With the rapid development of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), especially their capabilities in visual chat through refer and ground functionalities, their significance is increasingly recognized. However, the biomedical field currently exhibits a substantial gap in this area, primarily due to the absence of a dedicated refer and ground dataset for biomedical images. To address this challenge, we devised the Med-GRIT-270k dataset. It comprises 270k question-and-answer pairs and spans eight distinct medical imaging modalities. Most importantly, it is the first dedicated to the biomedical domain and integrating refer and ground conversations. The key idea is to sample large-scale biomedical image-mask pairs from medical segmentation datasets and generate instruction datasets from text using chatGPT. Additionally, we introduce a Refer-and-Ground Multimodal Large Language Model for Biomedicine (BiRD) by using this dataset and multi-task instruction learning. Extensive experiments have corroborated the efficacy of the Med-GRIT-270k dataset and the multi-modal, fine-grained interactive capabilities of the BiRD model. This holds significant reference value for the exploration and development of intelligent biomedical assistants.
Generating event graphs from long documents is challenging due to the inherent complexity of multiple tasks involved such as detecting events, identifying their relationships, and reconciling unstructured input with structured graphs. Recent studies typically consider all events with equal importance, failing to distinguish salient events crucial for understanding narratives. This paper presents CALLMSAE, a CAscading Large Language Model framework for SAlient Event graph generation, which leverages the capabilities of LLMs and eliminates the need for costly human annotations. We first identify salient events by prompting LLMs to generate summaries, from which salient events are identified. Next, we develop an iterative code refinement prompting strategy to generate event relation graphs, removing hallucinated relations and recovering missing edges. Fine-tuning contextualised graph generation models on the LLM-generated graphs outperforms the models trained on CAEVO-generated data. Experimental results on a human-annotated test set show that the proposed method generates salient and more accurate graphs, outperforming competitive baselines.
In this work, we present a conceptually simple yet powerful baseline for the multimodal dialog task, an S3 model, that achieves near state-of-the-art results on two compelling leaderboards: MMMU and AI Journey Contest 2023. The system is based on a pre-trained large language model, pre-trained modality encoders for image and audio, and a trainable modality projector. The proposed effective data mixture for training such an architecture demonstrates that a multimodal model based on a strong language model and trained on a small amount of multimodal data can perform efficiently in the task of multimodal dialog.
Badminton enjoys widespread popularity, and reports on matches generally include details such as player names, game scores, and ball types, providing audiences with a comprehensive view of the games. However, writing these reports can be a time-consuming task. This challenge led us to explore whether a Large Language Model (LLM) could automate the generation and evaluation of badminton reports. We introduce a novel framework named BADGE, designed for this purpose using LLM. Our method consists of two main phases: Report Generation and Report Evaluation. Initially, badminton-related data is processed by the LLM, which then generates a detailed report of the match. We tested different Input Data Types, In-Context Learning (ICL), and LLM, finding that GPT-4 performs best when using CSV data type and the Chain of Thought prompting. Following report generation, the LLM evaluates and scores the reports to assess their quality. Our comparisons between the scores evaluated by GPT-4 and human judges show a tendency to prefer GPT-4 generated reports. Since the application of LLM in badminton reporting remains largely unexplored, our research serves as a foundational step for future advancements in this area. Moreover, our method can be extended to other sports games, thereby enhancing sports promotion. For more details, please refer to https://github.com/AndyChiangSH/BADGE.
Large language models have become integral to question-answering applications despite their propensity for generating hallucinations and factually inaccurate content. Querying knowledge graphs to reduce hallucinations in LLM meets the challenge of incomplete knowledge coverage in knowledge graphs. On the other hand, updating knowledge graphs by information extraction and knowledge graph completion faces the knowledge update misalignment issue. In this work, we introduce a collaborative augmentation framework, CogMG, leveraging knowledge graphs to address the limitations of LLMs in QA scenarios, explicitly targeting the problems of incomplete knowledge coverage and knowledge update misalignment. The LLMs identify and decompose required knowledge triples that are not present in the KG, enriching them and aligning updates with real-world demands. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach through a supervised fine-tuned LLM within an agent framework, showing significant improvements in reducing hallucinations and enhancing factual accuracy in QA responses. Our code and video are publicly available.
