Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Africa


OntoTune: Ontology-Driven Self-training for Aligning Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Existing domain-specific Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically developed by fine-tuning general-purposed LLMs with large-scale domain-specific corpora. However, training on large-scale corpora often fails to effectively organize domain knowledge of LLMs, leading to fragmented understanding. Inspired by how humans connect concepts and organize knowledge through mind maps, we aim to emulate this approach by using ontology with hierarchical conceptual knowledge to reorganize LLM's domain knowledge. From this perspective, we propose an ontology-driven self-training framework called OntoTune, which aims to align LLMs with ontology through in-context learning, enabling the generation of responses guided by the ontology. We leverage in-context learning to identify whether the LLM has acquired the specific concept's ontology knowledge, and select the entries not yet mastered by LLM as the training set to further align the LLM with ontology. Compared to existing domain LLMs based on newly collected large-scale domain-specific corpora, our OntoTune, which relies on the existing, long-term developed ontology and LLM itself, significantly reduces data maintenance costs and offers improved generalization ability. We conduct our study in the medical domain to evaluate the effectiveness of OntoTune, utilizing a standardized medical ontology, SNOMED CT as our ontology source. Experimental results demonstrate that OntoTune achieves state-of-the-art performance in both in-ontology task hypernym discovery and out-of-ontology task medical domain QA. Moreover, compared to the latest direct ontology injection method TaxoLLaMA, our OntoTune better preserves original knowledge of LLM. The code and data are available at https://github.com/zjukg/OntoTune.


Convolutional Fourier Analysis Network (CFAN): A Unified Time-Frequency Approach for ECG Classification

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning has transformed the classification of biomedical signals such as electrocardiograms (ECGs). Advances in deep learning, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs), enable automatic feature extraction, raising the question: Can combining time- and frequency-domain attributes enhance classification accuracy? To explore this, we evaluated three ECG classification tasks: (1) arrhythmia classification, (2) identity recognition, and (3) apnea detection. We initially tested three methods: (i) 2-D spectrogram-based frequency-time classification (SPECT), (ii) time-domain classification using a 1-D CNN (CNN1D), and (iii) frequency-domain classification using a Fourier transform-based CNN (FFT1D). Performance was validated using K-fold cross-validation. Among these, CNN1D (time only) performed best, followed by SPECT (time-frequency) and FFT1D (frequency only). Surprisingly, SPECT, which integrates time- and frequency-domain features, performed worse than CNN1D, suggesting a need for a more effective time and frequency fusion approach. To address this, we tested the recently proposed Fourier Analysis Network (FAN), which combines time- and frequency-domain features. However, FAN performed comparably to CNN1D, excelling in some tasks while underperforming in others. To enhance this approach, we developed the Convolutional Fourier Analysis Network (CFAN), which integrates FAN with CNN. CFAN outperformed all previous methods across all classification tasks. These findings underscore the advantages of combining time- and frequency-domain features, demonstrating CFAN's potential as a powerful and versatile solution for ECG classification and broader biomedical signal analysis


AnyEdit: Edit Any Knowledge Encoded in Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) often produce incorrect or outdated information, necessitating efficient and precise knowledge updates. Current model editing methods, however, struggle with long-form knowledge in diverse formats, such as poetry, code snippets, and mathematical derivations. These limitations arise from their reliance on editing a single token's hidden state, a limitation we term "efficacy barrier". To solve this, we propose AnyEdit, a new autoregressive editing paradigm. It decomposes long-form knowledge into sequential chunks and iteratively edits the key token in each chunk, ensuring consistent and accurate outputs. Theoretically, we ground AnyEdit in the Chain Rule of Mutual Information, showing its ability to update any knowledge within LLMs. Empirically, it outperforms strong baselines by 21.5% on benchmarks including UnKEBench, AKEW, and our new EditEverything dataset for long-form diverse-formatted knowledge. Additionally, AnyEdit serves as a plug-and-play framework, enabling current editing methods to update knowledge with arbitrary length and format, significantly advancing the scope and practicality of LLM knowledge editing.


KMI: A Dataset of Korean Motivational Interviewing Dialogues for Psychotherapy

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The increasing demand for mental health services has led to the rise of AI-driven mental health chatbots, though challenges related to privacy, data collection, and expertise persist. Motivational Interviewing (MI) is gaining attention as a theoretical basis for boosting expertise in the development of these chatbots. However, existing datasets are showing limitations for training chatbots, leading to a substantial demand for publicly available resources in the field of MI and psychotherapy. These challenges are even more pronounced in non-English languages, where they receive less attention. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that simulates MI sessions enriched with the expertise of professional therapists. We train an MI forecaster model that mimics the behavioral choices of professional therapists and employ Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate utterances through prompt engineering. Then, we present KMI, the first synthetic dataset theoretically grounded in MI, containing 1,000 high-quality Korean Motivational Interviewing dialogues. Through an extensive expert evaluation of the generated dataset and the dialogue model trained on it, we demonstrate the quality, expertise, and practicality of KMI. We also introduce novel metrics derived from MI theory in order to evaluate dialogues from the perspective of MI.


