We explore the application of uncertainty quantification methods to agent-based models (ABMs) using a simple sheep and wolf predator-prey model. This work serves as a tutorial on how techniques like emulation can be powerful tools in this context. We also highlight the importance of advanced statistical methods in effectively utilising computationally expensive ABMs. Specifically, we implement stochastic Gaussian processes, Gaussian process classification, sequential design, and history matching to address uncertainties in model input parameters and outputs. Our results show that these methods significantly enhance the robustness, accuracy, and predictive power of ABMs.
Generalist foundation models (GFMs) are renowned for their exceptional capability and flexibility in effectively generalizing across diverse tasks and modalities. In the field of medicine, while GFMs exhibit superior generalizability based on their extensive intrinsic knowledge as well as proficiency in instruction following and in-context learning, specialist models excel in precision due to their domain knowledge. In this work, for the first time, we explore the synergy between the GFM and specialist models, to enable precise medical image analysis on a broader scope. Specifically, we propose a cooperative framework, Generalist-Specialist Collaboration (GSCo), which consists of two stages, namely the construction of GFM and specialists, and collaborative inference on downstream tasks. In the construction stage, we develop MedDr, the largest open-source GFM tailored for medicine, showcasing exceptional instruction-following and in-context learning capabilities. Meanwhile, a series of lightweight specialists are crafted for downstream tasks with low computational cost. In the collaborative inference stage, we introduce two cooperative mechanisms, Mixture-of-Expert Diagnosis and Retrieval-Augmented Diagnosis, to harvest the generalist's in-context learning abilities alongside the specialists' domain expertise. For a comprehensive evaluation, we curate a large-scale benchmark featuring 28 datasets and about 250,000 images. Extensive results demonstrate that MedDr consistently outperforms state-of-the-art GFMs on downstream datasets. Furthermore, GSCo exceeds both GFMs and specialists across all out-of-domain disease diagnosis datasets. These findings indicate a significant paradigm shift in the application of GFMs, transitioning from separate models for specific tasks to a collaborative approach between GFMs and specialists, thereby advancing the frontiers of generalizable AI in medicine.
Recently, tool learning with large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising paradigm for augmenting the capabilities of LLMs to tackle highly complex problems. Despite growing attention and rapid advancements in this field, the existing literature remains fragmented and lacks systematic organization, posing barriers to entry for newcomers. This gap motivates us to conduct a comprehensive survey of existing works on tool learning with LLMs. In this survey, we focus on reviewing existing literature from the two primary aspects (1) why tool learning is beneficial and (2) how tool learning is implemented, enabling a comprehensive understanding of tool learning with LLMs. We first explore the "why" by reviewing both the benefits of tool integration and the inherent benefits of the tool learning paradigm from six specific aspects. In terms of "how", we systematically review the literature according to a taxonomy of four key stages in the tool learning workflow: task planning, tool selection, tool calling, and response generation. Additionally, we provide a detailed summary of existing benchmarks and evaluation methods, categorizing them according to their relevance to different stages. Finally, we discuss current challenges and outline potential future directions, aiming to inspire both researchers and industrial developers to further explore this emerging and promising area. We also maintain a GitHub repository to continually keep track of the relevant papers and resources in this rising area at //github.com/quchangle1/LLM-Tool-Survey.