The alignment process changes several properties of a large language model's (LLM's) output distribution. We analyze two aspects of post-alignment distributional shift of LLM responses. First, we re-examine previously reported reductions in response diversity post-alignment. Our analysis suggests that an apparent drop in the diversity of responses is largely explained by quality control and information aggregation. Alignment suppresses irrelevant and unhelpful content while shifting the output distribution toward longer responses that cover information spanning several responses from the base LLM, essentially presenting diverse information in a single response. Finding little evidence that alignment suppresses useful information, it is natural to ask the opposite question: do aligned models surface information that cannot be recovered from base models? Our second investigation shows this is not the case and the behavior of aligned models is recoverable from base models without fine-tuning. A combination of in-context examples and lower-resolution semantic hints about response content can elicit responses from base LLMs that are as similar to alignment-tuned LLM responses as alignment-tuned LLM responses are to each other. Taken together, these results indicate that current alignment techniques capture but do not extend the useful subset of assistant-like base LLM behavior, providing further evidence for the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis. They also show that in-context alignment can go surprisingly far as a strategy for imitating aligned LLMs without fine-tuning. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/thomlake/investigating-alignment.
Large language model (LLM) training and finetuning are often bottlenecked by limited GPU memory. While existing projection-based optimization methods address this by projecting gradients into a lower-dimensional subspace to reduce optimizer state memory, they typically rely on dense projection matrices, which can introduce computational and memory overheads. In this work, we propose Grass (GRAdient Stuctured Sparsification), a novel approach that leverages sparse projections to transform gradients into structured sparse updates. This design not only significantly reduces memory usage for optimizer states but also minimizes gradient memory footprint, computation, and communication costs, leading to substantial throughput improvements. Extensive experiments on pretraining and finetuning tasks demonstrate that Grass achieves competitive performance to full-rank training and existing projection-based methods. Notably, Grass enables half-precision pretraining of a 13B parameter LLaMA model on a single 40GB A100 GPU--a feat infeasible for previous methods--and yields up to a $2\times$ throughput improvement on an 8-GPU system. Code can be found at https://github.com/aashiqmuhamed/GRASS .
Existing speculative decoding methods typically require additional model structure and training processes to assist the model for draft token generation. This makes the migration of acceleration methods to the new model more costly and more demanding on device memory. To address this problem, we propose the Make Some Noise (MSN) training framework as a replacement for the supervised fine-tuning stage of the large language model. The training method simply introduces some noise at the input for the model to learn the denoising task. It significantly enhances the parallel decoding capability of the model without affecting the original task capability. In addition, we propose a tree-based retrieval-augmented Jacobi (TR-Jacobi) decoding strategy to further improve the inference speed of MSN models. Experiments in both the general and code domains have shown that MSN can improve inference speed by 2.3-2.7x times without compromising model performance. The MSN model also achieves comparable acceleration ratios to the SOTA model with additional model structure on Spec-Bench.
The anti-cancer immune response relies on the bindings between T-cell receptors (TCRs) and antigens, which elicits adaptive immunity to eliminate tumor cells. This ability of the immune system to respond to novel various neoantigens arises from the immense diversity of TCR repository. However, TCR diversity poses a significant challenge on accurately predicting antigen-TCR bindings. In this study, we introduce a lightweight masked language model, termed tcrLM, to address this challenge. Our approach involves randomly masking segments of TCR sequences and training tcrLM to infer the masked segments, thereby enabling the extraction of expressive features from TCR sequences. To further enhance robustness, we incorporate virtual adversarial training into tcrLM. We construct the largest TCR CDR3 sequence set with more than 100 million distinct sequences, and pretrain tcrLM on these sequences. The pre-trained encoder is subsequently applied to predict TCR-antigen binding specificity. We evaluate model performance on three test datasets: independent, external, and COVID-19 test set. The results demonstrate that tcrLM not only surpasses existing TCR-antigen binding prediction methods, but also outperforms other mainstream protein language models. More interestingly, tcrLM effectively captures the biochemical properties and positional preference of amino acids within TCR sequences. Additionally, the predicted TCR-neoantigen binding scores indicates the immunotherapy responses and clinical outcomes in a melanoma cohort. These findings demonstrate the potential of tcrLM in predicting TCR-antigen binding specificity, with significant implications for advancing immunotherapy and personalized medicine.
