pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
RecurFormer: Not All Transformer Heads Need Self-Attention
Authors: Ruiqing Yan, Linghan Zheng, Xingbo Du, Han Zou, Yufeng Guo, Jianfei Yang
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Mamba

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.
VibeCheck: Discover and Quantify Qualitative Differences in Large Language Models
Authors: Lisa Dunlap, Krishna Mandal, Trevor Darrell, Jacob Steinhardt, Joseph E Gonzalez
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit subtle yet distinctive characteristics in their outputs that users intuitively recognize, but struggle to quantify. These "vibes" -- such as tone, formatting, or writing style -- influence user preferences, yet traditional evaluations focus primarily on the singular axis of correctness. We introduce VibeCheck, a system for automatically comparing a pair of LLMs by discovering identifying traits of a model (vibes) that are well-defined, differentiating, and user-aligned. VibeCheck iteratively discovers vibes from model outputs and then utilizes a panel of LLM judges to quantitatively measure the utility of each vibe. We validate that the vibes generated by VibeCheck align with those found in human discovery and run VibeCheck on pairwise preference data from real-world user conversations with Llama-3-70b vs GPT-4. VibeCheck reveals that Llama has a friendly, funny, and somewhat controversial vibe. These vibes predict model identity with 80% accuracy and human preference with 61% accuracy. Lastly, we run VibeCheck on a variety of models and tasks including summarization, math, and captioning to provide insight into differences in model behavior. VibeCheck discovers vibes like Command X prefers to add concrete intros and conclusions when summarizing in comparison to TNGL, Llama-405b often overexplains its thought process on math problems compared to GPT-4o, and GPT-4 prefers to focus on the mood and emotions of the scene when captioning compared to Gemini-1.5-Flash. Code and vibe visualizer found at https://bench-mark.org/
Diversity of Thought Elicits Stronger Reasoning Capabilities in Multi-Agent Debate Frameworks
Authors: Mahmood Hegazy
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: 8k, Diversity, Mathematical Reasoning, Text Generation

Large language models (LLMs) excel in natural language generation but often confidently produce incorrect responses, especially in tasks like mathematical reasoning. Chain-of-thought prompting, self-verification, and multi-agent debate are among the strategies proposed to improve the reasoning and factual accuracy of LLMs. Building on Du et al.'s multi-agent debate framework, we find that multi-agent debate helps at any model scale, and that diversity of thought elicits stronger reasoning in debating LLMs. Across various model sizes, performance on mathematical reasoning tasks benefits most when diverse trained models are used. Remarkably, after 4 rounds of debate, a diverse set of medium-capacity models (Gemini-Pro, Mixtral 7BX8, and PaLM 2-M) outperforms GPT-4 on the GSM-8K benchmark, scoring 91% accuracy. By comparison, when 3 instances of Gemini-Pro are used, performance only reaches 82%. Finally, this diverse set of medium-capacity models sets a new state-of-the-art performance on the ASDiv benchmark (94%). These results underscore the idea that the future of AI is agentic, with diverse cooperating agents yielding emergent capabilities beyond even the most powerful individual models.
TPO: Aligning Large Language Models with Multi-branch & Multi-step Preference Trees
Authors: Weibin Liao, Xu Chu, Yasha Wang
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Mathematical Reasoning

In the domain of complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical reasoning, recent advancements have proposed the use of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to suppress output of dispreferred responses, thereby enhancing the long-chain reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). To this end, these studies employed LLMs to generate preference trees via Tree-of-thoughts (ToT) and sample the paired preference responses required by the DPO algorithm. However, the DPO algorithm based on binary preference optimization is unable to learn multiple responses with varying degrees of preference/dispreference that provided by the preference trees, resulting in incomplete preference learning. In this work, we introduce Tree Preference Optimization (TPO), that does not sample paired preference responses from the preference tree; instead, it directly learns from the entire preference tree during the fine-tuning. Specifically, TPO formulates the language model alignment as a Preference List Ranking problem, where the policy can potentially learn more effectively from a ranked preference list of responses given the prompt. In addition, to further assist LLMs in identifying discriminative steps within long-chain reasoning and increase the relative reward margin in the preference list, TPO utilizes Adaptive Step Reward to adjust the reward values of each step in trajectory for performing fine-grained preference optimization. We carry out extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks to evaluate TPO. The experimental results indicate that TPO consistently outperforms DPO across three public large language models on four datasets.
JAILJUDGE: A Comprehensive Jailbreak Judge Benchmark with Multi-Agent Enhanced Explanation Evaluation Framework
Authors: Fan Liu, Yue Feng, Zhao Xu, Lixin Su, Xinyu Ma, Dawei Yin, Hao liu
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00

