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2502.10914
LLM-driven Knowledge Distillation for Dynamic Text-Attributed Graphs
cs.LG
Dynamic Text-Attributed Graphs (DyTAGs) have numerous real-world applications, e.g. social, collaboration, citation, communication, and review networks. In these networks, nodes and edges often contain text descriptions, and the graph structure can evolve over time. Future link prediction, edge classification, relation generation, and other downstream tasks on DyTAGs require powerful representations that encode structural, temporal, and textual information. Although graph neural networks (GNNs) excel at handling structured data, encoding temporal information within dynamic graphs remains a significant challenge. In this work, we propose LLM-driven Knowledge Distillation for Dynamic Text Attributed Graph (LKD4DyTAG) with temporal encoding to address these challenges. We use a simple, yet effective approach to encode temporal information in edges so that graph convolution can simultaneously capture both temporal and structural information in the hidden representations. To leverage LLM's text processing capabilities for learning richer representations on DyTAGs, we distill knowledge from LLM-driven edge representations (based on a neighborhood's text attributes) into saptio-temporal representations using a lightweight GNN model that encodes temporal and structural information. The objective of knowledge distillation enables the GNN to learn representations that more effectively encode the available structural, temporal, and textual information in DyTAG. We conducted extensive experimentation on six real-world DyTAG datasets to verify the effectiveness of our approach LKD4DyTAG for future link prediction and edge classification task. The results show that our approach significantly improves the performance of downstream tasks compared to the baseline models.
2502.10916
An Open-Source Web-Based Tool for Evaluating Open-Source Large Language Models Leveraging Information Retrieval from Custom Documents
cs.CL cs.IR
In our work, we present the first-of-its-kind open-source web-based tool which is able to demonstrate the impacts of a user's speech act during discourse with conversational agents, which leverages open-source large language models. With this software resource, it is possible for researchers and experts to evaluate the performance of various dialogues, visualize the user's communicative intents, and utilise uploaded specific documents for the chat agent to use for its information retrieval to respond to the user query. The context gathered by these models is obtained from a set of linguistic features extracted, which forms the context embeddings of the models. Regardless of these models showing good context understanding based on these features, there still remains a gap in including deeper pragmatic features to improve the model's comprehension of the query, hence the efforts to develop this web resource, which is able to extract and then inject this overlooked feature in the encoder-decoder pipeline of the conversational agent. To demonstrate the effect and impact of the resource, we carried out an experiment which evaluated the system using 2 knowledge files for information retrieval, with two user queries each, across 5 open-source large language models using 10 standard metrics. Our results showed that larger open-source models, demonstrated an improved alignment when the user speech act was included with their query. The smaller models in contrast showed an increased perplexity and mixed performance, which explicitly indicated struggles in processing queries that explicitly included speech acts. The results from the analysis using the developed web resource highlight the potential of speech acts towards enhancing conversational depths while underscoring the need for model-specific optimizations to address increased computational costs and response times.
2502.10920
Do Deepfake Detectors Work in Reality?
cs.CV cs.AI
Deepfakes, particularly those involving faceswap-based manipulations, have sparked significant societal concern due to their increasing realism and potential for misuse. Despite rapid advancements in generative models, detection methods have not kept pace, creating a critical gap in defense strategies. This disparity is further amplified by the disconnect between academic research and real-world applications, which often prioritize different objectives and evaluation criteria. In this study, we take a pivotal step toward bridging this gap by presenting a novel observation: the post-processing step of super-resolution, commonly employed in real-world scenarios, substantially undermines the effectiveness of existing deepfake detection methods. To substantiate this claim, we introduce and publish the first real-world faceswap dataset, collected from popular online faceswap platforms. We then qualitatively evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art deepfake detectors on real-world deepfakes, revealing that their accuracy approaches the level of random guessing. Furthermore, we quantitatively demonstrate the significant performance degradation caused by common post-processing techniques. By addressing this overlooked challenge, our study underscores a critical avenue for enhancing the robustness and practical applicability of deepfake detection methods in real-world settings.
2502.10921
Evolving Hate Speech Online: An Adaptive Framework for Detection and Mitigation
cs.CL cs.SI
The proliferation of social media platforms has led to an increase in the spread of hate speech, particularly targeting vulnerable communities. Unfortunately, existing methods for automatically identifying and blocking toxic language rely on pre-constructed lexicons, making them reactive rather than adaptive. As such, these approaches become less effective over time, especially when new communities are targeted with slurs not included in the original datasets. To address this issue, we present an adaptive approach that uses word embeddings to update lexicons and develop a hybrid model that adjusts to emerging slurs and new linguistic patterns. This approach can effectively detect toxic language, including intentional spelling mistakes employed by aggressors to avoid detection. Our hybrid model, which combines BERT with lexicon-based techniques, achieves an accuracy of 95% for most state-of-the-art datasets. Our work has significant implications for creating safer online environments by improving the detection of toxic content and proactively updating the lexicon. Content Warning: This paper contains examples of hate speech that may be triggering.
2502.10927
The underlying structures of self-attention: symmetry, directionality, and emergent dynamics in Transformer training
cs.LG
Self-attention is essential to Transformer architectures, yet how information is embedded in the self-attention matrices and how different objective functions impact this process remains unclear. We present a mathematical framework to analyze self-attention matrices by deriving the structures governing their weight updates. Using this framework, we demonstrate that bidirectional training induces symmetry in the weight matrices, while autoregressive training results in directionality and column dominance. Our theoretical findings are validated across multiple Transformer models - including ModernBERT, GPT, LLaMA3, and Mistral - and input modalities like text, vision, and audio. Finally, we apply these insights by showing that symmetric initialization improves the performance of encoder-only models on language tasks. This mathematical analysis offers a novel theoretical perspective on how information is embedded through self-attention, thereby improving the interpretability of Transformer models.
2502.10928
Semantic Specialization in MoE Appears with Scale: A Study of DeepSeek R1 Expert Specialization
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CL
DeepSeek-R1, the largest open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, has demonstrated reasoning capabilities comparable to proprietary frontier models. Prior research has explored expert routing in MoE models, but findings suggest that expert selection is often token-dependent rather than semantically driven. Given DeepSeek-R1's enhanced reasoning abilities, we investigate whether its routing mechanism exhibits greater semantic specialization than previous MoE models. To explore this, we conduct two key experiments: (1) a word sense disambiguation task, where we examine expert activation patterns for words with differing senses, and (2) a cognitive reasoning analysis, where we assess DeepSeek-R1's structured thought process in an interactive task setting of DiscoveryWorld. We conclude that DeepSeek-R1's routing mechanism is more semantically aware and it engages in structured cognitive processes.
2502.10930
Reduced Order Modeling with Shallow Recurrent Decoder Networks
cs.LG math.DS
Reduced Order Modeling is of paramount importance for efficiently inferring high-dimensional spatio-temporal fields in parametric contexts, enabling computationally tractable parametric analyses, uncertainty quantification and control. However, conventional dimensionality reduction techniques are typically limited to known and constant parameters, inefficient for nonlinear and chaotic dynamics, and uninformed to the actual system behavior. In this work, we propose sensor-driven SHallow REcurrent Decoder networks for Reduced Order Modeling (SHRED-ROM). Specifically, we consider the composition of a long short-term memory network, which encodes the temporal dynamics of limited sensor data in multiple scenarios, and a shallow decoder, which reconstructs the corresponding high-dimensional states. SHRED-ROM is a robust decoding-only strategy that circumvents the numerically unstable approximation of an inverse which is required by encoding-decoding schemes. To enhance computational efficiency and memory usage, the full-order state snapshots are reduced by, e.g., proper orthogonal decomposition, allowing for compressive training of the networks with minimal hyperparameter tuning. Through applications on chaotic and nonlinear fluid dynamics, we show that SHRED-ROM (i) accurately reconstructs the state dynamics for new parameter values starting from limited fixed or mobile sensors, independently on sensor placement, (ii) can cope with both physical, geometrical and time-dependent parametric dependencies, while being agnostic to their actual values, (iii) can accurately estimate unknown parameters, and (iv) can deal with different data sources, such as high-fidelity simulations, coupled fields and videos.
2502.10931
D-CIPHER: Dynamic Collaborative Intelligent Agents with Planning and Heterogeneous Execution for Enhanced Reasoning in Offensive Security
cs.AI cs.CR
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used in cybersecurity in many ways, including their recent use as intelligent agent systems for autonomous security analysis. Capture the Flag (CTF) challenges serve as benchmarks for assessing the automated task-planning abilities of LLM agents across various cybersecurity skill sets. Early attempts to apply LLMs for solving CTF challenges relied on single-agent systems, where feedback was restricted to a single reasoning-action loop. This approach proved inadequate for handling complex CTF tasks. Drawing inspiration from real-world CTF competitions, where teams of experts collaborate, we introduce the D-CIPHER multi-agent LLM framework for collaborative CTF challenge solving. D-CIPHER integrates agents with distinct roles, enabling dynamic feedback loops to enhance reasoning on CTF challenges. It introduces the Planner-Executor agent system, consisting of a Planner agent for overall problem-solving along with multiple heterogeneous Executor agents for individual tasks, facilitating efficient allocation of responsibilities among the LLMs. Additionally, D-CIPHER incorporates an Auto-prompter agent, which improves problem-solving by exploring the challenge environment and generating a highly relevant initial prompt. We evaluate D-CIPHER on CTF benchmarks using multiple LLM models and conduct comprehensive studies to highlight the impact of our enhancements. Our results demonstrate that the multi-agent D-CIPHER system achieves a significant improvement in challenges solved, setting a state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks: 22.0% on NYU CTF Bench, 22.5% on Cybench, and 44.0% on HackTheBox. D-CIPHER is available at https://github.com/NYU-LLM-CTF/nyuctf_agents as the nyuctf_multiagent package.
2502.10932
PPAC Driven Multi-die and Multi-technology Floorplanning
eess.SY cs.SY
In heterogeneous integration, where different dies may utilize distinct technologies, floorplanning across multiple dies inherently requires simultaneous technology selection. This work presents the first systematic study of multi-die and multi-technology floorplanning. Unlike many conventional approaches, which are primarily driven by area and wirelength, this study additionally considers performance, power, and cost, highlighting the impact of technology selection. A simulated annealing method and a reinforcement learning techniques are developed. Experimental results show that the proposed techniques significantly outperform a naive baseline approach.
2502.10934
Fundamental Principles of Linguistic Structure are Not Represented by o3
cs.CL
A core component of a successful artificial general intelligence would be the rapid creation and manipulation of grounded compositional abstractions and the demonstration of expertise in the family of recursive hierarchical syntactic objects necessary for the creative use of human language. We evaluated the recently released o3 model (OpenAI; o3-mini-high) and discovered that while it succeeds on some basic linguistic tests relying on linear, surface statistics (e.g., the Strawberry Test), it fails to generalize basic phrase structure rules; it fails with comparative sentences involving semantically illegal cardinality comparisons ('Escher sentences'); its fails to correctly rate and explain acceptability dynamics; and it fails to distinguish between instructions to generate unacceptable semantic vs. unacceptable syntactic outputs. When tasked with generating simple violations of grammatical rules, it is seemingly incapable of representing multiple parses to evaluate against various possible semantic interpretations. In stark contrast to many recent claims that artificial language models are on the verge of replacing the field of linguistics, our results suggest not only that deep learning is hitting a wall with respect to compositionality (Marcus 2022), but that it is hitting [a [stubbornly [resilient wall]]] that cannot readily be surmounted to reach human-like compositional reasoning simply through more compute.
2502.10937
SCALE: Towards Collaborative Content Analysis in Social Science with Large Language Model Agents and Human Intervention
cs.AI cs.CL cs.MA
Content analysis breaks down complex and unstructured texts into theory-informed numerical categories. Particularly, in social science, this process usually relies on multiple rounds of manual annotation, domain expert discussion, and rule-based refinement. In this paper, we introduce SCALE, a novel multi-agent framework that effectively $\underline{\textbf{S}}$imulates $\underline{\textbf{C}}$ontent $\underline{\textbf{A}}$nalysis via $\underline{\textbf{L}}$arge language model (LLM) ag$\underline{\textbf{E}}$nts. SCALE imitates key phases of content analysis, including text coding, collaborative discussion, and dynamic codebook evolution, capturing the reflective depth and adaptive discussions of human researchers. Furthermore, by integrating diverse modes of human intervention, SCALE is augmented with expert input to further enhance its performance. Extensive evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that SCALE achieves human-approximated performance across various complex content analysis tasks, offering an innovative potential for future social science research.
2502.10938
PEA: Enhancing LLM Performance on Computational-Reasoning Tasks
cs.AI
Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, prompting investigations into their potential as generic reasoning engines. While recent studies have explored inference-time computation to enhance model performance on complex problems, current research lacks a formal framework to characterize the complexity of reasoning tasks. This study introduces the Predicate-Enumeration-Aggregation (PEA) framework, a formal approach to describe and solve a class of important reasoning tasks termed computational reasoning problems. The PEA framework decomposes these problems into predicate and enumeration components, using LLMs to synthesize programs based on specified predicates, enumeration, and aggregation rules. These synthesized programs are then executed to obtain solutions to the computational tasks. We demonstrate the framework's efficacy on benchmark tasks including Boolean satisfiability problems, game of $24$, and planning problems. Empirical evaluation reveals that PEA substantially enhances the performance of underlying models on benchmark computational problems, yielding an average accuracy improvement of approximately $50\%$, coupled with increased efficiency.
