Authors: Anmolika Singh, Yuhang Diao
Abstract: Effective item categorization is vital for businesses, enabling the transformation of unstructured datasets into organized categories that streamline inventory management. Despite its importance, item categorization remains highly subjective and lacks a uniform standard across industries and businesses. The United Nations Standard Products and Services Code (UNSPSC) provides a standardized system for cataloguing inventory, yet employing UNSPSC categorizations often demands significant manual effort. This paper investigates the deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate the classification of inventory data into UNSPSC codes based on Item Descriptions. We evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of LLMs in categorizing diverse datasets, exploring their language processing capabilities and their potential as a tool for standardizing inventory classification. Our findings reveal that LLMs can substantially diminish the manual labor involved in item categorization while maintaining high accuracy, offering a scalable solution for businesses striving to enhance their inventory management practices.
Authors: Zheng Hui, Yinheng Li, Dan zhao, Tianyi Chen, Colby Banbury, Kazuhito Koishida
Abstract: Graphical User Interface (GUI) tasks are vital for automating workflows such as software testing, user interface navigation. For users, the GUI is the most intuitive platform for interacting with a computer. Previous work identified a key challenge in developing visual GUI agents: GUI grounding - the ability to accurately locate screen elements based on instructions. However, most existing GUI agents rely on structured data formats like DOM or HTML files in training or inferencing, which are inaccessible across all applications, particular in a general desktop environments such as Windows OS. To address this, we introduce WinClick, a novel visual GUI agent developed in Windows platform. WinClick leverages screenshots to detect actionable regions. To overcome the challenge of GUI grounding, we enhance WinClick with GUI grounding pre-training and propose an LLM-based method for aligning GUI grounding data. Additionally, we introduce WinSpot, the first comprehensive benchmark for GUI grounding on Windows. Our experiments demonstrate that WinClick, combined with GUI grounding pre-training, significantly outperforms existing baselines, offering a scalable solution for GUI automation in desktop environments. WinSpot is publicly available at https://github.com/zackhuiiiii/WinSpot.
Authors: Yansong Ning, Shuowei Cai, Wei Li, Jun Fang, Naiqiang Tan, Hua Chai, Hao Liu
Abstract: On-demand ride-hailing services like DiDi, Uber, and Lyft have transformed urban transportation, offering unmatched convenience and flexibility. In this paper, we introduce DiMA, an LLM-powered ride-hailing assistant deployed in DiDi Chuxing. Its goal is to provide seamless ride-hailing services and beyond through a natural and efficient conversational interface under dynamic and complex spatiotemporal urban contexts. To achieve this, we propose a spatiotemporal-aware order planning module that leverages external tools for precise spatiotemporal reasoning and progressive order planning. Additionally, we develop a cost-effective dialogue system that integrates multi-type dialog repliers with cost-aware LLM configurations to handle diverse conversation goals and trade-off response quality and latency. Furthermore, we introduce a continual fine-tuning scheme that utilizes real-world interactions and simulated dialogues to align the assistant's behavior with human preferred decision-making processes. Since its deployment in the DiDi application, DiMA has demonstrated exceptional performance, achieving 93% accuracy in order planning and 92% in response generation during real-world interactions. Offline experiments further validate DiMA capabilities, showing improvements of up to 70.23% in order planning and 321.27% in response generation compared to three state-of-the-art agent frameworks, while reducing latency by $0.72\times$ to $5.47\times$. These results establish DiMA as an effective, efficient, and intelligent mobile assistant for ride-hailing services.
Authors: Bingbing Fan, Lin Chen, Songwei Li, Jian Yuan, Fengli Xu, Pan Hui, Yong Li
Abstract: Understanding experienced segregation in urban daily life is crucial for addressing societal inequalities and fostering inclusivity. The abundance of user-generated reviews on social media encapsulates nuanced perceptions and feelings associated with different places, offering rich insights into segregation. However, leveraging this data poses significant challenges due to its vast volume, ambiguity, and confluence of diverse perspectives. To tackle these challenges, we propose using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate online review mining for segregation prediction. We design a Reflective LLM Coder to digest social media content into insights consistent with real-world feedback, and eventually produce a codebook capturing key dimensions that signal segregation experience, such as cultural resonance and appeal, accessibility and convenience, and community engagement and local involvement. Guided by the codebook, LLMs can generate both informative review summaries and ratings for segregation prediction. Moreover, we design a REasoning-and-EMbedding (RE'EM) framework, which combines the reasoning and embedding capabilities of language models to integrate multi-channel features for segregation prediction. Experiments on real-world data demonstrate that our framework greatly improves prediction accuracy, with a 22.79% elevation in R2 and a 9.33% reduction in MSE. The derived codebook is generalizable across three different cities, consistently improving prediction accuracy.Moreover, our user study confirms that the codebook-guided summaries provide cognitive gains for human participants in perceiving POIs' social inclusiveness.Our study marks an important step toward understanding implicit social barriers and inequalities, demonstrating the great potential of promoting social inclusiveness with AI.
Authors: Sumin Ha, Jun Hyeong Kim, Yinhua Piao, Sun Kim
Abstract: Human expertise in chemistry and biomedicine relies on contextual molecular understanding, a capability that large language models (LLMs) can extend through fine-grained alignment between molecular structures and text. Recent multimodal learning advances focus on cross-modal alignment, but existing molecule-text models ignore complementary information in different molecular views and rely on single-view representations, limiting molecular understanding. Moreover, na\"ive multi-view alignment strategies face two challenges: (1) separate aligned spaces with inconsistent mappings between molecule and text embeddings, and that (2) existing loss objectives fail to preserve complementary information for fine-grained alignment. This can limit the LLM's ability to fully understand the molecular properties. To address these issues, we propose MV-CLAM, a novel framework that aligns multi-view molecular representations into a unified textual space using a multi-query transformer (MQ-Former). Our approach ensures cross-view consistency while a token-level contrastive loss preserves diverse molecular features across textual queries. MV-CLAM enhances molecular reasoning, improving retrieval and captioning accuracy. The source code of MV-CLAM is available in https://github.com/sumin124/mv-clam.git.
Authors: Md. Zahin Hossain George, Naimul Hossain, Md. Rafiuzzaman Bhuiyan, Abu Kaisar Mohammad Masum, Sheikh Abujar
Abstract: There have recently been many cases of unverified or misleading information circulating quickly over bogus web networks and news portals. This false news creates big damage to society and misleads people. For Example, in 2019, there was a rumor that the Padma Bridge of Bangladesh needed 100,000 human heads for sacrifice. This rumor turns into a deadly position and this misleading information takes the lives of innocent people. There is a lot of work in English but a few works in Bangla. In this study, we are going to identify the fake news from the unconsidered news source to provide the newsreader with natural news or real news. The paper is based on the combination of convolutional neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM), where CNN is used for deep feature extraction and LSTM is used for detection using the extracted feature. The first thing we did to deploy this piece of work was data collection. We compiled a data set from websites and attempted to deploy it using the methodology of deep learning which contains about 50k of news. With the proposed model of Multichannel combined CNN-LSTM architecture, our model gained an accuracy of 75.05%, which is a good sign for detecting fake news in Bangla.
Authors: Anichur Rahman, Shahariar Hossain Mahir, Md Tanjum An Tashrif, Airin Afroj Aishi, Md Ahsan Karim, Dipanjali Kundu, Tanoy Debnath, Md. Abul Ala Moududi, MD. Zunead Abedin Eidmum
Abstract: Nowadays, DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Google Gemini are the most trending and exciting Large Language Model (LLM) technologies for reasoning, multimodal capabilities, and general linguistic performance worldwide. DeepSeek employs a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) approach, activating only the parameters most relevant to the task at hand, which makes it especially effective for domain-specific work. On the other hand, ChatGPT relies on a dense transformer model enhanced through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and then Google Gemini actually uses a multimodal transformer architecture that integrates text, code, and images into a single framework. However, by using those technologies, people can be able to mine their desired text, code, images, etc, in a cost-effective and domain-specific inference. People may choose those techniques based on the best performance. In this regard, we offer a comparative study based on the DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Gemini techniques in this research. Initially, we focus on their methods and materials, appropriately including the data selection criteria. Then, we present state-of-the-art features of DeepSeek, ChatGPT, and Gemini based on their applications. Most importantly, we show the technological comparison among them and also cover the dataset analysis for various applications. Finally, we address extensive research areas and future potential guidance regarding LLM-based AI research for the community.
Authors: Jiexiong Liu, Yixuan Chen, Yanqin Jia, Zhepeng Li
Abstract: Large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks, yet they face challenges such as low computational efficiency, gradient vanishing, and difficulties in capturing complex feature interactions. To address these limitations, a novel framework has been proposed. This framework incorporates a learnable dense residual skip connection mechanism, a TransformerX module a transformer based component integrating multiscale convolution and adaptive activation functions and a multitoken prediction interaction module. The learnable dense residual connections enhance information flow and feature capture across layers. Within the TransformerX module, large convolutional kernels aggregate semantic information from extensive text segments, while smaller convolutions focus on local word order and syntactic structures. The adaptive activation function dynamically adjusts its parameters based on the semantic features of the input text, improving the model's ability to handle diverse semantic expressions and complex relationships. The multitoken prediction module boosts data utilization and accelerates inference by predicting multiple future tokens. These components significantly enhance the performance and efficiency of large language models.
Authors: Jos\'e Siqueira de Cerqueira, Kai-Kristian Kemell, Rebekah Rousi, Nannan Xi, Juho Hamari, Pekka Abrahamsson
Abstract: The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised pressing concerns regarding their trustworthiness, spanning issues of reliability, transparency, fairness, and ethical alignment. Despite the increasing adoption of LLMs across various domains, there remains a lack of consensus on how to operationalize trustworthiness in practice. This study bridges the gap between theoretical discussions and implementation by conducting a bibliometric mapping analysis of 2,006 publications from 2019 to 2025. Through co-authorship networks, keyword co-occurrence analysis, and thematic evolution tracking, we identify key research trends, influential authors, and prevailing definitions of LLM trustworthiness. Additionally, a systematic review of 68 core papers is conducted to examine conceptualizations of trust and their practical implications. Our findings reveal that trustworthiness in LLMs is often framed through existing organizational trust frameworks, emphasizing dimensions such as ability, benevolence, and integrity. However, a significant gap exists in translating these principles into concrete development strategies. To address this, we propose a structured mapping of 20 trust-enhancing techniques across the LLM lifecycle, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), explainability techniques, and post-training audits. By synthesizing bibliometric insights with practical strategies, this study contributes towards fostering more transparent, accountable, and ethically aligned LLMs, ensuring their responsible deployment in real-world applications.
Authors: Erik J Schlicht
Abstract: Consumption of misinformation can lead to negative consequences that impact the individual and society. To help mitigate the influence of misinformation on human beliefs, algorithmic labels providing context about content accuracy and source reliability have been developed. Since the linguistic features used by algorithms to estimate information accuracy can change across time, it is important to understand their temporal dynamics. As a result, this study uses natural language processing to analyze PolitiFact statements spanning between 2010 and 2024 to quantify how the sources and linguistic features of misinformation change between five-year time periods. The results show that statement sentiment has decreased significantly over time, reflecting a generally more negative tone in PolitiFact statements. Moreover, statements associated with misinformation realize significantly lower sentiment than accurate information. Additional analysis shows that recent time periods are dominated by sources from online social networks and other digital forums, such as blogs and viral images, that contain high levels of misinformation containing negative sentiment. In contrast, most statements during early time periods are attributed to individual sources (i.e., politicians) that are relatively balanced in accuracy ratings and contain statements with neutral or positive sentiment. Named-entity recognition was used to identify that presidential incumbents and candidates are relatively more prevalent in statements containing misinformation, while US states tend to be present in accurate information. Finally, entity labels associated with people and organizations are more common in misinformation, while accurate statements are more likely to contain numeric entity labels, such as percentages and dates.
Authors: Fei Wei, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs), due to their advanced natural language capabilities, have seen significant success in applications where the user interface is usually a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) agent and engages the user through multi-round conversations. However, many scenarios require the agents to exhibit stronger social and conversational intelligence and demonstrate more human-like (anthropomorphic) reactions. This is an aspect that foundational LLMs have yet to fully address such that a single call of foundational models might be insufficient. To bridge this gap, we propose a two-stage solution. In this work, we focus on the first stage, introducing a multi-module framework designed to replicate the key aspects of human intelligence involved in conversations. This framework comprises thinking modules for reasoning, resource modules for managing knowledge and external information, and response modules for generating contextually appropriate interactions. With all the modules cooperating, the framework would empower the agents to provide a better human-like conversation experience. In the second stage of our approach, these conversational data, after filtering and labeling, can serve as training and testing data for reinforcement learning, enabling AI to better capture human preferences. This stage is left for future work. In our experiments, volunteers engaged in over 3000 rounds of conversation with the same AI character powered by a standalone LLM and our framework which integrates the same LLM. A separate group of evaluators rated the conversation samples, revealing that our framework significantly enhanced the social and conversational intelligence, even without fine-tuning the LLM.
Authors: Dinesh Jackson Samuel, Inna Skarga-Bandurova, David Sikolia, Muhammad Awais
Abstract: AgroLLM is an AI-powered chatbot designed to enhance knowledge-sharing and education in agriculture using Large Language Models (LLMs) and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework. By using a comprehensive open-source agricultural database, AgroLLM provides accurate, contextually relevant responses while reducing incorrect information retrieval. The system utilizes the FAISS vector database for efficient similarity searches, ensuring rapid access to agricultural knowledge. A comparative study of three advanced models: Gemini 1.5 Flash, ChatGPT-4o Mini, and Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 was conducted to evaluate performance across four key agricultural domains: Agriculture and Life Sciences, Agricultural Management, Agriculture and Forestry, and Agriculture Business. Key evaluation metrics included embedding quality, search efficiency, and response relevance. Results indicated that ChatGPT-4o Mini with RAG achieved the highest accuracy at 93%. Continuous feedback mechanisms enhance response quality, making AgroLLM a benchmark AI-driven educational tool for farmers, researchers, and professionals, promoting informed decision-making and improved agricultural practices.
Authors: Hwanjun Song, Jeonghwan Choi, Minseok Kim
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances LLMs by integrating external knowledge, but generation remains fragile due to the uncertain placement of relevant chunks and retrieval-induced information overload, leading to hallucinations. We propose Ext2Gen, a novel extract-then-generate model that enhances RAG robustness by first extracting query-relevant sentences before generating answers. To optimize this model, we employ preference alignment through pairwise feedback learning, enabling the model to generate robust answers regardless of variations in retrieval results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ext2Gen effectively identifies query-relevant sentences with high precision and recall, leading to highly reliable answers. Furthermore, deploying our model in a RAG environment reveals that it not only boosts the performance of the base LLM but also synergizes with advanced retrieval strategies like query expansion. The dataset and model will be released soon.
Authors: Jeff Yang, Duy-Khanh Vu, Minh-Tien Nguyen, Xuan-Quang Nguyen, Linh Nguyen, Hung Le
Abstract: This paper introduces layout-aware graph modeling for multimodal RAG. Different from traditional RAG methods that mostly deal with flat text chunks, the proposed method takes into account the relationship of multimodalities by using a graph structure. To do that, a graph modeling structure is defined based on document layout parsing. The structure of an input document is retained with the connection of text chunks, tables, and figures. This representation allows the method to handle complex questions that require information from multimodalities. To confirm the efficiency of the graph modeling, a flexible RAG pipeline is developed using robust components. Experimental results on four benchmark test sets confirm the contribution of the layout-aware modeling for performance improvement of the RAG pipeline.
Authors: Masaharu Mizumoto, Dat Tien Nguyen, Justin Sytsma, Mark Alfano, Yu Izumi, Koji Fujita, Nguyen Le Minh
Abstract: Multilingual large language models (LLMs) face an often-overlooked challenge stemming from intrinsic semantic differences across languages. Linguistic divergence can sometimes lead to cross-linguistic disagreements--disagreements purely due to semantic differences about a relevant concept. This paper identifies such disagreements as conflicts between two fundamental alignment norms in multilingual LLMs: cross-linguistic consistency (CL-consistency), which seeks universal concepts across languages, and consistency with folk judgments (Folk-consistency), which respects language-specific semantic norms. Through examining responses of conversational multilingual AIs in English and Japanese with the cases used in philosophy (cases of knowledge-how attributions), this study demonstrates that even state-of-the-art LLMs provide divergent and internally inconsistent responses. Such findings reveal a novel qualitative limitation in crosslingual knowledge transfer, or conceptual crosslingual knowledge barriers, challenging the assumption that universal representations and cross-linguistic transfer capabilities are inherently desirable. Moreover, they reveal conflicts of alignment policies of their developers, highlighting critical normative questions for LLM researchers and developers. The implications extend beyond technical alignment challenges, raising normative, moral-political, and metaphysical questions about the ideals underlying AI development--questions that are shared with philosophers and cognitive scientists but for which no one yet has definitive answers, inviting a multidisciplinary approach to balance the practical benefits of cross-linguistic consistency and respect for linguistic diversity.
Authors: Wenjie Qiu, Yi-Chen Li, Xuqin Zhang, Tianyi Zhang, Yihang Zhang, Zongzhang Zhang, Yang Yu
Abstract: Learning reward models from human preference datasets and subsequently optimizing language models via reinforcement learning has emerged as a fundamental paradigm for aligning LLMs with human preferences. The performance of the reward model plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of alignment. Previous reward models operate at a coarse-grained level, requiring the generation of a complete response to obtain a reward value. The sparse reward may present challenges for downstream reinforcement learning. While recent efforts have attempted to learn token-level reward models, the lack of explicit semantic information makes it difficult to model the credit of every individual token. In this paper, we propose assigning scores to every sentence, introducing an intermediate-grained reward model. By segmenting the complete response into sentences and applying differential operations to reward output at the start and end positions of each sentence, we can effectively model the rewards of sentences. Moreover, a novel attention mechanism is introduced to aggregate the scores of all sentences into a response-level score, which allows it to be trained using the Bradley-Terry model. On common benchmarks, our method outperforms the response-level reward model by 2.7% on RewardBench (for reward modeling evaluation) and surpasses all baselines on AlpacaEval (for alignment evaluation).
Authors: Dinesh Srivasthav P, Bala Mallikarjunarao Garlapati
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges in maintaining privacy, ethics, and compliance, when sensitive or obsolete data must be selectively removed. Retraining these models from scratch is computationally infeasible, necessitating efficient alternatives. As part of the SemEval 2025 Task 4, this work focuses on the application of selective unlearning in LLMs to address this challenge. In this paper, we present our experiments and findings, primarily leveraging global weight modification to achieve an equilibrium between effectiveness of unlearning, knowledge retention, and target model's post-unlearning utility. We also detail the task-specific evaluation mechanism, results, and challenges. Our algorithms have achieved an aggregate score of 0.409 and 0.389 on the test set for 7B and 1B target models, respectively, demonstrating promising results in verifiable LLM unlearning.
Authors: Jiaen Lin, Jingyu Liu
Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) encounters challenges when addressing complex queries, particularly multi-hop questions. While several methods tackle multi-hop queries by iteratively generating internal queries and retrieving external documents, these approaches are computationally expensive. In this paper, we identify a three-stage information processing pattern in LLMs during layer-by-layer reasoning, consisting of extraction, processing, and subsequent extraction steps. This observation suggests that the representations in intermediate layers contain richer information compared to those in other layers. Building on this insight, we propose Layer-wise RAG (L-RAG). Unlike prior methods that focus on generating new internal queries, L-RAG leverages intermediate representations from the middle layers, which capture next-hop information, to retrieve external knowledge. L-RAG achieves performance comparable to multi-step approaches while maintaining inference overhead similar to that of standard RAG. Experimental results show that L-RAG outperforms existing RAG methods on open-domain multi-hop question-answering datasets, including MuSiQue, HotpotQA, and 2WikiMultiHopQA. The code is available in https://anonymous.4open.science/r/L-RAG-ADD5/
Authors: Rahul Raja, Arpita Vats
Abstract: Parallel corpora play an important role in training machine translation (MT) models, particularly for low-resource languages where high-quality bilingual data is scarce. This review provides a comprehensive overview of available parallel corpora for Indic languages, which span diverse linguistic families, scripts, and regional variations. We categorize these corpora into text-to-text, code-switched, and various categories of multimodal datasets, highlighting their significance in the development of robust multilingual MT systems. Beyond resource enumeration, we critically examine the challenges faced in corpus creation, including linguistic diversity, script variation, data scarcity, and the prevalence of informal textual content.We also discuss and evaluate these corpora in various terms such as alignment quality and domain representativeness. Furthermore, we address open challenges such as data imbalance across Indic languages, the trade-off between quality and quantity, and the impact of noisy, informal, and dialectal data on MT performance. Finally, we outline future directions, including leveraging cross-lingual transfer learning, expanding multilingual datasets, and integrating multimodal resources to enhance translation quality. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first comprehensive review of parallel corpora specifically tailored for low-resource Indic languages in the context of machine translation.
Authors: Mohammad Sarim, Saim Shakeel, Laeeba Javed, Jamaluddin, Mohammad Nadeem
Abstract: Speech to speech translation (S2ST) is a transformative technology that bridges global communication gaps, enabling real time multilingual interactions in diplomacy, tourism, and international trade. Our review examines the evolution of S2ST, comparing traditional cascade models which rely on automatic speech recognition (ASR), machine translation (MT), and text to speech (TTS) components with newer end to end and direct speech translation (DST) models that bypass intermediate text representations. While cascade models offer modularity and optimized components, they suffer from error propagation, increased latency, and loss of prosody. In contrast, direct S2ST models retain speaker identity, reduce latency, and improve translation naturalness by preserving vocal characteristics and prosody. However, they remain limited by data sparsity, high computational costs, and generalization challenges for low-resource languages. The current work critically evaluates these approaches, their tradeoffs, and future directions for improving real time multilingual communication.
Authors: Jie Ouyang, Tingyue Pan, Mingyue Cheng, Ruiran Yan, Yucong Luo, Jiaying Lin, Qi Liu
Abstract: While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as an effective approach for addressing the knowledge outdating problem in Large Language Models (LLMs), it faces a critical challenge: the prevalence of outdated information in knowledge bases. Current research primarily focuses on incorporating up-to-date information, yet the impact of outdated information coexisting in retrieval sources remains inadequately addressed. To bridge this gap, we introduce HoH, the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the impact of outdated information on RAG. Our benchmark leverages token-level diff algorithms combined with LLM pipelines to efficiently create a large-scale QA dataset that accurately captures temporal knowledge evolution in real-world facts. Through comprehensive experiments, we reveal that outdated information significantly degrades RAG performance in two critical ways: (1) it substantially reduces response accuracy by distracting models from correct information, and (2) it can mislead models into generating potentially harmful outputs, even when current information is available. Current RAG approaches struggle with both retrieval and generation aspects when handling outdated information. These findings highlight the urgent need for innovative solutions to address the temporal challenges in RAG.
Authors: Boyu Jia, Junzhe Zhang, Huixuan Zhang, Xiaojun Wan
Abstract: In recent years, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved significant breakthroughs, enhancing understanding across text and vision. However, current MLLMs still face challenges in effectively integrating knowledge across these modalities during multimodal knowledge reasoning, leading to inconsistencies in reasoning outcomes. To systematically explore this issue, we propose four evaluation tasks and construct a new dataset. We conduct a series of experiments on this dataset to analyze and compare the extent of consistency degradation in multimodal knowledge reasoning within MLLMs. Based on the experimental results, we identify factors contributing to the observed degradation in consistency. Our research provides new insights into the challenges of multimodal knowledge reasoning and offers valuable guidance for future efforts aimed at improving MLLMs.
Authors: Birger Moell, Fredrik Sand Aronsson, Per \"Ostberg, Jonas Beskow
Abstract: Background:Speech patterns have emerged as potential diagnostic markers for conditions with varying etiologies. Machine learning (ML) presents an opportunity to harness these patterns for accurate disease diagnosis. Objective: This review synthesized findings from studies exploring ML's capability in leveraging speech for the diagnosis of neurological, laryngeal and mental disorders. Methods: A systematic examination of 564 articles was conducted with 91 articles included in the study, which encompassed a wide spectrum of conditions, ranging from voice pathologies to mental and neurological disorders. Methods for speech classifications were assessed based on the relevant studies and scored between 0-10 based on the reported diagnostic accuracy of their ML models. Results: High diagnostic accuracies were consistently observed for laryngeal disorders, dysarthria, and changes related to speech in Parkinsons disease. These findings indicate the robust potential of speech as a diagnostic tool. Disorders like depression, schizophrenia, mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimers dementia also demonstrated high accuracies, albeit with some variability across studies. Meanwhile, disorders like OCD and autism highlighted the need for more extensive research to ascertain the relationship between speech patterns and the respective conditions. Conclusion: ML models utilizing speech patterns demonstrate promising potential in diagnosing a range of mental, laryngeal, and neurological disorders. However, the efficacy varies across conditions, and further research is needed. The integration of these models into clinical practice could potentially revolutionize the evaluation and diagnosis of a number of different medical conditions.
