Daily Papers

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have great potential in medical tasks, like Visual Question Answering (VQA), where they could act as interactive assistants for both patients and clinicians. Yet their robustness to distribution shifts on unseen data remains a key concern for safe deployment. Evaluating such robustness requires a controlled experimental setup that allows for systematic insights into the model's behavior. However, we demonstrate that current setups fail to offer sufficiently thorough evaluations. To address this gap, we introduce a novel framework, called SURE-VQA, centered around three key requirements to overcome current pitfalls and systematically analyze VLM robustness: 1) Since robustness on synthetic shifts does not necessarily translate to real-world shifts, it should be measured on real-world shifts that are inherent to the VQA data; 2) Traditional token-matching metrics often fail to capture underlying semantics, necessitating the use of large language models (LLMs) for more accurate semantic evaluation; 3) Model performance often lacks interpretability due to missing sanity baselines, thus meaningful baselines should be reported that allow assessing the multimodal impact on the VLM. To demonstrate the relevance of this framework, we conduct a study on the robustness of various Fine-Tuning (FT) methods across three medical datasets with four types of distribution shifts. Our study highlights key insights into robustness: 1) No FT method consistently outperforms others in robustness, and 2) robustness trends are more stable across FT methods than across distribution shifts. Additionally, we find that simple sanity baselines that do not use the image data can perform surprisingly well and confirm LoRA as the best-performing FT method on in-distribution data. Code is provided at https://github.com/IML-DKFZ/sure-vqa.

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in various natural language processing tasks, including question answering (QA) tasks. While incorporating new information with the retrieval of relevant passages is a promising way to improve QA with LLMs, the existing methods often require additional fine-tuning which becomes infeasible with recent LLMs. Augmenting retrieved passages via prompting has the potential to address this limitation, but this direction has been limitedly explored. To this end, we design a simple yet effective framework to enhance open-domain QA (ODQA) with LLMs, based on the summarized retrieval (SuRe). SuRe helps LLMs predict more accurate answers for a given question, which are well-supported by the summarized retrieval that could be viewed as an explicit rationale extracted from the retrieved passages. Specifically, SuRe first constructs summaries of the retrieved passages for each of the multiple answer candidates. Then, SuRe confirms the most plausible answer from the candidate set by evaluating the validity and ranking of the generated summaries. Experimental results on diverse ODQA benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of SuRe, with improvements of up to 4.6% in exact match (EM) and 4.0% in F1 score over standard prompting approaches. SuRe also can be integrated with a broad range of retrieval methods and LLMs. Finally, the generated summaries from SuRe show additional advantages to measure the importance of retrieved passages and serve as more preferred rationales by models and humans.

Visual Species Recognition (VSR) is pivotal to biodiversity assessment and conservation, evolution research, and ecology and ecosystem management. Training a machine-learned model for VSR typically requires vast amounts of annotated images. Yet, species-level annotation demands domain expertise, making it realistic for domain experts to annotate only a few examples. These limited labeled data motivate training an ''expert'' model via few-shot learning (FSL). Meanwhile, advanced Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated prominent performance on general recognition tasks. It is straightforward to ask whether LMMs excel in the highly specialized VSR task and whether they outshine FSL expert models. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that LMMs struggle in this task, despite using various established prompting techniques. LMMs even significantly underperform FSL expert models, which are as simple as finetuning a pretrained visual encoder on the few-shot images. However, our in-depth analysis reveals that LMMs can effectively post-hoc correct the expert models' incorrect predictions. Briefly, given a test image, when prompted with the top predictions from an FSL expert model, LMMs can recover the ground-truth label. Building on this insight, we derive a simple method called Post-hoc Correction (POC), which prompts an LMM to re-rank the expert model's top predictions using enriched prompts that include softmax confidence scores and few-shot visual examples. Across five challenging VSR benchmarks, POC outperforms prior art of FSL by +6.4% in accuracy without extra training, validation, or manual intervention. Importantly, POC generalizes to different pretrained backbones and LMMs, serving as a plug-and-play module to significantly enhance existing FSL methods.

We obtain almost sure bounds for the weighted sum sum_{n leq t} f(n){n}, where f(n) is a Steinhaus random multiplicative function. Specifically, we obtain the bounds predicted by exponentiating the law of the iterated logarithm, giving sharp upper and lower bounds.

Even highly capable large language models (LLMs) can produce biased or unsafe responses, and alignment techniques, such as RLHF, aimed at mitigating this issue, are expensive and prone to overfitting as they retrain the LLM. This paper introduces a novel inference-time alignment approach that ensures LLMs generate safe responses almost surely, i.e., with a probability approaching one. We achieve this by framing the safe generation of inference-time responses as a constrained Markov decision process within the LLM's latent space. Crucially, we augment a safety state that tracks the evolution of safety constraints and enables us to demonstrate formal safety guarantees upon solving the MDP in the latent space. Building on this foundation, we propose InferenceGuard, a practical implementation that safely aligns LLMs without modifying the model weights. Empirically, we demonstrate InferenceGuard effectively balances safety and task performance, outperforming existing inference-time alignment methods in generating safe and aligned responses.

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) aligns model outputs more closely with human preferences. This involves an evaluator model ranking multiple candidate responses to user prompts. However, the rankings from popular evaluator models such as GPT-4 can be inconsistent. We propose the Repeat Ranking method - where we evaluate the same responses multiple times and train only on those responses which are consistently ranked. Using 2,714 prompts in 62 languages, we generated responses from 7 top multilingual LLMs and had GPT-4 rank them five times each. Evaluating on MT-Bench chat benchmarks in six languages, our method outperformed the standard practice of training on all available prompts. Our work highlights the quality versus quantity trade-off in RLAIF dataset generation and offers a stackable strategy for enhancing dataset and thus model quality.

Widely deployed large language models (LLMs) can produce convincing yet incorrect outputs, potentially misleading users who may rely on them as if they were correct. To reduce such overreliance, there have been calls for LLMs to communicate their uncertainty to end users. However, there has been little empirical work examining how users perceive and act upon LLMs' expressions of uncertainty. We explore this question through a large-scale, pre-registered, human-subject experiment (N=404) in which participants answer medical questions with or without access to responses from a fictional LLM-infused search engine. Using both behavioral and self-reported measures, we examine how different natural language expressions of uncertainty impact participants' reliance, trust, and overall task performance. We find that first-person expressions (e.g., "I'm not sure, but...") decrease participants' confidence in the system and tendency to agree with the system's answers, while increasing participants' accuracy. An exploratory analysis suggests that this increase can be attributed to reduced (but not fully eliminated) overreliance on incorrect answers. While we observe similar effects for uncertainty expressed from a general perspective (e.g., "It's not clear, but..."), these effects are weaker and not statistically significant. Our findings suggest that using natural language expressions of uncertainty may be an effective approach for reducing overreliance on LLMs, but that the precise language used matters. This highlights the importance of user testing before deploying LLMs at scale.

Marcinkiewicz strong law of large numbers, {n^{-frac1p}}sum_{k=1}^{n} (d_{k}- d)rightarrow 0 almost surely with pin(1,2), are developed for products d_k=prod_{r=1}^s x_k^{(r)}, where the x_k^{(r)} = sum_{l=-infty}^{infty}c_{k-l}^{(r)}xi_l^{(r)} are two-sided linear processes with coefficients {c_l^{(r)}}_{lin Z} and i.i.d. zero-mean innovations {xi_l^{(r)}}_{lin Z}. The decay of the coefficients c_l^{(r)} as |l|toinfty, can be slow enough for {x_k^{(r)}} to have long memory while {d_k} can have heavy tails. The long-range dependence and heavy tails for {d_k} are handled simultaneously and a decoupling property shows the convergence rate is dictated by the worst of long-range dependence and heavy tails, but not their combination. The Marcinkiewicz strong law of large numbers is also extended to the multivariate linear process case.