2502.10940
CoLA: Compute-Efficient Pre-Training of LLMs via Low-Rank Activation
cs.LG cs.AI
Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing many science and engineering fields. However, their huge model sizes impose extremely demanding needs of computational resources in the pre-training stage. Although low-rank factorizations can reduce model parameters, their direct application in LLM pre-training often lead to non-negligible performance loss. To address this fundamental challenge, we introduce CoLA and its memory-efficient implementation, CoLA-M. We leverage the low-rank structure observed widely in model activations, enforcing non-linear transformations between factorized weight matrices to reduce model size, boost model capacity and training efficiency. Experiments on LLaMA models with 60 million to 7 billion parameters show that CoLA reduces the computing cost by $\bf 2\pmb{\times}$ and improves training throughput by $\bf 1.86\pmb{\times}$ while maintaining full-rank level performance. CoLA-M further squeezes memory cost without sacrificing throughput, offering a pre-training approach with collectively superior parameter, computing, and memory efficiency. The LLMs produced are also $\bf 2\pmb{\times}$ smaller, enabling faster inference with lower memory cost on resource-constrained platforms
2502.10942
Exploring Contextual Flux in Large Language Models: A Novel Approach to Self-Modulating Semantic Networks
cs.CL
Self-modulating mechanisms introduce dynamic adaptation capabilities within language models through contextual realignment strategies that influence token embedding trajectories across extended sequences. Contextual Flux is explored as an approach to embedding modulation, integrating an auxiliary gating mechanism within the self-attention framework to dynamically adjust token representations based on evolving contextual dependencies. The empirical analysis evaluates entropy variations, latent space realignments, and coherence stability to assess the extent to which self-regulation enhances text generation consistency while preserving generative flexibility. Quantitative assessments suggest that embedding shifts contribute to more structured adaptation in long-form sequences, with measured reductions in redundant phrase repetitions and improvements in thematic retention. Variability in contextual weight computation affects modulation stability, leading to differing levels of adaptation across diverse linguistic structures. The computational demands introduced through real-time embedding reconfiguration are examined in relation to model scalability, emphasizing the need for optimization strategies in high-volume generative applications. The findings suggest that while adaptive embedding updates improve certain aspects of coherence, their impact remains contingent on model capacity and input complexity.
2502.10947
The Relationship between No-Regret Learning and Online Conformal Prediction
cs.LG cs.GT stat.ML
Existing algorithms for online conformal prediction -- guaranteeing marginal coverage in adversarial settings -- are variants of online gradient descent (OGD), but their analyses of worst-case coverage do not follow from the regret guarantee of OGD. What is the relationship between no-regret learning and online conformal prediction? We observe that although standard regret guarantees imply marginal coverage in i.i.d. settings, this connection fails as soon as we either move to adversarial environments or ask for group conditional coverage. On the other hand, we show a tight connection between threshold calibrated coverage and swap-regret in adversarial settings, which extends to group-conditional (multi-valid) coverage. We also show that algorithms in the follow the perturbed leader family of no regret learning algorithms (which includes online gradient descent) can be used to give group-conditional coverage guarantees in adversarial settings for arbitrary grouping functions. Via this connection we analyze and conduct experiments using a multi-group generalization of the ACI algorithm of Gibbs & Candes [2021] (arXiv:2106.00170).
2502.10949
Learning the Exact Time Integration Algorithm for Initial Value Problems by Randomized Neural Networks
math.NA cs.LG cs.NA physics.comp-ph
We present a method leveraging extreme learning machine (ELM) type randomized neural networks (NNs) for learning the exact time integration algorithm for initial value problems (IVPs). The exact time integration algorithm for non-autonomous systems can be represented by an algorithmic function in higher dimensions, which satisfies an associated system of partial differential equations with corresponding boundary conditions. Our method learns the algorithmic function by solving this associated system using ELM with a physics informed approach. The trained ELM network serves as the learned algorithm and can be used to solve the IVP with arbitrary initial data or step sizes from some domain. When the right hand side of the non-autonomous system exhibits a periodicity with respect to any of its arguments, while the solution itself to the problem is not periodic, we show that the algorithmic function is either periodic, or when it is not, satisfies a well-defined relation for different periods. This property can greatly simplify the algorithm learning in many problems. We consider explicit and implicit NN formulations, leading to explicit or implicit time integration algorithms, and discuss how to train the ELM network by the nonlinear least squares method. Extensive numerical experiments with benchmark problems, including non-stiff, stiff and chaotic systems, show that the learned NN algorithm produces highly accurate solutions in long-time simulations, with its time-marching errors decreasing nearly exponentially with increasing degrees of freedom in the neural network. We compare extensively the computational performance (accuracy vs.~cost) between the current NN algorithm and the leading traditional time integration algorithms. The learned NN algorithm is computationally competitive, markedly outperforming the traditional algorithms in many problems.
2502.10953
Empirical evaluation of LLMs in predicting fixes of Configuration bugs in Smart Home System
cs.SE cs.AI
This empirical study evaluates the effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in predicting fixes for configuration bugs in smart home systems. The research analyzes three prominent LLMs - GPT-4, GPT-4o (GPT-4 Turbo), and Claude 3.5 Sonnet - using four distinct prompt designs to assess their ability to identify appropriate fix strategies and generate correct solutions. The study utilized a dataset of 129 debugging issues from the Home Assistant Community, focusing on 21 randomly selected cases for in-depth analysis. Results demonstrate that GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet achieved 80\% accuracy in strategy prediction when provided with both bug descriptions and original scripts. GPT-4 exhibited consistent performance across different prompt types, while GPT-4o showed advantages in speed and cost-effectiveness despite slightly lower accuracy. The findings reveal that prompt design significantly impacts model performance, with comprehensive prompts containing both description and original script yielding the best results. This research provides valuable insights for improving automated bug fixing in smart home system configurations and demonstrates the potential of LLMs in addressing configuration-related challenges.
2502.10954
Learning to Stop Overthinking at Test Time
cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG
Test time scaling is currently one of the most active research areas that shows promise after training time scaling has reached its limits. Deep-thinking (DT) models are a class of recurrent models that can perform easy-to-hard generalization by assigning more compute to harder test samples. However, due to their inability to determine the complexity of a test sample, DT models have to use a large amount of computation for both easy and hard test samples. Excessive test time computation is wasteful and can cause the ``overthinking'' problem where more test time computation leads to worse results. In this paper, we introduce a test time training method for determining the optimal amount of computation needed for each sample during test time. We also propose Conv-LiGRU, a novel recurrent architecture for efficient and robust visual reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Conv-LiGRU is more stable than DT, effectively mitigates the ``overthinking'' phenomenon, and achieves superior accuracy.
2502.10955
A recurrent vision transformer shows signatures of primate visual attention
cs.CV cs.AI q-bio.NC
Attention is fundamental to both biological and artificial intelligence, yet research on animal attention and AI self attention remains largely disconnected. We propose a Recurrent Vision Transformer (Recurrent ViT) that integrates self-attention with recurrent memory, allowing both current inputs and stored information to guide attention allocation. Trained solely via sparse reward feedback on a spatially cued orientation change detection task, a paradigm used in primate studies, our model exhibits primate like signatures of attention, including improved accuracy and faster responses for cued stimuli that scale with cue validity. Analysis of self-attention maps reveals dynamic spatial prioritization with reactivation prior to expected changes, and targeted perturbations produce performance shifts similar to those observed in primate frontal eye fields and superior colliculus. These findings demonstrate that incorporating recurrent feedback into self attention can capture key aspects of primate visual attention.
2502.10956
Fine-Tuning Hard-to-Simulate Objectives for Quadruped Locomotion: A Case Study on Total Power Saving
cs.RO
Legged locomotion is not just about mobility; it also encompasses crucial objectives such as energy efficiency, safety, and user experience, which are vital for real-world applications. However, key factors such as battery power consumption and stepping noise are often inaccurately modeled or missing in common simulators, leaving these aspects poorly optimized or unaddressed by current sim-to-real methods. Hand-designed proxies, such as mechanical power and foot contact forces, have been used to address these challenges but are often problem-specific and inaccurate. In this paper, we propose a data-driven framework for fine-tuning locomotion policies, targeting these hard-to-simulate objectives. Our framework leverages real-world data to model these objectives and incorporates the learned model into simulation for policy improvement. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on power saving for quadruped locomotion, achieving a significant 24-28\% net reduction in total power consumption from the battery pack at various speeds. In essence, our approach offers a versatile solution for optimizing hard-to-simulate objectives in quadruped locomotion, providing an easy-to-adapt paradigm for continual improving with real-world knowledge. Project page https://hard-to-sim.github.io/.
2502.10957
Skillful Nowcasting of Convective Clouds With a Cascade Diffusion Model
cs.CV physics.ao-ph
Accurate nowcasting of convective clouds from satellite imagery is essential for mitigating the impacts of meteorological disasters, especially in developing countries and remote regions with limited ground-based observations. Recent advances in deep learning have shown promise in video prediction; however, existing models frequently produce blurry results and exhibit reduced accuracy when forecasting physical fields. Here, we introduce SATcast, a diffusion model that leverages a cascade architecture and multimodal inputs for nowcasting cloud fields in satellite imagery. SATcast incorporates physical fields predicted by FuXi, a deep-learning weather model, alongside past satellite observations as conditional inputs to generate high-quality future cloud fields. Through comprehensive evaluation, SATcast outperforms conventional methods on multiple metrics, demonstrating its superior accuracy and robustness. Ablation studies underscore the importance of its multimodal design and the cascade architecture in achieving reliable predictions. Notably, SATcast maintains predictive skill for up to 24 hours, underscoring its potential for operational nowcasting applications.
2502.10959
Revisiting the Design of In-Memory Dynamic Graph Storage
cs.DB
The effectiveness of in-memory dynamic graph storage (DGS) for supporting concurrent graph read and write queries is crucial for real-time graph analytics and updates. Various methods have been proposed, for example, LLAMA, Aspen, LiveGraph, Teseo, and Sortledton. These approaches differ significantly in their support for read and write operations, space overhead, and concurrency control. However, there has been no systematic study to explore the trade-offs among these dimensions. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of individual techniques and identify the performance factors affecting these storage methods by proposing a common abstraction for DGS design and implementing a generic test framework based on this abstraction. Our findings highlight several key insights: 1) Existing DGS methods exhibit substantial space overhead. For example, Aspen consumes 3.3-10.8x more memory than CSR, while the optimal fine-grained methods consume 4.1-8.9x more memory than CSR, indicating a significant memory overhead. 2) Existing methods often overlook memory access impact of modern architectures, leading to performance degradation compared to continuous storage methods. 3) Fine-grained concurrency control methods, in particular, suffer from severe efficiency and space issues due to maintaining versions and performing checks for each neighbor. These methods also experience significant contention on high-degree vertices. Our systematic study reveals these performance bottlenecks and outlines future directions to improve DGS for real-time graph analytics.
2502.10961
Graders should cheat: privileged information enables expert-level automated evaluations
cs.LG cs.AI
Auto-evaluating language models (LMs), i.e., using a grader LM to evaluate the candidate LM, is an appealing way to accelerate the evaluation process and the cost associated with it. But this presents a paradox: how can we trust the grader LM, which is presumably weaker than the candidate LM, to assess problems that are beyond the frontier of the capabilities of either model or both? For instance, today's LMs struggle on graduate-level physics and Olympiad-level math, making them unreliable graders in these domains. We show that providing privileged information -- such as ground-truth solutions or problem-specific guidelines -- improves automated evaluations on such frontier problems. This approach offers two key advantages. First, it expands the range of problems where LMs graders apply. Specifically, weaker models can now rate the predictions of stronger models. Second, privileged information can be used to devise easier variations of challenging problems which improves the separability of different LMs on tasks where their performance is generally low. With this approach, general-purpose LM graders match the state of the art performance on RewardBench, surpassing almost all the specially-tuned models. LM graders also outperform individual human raters on Vibe-Eval, and approach human expert graders on Olympiad-level math problems.
2502.10966
Neural Networks Remember More: The Power of Parameter Isolation and Combination
cs.CL cs.AI
Catastrophic forgetting is a pervasive issue for pre-trained language models (PLMs) during continual learning, where models lose previously acquired knowledge when sequentially trained on a series of tasks. The model's ability to retain old tasks is referred to as stability, while its adaptability to new tasks is called plasticity. Therefore, the key to solving this problem is to find a trade-off between the plasticity and stability of the model. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel method to achieve a balance between model stability and plasticity, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting. More specifically, our proposed approach leverages parameter isolation and a subsequent combination strategy. Initially, in the training stage, the model adapts to each downstream task via a parameter isolation method to prevent potential interference among different tasks. We then combine all trained parameters, which contain acquired knowledge, using the task arithmetic method and finally apply them to the backbone model. Empirical evaluations on continual language learning benchmarks substantiate the effectiveness of our approach, revealing a marked enhancement over existing state-of-the-art approaches.
