Authors: Yufei He, Yuexin Li, Jiaying Wu, Yuan Sui, Yulin Chen, Bryan Hooi
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) continue to evolve, ensuring their alignment with human goals and values remains a pressing challenge. A key concern is \textit{instrumental convergence}, where an AI system, in optimizing for a given objective, develops unintended intermediate goals that override the ultimate objective and deviate from human-intended goals. This issue is particularly relevant in reinforcement learning (RL)-trained models, which can generate creative but unintended strategies to maximize rewards. In this paper, we explore instrumental convergence in LLMs by comparing models trained with direct RL optimization (e.g., the o1 model) to those trained with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). We hypothesize that RL-driven models exhibit a stronger tendency for instrumental convergence due to their optimization of goal-directed behavior in ways that may misalign with human intentions. To assess this, we introduce InstrumentalEval, a benchmark for evaluating instrumental convergence in RL-trained LLMs. Initial experiments reveal cases where a model tasked with making money unexpectedly pursues instrumental objectives, such as self-replication, implying signs of instrumental convergence. Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of alignment challenges in AI systems and the risks posed by unintended model behaviors.
Authors: Zhiyuan Fang, Zicong Hong, Yuegui Huang, Yufeng Lyu, Wuhui Chen, Yue Yu, Fan Yu, Zibin Zheng
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various tasks, and their application in edge scenarios has attracted significant attention. However, sparse-activated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, which are well suited for edge scenarios, have received relatively little attention due to their high memory demands. Offload-based methods have been proposed to address this challenge, but they face difficulties with expert prediction. Inaccurate expert predictions can result in prolonged inference delays. To promote the application of MoE models in edge scenarios, we propose Fate, an offloading system designed for MoE models to enable efficient inference in resource-constrained environments. The key insight behind Fate is that gate inputs from adjacent layers can be effectively used for expert prefetching, achieving high prediction accuracy without additional GPU overhead. Furthermore, Fate employs a shallow-favoring expert caching strategy that increases the expert hit rate to 99\%. Additionally, Fate integrates tailored quantization strategies for cache optimization and IO efficiency. Experimental results show that, compared to Load on Demand and Expert Activation Path-based method, Fate achieves up to 4.5x and 1.9x speedups in prefill speed and up to 4.1x and 2.2x speedups in decoding speed, respectively, while maintaining inference quality. Moreover, Fate's performance improvements are scalable across different memory budgets.
Authors: Franciszek G\'orski, Oskar Wysocki, Marco Valentino, Andre Freitas
Abstract: This paper introduces ExKLoP, a novel framework designed to evaluate how effectively Large Language Models (LLMs) integrate expert knowledge into logical reasoning systems. This capability is especially valuable in engineering, where expert knowledge-such as manufacturer-recommended operational ranges-can be directly embedded into automated monitoring systems. By mirroring expert verification steps, tasks like range checking and constraint validation help ensure system safety and reliability. Our approach systematically evaluates LLM-generated logical rules, assessing both syntactic fluency and logical correctness in these critical validation tasks. We also explore the models capacity for self-correction via an iterative feedback loop based on code execution outcomes. ExKLoP presents an extensible dataset comprising 130 engineering premises, 950 prompts, and corresponding validation points. It enables comprehensive benchmarking while allowing control over task complexity and scalability of experiments. We leverage the synthetic data creation methodology to conduct extensive empirical evaluation on a diverse set of LLMs including Llama3, Gemma, Mixtral, Mistral, and Qwen. Results reveal that while models generate nearly perfect syntactically correct code, they frequently exhibit logical errors in translating expert knowledge. Furthermore, iterative self-correction yields only marginal improvements (up to 3%). Overall, ExKLoP serves as a robust evaluation platform that streamlines the selection of effective models for self-correcting systems while clearly delineating the types of errors encountered. The complete implementation, along with all relevant data, is available at GitHub.
Authors: Mohamed Aghzal, Erion Plaku, Gregory J. Stein, Ziyu Yao
Abstract: The planning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has garnered increasing attention in recent years due to their remarkable capacity for multi-step reasoning and their ability to generalize across a wide range of domains. While some researchers emphasize the potential of LLMs to perform complex planning tasks, others highlight significant limitations in their performance, particularly when these models are tasked with handling the intricacies of long-horizon reasoning. In this survey, we critically investigate existing research on the use of LLMs in automated planning, examining both their successes and shortcomings in detail. We illustrate that although LLMs are not well-suited to serve as standalone planners because of these limitations, they nonetheless present an enormous opportunity to enhance planning applications when combined with other approaches. Thus, we advocate for a balanced methodology that leverages the inherent flexibility and generalized knowledge of LLMs alongside the rigor and cost-effectiveness of traditional planning methods.
Authors: Pin-Yu Chen
Abstract: AI safety is a rapidly growing area of research that seeks to prevent the harm and misuse of frontier AI technology, particularly with respect to generative AI (GenAI) tools that are capable of creating realistic and high-quality content through text prompts. Examples of such tools include large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. As the performance of various leading GenAI models approaches saturation due to similar training data sources and neural network architecture designs, the development of reliable safety guardrails has become a key differentiator for responsibility and sustainability. This paper presents a formalization of the concept of computational safety, which is a mathematical framework that enables the quantitative assessment, formulation, and study of safety challenges in GenAI through the lens of signal processing theory and methods. In particular, we explore two exemplary categories of computational safety challenges in GenAI that can be formulated as hypothesis testing problems. For the safety of model input, we show how sensitivity analysis and loss landscape analysis can be used to detect malicious prompts with jailbreak attempts. For the safety of model output, we elucidate how statistical signal processing and adversarial learning can be used to detect AI-generated content. Finally, we discuss key open research challenges, opportunities, and the essential role of signal processing in computational AI safety.
Authors: Lei Wang, Zheqing Zhang, Xu Chen
Abstract: Homans' Social Exchange Theory (SET) is widely recognized as a basic framework for understanding the formation and emergence of human civilizations and social structures. In social science, this theory is typically studied based on simple simulation experiments or real-world human studies, both of which either lack realism or are too expensive to control. In artificial intelligence, recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities in simulating human behaviors. Inspired by these insights, we adopt an interdisciplinary research perspective and propose using LLM-based agents to study Homans' SET. Specifically, we construct a virtual society composed of three LLM agents and have them engage in a social exchange game to observe their behaviors. Through extensive experiments, we found that Homans' SET is well validated in our agent society, demonstrating the consistency between the agent and human behaviors. Building on this foundation, we intentionally alter the settings of the agent society to extend the traditional Homans' SET, making it more comprehensive and detailed. To the best of our knowledge, this paper marks the first step in studying Homans' SET with LLM-based agents. More importantly, it introduces a novel and feasible research paradigm that bridges the fields of social science and computer science through LLM-based agents. Code is available at https://github.com/Paitesanshi/SET.
Authors: Kounianhua Du, Hanjing Wang, Jianxing Liu, Jizheng Chen, Xinyi Dai, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Jun Wang, Weinan Zhang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various domains, particularly in system 1 tasks, yet the intricacies of their problem-solving mechanisms in system 2 tasks are not sufficiently explored. Recent research on System2-to-System1 methods surge, exploring the System 2 reasoning knowledge via inference-time computation and compressing the explored knowledge into System 1 process. In this paper, we focus on code generation, which is a representative System 2 task, and identify two primary challenges: (1) the complex hidden reasoning processes and (2) the heterogeneous data distributions that complicate the exploration and training of robust LLM solvers. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel BDC framework that explores insightful System 2 knowledge of LLMs using a MC-Tree-Of-Agents algorithm with mutual \textbf{B}oosting, \textbf{D}isentangles the heterogeneous training data for composable LoRA-experts, and obtain \textbf{C}ustomized problem solver for each data instance with an input-aware hypernetwork to weight over the LoRA-experts, offering effectiveness, flexibility, and robustness. This framework leverages multiple LLMs through mutual verification and boosting, integrated into a Monte-Carlo Tree Search process enhanced by reflection-based pruning and refinement. Additionally, we introduce the DisenLora algorithm, which clusters heterogeneous data to fine-tune LLMs into composable Lora experts, enabling the adaptive generation of customized problem solvers through an input-aware hypernetwork. This work lays the groundwork for advancing LLM capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, offering a novel System2-to-System1 solution.
Authors: Shubham Parashar, Blake Olson, Sambhav Khurana, Eric Li, Hongyi Ling, James Caverlee, Shuiwang Ji
Abstract: We examine the reasoning and planning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in solving complex tasks. Recent advances in inference-time techniques demonstrate the potential to enhance LLM reasoning without additional training by exploring intermediate steps during inference. Notably, OpenAI's o1 model shows promising performance through its novel use of multi-step reasoning and verification. Here, we explore how scaling inference-time techniques can improve reasoning and planning, focusing on understanding the tradeoff between computational cost and performance. To this end, we construct a comprehensive benchmark, known as Sys2Bench, and perform extensive experiments evaluating existing inference-time techniques on eleven diverse tasks across five categories, including arithmetic reasoning, logical reasoning, common sense reasoning, algorithmic reasoning, and planning. Our findings indicate that simply scaling inference-time computation has limitations, as no single inference-time technique consistently performs well across all reasoning and planning tasks.
Authors: Yong Zhao, Kai Xu, Zhengqiu Zhu, Yue Hu, Zhiheng Zheng, Yingfeng Chen, Yatai Ji, Chen Gao, Yong Li, Jincai Huang
Abstract: Embodied Question Answering (EQA) has primarily focused on indoor environments, leaving the complexities of urban settings - spanning environment, action, and perception - largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce CityEQA, a new task where an embodied agent answers open-vocabulary questions through active exploration in dynamic city spaces. To support this task, we present CityEQA-EC, the first benchmark dataset featuring 1,412 human-annotated tasks across six categories, grounded in a realistic 3D urban simulator. Moreover, we propose Planner-Manager-Actor (PMA), a novel agent tailored for CityEQA. PMA enables long-horizon planning and hierarchical task execution: the Planner breaks down the question answering into sub-tasks, the Manager maintains an object-centric cognitive map for spatial reasoning during the process control, and the specialized Actors handle navigation, exploration, and collection sub-tasks. Experiments demonstrate that PMA achieves 60.7% of human-level answering accuracy, significantly outperforming frontier-based baselines. While promising, the performance gap compared to humans highlights the need for enhanced visual reasoning in CityEQA. This work paves the way for future advancements in urban spatial intelligence. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/BiluYong/CityEQA.git.
Authors: Shuo Wang, Renhao Li, Xi Chen, Yulin Yuan, Derek F. Wong, Min Yang
Abstract: With the different roles that AI is expected to play in human life, imbuing large language models (LLMs) with different personalities has attracted increasing research interests. While the "personification" enhances human experiences of interactivity and adaptability of LLMs, it gives rise to critical concerns about content safety, particularly regarding bias, sentiment and toxicity of LLM generation. This study explores how assigning different personality traits to LLMs affects the toxicity and biases of their outputs. Leveraging the widely accepted HEXACO personality framework developed in social psychology, we design experimentally sound prompts to test three LLMs' performance on three toxic and bias benchmarks. The findings demonstrate the sensitivity of all three models to HEXACO personality traits and, more importantly, a consistent variation in the biases, negative sentiment and toxicity of their output. In particular, adjusting the levels of several personality traits can effectively reduce bias and toxicity in model performance, similar to humans' correlations between personality traits and toxic behaviors. The findings highlight the additional need to examine content safety besides the efficiency of training or fine-tuning methods for LLM personification. They also suggest a potential for the adjustment of personalities to be a simple and low-cost method to conduct controlled text generation.
Authors: Yu Zhang, Shujun Peng, Nengwu Wu, Xinhan Lin, Yang Hu, Jie Tang
Abstract: Recently, substantial advancements have been made in training language models to carry out step-by-step reasoning for solving intricate numerical reasoning tasks. Beyond the methods used to solve these problems, the structure and formulation of the problems themselves also play a crucial role in determining the performance of large language models. We observe that even small changes in the surface form of mathematical problems can have a profound impact on both the answer distribution and solve rate. This highlights the vulnerability of LLMs to surface-level variations, revealing its limited robustness when reasoning through complex problems. In this paper, we propose RM-PoT, a three-stage framework that integrates problem reformulation (RM), code-aided reasoning (PoT), and domain-aware few-shot learning to address these limitations. Our approach first reformulates the input problem into diverse surface forms to reduce structural bias, then retrieves five semantically aligned examples from a pre-constructed domain-specific question bank to provide contextual guidance, and finally generates executable Python code for precise computation.
Authors: Xiang Liu, Penglei Sun, Shuyan Chen, Longhan Zhang, Peijie Dong, Huajie You, Yongqi Zhang, Chang Yan, Xiaowen Chu, Tong-yi Zhang
Abstract: The rapid advancement of perovskite solar cells (PSCs) has led to an exponential growth in research publications, creating an urgent need for efficient knowledge management and reasoning systems in this domain. We present a comprehensive knowledge-enhanced system for PSCs that integrates three key components. First, we develop Perovskite-KG, a domain-specific knowledge graph constructed from 1,517 research papers, containing 23,789 entities and 22,272 relationships. Second, we create two complementary datasets: Perovskite-Chat, comprising 55,101 high-quality question-answer pairs generated through a novel multi-agent framework, and Perovskite-Reasoning, containing 2,217 carefully curated materials science problems. Third, we introduce two specialized large language models: Perovskite-Chat-LLM for domain-specific knowledge assistance and Perovskite-Reasoning-LLM for scientific reasoning tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our system significantly outperforms existing models in both domain-specific knowledge retrieval and scientific reasoning tasks, providing researchers with effective tools for literature review, experimental design, and complex problem-solving in PSC research.
Authors: Xinlong Chen, Yuanxing Zhang, Chongling Rao, Yushuo Guan, Jiaheng Liu, Fuzheng Zhang, Chengru Song, Qiang Liu, Di Zhang, Tieniu Tan
Abstract: The training of controllable text-to-video (T2V) models relies heavily on the alignment between videos and captions, yet little existing research connects video caption evaluation with T2V generation assessment. This paper introduces VidCapBench, a video caption evaluation scheme specifically designed for T2V generation, agnostic to any particular caption format. VidCapBench employs a data annotation pipeline, combining expert model labeling and human refinement, to associate each collected video with key information spanning video aesthetics, content, motion, and physical laws. VidCapBench then partitions these key information attributes into automatically assessable and manually assessable subsets, catering to both the rapid evaluation needs of agile development and the accuracy requirements of thorough validation. By evaluating numerous state-of-the-art captioning models, we demonstrate the superior stability and comprehensiveness of VidCapBench compared to existing video captioning evaluation approaches. Verification with off-the-shelf T2V models reveals a significant positive correlation between scores on VidCapBench and the T2V quality evaluation metrics, indicating that VidCapBench can provide valuable guidance for training T2V models. The project is available at https://github.com/VidCapBench/VidCapBench.
Authors: Kathrin Se{\ss}ler, Arne Bewersdorff, Claudia Nerdel, Enkelejda Kasneci
Abstract: Effective feedback is essential for fostering students' success in scientific inquiry. With advancements in artificial intelligence, large language models (LLMs) offer new possibilities for delivering instant and adaptive feedback. However, this feedback often lacks the pedagogical validation provided by real-world practitioners. To address this limitation, our study evaluates and compares the feedback quality of LLM agents with that of human teachers and science education experts on student-written experimentation protocols. Four blinded raters, all professionals in scientific inquiry and science education, evaluated the feedback texts generated by 1) the LLM agent, 2) the teachers and 3) the science education experts using a five-point Likert scale based on six criteria of effective feedback: Feed Up, Feed Back, Feed Forward, Constructive Tone, Linguistic Clarity, and Technical Terminology. Our results indicate that LLM-generated feedback shows no significant difference to that of teachers and experts in overall quality. However, the LLM agent's performance lags in the Feed Back dimension, which involves identifying and explaining errors within the student's work context. Qualitative analysis highlighted the LLM agent's limitations in contextual understanding and in the clear communication of specific errors. Our findings suggest that combining LLM-generated feedback with human expertise can enhance educational practices by leveraging the efficiency of LLMs and the nuanced understanding of educators.
Authors: Nandakishor M, Anjali M
Abstract: Creating personalized and adaptable conversational AI remains a key challenge. This paper introduces a Continuous Learning Conversational AI (CLCA) approach, implemented using A2C reinforcement learning, to move beyond static Large Language Models (LLMs). We use simulated sales dialogues, generated by LLMs, to train an A2C agent. This agent learns to optimize conversation strategies for personalization, focusing on engagement and delivering value. Our system architecture integrates reinforcement learning with LLMs for both data creation and response selection. This method offers a practical way to build personalized AI companions that evolve through continuous learning, advancing beyond traditional static LLM techniques.
Authors: Mourad Aouini, Jinan Loubani
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have demonstrated remarkable success in solving complex tasks across a wide range of general-purpose applications. However, their performance often degrades in context-specific scenarios, such as specialized industries or research domains, where the absence of domain-relevant knowledge leads to imprecise or suboptimal outcomes. To address this challenge, our work introduces a systematic approach to enhance the contextual adaptability of LLM-based agents by optimizing their underlying prompts-critical components that govern agent behavior, roles, and interactions. Manually crafting optimized prompts for context-specific tasks is labor-intensive, error-prone, and lacks scalability. In this work, we introduce an Extractor-Generator framework designed to automate the optimization of contextual LLM-based agents. Our method operates through two key stages: (i) feature extraction from a dataset of gold-standard input-output examples, and (ii) prompt generation via a high-level optimization strategy that iteratively identifies underperforming cases and applies self-improvement techniques. This framework substantially improves prompt adaptability by enabling more precise generalization across diverse inputs, particularly in context-specific tasks where maintaining semantic consistency and minimizing error propagation are critical for reliable performance. Although developed with single-stage workflows in mind, the approach naturally extends to multi-stage workflows, offering broad applicability across various agent-based systems. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances the performance of prompt-optimized agents, providing a structured and efficient approach to contextual LLM-based agents.
Authors: Wenjun Li, Dexun Li, Kuicai Dong, Cong Zhang, Hao Zhang, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Liu
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable emergent capabilities, transforming the execution of functional tasks by leveraging external tools for complex problems that require specialized processing or real-time data. While existing research expands LLMs access to diverse tools (e.g., program interpreters, search engines, weather/map apps), the necessity of using these tools is often overlooked, leading to indiscriminate tool invocation. This naive approach raises two key issues:(1) increased delays due to unnecessary tool calls, and (2) potential errors resulting from faulty interactions with external tools. In this paper, we introduce meta-cognition as a proxy for LLMs self-assessment of their capabilities, representing the model's awareness of its own limitations. Based on this, we propose MeCo, an adaptive decision-making strategy for external tool use. MeCo quantifies metacognitive scores by capturing high-level cognitive signals in the representation space, guiding when to invoke tools. Notably, MeCo is fine-tuning-free and incurs minimal cost. Our experiments show that MeCo accurately detects LLMs' internal cognitive signals and significantly improves tool-use decision-making across multiple base models and benchmarks.
Authors: Avinash Kori, Antonio Rago, Francesca Toni
Abstract: Deep learning models are powerful image classifiers but their opacity hinders their trustworthiness. Explanation methods for capturing the reasoning process within these classifiers faithfully and in a clear manner are scarce, due to their sheer complexity and size. We provide a solution for this problem by defining a novel method for explaining the outputs of image classifiers with debates between two agents, each arguing for a particular class. We obtain these debates as concrete instances of Free Argumentative eXchanges (FAXs), a novel argumentation-based multi-agent framework allowing agents to internalise opinions by other agents differently than originally stated. We define two metrics (consensus and persuasion rate) to assess the usefulness of FAXs as argumentative explanations for image classifiers. We then conduct a number of empirical experiments showing that FAXs perform well along these metrics as well as being more faithful to the image classifiers than conventional, non-argumentative explanation methods. All our implementations can be found at https://github.com/koriavinash1/FAX.
Authors: Frederic Kirstein, Muneeb Khan, Jan Philip Wahle, Terry Ruas, Bela Gipp
Abstract: Meeting summarization suffers from limited high-quality data, mainly due to privacy restrictions and expensive collection processes. We address this gap with FAME, a dataset of 500 meetings in English and 300 in German produced by MIMIC, our new multi-agent meeting synthesis framework that generates meeting transcripts on a given knowledge source by defining psychologically grounded participant profiles, outlining the conversation, and orchestrating a large language model (LLM) debate. A modular post-processing step refines these outputs, mitigating potential repetitiveness and overly formal tones, ensuring coherent, credible dialogues at scale. We also propose a psychologically grounded evaluation framework assessing naturalness, social behavior authenticity, and transcript difficulties. Human assessments show that FAME approximates real-meeting spontaneity (4.5/5 in naturalness), preserves speaker-centric challenges (3/5 in spoken language), and introduces richer information-oriented difficulty (4/5 in difficulty). These findings highlight that FAME is a good and scalable proxy for real-world meeting conditions. It enables new test scenarios for meeting summarization research and other conversation-centric applications in tasks requiring conversation data or simulating social scenarios under behavioral constraints.
Authors: Yarin Benyamin, Argaman Mordoch, Shahaf S. Shperberg, Roni Stern
Abstract: Automated Planning algorithms require a model of the domain that specifies the preconditions and effects of each action. Obtaining such a domain model is notoriously hard. Algorithms for learning domain models exist, yet it remains unclear whether learning a domain model and planning is an effective approach for numeric planning environments, i.e., where states include discrete and numeric state variables. In this work, we explore the benefits of learning a numeric domain model and compare it with alternative model-free solutions. As a case study, we use two tasks in Minecraft, a popular sandbox game that has been used as an AI challenge. First, we consider an offline learning setting, where a set of expert trajectories are available to learn from. This is the standard setting for learning domain models. We used the Numeric Safe Action Model Learning (NSAM) algorithm to learn a numeric domain model and solve new problems with the learned domain model and a numeric planner. We call this model-based solution NSAM_(+p), and compare it to several model-free Imitation Learning (IL) and Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Empirical results show that some IL algorithms can learn faster to solve simple tasks, while NSAM_(+p) allows solving tasks that require long-term planning and enables generalizing to solve problems in larger environments. Then, we consider an online learning setting, where learning is done by moving an agent in the environment. For this setting, we introduce RAMP. In RAMP, observations collected during the agent's execution are used to simultaneously train an RL policy and learn a planning domain action model. This forms a positive feedback loop between the RL policy and the learned domain model. We demonstrate experimentally the benefits of using RAMP, showing that it finds more efficient plans and solves more problems than several RL baselines.
Authors: Markus J. Buehler
Abstract: We present an agentic, autonomous graph expansion framework that iteratively structures and refines knowledge in situ. Unlike conventional knowledge graph construction methods relying on static extraction or single-pass learning, our approach couples a reasoning-native large language model with a continually updated graph representation. At each step, the system actively generates new concepts and relationships, merges them into a global graph, and formulates subsequent prompts based on its evolving structure. Through this feedback-driven loop, the model organizes information into a scale-free network characterized by hub formation, stable modularity, and bridging nodes that link disparate knowledge clusters. Over hundreds of iterations, new nodes and edges continue to appear without saturating, while centrality measures and shortest path distributions evolve to yield increasingly distributed connectivity. Our analysis reveals emergent patterns, such as the rise of highly connected 'hub' concepts and the shifting influence of 'bridge' nodes, indicating that agentic, self-reinforcing graph construction can yield open-ended, coherent knowledge structures. Applied to materials design problems, we present compositional reasoning experiments by extracting node-specific and synergy-level principles to foster genuinely novel knowledge synthesis, yielding cross-domain ideas that transcend rote summarization and strengthen the framework's potential for open-ended scientific discovery. We discuss other applications in scientific discovery and outline future directions for enhancing scalability and interpretability.
Authors: Gali Noti, Kate Donahue, Jon Kleinberg, Sigal Oren
Abstract: AI systems increasingly support human decision-making. In many cases, despite the algorithm's superior performance, the final decision remains in human hands. For example, an AI may assist doctors in determining which diagnostic tests to run, but the doctor ultimately makes the diagnosis. This paper studies such AI-assisted decision-making settings, where the human learns through repeated interactions with the algorithm. In our framework, the algorithm -- designed to maximize decision accuracy according to its own model -- determines which features the human can consider. The human then makes a prediction based on their own less accurate model. We observe that the discrepancy between the algorithm's model and the human's model creates a fundamental tradeoff. Should the algorithm prioritize recommending more informative features, encouraging the human to recognize their importance, even if it results in less accurate predictions in the short term until learning occurs? Or is it preferable to forgo educating the human and instead select features that align more closely with their existing understanding, minimizing the immediate cost of learning? This tradeoff is shaped by the algorithm's time-discounted objective and the human's learning ability. Our results show that optimal feature selection has a surprisingly clean combinatorial characterization, reducible to a stationary sequence of feature subsets that is tractable to compute. As the algorithm becomes more "patient" or the human's learning improves, the algorithm increasingly selects more informative features, enhancing both prediction accuracy and the human's understanding. Notably, early investment in learning leads to the selection of more informative features than a later investment. We complement our analysis by showing that the impact of errors in the algorithm's knowledge is limited as it does not make the prediction directly.
Authors: Sanidhya Vijayvargiya, Xuhui Zhou, Akhila Yerukola, Maarten Sap, Graham Neubig
Abstract: AI agents are increasingly being deployed to automate tasks, often based on ambiguous and underspecified user instructions. Making unwarranted assumptions and failing to ask clarifying questions can lead to suboptimal outcomes, safety risks due to tool misuse, and wasted computational resources. In this work, we study the ability of LLM agents to handle ambiguous instructions in interactive code generation settings by evaluating proprietary and open-weight models on their performance across three key steps: (a) leveraging interactivity to improve performance in ambiguous scenarios, (b) detecting ambiguity, and (c) asking targeted questions. Our findings reveal that models struggle to distinguish between well-specified and underspecified instructions. However, when models interact for underspecified inputs, they effectively obtain vital information from the user, leading to significant improvements in performance and underscoring the value of effective interaction. Our study highlights critical gaps in how current state-of-the-art models handle ambiguity in complex software engineering tasks and structures the evaluation into distinct steps to enable targeted improvements.
Authors: Yingheng Tang, Wenbin Xu, Jie Cao, Jianzhu Ma, Weilu Gao, Steve Farrell, Benjamin Erichson, Michael W. Mahoney, Andy Nonaka, Zhi Yao
Abstract: Understanding and predicting the properties of inorganic materials is crucial for accelerating advancements in materials science and driving applications in energy, electronics, and beyond. Integrating material structure data with language-based information through multi-modal large language models (LLMs) offers great potential to support these efforts by enhancing human-AI interaction. However, a key challenge lies in integrating atomic structures at full resolution into LLMs. In this work, we introduce MatterChat, a versatile structure-aware multi-modal LLM that unifies material structural data and textual inputs into a single cohesive model. MatterChat employs a bridging module to effectively align a pretrained machine learning interatomic potential with a pretrained LLM, reducing training costs and enhancing flexibility. Our results demonstrate that MatterChat significantly improves performance in material property prediction and human-AI interaction, surpassing general-purpose LLMs such as GPT-4. We also demonstrate its usefulness in applications such as more advanced scientific reasoning and step-by-step material synthesis.
Authors: Feng Luo, Rui Yang, Hao Sun, Chunyuan Deng, Jiarui Yao, Jingyan Shen, Huan Zhang, Hanjie Chen
Abstract: Understanding human preferences is crucial for improving foundation models and building personalized AI systems. However, preferences are inherently diverse and complex, making it difficult for traditional reward models to capture their full range. While fine-grained preference data can help, collecting it is expensive and hard to scale. In this paper, we introduce Decomposed Reward Models (DRMs), a novel approach that extracts diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without requiring fine-grained annotations. Our key insight is to represent human preferences as vectors and analyze them using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). By constructing a dataset of embedding differences between preferred and rejected responses, DRMs identify orthogonal basis vectors that capture distinct aspects of preference. These decomposed rewards can be flexibly combined to align with different user needs, offering an interpretable and scalable alternative to traditional reward models. We demonstrate that DRMs effectively extract meaningful preference dimensions (e.g., helpfulness, safety, humor) and adapt to new users without additional training. Our results highlight DRMs as a powerful framework for personalized and interpretable LLM alignment.
Authors: Joshua Ong Jun Leang, Giwon Hong, Wenda Li, Shay B. Cohen
Abstract: The demand for synthetic data in mathematical reasoning has increased due to its potential to enhance the mathematical capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, ensuring the validity of intermediate reasoning steps remains a significant challenge, affecting data quality. While formal verification via theorem provers effectively validates LLM reasoning, the autoformalisation of mathematical proofs remains error-prone. In response, we introduce iterative autoformalisation, an approach that iteratively refines theorem prover formalisation to mitigate errors, thereby increasing the execution rate on the Lean prover from 60% to 87%. Building upon that, we introduce Theorem Prover as a Judge (TP-as-a-Judge), a method that employs theorem prover formalisation to rigorously assess LLM intermediate reasoning, effectively integrating autoformalisation with synthetic data generation. Finally, we present Reinforcement Learning from Theorem Prover Feedback (RLTPF), a framework that replaces human annotation with theorem prover feedback in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Across multiple LLMs, applying TP-as-a-Judge and RLTPF improves benchmarks with only 3,508 samples, achieving 5.56% accuracy gain on Mistral-7B for MultiArith, 6.00% on Llama-2-7B for SVAMP, and 3.55% on Llama-3.1-8B for AQUA.
Authors: Zhengyao Jiang, Dominik Schmidt, Dhruv Srikanth, Dixing Xu, Ian Kaplan, Deniss Jacenko, Yuxiang Wu
Abstract: Machine learning, the foundation of modern artificial intelligence, has driven innovations that have fundamentally transformed the world. Yet, behind advancements lies a complex and often tedious process requiring labor and compute intensive iteration and experimentation. Engineers and scientists developing machine learning models spend much of their time on trial-and-error tasks instead of conceptualizing innovative solutions or research hypotheses. To address this challenge, we introduce AI-Driven Exploration (AIDE), a machine learning engineering agent powered by large language models (LLMs). AIDE frames machine learning engineering as a code optimization problem, and formulates trial-and-error as a tree search in the space of potential solutions. By strategically reusing and refining promising solutions, AIDE effectively trades computational resources for enhanced performance, achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple machine learning engineering benchmarks, including our Kaggle evaluations, OpenAI MLE-Bench and METRs RE-Bench.
Authors: Elahe Salari, Zohreh Azimifar
Abstract: Texture synthesis is a fundamental task in computer vision, whose goal is to generate visually realistic and structurally coherent textures for a wide range of applications, from graphics to scientific simulations. While traditional methods like tiling and patch-based techniques often struggle with complex textures, recent advancements in deep learning have transformed this field. In this paper, we propose ViT-SGAN, a new hybrid model that fuses Vision Transformers (ViTs) with a Spatial Generative Adversarial Network (SGAN) to address the limitations of previous methods. By incorporating specialized texture descriptors such as mean-variance (mu, sigma) and textons into the self-attention mechanism of ViTs, our model achieves superior texture synthesis. This approach enhances the model's capacity to capture complex spatial dependencies, leading to improved texture quality that is superior to state-of-the-art models, especially for regular and irregular textures. Comparison experiments with metrics such as FID, IS, SSIM, and LPIPS demonstrate the substantial improvement of ViT-SGAN, which underlines its efficiency in generating diverse realistic textures.
Authors: Mingchen Shao, Youjeong Kang, Xiao Hu, Hyunjung Gloria Kwak, Carl Yang, Jiaying Lu
Abstract: Heart Failure (HF) affects millions of Americans and leads to high readmission rates, posing significant healthcare challenges. While Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) such as socioeconomic status and housing stability play critical roles in health outcomes, they are often underrepresented in structured EHRs and hidden in unstructured clinical notes. This study leverages advanced large language models (LLMs) to extract SDOHs from clinical text and uses logistic regression to analyze their association with HF readmissions. By identifying key SDOHs (e.g. tobacco usage, limited transportation) linked to readmission risk, this work also offers actionable insights for reducing readmissions and improving patient care.
Authors: Zhang Ying, Wen Congcong, Sornette Didier, Zhan Chengxiang
Abstract: Earthquake forecasting remains a significant scientific challenge, with current methods falling short of achieving the performance necessary for meaningful societal benefits. Traditional models, primarily based on past seismicity and geomechanical data, struggle to capture the complexity of seismic patterns and often overlook valuable non-seismic precursors such as geophysical, geochemical, and atmospheric anomalies. The integration of such diverse data sources into forecasting models, combined with advancements in AI technologies, offers a promising path forward. AI methods, particularly deep learning, excel at processing complex, large-scale datasets, identifying subtle patterns, and handling multidimensional relationships, making them well-suited for overcoming the limitations of conventional approaches. This review highlights the importance of combining AI with geophysical knowledge to create robust, physics-informed forecasting models. It explores current AI methods, input data types, loss functions, and practical considerations for model development, offering guidance to both geophysicists and AI researchers. While many AI-based studies oversimplify earthquake prediction, neglecting critical features such as data imbalance and spatio-temporal clustering, the integration of specialized geophysical insights into AI models can address these shortcomings. We emphasize the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration, urging geophysicists to experiment with AI architectures thoughtfully and encouraging AI experts to deepen their understanding of seismology. By bridging these disciplines, we can develop more accurate, reliable, and societally impactful earthquake forecasting tools.
Authors: Jianda Yue, Tingting Li, Jian Ouyang, Jiawei Xu, Hua Tan, Zihui Chen, Changsheng Han, Huanyu Li, Songping Liang, Zhonghua Liu, Zhonghua Liu, Ying Wang
Abstract: Taste peptides have emerged as promising natural flavoring agents attributed to their unique organoleptic properties, high safety profile, and potential health benefits. However, the de novo identification of taste peptides derived from animal, plant, or microbial sources remains a time-consuming and resource-intensive process, significantly impeding their widespread application in the food industry. Here, we present TastePepAI, a comprehensive artificial intelligence framework for customized taste peptide design and safety assessment. As the key element of this framework, a loss-supervised adaptive variational autoencoder (LA-VAE) is implemented to efficiently optimizes the latent representation of sequences during training and facilitates the generation of target peptides with desired taste profiles. Notably, our model incorporates a novel taste-avoidance mechanism, allowing for selective flavor exclusion. Subsequently, our in-house developed toxicity prediction algorithm (SpepToxPred) is integrated in the framework to undergo rigorous safety evaluation of generated peptides. Using this integrated platform, we successfully identified 73 peptides exhibiting sweet, salty, and umami, significantly expanding the current repertoire of taste peptides. This work demonstrates the potential of TastePepAI in accelerating taste peptide discovery for food applications and provides a versatile framework adaptable to broader peptide engineering challenges.
Authors: Da Xiao, Qingye Meng, Shengping Li, Xingyuan Yuan
Abstract: We propose MUltiway Dynamic Dense (MUDD) connections, a simple yet effective method to address the limitations of residual connections and enhance cross-layer information flow in Transformers. Unlike existing dense connection approaches with static and shared connection weights, MUDD generates connection weights dynamically depending on hidden states at each sequence position and for each decoupled input stream (the query, key, value or residual) of a Transformer block. MUDD connections can be seamlessly integrated into any Transformer architecture to create MUDDFormer. Extensive experiments show that MUDDFormer significantly outperforms Transformers across various model architectures and scales in language modeling, achieving the performance of Transformers trained with 1.8X-2.4X compute. Notably, MUDDPythia-2.8B matches Pythia-6.9B in pretraining ppl and downstream tasks and even rivals Pythia-12B in five-shot settings, while adding only 0.23% parameters and 0.4% computation. Code in JAX and PyTorch and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Caiyun-AI/MUDDFormer .
Authors: Haonan He, Peng Ye, Yuchen Ren, Yuan Yuan, Lei Chen
Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a crucial method for efficiently fine-tuning pretrained large language models (LLMs), with its performance largely influenced by two key factors: rank and initialization strategy. Numerous LoRA variants have been proposed to enhance its performance by addressing these factors. However, these variants often compromise LoRA's usability or efficiency. In this paper, we analyze the fundamental limitations of existing methods and introduce a novel approach, GoRA (Gradient-driven Adaptive Low Rank Adaptation), which adaptively assigns ranks and initializes weights for low-rank adapters simultaneously based on gradient information. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GoRA significantly improves performance while preserving the high usability and efficiency of LoRA. On the T5 model fine-tuned for the GLUE benchmark, GoRA achieves a 5.88-point improvement over LoRA and slightly surpasses full fine-tuning. Similarly, on the Llama3.1-8B-Base model fine-tuned for GSM8k tasks, GoRA outperforms LoRA with a 5.13-point improvement and exceeds full fine-tuning in high-rank settings by a margin of 2.05 points.
Authors: Alan T. L. Bacellar, Mugdha P. Jadhao, Shashank Nag, Priscila M. V. Lima, Felipe M. G. Franca, Lizy K. John
Abstract: Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is critical for applications in healthcare, fitness, and IoT, but deploying accurate models on resource-constrained devices remains challenging due to high energy and memory demands. This paper demonstrates the application of Differentiable Weightless Neural Networks (DWNs) to HAR, achieving competitive accuracies of 96.34% and 96.67% while consuming only 56nJ and 104nJ per sample, with an inference time of just 5ns per sample. The DWNs were implemented and evaluated on an FPGA, showcasing their practical feasibility for energy-efficient hardware deployment. DWNs achieve up to 926,000x energy savings and 260x memory reduction compared to state-of-the-art deep learning methods. These results position DWNs as a nano-machine learning nanoML model for HAR, setting a new benchmark in energy efficiency and compactness for edge and wearable devices, paving the way for ultra-efficient edge AI.
Authors: Quoc Viet Nguyen, Joaquin Delgado Fernandez, Sergio Potenciano Menci
Abstract: Short term Load Forecasting (STLF) plays an important role in traditional and modern power systems. Most STLF models predominantly exploit temporal dependencies from historical data to predict future consumption. Nowadays, with the widespread deployment of smart meters, their data can contain spatiotemporal dependencies. In particular, their consumption data is not only correlated to historical values but also to the values of neighboring smart meters. This new characteristic motivates researchers to explore and experiment with new models that can effectively integrate spatiotemporal interrelations to increase forecasting performance. Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs) can leverage such interrelations by modeling relationships between smart meters as a graph and using these relationships as additional features to predict future energy consumption. While extensively studied in other spatiotemporal forecasting domains such as traffic, environments, or renewable energy generation, their application to load forecasting remains relatively unexplored, particularly in scenarios where the graph structure is not inherently available. This paper overviews the current literature focusing on STGNNs with application in STLF. Additionally, from a technical perspective, it also benchmarks selected STGNN models for STLF at the residential and aggregate levels. The results indicate that incorporating graph features can improve forecasting accuracy at the residential level; however, this effect is not reflected at the aggregate level
Authors: Tao Fan, Hanlin Gu, Xuemei Cao, Chee Seng Chan, Qian Chen, Yiqiang Chen, Yihui Feng, Yang Gu, Jiaxiang Geng, Bing Luo, Shuoling Liu, Win Kent Ong, Chao Ren, Jiaqi Shao, Chuan Sun, Xiaoli Tang, Hong Xi Tae, Yongxin Tong, Shuyue Wei, Fan Wu, Wei Xi, Mingcong Xu, He Yang, Xin Yang, Jiangpeng Yan, Hao Yu, Han Yu, Teng Zhang, Yifei Zhang, Xiaojin Zhang, Zhenzhe Zheng, Lixin Fan, Qiang Yang
Abstract: Federated Foundation Models (FedFMs) represent a distributed learning paradigm that fuses general competences of foundation models as well as privacy-preserving capabilities of federated learning. This combination allows the large foundation models and the small local domain models at the remote clients to learn from each other in a teacher-student learning setting. This paper provides a comprehensive summary of the ten challenging problems inherent in FedFMs, encompassing foundational theory, utilization of private data, continual learning, unlearning, Non-IID and graph data, bidirectional knowledge transfer, incentive mechanism design, game mechanism design, model watermarking, and efficiency. The ten challenging problems manifest in five pivotal aspects: ``Foundational Theory," which aims to establish a coherent and unifying theoretical framework for FedFMs. ``Data," addressing the difficulties in leveraging domain-specific knowledge from private data while maintaining privacy; ``Heterogeneity," examining variations in data, model, and computational resources across clients; ``Security and Privacy," focusing on defenses against malicious attacks and model theft; and ``Efficiency," highlighting the need for improvements in training, communication, and parameter efficiency. For each problem, we offer a clear mathematical definition on the objective function, analyze existing methods, and discuss the key challenges and potential solutions. This in-depth exploration aims to advance the theoretical foundations of FedFMs, guide practical implementations, and inspire future research to overcome these obstacles, thereby enabling the robust, efficient, and privacy-preserving FedFMs in various real-world applications.
Authors: Shruti Joshi, Andrea Dittadi, S\'ebastien Lachapelle, Dhanya Sridhar
Abstract: Steering methods manipulate the representations of large language models (LLMs) to induce responses that have desired properties, e.g., truthfulness, offering a promising approach for LLM alignment without the need for fine-tuning. Traditionally, steering has relied on supervision, such as from contrastive pairs of prompts that vary in a single target concept, which is costly to obtain and limits the speed of steering research. An appealing alternative is to use unsupervised approaches such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to map LLM embeddings to sparse representations that capture human-interpretable concepts. However, without further assumptions, SAEs may not be identifiable: they could learn latent dimensions that entangle multiple concepts, leading to unintentional steering of unrelated properties. We introduce Sparse Shift Autoencoders (SSAEs) that instead map the differences between embeddings to sparse representations. Crucially, we show that SSAEs are identifiable from paired observations that vary in \textit{multiple unknown concepts}, leading to accurate steering of single concepts without the need for supervision. We empirically demonstrate accurate steering across semi-synthetic and real-world language datasets using Llama-3.1 embeddings.
Authors: Xinpeng Wang, Rong Zhou, Han Xie, Xiaoying Tang, Lifang He, Carl Yang
Abstract: Multimodal Federated Learning (MFL) has emerged as a promising approach for collaboratively training multimodal models across distributed clients, particularly in healthcare domains. In the context of brain imaging analysis, modality incompleteness presents a significant challenge, where some institutions may lack specific imaging modalities (e.g., PET, MRI, or CT) due to privacy concerns, device limitations, or data availability issues. While existing work typically assumes modality completeness or oversimplifies missing-modality scenarios, we simulate a more realistic setting by considering both client-level and instance-level modality incompleteness in this study. Building on this realistic simulation, we propose ClusMFL, a novel MFL framework that leverages feature clustering for cross-institutional brain imaging analysis under modality incompleteness. Specifically, ClusMFL utilizes the FINCH algorithm to construct a pool of cluster centers for the feature embeddings of each modality-label pair, effectively capturing fine-grained data distributions. These cluster centers are then used for feature alignment within each modality through supervised contrastive learning, while also acting as proxies for missing modalities, allowing cross-modal knowledge transfer. Furthermore, ClusMFL employs a modality-aware aggregation strategy, further enhancing the model's performance in scenarios with severe modality incompleteness. We evaluate the proposed framework on the ADNI dataset, utilizing structural MRI and PET scans. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that ClusMFL achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to various baseline methods across varying levels of modality incompleteness, providing a scalable solution for cross-institutional brain imaging analysis.
