Long context is an important topic in Natural Language Processing (NLP), running through the development of NLP architectures, and offers immense opportunities for Large Language Models (LLMs) giving LLMs the lifelong learning potential akin to humans. Unfortunately, the pursuit of a long context is accompanied by numerous obstacles. Nevertheless, long context remains a core competitive advantage for LLMs. In the past two years, the context length of LLMs has achieved a breakthrough extension to millions of tokens. Moreover, the research on long-context LLMs has expanded from length extrapolation to a comprehensive focus on architecture, infrastructure, training, and evaluation technologies. Inspired by the symphonic poem, Thus Spake Zarathustra, we draw an analogy between the journey of extending the context of LLM and the attempts of humans to transcend its mortality. In this survey, We will illustrate how LLM struggles between the tremendous need for a longer context and its equal need to accept the fact that it is ultimately finite. To achieve this, we give a global picture of the lifecycle of long-context LLMs from four perspectives: architecture, infrastructure, training, and evaluation, showcasing the full spectrum of long-context technologies. At the end of this survey, we will present 10 unanswered questions currently faced by long-context LLMs. We hope this survey can serve as a systematic introduction to the research on long-context LLMs.
Financial bond yield forecasting is challenging due to data scarcity, nonlinear macroeconomic dependencies, and evolving market conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that leverages Causal Generative Adversarial Networks (CausalGANs) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) reinforcement learning (RL) to generate high-fidelity synthetic bond yield data for four major bond categories (AAA, BAA, US10Y, Junk). By incorporating 12 key macroeconomic variables, we ensure statistical fidelity by preserving essential market properties. To transform this market dependent synthetic data into actionable insights, we employ a finetuned Large Language Model (LLM) Qwen2.5-7B that generates trading signals (BUY/HOLD/SELL), risk assessments, and volatility projections. We use automated, human and LLM evaluations, all of which demonstrate that our framework improves forecasting performance over existing methods, with statistical validation via predictive accuracy, MAE evaluation(0.103%), profit/loss evaluation (60% profit rate), LLM evaluation (3.37/5) and expert assessments scoring 4.67 out of 5. The reinforcement learning-enhanced synthetic data generation achieves the least Mean Absolute Error of 0.103, demonstrating its effectiveness in replicating real-world bond market dynamics. We not only enhance data-driven trading strategies but also provides a scalable, high-fidelity synthetic financial data pipeline for risk & volatility management and investment decision-making. This work establishes a bridge between synthetic data generation, LLM driven financial forecasting, and language model evaluation, contributing to AI-driven financial decision-making.
Visually-situated text parsing (VsTP) has recently seen notable advancements, driven by the growing demand for automated document understanding and the emergence of large language models capable of processing document-based questions. While various methods have been proposed to tackle the complexities of VsTP, existing solutions often rely on task-specific architectures and objectives for individual tasks. This leads to modal isolation and complex workflows due to the diversified targets and heterogeneous schemas. In this paper, we introduce OmniParser V2, a universal model that unifies VsTP typical tasks, including text spotting, key information extraction, table recognition, and layout analysis, into a unified framework. Central to our approach is the proposed Structured-Points-of-Thought (SPOT) prompting schemas, which improves model performance across diverse scenarios by leveraging a unified encoder-decoder architecture, objective, and input\&output representation. SPOT eliminates the need for task-specific architectures and loss functions, significantly simplifying the processing pipeline. Our extensive evaluations across four tasks on eight different datasets show that OmniParser V2 achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results in VsTP. Additionally, we explore the integration of SPOT within a multimodal large language model structure, further enhancing text localization and recognition capabilities, thereby confirming the generality of SPOT prompting technique. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/AdvancedLiterateMachinery}{AdvancedLiterateMachinery}.
