With the expanding application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various domains, it becomes imperative to comprehensively investigate their unforeseen behaviors and consequent outcomes. In this study, we introduce and systematically explore the phenomenon of "glitch tokens", which are anomalous tokens produced by established tokenizers and could potentially compromise the models' quality of response. Specifically, we experiment on seven top popular LLMs utilizing three distinct tokenizers and involving a totally of 182,517 tokens. We present categorizations of the identified glitch tokens and symptoms exhibited by LLMs when interacting with glitch tokens. Based on our observation that glitch tokens tend to cluster in the embedding space, we propose GlitchHunter, a novel iterative clustering-based technique, for efficient glitch token detection. The evaluation shows that our approach notably outperforms three baseline methods on eight open-source LLMs. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first comprehensive study on glitch tokens. Our new detection further provides valuable insights into mitigating tokenization-related errors in LLMs.

Cutting planes (cuts) play an important role in solving mixed-integer linear programs (MILPs), which formulate many important real-world applications. Cut selection heavily depends on (P1) which cuts to prefer and (P2) how many cuts to select. Although modern MILP solvers tackle (P1)-(P2) by human-designed heuristics, machine learning carries the potential to learn more effective heuristics. However, many existing learning-based methods learn which cuts to prefer, neglecting the importance of learning how many cuts to select. Moreover, we observe that (P3) what order of selected cuts to prefer significantly impacts the efficiency of MILP solvers as well. To address these challenges, we propose a novel hierarchical sequence/set model (HEM) to learn cut selection policies. Specifically, HEM is a bi-level model: (1) a higher-level module that learns how many cuts to select, (2) and a lower-level module -- that formulates the cut selection as a sequence/set to sequence learning problem -- to learn policies selecting an ordered subset with the cardinality determined by the higher-level module. To the best of our knowledge, HEM is the first data-driven methodology that well tackles (P1)-(P3) simultaneously. Experiments demonstrate that HEM significantly improves the efficiency of solving MILPs on eleven challenging MILP benchmarks, including two Huawei's real problems.

Document Question Answering (QA) presents a challenge in understanding visually-rich documents (VRD), particularly those dominated by lengthy textual content like research journal articles. Existing studies primarily focus on real-world documents with sparse text, while challenges persist in comprehending the hierarchical semantic relations among multiple pages to locate multimodal components. To address this gap, we propose PDF-MVQA, which is tailored for research journal articles, encompassing multiple pages and multimodal information retrieval. Unlike traditional machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks, our approach aims to retrieve entire paragraphs containing answers or visually rich document entities like tables and figures. Our contributions include the introduction of a comprehensive PDF Document VQA dataset, allowing the examination of semantically hierarchical layout structures in text-dominant documents. We also present new VRD-QA frameworks designed to grasp textual contents and relations among document layouts simultaneously, extending page-level understanding to the entire multi-page document. Through this work, we aim to enhance the capabilities of existing vision-and-language models in handling challenges posed by text-dominant documents in VRD-QA.

Recent advancements in LLMs have shown their significant potential in tasks like text summarization and generation. Yet, they often encounter difficulty while solving complex physics problems that require arithmetic calculation and a good understanding of concepts. Moreover, many physics problems include images that contain important details required to understand the problem's context. We propose an LMM-based chatbot to answer multimodal physics MCQs. For domain adaptation, we utilize the MM-PhyQA dataset comprising Indian high school-level multimodal physics problems. To improve the LMM's performance, we experiment with two techniques, RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) and Image Captioning. In image captioning, we add a detailed explanation of the diagram in each image, minimizing hallucinations and image processing errors. We further explore the integration of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) methodology inspired by the ranking approach in RLHF to enhance the human-like problem-solving abilities of the models. The RLHF approach incorporates human feedback into the learning process of LLMs, improving the model's problem-solving skills, truthfulness, and reasoning capabilities, minimizing the hallucinations in the answers, and improving the quality instead of using vanilla-supervised fine-tuned models. We employ the LLaVA open-source model to answer multimodal physics MCQs and compare the performance with and without using RLHF.

The rapid progress in the field of natural language processing (NLP) systems and the expansion of large language models (LLMs) have opened up numerous opportunities in the field of education and instructional methods. These advancements offer the potential for tailored learning experiences and immediate feedback, all delivered through accessible and cost-effective services. One notable application area for this technological advancement is in the realm of solving mathematical problems. Mathematical problem-solving not only requires the ability to decipher complex problem statements but also the skill to perform precise arithmetic calculations at each step of the problem-solving process. However, the evaluation of the arithmetic capabilities of large language models remains an area that has received relatively little attention. In response, we introduce an extensive mathematics dataset called "MathQuest" sourced from the 11th and 12th standard Mathematics NCERT textbooks. This dataset encompasses mathematical challenges of varying complexity and covers a wide range of mathematical concepts. Utilizing this dataset, we conduct fine-tuning experiments with three prominent LLMs: LLaMA-2, WizardMath, and MAmmoTH. These fine-tuned models serve as benchmarks for evaluating their performance on our dataset. Our experiments reveal that among the three models, MAmmoTH-13B emerges as the most proficient, achieving the highest level of competence in solving the presented mathematical problems. Consequently, MAmmoTH-13B establishes itself as a robust and dependable benchmark for addressing NCERT mathematics problems.

