As autonomous robotic systems become increasingly mature, users will want to specify missions at the level of intent rather than in low-level detail. Language is an expressive and intuitive medium for such mission specification. However, realizing language-guided robotic teams requires overcoming significant technical hurdles. Interpreting and realizing language-specified missions requires advanced semantic reasoning. Successful heterogeneous robots must effectively coordinate actions and share information across varying viewpoints. Additionally, communication between robots is typically intermittent, necessitating robust strategies that leverage communication opportunities to maintain coordination and achieve mission objectives. In this work, we present a first-of-its-kind system where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) are able to collaboratively accomplish missions specified in natural language while reacting to changes in specification on the fly. We leverage a Large Language Model (LLM)-enabled planner to reason over semantic-metric maps that are built online and opportunistically shared between an aerial and a ground robot. We consider task-driven navigation in urban and rural areas. Our system must infer mission-relevant semantics and actively acquire information via semantic mapping. In both ground and air-ground teaming experiments, we demonstrate our system on seven different natural-language specifications at up to kilometer-scale navigation.
Due to time constraints, mental health professionals in China are unable to offer patients prolonged talk therapy, leaving a gap in care for patients with psychological disorders, including aberrant sleep and eating patterns, maladaptive explanatory styles, and gastrointestinal dysfunction. To bridge this gap in care and address these problems in a large-scale manner, we built NeuroPal, a large language model (LLM)-assistant that provides scalable, evidence-based interventions with three clinically validated modules: (1) a sleep chronotherapy planner to output personalized circadian rhythm correction protocols, (2) a cognitive-behavioral reframing engine grounded in CBT and humanistic principles to shift negative attributional biases, and (3) a biochemical regulation advisor to output phytotherapy formulations to regulate sleep-metabolism-gut-axis imbalances. In collaboration with Peking Union Medical College Hospital and Xiangya Hospital Central South University, we ran an RCT protocol with 513 participants with mood/anxiety disorders and showed statistically significant improvements towards primary endpoints (> p<.01). Experiment shows 37.2% drop in the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), 28.6% rise in positive affective word usages (LIWC analysis), and 23.4% improvement in patient-reported digestive comfort. The assistant also reached 89.1% adherence rates, significantly higher than the human-guided therapy intervention (72.3%) in matched controls. Our results indicate that an LLM-driven multimodal intervention is able to successfully bridge time-constrained clinical practice while preserving therapeutic effectiveness. For next steps, we plan to explore longitudinal outcome tracking and FDA/CFDA certification routes.
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a new paradigm for enhancing Large Language Model reliability through integration with external knowledge sources. However, efficient deployment of these systems presents significant technical challenges due to their inherently heterogeneous computational pipelines comprising LLMs, databases, and specialized processing components. We introduce Patchwork, a comprehensive end-to-end RAG serving framework designed to address these efficiency bottlenecks. Patchwork's architecture offers three key innovations: First, it provides a flexible specification interface enabling users to implement custom RAG pipelines. Secondly, it deploys these pipelines as distributed inference systems while optimizing for the unique scalability characteristics of individual RAG components. Third, Patchwork incorporates an online scheduling mechanism that continuously monitors request load and execution progress, dynamically minimizing SLO violations through strategic request prioritization and resource auto-scaling. Our experimental evaluation across four distinct RAG implementations demonstrates that Patchwork delivers substantial performance improvements over commercial alternatives, achieving throughput gains exceeding 48% while simultaneously reducing SLO violations by ~24%.
Due to long generations, large language model (LLM) math reasoning demands significant computational resources and time. While many existing efficient inference methods have been developed with excellent performance preservation on language tasks, they often severely degrade math performance. In this paper, we propose Caprese, a low-cost distillation method to recover lost capabilities from deploying efficient inference methods, focused primarily in feedforward blocks. With original weights unperturbed, roughly 1% of additional parameters, and only 20K synthetic training samples, we are able to recover much if not all of the math capabilities lost from efficient inference for thinking LLMs and without harm to language tasks for instruct LLMs. Moreover, Caprese slashes the number of active parameters (~2B cut for Gemma 2 9B and Llama 3.1 8B) and integrates cleanly into existing model layers to reduce latency (>11% reduction to generate 2048 tokens with Qwen 2.5 14B) while encouraging response brevity.