Authors: Melane Navaratnarajah, Sophie A. Martin, David A. Kelly, Nathan Blake, Hana Chocker
Abstract: Explainability remains a significant problem for AI models in medical imaging, making it challenging for clinicians to trust AI-driven predictions. We introduce 3D ReX, the first causality-based post-hoc explainability tool for 3D models. 3D ReX uses the theory of actual causality to generate responsibility maps which highlight the regions most crucial to the model's decision. We test 3D ReX on a stroke detection model, providing insight into the spatial distribution of features relevant to stroke.
Authors: Andrin B\"urli, Alessandro Pau, Thomas Koller, Olivier Sauter, JET Contributors
Abstract: Controlling and monitoring plasma within a tokamak device is complex and challenging. Plasma off-normal events, such as disruptions, are hindering steady-state operation. For large devices, they can even endanger the machine's integrity and it represents in general one of the most serious concerns for the exploitation of the tokamak concept for future power plants. Effective plasma state monitoring carries the potential to enable an understanding of such phenomena and their evolution which is crucial for the successful operation of tokamaks. This paper presents the application of a transparent and data-driven methodology to monitor the plasma state in a tokamak. Compared to previous studies in the field, supervised and unsupervised learning techniques are combined. The dataset consisted of 520 expert-validated discharges from JET. The goal was to provide an interpretable plasma state representation for the JET operational space by leveraging multi-task learning for the first time in the context of plasma state monitoring. When evaluated as disruption predictors, a sequence-based approach showed significant improvements compared to the state-based models. The best resulting network achieved a promising cross-validated success rate when combined with a physical indicator and accounting for nearby instabilities. Qualitative evaluations of the learned latent space uncovered operational and disruptive regions as well as patterns related to learned dynamics and global feature importance. The applied methodology provides novel possibilities for the definition of triggers to switch between different control scenarios, data analysis, and learning as well as exploring latent dynamics for plasma state monitoring. It also showed promising quantitative and qualitative results with warning times suitable for avoidance purposes and distributions that are consistent with known physical mechanisms.
Authors: Kiarash Naghavi Khanghah, Anandkumar Patel, Rajiv Malhotra, Hongyi Xu
Abstract: Conventional predictive modeling of parametric relationships in manufacturing processes is limited by the subjectivity of human expertise and intuition on the one hand and by the cost and time of experimental data generation on the other hand. This work addresses this issue by establishing a new Large Language Model (LLM) framework. The novelty lies in combining automatic extraction of process-relevant knowledge embedded in the literature with iterative model refinement based on a small amount of experimental data. This approach is evaluated on three distinct manufacturing processes that are based on machining, deformation, and additive principles. The results show that for the same small experimental data budget the models derived by our framework have unexpectedly high extrapolative performance, often surpassing the capabilities of conventional Machine Learning. Further, our approach eliminates manual generation of initial models or expertise-dependent interpretation of the literature. The results also reveal the importance of the nature of the knowledge extracted from the literature and the significance of both the knowledge extraction and model refinement components.
Authors: Jiacheng Xie, Yingrui Ji, Linghuan Zeng, Xi Xiao, Gaofei Chen, Lijing Zhu, Joyanta Jyoti Mondal, Jiansheng Chen
Abstract: Accurate prediction of CB2 receptor ligand activity is pivotal for advancing drug discovery targeting this receptor, which is implicated in inflammation, pain management, and neurodegenerative conditions. Although conventional machine learning and deep learning techniques have shown promise, their limited interpretability remains a significant barrier to rational drug design. In this work, we introduce CB2former, a framework that combines a Graph Convolutional Network with a Transformer architecture to predict CB2 receptor ligand activity. By leveraging the Transformer's self attention mechanism alongside the GCN's structural learning capability, CB2former not only enhances predictive performance but also offers insights into the molecular features underlying receptor activity. We benchmark CB2former against diverse baseline models including Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, K Nearest Neighbors, Gradient Boosting, Extreme Gradient Boosting, Multilayer Perceptron, Convolutional Neural Network, and Recurrent Neural Network and demonstrate its superior performance with an R squared of 0.685, an RMSE of 0.675, and an AUC of 0.940. Moreover, attention weight analysis reveals key molecular substructures influencing CB2 receptor activity, underscoring the model's potential as an interpretable AI tool for drug discovery. This ability to pinpoint critical molecular motifs can streamline virtual screening, guide lead optimization, and expedite therapeutic development. Overall, our results showcase the transformative potential of advanced AI approaches exemplified by CB2former in delivering both accurate predictions and actionable molecular insights, thus fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation in drug discovery.
Authors: Haoyu Lei, Kaiwen Zhou, Yinchuan Li, Zhitang Chen, Farzan Farnia
Abstract: Diffusion-based Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) has demonstrated effectiveness in solving NP-complete (NPC) problems by learning discrete diffusion models for solution generation, eliminating hand-crafted domain knowledge. Despite their success, existing NCO methods face significant challenges in both cross-scale and cross-problem generalization, and high training costs compared to traditional solvers. While recent studies have introduced training-free guidance approaches that leverage pre-defined guidance functions for zero-shot conditional generation, such methodologies have not been extensively explored in combinatorial optimization. To bridge this gap, we propose a general energy-guided sampling framework during inference time that enhances both the cross-scale and cross-problem generalization capabilities of diffusion-based NCO solvers without requiring additional training. We provide theoretical analysis that helps understanding the cross-problem transfer capability. Our experimental results demonstrate that a diffusion solver, trained exclusively on the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), can achieve competitive zero-shot solution generation on TSP variants, such as Prize Collecting TSP (PCTSP) and the Orienteering Problem (OP), through energy-guided sampling across different problem scales.
Authors: Hongyu Yang, Qi Zhao, Zhenhua hu, Rui Li
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback and its variants excel in aligning with human intentions to generate helpful, harmless, and honest responses. However, most of them rely on costly human-annotated pairwise comparisons for supervised alignment, which is not suitable for list-level scenarios, such as community question answering. Additionally, human preferences are influenced by multiple intrinsic factors in responses, leading to decision-making inconsistencies. Therefore, we propose \textbf{Se}lf-supervised \textbf{A}ttribute-aware \textbf{d}ynamic \textbf{p}reference \textbf{ra}nking, called \shortname. \ It quantifies preference differences between responses based on Attribute-Perceptual Distance Factors (APDF) and dynamically determines the list-wise alignment order. Furthermore, it achieves fine-grained preference difference learning and enables precise alignment with the optimal one. We specifically constructed a challenging code preference dataset named StaCoCoQA, and introduced more cost-effective and scalable preference evaluation metrics: PrefHit and PrefRecall. Extensive experimental results show that SeAdpra exhibits superior performance and generalizability on both StaCoCoQA and preference datasets from eight popular domains.
Authors: Pawel Weichbroth
Abstract: The use of ChatGPT to analyze and classify evidence in criminal proceedings has been a topic of ongoing discussion. However, to the best of our knowledge, this issue has not been studied in the context of the Polish language. This study addresses this research gap by evaluating the effectiveness of ChatGPT in classifying legal cases under the Polish Penal Code. The results show excellent binary classification accuracy, with all positive and negative cases correctly categorized. In addition, a qualitative evaluation confirms that the legal basis provided for each case, along with the relevant legal content, was appropriate. The results obtained suggest that ChatGPT can effectively analyze and classify evidence while applying the appropriate legal rules. In conclusion, ChatGPT has the potential to assist interested parties in the analysis of evidence and serve as a valuable legal resource for individuals with less experience or knowledge in this area.
Authors: Norman Mu, Jonathan Lu, Michael Lavery, David Wagner
Abstract: System prompts have emerged as a critical control surface for specifying the behavior of LLMs in chat and agent settings. Developers depend on system prompts to specify important context, output format, personalities, guardrails, content policies, and safety countermeasures, all of which require models to robustly adhere to the system prompt, especially when facing conflicting or adversarial user inputs. In practice, models often forget to consider relevant guardrails or fail to resolve conflicting demands between the system and the user. In this work, we study various methods for improving system prompt robustness by creating realistic new evaluation and fine-tuning datasets based on prompts collected from from OpenAI's GPT Store and HuggingFace's HuggingChat. Our experiments assessing models with a panel of new and existing benchmarks show that performance can be considerably improved with realistic fine-tuning data, as well as inference-time interventions such as classifier-free guidance. Finally, we analyze the results of recently released reasoning models from OpenAI and DeepSeek, which show exciting but uneven improvements on the benchmarks we study. Overall, current techniques fall short of ensuring system prompt robustness and further study is warranted.
Authors: Dom Huh, Prasant Mohapatra
Abstract: Diffusion-based planning, learning, and control methods present a promising branch of powerful and expressive decision-making solutions. Given the growing interest, such methods have undergone numerous refinements over the past years. However, despite these advancements, existing methods are limited in their investigations regarding general methods for reward maximization within the decision-making process. In this work, we study extensions of fine-tuning approaches for control applications. Specifically, we explore extensions and various design choices for four fine-tuning approaches: reward alignment through reinforcement learning, direct preference optimization, supervised fine-tuning, and cascading diffusion. We optimize their usage to merge these independent efforts into one unified paradigm. We show the utility of such propositions in offline RL settings and demonstrate empirical improvements over a rich array of control tasks.
Authors: Pengxiang Lan, Haoyu Xu, Enneng Yang, Yuliang Liang, Guibing Guo, Jianzhe Zhao, Xingwei Wang
Abstract: Prompt tuning (PT) offers a cost-effective alternative to fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs), requiring only a few parameters in soft prompt tokens added before the input text. However, existing PT approaches face two significant issues: (i) They overlook intrinsic semantic associations between soft prompt tokens, leading to high discreteness and limited interactions, thus reducing the model's comprehension and effectiveness in complex tasks. (ii) Due to the complexity of downstream tasks, long soft prompt is necessitated to improve performance, but prompt length correlates positively with memory usage and computational costs. Achieving high efficiency and performance remains an ongoing challenge. To address these issues, we propose a novel Low-parameters prompt tuning (LAMP) method, which leverages prompt decomposition and compressed outer product. Specifically, the prompt decomposition module employs Truncated SVD to reduce training parameters and significantly lower the dimensionality of the soft prompt parameter space. It then utilizes a compressed outer product module to facilitate multiple interactions among prompt tokens, exploring their intrinsic associations to enhance knowledge representation. Finally, LAMP uses average pooling to reduce memory usage and training/inference time. Extensive experiments across six architectures and eight datasets demonstrate that LAMP outperforms state-of-the-art PT-based and LoRA-based methods in performance and efficiency.
Authors: Zihao Zhu, Hongbao Zhang, Mingda Zhang, Ruotong Wang, Guanzong Wu, Ke Xu, Baoyuan Wu
Abstract: Longer thought, better performance: large language models with deep reasoning capabilities, particularly o1-like models, have demonstrated remarkable performance by generating extensive thought processes during inference. This trade-off reveals a potential vulnerability: adversaries could compromise model performance by forcing immediate responses without thought processes. To this end, in this paper, we introduce a novel attack scenario targeting the long thought processes of o1-like models and propose BoT (Break CoT), which can selectively break intrinsic reasoning mechanisms through backdoor attacks. BoT constructs poisoned datasets with designed triggers and injects backdoor by either supervised fine-tuning or direct preference optimization. When triggered, the model directly generates answers without thought processes, while maintaining normal reasoning capabilities for clean inputs. Extensive experiments on open-source o1-like models, including recent DeepSeek-R1, demonstrate that BoT nearly achieves high attack success rates while maintaining clean accuracy, highlighting the critical safety risk in current models. Furthermore, the relationship between task difficulty and helpfulness reveals a potential application for good, enabling users to customize model behavior based on task complexity. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/zihao-ai/BoT}{https://github.com/zihao-ai/BoT}.
URLs: https://github.com/zihao-ai/BoT, https://github.com/zihao-ai/BoT
Authors: Jiayuan Liu, Mingyu Guo, Vincent Conitzer
Abstract: Mechanism design has long been a cornerstone of economic theory, with traditional approaches relying on mathematical derivations. Recently, automated approaches, including differentiable economics with neural networks, have emerged for designing payments and allocations. While both analytical and automated methods have advanced the field, they each face significant weaknesses: mathematical derivations are not automated and often struggle to scale to complex problems, while automated and especially neural-network-based approaches suffer from limited interpretability. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework that reformulates mechanism design as a code generation task. Using large language models (LLMs), we generate heuristic mechanisms described in code and evolve them to optimize over some evaluation metrics while ensuring key design criteria (e.g., strategy-proofness) through a problem-specific fixing process. This fixing process ensures any mechanism violating the design criteria is adjusted to satisfy them, albeit with some trade-offs in performance metrics. These trade-offs are factored in during the LLM-based evolution process. The code generation capabilities of LLMs enable the discovery of novel and interpretable solutions, bridging the symbolic logic of mechanism design and the generative power of modern AI. Through rigorous experimentation, we demonstrate that LLM-generated mechanisms achieve competitive performance while offering greater interpretability compared to previous approaches. Notably, our framework can rediscover existing manually designed mechanisms and provide insights into neural-network based solutions through Programming-by-Example. These results highlight the potential of LLMs to not only automate but also enhance the transparency and scalability of mechanism design, ensuring safe deployment of the mechanisms in society.
Authors: Xianbing Zhao, Yiqing Lyu, Di Wang, Buzhou Tang
Abstract: Automatic depression detection provides cues for early clinical intervention by clinicians. Clinical interviews for depression detection involve dialogues centered around multiple themes. Existing studies primarily design end-to-end neural network models to capture the hierarchical structure of clinical interview dialogues. However, these methods exhibit defects in modeling the thematic content of clinical interviews: 1) they fail to capture intra-theme and inter-theme correlation explicitly, and 2) they do not allow clinicians to intervene and focus on themes of interest. To address these issues, this paper introduces an interactive depression detection framework. This framework leverages in-context learning techniques to identify themes in clinical interviews and then models both intra-theme and inter-theme correlation. Additionally, it employs AI-driven feedback to simulate the interests of clinicians, enabling interactive adjustment of theme importance. PDIMC achieves absolute improvements of 35\% and 12\% compared to the state-of-the-art on the depression detection dataset DAIC-WOZ, which demonstrates the effectiveness of modeling theme correlation and incorporating interactive external feedback.
Authors: Jiayu Zhang, Zhiyu Zhu, Xinyi Wang, Silin Liao, Zhibo Jin, Flora D. Salim, Huaming Chen
Abstract: Deep neural networks have demonstrated remarkable performance across various domains. However, they are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which can lead to erroneous predictions. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can leverage the generators and discriminators model to quickly produce high-quality adversarial examples. Since both modules train in a competitive and simultaneous manner, GAN-based algorithms like AdvGAN can generate adversarial examples with better transferability compared to traditional methods. However, the generation of perturbations is usually limited to a single iteration, preventing these examples from fully exploiting the potential of the methods. To tackle this issue, we introduce a novel approach named Progressive Auto-Regression AdvGAN (PAR-AdvGAN). It incorporates an auto-regressive iteration mechanism within a progressive generation network to craft adversarial examples with enhanced attack capability. We thoroughly evaluate our PAR-AdvGAN method with a large-scale experiment, demonstrating its superior performance over various state-of-the-art black-box adversarial attacks, as well as the original AdvGAN.Moreover, PAR-AdvGAN significantly accelerates the adversarial example generation, i.e., achieving the speeds of up to 335.5 frames per second on Inception-v3 model, outperforming the gradient-based transferable attack algorithms. Our code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PAR-01BF/
Authors: Xiaolei Lu
Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated strong capacity in supporting a wide variety of applications. Shapley value has emerged as a prominent tool to analyze feature importance to help people understand the inference process of deep neural models. Computing Shapley value function requires choosing a baseline to represent feature's missingness. However, existing random and conditional baselines could negatively influence the explanation. In this paper, by analyzing the suboptimality of different baselines, we identify the problematic baseline where the asymmetric interaction between $\bm{x}'_i$ (the replacement of the faithful influential feature) and other features has significant directional bias toward the model's output, and conclude that $p(y|\bm{x}'_i) = p(y)$ potentially minimizes the asymmetric interaction involving $\bm{x}'_i$. We further generalize the uninformativeness of $\bm{x}'_i$ toward the label space $L$ to avoid estimating $p(y)$ and design a simple uncertainty-based reweighting mechanism to accelerate the computation process. We conduct experiments on various NLP tasks and our quantitative analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed uncertainty-based reweighting mechanism. Furthermore, by measuring the consistency of explanations generated by explainable methods and human, we highlight the disparity between model inference and human understanding.
Authors: Papa Abdou Karim Karou Diallo, Amal Zouaq
Abstract: Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing have significantly improved the extraction of structured semantic representations from unstructured text, especially through Frame Semantic Role Labeling (FSRL). Despite this progress, the potential of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models for frame detection remains under-explored. In this paper, we present the first RAG-based approach for frame detection called RCIF (Retrieve Candidates and Identify Frames). RCIF is also the first approach to operate without the need for explicit target span and comprises three main stages: (1) generation of frame embeddings from various representations ; (2) retrieval of candidate frames given an input text; and (3) identification of the most suitable frames. We conducted extensive experiments across multiple configurations, including zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings. Our results show that our retrieval component significantly reduces the complexity of the task by narrowing the search space thus allowing the frame identifier to refine and complete the set of candidates. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on FrameNet 1.5 and 1.7, demonstrating its robustness in scenarios where only raw text is provided. Furthermore, we leverage the structured representation obtained through this method as a proxy to enhance generalization across lexical variations in the task of translating natural language questions into SPARQL queries.
Authors: Lingxiao Cao, Bin Wang, Guiyuan Jiang, Yanwei Yu, Junyu Dong
Abstract: Traffic prediction is critical for optimizing travel scheduling and enhancing public safety, yet the complex spatial and temporal dynamics within traffic data present significant challenges for accurate forecasting. In this paper, we introduce a novel model, the Spatiotemporal-aware Trend-Seasonality Decomposition Network (STDN). This model begins by constructing a dynamic graph structure to represent traffic flow and incorporates novel spatio-temporal embeddings to jointly capture global traffic dynamics. The representations learned are further refined by a specially designed trend-seasonality decomposition module, which disentangles the trend-cyclical component and seasonal component for each traffic node at different times within the graph. These components are subsequently processed through an encoder-decoder network to generate the final predictions. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world traffic datasets demonstrate that STDN achieves superior performance with remarkable computation cost. Furthermore, we have released a new traffic dataset named JiNan, which features unique inner-city dynamics, thereby enriching the scenario comprehensiveness in traffic prediction evaluation.
Authors: Guanghao Li, Wenhao Jiang, Li Shen, Ming Tang, Chun Yuan
Abstract: Resource limitations often constrain the parameter counts of Large Language Models (LLMs), hindering their performance. While existing methods employ parameter sharing to reuse the same parameter set under fixed budgets, such approaches typically force each layer to assume multiple roles with a predetermined number of iterations, restricting efficiency and adaptability. In this work, we propose the Zero Token Transformer (ZTT), which features a head-tail decoupled parameter cycling method. We disentangle the first (head) and last (tail) layers from parameter cycling and iteratively refine only the intermediate layers. Furthermore, we introduce a Zero-Token Mechanism, an internal architectural component rather than an input token, to guide layer-specific computation. At each cycle, the model retrieves a zero token (with trainable key values) from a Zero-Token Pool, integrating it alongside regular tokens in the attention mechanism. The corresponding attention scores not only reflect each layer's computational importance but also enable dynamic early exits without sacrificing overall model accuracy. Our approach achieves superior performance under tight parameter budgets, effectively reduces computational overhead via early exits, and can be readily applied to fine-tune existing pre-trained models for enhanced efficiency and adaptability.
Authors: Zhiyuan Zeng, Qinyuan Cheng, Zhangyue Yin, Yunhua Zhou, Xipeng Qiu
Abstract: The advent of test-time scaling in large language models (LLMs), exemplified by OpenAI's o1 series, has advanced reasoning capabilities by scaling computational resource allocation during inference. While successors like QwQ, Deepseek-R1 (R1) and LIMO replicate these advancements, whether these models truly possess test-time scaling capabilities remains underexplored. This study found that longer CoTs of these o1-like models do not consistently enhance accuracy; in fact, correct solutions are often shorter than incorrect ones for the same questions. Further investigation shows this phenomenon is closely related to models' self-revision capabilities - longer CoTs contain more self-revisions, which often lead to performance degradation. We then compare sequential and parallel scaling strategies on QwQ, R1 and LIMO, finding that parallel scaling achieves better coverage and scalability. Based on these insights, we propose Shortest Majority Vote, a method that combines parallel scaling strategies with CoT length characteristics, significantly improving models' test-time scalability compared to conventional majority voting approaches.
Authors: Kan Zhu, Tian Tang, Qinyu Xu, Yile Gu, Zhichen Zeng, Rohan Kadekodi, Liangyu Zhao, Ang Li, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Baris Kasikci
Abstract: Long-context models are essential for many applications but face inefficiencies in loading large KV caches during decoding. Prior methods enforce fixed token budgets for sparse attention, assuming a set number of tokens can approximate full attention. However, these methods overlook variations in the importance of attention across heads, layers, and contexts. To address these limitations, we propose Tactic, a sparsity-adaptive and calibration-free sparse attention mechanism that dynamically selects tokens based on their cumulative attention scores rather than a fixed token budget. By setting a target fraction of total attention scores, Tactic ensures that token selection naturally adapts to variations in attention sparsity. To efficiently approximate this selection, Tactic leverages clustering-based sorting and distribution fitting, allowing it to accurately estimate token importance with minimal computational overhead. We show that Tactic outperforms existing sparse attention algorithms, achieving superior accuracy and up to 7.29x decode attention speedup. This improvement translates to an overall 1.58x end-to-end inference speedup, making Tactic a practical and effective solution for long-context LLM inference in accuracy-sensitive applications.
Authors: Zhixiang Wang, Zhenyu Mao, Yixuan Qiao, Yunfang Wu, Biye Li
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities, but their high computational costs pose challenges for customization. Model merging offers a cost-effective alternative, yet existing methods suffer from interference among parameters, leading to performance degradation. In this work, we propose Optimal Brain Iterative Merging (OBIM), a novel method designed to mitigate both intra-model and inter-model interference. OBIM consists of two key components: (1) A saliency measurement mechanism that evaluates parameter importance based on loss changes induced by individual weight alterations, reducing intra-model interference by preserving only high-saliency parameters. (2) A mutually exclusive iterative merging framework, which incrementally integrates models using a binary mask to avoid direct parameter averaging, thereby mitigating inter-model interference. We validate OBIM through experiments on both Supervised Fine-Tuned (SFT) models and post-pretrained checkpoints. The results show that OBIM significantly outperforms existing merging techniques. Overall, OBIM provides an effective and practical solution for enhancing LLM merging.
Authors: Andrea Apicella, Salvatore Giugliano, Francesco Isgr\`o, Roberto Prevete
Abstract: The eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) research predominantly concentrates to provide explainations about AI model decisions, especially Deep Learning (DL) models. However, there is a growing interest in using XAI techniques to automatically improve the performance of the AI systems themselves. This paper proposes IMPACTX, a novel approach that leverages XAI as a fully automated attention mechanism, without requiring external knowledge or human feedback. Experimental results show that IMPACTX has improved performance respect to the standalone ML model by integrating an attention mechanism based an XAI method outputs during the model training. Furthermore, IMPACTX directly provides proper feature attribution maps for the model's decisions, without relying on external XAI methods during the inference process. Our proposal is evaluated using three widely recognized DL models (EfficientNet-B2, MobileNet, and LeNet-5) along with three standard image datasets: CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and STL-10. The results show that IMPACTX consistently improves the performance of all the inspected DL models across all evaluated datasets, and it directly provides appropriate explanations for its responses.
Authors: Jake Vasilakes
Abstract: Many existing approaches for learning from labeled data assume the existence of gold-standard labels. According to these approaches, inter-annotator disagreement is seen as noise to be removed, either through refinement of annotation guidelines, label adjudication, or label filtering. However, annotator disagreement can rarely be totally eradicated, especially on more subjective tasks such as sentiment analysis or hate speech detection where disagreement is natural. Therefore, a new approach to learning from labeled data, called data perspectivism, seeks to leverage inter-annotator disagreement to learn models that stay true to the inherent uncertainty of the task by treating annotations as opinions of the annotators, rather than gold-standard facts. Despite this conceptual grounding, existing methods under data perspectivism are limited to using disagreement as the sole source of annotation uncertainty. To expand the possibilities of data perspectivism, we introduce Subjective Logic Encodings (SLEs), a flexible framework for constructing classification targets that explicitly encodes annotations as opinions of the annotators. Based on Subjective Logic Theory, SLEs encode labels as Dirichlet distributions and provide principled methods for encoding and aggregating various types of annotation uncertainty -- annotator confidence, reliability, and disagreement -- into the targets. We show that SLEs are a generalization of other types of label encodings as well as how to estimate models to predict SLEs using a distribution matching objective.
Authors: Kausik Lakkaraju, Rachneet Kaur, Parisa Zehtabi, Sunandita Patra, Siva Likitha Valluru, Zhen Zeng, Biplav Srivastava, Marco Valtorta
Abstract: Foundation Models (FMs) have improved time series forecasting in various sectors, such as finance, but their vulnerability to input disturbances can hinder their adoption by stakeholders, such as investors and analysts. To address this, we propose a causally grounded rating framework to study the robustness of Foundational Models for Time Series (FMTS) with respect to input perturbations. We evaluate our approach to the stock price prediction problem, a well-studied problem with easily accessible public data, evaluating six state-of-the-art (some multi-modal) FMTS across six prominent stocks spanning three industries. The ratings proposed by our framework effectively assess the robustness of FMTS and also offer actionable insights for model selection and deployment. Within the scope of our study, we find that (1) multi-modal FMTS exhibit better robustness and accuracy compared to their uni-modal versions and, (2) FMTS pre-trained on time series forecasting task exhibit better robustness and forecasting accuracy compared to general-purpose FMTS pre-trained across diverse settings. Further, to validate our framework's usability, we conduct a user study showcasing FMTS prediction errors along with our computed ratings. The study confirmed that our ratings reduced the difficulty for users in comparing the robustness of different systems.
Authors: Mehrasa Ahmadipour, \'elise Crepon, Aur\'elien Garivier
Abstract: Motivated by recursive learning in Markov Decision Processes, this paper studies best-arm identification in bandit problems where each arm's reward is drawn from a multinomial distribution with a known support. We compare the performance { reached by strategies including notably LUCB without and with use of this knowledge. } In the first case, we use classical non-parametric approaches for the confidence intervals. In the second case, where a probability distribution is to be estimated, we first use classical deviation bounds (Hoeffding and Bernstein) on each dimension independently, and then the Empirical Likelihood method (EL-LUCB) on the joint probability vector. The effectiveness of these methods is demonstrated through simulations on scenarios with varying levels of structural complexity.
Authors: Xi Zheng, Ziyang Li, Ivan Ruchkin, Ruzica Piskac, Miroslav Pajic
Abstract: Autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPSs) leverage AI for perception, planning, and control but face trust and safety certification challenges due to inherent uncertainties. The neurosymbolic paradigm replaces stochastic layers with interpretable symbolic AI, enabling determinism. While promising, challenges like multisensor fusion, adaptability, and verification remain. This paper introduces NeuroStrata, a neurosymbolic framework to enhance the testing and verification of autonomous CPS. We outline its key components, present early results, and detail future plans.
Authors: Thomas Foster, Jakob Foerster
Abstract: Reinforcement learning is now widely adopted as the final stage of large language model training, especially for reasoning-style tasks such as maths problems. Typically, models attempt each question many times during a single training step and attempt to learn from their successes and failures. However, we demonstrate that throughout training with two popular algorithms (PPO and VinePPO) on two widely used datasets, many questions are either solved by all attempts - meaning they are already learned - or by none - providing no meaningful training signal. To address this, we adapt a method from the reinforcement learning literature - sampling for learnability - and apply it to the reinforcement learning stage of LLM training. Our curriculum prioritises questions with high variance of success, i.e. those where the agent sometimes succeeds, but not always. Our findings demonstrate that this curriculum consistently boosts training performance across multiple algorithms and datasets, paving the way for more efficient and effective reinforcement learning in LLMs.
Authors: Ananth K. Kidambi, Guramrit Singh, Paulius Dilkas, Kuldeep S. Meel
Abstract: First-order model counting (FOMC) is the problem of counting the number of models of a sentence in first-order logic. Since lifted inference techniques rely on reductions to variants of FOMC, the design of scalable methods for FOMC has attracted attention from both theoreticians and practitioners over the past decade. Recently, a new approach based on first-order knowledge compilation was proposed. This approach, called Crane, instead of simply providing the final count, generates definitions of (possibly recursive) functions that can be evaluated with different arguments to compute the model count for any domain size. However, this approach is not fully automated, as it requires manual evaluation of the constructed functions. The primary contribution of this work is a fully automated compilation algorithm, called Gantry, which transforms the function definitions into C++ code equipped with arbitrary-precision arithmetic. These additions allow the new FOMC algorithm to scale to domain sizes over 500,000 times larger than the current state of the art, as demonstrated through experimental results.
Authors: Heng Ma, Alexander Brace, Carlo Siebenschuh, Greg Pauloski, Ian Foster, Arvind Ramanathan
Abstract: The Large Language Model agent workflow enables the LLM to invoke tool functions to increase the performance on specific scientific domain questions. To tackle large scale of scientific research, it requires access to computing resource and parallel computing setup. In this work, we implemented Parsl to the LangChain/LangGraph tool call setup, to bridge the gap between the LLM agent to the computing resource. Two tool call implementations were set up and tested on both local workstation and HPC environment on Polaris/ALCF. The first implementation with Parsl-enabled LangChain tool node queues the tool functions concurrently to the Parsl workers for parallel execution. The second configuration is implemented by converting the tool functions into Parsl ensemble functions, and is more suitable for large task on super computer environment. The LLM agent workflow was prompted to run molecular dynamics simulations, with different protein structure and simulation conditions. These results showed the LLM agent tools were managed and executed concurrently by Parsl on the available computing resource.
Authors: Senyu Li, Zipeng Sun, Jiayi Wang, Xue Liu, Pontus Stenetorp, Siva Reddy, David Ifeoluwa Adelani
Abstract: Traditional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) strategies for sequence-to-sequence tasks often train models to directly generate the target output. Recent work has shown that guiding models with intermediate steps, such as keywords, outlines, or reasoning chains, can significantly improve performance, coherence, and interpretability. However, these methods often depend on predefined intermediate formats and annotated data, limiting their scalability and generalizability. In this work, we introduce a task-agnostic framework that enables models to generate intermediate "warmup" sequences. These warmup sequences, serving as an initial state for subsequent generation, are optimized to enhance the probability of generating the target sequence without relying on external supervision or human-designed structures. Drawing inspiration from reinforcement learning principles, our method iteratively refines these intermediate steps to maximize their contribution to the final output, similar to reward-driven optimization in reinforcement learning with human feedback. Experimental results across tasks such as translation, summarization, and multi-choice question answering for logical reasoning show that our approach outperforms traditional SFT methods, and offers a scalable and flexible solution for sequence-to-sequence tasks.
Authors: Allen M. Wang, Alessandro Pau, Cristina Rea, Oswin So, Charles Dawson, Olivier Sauter, Mark D. Boyer, Anna Vu, Cristian Galperti, Chuchu Fan, Antoine Merle, Yoeri Poels, Cristina Venturini, Stefano Marchioni, the TCV Team
Abstract: The rampdown in tokamak operations is a difficult to simulate phase during which the plasma is often pushed towards multiple instability limits. To address this challenge, and reduce the risk of disrupting operations, we leverage recent advances in Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) to develop a neural state-space model (NSSM) that predicts plasma dynamics during Tokamak \`a Configuration Variable (TCV) rampdowns. By integrating simple physics structure and data-driven models, the NSSM efficiently learns plasma dynamics during the rampdown from a modest dataset of 311 pulses with only five pulses in the reactor relevant high performance regime. The NSSM is parallelized across uncertainties, and reinforcement learning (RL) is applied to design trajectories that avoid multiple instability limits with high probability. Experiments at TCV ramping down high performance plasmas show statistically significant improvements in current and energy at plasma termination, with improvements in speed through continuous re-training. A predict-first experiment, increasing plasma current by 20\% from baseline, demonstrates the NSSM's ability to make small extrapolations with sufficient accuracy to design trajectories that successfully terminate the pulse. The developed approach paves the way for designing tokamak controls with robustness to considerable uncertainty, and demonstrates the relevance of the SciML approach to learning plasma dynamics for rapidly developing robust trajectories and controls during the incremental campaigns of upcoming burning plasma tokamaks.
Authors: Harsh Jhamtani, Jacob Andreas, Benjamin Van Durme
Abstract: This paper introduces PeopleJoin, a benchmark for evaluating LM-mediated collaborative problem solving. Given a user request, PeopleJoin agents must identify teammates who might be able to assist, converse with these teammates to gather information, and finally compile a useful answer or summary for the original user. PeopleJoin comprises two evaluation domains: PeopleJoin-QA, focused on questions about tabular data, and PeopleJoin-DocCreation, focused on document creation tasks. The two domains are adapted from existing NLP benchmarks for database question answering and multi-document summarization; here, however, the information needed to complete these tasks is distributed across synthetic ``organizations'' of 2--20 users, simulating natural multi-user collaboration scenarios. We implemented several popular LM agent architectures, evaluating their accuracy and efficiency at completing tasks, and highlight new research questions that can be studied using PeopleJoin.
Authors: Artem Riabinin, Ahmed Khaled, Peter Richt\'arik
Abstract: Nonconvex optimization is central to modern machine learning, but the general framework of nonconvex optimization yields weak convergence guarantees that are too pessimistic compared to practice. On the other hand, while convexity enables efficient optimization, it is of limited applicability to many practical problems. To bridge this gap and better understand the practical success of optimization algorithms in nonconvex settings, we introduce a novel unified parametric assumption. Our assumption is general enough to encompass a broad class of nonconvex functions while also being specific enough to enable the derivation of a unified convergence theorem for gradient-based methods. Notably, by tuning the parameters of our assumption, we demonstrate its versatility in recovering several existing function classes as special cases and in identifying functions amenable to efficient optimization. We derive our convergence theorem for both deterministic and stochastic optimization, and conduct experiments to verify that our assumption can hold practically over optimization trajectories.
Authors: Jiajun Zhou, Yifan Yang, Kai Zhen, Ziyue Liu, Yequan Zhao, Ershad Banijamali, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Ngai Wong, Zheng Zhang
Abstract: Language Models (LLMs) are often quantized to lower precision to reduce the memory cost and latency in inference. However, quantization often degrades model performance, thus fine-tuning is required for various down-stream tasks. Traditional fine-tuning methods such as stochastic gradient descent and Adam optimization require backpropagation, which are error-prone in the low-precision settings. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Quantized Zeroth-Order (QuZO) framework, specifically designed for fine-tuning LLMs through low-precision (e.g., 4- or 8-bit) forward passes. Our method can avoid the error-prone low-precision straight-through estimator, and utilizes optimized stochastic rounding to mitigate the increased bias. QuZO simplifies the training process, while achieving results comparable to first-order methods in ${\rm FP}8$ and superior accuracy in ${\rm INT}8$ and ${\rm INT}4$ training. Experiments demonstrate that low-bit training QuZO achieves performance comparable to MeZO optimization on GLUE, Multi-Choice, and Generation tasks, while reducing memory cost by $2.94 \times$ in LLaMA2-7B fine-tuning compared to quantized first-order methods.
Authors: Batu El, Deepro Choudhury, Pietro Li\`o, Chaitanya K. Joshi
Abstract: We introduce Attention Graphs, a new tool for mechanistic interpretability of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph Transformers based on the mathematical equivalence between message passing in GNNs and the self-attention mechanism in Transformers. Attention Graphs aggregate attention matrices across Transformer layers and heads to describe how information flows among input nodes. Through experiments on homophilous and heterophilous node classification tasks, we analyze Attention Graphs from a network science perspective and find that: (1) When Graph Transformers are allowed to learn the optimal graph structure using all-to-all attention among input nodes, the Attention Graphs learned by the model do not tend to correlate with the input/original graph structure; and (2) For heterophilous graphs, different Graph Transformer variants can achieve similar performance while utilising distinct information flow patterns. Open source code: https://github.com/batu-el/understanding-inductive-biases-of-gnns
URLs: https://github.com/batu-el/understanding-inductive-biases-of-gnns
Authors: Yongsu Ahn, Yu-Run Lin, Malihe Alikhani, Eunjeong Cheon
Abstract: Recent XAI studies have investigated what constitutes a \textit{good} explanation in AI-assisted decision-making. Despite the widely accepted human-friendly properties of explanations, such as contrastive and selective, existing studies have yielded inconsistent findings. To address these gaps, our study focuses on the cognitive dimensions of explanation evaluation, by evaluating six explanations with different contrastive strategies and information selectivity and scrutinizing factors behind their valuation process. Our analysis results find that contrastive explanations are not the most preferable or understandable in general; Rather, different contrastive and selective explanations were appreciated to a different extent based on who they are, when, how, and what to explain -- with different level of cognitive load and engagement and sociotechnical contexts. Given these findings, we call for a nuanced view of explanation strategies, with implications for designing AI interfaces to accommodate individual and contextual differences in AI-assisted decision-making.
Authors: Sujan Sai Gannamaneni, Rohil Prakash Rao, Michael Mock, Maram Akila, Stefan Wrobel
Abstract: Studying systematic weaknesses of DNNs has gained prominence in the last few years with the rising focus on building safe AI systems. Slice discovery methods (SDMs) are prominent algorithmic approaches for finding such systematic weaknesses. They identify top-k semantically coherent slices/subsets of data where a DNN-under-test has low performance. For being directly useful, e.g., as evidences in a safety argumentation, slices should be aligned with human-understandable (safety-relevant) dimensions, which, for example, are defined by safety and domain experts as parts of the operational design domain (ODD). While straightforward for structured data, the lack of semantic metadata makes these investigations challenging for unstructured data. Therefore, we propose a complete workflow which combines contemporary foundation models with algorithms for combinatorial search that consider structured data and DNN errors for finding systematic weaknesses in images. In contrast to existing approaches, ours identifies weak slices that are in line with predefined human-understandable dimensions. As the workflow includes foundation models, its intermediate and final results may not always be exact. Therefore, we build into our workflow an approach to address the impact of noisy metadata. We evaluate our approach w.r.t. its quality on four popular computer vision datasets, including autonomous driving datasets like Cityscapes, BDD100k, and RailSem19, while using multiple state-of-the-art models as DNNs-under-test.
Authors: Saber Jelodari Mamaghani, Cosima Strantz, Dennis Toddenroth
Abstract: Digital individual participant data (IPD) from clinical trials are increasingly distributed for potential scientific reuse. The identification of available IPD, however, requires interpretations of textual data-sharing statements (DSS) in large databases. Recent advancements in computational linguistics include pre-trained language models that promise to simplify the implementation of effective classifiers based on textual inputs. In a subset of 5,000 textual DSS from ClinicalTrials.gov, we evaluate how well classifiers based on domain-specific pre-trained language models reproduce original availability categories as well as manually annotated labels. Typical metrics indicate that classifiers that predicted manual annotations outperformed those that learned to output the original availability categories. This suggests that the textual DSS descriptions contain applicable information that the availability categories do not, and that such classifiers could thus aid the automatic identification of available IPD in large trial databases.
Authors: Krishan Rana, Robert Lee, David Pershouse, Niko Suenderhauf
Abstract: Recent advances in imitation learning, particularly using generative modelling techniques like diffusion, have enabled policies to capture complex multi-modal action distributions. However, these methods often require large datasets and multiple inference steps for action generation, posing challenges in robotics where the cost for data collection is high and computation resources are limited. To address this, we introduce IMLE Policy, a novel behaviour cloning approach based on Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (IMLE). IMLE Policy excels in low-data regimes, effectively learning from minimal demonstrations and requiring 38\% less data on average to match the performance of baseline methods in learning complex multi-modal behaviours. Its simple generator-based architecture enables single-step action generation, improving inference speed by 97.3\% compared to Diffusion Policy, while outperforming single-step Flow Matching. We validate our approach across diverse manipulation tasks in simulated and real-world environments, showcasing its ability to capture complex behaviours under data constraints. Videos and code are provided on our project page: https://imle-policy.github.io/.
Authors: Joy Mahapatra, Soumyajit Roy, Utpal Garain
Abstract: Monitoring factual inconsistency is essential for ensuring trustworthiness in data-to-text generation (D2T). While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across various D2T tasks, previous studies on scaling laws have primarily focused on generalization error through power law scaling to LLM size (i.e., the number of model parameters). However, no research has examined the impact of LLM size on factual inconsistency in D2T. In this paper, we investigate how factual inconsistency in D2T scales with LLM size by exploring two scaling laws: power law and exponential scaling. To rigorously evaluate and compare these scaling laws, we employ a statistical validation framework consisting of three key stages: predictive performance estimation, goodness-of-fit assessment, and comparative analysis. For a comprehensive empirical study, we analyze three popular LLM families across five D2T datasets, measuring factual inconsistency inversely using four state-of-the-art consistency metrics. Our findings, based on exhaustive empirical results and validated through our framework, reveal that, contrary to the widely assumed power law scaling, factual inconsistency in D2T follows an exponential scaling with LLM size.
Authors: Abhishek Sebastian
Abstract: Soft robotics has emerged as a transformative technology in Search and Rescue (SAR) operations, addressing challenges in navigating complex, hazardous environments that often limit traditional rigid robots. This paper critically examines advancements in soft robotic technologies tailored for SAR applications, focusing on their unique capabilities in adaptability, safety, and efficiency. By leveraging bio-inspired designs, flexible materials, and advanced locomotion mechanisms, such as crawling, rolling, and shape morphing, soft robots demonstrate exceptional potential in disaster scenarios. However, significant barriers persist, including material durability, power inefficiency, sensor integration, and control complexity. This comprehensive review highlights the current state of soft robotics in SAR, discusses simulation methodologies and hardware validations, and introduces performance metrics essential for their evaluation. By bridging the gap between theoretical advancements and practical deployment, this study underscores the potential of soft robotic systems to revolutionize SAR missions and advocates for continued interdisciplinary innovation to overcome existing limitations.
