Instructional Material
A Review of Large Language Models and Autonomous Agents in Chemistry
Ramos, Mayk Caldas, Collison, Christopher J., White, Andrew D.
Large language models (LLMs) are emerging as a powerful tool in chemistry across multiple domains. In chemistry, LLMs are able to accurately predict properties, design new molecules, optimize synthesis pathways, and accelerate drug and material discovery. A core emerging idea is combining LLMs with chemistry-specific tools like synthesis planners and databases, leading to so-called "agents." This review covers LLMs' recent history, current capabilities, design, challenges specific to chemistry, and future directions. Particular attention is given to agents and their emergence as a cross-chemistry paradigm. Agents have proven effective in diverse domains of chemistry, but challenges remain. It is unclear if creating domain-specific versus generalist agents and developing autonomous pipelines versus "co-pilot" systems will accelerate chemistry. An emerging direction is the development of multi-agent systems using a human-in-the-loop approach. Due to the incredibly fast development of this field, a repository has been built to keep track of the latest studies: https://github.com/ur-whitelab/LLMs-in-science.
GUIDE: A Guideline-Guided Dataset for Instructional Video Comprehension
Liang, Jiafeng, Jiang, Shixin, Wang, Zekun, Pan, Haojie, Chen, Zerui, Chu, Zheng, Liu, Ming, Fu, Ruiji, Wang, Zhongyuan, Qin, Bing
There are substantial instructional videos on the Internet, which provide us tutorials for completing various tasks. Existing instructional video datasets only focus on specific steps at the video level, lacking experiential guidelines at the task level, which can lead to beginners struggling to learn new tasks due to the lack of relevant experience. Moreover, the specific steps without guidelines are trivial and unsystematic, making it difficult to provide a clear tutorial. To address these problems, we present the GUIDE (Guideline-Guided) dataset, which contains 3.5K videos of 560 instructional tasks in 8 domains related to our daily life. Specifically, we annotate each instructional task with a guideline, representing a common pattern shared by all task-related videos. On this basis, we annotate systematic specific steps, including their associated guideline steps, specific step descriptions and timestamps. Our proposed benchmark consists of three sub-tasks to evaluate comprehension ability of models: (1) Step Captioning: models have to generate captions for specific steps from videos. (2) Guideline Summarization: models have to mine the common pattern in task-related videos and summarize a guideline from them. (3) Guideline-Guided Captioning: models have to generate captions for specific steps under the guide of guideline. We evaluate plenty of foundation models with GUIDE and perform in-depth analysis. Given the diversity and practicality of GUIDE, we believe that it can be used as a better benchmark for instructional video comprehension.
Math-LLaVA: Bootstrapping Mathematical Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models
Shi, Wenhao, Hu, Zhiqiang, Bin, Yi, Liu, Junhua, Yang, Yang, Ng, See-Kiong, Bing, Lidong, Lee, Roy Ka-Wei
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, particularly in textual mathematical problem-solving. However, existing open-source image instruction fine-tuning datasets, containing limited question-answer pairs per image, do not fully exploit visual information to enhance the multimodal mathematical reasoning capabilities of Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). To bridge this gap, we address the lack of high-quality, diverse multimodal mathematical datasets by collecting 40K high-quality images with question-answer pairs from 24 existing datasets and synthesizing 320K new pairs, creating the MathV360K dataset, which enhances both the breadth and depth of multimodal mathematical questions. We introduce Math-LLaVA, a LLaVA-1.5-based model fine-tuned with MathV360K. This novel approach significantly improves the multimodal mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLaVA-1.5, achieving a 19-point increase and comparable performance to GPT-4V on MathVista's minitest split. Furthermore, Math-LLaVA demonstrates enhanced generalizability, showing substantial improvements on the MMMU benchmark. Our research highlights the importance of dataset diversity and synthesis in advancing MLLMs' mathematical reasoning abilities. The code and data are available at: \url{https://github.com/HZQ950419/Math-LLaVA}.
Med-MoE: Mixture of Domain-Specific Experts for Lightweight Medical Vision-Language Models
Jiang, Songtao, Zheng, Tuo, Zhang, Yan, Jin, Yeying, Yuan, Li, Liu, Zuozhu
Recent advancements in general-purpose or domain-specific multimodal large language models (LLMs) have witnessed remarkable progress for medical decision-making. However, they are designated for specific classification or generative tasks, and require model training or finetuning on large-scale datasets with sizeable parameters and tremendous computing, hindering their clinical utility across diverse resource-constrained scenarios in practice. In this paper, we propose a novel and lightweight framework Med-MoE (Mixture-of-Experts) that tackles both discriminative and generative multimodal medical tasks. The learning of Med-MoE consists of three steps: multimodal medical alignment, instruction tuning and routing, and domain-specific MoE tuning. After aligning multimodal medical images with LLM tokens, we then enable the model for different multimodal medical tasks with instruction tuning, together with a trainable router tailored for expert selection across input modalities. Finally, the model is tuned by integrating the router with multiple domain-specific experts, which are selectively activated and further empowered by meta expert. Comprehensive experiments on both open- and close-end medical question answering (Med-VQA) and image classification tasks across datasets such as VQA-RAD, SLAKE and Path-VQA demonstrate that our model can achieve performance superior to or on par with state-of-the-art baselines, while only requiring approximately 30\%-50\% of activated model parameters. Extensive analysis and ablations corroborate the effectiveness and practical utility of our method.