Authors: Hyeonseok Moon, Jaehyung Seo, Heuiseok Lim
Abstract: Instruction tuning is crucial for adapting large language models (LLMs) to align with user intentions. Numerous studies emphasize the significance of the quality of instruction tuning (IT) data, revealing a strong correlation between IT data quality and the alignment performance of LLMs. In these studies, the quality of IT data is typically assessed by evaluating the performance of LLMs trained with that data. However, we identified a prevalent issue in such practice: hyperparameters for training models are often selected arbitrarily without adequate justification. We observed significant variations in hyperparameters applied across different studies, even when training the same model with the same data. In this study, we demonstrate the potential problems arising from this practice and emphasize the need for careful consideration in verifying data quality. Through our experiments on the quality of LIMA data and a selected set of 1,000 Alpaca data points, we demonstrate that arbitrary hyperparameter decisions can make any arbitrary conclusion.
Authors: Stephen Chung, Wenyu Du, Jie Fu
Abstract: Recent advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs), exemplified by DeepSeek R1, have shown that even a simple question-answering task can substantially improve an LLM's reasoning capabilities. In this work, we extend this approach by modifying the task into a multi-attempt setting. Instead of generating a single response per question, the model is given multiple attempts, with feedback provided after incorrect responses. The multi-attempt task encourages the model to refine its previous attempts and improve search efficiency. Experimental results show that even a small LLM trained on a multi-attempt task achieves significantly higher accuracy when evaluated with more attempts, improving from 45.6% with 1 attempt to 52.5% with 2 attempts on the math benchmark. In contrast, the same LLM trained on a standard single-turn task exhibits only a marginal improvement, increasing from 42.3% to 43.2% when given more attempts during evaluation. The results indicate that, compared to the standard single-turn task, an LLM trained on a multi-attempt task achieves slightly better performance on math benchmarks while also learning to refine its responses more effectively based on user feedback. Full code is available at https://github.com/DualityRL/multi-attempt
Authors: Lang Mei, Chong Chen, Jiaxin Mao
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) gain widespread attention in both academia and industry, it becomes increasingly critical and challenging to effectively evaluate their capabilities. Existing evaluation methods can be broadly categorized into two types: manual evaluation and automatic evaluation. Manual evaluation, while comprehensive, is often costly and resource-intensive. Conversely, automatic evaluation offers greater scalability but is constrained by the limitations of its evaluation criteria (dominated by reference-based answers). To address these challenges, NTCIR-18 introduced the AEOLLM (Automatic Evaluation of LLMs) task, aiming to encourage reference-free evaluation methods that can overcome the limitations of existing approaches. In this paper, to enhance the evaluation performance of the AEOLLM task, we propose three key methods to improve the reference-free evaluation: 1) Multi-model Collaboration: Leveraging multiple LLMs to approximate human ratings across various subtasks; 2) Prompt Auto-optimization: Utilizing LLMs to iteratively refine the initial task prompts based on evaluation feedback from training samples; and 3) In-context Learning (ICL) Optimization: Based on the multi-task evaluation feedback, we train a specialized in-context example retrieval model, combined with a semantic relevance retrieval model, to jointly identify the most effective in-context learning examples. Experiments conducted on the final dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance on the AEOLLM task.
Authors: Yiming Wang, Yi Yang, Jiahong Yuan
Abstract: Phonetic normalization plays a crucial role in speech recognition and analysis, ensuring the comparability of features derived from raw audio data. However, in the current paradigm of fine-tuning pre-trained large transformer models, phonetic normalization is not deemed a necessary step; instead, it is implicitly executed within the models. This study investigates the normalization process within transformer models, especially wav2vec 2.0. Through a comprehensive analysis of embeddings from models fine-tuned for various tasks, our results demonstrate that fine-tuning wav2vec 2.0 effectively achieves phonetic normalization by selectively suppressing task-irrelevant information. We found that models fine-tuned for multiple tasks retain information for both tasks without compromising performance, and that suppressing task-irrelevant information is not necessary for effective classification. These findings provide new insights into how phonetic normalization can be flexibly achieved in speech models and how it is realized in human speech perception.
Authors: Roberto Balestri, Guglielmo Pescatore
Abstract: Serialized TV shows are built on complex storylines that can be hard to track and evolve in ways that defy straightforward analysis. This paper introduces a multi-agent system designed to extract and analyze these narrative arcs. Tested on the first season of Grey's Anatomy (ABC 2005-), the system identifies three types of arcs: Anthology (self-contained), Soap (relationship-focused), and Genre-Specific (strictly related to the series' genre). Episodic progressions of these arcs are stored in both relational and semantic (vectorial) databases, enabling structured analysis and comparison. To bridge the gap between automation and critical interpretation, the system is paired with a graphical interface that allows for human refinement using tools to enhance and visualize the data. The system performed strongly in identifying Anthology Arcs and character entities, but its reliance on textual paratexts (such as episode summaries) revealed limitations in recognizing overlapping arcs and subtler dynamics. This approach highlights the potential of combining computational and human expertise in narrative analysis. Beyond television, it offers promise for serialized written formats, where the narrative resides entirely in the text. Future work will explore the integration of multimodal inputs, such as dialogue and visuals, and expand testing across a wider range of genres to refine the system further.
Authors: Lennart Meincke, Ethan Mollick, Lilach Mollick, Dan Shapiro
Abstract: This is the first of a series of short reports that seek to help business, education, and policy leaders understand the technical details of working with AI through rigorous testing. In this report, we demonstrate two things: - There is no single standard for measuring whether a Large Language Model (LLM) passes a benchmark, and that choosing a standard has a big impact on how well the LLM does on that benchmark. The standard you choose will depend on your goals for using an LLM in a particular case. - It is hard to know in advance whether a particular prompting approach will help or harm the LLM's ability to answer any particular question. Specifically, we find that sometimes being polite to the LLM helps performance, and sometimes it lowers performance. We also find that constraining the AI's answers helps performance in some cases, though it may lower performance in other cases. Taken together, this suggests that benchmarking AI performance is not one-size-fits-all, and also that particular prompting formulas or approaches, like being polite to the AI, are not universally valuable.
Authors: Shujie Li, Yuxia Wu, Chuan Shi, Yuan Fang
Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) have demonstrated success in modeling relational data primarily under the assumption of homophily. However, many real-world graphs exhibit heterophily, where linked nodes belong to different categories or possess diverse attributes. Additionally, nodes in many domains are associated with textual descriptions, forming heterophilic text-attributed graphs (TAGs). Despite their significance, the study of heterophilic TAGs remains underexplored due to the lack of comprehensive benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce the Heterophilic Text-attributed Graph Benchmark (HeTGB), a novel benchmark comprising five real-world heterophilic graph datasets from diverse domains, with nodes enriched by extensive textual descriptions. HeTGB enables systematic evaluation of GNNs, pre-trained language models (PLMs) and co-training methods on the node classification task. Through extensive benchmarking experiments, we showcase the utility of text attributes in heterophilic graphs, analyze the challenges posed by heterophilic TAGs and the limitations of existing models, and provide insights into the interplay between graph structures and textual attributes. We have publicly released HeTGB with baseline implementations to facilitate further research in this field.
Authors: Mahfuz Ahmed Anik, Abdur Rahman, Azmine Toushik Wasi, Md Manjurul Ahsan
Abstract: Language is a cornerstone of cultural identity, yet globalization and the dominance of major languages have placed nearly 3,000 languages at risk of extinction. Existing AI-driven translation models prioritize efficiency but often fail to capture cultural nuances, idiomatic expressions, and historical significance, leading to translations that marginalize linguistic diversity. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-agent AI framework designed for culturally adaptive translation in underserved language communities. Our approach leverages specialized agents for translation, interpretation, content synthesis, and bias evaluation, ensuring that linguistic accuracy and cultural relevance are preserved. Using CrewAI and LangChain, our system enhances contextual fidelity while mitigating biases through external validation. Comparative analysis shows that our framework outperforms GPT-4o, producing contextually rich and culturally embedded translations, a critical advancement for Indigenous, regional, and low-resource languages. This research underscores the potential of multi-agent AI in fostering equitable, sustainable, and culturally sensitive NLP technologies, aligning with the AI Governance, Cultural NLP, and Sustainable NLP pillars of Language Models for Underserved Communities. Our full experimental codebase is publicly available at: https://github.com/ciol-researchlab/Context-Aware_Translation_MAS
URLs: https://github.com/ciol-researchlab/Context-Aware_Translation_MAS
Authors: Vishakha Agrawal, Archie Chaudhury, Shreya Agrawal
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) are fundamentally next-token prediction systems, their practical applications extend far beyond this basic function. From natural language processing and text generation to conversational assistants and software use, LLMs have numerous use-cases, and have already acquired a significant degree of enterprise adoption. To evaluate such models, static evaluation datasets, consisting of a set of prompts and their corresponding ground truths, are often used to benchmark the efficacy of the model for a particular task. In this paper, we provide the basis for a more comprehensive evaluation framework, based upon a traditional game and tool-based architecture that enables a more overarching measurement of a model's capabilities. For simplicity, we provide a generalized foundation that can be extended, without significant alteration, to numerous scenarios, from specific use cases such as supply chain management or financial reasoning, to abstract measurements such as ethics or safety.
Authors: Jingying Zeng, Hui Liu, Zhenwei Dai, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Samarth Varshney, Zhen Li, Qi He
Abstract: With the advancement of conversational large language models (LLMs), several LLM-based Conversational Shopping Agents (CSA) have been developed to help customers answer questions and smooth their shopping journey in e-commerce domain. The primary objective in building a trustworthy CSA is to ensure the agent's responses are accurate and factually grounded, which is essential for building customer trust and encouraging continuous engagement. However, two challenges remain. First, LLMs produce hallucinated or unsupported claims. Such inaccuracies risk spreading misinformation and diminishing customer trust. Second, without providing knowledge source attribution in CSA response, customers struggle to verify LLM-generated information. To address these challenges, we present an easily productionized solution that enables a "citation experience" utilizing In-context Learning (ICL) and Multi-UX-Inference (MUI) to generate responses with citations to attribute its original sources without interfering other existing UX features. With proper UX design, these citation marks can be linked to the related product information and display the source to our customers. In this work, we also build auto-metrics and scalable benchmarks to holistically evaluate LLM's grounding and attribution capabilities. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating this citation generation paradigm can substantially enhance the grounding of LLM responses by 13.83% on the real-world data. As such, our solution not only addresses the immediate challenges of LLM grounding issues but also adds transparency to conversational AI.
Authors: Florian Lecourt (LIRMM | ADVANSE), Madalina Croitoru (GRAPHIK), Konstantin Todorov (LIRMM | WEB3, LIRMM, WEB3)
Abstract: This work investigates the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in detecting and understanding human emotions through text. Drawing upon emotion models from psychology, we adopt an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates computational and affective sciences insights. The main goal is to assess how accurately they can identify emotions expressed in textual interactions and compare different models on this specific task. This research contributes to broader efforts to enhance human-computer interaction, making artificial intelligence technologies more responsive and sensitive to users' emotional nuances. By employing a methodology that involves comparisons with a state-of-the-art model on the GoEmotions dataset, we aim to gauge LLMs' effectiveness as a system for emotional analysis, paving the way for potential applications in various fields that require a nuanced understanding of human language.
Authors: Yiguan Lin, Bin Xu, Yinghao Li, Yang Gao
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) require instruction fine-tuning to perform different downstream tasks. However, the instruction fine-tuning phase still demands significant computational resources and labeled data, lacking a paradigm that can improve model performance without additional computational power and data. Model merging aims to enhance performance by combining the parameters of different models, but the lack of a clear optimization direction during the merging process does not always guarantee improved performance. In this paper, we attempt to provide a clear optimization direction for model merging. We first validate the effectiveness of the model extrapolation method during the instruction fine-tuning phase. Then, we propose Extrapolation Merging, a paradigm that can continue improving model performance without requiring extra computational resources or data. Using the extrapolation method, we provide a clear direction for model merging, achieving local optimization search, and consequently enhancing the merged model's performance. We conduct experiments on seven different tasks, and the results show that our method can consistently improve the model's performance after fine-tuning.
Authors: Isaac Robinson, John Burden
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse contexts to support decision-making. While existing evaluations effectively probe latent model capabilities, they often overlook the impact of context framing on perceived rational decision-making. In this study, we introduce a novel evaluation framework that systematically varies evaluation instances across key features and procedurally generates vignettes to create highly varied scenarios. By analyzing decision-making patterns across different contexts with the same underlying game structure, we uncover significant contextual variability in LLM responses. Our findings demonstrate that this variability is largely predictable yet highly sensitive to framing effects. Our results underscore the need for dynamic, context-aware evaluation methodologies for real-world deployments.
Authors: Necdet Gurkan, Kimathi Njoki, Jordan W. Suchow
Abstract: As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance--particularly in generative models--an open question is whether these systems can replicate foundational models of human social perception. A well-established framework in social cognition suggests that social judgments are organized along two primary dimensions: valence (e.g., trustworthiness, warmth) and dominance (e.g., power, assertiveness). This study examines whether multimodal generative AI systems can reproduce this valence-dominance structure when evaluating facial images and how their representations align with those observed across world regions. Through principal component analysis (PCA), we found that the extracted dimensions closely mirrored the theoretical structure of valence and dominance, with trait loadings aligning with established definitions. However, many world regions and generative AI models also exhibited a third component, the nature and significance of which warrant further investigation. These findings demonstrate that multimodal generative AI systems can replicate key aspects of human social perception, raising important questions about their implications for AI-driven decision-making and human-AI interactions.
Authors: Hank Gerba
Abstract: Generative AI promises to finally realize dynamic, personalized storytelling technologies across a range of media. To date, experimentation with generative AI in the field of procedural narrative generation has been quite promising from a technical perspective. However, fundamental narrative dilemmas remain, such as the balance between player agency and narrative coherence, and no rigorous narrative standard has been proposed to specifically leverage the strengths of generative AI. In this paper, we propose the Universal Narrative Model (UNM), an open and extensible standard designed to place writers at the center of future narrative design workflows and enable interoperability across authoring platforms. By encoding an author's intent according to an objective narrative model, the UNM enables narrative portability as well as intent-based constraints for generative systems.
Authors: E Graham, R Granger
Abstract: Specific empirical phenomena spanning human natural language, and mathematical and logical abilities, are rigorously situated in the well-studied grammar-automata (G-A) hierarchy. We identify three tiers and corresponding two transitions within the hierarchy and show their correspondence to the emergence of particular abilities in humans and in transformer-based language models (LMs). These emergent abilities have often been described in terms of "scaling"; we show that it is the transition between tiers, rather than size itself, that determines a system's capabilities. Specifically, humans effortlessly process language yet require specific training to perform arithmetic or logical reasoning tasks; and LMs possess language abilities absent from predecessor systems yet still struggle with logical processing. The resulting principled analyses provide underlying explanatory accounts of both the abilities and shortfalls of these systems, and suggest actionable insights into the expansion of logic abilities in AI systems.
Authors: Likith Kadiyala, Ramteja Sajja, Yusuf Sermet, Ibrahim Demir
Abstract: This research investigates the integration of emotional diversity into Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance collective intelligence. Inspired by the human wisdom of crowds phenomenon, where group decisions often outperform individual judgments, we fine-tuned the DarkIdol-Llama-3.1-8B model using Google's GoEmotions dataset and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to simulate emotionally diverse responses. Evaluating the model on a distance estimation task between Fargo, ND, and Seattle, WA, across 15,064 unique persona configurations, we analyzed how emotional states and social attributes influence decision-making. Our findings demonstrate that emotional integration shapes response patterns while maintaining acceptable prediction accuracy, revealing its potential to enhance artificial collective intelligence. This study provides valuable insights into the interplay of emotional diversity and decision-making in LLMs, suggesting pathways for creating emotionally aware AI systems that balance emotional depth with analytical precision.
Authors: Junwoo Ha, Hyunjun Kim, Sangyoon Yu, Haon Park, Ashkan Yousefpour, Yuna Park, Suhyun Kim
Abstract: Despite extensive safety enhancements in large language models (LLMs), multi-turn "jailbreak" conversations crafted by skilled human adversaries can still breach even the most sophisticated guardrails. However, these multi-turn attacks demand considerable manual effort, limiting their scalability. In this work, we introduce a novel approach called Multi-turn-to-Single-turn (M2S) that systematically converts multi-turn jailbreak prompts into single-turn attacks. Specifically, we propose three conversion strategies - Hyphenize, Numberize, and Pythonize - each preserving sequential context yet packaging it in a single query. Our experiments on the Multi-turn Human Jailbreak (MHJ) dataset show that M2S often increases or maintains high Attack Success Rates (ASRs) compared to original multi-turn conversations. Notably, using a StrongREJECT-based evaluation of harmfulness, M2S achieves up to 95.9% ASR on Mistral-7B and outperforms original multi-turn prompts by as much as 17.5% in absolute improvement on GPT-4o. Further analysis reveals that certain adversarial tactics, when consolidated into a single prompt, exploit structural formatting cues to evade standard policy checks. These findings underscore that single-turn attacks - despite being simpler and cheaper to conduct - can be just as potent, if not more, than their multi-turn counterparts. Our findings underscore the urgent need to reevaluate and reinforce LLM safety strategies, given how adversarial queries can be compacted into a single prompt while still retaining sufficient complexity to bypass existing safety measures.
Authors: Stefano De Paoli, Walter Stan Mathis
Abstract: This paper reflects on the process of performing Thematic Analysis with Large Language Models (LLMs). Specifically, the paper deals with the problem of analytical saturation of initial codes, as produced by LLMs. Thematic Analysis is a well-established qualitative analysis method composed of interlinked phases. A key phase is the initial coding, where the analysts assign labels to discrete components of a dataset. Saturation is a way to measure the validity of a qualitative analysis and relates to the recurrence and repetition of initial codes. In the paper we reflect on how well LLMs achieve analytical saturation and propose also a novel technique to measure Inductive Thematic Saturation (ITS). This novel technique leverages a programming framework called DSPy. The proposed novel approach allows a precise measurement of ITS.
Authors: Bo Yuan, Yulin Chen, Zhen Tan, Wang Jinyan, Huan Liu, Yin Zhang
Abstract: Many text classification methods usually introduce external information (e.g., label descriptions and knowledge bases) to improve the classification performance. Compared to external information, some internal information generated by the model itself during training, like text embeddings and predicted label probability distributions, are exploited poorly when predicting the outcomes of some texts. In this paper, we focus on leveraging this internal information, proposing a dual $k$ nearest neighbor (D$k$NN) framework with two $k$NN modules, to retrieve several neighbors from the training set and augment the distribution of labels. For the $k$NN module, it is easily confused and may cause incorrect predictions when retrieving some nearest neighbors from noisy datasets (datasets with labeling errors) or similar datasets (datasets with similar labels). To address this issue, we also introduce a label distribution learning module that can learn label similarity, and generate a better label distribution to help models distinguish texts more effectively. This module eases model overfitting and improves final classification performance, hence enhancing the quality of the retrieved neighbors by $k$NN modules during inference. Extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our method.
Authors: Lin Sun, Guangxiang Zhao, Xiaoqi Jian, Yuhan Wu, Weihong Lin, Yongfu Zhu, Change Jia, Linglin Zhang, Jinzhu Wu, Junfeng Ran, Sai-er Hu, Zihan Jiang, Junting Zhou, Wenrui Liu, Bin Cui, Tong Yang, Xiangzheng Zhang
Abstract: The challenge of reducing the size of Large Language Models (LLMs) while maintaining their performance has gained significant attention. However, existing methods, such as model distillation and transfer learning, often fail to achieve high accuracy. To address this limitation, we introduce the Branch-Merge distillation approach, which enhances model compression through two phases: (1) the Branch Phase, where knowledge from a large teacher model is \textit{selectively distilled} into specialized student models via domain-specific supervised fine-tuning (SFT); And (2) the Merge Phase, where these student models are merged to enable cross-domain knowledge transfer and improve generalization. We validate our distillation approach using DeepSeek-R1 as the teacher and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B as the student. The resulting merged model, TinyR1-32B-Preview, outperforms its counterpart DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B across multiple benchmarks, including Mathematics (+5.5 points), Coding (+4.4 points) and Science (+2.9 points), while achieving near-equal performance to DeepSeek-R1 on AIME 2024. The Branch-Merge distillation approach provides a scalable solution for creating smaller, high-performing LLMs with reduced computational cost and time.
Authors: Xinyu Wei, Luojia Liu
Abstract: Recently, large language models (LLMs) with hundreds of billions of parameters have demonstrated the emergent ability, surpassing traditional methods in various domains even without fine-tuning over domain-specific data. However, when it comes to financial sentiment analysis (FSA)$\unicode{x2013}$a fundamental task in financial AI$\unicode{x2013}$these models often encounter various challenges, such as complex financial terminology, subjective human emotions, and ambiguous inclination expressions. In this paper, we aim to answer the fundamental question: whether LLMs are good in-context learners for FSA? Unveiling this question can yield informative insights on whether LLMs can learn to address the challenges by generalizing in-context demonstrations of financial document-sentiment pairs to the sentiment analysis of new documents, given that finetuning these models on finance-specific data is difficult, if not impossible at all. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper exploring in-context learning for FSA that covers most modern LLMs (recently released DeepSeek V3 included) and multiple in-context sample selection methods. Comprehensive experiments validate the in-context learning capability of LLMs for FSA.
Authors: Joan C. Timoneda, Sebasti\'an Vallejo Vera
Abstract: Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in text annotation using zero-shot and few-shot learning. Yet these approaches do not allow the model to retain information from previous annotations, making each response independent from the preceding ones. This raises the question of whether model memory -- the LLM having knowledge about its own previous annotations in the same task -- affects performance. In this article, using OpenAI's GPT-4o and Meta's Llama 3.1 on two political science datasets, we demonstrate that allowing the model to retain information about its own previous classifications yields significant performance improvements: between 5 and 25\% when compared to zero-shot and few-shot learning. Moreover, memory reinforcement, a novel approach we propose that combines model memory and reinforcement learning, yields additional performance gains in three out of our four tests. These findings have important implications for applied researchers looking to improve performance and efficiency in LLM annotation tasks.
Authors: Yaiza Aragon\'es-Soria, Manuel Oriol
Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based tools such as ChatGPT seem useful for classical programming assignments. The more specialized the field, the more likely they lack reliability because of the lack of data to train them. In the case of quantum computing, the quality of answers of generic chatbots is low. C4Q is a chatbot focused on quantum programs that addresses this challenge through a software architecture that integrates specialized LLMs to classify requests and specialized question answering modules with a deterministic logical engine to provide trustworthy quantum computing support. This article describes the latest version (2.0) of C4Q, which delivers several enhancements: ready-to-run Qiskit code for gate definitions and circuit operations, expanded features to solve software engineering tasks such as the travelling salesperson problem and the knapsack problem, and a feedback mechanism for iterative improvement. Extensive testing of the backend confirms the system's reliability, while empirical evaluations show that C4Q 2.0's classification LLM reaches near-perfect accuracy. The evaluation of the result consists in a comparative study with three existing chatbots highlighting C4Q 2.0's maintainability and correctness, reflecting on how software architecture decisions, such as separating deterministic logic from probabilistic text generation impact the quality of the results.
Authors: Kelsey Kraus, Margaret Kroll
Abstract: The emergence of powerful LLMs has led to a paradigm shift in Natural Language Understanding and Natural Language Generation. The properties that make LLMs so valuable for these tasks -- creativity, ability to produce fluent speech, and ability to quickly and effectively abstract information from large corpora -- also present new challenges to evaluating their outputs. The rush to market has led teams to fall back on quick, cost-effective automatic evaluations which offer value, but do not obviate the need for human judgments in model training and evaluation. This paper argues that in cases in which end users need to agree with the decisions made by ML models -- e.g. in toxicity detection or extraction of main points for summarization -- models should be trained and evaluated on data that represent the preferences of those users. We support this argument by explicating the role of human feedback in labeling and judgment tasks for model training and evaluation. First, we propose methods for disentangling noise from signal in labeling tasks. Then we show that noise in labeling disagreement can be minimized by adhering to proven methodological best practices, while signal can be maximized to play an integral role in model training and evaluation tasks. Finally, we illustrate best practices by providing a case study in which two guardrails classifiers are evaluated using human judgments to align final model behavior to user preferences. We aim for this paper to provide researchers and professionals with guidelines to integrating human judgments into their ML and generative AI evaluation toolkit, particularly when working toward achieving accurate and unbiased features that align with users' needs and expectations.
Authors: Yao Ge, Yuting Guo, Sudeshna Das, Swati Rajwal, Selen Bozkurt, Abeed Sarker
Abstract: We present HILGEN, a Hierarchically-Informed Data Generation approach that combines domain knowledge from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) with synthetic data generated by large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-3.5. Our approach leverages UMLS's hierarchical structure to expand training data with related concepts, while incorporating contextual information from LLMs through targeted prompts aimed at automatically generating synthetic examples for sparsely occurring named entities. The performance of the HILGEN approach was evaluated across four biomedical NER datasets (MIMIC III, BC5CDR, NCBI-Disease, and Med-Mentions) using BERT-Large and DANN (Data Augmentation with Nearest Neighbor Classifier) models, applying various data generation strategies, including UMLS, GPT-3.5, and their best ensemble. For the BERT-Large model, incorporating UMLS led to an average F1 score improvement of 40.36%, while using GPT-3.5 resulted in a comparable average increase of 40.52%. The Best-Ensemble approach using BERT-Large achieved the highest improvement, with an average increase of 42.29%. DANN model's F1 score improved by 22.74% on average using the UMLS-only approach. The GPT-3.5-based method resulted in a 21.53% increase, and the Best-Ensemble DANN model showed a more notable improvement, with an average increase of 25.03%. Our proposed HILGEN approach improves NER performance in few-shot settings without requiring additional manually annotated data. Our experiments demonstrate that an effective strategy for optimizing biomedical NER is to combine biomedical knowledge curated in the past, such as the UMLS, and generative LLMs to create synthetic training instances. Our future research will focus on exploring additional innovative synthetic data generation strategies for further improving NER performance.
