Education
Bridging Technology and Humanities: Evaluating the Impact of Large Language Models on Social Sciences Research with DeepSeek-R1
Gu, Peiran, Duan, Fuhao, Li, Wenhao, Xu, Bochen, Cai, Ying, Yao, Teng, Zhuo, Chenxun, Liu, Tianming, Ge, Bao
In recent years, the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made significant breakthroughs in the field of natural language processing and has gradually been applied to the field of humanities and social sciences research. LLMs have a wide range of application value in the field of humanities and social sciences because of its strong text understanding, generation and reasoning capabilities. In humanities and social sciences research, LLMs can analyze large-scale text data and make inferences. This article analyzes the large language model DeepSeek-R1 from seven aspects: low-resource language translation, educational question-answering, student writing improvement in higher education, logical reasoning, educational measurement and psychometrics, public health policy analysis, and art education.Then we compare the answers given by DeepSeek-R1 in the seven aspects with the answers given by o1-preview. DeepSeek-R1 performs well in the humanities and social sciences, answering most questions correctly and logically, and can give reasonable analysis processes and explanations. Compared with o1-preview, it can automatically generate reasoning processes and provide more detailed explanations, which is suitable for beginners or people who need to have a detailed understanding of this knowledge, while o1-preview is more suitable for quick reading. Through analysis, it is found that LLM has broad application potential in the field of humanities and social sciences, and shows great advantages in improving text analysis efficiency, language communication and other fields. LLM's powerful language understanding and generation capabilities enable it to deeply explore complex problems in the field of humanities and social sciences, and provide innovative tools for academic research and practical applications.
Offline Model-Based Optimization: Comprehensive Review
Kim, Minsu, Gu, Jiayao, Yuan, Ye, Yun, Taeyoung, Liu, Zixuan, Bengio, Yoshua, Chen, Can
Offline optimization is a fundamental challenge in science and engineering, where the goal is to optimize black-box functions using only offline datasets. This setting is particularly relevant when querying the objective function is prohibitively expensive or infeasible, with applications spanning protein engineering, material discovery, neural architecture search, and beyond. The main difficulty lies in accurately estimating the objective landscape beyond the available data, where extrapolations are fraught with significant epistemic uncertainty. This uncertainty can lead to objective hacking(reward hacking), exploiting model inaccuracies in unseen regions, or other spurious optimizations that yield misleadingly high performance estimates outside the training distribution. Recent advances in model-based optimization(MBO) have harnessed the generalization capabilities of deep neural networks to develop offline-specific surrogate and generative models. Trained with carefully designed strategies, these models are more robust against out-of-distribution issues, facilitating the discovery of improved designs. Despite its growing impact in accelerating scientific discovery, the field lacks a comprehensive review. To bridge this gap, we present the first thorough review of offline MBO. We begin by formalizing the problem for both single-objective and multi-objective settings and by reviewing recent benchmarks and evaluation metrics. We then categorize existing approaches into two key areas: surrogate modeling, which emphasizes accurate function approximation in out-of-distribution regions, and generative modeling, which explores high-dimensional design spaces to identify high-performing designs. Finally, we examine the key challenges and propose promising directions for advancement in this rapidly evolving field including safe control of superintelligent systems.
From Text to Talent: A Pipeline for Extracting Insights from Candidate Profiles
Frazzetto, Paolo, Haq, Muhammad Uzair Ul, Fabris, Flavia, Sperduti, Alessandro
The recruitment process is undergoing a significant transformation with the increasing use of machine learning and natural language processing techniques. While previous studies have focused on automating candidate selection, the role of multiple vacancies in this process remains understudied. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a novel pipeline that leverages Large Language Models and graph similarity measures to suggest ideal candidates for specific job openings. Our approach represents candidate profiles as multimodal embeddings, enabling the capture of nuanced relationships between job requirements and candidate attributes. The proposed approach has significant implications for the recruitment industry, enabling companies to streamline their hiring processes and identify top talent more efficiently. Our work contributes to the growing body of research on the application of machine learning in human resources, highlighting the potential of LLMs and graph-based methods in revolutionizing the recruitment landscape.
