Daily Papers

There have been many benchmarks for evaluating long-context language models (LCLMs), but developers often rely on synthetic tasks like needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) or arbitrary subsets of tasks. It remains unclear whether they translate to the diverse downstream applications of LCLMs, and the inconsistency further complicates model comparison. We investigate the underlying reasons behind current practices and find that existing benchmarks often provide noisy signals due to low coverage of applications, insufficient lengths, unreliable metrics, and incompatibility with base models. In this work, we present HELMET (How to Evaluate Long-context Models Effectively and Thoroughly), a comprehensive benchmark encompassing seven diverse, application-centric categories. We also address many issues in previous benchmarks by adding controllable lengths up to 128k tokens, model-based evaluation for reliable metrics, and few-shot prompting for robustly evaluating base models. Consequently, we demonstrate that HELMET offers more reliable and consistent rankings of frontier LCLMs. Through a comprehensive study of 51 LCLMs, we find that (1) synthetic tasks like NIAH are not good predictors of downstream performance; (2) the diverse categories in HELMET exhibit distinct trends and low correlation with each other; and (3) while most LCLMs achieve perfect NIAH scores, open-source models significantly lag behind closed ones when the task requires full-context reasoning or following complex instructions -- the gap widens with increased lengths. Finally, we recommend using our RAG tasks for fast model development, as they are easy to run and more predictive of other downstream performance; ultimately, we advocate for a holistic evaluation across diverse tasks.

In this work we take a Category Theoretic perspective on the relationship between probabilistic modeling and function approximation. We begin by defining two extensions of function composition to stochastic process subordination: one based on the co-Kleisli category under the comonad (Omega x -) and one based on the parameterization of a category with a Lawvere theory. We show how these extensions relate to the category Stoch and other Markov Categories. Next, we apply the Para construction to extend stochastic processes to parameterized statistical models and we define a way to compose the likelihood functions of these models. We conclude with a demonstration of how the Maximum Likelihood Estimation procedure defines an identity-on-objects functor from the category of statistical models to the category of Learners. Code to accompany this paper can be found at https://github.com/dshieble/Categorical_Stochastic_Processes_and_Likelihood

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in important tasks such as natural language understanding, language generation, and complex reasoning and have the potential to make a substantial impact on our society. Such capabilities, however, come with the considerable resources they demand, highlighting the strong need to develop effective techniques for addressing their efficiency challenges. In this survey, we provide a systematic and comprehensive review of efficient LLMs research. We organize the literature in a taxonomy consisting of three main categories, covering distinct yet interconnected efficient LLMs topics from model-centric, data-centric, and framework-centric perspective, respectively. We have also created a GitHub repository where we compile the papers featured in this survey at https://github.com/AIoT-MLSys-Lab/EfficientLLMs, and will actively maintain this repository and incorporate new research as it emerges. We hope our survey can serve as a valuable resource to help researchers and practitioners gain a systematic understanding of the research developments in efficient LLMs and inspire them to contribute to this important and exciting field.

A key puzzle in search, ads, and recommendation is that the ranking model can only utilize a small portion of the vastly available user interaction data. As a result, increasing data volume, model size, or computation FLOPs will quickly suffer from diminishing returns. We examined this problem and found that one of the root causes may lie in the so-called ``item-centric'' formulation, which has an unbounded vocabulary and thus uncontrolled model complexity. To mitigate quality saturation, we introduce an alternative formulation named ``user-centric ranking'', which is based on a transposed view of the dyadic user-item interaction data. We show that this formulation has a promising scaling property, enabling us to train better-converged models on substantially larger data sets.

Machine learning (ML) has the potential to revolutionize various domains, but its adoption is often hindered by the disconnect between the needs of domain experts and translating these needs into robust and valid ML tools. Despite recent advances in LLM-based co-pilots to democratize ML for non-technical domain experts, these systems remain predominantly focused on model-centric aspects while overlooking critical data-centric challenges. This limitation is problematic in complex real-world settings where raw data often contains complex issues, such as missing values, label noise, and domain-specific nuances requiring tailored handling. To address this we introduce CliMB-DC, a human-guided, data-centric framework for LLM co-pilots that combines advanced data-centric tools with LLM-driven reasoning to enable robust, context-aware data processing. At its core, CliMB-DC introduces a novel, multi-agent reasoning system that combines a strategic coordinator for dynamic planning and adaptation with a specialized worker agent for precise execution. Domain expertise is then systematically incorporated to guide the reasoning process using a human-in-the-loop approach. To guide development, we formalize a taxonomy of key data-centric challenges that co-pilots must address. Thereafter, to address the dimensions of the taxonomy, we integrate state-of-the-art data-centric tools into an extensible, open-source architecture, facilitating the addition of new tools from the research community. Empirically, using real-world healthcare datasets we demonstrate CliMB-DC's ability to transform uncurated datasets into ML-ready formats, significantly outperforming existing co-pilot baselines for handling data-centric challenges. CliMB-DC promises to empower domain experts from diverse domains -- healthcare, finance, social sciences and more -- to actively participate in driving real-world impact using ML.

We develop tools for explicitly constructing categories enriched over generating data and that compose via ordinary scalar and matrix arithmetic arithmetic operations. We characterize meaningful size maps, weightings, and magnitude that reveal features analogous to outliers that these same notions have previously been shown to reveal in the context of metric spaces. Throughout, we provide examples of such "outlier detection" relevant to the analysis of computer programs, neural networks, cyber-physical systems, and networks of communications channels.

Mobile phone agents can assist people in automating daily tasks on their phones, which have emerged as a pivotal research spotlight. However, existing procedure-oriented agents struggle with cross-app instructions, due to the following challenges: (1) complex task relationships, (2) diverse app environment, and (3) error propagation and information loss in multi-step execution. Drawing inspiration from object-oriented programming principles, we recognize that object-oriented solutions is more suitable for cross-app instruction. To address these challenges, we propose a self-evolving multi-agent framework named MobileSteward, which integrates multiple app-oriented StaffAgents coordinated by a centralized StewardAgent. We design three specialized modules in MobileSteward: (1) Dynamic Recruitment generates a scheduling graph guided by information flow to explicitly associate tasks among apps. (2) Assigned Execution assigns the task to app-oriented StaffAgents, each equipped with app-specialized expertise to address the diversity between apps. (3) Adjusted Evaluation conducts evaluation to provide reflection tips or deliver key information, which alleviates error propagation and information loss during multi-step execution. To continuously improve the performance of MobileSteward, we develop a Memory-based Self-evolution mechanism, which summarizes the experience from successful execution, to improve the performance of MobileSteward. We establish the first English Cross-APP Benchmark (CAPBench) in the real-world environment to evaluate the agents' capabilities of solving complex cross-app instructions. Experimental results demonstrate that MobileSteward achieves the best performance compared to both single-agent and multi-agent frameworks, highlighting the superiority of MobileSteward in better handling user instructions with diverse complexity.

Markov categories are a novel framework to describe and treat problems in probability and information theory. In this work we combine the categorical formalism with the traditional quantitative notions of entropy, mutual information, and data processing inequalities. We show that several quantitative aspects of information theory can be captured by an enriched version of Markov categories, where the spaces of morphisms are equipped with a divergence or even a metric. As it is customary in information theory, mutual information can be defined as a measure of how far a joint source is from displaying independence of its components. More strikingly, Markov categories give a notion of determinism for sources and channels, and we can define entropy exactly by measuring how far a source or channel is from being deterministic. This recovers Shannon and R\'enyi entropies, as well as the Gini-Simpson index used in ecology to quantify diversity, and it can be used to give a conceptual definition of generalized entropy.

