A Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model powered by a large language model (LLM) provides a faster and more cost-effective solution for adapting to new data and knowledge. It also delivers more specialized responses compared to pre-trained LLMs. However, most existing approaches rely on retrieving prefix-sized chunks as references to support question-answering (Q/A). This approach is often deployed to address information needs at a single level of abstraction, as it struggles to generate answers across multiple levels of abstraction. In an RAG setting, while LLMs can summarize and answer questions effectively when provided with sufficient details, retrieving excessive information often leads to the 'lost in the middle' problem and exceeds token limitations. We propose a novel RAG approach that uses chunks of multiple abstraction levels (MAL), including multi-sentence-level, paragraph-level, section-level, and document-level. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated in an under-explored scientific domain of Glycoscience. Compared to traditional single-level RAG approaches, our approach improves AI evaluated answer correctness of Q/A by 25.739\% on Glyco-related papers.
Large language models (LLMs) offer a promising way forward for automating software engineering tasks, such as bug fixes, feature additions, etc., via multi-step LLM-based agentic workflows. However, existing metrics for evaluating such workflows, mainly build status and occasionally log analysis, are too sparse and limited in providing the information needed to assess the quality of changes made. In this work, we designed LLM-based critics to derive well-structured and rigorous intermediate/step-level, execution-free evaluation proxies for repo-level code changes. Importantly, we assume access to the gold test patch for the problem (i.e., reference-aware) to assess both semantics and executability of generated patches. With the gold test patch as a reference, we predict executability of all editing locations with an F1 score of 91.6%, aggregating which, we can predict the build status in 84.8% of the instances in SWE-bench. In particular, such an execution-focused LLM critic outperforms other reference-free and reference-aware LLM critics by 38.9% to 72.5%. Moreover, we demonstrate the usefulness of such a reference-aware framework in comparing patches generated by different agentic workflows. Finally, we open-source the library developed for this project, which allows further usage for either other agentic workflows or other benchmarks. The source code is available at https://github.com/amazon-science/code-agent-eval.
Handling multi-party dialogues represents a significant step for advancing spoken dialogue systems, necessitating the development of tasks specific to multi-party interactions. To address this challenge, we are constructing a multi-modal multi-party dialogue corpus of triadic (three-participant) discussions. This paper focuses on the task of addressee recognition, identifying who is being addressed to take the next turn, a critical component unique to multi-party dialogue systems. A subset of the corpus was annotated with addressee information, revealing that explicit addressees are indicated in approximately 20% of conversational turns. To evaluate the task's complexity, we benchmarked the performance of a large language model (GPT-4o) on addressee recognition. The results showed that GPT-4o achieved an accuracy only marginally above chance, underscoring the challenges of addressee recognition in multi-party dialogue. These findings highlight the need for further research to enhance the capabilities of large language models in understanding and navigating the intricacies of multi-party conversational dynamics.
Applying Large language models (LLMs) within specific domains requires substantial adaptation to account for the unique terminologies, nuances, and context-specific challenges inherent to those areas. Here, we introduce DropMicroFluidAgents (DMFAs), an advanced language-driven framework leveraging state-of-the-art pre-trained LLMs. DMFAs employs LLM agents to perform two key functions: (1) delivering focused guidance, answers, and suggestions specific to droplet microfluidics and (2) generating machine learning models to optimise and automate the design of droplet microfluidic devices, including the creation of code-based computer-aided design (CAD) scripts to enable rapid and precise design execution. Experimental evaluations demonstrated that the integration of DMFAs with the LLAMA3.1 model yielded the highest accuracy of 76.15%, underscoring the significant performance enhancement provided by agent integration. This effect was particularly pronounced when DMFAs were paired with the GEMMA2 model, resulting in a 34.47% improvement in accuracy compared to the standalone GEMMA2 configuration. This study demonstrates the effective use of LLM agents in droplet microfluidics research as powerful tools for automating workflows, synthesising knowledge, optimising designs, and interacting with external systems. These capabilities enable their application across education and industrial support, driving greater efficiency in scientific discovery and innovation.
