Deep Learning
Relationship Detection on Tabular Data Using Statistical Analysis and Large Language Models
Koletsis, Panagiotis, Panagiotopoulos, Christos, Papadopoulos, Georgios Th., Efthymiou, Vasilis
Over the past few years, table interpretation tasks have made significant progress due to their importance and the introduction of new technologies and benchmarks in the field. This work experiments with a hybrid approach for detecting relationships among columns of unlabeled tabular data, using a Knowledge Graph (KG) as a reference point, a task known as CPA. This approach leverages large language models (LLMs) while employing statistical analysis to reduce the search space of potential KG relations. The main modules of this approach for reducing the search space are domain and range constraints detection, as well as relation co-appearance analysis. The experimental evaluation on two benchmark datasets provided by the SemTab challenge assesses the influence of each module and the effectiveness of different state-of-the-art LLMs at various levels of quantization. The experiments were performed, as well as at different prompting techniques. The proposed methodology, which is publicly available on github, proved to be competitive with state-of-the-art approaches on these datasets.
A Closer Look at Multimodal Representation Collapse
Chaudhuri, Abhra, Dutta, Anjan, Bui, Tu, Georgescu, Serban
We aim to develop a fundamental understanding of modality collapse, a recently observed empirical phenomenon wherein models trained for multimodal fusion tend to rely only on a subset of the modalities, ignoring the rest. We show that modality collapse happens when noisy features from one modality are entangled, via a shared set of neurons in the fusion head, with predictive features from another, effectively masking out positive contributions from the predictive features of the former modality and leading to its collapse. We further prove that cross-modal knowledge distillation implicitly disentangles such representations by freeing up rank bottlenecks in the student encoder, denoising the fusion-head outputs without negatively impacting the predictive features from either modality. Based on the above findings, we propose an algorithm that prevents modality collapse through explicit basis reallocation, with applications in dealing with missing modalities. Extensive experiments on multiple multimodal benchmarks validate our theoretical claims. Project page: https://abhrac.github.io/mmcollapse/.
JELAI: Integrating AI and Learning Analytics in Jupyter Notebooks
Torre, Manuel Valle, van der Velden, Thom, Specht, Marcus, Oertel, Catharine
Generative AI offers potential for educational support, but often lacks pedagogical grounding and awareness of the student's learning context. Furthermore, researching student interactions with these tools within authentic learning environments remains challenging. To address this, we present JELAI, an open-source platform architecture designed to integrate fine-grained Learning Analytics (LA) with Large Language Model (LLM)-based tutoring directly within a Jupyter Notebook environment. JELAI employs a modular, containerized design featuring JupyterLab extensions for telemetry and chat, alongside a central mid-dleware handling LA processing and context-aware LLM prompt enrichment. This architecture enables the capture of integrated code interaction and chat data, facilitating real-time, context-sensitive AI scaffolding and research into student behaviour. We describe the system's design, implementation, and demonstrate its feasibility through system performance benchmarks and two proof-of-concept use cases illustrating its capabilities for logging multi-modal data, analysing help-seeking patterns, and supporting A/B testing of AI configurations. JELAI's primary contribution is its technical framework, providing a flexible tool for researchers and educators to develop, deploy, and study LA-informed AI tutoring within the widely used Jupyter ecosystem.
Rethinking the Role of Prompting Strategies in LLM Test-Time Scaling: A Perspective of Probability Theory
Liu, Yexiang, Li, Zekun, Fang, Zhi, Xu, Nan, He, Ran, Tan, Tieniu
Recently, scaling test-time compute on Large Language Models (LLM) has garnered wide attention. However, there has been limited investigation of how various reasoning prompting strategies perform as scaling. In this paper, we focus on a standard and realistic scaling setting: majority voting. We systematically conduct experiments on 6 LLMs $\times$ 8 prompting strategies $\times$ 6 benchmarks. Experiment results consistently show that as the sampling time and computational overhead increase, complicated prompting strategies with superior initial performance gradually fall behind simple Chain-of-Thought. We analyze this phenomenon and provide theoretical proofs. Additionally, we propose a probabilistic method to efficiently predict scaling performance and identify the best prompting strategy under large sampling times, eliminating the need for resource-intensive inference processes in practical applications. Furthermore, we introduce two ways derived from our theoretical analysis to significantly improve the scaling performance. We hope that our research can promote to re-examine the role of complicated prompting, unleash the potential of simple prompting strategies, and provide new insights for enhancing test-time scaling performance. Code is available at https://github.com/MraDonkey/rethinking_prompting.
