Virtual reality (VR) environments have greatly expanded opportunities for immersive exploration, yet physically navigating these digital spaces remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we present the conceptual framework of NAVIS (Navigating Virtual Spaces with Immersive Scooters), a novel system that utilizes a scooter-based interface to enhance both navigation and interaction within virtual environments. NAVIS combines real-time physical mobility, haptic feedback, and CAVE-like (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) technology to create a realistic sense of travel and movement, improving both spatial awareness and the overall immersive experience. By offering a more natural and physically engaging method of exploration, NAVIS addresses key limitations found in traditional VR locomotion techniques, such as teleportation or joystick control, which can detract from immersion and realism. This approach highlights the potential of combining physical movement with virtual environments to provide a more intuitive and enjoyable experience for users, opening up new possibilities for applications in gaming, education, and beyond.
Arguments evoke emotions, influencing the effect of the argument itself. Not only the emotional intensity but also the category influence the argument's effects, for instance, the willingness to adapt stances. While binary emotionality has been studied in arguments, there is no work on discrete emotion categories (e.g., "Anger") in such data. To fill this gap, we crowdsource subjective annotations of emotion categories in a German argument corpus and evaluate automatic LLM-based labeling methods. Specifically, we compare three prompting strategies (zero-shot, one-shot, chain-of-thought) on three large instruction-tuned language models (Falcon-7b-instruct, Llama-3.1-8B-instruct, GPT-4o-mini). We further vary the definition of the output space to be binary (is there emotionality in the argument?), closed-domain (which emotion from a given label set is in the argument?), or open-domain (which emotion is in the argument?). We find that emotion categories enhance the prediction of emotionality in arguments, emphasizing the need for discrete emotion annotations in arguments. Across all prompt settings and models, automatic predictions show a high recall but low precision for predicting anger and fear, indicating a strong bias toward negative emotions.
Search and recommendation ecosystems exhibit competition among content creators. This competition has been tackled in a variety of game-theoretic frameworks. Content creators generate documents with the aim of being recommended by a content ranker for various information needs. In order for the ecosystem, modeled as a content ranking game, to be effective and maximize user welfare, it should guarantee stability, where stability is associated with the existence of pure Nash equilibrium in the corresponding game. Moreover, if the contents' ranking algorithm possesses a game in which any best-response learning dynamics of the content creators converge to equilibrium of high welfare, the system is considered highly attractive. However, as classical content ranking algorithms, employed by search and recommendation systems, rank documents by their distance to information needs, it has been shown that they fail to provide such stability properties. As a result, novel content ranking algorithms have been devised. In this work, we offer an alternative approach: corpus enrichment with a small set of fixed dummy documents. It turns out that, with the right design, such enrichment can lead to pure Nash equilibrium and even to the convergence of any best-response dynamics to a high welfare result, where we still employ the classical/current content ranking approach. We show two such corpus enrichment techniques with tight bounds on the number of documents needed to obtain the desired results. Interestingly, our study is a novel extension of Borel's Colonel Blotto game.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehending and analyzing lengthy sequential inputs, owing to their extensive context windows that allow processing millions of tokens in a single forward pass. However, this paper uncovers a surprising limitation: LLMs fall short when handling long input sequences. We investigate this issue using three datasets and two tasks (sentiment analysis and news categorization) across various LLMs, including Claude 3, Gemini Pro, GPT 3.5 Turbo, Llama 3 Instruct, and Mistral Instruct models. To address this limitation, we propose and evaluate ad-hoc solutions that substantially enhance LLMs' performance on long input sequences by up to 50%, while reducing API cost and latency by up to 93% and 50%, respectively.
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues advancing, ensuring positive societal impacts becomes critical, especially as AI systems become increasingly ubiquitous in various aspects of life. However, developing "AI for good" poses substantial challenges around aligning systems with complex human values. Presently, we lack mature methods for addressing these challenges. This article presents and evaluates the Positive AI design method aimed at addressing this gap. The method provides a human-centered process to translate wellbeing aspirations into concrete practices. First, we explain the method's four key steps: contextualizing, operationalizing, optimizing, and implementing wellbeing supported by continuous measurement for feedback cycles. We then present a multiple case study where novice designers applied the method, revealing strengths and weaknesses related to efficacy and usability. Next, an expert evaluation study assessed the quality of the resulting concepts, rating them moderately high for feasibility, desirability, and plausibility of achieving intended wellbeing benefits. Together, these studies provide preliminary validation of the method's ability to improve AI design, while surfacing areas needing refinement like developing support for complex steps. Proposed adaptations such as examples and evaluation heuristics could address weaknesses. Further research should examine sustained application over multiple projects. This human-centered approach shows promise for realizing the vision of 'AI for Wellbeing' that does not just avoid harm, but actively benefits humanity.
