Education
A Bilevel Optimization Framework for Imbalanced Data Classification
Medlin, Karen, Leyffer, Sven, Raghavan, Krishnan
Data rebalancing techniques, including oversampling and undersampling, are a common approach to addressing the challenges of imbalanced data. To tackle unresolved problems related to both oversampling and undersampling, we propose a new undersampling approach that: (i) avoids the pitfalls of noise and overlap caused by synthetic data and (ii) avoids the pitfall of under-fitting caused by random undersampling. Instead of undersampling majority data randomly, our method undersamples datapoints based on their ability to improve model loss. Using improved model loss as a proxy measurement for classification performance, our technique assesses a datapoint's impact on loss and rejects those unable to improve it. In so doing, our approach rejects majority datapoints redundant to datapoints already accepted and, thereby, finds an optimal subset of majority training data for classification. The accept/reject component of our algorithm is motivated by a bilevel optimization problem uniquely formulated to identify the optimal training set we seek. Experimental results show our proposed technique with F1 scores up to 10% higher than state-of-the-art methods.
A Survey on Large Language Models for Communication, Network, and Service Management: Application Insights, Challenges, and Future Directions
Boateng, Gordon Owusu, Sami, Hani, Alagha, Ahmed, Elmekki, Hanae, Hammoud, Ahmad, Mizouni, Rabeb, Mourad, Azzam, Otrok, Hadi, Bentahar, Jamal, Muhaidat, Sami, Talhi, Chamseddine, Dziong, Zbigniew, Guizani, Mohsen
The rapid evolution of communication networks in recent decades has intensified the need for advanced Network and Service Management (NSM) strategies to address the growing demands for efficiency, scalability, enhanced performance, and reliability of these networks. Large Language Models (LLMs) have received tremendous attention due to their unparalleled capabilities in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks and generating context-aware insights, offering transformative potential for automating diverse communication NSM tasks. Contrasting existing surveys that consider a single network domain, this survey investigates the integration of LLMs across different communication network domains, including mobile networks and related technologies, vehicular networks, cloud-based networks, and fog/edge-based networks. First, the survey provides foundational knowledge of LLMs, explicitly detailing the generic transformer architecture, general-purpose and domain-specific LLMs, LLM model pre-training and fine-tuning, and their relation to communication NSM. Under a novel taxonomy of network monitoring and reporting, AI-powered network planning, network deployment and distribution, and continuous network support, we extensively categorize LLM applications for NSM tasks in each of the different network domains, exploring existing literature and their contributions thus far. Then, we identify existing challenges and open issues, as well as future research directions for LLM-driven communication NSM, emphasizing the need for scalable, adaptable, and resource-efficient solutions that align with the dynamic landscape of communication networks. We envision that this survey serves as a holistic roadmap, providing critical insights for leveraging LLMs to enhance NSM.
Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models: A Survey
Li, Moxin, Zhao, Yong, Deng, Yang, Zhang, Wenxuan, Li, Shuaiyi, Xie, Wenya, Ng, See-Kiong, Chua, Tat-Seng
Although large language models (LLMs) store vast amount of knowledge in their parameters, they still have limitations in the memorization and utilization of certain knowledge, leading to undesired behaviors such as generating untruthful and inaccurate responses. This highlights the critical need to understand the knowledge boundary of LLMs, a concept that remains inadequately defined in existing research. In this survey, we propose a comprehensive definition of the LLM knowledge boundary and introduce a formalized taxonomy categorizing knowledge into four distinct types. Using this foundation, we systematically review the field through three key lenses: the motivation for studying LLM knowledge boundaries, methods for identifying these boundaries, and strategies for mitigating the challenges they present. Finally, we discuss open challenges and potential research directions in this area. We aim for this survey to offer the community a comprehensive overview, facilitate access to key issues, and inspire further advancements in LLM knowledge research.
