We introduce Concept Bottleneck Protein Language Models (CB-pLM), a generative masked language model with a layer where each neuron corresponds to an interpretable concept. Our architecture offers three key benefits: i) Control: We can intervene on concept values to precisely control the properties of generated proteins, achieving a 3 times larger change in desired concept values compared to baselines. ii) Interpretability: A linear mapping between concept values and predicted tokens allows transparent analysis of the model's decision-making process. iii) Debugging: This transparency facilitates easy debugging of trained models. Our models achieve pre-training perplexity and downstream task performance comparable to traditional masked protein language models, demonstrating that interpretability does not compromise performance. While adaptable to any language model, we focus on masked protein language models due to their importance in drug discovery and the ability to validate our model's capabilities through real-world experiments and expert knowledge. We scale our CB-pLM from 24 million to 3 billion parameters, making them the largest Concept Bottleneck Models trained and the first capable of generative language modeling.
This paper introduces BreakGPT, a novel large language model (LLM) architecture adapted specifically for time series forecasting and the prediction of sharp upward movements in asset prices. By leveraging both the capabilities of LLMs and Transformer-based models, this study evaluates BreakGPT and other Transformer-based models for their ability to address the unique challenges posed by highly volatile financial markets. The primary contribution of this work lies in demonstrating the effectiveness of combining time series representation learning with LLM prediction frameworks. We showcase BreakGPT as a promising solution for financial forecasting with minimal training and as a strong competitor for capturing both local and global temporal dependencies.
Characterizing the computational power of neural network architectures in terms of formal language theory remains a crucial line of research, as it describes lower and upper bounds on the reasoning capabilities of modern AI. However, when empirically testing these bounds, existing work often leaves a discrepancy between experiments and the formal claims they are meant to support. The problem is that formal language theory pertains specifically to recognizers: machines that receive a string as input and classify whether it belongs to a language. On the other hand, it is common to instead use proxy tasks that are similar in only an informal sense, such as language modeling or sequence-to-sequence transduction. We correct this mismatch by training and evaluating neural networks directly as binary classifiers of strings, using a general method that can be applied to a wide variety of languages. As part of this, we extend an algorithm recently proposed by Sn{\ae}bjarnarson et al. (2024) to do length-controlled sampling of strings from regular languages, with much better asymptotic time complexity than previous methods. We provide results on a variety of languages across the Chomsky hierarchy for three neural architectures: a simple RNN, an LSTM, and a causally-masked transformer. We find that the RNN and LSTM often outperform the transformer, and that auxiliary training objectives such as language modeling can help, although no single objective uniformly improves performance across languages and architectures. Our contributions will facilitate theoretically sound empirical testing of language recognition claims in future work. We have released our datasets as a benchmark called FLaRe (Formal Language Recognition), along with our code.
Addressing the complexity of accurately classifying International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes from medical discharge summaries is challenging due to the intricate nature of medical documentation. This paper explores the use of Large Language Models (LLM), specifically the LLAMA architecture, to enhance ICD code classification through two methodologies: direct application as a classifier and as a generator of enriched text representations within a Multi-Filter Residual Convolutional Neural Network (MultiResCNN) framework. We evaluate these methods by comparing them against state-of-the-art approaches, revealing LLAMA's potential to significantly improve classification outcomes by providing deep contextual insights into medical texts.
The recent development of vision language models (VLMs) has led to significant advances in visual-language integration through visual instruction tuning, and they have rapidly evolved in the field of remote sensing image understanding, demonstrating their powerful capabilities. However, existing RSVLMs mainly focus on image-level or frame-level understanding, making it difficult to achieve fine-grained pixel-level visual-language alignment. Additionally, the lack of mask-based instructional data limits their further development. In this paper, we propose a mask-text instruction tuning method called Aquila-plus, which extends the capabilities of RSVLMs to achieve pixel-level visual understanding by incorporating fine-grained mask regions into language instructions. To achieve this, we first meticulously constructed a mask region-text dataset containing 100K samples, and then designed a visual-language model by injecting pixel-level representations into a large language model (LLM). Specifically, Aquila-plus uses a convolutional CLIP as the visual encoder and employs a mask-aware visual extractor to extract precise visual mask features from high-resolution inputs. Experimental results demonstrate that Aquila-plus outperforms existing methods in various region understanding tasks, showcasing its novel capabilities in pixel-level instruction tuning.