Tool learning aims to enhance and expand large language models' (LLMs) capabilities with external tools, which has gained significant attention recently. Current methods have shown that LLMs can effectively handle a certain amount of tools through in-context learning or fine-tuning. However, in real-world scenarios, the number of tools is typically extensive and irregularly updated, emphasizing the necessity for a dedicated tool retrieval component. Tool retrieval is nontrivial due to the following challenges: 1) complex user instructions and tool descriptions; 2) misalignment between tool retrieval and tool usage models. To address the above issues, we propose to enhance tool retrieval with iterative feedback from the large language model. Specifically, we prompt the tool usage model, i.e., the LLM, to provide feedback for the tool retriever model in multi-round, which could progressively improve the tool retriever's understanding of instructions and tools and reduce the gap between the two standalone components. We build a unified and comprehensive benchmark to evaluate tool retrieval models. The extensive experiments indicate that our proposed approach achieves advanced performance in both in-domain evaluation and out-of-domain evaluation.
We present a simple meta quantization approach that quantizes different layers of a large language model (LLM) at different bit levels, and is independent of the underlying quantization technique. Specifically, we quantize the most important layers to higher bit precision and less important layers to lower bits. We propose two effective strategies to measure the importance of layers within LLMs: the first measures the importance of a layer based on how different its output embeddings are from the input embeddings (higher is better); the second estimates the importance of a layer using the number of layer weights that are much larger than average (smaller is better). We show that quantizing different layers at varying bits according to our importance scores results in minimal performance drop with a far more compressed model size. Finally, we present several practical key takeaways from our variable layer-wise quantization experiments: (a) LLM performance under variable quantization remains close to the original model until 25-50% of layers are moved in lower quantization using our proposed ordering but only until 5-10% if moved using no specific ordering; (b) Adding layer importance to inherently dynamic quantization techniques can further improve their performance, showing that our approach is complementary to other dynamic quantization methods; (c) Quantizing LLMs to lower bits performs substantially better than pruning unless extreme quantization (2-bit) is used; and (d) Layer-wise quantization to lower bits works better in the case of larger LLMs with more layers compared to smaller LLMs with fewer layers. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/RazvanDu/LayerwiseQuant/.
As large language models (LLMs) constantly evolve, ensuring their safety remains a critical research problem. Previous red-teaming approaches for LLM safety have primarily focused on single prompt attacks or goal hijacking. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study LLM safety in multi-turn dialogue coreference. We created a dataset of 1,400 questions across 14 categories, each featuring multi-turn coreference safety attacks. We then conducted detailed evaluations on five widely used open-source LLMs. The results indicated that under multi-turn coreference safety attacks, the highest attack success rate was 56% with the LLaMA2-Chat-7b model, while the lowest was 13.9% with the Mistral-7B-Instruct model. These findings highlight the safety vulnerabilities in LLMs during dialogue coreference interactions.