Road crashes claim over 1.3 million lives annually worldwide and incur global economic losses exceeding \$1.8 trillion. Such profound societal and financial impacts underscore the urgent need for road safety research that uncovers crash mechanisms and delivers actionable insights. Conventional statistical models and tree ensemble approaches typically rely on structured crash data, overlooking contextual nuances and struggling to capture complex relationships and underlying semantics. Moreover, these approaches tend to incur significant information loss, particularly in narrative elements related to multi-vehicle interactions, crash progression, and rare event characteristics. This study presents CrashSage, a novel Large Language Model (LLM)-centered framework designed to advance crash analysis and modeling through four key innovations. First, we introduce a tabular-to-text transformation strategy paired with relational data integration schema, enabling the conversion of raw, heterogeneous crash data into enriched, structured textual narratives that retain essential structural and relational context. Second, we apply context-aware data augmentation using a base LLM model to improve narrative coherence while preserving factual integrity. Third, we fine-tune the LLaMA3-8B model for crash severity inference, demonstrating superior performance over baseline approaches, including zero-shot, zero-shot with chain-of-thought prompting, and few-shot learning, with multiple models (GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, LLaMA3-70B). Finally, we employ a gradient-based explainability technique to elucidate model decisions at both the individual crash level and across broader risk factor dimensions. This interpretability mechanism enhances transparency and enables targeted road safety interventions by providing deeper insights into the most influential factors.
The rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology has transformed people's way of life and has a profound impact on both production and daily activities. However, with the rapid advancement of IoT technology, the security of IoT devices has become an unavoidable issue in both research and applications. Although some efforts have been made to detect or mitigate IoT security vulnerabilities, they often struggle to adapt to the complexity of IoT environments, especially when dealing with dynamic security scenarios. How to automatically, efficiently, and accurately understand these vulnerabilities remains a challenge. To address this, we propose an IoT security assistant driven by Large Language Model (LLM), which enhances the LLM's understanding of IoT security vulnerabilities and related threats. The aim of the ICoT method we propose is to enable the LLM to understand security issues by breaking down the various dimensions of security vulnerabilities and generating responses tailored to the user's specific needs and expertise level. By incorporating ICoT, LLM can gradually analyze and reason through complex security scenarios, resulting in more accurate, in-depth, and personalized security recommendations and solutions. Experimental results show that, compared to methods relying solely on LLM, our proposed LLM-driven IoT security assistant significantly improves the understanding of IoT security issues through the ICoT approach and provides personalized solutions based on the user's identity, demonstrating higher accuracy and reliability.
Speculative decoding, which combines a draft model with a target model, has emerged as an effective approach to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference. However, existing methods often face a trade-off between the acceptance rate and decoding speed in downstream tasks due to the limited capacity of the draft model, making it difficult to ensure efficiency across diverse tasks. To address this problem, we propose a speculative decoding algorithm tailored for downstream task optimization. It includes an automatic task partitioning and assigning method, which automatically categorizes downstream tasks into different sub-tasks and assigns them to a set of heterogeneous draft models. Each draft model is aligned with the target model using task-specific data, thereby enhancing the consistency of inference results. In addition, our proposed method incorporates an online lightweight prompt classifier to dynamically route prompts to the appropriate draft model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves draft accuracy by 6% to 50% over vanilla speculative decoding, while achieving a speedup of 1.10x to 2.64x in LLM inference.
We study the post-training of large language models (LLMs) with human preference data. Recently, direct preference optimization and its variants have shown considerable promise in aligning language models, eliminating the need for reward models and online sampling. Despite these benefits, these methods rely on explicit assumptions about the Bradley-Terry (BT) model, which makes them prone to overfitting and results in suboptimal performance, particularly on reasoning-heavy tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a principled preference fine-tuning algorithm called InfoPO, which effectively and efficiently aligns large language models using preference data. InfoPO eliminates the reliance on the BT model and prevents the likelihood of the chosen response from decreasing. Extensive experiments confirm that InfoPO consistently outperforms established baselines on widely used open benchmarks, particularly in reasoning tasks.
