Recent advancements in tabular deep learning (DL) have led to substantial performance improvements, surpassing the capabilities of traditional models. With the adoption of techniques from natural language processing (NLP), such as language model-based approaches, DL models for tabular data have also grown in complexity and size. Although tabular datasets do not typically pose scalability issues, the escalating size of these models has raised efficiency concerns. Despite its importance, efficiency has been relatively underexplored in tabular DL research. This paper critically examines the latest innovations in tabular DL, with a dual focus on performance and computational efficiency. The source code is available at https://github.com/basf/mamba-tabular.
This paper introduces MotionLLaMA, a unified framework for motion synthesis and comprehension, along with a novel full-body motion tokenizer called the HoMi Tokenizer. MotionLLaMA is developed based on three core principles. First, it establishes a powerful unified representation space through the HoMi Tokenizer. Using a single codebook, the HoMi Tokenizer in MotionLLaMA achieves reconstruction accuracy comparable to residual vector quantization tokenizers utilizing six codebooks, outperforming all existing single-codebook tokenizers. Second, MotionLLaMA integrates a large language model to tackle various motion-related tasks. This integration bridges various modalities, facilitating both comprehensive and intricate motion synthesis and comprehension. Third, MotionLLaMA introduces the MotionHub dataset, currently the most extensive multimodal, multitask motion dataset, which enables fine-tuning of large language models. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MotionLLaMA not only covers the widest range of motion-related tasks but also achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in motion completion, interaction dual-person text-to-motion, and all comprehension tasks while reaching performance comparable to SOTA in the remaining tasks. The code and MotionHub dataset are publicly available.
Vision Language Models (VLMs) can produce unintended and harmful content when exposed to adversarial attacks, particularly because their vision capabilities create new vulnerabilities. Existing defenses, such as input preprocessing, adversarial training, and response evaluation-based methods, are often impractical for real-world deployment due to their high costs. To address this challenge, we propose ASTRA, an efficient and effective defense by adaptively steering models away from adversarial feature directions to resist VLM attacks. Our key procedures involve finding transferable steering vectors representing the direction of harmful response and applying adaptive activation steering to remove these directions at inference time. To create effective steering vectors, we randomly ablate the visual tokens from the adversarial images and identify those most strongly associated with jailbreaks. These tokens are then used to construct steering vectors. During inference, we perform the adaptive steering method that involves the projection between the steering vectors and calibrated activation, resulting in little performance drops on benign inputs while strongly avoiding harmful outputs under adversarial inputs. Extensive experiments across multiple models and baselines demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance and high efficiency in mitigating jailbreak risks. Additionally, ASTRA exhibits good transferability, defending against unseen attacks (i.e., structured-based attack, perturbation-based attack with project gradient descent variants, and text-only attack). Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/ASTRAL-Group/ASTRA}.
Sequential sentence classification (SSC) in scientific publications is crucial for supporting downstream tasks such as fine-grained information retrieval and extractive summarization. However, current SSC methods are constrained by model size, sequence length, and single-label setting. To address these limitations, this paper proposes LLM-SSC, a large language model (LLM)-based framework for both single- and multi-label SSC tasks. Unlike previous approaches that employ small- or medium-sized language models, the proposed framework utilizes LLMs to generate SSC labels through designed prompts, which enhance task understanding by incorporating demonstrations and a query to describe the prediction target. We also present a multi-label contrastive learning loss with auto-weighting scheme, enabling the multi-label classification task. To support our multi-label SSC analysis, we introduce and release a new dataset, biorc800, which mainly contains unstructured abstracts in the biomedical domain with manual annotations. Experiments demonstrate LLM-SSC's strong performance in SSC under both in-context learning and task-specific tuning settings. We release biorc800 and our code at: https://github.com/ScienceNLP-Lab/LLM-SSC.
Here, we present the outcomes from the second Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry, which engaged participants across global hybrid locations, resulting in 34 team submissions. The submissions spanned seven key application areas and demonstrated the diverse utility of LLMs for applications in (1) molecular and material property prediction; (2) molecular and material design; (3) automation and novel interfaces; (4) scientific communication and education; (5) research data management and automation; (6) hypothesis generation and evaluation; and (7) knowledge extraction and reasoning from scientific literature. Each team submission is presented in a summary table with links to the code and as brief papers in the appendix. Beyond team results, we discuss the hackathon event and its hybrid format, which included physical hubs in Toronto, Montreal, San Francisco, Berlin, Lausanne, and Tokyo, alongside a global online hub to enable local and virtual collaboration. Overall, the event highlighted significant improvements in LLM capabilities since the previous year's hackathon, suggesting continued expansion of LLMs for applications in materials science and chemistry research. These outcomes demonstrate the dual utility of LLMs as both multipurpose models for diverse machine learning tasks and platforms for rapid prototyping custom applications in scientific research.
