Elucidating the rationale behind neural models' outputs has been challenging in the machine learning field, which is indeed applicable in this age of large language models (LLMs) and in-context learning (ICL). When it comes to estimating input attributions (IA), ICL poses a new issue of interpreting which example in the prompt, consisting of a set of examples, contributed to identifying the task/rule to be solved. To this end, in this paper, we introduce synthetic diagnostic tasks inspired by the poverty of the stimulus design in inductive reasoning; here, most in-context examples are ambiguous w.r.t. their underlying rule, and one critical example disambiguates the task demonstrated. The question is whether conventional IA methods can identify such an example in interpreting the inductive reasoning process in ICL. Our experiments provide several practical findings; for example, a certain simple IA method works the best, and the larger the model, the generally harder it is to interpret the ICL with gradient-based IA methods.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and multimodal learning has transformed digital content creation and manipulation. Traditional visual editing tools require significant expertise, limiting accessibility. Recent strides in instruction-based editing have enabled intuitive interaction with visual content, using natural language as a bridge between user intent and complex editing operations. This survey provides an overview of these techniques, focusing on how LLMs and multimodal models empower users to achieve precise visual modifications without deep technical knowledge. By synthesizing over 100 publications, we explore methods from generative adversarial networks to diffusion models, examining multimodal integration for fine-grained content control. We discuss practical applications across domains such as fashion, 3D scene manipulation, and video synthesis, highlighting increased accessibility and alignment with human intuition. Our survey compares existing literature, emphasizing LLM-empowered editing, and identifies key challenges to stimulate further research. We aim to democratize powerful visual editing across various industries, from entertainment to education. Interested readers are encouraged to access our repository at https://github.com/tamlhp/awesome-instruction-editing.

We propose NeRF-Insert, a NeRF editing framework that allows users to make high-quality local edits with a flexible level of control. Unlike previous work that relied on image-to-image models, we cast scene editing as an in-painting problem, which encourages the global structure of the scene to be preserved. Moreover, while most existing methods use only textual prompts to condition edits, our framework accepts a combination of inputs of different modalities as reference. More precisely, a user may provide a combination of textual and visual inputs including images, CAD models, and binary image masks for specifying a 3D region. We use generic image generation models to in-paint the scene from multiple viewpoints, and lift the local edits to a 3D-consistent NeRF edit. Compared to previous methods, our results show better visual quality and also maintain stronger consistency with the original NeRF.

Over the past decade, AI research has focused heavily on building ever-larger deep learning models. This approach has simultaneously unlocked incredible achievements in science and technology, and hindered AI from overcoming long-standing limitations with respect to explainability, ethical harms, and environmental efficiency. Drawing on qualitative interviews and computational analyses, our three-part history of AI research traces the creation of this "epistemic monoculture" back to a radical reconceptualization of scientific progress that began in the late 1980s. In the first era of AI research (1950s-late 1980s), researchers and patrons approached AI as a "basic" science that would advance through autonomous exploration and organic assessments of progress (e.g., peer-review, theoretical consensus). The failure of this approach led to a retrenchment of funding in the 1980s. Amid this "AI Winter," an intervention by the U.S. government reoriented the field towards measurable progress on tasks of military and commercial interest. A new evaluation system called "benchmarking" provided an objective way to quantify progress on tasks by focusing exclusively on increasing predictive accuracy on example datasets. Distilling science down to verifiable metrics clarified the roles of scientists, allowed the field to rapidly integrate talent, and provided clear signals of significance and progress. But history has also revealed a tradeoff to this streamlined approach to science: the consolidation around external interests and inherent conservatism of benchmarking has disincentivized exploration beyond scaling monoculture. In the discussion, we explain how AI's monoculture offers a compelling challenge to the belief that basic, exploration-driven research is needed for scientific progress. Implications for the spread of AI monoculture to other sciences in the era of generative AI are also discussed.

Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are able to understand visual concepts, describe and decompose complex tasks into sub-tasks, and provide feedback on task completion. In this paper, we aim to leverage these capabilities to support the training of reinforcement learning (RL) agents. In principle, VLMs are well suited for this purpose, as they can naturally analyze image-based observations and provide feedback (reward) on learning progress. However, inference in VLMs is computationally expensive, so querying them frequently to compute rewards would significantly slowdown the training of an RL agent. To address this challenge, we propose a framework named Code as Reward (VLM-CaR). VLM-CaR produces dense reward functions from VLMs through code generation, thereby significantly reducing the computational burden of querying the VLM directly. We show that the dense rewards generated through our approach are very accurate across a diverse set of discrete and continuous environments, and can be more effective in training RL policies than the original sparse environment rewards.

Using large language models (LLMs) for source code has recently gained attention. LLMs, such as Transformer-based models like Codex and ChatGPT, have been shown to be highly capable of solving a wide range of programming problems. However, the extent to which LLMs understand problem descriptions and generate programs accordingly or just retrieve source code from the most relevant problem in training data based on superficial cues has not been discovered yet. To explore this research question, we conduct experiments to understand the robustness of several popular LLMs, CodeGen and GPT-3.5 series models, capable of tackling code generation tasks in introductory programming problems. Our experimental results show that CodeGen and Codex are sensitive to the superficial modifications of problem descriptions and significantly impact code generation performance. Furthermore, we observe that Codex relies on variable names, as randomized variables decrease the solved rate significantly. However, the state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, such as InstructGPT and ChatGPT, show higher robustness to superficial modifications and have an outstanding capability for solving programming problems. This highlights the fact that slight modifications to the prompts given to the LLMs can greatly affect code generation performance, and careful formatting of prompts is essential for high-quality code generation, while the SOTA models are becoming more robust to perturbations.

The need to extend business process languages with the capability to model complex data objects along with the control flow perspective has lead to significant practical and theoretical advances in the field of Business Process Modeling (BPM).On the practical side, there are several suites for control flow and data modeling; nonetheless, when it comes to formal verification, the data perspective is abstracted away due to the intrinsic difficulty of handling unbounded data. On the theoretical side, there is significant literature providing decidability results for expressive data-aware processes. However, they struggle to produce a concrete impact as being far from real BPM architectures and, most of all, not providing actual verification tools. In this paper we aim at bridging such a gap: we provide a concrete framework which, on the one hand, being based on Petri Nets and relational models, is close to the widely used BPM suites, and on the other is grounded on solid formal basis which allow to perform formal verification tasks. Moreover, we show how to encode our framework in an action language so as to perform reachability analysis using virtually any state-of-the-art planner.