Africa
A Survey of Large Language Models for European Languages
Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained significant attention due to their high performance on a wide range of natural language tasks since the release of ChatGPT. The LLMs learn to understand and generate language by training billions of model parameters on vast volumes of text data. Despite being a relatively new field, LLM research is rapidly advancing in various directions. In this paper, we present an overview of LLM families, including LLaMA, PaLM, GPT, and MoE, and the methods developed to create and enhance LLMs for official European Union (EU) languages. We provide a comprehensive summary of common monolingual and multilingual datasets used for pretraining large language models.
Writing in the Margins: Better Inference Pattern for Long Context Retrieval
Russak, Melisa, Jamil, Umar, Bryant, Christopher, Kamble, Kiran, Magnuson, Axel, Russak, Mateusz, AlShikh, Waseem
In this paper, we introduce Writing in the Margins (WiM), a new inference pattern for Large Language Models designed to optimize the handling of long input sequences in retrieval-oriented tasks. This approach leverages the chunked prefill of the key-value cache to perform segment-wise inference, which enables efficient processing of extensive contexts along with the generation and classification of intermediate information ("margins") that guide the model towards specific tasks. This method increases computational overhead marginally while significantly enhancing the performance of off-the-shelf models without the need for fine-tuning. Specifically, we observe that WiM provides an average enhancement of 7.5% in accuracy for reasoning skills (HotpotQA, MultiHop-RAG) and more than a 30.0% increase in the F1-score for aggregation tasks (CWE). Additionally, we show how the proposed pattern fits into an interactive retrieval design that provides end-users with ongoing updates about the progress of context processing, and pinpoints the integration of relevant information into the final response. We release our implementation of WiM using Hugging Face Transformers library at https://github.com/writer/writing-in-the-margins.
SONICS: Synthetic Or Not -- Identifying Counterfeit Songs
Rahman, Md Awsafur, Hakim, Zaber Ibn Abdul, Sarker, Najibul Haque, Paul, Bishmoy, Fattah, Shaikh Anowarul
The recent surge in AI-generated songs presents exciting possibilities and challenges. While these tools democratize music creation, they also necessitate the ability to distinguish between human-composed and AI-generated songs for safeguarding artistic integrity and content curation. Existing research and datasets in fake song detection only focus on singing voice deepfake detection (SVDD), where the vocals are AI-generated but the instrumental music is sourced from real songs. However, this approach is inadequate for contemporary end-to-end AI-generated songs where all components (vocals, lyrics, music, and style) could be AI-generated. Additionally, existing datasets lack lyrics-music diversity, long-duration songs, and open fake songs. To address these gaps, we introduce SONICS, a novel dataset for end-to-end Synthetic Song Detection (SSD), comprising over 97k songs with over 49k synthetic songs from popular platforms like Suno and Udio. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of modeling long-range temporal dependencies in songs for effective authenticity detection, an aspect overlooked in existing methods. To capture these patterns, we propose a novel model, SpecTTTra, that is up to 3 times faster and 6 times more memory efficient compared to popular CNN and Transformer-based models while maintaining competitive performance. Finally, we offer both AI-based and Human evaluation benchmarks, addressing another deficiency in current research.
Towards turbine-location-aware multi-decadal wind power predictions with CMIP6
Effenberger, Nina, Ludwig, Nicole
With the increasing amount of renewable energy in the grid, long-term wind power forecasting for multiple decades becomes more critical. In these long-term forecasts, climate data is essential as it allows us to account for climate change. Yet the resolution of climate models is often very coarse. In this paper, we show that by including turbine locations when downscaling with Gaussian Processes, we can generate valuable aggregate wind power predictions despite the low resolution of the CMIP6 climate models. This work is a first step towards multi-decadal turbine-location-aware wind power forecasting using global climate model output.