An Information Theoretic Perspective on Conformal Prediction
Correia, Alvaro H. C., Massoli, Fabio Valerio, Louizos, Christos, Behboodi, Arash
Conformal Prediction (CP) is a distribution-free uncertainty estimation framework that constructs prediction sets guaranteed to contain the true answer with a user-specified probability. Intuitively, the size of the prediction set encodes a general notion of uncertainty, with larger sets associated with higher degrees of uncertainty. In this work, we leverage information theory to connect conformal prediction to other notions of uncertainty. More precisely, we prove three different ways to upper bound the intrinsic uncertainty, as described by the conditional entropy of the target variable given the inputs, by combining CP with information theoretical inequalities. Moreover, we demonstrate two direct and useful applications of such connection between conformal prediction and information theory: (i) more principled and effective conformal training objectives that generalize previous approaches and enable end-to-end training of machine learning models from scratch, and (ii) a natural mechanism to incorporate side information into conformal prediction. We empirically validate both applications in centralized and federated learning settings, showing our theoretical results translate to lower inefficiency (average prediction set size) for popular CP methods.
Facebook, Instagram are using your data to train AI: Learn how to protect it
Kurt "Cyberguy" Knutsson talks about how to protect your social media posts; a toddler getting trapped in a Tesla after the battery died. Meta may have paused its plans to train artificial intelligence models for the lucky ones living in Europe, where laws protect people using Facebook and Instagram better than Americans. Here in the good ole USA, both Facebook and Instagram have already been combing through public posts from U.S. accounts to train and improve its AI capabilities, including its chatbot, since last year. The proposed privacy policy update for European Union and U.K. users, originally scheduled for June 26, would have allowed Meta to use publicly shared content for AI training. However, users and regulatory agencies opposed this plan, leading to its indefinite postponement in those regions.
Using Helium Balloon Flying Drones for Introductory CS Education
Cao, Stanley, Gregg, Christopher
In the rapidly evolving field of computer science education, novel approaches to teaching fundamental concepts are crucial for engaging a diverse student body. Given the growing demand for a computing-skilled workforce, it is essential to adapt educational methods to capture the interest of a broader audience than what current computing education typically targets. Engaging educational experiences have been shown to have a positive impact on learning outcomes and examination performance, especially within computing education. Moreover, physical computing devices have been shown to correlate with increased student motivation when students are studying computer science.
Solving Hard Mizar Problems with Instantiation and Strategy Invention
Jakubลฏv, Jan, Janota, Mikolรกลก, Urban, Josef
In this work, we prove over 3000 previously ATP-unproved Mizar/MPTP problems by using several ATP and AI methods, raising the number of ATP-solved Mizar problems from 75\% to above 80\%. First, we start to experiment with the cvc5 SMT solver which uses several instantiation-based heuristics that differ from the superposition-based systems, that were previously applied to Mizar,and add many new solutions. Then we use automated strategy invention to develop cvc5 strategies that largely improve cvc5's performance on the hard problems. In particular, the best invented strategy solves over 14\% more problems than the best previously available cvc5 strategy. We also show that different clausification methods have a high impact on such instantiation-based methods, again producing many new solutions. In total, the methods solve 3021 (21.3\%) of the 14163 previously unsolved hard Mizar problems. This is a new milestone over the Mizar large-theory benchmark and a large strengthening of the hammer methods for Mizar.
Enhancing Explainability of Knowledge Learning Paths: Causal Knowledge Networks
Wei, Yuang, Zhou, Yizhou, Jiang, Yuan-Hao, Jiang, Bo
A reliable knowledge structure is a prerequisite for building effective adaptive learning systems and intelligent tutoring systems. Pursuing an explainable and trustworthy knowledge structure, we propose a method for constructing causal knowledge networks. This approach leverages Bayesian networks as a foundation and incorporates causal relationship analysis to derive a causal network. Additionally, we introduce a dependable knowledge-learning path recommendation technique built upon this framework, improving teaching and learning quality while maintaining transparency in the decision-making process.
TSynD: Targeted Synthetic Data Generation for Enhanced Medical Image Classification
Niemeijer, Joshua, Ehrhardt, Jan, Uzunova, Hristina, Handels, Heinz
The usage of medical image data for the training of large-scale machine learning approaches is particularly challenging due to its scarce availability and the costly generation of data annotations, typically requiring the engagement of medical professionals. The rapid development of generative models allows towards tackling this problem by leveraging large amounts of realistic synthetically generated data for the training process. However, randomly choosing synthetic samples, might not be an optimal strategy. In this work, we investigate the targeted generation of synthetic training data, in order to improve the accuracy and robustness of image classification. Therefore, our approach aims to guide the generative model to synthesize data with high epistemic uncertainty, since large measures of epistemic uncertainty indicate underrepresented data points in the training set. During the image generation we feed images reconstructed by an auto encoder into the classifier and compute the mutual information over the class-probability distribution as a measure for uncertainty.We alter the feature space of the autoencoder through an optimization process with the objective of maximizing the classifier uncertainty on the decoded image. By training on such data we improve the performance and robustness against test time data augmentations and adversarial attacks on several classifications tasks.