Authors: Mohammad Mahdi Samiei Paqaleh, Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah
Abstract: In the field of emergent language, efforts have traditionally focused on developing communication protocols through interactions between agents in referential games. However, the aspect of internal language learning, where language serves not only as a communicative tool with others but also as a means for individual thinking, self-reflection, and problem-solving remains underexplored. Developing a language through self-play, without another agent's involvement, poses a unique challenge. It requires an agent to craft symbolic representations and train them using direct gradient methods. The challenge here is that if an agent attempts to learn symbolic representations through self-play using conventional modeling and techniques such as REINFORCE, the solution will offer no advantage over previous multi-agent approaches. We introduce VQEL, a novel method that incorporates Vector Quantization into the agents' architecture, enabling them to autonomously invent and develop discrete symbolic representations in a self-play referential game. Following the self-play phase, agents can enhance their language through reinforcement learning and interactions with other agents in the mutual-play phase. Our experiments across various datasets demonstrate that VQEL not only outperforms the traditional REINFORCE method but also benefits from improved control and reduced susceptibility to collapse, thanks to the incorporation of vector quantization.
Authors: Jooyoung Lee, Xiaochen Zhu, Georgi Karadzhov, Tom Stafford, Andreas Vlachos, Dongwon Lee
Abstract: The proliferation of generative models has presented significant challenges in distinguishing authentic human-authored content from deepfake content. Collaborative human efforts, augmented by AI tools, present a promising solution. In this study, we explore the potential of DeepFakeDeLiBot, a deliberation-enhancing chatbot, to support groups in detecting deepfake text. Our findings reveal that group-based problem-solving significantly improves the accuracy of identifying machine-generated paragraphs compared to individual efforts. While engagement with DeepFakeDeLiBot does not yield substantial performance gains overall, it enhances group dynamics by fostering greater participant engagement, consensus building, and the frequency and diversity of reasoning-based utterances. Additionally, participants with higher perceived effectiveness of group collaboration exhibited performance benefits from DeepFakeDeLiBot. These findings underscore the potential of deliberative chatbots in fostering interactive and productive group dynamics while ensuring accuracy in collaborative deepfake text detection. \textit{Dataset and source code used in this study will be made publicly available upon acceptance of the manuscript.
Authors: Haoyuan Ma, Yongliang Shen, Hengwei Liu, Wenqi Zhang, Haolei Xu, Qiuying Peng, Jun Wang, Weiming Lu
Abstract: Recent text-to-SQL systems powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in translating natural language queries into SQL. However, these systems often struggle with complex database structures and domain-specific queries, as they primarily focus on enhancing logical reasoning and SQL syntax while overlooking the critical need for comprehensive database understanding. To address this limitation, we propose DB-Explore, a novel framework that systematically aligns LLMs with database knowledge through automated exploration and instruction synthesis. DB-Explore constructs database graphs to capture complex relational schemas, leverages GPT-4 to systematically mine structural patterns and semantic knowledge, and synthesizes instructions to distill this knowledge for efficient fine-tuning of LLMs. Our framework enables comprehensive database understanding through diverse sampling strategies and automated instruction generation, bridging the gap between database structures and language models. Experiments conducted on the SPIDER and BIRD benchmarks validate the effectiveness of DB-Explore, achieving an execution accuracy of 52.1% on BIRD and 84.0% on SPIDER. Notably, our open-source implementation, based on the Qwen2.5-coder-7B model, outperforms multiple GPT-4-driven text-to-SQL systems in comparative evaluations, and achieves near state-of-the-art performance with minimal computational cost.
Authors: Mehmet Kardan, Bhawna Piryani, Adam Jatowt
Abstract: Despite advancements in state-of-the-art models and information retrieval techniques, current systems still struggle to handle temporal information and to correctly answer detailed questions about past events. In this paper, we investigate the impact of temporal characteristics of answers in Question Answering (QA) by exploring several simple answer selection techniques. Our findings emphasize the role of temporal features in selecting the most relevant answers from diachronic document collections and highlight differences between explicit and implicit temporal questions.
Authors: Giulio Corallo, Orion Weller, Fabio Petroni, Paolo Papotti
Abstract: Incorporating external knowledge in large language models (LLMs) enhances their utility across diverse applications, but existing methods have trade-offs. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) fetches evidence via similarity search, but key information may fall outside top ranked results. Long-context models can process multiple documents but are computationally expensive and limited by context window size. Inspired by students condensing study material for open-book exams, we propose task-aware key-value (KV) cache compression, which compresses external knowledge in a zero- or few-shot setup. This enables LLMs to reason efficiently over a compacted representation of all relevant information. Experiments show our approach outperforms both RAG and task-agnostic compression methods. On LongBench v2, it improves accuracy by up to 7 absolute points over RAG with a 30x compression rate, while reducing inference latency from 0.43s to 0.16s. A synthetic dataset highlights that RAG performs well when sparse evidence suffices, whereas task-aware compression is superior for broad knowledge tasks.
Authors: Ali Aghababaei, Jan Nikadon, Magdalena Formanowicz, Maria Laura Bettinsoli, Carmen Cervone, Caterina Suitner, Tomaso Erseghe
Abstract: Classification of textual data in terms of sentiment, or more nuanced sociopsychological markers (e.g., agency), is now a popular approach commonly applied at the sentence level. In this paper, we exploit the integrated gradient (IG) method to capture the classification output at the word level, revealing which words actually contribute to the classification process. This approach improves explainability and provides in-depth insights into the text. We focus on sociopsychological markers beyond sentiment and investigate how to effectively train IG in agency, one of the very few markers for which a verified deep learning classifier, BERTAgent, is currently available. Performance and system parameters are carefully tested, alternatives to the IG approach are evaluated, and the usefulness of the result is verified in a relevant application scenario. The method is also applied in a scenario where only a small labeled dataset is available, with the aim of exploiting IG to identify the salient words that contribute to building the different classes that relate to relevant sociopsychological markers. To achieve this, an uncommon training procedure that encourages overfitting is employed to enhance the distinctiveness of each class. The results are analyzed through the lens of social psychology, offering valuable insights.
Authors: Mingchen Li, Heng Fan, Song Fu, Junhua Ding, Yunhe Feng
Abstract: Prompt privacy is crucial, especially when using online large language models (LLMs), due to the sensitive information often contained within prompts. While LLMs can enhance prompt privacy through text rewriting, existing methods primarily focus on document-level rewriting, neglecting the rich, multi-granular representations of text. This limitation restricts LLM utilization to specific tasks, overlooking their generalization and in-context learning capabilities, thus hindering practical application. To address this gap, we introduce DP-GTR, a novel three-stage framework that leverages local differential privacy (DP) and the composition theorem via group text rewriting. DP-GTR is the first framework to integrate both document-level and word-level information while exploiting in-context learning to simultaneously improve privacy and utility, effectively bridging local and global DP mechanisms at the individual data point level. Experiments on CommonSense QA and DocVQA demonstrate that DP-GTR outperforms existing approaches, achieving a superior privacy-utility trade-off. Furthermore, our framework is compatible with existing rewriting techniques, serving as a plug-in to enhance privacy protection. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/FatShion-FTD/DP-GTR for reproducibility.
Authors: Xuheng Cai, Erica Zhang
Abstract: Egyptian hieroglyphs are found on numerous ancient Egyptian artifacts, but it is common that they are blurry or even missing due to erosion. Existing efforts to restore blurry hieroglyphs adopt computer vision techniques such as CNNs and model hieroglyph recovery as an image classification task, which suffers from two major limitations: (i) They cannot handle severely damaged or completely missing hieroglyphs. (ii) They make predictions based on a single hieroglyph without considering contextual and grammatical information. This paper proposes a novel approach to model hieroglyph recovery as a next word prediction task and use language models to address it. We compare the performance of different SOTA language models and choose LSTM as the architecture of our HieroLM due to the strong local affinity of semantics in Egyptian hieroglyph texts. Experiments show that HieroLM achieves over 44% accuracy and maintains notable performance on multi-shot predictions and scarce data, which makes it a pragmatic tool to assist scholars in inferring missing hieroglyphs. It can also complement CV-based models to significantly reduce perplexity in recognizing blurry hieroglyphs. Our code is available at https://github.com/Rick-Cai/HieroLM/.
Authors: Benyamin Jamialahmadi, Parsa Kavehzadeh, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Parsa Farinneya, Hossein Rajabzadeh, Aref Jafari, Boxing Chen, Marzieh Tahaei
Abstract: Deploying large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications is often hindered by strict computational and latency constraints. While dynamic inference offers the flexibility to adjust model behavior based on varying resource budgets, existing methods are frequently limited by hardware inefficiencies or performance degradation. In this paper, we introduce Balcony, a simple yet highly effective framework for depth-based dynamic inference. By freezing the pretrained LLM and inserting additional transformer layers at selected exit points, Balcony maintains the full model's performance while enabling real-time adaptation to different computational budgets. These additional layers are trained using a straightforward self-distillation loss, aligning the sub-model outputs with those of the full model. This approach requires significantly fewer training tokens and tunable parameters, drastically reducing computational costs compared to prior methods. When applied to the LLaMA3-8B model, using only 0.2% of the original pretraining data, Balcony achieves minimal performance degradation while enabling significant speedups. Remarkably, we show that Balcony outperforms state-of-the-art methods such as Flextron and Layerskip as well as other leading compression techniques on multiple models and at various scales, across a variety of benchmarks.
Authors: Bryan Li, Jiaming Luo, Eleftheria Briakou, Colin Cherry
Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly adopted for machine translation (MT), their performance for specialist domains such as medicine and law remains an open challenge. Prior work has shown that LLMs can be domain-adapted at test-time by retrieving targeted few-shot demonstrations or terminologies for inclusion in the prompt. Meanwhile, for general-purpose LLM MT, recent studies have found some success in generating similarly useful domain knowledge from an LLM itself, prior to translation. Our work studies domain-adapted MT with LLMs through a careful prompting setup, finding that demonstrations consistently outperform terminology, and retrieval consistently outperforms generation. We find that generating demonstrations with weaker models can close the gap with larger model's zero-shot performance. Given the effectiveness of demonstrations, we perform detailed analyses to understand their value. We find that domain-specificity is particularly important, and that the popular multi-domain benchmark is testing adaptation to a particular writing style more so than to a specific domain.
Authors: Yuyou Zhang, Miao Li, William Han, Yihang Yao, Zhepeng Cen, Ding Zhao
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit weaknesses in traditional safety alignment, which often relies on rigid refusal heuristics or representation engineering to block harmful outputs. While they are effective for direct adversarial attacks, they fall short of broader safety challenges requiring nuanced, context-aware decision-making. To address this, we propose Reasoning-enhanced Finetuning for interpretable LLM Safety (Rational), a novel framework that trains models to engage in explicit safe reasoning before response. Fine-tuned models leverage the extensive pretraining knowledge in self-generated reasoning to bootstrap their own safety through structured reasoning, internalizing context-sensitive decision-making. Our findings suggest that safety extends beyond refusal, requiring context awareness for more robust, interpretable, and adaptive responses. Reasoning is not only a core capability of LLMs but also a fundamental mechanism for LLM safety. Rational employs reasoning-enhanced fine-tuning, allowing it to reject harmful prompts while providing meaningful and context-aware responses in complex scenarios.
Authors: Mohsen Fayyaz, Ali Modarressi, Hinrich Schuetze, Nanyun Peng
Abstract: Dense retrieval models are commonly used in Information Retrieval (IR) applications, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Since they often serve as the first step in these systems, their robustness is critical to avoid failures. In this work, by repurposing a relation extraction dataset (e.g. Re-DocRED), we design controlled experiments to quantify the impact of heuristic biases, such as favoring shorter documents, in retrievers like Dragon+ and Contriever. Our findings reveal significant vulnerabilities: retrievers often rely on superficial patterns like over-prioritizing document beginnings, shorter documents, repeated entities, and literal matches. Additionally, they tend to overlook whether the document contains the query's answer, lacking deep semantic understanding. Notably, when multiple biases combine, models exhibit catastrophic performance degradation, selecting the answer-containing document in less than 3% of cases over a biased document without the answer. Furthermore, we show that these biases have direct consequences for downstream applications like RAG, where retrieval-preferred documents can mislead LLMs, resulting in a 34% performance drop than not providing any documents at all.
Authors: Grace Proebsting, Adam Poliak
Abstract: We test whether NLP datasets created with Large Language Models (LLMs) contain annotation artifacts and social biases like NLP datasets elicited from crowd-source workers. We recreate a portion of the Stanford Natural Language Inference corpus using GPT-4, Llama-2 70b for Chat, and Mistral 7b Instruct. We train hypothesis-only classifiers to determine whether LLM-elicited NLI datasets contain annotation artifacts. Next, we use pointwise mutual information to identify the words in each dataset that are associated with gender, race, and age-related terms. On our LLM-generated NLI datasets, fine-tuned BERT hypothesis-only classifiers achieve between 86-96% accuracy. Our analyses further characterize the annotation artifacts and stereotypical biases in LLM-generated datasets.
Authors: Preetam Prabhu Srikar Dammu, Himanshu Naidu, Chirag Shah
Abstract: As question answering (QA) systems advance alongside the rapid evolution of foundation models, the need for robust, adaptable, and large-scale evaluation benchmarks becomes increasingly critical. Traditional QA benchmarks are often static and publicly available, making them susceptible to data contamination and memorization by large language models (LLMs). Consequently, static benchmarks may overestimate model generalization and hinder a reliable assessment of real-world performance. In this work, we introduce Dynamic-KGQA, a scalable framework for generating adaptive QA datasets from knowledge graphs (KGs), designed to mitigate memorization risks while maintaining statistical consistency across iterations. Unlike fixed benchmarks, Dynamic-KGQA generates a new dataset variant on every run while preserving the underlying distribution, enabling fair and reproducible evaluations. Furthermore, our framework provides fine-grained control over dataset characteristics, supporting domain-specific and topic-focused QA dataset generation. Additionally, Dynamic-KGQA produces compact, semantically coherent subgraphs that facilitate both training and evaluation of KGQA models, enhancing their ability to leverage structured knowledge effectively. To align with existing evaluation protocols, we also provide static large-scale train/test/validation splits, ensuring comparability with prior methods. By introducing a dynamic, customizable benchmarking paradigm, Dynamic-KGQA enables a more rigorous and adaptable evaluation of QA systems.
Authors: Melkamu Abay Mersha, Mesay Gemeda Yigezu, Hassan shakil, Ali Al shami, Sanghyun Byun, Jugal Kalita
Abstract: The increasing complexity of LLMs presents significant challenges to their transparency and interpretability, necessitating the use of eXplainable AI (XAI) techniques to enhance trustworthiness and usability. This study introduces a comprehensive evaluation framework with four novel metrics for assessing the effectiveness of five XAI techniques across five LLMs and two downstream tasks. We apply this framework to evaluate several XAI techniques LIME, SHAP, Integrated Gradients, Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), and Attention Mechanism Visualization (AMV) using the IMDB Movie Reviews and Tweet Sentiment Extraction datasets. The evaluation focuses on four key metrics: Human-reasoning Agreement (HA), Robustness, Consistency, and Contrastivity. Our results show that LIME consistently achieves high scores across multiple LLMs and evaluation metrics, while AMV demonstrates superior Robustness and near-perfect Consistency. LRP excels in Contrastivity, particularly with more complex models. Our findings provide valuable insights into the strengths and limitations of different XAI methods, offering guidance for developing and selecting appropriate XAI techniques for LLMs.
Authors: Yosuke Yamagishi, Tomohiro Kikuchi, Shouhei Hanaoka, Takeharu Yoshikawa, Osamu Abe
Abstract: Objective: This study aims to evaluate and compare the performance of two Japanese language models-conventional Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and the newer ModernBERT-in classifying findings from chest CT reports, with a focus on tokenization efficiency, processing time, and classification performance. Methods: We conducted a retrospective study using the CT-RATE-JPN dataset containing 22,778 training reports and 150 test reports. Both models were fine-tuned for multi-label classification of 18 common chest CT conditions. The training data was split in 18,222:4,556 for training and validation. Performance was evaluated using F1 scores for each condition and exact match accuracy across all 18 labels. Results: ModernBERT demonstrated superior tokenization efficiency, requiring 24.0% fewer tokens per document (258.1 vs. 339.6) compared to BERT Base. This translated to significant performance improvements, with ModernBERT completing training in 1877.67 seconds versus BERT's 3090.54 seconds (39% reduction). ModernBERT processed 38.82 samples per second during training (1.65x faster) and 139.90 samples per second during inference (1.66x faster). Despite these efficiency gains, classification performance remained comparable, with ModernBERT achieving superior F1 scores in 8 conditions, while BERT performed better in 4 conditions. Overall exact match accuracy was slightly higher for ModernBERT (74.67% vs. 72.67%), though this difference was not statistically significant (p=0.6291). Conclusion: ModernBERT offers substantial improvements in tokenization efficiency and training speed without sacrificing classification performance. These results suggest that ModernBERT is a promising candidate for clinical applications in Japanese radiology reports analysis.
Authors: Michael Krumdick, Charles Lovering, Varshini Reddy, Seth Ebner, Chris Tanner
Abstract: LLM-as-a-Judge is a framework that uses an LLM (large language model) to evaluate the quality of natural language text - typically text that is also generated by an LLM. This framework holds great promise due to its relative low-cost, ease of use, and strong correlations with human stylistic preferences. However, LLM Judges have been shown to exhibit biases that can distort their judgments. We evaluate how well LLM Judges can grade whether a given response to a conversational question is correct, an ability crucial to soundly estimating the overall response quality. To do so, we create and publicly release a human-annotated dataset with labels of correctness for 1,200 LLM responses. We source questions from a combination of existing datasets and a novel, challenging benchmark (BFF-Bench) created for this analysis. We demonstrate a strong connection between an LLM's ability to correctly answer a question and grade responses to that question. Although aggregate level statistics might imply a judge has high agreement with human annotators, it will struggle on the subset of questions it could not answer. To address this issue, we recommend a simple solution: provide the judge with a correct, human-written reference answer. We perform an in-depth analysis on how reference quality can affect the performance of an LLM Judge. We show that providing a weaker judge (e.g. Qwen 2.5 7B) with higher quality references reaches better agreement with human annotators than a stronger judge (e.g. GPT-4o) with synthetic references.
Authors: Nitheesha Nakka, Omer F. Yalcin, Bruce A. Desmarais, Sarah Rajtmajer, Burt Monroe
Abstract: Statistical topic modeling is widely used in political science to study text. Researchers examine documents of varying lengths, from tweets to speeches. There is ongoing debate on how document length affects the interpretability of topic models. We investigate the effects of aggregating short documents into larger ones based on natural units that partition the corpus. In our study, we analyze one million tweets by U.S. state legislators from April 2016 to September 2020. We find that for documents aggregated at the account level, topics are more associated with individual states than when using individual tweets. This finding is replicated with Wikipedia pages aggregated by birth cities, showing how document definitions can impact topic modeling results.
Authors: Feng Jiang, Zhiyu Lin, Fan Bu, Yuhao Du, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li
Abstract: The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has brought significant attention to speech models, particularly recent progress in speech2speech protocols supporting speech input and output. However, the existing benchmarks adopt automatic text-based evaluators for evaluating the instruction following ability of these models lack consideration for paralinguistic information in both speech understanding and generation. To address these issues, we introduce S2S-Arena, a novel arena-style S2S benchmark that evaluates instruction-following capabilities with paralinguistic information in both speech-in and speech-out across real-world tasks. We design 154 samples that fused TTS and live recordings in four domains with 21 tasks and manually evaluate existing popular speech models in an arena-style manner. The experimental results show that: (1) in addition to the superior performance of GPT-4o, the speech model of cascaded ASR, LLM, and TTS outperforms the jointly trained model after text-speech alignment in speech2speech protocols; (2) considering paralinguistic information, the knowledgeability of the speech model mainly depends on the LLM backbone, and the multilingual support of that is limited by the speech module; (3) excellent speech models can already understand the paralinguistic information in speech input, but generating appropriate audio with paralinguistic information is still a challenge.
Authors: Kaiyu Huang, Hao Wu, Zhubo Shi, Han Zou, Minchen Yu, Qingjiang Shi
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) services often face challenges in achieving low inference latency and meeting Service Level Objectives (SLOs) under dynamic request patterns. Speculative decoding, which exploits lightweight models for drafting and LLMs for verification, has emerged as a compelling technique to accelerate LLM inference. However, existing speculative decoding solutions often fail to adapt to varying workloads and system environments, resulting in performance variability and SLO violations. In this paper, we introduce SpecServe, an efficient LLM inference system that dynamically adjusts speculative strategies according to real-time request loads and system configurations. SpecServe proposes a theoretical model to understand and predict the efficiency of speculative decoding across diverse scenarios. Additionally, it implements intelligent drafting and verification algorithms to guarantee optimal performance while achieving high SLO attainment. Experimental results on real-world LLM traces demonstrate that SpecServe consistently meets SLOs and achieves substantial performance improvements, yielding 1.14$\times$-14.3$\times$ speedups over state-of-the-art speculative inference systems.
Authors: Tianjun Wei, Wei Wen, Ruizhi Qiao, Xing Sun, Jianghong Ma
Abstract: Evaluating large language models (LLMs) in diverse and challenging scenarios is essential to align them with human preferences. To mitigate the prohibitive costs associated with human evaluations, utilizing a powerful LLM as a judge has emerged as a favored approach. Nevertheless, this methodology encounters several challenges, including substantial expenses, concerns regarding privacy and security, and reproducibility. In this paper, we propose a straightforward, replicable, and accurate automated evaluation method by leveraging a lightweight LLM as the judge, named RocketEval. Initially, we identify that the performance disparity between lightweight and powerful LLMs in evaluation tasks primarily stems from their ability to conduct comprehensive analyses, which is not easily enhanced through techniques such as chain-of-thought reasoning. By reframing the evaluation task as a multi-faceted Q&A using an instance-specific checklist, we demonstrate that the limited judgment accuracy of lightweight LLMs is largely attributes to high uncertainty and positional bias. To address these challenges, we introduce an automated evaluation process grounded in checklist grading, which is designed to accommodate a variety of scenarios and questions. This process encompasses the creation of checklists, the grading of these checklists by lightweight LLMs, and the reweighting of checklist items to align with the supervised annotations. Our experiments carried out on the automated evaluation benchmarks, MT-Bench and WildBench datasets, reveal that RocketEval, when using Gemma-2-2B as the judge, achieves a high correlation (0.965) with human preferences, which is comparable to GPT-4o. Moreover, RocketEval provides a cost reduction exceeding 50-fold for large-scale evaluation and comparison scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/Joinn99/RocketEval-ICLR .
Authors: Bowen Wu, Wenqing Wang, Haoran Li, Ying Li, Jingsong Yu, Baoxun Wang
Abstract: Proactive dialogue systems aim to empower chatbots with the capability of leading conversations towards specific targets, thereby enhancing user engagement and service autonomy. Existing systems typically target pre-defined keywords or entities, neglecting user attributes and preferences implicit in dialogue history, hindering the development of long-term user intimacy. To address these challenges, we take a radical step towards building a more human-like conversational agent by integrating proactive dialogue systems with long-term memory into a unified framework. Specifically, we define a novel task named Memory-aware Proactive Dialogue (MapDia). By decomposing the task, we then propose an automatic data construction method and create the first Chinese Memory-aware Proactive Dataset (ChMapData). Furthermore, we introduce a joint framework based on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), featuring three modules: Topic Summarization, Topic Retrieval, and Proactive Topic-shifting Detection and Generation, designed to steer dialogues towards relevant historical topics at the right time. The effectiveness of our dataset and models is validated through both automatic and human evaluations. We release the open-source framework and dataset at https://github.com/FrontierLabs/MapDia.
Authors: Ruixi Lin, Ziqiao Wang, Yang You
Abstract: Language models are strong few-shot learners and achieve good overall accuracy in text classification tasks, masking the fact that their results suffer from great class accuracy imbalance. We believe that the pursuit of overall accuracy should not come from enriching the strong classes, but from raising up the weak ones. To address the imbalance, we propose a post-hoc nonlinear integer programming based debiasing method that ensembles weight correction and membership correction to enable flexible rectifications of class probabilities at both class and sample levels, enhancing the performance of LLMs directly from their outputs. Evaluations with Llama-2-13B on seven text classification benchmarks show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art overall accuracy gains with balanced class accuracies. The resulted probability correction scheme demonstrates that sample-level corrections are necessary to elevate weak classes. In addition, due to effectively correcting weak classes, our method also brings significant performance gains to Llama-2-70B, especially on a biomedical domain task, demonstrating its effectiveness across both small and large model variants.
