Although language model (LM) agents are demonstrating growing potential in many domains, their success in cybersecurity has been limited due to simplistic design and the lack of fundamental features for this domain. We present EnIGMA, an LM agent for autonomously solving Capture The Flag (CTF) challenges. EnIGMA introduces new Agent-Computer Interfaces (ACIs) to improve the success rate on CTF challenges. We establish the novel Interactive Agent Tool concept, which enables LM agents to run interactive command-line utilities essential for these challenges. Empirical analysis of EnIGMA on over 350 CTF challenges from three different benchmarks indicates that providing a robust set of new tools with demonstration of their usage helps the LM solve complex problems and achieves state-of-the-art results on the NYU CTF and Intercode-CTF benchmarks. Finally, we discuss insights on ACI design and agent behavior on cybersecurity tasks that highlight the need to adapt real-world tools for LM agents.
Long video understanding poses a significant challenge for current Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Notably, the MLLMs are constrained by their limited context lengths and the substantial costs while processing long videos. Although several existing methods attempt to reduce visual tokens, their strategies encounter severe bottleneck, restricting MLLMs' ability to perceive fine-grained visual details. In this work, we propose Video-XL, a novel approach that leverages MLLMs' inherent key-value (KV) sparsification capacity to condense the visual input. Specifically, we introduce a new special token, the Visual Summarization Token (VST), for each interval of the video, which summarizes the visual information within the interval as its associated KV. The VST module is trained by instruction fine-tuning, where two optimizing strategies are offered. 1.Curriculum learning, where VST learns to make small (easy) and large compression (hard) progressively. 2. Composite data curation, which integrates single-image, multi-image, and synthetic data to overcome the scarcity of long-video instruction data. The compression quality is further improved by dynamic compression, which customizes compression granularity based on the information density of different video intervals. Video-XL's effectiveness is verified from three aspects. First, it achieves a superior long-video understanding capability, outperforming state-of-the-art models of comparable sizes across multiple popular benchmarks. Second, it effectively preserves video information, with minimal compression loss even at 16x compression ratio. Third, it realizes outstanding cost-effectiveness, enabling high-quality processing of thousands of frames on a single A100 GPU.
The Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) integrates computer vision and natural language processing techniques, offering substantial application potential. However, these models demand extensive resources during inference. Adaptive attention techniques can dynamically reduce computational redundancy and thus improve efficiency. Although current adaptive attention methods significantly reduce the memory requirements of Transformer-based language models, they are not tailored for LVLMs. We observe that LVLMs generate responses from both remote image tokens and local text tokens, and different modalities have different attention patterns. This observation inspires us to manage the attention for each modality separately. Specifically, for visual input, we store the cache of potentially useful information but only compute the most critical parts. For language input, we care more about local information. Based on our observation and analysis of vision-language attention patterns, we develop A-VL, a plug-and-play adaptive attention tailored for LVLM inference. Extensive evaluations on three vision-language tasks and five datasets show the effectiveness of our designs. Our approach A-VL outperforms existing adaptive attention methods in reducing memory usage and computational load without compromising performance.
On-device LLMs have gained increasing attention for their ability to enhance privacy and provide a personalized user experience. To facilitate learning with private and scarce local data, federated learning has become a standard approach, though it introduces challenges related to system and data heterogeneity among end users. As a solution, we propose a novel $\textbf{Co}$llaborative learning approach with a $\textbf{Mi}$xture of $\textbf{G}$eneralists and $\textbf{S}$pecialists (CoMiGS), being the first to effectively address both. Our approach distinguishes generalists and specialists by aggregating certain experts across end users while keeping others localized to specialize in user-specific datasets. A key innovation of our method is the bi-level optimization formulation of the Mixture-of-Experts learning objective, where the router is updated using a separate validation set that represents the target distribution. CoMiGS effectively balances collaboration and personalization, as demonstrated by its superior performance in scenarios with high data heterogeneity across multiple datasets. By design, our approach accommodates users' varying computational resources through different numbers of specialists. By decoupling resource abundance from data quantity, CoMiGS remains robust against overfitting-due to the generalists' regularizing effect-while adapting to local data through specialist expertise.
