The patent domain is gaining attention in natural language processing research, offering practical applications in streamlining the patenting process and providing challenging benchmarks for large language models (LLMs). However, the generation of the description sections of patents, which constitute more than 90% of the patent document, has not been studied to date. We address this gap by introducing the task of outline-guided paper-to-patent generation, where an academic paper provides the technical specification of the invention and an outline conveys the desired patent structure. We present PAP2PAT, a new challenging benchmark of 1.8k patent-paper pairs with document outlines, collected using heuristics that reflect typical research lab practices. Our experiments with current open-weight LLMs and outline-guided chunk-based generation show that they can effectively use information from the paper but struggle with repetitions, likely due to the inherent repetitiveness of patent language. We release our data and code.

Federated Unlearning (FU) enables clients to selectively remove the influence of specific data from a trained federated learning model, addressing privacy concerns and regulatory requirements. However, existing FU methods often struggle to balance effective erasure with model utility preservation, especially for class-level unlearning in non-IID settings. We propose Federated Unlearning via Class-aware Representation Transformation (FUCRT), a novel method that achieves unlearning through class-aware representation transformation. FUCRT employs two key components: (1) a transformation class selection strategy to identify optimal forgetting directions, and (2) a transformation alignment technique using dual class-aware contrastive learning to ensure consistent transformations across clients. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate FUCRT's superior performance in terms of erasure guarantee, model utility preservation, and efficiency. FUCRT achieves complete (100\%) erasure of unlearning classes while maintaining or improving performance on remaining classes, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines across both IID and Non-IID settings. Analysis of the representation space reveals FUCRT's ability to effectively merge unlearning class representations with the transformation class from remaining classes, closely mimicking the model retrained from scratch.

Recent advancements in Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have set new standards in natural language processing. However, the classical softmax attention incurs significant computational costs, leading to a $O(T)$ complexity for per-token generation, where $T$ represents the context length. This work explores reducing LLMs' complexity while maintaining performance by introducing Rodimus and its enhanced version, Rodimus$+$. Rodimus employs an innovative data-dependent tempered selection (DDTS) mechanism within a linear attention-based, purely recurrent framework, achieving significant accuracy while drastically reducing the memory usage typically associated with recurrent models. This method exemplifies semantic compression by maintaining essential input information with fixed-size hidden states. Building on this, Rodimus$+$ combines Rodimus with the innovative Sliding Window Shared-Key Attention (SW-SKA) in a hybrid approach, effectively leveraging the complementary semantic, token, and head compression techniques. Our experiments demonstrate that Rodimus$+$-1.6B, trained on 1 trillion tokens, achieves superior downstream performance against models trained on more tokens, including Qwen2-1.5B and RWKV6-1.6B, underscoring its potential to redefine the accuracy-efficiency balance in LLMs. Model code and pre-trained checkpoints will be available soon.

Independent Component Analysis (ICA) offers interpretable semantic components of embeddings. While ICA theory assumes that embeddings can be linearly decomposed into independent components, real-world data often do not satisfy this assumption. Consequently, non-independencies remain between the estimated components, which ICA cannot eliminate. We quantified these non-independencies using higher-order correlations and demonstrated that when the higher-order correlation between two components is large, it indicates a strong semantic association between them, along with many words sharing common meanings with both components. The entire structure of non-independencies was visualized using Figure 1: Heatmap visualization of 300-dimensional a maximum spanning tree of semantic components. SGNS embeddings transformed by PCA and ICA, with These findings provide deeper insights axes sorted by variance and skewness, respectively.

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have become essential backbones for multimodal intelligence, yet significant safety challenges limit their real-world application. While textual inputs are often effectively safeguarded, adversarial visual inputs can easily bypass VLM defense mechanisms. Existing defense methods are either resource-intensive, requiring substantial data and compute, or fail to simultaneously ensure safety and usefulness in responses. To address these limitations, we propose a novel two-phase inference-time alignment framework, Evaluating Then Aligning (ETA): 1) Evaluating input visual contents and output responses to establish a robust safety awareness in multimodal settings, and 2) Aligning unsafe behaviors at both shallow and deep levels by conditioning the VLMs' generative distribution with an interference prefix and performing sentence-level best-of-N to search the most harmless and helpful generation paths. Extensive experiments show that ETA outperforms baseline methods in terms of harmlessness, helpfulness, and efficiency, reducing the unsafe rate by 87.5% in cross-modality attacks and achieving 96.6% win-ties in GPT-4 helpfulness evaluation. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/DripNowhy/ETA.

Intelligent auditing represents a crucial advancement in modern audit practices, enhancing both the quality and efficiency of audits within the realm of artificial intelligence. With the rise of large language model (LLM), there is enormous potential for intelligent models to contribute to audit domain. However, general LLMs applied in audit domain face the challenges of lacking specialized knowledge and the presence of data biases. To overcome these challenges, this study introduces AuditWen, an open-source audit LLM by fine-tuning Qwen with constructing instruction data from audit domain. We first outline the application scenarios for LLMs in the audit and extract requirements that shape the development of LLMs tailored for audit purposes. We then propose an audit LLM, called AuditWen, by fine-tuning Qwen with constructing 30k instruction dataset from 15 audit tasks and 3 layers. In evaluation stage, we proposed a benchmark with 5k instructions that covers a set of critical audit tasks derived from the application scenarios. With the benchmark, we compare AuditWen with other existing LLMs from information extraction, question answering and document generation. The experimental results demonstrate superior performance of AuditWen both in question understanding and answer generation, making it an immediately valuable tool for audit.