Finding high-quality solutions quickly is an important objective in motion planning. This is especially true for high-degree-of-freedom robots. Satisficing planners have traditionally found feasible solutions quickly but provide no guarantees on their optimality, while almost-surely asymptotically optimal (a.s.a.o.) planners have probabilistic guarantees on their convergence towards an optimal solution but are more computationally expensive. This paper uses the AO-x meta-algorithm to extend the satisficing RRT-Connect planner to optimal planning. The resulting Asymptotically Optimal RRT-Connect (AORRTC) finds initial solutions in similar times as RRT-Connect and uses any additional planning time to converge towards the optimal solution in an anytime manner. It is proven to be probabilistically complete and a.s.a.o. AORRTC was tested with the Panda (7 DoF) and Fetch (8 DoF) robotic arms on the MotionBenchMaker dataset. These experiments show that AORRTC finds initial solutions as fast as RRT-Connect and faster than the tested state-of-the-art a.s.a.o. algorithms while converging to better solutions faster. AORRTC finds solutions to difficult high-DoF planning problems in milliseconds where the other a.s.a.o. planners could not consistently find solutions in seconds. This performance was demonstrated both with and without single instruction/multiple data (SIMD) acceleration.

Data organized in tabular format is ubiquitous in real-world applications, and users often craft tables with biased feature definitions and flexibly set prediction targets of their interests. Thus, a rapid development of a robust, effective, dataset-versatile, user-friendly tabular prediction approach is highly desired. While Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDTs) and existing deep neural networks (DNNs) have been extensively utilized by professional users, they present several challenges for casual users, particularly: (i) the dilemma of model selection due to their different dataset preferences, and (ii) the need for heavy hyperparameter searching, failing which their performances are deemed inadequate. In this paper, we delve into this question: Can we develop a deep learning model that serves as a "sure bet" solution for a wide range of tabular prediction tasks, while also being user-friendly for casual users? We delve into three key drawbacks of deep tabular models, encompassing: (P1) lack of rotational variance property, (P2) large data demand, and (P3) over-smooth solution. We propose ExcelFormer, addressing these challenges through a semi-permeable attention module that effectively constrains the influence of less informative features to break the DNNs' rotational invariance property (for P1), data augmentation approaches tailored for tabular data (for P2), and attentive feedforward network to boost the model fitting capability (for P3). These designs collectively make ExcelFormer a "sure bet" solution for diverse tabular datasets. Extensive and stratified experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms previous approaches across diverse tabular data prediction tasks, and this framework can be friendly to casual users, offering ease of use without the heavy hyperparameter tuning.

Mobile mental health applications are seen as a promising way to fulfill the growing need for mental health care. Although there are more than ten thousand mental health apps available on app marketplaces, such as Google Play and Apple App Store, many of them are not evidence-based, or have been minimally evaluated or regulated. The real-life experience and concerns of the app users are largely unknown. To address this knowledge gap, we analyzed 2159 user reviews from 117 Android apps and 2764 user reviews from 76 iOS apps. Our findings include the critiques around inconsistent moderation standards and lack of transparency. App-embedded social features and chatbots were criticized for providing little support during crises. We provide research and design implications for future mental health app developers, discuss the necessity of developing a comprehensive and centralized app development guideline, and the opportunities of incorporating existing AI technology in mental health chatbots.

The stability of mine dumps is contingent upon the precise arrangement of spoil piles, taking into account their geological and geotechnical attributes. Yet, on-site characterisation of individual piles poses a formidable challenge. The utilisation of image-based techniques for spoil pile characterisation, employing remotely acquired data through unmanned aerial systems, is a promising complementary solution. Image processing, such as object-based classification and feature extraction, are dependent upon effective segmentation. This study refines and juxtaposes various segmentation approaches, specifically colour-based and morphology-based techniques. The objective is to enhance and evaluate avenues for object-based analysis for spoil characterisation within the context of mining environments. Furthermore, a comparative analysis is conducted between conventional segmentation approaches and those rooted in deep learning methodologies. Among the diverse segmentation approaches evaluated, the morphology-based deep learning segmentation approach, Segment Anything Model (SAM), exhibited superior performance in comparison to other approaches. This outcome underscores the efficacy of incorporating advanced morphological and deep learning techniques for accurate and efficient spoil pile characterisation. The findings of this study contribute valuable insights to the optimisation of segmentation strategies, thereby advancing the application of image-based techniques for the characterisation of spoil piles in mining environments.

We propose a new approach to extracting data items or field values from semi-structured documents. Examples of such problems include extracting passenger name, departure time and departure airport from a travel itinerary, or extracting price of an item from a purchase receipt. Traditional approaches to data extraction use machine learning or program synthesis to process the whole document to extract the desired fields. Such approaches are not robust to format changes in the document, and the extraction process typically fails even if changes are made to parts of the document that are unrelated to the desired fields of interest. We propose a new approach to data extraction based on the concepts of landmarks and regions. Humans routinely use landmarks in manual processing of documents to zoom in and focus their attention on small regions of interest in the document. Inspired by this human intuition, we use the notion of landmarks in program synthesis to automatically synthesize extraction programs that first extract a small region of interest, and then automatically extract the desired value from the region in a subsequent step. We have implemented our landmark-based extraction approach in a tool LRSyn, and show extensive evaluation on documents in HTML as well as scanned images of invoices and receipts. Our results show that our approach is robust to various types of format changes that routinely happen in real-world settings.

As large language models (LLMs) transition from research prototypes to production systems, practitioners often need reliable methods to verify that model outputs satisfy required constraints. While sampling-based estimates provide an intuition of model behavior, they offer no sound guarantees. We present BEAVER, the first practical framework for computing deterministic, sound probability bounds on LLM constraint satisfaction. Given any prefix-closed semantic constraint, BEAVER systematically explores the generation space using novel token trie and frontier data structures, maintaining provably sound bounds at every iteration. We formalize the verification problem, prove soundness of our approach, and evaluate BEAVER on correctness verification, privacy verification and secure code generation tasks across multiple state of the art LLMs. BEAVER achieves 6 to 8 times tighter probability bounds and identifies 3 to 4 times more high risk instances compared to baseline methods under identical computational budgets, enabling precise characterization and risk assessment that loose bounds or empirical evaluation cannot provide.

Diffusion LLMs have emerged as a promising alternative to conventional autoregressive LLMs, offering significant potential for improved runtime efficiency. However, existing diffusion models lack the ability to provably enforce user-specified formal constraints, such as regular expressions, which makes them unreliable for tasks that require structured outputs, such as fixed-schema JSON generation. Unlike autoregressive models that generate tokens sequentially, diffusion LLMs predict a block of tokens in parallel. This parallelism makes traditional constrained decoding algorithms, which are designed for sequential token prediction, ineffective at preserving the true output distribution. To address this limitation, we propose DINGO, a dynamic programming-based constrained decoding strategy that is both efficient and provably distribution-preserving. DINGO enables sampling of output strings with the highest probability under the model's predicted distribution, while strictly satisfying any user-specified regular expression. On standard symbolic math and JSON generation benchmarks, DINGO achieves up to a 68 percentage point improvement over unconstrained inference

We introduce Einstein Fields, a neural representation that is designed to compress computationally intensive four-dimensional numerical relativity simulations into compact implicit neural network weights. By modeling the metric, which is the core tensor field of general relativity, Einstein Fields enable the derivation of physical quantities via automatic differentiation. However, unlike conventional neural fields (e.g., signed distance, occupancy, or radiance fields), Einstein Fields are Neural Tensor Fields with the key difference that when encoding the spacetime geometry of general relativity into neural field representations, dynamics emerge naturally as a byproduct. Einstein Fields show remarkable potential, including continuum modeling of 4D spacetime, mesh-agnosticity, storage efficiency, derivative accuracy, and ease of use. We address these challenges across several canonical test beds of general relativity and release an open source JAX-based library, paving the way for more scalable and expressive approaches to numerical relativity. Code is made available at https://github.com/AndreiB137/EinFields