An increasingly prevalent socio-technical problem is people being taken in by offers that sound ``too good to be true'', where persuasion and trust shape decision-making. This paper investigates how \abr{ai} can help detect these deceptive scenarios. We analyze how humans strategically deceive each other in \textit{Diplomacy}, a board game that requires both natural language communication and strategic reasoning. This requires extracting logical forms of proposed agreements in player communications and computing the relative rewards of the proposal using agents' value functions. Combined with text-based features, this can improve our deception detection. Our method detects human deception with a high precision when compared to a Large Language Model approach that flags many true messages as deceptive. Future human-\abr{ai} interaction tools can build on our methods for deception detection by triggering \textit{friction} to give users a chance of interrogating suspicious proposals.
Large Language Model (LLM)-based cold-start recommendation systems continue to face significant computational challenges in billion-scale scenarios, as they follow a "Text-to-Judgment" paradigm. This approach processes user-item content pairs as input and evaluates each pair iteratively. To maintain efficiency, existing methods rely on pre-filtering a small candidate pool of user-item pairs. However, this severely limits the inferential capabilities of LLMs by reducing their scope to only a few hundred pre-filtered candidates. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel "Text-to-Distribution" paradigm, which predicts an item's interaction probability distribution for the entire user set in a single inference. Specifically, we present FilterLLM, a framework that extends the next-word prediction capabilities of LLMs to billion-scale filtering tasks. FilterLLM first introduces a tailored distribution prediction and cold-start framework. Next, FilterLLM incorporates an efficient user-vocabulary structure to train and store the embeddings of billion-scale users. Finally, we detail the training objectives for both distribution prediction and user-vocabulary construction. The proposed framework has been deployed on the Alibaba platform, where it has been serving cold-start recommendations for two months, processing over one billion cold items. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FilterLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in cold-start recommendation tasks, achieving over 30 times higher efficiency. Furthermore, an online A/B test validates its effectiveness in billion-scale recommendation systems.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged to address the knowledge-intensive visual question answering (VQA) task. Current methods mainly employ separate retrieval and generation modules to acquire external knowledge and generate answers, respectively. We propose ReAuSE, an alternative to the previous RAG model for the knowledge-based VQA task, which seamlessly integrates knowledge retriever into the generative multi-modal large language model, serving as a built-in search engine. Specifically, our model functions both as a generative retriever and an accurate answer generator. It not only helps retrieve documents from the knowledge base by producing identifiers for each document, but it also answers visual questions based on the retrieved documents. Furthermore, we propose a reinforced retrieval calibration module from relevance feedback to improve retrieval performance and align with the preferences for accurate answer generation. Extensive experiments on two representative OKVQA and A-OKVQA datasets demonstrate significant improvements ranging from 2.9\% to 9.6\% across all evaluation metrics when compared to strong baselines.
In this study, we investigate the integration of a large language model (LLM) with an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, specifically focusing on enhancing rare word recognition performance. Using a 190,000-hour dataset primarily sourced from YouTube, pre-processed with Whisper V3 pseudo-labeling, we demonstrate that the LLM-ASR architecture outperforms traditional Zipformer-Transducer models in the zero-shot rare word recognition task, after training on a large dataset. Our analysis reveals that the LLM contributes significantly to improvements in rare word error rate (R-WER), while the speech encoder primarily determines overall transcription performance (Orthographic Word Error Rate, O-WER, and Normalized Word Error Rate, N-WER). Through extensive ablation studies, we highlight the importance of adapter integration in aligning speech encoder outputs with the LLM's linguistic capabilities. Furthermore, we emphasize the critical role of high-quality labeled data in achieving optimal performance. These findings provide valuable insights into the synergy between LLM-based ASR architectures, paving the way for future advancements in large-scale LLM-based speech recognition systems.
Surface contamination on electrical grid insulators leads to an increase in leakage current until an electrical discharge occurs, which can result in a power system shutdown. To mitigate the possibility of disruptive faults resulting in a power outage, monitoring contamination and leakage current can help predict the progression of faults. Given this need, this paper proposes a hybrid deep learning (DL) model for predicting the increase in leakage current in high-voltage insulators. The hybrid structure considers a multi-criteria optimization using tree-structured Parzen estimation, an input stage filter for signal noise attenuation combined with a large language model (LLM) applied for time series forecasting. The proposed optimized LLM outperforms state-of-the-art DL models with a root-mean-square error equal to 2.24$\times10^{-4}$ for a short-term horizon and 1.21$\times10^{-3}$ for a medium-term horizon.
