The potential of multimodal generative artificial intelligence (mAI) to replicate human grounded language understanding, including the pragmatic, context-rich aspects of communication, remains to be clarified. Humans are known to use salient multimodal features, such as visual cues, to facilitate the processing of upcoming words. Correspondingly, multimodal computational models can integrate visual and linguistic data using a visual attention mechanism to assign next-word probabilities. To test whether these processes align, we tasked both human participants (N = 200) as well as several state-of-the-art computational models with evaluating the predictability of forthcoming words after viewing short audio-only or audio-visual clips with speech. During the task, the model's attention weights were recorded and human attention was indexed via eye tracking. Results show that predictability estimates from humans aligned more closely with scores generated from multimodal models vs. their unimodal counterparts. Furthermore, including an attention mechanism doubled alignment with human judgments when visual and linguistic context facilitated predictions. In these cases, the model's attention patches and human eye tracking significantly overlapped. Our results indicate that improved modeling of naturalistic language processing in mAI does not merely depend on training diet but can be driven by multimodality in combination with attention-based architectures. Humans and computational models alike can leverage the predictive constraints of multimodal information by attending to relevant features in the input.
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has great potential to improve the performance of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems, especially in scenarios where line-of-sight paths between the base station and users are blocked. However, the spectral efficiency (SE) of RIS-aided ISAC uplink transmissions may be drastically reduced by the heavy burden of pilot overhead for realizing sensing capabilities. In this paper, we tackle this bottleneck by proposing a superimposed symbol scheme, which superimposes sensing pilots onto data symbols over the same time-frequency resources. Specifically, we develop a structure-aware sparse Bayesian learning framework, where decoded data symbols serve as side information to enhance sensing performance and increase SE. To meet the low-latency requirements of emerging ISAC applications, we further propose a low-complexity simultaneous communication and localization algorithm for multiple users. This algorithm employs the unitary approximate message passing in the Bayesian learning framework for initial angle estimate, followed by iterative refinements through reduced-dimension matrix calculations. Moreover, the sparse code multiple access technology is incorporated into this iterative framework for accurate data detection which also facilitates localization. Numerical results show that the proposed superimposed symbol-based scheme empowered by the developed algorithm can achieve centimeter-level localization while attaining up to $96\%$ of the SE of conventional communications without sensing capabilities. Moreover, compared to other typical ISAC schemes, the proposed superimposed symbol scheme can provide an effective throughput improvement over $133\%$.
In enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), prior research primarily focuses on specific prompting techniques such as few-shot or zero-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. These methods, while effective, often involve manually intensive prompt engineering. Our study takes a novel approach by asking: Can LLMs reason effectively without prompting? Our findings reveal that, intriguingly, CoT reasoning paths can be elicited from pre-trained LLMs by simply altering the \textit{decoding} process. Rather than conventional greedy decoding, we investigate the top-$k$ alternative tokens, uncovering that CoT paths are frequently inherent in these sequences. This approach not only bypasses the confounders of prompting but also allows us to assess the LLMs' \textit{intrinsic} reasoning abilities. Moreover, we observe that the presence of a CoT in the decoding path correlates with a higher confidence in the model's decoded answer. This confidence metric effectively differentiates between CoT and non-CoT paths. Extensive empirical studies on various reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed CoT-decoding substantially outperforms the standard greedy decoding.
Improving the controllability, portability, and inference speed of diffusion language models (DLMs) is a key challenge in natural language generation. While recent research has shown significant success in complex text generation with language models, the memory and computational power are still very demanding and fall short of expectations, which naturally results in low portability and instability for the models. To mitigate these issues, numerous well-established methods were proposed for neural network quantization. To further enhance their portability of independent deployment as well as improve their stability evaluated by language perplexity, we propose a novel approach called the Quantized Embedding Controllable Diffusion Language Model (QE-CDLM). QE-CDLM builds upon the recent successful controllable DLMs by remodeling the task-specific embedding space via quantization. This leads to a gradient-based controller for the generation tasks, and more stable intermediate latent variables are obtained, which naturally brings in an accelerated convergence as well as better controllability. Additionally, the adaption fine-tuning method is employed to reduce tunable weights. Experimental results on five challenging fine-grained control tasks demonstrate that QE-CDLM compares favorably to existing methods in terms of quality and feasibility, achieving better perplexity and lightweight fine-tuning.
The rapid progression in artificial intelligence has facilitated the emergence of large language models like ChatGPT, offering potential applications extending into specialized engineering modeling, especially physics-based building energy modeling. This paper investigates the innovative integration of large language models with building energy modeling software, focusing specifically on the fusion of ChatGPT with EnergyPlus. A literature review is first conducted to reveal a growing trend of incorporating of large language models in engineering modeling, albeit limited research on their application in building energy modeling. We underscore the potential of large language models in addressing building energy modeling challenges and outline potential applications including 1) simulation input generation, 2) simulation output analysis and visualization, 3) conducting error analysis, 4) co-simulation, 5) simulation knowledge extraction and training, and 6) simulation optimization. Three case studies reveal the transformative potential of large language models in automating and optimizing building energy modeling tasks, underscoring the pivotal role of artificial intelligence in advancing sustainable building practices and energy efficiency. The case studies demonstrate that selecting the right large language model techniques is essential to enhance performance and reduce engineering efforts. Besides direct use of large language models, three specific techniques were utilized: 1) prompt engineering, 2) retrieval-augmented generation, and 3) multi-agent large language models. The findings advocate a multidisciplinary approach in future artificial intelligence research, with implications extending beyond building energy modeling to other specialized engineering modeling.
