Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a crucial technique for enhancing the accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating external information. With the advent of LLMs that support increasingly longer context lengths, there is a growing interest in understanding how these models perform in RAG scenarios. Can these new long context models improve RAG performance? This paper presents a comprehensive study of the impact of increased context length on RAG performance across 20 popular open source and commercial LLMs. We ran RAG workflows while varying the total context length from 2,000 to 128,000 tokens (and 2 million tokens when possible) on three domain-specific datasets, and report key insights on the benefits and limitations of long context in RAG applications. Our findings reveal that while retrieving more documents can improve performance, only a handful of the most recent state of the art LLMs can maintain consistent accuracy at long context above 64k tokens. We also identify distinct failure modes in long context scenarios, suggesting areas for future research.
Ultrasound imaging of the medial elbow is crucial for the early identification of Ulnar Collateral Ligament (UCL) injuries. Specifically, measuring the elbow joint space in ultrasound images is used to assess the valgus instability of elbow. To automate this measurement, a precisely annotated dataset is necessary; however, no publicly available dataset has been proposed thus far. This study introduces a novel ultrasound medial elbow dataset for measuring joint space to diagnose Ulnar Collateral Ligament (UCL) injuries. The dataset comprises 4,201 medial elbow ultrasound images from 22 subjects, with landmark annotations on the humerus and ulna. The annotations are made precisely by the authors under the supervision of three orthopedic surgeons. We evaluated joint space measurement methods using our proposed dataset with several landmark detection approaches, including ViTPose, HRNet, PCT, YOLOv8, and U-Net. In addition, we propose using Shape Subspace (SS) for landmark refinement in heatmap-based landmark detection. The results show that the mean Euclidean distance error of joint space is 0.116 mm when using HRNet. Furthermore, the SS landmark refinement improves the mean absolute error of landmark positions by 0.010 mm with HRNet and by 0.103 mm with ViTPose on average. These highlight the potential for high-precision, real-time diagnosis of UCL injuries and associated risks, which could be leveraged in large-scale screening. Lastly, we demonstrate point-based segmentation of the humerus and ulna using the detected landmarks as input. The dataset will be made publicly available upon acceptance of this paper at: //github.com/Akahori000/Ultrasound-Medial-Elbow-Dataset.
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) are a promising technique for enhancing the performance of Next Generation (NextG) wireless communication systems in terms of both spectral and energy efficiency, as well as resource utilization. However, current RIS research has primarily focused on theoretical modeling and Physical (PHY) layer considerations only. Full protocol stack emulation and accurate modeling of the propagation characteristics of the wireless channel are necessary for studying the benefits introduced by RIS technology across various spectrum bands and use-cases. In this paper, we propose, for the first time: (i) accurate PHY layer RIS-enabled channel modeling through Geometry-Based Stochastic Models (GBSMs), leveraging the QUAsi Deterministic RadIo channel GenerAtor (QuaDRiGa) open-source statistical ray-tracer; (ii) optimized resource allocation with RISs by comprehensively studying energy efficiency and power control on different portions of the spectrum through a single-leader multiple-followers Stackelberg game theoretical approach; (iii) full-stack emulation and performance evaluation of RIS-assisted channels with SCOPE/srsRAN for Enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) and Ultra Reliable and Low Latency Communications (URLLC) applications in the worlds largest emulator of wireless systems with hardware-in-the-loop, namely Colosseum. Our findings indicate (i) the significant power savings in terms of energy efficiency achieved with RIS-assisted topologies, especially in the millimeter wave (mmWave) band; and (ii) the benefits introduced for Sub-6 GHz band User Equipments (UEs), where the deployment of a relatively small RIS (e.g., in the order of 100 RIS elements) can result in decreased levels of latency for URLLC services in resource-constrained environments.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown excellent generalization capabilities that have led to the development of numerous models. These models propose various new architectures, tweaking existing architectures with refined training strategies, increasing context length, using high-quality training data, and increasing training time to outperform baselines. Analyzing new developments is crucial for identifying changes that enhance training stability and improve generalization in LLMs. This survey paper comprehensively analyses the LLMs architectures and their categorization, training strategies, training datasets, and performance evaluations and discusses future research directions. Moreover, the paper also discusses the basic building blocks and concepts behind LLMs, followed by a complete overview of LLMs, including their important features and functions. Finally, the paper summarizes significant findings from LLM research and consolidates essential architectural and training strategies for developing advanced LLMs. Given the continuous advancements in LLMs, we intend to regularly update this paper by incorporating new sections and featuring the latest LLM models.
Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) recently has been a new rising research hotspot, which uses powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) as a brain to perform multimodal tasks. The surprising emergent capabilities of MLLM, such as writing stories based on images and OCR-free math reasoning, are rare in traditional methods, suggesting a potential path to artificial general intelligence. In this paper, we aim to trace and summarize the recent progress of MLLM. First of all, we present the formulation of MLLM and delineate its related concepts. Then, we discuss the key techniques and applications, including Multimodal Instruction Tuning (M-IT), Multimodal In-Context Learning (M-ICL), Multimodal Chain of Thought (M-CoT), and LLM-Aided Visual Reasoning (LAVR). Finally, we discuss existing challenges and point out promising research directions. In light of the fact that the era of MLLM has only just begun, we will keep updating this survey and hope it can inspire more research. An associated GitHub link collecting the latest papers is available at //github.com/BradyFU/Awesome-Multimodal-Large-Language-Models.
This work aims to provide an engagement decision support tool for Beyond Visual Range (BVR) air combat in the context of Defensive Counter Air (DCA) missions. In BVR air combat, engagement decision refers to the choice of the moment the pilot engages a target by assuming an offensive stance and executing corresponding maneuvers. To model this decision, we use the Brazilian Air Force's Aerospace Simulation Environment (\textit{Ambiente de Simula\c{c}\~ao Aeroespacial - ASA} in Portuguese), which generated 3,729 constructive simulations lasting 12 minutes each and a total of 10,316 engagements. We analyzed all samples by an operational metric called the DCA index, which represents, based on the experience of subject matter experts, the degree of success in this type of mission. This metric considers the distances of the aircraft of the same team and the opposite team, the point of Combat Air Patrol, and the number of missiles used. By defining the engagement status right before it starts and the average of the DCA index throughout the engagement, we create a supervised learning model to determine the quality of a new engagement. An algorithm based on decision trees, working with the XGBoost library, provides a regression model to predict the DCA index with a coefficient of determination close to 0.8 and a Root Mean Square Error of 0.05 that can furnish parameters to the BVR pilot to decide whether or not to engage. Thus, using data obtained through simulations, this work contributes by building a decision support system based on machine learning for BVR air combat.
Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has achieved extraordinary success in learning effective task-specific representations of nodes in graphs. However, regarding Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN), existing HIN-oriented GCN methods still suffer from two deficiencies: (1) they cannot flexibly explore all possible meta-paths and extract the most useful ones for a target object, which hinders both effectiveness and interpretability; (2) they often need to generate intermediate meta-path based dense graphs, which leads to high computational complexity. To address the above issues, we propose an interpretable and efficient Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network (ie-HGCN) to learn the representations of objects in HINs. It is designed as a hierarchical aggregation architecture, i.e., object-level aggregation first, followed by type-level aggregation. The novel architecture can automatically extract useful meta-paths for each object from all possible meta-paths (within a length limit), which brings good model interpretability. It can also reduce the computational cost by avoiding intermediate HIN transformation and neighborhood attention. We provide theoretical analysis about the proposed ie-HGCN in terms of evaluating the usefulness of all possible meta-paths, its connection to the spectral graph convolution on HINs, and its quasi-linear time complexity. Extensive experiments on three real network datasets demonstrate the superiority of ie-HGCN over the state-of-the-art methods.