Large language models ($\textbf{LLMs}$) have emerged as a powerful method for discovery. Instead of utilizing numerical data, LLMs utilize associated variable $\textit{semantic metadata}$ to predict variable relationships. Simultaneously, LLMs demonstrate impressive abilities to act as black-box optimizers when given an objective $f$ and sequence of trials. We study LLMs at the intersection of these two capabilities by applying LLMs to the task of $\textit{interactive graph discovery}$: given a ground truth graph $G^*$ capturing variable relationships and a budget of $I$ edge experiments over $R$ rounds, minimize the distance between the predicted graph $\hat{G}_R$ and $G^*$ at the end of the $R$-th round. To solve this task we propose $\textbf{IGDA}$, a LLM-based pipeline incorporating two key components: 1) an LLM uncertainty-driven method for edge experiment selection 2) a local graph update strategy utilizing binary feedback from experiments to improve predictions for unselected neighboring edges. Experiments on eight different real-world graphs show our approach often outperforms all baselines including a state-of-the-art numerical method for interactive graph discovery. Further, we conduct a rigorous series of ablations dissecting the impact of each pipeline component. Finally, to assess the impact of memorization, we apply our interactive graph discovery strategy to a complex, new (as of July 2024) causal graph on protein transcription factors, finding strong performance in a setting where memorization is impossible. Overall, our results show IGDA to be a powerful method for graph discovery complementary to existing numerically driven approaches.
Understanding the effects of economic shocks on firms is critical for analyzing economic growth and resilience. We introduce a Web-Based Affectedness Indicator (WAI), a general-purpose tool for real-time monitoring of economic disruptions across diverse contexts. By leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) assisted classification and information extraction on texts from over five million company websites, WAI quantifies the degree and nature of firms' responses to external shocks. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a specific application, we show that WAI is highly correlated with pandemic containment measures and reliably predicts firm performance. Unlike traditional data sources, WAI provides timely firm-level information across industries and geographies worldwide that would otherwise be unavailable due to institutional and data availability constraints. This methodology offers significant potential for monitoring and mitigating the impact of technological, political, financial, health or environmental crises, and represents a transformative tool for adaptive policy-making and economic resilience.
Understanding the uncertainty in large language model (LLM) explanations is important for evaluating their faithfulness and reasoning consistency, and thus provides insights into the reliability of LLM's output regarding a question. In this work, we propose a novel framework that quantifies uncertainty in LLM explanations through a reasoning topology perspective. By designing a structural elicitation strategy, we guide the LLMs to frame the explanations of an answer into a graph topology. This process decomposes the explanations into the knowledge related sub-questions and topology-based reasoning structures, which allows us to quantify uncertainty not only at the semantic level but also from the reasoning path. It further brings convenience to assess knowledge redundancy and provide interpretable insights into the reasoning process. Our method offers a systematic way to interpret the LLM reasoning, analyze limitations, and provide guidance for enhancing robustness and faithfulness. This work pioneers the use of graph-structured uncertainty measurement in LLM explanations and demonstrates the potential of topology-based quantification.
The growing penetration of renewable energy sources in power systems has increased the complexity and uncertainty of load forecasting, especially for integrated energy systems with multiple energy carriers. Traditional forecasting methods heavily rely on historical data and exhibit limited transferability across different scenarios, posing significant challenges for emerging applications in smart grids and energy internet. This paper proposes the TSLLM-Load Forecasting Mechanism, a novel zero-shot load forecasting framework based on large language models (LLMs) to address these challenges. The framework consists of three key components: a data preprocessing module that handles multi-source energy load data, a time series prompt generation module that bridges the semantic gap between energy data and LLMs through multi-task learning and similarity alignment, and a prediction module that leverages pre-trained LLMs for accurate forecasting. The framework's effectiveness was validated on a real-world dataset comprising load profiles from 20 Australian solar-powered households, demonstrating superior performance in both conventional and zero-shot scenarios. In conventional testing, our method achieved a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 0.4163 and a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of 0.3760, outperforming existing approaches by at least 8\%. In zero-shot prediction experiments across 19 households, the framework maintained consistent accuracy with a total MSE of 11.2712 and MAE of 7.6709, showing at least 12\% improvement over current methods. The results validate the framework's potential for accurate and transferable load forecasting in integrated energy systems, particularly beneficial for renewable energy integration and smart grid applications.