Aligning XAI with EU Regulations for Smart Biomedical Devices: A Methodology for Compliance Analysis
Sovrano, Francesco, Lognoul, Michael, Vilone, Giulia
Significant investment and development have gone into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medical and healthcare applications, leading to advanced control systems in medical technology. However, the opacity of AI systems raises concerns about essential characteristics needed in such sensitive applications, like transparency and trustworthiness. Our study addresses these concerns by investigating a process for selecting the most adequate Explainable AI (XAI) methods to comply with the explanation requirements of key EU regulations in the context of smart bioelectronics for medical devices. The adopted methodology starts with categorising smart devices by their control mechanisms (open-loop, closed-loop, and semi-closed-loop systems) and delving into their technology. Then, we analyse these regulations to define their explainability requirements for the various devices and related goals. Simultaneously, we classify XAI methods by their explanatory objectives. This allows for matching legal explainability requirements with XAI explanatory goals and determining the suitable XAI algorithms for achieving them. Our findings provide a nuanced understanding of which XAI algorithms align better with EU regulations for different types of medical devices. We demonstrate this through practical case studies on different neural implants, from chronic disease management to advanced prosthetics. This study fills a crucial gap in aligning XAI applications in bioelectronics with stringent provisions of EU regulations. It provides a practical framework for developers and researchers, ensuring their AI innovations advance healthcare technology and adhere to legal and ethical standards.
BaichuanSEED: Sharing the Potential of ExtensivE Data Collection and Deduplication by Introducing a Competitive Large Language Model Baseline
Dong, Guosheng, Pan, Da, Sun, Yiding, Zhang, Shusen, Liang, Zheng, Wu, Xin, Shen, Yanjun, Yang, Fan, Sun, Haoze, Li, Tianpeng, Lin, Mingan, Xu, Jianhua, Zhang, Yufan, Nie, Xiaonan, Su, Lei, Wang, Bingning, Zhang, Wentao, Mao, Jiaxin, Zhou, Zenan, Chen, Weipeng
The general capabilities of Large Language Models (LLM) highly rely on the composition and selection on extensive pretraining datasets, treated as commercial secrets by several institutions. To mitigate this issue, we open-source the details of a universally applicable data processing pipeline and validate its effectiveness and potential by introducing a competitive LLM baseline. Specifically, the data processing pipeline consists of broad collection to scale up and reweighting to improve quality. We then pretrain a 7B model BaichuanSEED with 3T tokens processed by our pipeline without any deliberate downstream task-related optimization, followed by an easy but effective supervised fine-tuning stage. BaichuanSEED demonstrates consistency and predictability throughout training and achieves comparable performance on comprehensive benchmarks with several commercial advanced large language models, such as Qwen1.5 and Llama3. We also conduct several heuristic experiments to discuss the potential for further optimization of downstream tasks, such as mathematics and coding.
Learning Granularity Representation for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion
Zhang, Jinchuan, Wan, Tianqi, Mu, Chong, Lu, Guangxi, Tian, Ling
Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) incorporate temporal information to reflect the dynamic structural knowledge and evolutionary patterns of real-world facts. Nevertheless, TKGs are still limited in downstream applications due to the problem of incompleteness. Consequently, TKG completion (also known as link prediction) has been widely studied, with recent research focusing on incorporating independent embeddings of time or combining them with entities and relations to form temporal representations. However, most existing methods overlook the impact of history from a multi-granularity aspect. The inherent semantics of human-defined temporal granularities, such as ordinal dates, reveal general patterns to which facts typically adhere. To counter this limitation, this paper proposes \textbf{L}earning \textbf{G}ranularity \textbf{Re}presentation (termed $\mathsf{LGRe}$) for TKG completion. It comprises two main components: Granularity Representation Learning (GRL) and Adaptive Granularity Balancing (AGB). Specifically, GRL employs time-specific multi-layer convolutional neural networks to capture interactions between entities and relations at different granularities. After that, AGB generates adaptive weights for these embeddings according to temporal semantics, resulting in expressive representations of predictions. Moreover, to reflect similar semantics of adjacent timestamps, a temporal loss function is introduced. Extensive experimental results on four event benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of $\mathsf{LGRe}$ in learning time-related representations. To ensure reproducibility, our code is available at https://github.com/KcAcoZhang/LGRe.
