Education
Finding Optimally Robust Data Mixtures via Concave Maximization
Thudi, Anvith, Maddison, Chris J.
Training on mixtures of data distributions is now common in many modern machine learning pipelines, useful for performing well on several downstream tasks. Group distributionally robust optimization (group DRO) is one popular way to learn mixture weights for training a specific model class, but group DRO methods suffer for non-linear models due to non-convex loss functions and when the models are non-parametric. We address these challenges by proposing to solve a more general DRO problem, giving a method we call MixMax. MixMax selects mixture weights by maximizing a particular concave objective with entropic mirror ascent, and, crucially, we prove that optimally fitting this mixture distribution over the set of bounded predictors returns a group DRO optimal model. Experimentally, we tested MixMax on a sequence modeling task with transformers and on a variety of non-parametric learning problems. In all instances MixMax matched or outperformed the standard data mixing and group DRO baselines, and in particular, MixMax improved the performance of XGBoost over the only baseline, data balancing, for variations of the ACSIncome and CelebA annotations datasets.
Towards Building Multilingual Language Model for Medicine
Qiu, Pengcheng, Wu, Chaoyi, Zhang, Xiaoman, Lin, Weixiong, Wang, Haicheng, Zhang, Ya, Wang, Yanfeng, Xie, Weidi
In the recent literature, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great promise in healthcare, for example, closed-source models such as GPT-4 [1] and MedPalm-2 [38] have shown remarkable performance, and successfully passed the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE). Concurrently, open-source models like Llama 2 have also facilitated the development of specialized language models for medicine, such as MEDITRON, PMC-LLaMA, MedAlpaca, and ChatDoctors [48, 11, 25, 6], gradually bridging the performance gap with their closed-source peers. Despite these advancements, the primary focus on English-language applications by these sophisticated medical language models has constrained their potential reach, limiting the benefits to a wider, linguistically diverse audience. In the realm of open-source multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by BLOOM [37] and the more recent InternLM 2 [42], a notable challenge persists despite their training on diverse multilingual corpora, that is, they exhibit unsatisfactory performance on medical queries in non-English languages, a discrepancy primarily attributed to the under-representation of medical content in these general datasets. This paper endeavors to bridge this gap by developing an open-source, multilingual language model for healthcare. As shown by Figure 1, our contribution is threefold: firstly, we gather a multilingual medical corpus designed for auto-regressive training, this aims to lay a robust foundation that accurately reflects the linguistic diversity and complexity of the medical domain; secondly, to monitor the progress, we introduce a new comprehensive multilingual medical question-answering (QA) benchmark, enabling the evaluation on multi-choice QA and rationale ability of different language models under both zero-shot and fine-tuning settings; lastly, we have tested a wide spectrum of existing language models, together with those that have undergone auto-regressive pre-training on our corpus. Through this comprehensive evaluation, we aim to provide valuable insights into the models' capabilities and fostering a deeper understanding of the intricacies involved in multilingual medical query processing. For auto-regressive training, we have developed a large-scale Multilingual Medical Corpus (MMedC), amassing over 25.5 billion medical-related tokens across six primary languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, French, Russian, and Spanish. This diverse dataset was compiled from four distinct sources: (i) we devised an automatic pipeline to filter medical-related content from the broad multilingual corpus, ensuring a focused and relevant dataset, (ii) we curated an extensive collection of medical textbooks in various languages, and converted them into texts with carefully designed pre-processing, e.g., Optical Character Recognition (OCR), heuristic data filtering, etc.
Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Large Language Models: A Focus on Error Identification and Correction
Li, Xiaoyuan, Wang, Wenjie, Li, Moxin, Guo, Junrong, Zhang, Yang, Feng, Fuli
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the realm of mathematical reasoning necessitates comprehensive evaluations to gauge progress and inspire future directions. Existing assessments predominantly focus on problem-solving from the examinee perspective, overlooking a dual perspective of examiner regarding error identification and correction. From the examiner perspective, we define four evaluation tasks for error identification and correction along with a new dataset with annotated error types and steps. We also design diverse prompts to thoroughly evaluate eleven representative LLMs. Our principal findings indicate that GPT-4 outperforms all models, while open-source model LLaMA-2-7B demonstrates comparable abilities to closed-source models GPT-3.5 and Gemini Pro. Notably, calculation error proves the most challenging error type. Moreover, prompting LLMs with the error types can improve the average correction accuracy by 47.9\%. These results reveal potential directions for developing the mathematical reasoning abilities of LLMs. Our code and dataset is available on https://github.com/LittleCirc1e/EIC.
