Overview
How Toxicity Classifiers and Large Language Models Respond to Ableism
Phutane, Mahika, Seelam, Ananya, Vashistha, Aditya
People with disabilities (PwD) regularly encounter ableist hate and microaggressions online. While online platforms use machine learning models to moderate online harm, there is little research investigating how these models interact with ableism. In this paper, we curated a dataset of 100 social media comments targeted towards PwD, and recruited 160 participants to rate and explain how toxic and ableist these comments were. We then prompted state-of-the art toxicity classifiers (TCs) and large language models (LLMs) to rate and explain the harm. Our analysis revealed that TCs and LLMs rated toxicity significantly lower than PwD, but LLMs rated ableism generally on par with PwD. However, ableism explanations by LLMs overlooked emotional harm, and lacked specificity and acknowledgement of context, important facets of PwD explanations. Going forward, we discuss challenges in designing disability-aware toxicity classifiers, and advocate for the shift from ableism detection to ableism interpretation and explanation.
EB-NeRD: A Large-Scale Dataset for News Recommendation
Kruse, Johannes, Lindskow, Kasper, Kalloori, Saikishore, Polignano, Marco, Pomo, Claudio, Srivastava, Abhishek, Uppal, Anshuk, Andersen, Michael Riis, Frellsen, Jes
Personalized content recommendations have been pivotal to the content experience in digital media from video streaming to social networks. However, several domain specific challenges have held back adoption of recommender systems in news publishing. To address these challenges, we introduce the Ekstra Bladet News Recommendation Dataset (EB-NeRD). The dataset encompasses data from over a million unique users and more than 37 million impression logs from Ekstra Bladet. It also includes a collection of over 125,000 Danish news articles, complete with titles, abstracts, bodies, and metadata, such as categories. EB-NeRD served as the benchmark dataset for the RecSys '24 Challenge, where it was demonstrated how the dataset can be used to address both technical and normative challenges in designing effective and responsible recommender systems for news publishing. The dataset is available at: https://recsys.eb.dk.
Showing LLM-Generated Code Selectively Based on Confidence of LLMs
Li, Jia, Zhu, Yuqi, Li, Yongmin, Li, Ge, Jin, Zhi
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive abilities in code generation, but they may generate erroneous programs. Reading a program takes ten times longer than writing it. Showing these erroneous programs to developers will waste developers' energies and introduce security risks to software. To address the above limitations, we propose HonestCoder, a novel LLM-based code generation approach. HonestCoder selectively shows the generated programs to developers based on LLMs' confidence. The confidence provides valuable insights into the correctness of generated programs. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel approach to estimate LLMs' confidence in code generation. It estimates confidence by measuring the multi-modal similarity between LLMs-generated programs. We collect and release a multilingual benchmark named TruthCodeBench, which consists of 2,265 samples and covers two popular programming languages (i.e., Python and Java). We apply HonestCoder to four popular LLMs (e.g., DeepSeek-Coder and Code Llama) and evaluate it on TruthCodeBench. Based on the experiments, we obtain the following insights. (1) HonestCoder can effectively estimate LLMs' confidence and accurately determine the correctness of generated programs. For example, HonestCoder outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline by 27.79% in AUROC and 63.74% in AUCPR. (2) HonestCoder can decrease the number of erroneous programs shown to developers. Compared to eight baselines, it can show more correct programs and fewer erroneous programs to developers. (3) Compared to showing code indiscriminately, HonestCoder only adds slight time overhead (approximately 0.4 seconds per requirement). (4) We discuss future directions to facilitate the application of LLMs in software development. We hope this work can motivate broad discussions about measuring the reliability of LLMs' outputs in performing code-related tasks.