An effective and efficient architecture performance evaluation scheme is essential for the success of Neural Architecture Search (NAS). To save computational cost, most of existing NAS algorithms often train and evaluate intermediate neural architectures on a small proxy dataset with limited training epochs. But it is difficult to expect an accurate performance estimation of an architecture in such a coarse evaluation way. This paper advocates a new neural architecture evaluation scheme, which aims to determine which architecture would perform better instead of accurately predict the absolute architecture performance. Therefore, we propose a \textbf{relativistic} architecture performance predictor in NAS (ReNAS). We encode neural architectures into feature tensors, and further refining the representations with the predictor. The proposed relativistic performance predictor can be deployed in discrete searching methods to search for the desired architectures without additional evaluation. Experimental results on NAS-Bench-101 dataset suggests that, sampling 424 ($0.1\%$ of the entire search space) neural architectures and their corresponding validation performance is already enough for learning an accurate architecture performance predictor. The accuracies of our searched neural architectures on NAS-Bench-101 and NAS-Bench-201 datasets are higher than that of the state-of-the-art methods and show the priority of the proposed method.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been shown to be effective models for different predictive tasks on graph-structured data. Recent work on their expressive power has focused on isomorphism tasks and countable feature spaces. We extend this theoretical framework to include continuous features - which occur regularly in real-world input domains and within the hidden layers of GNNs - and we demonstrate the requirement for multiple aggregation functions in this context. Accordingly, we propose Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation (PNA), a novel architecture combining multiple aggregators with degree-scalers (which generalize the sum aggregator). Finally, we compare the capacity of different models to capture and exploit the graph structure via a novel benchmark containing multiple tasks taken from classical graph theory, alongside existing benchmarks from real-world domains, all of which demonstrate the strength of our model. With this work, we hope to steer some of the GNN research towards new aggregation methods which we believe are essential in the search for powerful and robust models.
Reasoning with knowledge expressed in natural language and Knowledge Bases (KBs) is a major challenge for Artificial Intelligence, with applications in machine reading, dialogue, and question answering. General neural architectures that jointly learn representations and transformations of text are very data-inefficient, and it is hard to analyse their reasoning process. These issues are addressed by end-to-end differentiable reasoning systems such as Neural Theorem Provers (NTPs), although they can only be used with small-scale symbolic KBs. In this paper we first propose Greedy NTPs (GNTPs), an extension to NTPs addressing their complexity and scalability limitations, thus making them applicable to real-world datasets. This result is achieved by dynamically constructing the computation graph of NTPs and including only the most promising proof paths during inference, thus obtaining orders of magnitude more efficient models. Then, we propose a novel approach for jointly reasoning over KBs and textual mentions, by embedding logic facts and natural language sentences in a shared embedding space. We show that GNTPs perform on par with NTPs at a fraction of their cost while achieving competitive link prediction results on large datasets, providing explanations for predictions, and inducing interpretable models. Source code, datasets, and supplementary material are available online at //github.com/uclnlp/gntp.
We introduce an effective model to overcome the problem of mode collapse when training Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). Firstly, we propose a new generator objective that finds it better to tackle mode collapse. And, we apply an independent Autoencoders (AE) to constrain the generator and consider its reconstructed samples as "real" samples to slow down the convergence of discriminator that enables to reduce the gradient vanishing problem and stabilize the model. Secondly, from mappings between latent and data spaces provided by AE, we further regularize AE by the relative distance between the latent and data samples to explicitly prevent the generator falling into mode collapse setting. This idea comes when we find a new way to visualize the mode collapse on MNIST dataset. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to propose and apply successfully the relative distance of latent and data samples for stabilizing GAN. Thirdly, our proposed model, namely Generative Adversarial Autoencoder Networks (GAAN), is stable and has suffered from neither gradient vanishing nor mode collapse issues, as empirically demonstrated on synthetic, MNIST, MNIST-1K, CelebA and CIFAR-10 datasets. Experimental results show that our method can approximate well multi-modal distribution and achieve better results than state-of-the-art methods on these benchmark datasets. Our model implementation is published here: //github.com/tntrung/gaan