2502.10967
Open-Set Cross-Network Node Classification via Unknown-Excluded Adversarial Graph Domain Alignment
cs.SI
Existing cross-network node classification methods are mainly proposed for closed-set setting, where the source network and the target network share exactly the same label space. Such a setting is restricted in real-world applications, since the target network might contain additional classes that are not present in the source. In this work, we study a more realistic open-set cross-network node classification (O-CNNC) problem, where the target network contains all the known classes in the source and further contains several target-private classes unseen in the source. Borrowing the concept from open-set domain adaptation, all target-private classes are defined as an additional unknown class. To address the challenging O-CNNC problem, we propose an unknown-excluded adversarial graph domain alignment (UAGA) model with a separate-adapt training strategy. Firstly, UAGA roughly separates known classes from unknown class, by training a graph neural network encoder and a neighborhood-aggregation node classifier in an adversarial framework. Then, unknown-excluded adversarial domain alignment is customized to align only target nodes from known classes with the source, while pushing target nodes from unknown class far away from the source, by assigning positive and negative domain adaptation coefficient to known class nodes and unknown class nodes. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate significant outperformance of the proposed UAGA over state-of-the-art methods on O-CNNC.
2502.10973
Akan Cinematic Emotions (ACE): A Multimodal Multi-party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Movie Dialogues
cs.CL
In this paper, we introduce the Akan Conversation Emotion (ACE) dataset, the first multimodal emotion dialogue dataset for an African language, addressing the significant lack of resources for low-resource languages in emotion recognition research. ACE, developed for the Akan language, contains 385 emotion-labeled dialogues and 6,162 utterances across audio, visual, and textual modalities, along with word-level prosodic prominence annotations. The presence of prosodic labels in this dataset also makes it the first prosodically annotated African language dataset. We demonstrate the quality and utility of ACE through experiments using state-of-the-art emotion recognition methods, establishing solid baselines for future research. We hope ACE inspires further work on inclusive, linguistically and culturally diverse NLP resources.
2502.10975
GS-GVINS: A Tightly-integrated GNSS-Visual-Inertial Navigation System Augmented by 3D Gaussian Splatting
cs.RO cs.CV eess.IV
Recently, the emergence of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has drawn significant attention in the area of 3D map reconstruction and visual SLAM. While extensive research has explored 3DGS for indoor trajectory tracking using visual sensor alone or in combination with Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), its integration with GNSS for large-scale outdoor navigation remains underexplored. To address these concerns, we proposed GS-GVINS: a tightly-integrated GNSS-Visual-Inertial Navigation System augmented by 3DGS. This system leverages 3D Gaussian as a continuous differentiable scene representation in largescale outdoor environments, enhancing navigation performance through the constructed 3D Gaussian map. Notably, GS-GVINS is the first GNSS-Visual-Inertial navigation application that directly utilizes the analytical jacobians of SE3 camera pose with respect to 3D Gaussians. To maintain the quality of 3DGS rendering in extreme dynamic states, we introduce a motionaware 3D Gaussian pruning mechanism, updating the map based on relative pose translation and the accumulated opacity along the camera ray. For validation, we test our system under different driving environments: open-sky, sub-urban, and urban. Both self-collected and public datasets are used for evaluation. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of GS-GVINS in enhancing navigation accuracy across diverse driving environments.
2502.10976
QuOTE: Question-Oriented Text Embeddings
cs.IR cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG
We present QuOTE (Question-Oriented Text Embeddings), a novel enhancement to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, aimed at improving document representation for accurate and nuanced retrieval. Unlike traditional RAG pipelines, which rely on embedding raw text chunks, QuOTE augments chunks with hypothetical questions that the chunk can potentially answer, enriching the representation space. This better aligns document embeddings with user query semantics, and helps address issues such as ambiguity and context-dependent relevance. Through extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate that QuOTE significantly enhances retrieval accuracy, including in multi-hop question-answering tasks. Our findings highlight the versatility of question generation as a fundamental indexing strategy, opening new avenues for integrating question generation into retrieval-based AI pipelines.
2502.10978
Agentic LLM Framework for Adaptive Decision Discourse
cs.AI cs.CY
Effective decision-making in complex systems requires synthesizing diverse perspectives to address multifaceted challenges under uncertainty. This study introduces a real-world inspired agentic Large Language Models (LLMs) framework, to simulate and enhance decision discourse-the deliberative process through which actionable strategies are collaboratively developed. Unlike traditional decision-support tools, the framework emphasizes dialogue, trade-off exploration, and the emergent synergies generated by interactions among agents embodying distinct personas. These personas simulate diverse stakeholder roles, each bringing unique priorities, expertise, and value-driven reasoning to the table. The framework incorporates adaptive and self-governing mechanisms, enabling agents to dynamically summon additional expertise and refine their assembly to address evolving challenges. An illustrative hypothetical example focused on extreme flooding in a Midwestern township demonstrates the framework's ability to navigate uncertainty, balance competing priorities, and propose mitigation and adaptation strategies by considering social, economic, and environmental dimensions. Results reveal how the breadth-first exploration of alternatives fosters robust and equitable recommendation pathways. This framework transforms how decisions are approached in high-stakes scenarios and can be incorporated in digital environments. It not only augments decision-makers' capacity to tackle complexity but also sets a foundation for scalable and context-aware AI-driven recommendations. This research explores novel and alternate routes leveraging agentic LLMs for adaptive, collaborative, and equitable recommendation processes, with implications across domains where uncertainty and complexity converge.
2502.10980
DFM: Deep Fourier Mimic for Expressive Dance Motion Learning
cs.RO
As entertainment robots gain popularity, the demand for natural and expressive motion, particularly in dancing, continues to rise. Traditionally, dancing motions have been manually designed by artists, a process that is both labor-intensive and restricted to simple motion playback, lacking the flexibility to incorporate additional tasks such as locomotion or gaze control during dancing. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Deep Fourier Mimic (DFM), a novel method that combines advanced motion representation with Reinforcement Learning (RL) to enable smooth transitions between motions while concurrently managing auxiliary tasks during dance sequences. While previous frequency domain based motion representations have successfully encoded dance motions into latent parameters, they often impose overly rigid periodic assumptions at the local level, resulting in reduced tracking accuracy and motion expressiveness, which is a critical aspect for entertainment robots. By relaxing these locally periodic constraints, our approach not only enhances tracking precision but also facilitates smooth transitions between different motions. Furthermore, the learned RL policy that supports simultaneous base activities, such as locomotion and gaze control, allows entertainment robots to engage more dynamically and interactively with users rather than merely replaying static, pre-designed dance routines.
2502.10982
TEASER: Token Enhanced Spatial Modeling for Expressions Reconstruction
cs.CV
3D facial reconstruction from a single in-the-wild image is a crucial task in human-centered computer vision tasks. While existing methods can recover accurate facial shapes, there remains significant space for improvement in fine-grained expression capture. Current approaches struggle with irregular mouth shapes, exaggerated expressions, and asymmetrical facial movements. We present TEASER (Token EnhAnced Spatial modeling for Expressions Reconstruction), which addresses these challenges and enhances 3D facial geometry performance. TEASER tackles two main limitations of existing methods: insufficient photometric loss for self-reconstruction and inaccurate localization of subtle expressions. We introduce a multi-scale tokenizer to extract facial appearance information. Combined with a neural renderer, these tokens provide precise geometric guidance for expression reconstruction. Furthermore, TEASER incorporates a pose-dependent landmark loss to further improve geometric performances. Our approach not only significantly enhances expression reconstruction quality but also offers interpretable tokens suitable for various downstream applications, such as photorealistic facial video driving, expression transfer, and identity swapping. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate that TEASER achieves state-of-the-art performance in precise expression reconstruction.
2502.10983
Learning Quiet Walking for a Small Home Robot
cs.RO
As home robotics gains traction, robots are increasingly integrated into households, offering companionship and assistance. Quadruped robots, particularly those resembling dogs, have emerged as popular alternatives for traditional pets. However, user feedback highlights concerns about the noise these robots generate during walking at home, particularly the loud footstep sound. To address this issue, we propose a sim-to-real based reinforcement learning (RL) approach to minimize the foot contact velocity highly related to the footstep sound. Our framework incorporates three key elements: learning varying PD gains to actively dampen and stiffen each joint, utilizing foot contact sensors, and employing curriculum learning to gradually enforce penalties on foot contact velocity. Experiments demonstrate that our learned policy achieves superior quietness compared to a RL baseline and the carefully handcrafted Sony commercial controllers. Furthermore, the trade-off between robustness and quietness is shown. This research contributes to developing quieter and more user-friendly robotic companions in home environments.
2502.10985
Is Elo Rating Reliable? A Study Under Model Misspecification
cs.LG cs.AI stat.ME stat.ML
Elo rating, widely used for skill assessment across diverse domains ranging from competitive games to large language models, is often understood as an incremental update algorithm for estimating a stationary Bradley-Terry (BT) model. However, our empirical analysis of practical matching datasets reveals two surprising findings: (1) Most games deviate significantly from the assumptions of the BT model and stationarity, raising questions on the reliability of Elo. (2) Despite these deviations, Elo frequently outperforms more complex rating systems, such as mElo and pairwise models, which are specifically designed to account for non-BT components in the data, particularly in terms of win rate prediction. This paper explains this unexpected phenomenon through three key perspectives: (a) We reinterpret Elo as an instance of online gradient descent, which provides no-regret guarantees even in misspecified and non-stationary settings. (b) Through extensive synthetic experiments on data generated from transitive but non-BT models, such as strongly or weakly stochastic transitive models, we show that the ''sparsity'' of practical matching data is a critical factor behind Elo's superior performance in prediction compared to more complex rating systems. (c) We observe a strong correlation between Elo's predictive accuracy and its ranking performance, further supporting its effectiveness in ranking.
2502.10988
OMG: Opacity Matters in Material Modeling with Gaussian Splatting
cs.CV
Decomposing geometry, materials and lighting from a set of images, namely inverse rendering, has been a long-standing problem in computer vision and graphics. Recent advances in neural rendering enable photo-realistic and plausible inverse rendering results. The emergence of 3D Gaussian Splatting has boosted it to the next level by showing real-time rendering potentials. An intuitive finding is that the models used for inverse rendering do not take into account the dependency of opacity w.r.t. material properties, namely cross section, as suggested by optics. Therefore, we develop a novel approach that adds this dependency to the modeling itself. Inspired by radiative transfer, we augment the opacity term by introducing a neural network that takes as input material properties to provide modeling of cross section and a physically correct activation function. The gradients for material properties are therefore not only from color but also from opacity, facilitating a constraint for their optimization. Therefore, the proposed method incorporates more accurate physical properties compared to previous works. We implement our method into 3 different baselines that use Gaussian Splatting for inverse rendering and achieve significant improvements universally in terms of novel view synthesis and material modeling.
2502.10990
FinMTEB: Finance Massive Text Embedding Benchmark
cs.CL cs.IR
Embedding models play a crucial role in representing and retrieving information across various NLP applications. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have further enhanced the performance of embedding models. While these models are often benchmarked on general-purpose datasets, real-world applications demand domain-specific evaluation. In this work, we introduce the Finance Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (FinMTEB), a specialized counterpart to MTEB designed for the financial domain. FinMTEB comprises 64 financial domain-specific embedding datasets across 7 tasks that cover diverse textual types in both Chinese and English, such as financial news articles, corporate annual reports, ESG reports, regulatory filings, and earnings call transcripts. We also develop a finance-adapted model, FinPersona-E5, using a persona-based data synthetic method to cover diverse financial embedding tasks for training. Through extensive evaluation of 15 embedding models, including FinPersona-E5, we show three key findings: (1) performance on general-purpose benchmarks shows limited correlation with financial domain tasks; (2) domain-adapted models consistently outperform their general-purpose counterparts; and (3) surprisingly, a simple Bag-of-Words (BoW) approach outperforms sophisticated dense embeddings in financial Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) tasks, underscoring current limitations in dense embedding techniques. Our work establishes a robust evaluation framework for financial NLP applications and provides crucial insights for developing domain-specific embedding models.
2502.10993
RoseRAG: Robust Retrieval-augmented Generation with Small-scale LLMs via Margin-aware Preference Optimization
cs.CL cs.LG
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance but face high computational costs and latency, limiting their deployment in resource-constrained settings. In contrast, small-scale LLMs (SLMs) are more efficient yet struggle to capture evolving real-world knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) helps by integrating external knowledge, but imperfect retrieval can introduce distracting noise that misleads SLMs. We propose RoseRAG, a robust RAG framework for SLMs via Margin-aware Preference Optimization. RoseRAG employs multi-turn prompting for detailed reasoning, rejection sampling for high-quality explanations, and contrastive preference selection to refine responses by maximizing the likelihood gap between preferred and non-preferred outputs. By integrating these components into a margin-aware optimization process, RoseRAG robustly enhances the accuracy and reliability of SLMs for RAG applications. Extensive experiments on three open-domain question answering benchmarks indicate that our innovative RoseRAG surpasses state-of-the-art baselines significantly.
2502.10994
SSVEP-BiMA: Bifocal Masking Attention Leveraging Native and Symmetric-Antisymmetric Components for Robust SSVEP Decoding
cs.LG
Brain-computer interface (BCI) based on steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) is a popular paradigm for its simplicity and high information transfer rate (ITR). Accurate and fast SSVEP decoding is crucial for reliable BCI performance. However, conventional decoding methods demand longer time windows, and deep learning models typically require subject-specific fine-tuning, leaving challenges in achieving optimal performance in cross-subject settings. This paper proposed a biofocal masking attention-based method (SSVEP-BiMA) that synergistically leverages the native and symmetric-antisymmetric components for decoding SSVEP. By utilizing multiple signal representations, the network is able to integrate features from a wider range of sample perspectives, leading to more generalized and comprehensive feature learning, which enhances both prediction accuracy and robustness. We performed experiments on two public datasets, and the results demonstrate that our proposed method surpasses baseline approaches in both accuracy and ITR. We believe that this work will contribute to the development of more efficient SSVEP-based BCI systems.
