Although LLMs are increasing the productivity of professional programmers, existing work shows that beginners struggle to prompt LLMs to solve text-to-code tasks. Why is this the case? This paper explores two competing hypotheses about the cause of student-LLM miscommunication: (1) students simply lack the technical vocabulary needed to write good prompts, and (2) students do not understand the extent of information that LLMs need to solve code generation tasks. We study (1) with a causal intervention experiment on technical vocabulary and (2) by analyzing graphs that abstract how students edit prompts and the different failures that they encounter. We find that substance beats style: a poor grasp of technical vocabulary is merely correlated with prompt failure; that the information content of prompts predicts success; that students get stuck making trivial edits; and more. Our findings have implications for the use of LLMs in programming education, and for efforts to make computing more accessible with LLMs.
The deployment of neural networks on heterogeneous SoCs coupled with custom accelerators is a challenging task because of the lack of end-to-end software tools provided for these systems. Moreover, the already available low level schedules and mapping strategies provided by the accelerator developers for typical tensor operations are not necessarily the best possible ones for each particular use case. This is why frameworks which automatically test the performance of the generated code on a specific hardware configuration are of special interest. In this work, the integration between the code generation framework TVM and the systolic array-based accelerator Gemmini is presented. A generic schedule to offload the GEneral Matrix Multiply (GEMM) tensor operation onto Gemmini is detailed, and its suitability is tested by executing the AutoTVM tuning process on it. Our generated code achieves a peak throughput of 46 giga-operations per second (GOPs) under a 100 MHz clock on a Xilinx ZCU102 FPGA, outperforming previous work. Furthermore, the code generated by this integration was able to surpass the default hand-tuned schedules provided by the Gemmini developers in real-world workloads.
We introduce DreamDrone, a novel zero-shot and training-free pipeline for generating unbounded flythrough scenes from textual prompts. Different from other methods that focus on warping images frame by frame, we advocate explicitly warping the intermediate latent code of the pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model for high-quality image generation and generalization ability. To further enhance the fidelity of the generated images, we also propose a feature-correspondence-guidance diffusion process and a high-pass filtering strategy to promote geometric consistency and high-frequency detail consistency, respectively. Extensive experiments reveal that DreamDrone significantly surpasses existing methods, delivering highly authentic scene generation with exceptional visual quality, without training or fine-tuning on datasets or reconstructing 3D point clouds in advance.
Product attributes are crucial for e-commerce platforms, supporting applications like search, recommendation, and question answering. The task of Product Attribute and Value Identification (PAVI) involves identifying both attributes and their values from product information. In this paper, we formulate PAVI as a generation task and provide, to the best of our knowledge, the most comprehensive evaluation of PAVI so far. We compare three different attribute-value generation (AVG) strategies based on fine-tuning encoder-decoder models on three datasets. Experiments show that end-to-end AVG approach, which is computationally efficient, outperforms other strategies. However, there are differences depending on model sizes and the underlying language model. The code to reproduce all experiments is available at: https://github.com/kassemsabeh/pavi-avg
Software engineers mainly write code by editing existing programs. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) autoregressively synthesize programs in a single pass. One explanation for this is the scarcity of open-sourced edit data. While high-quality instruction data for code synthesis is already scarce, high-quality edit data is even scarcer. To fill this gap, we develop a synthetic data generation algorithm called LintSeq. This algorithm refactors existing code into a sequence of code edits by using a linter to procedurally sample across the error-free insertions that can be used to sequentially write programs. It outputs edit sequences as text strings consisting of consecutive program diffs. To test LintSeq, we use it to refactor a dataset of instruction + program pairs into instruction + program-diff-sequence tuples. Then, we instruction finetune a series of smaller LLMs ranging from 2.6B to 14B parameters on both the re-factored and original versions of this dataset, comparing zero-shot performance on code synthesis benchmarks. We show that during repeated sampling, edit sequence finetuned models produce more diverse programs than baselines. This results in better inference-time scaling for benchmark coverage as a function of samples, i.e. the fraction of problems "pass@k" solved by any attempt given "k" tries. For example, on HumanEval pass@50, small LLMs finetuned on synthetic edit sequences are competitive with GPT-4 and outperform models finetuned on the baseline dataset by +20% (+/-3%) in absolute score. Finally, we also pretrain our own tiny LMs for code understanding. We show that finetuning tiny models on synthetic code edits results in state-of-the-art code synthesis for the on-device model class. Our 150M parameter edit sequence LM matches or outperforms code models with twice as many parameters, both with and without repeated sampling, including Codex and AlphaCode.
