Advances in natural language processing and large language models have sparked growing interest in modeling DNA, often referred to as the "language of life". However, DNA modeling poses unique challenges. First, it requires the ability to process ultra-long DNA sequences while preserving single-nucleotide resolution, as individual nucleotides play a critical role in DNA function. Second, success in this domain requires excelling at both generative and understanding tasks: generative tasks hold potential for therapeutic and industrial applications, while understanding tasks provide crucial insights into biological mechanisms and diseases. To address these challenges, we propose HybriDNA, a decoder-only DNA language model that incorporates a hybrid Transformer-Mamba2 architecture, seamlessly integrating the strengths of attention mechanisms with selective state-space models. This hybrid design enables HybriDNA to efficiently process DNA sequences up to 131kb in length with single-nucleotide resolution. HybriDNA achieves state-of-the-art performance across 33 DNA understanding datasets curated from the BEND, GUE, and LRB benchmarks, and demonstrates exceptional capability in generating synthetic cis-regulatory elements (CREs) with desired properties. Furthermore, we show that HybriDNA adheres to expected scaling laws, with performance improving consistently as the model scales from 300M to 3B and 7B parameters. These findings underscore HybriDNA's versatility and its potential to advance DNA research and applications, paving the way for innovations in understanding and engineering the "language of life".
While most current approaches rely on further training techniques, such as fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, to enhance model capacities, model merging stands out for its ability of improving models without requiring any additional training. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for model merging based on low-rank estimation of task vectors without the need for access to the base model, named \textsc{LoRE-Merging}. Our approach is motivated by the observation that task vectors from fine-tuned models frequently exhibit a limited number of dominant singular values, making low-rank estimations less prone to interference. We implement the method by formulating the merging problem as an optimization problem. Extensive empirical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in mitigating interference and preserving task-specific information, thereby advancing the state-of-the-art performance in model merging techniques.
As LLM-as-a-Judge emerges as a new paradigm for assessing large language models (LLMs), concerns have been raised regarding the alignment, bias, and stability of LLM evaluators. While substantial work has focused on alignment and bias, little research has concentrated on the stability of LLM evaluators. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments involving 9 widely used LLM evaluators across 2 different evaluation settings to investigate the uncertainty in model-based LLM evaluations. We pinpoint that LLM evaluators exhibit varying uncertainty based on model families and sizes. With careful comparative analyses, we find that employing special prompting strategies, whether during inference or post-training, can alleviate evaluation uncertainty to some extent. By utilizing uncertainty to enhance LLM's reliability and detection capability in Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) data, we further fine-tune an uncertainty-aware LLM evaluator named ConfiLM using a human-annotated fine-tuning set and assess ConfiLM's OOD evaluation ability on a manually designed test set sourced from the 2024 Olympics. Experimental results demonstrate that incorporating uncertainty as additional information during the fine-tuning phase can largely improve the model's evaluation performance in OOD scenarios. The code and data are released at: https://github.com/hasakiXie123/LLM-Evaluator-Uncertainty.
BabyLM aims to dissolve the boundaries between cognitive modeling and language modeling. We call for both workshop papers and for researchers to join the 3rd BabyLM competition. As in previous years, we call for participants in the data-efficient pretraining challenge in the general track. This year, we also offer a new track: INTERACTION. This new track encourages interactive behavior, learning from a teacher, and adapting the teaching material to the student. We also call for papers outside the competition in any relevant areas. These include training efficiency, cognitively plausible research, weak model evaluation, and more.
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems normally consist of an acoustic model (AM) and a language model (LM). The acoustic model estimates the probability distribution of text given the input speech, while the language model calibrates this distribution toward a specific knowledge domain to produce the final transcription. Traditional ASR-specific LMs are typically trained in a unidirectional (left-to-right) manner to align with autoregressive decoding. However, this restricts the model from leveraging the right-side context during training, limiting its representational capacity. In this work, we propose MTLM, a novel training paradigm that unifies unidirectional and bidirectional manners through 3 training objectives: ULM, BMLM, and UMLM. This approach enhances the LM's ability to capture richer linguistic patterns from both left and right contexts while preserving compatibility with standard ASR autoregressive decoding methods. As a result, the MTLM model not only enhances the ASR system's performance but also support multiple decoding strategies, including shallow fusion, unidirectional/bidirectional n-best rescoring. Experiments on the LibriSpeech dataset show that MTLM consistently outperforms unidirectional training across multiple decoding strategies, highlighting its effectiveness and flexibility in ASR applications.