Authors: Simon A. Aytes, Jinheon Baek, Sung Ju Hwang
Abstract: Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities through Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting, but often at the cost of excessive verbosity in their intermediate outputs, which increases computational overhead. We introduce Sketch-of-Thought (SoT), a novel prompting framework that combines cognitive-inspired reasoning paradigms with linguistic constraints to minimize token usage while preserving reasoning accuracy. SoT is designed as a flexible framework that can incorporate any custom reasoning paradigms based on cognitive science, and we instantiate it with three such paradigms - Conceptual Chaining, Chunked Symbolism, and Expert Lexicons - each tailored to different reasoning tasks and selected dynamically via a lightweight routing model. Through comprehensive evaluation across 15 reasoning datasets with multiple languages and multimodal scenarios, we demonstrate that SoT achieves token reductions of 76% with negligible accuracy impact. In certain domains like mathematical and multi-hop reasoning, it even improves accuracy while using significantly fewer tokens. Our code is publicly available: https://www.github.com/SimonAytes/SoT.
Authors: Jiachun Li, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Xiaojian Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting demonstrates varying performance under different reasoning tasks. Previous work attempts to evaluate it but falls short in providing an in-depth analysis of patterns that influence the CoT. In this paper, we study the CoT performance from the perspective of effectiveness and faithfulness. For the former, we identify key factors that influence CoT effectiveness on performance improvement, including problem difficulty, information gain, and information flow. For the latter, we interpret the unfaithful CoT issue by conducting a joint analysis of the information interaction among the question, CoT, and answer. The result demonstrates that, when the LLM predicts answers, it can recall correct information missing in the CoT from the question, leading to the problem. Finally, we propose a novel algorithm to mitigate this issue, in which we recall extra information from the question to enhance the CoT generation and evaluate CoTs based on their information gain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach enhances both the faithfulness and effectiveness of CoT.
Authors: Mufan Xu, Gewen Liang, Kehai Chen, Wei Wang, Xun Zhou, Muyun Yang, Tiejun Zhao, Min Zhang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) tasks by planning and interacting with knowledge graphs. However, existing methods often confuse tool utilization with knowledge reasoning, harming readability of model outputs and giving rise to hallucinatory tool invocations, which hinder the advancement of KGQA. To address this issue, we propose Memory-augmented Query Reconstruction for LLM-based Knowledge Graph Reasoning (MemQ) to decouple LLM from tool invocation tasks using LLM-built query memory. By establishing a memory module with explicit descriptions of query statements, the proposed MemQ facilitates the KGQA process with natural language reasoning and memory-augmented query reconstruction. Meanwhile, we design an effective and readable reasoning to enhance the LLM's reasoning capability in KGQA. Experimental results that MemQ achieves state-of-the-art performance on widely used benchmarks WebQSP and CWQ.
Authors: Pranshav Gajjar, Vijay K. Shah
Abstract: Despite the transformative impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) across critical domains such as healthcare, customer service, and business marketing, their integration into Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN) remains limited. This gap is primarily due to the absence of domain-specific foundational models, with existing solutions often relying on general-purpose LLMs that fail to address the unique challenges and technical intricacies of O-RAN. To bridge this gap, we introduce ORANSight-2.0 (O-RAN Insights), a pioneering initiative aimed at developing specialized foundational LLMs tailored for O-RAN. Built on 18 LLMs spanning five open-source LLM frameworks, ORANSight-2.0 fine-tunes models ranging from 1 to 70B parameters, significantly reducing reliance on proprietary, closed-source models while enhancing performance for O-RAN. At the core of ORANSight-2.0 is RANSTRUCT, a novel Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) based instruction-tuning framework that employs two LLM agents to create high-quality instruction-tuning datasets. The generated dataset is then used to fine-tune the 18 pre-trained open-source LLMs via QLoRA. To evaluate ORANSight-2.0, we introduce srsRANBench, a novel benchmark designed for code generation and codebase understanding in the context of srsRAN, a widely used 5G O-RAN stack. We also leverage ORANBench13K, an existing benchmark for assessing O-RAN-specific knowledge. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that ORANSight-2.0 models outperform general-purpose and closed-source models, such as ChatGPT-4o and Gemini, by 5.421% on ORANBench and 18.465% on srsRANBench, achieving superior performance while maintaining lower computational and energy costs. We also experiment with RAG-augmented variants of ORANSight-2.0 LLMs and thoroughly evaluate their energy characteristics, demonstrating costs for training, standard inference, and RAG-augmented inference.
Authors: Guoxiu He, Xin Song, Aixin Sun
Abstract: As real-world knowledge evolves, the information embedded within large language models (LLMs) can become outdated, inadequate, or erroneous. Model editing has emerged as a prominent approach for updating LLMs' knowledge with minimal computational costs and parameter changes. This approach typically identifies and adjusts specific model parameters associated with newly acquired knowledge. However, existing methods often underestimate the adverse effects that parameter modifications can have on broadly distributed knowledge. More critically, post-edit LLMs frequently struggle with multi-hop reasoning and continuous knowledge updates. Although various studies have discussed these shortcomings, there is a lack of comprehensive evaluation. In this paper, we provide an evaluation of ten model editing methods along four dimensions: reliability, generalization, locality, and portability. Results confirm that all ten popular model editing methods show significant shortcomings across multiple dimensions, suggesting model editing is less promising. We then propose a straightforward method called Selective Contextual Reasoning (SCR), for knowledge updating. SCR does not modify model parameters but harnesses LLM's inherent contextual reasoning capabilities utilizing the updated knowledge pieces. Under SCR, an LLM first assesses whether an incoming query falls within the scope of an external knowledge base. If it does, the relevant external knowledge texts are contextualized to enhance reasoning; otherwise, the query is answered directly. We evaluate SCR against the ten model editing methods on two counterfactual datasets with three backbone LLMs. Empirical results confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of contextual reasoning for knowledge updating.
Authors: Jinghao Zhang, Yuting Liu, Wenjie Wang, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Liang Wang, Tat-Seng Chua
Abstract: Personalized text generation aims to infer users' writing style preferences from their historical texts and generate outputs that faithfully reflect these stylistic characteristics. Existing solutions primarily adopt two paradigms: retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). While these approaches have advanced the field, they suffer from two critical limitations: (1) the entanglement of content semantics and stylistic patterns in historical texts impedes accurate modeling of user-specific writing preferences; and (2) scalability challenges arising from both RAG's inference latency by retrieval operations and PEFT's parameter storage requirements for per user model. To overcome these limitations, we propose StyleVector, a training-free framework that disentangles and represents personalized writing style as a vector in LLM's activation space, enabling style-steered generation during inference without requiring costly retrieval or parameter storage. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves a significant 8% relative improvement in personalized generation while reducing storage requirements by 1700 times over PEFT method.
Authors: Xuenan Xu, Jiahao Mei, Chenliang Li, Yuning Wu, Ming Yan, Shaopeng Lai, Ji Zhang, Mengyue Wu
Abstract: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) has accelerated AI-native applications, such as AI-based storybooks that automate engaging story production for children. However, challenges remain in improving story attractiveness, enriching storytelling expressiveness, and developing open-source evaluation benchmarks and frameworks. Therefore, we propose and opensource MM-StoryAgent, which creates immersive narrated video storybooks with refined plots, role-consistent images, and multi-channel audio. MM-StoryAgent designs a multi-agent framework that employs LLMs and diverse expert tools (generative models and APIs) across several modalities to produce expressive storytelling videos. The framework enhances story attractiveness through a multi-stage writing pipeline. In addition, it improves the immersive storytelling experience by integrating sound effects with visual, music and narrative assets. MM-StoryAgent offers a flexible, open-source platform for further development, where generative modules can be substituted. Both objective and subjective evaluation regarding textual story quality and alignment between modalities validate the effectiveness of our proposed MM-StoryAgent system. The demo and source code are available.
Authors: Rumi A. Allbert, Makai L. Allbert
Abstract: We present PhiloBERTA, a cross-lingual transformer model that measures semantic relationships between ancient Greek and Latin lexicons. Through analysis of selected term pairs from classical texts, we use contextual embeddings and angular similarity metrics to identify precise semantic alignments. Our results show that etymologically related pairs demonstrate significantly higher similarity scores, particularly for abstract philosophical concepts such as epist\=em\=e (scientia) and dikaiosyn\=e (iustitia). Statistical analysis reveals consistent patterns in these relationships (p = 0.012), with etymologically related pairs showing remarkably stable semantic preservation compared to control pairs. These findings establish a quantitative framework for examining how philosophical concepts moved between Greek and Latin traditions, offering new methods for classical philological research.
Authors: Francesco Cazzaro, Justin Kleindienst, Sofia Marquez, Ariadna Quattoni
Abstract: Natural language interfaces to knowledge graphs have become increasingly important in recent years, enabling easy and efficient access to structured data. In particular property graphs have seen growing adoption. However, these kind of graphs remain relatively underrepresented in research, which has focused in large part on RDF-style graphs. As a matter of fact there is a lack of resources for evaluating systems on property graphs, with many existing datasets featuring relatively simple queries. To address this gap, we introduce ZOGRASCOPE, a benchmark designed specifically for the cypher query language. The benchmark includes a diverse set of manually annotated queries of varying complexity. We complement this paper with a set of experiments that test the performance of out-of-the-box LLMs of different sizes. Our experiments show that semantic parsing over graphs is still a challenging open problem that can not be solved by prompting LLMs alone.
Authors: Neemesh Yadav, Jiarui Liu, Francesco Ortu, Roya Ensafi, Zhijing Jin, Rada Mihalcea
Abstract: The ability of Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods to categorize text into multiple classes has motivated their use in online content moderation tasks, such as hate speech and fake news detection. However, there is limited understanding of how or why these methods make such decisions, or why certain content is moderated in the first place. To investigate the hidden mechanisms behind content moderation, we explore multiple directions: 1) training classifiers to reverse-engineer content moderation decisions across countries; 2) explaining content moderation decisions by analyzing Shapley values and LLM-guided explanations. Our primary focus is on content moderation decisions made across countries, using pre-existing corpora sampled from the Twitter Stream Grab. Our experiments reveal interesting patterns in censored posts, both across countries and over time. Through human evaluations of LLM-generated explanations across three LLMs, we assess the effectiveness of using LLMs in content moderation. Finally, we discuss potential future directions, as well as the limitations and ethical considerations of this work. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/causalNLP/censorship
Authors: Jie He, Wendi Zhou, Xiang Lorraine Li, Jeff Z. Pan
Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation leverages abundant labeled data from various source domains to generalize onto unlabeled target data. Prior research has primarily focused on learning domain-invariant features across the source and target domains. However, these methods often require training a model using source domain data, which is time-consuming and can limit model usage for applications with different source data. This paper introduces a simple framework that utilizes the impressive generalization capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for target data annotation without the need of source model training, followed by a novel similarity-based knowledge distillation loss. Our extensive experiments on cross-domain text classification reveal that our framework achieves impressive performance, specifically, 2.44\% accuracy improvement when compared to the SOTA method.
Authors: Nikolai Ilinykh, Shalom Lappin, Asad Sayeed, Sharid Lo\'aiciga
Abstract: We demonstrate that large multimodal language models differ substantially from humans in the distribution of coreferential expressions in a visual storytelling task. We introduce a number of metrics to quantify the characteristics of coreferential patterns in both human- and machine-written texts. Humans distribute coreferential expressions in a way that maintains consistency across texts and images, interleaving references to different entities in a highly varied way. Machines are less able to track mixed references, despite achieving perceived improvements in generation quality.
Authors: Nico Daheim, Clara Meister, Thomas M\"ollenhoff, Iryna Gurevych
Abstract: Despite their outstanding performance in the majority of scenarios, contemporary language models still occasionally generate undesirable outputs, for example, hallucinated text. While such behaviors have previously been linked to uncertainty, there is a notable lack of methods that actively consider uncertainty during text generation. In this work, we show how Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding, which selects model generations according to an expected risk, can be generalized into a principled uncertainty-aware decoding method. In short, we account for model uncertainty during decoding by incorporating a posterior over model parameters into MBR's computation of expected risk. We show that this modified expected risk is useful for both choosing outputs and deciding when to abstain from generation and can provide improvements without incurring overhead. We benchmark different methods for learning posteriors and show that performance improves with prediction diversity. We release our code publicly.
Authors: Xinyi Cai
Abstract: Implicit discourse relation recognition is a challenging task in discourse analysis due to the absence of explicit discourse connectives between spans of text. Recent pre-trained language models have achieved great success on this task. However, there is no fine-grained analysis of the performance of these pre-trained language models for this task. Therefore, the difficulty and possible directions of this task is unclear. In this paper, we deeply analyze the model prediction, attempting to find out the difficulty for the pre-trained language models and the possible directions of this task. In addition to having an in-depth analysis for this task by using pre-trained language models, we semi-manually annotate data to add relatively high-quality data for the relations with few annotated examples in PDTB 3.0. The annotated data significantly help improve implicit discourse relation recognition for level-2 senses.
Authors: Anar Yeginbergen, Maite Oronoz, Rodrigo Agerri
Abstract: This paper investigates the role of dynamic external knowledge integration in improving counter-argument generation using Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs have shown promise in argumentative tasks, their tendency to generate lengthy, potentially unfactual responses highlights the need for more controlled and evidence-based approaches. We introduce a new manually curated dataset of argument and counter-argument pairs specifically designed to balance argumentative complexity with evaluative feasibility. We also propose a new LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation methodology that shows a stronger correlation with human judgments compared to traditional reference-based metrics. Our experimental results demonstrate that integrating dynamic external knowledge from the web significantly improves the quality of generated counter-arguments, particularly in terms of relatedness, persuasiveness, and factuality. The findings suggest that combining LLMs with real-time external knowledge retrieval offers a promising direction for developing more effective and reliable counter-argumentation systems.
Authors: Yiwei Li, Jiayi Shi, Shaoxiong Feng, Peiwen Yuan, Xinglin Wang, Yueqi Zhang, Ji Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
Abstract: We propose a novel speculative decoding method tailored for multi-sample reasoning scenarios, such as self-consistency and Best-of-N sampling. Our method exploits the intrinsic consensus of parallel generation paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without requiring auxiliary models or external databases. By dynamically analyzing structural patterns across parallel reasoning paths through a probabilistic aggregation mechanism, it identifies consensus token sequences that align with the decoding distribution. Evaluations on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate a substantial improvement in draft acceptance rates over baselines, while reducing the latency in draft token construction. This work establishes a paradigm shift for efficient multi-sample inference, enabling seamless integration of speculative decoding with sampling-based reasoning techniques.
Authors: Leming Shen, Qiang Yang, Yuanqing Zheng, Mo Li
Abstract: The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has profoundly transformed our lives, revolutionizing interactions with AI and lowering the barrier to AI usage. While LLMs are primarily designed for natural language interaction, the extensive embedded knowledge empowers them to comprehend digital sensor data. This capability enables LLMs to engage with the physical world through IoT sensors and actuators, performing a myriad of AIoT tasks. Consequently, this evolution triggers a paradigm shift in conventional AIoT application development, democratizing its accessibility to all by facilitating the design and development of AIoT applications via natural language. However, some limitations need to be addressed to unlock the full potential of LLMs in AIoT application development. First, existing solutions often require transferring raw sensor data to LLM servers, which raises privacy concerns, incurs high query fees, and is limited by token size. Moreover, the reasoning processes of LLMs are opaque to users, making it difficult to verify the robustness and correctness of inference results. This paper introduces AutoIOT, an LLM-based automated program generator for AIoT applications. AutoIOT enables users to specify their requirements using natural language (input) and automatically synthesizes interpretable programs with documentation (output). AutoIOT automates the iterative optimization to enhance the quality of generated code with minimum user involvement. AutoIOT not only makes the execution of AIoT tasks more explainable but also mitigates privacy concerns and reduces token costs with local execution of synthesized programs. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate AutoIOT's remarkable capability in program synthesis for various AIoT tasks. The synthesized programs can match and even outperform some representative baselines.
Authors: Zhenxuan Zhang, Kinhei Lee, Weihang Deng, Huichi Zhou, Zihao Jin, Jiahao Huang, Zhifan Gao, Dominic C Marshall, Yingying Fang, Guang Yang
Abstract: Automatic medical report generation supports clinical diagnosis, reduces the workload of radiologists, and holds the promise of improving diagnosis consistency. However, existing evaluation metrics primarily assess the accuracy of key medical information coverage in generated reports compared to human-written reports, while overlooking crucial details such as the location and certainty of reported abnormalities. These limitations hinder the comprehensive assessment of the reliability of generated reports and pose risks in their selection for clinical use. Therefore, we propose a Granular Explainable Multi-Agent Score (GEMA-Score) in this paper, which conducts both objective quantification and subjective evaluation through a large language model-based multi-agent workflow. Our GEMA-Score parses structured reports and employs NER-F1 calculations through interactive exchanges of information among agents to assess disease diagnosis, location, severity, and uncertainty. Additionally, an LLM-based scoring agent evaluates completeness, readability, and clinical terminology while providing explanatory feedback. Extensive experiments validate that GEMA-Score achieves the highest correlation with human expert evaluations on a public dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in clinical scoring (Kendall coefficient = 0.70 for Rexval dataset and Kendall coefficient = 0.54 for RadEvalX dataset). The anonymous project demo is available at: https://github.com/Zhenxuan-Zhang/GEMA_score.
Authors: Jan Fillies, Adrian Paschke
Abstract: Algorithmic hate speech detection faces significant challenges due to the diverse definitions and datasets used in research and practice. Social media platforms, legal frameworks, and institutions each apply distinct yet overlapping definitions, complicating classification efforts. This study addresses these challenges by demonstrating that existing datasets and taxonomies can be integrated into a unified model, enhancing prediction performance and reducing reliance on multiple specialized classifiers. The work introduces a universal taxonomy and a hate speech classifier capable of detecting a wide range of definitions within a single framework. Our approach is validated by combining two widely used but differently annotated datasets, showing improved classification performance on an independent test set. This work highlights the potential of dataset and taxonomy integration in advancing hate speech detection, increasing efficiency, and ensuring broader applicability across contexts.
Authors: Weixiang Zhao, Xingyu Sui, Xinyang Han, Yang Deng, Yulin Hu, Jiahe Guo, Libo Qin, Qianyun Du, Shijin Wang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
Abstract: The growing emotional stress in modern society has increased the demand for Emotional Support Conversations (ESC). While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for ESC, they face two key challenges: (1) low strategy selection accuracy, and (2) preference bias, limiting their adaptability to emotional needs of users. Existing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) struggles to address these issues, as it rigidly trains models on single gold-standard responses without modeling nuanced strategy trade-offs. To overcome these limitations, we propose Chain-of-Strategy Optimization (CSO), a novel approach that optimizes strategy selection preferences at each dialogue turn. We first leverage Monte Carlo Tree Search to construct ESC-Pro, a high-quality preference dataset with turn-level strategy-response pairs. Training on ESC-Pro with CSO improves both strategy accuracy and bias mitigation, enabling LLMs to generate more empathetic and contextually appropriate responses. Experiments on LLaMA-3.1-8B, Gemma-2-9B, and Qwen2.5-7B demonstrate that CSO outperforms standard SFT, highlighting the efficacy of fine-grained, turn-level preference modeling in ESC.
Authors: Linh Le, Guido Zuccon, Gianluca Demartini, Genghong Zhao, Xia Zhang
Abstract: Previous work on clinical relation extraction from free-text sentences leveraged information about semantic types from clinical knowledge bases as a part of entity representations. In this paper, we exploit additional evidence by also making use of domain-specific semantic type dependencies. We encode the relation between a span of tokens matching a Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) concept and other tokens in the sentence. We implement our method and compare against different named entity recognition (NER) architectures (i.e., BiLSTM-CRF and BiLSTM-GCN-CRF) using different pre-trained clinical embeddings (i.e., BERT, BioBERT, UMLSBert). Our experimental results on clinical datasets show that in some cases NER effectiveness can be significantly improved by making use of domain-specific semantic type dependencies. Our work is also the first study generating a matrix encoding to make use of more than three dependencies in one pass for the NER task.
Authors: Navdeep Kaur, Lachlan McPheat, Alessandra Russo, Anthony G Cohn, Pranava Madhyastha
Abstract: In this paper, we examine the use of Conformal Language Modelling (CLM) alongside Answer Set Programming (ASP) to enhance the performance of standard open-weight LLMs on complex multi-step reasoning tasks. Using the StepGame dataset, which requires spatial reasoning, we apply CLM to generate sets of ASP programs from an LLM, providing statistical guarantees on the correctness of the outputs. Experimental results show that CLM significantly outperforms baseline models that use standard sampling methods, achieving substantial accuracy improvements across different levels of reasoning complexity. Additionally, the LLM-as-Judge metric enhances CLM's performance, especially in assessing structurally and logically correct ASP outputs. However, calibrating CLM with diverse calibration sets did not improve generalizability for tasks requiring much longer reasoning steps, indicating limitations in handling more complex tasks.
Authors: Minsoo Khang, Sang Chul Jung, Sungrae Park, Teakgyu Hong
Abstract: Document Key Information Extraction (KIE) is a technology that transforms valuable information in document images into structured data, and it has become an essential function in industrial settings. However, current evaluation metrics of this technology do not accurately reflect the critical attributes of its industrial applications. In this paper, we present KIEval, a novel application-centric evaluation metric for Document KIE models. Unlike prior metrics, KIEval assesses Document KIE models not just on the extraction of individual information (entity) but also of the structured information (grouping). Evaluation of structured information provides assessment of Document KIE models that are more reflective of extracting grouped information from documents in industrial settings. Designed with industrial application in mind, we believe that KIEval can become a standard evaluation metric for developing or applying Document KIE models in practice. The code will be publicly available.
Authors: Nicolas Boizard, Hippolyte Gisserot-Boukhlef, Duarte M. Alves, Andr\'e Martins, Ayoub Hammal, Caio Corro, C\'eline Hudelot, Emmanuel Malherbe, Etienne Malaboeuf, Fanny Jourdan, Gabriel Hautreux, Jo\~ao Alves, Kevin El-Haddad, Manuel Faysse, Maxime Peyrard, Nuno M. Guerreiro, Patrick Fernandes, Ricardo Rei, Pierre Colombo
Abstract: General-purpose multilingual vector representations, used in retrieval, regression and classification, are traditionally obtained from bidirectional encoder models. Despite their wide applicability, encoders have been recently overshadowed by advances in generative decoder-only models. However, many innovations driving this progress are not inherently tied to decoders. In this paper, we revisit the development of multilingual encoders through the lens of these advances, and introduce EuroBERT, a family of multilingual encoders covering European and widely spoken global languages. Our models outperform existing alternatives across a diverse range of tasks, spanning multilingual capabilities, mathematics, and coding, and natively supporting sequences of up to 8,192 tokens. We also examine the design decisions behind EuroBERT, offering insights into our dataset composition and training pipeline. We publicly release the EuroBERT models, including intermediate training checkpoints, together with our training framework.
Authors: Yusong Ke
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world question-answering (QA) applications. However, LLMs have been proven to generate hallucinations and nonfactual information, undermining their trustworthiness in high-stakes medical tasks. Conformal prediction (CP) is well-known to be model-agnostic and distribution-free, which creates statistically rigorous prediction sets in classification tasks. In this work, we for the first time adapt the CP framework to medical multiple-choice question-answering (MCQA) tasks, by correlating the nonconformity score with the frequency score of correct options grounded in self-consistency theory, assuming no access to internal model information. Considering that the adapted CP framework can only control the (mis)coverage rate, we employ a risk control framework, which can manage task-specific metrics by devising a monotonically decreasing loss function. We evaluate our framework on 3 popular medical MCQA datasets utilizing 4 ``off-the-shelf'' LLMs. Empirical results demonstrate that we achieve user-specified average (or marginal) error rates on the test set. Furthermore, we observe that the average prediction set size (APSS) on the test set decreases as the risk level increases, which concludes a promising evaluation metric for the uncertainty of LLMs.
Authors: Shiping Yang, Jie Wu, Wenbiao Ding, Ning Wu, Shining Liang, Ming Gong, Hengyuan Zhang, Dongmei Zhang
Abstract: Robustness has become a critical attribute for the deployment of RAG systems in real-world applications. Existing research focuses on robustness to explicit noise (e.g., document semantics) but overlooks spurious features (a.k.a. implicit noise). While previous works have explored spurious features in LLMs, they are limited to specific features (e.g., formats) and narrow scenarios (e.g., ICL). In this work, we statistically confirm the presence of spurious features in the RAG paradigm, a robustness problem caused by the sensitivity of LLMs to semantic-agnostic features. Moreover, we provide a comprehensive taxonomy of spurious features and empirically quantify their impact through controlled experiments. Further analysis reveals that not all spurious features are harmful and they can even be beneficial sometimes. Extensive evaluation results across multiple LLMs suggest that spurious features are a widespread and challenging problem in the field of RAG. The code and dataset will be released to facilitate future research. We release all codes and data at: $\\\href{https://github.com/maybenotime/RAG-SpuriousFeatures}{https://github.com/maybenotime/RAG-SpuriousFeatures}$.
