OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Resolving Positional Ambiguity in Dialogues by Vision-Language Models for Robot Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We consider an autonomous navigation robot that can accept human commands through natural language to provide services in an indoor environment. These natural language commands may include time, position, object, and action components. However, we observe that the positional components within such commands usually refer to objects in the environment that may contain different levels of positional ambiguity. For example, the command "Go to the chair!" may be ambiguous when there are multiple chairs of the same type in a room. In order to disambiguate these commands, we employ a large language model and a large vision-language model to conduct multiple turns of conversations with the user. We propose a two-level approach that utilizes a vision-language model to map the meanings in natural language to a unique object ID in images and then performs another mapping from the unique object ID to a 3D depth map, thereby allowing the robot to navigate from its current position to the target position. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work linking foundation models to the positional ambiguity issue.
Decoding Emotions: Unveiling Facial Expressions through Acoustic Sensing with Contrastive Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Expression recognition holds great promise for applications such as content recommendation and mental healthcare by accurately detecting users' emotional states. Traditional methods often rely on cameras or wearable sensors, which raise privacy concerns and add extra device burdens. In addition, existing acoustic-based methods struggle to maintain satisfactory performance when there is a distribution shift between the training dataset and the inference dataset. In this paper, we introduce FacER+, an active acoustic facial expression recognition system, which eliminates the requirement for external microphone arrays. FacER+ extracts facial expression features by analyzing the echoes of near-ultrasound signals emitted between the 3D facial contour and the earpiece speaker on a smartphone. This approach not only reduces background noise but also enables the identification of different expressions from various users with minimal training data. We develop a contrastive external attention-based model to consistently learn expression features across different users, reducing the distribution differences. Extensive experiments involving 20 volunteers, both with and without masks, demonstrate that FacER+ can accurately recognize six common facial expressions with over 90% accuracy in diverse, user-independent real-life scenarios, surpassing the performance of the leading acoustic sensing methods by 10%. FacER+ offers a robust and practical solution for facial expression recognition.
Leveraging generative models to characterize the failure conditions of image classifiers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

We address in this work the question of identifying the failure conditions of a given image classifier. To do so, we exploit the capacity of producing controllable distributions of high quality image data made available by recent Generative Adversarial Networks (StyleGAN2): the failure conditions are expressed as directions of strong performance degradation in the generative model latent space. This strategy of analysis is used to discover corner cases that combine multiple sources of corruption, and to compare in more details the behavior of different classifiers. The directions of degradation can also be rendered visually by generating data for better interpretability. Some degradations such as image quality can affect all classes, whereas other ones such as shape are more class-specific. The approach is demonstrated on the MNIST dataset that has been completed by two sources of corruption: noise and blur, and shows a promising way to better understand and control the risks of exploiting Artificial Intelligence components for safety-critical applications.
A Comprehensive Survey of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Evolution, Current Landscape and Future Directions
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a comprehensive study of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), tracing its evolution from foundational concepts to the current state of the art. RAG combines retrieval mechanisms with generative language models to enhance the accuracy of outputs, addressing key limitations of LLMs. The study explores the basic architecture of RAG, focusing on how retrieval and generation are integrated to handle knowledge-intensive tasks. A detailed review of the significant technological advancements in RAG is provided, including key innovations in retrieval-augmented language models and applications across various domains such as question-answering, summarization, and knowledge-based tasks. Recent research breakthroughs are discussed, highlighting novel methods for improving retrieval efficiency. Furthermore, the paper examines ongoing challenges such as scalability, bias, and ethical concerns in deployment. Future research directions are proposed, focusing on improving the robustness of RAG models, expanding the scope of application of RAG models, and addressing societal implications. This survey aims to serve as a foundational resource for researchers and practitioners in understanding the potential of RAG and its trajectory in natural language processing.
Exploring Prompt Engineering: A Systematic Review with SWOT Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive SWOT analysis of prompt engineering techniques within the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs). Emphasizing linguistic principles, we examine various techniques to identify their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Our findings provide insights into enhancing AI interactions and improving language model comprehension of human prompts. The analysis covers techniques including template-based approaches and fine-tuning, addressing the problems and challenges associated with each. The conclusion offers future research directions aimed at advancing the effectiveness of prompt engineering in optimizing human-machine communication.
