Multi-task large language models (MTLLMs) are important for many applications at the wireless edge, where users demand specialized models to handle multiple tasks efficiently. However, training MTLLMs is complex and exhaustive, particularly when tasks are subject to change. Recently, the concept of model fusion via task vectors has emerged as an efficient approach for combining fine-tuning parameters to produce an MTLLM. In this paper, the problem of enabling edge users to collaboratively craft such MTLMs via tasks vectors is studied, under the assumption of worst-case adversarial attacks. To this end, first the influence of adversarial noise to multi-task model fusion is investigated and a relationship between the so-called weight disentanglement error and the mean squared error (MSE) is derived. Using hypothesis testing, it is directly shown that the MSE increases interference between task vectors, thereby rendering model fusion ineffective. Then, a novel resilient MTLLM fusion (R-MTLLMF) is proposed, which leverages insights about the LLM architecture and fine-tuning process to safeguard task vector aggregation under adversarial noise by realigning the MTLLM. The proposed R-MTLLMF is then compared for both worst-case and ideal transmission scenarios to study the impact of the wireless channel. Extensive model fusion experiments with vision LLMs demonstrate R-MTLLMF's effectiveness, achieving close-to-baseline performance across eight different tasks in ideal noise scenarios and significantly outperforming unprotected model fusion in worst-case scenarios. The results further advocate for additional physical layer protection for a holistic approach to resilience, from both a wireless and LLM perspective.
The Large Vision Language Model (VLM) has recently addressed remarkable progress in bridging two fundamental modalities. VLM, trained by a sufficiently large dataset, exhibits a comprehensive understanding of both visual and linguistic to perform diverse tasks. To distill this knowledge accurately, in this paper, we introduce a novel approach that explicitly utilizes VLM as an objective function form for the Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection task (\textbf{VLM-HOI}). Specifically, we propose a method that quantifies the similarity of the predicted HOI triplet using the Image-Text matching technique. We represent HOI triplets linguistically to fully utilize the language comprehension of VLMs, which are more suitable than CLIP models due to their localization and object-centric nature. This matching score is used as an objective for contrastive optimization. To our knowledge, this is the first utilization of VLM language abilities for HOI detection. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, achieving state-of-the-art HOI detection accuracy on benchmarks. We believe integrating VLMs into HOI detection represents important progress towards more advanced and interpretable analysis of human-object interactions.
In an era of information overload, manually annotating the vast and growing corpus of documents and scholarly papers is increasingly impractical. Automated keyphrase extraction addresses this challenge by identifying representative terms within texts. However, most existing methods focus on short documents (up to 512 tokens), leaving a gap in processing long-context documents. In this paper, we introduce LongKey, a novel framework for extracting keyphrases from lengthy documents, which uses an encoder-based language model to capture extended text intricacies. LongKey uses a max-pooling embedder to enhance keyphrase candidate representation. Validated on the comprehensive LDKP datasets and six diverse, unseen datasets, LongKey consistently outperforms existing unsupervised and language model-based keyphrase extraction methods. Our findings demonstrate LongKey's versatility and superior performance, marking an advancement in keyphrase extraction for varied text lengths and domains.
Iterative improvement of model architectures is fundamental to deep learning: Transformers first enabled scaling, and recent advances in model hybridization have pushed the quality-efficiency frontier. However, optimizing architectures remains challenging and expensive. Current automated or manual approaches fall short, largely due to limited progress in the design of search spaces and due to the simplicity of resulting patterns and heuristics. In this work, we propose a new approach for the synthesis of tailored architectures (STAR). Our approach combines a novel search space based on the theory of linear input-varying systems, supporting a hierarchical numerical encoding into architecture genomes. STAR genomes are automatically refined and recombined with gradient-free, evolutionary algorithms to optimize for multiple model quality and efficiency metrics. Using STAR, we optimize large populations of new architectures, leveraging diverse computational units and interconnection patterns, improving over highly-optimized Transformers and striped hybrid models on the frontier of quality, parameter size, and inference cache for autoregressive language modeling.
Identifying T-cell receptors (TCRs) that interact with antigenic peptides provides the technical basis for developing vaccines and immunotherapies. The emergent deep learning methods excel at learning antigen binding patterns from known TCRs but struggle with novel or sparsely represented antigens. However, binding specificity for unseen antigens or exogenous peptides is critical. We introduce a domain-adaptive peptide-agnostic learning framework DapPep for universal TCR-antigen binding affinity prediction to address this challenge. The lightweight self-attention architecture combines a pre-trained protein language model with an inner-loop self-supervised regime to enable robust TCR-peptide representations. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that DapPep consistently outperforms existing tools, showcasing robust generalization capability, especially for data-scarce settings and unseen peptides. Moreover, DapPep proves effective in challenging clinical tasks such as sorting reactive T cells in tumor neoantigen therapy and identifying key positions in 3D structures.