As the capabilities of code large language models (LLMs) continue to expand, their applications across diverse code intelligence domains are rapidly increasing. However, most existing datasets only evaluate limited application domains. To address this gap, we have developed a comprehensive code evaluation dataset FullStack Bench focusing on full-stack programming, which encompasses a wide range of application domains (e.g., basic programming, data analysis, software engineering, mathematics, and machine learning). Besides, to assess multilingual programming capabilities, in FullStack Bench, we design real-world instructions and corresponding unit test cases from 16 widely-used programming languages to reflect real-world usage scenarios rather than simple translations. Moreover, we also release an effective code sandbox execution tool (i.e., SandboxFusion) supporting various programming languages and packages to evaluate the performance of our FullStack Bench efficiently. Comprehensive experimental results on our FullStack Bench demonstrate the necessity and effectiveness of our FullStack Bench and SandboxFusion.

Markov categories are a recent categorical approach to the mathematical foundations of probability and statistics. Here, this approach is advanced by stating and proving equivalent conditions for second-order stochastic dominance, a widely used way of comparing probability distributions by their spread. Furthermore, we lay foundation for the theory of comparing statistical experiments within Markov categories by stating and proving the classical Blackwell-Sherman-Stein Theorem. Our version not only offers new insight into the proof, but its abstract nature also makes the result more general, automatically specializing to the standard Blackwell-Sherman-Stein Theorem in measure-theoretic probability as well as a Bayesian version that involves prior-dependent garbling. Along the way, we define and characterize representable Markov categories, within which one can talk about Markov kernels to or from spaces of distributions. We do so by exploring the relation between Markov categories and Kleisli categories of probability monads.

The rapid advancement of AI technology has led to widespread applications of agent systems across various domains. However, the need for detailed architecture design poses significant challenges in designing and operating these systems. This paper introduces a taxonomy focused on the architectures of foundation-model-based agents, addressing critical aspects such as functional capabilities and non-functional qualities. We also discuss the operations involved in both design-time and run-time phases, providing a comprehensive view of architectural design and operational characteristics. By unifying and detailing these classifications, our taxonomy aims to improve the design of foundation-model-based agents. Additionally, the paper establishes a decision model that guides critical design and runtime decisions, offering a structured approach to enhance the development of foundation-model-based agents. Our contributions include providing a structured architecture design option and guiding the development process of foundation-model-based agents, thereby addressing current fragmentation in the field.

Extracting semantic representations from mobile user interfaces (UI) and using the representations for designers' decision-making processes have shown the potential to be effective computational design support tools. Current approaches rely on machine learning models trained on small-sized mobile UI datasets to extract semantic vectors and use screenshot-to-screenshot comparison to retrieve similar-looking UIs given query screenshots. However, the usability of these methods is limited because they are often not open-sourced and have complex training pipelines for practitioners to follow, and are unable to perform screenshot set-to-set (i.e., app-to-app) retrieval. To this end, we (1) employ visual models trained with large web-scale images and test whether they could extract a UI representation in a zero-shot way and outperform existing specialized models, and (2) use mathematically founded methods to enable app-to-app retrieval and design consistency analysis. Our experiments show that our methods not only improve upon previous retrieval models but also enable multiple new applications.

The rapid advancement and widespread deployment of foundation model (FM) based systems have revolutionized numerous applications across various domains. However, the fast-growing capabilities and autonomy have also raised significant concerns about responsible AI and AI safety. Recently, there have been increasing attention toward implementing guardrails to ensure the runtime behavior of FM-based systems is safe and responsible. Given the early stage of FMs and their applications (such as agents), the design of guardrails have not yet been systematically studied. It remains underexplored which software qualities should be considered when designing guardrails and how these qualities can be ensured from a software architecture perspective. Therefore, in this paper, we present a taxonomy for guardrails to classify and compare the characteristics and design options of guardrails. Our taxonomy is organized into three main categories: the motivation behind adopting runtime guardrails, the quality attributes to consider, and the design options available. This taxonomy provides structured and concrete guidance for making architectural design decisions when designing guardrails and highlights trade-offs arising from the design decisions.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has enabled LLM-based applications (a.k.a. AI agents or co-pilots), a new software paradigm that combines the strength of LLM and conventional software. Diverse LLM applications from different tenants could design complex workflows using multiple LLM requests to accomplish one task. However, they have to use the over-simplified request-level API provided by today's public LLM services, losing essential application-level information. Public LLM services have to blindly optimize individual LLM requests, leading to sub-optimal end-to-end performance of LLM applications. This paper introduces Parrot, an LLM service system that focuses on the end-to-end experience of LLM-based applications. Parrot proposes Semantic Variable, a unified abstraction to expose application-level knowledge to public LLM services. A Semantic Variable annotates an input/output variable in the prompt of a request, and creates the data pipeline when connecting multiple LLM requests, providing a natural way to program LLM applications. Exposing Semantic Variables to the public LLM service allows it to perform conventional data flow analysis to uncover the correlation across multiple LLM requests. This correlation opens a brand-new optimization space for the end-to-end performance of LLM-based applications. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Parrot can achieve up to an order-of-magnitude improvement for popular and practical use cases of LLM applications.

A multi-decade exploration into the theoretical foundations of artificial and natural general intelligence, which has been expressed in a series of books and papers and used to guide a series of practical and research-prototype software systems, is reviewed at a moderate level of detail. The review covers underlying philosophies (patternist philosophy of mind, foundational phenomenological and logical ontology), formalizations of the concept of intelligence, and a proposed high level architecture for AGI systems partly driven by these formalizations and philosophies. The implementation of specific cognitive processes such as logical reasoning, program learning, clustering and attention allocation in the context and language of this high level architecture is considered, as is the importance of a common (e.g. typed metagraph based) knowledge representation for enabling "cognitive synergy" between the various processes. The specifics of human-like cognitive architecture are presented as manifestations of these general principles, and key aspects of machine consciousness and machine ethics are also treated in this context. Lessons for practical implementation of advanced AGI in frameworks such as OpenCog Hyperon are briefly considered.

Recently, an increasing number of AI-driven programming assistants powered by code LLMs have been integrated into various real-world software development environments, significantly boosting developer productivity. However, existing code generation benchmarks primarily focus on general-purpose scenarios, leaving the code generation performance of LLMs for specific application domains largely unknown. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark, MultiCodeBench, to fill this gap. MultiCodeBench comprises 2,400 programming tasks, covering 12 popular software development domains and 15 programming languages. Specifically, we perform in-depth research to identify these 12 application domains. Given that each domain may involve multiple technical frameworks, and that different frameworks present distinct challenges in the coding process, we categorize the commonly used frameworks and platforms within each domain. We then sample programming problems from GitHub repositories related to these subdomains. To ensure the quality of the tasks and mitigate data leakage issues, we invite annotators to rewrite the docstrings for each task in MultiCodeBench. Additionally, we build a static analysis-based dependency parsing tool to extract the dependencies in the ground truth for each task, enabling deeper performance analysis. Through extensive experiments on MultiCodeBench with eleven representative mainstream LLMs, we reveal the code generation performance of the LLMs across different application domains, providing practical insights for developers in downstream fields when selecting LLMs. Furthermore, we analyze the reasons behind the models' failures in completing software application development tasks, offering guidance for model developers to enhance domain-specific code generation capabilities.