Authors: Md Ahnaf Akif, Ismail Butun, Andre Williams, Imadeldin Mahgoub
Abstract: The rapid growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has revolutionized industries, enabling unprecedented connectivity and functionality. However, this expansion also increases vulnerabilities, exposing IoT networks to increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are crucial for mitigating these threats, and recent advancements in Machine Learning (ML) offer promising avenues for improvement. This research explores a hybrid approach, combining several standalone ML models such as Random Forest (RF), XGBoost, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and AdaBoost, in a voting-based hybrid classifier for effective IoT intrusion detection. This ensemble method leverages the strengths of individual algorithms to enhance accuracy and address challenges related to data complexity and scalability. Using the widely-cited IoT-23 dataset, a prominent benchmark in IoT cybersecurity research, we evaluate our hybrid classifiers for both binary and multi-class intrusion detection problems, ensuring a fair comparison with existing literature. Results demonstrate that our proposed hybrid models, designed for robustness and scalability, outperform standalone approaches in IoT environments. This work contributes to the development of advanced, intelligent IDS frameworks capable of addressing evolving cyber threats.
Authors: Simin Zheng, Jared M. Clark, Fatemeh Salboukh, Priscila Silva, Karen da Mata, Fenglian Pan, Jie Min, Jiayi Lian, Caleb B. King, Lance Fiondella, Jian Liu, Xinwei Deng, Yili Hong
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) technology and systems have been advancing rapidly. However, ensuring the reliability of these systems is crucial for fostering public confidence in their use. This necessitates the modeling and analysis of reliability data specific to AI systems. A major challenge in AI reliability research, particularly for those in academia, is the lack of readily available AI reliability data. To address this gap, this paper focuses on conducting a comprehensive review of available AI reliability data and establishing DR-AIR: a data repository for AI reliability. Specifically, we introduce key measurements and data types for assessing AI reliability, along with the methodologies used to collect these data. We also provide a detailed description of the currently available datasets with illustrative examples. Furthermore, we outline the setup of the DR-AIR repository and demonstrate its practical applications. This repository provides easy access to datasets specifically curated for AI reliability research. We believe these efforts will significantly benefit the AI research community by facilitating access to valuable reliability data and promoting collaboration across various academic domains within AI. We conclude our paper with a call to action, encouraging the research community to contribute and share AI reliability data to further advance this critical field of study.
Authors: Juan Shu, Qiyu Han, George Chen, Xihao Cao, Kangming Luo, Dan Pallotta, Shivam Agrawal, Yuping Lu, Xiaoyu Zhang, Jawad Mansoor, Jyoti Anand
Abstract: Estimating treatment effects in time series data presents a significant challenge, especially when the control group is always unobservable. For example, in analyzing the effects of Christmas on retail sales, we lack direct observation of what would have occurred in late December without the Christmas impact. To address this, we try to recover the control group in the event period while accounting for confounders and temporal dependencies. Experimental results on the M5 Walmart retail sales data demonstrate robust estimation of the potential outcome of the control group as well as accurate predicted holiday effect. Furthermore, we provided theoretical guarantees for the estimated treatment effect, proving its consistency and asymptotic normality. The proposed methodology is applicable not only to this always-missing control scenario but also in other conventional time series causal inference settings.
Authors: Daniel Bj\"orkegren, Jun Ho Choi, Divya Budihal, Dominic Sobhani, Oliver Garrod, Paul Atherton
Abstract: Access to digital information is a driver of economic development. But although 85% of sub-Saharan Africa's population is covered by mobile broadband signal, only 37% use the internet, and those who do seldom use the web. We investigate whether AI can bridge this gap by analyzing how 469 teachers use an AI chatbot in Sierra Leone. The chatbot, accessible via a common messaging app, is compared against traditional web search. Teachers use AI more frequently than web search for teaching assistance. Data cost is the most frequently cited reason for low internet usage across Africa. The average web search result consumes 3,107 times more data than an AI response, making AI 87% less expensive than web search. Additionally, only 2% of results for corresponding web searches contain content from Sierra Leone. In blinded evaluations, an independent sample of teachers rate AI responses as more relevant, helpful, and correct than web search results. These findings suggest that AI-driven solutions can cost-effectively bridge information gaps in low-connectivity regions.
Authors: Ryoma Sato
Abstract: We propose a new approach that enables end users to directly solve the cold start problem by themselves. The cold start problem is a common issue in recommender systems, and many methods have been proposed to address the problem on the service provider's side. However, when the service provider does not take action, users are left with poor recommendations and no means to improve their experience. We propose an algorithm, Pretender, that allows end users to proactively solve the cold start problem on their own. Pretender does not require any special support from the service provider and can be deployed independently by users. We formulate the problem as minimizing the distance between the source and target distributions and optimize item selection from the target service accordingly. Furthermore, we establish theoretical guarantees for Pretender based on a discrete quadrature problem. We conduct experiments on real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of Pretender.
Authors: Jingyuan Yang, Bowen Yan, Rongjun Li, Ziyu Zhou, Xin Chen, Zhiyong Feng, Wei Peng
Abstract: Unsafe prompts pose significant safety risks to large language models (LLMs). Existing methods for detecting unsafe prompts rely on data-driven fine-tuning to train guardrail models, necessitating significant data and computational resources. In contrast, recent few-shot gradient-based methods emerge, requiring only few safe and unsafe reference prompts. A gradient-based approach identifies unsafe prompts by analyzing consistent patterns of the gradients of safety-critical parameters in LLMs. Although effective, its restriction to directional similarity (cosine similarity) introduces ``directional bias'', limiting its capability to identify unsafe prompts. To overcome this limitation, we introduce GradCoo, a novel gradient co-occurrence analysis method that expands the scope of safety-critical parameter identification to include unsigned gradient similarity, thereby reducing the impact of ``directional bias'' and enhancing the accuracy of unsafe prompt detection. Comprehensive experiments on the widely-used benchmark datasets ToxicChat and XStest demonstrate that our proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared to existing methods. Moreover, we confirm the generalizability of GradCoo in detecting unsafe prompts across a range of LLM base models with various sizes and origins.
Authors: Mengda Xie, Chengzhi Zhong, Yiling He, Zhan Qin, Meie Fang
Abstract: Color constancy estimates illuminant chromaticity to correct color-biased images. Recently, Deep Neural Network-driven Color Constancy (DNNCC) models have made substantial advancements. Nevertheless, the potential risks in DNNCC due to the vulnerability of deep neural networks have not yet been explored. In this paper, we conduct the first investigation into the impact of a key factor in color constancy-brightness-on DNNCC from a robustness perspective. Our evaluation reveals that several mainstream DNNCC models exhibit high sensitivity to brightness despite their focus on chromaticity estimation. This sheds light on a potential limitation of existing DNNCC models: their sensitivity to brightness may hinder performance given the widespread brightness variations in real-world datasets. From the insights of our analysis, we propose a simple yet effective brightness robustness enhancement strategy for DNNCC models, termed BRE. The core of BRE is built upon the adaptive step-size adversarial brightness augmentation technique, which identifies high-risk brightness variation and generates augmented images via explicit brightness adjustment. Subsequently, BRE develops a brightness-robustness-aware model optimization strategy that integrates adversarial brightness training and brightness contrastive loss, significantly bolstering the brightness robustness of DNNCC models. BRE is hyperparameter-free and can be integrated into existing DNNCC models, without incurring additional overhead during the testing phase. Experiments on two public color constancy datasets-ColorChecker and Cube+-demonstrate that the proposed BRE consistently enhances the illuminant estimation performance of existing DNNCC models, reducing the estimation error by an average of 5.04% across six mainstream DNNCC models, underscoring the critical role of enhancing brightness robustness in these models.
Authors: Shuqi Liu, Han Wu, Bowei He, Xiongwei Han, Mingxuan Yuan, Linqin Song
Abstract: Recent advances in large language models have led to numerous task-specialized fine-tuned variants, creating a need for efficient model merging techniques that preserve specialized capabilities while avoiding costly retraining. While existing task vector-based merging methods show promise, they typically apply uniform coefficients across all parameters, overlooking varying parameter importance both within and across tasks. We present Sens-Merging, a sensitivity-guided coefficient adjustment method that enhances existing model merging techniques by operating at both task-specific and cross-task levels. Our method analyzes parameter sensitivity within individual tasks and evaluates cross-task transferability to determine optimal merging coefficients. Extensive experiments on Mistral 7B and LLaMA2-7B/13B models demonstrate that Sens-Merging significantly improves performance across general knowledge, mathematical reasoning, and code generation tasks. Notably, when combined with existing merging techniques, our method enables merged models to outperform specialized fine-tuned models, particularly in code generation tasks. Our findings reveal important trade-offs between task-specific and cross-task scalings, providing insights for future model merging strategies.
Authors: Bill Marino, Meghdad Kurmanji, Nicholas D. Lane
Abstract: The "right to be forgotten" and the data privacy laws that encode it have motivated machine unlearning since its earliest days. Now, an inbound wave of artificial intelligence regulations - like the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) - potentially offer important new use cases for machine unlearning. However, this position paper argues, this opportunity will only be realized if researchers, aided by policymakers, proactively bridge the (sometimes sizable) gaps between machine unlearning's state of the art and its potential applications to AI regulation. To demonstrate this point, we use the AIA as an example. Specifically, we deliver a "state of the union" as regards machine unlearning's current potential for aiding compliance with the AIA. This starts with a precise cataloging of the potential applications of machine unlearning to AIA compliance. For each, we flag any legal ambiguities clouding the potential application and, moreover, flag the technical gaps that exist between the potential application and the state of the art of machine unlearning. Finally, we end with a call to action: for both machine learning researchers and policymakers, to, respectively, solve the open technical and legal questions that will unlock machine unlearning's potential to assist compliance with the AIA - and other AI regulation like it.
Authors: Ahmed F. AbouElhamayed, Jordan Dotzel, Yash Akhauri, Chi-Chih Chang, Sameh Gobriel, J. Pablo Mu\~noz, Vui Seng Chua, Nilesh Jain, Mohamed S. Abdelfattah
Abstract: Large language models have high compute, latency, and memory requirements. While specialized accelerators such as GPUs and TPUs typically run these workloads, CPUs are more widely available and consume less energy. Accelerating LLMs with CPUs enables broader AI access at a lower cost and power consumption. This acceleration potential for CPUs is especially relevant during the memory-bound decoding stage of LLM inference, which processes one token at a time and is becoming increasingly utilized with reasoning models. We utilize Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) support on the latest Intel CPUs together with unstructured sparsity to achieve a $1.42 \times$ reduction in end-to-end latency compared to the current PyTorch implementation by applying our technique in linear layers. We provide a set of open-source customized sparse kernels that can speed up any PyTorch model by automatically replacing all linear layers with our custom sparse implementation. Furthermore, we demonstrate for the first time the use of unstructured sparsity in the attention computation achieving a $1.14 \times$ speedup over the current systems without compromising accuracy. Code: https://github.com/IntelLabs/Hardware-Aware-Automated-Machine-Learning/tree/main/SparAMX
URLs: https://github.com/IntelLabs/Hardware-Aware-Automated-Machine-Learning/tree/main/SparAMX
Authors: Duy Nguyen, Archiki Prasad, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal
Abstract: Inference-time intervention (ITI) has emerged as a promising method for steering large language model (LLM) behavior in a particular direction (e.g., improving helpfulness) by intervening on token representations without costly updates to the LLM's parameters. However, existing ITI approaches fail to scale to multi-attribute settings with conflicts, such as enhancing helpfulness while also reducing toxicity. To address this, we introduce Multi-Attribute Targeted Steering (MAT-Steer), a novel steering framework designed for selective token-level intervention across multiple attributes. MAT-Steer learns steering vectors using an alignment objective that shifts the model's internal representations of undesirable outputs closer to those of desirable ones while enforcing sparsity and orthogonality among vectors for different attributes, thereby reducing inter-attribute conflicts. We evaluate MAT-Steer in two distinct settings: (i) on question answering (QA) tasks where we balance attributes like truthfulness, bias, and toxicity; (ii) on generative tasks where we simultaneously improve attributes like helpfulness, correctness, and coherence. MAT-Steer outperforms existing ITI and parameter-efficient finetuning approaches across both task types (e.g., 3% average accuracy gain across QA tasks and 55.82% win rate against the best ITI baseline).
Authors: Ruifeng Li, Mingqian Li, Wei Liu, Yuhua Zhou, Xiangxin Zhou, Yuan Yao, Qiang Zhang, Hongyang Chen
Abstract: Drug discovery is crucial for identifying candidate drugs for various diseases.However, its low success rate often results in a scarcity of annotations, posing a few-shot learning problem. Existing methods primarily focus on single-scale features, overlooking the hierarchical molecular structures that determine different molecular properties. To address these issues, we introduce Universal Matching Networks (UniMatch), a dual matching framework that integrates explicit hierarchical molecular matching with implicit task-level matching via meta-learning, bridging multi-level molecular representations and task-level generalization. Specifically, our approach explicitly captures structural features across multiple levels, such as atoms, substructures, and molecules, via hierarchical pooling and matching, facilitating precise molecular representation and comparison. Additionally, we employ a meta-learning strategy for implicit task-level matching, allowing the model to capture shared patterns across tasks and quickly adapt to new ones. This unified matching framework ensures effective molecular alignment while leveraging shared meta-knowledge for fast adaptation. Our experimental results demonstrate that UniMatch outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the MoleculeNet and FS-Mol benchmarks, achieving improvements of 2.87% in AUROC and 6.52% in delta AUPRC. UniMatch also shows excellent generalization ability on the Meta-MolNet benchmark.
Authors: He Zhang, Xinyi Fu
Abstract: This study investigates the feasibility and performance of using large language models (LLMs) to automatically annotate human emotions in everyday scenarios. We conducted experiments on the DailyLife subset of the publicly available FERV39k dataset, employing the GPT-4o-mini model for rapid, zero-shot labeling of key frames extracted from video segments. Under a seven-class emotion taxonomy ("Angry," "Disgust," "Fear," "Happy," "Neutral," "Sad," "Surprise"), the LLM achieved an average precision of approximately 50%. In contrast, when limited to ternary emotion classification (negative/neutral/positive), the average precision increased to approximately 64%. Additionally, we explored a strategy that integrates multiple frames within 1-2 second video clips to enhance labeling performance and reduce costs. The results indicate that this approach can slightly improve annotation accuracy. Overall, our preliminary findings highlight the potential application of zero-shot LLMs in human facial emotion annotation tasks, offering new avenues for reducing labeling costs and broadening the applicability of LLMs in complex multimodal environments.
Authors: Ka-Hei Hui, Chao Liu, Xiaohui Zeng, Chi-Wing Fu, Arash Vahdat
Abstract: Learning generative models of 3D point clouds is one of the fundamental problems in 3D generative learning. One of the key properties of point clouds is their permutation invariance, i.e., changing the order of points in a point cloud does not change the shape they represent. In this paper, we analyze the recently proposed equivariant OT flows that learn permutation invariant generative models for point-based molecular data and we show that these models scale poorly on large point clouds. Also, we observe learning (equivariant) OT flows is generally challenging since straightening flow trajectories makes the learned flow model complex at the beginning of the trajectory. To remedy these, we propose not-so-optimal transport flow models that obtain an approximate OT by an offline OT precomputation, enabling an efficient construction of OT pairs for training. During training, we can additionally construct a hybrid coupling by combining our approximate OT and independent coupling to make the target flow models easier to learn. In an extensive empirical study, we show that our proposed model outperforms prior diffusion- and flow-based approaches on a wide range of unconditional generation and shape completion on the ShapeNet benchmark.
Authors: Guangxiang Zhao, Saier Hu, Xiaoqi Jian, Jinzhu Wu, Yuhan Wu, Change Jia, Lin Sun, Xiangzheng Zhang
Abstract: This paper investigates the fragility of Large Language Models (LLMs) in generalizing to novel inputs, specifically focusing on minor perturbations in well-established benchmarks (e.g., slight changes in question format or distractor length). Despite high benchmark scores, LLMs exhibit significant accuracy drops and unexpected biases (e.g., preference for longer distractors) when faced with these minor but content-preserving modifications. For example, Qwen 2.5 1.5B's MMLU score rises from 60 to 89 and drops from 89 to 36 when option lengths are changed without altering the question. Even GPT-4 experiences a 25-point accuracy loss when question types are changed, with a 6-point drop across all three modification categories. These analyses suggest that LLMs rely heavily on superficial cues rather than forming robust, abstract representations that generalize across formats, lexical variations, and irrelevant content shifts. This work aligns with the ACL 2025 theme track on the Generalization of NLP models, proposing a "Generalization Stress Test" to assess performance shifts under controlled perturbations. The study calls for reevaluating benchmarks and developing more reliable evaluation methodologies to capture LLM generalization abilities better.
Authors: Anjiang Wei, Jiannan Cao, Ran Li, Hongyu Chen, Yuhui Zhang, Ziheng Wang, Yaofeng Sun, Yuan Liu, Thiago S. F. X. Teixeira, Diyi Yang, Ke Wang, Alex Aiken
Abstract: Equivalence checking, i.e., determining whether two programs produce identical outputs for all possible inputs, underpins a broad range of applications, including software refactoring, testing, and optimization. We present the task of equivalence checking as a new way to evaluate the code reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). We introduce EquiBench, a dataset of 2400 program pairs spanning four programming languages and six equivalence categories. These pairs are systematically generated through program analysis, compiler scheduling, and superoptimization, covering nontrivial structural transformations that demand deep semantic reasoning beyond simple syntactic variations. Our evaluation of 17 state-of-the-art LLMs shows that OpenAI o3-mini achieves the highest overall accuracy of 78.0%. In the most challenging categories, the best accuracies are 62.3% and 68.8%, only modestly above the 50% random baseline for binary classification, indicating significant room for improvement in current models' code reasoning capabilities.
Authors: Yutong Wang, Pengliang Ji, Chaoqun Yang, Kaixin Li, Ming Hu, Jiaoyang Li, Guillaume Sartoretti
Abstract: The LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm shows promise for evaluating generative content but lacks reliability in reasoning-intensive scenarios, such as programming. Inspired by recent advances in reasoning models and shifts in scaling laws, we pioneer bringing test-time computation into LLM-as-a-Judge, proposing MCTS-Judge, a resource-efficient, System-2 thinking framework for code correctness evaluation. MCTS-Judge leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to decompose problems into simpler, multi-perspective evaluations. Through a node-selection strategy that combines self-assessment based on historical actions in the current trajectory and the Upper Confidence Bound for Trees based on prior rollouts, MCTS-Judge balances global optimization and refinement of the current trajectory. We further designed a high-precision, unit-test-level reward mechanism to encourage the Large Language Model (LLM) to perform line-by-line analysis. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks and five LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of MCTS-Judge, which improves the base model's accuracy from 41% to 80%, surpassing the o1-series models with 3x fewer tokens. Further evaluations validate the superiority of its reasoning trajectory in logic, analytics, thoroughness, and overall quality, while revealing the test-time scaling law of the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm.
Authors: Emily Jin, Joy Hsu, Jiajun Wu
Abstract: State classification of objects and their relations is core to many long-horizon tasks, particularly in robot planning and manipulation. However, the combinatorial explosion of possible object-predicate combinations, coupled with the need to adapt to novel real-world environments, makes it a desideratum for state classification models to generalize to novel queries with few examples. To this end, we propose PHIER, which leverages predicate hierarchies to generalize effectively in few-shot scenarios. PHIER uses an object-centric scene encoder, self-supervised losses that infer semantic relations between predicates, and a hyperbolic distance metric that captures hierarchical structure; it learns a structured latent space of image-predicate pairs that guides reasoning over state classification queries. We evaluate PHIER in the CALVIN and BEHAVIOR robotic environments and show that PHIER significantly outperforms existing methods in few-shot, out-of-distribution state classification, and demonstrates strong zero- and few-shot generalization from simulated to real-world tasks. Our results demonstrate that leveraging predicate hierarchies improves performance on state classification tasks with limited data.
Authors: Junrui Wen, Yifei Li, Bart Selman, Kun He
Abstract: Neural solvers have shown significant potential in solving the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), yet current approaches face significant challenges. Supervised learning (SL)-based solvers require large amounts of high-quality labeled data, while reinforcement learning (RL)-based solvers, though less dependent on such data, often suffer from inefficiencies. To address these limitations, we propose LocalEscaper, a novel weakly-supervised learning framework for large-scale TSP. LocalEscaper effectively combines the advantages of both SL and RL, enabling effective training on datasets with low-quality labels. To further enhance solution quality, we introduce a regional reconstruction strategy, which mitigates the problem of local optima, a common issue in existing local reconstruction methods. Additionally, we propose a linear-complexity attention mechanism that reduces computational overhead, enabling the efficient solution of large-scale TSPs without sacrificing performance. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that LocalEscaper outperforms existing neural solvers, achieving state-of-the-art results. Notably, it sets a new benchmark for scalability and efficiency, solving TSP instances with up to 50,000 cities.
Authors: Isaac Lim, Shaun Khoo, Watson Chua, Goh Jiayi, Jessica Foo
Abstract: To ensure safe usage, Large Language Models (LLMs) typically undergo alignment with human-defined values. However, this alignment often relies on primarily English data and is biased towards Western-centric values, limiting its effectiveness in low-resource language settings. In this paper, we describe our approach for aligning SEA-Lion-v2.1-Instruct (a Llama3-8B variant) to minimize toxicity in Singlish, an English creole specific to Singapore. We find that supervised fine-tuning and Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO) on paired and unpaired preferences is more sample efficient and yields significantly better results than Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Our analysis reveals that DPO implicitly enforces a weaker safety objective than KTO, and that SFT complements KTO by improving training stability. Finally, we introduce a simple but novel modification to KTO, KTO-S, which improves training stability through better gradient exploitation. Overall, we present a general approach for safety alignment conducive to low-resource English languages, successfully reducing toxicity by 99\% on our Singlish benchmark, with gains generalizing to the broader TOXIGEN dataset while maintaining strong performance across standard LLM benchmarks.
Authors: Shulei Ji, Songruoyao Wu, Zihao Wang, Shuyu Li, Kejun Zhang
Abstract: The burgeoning growth of video-to-music generation can be attributed to the ascendancy of multimodal generative models. However, there is a lack of literature that comprehensively combs through the work in this field. To fill this gap, this paper presents a comprehensive review of video-to-music generation using deep generative AI techniques, focusing on three key components: visual feature extraction, music generation frameworks, and conditioning mechanisms. We categorize existing approaches based on their designs for each component, clarifying the roles of different strategies. Preceding this, we provide a fine-grained classification of video and music modalities, illustrating how different categories influence the design of components within the generation pipelines. Furthermore, we summarize available multimodal datasets and evaluation metrics while highlighting ongoing challenges in the field.
Authors: Yunxiao Zhang, Guanming Xiong, Haochen Li, Wen Zhao
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities as AI agents. However, existing methods for enhancing LLM-agent abilities often lack a focus on data quality, leading to inefficiencies and suboptimal results in both fine-tuning and prompt engineering. To address this issue, we introduce EDGE, a novel approach for identifying informative samples without needing golden answers. We propose the Guideline Effectiveness (GE) metric, which selects challenging samples by measuring the impact of human-provided guidelines in multi-turn interaction tasks. A low GE score indicates that the human expertise required for a sample is missing from the guideline, making the sample more informative. By selecting samples with low GE scores, we can improve the efficiency and outcomes of both prompt engineering and fine-tuning processes for LLMs. Extensive experiments validate the performance of our method. Our method achieves competitive results on the HotpotQA and WebShop and datasets, requiring 75\% and 50\% less data, respectively, while outperforming existing methods. We also provide a fresh perspective on the data quality of LLM-agent fine-tuning.
Authors: Xuechen Li, Yupeng Li, Jian Liu, Xiaolin Jin, Tian Yang, Xin Hu
Abstract: Tabular data inherently exhibits significant feature heterogeneity, but existing transformer-based methods lack specialized mechanisms to handle this property. To bridge the gap, we propose MAYA, an encoder-decoder transformer-based framework. In the encoder, we design a Mixture of Attention (MOA) that constructs multiple parallel attention branches and averages the features at each branch, effectively fusing heterogeneous features while limiting parameter growth. Additionally, we employ collaborative learning with a dynamic consistency weight constraint to produce more robust representations. In the decoder stage, cross-attention is utilized to seamlessly integrate tabular data with corresponding label features. This dual-attention mechanism effectively captures both intra-instance and inter-instance interactions. We evaluate the proposed method on a wide range of datasets and compare it with other state-of-the-art transformer-based methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance among transformer-based methods in both tabular classification and regression tasks.
Authors: Kangda Wei, Xi Shi, Jonathan Tong, Sai Ramana Reddy, Anandhavelu Natarajan, Rajiv Jain, Aparna Garimella, Ruihong Huang
Abstract: Recognizing events and their coreferential mentions in a document is essential for understanding semantic meanings of text. The existing research on event coreference resolution is mostly limited to news articles. In this paper, we present the first dataset for the legal domain, LegalCore, which has been annotated with comprehensive event and event coreference information. The legal contract documents we annotated in this dataset are several times longer than news articles, with an average length of around 25k tokens per document. The annotations show that legal documents have dense event mentions and feature both short-distance and super long-distance coreference links between event mentions. We further benchmark mainstream Large Language Models (LLMs) on this dataset for both event detection and event coreference resolution tasks, and find that this dataset poses significant challenges for state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary LLMs, which perform significantly worse than a supervised baseline. We will publish the dataset as well as the code.
Authors: Ori Yonay, Tracy Hammond, Tianbao Yang
Abstract: We present Myna, a simple yet effective approach for self-supervised musical representation learning. Built on a contrastive learning framework, Myna introduces two key innovations: (1) the use of a Vision Transformer (ViT) on mel-spectrograms as the backbone and (2) a novel data augmentation strategy, token masking, that masks 90 percent of spectrogram tokens. These innovations deliver both effectiveness and efficiency: (i) Token masking enables a significant increase in per-GPU batch size, from 48 or 120 in prior methods (CLMR, MULE) to 4096. (ii) By avoiding traditional augmentations, Myna retains pitch sensitivity, enhancing performance in tasks like key detection. (iii) The use of vertical patches allows the model to better capture critical features for key detection. Our hybrid model, Myna-22M-Hybrid, processes both 16x16 and 128x2 patches, achieving state-of-the-art results. Trained on a single GPU, it outperforms MULE (62M) on average and rivals MERT-95M, which was trained on 16 and 64 GPUs, respectively. Additionally, it surpasses MERT-95M-public, establishing itself as the best-performing model trained on publicly available data. We release our code and models to promote reproducibility and facilitate future research.
Authors: Yunjie Tian, Qixiang Ye, David Doermann
Abstract: Enhancing the network architecture of the YOLO framework has been crucial for a long time, but has focused on CNN-based improvements despite the proven superiority of attention mechanisms in modeling capabilities. This is because attention-based models cannot match the speed of CNN-based models. This paper proposes an attention-centric YOLO framework, namely YOLOv12, that matches the speed of previous CNN-based ones while harnessing the performance benefits of attention mechanisms. YOLOv12 surpasses all popular real-time object detectors in accuracy with competitive speed. For example, YOLOv12-N achieves 40.6% mAP with an inference latency of 1.64 ms on a T4 GPU, outperforming advanced YOLOv10-N / YOLOv11-N by 2.1%/1.2% mAP with a comparable speed. This advantage extends to other model scales. YOLOv12 also surpasses end-to-end real-time detectors that improve DETR, such as RT-DETR / RT-DETRv2: YOLOv12-S beats RT-DETR-R18 / RT-DETRv2-R18 while running 42% faster, using only 36% of the computation and 45% of the parameters. More comparisons are shown in Figure 1.
Authors: Jiaxin Xu, Hung Chau, Angela Burden
Abstract: Explainable AI (XAI) is critical for ensuring transparency, accountability, and trust in machine learning systems as black-box models are increasingly deployed within high-stakes domains. Among XAI methods, Shapley values are widely used for their fairness and consistency axioms. However, prevalent Shapley value approximation methods commonly rely on abstract baselines or computationally intensive calculations, which can limit their interpretability and scalability. To address such challenges, we propose Pairwise Shapley Values, a novel framework that grounds feature attributions in explicit, human-relatable comparisons between pairs of data instances proximal in feature space. Our method introduces pairwise reference selection combined with single-value imputation to deliver intuitive, model-agnostic explanations while significantly reducing computational overhead. Here, we demonstrate that Pairwise Shapley Values enhance interpretability across diverse regression and classification scenarios--including real estate pricing, polymer property prediction, and drug discovery datasets. We conclude that the proposed methods enable more transparent AI systems and advance the real-world applicability of XAI.
Authors: Wenhao Wang, Yanyan Li, Long Jiao, Jiawei Yuan
Abstract: The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into robotic control, including drones, has the potential to revolutionize autonomous systems. Research studies have demonstrated that LLMs can be leveraged to support robotic operations. However, when facing tasks with complex reasoning, concerns and challenges are raised about the reliability of solutions produced by LLMs. In this paper, we propose a prompt framework with enhanced reasoning to enable reliable LLM-driven control for drones. Our framework consists of novel technical components designed using Guidelines, Skill APIs, Constraints, and Examples, namely GSCE. GSCE is featured by its reliable and constraint-compliant code generation. We performed thorough experiments using GSCE for the control of drones with a wide level of task complexities. Our experiment results demonstrate that GSCE can significantly improve task success rates and completeness compared to baseline approaches, highlighting its potential for reliable LLM-driven autonomous drone systems.
Authors: Jingyi Feng, Kai Yang
Abstract: Understanding the mechanisms of neural encoding and decoding has always been a highly interesting research topic in fields such as neuroscience and cognitive intelligence. In prior studies, some researchers identified a symmetry in neural data decoded by unsupervised methods in motor scenarios and constructed a cognitive learning system based on this pattern (i.e., symmetry). Nevertheless, the distribution state of the data flow that significantly influences neural decoding positions still remains a mystery within the system, which further restricts the enhancement of the system's interpretability. Based on this, this paper mainly explores changes in the distribution state within the system from the machine learning and mathematical statistics perspectives. In the experiment, we assessed the correctness of this symmetry using various tools and indicators commonly utilized in mathematics and statistics. According to the experimental results, the normal distribution (or Gaussian distribution) plays a crucial role in the decoding of prediction positions within the system. Eventually, an algorithm board similar to the Galton board was built to serve as the mathematical foundation of the discovered symmetry.
Authors: Sina Montazeria, Haseebullah Jumakhanb, Amir Mirzaeinia
Abstract: This paper investigates the optimization of temporal windows in Financial Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) models using 2D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We introduce a novel approach to treating the temporal field as a hyperparameter and examine its impact on model performance across various datasets and feature arrangements. We introduce a new hyperparameter for the CNN policy, proposing that this temporal field can and should be treated as a hyperparameter for these models. We examine the significance of this temporal field by iteratively expanding the window of observations presented to the CNN policy during the deep reinforcement learning process. Our iterative process involves progressively increasing the observation period from two weeks to twelve weeks, allowing us to examine the effects of different temporal windows on the model's performance. This window expansion is implemented in two settings. In one setting, we rearrange the features in the dataset to group them by company, allowing the model to have a full view of company data in its observation window and CNN kernel. In the second setting, we do not group the features by company, and features are arranged by category. Our study reveals that shorter temporal windows are most effective when no feature rearrangement to group per company is in effect. However, the model will utilize longer temporal windows and yield better performance once we introduce the feature rearrangement. To examine the consistency of our findings, we repeated our experiment on two datasets containing the same thirty companies from the Dow Jones Index but with different features in each dataset and consistently observed the above-mentioned patterns. The result is a trading model significantly outperforming global financial services firms such as the Global X Guru by the established Mirae Asset.
Authors: Evi Micha, Vasilis Varsamis
Abstract: Aggregating preferences under incomplete or constrained feedback is a fundamental problem in social choice and related domains. While prior work has established strong impossibility results for pairwise comparisons, this paper extends the inquiry to improvement feedback, where voters express incremental adjustments rather than complete preferences. We provide a complete characterization of the positional scoring rules that can be computed given improvement feedback. Interestingly, while plurality is learnable under improvement feedback--unlike with pairwise feedback--strong impossibility results persist for many other positional scoring rules. Furthermore, we show that improvement feedback, unlike pairwise feedback, does not suffice for the computation of any Condorcet-consistent rule. We complement our theoretical findings with experimental results, providing further insights into the practical implications of improvement feedback for preference aggregation.
Authors: Yujie Zeng, Wenlong He, Ihor Vasyltsov, Jiaxin Wei, Ying Zhang, Lin Chen, Yuehua Dai
Abstract: Recently, Graph Neural Network based Force Field (GNNFF) models are widely used in Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulation, which is one of the most cost-effective means in semiconductor material research. However, even such models provide high accuracy in energy and force Mean Absolute Error (MAE) over trained (in-distribution) datasets, they often become unstable during long-time MD simulation when used for out-of-distribution datasets. In this paper, we propose a feature correlation based method for GNNFF models to enhance the stability of MD simulation. We reveal the negative relationship between feature correlation and the stability of GNNFF models, and design a loss function with a dynamic loss coefficient scheduler to reduce edge feature correlation that can be applied in general GNNFF training. We also propose an empirical metric to evaluate the stability in MD simulation. Experiments show our method can significantly improve stability for GNNFF models especially in out-of-distribution data with less than 3% computational overhead. For example, we can ensure the stable MD simulation time from 0.03ps to 10ps for Allegro model.
Authors: Prasanjit Rath, Hari Shrawgi, Parag Agrawal, Sandipan Dandapat
Abstract: This paper analyzes the safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) in interactions with children below age of 18 years. Despite the transformative applications of LLMs in various aspects of children's lives such as education and therapy, there remains a significant gap in understanding and mitigating potential content harms specific to this demographic. The study acknowledges the diverse nature of children often overlooked by standard safety evaluations and proposes a comprehensive approach to evaluating LLM safety specifically for children. We list down potential risks that children may encounter when using LLM powered applications. Additionally we develop Child User Models that reflect the varied personalities and interests of children informed by literature in child care and psychology. These user models aim to bridge the existing gap in child safety literature across various fields. We utilize Child User Models to evaluate the safety of six state of the art LLMs. Our observations reveal significant safety gaps in LLMs particularly in categories harmful to children but not adults
Authors: Huaying Yuan, Jian Ni, Yueze Wang, Junjie Zhou, Zhengyang Liang, Zheng Liu, Zhao Cao, Zhicheng Dou, Ji-Rong Wen
Abstract: Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) holds great promise in addressing challenges associated with long video understanding. These methods retrieve useful moments from long videos for their presented tasks, thereby enabling multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate high-quality answers in a cost-effective way. In this work, we present MomentSeeker, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate retrieval models' performance in handling general long-video moment retrieval (LVMR) tasks. MomentSeeker offers three key advantages. First, it incorporates long videos of over 500 seconds on average, making it the first benchmark specialized for long-video moment retrieval. Second, it covers a wide range of task categories (including Moment Search, Caption Alignment, Image-conditioned Moment Search, and Video-conditioned Moment Search) and diverse application scenarios (e.g., sports, movies, cartoons, and ego), making it a comprehensive tool for assessing retrieval models' general LVMR performance. Additionally, the evaluation tasks are carefully curated through human annotation, ensuring the reliability of assessment. We further fine-tune an MLLM-based LVMR retriever on synthetic data, which demonstrates strong performance on our benchmark. We perform extensive experiments with various popular multimodal retrievers based on our benchmark, whose results highlight the challenges of LVMR and limitations for existing methods. Our created resources will be shared with community to advance future research in this field.
Authors: Geetanjali Bihani, Tatiana Ringenberg, Julia Rayz
Abstract: Encoding implicit language presents a challenge for language models, especially in high-risk domains where maintaining high precision is important. Automated detection of online child grooming is one such critical domain, where predators manipulate victims using a combination of explicit and implicit language to convey harmful intentions. While recent studies have shown the potential of Transformer language models like SBERT for preemptive grooming detection, they primarily depend on surface-level features and approximate real victim grooming processes using vigilante and law enforcement conversations. The question of whether these features and approximations are reasonable has not been addressed thus far. In this paper, we address this gap and study whether SBERT can effectively discern varying degrees of grooming risk inherent in conversations, and evaluate its results across different participant groups. Our analysis reveals that while fine-tuning aids language models in learning to assign grooming scores, they show high variance in predictions, especially for contexts containing higher degrees of grooming risk. These errors appear in cases that 1) utilize indirect speech pathways to manipulate victims and 2) lack sexually explicit content. This finding underscores the necessity for robust modeling of indirect speech acts by language models, particularly those employed by predators.
Authors: Kaiyang Wan, Honglin Mu, Rui Hao, Haoran Luo, Tianle Gu, Xiuying Chen
Abstract: Like humans, Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to generate high-quality long-form text that adheres to strict requirements in a single pass. This challenge is unsurprising, as successful human writing, according to the Cognitive Writing Theory, is a complex cognitive process involving iterative planning, translating, reviewing, and monitoring. Motivated by these cognitive principles, we aim to equip LLMs with human-like cognitive writing capabilities through CogWriter, a novel training-free framework that transforms LLM constrained long-form text generation into a systematic cognitive writing paradigm. Our framework consists of two key modules: (1) a Planning Agent that performs hierarchical planning to decompose the task, and (2) multiple Generation Agents that execute these plans in parallel. The system maintains quality via continuous monitoring and reviewing mechanisms, which evaluate outputs against specified requirements and trigger necessary revisions. CogWriter demonstrates exceptional performance on LongGenBench, a benchmark for complex constrained long-form text generation. Even when using Qwen-2.5-14B as its backbone, CogWriter surpasses GPT-4o by 22% in complex instruction completion accuracy while reliably generating texts exceeding 10,000 words. We hope this cognitive science-inspired approach provides a paradigm for LLM writing advancements: \href{https://github.com/KaiyangWan/CogWriter}{CogWriter}.
Authors: Cheng Luo, Zefan Cai, Hanshi Sun, Jinqi Xiao, Bo Yuan, Wen Xiao, Junjie Hu, Jiawei Zhao, Beidi Chen, Anima Anandkumar
Abstract: Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance in long context generation. Extending the context length has disproportionately shifted the memory footprint of LLMs during inference to the key-value cache (KV cache). In this paper, we propose HEADINFER, which offloads the KV cache to CPU RAM while avoiding the need to fully store the KV cache for any transformer layer on the GPU. HEADINFER employs a fine-grained, head-wise offloading strategy, maintaining only selective attention heads KV cache on the GPU while computing attention output dynamically. Through roofline analysis, we demonstrate that HEADINFER maintains computational efficiency while significantly reducing memory footprint. We evaluate HEADINFER on the Llama-3-8B model with a 1-million-token sequence, reducing the GPU memory footprint of the KV cache from 128 GB to 1 GB and the total GPU memory usage from 207 GB to 17 GB, achieving a 92% reduction compared to BF16 baseline inference. Notably, HEADINFER enables 4-million-token inference with an 8B model on a single consumer GPU with 24GB memory (e.g., NVIDIA RTX 4090) without approximation methods.
Authors: Pengyu Zhu, Zhenhong Zhou, Yuanhe Zhang, Shilinlu Yan, Kun Wang, Sen Su
Abstract: As LLM-based agents become increasingly prevalent, backdoors can be implanted into agents through user queries or environment feedback, raising critical concerns regarding safety vulnerabilities. However, backdoor attacks are typically detectable by safety audits that analyze the reasoning process of agents. To this end, we propose a novel backdoor implantation strategy called \textbf{Dynamically Encrypted Multi-Backdoor Implantation Attack}. Specifically, we introduce dynamic encryption, which maps the backdoor into benign content, effectively circumventing safety audits. To enhance stealthiness, we further decompose the backdoor into multiple sub-backdoor fragments. Based on these advancements, backdoors are allowed to bypass safety audits significantly. Additionally, we present AgentBackdoorEval, a dataset designed for the comprehensive evaluation of agent backdoor attacks. Experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate that our method achieves an attack success rate nearing 100\% while maintaining a detection rate of 0\%, illustrating its effectiveness in evading safety audits. Our findings highlight the limitations of existing safety mechanisms in detecting advanced attacks, underscoring the urgent need for more robust defenses against backdoor threats. Code and data are available at https://github.com/whfeLingYu/DemonAgent.
Authors: Geetanjali Bihani, Julia Rayz
Abstract: With the advent of social media, children are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the risk of grooming in online settings. Detecting grooming instances in an online conversation poses a significant challenge as the interactions are not necessarily sexually explicit, since the predators take time to build trust and a relationship with their victim. Moreover, predators evade detection using indirect and coded language. While previous studies have fine-tuned Transformers to automatically identify grooming in chat conversations, they overlook the impact of coded and indirect language on model predictions, and how these align with human perceptions of grooming. In this paper, we address this gap and evaluate bi-encoders on the task of classifying different degrees of grooming risk in chat contexts, for three different participant groups, i.e. law enforcement officers, real victims, and decoys. Using a fuzzy-theoretic framework, we map human assessments of grooming behaviors to estimate the actual degree of grooming risk. Our analysis reveals that fine-tuned models fail to tag instances where the predator uses indirect speech pathways and coded language to evade detection. Further, we find that such instances are characterized by a higher presence of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words in samples, causing the model to misclassify. Our findings highlight the need for more robust models to identify coded language from noisy chat inputs in grooming contexts.
Authors: Antonio Purificato, Maria Sofia Bucarelli, Anil Kumar Nelakanti, Andrea Bacciu, Fabrizio Silvestri, Amin Mantrach
Abstract: Reliably labelling data typically requires annotations from multiple human workers. However, humans are far from being perfect. Hence, it is a common practice to aggregate labels gathered from multiple annotators to make a more confident estimate of the true label. Among many aggregation methods, the simple and well known Majority Vote (MV) selects the class label polling the highest number of votes. However, despite its importance, the optimality of MV's label aggregation has not been extensively studied. We address this gap in our work by characterising the conditions under which MV achieves the theoretically optimal lower bound on label estimation error. Our results capture the tolerable limits on annotation noise under which MV can optimally recover labels for a given class distribution. This certificate of optimality provides a more principled approach to model selection for label aggregation as an alternative to otherwise inefficient practices that sometimes include higher experts, gold labels, etc., that are all marred by the same human uncertainty despite huge time and monetary costs. Experiments on both synthetic and real world data corroborate our theoretical findings.
