Deep Learning
CryptoQA: A Large-scale Question-answering Dataset for AI-assisted Cryptography
Elfares, Mayar, Reisert, Pascal, Dietz, Tilman, Barman, Manpa, Zaki, Ahmed, Kรผsters, Ralf, Bulling, Andreas
Large language models (LLMs) excel at many general-purpose natural language processing tasks. However, their ability to perform deep reasoning and mathematical analysis, particularly for complex tasks as required in cryptography, remains poorly understood, largely due to the lack of suitable data for evaluation and training. To address this gap, we present CryptoQA, the first large-scale question-answering (QA) dataset specifically designed for cryptography. CryptoQA contains over two million QA pairs drawn from curated academic sources, along with contextual metadata that can be used to test the cryptographic capabilities of LLMs and to train new LLMs on cryptographic tasks. We benchmark 15 state-of-the-art LLMs on CryptoQA, evaluating their factual accuracy, mathematical reasoning, consistency, referencing, backward reasoning, and robustness to adversarial samples. In addition to quantitative metrics, we provide expert reviews that qualitatively assess model outputs and establish a gold-standard baseline. Our results reveal significant performance deficits of LLMs, particularly on tasks that require formal reasoning and precise mathematical knowledge. This shows the urgent need for LLM assistants tailored to cryptography research and development. We demonstrate that, by using CryptoQA, LLMs can be fine-tuned to exhibit better performance on cryptographic tasks.
Target-specific Adaptation and Consistent Degradation Alignment for Cross-Domain Remaining Useful Life Prediction
Hou, Yubo, Ragab, Mohamed, Wu, Min, Kwoh, Chee-Keong, Li, Xiaoli, Chen, Zhenghua
Accurate prediction of the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) in machinery can significantly diminish maintenance costs, enhance equipment up-time, and mitigate adverse outcomes. Data-driven RUL prediction techniques have demonstrated commendable performance. However, their efficacy often relies on the assumption that training and testing data are drawn from the same distribution or domain, which does not hold in real industrial settings. To mitigate this domain discrepancy issue, prior adversarial domain adaptation methods focused on deriving domain-invariant features. Nevertheless, they overlook target-specific information and inconsistency characteristics pertinent to the degradation stages, resulting in suboptimal performance. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel domain adaptation approach for cross-domain RUL prediction named TACDA. Specifically, we propose a target domain reconstruction strategy within the adversarial adaptation process, thereby retaining target-specific information while learning domain-invariant features. Furthermore, we develop a novel clustering and pairing strategy for consistent alignment between similar degradation stages. Through extensive experiments, our results demonstrate the remarkable performance of our proposed TACDA method, surpassing state-of-the-art approaches with regard to two different evaluation metrics. Our code is available at https://github.com/keyplay/TACDA.
Spoken Conversational Agents with Large Language Models
Yang, Chao-Han Huck, Stolcke, Andreas, Heck, Larry
Building on this, we will examine joint text-speech pre-training (Chiu et al., 2022; Bar-rault et al., 2023; Chen et al., 2022) methods, This section will provide a comprehensive look at how state-of-the-art voice-interfaced LLMs (Reid et al., 2024; Chu et al., Current Trends The current work in AI virtual assistants builds upon the voice-only systems of the last decade by leveraging LLMs to significantly improve the coverage and robustness of the spoken language understanding and dialogue state tracking components, in addition to substantial advancements in spoken language generation. It highlights recent advancements in multi-turn dialogue systems, encompassing both LLM-based open-domain dialogue (ODD) and task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems, as well as relevant datasets and evaluation metrics.
Feedback Loops and Code Perturbations in LLM-based Software Engineering: A Case Study on a C-to-Rust Translation System
Weiss, Martin, Hecking-Harbusch, Jesko, Quante, Jochen, Woehrle, Matthias
The advent of strong generative AI has a considerable impact on various software engineering tasks such as code repair, test generation, or language translation. While tools like GitHub Copilot are already in widespread use in interactive settings, automated approaches require a higher level of reliability before being usable in industrial practice. In this paper, we focus on three aspects that directly influence the quality of the results: a) the effect of automated feedback loops, b) the choice of Large Language Model (LLM), and c) the influence of behavior-preserving code changes. We study the effect of these three variables on an automated C-to-Rust translation system. Code translation from C to Rust is an attractive use case in industry due to Rust's safety guarantees. The translation system is based on a generate-and-check pattern, in which Rust code generated by the LLM is automatically checked for compilability and behavioral equivalence with the original C code. For negative checking results, the LLM is re-prompted in a feedback loop to repair its output. These checks also allow us to evaluate and compare the respective success rates of the translation system when varying the three variables. Our results show that without feedback loops LLM selection has a large effect on translation success. However, when the translation system uses feedback loops the differences across models diminish. We observe this for the average performance of the system as well as its robustness under code perturbations. Finally, we also identify that diversity provided by code perturbations can even result in improved system performance.
