Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in various natural language generation tasks. However, they incur high computation cost and latency resulting from the autoregressive token-by-token generation. To address this issue, several approaches have been proposed to reduce computational cost using early-exit strategies. These strategies enable faster text generation using reduced computation without applying the full computation graph to each token. While existing token-level early exit methods show promising results for online inference, they cannot be readily applied for batch inferencing and Key-Value caching. This is because they have to wait until the last token in a batch exits before they can stop computing. This severely limits the practical application of such techniques. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective token-level early exit method, SkipDecode, designed to work seamlessly with batch inferencing and KV caching. It overcomes prior constraints by setting up a singular exit point for every token in a batch at each sequence position. It also guarantees a monotonic decrease in exit points, thereby eliminating the need to recompute KV Caches for preceding tokens. Rather than terminating computation prematurely as in prior works, our approach bypasses lower to middle layers, devoting most of the computational resources to upper layers, allowing later tokens to benefit from the compute expenditure by earlier tokens. Our experimental results show that SkipDecode can obtain 2x to 5x inference speedups with negligible regression across a variety of tasks. This is achieved using OPT models of 1.3 billion and 6.7 billion parameters, all the while being directly compatible with batching and KV caching optimization techniques.

Satellite Earth observations (EO) can provide affordable and timely information for assessing crop conditions and food production. Such monitoring systems are essential in Africa, where there is high food insecurity and sparse agricultural statistics. EO-based monitoring systems require accurate cropland maps to provide information about croplands, but there is a lack of data to determine which of the many available land cover maps most accurately identify cropland in African countries. This study provides a quantitative evaluation and intercomparison of 11 publicly available land cover maps to assess their suitability for cropland classification and EO-based agriculture monitoring in Africa using statistically rigorous reference datasets from 8 countries. We hope the results of this study will help users determine the most suitable map for their needs and encourage future work to focus on resolving inconsistencies between maps and improving accuracy in low-accuracy regions.

AI Image generators based on diffusion models are widely discussed recently for their capability to create images from simple text prompts. But, for practical use in civil engineering they need to be able to create specific construction plans for given constraints. Within this paper we explore the capabilities of those diffusion-based AI generators for computational design at the example of floor plans and identify their current limitation. We explain how the diffusion-models work and propose new diffusion models with improved semantic encoding. In several experiments we show that we can improve validity of generated floor plans from 6% to 90% and query performance for different examples. We identify short comings and derive future research challenges of those models and discuss the need to combine diffusion models with building information modelling. With this we provide key insights into the current state and future directions for diffusion models in civil engineering.

Large language models trained for safety and harmlessness remain susceptible to adversarial misuse, as evidenced by the prevalence of "jailbreak" attacks on early releases of ChatGPT that elicit undesired behavior. Going beyond recognition of the issue, we investigate why such attacks succeed and how they can be created. We hypothesize two failure modes of safety training: competing objectives and mismatched generalization. Competing objectives arise when a model's capabilities and safety goals conflict, while mismatched generalization occurs when safety training fails to generalize to a domain for which capabilities exist. We use these failure modes to guide jailbreak design and then evaluate state-of-the-art models, including OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude v1.3, against both existing and newly designed attacks. We find that vulnerabilities persist despite the extensive red-teaming and safety-training efforts behind these models. Notably, new attacks utilizing our failure modes succeed on every prompt in a collection of unsafe requests from the models' red-teaming evaluation sets and outperform existing ad hoc jailbreaks. Our analysis emphasizes the need for safety-capability parity -- that safety mechanisms should be as sophisticated as the underlying model -- and argues against the idea that scaling alone can resolve these safety failure modes.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown unprecedented potential in various fields, especially as the backbones for question-answering (QA) systems. However, they tend to be easily deceived by tricky questions such as "How many eyes does the sun have?". Such frailties of PLMs often allude to the lack of knowledge within them. In this paper, we find that the PLMs already possess the knowledge required to rebut such questions, and the key is how to activate the knowledge. To systematize this observation, we investigate the PLMs' responses to one kind of tricky questions, i.e., the false premises questions (FPQs). We annotate a FalseQA dataset containing 2365 human-written FPQs, with the corresponding explanations for the false premises and the revised true premise questions. Using FalseQA, we discover that PLMs are capable of discriminating FPQs by fine-tuning on moderate numbers (e.g., 256) of examples. PLMs also generate reasonable explanations for the false premise, which serve as rebuttals. Further replaying a few general questions during training allows PLMs to excel on FPQs and general questions simultaneously. Our work suggests that once the rebuttal ability is stimulated, knowledge inside the PLMs can be effectively utilized to handle FPQs, which incentivizes the research on PLM-based QA systems.