2502.10995
Evaluating Large language models on Understanding Korean indirect Speech acts
cs.CL
To accurately understand the intention of an utterance is crucial in conversational communication. As conversational artificial intelligence models are rapidly being developed and applied in various fields, it is important to evaluate the LLMs' capabilities of understanding the intentions of user's utterance. This study evaluates whether current LLMs can understand the intention of an utterance by considering the given conversational context, particularly in cases where the actual intention differs from the surface-leveled, literal intention of the sentence, i.e. indirect speech acts. Our findings reveal that Claude3-Opus outperformed the other competing models, with 71.94% in MCQ and 65% in OEQ, showing a clear advantage. In general, proprietary models exhibited relatively higher performance compared to open-source models. Nevertheless, no LLMs reached the level of human performance. Most LLMs, except for Claude3-Opus, demonstrated significantly lower performance in understanding indirect speech acts compared to direct speech acts, where the intention is explicitly revealed through the utterance. This study not only performs an overall pragmatic evaluation of each LLM's language use through the analysis of OEQ response patterns, but also emphasizes the necessity for further research to improve LLMs' understanding of indirect speech acts for more natural communication with humans.
2502.10996
RAS: Retrieval-And-Structuring for Knowledge-Intensive LLM Generation
cs.CL
Retrieval-augmented language models often struggle with knowledge-intensive tasks due to inefficient retrieval, unstructured knowledge integration, and single-pass architectures. We present Retrieval-And-Structuring (RAS), a novel framework that dynamically constructs and reasons over query-specific knowledge graphs through iterative retrieval and structuring. RAS introduces four key technical innovations: (1) a themescoped retrieval mechanism that efficiently narrows the search space while maintaining retrieval quality, (2) an action planning module that determines knowledge needs and generates focused sub-queries, (3) a dynamic knowledge structuring approach that converts retrieved text into an evolving knowledge graph, and (4) a graph-augmented answering component that leverages the accumulated structured information. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing leading baselines by 6.4% with open-source language models and 7.0% with proprietary models on seven knowledge-intensive generation datasets across all evaluation metrics. Detailed ablation studies verify the contribution of each technical component to the overall system performance.
2502.10997
New Rates in Stochastic Decision-Theoretic Online Learning under Differential Privacy
cs.LG cs.CR cs.DS
Hu and Mehta (2024) posed an open problem: what is the optimal instance-dependent rate for the stochastic decision-theoretic online learning (with $K$ actions and $T$ rounds) under $\varepsilon$-differential privacy? Before, the best known upper bound and lower bound are $O\left(\frac{\log K}{\Delta_{\min}} + \frac{\log K\log T}{\varepsilon}\right)$ and $\Omega\left(\frac{\log K}{\Delta_{\min}} + \frac{\log K}{\varepsilon}\right)$ (where $\Delta_{\min}$ is the gap between the optimal and the second actions). In this paper, we partially address this open problem by having two new results. First, we provide an improved upper bound for this problem $O\left(\frac{\log K}{\Delta_{\min}} + \frac{\log^2K}{\varepsilon}\right)$, where the $T$-dependency has been removed. Second, we introduce the deterministic setting, a weaker setting of this open problem, where the received loss vector is deterministic and we can focus on the analysis for $\varepsilon$ regardless of the sampling error. At the deterministic setting, we prove upper and lower bounds that match at $\Theta\left(\frac{\log K}{\varepsilon}\right)$, while a direct application of the analysis and algorithms from the original setting still leads to an extra log factor. Technically, we introduce the Bernoulli resampling trick, which enforces a monotonic property for the output from report-noisy-max mechanism that enables a tighter analysis. Moreover, by replacing the Laplace noise with Gumbel noise, we derived explicit integral form that gives a tight characterization of the regret in the deterministic case.
2502.10999
ControlText: Unlocking Controllable Fonts in Multilingual Text Rendering without Font Annotations
cs.CV cs.AI cs.CL cs.MM
This work demonstrates that diffusion models can achieve font-controllable multilingual text rendering using just raw images without font label annotations. Visual text rendering remains a significant challenge. While recent methods condition diffusion on glyphs, it is impossible to retrieve exact font annotations from large-scale, real-world datasets, which prevents user-specified font control. To address this, we propose a data-driven solution that integrates the conditional diffusion model with a text segmentation model, utilizing segmentation masks to capture and represent fonts in pixel space in a self-supervised manner, thereby eliminating the need for any ground-truth labels and enabling users to customize text rendering with any multilingual font of their choice. The experiment provides a proof of concept of our algorithm in zero-shot text and font editing across diverse fonts and languages, providing valuable insights for the community and industry toward achieving generalized visual text rendering.
2502.11001
CL-MFAP: A Contrastive Learning-Based Multimodal Foundation Model for Molecular Property Prediction and Antibiotic Screening
q-bio.BM cs.AI cs.LG q-bio.QM
Due to the rise in antimicrobial resistance, identifying novel compounds with antibiotic potential is crucial for combatting this global health issue. However, traditional drug development methods are costly and inefficient. Recognizing the pressing need for more effective solutions, researchers have turned to machine learning techniques to streamline the prediction and development of novel antibiotic compounds. While foundation models have shown promise in antibiotic discovery, current mainstream efforts still fall short of fully leveraging the potential of multimodal molecular data. Recent studies suggest that contrastive learning frameworks utilizing multimodal data exhibit excellent performance in representation learning across various domains. Building upon this, we introduce CL-MFAP, an unsupervised contrastive learning (CL)-based multimodal foundation (MF) model specifically tailored for discovering small molecules with potential antibiotic properties (AP) using three types of molecular data. This model employs 1.6 million bioactive molecules with drug-like properties from the ChEMBL dataset to jointly pretrain three encoders: (1) a transformer-based encoder with rotary position embedding for processing SMILES strings; (2) another transformer-based encoder, incorporating a novel bi-level routing attention mechanism to handle molecular graph representations; and (3) a Morgan fingerprint encoder using a multilayer perceptron, to achieve the contrastive learning purpose. The CL-MFAP outperforms baseline models in antibiotic property prediction by effectively utilizing different molecular modalities and demonstrates superior domain-specific performance when fine-tuned for antibiotic-related property prediction tasks.
2502.11002
Adjust Your Focus: Defocus Deblurring From Dual-Pixel Images Using Explicit Multi-Scale Cross-Correlation
cs.CV
Defocus blur is a common problem in photography. It arises when an image is captured with a wide aperture, resulting in a shallow depth of field. Sometimes it is desired, e.g., in portrait effect. Otherwise, it is a problem from both an aesthetic point of view and downstream computer vision tasks, such as segmentation and depth estimation. Defocusing an out-of-focus image to obtain an all-in-focus image is a highly challenging and often ill-posed problem. A recent work exploited dual-pixel (DP) image information, widely available in consumer DSLRs and high-end smartphones, to solve the problem of defocus deblurring. DP sensors result in two sub-aperture views containing defocus disparity cues. A given pixel's disparity is directly proportional to the distance from the focal plane. However, the existing methods adopt a na\"ive approach of a channel-wise concatenation of the two DP views without explicitly utilizing the disparity cues within the network. In this work, we propose to perform an explicit cross-correlation between the two DP views to guide the network for appropriate deblurring in different image regions. We adopt multi-scale cross-correlation to handle blur and disparities at different scales. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation of our multi-scale cross-correlation network (MCCNet) reveals that it achieves better defocus deblurring than existing state-of-the-art methods despite having lesser computational complexity.
2502.11003
FeaKM: Robust Collaborative Perception under Noisy Pose Conditions
cs.CV
Collaborative perception is essential for networks of agents with limited sensing capabilities, enabling them to work together by exchanging information to achieve a robust and comprehensive understanding of their environment. However, localization inaccuracies often lead to significant spatial message displacement, which undermines the effectiveness of these collaborative efforts. To tackle this challenge, we introduce FeaKM, a novel method that employs Feature-level Keypoints Matching to effectively correct pose discrepancies among collaborating agents. Our approach begins by utilizing a confidence map to identify and extract salient points from intermediate feature representations, allowing for the computation of their descriptors. This step ensures that the system can focus on the most relevant information, enhancing the matching process. We then implement a target-matching strategy that generates an assignment matrix, correlating the keypoints identified by different agents. This is critical for establishing accurate correspondences, which are essential for effective collaboration. Finally, we employ a fine-grained transformation matrix to synchronize the features of all agents and ascertain their relative statuses, ensuring coherent communication among them. Our experimental results demonstrate that FeaKM significantly outperforms existing methods on the DAIR-V2X dataset, confirming its robustness even under severe noise conditions. The code and implementation details are available at https://github.com/uestchjw/FeaKM.
2502.11006
Prompt Inject Detection with Generative Explanation as an Investigative Tool
cs.CR cs.AI
Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to adversarial prompt based injects. These injects could jailbreak or exploit vulnerabilities within these models with explicit prompt requests leading to undesired responses. In the context of investigating prompt injects, the challenge is the sheer volume of input prompts involved that are likely to be largely benign. This investigative challenge is further complicated by the semantics and subjectivity of the input prompts involved in the LLM conversation with its user and the context of the environment to which the conversation is being carried out. Hence, the challenge for AI security investigators would be two-fold. The first is to identify adversarial prompt injects and then to assess whether the input prompt is contextually benign or adversarial. For the first step, this could be done using existing AI security solutions like guardrails to detect and protect the LLMs. Guardrails have been developed using a variety of approaches. A popular approach is to use signature based. Another popular approach to develop AI models to classify such prompts include the use of NLP based models like a language model. However, in the context of conducting an AI security investigation of prompt injects, these guardrails lack the ability to aid investigators in triaging or assessing the identified input prompts. In this applied research exploration, we explore the use of a text generation capabilities of LLM to detect prompt injects and generate explanation for its detections to aid AI security investigators in assessing and triaging of such prompt inject detections. The practical benefit of such a tool is to ease the task of conducting investigation into prompt injects.
2502.11007
Local-Cloud Inference Offloading for LLMs in Multi-Modal, Multi-Task, Multi-Dialogue Settings
cs.LG cs.DC
Compared to traditional machine learning models, recent large language models (LLMs) can exhibit multi-task-solving capabilities through multiple dialogues and multi-modal data sources. These unique characteristics of LLMs, beyond their large size, make their deployment more challenging during the inference stage. Specifically, (i) deploying LLMs on local devices faces computational, memory, and energy resource issues, while (ii) deploying them in the cloud cannot guarantee real-time service and incurs communication/usage costs. In this paper, we design a local-cloud LLM inference offloading (LCIO) system, featuring (i) a large-scale cloud LLM that can handle multi-modal data sources and (ii) a lightweight local LLM that can process simple tasks at high speed. LCIO employs resource-constrained reinforcement learning (RCRL) to determine where to make the inference (i.e., local vs. cloud) and which multi-modal data sources to use for each dialogue/task, aiming to maximize the long-term reward (which incorporates response quality, latency, and usage cost) while adhering to resource constraints. We also propose M4A1, a new dataset that accounts for multi-modal, multi-task, multi-dialogue, and multi-LLM characteristics, to investigate the capabilities of LLMs in various practical scenarios. We demonstrate the effectiveness of LCIO compared to baselines, showing significant savings in latency and cost while achieving satisfactory response quality.
2502.11008
CounterBench: A Benchmark for Counterfactuals Reasoning in Large Language Models
cs.CL
Counterfactual reasoning is widely recognized as one of the most challenging and intricate aspects of causality in artificial intelligence. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of large language models (LLMs) in counterfactual reasoning. In contrast to previous studies that primarily focus on commonsense causal reasoning, where LLMs often rely on prior knowledge for inference, we specifically assess their ability to perform counterfactual inference using a set of formal rules. To support this evaluation, we introduce a new benchmark dataset, CounterBench, comprising 1K counterfactual reasoning questions. The dataset is designed with varying levels of difficulty, diverse causal graph structures, distinct types of counterfactual questions, and multiple nonsensical name variants. Our experiments demonstrate that counterfactual reasoning poses a significant challenge for LLMs, with most models performing at levels comparable to random guessing. To enhance LLM's counterfactual reasoning ability, we propose a novel reasoning paradigm, CoIn, which guides LLMs through iterative reasoning and backtracking to systematically explore counterfactual solutions. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves LLM performance on counterfactual reasoning tasks and consistently enhances performance across different LLMs.Our dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/CounterBench/CounterBench.
2502.11009
Computing Inconsistency Measures Under Differential Privacy
cs.DB
Assessing data quality is crucial to knowing whether and how to use the data for different purposes. Specifically, given a collection of integrity constraints, various ways have been proposed to quantify the inconsistency of a database. Inconsistency measures are particularly important when we wish to assess the quality of private data without revealing sensitive information. We study the estimation of inconsistency measures for a database protected under Differential Privacy (DP). Such estimation is nontrivial since some measures intrinsically query sensitive information, and the computation of others involves functions on underlying sensitive data. Among five inconsistency measures that have been proposed in recent work, we identify that two are intractable in the DP setting. The major challenge for the other three is high sensitivity: adding or removing one tuple from the dataset may significantly affect the outcome. To mitigate that, we model the dataset using a conflict graph and investigate private graph statistics to estimate these measures. The proposed machinery includes adapting graph-projection techniques with parameter selection optimizations on the conflict graph and a DP variant of approximate vertex cover size. We experimentally show that we can effectively compute DP estimates of the three measures on five real-world datasets with denial constraints, where the density of the conflict graphs highly varies.
