Deep Learning
Distribution Prompting: Understanding the Expressivity of Language Models Through the Next-Token Distributions They Can Produce
Wang, Haojin, Zhu, Zining, Shi, Freda
Autoregressive neural language models (LMs) generate a probability distribution over tokens at each time step given a prompt. In this work, we attempt to systematically understand the probability distributions that LMs can produce, showing that some distributions are significantly harder to elicit than others. Specifically, for any target next-token distribution over the vocabulary, we attempt to find a prompt that induces the LM to output a distribution as close as possible to the target, using either soft or hard gradient-based prompt tuning. We find that (1) in general, distributions with very low or very high entropy are easier to approximate than those with moderate entropy; (2) among distributions with the same entropy, those containing ''outlier tokens'' are easier to approximate; (3) target distributions generated by LMs -- even LMs with different tokenizers -- are easier to approximate than randomly chosen targets. These results offer insights into the expressiveness of LMs and the challenges of using them as probability distribution proposers.
EAMET: Robust Massive Model Editing via Embedding Alignment Optimization
Dai, Yanbo, Ji, Zhenlan, Li, Zongjie, Wang, Shuai
Model editing techniques are essential for efficiently updating knowledge in large language models (LLMs). However, the effectiveness of existing approaches degrades in massive editing scenarios, particularly when evaluated with practical metrics. Their robustness is also limited in context-rich settings or when editing multiple facts of the same subject simultaneously. We attribute these failures to the embedding misalignment among knowledge items, which undermines editing reliability at scale. To address this, we propose EAMET (Embedding Alignment Model Editing in Transformers), which addresses this issue by aligning the space of key and residual embeddings. Extensive experiments across six LLMs and three datasets demonstrate that EAMET consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving about 90\% editing efficacy when editing 10k facts. Codes and datasets are publicly available at https://ybdai7.github.io/eamet-page/.
Creating General User Models from Computer Use
Shaikh, Omar, Sapkota, Shardul, Rizvi, Shan, Horvitz, Eric, Park, Joon Sung, Yang, Diyi, Bernstein, Michael S.
Human-computer interaction has long imagined technology that understands us-from our preferences and habits, to the timing and purpose of our everyday actions. Yet current user models remain fragmented, narrowly tailored to specific apps, and incapable of the flexible reasoning required to fulfill these visions. This paper presents an architecture for a general user model (GUM) that learns about you by observing any interaction you have with your computer. The GUM takes as input any unstructured observation of a user (e.g., device screenshots) and constructs confidence-weighted propositions that capture user knowledge and preferences. GUMs can infer that a user is preparing for a wedding they're attending from messages with a friend. Or recognize that a user is struggling with a collaborator's feedback on a draft by observing multiple stalled edits and a switch to reading related work. GUMs introduce an architecture that infers new propositions about a user from multimodal observations, retrieves related propositions for context, and continuously revises existing propositions. To illustrate the breadth of applications that GUMs enable, we demonstrate how they augment chat-based assistants with context, manage OS notifications to selectively surface important information, and enable interactive agents that adapt to preferences across apps. We also instantiate proactive assistants (GUMBOs) that discover and execute useful suggestions on a user's behalf using their GUM. In our evaluations, we find that GUMs make calibrated and accurate inferences about users, and that assistants built on GUMs proactively identify and perform actions that users wouldn't think to request explicitly. Altogether, GUMs introduce methods that leverage multimodal models to understand unstructured context, enabling long-standing visions of HCI and entirely new interactive systems that anticipate user needs.
