Reducing hallucination of Large Language Models (LLMs) is imperative for use in the sciences where reproducibility is crucial. However, LLMs inherently lack long-term memory, making it a nontrivial, ad hoc, and inevitably biased task to fine-tune them on domain-specific literature and data. Here we introduce LLaMP, a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework of multiple data-aware reasoning-and-acting (ReAct) agents that dynamically interact with computational and experimental data on Materials Project (MP). Without fine-tuning, LLaMP demonstrates an ability to comprehend and integrate various modalities of materials science concepts, fetch relevant data stores on the fly, process higher-order data (such as crystal structures and elastic tensors), and summarize multi-step procedures for solid-state synthesis. We show that LLaMP effectively corrects errors in GPT-3.5's intrinsic knowledge, reducing a 5.21% MAPE on frequently-documented bandgaps and a significant 1103.54% MAPE on formation energies -- errors that GPT-3.5 seems to derive from mixed data sources. Additionally, LLaMP substantially reduces the hallucinated volumetric strain in a diamond cubic silicon structure from 66.3% to 0. The proposed framework offers an intuitive and nearly hallucination-free approach to exploring materials informatics and establishes a pathway for knowledge distillation and fine-tuning other language models. We envision the framework as a valuable component for scientific hypotheses and a foundation for future autonomous laboratories where multiple LLM agents communicate and cooperate with robotics to drive material synthesis and chemical reactions without hard-coded human logic and intervention.
A critical bottleneck limiting imitation learning in robotics is the lack of data. This problem is more severe in mobile manipulation, where collecting demonstrations is harder than in stationary manipulation due to the lack of available and easy-to-use teleoperation interfaces. In this work, we demonstrate TeleMoMa, a general and modular interface for whole-body teleoperation of mobile manipulators. TeleMoMa unifies multiple human interfaces including RGB and depth cameras, virtual reality controllers, keyboard, joysticks, etc., and any combination thereof. In its more accessible version, TeleMoMa works using simply vision (e.g., an RGB-D camera), lowering the entry bar for humans to provide mobile manipulation demonstrations. We demonstrate the versatility of TeleMoMa by teleoperating several existing mobile manipulators - PAL Tiago++, Toyota HSR, and Fetch - in simulation and the real world. We demonstrate the quality of the demonstrations collected with TeleMoMa by training imitation learning policies for mobile manipulation tasks involving synchronized whole-body motion. Finally, we also show that TeleMoMa's teleoperation channel enables teleoperation on site, looking at the robot, or remote, sending commands and observations through a computer network, and perform user studies to evaluate how easy it is for novice users to learn to collect demonstrations with different combinations of human interfaces enabled by our system. We hope TeleMoMa becomes a helpful tool for the community enabling researchers to collect whole-body mobile manipulation demonstrations. For more information and video results, //robin-lab.cs.utexas.edu/telemoma-web.
Recent advances in instruction-tuned Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have imbued the models with the ability to generate high-level, image-grounded explanations with ease. While such capability is largely attributed to the rich world knowledge contained within the Large Language Models (LLMs), our work reveals their shortcomings in fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) across six different benchmark settings. Most recent state-of-the-art LVLMs like LLaVa-1.5, InstructBLIP and GPT-4V not only severely deteriorate in terms of classification performance, e.g., average drop of 65.58 in EM for Stanford Dogs for LLaVA-1.5, but also struggle to generate an accurate explanation with detailed attributes based on the concept that appears within an input image despite their capability to generate holistic image-level descriptions. In-depth analyses show that instruction-tuned LVLMs exhibit modality gap, showing discrepancy when given textual and visual inputs that correspond to the same concept, preventing the image modality from leveraging the rich parametric knowledge within the LLMs. In an effort to further the community's endeavor in this direction, we propose a multiple granularity attribute-centric evaluation benchmark, Finer, which aims to establish a ground to evaluate LVLMs' fine-grained visual comprehension ability and provide significantly improved explainability.
Tool learning aims to extend the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with external tools. A major challenge in tool learning is how to support a large number of tools, including unseen tools. To address this challenge, previous studies have proposed retrieving suitable tools for the LLM based on the user query. However, previously proposed methods do not consider the differences between seen and unseen tools, nor do they take the hierarchy of the tool library into account, which may lead to suboptimal performance for tool retrieval. Therefore, to address the aforementioned issues, we propose ToolRerank, an adaptive and hierarchy-aware reranking method for tool retrieval to further refine the retrieval results. Specifically, our proposed ToolRerank includes Adaptive Truncation, which truncates the retrieval results related to seen and unseen tools at different positions, and Hierarchy-Aware Reranking, which makes retrieval results more concentrated for single-tool queries and more diverse for multi-tool queries. Experimental results show that ToolRerank can improve the quality of the retrieval results, leading to better execution results generated by the LLM.
Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 and LLaMA have shown incredible proficiency at natural language processing tasks and have even begun to excel at tasks across other modalities such as vision and audio. Despite their success, LLMs often struggle to perform well on low-resource languages because there is so little training data available. This shortcoming is especially prevalent with open source models. In this work, we explore training LLaMA-2 to speak Amharic, a language which is spoken by over 50 million people world wide, but has orders of magnitude less data available than languages like English. We employ methods previously used for training LLMs on other languages with data scarcity, and use open source translation models to perform data augmentation and grow our dataset from millions of tokens to billions. We further enhance the capabilities of our model by connecting an image encoder and training on a translated visual instruction tuning dataset in the same manner as LLaVA, resulting in a multimodal Amharic LLM that can understand images along with text. We introduce an Amharic version of a popular benchmarking dataset to evaluate our work. Our models and dataset are open sourced and available on GitHub.
