This paper introduces the WordArt Designer API, a novel framework for user-driven artistic typography synthesis utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) on ModelScope. We address the challenge of simplifying artistic typography for non-professionals by offering a dynamic, adaptive, and computationally efficient alternative to traditional rigid templates. Our approach leverages the power of LLMs to understand and interpret user input, facilitating a more intuitive design process. We demonstrate through various case studies how users can articulate their aesthetic preferences and functional requirements, which the system then translates into unique and creative typographic designs. Our evaluations indicate significant improvements in user satisfaction, design flexibility, and creative expression over existing systems. The WordArt Designer API not only democratizes the art of typography but also opens up new possibilities for personalized digital communication and design.

In recent times, substantial advancements have been witnessed in large language models (LLMs), exemplified by ChatGPT, showcasing remarkable proficiency across a range of complex tasks. However, many mainstream LLMs (e.g. LLaMA) are pretrained on English-dominant corpus, which limits their performance in other non-English languages. In this paper, we focus on how to effectively transfer the capabilities of language generation and following instructions to a non-English language. To answer this question, we conduct an extensive empirical investigation based on LLaMA, accumulating over 1440 GPU hours. We analyze the impact of key factors such as vocabulary extension, further pretraining, and instruction tuning on transfer. To accurately assess the model's level of knowledge, we employ four widely used standardized testing benchmarks: C-Eval, MMLU, AGI-Eval, and GAOKAO-Bench. Furthermore, a comprehensive evaluation of the model's response quality is conducted, considering aspects such as accuracy, fluency, informativeness, logical coherence, and harmlessness, based on LLM-Eval, a benchmarks consisting instruction tasks from 17 diverse categories. Our evaluation results demonstrate that comparable performance to state-of-the-art transfer models can be achieved with less than 1% of the pretraining data, both in terms of knowledge alignment and response quality. Furthermore, the experimental outcomes across the thirteen low-resource languages also exhibit similar trends. We anticipate that the conclusions revealed by the experiments will aid the community in developing non-English LLMs.

Complex reasoning ability is one of the most important features of current LLMs, which has also been leveraged to play an integral role in complex decision-making tasks. Therefore, the investigation into the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical: numerous benchmarks have been established to assess the reasoning abilities of LLMs. However, current benchmarks are inadequate in offering a rigorous evaluation of the full extent of reasoning abilities that LLMs are capable of achieving. They are also prone to the risk of overfitting, as these benchmarks, being publicly accessible and static, allow models to potentially tailor their responses to specific benchmark metrics, thereby inflating their performance. Addressing these limitations, our research introduces a new benchmark, named NPHardEval. This benchmark is designed to evaluate the reasoning abilities of LLMs across a broad spectrum of 900 algorithmic questions, extending up to the NP-Hard complexity class. These questions are meticulously chosen to represent a wide range of complexity class below the NP-hard complexity class, offering a rigorous measure of the reasoning ability of LLMs. Through this study, we shed light on the current state of reasoning in LLMs, providing an objective and rigorous perspective through the comparison of LLMs' performance across complex classes. Moreover, this benchmark is designed with a dynamic update mechanism, where the datapoints are refreshed on a monthly basis. Such regular updates play a crucial role in mitigating the risk of LLMs overfitting to the benchmark, promoting a more accurate and reliable assessment of their reasoning capabilities. The benchmark dataset and code of NPHardEval are available at https://github.com/casmlab/NPHardEval.

Partial differential equations are often used in the spatial-temporal modeling of complex dynamical systems in many engineering applications. In this work, we build on the recent progress of operator learning and present a data-driven modeling framework that is continuous in both space and time. A key feature of the proposed model is the resolution-invariance with respect to both spatial and temporal discretizations, without demanding abundant training data in different temporal resolutions. To improve the long-term performance of the calibrated model, we further propose a hybrid optimization scheme that leverages both gradient-based and derivative-free optimization methods and efficiently trains on both short-term time series and long-term statistics. We investigate the performance of the spatial-temporal continuous learning framework with three numerical examples, including the viscous Burgers' equation, the Navier-Stokes equations, and the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. The results confirm the resolution-invariance of the proposed modeling framework and also demonstrate stable long-term simulations with only short-term time series data. In addition, we show that the proposed model can better predict long-term statistics via the hybrid optimization scheme with a combined use of short-term and long-term data.

