Educational Personalized Learning Path Planning (PLPP) aims to tailor learning experiences to individual learners' needs, enhancing learning efficiency and engagement. Despite its potential, traditional PLPP systems often lack adaptability, interactivity, and transparency. This paper proposes a novel approach integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with prompt engineering to address these challenges. By designing prompts that incorporate learner-specific information, our method guides LLMs like LLama-2-70B and GPT-4 to generate personalized, coherent, and pedagogically sound learning paths. We conducted experiments comparing our method with a baseline approach across various metrics, including accuracy, user satisfaction, and the quality of learning paths. The results show significant improvements in all areas, particularly with GPT-4, demonstrating the effectiveness of prompt engineering in enhancing PLPP. Additional long-term impact analysis further validates our method's potential to improve learner performance and retention. This research highlights the promise of LLMs and prompt engineering in advancing personalized education.
Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is one of the central problems in fields such as healthcare, elderly care, and security at home. However, traditional HAR approaches face challenges including data scarcity, difficulties in model generalization, and the complexity of recognizing activities in multi-person scenarios. This paper proposes a system framework called LAHAR, based on large language models. Utilizing prompt engineering techniques, LAHAR addresses HAR in multi-person scenarios by enabling subject separation and action-level descriptions of events occurring in the environment. We validated our approach on the ARAS dataset, and the results demonstrate that LAHAR achieves comparable accuracy to the state-of-the-art method at higher resolutions and maintains robustness in multi-person scenarios.
As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly prevalent in critical applications, the need for interpretable AI has grown. We introduce TokenSHAP, a novel method for interpreting LLMs by attributing importance to individual tokens or substrings within input prompts. This approach adapts Shapley values from cooperative game theory to natural language processing, offering a rigorous framework for understanding how different parts of an input contribute to a model's response. TokenSHAP leverages Monte Carlo sampling for computational efficiency, providing interpretable, quantitative measures of token importance. We demonstrate its efficacy across diverse prompts and LLM architectures, showing consistent improvements over existing baselines in alignment with human judgments, faithfulness to model behavior, and consistency. Our method's ability to capture nuanced interactions between tokens provides valuable insights into LLM behavior, enhancing model transparency, improving prompt engineering, and aiding in the development of more reliable AI systems. TokenSHAP represents a significant step towards the necessary interpretability for responsible AI deployment, contributing to the broader goal of creating more transparent, accountable, and trustworthy AI systems.
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for model reliability, as it identifies samples from unknown classes and reduces errors due to unexpected inputs. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP are emerging as powerful tools for OOD detection by integrating multi-modal information. However, the practical application of such systems is challenged by manual prompt engineering, which demands domain expertise and is sensitive to linguistic nuances. In this paper, we introduce Label-driven Automated Prompt Tuning (LAPT), a novel approach to OOD detection that reduces the need for manual prompt engineering. We develop distribution-aware prompts with in-distribution (ID) class names and negative labels mined automatically. Training samples linked to these class labels are collected autonomously via image synthesis and retrieval methods, allowing for prompt learning without manual effort. We utilize a simple cross-entropy loss for prompt optimization, with cross-modal and cross-distribution mixing strategies to reduce image noise and explore the intermediate space between distributions, respectively. The LAPT framework operates autonomously, requiring only ID class names as input and eliminating the need for manual intervention. With extensive experiments, LAPT consistently outperforms manually crafted prompts, setting a new standard for OOD detection. Moreover, LAPT not only enhances the distinction between ID and OOD samples, but also improves the ID classification accuracy and strengthens the generalization robustness to covariate shifts, resulting in outstanding performance in challenging full-spectrum OOD detection tasks. Codes are available at \url{https://github.com/YBZh/LAPT}.
Power grid fault diagnosis is a critical task for ensuring the reliability and stability of electrical infrastructure. Traditional diagnostic systems often struggle with the complexity and variability of power grid data. This paper proposes a novel approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically ChatGPT and GPT-4, combined with advanced prompt engineering to enhance fault diagnosis accuracy and explainability. We designed comprehensive, context-aware prompts to guide the LLMs in interpreting complex data and providing detailed, actionable insights. Our method was evaluated against baseline techniques, including standard prompting, Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and Tree-of-Thought (ToT) methods, using a newly constructed dataset comprising real-time sensor data, historical fault records, and component descriptions. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in diagnostic accuracy, explainability quality, response coherence, and contextual understanding, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach. These findings suggest that prompt-engineered LLMs offer a promising solution for robust and reliable power grid fault diagnosis.