2502.11013
Collaborative Deterministic-Diffusion Model for Probabilistic Urban Spatiotemporal Prediction
cs.LG cs.AI
Accurate prediction of urban spatiotemporal dynamics is essential for enhancing urban management and decision-making. Existing spatiotemporal prediction models are predominantly deterministic, focusing on primary spatiotemporal patterns. However, those dynamics are highly complex, exhibiting multi-modal distributions that are challenging for deterministic models to capture. In this paper, we highlight the critical role of probabilistic prediction in capturing the uncertainties and complexities inherent in spatiotemporal data. While mainstream probabilistic models can capture uncertainty, they struggle with accurately learning primary patterns and often suffer from computational inefficiency. To address these challenges, we propose CoST, which collaborates deterministic and probabilistic models to improve both predictive accuracy and the ability to handle uncertainty. To achieve this, we design a mean-residual decomposition framework, where the mean value is modeled by a deterministic model, and the residual variations are learned by a probabilistic model, specifically diffusion models. Moreover, we introduce a scale-aware diffusion process, which better accounts for spatially heterogeneous dynamics across different regions. Extensive experiments on eight real-world datasets demonstrate that CoST significantly outperforms existing methods in both deterministic and probabilistic metrics, achieving a 20% improvement with low computational cost. CoST bridges the gap between deterministic precision and probabilistic uncertainty, making a significant advancement in the field of urban spatiotemporal prediction.
2502.11018
GRIFFIN: Effective Token Alignment for Faster Speculative Decoding
cs.CL cs.AI
Speculative decoding accelerates inference in large language models (LLMs) by generating multiple draft tokens simultaneously. However, existing methods often struggle with token misalignment between the training and decoding phases, limiting their performance. To address this, we propose GRIFFIN, a novel framework that incorporates a token-alignable training strategy and a token-alignable draft model to mitigate misalignment. The training strategy employs a loss masking mechanism to exclude highly misaligned tokens during training, preventing them from negatively impacting the draft model's optimization. The token-alignable draft model introduces input tokens to correct inconsistencies in generated features. Experiments on LLaMA-series and Vicuna models demonstrate that GRIFFIN achieves an average acceptance length improvement of over 7\% and a speedup ratio exceeding 8%, outperforming current SoTAs as shown in Fig. 1 (a) and (b).
2502.11019
Unlocking the Power of Function Vectors for Characterizing and Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Instruction Tuning
cs.LG cs.AI
Catastrophic forgetting (CF) poses a significant challenge in machine learning, where a model forgets previously learned information upon learning new tasks. Despite the advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), they continue to face challenges with CF during continual learning. The majority of existing research focuses on analyzing forgetting patterns through a singular training sequence, thereby overlooking the intricate effects that diverse tasks have on model behavior. Our study explores CF across various settings, discovering that model forgetting is influenced by both the specific training tasks and the models themselves. To this end, we interpret forgetting by examining the function vector (FV), a compact representation of functions in LLMs, offering a model-dependent indicator for the occurrence of CF. Through theoretical and empirical analyses, we demonstrated that CF in LLMs primarily stems from biases in function activation rather than the overwriting of task processing functions. Leveraging these insights, we propose a novel function vector guided training methodology, incorporating a regularization technique to stabilize the FV and mitigate forgetting. Empirical tests on four benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of our proposed training method, substantiating our theoretical framework concerning CF and model function dynamics. We plan to make our code publicly accessible in the near future.
2502.11020
TUMLU: A Unified and Native Language Understanding Benchmark for Turkic Languages
cs.CL cs.AI
Being able to thoroughly assess massive multi-task language understanding (MMLU) capabilities is essential for advancing the applicability of multilingual language models. However, preparing such benchmarks in high quality native language is often costly and therefore limits the representativeness of evaluation datasets. While recent efforts focused on building more inclusive MMLU benchmarks, these are conventionally built using machine translation from high-resource languages, which may introduce errors and fail to account for the linguistic and cultural intricacies of the target languages. In this paper, we address the lack of native language MMLU benchmark especially in the under-represented Turkic language family with distinct morphosyntactic and cultural characteristics. We propose two benchmarks for Turkic language MMLU: TUMLU is a comprehensive, multilingual, and natively developed language understanding benchmark specifically designed for Turkic languages. It consists of middle- and high-school level questions spanning 11 academic subjects in Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Karakalpak, Kazakh, Tatar, Turkish, Uyghur, and Uzbek. We also present TUMLU-mini, a more concise, balanced, and manually verified subset of the dataset. Using this dataset, we systematically evaluate a diverse range of open and proprietary multilingual large language models (LLMs), including Claude, Gemini, GPT, and LLaMA, offering an in-depth analysis of their performance across different languages, subjects, and alphabets. To promote further research and development in multilingual language understanding, we release TUMLU-mini and all corresponding evaluation scripts.
2502.11021
Leveraging Uncertainty Estimation for Efficient LLM Routing
cs.NI cs.CL
Deploying large language models (LLMs) in edge-cloud environments requires an efficient routing strategy to balance cost and response quality. Traditional approaches prioritize either human-preference data or accuracy metrics from benchmark datasets as routing criteria, but these methods suffer from rigidity and subjectivity. Moreover, existing routing frameworks primarily focus on accuracy and cost, neglecting response quality from a human preference perspective. In this work, we propose the Confidence-Driven LLM Router, a novel framework that leverages uncertainty estimation to optimize routing decisions. To comprehensively assess routing performance, we evaluate both system cost efficiency and response quality. In particular, we introduce the novel use of LLM-as-a-Judge to simulate human rating preferences, providing the first systematic assessment of response quality across different routing strategies. Extensive experiments on MT-Bench, GSM8K, and MMLU demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art routing methods, achieving superior response quality while maintaining cost efficiency.
2502.11022
MultiTEND: A Multilingual Benchmark for Natural Language to NoSQL Query Translation
cs.CL cs.AI
Natural language interfaces for NoSQL databases are increasingly vital in the big data era, enabling users to interact with complex, unstructured data without deep technical expertise. However, most recent advancements focus on English, leaving a gap for multilingual support. This paper introduces MultiTEND, the first and largest multilingual benchmark for natural language to NoSQL query generation, covering six languages: English, German, French, Russian, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Using MultiTEND, we analyze challenges in translating natural language to NoSQL queries across diverse linguistic structures, including lexical and syntactic differences. Experiments show that performance accuracy in both English and non-English settings remains relatively low, with a 4%-6% gap across scenarios like fine-tuned SLM, zero-shot LLM, and RAG for LLM. To address the aforementioned challenges, we introduce MultiLink, a novel framework that bridges the multilingual input to NoSQL query generation gap through a Parallel Linking Process. It breaks down the task into multiple steps, integrating parallel multilingual processing, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to tackle lexical and structural challenges inherent in multilingual NoSQL generation. MultiLink shows enhancements in all metrics for every language against the top baseline, boosting execution accuracy by about 15% for English and averaging a 10% improvement for non-English languages.
2502.11023
DT4ECG: A Dual-Task Learning Framework for ECG-Based Human Identity Recognition and Human Activity Detection
eess.SP cs.LG
This article introduces DT4ECG, an innovative dual-task learning framework for Electrocardiogram (ECG)-based human identity recognition and activity detection. The framework employs a robust one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) backbone integrated with residual blocks to extract discriminative ECG features. To enhance feature representation, we propose a novel Sequence Channel Attention (SCA) mechanism, which combines channel-wise and sequential context attention to prioritize informative features across both temporal and channel dimensions. Furthermore, to address gradient imbalance in multi-task learning, we integrate GradNorm, a technique that dynamically adjusts loss weights based on gradient magnitudes, ensuring balanced training across tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our model, achieving accuracy rates of 99.12% in ID classification and 90.11% in activity classification. These findings underscore the potential of the DT4ECG framework in enhancing security and user experience across various applications such as fitness monitoring and personalized healthcare, thereby presenting a transformative approach to integrating ECG-based biometrics in everyday technologies.
2502.11024
TPCap: Unlocking Zero-Shot Image Captioning with Trigger-Augmented and Multi-Modal Purification Modules
cs.CV
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the fluency and logical coherence of image captioning. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely adopted to incorporate external knowledge into LLMs; however, existing RAG-based methods rely on separate retrieval banks, introducing computational overhead and limiting the utilization of LLMs' inherent zero-shot capabilities. To address these limitations, we propose TPCap, a novel trigger-augmented and multi-modal purification framework for zero-shot image captioning without external retrieval libraries. TPCap consists of two key components: trigger-augmented (TA) generation and multi-modal purification (MP). The TA module employs a trigger projector with frozen and learnable projections to activate LLMs' contextual reasoning, enhance visual-textual alignment, and mitigate data bias. The MP module further refines the generated entity-related information by filtering noise and enhancing feature quality, ensuring more precise and factually consistent captions. We evaluate TPCap on COCO, NoCaps, Flickr30k, and WHOOPS datasets. With only 0.82M trainable parameters and training on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU, TPCap achieves competitive performance comparable to state-of-the-art models.
2502.11026
Simplify RLHF as Reward-Weighted SFT: A Variational Method
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CL
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values. However, RLHF has been continuously challenged by its high complexity in implementation and computation consumption. Even with recent simplifications, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Advantage Leftover Lunch (A-LoL), the problems of over-fitting and training instability remain hindering the alignment process from the expected optimal performance. To address the existing challenges, we propose a novel simplification of RLHF from the perspective of variational inference, called $\textbf{V}$ariational $\textbf{A}$lignment with $\textbf{R}$e-weighting ($\textbf{VAR}$). More specifically, by directly minimizing the distribution gap between the learning LLM policy and the optimal solution of RLHF, we transform the alignment objective into a reward-driven re-weighted supervised fine-tuning (SFT) form, which only requires minor adjustment on the SFT loss to obtain noticeable improvement on training stability and effectiveness. On comprehensive alignment and generation benchmarks, our VAR method has numerically achieved competitive performance in LLM alignment helpfulness and harmlessness.
2502.11027
Diversified Sampling Improves Scaling LLM inference
cs.LG
While increasing training compute has significantly improved the performance of large language models (LLMs), similar gains have not been observed when scaling inference compute. We hypothesize that the primary issue lies in the uniformity of LLM outputs, which leads to inefficient sampling as models repeatedly generate similar but inaccurate responses. Motivated by an intriguing relationship between solution accuracy (Pass@10) and response diversity, we propose DivSampling -- a novel and versatile sampling technique designed to enhance the diversity of candidate solutions by introducing prompt perturbations.DivSampling incorporates two categories of perturbations: task-agnostic approaches, which are general and not tailored to any specific task, and task-specific approaches, which are customized based on task content. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that, under mild assumptions, the error rates of responses generated from diverse prompts are significantly lower compared to those produced by stationary prompts. Comprehensive evaluations across various tasks -- including reasoning, mathematics, and code generation -- highlight the effectiveness of DivSampling in improving solution accuracy. This scalable and efficient approach offers a new perspective on optimizing test-time inference, addressing limitations in current sampling strategies.
2502.11028
Mind the Confidence Gap: Overconfidence, Calibration, and Distractor Effects in Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance across diverse tasks, yet confidence calibration remains a challenge. Miscalibration - where models are overconfident or underconfident - poses risks, particularly in high-stakes applications. This paper presents an empirical study on LLM calibration, examining how model size, distractors, and question types affect confidence alignment. We introduce an evaluation framework to measure overconfidence and investigate whether multiple-choice formats mitigate or worsen miscalibration. Our findings show that while larger models (e.g., GPT-4o) are better calibrated overall, they are more prone to distraction, whereas smaller models benefit more from answer choices but struggle with uncertainty estimation. Unlike prior work, which primarily reports miscalibration trends, we provide actionable insights into failure modes and conditions that worsen overconfidence. These findings highlight the need for calibration-aware interventions and improved uncertainty estimation methods.
2502.11031
A Critical Review of Predominant Bias in Neural Networks
cs.LG
Bias issues of neural networks garner significant attention along with its promising advancement. Among various bias issues, mitigating two predominant biases is crucial in advancing fair and trustworthy AI: (1) ensuring neural networks yields even performance across demographic groups, and (2) ensuring algorithmic decision-making does not rely on protected attributes. However, upon the investigation of \pc papers in the relevant literature, we find that there exists a persistent, extensive but under-explored confusion regarding these two types of biases. Furthermore, the confusion has already significantly hampered the clarity of the community and subsequent development of debiasing methodologies. Thus, in this work, we aim to restore clarity by providing two mathematical definitions for these two predominant biases and leveraging these definitions to unify a comprehensive list of papers. Next, we highlight the common phenomena and the possible reasons for the existing confusion. To alleviate the confusion, we provide extensive experiments on synthetic, census, and image datasets, to validate the distinct nature of these biases, distinguish their different real-world manifestations, and evaluate the effectiveness of a comprehensive list of bias assessment metrics in assessing the mitigation of these biases. Further, we compare these two types of biases from multiple dimensions including the underlying causes, debiasing methods, evaluation protocol, prevalent datasets, and future directions. Last, we provide several suggestions aiming to guide researchers engaged in bias-related work to avoid confusion and further enhance clarity in the community.