Textbook question answering (TQA) is a challenging task in artificial intelligence due to the complex nature of context and multimodal data. Although previous research has significantly improved the task, there are still some limitations including the models' weak reasoning and inability to capture contextual information in the lengthy context. The introduction of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field of AI, however, directly applying LLMs often leads to inaccurate answers. This paper proposes a methodology that handle the out-of-domain scenario in TQA where concepts are spread across different lessons by incorporating the retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technique and utilize transfer learning to handle the long context and enhance reasoning abilities. Through supervised fine-tuning of the LLM model Llama-2 and the incorporation of RAG, our architecture outperforms the baseline, achieving a 4.12% accuracy improvement on validation set and 9.84% on test set for non-diagram multiple-choice questions.
Matching problems have been widely studied in the research community, especially Ad-Auctions with many applications ranging from network design to advertising. Following the various advancements in machine learning, one natural question is whether classical algorithms can benefit from machine learning and obtain better-quality solutions. Even a small percentage of performance improvement in matching problems could result in significant gains for the studied use cases. For example, the network throughput or the revenue of Ad-Auctions can increase remarkably. This paper presents algorithms with machine learning predictions for the Online Bounded Allocation and the Online Ad-Auctions problems. We constructed primal-dual algorithms that achieve competitive performance depending on the quality of the predictions. When the predictions are accurate, the algorithms' performance surpasses previous performance bounds, while when the predictions are misleading, the algorithms maintain standard worst-case performance guarantees. We provide supporting experiments on generated data for our theoretical findings.
With the continuous growth in the number of parameters of transformer-based pretrained language models (PLMs), particularly the emergence of large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters, many natural language processing (NLP) tasks have demonstrated remarkable success. However, the enormous size and computational demands of these models pose significant challenges for adapting them to specific downstream tasks, especially in environments with limited computational resources. Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) offers an effective solution by reducing the number of fine-tuning parameters and memory usage while achieving comparable performance to full fine-tuning. The demands for fine-tuning PLMs, especially LLMs, have led to a surge in the development of PEFT methods, as depicted in Fig. 1. In this paper, we present a comprehensive and systematic review of PEFT methods for PLMs. We summarize these PEFT methods, discuss their applications, and outline future directions. Furthermore, we conduct experiments using several representative PEFT methods to better understand their effectiveness in parameter efficiency and memory efficiency. By offering insights into the latest advancements and practical applications, this survey serves as an invaluable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by PEFT in the context of PLMs.
The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has substantially influenced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional results across various tasks. In this study, we employ ``Introspective Tips" to facilitate LLMs in self-optimizing their decision-making. By introspectively examining trajectories, LLM refines its policy by generating succinct and valuable tips. Our method enhances the agent's performance in both few-shot and zero-shot learning situations by considering three essential scenarios: learning from the agent's past experiences, integrating expert demonstrations, and generalizing across diverse games. Importantly, we accomplish these improvements without fine-tuning the LLM parameters; rather, we adjust the prompt to generalize insights from the three aforementioned situations. Our framework not only supports but also emphasizes the advantage of employing LLM in in-contxt decision-making. Experiments involving over 100 games in TextWorld illustrate the superior performance of our approach.
Training machines to understand natural language and interact with humans is an elusive and essential task of artificial intelligence. A diversity of dialogue systems has been designed with the rapid development of deep learning techniques, especially the recent pre-trained language models (PrLMs). Among these studies, the fundamental yet challenging type of task is dialogue comprehension whose role is to teach the machines to read and comprehend the dialogue context before responding. In this paper, we review the previous methods from the technical perspective of dialogue modeling for the dialogue comprehension task. We summarize the characteristics and challenges of dialogue comprehension in contrast to plain-text reading comprehension. Then, we discuss three typical patterns of dialogue modeling. In addition, we categorize dialogue-related pre-training techniques which are employed to enhance PrLMs in dialogue scenarios. Finally, we highlight the technical advances in recent years and point out the lessons from the empirical analysis and the prospects towards a new frontier of researches.
Pre-trained deep neural network language models such as ELMo, GPT, BERT and XLNet have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of language understanding tasks. However, their size makes them impractical for a number of scenarios, especially on mobile and edge devices. In particular, the input word embedding matrix accounts for a significant proportion of the model's memory footprint, due to the large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Knowledge distillation techniques have had success at compressing large neural network models, but they are ineffective at yielding student models with vocabularies different from the original teacher models. We introduce a novel knowledge distillation technique for training a student model with a significantly smaller vocabulary as well as lower embedding and hidden state dimensions. Specifically, we employ a dual-training mechanism that trains the teacher and student models simultaneously to obtain optimal word embeddings for the student vocabulary. We combine this approach with learning shared projection matrices that transfer layer-wise knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. Our method is able to compress the BERT_BASE model by more than 60x, with only a minor drop in downstream task metrics, resulting in a language model with a footprint of under 7MB. Experimental results also demonstrate higher compression efficiency and accuracy when compared with other state-of-the-art compression techniques.