Applying Fine-Tuned LLMs for Reducing Data Needs in Load Profile Analysis
Hu, Yi, Kim, Hyeonjin, Ye, Kai, Lu, Ning
This paper presents a novel method for utilizing fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) to minimize data requirements in load profile analysis, demonstrated through the restoration of missing data in power system load profiles. A two-stage fine-tuning strategy is proposed to adapt a pre-trained LLMs, i.e., GPT-3.5, for missing data restoration tasks. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the fine-tuned model in accurately restoring missing data, achieving comparable performance to state-of-the-art specifically designed models such as BERT-PIN. Key findings include the importance of prompt engineering and the optimal utilization of fine-tuning samples, highlighting the efficiency of few-shot learning in transferring knowledge from general user cases to specific target users. Furthermore, the proposed approach demonstrates notable cost-effectiveness and time efficiency compared to training models from scratch, making it a practical solution for scenarios with limited data availability and computing resources. This research has significant potential for application to other power system load profile analysis tasks. Consequently, it advances the use of LLMs in power system analytics, offering promising implications for enhancing the resilience and efficiency of power distribution systems.
Learning to Defer in Content Moderation: The Human-AI Interplay
Lykouris, Thodoris, Weng, Wentao
Successful content moderation in online platforms relies on a human-AI collaboration approach. A typical heuristic estimates the expected harmfulness of a post and uses fixed thresholds to decide whether to remove it and whether to send it for human review. This disregards the prediction uncertainty, the time-varying element of human review capacity and post arrivals, and the selective sampling in the dataset (humans only review posts filtered by the admission algorithm). In this paper, we introduce a model to capture the human-AI interplay in content moderation. The algorithm observes contextual information for incoming posts, makes classification and admission decisions, and schedules posts for human review. Only admitted posts receive human reviews on their harmfulness. These reviews help educate the machine-learning algorithms but are delayed due to congestion in the human review system. The classical learning-theoretic way to capture this human-AI interplay is via the framework of learning to defer, where the algorithm has the option to defer a classification task to humans for a fixed cost and immediately receive feedback. Our model contributes to this literature by introducing congestion in the human review system. Moreover, unlike work on online learning with delayed feedback where the delay in the feedback is exogenous to the algorithm's decisions, the delay in our model is endogenous to both the admission and the scheduling decisions. We propose a near-optimal learning algorithm that carefully balances the classification loss from a selectively sampled dataset, the idiosyncratic loss of non-reviewed posts, and the delay loss of having congestion in the human review system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result for online learning in contextual queueing systems and hence our analytical framework may be of independent interest.
Achieving $\tilde{O}(1/\epsilon)$ Sample Complexity for Constrained Markov Decision Process
We consider the reinforcement learning problem for the constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), which plays a central role in satisfying safety or resource constraints in sequential learning and decision-making. In this problem, we are given finite resources and a MDP with unknown transition probabilities. At each stage, we take an action, collecting a reward and consuming some resources, all assumed to be unknown and need to be learned over time. In this work, we take the first step towards deriving optimal problem-dependent guarantees for the CMDP problems. We derive a logarithmic regret bound, which translates into a $O(\frac{1}{\Delta\cdot\eps}\cdot\log^2(1/\eps))$ sample complexity bound, with $\Delta$ being a problem-dependent parameter, yet independent of $\eps$. Our sample complexity bound improves upon the state-of-art $O(1/\eps^2)$ sample complexity for CMDP problems established in the previous literature, in terms of the dependency on $\eps$. To achieve this advance, we develop a new framework for analyzing CMDP problems. To be specific, our algorithm operates in the primal space and we resolve the primal LP for the CMDP problem at each period in an online manner, with \textit{adaptive} remaining resource capacities. The key elements of our algorithm are: i) a characterization of the instance hardness via LP basis, ii) an eliminating procedure that identifies one optimal basis of the primal LP, and; iii) a resolving procedure that is adaptive to the remaining resources and sticks to the characterized optimal basis.
