pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SPECTRE: An FFT-Based Efficient Drop-In Replacement to Self-Attention for Long Contexts
Authors: Jacob Fein-Ashley, Neelesh Gupta, Rajgopal Kannan, Viktor Prasanna
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Long-context transformers face significant efficiency challenges due to the quadratic cost of self-attention. However, many modern applications-from multi-turn dialogue to high-resolution vision-require contexts spanning tens of thousands of tokens. We introduce SPECTRE, a method that replaces each attention head with a fast real FFT, a content-adaptive spectral gate, and an inverse FFT, reducing per-layer complexity from $\mathcal{O}(L^{2})$ to $O(L\log L)$ while preserving the surrounding architecture. We extend this efficiency to autoregressive generation through our Prefix-FFT cache and enhance local feature representation with an optional wavelet module that adds negligible computational overhead. Our experiments demonstrate that SPECTRE operates up to 7$\times$ faster than FlashAttention-2 on 128k-token contexts while matching or exceeding baseline performance on PG-19 language modeling and ImageNet-1k classification tasks. SPECTRE achieves these improvements by adding fewer than 6\% parameters to the base model, making hundred-kilotoken context processing feasible on commodity GPUs without specialized hardware.
Enhancing DNA Foundation Models to Address Masking Inefficiencies
Authors: Monireh Safari, Pablo Millan Arias, Scott C. Lowe, Lila Kari, Angel X. Chang, Graham W. Taylor
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Language Modelling

Masked language modelling (MLM) as a pretraining objective has been widely adopted in genomic sequence modelling. While pretrained models can successfully serve as encoders for various downstream tasks, the distribution shift between pretraining and inference detrimentally impacts performance, as the pretraining task is to map [MASK] tokens to predictions, yet the [MASK] is absent during downstream applications. This means the encoder does not prioritize its encodings of non-[MASK] tokens, and expends parameters and compute on work only relevant to the MLM task, despite this being irrelevant at deployment time. In this work, we propose a modified encoder-decoder architecture based on the masked autoencoder framework, designed to address this inefficiency within a BERT-based transformer. We empirically show that the resulting mismatch is particularly detrimental in genomic pipelines where models are often used for feature extraction without fine-tuning. We evaluate our approach on the BIOSCAN-5M dataset, comprising over 2 million unique DNA barcodes. We achieve substantial performance gains in both closed-world and open-world classification tasks when compared against causal models and bidirectional architectures pretrained with MLM tasks.
Supervised Reward Inference
Authors: Will Schwarzer, Jordan Schneider, Philip S. Thomas, Scott Niekum
Date: 2025-02-25 00:00:00

Existing approaches to reward inference from behavior typically assume that humans provide demonstrations according to specific models of behavior. However, humans often indicate their goals through a wide range of behaviors, from actions that are suboptimal due to poor planning or execution to behaviors which are intended to communicate goals rather than achieve them. We propose that supervised learning offers a unified framework to infer reward functions from any class of behavior, and show that such an approach is asymptotically Bayes-optimal under mild assumptions. Experiments on simulated robotic manipulation tasks show that our method can efficiently infer rewards from a wide variety of arbitrarily suboptimal demonstrations.
GenAIOps for GenAI Model-Agility
Authors: Ken Ueno, Makoto Kogo, Hiromi Kawatsu, Yohsuke Uchiumi, Michiaki Tatsubori
Date: 2024-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: model

AI-agility, with which an organization can be quickly adapted to its business priorities, is desired even for the development and operations of generative AI (GenAI) applications. Especially in this paper, we discuss so-called GenAI Model-agility, which we define as the readiness to be flexibly adapted to base foundation models as diverse as the model providers and versions. First, for handling issues specific to generative AI, we first define a methodology of GenAI application development and operations, as GenAIOps, to identify the problem of application quality degradation caused by changes to the underlying foundation models. We study prompt tuning technologies, which look promising to address this problem, and discuss their effectiveness and limitations through case studies using existing tools.
Renaissance of Literate Programming in the Era of LLMs: Enhancing LLM-Based Code Generation in Large-Scale Projects
Authors: Wuyang Zhang, Yansong Li, Zeyu Dong, Yu Wu, Yingyao Zhou, Duolei Wang, Songsirou Xing, ChiChun Zhou, Da Shen
Date: 2024-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Prompt Engineering

