Large Language Models(LLMs) have dramatically revolutionized the field of Natural Language Processing(NLP), offering remarkable capabilities that have garnered widespread usage. However, existing interaction paradigms between LLMs and users are constrained by either inflexibility, limitations in customization, or a lack of persistent learning. This inflexibility is particularly evident as users, especially those without programming skills, have restricted avenues to enhance or personalize the model. Existing frameworks further complicate the model training and deployment process due to their computational inefficiencies and lack of user-friendly interfaces. To overcome these challenges, this paper introduces a novel interaction paradigm-'Online Training using External Interactions'-that merges the benefits of persistent, real-time model updates with the flexibility for individual customization through external interactions such as AI agents or online/offline knowledge bases.

In recent advancements in Conversational Large Language Models (LLMs), a concerning trend has emerged, showing that many new base LLMs experience a knowledge reduction in their foundational capabilities following Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). This process often leads to issues such as forgetting or a decrease in the base model's abilities. Moreover, fine-tuned models struggle to align with user preferences, inadvertently increasing the generation of toxic outputs when specifically prompted. To overcome these challenges, we adopted an innovative approach by completely bypassing SFT and directly implementing Harmless Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Our method not only preserves the base model's general capabilities but also significantly enhances its conversational abilities, while notably reducing the generation of toxic outputs. Our approach holds significant implications for fields that demand a nuanced understanding and generation of responses, such as customer service. We applied this methodology to Mistral, the most popular base model, thereby creating Mistral-Plus. Our validation across 11 general tasks demonstrates that Mistral-Plus outperforms similarly sized open-source base models and their corresponding instruct versions. Importantly, the conversational abilities of Mistral-Plus were significantly improved, indicating a substantial advancement over traditional SFT models in both safety and user preference alignment.

LLMOps incur significant costs due to hardware requirements, hindering their widespread accessibility. Additionally, a lack of transparency in model training methods and data contributes to the majority of models being non-reproducible. To tackle these challenges, the LLM Efficiency Challenge was introduced at NeurIPS Workshop, aiming to adapt foundation models on a diverse set of tasks via fine-tuning on a single GPU (RTX 4090 or A100 with 40GB) within a 24-hour timeframe. In this system description paper, we introduce Birbal, our Mistral-7B based winning model, fine-tuned on a single RTX 4090 for 16 hours. Birbal's success lies in curating high-quality instructions covering diverse tasks, resulting in a 35% performance improvement over second-best Qwen-14B based submission.

Transformer-based Neural Language Models achieve state-of-the-art performance on various natural language processing tasks. However, an open question is the extent to which these models rely on word-order/syntactic or word co-occurrence/topic-based information when processing natural language. This work contributes to this debate by addressing the question of whether these models primarily use topic as a signal, by exploring the relationship between Transformer-based models' (BERT and RoBERTa's) performance on a range of probing tasks in English, from simple lexical tasks such as sentence length prediction to complex semantic tasks such as idiom token identification, and the sensitivity of these tasks to the topic information. To this end, we propose a novel probing method which we call topic-aware probing. Our initial results indicate that Transformer-based models encode both topic and non-topic information in their intermediate layers, but also that the facility of these models to distinguish idiomatic usage is primarily based on their ability to identify and encode topic. Furthermore, our analysis of these models' performance on other standard probing tasks suggests that tasks that are relatively insensitive to the topic information are also tasks that are relatively difficult for these models.

LLMs are powerful tools for language processing and prediction, pre-trained on vast collections of natural language, and capable of performing diverse language analysis and generation tasks [23]. The release of ChatGPT, along with the many other available LLMs (e.g., GPT-4, LLaMa, Codex, BERT) has opened new doors to research and development potential, which has seen a recent increase in related research. Like many fields, LLMs hold interesting possibilities for video games, which has prompted many researchers to hasten to investigate the potential for applying LLMs to various aspects of video game research and development. Although the concept of generative AI is not new to video games, with decades of prior work in AI-powered generation of game content [26, 46], LLMs have the potential to revolutionise generation and co-creation of video game content, along with game development tools and processes, and games research approaches. As research and development of LLMs and games is occurring and evolving quickly, it is difficult to capture a full picture of how LLMs are being used in games research. The aim of this paper is to provide a preliminary scoping review of LLMs and video games, surveying the related research conducted between 2020 and 2023. We aim to identify the ways in which researchers have been exploring the use of LLMs for game development and research to date. To identify the relevant papers, we conducted a Google Scholar search for papers published between 2020-2023 (and very early 2024). We identified 76 relevant papers from 2260 results returned in the search.