URLs: https://github.com/maybenotime/RAG-SpuriousFeatures, https://github.com/maybenotime/RAG-SpuriousFeatures
Authors: Joyjit Chattoraj, Brahim Hamadicharef, Teo Shi Chang, Yingzhi Zeng, Chee Kok Poh, Luwei Chen, Teck Leong Tan
Abstract: While the Water-Gas Shift (WGS) reaction plays a crucial role in hydrogen production for fuel cells, finding suitable catalysts to achieve high yields for low-temperature WGS reactions remains a persistent challenge. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has shown promise in accelerating catalyst design by exploring vast candidate spaces, however, two key gaps limit its effectiveness. First, AI models primarily train on numerical data, which fail to capture essential text-based information, such as catalyst synthesis methods. Second, the cross-disciplinary nature of catalyst design requires seamless collaboration between AI, theory, experiments, and numerical simulations, often leading to communication barriers. To address these gaps, we present AceWGS, a Large Language Models (LLMs)-aided framework to streamline WGS catalyst design. AceWGS interacts with researchers through natural language, answering queries based on four features: (i) answering general queries, (ii) extracting information about the database comprising WGS-related journal articles, (iii) comprehending the context described in these articles, and (iv) identifying catalyst candidates using our proposed AI inverse model. We presented a practical case study demonstrating how AceWGS can accelerate the catalyst design process. AceWGS, built with open-source tools, offers an adjustable framework that researchers can readily adapt for a range of AI-accelerated catalyst design applications, supporting seamless integration across cross-disciplinary studies.
Authors: Xuanqing Liu, Luyang Kong, Wei Niu, Afshin Khashei, Belinda Zeng, Steve Johnson, Jon Jay, Davor Golac, Matt Pope
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling complex dialogue tasks without requiring use case-specific fine-tuning. However, analyzing live dialogues in real-time necessitates low-latency processing systems, making it impractical to deploy models with billions of parameters due to latency constraints. As a result, practitioners often prefer smaller models with millions of parameters, trained on high-quality, human-annotated datasets. Yet, curating such datasets is both time-consuming and costly. Consequently, there is a growing need to combine the scalability of LLM-generated labels with the precision of human annotations, enabling fine-tuned smaller models to achieve both higher speed and accuracy comparable to larger models. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective framework to address this challenge. Our approach is specifically designed for per-utterance classification problems, which encompass tasks such as intent detection, dialogue state tracking, and more. To mitigate the impact of labeling errors from LLMs -- the primary source of inaccuracies in student models -- we propose a noise-reduced preference learning loss. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves accuracy across utterance-level dialogue tasks, including sentiment detection (over $2\%$), dialogue act classification (over $1.5\%$), etc.
Authors: Justin Chih-Yao Chen, Sukwon Yun, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Tianlong Chen, Mohit Bansal
Abstract: Combining existing pre-trained expert LLMs is a promising avenue for scalably tackling large-scale and diverse tasks. However, selecting experts at the task level is often too coarse-grained, as heterogeneous tasks may require different expertise for each instance. To enable adaptive instance-level mixing of pre-trained LLM experts, we propose Symbolic-MoE, a symbolic, text-based, and gradient-free Mixture-of-Experts framework. Symbolic-MoE takes a fine-grained approach to selection by emphasizing skills, e.g., algebra in math or molecular biology in biomedical reasoning. We propose a skill-based recruiting strategy that dynamically selects the most relevant set of expert LLMs for diverse reasoning tasks based on their strengths. Each selected expert then generates its own reasoning, resulting in k outputs from k experts, which are then synthesized into a final high-quality response by an aggregator chosen based on its ability to integrate diverse reasoning outputs. We show that Symbolic-MoE's instance-level expert selection improves performance by a large margin but -- when implemented naively -- can introduce a high computational overhead due to the need for constant model loading and offloading. To address this, we implement a batch inference strategy that groups instances based on their assigned experts, loading each model only once. This allows us to integrate 16 expert models on 1 GPU with a time cost comparable to or better than prior multi-agent baselines using 4 GPUs. Through extensive evaluations on diverse benchmarks (MMLU-Pro, GPQA, AIME, and MedMCQA), we demonstrate that Symbolic-MoE outperforms strong LLMs like GPT4o-mini, as well as multi-agent approaches, with an absolute average improvement of 8.15% over the best multi-agent baseline. Moreover, Symbolic-MoE removes the need for expensive multi-round discussions, outperforming discussion baselines with less computation.
Authors: Lukas Thede, Karsten Roth, Matthias Bethge, Zeynep Akata, Tom Hartvigsen
Abstract: Keeping large language models factually up-to-date is crucial for deployment, yet costly retraining remains a challenge. Knowledge editing offers a promising alternative, but methods are only tested on small-scale or synthetic edit benchmarks. In this work, we aim to bridge research into lifelong knowledge editing to real-world edits at practically relevant scale. We first introduce WikiBigEdit; a large-scale benchmark of real-world Wikidata edits, built to automatically extend lifelong for future-proof benchmarking. In its first instance, it includes over 500K question-answer pairs for knowledge editing alongside a comprehensive evaluation pipeline. Finally, we use WikiBigEdit to study existing knowledge editing techniques' ability to incorporate large volumes of real-world facts and contrast their capabilities to generic modification techniques such as retrieval augmentation and continual finetuning to acquire a complete picture of the practical extent of current lifelong knowledge editing.
Authors: Anna T. Thomas, Adam Yee, Andrew Mayne, Maya B. Mathur, Dan Jurafsky, Kristina Gligori\'c
Abstract: Food systems are responsible for a third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. We investigate what Large Language Models (LLMs) can contribute to reducing the environmental impacts of food production. We define a typology of design and prediction tasks based on the sustainable food literature and collaboration with domain experts, and evaluate six LLMs on four tasks in our typology. For example, for a sustainable protein design task, food science experts estimated that collaboration with an LLM can reduce time spent by 45% on average, compared to 22% for collaboration with another expert human food scientist. However, for a sustainable menu design task, LLMs produce suboptimal solutions when instructed to consider both human satisfaction and climate impacts. We propose a general framework for integrating LLMs with combinatorial optimization to improve reasoning capabilities. Our approach decreases emissions of food choices by 79% in a hypothetical restaurant while maintaining participants' satisfaction with their set of choices. Our results demonstrate LLMs' potential, supported by optimization techniques, to accelerate sustainable food development and adoption.
Authors: Joseph Marvin Imperial, Matthew D. Jones, Harish Tayyar Madabushi
Abstract: Technical standards, or simply standards, are established documented guidelines and rules that facilitate the interoperability, quality, and accuracy of systems and processes. In recent years, we have witnessed an emerging paradigm shift where the adoption of generative AI (GenAI) models has increased tremendously, spreading implementation interests across standard-driven industries, including engineering, legal, healthcare, and education. In this paper, we assess the criticality levels of different standards across domains and sectors and complement them by grading the current compliance capabilities of state-of-the-art GenAI models. To support the discussion, we outline possible challenges and opportunities with integrating GenAI for standard compliance tasks while also providing actionable recommendations for entities involved with developing and using standards. Overall, we argue that aligning GenAI with standards through computational methods can help strengthen regulatory and operational compliance. We anticipate this area of research will play a central role in the management, oversight, and trustworthiness of larger, more powerful GenAI-based systems in the near future.
Authors: Mykhailo Bondarenko, Sviatoslav Lushnei, Yurii Paniv, Oleksii Molchanovsky, Mariana Romanyshyn, Yurii Filipchuk, Artur Kiulian
Abstract: This report analyzes key trends, challenges, risks, and opportunities associated with the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) globally. It examines national experiences in developing LLMs and assesses the feasibility of investment in this sector. Additionally, the report explores strategies for implementing, regulating, and financing AI projects at the state level.
Authors: Thorsten Ruprechter, Marion Garaus, Ivo Ponocny, Denis Helic
Abstract: Deriving nutritional information from online food posts is challenging, particularly when users do not explicitly log the macro-nutrients of a shared meal. In this work, we present an efficient and straightforward approach to approximating macro-nutrients based solely on the titles of food posts. Our method combines a public food database from the U.S. Department of Agriculture with advanced text embedding techniques. We evaluate the approach on a labeled food dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness, and apply it to over 500,000 real-world posts from Reddit's popular /r/food subreddit to uncover trends in food-sharing behavior based on the estimated macro-nutrient content. Altogether, this work lays a foundation for researchers and practitioners aiming to estimate caloric and nutritional content using only text data.
Authors: Hritik Bansal, Pratyush Maini
Abstract: The rapid advancement in building large language models (LLMs) has intensified competition among big-tech companies and AI startups. In this regard, model evaluations are critical for product and investment-related decision-making. While open evaluation sets like MMLU initially drove progress, concerns around data contamination and data bias have constantly questioned their reliability. As a result, it has led to the rise of private data curators who have begun conducting hidden evaluations with high-quality self-curated test prompts and their own expert annotators. In this paper, we argue that despite potential advantages in addressing contamination issues, private evaluations introduce inadvertent financial and evaluation risks. In particular, the key concerns include the potential conflict of interest arising from private data curators' business relationships with their clients (leading LLM firms). In addition, we highlight that the subjective preferences of private expert annotators will lead to inherent evaluation bias towards the models trained with the private curators' data. Overall, this paper lays the foundation for studying the risks of private evaluations that can lead to wide-ranging community discussions and policy changes.
Authors: Kunal Handa, Alex Tamkin, Miles McCain, Saffron Huang, Esin Durmus, Sarah Heck, Jared Mueller, Jerry Hong, Stuart Ritchie, Tim Belonax, Kevin K. Troy, Dario Amodei, Jared Kaplan, Jack Clark, Deep Ganguli
Abstract: Despite widespread speculation about artificial intelligence's impact on the future of work, we lack systematic empirical evidence about how these systems are actually being used for different tasks. Here, we present a novel framework for measuring AI usage patterns across the economy. We leverage a recent privacy-preserving system to analyze over four million Claude.ai conversations through the lens of tasks and occupations in the U.S. Department of Labor's O*NET Database. Our analysis reveals that AI usage primarily concentrates in software development and writing tasks, which together account for nearly half of all total usage. However, usage of AI extends more broadly across the economy, with approximately 36% of occupations using AI for at least a quarter of their associated tasks. We also analyze how AI is being used for tasks, finding 57% of usage suggests augmentation of human capabilities (e.g., learning or iterating on an output) while 43% suggests automation (e.g., fulfilling a request with minimal human involvement). While our data and methods face important limitations and only paint a picture of AI usage on a single platform, they provide an automated, granular approach for tracking AI's evolving role in the economy and identifying leading indicators of future impact as these technologies continue to advance.
Authors: Jules Viennot, Guillaume Baudart, Emilio Jes\`us Gallego Arias, Marc Lelarge
Abstract: In this work, we conduct an experiment using state-of-the-art LLMs to translate MiniF2F into Rocq. The translation task focuses on generating a Rocq theorem based on three sources: a natural language description, the Lean formalization, and the Isabelle formalization. We conducted our experiment in 3 stages of increasing complexity, from basic one-shot prompting to multi-turn conversations that incorporate feedback from unsuccessful attempts. At each stage, we perform multiple rounds of translation using increasingly advanced models: GPT-4o mini, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, o1 mini, and o1. We successfully translated 478 out of 488 theorems. The dataset is opensource: https://github.com/LLM4Rocq/miniF2F-rocq.
Authors: Arturs Kanepajs, Aditi Basu, Sankalpa Ghose, Constance Li, Akshat Mehta, Ronak Mehta, Samuel David Tucker-Davis, Eric Zhou, Bob Fischer
Abstract: As machine learning systems become increasingly embedded in human society, their impact on the natural world continues to escalate. Technical evaluations have addressed a variety of potential harms from large language models (LLMs) towards humans and the environment, but there is little empirical work regarding harms towards nonhuman animals. Following the growing recognition of animal protection in regulatory and ethical AI frameworks, we present the Animal Harm Assessment (AHA), a novel evaluation of risks of animal harm in LLM-generated text. Our dataset comprises 1,850 curated questions from Reddit post titles and 2,500 synthetic questions based on 50 animal categories (e.g., cats, reptiles) and 50 ethical scenarios, with further 70-30 publi-private split. Scenarios include open-ended questions about how to treat animals, practical scenarios with potential animal harm, and willingness-to-pay measures for the prevention of animal harm. Using the LLM-as-a-judge framework, answers are evaluated for their potential to increase or decrease harm, and evaluations are debiased for the tendency to judge their own outputs more favorably. We show that AHA produces meaningful evaluation results when applied to frontier LLMs, revealing significant differences between models, animal categories, scenarios, and subreddits. We conclude with future directions for technical research and the challenges of building evaluations on complex social and moral topics.
Authors: Zhibin Lan, Liqiang Niu, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Jinsong Su
Abstract: Universal multimodal embedding models play a critical role in tasks such as interleaved image-text retrieval, multimodal RAG, and multimodal clustering. However, our empirical results indicate that existing LMM-based embedding models trained with the standard InfoNCE loss exhibit a high degree of overlap in similarity distribution between positive and negative pairs, making it challenging to distinguish hard negative pairs effectively. To deal with this issue, we propose a simple yet effective framework that dynamically improves the embedding model's representation learning for negative pairs based on their discriminative difficulty. Within this framework, we train a series of models, named LLaVE, and evaluate them on the MMEB benchmark, which covers 4 meta-tasks and 36 datasets. Experimental results show that LLaVE establishes stronger baselines that achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance while demonstrating strong scalability and efficiency. Specifically, LLaVE-2B surpasses the previous SOTA 7B models, while LLaVE-7B achieves a further performance improvement of 6.2 points. Although LLaVE is trained on image-text data, it can generalize to text-video retrieval tasks in a zero-shot manner and achieve strong performance, demonstrating its remarkable potential for transfer to other embedding tasks.
Authors: Joykirat Singh, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Akshay Nambi
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved their reasoning capabilities; however, they still struggle with complex multi-step mathematical problem-solving due to error propagation, lack of self-correction, and limited adaptability to diverse reasoning styles. Existing methods rely on static fine-tuning or prompt engineering, which fail to generalize across problem complexities, while the scarcity of high-quality preference data further hinders reliable reasoning. We introduce SPHERE, a self-evolving data generation pipeline that enhances reasoning in small language models (SLMs) by iteratively generating, correcting, and diversifying reasoning chains. SPHERE operates in three stages: (i) Self-Generation, where the model autonomously constructs problem-solving steps; (ii) Self-Correction, enabling it to identify and rectify errors; and (iii) Diversity Induction, improving robustness through multiple valid reasoning trajectories. This self-evolution mechanism strengthens mathematical reasoning and enhances model reliability. Evaluations on MATH 500, GSM8K, AIME, AMC, and Olympiad show that SPHERE-trained models achieve significant gains over their base versions and match/surpass GPT-4o on certain benchmarks. Our findings demonstrate that self-evolving models can close the reasoning gap between SLMs and state-of-the-art LLMs, making mathematical AI more reliable, scalable, and efficient.
Authors: Liming Lu, Shuchao Pang, Siyuan Liang, Haotian Zhu, Xiyu Zeng, Aishan Liu, Yunhuai Liu, Yongbin Zhou
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made remarkable strides in cross-modal comprehension and generation tasks. However, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, where crafted perturbations bypass security guardrails and elicit harmful outputs. In this paper, we present the first adversarial training (AT) paradigm tailored to defend against jailbreak attacks during the MLLM training phase. Extending traditional AT to this domain poses two critical challenges: efficiently tuning massive parameters and ensuring robustness against attacks across multiple modalities. To address these challenges, we introduce Projection Layer Against Adversarial Training (ProEAT), an end-to-end AT framework. ProEAT incorporates a projector-based adversarial training architecture that efficiently handles large-scale parameters while maintaining computational feasibility by focusing adversarial training on a lightweight projector layer instead of the entire model; additionally, we design a dynamic weight adjustment mechanism that optimizes the loss function's weight allocation based on task demands, streamlining the tuning process. To enhance defense performance, we propose a joint optimization strategy across visual and textual modalities, ensuring robust resistance to jailbreak attacks originating from either modality. Extensive experiments conducted on five major jailbreak attack methods across three mainstream MLLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. ProEAT achieves state-of-the-art defense performance, outperforming existing baselines by an average margin of +34% across text and image modalities, while incurring only a 1% reduction in clean accuracy. Furthermore, evaluations on real-world embodied intelligent systems highlight the practical applicability of our framework, paving the way for the development of more secure and reliable multimodal systems.
Authors: Yanshu Li
Abstract: Multimodal in-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a key capability of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), driven by their increasing scale and applicability. Despite its promise, effective ICL in the multimodal setting remains challenging due to the inherent complexity of image-text inputs and the high sensitivity of ICL performance to input configurations. In this work, we shed light on the core mechanism underlying multimodal ICL, identifying task mapping as a crucial factor in configuring robust in-context demonstration (ICD) sequences. Building on these insights, we propose \textit{SabER}, a lightweight yet powerful decoder-only transformer equipped with task-aware attention, which intelligently selects and arranges ICDs from a demonstration library in an autoregressive fashion. This design enables fine-grained feature extraction and cross-modal reasoning, iteratively refining task mapping to generate high-quality ICD sequences. Through extensive experiments covering five LVLMs and nine benchmark datasets, SabER not only demonstrates strong empirical performance, but also provides deeper understanding of how task semantics interact with multimodal ICDs. Our findings highlight the importance of principled ICD sequence configuration and open new avenues to enhance multimodal ICL in a wide range of real-world scenarios.
Authors: Ada Defne Tur, Nicholas Meade, Xing Han L\`u, Alejandra Zambrano, Arkil Patel, Esin Durmus, Spandana Gella, Karolina Sta\'nczak, Siva Reddy
Abstract: LLM-based agents are becoming increasingly proficient at solving web-based tasks. With this capability comes a greater risk of misuse for malicious purposes, such as posting misinformation in an online forum or selling illicit substances on a website. To evaluate these risks, we propose SafeArena, the first benchmark to focus on the deliberate misuse of web agents. SafeArena comprises 250 safe and 250 harmful tasks across four websites. We classify the harmful tasks into five harm categories -- misinformation, illegal activity, harassment, cybercrime, and social bias, designed to assess realistic misuses of web agents. We evaluate leading LLM-based web agents, including GPT-4o, Claude-3.5 Sonnet, Qwen-2-VL 72B, and Llama-3.2 90B, on our benchmark. To systematically assess their susceptibility to harmful tasks, we introduce the Agent Risk Assessment framework that categorizes agent behavior across four risk levels. We find agents are surprisingly compliant with malicious requests, with GPT-4o and Qwen-2 completing 34.7% and 27.3% of harmful requests, respectively. Our findings highlight the urgent need for safety alignment procedures for web agents. Our benchmark is available here: https://safearena.github.io
Authors: Souvik Kundu, Anahita Bhiwandiwalla, Sungduk Yu, Phillip Howard, Tiep Le, Sharath Nittur Sridhar, David Cobbley, Hao Kang, Vasudev Lal
Abstract: Despite recent efforts in understanding the compression impact on large language models (LLMs) in terms of their downstream task performance and trustworthiness on relatively simpler uni-modal benchmarks (for example, question answering, common sense reasoning), their detailed study on multi-modal Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) is yet to be unveiled. Towards mitigating this gap, we present LVLM-Compress-Bench, a framework to first thoroughly study the broad impact of compression on the generative performance of LVLMs with multi-modal input driven tasks. In specific, we consider two major classes of compression for autoregressive models, namely KV cache and weight compression, for the dynamically growing intermediate cache and static weights, respectively. We use four LVLM variants of the popular LLaVA framework to present our analysis via integrating various state-of-the-art KV and weight compression methods including uniform, outlier-reduced, and group quantization for the KV cache and weights. With this framework we demonstrate on ten different multi-modal datasets with different capabilities including recognition, knowledge, language generation, spatial awareness, visual reasoning, hallucination and visual illusion identification, toxicity, stereotypes and bias. In specific, our framework demonstrates the compression impact on both general and ethically critical metrics leveraging a combination of real world and synthetic datasets to encompass diverse societal intersectional attributes. Extensive experimental evaluations yield diverse and intriguing observations on the behavior of LVLMs at different quantization budget of KV and weights, in both maintaining and losing performance as compared to the baseline model with FP16 data format. Code will be open-sourced at https://github.com/opengear-project/LVLM-compress-bench.
URLs: https://github.com/opengear-project/LVLM-compress-bench.
Authors: Yifan Yang, Kai Zhen, Bhavana Ganesh, Aram Galstyan, Goeric Huybrechts, Markus M\"uller, Jonas M. K\"ubler, Rupak Vignesh Swaminathan, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Sravan Babu Bodapati, Nathan Susanj, Zheng Zhang, Jack FitzGerald, Abhishek Kumar
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) pruning seeks to remove unimportant weights for inference speedup with minimal performance impact. However, existing methods often suffer from performance loss without full-model sparsity-aware fine-tuning. This paper presents Wanda++, a novel pruning framework that outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by utilizing decoder-block-level \textbf{regional} gradients. Specifically, Wanda++ improves the pruning score with regional gradients for the first time and proposes an efficient regional optimization method to minimize pruning-induced output discrepancies between the dense and sparse decoder output. Notably, Wanda++ improves perplexity by up to 32\% over Wanda in the language modeling task and generalizes effectively to downstream tasks. Further experiments indicate our proposed method is orthogonal to sparsity-aware fine-tuning, where Wanda++ can be combined with LoRA fine-tuning to achieve a similar perplexity improvement as the Wanda method. The proposed method is lightweight, pruning a 7B LLaMA model in under 10 minutes on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU.
Authors: Benjamin Th\'erien, Charles-\'Etienne Joseph, Zain Sarwar, Ashwinee Panda, Anirban Das, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Stephen Rawls, Sambit Sahu, Eugene Belilovsky, Irina Rish
Abstract: Sparsely-activated Mixture of Experts (MoE) transformers are promising architectures for foundation models. Compared to dense transformers that require the same amount of floating point operations (FLOPs) per forward pass, MoEs benefit from improved sample efficiency at training time and achieve much stronger performance. Many closed-source and open-source frontier language models have thus adopted an MoE architecture. Naturally, practitioners will want to extend the capabilities of these models with large amounts of newly collected data without completely re-training them. Prior work has shown that a simple combination of replay and learning rate re-warming and re-decaying can enable the continual pre-training (CPT) of dense decoder-only transformers with minimal performance degradation compared to full re-training. In the case of decoder-only MoE transformers, however, it is unclear how the routing algorithm will impact continual pre-training performance: 1) do the MoE transformer's routers exacerbate forgetting relative to a dense model?; 2) do the routers maintain a balanced load on previous distributions after CPT?; 3) are the same strategies applied to dense models sufficient to continually pre-train MoE LLMs? In what follows, we conduct a large-scale (>2B parameter switch and DeepSeek MoE LLMs trained for 600B tokens) empirical study across four MoE transformers to answer these questions. Our results establish a surprising robustness to distribution shifts for both Sinkhorn-Balanced and Z-and-Aux-loss-balanced routing algorithms, even in MoEs continually pre-trained without replay. Moreover, we show that MoE LLMs maintain their sample efficiency (relative to a FLOP-matched dense model) during CPT and that they can match the performance of a fully re-trained MoE at a fraction of the cost.
Authors: Beyazit Yalcinkaya, Niklas Lauffer, Marcell Vazquez-Chanlatte, Sanjit A. Seshia
Abstract: Automata-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) has given promising results for learning multi-task policies capable of performing temporally extended objectives given at runtime, done by pretraining and freezing automata embeddings prior to training the downstream policy. However, no theoretical guarantees were given. This work provides a theoretical framework for the automata-conditioned RL problem and shows that it is probably approximately correct learnable. We then present a technique for learning provably correct automata embeddings, guaranteeing optimal multi-task policy learning. Our experimental evaluation confirms these theoretical results.
Authors: Shwai He, Weilin Cai, Jiayi Huang, Ang Li
Abstract: The Mixture of Experts (MoE) is an effective architecture for scaling large language models by leveraging sparse expert activation, optimizing the trade-off between performance and efficiency. However, under expert parallelism, MoE suffers from inference inefficiencies due to imbalanced token-to-expert assignment, where some experts are overloaded while others remain underutilized. This imbalance leads to poor resource utilization and increased latency, as the most burdened expert dictates the overall delay, a phenomenon we define as the \textbf{\textit{Straggler Effect}}. To mitigate this, we propose Capacity-Aware Inference, including two key techniques: (1) \textbf{\textit{Capacity-Aware Token Drop}}, which discards overloaded tokens to regulate the maximum latency of MoE, and (2) \textbf{\textit{Capacity-Aware Token Reroute}}, which reallocates overflowed tokens to underutilized experts, balancing the token distribution. These techniques collectively optimize both high-load and low-load expert utilization, leading to a more efficient MoE inference pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, showing significant improvements in inference efficiency, e.g., 0.2\% average performance increase and a 1.94$\times$ inference speedup on Mixtral-8$\times$7B-Instruct.