In the field of crisis/disaster informatics, social media is increasingly being used for improving situational awareness to inform response and relief efforts. Efficient and accurate text classification tools have been a focal area of investigation in crisis informatics. However, current methods mostly rely on single-label text classification models, which fails to capture different insights embedded in dynamic and multifaceted disaster-related social media data. This study introduces a novel approach to disaster text classification by enhancing a pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) through instruction fine-tuning targeted for multi-label classification of disaster-related tweets. Our methodology involves creating a comprehensive instruction dataset from disaster-related tweets, which is then used to fine-tune an open-source LLM, thereby embedding it with disaster-specific knowledge. This fine-tuned model can classify multiple aspects of disaster-related information simultaneously, such as the type of event, informativeness, and involvement of human aid, significantly improving the utility of social media data for situational awareness in disasters. The results demonstrate that this approach enhances the categorization of critical information from social media posts, thereby facilitating a more effective deployment for situational awareness during emergencies. This research paves the way for more advanced, adaptable, and robust disaster management tools, leveraging the capabilities of LLMs to improve real-time situational awareness and response strategies in disaster scenarios.
The instruction-following ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has cultivated a class of LLM-based systems capable of approaching complex tasks such as making edits to large code repositories. Due to the high sensitivity and unpredictability of LLM behavior in response to changes in prompting, robust evaluation tools are needed to drive future iteration of these systems. We propose RES-Q, a natural language instruction-based benchmark for evaluating $\textbf{R}$epository $\textbf{E}$diting $\textbf{S}$ystems, which consists of 100 handcrafted repository editing tasks derived from real GitHub commits. Given an edit instruction and a code repository, RES-Q evaluates an LLM system's ability to interpret the instruction, navigate the repository to gather relevant information, and construct an appropriate edit that satisfies the specified criteria. We argue that evaluating LLMs in this way addresses issues with traditional benchmarks and provides a more holistic assessment of a model's abilities. We evaluate various state-of-the-art LLMs as language agents in a repository-editing system built on Qurrent OS, our language agent development software. Despite their 1% pass@1 performance difference on HumanEval, we find Claude Sonnet 3.5 outperforms GPT-4o by 12% pass@1 on RES-Q, indicating RES-Q's capacity to differentiate model capability as traditional benchmarks approach saturation. We further investigate token efficiency, performance relationships with existing benchmarks, and interesting disparities between closed and open-source LLMs. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Qurrent-AI/RES-Q.
Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct spelling errors in sentences. Despite Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit robust capabilities and are widely applied in various tasks, their performance on CSC is often unsatisfactory. We find that LLMs fail to meet the Chinese character-level constraints of the CSC task, namely equal length and phonetic similarity, leading to a performance bottleneck. Further analysis reveal that this issue stems from the granularity of tokenization, as current mixed character-word tokenization struggles to satisfy these character-level constraints. To address this issue, we propose C-LLM, a Large Language Model-based Chinese Spell Checking method that learns to check errors Character by Character. Character-level tokenization enables the model to learn character-level alignment, effectively mitigating issues related to character-level constraints. Furthermore, CSC is simplified to replication-dominated and substitution-supplemented tasks. Experiments on two CSC benchmarks demonstrate that C-LLM achieves an average improvement of 10% over existing methods. Specifically, it shows a 2.1% improvement in general scenarios and a significant 12% improvement in vertical domain scenarios, establishing state-of-the-art performance. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/ktlKTL/C-LLM.
