Education
Computing in the Life Sciences: From Early Algorithms to Modern AI
Donkor, Samuel A., Walsh, Matthew E., Titus, Alexander J.
Computing in the life sciences has undergone a transformative evolution, from early computational models in the 1950s to the applications of arti cial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) seen today. This paper highlights key milestones and technological advancements through the historical development of computing in the life sciences. The discussion includes the inception of computational models for biological processes, the advent of bioinformatics tools, and the integration of AI/ML in modern life sciences research. Attention is given to AI-enabled tools used in the life sciences, such as scienti c large language models and bio-AI tools, examining their capabilities, limitations, and impact to biological risk. This paper seeks to clarify and establish essential terminology and concepts to ensure informed decision-making and e ective communication across disciplines. The views and opinions expressed within this manuscript are those of the authors and do not necessarily re ect the views and opinions of any organization the authors are a liated with.
DialSim: A Real-Time Simulator for Evaluating Long-Term Dialogue Understanding of Conversational Agents
Kim, Jiho, Chay, Woosog, Hwang, Hyeonji, Kyung, Daeun, Chung, Hyunseung, Cho, Eunbyeol, Jo, Yohan, Choi, Edward
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the capabilities of conversational agents, making them applicable to various fields (e.g., education). Despite their progress, the evaluation of the agents often overlooks the complexities of real-world conversations, such as real-time interactions, multi-party dialogues, and extended contextual dependencies. To bridge this gap, we introduce DialSim, a real-time dialogue simulator. In this simulator, an agent is assigned the role of a character from popular TV shows, requiring it to respond to spontaneous questions using past dialogue information and to distinguish between known and unknown information. Key features of DialSim include evaluating the agent's ability to respond within a reasonable time limit, handling long-term multi-party dialogues, and managing adversarial settings (e.g., swap character names) to challenge the agent's reliance on pre-trained knowledge. We utilized this simulator to evaluate the latest conversational agents and analyze their limitations. Our experiments highlight both the strengths and weaknesses of these agents, providing valuable insights for future improvements in the field of conversational AI.
SciRIFF: A Resource to Enhance Language Model Instruction-Following over Scientific Literature
Wadden, David, Shi, Kejian, Morrison, Jacob, Naik, Aakanksha, Singh, Shruti, Barzilay, Nitzan, Lo, Kyle, Hope, Tom, Soldaini, Luca, Shen, Shannon Zejiang, Downey, Doug, Hajishirzi, Hannaneh, Cohan, Arman
We present SciRIFF (Scientific Resource for Instruction-Following and Finetuning), a dataset of 137K instruction-following demonstrations for 54 tasks covering five essential scientific literature understanding capabilities: information extraction, summarization, question answering, claim verification, and classification. SciRIFF demonstrations are notable for their long input contexts, detailed task specifications, and complex structured outputs. While instruction-following resources are available in specific domains such as clinical medicine and chemistry, SciRIFF is the first dataset focused on extracting and synthesizing information from research literature across a wide range of scientific fields. To demonstrate the utility of SciRIFF, we develop a sample-efficient strategy to adapt a general instruction-following model for science by performing additional finetuning on a mix of general-domain and SciRIFF demonstrations. In evaluations on nine held-out scientific tasks, our model -- called SciTulu -- improves over a strong LLM baseline by 28.1% and 6.5% at the 7B and 70B scales respectively, while maintaining general instruction-following performance within 2% of the baseline. We are optimistic that SciRIFF will facilitate the development and evaluation of LLMs to help researchers navigate the ever-growing body of scientific literature. We release our dataset, model checkpoints, and data processing and evaluation code to enable further research.