Text-to-image diffusion models produce impressive results but are frustrating tools for artists who desire fine-grained control. For example, a common use case is to create images of a specific instance in novel contexts, i.e., "identity-preserving generation". This setting, along with many other tasks (e.g., relighting), is a natural fit for image+text-conditional generative models. However, there is insufficient high-quality paired data to train such a model directly. We propose Diffusion Self-Distillation, a method for using a pre-trained text-to-image model to generate its own dataset for text-conditioned image-to-image tasks. We first leverage a text-to-image diffusion model's in-context generation ability to create grids of images and curate a large paired dataset with the help of a Visual-Language Model. We then fine-tune the text-to-image model into a text+image-to-image model using the curated paired dataset. We demonstrate that Diffusion Self-Distillation outperforms existing zero-shot methods and is competitive with per-instance tuning techniques on a wide range of identity-preservation generation tasks, without requiring test-time optimization.
Speech language models (SpeechLMs) accept speech input and produce speech output, allowing for more natural human-computer interaction compared to text-based large language models (LLMs). Traditional approaches for developing SpeechLMs are constrained by the limited availability of unsupervised speech data and parallel speech-text data, which are significantly less abundant than text pre-training data, thereby limiting their scalability as LLMs. We propose a novel approach to scaling speech-text pre-training by leveraging large-scale synthetic interleaved data derived from text corpora, eliminating the need for parallel speech-text datasets. Our method efficiently constructs speech-text interleaved data by sampling text spans from existing text corpora and synthesizing corresponding speech spans using a text-to-token model, bypassing the need to generate actual speech. We also employ a supervised speech tokenizer derived from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model by incorporating a vector-quantized bottleneck into the encoder. This supervised training approach results in discrete speech tokens with strong semantic preservation even at lower frame rates (e.g. 12.5Hz), while still maintaining speech reconstruction quality. Starting from a pre-trained language model and scaling our pre-training to 1 trillion tokens (with 600B synthetic interleaved speech-text data), we achieve state-of-the-art performance in speech language modeling and spoken question answering, improving performance on spoken questions tasks from the previous SOTA of 13% (Moshi) to 31%. We further demonstrate that by fine-tuning the pre-trained model with speech dialogue data, we can develop an end-to-end spoken chatbot that achieves competitive performance comparable to existing baselines in both conversational abilities and speech quality, even operating exclusively in the speech domain.
Quantizing large language models has become a standard way to reduce their memory and computational costs. Typically, existing methods focus on breaking down the problem into individual layer-wise sub-problems, and minimizing per-layer error, measured via various metrics. Yet, this approach currently lacks theoretical justification and the metrics employed may be sub-optimal. In this paper, we present a "linearity theorem" establishing a direct relationship between the layer-wise $\ell_2$ reconstruction error and the model perplexity increase due to quantization. This insight enables two novel applications: (1) a simple data-free LLM quantization method using Hadamard rotations and MSE-optimal grids, dubbed HIGGS, which outperforms all prior data-free approaches such as the extremely popular NF4 quantized format, and (2) an optimal solution to the problem of finding non-uniform per-layer quantization levels which match a given compression constraint in the medium-bitwidth regime, obtained by reduction to dynamic programming. On the practical side, we demonstrate improved accuracy-compression trade-offs on Llama-3.1 and 3.2-family models, as well as on Qwen-family models. Further, we show that our method can be efficiently supported in terms of GPU kernels at various batch sizes, advancing both data-free and non-uniform quantization for LLMs.
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.
Linguists have long held that a key aspect of natural language syntax is the recursive organization of language units into constituent structures, and research has suggested that current state-of-the-art language models lack an inherent bias towards this feature. A number of alternative models have been proposed to provide inductive biases towards constituency, including the Tree Transformer, which utilizes a modified attention mechanism to organize tokens into constituents. We investigate Tree Transformers to study whether they utilize meaningful and/or useful constituent structures. We pretrain a large Tree Transformer on language modeling in order to investigate the learned constituent tree representations of sentences, finding little evidence for meaningful structures. Next, we evaluate Tree Transformers with similar transformer models on error detection tasks requiring constituent structure. We find that while the Tree Transformer models may slightly outperform at these tasks, there is little evidence to suggest a meaningful improvement. In general, we conclude that there is little evidence to support Tree Transformer as an effective model of syntactic constituency.
Recent advances in data-driven research have shown great potential in understanding the intricate relationships between materials and their performances. Herein, we introduce a novel multi modal data-driven approach employing an Automatic Battery data Collector (ABC) that integrates a large language model (LLM) with an automatic graph mining tool, Material Graph Digitizer (MatGD). This platform enables state-of-the-art accurate extraction of battery material data and cyclability performance metrics from diverse textual and graphical data sources. From the database derived through the ABC platform, we developed machine learning models that can accurately predict the capacity and stability of lithium metal batteries, which is the first-ever model developed to achieve such predictions. Our models were also experimentally validated, confirming practical applicability and reliability of our data-driven approach.