To achieve human-level dexterity, robots must infer spatial awareness from multimodal sensing to reason over contact interactions. During in-hand manipulation of novel objects, such spatial awareness involves estimating the object's pose and shape. The status quo for in-hand perception primarily employs vision, and restricts to tracking a priori known objects. Moreover, visual occlusion of objects in-hand is imminent during manipulation, preventing current systems to push beyond tasks without occlusion. We combine vision and touch sensing on a multi-fingered hand to estimate an object's pose and shape during in-hand manipulation. Our method, NeuralFeels, encodes object geometry by learning a neural field online and jointly tracks it by optimizing a pose graph problem. We study multimodal in-hand perception in simulation and the real-world, interacting with different objects via a proprioception-driven policy. Our experiments show final reconstruction F-scores of 81% and average pose drifts of 4.7,mm, further reduced to 2.3,mm with known CAD models. Additionally, we observe that under heavy visual occlusion we can achieve up to 94% improvements in tracking compared to vision-only methods. Our results demonstrate that touch, at the very least, refines and, at the very best, disambiguates visual estimates during in-hand manipulation. We release our evaluation dataset of 70 experiments, FeelSight, as a step towards benchmarking in this domain. Our neural representation driven by multimodal sensing can serve as a perception backbone towards advancing robot dexterity. Videos can be found on our project website https://suddhu.github.io/neural-feels/

As generative AI systems become competent and democratized in science, business, and government, deeper insight into their failure modes now poses an acute need. The occasional volatility in their behavior, such as the propensity of transformer models to hallucinate, impedes trust and adoption of emerging AI solutions in high-stakes areas. In the present work, we establish how and when hallucinations arise in pre-trained transformer models through concept representations captured by sparse autoencoders, under scenarios with experimentally controlled uncertainty in the input space. Our systematic experiments reveal that the number of semantic concepts used by the transformer model grows as the input information becomes increasingly unstructured. In the face of growing uncertainty in the input space, the transformer model becomes prone to activate coherent yet input-insensitive semantic features, leading to hallucinated output. At its extreme, for pure-noise inputs, we identify a wide variety of robustly triggered and meaningful concepts in the intermediate activations of pre-trained transformer models, whose functional integrity we confirm through targeted steering. We also show that hallucinations in the output of a transformer model can be reliably predicted from the concept patterns embedded in transformer layer activations. This collection of insights on transformer internal processing mechanics has immediate consequences for aligning AI models with human values, AI safety, opening the attack surface for potential adversarial attacks, and providing a basis for automatic quantification of a model's hallucination risk.

Effective code retrieval plays a crucial role in advancing code generation, bug fixing, and software maintenance, particularly as software systems increase in complexity. While current code embedding models have demonstrated promise in retrieving code snippets for small-scale, well-defined tasks, they often underperform in more demanding real-world applications such as bug localization within GitHub repositories. We hypothesize that a key issue is their reliance on noisy and inconsistent datasets for training, which impedes their ability to generalize to more complex retrieval scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce CoRNStack, a large-scale, high-quality contrastive training dataset for code that spans multiple programming languages. This dataset is curated using consistency filtering to eliminate noisy positives and is further enriched with mined hard negatives, thereby facilitating more effective learning. We demonstrate that contrastive training of embedding models using CoRNStack leads to state-of-the-art performance across a variety of code retrieval tasks. Furthermore, the dataset can be leveraged for training code reranking models, a largely underexplored area compared to text reranking. Our finetuned code reranking model significantly improves the ranking quality over the retrieved results. Finally, by employing our code retriever and reranker together, we demonstrate significant improvements in function localization for GitHub issues, an important component of real-world software development.

The development of video game streaming has grown rapidly, with major platforms such as YouTube and Twitch using different codecs. To support quality assessment models that work consistently across any codec, it is necessary to have access to large, diverse subjective gaming quality datasets. Currently, there are only a few available, each having limitations. To address this gap, we present the largest gaming video quality dataset to date, incorporating both user-generated content (UGC) and professional-generated content (PGC) with extensive visual diversity. Our dataset covers the most widely used codecs - H.264, H.265, and AV1 - and consists of 4,048 video samples, each annotated by an average of 37 mean opinion score (MOS) ratings. In addition to overall quality scores, we collect coarse-grained quality attributes, enabling a better understanding of perceptual factors. We study the performance of leading video quality assessment methods on this dataset, including a vision language model that outperforms all the benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset that comprehensively addresses gaming video quality assessment across multiple codecs and content types with quality attributes. Our dataset is publicly available at https://rajeshsureddi.github.io/GameScope/.

Large Action Models (LAMs) extend large language models by enabling autonomous decision-making and tool execution, making them promising for automating scientific workflows. However, scientific workflows impose strict requirements on reproducibility, auditability, and deterministic execution, which are not satisfied by generic LLM-based agents. Unconstrained action generation can lead to silent state changes, non-deterministic executions, and irreproducible experimental results, limiting the applicability of LAMs in scientific settings. In this paper, we propose R-LAM, a reproducibility-constrained framework for applying Large Action Models to scientific workflow automation. R-LAM introduces structured action schemas, deterministic execution policies, and explicit provenance tracking to ensure that every action and intermediate artifact is auditable and replayable. The framework supports failure-aware execution loops and controlled workflow forking, enabling iterative experimentation without compromising reproducibility. We implement R-LAM as a lightweight Python framework and release it as an open-source PyPI package to facilitate reproducible research. An experimental evaluation of representative scientific workflows demonstrates that R-LAM improves reproducibility success rates and execution reliability compared to unconstrained LLM-based agents, while retaining adaptive control over workflow execution.

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) models aim to predict perceptual image quality in alignment with human judgments. No-Reference (NR) IQA remains particularly challenging due to the absence of a reference image. While deep learning has significantly advanced this field, a major hurdle in developing NR-IQA models is the limited availability of subjectively labeled data. Most existing deep learning-based NR-IQA approaches rely on pre-training on large-scale datasets before fine-tuning for IQA tasks. To further advance progress in this area, we propose a novel approach that constructs a custom dataset using a limited number of reference content images and introduces a no-reference IQA model that incorporates both content and quality features for perceptual quality prediction. Specifically, we train a quality-aware model using contrastive triplet-based learning, enabling efficient training with fewer samples while achieving strong generalization performance across publicly available datasets. Our repository is available at https://github.com/rajeshsureddi/triqa.

Current emotion-based contrastive language-audio pretraining (CLAP) methods typically learn by na\"ively aligning audio samples with corresponding text prompts. Consequently, this approach fails to capture the ordinal nature of emotions, hindering inter-emotion understanding and often resulting in a wide modality gap between the audio and text embeddings due to insufficient alignment. To handle these drawbacks, we introduce EmotionRankCLAP, a supervised contrastive learning approach that uses dimensional attributes of emotional speech and natural language prompts to jointly capture fine-grained emotion variations and improve cross-modal alignment. Our approach utilizes a Rank-N-Contrast objective to learn ordered relationships by contrasting samples based on their rankings in the valence-arousal space. EmotionRankCLAP outperforms existing emotion-CLAP methods in modeling emotion ordinality across modalities, measured via a cross-modal retrieval task.

Researchers have found that fake news spreads much times faster than real news. This is a major problem, especially in today's world where social media is the key source of news for many among the younger population. Fact verification, thus, becomes an important task and many media sites contribute to the cause. Manual fact verification is a tedious task, given the volume of fake news online. The Factify5WQA shared task aims to increase research towards automated fake news detection by providing a dataset with an aspect-based question answering based fact verification method. Each claim and its supporting document is associated with 5W questions that help compare the two information sources. The objective performance measure in the task is done by comparing answers using BLEU score to measure the accuracy of the answers, followed by an accuracy measure of the classification. The task had submissions using custom training setup and pre-trained language-models among others. The best performing team posted an accuracy of 69.56%, which is a near 35% improvement over the baseline.

Many frameworks for emotional text-to-speech (E-TTS) rely on human-annotated emotion labels that are often inaccurate and difficult to obtain. Learning emotional prosody implicitly presents a tough challenge due to the subjective nature of emotions. In this study, we propose a novel approach that leverages text awareness to acquire emotional styles without the need for explicit emotion labels or text prompts. We present TEMOTTS, a two-stage framework for E-TTS that is trained without emotion labels and is capable of inference without auxiliary inputs. Our proposed method performs knowledge transfer between the linguistic space learned by BERT and the emotional style space constructed by global style tokens. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, showcasing improvements in emotional accuracy and naturalness. This is one of the first studies to leverage the emotional correlation between spoken content and expressive delivery for emotional TTS.

