OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Eagle: Efficient Training-Free Router for Multi-LLM Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) with varying capabilities and costs has created a need for efficient model selection in AI systems. LLM routers address this need by dynamically choosing the most suitable model for a given query based on task requirements and budget constraints. However, existing routers face challenges in scalability and real-time adaptation, particularly in high-volume online environments. We present Eagle, a novel LLM routing approach that combines global and local ELO ranking modules to overcome these limitations. By evaluating both general and specialized LLM abilities, Eagle provides a scalable, training-free solution that enhances model selection quality while reducing computational overhead. Our experiments across multiple datasets show Eagle consistently outperforms baseline methods, with improvements of up to 23.52 percent in Area Under Curve (AUC) scores. Moreover, Eagle demonstrates remarkable efficiency, requiring only 1/20 of baseline methods' time for initialization and 100 to 200 times faster incremental updates in online scenarios, making it well-suited for dynamic, high-volume online serving environments.
Critic Loss for Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Modern neural network classifiers achieve remarkable performance across a variety of tasks; however, they frequently exhibit overconfidence in their predictions due to the cross-entropy loss. Inspired by this problem, we propose the \textbf{Cr}i\textbf{t}ic Loss for Image \textbf{Cl}assification (CrtCl, pronounced Critical). CrtCl formulates image classification training in a generator-critic framework, with a base classifier acting as a generator, and a correctness critic imposing a loss on the classifier. The base classifier, acting as the generator, given images, generates the probability distribution over classes and intermediate embeddings. The critic model, given the image, intermediate embeddings, and output predictions of the base model, predicts the probability that the base model has produced the correct classification, which then can be back propagated as a self supervision signal. Notably, the critic does not use the label as input, meaning that the critic can train the base model on both labeled and unlabeled data in semi-supervised learning settings. CrtCl represents a learned loss method for accuracy, alleviating the negative side effects of using cross-entropy loss. Additionally, CrtCl provides a powerful way to select data to be labeled in an active learning setting, by estimating the classification ability of the base model on unlabeled data. We study the effectiveness of CrtCl in low-labeled data regimes, and in the context of active learning. In classification, we find that CrtCl, compared to recent baselines, increases classifier generalization and calibration with various amounts of labeled data. In active learning, we show our method outperforms baselines in accuracy and calibration. We observe consistent results across three image classification datasets.
Asking an AI for salary negotiation advice is a matter of concern: Controlled experimental perturbation of ChatGPT for protected and non-protected group discrimination on a contextual task with no clear ground truth answers
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2024
Year: 2024

We conducted controlled experimental bias audits for four versions of ChatGPT, which we asked to recommend an opening offer in salary negotiations for a new hire. We submitted 98,800 prompts to each version, systematically varying the employee's gender, university, and major, and tested prompts in voice of each side of the negotiation: the employee versus employer. We find ChatGPT as a multi-model platform is not robust and consistent enough to be trusted for such a task. We observed statistically significant salary offers when varying gender for all four models, although with smaller gaps than for other attributes tested. The largest gaps were different model versions and between the employee- vs employer-voiced prompts. We also observed substantial gaps when varying university and major, but many of the biases were not consistent across model versions. We tested for fictional and fraudulent universities and found wildly inconsistent results across cases and model versions. We make broader contributions to the AI/ML fairness literature. Our scenario and our experimental design differ from mainstream AI/ML auditing efforts in key ways. Bias audits typically test discrimination for protected classes like gender, which we contrast with testing non-protected classes of university and major. Asking for negotiation advice includes how aggressive one ought to be in a negotiation relative to known empirical salary distributions and scales, which is a deeply contextual and personalized task that has no objective ground truth to validate. These results raise concerns for the specific model versions we tested and ChatGPT as a multi-model platform in continuous development. Our epistemology does not permit us to definitively certify these models as either generally biased or unbiased on the attributes we test, but our study raises matters of concern for stakeholders to further investigate.
Clinical-grade Multi-Organ Pathology Report Generation for Multi-scale Whole Slide Images via a Semantically Guided Medical Text Foundation Model
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Vision language models (VLM) have achieved success in both natural language comprehension and image recognition tasks. However, their use in pathology report generation for whole slide images (WSIs) is still limited due to the huge size of multi-scale WSIs and the high cost of WSI annotation. Moreover, in most of the existing research on pathology report generation, sufficient validation regarding clinical efficacy has not been conducted. Herein, we propose a novel Patient-level Multi-organ Pathology Report Generation (PMPRG) model, which utilizes the multi-scale WSI features from our proposed multi-scale regional vision transformer (MR-ViT) model and their real pathology reports to guide VLM training for accurate pathology report generation. The model then automatically generates a report based on the provided key features attended regional features. We assessed our model using a WSI dataset consisting of multiple organs, including the colon and kidney. Our model achieved a METEOR score of 0.68, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach. This model allows pathologists to efficiently generate pathology reports for patients, regardless of the number of WSIs involved.