Recent advances in All-in-One (AiO) RGB image restoration have demonstrated the effectiveness of prompt learning in handling multiple degradations within a single model. However, extending these approaches to hyperspectral image (HSI) restoration is challenging due to the domain gap between RGB and HSI features, information loss in visual prompts under severe composite degradations, and difficulties in capturing HSI-specific degradation patterns via text prompts. In this paper, we propose PromptHSI, the first universal AiO HSI restoration framework that addresses these challenges. By incorporating frequency-aware feature modulation, which utilizes frequency analysis to narrow down the restoration search space and employing vision-language model (VLM)-guided prompt learning, our approach decomposes text prompts into intensity and bias controllers that effectively guide the restoration process while mitigating domain discrepancies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our unified architecture excels at both fine-grained recovery and global information restoration across diverse degradation scenarios, highlighting its significant potential for practical remote sensing applications. The source code is available at https://github.com/chingheng0808/PromptHSI.
Most current molecular language models transfer the masked language model or image-text generation model from natural language processing to molecular field. However, molecules are not solely characterized by atom/bond symbols; they encapsulate important physical/chemical properties. Moreover, normal language models bring grammar rules that are irrelevant for understanding molecules. In this study, we propose a novel physicochemical knowledge-guided molecular meta language framework MolMetaLM. We design a molecule-specialized meta language paradigm, formatted as multiple <S,P,O> (subject, predicate, object) knowledge triples sharing the same S (i.e., molecule) to enhance learning the semantic relationships between physicochemical knowledge and molecules. By introducing different molecular knowledge and noises, the meta language paradigm generates tens of thousands of pretraining tasks. By recovering the token/sequence/order-level noises, MolMetaLM exhibits proficiency in large-scale benchmark evaluations involving property prediction, molecule generation, conformation inference, and molecular optimization. Through MolMetaLM, we offer a new insight for designing language models.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to solve complex tasks through In-Context Learning (ICL), where models learn from a few input-output pairs without explicit fine-tuning. In this paper, we explore the capacity of LLMs to solve non-linear numerical computations, with specific emphasis on functions of the Singular Value Decomposition. Our experiments show that while LLMs perform comparably to traditional models such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) based Linear Regression and Neural Networks (NN) for simpler tasks, they outperform these models on more complex tasks, particularly in the case of top-k Singular Values. Furthermore, LLMs demonstrate strong scalability, maintaining high accuracy even as the matrix size increases. Additionally, we found that LLMs can achieve high accuracy with minimal prior examples, converging quickly and avoiding the overfitting seen in classical models. These results suggest that LLMs could provide an efficient alternative to classical methods for solving high-dimensional problems. Future work will focus on extending these findings to larger matrices and more complex matrix operations while exploring the effect of using different numerical representations in ICL.
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance in multimodal task reasoning. However, they often generate responses that appear plausible yet do not accurately reflect the visual content, a phenomenon known as hallucination. Recent approaches have introduced training-free methods that mitigate hallucinations by adjusting the decoding strategy during inference stage, typically attributing hallucination to the language model itself. Our analysis, however, reveals that distortions in the visual encoding process significantly affect the model's reasoning accuracy. Specifically, earlier visual layers may retain key features but gradually distort as the information propagates toward the output layer. Building on these findings, we propose a novel hallucination-mitigation method from the visual encoding perspective: \textbf{V}isu\textbf{a}l \textbf{L}ayer Fus\textbf{i}on Contrastive \textbf{D}ecoding (VaLiD). This method utilizes uncertainty to guide the selection of visual hidden layers, correcting distortions in the visual encoding process and thereby improving the reliability of generated text. Experimental results show that VaLiD effectively reduces hallucinations across various benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance compared to multiple baseline methods.
In recent years there has been enormous interest in vision-language models trained using self-supervised objectives. However, the use of large-scale datasets scraped from the web for training also makes these models vulnerable to potential security threats, such as backdooring and poisoning attacks. In this paper, we propose a method for mitigating such attacks on contrastively trained vision-language models. Our approach leverages external knowledge extracted from a language model to prevent models from learning correlations between image regions which lack strong alignment with external knowledge. We do this by imposing constraints to enforce that attention paid by the model to visual regions is proportional to the alignment of those regions with external knowledge. We conduct extensive experiments using a variety of recent backdooring and poisoning attacks on multiple datasets and architectures. Our results clearly demonstrate that our proposed approach is highly effective at defending against such attacks across multiple settings, while maintaining model utility and without requiring any changes at inference time
Computed tomography (CT) report generation is crucial to assist radiologists in interpreting CT volumes, which can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. Existing methods primarily only consider the global features of the entire volume, making it struggle to focus on specific regions and potentially missing abnormalities. To address this issue, we propose Reg2RG, the first region-guided referring and grounding framework for CT report generation, which enhances diagnostic performance by focusing on anatomical regions within the volume. Specifically, we utilize masks from a universal segmentation module to capture local features for each referring region. A local feature decoupling (LFD) strategy is proposed to preserve the local high-resolution details with little computational overhead. Then the local features are integrated with global features to capture inter-regional relationships within a cohesive context. Moreover, we propose a novel region-report alignment (RRA) training strategy. It leverages the recognition of referring regions to guide the generation of region-specific reports, enhancing the model's referring and grounding capabilities while also improving the report's interpretability. A large language model (LLM) is further employed as the language decoder to generate reports from integrated visual features, facilitating region-level comprehension. Extensive experiments on two large-scale chest CT-report datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method, which outperforms several state-of-the-art methods in terms of both natural language generation and clinical efficacy metrics while preserving promising interpretability. The code is available at https://github.com/zhi-xuan-chen/Reg2RG.
