Education
Value Profiles for Encoding Human Variation
Sorensen, Taylor, Mishra, Pushkar, Patel, Roma, Tessler, Michael Henry, Bakker, Michiel, Evans, Georgina, Gabriel, Iason, Goodman, Noah, Rieser, Verena
Modelling human variation in rating tasks is crucial for enabling AI systems for personalization, pluralistic model alignment, and computational social science. We propose representing individuals using value profiles -- natural language descriptions of underlying values compressed from in-context demonstrations -- along with a steerable decoder model to estimate ratings conditioned on a value profile or other rater information. To measure the predictive information in rater representations, we introduce an information-theoretic methodology. We find that demonstrations contain the most information, followed by value profiles and then demographics. However, value profiles offer advantages in terms of scrutability, interpretability, and steerability due to their compressed natural language format. Value profiles effectively compress the useful information from demonstrations (>70% information preservation). Furthermore, clustering value profiles to identify similarly behaving individuals better explains rater variation than the most predictive demographic groupings. Going beyond test set performance, we show that the decoder models interpretably change ratings according to semantic profile differences, are well-calibrated, and can help explain instance-level disagreement by simulating an annotator population. These results demonstrate that value profiles offer novel, predictive ways to describe individual variation beyond demographics or group information.
KunlunBaize: LLM with Multi-Scale Convolution and Multi-Token Prediction Under TransformerX Framework
Li, Cheng, Liu, Jiexiong, Chen, Yixuan, Jia, Yanqin, Li, Zhepeng
Large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks, yet they face challenges such as low computational efficiency, gradient vanishing, and difficulties in capturing complex feature interactions. To address these limitations, a novel framework has been proposed. This framework incorporates a learnable dense residual skip connection mechanism, a TransformerX module a transformer based component integrating multiscale convolution and adaptive activation functions and a multitoken prediction interaction module. The learnable dense residual connections enhance information flow and feature capture across layers. Within the TransformerX module, large convolutional kernels aggregate semantic information from extensive text segments, while smaller convolutions focus on local word order and syntactic structures. The adaptive activation function dynamically adjusts its parameters based on the semantic features of the input text, improving the model's ability to handle diverse semantic expressions and complex relationships. The multitoken prediction module boosts data utilization and accelerates inference by predicting multiple future tokens. These components significantly enhance the performance and efficiency of large language models.
Text-Derived Relational Graph-Enhanced Network for Skeleton-Based Action Segmentation
Ji, Haoyu, Chen, Bowen, Ren, Weihong, Huang, Wenze, Yang, Zhihao, Wang, Zhiyong, Liu, Honghai
--Skeleton-based T emporal Action Segmentation (ST AS) aims to segment and recognize various actions from long, untrimmed sequences of human skeletal movements. Current ST AS methods typically employ spatio-temporal modeling to establish dependencies among joints as well as frames, and utilize one-hot encoding with cross-entropy loss for frame-wise classification supervision. However, these methods overlook the intrinsic correlations among joints and actions within skeletal features, leading to a limited understanding of human movements. T o address this, we propose a T ext-Derived Relational Graph-Enhanced Network (TRG-Net) that leverages prior graphs generated by Large Language Models (LLM) to enhance both modeling and supervision. For modeling, the Dynamic Spatio-T emporal Fusion Modeling (DSFM) method incorporates T ext-Derived Joint Graphs (TJG) with channel-and frame-level dynamic adaptation to effectively model spatial relations, while integrating spatio-temporal core features during temporal modeling. For supervision, the Absolute-Relative Inter-Class Supervision (ARIS) method employs contrastive learning between action features and text embeddings to regularize the absolute class distributions, and utilizes T ext-Derived Action Graphs (T AG) to capture the relative inter-class relationships among action features. Additionally, we propose a Spatial-A ware Enhancement Processing (SAEP) method, which incorporates random joint occlusion and axial rotation to enhance spatial generalization. Performance evaluations on four public datasets demonstrate that TRG-Net achieves state-of-the-art results. EMPORAL Action Segmentation (T AS), an advanced task in video understanding, aims to segment and recognize each action within long, untrimmed video sequences of human activities [1]. Similar to how semantic segmentation predicts labels for each pixel in an image, T AS predicts action labels for each frame in a video. As a significant task in computer vision, T AS finds applications in various domains such as medical rehabilitation, [2], industrial monitoring [3], and activity analysis [4]. Haoyu Ji, Bowen Chen, Weihong Ren, Wenze Huang, Zhihao Y ang, Zhiyong Wang, and Honghai Liu are with the State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Systems, Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen, Shenzhen 518055, China (e-mail: jihaoyu1224@gmail.com, The code is available at https://github.com/HaoyuJi/TRG-Net. The text embeddings and relational graphs generated by large language models can serve as priors for enhancing modeling and supervision of action segmentation. Specifically, the text-derived joint graph effectively captures spatial correlations, while the text-derived action graph and action embeddings supervise the relationships and distributions of action classes. Existing T AS methods can be broadly categorized into two types based on input modality: Video-based T AS (VT AS) and Skeleton-based T AS (ST AS) [5]-[7].
