Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data, most of which is automatically scraped from the internet. This data includes encyclopedic documents that harbor a vast amount of general knowledge (e.g., Wikipedia) but also potentially overlap with benchmark datasets used for evaluating LLMs. Consequently, evaluating models on test splits that might have leaked into the training set is prone to misleading conclusions. To foster sound evaluation of language models, we introduce a new test dataset named RepLiQA, suited for question-answering and topic retrieval tasks. RepLiQA is a collection of five splits of test sets, four of which have not been released to the internet or exposed to LLM APIs prior to this publication. Each sample in RepLiQA comprises (1) a reference document crafted by a human annotator and depicting an imaginary scenario (e.g., a news article) absent from the internet; (2) a question about the document's topic; (3) a ground-truth answer derived directly from the information in the document; and (4) the paragraph extracted from the reference document containing the answer. As such, accurate answers can only be generated if a model can find relevant content within the provided document. We run a large-scale benchmark comprising several state-of-the-art LLMs to uncover differences in performance across models of various types and sizes in a context-conditional language modeling setting. Released splits of RepLiQA can be found here: //huggingface.co/datasets/ServiceNow/repliqa.
Guardrails have emerged as an alternative to safety alignment for content moderation of large language models (LLMs). Existing model-based guardrails have not been designed for resource-constrained computational portable devices, such as mobile phones, more and more of which are running LLM-based applications locally. We introduce LoRA-Guard, a parameter-efficient guardrail adaptation method that relies on knowledge sharing between LLMs and guardrail models. LoRA-Guard extracts language features from the LLMs and adapts them for the content moderation task using low-rank adapters, while a dual-path design prevents any performance degradation on the generative task. We show that LoRA-Guard outperforms existing approaches with 100-1000x lower parameter overhead while maintaining accuracy, enabling on-device content moderation.
Current Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDSs) often serve as passive listeners that respond only after receiving user speech. To achieve human-like dialogue, we propose a novel future prediction architecture that allows an SDS to anticipate future affective reactions based on its current behaviors before the user speaks. In this work, we investigate two scenarios: speech and laughter. In speech, we propose to predict the user's future emotion based on its temporal relationship with the system's current emotion and its causal relationship with the system's current Dialogue Act (DA). In laughter, we propose to predict the occurrence and type of the user's laughter using the system's laughter behaviors in the current turn. Preliminary analysis of human-robot dialogue demonstrated synchronicity in the emotions and laughter displayed by the human and robot, as well as DA-emotion causality in their dialogue. This verifies that our architecture can contribute to the development of an anticipatory SDS.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited exceptional performance across a spectrum of natural language processing tasks. However, their substantial sizes pose considerable challenges, particularly in computational demands and inference speed, due to their quadratic complexity. In this work, we have identified a key pattern: certain seemingly meaningless special tokens (i.e., separators) contribute disproportionately to attention scores compared to semantically meaningful tokens. This observation suggests that information of the segments between these separator tokens can be effectively condensed into the separator tokens themselves without significant information loss. Guided by this insight, we introduce SepLLM, a plug-and-play framework that accelerates inference by compressing these segments and eliminating redundant tokens. Additionally, we implement efficient kernels for training acceleration. Experimental results across training-free, training-from-scratch, and post-training settings demonstrate SepLLM's effectiveness. Notably, using the Llama-3-8B backbone, SepLLM achieves over 50% reduction in KV cache on the GSM8K-CoT benchmark while maintaining comparable performance. Furthermore, in streaming settings, SepLLM effectively processes sequences of up to 4 million tokens or more while maintaining consistent language modeling capabilities.
Generative LLM have achieved remarkable success in various industrial applications, owing to their promising In-Context Learning capabilities. However, the issue of long context in complex tasks poses a significant barrier to their wider adoption, manifested in two main aspects: (i) The excessively long context leads to high costs and inference delays. (ii) A substantial amount of task-irrelevant information introduced by long contexts exacerbates the "lost in the middle" problem. Existing methods compress context by removing redundant tokens using metrics such as self-information or PPL, which is inconsistent with the objective of retaining the most important tokens when conditioning on a given query. In this study, we introduce information bottleneck theory (IB) to model the problem, offering a novel perspective that thoroughly addresses the essential properties required for context compression. Additionally, we propose a cross-attention-based approach to approximate mutual information in IB, which can be flexibly replaced with suitable alternatives in different scenarios. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate that our method achieves a 25% increase in compression rate compared to the state-of-the-art, while maintaining question answering performance. In particular, the context compressed by our method even outperform the full context in some cases.
The domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has experienced notable progress in the evolution of Bangla Question Answering (QA) systems. This paper presents a comprehensive review of seven research articles that contribute to the progress in this domain. These research studies explore different aspects of creating question-answering systems for the Bangla language. They cover areas like collecting data, preparing it for analysis, designing models, conducting experiments, and interpreting results. The papers introduce innovative methods like using LSTM-based models with attention mechanisms, context-based QA systems, and deep learning techniques based on prior knowledge. However, despite the progress made, several challenges remain, including the lack of well-annotated data, the absence of high-quality reading comprehension datasets, and difficulties in understanding the meaning of words in context. Bangla QA models' precision and applicability are constrained by these challenges. This review emphasizes the significance of these research contributions by highlighting the developments achieved in creating Bangla QA systems as well as the ongoing effort required to get past roadblocks and improve the performance of these systems for actual language comprehension tasks.