Time Series Analysis for Education: Methods, Applications, and Future Directions
Mao, Shengzhong, Zhang, Chaoli, Song, Yichi, Wang, Jindong, Zeng, Xiao-Jun, Xu, Zenglin, Wen, Qingsong
Recent advancements in the collection and analysis of sequential educational data have brought time series analysis to a pivotal position in educational research, highlighting its essential role in facilitating data-driven decision-making. However, there is a lack of comprehensive summaries that consolidate these advancements. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to provide a comprehensive review of time series analysis techniques specifically within the educational context. We begin by exploring the landscape of educational data analytics, categorizing various data sources and types relevant to education. We then review four prominent time series methods-forecasting, classification, clustering, and anomaly detection-illustrating their specific application points in educational settings. Subsequently, we present a range of educational scenarios and applications, focusing on how these methods are employed to address diverse educational tasks, which highlights the practical integration of multiple time series methods to solve complex educational problems. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on future directions, including personalized learning analytics, multimodal data fusion, and the role of large language models (LLMs) in educational time series. The contributions of this paper include a detailed taxonomy of educational data, a synthesis of time series techniques with specific educational applications, and a forward-looking perspective on emerging trends and future research opportunities in educational analysis. The related papers and resources are available and regularly updated at the project page.
Efficient LLM Training and Serving with Heterogeneous Context Sharding among Attention Heads
Lin, Xihui, Zhang, Yunan, Ge, Suyu, Patra, Barun, Chaudhary, Vishrav, Peng, Hao, Song, Xia
Existing LLM training and inference frameworks struggle in boosting efficiency with sparsity while maintaining the integrity of context and model architecture. Inspired by the sharding concept in database and the fact that attention parallelizes over heads on accelerators, we propose Sparsely-Sharded (S2) Attention, an attention algorithm that allocates heterogeneous context partitions for different attention heads to divide and conquer. S2-Attention enforces each attention head to only attend to a partition of contexts following a strided sparsity pattern, while the full context is preserved as the union of all the shards. As attention heads are processed in separate thread blocks, the context reduction for each head can thus produce end-to-end speed-up and memory reduction. At inference, LLMs trained with S2-Attention can then take the KV cache reduction as free meals with guaranteed model quality preserve. In experiments, we show S2-Attentioncan provide as much as (1) 25.3X wall-clock attention speed-up over FlashAttention-2, resulting in 6X reduction in end-to-end training time and 10X inference latency, (2) on-par model training quality compared to default attention, (3)perfect needle retrieval accuracy over 32K context window. On top of the algorithm, we build DKernel, an LLM training and inference kernel library that allows users to customize sparsity patterns for their own models. We open-sourced DKerneland make it compatible with Megatron, Pytorch, and vLLM.
Cross-subject Brain Functional Connectivity Analysis for Multi-task Cognitive State Evaluation
Chen, Jun, Chen, Anqi, Jiang, Bingkun, Obaidat, Mohammad S., Li, Ni, Zhang, Xinyu
Cognition refers to the function of information perception and processing, which is the fundamental psychological essence of human beings. It is responsible for reasoning and decision-making, while its evaluation is significant for the aviation domain in mitigating potential safety risks. Existing studies tend to use varied methods for cognitive state evaluation yet have limitations in timeliness, generalisation, and interpretability. Accordingly, this study adopts brain functional connectivity with electroencephalography signals to capture associations in brain regions across multiple subjects for evaluating real-time cognitive states. Specifically, a virtual reality-based flight platform is constructed with multi-screen embedded. Three distinctive cognitive tasks are designed and each has three degrees of difficulty. Thirty subjects are acquired for analysis and evaluation. The results are interpreted through different perspectives, including inner-subject and cross-subject for task-wise and gender-wise underlying brain functional connectivity. Additionally, this study incorporates questionnaire-based, task performance-based, and physiological measure-based approaches to fairly label the trials. A multi-class cognitive state evaluation is further conducted with the active brain connections. Benchmarking results demonstrate that the identified brain regions have considerable influences in cognition, with a multi-class accuracy rate of 95.83% surpassing existing studies. The derived findings bring significance to understanding the dynamic relationships among human brain functional regions, cross-subject cognitive behaviours, and decision-making, which have promising practical application values.