We introduce a novel non-cooperative game to analyse opinion formation and resistance, incorporating principles from social psychology such as confirmation bias, resource constraints, and influence penalties. Our simulation features Large Language Model (LLM) agents competing to influence a population, with penalties imposed for generating messages that propagate or counter misinformation. This framework integrates resource optimisation into the agents' decision-making process. Our findings demonstrate that while higher confirmation bias strengthens opinion alignment within groups, it also exacerbates overall polarisation. Conversely, lower confirmation bias leads to fragmented opinions and limited shifts in individual beliefs. Investing heavily in a high-resource debunking strategy can initially align the population with the debunking agent, but risks rapid resource depletion and diminished long-term influence.
To advance continuous-valued token modeling and temporal-coherence enforcement, we propose FELLE, an autoregressive model that integrates language modeling with token-wise flow matching. By leveraging the autoregressive nature of language models and the generative efficacy of flow matching, FELLE effectively predicts continuous-valued tokens (mel-spectrograms). For each continuous-valued token, FELLE modifies the general prior distribution in flow matching by incorporating information from the previous step, improving coherence and stability. Furthermore, to enhance synthesis quality, FELLE introduces a coarse-to-fine flow-matching mechanism, generating continuous-valued tokens hierarchically, conditioned on the language model's output. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of incorporating flow-matching techniques in autoregressive mel-spectrogram modeling, leading to significant improvements in TTS generation quality, as shown in https://aka.ms/felle.
This paper presents a hybrid approach that integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with a multi-scenario Stochastic Unit Commitment (SUC) framework to enhance both efficiency and reliability under high wind generation uncertainties. In a 10-trial study on the test energy system, the traditional SUC approach incurs an average total cost of 187.68 million dollars, whereas the LLM-assisted SUC (LLM-SUC) achieves a mean cost of 185.58 million dollars (range: 182.61 to 188.65 million dollars), corresponding to a cost reduction of 1.1 to 2.7 percent. Furthermore, LLM-SUC reduces load curtailment by 26.3 percent (2.24 plus/minus 0.31 GWh versus 3.04 GWh for SUC), while both methods maintain zero wind curtailment. Detailed temporal analysis shows that LLM-SUC achieves lower costs in the majority of time intervals and consistently outperforms SUC in 90 percent of cases, with solutions clustering in a favorable cost-reliability region (Coefficient of Variation = 0.93 percent for total cost and 13.8 percent for load curtailment). By leveraging an LLM agent to guide generator commitment decisions and dynamically adjust to stochastic conditions, the proposed framework improves demand fulfillment and operational resilience.
Content analysis breaks down complex and unstructured texts into theory-informed numerical categories. Particularly, in social science, this process usually relies on multiple rounds of manual annotation, domain expert discussion, and rule-based refinement. In this paper, we introduce SCALE, a novel multi-agent framework that effectively $\underline{\textbf{S}}$imulates $\underline{\textbf{C}}$ontent $\underline{\textbf{A}}$nalysis via $\underline{\textbf{L}}$arge language model (LLM) ag$\underline{\textbf{E}}$nts. SCALE imitates key phases of content analysis, including text coding, collaborative discussion, and dynamic codebook evolution, capturing the reflective depth and adaptive discussions of human researchers. Furthermore, by integrating diverse modes of human intervention, SCALE is augmented with expert input to further enhance its performance. Extensive evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that SCALE achieves human-approximated performance across various complex content analysis tasks, offering an innovative potential for future social science research.
Recent studies in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive advancements in multimodal Out-of-Context (OOC) misinformation detection, discerning whether an authentic image is wrongly used in a claim. Despite their success, the textual evidence of authentic images retrieved from the inverse search is directly transmitted to LVLMs, leading to inaccurate or false information in the decision-making phase. To this end, we present E2LVLM, a novel evidence-enhanced large vision-language model by adapting textual evidence in two levels. First, motivated by the fact that textual evidence provided by external tools struggles to align with LVLMs inputs, we devise a reranking and rewriting strategy for generating coherent and contextually attuned content, thereby driving the aligned and effective behavior of LVLMs pertinent to authentic images. Second, to address the scarcity of news domain datasets with both judgment and explanation, we generate a novel OOC multimodal instruction-following dataset by prompting LVLMs with informative content to acquire plausible explanations. Further, we develop a multimodal instruction-tuning strategy with convincing explanations for beyond detection. This scheme contributes to E2LVLM for multimodal OOC misinformation detection and explanation. A multitude of experiments demonstrate that E2LVLM achieves superior performance than state-of-the-art methods, and also provides compelling rationales for judgments.