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.
We explore the collaborative dynamics of an innovative language model interaction system involving advanced models such as GPT-4-0125-preview, Meta-LLaMA-3-70B-Instruct, Claude-3-Opus, and Gemini-1.5-Flash. These models generate and answer complex, PhD-level statistical questions without exact ground-truth answers. Our study investigates how inter-model consensus enhances the reliability and precision of responses. By employing statistical methods such as chi-square tests, Fleiss' Kappa, and confidence interval analysis, we evaluate consensus rates and inter-rater agreement to quantify the reliability of collaborative outputs. Key results reveal that Claude and GPT-4 exhibit the highest reliability and consistency, as evidenced by their narrower confidence intervals and higher alignment with question-generating models. Conversely, Gemini and LLaMA show more significant variability in their consensus rates, as reflected in wider confidence intervals and lower reliability percentages. These findings demonstrate that collaborative interactions among large language models (LLMs) significantly improve response reliability, offering novel insights into autonomous, cooperative reasoning and validation in AI systems.
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}.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable planning abilities across various domains, including robotics manipulation and navigation. While recent efforts in robotics have leveraged LLMs both for high-level and low-level planning, these approaches often face significant challenges, such as hallucinations in long-horizon tasks and limited adaptability due to the generation of plans in a single pass without real-time feedback. To address these limitations, we propose a novel multi-agent LLM framework, Multi-Agent Large Language Model for Manipulation (MALMM) that distributes high-level planning and low-level control code generation across specialized LLM agents, supervised by an additional agent that dynamically manages transitions. By incorporating observations from the environment after each step, our framework effectively handles intermediate failures and enables adaptive re-planning. Unlike existing methods, our approach does not rely on pre-trained skill policies or in-context learning examples and generalizes to a variety of new tasks. We evaluate our approach on nine RLBench tasks, including long-horizon tasks, and demonstrate its ability to solve robotics manipulation in a zero-shot setting, thereby overcoming key limitations of existing LLM-based manipulation methods.
Recent advancements in large language model(LLM) performance on medical multiple choice question (MCQ) benchmarks have stimulated interest from healthcare providers and patients globally. Particularly in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) facing acute physician shortages and lack of specialists, LLMs offer a potentially scalable pathway to enhance healthcare access and reduce costs. However, their effectiveness in the Global South, especially across the African continent, remains to be established. In this work, we introduce AfriMed-QA, the first large scale Pan-African English multi-specialty medical Question-Answering (QA) dataset, 15,000 questions (open and closed-ended) sourced from over 60 medical schools across 16 countries, covering 32 medical specialties. We further evaluate 30 LLMs across multiple axes including correctness and demographic bias. Our findings show significant performance variation across specialties and geographies, MCQ performance clearly lags USMLE (MedQA). We find that biomedical LLMs underperform general models and smaller edge-friendly LLMs struggle to achieve a passing score. Interestingly, human evaluations show a consistent consumer preference for LLM answers and explanations when compared with clinician answers.
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.
Recent advances in language modeling have demonstrated significant improvements in zero-shot capabilities, including in-context learning, instruction following, and machine translation for extremely under-resourced languages (Tanzer et al., 2024). However, many languages with limited written resources rely primarily on formal descriptions of grammar and vocabulary. In this paper, we introduce a set of benchmarks to evaluate how well models can extract and classify information from the complex descriptions found in linguistic grammars. We present a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based approach that leverages these descriptions for downstream tasks such as machine translation. Our benchmarks encompass linguistic descriptions for 248 languages across 142 language families, focusing on typological features from WALS and Grambank. This set of benchmarks offers the first comprehensive evaluation of language models' in-context ability to accurately interpret and extract linguistic features, providing a critical resource for scaling NLP to low-resource languages. The code and data are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/al-the-eigenvalue/RAG-on-grammars}.
Current benchmarks for evaluating Vision Language Models (VLMs) often fall short in thoroughly assessing model abilities to understand and process complex visual and textual content. They typically focus on simple tasks that do not require deep reasoning or the integration of multiple data modalities to solve an original problem. To address this gap, we introduce the PARROT-360V Benchmark, a novel and comprehensive benchmark featuring 2487 challenging visual puzzles designed to test VLMs on complex visual reasoning tasks. We evaluated leading models: GPT-4o, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, and Gemini-1.5-Pro, using PARROT-360V to assess their capabilities in combining visual clues with language skills to solve tasks in a manner akin to human problem-solving. Our findings reveal a notable performance gap: state-of-the-art models scored between 28 to 56 percentage on our benchmark, significantly lower than their performance on popular benchmarks. This underscores the limitations of current VLMs in handling complex, multi-step reasoning tasks and highlights the need for more robust evaluation frameworks to advance the field.
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.