This paper presents and evaluates a new retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and large language model (LLM)-based artificial intelligence (AI) technique: rubric enabled generative artificial intelligence (REGAI). REGAI uses rubrics, which can be created manually or automatically by the system, to enhance the performance of LLMs for evaluation purposes. REGAI improves on the performance of both classical LLMs and RAG-based LLM techniques. This paper describes REGAI, presents data regarding its performance and discusses several possible application areas for the technology.
Despite recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), their performance on complex reasoning problems requiring multi-step thinking and combining various skills is still limited. To address this, we propose a novel framework HDFlow for complex reasoning with LLMs that combines fast and slow thinking modes in an adaptive manner. Our approach consists of two key components: 1) a new approach for slow, deliberate reasoning called Dynamic Workflow, which automatically decomposes complex problems into more manageable sub-tasks and dynamically designs a workflow to assemble specialized LLM or symbolic reasoning tools to solve sub-tasks; 2) Hybrid Thinking, a general framework that dynamically combines fast and slow thinking based on problem complexity. Finally, we propose an easy-to-scale method for automatically synthesizing a large-scale dataset of 27K challenging reasoning problems for complex reasoning and a hybrid thinking tuning method that trains smaller LLMs on this dataset to internalize the fast/slow hybrid reasoning strategies. Experiments on four reasoning benchmark datasets demonstrate that our slow thinking with dynamic workflows significantly outperforms Chain-of-Thought, and hybrid thinking achieves the highest accuracy while providing an effective balance between computational efficiency and performance. Fine-tuning using our hybrid thinking approach also significantly boosts the complex reasoning capabilities of open-source language models. The results showcase the promise of slow thinking, dynamic workflows, and hybrid thinking in expanding the frontier of complex problem-solving with LLMs\footnote{Code and data will be released at \url{//github.com/wenlinyao/HDFlow}.}.
This paper introduces SGCode, a flexible prompt-optimizing system to generate secure code with large language models (LLMs). SGCode integrates recent prompt-optimization approaches with LLMs in a unified system accessible through front-end and back-end APIs, enabling users to 1) generate secure code, which is free of vulnerabilities, 2) review and share security analysis, and 3) easily switch from one prompt optimization approach to another, while providing insights on model and system performance. We populated SGCode on an AWS server with PromSec, an approach that optimizes prompts by combining an LLM and security tools with a lightweight generative adversarial graph neural network to detect and fix security vulnerabilities in the generated code. Extensive experiments show that SGCode is practical as a public tool to gain insights into the trade-offs between model utility, secure code generation, and system cost. SGCode has only a marginal cost compared with prompting LLMs. SGCode is available at: //sgcode.codes/.
This paper proposes Pix2Next, a novel image-to-image translation framework designed to address the challenge of generating high-quality Near-Infrared (NIR) images from RGB inputs. Our approach leverages a state-of-the-art Vision Foundation Model (VFM) within an encoder-decoder architecture, incorporating cross-attention mechanisms to enhance feature integration. This design captures detailed global representations and preserves essential spectral characteristics, treating RGB-to-NIR translation as more than a simple domain transfer problem. A multi-scale PatchGAN discriminator ensures realistic image generation at various detail levels, while carefully designed loss functions couple global context understanding with local feature preservation. We performed experiments on the RANUS dataset to demonstrate Pix2Next's advantages in quantitative metrics and visual quality, improving the FID score by 34.81% compared to existing methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical utility of Pix2Next by showing improved performance on a downstream object detection task using generated NIR data to augment limited real NIR datasets. The proposed approach enables the scaling up of NIR datasets without additional data acquisition or annotation efforts, potentially accelerating advancements in NIR-based computer vision applications.
This study introduces a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of large language models (LLMs) in understanding and processing cultural knowledge, with a specific focus on Hakka culture as a case study. Leveraging Bloom's Taxonomy, the study develops a multi-dimensional framework that systematically assesses LLMs across six cognitive domains: Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating. This benchmark extends beyond traditional single-dimensional evaluations by providing a deeper analysis of LLMs' abilities to handle culturally specific content, ranging from basic recall of facts to higher-order cognitive tasks such as creative synthesis. Additionally, the study integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology to address the challenges of minority cultural knowledge representation in LLMs, demonstrating how RAG enhances the models' performance by dynamically incorporating relevant external information. The results highlight the effectiveness of RAG in improving accuracy across all cognitive domains, particularly in tasks requiring precise retrieval and application of cultural knowledge. However, the findings also reveal the limitations of RAG in creative tasks, underscoring the need for further optimization. This benchmark provides a robust tool for evaluating and comparing LLMs in culturally diverse contexts, offering valuable insights for future research and development in AI-driven cultural knowledge preservation and dissemination.
The recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing, progressively broadening their scope to multimodal perception and generation. However, effectively integrating listening capabilities into LLMs poses significant challenges, particularly with respect to generalizing across varied contexts and executing complex auditory tasks. In this work, we introduce WavLLM, a robust and adaptive speech large language model with dual encoders, and a prompt-aware LoRA weight adapter, optimized by a two-stage curriculum learning approach. Leveraging dual encoders, we decouple different types of speech information, utilizing a Whisper encoder to process the semantic content of speech, and a WavLM encoder to capture the unique characteristics of the speaker's identity. Within the curriculum learning framework, WavLLM first builds its foundational capabilities by optimizing on mixed elementary single tasks, followed by advanced multi-task training on more complex tasks such as combinations of the elementary tasks. To enhance the flexibility and adherence to different tasks and instructions, a prompt-aware LoRA weight adapter is introduced in the second advanced multi-task training stage. We validate the proposed model on universal speech benchmarks including tasks such as ASR, ST, SV, ER, and also apply it to specialized datasets like Gaokao English listening comprehension set for SQA, and speech Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation set. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of speech tasks on the same model size, exhibiting robust generalization capabilities in executing complex tasks using CoT approach. Furthermore, our model successfully completes Gaokao tasks without specialized training. The codes, models, audio, and Gaokao evaluation set can be accessed at \url{aka.ms/wavllm}.