Speculative decoding is a powerful technique that accelerates Large Language Model (LLM) inference by leveraging a lightweight speculative draft model. However, existing designs suffers in performance due to misalignment between training and inference. Recent methods have tried to solve this issue by adopting a multi-step training strategy, but the complex inputs of different training steps make it harder for the draft model to converge. To address this, we propose CORAL, a novel framework that improves both accuracy and efficiency in speculative drafting. CORAL introduces Cross-Step Representation Alignment, a method that enhances consistency across multiple training steps, significantly improving speculative drafting performance. Additionally, we identify the LM head as a major bottleneck in the inference speed of the draft model. We introduce a weight-grouping mechanism that selectively activates a subset of LM head parameters during inference, substantially reducing the latency of the draft model. We evaluate CORAL on three LLM families and three benchmark datasets, achieving speedup ratios of 2.50x-4.07x, outperforming state-of-the-art methods such as EAGLE-2 and HASS. Our results demonstrate that CORAL effectively mitigates training-inference misalignment and delivers significant speedup for modern LLMs with large vocabularies.
Cancer treatments require personalized approaches based on a patient's clinical condition, medical history, and evidence-based guidelines. The National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) provides frequently updated, complex guidelines through visuals like flowcharts and diagrams, which can be time consuming for oncologists to stay current with treatment protocols. This study presents an AI (Artificial Intelligence)-driven methodology to accurately automate treatment regimens following NCCN guidelines for breast cancer patients. We proposed two AI-driven methods: Agentic-RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and Graph-RAG. Agentic-RAG used a three-step Large Language Model (LLM) process to select clinical titles from NCCN guidelines, retrieve matching JSON content, and iteratively refine recommendations based on insufficiency checks. Graph-RAG followed a Microsoft-developed framework with proprietary prompts, where JSON data was converted to text via an LLM, summarized, and mapped into graph structures representing key treatment relationships. Final recommendations were generated by querying relevant graph summaries. Both were evaluated using a set of patient descriptions, each with four associated questions. As shown in Table 1, Agentic RAG achieved a 100% adherence (24/24) with no hallucinations or incorrect treatments. Graph-RAG had 95.8% adherence (23/24) with one incorrect treatment and no hallucinations. Chat GPT-4 showed 91.6% adherence (22/24) with two wrong treatments and no hallucinations. Both Agentic RAG and Graph-RAG provided detailed treatment recommendations with accurate references to relevant NCCN document page numbers.
Large language models (LLMs) provide a promising way for accurate session-based recommendation (SBR), but they demand substantial computational time and memory. Knowledge distillation (KD)-based methods can alleviate these issues by transferring the knowledge to a small student, which trains a student based on the predictions of a cumbersome teacher. However, these methods encounter difficulties for \textit{LLM-based KD in SBR}. 1) It is expensive to make LLMs predict for all instances in KD. 2) LLMs may make ineffective predictions for some instances in KD, e.g., incorrect predictions for hard instances or similar predictions as existing recommenders for easy instances. In this paper, we propose an active LLM-based KD method in SBR, contributing to sustainable AI. To efficiently distill knowledge from LLMs with limited cost, we propose to extract a small proportion of instances predicted by LLMs. Meanwhile, for a more effective distillation, we propose an active learning strategy to extract instances that are as effective as possible for KD from a theoretical view. Specifically, we first formulate gains based on potential effects (e.g., effective, similar, and incorrect predictions by LLMs) and difficulties (e.g., easy or hard to fit) of instances for KD. Then, we propose to maximize the minimal gains of distillation to find the optimal selection policy for active learning, which can largely avoid extracting ineffective instances in KD. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for SBR.