LCES: Zero-shot Automated Essay Scoring via Pairwise Comparisons Using Large Language Models
Shibata, Takumi, Miyamura, Yuichi
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled zero-shot automated essay scoring (AES), providing a promising way to reduce the cost and effort of essay scoring in comparison with manual grading. However, most existing zero-shot approaches rely on LLMs to directly generate absolute scores, which often diverge from human evaluations owing to model biases and inconsistent scoring. To address these limitations, we propose LLM-based Comparative Essay Scoring (LCES), a method that formulates AES as a pairwise comparison task. Specifically, we instruct LLMs to judge which of two essays is better, collect many such comparisons, and convert them into continuous scores. Considering that the number of possible comparisons grows quadratically with the number of essays, we improve scalability by employing RankNet to efficiently transform LLM preferences into scalar scores. Experiments using AES benchmark datasets show that LCES outperforms conventional zero-shot methods in accuracy while maintaining computational efficiency. Moreover, LCES is robust across different LLM backbones, highlighting its applicability to real-world zero-shot AES.
GuidedQuant: Large Language Model Quantization via Exploiting End Loss Guidance
Kim, Jinuk, Halabi, Marwa El, Park, Wonpyo, Schaefer, Clemens JS, Lee, Deokjae, Park, Yeonhong, Lee, Jae W., Song, Hyun Oh
Post-training quantization is a key technique for reducing the memory and inference latency of large language models by quantizing weights and activations without requiring retraining. However, existing methods either (1) fail to account for the varying importance of hidden features to the end loss or, when incorporating end loss, (2) neglect the critical interactions between model weights. To address these limitations, we propose GuidedQuant, a novel quantization approach that integrates gradient information from the end loss into the quantization objective while preserving cross-weight dependencies within output channels. GuidedQuant consistently boosts the performance of state-of-the-art quantization methods across weight-only scalar, weight-only vector, and weight-and-activation quantization. Additionally, we introduce a novel non-uniform scalar quantization algorithm, which is guaranteed to monotonically decrease the quantization objective value, and outperforms existing methods in this category. We release the code at https://github.com/snu-mllab/GuidedQuant.
CodeSSM: Towards State Space Models for Code Understanding
Verma, Shweta, Anand, Abhinav, Mezini, Mira
Although transformers dominate many code-specific tasks, they have significant limitations. This paper explores State Space Models (SSMs) as a promising alternative for code understanding tasks such as retrieval, classification, and clone detection. We introduce CodeSSM, the first SSM-based model trained on code corpora to assess its effectiveness. Our results demonstrate that SSMs are more sample-efficient and can extrapolate to longer contexts beyond the pretraining length. Extensive experiments show that SSMs offer a viable alternative to transformers, addressing several their limitations. Additionally, CodeSSM reduces memory usage by up to 64\% compared to transformers at a context length of 2048, with greater savings as context length grows.
KoACD: The First Korean Adolescent Dataset for Cognitive Distortion Analysis via Role-Switching Multi-LLM Negotiation
Cognitive distortion refers to negative thinking patterns that can lead to mental health issues like depression and anxiety in adolescents. Previous studies using natural language processing (NLP) have focused mainly on small-scale adult datasets, with limited research on adolescents. This study introduces KoACD, the first large-scale dataset of cognitive distortions in Korean adolescents, containing 108,717 instances. We applied a multi-Large Language Model (LLM) negotiation method to refine distortion classification, enabling iterative feedback and role-switching between models to reduce bias and improve label consistency. In addition, we generated synthetic data using two approaches: cognitive clarification for textual clarity and cognitive balancing for diverse distortion representation. Validation through LLMs and expert evaluations showed that while LLMs classified distortions with explicit markers, they struggled with context-dependent reasoning, where human evaluators demonstrated higher accuracy. KoACD aims to enhance future research on cognitive distortion detection. The dataset and implementation details are publicly accessible.
