pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ByteScale: Efficient Scaling of LLM Training with a 2048K Context Length on More Than 12,000 GPUs
Authors: Hao Ge, Junda Feng, Qi Huang, Fangcheng Fu, Xiaonan Nie, Lei Zuo, Haibin Lin, Bin Cui, Xin Liu
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00

Scaling long-context ability is essential for Large Language Models (LLMs). To amortize the memory consumption across multiple devices in long-context training, inter-data partitioning (a.k.a. Data Parallelism) and intra-data partitioning (a.k.a. Context Parallelism) are commonly used. Current training frameworks predominantly treat the two techniques as orthogonal, and establish static communication groups to organize the devices as a static mesh (e.g., a 2D mesh). However, the sequences for LLM training typically vary in lengths, no matter for texts, multi-modalities or reinforcement learning. The mismatch between data heterogeneity and static mesh causes redundant communication and imbalanced computation, degrading the training efficiency. In this work, we introduce ByteScale, an efficient, flexible, and scalable LLM training framework for large-scale mixed training of long and short sequences. The core of ByteScale is a novel parallelism strategy, namely Hybrid Data Parallelism (HDP), which unifies the inter- and intra-data partitioning with a dynamic mesh design. In particular, we build a communication optimizer, which eliminates the redundant communication for short sequences by data-aware sharding and dynamic communication, and further compresses the communication cost for long sequences by selective offloading. Besides, we also develop a balance scheduler to mitigate the imbalanced computation by parallelism-aware data assignment. We evaluate ByteScale with the model sizes ranging from 7B to 141B, context lengths from 256K to 2048K, on a production cluster with more than 12,000 GPUs. Experiment results show that ByteScale outperforms the state-of-the-art training system by up to 7.89x.
FedDyMem: Efficient Federated Learning with Dynamic Memory and Memory-Reduce for Unsupervised Image Anomaly Detection
Authors: Silin Chen, Kangjian Di, Yichu Xu, Han-Jia Ye, Wenhan Luo, Ningmu Zou
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Federated Learning, One-Class Classification

Unsupervised image anomaly detection (UAD) has become a critical process in industrial and medical applications, but it faces growing challenges due to increasing concerns over data privacy. The limited class diversity inherent to one-class classification tasks, combined with distribution biases caused by variations in products across and within clients, poses significant challenges for preserving data privacy with federated UAD. Thus, this article proposes an efficient federated learning method with dynamic memory and memory-reduce for unsupervised image anomaly detection, called FedDyMem. Considering all client data belongs to a single class (i.e., normal sample) in UAD and the distribution of intra-class features demonstrates significant skewness, FedDyMem facilitates knowledge sharing between the client and server through the client's dynamic memory bank instead of model parameters. In the local clients, a memory generator and a metric loss are employed to improve the consistency of the feature distribution for normal samples, leveraging the local model to update the memory bank dynamically. For efficient communication, a memory-reduce method based on weighted averages is proposed to significantly decrease the scale of memory banks. On the server, global memory is constructed and distributed to individual clients through k-means aggregation. Experiments conducted on six industrial and medical datasets, comprising a mixture of six products or health screening types derived from eleven public datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of FedDyMem.
TeleRAG: Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation Inference with Lookahead Retrieval
Authors: Chien-Yu Lin, Keisuke Kamahori, Yiyu Liu, Xiaoxiang Shi, Madhav Kashyap, Yile Gu, Rulin Shao, Zihao Ye, Kan Zhu, Stephanie Wang, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Rohan Kadekodi, Luis Ceze, Baris Kasikci
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) extends large language models (LLMs) with external data sources to enhance factual correctness and domain coverage. Modern RAG pipelines rely on large datastores, leading to system challenges in latency-sensitive deployments, especially when limited GPU memory is available. To address these challenges, we propose TeleRAG, an efficient inference system that reduces RAG latency with minimal GPU memory requirements. The core innovation of TeleRAG is lookahead retrieval, a prefetching mechanism that anticipates required data and transfers it from CPU to GPU in parallel with LLM generation. By leveraging the modularity of RAG pipelines, the inverted file index (IVF) search algorithm and similarities between queries, TeleRAG optimally overlaps data movement and computation. Experimental results show that TeleRAG reduces end-to-end RAG inference latency by up to 1.72x on average compared to state-of-the-art systems, enabling faster, more memory-efficient deployments of advanced RAG applications.
LADs: Leveraging LLMs for AI-Driven DevOps
Authors: Ahmad Faraz Khan, Azal Ahmad Khan, Anas Mohamed, Haider Ali, Suchithra Moolinti, Sabaat Haroon, Usman Tahir, Mattia Fazzini, Ali R. Butt, Ali Anwar
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Automating cloud configuration and deployment remains a critical challenge due to evolving infrastructures, heterogeneous hardware, and fluctuating workloads. Existing solutions lack adaptability and require extensive manual tuning, leading to inefficiencies and misconfigurations. We introduce LADs, the first LLM-driven framework designed to tackle these challenges by ensuring robustness, adaptability, and efficiency in automated cloud management. Instead of merely applying existing techniques, LADs provides a principled approach to configuration optimization through in-depth analysis of what optimization works under which conditions. By leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Few-Shot Learning, Chain-of-Thought, and Feedback-Based Prompt Chaining, LADs generates accurate configurations and learns from deployment failures to iteratively refine system settings. Our findings reveal key insights into the trade-offs between performance, cost, and scalability, helping practitioners determine the right strategies for different deployment scenarios. For instance, we demonstrate how prompt chaining-based adaptive feedback loops enhance fault tolerance in multi-tenant environments and how structured log analysis with example shots improves configuration accuracy. Through extensive evaluations, LADs reduces manual effort, optimizes resource utilization, and improves system reliability. By open-sourcing LADs, we aim to drive further innovation in AI-powered DevOps automation.
SPD: Sync-Point Drop for Efficient Tensor Parallelism of Large Language Models
Authors: Han-Byul Kim, Duc Hoang, Arnav Kundu, Mohammad Samragh, Minsik Cho
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00