We present the first study of the robustness of existing watermarking techniques on Python code generated by large language models. Although existing works showed that watermarking can be robust for natural language, we show that it is easy to remove these watermarks on code by semantic-preserving transformations.

We present a method based on natural language processing (NLP), for studying the influence of interest groups (lobbies) in the law-making process in the European Parliament (EP). We collect and analyze novel datasets of lobbies' position papers and speeches made by members of the EP (MEPs). By comparing these texts on the basis of semantic similarity and entailment, we are able to discover interpretable links between MEPs and lobbies. In the absence of a ground-truth dataset of such links, we perform an indirect validation by comparing the discovered links with a dataset, which we curate, of retweet links between MEPs and lobbies, and with the publicly disclosed meetings of MEPs. Our best method achieves an AUC score of 0.77 and performs significantly better than several baselines. Moreover, an aggregate analysis of the discovered links, between groups of related lobbies and political groups of MEPs, correspond to the expectations from the ideology of the groups (e.g., center-left groups are associated with social causes). We believe that this work, which encompasses the methodology, datasets, and results, is a step towards enhancing the transparency of the intricate decision-making processes within democratic institutions.

How do humans learn language, and can the first language be learned at all? These fundamental questions are still hotly debated. In contemporary linguistics, there are two major schools of thought that give completely opposite answers. According to Chomsky's theory of universal grammar, language cannot be learned because children are not exposed to sufficient data in their linguistic environment. In contrast, usage-based models of language assume a profound relationship between language structure and language use. In particular, contextual mental processing and mental representations are assumed to have the cognitive capacity to capture the complexity of actual language use at all levels. The prime example is syntax, i.e., the rules by which words are assembled into larger units such as sentences. Typically, syntactic rules are expressed as sequences of word classes. However, it remains unclear whether word classes are innate, as implied by universal grammar, or whether they emerge during language acquisition, as suggested by usage-based approaches. Here, we address this issue from a machine learning and natural language processing perspective. In particular, we trained an artificial deep neural network on predicting the next word, provided sequences of consecutive words as input. Subsequently, we analyzed the emerging activation patterns in the hidden layers of the neural network. Strikingly, we find that the internal representations of nine-word input sequences cluster according to the word class of the tenth word to be predicted as output, even though the neural network did not receive any explicit information about syntactic rules or word classes during training. This surprising result suggests, that also in the human brain, abstract representational categories such as word classes may naturally emerge as a consequence of predictive coding and processing during language acquisition.

We present MidasTouch, a tactile perception system for online global localization of a vision-based touch sensor sliding on an object surface. This framework takes in posed tactile images over time, and outputs an evolving distribution of sensor pose on the object's surface, without the need for visual priors. Our key insight is to estimate local surface geometry with tactile sensing, learn a compact representation for it, and disambiguate these signals over a long time horizon. The backbone of MidasTouch is a Monte-Carlo particle filter, with a measurement model based on a tactile code network learned from tactile simulation. This network, inspired by LIDAR place recognition, compactly summarizes local surface geometries. These generated codes are efficiently compared against a precomputed tactile codebook per-object, to update the pose distribution. We further release the YCB-Slide dataset of real-world and simulated forceful sliding interactions between a vision-based tactile sensor and standard YCB objects. While single-touch localization can be inherently ambiguous, we can quickly localize our sensor by traversing salient surface geometries. Project page: https://suddhu.github.io/midastouch-tactile/

The scarcity of domain specific dialogue datasets across various domains, from academic topics to everyday conversations, limits the development of dialogue systems for various applications. Existing research is often constrained either by dialogue datasets that are too general or by niche domain dialogue datasets whose scale does not match the required scale for training dialogue systems. To address this gap, we introduce DiaSynth - a synthetic dialogue generation framework capable of generating high quality, contextually rich dialogues across a wide range of domains. Our approach differs from existing frameworks by dynamically generating dialogues that incorporate simulated personas, subtopics, and diverse conversational characteristics, using a Large Language Model (LLM) with Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning to create contextually rich, domain-specific dialogues that closely mimic natural human interactions. DiaSynth produces tailored dialogues that emulate realistic conversations. We perform our experiments by generating synthetic data using different LLMs and few-shot examples from DialogSum and SAMSum. The pretrained language models fine-tuned on the synthetic data outperform the base models by 16.47%, while the comparison between models fine-tuned on in-domain data and synthetic data shows that the synthetic data is able to capture 90.48% of the distribution of the in-domain data. The quality of the data generated also scales with the size of LLMs. These results validate DiaSynth's potential as a robust alternative to traditional data collection methods.

Code-switching (CS) poses a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its comprehensibility remains underexplored in LLMs. We introduce CS-Sum, to evaluate the comprehensibility of CS by the LLMs through CS dialogue to English summarization. CS-Sum is the first benchmark for CS dialogue summarization across Mandarin-English (EN-ZH), Tamil-English (EN-TA), and Malay-English (EN-MS), with 900-1300 human-annotated dialogues per language pair. Evaluating ten LLMs, including open and closed-source models, we analyze performance across few-shot, translate-summarize, and fine-tuning (LoRA, QLoRA on synthetic data) approaches. Our findings show that though the scores on automated metrics are high, LLMs make subtle mistakes that alter the complete meaning of the dialogue. To this end, we introduce 3 most common type of errors that LLMs make when handling CS input. Error rates vary across CS pairs and LLMs, with some LLMs showing more frequent errors on certain language pairs, underscoring the need for specialized training on code-switched data.

Research on Large Language Models (LLMs) has recently seen exponential growth, largely focused on transformer-based architectures, as introduced by [1] and further advanced by the decoder-only variations in [2]. Contemporary studies typically aim to improve model capabilities by increasing both the architecture's complexity and the volume of training data. However, research exploring how to reduce model sizes while maintaining performance is limited. This study introduces three modifications to the decoder-only transformer architecture: ParallelGPT (p-gpt), LinearlyCompressedGPT (lc-gpt), and ConvCompressedGPT (cc-gpt). These variants achieve comparable performance to conventional architectures in code generation tasks while benefiting from reduced model sizes and faster training times. We open-source the model weights and codebase to support future research and development in this domain.

Inductive program synthesis, or programming by example, requires synthesizing functions from input-output examples that generalize to unseen inputs. While large language model agents have shown promise in programming tasks guided by natural language, their ability to perform inductive program synthesis is underexplored. Existing evaluation protocols rely on static sets of examples and held-out tests, offering no feedback when synthesized functions are incorrect and failing to reflect real-world scenarios such as reverse engineering. We propose CodeARC, the Code Abstraction and Reasoning Challenge, a new evaluation framework where agents interact with a hidden target function by querying it with new inputs, synthesizing candidate functions, and iteratively refining their solutions using a differential testing oracle. This interactive setting encourages agents to perform function calls and self-correction based on feedback. We construct the first large-scale benchmark for general-purpose inductive program synthesis, featuring 1114 functions. Among 18 models evaluated, o3-mini performs best with a success rate of 52.7%, highlighting the difficulty of this task. Fine-tuning LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct on curated synthesis traces yields up to a 31% relative performance gain. CodeARC provides a more realistic and challenging testbed for evaluating LLM-based program synthesis and inductive reasoning.

Code generation, symbolic math reasoning, and other tasks require LLMs to produce outputs that are both syntactically and semantically correct. Constrained LLM generation is a promising direction to enforce adherence to formal grammar, but prior works have empirically observed that strict enforcement of formal constraints often diminishes the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. In this work, we first provide a theoretical explanation for why constraining LLM outputs to very restrictive grammars that only allow syntactically valid final answers reduces the reasoning capabilities of the model. Second, we demonstrate that by augmenting the output grammar with carefully designed additional rules, it is always possible to preserve the reasoning capabilities of the LLM while ensuring syntactic and semantic correctness in its outputs. Building on these theoretical insights, we propose a reasoning-augmented constrained decoding algorithm, CRANE, which effectively balances the correctness of constrained generation with the flexibility of unconstrained generation. Experiments on multiple open-source LLMs and benchmarks show that CRANE significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art constrained decoding strategies and standard unconstrained decoding, showing up to 10% points accuracy improvement over baselines on challenging symbolic reasoning benchmarks GSM-symbolic and FOLIO.