Current deep learning models are mostly task specific and lack a user-friendly interface to operate. We present Meta-EyeFM, a multi-function foundation model that integrates a large language model (LLM) with vision foundation models (VFMs) for ocular disease assessment. Meta-EyeFM leverages a routing mechanism to enable accurate task-specific analysis based on text queries. Using Low Rank Adaptation, we fine-tuned our VFMs to detect ocular and systemic diseases, differentiate ocular disease severity, and identify common ocular signs. The model achieved 100% accuracy in routing fundus images to appropriate VFMs, which achieved $\ge$ 82.2% accuracy in disease detection, $\ge$ 89% in severity differentiation, $\ge$ 76% in sign identification. Meta-EyeFM was 11% to 43% more accurate than Gemini-1.5-flash and ChatGPT-4o LMMs in detecting various eye diseases and comparable to an ophthalmologist. This system offers enhanced usability and diagnostic performance, making it a valuable decision support tool for primary eye care or an online LLM for fundus evaluation.
The use of large language models (LLMs) as feature enhancers to optimize node representations, which are then used as inputs for graph neural networks (GNNs), has shown significant potential in graph representation learning. However, the fundamental properties of this approach remain underexplored. To address this issue, we propose conducting a more in-depth analysis of this issue based on the interchange intervention method. First, we construct a synthetic graph dataset with controllable causal relationships, enabling precise manipulation of semantic relationships and causal modeling to provide data for analysis. Using this dataset, we conduct interchange interventions to examine the deeper properties of LLM enhancers and GNNs, uncovering their underlying logic and internal mechanisms. Building on the analytical results, we design a plug-and-play optimization module to improve the information transfer between LLM enhancers and GNNs. Experiments across multiple datasets and models validate the proposed module.
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has outpaced traditional evaluation methodologies. It presents novel challenges, such as measuring human-like psychological constructs, navigating beyond static and task-specific benchmarks, and establishing human-centered evaluation. These challenges intersect with Psychometrics, the science of quantifying the intangible aspects of human psychology, such as personality, values, and intelligence. This survey introduces and synthesizes an emerging interdisciplinary field of LLM Psychometrics, which leverages psychometric instruments, theories, and principles to evaluate, understand, and enhance LLMs. We systematically explore the role of Psychometrics in shaping benchmarking principles, broadening evaluation scopes, refining methodologies, validating results, and advancing LLM capabilities. This paper integrates diverse perspectives to provide a structured framework for researchers across disciplines, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of this nascent field. Ultimately, we aim to provide actionable insights for developing future evaluation paradigms that align with human-level AI and promote the advancement of human-centered AI systems for societal benefit. A curated repository of LLM psychometric resources is available at https://github.com/valuebyte-ai/Awesome-LLM-Psychometrics.
The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has provided significant support and opportunities for the advancement of domain-specific LLMs. However, fine-tuning these large models using Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) data inevitably faces challenges such as bias, incorrect knowledge inheritance, and catastrophic forgetting. To address these issues, we propose a novel training method that integrates a bidirectional chains of thought and a reward mechanism. This method is built upon ICH-Qwen, a large language model specifically designed for the field of intangible cultural heritage. The proposed method enables the model to not only perform forward reasoning but also enhances the accuracy of the generated answers by utilizing reverse questioning and reverse reasoning to activate the model's latent knowledge. Additionally, a reward mechanism is introduced during training to optimize the decision-making process. This mechanism improves the quality of the model's outputs through structural and content evaluations with different weighting schemes. We conduct comparative experiments on ICH-Qwen, with results demonstrating that our method outperforms 0-shot, step-by-step reasoning, knowledge distillation, and question augmentation methods in terms of accuracy, Bleu-4, and Rouge-L scores on the question-answering task. Furthermore, the paper highlights the effectiveness of combining the bidirectional chains of thought and reward mechanism through ablation experiments. In addition, a series of generalizability experiments are conducted, with results showing that the proposed method yields improvements on various domain-specific datasets and advanced models in areas such as Finance, Wikidata, and StrategyQA. This demonstrates that the method is adaptable to multiple domains and provides a valuable approach for model training in future applications across diverse fields.
