OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
TransformCode: A Contrastive Learning Framework for Code Embedding via Subtree Transformation
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized software engineering (SE) by enhancing software development efficiency. The advent of pre-trained models (PTMs) leveraging transfer learning has significantly advanced AI for SE. However, existing PTMs that operate on individual code tokens suffer from several limitations: They are costly to train and fine-tune; and they rely heavily on labeled data for fine-tuning on task-specific datasets. In this paper, we present TransformCode, a novel framework that learns code embeddings in a contrastive learning manner. Our framework is encoder-agnostic and language-agnostic, which means that it can leverage any encoder model and handle any programming language. We also propose a novel data-augmentation technique called abstract syntax tree (AST) transformation, which applies syntactic and semantic transformations to the original code snippets, to generate more diverse and robust samples for contrastive learning. Our framework has several advantages over existing methods: (1) It is flexible and adaptable, because it can easily be extended to other downstream tasks that require code representation (such as code-clone detection and classification); (2) it is efficient and scalable, because it does not require a large model or a large amount of training data, and it can support any programming language; (3) it is not limited to unsupervised learning, but can also be applied to some supervised learning tasks by incorporating task-specific labels or objectives; and (4) it can also adjust the number of encoder parameters based on computing resources. We evaluate our framework on several code-related tasks, and demonstrate its effectiveness and superiority over the state-of-the-art methods such as SourcererCC, Code2vec, and InferCode.
Extrinsically-Focused Evaluation of Omissions in Medical Summarization
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in safety-critical applications such as healthcare, yet the ability to quantify performance has lagged. An example of this challenge is in evaluating a summary of the patient's medical record. A resulting summary can enable the provider to get a high-level overview of the patient's health status quickly. Yet, a summary that omits important facts about the patient's record can produce a misleading picture. This can lead to negative consequences on medical decision-making. We propose MED-OMIT as a metric to explore this challenge. We focus on using provider-patient history conversations to generate a subjective (a summary of the patient's history) as a case study. We begin by discretizing facts from the dialogue and identifying which are omitted from the subjective. To determine which facts are clinically relevant, we measure the importance of each fact to a simulated differential diagnosis. We compare MED-OMIT's performance to that of clinical experts and find broad agreement We use MED-OMIT to evaluate LLM performance on subjective generation and find some LLMs (gpt-4 and llama-3.1-405b) work well with little effort, while others (e.g. Llama 2) perform worse.
On the Fast Track to Full Gold Open Access
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2024
Year: 2024

The world of scientific publishing is changing; the days of an old type of subscription-based earnings for publishers seem over, and we are entering a new era. It seems as if an ever-increasing number of journals from disparate publishers are going Gold, Open Access that is, yet have we rigorously ascertained the issue in its entirety, or are we touting the strengths and forgetting about constructive criticism and careful weighing of evidence? We will therefore present the current state of the art, in a compact review/bibliometrics style, of this more relevant than ever hot topic, including challenges and potential solutions that are most likely to be acceptable to all parties. Suggested solutions, as per the performed analysis, at least for the time being, represent an inclusive publishing environment where multiple publishing models are competing for a piece of the pie and thus inhibiting each other's flaws. The performed analysis also shows that there seems to be a link between trends in scientific publishing and tumultuous world events, which in turn has a special significance for the publishing environment in the current world stage -- implying that academy publishing has potentially now found itself at a tipping point of change.
SimpleSafetyTests: a Test Suite for Identifying Critical Safety Risks in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The past year has seen rapid acceleration in the development of large language models (LLMs). However, without proper steering and safeguards, LLMs will readily follow malicious instructions, provide unsafe advice, and generate toxic content. We introduce SimpleSafetyTests (SST) as a new test suite for rapidly and systematically identifying such critical safety risks. The test suite comprises 100 test prompts across five harm areas that LLMs, for the vast majority of applications, should refuse to comply with. We test 11 open-access and open-source LLMs and four closed-source LLMs, and find critical safety weaknesses. While some of the models do not give a single unsafe response, most give unsafe responses to more than 20% of the prompts, with over 50% unsafe responses in the extreme. Prepending a safety-emphasising system prompt substantially reduces the occurrence of unsafe responses, but does not completely stop them from happening. Trained annotators labelled every model response to SST (n = 3,000). We use these annotations to evaluate five AI safety filters (which assess whether a models' response is unsafe given a prompt) as a way of automatically evaluating models' performance on SST. The filters' performance varies considerably. There are also differences across the five harm areas, and on the unsafe versus safe responses. The widely-used Perspective API has 72% accuracy and a newly-created zero-shot prompt to OpenAI's GPT-4 performs best with 89% accuracy. Content Warning: This paper contains prompts and responses that relate to child abuse, suicide, self-harm and eating disorders, scams and fraud, illegal items, and physical harm.
Direct Preference Optimization for Neural Machine Translation with Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Minimum Bayes Risk (MBR) decoding can significantly improve translation performance of Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, MBR decoding is computationally expensive. We show how the recently developed Reinforcement Learning technique, Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), can fine-tune MLLMs to get the gains of MBR without any additional computation in inference. Our method uses only a small monolingual fine-tuning set and yields significantly improved performance on multiple NMT test sets compared to MLLMs without DPO.
Aligning Large Language Models with Human Opinions through Persona Selection and Value--Belief--Norm Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Reasoning and predicting human opinions with large language models (LLMs) is essential yet challenging. Current methods employ role-playing with personae but face two major issues: LLMs are sensitive to even a single irrelevant persona, skewing predictions by up to 30%, and LLMs fail to reason strategically over personae. We propose Chain-of-Opinion (COO), a simple four-step solution modeling which and how to reason with personae, inspired by the Value--Belief--Norm (VBN) theory. COO differentiates between explicit personae (demographics and ideology) and implicit personae (historical opinions), involves: (1) filtering irrelevant attributes from explicit personae, (2) ranking implicit personae into a preferential list for selecting top-k, (3) applying novel VBN reasoning to extract user environmental and personal value, belief, and norm variables for accurate and reliable predictions, and (4) iterating VBN reasoning with progressively larger lists of implicit personae to handle potential persona insufficiency. COO efficiently achieves new state-of-the-art opinion prediction via prompting with only 5 inference calls, improving prior techniques by up to 4%. Notably, fine-tuning LMs with COO data results in significantly better opinion-aligned models, by up to 23%.
MVSA-Net: Multi-View State-Action Recognition for Robust and Deployable Trajectory Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