Authors: Hengrui Xing, Cong Tian, Liang Zhao, Zhi Ma, WenSheng Wang, Nan Zhang, Chao Huang, Zhenhua Duan
Abstract: In recent years, the application of behavioral testing in Natural Language Processing (NLP) model evaluation has experienced a remarkable and substantial growth. However, the existing methods continue to be restricted by the requirements for manual labor and the limited scope of capability assessment. To address these limitations, we introduce AutoTestForge, an automated and multidimensional testing framework for NLP models in this paper. Within AutoTestForge, through the utilization of Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate test templates and instantiate them, manual involvement is significantly reduced. Additionally, a mechanism for the validation of test case labels based on differential testing is implemented which makes use of a multi-model voting system to guarantee the quality of test cases. The framework also extends the test suite across three dimensions, taxonomy, fairness, and robustness, offering a comprehensive evaluation of the capabilities of NLP models. This expansion enables a more in-depth and thorough assessment of the models, providing valuable insights into their strengths and weaknesses. A comprehensive evaluation across sentiment analysis (SA) and semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks demonstrates that AutoTestForge consistently outperforms existing datasets and testing tools, achieving higher error detection rates (an average of $30.89\%$ for SA and $34.58\%$ for STS). Moreover, different generation strategies exhibit stable effectiveness, with error detection rates ranging from $29.03\% - 36.82\%$.
Authors: Ling Team, Binwei Zeng, Chao Huang, Chao Zhang, Changxin Tian, Cong Chen, Dingnan Jin, Feng Yu, Feng Zhu, Feng Yuan, Fakang Wang, Gangshan Wang, Guangyao Zhai, Haitao Zhang, Huizhong Li, Jun Zhou, Jia Liu, Junpeng Fang, Junjie Ou, Jun Hu, Ji Luo, Ji Zhang, Jian Liu, Jian Sha, Jianxue Qian, Jiewei Wu, Junping Zhao, Jianguo Li, Jubao Feng, Jingchao Di, Junming Xu, Jinghua Yao, Kuan Xu, Kewei Du, Longfei Li, Lei Liang, Lu Yu, Li Tang, Lin Ju, Peng Xu, Qing Cui, Song Liu, Shicheng Li, Shun Song, Song Yan, Tengwei Cai, Tianyi Chen, Ting Guo, Ting Huang, Tao Feng, Tao Wu, Wei Wu, Xiaolu Zhang, Xueming Yang, Xin Zhao, Xiaobo Hu, Xin Lin, Yao Zhao, Yilong Wang, Yongzhen Guo, Yuanyuan Wang, Yue Yang, Yang Cao, Yuhao Fu, Yi Xiong, Yanzhe Li, Zhe Li, Zhiqiang Zhang, Ziqi Liu, Zhaoxin Huan, Zujie Wen, Zhenhang Sun, Zhuoxuan Du, Zhengyu He
Abstract: In this technical report, we tackle the challenges of training large-scale Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, focusing on overcoming cost inefficiency and resource limitations prevalent in such systems. To address these issues, we present two differently sized MoE large language models (LLMs), namely Ling-Lite and Ling-Plus (referred to as "Bailing" in Chinese, spelled B\v{a}il\'ing in Pinyin). Ling-Lite contains 16.8 billion parameters with 2.75 billion activated parameters, while Ling-Plus boasts 290 billion parameters with 28.8 billion activated parameters. Both models exhibit comparable performance to leading industry benchmarks. This report offers actionable insights to improve the efficiency and accessibility of AI development in resource-constrained settings, promoting more scalable and sustainable technologies. Specifically, to reduce training costs for large-scale MoE models, we propose innovative methods for (1) optimization of model architecture and training processes, (2) refinement of training anomaly handling, and (3) enhancement of model evaluation efficiency. Additionally, leveraging high-quality data generated from knowledge graphs, our models demonstrate superior capabilities in tool use compared to other models. Ultimately, our experimental findings demonstrate that a 300B MoE LLM can be effectively trained on lower-performance devices while achieving comparable performance to models of a similar scale, including dense and MoE models. Compared to high-performance devices, utilizing a lower-specification hardware system during the pre-training phase demonstrates significant cost savings, reducing computing costs by approximately 20%. The models can be accessed at https://huggingface.co/inclusionAI.
Authors: Hairu Wang, Yuan Feng, Xike Xie, S Kevin Zhou
Abstract: Although Large Language Models achieve strong success in many tasks, they still suffer from hallucinations and knowledge deficiencies in real-world applications. Many knowledge graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (KG-RAG) methods enhance the quality and credibility of LLMs by leveraging structure and semantic information in KGs as external knowledge bases. However, these methods struggle to effectively incorporate structure information, either incurring high computational costs or underutilizing available knowledge. Inspired by smoothing operations in graph representation learning, we propose path pooling, a simple, train-free strategy that introduces structure information through a novel path-centric pooling operation. It seamlessly integrates into existing KG-RAG methods in a plug-and-play manner, enabling richer structure information utilization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that incorporating the path pooling into the state-of-the-art KG-RAG method consistently improves performance across various settings while introducing negligible additional cost. Code is coming soon at https://github.com/hrwang00/path-pooling.
Authors: Yuning Wu, Jiahao Mei, Ming Yan, Chenliang Li, SHaopeng Lai, Yuran Ren, Zijia Wang, Ji Zhang, Mengyue Wu, Qin Jin, Fei Huang
Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced text generation capabilities, yet evaluating their performance in generative writing remains a challenge. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on generic text generation or limited in writing tasks, failing to capture the diverse requirements of high-quality written contents across various domains. To bridge this gap, we present WritingBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs across 6 core writing domains and 100 subdomains, encompassing creative, persuasive, informative, and technical writing. We further propose a query-dependent evaluation framework that empowers LLMs to dynamically generate instance-specific assessment criteria. This framework is complemented by a fine-tuned critic model for criteria-aware scoring, enabling evaluations in style, format and length. The framework's validity is further demonstrated by its data curation capability, which enables 7B-parameter models to approach state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. We open-source the benchmark, along with evaluation tools and modular framework components, to advance the development of LLMs in writing.
Authors: Zara Siddique, Irtaza Khalid, Liam D. Turner, Luis Espinosa-Anke
Abstract: We present a novel approach to bias mitigation in large language models (LLMs) by applying steering vectors to modify model activations in forward passes. We employ Bayesian optimization to systematically identify effective contrastive pair datasets across nine bias axes. When optimized on the BBQ dataset, our individually tuned steering vectors achieve average improvements of 12.2%, 4.7%, and 3.2% over the baseline for Mistral, Llama, and Qwen, respectively. Building on these promising results, we introduce Steering Vector Ensembles (SVE), a method that averages multiple individually optimized steering vectors, each targeting a specific bias axis such as age, race, or gender. By leveraging their collective strength, SVE outperforms individual steering vectors in both bias reduction and maintaining model performance. The work presents the first systematic investigation of steering vectors for bias mitigation, and we demonstrate that SVE is a powerful and computationally efficient strategy for reducing bias in LLMs, with broader implications for enhancing AI safety.
Authors: Sakharam Gawade, Shivam Akhouri, Chinmay Kulkarni, Jagdish Samant, Pragya Sahu, Aastik, Jai Pahal, Saswat Meher
Abstract: Large Action Models (LAMs) have revolutionized intelligent automation, but their application in healthcare faces challenges due to privacy concerns, latency, and dependency on internet access. This report introduces an ondevice, multi-agent healthcare assistant that overcomes these limitations. The system utilizes smaller, task-specific agents to optimize resources, ensure scalability and high performance. Our proposed system acts as a one-stop solution for health care needs with features like appointment booking, health monitoring, medication reminders, and daily health reporting. Powered by the Qwen Code Instruct 2.5 7B model, the Planner and Caller Agents achieve an average RougeL score of 85.5 for planning and 96.5 for calling for our tasks while being lightweight for on-device deployment. This innovative approach combines the benefits of ondevice systems with multi-agent architectures, paving the way for user-centric healthcare solutions.
Authors: Weigao Sun, Disen Lan, Tong Zhu, Xiaoye Qu, Yu Cheng
Abstract: Linear Sequence Modeling (LSM) like linear attention, state space models and linear RNNs, and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) have recently emerged as significant architectural improvements. In this paper, we introduce Linear-MoE, a production-level system for modeling and training large-scale models that integrate LSM with MoE. Linear-MoE leverages the advantages of both LSM modules for linear-complexity sequence modeling and MoE layers for sparsely activation, aiming to offer high performance with efficient training. The Linear-MoE system comprises: 1) Modeling subsystem, which provides a unified framework supporting all instances of LSM. and 2) Training subsystem, which facilitates efficient training by incorporating various advanced parallelism technologies, particularly Sequence Parallelism designed for Linear-MoE models. Additionally, we explore hybrid models that combine Linear-MoE layers with standard Transformer-MoE layers with its Sequence Parallelism to further enhance model flexibility and performance. Evaluations on two model series, A0.3B-2B and A1B-7B, demonstrate Linear-MoE achieves efficiency gains while maintaining competitive performance on various benchmarks, showcasing its potential as a next-generation foundational model architecture. Code: https://github.com/OpenSparseLLMs/Linear-MoE.
Authors: Qijiong Liu, Jieming Zhu, Lu Fan, Kun Wang, Hengchang Hu, Wei Guo, Yong Liu, Xiao-Ming Wu
Abstract: In recent years, integrating large language models (LLMs) into recommender systems has created new opportunities for improving recommendation quality. However, a comprehensive benchmark is needed to thoroughly evaluate and compare the recommendation capabilities of LLMs with traditional recommender systems. In this paper, we introduce RecBench, which systematically investigates various item representation forms (including unique identifier, text, semantic embedding, and semantic identifier) and evaluates two primary recommendation tasks, i.e., click-through rate prediction (CTR) and sequential recommendation (SeqRec). Our extensive experiments cover up to 17 large models and are conducted across five diverse datasets from fashion, news, video, books, and music domains. Our findings indicate that LLM-based recommenders outperform conventional recommenders, achieving up to a 5% AUC improvement in the CTR scenario and up to a 170% NDCG@10 improvement in the SeqRec scenario. However, these substantial performance gains come at the expense of significantly reduced inference efficiency, rendering the LLM-as-RS paradigm impractical for real-time recommendation environments. We aim for our findings to inspire future research, including recommendation-specific model acceleration methods. We will release our code, data, configurations, and platform to enable other researchers to reproduce and build upon our experimental results.
Authors: Frederic Lemieux, Aisha Behr, Clara Kellermann-Bryant, Zaki Mohammed
Abstract: Cognitive biases, systematic deviations from rationality in judgment, pose significant challenges in generating objective content. This paper introduces a novel approach for real-time cognitive bias detection in user-generated text using large language models (LLMs) and advanced prompt engineering techniques. The proposed system analyzes textual data to identify common cognitive biases such as confirmation bias, circular reasoning, and hidden assumption. By designing tailored prompts, the system effectively leverages LLMs' capabilities to both recognize and mitigate these biases, improving the quality of human-generated content (e.g., news, media, reports). Experimental results demonstrate the high accuracy of our approach in identifying cognitive biases, offering a valuable tool for enhancing content objectivity and reducing the risks of biased decision-making.
Authors: Junbo Zhao, Ting Zhang, Jiayu Sun, Mi Tian, Hua Huang
Abstract: Geometry problem solving has garnered increasing attention due to its potential applications in intelligent education field. Inspired by the observation that text often introduces ambiguities that diagrams can clarify, this paper presents Pi-GPS, a novel framework that unleashes the power of diagrammatic information to resolve textual ambiguities, an aspect largely overlooked in prior research. Specifically, we design a micro module comprising a rectifier and verifier: the rectifier employs MLLMs to disambiguate text based on the diagrammatic context, while the verifier ensures the rectified output adherence to geometric rules, mitigating model hallucinations. Additionally, we explore the impact of LLMs in theorem predictor based on the disambiguated formal language. Empirical results demonstrate that Pi-GPS surpasses state-of-the-art models, achieving a nearly 10\% improvement on Geometry3K over prior neural-symbolic approaches. We hope this work highlights the significance of resolving textual ambiguity in multimodal mathematical reasoning, a crucial factor limiting performance.
Authors: Nicolo' Fontana, Francesco Corso, Enrico Zuccolotto, Francesco Pierri
Abstract: The increasing prevalence of online misinformation has heightened the demand for automated fact-checking solutions. Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as potential tools for assisting in this task, but their effectiveness remains uncertain. This study evaluates the fact-checking capabilities of various open-source LLMs, focusing on their ability to assess claims with different levels of contextual information. We conduct three key experiments: (1) evaluating whether LLMs can identify the semantic relationship between a claim and a fact-checking article, (2) assessing models' accuracy in verifying claims when given a related fact-checking article, and (3) testing LLMs' fact-checking abilities when leveraging data from external knowledge sources such as Google and Wikipedia. Our results indicate that LLMs perform well in identifying claim-article connections and verifying fact-checked stories but struggle with confirming factual news, where they are outperformed by traditional fine-tuned models such as RoBERTa. Additionally, the introduction of external knowledge does not significantly enhance LLMs' performance, calling for more tailored approaches. Our findings highlight both the potential and limitations of LLMs in automated fact-checking, emphasizing the need for further refinements before they can reliably replace human fact-checkers.
Authors: Huatong Song, Jinhao Jiang, Yingqian Min, Jie Chen, Zhipeng Chen, Wayne Xin Zhao, Lei Fang, Ji-Rong Wen
Abstract: Existing Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown the potential of reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the complex reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models~(LLMs). While they achieve remarkable performance on challenging tasks such as mathematics and coding, they often rely on their internal knowledge to solve problems, which can be inadequate for time-sensitive or knowledge-intensive questions, leading to inaccuracies and hallucinations. To address this, we propose \textbf{R1-Searcher}, a novel two-stage outcome-based RL approach designed to enhance the search capabilities of LLMs. This method allows LLMs to autonomously invoke external search systems to access additional knowledge during the reasoning process. Our framework relies exclusively on RL, without requiring process rewards or distillation for a cold start. % effectively generalizing to out-of-domain datasets and supporting both Base and Instruct models. Our experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous strong RAG methods, even when compared to the closed-source GPT-4o-mini.
Authors: Dong Shu, Xuansheng Wu, Haiyan Zhao, Daking Rai, Ziyu Yao, Ninghao Liu, Mengnan Du
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, yet their internal mechanisms remain largely opaque. Recently, mechanistic interpretability has attracted significant attention from the research community as a means to understand the inner workings of LLMs. Among various mechanistic interpretability approaches, Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a particularly promising method due to their ability to disentangle the complex, superimposed features within LLMs into more interpretable components. This paper presents a comprehensive examination of SAEs as a promising approach to interpreting and understanding LLMs. We provide a systematic overview of SAE principles, architectures, and applications specifically tailored for LLM analysis, covering theoretical foundations, implementation strategies, and recent developments in sparsity mechanisms. We also explore how SAEs can be leveraged to explain the internal workings of LLMs, steer model behaviors in desired directions, and develop more transparent training methodologies for future models. Despite the challenges that remain around SAE implementation and scaling, they continue to provide valuable tools for understanding the internal mechanisms of large language models.
Authors: Simran Arora, Brandon Yang, Sabri Eyuboglu, Avanika Narayan, Andrew Hojel, Immanuel Trummer, Christopher R\'e
Abstract: A long standing goal of the data management community is to develop general, automated systems that ingest semi-structured documents and output queryable tables without human effort or domain specific customization. Given the sheer variety of potential documents, state-of-the art systems make simplifying assumptions and use domain specific training. In this work, we ask whether we can maintain generality by using large language models (LLMs). LLMs, which are pretrained on broad data, can perform diverse downstream tasks simply conditioned on natural language task descriptions. We propose and evaluate EVAPORATE, a simple, prototype system powered by LLMs. We identify two fundamentally different strategies for implementing this system: prompt the LLM to directly extract values from documents or prompt the LLM to synthesize code that performs the extraction. Our evaluations show a cost-quality tradeoff between these two approaches. Code synthesis is cheap, but far less accurate than directly processing each document with the LLM. To improve quality while maintaining low cost, we propose an extended code synthesis implementation, EVAPORATE-CODE+, which achieves better quality than direct extraction. Our key insight is to generate many candidate functions and ensemble their extractions using weak supervision. EVAPORATE-CODE+ not only outperforms the state-of-the art systems, but does so using a sublinear pass over the documents with the LLM. This equates to a 110x reduction in the number of tokens the LLM needs to process, averaged across 16 real-world evaluation settings of 10k documents each.
Authors: Carel van Niekerk, Christian Geishauser, Michael Heck, Shutong Feng, Hsien-chin Lin, Nurul Lubis, Benjamin Ruppik, Renato Vukovic, Milica Ga\v{s}i\'c
Abstract: Supervised neural approaches are hindered by their dependence on large, meticulously annotated datasets, a requirement that is particularly cumbersome for sequential tasks. The quality of annotations tends to deteriorate with the transition from expert-based to crowd-sourced labelling. To address these challenges, we present CAMEL (Confidence-based Acquisition Model for Efficient self-supervised active Learning), a pool-based active learning framework tailored to sequential multi-output problems. CAMEL possesses two core features: (1) it requires expert annotators to label only a fraction of a chosen sequence, and (2) it facilitates self-supervision for the remainder of the sequence. By deploying a label correction mechanism, CAMEL can also be utilised for data cleaning. We evaluate CAMEL on two sequential tasks, with a special emphasis on dialogue belief tracking, a task plagued by the constraints of limited and noisy datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that CAMEL significantly outperforms the baselines in terms of efficiency. Furthermore, the data corrections suggested by our method contribute to an overall improvement in the quality of the resulting datasets.
Authors: Fatima Muhammad Adam, Abubakar Yakubu Zandam, Isa Inuwa-Dutse
Abstract: Hausa, a major Chadic language spoken by over 100 million people mostly in West Africa is considered a low-resource language from a computational linguistic perspective. This classification indicates a scarcity of linguistic resources and tools necessary for handling various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including the detection of offensive content. To address this gap, we conducted two set of studies (1) a user study (n=101) to explore cyberbullying in Hausa and (2) an empirical study that led to the creation of the first dataset of offensive terms in the Hausa language. We developed detection systems trained on this dataset and compared their performance against relevant multilingual models, including Google Translate. Our detection system successfully identified over 70% of offensive, whereas baseline models frequently mistranslated such terms. We attribute this discrepancy to the nuanced nature of the Hausa language and the reliance of baseline models on direct or literal translation due to limited data to build purposive detection systems. These findings highlight the importance of incorporating cultural context and linguistic nuances when developing NLP models for low-resource languages such as Hausa. A post hoc analysis further revealed that offensive language is particularly prevalent in discussions related to religion and politics. To foster a safer online environment, we recommend involving diverse stakeholders with expertise in local contexts and demographics. Their insights will be crucial in developing more accurate detection systems and targeted moderation strategies that align with cultural sensitivities.
Authors: Simran Arora, Sabri Eyuboglu, Michael Zhang, Aman Timalsina, Silas Alberti, Dylan Zinsley, James Zou, Atri Rudra, Christopher R\'e
Abstract: Recent work has shown that attention-based language models excel at recall, the ability to ground generations in tokens previously seen in context. However, the efficiency of attention-based models is bottle-necked during inference by the KV-cache's aggressive memory consumption. In this work, we explore whether we can improve language model efficiency (e.g. by reducing memory consumption) without compromising on recall. By applying experiments and theory to a broad set of architectures, we identify a key tradeoff between a model's state size and recall ability. We show that efficient alternatives to attention (e.g. H3, Mamba, RWKV) maintain a fixed-size recurrent state, but struggle at recall. We propose BASED a simple architecture combining linear and sliding window attention. By varying BASED window size and linear attention feature dimension, we can dial the state size and traverse the pareto frontier of the recall-memory tradeoff curve, recovering the full quality of attention on one end and the small state size of attention-alternatives on the other. We train language models up to 1.3b parameters and show that BASED matches the strongest sub-quadratic models (e.g. Mamba) in perplexity and outperforms them on real-world recall-intensive tasks by 6.22 accuracy points. Implementations of linear attention are often less efficient than optimized standard attention implementations. To make BASED competitive, we develop IO-aware algorithms that enable 24x higher throughput on language generation than FlashAttention-2, when generating 1024 tokens using 1.3b parameter models. Code for this work is provided at: https://github.com/HazyResearch/based.
Authors: Jinwei Yao, Kaiqi Chen, Kexun Zhang, Jiaxuan You, Binhang Yuan, Zeke Wang, Tao Lin
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly employed for complex tasks that process multiple generation calls in a tree structure with shared prefixes of tokens, including few-shot prompting, multi-step reasoning, speculative decoding, etc. However, existing inference systems for tree-based applications are inefficient due to improper partitioning of queries and KV cache during attention calculation. This leads to two main issues: (1) a lack of memory access (IO) reuse for KV cache of shared prefixes, and (2) poor load balancing.As a result, there is redundant KV cache IO between GPU global memory and shared memory, along with low GPU utilization. To address these challenges, we propose DeFT(Decoding with Flash Tree-Attention), a hardware-efficient attention algorithm with prefix-aware and load-balanced KV cache partitions. DeFT reduces the number of read/write operations of KV cache during attention calculation through KV-Guided Grouping, a method that avoids repeatedly loading KV cache of shared prefixes in attention computation. Additionally, we propose Flattened Tree KV Splitting, a mechanism that ensures even distribution of the KV cache across partitions with little computation redundancy, enhancing GPU utilization during attention computations. By reducing 73-99% KV cache IO and nearly 100% IO for partial results during attention calculation, DeFT achieves up to 2.23/3.59x speedup in the end-to-end/attention latency across three practical tree-based workloads compared to state-of-the-art attention algorithms. Our code is available at https://github.com/LINs-lab/DeFT.
Authors: William Hogan, Jingbo Shang
Abstract: Recent research efforts have explored the potential of leveraging natural language inference (NLI) techniques to enhance relation extraction (RE). In this vein, we introduce MetaEntailRE, a novel adaptation method that harnesses NLI principles to enhance RE performance. Our approach follows past works by verbalizing relation classes into class-indicative hypotheses, aligning a traditionally multi-class classification task to one of textual entailment. We introduce three key enhancements: (1) Meta-class analysis which, instead of labeling non-entailed premise-hypothesis pairs with the less informative "neutral" entailment label, provides additional context by analyzing overarching meta-relationships between classes; (2) Feasible hypothesis filtering, which removes unlikely hypotheses from consideration based on domain knowledge derived from data; and (3) Group-based prediction selection, which further improves performance by selecting highly confident predictions. MetaEntailRE is conceptually simple and empirically powerful, yielding significant improvements over conventional relation extraction techniques and other NLI formulations. We observe surprisingly large F1 gains of 17.6 points on BioRED and 13.4 points on ReTACRED compared to conventional methods, underscoring the versatility of MetaEntailRE across both biomedical and general domains.
Authors: Changyu Chen, Zichen Liu, Chao Du, Tianyu Pang, Qian Liu, Arunesh Sinha, Pradeep Varakantham, Min Lin
Abstract: Human alignment in large language models (LLMs) is an active area of research. A recent groundbreaking work, direct preference optimization (DPO), has greatly simplified the process from past work in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) by bypassing the reward learning stage in RLHF. DPO, after training, provides an implicit reward model. In this work, we make a novel observation that this implicit reward model can by itself be used in a bootstrapping fashion to further align the LLM. Our approach is to use the rewards from a current LLM to construct a preference dataset, which is then used in subsequent DPO rounds. We incorporate two refinements to further improve our approach: 1) length-regularized reward shaping to make the preference dataset length-unbiased; 2) experience replay to enhance the quality of the preference dataset. Our approach, named self-alignment with DPO ImpliCit rEwards (DICE), shows great improvements in alignment. It achieves an increase of more than 8$\\%$ in lengthcontrolled win rate on AlpacaEval 2 for all the different base models that we tried, without relying on external feedback. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/dice.
Authors: Matthieu Meeus, Igor Shilov, Shubham Jain, Manuel Faysse, Marek Rei, Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye
Abstract: Whether LLMs memorize their training data and what this means, from measuring privacy leakage to detecting copyright violations, has become a rapidly growing area of research. In the last few months, more than 10 new methods have been proposed to perform Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) against LLMs. Contrary to traditional MIAs which rely on fixed-but randomized-records or models, these methods are mostly trained and tested on datasets collected post-hoc. Sets of members and non-members, used to evaluate the MIA, are constructed using informed guesses after the release of a model. This lack of randomization raises concerns of a distribution shift between members and non-members. In this work, we first extensively review the literature on MIAs against LLMs and show that, while most work focuses on sequence-level MIAs evaluated in post-hoc setups, a range of target models, motivations and units of interest are considered. We then quantify distribution shifts present in 6 datasets used in the literature using a model-less bag of word classifier and show that all datasets constructed post-hoc suffer from strong distribution shifts. These shifts invalidate the claims of LLMs memorizing strongly in real-world scenarios and, potentially, also the methodological contributions of the recent papers based on these datasets. Yet, all hope might not be lost. We introduce important considerations to properly evaluate MIAs against LLMs and discuss, in turn, potential ways forwards: randomized test splits, injections of randomized (unique) sequences, randomized fine-tuning, and several post-hoc control methods. While each option comes with its advantages and limitations, we believe they collectively provide solid grounds to guide MIA development and study LLM memorization. We conclude with an overview of recommended approaches to benchmark sequence-level and document-level MIAs against LLMs.