A central question for cognitive science is to understand how humans process visual objects, i.e, to uncover human low-dimensional concept representation space from high-dimensional visual stimuli. Generating visual stimuli with controlling concepts is the key. However, there are currently no generative models in AI to solve this problem. Here, we present the Concept based Controllable Generation (CoCoG) framework. CoCoG consists of two components, a simple yet efficient AI agent for extracting interpretable concept and predicting human decision-making in visual similarity judgment tasks, and a conditional generation model for generating visual stimuli given the concepts. We quantify the performance of CoCoG from two aspects, the human behavior prediction accuracy and the controllable generation ability. The experiments with CoCoG indicate that 1) the reliable concept embeddings in CoCoG allows to predict human behavior with 64.07\% accuracy in the THINGS-similarity dataset; 2) CoCoG can generate diverse objects through the control of concepts; 3) CoCoG can manipulate human similarity judgment behavior by intervening key concepts. CoCoG offers visual objects with controlling concepts to advance our understanding of causality in human cognition. The code of CoCoG is available at \url{https://github.com/ncclab-sustech/CoCoG}.
Generating high-quality meshes with complex structures and realistic surfaces is the primary goal of 3D generative models. Existing methods typically employ sequence data or deformable tetrahedral grids for mesh generation. However, sequence-based methods have difficulty producing complex structures with many faces due to memory limits. The deformable tetrahedral grid-based method MeshDiffusion fails to recover realistic surfaces due to the inherent ambiguity in deformable grids. We propose the GenUDC framework to address these challenges by leveraging the Unsigned Dual Contouring (UDC) as the mesh representation. UDC discretizes a mesh in a regular grid and divides it into the face and vertex parts, recovering both complex structures and fine details. As a result, the one-to-one mapping between UDC and mesh resolves the ambiguity problem. In addition, GenUDC adopts a two-stage, coarse-to-fine generative process for 3D mesh generation. It first generates the face part as a rough shape and then the vertex part to craft a detailed shape. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superiority of UDC as a mesh representation and the favorable performance of GenUDC in mesh generation. The code and trained models are available at https://github.com/TrepangCat/GenUDC.
Diffusion-based generative models have significantly advanced text-to-image synthesis, demonstrating impressive text comprehension and zero-shot generalization. These models refine images from random noise based on textual prompts, with initial reliance on text input shifting towards enhanced visual fidelity over time. This transition suggests that static model parameters might not optimally address the distinct phases of generation. We introduce LGR-AD (Learning Graph Representation of Agent Diffusers), a novel multi-agent system designed to improve adaptability in dynamic computer vision tasks. LGR-AD models the generation process as a distributed system of interacting agents, each representing an expert sub-model. These agents dynamically adapt to varying conditions and collaborate through a graph neural network that encodes their relationships and performance metrics. Our approach employs a coordination mechanism based on top-$k$ maximum spanning trees, optimizing the generation process. Each agent's decision-making is guided by a meta-model that minimizes a novel loss function, balancing accuracy and diversity. Theoretical analysis and extensive empirical evaluations show that LGR-AD outperforms traditional diffusion models across various benchmarks, highlighting its potential for scalable and flexible solutions in complex image generation tasks. Code is available at: https://github.com/YousIA/LGR_AD
Question-answering (QA) that comes naturally to humans is a critical component in seamless human-computer interaction. It has emerged as one of the most convenient and natural methods to interact with the web and is especially desirable in voice-controlled environments. Despite being one of the oldest research areas, the current QA system faces the critical challenge of handling multilingual queries. To build an Artificial Intelligent (AI) agent that can serve multilingual end users, a QA system is required to be language versatile and tailored to suit the multilingual environment. Recent advances in QA models have enabled surpassing human performance primarily due to the availability of a sizable amount of high-quality datasets. However, the majority of such annotated datasets are expensive to create and are only confined to the English language, making it challenging to acknowledge progress in foreign languages. Therefore, to measure a similar improvement in the multilingual QA system, it is necessary to invest in high-quality multilingual evaluation benchmarks. In this dissertation, we focus on advancing QA techniques for handling end-user queries in multilingual environments. This dissertation consists of two parts. In the first part, we explore multilingualism and a new dimension of multilingualism referred to as code-mixing. Second, we propose a technique to solve the task of multi-hop question generation by exploiting multiple documents. Experiments show our models achieve state-of-the-art performance on answer extraction, ranking, and generation tasks on multiple domains of MQA, VQA, and language generation. The proposed techniques are generic and can be widely used in various domains and languages to advance QA systems.