Existing information on AI-based facial emotion recognition (FER) is not easily comprehensible by those outside the field of computer science, requiring cross-disciplinary effort to determine a categorisation framework that promotes the understanding of this technology, and its impact on users. Most proponents classify FER in terms of methodology, implementation and analysis; relatively few by its application in education; and none by its users. This paper is concerned primarily with (potential) teacher-users of FER tools for education. It proposes a three-part classification of these teachers, by orientation, condition and preference, based on a classical taxonomy of affective educational objectives, and related theories. It also compiles and organises the types of FER solutions found in or inferred from the literature into "technology" and "applications" categories, as a prerequisite for structuring the proposed "teacher-user" category. This work has implications for proponents', critics', and users' understanding of the relationship between teachers and FER.

Large Language Models (LLM)-based systems, i.e. interconnected elements that include an LLM as a central component (e.g., conversational agents), are typically monolithic static architectures that rely on a single LLM for all user queries. However, they often require different preprocessing strategies, levels of reasoning, or knowledge. Generalist LLMs (i.e. GPT-4), trained on very large multi-topic corpora, can perform well in a variety of tasks. However, they require significant financial, energy, and hardware resources that may not be justified for basic tasks. This implies potentially investing in unnecessary costs for a given query. To overcome this problem, a routing mechanism routes user queries to the most suitable components, such as smaller LLMs or experts in specific topics. This approach may improve response quality while minimising costs. Routing can be expanded to other components of the conversational agent architecture, such as the selection of optimal embedding strategies. This paper explores key considerations for integrating routing into LLM-based systems, focusing on resource management, cost definition, and strategy selection. Our main contributions include a formalisation of the problem, a novel taxonomy of existing approaches emphasising relevance and resource efficiency, and a comparative analysis of these strategies in relation to industry practices. Finally, we identify critical challenges and directions for future research.

Ensuring alignment, which refers to making models behave in accordance with human intentions [1,2], has become a critical task before deploying large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications. For instance, OpenAI devoted six months to iteratively aligning GPT-4 before its release [3]. However, a major challenge faced by practitioners is the lack of clear guidance on evaluating whether LLM outputs align with social norms, values, and regulations. This obstacle hinders systematic iteration and deployment of LLMs. To address this issue, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of key dimensions that are crucial to consider when assessing LLM trustworthiness. The survey covers seven major categories of LLM trustworthiness: reliability, safety, fairness, resistance to misuse, explainability and reasoning, adherence to social norms, and robustness. Each major category is further divided into several sub-categories, resulting in a total of 29 sub-categories. Additionally, a subset of 8 sub-categories is selected for further investigation, where corresponding measurement studies are designed and conducted on several widely-used LLMs. The measurement results indicate that, in general, more aligned models tend to perform better in terms of overall trustworthiness. However, the effectiveness of alignment varies across the different trustworthiness categories considered. This highlights the importance of conducting more fine-grained analyses, testing, and making continuous improvements on LLM alignment. By shedding light on these key dimensions of LLM trustworthiness, this paper aims to provide valuable insights and guidance to practitioners in the field. Understanding and addressing these concerns will be crucial in achieving reliable and ethically sound deployment of LLMs in various applications.

Optics and lenses are abstract categorical gadgets that model systems with bidirectional data flow. In this paper we observe that the denotational definition of optics - identifying two optics as equivalent by observing their behaviour from the outside - is not suitable for operational, software oriented approaches where optics are not merely observed, but built with their internal setups in mind. We identify operational differences between denotationally isomorphic categories of cartesian optics and lenses: their different composition rule and corresponding space-time tradeoffs, positioning them at two opposite ends of a spectrum. With these motivations we lift the existing categorical constructions and their relationships to the 2-categorical level, showing that the relevant operational concerns become visible. We define the 2-category 2-Optic(C) whose 2-cells explicitly track optics' internal configuration. We show that the 1-category Optic(C) arises by locally quotienting out the connected components of this 2-category. We show that the embedding of lenses into cartesian optics gets weakened from a functor to an oplax functor whose oplaxator now detects the different composition rule. We determine the difficulties in showing this functor forms a part of an adjunction in any of the standard 2-categories. We establish a conjecture that the well-known isomorphism between cartesian lenses and optics arises out of the lax 2-adjunction between their double-categorical counterparts. In addition to presenting new research, this paper is also meant to be an accessible introduction to the topic.

Scholarly writing presents a complex space that generally follows a methodical procedure to plan and produce both rationally sound and creative compositions. Recent works involving large language models (LLM) demonstrate considerable success in text generation and revision tasks; however, LLMs still struggle to provide structural and creative feedback on the document level that is crucial to academic writing. In this paper, we introduce a novel taxonomy that categorizes scholarly writing behaviors according to intention, writer actions, and the information types of the written data. We also provide ManuScript, an original dataset annotated with a simplified version of our taxonomy to show writer actions and the intentions behind them. Motivated by cognitive writing theory, our taxonomy for scientific papers includes three levels of categorization in order to trace the general writing flow and identify the distinct writer activities embedded within each higher-level process. ManuScript intends to provide a complete picture of the scholarly writing process by capturing the linearity and non-linearity of writing trajectory, such that writing assistants can provide stronger feedback and suggestions on an end-to-end level. The collected writing trajectories are viewed at https://minnesotanlp.github.io/REWARD_demo/

Understanding the landscape of potential harms from algorithmic systems enables practitioners to better anticipate consequences of the systems they build. It also supports the prospect of incorporating controls to help minimize harms that emerge from the interplay of technologies and social and cultural dynamics. A growing body of scholarship has identified a wide range of harms across different algorithmic technologies. However, computing research and practitioners lack a high level and synthesized overview of harms from algorithmic systems. Based on a scoping review of computing research (n=172), we present an applied taxonomy of sociotechnical harms to support a more systematic surfacing of potential harms in algorithmic systems. The final taxonomy builds on and refers to existing taxonomies, classifications, and terminologies. Five major themes related to sociotechnical harms - representational, allocative, quality-of-service, interpersonal harms, and social system/societal harms - and sub-themes are presented along with a description of these categories. We conclude with a discussion of challenges and opportunities for future research.

The integration of tools in LLM-based agents overcame the difficulties of standalone LLMs and traditional agents' limited capabilities. However, the conjunction of these technologies and the proposed enhancements in several state-of-the-art works followed a non-unified software architecture resulting in a lack of modularity. Indeed, they focused mainly on functionalities and overlooked the definition of the component's boundaries within the agent. This caused terminological and architectural ambiguities between researchers which we addressed in this paper by proposing a unified framework that establishes a clear foundation for LLM-based agents' development from both functional and software architectural perspectives. Our framework, LLM-Agent-UMF (LLM-based Agent Unified Modeling Framework), clearly distinguishes between the different components of an agent, setting LLMs, and tools apart from a newly introduced element: the core-agent, playing the role of the central coordinator of the agent which comprises five modules: planning, memory, profile, action, and security, the latter often neglected in previous works. Differences in the internal structure of core-agents led us to classify them into a taxonomy of passive and active types. Based on this, we proposed different multi-core agent architectures combining unique characteristics of various individual agents. For evaluation purposes, we applied this framework to a selection of state-of-the-art agents, thereby demonstrating its alignment with their functionalities and clarifying the overlooked architectural aspects. Moreover, we thoroughly assessed four of our proposed architectures by integrating distinctive agents into hybrid active/passive core-agents' systems. This analysis provided clear insights into potential improvements and highlighted the challenges involved in the combination of specific agents.