Large Language Models (LLMs) have helped programmers increase efficiency through code generation, comprehension, and repair. However, their application to large-scale projects remains challenging due to complex interdependencies and the extensive size of modern codebases. Although Knuth's concept of Literate Programming (LP) combines code and natural language to convey logic and intent, its potential for enhancing relationships in large projects has not been fully explored. In this study, we introduce the idea of Interoperable LP (ILP), which leverages literate programming principles to enhance the development of both small-scale documents and large-scale projects with LLMs. We investigate how LLMs perform under ILP-style instructions for both document-oriented tasks and entire projects. Recognizing that many researchers rely on well-structured templates to guide LLMs, we propose a concise prompt engineering method to write LP documents so LLMs can better be involved in code generation. We also examine the capacity of various LLMs to generate Scheme and Python code on the RepoBench benchmark, illustrating the advantages of our approach. Our findings indicate that ILP with LLMs can enhance LLM-based code generation in large-scale project development.
Lost in Space: Optimizing Tokens for Grammar-Constrained Decoding
Authors: Sil Hamilton, David Mimno
Date: 2025-02-20 00:00:00

General-purpose language models are trained to produce varied natural language outputs, but for some tasks like annotation or classification we need more specific output formats. LLM systems increasingly support structured output, sampling tokens according to a grammar, which enforces a format but which can also reduce performance. We ask whether there are systematic differences between grammars that appear semantically similar to humans. To answer this question, we test four popular model families with five token formats on four NLP benchmarks. All models perform most accurately when instructed to classify with real numbers. Performance also improves by 5%-10% when models are instructed to return tokens incorporating leading whitespace, which we find can help models avoid structural deficiencies in subword token representations. Format-based differences are largest for smaller models that are often used for local laptop-scale inference. We present best practices for researchers using language models as zero-shot classifiers with structured output.
Decision Tree Algorithm Considering Distances Between Classes
Authors: Sangyong Lee, Chulhee Lee, Kwon Gi Mun, Dohyun Kim
Date: 2022-06-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE Access 2022 6
Tasks: Classification

Decision tree algorithm (DT) is a commonly used data mining method for classification and regression. DT repeatedly divides a dataset into pure subsets based on impurity measurements such as entropy and Gini. Then relatively “pure” partitions consisting of observations with the (almost) same class are obtained. Gini index is one of the representative indices for measuring the impurity of data. However, the Gini index does not take into account distances between classes. If the distances between classes are considered when measuring impurity, the decision tree algorithm can distinguish clearly observations with different classes. To the end, a new decision tree algorithm based on Rao-Stirling index is proposed considering distances between classes. Rao-Stirling index considers distances between classes in such a way that weights more to pairs of references in more distant classes when measuring data impurity. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is superior in terms of accuracy, implying that considering the distances between classes can help improve accuracy in DT.
Vision-Language Models Can Self-Improve Reasoning via Reflection
Authors: Kanzhi Cheng, Yantao Li, Fangzhi Xu, Jianbing Zhang, Hao Zhou, Yang Liu
Date: 2024-10-30 00:00:00