Data transformation pipelines shape the training distribution in computer vision, but designing them is a computationally expensive problem. We investigate whether large language models can enable efficient discovery by synthesizing executable transformation programs outside predefined augmentation spaces. We compare nine strategies under a unified training protocol, including standard augmentation policies, brute-force search, direct code generation with two LLMs, and performance-guided generation using LLMs fine-tuned on accuracy-ordered transformation pairs. When the best candidates are retrained for 20 epochs, LLM-generated transformation programs lead on every dataset, reaching 0.8877 accuracy on CIFAR-10, 0.5825 on CIFAR-100, and 0.9588 on SVHN, surpassing brute-force search over 6,000 candidates. The best transform on CIFAR-10 and SVHN comes from a fine-tuned generator using 270 candidates, while the best on CIFAR-100 comes from an off-the-shelf generator using only 10. This needs 22x fewer candidate evaluations in the generation step and 600x fewer for off-the-shelf generations, relative to brute-force search. Beyond transformation discovery, we analyze the reliability of the reduced-budget evaluation commonly used for augmentation search. Correlating one-epoch selection scores with 20-epoch outcomes reveals strong, weak, and absent predictive relationships depending on the dataset and architecture, with correlations ranging from 0.756 to near zero. A positive control indicates that range restriction alone is unlikely to explain the low correlations. Our results indicate that semantic synthesis with code LLMs provides an efficient alternative to search-based transformation discovery and highlight the importance of validating evaluation fidelity when optimizing data transformations.
Many software projects implement APIs and algorithms in multiple programming languages. Maintaining such projects is tiresome, as developers have to ensure that any change (e.g., a bug fix or a new feature) is being propagated, timely and without errors, to implementations in other programming languages. In the world of ever-changing software, using rule-based translation tools (i.e., transpilers) or machine learning models for translating code from one language to another provides limited value. Translating each time the entire codebase from one language to another is not the way developers work. In this paper, we target a novel task: translating code changes from one programming language to another using large language models (LLMs). We design and implement the first LLM, dubbed Codeditor, to tackle this task. Codeditor explicitly models code changes as edit sequences and learns to correlate changes across programming languages. To evaluate Codeditor, we collect a corpus of 6,613 aligned code changes from 8 pairs of open-source software projects implementing similar functionalities in two programming languages (Java and C#). Results show that Codeditor outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin on all commonly used automatic metrics. Our work also reveals that Codeditor is complementary to the existing generation-based models, and their combination ensures even greater performance.