Recently, language models like Llama 3.1 Instruct have become increasingly capable of agentic behavior, enabling them to perform tasks requiring short-term planning and tool use. In this study, we apply refusal-vector ablation to Llama 3.1 70B and implement a simple agent scaffolding to create an unrestricted agent. Our findings imply that these refusal-vector ablated models can successfully complete harmful tasks, such as bribing officials or crafting phishing attacks, revealing significant vulnerabilities in current safety mechanisms. To further explore this, we introduce a small Safe Agent Benchmark, designed to test both harmful and benign tasks in agentic scenarios. Our results imply that safety fine-tuning in chat models does not generalize well to agentic behavior, as we find that Llama 3.1 Instruct models are willing to perform most harmful tasks without modifications. At the same time, these models will refuse to give advice on how to perform the same tasks when asked for a chat completion. This highlights the growing risk of misuse as models become more capable, underscoring the need for improved safety frameworks for language model agents.

We conducted controlled experimental bias audits for four versions of ChatGPT, which we asked to recommend an opening offer in salary negotiations for a new hire. We submitted 98,800 prompts to each version, systematically varying the employee's gender, university, and major, and tested prompts in voice of each side of the negotiation: the employee versus employer. We find ChatGPT as a multi-model platform is not robust and consistent enough to be trusted for such a task. We observed statistically significant salary offers when varying gender for all four models, although with smaller gaps than for other attributes tested. The largest gaps were different model versions and between the employee- vs employer-voiced prompts. We also observed substantial gaps when varying university and major, but many of the biases were not consistent across model versions. We tested for fictional and fraudulent universities and found wildly inconsistent results across cases and model versions. We make broader contributions to the AI/ML fairness literature. Our scenario and our experimental design differ from mainstream AI/ML auditing efforts in key ways. Bias audits typically test discrimination for protected classes like gender, which we contrast with testing non-protected classes of university and major. Asking for negotiation advice includes how aggressive one ought to be in a negotiation relative to known empirical salary distributions and scales, which is a deeply contextual and personalized task that has no objective ground truth to validate. These results raise concerns for the specific model versions we tested and ChatGPT as a multi-model platform in continuous development. Our epistemology does not permit us to definitively certify these models as either generally biased or unbiased on the attributes we test, but our study raises matters of concern for stakeholders to further investigate.

Compressive adaptation approaches, such as QLoRA, are widely popular alternatives for reducing memory requirements during fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) while producing models capable of handling various downstream tasks. The key idea is to employ a "two-tower" architecture: compressing pretrained LLM parameters into compact representations and fine-tuning the additive full-precision adapter, which typically has few tunable parameters in low-rank format. However, the strict algebraic assumptions, such as low-rank assumption, and the complexity of composing two-tower architectures are some of the known shortcomings, resulting in a poor accuracy-efficiency trade-off. In response to these known limitations, we propose SpaLLM (Sketched Parameter Adaptation of LLMs), a novel compressive adaptation approach for LLMs. This method is also the first to illustrate parameter-sharing compression methods for LLM finetuning, which, unlike QLoRA, are free from strict low-rank algebraic assumptions on adapters. This approach simplifies LLMs' compressive adaptation workflow, potentially improves multi-user serving efficiency, and delivers significantly better accuracy for both natural language understanding and generation tasks. Moreover, by avoiding the "two-tower" architecture, our framework only requires one compressed matrix multiplication per layer during inference, demonstrating superior inference efficiency compared to previous methods. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in Natural Language Processing (NLP), enabling a broad spectrum of downstream applications. LLMs have demonstrated impressive generalization abilities across many downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner. However, compared to training-free methods such as in-context learning (Dong et al., 2022; Rubin et al., 2021) and few-shot prompting (Brown, 2020; Song et al., 2023), fine-tuning on these LLMs is often the ideal method to achieve optimal performance on a specific downstream task (Ding et al., 2023). Clearly, full-precision fine-tuning on these LLMs are often impractical due to the massive requirement of high-performance computing devices such as GPUs. As a result, Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning methods (PEFT), such as Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) (Hu et al., 2022), emerged as a less resource-intensive approach to fine-tuning while achieving reasonable Clearly, there is a trade-off between accuracy and efficiency.

Document understanding is a challenging task to process and comprehend large amounts of textual and visual information. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved the performance of this task. However, existing methods typically focus on either plain text or a limited number of document images, struggling to handle long PDF documents with interleaved text and images, especially in academic papers. In this paper, we introduce PDF-WuKong, a multimodal large language model (MLLM) which is designed to enhance multimodal question-answering (QA) for long PDF documents. PDF-WuKong incorporates a sparse sampler that operates on both text and image representations, significantly improving the efficiency and capability of the MLLM. The sparse sampler is integrated with the MLLM's image encoder and selects the paragraphs or diagrams most pertinent to user queries for processing by the language model. To effectively train and evaluate our model, we construct PaperPDF, a dataset consisting of a broad collection of academic papers sourced from arXiv, multiple strategies are proposed to generate automatically 1M QA pairs along with their corresponding evidence sources. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority and high efficiency of our approach over other models on the task of long multimodal PDF understanding, surpassing proprietary products by an average of 8.6% on F1. Our code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/yh-hust/PDF-Wukong.