Efficient adaption of large language models (LLMs) on edge devices is essential for applications requiring continuous and privacy-preserving adaptation and inference. However, existing tuning techniques fall short because of the high computation and memory overheads. To this end, we introduce a computation- and memory-efficient LLM tuning framework, called Edge-LLM, to facilitate affordable and effective LLM adaptation on edge devices. Specifically, Edge-LLM features three core components: (1) a layer-wise unified compression (LUC) technique to reduce the computation overhead by generating layer-wise pruning sparsity and quantization bit-width policies, (2) an adaptive layer tuning and voting scheme to reduce the memory overhead by reducing the backpropagation depth, and (3) a complementary hardware scheduling strategy to handle the irregular computation patterns introduced by LUC and adaptive layer tuning, thereby achieving efficient computation and data movements. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Edge-LLM achieves a 2.92x speed up and a 4x memory overhead reduction as compared to vanilla tuning methods with comparable task accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/GATECH-EIC/Edge-LLM
Image super-resolution pursuits reconstructing high-fidelity high-resolution counterpart for low-resolution image. In recent years, diffusion-based models have garnered significant attention due to their capabilities with rich prior knowledge. The success of diffusion models based on general text prompts has validated the effectiveness of textual control in the field of text2image. However, given the severe degradation commonly presented in low-resolution images, coupled with the randomness characteristics of diffusion models, current models struggle to adequately discern semantic and degradation information within severely degraded images. This often leads to obstacles such as semantic loss, visual artifacts, and visual hallucinations, which pose substantial challenges for practical use. To address these challenges, this paper proposes to leverage degradation-aligned language prompt for accurate, fine-grained, and high-fidelity image restoration. Complementary priors including semantic content descriptions and degradation prompts are explored. Specifically, on one hand, image-restoration prompt alignment decoder is proposed to automatically discern the degradation degree of LR images, thereby generating beneficial degradation priors for image restoration. On the other hand, much richly tailored descriptions from pretrained multimodal large language model elicit high-level semantic priors closely aligned with human perception, ensuring fidelity control for image restoration. Comprehensive comparisons with state-of-the-art methods have been done on several popular synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets. The quantitative and qualitative analysis have demonstrated that the proposed method achieves a new state-of-the-art perceptual quality level. Related source codes and pre-trained parameters were public in https://github.com/puppy210/DaLPSR.
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have expanded their capabilities to multimodal contexts, including comprehensive video understanding. However, processing extensive videos such as 24-hour CCTV footage or full-length films presents significant challenges due to the vast data and processing demands. Traditional methods, like extracting key frames or converting frames to text, often result in substantial information loss. To address these shortcomings, we develop OmAgent, efficiently stores and retrieves relevant video frames for specific queries, preserving the detailed content of videos. Additionally, it features an Divide-and-Conquer Loop capable of autonomous reasoning, dynamically invoking APIs and tools to enhance query processing and accuracy. This approach ensures robust video understanding, significantly reducing information loss. Experimental results affirm OmAgent's efficacy in handling various types of videos and complex tasks. Moreover, we have endowed it with greater autonomy and a robust tool-calling system, enabling it to accomplish even more intricate tasks.
While large language models (LLMs) have showcased impressive capabilities, they struggle with addressing legal queries due to the intricate complexities and specialized expertise required in the legal field. In this paper, we introduce InternLM-Law, a specialized LLM tailored for addressing diverse legal queries related to Chinese laws, spanning from responding to standard legal questions (e.g., legal exercises in textbooks) to analyzing complex real-world legal situations. We meticulously construct a dataset in the Chinese legal domain, encompassing over 1 million queries, and implement a data filtering and processing pipeline to ensure its diversity and quality. Our training approach involves a novel two-stage process: initially fine-tuning LLMs on both legal-specific and general-purpose content to equip the models with broad knowledge, followed by exclusive fine-tuning on high-quality legal data to enhance structured output generation. InternLM-Law achieves the highest average performance on LawBench, outperforming state-of-the-art models, including GPT-4, on 13 out of 20 subtasks. We make InternLM-Law and our dataset publicly available to facilitate future research in applying LLMs within the legal domain.
This paper proposes a novel approach to evaluate Counter Narrative (CN) generation using a Large Language Model (LLM) as an evaluator. We show that traditional automatic metrics correlate poorly with human judgements and fail to capture the nuanced relationship between generated CNs and human perception. To alleviate this, we introduce a model ranking pipeline based on pairwise comparisons of generated CNs from different models, organized in a tournament-style format. The proposed evaluation method achieves a high correlation with human preference, with a $\rho$ score of 0.88. As an additional contribution, we leverage LLMs as zero-shot CN generators and provide a comparative analysis of chat, instruct, and base models, exploring their respective strengths and limitations. Through meticulous evaluation, including fine-tuning experiments, we elucidate the differences in performance and responsiveness to domain-specific data. We conclude that chat-aligned models in zero-shot are the best option for carrying out the task, provided they do not refuse to generate an answer due to security concerns.