Semi-automated analysis of audio-recorded lessons: The case of teachers' engaging messages
Falcon, Samuel, Alvarez-Alvarez, Carmen, Leon, Jaime
Engaging messages delivered by teachers are a key aspect of the classroom discourse that influences student outcomes. However, improving this communication is challenging due to difficulties in obtaining observations. This study presents a methodology for efficiently extracting actual observations of engaging messages from audio-recorded lessons. We collected 2,477 audio-recorded lessons from 75 teachers over two academic years. Using automatic transcription and keyword-based filtering analysis, we identified and classified engaging messages. This method reduced the information to be analysed by 90%, optimising the time and resources required compared to traditional manual coding. Subsequent descriptive analysis revealed that the most used messages emphasised the future benefits of participating in school activities. In addition, the use of engaging messages decreased as the academic year progressed. This study offers insights for researchers seeking to extract information from teachers' discourse in naturalistic settings and provides useful information for designing interventions to improve teachers' communication strategies. Keywords: Teacher education; Technology; Discourse; Secondary education; Engagement 1. Introduction Teachers' discourse has the power to shape students' outcomes (Caldarella et al., 2023; Howe & Abedin, 2013; Mercer, 2010).
RareAgents: Autonomous Multi-disciplinary Team for Rare Disease Diagnosis and Treatment
Chen, Xuanzhong, Jin, Ye, Mao, Xiaohao, Wang, Lun, Zhang, Shuyang, Chen, Ting
Rare diseases, despite their low individual incidence, collectively impact around 300 million people worldwide due to the huge number of diseases. The complexity of symptoms and the shortage of specialized doctors with relevant experience make diagnosing and treating rare diseases more challenging than common diseases. Recently, agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated notable improvements across various domains. In the medical field, some agent methods have outperformed direct prompts in question-answering tasks from medical exams. However, current agent frameworks lack adaptation for real-world clinical scenarios, especially those involving the intricate demands of rare diseases. To address these challenges, we present RareAgents, the first multi-disciplinary team of LLM-based agents tailored to the complex clinical context of rare diseases. RareAgents integrates advanced planning capabilities, memory mechanisms, and medical tools utilization, leveraging Llama-3.1-8B/70B as the base model. Experimental results show that RareAgents surpasses state-of-the-art domain-specific models, GPT-4o, and existing agent frameworks in both differential diagnosis and medication recommendation for rare diseases. Furthermore, we contribute a novel dataset, MIMIC-IV-Ext-Rare, derived from MIMIC-IV, to support further advancements in this field.
CharacterBench: Benchmarking Character Customization of Large Language Models
Zhou, Jinfeng, Huang, Yongkang, Wen, Bosi, Bi, Guanqun, Chen, Yuxuan, Ke, Pei, Chen, Zhuang, Xiao, Xiyao, Peng, Libiao, Tang, Kuntian, Zhang, Rongsheng, Zhang, Le, Lv, Tangjie, Hu, Zhipeng, Wang, Hongning, Huang, Minlie
Character-based dialogue (aka role-playing) enables users to freely customize characters for interaction, which often relies on LLMs, raising the need to evaluate LLMs' character customization capability. However, existing benchmarks fail to ensure a robust evaluation as they often only involve a single character category or evaluate limited dimensions. Moreover, the sparsity of character features in responses makes feature-focused generative evaluation both ineffective and inefficient. To address these issues, we propose CharacterBench, the largest bilingual generative benchmark, with 22,859 human-annotated samples covering 3,956 characters from 25 detailed character categories. We define 11 dimensions of 6 aspects, classified as sparse and dense dimensions based on whether character features evaluated by specific dimensions manifest in each response. We enable effective and efficient evaluation by crafting tailored queries for each dimension to induce characters' responses related to specific dimensions. Further, we develop CharacterJudge model for cost-effective and stable evaluations. Experiments show its superiority over SOTA automatic judges (e.g., GPT-4) and our benchmark's potential to optimize LLMs' character customization. Our repository is at https://github.com/thu-coai/CharacterBench.
Data-Dependent Generalization Bounds for Parameterized Quantum Models Under Noise
Quantum machine learning offers a transformative approach to solving complex problems, but the inherent noise hinders its practical implementation in near-term quantum devices. This obstacle makes it challenging to understand the generalization capabilities of quantum circuit models. Designing robust quantum machine learning models under noise requires a principled understanding of complexity and generalization, extending beyond classical capacity measures. This study investigates the generalization properties of parameterized quantum machine learning models under the influence of noise. We present a data-dependent generalization bound grounded in the quantum Fisher information matrix. We leverage statistical learning theory to relate the parameter space volumes and training sizes to estimate the generalization capability of the trained model. By integrating local parameter neighborhoods and effective dimensions defined through quantum Fisher information matrix eigenvalues, we provide a structured characterization of complexity in quantum models. We analyze the tightness of the bound and discuss the trade-off between model expressiveness and generalization performance.