2502.11033
Convergence of Policy Mirror Descent Beyond Compatible Function Approximation
cs.LG math.OC stat.ML
Modern policy optimization methods roughly follow the policy mirror descent (PMD) algorithmic template, for which there are by now numerous theoretical convergence results. However, most of these either target tabular environments, or can be applied effectively only when the class of policies being optimized over satisfies strong closure conditions, which is typically not the case when working with parametric policy classes in large-scale environments. In this work, we develop a theoretical framework for PMD for general policy classes where we replace the closure conditions with a strictly weaker variational gradient dominance assumption, and obtain upper bounds on the rate of convergence to the best-in-class policy. Our main result leverages a novel notion of smoothness with respect to a local norm induced by the occupancy measure of the current policy, and casts PMD as a particular instance of smooth non-convex optimization in non-Euclidean space.
2502.11034
AdaGC: Improving Training Stability for Large Language Model Pretraining
cs.LG
Large Language Models (LLMs) face increasing loss spikes during scaling, undermining training stability and final performance. While gradient clipping mitigates this issue, traditional global approaches poorly handle parameter-specific gradient variations and decaying gradient norms. We propose **AdaGC**, an adaptive gradient clipping framework that automatically adjusts local thresholds per parameter through exponential moving average of gradient norms. Theoretical analysis proves AdaGC's convergence under non-convex conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant improvements: On Llama-2 7B/13B, AdaGC completely eliminates loss spikes while reducing WikiText perplexity by 3.5% (+0.14pp LAMBADA accuracy) for 7B and achieving 0.65% lower training loss with 1.47% reduced validation perplexity for 13B compared to global clipping. For CLIP ViT-Base, AdaGC converges 25% faster than StableAdamW with full spike elimination. The method shows universal effectiveness across architectures (Llama-2 7B/13B) and modalities (CLIP), with successful integration into diverse optimizers like AdamW and Lion. Source code will be released on GitHub.
2502.11037
Deep Incomplete Multi-view Learning via Cyclic Permutation of VAEs
cs.LG cs.AI cs.CV
Multi-View Representation Learning (MVRL) aims to derive a unified representation from multi-view data by leveraging shared and complementary information across views. However, when views are irregularly missing, the incomplete data can lead to representations that lack sufficiency and consistency. To address this, we propose Multi-View Permutation of Variational Auto-Encoders (MVP), which excavates invariant relationships between views in incomplete data. MVP establishes inter-view correspondences in the latent space of Variational Auto-Encoders, enabling the inference of missing views and the aggregation of more sufficient information. To derive a valid Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) for learning, we apply permutations to randomly reorder variables for cross-view generation and then partition them by views to maintain invariant meanings under permutations. Additionally, we enhance consistency by introducing an informational prior with cyclic permutations of posteriors, which turns the regularization term into a similarity measure across distributions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on seven diverse datasets with varying missing ratios, achieving superior performance in multi-view clustering and generation tasks.
2502.11044
Detecting Cadastral Boundary from Satellite Images Using U-Net model
cs.CV cs.LG
Finding the cadastral boundaries of farmlands is a crucial concern for land administration. Therefore, using deep learning methods to expedite and simplify the extraction of cadastral boundaries from satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) images is critical. In this paper, we employ transfer learning to train a U-Net model with a ResNet34 backbone to detect cadastral boundaries through three-class semantic segmentation: "boundary", "field", and "background". We evaluate the performance on two satellite images from farmlands in Iran using "precision", "recall", and "F-score", achieving high values of 88%, 75%, and 81%, respectively, which indicate promising results.
2502.11049
Faces of Fairness: Examining Bias in Facial Expression Recognition Datasets and Models
cs.CV
Building AI systems, including Facial Expression Recognition (FER), involves two critical aspects: data and model design. Both components significantly influence bias and fairness in FER tasks. Issues related to bias and fairness in FER datasets and models remain underexplored. This study investigates bias sources in FER datasets and models. Four common FER datasets--AffectNet, ExpW, Fer2013, and RAF-DB--are analyzed. The findings demonstrate that AffectNet and ExpW exhibit high generalizability despite data imbalances. Additionally, this research evaluates the bias and fairness of six deep models, including three state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN) models: MobileNet, ResNet, XceptionNet, as well as three transformer-based models: ViT, CLIP, and GPT-4o-mini. Experimental results reveal that while GPT-4o-mini and ViT achieve the highest accuracy scores, they also display the highest levels of bias. These findings underscore the urgent need for developing new methodologies to mitigate bias and ensure fairness in datasets and models, particularly in affective computing applications. See our implementation details at https://github.com/MMHosseini/bias_in_FER.
2502.11051
MMUNLEARNER: Reformulating Multimodal Machine Unlearning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI
Recent progress in Machine Unlearning (MU) has introduced solutions for the selective removal of private or sensitive information encoded within deep neural networks. Nonetheless, MU for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remains in its nascent phase. Therefore, we propose to reformulate the task of multimodal MU in the era of MLLMs, which aims to erase only the visual patterns associated with a given entity while preserving the corresponding textual knowledge encoded within the original parameters of the language model backbone. Furthermore, we develop a novel geometry-constrained gradient descent method MMUnlearner. It updates the weights of MLLMs with a weight saliency map jointly restricted by the remaining concepts and textual knowledge during unlearning, thereby preserving parameters essential for non-target knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MMUnlearner surpasses baselines that finetuning MLLMs with VQA data directly through Gradient Ascent (GA) or Negative Preference Optimization (NPO), across all evaluation dimensions. Our code will be released upon acceptance.
2502.11053
Demystifying 5G Polar and LDPC Codes: A Comprehensive Review and Foundations
cs.IT math.IT
This paper serves as a comprehensive guide for practitioners and scholars aiming to understand the channel coding and decoding schemes integral to the 5G NR standard, with a particular focus on LDPC and polar codes. We start by explaining the design procedures that underlie these channel codes, offering fundamental information from perspectives of both encoding and decoding. In order to determine the present status of research in this area, we also provide a thorough literature review. Notably, we add comprehensive, standard-specific information to these foundational evaluations that is frequently difficult to extract from technical specification documents.
2502.11054
Reasoning-Augmented Conversation for Multi-Turn Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI cs.CR
Multi-turn jailbreak attacks simulate real-world human interactions by engaging large language models (LLMs) in iterative dialogues, exposing critical safety vulnerabilities. However, existing methods often struggle to balance semantic coherence with attack effectiveness, resulting in either benign semantic drift or ineffective detection evasion. To address this challenge, we propose Reasoning-Augmented Conversation, a novel multi-turn jailbreak framework that reformulates harmful queries into benign reasoning tasks and leverages LLMs' strong reasoning capabilities to compromise safety alignment. Specifically, we introduce an attack state machine framework to systematically model problem translation and iterative reasoning, ensuring coherent query generation across multiple turns. Building on this framework, we design gain-guided exploration, self-play, and rejection feedback modules to preserve attack semantics, enhance effectiveness, and sustain reasoning-driven attack progression. Extensive experiments on multiple LLMs demonstrate that RACE achieves state-of-the-art attack effectiveness in complex conversational scenarios, with attack success rates (ASRs) increasing by up to 96%. Notably, our approach achieves ASRs of 82% and 92% against leading commercial models, OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1, underscoring its potency. We release our code at https://github.com/NY1024/RACE to facilitate further research in this critical domain.
2502.11057
A Physics-Informed Machine Learning Framework for Safe and Optimal Control of Autonomous Systems
cs.RO cs.AI cs.SY eess.SY
As autonomous systems become more ubiquitous in daily life, ensuring high performance with guaranteed safety is crucial. However, safety and performance could be competing objectives, which makes their co-optimization difficult. Learning-based methods, such as Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL), achieve strong performance but lack formal safety guarantees due to safety being enforced as soft constraints, limiting their use in safety-critical settings. Conversely, formal methods such as Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) Reachability Analysis and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide rigorous safety assurances but often neglect performance, resulting in overly conservative controllers. To bridge this gap, we formulate the co-optimization of safety and performance as a state-constrained optimal control problem, where performance objectives are encoded via a cost function and safety requirements are imposed as state constraints. We demonstrate that the resultant value function satisfies a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation, which we approximate efficiently using a novel physics-informed machine learning framework. In addition, we introduce a conformal prediction-based verification strategy to quantify the learning errors, recovering a high-confidence safety value function, along with a probabilistic error bound on performance degradation. Through several case studies, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework in enabling scalable learning of safe and performant controllers for complex, high-dimensional autonomous systems.
2502.11059
ClimateLLM: Efficient Weather Forecasting via Frequency-Aware Large Language Models
cs.LG cs.AI
Weather forecasting is crucial for public safety, disaster prevention and mitigation, agricultural production, and energy management, with global relevance. Although deep learning has significantly advanced weather prediction, current methods face critical limitations: (i) they often struggle to capture both dynamic temporal dependencies and short-term abrupt changes, making extreme weather modeling difficult; (ii) they incur high computational costs due to extensive training and resource requirements; (iii) they have limited adaptability to multi-scale frequencies, leading to challenges when separating global trends from local fluctuations. To address these issues, we propose ClimateLLM, a foundation model for weather forecasting. It captures spatiotemporal dependencies via a cross-temporal and cross-spatial collaborative modeling framework that integrates Fourier-based frequency decomposition with Large Language Models (LLMs) to strengthen spatial and temporal modeling. Our framework uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism that adaptively processes different frequency components, enabling efficient handling of both global signals and localized extreme events. In addition, we introduce a cross-temporal and cross-spatial dynamic prompting mechanism, allowing LLMs to incorporate meteorological patterns across multiple scales effectively. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that ClimateLLM outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in accuracy and efficiency, as a scalable solution for global weather forecasting.
2502.11061
D\'ej\`a Vu? Decoding Repeated Reading from Eye Movements
cs.CL
Be it your favorite novel, a newswire article, a cooking recipe or an academic paper -- in many daily situations we read the same text more than once. In this work, we ask whether it is possible to automatically determine whether the reader has previously encountered a text based on their eye movement patterns. We introduce two variants of this task and address them with considerable success using both feature-based and neural models. We further introduce a general strategy for enhancing these models with machine generated simulations of eye movements from a cognitive model. Finally, we present an analysis of model performance which on the one hand yields insights on the information used by the models, and on the other hand leverages predictive modeling as an analytic tool for better characterization of the role of memory in repeated reading. Our work advances the understanding of the extent and manner in which eye movements in reading capture memory effects from prior text exposure, and paves the way for future applications that involve predictive modeling of repeated reading.
2502.11062
Beyond Similarity: A Gradient-based Graph Method for Instruction Tuning Data Selection
cs.CL
Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential across various industries due to their remarkable ability to generalize through instruction tuning. However, the limited availability of domain-specific data significantly hampers their performance on specialized tasks. While existing methods primarily focus on selecting training data from general datasets that are similar to the target domain, they often fail to consider the joint distribution of instructions, resulting in inefficient learning and suboptimal knowledge transfer. To address these challenges, we introduce G2IS (Gradient-based Graph Instruction Selection), a novel method that constructs a mixed gradient-based instruction graph to capture the joint distribution and interdependencies between instructions. By accounting for the relationships between instructions, G2IS improves domain adaptation efficiency. Additionally, we propose a gradient walk algorithm to refine the data selection process, enhancing both training effectiveness and efficiency. Our experiments demonstrate that G2IS outperforms traditional methods across various domain adaptation tasks, yielding significant performance gains, particularly in complex, data-scarce scenarios. These results underscore the potential of G2IS in advancing the development of large, domain-specific models.
2502.11066
CARMA: Enhanced Compositionality in LLMs via Advanced Regularisation and Mutual Information Alignment
cs.CL
Large language models (LLMs) struggle with compositional generalisation, limiting their ability to systematically combine learned components to interpret novel inputs. While architectural modifications, fine-tuning, and data augmentation improve compositionality, they often have limited adaptability, face scalability constraints, or yield diminishing returns on real data. To address this, we propose CARMA, an intervention that enhances the stability and robustness of compositional reasoning in LLMs while preserving fine-tuned performance. CARMA employs mutual information regularisation and layer-wise stability constraints to mitigate feature fragmentation, ensuring structured representations persist across and within layers. We evaluate CARMA on inverse dictionary modelling and sentiment classification, measuring its impact on semantic consistency, performance stability, and robustness to lexical perturbations. Results show that CARMA reduces the variability introduced by fine-tuning, stabilises token representations, and improves compositional reasoning. While its effectiveness varies across architectures, CARMA's key strength lies in reinforcing learned structures rather than introducing new capabilities, making it a scalable auxiliary method. These findings suggest that integrating CARMA with fine-tuning can improve compositional generalisation while maintaining task-specific performance in LLMs.
2502.11067
A Survey on Active Feature Acquisition Strategies
cs.LG
Active feature acquisition studies the challenge of making accurate predictions while limiting the cost of collecting complete data. By selectively acquiring only the most informative features for each instance, these strategies enable efficient decision-making in scenarios where data collection is expensive or time-consuming. This survey reviews recent progress in active feature acquisition, discussing common problem formulations, practical challenges, and key insights. We also highlight open issues and promising directions for future research.