Temperature plays a pivotal role in moderating label softness in the realm of knowledge distillation (KD). Traditional approaches often employ a static temperature throughout the KD process, which fails to address the nuanced complexities of samples with varying levels of difficulty and overlooks the distinct capabilities of different teacher-student pairings. This leads to a less-than-ideal transfer of knowledge. To improve the process of knowledge propagation, we proposed Dynamic Temperature Knowledge Distillation (DTKD) which introduces a dynamic, cooperative temperature control for both teacher and student models simultaneously within each training iterafion. In particular, we proposed "\textbf{sharpness}" as a metric to quantify the smoothness of a model's output distribution. By minimizing the sharpness difference between the teacher and the student, we can derive sample-specific temperatures for them respectively. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-2012 demonstrate that DTKD performs comparably to leading KD techniques, with added robustness in Target Class KD and None-target Class KD scenarios.The code is available at https://github.com/JinYu1998/DTKD.

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, AI-enabled image recognition has emerged as a potent tool for addressing challenges in traditional environmental monitoring. This study focuses on the detection of floating objects in river and lake environments, exploring an innovative approach based on deep learning. By intricately analyzing the technical pathways for detecting static and dynamic features and considering the characteristics of river and lake debris, a comprehensive image acquisition and processing workflow has been developed. The study highlights the application and performance comparison of three mainstream deep learning models -SSD, Faster-RCNN, and YOLOv5- in debris identification. Additionally, a detection system for floating objects has been designed and implemented, encompassing both hardware platform construction and software framework development. Through rigorous experimental validation, the proposed system has demonstrated its ability to significantly enhance the accuracy and efficiency of debris detection, thus offering a new technological avenue for water quality monitoring in rivers and lakes

Although Split Federated Learning (SFL) is good at enabling knowledge sharing among resource-constrained clients, it suffers from the problem of low training accuracy due to the neglect of data heterogeneity and catastrophic forgetting. To address this issue, we propose a novel SFL approach named KoReA-SFL, which adopts a multi-model aggregation mechanism to alleviate gradient divergence caused by heterogeneous data and a knowledge replay strategy to deal with catastrophic forgetting. Specifically, in KoReA-SFL cloud servers (i.e., fed server and main server) maintain multiple branch model portions rather than a global portion for local training and an aggregated master-model portion for knowledge sharing among branch portions. To avoid catastrophic forgetting, the main server of KoReA-SFL selects multiple assistant devices for knowledge replay according to the training data distribution of each server-side branch-model portion. Experimental results obtained from non-IID and IID scenarios demonstrate that KoReA-SFL significantly outperforms conventional SFL methods (by up to 23.25\% test accuracy improvement).

Depression is a significant issue nowadays. As per the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2023, over 280 million individuals are grappling with depression. This is a huge number; if not taken seriously, these numbers will increase rapidly. About 4.89 billion individuals are social media users. People express their feelings and emotions on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, etc. These platforms contain valuable information which can be used for research purposes. Considerable research has been conducted across various social media platforms. However, certain limitations persist in these endeavors. Particularly, previous studies were only focused on detecting depression and the intensity of depression in tweets. Also, there existed inaccuracies in dataset labeling. In this research work, five types of depression (Bipolar, major, psychotic, atypical, and postpartum) were predicted using tweets from the Twitter database based on lexicon labeling. Explainable AI was used to provide reasoning by highlighting the parts of tweets that represent type of depression. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) was used for feature extraction and training. Machine learning and deep learning methodologies were used to train the model. The BERT model presented the most promising results, achieving an overall accuracy of 0.96.

Her research focuses on developing privacy-preserving generative models for tabular data and speech models tailored for African-accented English. She is also the co-founder of AISaturdays Lagos whose aim is to make AI knowledge easily accessible in Africa; free courses on data science, machine learning and deep learning are offered. She is among the few people working to make African data accessible on the internet. She shares her story about how she balances the multiple roles she plays to maintain a healthy work/life balance. My journey into the realm of technology began in my second year of undergraduate studies, ignited by the captivating images of NASA's Curiosity rover exploring Mars.