SPaR: Self-Play with Tree-Search Refinement to Improve Instruction-Following in Large Language Models
Cheng, Jiale, Liu, Xiao, Wang, Cunxiang, Gu, Xiaotao, Lu, Yida, Zhang, Dan, Dong, Yuxiao, Tang, Jie, Wang, Hongning, Huang, Minlie
Instruction-following is a fundamental capability of language models, requiring the model to recognize even the most subtle requirements in the instructions and accurately reflect them in its output. Such an ability is well-suited for and often optimized by preference learning. Such practice can introduce content variations irrelevant to whether the instruction is precisely followed (e.g., different expressions about the same semantic), interfering with the goal of teaching models to recognize the key differences that lead to improved instruction following. R, a self-play framework integrating tree-search self-refinement to yield valid and comparable preference pairs free from distractions. By playing against itself, an LLM employs a tree-search strategy to refine its previous responses with respect to the instruction while minimizing unnecessary variations. R demonstrates promising scalability and transferability, greatly enhancing models like GLM-4-9B and LLaMA3-70B. We also identify how inference scaling in tree search would impact model performance. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/thu-coai/SPaR. Write a story and end it with "The devil is in the details." The is in the details. Figure 1: An example of the interfering factors (story content) in independently sampled multiple responses (Left). Refined response pairs exclude these factors, highlight the key difference (ending sentence), and lead to improved performance on iteratively trained LLaMA3-8B-Instruct (Right).
A Survey of Mathematical Reasoning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Model: Benchmark, Method & Challenges
Yan, Yibo, Su, Jiamin, He, Jianxiang, Fu, Fangteng, Zheng, Xu, Lyu, Yuanhuiyi, Wang, Kun, Wang, Shen, Wen, Qingsong, Hu, Xuming
Mathematical reasoning, a core aspect of human cognition, is vital across many domains, from educational problem-solving to scientific advancements. As artificial general intelligence (AGI) progresses, integrating large language models (LLMs) with mathematical reasoning tasks is becoming increasingly significant. This survey provides the first comprehensive analysis of mathematical reasoning in the era of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We review over 200 studies published since 2021, and examine the state-of-the-art developments in Math-LLMs, with a focus on multimodal settings. We categorize the field into three dimensions: benchmarks, methodologies, and challenges. In particular, we explore multimodal mathematical reasoning pipeline, as well as the role of (M)LLMs and the associated methodologies. Finally, we identify five major challenges hindering the realization of AGI in this domain, offering insights into the future direction for enhancing multimodal reasoning capabilities. This survey serves as a critical resource for the research community in advancing the capabilities of LLMs to tackle complex multimodal reasoning tasks.
Combining Large Language Models with Tutoring System Intelligence: A Case Study in Caregiver Homework Support
Venugopalan, Devika, Yan, Ziwen, Borchers, Conrad, Lin, Jionghao, Aleven, Vincent
Caregivers (i.e., parents and members of a child's caring community) are underappreciated stakeholders in learning analytics. Although caregiver involvement can enhance student academic outcomes, many obstacles hinder involvement, most notably knowledge gaps with respect to modern school curricula. An emerging topic of interest in learning analytics is hybrid tutoring, which includes instructional and motivational support. Caregivers assert similar roles in homework, yet it is unknown how learning analytics can support them. Our past work with caregivers suggested that conversational support is a promising method of providing caregivers with the guidance needed to effectively support student learning. We developed a system that provides instructional support to caregivers through conversational recommendations generated by a Large Language Model (LLM). Addressing known instructional limitations of LLMs, we use instructional intelligence from tutoring systems while conducting prompt engineering experiments with the open-source Llama 3 LLM. This LLM generated message recommendations for caregivers supporting their child's math practice via chat. Few-shot prompting and combining real-time problem-solving context from tutoring systems with examples of tutoring practices yielded desirable message recommendations. These recommendations were evaluated with ten middle school caregivers, who valued recommendations facilitating content-level support and student metacognition through self-explanation. We contribute insights into how tutoring systems can best be merged with LLMs to support hybrid tutoring settings through conversational assistance, facilitating effective caregiver involvement in tutoring systems.