In the age of social media, the rapid spread of misinformation and rumors has led to the emergence of infodemics, where false information poses a significant threat to society. To combat this issue, we introduce TrumorGPT , a novel generative artificial intelligence solution designed for fact-checking in the health domain. TrumorGPT aims to distinguish "trumors", which are health-related rumors that turn out to be true, providing a crucial tool in differentiating between mere speculation and verified facts. This framework leverages a large language model (LLM) with few-shot learning for semantic health knowledge graph construction and semantic reasoning. TrumorGPT incorporates graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) to address the hallucination issue common in LLMs and the limitations of static training data. GraphRAG involves accessing and utilizing information from regularly updated semantic health knowledge graphs that consist of the latest medical news and health information, ensuring that fact-checking by TrumorGPT is based on the most recent data. Evaluating with extensive healthcare datasets, TrumorGPT demonstrates superior performance in fact-checking for public health claims. Its ability to effectively conduct fact-checking across various platforms marks a critical step forward in the fight against health-related misinformation, enhancing trust and accuracy in the digital information age.
Rational decision-making under uncertainty requires coherent degrees of belief in events. However, event probabilities generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to exhibit incoherence, violating the axioms of probability theory. This raises the question of whether coherent event probabilities can be recovered from the embeddings used by the models. If so, those derived probabilities could be used as more accurate estimates in events involving uncertainty. To explore this question, we propose enforcing axiomatic constraints, such as the additive rule of probability theory, in the latent space learned by an extended variational autoencoder (VAE) applied to LLM embeddings. This approach enables event probabilities to naturally emerge in the latent space as the VAE learns to both reconstruct the original embeddings and predict the embeddings of semantically related events. We evaluate our method on complementary events (i.e., event A and its complement, event not-A), where the true probabilities of the two events must sum to 1. Experiment results on open-weight language models demonstrate that probabilities recovered from embeddings exhibit greater coherence than those directly reported by the corresponding models and align closely with the true probabilities.
As large language models (LLMs) continue to be deployed and utilized across domains, the volume of LLM-generated data is growing rapidly. This trend highlights the increasing importance of effective and lossless compression for such data in modern text management systems. However, compressing LLM-generated data presents unique challenges compared to traditional human- or machine-generated content. Traditional machine-generated data is typically derived from computational processes or device outputs, often highly structured and limited to low-level elements like labels or numerical values. This structure enables conventional lossless compressors to perform efficiently. In contrast, LLM-generated data is more complex and diverse, requiring new approaches for effective compression. In this work, we conduct the first systematic investigation of lossless compression techniques tailored specifically to LLM-generated data. Notably, because LLMs are trained via next-token prediction, we find that LLM-generated data is highly predictable for the models themselves. This predictability enables LLMs to serve as efficient compressors of their own outputs. Through extensive experiments with 14 representative LLMs and 8 LLM-generated datasets from diverse domains, we show that LLM-based prediction methods achieve remarkable compression rates, exceeding 20x, far surpassing the 3x rate achieved by Gzip, a widely used general-purpose compressor. Furthermore, this advantage holds across different LLM sizes and dataset types, demonstrating the robustness and practicality of LLM-based methods in lossless text compression under generative AI workloads.
Recent improvement in large language model performance have, in all likelihood, been accompanied by improvement in how well they can approximate the distribution of their training data. In this work, we explore the following question: which properties of text domains do LLMs faithfully approximate, and how well do they do so? Applying observational approaches familiar from corpus linguistics, we prompt a commonly used, opensource LLM to regenerate text from two domains of permissively licensed English text which are often contained in LLM training data -- Wikipedia and news text. This regeneration paradigm allows us to investigate whether LLMs can faithfully match the original human text domains in a fairly semantically-controlled setting. We investigate varying levels of syntactic abstraction, from more simple properties like sentence length, and article readability, to more complex and higher order properties such as dependency tag distribution, parse depth, and parse complexity. We find that the majority of the regenerated distributions show a shifted mean, a lower standard deviation, and a reduction of the long tail, as compared to the human originals.
