South America
The Role of Generative AI in Software Student CollaborAItion
Kiesler, Natalie, Smith, Jacqueline, Leinonen, Juho, Fox, Armando, MacNeil, Stephen, Ihantola, Petri
Collaboration is a crucial part of computing education. The increase Khan [28] has proposed an inspiring vision of how AI could in AI capabilities over the last couple of years is bound to profoundly help realize personalized individual tutors for every learner. Complementing affect all aspects of systems and software engineering, including this, an expert panel from 2020 [49] draws a scenario collaboration. In this position paper, we consider a scenario where where "AI supports orchestration of the multiple types of activities, AI agents would be able to take on any role in collaborative processes learning partners, and interaction patterns that can enrich a classroom". in computing education. We outline these roles, the activities We believe the possibilities are even broader, and to help and group dynamics that software development currently include, think about them, we propose a thought experiment that not only and discuss if and in what way AI could facilitate these roles and accommodates emerging practices and visions but also suggests activities. The goal of our work is to envision and critically examine new use cases in education that (to the best of our knowledge) have potential futures. We present scenarios suggesting how AI not yet been explored.
Analysis of Indic Language Capabilities in LLMs
Vaidya, Aatman, Prabhakar, Tarunima, George, Denny, Shah, Swair
This report evaluates the performance of text-in text-out Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand and generate Indic languages. This evaluation is used to identify and prioritize Indic languages suited for inclusion in safety benchmarks. We conduct this study by reviewing existing evaluation studies and datasets; and a set of twenty-eight LLMs that support Indic languages. We analyze the LLMs on the basis of the training data, license for model and data, type of access and model developers. We also compare Indic language performance across evaluation datasets and find that significant performance disparities in performance across Indic languages. Hindi is the most widely represented language in models. While model performance roughly correlates with number of speakers for the top five languages, the assessment after that varies.
Text-to-SQL based on Large Language Models and Database Keyword Search
Nascimento, Eduardo R., Avila, Caio Viktor S., Izquierdo, Yenier T., García, Grettel M., Andrade, Lucas Feijó L., Facina, Michelle S. P., Lemos, Melissa, Casanova, Marco A.
Text-to-SQL prompt strategies based on Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance on well-known benchmarks. However, when applied to real-world databases, their performance is significantly less than for these benchmarks, especially for Natural Language (NL) questions requiring complex filters and joins to be processed. This paper then proposes a strategy to compile NL questions into SQL queries that incorporates a dynamic few-shot examples strategy and leverages the services provided by a database keyword search (KwS) platform. The paper details how the precision and recall of the schema-linking process are improved with the help of the examples provided and the keyword-matching service that the KwS platform offers. Then, it shows how the KwS platform can be used to synthesize a view that captures the joins required to process an input NL question and thereby simplify the SQL query compilation step. The paper includes experiments with a real-world relational database to assess the performance of the proposed strategy. The experiments suggest that the strategy achieves an accuracy on the real-world relational database that surpasses state-of-the-art approaches. The paper concludes by discussing the results obtained.
A RAG-Based Institutional Assistant
Kuratomi, Gustavo, Pirozelli, Paulo, Cozman, Fabio G., Peres, Sarajane M.
Although large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong text generation capabilities, they struggle in scenarios requiring access to structured knowledge bases or specific documents, limiting their effectiveness in knowledge-intensive tasks. To address this limitation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models have been developed, enabling generative models to incorporate relevant document fragments into their inputs. In this paper, we design and evaluate a RAG-based virtual assistant specifically tailored for the University of S\~ao Paulo. Our system architecture comprises two key modules: a retriever and a generative model. We experiment with different types of models for both components, adjusting hyperparameters such as chunk size and the number of retrieved documents. Our optimal retriever model achieves a Top-5 accuracy of 30%, while our most effective generative model scores 22.04\% against ground truth answers. Notably, when the correct document chunks are supplied to the LLMs, accuracy significantly improves to 54.02%, an increase of over 30 percentage points. Conversely, without contextual input, performance declines to 13.68%. These findings highlight the critical role of database access in enhancing LLM performance. They also reveal the limitations of current semantic search methods in accurately identifying relevant documents and underscore the ongoing challenges LLMs face in generating precise responses.
