Large Language Models (LLMs) are proficient at generating coherent and contextually relevant text but face challenges when addressing knowledge-intensive queries in domain-specific and factual question-answering tasks. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems mitigate this by incorporating external knowledge sources, such as structured knowledge graphs (KGs). However, LLMs often struggle to produce accurate answers despite access to KG-extracted information containing necessary facts. Our study investigates this dilemma by analyzing error patterns in existing KG-based RAG methods and identifying eight critical failure points. We observed that these errors predominantly occur due to insufficient focus on discerning the question's intent and adequately gathering relevant context from the knowledge graph facts. Drawing on this analysis, we propose the Mindful-RAG approach, a framework designed for intent-based and contextually aligned knowledge retrieval. This method explicitly targets the identified failures and offers improvements in the correctness and relevance of responses provided by LLMs, representing a significant step forward from existing methods.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities and contributed to multiple fields, such as generating and summarizing text, language translation, and question-answering. Nowadays, LLM is becoming a very popular tool in computerized language processing tasks, with the capability to analyze complicated linguistic patterns and provide relevant and appropriate responses depending on the context. While offering significant advantages, these models are also vulnerable to security and privacy attacks, such as jailbreaking attacks, data poisoning attacks, and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) leakage attacks. This survey provides a thorough review of the security and privacy challenges of LLMs for both training data and users, along with the application-based risks in various domains, such as transportation, education, and healthcare. We assess the extent of LLM vulnerabilities, investigate emerging security and privacy attacks for LLMs, and review the potential defense mechanisms. Additionally, the survey outlines existing research gaps in this domain and highlights future research directions.
Background: Open-Source Pre-Trained Models (PTMs) and datasets provide extensive resources for various Machine Learning (ML) tasks, yet these resources lack a classification tailored to Software Engineering (SE) needs. Aims: We apply an SE-oriented classification to PTMs and datasets on a popular open-source ML repository, Hugging Face (HF), and analyze the evolution of PTMs over time. Method: We conducted a repository mining study. We started with a systematically gathered database of PTMs and datasets from the HF API. Our selection was refined by analyzing model and dataset cards and metadata, such as tags, and confirming SE relevance using Gemini 1.5 Pro. All analyses are replicable, with a publicly accessible replication package. Results: The most common SE task among PTMs and datasets is code generation, with a primary focus on software development and limited attention to software management. Popular PTMs and datasets mainly target software development. Among ML tasks, text generation is the most common in SE PTMs and datasets. There has been a marked increase in PTMs for SE since 2023 Q2. Conclusions: This study underscores the need for broader task coverage to enhance the integration of ML within SE practices.
This work explores expanding the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) pretrained on text to generate 3D meshes within a unified model. This offers key advantages of (1) leveraging spatial knowledge already embedded in LLMs, derived from textual sources like 3D tutorials, and (2) enabling conversational 3D generation and mesh understanding. A primary challenge is effectively tokenizing 3D mesh data into discrete tokens that LLMs can process seamlessly. To address this, we introduce LLaMA-Mesh, a novel approach that represents the vertex coordinates and face definitions of 3D meshes as plain text, allowing direct integration with LLMs without expanding the vocabulary. We construct a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset enabling pretrained LLMs to (1) generate 3D meshes from text prompts, (2) produce interleaved text and 3D mesh outputs as required, and (3) understand and interpret 3D meshes. Our work is the first to demonstrate that LLMs can be fine-tuned to acquire complex spatial knowledge for 3D mesh generation in a text-based format, effectively unifying the 3D and text modalities. LLaMA-Mesh achieves mesh generation quality on par with models trained from scratch while maintaining strong text generation performance.
Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have emerged as an extension of Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling the integration of various modalities. However, Any-to-Any MLLMs are limited to generating pairwise modalities 'Text + X' within a single response, such as Text + {Image or Audio or Video}. To address this limitation, we introduce Spider, a novel efficient Any-to-Many Modalities Generation (AMMG) framework, which can generate an arbitrary combination of modalities 'Text + Xs', such as Text + {Image and Audio and Video}. To achieve efficient AMMG, our Spider integrates three core components: a Base Model for basic X-to-X (i.e., Any-to-Any) modality processing, a novel Efficient Decoders-Controller for controlling multimodal Decoders to generate Xs (many-modal) contents, and an Any-to-Many Instruction Template designed for producing Xs signal prompts. To train Spider, we constructed a novel Text-formatted Many-Modal (TMM) dataset, which facilitates the learning of the X-to-Xs (i.e., Any-to-Many) capability necessary for AMMG. Ultimately, the well-trained Spider generates a pseudo X-to-Xs dataset, the first-ever X-to-Xs many-modal dataset, enhancing the potential for AMMG task in future research. Overall, this work not only pushes the boundary of multimodal interaction but also provides rich data support for advancing the field.