This study explores the integration of Agent AI with LangGraph to enhance real-time data analysis systems in big data environments. The proposed framework overcomes limitations of static workflows, inefficient stateful computations, and lack of human intervention by leveraging LangGraph's graph-based workflow construction and dynamic decision-making capabilities. LangGraph allows large language models (LLMs) to dynamically determine control flows, invoke tools, and assess the necessity of further actions, improving flexibility and efficiency. The system architecture incorporates Apache Spark Streaming, Kafka, and LangGraph to create a high-performance sentiment analysis system. LangGraph's capabilities include precise state management, dynamic workflow construction, and robust memory checkpointing, enabling seamless multi-turn interactions and context retention. Human-in-the-loop mechanisms are integrated to refine sentiment analysis, particularly in ambiguous or high-stakes scenarios, ensuring greater reliability and contextual relevance. Key features such as real-time state streaming, debugging via LangGraph Studio, and efficient handling of large-scale data streams make this framework ideal for adaptive decision-making. Experimental results confirm the system's ability to classify inquiries, detect sentiment trends, and escalate complex issues for manual review, demonstrating a synergistic blend of LLM capabilities and human oversight. This work presents a scalable, adaptable, and reliable solution for real-time sentiment analysis and decision-making, advancing the use of Agent AI and LangGraph in big data applications.
Diffusion based Text-To-Music (TTM) models generate music corresponding to text descriptions. Typically UNet based diffusion models condition on text embeddings generated from a pre-trained large language model or from a cross-modality audio-language representation model. This work proposes a diffusion based TTM, in which the UNet is conditioned on both (i) a uni-modal language model (e.g., T5) via cross-attention and (ii) a cross-modal audio-language representation model (e.g., CLAP) via Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM). The diffusion model is trained to exploit both a local text representation from the T5 and a global representation from the CLAP. Furthermore, we propose modifications that extract both global and local representations from the T5 through pooling mechanisms that we call mean pooling and self-attention pooling. This approach mitigates the need for an additional encoder (e.g., CLAP) to extract a global representation, thereby reducing the number of model parameters. Our results show that incorporating the CLAP global embeddings to the T5 local embeddings enhances text adherence (KL=1.47) compared to a baseline model solely relying on the T5 local embeddings (KL=1.54). Alternatively, extracting global text embeddings directly from the T5 local embeddings through the proposed mean pooling approach yields superior generation quality (FAD=1.89) while exhibiting marginally inferior text adherence (KL=1.51) against the model conditioned on both CLAP and T5 text embeddings (FAD=1.94 and KL=1.47). Our proposed solution is not only efficient but also compact in terms of the number of parameters required.
As is known, hybrid quadratic and subquadratic attention models in multi-head architectures have surpassed both Transformer and Linear RNN models , with these works primarily focusing on reducing KV complexity and improving efficiency. For further research on expressiveness, we introduce our series of models distilled from Qwen 2.5, based on pure native RWKV-7 attention, which aims to make RNN more expressive and demonstrates state tracking ability beyond transformers. We work with QRWK 32B based on RWKV-6 architecture, another approach that reduces the entire knowledge processing time to just 8 hours using 16 AMD MI300X GPUs while maintaining Qwen 2.5's performance. In fact, the distillation process can utilize any LLM, not just Qwen, and enables knowledge transfer from larger LLMs to smaller ones with more fewer tokens. We will explain the detailed process and share our insights on building more powerful foundation models. Please note that this is an ongoing work that will be updated continuously. The model checkpoints and source code are available at \href{https://github.com/yynil/RWKVInside}{https://github.com/yynil/RWKVInside}, \href{https://huggingface.co/RWKV-Red-Team/ARWKV-7B-Preview-0.1}{https://huggingface.co/RWKV-Red-Team/ARWKV-7B-Preview-0.1}.
Artificial intelligence systems significantly impact the environment, particularly in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. These tasks often require extensive computational resources to train deep neural networks, including large-scale language models containing billions of parameters. This study analyzes the trade-offs between energy consumption and performance across three neural language models: two pre-trained models (T5-base and BART-base), and one large language model (LLaMA 3-8B). These models were fine-tuned for the text summarization task, focusing on generating research paper highlights that encapsulate the core themes of each paper. A wide range of evaluation metrics, including ROUGE, METEOR, MoverScore, BERTScore, and SciBERTScore, were employed to assess their performance. Furthermore, the carbon footprint associated with fine-tuning each model was measured, offering a comprehensive assessment of their environmental impact. This research underscores the importance of incorporating environmental considerations into the design and implementation of neural language models and calls for the advancement of energy-efficient AI methodologies.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models have drawn considerable attention in modern open-domain question answering. The effectiveness of RAG depends on the quality of the top retrieved documents. However, conventional retrieval methods sometimes fail to rank the most relevant documents at the top. In this paper, we introduce ASRank, a new re-ranking method based on scoring retrieved documents using zero-shot answer scent which relies on a pre-trained large language model to compute the likelihood of the document-derived answers aligning with the answer scent. Our approach demonstrates marked improvements across several datasets, including NQ, TriviaQA, WebQA, ArchivalQA, HotpotQA, and Entity Questions. Notably, ASRank increases Top-1 retrieval accuracy on NQ from $19.2\%$ to $46.5\%$ for MSS and $22.1\%$ to $47.3\%$ for BM25. It also shows strong retrieval performance on several datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods (47.3 Top-1 by ASRank vs 35.4 by UPR by BM25).