On Deciding the Data Complexity of Answering Linear Monadic Datalog Queries with LTL Operators(Extended Version)
Artale, Alessandro, Gnatenko, Anton, Ryzhikov, Vladislav, Zakharyaschev, Michael
Our concern is the data complexity of answering linear monadic datalog queries whose atoms in the rule bodies can be prefixed by operators of linear temporal logic LTL. We first observe that, for data complexity, answering any connected query with operators $\bigcirc/\bigcirc^-$ (at the next/previous moment) is either in AC0, or in $ACC0\!\setminus\!AC0$, or $NC^1$-complete, or LogSpace-hard and in NLogSpace. Then we show that the problem of deciding LogSpace-hardness of answering such queries is PSpace-complete, while checking membership in the classes AC0 and ACC0 as well as $NC^1$-completeness can be done in ExpSpace. Finally, we prove that membership in AC0 or in ACC0, $NC^1$-completeness, and LogSpace-hardness are undecidable for queries with operators $\Diamond_f/\Diamond_p$ (sometime in the future/past) provided that $NC^1 \ne NLogSpace$, and $LogSpace \ne NLogSpace$.
UGMathBench: A Diverse and Dynamic Benchmark for Undergraduate-Level Mathematical Reasoning with Large Language Models
Xu, Xin, Zhang, Jiaxin, Chen, Tianhao, Chao, Zitong, Hu, Jishan, Yang, Can
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in mathematical reasoning, underscoring the need for a comprehensive and fair evaluation of their capabilities. However, existing benchmarks often fall short, either lacking extensive coverage of undergraduate-level mathematical problems or probably suffering from test-set contamination. To address these issues, we introduce UGMathBench, a diverse and dynamic benchmark specifically designed for evaluating undergraduate-level mathematical reasoning with LLMs. UGMathBench comprises 5,062 problems across 16 subjects and 111 topics, featuring 10 distinct answer types. Each problem includes three randomized versions, with additional versions planned for release as leading open-source LLMs become saturated in UGMathBench. Furthermore, we propose two key metrics: effective accuracy (EAcc), which measures the percentage of correctly solved problems across all three versions, and reasoning gap ($\Delta$), which assesses reasoning robustness by calculating the difference between the average accuracy across all versions and EAcc. Our extensive evaluation of 23 leading LLMs reveals that the highest EAcc achieved is 56.3\% by OpenAI-o1-mini, with large $\Delta$ values observed across different models. This highlights the need for future research aimed at developing "large reasoning models" with high EAcc and $\Delta = 0$. We anticipate that the release of UGMathBench, along with its detailed evaluation codes, will serve as a valuable resource to advance the development of LLMs in solving mathematical problems.
Hallucinations Can Improve Large Language Models in Drug Discovery
Yuan, Shuzhou, Färber, Michael
Concerns about hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been raised by researchers, yet their potential in areas where creativity is vital, such as drug discovery, merits exploration. In this paper, we come up with the hypothesis that hallucinations can improve LLMs in drug discovery. To verify this hypothesis, we use LLMs to describe the SMILES string of molecules in natural language and then incorporate these descriptions as part of the prompt to address specific tasks in drug discovery. Evaluated on seven LLMs and five classification tasks, our findings confirm the hypothesis: LLMs can achieve better performance with text containing hallucinations. Notably, Llama-3.1-8B achieves an 18.35% gain in ROC-AUC compared to the baseline without hallucination. Furthermore, hallucinations generated by GPT-4o provide the most consistent improvements across models. Additionally, we conduct empirical analyses and a case study to investigate key factors affecting performance and the underlying reasons. Our research sheds light on the potential use of hallucinations for LLMs and offers new perspectives for future research leveraging LLMs in drug discovery.