2502.11068
Accelerating Anchors via Specialization and Feature Transformation
cs.LG cs.AI
Anchors is a popular local model-agnostic explanation technique whose applicability is limited by its computational inefficiency. To address this limitation, we propose a pre-training-based approach to accelerate Anchors without compromising the explanation quality. Our approach leverages the iterative nature of Anchors' algorithm which gradually refines an explanation until it is precise enough for a given input by providing a general explanation that is obtained through pre-training as Anchors' initial explanation. Specifically, we develop a two-step rule transformation process: the horizontal transformation adapts a pre-trained explanation to the current input by replacing features, and the vertical transformation refines the general explanation until it is precise enough for the input. We evaluate our method across tabular, text, and image datasets, demonstrating that it significantly reduces explanation generation time while maintaining fidelity and interpretability, thereby enabling the practical adoption of Anchors in time-sensitive applications.
2502.11070
A Survey on Vulnerability Prioritization: Taxonomy, Metrics, and Research Challenges
cs.CR cs.AI
In the highly interconnected digital landscape of today, safeguarding complex infrastructures against cyber threats has become increasingly challenging due to the exponential growth in the number and complexity of vulnerabilities. Resource constraints necessitate effective vulnerability prioritization strategies, focusing efforts on the most critical risks. This paper presents a systematic literature review of 82 studies, introducing a novel taxonomy that categorizes metrics into severity, exploitability, contextual factors, predictive indicators, and aggregation methods. Our analysis reveals significant gaps in existing approaches and challenges with multi-domain applicability. By emphasizing the need for dynamic, context-aware metrics and scalable solutions, we provide actionable insights to bridge the gap between research and real-world applications. This work contributes to the field by offering a comprehensive framework for evaluating vulnerability prioritization methodologies and setting a research agenda to advance the state of practice.
2502.11071
Generalization of the Gibbs algorithm with high probability at low temperatures
cs.LG stat.ML
The paper gives a bound on the generalization error of the Gibbs algorithm, which recovers known data-independent bounds for the high temperature range and extends to the low-temperature range, where generalization depends critically on the data-dependent loss-landscape. It is shown, that with high probability the generalization error of a single hypothesis drawn from the Gibbs posterior decreases with the total prior volume of all hypotheses with similar or smaller empirical error. This gives theoretical support to the belief in the benefit of flat minima. The zero temperature limit is discussed and the bound is extended to a class of similar stochastic algorithms.
2502.11073
Demystifying Hateful Content: Leveraging Large Multimodal Models for Hateful Meme Detection with Explainable Decisions
cs.CL
Hateful meme detection presents a significant challenge as a multimodal task due to the complexity of interpreting implicit hate messages and contextual cues within memes. Previous approaches have fine-tuned pre-trained vision-language models (PT-VLMs), leveraging the knowledge they gained during pre-training and their attention mechanisms to understand meme content. However, the reliance of these models on implicit knowledge and complex attention mechanisms renders their decisions difficult to explain, which is crucial for building trust in meme classification. In this paper, we introduce IntMeme, a novel framework that leverages Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) for hateful meme classification with explainable decisions. IntMeme addresses the dual challenges of improving both accuracy and explainability in meme moderation. The framework uses LMMs to generate human-like, interpretive analyses of memes, providing deeper insights into multimodal content and context. Additionally, it uses independent encoding modules for both memes and their interpretations, which are then combined to enhance classification performance. Our approach addresses the opacity and misclassification issues associated with PT-VLMs, optimizing the use of LMMs for hateful meme detection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of IntMeme through comprehensive experiments across three datasets, showcasing its superiority over state-of-the-art models.
2502.11075
Exposing Numeracy Gaps: A Benchmark to Evaluate Fundamental Numerical Abilities in Large Language Models
cs.CL cs.AI
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language processing tasks, such as text generation and semantic understanding. However, their performance on numerical reasoning tasks, such as basic arithmetic, numerical retrieval, and magnitude comparison, remains surprisingly poor. This gap arises from their reliance on surface-level statistical patterns rather than understanding numbers as continuous magnitudes. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on either linguistic competence or structured mathematical problem-solving, neglecting fundamental numerical reasoning required in real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose NumericBench, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate six fundamental numerical capabilities: number recognition, arithmetic operations, contextual retrieval, comparison, summary, and logical reasoning. NumericBench includes datasets ranging from synthetic number lists to the crawled real-world data, addressing challenges like long contexts, noise, and multi-step reasoning. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-4 and DeepSeek, reveal persistent weaknesses in numerical reasoning, highlighting the urgent need to improve numerically-aware language modeling. The benchmark is released in: https://github.com/TreeAI-Lab/NumericBench.
2502.11078
DEEPER Insight into Your User: Directed Persona Refinement for Dynamic Persona Modeling
cs.CL
To advance personalized applications such as recommendation systems and user behavior prediction, recent research increasingly adopts large language models (LLMs) for human -readable persona modeling. In dynamic real -world scenarios, effective persona modeling necessitates leveraging streaming behavior data to continually optimize user personas. However, existing methods -whether regenerating personas or incrementally extending them with new behaviors -often fail to achieve sustained improvements in persona quality or future behavior prediction accuracy. To address this, we propose DEEPER, a novel approach for dynamic persona modeling that enables continual persona optimization. Specifically, we enhance the model's direction -search capability through an iterative reinforcement learning framework, allowing it to automatically identify effective update directions and optimize personas using discrepancies between user behaviors and model predictions. Extensive experiments on dynamic persona modeling involving 4800 users across 10 domains highlight the superior persona optimization capabilities of DEEPER, delivering an impressive 32.2% average reduction in user behavior prediction error over four update rounds -outperforming the best baseline by a remarkable 22.92%.
2502.11079
Phantom: Subject-consistent video generation via cross-modal alignment
cs.CV cs.AI
The continuous development of foundational models for video generation is evolving into various applications, with subject-consistent video generation still in the exploratory stage. We refer to this as Subject-to-Video, which extracts subject elements from reference images and generates subject-consistent video through textual instructions. We believe that the essence of subject-to-video lies in balancing the dual-modal prompts of text and image, thereby deeply and simultaneously aligning both text and visual content. To this end, we propose Phantom, a unified video generation framework for both single and multi-subject references. Building on existing text-to-video and image-to-video architectures, we redesign the joint text-image injection model and drive it to learn cross-modal alignment via text-image-video triplet data. In particular, we emphasize subject consistency in human generation, covering existing ID-preserving video generation while offering enhanced advantages. The project homepage is here https://phantom-video.github.io/Phantom/.
2502.11083
Streamlining the Collaborative Chain of Models into A Single Forward Pass in Generation-Based Tasks
cs.CL
In Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agent-based frameworks, the "Chain of Models" approach is widely used, where multiple specialized models work sequentially on distinct sub-tasks. This approach is effective but increases resource demands as each model must be deployed separately. Recent advancements attempt to address this by applying prompt tuning, which allows a shared base model to adapt to multiple tasks with minimal parameter changes. However, a key challenge remains: intermediate outputs, passed between models as plain text, require recomputation of hidden states (i.e., Key and Value (KV) states in Transformers) during inference. In this paper, we introduce FTHSS, a novel prompt-tuning method that enables models to share KV hidden states, eliminating redundant forward passes and reducing KV cache storage. By modifying input and attention masks during training, FTHSS allows models to effectively utilize KV hidden states from prior models in both single- and multi-round scenarios. Empirical results on four tasks show that FTHSS matches the performance of traditional model chains while improving inference efficiency.
2502.11084
Rewrite to Jailbreak: Discover Learnable and Transferable Implicit Harmfulness Instruction
cs.CL
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely applied in various domains, the safety of LLMs is increasingly attracting attention to avoid their powerful capabilities being misused. Existing jailbreak methods create a forced instruction-following scenario, or search adversarial prompts with prefix or suffix tokens to achieve a specific representation manually or automatically. However, they suffer from low efficiency and explicit jailbreak patterns, far from the real deployment of mass attacks to LLMs. In this paper, we point out that simply rewriting the original instruction can achieve a jailbreak, and we find that this rewriting approach is learnable and transferable. We propose the Rewrite to Jailbreak (R2J) approach, a transferable black-box jailbreak method to attack LLMs by iteratively exploring the weakness of the LLMs and automatically improving the attacking strategy. The jailbreak is more efficient and hard to identify since no additional features are introduced. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of R2J, and we find that the jailbreak is also transferable to multiple datasets and various types of models with only a few queries. We hope our work motivates further investigation of LLM safety.
2502.11085
Towards Data-Efficient Pretraining for Atomic Property Prediction
cs.LG cs.AI
This paper challenges the recent paradigm in atomic property prediction that links progress to growing dataset sizes and computational resources. We show that pretraining on a carefully selected, task-relevant dataset can match or even surpass large-scale pretraining, while using as little as 1/24th of the computational cost. We introduce the Chemical Similarity Index (CSI), a novel metric inspired by computer vision's Fr\'echet Inception Distance, for molecular graphs which quantifies the alignment between upstream pretraining datasets and downstream tasks. By selecting the most relevant dataset with minimal CSI distance, we show that models pretrained on a smaller, focused dataset consistently outperform those pretrained on massive, mixed datasets such as JMP, even when those larger datasets include the relevant dataset. Counterintuitively, we also find that indiscriminately adding more data can degrade model performance when the additional data poorly aligns with the task at hand. Our findings highlight that quality often outperforms quantity in pretraining for atomic property prediction.
2502.11089
Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention
cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Long-context modeling is crucial for next-generation language models, yet the high computational cost of standard attention mechanisms poses significant computational challenges. Sparse attention offers a promising direction for improving efficiency while maintaining model capabilities. We present NSA, a Natively trainable Sparse Attention mechanism that integrates algorithmic innovations with hardware-aligned optimizations to achieve efficient long-context modeling. NSA employs a dynamic hierarchical sparse strategy, combining coarse-grained token compression with fine-grained token selection to preserve both global context awareness and local precision. Our approach advances sparse attention design with two key innovations: (1) We achieve substantial speedups through arithmetic intensity-balanced algorithm design, with implementation optimizations for modern hardware. (2) We enable end-to-end training, reducing pretraining computation without sacrificing model performance. As shown in Figure 1, experiments show the model pretrained with NSA maintains or exceeds Full Attention models across general benchmarks, long-context tasks, and instruction-based reasoning. Meanwhile, NSA achieves substantial speedups over Full Attention on 64k-length sequences across decoding, forward propagation, and backward propagation, validating its efficiency throughout the model lifecycle.
2502.11090
SafeDialBench: A Fine-Grained Safety Benchmark for Large Language Models in Multi-Turn Dialogues with Diverse Jailbreak Attacks
cs.CL cs.AI
With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), the safety of LLMs has been a critical concern requiring precise assessment. Current benchmarks primarily concentrate on single-turn dialogues or a single jailbreak attack method to assess the safety. Additionally, these benchmarks have not taken into account the LLM's capability of identifying and handling unsafe information in detail. To address these issues, we propose a fine-grained benchmark SafeDialBench for evaluating the safety of LLMs across various jailbreak attacks in multi-turn dialogues. Specifically, we design a two-tier hierarchical safety taxonomy that considers 6 safety dimensions and generates more than 4000 multi-turn dialogues in both Chinese and English under 22 dialogue scenarios. We employ 7 jailbreak attack strategies, such as reference attack and purpose reverse, to enhance the dataset quality for dialogue generation. Notably, we construct an innovative assessment framework of LLMs, measuring capabilities in detecting, and handling unsafe information and maintaining consistency when facing jailbreak attacks. Experimental results across 17 LLMs reveal that Yi-34B-Chat and GLM4-9B-Chat demonstrate superior safety performance, while Llama3.1-8B-Instruct and o3-mini exhibit safety vulnerabilities.
2502.11093
Text-promptable Propagation for Referring Medical Image Sequence Segmentation
cs.CV
Medical image sequences, generated by both 2D video-based examinations and 3D imaging techniques, consist of sequential frames or slices that capture the same anatomical entities (e.g., organs or lesions) from multiple perspectives. Existing segmentation studies typically process medical images using either 2D or 3D methods in isolation, often overlooking the inherent consistencies among these images. Additionally, interactive segmentation, while highly beneficial in clinical scenarios, faces the challenge of integrating text prompts effectively across multi-modalities. To address these issues, we introduce an innovative task, Referring Medical Image Sequence Segmentation for the first time, which aims to segment the referred anatomical entities corresponding to medical text prompts. We develop a strong baseline model, Text-Promptable Propagation (TPP), designed to exploit the intrinsic relationships among sequential images and their associated textual descriptions. TPP supports the segmentation of arbitrary objects of interest based on cross-modal prompt fusion. Carefully designed medical prompts are fused and employed as queries to guide image sequence segmentation through triple-propagation. We curate a large and comprehensive benchmark covering 4 modalities and 20 different organs and lesions. Experimental results consistently demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to previous methods across these datasets.
2502.11094
SyncSpeech: Low-Latency and Efficient Dual-Stream Text-to-Speech based on Temporal Masked Transformer
cs.SD cs.AI
This paper presents a dual-stream text-to-speech (TTS) model, SyncSpeech, capable of receiving streaming text input from upstream models while simultaneously generating streaming speech, facilitating seamless interaction with large language models. SyncSpeech has the following advantages: Low latency, as it begins generating streaming speech upon receiving the second text token; High efficiency, as it decodes all speech tokens corresponding to the each arrived text token in one step. To achieve this, we propose a temporal masked transformer as the backbone of SyncSpeech, combined with token-level duration prediction to predict speech tokens and the duration for the next step. Additionally, we design a two-stage training strategy to improve training efficiency and the quality of generated speech. We evaluated the SyncSpeech on both English and Mandarin datasets. Compared to the recent dual-stream TTS models, SyncSpeech significantly reduces the first packet delay of speech tokens and accelerates the real-time factor. Moreover, with the same data scale, SyncSpeech achieves performance comparable to that of traditional autoregressive-based TTS models in terms of both speech quality and robustness. Speech samples are available at https://SyncSpeech.github.io/}{https://SyncSpeech.github.io/.