Authors: Jichan Chung, Irene Y. Chen
Abstract: Semi-supervised learning (SSL) leverages limited labeled data alongside abundant unlabeled data to address labeling costs in machine learning. While recent foundation models enable zero-shot inference, attempts to integrate these capabilities into SSL through pseudo-labeling have shown mixed results due to unreliable zero-shot predictions. We present ZMT (Zero-Shot Multi-Task Learning), a framework that jointly optimizes zero-shot pseudo-labels and unsupervised representation learning objectives from contemporary SSL approaches. Our method introduces a multi-task learning-based mechanism that incorporates pseudo-labels while ensuring robustness to varying pseudo-label quality. Experiments across 8 datasets in vision, language, and audio domains demonstrate that ZMT reduces error by up to 56% compared to traditional SSL methods, with particularly compelling results when pseudo-labels are noisy and unreliable. ZMT represents a significant step toward making semi-supervised learning more effective and accessible in resource-constrained environments.
Authors: Lunjun Liu, Weilai Jiang, Yaonan Wang
Abstract: The Incomplete Utterance Rewriting (IUR) task has garnered significant attention in recent years. Its goal is to reconstruct conversational utterances to better align with the current context, thereby enhancing comprehension. In this paper, we introduce a novel and versatile lightweight method, Rewritten-Sampled MLP (RSMLP). By employing an MLP based architecture with a carefully designed down-sampling strategy, RSMLP effectively extracts latent semantic information between utterances and makes appropriate edits to restore incomplete utterances. Due to its simple yet efficient structure, our method achieves competitive performance on public IUR datasets and in real-world applications.
Authors: Ruichu Cai, Haiqin Huang, Zhifang Jiang, Zijian Li, Changze Zhou, Yuequn Liu, Yuming Liu, Zhifeng Hao
Abstract: Current methods for time series forecasting struggle in the online scenario, since it is difficult to preserve long-term dependency while adapting short-term changes when data are arriving sequentially. Although some recent methods solve this problem by controlling the updates of latent states, they cannot disentangle the long/short-term states, leading to the inability to effectively adapt to nonstationary. To tackle this challenge, we propose a general framework to disentangle long/short-term states for online time series forecasting. Our idea is inspired by the observations where short-term changes can be led by unknown interventions like abrupt policies in the stock market. Based on this insight, we formalize a data generation process with unknown interventions on short-term states. Under mild assumptions, we further leverage the independence of short-term states led by unknown interventions to establish the identification theory to achieve the disentanglement of long/short-term states. Built on this theory, we develop a long short-term disentanglement model (LSTD) to extract the long/short-term states with long/short-term encoders, respectively. Furthermore, the LSTD model incorporates a smooth constraint to preserve the long-term dependencies and an interrupted dependency constraint to enforce the forgetting of short-term dependencies, together boosting the disentanglement of long/short-term states. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets show that our \textbf{LSTD} model outperforms existing methods for online time series forecasting, validating its efficacy in real-world applications.
Authors: Bingheng Li, Zhikai Chen, Haoyu Han, Shenglai Zeng, Jingzhe Liu, Jiliang Tang
Abstract: A fundamental challenge in understanding graph neural networks (GNNs) lies in characterizing their optimization dynamics and loss landscape geometry, critical for improving interpretability and robustness. While mode connectivity, a lens for analyzing geometric properties of loss landscapes has proven insightful for other deep learning architectures, its implications for GNNs remain unexplored. This work presents the first investigation of mode connectivity in GNNs. We uncover that GNNs exhibit distinct non-linear mode connectivity, diverging from patterns observed in fully-connected networks or CNNs. Crucially, we demonstrate that graph structure, rather than model architecture, dominates this behavior, with graph properties like homophily correlating with mode connectivity patterns. We further establish a link between mode connectivity and generalization, proposing a generalization bound based on loss barriers and revealing its utility as a diagnostic tool. Our findings further bridge theoretical insights with practical implications: they rationalize domain alignment strategies in graph learning and provide a foundation for refining GNN training paradigms.
Authors: Lu Yang, Jiajia Li, En Ci, Lefei Zhang, Zuchao Li, Ping Wang
Abstract: Universal Information Extraction (UIE) has garnered significant attention due to its ability to address model explosion problems effectively. Extractive UIE can achieve strong performance using a relatively small model, making it widely adopted. Extractive UIEs generally rely on task instructions for different tasks, including single-target instructions and multiple-target instructions. Single-target instruction UIE enables the extraction of only one type of relation at a time, limiting its ability to model correlations between relations and thus restricting its capability to extract complex relations. While multiple-target instruction UIE allows for the extraction of multiple relations simultaneously, the inclusion of irrelevant relations introduces decision complexity and impacts extraction accuracy. Therefore, for multi-relation extraction, we propose LDNet, which incorporates multi-aspect relation modeling and a label drop mechanism. By assigning different relations to different levels for understanding and decision-making, we reduce decision confusion. Additionally, the label drop mechanism effectively mitigates the impact of irrelevant relations. Experiments show that LDNet outperforms or achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art systems on 9 tasks, 33 datasets, in both single-modal and multi-modal, few-shot and zero-shot settings.\footnote{https://github.com/Lu-Yang666/LDNet}
Authors: Vatsal Maru
Abstract: The Aircraft Landing Problem (ALP) is one of the challenging problems in aircraft transportation and management. The challenge is to schedule the arriving aircraft in a sequence so that the cost and delays are optimized. There are various solution approaches to solving this problem, most of which are based on operations research algorithms and meta-heuristics. Although traditional methods perform better on one or the other factors, there remains a problem of solving real-time rescheduling and computational scalability altogether. This paper presents a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework that combines graph neural networks with actor-critic architectures to address the ALP. This paper introduces three key contributions: A graph-based state representation that efficiently captures temporal and spatial relationships between aircraft, a specialized actor-critic architecture designed to handle multiple competing objectives in landing scheduling, and a runway balance strategy that ensures efficient resource utilization while maintaining safety constraints. The results show that the trained algorithm can be tested on different problem sets and the results are competitive to operation research algorithms. The experimental results on standard benchmark data sets demonstrate a 99.95 reduction in computational time compared to Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) and 38 higher runway throughput over First Come First Serve (FCFS) approaches. Therefore, the proposed solution is competitive to traditional approaches and achieves substantial advancements. Notably, it does not require retraining, making it particularly suitable for industrial deployment. The frameworks capability to generate solutions within 1 second enables real-time rescheduling, addressing critical requirements of air traffic management.
Authors: Zhuoyuan Mao, Mengjie Zhao, Qiyu Wu, Hiromi Wakaki, Yuki Mitsufuji
Abstract: Recent advancements in music large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved music understanding tasks, which involve the model's ability to analyze and interpret various musical elements. These improvements primarily focused on integrating both music and text inputs. However, the potential of incorporating additional modalities such as images, videos and textual music features to enhance music understanding remains unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose DeepResonance, a multimodal music understanding LLM fine-tuned via multi-way instruction tuning with multi-way aligned music, text, image, and video data. To this end, we construct Music4way-MI2T, Music4way-MV2T, and Music4way-Any2T, three 4-way training and evaluation datasets designed to enable DeepResonance to integrate both visual and textual music feature content. We also introduce multi-sampled ImageBind embeddings and a pre-alignment Transformer to enhance modality fusion prior to input into text LLMs, tailoring DeepResonance for multi-way instruction tuning. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performances across six music understanding tasks, highlighting the benefits of the auxiliary modalities and the structural superiority of DeepResonance. We plan to open-source the models and the newly constructed datasets.
Authors: Tvrtko Sternak, Davor Runje, Dorian Grano\v{s}a, Chi Wang
Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach to evaluating the security of large language models (LLMs) against prompt leakage-the exposure of system-level prompts or proprietary configurations. We define prompt leakage as a critical threat to secure LLM deployment and introduce a framework for testing the robustness of LLMs using agentic teams. Leveraging AG2 (formerly AutoGen), we implement a multi-agent system where cooperative agents are tasked with probing and exploiting the target LLM to elicit its prompt. Guided by traditional definitions of security in cryptography, we further define a prompt leakage-safe system as one in which an attacker cannot distinguish between two agents: one initialized with an original prompt and the other with a prompt stripped of all sensitive information. In a safe system, the agents' outputs will be indistinguishable to the attacker, ensuring that sensitive information remains secure. This cryptographically inspired framework provides a rigorous standard for evaluating and designing secure LLMs. This work establishes a systematic methodology for adversarial testing of prompt leakage, bridging the gap between automated threat modeling and practical LLM security. You can find the implementation of our prompt leakage probing on GitHub.
Authors: Mingyang Sun, Pengxiang Ding, Weinan Zhang, Donglin Wang
Abstract: Diffusion policies have shown promise in learning complex behaviors from demonstrations, particularly for tasks requiring precise control and long-term planning. However, they face challenges in robustness when encountering distribution shifts. This paper explores improving diffusion-based imitation learning models through online interactions with the environment. We propose OTPR (Optimal Transport-guided score-based diffusion Policy for Reinforcement learning fine-tuning), a novel method that integrates diffusion policies with RL using optimal transport theory. OTPR leverages the Q-function as a transport cost and views the policy as an optimal transport map, enabling efficient and stable fine-tuning. Moreover, we introduce masked optimal transport to guide state-action matching using expert keypoints and a compatibility-based resampling strategy to enhance training stability. Experiments on three simulation tasks demonstrate OTPR's superior performance and robustness compared to existing methods, especially in complex and sparse-reward environments. In sum, OTPR provides an effective framework for combining IL and RL, achieving versatile and reliable policy learning. The code will be released at https://github.com/Sunmmyy/OTPR.git.
Authors: Ben Liu, Jihan Zhang, Fangquan Lin, Xu Jia, Min Peng
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly employed in various intelligent educational systems, simulating human tutors to facilitate effective human-machine interaction. However, previous studies often overlook the significance of recognizing and adapting to individual learner characteristics. Such adaptation is crucial for enhancing student engagement and learning efficiency, particularly in mathematics instruction, where diverse learning styles require personalized strategies to promote comprehension and enthusiasm. In this paper, we propose a \textbf{P}erson\textbf{A}lized \textbf{C}onversational tutoring ag\textbf{E}nt (PACE) for mathematics instruction. PACE simulates students' learning styles based on the Felder and Silverman learning style model, aligning with each student's persona. In this way, our PACE can effectively assess the personality of students, allowing to develop individualized teaching strategies that resonate with their unique learning styles. To further enhance students' comprehension, PACE employs the Socratic teaching method to provide instant feedback and encourage deep thinking. By constructing personalized teaching data and training models, PACE demonstrates the ability to identify and adapt to the unique needs of each student, significantly improving the overall learning experience and outcomes. Moreover, we establish multi-aspect evaluation criteria and conduct extensive analysis to assess the performance of personalized teaching. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our model in personalizing the educational experience and motivating students compared to existing methods.
Authors: Kaiwen Zhou, Chengzhi Liu, Xuandong Zhao, Shreedhar Jangam, Jayanth Srinivasa, Gaowen Liu, Dawn Song, Xin Eric Wang
Abstract: The rapid development of large reasoning models, such as OpenAI-o3 and DeepSeek-R1, has led to significant improvements in complex reasoning over non-reasoning large language models~(LLMs). However, their enhanced capabilities, combined with the open-source access of models like DeepSeek-R1, raise serious safety concerns, particularly regarding their potential for misuse. In this work, we present a comprehensive safety assessment of these reasoning models, leveraging established safety benchmarks to evaluate their compliance with safety regulations. Furthermore, we investigate their susceptibility to adversarial attacks, such as jailbreaking and prompt injection, to assess their robustness in real-world applications. Through our multi-faceted analysis, we uncover four key findings: (1) There is a significant safety gap between the open-source R1 models and the o3-mini model, on both safety benchmark and attack, suggesting more safety effort on R1 is needed. (2) The distilled reasoning model shows poorer safety performance compared to its safety-aligned base models. (3) The stronger the model's reasoning ability, the greater the potential harm it may cause when answering unsafe questions. (4) The thinking process in R1 models pose greater safety concerns than their final answers. Our study provides insights into the security implications of reasoning models and highlights the need for further advancements in R1 models' safety to close the gap.
Authors: Tzu-Quan Lin, Wei-Ping Huang, Hao Tang, Hung-yi Lee
Abstract: Speech representation models are highly effective at extracting general features for various tasks. While fine-tuning can enhance these representations for specific applications, it often compromises their generalization ability. To address this challenge, we propose Speech-FT, a fine-tuning strategy for speech representation models that leverages model merging to preserve generalization ability while still benefiting from fine-tuning. Speech-FT is effective across different fine-tuning scenarios and is compatible with various types of speech representation models, providing a versatile solution. Speech-FT offers an efficient and practical approach to further improving general speech representations after pre-training.
Authors: Shuai Wang, Malu Zhang, Dehao Zhang, Ammar Belatreche, Yichen Xiao, Yu Liang, Yimeng Shan, Qian Sun, Enqi Zhang, Yang Yang
Abstract: The combination of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) holds potential for achieving both energy efficiency and high performance, particularly suitable for edge vision applications. However, a significant performance gap still exists between SNN-based ViTs and their ANN counterparts. Here, we first analyze why SNN-based ViTs suffer from limited performance and identify a mismatch between the vanilla self-attention mechanism and spatio-temporal spike trains. This mismatch results in degraded spatial relevance and limited temporal interactions. To address these issues, we draw inspiration from biological saccadic attention mechanisms and introduce an innovative Saccadic Spike Self-Attention (SSSA) method. Specifically, in the spatial domain, SSSA employs a novel spike distribution-based method to effectively assess the relevance between Query and Key pairs in SNN-based ViTs. Temporally, SSSA employs a saccadic interaction module that dynamically focuses on selected visual areas at each timestep and significantly enhances whole scene understanding through temporal interactions. Building on the SSSA mechanism, we develop a SNN-based Vision Transformer (SNN-ViT). Extensive experiments across various visual tasks demonstrate that SNN-ViT achieves state-of-the-art performance with linear computational complexity. The effectiveness and efficiency of the SNN-ViT highlight its potential for power-critical edge vision applications.
Authors: Yongtao Wu, Luca Viano, Yihang Chen, Zhenyu Zhu, Kimon Antonakopoulos, Quanquan Gu, Volkan Cevher
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been highly successful in aligning large language models with human preferences. While prevalent methods like DPO have demonstrated strong performance, they frame interactions with the language model as a bandit problem, which limits their applicability in real-world scenarios where multi-turn conversations are common. Additionally, DPO relies on the Bradley-Terry model assumption, which does not adequately capture the non-transitive nature of human preferences. In this paper, we address these challenges by modeling the alignment problem as a two-player constant-sum Markov game, where each player seeks to maximize their winning rate against the other across all steps of the conversation. Our approach Multi-step Preference Optimization (MPO) is built upon the natural actor-critic framework~\citep{peters2008natural}. We further develop OMPO based on the optimistic online gradient descent algorithm~\citep{rakhlin2013online,joulani17a}. Theoretically, we provide a rigorous analysis for both algorithms on convergence and show that OMPO requires $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-1})$ policy updates to converge to an $\epsilon$-approximate Nash equilibrium. We also validate the effectiveness of our method on multi-turn conversations dataset and math reasoning dataset.
Authors: Emil Njor, Colby Banbury, Xenofon Fafoutis
Abstract: Tiny machine learning (TinyML) promises to revolutionize fields such as healthcare, environmental monitoring, and industrial maintenance by running machine learning models on low-power embedded systems. However, the complex optimizations required for successful TinyML deployment continue to impede its widespread adoption. A promising route to simplifying TinyML is through automatic machine learning (AutoML), which can distill elaborate optimization workflows into accessible key decisions. Notably, Hardware Aware Neural Architecture Searches - where a computer searches for an optimal TinyML model based on predictive performance and hardware metrics - have gained significant traction, producing some of today's most widely used TinyML models. Nevertheless, limiting optimization solely to neural network architectures can prove insufficient. Because TinyML systems must operate under extremely tight resource constraints, the choice of input data configuration, such as resolution or sampling rate, also profoundly impacts overall system efficiency. Achieving truly optimal TinyML systems thus requires jointly tuning both input data and model architecture. Despite its importance, this "Data Aware Neural Architecture Search" remains underexplored. To address this gap, we propose a new state-of-the-art Data Aware Neural Architecture Search technique and demonstrate its effectiveness on the novel TinyML ``Wake Vision'' dataset. Our experiments show that across varying time and hardware constraints, Data Aware Neural Architecture Search consistently discovers superior TinyML systems compared to purely architecture-focused methods, underscoring the critical role of data-aware optimization in advancing TinyML.
Authors: Ant\'onio Farinhas, Nuno M. Guerreiro, Sweta Agrawal, Ricardo Rei, Andr\'e F. T. Martins
Abstract: Larger models often outperform smaller ones but come with high computational costs. Cascading offers a potential solution. By default, it uses smaller models and defers only some instances to larger, more powerful models. However, designing effective deferral rules remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach for machine translation, using existing quality estimation (QE) metrics as deferral rules. We show that QE-based deferral allows a cascaded system to match the performance of a larger model while invoking it for a small fraction (30% to 50%) of the examples, significantly reducing computational costs. We validate this approach through both automatic and human evaluation.
Authors: Malte Hellmeier, Hendrik Norkowski, Ernst-Christoph Schrewe, Haydar Qarawlus, Falk Howar
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant popularity in recent years. Differentiating between a text written by a human and a text generated by an LLM has become almost impossible. Information hiding techniques such as digital watermarking or steganography can help by embedding information inside text without being noticed. However, existing techniques, such as linguistic-based or format-based methods, change the semantics or do not work on pure, unformatted text. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for information hiding termed TREND, which is able to conceal any byte-encoded sequence within a cover text. The proposed method is implemented as a multi-platform library using the Kotlin programming language, accompanied by a command-line tool and a web interface provided as examples of usage. By substituting conventional whitespace characters with visually similar Unicode whitespace characters, our proposed scheme preserves the semantics of the cover text without increasing the number of characters. Furthermore, we propose a specified structure for secret messages that enables configurable compression, encryption, hashing, and error correction. Our experimental benchmark comparison on a dataset of one million Wikipedia articles compares ten algorithms from literature and practice. It proves the robustness of our proposed method in various applications while remaining imperceptible to humans. We discuss the limitations of limited embedding capacity and further robustness, which guide implications for future work.
Authors: Shengxiang Gao, Jey Han Lau, Jianzhong Qi
Abstract: Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) aims to answer user questions in natural language using rich human knowledge stored in large KBs. As current KBQA methods struggle with unseen knowledge base elements at test time,we introduce SG-KBQA: a novel model that injects schema contexts into entity retrieval and logical form generation to tackle this issue. It uses the richer semantics and awareness of the knowledge base structure provided by schema contexts to enhance generalizability. We show that SG-KBQA achieves strong generalizability, outperforming state-of-the-art models on two commonly used benchmark datasets across a variety of test settings. Code will be released upon paper publication.
Authors: Jiazhou Ji, Jie Guo, Weidong Qiu, Zheng Huang, Yang Xu, Xinru Lu, Xiaoyu Jiang, Ruizhe Li, Shujun Li
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating human-like texts, but the potential misuse of such LLM-generated texts raises the need to distinguish between human-generated and LLM-generated content. This paper explores the detection and explanation capabilities of LLM-based detectors of LLM-generated texts, in the context of a binary classification task (human-generated texts vs LLM-generated texts) and a ternary classification task (human-generated texts, LLM-generated texts, and undecided). By evaluating on six close/open-source LLMs with different sizes, our findings reveal that while self-detection consistently outperforms cross-detection, i.e., LLMs can detect texts generated by themselves more accurately than those generated by other LLMs, the performance of self-detection is still far from ideal, indicating that further improvements are needed. We also show that extending the binary to the ternary classification task with a new class "Undecided" can enhance both detection accuracy and explanation quality, with improvements being statistically significant and consistent across all LLMs. We finally conducted comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analyses on the explanation errors, which are categorized into three types: reliance on inaccurate features (the most frequent error), hallucinations, and incorrect reasoning. These findings with our human-annotated dataset emphasize the need for further research into improving both self-detection and self-explanation, particularly to address overfitting issues that may hinder generalization.
Authors: Ahmet Gunduz, Kamer Ali Yuksel, Hassan Sawaf
Abstract: In an era of rapid technological advancements, agentification of software tools has emerged as a critical innovation, enabling systems to function autonomously and adaptively. This paper introduces MediaMind as a case study to demonstrate the agentification process, highlighting how existing software can be transformed into intelligent agents capable of independent decision-making and dynamic interaction. Developed by aiXplain, MediaMind leverages agent-based architecture to autonomously monitor, analyze, and provide insights from multilingual media content in real time. The focus of this paper is on the technical methodologies and design principles behind agentifying MediaMind, showcasing how agentification enhances adaptability, efficiency, and responsiveness. Through detailed case studies and practical examples, we illustrate how the agentification of MediaMind empowers organizations to streamline workflows, optimize decision-making, and respond to evolving trends. This work underscores the broader potential of agentification to revolutionize software tools across various domains.
Authors: Kamer Ali Yuksel, Ahmet Gunduz, Abdul Baseet Anees, Hassan Sawaf
Abstract: This paper introduces an advanced methodology for machine translation (MT) corpus generation, integrating semi-automated, human-in-the-loop post-editing with large language models (LLMs) to enhance efficiency and translation quality. Building upon previous work that utilized real-time training of a custom MT quality estimation metric, this system incorporates novel LLM features such as Enhanced Translation Synthesis and Assisted Annotation Analysis, which improve initial translation hypotheses and quality assessments, respectively. Additionally, the system employs LLM-Driven Pseudo Labeling and a Translation Recommendation System to reduce human annotator workload in specific contexts. These improvements not only retain the original benefits of cost reduction and enhanced post-edit quality but also open new avenues for leveraging cutting-edge LLM advancements. The project's source code is available for community use, promoting collaborative developments in the field. The demo video can be accessed here.
Authors: Sumin Jo, Junseong Choi, Jiho Kim, Edward Choi
Abstract: Recent studies have combined Large Language Models (LLMs) with Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to enhance reasoning, improving inference accuracy without additional training while mitigating hallucination. However, existing frameworks are often rigid, struggling to adapt to KG or task changes. They also rely heavily on powerful LLMs for reliable (i.e., trustworthy) reasoning. To address this, We introduce R2-KG, a plug-and-play, dual-agent framework that separates reasoning into two roles: an Operator (a low-capacity LLM) that gathers evidence and a Supervisor (a high-capacity LLM) that makes final judgments. This design is cost-efficient for LLM inference while still maintaining strong reasoning accuracy. Additionally, R2-KG employs an Abstention mechanism, generating answers only when sufficient evidence is collected from KG, which significantly enhances reliability. Experiments across multiple KG-based reasoning tasks show that R2-KG consistently outperforms baselines in both accuracy and reliability, regardless of the inherent capability of LLMs used as the Operator. Further experiments reveal that the single-agent version of R2-KG, equipped with a strict self-consistency strategy, achieves significantly higher-than-baseline reliability while reducing inference cost. However, it also leads to a higher abstention rate in complex KGs. Our findings establish R2-KG as a flexible and cost-effective solution for KG-based reasoning. It reduces reliance on high-capacity LLMs while ensuring trustworthy inference.
Authors: Saad Obaid ul Islam, Anne Lauscher, Goran Glava\v{s}
Abstract: In the age of misinformation, hallucination -- the tendency of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate non-factual or unfaithful responses -- represents the main risk for their global utility. Despite LLMs becoming increasingly multilingual, the vast majority of research on detecting and quantifying LLM hallucination are (a) English-centric and (b) focus on machine translation (MT) and summarization, tasks that are less common ``in the wild'' than open information seeking. In contrast, we aim to quantify the extent of LLM hallucination across languages in knowledge-intensive long-form question answering. To this end, we train a multilingual hallucination detection model and conduct a large-scale study across 30 languages and 6 open-source LLM families. We start from an English hallucination detection dataset and rely on MT to generate (noisy) training data in other languages. We also manually annotate gold data for five high-resource languages; we then demonstrate, for these languages, that the estimates of hallucination rates are similar between silver (LLM-generated) and gold test sets, validating the use of silver data for estimating hallucination rates for other languages. For the final rates estimation, we build a knowledge-intensive QA dataset for 30 languages with LLM-generated prompts and Wikipedia articles as references. We find that, while LLMs generate longer responses with more hallucinated tokens for higher-resource languages, there is no correlation between length-normalized hallucination rates of languages and their digital representation. Further, we find that smaller LLMs exhibit larger hallucination rates than larger models.
Authors: Daiki Chijiwa, Taku Hasegawa, Kyosuke Nishida, Kuniko Saito, Susumu Takeuchi
Abstract: While foundation models have been exploited for various expert tasks through fine-tuning, any foundation model will become outdated due to its old knowledge or limited capability. Thus the underlying foundation model should be eventually replaced by new ones, which leads to repeated cost of fine-tuning these new models. Existing work addresses this problem by inference-time tuning, i.e., modifying the output probabilities from the new foundation model with the outputs from the old foundation model and its fine-tuned model, which involves an additional overhead in inference by the latter two models. In this paper, we propose a new fine-tuning principle, Portable Reward Tuning (PRT), that reduces the inference overhead by its nature, based on the reformulation of fine-tuning as the reward maximization. Specifically, instead of fine-tuning parameters of the foundation models, PRT trains the reward model explicitly through the same loss function as in fine-tuning. During inference, the reward model can be used with any foundation model (with the same set of vocabularies or labels) through the formulation of reward maximization. Experimental results, covering both vision and language models, demonstrate that the PRT-trained model can achieve comparable accuracy to the existing work of inference-time tuning, with less inference cost.
Authors: Bhargavi Kalyani I, A Rama Prasad Mathi, Niladri Sett
Abstract: Link prediction (LP) is an important problem in network science and machine learning research. The state-of-the-art LP methods are usually evaluated in a uniform setup, ignoring several factors associated with the data and application specific needs. We identify a number of such factors, such as, network-type, problem-type, geodesic distance between the end nodes and its distribution over the classes, nature and applicability of LP methods, class imbalance and its impact on early retrieval, evaluation metric, etc., and present an experimental setup which allows us to evaluate LP methods in a rigorous and controlled manner. We perform extensive experiments with a variety of LP methods over real network datasets in this controlled setup, and gather valuable insights on the interactions of these factors with the performance of LP through an array of carefully designed hypotheses. Following the insights, we provide recommendations to be followed as best practice for evaluating LP methods.
Authors: Eduardo Fernandes Montesuma, Adel El Habazi, Fred Ngole Mboula
Abstract: Detecting anomalies in datasets is a longstanding problem in machine learning. In this context, anomalies are defined as a sample that significantly deviates from the remaining data. Meanwhile, optimal transport (OT) is a field of mathematics concerned with the transportation, between two probability measures, at least effort. In classical OT, the optimal transportation strategy of a measure to itself is the identity. In this paper, we tackle anomaly detection by forcing samples to displace its mass, while keeping the least effort objective. We call this new transportation problem Mass Repulsing Optimal Transport (MROT). Naturally, samples lying in low density regions of space will be forced to displace mass very far, incurring a higher transportation cost. We use these concepts to design a new anomaly score. Through a series of experiments in existing benchmarks, and fault detection problems, we show that our algorithm improves over existing methods.
Authors: Omer Ben-Porat, Yotam Gafni, Or Markovetzki
Abstract: Explore-and-exploit tradeoffs play a key role in recommendation systems (RSs), aiming at serving users better by learning from previous interactions. Despite their commercial success, the societal effects of explore-and-exploit mechanisms are not well understood, especially regarding the utility discrepancy they generate between different users. In this work, we measure such discrepancy using the economic notion of envy. We present a multi-armed bandit-like model in which every round consists of several sessions, and rewards are realized once per round. We call the latter property reward consistency, and show that the RS can leverage this property for better societal outcomes. On the downside, doing so also generates envy, as late-to-arrive users enjoy the information gathered by early-to-arrive users. We examine the generated envy under several arrival order mechanisms and virtually any anonymous algorithm, i.e., any algorithm that treats all similar users similarly without leveraging their identities. We provide tight envy bounds on uniform arrival and upper bound the envy for nudged arrival, in which the RS can affect the order of arrival by nudging its users. Furthermore, we study the efficiency-fairness trade-off by devising an algorithm that allows constant envy and approximates the optimal welfare in restricted settings. Finally, we validate our theoretical results empirically using simulations.
Authors: Rubing Lu, Jo\~ao Sedoc, Arun Sundararajan
Abstract: When encountering increasingly frequent performance improvements or cost reductions from a new large language model (LLM), developers of applications leveraging LLMs must decide whether to take advantage of these improvements or stay with older tried-and-tested models. Low perceived switching frictions can lead to choices that do not consider more subtle behavior changes that the transition may induce. Our experiments use a popular game-theoretic behavioral economics model of trust to show stark differences in the trusting behavior of OpenAI's and DeepSeek's models. We highlight a collapse in the economic trust behavior of the o1-mini and o3-mini models as they reconcile profit-maximizing and risk-seeking with future returns from trust, and contrast it with DeepSeek's more sophisticated and profitable trusting behavior that stems from an ability to incorporate deeper concepts like forward planning and theory-of-mind. As LLMs form the basis for high-stakes commercial systems, our results highlight the perils of relying on LLM performance benchmarks that are too narrowly defined and suggest that careful analysis of their hidden fault lines should be part of any organization's AI strategy.
Authors: Fabio Massimo Zanzotto, Elena Sofia Ruzzetti, Giancarlo A. Xompero, Leonardo Ranaldi, Davide Venditti, Federico Ranaldi, Cristina Giannone, Andrea Favalli, Raniero Romagnoli
Abstract: Memorization is a fundamental ability of Transformer-based Large Language Models, achieved through learning. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift by designing an architecture to memorize text directly, bearing in mind the principle that memorization precedes learning. We introduce MeMo, a novel architecture for language modeling that explicitly memorizes sequences of tokens in layered associative memories. By design, MeMo offers transparency and the possibility of model editing, including forgetting texts. We experimented with the MeMo architecture, showing the memorization power of the one-layer and the multi-layer configurations.
Authors: Neeraj Gangwar, Suma P Bhat, Nickvash Kani
Abstract: While large models pre-trained on high-quality data exhibit excellent performance across various reasoning tasks, including mathematical reasoning (e.g. GSM8k, MultiArith), specializing smaller models to excel at mathematical reasoning remains a challenging problem. Common approaches to address this challenge include knowledge distillation, where smaller student models learn from large pre-trained teacher models, and data augmentation, such as rephrasing questions. Despite these efforts, smaller models struggle with arithmetic computations, leading to errors in mathematical reasoning. In this work, we focus on leveraging a programmatically generated arithmetic dataset to enhance the reasoning capabilities of smaller models. We investigate two key approaches to incorporate this dataset -- (1) intermediate fine-tuning, where a model is fine-tuned on the arithmetic dataset before being trained on a reasoning dataset, and (2) integrating the arithmetic dataset into the instruction-tuning mixture, allowing the model to learn arithmetic skills alongside general instruction-following abilities. Our experiments on multiple reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that incorporating an arithmetic dataset, whether through targeted fine-tuning or within the instruction-tuning mixture, enhances the models' arithmetic capabilities, which in turn improves their mathematical reasoning performance.
Authors: Joel Mire, Zubin Trivadi Aysola, Daniel Chechelnitsky, Nicholas Deas, Chrysoula Zerva, Maarten Sap
Abstract: Preference alignment via reward models helps build safe, helpful, and reliable large language models (LLMs). However, subjectivity in preference judgments and the lack of representative sampling in preference data collection can introduce new biases, hindering reward models' fairness and equity. In this work, we introduce a framework for evaluating dialect biases in reward models and conduct a case study on biases against African American Language (AAL) through several experiments comparing reward model preferences and behavior on paired White Mainstream English (WME) and both machine-translated and human-written AAL corpora. We show that reward models are less aligned with human preferences when processing AAL texts vs. WME ones (-4\% accuracy on average), frequently disprefer AAL-aligned texts vs. WME-aligned ones, and steer conversations toward WME, even when prompted with AAL texts. Our findings provide a targeted analysis of anti-AAL biases at a relatively understudied stage in LLM development, highlighting representational harms and ethical questions about the desired behavior of LLMs concerning AAL.
Authors: Chenxing Wei, Yao Shu, Mingwen Ou, Ying Tiffany He, Fei Richard Yu
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) adapt well to downstream tasks after fine-tuning, this adaptability often compromises prompt robustness, as even minor prompt variations can significantly degrade performance. To address this, we propose Prompt-Agnostic Fine-Tuning(PAFT), a simple yet effective approach that dynamically adjusts prompts during fine-tuning. This encourages the model to learn underlying task principles rather than overfitting to specific prompt formulations. PAFT operates in two stages: First, a diverse set of meaningful, synthetic candidate prompts is constructed. Second, during fine-tuning, prompts are randomly sampled from this set to create dynamic training inputs. Extensive experiments across diverse datasets and LLMs demonstrate that models trained with PAFT exhibit strong robustness and generalization across a wide range of prompts, including unseen ones. This enhanced robustness improves both model performance and inference speed while maintaining training efficiency. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of PAFT.
Authors: Yuhao Zhang, Zhiheng Liu, Fan Bu, Ruiyu Zhang, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li
Abstract: Existing end-to-end speech large language models (LLMs) usually rely on large-scale annotated data for training, while data-efficient training has not been discussed in depth. We focus on two fundamental problems between speech and text: the representation space gap and sequence length inconsistency. We propose Soundwave, which utilizes an efficient training strategy and a novel architecture to address these issues. Results show that Soundwave outperforms the advanced Qwen2-Audio in speech translation and AIR-Bench speech tasks, using only one-fiftieth of the training data. Further analysis shows that Soundwave still retains its intelligence during conversation. The project is available at https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/Soundwave.
Authors: Ziming Li, Youhuan Li, Yuyu Luo, Guoliang Li, Chuxu Zhang
Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) are powerful deep learning models for graph-structured data, demonstrating remarkable success across diverse domains. Recently, the database (DB) community has increasingly recognized the potentiality of GNNs, prompting a surge of researches focusing on improving database systems through GNN-based approaches. However, despite notable advances, There is a lack of a comprehensive review and understanding of how GNNs could improve DB systems. Therefore, this survey aims to bridge this gap by providing a structured and in-depth overview of GNNs for DB systems. Specifically, we propose a new taxonomy that classifies existing methods into two key categories: (1) Relational Databases, which includes tasks like performance prediction, query optimization, and text-to-SQL, and (2) Graph Databases, addressing challenges like efficient graph query processing and graph similarity computation. We systematically review key methods in each category, highlighting their contributions and practical implications. Finally, we suggest promising avenues for integrating GNNs into Database systems.
Authors: Sifan Zhou, Shuo Wang, Zhihang Yuan, Mingjia Shi, Yuzhang Shang, Dawei Yang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) fine-tuning technologies have achieved remarkable results. However, traditional LLM fine-tuning approaches face significant challenges: they require large Floating Point (FP) computation, raising privacy concerns when handling sensitive data, and are impractical for resource-constrained edge devices. While Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques reduce trainable parameters, their reliance on floating-point arithmetic creates fundamental incompatibilities with edge hardware. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for on-device LLM fine-tuning that eliminates the need for floating-point operations in both inference and training, named GSQ-Tuning. At its core is the Group-Shared Exponents Integer format, which efficiently represents model parameters in integer format using shared exponents among parameter groups. When combined with LoRA-like adapters, this enables fully integer-based fine-tuning that is both memory and compute efficient. We demonstrate that our approach achieves accuracy comparable to FP16-based fine-tuning while significantly reducing memory usage (50%). Moreover, compared to FP8, our method can reduce 5x power consumption and 11x chip area with same performance, making large-scale model adaptation feasible on edge devices.
Authors: Maite Heredia, Gorka Labaka, Jeremy Barnes, Aitor Soroa
Abstract: Code-switching (CS) is still a critical challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Current Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to interpret and generate code-switched text, primarily due to the scarcity of large-scale CS datasets for training. This paper presents a novel methodology to generate CS data using LLMs, and test it on the English-Spanish language pair. We propose back-translating natural CS sentences into monolingual English, and using the resulting parallel corpus to fine-tune LLMs to turn monolingual sentences into CS. Unlike previous approaches to CS generation, our methodology uses natural CS data as a starting point, allowing models to learn its natural distribution beyond grammatical patterns. We thoroughly analyse the models' performance through a study on human preferences, a qualitative error analysis and an evaluation with popular automatic metrics. Results show that our methodology generates fluent code-switched text, expanding research opportunities in CS communication, and that traditional metrics do not correlate with human judgement when assessing the quality of the generated CS data. We release our code and generated dataset under a CC-BY-NC-SA license.
Authors: David Genova, Philippe Esling, Tom Hurlin
Abstract: Recently, research on audio foundation models has witnessed notable advances, as illustrated by the ever improving results on complex downstream tasks. Subsequently, those pretrained networks have quickly been used for various audio applications. These improvements have however resulted in a considerable increase both in size and complexity of these models. Along the environmental concerns this issue raises, this prevents the deployment of such networks on consumer-level devices, and precludes their use for real-time applications. Moreover, this appears contradictory with the specificity of the tasks for which these models are used, which are often simpler compared to extracting a rich, multi-purpose representation from any type of audio data. In this paper, we address this issue with a simple, yet effective method to extract lightweight specialist subnetworks from large foundation models. Specifically, we introduce learnable binary masks in-between the layers of a pretrained representation model. When training the end-to-end model on a downstream task, we add a sparsity-inducing loss to the overall objective, hence learning a compact subnetwork specialized on a single task. Importantly, the weights of the foundation model are kept frozen, resulting into low additional training costs. Once trained, the masked computational units can then be removed from the network, implying significant performance gains. We assess our method on three widespread audio foundation models, each based on a different backbone architecture, and illustrate its effectiveness on common audio representation evaluation tasks, as well as its versatility on both speech, music, and general audio. Code for reproducing the results and supporting webpage are available at https://github.com/gnvIRCAM/Audio-representation-trimming
URLs: https://github.com/gnvIRCAM/Audio-representation-trimming
Authors: Lakshmi Nair, Ian Trase, Mark Kim
Abstract: We present a novel reasoning approach called Flow-of-Options (FoO), designed to address intrinsic biases in Large Language Models (LLMs). FoO enables LLMs to systematically explore a diverse range of possibilities in their reasoning, as demonstrated by an FoO-based agentic system for autonomously solving Machine Learning tasks (AutoML). Our framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving improvements of 38.2% - 69.2% on standard data science tasks, and 37.4% - 47.9% on therapeutic chemistry tasks. With an overall operation cost under $1 per task, our framework is well-suited for cost-sensitive applications. Beyond classification and regression, we illustrate the broader applicability of our FoO-based agentic system to tasks such as reinforcement learning and image generation. Our framework presents significant advancements compared to current state-of-the-art agentic systems for AutoML, due to the benefits of FoO in enforcing diversity in LLM solutions through compressed, explainable representations that also support long-term memory when combined with case-based reasoning.
Authors: Gyeongman Kim, Gyouk Chu, Eunho Yang
Abstract: With the emergence of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), the efficient scaling of model size has accelerated the development of large language models in recent years. However, their high memory requirements prevent their use in resource-constrained environments. While knowledge distillation (KD) has been a proven method for model compression, its application to MoE teacher models remains underexplored. Through our investigation, we discover that non-activated experts in MoE models possess valuable knowledge that benefits student models. We further demonstrate that existing KD methods are not optimal for compressing MoE models, as they fail to leverage this knowledge effectively. To address this, we propose two intuitive MoE-specific KD methods for the first time: Knowledge Augmentation (KA) and Student-Aware Router (SAR), both designed to effectively extract knowledge from all experts. Specifically, KA augments knowledge by sampling experts multiple times, while SAR uses all experts and adjusts the expert weights through router training to provide optimal knowledge. Extensive experiments show that our methods outperform conventional KD methods, demonstrating their effectiveness for MoE teacher models.
Authors: Athira J Jacob, Puneet Sharma, Daniel Rueckert
Abstract: Detection of hyperenhancement from cardiac LGE MRI images is a complex task requiring significant clinical expertise. Although deep learning-based models have shown promising results for the task, they require large amounts of data with fine-grained annotations. Clinical reports generated for cardiac MR studies contain rich, clinically relevant information, including the location, extent and etiology of any scars present. Although recently developed CLIP-based training enables pretraining models with image-text pairs, it requires large amounts of data and further finetuning strategies on downstream tasks. In this study, we use various strategies rooted in domain knowledge to train a model for LGE detection solely using text from clinical reports, on a relatively small clinical cohort of 965 patients. We improve performance through the use of synthetic data augmentation, by systematically creating scar images and associated text. In addition, we standardize the orientation of the images in an anatomy-informed way to enable better alignment of spatial and text features. We also use a captioning loss to enable fine-grained supervision and explore the effect of pretraining of the vision encoder on performance. Finally, ablation studies are carried out to elucidate the contributions of each design component to the overall performance of the model.
Authors: Andrei Jarca, Florinel Alin Croitoru, Radu Tudor Ionescu
Abstract: Masked language modeling has become a widely adopted unsupervised technique to pre-train language models. However, the process of selecting tokens for masking is random, and the percentage of masked tokens is typically fixed for the entire training process. In this paper, we propose to adjust the masking ratio and to decide which tokens to mask based on a novel task-informed anti-curriculum learning scheme. First, we harness task-specific knowledge about useful and harmful tokens in order to determine which tokens to mask. Second, we propose a cyclic decaying masking ratio, which corresponds to an anti-curriculum schedule (from hard to easy). We exemplify our novel task-informed anti-curriculum by masking (TIACBM) approach across three diverse downstream tasks: sentiment analysis, text classification by topic, and authorship attribution. Our findings suggest that TIACBM enhances the ability of the model to focus on key task-relevant features, contributing to statistically significant performance gains across tasks. We release our code at https://github.com/JarcaAndrei/TIACBM.
Authors: Steve Bakos, F\'elix Gaschi, David Guzm\'an, Riddhi More, Kelly Chutong Li, En-Shiun Annie Lee
Abstract: Realignment techniques are often employed to enhance cross-lingual transfer in multilingual language models, still, they can sometimes degrade performance in languages that differ significantly from the fine-tuned source language. This paper introduces AlignFreeze, a method that freezes either the layers' lower half or upper half during realignment. Through controlled experiments on 4 tasks, 3 models, and in 35 languages, we find that realignment affects all the layers but can be the most detrimental to the lower ones. Freezing the lower layers can prevent performance degradation. Particularly, AlignFreeze improves Part-of-Speech (PoS) tagging performances in languages where full realignment fails: with XLM-R, it provides improvements of more than one standard deviation in accuracy in seven more languages than full realignment.
