Tabular data is a common format for storing information in rows and columns to represent data entries and their features. Although deep neural networks have become the main approach for modeling a wide range of domains including computer vision and NLP, many of them are not well-suited for tabular data. Recently, a few deep learning models have been proposed for deep tabular learning, featuring an internal feature selection mechanism with end-to-end gradient-based optimization. However, their feature selection mechanisms are unidimensional, and hence fail to account for the contextual dependence of feature importance, potentially overlooking crucial interactions that govern complex tasks. In addition, they overlook the bias of high-impact features and the risk associated with the limitations of attention generalization. To address this limitation, this study proposes a novel iterative feature exclusion module that enhances the feature importance ranking in tabular data. The proposed module iteratively excludes each feature from the input data and computes the attention scores, which represent the impact of the features on the prediction. By aggregating the attention scores from each iteration, the proposed module generates a refined representation of feature importance that captures both global and local interactions between features. The effectiveness of the proposed module is evaluated on four public datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed module consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods and baseline models in feature ranking and classification tasks. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/abaraka2020/Iterative-Feature-Exclusion-Ranking-Module and https://github.com/mohalim/IFENet

This report presents a small language model (SLM) for Japanese clinical and medicine, named NCVC-slm-1. This 1B parameters model was trained using Japanese text classified to be of high-quality. Moreover, NCVC-slm-1 was augmented with respect to clinical and medicine content that includes the variety of diseases, drugs, and examinations. Using a carefully designed pre-processing, a specialized morphological analyzer and tokenizer, this small and light-weight model performed not only to generate text but also indicated the feasibility of understanding clinical and medicine text. In comparison to other large language models, a fine-tuning NCVC-slm-1 demonstrated the highest scores on 6 tasks of total 8 on JMED-LLM. According to this result, SLM indicated the feasibility of performing several downstream tasks in the field of clinical and medicine. Hopefully, NCVC-slm-1 will be contributed to develop and accelerate the field of clinical and medicine for a bright future.

Abstraction is key to scaling up reinforcement learning (RL). However, autonomously learning abstract state and action representations to enable transfer and generalization remains a challenging open problem. This paper presents a novel approach for inventing, representing, and utilizing options, which represent temporally extended behaviors, in continual RL settings. Our approach addresses streams of stochastic problems characterized by long horizons, sparse rewards, and unknown transition and reward functions. Our approach continually learns and maintains an interpretable state abstraction, and uses it to invent high-level options with abstract symbolic representations. These options meet three key desiderata: (1) composability for solving tasks effectively with lookahead planning, (2) reusability across problem instances for minimizing the need for relearning, and (3) mutual independence for reducing interference among options. Our main contributions are approaches for continually learning transferable, generalizable options with symbolic representations, and for integrating search techniques with RL to efficiently plan over these learned options to solve new problems. Empirical results demonstrate that the resulting approach effectively learns and transfers abstract knowledge across problem instances, achieving superior sample efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods.

With the rise of foundation models, there is growing concern about their potential social impacts. Social science has a long history of studying the social impacts of transformative technologies in terms of pre-existing systems of power and how these systems are disrupted or reinforced by new technologies. In this position paper, we build on prior work studying the social impacts of earlier technologies to propose a conceptual framework studying foundation models as sociotechnical systems, incorporating social science expertise to better understand how these models affect systems of power, anticipate the impacts of deploying these models in various applications, and study the effectiveness of technical interventions intended to mitigate social harms. We advocate for an interdisciplinary and collaborative research paradigm between AI and social science across all stages of foundation model research and development to promote socially responsible research practices and use cases, and outline several strategies to facilitate such research.

AI for Mathematics (AI4Math) is not only intriguing intellectually but also crucial for AI-driven discovery in science, engineering, and beyond. Extensive efforts on AI4Math have mirrored techniques in NLP, in particular, training large language models on carefully curated math datasets in text form. As a complementary yet less explored avenue, formal mathematical reasoning is grounded in formal systems such as proof assistants, which can verify the correctness of reasoning and provide automatic feedback. In this position paper, we advocate for formal mathematical reasoning and argue that it is indispensable for advancing AI4Math to the next level. In recent years, we have seen steady progress in using AI to perform formal reasoning, including core tasks such as theorem proving and autoformalization, as well as emerging applications such as verifiable generation of code and hardware designs. However, significant challenges remain to be solved for AI to truly master mathematics and achieve broader impact. We summarize existing progress, discuss open challenges, and envision critical milestones to measure future success. At this inflection point for formal mathematical reasoning, we call on the research community to come together to drive transformative advancements in this field.