The learn-from-observation (LfO) paradigm is a human-inspired mode for a robot to learn to perform a task simply by watching it being performed. LfO can facilitate robot integration on factory floors by minimizing disruption and reducing tedious programming. A key component of the LfO pipeline is a transformation of the depth camera frames to the corresponding task state and action pairs, which are then relayed to learning techniques such as imitation or inverse reinforcement learning for understanding the task parameters. While several existing computer vision models analyze videos for activity recognition, SA-Net specifically targets robotic LfO from RGB-D data. However, SA-Net and many other models analyze frame data captured from a single viewpoint. Their analysis is therefore highly sensitive to occlusions of the observed task, which are frequent in deployments. An obvious way of reducing occlusions is to simultaneously observe the task from multiple viewpoints and synchronously fuse the multiple streams in the model. Toward this, we present multi-view SA-Net, which generalizes the SA-Net model to allow the perception of multiple viewpoints of the task activity, integrate them, and better recognize the state and action in each frame. Performance evaluations on two distinct domains establish that MVSA-Net recognizes the state-action pairs under occlusion more accurately compared to single-view MVSA-Net and other baselines. Our ablation studies further evaluate its performance under different ambient conditions and establish the contribution of the architecture components. As such, MVSA-Net offers a significantly more robust and deployable state-action trajectory generation compared to previous methods.
LLMs cannot find reasoning errors, but can correct them given the error location
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