Large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning have significantly improved the performance of text-to-SQL task. Previous works generally focus on using exclusive SQL generation prompt to improve the LLMs' reasoning ability. However, they are mostly hard to handle large databases with numerous tables and columns, and usually ignore the significance of pre-processing database and extracting valuable information for more efficient prompt engineering. Based on above analysis, we propose RB-SQL, a novel retrieval-based LLM framework for in-context prompt engineering, which consists of three modules that retrieve concise tables and columns as schema, and targeted examples for in-context learning. Experiment results demonstrate that our model achieves better performance than several competitive baselines on public datasets BIRD and Spider.
We introduce a novel application of large language models (LLMs) in developing a virtual counselor capable of conducting motivational interviewing (MI) for alcohol use counseling. Access to effective counseling remains limited, particularly for substance abuse, and virtual agents offer a promising solution by leveraging LLM capabilities to simulate nuanced communication techniques inherent in MI. Our approach combines prompt engineering and integration into a user-friendly virtual platform to facilitate realistic, empathetic interactions. We evaluate the effectiveness of our virtual agent through a series of studies focusing on replicating MI techniques and human counselor dialog. Initial findings suggest that our LLM-powered virtual agent matches human counselors' empathetic and adaptive conversational skills, presenting a significant step forward in virtual health counseling and providing insights into the design and implementation of LLM-based therapeutic interactions.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence, demonstrating remarkable computational power and linguistic capabilities. However, these models are inherently prone to various biases stemming from their training data. These include selection, linguistic, and confirmation biases, along with common stereotypes related to gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, socioeconomic status, disability, and age. This study explores the presence of these biases within the responses given by the most recent LLMs, analyzing the impact on their fairness and reliability. We also investigate how known prompt engineering techniques can be exploited to effectively reveal hidden biases of LLMs, testing their adversarial robustness against jailbreak prompts specially crafted for bias elicitation. Extensive experiments are conducted using the most widespread LLMs at different scales, confirming that LLMs can still be manipulated to produce biased or inappropriate responses, despite their advanced capabilities and sophisticated alignment processes. Our findings underscore the importance of enhancing mitigation techniques to address these safety issues, toward a more sustainable and inclusive artificial intelligence.
This work explores how to fine-tune large language models using prompt engineering techniques with contextual information for generating an accurate text description of the full story, ready to be forwarded to off-the-shelve speech synthesis tools. We propose to use existing computer vision and optical character recognition techniques to build a grounded context from the comic strip image content, such as panels, characters, text, reading order and the association of bubbles and characters. Then we infer character identification and generate comic book script with context-aware panel description including character's appearance, posture, mood, dialogues etc. We believe that such enriched content description can be easily used to produce audiobook and eBook with various voices for characters, captions and playing sound effects.
Our team participated in the BioASQ 2024 Task12b and Synergy tasks to build a system that can answer biomedical questions by retrieving relevant articles and snippets from the PubMed database and generating exact and ideal answers. We propose a two-level information retrieval and question-answering system based on pre-trained large language models (LLM), focused on LLM prompt engineering and response post-processing. We construct prompts with in-context few-shot examples and utilize post-processing techniques like resampling and malformed response detection. We compare the performance of various pre-trained LLM models on this challenge, including Mixtral, OpenAI GPT and Llama2. Our best-performing system achieved 0.14 MAP score on document retrieval, 0.05 MAP score on snippet retrieval, 0.96 F1 score for yes/no questions, 0.38 MRR score for factoid questions and 0.50 F1 score for list questions in Task 12b.