With the rapid expansion in the scale of large language models (LLMs), enabling efficient distributed inference across multiple computing units has become increasingly critical. However, communication overheads from popular distributed inference techniques such as Tensor Parallelism pose a significant challenge to achieve scalability and low latency. Therefore, we introduce a novel optimization technique, Sync-Point Drop (SPD), to reduce communication overheads in tensor parallelism by selectively dropping synchronization on attention outputs. In detail, we first propose a block design that allows execution to proceed without communication through SPD. Second, we apply different SPD strategies to attention blocks based on their sensitivity to the model accuracy. The proposed methods effectively alleviate communication bottlenecks while minimizing accuracy degradation during LLM inference, offering a scalable solution for diverse distributed environments: SPD offered about 20% overall inference latency reduction with < 1% accuracy regression for LLaMA2-70B inference over 8 GPUs.
Adversarial Robustness of Partitioned Quantum Classifiers
Authors: Pouya Kananian, Hans-Arno Jacobsen
Date: 2025-01-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Quantum Machine Learning

Adversarial robustness in quantum classifiers is a critical area of study, providing insights into their performance compared to classical models and uncovering potential advantages inherent to quantum machine learning. In the NISQ era of quantum computing, circuit cutting is a notable technique for simulating circuits that exceed the qubit limitations of current devices, enabling the distribution of a quantum circuit's execution across multiple quantum processing units through classical communication. We examine how partitioning quantum classifiers through circuit cutting increase their susceptibility to adversarial attacks, establishing a link between attacking the state preparation channels in wire cutting and implementing adversarial gates within intermediate layers of a quantum classifier. We then proceed to study the latter problem from both a theoretical and experimental perspective.
Flattening Supply Chains: When do Technology Improvements lead to Disintermediation?
Authors: S. Nageeb Ali, Nicole Immorlica, Meena Jagadeesan, Brendan Lucier
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00

In the digital economy, technological innovations make it cheaper to produce high-quality content. For example, generative AI tools reduce costs for creators who develop content to be distributed online, but can also reduce production costs for the users who consume that content. These innovations can thus lead to disintermediation, since consumers may choose to use these technologies directly, bypassing intermediaries. To investigate when technological improvements lead to disintermediation, we study a game with an intermediary, suppliers of a production technology, and consumers. First, we show disintermediation occurs whenever production costs are too high or too low. We then investigate the consequences of disintermediation for welfare and content quality at equilibrium. While the intermediary is welfare-improving, the intermediary extracts all gains to social welfare and its presence can raise or lower content quality. We further analyze how disintermediation is affected by the level of competition between suppliers and the intermediary's fee structure. More broadly, our results take a step towards assessing how production technology innovations affect the survival of intermediaries and impact the digital economy.
Learning to Steer Learners in Games
Authors: Yizhou Zhang, Yi-An Ma, Eric Mazumdar
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00

We consider the problem of learning to exploit learning algorithms through repeated interactions in games. Specifically, we focus on the case of repeated two player, finite-action games, in which an optimizer aims to steer a no-regret learner to a Stackelberg equilibrium without knowledge of its payoffs. We first show that this is impossible if the optimizer only knows that the learner is using an algorithm from the general class of no-regret algorithms. This suggests that the optimizer requires more information about the learner's objectives or algorithm to successfully exploit them. Building on this intuition, we reduce the problem for the optimizer to that of recovering the learner's payoff structure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach if the learner's algorithm is drawn from a smaller class by analyzing two examples: one where the learner uses an ascent algorithm, and another where the learner uses stochastic mirror ascent with known regularizer and step sizes.
ReaLJam: Real-Time Human-AI Music Jamming with Reinforcement Learning-Tuned Transformers
Authors: Alexander Scarlatos, Yusong Wu, Ian Simon, Adam Roberts, Tim Cooijmans, Natasha Jaques, Cassie Tarakajian, Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent

Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have created models capable of high-quality musical content generation. However, little consideration is given to how to use these models for real-time or cooperative jamming musical applications because of crucial required features: low latency, the ability to communicate planned actions, and the ability to adapt to user input in real-time. To support these needs, we introduce ReaLJam, an interface and protocol for live musical jamming sessions between a human and a Transformer-based AI agent trained with reinforcement learning. We enable real-time interactions using the concept of anticipation, where the agent continually predicts how the performance will unfold and visually conveys its plan to the user. We conduct a user study where experienced musicians jam in real-time with the agent through ReaLJam. Our results demonstrate that ReaLJam enables enjoyable and musically interesting sessions, and we uncover important takeaways for future work.
Transforming Tuberculosis Care: Optimizing Large Language Models For Enhanced Clinician-Patient Communication
Authors: Daniil Filienko, Mahek Nizar, Javier Roberti, Denise Galdamez, Haroon Jakher, Sarah Iribarren, Weichao Yuwen, Martine De Cock
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Tuberculosis (TB) is the leading cause of death from an infectious disease globally, with the highest burden in low- and middle-income countries. In these regions, limited healthcare access and high patient-to-provider ratios impede effective patient support, communication, and treatment completion. To bridge this gap, we propose integrating a specialized Large Language Model into an efficacious digital adherence technology to augment interactive communication with treatment supporters. This AI-powered approach, operating within a human-in-the-loop framework, aims to enhance patient engagement and improve TB treatment outcomes.
XAIxArts Manifesto: Explainable AI for the Arts
Authors: Nick Bryan-Kinns, Shuoyang Jasper Zheng, Francisco Castro, Makayla Lewis, Jia-Rey Chang, Gabriel Vigliensoni, Terence Broad, Michael Clemens, Elizabeth Wilson
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Explainable AI (XAI) is concerned with how to make AI models more understandable to people. To date these explanations have predominantly been technocentric - mechanistic or productivity oriented. This paper introduces the Explainable AI for the Arts (XAIxArts) manifesto to provoke new ways of thinking about explainability and AI beyond technocentric discourses. Manifestos offer a means to communicate ideas, amplify unheard voices, and foster reflection on practice. To supports the co-creation and revision of the XAIxArts manifesto we combine a World Caf\'e style discussion format with a living manifesto to question four core themes: 1) Empowerment, Inclusion, and Fairness; 2) Valuing Artistic Practice; 3) Hacking and Glitches; and 4) Openness. Through our interactive living manifesto experience we invite participants to actively engage in shaping this XIAxArts vision within the CHI community and beyond.
Measuring and identifying factors of individuals' trust in Large Language Models
Authors: Edoardo Sebastiano De Duro, Giuseppe Alessandro Veltri, Hudson Golino, Massimo Stella
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) can engage in human-looking conversational exchanges. Although conversations can elicit trust between users and LLMs, scarce empirical research has examined trust formation in human-LLM contexts, beyond LLMs' trustworthiness or human trust in AI in general. Here, we introduce the Trust-In-LLMs Index (TILLMI) as a new framework to measure individuals' trust in LLMs, extending McAllister's cognitive and affective trust dimensions to LLM-human interactions. We developed TILLMI as a psychometric scale, prototyped with a novel protocol we called LLM-simulated validity. The LLM-based scale was then validated in a sample of 1,000 US respondents. Exploratory Factor Analysis identified a two-factor structure. Two items were then removed due to redundancy, yielding a final 6-item scale with a 2-factor structure. Confirmatory Factor Analysis on a separate subsample showed strong model fit ($CFI = .995$, $TLI = .991$, $RMSEA = .046$, $p_{X^2} > .05$). Convergent validity analysis revealed that trust in LLMs correlated positively with openness to experience, extraversion, and cognitive flexibility, but negatively with neuroticism. Based on these findings, we interpreted TILLMI's factors as "closeness with LLMs" (affective dimension) and "reliance on LLMs" (cognitive dimension). Younger males exhibited higher closeness with- and reliance on LLMs compared to older women. Individuals with no direct experience with LLMs exhibited lower levels of trust compared to LLMs' users. These findings offer a novel empirical foundation for measuring trust in AI-driven verbal communication, informing responsible design, and fostering balanced human-AI collaboration.
A Deep User Interface for Exploring LLaMa
Authors: Divya Perumal, Swaroop Panda
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