Prompts used in recent large language model based applications are often fixed and lengthy, leading to significant computational overhead. To address this challenge, we propose Generative Prompt Internalization (GenPI), a lightweight method that employs a joint training approach. GenPI not only replicates the behavior of models with prompt inputs but also generates the content of the prompt along with reasons for why the model's behavior should change accordingly. We demonstrate that our approach effectively internalizes complex prompts across various agent-based application scenarios. For effective training without interactions with the dedicated environments, we introduce a data synthesis technique that autonomously collects conversational datasets by swapping the roles of the agent and environment. This method is especially useful in scenarios where only a predefined prompt is available without a corresponding training dataset. By internalizing complex prompts, Generative Prompt Internalization enables high performance and efficient inference without the need for explicit prompts.
This study investigates the relative impact of training data quality versus quantity on the performance of small language models (SLMs), utilizing the TinyStories dataset for empirical analysis. Analysis of dataset variations with respect to size (25% and 50% of the original size) and duplication (controlled rates of 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%) were performed. Model performance was evaluated based on the validation loss, accuracy, and perplexity metrics. Results indicate training data quality plays a more significant role in the overall performance of SLMs, especially given scale of this experiment. Minimal duplication positively impacted model accuracy (+0.87% increase in accuracy at 25% duplication) without significantly increasing perplexity (+0.52% increase going from 0% to 25% duplication) but excessive duplication led to pronounced performance degradation (-40% drop in accuracy at 100% duplication). The implications of this exploration extend beyond just model performance; training large-scale models imposes significant financial and computational burdens, which can be prohibitive for organizations, individuals, and the public at large, especially in developing countries. Additionally, the energy consumption associated with large-scale training raises environmental concerns. Understanding the relative importance of data quality versus quantity could democratize AI technology, making advanced models more accessible and sustainable for all.
We present our submission to the BabyLM challenge, aiming to push the boundaries of data-efficient language model pretraining. Our method builds upon deep mutual learning, introducing a student model search for diverse initialization. We address the limitation of treating students equally by formulating weighted mutual learning as a bi-level optimization problem. The inner loop learns compact students through online distillation, while the outer loop optimizes weights for better knowledge distillation from diverse students. This dynamic weighting strategy eliminates the need for a teacher model, reducing computational requirements. Our evaluations show that teacher-less methods can match or surpass teacher-supervised approaches.
Large language models (LLMs), with their powerful generative capabilities and vast knowledge, empower various tasks in everyday life. However, these abilities are primarily concentrated in high-resource languages, leaving low-resource languages with weaker generative capabilities and relatively limited knowledge. Enhancing the multilingual capabilities of LLMs is therefore crucial for serving over 100 linguistic communities worldwide. An intuitive approach to enhance the multilingual capabilities would be to construct instruction data for various languages, but constructing instruction data for over 100 languages is prohibitively costly. In this paper, we introduce BayLing 2, which efficiently transfers generative capabilities and knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages through language alignment. To achieve this, we constructed a dataset of 3.2 million instructions, comprising high-resource language instructions (Chinese and English) and cross-lingual instructions for 100+ languages and performed instruction tuning based on the dataset to facilitate the capability transfer between languages. Using Llama as the foundation model, we developed BayLing-2-7B, BayLing-2-13B, and BayLing-2-8B, and conducted a comprehensive evaluation of BayLing. For multilingual translation across 100+ languages, BayLing shows superior performance compared to open-source models of similar scale. For multilingual knowledge and understanding benchmarks, BayLing achieves significant improvements across over 20 low-resource languages, demonstrating its capability of effective knowledge transfer from high-resource to low-resource languages. Furthermore, results on English benchmarks indicate that BayLing maintains high performance in highresource languages while enhancing the performance in low-resource languages. Demo, homepage, code and models of BayLing are available.