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has transformed many industries, including healthcare. However, previous medical LLMs have largely focused on leveraging general medical knowledge to provide responses, without accounting for patient variability and lacking true personalization at the individual level. To address this, we propose a novel method called personalized medical language model (PMLM), which explores and optimizes personalized LLMs through recommendation systems and reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, by utilizing self-informed and peer-informed personalization, PMLM captures changes in behaviors and preferences to design initial personalized prompts tailored to individual needs. We further refine these initial personalized prompts through RL, ultimately enhancing the precision of LLM guidance. Notably, the personalized prompt are hard prompt, which grants PMLM high adaptability and reusability, allowing it to directly leverage high-quality proprietary LLMs. We evaluate PMLM using real-world obstetrics and gynecology data, and the experimental results demonstrate that PMLM achieves personalized responses, and it provides more refined and individualized services, offering a potential way for personalized medical LLMs.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across numerous academic benchmarks. However, fine-tuning still remains essential to achieve satisfactory performance on downstream tasks, while the task-specific tuning samples are usually not readily available or expensive and time-consuming to obtain. To address this, we propose an error-driven data-efficient tuning framework that aims to efficiently adapt generic LMMs to newly emerging tasks without requiring any task-specific training samples. In our approach, a generic LMM, acting as a student model, is first evaluated on a small validation set of the target task, and then a more powerful model, acting as a teacher model, identifies the erroneous steps within the student model's reasoning steps and analyzes its capability gaps from fully addressing the target task. Based on these gaps, targeted training samples are further retrieved from existing task-agnostic datasets to tune the student model and tailor it to the target task. We perform extensive experiments across three different training data scales and seven tasks, demonstrating that our training paradigm significantly and efficiently improves LMM's performance on downstream tasks, achieving an average performance boost of 7.01%.

Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning (RAIT) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to refuse to answer unknown questions. By modifying responses of unknown questions in the training data to refusal responses such as "I don't know", RAIT enhances the reliability of LLMs and reduces their hallucination. Generally, RAIT modifies training samples based on the correctness of the initial LLM's response. However, this crude approach can cause LLMs to excessively refuse answering questions they could have correctly answered, the problem we call over-refusal. In this paper, we explore two primary causes of over-refusal: Static conflict occurs when similar samples within the LLM's feature space receive differing supervision signals (original vs. modified "I don't know"). Dynamic conflict arises as the LLM's evolving knowledge during SFT enables it to answer previously unanswerable questions, but the now-answerable training samples still retain the original "I don't know" supervision signals from the initial LLM state, leading to inconsistencies. These conflicts cause the trained LLM to misclassify known questions as unknown, resulting in over-refusal. To address this issue, we introduce Certainty Represented Knowledge Flow for Refusal-Aware Instructions Tuning (CRaFT). CRaFT centers on two main contributions: First, we additionally incorporate response certainty to selectively filter and modify data, reducing static conflicts. Second, we implement preliminary rehearsal training to characterize changes in the LLM's knowledge state, which helps mitigate dynamic conflicts during the fine-tuning process. We conducted extensive experiments on open-ended question answering and multiple-choice question task. Experiment results show that CRaFT can improve LLM's overall performance during the RAIT process. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/opendatalab/CRaFT .

An Austin-based national charter school network offers K-12 students an AI-guided education. Operating under a model called "2 Hour Learning," a company of the same name advertises accelerated pace, app-based classes designed to teach students at "2X" the speed of a traditional classroom, whatever that means. Parents are promised that the system works for 80-90 percent of children, and that students consistently rank in the NWEA's 90th percentile. Apart from generating top-ranking national standardized test takers, however, one of 2 Hour Learning's other explicit goals is the removal of teachers from classrooms. "Imagine starting a school and declaring, 'We won't have any academic teachers.' We did exactly that!" reads a portion of the company's white paper.

Artificial intelligence (AI) services such as ChatGPT are becoming increasingly popular among people in Japan as a way to learn new languages, with the number of people using such tools increasing by more than 80% in 2024, a recent survey showed. According to the annual Language Report released by language-learning app Duolingo earlier this month, 10.9% of respondents used AI-powered tools to study a new language -- up from 6% last year. Apps were the most popular learning method, with around 58% of respondents using them, followed by video streaming services such as YouTube and Netflix (37%), textbooks (35.6%) and online lessons (15.6%). Only 13.8% of people said they were studying a new language through in-person classes.