Recently, large vision language models (VLMs) have made significant strides in visual language capabilities through visual instruction tuning, showing great promise in the field of remote sensing image interpretation. However, existing remote sensing vision language models (RSVLMs) often fall short in capturing the complex characteristics of remote sensing scenes, as they typically rely on low resolution, single scale visual features and simplistic methods to map visual features to language features. In this paper, we present Aquila, an advanced visual language foundation model designed to enable richer visual feature representation and more precise visual-language feature alignment for remote sensing images. Our approach introduces a learnable Hierarchical Spatial Feature Integration (SFI) module that supports high resolution image inputs and aggregates multi scale visual features, allowing for the detailed representation of complex visual information. Additionally, the SFI module is repeatedly integrated into the layers of the large language model (LLM) to achieve deep visual language feature alignment, without compromising the model's performance in natural language processing tasks. These innovations, capturing detailed visual effects through higher resolution and multi scale input, and enhancing feature alignment significantly improve the model's ability to learn from image text data. We validate the effectiveness of Aquila through extensive quantitative experiments and qualitative analyses, demonstrating its superior performance.
Category-agnostic pose estimation (CAPE) has traditionally relied on support images with annotated keypoints, a process that is often cumbersome and may fail to fully capture the necessary correspondences across diverse object categories. Recent efforts have begun exploring the use of text-based queries, where the need for support keypoints is eliminated. However, the optimal use of textual descriptions for keypoints remains an underexplored area. In this work, we introduce CapeLLM, a novel approach that leverages a text-based multimodal large language model (MLLM) for CAPE. Our method only employs query image and detailed text descriptions as an input to estimate category-agnostic keypoints. We conduct extensive experiments to systematically explore the design space of LLM-based CAPE, investigating factors such as choosing the optimal description for keypoints, neural network architectures, and training strategies. Thanks to the advanced reasoning capabilities of the pre-trained MLLM, CapeLLM demonstrates superior generalization and robust performance. Our approach sets a new state-of-the-art on the MP-100 benchmark in the challenging 1-shot setting, marking a significant advancement in the field of category-agnostic pose estimation.
Sandboxes and other dynamic analysis processes are prevalent in malware detection systems nowadays to enhance the capability of detecting 0-day malware. Therefore, techniques of anti-dynamic analysis (TADA) are prevalent in modern malware samples, and sandboxes can suffer from false negatives and analysis failures when analyzing the samples with TADAs. In such cases, human reverse engineers will get involved in conducting dynamic analysis manually (i.e., debugging, patching), which in turn also gets obstructed by TADAs. In this work, we propose a Large Language Model (LLM) based workflow that can pinpoint the location of the TADA implementation in the code, to help reverse engineers place breakpoints used in debugging. Our evaluation shows that we successfully identified the locations of 87.80% known TADA implementations adopted from public repositories. In addition, we successfully pinpoint the locations of TADAs in 4 well-known malware samples that are documented in online malware analysis blogs.
We present a novel 4.5B parameter small language model that can handle multiple input and output modalities, including text, images, videos, and audio. Despite its small size, the model achieves near state-of-the-art performance on a variety of tasks, demonstrating the potential of multi-modal models to tackle complex real-world problems. Our approach leverages recent advancements in language modeling and multi-task learning to create a versatile and high-performing model that can even be deployed for edge inference. Experimental results show the model's strong performance across multiple benchmarks, paving the way for further progress in multi-modal artificial intelligence.
In this paper, we propose a novel framework for enhancing visual comprehension in autonomous driving systems by integrating visual language models (VLMs) with additional visual perception module specialised in object detection. We extend the Llama-Adapter architecture by incorporating a YOLOS-based detection network alongside the CLIP perception network, addressing limitations in object detection and localisation. Our approach introduces camera ID-separators to improve multi-view processing, crucial for comprehensive environmental awareness. Experiments on the DriveLM visual question answering challenge demonstrate significant improvements over baseline models, with enhanced performance in ChatGPT scores, BLEU scores, and CIDEr metrics, indicating closeness of model answer to ground truth. Our method represents a promising step towards more capable and interpretable autonomous driving systems. Possible safety enhancement enabled by detection modality is also discussed.