The late-stage training dynamics of (stochastic) subgradient descent on homogeneous neural networks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We analyze the implicit bias of constant step stochastic subgradient descent (SGD). We consider the setting of binary classification with homogeneous neural networks - a large class of deep neural networks with ReLU-type activation functions such as MLPs and CNNs without biases. We interpret the dynamics of normalized SGD iterates as an Euler-like discretization of a conservative field flow that is naturally associated to the normalized classification margin. Owing to this interpretation, we show that normalized SGD iterates converge to the set of critical points of the normalized margin at late-stage training (i.e., assuming that the data is correctly classified with positive normalized margin). Up to our knowledge, this is the first extension of the analysis of Lyu and Li (2020) on the discrete dynamics of gradient descent to the nonsmooth and stochastic setting. Our main result applies to binary classification with exponential or logistic losses. We additionally discuss extensions to more general settings.


Democratic Training Against Universal Adversarial Perturbations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite their advances and success, real-world deep neural networks are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Universal adversarial perturbation, an input-agnostic attack, poses a serious threat for them to be deployed in security-sensitive systems. In this case, a single universal adversarial perturbation deceives the model on a range of clean inputs without requiring input-specific optimization, which makes it particularly threatening. In this work, we observe that universal adversarial perturbations usually lead to abnormal entropy spectrum in hidden layers, which suggests that the prediction is dominated by a small number of ``feature'' in such cases (rather than democratically by many features). Inspired by this, we propose an efficient yet effective defense method for mitigating UAPs called \emph{Democratic Training} by performing entropy-based model enhancement to suppress the effect of the universal adversarial perturbations in a given model. \emph{Democratic Training} is evaluated with 7 neural networks trained on 5 benchmark datasets and 5 types of state-of-the-art universal adversarial attack methods. The results show that it effectively reduces the attack success rate, improves model robustness and preserves the model accuracy on clean samples.


The Rise of China's Soft Power

The New Yorker

Last year, the Africa Cup of Nations, the continent's biggest international soccer tournament, kicked off in Côte d'Ivoire, in a stadium designed, financed, and built by China. This should not come as a surprise to anyone who follows the sport, nor is it some new development. The first Chinese-made stadium in Africa was completed more than fifty years ago. By the end of the millennium, nine more African countries would open their capital cities to what came to be known as "stadium diplomacy." The quantity and scale of these stadiums grew alongside an increasingly robust push to quickly build infrastructure in poor African countries.


Football Manager 25 cancelled after two delays

BBC News

The latest update in the popular Football Manager series has been cancelled, its makers have announced. Fans of the long-running video game began to speculate about its fate when an update due to be unveiled late last month did not arrive. In a blog post, developer Sports Interactive told players it had made the "difficult decision" to cancel the 2025 edition as it was "too far away from the standards you deserve". It said it would now shift focus to the 2026 version of the game and fans who had preordered the cancelled release could obtain a refund. Football Manager, first launched in 2004, allows fans to step into the shoes of a gaffer and guide a chosen team through a season.


CASE-Bench: Context-Aware SafEty Benchmark for Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values is essential for their safe deployment and widespread adoption. Current LLM safety benchmarks often focus solely on the refusal of individual problematic queries, which overlooks the importance of the context where the query occurs and may cause undesired refusal of queries under safe contexts that diminish user experience. Addressing this gap, we introduce CASE-Bench, a Context-Aware SafEty Benchmark that integrates context into safety assessments of LLMs. CASE-Bench assigns distinct, formally described contexts to categorized queries based on Contextual Integrity theory. Additionally, in contrast to previous studies which mainly rely on majority voting from just a few annotators, we recruited a sufficient number of annotators necessary to ensure the detection of statistically significant differences among the experimental conditions based on power analysis. Our extensive analysis using CASE-Bench on various open-source and commercial LLMs reveals a substantial and significant influence of context on human judgments (p<0.0001 from a z-test), underscoring the necessity of context in safety evaluations. We also identify notable mismatches between human judgments and LLM responses, particularly in commercial models within safe contexts.


EAP-GP: Mitigating Saturation Effect in Gradient-based Automated Circuit Identification

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Understanding the internal mechanisms of transformer-based language models remains challenging. Mechanistic interpretability based on circuit discovery aims to reverse engineer neural networks by analyzing their internal processes at the level of computational subgraphs. In this paper, we revisit existing gradient-based circuit identification methods and find that their performance is either affected by the zero-gradient problem or saturation effects, where edge attribution scores become insensitive to input changes, resulting in noisy and unreliable attribution evaluations for circuit components. To address the saturation effect, we propose Edge Attribution Patching with GradPath (EAP-GP), EAP-GP introduces an integration path, starting from the input and adaptively following the direction of the difference between the gradients of corrupted and clean inputs to avoid the saturated region. This approach enhances attribution reliability and improves the faithfulness of circuit identification. We evaluate EAP-GP on 6 datasets using GPT-2 Small, GPT-2 Medium, and GPT-2 XL. Experimental results demonstrate that EAP-GP outperforms existing methods in circuit faithfulness, achieving improvements up to 17.7%. Comparisons with manually annotated ground-truth circuits demonstrate that EAP-GP achieves precision and recall comparable to or better than previous approaches, highlighting its effectiveness in identifying accurate circuits.