Toward Relieving Clinician Burden by Automatically Generating Progress Notes using Interim Hospital Data
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Regular documentation of progress notes is one of the main contributors to clinician burden. The abundance of structured chart information in medical records further exacerbates the burden, however, it also presents an opportunity to automate the generation of progress notes. In this paper, we propose a task to automate progress note generation using structured or tabular information present in electronic health records. To this end, we present a novel framework and a large dataset, ChartPNG, for the task which contains $7089$ annotation instances (each having a pair of progress notes and interim structured chart data) across $1616$ patients. We establish baselines on the dataset using large language models from general and biomedical domains. We perform both automated (where the best performing Biomistral model achieved a BERTScore F1 of $80.53$ and MEDCON score of $19.61$) and manual (where we found that the model was able to leverage relevant structured data with $76.9\%$ accuracy) analyses to identify the challenges with the proposed task and opportunities for future research.
RecurFormer: Not All Transformer Heads Need Self-Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) excel in modeling complex language patterns but face significant computational costs during inference, especially with long inputs due to the attention mechanism's memory overhead. We observe that certain attention heads exhibit a distribution where the attention weights concentrate on tokens near the query token, termed as recency aware, which focuses on local and short-range dependencies. Leveraging this insight, we propose RecurFormer, a novel architecture that replaces these attention heads with linear recurrent neural networks (RNNs), specifically the Mamba architecture. This replacement reduces the cache size without evicting tokens, thus maintaining generation quality. RecurFormer retains the ability to model long-range dependencies through the remaining attention heads and allows for reusing pre-trained Transformer-based LLMs weights with continual training. Experiments demonstrate that RecurFormer matches the original model's performance while significantly enhancing inference efficiency. Our approach provides a practical solution to the computational challenges of Transformer-based LLMs inference, making it highly attractive for tasks involving long inputs.
Enterprise Benchmarks for Large Language Model Evaluation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to a greater challenge of having a rigorous and systematic evaluation of complex tasks performed, especially in enterprise applications. Therefore, LLMs need to be able to benchmark enterprise datasets for various tasks. This work presents a systematic exploration of benchmarking strategies tailored to LLM evaluation, focusing on the utilization of domain-specific datasets and consisting of a variety of NLP tasks. The proposed evaluation framework encompasses 25 publicly available datasets from diverse enterprise domains like financial services, legal, cyber security, and climate and sustainability. The diverse performance of 13 models across different enterprise tasks highlights the importance of selecting the right model based on the specific requirements of each task. Code and prompts are available on GitHub.
Enhancing Affinity Propagation for Improved Public Sentiment Insights
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

With the large amount of data generated every day, public sentiment is a key factor for various fields, including marketing, politics, and social research. Understanding the public sentiment about different topics can provide valuable insights. However, most traditional approaches for sentiment analysis often depend on supervised learning, which requires a significant amount of labeled data. This makes it both expensive and time-consuming to implement. This project introduces an approach using unsupervised learning techniques, particularly Affinity Propagation (AP) clustering, to analyze sentiment. AP clustering groups text data based on natural patterns, without needing predefined cluster numbers. The paper compares AP with K-means clustering, using TF-IDF Vectorization for text representation and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction. To enhance performance, AP is combined with Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering. This hybrid method refines clusters further, capturing both global and local sentiment structures more effectively. The effectiveness of these methods is evaluated using the Silhouette Score, Calinski-Harabasz Score, and Davies-Bouldin Index. Results show that AP with Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering significantly outperforms K-means. This research contributes to Natural Language Processing (NLP) by proposing a scalable and efficient unsupervised learning framework for sentiment analysis, highlighting the significant societal impact of advanced AI techniques in analyzing public sentiment without the need for extensive labeled data.
Skill Learning Using Process Mining for Large Language Model Plan Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) hold promise for generating plans for complex tasks, but their effectiveness is limited by sequential execution, lack of control flow models, and difficulties in skill retrieval. Addressing these issues is crucial for improving the efficiency and interpretability of plan generation as LLMs become more central to automation and decision-making. We introduce a novel approach to skill learning in LLMs by integrating process mining techniques, leveraging process discovery for skill acquisition, process models for skill storage, and conformance checking for skill retrieval. Our methods enhance text-based plan generation by enabling flexible skill discovery, parallel execution, and improved interpretability. Experimental results suggest the effectiveness of our approach, with our skill retrieval method surpassing state-of-the-art accuracy baselines under specific conditions.
