and present a novel vision-based method to learn cross-displacement through dense diffusion. To this end, we demonstrate our method's ability to generalize to unseen object instances, out-of-distribution scene configurations, and multimodal goals on multiple highly deformable tasks (both in simulation and in the real world) beyond the scope of prior works. Supplementary information and videos can be found at our $\href{https://sites.google.com/view/tax3d-corl-2024}{\text{website}}$.
Authors: Yu Fu, Zefan Cai, Abedelkadir Asi, Wayne Xiong, Yue Dong, Wen Xiao
Abstract: Key-Value (KV) caching is a common technique to enhance the computational efficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs), but its memory overhead grows rapidly with input length. Prior work has shown that not all tokens are equally important for text generation, proposing layer-level KV cache compression to selectively retain key information. Recognizing the distinct roles of attention heads in generation, we propose HeadKV, a head-level KV cache compression method, and HeadKV-R2, which leverages a novel contextual reasoning ability estimation for compression. Our approach operates at the level of individual heads, estimating their importance for contextual QA tasks that require both retrieval and reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks (LongBench, LooGLE), model architectures (e.g., Llama-3-8B-Instruct, Mistral-7B-Instruct), and long-context abilities tests demonstrate that our head-level KV cache compression significantly outperforms strong baselines, particularly in low-resource settings (KV size = 64 & 128). Notably, our method retains just 1.5% of the KV cache while achieving 97% of the performance of the full KV cache on the contextual question answering benchmark.
Authors: Tuowei Wang, Ruwen Fan, Minxing Huang, Zixu Hao, Kun Li, Ting Cao, Youyou Lu, Yaoxue Zhang, Ju Ren
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various domains, yet deploying them on mobile devices remains an arduous challenge due to their extensive computational and memory demands. While lightweight LLMs have been developed to fit mobile environments, they suffer from degraded model accuracy. In contrast, sparsity-based techniques minimize DRAM usage by selectively transferring only relevant neurons to DRAM while retaining the full model in external storage, such as flash. However, such approaches are critically limited by numerous I/O operations, particularly on smartphones with severe IOPS constraints. In this paper, we propose Ripple, a novel approach that accelerates LLM inference on smartphones by optimizing neuron placement in flash memory. Ripple leverages the concept of Neuron Co-Activation, where neurons frequently activated together are linked to facilitate continuous read access and optimize data transfer efficiency. Our approach incorporates a two-stage solution: an offline stage that reorganizes neuron placement based on co-activation patterns, and an online stage that employs tailored data access and caching strategies to align well with hardware characteristics. Evaluations conducted on a variety of smartphones and LLMs demonstrate that Ripple achieves up to 5.93x improvements in I/O latency compared to the state-of-the-art. As the first solution to optimize storage placement under sparsity, Ripple explores a new optimization space at the intersection of sparsity-driven algorithm and storage-level system co-design in LLM inference.
Authors: Eoin Farrell, Yeu-Tong Lau, Arthur Conmy
Abstract: We investigate whether sparse autoencoders (SAEs) can be used to remove knowledge from language models. We use the biology subset of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proxy dataset and test on the gemma-2b-it and gemma-2-2b-it language models. We demonstrate that individual interpretable biology-related SAE features can be used to unlearn biology-related knowledge with minimal side-effects. Our results suggest that negative scaling of feature activations is necessary and that zero ablating features is ineffective. We find that intervening using multiple SAE features simultaneously can unlearn multiple different topics, but with similar or larger unwanted side-effects than the existing Representation Misdirection for Unlearning technique. Current SAE quality or intervention techniques would need to improve to make SAE-based unlearning comparable to the existing fine-tuning based techniques.
Authors: Haoyu Bian, Bin Guo, Sicong Liu, Yasan Ding, Shanshan Gao, Zhiwen Yu
Abstract: Ubiquitous on-device heart rate sensing is vital for high-stress individuals and chronic patients. Non-contact sensing, compared to contact-based tools, allows for natural user monitoring, potentially enabling more accurate and holistic data collection. However, in open and uncontrolled mobile environments, user movement and lighting introduce. Existing methods, such as curve-based or short-range deep learning recognition based on adjacent frames, strike the optimal balance between real-time performance and accuracy, especially under limited device resources. In this paper, we present UbiHR, a ubiquitous device-based heart rate sensing system. Key to UbiHR is a real-time long-range spatio-temporal model enabling noise-independent heart rate recognition and display on commodity mobile devices, along with a set of mechanisms for prompt and energy-efficient sampling and preprocessing. Diverse experiments and user studies involving four devices, four tasks, and 80 participants demonstrate UbiHR's superior performance, enhancing accuracy by up to 74.2\% and reducing latency by 51.2\%.
Authors: Liang Qiu, Liyue Shen, Lianli Liu, Junyan Liu, Yizheng Chen, Lei Xing
Abstract: During and after a course of therapy, imaging is routinely used to monitor the disease progression and assess the treatment responses. Despite of its significance, reliably capturing and predicting the spatial-temporal anatomic changes from a sequence of patient-specific image series presents a considerable challenge. Thus, the development of a computational framework becomes highly desirable for a multitude of practical applications. In this context, we propose a strategy of Spatial-Temporal Neural Representation learning with Prior embedding (ST-NeRP) for patient-specific imaging study. Our strategy involves leveraging an Implicit Neural Representation (INR) network to encode the image at the reference time point into a prior embedding. Subsequently, a spatial-temporally continuous deformation function is learned through another INR network. This network is trained using the whole patient-specific image sequence, enabling the prediction of deformation fields at various target time points. The efficacy of the ST-NeRP model is demonstrated through its application to diverse sequential image series, including 4D CT and longitudinal CT datasets within thoracic and abdominal imaging. The proposed ST-NeRP model exhibits substantial potential in enabling the monitoring of anatomical changes within a patient throughout the therapeutic journey.
Authors: Zhiyuan Pei, Jianqi Yan, Jin Yan, Bailing Yang, Ziyuan Li, Lin Zhang, Xin Liu, Yang Zhang
Abstract: Stock price fluctuations are influenced by a variety of factors, including macroeconomic conditions, government policies, and market sentiment, which together make price movements complex and difficult to predict. Despite many studies aimed at enhancing stock price prediction models, challenges such as data noise, model overfitting, and lack of interpretability are still encountered. To address these issues and improve prediction accuracy, this paper proposes a novel method, named Sequence-based Multiscale Fusion Regression Convolutional Neural Network (SMSFR-CNN), for predicting stock price movements in the China A-share market. By utilizing CNN to learn sequential features and combining them with image features, we improve the accuracy of stock trend prediction on the A-share market stock dataset. This approach reduces the search space for image features, stabilizes, and accelerates the training process. Extensive comparative experiments on 4,454 A-share stocks show that the proposed model achieves 61.15% for positive predictive value and 63.37% for negative predictive value of the stock price trend over the next 5 days, resulting in a total profit of 165.09%.
Authors: Emiliano Penaloza, Olivier Gouvert, Haolun Wu, Laurent Charlin
Abstract: Traditional recommender systems rely on high-dimensional (latent) embeddings for modeling user-item interactions, often resulting in opaque representations that lack interpretability. Moreover, these systems offer limited control to users over their recommendations. Inspired by recent work, we introduce TExtuAl Representations for Scrutable recommendations (TEARS) to address these challenges. Instead of representing a user's interests through a latent embedding, TEARS encodes them in natural text, providing transparency and allowing users to edit them. To do so, TEARS uses a modern LLM to generate user summaries based on user preferences. We find the summaries capture user preferences uniquely. Using these summaries, we take a hybrid approach where we use an optimal transport procedure to align the summaries' representation with the learned representation of a standard VAE for collaborative filtering. We find this approach can surpass the performance of three popular VAE models while providing user-controllable recommendations. We also analyze the controllability of TEARS through three simulated user tasks to evaluate the effectiveness of a user editing its summary.
Authors: Jamie Milton Freestone
Abstract: The word semantics, in robotics and AI, has no canonical definition. It usually serves to denote additional data provided to autonomous agents to aid HRI. Most researchers seem, implicitly, to understand that such data cannot simply be extracted from environmental data. I try to make explicit why this is so and argue that so-called semantics are best understood as data comprised of conventions of human behaviour. This includes labels, most obviously, but also places, ontologies, and affordances. Object affordances are especially problematic because they require not only semantics that are not in the environmental data (conventions of object use) but also an understanding of physics and object combinations that would, if achieved, constitute artificial superintelligence.
Authors: Zemin Huang, Zhengyang Geng, Weijian Luo, Guo-jun Qi
Abstract: In the realm of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC), flow-matching models have emerged as a powerhouse, achieving success due to their robust theoretical underpinnings and solid ability for large-scale generative modeling. These models have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance, but their brilliance comes at a cost. The process of sampling from these models is notoriously demanding on computational resources, as it necessitates the use of multi-step numerical ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Against this backdrop, this paper presents a novel solution with theoretical guarantees in the form of Flow Generator Matching (FGM), an innovative approach designed to accelerate the sampling of flow-matching models into a one-step generation, while maintaining the original performance. On the CIFAR10 unconditional generation benchmark, our one-step FGM model achieves a new record Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) score of 3.08 among few-step flow-matching-based models, outperforming original 50-step flow-matching models. Furthermore, we use the FGM to distill the Stable Diffusion 3, a leading text-to-image flow-matching model based on the MM-DiT architecture. The resulting MM-DiT-FGM one-step text-to-image model demonstrates outstanding industry-level performance. When evaluated on the GenEval benchmark, MM-DiT-FGM has delivered remarkable generating qualities, rivaling other multi-step models in light of the efficiency of a single generation step.
Authors: Haocheng Xi, Han Cai, Ligeng Zhu, Yao Lu, Kurt Keutzer, Jianfei Chen, Song Han
Abstract: FP8 training has emerged as a promising method for improving training efficiency. Existing frameworks accelerate training by applying FP8 computation to linear layers while leaving optimizer states and activations in higher precision, which fails to fully optimize memory usage. This paper introduces COAT (Compressing Optimizer States and Activations for FP8 Training), a novel FP8 training framework designed to significantly reduce memory footprint when training large models. COAT addresses current limitations through two key innovations: (1) Dynamic Range Expansion, which aligns optimizer state distributions more closely with the FP8 representation range, thereby reducing quantization error, and (2) Mixed-Granularity Activation Quantization, which optimizes activation memory using a combination of per-tensor and per-group quantization strategies. Experiments demonstrate that COAT effectively reduces end-to-end training memory footprint by 1.54x compared to BF16 while achieving nearly lossless performance across various tasks, such as Large Language Model pretraining and fine-tuning and Vision Language Model training. COAT also achieves a 1.43x end-to-end training speedup compared to BF16, performing on par with or surpassing TransformerEngine's speedup. COAT enables efficient full-parameter training of large models on fewer GPUs, and facilitates doubling the batch size in distributed training settings, providing a practical solution for scaling large-scale model training. The code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/COAT.
Authors: Wei Han, Pan Zhou, Soujanya Poria, Shuicheng Yan
Abstract: The limited context window of contemporary large language models (LLMs) remains a huge barrier to their broader application across various domains. While continual pre-training on long-context data is a straightforward and effective solution, it incurs substantial costs in terms of data acquisition and computational resources. To alleviate this issue, we propose SharedLLM, a novel approach grounded in the design philosophy of multi-grained context compression and query-aware information retrieval. SharedLLM is composed of two short-context LLMs such as LLaMA-2, termed upper model and lower model. The lower model functions as a compressor while the upper model acts as a decoder. The upper model receives compressed, multi-grained context information from the lower model and performs context-aware modeling on the running text. Information transfer between the compressor and decoder occurs only at the lowest layers to refrain from long forward paths in the lower model and redundant cross-attention modules in the upper model. Based on this architecture, we introduce a specialized tree-style data structure to efficiently encode, store and retrieve multi-grained contextual information for text chunks. This structure, combined with a search algorithm, enables rapid encoding and retrieval of relevant information from various levels of the tree based on the input query. This entire process, wherein the sender and receiver are derived from the same LLM layer, is referred to as self-injection.
Authors: Andreas Bergmeister, Kadek Hendrawan Palgunadi, Andrea Bosisio, Laura Ermert, Maria Koroni, Nathana\"el Perraudin, Simon Dirmeier, Men-Andrin Meier
Abstract: Accurate prediction and synthesis of seismic waveforms are crucial for seismic hazard assessment and earthquake-resistant infrastructure design. Existing prediction methods, such as Ground Motion Models and physics-based simulations, often fail to capture the full complexity of seismic wavefields, particularly at higher frequencies. This study introduces a novel, efficient, and scalable generative model for high-frequency seismic waveform generation. Our approach leverages a spectrogram representation of seismic waveform data, which is reduced to a lower-dimensional submanifold via an autoencoder. A state-of-the-art diffusion model is trained to generate this latent representation, conditioned on key input parameters: earthquake magnitude, recording distance, site conditions, and faulting type. The model generates waveforms with frequency content up to 50 Hz. Any scalar ground motion statistic, such as peak ground motion amplitudes and spectral accelerations, can be readily derived from the synthesized waveforms. We validate our model using commonly used seismological metrics, and performance metrics from image generation studies. Our results demonstrate that our openly available model can generate distributions of realistic high-frequency seismic waveforms across a wide range of input parameters, even in data-sparse regions. For the scalar ground motion statistics commonly used in seismic hazard and earthquake engineering studies, we show that the model accurately reproduces both the median trends of the real data and its variability. To evaluate and compare the growing number of this and similar 'Generative Waveform Models' (GWM), we argue that they should generally be openly available and that they should be included in community efforts for ground motion model evaluations.
Authors: Han Zhang, Yunjing Jiang, Mingming Li, Haowei Yuan, Wen-Yun Yang
Abstract: Embedding retrieval aims to learn a shared semantic representation space for both queries and items, thus enabling efficient and effective item retrieval using approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) algorithms. In current industrial practice, retrieval systems typically retrieve a fixed number of items for different queries, which actually leads to insufficient retrieval (low recall) for head queries and irrelevant retrieval (low precision) for tail queries. Mostly due to the trend of frequentist approach to loss function designs, till now there is no satisfactory solution to holistically address this challenge in the industry. In this paper, we move away from the frequentist approach, and take a novel \textbf{p}robabilistic approach to \textbf{e}mbedding \textbf{b}ased \textbf{r}etrieval (namely \textbf{pEBR}) by learning the item distribution for different queries, which enables a dynamic cosine similarity threshold calculated by the probabilistic cumulative distribution function (CDF) value. The experimental results show that our approach improves both the retrieval precision and recall significantly. Ablation studies also illustrate how the probabilistic approach is able to capture the differences between head and tail queries.
Authors: Alan Oursland
Abstract: This paper introduces a theoretical framework that connects neural network linear layers with the Mahalanobis distance, offering a new perspective on neural network interpretability. While previous studies have explored activation functions primarily for performance optimization, our work interprets these functions through statistical distance measures, a less explored area in neural network research. By establishing this connection, we provide a foundation for developing more interpretable neural network models, which is crucial for applications requiring transparency. Although this work is theoretical and does not include empirical data, the proposed distance-based interpretation has the potential to enhance model robustness, improve generalization, and provide more intuitive explanations of neural network decisions.
Authors: Marvin Alberts, Gianmarco Gabrieli, Irina Espejo Morales
Abstract: Integrating text and numbers effectively is a crucial step towards enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) capabilities in assisting in scientific tasks. While most current approaches rely on discrete tokenization of numbers, for instance, conversion to scientific notation or base 10-decomposition, a recent approach proposed a continuous numerical encoding as an inductive bias. In this paper, we build upon this approach by introducing more expressive numerical embeddings. Our method addresses key shortcomings, including the elimination of numerical artefacts and the ability to handle a wide range of magnitudes without clipping. Our work presents two key contributions. First, we employ an MLP to assign distinct directions in the embedding space to different numbers. Our second contribution is the introduction of a routing layer that differentiates between numerical and text embeddings. We hypothesise that this combined approach enables the model to distinguish between text and number distributions while maintaining its capacity for arithmetic operations. Using only a 45 M parameter encoder-decoder architecture our method achieves a $R^2$=0.9988 over a wide range of magnitude ($10^{-3},10^{8}$). In addition, we empirically observe a reduction of the numerical artefacts and biases observed compared to the baselines.
Authors: Houming Wu, Ling Chen, Wenjie Yu
Abstract: With the increasing scale of models, the need for efficient distributed training has become increasingly urgent. Recently, many synchronous pipeline parallelism approaches have been proposed to improve training throughput. However, these approaches still suffer from two major issues, i.e., pipeline bubbles caused by periodic flushing and extra communication due to the increasing number of pipeline stages. To this end, we propose BitPipe, a bidirectional interleaved pipeline parallelism for accelerating large models training. Specifically, a hybrid scheme of fusing interleaved pipelines with bidirectional pipelines is proposed to reduce the computational time of each single micro-batch and multiply the number of devices executing simultaneously. A V-shaped schedule with eager gradient synchronization is introduced to reduce and overlap the communication between devices. Experiments conducted on up to 32 GPUs show that BitPipe improves the training throughput of GPT-style and BERT-style models by 1.05x-1.28x compared to the state-of-the-art synchronous approaches. The code of our implementation is available at https://github.com/wuhouming/BitPipe.
Authors: Jemma Daniel, Ruan de Kock, Louay Ben Nessir, Sasha Abramowitz, Omayma Mahjoub, Wiem Khlifi, Claude Formanek, Arnu Pretorius
Abstract: The Transformer model has demonstrated success across a wide range of domains, including in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) where the Multi-Agent Transformer (MAT) has emerged as a leading algorithm in the field. The Transformer model has demonstrated success across a wide range of domains, including in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) where the Multi-Agent Transformer (MAT) has emerged as a leading algorithm in the field. However, a significant drawback of Transformer models is their quadratic computational complexity relative to input size, making them computationally expensive when scaling to larger inputs. This limitation restricts MAT's scalability in environments with many agents. Recently, State-Space Models (SSMs) have gained attention due to their computational efficiency, but their application in MARL remains unexplored. In this work, we investigate the use of Mamba, a recent SSM, in MARL and assess whether it can match the performance of MAT while providing significant improvements in efficiency. We introduce a modified version of MAT that incorporates standard and bi-directional Mamba blocks, as well as a novel "cross-attention" Mamba block. Extensive testing shows that our Multi-Agent Mamba (MAM) matches the performance of MAT across multiple standard multi-agent environments, while offering superior scalability to larger agent scenarios. This is significant for the MARL community, because it indicates that SSMs could replace Transformers without compromising performance, whilst also supporting more effective scaling to higher numbers of agents. Our project page is available at https://sites.google.com/view/multi-agent-mamba .