Despite advancements in enhancing LLM safety against jailbreak attacks, evaluating LLM defenses remains a challenge, with current methods often lacking explainability and generalization to complex scenarios, leading to incomplete assessments (e.g., direct judgment without reasoning, low F1 score of GPT-4 in complex cases, bias in multilingual scenarios). To address this, we present JAILJUDGE, a comprehensive benchmark featuring diverse risk scenarios, including synthetic, adversarial, in-the-wild, and multilingual prompts, along with high-quality human-annotated datasets. The JAILJUDGE dataset includes over 35k+ instruction-tune data with reasoning explainability and JAILJUDGETEST, a 4.5k+ labeled set for risk scenarios, and a 6k+ multilingual set across ten languages. To enhance evaluation with explicit reasoning, we propose the JailJudge MultiAgent framework, which enables explainable, fine-grained scoring (1 to 10). This framework supports the construction of instruction-tuning ground truth and facilitates the development of JAILJUDGE Guard, an end-to-end judge model that provides reasoning and eliminates API costs. Additionally, we introduce JailBoost, an attacker-agnostic attack enhancer, and GuardShield, a moderation defense, both leveraging JAILJUDGE Guard. Our experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of JailJudge methods (JailJudge MultiAgent, JAILJUDGE Guard) across diverse models (e.g., GPT-4, Llama-Guard) and zero-shot scenarios. JailBoost and GuardShield significantly improve jailbreak attack and defense tasks under zero-shot settings, with JailBoost enhancing performance by 29.24% and GuardShield reducing defense ASR from 40.46% to 0.15%.
Optimized Biomedical Question-Answering Services with LLM and Multi-BERT Integration
Authors: Cheng Qian, Xianglong Shi, Shanshan Yao, Yichen Liu, Fengming Zhou, Zishu Zhang, Junaid Akram, Ali Braytee, Ali Anaissi
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Question Answering

We present a refined approach to biomedical question-answering (QA) services by integrating large language models (LLMs) with Multi-BERT configurations. By enhancing the ability to process and prioritize vast amounts of complex biomedical data, this system aims to support healthcare professionals in delivering better patient outcomes and informed decision-making. Through innovative use of BERT and BioBERT models, combined with a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) layer, we enable more specialized and efficient responses to the growing demands of the healthcare sector. Our approach not only addresses the challenge of overfitting by freezing one BERT model while training another but also improves the overall adaptability of QA services. The use of extensive datasets, such as BioASQ and BioMRC, demonstrates the system's ability to synthesize critical information. This work highlights how advanced language models can make a tangible difference in healthcare, providing reliable and responsive tools for professionals to manage complex information, ultimately serving the broader goal of improved care and data-driven insights.
Large Language Models for Medical OSCE Assessment: A Novel Approach to Transcript Analysis
Authors: Ameer Hamza Shakur, Michael J. Holcomb, David Hein, Shinyoung Kang, Thomas O. Dalton, Krystle K. Campbell, Daniel J. Scott, Andrew R. Jamieson
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval-augmented Generation

Grading Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) is a time-consuming and expensive process, traditionally requiring extensive manual effort from human experts. In this study, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) to assess skills related to medical student communication. We analyzed 2,027 video-recorded OSCE examinations from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW), spanning four years (2019-2022), and several different medical cases or "stations." Specifically, our focus was on evaluating students' ability to summarize patients' medical history: we targeted the rubric item 'did the student summarize the patients' medical history?' from the communication skills rubric. After transcribing speech audio captured by OSCE videos using Whisper-v3, we studied the performance of various LLM-based approaches for grading students on this summarization task based on their examination transcripts. Using various frontier-level open-source and proprietary LLMs, we evaluated different techniques such as zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting, retrieval augmented generation, and multi-model ensemble methods. Our results show that frontier LLM models like GPT-4 achieved remarkable alignment with human graders, demonstrating a Cohen's kappa agreement of 0.88 and indicating strong potential for LLM-based OSCE grading to augment the current grading process. Open-source models also showed promising results, suggesting potential for widespread, cost-effective deployment. Further, we present a failure analysis identifying conditions where LLM grading may be less reliable in this context and recommend best practices for deploying LLMs in medical education settings.
LLMD: A Large Language Model for Interpreting Longitudinal Medical Records
Authors: Robert Porter, Adam Diehl, Benjamin Pastel, J. Henry Hinnefeld, Lawson Nerenberg, Pye Maung, Sebastien Kerbrat, Gillian Hanson, Troy Astorino, Stephen J. Tarsa
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