Towards More Effective Table-to-Text Generation: Assessing In-Context Learning and Self-Evaluation with Open-Source Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Table processing, a key task in natural language processing, has significantly benefited from recent advancements in language models (LMs). However, the capabilities of LMs in table-to-text generation, which transforms structured data into coherent narrative text, require an in-depth investigation, especially with current open-source models. This study explores the effectiveness of various in-context learning strategies in LMs across benchmark datasets, focusing on the impact of providing examples to the model. More importantly, we examine a real-world use case, offering valuable insights into practical applications. To complement traditional evaluation metrics, we employ a large language model (LLM) self-evaluation approach using chain-of-thought reasoning and assess its correlation with human-aligned metrics like BERTScore. Our findings highlight the significant impact of examples in improving table-to-text generation and suggest that, while LLM self-evaluation has potential, its current alignment with human judgment could be enhanced. This points to the need for more reliable evaluation methods.
Exploring transfer learning for Deep NLP systems on rarely annotated languages
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Natural language processing (NLP) has experienced rapid advancements with the rise of deep learning, significantly outperforming traditional rule-based methods. By capturing hidden patterns and underlying structures within data, deep learning has improved performance across various NLP tasks, overcoming the limitations of rule-based systems. However, most research and development in NLP has been concentrated on a select few languages, primarily those with large numbers of speakers or financial significance, leaving many others underexplored. This lack of research is often attributed to the scarcity of adequately annotated datasets essential for training deep learning models. Despite this challenge, there is potential in leveraging the linguistic similarities between unexplored and well-studied languages, particularly those in close geographic and linguistic proximity. This thesis investigates the application of transfer learning for Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging between Hindi and Nepali, two highly similar languages belonging to the Indo-Aryan language family. Specifically, the work explores whether joint training of a POS tagging model for both languages enhances performance. Additionally, we assess whether multitask learning in Hindi, with auxiliary tasks such as gender and singular/plural tagging, can contribute to improved POS tagging accuracy. The deep learning architecture employed is the BLSTM-CNN-CRF model, trained under different conditions: monolingual word embeddings, vector-mapped embeddings, and jointly trained Hindi-Nepali word embeddings. Varying dropout rates (0.25 to 0.5) and optimizers (ADAM and AdaDelta) are also evaluated. Results indicate that jointly trained Hindi-Nepali word embeddings improve performance across all models compared to monolingual and vector-mapped embeddings.
Using Protected Attributes to Consider Fairness in Multi-Agent Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2024
Year: 2024

Fairness in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) has been extensively studied, particularly in reward distribution among agents in scenarios such as goods allocation, resource division, lotteries, and bargaining systems. Fairness in MAS depends on various factors, including the system's governing rules, the behaviour of the agents, and their characteristics. Yet, fairness in human society often involves evaluating disparities between disadvantaged and privileged groups, guided by principles of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI). Taking inspiration from the work on algorithmic fairness, which addresses bias in machine learning-based decision-making, we define protected attributes for MAS as characteristics that should not disadvantage an agent in terms of its expected rewards. We adapt fairness metrics from the algorithmic fairness literature -- namely, demographic parity, counterfactual fairness, and conditional statistical parity -- to the multi-agent setting, where self-interested agents interact within an environment. These metrics allow us to evaluate the fairness of MAS, with the ultimate aim of designing MAS that do not disadvantage agents based on protected attributes.
A Survey on Data Synthesis and Augmentation for Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) is inherently linked to the availability of vast, diverse, and high-quality data for training and evaluation. However, the growth rate of high-quality data is significantly outpaced by the expansion of training datasets, leading to a looming data exhaustion crisis. This underscores the urgent need to enhance data efficiency and explore new data sources. In this context, synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution. Currently, data generation primarily consists of two major approaches: data augmentation and synthesis. This paper comprehensively reviews and summarizes data generation techniques throughout the lifecycle of LLMs, including data preparation, pre-training, fine-tuning, instruction-tuning, preference alignment, and applications. Furthermore, We discuss the current constraints faced by these methods and investigate potential pathways for future development and research. Our aspiration is to equip researchers with a clear understanding of these methodologies, enabling them to swiftly identify appropriate data generation strategies in the construction of LLMs, while providing valuable insights for future exploration.