This paper presents DENSER, an efficient and effective approach leveraging 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) for the reconstruction of dynamic urban environments. While several methods for photorealistic scene representations, both implicitly using neural radiance fields (NeRF) and explicitly using 3DGS have shown promising results in scene reconstruction of relatively complex dynamic scenes, modeling the dynamic appearance of foreground objects tend to be challenging, limiting the applicability of these methods to capture subtleties and details of the scenes, especially far dynamic objects. To this end, we propose DENSER, a framework that significantly enhances the representation of dynamic objects and accurately models the appearance of dynamic objects in the driving scene. Instead of directly using Spherical Harmonics (SH) to model the appearance of dynamic objects, we introduce and integrate a new method aiming at dynamically estimating SH bases using wavelets, resulting in better representation of dynamic objects appearance in both space and time. Besides object appearance, DENSER enhances object shape representation through densification of its point cloud across multiple scene frames, resulting in faster convergence of model training. Extensive evaluations on KITTI dataset show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a wide margin. Source codes and models will be uploaded to this repository //github.com/sntubix/denser
We introduce RecurrentGemma, a family of open language models which uses Google's novel Griffin architecture. Griffin combines linear recurrences with local attention to achieve excellent performance on language. It has a fixed-sized state, which reduces memory use and enables efficient inference on long sequences. We provide two sizes of models, containing 2B and 9B parameters, and provide pre-trained and instruction tuned variants for both. Our models achieve comparable performance to similarly-sized Gemma baselines despite being trained on fewer tokens.
We introduce Lemur and Lemur-Chat, openly accessible language models optimized for both natural language and coding capabilities to serve as the backbone of versatile language agents. The evolution from language chat models to functional language agents demands that models not only master human interaction, reasoning, and planning but also ensure grounding in the relevant environments. This calls for a harmonious blend of language and coding capabilities in the models. Lemur and Lemur-Chat are proposed to address this necessity, demonstrating balanced proficiencies in both domains, unlike existing open-source models that tend to specialize in either. Through meticulous pre-training using a code-intensive corpus and instruction fine-tuning on text and code data, our models achieve state-of-the-art averaged performance across diverse text and coding benchmarks among open-source models. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate Lemur's superiority over existing open-source models and its proficiency across various agent tasks involving human communication, tool usage, and interaction under fully- and partially- observable environments. The harmonization between natural and programming languages enables Lemur-Chat to significantly narrow the gap with proprietary models on agent abilities, providing key insights into developing advanced open-source agents adept at reasoning, planning, and operating seamlessly across environments. //github.com/OpenLemur/Lemur
The recent success of large language models (LLMs) trained on static, pre-collected, general datasets has sparked numerous research directions and applications. One such direction addresses the non-trivial challenge of integrating pre-trained LLMs into dynamic data distributions, task structures, and user preferences. Pre-trained LLMs, when tailored for specific needs, often experience significant performance degradation in previous knowledge domains -- a phenomenon known as "catastrophic forgetting". While extensively studied in the continual learning (CL) community, it presents new manifestations in the realm of LLMs. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of the current research progress on LLMs within the context of CL. This survey is structured into four main sections: we first describe an overview of continually learning LLMs, consisting of two directions of continuity: vertical continuity (or vertical continual learning), i.e., continual adaptation from general to specific capabilities, and horizontal continuity (or horizontal continual learning), i.e., continual adaptation across time and domains (Section 3). We then summarize three stages of learning LLMs in the context of modern CL: Continual Pre-Training (CPT), Domain-Adaptive Pre-training (DAP), and Continual Fine-Tuning (CFT) (Section 4). Then we provide an overview of evaluation protocols for continual learning with LLMs, along with the current available data sources (Section 5). Finally, we discuss intriguing questions pertaining to continual learning for LLMs (Section 6). The full list of papers examined in this survey is available at //github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/llm-continual-learning-survey.
The advent of large language models marks a revolutionary breakthrough in artificial intelligence. With the unprecedented scale of training and model parameters, the capability of large language models has been dramatically improved, leading to human-like performances in understanding, language synthesizing, and common-sense reasoning, etc. Such a major leap-forward in general AI capacity will change the pattern of how personalization is conducted. For one thing, it will reform the way of interaction between humans and personalization systems. Instead of being a passive medium of information filtering, large language models present the foundation for active user engagement. On top of such a new foundation, user requests can be proactively explored, and user's required information can be delivered in a natural and explainable way. For another thing, it will also considerably expand the scope of personalization, making it grow from the sole function of collecting personalized information to the compound function of providing personalized services. By leveraging large language models as general-purpose interface, the personalization systems may compile user requests into plans, calls the functions of external tools to execute the plans, and integrate the tools' outputs to complete the end-to-end personalization tasks. Today, large language models are still being developed, whereas the application in personalization is largely unexplored. Therefore, we consider it to be the right time to review the challenges in personalization and the opportunities to address them with LLMs. In particular, we dedicate this perspective paper to the discussion of the following aspects: the development and challenges for the existing personalization system, the newly emerged capabilities of large language models, and the potential ways of making use of large language models for personalization.