Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Deep Learning


DATE-LM: Benchmarking Data Attribution Evaluation for Large Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Data attribution methods quantify the influence of training data on model outputs and are becoming increasingly relevant for a wide range of LLM research and applications, including dataset curation, model interpretability, data valuation. However, there remain critical gaps in systematic LLM-centric evaluation of data attribution methods. To this end, we introduce DATE-LM (Data Attribution Evaluation in Language Models), a unified benchmark for evaluating data attribution methods through real-world LLM applications. DATE-LM measures attribution quality through three key tasks -- training data selection, toxicity/bias filtering, and factual attribution. Our benchmark is designed for ease of use, enabling researchers to configure and run large-scale evaluations across diverse tasks and LLM architectures. Furthermore, we use DATE-LM to conduct a large-scale evaluation of existing data attribution methods. Our findings show that no single method dominates across all tasks, data attribution methods have trade-offs with simpler baselines, and method performance is sensitive to task-specific evaluation design. Finally, we release a public leaderboard for quick comparison of methods and to facilitate community engagement, with the motivation that DATE-LM can serve as a foundation for future data attribution research in LLMs.


Decoder-Hybrid-Decoder Architecture for Efficient Reasoning with Long Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advances in language modeling have demonstrated the effectiveness of State Space Models (SSMs) for efficient sequence modeling. While hybrid architectures such as Samba and the decoder-decoder architecture, YOCO, have shown promising performance gains over Transformers, prior works have not investigated the efficiency potential of representation sharing between SSM layers. In this paper, we introduce the Gated Memory Unit (GMU), a simple yet effective mechanism for efficient memory sharing across layers. We apply it to create SambaY, a decoder-hybrid-decoder architecture that incorporates GMUs in the cross-decoder to share memory readout states from a Samba-based self-decoder. SambaY significantly enhances decoding efficiency, preserves linear pre-filling time complexity, and boosts long-context performance, all while eliminating the need for explicit positional encoding. Through extensive scaling experiments, we demonstrate that our model exhibits a significantly lower irreducible loss compared to a strong YOCO baseline, indicating superior performance scalability under large-scale compute regimes. Our largest model enhanced with Differential Attention, Phi4-mini-Flash-Reasoning, achieves significantly better performance than Phi4-mini-Reasoning on reasoning tasks such as Math500, AIME24/25, and GPQA Diamond without any reinforcement learning, while delivering up to 10x higher decoding throughput on 2K-length prompts with 32K generation length under the vLLM inference framework. We release our training codebase on open-source data at https://github.com/microsoft/ArchScale.


Agent KB: Leveraging Cross-Domain Experience for Agentic Problem Solving

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI agent frameworks operate in isolation, forcing agents to rediscover solutions and repeat mistakes across different systems. Despite valuable problem-solving experiences accumulated by frameworks like smolagents, OpenHands, and OWL, this knowledge remains trapped within individual systems, preventing the emergence of collective intelligence. Current memory systems focus on individual agents or framework-specific demonstrations, failing to enable cross-architecture knowledge transfer. We introduce AGENT KB, a universal memory infrastructure enabling seamless experience sharing across heterogeneous agent frameworks without retraining. AGENT KB aggregates trajectories into a structured knowledge base and serves lightweight APIs. At inference time, hybrid retrieval operates through two stages: planning seeds agents with cross-domain workflows, while feedback applies targeted diagnostic fixes. A disagreement gate ensures retrieved knowledge enhances rather than disrupts reasoning, addressing knowledge interference in cross-framework transfer. We validate AGENT KB across major frameworks on GAIA, Humanity's Last Exam, GPQA, and SWE-bench. Results show substantial improvements across diverse model families: compared to baseline pass@1, smolagents with AGENT KB achieve up to 18.7pp gains at pass@3 (55.2% -> 73.9%), while OpenHands improves 4.0pp on SWE-bench pass@1 (24.3% -> 28.3%). Similar improvements are observed across all base model families. Ablations confirm that hybrid retrieval and feedback stages are essential, with automatically generated experiences matching manual curation. This establishes the foundation for collective agent intelligence through shared memory infrastructures.