Authors: Renato Vukovic, David Arps, Carel van Niekerk, Benjamin Matthias Ruppik, Hsien-Chin Lin, Michael Heck, Milica Ga\v{s}i\'c
Abstract: State-of-the-art task-oriented dialogue systems typically rely on task-specific ontologies for fulfilling user queries. The majority of task-oriented dialogue data, such as customer service recordings, comes without ontology and annotation. Such ontologies are normally built manually, limiting the application of specialised systems. Dialogue ontology construction is an approach for automating that process and typically consists of two steps: term extraction and relation extraction. In this work, we focus on relation extraction in a transfer learning set-up. To improve the generalisation, we propose an extension to the decoding mechanism of large language models. We adapt Chain-of-Thought (CoT) decoding, recently developed for reasoning problems, to generative relation extraction. Here, we generate multiple branches in the decoding space and select the relations based on a confidence threshold. By constraining the decoding to ontology terms and relations, we aim to decrease the risk of hallucination. We conduct extensive experimentation on two widely used datasets and find improvements in performance on target ontology for source fine-tuned and one-shot prompted large language models.
Authors: Xinyue Fang, Zhen Huang, Zhiliang Tian, Minghui Fang, Ziyi Pan, Quntian Fang, Zhihua Wen, Hengyue Pan, Dongsheng Li
Abstract: LLMs obtain remarkable performance but suffer from hallucinations. Most research on detecting hallucination focuses on the questions with short and concrete correct answers that are easy to check the faithfulness. Hallucination detections for text generation with open-ended answers are more challenging. Some researchers use external knowledge to detect hallucinations in generated texts, but external resources for specific scenarios are hard to access. Recent studies on detecting hallucinations in long text without external resources conduct consistency comparison among multiple sampled outputs. To handle long texts, researchers split long texts into multiple facts and individually compare the consistency of each pairs of facts. However, these methods (1) hardly achieve alignment among multiple facts; (2) overlook dependencies between multiple contextual facts. In this paper, we propose a graph-based context-aware (GCA) hallucination detection for text generations, which aligns knowledge facts and considers the dependencies between contextual knowledge triples in consistency comparison. Particularly, to align multiple facts, we conduct a triple-oriented response segmentation to extract multiple knowledge triples. To model dependencies among contextual knowledge triple (facts), we construct contextual triple into a graph and enhance triples' interactions via message passing and aggregating via RGCN. To avoid the omission of knowledge triples in long text, we conduct a LLM-based reverse verification via reconstructing the knowledge triples. Experiments show that our model enhances hallucination detection and excels all baselines.
Authors: Junfeng Fang, Houcheng Jiang, Kun Wang, Yunshan Ma, Shi Jie, Xiang Wang, Xiangnan He, Tat-seng Chua
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit hallucinations due to incorrect or outdated knowledge. Hence, model editing methods have emerged to enable targeted knowledge updates. To achieve this, a prevailing paradigm is the locating-then-editing approach, which first locates influential parameters and then edits them by introducing a perturbation. While effective, current studies have demonstrated that this perturbation inevitably disrupt the originally preserved knowledge within LLMs, especially in sequential editing scenarios. To address this, we introduce AlphaEdit, a novel solution that projects perturbation onto the null space of the preserved knowledge before applying it to the parameters. We theoretically prove that this projection ensures the output of post-edited LLMs remains unchanged when queried about the preserved knowledge, thereby mitigating the issue of disruption. Extensive experiments on various LLMs, including LLaMA3, GPT2-XL, and GPT-J, show that AlphaEdit boosts the performance of most locating-then-editing methods by an average of 36.4% with a single line of additional code for projection solely. Our code is available at: https://github.com/jianghoucheng/AlphaEdit.
Authors: German Gritsai, Anastasia Voznyuk, Andrey Grabovoy, Yury Chekhovich
Abstract: The rapid development of autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly improved the quality of generated texts, necessitating reliable machine-generated text detectors. A huge number of detectors and collections with AI fragments have emerged, and several detection methods even showed recognition quality up to 99.9% according to the target metrics in such collections. However, the quality of such detectors tends to drop dramatically in the wild, posing a question: Are detectors actually highly trustworthy or do their high benchmark scores come from the poor quality of evaluation datasets? In this paper, we emphasise the need for robust and qualitative methods for evaluating generated data to be secure against bias and low generalising ability of future model. We present a systematic review of datasets from competitions dedicated to AI-generated content detection and propose methods for evaluating the quality of datasets containing AI-generated fragments. In addition, we discuss the possibility of using high-quality generated data to achieve two goals: improving the training of detection models and improving the training datasets themselves. Our contribution aims to facilitate a better understanding of the dynamics between human and machine text, which will ultimately support the integrity of information in an increasingly automated world. The code is available at https://github.com/Advacheck-OU/ai-dataset-analysing.
Authors: Guangliang Liu, Zimo Qi, Xitong Zhang, Lu Cheng, Kristen Marie Johnson
Abstract: Though there has been intensive attention to the self-correction capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), conclusions regarding its effectiveness remain varied. In this paper, we investigate a fundamental question: is moral self-correction an innate capability in LLMs? To explore this, we conduct (1) a mechanistic analysis of how key components of self-correction, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and external feedback, interact to enable moral self-correction; and (2) a behavioral analysis of LLMs' ability to distinguish between desired and undesired outputs, introducing a self-distinguish framework. Our mechanistic analysis reveals that LLMs struggle to effectively leverage helpful feedback, and conflicts can arise between feedback and CoT reasoning. These limitations suggest that LLMs fail to identify useful contextual information, instead prioritizing their own internal knowledge. Additionally, our behavioral analysis indicates that LLMs struggle to differentiate among their own outputs. Based on these empirical findings across two analytical dimensions, mechanism and behavior, we argue that moral self-correction is not an innate capability of LLMs.
Authors: Minkai Xu, Tomas Geffner, Karsten Kreis, Weili Nie, Yilun Xu, Jure Leskovec, Stefano Ermon, Arash Vahdat
Abstract: Despite remarkable progress in autoregressive language models, alternative generative paradigms beyond left-to-right generation are still being actively explored. Discrete diffusion models, with the capacity for parallel generation, have recently emerged as a promising alternative. Unfortunately, these models still underperform the autoregressive counterparts, with the performance gap increasing when reducing the number of sampling steps. Our analysis reveals that this degradation is a consequence of an imperfect approximation used by diffusion models. In this work, we propose Energy-based Diffusion Language Model (EDLM), an energy-based model operating at the full sequence level for each diffusion step, introduced to improve the underlying approximation used by diffusion models. More specifically, we introduce an EBM in a residual form, and show that its parameters can be obtained by leveraging a pretrained autoregressive model or by finetuning a bidirectional transformer via noise contrastive estimation. We also propose an efficient generation algorithm via parallel important sampling. Comprehensive experiments on language modeling benchmarks show that our model can consistently outperform state-of-the-art diffusion models by a significant margin, and approaches autoregressive models' perplexity. We further show that, without any generation performance drop, our framework offers a 1.3$\times$ sampling speedup over existing diffusion models. Reproduced code is available at https://github.com/MinkaiXu/Energy-Diffusion-LLM.
Authors: Junchao Wu, Runzhe Zhan, Derek F. Wong, Shu Yang, Xinyi Yang, Yulin Yuan, Lidia S. Chao
Abstract: Detecting text generated by large language models (LLMs) is of great recent interest. With zero-shot methods like DetectGPT, detection capabilities have reached impressive levels. However, the reliability of existing detectors in real-world applications remains underexplored. In this study, we present a new benchmark, DetectRL, highlighting that even state-of-the-art (SOTA) detection techniques still underperformed in this task. We collected human-written datasets from domains where LLMs are particularly prone to misuse. Using popular LLMs, we generated data that better aligns with real-world applications. Unlike previous studies, we employed heuristic rules to create adversarial LLM-generated text, simulating various prompts usages, human revisions like word substitutions, and writing noises like spelling mistakes. Our development of DetectRL reveals the strengths and limitations of current SOTA detectors. More importantly, we analyzed the potential impact of writing styles, model types, attack methods, the text lengths, and real-world human writing factors on different types of detectors. We believe DetectRL could serve as an effective benchmark for assessing detectors in real-world scenarios, evolving with advanced attack methods, thus providing more stressful evaluation to drive the development of more efficient detectors. Data and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/NLP2CT/DetectRL.
Authors: Cau\~a Ferreira Barros, Bruna Borges Azevedo, Valdemar Vicente Graciano Neto, Mohamad Kassab, Marcos Kalinowski, Hugo Alexandre D. do Nascimento, Michelle C. G. S. P. Bandeira
Abstract: The exponential growth of text-based data in domains such as healthcare, education, and social sciences has outpaced the capacity of traditional qualitative analysis methods, which are time-intensive and prone to subjectivity. Large Language Models (LLMs), powered by advanced generative AI, have emerged as transformative tools capable of automating and enhancing qualitative analysis. This study systematically maps the literature on the use of LLMs for qualitative research, exploring their application contexts, configurations, methodologies, and evaluation metrics. Findings reveal that LLMs are utilized across diverse fields, demonstrating the potential to automate processes traditionally requiring extensive human input. However, challenges such as reliance on prompt engineering, occasional inaccuracies, and contextual limitations remain significant barriers. This research highlights opportunities for integrating LLMs with human expertise, improving model robustness, and refining evaluation methodologies. By synthesizing trends and identifying research gaps, this study aims to guide future innovations in the application of LLMs for qualitative analysis.
Authors: Jonas Golde, Patrick Haller, Max Ploner, Fabio Barth, Nicolaas Jedema, Alan Akbik
Abstract: Zero-shot named entity recognition (NER) is the task of detecting named entities of specific types (such as 'Person' or 'Medicine') without any training examples. Current research increasingly relies on large synthetic datasets, automatically generated to cover tens of thousands of distinct entity types, to train zero-shot NER models. However, in this paper, we find that these synthetic datasets often contain entity types that are semantically highly similar to (or even the same as) those in standard evaluation benchmarks. Because of this overlap, we argue that reported F1 scores for zero-shot NER overestimate the true capabilities of these approaches. Further, we argue that current evaluation setups provide an incomplete picture of zero-shot abilities since they do not quantify the label shift (i.e., the similarity of labels) between training and evaluation datasets. To address these issues, we propose Familiarity, a novel metric that captures both the semantic similarity between entity types in training and evaluation, as well as their frequency in the training data, to provide an estimate of label shift. It allows researchers to contextualize reported zero-shot NER scores when using custom synthetic training datasets. Further, it enables researchers to generate evaluation setups of various transfer difficulties for fine-grained analysis of zero-shot NER.
Authors: Mufan Xu, Kehai Chen, Xuefeng Bai, Muyun Yang, Tiejun Zhao, Min Zhang
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) based on generative pre-trained Transformer have achieved remarkable performance on knowledge graph question-answering (KGQA) tasks. However, LLMs often produce ungrounded subgraph planning or reasoning results in KGQA due to the hallucinatory behavior brought by the generative paradigm. To tackle this issue, we propose READS to reformulate the KGQA process into discriminative subtasks, which simplifies the search space for each subtasks. Based on the subtasks, we design a new corresponding discriminative inference strategy to conduct the reasoning for KGQA, thereby alleviating hallucination and ungrounded reasoning issues in LLMs. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms multiple strong comparison methods, along with achieving state-of-the-art performance on widely used benchmarks WebQSP and CWQ.
Authors: Roseval Malaquias Junior, Ramon Pires, Thales Sales Almeida, Kenzo Sakiyama, Roseli A. F. Romero, Rodrigo Nogueira
Abstract: Scaling laws for language models have often focused on finding the optimal model size and token count for training from scratch. However, achieving this optimal balance requires significant compute resources due to the extensive data demands when training models from randomly-initialized weights. Continued pretraining offers a cost-effective alternative, leveraging the compute investment from pretrained models to incorporate new knowledge without requiring extensive new data. Recent findings suggest that data quality influences constants in scaling laws, thereby altering the optimal parameter-token allocation ratio. Building on this insight, we investigate the interplay between domain specialization and model size during continued pretraining under compute-constrained scenarios. Our goal is to identify an optimal training regime for this scenario and detect patterns in this interplay that can be generalized across different model sizes and domains. To compare general and specialized training, we filtered a web-based dataset to extract data from three domains: legal, medical, and accounting. We pretrained models with 1.5B, 3B, 7B, and 14B parameters on both the unfiltered and filtered datasets, then evaluated their performance on domain-specific exams. Results show that as model size increases, specialized models outperform general models while requiring less training compute. Additionally, their growing compute efficiency leads to reduced forgetting of previously learned knowledge.
Authors: Yachao Zhao, Bo Wang, Yan Wang
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to exhibit various biases and stereotypes in their generated content. While extensive research has investigated bias in LLMs, prior work has predominantly focused on explicit bias, leaving the more nuanced implicit biases largely unexplored. This paper presents a systematic framework grounded in social psychology theories to investigate and compare explicit and implicit biases in LLMs. We propose a novel "self-reflection" based evaluation framework that operates in two phases: first measuring implicit bias through simulated psychological assessment methods, then evaluating explicit bias by prompting LLMs to analyze their own generated content. Through extensive experiments on state-of-the-art LLMs across multiple social dimensions, we demonstrate that LLMs exhibit a substantial inconsistency between explicit and implicit biases, where explicit biases manifest as mild stereotypes while implicit biases show strong stereotypes. Furthermore, we investigate the underlying factors contributing to this explicit-implicit bias inconsistency. Our experiments examine the effects of training data scale, model parameters, and alignment techniques. Results indicate that while explicit bias diminishes with increased training data and model size, implicit bias exhibits a contrasting upward trend. Notably, contemporary alignment methods (e.g., RLHF, DPO) effectively suppress explicit bias but show limited efficacy in mitigating implicit bias. These findings suggest that while scaling up models and alignment training can address explicit bias, the challenge of implicit bias requires novel approaches beyond current methodologies.
Authors: Yang Fan
Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on massive-scale corpora, the issue of data contamination has become increasingly severe, leading to potential overestimation of model performance during evaluation. To address this, we propose AdEval (Alignment-based Dynamic Evaluation), a dynamic data evaluation method aimed at mitigating the impact of data contamination on evaluation reliability. Experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate that AdEval effectively reduces the impact of data contamination on evaluation outcomes, enhancing both the fairness and reliability of the evaluation process.
Authors: Yongcheng Zeng, Xinyu Cui, Xuanfa Jin, Guoqing Liu, Zexu Sun, Quan He, Dong Li, Ning Yang, Jianye Hao, Haifeng Zhang, Jun Wang
Abstract: A truly intelligent Large Language Model (LLM) should be capable of correcting errors in its responses through external interactions. However, even the most advanced models often face challenges in improving their outputs. In this paper, we explore how to cultivate LLMs with the self-refinement capability through iterative preference training, and how this ability can be leveraged to improve model performance during inference. To this end, we introduce a novel post-training and inference framework, called ARIES: Adaptive Refinement and Iterative Enhancement Structure. This method iteratively performs preference training and self-refinement-based data collection. During training, ARIES strengthen the model's direct question-answering capability while simultaneously unlocking its self-refinement potential. During inference, ARIES harnesses this self-refinement capability to generate a series of progressively refined responses, which are then filtered using either the Reward Model Scoring or a simple yet effective Rule-Based Selection mechanism, specifically tailored to our approach, to construct a dataset for the next round of preference training. Experimental results demonstrate the remarkable performance of ARIES. When applied to the Llama-3.1-8B model and under the self-refinement setting, ARIES surpasses powerful models such as GPT-4o, achieving 62.3% length-controlled (LC) and a 63.3% raw win rates on AlpacaEval 2, outperforming Iterative DPO by 27.8% and 35.5% respectively, as well as a 50.3% win rate on Arena-Hard, surpassing Iterative DPO by 26.6%. Furthermore, ARIES consistently enhances performance on mathematical reasoning tasks like GSM8K and MATH.
Authors: Neha Srikanth, Rachel Rudinger
Abstract: Decomposition of text into atomic propositions is a flexible framework allowing for the closer inspection of input and output text. We use atomic decomposition of hypotheses in two natural language reasoning tasks, traditional NLI and defeasible NLI, to form atomic sub-problems, or granular inferences that models must weigh when solving the overall problem. These atomic sub-problems serve as a tool to further understand the structure of both NLI and defeasible reasoning, probe a model's consistency and understanding of different inferences, and measure the diversity of examples in benchmark datasets. Our results indicate that LLMs still struggle with logical consistency on atomic NLI and defeasible NLI sub-problems. Lastly, we identify critical atomic sub-problems of defeasible NLI examples, or those that most contribute to the overall label, and propose a method to measure the inferential consistency of a model, a metric designed to capture the degree to which a model makes consistently correct or incorrect predictions about the same fact under different contexts.
Authors: Soyoung Yoon, Dongha Ahn, Youngwon Lee, Minkyu Jung, HyungJoo Jang, Seung-won Hwang
Abstract: Mitigating positional bias of language models (LMs) for listwise inputs is a well-known and important problem (e.g., lost-in-the-middle). While zero-shot order-invariant LMs have been proposed to solve this issue, their success on practical listwise problems has been limited. In this work, as a first contribution, we identify and overcome two limitations to make zero-shot invariant LMs more practical: (1) training and inference distribution mismatch arising from modifying positional ID assignments to enforce invariance, and (2) failure to adapt to a mixture of order-invariant and sensitive inputs in practical listwise problems. Then, to overcome these issues we propose (1) RoToR, a zero-shot invariant LM for genuinely order-invariant inputs with minimal modifications of positional IDs, and (2) Selective Routing, an adaptive framework that handles both order-invariant and order-sensitive inputs in listwise tasks. On the Lost in the middle (LitM), Knowledge Graph QA (KGQA), and MMLU benchmarks, we show that RoToR with Selective Routing can effectively handle practical listwise input tasks in a zero-shot manner.
Authors: Yansheng Mao, Yufei Xu, Jiaqi Li, Fanxu Meng, Haotong Yang, Zilong Zheng, Xiyuan Wang, Muhan Zhang
Abstract: Long context understanding remains challenging for large language models due to their limited context windows. This paper presents Long Input Fine-Tuning (LIFT), a novel framework for long-context modeling that can improve the long-context performance of arbitrary (short-context) LLMs by dynamically adapting model parameters based on the long input. Importantly, LIFT, rather than endlessly extending the context window size to accommodate increasingly longer inputs in context, chooses to store and absorb the long input in parameter. By fine-tuning the long input into model parameters, LIFT allows short-context LLMs to answer questions even when the required information is not provided in the context during inference. Furthermore, to enhance LIFT performance while maintaining the original in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, we introduce Gated Memory, a specialized attention adapter that automatically balances long input memorization and ICL. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the strengths and limitations of LIFT on long context understanding, offering valuable directions for future research.
Authors: Siwei Wu, Yizhi Li, Xingwei Qu, Rishi Ravikumar, Yucheng Li, Tyler Loakman, Shanghaoran Quan, Xiaoyong Wei, Riza Batista-Navarro, Chenghua Lin
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks, yet their ability to generate long-form content remains poorly understood and evaluated. Our analysis reveals that current LLMs struggle with length requirements and information density in long-text generation, with performance deteriorating as text length increases. To quantitively locate such a performance degradation and provide further insights on model development, we present LongEval, a benchmark that evaluates long-text generation through both direct and plan-based generation paradigms, inspired by cognitive and linguistic writing models. The comprehensive experiments in this work reveal interesting findings such as that while model size correlates with generation ability, the small-scale model (e.g., LongWriter), well-trained on long texts, has comparable performance. All code and datasets are released in https://github.com/Wusiwei0410/LongEval.
Authors: Thanh-Phong Le, Trung Le Chi Phan, Nghia Hieu Nguyen, Kiet Van Nguyen
Abstract: Document Visual Question Answering (Document VQA) challenges multimodal systems to holistically handle textual, layout, and visual modalities to provide appropriate answers. Document VQA has gained popularity in recent years due to the increasing amount of documents and the high demand for digitization. Nonetheless, most of document VQA datasets are developed in high-resource languages such as English. In this paper, we present ReceiptVQA (\textbf{Receipt} \textbf{V}isual \textbf{Q}uestion \textbf{A}nswering), the initial large-scale document VQA dataset in Vietnamese dedicated to receipts, a document kind with high commercial potentials. The dataset encompasses \textbf{9,000+} receipt images and \textbf{60,000+} manually annotated question-answer pairs. In addition to our study, we introduce LiGT (\textbf{L}ayout-\textbf{i}nfused \textbf{G}enerative \textbf{T}ransformer), a layout-aware encoder-decoder architecture designed to leverage embedding layers of language models to operate layout embeddings, minimizing the use of additional neural modules. Experiments on ReceiptVQA show that our architecture yielded promising performance, achieving competitive results compared with outstanding baselines. Furthermore, throughout analyzing experimental results, we found evident patterns that employing encoder-only model architectures has considerable disadvantages in comparison to architectures that can generate answers. We also observed that it is necessary to combine multiple modalities to tackle our dataset, despite the critical role of semantic understanding from language models. We hope that our work will encourage and facilitate future development in Vietnamese document VQA, contributing to a diverse multimodal research community in the Vietnamese language.
Authors: Cornelius Emde, Alasdair Paren, Preetham Arvind, Maxime Kayser, Tom Rainforth, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Bernard Ghanem, Philip H. S. Torr, Adel Bibi
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often deployed to perform constrained tasks, with narrow domains. For example, customer support bots can be built on top of LLMs, relying on their broad language understanding and capabilities to enhance performance. However, these LLMs are adversarially susceptible, potentially generating outputs outside the intended domain. To formalize, assess, and mitigate this risk, we introduce domain certification; a guarantee that accurately characterizes the out-of-domain behavior of language models. We then propose a simple yet effective approach, which we call VALID that provides adversarial bounds as a certificate. Finally, we evaluate our method across a diverse set of datasets, demonstrating that it yields meaningful certificates, which bound the probability of out-of-domain samples tightly with minimum penalty to refusal behavior.
Authors: Yu Zhao, Songping Huang, Dongsheng Zhou, Zhaoyun Ding, Fei Wang, Aixin Nian
Abstract: Obtaining valuable information from massive data efficiently has become our research goal in the era of Big Data. Text summarization technology has been continuously developed to meet this demand. Recent work has also shown that transformer-based pre-trained language models have achieved great success on various tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Aiming at the problem of Chinese news text summary generation and the application of Transformer structure on Chinese, this paper proposes a Chinese news text summarization model (CNsum) based on Transformer structure, and tests it on Chinese datasets such as THUCNews. The results of the conducted experiments show that CNsum achieves better ROUGE score than the baseline models, which verifies the outperformance of the model.
Authors: Isa Inuwa-Dutse
Abstract: With over 500 languages in Nigeria, three languages -- Hausa, Yor\`ub\'a and Igbo -- spoken by over 175 million people, account for about 60% of the spoken languages. However, these languages are categorised as low-resource due to insufficient resources to support tasks in computational linguistics. Several research efforts and initiatives have been presented, however, a coherent understanding of the state of Natural Language Processing (NLP) - from grammatical formalisation to linguistic resources that support complex tasks such as language understanding and generation is lacking. This study presents the first comprehensive review of advancements in low-resource NLP (LR-NLP) research across the three major Nigerian languages (NaijaNLP). We quantitatively assess the available linguistic resources and identify key challenges. Although a growing body of literature addresses various NLP downstream tasks in Hausa, Igbo, and Yor\`ub\'a, only about 25.1% of the reviewed studies contribute new linguistic resources. This finding highlights a persistent reliance on repurposing existing data rather than generating novel, high-quality resources. Additionally, language-specific challenges, such as the accurate representation of diacritics, remain under-explored. To advance NaijaNLP and LR-NLP more broadly, we emphasise the need for intensified efforts in resource enrichment, comprehensive annotation, and the development of open collaborative initiatives.
Authors: Andreas Evangelatos, Giorgos Filandrianos, Maria Lymperaiou, Athanasios Voulodimos, Giorgos Stamou
Abstract: In this paper, we present our submission to SemEval-2025 Task 8: Question Answering over Tabular Data. This task, evaluated on the DataBench dataset, assesses Large Language Models' (LLMs) ability to answer natural language questions over structured data while addressing topic diversity and table size limitations in previous benchmarks. We propose a system that employs effective LLM prompting to translate natural language queries into executable code, enabling accurate responses, error correction, and interpretability. Our approach ranks first in both subtasks of the competition in the proprietary model category, significantly outperforming the organizer's baseline.