Manifold Learning for Hyperspectral Images
Harkat, Fethi, Deuberet, Tiphaine, Gey, Guillaume, Perrier, Valérie, Polisano, Kévin
Abstract--Traditional feature extraction and projection techniques, such as Principal Component Analysis, struggle to adequately represent X-Ray Transmission (XRT) Multi-Energy (ME) images, limiting the performance of neural networks in decision-making processes. To address this issue, we propose a method that approximates the dataset topology by constructing adjacency graphs using the Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection. This technique not only preserves the global structure of the data but also enhances feature separability, leading to more accurate and robust classification results. Figure 1: Scheme of the experimental setting (left) view from aside. A top view of the detector is also given (right) to make I. Recent advances in Hyperspectral Images (HSI) analysis have primarily focused on reflection spectroscopy in the visible or near-infrared light domains.
Chain-of-Thought Reasoning In The Wild Is Not Always Faithful
Arcuschin, Iván, Janiak, Jett, Krzyzanowski, Robert, Rajamanoharan, Senthooran, Nanda, Neel, Conmy, Arthur
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly advanced state-of-the-art AI capabilities. However, recent studies have shown that CoT reasoning is not always faithful, i.e. CoT reasoning does not always reflect how models arrive at conclusions. So far, most of these studies have focused on unfaithfulness in unnatural contexts where an explicit bias has been introduced. In contrast, we show that unfaithful CoT can occur on realistic prompts with no artificial bias. Our results reveal non-negligible rates of several forms of unfaithful reasoning in frontier models: Sonnet 3.7 (16.3%), DeepSeek R1 (5.3%) and ChatGPT-4o (7.0%) all answer a notable proportion of question pairs unfaithfully. Specifically, we find that models rationalize their implicit biases in answers to binary questions ("implicit post-hoc rationalization"). For example, when separately presented with the questions "Is X bigger than Y?" and "Is Y bigger than X?", models sometimes produce superficially coherent arguments to justify answering Yes to both questions or No to both questions, despite such responses being logically contradictory. We also investigate restoration errors (Dziri et al., 2023), where models make and then silently correct errors in their reasoning, and unfaithful shortcuts, where models use clearly illogical reasoning to simplify solving problems in Putnam questions (a hard benchmark). Our findings raise challenges for AI safety work that relies on monitoring CoT to detect undesired behavior.
ES-Parkour: Advanced Robot Parkour with Bio-inspired Event Camera and Spiking Neural Network
Zhang, Qiang, Cao, Jiahang, Sun, Jingkai, Shao, Yecheng, Han, Gang, Zhao, Wen, Guo, Yijie, Xu, Renjing
In recent years, quadruped robotics has advanced significantly, particularly in perception and motion control via reinforcement learning, enabling complex motions in challenging environments. Visual sensors like depth cameras enhance stability and robustness but face limitations, such as low operating frequencies relative to joint control and sensitivity to lighting, which hinder outdoor deployment. Additionally, deep neural networks in sensor and control systems increase computational demands. To address these issues, we introduce spiking neural networks (SNNs) and event cameras to perform a challenging quadruped parkour task. Event cameras capture dynamic visual data, while SNNs efficiently process spike sequences, mimicking biological perception. Experimental results demonstrate that this approach significantly outperforms traditional models, achieving excellent parkour performance with just 11.7% of the energy consumption of an artificial neural network (ANN)-based model, yielding an 88.3% energy reduction. By integrating event cameras with SNNs, our work advances robotic reinforcement learning and opens new possibilities for applications in demanding environments.
Challenges and Trends in Egocentric Vision: A Survey
Li, Xiang, Qiu, Heqian, Wang, Lanxiao, Zhang, Hanwen, Qi, Chenghao, Han, Linfeng, Xiong, Huiyu, Li, Hongliang
With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technologies and wearable devices, egocentric vision understanding has emerged as a new and challenging research direction, gradually attracting widespread attention from both academia and industry. Egocentric vision captures visual and multimodal data through cameras or sensors worn on the human body, offering a unique perspective that simulates human visual experiences. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the research on egocentric vision understanding, systematically analyzing the components of egocentric scenes and categorizing the tasks into four main areas: subject understanding, object understanding, environment understanding, and hybrid understanding. We explore in detail the sub-tasks within each category. We also summarize the main challenges and trends currently existing in the field. Furthermore, this paper presents an overview of high-quality egocentric vision datasets, offering valuable resources for future research. By summarizing the latest advancements, we anticipate the broad applications of egocentric vision technologies in fields such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and embodied intelligence, and propose future research directions based on the latest developments in the field.