Subject-driven generation has garnered significant interest recently due to its ability to personalize text-to-image generation. Typical works focus on learning the new subject's private attributes. However, an important fact has not been taken seriously that a subject is not an isolated new concept but should be a specialization of a certain category in the pre-trained model. This results in the subject failing to comprehensively inherit the attributes in its category, causing poor attribute-related generations. In this paper, motivated by object-oriented programming, we model the subject as a derived class whose base class is its semantic category. This modeling enables the subject to inherit public attributes from its category while learning its private attributes from the user-provided example. Specifically, we propose a plug-and-play method, Subject-Derived regularization (SuDe). It constructs the base-derived class modeling by constraining the subject-driven generated images to semantically belong to the subject's category. Extensive experiments under three baselines and two backbones on various subjects show that our SuDe enables imaginative attribute-related generations while maintaining subject fidelity. Codes will be open sourced soon at FaceChain (https://github.com/modelscope/facechain).

With the rise of software-as-a-service and microservice architectures, RESTful APIs are now ubiquitous in mobile and web applications. A service can have tens or hundreds of API methods, making it a challenge for programmers to find the right combination of methods to solve their task. We present APIphany, a component-based synthesizer for programs that compose calls to RESTful APIs. The main innovation behind APIphany is the use of precise semantic types, both to specify user intent and to direct the search. APIphany contributes three novel mechanisms to overcome challenges in adapting component-based synthesis to the REST domain: (1) a type inference algorithm for augmenting REST specifications with semantic types; (2) an efficient synthesis technique for "wrangling" semi-structured data, which is commonly required in working with RESTful APIs; and (3) a new form of simulated execution to avoid executing APIs calls during synthesis. We evaluate APIphany on three real-world APIs and 32 tasks extracted from GitHub repositories and StackOverflow. In our experiments, APIphany found correct solutions to 29 tasks, with 23 of them reported among top ten synthesis results.

We investigate the construction of latent spaces through self-supervised learning to support semantically meaningful operations. Analogous to operational amplifiers, these "operational latent spaces" (OpLaS) not only demonstrate semantic structure such as clustering but also support common transformational operations with inherent semantic meaning. Some operational latent spaces are found to have arisen "unintentionally" in the progress toward some (other) self-supervised learning objective, in which unintended but still useful properties are discovered among the relationships of points in the space. Other spaces may be constructed "intentionally" by developers stipulating certain kinds of clustering or transformations intended to produce the desired structure. We focus on the intentional creation of operational latent spaces via self-supervised learning, including the introduction of rotation operators via a novel "FiLMR" layer, which can be used to enable ring-like symmetries found in some musical constructions.

As research and industry moves towards large-scale models capable of numerous downstream tasks, the complexity of understanding multi-modal datasets that give nuance to models rapidly increases. A clear and thorough understanding of a dataset's origins, development, intent, ethical considerations and evolution becomes a necessary step for the responsible and informed deployment of models, especially those in people-facing contexts and high-risk domains. However, the burden of this understanding often falls on the intelligibility, conciseness, and comprehensiveness of the documentation. It requires consistency and comparability across the documentation of all datasets involved, and as such documentation must be treated as a user-centric product in and of itself. In this paper, we propose Data Cards for fostering transparent, purposeful and human-centered documentation of datasets within the practical contexts of industry and research. Data Cards are structured summaries of essential facts about various aspects of ML datasets needed by stakeholders across a dataset's lifecycle for responsible AI development. These summaries provide explanations of processes and rationales that shape the data and consequently the models, such as upstream sources, data collection and annotation methods; training and evaluation methods, intended use; or decisions affecting model performance. We also present frameworks that ground Data Cards in real-world utility and human-centricity. Using two case studies, we report on desirable characteristics that support adoption across domains, organizational structures, and audience groups. Finally, we present lessons learned from deploying over 20 Data Cards.

Certain statistical models are capable of interpreting input strings as instructions, or prompts, and carry out tasks based on them. Many approaches to prompting and pre-training these models involve the automated generation of these prompts. We call these approaches meta-prompting, or prompting to obtain prompts. We propose a theoretical framework based on category theory to generalize and describe them. This framework is flexible enough to account for LLM stochasticity; and allows us to obtain formal results around task agnosticity and equivalence of various meta-prompting approaches. We experiment with meta-prompting in two active areas of model research: creativity and ideation. We find that user preference favors (p < 0.01) the prompts generated under meta-prompting, as well as their corresponding outputs, over a series of hardcoded baseline prompts that include the original task prompt. Using our framework, we argue that meta-prompting is more effective than basic prompting at generating desirable outputs.

With the rapid advance of computer graphics and artificial intelligence technologies, the ways we interact with the world have undergone a transformative shift. Virtual Reality (VR) technology, aided by artificial intelligence (AI), has emerged as a dominant interaction media in multiple application areas, thanks to its advantage of providing users with immersive experiences. Among those applications, medicine is considered one of the most promising areas. In this paper, we present a comprehensive examination of the burgeoning field of AI-enhanced VR applications in medical care and services. By introducing a systematic taxonomy, we meticulously classify the pertinent techniques and applications into three well-defined categories based on different phases of medical diagnosis and treatment: Visualization Enhancement, VR-related Medical Data Processing, and VR-assisted Intervention. This categorization enables a structured exploration of the diverse roles that AI-powered VR plays in the medical domain, providing a framework for a more comprehensive understanding and evaluation of these technologies. To our best knowledge, this is the first systematic survey of AI-powered VR systems in medical settings, laying a foundation for future research in this interdisciplinary domain.

Large Language Models (LLMs) specializing in code generation (which are also often referred to as code LLMs), e.g., StarCoder and Code Llama, play increasingly critical roles in various software development scenarios. It is also crucial for code LLMs to possess both code generation and natural language abilities for many specific applications, such as code snippet retrieval using natural language or code explanations. The intricate interaction between acquiring language and coding skills complicates the development of strong code LLMs. Furthermore, there is a lack of thorough prior studies on the LLM pretraining strategy that mixes code and natural language. In this work, we propose a pretraining strategy to enhance the integration of natural language and coding capabilities within a single LLM. Specifically, it includes two phases of training with appropriately adjusted code/language ratios. The resulting model, Crystal, demonstrates remarkable capabilities in both domains. Specifically, it has natural language and coding performance comparable to that of Llama 2 and Code Llama, respectively. Crystal exhibits better data efficiency, using 1.4 trillion tokens compared to the more than 2 trillion tokens used by Llama 2 and Code Llama. We verify our pretraining strategy by analyzing the training process and observe consistent improvements in most benchmarks. We also adopted a typical application adaptation phase with a code-centric data mixture, only to find that it did not lead to enhanced performance or training efficiency, underlining the importance of a carefully designed data recipe. To foster research within the community, we commit to open-sourcing every detail of the pretraining, including our training datasets, code, loggings and 136 checkpoints throughout the training.