DEeR: Deviation Eliminating and Noise Regulating for Privacy-preserving Federated Low-rank Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Integrating low-rank adaptation (LoRA) with federated learning (FL) has received widespread attention recently, aiming to adapt pretrained foundation models (FMs) to downstream medical tasks via privacy-preserving decentralized training. However, owing to the direct combination of LoRA and FL, current methods generally undergo two problems, i.e., aggregation deviation, and differential privacy (DP) noise amplification effect. To address these problems, we propose a novel privacy-preserving federated finetuning framework called \underline{D}eviation \underline{E}liminating and Nois\underline{e} \underline{R}egulating (DEeR). Specifically, we firstly theoretically prove that the necessary condition to eliminate aggregation deviation is guaranteing the equivalence between LoRA parameters of clients. Based on the theoretical insight, a deviation eliminator is designed to utilize alternating minimization algorithm to iteratively optimize the zero-initialized and non-zero-initialized parameter matrices of LoRA, ensuring that aggregation deviation always be zeros during training. Furthermore, we also conduct an in-depth analysis of the noise amplification effect and find that this problem is mainly caused by the ``linear relationship'' between DP noise and LoRA parameters. To suppress the noise amplification effect, we propose a noise regulator that exploits two regulator factors to decouple relationship between DP and LoRA, thereby achieving robust privacy protection and excellent finetuning performance. Additionally, we perform comprehensive ablated experiments to verify the effectiveness of the deviation eliminator and noise regulator. DEeR shows better performance on public medical datasets in comparison with state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/CUHK-AIM-Group/DEeR.
modOpt: A modular development environment and library for optimization algorithms
Venue: arXiv cs.MS 2024
Year: 2024

Recent advances in computing hardware and modeling software have given rise to new applications for numerical optimization. These new applications occasionally uncover bottlenecks in existing optimization algorithms and necessitate further specialization of the algorithms. However, such specialization requires expert knowledge of the underlying mathematical theory and the software implementation of existing algorithms. To address this challenge, we present modOpt, an open-source software framework that facilitates the construction of optimization algorithms from modules. The modular environment provided by modOpt enables developers to tailor an existing algorithm for a new application by only altering the relevant modules. modOpt is designed as a platform to support students and beginner developers in quickly learning and developing their own algorithms. With that aim, the entirety of the framework is written in Python, and it is well-documented, well-tested, and hosted open-source on GitHub. Several additional features are embedded into the framework to assist both beginner and advanced developers. In addition to providing stock modules, the framework also includes fully transparent implementations of pedagogical optimization algorithms in Python. To facilitate testing and benchmarking of new algorithms, the framework features built-in visualization and recording capabilities, interfaces to modeling frameworks such as OpenMDAO and CSDL, interfaces to general-purpose optimization algorithms such as SNOPT and SLSQP, an interface to the CUTEst test problem set, etc. In this paper, we present the underlying software architecture of modOpt, review its various features, discuss several educational and performance-oriented algorithms within modOpt, and present numerical studies illustrating its unique benefits.
How much does AI impact development speed? An enterprise-based randomized controlled trial
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

How much does AI assistance impact developer productivity? To date, the software engineering literature has provided a range of answers, targeting a diversity of outcomes: from perceived productivity to speed on task and developer throughput. Our randomized controlled trial with 96 full-time Google software engineers contributes to this literature by sharing an estimate of the impact of three AI features on the time developers spent on a complex, enterprise-grade task. We found that AI significantly shortened the time developers spent on task. Our best estimate of the size of this effect, controlling for factors known to influence developer time on task, stands at about 21\%, although our confidence interval is large. We also found an interesting effect whereby developers who spend more hours on code-related activities per day were faster with AI. Product and future research considerations are discussed. In particular, we invite further research that explores the impact of AI at the ecosystem level and across multiple suites of AI-enhanced tools, since we cannot assume that the effect size obtained in our lab study will necessarily apply more broadly, or that the effect of AI found using internal Google tooling in the summer of 2024 will translate across tools and over time.