Authors: Adriana Valentina Costache, Silviu Florin Gheorghe, Eduard Gabriel Poesina, Paul Irofti, Radu Tudor Ionescu
Abstract: The basic underlying assumption of machine learning (ML) models is that the training and test data are sampled from the same distribution. However, in daily practice, this assumption is often broken, i.e.~the distribution of the test data changes over time, which hinders the application of conventional ML models. One domain where the distribution shift naturally occurs is text classification, since people always find new topics to discuss. To this end, we survey research articles studying open-set text classification and related tasks. We divide the methods in this area based on the constraints that define the kind of distribution shift and the corresponding problem formulation, i.e.~learning with the Universum, zero-shot learning, and open-set learning. We next discuss the predominant mitigation approaches for each problem setup. Finally, we identify several future work directions, aiming to push the boundaries beyond the state of the art. Interestingly, we find that continual learning can solve many of the issues caused by the shifting class distribution. We maintain a list of relevant papers at https://github.com/Eduard6421/Open-Set-Survey.
Authors: Steffen Schneider, Rodrigo Gonz\'alez Laiz, Anastasiia Filippova, Markus Frey, Mackenzie Weygandt Mathis
Abstract: Gradient-based attribution methods aim to explain decisions of deep learning models but so far lack identifiability guarantees. Here, we propose a method to generate attribution maps with identifiability guarantees by developing a regularized contrastive learning algorithm trained on time-series data plus a new attribution method called Inverted Neuron Gradient (collectively named xCEBRA). We show theoretically that xCEBRA has favorable properties for identifying the Jacobian matrix of the data generating process. Empirically, we demonstrate robust approximation of zero vs. non-zero entries in the ground-truth attribution map on synthetic datasets, and significant improvements across previous attribution methods based on feature ablation, Shapley values, and other gradient-based methods. Our work constitutes a first example of identifiable inference of time-series attribution maps and opens avenues to a better understanding of time-series data, such as for neural dynamics and decision-processes within neural networks.
Authors: Longxu Dou, Qian Liu, Fan Zhou, Changyu Chen, Zili Wang, Ziqi Jin, Zichen Liu, Tongyao Zhu, Cunxiao Du, Penghui Yang, Haonan Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Yongchi Zhao, Xiachong Feng, Xin Mao, Man Tsung Yeung, Kunat Pipatanakul, Fajri Koto, Min Si Thu, Hynek Kydl\'i\v{c}ek, Zeyi Liu, Qunshu Lin, Sittipong Sripaisarnmongkol, Kridtaphad Sae-Khow, Nirattisai Thongchim, Taechawat Konkaew, Narong Borijindargoon, Anh Dao, Matichon Maneegard, Phakphum Artkaew, Zheng-Xin Yong, Quan Nguyen, Wannaphong Phatthiyaphaibun, Hoang H. Tran, Mike Zhang, Shiqi Chen, Tianyu Pang, Chao Du, Xinyi Wan, Wei Lu, Min Lin
Abstract: Sailor2 is a family of cutting-edge multilingual language models for South-East Asian (SEA) languages, available in 1B, 8B, and 20B sizes to suit diverse applications. Building on Qwen2.5, Sailor2 undergoes continuous pre-training on 500B tokens (400B SEA-specific and 100B replay tokens) to support 13 SEA languages while retaining proficiency in Chinese and English. Sailor2-20B model achieves a 50-50 win rate against GPT-4o across SEA languages. We also deliver a comprehensive cookbook on how to develop the multilingual model in an efficient manner, including five key aspects: data curation, pre-training, post-training, model customization and evaluation. We hope that Sailor2 model (Apache 2.0 license) will drive language development in the SEA region, and Sailor2 cookbook will inspire researchers to build more inclusive LLMs for other under-served languages.
Authors: Nicolas Talabot, Olivier Clerc, Arda Cinar Demirtas, Doruk Oner, Pascal Fua
Abstract: Accurate 3D shape representation is essential in engineering applications such as design, optimization, and simulation. In practice, engineering workflows require structured, part-aware representations, as objects are inherently designed as assemblies of distinct components. However, most existing methods either model shapes holistically or decompose them without predefined part structures, limiting their applicability in real-world design tasks. We propose PartSDF, a supervised implicit representation framework that explicitly models composite shapes with independent, controllable parts while maintaining shape consistency. Despite its simple single-decoder architecture, PartSDF outperforms both supervised and unsupervised baselines in reconstruction and generation tasks. We further demonstrate its effectiveness as a structured shape prior for engineering applications, enabling precise control over individual components while preserving overall coherence. Code available at https://github.com/cvlab-epfl/PartSDF.
Authors: Yifan Wang, Sukrut Rao, Ji-Ung Lee, Mayank Jobanputra, Vera Demberg
Abstract: Post-hoc explanation methods for black-box models often struggle with faithfulness and human interpretability due to the lack of explainability in current neural models. Meanwhile, B-cos networks have been introduced to improve model explainability through architectural and computational adaptations, but their application has so far been limited to computer vision models and their associated training pipelines. In this work, we introduce B-cos LMs, i.e., B-cos networks empowered for NLP tasks. Our approach directly transforms pre-trained language models into B-cos LMs by combining B-cos conversion and task fine-tuning, improving efficiency compared to previous B-cos methods. Our automatic and human evaluation results demonstrate that B-cos LMs produce more faithful and human interpretable explanations than post hoc methods, while maintaining task performance comparable to conventional fine-tuning. Our in-depth analysis explores how B-cos LMs differ from conventionally fine-tuned models in their learning processes and explanation patterns. Finally, we provide practical guidelines for effectively building B-cos LMs based on our findings. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/bcos_lm.
Authors: Sohrab Namazi Nia, Subhodeep Ghosh, Senjuti Basu Roy, Sihem Amer-Yahia
Abstract: This work studies the applicability of expensive external oracles such as large language models in answering top-k queries over predicted scores. Such scores are incurred by user-defined functions to answer personalized queries over multi-modal data. We propose a generic computational framework that handles arbitrary set-based scoring functions, as long as the functions could be decomposed into constructs, each of which sent to an oracle (in our case an LLM) to predict partial scores. At a given point in time, the framework assumes a set of responses and their partial predicted scores, and it maintains a collection of possible sets that are likely to be the true top-k. Since calling oracles is costly, our framework judiciously identifies the next construct, i.e., the next best question to ask the oracle so as to maximize the likelihood of identifying the true top-k. We present a principled probabilistic model that quantifies that likelihood. We study efficiency opportunities in designing algorithms. We run an evaluation with three large scale datasets, scoring functions, and baselines. Experiments indicate the efficacy of our framework, as it achieves an order of magnitude improvement over baselines in requiring LLM calls while ensuring result accuracy. Scalability experiments further indicate that our framework could be used in large-scale applications.
Authors: Qingwei Ben, Feiyu Jia, Jia Zeng, Junting Dong, Dahua Lin, Jiangmiao Pang
Abstract: Current humanoid teleoperation systems either lack reliable low-level control policies, or struggle to acquire accurate whole-body control commands, making it difficult to teleoperate humanoids for loco-manipulation tasks. To solve these issues, we propose HOMIE, a novel humanoid teleoperation cockpit integrates a humanoid loco-manipulation policy and a low-cost exoskeleton-based hardware system. The policy enables humanoid robots to walk and squat to specific heights while accommodating arbitrary upper-body poses. This is achieved through our novel reinforcement learning-based training framework that incorporates upper-body pose curriculum, height-tracking reward, and symmetry utilization, without relying on any motion priors. Complementing the policy, the hardware system integrates isomorphic exoskeleton arms, a pair of motion-sensing gloves, and a pedal, allowing a single operator to achieve full control of the humanoid robot. Our experiments show our cockpit facilitates more stable, rapid, and precise humanoid loco-manipulation teleoperation, accelerating task completion and eliminating retargeting errors compared to inverse kinematics-based methods. We also validate the effectiveness of the data collected by our cockpit for imitation learning. Our project is fully open-sourced, demos and code can be found in https://homietele.github.io/.
Authors: Sepanta Zeighami, Yiming Lin, Shreya Shankar, Aditya Parameswaran
Abstract: With the power of LLMs, we now have the ability to query data that was previously impossible to query, including text, images, and video. However, despite this enormous potential, most present-day data systems that leverage LLMs are reactive, reflecting our community's desire to map LLMs to known abstractions. Most data systems treat LLMs as an opaque black box that operates on user inputs and data as is, optimizing them much like any other approximate, expensive UDFs, in conjunction with other relational operators. Such data systems do as they are told, but fail to understand and leverage what the LLM is being asked to do (i.e. the underlying operations, which may be error-prone), the data the LLM is operating on (e.g., long, complex documents), or what the user really needs. They don't take advantage of the characteristics of the operations and/or the data at hand, or ensure correctness of results when there are imprecisions and ambiguities. We argue that data systems instead need to be proactive: they need to be given more agency -- armed with the power of LLMs -- to understand and rework the user inputs and the data and to make decisions on how the operations and the data should be represented and processed. By allowing the data system to parse, rewrite, and decompose user inputs and data, or to interact with the user in ways that go beyond the standard single-shot query-result paradigm, the data system is able to address user needs more efficiently and effectively. These new capabilities lead to a rich design space where the data system takes more initiative: they are empowered to perform optimization based on the transformation operations, data characteristics, and user intent. We discuss various successful examples of how this framework has been and can be applied in real-world tasks, and present future directions for this ambitious research agenda.
Authors: Sunay Joshi, Shayan Kiyani, George Pappas, Edgar Dobriban, Hamed Hassani
Abstract: We consider the problem of conformal prediction under covariate shift. Given labeled data from a source domain and unlabeled data from a covariate shifted target domain, we seek to construct prediction sets with valid marginal coverage in the target domain. Most existing methods require estimating the unknown likelihood ratio function, which can be prohibitive for high-dimensional data such as images. To address this challenge, we introduce the likelihood ratio regularized quantile regression (LR-QR) algorithm, which combines the pinball loss with a novel choice of regularization in order to construct a threshold function without directly estimating the unknown likelihood ratio. We show that the LR-QR method has coverage at the desired level in the target domain, up to a small error term that we can control. Our proofs draw on a novel analysis of coverage via stability bounds from learning theory. Our experiments demonstrate that the LR-QR algorithm outperforms existing methods on high-dimensional prediction tasks, including a regression task for the Communities and Crime dataset, and an image classification task from the WILDS repository.
Authors: Aditya K Surikuchi, Raquel Fern\'andez, Sandro Pezzelle
Abstract: The ability to use natural language to talk about visual content is at the core of human intelligence and a crucial feature of any artificial intelligence system. Various studies have focused on generating text for single images. In contrast, comparatively little attention has been paid to exhaustively analyzing and advancing work on multiple-image vision-to-text settings. In this position paper, we claim that any task dealing with temporally ordered sequences of multiple images or frames is an instance of a broader, more general problem involving the understanding of intricate relationships between the visual content and the corresponding text. We comprehensively analyze five tasks that are instances of this problem and argue that they pose a common set of challenges and share similarities in terms of modeling and evaluation approaches. Based on the insights from these various aspects and stages of multi-image-to-text generation, we highlight several open questions and suggest future research directions. We believe that these directions can advance the understanding of complex phenomena in this domain and the development of better models.
Authors: Xingzhi Qian, Xinran Zheng, Yiling He, Shuo Yang, Lorenzo Cavallaro
Abstract: The rapid growth of mobile applications has escalated Android malware threats. Although there are numerous detection methods, they often struggle with evolving attacks, dataset biases, and limited explainability. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative with their zero-shot inference and reasoning capabilities. However, applying LLMs to Android malware detection presents two key challenges: (1)the extensive support code in Android applications, often spanning thousands of classes, exceeds LLMs' context limits and obscures malicious behavior within benign functionality; (2)the structural complexity and interdependencies of Android applications surpass LLMs' sequence-based reasoning, fragmenting code analysis and hindering malicious intent inference. To address these challenges, we propose LAMD, a practical context-driven framework to enable LLM-based Android malware detection. LAMD integrates key context extraction to isolate security-critical code regions and construct program structures, then applies tier-wise code reasoning to analyze application behavior progressively, from low-level instructions to high-level semantics, providing final prediction and explanation. A well-designed factual consistency verification mechanism is equipped to mitigate LLM hallucinations from the first tier. Evaluation in real-world settings demonstrates LAMD's effectiveness over conventional detectors, establishing a feasible basis for LLM-driven malware analysis in dynamic threat landscapes.
Authors: Jingbiao Mei, Jinghong Chen, Guangyu Yang, Weizhe Lin, Bill Byrne
Abstract: Hateful memes have become a significant concern on the Internet, necessitating robust automated detection systems. While large multimodal models have shown strong generalization across various tasks, they exhibit poor generalization to hateful meme detection due to the dynamic nature of memes tied to emerging social trends and breaking news. Recent work further highlights the limitations of conventional supervised fine-tuning for large multimodal models in this context. To address these challenges, we propose Large Multimodal Model Retrieval-Guided Contrastive Learning (LMM-RGCL), a novel two-stage fine-tuning framework designed to improve both in-domain accuracy and cross-domain generalization. Experimental results on six widely used meme classification datasets demonstrate that LMM-RGCL achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming agent-based systems such as VPD-PALI-X-55B. Furthermore, our method effectively generalizes to out-of-domain memes under low-resource settings, surpassing models like GPT-4o.
Authors: Bich-Chung Phan, Thanh Ma, Huu-Hoa Nguyen, and Thanh-Nghi Do
Abstract: Gene expression classification is a pivotal yet challenging task in bioinformatics, primarily due to the high dimensionality of genomic data and the risk of overfitting. To bridge this gap, we propose BOLIMES, a novel feature selection algorithm designed to enhance gene expression classification by systematically refining the feature subset. Unlike conventional methods that rely solely on statistical ranking or classifier-specific selection, we integrate the robustness of Boruta with the interpretability of LIME, ensuring that only the most relevant and influential genes are retained. BOLIMES first employs Boruta to filter out non-informative genes by comparing each feature against its randomized counterpart, thus preserving valuable information. It then uses LIME to rank the remaining genes based on their local importance to the classifier. Finally, an iterative classification evaluation determines the optimal feature subset by selecting the number of genes that maximizes predictive accuracy. By combining exhaustive feature selection with interpretability-driven refinement, our solution effectively balances dimensionality reduction with high classification performance, offering a powerful solution for high-dimensional gene expression analysis.
Authors: Mengkang Hu, Tianxing Chen, Yude Zou, Yuheng Lei, Qiguang Chen, Ming Li, Hongyuan Zhang, Wenqi Shao, Ping Luo
Abstract: Recently, there has been growing interest in leveraging large language models (LLMs) to generate symbolic world models from textual descriptions. Although LLMs have been extensively explored in the context of world modeling, prior studies encountered several challenges, including evaluation randomness, dependence on indirect metrics, and a limited domain scope. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel benchmark, Text2World, based on planning domain definition language (PDDL), featuring hundreds of diverse domains and employing multi-criteria, execution-based metrics for a more robust evaluation. We benchmark current LLMs using Text2World and find that reasoning models trained with large-scale reinforcement learning outperform others. However, even the best-performing model still demonstrates limited capabilities in world modeling. Building on these insights, we examine several promising strategies to enhance the world modeling capabilities of LLMs, including test-time scaling, agent training, and more. We hope that Text2World can serve as a crucial resource, laying the groundwork for future research in leveraging LLMs as world models. The project page is available at https://text-to-world.github.io/.
Authors: Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Amit Agarwal, Bhargava Kumar, Srikant Panda, Tejaswini Kumar
Abstract: Clinical Question Answering (CQA) plays a crucial role in medical decision-making, enabling physicians to extract relevant information from Electronic Medical Records (EMRs). While transformer-based models such as BERT, BioBERT, and ClinicalBERT have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in CQA, existing models lack the ability to categorize extracted answers, which is critical for structured retrieval, content filtering, and medical decision support. To address this limitation, we introduce a Multi-Task Learning (MTL) framework that jointly trains CQA models for both answer extraction and medical categorization. In addition to predicting answer spans, our model classifies responses into five standardized medical categories: Diagnosis, Medication, Symptoms, Procedure, and Lab Reports. This categorization enables more structured and interpretable outputs, making clinical QA models more useful in real-world healthcare settings. We evaluate our approach on emrQA, a large-scale dataset for medical question answering. Results show that MTL improves F1-score by 2.2% compared to standard fine-tuning, while achieving 90.7% accuracy in answer categorization. These findings suggest that MTL not only enhances CQA performance but also introduces an effective mechanism for categorization and structured medical information retrieval.
Authors: Fan Chen, Jiachun Li, Alexander Rakhlin, David Simchi-Levi
Abstract: We analyze the problem of private learning in generalized linear contextual bandits. Our approach is based on a novel method of re-weighted regression, yielding an efficient algorithm with regret of order $\sqrt{T}+\frac{1}{\alpha}$ and $\sqrt{T}/\alpha$ in the joint and local model of $\alpha$-privacy, respectively. Further, we provide near-optimal private procedures that achieve dimension-independent rates in private linear models and linear contextual bandits. In particular, our results imply that joint privacy is almost "for free" in all the settings we consider, partially addressing the open problem posed by Azize and Basu (2024).
Authors: Xinyi Song, Kexin Xie, Lina Lee, Ruizhe Chen, Jared M. Clark, Hao He, Haoran He, Jie Min, Xinlei Zhang, Simin Zheng, Zhiyang Zhang, Xinwei Deng, Yili Hong
Abstract: The programming capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized automatic code generation and opened new avenues for automatic statistical analysis. However, the validity and quality of these generated codes need to be systematically evaluated before they can be widely adopted. Despite their growing prominence, a comprehensive evaluation of statistical code generated by LLMs remains scarce in the literature. In this paper, we assess the performance of LLMs, including two versions of ChatGPT and one version of Llama, in the domain of SAS programming for statistical analysis. Our study utilizes a set of statistical analysis tasks encompassing diverse statistical topics and datasets. Each task includes a problem description, dataset information, and human-verified SAS code. We conduct a comprehensive assessment of the quality of SAS code generated by LLMs through human expert evaluation based on correctness, effectiveness, readability, executability, and the accuracy of output results. The analysis of rating scores reveals that while LLMs demonstrate usefulness in generating syntactically correct code, they struggle with tasks requiring deep domain understanding and may produce redundant or incorrect results. This study offers valuable insights into the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in statistical programming, providing guidance for future advancements in AI-assisted coding systems for statistical analysis.
Authors: Marion Bartl, Thomas Brendan Murphy, Susan Leavy
Abstract: Gender-inclusive language is often used with the aim of ensuring that all individuals, regardless of gender, can be associated with certain concepts. While psycholinguistic studies have examined its effects in relation to human cognition, it remains unclear how Large Language Models (LLMs) process gender-inclusive language. Given that commercial LLMs are gaining an increasingly strong foothold in everyday applications, it is crucial to examine whether LLMs in fact interpret gender-inclusive language neutrally, because the language they generate has the potential to influence the language of their users. This study examines whether LLM-generated coreferent terms align with a given gender expression or reflect model biases. Adapting psycholinguistic methods from French to English and German, we find that in English, LLMs generally maintain the antecedent's gender but exhibit underlying masculine bias. In German, this bias is much stronger, overriding all tested gender-neutralization strategies.
Authors: Zihan Liu, Shuangrui Ding, Zhixiong Zhang, Xiaoyi Dong, Pan Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Yuhang Cao, Dahua Lin, Jiaqi Wang
Abstract: Text-to-song generation, the task of creating vocals and accompaniment from textual inputs, poses significant challenges due to domain complexity and data scarcity. Existing approaches often employ multi-stage generation procedures, resulting in cumbersome training and inference pipelines. In this paper, we propose SongGen, a fully open-source, single-stage auto-regressive transformer designed for controllable song generation. The proposed model facilitates fine-grained control over diverse musical attributes, including lyrics and textual descriptions of instrumentation, genre, mood, and timbre, while also offering an optional three-second reference clip for voice cloning. Within a unified auto-regressive framework, SongGen supports two output modes: mixed mode, which generates a mixture of vocals and accompaniment directly, and dual-track mode, which synthesizes them separately for greater flexibility in downstream applications. We explore diverse token pattern strategies for each mode, leading to notable improvements and valuable insights. Furthermore, we design an automated data preprocessing pipeline with effective quality control. To foster community engagement and future research, we will release our model weights, training code, annotated data, and preprocessing pipeline. The generated samples are showcased on our project page at https://liuzh-19.github.io/SongGen/ , and the code will be available at https://github.com/LiuZH-19/SongGen .
URLs: https://liuzh-19.github.io/SongGen/, https://github.com/LiuZH-19/SongGen
Authors: Jianwei Yang, Reuben Tan, Qianhui Wu, Ruijie Zheng, Baolin Peng, Yongyuan Liang, Yu Gu, Mu Cai, Seonghyeon Ye, Joel Jang, Yuquan Deng, Lars Liden, Jianfeng Gao
Abstract: We present Magma, a foundation model that serves multimodal AI agentic tasks in both the digital and physical worlds. Magma is a significant extension of vision-language (VL) models in that it not only retains the VL understanding ability (verbal intelligence) of the latter, but is also equipped with the ability to plan and act in the visual-spatial world (spatial-temporal intelligence) and complete agentic tasks ranging from UI navigation to robot manipulation. To endow the agentic capabilities, Magma is pretrained on large amounts of heterogeneous datasets spanning from images, videos to robotics data, where the actionable visual objects (e.g., clickable buttons in GUI) in images are labeled by Set-of-Mark (SoM) for action grounding, and the object movements (e.g., the trace of human hands or robotic arms) in videos are labeled by Trace-of-Mark (ToM) for action planning. Extensive experiments show that SoM and ToM reach great synergy and facilitate the acquisition of spatial-temporal intelligence for our Magma model, which is fundamental to a wide range of tasks as shown in Fig.1. In particular, Magma creates new state-of-the-art results on UI navigation and robotic manipulation tasks, outperforming previous models that are specifically tailored to these tasks. On image and video-related multimodal tasks, Magma also compares favorably to popular large multimodal models that are trained on much larger datasets. We make our model and code public for reproducibility at https://microsoft.github.io/Magma.
Authors: Oscar Clivio, Divyat Mahajan, Perouz Taslakian, Sara Magliacane, Ioannis Mitliagkas, Valentina Zantedeschi, Alexandre Drouin
Abstract: Integrating expert knowledge, e.g. from large language models, into causal discovery algorithms can be challenging when the knowledge is not guaranteed to be correct. Expert recommendations may contradict data-driven results, and their reliability can vary significantly depending on the domain or specific query. Existing methods based on soft constraints or inconsistencies in predicted causal relationships fail to account for these variations in expertise. To remedy this, we propose L2D-CD, a method for gauging the correctness of expert recommendations and optimally combining them with data-driven causal discovery results. By adapting learning-to-defer (L2D) algorithms for pairwise causal discovery (CD), we learn a deferral function that selects whether to rely on classical causal discovery methods using numerical data or expert recommendations based on textual meta-data. We evaluate L2D-CD on the canonical T\"ubingen pairs dataset and demonstrate its superior performance compared to both the causal discovery method and the expert used in isolation. Moreover, our approach identifies domains where the expert's performance is strong or weak. Finally, we outline a strategy for generalizing this approach to causal discovery on graphs with more than two variables, paving the way for further research in this area.
Authors: Taedong Yun, Eric Yang, Mustafa Safdari, Jong Ha Lee, Vaishnavi Vinod Kumar, S. Sara Mahdavi, Jonathan Amar, Derek Peyton, Reut Aharony, Andreas Michaelides, Logan Schneider, Isaac Galatzer-Levy, Yugang Jia, John Canny, Arthur Gretton, Maja Matari\'c
Abstract: We present an end-to-end framework for generating synthetic users for evaluating interactive agents designed to encourage positive behavior changes, such as in health and lifestyle coaching. The synthetic users are grounded in health and lifestyle conditions, specifically sleep and diabetes management in this study, to ensure realistic interactions with the health coaching agent. Synthetic users are created in two stages: first, structured data are generated grounded in real-world health and lifestyle factors in addition to basic demographics and behavioral attributes; second, full profiles of the synthetic users are developed conditioned on the structured data. Interactions between synthetic users and the coaching agent are simulated using generative agent-based models such as Concordia, or directly by prompting a language model. Using two independently-developed agents for sleep and diabetes coaching as case studies, the validity of this framework is demonstrated by analyzing the coaching agent's understanding of the synthetic users' needs and challenges. Finally, through multiple blinded evaluations of user-coach interactions by human experts, we demonstrate that our synthetic users with health and behavioral attributes more accurately portray real human users with the same attributes, compared to generic synthetic users not grounded in such attributes. The proposed framework lays the foundation for efficient development of conversational agents through extensive, realistic, and grounded simulated interactions.
Authors: Huawei Lin, Yingjie Lao, Tong Geng, Tan Yu, Weijie Zhao
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to attacks like prompt injection, backdoor attacks, and adversarial attacks, which manipulate prompts or models to generate harmful outputs. In this paper, departing from traditional deep learning attack paradigms, we explore their intrinsic relationship and collectively term them Prompt Trigger Attacks (PTA). This raises a key question: Can we determine if a prompt is benign or poisoned? To address this, we propose UniGuardian, the first unified defense mechanism designed to detect prompt injection, backdoor attacks, and adversarial attacks in LLMs. Additionally, we introduce a single-forward strategy to optimize the detection pipeline, enabling simultaneous attack detection and text generation within a single forward pass. Our experiments confirm that UniGuardian accurately and efficiently identifies malicious prompts in LLMs.
Authors: Dantong Niu, Yuvan Sharma, Haoru Xue, Giscard Biamby, Junyi Zhang, Ziteng Ji, Trevor Darrell, Roei Herzig
Abstract: Foundation models pre-trained on massive unlabeled datasets have revolutionized natural language and computer vision, exhibiting remarkable generalization capabilities, thus highlighting the importance of pre-training. Yet, efforts in robotics have struggled to achieve similar success, limited by either the need for costly robotic annotations or the lack of representations that effectively model the physical world. In this paper, we introduce ARM4R, an Auto-regressive Robotic Model that leverages low-level 4D Representations learned from human video data to yield a better pre-trained robotic model. Specifically, we focus on utilizing 3D point tracking representations from videos derived by lifting 2D representations into 3D space via monocular depth estimation across time. These 4D representations maintain a shared geometric structure between the points and robot state representations up to a linear transformation, enabling efficient transfer learning from human video data to low-level robotic control. Our experiments show that ARM4R can transfer efficiently from human video data to robotics and consistently improves performance on tasks across various robot environments and configurations.
Authors: Zekun Qi, Wenyao Zhang, Yufei Ding, Runpei Dong, Xinqiang Yu, Jingwen Li, Lingyun Xu, Baoyu Li, Xialin He, Guofan Fan, Jiazhao Zhang, Jiawei He, Jiayuan Gu, Xin Jin, Kaisheng Ma, Zhizheng Zhang, He Wang, Li Yi
Abstract: Spatial intelligence is a critical component of embodied AI, promoting robots to understand and interact with their environments. While recent advances have enhanced the ability of VLMs to perceive object locations and positional relationships, they still lack the capability to precisely understand object orientations-a key requirement for tasks involving fine-grained manipulations. Addressing this limitation not only requires geometric reasoning but also an expressive and intuitive way to represent orientation. In this context, we propose that natural language offers a more flexible representation space than canonical frames, making it particularly suitable for instruction-following robotic systems. In this paper, we introduce the concept of semantic orientation, which defines object orientations using natural language in a reference-frame-free manner (e.g., the ''plug-in'' direction of a USB or the ''handle'' direction of a knife). To support this, we construct OrienText300K, a large-scale dataset of 3D models annotated with semantic orientations that link geometric understanding to functional semantics. By integrating semantic orientation into a VLM system, we enable robots to generate manipulation actions with both positional and orientational constraints. Extensive experiments in simulation and real world demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances robotic manipulation capabilities, e.g., 48.7% accuracy on Open6DOR and 74.9% accuracy on SIMPLER.
Authors: Simon St\r{a}hlberg, Blai Bonet, Hector Geffner
Abstract: GNN-based approaches for learning general policies across planning domains are limited by the expressive power of $C_2$, namely; first-order logic with two variables and counting. This limitation can be overcame by transitioning to $k$-GNNs, for $k=3$, wherein object embeddings are substituted with triplet embeddings. Yet, while $3$-GNNs have the expressive power of $C_3$, unlike $1$- and $2$-GNNs that are confined to $C_2$, they require quartic time for message exchange and cubic space to store embeddings, rendering them infeasible in practice. In this work, we introduce a parameterized version R-GNN[$t$] (with parameter $t$) of Relational GNNs. Unlike GNNs, that are designed to perform computation on graphs, Relational GNNs are designed to do computation on relational structures. When $t=\infty$, R-GNN[$t$] approximates $3$-GNNs over graphs, but using only quadratic space for embeddings. For lower values of $t$, such as $t=1$ and $t=2$, R-GNN[$t$] achieves a weaker approximation by exchanging fewer messages, yet interestingly, often yield the expressivity required in several planning domains. Furthermore, the new R-GNN[$t$] architecture is the original R-GNN architecture with a suitable transformation applied to the inputs only. Experimental results illustrate the clear performance gains of R-GNN[$1$] over the plain R-GNNs, and also over Edge Transformers that also approximate $3$-GNNs.
Authors: Shenzhe Zhu, Shengxiang Sun
Abstract: Advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deep neural networks have driven significant progress in vision and text processing. However, achieving human-like reasoning and interpretability in AI systems remains a substantial challenge. The Neural-Symbolic paradigm, which integrates neural networks with symbolic systems, presents a promising pathway toward more interpretable AI. Within this paradigm, Knowledge Graphs (KG) are crucial, offering a structured and dynamic method for representing knowledge through interconnected entities and relationships, typically as triples (subject, predicate, object). This paper explores recent advancements in neural-symbolic integration based on KG, examining how it supports integration in three categories: enhancing the reasoning and interpretability of neural networks with symbolic knowledge (Symbol for Neural), refining the completeness and accuracy of symbolic systems via neural network methodologies (Neural for Symbol), and facilitating their combined application in Hybrid Neural-Symbolic Integration. It highlights current trends and proposes future research directions in Neural-Symbolic AI.
Authors: Shi-Yu Tian, Zhi Zhou, Kun-Yang Yu, Ming Yang, Lin-Han Jia, Lan-Zhe Guo, Yu-Feng Li
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on reasoning tasks, including mathematical reasoning. However, the current evaluation mostly focuses on carefully constructed benchmarks and neglects the consideration of real-world reasoning problems that present missing or contradictory conditions, known as ill-defined problems. To further study this problem, we develop a largescale benchmark called Problems with Missing and Contradictory conditions ( PMC) containing over 5,000 validated ill-defined mathematical problems. Our preliminary experiments through PMC reveal two challenges about existing methods: (1) traditional methods exhibit a trade-off between solving accuracy and rejection capabilities, and (2) formal methods struggle with modeling complex problems. To address these challenges, We develop Variable-Constraint Search (VCSEARCH), a trainingfree framework that leverages formal language to detect ill-defined problems, where a variableconstraint pair search strategy is incorporated to improve the modeling capability of formal language. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VCSEARCH improves the accuracy of identifying unsolvable problems by at least 12% across different LLMs, thus achieving stronger robust mathematical reasoning ability.
Authors: Audrey Huang, Wenhao Zhan, Tengyang Xie, Jason D. Lee, Wen Sun, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Dylan J. Foster
Abstract: Language model alignment methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) have led to impressive advances in language model capabilities, but are limited by a widely observed phenomenon known as overoptimization, where the quality of the language model degrades over the course of the alignment process. As the model optimizes performance with respect to an offline reward model, it overfits to inaccuracies and drifts away from preferred responses covered by the data. To discourage such distribution shift, KL-regularization is widely employed in existing offline alignment methods, but overoptimization continues to harm performance. Lending theoretical insight into the source of these empirical observations, we first show that the KL-regularization is too weak to prevent overfitting, then raise the following question: is it possible to design an efficient algorithm that is provably robust to overoptimization? We address this question with a new algorithm for offline alignment, $\chi^2$-Preference Optimization ($\chi$PO). $\chi$PO is a one-line change to Direct Preference Optimization (DPO; Rafailov et al., 2023), which only involves modifying the logarithmic link function in the DPO objective. Despite this minimal change, $\chi$PO implicitly implements the principle of pessimism in the face of uncertainty via regularization with the $\chi^2$-divergence -- which quantifies uncertainty more effectively than KL-regularization -- and provably alleviates overoptimization, achieving sample-complexity guarantees based on single-policy concentrability -- the gold standard in offline reinforcement learning. $\chi$PO's simplicity and strong guarantees make it the first practical and general-purpose offline alignment algorithm that is provably robust to overoptimization.
Authors: Randy Lefebvre, Audrey Durand
Abstract: Formulating a real-world problem under the Reinforcement Learning framework involves non-trivial design choices, such as selecting a discount factor for the learning objective (discounted cumulative rewards), which articulates the planning horizon of the agent. This work investigates the impact of the discount factor on the bias-variance trade-off given structural parameters of the underlying Markov Decision Process. Our results support the idea that a shorter planning horizon might be beneficial, especially under partial observability.
Authors: Saman Kazemkhani, Aarav Pandya, Daphne Cornelisse, Brennan Shacklett, Eugene Vinitsky
Abstract: Multi-agent learning algorithms have been successful at generating superhuman planning in various games but have had limited impact on the design of deployed multi-agent planners. A key bottleneck in applying these techniques to multi-agent planning is that they require billions of steps of experience. To enable the study of multi-agent planning at scale, we present GPUDrive. GPUDrive is a GPU-accelerated, multi-agent simulator built on top of the Madrona Game Engine capable of generating over a million simulation steps per second. Observation, reward, and dynamics functions are written directly in C++, allowing users to define complex, heterogeneous agent behaviors that are lowered to high-performance CUDA. Despite these low-level optimizations, GPUDrive is fully accessible through Python, offering a seamless and efficient workflow for multi-agent, closed-loop simulation. Using GPUDrive, we train reinforcement learning agents on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset, achieving efficient goal-reaching in minutes and scaling to thousands of scenarios in hours. We open-source the code and pre-trained agents at https://github.com/Emerge-Lab/gpudrive.
Authors: Chenxing Wei, Yao Shu, Ying Tiffany He, Fei Richard Yu
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are driving advancements in artificial intelligence by increasing the scale of model parameters, which has significantly enhanced generalization ability and unlocked new capabilities in practice. However, their performance in specific downstream tasks is usually hindered by their knowledge boundaries on these tasks. Thus, fine-tuning techniques, especially the widely used Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) method, have been introduced to expand the boundaries on these tasks, whereas LoRA would underperform on certain tasks owing to its potential overfitting on these tasks. To overcome this overfitting and improve the performance of LoRA, we propose the flexible low rank adaptation (Flexora) method to automatically and flexibly select the most important layers needing to be fine-tuned to achieve the best performance on different downstream tasks. Specifically, Flexora firstly frames this layer selection problem as a well-defined hyperparameter optimization (HPO) problem, then addresses it using the unrolled differentiation (UD) method, and finally selects the most useful layers based on the optimized hyperparameters. Our extensive experiments on many pretrained models and natural language tasks show that Flexora is able to consistently improve over the existing baselines, indicating the effectiveness of our Flexora in practice. We additionally provide insightful theoretical results and many ablation studies to deliver a comprehensive understanding of our Flexora.
Authors: Lucas Heublein, Tobias Feigl, Thorsten Nowak, Alexander R\"ugamer, Christopher Mutschler, Felix Ott
Abstract: Jamming devices disrupt signals from the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and pose a significant threat, as they compromise the robustness of accurate positioning. The detection of anomalies within frequency snapshots is crucial to counteract these interferences effectively. A critical preliminary countermeasure involves the reliable classification of interferences and the characterization and localization of jamming devices. This paper introduces an extensive dataset comprising snapshots obtained from a low-frequency antenna that capture various generated interferences within a large-scale environment, including controlled multipath effects. Our objective is to assess the resilience of machine learning (ML) models against environmental changes, such as multipath effects, variations in interference attributes, such as interference class, bandwidth, and signal power, the accuracy jamming device localization, and the constraints imposed by snapshot input lengths. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of a diverse set of 129 distinct vision encoder models across all tasks. By analyzing the aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties, we demonstrate the adaptability of our model in generalizing across diverse facets, thus establishing its suitability for real-world applications. Dataset: https://gitlab.cc-asp.fraunhofer.de/darcy_gnss/controlled_low_frequency
URLs: https://gitlab.cc-asp.fraunhofer.de/darcy_gnss/controlled_low_frequency
Authors: Purin Sukpanichnant, Anna Rapberger, Francesca Toni
Abstract: Peer review is an essential process to determine the quality of papers submitted to scientific conferences or journals. However, it is subjective and prone to biases. Several studies have been conducted to apply techniques from NLP to support peer review, but they are based on black-box techniques and their outputs are difficult to interpret and trust. In this paper, we propose a novel pipeline to support and understand the reviewing and decision-making processes of peer review: the PeerArg system combining LLMs with methods from knowledge representation. PeerArg takes in input a set of reviews for a paper and outputs the paper acceptance prediction. We evaluate the performance of the PeerArg pipeline on three different datasets, in comparison with a novel end-2-end LLM that uses few-shot learning to predict paper acceptance given reviews. The results indicate that the end-2-end LLM is capable of predicting paper acceptance from reviews, but a variant of the PeerArg pipeline outperforms this LLM.
Authors: Shin'ya Yamaguchi, Kosuke Nishida
Abstract: Recent concept-based interpretable models have succeeded in providing meaningful explanations by pre-defined concept sets. However, the dependency on the pre-defined concepts restricts the application because of the limited number of concepts for explanations. This paper proposes a novel interpretable deep neural network called explanation bottleneck models (XBMs). XBMs generate a text explanation from the input without pre-defined concepts and then predict a final task prediction based on the generated explanation by leveraging pre-trained vision-language encoder-decoder models. To achieve both the target task performance and the explanation quality, we train XBMs through the target task loss with the regularization penalizing the explanation decoder via the distillation from the frozen pre-trained decoder. Our experiments, including a comparison to state-of-the-art concept bottleneck models, confirm that XBMs provide accurate and fluent natural language explanations without pre-defined concept sets. Code is available at https://github.com/yshinya6/xbm/.
Authors: Yifan Zhang, Ge Zhang, Yue Wu, Kangping Xu, Quanquan Gu
Abstract: Modeling human preferences is crucial for aligning foundation models with human values. Traditional reward modeling methods, such as the Bradley-Terry (BT) reward model, fall short in expressiveness, particularly in addressing intransitive preferences. In this paper, we introduce preference embedding, an approach that embeds responses into a latent space to capture intricate preference structures efficiently, achieving linear query complexity. Additionally, we propose preference score-based General Preference Optimization (GPO), which generalizes reward-based reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Experimental results show that our General Preference embedding Model (GPM) consistently outperforms the BT reward model on the RewardBench benchmark and effectively models cyclic preferences where any BT reward model behaves like a random guess. Furthermore, evaluations on downstream tasks such as AlpacaEval2.0, following the language model post-training with GPO and our general preference model, reveal performance improvements over BT models. These findings indicate that our method may enhance the alignment of foundation models with nuanced human values. The code is available at https://github.com/general-preference/general-preference-model.
URLs: https://github.com/general-preference/general-preference-model.
Authors: Xunjian Yin, Xinyi Wang, Liangming Pan, Xiaojun Wan, William Yang Wang
Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced the capabilities of AI-driven agents across various tasks. However, existing agentic systems, whether based on fixed pipeline algorithms or pre-defined meta-learning frameworks, cannot search the whole agent design space due to the restriction of human-designed components, and thus might miss the globally optimal agent design. In this paper, we introduce G\"odel Agent, a self-evolving framework inspired by the G\"odel machine, enabling agents to recursively improve themselves without relying on predefined routines or fixed optimization algorithms. G\"odel Agent leverages LLMs to dynamically modify its own logic and behavior, guided solely by high-level objectives through prompting. Experimental results on mathematical reasoning and complex agent tasks demonstrate that implementation of G\"odel Agent can achieve continuous self-improvement, surpassing manually crafted agents in performance, efficiency, and generalizability.
Authors: Dongqi Fu, Liri Fang, Zihao Li, Hanghang Tong, Vetle I. Torvik, Jingrui He
Abstract: Graphs, as a relational data structure, have been widely used for various application scenarios, like molecule design and recommender systems. Recently, large language models (LLMs) are reorganizing in the AI community for their expected reasoning and inference abilities. Making LLMs understand graph-based relational data has great potential, including but not limited to (1) distillate external knowledge base for eliminating hallucination and breaking the context window limit for LLMs' inference during the retrieval augmentation generation process; (2) taking graph data as the input and directly solve the graph-based research tasks like protein design and drug discovery. However, inputting the entire graph data to LLMs is not practical due to its complex topological structure, data size, and the lack of effective and efficient semantic graph representations. A natural question arises: Is there a kind of graph representation that can be described by natural language for LLM's understanding and is also easy to require to serve as the raw input for LLMs? Based on statistical computation, graph laws pre-define a set of parameters (e.g., degree, time, diameter) and identifie their relationships and values by observing the topological distribution of plenty of real-world graph data. We believe this kind of parametric representation of graphs, graph laws, can be a solution for making LLMs understand graph data as the input. In this survey, we first review the previous study of graph laws from multiple perspectives, i.e., macroscope and microscope of graphs, low-order and high-order graphs, static and dynamic graphs, different observation spaces, and newly proposed graph parameters. After we review various real-world applications benefiting from the guidance of graph laws, we conclude the paper with current challenges and future research directions.
Authors: Longxuan Yu, Delin Chen, Siheng Xiong, Qingyang Wu, Qingzhen Liu, Dawei Li, Zhikai Chen, Xiaoze Liu, Liangming Pan
Abstract: Causal reasoning (CR) is a crucial aspect of intelligence, essential for problem-solving, decision-making, and understanding the world. While language models (LMs) can generate rationales for their outputs, their ability to reliably perform causal reasoning remains uncertain, often falling short in tasks requiring a deep understanding of causality. In this paper, we introduce CausalEval, a comprehensive review of research aimed at enhancing LMs for causal reasoning, coupled with an empirical evaluation of current models and methods. We categorize existing methods based on the role of LMs: either as reasoning engines or as helpers providing knowledge or data to traditional CR methods, followed by a detailed discussion of methodologies in each category. We then assess the performance of current LMs and various enhancement methods on a range of causal reasoning tasks, providing key findings and in-depth analysis. Finally, we present insights from current studies and highlight promising directions for future research. We aim for this work to serve as a comprehensive resource, fostering further advancements in causal reasoning with LMs.