Rethinking and Exploring String-Based Malware Family Classification in the Era of LLMs and RAG

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Malware family classification aims to identify the specific family (e.g., GuLoader or BitRAT) a malware sample may belong to, in contrast to malware detection or sample classification, which only predicts a Yes/No outcome. Accurate family identification can greatly facilitate automated sample labeling and understanding on crowdsourced malware analysis platforms such as VirusTotal and MalwareBazaar, which generate vast amounts of data daily. In this paper, we explore and assess the feasibility of using traditional binary string features for family classification in the new era of large language models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Specifically, we investigate howFamily-Specific String (FSS) features can be utilized in a manner similar to RAG to facilitate family classification. To this end, we develop a curated evaluation framework covering 4,347 samples from 67 malware families, extract and analyze over 25 million strings, and conduct detailed ablation studies to assess the impact of different design choices in four major modules, with each providing a relative improvement ranging from 8.1% to 120%.


MPX: Mixed Precision Training for JAX

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Mixed-precision training has emerged as an indispensable tool for enhancing the efficiency of neural network training in recent years. Concurrently, JAX has grown in popularity as a versatile machine learning toolbox. However, it currently lacks robust support for mixed-precision training. We propose MPX, a mixed-precision training toolbox for JAX that simplifies and accelerates the training of large-scale neural networks while preserving model accuracy. MPX seamlessly integrates with popular toolboxes such as Equinox and Flax, allowing users to convert full-precision pipelines to mixed-precision versions with minimal modifications. By casting both inputs and outputs to half precision, and introducing a dynamic loss-scaling mechanism, MPX alleviates issues like gradient underflow and overflow that commonly arise in half precision computations. Its design inherits critical features from JAX's type-promotion behavior, ensuring that operations take place in the correct precision and allowing for selective enforcement of full precision where needed (e.g., sums, means, or softmax). MPX further provides wrappers for automatic creation and management of mixed-precision gradients and optimizers, enabling straightforward integration into existing JAX training pipelines. MPX's source code, documentation, and usage examples are available at github.com/Data-Science-in-Mechanical-Engineering/mixed_precision_for_JAX .


Deep Learning Atmospheric Models Reliably Simulate Out-of-Sample Land Heat and Cold Wave Frequencies

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Deep learning (DL)-based general circulation models (GCMs) are emerging as fast simulators, yet their ability to replicate extreme events outside their training range remains unknown. Here, we evaluate two such models -- the hybrid Neural General Circulation Model (NGCM) and purely data-driven Deep Learning Earth System Model (DL\textit{ESy}M) -- against a conventional high-resolution land-atmosphere model (HiRAM) in simulating land heatwaves and coldwaves. All models are forced with observed sea surface temperatures and sea ice over 1900-2020, focusing on the out-of-sample early-20th-century period (1900-1960). Both DL models generalize successfully to unseen climate conditions, broadly reproducing the frequency and spatial patterns of heatwave and cold wave events during 1900-1960 with skill comparable to HiRAM. An exception is over portions of North Asia and North America, where all models perform poorly during 1940-1960. Due to excessive temperature autocorrelation, DL\textit{ESy}M tends to overestimate heatwave and cold wave frequencies, whereas the physics-DL hybrid NGCM exhibits persistence more similar to HiRAM.


BLaST: High Performance Inference and Pretraining using BLock Sparse Transformers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The energy consumption of large-scale ML models is dominated by data movement, shuffling billions of parameters across memory hierarchies and data centers. Sparsification offers a principled way to mitigate these costs by pruning redundant weights and activations, thereby reducing data movement. Effective sparsification to prune redundant parameters is still challenging: existing methods incur significant accuracy degradation, performance overhead, or both. We introduce (Bl)ock (a)nd (S)parse (T)ransformers (BLaST), a general, robust, and reliable method for sparsification, applicable to linear layers in all settings. Our method iteratively sparsifies weight matrices into a block sparsity pattern suitable for efficient sparse matrix-matrix (SpMM) multiplication. BLaST achieves up to 95% sparsity in MLP weights with negligible accuracy loss (majority <2.25%). We show a 2.2x inference speedup for Llama 3.2 with 16 GPUs, and up to 4.45x reduction in inference memory footprint resulting in a 2.9x reduction in GPU setup and operating costs.