Chain-of-thought (CoT) has proven to improve the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs). However, due to the complexity of multimodal scenarios and the difficulty in collecting high-quality CoT data, CoT reasoning in multimodal LLMs has been largely overlooked. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective self-training framework, R3V, which iteratively enhances the model's Vision-language Reasoning by Reflecting on CoT Rationales. Our framework consists of two interleaved parts: (1) iteratively bootstrapping positive and negative solutions for reasoning datasets, and (2) reflection on rationale for learning from mistakes. Specifically, we introduce the self-refine and self-select losses, enabling the model to refine flawed rationale and derive the correct answer by comparing rationale candidates. Experiments on a wide range of vision-language tasks show that R3V consistently improves multimodal LLM reasoning, achieving a relative improvement of 23 to 60 percent over GPT-distilled baselines. Additionally, our approach supports self-reflection on generated solutions, further boosting performance through test-time computation.
Integrating Arithmetic Learning Improves Mathematical Reasoning in Smaller Models
Authors: Neeraj Gangwar, Suma P Bhat, Nickvash Kani
Date: 2025-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, GSM8K, Instruction Following, Knowledge Distillation, Mathematical Reasoning

While large models pre-trained on high-quality data exhibit excellent performance across various reasoning tasks, including mathematical reasoning (e.g. GSM8k, MultiArith), specializing smaller models to excel at mathematical reasoning remains a challenging problem. Common approaches to address this challenge include knowledge distillation, where smaller student models learn from large pre-trained teacher models, and data augmentation, such as rephrasing questions. Despite these efforts, smaller models struggle with arithmetic computations, leading to errors in mathematical reasoning. In this work, we focus on leveraging a programmatically generated arithmetic dataset to enhance the reasoning capabilities of smaller models. We investigate two key approaches to incorporate this dataset -- (1) intermediate fine-tuning, where a model is fine-tuned on the arithmetic dataset before being trained on a reasoning dataset, and (2) integrating the arithmetic dataset into the instruction-tuning mixture, allowing the model to learn arithmetic skills alongside general instruction-following abilities. Our experiments on multiple reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that incorporating an arithmetic dataset, whether through targeted fine-tuning or within the instruction-tuning mixture, enhances the models' arithmetic capabilities, which in turn improves their mathematical reasoning performance.
Know You First and Be You Better: Modeling Human-Like User Simulators via Implicit Profiles
Authors: Kuang Wang, Xianfei Li, Shenghao Yang, Li Zhou, Feng Jiang, Haizhou Li
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00

User simulators are crucial for replicating human interactions with dialogue systems, supporting both collaborative training and automatic evaluation, especially for large language models (LLMs). However, existing simulators often rely solely on text utterances, missing implicit user traits such as personality, speaking style, and goals. In contrast, persona-based methods lack generalizability, as they depend on predefined profiles of famous individuals or archetypes. To address these challenges, we propose User Simulator with implicit Profiles (USP), a framework that infers implicit user profiles from human-machine conversations and uses them to generate more personalized and realistic dialogues. We first develop an LLM-driven extractor with a comprehensive profile schema. Then, we refine the simulation through conditional supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with cycle consistency, optimizing it at both the utterance and conversation levels. Finally, we adopt a diverse profile sampler to capture the distribution of real-world user profiles. Experimental results demonstrate that USP outperforms strong baselines in terms of authenticity and diversity while achieving comparable performance in consistency. Furthermore, dynamic multi-turn evaluations based on USP strongly align with mainstream benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world applications.
A Universal Framework for Compressing Embeddings in CTR Prediction
Authors: Kefan Wang, Hao Wang, Kenan Song, Wei Guo, Kai Cheng, Zhi Li, Yong liu, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Click-Through Rate Prediction, Contrastive Learning, CPU, GPU, Recommendation Systems