Recently, mobile AI agents based on VLMs have been gaining increasing attention. These works typically utilize VLM as a foundation, fine-tuning it with instruction-based mobile datasets. However, these VLMs are typically pre-trained on general-domain data, which often results in a lack of fundamental capabilities specific to the mobile domain. Therefore, they may struggle to recognize specific UI elements and understand intra-UI fine-grained information. In addition, the current fine-tuning task focuses on interacting with the most relevant element for the given instruction. These fine-tuned VLMs may still ignore the relationships between UI pages, neglect the roles of elements in page transitions and lack inter-UI understanding. To address issues, we propose a VLM called MobileVLM, which includes two additional pre-training stages to enhance both intra- and inter-UI understanding. We defined four UI-based pre-training tasks, enabling the model to better perceive fine-grained elements and capture page transition actions. To address the lack of mobile pre-training data, we built a large Chinese mobile dataset Mobile3M from scratch, which contains 3 million UI pages, and real-world transition actions, forming a directed graph structure. Experimental results show MobileVLM excels on both our test set and public mobile benchmarks, outperforming existing VLMs.
Instruction tuning commonly means finetuning a language model on instruction-response pairs. We discover two forms of adaptation (tuning) that are deficient compared to instruction tuning, yet still yield instruction following; we call this implicit instruction tuning. We first find that instruction-response pairs are not necessary: training solely on responses, without any corresponding instructions, yields instruction following. This suggests pretrained models have an instruction-response mapping which is revealed by teaching the model the desired distribution of responses. However, we then find it's not necessary to teach the desired distribution of responses: instruction-response training on narrow-domain data like poetry still leads to broad instruction-following behavior like recipe generation. In particular, when instructions are very different from those in the narrow finetuning domain, models' responses do not adhere to the style of the finetuning domain. To begin to explain implicit instruction tuning, we hypothesize that very simple changes to a language model's distribution yield instruction following. We support this by hand-writing a rule-based language model which yields instruction following in a product-of-experts with a pretrained model. The rules are to slowly increase the probability of ending the sequence, penalize repetition, and uniformly change 15 words' probabilities. In summary, adaptations made without being designed to yield instruction following can do so implicitly.
Exploring the data sources used to train Large Language Models (LLMs) is a crucial direction in investigating potential copyright infringement by these models. While this approach can identify the possible use of copyrighted materials in training data, it does not directly measure infringing risks. Recent research has shifted towards testing whether LLMs can directly output copyrighted content. Addressing this direction, we investigate and assess LLMs' capacity to generate infringing content by providing them with partial information from copyrighted materials, and try to use iterative prompting to get LLMs to generate more infringing content. Specifically, we input a portion of a copyrighted text into LLMs, prompt them to complete it, and then analyze the overlap between the generated content and the original copyrighted material. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs can indeed generate content highly overlapping with copyrighted materials based on these partial inputs.
Small language models (SLMs), despite their widespread adoption in modern smart devices, have received significantly less academic attention compared to their large language model (LLM) counterparts, which are predominantly deployed in data centers and cloud environments. While researchers continue to improve the capabilities of LLMs in the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, SLM research aims to make machine intelligence more accessible, affordable, and efficient for everyday tasks. Focusing on transformer-based, decoder-only language models with 100M-5B parameters, we survey 59 state-of-the-art open-source SLMs, analyzing their technical innovations across three axes: architectures, training datasets, and training algorithms. In addition, we evaluate their capabilities in various domains, including commonsense reasoning, in-context learning, mathematics, and coding. To gain further insight into their on-device runtime costs, we benchmark their inference latency and memory footprints. Through in-depth analysis of our benchmarking data, we offer valuable insights to advance research in this field.