In recent years, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred a growing demand for plug-and-play AI systems. Among the various AI techniques, prompt engineering stands out as particularly significant. However, users often face challenges in writing prompts due to the steep learning curve and significant time investment, and existing automatic prompt engineering (APE) models can be difficult to use. To address this issue, we propose PAS, an LLM-based plug-and-play APE system. PAS utilizes LLMs trained on high-quality, automatically generated prompt complementary datasets, resulting in exceptional performance. In comprehensive benchmarks, PAS achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) results compared to previous APE models, with an average improvement of 6.09 points. Moreover, PAS is highly efficient, achieving SoTA performance with only 9000 data points. Additionally, PAS can autonomously generate prompt augmentation data without requiring additional human labor. Its flexibility also allows it to be compatible with all existing LLMs and applicable to a wide range of tasks. PAS excels in human evaluations, underscoring its suitability as a plug-in for users. This combination of high performance, efficiency, and flexibility makes PAS a valuable system for enhancing the usability and effectiveness of LLMs through improved prompt engineering.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are flourishing, but mainly focus on images with less attention than videos, especially in sub-fields such as prompt engineering, video chain-of-thought (CoT), and instruction tuning on videos. Therefore, we try to explore the collection of CoT datasets in videos to lead to video OpenQA and improve the reasoning ability of MLLMs. Unfortunately, making such video CoT datasets is not an easy task. Given that human annotation is too cumbersome and expensive, while machine-generated is not reliable due to the hallucination issue, we develop an automatic annotation tool that combines machine and human experts, under the active learning paradigm. Active learning is an interactive strategy between the model and human experts, in this way, the workload of human labeling can be reduced and the quality of the dataset can be guaranteed. With the help of the automatic annotation tool, we strive to contribute three datasets, namely VideoCoT, TopicQA, TopicCoT. Furthermore, we propose a simple but effective benchmark based on the collected datasets, which exploits CoT to maximize the complex reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness our solution.
Object tracking in satellite videos remains a complex endeavor in remote sensing due to the intricate and dynamic nature of satellite imagery. Existing state-of-the-art trackers in computer vision integrate sophisticated architectures, attention mechanisms, and multi-modal fusion to enhance tracking accuracy across diverse environments. However, the challenges posed by satellite imagery, such as background variations, atmospheric disturbances, and low-resolution object delineation, significantly impede the precision and reliability of traditional Single Object Tracking (SOT) techniques. Our study delves into these challenges and proposes prompt engineering methodologies, leveraging the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and TAPIR (Tracking Any Point with per-frame Initialization and temporal Refinement), to create a training-free point-based tracking method for small-scale objects on satellite videos. Experiments on the VISO dataset validate our strategy, marking a significant advancement in robust tracking solutions tailored for satellite imagery in remote sensing applications.
Large language models (LLMs) and prompt engineering hold significant potential for advancing computer programming education through personalized instruction. This paper explores this potential by investigating three critical research questions: the systematic categorization of prompt engineering strategies tailored to diverse educational needs, the empowerment of LLMs to solve complex problems beyond their inherent capabilities, and the establishment of a robust framework for evaluating and implementing these strategies. Our methodology involves categorizing programming questions based on educational requirements, applying various prompt engineering strategies, and assessing the effectiveness of LLM-generated responses. Experiments with GPT-4, GPT-4o, Llama3-8b, and Mixtral-8x7b models on datasets such as LeetCode and USACO reveal that GPT-4o consistently outperforms others, particularly with the "multi-step" prompt strategy. The results show that tailored prompt strategies significantly enhance LLM performance, with specific strategies recommended for foundational learning, competition preparation, and advanced problem-solving. This study underscores the crucial role of prompt engineering in maximizing the educational benefits of LLMs. By systematically categorizing and testing these strategies, we provide a comprehensive framework for both educators and students to optimize LLM-based learning experiences. Future research should focus on refining these strategies and addressing current LLM limitations to further enhance educational outcomes in computer programming instruction.
Currently, the vast majority of locally deployed open-source large language models (LLMs) and some commercial model interfaces do not support stable tool calling functionality. The existing solution involves fine-tuning LLMs, which results in significant time and computational resource consumption. This paper proposes a method that enables LLMs to achieve stable tool calling capabilities using only prompt engineering and some ingenious code design. We conducted experiments on multiple LLMs that lack tool calling capabilities across various tool calling tasks, achieving a success rate of 100%.