A Simple Review of EEG Foundation Models: Datasets, Advancements and Future Perspectives
Lai, Junhong, Wei, Jiyu, Yao, Lin, Wang, Yueming
Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals play a crucial role in understanding brain activity and diagnosing neurological diseases. Because supervised EEG encoders are unable to learn robust EEG patterns and rely too heavily on expensive signal annotation, research has turned to general-purpose self-supervised EEG encoders, known as EEG-based models (EEG-FMs), to achieve robust and scalable EEG feature extraction. However, the readiness of early EEG-FMs for practical applications and the standards for long-term research progress remain unclear . Therefore, a systematic and comprehensive review of first-generation EEG-FMs is necessary to understand their current state-of-the-art and identify key directions for future EEG-FMs. T o this end, this study reviews 14 early EEG-FMs and provides a critical comprehensive analysis of their methodologies, empirical findings, and unaddressed research gaps. This review focuses on the latest developments in EEG-based models (EEG-FMs), which have shown great potential for processing and analyzing EEG data. We discuss various EEG-FMs, including their architectures, pretraining strategies, pretraining and downstream datasets, and other details. This review also highlights challenges and future directions in the field, aiming to provide a comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners interested in EEG analysis and related EEG-FM. EG is a non-invasive technique that records the electrical activity of the brain.
Survey of Video Diffusion Models: Foundations, Implementations, and Applications
Wang, Yimu, Liu, Xuye, Pang, Wei, Ma, Li, Yuan, Shuai, Debevec, Paul, Yu, Ning
Recent advances in diffusion models have revolutionized video generation, offering superior temporal consistency and visual quality compared to traditional generative adversarial networks-based approaches. While this emerging field shows tremendous promise in applications, it faces significant challenges in motion consistency, computational efficiency, and ethical considerations. This survey provides a comprehensive review of diffusion-based video generation, examining its evolution, technical foundations, and practical applications. We present a systematic taxonomy of current methodologies, analyze architectural innovations and optimization strategies, and investigate applications across low-level vision tasks such as denoising and super-resolution. Additionally, we explore the synergies between diffusion-based video generation and related domains, including video representation learning, question answering, and retrieval. Compared to the existing surveys (Lei et al., 2024a;b; Melnik et al., 2024; Cao et al., 2023; Xing et al., 2024c) which focus on specific aspects of video generation, such as human video synthesis (Lei et al., 2024a) or long-form content generation (Lei et al., 2024b), our work provides a broader, more updated, and more fine-grained perspective on diffusion-based approaches with a special section for evaluation metrics, industry solutions, and training engineering techniques in video generation. This survey serves as a foundational resource for researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of diffusion models and video generation, providing insights into both the theoretical frameworks and practical implementations that drive this rapidly evolving field. A structured list of re-These authors contributed equally to this work.
ScaleGNN: Towards Scalable Graph Neural Networks via Adaptive High-order Neighboring Feature Fusion
Li, Xiang, Qi, Jianpeng, Liu, Haobing, Cao, Yuan, Chao, Guoqing, Zhao, Zhongying, Dong, Junyu, Liu, Xinwang, Yu, Yanwei
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated impressive performance across diverse graph-based tasks by leveraging message passing to capture complex node relationships. However, when applied to large-scale real-world graphs, GNNs face two major challenges: First, it becomes increasingly difficult to ensure both scalability and efficiency, as the repeated aggregation of large neighborhoods leads to significant computational overhead; Second, the over-smoothing problem arises, where excessive or deep propagation makes node representations indistinguishable, severely hindering model expressiveness. To tackle these issues, we propose ScaleGNN, a novel framework that adaptively fuses multi-hop node features for both scalable and effective graph learning. First, we construct per-hop pure neighbor matrices that capture only the exclusive structural information at each hop, avoiding the redundancy of conventional aggregation. Then, an enhanced feature fusion strategy significantly balances low-order and high-order information, preserving both local detail and global correlations without incurring excessive complexity. To further reduce redundancy and over-smoothing, we introduce a Local Contribution Score (LCS)-based masking mechanism to filter out less relevant high-order neighbors, ensuring that only the most meaningful information is aggregated. In addition, learnable sparse constraints selectively integrate multi-hop valuable features, emphasizing the most informative high-order neighbors. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that ScaleGNN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art GNNs in both predictive accuracy and computational efficiency, highlighting its practical value for large-scale graph learning.