Data compression continues to evolve, with traditional information theory methods being widely used for compressing text, images, and videos. Recently, there has been growing interest in leveraging Generative AI for predictive compression techniques. This paper introduces a lossless text compression approach using a Large Language Model (LLM). The method involves two key steps: first, prediction using a dense neural network architecture, such as a transformer block; second, compressing the predicted ranks with standard compression algorithms like Adaptive Huffman, LZ77, or Gzip. Extensive analysis and benchmarking against conventional information-theoretic baselines demonstrate that neural compression offers improved performance.
Language models are known to hallucinate incorrect information, and it is unclear if they are sufficiently accurate and reliable for use in scientific research. We developed a rigorous human-AI comparison methodology to evaluate language model agents on real-world literature search tasks covering information retrieval, summarization, and contradiction detection tasks. We show that PaperQA2, a frontier language model agent optimized for improved factuality, matches or exceeds subject matter expert performance on three realistic literature research tasks without any restrictions on humans (i.e., full access to internet, search tools, and time). PaperQA2 writes cited, Wikipedia-style summaries of scientific topics that are significantly more accurate than existing, human-written Wikipedia articles. We also introduce a hard benchmark for scientific literature research called LitQA2 that guided design of PaperQA2, leading to it exceeding human performance. Finally, we apply PaperQA2 to identify contradictions within the scientific literature, an important scientific task that is challenging for humans. PaperQA2 identifies 2.34 +/- 1.99 contradictions per paper in a random subset of biology papers, of which 70% are validated by human experts. These results demonstrate that language model agents are now capable of exceeding domain experts across meaningful tasks on scientific literature.
Diabetes is a chronic disease with a significant global health burden, requiring multi-stakeholder collaboration for optimal management. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in various healthcare scenarios, but their effectiveness across diverse diabetes tasks remains unproven. Our study introduced a framework to train and validate diabetes-specific LLMs. We first developed a comprehensive data processing pipeline that includes data collection, filtering, augmentation and refinement. This created a high-quality, diabetes-specific dataset and evaluation benchmarks from scratch. Fine-tuned on the collected training dataset, our diabetes-specific LLM family demonstrated state-of-the-art proficiency in processing various diabetes tasks compared to other LLMs. Furthermore, clinical studies revealed the potential applications of our models in diabetes care, including providing personalized healthcare, assisting medical education, and streamlining clinical tasks. Generally, our introduced framework helps develop diabetes-specific LLMs and highlights their potential to enhance clinical practice and provide personalized, data-driven support for diabetes management across different end users. Our codes, benchmarks and models are available at https://github.com/waltonfuture/Diabetica.
We introduce SAM4MLLM, an innovative approach which integrates the Segment Anything Model (SAM) with Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for pixel-aware tasks. Our method enables MLLMs to learn pixel-level location information without requiring excessive modifications to the existing model architecture or adding specialized tokens. We introduce an inquiry-based approach that can effectively find prompt points for SAM to perform segmentation based on MLLM. It combines detailed visual information with the powerful expressive capabilities of large language models in a unified language-based manner without additional computational overhead in learning. Experimental results on pubic benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
The Automated Audio Captioning (AAC) task asks models to generate natural language descriptions of an audio input. Evaluating these machine-generated audio captions is a complex task that requires considering diverse factors, among them, auditory scene understanding, sound-object inference, temporal coherence, and the environmental context of the scene. While current methods focus on specific aspects, they often fail to provide an overall score that aligns well with human judgment. In this work, we propose CLAIR-A, a simple and flexible method that leverages the zero-shot capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate candidate audio captions by directly asking LLMs for a semantic distance score. In our evaluations, CLAIR-A better predicts human judgements of quality compared to traditional metrics, with a 5.8% relative accuracy improvement compared to the domain-specific FENSE metric and up to 11% over the best general-purpose measure on the Clotho-Eval dataset. Moreover, CLAIR-A offers more transparency by allowing the language model to explain the reasoning behind its scores, with these explanations rated up to 30% better by human evaluators than those provided by baseline methods. CLAIR-A is made publicly available at https://github.com/DavidMChan/clair-a.