Harvard Undergraduate Survey on Generative AI
Hirabayashi, Shikoh, Jain, Rishab, Jurkoviฤ, Nikola, Wu, Gabriel
How has generative AI impacted the experiences of college students? We study the influence of AI on the study habits, class choices, and career prospects of Harvard undergraduates (n = 326), finding that almost 90% of students use generative AI. For roughly 25% of these students, AI has begun to substitute for attending office hours and completing required readings. Half of students are concerned that AI will negatively impact their job prospects, and over half of students wish that Harvard had more classes on the future impacts of AI. We also investigate students' outlook on the broader social implications of AI, finding that half of students are worried that AI will increase economic inequality, and 40% believe that extinction risk from AI should be treated as a global priority with the same urgency as pandemics and nuclear war. Around half of students who have taken a class on AI expect AI to exceed human capabilities on almost all tasks within 30 years. We make some recommendations to the Harvard community in light of these results.
iVideoGPT: Interactive VideoGPTs are Scalable World Models
Wu, Jialong, Yin, Shaofeng, Feng, Ningya, He, Xu, Li, Dong, Hao, Jianye, Long, Mingsheng
World models empower model-based agents to interactively explore, reason, and plan within imagined environments for real-world decision-making. However, the high demand for interactivity poses challenges in harnessing recent advancements in video generative models for developing world models at scale. This work introduces Interactive VideoGPT (iVideoGPT), a scalable autoregressive transformer framework that integrates multimodal signals--visual observations, actions, and rewards--into a sequence of tokens, facilitating an interactive experience of agents via next-token prediction. iVideoGPT features a novel compressive tokenization technique that efficiently discretizes high-dimensional visual observations. Leveraging its scalable architecture, we are able to pre-train iVideoGPT on millions of human and robotic manipulation trajectories, establishing a versatile foundation that is adaptable to serve as interactive world models for a wide range of downstream tasks. These include action-conditioned video prediction, visual planning, and model-based reinforcement learning, where iVideoGPT achieves competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our work advances the development of interactive general world models, bridging the gap between generative video models and practical model-based reinforcement learning applications.
A Survey of Useful LLM Evaluation
Peng, Ji-Lun, Cheng, Sijia, Diau, Egil, Shih, Yung-Yu, Chen, Po-Heng, Lin, Yen-Ting, Chen, Yun-Nung
LLMs have gotten attention across various research domains due to their exceptional performance on a wide range of complex tasks. Therefore, refined methods to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs are needed to determine the tasks and responsibility they should undertake. Our study mainly discussed how LLMs, as useful tools, should be effectively assessed. We proposed the two-stage framework: from ``core ability'' to ``agent'', clearly explaining how LLMs can be applied based on their specific capabilities, along with the evaluation methods in each stage. Core ability refers to the capabilities that LLMs need in order to generate high-quality natural language texts. After confirming LLMs possess core ability, they can solve real-world and complex tasks as agent. In the "core ability" stage, we discussed the reasoning ability, societal impact, and domain knowledge of LLMs. In the ``agent'' stage, we demonstrated embodied action, planning, and tool learning of LLMs agent applications. Finally, we examined the challenges currently confronting the evaluation methods for LLMs, as well as the directions for future development.
Learning Multimodal Behaviors from Scratch with Diffusion Policy Gradient
Li, Zechu, Krohn, Rickmer, Chen, Tao, Ajay, Anurag, Agrawal, Pulkit, Chalvatzaki, Georgia
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically parameterize the policy as a deep network that outputs either a deterministic action or a stochastic one modeled as a Gaussian distribution, hence restricting learning to a single behavioral mode. Meanwhile, diffusion models emerged as a powerful framework for multimodal learning. However, the use of diffusion policies in online RL is hindered by the intractability of policy likelihood approximation, as well as the greedy objective of RL methods that can easily skew the policy to a single mode. This paper presents Deep Diffusion Policy Gradient (DDiffPG), a novel actor-critic algorithm that learns from scratch multimodal policies parameterized as diffusion models while discovering and maintaining versatile behaviors. DDiffPG explores and discovers multiple modes through off-the-shelf unsupervised clustering combined with novelty-based intrinsic motivation. DDiffPG forms a multimodal training batch and utilizes mode-specific Q-learning to mitigate the inherent greediness of the RL objective, ensuring the improvement of the diffusion policy across all modes. Our approach further allows the policy to be conditioned on mode-specific embeddings to explicitly control the learned modes. Empirical studies validate DDiffPG's capability to master multimodal behaviors in complex, high-dimensional continuous control tasks with sparse rewards, also showcasing proof-of-concept dynamic online replanning when navigating mazes with unseen obstacles.