A Prescription of Methodological Guidelines for Comparing Bio-inspired Optimization Algorithms
LaTorre, Antonio, Molina, Daniel, Osaba, Eneko, Del Ser, Javier, Herrera, Francisco
Bio-inspired optimization (including Evolutionary Computation and Swarm Intelligence) is a growing research topic with many competitive bio-inspired algorithms being proposed every year. In such an active area, preparing a successful proposal of a new bio-inspired algorithm is not an easy task. Given the maturity of this research field, proposing a new optimization technique with innovative elements is no longer enough. Apart from the novelty, results reported by the authors should be proven to achieve a significant advance over previous outcomes from the state of the art. Unfortunately, not all new proposals deal with this requirement properly. Some of them fail to select appropriate benchmarks or reference algorithms to compare with. In other cases, the validation process carried out is not defined in a principled way (or is even not done at all). Consequently, the significance of the results presented in such studies cannot be guaranteed. In this work we review several recommendations in the literature and propose methodological guidelines to prepare a successful proposal, taking all these issues into account. We expect these guidelines to be useful not only for authors, but also for reviewers and editors along their assessment of new contributions to the field.
How Discrete and Continuous Diffusion Meet: Comprehensive Analysis of Discrete Diffusion Models via a Stochastic Integral Framework
Ren, Yinuo, Chen, Haoxuan, Rotskoff, Grant M., Ying, Lexing
Discrete diffusion models have gained increasing attention for their ability to model complex distributions with tractable sampling and inference. However, the error analysis for discrete diffusion models remains less well-understood. In this work, we propose a comprehensive framework for the error analysis of discrete diffusion models based on L\'evy-type stochastic integrals. By generalizing the Poisson random measure to that with a time-independent and state-dependent intensity, we rigorously establish a stochastic integral formulation of discrete diffusion models and provide the corresponding change of measure theorems that are intriguingly analogous to It\^o integrals and Girsanov's theorem for their continuous counterparts. Our framework unifies and strengthens the current theoretical results on discrete diffusion models and obtains the first error bound for the $\tau$-leaping scheme in KL divergence. With error sources clearly identified, our analysis gives new insight into the mathematical properties of discrete diffusion models and offers guidance for the design of efficient and accurate algorithms for real-world discrete diffusion model applications.
Mamba in Vision: A Comprehensive Survey of Techniques and Applications
Rahman, Md Maklachur, Tutul, Abdullah Aman, Nath, Ankur, Laishram, Lamyanba, Jung, Soon Ki, Hammond, Tracy
Mamba is emerging as a novel approach to overcome the challenges faced by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) in computer vision. While CNNs excel at extracting local features, they often struggle to capture long-range dependencies without complex architectural modifications. In contrast, ViTs effectively model global relationships but suffer from high computational costs due to the quadratic complexity of their self-attention mechanisms. Mamba addresses these limitations by leveraging Selective Structured State Space Models to effectively capture long-range dependencies with linear computational complexity. This survey analyzes the unique contributions, computational benefits, and applications of Mamba models while also identifying challenges and potential future research directions. We provide a foundational resource for advancing the understanding and growth of Mamba models in computer vision. An overview of this work is available at https://github.com/maklachur/Mamba-in-Computer-Vision.
AutoML-Agent: A Multi-Agent LLM Framework for Full-Pipeline AutoML
Trirat, Patara, Jeong, Wonyong, Hwang, Sung Ju
Automated machine learning (AutoML) accelerates AI development by automating tasks in the development pipeline, such as optimal model search and hyperparameter tuning. Existing AutoML systems often require technical expertise to set up complex tools, which is in general time-consuming and requires a large amount of human effort. Therefore, recent works have started exploiting large language models (LLM) to lessen such burden and increase the usability of AutoML frameworks via a natural language interface, allowing non-expert users to build their data-driven solutions. These methods, however, are usually designed only for a particular process in the AI development pipeline and do not efficiently use the inherent capacity of the LLMs. This paper proposes AutoML-Agent, a novel multi-agent framework tailored for full-pipeline AutoML, i.e., from data retrieval to model deployment. AutoML-Agent takes user's task descriptions, facilitates collaboration between specialized LLM agents, and delivers deployment-ready models. Unlike existing work, instead of devising a single plan, we introduce a retrieval-augmented planning strategy to enhance exploration to search for more optimal plans. We also decompose each plan into sub-tasks (e.g., data preprocessing and neural network design) each of which is solved by a specialized agent we build via prompting executing in parallel, making the search process more efficient. Moreover, we propose a multi-stage verification to verify executed results and guide the code generation LLM in implementing successful solutions. Extensive experiments on seven downstream tasks using fourteen datasets show that AutoML-Agent achieves a higher success rate in automating the full AutoML process, yielding systems with good performance throughout the diverse domains.