Combining images from multi-modalities is beneficial to explore various information in computer vision, especially in the medical domain. As an essential part of clinical diagnosis, multi-modal brain tumor segmentation aims to delineate the malignant entity involving multiple modalities. Although existing methods have shown remarkable performance in the task, the information exchange for cross-scale and high-level representations fusion in spatial and modality are limited in these methods. In this paper, we present a novel Modality Aware and Shift Mixer that integrates intra-modality and inter-modality dependencies of multi-modal images for effective and robust brain tumor segmentation. Specifically, we introduce a Modality-Aware module according to neuroimaging studies for modeling the specific modality pair relationships at low levels, and a Modality-Shift module with specific mosaic patterns is developed to explore the complex relationships across modalities at high levels via the self-attention. Experimentally, we outperform previous state-of-the-art approaches on the public Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS 2021 segmentation) dataset. Further qualitative experiments demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of MASM.

We present INDICVOICES, a dataset of natural and spontaneous speech containing a total of 7348 hours of read (9%), extempore (74%) and conversational (17%) audio from 16237 speakers covering 145 Indian districts and 22 languages. Of these 7348 hours, 1639 hours have already been transcribed, with a median of 73 hours per language. Through this paper, we share our journey of capturing the cultural, linguistic and demographic diversity of India to create a one-of-its-kind inclusive and representative dataset. More specifically, we share an open-source blueprint for data collection at scale comprising of standardised protocols, centralised tools, a repository of engaging questions, prompts and conversation scenarios spanning multiple domains and topics of interest, quality control mechanisms, comprehensive transcription guidelines and transcription tools. We hope that this open source blueprint will serve as a comprehensive starter kit for data collection efforts in other multilingual regions of the world. Using INDICVOICES, we build IndicASR, the first ASR model to support all the 22 languages listed in the 8th schedule of the Constitution of India. All the data, tools, guidelines, models and other materials developed as a part of this work will be made publicly available

In multicriteria decision-making, a user seeks a set of non-dominated solutions to a (constrained) multiobjective optimization problem, the so-called Pareto frontier. In this work, we seek to bring a state-of-the-art method for exact multiobjective integer linear programming into the heuristic realm. We focus on binary decision diagrams (BDDs) which first construct a graph that represents all feasible solutions to the problem and then traverse the graph to extract the Pareto frontier. Because the Pareto frontier may be exponentially large, enumerating it over the BDD can be time-consuming. We explore how restricted BDDs, which have already been shown to be effective as heuristics for single-objective problems, can be adapted to multiobjective optimization through the use of machine learning (ML). MORBDD, our ML-based BDD sparsifier, first trains a binary classifier to eliminate BDD nodes that are unlikely to contribute to Pareto solutions, then post-processes the sparse BDD to ensure its connectivity via optimization. Experimental results on multiobjective knapsack problems show that MORBDD is highly effective at producing very small restricted BDDs with excellent approximation quality, outperforming width-limited restricted BDDs and the well-known evolutionary algorithm NSGA-II.

The task of stock earnings forecasting has received considerable attention due to the demand investors in real-world scenarios. However, compared with financial institutions, it is not easy for ordinary investors to mine factors and analyze news. On the other hand, although large language models in the financial field can serve users in the form of dialogue robots, it still requires users to have financial knowledge to ask reasonable questions. To serve the user experience, we aim to build an automatic system, FinReport, for ordinary investors to collect information, analyze it, and generate reports after summarizing. Specifically, our FinReport is based on financial news announcements and a multi-factor model to ensure the professionalism of the report. The FinReport consists of three modules: news factorization module, return forecasting module, risk assessment module. The news factorization module involves understanding news information and combining it with stock factors, the return forecasting module aim to analysis the impact of news on market sentiment, and the risk assessment module is adopted to control investment risk. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets have well verified the effectiveness and explainability of our proposed FinReport. Our codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/frinkleko/FinReport.

Distance-based time series anomaly detection methods are prevalent due to their relative non-parametric nature and interpretability. However, the commonly used Euclidean distance is sensitive to noise. While existing works have explored dynamic time warping (DTW) for its robustness, they only support supervised tasks over multivariate time series (MTS), leaving a scarcity of unsupervised methods. In this work, we propose FCM-wDTW, an unsupervised distance metric learning method for anomaly detection over MTS, which encodes raw data into latent space and reveals normal dimension relationships through cluster centers. FCM-wDTW introduces locally weighted DTW into fuzzy C-means clustering and learns the optimal latent space efficiently, enabling anomaly identification via data reconstruction. Experiments with 11 different types of benchmarks demonstrate our method's competitive accuracy and efficiency.