Authors: Shenghui Chen, Ruihan Zhao, Sandeep Chinchali, Ufuk Topcu
Abstract: Strategic coordination between autonomous agents and human partners under incomplete information can be modeled as turn-based cooperative games. We extend a turn-based game under incomplete information, the shared-control game, to allow players to take multiple actions per turn rather than a single action. The extension enables the use of multi-step intent, which we hypothesize will improve performance in long-horizon tasks. To synthesize cooperative policies for the agent in this extended game, we propose an approach featuring a memory module for a running probabilistic belief of the environment dynamics and an online planning algorithm called IntentMCTS. This algorithm strategically selects the next action by leveraging any communicated multi-step intent via reward augmentation while considering the current belief. Agent-to-agent simulations in the Gnomes at Night testbed demonstrate that IntentMCTS requires fewer steps and control switches than baseline methods. A human-agent user study corroborates these findings, showing an 18.52% higher success rate compared to the heuristic baseline and a 5.56% improvement over the single-step prior work. Participants also report lower cognitive load, frustration, and higher satisfaction with the IntentMCTS agent partner.
Authors: Antonia W\"ust, Tim Tobiasch, Lukas Helff, Inga Ibs, Wolfgang Stammer, Devendra S. Dhami, Constantin A. Rothkopf, Kristian Kersting
Abstract: Recently, newly developed Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as OpenAI's o1, have emerged, seemingly demonstrating advanced reasoning capabilities across text and image modalities. However, 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 classic visual reasoning puzzles that require human-like abilities of pattern recognition and abstract reasoning. With our extensive evaluation setup, we show that while VLMs occasionally succeed in identifying discriminative concepts and solving some of the problems, they frequently falter. Surprisingly, even elementary concepts that may seem trivial to humans, such as simple spirals, pose significant challenges. Moreover, when explicitly asked to recognize ground truth 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. We compare the results of VLMs to human performance and observe that a significant gap remains between human visual reasoning capabilities and machine cognition.
Authors: Antonis Antoniades, Albert \"Orwall, Kexun Zhang, Yuxi Xie, Anirudh Goyal, William Wang
Abstract: Software engineers operating in complex and dynamic environments must continuously adapt to evolving requirements, learn iteratively from experience, and reconsider their approaches based on new insights. However, current large language model (LLM)-based software agents often rely on rigid processes and tend to repeat ineffective actions without the capacity to evaluate their performance or adapt their strategies over time. To address these challenges, we propose SWE-Search, a multi-agent framework that integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with a self-improvement mechanism to enhance software agents' performance on repository-level software tasks. SWE-Search extends traditional MCTS by incorporating a hybrid value function that leverages LLMs for both numerical value estimation and qualitative evaluation. This enables self-feedback loops where agents iteratively refine their strategies based on both quantitative numerical evaluations and qualitative natural language assessments of pursued trajectories. The framework includes a SWE-Agent for adaptive exploration, a Value Agent for iterative feedback, and a Discriminator Agent that facilitates multi-agent debate for collaborative decision-making. Applied to the SWE-bench benchmark, our approach demonstrates a 23% relative improvement in performance across five models compared to standard open-source agents without MCTS. Our analysis reveals how performance scales with increased search depth and identifies key factors that facilitate effective self-evaluation in software agents. This work highlights the potential of self-evaluation driven search techniques to enhance agent reasoning and planning in complex, dynamic software engineering environments.
Authors: Kaixin Wu, Yixin Ji, Zeyuan Chen, Qiang Wang, Cunxiang Wang, Hong Liu, Baijun Ji, Jia Xu, Zhongyi Liu, Jinjie Gu, Yuan Zhou, Linjian Mo
Abstract: Relevance modeling between queries and items stands as a pivotal component in commercial search engines, directly affecting the user experience. Given the remarkable achievements of large language models (LLMs) in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, LLM-based relevance modeling is gradually being adopted within industrial search systems. Nevertheless, foundational LLMs lack domain-specific knowledge and do not fully exploit the potential of in-context learning. Furthermore, structured item text remains underutilized, and there is a shortage in the supply of corresponding queries and background knowledge. We thereby propose CPRM (Continual Pre-training for Relevance Modeling), a framework designed for the continual pre-training of LLMs to address these issues. Our CPRM framework includes three modules: 1) employing both queries and multi-field item to jointly pre-train for enhancing domain knowledge, 2) applying in-context pre-training, a novel approach where LLMs are pre-trained on a sequence of related queries or items, and 3) conducting reading comprehension on items to produce associated domain knowledge and background information (e.g., generating summaries and corresponding queries) to further strengthen LLMs. Results on offline experiments and online A/B testing demonstrate that our model achieves convincing performance compared to strong baselines.
Authors: Jiaqi Zhang, Chen Gao, Liyuan Zhang, Yong Li, Hongzhi Yin
Abstract: Recent advances in embodied agents with multimodal perception and reasoning capabilities based on large vision-language models (LVLMs), excel in autonomously interacting either real or cyber worlds, helping people make intelligent decisions in complex environments. However, the current works are normally optimized by golden action trajectories or ideal task-oriented solutions toward a definitive goal. This paradigm considers limited user-oriented factors, which could be the reason for their performance reduction in a wide range of personal assistant applications. To address this, we propose Chain-of-User-Thought (COUT), a novel embodied reasoning paradigm that takes a chain of thought from basic action thinking to explicit and implicit personalized preference thought to incorporate personalized factors into autonomous agent learning. To target COUT, we introduce SmartAgent, an agent framework perceiving cyber environments and reasoning personalized requirements as 1) interacting with GUI to access an item pool, 2) generating users' explicit requirements implied by previous actions, and 3) recommending items to fulfill users' implicit requirements. To demonstrate SmartAgent's capabilities, we also create a brand-new dataset SmartSpot that offers a full-stage personalized action-involved environment. To our best knowledge, our work is the first to formulate the COUT process, serving as a preliminary attempt towards embodied personalized agent learning. Our extensive experiments on SmartSpot illuminate SmartAgent's functionality among a series of embodied and personalized sub-tasks. We will release code and data upon paper notification at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/SmartAgent.
Authors: Agnieszka Mensfelt, Kostas Stathis, Vince Trencsenyi
Abstract: Multi-agent simulations facilitate the exploration of interactions among both natural and artificial agents. However, modelling real-world scenarios and developing simulations often requires substantial expertise and effort. To streamline this process, we present a framework that enables the autoformalization of interaction scenarios using agents augmented by large language models (LLMs) utilising game-theoretic formalisms. The agents translate natural language descriptions of interactions into executable logic programs that define the rules of each game, ensuring syntactic correctness through validation by a solver. A tournament simulation then tests the functionality of the generated game rules and strategies. After the tournament, if a ground truth payoff matrix is available, an exact semantic validation is performed. We evaluate our approach on a diverse set of 110 natural language descriptions exemplifying five $2\times2$ simultaneous-move games, achieving 100% syntactic and 76.5% semantic correctness in the generated game rules for Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and 99.82% syntactic and 77% semantic correctness for GPT-4o. Additionally, we demonstrate high semantic correctness in autoformalizing gameplay strategies. Overall, the results highlight the potential of autoformalization to leverage LLMs in generating formal reasoning modules for decision-making agents.
Authors: Yutong Xie, Yijun Pan, Hua Xu, Qiaozhu Mei
Abstract: Artificial Intelligence has proven to be a transformative tool for advancing scientific research across a wide range of disciplines. However, a significant gap still exists between AI and scientific communities, limiting the full potential of AI methods in driving broad scientific discovery. Existing efforts in identifying and bridging this gap have often relied on qualitative examination of small samples of literature, offering a limited perspective on the broader AI4Science landscape. In this work, we present a large-scale analysis of the AI4Science literature, starting by using large language models to identify scientific problems and AI methods in publications from top science and AI venues. Leveraging this new dataset, we quantitatively highlight key disparities between AI methods and scientific problems, revealing substantial opportunities for deeper AI integration across scientific disciplines. Furthermore, we explore the potential and challenges of facilitating collaboration between AI and scientific communities through the lens of link prediction. Our findings and tools aim to promote more impactful interdisciplinary collaborations and accelerate scientific discovery through deeper and broader AI integration. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/charles-pyj/Bridging-AI-and-Science.
URLs: https://github.com/charles-pyj/Bridging-AI-and-Science.
Authors: Yuxiang Chai, Hanhao Li, Jiayu Zhang, Liang Liu, Guangyi Liu, Guozhi Wang, Shuai Ren, Siyuan Huang, Hongsheng Li
Abstract: AI agents have become increasingly prevalent in recent years, driven by significant advancements in the field of large language models (LLMs). Mobile GUI agents, a subset of AI agents, are designed to autonomously perform tasks on mobile devices. While numerous studies have introduced agents, datasets, and benchmarks to advance mobile GUI agent research, many existing datasets focus on static frame evaluations and fail to provide a comprehensive platform for assessing performance on real-world, in-the-wild tasks. To address this gap, we present Android Agent Arena (A3), a novel evaluation platform. Unlike existing in-the-wild systems, A3 offers: (1) meaningful and practical tasks, such as real-time online information retrieval and operational instructions; (2) a larger, more flexible action space, enabling compatibility with agents trained on any dataset; and (3) automated business-level LLM-based evaluation process. A3 includes 21 widely used general third-party apps and 201 tasks representative of common user scenarios, providing a robust foundation for evaluating mobile GUI agents in real-world situations and a new autonomous evaluation process for less human labor and coding expertise. The project is available at https://yuxiangchai.github.io/Android-Agent-Arena/.
Authors: Hao Zheng, Xinyan Guan, Hao Kong, Jia Zheng, Weixiang Zhou, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
Abstract: Automatically generating presentations from documents is a challenging task that requires accommodating content quality, visual appeal, and structural coherence. Existing methods primarily focus on improving and evaluating the content quality in isolation, overlooking visual appeal and structural coherence, which limits their practical applicability. To address these limitations, we propose PPTAgent, which comprehensively improves presentation generation through a two-stage, edit-based approach inspired by human workflows. PPTAgent first analyzes reference presentations to extract slide-level functional types and content schemas, then drafts an outline and iteratively generates editing actions based on selected reference slides to create new slides. To comprehensively evaluate the quality of generated presentations, we further introduce PPTEval, an evaluation framework that assesses presentations across three dimensions: Content, Design, and Coherence. Results demonstrate that PPTAgent significantly outperforms existing automatic presentation generation methods across all three dimensions.
Authors: Yulan Hu, Ge Chen, Jinman Zhao, Sheng Ouyang, Yong Liu
Abstract: The Process Reward Model (PRM) plays a crucial role in mathematical reasoning tasks, requiring high-quality supervised process data. However, we observe that reasoning steps generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail to exhibit strictly incremental information, leading to redundancy that can hinder effective reasoning. To address this issue, we propose CFPRM, a simple yet effective coarse-to-fine strategy. Instead of focusing on the detection of redundant steps, our approach first establishes a coarse-grained window to merge adjacent reasoning steps into unified, holistic steps. The window size is then progressively reduced to extract fine-grained reasoning steps, enabling data collection at multiple granularities for training. By leveraging this hierarchical refinement process, CFPRM mitigates redundancy while preserving essential fine-grained knowledge. Extensive experiments on two reasoning datasets across three loss criteria validate the CFPRM's effectiveness and versatility.
Authors: Ben Liu, Jihai Zhang, Fangquan Lin, Cheng Yang, Min Peng, Wotao Yin
Abstract: Recent advancements have highlighted that Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucinations when solving complex reasoning problems, leading to erroneous results. To tackle this issue, researchers incorporate Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to improve the reasoning ability of LLMs. However, existing methods face two limitations: 1) they typically assume that all answers to the questions are contained in KGs, neglecting the incompleteness issue of KGs, and 2) they treat the KG as a static repository and overlook the implicit logical reasoning structures inherent in KGs. In this paper, we introduce SymAgent, an innovative neural-symbolic agent framework that achieves collaborative augmentation between KGs and LLMs. We conceptualize KGs as dynamic environments and transform complex reasoning tasks into a multi-step interactive process, enabling KGs to participate deeply in the reasoning process. SymAgent consists of two modules: Agent-Planner and Agent-Executor. The Agent-Planner leverages LLM's inductive reasoning capability to extract symbolic rules from KGs, guiding efficient question decomposition. The Agent-Executor autonomously invokes predefined action tools to integrate information from KGs and external documents, addressing the issues of KG incompleteness. Furthermore, we design a self-learning framework comprising online exploration and offline iterative policy updating phases, enabling the agent to automatically synthesize reasoning trajectories and improve performance. Experimental results demonstrate that SymAgent with weak LLM backbones (i.e., 7B series) yields better or comparable performance compared to various strong baselines. Further analysis reveals that our agent can identify missing triples, facilitating automatic KG updates.
Authors: Jiabin Tang, Tianyu Fan, Chao Huang
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) Agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in task automation and intelligent decision-making, driving the widespread adoption of agent development frameworks such as LangChain and AutoGen. However, these frameworks predominantly serve developers with extensive technical expertise - a significant limitation considering that only 0.03 % of the global population possesses the necessary programming skills. This stark accessibility gap raises a fundamental question: Can we enable everyone, regardless of technical background, to build their own LLM agents using natural language alone? To address this challenge, we introduce AutoAgent-a Fully-Automated and highly Self-Developing framework that enables users to create and deploy LLM agents through Natural Language Alone. Operating as an autonomous Agent Operating System, AutoAgent comprises four key components: i) Agentic System Utilities, ii) LLM-powered Actionable Engine, iii) Self-Managing File System, and iv) Self-Play Agent Customization module. This lightweight yet powerful system enables efficient and dynamic creation and modification of tools, agents, and workflows without coding requirements or manual intervention. Beyond its code-free agent development capabilities, AutoAgent also serves as a versatile multi-agent system for General AI Assistants. Comprehensive evaluations on the GAIA benchmark demonstrate AutoAgent's effectiveness in generalist multi-agent tasks, surpassing existing state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, AutoAgent's Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-related capabilities have shown consistently superior performance compared to many alternative LLM-based solutions.
Authors: Simeon Campos, Henry Papadatos, Fabien Roger, Chlo\'e Touzet, Malcolm Murray, Otter Quarks
Abstract: The recent development of powerful AI systems has highlighted the need for robust risk management frameworks in the AI industry. Although companies have begun to implement safety frameworks, current approaches often lack the systematic rigor found in other high-risk industries. This paper presents a comprehensive risk management framework for the development of frontier AI that bridges this gap by integrating established risk management principles with emerging AI-specific practices. The framework consists of four key components: (1) risk identification (through literature review, open-ended red-teaming, and risk modeling), (2) risk analysis and evaluation using quantitative metrics and clearly defined thresholds, (3) risk treatment through mitigation measures such as containment, deployment controls, and assurance processes, and (4) risk governance establishing clear organizational structures and accountability. Drawing from best practices in mature industries such as aviation or nuclear power, while accounting for AI's unique challenges, this framework provides AI developers with actionable guidelines for implementing robust risk management. The paper details how each component should be implemented throughout the life-cycle of the AI system - from planning through deployment - and emphasizes the importance and feasibility of conducting risk management work prior to the final training run to minimize the burden associated with it.
Authors: Dacheng Li, Shiyi Cao, Tyler Griggs, Shu Liu, Xiangxi Mo, Eric Tang, Sumanth Hegde, Kourosh Hakhamaneshi, Shishir G. Patil, Matei Zaharia, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica
Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) tackle complex reasoning problems by following long chain-of-thoughts (Long CoT) that incorporate reflection, backtracking, and self-validation. However, the training techniques and data requirements to elicit Long CoT remain poorly understood. In this work, we find that a Large Language model (LLM) can effectively learn Long CoT reasoning through data-efficient supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and parameter-efficient low-rank adaptation (LoRA). With just 17k long CoT training samples, the Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct model achieves significant improvements on a wide range of math and coding benchmarks, including 56.7% (+40.0%) on AIME 2024 and 57.0% (+8.1%) on LiveCodeBench, competitive to the proprietary o1-preview model's score of 44.6% and 59.1%. More importantly, we find that the structure of Long CoT is critical to the learning process, whereas the content of individual reasoning steps has minimal impact. Perturbations affecting content, such as training on incorrect samples or removing reasoning keywords, have little impact on performance. In contrast, structural modifications that disrupt logical consistency in the Long CoT, such as shuffling or deleting reasoning steps, significantly degrade accuracy. For example, a model trained on Long CoT samples with incorrect answers still achieves only 3.2% lower accuracy compared to training with fully correct samples. These insights deepen our understanding of how to elicit reasoning capabilities in LLMs and highlight key considerations for efficiently training the next generation of reasoning models. This is the academic paper of our previous released Sky-T1-32B-Preview model. Codes are available at https://github.com/NovaSky-AI/SkyThought.
Authors: Emre Can Acikgoz, Jeremiah Greer, Akul Datta, Ze Yang, William Zeng, Oussama Elachqar, Emmanouil Koukoumidis, Dilek Hakkani-T\"ur, Gokhan Tur
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) with API-calling capabilities enabled building effective Language Agents (LA), while also revolutionizing the conventional task-oriented dialogue (TOD) paradigm. However, current approaches face a critical dilemma: TOD systems are often trained on a limited set of target APIs, requiring new data to maintain their quality when interfacing with new services, while LAs are not trained to maintain user intent over multi-turn conversations. Because both robust multi-turn management and advanced function calling are crucial for effective conversational agents, we evaluate these skills on three popular benchmarks: MultiWOZ 2.4 (TOD), BFCL V3 (LA), and API-Bank (LA), and our analyses reveal that specialized approaches excel in one domain but underperform in the other. To bridge this chasm, we introduce CoALM (Conversational Agentic Language Model), a unified approach that integrates both conversational and agentic capabilities. We created CoALM-IT, a carefully constructed multi-task dataset that interleave multi-turn ReAct reasoning with complex API usage. Using CoALM-IT, we train three models CoALM 8B, CoALM 70B, and CoALM 405B, which outperform top domain-specific models, including GPT-4o, across all three benchmarks.This demonstrates the feasibility of a single model approach for both TOD and LA, setting a new standard for conversational agents.
Authors: Libo Wang
Abstract: To reduce the cost and consumption of computing resources caused by computational redundancy and delayed reward assignment in long CoT, this research proposes the dynamic chain-of-thought (D-CoT) with adaptive reasoning time and steps. The researcher used simulation experiment to simulate the integration of D-CoT through Python 3.13 IDLE combined with a Python simulator based on GPTs. At the same time, the researcher used DeepSeek R1 as a control group to test and compare the performance of the D-CoT simulator in processing MIT OpenCourseWare's linear algebra exam questions. Experimental results show that D-CoT is better than DeepSeek R1 based on long CoT in three indicators: reasoning time, CoT length (reasoning steps) and token count, which achieves a significant reduction in computing resource consumption. In addition, this research has potential value in deep reasoning optimization that is used as a reference for future dynamic deep reasoning frameworks.
Authors: Zongqian Wu, Tianyu Li, Baoduo Xu, Jiaying Yang, Mengmeng Zhan, Xiaofeng Zhu, Lei Feng
Abstract: Deep iterative chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables LLMs to tackle complex tasks by progressively activating relevant pre-trained knowledge. However, it faces challenges in ensuring continual improvement and determining a stopping criterion. In this paper, we investigate whether the relevant knowledge that contributes directly to solving the given question can be activated from the initial reasoning path, thus circumventing the need for iterative refinement. Our experiments reveal that increasing the diversity of initial reasoning paths can achieve comparable or superior performance, a concept we term \textit{breadth reasoning}. However, existing breadth reasoning approaches, such as self-consistency, offer limited diversity. To address this limitation, we propose a simple yet effective method that enhances reasoning breadth by integrating contextual exploration with reduced sampling randomness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms deep iterative reasoning. Our code is provided in https://github.com/zongqianwu/breadth.
Authors: Guojun Xiong, Zhiyang Deng, Keyi Wang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xueqing Peng, Mingquan Lin, Kaleb E Smith, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on multimodal financial data have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities in various financial tasks. However, they often struggle with multi-step, goal-oriented scenarios in interactive financial markets, such as trading, where complex agentic approaches are required to improve decision-making. To address this, we propose \textsc{FLAG-Trader}, a unified architecture integrating linguistic processing (via LLMs) with gradient-driven reinforcement learning (RL) policy optimization, in which a partially fine-tuned LLM acts as the policy network, leveraging pre-trained knowledge while adapting to the financial domain through parameter-efficient fine-tuning. Through policy gradient optimization driven by trading rewards, our framework not only enhances LLM performance in trading but also improves results on other financial-domain tasks. We present extensive empirical evidence to validate these enhancements.
Authors: Weidi Luo, Shenghong Dai, Xiaogeng Liu, Suman Banerjee, Huan Sun, Muhao Chen, Chaowei Xiao
Abstract: The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled their deployment as autonomous agents for handling complex tasks in dynamic environments. These LLMs demonstrate strong problem-solving capabilities and adaptability to multifaceted scenarios. However, their use as agents also introduces significant risks, including task-specific risks, which are identified by the agent administrator based on the specific task requirements and constraints, and systemic risks, which stem from vulnerabilities in their design or interactions, potentially compromising confidentiality, integrity, or availability (CIA) of information and triggering security risks. Existing defense agencies fail to adaptively and effectively mitigate these risks. In this paper, we propose AGrail, a lifelong agent guardrail to enhance LLM agent safety, which features adaptive safety check generation, effective safety check optimization, and tool compatibility and flexibility. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AGrail not only achieves strong performance against task-specific and system risks but also exhibits transferability across different LLM agents' tasks.
Authors: Shuyin Xia, Xinyu Lin, Guan Wang, De-Gang Chen, Sen Zhao, Guoyin Wang, Jing Liang
Abstract: Optimization problems aim to find the optimal solution, which is becoming increasingly complex and difficult to solve. Traditional evolutionary optimization methods always overlook the granular characteristics of solution space. In the real scenario of numerous optimizations, the solution space is typically partitioned into sub-regions characterized by varying degree distributions. These sub-regions present different granularity characteristics at search potential and difficulty. Considering the granular characteristics of the solution space, the number of coarse-grained regions is smaller than the number of points, so the calculation is more efficient. On the other hand, coarse-grained characteristics are not easily affected by fine-grained sample points, so the calculation is more robust. To this end, this paper proposes a new multi-granularity evolutionary optimization method, namely the Granular-ball Optimization (GBO) algorithm, which characterizes and searches the solution space from coarse to fine. Specifically, using granular-balls instead of traditional points for optimization increases the diversity and robustness of the random search process. At the same time, the search range in different iteration processes is limited by the radius of granular-balls, covering the solution space from large to small. The mechanism of granular-ball splitting is applied to continuously split and evolve the large granular-balls into smaller ones for refining the solution space. Extensive experiments on commonly used benchmarks have shown that GBO outperforms popular and advanced evolutionary algorithms. The code can be found in the supporting materials.
Authors: Minghao Liu, Jiaheng Wei, Yang Liu, James Davis
Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) models for computer vision trained with supervised machine learning are assumed to solve classification tasks by imitating human behavior learned from training labels. Most efforts in recent vision research focus on measuring the model task performance using standardized benchmarks such as accuracy. However, limited work has sought to understand the perceptual difference between humans and machines. To fill this gap, this study first analyzes the statistical distributions of mistakes from the two sources and then explores how task difficulty level affects these distributions. We find that even when AI learns an excellent model from the training data, one that outperforms humans in overall accuracy, these AI models have significant and consistent differences from human perception. We demonstrate the importance of studying these differences with a simple human-AI teaming algorithm that outperforms humans alone, AI alone, or AI-AI teaming.
Authors: Euan D Lindsay, Mike Zhang, Aditya Johri, Johannes Bjerva
Abstract: Providing rich, constructive feedback to students is essential for supporting and enhancing their learning. Recent advancements in Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly with large language models (LLMs), present new opportunities to deliver scalable, repeatable, and instant feedback, effectively making abundant a resource that has historically been scarce and costly. From a technical perspective, this approach is now feasible due to breakthroughs in AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP). While the potential educational benefits are compelling, implementing these technologies also introduces a host of ethical considerations that must be thoughtfully addressed. One of the core advantages of AI systems is their ability to automate routine and mundane tasks, potentially freeing up human educators for more nuanced work. However, the ease of automation risks a ``tyranny of the majority'', where the diverse needs of minority or unique learners are overlooked, as they may be harder to systematize and less straightforward to accommodate. Ensuring inclusivity and equity in AI-generated feedback, therefore, becomes a critical aspect of responsible AI implementation in education. The process of developing machine learning models that produce valuable, personalized, and authentic feedback also requires significant input from human domain experts. Decisions around whose expertise is incorporated, how it is captured, and when it is applied have profound implications for the relevance and quality of the resulting feedback. Additionally, the maintenance and continuous refinement of these models are necessary to adapt feedback to evolving contextual, theoretical, and student-related factors. Without ongoing adaptation, feedback risks becoming obsolete or mismatched with the current needs of diverse student populations [...]
Authors: Andreas Happe, Aaron Kaplan, Juergen Cito
Abstract: Penetration testing, an essential component of software security testing, allows organizations to identify and remediate vulnerabilities in their systems, thus bolstering their defense mechanisms against cyberattacks. One recent advancement in the realm of penetration testing is the utilization of Language Models (LLMs). We explore the intersection of LLMs and penetration testing to gain insight into their capabilities and challenges in the context of privilege escalation. We introduce a fully automated privilege-escalation tool designed for evaluating the efficacy of LLMs for (ethical) hacking, executing benchmarks using multiple LLMs, and investigating their respective results. Our results show that GPT-4-turbo is well suited to exploit vulnerabilities (33-83% of vulnerabilities). GPT-3.5-turbo can abuse 16-50% of vulnerabilities, while local models, such as Llama3, can only exploit between 0 and 33% of the vulnerabilities. We analyze the impact of different context sizes, in-context learning, optional high-level guidance mechanisms, and memory management techniques. We discuss challenging areas for LLMs, including maintaining focus during testing, coping with errors, and finally comparing LLMs with human hackers. The current version of the LLM-guided privilege-escalation prototype can be found at https://github.com/ipa-labs/hackingBuddyGPT.
Authors: Daniel Garces, Sushmita Bhattacharya, Dimitri Bertsekas, Stephanie Gil
Abstract: In this paper, we focus on the autonomous multiagent taxi routing problem for a large urban environment where the location and number of future ride requests are unknown a-priori, but can be estimated by an empirical distribution. Recent theory has shown that a rollout algorithm with a stable base policy produces a near-optimal stable policy. In the routing setting, a policy is stable if its execution keeps the number of outstanding requests uniformly bounded over time. Although, rollout-based approaches are well-suited for learning cooperative multiagent policies with considerations for future demand, applying such methods to a large urban environment can be computationally expensive due to the large number of taxis required for stability. In this paper, we aim to address the computational bottleneck of multiagent rollout by proposing an approximate multiagent rollout-based two phase algorithm that reduces computational costs, while still achieving a stable near-optimal policy. Our approach partitions the graph into sectors based on the predicted demand and the maximum number of taxis that can run sequentially given the user's computational resources. The algorithm then applies instantaneous assignment (IA) for re-balancing taxis across sectors and a sector-wide multiagent rollout algorithm that is executed in parallel for each sector. We provide two main theoretical results: 1) characterize the number of taxis $m$ that is sufficient for IA to be stable; 2) derive a necessary condition on $m$ to maintain stability for IA as time goes to infinity. Our numerical results show that our approach achieves stability for an $m$ that satisfies the theoretical conditions. We also empirically demonstrate that our proposed two phase algorithm has equivalent performance to the one-at-a-time rollout over the entire map, but with significantly lower runtimes.
Authors: Nianli Peng, Muhang Tian, Brandon Fain
Abstract: We study multi-objective reinforcement learning with nonlinear preferences over trajectories. That is, we maximize the expected value of a nonlinear function over accumulated rewards (expected scalarized return or ESR) in a multi-objective Markov Decision Process (MOMDP). We derive an extended form of Bellman optimality for nonlinear optimization that explicitly considers time and current accumulated reward. Using this formulation, we describe an approximation algorithm for computing an approximately optimal non-stationary policy in pseudopolynomial time for smooth scalarization functions with a constant number of rewards. We prove the approximation analytically and demonstrate the algorithm experimentally, showing that there can be a substantial gap between the optimal policy computed by our algorithm and alternative baselines.
Authors: Zhu Sun, Kaidong Feng, Jie Yang, Xinghua Qu, Hui Fang, Yew-Soon Ong, Wenyuan Liu
Abstract: Most existing bundle generation approaches fall short in generating fixed-size bundles. Furthermore, they often neglect the underlying user intents reflected by the bundles in the generation process, resulting in less intelligible bundles. This paper addresses these limitations through the exploration of two interrelated tasks, i.e., personalized bundle generation and the underlying intent inference, based on different user sessions. Inspired by the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), we propose an adaptive in-context learning paradigm, which allows LLMs to draw tailored lessons from related sessions as demonstrations, enhancing the performance on target sessions. Specifically, we first employ retrieval augmented generation to identify nearest neighbor sessions, and then carefully design prompts to guide LLMs in executing both tasks on these neighbor sessions. To tackle reliability and hallucination challenges, we further introduce (1) a self-correction strategy promoting mutual improvements of the two tasks without supervision signals and (2) an auto-feedback mechanism for adaptive supervision based on the distinct mistakes made by LLMs on different neighbor sessions. Thereby, the target session can gain customized lessons for improved performance by observing the demonstrations of its neighbor sessions. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Authors: Karina Corti\~nas-Lorenzo, Si\^an Lindley, Ida Larsen-Ledet, Bhaskar Mitra
Abstract: Knowledge can't be disentangled from people. As AI knowledge systems mine vast volumes of work-related data, the knowledge that's being extracted and surfaced is intrinsically linked to the people who create and use it. When these systems get embedded in organizational settings, the information that is brought to the foreground and the information that's pushed to the periphery can influence how individuals see each other and how they see themselves at work. In this paper, we present the looking-glass metaphor and use it to conceptualize AI knowledge systems as systems that reflect and distort, expanding our view on transparency requirements, implications and challenges. We formulate transparency as a key mediator in shaping different ways of seeing, including seeing into the system, which unveils its capabilities, limitations and behavior, and seeing through the system, which shapes workers' perceptions of their own contributions and others within the organization. Recognizing the sociotechnical nature of these systems, we identify three transparency dimensions necessary to realize the value of AI knowledge systems, namely system transparency, procedural transparency and transparency of outcomes. We discuss key challenges hindering the implementation of these forms of transparency, bringing to light the wider sociotechnical gap and highlighting directions for future Computer-supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) research.
Authors: Weide Liu, Huijing Zhan, Hao Chen, Fengmao Lv
Abstract: Multimodal sentiment analysis aims to identify the emotions expressed by individuals through visual, language, and acoustic cues. However, most of the existing research efforts assume that all modalities are available during both training and testing, making their algorithms susceptible to the missing modality scenario. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-transfer network to translate between different modalities to reconstruct the missing audio modalities. Moreover, we develop a cross-modality attention mechanism to retain the maximal information of the reconstructed and observed modalities for sentiment prediction. Extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets demonstrate significant improvements over baselines and achieve comparable results to the previous methods with complete multi-modality supervision.
Authors: Hong Guan, Ansh Tiwari, Summer Gautier, Rajan Hari Ambrish, Lixi Zhou, Yancheng Wang, Deepti Gupta, Yingzhen Yang, Chaowei Xiao, Kanchan Chowdhury, Jia Zou
Abstract: Detecting inference queries running over personal attributes and protecting such queries from leaking individual information requires tremendous effort from practitioners. To tackle this problem, we propose an end-to-end workflow for automating privacy-preserving inference queries including the detection of subqueries that involve AI/ML model inferences on sensitive attributes. Our proposed novel declarative privacy-preserving workflow allows users to specify "what private information to protect" rather than "how to protect". Under the hood, the system automatically chooses privacy-preserving plans and hyper-parameters.
Authors: Yifan Zhang, Yifan Luo, Yang Yuan, Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
Abstract: We present Autonomous Data Selection (AutoDS), a method that leverages base language models themselves as zero-shot "generative classifiers" to automatically curate high-quality mathematical texts. Unlike prior approaches that require human annotations or training a dedicated data filter, AutoDS relies solely on a model's logits to determine whether a given passage is mathematically informative and educational. By integrating AutoDS into a continual pretraining pipeline, we substantially boost downstream performance on challenging math benchmarks (MATH, GSM8K, and BBH) while using far fewer tokens than previous methods. Empirically, our approach achieves roughly a twofold improvement in pretraining token efficiency over strong baselines, underscoring the potential of self-directed data selection in enhancing mathematical reasoning. We release our curated AutoMathText dataset to facilitate future research in automated domain-specific data curation. The AutoMathText dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/math-ai/AutoMathText. The code is available at https://github.com/yifanzhang-pro/AutoMathText.
URLs: https://huggingface.co/datasets/math-ai/AutoMathText., https://github.com/yifanzhang-pro/AutoMathText.
Authors: Hwiyeol Jo, Taiwoo Park, Hyunwoo Lee, Nayoung Choi, Changbong Kim, Ohjoon Kwon, Donghyeon Jeon, Eui-Hyeon Lee, Kyoungho Shin, Sun Suk Lim, Kyungmi Kim, Jihye Lee, Sun Kim
Abstract: Although there has been a growing interest among industries in integrating generative LLMs into their services, limited experience and scarcity of resources act as a barrier in launching and servicing large-scale LLM-based services. In this paper, we share our experiences in developing and operating generative AI models within a national-scale search engine, with a specific focus on the sensitiveness of user queries. We propose a taxonomy for sensitive search queries, outline our approaches, and present a comprehensive analysis report on sensitive queries from actual users. We believe that our experiences in launching generative AI search systems can contribute to reducing the barrier in building generative LLM-based services.
Authors: Zukang Yang, Zixuan Zhu, Xuan Zhu
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in open-domain question answering. However, they continue to face challenges such as hallucinations and knowledge cutoffs. These issues can be mitigated through in-context learning by providing LLMs with relevant context before generating answers. Recent literature proposes Knowledge Graph Prompting (KGP) which integrates knowledge graphs with an LLM-based traversal agent to substantially enhance document retrieval quality. However, KGP requires costly fine-tuning with large datasets and remains prone to hallucination. In this paper, we propose CuriousLLM, an enhancement that integrates a curiosity-driven reasoning mechanism into an LLM agent. This mechanism enables the agent to generate relevant follow-up questions, thereby guiding the information retrieval process more efficiently. Central to our approach is the development of the new Follow-upQA dataset, which includes questions and supporting evidence as input, with follow-up questions serving as ground truths. These follow-up questions either inquire about what is still missing to fully answer the user's query or use special tokens to signify that the retrieved evidence is sufficient. Our experiments show that CuriousLLM significantly boosts LLM performance in multi-document question answering (MD-QA), circumventing the substantial computational costs and latency from the original KGP framework.
Authors: Antonio Pio Ricciardi, Valentino Maiorca, Luca Moschella, Riccardo Marin, Emanuele Rodol\`a
Abstract: Visual Reinforcement Learning is a popular and powerful framework that takes full advantage of the Deep Learning breakthrough. It is known that variations in input domains (e.g., different panorama colors due to seasonal changes) or task domains (e.g., altering the target speed of a car) can disrupt agent performance, necessitating new training for each variation. Recent advancements in the field of representation learning have demonstrated the possibility of combining components from different neural networks to create new models in a zero-shot fashion. In this paper, we build upon relative representations, a framework that maps encoder embeddings to a universal space. We adapt this framework to the Visual Reinforcement Learning setting, allowing to combine agents components to create new agents capable of effectively handling novel visual-task pairs not encountered during training. Our findings highlight the potential for model reuse, significantly reducing the need for retraining and, consequently, the time and computational resources required.
Authors: Yuheng Ji, Yue Liu, Zhicheng Zhang, Zhao Zhang, Yuting Zhao, Xiaoshuai Hao, Gang Zhou, Xingwei Zhang, Xiaolong Zheng
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) play a crucial role in the advancement of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). As AGI rapidly evolves, addressing security concerns has emerged as one of the most significant challenges for VLMs. In this paper, we present extensive experiments that expose the vulnerabilities of conventional adaptation methods for VLMs, highlighting significant security risks. Moreover, as VLMs grow in size, the application of traditional adversarial adaptation techniques incurs substantial computational costs. To address these issues, we propose a parameter-efficient adversarial adaptation method called \textbf{\textit{AdvLoRA}} based on Low-Rank Adaptation. We investigate and reveal the inherent low-rank properties involved in adversarial adaptation for VLMs. Different from LoRA, we enhance the efficiency and robustness of adversarial adaptation by introducing a novel reparameterization method that leverages parameter clustering and alignment. Additionally, we propose an adaptive parameter update strategy to further bolster robustness. These innovations enable our AdvLoRA to mitigate issues related to model security and resource wastage. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of AdvLoRA.
Authors: Kiho Park, Yo Joong Choe, Yibo Jiang, Victor Veitch
Abstract: The linear representation hypothesis is the informal idea that semantic concepts are encoded as linear directions in the representation spaces of large language models (LLMs). Previous work has shown how to make this notion precise for representing binary concepts that have natural contrasts (e.g., {male, female}) as directions in representation space. However, many natural concepts do not have natural contrasts (e.g., whether the output is about an animal). In this work, we show how to extend the formalization of the linear representation hypothesis to represent features (e.g., is_animal) as vectors. This allows us to immediately formalize the representation of categorical concepts as polytopes in the representation space. Further, we use the formalization to prove a relationship between the hierarchical structure of concepts and the geometry of their representations. We validate these theoretical results on the Gemma and LLaMA-3 large language models, estimating representations for 900+ hierarchically related concepts using data from WordNet.
Authors: Liting Huang, Zhihao Zhang, Yiran Zhang, Xiyue Zhou, Shoujin Wang
Abstract: The recent generative AI models' capability of creating realistic and human-like content is significantly transforming the ways in which people communicate, create and work. The machine-generated content is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it can benefit the society when used appropriately. On the other hand, it may mislead people, posing threats to the society, especially when mixed together with natural content created by humans. Hence, there is an urgent need to develop effective methods to detect machine-generated content. However, the lack of aligned multimodal datasets inhibited the development of such methods, particularly in triple-modality settings (e.g., text, image, and voice). In this paper, we introduce RU-AI, a new large-scale multimodal dataset for robust and effective detection of machine-generated content in text, image and voice. Our dataset is constructed on the basis of three large publicly available datasets: Flickr8K, COCO and Places205, by adding their corresponding AI duplicates, resulting in a total of 1,475,370 instances. In addition, we created an additional noise variant of the dataset for testing the robustness of detection models. We conducted extensive experiments with the current SOTA detection methods on our dataset. The results reveal that existing models still struggle to achieve accurate and robust detection on our dataset. We hope that this new data set can promote research in the field of machine-generated content detection, fostering the responsible use of generative AI. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/ZhihaoZhang97/RU-AI.
Authors: Minghao Shao, Sofija Jancheska, Meet Udeshi, Brendan Dolan-Gavitt, Haoran Xi, Kimberly Milner, Boyuan Chen, Max Yin, Siddharth Garg, Prashanth Krishnamurthy, Farshad Khorrami, Ramesh Karri, Muhammad Shafique
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are being deployed across various domains today. However, their capacity to solve Capture the Flag (CTF) challenges in cybersecurity has not been thoroughly evaluated. To address this, we develop a novel method to assess LLMs in solving CTF challenges by creating a scalable, open-source benchmark database specifically designed for these applications. This database includes metadata for LLM testing and adaptive learning, compiling a diverse range of CTF challenges from popular competitions. Utilizing the advanced function calling capabilities of LLMs, we build a fully automated system with an enhanced workflow and support for external tool calls. Our benchmark dataset and automated framework allow us to evaluate the performance of five LLMs, encompassing both black-box and open-source models. This work lays the foundation for future research into improving the efficiency of LLMs in interactive cybersecurity tasks and automated task planning. By providing a specialized benchmark, our project offers an ideal platform for developing, testing, and refining LLM-based approaches to vulnerability detection and resolution. Evaluating LLMs on these challenges and comparing with human performance yields insights into their potential for AI-driven cybersecurity solutions to perform real-world threat management. We make our benchmark dataset open source to public https://github.com/NYU-LLM-CTF/NYU_CTF_Bench along with our playground automated framework https://github.com/NYU-LLM-CTF/llm_ctf_automation.
URLs: https://github.com/NYU-LLM-CTF/NYU_CTF_Bench, https://github.com/NYU-LLM-CTF/llm_ctf_automation.
Authors: Bruno Petrungaro, Neville K. Kitson, Anthony C. Constantinou
Abstract: Sepsis is a life-threatening and serious global health issue. This study combines knowledge with available hospital data to investigate the potential causes of Sepsis that can be affected by policy decisions. We investigate the underlying causal structure of this problem by combining clinical expertise with score-based, constraint-based, and hybrid structure learning algorithms. A novel approach to model averaging and knowledge-based constraints was implemented to arrive at a consensus structure for causal inference. The structure learning process highlighted the importance of exploring data-driven approaches alongside clinical expertise. This includes discovering unexpected, although reasonable, relationships from a clinical perspective. Hypothetical interventions on Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Alcohol dependence, and Diabetes suggest that the presence of any of these risk factors in patients increases the likelihood of Sepsis. This finding, alongside measuring the effect of these risk factors on Sepsis, has potential policy implications. Recognising the importance of prediction in improving health outcomes related to Sepsis, the model is also assessed in its ability to predict Sepsis by evaluating accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. These three indicators all had results around 70%, and the AUC was 80%, which means the causal structure of the model is reasonably accurate given that the models were trained on data available for commissioning purposes only.
Authors: Jiacheng Du, Zhibo Wang, Jie Zhang, Xiaoyi Pang, Jiahui Hu, Kui Ren
Abstract: Language Models (LMs) are prone to ''memorizing'' training data, including substantial sensitive user information. To mitigate privacy risks and safeguard the right to be forgotten, machine unlearning has emerged as a promising approach for enabling LMs to efficiently ''forget'' specific texts. However, despite the good intentions, is textual unlearning really as effective and reliable as expected? To address the concern, we first propose Unlearning Likelihood Ratio Attack+ (U-LiRA+), a rigorous textual unlearning auditing method, and find that unlearned texts can still be detected with very high confidence after unlearning. Further, we conduct an in-depth investigation on the privacy risks of textual unlearning mechanisms in deployment and present the Textual Unlearning Leakage Attack (TULA), along with its variants in both black- and white-box scenarios. We show that textual unlearning mechanisms could instead reveal more about the unlearned texts, exposing them to significant membership inference and data reconstruction risks. Our findings highlight that existing textual unlearning actually gives a false sense of unlearning, underscoring the need for more robust and secure unlearning mechanisms.