Systematic reviews are comprehensive literature reviews that address highly focused research questions and represent the highest form of evidence in medicine. A critical step in this process is the development of complex Boolean queries to retrieve relevant literature. Given the difficulty of manually constructing these queries, recent efforts have explored Large Language Models (LLMs) to assist in their formulation. One of the first studies,Wang et al., investigated ChatGPT for this task, followed by Staudinger et al., which evaluated multiple LLMs in a reproducibility study. However, the latter overlooked several key aspects of the original work, including (i) validation of generated queries, (ii) output formatting constraints, and (iii) selection of examples for chain-of-thought (Guided) prompting. As a result, its findings diverged significantly from the original study. In this work, we systematically reproduce both studies while addressing these overlooked factors. Our results show that query effectiveness varies significantly across models and prompt designs, with guided query formulation benefiting from well-chosen seed studies. Overall, prompt design and model selection are key drivers of successful query formulation. Our findings provide a clearer understanding of LLMs' potential in Boolean query generation and highlight the importance of model- and prompt-specific optimisations. The complex nature of systematic reviews adds to challenges in both developing and reproducing methods but also highlights the importance of reproducibility studies in this domain.
A web crawler is a system designed to collect web pages, and efficient crawling of new pages requires appropriate algorithms. While website features such as XML sitemaps and the frequency of past page updates provide important clues for accessing new pages, their universal application across diverse conditions is challenging. In this study, we propose a method to efficiently collect new pages by classifying web pages into two types, "Index Pages" and "Content Pages," using a large language model (LLM), and leveraging the classification results to select index pages as starting points for accessing new pages. We construct a dataset with automatically annotated web page types and evaluate our approach from two perspectives: the page type classification performance and coverage of new pages. Experimental results demonstrate that the LLM-based method outperformed baseline methods in both evaluation metrics.
Australia and the UK have developed contrasting approaches to the regulation of electronic cigarettes, with - broadly speaking - Australia adopting a relatively restrictive approach and the UK adopting a more permissive approach. Notably, these divergent policies were developed from the same broad evidence base. In this paper, to investigate differences in how the two jurisdictions manage and present evidence, we developed and evaluated a Large Language Model-based sentence classifier to perform automated analyses of electronic cigarette-related policy documents drawn from official Australian and UK legislative processes (109 documents in total). Specifically, we utilized GPT-4 to automatically classify sentences based on whether they contained claims that e-cigarettes were broadly helpful or harmful for public health. Our LLM-based classifier achieved an F-score of 0.9. Further, when applying the classifier to our entire sentence-level corpus, we found that Australian legislative documents show a much higher proportion of harmful statements, and a lower proportion of helpful statements compared to the expected values, with the opposite holding for the UK. In conclusion, this work utilized an LLM-based approach to provide evidence to support the contention that - drawing on the same evidence base - Australian ENDS-related policy documents emphasize the harms associated with ENDS products and UK policy documents emphasize the benefits. Further, our approach provides a starting point for using LLM-based methods to investigate the complex relationship between evidence and health policy formation.
SIEM systems serve as a critical hub, employing rule-based logic to detect and respond to threats. Redundant or overlapping rules in SIEM systems lead to excessive false alerts, degrading analyst performance due to alert fatigue, and increase computational overhead and response latency for actual threats. As a result, optimizing SIEM rule sets is essential for efficient operations. Despite the importance of such optimization, research in this area is limited, with current practices relying on manual optimization methods that are both time-consuming and error-prone due to the scale and complexity of enterprise-level rule sets. To address this gap, we present RuleGenie, a novel large language model (LLM) aided recommender system designed to optimize SIEM rule sets. Our approach leverages transformer models' multi-head attention capabilities to generate SIEM rule embeddings, which are then analyzed using a similarity matching algorithm to identify the top-k most similar rules. The LLM then processes the rules identified, utilizing its information extraction, language understanding, and reasoning capabilities to analyze rule similarity, evaluate threat coverage and performance metrics, and deliver optimized recommendations for refining the rule set. By automating the rule optimization process, RuleGenie allows security teams to focus on more strategic tasks while enhancing the efficiency of SIEM systems and strengthening organizations' security posture. We evaluated RuleGenie on a comprehensive set of real-world SIEM rule formats, including Splunk, Sigma, and AQL (Ariel query language), demonstrating its platform-agnostic capabilities and adaptability across diverse security infrastructures. Our experimental results show that RuleGenie can effectively identify redundant rules, which in turn decreases false positive rates and enhances overall rule efficiency.