Efficient Knowledge Distillation via Curriculum Extraction
Gupta, Shivam, Karmalkar, Sushrut
Knowledge distillation is a technique used to train a small student network using the output generated by a large teacher network, and has many empirical advantages~\citep{Hinton2015DistillingTK}. While the standard one-shot approach to distillation only uses the output of the final teacher network, recent work~\citep{panigrahi2024progressive} has shown that using intermediate checkpoints from the teacher's training process as an implicit ``curriculum'' for progressive distillation can significantly speed up training. However, such schemes require storing these checkpoints, and often require careful selection of the intermediate checkpoints to train on, which can be impractical for large-scale training. In this paper, we show that a curriculum can be \emph{extracted} from just the fully trained teacher network, and that this extracted curriculum can give similar efficiency benefits to those of progressive distillation. Our extraction scheme is natural; we use a random projection of the hidden representations of the teacher network to progressively train the student network, before training using the output of the full network. We show that our scheme significantly outperforms one-shot distillation and achieves a performance similar to that of progressive distillation for learning sparse parities with two-layer networks, and provide theoretical guarantees for this setting. Additionally, we show that our method outperforms one-shot distillation even when using transformer-based architectures, both for sparse-parity learning, and language modeling tasks.
Sparse Logit Sampling: Accelerating Knowledge Distillation in LLMs
Anshumann, null, Zaidi, Mohd Abbas, Kedia, Akhil, Ahn, Jinwoo, Kwon, Taehwak, Lee, Kangwook, Lee, Haejun, Lee, Joohyung
Knowledge distillation can be a cost-effective technique to distill knowledge in Large Language Models, if the teacher output logits can be pre-computed and cached. However, successfully applying this to pre-training remains largely unexplored. In this work, we prove that naive approaches for sparse knowledge distillation such as caching Top-K probabilities, while intuitive, provide biased estimates of teacher probability distribution to the student, resulting in suboptimal performance and calibration. We propose an importance-sampling-based method `Random Sampling Knowledge Distillation', which provides unbiased estimates, preserves the gradient in expectation, and requires storing significantly sparser logits. Our method enables faster training of student models with marginal overhead (<10%) compared to cross-entropy based training, while maintaining competitive performance compared to full distillation, across a range of model sizes from 300M to 3B.
PP-DocLayout: A Unified Document Layout Detection Model to Accelerate Large-Scale Data Construction
Sun, Ting, Cui, Cheng, Du, Yuning, Liu, Yi
Document layout analysis is a critical preprocessing step in document intelligence, enabling the detection and localization of structural elements such as titles, text blocks, tables, and formulas. Despite its importance, existing layout detection models face significant challenges in generalizing across diverse document types, handling complex layouts, and achieving real-time performance for large-scale data processing. To address these limitations, we present PP-DocLayout, which achieves high precision and efficiency in recognizing 23 types of layout regions across diverse document formats. To meet different needs, we offer three models of varying scales. PP-DocLayout-L is a high-precision model based on the RT-DETR-L detector, achieving 90.4% mAP@0.5 and an end-to-end inference time of 13.4 ms per page on a T4 GPU. PP-DocLayout-M is a balanced model, offering 75.2% mAP@0.5 with an inference time of 12.7 ms per page on a T4 GPU. PP-DocLayout-S is a high-efficiency model designed for resource-constrained environments and real-time applications, with an inference time of 8.1 ms per page on a T4 GPU and 14.5 ms on a CPU. This work not only advances the state of the art in document layout analysis but also provides a robust solution for constructing high-quality training data, enabling advancements in document intelligence and multimodal AI systems. Code and models are available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleX .
Integrated Subset Selection and Bandwidth Estimation Algorithm for Geographically Weighted Regression
Lee, Hyunwoo, Park, Young Woong
This study proposes a mathematical programming-based algorithm for the integrated selection of variable subsets and bandwidth estimation in geographically weighted regression, a local regression method that allows the kernel bandwidth and regression coefficients to vary across study areas. Unlike standard approaches in the literature, in which bandwidth and regression parameters are estimated separately for each focal point on the basis of different criteria, our model uses a single objective function for the integrated estimation of regression and bandwidth parameters across all focal points, based on the regression likelihood function and variance modeling. The proposed model further integrates a procedure to select a single subset of independent variables for all focal points, whereas existing approaches may return heterogeneous subsets across focal points. We then propose an alternative direction method to solve the nonconvex mathematical model and show that it converges to a partial minimum. The computational experiment indicates that the proposed algorithm provides competitive explanatory power with stable spatially varying patterns, with the ability to select the best subset and account for additional constraints.
Beyond the Visible: Multispectral Vision-Language Learning for Earth Observation
Marimo, Clive Tinashe, Blumenstiel, Benedikt, Nitsche, Maximilian, Jakubik, Johannes, Brunschwiler, Thomas
Vision-language models for Earth observation (EO) typically rely on the visual spectrum of data as the only model input, thus failing to leverage the rich spectral information available in the multispectral channels recorded by satellites. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce Llama3-MS-CLIP, the first vision-language model pre-trained with contrastive learning on a large-scale multispectral dataset and report on the performance gains due to the extended spectral range. Furthermore, we present the largest-to-date image-caption dataset for multispectral data, consisting of one million Sentinel-2 samples and corresponding textual descriptions generated with Llama3-LLaVA-Next and Overture Maps data. We develop a scalable captioning pipeline, which is validated by domain experts. We evaluate Llama3-MS-CLIP on multispectral zero-shot image classification and retrieval using three datasets of varying complexity. Our results demonstrate that Llama3-MS-CLIP significantly outperforms other RGB-based approaches, improving classification accuracy by 6.77% on average and retrieval performance by 4.63% mAP compared to the second-best model. Our results emphasize the relevance of multispectral vision-language learning. We release the image-caption dataset, code, and model weights under an open-source license.
FutureGen: LLM-RAG Approach to Generate the Future Work of Scientific Article
Azher, Ibrahim Al, Mokarrama, Miftahul Jannat, Guo, Zhishuai, Choudhury, Sagnik Ray, Alhoori, Hamed
The future work section of a scientific article outlines potential research directions by identifying gaps and limitations of a current study. This section serves as a valuable resource for early-career researchers seeking unexplored areas and experienced researchers looking for new projects or collaborations. In this study, we generate future work suggestions from key sections of a scientific article alongside related papers and analyze how the trends have evolved. We experimented with various Large Language Models (LLMs) and integrated Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance the generation process. We incorporate a LLM feedback mechanism to improve the quality of the generated content and propose an LLM-as-a-judge approach for evaluation. Our results demonstrated that the RAG-based approach with LLM feedback outperforms other methods evaluated through qualitative and quantitative metrics. Moreover, we conduct a human evaluation to assess the LLM as an extractor and judge. The code and dataset for this project are here, code: HuggingFace
Do Visual Imaginations Improve Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents?
Perincherry, Akhil, Krantz, Jacob, Lee, Stefan
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) agents are tasked with navigating an unseen environment using natural language instructions. In this work, we study if visual representations of sub-goals implied by the instructions can serve as navigational cues and lead to increased navigation performance. To synthesize these visual representations or imaginations, we leverage a text-to-image diffusion model on landmark references contained in segmented instructions. These imaginations are provided to VLN agents as an added modality to act as landmark cues and an auxiliary loss is added to explicitly encourage relating these with their corresponding referring expressions. Our findings reveal an increase in success rate (SR) of around 1 point and up to 0.5 points in success scaled by inverse path length (SPL) across agents. These results suggest that the proposed approach reinforces visual understanding compared to relying on language instructions alone. Code and data for our work can be found at https://www.akhilperincherry.com/VLN-Imagine-website/.