While self-correction has shown promise in improving LLM outputs in terms of style and quality (e.g. Chen et al., 2023b; Madaan et al., 2023), recent attempts to self-correct logical or reasoning errors often cause correct answers to become incorrect, resulting in worse performances overall (Huang et al., 2023). In this paper, we show that poor self-correction performance stems from LLMs' inability to find logical mistakes, rather than their ability to correct a known mistake. Firstly, we benchmark several state-of-the-art LLMs on their mistake-finding ability and demonstrate that they generally struggle with the task, even in highly objective, unambiguous cases. Secondly, we test the correction abilities of LLMs -- separately from mistake finding -- using a backtracking setup that feeds ground truth mistake location information to the model. We show that this boosts downstream task performance across our 5 reasoning tasks, indicating that LLMs' correction abilities are robust. Finally, we show that it is possible to obtain mistake location information without ground truth labels or in-domain training data. We train a small classifier with out-of-domain data, which exhibits stronger mistake-finding performance than prompting a large model. We release our dataset of LLM-generated logical mistakes, BIG-Bench Mistake, to enable further research into locating LLM reasoning mistakes.
Summarization-Based Document IDs for Generative Retrieval with Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Generative retrieval (Wang et al., 2022; Tay et al., 2022) is a popular approach for end-to-end document retrieval that directly generates document identifiers given an input query. We introduce summarization-based document IDs, in which each document's ID is composed of an extractive summary or abstractive keyphrases generated by a language model, rather than an integer ID sequence or bags of n-grams as proposed in past work. We find that abstractive, content-based IDs (ACID) and an ID based on the first 30 tokens are very effective in direct comparisons with previous approaches to ID creation. We show that using ACID improves top-10 and top-20 recall by 15.6% and 14.4% (relative) respectively versus the cluster-based integer ID baseline on the MSMARCO 100k retrieval task, and 9.8% and 9.9% respectively on the Wikipedia-based NQ 100k retrieval task. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of human-readable, natural-language IDs created through summarization for generative retrieval. We also observed that extractive IDs outperformed abstractive IDs on Wikipedia articles in NQ but not the snippets in MSMARCO, which suggests that document characteristics affect generative retrieval performance.
Are You Sure? Challenging LLMs Leads to Performance Drops in The FlipFlop Experiment
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The interactive nature of Large Language Models (LLMs) theoretically allows models to refine and improve their answers, yet systematic analysis of the multi-turn behavior of LLMs remains limited. In this paper, we propose the FlipFlop experiment: in the first round of the conversation, an LLM completes a classification task. In a second round, the LLM is challenged with a follow-up phrase like "Are you sure?", offering an opportunity for the model to reflect on its initial answer, and decide whether to confirm or flip its answer. A systematic study of ten LLMs on seven classification tasks reveals that models flip their answers on average 46% of the time and that all models see a deterioration of accuracy between their first and final prediction, with an average drop of 17% (the FlipFlop effect). We conduct finetuning experiments on an open-source LLM and find that finetuning on synthetically created data can mitigate - reducing performance deterioration by 60% - but not resolve sycophantic behavior entirely. The FlipFlop experiment illustrates the universality of sycophantic behavior in LLMs and provides a robust framework to analyze model behavior and evaluate future models.
Controlling the Output of a Generative Model by Latent Feature Vector Shifting
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

State-of-the-art generative models (e.g. StyleGAN3 \cite{karras2021alias}) often generate photorealistic images based on vectors sampled from their latent space. However, the ability to control the output is limited. Here we present our novel method for latent vector shifting for controlled output image modification utilizing semantic features of the generated images. In our approach we use a pre-trained model of StyleGAN3 that generates images of realistic human faces in relatively high resolution. We complement the generative model with a convolutional neural network classifier, namely ResNet34, trained to classify the generated images with binary facial features from the CelebA dataset. Our latent feature shifter is a neural network model with a task to shift the latent vectors of a generative model into a specified feature direction. We have trained latent feature shifter for multiple facial features, and outperformed our baseline method in the number of generated images with the desired feature. To train our latent feature shifter neural network, we have designed a dataset of pairs of latent vectors with and without a certain feature. Based on the evaluation, we conclude that our latent feature shifter approach was successful in the controlled generation of the StyleGAN3 generator.
Channel Estimation for mmWave MIMO using sub-6 GHz Out-of-Band Information
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Future wireless multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems will employ sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency bands working cooperatively. Establishing a MIMO communication link usually relies on estimating channel state information (CSI) which is difficult to acquire at mmWave frequencies due to a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this paper, we propose three novel methods to estimate mmWave MIMO channels using out-of-band information obtained from the sub-6GHz band. We compare the proposed channel estimation methods with a conventional one utilizing only in-band information. Simulation results show that the proposed methods outperform the conventional mmWave channel estimation method in terms of achievable spectral efficiency, especially at low SNR and high K-factor.
Factcheck-Bench: Fine-Grained Evaluation Benchmark for Automatic Fact-checkers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