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed in agentic environments must exercise multiple capabilities across different task instances, where a capability is performing one or more actions in a trajectory that are necessary for successfully solving a subset of tasks in the environment. Many existing approaches either rely on synthetic training data that is not targeted to the model's actual capability deficits in the target environment or train directly on the target environment, where the model needs to implicitly learn the capabilities across tasks. We introduce TRACE (Turning Recurrent Agent failures into Capability-targeted training Environments), an end-to-end system for environment-specific agent self-improvement. TRACE contrasts successful and failed trajectories to automatically identify lacking capabilities, synthesizes a targeted training environment for each that rewards whether the capability was exercised, and trains a LoRA adapter via RL on each synthetic environment, routing to the relevant adapter at inference. Empirically, TRACE generalizes across different environments, improving over the base agent by +14.1 points on τ^2-bench (customer service) and +7 perfect scores on ToolSandbox (tool use), outperforming the strongest baseline by +7.4 points and +4 perfect scores, respectively. Given the same number of rollouts, TRACE scales more efficiently than baselines, outperforming GRPO and GEPA by +9.2 and +7.4 points on τ^2-bench.

Software issue localization, the task of identifying the precise code locations (files, classes, or functions) relevant to a natural language issue description (e.g., bug report, feature request), is a critical yet time-consuming aspect of software development. While recent LLM-based agentic approaches demonstrate promise, they often incur significant latency and cost due to complex multi-step reasoning and relying on closed-source LLMs. Alternatively, traditional code ranking models, typically optimized for query-to-code or code-to-code retrieval, struggle with the verbose and failure-descriptive nature of issue localization queries. To bridge this gap, we introduce SweRank, an efficient and effective retrieve-and-rerank framework for software issue localization. To facilitate training, we construct SweLoc, a large-scale dataset curated from public GitHub repositories, featuring real-world issue descriptions paired with corresponding code modifications. Empirical results on SWE-Bench-Lite and LocBench show that SweRank achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming both prior ranking models and costly agent-based systems using closed-source LLMs like Claude-3.5. Further, we demonstrate SweLoc's utility in enhancing various existing retriever and reranker models for issue localization, establishing the dataset as a valuable resource for the community.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of programming tasks, yet their potential for code optimization remains underexplored. This work investigates whether LLMs can optimize the performance of assembly code, where fine-grained control over execution enables improvements that are difficult to express in high-level languages. We present a reinforcement learning framework that trains LLMs using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), guided by a reward function that considers both functional correctness, validated through test cases, and execution performance relative to the industry-standard compiler gcc -O3. To support this study, we introduce a benchmark of 8,072 real-world programs. Our model, Qwen2.5-Coder-7B-PPO, achieves 96.0% test pass rates and an average speedup of 1.47x over the gcc -O3 baseline, outperforming all 20 other models evaluated, including Claude-3.7-sonnet. These results indicate that reinforcement learning can unlock the potential of LLMs to serve as effective optimizers for assembly code performance.

Fast, geometry-generalizing surrogates for unsteady flow remain challenging. We present a time-dependent, geometry-aware Deep Operator Network that predicts velocity fields for moderate-Re flows around parametric and non-parametric shapes. The model encodes geometry via a signed distance field (SDF) trunk and flow history via a CNN branch, trained on 841 high-fidelity simulations. On held-out shapes, it attains sim 5% relative L2 single-step error and up to 1000X speedups over CFD. We provide physics-centric rollout diagnostics, including phase error at probes and divergence norms, to quantify long-horizon fidelity. These reveal accurate near-term transients but error accumulation in fine-scale wakes, most pronounced for sharp-cornered geometries. We analyze failure modes and outline practical mitigations. Code, splits, and scripts are openly released at: https://github.com/baskargroup/TimeDependent-DeepONet to support reproducibility and benchmarking.

Handwriting recognition is one of the desirable attributes of document comprehension and analysis. It is concerned with the documents writing style and characteristics that distinguish the authors. The diversity of text images, notably in images with varying handwriting, makes the process of learning good features difficult in cases where little data is available. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to identify the author of a document based on the input word image. Our method is text independent and does not impose any constraint on the size of the input image under examination. To begin with, we detect crucial components in handwriting and extract regions surrounding them using Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT). These patches are designed to capture individual writing features (including allographs, characters, or combinations of characters) that are likely to be unique for an individual writer. These features are then passed through a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in which the weights are learned by applying the concept of Similarity learning using Siamese network. Siamese network enhances the discrimination power of CNN by mapping similarity between different pairs of input image. Features learned at different scales of the extracted SIFT key-points are encoded using Sparse PCA, each components of the Sparse PCA is assigned a saliency score signifying its level of significance in discriminating different writers effectively. Finally, the weighted Sparse PCA corresponding to each SIFT key-points is combined to arrive at a final classification score for each writer. The proposed algorithm was evaluated on two publicly available databases (namely IAM and CVL) and is able to achieve promising result, when compared with other deep learning based algorithm.

Latent heat thermal energy storage (LHTES) systems are compelling candidates for energy storage, primarily owing to their high storage density. Improving their performance is crucial for developing the next-generation efficient and cost effective devices. Topology optimization (TO) has emerged as a powerful computational tool to design LHTES systems by optimally distributing a high-conductivity material (HCM) and a phase change material (PCM). However, conventional TO typically limits to optimizing the geometry for a fixed, pre-selected materials. This approach does not leverage the large and expanding databases of novel materials. Consequently, the co-design of material and geometry for LHTES remains a challenge and unexplored. To address this limitation, we present an automated design framework for the concurrent optimization of material choice and topology. A key challenge is the discrete nature of material selection, which is incompatible with the gradient-based methods used for TO. We overcome this by using a data-driven variational autoencoder (VAE) to project discrete material databases for both the HCM and PCM onto continuous and differentiable latent spaces. These continuous material representations are integrated into an end-to-end differentiable, transient nonlinear finite-element solver that accounts for phase change. We demonstrate this framework on a problem aimed at maximizing the discharged energy within a specified time, subject to cost constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through several illustrative examples.

Robust tooling and publicly available pre-trained models have helped drive recent advances in mechanistic interpretability for language models. However, similar progress in vision mechanistic interpretability has been hindered by the lack of accessible frameworks and pre-trained weights. We present Prisma (Access the codebase here: https://github.com/Prisma-Multimodal/ViT-Prisma), an open-source framework designed to accelerate vision mechanistic interpretability research, providing a unified toolkit for accessing 75+ vision and video transformers; support for sparse autoencoder (SAE), transcoder, and crosscoder training; a suite of 80+ pre-trained SAE weights; activation caching, circuit analysis tools, and visualization tools; and educational resources. Our analysis reveals surprising findings, including that effective vision SAEs can exhibit substantially lower sparsity patterns than language SAEs, and that in some instances, SAE reconstructions can decrease model loss. Prisma enables new research directions for understanding vision model internals while lowering barriers to entry in this emerging field.

Despite the remarkable strides made by autoregressive language models, their potential is often hampered by the slow inference speeds inherent in sequential token generation. Blockwise parallel decoding (BPD) was proposed by Stern et al. (2018) as a way to improve inference speed of language models. In this paper, we make two contributions to understanding and improving BPD drafts. We first offer an analysis of the token distributions produced by the BPD prediction heads. Secondly, we use this analysis to inform algorithms to improve BPD inference speed by refining the BPD drafts using small n-gram or neural language models. We empirically show that these refined BPD drafts yield a higher average verified prefix length across tasks.

