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Will the Real Linda Please Stand up...to Large Language Models? Examining the Representativeness Heuristic in LLMs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in "understanding" text and generating human-like text, they may exhibit biases acquired from training data in doing so. Specifically, LLMs may be susceptible to a common cognitive trap in human decision-making called the representativeness heuristic. This is a concept in psychology that refers to judging the likelihood of an event based on how closely it resembles a well-known prototype or typical example versus considering broader facts or statistical evidence. This work investigates the impact of the representativeness heuristic on LLM reasoning. We created ReHeAT (Representativeness Heuristic AI Testing), a dataset containing a series of problems spanning six common types of representativeness heuristics. Experiments reveal that four LLMs applied to REHEAT all exhibited representativeness heuristic biases. We further identify that the model's reasoning steps are often incorrectly based on a stereotype rather than the problem's description. Interestingly, the performance improves when adding a hint in the prompt to remind the model of using its knowledge. This suggests the uniqueness of the representativeness heuristic compared to traditional biases. It can occur even when LLMs possess the correct knowledge while failing in a cognitive trap. This highlights the importance of future research focusing on the representativeness heuristic in model reasoning and decision-making and on developing solutions to address it.


Group-Aware Coordination Graph for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) necessitates seamless collaboration among agents, often represented by an underlying relation graph. Existing methods for learning this graph primarily focus on agent-pair relations, neglecting higher-order relationships. While several approaches attempt to extend cooperation modelling to encompass behaviour similarities within groups, they commonly fall short in concurrently learning the latent graph, thereby constraining the information exchange among partially observed agents. To overcome these limitations, we present a novel approach to infer the Group-Aware Coordination Graph (GACG), which is designed to capture both the cooperation between agent pairs based on current observations and group-level dependencies from behaviour patterns observed across trajectories. This graph is further used in graph convolution for information exchange between agents during decision-making. To further ensure behavioural consistency among agents within the same group, we introduce a group distance loss, which promotes group cohesion and encourages specialization between groups. Our evaluations, conducted on StarCraft II micromanagement tasks, demonstrate GACG's superior performance. An ablation study further provides experimental evidence of the effectiveness of each component of our method.


Exploring and Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models in Automated Code Translation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Code translation tools (transpilers) are developed for automatic source-to-source translation. Although learning-based transpilers have shown impressive enhancement against rule-based counterparts, owing to their task-specific pre-training on extensive monolingual corpora. Their current performance still remains unsatisfactory for practical deployment, and the associated training resources are also prohibitively expensive. LLMs pre-trained on huge amounts of human-written code/text have shown remarkable performance in many code intelligence tasks due to their powerful generality, even without task-specific training. Thus, LLMs can potentially circumvent the above limitations, but they have not been exhaustively explored yet. This paper investigates diverse LLMs and learning-based transpilers for automated code translation tasks, finding that: although certain LLMs have outperformed current transpilers, they still have some accuracy issues, where most of the failures are induced by a lack of comprehension of source programs, missing clear instructions on I/O types in translation, and ignoring discrepancies between source and target programs. Enlightened by the above findings, we further propose UniTrans, a Unified code Translation framework, applicable to various LLMs, for unleashing their power in this field. Specifically, UniTrans first crafts a series of test cases for target programs with the assistance of source programs. Next, it harnesses the above auto-generated test cases to augment the code translation and then evaluate their correctness via execution. Afterward, UniTrans further (iteratively) repairs incorrectly translated programs prompted by test case execution results. Extensive experiments are conducted on six settings of translation datasets between Python, Java, and C++. Three recent LLMs of diverse sizes are tested with UniTrans, and all achieve substantial improvements.


Interpretable global minima of deep ReLU neural networks on sequentially separable data

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We explicitly construct zero loss neural network classifiers. We write the weight matrices and bias vectors in terms of cumulative parameters, which determine truncation maps acting recursively on input space. The configurations for the training data considered are (i) sufficiently small, well separated clusters corresponding to each class, and (ii) equivalence classes which are sequentially linearly separable. In the best case, for $Q$ classes of data in $\mathbb{R}^M$, global minimizers can be described with $Q(M+2)$ parameters.


FedGCS: A Generative Framework for Efficient Client Selection in Federated Learning via Gradient-based Optimization

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Federated Learning faces significant challenges in statistical and system heterogeneity, along with high energy consumption, necessitating efficient client selection strategies. Traditional approaches, including heuristic and learning-based methods, fall short of addressing these complexities holistically. In response, we propose FedGCS, a novel generative client selection framework that innovatively recasts the client selection process as a generative task. Drawing inspiration from the methodologies used in large language models, FedGCS efficiently encodes abundant decision-making knowledge within a continuous representation space, enabling efficient gradient-based optimization to search for optimal client selection that will be finally output via generation. The framework comprises four steps: (1) automatic collection of diverse "selection-score" pair data using classical client selection methods; (2) training an encoder-evaluator-decoder framework on this data to construct a continuous representation space; (3) employing gradient-based optimization in this space for optimal client selection; (4) generating the final optimal client selection via using beam search for the well-trained decoder. FedGCS outperforms traditional methods by being more comprehensive, generalizable, and efficient, simultaneously optimizing for model performance, latency, and energy consumption. The effectiveness of FedGCS is proven through extensive experimental analyses.