The increased use of large language models (LLMs) across a variety of real-world applications calls for mechanisms to verify the factual accuracy of their outputs. In this work, we present a holistic end-to-end solution for annotating the factuality of LLM-generated responses, which encompasses a multi-stage annotation scheme designed to yield detailed labels concerning the verifiability and factual inconsistencies found in LLM outputs. We further construct an open-domain document-level factuality benchmark in three-level granularity: claim, sentence and document, aiming to facilitate the evaluation of automatic fact-checking systems. Preliminary experiments show that FacTool, FactScore and Perplexity.ai are struggling to identify false claims, with the best F1=0.63 by this annotation solution based on GPT-4. Annotation tool, benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/yuxiaw/Factcheck-GPT.
Incremental Object-Based Novelty Detection with Feedback Loop
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Object-based Novelty Detection (ND) aims to identify unknown objects that do not belong to classes seen during training by an object detection model. The task is particularly crucial in real-world applications, as it allows to avoid potentially harmful behaviours, e.g. as in the case of object detection models adopted in a self-driving car or in an autonomous robot. Traditional approaches to ND focus on one time offline post processing of the pretrained object detection output, leaving no possibility to improve the model robustness after training and discarding the abundant amount of out-of-distribution data encountered during deployment. In this work, we propose a novel framework for object-based ND, assuming that human feedback can be requested on the predicted output and later incorporated to refine the ND model without negatively affecting the main object detection performance. This refinement operation is repeated whenever new feedback is available. To tackle this new formulation of the problem for object detection, we propose a lightweight ND module attached on top of a pre-trained object detection model, which is incrementally updated through a feedback loop. We also propose a new benchmark to evaluate methods on this new setting and test extensively our ND approach against baselines, showing increased robustness and a successful incorporation of the received feedback.
Modeling Health Video Consumption Behaviors on Social Media: Activities, Challenges, and Characteristics
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2024
Year: 2024

Many people now watch health videos, such as diet, exercise, mental health, COVID-19, and chronic disease videos, on social media. Most existing studies focused on video creators, leaving the motivations and practices of viewers underexplored. We interviewed 18 participants, surveyed 121 respondents, and derived a model characterizing consumers' video consumption practices on social media. The practices include five main activities: deciding to watch videos driven by various motivations, accessing videos on social media through a socio-technical ecosystem, watching videos to meet informational, emotional, and entertainment needs, evaluating the credibility and interestingness of videos, and using videos to achieve health goals. Through an iterative video consumption process, individuals strategically navigate across multiple platforms, seeking better accessibility, higher reliability, and cultivating a stronger motivation. They actively look for longer and more in-depth videos. We further identified challenges consumers face while consuming health videos on social media and discussed design implications and directions for future research.
Range-Visual-Inertial Sensor Fusion for Micro Aerial Vehicle Localization and Navigation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

We propose a fixed-lag smoother-based sensor fusion architecture to leverage the complementary benefits of range-based sensors and visual-inertial odometry (VIO) for localization. We use two fixed-lag smoothers (FLS) to decouple accurate state estimation and high-rate pose generation for closed-loop control. The first FLS combines ultrawideband (UWB)-based range measurements and VIO to estimate the robot trajectory and any systematic biases that affect the range measurements in cluttered environments. The second FLS estimates smooth corrections to VIO to generate pose estimates at a high rate for online control. The proposed method is lightweight and can run on a computationally constrained micro-aerial vehicle (MAV). We validate our approach through closed-loop flight tests involving dynamic trajectories in multiple real-world cluttered indoor environments. Our method achieves decimeter-to-sub-decimeter-level positioning accuracy using off-the-shelf sensors and decimeter-level tracking accuracy with minimally-tuned open-source controllers.
Towards A Unified View of Answer Calibration for Multi-Step Reasoning
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) employing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting have broadened the scope for improving multi-step reasoning capabilities. We generally divide multi-step reasoning into two phases: path generation to generate the reasoning path(s); and answer calibration post-processing the reasoning path(s) to obtain a final answer. However, the existing literature lacks systematic analysis on different answer calibration approaches. In this paper, we summarize the taxonomy of recent answer calibration techniques and break them down into step-level and path-level strategies. We then conduct a thorough evaluation on these strategies from a unified view, systematically scrutinizing step-level and path-level answer calibration across multiple paths. Experimental results reveal that integrating the dominance of both strategies tends to derive optimal outcomes. Our study holds the potential to illuminate key insights for optimizing multi-step reasoning with answer calibration.
Universal NER: A Gold-Standard Multilingual Named Entity Recognition Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We introduce Universal NER (UNER), an open, community-driven project to develop gold-standard NER benchmarks in many languages. The overarching goal of UNER is to provide high-quality, cross-lingually consistent annotations to facilitate and standardize multilingual NER research. UNER v1 contains 18 datasets annotated with named entities in a cross-lingual consistent schema across 12 diverse languages. In this paper, we detail the dataset creation and composition of UNER; we also provide initial modeling baselines on both in-language and cross-lingual learning settings. We release the data, code, and fitted models to the public.