FACET: Fast and Accurate Event-Based Eye Tracking Using Ellipse Modeling for Extended Reality
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Eye tracking is a key technology for gaze-based interactions in Extended Reality (XR), but traditional frame-based systems struggle to meet XR's demands for high accuracy, low latency, and power efficiency. Event cameras offer a promising alternative due to their high temporal resolution and low power consumption. In this paper, we present FACET (Fast and Accurate Event-based Eye Tracking), an end-to-end neural network that directly outputs pupil ellipse parameters from event data, optimized for real-time XR applications. The ellipse output can be directly used in subsequent ellipse-based pupil trackers. We enhance the EV-Eye dataset by expanding annotated data and converting original mask labels to ellipse-based annotations to train the model. Besides, a novel trigonometric loss is adopted to address angle discontinuities and a fast causal event volume event representation method is put forward. On the enhanced EV-Eye test set, FACET achieves an average pupil center error of 0.20 pixels and an inference time of 0.53 ms, reducing pixel error and inference time by 1.6$\times$ and 1.8$\times$ compared to the prior art, EV-Eye, with 4.4$\times$ and 11.7$\times$ less parameters and arithmetic operations. The code is available at https://github.com/DeanJY/FACET.
Persona-L has Entered the Chat: Leveraging LLM and Ability-based Framework for Personas of People with Complex Needs
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

We present Persona-L, a novel approach for creating personas using Large Language Models (LLMs) and an ability-based framework, specifically designed to improve the representation of users with complex needs. Traditional methods of persona creation often fall short of accurately depicting the dynamic and diverse nature of complex needs, resulting in oversimplified or stereotypical profiles. Persona-L enables users to create and interact with personas through a chat interface. Persona-L was evaluated through interviews with UX designers (N=6), where we examined its effectiveness in reflecting the complexities of lived experiences of people with complex needs. We report our findings that indicate the potential of Persona-L to increase empathy and understanding of complex needs while also revealing the need for transparency of data used in persona creation, the role of the language and tone, and the need to provide a more balanced presentation of abilities with constraints.
Qualitative Insights Tool (QualIT): LLM Enhanced Topic Modeling
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Topic modeling is a widely used technique for uncovering thematic structures from large text corpora. However, most topic modeling approaches e.g. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) struggle to capture nuanced semantics and contextual understanding required to accurately model complex narratives. Recent advancements in this area include methods like BERTopic, which have demonstrated significantly improved topic coherence and thus established a new standard for benchmarking. In this paper, we present a novel approach, the Qualitative Insights Tool (QualIT) that integrates large language models (LLMs) with existing clustering-based topic modeling approaches. Our method leverages the deep contextual understanding and powerful language generation capabilities of LLMs to enrich the topic modeling process using clustering. We evaluate our approach on a large corpus of news articles and demonstrate substantial improvements in topic coherence and topic diversity compared to baseline topic modeling techniques. On the 20 ground-truth topics, our method shows 70% topic coherence (vs 65% & 57% benchmarks) and 95.5% topic diversity (vs 85% & 72% benchmarks). Our findings suggest that the integration of LLMs can unlock new opportunities for topic modeling of dynamic and complex text data, as is common in talent management research contexts.
Personalized Federated Learning via Backbone Self-Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In practical scenarios, federated learning frequently necessitates training personalized models for each client using heterogeneous data. This paper proposes a backbone self-distillation approach to facilitate personalized federated learning. In this approach, each client trains its local model and only sends the backbone weights to the server. These weights are then aggregated to create a global backbone, which is returned to each client for updating. However, the client's local backbone lacks personalization because of the common representation. To solve this problem, each client further performs backbone self-distillation by using the global backbone as a teacher and transferring knowledge to update the local backbone. This process involves learning two components: the shared backbone for common representation and the private head for local personalization, which enables effective global knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments and comparisons with 12 state-of-the-art approaches demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Linear Contextual Bandits with Interference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Interference, a key concept in causal inference, extends the reward modeling process by accounting for the impact of one unit's actions on the rewards of others. In contextual bandit (CB) settings, where multiple units are present in the same round, potential interference can significantly affect the estimation of expected rewards for different arms, thereby influencing the decision-making process. Although some prior work has explored multi-agent and adversarial bandits in interference-aware settings, the effect of interference in CB, as well as the underlying theory, remains significantly underexplored. In this paper, we introduce a systematic framework to address interference in Linear CB (LinCB), bridging the gap between causal inference and online decision-making. We propose a series of algorithms that explicitly quantify the interference effect in the reward modeling process and provide comprehensive theoretical guarantees, including sublinear regret bounds, finite sample upper bounds, and asymptotic properties. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through simulations and a synthetic data generated based on MovieLens data.