Recently, while significant progress has been made in remote sensing image change captioning, existing methods fail to filter out areas unrelated to actual changes, making models susceptible to irrelevant features. In this article, we propose a novel multimodal framework for remote sensing image change captioning, guided by Key Change Features and Instruction-tuned (KCFI). This framework aims to fully leverage the intrinsic knowledge of large language models through visual instructions and enhance the effectiveness and accuracy of change features using pixel-level change detection tasks. Specifically, KCFI includes a ViTs encoder for extracting bi-temporal remote sensing image features, a key feature perceiver for identifying critical change areas, a pixel-level change detection decoder to constrain key change features, and an instruction-tuned decoder based on a large language model. Moreover, to ensure that change description and change detection tasks are jointly optimized, we employ a dynamic weight-averaging strategy to balance the losses between the two tasks. We also explore various feature combinations for visual fine-tuning instructions and demonstrate that using only key change features to guide the large language model is the optimal choice. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we compare it against several state-of-the-art change captioning methods on the LEVIR-CC dataset, achieving the best performance. Our code will be available at https://github.com/yangcong356/KCFI.git.
The pre-training phase of language models often begins with randomly initialized parameters. With the current trends in scaling models, training their large number of parameters can be extremely slow and costly. In contrast, small language models are less expensive to train, but they often cannot achieve the accuracy of large models. In this paper, we explore an intriguing idea to connect these two different regimes: Can we develop a method to initialize large language models using smaller pre-trained models? Will such initialization bring any benefits in terms of training time and final accuracy? In this paper, we introduce HyperCloning, a method that can expand the parameters of a pre-trained language model to those of a larger model with increased hidden dimensions. Our method ensures that the larger model retains the functionality of the smaller model. As a result, the larger model already inherits the predictive power and accuracy of the smaller model before the training starts. We demonstrate that training such an initialized model results in significant savings in terms of GPU hours required for pre-training large language models.
At present, Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) have begun to open road testing around the world, but their safety and efficiency performance in complex scenarios is still not satisfactory. Cooperative driving leverages the connectivity ability of CAVs to achieve synergies greater than the sum of their parts, making it a promising approach to improving CAV performance in complex scenarios. However, the lack of interaction and continuous learning ability limits current cooperative driving to single-scenario applications and specific Cooperative Driving Automation (CDA). To address these challenges, this paper proposes CoDrivingLLM, an interactive and learnable LLM-driven cooperative driving framework, to achieve all-scenario and all-CDA. First, since Large Language Models(LLMs) are not adept at handling mathematical calculations, an environment module is introduced to update vehicle positions based on semantic decisions, thus avoiding potential errors from direct LLM control of vehicle positions. Second, based on the four levels of CDA defined by the SAE J3216 standard, we propose a Chain-of-Thought (COT) based reasoning module that includes state perception, intent sharing, negotiation, and decision-making, enhancing the stability of LLMs in multi-step reasoning tasks. Centralized conflict resolution is then managed through a conflict coordinator in the reasoning process. Finally, by introducing a memory module and employing retrieval-augmented generation, CAVs are endowed with the ability to learn from their past experiences. We validate the proposed CoDrivingLLM through ablation experiments on the negotiation module, reasoning with different shots experience, and comparison with other cooperative driving methods.