Asymptotic theory for M-estimation problems usually focuses on the asymptotic convergence of the sample descriptor, defined as the minimizer of the sample loss function. Here, we explore a related question and formulate asymptotic theory for the minimum value of sample loss, the M-variance. Since the loss function value is always a real number, the asymptotic theory for the M-variance is comparatively simple. M-variance often satisfies a standard central limit theorem, even in situations where the asymptotics of the descriptor is more complicated as for example in case of smeariness, or if no asymptotic distribution can be given as can be the case if the descriptor space is a general metric space. We use the asymptotic results for the M-variance to formulate a hypothesis test to systematically determine for a given sample whether the underlying population loss function may have multiple global minima. We discuss three applications of our test to data, each of which presents a typical scenario in which non-uniqueness of descriptors may occur. These model scenarios are the mean on a non-euclidean space, non-linear regression and Gaussian mixture clustering.
A novel online MOT algorithm, IMM Joint Homography State Estimation (IMM-JHSE), is proposed. IMM-JHSE uses an initial homography estimate as the only additional 3D information, whereas other 3D MOT methods use regular 3D measurements. By jointly modelling the homography matrix and its dynamics as part of track state vectors, IMM-JHSE removes the explicit influence of camera motion compensation techniques on predicted track position states, which was prevalent in previous approaches. Expanding upon this, static and dynamic camera motion models are combined using an IMM filter. A simple bounding box motion model is used to predict bounding box positions to incorporate image plane information. In addition to applying an IMM to camera motion, a non-standard IMM approach is applied where bounding-box-based BIoU scores are mixed with ground-plane-based Mahalanobis distances in an IMM-like fashion to perform association only, making IMM-JHSE robust to motion away from the ground plane. Finally, IMM-JHSE makes use of dynamic process and measurement noise estimation techniques. IMM-JHSE improves upon related techniques, including UCMCTrack, OC-SORT, C-BIoU and ByteTrack on the DanceTrack and KITTI-car datasets, increasing HOTA by 2.64 and 2.11, respectively, while offering competitive performance on the MOT17, MOT20 and KITTI-pedestrian datasets. Using publicly available detections, IMM-JHSE outperforms almost all other 2D MOT methods and is outperformed only by 3D MOT methods -- some of which are offline -- on the KITTI-car dataset. Compared to tracking-by-attention methods, IMM-JHSE shows remarkably similar performance on the DanceTrack dataset and outperforms them on the MOT17 dataset. The code is publicly available: \url{//github.com/Paulkie99/imm-jhse}.
Printed Electronics (PE) feature distinct and remarkable characteristics that make them a prominent technology for achieving true ubiquitous computing. This is particularly relevant in application domains that require conformal and ultra-low cost solutions, which have experienced limited penetration of computing until now. Unlike silicon-based technologies, PE offer unparalleled features such as non-recurring engineering costs, ultra-low manufacturing cost, and on-demand fabrication of conformal, flexible, non-toxic, and stretchable hardware. However, PE face certain limitations due to their large feature sizes, that impede the realization of complex circuits, such as machine learning classifiers. In this work, we address these limitations by leveraging the principles of Approximate Computing and Bespoke (fully-customized) design. We propose an automated framework for designing ultra-low power Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) classifiers which employs, for the first time, a holistic approach to approximate all functions of the MLP's neurons: multiplication, accumulation, and activation. Through comprehensive evaluation across various MLPs of varying size, our framework demonstrates the ability to enable battery-powered operation of even the most intricate MLP architecture examined, significantly surpassing the current state of the art.
As Large-Scale Cloud Systems (LCS) become increasingly complex, effective anomaly detection is critical for ensuring system reliability and performance. However, there is a shortage of large-scale, real-world datasets available for benchmarking anomaly detection methods. To address this gap, we introduce a new high-dimensional dataset from IBM Cloud, collected over 4.5 months from the IBM Cloud Console. This dataset comprises 39,365 rows and 117,448 columns of telemetry data. Additionally, we demonstrate the application of machine learning models for anomaly detection and discuss the key challenges faced in this process. This study and the accompanying dataset provide a resource for researchers and practitioners in cloud system monitoring. It facilitates more efficient testing of anomaly detection methods in real-world data, helping to advance the development of robust solutions to maintain the health and performance of large-scale cloud infrastructures.
Transformer-based pretrained language models (T-PTLMs) have achieved great success in almost every NLP task. The evolution of these models started with GPT and BERT. These models are built on the top of transformers, self-supervised learning and transfer learning. Transformed-based PTLMs learn universal language representations from large volumes of text data using self-supervised learning and transfer this knowledge to downstream tasks. These models provide good background knowledge to downstream tasks which avoids training of downstream models from scratch. In this comprehensive survey paper, we initially give a brief overview of self-supervised learning. Next, we explain various core concepts like pretraining, pretraining methods, pretraining tasks, embeddings and downstream adaptation methods. Next, we present a new taxonomy of T-PTLMs and then give brief overview of various benchmarks including both intrinsic and extrinsic. We present a summary of various useful libraries to work with T-PTLMs. Finally, we highlight some of the future research directions which will further improve these models. We strongly believe that this comprehensive survey paper will serve as a good reference to learn the core concepts as well as to stay updated with the recent happenings in T-PTLMs.
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.