Lighter And Better: Towards Flexible Context Adaptation For Retrieval Augmented Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems face significant challenges in terms of cost and effectiveness. On one hand, they need to encode the lengthy retrieved contexts before responding to the input tasks, which imposes substantial computational overhead. On the other hand, directly using generic Large Language Models (LLMs) often leads to sub-optimal answers, while task-specific fine-tuning may compromise the LLMs' general capabilities. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach called FlexRAG (Flexible Context Adaptation for RAG). In this approach, the retrieved contexts are compressed into compact embeddings before being encoded by the LLMs. Simultaneously, these compressed embeddings are optimized to enhance downstream RAG performance. A key feature of FlexRAG is its flexibility, which enables effective support for diverse compression ratios and selective preservation of important contexts. Thanks to these technical designs, FlexRAG achieves superior generation quality while significantly reducing running costs. Comprehensive experiments on various question-answering datasets validate our approach as a cost-effective and flexible solution for RAG systems.
Making Text Embedders Few-Shot Learners
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) with decoder-only architectures demonstrate remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. This feature enables them to effectively handle both familiar and novel tasks by utilizing examples provided within their input context. Recognizing the potential of this capability, we propose leveraging the ICL feature in LLMs to enhance the process of text embedding generation. To this end, we introduce a novel model bge-en-icl, which employs few-shot examples to produce high-quality text embeddings. Our approach integrates task-related examples directly into the query side, resulting in significant improvements across various tasks. Additionally, we have investigated how to effectively utilize LLMs as embedding models, including various attention mechanisms, pooling methods, etc. Our findings suggest that retaining the original framework often yields the best results, underscoring that simplicity is best. Experimental results on the MTEB and AIR-Bench benchmarks demonstrate that our approach sets new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Our model, code and dataset are freely available at https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding .
EvoFA: Evolvable Fast Adaptation for EEG Emotion Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based emotion recognition has gained significant traction due to its accuracy and objectivity. However, the non-stationary nature of EEG signals leads to distribution drift over time, causing severe performance degradation when the model is reused. While numerous domain adaptation (DA) approaches have been proposed in recent years to address this issue, their reliance on large amounts of target data for calibration restricts them to offline scenarios, rendering them unsuitable for real-time applications. To address this challenge, this paper proposes Evolvable Fast Adaptation (EvoFA), an online adaptive framework tailored for EEG data. EvoFA organically integrates the rapid adaptation of Few-Shot Learning (FSL) and the distribution matching of Domain Adaptation (DA) through a two-stage generalization process. During the training phase, a robust base meta-learning model is constructed for strong generalization. In the testing phase, a designed evolvable meta-adaptation module iteratively aligns the marginal distribution of target (testing) data with the evolving source (training) data within a model-agnostic meta-learning framework, enabling the model to learn the evolving trends of testing data relative to training data and improving online testing performance. Experimental results demonstrate that EvoFA achieves significant improvements compared to the basic FSL method and previous online methods. The introduction of EvoFA paves the way for broader adoption of EEG-based emotion recognition in real-world applications. Our code will be released upon publication.
Boosting Cybersecurity Vulnerability Scanning based on LLM-supported Static Application Security Testing
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The current cybersecurity landscape is increasingly complex, with traditional Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools struggling to capture complex and emerging vulnerabilities due to their reliance on rule-based matching. Meanwhile, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful code analysis capabilities, but their static training data and privacy risks limit their effectiveness. To overcome the limitations of both approaches, we propose LSAST, a novel approach that integrates LLMs with SAST scanners to enhance vulnerability detection. LSAST leverages a locally hostable LLM, combined with a state-of-the-art knowledge retrieval system, to provide up-to-date vulnerability insights without compromising data privacy. We set a new benchmark for static vulnerability analysis, offering a robust, privacy-conscious solution that bridges the gap between traditional scanners and advanced AI-driven analysis. Our evaluation demonstrates that incorporating SAST results into LLM analysis significantly improves detection accuracy, identifying vulnerabilities missed by conventional methods.