This paper presents an effective approach to detect AI-generated text, developed for the Defactify 4.0 shared task at the fourth workshop on multimodal fact checking and hate speech detection. The task consists of two subtasks: Task-A, classifying whether a text is AI generated or human written, and Task-B, classifying the specific large language model that generated the text. Our team (Sarang) achieved the 1st place in both tasks with F1 scores of 1.0 and 0.9531, respectively. The methodology involves adding noise to the dataset to improve model robustness and generalization. We used an ensemble of DeBERTa models to effectively capture complex patterns in the text. The result indicates the effectiveness of our noise-driven and ensemble-based approach, setting a new standard in AI-generated text detection and providing guidance for future developments.
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular method for interpreting concepts represented in large language model (LLM) activations. However, there is a lack of evidence regarding the validity of their interpretations due to the lack of a ground truth for the concepts used by an LLM, and a growing number of works have presented problems with current SAEs. One alternative source of evidence would be demonstrating that SAEs improve performance on downstream tasks beyond existing baselines. We test this by applying SAEs to the real-world task of LLM activation probing in four regimes: data scarcity, class imbalance, label noise, and covariate shift. Due to the difficulty of detecting concepts in these challenging settings, we hypothesize that SAEs' basis of interpretable, concept-level latents should provide a useful inductive bias. However, although SAEs occasionally perform better than baselines on individual datasets, we are unable to design ensemble methods combining SAEs with baselines that consistently outperform ensemble methods solely using baselines. Additionally, although SAEs initially appear promising for identifying spurious correlations, detecting poor dataset quality, and training multi-token probes, we are able to achieve similar results with simple non-SAE baselines as well. Though we cannot discount SAEs' utility on other tasks, our findings highlight the shortcomings of current SAEs and the need to rigorously evaluate interpretability methods on downstream tasks with strong baselines.
The next token prediction loss is the dominant self-supervised training objective for large language models and has achieved promising results in a variety of downstream tasks. However, upon closer investigation of this objective, we find that it lacks an understanding of sequence-level signals, leading to a mismatch between training and inference processes. To bridge this gap, we introduce a contrastive preference optimization (CPO) procedure that can inject sequence-level information into the language model at any training stage without expensive human labeled data. Our experiments show that the proposed objective surpasses the next token prediction in terms of win rate in the instruction-following and text generation tasks.
Companies across all economic sectors continue to deploy large language models at a rapid pace. Reinforcement learning is experiencing a resurgence of interest due to its association with the fine-tuning of language models from human feedback. Tool-chain language models control task-specific agents; if the converse has not already appeared, it soon will. In this paper, we present what we believe is the first investigation of an intelligent trading agent based on continuous deep reinforcement learning that also controls a large language model with which it can post to a social media feed observed by other traders. We empirically investigate the performance and impact of such an agent in a simulated financial market, finding that it learns to optimize its total reward, and thereby augment its profit, by manipulating the sentiment of the posts it produces. The paper concludes with discussion, limitations, and suggestions for future work.
Generative AI (GenAI) is increasingly used in survey contexts to simulate human preferences. While many research endeavors evaluate the quality of synthetic GenAI data by comparing model-generated responses to gold-standard survey results, fundamental questions about the validity and reliability of using LLMs as substitutes for human respondents remain. Our study provides a technical analysis of how demographic attributes and prompt variations influence latent opinion mappings in large language models (LLMs) and evaluates their suitability for survey-based predictions. Using 14 different models, we find that LLM-generated data fails to replicate the variance observed in real-world human responses, particularly across demographic subgroups. In the political space, persona-to-party mappings exhibit limited differentiation, resulting in synthetic data that lacks the nuanced distribution of opinions found in survey data. Moreover, we show that prompt sensitivity can significantly alter outputs for some models, further undermining the stability and predictiveness of LLM-based simulations. As a key contribution, we adapt a probe-based methodology that reveals how LLMs encode political affiliations in their latent space, exposing the systematic distortions introduced by these models. Our findings highlight critical limitations in AI-generated survey data, urging caution in its use for public opinion research, social science experimentation, and computational behavioral modeling.