Reversal Blessing: Thinking Backward May Outpace Thinking Forward in Multi-choice Questions
Zhang, Yizhe, Bai, Richard, Gu, Zijin, Zhang, Ruixiang, Gu, Jiatao, Abbe, Emmanuel, Bengio, Samy, Jaitly, Navdeep
Language models usually use left-to-right (L2R) autoregressive factorization. However, L2R factorization may not always be the best inductive bias. Therefore, we investigate whether alternative factorizations of the text distribution could be beneficial in some tasks. We investigate right-to-left (R2L) training as a compelling alternative, focusing on multiple-choice questions (MCQs) as a test bed for knowledge extraction and reasoning. Through extensive experiments across various model sizes (2B-8B parameters) and training datasets, we find that R2L models can significantly outperform L2R models on several MCQ benchmarks, including logical reasoning, commonsense understanding, and truthfulness assessment tasks. Our analysis reveals that this performance difference may be fundamentally linked to multiple factors including calibration, computability and directional conditional entropy. We ablate the impact of these factors through controlled simulation studies using arithmetic tasks, where the impacting factors can be better disentangled. Our work demonstrates that exploring alternative factorizations of the text distribution can lead to improvements in LLM capabilities and provides theoretical insights into optimal factorization towards approximating human language distribution, and when each reasoning order might be more advantageous.
Model Hubs and Beyond: Analyzing Model Popularity, Performance, and Documentation
Kadasi, Pritam, Reddy, Sriman, Chaturvedula, Srivathsa Vamsi, Sen, Rudranshu, Saha, Agnish, Sikdar, Soumavo, Sarkar, Sayani, Mittal, Suhani, Jindal, Rohit, Singh, Mayank
With the massive surge in ML models on platforms like Hugging Face, users often lose track and struggle to choose the best model for their downstream tasks, frequently relying on model popularity indicated by download counts, likes, or recency. We investigate whether this popularity aligns with actual model performance and how the comprehensiveness of model documentation correlates with both popularity and performance. In our study, we evaluated a comprehensive set of 500 Sentiment Analysis models on Hugging Face. This evaluation involved massive annotation efforts, with human annotators completing nearly 80,000 annotations, alongside extensive model training and evaluation. Our findings reveal that model popularity does not necessarily correlate with performance. Additionally, we identify critical inconsistencies in model card reporting: approximately 80\% of the models analyzed lack detailed information about the model, training, and evaluation processes. Furthermore, about 88\% of model authors overstate their models' performance in the model cards. Based on our findings, we provide a checklist of guidelines for users to choose good models for downstream tasks.
Advancing Problem-Based Learning in Biomedical Engineering in the Era of Generative AI
Nnamdi, Micky C., Tamo, J. Ben, Shi, Wenqi, Wang, May D.
Problem-Based Learning (PBL) has significantly impacted biomedical engineering (BME) education since its introduction in the early 2000s, effectively enhancing critical thinking and real-world knowledge application among students. With biomedical engineering rapidly converging with artificial intelligence (AI), integrating effective AI education into established curricula has become challenging yet increasingly necessary. Recent advancements, including AI's recognition by the 2024 Nobel Prize, have highlighted the importance of training students comprehensively in biomedical AI. However, effective biomedical AI education faces substantial obstacles, such as diverse student backgrounds, limited personalized mentoring, constrained computational resources, and difficulties in safely scaling hands-on practical experiments due to privacy and ethical concerns associated with biomedical data. To overcome these issues, we conducted a three-year (2021-2023) case study implementing an advanced PBL framework tailored specifically for biomedical AI education, involving 92 undergraduate and 156 graduate students from the joint Biomedical Engineering program of Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. Our approach emphasizes collaborative, interdisciplinary problem-solving through authentic biomedical AI challenges. The implementation led to measurable improvements in learning outcomes, evidenced by high research productivity (16 student-authored publications), consistently positive peer evaluations, and successful development of innovative computational methods addressing real biomedical challenges. Additionally, we examined the role of generative AI both as a teaching subject and an educational support tool within the PBL framework. Our study presents a practical and scalable roadmap for biomedical engineering departments aiming to integrate robust AI education into their curricula.