Language model post-training is applied to refine behaviors and unlock new skills across a wide range of recent language models, but open recipes for applying these techniques lag behind proprietary ones. The underlying training data and recipes for post-training are simultaneously the most important pieces of the puzzle and the portion with the least transparency. To bridge this gap, we introduce Tulu 3, a family of fully-open state-of-the-art post-trained models, alongside its data, code, and training recipes, serving as a comprehensive guide for modern post-training techniques. Tulu 3, which builds on Llama 3.1 base models, achieves results surpassing the instruct versions of Llama 3.1, Qwen 2.5, Mistral, and even closed models such as GPT-4o-mini and Claude 3.5-Haiku. The training algorithms for our models include supervised finetuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and a novel method we call Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). With Tulu 3, we introduce a multi-task evaluation scheme for post-training recipes with development and unseen evaluations, standard benchmark implementations, and substantial decontamination of existing open datasets on said benchmarks. We conclude with analysis and discussion of training methods that did not reliably improve performance. In addition to the Tulu 3 model weights and demo, we release the complete recipe -- including datasets for diverse core skills, a robust toolkit for data curation and evaluation, the training code and infrastructure, and, most importantly, a detailed report for reproducing and further adapting the Tulu 3 approach to more domains.
Despite significant advancements in general AI, its effectiveness in the medical domain is limited by the lack of specialized medical knowledge. To address this, we formulate GMAI-VL-5.5M, a multimodal medical dataset created by converting hundreds of specialized medical datasets with various annotations into high-quality image-text pairs. This dataset offers comprehensive task coverage, diverse modalities, and rich image-text data. Building upon this dataset, we develop GMAI-VL, a general medical vision-language model, with a three-stage training strategy that enhances the integration of visual and textual information. This approach significantly improves the model's ability to process multimodal data, supporting accurate diagnoses and clinical decision-making. Experiments show that GMAI-VL achieves state-of-the-art performance across various multimodal medical tasks, including visual question answering and medical image diagnosis.
Large language models (LLMs) excel at retrieving information from lengthy text, but their vision-language counterparts (VLMs) face difficulties with hour-long videos, especially for temporal grounding. Specifically, these VLMs are constrained by frame limitations, often losing essential temporal details needed for accurate event localization in extended video content. We propose ReVisionLLM, a recursive vision-language model designed to locate events in hour-long videos. Inspired by human search strategies, our model initially targets broad segments of interest, progressively revising its focus to pinpoint exact temporal boundaries. Our model can seamlessly handle videos of vastly different lengths, from minutes to hours. We also introduce a hierarchical training strategy that starts with short clips to capture distinct events and progressively extends to longer videos. To our knowledge, ReVisionLLM is the first VLM capable of temporal grounding in hour-long videos, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods across multiple datasets by a significant margin (+2.6% [email omitted] on MAD). The code is available at https://github.com/Tanveer81/ReVisionLLM.
The strong performance of large language models (LLMs) raises extensive discussion on their application to code generation. Recent research suggests continuous program refinements through visible tests to improve code generation accuracy in LLMs. However, these methods suffer from LLMs' inefficiency and limited reasoning capacity. In this work, we propose an LLM programming workflow (LPW) designed to improve both initial code generation and subsequent refinements within a structured two-phase workflow. Specifically, the solution generation phase formulates a solution plan, which is then verified through visible tests to specify the intended natural language solution. Subsequently, the code implementation phase drafts an initial code according to the solution plan and its verification. If the generated code fails the visible tests, the plan verification serves as the intended solution to consistently inform the refinement process for correcting bugs. Compared to state-of-the-art methods across various existing LLMs, LPW significantly improves the Pass@1 accuracy by up to 16.4% on well-established text-to-code generation benchmarks. LPW also sets new state-of-the-art Pass@1 accuracy, achieving 98.2% on HumanEval, 84.8% on MBPP, 59.3% on LiveCode, 62.6% on APPS, and 34.7% on CodeContest, using GPT-4o as the backbone. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/you68681/lpw
Previous work has attempted to boost Large Language Model (LLM) performance on planning and scheduling tasks through a variety of prompt engineering techniques. While these methods can work within the distributions tested, they are neither robust nor predictable. This limitation can be addressed through compound LLM architectures where LLMs work in conjunction with other components to ensure reliability. In this paper, we present a technical evaluation of a compound LLM architecture--the LLM-Modulo framework. In this framework, an LLM is paired with a complete set of sound verifiers that validate its output, re-prompting it if it fails. This approach ensures that the system can never output any fallacious output, and therefore that every output generated is guaranteed correct--something previous techniques have not been able to claim. Our results, evaluated across four scheduling domains, demonstrate significant performance gains with the LLM-Modulo framework using various models. Additionally, we explore modifications to the base configuration of the framework and assess their impact on overall system performance.