Optimizing Pretraining Data Mixtures with LLM-Estimated Utility
Held, William, Paranjape, Bhargavi, Koura, Punit Singh, Lewis, Mike, Zhang, Frank, Mihaylov, Todor
Large Language Models improve with increasing amounts of high-quality training data. However, leveraging larger datasets requires balancing quality, quantity, and diversity across sources. After evaluating nine baseline methods under both compute-and data-constrained scenarios, we find token-count heuristics outperform manual and learned mixes, indicating that simple approaches accounting for dataset size and diversity are surprisingly effective. Building on this insight, we propose two complementary approaches: UtiliMax, which extends token-based heuristics by incorporating utility estimates from reduced-scale ablations, achieving up to a 10.6x speedup over manual baselines; and Model Estimated Data Utility (MEDU), which leverages LLMs to estimate data utility from small samples, matching ablation-based performance while reducing computational requirements by 200x Compared to manual (Groeneveld et al., 2024, OLMo), heuristic (Chung et al., 2023, UniMax), and learned (Xie et al., 2024, DoReMi) data mixes, UtiliMax leads to more compute efficient models that perform better on average across tasks. Large Language Model (LLM) pretraining data increasingly consists of sub-corpora from many sources covering multiple domains and varying in size (Gao et al., 2020; Du et al., 2022; TogetherAI, Work completed during an internship at Meta AI. FLOPs from Llama 70B on 2.1 million tokens needed for MEDU using the FLOP equations from Hoffmann et al. (2022) Unlike traditional multi-task learning scenarios, datasets are not necessarily aligned with a specific intended use. Moreover, "intended usage" is often multi-functional as LLMs are being developed for general-purpose functionality (Eloundou et al., 2024; Qin et al., 2023). Given multiple training corpora and multiple downstream goals, how should we sample from each corpus to get the best possible model? Prior work has explored heuristic (Rae et al., 2021; Soldaini et al., 2024) and learned (Xie et al., 2024; Albalak et al., 2023) approaches to solve this. However, there is minimal comparison between these methods using the same data and model configuration. Furthermore, it is unclear whether these approaches are robust to the impacts of epoching which is critical as frontier models are increasingly data-constrained (Villalobos et al., 2024; Longpre et al., 2024).
Symbolic Knowledge Extraction and Injection with Sub-symbolic Predictors: A Systematic Literature Review
Ciatto, Giovanni, Sabbatini, Federico, Agiollo, Andrea, Magnini, Matteo, Omicini, Andrea
In this paper we focus on the opacity issue of sub-symbolic machine learning predictors by promoting two complementary activities, namely, symbolic knowledge extraction (SKE) and injection (SKI) from and into sub-symbolic predictors. We consider as symbolic any language being intelligible and interpretable for both humans and computers. Accordingly, we propose general meta-models for both SKE and SKI, along with two taxonomies for the classification of SKE and SKI methods. By adopting an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) perspective, we highlight how such methods can be exploited to mitigate the aforementioned opacity issue. Our taxonomies are attained by surveying and classifying existing methods from the literature, following a systematic approach, and by generalising the results of previous surveys targeting specific sub-topics of either SKE or SKI alone. More precisely, we analyse 132 methods for SKE and 117 methods for SKI, and we categorise them according to their purpose, operation, expected input/output data and predictor types. For each method, we also indicate the presence/lack of runnable software implementations. Our work may be of interest for data scientists aiming at selecting the most adequate SKE/SKI method for their needs, and also work as suggestions for researchers interested in filling the gaps of the current state of the art, as well as for developers willing to implement SKE/SKI-based technologies.
EventVL: Understand Event Streams via Multimodal Large Language Model
Li, Pengteng, Lu, Yunfan, Song, Pinghao, Li, Wuyang, Yao, Huizai, Xiong, Hui
The event-based Vision-Language Model (VLM) recently has made good progress for practical vision tasks. However, most of these works just utilize CLIP for focusing on traditional perception tasks, which obstruct model understanding explicitly the sufficient semantics and context from event streams. To address the deficiency, we propose EventVL, the first generative event-based MLLM (Multimodal Large Language Model) framework for explicit semantic understanding. Specifically, to bridge the data gap for connecting different modalities semantics, we first annotate a large event-image/video-text dataset, containing almost 1.4 million high-quality pairs of data, which enables effective learning across various scenes, e.g., drive scene or human motion. After that, we design Event Spatiotemporal Representation to fully explore the comprehensive information by diversely aggregating and segmenting the event stream. To further promote a compact semantic space, Dynamic Semantic Alignment is introduced to improve and complete sparse semantic spaces of events. Extensive experiments show that our EventVL can significantly surpass existing MLLM baselines in event captioning and scene description generation tasks. We hope our research could contribute to the development of the event vision community.