Alzheimer's disease (AD) stands as the predominant cause of dementia, characterized by a gradual decline in speech and language capabilities. Recent deep-learning advancements have facilitated automated AD detection through spontaneous speech. However, common transcript-based detection methods directly model text patterns in each utterance without a global view of the patient's linguistic characteristics, resulting in limited discriminability and interpretability. Despite the enhanced reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), there remains a gap in fully harnessing the reasoning ability to facilitate AD detection and model interpretation. Therefore, we propose a patient-level transcript profiling framework leveraging LLM-based reasoning augmentation to systematically elicit linguistic deficit attributes. The summarized embeddings of the attributes are integrated into an Albert model for AD detection. The framework achieves 8.51\% ACC and 8.34\% F1 improvements on the ADReSS dataset compared to the baseline without reasoning augmentation. Our further analysis shows the effectiveness of our identified linguistic deficit attributes and the potential to use LLM for AD detection interpretation.
Iterative human engagement is a common and effective means of leveraging the advanced language processing power of large language models (LLMs). Using well-structured prompts in a conversational manner, human users can effectively influence an LLM to develop more thoughtful and accurate responses. Motivated by this insight, we propose the Iteration of Thought (IoT) framework for enhancing LLM responses by generating "thought"-provoking prompts vis a vis an input query and the current iteration of an LLM's response. Unlike static or semi-static approaches, e.g. Chain of Thought (CoT) or Tree of Thoughts (ToT), IoT adapts its reasoning path dynamically, based on evolving context, and without generating alternate explorative thoughts which are ultimately discarded. The three components of the IoT framework are (1) an Inner Dialogue Agent (IDA) responsible for generating instructive, context-specific prompts; (2) an LLM Agent (LLMA) that processes these prompts to refine its responses; and (3) an iterative prompting loop that implements a conversation between the former two components. We introduce two variants of our framework: Autonomous Iteration of Thought (AIoT), where an LLM decides when to stop iterating, and Guided Iteration of Thought (GIoT), which always forces a fixed number iterations. We investigate the performance of IoT across various datasets, spanning complex reasoning tasks from the GPQA dataset, explorative problem-solving in Game of 24, puzzle solving in Mini Crosswords, and multi-hop question answering from the HotpotQA dataset. Our results show that IoT represents a viable paradigm for autonomous response refinement in LLMs, showcasing significant improvements over CoT and thereby enabling more adaptive and efficient reasoning systems that minimize human intervention.
Unified information extraction (UIE) aims to extract diverse structured information from unstructured text. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for UIE, they require significant computational resources and often struggle to generalize to unseen tasks. We propose RUIE (Retrieval-based Unified Information Extraction), a framework that leverages in-context learning for efficient task generalization. RUIE introduces a novel demonstration selection mechanism combining LLM preferences with a keyword-enhanced reward model, and employs a bi-encoder retriever trained through contrastive learning and knowledge distillation. As the first trainable retrieval framework for UIE, RUIE serves as a universal plugin for various LLMs. Experimental results on eight held-out datasets demonstrate RUIE's effectiveness, with average F1-score improvements of 19.22 and 3.22 compared to instruction-tuning methods and other retrievers, respectively.
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and agent technologies offer promising solutions to the simulation of social science experiments, but the availability of data of real-world population required by many of them still poses as a major challenge. This paper explores a novel framework that leverages census data and LLMs to generate virtual populations, significantly reducing resource requirements and bypassing privacy compliance issues associated with real-world data, while keeping a statistical truthfulness. Drawing on real-world census data, our approach first generates a persona that reflects demographic characteristics of the population. We then employ LLMs to enrich these personas with intricate details, using techniques akin to those in image generative models but applied to textual data. Additionally, we propose a framework for the evaluation of the feasibility of our method with respect to capability of LLMs based on personality trait tests, specifically the Big Five model, which also enhances the depth and realism of the generated personas. Through preliminary experiments and analysis, we demonstrate that our method produces personas with variability essential for simulating diverse human behaviors in social science experiments. But the evaluation result shows that only weak sign of statistical truthfulness can be produced due to limited capability of current LLMs. Insights from our study also highlight the tension within LLMs between aligning with human values and reflecting real-world complexities. Thorough and rigorous test call for further research. Our codes are released at https://github.com/baiyuqi/agentic-society.git