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a new paradigm for recommendation by converting interacted item history into language modeling. However, constrained by the limited context length of LLMs, existing approaches have to truncate item history in the prompt, focusing only on recent interactions and sacrificing the ability to model long-term history. To enable LLMs to model long histories, we pursue a concise embedding representation for items and sessions. In the LLM embedding space, we construct an item's embedding by aggregating its textual token embeddings; similarly, we construct a session's embedding by aggregating its item embeddings. While efficient, this way poses two challenges since it ignores the temporal significance of user interactions and LLMs do not natively interpret our custom embeddings. To overcome these, we propose PatchRec, a multi-grained patch training method consisting of two stages: (1) Patch Pre-training, which familiarizes LLMs with aggregated embeddings -- patches, and (2) Patch Fine-tuning, which enables LLMs to capture time-aware significance in interaction history. Extensive experiments show that PatchRec effectively models longer behavior histories with improved efficiency. This work facilitates the practical use of LLMs for modeling long behavior histories. Codes are available at https://github.com/ljy0ustc/PatchRec.
With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technologies such as ChatGPT, AI agents and video generation,contemporary mobile systems have begun integrating these AI capabilities on local devices to enhance privacy and reduce response latency. To meet the computational demands of AI tasks, current mobile SoCs are equipped with diverse AI accelerators, including GPUs and Neural Processing Units (NPUs). However, there has not been a comprehensive characterization of these heterogeneous processors, and existing designs typically only leverage a single AI accelerator for LLM inference, leading to suboptimal use of computational resources and memory bandwidth. In this paper, we first summarize key performance characteristics of mobile SoC, including heterogeneous processors, unified memory, synchronization, etc. Drawing on these observations, we propose different tensor partition strategies to fulfill the distinct requirements of the prefill and decoding phases. We further design a fast synchronization mechanism that leverages the unified memory address provided by mobile SoCs. By employing these techniques, we present HeteroLLM, the fastest LLM inference engine in mobile devices which supports both layer-level and tensor-level heterogeneous execution. Evaluation results show that HeteroLLM achieves 9.99 and 4.36 performance improvement over other mobile-side LLM inference engines: MLC and MNN.
The rapid growth of generative AI and its integration into everyday workflows have significantly increased the demand for large language model (LLM) inference services. While proprietary models remain popular, recent advancements in open-source LLMs have positioned them as strong contenders. However, deploying these models is often constrained by the high costs and limited availability of GPU resources. In response, this paper presents the design of a decentralized offline serving system for LLM inference. Utilizing idle GPU resources, our proposed system, DeServe, decentralizes access to LLMs at a lower cost. DeServe specifically addresses key challenges in optimizing serving throughput in high-latency network environments. Experiments demonstrate that DeServe achieves a 6.7x-12.6x improvement in throughput over existing serving system baselines in such conditions.
In this paper, we present a system that uses a Large Language Model (LLM) to perform grammar and spelling correction as a component of Quality Assurance (QA) for texts generated by NLG systems, which is important for text production in real-world scenarios. Evaluating the results of the system on work-in-progress sports news texts in three languages, we show that it is able to deliver acceptable corrections.
Legal texts, characterized by complex and specialized terminology, present a significant challenge for Language Models. Adding an underrepresented language, such as Spanish, to the mix makes it even more challenging. While pre-trained models like XLM-RoBERTa have shown capabilities in handling multilingual corpora, their performance on domain specific documents remains underexplored. This paper presents the development and evaluation of MEL, a legal language model based on XLM-RoBERTa-large, fine-tuned on legal documents such as BOE (Bolet\'in Oficial del Estado, the Spanish oficial report of laws) and congress texts. We detail the data collection, processing, training, and evaluation processes. Evaluation benchmarks show a significant improvement over baseline models in understanding the legal Spanish language. We also present case studies demonstrating the model's application to new legal texts, highlighting its potential to perform top results over different NLP tasks.