From Complex to Simple: Enhancing Multi-Constraint Complex Instruction Following Ability of Large Language Models
He, Qianyu, Zeng, Jie, He, Qianxi, Liang, Jiaqing, Xiao, Yanghua
It is imperative for Large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions with elaborate requirements (i.e. Complex Instructions Following). Yet, it remains under-explored how to enhance the ability of LLMs to follow complex instructions with multiple constraints. To bridge the gap, we initially study what training data is effective in enhancing complex constraints following abilities. We found that training LLMs with instructions containing multiple constraints enhances their understanding of complex instructions, especially those with lower complexity levels. The improvement can even generalize to compositions of out-of-domain constraints. Additionally, we further propose methods addressing how to obtain and utilize the effective training data. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to prove the effectiveness of our methods in terms of overall performance and training efficiency. We also demonstrate that our methods improve models' ability to follow instructions generally and generalize effectively across out-of-domain, in-domain, and adversarial settings, while maintaining general capabilities.
From Instance Training to Instruction Learning: Task Adapters Generation from Instructions
Liao, Huanxuan, Xu, Yao, He, Shizhu, Zhang, Yuanzhe, Hao, Yanchao, Liu, Shengping, Liu, Kang, Zhao, Jun
Large language models (LLMs) have acquired the ability to solve general tasks by utilizing instruction finetuning (IFT). However, IFT still relies heavily on instance training of extensive task data, which greatly limits the adaptability of LLMs to real-world scenarios where labeled task instances are scarce and broader task generalization becomes paramount. Contrary to LLMs, humans acquire skills and complete tasks not merely through repeated practice but also by understanding and following instructional guidelines. This paper is dedicated to simulating human learning to address the shortcomings of instance training, focusing on instruction learning to enhance cross-task generalization. Within this context, we introduce Task Adapters Generation from Instructions (TAGI), which automatically constructs the task-specific model in a parameter generation manner based on the given task instructions without retraining for unseen tasks. Specifically, we utilize knowledge distillation to enhance the consistency between TAGI developed through Learning with Instruction and task-specific models developed through Training with Instance, by aligning the labels, output logits, and adapter parameters between them. TAGI is endowed with cross-task generalization capabilities through a two-stage training process that includes hypernetwork pretraining and finetuning. We evaluate TAGI on the Super-Natural Instructions and P3 datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that TAGI can match or even outperform traditional meta-trained models and other hypernetwork models, while significantly reducing computational requirements.
Synthetic Context Generation for Question Generation
Liu, Naiming, Wang, Zichao, Baraniuk, Richard
Despite rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), QG remains a challenging problem due to its complicated process, open-ended nature, and the diverse settings in which question generation occurs. A common approach to address these challenges involves fine-tuning smaller, custom models using datasets containing background context, question, and answer. However, obtaining suitable domain-specific datasets with appropriate context is often more difficult than acquiring question-answer pairs. In this paper, we investigate training QG models using synthetic contexts generated by LLMs from readily available question-answer pairs. We conduct a comprehensive study to answer critical research questions related to the performance of models trained on synthetic contexts and their potential impact on QG research and applications. Our empirical results reveal: 1) contexts are essential for QG tasks, even if they are synthetic; 2) fine-tuning smaller language models has the capability of achieving better performances as compared to prompting larger language models; and 3) synthetic context and real context could achieve comparable performances. These findings highlight the effectiveness of synthetic contexts in QG and paves the way for future advancements in the field.
Enhancing Spatio-temporal Quantile Forecasting with Curriculum Learning: Lessons Learned
Yin, Du, Deng, Jinliang, Ao, Shuang, Li, Zechen, Xue, Hao, Prabowo, Arian, Jiang, Renhe, Song, Xuan, Salim, Flora
Training models on spatio-temporal (ST) data poses an open problem due to the complicated and diverse nature of the data itself, and it is challenging to ensure the model's performance directly trained on the original ST data. While limiting the variety of training data can make training easier, it can also lead to a lack of knowledge and information for the model, resulting in a decrease in performance. To address this challenge, we presented an innovative paradigm that incorporates three separate forms of curriculum learning specifically targeting from spatial, temporal, and quantile perspectives. Furthermore, our framework incorporates a stacking fusion module to combine diverse information from three types of curriculum learning, resulting in a strong and thorough learning process. We demonstrated the effectiveness of this framework with extensive empirical evaluations, highlighting its better performance in addressing complex ST challenges. We provided thorough ablation studies to investigate the effectiveness of our curriculum and to explain how it contributes to the improvement of learning efficiency on ST data.