Accurate click-through rate (CTR) prediction is vital for online advertising and recommendation systems. Recent deep learning advancements have improved the ability to capture feature interactions and understand user interests. However, optimizing the embedding layer often remains overlooked. Embedding tables, which represent categorical and sequential features, can become excessively large, surpassing GPU memory limits and necessitating storage in CPU memory. This results in high memory consumption and increased latency due to frequent GPU-CPU data transfers. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a Model-agnostic Embedding Compression (MEC) framework that compresses embedding tables by quantizing pre-trained embeddings, without sacrificing recommendation quality. Our approach consists of two stages: first, we apply popularity-weighted regularization to balance code distribution between high- and low-frequency features. Then, we integrate a contrastive learning mechanism to ensure a uniform distribution of quantized codes, enhancing the distinctiveness of embeddings. Experiments on three datasets reveal that our method reduces memory usage by over 50x while maintaining or improving recommendation performance compared to existing models. The implementation code is accessible in our project repository https://github.com/USTC-StarTeam/MEC.
COVE: COntext and VEracity prediction for out-of-context images
Authors: Jonathan Tonglet, Gabriel Thiem, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Misinformation

Images taken out of their context are the most prevalent form of multimodal misinformation. Debunking them requires (1) providing the true context of the image and (2) checking the veracity of the image's caption. However, existing automated fact-checking methods fail to tackle both objectives explicitly. In this work, we introduce COVE, a new method that predicts first the true COntext of the image and then uses it to predict the VEracity of the caption. COVE beats the SOTA context prediction model on all context items, often by more than five percentage points. It is competitive with the best veracity prediction models on synthetic data and outperforms them on real-world data, showing that it is beneficial to combine the two tasks sequentially. Finally, we conduct a human study that reveals that the predicted context is a reusable and interpretable artifact to verify new out-of-context captions for the same image. Our code and data are made available.
Exploring Graph Tasks with Pure LLMs: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Investigation
Authors: Yuxiang Wang, Xinnan Dai, Wenqi Fan, Yao Ma
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Graph Learning, Link Prediction, Node Classification

Graph-structured data has become increasingly prevalent across various domains, raising the demand for effective models to handle graph tasks like node classification and link prediction. Traditional graph learning models like Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have made significant strides, but their capabilities in handling graph data remain limited in certain contexts. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as promising candidates for graph tasks, yet most studies focus primarily on performance benchmarks and fail to address their broader potential, including their ability to handle limited data, their transferability across tasks, and their robustness. In this work, we provide a comprehensive exploration of LLMs applied to graph tasks. We evaluate the performance of pure LLMs, including those without parameter optimization and those fine-tuned with instructions, across various scenarios. Our analysis goes beyond accuracy, assessing LLM ability to perform in few-shot/zero-shot settings, transfer across domains, understand graph structures, and demonstrate robustness in challenging scenarios. We conduct extensive experiments with 16 graph learning models alongside 6 LLMs (e.g., Llama3B, GPT-4o, Qwen-plus), comparing their performance on datasets like Cora, PubMed, ArXiv, and Products. Our findings show that LLMs, particularly those with instruction tuning, outperform traditional models in few-shot settings, exhibit strong domain transferability, and demonstrate excellent generalization and robustness. This work offers valuable insights into the capabilities of LLMs for graph learning, highlighting their advantages and potential for real-world applications, and paving the way for future research in this area. Codes and datasets are released in https://github.com/myflashbarry/LLM-benchmarking.
Naked Eye Three-dimensional Display System Based on Time-multiplexed Technology
Authors: Ziyang Liu, Zekai Chen, Changxiong Zheng, Phil Surman, Xiao Wei Sun
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00

Our group is developing a multi-user eye-tracked 3D display, an evolution of the single-user eye-tracked 3D display that we have already successfully developed. This display utilizes a slanted lenticular setup, where multiple perspective views are shown across the viewing field. Due to the constraints of the lenticular lens parameters, identical views are repeated across the field, limiting eye tracking to a single user. However, this limitation can be addressed using spatio-temporal multiplexing, where view zone groups are presented sequentially with a high frame rate liquid crystal display (LCD) and driver, in combination with a synchronized directional light emitting diode (LED) array. In this paper, we describe the operation and results of the backlight drive electronics, where a prototype using a white LED illumination matrix, a simplified LCD panel, and a linear Fresnel lens array serves as a test bed.
Model Adaptation: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation without Source Data
Authors: Rui Li, Qianfen Jiao, Wenming Cao, Hau-San Wong, Si Wu
Date: 2025-02-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Prediction, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