ARF-RLHF: Adaptive Reward-Following for RLHF through Emotion-Driven Self-Supervision and Trace-Biased Dynamic Optimization

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Current RLHF methods such as PPO and DPO typically reduce human preferences to binary labels, which are costly to obtain and too coarse to reflect individual variation. We observe that expressions of satisfaction and dissatisfaction follow stable linguistic patterns across users, indicating that more informative supervisory signals can be extracted from free-form feedback. Building on this insight, we introduce Adaptive Reward-Following (ARF), which converts natural feedback into continuous preference trajectories and optimizes them using the novel TraceBias algorithm. Across diverse LLMs and preference domains, ARF consistently outperforms PPO and DPO, improving alignment by up to 7.6%. Our results demonstrate that continuous reward modeling provides a scalable path toward personalized and theoretically grounded RLHF.


Echo State Transformer: Attention Over Finite Memories

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While Large Language Models and their underlying Transformer architecture are remarkably efficient, they do not reflect how our brain processes and learns a diversity of cognitive tasks such as language and working memory. Furthermore, sequential data processing with Transformers encounters a fundamental barrier: quadratic complexity growth with sequence length. Motivated by these limitations, our ambition is to create more efficient models that are less reliant on intensive computations. We introduce Echo State Transformers (EST), a hybrid architecture that elegantly resolves this challenge while demonstrating exceptional performance in classification and detection tasks. EST integrates the Transformer attention mechanisms with principles from Reservoir Computing to create a fixed-size window distributed memory system. Drawing inspiration from Echo State Networks, the most prominent instance of the Reservoir Computing paradigm, our approach leverages reservoirs (random recurrent networks) as a lightweight and efficient memory. Our architecture integrates a new module called ''Working Memory'' based on several reservoirs working in parallel. These reservoirs work as independent working memory units with distinct internal dynamics. A novelty here is that the classical reservoir hyperparameters, controlling the dynamics, are now trained. Thus, the EST dynamically adapts the reservoir memory/non-linearity trade-off. Thanks to these working memory units, EST achieves constant computational complexity at each processing step, effectively breaking the quadratic scaling problem of standard Transformers. We evaluate ESTs on a recent challenging timeseries benchmark: the Time Series Library, which comprises 69 tasks across five categories. Results show that ESTs ranks first overall in two of five categories, outperforming strong state-of-the-art baselines on classification and anomaly detection tasks, while remaining competitive on short-term forecasting. These results position ESTs as a compelling alternative for time-series classification and anomaly detection, and a practical complement to transformer-style models in applications that prioritize robust representations and sensitive event detection.


Wearable Sensor-Based IoT XAI Framework for Predicting Freezing of Gait in Parkinsons Disease

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This research discusses the critical need for early detection and treatment for early prediction of Freezing of Gaits (FOG) utilizing a wearable sensor technology powered with LoRa communication. The system consisted of an Esp-32 microcontroller, in which the trained model is utilized utilizing the Micromlgen Python library. The research investigates accurate FOG classification based on pertinent clinical data by utilizing machine learning (ML) algorithms like Catboost, XGBoost, and Extra Tree classifiers. The XGBoost could classify with approximately 97% accuracy, along with 96% for the catboost and 90% for the Extra Trees Classifier model. The SHAP analysis interpretability shows that GYR SI degree is the most affecting factor in the prediction of the diseases. These results show the possibility of monitoring and identifying the affected person with tracking location on GPS and providing aid as an assistive technology for aiding the affected. The developed sensor-based technology has great potential for real-world problem solving in the field of healthcare and biomedical technology enhancements.