We give a conceptual treatment of the notion of joints, marginals, and independence in the setting of categorical probability. This is achieved by endowing the usual probability monads (like the Giry monad) with a monoidal and an opmonoidal structure, mutually compatible (i.e. a bimonoidal structure). If the underlying monoidal category is cartesian monoidal, a bimonoidal structure is given uniquely by a commutative strength. However, if the underlying monoidal category is not cartesian monoidal, a strength is not enough to guarantee all the desired properties of joints and marginals. A bimonoidal structure is then the correct requirement for the more general case. We explain the theory and the operational interpretation, with the help of the graphical calculus for monoidal categories. We give a definition of stochastic independence based on the bimonoidal structure, compatible with the intuition and with other approaches in the literature for cartesian monoidal categories. We then show as an example that the Kantorovich monad on the category of complete metric spaces is a bimonoidal monad for a non-cartesian monoidal structure.

This paper introduces the Pandemic PACT Advanced Categorisation Engine (PPACE) along with its associated dataset. PPACE is a fine-tuned model developed to automatically classify research abstracts from funded biomedical projects according to WHO-aligned research priorities. This task is crucial for monitoring research trends and identifying gaps in global health preparedness and response. Our approach builds on human-annotated projects, which are allocated one or more categories from a predefined list. A large language model is then used to generate `rationales' explaining the reasoning behind these annotations. This augmented data, comprising expert annotations and rationales, is subsequently used to fine-tune a smaller, more efficient model. Developed as part of the Pandemic PACT project, which aims to track and analyse research funding and clinical evidence for a wide range of diseases with outbreak potential, PPACE supports informed decision-making by research funders, policymakers, and independent researchers. We introduce and release both the trained model and the instruction-based dataset used for its training. Our evaluation shows that PPACE significantly outperforms its baselines. The release of PPACE and its associated dataset offers valuable resources for researchers in multilabel biomedical document classification and supports advancements in aligning biomedical research with key global health priorities.

We present ABSApp, a portable system for weakly-supervised aspect-based sentiment extraction. The system is interpretable and user friendly and does not require labeled training data, hence can be rapidly and cost-effectively used across different domains in applied setups. The system flow includes three stages: First, it generates domain-specific aspect and opinion lexicons based on an unlabeled dataset; second, it enables the user to view and edit those lexicons (weak supervision); and finally, it enables the user to select an unlabeled target dataset from the same domain, classify it, and generate an aspect-based sentiment report. ABSApp has been successfully used in a number of real-life use cases, among them movie review analysis and convention impact analysis.

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) refers to circumstances where developers use textual artifacts to explain why the existing implementation is not optimal. Past research in detecting SATD has focused on either identifying SATD (classifying SATD items as SATD or not) or categorizing SATD (labeling instances as SATD that pertain to requirement, design, code, test debt, etc.). However, the performance of these approaches remains suboptimal, particularly for specific types of SATD, such as test and requirement debt, primarily due to extremely imbalanced datasets. To address these challenges, we build on earlier research by utilizing BiLSTM architecture for the binary identification of SATD and BERT architecture for categorizing different types of SATD. Despite their effectiveness, both architectures struggle with imbalanced data. Therefore, we employ a large language model data augmentation strategy to mitigate this issue. Furthermore, we introduce a two-step approach to identify and categorize SATD across various datasets derived from different artifacts. Our contributions include providing a balanced dataset for future SATD researchers and demonstrating that our approach significantly improves SATD identification and categorization performance compared to baseline methods.

On-device automatic speech recognition systems face several challenges compared to server-based systems. They have to meet stricter constraints in terms of speed, disk size and memory while maintaining the same accuracy. Often they have to serve several applications with different distributions at once, such as communicating with a virtual assistant and speech-to-text. The simplest solution to serve multiple applications is to build application-specific (language) models, but this leads to an increase in memory. Therefore, we explore different data- and architecture-driven language modeling approaches to build a single application-agnostic model. We propose two novel feed-forward architectures that find an optimal trade off between different on-device constraints. In comparison to the application-specific solution, one of our novel approaches reduces the disk size by half, while maintaining speed and accuracy of the original model.

We present Spacerini, a modular framework for seamless building and deployment of interactive search applications, designed to facilitate the qualitative analysis of large scale research datasets. Spacerini integrates features from both the Pyserini toolkit and the HF中国镜像站 ecosystem to ease the indexing text collections and deploy them as search engines for ad-hoc exploration and to make the retrieval of relevant data points quick and efficient. The user-friendly interface enables searching through massive datasets in a no-code fashion, making Spacerini broadly accessible to anyone looking to qualitatively audit their text collections. This is useful both to IR~researchers aiming to demonstrate the capabilities of their indexes in a simple and interactive way, and to NLP~researchers looking to better understand and audit the failure modes of large language models. The framework is open source and available on GitHub: https://github.com/castorini/hf-spacerini, and includes utilities to load, pre-process, index, and deploy local and web search applications. A portfolio of applications created with Spacerini for a multitude of use cases can be found by visiting https://hf.co/spacerini.

Linking clinical narratives to standardized vocabularies and coding systems is a key component of unlocking the information in medical text for analysis. However, many domains of medical concepts lack well-developed terminologies that can support effective coding of medical text. We present a framework for developing natural language processing (NLP) technologies for automated coding of under-studied types of medical information, and demonstrate its applicability via a case study on physical mobility function. Mobility is a component of many health measures, from post-acute care and surgical outcomes to chronic frailty and disability, and is coded in the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF). However, mobility and other types of functional activity remain under-studied in medical informatics, and neither the ICF nor commonly-used medical terminologies capture functional status terminology in practice. We investigated two data-driven paradigms, classification and candidate selection, to link narrative observations of mobility to standardized ICF codes, using a dataset of clinical narratives from physical therapy encounters. Recent advances in language modeling and word embedding were used as features for established machine learning models and a novel deep learning approach, achieving a macro F-1 score of 84% on linking mobility activity reports to ICF codes. Both classification and candidate selection approaches present distinct strengths for automated coding in under-studied domains, and we highlight that the combination of (i) a small annotated data set; (ii) expert definitions of codes of interest; and (iii) a representative text corpus is sufficient to produce high-performing automated coding systems. This study has implications for the ongoing growth of NLP tools for a variety of specialized applications in clinical care and research.

Recommender systems play a significant role in information filtering and have been utilized in different scenarios, such as e-commerce and social media. With the prosperity of deep learning, deep recommender systems show superior performance by capturing non-linear information and item-user relationships. However, the design of deep recommender systems heavily relies on human experiences and expert knowledge. To tackle this problem, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is introduced to automatically search for the proper candidates for different parts of deep recommender systems. This survey performs a comprehensive review of the literature in this field. Firstly, we propose an abstract concept for AutoML for deep recommender systems (AutoRecSys) that describes its building blocks and distinguishes it from conventional AutoML techniques and recommender systems. Secondly, we present a taxonomy as a classification framework containing feature selection search, embedding dimension search, feature interaction search, model architecture search, and other components search. Furthermore, we put a particular emphasis on the search space and search strategy, as they are the common thread to connect all methods within each category and enable practitioners to analyze and compare various approaches. Finally, we propose four future promising research directions that will lead this line of research.