Authors: Liam Barkley, Brink van der Merwe
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful computational models trained on extensive corpora of human-readable text, enabling them to perform general-purpose language understanding and generation. LLMs have garnered significant attention in both industry and academia due to their exceptional performance across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Despite these successes, LLMs often produce inaccuracies, commonly referred to as hallucinations. Prompt engineering, the process of designing and formulating instructions for LLMs to perform specific tasks, has emerged as a key approach to mitigating hallucinations. This paper provides a comprehensive empirical evaluation of different prompting strategies and frameworks aimed at reducing hallucinations in LLMs. Various prompting techniques are applied to a broad set of benchmark datasets to assess the accuracy and hallucination rate of each method. Additionally, the paper investigates the influence of tool-calling agents (LLMs augmented with external tools to enhance their capabilities beyond language generation) on hallucination rates in the same benchmarks. The findings demonstrate that the optimal prompting technique depends on the type of problem, and that simpler techniques often outperform more complex methods in reducing hallucinations. Furthermore, it is shown that LLM agents can exhibit significantly higher hallucination rates due to the added complexity of external tool usage.
Authors: Qiufan Lin, Hengxin Ruan, Dominique Fouchez, Shupei Chen, Rui Li, Paulo Montero-Camacho, Nicola R. Napolitano, Yuan-Sen Ting, Wei Zhang
Abstract: Obtaining well-calibrated photometric redshift probability densities for galaxies without a spectroscopic measurement remains a challenge. Deep learning discriminative models, typically fed with multi-band galaxy images, can produce outputs that mimic probability densities and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy. However, such models may be affected by miscalibration that would result in discrepancies between the model outputs and the actual distributions of true redshifts. Our work develops a novel method called the Contrastive Learning and Adaptive KNN for Photometric Redshift (CLAP) that resolves this issue. It leverages supervised contrastive learning (SCL) and k-nearest neighbours (KNN) to construct and calibrate raw probability density estimates, and implements a refitting procedure to resume end-to-end discriminative models ready to produce final estimates for large-scale imaging data. The harmonic mean is adopted to combine an ensemble of estimates from multiple realisations for improving accuracy. Our experiments demonstrate that CLAP takes advantage of both deep learning and KNN, outperforming benchmark methods on the calibration of probability density estimates and retaining high accuracy and computational efficiency. With reference to CLAP, we point out that miscalibration is particularly sensitive to the method-induced excessive correlations among data instances in addition to the unaccounted-for epistemic uncertainties. Reducing the uncertainties may not guarantee the removal of miscalibration due to the presence of such excessive correlations, yet this is a problem for conventional deep learning methods rather than CLAP. These discussions underscore the robustness of CLAP for obtaining photometric redshift probability densities required by astrophysical and cosmological applications. This is the first paper in our series on CLAP.
Authors: Haowei Yang, Zhan Cheng, Zhaoyang Zhang, Yuanshuai Luo, Shuaishuai Huang, Ao Xiang
Abstract: As the complexity and dynamism of financial markets continue to grow, traditional financial risk prediction methods increasingly struggle to handle large datasets and intricate behavior patterns. This paper explores the feasibility and effectiveness of using deep learning and big data algorithms for financial risk behavior prediction. First, the application and advantages of deep learning and big data algorithms in the financial field are analyzed. Then, a deep learning-based big data risk prediction framework is designed and experimentally validated on actual financial datasets. The experimental results show that this method significantly improves the accuracy of financial risk behavior prediction and provides valuable support for risk management in financial institutions. Challenges in the application of deep learning are also discussed, along with potential directions for future research.
Authors: Gene Yu, Ce Guo, Wayne Luk
Abstract: Agent-Based Model (ABM) validation is crucial as it helps ensuring the reliability of simulations, and causal discovery has become a powerful tool in this context. However, current causal discovery methods often face accuracy and robustness challenges when applied to complex and noisy time series data, which is typical in ABM scenarios. This study addresses these issues by proposing a Robust Cross-Validation (RCV) approach to enhance causal structure learning for ABM validation. We develop RCV-VarLiNGAM and RCV-PCMCI, novel extensions of two prominent causal discovery algorithms. These aim to reduce the impact of noise better and give more reliable causal relation results, even with high-dimensional, time-dependent data. The proposed approach is then integrated into an enhanced ABM validation framework, which is designed to handle diverse data and model structures. The approach is evaluated using synthetic datasets and a complex simulated fMRI dataset. The results demonstrate greater reliability in causal structure identification. The study examines how various characteristics of datasets affect the performance of established causal discovery methods. These characteristics include linearity, noise distribution, stationarity, and causal structure density. This analysis is then extended to the RCV method to see how it compares in these different situations. This examination helps confirm whether the results are consistent with existing literature and also reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the novel approaches. By tackling key methodological challenges, the study aims to enhance ABM validation with a more resilient valuation framework presented. These improvements increase the reliability of model-driven decision making processes in complex systems analysis.
Authors: Aviral Dhingra
Abstract: Gradient descent is a widely used iterative algorithm for finding local minima in multivariate functions. However, the final iterations often either overshoot the minima or make minimal progress, making it challenging to determine an optimal stopping point. This study introduces a new efficiency metric, Ek, designed to quantify the effectiveness of each iteration. The proposed metric accounts for both the relative change in error and the stability of the loss function across iterations. This measure is particularly valuable in resource-constrained environments, where costs are closely tied to training time. Experimental validation across multiple datasets and models demonstrates that Ek provides valuable insights into the convergence behavior of gradient descent, complementing traditional performance metrics. The index has the potential to guide more informed decisions in the selection and tuning of optimization algorithms in machine learning applications and be used to compare the "effectiveness" of models relative to each other.
Authors: Yirui Chen, Qinyu Xiao, Jia Yi, Jing Chen, Mengyang Wang
Abstract: This paper explores the application of prompt engineering to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) in the domain of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). We propose TCM-Prompt, a framework that integrates various pre-trained language models (PLMs), templates, tokenization, and verbalization methods, allowing researchers to easily construct and fine-tune models for specific TCM-related tasks. We conducted experiments on disease classification, syndrome identification, herbal medicine recommendation, and general NLP tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of our approach compared to baseline methods. Our findings suggest that prompt engineering is a promising technique for improving the performance of LLMs in specialized domains like TCM, with potential applications in digitalization, modernization, and personalized medicine.
Authors: Zixuan Gong, Guangyin Bao, Qi Zhang, Zhongwei Wan, Duoqian Miao, Shoujin Wang, Lei Zhu, Changwei Wang, Rongtao Xu, Liang Hu, Ke Liu, Yu Zhang
Abstract: Reconstruction of static visual stimuli from non-invasion brain activity fMRI achieves great success, owning to advanced deep learning models such as CLIP and Stable Diffusion. However, the research on fMRI-to-video reconstruction remains limited since decoding the spatiotemporal perception of continuous visual experiences is formidably challenging. We contend that the key to addressing these challenges lies in accurately decoding both high-level semantics and low-level perception flows, as perceived by the brain in response to video stimuli. To the end, we propose NeuroClips, an innovative framework to decode high-fidelity and smooth video from fMRI. NeuroClips utilizes a semantics reconstructor to reconstruct video keyframes, guiding semantic accuracy and consistency, and employs a perception reconstructor to capture low-level perceptual details, ensuring video smoothness. During inference, it adopts a pre-trained T2V diffusion model injected with both keyframes and low-level perception flows for video reconstruction. Evaluated on a publicly available fMRI-video dataset, NeuroClips achieves smooth high-fidelity video reconstruction of up to 6s at 8FPS, gaining significant improvements over state-of-the-art models in various metrics, e.g., a 128\% improvement in SSIM and an 81\% improvement in spatiotemporal metrics. Our project is available at https://github.com/gongzix/NeuroClips}{https://github.com/gongzix/NeuroClips.
URLs: https://github.com/gongzix/NeuroClips, https://github.com/gongzix/NeuroClips.
Authors: Saleem Abdul Fattah Ahmed Al Dajani, David E. Keyes
Abstract: We present a novel approach for accelerating AI performance by leveraging Anderson extrapolation, a vector-to-vector mapping technique based on a window of historical iterations. By identifying the crossover point where a mixing penalty is incurred, the method focuses on reducing iterations to convergence, with fewer more compute-intensive but generally cacheable iterations, balancing speed and memory usage with accuracy and algorithmic stability, respectively. We demonstrate significant improvements, in both training and inference, motivated by scalability and efficiency extensions to the realm of high-performance computing (HPC).
Authors: Yue Cheng, Jiajun Zhang, Weiwei Xing, Xiaoyu Guo, Xiaohui Gao
Abstract: Discovering the underlying Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) from time series observational data is highly challenging due to the dynamic nature and complex nonlinear interactions between variables. Existing methods often struggle with inefficiency and the handling of high-dimensional data. To address these research gap, we propose LOCAL, a highly efficient, easy-to-implement, and constraint-free method for recovering dynamic causal structures. LOCAL is the first attempt to formulate a quasi-maximum likelihood-based score function for learning the dynamic DAG equivalent to the ground truth. On this basis, we propose two adaptive modules for enhancing the algebraic characterization of acyclicity with new capabilities: Asymptotic Causal Mask Learning (ACML) and Dynamic Graph Parameter Learning (DGPL). ACML generates causal masks using learnable priority vectors and the Gumbel-Sigmoid function, ensuring the creation of DAGs while optimizing computational efficiency. DGPL transforms causal learning into decomposed matrix products, capturing the dynamic causal structure of high-dimensional data and enhancing interpretability. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that LOCAL significantly outperforms existing methods, and highlight LOCAL's potential as a robust and efficient method for dynamic causal discovery. Our code will be available soon.
Authors: Andr\'as Telcs, Marcell T. Kurbucz, Antal Jakov\'ac
Abstract: Temporally evolving systems are typically modeled by dynamic equations. A key challenge in accurate modeling is understanding the causal relationships between subsystems, as well as identifying the presence and influence of unobserved hidden drivers on the observed dynamics. This paper presents a unified method capable of identifying fundamental causal relationships between pairs of systems, whether deterministic or stochastic. Notably, the method also uncovers hidden common causes beyond the observed variables. By analyzing the degrees of freedom in the system, our approach provides a more comprehensive understanding of both causal influence and hidden confounders. This unified framework is validated through theoretical models and simulations, demonstrating its robustness and potential for broader application.
Authors: Ryan Park, Darren J. Hsu, C. Brian Roland, Maria Korshunova, Chen Tessler, Shie Mannor, Olivia Viessmann, Bruno Trentini
Abstract: Inverse folding models play an important role in structure-based design by predicting amino acid sequences that fold into desired reference structures. Models like ProteinMPNN, a message-passing encoder-decoder model, are trained to reliably produce new sequences from a reference structure. However, when applied to peptides, these models are prone to generating repetitive sequences that do not fold into the reference structure. To address this, we fine-tune ProteinMPNN to produce diverse and structurally consistent peptide sequences via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We derive two enhancements to DPO: online diversity regularization and domain-specific priors. Additionally, we develop a new understanding on improving diversity in decoder models. When conditioned on OpenFold generated structures, our fine-tuned models achieve state-of-the-art structural similarity scores, improving base ProteinMPNN by at least 8%. Compared to standard DPO, our regularized method achieves up to 20% higher sequence diversity with no loss in structural similarity score.
Authors: Nuthan Mummani, Simran Ketha, Venkatakrishnan Ramaswamy
Abstract: In the supervised classification setting, during inference, deep networks typically make multiple predictions. For a pair of such predictions (that are in the top-k predictions), two distinct possibilities might occur. On the one hand, each of the two predictions might be primarily driven by two distinct sets of entities in the input. On the other hand, it is possible that there is a single entity or set of entities that is driving the prediction for both the classes in question. This latter case, in effect, corresponds to the network making two separate guesses about the identity of a single entity type. Clearly, both the guesses cannot be true, i.e. both the labels cannot be present in the input. Current techniques in interpretability research do not readily disambiguate these two cases, since they typically consider input attributions for one class label at a time. Here, we present a framework and method to do so, leveraging modern segmentation and input attribution techniques. Notably, our framework also provides a simple counterfactual "proof" of each case, which can be verified for the input on the model (i.e. without running the method again). We demonstrate that the method performs well for a number of samples from the ImageNet validation set and on multiple models.
Authors: Zelin Zang, Yuhao Wang, Jinlin Wu, Hong Liu, Yue Shen, Stan. Z Li, Zhen Lei
Abstract: Dimensionality reduction (DR) plays a crucial role in various fields, including data engineering and visualization, by simplifying complex datasets while retaining essential information. However, the challenge of balancing DR accuracy and interpretability remains crucial, particularly for users dealing with high-dimensional data. Traditional DR methods often face a trade-off between precision and transparency, where optimizing for performance can lead to reduced interpretability, and vice versa. This limitation is especially prominent in real-world applications such as image, tabular, and text data analysis, where both accuracy and interpretability are critical. To address these challenges, this work introduces the MOE-based Hyperbolic Interpretable Deep Manifold Transformation (DMT-HI). The proposed approach combines hyperbolic embeddings, which effectively capture complex hierarchical structures, with Mixture of Experts (MOE) models, which dynamically allocate tasks based on input features. DMT-HI enhances DR accuracy by leveraging hyperbolic embeddings to represent the hierarchical nature of data, while also improving interpretability by explicitly linking input data, embedding outcomes, and key features through the MOE structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DMT-HI consistently achieves superior performance in both DR accuracy and model interpretability, making it a robust solution for complex data analysis. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/zangzelin/code_dmthi}.
Authors: Aleksandra Piekarzewicz, Tomasz Sroka, Aleksander Tym, Mateusz Modrzejewski
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce CloserMusicDB, a collection of full length studio quality tracks annotated by a team of human experts. We describe the selected qualities of our dataset, along with three example tasks possible to perform using this dataset: hook detection, contextual tagging and artist identification. We conduct baseline experiments and provide initial benchmarks for these tasks.
Authors: H. Sun, L. Zhao, Z. Wu, X. Gao, Y. Hu, M. Zuo, W. Zhang, J. Han, T. Liu, X. Hu
Abstract: The human brain has long inspired the pursuit of artificial intelligence (AI). Recently, neuroimaging studies provide compelling evidence of alignment between the computational representation of artificial neural networks (ANNs) and the neural responses of the human brain to stimuli, suggesting that ANNs may employ brain-like information processing strategies. While such alignment has been observed across sensory modalities--visual, auditory, and linguistic--much of the focus has been on the behaviors of artificial neurons (ANs) at the population level, leaving the functional organization of individual ANs that facilitates such brain-like processes largely unexplored. In this study, we bridge this gap by directly coupling sub-groups of artificial neurons with functional brain networks (FBNs), the foundational organizational structure of the human brain. Specifically, we extract representative patterns from temporal responses of ANs in large language models (LLMs), and use them as fixed regressors to construct voxel-wise encoding models to predict brain activity recorded by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This framework links the AN sub-groups to FBNs, enabling the delineation of brain-like functional organization within LLMs. Our findings reveal that LLMs (BERT and Llama 1-3) exhibit brain-like functional architecture, with sub-groups of artificial neurons mirroring the organizational patterns of well-established FBNs. Notably, the brain-like functional organization of LLMs evolves with the increased sophistication and capability, achieving an improved balance between the diversity of computational behaviors and the consistency of functional specializations. This research represents the first exploration of brain-like functional organization within LLMs, offering novel insights to inform the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) with human brain principles.
Authors: Huajian Liu, Wei Dong, Kunpeng Fan, Chao Wang, Yongzhuo Gao
Abstract: Analyzing and forecasting trajectories of agents like pedestrians plays a pivotal role for embodied intelligent applications. The inherent indeterminacy of human behavior and complex social interaction among a rich variety of agents make this task more challenging than common time-series forecasting. In this letter, we aim to explore a distinct formulation for multi-agent trajectory prediction framework. Specifically, we proposed a patching-based temporal feature extraction module and a graph-based social feature extraction module, enabling effective feature extraction and cross-scenario generalization. Moreover, we reassess the role of social interaction and present a novel method based on explicit modality modulation to integrate temporal and social features, thereby constructing an efficient single-stage inference pipeline. Results on public benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our model compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at: github.com/TIB-K330/pmm-net.
Authors: Yu Qiao, Lina Gong, Yu Zhao, Yongwei Wang, Mingqiang Wei
Abstract: Software defect prediction (SDP) aims to identify high-risk defect modules in software development, optimizing resource allocation. While previous studies show that dependency network metrics improve defect prediction, most methods focus on code-based dependency graphs, overlooking developer factors. Current metrics, based on handcrafted features like ego and global network metrics, fail to fully capture defect-related information. To address this, we propose DeMuVGN, a defect prediction model that learns multi-view software dependency via graph neural networks. We introduce a Multi-view Software Dependency Graph (MSDG) that integrates data, call, and developer dependencies. DeMuVGN also leverages the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) to address class imbalance and enhance defect module identification. In a case study of eight open-source projects across 20 versions, DeMuVGN demonstrates significant improvements: i) models based on multi-view graphs improve F1 scores by 11.1% to 12.1% over single-view models; ii) DeMuVGN improves F1 scores by 17.4% to 45.8% in within-project contexts and by 17.9% to 41.0% in cross-project contexts. Additionally, DeMuVGN excels in software evolution, showing more improvement in later-stage software versions. Its strong performance across different projects highlights its generalizability. We recommend future research focus on multi-view dependency graphs for defect prediction in both mature and newly developed projects.
Authors: Rajat Modi, Vibhav Vineet, Yogesh Singh Rawat
Abstract: This paper explores the impact of occlusions in video action detection. We facilitate this study by introducing five new benchmark datasets namely O-UCF and O-JHMDB consisting of synthetically controlled static/dynamic occlusions, OVIS-UCF and OVIS-JHMDB consisting of occlusions with realistic motions and Real-OUCF for occlusions in realistic-world scenarios. We formally confirm an intuitive expectation: existing models suffer a lot as occlusion severity is increased and exhibit different behaviours when occluders are static vs when they are moving. We discover several intriguing phenomenon emerging in neural nets: 1) transformers can naturally outperform CNN models which might have even used occlusion as a form of data augmentation during training 2) incorporating symbolic-components like capsules to such backbones allows them to bind to occluders never even seen during training and 3) Islands of agreement can emerge in realistic images/videos without instance-level supervision, distillation or contrastive-based objectives2(eg. video-textual training). Such emergent properties allow us to derive simple yet effective training recipes which lead to robust occlusion models inductively satisfying the first two stages of the binding mechanism (grouping/segregation). Models leveraging these recipes outperform existing video action-detectors under occlusion by 32.3% on O-UCF, 32.7% on O-JHMDB & 2.6% on Real-OUCF in terms of the vMAP metric. The code for this work has been released at https://github.com/rajatmodi62/OccludedActionBenchmark.