Over the past year, Speculative Decoding has gained popularity as a technique for accelerating Large Language Model inference. While several methods have been introduced, most struggle to deliver satisfactory performance at batch sizes typical for data centers ($\geq 8$) and often involve significant deployment complexities. In this work, we offer a theoretical explanation of how Speculative Decoding can be effectively utilized with larger batch sizes. We also introduce a method that integrates seamlessly into existing systems without additional training or the complexity of deploying a small LLM. In a continuous batching setting, we achieve a 4x increase in throughput without any latency impact for short context generation, and a 1.7-2x improvement in both latency and throughput for longer contexts.
Threat hunting analyzes large, noisy, high-dimensional data to find sparse adversarial behavior. We believe adversarial activities, however they are disguised, are extremely difficult to completely obscure in high dimensional space. In this paper, we employ these latent features of cyber data to find anomalies via a prototype tool called Cyber Log Embeddings Model (CLEM). CLEM was trained on Zeek network traffic logs from both a real-world production network and an from Internet of Things (IoT) cybersecurity testbed. The model is deliberately overtrained on a sliding window of data to characterize each window closely. We use the Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) to comparing the k-means clustering of CLEM output to expert labeling of the embeddings. Our approach demonstrates that there is promise in using natural language modeling to understand cyber data.
Network pruning focuses on computational techniques that aim to reduce a given model's computational cost by removing a subset of its parameters while having minimal impact on performance. Throughout the last decade, the most widely used pruning paradigm has been pruning and re-training, which nowadays is inconvenient due to the vast amount of pre-trained models, which are in any case too expensive to re-train. In this paper, we exploit functional information from dense pre-trained models, i.e., their activations, to obtain sparse models that maximize the activations' alignment w.r.t. their corresponding dense models. Hence, we propose \textsc{NeuroAL}, a \emph{top-up} algorithm that can be used on top of any given pruning algorithm for LLMs, which modifies the block-wise and row-wise sparsity exploiting information from both the dense model and its sparse version to maximize the \emph{neuron alignment} among activations. Differently from existing methods, our approach adaptively selects the best hyperparameters for the block-wise and row-wise sparsity ratios w.r.t. the model and the desired sparsity, and requires \emph{no re-training}. We test our method over 276 cases combining four LLM families, three sparsity ratios, and ten language tasks (three language modeling and seven zero-shot datasets), showing how it consistently outperforms the latest state-of-the-art methods in terms of performance-runtime trade-off. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/eliacunegatti/NeuroAL}{https://github.com/eliacunegatti/NeuroAL}.
This paper provides an in-depth analysis of Wave Network, a novel token representation method derived from the Wave Network, designed to capture both global and local semantics of input text through wave-inspired complex vectors. In complex vector token representation, each token is represented with a magnitude component, capturing the global semantics of the entire input text, and a phase component, encoding the relationships between individual tokens and the global semantics. Building on prior research that demonstrated the effectiveness of wave-like operations, such as interference and modulation, during forward propagation, this study investigates the convergence behavior, backpropagation characteristics, and embedding independence within the Token2Wave framework. A detailed computational complexity analysis shows that Token2Wave can significantly reduce video memory usage and training time compared to BERT. Gradient comparisons for the [CLS] token, total input text, and classifier parameters further highlight Token2Wave's unique characteristics. This research offers new insights into wave-based token representations, demonstrating their potential to enable efficient and computationally friendly language model architectures.
In this paper, we propose a novel LLM-Neo framework that efficiently transfers knowledge from a large language model (LLM) teacher to a compact student. Initially, we revisit the knowledge distillation (KD) and low-rank adaption (LoRA), and argue that they share the same paradigm. Inspired by this observation, we explore the strategy that combines LoRA and KD to enhance the efficiency of knowledge transfer. We first summarize some guidelines for this design and further develop the LLM-Neo. Experimental results on compressing Llama 2 and Llama 3 show that LLM-Neo outperforms various baselines. Further analysis demonstrates the robustness of the proposed LLM-Neo on variants of LoRA. The trained models have been available at \href{https://huggingface.co/collections/yang31210999/llm-neo-66e3c882f5579b829ff57eba}{this repository}.
