While large models trained with self-supervised learning on offline datasets have shown remarkable capabilities in text and image domains, achieving the same generalisation for agents that act in sequential decision problems remains an open challenge. In this work, we take a step towards this goal by procedurally generating tens of millions of 2D physics-based tasks and using these to train a general reinforcement learning (RL) agent for physical control. To this end, we introduce Kinetix: an open-ended space of physics-based RL environments that can represent tasks ranging from robotic locomotion and grasping to video games and classic RL environments, all within a unified framework. Kinetix makes use of our novel hardware-accelerated physics engine Jax2D that allows us to cheaply simulate billions of environment steps during training. Our trained agent exhibits strong physical reasoning capabilities, being able to zero-shot solve unseen human-designed environments. Furthermore, fine-tuning this general agent on tasks of interest shows significantly stronger performance than training an RL agent *tabula rasa*. This includes solving some environments that standard RL training completely fails at. We believe this demonstrates the feasibility of large scale, mixed-quality pre-training for online RL and we hope that Kinetix will serve as a useful framework to investigate this further.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a powerful paradigm for enhancing large language models (LLMs) through external knowledge retrieval. Despite its widespread attention, existing academic research predominantly focuses on single-turn RAG, leaving a significant gap in addressing the complexities of multi-turn conversations found in real-world applications. To bridge this gap, we introduce CORAL, a large-scale benchmark designed to assess RAG systems in realistic multi-turn conversational settings. CORAL includes diverse information-seeking conversations automatically derived from Wikipedia and tackles key challenges such as open-domain coverage, knowledge intensity, free-form responses, and topic shifts. It supports three core tasks of conversational RAG: passage retrieval, response generation, and citation labeling. We propose a unified framework to standardize various conversational RAG methods and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of these methods on CORAL, demonstrating substantial opportunities for improving existing approaches.

Interpreting the decisions of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is essential for understanding their behavior, yet explainability remains a significant challenge, particularly for self-supervised models. Most existing methods for generating saliency maps rely on ground truth labels, restricting their use to supervised tasks. EigenCAM is the only notable label-independent alternative, leveraging Singular Value Decomposition to generate saliency maps applicable across CNN models, but it does not fully exploit the tensorial structure of feature maps. In this work, we introduce the Tucker Saliency Map (TSM) method, which applies Tucker tensor decomposition to better capture the inherent structure of feature maps, producing more accurate singular vectors and values. These are used to generate high-fidelity saliency maps, effectively highlighting objects of interest in the input. We further extend EigenCAM and TSM into multivector variants--Multivec-EigenCAM and Multivector Tucker Saliency Maps (MTSM)--which utilize all singular vectors and values, further improving saliency map quality. Quantitative evaluations on supervised classification models demonstrate that TSM, Multivec-EigenCAM, and MTSM achieve competitive performance with label-dependent methods. Moreover, TSM enhances explainability by approximately 50% over EigenCAM for both supervised and self-supervised models.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a promising approach to address the limitations of fixed knowledge in large language models (LLMs). However, current benchmarks for evaluating RAG systems suffer from two key deficiencies: (1) they fail to adequately measure LLMs' capability in handling long-context retrieval due to a lack of datasets that reflect the characteristics of retrieved documents, and (2) they lack a comprehensive evaluation method for assessing LLMs' ability to generate long-form responses that effectively exploits retrieved information. To address these shortcomings, we introduce the Long$^2$RAG benchmark and the Key Point Recall (KPR) metric. Long$^2$RAG comprises 280 questions spanning 10 domains and across 8 question categories, each associated with 5 retrieved documents with an average length of 2,444 words. KPR evaluates the extent to which LLMs incorporate key points extracted from the retrieved documents into their generated responses, providing a more nuanced assessment of their ability to exploit retrieved information.

A well structured collection of the various Quantum Cascade Laser (QCL) design and working properties data provides a platform to analyze and understand the relationships between these properties. By analyzing these relationships, we can gain insights into how different design features impact laser performance properties such as the working temperature. Most of these QCL properties are captured in scientific text. There is therefore need for efficient methodologies that can be utilized to extract QCL properties from text and generate a semantically enriched and interlinked platform where the properties can be analyzed to uncover hidden relations. There is also the need to maintain provenance and reference information on which these properties are based. Semantic Web technologies such as Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs have proven capability in providing interlinked data platforms for knowledge representation in various domains. In this paper, we propose an approach for generating a QCL properties Knowledge Graph (KG) from text for semantic enrichment of the properties. The approach is based on the QCL ontology and a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) enabled information extraction pipeline based on GPT 4-Turbo language model. The properties of interest include: working temperature, laser design type, lasing frequency, laser optical power and the heterostructure. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach for efficiently extracting QCL properties from unstructured text and generating a QCL properties Knowledge Graph, which has potential applications in semantic enrichment and analysis of QCL data.