The emergence of models like GPTs, Claude, LLaMA, and Qwen has reshaped AI applications, presenting vast new opportunities across industries. Yet, the integration of tabular data remains notably underdeveloped, despite its foundational role in numerous real-world domains. This gap is critical for three main reasons. First, database or data warehouse data integration is essential for advanced applications; second, the vast and largely untapped resource of tabular data offers immense potential for analysis; and third, the business intelligence domain specifically demands adaptable, precise solutions that many current LLMs may struggle to provide. In response, we introduce TableGPT2, a model rigorously pre-trained and fine-tuned with over 593.8K tables and 2.36M high-quality query-table-output tuples, a scale of table-related data unprecedented in prior research. This extensive training enables TableGPT2 to excel in table-centric tasks while maintaining strong general language and coding abilities. One of TableGPT2's key innovations is its novel table encoder, specifically designed to capture schema-level and cell-level information. This encoder strengthens the model's ability to handle ambiguous queries, missing column names, and irregular tables commonly encountered in real-world applications. Similar to visual language models, this pioneering approach integrates with the decoder to form a robust large multimodal model. We believe the results are compelling: over 23 benchmarking metrics, TableGPT2 achieves an average performance improvement of 35.20% in the 7B model and 49.32% in the 72B model over prior benchmark-neutral LLMs, with robust general-purpose capabilities intact.
Prophet inequalities are a central object of study in optimal stopping theory. In the iid model, a gambler sees values in an online fashion, sampled independently from a given distribution. Upon observing each value, the gambler either accepts it as a reward or irrevocably rejects it and proceeds to observe the next value. The goal of the gambler, who cannot see the future, is maximising the expected value of the reward while competing against the expectation of a prophet (the offline maximum). In other words, one seeks to maximise the gambler-to-prophet ratio of the expectations. This model has been studied with infinite, finite and unknown number of values. When the gambler faces a random number of values, the model is said to have random horizon. We consider the model in which the gambler is given a priori knowledge of the horizon's distribution. Alijani et al. (2020) designed a single-threshold algorithms achieving a ratio of $1/2$ when the random horizon has an increasing hazard rate and is independent of the values. We prove that with a single-threshold, a ratio of $1/2$ is actually achievable for several larger classes of horizon distributions, with the largest being known as the $\mathcal{G}$ class in reliability theory. Moreover, we extend this result to its dual, the $\overline{\mathcal{G}}$ class (which includes the decreasing hazard rate class), and to low-variance horizons. Finally, we construct the first example of a family of horizons, for which multiple thresholds are necessary to achieve a nonzero ratio. We establish that the Secretary Problem optimal stopping rule provides one such algorithm, paving the way towards the study of the model beyond single-threshold algorithms.
As a primary means of information acquisition, information retrieval (IR) systems, such as search engines, have integrated themselves into our daily lives. These systems also serve as components of dialogue, question-answering, and recommender systems. The trajectory of IR has evolved dynamically from its origins in term-based methods to its integration with advanced neural models. While the neural models excel at capturing complex contextual signals and semantic nuances, thereby reshaping the IR landscape, they still face challenges such as data scarcity, interpretability, and the generation of contextually plausible yet potentially inaccurate responses. This evolution requires a combination of both traditional methods (such as term-based sparse retrieval methods with rapid response) and modern neural architectures (such as language models with powerful language understanding capacity). Meanwhile, the emergence of large language models (LLMs), typified by ChatGPT and GPT-4, has revolutionized natural language processing due to their remarkable language understanding, generation, generalization, and reasoning abilities. Consequently, recent research has sought to leverage LLMs to improve IR systems. Given the rapid evolution of this research trajectory, it is necessary to consolidate existing methodologies and provide nuanced insights through a comprehensive overview. In this survey, we delve into the confluence of LLMs and IR systems, including crucial aspects such as query rewriters, retrievers, rerankers, and readers. Additionally, we explore promising directions within this expanding field.