As world knowledge advances and new task schemas emerge, Continual Learning (CL) becomes essential for keeping Large Language Models (LLMs) current and addressing their shortcomings. This process typically involves continual instruction tuning (CIT) and continual pre-training (CPT) to enable these models to adapt to novel tasks and acquire critical knowledge. However, collecting sufficient CPT data and efficiently bridging knowledge gaps remain significant challenges. Inspired by the 'summarizing mistakes' strategy, we propose the Continue Evolving from Mistakes (CEM) method, a data-efficient approach aiming to collect CPT data and continually improve LLMs' performance through iterative evaluation and supplementation with mistake-relevant knowledge. To further optimize data usage and mitigate forgetting, we introduce a novel training paradigm that combines CIT and CPT. Experiments show that CEM substantially enhances multiple models' performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain QA tasks, achieving gains of up to 29.63%. Code and datasets are available on //anonymous.4open.science/r/cem-BB25.
As the Internet of Things (IoT) industry advances, the imperative to secure IoT devices has become increasingly critical. Current practices in both industry and academia advocate for the enhancement of device security through key installation. However, it has been observed that, in practice, IoT vendors frequently assign shared keys to batches of devices. This practice can expose devices to risks, such as data theft by attackers or large-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. To address this issue, our intuition is to assign a unique key to each device. Unfortunately, this strategy proves to be highly complex within the IoT context, as existing keys are typically hardcoded into the firmware, necessitating the creation of bespoke firmware for each device. Furthermore, correct pairing of device keys with their respective devices is crucial. Errors in this pairing process would incur substantial human and temporal resources to rectify and require extensive communication between IoT vendors, device manufacturers, and cloud platforms, leading to significant communication overhead. To overcome these challenges, we propose the OTA-Key scheme. This approach fundamentally decouples device keys from the firmware features stored in flash memory, utilizing an intermediary server to allocate unique device keys in two distinct stages and update keys. We conducted a formal security verification of our scheme using ProVerif and assessed its performance through a series of evaluations. The results demonstrate that our scheme is secure and effectively manages the large-scale distribution and updating of unique device keys. Additionally, it achieves significantly lower update times and data transfer volumes compared to other schemes.
Automated Program Repair (APR) has evolved significantly with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs). Fine-tuning LLMs for program repair is a recent avenue of research, with many dimensions which have not been explored. Existing work mostly fine-tune LLMs with naive code representations and does not scale to frontier models. To address this problem, we propose RepairLLaMA, a novel program repair approach that 1) identifies optimal code representations for APR with fine-tuned models, and 2) pioneers state-of-the-art parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique (PEFT) for program repair. This results in RepairLLaMA producing a highly effective `program repair adapter' for fixing bugs with AI. Our experiments demonstrate the validity of both concepts. First, fine-tuning adapters with program repair specific code representations enables the model to use meaningful repair signals and produce better patches. Second, parameter-efficient fine-tuning helps fine-tuning to converge and clearly contributes to the effectiveness of RepairLLaMA in fixing bugs outside the fine-tuning data distribution. Overall, RepairLLaMA correctly fixes 144 Defects4J v2, 109 HumanEval-Java, and 20 GitBug-Java bugs, outperforming all baselines.
The introduction of Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) has significantly improved object detection performance. However, substantial challenges remain in detecting tiny objects, as their features occupy only a very small proportion of the feature maps. Although FPN integrates multi-scale features, it does not directly enhance or enrich the features of tiny objects. Furthermore, FPN lacks spatial perception ability. To address these issues, we propose a novel High Frequency and Spatial Perception Feature Pyramid Network (HS-FPN) with two innovative modules. First, we designed a high frequency perception module (HFP) that generates high frequency responses through high pass filters. These high frequency responses are used as mask weights from both spatial and channel perspectives to enrich and highlight the features of tiny objects in the original feature maps. Second, we developed a spatial dependency perception module (SDP) to capture the spatial dependencies that FPN lacks. Our experiments demonstrate that detectors based on HS-FPN exhibit competitive advantages over state-of-the-art models on the AI-TOD dataset for tiny object detection.
Recommender systems have been widely applied in different real-life scenarios to help us find useful information. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) based recommender systems have become an emerging research topic. It often surpasses traditional recommendation models even most deep learning-based methods, owing to its interactive nature and autonomous learning ability. Nevertheless, there are various challenges of RL when applying in recommender systems. Toward this end, we firstly provide a thorough overview, comparisons, and summarization of RL approaches for five typical recommendation scenarios, following three main categories of RL: value-function, policy search, and Actor-Critic. Then, we systematically analyze the challenges and relevant solutions on the basis of existing literature. Finally, under discussion for open issues of RL and its limitations of recommendation, we highlight some potential research directions in this field.