Large language models (LLMs) need knowledge updates to meet the ever-growing world facts and correct the hallucinated responses, facilitating the methods of lifelong model editing. Where the updated knowledge resides in memories is a fundamental question for model editing. In this paper, we find that editing either long-term memory (direct model parameters) or working memory (non-parametric knowledge of neural network activations/representations by retrieval) will result in an impossible triangle -- reliability, generalization, and locality can not be realized together in the lifelong editing settings. For long-term memory, directly editing the parameters will cause conflicts with irrelevant pretrained knowledge or previous edits (poor reliability and locality). For working memory, retrieval-based activations can hardly make the model understand the edits and generalize (poor generalization). Therefore, we propose WISE to bridge the gap between memories. In WISE, we design a dual parametric memory scheme, which consists of the main memory for the pretrained knowledge and a side memory for the edited knowledge. We only edit the knowledge in the side memory and train a router to decide which memory to go through when given a query. For continual editing, we devise a knowledge-sharding mechanism where different sets of edits reside in distinct subspaces of parameters, and are subsequently merged into a shared memory without conflicts. Extensive experiments show that WISE can outperform previous model editing methods and overcome the impossible triangle under lifelong model editing of question answering, hallucination, and out-of-distribution settings across trending LLM architectures, e.g., GPT, LLaMA, and Mistral. Code is available at //github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains, particularly in task generalization for both text and vision data. While fine-tuning these models can significantly enhance their performance on specific downstream tasks, it often requires high-quality data that cannot be shared due to privacy concerns. Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising solution for collaborative training without direct data sharing. However, many parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies for LLMs in FL, particularly those based on Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), face limitations. In this paper, we critically analyze the convergence and performance guarantees of popular FL frameworks utilizing LoRA, highlighting its suboptimal nature due to constrained subspace learning of low-rank matrices. This limitation hinders effective fine-tuning of LLMs in federated settings. Through rigorous analytical and empirical evaluations, we demonstrate that direct weight averaging outperforms LoRA-based strategies, leading to superior performance for fine-tuned models. Our comprehensive comparison unmasks inefficiencies in LoRA approaches and underscores the advantages of direct weight aggregation. We extend our analysis to low-rank gradient-based optimizers, such as GaLore, used during local training steps. Our findings show that GaLore along with direct-weight aggregation is a more effective approach, outperforming federated LoRA methods like FlexLoRA and FFA-LoRA across both text and image modalities. While privacy remains paramount in FL discourse, our focus is on assessing performance outcomes of federated fine-tuned models and evaluating various FL frameworks from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Our findings advocate reassessing the reliance on LoRA within FL contexts, paving the way for more efficient training methodologies.
Background: Various factors determine analyst effectiveness during elicitation. While the literature suggests that elicitation technique and time are influential factors, other attributes could also play a role. Aim: Determine aspects that may have an influence on analysts' ability to identify certain elements of the problem domain. Methodology: We conducted 14 quasi-experiments, inquiring 134 subjects about two problem domains. For each problem domain, we calculated whether the experimental subjects identified the problem domain elements (concepts, processes, and requirements), i.e., the degree to which these domain elements were visible. Results: Domain element visibility does not appear to be related to either analyst experience or analyst-client interaction. Domain element visibility depends on how analysts provide the elicited information: when asked about the knowledge acquired during elicitation, domain element visibility dramatically increases compared to the information they provide using a written report. Conclusions: Further research is required to replicate our results. However, the finding that analysts have difficulty reporting the information they have acquired is useful for identifying alternatives for improving the documentation of elicitation results. We found evidence that other issues, like domain complexity, the relative importance of different elements within the domain, and the interview script, also seem influential.
Reasoning, a crucial ability for complex problem-solving, plays a pivotal role in various real-world settings such as negotiation, medical diagnosis, and criminal investigation. It serves as a fundamental methodology in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With the ongoing development of foundation models, e.g., Large Language Models (LLMs), there is a growing interest in exploring their abilities in reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce seminal foundation models proposed or adaptable for reasoning, highlighting the latest advancements in various reasoning tasks, methods, and benchmarks. We then delve into the potential future directions behind the emergence of reasoning abilities within foundation models. We also discuss the relevance of multimodal learning, autonomous agents, and super alignment in the context of reasoning. By discussing these future research directions, we hope to inspire researchers in their exploration of this field, stimulate further advancements in reasoning with foundation models, and contribute to the development of AGI.
For a long time, humanity has pursued artificial intelligence (AI) equivalent to or surpassing the human level, with AI agents considered a promising vehicle for this pursuit. AI agents are artificial entities that sense their environment, make decisions, and take actions. Many efforts have been made to develop intelligent AI agents since the mid-20th century. However, these efforts have mainly focused on advancement in algorithms or training strategies to enhance specific capabilities or performance on particular tasks. Actually, what the community lacks is a sufficiently general and powerful model to serve as a starting point for designing AI agents that can adapt to diverse scenarios. Due to the versatile and remarkable capabilities they demonstrate, large language models (LLMs) are regarded as potential sparks for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), offering hope for building general AI agents. Many research efforts have leveraged LLMs as the foundation to build AI agents and have achieved significant progress. We start by tracing the concept of agents from its philosophical origins to its development in AI, and explain why LLMs are suitable foundations for AI agents. Building upon this, we present a conceptual framework for LLM-based agents, comprising three main components: brain, perception, and action, and the framework can be tailored to suit different applications. Subsequently, we explore the extensive applications of LLM-based agents in three aspects: single-agent scenarios, multi-agent scenarios, and human-agent cooperation. Following this, we delve into agent societies, exploring the behavior and personality of LLM-based agents, the social phenomena that emerge when they form societies, and the insights they offer for human society. Finally, we discuss a range of key topics and open problems within the field.
This work considers the question of how convenient access to copious data impacts our ability to learn causal effects and relations. In what ways is learning causality in the era of big data different from -- or the same as -- the traditional one? To answer this question, this survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of both traditional and frontier methods in learning causality and relations along with the connections between causality and machine learning. This work points out on a case-by-case basis how big data facilitates, complicates, or motivates each approach.