URLs: https://github.com/rajatmodi62/OccludedActionBenchmark.
Authors: Shentong Mo, Shengbang Tong
Abstract: In recent advancements in unsupervised visual representation learning, the Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) has emerged as a significant method for extracting visual features from unlabeled imagery through an innovative masking strategy. Despite its success, two primary limitations have been identified: the inefficacy of Exponential Moving Average (EMA) from I-JEPA in preventing entire collapse and the inadequacy of I-JEPA prediction in accurately learning the mean of patch representations. Addressing these challenges, this study introduces a novel framework, namely C-JEPA (Contrastive-JEPA), which integrates the Image-based Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture with the Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization (VICReg) strategy. This integration is designed to effectively learn the variance/covariance for preventing entire collapse and ensuring invariance in the mean of augmented views, thereby overcoming the identified limitations. Through empirical and theoretical evaluations, our work demonstrates that C-JEPA significantly enhances the stability and quality of visual representation learning. When pre-trained on the ImageNet-1K dataset, C-JEPA exhibits rapid and improved convergence in both linear probing and fine-tuning performance metrics.
Authors: Yuan Gao, Dokyun Lee, Gordon Burtch, Sina Fazelpour
Abstract: Recent studies suggest large language models (LLMs) can exhibit human-like reasoning, aligning with human behavior in economic experiments, surveys, and political discourse. This has led many to propose that LLMs can be used as surrogates for humans in social science research. However, LLMs differ fundamentally from humans, relying on probabilistic patterns, absent the embodied experiences or survival objectives that shape human cognition. We assess the reasoning depth of LLMs using the 11-20 money request game. Almost all advanced approaches fail to replicate human behavior distributions across many models, except in one case involving fine-tuning using a substantial amount of human behavior data. Causes of failure are diverse, relating to input language, roles, and safeguarding. These results caution against using LLMs to study human behaviors or as human surrogates.
Authors: Andrei Kozyrev, Gleb Solovev, Nikita Khramov, Anton Podkopaev
Abstract: We present CoqPilot, a VS Code extension designed to help automate writing of Coq proofs. The plugin collects the parts of proofs marked with the admit tactic in a Coq file, i.e., proof holes, and combines LLMs along with non-machine-learning methods to generate proof candidates for the holes. Then, CoqPilot checks if each proof candidate solves the given subgoal and, if successful, replaces the hole with it. The focus of CoqPilot is twofold. Firstly, we want to allow users to seamlessly combine multiple Coq generation approaches and provide a zero-setup experience for our tool. Secondly, we want to deliver a platform for LLM-based experiments on Coq proof generation. We developed a benchmarking system for Coq generation methods, available in the plugin, and conducted an experiment using it, showcasing the framework's possibilities. Demo of CoqPilot is available at: https://youtu.be/oB1Lx-So9Lo. Code at: https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/coqpilot
URLs: https://youtu.be/oB1Lx-So9Lo., https://github.com/JetBrains-Research/coqpilot
Authors: Hongliang He, Wenlin Yao, Kaixin Ma, Wenhao Yu, Hongming Zhang, Tianqing Fang, Zhenzhong Lan, Dong Yu
Abstract: The rapid development of large language and multimodal models has sparked significant interest in using proprietary models, such as GPT-4o, to develop autonomous agents capable of handling real-world scenarios like web navigation. Although recent open-source efforts have tried to equip agents with the ability to explore environments and continuously improve over time, they are building text-only agents in synthetic environments where the reward signals are clearly defined. Such agents struggle to generalize to realistic settings that require multimodal perception abilities and lack ground-truth signals. In this paper, we introduce an open-source framework designed to facilitate the development of multimodal web agent that can autonomously conduct real-world exploration and improve itself. We first train the base model with imitation learning to gain the basic abilities. We then let the agent explore the open web and collect feedback on its trajectories. After that, it further improves its policy by learning from well-performing trajectories judged by another general-purpose model. This exploration-feedback-optimization cycle can continue for several iterations. Experimental results show that our web agent successfully improves itself after each iteration, demonstrating strong performance across multiple test sets.
Authors: Nicol\'as Nieto, Simon B. Eickhoff, Christian Jung, Martin Reuter, Kersten Diers, Malte Kelm, Artur Lichtenberg, Federico Raimondo, Kaustubh R. Patil
Abstract: Machine learning (ML) models benefit from large datasets. Collecting data in biomedical domains is costly and challenging, hence, combining datasets has become a common practice. However, datasets obtained under different conditions could present undesired site-specific variability. Data harmonization methods aim to remove site-specific variance while retaining biologically relevant information. This study evaluates the effectiveness of popularly used ComBat-based methods for harmonizing data in scenarios where the class balance is not equal across sites. We find that these methods struggle with data leakage issues. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel approach PrettYharmonize, designed to harmonize data by pretending the target labels. We validate our approach using controlled datasets designed to benchmark the utility of harmonization. Finally, using real-world MRI and clinical data, we compare leakage-prone methods with PrettYharmonize and show that it achieves comparable performance while avoiding data leakage, particularly in site-target-dependence scenarios.
Authors: Vivek Singh, Shikha Chaganti, Matthias Siebert, Soumya Rajesh, Andrei Puiu, Raj Gopalan, Jamie Gramz, Dorin Comaniciu, Ali Kamen
Abstract: Early screening for cancer has proven to improve the survival rate and spare patients from intensive and costly treatments due to late diagnosis. Cancer screening in the healthy population involves an initial risk stratification step to determine the screening method and frequency, primarily to optimize resource allocation by targeting screening towards individuals who draw most benefit. For most screening programs, age and clinical risk factors such as family history are part of the initial risk stratification algorithm. In this paper, we focus on developing a blood marker-based risk stratification approach, which could be used to identify patients with elevated cancer risk to be encouraged for taking a diagnostic test or participate in a screening program. We demonstrate that the combination of simple, widely available blood tests, such as complete blood count and complete metabolic panel, could potentially be used to identify patients at risk for colorectal, liver, and lung cancers with areas under the ROC curve of 0.76, 0.85, 0.78, respectively. Furthermore, we hypothesize that such an approach could not only be used as pre-screening risk assessment for individuals but also as population health management tool, for example to better interrogate the cancer risk in certain sub-populations.
Authors: Clemencia Siro, Yifei Yuan, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Maarten de Rijke
Abstract: Generating diverse and effective clarifying questions is crucial for improving query understanding and retrieval performance in open-domain conversational search (CS) systems. We propose AGENT-CQ (Automatic GENeration, and evaluaTion of Clarifying Questions), an end-to-end LLM-based framework addressing the challenges of scalability and adaptability faced by existing methods that rely on manual curation or template-based approaches. AGENT-CQ consists of two stages: a generation stage employing LLM prompting strategies to generate clarifying questions, and an evaluation stage (CrowdLLM) that simulates human crowdsourcing judgments using multiple LLM instances to assess generated questions and answers based on comprehensive quality metrics. Extensive experiments on the ClariQ dataset demonstrate CrowdLLM's effectiveness in evaluating question and answer quality. Human evaluation and CrowdLLM show that the AGENT-CQ - generation stage, consistently outperforms baselines in various aspects of question and answer quality. In retrieval-based evaluation, LLM-generated questions significantly enhance retrieval effectiveness for both BM25 and cross-encoder models compared to human-generated questions.
Authors: Georgios Papagiannis, Edward Johns
Abstract: Data collection in imitation learning often requires significant, laborious human supervision, such as numerous demonstrations, and/or frequent environment resets for methods that incorporate reinforcement learning. In this work, we propose an alternative approach, MILES: a fully autonomous, self-supervised data collection paradigm, and we show that this enables efficient policy learning from just a single demonstration and a single environment reset. MILES autonomously learns a policy for returning to and then following the single demonstration, whilst being self-guided during data collection, eliminating the need for additional human interventions. We evaluated MILES across several real-world tasks, including tasks that require precise contact-rich manipulation such as locking a lock with a key. We found that, under the constraints of a single demonstration and no repeated environment resetting, MILES significantly outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives like imitation learning methods that leverage reinforcement learning. Videos of our experiments and code can be found on our webpage: www.robot-learning.uk/miles.
Authors: Yifei Zhang, Hao Zhu, Aiwei Liu, Han Yu, Piotr Koniusz, Irwin King
Abstract: Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a crucial technique for adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks. However, the enormous size of LLMs poses significant challenges in terms of computational complexity and resource requirements. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a promising solution. However, there exists a gap between the practical performance of low-rank adaptations and its theoretical optimum. In this work, we propose eXtreme Gradient Boosting LoRA (XGBLoRA), a novel framework that bridges this gap by leveraging the power of ensemble learning. Inspired by gradient boosting, XGBLoRA iteratively learns and merges a sequence of LoRA adaptations to refine model predictions. It achieves better performance than the standard LoRA, while enjoying the computational efficiency of rank-1 adaptations. We provide theoretical analysis to show the convergence and optimality of our approach, and conduct extensive experiments on a range of natural language processing tasks. The results demonstrate that XGBLoRA consistently outperforms standard LoRA and achieves performance comparable to full fine-tuning with significantly fewer trainable parameters. This work advances parameter-efficient fine-tuning for LLMs, and offers a promising solution for adapting LLMs to downstream tasks while optimizing performance and efficiency.
Authors: Kaixian Qu, Jie Tan, Tingnan Zhang, Fei Xia, Cesar Cadena, Marco Hutter
Abstract: Navigating efficiently to an object in an unexplored environment is a critical skill for general-purpose intelligent robots. Recent approaches to this object goal navigation problem have embraced a modular strategy, integrating classical exploration algorithms-notably frontier exploration-with a learned semantic mapping/exploration module. This paper introduces a novel informative path planning and 3D object probability mapping approach. The mapping module computes the probability of the object of interest through semantic segmentation and a Bayes filter. Additionally, it stores probabilities for common objects, which semantically guides the exploration based on common sense priors from a large language model. The planner terminates when the current viewpoint captures enough voxels identified with high confidence as the object of interest. Although our planner follows a zero-shot approach, it achieves state-of-the-art performance as measured by the Success weighted by Path Length (SPL) and Soft SPL in the Habitat ObjectNav Challenge 2023, outperforming other works by more than 20%. Furthermore, we validate its effectiveness on real robots. Project webpage: https://ippon-paper.github.io/
Authors: Biman Barua, M. Shamim Kaiser
Abstract: This paper investigates the inclusion of microservices architecture in the development of scalable and reliable airline reservation systems. Most of the traditional reservation systems are very rigid and centralized which makes them prone to bottlenecks and a single point of failure. As such, systems do not meet the requirements of modern airlines which are dynamic. Microservices offer better resiliency and scalability because the services do not depend on one another and can be deployed independently. The approach is grounded on the Circuit Breaker Pattern to maintain fault tolerance while consuming foreign resources such as flight APIs and payment systems. This avoided the failure propagation to the systems by 60% enabling the systems to function under external failures. Traffic rerouting also bolstered this with a guarantee of above 99.95% uptime in systems where high availability was demanded. To address this, load balancing was used, particularly the Round-Robin method which managed to enhance performance by 35% through the equal distribution of user requests among the service instances. Health checks, as well as monitoring in real-time, helped as well with failure management as they helped to contain failures before the users of the system were affected. The results suggest that the use of microservices led to a 40% increase in system scalability, a 50% decrease in downtime and a support for 30% more concurrent users than the use of monolithic architectures. These findings affirm the capability of microservices in the development of robust and flexible airline ticket booking systems that are responsive to change and recover from external system unavailability.
Authors: Xiangyu Zeng, Kunchang Li, Chenting Wang, Xinhao Li, Tianxiang Jiang, Ziang Yan, Songze Li, Yansong Shi, Zhengrong Yue, Yi Wang, Yali Wang, Yu Qiao, Limin Wang
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in short video understanding. However, understanding long-form videos still remains challenging for MLLMs. This paper proposes TimeSuite, a collection of new designs to adapt the existing short-form video MLLMs for long video understanding, including a simple yet efficient framework to process long video sequence, a high-quality video dataset for grounded tuning of MLLMs, and a carefully-designed instruction tuning task to explicitly incorporate the grounding supervision in the traditional QA format. Specifically, based on VideoChat, we propose our long-video MLLM, coined as VideoChat-T, by implementing a token shuffling to compress long video tokens and introducing Temporal Adaptive Position Encoding (TAPE) to enhance the temporal awareness of visual representation. Meanwhile, we introduce the TimePro, a comprehensive grounding-centric instruction tuning dataset composed of 9 tasks and 349k high-quality grounded annotations. Notably, we design a new instruction tuning task type, called Temporal Grounded Caption, to peform detailed video descriptions with the corresponding time stamps prediction. This explicit temporal location prediction will guide MLLM to correctly attend on the visual content when generating description, and thus reduce the hallucination risk caused by the LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that our TimeSuite provides a successful solution to enhance the long video understanding capability of short-form MLLM, achieving improvement of 5.6% and 6.8% on the benchmarks of Egoschema and VideoMME, respectively. In addition, VideoChat-T exhibits robust zero-shot temporal grounding capabilities, significantly outperforming the existing state-of-the-art MLLMs. After fine-tuning, it performs on par with the traditional supervised expert models.
Authors: Hojun Chung, Junseo Lee, Minsoo Kim, Dohyeong Kim, Songhwai Oh
Abstract: Training agents that are robust to environmental changes remains a significant challenge in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Unsupervised environment design (UED) has recently emerged to address this issue by generating a set of training environments tailored to the agent's capabilities. While prior works demonstrate that UED has the potential to learn a robust policy, their performance is constrained by the capabilities of the environment generation. To this end, we propose a novel UED algorithm, adversarial environment design via regret-guided diffusion models (ADD). The proposed method guides the diffusion-based environment generator with the regret of the agent to produce environments that the agent finds challenging but conducive to further improvement. By exploiting the representation power of diffusion models, ADD can directly generate adversarial environments while maintaining the diversity of training environments, enabling the agent to effectively learn a robust policy. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method successfully generates an instructive curriculum of environments, outperforming UED baselines in zero-shot generalization across novel, out-of-distribution environments. Project page: https://github.com/rllab-snu.github.io/projects/ADD
Authors: Guilherme S. Y. Giardini, John F. Hardy II, Carlo R. da Cunha
Abstract: Understanding the mechanisms behind emergent behaviors in multi-agent systems is critical for advancing fields such as swarm robotics and artificial intelligence. In this study, we investigate how neural networks evolve to control agents' behavior in a dynamic environment, focusing on the relationship between the network's complexity and collective behavior patterns. By performing quantitative and qualitative analyses, we demonstrate that the degree of network non-linearity correlates with the complexity of emergent behaviors. Simpler behaviors, such as lane formation and laminar flow, are characterized by more linear network operations, while complex behaviors like swarming and flocking show highly non-linear neural processing. Moreover, specific environmental parameters, such as moderate noise, broader field of view, and lower agent density, promote the evolution of non-linear networks that drive richer, more intricate collective behaviors. These results highlight the importance of tuning evolutionary conditions to induce desired behaviors in multi-agent systems, offering new pathways for optimizing coordination in autonomous swarms. Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how neural mechanisms influence collective dynamics, with implications for the design of intelligent, self-organizing systems.
Authors: Mohamed Elshaarawy, Ashrakat Saeed, Mariam Sheta, Abdelrahman Said, Asem Bakr, Omar Bahaa, Walid Gomaa
Abstract: This paper proposes a machine learning approach for classifying classical and new Egyptian music by composer and generating new similar music. The proposed system utilizes a convolutional neural network (CNN) for classification and a CNN autoencoder for generation. The dataset used in this project consists of new and classical Egyptian music pieces composed by different composers. To classify the music by composer, each sample is normalized and transformed into a mel spectrogram. The CNN model is trained on the dataset using the mel spectrograms as input features and the composer labels as output classes. The model achieves 81.4\% accuracy in classifying the music by composer, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach. To generate new music similar to the original pieces, a CNN autoencoder is trained on a similar dataset. The model is trained to encode the mel spectrograms of the original pieces into a lower-dimensional latent space and then decode them back into the original mel spectrogram. The generated music is produced by sampling from the latent space and decoding the samples back into mel spectrograms, which are then transformed into audio. In conclusion, the proposed system provides a promising approach to classifying and generating classical Egyptian music, which can be applied in various musical applications, such as music recommendation systems, music production, and music education.
Authors: Shilong Li, Yancheng He, Hui Huang, Xingyuan Bu, Jiaheng Liu, Hangyu Guo, Weixun Wang, Jihao Gu, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
Abstract: Recent advancements in Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have significantly enhanced the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, owing to its simplicity and effectiveness. However, existing methods typically optimize a scalar score or ranking reward, thereby overlooking the multi-dimensional nature of human preferences. In this work, we propose to extend the preference of DPO to two dimensions: segments and aspects. We first introduce a 2D supervision dataset called HelpSteer-2D. For the segment dimension, we divide the response into sentences and assign scores to each segment. For the aspect dimension, we meticulously design several criteria covering the response quality rubrics. With the 2-dimensional signals as feedback, we develop a 2D-DPO framework, decomposing the overall objective into multi-segment and multi-aspect objectives. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks demonstrate that 2D-DPO performs better than methods that optimize for scalar or 1-dimensional preferences.
Authors: Yaochen Hu, Mai Zeng, Ge Zhang, Pavel Rumiantsev, Liheng Ma, Yingxue Zhang, Mark Coates
Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNN) exhibit superior performance in graph representation learning, but their inference cost can be high, due to an aggregation operation that can require a memory fetch for a very large number of nodes. This inference cost is the major obstacle to deploying GNN models with \emph{online prediction} to reflect the potentially dynamic node features. To address this, we propose an approach to reduce the number of nodes that are included during aggregation. We achieve this through a sparse decomposition, learning to approximate node representations using a weighted sum of linearly transformed features of a carefully selected subset of nodes within the extended neighbourhood. The approach achieves linear complexity with respect to the average node degree and the number of layers in the graph neural network. We introduce an algorithm to compute the optimal parameters for the sparse decomposition, ensuring an accurate approximation of the original GNN model, and present effective strategies to reduce the training time and improve the learning process. We demonstrate via extensive experiments that our method outperforms other baselines designed for inference speedup, achieving significant accuracy gains with comparable inference times for both node classification and spatio-temporal forecasting tasks.