In this paper, we investigate a challenging unsupervised domain adaptation setting -- unsupervised model adaptation. We aim to explore how to rely only on unlabeled target data to improve performance of an existing source prediction model on the target domain, since labeled source data may not be available in some real-world scenarios due to data privacy issues. For this purpose, we propose a new framework, which is referred to as collaborative class conditional generative adversarial net to bypass the dependence on the source data. Specifically, the prediction model is to be improved through generated target-style data, which provides more accurate guidance for the generator. As a result, the generator and the prediction model can collaborate with each other without source data. Furthermore, due to the lack of supervision from source data, we propose a weight constraint that encourages similarity to the source model. A clustering-based regularization is also introduced to produce more discriminative features in the target domain. Compared to conventional domain adaptation methods, our model achieves superior performance on multiple adaptation tasks with only unlabeled target data, which verifies its effectiveness in this challenging setting.
TETRIS: Optimal Draft Token Selection for Batch Speculative Decoding
Authors: Zhaoxuan Wu, Zijian Zhou, Arun Verma, Alok Prakash, Daniela Rus, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00

We propose TETRIS, a novel method that optimizes the total throughput of batch speculative decoding in multi-request settings. Unlike existing methods that optimize for a single request or a group of requests as a whole, TETRIS actively selects the most promising draft tokens (for every request in a batch) to be accepted when verified in parallel, resulting in fewer rejected tokens and hence less wasted computing resources. Such an effective resource utilization to achieve fast inference in large language models (LLMs) is especially important to service providers with limited inference capacity. Compared to baseline speculative decoding, TETRIS yields a consistently higher acceptance rate and more effective utilization of the limited inference capacity. We show theoretically and empirically that TETRIS outperforms baseline speculative decoding and existing methods that dynamically select draft tokens, leading to a more efficient batch inference in LLMs.
Disrupt Your Research Using Generative AI Powered ScienceSage
Authors: Yong Zhang, Eric Herrison Gyamfi, Kelly Anderson, Sasha Roberts, Matt Barker
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval

Large Language Models (LLM) are disrupting science and research in different subjects and industries. Here we report a minimum-viable-product (MVP) web application called $\textbf{ScienceSage}$. It leverages generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to help researchers disrupt the speed, magnitude and scope of product innovation. $\textbf{ScienceSage}$ enables researchers to build, store, update and query a knowledge base (KB). A KB codifies user's knowledge/information of a given domain in both vector index and knowledge graph (KG) index for efficient information retrieval and query. The knowledge/information can be extracted from user's textual documents, images, videos, audios and/or the research reports generated based on a research question and the latest relevant information on internet. The same set of KBs interconnect three functions on $\textbf{ScienceSage}$: 'Generate Research Report', 'Chat With Your Documents' and 'Chat With Anything'. We share our learning to encourage discussion and improvement of GenAI's role in scientific research.
Single-pass Detection of Jailbreaking Input in Large Language Models
Authors: Leyla Naz Candogan, Yongtao Wu, Elias Abad Rocamora, Grigorios G. Chrysos, Volkan Cevher
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

Defending aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) against jailbreaking attacks is a challenging problem, with existing approaches requiring multiple requests or even queries to auxiliary LLMs, making them computationally heavy. Instead, we focus on detecting jailbreaking input in a single forward pass. Our method, called Single Pass Detection SPD, leverages the information carried by the logits to predict whether the output sentence will be harmful. This allows us to defend in just one forward pass. SPD can not only detect attacks effectively on open-source models, but also minimizes the misclassification of harmless inputs. Furthermore, we show that SPD remains effective even without complete logit access in GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. We believe that our proposed method offers a promising approach to efficiently safeguard LLMs against adversarial attacks.