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their knowledge and generative capabilities, leading to a surge of interest in leveraging LLMs for high-quality data synthesis. However, synthetic data generation via prompting LLMs remains challenging due to LLMs' limited understanding of target data distributions and the complexity of prompt engineering, especially for structured formatted data. To address these issues, we introduce DiffLM, a controllable data synthesis framework based on variational autoencoder (VAE), which further (1) leverages diffusion models to reserve more information of original distribution and format structure in the learned latent distribution and (2) decouples the learning of target distribution knowledge from the LLM's generative objectives via a plug-and-play latent feature injection module. As we observed significant discrepancies between the VAE's latent representations and the real data distribution, the latent diffusion module is introduced into our framework to learn a fully expressive latent distribution. Evaluations on seven real-world datasets with structured formatted data (i.e., Tabular, Code and Tool data) demonstrate that DiffLM generates high-quality data, with performance on downstream tasks surpassing that of real data by 2-7 percent in certain cases. The data and code will be publicly available upon completion of internal review.
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled near-human performance on software coding benchmarks, but their effectiveness in RTL code generation remains limited due to the scarcity of high-quality training data. While prior efforts have fine-tuned LLMs for RTL tasks, they do not fundamentally overcome the data bottleneck and lack support for test-time scaling due to their non-reasoning nature. In this work, we introduce ScaleRTL, the first reasoning LLM for RTL coding that scales up both high-quality reasoning data and test-time compute. Specifically, we curate a diverse set of long chain-of-thought reasoning traces averaging 56K tokens each, resulting in a dataset of 3.5B tokens that captures rich RTL knowledge. Fine-tuning a general-purpose reasoning model on this corpus yields ScaleRTL that is capable of deep RTL reasoning. Subsequently, we further enhance the performance of ScaleRTL through a novel test-time scaling strategy that extends the reasoning process via iteratively reflecting on and self-correcting previous reasoning steps. Experimental results show that ScaleRTL achieves state-of-the-art performance on VerilogEval and RTLLM, outperforming 18 competitive baselines by up to 18.4% on VerilogEval and 12.7% on RTLLM.
All text-based language problems can be reduced to either generation or embedding. Current models only perform well at one or the other. We introduce generative representational instruction tuning (GRIT) whereby a large language model is trained to handle both generative and embedding tasks by distinguishing between them through instructions. Compared to other open models, our resulting GritLM 7B sets a new state of the art on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) and outperforms all models up to its size on a range of generative tasks. By scaling up further, GritLM 8x7B outperforms all open generative language models that we tried while still being among the best embedding models. Notably, we find that GRIT matches training on only generative or embedding data, thus we can unify both at no performance loss. Among other benefits, the unification via GRIT speeds up Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by > 60% for long documents, by no longer requiring separate retrieval and generation models. Models, code, etc. are freely available at https://github.com/ContextualAI/gritlm.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution for mitigating hallucinations of large language models (LLMs) with retrieved external knowledge. Adaptive RAG enhances this approach by enabling dynamic retrieval during generation, activating retrieval only when the query exceeds LLM's internal knowledge. Existing methods primarily focus on detecting LLM's confidence via statistical uncertainty. Instead, we present the first attempts to solve adaptive RAG from a representation perspective and develop an inherent control-based framework, termed \name. Specifically, we extract the features that represent the honesty and confidence directions of LLM and adopt them to control LLM behavior and guide retrieval timing decisions. We also design a simple yet effective query formulation strategy to support adaptive retrieval. Experiments show that \name is superior to existing adaptive RAG methods on a diverse set of tasks, the honesty steering can effectively make LLMs more honest and confidence monitoring is a promising indicator of retrieval trigger.Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/HSLiu-Initial/CtrlA}.
We present I2V3D, a novel framework for animating static images into dynamic videos with precise 3D control, leveraging the strengths of both 3D geometry guidance and advanced generative models. Our approach combines the precision of a computer graphics pipeline, enabling accurate control over elements such as camera movement, object rotation, and character animation, with the visual fidelity of generative AI to produce high-quality videos from coarsely rendered inputs. To support animations with any initial start point and extended sequences, we adopt a two-stage generation process guided by 3D geometry: 1) 3D-Guided Keyframe Generation, where a customized image diffusion model refines rendered keyframes to ensure consistency and quality, and 2) 3D-Guided Video Interpolation, a training-free approach that generates smooth, high-quality video frames between keyframes using bidirectional guidance. Experimental results highlight the effectiveness of our framework in producing controllable, high-quality animations from single input images by harmonizing 3D geometry with generative models. The code for our framework will be publicly released.