Autoregressive sampling from large language models has led to state-of-the-art results in several natural language tasks. However, autoregressive sampling generates tokens one at a time making it slow, and even prohibitive in certain tasks. One way to speed up sampling is speculative decoding: use a small model to sample a draft (block or sequence of tokens), and then score all tokens in the draft by the large language model in parallel. A subset of the tokens in the draft are accepted (and the rest rejected) based on a statistical method to guarantee that the final output follows the distribution of the large model. In this work, we provide a principled understanding of speculative decoding through the lens of optimal transport (OT) with membership cost. This framework can be viewed as an extension of the well-known maximal-coupling problem. This new formulation enables us to generalize the speculative decoding method to allow for a set of k candidates at the token-level, which leads to an improved optimal membership cost. We show that the optimal draft selection algorithm (transport plan) can be computed via linear programming, whose best-known runtime is exponential in k. We then propose a valid draft selection algorithm whose acceptance probability is (1-1/e)-optimal multiplicatively. Moreover, it can be computed in time almost linear with size of domain of a single token. Using this new draft selection algorithm, we develop a new autoregressive sampling algorithm called SpecTr, which provides speedup in decoding while ensuring that there is no quality degradation in the decoded output. We experimentally demonstrate that for state-of-the-art large language models, the proposed approach achieves a wall clock speedup of 2.13X, a further 1.37X speedup over speculative decoding on standard benchmarks.

Large Language Models (LLM) are a new class of computation engines, "programmed" via prompt engineering. We are still learning how to best "program" these LLMs to help developers. We start with the intuition that developers tend to consciously and unconsciously have a collection of semantics facts in mind when working on coding tasks. Mostly these are shallow, simple facts arising from a quick read. For a function, examples of facts might include parameter and local variable names, return expressions, simple pre- and post-conditions, and basic control and data flow, etc. One might assume that the powerful multi-layer architecture of transformer-style LLMs makes them inherently capable of doing this simple level of "code analysis" and extracting such information, implicitly, while processing code: but are they, really? If they aren't, could explicitly adding this information help? Our goal here is to investigate this question, using the code summarization task and evaluate whether automatically augmenting an LLM's prompt with semantic facts explicitly, actually helps. Prior work shows that LLM performance on code summarization benefits from few-shot samples drawn either from the same-project or from examples found via information retrieval methods (such as BM25). While summarization performance has steadily increased since the early days, there is still room for improvement: LLM performance on code summarization still lags its performance on natural-language tasks like translation and text summarization. We find that adding semantic facts actually does help! This approach improves performance in several different settings suggested by prior work, including for two different Large Language Models. In most cases, improvement nears or exceeds 2 BLEU; for the PHP language in the challenging CodeSearchNet dataset, this augmentation actually yields performance surpassing 30 BLEU.

Toxic language includes content that is offensive, abusive, or that promotes harm. Progress in preventing toxic output from large language models (LLMs) is hampered by inconsistent definitions of toxicity. We introduce TRuST, a large-scale dataset that unifies and expands prior resources through a carefully synthesized definition of toxicity, and corresponding annotation scheme. It consists of ~300k annotations, with high-quality human annotation on ~11k. To ensure high-quality, we designed a rigorous, multi-stage human annotation process, and evaluated the diversity of the annotators. Then we benchmarked state-of-the-art LLMs and pre-trained models on three tasks: toxicity detection, identification of the target group, and of toxic words. Our results indicate that fine-tuned PLMs outperform LLMs on the three tasks, and that current reasoning models do not reliably improve performance. TRuST constitutes one of the most comprehensive resources for evaluating and mitigating LLM toxicity, and other research in socially-aware and safer language technologies.

Everyday speech conveys far more than words, it reflects who we are, how we feel, and the circumstances surrounding our interactions. Yet, most existing speech datasets are acted, limited in scale, and fail to capture the expressive richness of real-life communication. With the rise of large neural networks, several large-scale speech corpora have emerged and been widely adopted across various speech processing tasks. However, the field of voice conversion (VC) still lacks large-scale, expressive, and real-life speech resources suitable for modeling natural prosody and emotion. To fill this gap, we release NaturalVoices (NV), the first large-scale spontaneous podcast dataset specifically designed for emotion-aware voice conversion. It comprises 5,049 hours of spontaneous podcast recordings with automatic annotations for emotion (categorical and attribute-based), speech quality, transcripts, speaker identity, and sound events. The dataset captures expressive emotional variation across thousands of speakers, diverse topics, and natural speaking styles. We also provide an open-source pipeline with modular annotation tools and flexible filtering, enabling researchers to construct customized subsets for a wide range of VC tasks. Experiments demonstrate that NaturalVoices supports the development of robust and generalizable VC models capable of producing natural, expressive speech, while revealing limitations of current architectures when applied to large-scale spontaneous data. These results suggest that NaturalVoices is both a valuable resource and a challenging benchmark for advancing the field of voice conversion. Dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/JHU-SmileLab

Using data from the Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey, we investigate how galaxy properties correlate with the local environment, focusing on the two southern regions of the survey (G02 and G23) that have not previously been examined in this context. We employ two-point and marked correlation functions to quantify the environmental dependence of galaxy color, stellar mass, luminosity across the u, g, r, J, and K bands, as well as star formation rate (SFR) and specific star formation rate (sSFR). We also assess the impact of redshift incompleteness and cosmic variance on these clustering measurements. Our results show that u-r and g-r colors are most strongly correlated with local overdensity, followed by stellar mass. The sSFR exhibits a clear inverse relationship with density of the environment, consistent with the trend observed for u-band luminosity, which traces young stellar populations. In contrast, galaxies brighter in the g, J, and K bands preferentially inhabit denser regions. By comparing our measurements from the southern regions with those from the equatorial regions of GAMA, we find that cosmic variance does not significantly influence our conclusions. However, redshift incompleteness affects the clustering measurements, as revealed through comparisons of subsets within the G02 region. The measured correlations provide key constraints for models of galaxy assembly across mass and environment, while the environmental trends in color and near-infrared luminosity offer a means to trace stellar mass growth and quenching with redshift.

Small sample sizes are common in many disciplines, which necessitates pooling roughly similar datasets across multiple institutions to study weak but relevant associations between images and disease outcomes. Such data often manifest shift/imbalance in covariates (i.e., secondary non-imaging data). Controlling for such nuisance variables is common within standard statistical analysis, but the ideas do not directly apply to overparameterized models. Consequently, recent work has shown how strategies from invariant representation learning provides a meaningful starting point, but the current repertoire of methods is limited to accounting for shifts/imbalances in just a couple of covariates at a time. In this paper, we show how viewing this problem from the perspective of Category theory provides a simple and effective solution that completely avoids elaborate multi-stage training pipelines that would otherwise be needed. We show the effectiveness of this approach via extensive experiments on real datasets. Further, we discuss how this style of formulation offers a unified perspective on at least 5+ distinct problem settings, from self-supervised learning to matching problems in 3D reconstruction.

LLMs are widely used in complex AI applications. These applications underscore the need for LLM outputs to adhere to a specific format, for their integration with other components in the systems. Typically the format rules e.g., for data serialization formats such as JSON, YAML, or Code in Programming Language are expressed as context-free grammar (CFG). Due to the hallucinations and unreliability of LLMs, instructing LLMs to adhere to specified syntax becomes an increasingly important challenge. We present SynCode, a novel framework for efficient and general syntactical decoding with LLMs, to address this challenge. SynCode leverages the CFG of a formal language, utilizing an offline-constructed efficient lookup table called DFA mask store based on the discrete finite automaton (DFA) of the language grammar terminals. We demonstrate SynCode's soundness and completeness given the CFG of the formal language, presenting its ability to retain syntactically valid tokens while rejecting invalid ones. SynCode seamlessly integrates with any language defined by CFG, as evidenced by experiments focusing on generating JSON, Python, and Go outputs. Our experiments evaluating the effectiveness of SynCode for JSON generation demonstrate that SynCode eliminates all syntax errors and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, our results underscore how SynCode significantly reduces 96.07% of syntax errors in generated Python and Go code, showcasing its substantial impact on enhancing syntactical precision in LLM generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/uiuc-focal-lab/syncode

Training machine learning models with differential privacy (DP) has received increasing interest in recent years. One of the most popular algorithms for training differentially private models is differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DPSGD) and its variants, where at each step gradients are clipped and combined with some noise. Given the increasing usage of DPSGD, we ask the question: is DPSGD alone sufficient to find a good minimizer for every dataset under privacy constraints? Towards answering this question, we show that even for the simple case of linear classification, unlike non-private optimization, (private) feature preprocessing is vital for differentially private optimization. In detail, we first show theoretically that there exists an example where without feature preprocessing, DPSGD incurs an optimality gap proportional to the maximum Euclidean norm of features over all samples. We then propose an algorithm called DPSGD-F, which combines DPSGD with feature preprocessing and prove that for classification tasks, it incurs an optimality gap proportional to the diameter of the features max_{x, x' in D} |x - x'|_2. We finally demonstrate the practicality of our algorithm on image classification benchmarks.