As big data grows ubiquitous across many domains, more and more stakeholders seek to develop Machine Learning (ML) applications on their data. The success of an ML application usually depends on the close collaboration of ML experts and domain experts. However, the shortage of ML engineers remains a fundamental problem. Low-code Machine learning tools/platforms (aka, AutoML) aim to democratize ML development to domain experts by automating many repetitive tasks in the ML pipeline. This research presents an empirical study of around 14k posts (questions + accepted answers) from Stack Overflow (SO) that contained AutoML-related discussions. We examine how these topics are spread across the various Machine Learning Life Cycle (MLLC) phases and their popularity and difficulty. This study offers several interesting findings. First, we find 13 AutoML topics that we group into four categories. The MLOps topic category (43% questions) is the largest, followed by Model (28% questions), Data (27% questions), Documentation (2% questions). Second, Most questions are asked during Model training (29%) (i.e., implementation phase) and Data preparation (25%) MLLC phase. Third, AutoML practitioners find the MLOps topic category most challenging, especially topics related to model deployment & monitoring and Automated ML pipeline. These findings have implications for all three AutoML stakeholders: AutoML researchers, AutoML service vendors, and AutoML developers. Academia and Industry collaboration can improve different aspects of AutoML, such as better DevOps/deployment support and tutorial-based documentation.

Many clustering schemes are defined by optimizing an objective function defined on the partitions of the underlying set of a finite metric space. In this paper, we construct a framework for studying what happens when we instead impose various structural conditions on the clustering schemes, under the general heading of functoriality. Functoriality refers to the idea that one should be able to compare the results of clustering algorithms as one varies the data set, for example by adding points or by applying functions to it. We show that within this framework, one can prove a theorems analogous to one of J. Kleinberg, in which for example one obtains an existence and uniqueness theorem instead of a non-existence result. We obtain a full classification of all clustering schemes satisfying a condition we refer to as excisiveness. The classification can be changed by varying the notion of maps of finite metric spaces. The conditions occur naturally when one considers clustering as the statistical version of the geometric notion of connected components. By varying the degree of functoriality that one requires from the schemes it is possible to construct richer families of clustering schemes that exhibit sensitivity to density.

While there has been a recent burgeoning of applications at the intersection of natural and programming languages, such as code generation and code summarization, these applications are usually English-centric. This creates a barrier for program developers who are not proficient in English. To mitigate this gap in technology development across languages, we propose a multilingual dataset, MCoNaLa, to benchmark code generation from natural language commands extending beyond English. Modeled off of the methodology from the English Code/Natural Language Challenge (CoNaLa) dataset, we annotated a total of 896 NL-code pairs in three languages: Spanish, Japanese, and Russian. We present a quantitative evaluation of performance on the MCoNaLa dataset by testing with state-of-the-art code generation systems. While the difficulties vary across these three languages, all systems lag significantly behind their English counterparts, revealing the challenges in adapting code generation to new languages.

The proliferation of open-source scientific software for science and research presents opportunities and challenges. In this paper, we introduce the SciCat dataset -- a comprehensive collection of Free-Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects, designed to address the need for a curated repository of scientific and research software. This collection is crucial for understanding the creation of scientific software and aiding in its development. To ensure extensive coverage, our approach involves selecting projects from a pool of 131 million deforked repositories from the World of Code data source. Subsequently, we analyze README.md files using OpenAI's advanced language models. Our classification focuses on software designed for scientific purposes, research-related projects, and research support software. The SciCat dataset aims to become an invaluable tool for researching science-related software, shedding light on emerging trends, prevalent practices, and challenges in the field of scientific software development. Furthermore, it includes data that can be linked to the World of Code, GitHub, and other platforms, providing a solid foundation for conducting comparative studies between scientific and non-scientific software.

We develop Markov categories as a framework for synthetic probability and statistics, following work of Golubtsov as well as Cho and Jacobs. This means that we treat the following concepts in purely abstract categorical terms: conditioning and disintegration; various versions of conditional independence and its standard properties; conditional products; almost surely; sufficient statistics; versions of theorems on sufficient statistics due to Fisher--Neyman, Basu, and Bahadur. Besides the conceptual clarity offered by our categorical setup, its main advantage is that it provides a uniform treatment of various types of probability theory, including discrete probability theory, measure-theoretic probability with general measurable spaces, Gaussian probability, stochastic processes of either of these kinds, and many others.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making a profound impact in almost every domain. A vital enabler of its great success is the availability of abundant and high-quality data for building machine learning models. Recently, the role of data in AI has been significantly magnified, giving rise to the emerging concept of data-centric AI. The attention of researchers and practitioners has gradually shifted from advancing model design to enhancing the quality and quantity of the data. In this survey, we discuss the necessity of data-centric AI, followed by a holistic view of three general data-centric goals (training data development, inference data development, and data maintenance) and the representative methods. We also organize the existing literature from automation and collaboration perspectives, discuss the challenges, and tabulate the benchmarks for various tasks. We believe this is the first comprehensive survey that provides a global view of a spectrum of tasks across various stages of the data lifecycle. We hope it can help the readers efficiently grasp a broad picture of this field, and equip them with the techniques and further research ideas to systematically engineer data for building AI systems. A companion list of data-centric AI resources will be regularly updated on https://github.com/daochenzha/data-centric-AI

From the Bayesian perspective, the category of conditional probabilities (a variant of the Kleisli category of the Giry monad, whose objects are measurable spaces and arrows are Markov kernels) gives a nice framework for conceptualization and analysis of many aspects of machine learning. Using categorical methods, we construct models for parametric and nonparametric Bayesian reasoning on function spaces, thus providing a basis for the supervised learning problem. In particular, stochastic processes are arrows to these function spaces which serve as prior probabilities. The resulting inference maps can often be analytically constructed in this symmetric monoidal weakly closed category. We also show how to view general stochastic processes using functor categories and demonstrate the Kalman filter as an archetype for the hidden Markov model.

This work presents an unsupervised method for automatically constructing and expanding topic taxonomies by using instruction-based fine-tuned LLMs (Large Language Models). We apply topic modeling and keyword extraction techniques to create initial topic taxonomies and LLMs to post-process the resulting terms and create a hierarchy. To expand an existing taxonomy with new terms, we use zero-shot prompting to find out where to add new nodes, which, to our knowledge, is the first work to present such an approach to taxonomy tasks. We use the resulting taxonomies to assign tags that characterize merchants from a retail bank dataset. To evaluate our work, we asked 12 volunteers to answer a two-part form in which we first assessed the quality of the taxonomies created and then the tags assigned to merchants based on that taxonomy. The evaluation revealed a coherence rate exceeding 90% for the chosen taxonomies, while the average coherence for merchant tagging surpassed 80%.