While transformer-based language models have driven the AI revolution thus far, their computational complexity has spurred growing interest in viable alternatives, such as structured state space sequence models (SSMs) and Selective SSMs. Among these, Mamba (S6) and its variant Mamba-2 have shown remarkable inference speed ups over transformers while achieving comparable or superior performance on complex language modeling tasks. However, despite these architectural innovations and empirical successes, the fundamental learning capabilities of Mamba remain poorly understood. In this paper, we address this gap by studying in-context learning (ICL) on Markov chains and uncovering a surprising phenomenon: unlike transformers, even a single-layer Mamba efficiently learns the in-context Laplacian smoothing estimator, which is both Bayes and minimax optimal, for all Markovian orders. To explain this, we theoretically characterize the representation capacity of Mamba and reveal the fundamental role of convolution in enabling it to represent the optimal Laplacian smoothing. These theoretical insights align strongly with empirical results and, to the best of our knowledge, represent the first formal connection between Mamba and optimal statistical estimators. Finally, we outline promising research directions inspired by these findings.
Decoding with autoregressive large language models (LLMs) traditionally occurs sequentially, generating one token after another. An emerging line of work explored parallel decoding by identifying and simultaneously generating semantically independent chunks of LLM responses. However, these techniques rely on hand-crafted heuristics tied to syntactic structures like lists and paragraphs, making them rigid and imprecise. We present PASTA, a learning-based system that teaches LLMs to identify semantic independence and express parallel decoding opportunities in their own responses. At its core are PASTA-LANG and its interpreter: PASTA-LANG is an annotation language that enables LLMs to express semantic independence in their own responses; the language interpreter acts on these annotations to orchestrate parallel decoding on-the-fly at inference time. Through a two-stage finetuning process, we train LLMs to generate PASTA-LANG annotations that optimize both response quality and decoding speed. Evaluation on AlpacaEval, an instruction following benchmark, shows that our approach Pareto-dominates existing methods in terms of decoding speed and response quality; our results demonstrate geometric mean speedups ranging from 1.21x to 1.93x with corresponding quality changes of +2.2% to -7.1%, measured by length-controlled win rates against sequential decoding baseline.
Linear Recurrent Neural Networks (linear RNNs) have emerged as competitive alternatives to Transformers for sequence modeling, offering efficient training and linear-time inference. However, existing architectures face a fundamental trade-off between expressivity and efficiency, dictated by the structure of their state-transition matrices. Diagonal matrices, used in models such as Mamba, GLA, or mLSTM, yield fast runtime but have limited expressivity. To address this, recent architectures such as DeltaNet and RWKV-7 adopted a diagonal plus rank-1 structure, which allows simultaneous token and channel mixing, improving associative recall and, as recently shown, state-tracking when allowing negative eigenvalues in the state-transition matrices. Building on the interpretation of DeltaNet's recurrence as performing one step of online gradient descent per token on an associative recall loss, we introduce DeltaProduct, which instead takes multiple ($n_h$) steps per token. This naturally leads to diagonal plus rank-$n_h$ state-transition matrices, formed as products of $n_h$ generalized Householder transformations, providing a tunable mechanism to balance expressivity and efficiency. We provide a detailed theoretical characterization of the state-tracking capability of DeltaProduct in finite precision, showing how it improves by increasing $n_h$. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that DeltaProduct outperforms DeltaNet in both state-tracking and language modeling, while also showing significantly improved length extrapolation capabilities.
Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various complex tasks, ranging from collaborative problem-solving to autonomous decision-making. However, as these systems become increasingly integrated into critical applications, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks, misinformation propagation, and unintended behaviors have raised significant concerns. To address this challenge, we introduce G-Safeguard, a topology-guided security lens and treatment for robust LLM-MAS, which leverages graph neural networks to detect anomalies on the multi-agent utterance graph and employ topological intervention for attack remediation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that G-Safeguard: (I) exhibits significant effectiveness under various attack strategies, recovering over 40% of the performance for prompt injection; (II) is highly adaptable to diverse LLM backbones and large-scale MAS; (III) can seamlessly combine with mainstream MAS with security guarantees. The code is available at https://github.com/wslong20/G-safeguard.