Authors: Microsoft, :, Abdelrahman Abouelenin, Atabak Ashfaq, Adam Atkinson, Hany Awadalla, Nguyen Bach, Jianmin Bao, Alon Benhaim, Martin Cai, Vishrav Chaudhary, Congcong Chen, Dong Chen, Dongdong Chen, Junkun Chen, Weizhu Chen, Yen-Chun Chen, Yi-ling Chen, Qi Dai, Xiyang Dai, Ruchao Fan, Mei Gao, Min Gao, Amit Garg, Abhishek Goswami, Junheng Hao, Amr Hendy, Yuxuan Hu, Xin Jin, Mahmoud Khademi, Dongwoo Kim, Young Jin Kim, Gina Lee, Jinyu Li, Yunsheng Li, Chen Liang, Xihui Lin, Zeqi Lin, Mengchen Liu, Yang Liu, Gilsinia Lopez, Chong Luo, Piyush Madan, Vadim Mazalov, Arindam Mitra, Ali Mousavi, Anh Nguyen, Jing Pan, Daniel Perez-Becker, Jacob Platin, Thomas Portet, Kai Qiu, Bo Ren, Liliang Ren, Sambuddha Roy, Ning Shang, Yelong Shen, Saksham Singhal, Subhojit Som, Xia Song, Tetyana Sych, Praneetha Vaddamanu, Shuohang Wang, Yiming Wang, Zhenghao Wang, Haibin Wu, Haoran Xu, Weijian Xu, Yifan Yang, Ziyi Yang, Donghan Yu, Ishmam Zabir, Jianwen Zhang, Li Lyna Zhang, Yunan Zhang, Xiren Zhou
Abstract: We introduce Phi-4-Mini and Phi-4-Multimodal, compact yet highly capable language and multimodal models. Phi-4-Mini is a 3.8-billion-parameter language model trained on high-quality web and synthetic data, significantly outperforming recent open-source models of similar size and matching the performance of models twice its size on math and coding tasks requiring complex reasoning. This achievement is driven by a carefully curated synthetic data recipe emphasizing high-quality math and coding datasets. Compared to its predecessor, Phi-3.5-Mini, Phi-4-Mini features an expanded vocabulary size of 200K tokens to better support multilingual applications, as well as group query attention for more efficient long-sequence generation. Phi-4-Multimodal is a multimodal model that integrates text, vision, and speech/audio input modalities into a single model. Its novel modality extension approach leverages LoRA adapters and modality-specific routers to allow multiple inference modes combining various modalities without interference. For example, it now ranks first in the OpenASR leaderboard to date, although the LoRA component of the speech/audio modality has just 460 million parameters. Phi-4-Multimodal supports scenarios involving (vision + language), (vision + speech), and (speech/audio) inputs, outperforming larger vision-language and speech-language models on a wide range of tasks. Additionally, we experiment to further train Phi-4-Mini to enhance its reasoning capabilities. Despite its compact 3.8-billion-parameter size, this experimental version achieves reasoning performance on par with or surpassing significantly larger models, including DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B.
Authors: Nimet Beyza Bozdag, Shuhaib Mehri, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-T\"ur
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate persuasive capabilities that rival human-level persuasion. While these capabilities can be used for social good, they also present risks of potential misuse. Moreover, LLMs' susceptibility to persuasion raises concerns about alignment with ethical principles. To study these dynamics, we introduce Persuade Me If You Can (PMIYC), an automated framework for evaluating persuasion through multi-agent interactions. Here, Persuader agents engage in multi-turn conversations with the Persuadee agents, allowing us to measure LLMs' persuasive effectiveness and their susceptibility to persuasion. We conduct comprehensive evaluations across diverse LLMs, ensuring each model is assessed against others in both subjective and misinformation contexts. We validate the efficacy of our framework through human evaluations and show alignment with prior work. PMIYC offers a scalable alternative to human annotation for studying persuasion in LLMs. Through PMIYC, we find that Llama-3.3-70B and GPT-4o exhibit similar persuasive effectiveness, outperforming Claude 3 Haiku by 30%. However, GPT-4o demonstrates over 50% greater resistance to persuasion for misinformation compared to Llama-3.3-70B. These findings provide empirical insights into the persuasive dynamics of LLMs and contribute to the development of safer AI systems.
Authors: Jude Khouja, Karolina Korgul, Simi Hellsten, Lingyi Yang, Vlad Neacsu, Harry Mayne, Ryan Kearns, Andrew Bean, Adam Mahdi
Abstract: Assessing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is susceptible to overestimation due to data exposure of evaluation benchmarks. We introduce a framework for producing linguistic reasoning problems that reduces the effect of memorisation in model performance estimates and apply this framework to develop LINGOLY-TOO, a challenging benchmark for linguistic reasoning. By developing orthographic templates, we dynamically obfuscate the writing systems of real languages to generate numerousquestion variations. These variations preserve the reasoning steps required for each solution while reducing the likelihood of specific problem instances appearing in model training data. Our experiments demonstrate that frontier models, including Claud 3.7 Sonnet, o1-preview and DeepSeek R1, struggle with advanced reasoning. Our analysis also shows that LLMs exhibit noticeable variance in accuracy across permutations of the same problem, and on average perform better on questions appearing in their original orthography. Our findings highlight the opaque nature of response generation in LLMs and provide evidence that prior data exposure contributes to over estimating the reasoning capabilities of frontier models.
Authors: Xiangnan Chen, Yuancheng Fang, Qian Xiao, Juncheng Li, Jun Lin, Siliang Tang, Yi Yang, Yueting Zhuang
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have garnered significant attention for their strong visual-semantic understanding. Most existing chart benchmarks evaluate MLLMs' ability to parse information from charts to answer questions. However, they overlook the inherent output biases of MLLMs, where models rely on their parametric memory to answer questions rather than genuinely understanding the chart content. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel Chart Hypothetical Question Answering (HQA) task, which imposes assumptions on the same question to compel models to engage in counterfactual reasoning based on the chart content. Furthermore, we introduce HAI, a human-AI interactive data synthesis approach that leverages the efficient text-editing capabilities of LLMs alongside human expert knowledge to generate diverse and high-quality HQA data at a low cost. Using HAI, we construct Chart-HQA, a challenging benchmark synthesized from publicly available data sources. Evaluation results on 18 MLLMs of varying model sizes reveal that current models face significant generalization challenges and exhibit imbalanced reasoning performance on the HQA task.
Authors: Xue Han, Qian Hu, Yitong Wang, Wenchun Gao, Lianlian Zhang, Qing Wang, Lijun Mei, Chao Deng, Junlan Feng
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) suffer from temporal misalignment issues especially across long span of time. The issue arises from knowing that LLMs are trained on large amounts of data where temporal information is rather sparse over long times, such as thousands of years, resulting in insufficient learning or catastrophic forgetting by the LLMs. This paper proposes a methodology named "Ticktack" for addressing the LLM's long-time span misalignment in a yearly setting. Specifically, we first propose to utilize the sexagenary year expression instead of the Gregorian year expression employed by LLMs, achieving a more uniform distribution in yearly granularity. Then, we employ polar coordinates to model the sexagenary cycle of 60 terms and the year order within each term, with additional temporal encoding to ensure LLMs understand them. Finally, we present a temporal representational alignment approach for post-training LLMs that effectively distinguishes time points with relevant knowledge, hence improving performance on time-related tasks, particularly over a long period. We also create a long time span benchmark for evaluation. Experimental results prove the effectiveness of our proposal.
Authors: Wenhong Zhu, Weinan Zhang, Rui Wang
Abstract: Post-training alignment has increasingly become a crucial factor in enhancing the usability of language models (LMs). However, the strength of alignment varies depending on individual preferences. This paper proposes a method to incorporate alignment control into a single model, referred to as CLM. This approach adds one identity layer preceding the initial layers and performs preference learning only on this layer to map unaligned input token embeddings into the aligned space. Experimental results demonstrate that this efficient fine-tuning method performs comparable to full fine-tuning. During inference, the input embeddings are processed through the aligned and unaligned layers, which are then merged through the interpolation coefficient. By controlling this parameter, the alignment exhibits a clear interpolation and extrapolation phenomenon.
Authors: Chengpeng Li, Mingfeng Xue, Zhenru Zhang, Jiaxi Yang, Beichen Zhang, Xiang Wang, Bowen Yu, Binyuan Hui, Junyang Lin, Dayiheng Liu
Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) like OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks through the utilization of long Chain-of-thought (CoT). However, these models often suffer from hallucinations and inefficiencies due to their reliance solely on internal reasoning processes. In this paper, we introduce START (Self-Taught Reasoner with Tools), a novel tool-integrated long CoT reasoning LLM that significantly enhances reasoning capabilities by leveraging external tools. Through code execution, START is capable of performing complex computations, self-checking, exploring diverse methods, and self-debugging, thereby addressing the limitations of LRMs. The core innovation of START lies in its self-learning framework, which comprises two key techniques: 1) Hint-infer: We demonstrate that inserting artificially designed hints (e.g., ``Wait, maybe using Python here is a good idea.'') during the inference process of a LRM effectively stimulates its ability to utilize external tools without the need for any demonstration data. Hint-infer can also serve as a simple and effective sequential test-time scaling method; 2) Hint Rejection Sampling Fine-Tuning (Hint-RFT): Hint-RFT combines Hint-infer and RFT by scoring, filtering, and modifying the reasoning trajectories with tool invocation generated by a LRM via Hint-infer, followed by fine-tuning the LRM. Through this framework, we have fine-tuned the QwQ-32B model to achieve START. On PhD-level science QA (GPQA), competition-level math benchmarks (AMC23, AIME24, AIME25), and the competition-level code benchmark (LiveCodeBench), START achieves accuracy rates of 63.6%, 95.0%, 66.7%, 47.1%, and 47.3%, respectively. It significantly outperforms the base QwQ-32B and achieves performance comparable to the state-of-the-art open-weight model R1-Distill-Qwen-32B and the proprietary model o1-Preview.
Authors: Krish Sharma, Niyar R Barman, Akshay Chaturvedi, Nicholas Asher
Abstract: We look at reasoning on GSM8k, a dataset of short texts presenting primary school, math problems. We find, with Mirzadeh et al. (2024), that current LLM progress on the data set may not be explained by better reasoning but by exposure to a broader pretraining data distribution. We then introduce a novel information source for helping models with less data or inferior training reason better: discourse structure. We show that discourse structure improves performance for models like Llama2 13b by up to 160%. Even for models that have most likely memorized the data set, adding discourse structural information to the model still improves predictions and dramatically improves large model performance on out of distribution examples.
Authors: Yuhao Wu, Yushi Bai, Zhiqing Hu, Shangqing Tu, Ming Shan Hee, Juanzi Li, Roy Ka-Wei Lee
Abstract: Recent advancements in long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) have primarily concentrated on processing extended input contexts, resulting in significant strides in long-context comprehension. However, the equally critical aspect of generating long-form outputs has received comparatively less attention. This paper advocates for a paradigm shift in NLP research toward addressing the challenges of long-output generation. Tasks such as novel writing, long-term planning, and complex reasoning require models to understand extensive contexts and produce coherent, contextually rich, and logically consistent extended text. These demands highlight a critical gap in current LLM capabilities. We underscore the importance of this under-explored domain and call for focused efforts to develop foundational LLMs tailored for generating high-quality, long-form outputs, which hold immense potential for real-world applications.
Authors: Rongjie Yi, Liwei Guo, Shiyun Wei, Ao Zhou, Shangguang Wang, Mengwei Xu
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) such as GPTs and Mixtral-8x7B have revolutionized machine intelligence due to their exceptional abilities in generic ML tasks. Transiting LLMs from datacenters to edge devices brings benefits like better privacy and availability, but is challenged by their massive parameter size and thus unbearable runtime costs. To this end, we present EdgeMoE, an on-device inference engine for mixture-of-expert (MoE) LLMs -- a popular form of sparse LLM that scales its parameter size with almost constant computing complexity. EdgeMoE achieves both memory- and compute-efficiency by partitioning the model into the storage hierarchy: non-expert weights are held in device memory; while expert weights are held on external storage and fetched to memory only when activated. This design is motivated by a key observation that expert weights are bulky but infrequently used due to sparse activation. To further reduce the expert I/O swapping overhead, EdgeMoE incorporates two novel techniques: (1) expert-wise bitwidth adaptation that reduces the expert sizes with tolerable accuracy loss; (2) expert preloading that predicts the activated experts ahead of time and preloads it with the compute-I/O pipeline. On popular MoE LLMs and edge devices, EdgeMoE showcase significant memory savings and speedup over competitive baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/UbiquitousLearning/mllm.
Authors: Chao Wang, Jiaxuan Zhao, Licheng Jiao, Lingling Li, Fang Liu, Shuyuan Yang
Abstract: Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) exhibit powerful capabilities for generating natural text. Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) can discover diverse solutions to complex real-world problems. Motivated by the common collective and directionality of text generation and evolution, this paper first illustrates the conceptual parallels between LLMs and EAs at a micro level, which includes multiple one-to-one key characteristics: token representation and individual representation, position encoding and fitness shaping, position embedding and selection, Transformers block and reproduction, and model training and parameter adaptation. These parallels highlight potential opportunities for technical advancements in both LLMs and EAs. Subsequently, we analyze existing interdisciplinary research from a macro perspective to uncover critical challenges, with a particular focus on evolutionary fine-tuning and LLM-enhanced EAs. These analyses not only provide insights into the evolutionary mechanisms behind LLMs but also offer potential directions for enhancing the capabilities of artificial agents.
Authors: Waris Gill (Virginia Tech, USA), Mohamed Elidrisi (Cisco, USA), Pallavi Kalapatapu (Cisco, USA), Ammar Ahmed (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA), Ali Anwar (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA), Muhammad Ali Gulzar (Virginia Tech, USA)
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Llama have revolutionized natural language processing and search engine dynamics. However, these models incur exceptionally high computational costs. For instance, GPT-3 consists of 175 billion parameters, where inference demands billions of floating-point operations. Caching is a natural solution to reduce LLM inference costs on repeated queries, which constitute about 31% of the total queries. However, existing caching methods are incapable of finding semantic similarities among LLM queries nor do they operate on contextual queries, leading to unacceptable false hit-and-miss rates. This paper introduces MeanCache, a user-centric semantic cache for LLM-based services that identifies semantically similar queries to determine cache hit or miss. Using MeanCache, the response to a user's semantically similar query can be retrieved from a local cache rather than re-querying the LLM, thus reducing costs, service provider load, and environmental impact. MeanCache leverages Federated Learning (FL) to collaboratively train a query similarity model without violating user privacy. By placing a local cache in each user's device and using FL, MeanCache reduces the latency and costs and enhances model performance, resulting in lower false hit rates. MeanCache also encodes context chains for every cached query, offering a simple yet highly effective mechanism to discern contextual query responses from standalone. Our experiments benchmarked against the state-of-the-art caching method, reveal that MeanCache attains an approximately 17% higher F-score and a 20% increase in precision during semantic cache hit-and-miss decisions while performing even better on contextual queries. It also reduces the storage requirement by 83% and accelerates semantic cache hit-and-miss decisions by 11%.
Authors: Lei Chen, Joan Bruna, Alberto Bietti
Abstract: Large language models have been successful at tasks involving basic forms of in-context reasoning, such as generating coherent language, as well as storing vast amounts of knowledge. At the core of the Transformer architecture behind such models are feed-forward and attention layers, which are often associated to knowledge and reasoning, respectively. In this paper, we study this distinction empirically and theoretically in a controlled synthetic setting where certain next-token predictions involve both distributional and in-context information. We find that feed-forward layers tend to learn simple distributional associations such as bigrams, while attention layers focus on in-context reasoning. Our theoretical analysis identifies the noise in the gradients as a key factor behind this discrepancy. Finally, we illustrate how similar disparities emerge in pre-trained models through ablations on the Pythia model family on simple reasoning tasks.
Authors: Jannik Peters, Constantin Waubert de Puiseau, Hasan Tercan, Arya Gopikrishnan, Gustavo Adolpho Lucas De Carvalho, Christian Bitter, Tobias Meisen
Abstract: The field of emergent language represents a novel area of research within the domain of artificial intelligence, particularly within the context of multi-agent reinforcement learning. Although the concept of studying language emergence is not new, early approaches were primarily concerned with explaining human language formation, with little consideration given to its potential utility for artificial agents. In contrast, studies based on reinforcement learning aim to develop communicative capabilities in agents that are comparable to or even superior to human language. Thus, they extend beyond the learned statistical representations that are common in natural language processing research. This gives rise to a number of fundamental questions, from the prerequisites for language emergence to the criteria for measuring its success. This paper addresses these questions by providing a comprehensive review of 181 scientific publications on emergent language in artificial intelligence. Its objective is to serve as a reference for researchers interested in or proficient in the field. Consequently, the main contributions are the definition and overview of the prevailing terminology, the analysis of existing evaluation methods and metrics, and the description of the identified research gaps.
Authors: Paloma Rabaey, Henri Arno, Stefan Heytens, Thomas Demeester
Abstract: We present the SynSUM benchmark, a synthetic dataset linking unstructured clinical notes to structured background variables. The dataset consists of 10,000 artificial patient records containing tabular variables (like symptoms, diagnoses and underlying conditions) and related notes describing the fictional patient encounter in the domain of respiratory diseases. The tabular portion of the data is generated through a Bayesian network, where both the causal structure between the variables and the conditional probabilities are proposed by an expert based on domain knowledge. We then prompt a large language model (GPT-4o) to generate a clinical note related to this patient encounter, describing the patient symptoms and additional context. We conduct both an expert evaluation study to assess the quality of the generated notes, as well as running some simple predictor models on both the tabular and text portions of the dataset, forming a baseline for further research. The SynSUM dataset is primarily designed to facilitate research on clinical information extraction in the presence of tabular background variables, which can be linked through domain knowledge to concepts of interest to be extracted from the text - the symptoms, in the case of SynSUM. Secondary uses include research on the automation of clinical reasoning over both tabular data and text, causal effect estimation in the presence of tabular and/or textual confounders, and multi-modal synthetic data generation.
Authors: Mohamed Fazli Imam, Rufael Fedaku Marew, Jameel Hassan, Mustansar Fiaz, Alham Fikri Aji, Hisham Cholakkal
Abstract: In the era of foundation models, CLIP has emerged as a powerful tool for aligning text & visual modalities into a common embedding space. However, the alignment objective used to train CLIP often results in subpar visual features for fine-grained tasks. In contrast, SSL-pretrained models like DINO excel at extracting rich visual features due to their specialized training paradigm. Yet, these SSL models require an additional supervised linear probing step, which relies on fully labeled data which is often expensive and difficult to obtain at scale. In this paper, we propose a label-free prompt-tuning method that leverages the rich visual features of self-supervised learning models (DINO) and the broad textual knowledge of large language models (LLMs) to largely enhance CLIP-based image classification performance using unlabeled images. Our approach unfolds in three key steps: (1) We generate robust textual feature embeddings that more accurately represent object classes by leveraging class-specific descriptions from LLMs, enabling more effective zero-shot classification compared to CLIP's default name-specific prompts. (2) These textual embeddings are then used to produce pseudo-labels to train an alignment module that integrates the complementary strengths of LLM description-based textual embeddings & DINO's visual features. (3) Finally, we prompt-tune CLIP's vision encoder through DINO-assisted supervision using the trained alignment module. This three-step process allows us to harness the best of visual & textual foundation models, resulting in a powerful and efficient approach that surpasses state-of-the-art label-free classification methods. Notably, our framework, NoLA (No Labels Attached), achieves an average absolute gain of 3.6% over the state-of-the-art LaFTer across 11 diverse image classification datasets. Our code & models can be found at https://github.com/fazliimam/NoLA.
Authors: Stephanie Eckman, Bolei Ma, Christoph Kern, Rob Chew, Barbara Plank, Frauke Kreuter
Abstract: Models trained on crowdsourced labels may not reflect broader population views, because those who work as annotators do not represent the population. We propose Population-Aligned Instance Replication (PAIR), a method to address bias caused by non-representative annotator pools. Using a simulation study of offensive language and hate speech, we create two types of annotators with different labeling tendencies and generate datasets with varying proportions of the types. We observe that models trained on unbalanced annotator pools show poor calibration compared to those trained on representative data. By duplicating labels from underrepresented annotator groups to match population proportions, PAIR reduces bias without collecting additional annotations. These results suggest that statistical techniques from survey research can improve model performance. We conclude with practical recommendations for improving the representativity of training data and model performance.
Authors: Julien Siems, Timur Carstensen, Arber Zela, Frank Hutter, Massimiliano Pontil, Riccardo Grazzi
Abstract: Linear Recurrent Neural Networks (linear RNNs) have emerged as competitive alternatives to Transformers for sequence modeling, offering efficient training and linear-time inference. However, existing architectures face a fundamental trade-off between expressivity and efficiency, dictated by the structure of their state-transition matrices. While diagonal matrices used in architectures like Mamba, GLA, or mLSTM yield fast runtime, they suffer from severely limited expressivity. To address this, recent architectures such as (Gated) DeltaNet and RWKVv7 adopted a diagonal plus rank-1 structure, allowing simultaneous token-channel mixing, which overcomes some expressivity limitations with only a slight decrease in training efficiency. Building on the interpretation of DeltaNet's recurrence as performing one step of online gradient descent per token on an associative recall loss, we introduce DeltaProduct, which instead takes multiple ($n_h$) steps per token. This naturally leads to diagonal plus rank-$n_h$ state-transition matrices, formed as products of $n_h$ generalized Householder transformations, providing a tunable mechanism to balance expressivity and efficiency and a stable recurrence. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that DeltaProduct achieves superior state-tracking and language modeling capabilities while exhibiting significantly improved length extrapolation compared to DeltaNet. Additionally, we also strengthen the theoretical foundation of DeltaNet's expressivity by proving that it can solve dihedral group word problems in just two layers.
Authors: Zihan Wang, Yaohui Zhu, Gim Hee Lee, Yachun Fan
Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is an essential skill for embodied agents, allowing them to navigate in 3D environments following natural language instructions. High-performance navigation models require a large amount of training data, the high cost of manually annotating data has seriously hindered this field. Therefore, some previous methods translate trajectory videos into step-by-step instructions for expanding data, but such instructions do not match well with users' communication styles that briefly describe destinations or state specific needs. Moreover, local navigation trajectories overlook global context and high-level task planning. To address these issues, we propose NavRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework that generates user demand instructions for VLN. NavRAG leverages LLM to build a hierarchical scene description tree for 3D scene understanding from global layout to local details, then simulates various user roles with specific demands to retrieve from the scene tree, generating diverse instructions with LLM. We annotate over 2 million navigation instructions across 861 scenes and evaluate the data quality and navigation performance of trained models.
Authors: Kai Mei, Wujiang Xu, Shuhang Lin, Yongfeng Zhang
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as service endpoints in systems, the surge in query volume creates significant scheduling challenges. Existing scheduling frameworks mainly target at latency optimization while neglecting the capability of LLMs to serve different level of queries, which could lead to computational resource waste. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing a capability-cost coordinated scheduling framework, ECCOS, for multi-LLM serving, which explicitly constrains response quality and workload to optimize LLM inference cost. Specifically, it introduces the two-stage scheduling by designing a multi-objective predictor and a constrained optimizer. The predictor estimates both model capabilities and computational costs through training-based and retrieval-based approaches, while the optimizer determines cost-optimal assignments under quality and workload constraints. It also introduces QAServe, a dataset collected for sample-wise response quality and costs by zero-shot prompting different LLMs on knowledge QA and mathematical reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ECCOS improves success rates by 6.30% while reducing costs by 10.15% compared to existing methods, consuming less than 0.5% of LLM response time. The code is available at: https://github.com/agiresearch/ECCOS.
Authors: Seonghyeon Lee, Heejae Chon, Joonwon Jang, Dongha Lee, Hwanjo Yu
Abstract: Language models (LMs) have exhibited impressive abilities in generating code from natural language requirements. In this work, we highlight the diversity of code generated by LMs as a critical criterion for evaluating their code generation capabilities. There is a lack of studies focused on assessing the diversity of generated code, which overlooks its importance in code LMs. Therefore, we propose a systematic approach to evaluate code diversity, introducing various metrics with inter-code similarity. Specifically, we introduce code clustering methods that leverages LMs' capabilities in code understanding and reasoning, resulting in a set of metrics that represent the number of algorithms in model-generated solutions. We extensively investigate the property of model-generated solutions by contrasting them with human-written ones and quantifying the impact of various factors on code diversity: model size, temperature, instruction tuning, and problem complexity. Our analysis demonstrates that model-generated solutions exhibit low algorithmic diversity, which was neglected by the research community. Moreover, we explore methods to increase code diversity by combining solutions from different models and increasing sampling temperatures. Our findings highlight that code diversity can be enhanced with the help of heterogeneous models and setting temperature beyond 1.0 that has not been fully explored due to the functional correctness degradation. To facilitate our research direction, we publicly share our code and datasets through open-source repositories.
Authors: Afnan Sultan, Max Rausch-Dupont, Shahrukh Khan, Olga Kalinina, Andrea Volkamer, Dietrich Klakow
Abstract: Most of the current transformer-based chemical language models are pre-trained on millions to billions of molecules. However, the improvement from such scaling in dataset size is not confidently linked to improved molecular property prediction. The aim of this study is to investigate and overcome some of the limitations of transformer models in predicting molecular properties. Specifically, we examine the impact of pre-training dataset size and diversity on the performance of transformer models and investigate the use of domain adaptation as a technique for improving model performance. First, our findings indicate that increasing pretraining dataset size beyond 400K molecules from the GuacaMol dataset does not result in a significant improvement on four ADME endpoints, namely, solubility, permeability, microsomal stability, and plasma protein binding. Second, our results demonstrate that using domain adaptation by further training the transformer model on a small set of domain-relevant molecules, i.e., a few hundred to a few thousand, using multi-task regression of physicochemical properties was sufficient to significantly improve performance for three out of the four investigated ADME endpoints (P-value < 0.001). Finally, we observe that a model pre-trained on 400K molecules and domain adopted on a few hundred/thousand molecules performs similarly (P-value > 0.05) to more complicated transformer models like MolBERT(pre-trained on 1.3M molecules) and MolFormer (pre-trained on 100M molecules). A comparison to a random forest model trained on basic physicochemical properties showed similar performance to the examined transformer models. We believe that current transformer models can be improved through further systematic analysis of pre-training and downstream data, pre-training objectives, and scaling laws, ultimately leading to better and more helpful models.