The cost of information processing in physical systems calls for a trade-off between performance and energetic expenditure. Here we formulate and study a computation-dissipation bottleneck in mesoscopic systems used as input-output devices. Using both real datasets and synthetic tasks, we show how non-equilibrium leads to enhanced performance. Our framework sheds light on a crucial compromise between information compression, input-output computation and dynamic irreversibility induced by non-reciprocal interactions.

One of the key problems in 3D object detection is to reduce the accuracy gap between methods based on LiDAR sensors and those based on monocular cameras. A recently proposed framework for monocular 3D detection based on Pseudo-Stereo has received considerable attention in the community. However, so far these two problems are discovered in existing practices, including (1) monocular depth estimation and Pseudo-Stereo detector must be trained separately, (2) Difficult to be compatible with different stereo detectors and (3) the overall calculation is large, which affects the reasoning speed. In this work, we propose an end-to-end, efficient pseudo-stereo 3D detection framework by introducing a Single-View Diffusion Model (SVDM) that uses a few iterations to gradually deliver right informative pixels to the left image. SVDM allows the entire pseudo-stereo 3D detection pipeline to be trained end-to-end and can benefit from the training of stereo detectors. Afterwards, we further explore the application of SVDM in depth-free stereo 3D detection, and the final framework is compatible with most stereo detectors. Among multiple benchmarks on the KITTI dataset, we achieve new state-of-the-art performance.

For instance, studies demonstrate that ChatGPT exceeds the performance of crowd-workers in tasks encompassing relevance, stance, sentiment, topic identification, and frame detection (Gilardi, Alizadeh and Kubli, 2023), that it outperforms trained annotators in detecting the political party affiliations of Twitter users (Törnberg, 2023), and that it achieves accuracy scores over 0.6 for tasks such as stance, sentiment, hate speech detection, and bot identification (Zhu et al., 2023). Notably, ChatGPT also demonstrates the ability to correctly classify more than 70% of news as either true or false (Hoes, Altay and Bermeo, 2023), which suggests that LLMs might potentially be used to assist content moderation processes. While the performance of LLMs for text annotation is promising, there are several aspects that remain unclear and require further research. Among these is the impact of different approaches such as zero-shot versus few-shot learning and settings such as varying temperature parameters. Zero-shot learning allows models to predict for unseen tasks, while few-shot learning uses a small number of examples to generalize to new tasks. The conditions under which one approach outperforms the other are not fully understood yet.

Text is by far the most ubiquitous source of knowledge and information and should be made easily accessible to as many people as possible; however, texts often contain complex words that hinder reading comprehension and accessibility. Therefore, suggesting simpler alternatives for complex words without compromising meaning would help convey the information to a broader audience. This paper proposes mTLS, a multilingual controllable Transformer-based Lexical Simplification (LS) system fined-tuned with the T5 model. The novelty of this work lies in the use of language-specific prefixes, control tokens, and candidates extracted from pre-trained masked language models to learn simpler alternatives for complex words. The evaluation results on three well-known LS datasets -- LexMTurk, BenchLS, and NNSEval -- show that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models like LSBert and ConLS. Moreover, further evaluation of our approach on the part of the recent TSAR-2022 multilingual LS shared-task dataset shows that our model performs competitively when compared with the participating systems for English LS and even outperforms the GPT-3 model on several metrics. Moreover, our model obtains performance gains also for Spanish and Portuguese.

Existing NTMs with contrastive learning suffer from the sample bias problem owing to the word frequency-based sampling strategy, which may result in false negative samples with similar semantics to the prototypes. In this paper, we aim to explore the efficient sampling strategy and contrastive learning in NTMs to address the aforementioned issue. We propose a new sampling assumption that negative samples should contain words that are semantically irrelevant to the prototype. Based on it, we propose the graph contrastive topic model (GCTM), which conducts graph contrastive learning (GCL) using informative positive and negative samples that are generated by the graph-based sampling strategy leveraging in-depth correlation and irrelevance among documents and words. In GCTM, we first model the input document as the document word bipartite graph (DWBG), and construct positive and negative word co-occurrence graphs (WCGs), encoded by graph neural networks, to express in-depth semantic correlation and irrelevance among words. Based on the DWBG and WCGs, we design the document-word information propagation (DWIP) process to perform the edge perturbation of DWBG, based on multi-hop correlations/irrelevance among documents and words. This yields the desired negative and positive samples, which will be utilized for GCL together with the prototypes to improve learning document topic representations and latent topics. We further show that GCL can be interpreted as the structured variational graph auto-encoder which maximizes the mutual information of latent topic representations of different perspectives on DWBG. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for topic coherence and document representation learning compared with existing SOTA methods.