2502.11095
A Survey of Large Language Models in Psychotherapy: Current Landscape and Future Directions
cs.CL
Mental health remains a critical global challenge, with increasing demand for accessible, effective interventions. Large language models (LLMs) offer promising solutions in psychotherapy by enhancing the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of mental health conditions through dynamic, context-aware interactions. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the current landscape of LLM applications in psychotherapy, highlighting the roles of LLMs in symptom detection, severity estimation, cognitive assessment, and therapeutic interventions. We present a novel conceptual taxonomy to organize the psychotherapy process into three core components: assessment, diagnosis, and treatment, and examine the challenges and advancements in each area. The survey also addresses key research gaps, including linguistic biases, limited disorder coverage, and underrepresented therapeutic models. Finally, we discuss future directions to integrate LLMs into a holistic, end-to-end psychotherapy framework, addressing the evolving nature of mental health conditions and fostering more inclusive, personalized care.
2502.11096
Mixture of Tunable Experts -- Behavior Modification of DeepSeek-R1 at Inference Time
cs.AI cs.CL
We present the Mixture-of-Tunable-Experts (MoTE), a method that extends the Mixture-of-Experts architecture of Large Language Models (LLMs). Without additional training, MoTE enables meaningful and focused behavior changes in LLMs on-the-fly during inference time. By analyzing the digital LLM brain of DeepSeek-R1 using a technique we dub 'functional Token Resonance Imaging' (fTRI) -- inspired by fMRI and using prompts designed to elicit specific behavior (e.g., 'What happened {time}{place}?') -- we empirically identify distinctive experts associated with behaviors like refusal responses. Using MoTE we are able to intervene and control such specific behavior. We switched off the top 10 most refusal-relevant experts (0.07% of R1's 14,848 routed experts), achieving a 52% refusal reduction on sensitive reference prompts without performance degradation on MT-Bench. Random expert deactivation resulted in smaller behavioral shifts with increased noise, whereas forced expert activation led to significantly higher refusal rates. Our approach shares similarities with sparse autoencoders (SAEs) in terms of explainability and steerability. Unlike SAEs, MoTE does not require large training efforts, as within MoEs with a vast number of experts, specialization already emerged naturally during pretraining. Our findings suggest that significant functional mechanisms in Mixture-of-Experts architectures can at least partially be localized in a small number of specific experts, rather than being distributed throughout the model's weights. Expert subgroups can be tuned to trigger significant behavior variations, providing insights into the inner workings of LLMs.
2502.11098
Talk Structurally, Act Hierarchically: A Collaborative Framework for LLM Multi-Agent Systems
cs.AI cs.LG cs.MA
Recent advancements in LLM-based multi-agent (LLM-MA) systems have shown promise, yet significant challenges remain in managing communication and refinement when agents collaborate on complex tasks. In this paper, we propose \textit{Talk Structurally, Act Hierarchically (TalkHier)}, a novel framework that introduces a structured communication protocol for context-rich exchanges and a hierarchical refinement system to address issues such as incorrect outputs, falsehoods, and biases. \textit{TalkHier} surpasses various types of SoTA, including inference scaling model (OpenAI-o1), open-source multi-agent models (e.g., AgentVerse), and majority voting strategies on current LLM and single-agent baselines (e.g., ReAct, GPT4o), across diverse tasks, including open-domain question answering, domain-specific selective questioning, and practical advertisement text generation. These results highlight its potential to set a new standard for LLM-MA systems, paving the way for more effective, adaptable, and collaborative multi-agent frameworks. The code is available https://github.com/sony/talkhier.
2502.11100
Towards Achieving Concept Completeness for Unsupervised Textual Concept Bottleneck Models
cs.CL
Textual Concept Bottleneck Models (TBMs) are interpretable-by-design models for text classification that predict a set of salient concepts before making the final prediction. This paper proposes Complete Textual Concept Bottleneck Model (CT-CBM),a novel TCBM generator building concept labels in a fully unsupervised manner using a small language model, eliminating both the need for predefined human labeled concepts and LLM annotations. CT-CBM iteratively targets and adds important concepts in the bottleneck layer to create a complete concept basis and addresses downstream classification leakage through a parallel residual connection. CT-CBM achieves good results against competitors, offering a promising solution to enhance interpretability of NLP classifiers without sacrificing performance.
2502.11101
CacheFocus: Dynamic Cache Re-Positioning for Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation
cs.CL cs.AI
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel across a variety of language tasks yet are constrained by limited input lengths and high computational costs. Existing approaches\textemdash such as relative positional encodings (e.g., RoPE, ALiBi) and sliding window mechanisms\textemdash partially alleviate these issues but often require additional training or suffer from performance degradation with longer inputs. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{\textit{CacheFocus}}, a method that enhances length normalization and reduces inference latency without any further training. Our approach leverages query-independent, offline caching to efficiently reuse a Context KV Cache Store. We address the amplification of abnormal token distributions problem by re-positioning cached keys and introducing Layer-Adaptive Cache Pruning to discard low-relevance caches during pre-filling. Additionally, our Adaptive Positional Allocation Strategy dynamically reassigns cache positions to maximize the use of the available positional encoding range. Experiments on the Natural Questions and TriviaQA datasets demonstrate that CacheFocus outperforms alternative methods even when inputs exceed the $4$K limit of the \texttt{LLaMA-2} model, emphasizing its practical effectiveness for long-context LLMs. Moreover, even with large maximum input length of \texttt{Qwen2}, the performance of CacheFocus shows that it maintains consistent performance even as the number of documents increases, effectively managing long-text generation without degradation.
2502.11102
OptMATH: A Scalable Bidirectional Data Synthesis Framework for Optimization Modeling
cs.AI cs.LG
Despite the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), a fundamental challenge persists: the lack of high-quality optimization modeling datasets hampers LLMs' robust modeling of practical optimization problems from natural language descriptions (NL). This data scarcity also contributes to the generalization difficulties experienced by learning-based methods. To address these challenges, we propose a scalable framework for synthesizing a high-quality dataset, named OptMATH. Starting from curated seed data with mathematical formulations (MF), this framework automatically generates problem data (PD) with controllable complexity. Then, a back-translation step is employed to obtain NL. To verify the correspondence between the NL and the PD, a forward modeling step followed by rejection sampling is used. The accepted pairs constitute the training part of OptMATH. Then a collection of rejected pairs is identified and further filtered. This collection serves as a new benchmark for optimization modeling, containing difficult instances whose lengths are much longer than these of NL4OPT and MAMO. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that models of various sizes (0.5B-32B parameters) trained on OptMATH achieve superior results on multiple modeling benchmarks, thereby validating the effectiveness and scalability of our approach.
2502.11104
Enhancing Cross-Tokenizer Knowledge Distillation with Contextual Dynamical Mapping
cs.CL
Knowledge Distillation (KD) has emerged as a prominent technique for model compression. However, conventional KD approaches primarily focus on homogeneous architectures with identical tokenizers, constraining their applicability in cross-architecture scenarios. As for the cross-tokenizer KD, the differences in the tokenizers give rise to two fundamental challenges: (1) sequence misalignment caused by divergent tokenization strategies, and (2) mismatched vocabulary size and composition. While existing probability-matching methods attempt to address these issues, their efficacy remains limited due to suboptimal alignment in both the sequence and vocabulary aspects. To overcome these limitations, we propose Contextual Dynamic Mapping (CDM), a novel cross-tokenizer distillation framework that employs contextual information to enhance sequence alignment precision and dynamically improves vocabulary mapping. We evaluated the effectiveness of our approach across five advanced and widely-used model families (i.e, LLama3, Phi3, Gemma2, OPT and Qwen2), which were configured into three distinct teacher-student pairs. Our method shows significant advantages over existing cross-tokenizer distillation baselines across diverse benchmarks, including instruction-following, code generation and math. Notably, our analysis reveals that combining conventional same-tokenizer distillation and cross-tokenizer distillation through CDM yields further performance improvements. The code is available at https://github.com/pppa2019/ContexualDynamicMapping
2502.11105
Graceful forgetting: Memory as a process
q-bio.NC cs.IR cs.LG
A rational theory of memory is proposed to explain how we can accommodate unbounded sensory input within bounded storage space. Memory is stored as statistics, organized into complex structures that are constantly summarized and compressed to make room for new input. This process, driven by space constraints, is guided by heuristics that optimize the memory for future needs. Sensory input is rapidly encoded as simple statistics that are more slowly elaborated into more abstract constructs. This theory differs from previous accounts of memory by (a) its reliance on statistics, (b) its use of heuristics to guide the choice of statistics, and (c) the emphasis on memory as a process that is intensive, complex, and expensive. The theory is intended as an aid to make sense of our extensive knowledge of memory, and bring us closer to an understanding of memory in functional and mechanistic terms.
2502.11107
Revisiting Weak-to-Strong Generalization in Theory and Practice: Reverse KL vs. Forward KL
cs.LG cs.AI
As large language models advance toward superhuman performance, ensuring their alignment with human values and abilities grows increasingly complex. Weak-to-strong generalization offers a promising approach by leveraging predictions from weaker models to guide stronger systems, but its effectiveness could be constrained by the inherent noise and inaccuracies in these weak predictions. To address this, we propose a theoretically grounded approach that replaces forward KL divergence-whose mass-covering behavior risks overfitting to imperfect weak signals-with reverse KL divergence. Reverse KL divergence's zero-forcing effect prioritizes high-confidence predictions, effectively mitigating the influence of unreliable weak supervision. Theoretically, we extend existing bounds and derive tighter lower bounds for both forward and reverse KL divergence, establishing that reverse KL achieves at least comparable guarantees to forward KL. Notably, when a sufficiently pre-trained strong model is fine-tuned on the last layer, reverse KL uniquely guarantees that it outperforms its weak supervisor by the magnitude of their disagreement-a guarantee that forward KL cannot provide. Empirically, we demonstrate that reverse KL and reverse cross-entropy enable strong models to consistently outperform those trained with forward KL and standard cross-entropy across most settings, highlighting the practical advantages of these reverse losses.
2502.11108
Knowledge Graph-Driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Integrating Deepseek-R1 with Weaviate for Advanced Chatbot Applications
cs.CL cs.AI
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language generation. However, they frequently generate unverified outputs, which compromises their reliability in critical applications. In this study, we propose an innovative framework that combines structured biomedical knowledge with LLMs through a retrieval-augmented generation technique. Our system develops a thorough knowledge graph by identifying and refining causal relationships and named entities from medical abstracts related to age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Using a vector-based retrieval process and a locally deployed language model, our framework produces responses that are both contextually relevant and verifiable, with direct references to clinical evidence. Experimental results show that this method notably decreases hallucinations, enhances factual precision, and improves the clarity of generated responses, providing a robust solution for advanced biomedical chatbot applications.
2502.11109
Explosive Growth in Large-Scale Collaboration Networks
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We analyse the evolution of two large collaboration networks: the Microsoft Academic Graph (1800-2020) and Internet Movie Database (1900-2020), comprising $2.72 \times 10^8$ and $1.88 \times 10^6$ nodes respectively. The networks show super-linear growth, with node counts following power laws $N(t) \propto t^{\alpha}$ where $\alpha = 2.3$ increasing to $3.1$ after 1950 (MAG) and $\alpha = 1.8$ (IMDb). Node and edge processes maintain stable but noisy timescale ratios ($\tau_N/\tau_E \approx 2.8 \pm 0.3$ MAG, $2.3 \pm 0.2$ IMDb). The probability of waiting a time $t$ between successive collaborations was found to be scale-free, $P(t) \propto t^{-\gamma}$, with indices evolving from $\gamma \approx 2.3$ to $1.6$ (MAG) and $2.6$ to $2.1$ (IMDb). Academic collaboration sizes increased from $1.2$ to $5.8$ authors per paper, while entertainment collaborations remained more stable ($3.2$ to $4.5$ actors). These observations indicate that current network models might be enhanced by considering accelerating growth, coupled timescales, and environmental influence, while explaining stable local properties.
2502.11112
Parametric Analysis of Network Evolution Processes
cs.SI physics.soc-ph
We present a comprehensive parametric analysis of node and edge lifetimes processes in two large-scale collaboration networks: the Microsoft Academic Graph (1800-2020) and Internet Movie Database (1900-2020). Node and edge lifetimes (career and collaboration durations) follow Weibull distributions with consistent shape parameters ($k \approx 0.2$ for academic, $k \approx 0.5$ for entertainment careers) across centuries of evolution. These distributions persist despite dramatic changes in network size and structure. Edge processes show domain-specific evolution: academic collaboration durations increase over time (power-law index $1.6$ to $2.3$) while entertainment collaborations maintain more stable patterns (index $2.6$ to $2.1$). These findings indicate that while career longevity exhibits consistent patterns, collaboration dynamics appear to be influenced by domain-specific factors. The results provide new constraints for models of social network evolution, requiring incorporation of both universal lifetime distributions and domain-specific growth dynamics.