MLP-KAN: Unifying Deep Representation and Function Learning
He, Yunhong, Xie, Yifeng, Yuan, Zhengqing, Sun, Lichao
Recent advancements in both representation learning and function learning have demonstrated substantial promise across diverse domains of artificial intelligence. However, the effective integration of these paradigms poses a significant challenge, particularly in cases where users must manually decide whether to apply a representation learning or function learning model based on dataset characteristics. To address this issue, we introduce MLP-KAN, a unified method designed to eliminate the need for manual model selection. By integrating Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) for representation learning and Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for function learning within a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, MLP-KAN dynamically adapts to the specific characteristics of the task at hand, ensuring optimal performance. Embedded within a transformer-based framework, our work achieves remarkable results on four widely-used datasets across diverse domains. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates its superior versatility, delivering competitive performance across both deep representation and function learning tasks. These findings highlight the potential of MLP-KAN to simplify the model selection process, offering a comprehensive, adaptable solution across various domains. Our code and weights are available at \url{https://github.com/DLYuanGod/MLP-KAN}.
AiBAT: Artificial Intelligence/Instructions for Build, Assembly, and Test
Nuernberger, Benjamin, Liu, Anny, Stefanini, Heather, Otis, Richard, Towler, Amanda, Dillon, R. Peter
Instructions for Build, Assembly, and Test (IBAT) refers to the process used whenever any operation is conducted on hardware, including tests, assembly, and maintenance. Currently, the generation of IBAT documents is time-intensive, as users must manually reference and transfer information from engineering diagrams and parts lists into IBAT instructions. With advances in machine learning and computer vision, however, it is possible to have an artificial intelligence (AI) model perform the partial filling of the IBAT template, freeing up engineer time for more highly skilled tasks. AiBAT is a novel system for assisting users in authoring IBATs. It works by first analyzing assembly drawing documents, extracting information and parsing it, and then filling in IBAT templates with the extracted information. Such assisted authoring has potential to save time and reduce cost. This paper presents an overview of the AiBAT system, including promising preliminary results and discussion on future work.
Determine-Then-Ensemble: Necessity of Top-k Union for Large Language Model Ensembling
Yao, Yuxuan, Wu, Han, Liu, Mingyang, Luo, Sichun, Han, Xiongwei, Liu, Jie, Guo, Zhijiang, Song, Linqi
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit varying strengths and weaknesses across different tasks, prompting recent studies to explore the benefits of ensembling models to leverage their complementary advantages. However, existing LLM ensembling methods often overlook model compatibility and struggle with inefficient alignment of probabilities across the entire vocabulary. In this study, we empirically investigate the factors influencing ensemble performance, identifying model performance, vocabulary size, and response style as key determinants, revealing that compatibility among models is essential for effective ensembling. This analysis leads to the development of a simple yet effective model selection strategy that identifies compatible models. TE), a novel approach that efficiently combines models by focusing on the union of the top-k tokens from each model, thereby avoiding the need for full vocabulary alignment and reducing computational overhead. TE significantly enhances performance compared to existing methods, offering a more efficient framework for LLM ensembling. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks and have shown promising results in real-world applications (OpenAI, 2023; Yang et al., 2024; Dubey et al., 2024). Given the diversity in data sources, model architectures, and training methods, LLMs exhibit varying strengths and weaknesses depending on the task at hand. Consequently, rather than relying solely on training an LLM from scratch, an alternative approach is to create an ensemble of LLMs. This method allows for leveraging the complementary advantages of different LLMs (Jiang et al., 2023b; Lu et al., 2024; Yu et al., 2024b). Existing model ensembling methods can be broadly categorized into three types: output-level, probability-level, and training-level approaches.