Randomized smoothing-based certification is an effective approach for obtaining robustness certificates of deep neural networks (DNNs) against adversarial attacks. This method constructs a smoothed DNN model and certifies its robustness through statistical sampling, but it is computationally expensive, especially when certifying with a large number of samples. Furthermore, when the smoothed model is modified (e.g., quantized or pruned), certification guarantees may not hold for the modified DNN, and recertifying from scratch can be prohibitively expensive. We present the first approach for incremental robustness certification for randomized smoothing, IRS. We show how to reuse the certification guarantees for the original smoothed model to certify an approximated model with very few samples. IRS significantly reduces the computational cost of certifying modified DNNs while maintaining strong robustness guarantees. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing up to 3x certification speedup over the certification that applies randomized smoothing of the approximate model from scratch.

Prior work on controllable text generation has focused on learning how to control language models through trainable decoding, smart-prompt design, or fine-tuning based on a desired objective. We hypothesize that the information needed to steer the model to generate a target sentence is already encoded within the model. Accordingly, we explore a different approach altogether: extracting latent vectors directly from pretrained language model decoders without fine-tuning. Experiments show that there exist steering vectors, which, when added to the hidden states of the language model, generate a target sentence nearly perfectly (> 99 BLEU) for English sentences from a variety of domains. We show that vector arithmetic can be used for unsupervised sentiment transfer on the Yelp sentiment benchmark, with performance comparable to models tailored to this task. We find that distances between steering vectors reflect sentence similarity when evaluated on a textual similarity benchmark (STS-B), outperforming pooled hidden states of models. Finally, we present an analysis of the intrinsic properties of the steering vectors. Taken together, our results suggest that frozen LMs can be effectively controlled through their latent steering space.

Despite the extensive success of pretrained language models as encoders for building NLP systems, they haven't seen prominence as decoders for sequence generation tasks. We explore the question of whether these models can be adapted to be used as universal decoders. To be considered "universal," a decoder must have an implicit representation for any target sentence s, such that it can recover that sentence exactly when conditioned on its representation. For large transformer-based language models trained on vast amounts of English text, we investigate whether such representations can be easily discovered using standard optimization methods. We present and compare three representation injection techniques for transformer-based models and three accompanying methods which map sentences to and from this representation space. Experiments show that not only do representations exist for sentences from a variety of genres. More importantly, without needing complex optimization algorithms, our methods recover these sentences almost perfectly without fine-tuning the underlying language model at all.

As online shopping is growing, the ability for buyers to virtually visualize products in their settings-a phenomenon we define as "Virtual Try-All"-has become crucial. Recent diffusion models inherently contain a world model, rendering them suitable for this task within an inpainting context. However, traditional image-conditioned diffusion models often fail to capture the fine-grained details of products. In contrast, personalization-driven models such as DreamPaint are good at preserving the item's details but they are not optimized for real-time applications. We present "Diffuse to Choose," a novel diffusion-based image-conditioned inpainting model that efficiently balances fast inference with the retention of high-fidelity details in a given reference item while ensuring accurate semantic manipulations in the given scene content. Our approach is based on incorporating fine-grained features from the reference image directly into the latent feature maps of the main diffusion model, alongside with a perceptual loss to further preserve the reference item's details. We conduct extensive testing on both in-house and publicly available datasets, and show that Diffuse to Choose is superior to existing zero-shot diffusion inpainting methods as well as few-shot diffusion personalization algorithms like DreamPaint.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for tasks such as natural language and code generation. Still, their outputs often suffer from issues like privacy violations, and semantically inaccurate code generation. Current libraries for LLM generation rely on left-to-right decoding without systematic support for backtracking, limiting the ability to correct or refine outputs mid-generation. To address this issue, we introduce IterGen, an intuitive framework for iterative, grammar-guided LLM generation that enables users to move both forward and backward within the generated output based on grammar symbols. By leveraging a symbol-to-position mapping, IterGen ensures efficient and structured generation while allowing for corrections during the process. We demonstrate IterGen's effectiveness in two important applications: reducing privacy leakage in LLM outputs and improving the accuracy of LLM-generated SQL queries. Our code is available at https://github.com/uiuc-arc/itergen

Complex sensors such as LiDAR, RADAR, and event cameras have proliferated in autonomous robotics to enhance perception and understanding of the environment. Meanwhile, these sensors are also vulnerable to diverse failure mechanisms that can intricately interact with their operation environment. In parallel, the limited availability of training data on complex sensors also affects the reliability of their deep learning-based prediction flow, where their prediction models can fail to generalize to environments not adequately captured in the training set. To address these reliability concerns, this paper introduces STARNet, a Sensor Trustworthiness and Anomaly Recognition Network designed to detect untrustworthy sensor streams that may arise from sensor malfunctions and/or challenging environments. We specifically benchmark STARNet on LiDAR and camera data. STARNet employs the concept of approximated likelihood regret, a gradient-free framework tailored for low-complexity hardware, especially those with only fixed-point precision capabilities. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate the efficacy of STARNet in detecting untrustworthy sensor streams in unimodal and multimodal settings. In particular, the network shows superior performance in addressing internal sensor failures, such as cross-sensor interference and crosstalk. In diverse test scenarios involving adverse weather and sensor malfunctions, we show that STARNet enhances prediction accuracy by approximately 10% by filtering out untrustworthy sensor streams. STARNet is publicly available at https://github.com/sinatayebati/STARNet.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in applying them to Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tasks, particularly Register Transfer Level (RTL) code generation. While several RTL datasets have been introduced, most focus on syntactic validity rather than functional validation with tests, leading to training examples that compile but may not implement the intended behavior. We present VERICODER, a model for RTL code generation fine-tuned on a dataset validated for functional correctness. This fine-tuning dataset is constructed using a novel methodology that combines unit test generation with feedback-directed refinement. Given a natural language specification and an initial RTL design, we prompt a teacher model (GPT-4o-mini) to generate unit tests and iteratively revise the RTL design based on its simulation results using the generated tests. If necessary, the teacher model also updates the tests to ensure they comply with the natural language specification. As a result of this process, every example in our dataset is functionally validated, consisting of a natural language description, an RTL implementation, and passing tests. Fine-tuned on this dataset of over 125,000 examples, VERICODER achieves state-of-the-art metrics in functional correctness on VerilogEval and RTLLM, with relative gains of up to 71.7% and 27.4% respectively. An ablation study further shows that models trained on our functionally validated dataset outperform those trained on functionally non-validated datasets, underscoring the importance of high-quality datasets in RTL code generation.

Continual learning has emerged as an important research direction due to the infeasibility of retraining large language models (LLMs) from scratch in the event of new data availability. Of great interest is the domain-adaptive pre-training (DAPT) paradigm, which focuses on continually training a pre-trained language model to adapt it to a domain it was not originally trained on. In this work, we evaluate the feasibility of DAPT in a low-resource setting, namely the Nepali language. We use synthetic data to continue training Llama 3 8B to adapt it to the Nepali language in a 4-bit QLoRA setting. We evaluate the adapted model on its performance, forgetting, and knowledge acquisition. We compare the base model and the final model on their Nepali generation abilities, their performance on popular benchmarks, and run case-studies to probe their linguistic knowledge in Nepali. We see some unsurprising forgetting in the final model, but also surprisingly find that increasing the number of shots during evaluation yields better percent increases in the final model (as high as 19.29% increase) compared to the base model (4.98%), suggesting latent retention. We also explore layer-head self-attention heatmaps to establish dependency resolution abilities of the final model in Nepali.