Front-line police officers often categorize all police call reported cases of Telecom Fraud into 14 subcategories to facilitate targeted prevention measures, such as precise public education. However, the associated data is characterized by its large volume, diverse information content, and variations in expression. Currently, there is a lack of efficient and accurate intelligent models to replace manual classification, which, while precise, is relatively inefficient. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a text classification model that combines adversarial training with Pre-trained Language Model and neural networks. The Linguistically-motivated Pre-trained Language Model model extracts three types of language features and then utilizes the Fast Gradient Method algorithm to perturb the generated embedding layer. Subsequently, the Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory and Convolutional Neural Networks networks extract contextual syntactic information and local semantic information, respectively. The model achieved an 83.9% classification accuracy when trained on a portion of telecom fraud case data provided by the operational department. The model established in this paper has been deployed in the operational department, freeing up a significant amount of manpower and improving the department's efficiency in combating Telecom Fraud crimes. Furthermore, considering the universality of the model established in this paper, other application scenarios await further exploration.
Fine-tuning pre-trained models for downstream tasks is a widely adopted technique known for its adaptability and reliability across various domains. Despite its conceptual simplicity, fine-tuning entails several troublesome engineering choices, such as selecting hyperparameters and determining checkpoints from an optimization trajectory. To tackle the difficulty of choosing the best model, one effective solution is model fusion, which combines multiple models in a parameter space. However, we observe a large discrepancy between loss and metric landscapes during the fine-tuning of pre-trained language models. Building on this observation, we introduce a novel model fusion technique that optimizes both the desired metric and loss through multi-objective Bayesian optimization. In addition, to effectively select hyperparameters, we establish a two-stage procedure by integrating Bayesian optimization processes into our framework. Experiments across various downstream tasks show considerable performance improvements using our Bayesian optimization-guided method.
We explore the impact of pre-training data composition on the performance of small language models in a sample-efficient setting. Using datasets limited to 10 million words, we evaluate several dataset sources, including child-directed speech (CHILDES), classic books (Gutenberg), synthetic data (TinyStories), and a mix of these (Mix) across different model sizes ranging from 18 million to 705 million parameters. Our experiments show that smaller models (e.g., GPT2-97M, GPT2-705M, Llama-360M) perform better when trained on more complex and rich datasets like Gutenberg. Models trained on the CHILDES and TinyStories datasets underperformed across all model sizes. These findings suggest that the optimal dataset for sample efficient training depends on the model size, and that neither child-directed speech nor simplified stories are optimal for language models of all sizes. We highlight the importance of considering both dataset composition and model capacity for effective sample efficient language model training.
This paper presents LProtector, an automated vulnerability detection system for C/C++ codebases driven by the large language model (LLM) GPT-4o and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). As software complexity grows, traditional methods face challenges in detecting vulnerabilities effectively. LProtector leverages GPT-4o's powerful code comprehension and generation capabilities to perform binary classification and identify vulnerabilities within target codebases. We conducted experiments on the Big-Vul dataset, showing that LProtector outperforms two state-of-the-art baselines in terms of F1 score, demonstrating the potential of integrating LLMs with vulnerability detection.
The drive toward automating cellular network operations has grown with the increasing complexity of these systems. Despite advancements, full autonomy currently remains out of reach due to reliance on human intervention for modeling network behaviors and defining policies to meet target requirements. Network Digital Twins (NDTs) have shown promise in enhancing network intelligence, but the successful implementation of this technology is constrained by use case-specific architectures, limiting its role in advancing network autonomy. A more capable network intelligence, or "telecommunications brain", is needed to enable seamless, autonomous management of cellular network. Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as potential enablers for this vision but face challenges in network modeling, especially in reasoning and handling diverse data types. To address these gaps, we introduce Hermes, a chain of LLM agents that uses "blueprints" for constructing NDT instances through structured and explainable logical steps. Hermes allows automatic, reliable, and accurate network modeling of diverse use cases and configurations, thus marking progress toward fully autonomous network operations.