In this work, we investigate a method for simulation-free training of Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) for learning deterministic mappings between paired data. Despite the analogy of NODEs as continuous-depth residual networks, their application in typical supervised learning tasks has not been popular, mainly due to the large number of function evaluations required by ODE solvers and numerical instability in gradient estimation. To alleviate this problem, we employ the flow matching framework for simulation-free training of NODEs, which directly regresses the parameterized dynamics function to a predefined target velocity field. Contrary to generative tasks, however, we show that applying flow matching directly between paired data can often lead to an ill-defined flow that breaks the coupling of the data pairs (e.g., due to crossing trajectories). We propose a simple extension that applies flow matching in the embedding space of data pairs, where the embeddings are learned jointly with the dynamic function to ensure the validity of the flow which is also easier to learn. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both regression and classification tasks, where our method outperforms existing NODEs with a significantly lower number of function evaluations.

Mobile health (mHealth) programs face a critical challenge in optimizing the timing of automated health information calls to beneficiaries. This challenge has been formulated as a collaborative multi-armed bandit problem, requiring online learning of a low-rank reward matrix. Existing solutions often rely on heuristic combinations of offline matrix completion and exploration strategies. In this work, we propose a principled Bayesian approach using Thompson Sampling for this collaborative bandit problem. Our method leverages prior information through efficient Gibbs sampling for posterior inference over the low-rank matrix factors, enabling faster convergence. We demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines on a real-world dataset from the world's largest maternal mHealth program. Our approach achieves a $16\%$ reduction in the number of calls compared to existing methods and a $47$\% reduction compared to the deployed random policy. This efficiency gain translates to a potential increase in program capacity by $0.5-1.4$ million beneficiaries, granting them access to vital ante-natal and post-natal care information. Furthermore, we observe a $7\%$ and $29\%$ improvement in beneficiary retention (an extremely hard metric to impact) compared to state-of-the-art and deployed baselines, respectively. Synthetic simulations further demonstrate the superiority of our approach, particularly in low-data regimes and in effectively utilizing prior information. We also provide a theoretical analysis of our algorithm in a special setting using Eluder dimension.

Large Language Models (LLMs), with their exceptional ability to handle a wide range of tasks, have driven significant advancements in tackling reasoning and planning tasks, wherein decomposing complex problems into executable workflows is a crucial step in this process. Existing workflow evaluation frameworks either focus solely on holistic performance or suffer from limitations such as restricted scenario coverage, simplistic workflow structures, and lax evaluation standards. To this end, we introduce WorFBench, a unified workflow generation benchmark with multi-faceted scenarios and intricate graph workflow structures. Additionally, we present WorFEval, a systemic evaluation protocol utilizing subsequence and subgraph matching algorithms to accurately quantify the LLM agent's workflow generation capabilities. Through comprehensive evaluations across different types of LLMs, we discover distinct gaps between the sequence planning capabilities and graph planning capabilities of LLM agents, with even GPT-4 exhibiting a gap of around 15%. We also train two open-source models and evaluate their generalization abilities on held-out tasks. Furthermore, we observe that the generated workflows can enhance downstream tasks, enabling them to achieve superior performance with less time during inference. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zjunlp/WorFBench.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across a wide range of domains, with increasing emphasis on enhancing their zero-shot generalization capabilities for unseen tasks across various modalities. Instruction tuning has emerged as an effective strategy for achieving zero-shot generalization by finetuning pretrained models on diverse multimodal tasks. As the scale of MLLMs continues to grow, parameter-efficient finetuning becomes increasingly critical. However, most existing parameter-efficient approaches focus only on single modalities and often overlook the multimodal characteristics during finetuning. In this work, we introduce a novel Multimodal Prompt Tuning (M$^2$PT) approach for efficient instruction tuning of MLLMs. M$^2$PT effectively integrates visual and textual prompts into the vision encoder and language processor respectively during finetuning, facilitating the extraction and alignment of features across modalities. Empirical results on various multimodal evaluation datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to several state-of-the-art baselines. A comprehensive set of ablation studies validates the effectiveness of our prompt design and the efficiency of our approach.

Data increasingly take the form of a multi-way array, or tensor, in several biomedical domains. Such tensors are often incompletely observed. For example, we are motivated by longitudinal microbiome studies in which several timepoints are missing for several subjects. There is a growing literature on missing data imputation for tensors. However, existing methods give a point estimate for missing values without capturing uncertainty. We propose a multiple imputation approach for tensors in a flexible Bayesian framework, that yields realistic simulated values for missing entries and can propagate uncertainty through subsequent analyses. Our model uses efficient and widely applicable conjugate priors for a CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) factorization, with a separable residual covariance structure. This approach is shown to perform well with respect to both imputation accuracy and uncertainty calibration, for scenarios in which either single entries or entire fibers of the tensor are missing. For two microbiome applications, it is shown to accurately capture uncertainty in the full microbiome profile at missing timepoints and used to infer trends in species diversity for the population. Documented R code to perform our multiple imputation approach is available at https://github.com/lockEF/MultiwayImputation .