InstructCMP: Length Control in Sentence Compression through Instruction-based Large Language Models
Juseon-Do, null, Kwon, Jingun, Kamigaito, Hidetaka, Okumura, Manabu
Extractive summarization can produce faithful summaries but often requires additional constraints such as a desired summary length. Traditional sentence compression models do not typically consider the constraints because of their restricted model abilities, which require model modifications for coping with them. To bridge this gap, we propose Instruction-based Compression (InstructCMP), an approach to the sentence compression task that can consider the length constraint through instructions by leveraging the zero-shot task-solving abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). For this purpose, we created new evaluation datasets by transforming traditional sentence compression datasets into an instruction format. By using the datasets, we first reveal that the current LLMs still face challenges in accurately controlling the length for a compressed text. To address this issue, we propose an approach named "length priming," that incorporates additional length information into the instructions without external resources. While the length priming effectively works in a zero-shot setting, a training dataset with the instructions would further improve the ability of length control. Thus, we additionally created a training dataset in an instruction format to fine-tune the model on it. Experimental results and analysis show that applying the length priming significantly improves performances of InstructCMP in both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings without the need of any model modifications.
A Comparative Study of Continuous Sign Language Recognition Techniques
Some CSLR systems depend Sign language serves as a critical means of communication on the skeleton or pose information as an input to the following delivered using visual cues, including hand gestures and facial stages, therefore, they extract the pose information from each expressions [1]. Sign language recognition (SLR) involves video's frame at the preprocessing stage. However, this stage interpreting signs in video sequences and converting them into may be skipped by some CSLR systems that utilize sensorbased their corresponding glosses. The process includes capturing systems for signs capturing [5]. The spatial feature the movements of the signer's hands and body which are extractor captures feature representations from sign's frames usually integrated with facial expressions [2]. SLR aims to using spatial information learning techniques, such as 2D facilitate communication between deaf individuals and the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), 3D CNNs, Graph broader community by converting sign language into a form Convolutional Networks (GCN) or Vision Transformers (ViT).
CollabStory: Multi-LLM Collaborative Story Generation and Authorship Analysis
Venkatraman, Saranya, Tripto, Nafis Irtiza, Lee, Dongwon
The rise of unifying frameworks that enable seamless interoperability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made LLM-LLM collaboration for open-ended tasks a possibility. Despite this, there have not been efforts to explore such collaborative writing. We take the next step beyond human-LLM collaboration to explore this multi-LLM scenario by generating the first exclusively LLM-generated collaborative stories dataset called CollabStory. We focus on single-author ($N=1$) to multi-author (up to $N=5$) scenarios, where multiple LLMs co-author stories. We generate over 32k stories using open-source instruction-tuned LLMs. Further, we take inspiration from the PAN tasks that have set the standard for human-human multi-author writing tasks and analysis. We extend their authorship-related tasks for multi-LLM settings and present baselines for LLM-LLM collaboration. We find that current baselines are not able to handle this emerging scenario. Thus, CollabStory is a resource that could help propel an understanding as well as the development of techniques to discern the use of multiple LLMs. This is crucial to study in the context of writing tasks since LLM-LLM collaboration could potentially overwhelm ongoing challenges related to plagiarism detection, credit assignment, maintaining academic integrity in educational settings, and addressing copyright infringement concerns. We make our dataset and code available at \texttt{\url{https://github.com/saranya-venkatraman/multi_llm_story_writing}}.