Authors: Xiang Zhang, Juntai Cao, Chenyu You
Abstract: Transformers, the backbone of modern large language models (LLMs), face inherent architectural limitations that impede their reasoning capabilities. Unlike recurrent networks, Transformers lack recurrent connections, confining them to constant-depth computation. This restriction places them in the complexity class TC$^0$, making them theoretically incapable of solving tasks that demand increasingly deep reasoning as input length grows. Counting, a fundamental component of many reasoning tasks, also requires reasoning depth to grow linearly to be performed inductively. While previous studies have established the upper limits of counting ability in Transformer-based expert models (i.e., models specifically trained for counting tasks), these findings do not directly extend to general-purpose LLMs due to differences in reasoning mechanisms. Recent work has highlighted how Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning can help alleviate some of the architectural limitations of Transformers in counting tasks. However, little attention has been paid to the role of tokenization in these models. Unlike expert models that often use character-level tokenization, LLMs typically rely on byte-level (BPE) tokenizers, which fundamentally alters the way reasoning is processed. Our work investigates the impact of tokenization on the counting abilities of LLMs, uncovering substantial performance variations based on input tokenization differences. We provide both theoretical and experimental analyses, offering insights into how tokenization choices can undermine models' theoretical computability, thereby inspiring the design of new tokenization methods to enhance reasoning in LLMs.
Authors: Hormoz Shahrzad, Babak Hodjat, Risto Miikkulainen
Abstract: Most AI systems are black boxes generating reasonable outputs for given inputs. Some domains, however, have explainability and trustworthiness requirements that cannot be directly met by these approaches. Various methods have therefore been developed to interpret black-box models after training. This paper advocates an alternative approach where the models are transparent and explainable to begin with. This approach, EVOTER, evolves rule-sets based on simple logical expressions. The approach is evaluated in several prediction/classification and prescription/policy search domains with and without a surrogate. It is shown to discover meaningful rule sets that perform similarly to black-box models. The rules can provide insight into the domain, and make biases hidden in the data explicit. It may also be possible to edit them directly to remove biases and add constraints. EVOTER thus forms a promising foundation for building trustworthy AI systems for real-world applications in the future.
Authors: Zibin Dong, Jianye Hao, Yifu Yuan, Fei Ni, Yitian Wang, Pengyi Li, Yan Zheng
Abstract: Diffusion planning has been recognized as an effective decision-making paradigm in various domains. The capability of generating high-quality long-horizon trajectories makes it a promising research direction. However, existing diffusion planning methods suffer from low decision-making frequencies due to the expensive iterative sampling cost. To alleviate this, we introduce DiffuserLite, a super fast and lightweight diffusion planning framework, which employs a planning refinement process (PRP) to generate coarse-to-fine-grained trajectories, significantly reducing the modeling of redundant information and leading to notable increases in decision-making frequency. Our experimental results demonstrate that DiffuserLite achieves a decision-making frequency of 122.2Hz (112.7x faster than predominant frameworks) and reaches state-of-the-art performance on D4RL, Robomimic, and FinRL benchmarks. In addition, DiffuserLite can also serve as a flexible plugin to increase the decision-making frequency of other diffusion planning algorithms, providing a structural design reference for future works. More details and visualizations are available at https://diffuserlite.github.io/.
Authors: Wenbo Yu, Hao Fang, Bin Chen, Xiaohang Sui, Chuan Chen, Hao Wu, Shu-Tao Xia, Ke Xu
Abstract: Gradient Inversion Attacks invert the transmitted gradients in Federated Learning (FL) systems to reconstruct the sensitive data of local clients and have raised considerable privacy concerns. A majority of gradient inversion methods rely heavily on explicit prior knowledge (e.g., a well pre-trained generative model), which is often unavailable in realistic scenarios. To alleviate this issue, researchers have proposed to leverage the implicit prior knowledge of an over-parameterized network. However, they only utilize a fixed neural architecture for all the attack settings. This would hinder the adaptive use of implicit architectural priors and consequently limit the generalizability. In this paper, we further exploit such implicit prior knowledge by proposing Gradient Inversion via Neural Architecture Search (GI-NAS), which adaptively searches the network and captures the implicit priors behind neural architectures. Extensive experiments verify that our proposed GI-NAS can achieve superior attack performance compared to state-of-the-art gradient inversion methods, even under more practical settings with high-resolution images, large-sized batches, and advanced defense strategies.
Authors: Zafeirios Fountas, Martin A Benfeghoul, Adnan Oomerjee, Fenia Christopoulou, Gerasimos Lampouras, Haitham Bou-Ammar, Jun Wang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities, but still struggle with processing extensive contexts, limiting their ability to maintain coherence and accuracy over long sequences. In contrast, the human brain excels at organising and retrieving episodic experiences across vast temporal scales, spanning a lifetime. In this work, we introduce EM-LLM, a novel approach that integrates key aspects of human episodic memory and event cognition into LLMs with no fine-tuning, enabling them to handle practically infinite context lengths while maintaining computational efficiency. EM-LLM organises sequences of tokens into coherent episodic events using a combination of Bayesian surprise and graph-theoretic boundary refinement in an online fashion. When needed, these events are retrieved through a two-stage memory process, combining similarity-based and temporally contiguous retrieval for efficient and human-like access to relevant information. Experiments on the LongBench and InfiniteBench benchmarks demonstrate EM-LLM's superior performance, consistently outperforming the state-of-the-art retrieval model InfLLM across various baseline LLMs. In addition, EM-LLM outperforms its popular counterpart, RAG, in a wide range of tasks, while requiring similar resources. Notably, EM-LLM's performance even surpasses full-context models in most tasks, while successfully performing retrieval across 10 million tokens - a scale computationally infeasible for such models. Finally, our analysis reveals strong correlations between EM-LLM's event segmentation and human-perceived events, suggesting a bridge between this artificial system and its biological counterpart, thereby offering a novel computational framework for exploring human memory mechanisms.
Authors: Kevin Baum, Lisa Dargasz, Felix Jahn, Timo P. Gros, Verena Wolf
Abstract: We propose an extension of the reinforcement learning architecture that enables moral decision-making of reinforcement learning agents based on normative reasons. Central to this approach is a reason-based shield generator yielding a moral shield that binds the agent to actions that conform with recognized normative reasons so that our overall architecture restricts the agent to actions that are (internally) morally justified. In addition, we describe an algorithm that allows to iteratively improve the reason-based shield generator through case-based feedback from a moral judge.
Authors: Chuang Niu, Parisa Kaviani, Qing Lyu, Mannudeep K. Kalra, Christopher T. Whitlow, Ge Wang
Abstract: Current LLMs for creating fully-structured reports face the challenges of formatting errors, content hallucinations, and privacy leakage issues when uploading data to external servers.We aim to develop an open-source, accurate LLM for creating fully-structured and standardized LCS reports from varying free-text reports across institutions and demonstrate its utility in automatic statistical analysis and individual lung nodule retrieval. With IRB approvals, our retrospective study included 5,442 de-identified LDCT LCS radiology reports from two institutions. We constructed two evaluation datasets by labeling 500 pairs of free-text and fully-structured radiology reports and one large-scale consecutive dataset from January 2021 to December 2023. Two radiologists created a standardized template for recording 27 lung nodule features on LCS. We designed a dynamic-template-constrained decoding method to enhance existing LLMs for creating fully-structured reports from free-text radiology reports. Using consecutive structured reports, we automated descriptive statistical analyses and a nodule retrieval prototype. Our best LLM for creating fully-structured reports achieved high performance on cross-institutional datasets with an F1 score of about 97%, with neither formatting errors nor content hallucinations. Our method consistently improved the best open-source LLMs by up to 10.42%, and outperformed GPT-4o by 17.19%. The automatically derived statistical distributions were consistent with prior findings regarding attenuation, location, size, stability, and Lung-RADS. The retrieval system with structured reports allowed flexible nodule-level search and complex statistical analysis. Our developed software is publicly available for local deployment and further research.
Authors: Lang Yin, Han Zhao
Abstract: Probabilistic circuits (PCs) have emerged as a powerful framework to compactly represent probability distributions for efficient and exact probabilistic inference. It has been shown that PCs with a general directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure can be understood as a mixture of exponentially (in its height) many components, each of which is a product distribution over univariate marginals. However, existing structure learning algorithms for PCs often generate tree-structured circuits or use tree-structured circuits as intermediate steps to compress them into DAG-structured circuits. This leads to the intriguing question of whether there exists an exponential gap between DAGs and trees for the PC structure. In this paper, we provide a negative answer to this conjecture by proving that, for $n$ variables, there exists a quasi-polynomial upper bound $n^{O(\log n)}$ on the size of an equivalent tree computing the same probability distribution. On the other hand, we also show that given a depth restriction on the tree, there is a super-polynomial separation between tree and DAG-structured PCs. Our work takes an important step towards understanding the expressive power of tree-structured PCs, and our techniques may be of independent interest in the study of structure learning algorithms for PCs.
Authors: Long Li, Weiwen Xu, Jiayan Guo, Ruochen Zhao, Xinxuan Li, Yuqian Yuan, Boqiang Zhang, Yuming Jiang, Yifei Xin, Ronghao Dang, Deli Zhao, Yu Rong, Tian Feng, Lidong Bing
Abstract: Effective research ideation is a critical step for scientific research. However, the exponential increase in scientific literature makes it challenging for researchers to stay current with recent advances and identify meaningful research directions. Recent developments in large language models~(LLMs) suggest a promising avenue for automating the generation of novel research ideas. However, existing methods for idea generation either trivially prompt LLMs or directly expose LLMs to extensive literature without indicating useful information. Inspired by the research process of human researchers, we propose a Chain-of-Ideas~(CoI) agent, an LLM-based agent that organizes relevant literature in a chain structure to effectively mirror the progressive development in a research domain. This organization facilitates LLMs to capture the current advancements in research, thereby enhancing their ideation capabilities. Furthermore, we propose Idea Arena, an evaluation protocol that can comprehensively evaluate idea generation methods from different perspectives, aligning closely with the preferences of human researchers. Experimental results indicate that the CoI agent consistently outperforms other methods and shows comparable quality as humans in research idea generation. Moreover, our CoI agent is budget-friendly, with a minimum cost of \$0.50 to generate a candidate idea and its corresponding experimental design.
Authors: A Mani
Abstract: The concepts of precision, and accuracy are domain and problem dependent. The simplified numeric hard and soft measures used in the fields of statistical learning, many types of machine learning, and binary or multiclass classification problems are known to be of limited use for understanding the meaningfulness of models or their relevance. Arguably, they are neither of patterns nor proofs. Further, there are no good measures or representations for analogous concepts in the cognition domain. In this research, the key issues are reflected upon, and a compositional knowledge representation approach in a minimalist general rough framework is proposed for the problem contexts. The latter is general enough to cover most application contexts, and may be applicable in the light of improved computational tools available.
Authors: Mete Ismayilzada, Debjit Paul, Antoine Bosselut, Lonneke van der Plas
Abstract: Creativity is the ability to produce novel, useful, and surprising ideas, and has been widely studied as a crucial aspect of human cognition. Machine creativity on the other hand has been a long-standing challenge. With the rise of advanced generative AI, there has been renewed interest and debate regarding AI's creative capabilities. Therefore, it is imperative to revisit the state of creativity in AI and identify key progresses and remaining challenges. In this work, we survey leading works studying the creative capabilities of AI systems, focusing on creative problem-solving, linguistic, artistic, and scientific creativity. Our review suggests that while the latest AI models are largely capable of producing linguistically and artistically creative outputs such as poems, images, and musical pieces, they struggle with tasks that require creative problem-solving, abstract thinking and compositionality and their generations suffer from a lack of diversity, originality, long-range incoherence and hallucinations. We also discuss key questions concerning copyright and authorship issues with generative models. Furthermore, we highlight the need for a comprehensive evaluation of creativity that is process-driven and considers several dimensions of creativity. Finally, we propose future research directions to improve the creativity of AI outputs, drawing inspiration from cognitive science and psychology.
Authors: Junnan Dong, Zijin Hong, Yuanchen Bei, Feiran Huang, Xinrun Wang, Xiao Huang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their remarkable performance across various language understanding tasks. While emerging benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate LLMs in various domains such as mathematics and computer science, they merely measure the accuracy in terms of the final prediction on multi-choice questions. However, it remains insufficient to verify the essential understanding of LLMs given a chosen choice. To fill this gap, we present CLR-Bench to comprehensively evaluate the LLMs in complex college-level reasoning. Specifically, (i) we prioritize 16 challenging college disciplines in computer science and artificial intelligence. The dataset contains 5 types of questions, while each question is associated with detailed explanations from experts. (ii) To quantify a fair evaluation of LLMs' reasoning ability, we formalize the criteria with two novel metrics. Q$\rightarrow$A is utilized to measure the performance of direct answer prediction, and Q$\rightarrow$AR effectively considers the joint ability to answer the question and provide rationale simultaneously. Extensive experiments are conducted with 40 LLMs over 1,018 discipline-specific questions. The results demonstrate the key insights that LLMs, even the best closed-source LLM, i.e., GPT-4 turbo, tend to `guess' the college-level answers. It shows a dramatic decrease in accuracy from 63.31% Q$\rightarrow$A to 39.00% Q$\rightarrow$AR, indicating an unsatisfactory reasoning ability.
Authors: Dae Yon Hwang, Bilal Taha, Harshit Pande, Yaroslav Nechaev
Abstract: Despite the recent advancements in information retrieval (IR), zero-shot IR remains a significant challenge, especially when dealing with new domains, languages, and newly-released use cases that lack historical query traffic from existing users. For such cases, it is common to use query augmentations followed by fine-tuning pre-trained models on the document data paired with synthetic queries. In this work, we propose a novel Universal Document Linking (UDL) algorithm, which links similar documents to enhance synthetic query generation across multiple datasets with different characteristics. UDL leverages entropy for the choice of similarity models and named entity recognition (NER) for the link decision of documents using similarity scores. Our empirical studies demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of the UDL across diverse datasets and IR models, surpassing state-of-the-art methods in zero-shot cases. The developed code for reproducibility is included in https://github.com/eoduself/UDL
Authors: Hiroyasu Tsukamoto, Soon-Jo Chung, Yashwanth Kumar Nakka, Benjamin Donitz, Declan Mages, Michel Ingham
Abstract: Interstellar objects (ISOs) are likely representatives of primitive materials invaluable in understanding exoplanetary star systems. Due to their poorly constrained orbits with generally high inclinations and relative velocities, however, exploring ISOs with conventional human-in-the-loop approaches is significantly challenging. This paper presents Neural-Rendezvous -- a deep learning-based guidance and control framework for encountering fast-moving objects, including ISOs, robustly, accurately, and autonomously in real time. It uses pointwise minimum norm tracking control on top of a guidance policy modeled by a spectrally-normalized deep neural network, where its hyperparameters are tuned with a loss function directly penalizing the MPC state trajectory tracking error. We show that Neural-Rendezvous provides a high probability exponential bound on the expected spacecraft delivery error, the proof of which leverages stochastic incremental stability analysis. In particular, it is used to construct a non-negative function with a supermartingale property, explicitly accounting for the ISO state uncertainty and the local nature of nonlinear state estimation guarantees. In numerical simulations, Neural-Rendezvous is demonstrated to satisfy the expected error bound for 100 ISO candidates. This performance is also empirically validated using our spacecraft simulator and in high-conflict and distributed UAV swarm reconfiguration with up to 20 UAVs.
Authors: Sizhe Zhou, Siru Ouyang, Zhuosheng Zhang, Hai Zhao
Abstract: In open-retrieval conversational machine reading (OR-CMR) task, machines are required to do multi-turn question answering given dialogue history and a textual knowledge base. Existing works generally utilize two independent modules to approach this problem's two successive sub-tasks: first with a hard-label decision making and second with a question generation aided by various entailment reasoning methods. Such usual cascaded modeling is vulnerable to error propagation and prevents the two sub-tasks from being consistently optimized. In this work, we instead model OR-CMR as a unified text-to-text task in a fully end-to-end style. Experiments on the ShARC and OR-ShARC dataset show the effectiveness of our proposed end-to-end framework on both sub-tasks by a large margin, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Further ablation studies support that our framework can generalize to different backbone models.
Authors: Jasmine Bayrooti, Zhan Gao, Amanda Prorok
Abstract: Cooperative decentralized learning relies on direct information exchange between communicating agents, each with access to locally available datasets. The goal is to agree on model parameters that are optimal over all data. However, sharing parameters with untrustworthy neighbors can incur privacy risks by leaking exploitable information. To enable trustworthy cooperative learning, we propose a framework that embeds differential privacy into decentralized deep learning and secures each agent's local dataset during and after cooperative training. We prove convergence guarantees for algorithms derived from this framework and demonstrate its practical utility when applied to subgradient and ADMM decentralized approaches, finding accuracies approaching the centralized baseline while ensuring individual data samples are resilient to inference attacks. Furthermore, we study the relationships between accuracy, privacy budget, and networks' graph properties on collaborative classification tasks, discovering a useful invariance to the communication graph structure beyond a threshold.
Authors: Saurabh Kumar, Henrik Marklund, Benjamin Van Roy
Abstract: In continual learning, plasticity refers to the ability of an agent to quickly adapt to new information. Neural networks are known to lose plasticity when processing non-stationary data streams. In this paper, we propose L2 Init, a simple approach for maintaining plasticity by incorporating in the loss function L2 regularization toward initial parameters. This is very similar to standard L2 regularization (L2), the only difference being that L2 regularizes toward the origin. L2 Init is simple to implement and requires selecting only a single hyper-parameter. The motivation for this method is the same as that of methods that reset neurons or parameter values. Intuitively, when recent losses are insensitive to particular parameters, these parameters should drift toward their initial values. This prepares parameters to adapt quickly to new tasks. On problems representative of different types of nonstationarity in continual supervised learning, we demonstrate that L2 Init most consistently mitigates plasticity loss compared to previously proposed approaches.