Transformer architectures have facilitated the development of large-scale and general-purpose sequence models for prediction tasks in natural language processing and computer vision, e.g., GPT-3 and Swin Transformer. Although originally designed for prediction problems, it is natural to inquire about their suitability for sequential decision-making and reinforcement learning problems, which are typically beset by long-standing issues involving sample efficiency, credit assignment, and partial observability. In recent years, sequence models, especially the Transformer, have attracted increasing interest in the RL communities, spawning numerous approaches with notable effectiveness and generalizability. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of recent works aimed at solving sequential decision-making tasks with sequence models such as the Transformer, by discussing the connection between sequential decision-making and sequence modeling, and categorizing them based on the way they utilize the Transformer. Moreover, this paper puts forth various potential avenues for future research intending to improve the effectiveness of large sequence models for sequential decision-making, encompassing theoretical foundations, network architectures, algorithms, and efficient training systems. As this article has been accepted by the Frontiers of Computer Science, here is an early version, and the most up-to-date version can be found at //journal.hep.com.cn/fcs/EN/10.1007/s11704-023-2689-5
Traffic forecasting is an important factor for the success of intelligent transportation systems. Deep learning models including convolution neural networks and recurrent neural networks have been applied in traffic forecasting problems to model the spatial and temporal dependencies. In recent years, to model the graph structures in the transportation systems as well as the contextual information, graph neural networks (GNNs) are introduced as new tools and have achieved the state-of-the-art performance in a series of traffic forecasting problems. In this survey, we review the rapidly growing body of recent research using different GNNs, e.g., graph convolutional and graph attention networks, in various traffic forecasting problems, e.g., road traffic flow and speed forecasting, passenger flow forecasting in urban rail transit systems, demand forecasting in ride-hailing platforms, etc. We also present a collection of open data and source resources for each problem, as well as future research directions. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first comprehensive survey that explores the application of graph neural networks for traffic forecasting problems. We have also created a public Github repository to update the latest papers, open data and source resources.
Generative commonsense reasoning which aims to empower machines to generate sentences with the capacity of reasoning over a set of concepts is a critical bottleneck for text generation. Even the state-of-the-art pre-trained language generation models struggle at this task and often produce implausible and anomalous sentences. One reason is that they rarely consider incorporating the knowledge graph which can provide rich relational information among the commonsense concepts. To promote the ability of commonsense reasoning for text generation, we propose a novel knowledge graph augmented pre-trained language generation model KG-BART, which encompasses the complex relations of concepts through the knowledge graph and produces more logical and natural sentences as output. Moreover, KG-BART can leverage the graph attention to aggregate the rich concept semantics that enhances the model generalization on unseen concept sets. Experiments on benchmark CommonGen dataset verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach by comparing with several strong pre-trained language generation models, particularly KG-BART outperforms BART by 5.80, 4.60, in terms of BLEU-3, 4. Moreover, we also show that the generated context by our model can work as background scenarios to benefit downstream commonsense QA tasks.
The design of deep graph models still remains to be investigated and the crucial part is how to explore and exploit the knowledge from different hops of neighbors in an efficient way. In this paper, we propose a novel RNN-like deep graph neural network architecture by incorporating AdaBoost into the computation of network; and the proposed graph convolutional network called AdaGCN~(AdaBoosting Graph Convolutional Network) has the ability to efficiently extract knowledge from high-order neighbors and integrate knowledge from different hops of neighbors into the network in an AdaBoost way. We also present the architectural difference between AdaGCN and existing graph convolutional methods to show the benefits of our proposal. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art prediction performance and the computational advantage of our approach AdaGCN.
With the capability of modeling bidirectional contexts, denoising autoencoding based pretraining like BERT achieves better performance than pretraining approaches based on autoregressive language modeling. However, relying on corrupting the input with masks, BERT neglects dependency between the masked positions and suffers from a pretrain-finetune discrepancy. In light of these pros and cons, we propose XLNet, a generalized autoregressive pretraining method that (1) enables learning bidirectional contexts by maximizing the expected likelihood over all permutations of the factorization order and (2) overcomes the limitations of BERT thanks to its autoregressive formulation. Furthermore, XLNet integrates ideas from Transformer-XL, the state-of-the-art autoregressive model, into pretraining. Empirically, XLNet outperforms BERT on 20 tasks, often by a large margin, and achieves state-of-the-art results on 18 tasks including question answering, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and document ranking.