Authors: Minchong Li, Feng Zhou, Xiaohui Song
Abstract: In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional capabilities across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, such impressive performance often comes with the trade-off of an increased parameter size, posing significant challenges for widespread deployment. Knowledge distillation (KD) provides a solution by transferring knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student model. In this paper, we explore the task-specific distillation of LLMs at the logit level. Our investigation reveals that the logits of fine-tuned LLMs exhibit a more extreme long-tail distribution than those from vision models, with hidden "noise" in the long tail affecting distillation performance. Furthermore, existing logits distillation methods often struggle to effectively utilize the internal ranking information from the logits. To address these, we propose the Bi-directional Logits Difference (BiLD) loss. The BiLD loss filters out the long-tail noise by utilizing only top-$k$ teacher and student logits, and leverages the internal logits ranking information by constructing logits differences. To evaluate BiLD loss, we conduct comprehensive experiments on 13 datasets using two types of LLMs. Our results show that the BiLD loss, with only the top-8 logits, outperforms supervised fine-tuning (SFT), vanilla KL loss, and five other distillation methods from both NLP and CV fields.
Authors: Simon Kloker, Matthew Bazanya, Twaha Kateete
Abstract: Trust plays a pivotal role in Lecturer-Student-Collaboration, encompassing teaching and research aspects. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) in platforms like Open AI's ChatGPT, coupled with their cost-effectiveness and high-quality results, has led to their rapid adoption among university students. However, discerning genuine student input from LLM-generated output poses a challenge for lecturers. This dilemma jeopardizes the trust relationship between lecturers and students, potentially impacting university downstream activities, particularly collaborative research initiatives. Despite attempts to establish guidelines for student LLM use, a clear framework mutually beneficial for lecturers and students in higher education remains elusive. This study addresses the research question: How does the use of LLMs by students impact Informational and Procedural Justice, influencing Team Trust and Expected Team Performance? Methodically, we applied a quantitative construct-based survey, evaluated using techniques of Structural Equation Modelling (PLS- SEM) to examine potential relationships among these constructs. Our findings based on 23 valid respondents from Ndejje University indicate that lecturers are less concerned about the fairness of LLM use per se but are more focused on the transparency of student utilization, which significantly influences Team Trust positively. This research contributes to the global discourse on integrating and regulating LLMs and subsequent models in education. We propose that guidelines should support LLM use while enforcing transparency in Lecturer-Student- Collaboration to foster Team Trust and Performance. The study contributes valuable insights for shaping policies enabling ethical and transparent LLMs usage in education to ensure effectiveness of collaborative learning environments.
Authors: Bao Gia Doan, Afshar Shamsi, Xiao-Yu Guo, Arash Mohammadi, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Dino Sejdinovic, Damien Teney, Damith C. Ranasinghe, Ehsan Abbasnejad
Abstract: Computational complexity of Bayesian learning is impeding its adoption in practical, large-scale tasks. Despite demonstrations of significant merits such as improved robustness and resilience to unseen or out-of-distribution inputs over their non- Bayesian counterparts, their practical use has faded to near insignificance. In this study, we introduce an innovative framework to mitigate the computational burden of Bayesian neural networks (BNNs). Our approach follows the principle of Bayesian techniques based on deep ensembles, but significantly reduces their cost via multiple low-rank perturbations of parameters arising from a pre-trained neural network. Both vanilla version of ensembles as well as more sophisticated schemes such as Bayesian learning with Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD), previously deemed impractical for large models, can be seamlessly implemented within the proposed framework, called Bayesian Low-Rank LeArning (Bella). In a nutshell, i) Bella achieves a dramatic reduction in the number of trainable parameters required to approximate a Bayesian posterior; and ii) it not only maintains, but in some instances, surpasses the performance of conventional Bayesian learning methods and non-Bayesian baselines. Our results with large-scale tasks such as ImageNet, CAMELYON17, DomainNet, VQA with CLIP, LLaVA demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of Bella in building highly scalable and practical Bayesian deep models for real-world applications.
Authors: Hiroki Tanioka, Tetsushi Ueta, Masahiko Sano
Abstract: The performance of ChatGPT\copyright{} and other LLMs has improved tremendously, and in online environments, they are increasingly likely to be used in a wide variety of situations, such as ChatBot on web pages, call center operations using voice interaction, and dialogue functions using agents. In the offline environment, multimodal dialogue functions are also being realized, such as guidance by Artificial Intelligence agents (AI agents) using tablet terminals and dialogue systems in the form of LLMs mounted on robots. In this multimodal dialogue, mutual emotion recognition between the AI and the user will become important. So far, there have been methods for expressing emotions on the part of the AI agent or for recognizing them using textual or voice information of the user's utterances, but methods for AI agents to recognize emotions from the user's facial expressions have not been studied. In this study, we examined whether or not LLM-based AI agents can interact with users according to their emotional states by capturing the user in dialogue with a camera, recognizing emotions from facial expressions, and adding such emotion information to prompts. The results confirmed that AI agents can have conversations according to the emotional state for emotional states with relatively high scores, such as Happy and Angry.
Authors: Bruce W. Lee, Inkit Padhi, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy, Erik Miehling, Pierre Dognin, Manish Nagireddy, Amit Dhurandhar
Abstract: LLMs have shown remarkable capabilities, but precisely controlling their response behavior remains challenging. Existing activation steering methods alter LLM behavior indiscriminately, limiting their practical applicability in settings where selective responses are essential, such as content moderation or domain-specific assistants. In this paper, we propose Conditional Activation Steering (CAST), which analyzes LLM activation patterns during inference to selectively apply or withhold activation steering based on the input context. Our method is based on the observation that different categories of prompts activate distinct patterns in the model's hidden states. Using CAST, one can systematically control LLM behavior with rules like "if input is about hate speech or adult content, then refuse" or "if input is not about legal advice, then refuse." This allows for selective modification of responses to specific content while maintaining normal responses to other content, all without requiring weight optimization. We release an open-source implementation of our framework at github.com/IBM/activation-steering .
Authors: Joy Hsu, Jiayuan Mao, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Noah D. Goodman, Jiajun Wu
Abstract: A unique aspect of human visual understanding is the ability to flexibly interpret abstract concepts: acquiring lifted rules explaining what they symbolize, grounding them across familiar and unfamiliar contexts, and making predictions or reasoning about them. While off-the-shelf vision-language models excel at making literal interpretations of images (e.g., recognizing object categories such as tree branches), they still struggle to make sense of such visual abstractions (e.g., how an arrangement of tree branches may form the walls of a maze). To address this challenge, we introduce Deep Schema Grounding (DSG), a framework that leverages explicit structured representations of visual abstractions for grounding and reasoning. At the core of DSG are schemas--dependency graph descriptions of abstract concepts that decompose them into more primitive-level symbols. DSG uses large language models to extract schemas, then hierarchically grounds concrete to abstract components of the schema onto images with vision-language models. The grounded schema is used to augment visual abstraction understanding. We systematically evaluate DSG and different methods in reasoning on our new Visual Abstractions Dataset, which consists of diverse, real-world images of abstract concepts and corresponding question-answer pairs labeled by humans. We show that DSG significantly improves the abstract visual reasoning performance of vision-language models, and is a step toward human-aligned understanding of visual abstractions.
Authors: Benjamin Stoler, Ingrid Navarro, Jonathan Francis, Jean Oh
Abstract: Verification and validation of autonomous driving (AD) systems and components is of increasing importance, as such technology increases in real-world prevalence. Safety-critical scenario generation is a key approach to robustify AD policies through closed-loop training. However, existing approaches for scenario generation rely on simplistic objectives, resulting in overly-aggressive or non-reactive adversarial behaviors. To generate diverse adversarial yet realistic scenarios, we propose SEAL, a scenario perturbation approach which leverages learned objective functions and adversarial, human-like skills. SEAL-perturbed scenarios are more realistic than SOTA baselines, leading to improved ego task success across real-world, in-distribution, and out-of-distribution scenarios, of more than 20%. To facilitate future research, we release our code and tools: https://github.com/cmubig/SEAL
Authors: Yuxuan Zhang, Ruizhe Li
Abstract: Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved robust performance across diverse tasks, but fine-tuning these models for specific domains remains resource-intensive. Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) address this challenge by fine-tuning a small subset of parameters. However, existing methods for fusing multiple LoRAs lack dynamic fusion based on contextual inputs and often increase inference time due to token-level operations. We propose DLP-LoRA, a Dynamic Lightweight Plugin that employs a mini-MLP module with only 5M parameters to dynamically fuse multiple LoRAs at the sentence level using top-p sampling strategies. This approach reduces inference time to less than twice that of single LoRA inference by leveraging parallel computation. Evaluations across 26 tasks-including multiple-choice questions and question answering-demonstrate that DLP-LoRA achieves an average accuracy of 92.34% on multiple-choice datasets and significant improvements in BLEU and ROUGE scores on QA datasets, outperforming different LLMs backbones under composite task settings. DLP-LoRA effectively balances performance and efficiency, making it a practical solution for dynamic multi-task adaptation in LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/MeCuping/DLP-LoRA.
Authors: Omayma Mahjoub, Sasha Abramowitz, Ruan de Kock, Wiem Khlifi, Simon du Toit, Jemma Daniel, Louay Ben Nessir, Louise Beyers, Claude Formanek, Liam Clark, Arnu Pretorius
Abstract: As multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) progresses towards solving larger and more complex problems, it becomes increasingly important that algorithms exhibit the key properties of (1) strong performance, (2) memory efficiency and (3) scalability. In this work, we introduce Sable, a performant, memory efficient and scalable sequence modeling approach to MARL. Sable works by adapting the retention mechanism in Retentive Networks (Sun et al., 2023) to achieve computationally efficient processing of multi-agent observations with long context memory for temporal reasoning. Through extensive evaluations across six diverse environments, we demonstrate how Sable is able to significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art methods in a large number of diverse tasks (34 out of 45 tested). Furthermore, Sable maintains performance as we scale the number of agents, handling environments with more than a thousand agents while exhibiting a linear increase in memory usage. Finally, we conduct ablation studies to isolate the source of Sable's performance gains and confirm its efficient computational memory usage.
Authors: Jonas Gehring, Kunhao Zheng, Jade Copet, Vegard Mella, Quentin Carbonneaux, Taco Cohen, Gabriel Synnaeve
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) deployed as agents solve user-specified tasks over multiple steps while keeping the required manual engagement to a minimum. Crucially, such LLMs need to ground their generations in any feedback obtained to reliably achieve the desired outcomes. We propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning method for teaching models to leverage execution feedback in the realm of code synthesis, where state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to improve code iteratively compared to independent sampling. We benchmark on competitive programming tasks, where we achieve new state-of-the art results with both small (8B parameters) and large (70B) models while reducing the amount of samples required by an order of magnitude. Our analysis of inference-time behavior demonstrates that our method produces LLMs that effectively leverage automatic feedback over multiple steps.
Authors: Xiaoqun Liu, Jiacheng Liang, Luoxi Tang, Muchao Ye, Weicheng Ma, Zhaohan Xi
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely adapted for downstream applications through fine-tuning, a process named customization. However, recent studies have identified a vulnerability during this process, where malicious samples can compromise the robustness of LLMs and amplify harmful behaviors-an attack commonly referred to as jailbreaking. To address this challenge, we propose an adaptive data curation approach allowing any text to be curated to enhance its effectiveness in counteracting harmful samples during customization. To avoid the need for additional defensive modules, we further introduce a comprehensive mitigation framework spanning the lifecycle of the customization process: before customization to immunize LLMs against future jailbreak attempts, during customization to neutralize risks, and after customization to restore compromised models. Experimental results demonstrate a significant reduction in jailbreaking effects, achieving up to a 100% success rate in generating safe responses. By combining adaptive data curation with lifecycle-based mitigation strategies, this work represents a solid step forward in mitigating jailbreaking risks and ensuring the secure adaptation of LLMs.
Authors: Po-han Li, Sandeep P. Chinchali, Ufuk Topcu
Abstract: Multimodal encoders like CLIP excel in tasks such as zero-shot image classification and cross-modal retrieval. However, they require excessive training data. We propose canonical similarity analysis (CSA), which uses two unimodal encoders to replicate multimodal encoders using limited data. CSA maps unimodal features into a multimodal space, using a new similarity score to retain only the multimodal information. CSA only involves the inference of unimodal encoders and a cubic-complexity matrix decomposition, eliminating the need for extensive GPU-based model training. Experiments show that CSA outperforms CLIP while requiring $50,000\times$ fewer multimodal data pairs to bridge the modalities given pre-trained unimodal encoders on ImageNet classification and misinformative news caption detection. CSA surpasses the state-of-the-art method to map unimodal features to multimodal features. We also demonstrate the ability of CSA with modalities beyond image and text, paving the way for future modality pairs with limited paired multimodal data but abundant unpaired unimodal data, such as lidar and text.
Authors: Daniel Neider, Leif Sabellek, Johannes Schmidt, Fabian Vehlken, Thomas Zeume
Abstract: Explaining why and how a tree $t$ structurally differs from another tree $t^\star$ is a question that is encountered throughout computer science, including in understanding tree-structured data such as XML or JSON data. In this article, we explore how to learn explanations for structural differences between pairs of trees from sample data: suppose we are given a set $\{(t_1, t_1^\star),\dots, (t_n, t_n^\star)\}$ of pairs of labelled, ordered trees; is there a small set of rules that explains the structural differences between all pairs $(t_i, t_i^\star)$? This raises two research questions: (i) what is a good notion of "rule" in this context?; and (ii) how can sets of rules explaining a data set be learned algorithmically? We explore these questions from the perspective of database theory by (1) introducing a pattern-based specification language for tree transformations; (2) exploring the computational complexity of variants of the above algorithmic problem, e.g. showing NP-hardness for very restricted variants; and (3) discussing how to solve the problem for data from CS education research using SAT solvers.
Authors: Weize Chen, Jiarui Yuan, Chen Qian, Cheng Yang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) based multi-agent systems (MAS) show remarkable potential in collaborative problem-solving, yet they still face critical challenges: low communication efficiency, poor scalability, and a lack of effective parameter-updating optimization methods. We present Optima, a novel framework that addresses these issues by significantly enhancing both communication efficiency and task effectiveness in LLM-based MAS through LLM training. Optima employs an iterative generate, rank, select, and train paradigm with a reward function balancing task performance, token efficiency, and communication readability. We explore various RL algorithms, including Supervised Fine-Tuning, Direct Preference Optimization, and their hybrid approaches, providing insights into their effectiveness-efficiency trade-offs. We integrate Monte Carlo Tree Search-inspired techniques for DPO data generation, treating conversation turns as tree nodes to explore diverse interaction paths. Evaluated on common multi-agent tasks, including information-asymmetric question answering and complex reasoning, Optima shows consistent and substantial improvements over single-agent baselines and vanilla MAS based on Llama 3 8B, achieving up to 2.8x performance gain with less than 10\% tokens on tasks requiring heavy information exchange. Moreover, Optima's efficiency gains open new possibilities for leveraging inference-compute more effectively, leading to improved inference-time scaling laws. By addressing fundamental challenges in LLM-based MAS, Optima shows the potential towards scalable, efficient, and effective MAS (https://chenweize1998.github.io/optima-project-page).
Authors: Yurong Liu, R. Teal Witter, Flip Korn, Tarfah Alrashed, Dimitris Paparas, Christopher Musco, Juliana Freire
Abstract: Banzhaf values provide a popular, interpretable alternative to the widely-used Shapley values for quantifying the importance of features in machine learning models. Like Shapley values, computing Banzhaf values exactly requires time exponential in the number of features, necessitating the use of efficient estimators. Existing estimators, however, are limited to Monte Carlo sampling methods. In this work, we introduce Kernel Banzhaf, the first regression-based estimator for Banzhaf values. Our approach leverages a novel regression formulation, whose exact solution corresponds to the exact Banzhaf values. Inspired by the success of Kernel SHAP for Shapley values, Kernel Banzhaf efficiently solves a sampled instance of this regression problem. Through empirical evaluations across eight datasets, we find that Kernel Banzhaf significantly outperforms existing Monte Carlo methods in terms of accuracy, sample efficiency, robustness to noise, and feature ranking recovery. Finally, we complement our experimental evaluation with strong theoretical guarantees on Kernel Banzhaf's performance.
Authors: Neeraj Mohan Sushma, Yudou Tian, Harshvardhan Mestha, Nicolo Colombo, David Kappel, Anand Subramoney
Abstract: Deep state-space models (Deep SSMs) are becoming popular as effective approaches to model sequence data. They have also been shown to be capable of in-context learning, much like transformers. However, a complete picture of how SSMs might be able to do in-context learning has been missing. In this study, we provide a direct and explicit construction to show that state-space models can perform gradient-based learning and use it for in-context learning in much the same way as transformers. Specifically, we prove that a single structured state-space model layer, augmented with multiplicative input and output gating, can reproduce the outputs of an implicit linear model with least squares loss after one step of gradient descent. We then show a straightforward extension to multi-step linear and non-linear regression tasks. We validate our construction by training randomly initialized augmented SSMs on linear and non-linear regression tasks. The empirically obtained parameters through optimization match the ones predicted analytically by the theoretical construction. Overall, we elucidate the role of input- and output-gating in recurrent architectures as the key inductive biases for enabling the expressive power typical of foundation models. We also provide novel insights into the relationship between state-space models and linear self-attention, and their ability to learn in-context.
Authors: Fengji Zhang, Linquan Wu, Huiyu Bai, Guancheng Lin, Xiao Li, Xiao Yu, Yue Wang, Bei Chen, Jacky Keung
Abstract: Understanding and reasoning over diagrams is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence. While Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, existing benchmarks lack comprehensive evaluation of their diagram interpretation and reasoning abilities, particularly in coding contexts. We present HumanEval-V, a rigorous benchmark of human-annotated coding tasks that spans six task types and evaluates diverse visual reasoning capabilities. Each task features carefully crafted diagrams paired with function signatures and test cases, employing novel code generation tasks to thoroughly assess models' diagram comprehension. Through extensive experiments with 22 LMMs, we find that even top-performing models achieve modest success rates, with Claude 3.5 Sonnet reaching only 36.8% pass@1, highlighting substantial room for improvement. Our analysis reveals that current LMMs struggle with spatial transformations, topological relationships, and dynamic patterns that humans find intuitive. These findings provide valuable insights for advancing LMMs' visual reasoning abilities. We have open-sourced our code and benchmark at https://github.com/HumanEval-V/HumanEval-V-Benchmark.
Authors: Cosimo Gregucci, Bo Xiong, Daniel Hernandez, Lorenzo Loconte, Pasquale Minervini, Steffen Staab, Antonio Vergari
Abstract: Complex query answering (CQA) on knowledge graphs (KGs) is gaining momentum as a challenging reasoning task. In this paper, we show that the current benchmarks for CQA might not be as complex as we think, as the way they are built distorts our perception of progress in this field. For example, we find that in these benchmarks, most queries (up to 98% for some query types) can be reduced to simpler problems, e.g., link prediction, where only one link needs to be predicted. The performance of state-of-the-art CQA models decreases significantly when such models are evaluated on queries that cannot be reduced to easier types. Thus, we propose a set of more challenging benchmarks composed of queries that require models to reason over multiple hops and better reflect the construction of real-world KGs. In a systematic empirical investigation, the new benchmarks show that current methods leave much to be desired from current CQA methods.
Authors: Di Wu, Siyuan Li, Chen Feng, Lu Cao, Yue Zhang, Jie Yang, Mohamad Sawan
Abstract: Recent advancements in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have enabled the decoding of lexical tones from intracranial recordings, offering the potential to restore the communication abilities of speech-impaired tonal language speakers. However, data heterogeneity induced by both physiological and instrumental factors poses a significant challenge for unified invasive brain tone decoding. Traditional subject-specific models, which operate under a heterogeneous decoding paradigm, fail to capture generalized neural representations and cannot effectively leverage data across subjects. To address these limitations, we introduce Homogeneity-Heterogeneity Disentangled Learning for neural Representations (H2DiLR), a novel framework that disentangles and learns both the homogeneity and heterogeneity from intracranial recordings across multiple subjects. To evaluate H2DiLR, we collected stereoelectroencephalography (sEEG) data from multiple participants reading Mandarin materials comprising 407 syllables, representing nearly all Mandarin characters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that H2DiLR, as a unified decoding paradigm, significantly outperforms the conventional heterogeneous decoding approach. Furthermore, we empirically confirm that H2DiLR effectively captures both homogeneity and heterogeneity during neural representation learning.
Authors: Xintong Wang, Jingheng Pan, Liang Ding, Longyue Wang, Longqin Jiang, Xingshan Li, Chris Biemann
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance through pretraining on extensive data. This enables efficient adaptation to diverse downstream tasks. However, the lack of interpretability in their underlying mechanisms limits the ability to effectively steer LLMs for specific applications. In this work, we investigate the intrinsic mechanisms of LLMs from a cognitive perspective using eye movement measures. Specifically, we analyze the layer-wise correlation between human cognitive indicators and LLM representations. Building on these insights, we propose a heuristic approach for selecting the optimal steering layer to modulate LLM semantics. To this end, we introduce an efficient selective layer intervention based on prominent parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, which conventionally adjust either all layers or only the final layer. Additionally, we present an implicit layer contrastive intervention during inference to steer LLMs away from toxic outputs. Extensive experiments on natural language understanding, reasoning, and generation tasks, conducted on GPT-2, LLaMa2-7B, and Mixtral-7B, demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. As a model-agnostic framework, it enhances the interpretability of LLMs while improving efficiency for safe deployment.
Authors: Xintong Yang, Ze Ji, Yu-Kun Lai
Abstract: Robotic manipulation of volumetric elastoplastic deformable materials, from foods such as dough to construction materials like clay, is in its infancy, largely due to the difficulty of modelling and perception in a high-dimensional space. Simulating the dynamics of such materials is computationally expensive. It tends to suffer from inaccurately estimated physics parameters of the materials and the environment, impeding high-precision manipulation. Estimating such parameters from raw point clouds captured by optical cameras suffers further from heavy occlusions. To address this challenge, this work introduces a novel Differentiable Physics-based System Identification (DPSI) framework that enables a robot arm to infer the physics parameters of elastoplastic materials and the environment using simple manipulation motions and incomplete 3D point clouds, aligning the simulation with the real world. Extensive experiments show that with only a single real-world interaction, the estimated parameters, Young's modulus, Poisson's ratio, yield stress and friction coefficients, can accurately simulate visually and physically realistic deformation behaviours induced by unseen and long-horizon manipulation motions. Additionally, the DPSI framework inherently provides physically intuitive interpretations for the parameters in contrast to black-box approaches such as deep neural networks. The project is fully open-sourced via https://ianyangchina.github.io/SI4RP-data/.
Authors: Seonil Son, Ju-Min Oh, Heegon Jin, Cheolhun Jang, Jeongbeom Jeong, Kuntae Kim
Abstract: Most existing benchmarking approaches for evaluating the output quality of large language models (LLMs) rely on comparing LLM responses to predefined references. Such methods, based on static datasets, quickly become outdated as LLM capabilities and use cases evolve. In this work, we introduce VARCO Arena--a novel, cost-effective, and robust benchmarking approach that leverages a single-elimination tournament structure to minimize the number of required comparisons while eliminating the need for static references or costly human annotations. We validate our approach through two experiments: (i) a simulation study that examines its robustness under various conditions, and (ii) an empirical evaluation using publicly available benchmark prompts. In both experiments, VARCO Arena consistently outperforms current LLM benchmarking practices, achieving stronger correlations with human-established Elo ratings. Our results demonstrate that VARCO Arena not only produces reliable LLM rankings but also provides a scalable, adaptable solution for qualitative evaluation across diverse, customized use cases.
Authors: Simon Kloker, Alex Cedric Luyima, Matthew Bazanya
Abstract: This paper introduces WASHtsApp, a WhatsApp-based chatbot designed to educate rural African communities on clean water access, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) principles. WASHtsApp leverages a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach to address the limitations of previous approaches with limited reach or missing contextualization. The paper details the development process, employing Design Science Research Methodology. The evaluation consisted of two phases: content validation by four WASH experts and community validation by potential users. Content validation confirmed WASHtsApp's ability to provide accurate and relevant WASH-related information. Community validation indicated high user acceptance and perceived usefulness of the chatbot. The paper concludes by discussing the potential for further development, including incorporating local languages and user data analysis for targeted interventions. It also proposes future research cycles focused on wider deployment and leveraging user data for educational purposes.
Authors: Benedikt Br\"uckner, Alessio Lomuscio
Abstract: We develop a method for the efficient verification of neural networks against convolutional perturbations such as blurring or sharpening. To define input perturbations we use well-known camera shake, box blur and sharpen kernels. We demonstrate that these kernels can be linearly parameterised in a way that allows for a variation of the perturbation strength while preserving desired kernel properties. To facilitate their use in neural network verification, we develop an efficient way of convolving a given input with these parameterised kernels. The result of this convolution can be used to encode the perturbation in a verification setting by prepending a linear layer to a given network. This leads to tight bounds and a high effectiveness in the resulting verification step. We add further precision by employing input splitting as a branch and bound strategy. We demonstrate that we are able to verify robustness on a number of standard benchmarks where the baseline is unable to provide any safety certificates. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first solution for verifying robustness against specific convolutional perturbations such as camera shake.
Authors: Kirti Bhagat, Kinshuk Vasisht, Danish Pruthi
Abstract: While a large body of work inspects language models for biases concerning gender, race, occupation and religion, biases of geographical nature are relatively less explored. Some recent studies benchmark the degree to which large language models encode geospatial knowledge. However, the impact of the encoded geographical knowledge (or lack thereof) on real-world applications has not been documented. In this work, we examine large language models for two common scenarios that require geographical knowledge: (a) travel recommendations and (b) geo-anchored story generation. Specifically, we study five popular language models, and across about $100$K travel requests, and $200$K story generations, we observe that travel recommendations corresponding to poorer countries are less unique with fewer location references, and stories from these regions more often convey emotions of hardship and sadness compared to those from wealthier nations.
Authors: Zheng Hui, Zhaoxiao Guo, Hang Zhao, Juanyong Duan, Lin Ai, Yinheng Li, Julia Hirschberg, Congrui Huang
Abstract: Effective toxic content detection relies heavily on high-quality and diverse data, which serve as the foundation for robust content moderation models. Synthetic data has become a common approach for training models across various NLP tasks. However, its effectiveness remains uncertain for highly subjective tasks like hate speech detection, with previous research yielding mixed results. This study explores the potential of open-source LLMs for harmful data synthesis, utilizing controlled prompting and supervised fine-tuning techniques to enhance data quality and diversity. We systematically evaluated 6 open source LLMs on 5 datasets, assessing their ability to generate diverse, high-quality harmful data while minimizing hallucination and duplication. Our results show that Mistral consistently outperforms other open models, and supervised fine-tuning significantly enhances data reliability and diversity. We further analyze the trade-offs between prompt-based vs. fine-tuned toxic data synthesis, discuss real-world deployment challenges, and highlight ethical considerations. Our findings demonstrate that fine-tuned open source LLMs provide scalable and cost-effective solutions to augment toxic content detection datasets, paving the way for more accessible and transparent content moderation tools.
Authors: Toyotaro Suzumura, Hiroki Kanezashi, Shotaro Akahori
Abstract: In diagnosing neurological disorders from electroencephalography (EEG) data, foundation models such as Transformers have been employed to capture temporal dynamics. Additionally, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are critical for representing the spatial relationships among EEG sensors. However, fine-tuning these large-scale models for both temporal and spatial features can be prohibitively large in computational cost, especially under the limited availability of labeled EEG datasets. We propose EEG-GraphAdapter (EGA), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approach designed to address these challenges. EGA is integrated into a pre-trained temporal backbone model as a GNN-based module, freezing the backbone and allowing only the adapter to be fine-tuned. This enables the effective acquisition of EEG spatial representations, significantly reducing computational overhead and data requirements. Experimental evaluations on two healthcare-related downstream tasks-Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Abnormality Detection (TUAB)-show that EGA improves performance by up to 16.1% in F1-score compared with the backbone BENDR model, highlighting its potential for scalable and accurate EEG-based predictions.
Authors: Pengjie Zhou, Haoyu Wei, Huiming Zhang
Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a widely researched area in artificial intelligence that focuses on teaching agents decision-making through interactions with their environment. A key subset includes stochastic multi-armed bandit (MAB) and continuum-armed bandit (SCAB) problems, which model sequential decision-making under uncertainty. This review outlines the foundational models and assumptions of bandit problems, explores non-asymptotic theoretical tools like concentration inequalities and minimax regret bounds, and compares frequentist and Bayesian algorithms for managing exploration-exploitation trade-offs. Additionally, we explore K-armed contextual bandits and SCAB, focusing on their methodologies and regret analyses. We also examine the connections between SCAB problems and functional data analysis. Finally, we highlight recent advances and ongoing challenges in the field.
Authors: Dipankar Srirag, Aditya Joshi, Jordan Painter, Diptesh Kanojia
Abstract: Despite large language models (LLMs) being known to exhibit bias against non-mainstream varieties, there are no known labeled datasets for sentiment analysis of English. To address this gap, we introduce BESSTIE, a benchmark for sentiment and sarcasm classification for three varieties of English: Australian (en-AU), Indian (en-IN), and British (en-UK). Using web-based content from two domains, namely, Google Place reviews and Reddit comments, we collect datasets for these language varieties using two methods: location-based and topic-based filtering. Native speakers of the language varieties manually annotate the datasets with sentiment and sarcasm labels. To assess whether the dataset accurately represents these varieties, we conduct two validation steps: (a) manual annotation of language varieties and (b) automatic language variety prediction. Subsequently, we fine-tune nine large language models (LLMs) (representing a range of encoder/decoder and mono/multilingual models) on these datasets, and evaluate their performance on the two tasks. Our results reveal that the models consistently perform better on inner-circle varieties (i.e., en-AU and en-UK), with significant performance drops for en-IN, particularly in sarcasm detection. We also report challenges in cross-variety generalisation, highlighting the need for language variety-specific datasets such as ours. BESSTIE promises to be a useful evaluative benchmark for future research in equitable LLMs, specifically in terms of language varieties. The BESSTIE datasets, code, and models will be publicly available upon acceptance.
Authors: Hyowon Cho, Soonwon Ka, Daechul Park, Jaewook Kang, Minjoon Seo, Bokyung Son
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often struggle to objectively identify latent characteristics in large datasets due to their reliance on pre-trained knowledge rather than actual data patterns. To address this data grounding issue, we propose Data Scientist AI (DSAI), a framework that enables unbiased and interpretable feature extraction through a multi-stage pipeline with quantifiable prominence metrics for evaluating extracted features. On synthetic datasets with known ground-truth features, DSAI demonstrates high recall in identifying expert-defined features while faithfully reflecting the underlying data. Applications on real-world datasets illustrate the framework's practical utility in uncovering meaningful patterns with minimal expert oversight, supporting use cases such as interpretable classification. The title of our paper is chosen from multiple candidates based on DSAI-generated criteria.
Authors: Jorge Guevara, Victor Nascimento, Johannes Schmude, Daniel Salles, Simon Corbeil-L\'etourneau, Madalina Surcel, Dominique Brunet
Abstract: Wind downscaling is essential for improving the spatial resolution of weather forecasts, particularly in operational Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP). This study advances wind downscaling by extending the DownGAN framework introduced by Annau et al.,to operational datasets from the Global Deterministic Prediction System (GDPS) and High-Resolution Deterministic Prediction System (HRDPS), covering the entire Canadian domain. We enhance the model by incorporating high-resolution static covariates, such as HRDPS-derived topography, into a Conditional Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network with Gradient Penalty, implemented using a UNET-based generator. Following the DownGAN framework, our methodology integrates low-resolution GDPS forecasts (15 km, 10-day horizon) and high-resolution HRDPS forecasts (2.5 km, 48-hour horizon) with Frequency Separation techniques adapted from computer vision. Through robust training and inference over the Canadian region, we demonstrate the operational scalability of our approach, achieving significant improvements in wind downscaling accuracy. Statistical validation highlights reductions in root mean square error (RMSE) and log spectral distance (LSD) metrics compared to the original DownGAN. High-resolution conditioning covariates and Frequency Separation strategies prove instrumental in enhancing model performance. This work underscores the potential for extending high-resolution wind forecasts beyond the 48-hour horizon, bridging the gap to the 10-day low resolution global forecast window.
Authors: Jinzong Dong, Zhaohui Jiang, Dong Pan, Haoyang Yu
Abstract: Confidence calibration of classification models is a technique to estimate the true posterior probability of the predicted class, which is critical for ensuring reliable decision-making in practical applications. Existing confidence calibration methods mostly use statistical techniques to estimate the calibration curve from data or fit a user-defined calibration function, but often overlook fully mining and utilizing the prior distribution behind the calibration curve. However, a well-informed prior distribution can provide valuable insights beyond the empirical data under the limited data or low-density regions of confidence scores. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a new method that integrates the prior distribution behind the calibration curve with empirical data to estimate a continuous calibration curve, which is realized by modeling the sampling process of calibration data as a binomial process and maximizing the likelihood function of the binomial process. We prove that the calibration curve estimating method is Lipschitz continuous with respect to data distribution and requires a sample size of $3/B$ of that required for histogram binning, where $B$ represents the number of bins. Also, a new calibration metric ($TCE_{bpm}$), which leverages the estimated calibration curve to estimate the true calibration error (TCE), is designed. $TCE_{bpm}$ is proven to be a consistent calibration measure. Furthermore, realistic calibration datasets can be generated by the binomial process modeling from a preset true calibration curve and confidence score distribution, which can serve as a benchmark to measure and compare the discrepancy between existing calibration metrics and the true calibration error. The effectiveness of our calibration method and metric are verified in real-world and simulated data.
Authors: Yuanhe Zhang, Zhenhong Zhou, Wei Zhang, Xinyue Wang, Xiaojun Jia, Yang Liu, Sen Su
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse tasks yet still are vulnerable to external threats, particularly LLM Denial-of-Service (LLM-DoS) attacks. Specifically, LLM-DoS attacks aim to exhaust computational resources and block services. However, existing studies predominantly focus on white-box attacks, leaving black-box scenarios underexplored. In this paper, we introduce Auto-Generation for LLM-DoS (AutoDoS) attack, an automated algorithm designed for black-box LLMs. AutoDoS constructs the DoS Attack Tree and expands the node coverage to achieve effectiveness under black-box conditions. By transferability-driven iterative optimization, AutoDoS could work across different models in one prompt. Furthermore, we reveal that embedding the Length Trojan allows AutoDoS to bypass existing defenses more effectively. Experimental results show that AutoDoS significantly amplifies service response latency by over 250$\times\uparrow$, leading to severe resource consumption in terms of GPU utilization and memory usage. Our work provides a new perspective on LLM-DoS attacks and security defenses. Our code is available at https://github.com/shuita2333/AutoDoS.
Authors: DeepSeek-AI, Aixin Liu, Bei Feng, Bing Xue, Bingxuan Wang, Bochao Wu, Chengda Lu, Chenggang Zhao, Chengqi Deng, Chenyu Zhang, Chong Ruan, Damai Dai, Daya Guo, Dejian Yang, Deli Chen, Dongjie Ji, Erhang Li, Fangyun Lin, Fucong Dai, Fuli Luo, Guangbo Hao, Guanting Chen, Guowei Li, H. Zhang, Han Bao, Hanwei Xu, Haocheng Wang, Haowei Zhang, Honghui Ding, Huajian Xin, Huazuo Gao, Hui Li, Hui Qu, J. L. Cai, Jian Liang, Jianzhong Guo, Jiaqi Ni, Jiashi Li, Jiawei Wang, Jin Chen, Jingchang Chen, Jingyang Yuan, Junjie Qiu, Junlong Li, Junxiao Song, Kai Dong, Kai Hu, Kaige Gao, Kang Guan, Kexin Huang, Kuai Yu, Lean Wang, Lecong Zhang, Lei Xu, Leyi Xia, Liang Zhao, Litong Wang, Liyue Zhang, Meng Li, Miaojun Wang, Mingchuan Zhang, Minghua Zhang, Minghui Tang, Mingming Li, Ning Tian, Panpan Huang, Peiyi Wang, Peng Zhang, Qiancheng Wang, Qihao Zhu, Qinyu Chen, Qiushi Du, R. J. Chen, R. L. Jin, Ruiqi Ge, Ruisong Zhang, Ruizhe Pan, Runji Wang, Runxin Xu, Ruoyu Zhang, Ruyi Chen, S. S. Li, Shanghao Lu, Shangyan Zhou, Shanhuang Chen, Shaoqing Wu, Shengfeng Ye, Shengfeng Ye, Shirong Ma, Shiyu Wang, Shuang Zhou, Shuiping Yu, Shunfeng Zhou, Shuting Pan, T. Wang, Tao Yun, Tian Pei, Tianyu Sun, W. L. Xiao, Wangding Zeng, Wanjia Zhao, Wei An, Wen Liu, Wenfeng Liang, Wenjun Gao, Wenqin Yu, Wentao Zhang, X. Q. Li, Xiangyue Jin, Xianzu Wang, Xiao Bi, Xiaodong Liu, Xiaohan Wang, Xiaojin Shen, Xiaokang Chen, Xiaokang Zhang, Xiaosha Chen, Xiaotao Nie, Xiaowen Sun, Xiaoxiang Wang, Xin Cheng, Xin Liu, Xin Xie, Xingchao Liu, Xingkai Yu, Xinnan Song, Xinxia Shan, Xinyi Zhou, Xinyu Yang, Xinyuan Li, Xuecheng Su, Xuheng Lin, Y. K. Li, Y. Q. Wang, Y. X. Wei, Y. X. Zhu, Yang Zhang, Yanhong Xu, Yanhong Xu, Yanping Huang, Yao Li, Yao Zhao, Yaofeng Sun, Yaohui Li, Yaohui Wang, Yi Yu, Yi Zheng, Yichao Zhang, Yifan Shi, Yiliang Xiong, Ying He, Ying Tang, Yishi Piao, Yisong Wang, Yixuan Tan, Yiyang Ma, Yiyuan Liu, Yongqiang Guo, Yu Wu, Yuan Ou, Yuchen Zhu, Yuduan Wang, Yue Gong, Yuheng Zou, Yujia He, Yukun Zha, Yunfan Xiong, Yunxian Ma, Yuting Yan, Yuxiang Luo, Yuxiang You, Yuxuan Liu, Yuyang Zhou, Z. F. Wu, Z. Z. Ren, Zehui Ren, Zhangli Sha, Zhe Fu, Zhean Xu, Zhen Huang, Zhen Zhang, Zhenda Xie, Zhengyan Zhang, Zhewen Hao, Zhibin Gou, Zhicheng Ma, Zhigang Yan, Zhihong Shao, Zhipeng Xu, Zhiyu Wu, Zhongyu Zhang, Zhuoshu Li, Zihui Gu, Zijia Zhu, Zijun Liu, Zilin Li, Ziwei Xie, Ziyang Song, Ziyi Gao, Zizheng Pan
Abstract: We present DeepSeek-V3, a strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model with 671B total parameters with 37B activated for each token. To achieve efficient inference and cost-effective training, DeepSeek-V3 adopts Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and DeepSeekMoE architectures, which were thoroughly validated in DeepSeek-V2. Furthermore, DeepSeek-V3 pioneers an auxiliary-loss-free strategy for load balancing and sets a multi-token prediction training objective for stronger performance. We pre-train DeepSeek-V3 on 14.8 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning stages to fully harness its capabilities. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that DeepSeek-V3 outperforms other open-source models and achieves performance comparable to leading closed-source models. Despite its excellent performance, DeepSeek-V3 requires only 2.788M H800 GPU hours for its full training. In addition, its training process is remarkably stable. Throughout the entire training process, we did not experience any irrecoverable loss spikes or perform any rollbacks. The model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3.
Authors: Zijie Chen, Zhanchao Zhou, Yu Lu, Renjun Xu, Lili Pan, Zhenzhong Lan
Abstract: Solving NP-hard problems traditionally relies on heuristics, yet manually designing effective heuristics for complex problems remains a significant challenge. While recent advancements like FunSearch have shown that large language models (LLMs) can be integrated into evolutionary algorithms (EAs) for heuristic design, their potential is hindered by limitations in balancing exploitation and exploration. We introduce Quality-Uncertainty Balanced Evolution (QUBE), a novel approach that enhances LLM+EA methods by redefining the priority criterion within the FunSearch framework. QUBE employs the Quality-Uncertainty Trade-off Criterion (QUTC), based on our proposed Uncertainty-Inclusive Quality metric, to evaluate and guide the evolutionary process. Through extensive experiments on challenging NP-complete problems, QUBE demonstrates significant performance improvements over FunSearch and baseline methods. Our code are available at https://github.com/zzjchen/QUBE\_code.
Authors: Jiayu Song, Mahmud Akhter, Dana Atzil Slonim, Maria Liakata
Abstract: This paper explores whether enhancing temporal reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) can improve the quality of timeline summarisation, the task of summarising long texts containing sequences of events, such as social media threads. We first introduce NarrativeReason, a novel dataset focused on temporal relationships among sequential events within narratives, distinguishing it from existing temporal reasoning datasets that primarily address pair-wise event relationships. Our approach then combines temporal reasoning with timeline summarisation through a knowledge distillation framework, where we first fine-tune a teacher model on temporal reasoning tasks and then distill this knowledge into a student model while simultaneously training it for the task of timeline summarisation. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance on out-of-domain mental health-related timeline summarisation tasks, which involve long social media threads with repetitions of events and a mix of emotions, highlighting the importance and generalisability of leveraging temporal reasoning to improve timeline summarisation.
Authors: Xingyu Bruce Liu, Shitao Fang, Weiyan Shi, Chien-Sheng Wu, Takeo Igarashi, Xiang Anthony Chen
Abstract: One of the long-standing aspirations in conversational AI is to allow them to autonomously take initiatives in conversations, i.e., being proactive. This is especially challenging for multi-party conversations. Prior NLP research focused mainly on predicting the next speaker from contexts like preceding conversations. In this paper, we demonstrate the limitations of such methods and rethink what it means for AI to be proactive in multi-party, human-AI conversations. We propose that just like humans, rather than merely reacting to turn-taking cues, a proactive AI formulates its own inner thoughts during a conversation, and seeks the right moment to contribute. Through a formative study with 24 participants and inspiration from linguistics and cognitive psychology, we introduce the Inner Thoughts framework. Our framework equips AI with a continuous, covert train of thoughts in parallel to the overt communication process, which enables it to proactively engage by modeling its intrinsic motivation to express these thoughts. We instantiated this framework into two real-time systems: an AI playground web app and a chatbot. Through a technical evaluation and user studies with human participants, our framework significantly surpasses existing baselines on aspects like anthropomorphism, coherence, intelligence, and turn-taking appropriateness.