In dynamic operational environments, particularly in collaborative robotics, the inevitability of failures necessitates robust and adaptable recovery strategies. Traditional automated recovery strategies, while effective for predefined scenarios, often lack the flexibility required for on-the-fly task management and adaptation to expected failures. Addressing this gap, we propose a novel approach that models recovery behaviors as adaptable robotic skills, leveraging the Behavior Trees and Motion Generators~(BTMG) framework for policy representation. This approach distinguishes itself by employing reinforcement learning~(RL) to dynamically refine recovery behavior parameters, enabling a tailored response to a wide array of failure scenarios with minimal human intervention. We assess our methodology through a series of progressively challenging scenarios within a peg-in-a-hole task, demonstrating the approach's effectiveness in enhancing operational efficiency and task success rates in collaborative robotics settings. We validate our approach using a dual-arm KUKA robot.

Machine learning models are widely used, but can also often be wrong. Users would benefit from a reliable indication of whether a given output from a given model should be trusted, so a rational decision can be made whether to use the output or not. For example, outputs can be associated with a confidence measure; if this confidence measure is strongly associated with likelihood of correctness, then the model is said to be well-calibrated. A well-calibrated confidence measure can serve as a basis for rational, graduated decision-making on how much review and care is needed when using generated code. Calibration has so far been studied in mostly non-generative (e.g. classification) settings, especially in software engineering. However, generated code can quite often be wrong: Given generated code, developers must decide whether to use directly, use after varying intensity of careful review, or discard model-generated code. Thus, calibration is vital in generative settings. We make several contributions. We develop a framework for evaluating the calibration of code-generating models. We consider several tasks, correctness criteria, datasets, and approaches, and find that, by and large, generative code models we test are not well-calibrated out of the box. We then show how calibration can be improved using standard methods, such as Platt scaling. Since Platt scaling relies on the prior availability of correctness data, we evaluate the applicability and generalizability of Platt scaling in software engineering, discuss settings where it has good potential for practical use, and settings where it does not. Our contributions will lead to better-calibrated decision-making in the current use of code generated by language models, and offers a framework for future research to further improve calibration methods for generative models in software engineering.

The multitude of makeup products available can make it challenging to find the ideal match for desired attributes. An intelligent approach for product discovery is required to enhance the makeup shopping experience to make it more convenient and satisfying. However, enabling accurate and efficient product discovery requires extracting detailed attributes like color and finish type. Our work introduces an automated pipeline that utilizes multiple customized machine learning models to extract essential material attributes from makeup product images. Our pipeline is versatile and capable of handling various makeup products. To showcase the efficacy of our pipeline, we conduct extensive experiments on eyeshadow products (both single and multi-shade ones), a challenging makeup product known for its diverse range of shapes, colors, and finish types. Furthermore, we demonstrate the applicability of our approach by successfully extending it to other makeup categories like lipstick and foundation, showcasing its adaptability and effectiveness across different beauty products. Additionally, we conduct ablation experiments to demonstrate the superiority of our machine learning pipeline over human labeling methods in terms of reliability. Our proposed method showcases its effectiveness in cross-category product discovery, specifically in recommending makeup products that perfectly match a specified outfit. Lastly, we also demonstrate the application of these material attributes in enabling virtual-try-on experiences which makes makeup shopping experience significantly more engaging.

We introduce RotateIt, a system that enables fingertip-based object rotation along multiple axes by leveraging multimodal sensory inputs. Our system is trained in simulation, where it has access to ground-truth object shapes and physical properties. Then we distill it to operate on realistic yet noisy simulated visuotactile and proprioceptive sensory inputs. These multimodal inputs are fused via a visuotactile transformer, enabling online inference of object shapes and physical properties during deployment. We show significant performance improvements over prior methods and the importance of visual and tactile sensing.

Recent advances in machine learning have significantly improved the understanding of source code data and achieved good performance on a number of downstream tasks. Open source repositories like GitHub enable this process with rich unlabeled code data. However, the lack of high quality labeled data has largely hindered the progress of several code related tasks, such as program translation, summarization, synthesis, and code search. This paper introduces XLCoST, Cross-Lingual Code SnippeT dataset, a new benchmark dataset for cross-lingual code intelligence. Our dataset contains fine-grained parallel data from 8 languages (7 commonly used programming languages and English), and supports 10 cross-lingual code tasks. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest parallel dataset for source code both in terms of size and the number of languages. We also provide the performance of several state-of-the-art baseline models for each task. We believe this new dataset can be a valuable asset for the research community and facilitate the development and validation of new methods for cross-lingual code intelligence.

Translation of perceptual soundscape attributes from one language to another remains a challenging task that requires a high degree of fidelity in both psychoacoustic and psycholinguistic senses across the target population. Due to the inherently subjective nature of human perception, translating soundscape attributes using only small focus group discussion or expert panels could lead to translations with psycholinguistic meanings that, in a non-expert setting, deviate or distort from that of the source language. In this work, we present a quantitative evaluation method based on the circumplex model of soundscape perception to assess the overall translation quality across a set of criteria. As an initial application domain, we demonstrated the use of the quantitative evaluation framework in the context of an English-to-Thai translation of soundscape attributes.

Deep Learning (DL) has shown remarkable results in solving inverse problems in various domains. In particular, the Tikhonet approach is very powerful to deconvolve optical astronomical images (Sureau et al. 2020). Yet, this approach only uses the ell_2 loss, which does not guarantee the preservation of physical information (e.g. flux and shape) of the object reconstructed in the image. In Nammour et al. (2021), a new loss function was proposed in the framework of sparse deconvolution, which better preserves the shape of galaxies and reduces the pixel error. In this paper, we extend Tikhonet to take into account this shape constraint, and apply our new DL method, called ShapeNet, to optical and radio-interferometry simulated data set. The originality of the paper relies on i) the shape constraint we use in the neural network framework, ii) the application of deep learning to radio-interferometry image deconvolution for the first time, and iii) the generation of a simulated radio data set that we make available for the community. A range of examples illustrates the results.

As Deep Learning algorithms continue to evolve and become more sophisticated, they require massive datasets for model training and efficacy of models. Some of those data requirements can be met with the help of existing datasets within the organizations. Current Machine Learning practices can be leveraged to generate synthetic data from an existing dataset. Further, it is well established that diversity in generated synthetic data relies on (and is perhaps limited by) statistical properties of available dataset within a single organization or entity. The more diverse an existing dataset is, the more expressive and generic synthetic data can be. However, given the scarcity of underlying data, it is challenging to collate big data in one organization. The diverse, non-overlapping dataset across distinct organizations provides an opportunity for them to contribute their limited distinct data to a larger pool that can be leveraged to further synthesize. Unfortunately, this raises data privacy concerns that some institutions may not be comfortable with. This paper proposes a novel approach to generate synthetic data - FedSyn. FedSyn is a collaborative, privacy preserving approach to generate synthetic data among multiple participants in a federated and collaborative network. FedSyn creates a synthetic data generation model, which can generate synthetic data consisting of statistical distribution of almost all the participants in the network. FedSyn does not require access to the data of an individual participant, hence protecting the privacy of participant's data. The proposed technique in this paper leverages federated machine learning and generative adversarial network (GAN) as neural network architecture for synthetic data generation. The proposed method can be extended to many machine learning problem classes in finance, health, governance, technology and many more.

Over the recent years, Federated machine learning continues to gain interest and momentum where there is a need to draw insights from data while preserving the data provider's privacy. However, one among other existing challenges in the adoption of federated learning has been the lack of fair, transparent and universally agreed incentivization schemes for rewarding the federated learning contributors. Smart contracts on a blockchain network provide transparent, immutable and independently verifiable proofs by all participants of the network. We leverage this open and transparent nature of smart contracts on a blockchain to define incentivization rules for the contributors, which is based on a novel scalar quantity - federated contribution. Such a smart contract based reward-driven model has the potential to revolutionize the federated learning adoption in enterprises. Our contribution is two-fold: first is to show how smart contract based blockchain can be a very natural communication channel for federated learning. Second, leveraging this infrastructure, we can show how an intuitive measure of each agents' contribution can be built and integrated with the life cycle of the training and reward process.