Prompt engineering has emerged as a powerful technique for optimizing large language models (LLMs) for specific applications, enabling faster prototyping and improved performance, and giving rise to the interest of the community in protecting proprietary system prompts. In this work, we explore a novel perspective on prompt privacy through the lens of membership inference. We develop Prompt Detective, a statistical method to reliably determine whether a given system prompt was used by a third-party language model. Our approach relies on a statistical test comparing the distributions of two groups of model outputs corresponding to different system prompts. Through extensive experiments with a variety of language models, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Prompt Detective for prompt membership inference. Our work reveals that even minor changes in system prompts manifest in distinct response distributions, enabling us to verify prompt usage with statistical significance.
The emergence of generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), has opened the door for student-centered and active learning methods like project-based learning (PBL). However, PBL poses practical implementation challenges for educators around project design and management, assessment, and balancing student guidance with student autonomy. The following research documents a co-design process with interdisciplinary K-12 teachers to explore and address the current PBL challenges they face. Through teacher-driven interviews, collaborative workshops, and iterative design of wireframes, we gathered evidence for ways LLMs can support teachers in implementing high-quality PBL pedagogy by automating routine tasks and enhancing personalized learning. Teachers in the study advocated for supporting their professional growth and augmenting their current roles without replacing them. They also identified affordances and challenges around classroom integration, including resource requirements and constraints, ethical concerns, and potential immediate and long-term impacts. Drawing on these, we propose design guidelines for future deployment of LLM tools in PBL.
The most effective misinformation campaigns are multimodal, often combining text with images and videos taken out of context -- or fabricating them entirely -- to support a given narrative. Contemporary methods for detecting misinformation, whether in deepfakes or text articles, often miss the interplay between multiple modalities. Built around a large language model, the system proposed in this paper addresses these challenges. It analyzes both the article's text and the provenance metadata of included images and videos to determine whether they are relevant. We open-source the system prototype and interactive web interface.
We present AI-VERDE, a unified LLM-as-a-platform service designed to facilitate seamless integration of commercial, cloud-hosted, and on-premise open LLMs in academic settings. AI-VERDE streamlines access management for instructional and research groups by providing features such as robust access control, privacy-preserving mechanisms, native Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) support, budget management for third-party LLM services, and both a conversational web interface and API access. In a pilot deployment at a large public university, AI-VERDE demonstrated significant engagement across diverse educational and research groups, enabling activities that would typically require substantial budgets for commercial LLM services with limited user and team management capabilities. To the best of our knowledge, AI-Verde is the first platform to address both academic and research needs for LLMs within an higher education institutional framework.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely applied in decision making, but their deployment is threatened by jailbreak attacks, where adversarial users manipulate model behavior to bypass safety measures. Existing defense mechanisms, such as safety fine-tuning and model editing, either require extensive parameter modifications or lack precision, leading to performance degradation on general tasks, which is unsuitable to post-deployment safety alignment. To address these challenges, we propose DELMAN (Dynamic Editing for LLMs JAilbreak DefeNse), a novel approach leveraging direct model editing for precise, dynamic protection against jailbreak attacks. DELMAN directly updates a minimal set of relevant parameters to neutralize harmful behaviors while preserving the model's utility. To avoid triggering a safe response in benign context, we incorporate KL-divergence regularization to ensure the updated model remains consistent with the original model when processing benign queries. Experimental results demonstrate that DELMAN outperforms baseline methods in mitigating jailbreak attacks while preserving the model's utility, and adapts seamlessly to new attack instances, providing a practical and efficient solution for post-deployment model protection.
Large language models (LLMs) offer powerful capabilities but come with significant environmental impact, particularly in carbon emissions. Existing studies benchmark carbon emissions but lack a standardized basis for comparison across different model configurations. To address this, we introduce the concept of functional unit (FU) as a standardized basis and develop FUEL, the first FU-based framework for evaluating LLM serving's environmental impact. Through three case studies, we uncover key insights and trade-offs in reducing carbon emissions by optimizing model size, quantization strategy, and hardware choice, paving the way for more sustainable LLM serving. The code is available at https://github.com/jojacola/FUEL.