Emotions have played an important part in many sectors, including psychology, medicine, mental health, computer science, and so on, and categorizing them has proven extremely useful in separating one emotion from another. Emotions can be classified using the following two methods: (1) The supervised method's efficiency is strongly dependent on the size and domain of the data collected. A categorization established using relevant data from one domain may not work well in another. (2) An unsupervised method that uses either domain expertise or a knowledge base of emotion types already exists. Though this second approach provides a suitable and generic categorization of emotions and is cost-effective, the literature doesn't possess a publicly available knowledge base that can be directly applied to any emotion categorization-related task. This pushes us to create a knowledge base that can be used for emotion classification across domains, and ontology is often used for this purpose. In this study, we provide TONE, an emotion-based ontology that effectively creates an emotional hierarchy based on Dr. Gerrod Parrot's group of emotions. In addition to ontology development, we introduce a semi-automated vocabulary construction process to generate a detailed collection of terms for emotions at each tier of the hierarchy. We also demonstrate automated methods for establishing three sorts of dependencies in order to develop linkages between different emotions. Our human and automatic evaluation results show the ontology's quality. Furthermore, we describe three distinct use cases that demonstrate the applicability of our ontology.

The burgeoning field of Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by sophisticated models like OpenAI's ChatGPT, represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence. These models, however, bring forth substantial challenges in the high consumption of computational, memory, energy, and financial resources, especially in environments with limited resource capabilities. This survey aims to systematically address these challenges by reviewing a broad spectrum of techniques designed to enhance the resource efficiency of LLMs. We categorize methods based on their optimization focus: computational, memory, energy, financial, and network resources and their applicability across various stages of an LLM's lifecycle, including architecture design, pretraining, finetuning, and system design. Additionally, the survey introduces a nuanced categorization of resource efficiency techniques by their specific resource types, which uncovers the intricate relationships and mappings between various resources and corresponding optimization techniques. A standardized set of evaluation metrics and datasets is also presented to facilitate consistent and fair comparisons across different models and techniques. By offering a comprehensive overview of the current sota and identifying open research avenues, this survey serves as a foundational reference for researchers and practitioners, aiding them in developing more sustainable and efficient LLMs in a rapidly evolving landscape.

Besides entity-centric knowledge, usually organized as Knowledge Graph (KG), events are also an essential kind of knowledge in the world, which trigger the spring up of event-centric knowledge representation form like Event KG (EKG). It plays an increasingly important role in many downstream applications, such as search, question-answering, recommendation, financial quantitative investments, and text generation. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of EKG from history, ontology, instance, and application views. Specifically, to characterize EKG thoroughly, we focus on its history, definition, schema induction, acquisition, related representative graphs/systems, and applications. The development processes and trends are studied therein. We further summarize prospective directions to facilitate future research on EKG.

This paper generalises the treatment of compositional game theory as introduced by the second and third authors with Ghani and Winschel, where games are modelled as morphisms of a symmetric monoidal category. From an economic modelling perspective, the existing notion of an open game is not expressive enough for many applications. This includes stochastic environments, stochastic choices by players, as well as incomplete information regarding the game being played. The current paper addresses these three issue all at once. To achieve this we make significant use of category theory, especially the 'coend optics' of Riley.

Compositional AI systems, which combine multiple artificial intelligence components together with other application components to solve a larger problem, have no known pattern of development and are often approached in a bespoke and ad hoc style. This makes development slower and harder to reuse for future applications. To support the full rapid development cycle of compositional AI applications, we have developed a novel framework called (Bee)* (written as a regular expression and pronounced as "beestar"). We illustrate how (Bee)* supports building integrated, scalable, and interactive compositional AI applications with a simplified developer experience.

Humans can learn to operate the user interface (UI) of an application by reading an instruction manual or how-to guide. Along with text, these resources include visual content such as UI screenshots and images of application icons referenced in the text. We explore how to leverage this data to learn generic visio-linguistic representations of UI screens and their components. These representations are useful in many real applications, such as accessibility, voice navigation, and task automation. Prior UI representation models rely on UI metadata (UI trees and accessibility labels), which is often missing, incompletely defined, or not accessible. We avoid such a dependency, and propose Lexi, a pre-trained vision and language model designed to handle the unique features of UI screens, including their text richness and context sensitivity. To train Lexi we curate the UICaption dataset consisting of 114k UI images paired with descriptions of their functionality. We evaluate Lexi on four tasks: UI action entailment, instruction-based UI image retrieval, grounding referring expressions, and UI entity recognition.

As mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous, regularly interacting with a variety of user interfaces (UIs) is a common aspect of daily life for many people. To improve the accessibility of these devices and to enable their usage in a variety of settings, building models that can assist users and accomplish tasks through the UI is vitally important. However, there are several challenges to achieve this. First, UI components of similar appearance can have different functionalities, making understanding their function more important than just analyzing their appearance. Second, domain-specific features like Document Object Model (DOM) in web pages and View Hierarchy (VH) in mobile applications provide important signals about the semantics of UI elements, but these features are not in a natural language format. Third, owing to a large diversity in UIs and absence of standard DOM or VH representations, building a UI understanding model with high coverage requires large amounts of training data. Inspired by the success of pre-training based approaches in NLP for tackling a variety of problems in a data-efficient way, we introduce a new pre-trained UI representation model called ActionBert. Our methodology is designed to leverage visual, linguistic and domain-specific features in user interaction traces to pre-train generic feature representations of UIs and their components. Our key intuition is that user actions, e.g., a sequence of clicks on different UI components, reveals important information about their functionality. We evaluate the proposed model on a wide variety of downstream tasks, ranging from icon classification to UI component retrieval based on its natural language description. Experiments show that the proposed ActionBert model outperforms multi-modal baselines across all downstream tasks by up to 15.5%.

Candidate generation is the first stage in recommendation systems, where a light-weight system is used to retrieve potentially relevant items for an input user. These candidate items are then ranked and pruned in later stages of recommender systems using a more complex ranking model. Since candidate generation is the top of the recommendation funnel, it is important to retrieve a high-recall candidate set to feed into downstream ranking models. A common approach for candidate generation is to leverage approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search from a single dense query embedding; however, this approach this can yield a low-diversity result set with many near duplicates. As users often have multiple interests, candidate retrieval should ideally return a diverse set of candidates reflective of the user's multiple interests. To this end, we introduce kNN-Embed, a general approach to improving diversity in dense ANN-based retrieval. kNN-Embed represents each user as a smoothed mixture over learned item clusters that represent distinct `interests' of the user. By querying each of a user's mixture component in proportion to their mixture weights, we retrieve a high-diversity set of candidates reflecting elements from each of a user's interests. We experimentally compare kNN-Embed to standard ANN candidate retrieval, and show significant improvements in overall recall and improved diversity across three datasets. Accompanying this work, we open source a large Twitter follow-graph dataset, to spur further research in graph-mining and representation learning for recommender systems.