We present and evaluate a method called grammar masking, which is used to guide large language models (LLMs) toward producing syntactically correct models for a given context-free grammar. Prompt engineering methods such as few-shot learning or priming can be used to improve the chances of an LLM producing correct syntax, but the more complex the grammar, the more time-consuming and less promising these methods become. Previous work is focused primarily on the usage of either language model training or prompt engineering. In this work, a method is presented that restricts the output to a given grammar using constrained decoding to ensure the output adheres to a valid syntax. We use several DSLs built with MontiCore and task multiple LLMs to produce models with and without constrained decoding. A corresponding parser is used to confirm the syntactic correctness of each model. We show that grammar masking can dramatically improve the modeling capabilities of several LLMs, reducing the need for well-refined prompting while increasing the chance of producing correct models.
We introduce the sequence classification problem CIViC Evidence to the field of medical NLP. CIViC Evidence denotes the multi-label classification problem of assigning labels of clinical evidence to abstracts of scientific papers which have examined various combinations of genomic variants, cancer types, and treatment approaches. We approach CIViC Evidence using different language models: We fine-tune pretrained checkpoints of BERT and RoBERTa on the CIViC Evidence dataset and challenge their performance with models of the same architecture which have been pretrained on domain-specific text. In this context, we find that BiomedBERT and BioLinkBERT can outperform BERT on CIViC Evidence (+0.8% and +0.9% absolute improvement in class-support weighted F1 score). All transformer-based models show a clear performance edge when compared to a logistic regression trained on bigram tf-idf scores (+1.5 - 2.7% improved F1 score). We compare the aforementioned BERT-like models to OpenAI's GPT-4 in a few-shot setting (on a small subset of our original test dataset), demonstrating that, without additional prompt-engineering or fine-tuning, GPT-4 performs worse on CIViC Evidence than our six fine-tuned models (66.1% weighted F1 score compared to 71.8% for the best fine-tuned model). However, performance gets reasonably close to the benchmark of a logistic regression model trained on bigram tf-idf scores (67.7% weighted F1 score).
This demo presents a novel end-to-end framework that combines on-device large language models (LLMs) with smartphone sensing technologies to achieve context-aware and personalized services. The framework addresses critical limitations of current personalization solutions via cloud LLMs, such as privacy concerns, latency and cost, and limited personal information. To achieve this, we innovatively proposed deploying LLMs on smartphones with multimodal sensor data through context-aware sensing and customized prompt engineering, ensuring privacy and enhancing personalization performance. A case study involving a university student demonstrated the capability of the framework to provide tailored recommendations. In addition, we show that the framework achieves the best trade-off in privacy, performance, latency, cost, battery and energy consumption between on-device and cloud LLMs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first framework to provide on-device LLMs personalization with smartphone sensing. Future work will incorporate more diverse sensor data and involve extensive user studies to enhance personalization. Our proposed framework has the potential to substantially improve user experiences across domains including healthcare, productivity, and entertainment.
Prompt engineering, as an efficient and effective way to leverage Large Language Models (LLM), has drawn a lot of attention from the research community. The existing research primarily emphasizes the importance of adapting prompts to specific tasks, rather than specific LLMs. However, a good prompt is not solely defined by its wording, but also binds to the nature of the LLM in question. In this work, we first quantitatively demonstrate that different prompts should be adapted to different LLMs to enhance their capabilities across various downstream tasks in NLP. Then we novelly propose a model-adaptive prompt optimizer (MAPO) method that optimizes the original prompts for each specific LLM in downstream tasks. Extensive experiments indicate that the proposed method can effectively refine prompts for an LLM, leading to significant improvements over various downstream tasks.
Interleaved practice enhances the memory and problem-solving ability of students in undergraduate courses. We introduce a personalized learning tool built on a Large Language Model (LLM) that can provide immediate and personalized attention to students as they complete homework containing problems interleaved from undergraduate physics courses. Our tool leverages the dimensional analysis method, enhancing students' qualitative thinking and problem-solving skills for complex phenomena. Our approach combines LLMs for symbolic regression with dimensional analysis via prompt engineering and offers students a unique perspective to comprehend relationships between physics variables. This fosters a broader and more versatile understanding of physics and mathematical principles and complements a conventional undergraduate physics education that relies on interpreting and applying established equations within specific contexts. We test our personalized learning tool on the equations from Feynman's lectures on physics. Our tool can correctly identify relationships between physics variables for most equations, underscoring its value as a complementary personalized learning tool for undergraduate physics students.