Authors: Pietro Barbiero, Francesco Giannini, Gabriele Ciravegna, Michelangelo Diligenti, Giuseppe Marra
Abstract: The design of interpretable deep learning models working in relational domains poses an open challenge: interpretable deep learning methods, such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), are not designed to solve relational problems, while relational deep learning models, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), are not as interpretable as CBMs. To overcome these limitations, we propose Relational Concept Bottleneck Models (R-CBMs), a family of relational deep learning methods providing interpretable task predictions. As special cases, we show that R-CBMs are capable of both representing standard CBMs and message-passing GNNs. To evaluate the effectiveness and versatility of these models, we designed a class of experimental problems, ranging from image classification to link prediction in knowledge graphs. In particular we show that R-CBMs (i) match generalization performance of existing relational black-boxes, (ii) support the generation of quantified concept-based explanations, (iii) effectively respond to test-time interventions, and (iv) withstand demanding settings including out-of-distribution scenarios, limited training data regimes, and scarce concept supervisions.
Authors: Yijia Xiao, Yiqiao Jin, Yushi Bai, Yue Wu, Xianjun Yang, Xiao Luo, Wenchao Yu, Xujiang Zhao, Yanchi Liu, Quanquan Gu, Haifeng Chen, Wei Wang, Wei Cheng
Abstract: The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven considerable interest in fine-tuning them with domain-specific data to create specialized language models. Nevertheless, such domain-specific fine-tuning data often contains contextually sensitive personally identifiable information (PII). Direct fine-tuning of LLMs on this data without privacy protection poses a risk of data leakage of sensitive PII during inference time. To address this challenge, we introduce Contextual Privacy Protection Language Models (CPPLM), a novel paradigm for fine-tuning LLMs that effectively injects domain-specific knowledge while safeguarding inference-time data privacy. Our work offers a theoretical analysis for model design and benchmarks various techniques such as corpus curation, penalty-based unlikelihood in training loss, instruction-based tuning, etc. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches. In particular, instruction tuning with both positive and negative examples stands out as a promising method, effectively protecting private data while enhancing the model's knowledge. Our work underscores the potential for Large Language Models as robust contextual privacy protection learners. The complete code and data for the work can be found at https://github.com/Yijia-Xiao/PPLM.
Authors: George Chrysostomou, Zhixue Zhao, Miles Williams, Nikolaos Aletras
Abstract: Despite the remarkable performance of generative large language models (LLMs) on abstractive summarization, they face two significant challenges: their considerable size and tendency to hallucinate. Hallucinations are concerning because they erode reliability and raise safety issues. Pruning is a technique that reduces model size by removing redundant weights, enabling more efficient sparse inference. Pruned models yield downstream task performance comparable to the original, making them ideal alternatives when operating on a limited budget. However, the effect that pruning has upon hallucinations in abstractive summarization with LLMs has yet to be explored. In this paper, we provide an extensive empirical study across five summarization datasets, two state-of-the-art pruning methods, and five instruction-tuned LLMs. Surprisingly, we find that hallucinations are less prevalent from pruned LLMs than the original models. Our analysis suggests that pruned models tend to depend more on the source document for summary generation. This leads to a higher lexical overlap between the generated summary and the source document, which could be a reason for the reduction in hallucination risk.
Authors: Lennart Brocki, Jakub Binda, Neo Christopher Chung
Abstract: Importance estimators are explainability methods that quantify feature importance for deep neural networks (DNN). In vision transformers (ViT), the self-attention mechanism naturally leads to attention maps, which are sometimes interpreted as importance scores that indicate which input features ViT models are focusing on. However, attention maps do not account for signals from downstream tasks. To generate explanations that are sensitive to downstream tasks, we have developed class-discriminative attention maps (CDAM), a gradient-based extension that estimates feature importance with respect to a known class or a latent concept. CDAM scales attention scores by how relevant the corresponding tokens are for the predictions of a classifier head. In addition to targeting the supervised classifier, CDAM can explain an arbitrary concept shared by selected samples by measuring similarity in the latent space of ViT. Additionally, we introduce Smooth CDAM and Integrated CDAM, which average a series of CDAMs with slightly altered tokens. Our quantitative benchmarks include correctness, compactness, and class sensitivity, in comparison to 7 other importance estimators. Vanilla, Smooth, and Integrated CDAM excel across all three benchmarks. In particular, our results suggest that existing importance estimators may not provide sufficient class-sensitivity. We demonstrate the utility of CDAM in medical images by training and explaining malignancy and biomarker prediction models based on lung Computed Tomography (CT) scans. Overall, CDAM is shown to be highly class-discriminative and semantically relevant, while providing compact explanations.
Authors: Zonghai Yao, Nandyala Siddharth Kantu, Guanghao Wei, Hieu Tran, Zhangqi Duan, Sunjae Kwon, Zhichao Yang, README annotation team, Hong Yu
Abstract: The advancement in healthcare has shifted focus toward patient-centric approaches, particularly in self-care and patient education, facilitated by access to Electronic Health Records (EHR). However, medical jargon in EHRs poses significant challenges in patient comprehension. To address this, we introduce a new task of automatically generating lay definitions, aiming to simplify complex medical terms into patient-friendly lay language. We first created the README dataset, an extensive collection of over 50,000 unique (medical term, lay definition) pairs and 300,000 mentions, each offering context-aware lay definitions manually annotated by domain experts. We have also engineered a data-centric Human-AI pipeline that synergizes data filtering, augmentation, and selection to improve data quality. We then used README as the training data for models and leveraged a Retrieval-Augmented Generation method to reduce hallucinations and improve the quality of model outputs. Our extensive automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that open-source mobile-friendly models, when fine-tuned with high-quality data, are capable of matching or even surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art closed-source large language models like ChatGPT. This research represents a significant stride in closing the knowledge gap in patient education and advancing patient-centric healthcare solutions.
Authors: Yinglun Xu, Tarun Suresh, Rohan Gumaste, David Zhu, Ruirui Li, Zhengyang Wang, Haoming Jiang, Xianfeng Tang, Qingyu Yin, Monica Xiao Cheng, Qi Zeng, Chao Zhang, Gagandeep Singh
Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PBRL) in the offline setting has succeeded greatly in industrial applications such as chatbots. A two-step learning framework where one applies a reinforcement learning step after a reward modeling step has been widely adopted for the problem. However, such a method faces challenges from the risk of reward hacking and the complexity of reinforcement learning. To overcome the challenge, our insight is that both challenges come from the state-actions not supported in the dataset. Such state-actions are unreliable and increase the complexity of the reinforcement learning problem at the second step. Based on the insight, we develop a novel two-step learning method called PRC: preference-based reinforcement learning with constrained actions. The high-level idea is to limit the reinforcement learning agent to optimize over a constrained action space that excludes the out-of-distribution state-actions. We empirically verify that our method has high learning efficiency on various datasets in robotic control environments.
Authors: Barak Or
Abstract: We introduce the CarSpeedNet, a deep learning model designed to estimate car speed using three-axis accelerometer data from smartphones. Using 13 hours of data collected from a smartphone in cars across various roads, CarSpeedNet accurately models the relationship between smartphone acceleration and car speed. Ground truth speed data was collected at 1 [Hz] from GPS receivers. The model provides high-frequency speed estimation by incorporating historical data and achieves a precision of less than 0.72 [m/s] during extended driving tests, relying solely on smartphone accelerometer data without any connection to the car.
Authors: Aliz\'ee Pace, Jonathan Mallinson, Eric Malmi, Sebastian Krause, Aliaksei Severyn
Abstract: The success of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) in language model alignment is strongly dependent on the quality of the underlying reward model. In this paper, we present a novel approach to improve reward model quality by generating synthetic preference data, thereby augmenting the training dataset with on-policy, high-quality preference pairs. Motivated by the promising results of Best-of-N sampling strategies in language model training, we extend their application to reward model training. This results in a self-training strategy to generate preference pairs by selecting the best and worst candidates in a pool of responses to a given query. Empirically, we find that this approach improves the performance of any reward model, with an effect comparable to the addition of a similar quantity of human preference data. This work opens up new avenues of research for improving RLHF for language model alignment, by offering synthetic preference generation as a solution to reward modeling challenges.
Authors: Boyi Wei, Kaixuan Huang, Yangsibo Huang, Tinghao Xie, Xiangyu Qi, Mengzhou Xia, Prateek Mittal, Mengdi Wang, Peter Henderson
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) show inherent brittleness in their safety mechanisms, as evidenced by their susceptibility to jailbreaking and even non-malicious fine-tuning. This study explores this brittleness of safety alignment by leveraging pruning and low-rank modifications. We develop methods to identify critical regions that are vital for safety guardrails, and that are disentangled from utility-relevant regions at both the neuron and rank levels. Surprisingly, the isolated regions we find are sparse, comprising about $3\%$ at the parameter level and $2.5\%$ at the rank level. Removing these regions compromises safety without significantly impacting utility, corroborating the inherent brittleness of the model's safety mechanisms. Moreover, we show that LLMs remain vulnerable to low-cost fine-tuning attacks even when modifications to the safety-critical regions are restricted. These findings underscore the urgent need for more robust safety strategies in LLMs.
Authors: Tianying Ji, Yongyuan Liang, Yan Zeng, Yu Luo, Guowei Xu, Jiawei Guo, Ruijie Zheng, Furong Huang, Fuchun Sun, Huazhe Xu
Abstract: The varying significance of distinct primitive behaviors during the policy learning process has been overlooked by prior model-free RL algorithms. Leveraging this insight, we explore the causal relationship between different action dimensions and rewards to evaluate the significance of various primitive behaviors during training. We introduce a causality-aware entropy term that effectively identifies and prioritizes actions with high potential impacts for efficient exploration. Furthermore, to prevent excessive focus on specific primitive behaviors, we analyze the gradient dormancy phenomenon and introduce a dormancy-guided reset mechanism to further enhance the efficacy of our method. Our proposed algorithm, ACE: Off-policy Actor-critic with Causality-aware Entropy regularization, demonstrates a substantial performance advantage across 29 diverse continuous control tasks spanning 7 domains compared to model-free RL baselines, which underscores the effectiveness, versatility, and efficient sample efficiency of our approach. Benchmark results and videos are available at https://ace-rl.github.io/.
Authors: Nikhil Behari, Edwin Zhang, Yunfan Zhao, Aparna Taneja, Dheeraj Nagaraj, Milind Tambe
Abstract: Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) have demonstrated success in optimizing resource allocation for large beneficiary populations in public health settings. Unfortunately, RMAB models lack flexibility to adapt to evolving public health policy priorities. Concurrently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as adept automated planners across domains of robotic control and navigation. In this paper, we propose a Decision Language Model (DLM) for RMABs, enabling dynamic fine-tuning of RMAB policies in public health settings using human-language commands. We propose using LLMs as automated planners to (1) interpret human policy preference prompts, (2) propose reward functions as code for a multi-agent RMAB environment, and (3) iterate on the generated reward functions using feedback from grounded RMAB simulations. We illustrate the application of DLM in collaboration with ARMMAN, an India-based non-profit promoting preventative care for pregnant mothers, that currently relies on RMAB policies to optimally allocate health worker calls to low-resource populations. We conduct a technology demonstration in simulation using the Gemini Pro model, showing DLM can dynamically shape policy outcomes using only human prompts as input.
Authors: Yijing Liu, Chao Du, Tianyu Pang, Chongxuan Li, Min Lin, Wei Chen
Abstract: Recent research has made significant progress in optimizing diffusion models for downstream objectives, which is an important pursuit in fields such as graph generation for drug design. However, directly applying these models to graph presents challenges, resulting in suboptimal performance. This paper introduces graph diffusion policy optimization (GDPO), a novel approach to optimize graph diffusion models for arbitrary (e.g., non-differentiable) objectives using reinforcement learning. GDPO is based on an eager policy gradient tailored for graph diffusion models, developed through meticulous analysis and promising improved performance. Experimental results show that GDPO achieves state-of-the-art performance in various graph generation tasks with complex and diverse objectives. Code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/GDPO.
Authors: Bedionita Soro, Bruno Andreis, Hayeon Lee, Wonyong Jeong, Song Chong, Frank Hutter, Sung Ju Hwang
Abstract: Transfer learning has gained significant attention in recent deep learning research due to its ability to accelerate convergence and enhance performance on new tasks. However, its success is often contingent on the similarity between source and target data, and training on numerous datasets can be costly, leading to blind selection of pretrained models with limited insight into their effectiveness. To address these challenges, we introduce D2NWG, a diffusion-based neural network weights generation technique that efficiently produces high-performing weights for transfer learning, conditioned on the target dataset. Our method extends generative hyper-representation learning to recast the latent diffusion paradigm for neural network weights generation, learning the weight distributions of models pretrained on various datasets. This allows for automatic generation of weights that generalize well across both seen and unseen tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art meta-learning methods and pretrained models. Moreover, our approach is scalable to large architectures such as large language models (LLMs), overcoming the limitations of current parameter generation techniques that rely on task-specific model collections or access to original training data. By modeling the parameter distribution of LLMs, D2NWG enables task-specific parameter generation without requiring additional fine-tuning or large collections of model variants. Extensive experiments show that our method consistently enhances the performance of diverse base models, regardless of their size or complexity, positioning it as a robust solution for scalable transfer learning.
Authors: Shubham Vatsal, Ayush Singh, Shabnam Tafreshi
Abstract: Health insurance companies have a defined process called prior authorization (PA) which is a health plan cost-control process that requires doctors and other healthcare professionals to get clearance in advance from a health plan before performing a particular procedure on a patient in order to be eligible for payment coverage. For health insurance companies, approving PA requests for patients in the medical domain is a time-consuming and challenging task. One of those key challenges is validating if a request matches up to certain criteria such as age, gender, etc. In this work, we evaluate whether GPT can validate numerous key factors, in turn helping health plans reach a decision drastically faster. We frame it as a question answering task, prompting GPT to answer a question from patient electronic health record. We experiment with different conventional prompting techniques as well as introduce our own novel prompting technique. Moreover, we report qualitative assessment by humans on the natural language generation outputs from our approach. Results show that our method achieves superior performance with the mean weighted F1 score of 0.61 as compared to its standard counterparts.
Authors: Lang Cao, Jimeng Sun, Adam Cross
Abstract: Rare diseases affect millions worldwide but often face limited research focus due to their low prevalence. This results in prolonged diagnoses and a lack of approved therapies. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating the extraction of medical information, offering potential to improve medical diagnosis and management. However, most LLMs lack professional medical knowledge, especially concerning rare diseases, and struggle to handle the latest rare disease information. They also cannot effectively manage rare disease data and are not directly suitable for diagnosis and management tasks. Our objective is to create an end-to-end system called AutoRD, which automates the extraction of information from medical texts about rare diseases, focusing on entities and their relations. AutoRD integrates up-to-date structured knowledge and demonstrates superior performance in rare disease extraction tasks. We conduct various experiments to evaluate AutoRD's performance, aiming to surpass common LLMs and traditional methods.
Authors: Hengyuan Zhang, Zitao Liu, Shuyan Huang, Chenming Shang, Bojun Zhan, Yong Jiang
Abstract: Knowledge tracing (KT) aims to estimate student's knowledge mastery based on their historical interactions. Recently, the deep learning based KT (DLKT) approaches have achieved impressive performance in the KT task. These DLKT models heavily rely on the large number of available student interactions. However, due to various reasons such as budget constraints and privacy concerns, observed interactions are very limited in many real-world scenarios, a.k.a, low-resource KT datasets. Directly training a DLKT model on a low-resource KT dataset may lead to overfitting and it is difficult to choose the appropriate deep neural architecture. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a low-resource KT framework called LoReKT to address above challenges. Inspired by the prevalent "pre-training and fine-tuning" paradigm, we aim to learn transferable parameters and representations from rich-resource KT datasets during the pre-training stage and subsequently facilitate effective adaptation to low-resource KT datasets. Specifically, we simplify existing sophisticated DLKT model architectures with purely a stack of transformer decoders. We design an encoding mechanism to incorporate student interactions from multiple KT data sources and develop an importance mechanism to prioritize updating parameters with high importance while constraining less important ones during the fine-tuning stage. We evaluate LoReKT on six public KT datasets and experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of AUC and Accuracy. To encourage reproducible research, we make our data and code publicly available at https://github.com/rattlesnakey/LoReKT.
Authors: Xiang Fan, Anand Bhattad, Ranjay Krishna
Abstract: We introduce Videoshop, a training-free video editing algorithm for localized semantic edits. Videoshop allows users to use any editing software, including Photoshop and generative inpainting, to modify the first frame; it automatically propagates those changes, with semantic, spatial, and temporally consistent motion, to the remaining frames. Unlike existing methods that enable edits only through imprecise textual instructions, Videoshop allows users to add or remove objects, semantically change objects, insert stock photos into videos, etc. with fine-grained control over locations and appearance. We achieve this through image-based video editing by inverting latents with noise extrapolation, from which we generate videos conditioned on the edited image. Videoshop produces higher quality edits against 6 baselines on 2 editing benchmarks using 10 evaluation metrics.
Authors: Yingshan Chang, Yasi Zhang, Zhiyuan Fang, Yingnian Wu, Yonatan Bisk, Feng Gao
Abstract: The literature on text-to-image generation is plagued by issues of faithfully composing entities with relations. But there lacks a formal understanding of how entity-relation compositions can be effectively learned. Moreover, the underlying phenomenon space that meaningfully reflects the problem structure is not well-defined, leading to an arms race for larger quantities of data in the hope that generalization emerges out of large-scale pretraining. We hypothesize that the underlying phenomenological coverage has not been proportionally scaled up, leading to a skew of the presented phenomenon which harms generalization. We introduce statistical metrics that quantify both the linguistic and visual skew of a dataset for relational learning, and show that generalization failures of text-to-image generation are a direct result of incomplete or unbalanced phenomenological coverage. We first perform experiments in a synthetic domain and demonstrate that systematically controlled metrics are strongly predictive of generalization performance. Then we move to natural images and show that simple distribution perturbations in light of our theories boost generalization without enlarging the absolute data size. This work informs an important direction towards quality-enhancing the data diversity or balance orthogonal to scaling up the absolute size. Our discussions point out important open questions on 1) Evaluation of generated entity-relation compositions, and 2) Better models for reasoning with abstract relations.