BLIP: Facilitating the Exploration of Undesirable Consequences of Digital Technologies

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Digital technologies have positively transformed society, but they have also led to undesirable consequences not anticipated at the time of design or development. We posit that insights into past undesirable consequences can help researchers and practitioners gain awareness and anticipate potential adverse effects. To test this assumption, we introduce BLIP, a system that extracts real-world undesirable consequences of technology from online articles, summarizes and categorizes them, and presents them in an interactive, web-based interface. In two user studies with 15 researchers in various computer science disciplines, we found that BLIP substantially increased the number and diversity of undesirable consequences they could list in comparison to relying on prior knowledge or searching online. Moreover, BLIP helped them identify undesirable consequences relevant to their ongoing projects, made them aware of undesirable consequences they "had never considered," and inspired them to reflect on their own experiences with technology.


Decomposing weather forecasting into advection and convection with neural networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Operational weather forecasting models have advanced for decades on both the explicit numerical solvers and the empirical physical parameterization schemes. However, the involved high computational costs and uncertainties in these existing schemes are requiring potential improvements through alternative machine learning methods. Previous works use a unified model to learn the dynamics and physics of the atmospheric model. Contrarily, we propose a simple yet effective machine learning model that learns the horizontal movement in the dynamical core and vertical movement in the physical parameterization separately. By replacing the advection with a graph attention network and the convection with a multi-layer perceptron, our model provides a new and efficient perspective to simulate the transition of variables in atmospheric models. We also assess the model's performance over a 5-day iterative forecasting. Under the same input variables and training methods, our model outperforms existing data-driven methods with a significantly-reduced number of parameters with a resolution of 5.625 deg. Overall, this work aims to contribute to the ongoing efforts that leverage machine learning techniques for improving both the accuracy and efficiency of global weather forecasting.


UniDM: A Unified Framework for Data Manipulation with Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Designing effective data manipulation methods is a long standing problem in data lakes. Traditional methods, which rely on rules or machine learning models, require extensive human efforts on training data collection and tuning models. Recent methods apply Large Language Models (LLMs) to resolve multiple data manipulation tasks. They exhibit bright benefits in terms of performance but still require customized designs to fit each specific task. This is very costly and can not catch up with the requirements of big data lake platforms. In this paper, inspired by the cross-task generality of LLMs on NLP tasks, we pave the first step to design an automatic and general solution to tackle with data manipulation tasks. We propose UniDM, a unified framework which establishes a new paradigm to process data manipulation tasks using LLMs. UniDM formalizes a number of data manipulation tasks in a unified form and abstracts three main general steps to solve each task. We develop an automatic context retrieval to allow the LLMs to retrieve data from data lakes, potentially containing evidence and factual information. For each step, we design effective prompts to guide LLMs to produce high quality results. By our comprehensive evaluation on a variety of benchmarks, our UniDM exhibits great generality and state-of-the-art performance on a wide variety of data manipulation tasks.


Open Challenges and Opportunities in Federated Foundation Models Towards Biomedical Healthcare

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This survey explores the transformative impact of foundation models (FMs) in artificial intelligence, focusing on their integration with federated learning (FL) for advancing biomedical research. Foundation models such as ChatGPT, LLaMa, and CLIP, which are trained on vast datasets through methods including unsupervised pretraining, self-supervised learning, instructed fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning from human feedback, represent significant advancements in machine learning. These models, with their ability to generate coherent text and realistic images, are crucial for biomedical applications that require processing diverse data forms such as clinical reports, diagnostic images, and multimodal patient interactions. The incorporation of FL with these sophisticated models presents a promising strategy to harness their analytical power while safeguarding the privacy of sensitive medical data. This approach not only enhances the capabilities of FMs in medical diagnostics and personalized treatment but also addresses critical concerns about data privacy and security in healthcare. This survey reviews the current applications of FMs in federated settings, underscores the challenges, and identifies future research directions including scaling FMs, managing data diversity, and enhancing communication efficiency within FL frameworks. The objective is to encourage further research into the combined potential of FMs and FL, laying the groundwork for groundbreaking healthcare innovations.


The Ghanaian NLP Landscape: A First Look

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite comprising one-third of global languages, African languages are critically underrepresented in Artificial Intelligence (AI), threatening linguistic diversity and cultural heritage. Ghanaian languages, in particular, face an alarming decline, with documented extinction and several at risk. This study pioneers a comprehensive survey of Natural Language Processing (NLP) research focused on Ghanaian languages, identifying methodologies, datasets, and techniques employed. Additionally, we create a detailed roadmap outlining challenges, best practices, and future directions, aiming to improve accessibility for researchers. This work serves as a foundational resource for Ghanaian NLP research and underscores the critical need for integrating global linguistic diversity into AI development.