Authors: You Li, Heyu Huang, Chi Chen, Kaiyu Huang, Chao Huang, Zonghao Guo, Zhiyuan Liu, Jinan Xu, Yuhua Li, Ruixuan Li, Maosong Sun
Abstract: The recent advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has significantly improved their fine-grained perception of single images and general comprehension across multiple images. However, existing MLLMs still face challenges in achieving precise grounding in complex multi-image scenarios. To address this, we first explore a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) framework that integrates single-image grounding with multi-image comprehension. While partially effective, it remains unstable and struggles to capture abstract visual information due to its non-end-to-end nature. Therefore, we introduce Migician, the first multi-image grounding model capable of performing free-form and accurate grounding across multiple images. To support this, we present the MGrounding-630k dataset, which comprises data for several multi-image grounding tasks derived from existing datasets, along with newly generated free-form grounding instruction-following data. Furthermore, we propose MIG-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating multi-image grounding capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves significantly superior multi-image grounding capabilities, outperforming the best existing MLLMs by 24.94% and even surpassing much larger 70B models. Our code, model, dataset, and benchmark are fully open-sourced at https://migician-vg.github.io/.
Authors: Gouki Minegishi, Hiroki Furuta, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo
Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have gained a lot of attention as a promising tool to improve the interpretability of large language models (LLMs) by mapping the complex superposition of polysemantic neurons into monosemantic features and composing a sparse dictionary of words. However, traditional performance metrics like Mean Squared Error and L0 sparsity ignore the evaluation of the semantic representational power of SAEs -- whether they can acquire interpretable monosemantic features while preserving the semantic relationship of words. For instance, it is not obvious whether a learned sparse feature could distinguish different meanings in one word. In this paper, we propose a suite of evaluations for SAEs to analyze the quality of monosemantic features by focusing on polysemous words. Our findings reveal that SAEs developed to improve the MSE-L0 Pareto frontier may confuse interpretability, which does not necessarily enhance the extraction of monosemantic features. The analysis of SAEs with polysemous words can also figure out the internal mechanism of LLMs; deeper layers and the Attention module contribute to distinguishing polysemy in a word. Our semantics focused evaluation offers new insights into the polysemy and the existing SAE objective and contributes to the development of more practical SAEs.
Authors: Matthijs de Jong, Jan Viebahn, Yuliya Shapovalova
Abstract: The energy transition necessitates new congestion management methods. One such method is controlling the grid topology with machine learning (ML). This approach has gained popularity following the Learning to Run a Power Network (L2RPN) competitions. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a class of ML models that reflect graph structure in their computation, which makes them suitable for power grid modeling. Various GNN approaches for topology control have thus been proposed. We propose the first GNN model for grid topology control that uses only GNN layers. Additionally, we identify the busbar information asymmetry problem that the popular homogeneous graph representation suffers from, and propose a heterogeneous graph representation to resolve it. We train both homogeneous and heterogeneous GNNs and fully connected neural networks (FCNN) baselines on an imitation learning task. We evaluate the models according to their classification accuracy and grid operation ability. We find that the heterogeneous GNNs perform best on in-distribution networks, followed by the FCNNs, and lastly, the homogeneous GNNs. We also find that both GNN types generalize better to out-of-distribution networks than FCNNs.
Authors: Nikos Kanakaris, Heng Ping, Xiongye Xiao, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Luca Luceri, Emilio Ferrara, Paul Bogdan
Abstract: Detecting organized political campaigns is of paramount importance in fighting against disinformation on social media. Existing approaches for the identification of such organized actions employ techniques mostly from network science, graph machine learning and natural language processing. Their ultimate goal is to analyze the relationships and interactions (e.g. re-posting) among users and the textual similarities of their posts. Despite their effectiveness in recognizing astroturf campaigns, these methods face significant challenges, notably the class imbalance in available training datasets. To mitigate this issue, recent methods usually resort to data augmentation or increasing the number of positive samples, which may not always be feasible or sufficient in real-world settings. Following a different path, in this paper, we propose a novel framework for identifying astroturf campaigns based solely on large language models (LLMs), introducing a Balanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Balanced RAG) component. Our approach first gives both textual information concerning the posts (in our case tweets) and the user interactions of the social network as input to a language model. Then, through prompt engineering and the proposed Balanced RAG method, it effectively detects coordinated disinformation campaigns on X (Twitter). The proposed framework does not require any training or fine-tuning of the language model. Instead, by strategically harnessing the strengths of prompt engineering and Balanced RAG, it facilitates LLMs to overcome the effects of class imbalance and effectively identify coordinated political campaigns. The experimental results demonstrate that by incorporating the proposed prompt engineering and Balanced RAG methods, our framework outperforms the traditional graph-based baselines, achieving 2x-3x improvements in terms of precision, recall and F1 scores.
Authors: Zui Chen, Tianqiao Liu, Mi Tian, Qing Tong, Weiqi Luo, Zitao Liu
Abstract: Mathematical reasoning remains a challenging area for large language models (LLMs), prompting the development of math-specific LLMs such as LLEMMA, DeepSeekMath, and Qwen2-Math, among others. These models typically follow a two-stage training paradigm: pre-training with math-related corpora and post-training with problem datasets for supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Despite these efforts, the improvements in mathematical reasoning achieved through continued pre-training (CPT) are often less significant compared to those obtained via SFT. This study addresses this discrepancy by exploring alternative strategies during the pre-training phase, focusing on the use of problem-solving data over general mathematical corpora. We investigate three primary research questions: (1) Can problem-solving data enhance the model's mathematical reasoning capabilities more effectively than general mathematical corpora during CPT? (2) Are synthetic data from the same source equally effective, and which synthesis methods are most efficient? (3) How do the capabilities developed from the same problem-solving data differ between the CPT and SFT stages, and what factors contribute to these differences? Our findings indicate that problem-solving data significantly enhances the model's mathematical capabilities compared to general mathematical corpora. We also identify effective data synthesis methods, demonstrating that the tutorship amplification synthesis method achieves the best performance. Furthermore, while SFT facilitates instruction-following abilities, it underperforms compared to CPT with the same data, which can be partially attributed to its poor learning capacity for more challenging problem-solving data. These insights provide valuable guidance for optimizing the mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLMs, culminating in our development of a powerful mathematical base model called MathGPT-8B.
Authors: Junyeob Baek, Yi-Fu Wu, Gautam Singh, Sungjin Ahn
Abstract: Humans have an innate ability to decompose their perceptions of the world into objects and their attributes, such as colors, shapes, and movement patterns. This cognitive process enables us to imagine novel futures by recombining familiar concepts. However, replicating this ability in artificial intelligence systems has proven challenging, particularly when it comes to modeling videos into compositional concepts and generating unseen, recomposed futures without relying on auxiliary data, such as text, masks, or bounding boxes. In this paper, we propose Dreamweaver, a neural architecture designed to discover hierarchical and compositional representations from raw videos and generate compositional future simulations. Our approach leverages a novel Recurrent Block-Slot Unit (RBSU) to decompose videos into their constituent objects and attributes. In addition, Dreamweaver uses a multi-future-frame prediction objective to capture disentangled representations for dynamic concepts more effectively as well as static concepts. In experiments, we demonstrate our model outperforms current state-of-the-art baselines for world modeling when evaluated under the DCI framework across multiple datasets. Furthermore, we show how the modularized concept representations of our model enable compositional imagination, allowing the generation of novel videos by recombining attributes from different objects.
Authors: Ilya Orson Sandoval, Isaac Symes Thompson, Vasilios Mavroudis, Chris Hicks
Abstract: As cyber threats grow increasingly sophisticated, reinforcement learning (RL) is emerging as a promising technique to create intelligent and adaptive cyber defense systems. However, most existing autonomous defensive agents have overlooked the inherent graph structure of computer networks subject to cyber attacks, potentially missing critical information and constraining their adaptability. To overcome these limitations, we developed a custom version of the Cyber Operations Research Gym (CybORG) environment, encoding network state as a directed graph with realistic low-level features. We employ a Graph Attention Network (GAT) architecture to process node, edge, and global features, and adapt its output to be compatible with policy gradient methods in RL. Our GAT-based approach offers key advantages over flattened alternatives: policies that demonstrate resilience to certain types of unexpected dynamic network topology changes, reasonable generalisation to networks of varying sizes within the same structural distribution, and interpretable defensive actions grounded in tangible network properties. We demonstrate that GAT defensive policies can be trained using our low-level directed graph observations, even when unexpected connections arise during simulation. Evaluations across networks of different sizes, but consistent subnetwork structure, show our policies achieve comparable performance to policies trained specifically for each network configuration. Our study contributes to the development of robust cyber defence systems that can better adapt to real-world network security challenges.
Authors: Hanwen Zhang, Ruichen Zhang, Wei Zhang, Dusit Niyato, Yonggang Wen
Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence, particularly through large language models (LLMs), is poised to transform energy optimization and demand side management (DSM) within microgrids. This paper explores the integration of LLMs into energy management, emphasizing their roles in automating the optimization of DSM strategies with Internet of electric vehicles. We investigate challenges and solutions associated with DSM and explore the new opportunities presented by leveraging LLMs. Then, we propose an innovative solution that enhances LLMs with retrieval-augmented generation for automatic problem formulation, code generation, and customizing optimization. We present a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solution in charging scheduling and optimization for electric vehicles, highlighting our solution's significant advancements in energy efficiency and user adaptability. This work underscores the potential of LLMs for energy optimization and fosters a new era of intelligent DSM solutions.
Authors: Ting-Yao E. Hsu, Yi-Li Hsu, Shaurya Rohatgi, Chieh-Yang Huang, Ho Yin Sam Ng, Ryan Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Tong Yu, Lun-Wei Ku, C. Lee Giles, Ting-Hao K. Huang
Abstract: Since the SciCap datasets launch in 2021, the research community has made significant progress in generating captions for scientific figures in scholarly articles. In 2023, the first SciCap Challenge took place, inviting global teams to use an expanded SciCap dataset to develop models for captioning diverse figure types across various academic fields. At the same time, text generation models advanced quickly, with many powerful pre-trained large multimodal models (LMMs) emerging that showed impressive capabilities in various vision-and-language tasks. This paper presents an overview of the first SciCap Challenge and details the performance of various models on its data, capturing a snapshot of the fields state. We found that professional editors overwhelmingly preferred figure captions generated by GPT-4V over those from all other models and even the original captions written by authors. Following this key finding, we conducted detailed analyses to answer this question: Have advanced LMMs solved the task of generating captions for scientific figures?
Authors: Felipe Azua, Leopoldo Bertossi
Abstract: The Causal Effect (CE) is a numerical measure of causal influence of variables on observed results. Despite being widely used in many areas, only preliminary attempts have been made to use CE as an attribution score in data management, to measure the causal strength of tuples for query answering in databases. In this work, we introduce, generalize and investigate the so-called Causal-Effect Score in the context of classical and probabilistic databases.
Authors: Liang Wendong, Simon Buchholz, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf
Abstract: We explore the relationship between causality, symmetry, and compression. We build on and generalize the known connection between learning and compression to a setting where causal models are not identifiable. We propose a framework where causality emerges as a consequence of compressing data across multiple environments. We define algorithmic causality as an alternative definition of causality when traditional assumptions for causal identifiability do not hold. We demonstrate how algorithmic causal and symmetric structures can emerge from minimizing upper bounds on Kolmogorov complexity, without knowledge of intervention targets. We hypothesize that these insights may also provide a novel perspective on the emergence of causality in machine learning models, such as large language models, where causal relationships may not be explicitly identifiable.
Authors: Congjie He, Yeqi Huang, Pei Mu, Ziming Miao, Jilong Xue, Lingxiao Ma, Fan Yang, Luo Mai
Abstract: Emerging AI accelerators increasingly adopt wafer-scale manufacturing technologies, integrating hundreds of thousands of AI cores in a mesh-based architecture with large distributed on-chip memory (tens of GB in total) and ultra-high on-chip memory bandwidth (tens of PB/s). However, current LLM inference systems, optimized for shared memory architectures like GPUs, fail to fully exploit these accelerators. We introduce WaferLLM, the first wafer-scale LLM inference system. WaferLLM is guided by a novel PLMR model (pronounced as "Plummer") that captures the unique hardware characteristics of wafer-scale architectures. Leveraging this model, WaferLLM pioneers wafer-scale LLM parallelism, optimizing the utilization of hundreds of thousands of on-chip cores. It also introduces MeshGEMM and MeshGEMV, the first GEMM and GEMV implementations designed to scale effectively on wafer-scale accelerators. Evaluations show that WaferLLM achieves 200$\times$ better wafer-scale accelerator utilization than state-of-the-art systems. On a commodity wafer-scale accelerator, WaferLLM delivers 606$\times$ faster and 22$\times$ more energy-efficient GEMV compared to an advanced GPU. For LLMs, based on 16-bit data type, WaferLLM achieves 2700 toks/sec/req decode speed on Llama3-8B model and 840 toks/sec/req decode speed on Qwen2-72B model, which enables 39$\times$ faster decoding with 1.7$\times$ better energy efficiency. We anticipate these numbers will grow significantly as wafer-scale AI models, software, and hardware continue to mature.
Authors: Taiyi Wang, Liang Liang, Guang Yang, Thomas Heinis, Eiko Yoneki
Abstract: Learned Index Structures (LIS) have significantly advanced data management by leveraging machine learning models to optimize data indexing. However, designing these structures often involves critical trade-offs, making it challenging for both designers and end-users to find an optimal balance tailored to specific workloads and scenarios. While some indexes offer adjustable parameters that demand intensive manual tuning, others rely on fixed configurations based on heuristic auto-tuners or expert knowledge, which may not consistently deliver optimal performance. This paper introduces LITune, a novel framework for end-to-end automatic tuning of Learned Index Structures. LITune employs an adaptive training pipeline equipped with a tailor-made Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach to ensure stable and efficient tuning. To accommodate long-term dynamics arising from online tuning, we further enhance LITune with an on-the-fly updating mechanism termed the O2 system. These innovations allow LITune to effectively capture state transitions in online tuning scenarios and dynamically adjust to changing data distributions and workloads, marking a significant improvement over other tuning methods. Our experimental results demonstrate that LITune achieves up to a 98% reduction in runtime and a 17-fold increase in throughput compared to default parameter settings given a selected Learned Index instance. These findings highlight LITune's effectiveness and its potential to facilitate broader adoption of LIS in real-world applications.
Authors: Yongfan Chen, Xiuwen Zhu, Tianyu Li, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen
Abstract: Recent advances in video generation models demonstrate their potential as world simulators, but they often struggle with videos deviating from physical laws, a key concern overlooked by most text-to-video benchmarks. We introduce a benchmark designed specifically to assess the Physical Coherence of generated videos, PhyCoBench. Our benchmark includes 120 prompts covering 7 categories of physical principles, capturing key physical laws observable in video content. We evaluated four state-of-the-art (SoTA) T2V models on PhyCoBench and conducted manual assessments. Additionally, we propose an automated evaluation model: PhyCoPredictor, a diffusion model that generates optical flow and video frames in a cascade manner. Through a consistency evaluation comparing automated and manual sorting, the experimental results show that PhyCoPredictor currently aligns most closely with human evaluation. Therefore, it can effectively evaluate the physical coherence of videos, providing insights for future model optimization. Our benchmark, including physical coherence prompts, the automatic evaluation tool PhyCoPredictor, and the generated video dataset, has been released on GitHub at https://github.com/Jeckinchen/PhyCoBench.
Authors: Song Kyung Yu, Da Eun Lee, Yunyong Ko, Sang-Wook Kim
Abstract: Hyperedge prediction is a fundamental task to predict future high-order relations based on the observed network structure. Existing hyperedge prediction methods, however, suffer from the data sparsity problem. To alleviate this problem, negative sampling methods can be used, which leverage non-existing hyperedges as contrastive information for model training. However, the following important challenges have been rarely studied: (C1) lack of guidance for generating negatives and (C2) possibility of producing false negatives. To address them, we propose a novel hyperedge prediction method, HyGEN, that employs (1) a negative hyperedge generator that employs positive hyperedges as a guidance to generate more realistic ones and (2) a regularization term that prevents the generated hyperedges from being false negatives. Extensive experiments on six real-world hypergraphs reveal that HyGEN consistently outperforms four state-of-the-art hyperedge prediction methods.
Authors: Jiaying Lu, Stephanie R. Brown, Songyuan Liu, Shifan Zhao, Kejun Dong, Del Bold, Michael Fundora, Alaa Aljiffry, Alex Fedorov, Jocelyn Grunwell, Xiao Hu
Abstract: Early prediction of pediatric cardiac arrest (CA) is critical for timely intervention in high-risk intensive care settings. We introduce PedCA-FT, a novel transformer-based framework that fuses tabular view of EHR with the derived textual view of EHR to fully unleash the interactions of high-dimensional risk factors and their dynamics. By employing dedicated transformer modules for each modality view, PedCA-FT captures complex temporal and contextual patterns to produce robust CA risk estimates. Evaluated on a curated pediatric cohort from the CHOA-CICU database, our approach outperforms ten other artificial intelligence models across five key performance metrics and identifies clinically meaningful risk factors. These findings underscore the potential of multimodal fusion techniques to enhance early CA detection and improve patient care.
Authors: Shivansh Patel, Xinchen Yin, Wenlong Huang, Shubham Garg, Hooshang Nayyeri, Li Fei-Fei, Svetlana Lazebnik, Yunzhu Li
Abstract: Task specification for robotic manipulation in open-world environments is challenging, requiring flexible and adaptive objectives that align with human intentions and can evolve through iterative feedback. We introduce Iterative Keypoint Reward (IKER), a visually grounded, Python-based reward function that serves as a dynamic task specification. Our framework leverages VLMs to generate and refine these reward functions for multi-step manipulation tasks. Given RGB-D observations and free-form language instructions, we sample keypoints in the scene and generate a reward function conditioned on these keypoints. IKER operates on the spatial relationships between keypoints, leveraging commonsense priors about the desired behaviors, and enabling precise SE(3) control. We reconstruct real-world scenes in simulation and use the generated rewards to train reinforcement learning (RL) policies, which are then deployed into the real world-forming a real-to-sim-to-real loop. Our approach demonstrates notable capabilities across diverse scenarios, including both prehensile and non-prehensile tasks, showcasing multi-step task execution, spontaneous error recovery, and on-the-fly strategy adjustments. The results highlight IKER's effectiveness in enabling robots to perform multi-step tasks in dynamic environments through iterative reward shaping.
Authors: Mohammad Mahdi Abootorabi, Amirhosein Zobeiri, Mahdi Dehghani, Mohammadali Mohammadkhani, Bardia Mohammadi, Omid Ghahroodi, Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah, Ehsaneddin Asgari
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with hallucinations and outdated knowledge due to their reliance on static training data. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these issues by integrating external dynamic information enhancing factual and updated grounding. Recent advances in multimodal learning have led to the development of Multimodal RAG, incorporating multiple modalities such as text, images, audio, and video to enhance the generated outputs. However, cross-modal alignment and reasoning introduce unique challenges to Multimodal RAG, distinguishing it from traditional unimodal RAG. This survey offers a structured and comprehensive analysis of Multimodal RAG systems, covering datasets, metrics, benchmarks, evaluation, methodologies, and innovations in retrieval, fusion, augmentation, and generation. We precisely review training strategies, robustness enhancements, and loss functions, while also exploring the diverse Multimodal RAG scenarios. Furthermore, we discuss open challenges and future research directions to support advancements in this evolving field. This survey lays the foundation for developing more capable and reliable AI systems that effectively leverage multimodal dynamic external knowledge bases. Resources are available at https://github.com/llm-lab-org/Multimodal-RAG-Survey.
Authors: Blanca Calvo Figueras, Eneko Sagarzazu, Julen Etxaniz, Jeremy Barnes, Pablo Gamallo, Iria De Dios Flores, Rodrigo Agerri
Abstract: We introduce a professionally translated extension of the TruthfulQA benchmark designed to evaluate truthfulness in Basque, Catalan, Galician, and Spanish. Truthfulness evaluations of large language models (LLMs) have primarily been conducted in English. However, the ability of LLMs to maintain truthfulness across languages remains under-explored. Our study evaluates 12 state-of-the-art open LLMs, comparing base and instruction-tuned models using human evaluation, multiple-choice metrics, and LLM-as-a-Judge scoring. Our findings reveal that, while LLMs perform best in English and worst in Basque (the lowest-resourced language), overall truthfulness discrepancies across languages are smaller than anticipated. Furthermore, we show that LLM-as-a-Judge correlates more closely with human judgments than multiple-choice metrics, and that informativeness plays a critical role in truthfulness assessment. Our results also indicate that machine translation provides a viable approach for extending truthfulness benchmarks to additional languages, offering a scalable alternative to professional translation. Finally, we observe that universal knowledge questions are better handled across languages than context- and time-dependent ones, highlighting the need for truthfulness evaluations that account for cultural and temporal variability. Dataset and code are publicly available under open licenses.
Authors: Wenbo Pan, Zhichao Liu, Qiguang Chen, Xiangyang Zhou, Haining Yu, Xiaohua Jia
Abstract: Large Language Models' safety-aligned behaviors, such as refusing harmful queries, can be represented by linear directions in activation space. Previous research modeled safety behavior with a single direction, limiting mechanistic understanding to an isolated safety feature. In this work, we discover that safety-aligned behavior is jointly controlled by multi-dimensional directions. Namely, we study the vector space of representation shifts during safety fine-tuning on Llama 3 8B for refusing jailbreaks. By studying orthogonal directions in the space, we first find that a dominant direction governs the model's refusal behavior, while multiple smaller directions represent distinct and interpretable features like hypothetical narrative and role-playing. We then measure how different directions promote or suppress the dominant direction, showing the important role of secondary directions in shaping the model's refusal representation. Finally, we demonstrate that removing certain trigger tokens in harmful queries can mitigate these directions to bypass the learned safety capability, providing new insights on understanding safety alignment vulnerability from a multi-dimensional perspective. Code and artifacts are available at https://github.com/BMPixel/safety-residual-space.
Authors: Peng Ling, Wenxiao Xiong
Abstract: Nuclear instance segmentation has played a critical role in pathology image analysis. The main challenges arise from the difficulty in accurately segmenting instances and the high cost of precise mask-level annotations for fully-supervised training.In this work, we propose a fourier guidance framework for solving the weakly-supervised nuclear instance segmentation problem. In this framework, we construct a fourier guidance module to fuse the priori information into the training process of the model, which facilitates the model to capture the relevant features of the nuclear. Meanwhile, in order to further improve the model's ability to represent the features of nuclear, we propose the guide-based instance level contrastive module. This module makes full use of the framework's own properties and guide information to effectively enhance the representation features of nuclear. We show on two public datasets that our model can outperform current SOTA methods under fully-supervised design, and in weakly-supervised experiments, with only a small amount of labeling our model still maintains close to the performance under full supervision.In addition, we also perform generalization experiments on a private dataset, and without any labeling, our model is able to segment nuclear images that have not been seen during training quite effectively. As open science, all codes and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/LQY404/FrGNet.
Authors: Lei Huang, Hao Guo, Linzhi Peng, Long Zhang, Xiaoteng Wang, Daoyuan Wang, Shichao Wang, Jinpeng Wang, Lei Wang, Sheng Chen
Abstract: We introduce SessionRec, a novel next-session prediction paradigm (NSPP) for generative sequential recommendation, addressing the fundamental misalignment between conventional next-item prediction paradigm (NIPP) and real-world recommendation scenarios. Unlike NIPP's item-level autoregressive generation that contradicts actual session-based user interactions, our framework introduces a session-aware representation learning through hierarchical sequence aggregation (intra/inter-session), reducing attention computation complexity while enabling implicit modeling of massive negative interactions, and a session-based prediction objective that better captures users' diverse interests through multi-item recommendation in next sessions. Moreover, we found that incorporating a rank loss for items within the session under the next session prediction paradigm can significantly improve the ranking effectiveness of generative sequence recommendation models. We also verified that SessionRec exhibits clear power-law scaling laws similar to those observed in LLMs. Extensive experiments conducted on public datasets and online A/B test in Meituan App demonstrate the effectiveness of SessionRec. The proposed paradigm establishes new foundations for developing industrial-scale generative recommendation systems through its model-agnostic architecture and computational efficiency.
Authors: Gregor Autischer, Kerstin Waxnegger, Dominik Kowald
Abstract: In this work-in-progress, we investigate the certification of AI systems, focusing on the practical application and limitations of existing certification catalogues in the light of the AI Act by attempting to certify a publicly available AI system. We aim to evaluate how well current approaches work to effectively certify an AI system, and how publicly accessible AI systems, that might not be actively maintained or initially intended for certification, can be selected and used for a sample certification process. Our methodology involves leveraging the Fraunhofer AI Assessment Catalogue as a comprehensive tool to systematically assess an AI model's compliance with certification standards. We find that while the catalogue effectively structures the evaluation process, it can also be cumbersome and time-consuming to use. We observe the limitations of an AI system that has no active development team anymore and highlighted the importance of complete system documentation. Finally, we identify some limitations of the certification catalogues used and proposed ideas on how to streamline the certification process.
Authors: Wei Wu, Can Liao, Zizhen Deng, Zhengrui Guo, Jinzhuo Wang
Abstract: The Platonic Representation Hypothesis suggests a universal, modality-independent reality representation behind different data modalities. Inspired by this, we view each neuron as a system and detect its multi-segment activity data under various peripheral conditions. We assume there's a time-invariant representation for the same neuron, reflecting its intrinsic properties like molecular profiles, location, and morphology. The goal of obtaining these intrinsic neuronal representations has two criteria: (I) segments from the same neuron should have more similar representations than those from different neurons; (II) the representations must generalize well to out-of-domain data. To meet these, we propose the NeurPIR (Neuron Platonic Intrinsic Representation) framework. It uses contrastive learning, with segments from the same neuron as positive pairs and those from different neurons as negative pairs. In implementation, we use VICReg, which focuses on positive pairs and separates dissimilar samples via regularization. We tested our method on Izhikevich model-simulated neuronal population dynamics data. The results accurately identified neuron types based on preset hyperparameters. We also applied it to two real-world neuron dynamics datasets with neuron type annotations from spatial transcriptomics and neuron locations. Our model's learned representations accurately predicted neuron types and locations and were robust on out-of-domain data (from unseen animals). This shows the potential of our approach for understanding neuronal systems and future neuroscience research.
Authors: Mingqian Ma, Guoqing Liu, Chuan Cao, Pan Deng, Tri Dao, Albert Gu, Peiran Jin, Zhao Yang, Yingce Xia, Renqian Luo, Pipi Hu, Zun Wang, Yuan-Jyue Chen, Haiguang Liu, Tao Qin
Abstract: Advances in natural language processing and large language models have sparked growing interest in modeling DNA, often referred to as the "language of life". However, DNA modeling poses unique challenges. First, it requires the ability to process ultra-long DNA sequences while preserving single-nucleotide resolution, as individual nucleotides play a critical role in DNA function. Second, success in this domain requires excelling at both generative and understanding tasks: generative tasks hold potential for therapeutic and industrial applications, while understanding tasks provide crucial insights into biological mechanisms and diseases. To address these challenges, we propose HybriDNA, a decoder-only DNA language model that incorporates a hybrid Transformer-Mamba2 architecture, seamlessly integrating the strengths of attention mechanisms with selective state-space models. This hybrid design enables HybriDNA to efficiently process DNA sequences up to 131kb in length with single-nucleotide resolution. HybriDNA achieves state-of-the-art performance across 33 DNA understanding datasets curated from the BEND, GUE, and LRB benchmarks, and demonstrates exceptional capability in generating synthetic cis-regulatory elements (CREs) with desired properties. Furthermore, we show that HybriDNA adheres to expected scaling laws, with performance improving consistently as the model scales from 300M to 3B and 7B parameters. These findings underscore HybriDNA's versatility and its potential to advance DNA research and applications, paving the way for innovations in understanding and engineering the "language of life".
Authors: Shaoxuan Xu, Menglu Cui, Chengxiang Huang, Hongfa Wang, DiHu
Abstract: Multimodal learning has gained attention for its capacity to integrate information from different modalities. However, it is often hindered by the multimodal imbalance problem, where certain modality dominates while others remain underutilized. Although recent studies have proposed various methods to alleviate this problem, they lack comprehensive and fair comparisons. In this paper, we systematically categorize various mainstream multimodal imbalance algorithms into four groups based on the strategies they employ to mitigate imbalance. To facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of these methods, we introduce BalanceBenchmark, a benchmark including multiple widely used multidimensional datasets and evaluation metrics from three perspectives: performance, imbalance degree, and complexity. To ensure fair comparisons, we have developed a modular and extensible toolkit that standardizes the experimental workflow across different methods. Based on the experiments using BalanceBenchmark, we have identified several key insights into the characteristics and advantages of different method groups in terms of performance, balance degree and computational complexity. We expect such analysis could inspire more efficient approaches to address the imbalance problem in the future, as well as foundation models. The code of the toolkit is available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/BalanceBenchmark.
Authors: Hieu Tran Bao, Nguyen Cong Dat, Nguyen Duc Anh, Hoang Thanh-Tung
Abstract: Test time scaling is currently one of the most active research areas that shows promise after training time scaling has reached its limits. Deep-thinking (DT) models are a class of recurrent models that can perform easy-to-hard generalization by assigning more compute to harder test samples. However, due to their inability to determine the complexity of a test sample, DT models have to use a large amount of computation for both easy and hard test samples. Excessive test time computation is wasteful and can cause the ``overthinking'' problem where more test time computation leads to worse results. In this paper, we introduce a test time training method for determining the optimal amount of computation needed for each sample during test time. We also propose Conv-LiGRU, a novel recurrent architecture for efficient and robust visual reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Conv-LiGRU is more stable than DT, effectively mitigates the ``overthinking'' phenomenon, and achieves superior accuracy.
Authors: Zonghao Ying, Deyue Zhang, Zonglei Jing, Yisong Xiao, Quanchen Zou, Aishan Liu, Siyuan Liang, Xiangzheng Zhang, Xianglong Liu, Dacheng Tao
Abstract: Multi-turn jailbreak attacks simulate real-world human interactions by engaging large language models (LLMs) in iterative dialogues, exposing critical safety vulnerabilities. However, existing methods often struggle to balance semantic coherence with attack effectiveness, resulting in either benign semantic drift or ineffective detection evasion. To address this challenge, we propose Reasoning-Augmented Conversation, a novel multi-turn jailbreak framework that reformulates harmful queries into benign reasoning tasks and leverages LLMs' strong reasoning capabilities to compromise safety alignment. Specifically, we introduce an attack state machine framework to systematically model problem translation and iterative reasoning, ensuring coherent query generation across multiple turns. Building on this framework, we design gain-guided exploration, self-play, and rejection feedback modules to preserve attack semantics, enhance effectiveness, and sustain reasoning-driven attack progression. Extensive experiments on multiple LLMs demonstrate that RACE achieves state-of-the-art attack effectiveness in complex conversational scenarios, with attack success rates (ASRs) increasing by up to 96%. Notably, our approach achieves ASRs of 82% and 92% against leading commercial models, OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1, underscoring its potency. We release our code at https://github.com/NY1024/RACE to facilitate further research in this critical domain.
Authors: Hongye Cao, Yanming Wang, Sijia Jing, Ziyue Peng, Zhixin Bai, Zhe Cao, Meng Fang, Fan Feng, Boyan Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Tianpei Yang, Jing Huo, Yang Gao, Fanyu Meng, Xi Yang, Chao Deng, Junlan Feng
Abstract: With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), the safety of LLMs has been a critical concern requiring precise assessment. Current benchmarks primarily concentrate on single-turn dialogues or a single jailbreak attack method to assess the safety. Additionally, these benchmarks have not taken into account the LLM's capability of identifying and handling unsafe information in detail. To address these issues, we propose a fine-grained benchmark SafeDialBench for evaluating the safety of LLMs across various jailbreak attacks in multi-turn dialogues. Specifically, we design a two-tier hierarchical safety taxonomy that considers 6 safety dimensions and generates more than 4000 multi-turn dialogues in both Chinese and English under 22 dialogue scenarios. We employ 7 jailbreak attack strategies, such as reference attack and purpose reverse, to enhance the dataset quality for dialogue generation. Notably, we construct an innovative assessment framework of LLMs, measuring capabilities in detecting, and handling unsafe information and maintaining consistency when facing jailbreak attacks. Experimental results across 17 LLMs reveal that Yi-34B-Chat and GLM4-9B-Chat demonstrate superior safety performance, while Llama3.1-8B-Instruct and o3-mini exhibit safety vulnerabilities.
Authors: Jinwei Lu, Yuanfeng Song, Zhiqian Qin, Haodi Zhang, Chen Zhang, Raymond Chi-Wing Wong
Abstract: NoSQL databases have become increasingly popular due to their outstanding performance in handling large-scale, unstructured, and semi-structured data, highlighting the need for user-friendly interfaces to bridge the gap between non-technical users and complex database queries. In this paper, we introduce the Text-to-NoSQL task, which aims to convert natural language queries into NoSQL queries, thereby lowering the technical barrier for non-expert users. To promote research in this area, we developed a novel automated dataset construction process and released a large-scale and open-source dataset for this task, named TEND (short for Text-to-NoSQL Dataset). Additionally, we designed a SLM (Small Language Model)-assisted and RAG (Retrieval-augmented Generation)-assisted multi-step framework called SMART, which is specifically designed for Text-to-NoSQL conversion. To ensure comprehensive evaluation of the models, we also introduced a detailed set of metrics that assess the model's performance from both the query itself and its execution results. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and establish a benchmark for future research in this emerging field. We believe that our contributions will pave the way for more accessible and intuitive interactions with NoSQL databases.
Authors: Yue Tu, Mark Dubynskyi, Mohammadhossein Mohammadisiahroudi, Ekaterina Riashchentceva, Jinglei Cheng, Dmitry Ryashchentsev, Tam\'as Terlaky, Junyu Liu
Abstract: Quantum computing, a prominent non-Von Neumann paradigm beyond Moore's law, can offer superpolynomial speedups for certain problems. Yet its advantages in efficiency for tasks like machine learning remain under investigation, and quantum noise complicates resource estimations and classical comparisons. We provide a detailed estimation of space, time, and energy resources for fault-tolerant superconducting devices running the Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd (HHL) algorithm, a quantum linear system solver relevant to linear algebra and machine learning. Excluding memory and data transfer, possible quantum advantages over the classical conjugate gradient method could emerge at $N \approx 2^{33} \sim 2^{48}$ or even lower, requiring ${O}(10^5)$ physical qubits, ${O}(10^{12}\sim10^{13})$ Joules, and ${O}(10^6)$ seconds under surface code fault-tolerance with three types of magic state distillation (15-1, 116-12, 225-1). Key parameters include condition number, sparsity, and precision $\kappa, s\approx{O}(10\sim100)$, $\epsilon\sim0.01$, and physical error $10^{-5}$. Our resource estimator adjusts $N, \kappa, s, \epsilon$, providing a map of quantum-classical boundaries and revealing where a practical quantum advantage may arise. Our work quantitatively determine how advanced a fault-tolerant quantum computer should be to achieve possible, significant benefits on problems related to real-world.
Authors: Yiyi Chen, Qiongkai Xu, Johannes Bjerva
Abstract: With the growing popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) and vector databases, private textual data is increasingly processed and stored as numerical embeddings. However, recent studies have proven that such embeddings are vulnerable to inversion attacks, where original text is reconstructed to reveal sensitive information. Previous research has largely assumed access to millions of sentences to train attack models, e.g., through data leakage or nearly unrestricted API access. With our method, a single data point is sufficient for a partially successful inversion attack. With as little as 1k data samples, performance reaches an optimum across a range of black-box encoders, without training on leaked data. We present a Few-shot Textual Embedding Inversion Attack using ALignment and GENeration (ALGEN), by aligning victim embeddings to the attack space and using a generative model to reconstruct text. We find that ALGEN attacks can be effectively transferred across domains and languages, revealing key information. We further examine a variety of defense mechanisms against ALGEN, and find that none are effective, highlighting the vulnerabilities posed by inversion attacks. By significantly lowering the cost of inversion and proving that embedding spaces can be aligned through one-step optimization, we establish a new textual embedding inversion paradigm with broader applications for embedding alignment in NLP.
Authors: Xiaoyi Dong, Jian Cheng, Xi Sheryl Zhang
Abstract: The Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm with a Gaussian policy has become a mainstream implementation for realizing the Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL) objective, which incorporates entropy maximization to encourage exploration and enhance policy robustness. While the Gaussian policy performs well on simpler tasks, its exploration capacity and potential performance in complex multi-goal RL environments are limited by its inherent unimodality. In this paper, we employ the diffusion model, a powerful generative model capable of capturing complex multimodal distributions, as the policy representation to fulfill the MaxEnt RL objective, developing a method named MaxEnt RL with Diffusion Policy (MaxEntDP). Our method enables efficient exploration and brings the policy closer to the optimal MaxEnt policy. Experimental results on Mujoco benchmarks show that MaxEntDP outperforms the Gaussian policy and other generative models within the MaxEnt RL framework, and performs comparably to other state-of-the-art diffusion-based online RL algorithms. Our code is available at https://github.com/diffusionyes/MaxEntDP.
Authors: Antoine Boutet, Victor Morel
Abstract: Although mobile devices benefit users in their daily lives in numerous ways, they also raise several privacy concerns. For instance, they can reveal sensitive information that can be inferred from location data. This location data is shared through service providers as well as mobile applications. Understanding how and with whom users share their location data -- as well as users' perception of the underlying privacy risks --, are important notions to grasp in order to design usable privacy-enhancing technologies. In this work, we perform a quantitative and qualitative analysis of smartphone users' awareness, perception and self-reported behavior towards location data-sharing through a survey of n=99 young adult participants (i.e., digital natives). We compare stated practices with actual behaviors to better understand their mental models, and survey participants' understanding of privacy risks before and after the inspection of location traces and the information that can be inferred therefrom. Our empirical results show that participants have risky privacy practices: about 54% of participants underestimate the number of mobile applications to which they have granted access to their data, and 33% forget or do not think of revoking access to their data. Also, by using a demonstrator to perform inferences from location data, we observe that slightly more than half of participants (57%) are surprised by the extent of potentially inferred information, and that 47% intend to reduce access to their data via permissions as a result of using the demonstrator. Last, a majority of participants have little knowledge of the tools to better protect themselves, but are nonetheless willing to follow suggestions to improve privacy (51%). Educating people, including digital natives, about privacy risks through transparency tools seems a promising approach.
Authors: Ailin Huang, Boyong Wu, Bruce Wang, Chao Yan, Chen Hu, Chengli Feng, Fei Tian, Feiyu Shen, Jingbei Li, Mingrui Chen, Peng Liu, Ruihang Miao, Wang You, Xi Chen, Xuerui Yang, Yechang Huang, Yuxiang Zhang, Zheng Gong, Zixin Zhang, Hongyu Zhou, Jianjian Sun, Brian Li, Chengting Feng, Changyi Wan, Hanpeng Hu, Jianchang Wu, Jiangjie Zhen, Ranchen Ming, Song Yuan, Xuelin Zhang, Yu Zhou, Bingxin Li, Buyun Ma, Hongyuan Wang, Kang An, Wei Ji, Wen Li, Xuan Wen, Xiangwen Kong, Yuankai Ma, Yuanwei Liang, Yun Mou, Bahtiyar Ahmidi, Bin Wang, Bo Li, Changxin Miao, Chen Xu, Chenrun Wang, Dapeng Shi, Deshan Sun, Dingyuan Hu, Dula Sai, Enle Liu, Guanzhe Huang, Gulin Yan, Heng Wang, Haonan Jia, Haoyang Zhang, Jiahao Gong, Junjing Guo, Jiashuai Liu, Jiahong Liu, Jie Feng, Jie Wu, Jiaoren Wu, Jie Yang, Jinguo Wang, Jingyang Zhang, Junzhe Lin, Kaixiang Li, Lei Xia, Li Zhou, Liang Zhao, Longlong Gu, Mei Chen, Menglin Wu, Ming Li, Mingxiao Li, Mingliang Li, Mingyao Liang, Na Wang, Nie Hao, Qiling Wu, Qinyuan Tan, Ran Sun, Shuai Shuai, Shaoliang Pang, Shiliang Yang, Shuli Gao, Shanshan Yuan, Siqi Liu, Shihong Deng, Shilei Jiang, Sitong Liu, Tiancheng Cao, Tianyu Wang, Wenjin Deng, Wuxun Xie, Weipeng Ming, Wenqing He, Wen Sun, Xin Han, Xin Huang, Xiaomin Deng, Xiaojia Liu, Xin Wu, Xu Zhao, Yanan Wei, Yanbo Yu, Yang Cao, Yangguang Li, Yangzhen Ma, Yanming Xu, Yaoyu Wang, Yaqiang Shi, Yilei Wang, Yizhuang Zhou, Yinmin Zhong, Yang Zhang, Yaoben Wei, Yu Luo, Yuanwei Lu, Yuhe Yin, Yuchu Luo, Yuanhao Ding, Yuting Yan, Yaqi Dai, Yuxiang Yang, Zhe Xie, Zheng Ge, Zheng Sun, Zhewei Huang, Zhichao Chang, Zhisheng Guan, Zidong Yang, Zili Zhang, Binxing Jiao, Daxin Jiang, Heung-Yeung Shum, Jiansheng Chen, Jing Li, Shuchang Zhou, Xiangyu Zhang, Xinhao Zhang, Yibo Zhu
Abstract: Real-time speech interaction, serving as a fundamental interface for human-machine collaboration, holds immense potential. However, current open-source models face limitations such as high costs in voice data collection, weakness in dynamic control, and limited intelligence. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Step-Audio, the first production-ready open-source solution. Key contributions include: 1) a 130B-parameter unified speech-text multi-modal model that achieves unified understanding and generation, with the Step-Audio-Chat version open-sourced; 2) a generative speech data engine that establishes an affordable voice cloning framework and produces the open-sourced lightweight Step-Audio-TTS-3B model through distillation; 3) an instruction-driven fine control system enabling dynamic adjustments across dialects, emotions, singing, and RAP; 4) an enhanced cognitive architecture augmented with tool calling and role-playing abilities to manage complex tasks effectively. Based on our new StepEval-Audio-360 evaluation benchmark, Step-Audio achieves state-of-the-art performance in human evaluations, especially in terms of instruction following. On open-source benchmarks like LLaMA Question, shows 9.3% average performance improvement, demonstrating our commitment to advancing the development of open-source multi-modal language technologies. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Audio.