Endangered languages, such as Navajo - the most widely spoken Native American language - are significantly underrepresented in contemporary language technologies, exacerbating the challenges of their preservation and revitalization. This study evaluates Google's large language model (LLM)-based language identification system, which consistently misidentifies Navajo, exposing inherent limitations when applied to low-resource Native American languages. To address this, we introduce a random forest classifier trained on Navajo and eight frequently confused languages. Despite its simplicity, the classifier achieves near-perfect accuracy (97-100%), significantly outperforming Google's LLM-based system. Additionally, the model demonstrates robustness across other Athabaskan languages - a family of Native American languages spoken primarily in Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, and parts of the Southwestern United States - suggesting its potential for broader application. Our findings underscore the pressing need for NLP systems that prioritize linguistic diversity and adaptability over centralized, one-size-fits-all solutions, especially in supporting underrepresented languages in a multicultural world. This work directly contributes to ongoing efforts to address cultural biases in language models and advocates for the development of culturally localized NLP tools that serve diverse linguistic communities.
This study introduces an approach to Estonian text simplification using two model architectures: a neural machine translation model and a fine-tuned large language model (LLaMA). Given the limited resources for Estonian, we developed a new dataset, the Estonian Simplification Dataset, combining translated data and GPT-4.0-generated simplifications. We benchmarked OpenNMT, a neural machine translation model that frames text simplification as a translation task, and fine-tuned the LLaMA model on our dataset to tailor it specifically for Estonian simplification. Manual evaluations on the test set show that the LLaMA model consistently outperforms OpenNMT in readability, grammaticality, and meaning preservation. These findings underscore the potential of large language models for low-resource languages and provide a basis for further research in Estonian text simplification.
Recent advancements in language representation learning primarily emphasize language modeling for deriving meaningful representations, often neglecting style-specific considerations. This study addresses this gap by creating generic, sentence-level style embeddings crucial for style-centric tasks. Our approach is grounded on the premise that low-level text style changes can compose any high-level style. We hypothesize that applying this concept to representation learning enables the development of versatile text style embeddings. By fine-tuning a general-purpose text encoder using contrastive learning and standard cross-entropy loss, we aim to capture these low-level style shifts, anticipating that they offer insights applicable to high-level text styles. The outcomes prompt us to reconsider the underlying assumptions as the results do not always show that the learned style representations capture high-level text styles.
In statistical classification and machine learning, classification error is an important performance measure, which is minimized by the Bayes decision rule. In practice, the unknown true distribution is usually replaced with a model distribution estimated from the training data in the Bayes decision rule. This substitution introduces a mismatch between the Bayes error and the model-based classification error. In this work, we apply classification error bounds to study the relationship between the error mismatch and the Kullback-Leibler divergence in machine learning. Motivated by recent observations of low model-based classification errors in many machine learning tasks, bounding the Bayes error to be lower, we propose a linear approximation of the classification error bound for low Bayes error conditions. Then, the bound for class priors are discussed. Moreover, we extend the classification error bound for sequences. Using automatic speech recognition as a representative example of machine learning applications, this work analytically discusses the correlations among different performance measures with extended bounds, including cross-entropy loss, language model perplexity, and word error rate.
Today's image generation systems are capable of producing realistic and high-quality images. However, user prompts often contain ambiguities, making it difficult for these systems to interpret users' actual intentions. Consequently, many users must modify their prompts several times to ensure the generated images meet their expectations. While some methods focus on enhancing prompts to make the generated images fit user needs, the model is still hard to understand users' real needs, especially for non-expert users. In this research, we aim to enhance the visual parameter-tuning process, making the model user-friendly for individuals without specialized knowledge and better understand user needs. We propose a human-machine co-adaption strategy using mutual information between the user's prompts and the pictures under modification as the optimizing target to make the system better adapt to user needs. We find that an improved model can reduce the necessity for multiple rounds of adjustments. We also collect multi-round dialogue datasets with prompts and images pairs and user intent. Various experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in our proposed dataset. Our annotation tools and several examples of our dataset are available at https://zenodo.org/records/14876029 for easier review. We will make open source our full dataset and code.
In human-centric scenes, the ability to simultaneously understand visual and auditory information is crucial. While recent omni models can process multiple modalities, they generally lack effectiveness in human-centric scenes due to the absence of large-scale, specialized datasets and non-targeted architectures. In this work, we developed HumanOmni, the industry's first human-centric Omni-multimodal large language model. We constructed a dataset containing over 2.4 million human-centric video clips with detailed captions and more than 14 million instructions, facilitating the understanding of diverse human-centric scenes. HumanOmni includes three specialized branches for understanding different types of scenes. It adaptively fuses features from these branches based on user instructions, significantly enhancing visual understanding in scenes centered around individuals. Moreover, HumanOmni integrates audio features to ensure a comprehensive understanding of environments and individuals. Our experiments validate HumanOmni's advanced capabilities in handling human-centric scenes across a variety of tasks, including emotion recognition, facial expression description, and action understanding. Our model will be open-sourced to facilitate further development and collaboration within both academia and industry.