We introduce LLMD, a large language model designed to analyze a patient's medical history based on their medical records. Along with domain knowledge, LLMD is trained on a large corpus of records collected over time and across facilities, as well as tasks and labels that make nuanced connections among them. This approach is critical to an accurate picture of patient health, and has distinctive advantages over models trained on knowledge alone, unlabeled records, structured EHR data, or records from a single health system. The recipe for LLMD continues pretraining a foundational model on both domain knowledge and the contents of millions of records. These span an average of 10 years of care and as many as 140 care sites per patient. LLMD is then instruction fine-tuned on structuring and abstraction tasks. The former jointly identify and normalize document metadata, provenance information, clinical named-entities, and ontology mappings, while the latter roll these into higher-level representations, such a continuous era of time a patient was on a medication. LLMD is deployed within a layered validation system that includes continual random audits and review by experts, e.g. based on uncertainty, disease-specific rules, or use-case. LLMD exhibits large gains over both more-powerful generalized models and domain-specific models. On medical knowledge benchmarks, LLMD-8B achieves state of the art accuracy on PubMedQA text responses, besting orders-of-magnitude larger models. On production tasks, we show that LLMD significantly outperforms all other models evaluated, and among alternatives, large general purpose LLMs like GPT-4o are more accurate than models emphasizing medical knowledge. We find strong evidence that accuracy on today's medical benchmarks is not the most significant factor when analyzing real-world patient data, an insight with implications for future medical LLMs.'
Scaled and Inter-token Relation Enhanced Transformer for Sample-restricted Residential NILM
Authors: Minhajur Rahman, Yasir Arafat
Date: 2024-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring, Relation

Transformers have demonstrated exceptional performance across various domains due to their self-attention mechanism, which captures complex relationships in data. However, training on smaller datasets poses challenges, as standard attention mechanisms can over-smooth attention scores and overly prioritize intra-token relationships, reducing the capture of meaningful inter-token dependencies critical for tasks like Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM). To address this, we propose a novel transformer architecture with two key innovations: inter-token relation enhancement and dynamic temperature tuning. The inter-token relation enhancement mechanism removes diagonal entries in the similarity matrix to improve attention focus on inter-token relations. The dynamic temperature tuning mechanism, a learnable parameter, adapts attention sharpness during training, preventing over-smoothing and enhancing sensitivity to token relationships. We validate our method on the REDD dataset and show that it outperforms the original transformer and state-of-the-art models by 10-15\% in F1 score across various appliance types, demonstrating its efficacy for training on smaller datasets.
Investigating Implicit Bias in Large Language Models: A Large-Scale Study of Over 50 LLMs
Authors: Divyanshu Kumar, Umang Jain, Sahil Agarwal, Prashanth Harshangi
Date: 2024-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Large Language Models (LLMs) are being adopted across a wide range of tasks, including decision-making processes in industries where bias in AI systems is a significant concern. Recent research indicates that LLMs can harbor implicit biases even when they pass explicit bias evaluations. Building upon the frameworks of the LLM Implicit Association Test (IAT) Bias and LLM Decision Bias, this study highlights that newer or larger language models do not automatically exhibit reduced bias; in some cases, they displayed higher bias scores than their predecessors, such as in Meta's Llama series and OpenAI's GPT models. This suggests that increasing model complexity without deliberate bias mitigation strategies can unintentionally amplify existing biases. The variability in bias scores within and across providers underscores the need for standardized evaluation metrics and benchmarks for bias assessment. The lack of consistency indicates that bias mitigation is not yet a universally prioritized goal in model development, which can lead to unfair or discriminatory outcomes. By broadening the detection of implicit bias, this research provides a more comprehensive understanding of the biases present in advanced models and underscores the critical importance of addressing these issues to ensure the development of fair and responsible AI systems.
ELF-Gym: Evaluating Large Language Models Generated Features for Tabular Prediction
Authors: Yanlin Zhang, Ning li, Quan Gan, Weinan Zhang, David Wipf, Minjie Wang
Date: 2024-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering

Crafting effective features is a crucial yet labor-intensive and domain-specific task within machine learning pipelines. Fortunately, recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating various data science tasks, including feature engineering. But despite this potential, evaluations thus far are primarily based on the end performance of a complete ML pipeline, providing limited insight into precisely how LLMs behave relative to human experts in feature engineering. To address this gap, we propose ELF-Gym, a framework for Evaluating LLM-generated Features. We curated a new dataset from historical Kaggle competitions, including 251 "golden" features used by top-performing teams. ELF-Gym then quantitatively evaluates LLM-generated features by measuring their impact on downstream model performance as well as their alignment with expert-crafted features through semantic and functional similarity assessments. This approach provides a more comprehensive evaluation of disparities between LLMs and human experts, while offering valuable insights into specific areas where LLMs may have room for improvement. For example, using ELF-Gym we empirically demonstrate that, in the best-case scenario, LLMs can semantically capture approximately 56% of the golden features, but at the more demanding implementation level this overlap drops to 13%. Moreover, in other cases LLMs may fail completely, particularly on datasets that require complex features, indicating broad potential pathways for improvement.
Towards Homogeneous Lexical Tone Decoding from Heterogeneous Intracranial Recordings
Authors: Di wu, Siyuan Li, Chen Feng, Lu Cao, Yue Zhang, Jie Yang, Mohamad Sawan
Date: 2024-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Recent advancements in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have enabled the decoding of lexical tones from intracranial recordings, offering the potential to restore the communication abilities of speech-impaired tonal language speakers. However, data heterogeneity induced by both physiological and instrumental factors poses a significant challenge for unified invasive brain tone decoding. Traditional subject-specific models, which operate under a heterogeneous decoding paradigm, fail to capture generalized neural representations and cannot effectively leverage data across subjects. To address these limitations, we introduce Homogeneity-Heterogeneity Disentangled Learning for neural Representations (H2DiLR), a novel framework that disentangles and learns both the homogeneity and heterogeneity from intracranial recordings across multiple subjects. To evaluate H2DiLR, we collected stereoelectroencephalography (sEEG) data from multiple participants reading Mandarin materials comprising 407 syllables, representing nearly all Mandarin characters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that H2DiLR, as a unified decoding paradigm, significantly outperforms the conventional heterogeneous decoding approach. Furthermore, we empirically confirm that H2DiLR effectively captures both homogeneity and heterogeneity during neural representation learning.
Empowering Dysarthric Speech: Leveraging Advanced LLMs for Accurate Speech Correction and Multimodal Emotion Analysis
Authors: Kaushal Attaluri, Anirudh CHVS, Sireesha Chittepu
Date: 2024-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Sentence

Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder caused by neurological damage that affects the muscles used for speech production, leading to slurred, slow, or difficult-to-understand speech. It affects millions of individuals worldwide, including those with conditions such as stroke, traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy, Parkinsons disease, and multiple sclerosis. Dysarthria presents a major communication barrier, impacting quality of life and social interaction. This paper introduces a novel approach to recognizing and translating dysarthric speech, empowering individuals with this condition to communicate more effectively. We leverage advanced large language models for accurate speech correction and multimodal emotion analysis. Dysarthric speech is first converted to text using OpenAI Whisper model, followed by sentence prediction using fine-tuned open-source models and benchmark models like GPT-4.o, LLaMA 3.1 70B and Mistral 8x7B on Groq AI accelerators. The dataset used combines the TORGO dataset with Google speech data, manually labeled for emotional context. Our framework identifies emotions such as happiness, sadness, neutrality, surprise, anger, and fear, while reconstructing intended sentences from distorted speech with high accuracy. This approach demonstrates significant advancements in the recognition and interpretation of dysarthric speech.
Language Model Preference Evaluation with Multiple Weak Evaluators
Authors: Zhengyu Hu, Jieyu Zhang, Zhihan Xiong, Alexander Ratner, Hui Xiong, Ranjay Krishna
Date: 2024-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Despite the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs), evaluating their outputs' quality regarding *preference* remains a critical challenge. Existing works usually leverage an LLM as the judge for comparing LLMs' output pairwisely, yet such model-based evaluator is *weak evaluator* due to *conflicting preference*, i.e., output A is better than B, B than C, but C than A, causing contradictory evaluation results. To address this, we introduce GED (Preference Graph Ensemble and Denoise), a novel approach that leverages multiple model-based evaluators to construct preference graphs, and then ensemble and denoise these graphs for better, non-contradictory evaluation results. In particular, our method consists of two primary stages: aggregating evaluations into a unified graph and applying a denoising process to eliminate cyclic inconsistencies, ensuring a directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure. We provide theoretical guarantees for our framework, demonstrating its efficacy in recovering the ground truth preference structure. Extensive experiments on ten benchmarks demonstrate GED's superiority in three applications: model ranking, response selection, and model alignment tasks. Notably, GED combines small LLM evaluators (e.g., Llama3-8B, Mistral-7B, Qwen2-7B) to outperform stronger ones (e.g., Qwen2-72B), showcasing its effectiveness in enhancing evaluation reliability and improving model performance.