EZYer: A simulacrum of high school with generative agent
Yang, Jinming, Ji, Zimu, Luo, Weiqi, Wang, Gaoxi, Ma, Bin, Deng, Yueling
With the rapid development of the online education and large language model, the existing educational tools still suffer from incomplete service, insufficient performance and weak interactivity in terms of courseware generation, interactive notes and quality assurance of content. In particular, the proposed generative agent EZYer : 1) Teacher Module: Integrating the Text Corpus retrieval and in-depth generation technologies, it automatically generates structured teaching materials and LaTeX Beamer courseware in line with the high school mathematics syllabus and supports user-defined image insertion. 2) Student Module: Throughout the collaborative interaction of the four roles of Teacher, Assistant, Top Student and Struggling Student, Note Taker summarizes and generates academic notes to enhance the depth and interest of learning. 3) Controller: set up keyword filtering system, content scoring system, role co-validation system, and dynamic content correction system. This ensure academic strictness and pedagogical propriety of EZYer inputs and outputs. In order to evaluate EZYer, this paper designs five-dimensional evaluation indexes of content accuracy, knowledge coverage, usability, formatting correctness and visual design and appeal, and scores 100 Beamer and Notes generated by EZYer by five large language models, separately, and the results show that the quality of EZYer-generated content is excellent and has a good application prospect.
Empathy Level Prediction in Multi-Modal Scenario with Supervisory Documentation Assistance
Abstract--Prevalent empathy prediction techniques primarily concentrate on a singular modality, typically textual, thus neglecting multi-modal processing capabilities. They also overlook the utilization of certain privileged information, which may encompass additional empathetic content. In response, we introduce an advanced multi-modal empathy prediction method integrating video, audio, and text information. The method comprises the Multi-Modal Empathy Prediction and Supervisory Documentation Assisted Training. We use pre-trained networks in the empathy prediction network to extract features from various modalities, followed by a cross-modal fusion. This process yields a multi-modal feature representation, which is employed to predict empathy labels. T o enhance the extraction of text features, we incorporate supervisory documents as privileged information during the assisted training phase. Specifically, we apply the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model to identify potential topic distributions to constrain text features. These supervisory documents, created by supervisors, focus on the counseling topics and the counselor's display of empathy. Notably, this privileged information is only available during training and is not accessible during the prediction phase. Experimental results on the multi-modal and dialogue empathy datasets demonstrate that our approach is superior to the existing methods. MP A THY is characterized by an emotional response that arises from the interplay between inherent traits and situational factors. This empathetic response is spontaneously triggered, yet it is also sculpted by deliberate cognitive control.
Sparse Computations in Deep Learning Inference
Tasou, Ioanna, Mpakos, Panagiotis, Vlachos, Angelos, Adamopoulos, Dionysios, Giannakopoulos, Georgios, Katsikopoulos, Konstantinos, Karaparisis, Ioannis, Lazou, Maria, Loukovitis, Spyridon, Mei, Areti, Poulopoulou, Anastasia, Dimitriou, Angeliki, Filandrianos, Giorgos, Galanopoulos, Dimitrios, Karampinis, Vasileios, Mitsouras, Ilias, Spanos, Nikolaos, Anastasiadis, Petros, Doudalis, Ioannis, Nikas, Konstantinos, Retsinas, George, Tzouveli, Paraskevi, Giannoula, Christina, Koziris, Nectarios, Papadopoulou, Nikela, Stamou, Giorgos, Voulodimos, Athanasios, Goumas, Georgios
The computational demands of modern Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are immense and constantly growing. While training costs usually capture public attention, inference demands are also contributing in significant computational, energy and environmental footprints. Sparsity stands out as a critical mechanism for drastically reducing these resource demands. However, its potential remains largely untapped and is not yet fully incorporated in production AI systems. To bridge this gap, this work provides the necessary knowledge and insights for performance engineers keen to get involved in deep learning inference optimization. In particular, in this work we: a) discuss the various forms of sparsity that can be utilized in DNN inference, b) explain how the original dense computations translate to sparse kernels, c) provide an extensive bibliographic review of the state-of-the-art in the implementation of these kernels for CPUs and GPUs, d) discuss the availability of sparse datasets in support of sparsity-related research and development, e) explore the current software tools and frameworks that provide robust sparsity support, and f) present evaluation results of different implementations of the key SpMM and SDDMM kernels on CPU and GPU platforms. Ultimately, this paper aims to serve as a resource for performance engineers seeking to develop and deploy highly efficient sparse deep learning models in productions.