Entity resolution (record linkage, microclustering) systems are notoriously difficult to evaluate. Looking for a needle in a haystack, traditional evaluation methods use sophisticated, application-specific sampling schemes to find matching pairs of records among an immense number of non-matches. We propose an alternative that facilitates the creation of representative, reusable benchmark data sets without necessitating complex sampling schemes. These benchmark data sets can then be used for model training and a variety of evaluation tasks. Specifically, we propose an entity-centric data labeling methodology that integrates with a unified framework for monitoring summary statistics, estimating key performance metrics such as cluster and pairwise precision and recall, and analyzing root causes for errors. We validate the framework in an application to inventor name disambiguation and through simulation studies. Software: https://github.com/OlivierBinette/er-evaluation/

Language models of code (LMs) work well when the surrounding code in the vicinity of generation provides sufficient context. This is not true when it becomes necessary to use types or functionality defined in another module or library, especially those not seen during training. LMs suffer from limited awareness of such global context and end up hallucinating, e.g., using types defined in other files incorrectly. Recent work tries to overcome this issue by retrieving global information to augment the local context. However, this bloats the prompt or requires architecture modifications and additional training. Integrated development environments (IDEs) assist developers by bringing the global context at their fingertips using static analysis. We extend this assistance, enjoyed by developers, to the LMs. We propose a notion of monitors that use static analysis in the background to guide the decoding. Unlike a priori retrieval, static analysis is invoked iteratively during the entire decoding process, providing the most relevant suggestions on demand. We demonstrate the usefulness of our proposal by monitoring for type-consistent use of identifiers whenever an LM generates code for object dereference. To evaluate our approach, we curate PragmaticCode, a dataset of open-source projects with their development environments. On models of varying parameter scale, we show that monitor-guided decoding consistently improves the ability of an LM to not only generate identifiers that match the ground truth but also improves compilation rates and agreement with ground truth. We find that LMs with fewer parameters, when guided with our monitor, can outperform larger LMs. With monitor-guided decoding, SantaCoder-1.1B achieves better compilation rate and next-identifier match than the much larger text-davinci-003 model. The datasets and code will be released at https://aka.ms/monitors4codegen .

We introduce Reverse Derivative Ascent: a categorical analogue of gradient based methods for machine learning. Our algorithm is defined at the level of so-called reverse differential categories. It can be used to learn the parameters of models which are expressed as morphisms of such categories. Our motivating example is boolean circuits: we show how our algorithm can be applied to such circuits by using the theory of reverse differential categories. Note our methodology allows us to learn the parameters of boolean circuits directly, in contrast to existing binarised neural network approaches. Moreover, we demonstrate its empirical value by giving experimental results on benchmark machine learning datasets.

Recently, the relationship between automated and human evaluation of topic models has been called into question. Method developers have staked the efficacy of new topic model variants on automated measures, and their failure to approximate human preferences places these models on uncertain ground. Moreover, existing evaluation paradigms are often divorced from real-world use. Motivated by content analysis as a dominant real-world use case for topic modeling, we analyze two related aspects of topic models that affect their effectiveness and trustworthiness in practice for that purpose: the stability of their estimates and the extent to which the model's discovered categories align with human-determined categories in the data. We find that neural topic models fare worse in both respects compared to an established classical method. We take a step toward addressing both issues in tandem by demonstrating that a straightforward ensembling method can reliably outperform the members of the ensemble.

Bayes' rule tells us how to invert a causal process in order to update our beliefs in light of new evidence. If the process is believed to have a complex compositional structure, we may observe that the inversion of the whole can be computed piecewise in terms of the component processes. We study the structure of this compositional rule, noting that it relates to the lens pattern in functional programming. Working in a suitably general axiomatic presentation of a category of Markov kernels, we see how we can think of Bayesian inversion as a particular instance of a state-dependent morphism in a fibred category. We discuss the compositional nature of this, formulated as a functor on the underlying category and explore how this can used for a more type-driven approach to statistical inference.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the potential to address some issues within the semiconductor industry. However, they are often general-purpose models that lack the specialized knowledge needed to tackle the unique challenges of this sector, such as the intricate physics and chemistry of semiconductor devices and processes. SemiKong, the first industry-specific LLM for the semiconductor domain, provides a foundation that can be used to develop tailored proprietary models. With SemiKong 1.0, we aim to develop a foundational model capable of understanding etching problems at an expert level. Our key contributions include (a) curating a comprehensive corpus of semiconductor-related texts, (b) creating a foundational model with in-depth semiconductor knowledge, and (c) introducing a framework for integrating expert knowledge, thereby advancing the evaluation process of domain-specific AI models. Through fine-tuning a pre-trained LLM using our curated dataset, we have shown that SemiKong outperforms larger, general-purpose LLMs in various semiconductor manufacturing and design tasks. Our extensive experiments underscore the importance of developing domain-specific LLMs as a foundation for company- or tool-specific proprietary models, paving the way for further research and applications in the semiconductor domain. Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/aitomatic/semikong

Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered remarkable advancements across diverse code-related tasks, known as Code LLMs, particularly in code generation that generates source code with LLM from natural language descriptions. This burgeoning field has captured significant interest from both academic researchers and industry professionals due to its practical significance in software development, e.g., GitHub Copilot. Despite the active exploration of LLMs for a variety of code tasks, either from the perspective of natural language processing (NLP) or software engineering (SE) or both, there is a noticeable absence of a comprehensive and up-to-date literature review dedicated to LLM for code generation. In this survey, we aim to bridge this gap by providing a systematic literature review that serves as a valuable reference for researchers investigating the cutting-edge progress in LLMs for code generation. We introduce a taxonomy to categorize and discuss the recent developments in LLMs for code generation, covering aspects such as data curation, latest advances, performance evaluation, and real-world applications. In addition, we present a historical overview of the evolution of LLMs for code generation and offer an empirical comparison using the widely recognized HumanEval and MBPP benchmarks to highlight the progressive enhancements in LLM capabilities for code generation. We identify critical challenges and promising opportunities regarding the gap between academia and practical development. Furthermore, we have established a dedicated resource website (https://codellm.github.io) to continuously document and disseminate the most recent advances in the field.

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task-agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused by the heterogeneity of domain data, the sophistication of domain knowledge, the uniqueness of domain objectives, and the diversity of the constraints (e.g., various social norms, cultural conformity, religious beliefs, and ethical standards in the domain applications). Domain specification techniques are key to make large language models disruptive in many applications. Specifically, to solve these hurdles, there has been a notable increase in research and practices conducted in recent years on the domain specialization of LLMs. This emerging field of study, with its substantial potential for impact, necessitates a comprehensive and systematic review to better summarize and guide ongoing work in this area. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on domain specification techniques for large language models, an emerging direction critical for large language model applications. First, we propose a systematic taxonomy that categorizes the LLM domain-specialization techniques based on the accessibility to LLMs and summarizes the framework for all the subcategories as well as their relations and differences to each other. Second, we present an extensive taxonomy of critical application domains that can benefit dramatically from specialized LLMs, discussing their practical significance and open challenges. Last, we offer our insights into the current research status and future trends in this area.

With advances in generative AI, there is increasing work towards creating autonomous agents that can manage daily tasks by operating user interfaces (UIs). While prior research has studied the mechanics of how AI agents might navigate UIs and understand UI structure, the effects of agents and their autonomous actions-particularly those that may be risky or irreversible-remain under-explored. In this work, we investigate the real-world impacts and consequences of UI actions by AI agents. We began by developing a taxonomy of the impacts of UI actions through a series of workshops with domain experts. Following this, we conducted a data synthesis study to gather realistic UI screen traces and action data that users perceive as impactful. We then used our impact categories to annotate our collected data and data repurposed from existing UI navigation datasets. Our quantitative evaluations of different large language models (LLMs) and variants demonstrate how well different LLMs can understand the impacts of UI actions that might be taken by an agent. We show that our taxonomy enhances the reasoning capabilities of these LLMs for understanding the impacts of UI actions, but our findings also reveal significant gaps in their ability to reliably classify more nuanced or complex categories of impact.