Monocular SLAM has received a lot of attention due to its simple RGB inputs and the lifting of complex sensor constraints. However, existing monocular SLAM systems are designed for bounded scenes, restricting the applicability of SLAM systems. To address this limitation, we propose MoD-SLAM, the first monocular NeRF-based dense mapping method that allows 3D reconstruction in real-time in unbounded scenes. Specifically, we introduce a Gaussian-based unbounded scene representation approach to solve the challenge of mapping scenes without boundaries. This strategy is essential to extend the SLAM application. Moreover, a depth estimation module in the front-end is designed to extract accurate priori depth values to supervise mapping and tracking processes. By introducing a robust depth loss term into the tracking process, our SLAM system achieves more precise pose estimation in large-scale scenes. Our experiments on two standard datasets show that MoD-SLAM achieves competitive performance, improving the accuracy of the 3D reconstruction and localization by up to 30% and 15% respectively compared with existing state-of-the-art monocular SLAM systems.
The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to critique and refine their reasoning is crucial for their application in evaluation, feedback provision, and self-improvement. This paper introduces CriticBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to assess LLMs' abilities to critique and rectify their reasoning across a variety of tasks. CriticBench encompasses five reasoning domains: mathematical, commonsense, symbolic, coding, and algorithmic. It compiles 15 datasets and incorporates responses from three LLM families. Utilizing CriticBench, we evaluate and dissect the performance of 17 LLMs in generation, critique, and correction reasoning, i.e., GQC reasoning. Our findings reveal: (1) a linear relationship in GQC capabilities, with critique-focused training markedly enhancing performance; (2) a task-dependent variation in correction effectiveness, with logic-oriented tasks being more amenable to correction; (3) GQC knowledge inconsistencies that decrease as model size increases; and (4) an intriguing inter-model critiquing dynamic, where stronger models are better at critiquing weaker ones, while weaker models can surprisingly surpass stronger ones in their self-critique. We hope these insights into the nuanced critique-correct reasoning of LLMs will foster further research in LLM critique and self-improvement.
Recent achievements in deep learning (DL) have shown its potential for predicting traffic flows. Such predictions are beneficial for understanding the situation and making decisions in traffic control. However, most state-of-the-art DL models are considered "black boxes" with little to no transparency for end users with respect to the underlying mechanisms. Some previous work tried to "open the black boxes" and increase the interpretability of how predictions are generated. However, it still remains challenging to handle complex models on large-scale spatio-temporal data and discover salient spatial and temporal patterns that significantly influence traffic flows. To overcome the challenges, we present TrafPS, a visual analytics approach for interpreting traffic prediction outcomes to support decision-making in traffic management and urban planning. The measurements, region SHAP and trajectory SHAP, are proposed to quantify the impact of flow patterns on urban traffic at different levels. Based on the task requirement from the domain experts, we employ an interactive visual interface for multi-aspect exploration and analysis of significant flow patterns. Two real-world case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of TrafPS in identifying key routes and decision-making support for urban planning.
Recently, Mutual Information (MI) has attracted attention in bounding the generalization error of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, it is intractable to accurately estimate the MI in DNNs, thus most previous works have to relax the MI bound, which in turn weakens the information theoretic explanation for generalization. To address the limitation, this paper introduces a probabilistic representation of DNNs for accurately estimating the MI. Leveraging the proposed MI estimator, we validate the information theoretic explanation for generalization, and derive a tighter generalization bound than the state-of-the-art relaxations.
UMAP (Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection) is a novel manifold learning technique for dimension reduction. UMAP is constructed from a theoretical framework based in Riemannian geometry and algebraic topology. The result is a practical scalable algorithm that applies to real world data. The UMAP algorithm is competitive with t-SNE for visualization quality, and arguably preserves more of the global structure with superior run time performance. Furthermore, UMAP has no computational restrictions on embedding dimension, making it viable as a general purpose dimension reduction technique for machine learning.
Many natural language processing tasks solely rely on sparse dependencies between a few tokens in a sentence. Soft attention mechanisms show promising performance in modeling local/global dependencies by soft probabilities between every two tokens, but they are not effective and efficient when applied to long sentences. By contrast, hard attention mechanisms directly select a subset of tokens but are difficult and inefficient to train due to their combinatorial nature. In this paper, we integrate both soft and hard attention into one context fusion model, "reinforced self-attention (ReSA)", for the mutual benefit of each other. In ReSA, a hard attention trims a sequence for a soft self-attention to process, while the soft attention feeds reward signals back to facilitate the training of the hard one. For this purpose, we develop a novel hard attention called "reinforced sequence sampling (RSS)", selecting tokens in parallel and trained via policy gradient. Using two RSS modules, ReSA efficiently extracts the sparse dependencies between each pair of selected tokens. We finally propose an RNN/CNN-free sentence-encoding model, "reinforced self-attention network (ReSAN)", solely based on ReSA. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on both Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) and Sentences Involving Compositional Knowledge (SICK) datasets.