In-Context Distillation with Self-Consistency Cascades: A Simple, Training-Free Way to Reduce LLM Agent Costs
Sarukkai, Vishnu, Gupta, Asanshay, Hong, James, Gharbi, Michaรซl, Fatahalian, Kayvon
The world currently has an abundance of ideas for how to use new LLM agents, and developers seek to rapidly prototype and test new agentic designs. However, executing agents at scale using high-capacity LLMs incurs high inference costs. We propose a simple method for reducing LLM agent inference costs without incurring the development friction costs associated with LLM fine-tuning (long training cycles, optimization hyperparameter tweaking loops) or manual prompt engineering (laborious trial and error). Most importantly, we introduce $\textit{in-context distillation}$, which adapts the idea of knowledge distillation (training a low cost-student model to mimic a high-cost teacher) to an in-context learning setting. Our approach retrieves relevant teacher demonstrations at each agent step and provides them to the student as in-context examples, enabling the student to imitate teacher behavior on-the-fly. We combine in-context distillation with the established idea of $\textit{self-consistency cascades}$ to know when the trust the student. This adaptive strategy realizes the cost benefits of model specialization while preserving the productivity of working with frozen models. On the multi-step embodied reasoning benchmark ALFWorld, our method matches teacher-level accuracy at $\textbf{2.5$\times$ lower cost}$, reducing per-episode costs from \$0.059 to \$0.024. The upfront demonstration cost amortizes after just 843 episodes, yielding cumulative savings exceeding \$34,900 at deployment scale (1M episodes). On AppWorld, a complex agent benchmark requiring multi-step API workflows, we shift the Pareto frontier by achieving a $\textbf{2$\times$ cost reduction}$ at iso-accuracy. By reducing operational costs while maintaining rapid experimentation cycles with frozen models, our approach makes advanced agentic systems economically viable for a broader range of applications.
A Concise Review of Hallucinations in LLMs and their Mitigation
Pulkundwar, Parth, Dhanawade, Vivek, Yadav, Rohit, Sonkar, Minal, Asurlekar, Medha, Rathod, Sarita
Abstract--Traditional language models face a challenge from hallucinations. Their very presence casts a large, dangerous shadow over the promising realm of natural language processing. It becomes crucial to understand the various kinds of hallucinations that occur nowadays, their origins, and ways of reducing them. This document provides a concise and straightforward summary of that. It serves as a one-stop resource for a general understanding of hallucinations and how to mitigate them. In the fast-moving world of Natural Language Processing (NLP) today, large language models (LLMs) such as GPT, BERT, and others have become the principal agents of change in natural language processing. They can generate human-like text, answer multifaceted questions, or engage in conversation with as much fluency.
Generative Multi-modal Feedback for Singing Voice Synthesis Evaluation
Li, Xueyan, Wang, Yuxin, Jiang, Mengjie, Zhu, Qingzi, Zhang, Jiang, Kim, Zoey, Niu, Yazhe
Singing voice synthesis (SVS) has advanced significantly, enabling models to generate vocals with accurate pitch and consistent style. As these capabilities improve, the need for reliable evaluation and optimization becomes increasingly critical. However, current methods like reward systems often rely on single numerical scores, struggle to capture various dimensions such as phrasing or expressiveness, and require costly annotations, limiting interpretability and generalization. To address these issues, we propose a generative feedback (i.e., reward model) framework that provides multi-dimensional language and audio feedback for SVS assessment. Our approach leverages an audio-language model to generate text and audio critiques-covering aspects such as melody, content, and auditory quality. The model is fine-tuned on a hybrid dataset combining human music reactions and synthetic critiques from a MLLMs, enhancing diversity and linguistic richness. Quantitative experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed dataset and training strategy, demonstrating that the framework produces musically accurate and interpretable evaluations suitable for guiding generative model improvement. The code is at [https://github.com/opendilab/VocalCritic](https://github.com/opendilab/VocalCritic)