Real-Time Pedestrian Detection on IoT Edge Devices: A Lightweight Deep Learning Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become integral to our everyday lives. Computer vision has advanced to the point where it can play the safety critical role of detecting pedestrians at road intersections in intelligent transportation systems and alert vehicular traffic as to potential collisions. Centralized computing analyzes camera feeds and generates alerts for nearby vehicles. However, real-time applications face challenges such as latency, limited data transfer speeds, and the risk of life loss. Edge servers offer a potential solution for real-time applications, providing localized computing and storage resources and lower response times. Unfortunately, edge servers have limited processing power. Lightweight deep learning (DL) techniques enable edge servers to utilize compressed deep neural network (DNN) models. The research explores implementing a lightweight DL model on Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) edge devices. An optimized You Only Look Once (YOLO) based DL model is deployed for real-time pedestrian detection, with detection events transmitted to the edge server using the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol. The simulation results demonstrate that the optimized YOLO model can achieve real-time pedestrian detection, with a fast inference speed of 147 milliseconds, a frame rate of 2.3 frames per second, and an accuracy of 78%, representing significant improvements over baseline models.
Stage-Wise Reward Shaping for Acrobatic Robots: A Constrained Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

As the complexity of tasks addressed through reinforcement learning (RL) increases, the definition of reward functions also has become highly complicated. We introduce an RL method aimed at simplifying the reward-shaping process through intuitive strategies. Initially, instead of a single reward function composed of various terms, we define multiple reward and cost functions within a constrained multi-objective RL (CMORL) framework. For tasks involving sequential complex movements, we segment the task into distinct stages and define multiple rewards and costs for each stage. Finally, we introduce a practical CMORL algorithm that maximizes objectives based on these rewards while satisfying constraints defined by the costs. The proposed method has been successfully demonstrated across a variety of acrobatic tasks in both simulation and real-world environments. Additionally, it has been shown to successfully perform tasks compared to existing RL and constrained RL algorithms. Our code is available at https://github.com/rllab-snu/Stage-Wise-CMORL.
Smart Grid Security: A Verified Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework to Counter Cyber-Physical Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2024
Year: 2024

The distributed nature of smart grids, combined with sophisticated sensors, control algorithms, and data collection facilities at Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) centers, makes them vulnerable to strategically crafted cyber-physical attacks. These malicious attacks can manipulate power demands using high-wattage Internet of Things (IoT) botnet devices, such as refrigerators and air conditioners, or introduce false values into transmission line power flow sensor readings. Consequently, grids experience blackouts and high power flow oscillations. Existing grid protection mechanisms, originally designed to tackle natural faults in transmission lines and generator outages, are ineffective against such intelligently crafted attacks. This is because grid operators overlook potential scenarios of cyber-physical attacks during their design phase. In this work, we propose a safe Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based framework for mitigating attacks on smart grids. The DRL agent effectively neutralizes cyber-physical attacks on grid surfaces by triggering appropriate sequences of existing protection schemes. The safety of the DRL agent is formally verified through a reachability analysis method. Additionally, our framework is designed for deployment on CUDA-enabled GPU systems, which enables faster execution of these protection sequences and their real-time validation. Our framework establishes a new set of protection rules for grid models, successfully thwarting existing cyber-physical attacks.
IRSC: A Zero-shot Evaluation Benchmark for Information Retrieval through Semantic Comprehension in Retrieval-Augmented Generation Scenarios
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

In Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) tasks using Large Language Models (LLMs), the quality of retrieved information is critical to the final output. This paper introduces the IRSC benchmark for evaluating the performance of embedding models in multilingual RAG tasks. The benchmark encompasses five retrieval tasks: query retrieval, title retrieval, part-of-paragraph retrieval, keyword retrieval, and summary retrieval. Our research addresses the current lack of comprehensive testing and effective comparison methods for embedding models in RAG scenarios. We introduced new metrics: the Similarity of Semantic Comprehension Index (SSCI) and the Retrieval Capability Contest Index (RCCI), and evaluated models such as Snowflake-Arctic, BGE, GTE, and M3E. Our contributions include: 1) the IRSC benchmark, 2) the SSCI and RCCI metrics, and 3) insights into the cross-lingual limitations of embedding models. The IRSC benchmark aims to enhance the understanding and development of accurate retrieval systems in RAG tasks. All code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/Jasaxion/IRSC_Benchmark