In this paper, we propose LSRNA, a novel framework for higher-resolution (exceeding 1K) image generation using diffusion models by leveraging super-resolution directly in the latent space. Existing diffusion models struggle with scaling beyond their training resolutions, often leading to structural distortions or content repetition. Reference-based methods address the issues by upsampling a low-resolution reference to guide higher-resolution generation. However, they face significant challenges: upsampling in latent space often causes manifold deviation, which degrades output quality. On the other hand, upsampling in RGB space tends to produce overly smoothed outputs. To overcome these limitations, LSRNA combines Latent space Super-Resolution (LSR) for manifold alignment and Region-wise Noise Addition (RNA) to enhance high-frequency details. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that integrating LSRNA outperforms state-of-the-art reference-based methods across various resolutions and metrics, while showing the critical role of latent space upsampling in preserving detail and sharpness. The code is available at https://github.com/3587jjh/LSRNA.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly enhanced large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive tasks by incorporating external knowledge retrieval. However, existing RAG frameworks primarily rely on semantic similarity and correlation-driven retrieval, limiting their ability to distinguish true causal relationships from spurious associations. This results in responses that may be factually grounded but fail to establish cause-and-effect mechanisms, leading to incomplete or misleading insights. To address this issue, we introduce Causal Dynamic Feedback for Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation (CDF-RAG), a framework designed to improve causal consistency, factual accuracy, and explainability in generative reasoning. CDF-RAG iteratively refines queries, retrieves structured causal graphs, and enables multi-hop causal reasoning across interconnected knowledge sources. Additionally, it validates responses against causal pathways, ensuring logically coherent and factually grounded outputs. We evaluate CDF-RAG on four diverse datasets, demonstrating its ability to improve response accuracy and causal correctness over existing RAG-based methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ elakhatibi/CDF-RAG.
Large Language Models (LLMs) recently demonstrated capabilities for generating source code in common programming languages. Additionally, commercial products such as ChatGPT 4 started to provide code interpreters, allowing for the automatic execution of generated code fragments, instant feedback, and the possibility to develop and refine in a conversational fashion. With an exploratory research approach, this paper applies code generation and interpretation to conceptual models. The concept and prototype of a conceptual model interpreter is explored, capable of rendering visual models generated in textual syntax by state-of-the-art LLMs such as Llama~2 and ChatGPT 4. In particular, these LLMs can generate textual syntax for the PlantUML and Graphviz modeling software that is automatically rendered within a conversational user interface. The first result is an architecture describing the components necessary to interact with interpreters and LLMs through APIs or locally, providing support for many commercial and open source LLMs and interpreters. Secondly, experimental results for models generated with ChatGPT 4 and Llama 2 are discussed in two cases covering UML and, on an instance level, graphs created from custom data. The results indicate the possibility of modeling iteratively in a conversational fashion.
Underwater images often suffer from quality degradation due to absorption and scattering effects. Most existing underwater image enhancement algorithms produce a single, fixed-color image, limiting user flexibility and application. To address this limitation, we propose a method called \textit{ColorCode}, which enhances underwater images while offering a range of controllable color outputs. Our approach involves recovering an underwater image to a reference enhanced image through supervised training and decomposing it into color and content codes via self-reconstruction and cross-reconstruction. The color code is explicitly constrained to follow a Gaussian distribution, allowing for efficient sampling and interpolation during inference. ColorCode offers three key features: 1) color enhancement, producing an enhanced image with a fixed color; 2) color adaptation, enabling controllable adjustments of long-wavelength color components using guidance images; and 3) color interpolation, allowing for the smooth generation of multiple colors through continuous sampling of the color code. Quantitative and visual evaluations on popular and challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of ColorCode over existing methods in providing diverse, controllable, and color-realistic enhancement results. The source code is available at https://github.com/Xiaofeng-life/ColorCode.