Authors: Andrew Holliday, Ahmed El-Geneidy, Gregory Dudek
Abstract: Transit agencies world-wide face tightening budgets. To maintain quality of service while cutting costs, efficient transit network design is essential. But planning a network of public transit routes is a challenging optimization problem. The most successful approaches to date use metaheuristic algorithms to search through the space of possible transit networks by applying low-level heuristics that randomly alter routes in a network. The design of these low-level heuristics has a major impact on the quality of the result. In this paper we use deep reinforcement learning with graph neural nets to learn low-level heuristics for an evolutionary algorithm, instead of designing them manually. These learned heuristics improve the algorithm's results on benchmark synthetic cities with 70 nodes or more, and obtain state-of-the-art results when optimizing operating costs. They also improve upon a simulation of the real transit network in the city of Laval, Canada, by as much as 54% and 18% on two key metrics, and offer cost savings of up to 12% over the city's existing transit network.
Authors: Tianliang Ma, Guangxi Fan, Xuguang Sun, Zhihui Deng, Kainlu Low, Leilai Shao
Abstract: This paper proposes a fast system technology co-optimization (STCO) framework that optimizes power, performance, and area (PPA) for next-generation IC design, addressing the challenges and opportunities presented by novel materials and device architectures. We focus on accelerating the technology level of STCO using AI techniques, by employing graph neural network (GNN)-based approaches for both TCAD simulation and cell library characterization, which are interconnected through a unified compact model, collectively achieving over a 100X speedup over traditional methods. These advancements enable comprehensive STCO iterations with runtime speedups ranging from 1.9X to 14.1X and supports both emerging and traditional technologies.
Authors: Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert
Abstract: This paper presents AFU, an off-policy deep RL algorithm addressing in a new way the challenging "max-Q problem" in Q-learning for continuous action spaces, with a solution based on regression and conditional gradient scaling. AFU has an actor but its critic updates are entirely independent from it. As a consequence, the actor can be chosen freely. In the initial version, AFU-alpha, we employ the same stochastic actor as in Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), but we then study a simple failure mode of SAC and show how AFU can be modified to make actor updates less likely to become trapped in local optima, resulting in a second version of the algorithm, AFU-beta. Experimental results demonstrate the sample efficiency of both versions of AFU, marking it as the first model-free off-policy algorithm competitive with state-of-the-art actor-critic methods while departing from the actor-critic perspective.
Authors: Luca Savant Aira, Antonio Montanaro, Emanuele Aiello, Diego Valsesia, Enrico Magli
Abstract: Generating videos with realistic and physically plausible motion is one of the main recent challenges in computer vision. While diffusion models are achieving compelling results in image generation, video diffusion models are limited by heavy training and huge models, resulting in videos that are still biased to the training dataset. In this work we propose MotionCraft, a new zero-shot video generator to craft physics-based and realistic videos. MotionCraft is able to warp the noise latent space of an image diffusion model, such as Stable Diffusion, by applying an optical flow derived from a physics simulation. We show that warping the noise latent space results in coherent application of the desired motion while allowing the model to generate missing elements consistent with the scene evolution, which would otherwise result in artefacts or missing content if the flow was applied in the pixel space. We compare our method with the state-of-the-art Text2Video-Zero reporting qualitative and quantitative improvements, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach to generate videos with finely-prescribed complex motion dynamics. Project page: https://mezzelfo.github.io/MotionCraft/
Authors: Md Yousuf Harun, Kyungbok Lee, Jhair Gallardo, Giri Krishnan, Christopher Kanan
Abstract: Embeddings produced by pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely used; however, their efficacy for downstream tasks can vary widely. We study the factors influencing transferability and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of pre-trained DNN embeddings through the lens of the tunnel effect hypothesis, which is closely related to intermediate neural collapse. This hypothesis suggests that deeper DNN layers compress representations and hinder OOD generalization. Contrary to earlier work, our experiments show this is not a universal phenomenon. We comprehensively investigate the impact of DNN architecture, training data, image resolution, and augmentations on transferability. We identify that training with high-resolution datasets containing many classes greatly reduces representation compression and improves transferability. Our results emphasize the danger of generalizing findings from toy datasets to broader contexts.
Authors: Jianbiao Mei, Yukai Ma, Xuemeng Yang, Licheng Wen, Xinyu Cai, Xin Li, Daocheng Fu, Bo Zhang, Pinlong Cai, Min Dou, Botian Shi, Liang He, Yong Liu, Yu Qiao
Abstract: Autonomous driving has advanced significantly due to sensors, machine learning, and artificial intelligence improvements. However, prevailing methods struggle with intricate scenarios and causal relationships, hindering adaptability and interpretability in varied environments. To address the above problems, we introduce LeapAD, a novel paradigm for autonomous driving inspired by the human cognitive process. Specifically, LeapAD emulates human attention by selecting critical objects relevant to driving decisions, simplifying environmental interpretation, and mitigating decision-making complexities. Additionally, LeapAD incorporates an innovative dual-process decision-making module, which consists of an Analytic Process (System-II) for thorough analysis and reasoning, along with a Heuristic Process (System-I) for swift and empirical processing. The Analytic Process leverages its logical reasoning to accumulate linguistic driving experience, which is then transferred to the Heuristic Process by supervised fine-tuning. Through reflection mechanisms and a growing memory bank, LeapAD continuously improves itself from past mistakes in a closed-loop environment. Closed-loop testing in CARLA shows that LeapAD outperforms all methods relying solely on camera input, requiring 1-2 orders of magnitude less labeled data. Experiments also demonstrate that as the memory bank expands, the Heuristic Process with only 1.8B parameters can inherit the knowledge from a GPT-4 powered Analytic Process and achieve continuous performance improvement. Project page: https://pjlab-adg.github.io/LeapAD.
Authors: Shubham Vatsal, Ayush Singh
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on many tasks in different domains. However, their performance in closed-book biomedical machine reading comprehension (MRC) has not been evaluated in depth. In this work, we evaluate GPT on four closed-book biomedical MRC benchmarks. We experiment with different conventional prompting techniques as well as introduce our own novel prompting method. To solve some of the retrieval problems inherent to LLMs, we propose a prompting strategy named Implicit Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) that alleviates the need for using vector databases to retrieve important chunks in traditional RAG setups. Moreover, we report qualitative assessments on the natural language generation outputs from our approach. The results show that our new prompting technique is able to get the best performance in two out of four datasets and ranks second in rest of them. Experiments show that modern-day LLMs like GPT even in a zero-shot setting can outperform supervised models, leading to new state-of-the-art (SoTA) results on two of the benchmarks.
Authors: Yingshan Chang, Yonatan Bisk
Abstract: Counting is a fundamental example of generalization, whether viewed through the mathematical lens of Peano's axioms defining the natural numbers or the cognitive science literature for children learning to count. The argument holds for both cases that learning to count means learning to count infinitely. While few papers have tried to distill transformer "reasoning" to the simplest case of counting, investigating length generalization does occur throughout the literature. In the "train short, test long" paradigm of NLP, length refers to the training sentence length. In formal language recognition, length refers to the input sequence length, or the maximum stack size induced by a pushdown automata. In general problem solving, length refers to the number of hops in a deductive reasoning chain or the recursion depth. For all cases, counting is central to task success. And crucially, generalizing counting inductively is central to success on OOD instances. This work provides extensive empirical results on training language models to count. We experiment with architectures ranging from RNNs, Transformers, State-Space Models and RWKV. We present carefully-designed task formats, auxiliary tasks and positional embeddings to avoid limitations in generalization with OOD-position and OOD-vocabulary. We find that while traditional RNNs trivially achieve inductive counting, Transformers have to rely on positional embeddings to count out-of-domain. As counting is the basis for many arguments concerning the expressivity of Transformers, our finding calls for the community to reexamine the application scope of primitive functions defined in formal characterizations. Finally, modern RNNs also largely underperform traditional RNNs in generalizing counting inductively. We discuss how design choices that enable parallelized training of modern RNNs cause them to lose merits of a recurrent nature.
Authors: Hamidreza Kamkari, Brendan Leigh Ross, Rasa Hosseinzadeh, Jesse C. Cresswell, Gabriel Loaiza-Ganem
Abstract: High-dimensional data commonly lies on low-dimensional submanifolds, and estimating the local intrinsic dimension (LID) of a datum -- i.e. the dimension of the submanifold it belongs to -- is a longstanding problem. LID can be understood as the number of local factors of variation: the more factors of variation a datum has, the more complex it tends to be. Estimating this quantity has proven useful in contexts ranging from generalization in neural networks to detection of out-of-distribution data, adversarial examples, and AI-generated text. The recent successes of deep generative models present an opportunity to leverage them for LID estimation, but current methods based on generative models produce inaccurate estimates, require more than a single pre-trained model, are computationally intensive, or do not exploit the best available deep generative models: diffusion models (DMs). In this work, we show that the Fokker-Planck equation associated with a DM can provide an LID estimator which addresses the aforementioned deficiencies. Our estimator, called FLIPD, is easy to implement and compatible with all popular DMs. Applying FLIPD to synthetic LID estimation benchmarks, we find that DMs implemented as fully-connected networks are highly effective LID estimators that outperform existing baselines. We also apply FLIPD to natural images where the true LID is unknown. Despite being sensitive to the choice of network architecture, FLIPD estimates remain a useful measure of relative complexity; compared to competing estimators, FLIPD exhibits a consistently higher correlation with image PNG compression rate and better aligns with qualitative assessments of complexity. Notably, FLIPD is orders of magnitude faster than other LID estimators, and the first to be tractable at the scale of Stable Diffusion.
Authors: Yunzhen Feng, Elvis Dohmatob, Pu Yang, Francois Charton, Julia Kempe
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLM) are increasingly trained on data generated by other LLM, either because generated text and images become part of the pre-training corpus, or because synthetized data is used as a replacement for expensive human-annotation. This raises concerns about \emph{model collapse}, a drop in model performance when their training sets include generated data. Considering that it is easier for both humans and machines to tell between good and bad examples than to generate high-quality samples, we investigate the use of verification on synthesized data to prevent model collapse. We provide a theoretical characterization using Gaussian mixtures, linear classifiers, and linear verifiers to derive conditions with measurable proxies to assess whether the verifier can effectively select synthesized data that leads to optimal performance. We experiment with two practical tasks -- computing matrix eigenvalues with transformers and news summarization with LLMs -- which both exhibit model collapse when trained on generated data, and show that verifiers, even imperfect ones, can indeed be harnessed to prevent model collapse and that our proposed proxy measure strongly correlates with performance.
Authors: Qizhen Wu, Kexin Liu, Lei Chen, Jinhu L\"u
Abstract: In swarm robotics, confrontation including the pursuit-evasion game is a key scenario. High uncertainty caused by unknown opponents' strategies, dynamic obstacles, and insufficient training complicates the action space into a hybrid decision process. Although the deep reinforcement learning method is significant for swarm confrontation since it can handle various sizes, as an end-to-end implementation, it cannot deal with the hybrid process. Here, we propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning approach consisting of a target allocation layer, a path planning layer, and the underlying dynamic interaction mechanism between the two layers, which indicates the quantified uncertainty. It decouples the hybrid process into discrete allocation and continuous planning layers, with a probabilistic ensemble model to quantify the uncertainty and regulate the interaction frequency adaptively. Furthermore, to overcome the unstable training process introduced by the two layers, we design an integration training method including pre-training and cross-training, which enhances the training efficiency and stability. Experiment results in both comparison, ablation, and real-robot studies validate the effectiveness and generalization performance of our proposed approach. In our defined experiments with twenty to forty agents, the win rate of the proposed method reaches around ninety percent, outperforming other traditional methods.
Authors: Sara Court, Micha Elsner
Abstract: This work investigates the in-context learning abilities of pretrained large language models (LLMs) when instructed to translate text from a low-resource language into a high-resource language as part of an automated machine translation pipeline. We conduct a set of experiments translating Southern Quechua to Spanish and examine the informativity of various types of context retrieved from a constrained database of digitized pedagogical materials (dictionaries and grammar lessons) and parallel corpora. Using both automatic and human evaluation of model output, we conduct ablation studies that manipulate (1) context type (morpheme translations, grammar descriptions, and corpus examples), (2) retrieval methods (automated vs. manual), and (3) model type. Our results suggest that even relatively small LLMs are capable of utilizing prompt context for zero-shot low-resource translation when provided a minimally sufficient amount of relevant linguistic information. However, the variable effects of context type, retrieval method, model type, and language-specific factors highlight the limitations of using even the best LLMs as translation systems for the majority of the world's 7,000+ languages and their speakers.
Authors: Yuxuan Wan, Chaozheng Wang, Yi Dong, Wenxuan Wang, Shuqing Li, Yintong Huo, Michael R. Lyu
Abstract: Websites are critical in today's digital world, with over 1.11 billion currently active and approximately 252,000 new sites launched daily. Converting website layout design into functional UI code is a time-consuming yet indispensable step of website development. Manual methods of converting visual designs into functional code present significant challenges, especially for non-experts. To explore automatic design-to-code solutions, we first conduct a motivating study on GPT-4o and identify three types of issues in generating UI code: element omission, element distortion, and element misarrangement. We further reveal that a focus on smaller visual segments can help multimodal large language models (MLLMs) mitigate these failures in the generation process. In this paper, we propose DCGen, a divide-and-conquer-based approach to automate the translation of webpage design to UI code. DCGen starts by dividing screenshots into manageable segments, generating descriptions for each segment, and then reassembling them into complete UI code for the entire screenshot. We conduct extensive testing with a dataset comprised of real-world websites and various MLLMs and demonstrate that DCGen achieves up to a 14% improvement in visual similarity over competing methods. To the best of our knowledge, DCGen is the first segment-aware prompt-based approach for generating UI code directly from screenshots.
Authors: Rickard Br\"uel-Gabrielsson, Jiacheng Zhu, Onkar Bhardwaj, Leshem Choshen, Kristjan Greenewald, Mikhail Yurochkin, Justin Solomon
Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with low-rank adaptations (LoRAs) has become common practice, often yielding numerous copies of the same LLM differing only in their LoRA updates. This paradigm presents challenges for systems that serve real-time responses to queries that each involve a different LoRA. Prior works optimize the design of such systems but still require continuous loading and offloading of LoRAs, as it is infeasible to store thousands of LoRAs in GPU memory. To mitigate this issue, we investigate the efficacy of model compression when serving LoRAs. We propose a method for joint compression of LoRAs into a shared basis paired with LoRA-specific scaling matrices. We extend our algorithm to learn clusters of LoRAs that are more amenable to joint compression, allowing it to scale gracefully to large LoRA collections. Our experiments with up to 500 LoRAs demonstrate that compressed LoRAs preserve performance while offering major throughput gains in realistic serving scenarios with over a thousand LoRAs, maintaining 80% of the throughput of serving a single LoRA.
Authors: Wataru Hashimoto, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Taro Watanabe
Abstract: This work investigates the impact of data augmentation on confidence calibration and uncertainty estimation in Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks. For the future advance of NER in safety-critical fields like healthcare and finance, it is essential to achieve accurate predictions with calibrated confidence when applying Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), including Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), as a real-world application. However, DNNs are prone to miscalibration, which limits their applicability. Moreover, existing methods for calibration and uncertainty estimation are computational expensive. Our investigation in NER found that data augmentation improves calibration and uncertainty in cross-genre and cross-lingual setting, especially in-domain setting. Furthermore, we showed that the calibration for NER tends to be more effective when the perplexity of the sentences generated by data augmentation is lower, and that increasing the size of the augmentation further improves calibration and uncertainty.
Authors: Aleksander Ficek, Jiaqi Zeng, Oleksii Kuchaiev
Abstract: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have become popular methods for adapting large language models while minimizing compute requirements. In this paper, we apply PEFT methods (P-tuning, Adapters, and LoRA) to a modified Retrieval-Enhanced Transformer (RETRO) and a baseline GPT model across several sizes, ranging from 823 million to 48 billion parameters. We show that RETRO models outperform GPT models in zero-shot settings due to their unique pre-training process but GPT models have higher performance potential with PEFT. Additionally, our study indicates that 8B parameter models strike an optimal balance between cost and performance and P-tuning lags behind other PEFT techniques. We further provide a comparative analysis between applying PEFT to an Instruction-tuned RETRO model and base RETRO model. This work presents the first comprehensive comparison of various PEFT methods integrated with RAG, applied to both GPT and RETRO models, highlighting their relative performance.
Authors: Aditya K Surikuchi, Raquel Fern\'andez, Sandro Pezzelle
Abstract: Visual storytelling consists in generating a natural language story given a temporally ordered sequence of images. This task is not only challenging for models, but also very difficult to evaluate with automatic metrics since there is no consensus about what makes a story 'good'. In this paper, we introduce a novel method that measures story quality in terms of human likeness regarding three key aspects highlighted in previous work: visual grounding, coherence, and repetitiveness. We then use this method to evaluate the stories generated by several models, showing that the foundation model LLaVA obtains the best result, but only slightly so compared to TAPM, a 50-times smaller visual storytelling model. Upgrading the visual and language components of TAPM results in a model that yields competitive performance with a relatively low number of parameters. Finally, we carry out a human evaluation study, whose results suggest that a 'good' story may require more than a human-like level of visual grounding, coherence, and repetition.
Authors: Bo Wang, Tsunenori Mine
Abstract: This paper presents a novel and comprehensive solution to enhance both the robustness and efficiency of question answering (QA) systems through supervised contrastive learning (SCL). Training a high-performance QA system has become straightforward with pre-trained language models, requiring only a small amount of data and simple fine-tuning. However, despite recent advances, existing QA systems still exhibit significant deficiencies in functionality and training efficiency. We address the functionality issue by defining four key tasks: user input intent classification, out-of-domain input detection, new intent discovery, and continual learning. We then leverage a unified SCL-based representation learning method to efficiently build an intra-class compact and inter-class scattered feature space, facilitating both known intent classification and unknown intent detection and discovery. Consequently, with minimal additional tuning on downstream tasks, our approach significantly improves model efficiency and achieves new state-of-the-art performance across all tasks.