We study semi-supervised sequence generation tasks where labeled data are too scarce to effectively finetune a model and at the same time few-shot prompting of a large language model (LLM) has suboptimal performance. This happens when a task, such as parsing, is expensive to annotate and also unfamiliar to a pretrained LLM. In this paper, we present a discovery that student models distilled from an in-context learned LLM can often generalize better than their teacher on such tasks. Leveraging this finding, we present a new method -- multistage collaborative knowledge distillation from an LLM (MCKD) -- for such tasks. MCKD first few-shot prompts an LLM to produce pseudolabels for unlabeled data. At each intermediate knowledge distillation (KD) stage, a new pair of students is trained on disjoint partitions of the pseudolabeled data. Each student then produces new and improved pseudolabels for its unseen partition to be used in the next stage of distillation. We demonstrate the advantage of multistage cross-partition labeling on several syntactic and semantic parsing tasks. On CRAFT biomedical parsing, for example, 3-stage MCKD with 50 labeled examples outperforms the prompted LLM and vanilla KD by 7.5% and 3.7% parsing F1, respectively, and matches the performance of supervised finetuning with 500 examples.

In this article, we propose a new paradigm for training spiking neural networks (SNNs), spike accumulation forwarding (SAF). It is known that SNNs are energy-efficient but difficult to train. Consequently, many researchers have proposed various methods to solve this problem, among which online training through time (OTTT) is a method that allows inferring at each time step while suppressing the memory cost. However, to compute efficiently on GPUs, OTTT requires operations with spike trains and weighted summation of spike trains during forwarding. In addition, OTTT has shown a relationship with the Spike Representation, an alternative training method, though theoretical agreement with Spike Representation has yet to be proven. Our proposed method can solve these problems; namely, SAF can halve the number of operations during the forward process, and it can be theoretically proven that SAF is consistent with the Spike Representation and OTTT, respectively. Furthermore, we confirmed the above contents through experiments and showed that it is possible to reduce memory and training time while maintaining accuracy.

Exemplar-free class-incremental learning (CIL) poses several challenges since it prohibits the rehearsal of data from previous tasks and thus suffers from catastrophic forgetting. Recent approaches to incrementally learning the classifier by freezing the feature extractor after the first task have gained much attention. In this paper, we explore prototypical networks for CIL, which generate new class prototypes using the frozen feature extractor and classify the features based on the Euclidean distance to the prototypes. In an analysis of the feature distributions of classes, we show that classification based on Euclidean metrics is successful for jointly trained features. However, when learning from non-stationary data, we observe that the Euclidean metric is suboptimal and that feature distributions are heterogeneous. To address this challenge, we revisit the anisotropic Mahalanobis distance for CIL. In addition, we empirically show that modeling the feature covariance relations is better than previous attempts at sampling features from normal distributions and training a linear classifier.

End-to-end neural Natural Language Processing (NLP) models are notoriously difficult to understand. This has given rise to numerous efforts towards model explainability in recent years. One desideratum of model explanation is faithfulness, i.e. an explanation should accurately represent the reasoning process behind the model's prediction. In this survey, we review over 110 model explanation methods in NLP through the lens of faithfulness. We first discuss the definition and evaluation of faithfulness, as well as its significance for explainability. We then introduce recent advances in faithful explanation, grouping existing approaches into five categories: similarity-based methods, analysis of model-internal structures, backpropagation-based methods, counterfactual intervention, and self-explanatory models. For each category, we synthesize its representative studies, strengths, and weaknesses. Finally, we summarize their common virtues and remaining challenges, and reflect on future work directions towards faithful explainability in NLP.

The goal of the Acoustic Question Answering (AQA) task is to answer a free-form text question about the content of an acoustic scene. It was inspired by the Visual Question Answering (VQA) task. In this paper, based on the previously introduced CLEAR dataset, we propose a new benchmark for AQA, namely CLEAR2, that emphasizes the specific challenges of acoustic inputs. These include handling of variable duration scenes, and scenes built with elementary sounds that differ between training and test set. We also introduce NAAQA, a neural architecture that leverages specific properties of acoustic inputs. The use of 1D convolutions in time and frequency to process 2D spectro-temporal representations of acoustic content shows promising results and enables reductions in model complexity. We show that time coordinate maps augment temporal localization capabilities which enhance performance of the network by ~17 percentage points. On the other hand, frequency coordinate maps have little influence on this task. NAAQA achieves 79.5% of accuracy on the AQA task with ~4 times fewer parameters than the previously explored VQA model. We evaluate the perfomance of NAAQA on an independent data set reconstructed from DAQA. We also test the addition of a MALiMo module in our model on both CLEAR2 and DAQA. We provide a detailed analysis of the results for the different question types. We release the code to produce CLEAR2 as well as NAAQA to foster research in this newly emerging machine learning task.

Thousands of cold cases could be solved thanks to an breakthrough in fingerprint analysis by artificial intelligence. A computer using artificial intelligence system has shattered the received wisdom of decades that each fingerprint from a person's finger is unique. So if a criminal left a thumbprint at one crime scene, and a print from his index finger at another, there would be no way to link the two. The breakthrough came about when a Columbia University student attempted to see if artificial intelligence could find links between apparently very different fingerprints from the same person. To test the idea, Gabe Guo, an engineering graduate with no background in forensics presented a computer with images of some 60,000 fingerprints in pairs.