The growing popularity and widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) necessitates the development of tools that enhance the effectiveness of user interactions with these models. Understanding the structures and functions of these models poses a significant challenge for users. Visual analytics-driven tools enables users to explore and compare, facilitating better decision-making. This paper presents a visual analytics-driven tool equipped with interactive controls for key hyperparameters, including top-p, frequency and presence penalty, enabling users to explore, examine and compare the outputs of LLMs. In a user study, we assessed the tool's effectiveness, which received favorable feedback for its visual design, with particular commendation for the interface layout and ease of navigation. Additionally, the feedback provided valuable insights for enhancing the effectiveness of Human-LLM interaction tools.
Acquiring Grounded Representations of Words with Situated Interactive Instruction
Authors: Shiwali Mohan, Aaron H. Mininger, James R. Kirk, John E. Laird
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00

We present an approach for acquiring grounded representations of words from mixed-initiative, situated interactions with a human instructor. The work focuses on the acquisition of diverse types of knowledge including perceptual, semantic, and procedural knowledge along with learning grounded meanings. Interactive learning allows the agent to control its learning by requesting instructions about unknown concepts, making learning efficient. Our approach has been instantiated in Soar and has been evaluated on a table-top robotic arm capable of manipulating small objects.
Can LLM Assist in the Evaluation of the Quality of Machine Learning Explanations?
Authors: Bo wang, Yiqiao Li, Jianlong Zhou, Fang Chen
Date: 2025-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

EXplainable machine learning (XML) has recently emerged to address the mystery mechanisms of machine learning (ML) systems by interpreting their 'black box' results. Despite the development of various explanation methods, determining the most suitable XML method for specific ML contexts remains unclear, highlighting the need for effective evaluation of explanations. The evaluating capabilities of the Transformer-based large language model (LLM) present an opportunity to adopt LLM-as-a-Judge for assessing explanations. In this paper, we propose a workflow that integrates both LLM-based and human judges for evaluating explanations. We examine how LLM-based judges evaluate the quality of various explanation methods and compare their evaluation capabilities to those of human judges within an iris classification scenario, employing both subjective and objective metrics. We conclude that while LLM-based judges effectively assess the quality of explanations using subjective metrics, they are not yet sufficiently developed to replace human judges in this role.
Personas Evolved: Designing Ethical LLM-Based Conversational Agent Personalities
Authors: Smit Desai, Mateusz Dubiel, Nima Zargham, Thomas Mildner, Laura Spillner
Date: 2025-02-27 00:00:00

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs), enabling more dynamic, context-aware, and human-like interactions across diverse domains, from social sciences to healthcare. However, the rapid adoption of LLM-based personas raises critical ethical and practical concerns, including bias, manipulation, and unforeseen social consequences. Unlike traditional CUIs, where personas are carefully designed with clear intent, LLM-based personas generate responses dynamically from vast datasets, making their behavior less predictable and harder to govern. This workshop aims to bridge the gap between CUI and broader AI communities by fostering a cross-disciplinary dialogue on the responsible design and evaluation of LLM-based personas. Bringing together researchers, designers, and practitioners, we will explore best practices, develop ethical guidelines, and promote frameworks that ensure transparency, inclusivity, and user-centered interactions. By addressing these challenges collaboratively, we seek to shape the future of LLM-driven CUIs in ways that align with societal values and expectations.
VideoA11y: Method and Dataset for Accessible Video Description
Authors: Chaoyu Li, Sid Padmanabhuni, Maryam Cheema, Hasti Seifi, Pooyan Fazli
Date: 2025-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Description

Video descriptions are crucial for blind and low vision (BLV) users to access visual content. However, current artificial intelligence models for generating descriptions often fall short due to limitations in the quality of human annotations within training datasets, resulting in descriptions that do not fully meet BLV users' needs. To address this gap, we introduce VideoA11y, an approach that leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and video accessibility guidelines to generate descriptions tailored for BLV individuals. Using this method, we have curated VideoA11y-40K, the largest and most comprehensive dataset of 40,000 videos described for BLV users. Rigorous experiments across 15 video categories, involving 347 sighted participants, 40 BLV participants, and seven professional describers, showed that VideoA11y descriptions outperform novice human annotations and are comparable to trained human annotations in clarity, accuracy, objectivity, descriptiveness, and user satisfaction. We evaluated models on VideoA11y-40K using both standard and custom metrics, demonstrating that MLLMs fine-tuned on this dataset produce high-quality accessible descriptions. Code and dataset are available at https://people-robots.github.io/VideoA11y.
Information Theoretic I-MMSE generalize Time-Frequency Signal Processing Tools
Authors: Samah A. M. Ghanem
Date: 2023-01-05 00:00:00

In this paper, we capitalize on information theoretic-estimation theoretic result, called the I-MMSE [1]-[2] to show that such tool generalizes time-frequency signal processing tools urgent for the analysis of non-stationary non-Gaussian signals.