Authors: Marawan Elbatel, Hualiang Wang, Jixiang Chen, Hao Wang, Xiaomeng Li
Abstract: Federated semi-supervised learning (FedSemi) refers to scenarios where there may be clients with fully labeled data, clients with partially labeled, and even fully unlabeled clients while preserving data privacy. However, challenges arise from client drift due to undefined heterogeneous class distributions and erroneous pseudo-labels. Existing FedSemi methods typically fail to aggregate models from unlabeled clients due to their inherent unreliability, thus overlooking unique information from their heterogeneous data distribution, leading to sub-optimal results. In this paper, we enable unlabeled client aggregation through SemiAnAgg, a novel Semi-supervised Anchor-Based federated Aggregation. SemiAnAgg learns unlabeled client contributions via an anchor model, effectively harnessing their informative value. Our key idea is that by feeding local client data to the same global model and the same consistently initialized anchor model (i.e., random model), we can measure the importance of each unlabeled client accordingly. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SemiAnAgg achieves new state-of-the-art results on four widely used FedSemi benchmarks, leading to substantial performance improvements: a 9% increase in accuracy on CIFAR-100 and a 7.6% improvement in recall on the medical dataset ISIC-18, compared with prior state-of-the-art. Code is available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/SemiAnAgg.
Authors: Mohammad Taufeeque, Philip Quirke, Maximilian Li, Chris Cundy, Aaron David Tucker, Adam Gleave, Adri\`a Garriga-Alonso
Abstract: How a neural network (NN) generalizes to novel situations depends on whether it has learned to select actions heuristically or via a planning process. "An investigation of model-free planning" (Guez et al. 2019) found that a recurrent NN (RNN) trained to play Sokoban appears to plan, with extra computation steps improving the RNN's success rate. We replicate and expand on their behavioral analysis, finding the RNN learns to give itself extra computation steps in complex situations by "pacing" in cycles. Moreover, we train linear probes that predict the future actions taken by the network and find that intervening on the hidden state using these probes controls the agent's subsequent actions. Leveraging these insights, we perform model surgery, enabling the convolutional NN to generalize beyond its 10x10 architectural limit to arbitrarily sized inputs. The resulting model solves challenging, highly off-distribution levels. We open-source our model and code, and believe the neural network's small size (1.29M parameters) makes it an excellent model organism to deepen our understanding of learned planning.
Authors: Youngseok Yoon, Dainong Hu, Iain Weissburg, Yao Qin, Haewon Jeong
Abstract: The success of generative models has reached a unique threshold where their outputs are indistinguishable from real data, leading to the inevitable contamination of future data collection pipelines with synthetic data. While their potential to generate infinite samples initially offers promise for reducing data collection costs and addressing challenges in data-scarce fields, the severe degradation in performance has been observed when iterative loops of training and generation occur -- known as ``model collapse.'' This paper explores a practical scenario in which a pretrained text-to-image diffusion model is finetuned using synthetic images generated from a previous iteration, a process we refer to as the ``Chain of Diffusion.'' We first demonstrate the significant degradation in image quality caused by this iterative process and identify the key factor driving this decline through rigorous empirical investigations. Drawing an analogy between the Chain of Diffusion and biological evolution, we then introduce a novel theoretical analysis based on quantitative trait modeling. Our theoretical analysis aligns with empirical observations of the generated images in the Chain of Diffusion. Finally, we propose Reusable Diffusion Finetuning (ReDiFine), a simple yet effective strategy inspired by genetic mutations. ReDiFine mitigates model collapse without requiring any hyperparameter tuning, making it a plug-and-play solution for reusable image generation.
Authors: Mingming Li, Huimu Wang, Zuxu Chen, Guangtao Nie, Yiming Qiu, Guoyu Tang, Lin Liu, Jingwei Zhuo
Abstract: Generative retrieval introduces a groundbreaking paradigm to document retrieval by directly generating the identifier of a pertinent document in response to a specific query. This paradigm has demonstrated considerable benefits and potential, particularly in representation and generalization capabilities, within the context of large language models. However, it faces significant challenges in E-commerce search scenarios, including the complexity of generating detailed item titles from brief queries, the presence of noise in item titles with weak language order, issues with long-tail queries, and the interpretability of results. To address these challenges, we have developed an innovative framework for E-commerce search, called generative retrieval with preference optimization. This framework is designed to effectively learn and align an autoregressive model with target data, subsequently generating the final item through constraint-based beam search. By employing multi-span identifiers to represent raw item titles and transforming the task of generating titles from queries into the task of generating multi-span identifiers from queries, we aim to simplify the generation process. The framework further aligns with human preferences using click data and employs a constrained search method to identify key spans for retrieving the final item, thereby enhancing result interpretability. Our extensive experiments show that this framework achieves competitive performance on a real-world dataset, and online A/B tests demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness in improving conversion gains.
Authors: Ali Abdollahi, Mahdi Ghaznavi, Mohammad Reza Karimi Nejad, Arash Mari Oriyad, Reza Abbasi, Ali Salesi, Melika Behjati, Mohammad Hossein Rohban, Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah
Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are intensively used in many downstream tasks, including those requiring assessments of individuals appearing in the images. While VLMs perform well in simple single-person scenarios, in real-world applications, we often face complex situations in which there are persons of different genders doing different activities. We show that in such cases, VLMs are biased towards identifying the individual with the expected gender (according to ingrained gender stereotypes in the model or other forms of sample selection bias) as the performer of the activity. We refer to this bias in associating an activity with the gender of its actual performer in an image or text as the Gender-Activity Binding (GAB) bias and analyze how this bias is internalized in VLMs. To assess this bias, we have introduced the GAB dataset with approximately 5500 AI-generated images that represent a variety of activities, addressing the scarcity of real-world images for some scenarios. To have extensive quality control, the generated images are evaluated for their diversity, quality, and realism. We have tested 12 renowned pre-trained VLMs on this dataset in the context of text-to-image and image-to-text retrieval to measure the effect of this bias on their predictions. Additionally, we have carried out supplementary experiments to quantify the bias in VLMs' text encoders and to evaluate VLMs' capability to recognize activities. Our experiments indicate that VLMs experience an average performance decline of about 13.2% when confronted with gender-activity binding bias.
Authors: Anissa Alloula, Rima Mustafa, Daniel R McGowan, Bart{\l}omiej W. Papie\.z
Abstract: Recent work has uncovered alarming disparities in the performance of machine learning models in healthcare. In this study, we explore whether such disparities are present in the UK Biobank fundus retinal images by training and evaluating a disease classification model on these images. We assess possible disparities across various population groups and find substantial differences despite strong overall performance of the model. In particular, we discover unfair performance for certain assessment centres, which is surprising given the rigorous data standardisation protocol. We compare how these differences emerge and apply a range of existing bias mitigation methods to each one. A key insight is that each disparity has unique properties and responds differently to the mitigation methods. We also find that these methods are largely unable to enhance fairness, highlighting the need for better bias mitigation methods tailored to the specific type of bias.
Authors: Hao-Yun Hsu, Yi-Ching Cheng, Guan-Hua Huang
Abstract: This study explored the architecture of semantic segmentation and evaluated models that excel in polyp segmentation. We present an integrated framework that harnesses the advantages of different models to attain an optimal outcome. Specifically, in this framework, we fuse the learned features from convolutional and transformer models for prediction, thus engendering an ensemble technique to enhance model performance. Our experiments on polyp segmentation revealed that the proposed architecture surpassed other top models, exhibiting improved learning capacity and resilience. The code is available at https://github.com/HuangDLab/EnFormer.
Authors: Xiner Li, Yulai Zhao, Chenyu Wang, Gabriele Scalia, Gokcen Eraslan, Surag Nair, Tommaso Biancalani, Shuiwang Ji, Aviv Regev, Sergey Levine, Masatoshi Uehara
Abstract: Diffusion models excel at capturing the natural design spaces of images, molecules, DNA, RNA, and protein sequences. However, rather than merely generating designs that are natural, we often aim to optimize downstream reward functions while preserving the naturalness of these design spaces. Existing methods for achieving this goal often require ``differentiable'' proxy models (\textit{e.g.}, classifier guidance or DPS) or involve computationally expensive fine-tuning of diffusion models (\textit{e.g.}, classifier-free guidance, RL-based fine-tuning). In our work, we propose a new method to address these challenges. Our algorithm is an iterative sampling method that integrates soft value functions, which looks ahead to how intermediate noisy states lead to high rewards in the future, into the standard inference procedure of pre-trained diffusion models. Notably, our approach avoids fine-tuning generative models and eliminates the need to construct differentiable models. This enables us to (1) directly utilize non-differentiable features/reward feedback, commonly used in many scientific domains, and (2) apply our method to recent discrete diffusion models in a principled way. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm across several domains, including image generation, molecule generation, and DNA/RNA sequence generation. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/masa-ue/SVDD}{https://github.com/masa-ue/SVDD}.
URLs: https://github.com/masa-ue/SVDD, https://github.com/masa-ue/SVDD
Authors: Zifan Chen, Xinyu Nan, Jiazheng Li, Jie Zhao, Haifeng Li, Ziling Lin, Haoshen Li, Heyun Chen, Yiting Liu, Lei Tang, Li Zhang, Bin Dong
Abstract: Volumetric segmentation is important in medical imaging, but current methods face challenges like requiring lots of manual annotations and being tailored to specific tasks, which limits their versatility. General segmentation models used for natural images don't perform well with the unique features of medical images. There's a strong need for an adaptable approach that can effectively handle different 3D medical structures and imaging modalities. In this study, we present PAM (Propagating Anything Model), a segmentation approach that uses a 2D prompt, like a bounding box or sketch, to create a complete 3D segmentation of medical image volumes. PAM works by modeling relationships between slices, maintaining information flow across the 3D structure. It combines a CNN-based UNet for processing within slices and a Transformer-based attention module for propagating information between slices, leading to better generalizability across various imaging modalities. PAM significantly outperformed existing models like MedSAM and SegVol, with an average improvement of over 18.1% in dice similarity coefficient (DSC) across 44 medical datasets and various object types. It also showed stable performance despite prompt deviations and different propagation setups, and faster inference speeds compared to other models. PAM's one-view prompt design made it more efficient, reducing interaction time by about 63.6% compared to two-view prompts. Thanks to its focus on structural relationships, PAM handled unseen and complex objects well, showing a unique ability to generalize to new situations. PAM represents an advancement in medical image segmentation, effectively reducing the need for extensive manual work and specialized training. Its adaptability makes it a promising tool for more automated and reliable analysis in clinical settings.
Authors: Kaiwen Zheng, Yongxin Chen, Hanzi Mao, Ming-Yu Liu, Jun Zhu, Qinsheng Zhang
Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a popular research topic for generative modeling of discrete data, thanks to their superior performance over other discrete diffusion models, and are rivaling the auto-regressive models (ARMs) for language modeling tasks. The recent effort in simplifying the masked diffusion framework further leads to alignment with continuous-space diffusion models and more principled training and sampling recipes. In this paper, however, we reveal that both training and sampling of MDMs are theoretically free from the time variable, arguably the key signature of diffusion models, and are instead equivalent to masked models. The connection on the sampling aspect is drawn by our proposed first-hitting sampler (FHS). Specifically, we show that the FHS is theoretically equivalent to MDMs' original generation process while significantly alleviating the time-consuming categorical sampling and achieving a 20$\times$ speedup. In addition, our investigation raises doubts about whether MDMs can truly beat ARMs in text generation. We identify, for the first time, an underlying numerical issue, even with the commonly used 32-bit floating-point precision, which results in inaccurate categorical sampling. We show that it lowers the effective temperature both theoretically and empirically, and the resulting decrease in token diversity makes previous evaluations, which assess the generation quality solely through the incomplete generative perplexity metric, somewhat unfair.
Authors: Yubo Li, Saba Al-Sayouri, Rema Padman
Abstract: This study explores the potential of utilizing administrative claims data, combined with advanced machine learning and deep learning techniques, to predict the progression of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) to End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD). We analyze a comprehensive, 10-year dataset provided by a major health insurance organization to develop prediction models for multiple observation windows using traditional machine learning methods such as Random Forest and XGBoost as well as deep learning approaches such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. Our findings demonstrate that the LSTM model, particularly with a 24-month observation window, exhibits superior performance in predicting ESRD progression, outperforming existing models in the literature. We further apply SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analysis to enhance interpretability, providing insights into the impact of individual features on predictions at the individual patient level. This study underscores the value of leveraging administrative claims data for CKD management and predicting ESRD progression.
Authors: Asif Newaz, Asif Ur Rahman Adib, Taskeed Jabid
Abstract: Class imbalance in data presents significant challenges for classification tasks. It is fairly common and requires careful handling to obtain desirable performance. Traditional classification algorithms become biased toward the majority class. One way to alleviate the scenario is to make the classifiers cost-sensitive. This is achieved by assigning a higher misclassification cost to minority-class instances. One issue with this implementation is that all the minority-class instances are treated equally, and assigned with the same penalty value. However, the learning difficulties of all the instances are not the same. Instances that are located in the overlapping region or near the decision boundary are harder to classify, whereas those further away are easier. Without taking into consideration the instance complexity and naively weighting all the minority-class samples uniformly, results in an unwarranted bias and consequently, a higher number of misclassifications of the majority-class instances. This is undesirable and to overcome the situation, we propose a novel instance complexity-based cost-sensitive approach (termed 'iCost') in this study. We first categorize all the minority-class instances based on their difficulty level and then the instances are penalized accordingly. This ensures a more equitable instance weighting and prevents excessive penalization. The performance of the proposed approach is tested on 65 binary and 10 multiclass imbalanced datasets against the traditional cost-sensitive learning frameworks. A significant improvement in performance has been observed, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.
Authors: Fabio Ferreira, Moreno Schlageter, Raghu Rajan, Andre Biedenkapp, Frank Hutter
Abstract: A World Model is a compressed spatial and temporal representation of a real world environment that allows one to train an agent or execute planning methods. However, world models are typically trained on observations from the real world environment, and they usually do not enable learning policies for other real environments. We propose One-Shot World Model (OSWM), a transformer world model that is learned in an in-context learning fashion from purely synthetic data sampled from a prior distribution. Our prior is composed of multiple randomly initialized neural networks, where each network models the dynamics of each state and reward dimension of a desired target environment. We adopt the supervised learning procedure of Prior-Fitted Networks by masking next-state and reward at random context positions and query OSWM to make probabilistic predictions based on the remaining transition context. During inference time, OSWM is able to quickly adapt to the dynamics of a simple grid world, as well as the CartPole gym and a custom control environment by providing 1k transition steps as context and is then able to successfully train environment-solving agent policies. However, transferring to more complex environments remains a challenge, currently. Despite these limitations, we see this work as an important stepping-stone in the pursuit of learning world models purely from synthetic data.
Authors: Jente Vandersanden, Sascha Holl, Xingchang Huang, Gurprit Singh
Abstract: Classical generative diffusion models learn an isotropic Gaussian denoising process, treating all spatial regions uniformly, thus neglecting potentially valuable structural information in the data. Inspired by the long-established work on anisotropic diffusion in image processing, we present a novel edge-preserving diffusion model that is a generalization of denoising diffusion probablistic models (DDPM). In particular, we introduce an edge-aware noise scheduler that varies between edge-preserving and isotropic Gaussian noise. We show that our model's generative process converges faster to results that more closely match the target distribution. We demonstrate its capability to better learn the low-to-mid frequencies within the dataset, which plays a crucial role in representing shapes and structural information. Our edge-preserving diffusion process consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in unconditional image generation. It is also more robust for generative tasks guided by a shape-based prior, such as stroke-to-image generation. We present qualitative and quantitative results showing consistent improvements (FID score) of up to 30% for both tasks. We provide source code and supplementary content via the public domain edge-preserving-diffusion.mpi-inf.mpg.de .
Authors: Chenyue Li, Shuoyi Chen, Mang Ye
Abstract: Wildlife ReID involves utilizing visual technology to identify specific individuals of wild animals in different scenarios, holding significant importance for wildlife conservation, ecological research, and environmental monitoring. Existing wildlife ReID methods are predominantly tailored to specific species, exhibiting limited applicability. Although some approaches leverage extensively studied person ReID techniques, they struggle to address the unique challenges posed by wildlife. Therefore, in this paper, we present a unified, multi-species general framework for wildlife ReID. Given that high-frequency information is a consistent representation of unique features in various species, significantly aiding in identifying contours and details such as fur textures, we propose the Adaptive High-Frequency Transformer model with the goal of enhancing high-frequency information learning. To mitigate the inevitable high-frequency interference in the wilderness environment, we introduce an object-aware high-frequency selection strategy to adaptively capture more valuable high-frequency components. Notably, we unify the experimental settings of multiple wildlife datasets for ReID, achieving superior performance over state-of-the-art ReID methods. In domain generalization scenarios, our approach demonstrates robust generalization to unknown species.
Authors: Joost de Winter, Dimitra Dodou, Yke Bauke Eisma
Abstract: The processes underlying human cognition are often divided into System 1, which involves fast, intuitive thinking, and System 2, which involves slow, deliberate reasoning. Previously, large language models were criticized for lacking the deeper, more analytical capabilities of System 2. In September 2024, OpenAI introduced the o1 model series, designed to handle System 2-like reasoning. While OpenAI's benchmarks are promising, independent validation is still needed. In this study, we tested the o1-preview model twice on the Dutch 'Mathematics B' final exam. It scored a near-perfect 76 and 74 out of 76 points. For context, only 24 out of 16,414 students in the Netherlands achieved a perfect score. By comparison, the GPT-4o model scored 66 and 62 out of 76, well above the Dutch students' average of 40.63 points. Neither model had access to the exam figures. Since there was a risk of model contami-nation (i.e., the knowledge cutoff for o1-preview and GPT-4o was after the exam was published online), we repeated the procedure with a new Mathematics B exam that was published after the cutoff date. The results again indicated that o1-preview performed strongly (97.8th percentile), which suggests that contamination was not a factor. We also show that there is some variability in the output of o1-preview, which means that sometimes there is 'luck' (the answer is correct) or 'bad luck' (the output has diverged into something that is incorrect). We demonstrate that the self-consistency approach, where repeated prompts are given and the most common answer is selected, is a useful strategy for identifying the correct answer. It is concluded that while OpenAI's new model series holds great potential, certain risks must be considered.
Authors: Zhuoqun Li, Xuanang Chen, Haiyang Yu, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Qiaoyu Tang, Fei Huang, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Yongbin Li
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a key means to effectively enhance large language models (LLMs) in many knowledge-based tasks. However, existing RAG methods struggle with knowledge-intensive reasoning tasks, because useful information required to these tasks are badly scattered. This characteristic makes it difficult for existing RAG methods to accurately identify key information and perform global reasoning with such noisy augmentation. In this paper, motivated by the cognitive theories that humans convert raw information into various structured knowledge when tackling knowledge-intensive reasoning, we proposes a new framework, StructRAG, which can identify the optimal structure type for the task at hand, reconstruct original documents into this structured format, and infer answers based on the resulting structure. Extensive experiments across various knowledge-intensive tasks show that StructRAG achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly excelling in challenging scenarios, demonstrating its potential as an effective solution for enhancing LLMs in complex real-world applications.
Authors: Vishnu Sarukkai, Brennan Shacklett, Zander Majercik, Kush Bhatia, Christopher R\'e, Kayvon Fatahalian
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to automate reward engineering by leveraging their broad domain knowledge across various tasks. However, they often need many iterations of trial-and-error to generate effective reward functions. This process is costly because evaluating every sampled reward function requires completing the full policy optimization process for each function. In this paper, we introduce an LLM-driven reward generation framework that is able to produce state-of-the-art policies on the challenging Bi-DexHands benchmark with 20x fewer reward function samples than the prior state-of-the-art work. Our key insight is that we reduce the problem of generating task-specific rewards to the problem of coarsely estimating task progress. Our two-step solution leverages the task domain knowledge and the code synthesis abilities of LLMs to author progress functions that estimate task progress from a given state. Then, we use this notion of progress to discretize states, and generate count-based intrinsic rewards using the low-dimensional state space. We show that the combination of LLM-generated progress functions and count-based intrinsic rewards is essential for our performance gains, while alternatives such as generic hash-based counts or using progress directly as a reward function fall short.
Authors: Michael Zhang, Simran Arora, Rahul Chalamala, Alan Wu, Benjamin Spector, Aaryan Singhal, Krithik Ramesh, Christopher R\'e
Abstract: Recent works show we can linearize large language models (LLMs) -- swapping the quadratic attentions of popular Transformer-based LLMs with subquadratic analogs, such as linear attention -- avoiding the expensive pretraining costs. However, linearizing LLMs often significantly degrades model quality, still requires training over billions of tokens, and remains limited to smaller 1.3B to 7B LLMs. We thus propose Low-rank Linear Conversion via Attention Transfer (LoLCATs), a simple two-step method that improves LLM linearizing quality with orders of magnitudes less memory and compute. We base these steps on two findings. First, we can replace an LLM's softmax attentions with closely-approximating linear attentions, simply by training the linear attentions to match their softmax counterparts with an output MSE loss ("attention transfer"). Then, this enables adjusting for approximation errors and recovering LLM quality simply with low-rank adaptation (LoRA). LoLCATs significantly improves linearizing quality, training efficiency, and scalability. We significantly reduce the linearizing quality gap and produce state-of-the-art subquadratic LLMs from Llama 3 8B and Mistral 7B v0.1, leading to 20+ points of improvement on 5-shot MMLU. Furthermore, LoLCATs does so with only 0.2% of past methods' model parameters and 0.4% of their training tokens. Finally, we apply LoLCATs to create the first linearized 70B and 405B LLMs (50x larger than prior work). When compared with prior approaches under the same compute budgets, LoLCATs significantly improves linearizing quality, closing the gap between linearized and original Llama 3.1 70B and 405B LLMs by 77.8% and 78.1% on 5-shot MMLU.
Authors: Abdoul Aziz Amadou, Yue Zhang, Sebastien Piat, Paul Klein, Ingo Schmuecking, Tiziano Passerini, Puneet Sharma
Abstract: Quantitative evaluation of echocardiography is essential for precise assessment of cardiac condition, monitoring disease progression, and guiding treatment decisions. The diverse nature of echo images, including variations in probe types, manufacturers, and pathologies, poses challenges for developing artificial intelligent models that can generalize across different clinical practice. We introduce EchoApex, the first general-purpose vision foundation model echocardiography with applications on a variety of clinical practice. Leveraging self-supervised learning, EchoApex is pretrained on over 20 million echo images from 11 clinical centres. By incorporating task-specific decoders and adapter modules, we demonstrate the effectiveness of EchoApex on 4 different kind of clinical applications with 28 sub-tasks, including view classification, interactive structure segmentation, left ventricle hypertrophy detection and automated ejection fraction estimation from view sequences. Compared to state-of-the-art task-specific models, EchoApex attains improved performance with a unified image encoding architecture, demonstrating the benefits of model pretraining at scale with in-domain data. Furthermore, EchoApex illustrates the potential for developing a general-purpose vision foundation model tailored specifically for echocardiography, capable of addressing a diverse range of clinical applications with high efficiency and efficacy.
Authors: Cheng Yu, Haoyu Xie, Lei Shang, Yang Liu, Jun Dan, Liefeng Bo, Baigui Sun
Abstract: In the field of human-centric personalized image generation, the adapter-based method obtains the ability to customize and generate portraits by text-to-image training on facial data. This allows for identity-preserved personalization without additional fine-tuning in inference. Although there are improvements in efficiency and fidelity, there is often a significant performance decrease in test following ability, controllability, and diversity of generated faces compared to the base model. In this paper, we analyze that the performance degradation is attributed to the failure to decouple identity features from other attributes during extraction, as well as the failure to decouple the portrait generation training from the overall generation task. To address these issues, we propose the Face Adapter with deCoupled Training (FACT) framework, focusing on both model architecture and training strategy. To decouple identity features from others, we leverage a transformer-based face-export encoder and harness fine-grained identity features. To decouple the portrait generation training, we propose Face Adapting Increment Regularization~(FAIR), which effectively constrains the effect of face adapters on the facial region, preserving the generative ability of the base model. Additionally, we incorporate a face condition drop and shuffle mechanism, combined with curriculum learning, to enhance facial controllability and diversity. As a result, FACT solely learns identity preservation from training data, thereby minimizing the impact on the original text-to-image capabilities of the base model. Extensive experiments show that FACT has both controllability and fidelity in both text-to-image generation and inpainting solutions for portrait generation.
Authors: Lisa Dunlap, Krishna Mandal, Trevor Darrell, Jacob Steinhardt, Joseph E Gonzalez
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit subtle yet distinctive characteristics in their outputs that users intuitively recognize, but struggle to quantify. These "vibes" - such as tone, formatting, or writing style - influence user preferences, yet traditional evaluations focus primarily on the single axis of correctness. We introduce VibeCheck, a system for automatically comparing a pair of LLMs by discovering identifying traits of a model ("vibes") that are well-defined, differentiating, and user-aligned. VibeCheck iteratively discover vibes from model outputs, then utilizes a panel of LLM judges to quantitatively measure the utility of each vibe. We validate that the vibes generated by VibeCheck align with those found in human discovery and run VibeCheck on pairwise preference data from real-world user conversations with llama-3-70b VS GPT-4. VibeCheck reveals that Llama has a friendly, funny, and somewhat controversial vibe. These vibes predict model identity with 80% accuracy and human preference with 61% accuracy. Lastly, we run VibeCheck on a variety of models and tasks including summarization, math, and captioning to provide insight into differences in model behavior. VibeCheck discovers vibes like Command X prefers to add concrete intros and conclusions when summarizing in comparison to TNGL, Llama-405b often overexplains its thought process on math problems compared to GPT-4o, and GPT-4 prefers to focus on the mood and emotions of the scene when captioning compared to Gemini-1.5-Flash. Code can be found at https://github.com/lisadunlap/VibeCheck
Authors: Ali Borji
Abstract: The study conducted by Shumailov et al. (2024) demonstrates that repeatedly training a generative model on synthetic data leads to model collapse. This finding has generated considerable interest and debate, particularly given that current models have nearly exhausted the available data. In this work, we investigate the effects of fitting a distribution (through Kernel Density Estimation, or KDE) or a model to the data, followed by repeated sampling from it. Our objective is to develop a theoretical understanding of the phenomenon observed by Shumailov et al. (2024). Our results indicate that the outcomes reported are a statistical phenomenon and may be unavoidable.
Authors: Ruihan Yang, Caiqi Zhang, Zhisong Zhang, Xinting Huang, Sen Yang, Nigel Collier, Dong Yu, Deqing Yang
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities, they still struggle with generating factually incorrect content (i.e., hallucinations). A promising approach to mitigate this issue is enabling models to express uncertainty when unsure. Previous research on uncertainty modeling has primarily focused on short-form QA, but realworld applications often require much longer responses. In this work, we introduce the task of Long-form Generation with Uncertainty(LoGU). We identify two key challenges: Uncertainty Suppression, where models hesitate to express uncertainty, and Uncertainty Misalignment, where models convey uncertainty inaccurately. To tackle these challenges, we propose a refinement-based data collection framework and a two-stage training pipeline. Our framework adopts a divide-and-conquer strategy, refining uncertainty based on atomic claims. The collected data are then used in training through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and direct preference optimization (DPO) to enhance uncertainty expression. Extensive experiments on three long-form instruction following datasets show that our method significantly improves accuracy, reduces hallucinations, and maintains the comprehensiveness of responses.
Authors: Taiyi Wang, Zhihao Wu, Jianheng Liu, Jianye Hao, Jun Wang, Kun Shao
Abstract: On-device control agents, especially on mobile devices, are responsible for operating mobile devices to fulfill users' requests, enabling seamless and intuitive interactions. Integrating Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into these agents enhances their ability to understand and execute complex commands, thereby improving user experience. However, fine-tuning MLLMs for on-device control presents significant challenges due to limited data availability and inefficient online training processes. This paper introduces DistRL, a novel framework designed to enhance the efficiency of online RL fine-tuning for mobile device control agents. DistRL employs centralized training and decentralized data acquisition to ensure efficient fine-tuning in the context of dynamic online interactions. Additionally, the framework is backed by our tailor-made RL algorithm, which effectively balances exploration with the prioritized utilization of collected data to ensure stable and robust training. Our experiments show that, on average, DistRL delivers a 3X improvement in training efficiency and enables training data collection 2.4X faster than the leading synchronous multi-machine methods. Notably, after training, DistRL achieves a 20% relative improvement in success rate compared to state-of-the-art methods on general Android tasks from an open benchmark, significantly outperforming existing approaches while maintaining the same training time. These results validate DistRL as a scalable and efficient solution, offering substantial improvements in both training efficiency and agent performance for real-world, in-the-wild device control tasks.
Authors: Lechen Zhang, Tolga Ergen, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Moontae Lee, David Jurgens
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in many scenarios, but their performance depends, in part, on the choice of prompt. Past research has focused on optimizing prompts specific to a task. However, much less attention has been given to optimizing the general instructions included in a prompt, known as a system prompt. To address this gap, we propose SPRIG, an edit-based genetic algorithm that iteratively constructs prompts from prespecified components to maximize the model's performance in general scenarios. We evaluate the performance of system prompts on a collection of 47 different types of tasks to ensure generalizability. Our study finds that a single optimized system prompt performs on par with task prompts optimized for each individual task. Moreover, combining system and task-level optimizations leads to further improvement, which showcases their complementary nature. Experiments also reveal that the optimized system prompts generalize effectively across model families, parameter sizes, and languages. This study provides insights into the role of system-level instructions in maximizing LLM potential.
Authors: Jiaxuan Gao, Shusheng Xu, Wenjie Ye, Weilin Liu, Chuyi He, Wei Fu, Zhiyu Mei, Guangju Wang, Yi Wu
Abstract: Reward models have been increasingly critical for improving the reasoning capability of LLMs. Existing research has shown that a well-trained reward model can substantially improve model performances at inference time via search. However, the potential of reward models during RL training time still remains largely under-explored. It is currently unclear whether these reward models can provide additional training signals to enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in RL training that uses sparse success rewards, which verify the correctness of solutions. In this work, we evaluate popular reward models for RL training, including the Outcome-supervised Reward Model (ORM) and the Process-supervised Reward Model (PRM), and train a collection of LLMs for math problems using RL by combining these learned rewards with success rewards. Surprisingly, even though these learned reward models have strong inference-time performances, they may NOT help or even hurt RL training, producing worse performances than LLMs trained with the success reward only. Our analysis reveals that an LLM can receive high rewards from some of these reward models by repeating correct but unnecessary reasoning steps, leading to a severe reward hacking issue. Therefore, we introduce two novel reward refinement techniques, including Clipping and Delta. The key idea is to ensure the accumulative reward of any reasoning trajectory is upper-bounded to keep a learned reward model effective without being exploited. We evaluate our techniques with multiple reward models over a set of 1.5B and 7B LLMs on MATH and GSM8K benchmarks and demonstrate that with a carefully designed reward function, RL training without any additional supervised tuning can improve all the evaluated LLMs, including the state-of-the-art 7B LLM Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct on MATH and GSM8K benchmarks.
Authors: Aryaman Arora, Dan Jurafsky, Christopher Potts, Noah D. Goodman
Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) is a powerful technique for getting language models to perform complex tasks with no training updates. Prior work has established strong correlations between the number of in-context examples provided and the accuracy of the model's predictions. In this paper, we seek to explain this correlation by showing that ICL approximates a Bayesian learner. This perspective gives rise to a family of novel Bayesian scaling laws for ICL. In experiments with \mbox{GPT-2} models of different sizes, our scaling laws exceed or match existing scaling laws in accuracy while also offering interpretable terms for task priors, learning efficiency, and per-example probabilities. To illustrate the analytic power that such interpretable scaling laws provide, we report on controlled synthetic dataset experiments designed to inform real-world studies of safety alignment. In our experimental protocol, we use SFT to suppress an unwanted existing model capability and then use ICL to try to bring that capability back (many-shot jailbreaking). We then experiment on real-world instruction-tuned LLMs using capabilities benchmarks as well as a new many-shot jailbreaking dataset. In all cases, Bayesian scaling laws accurately predict the conditions under which ICL will cause the suppressed behavior to reemerge, which sheds light on the ineffectiveness of post-training at increasing LLM safety.
Authors: Antoine Gorceix, Bastien Le Chenadec, Ahmad Rammal, Nelson Vadori, Manuela Veloso
Abstract: In this paper, we study the ability of large language models to learn specific mathematical rules such as distributivity or simplifying equations. We present an empirical analysis of their ability to generalize these rules, as well as to reuse them in the context of word problems. For this purpose, we provide a rigorous methodology to build synthetic data incorporating such rules, and perform fine-tuning of large language models on such data. Our experiments show that our model can learn and generalize these rules to some extent, as well as suitably reuse them in the context of word problems.
Authors: Isamu Isozaki, Manil Shrestha, Rick Console, Edward Kim
Abstract: Hacking poses a significant threat to cybersecurity, inflicting billions of dollars in damages annually. To mitigate these risks, ethical hacking, or penetration testing, is employed to identify vulnerabilities in systems and networks. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown potential across various domains, including cybersecurity. However, there is currently no comprehensive, open, end-to-end automated penetration testing benchmark to drive progress and evaluate the capabilities of these models in security contexts. This paper introduces a novel open benchmark for LLM-based automated penetration testing, addressing this critical gap. We first evaluate the performance of LLMs, including GPT-4o and Llama 3.1-405B, using the state-of-the-art PentestGPT tool. Our findings reveal that while Llama 3.1 demonstrates an edge over GPT-4o, both models currently fall short of performing fully automated, end-to-end penetration testing. Next, we advance the state-of-the-art and present ablation studies that provide insights into improving the PentestGPT tool. Our research illuminates the challenges LLMs face in each aspect of Pentesting, e.g. enumeration, exploitation, and privilege escalation. This work contributes to the growing body of knowledge on AI-assisted cybersecurity and lays the foundation for future research in automated penetration testing using large language models.
Authors: Nicholas A. Caputo
Abstract: Legal theory can address two related key problems of alignment: pluralism and specification. Alignment researchers must determine how to specify what is concretely meant by vague principles like helpfulness and fairness and they must ensure that their techniques do not exclude alternative perspectives on life and values. The law faces these same problems. Leading legal theories suggest the law solves these problems through the interaction of rules and cases, where general rules promulgated by a democratic authority are given specific content through their application over time. Concrete applications allow for convergence on practical meaning while preserving space for disagreement on values. These approaches suggest improvements to existing democratic alignment processes that use AI to create cases that give content to rules, allowing for more pluralist alignment.
Authors: Jinxu Lin, Linwei Tao, Minjing Dong, Chang Xu
Abstract: As diffusion models become increasingly popular, the misuse of copyrighted and private images has emerged as a major concern. One promising solution to mitigate this issue is identifying the contribution of specific training samples in generative models, a process known as data attribution. Existing data attribution methods for diffusion models typically quantify the contribution of a training sample by evaluating the change in diffusion loss when the sample is included or excluded from the training process. However, we argue that the direct usage of diffusion loss cannot represent such a contribution accurately due to the calculation of diffusion loss. Specifically, these approaches measure the divergence between predicted and ground truth distributions, which leads to an indirect comparison between the predicted distributions and cannot represent the variances between model behaviors. To address these issues, we aim to measure the direct comparison between predicted distributions with an attribution score to analyse the training sample importance, which is achieved by Diffusion Attribution Score (DAS). Underpinned by rigorous theoretical analysis, we elucidate the effectiveness of DAS. Additionally, we explore strategies to accelerate DAS calculations, facilitating its application to large-scale diffusion models. Our extensive experiments across various datasets and diffusion models demonstrate that DAS significantly surpasses previous benchmarks in terms of the linear data-modelling score, establishing new state-of-the-art performance.
Authors: Woosung Koh, Jang Han Yoon, MinHyung Lee, Youngjin Song, Jaegwan Cho, Jaehyun Kang, Taehyeon Kim, Se-young Yun, Youngjae Yu, Bongshin Lee
Abstract: Generating high-quality charts with Large Language Models presents significant challenges due to limited data and the high cost of scaling through human curation. Instruction, data, and code triplets are scarce and expensive to manually curate as their creation demands technical expertise. To address this scalability issue, we introduce a reference-free automatic feedback generator, which eliminates the need for costly human intervention. Our novel framework, $C^2$, consists of (1) an automatic feedback provider (ChartAF) and (2) a diverse, reference-free dataset (ChartUIE-8K). Quantitative results are compelling: in our first experiment, 74% of respondents strongly preferred, and 10% preferred, the results after feedback. The second post-feedback experiment demonstrates that ChartAF outperforms nine baselines. Moreover, ChartUIE-8K significantly improves data diversity by increasing queries, datasets, and chart types by 5982%, 1936%, and 91%, respectively, over benchmarks. Finally, an LLM user study revealed that 94% of participants preferred ChartUIE-8K's queries, with 93% deeming them aligned with real-world use cases. Core contributions are available as open-source at an anonymized project site, with ample qualitative examples.