TokLIP: Marry Visual Tokens to CLIP for Multimodal Comprehension and Generation
Lin, Haokun, Wang, Teng, Ge, Yixiao, Ge, Yuying, Lu, Zhichao, Wei, Ying, Zhang, Qingfu, Sun, Zhenan, Shan, Ying
Pioneering token-based works such as Chameleon and Emu3 have established a foundation for multimodal unification but face challenges of high training computational overhead and limited comprehension performance due to a lack of high-level semantics. In this paper, we introduce TokLIP, a visual tokenizer that enhances comprehension by semanticizing vector-quantized (VQ) tokens and incorporating CLIP-level semantics while enabling end-to-end multimodal autoregressive training with standard VQ tokens. TokLIP integrates a low-level discrete VQ tokenizer with a ViT-based token encoder to capture high-level continuous semantics. Unlike previous approaches (e.g., VILA-U) that discretize high-level features, TokLIP disentangles training objectives for comprehension and generation, allowing the direct application of advanced VQ tokenizers without the need for tailored quantization operations. Our empirical results demonstrate that TokLIP achieves exceptional data efficiency, empowering visual tokens with high-level semantic understanding while enhancing low-level generative capacity, making it well-suited for autoregressive Transformers in both comprehension and generation tasks. The code and models are available at https://github.com/TencentARC/TokLIP.
Sparse Training from Random Initialization: Aligning Lottery Ticket Masks using Weight Symmetry
Adnan, Mohammed, Jain, Rohan, Sharma, Ekansh, Krishnan, Rahul G., Ioannou, Yani
The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) suggests there exists a sparse LTH mask and weights that achieve the same generalization performance as the dense model while using significantly fewer parameters. However, finding a LTH solution is computationally expensive, and a LTH sparsity mask does not generalize to other random weight initializations. Recent work has suggested that neural networks trained from random initialization find solutions within the same basin modulo permutation, and proposes a method to align trained models within the same loss basin. We hypothesize that misalignment of basins is the reason why LTH masks do not generalize to new random initializations and propose permuting the LTH mask to align with the new optimization basin when performing sparse training from a different random init. We empirically show a significant increase in generalization when sparse training from random initialization with the permuted mask as compared to using the non-permuted LTH mask, on multiple datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet) and models (VGG11, ResNet20 and ResNet50).
Convolutional Autoencoders for Data Compression and Anomaly Detection in Small Satellite Technologies
Jayeprokash, Dishanand, Gonski, Julia
Small satellite technologies have enhanced the potential and feasibility of geodesic missions, through simplification of design and decreased costs allowing for more frequent launches. On-satellite data acquisition systems can benefit from the implementation of machine learning (ML), for better performance and greater efficiency on tasks such as image processing or feature extraction. This work presents convolutional autoencoders for implementation on the payload of small satellites, designed to achieve dual functionality of data compression for more efficient off-satellite transmission, and at-source anomaly detection to inform satellite data-taking. This capability is demonstrated for a use case of disaster monitoring using aerial image datasets of the African continent, offering avenues for both novel ML-based approaches in small satellite applications along with the expansion of space technology and artificial intelligence in Africa.
EmbodiedAgent: A Scalable Hierarchical Approach to Overcome Practical Challenge in Multi-Robot Control
Wan, Hanwen, Chen, Yifei, Deng, Yixuan, Wei, Zeyu, Li, Dongrui, Lin, Zexin, Wu, Donghao, Cheng, Jiu, Ji, Xiaoqiang
In response to these limitations, this work introduces a hierarchical Embodied system with an Agent-based planner, named EmbodiedAgent. EmbodiedAgent leverages a next-action prediction paradigm to establish a heterogeneous multi-robot control system. The core agent generates a single action and its corresponding arguments per inference, terminating upon receiving an end-of-planning signal, thus ensuring a controlled and concise execution process. To address the aforementioned challenges, we enhance the planner's robustness and generalizability through supervised fine-tuning. Extended from previous work MultiPlan [4], we present MultiPlan+, a large-scale dataset comprising 100 scenarios with over 18,000 tasks, enriched with a subset of impractical cases to mitigate hallucinations. Additionally, we develop an agent based on a fine-tuned language model equipped with function calling capabilities and structured memory. Specifically, robot skills, termination signals, and error signals related to impractical cases are encapsulated as tools, while planning history is organized within the structured memory. For low-level execution, we employ specialized policies trained on individual basic tasks to ensure reliable and robust performance. Furthermore, we propose a comprehensive R obot Planning A ssessment S chema ( RPAS), which moves beyond error-type diagnostics to emphasize stratified success rates assessed through both human evaluation and automated grading.
Pr$ฮตฮต$mpt: Sanitizing Sensitive Prompts for LLMs
Chowdhury, Amrita Roy, Glukhov, David, Anshumaan, Divyam, Chalasani, Prasad, Papernot, Nicolas, Jha, Somesh, Bellare, Mihir
The recent advent of large language models (LLMs) have brought forth a fresh set of challenges for protecting users' data privacy. LLMs and their APIs present significant privacy concerns at inference time, which are fundamentally distinct from the well-documented risks of training data memorization [19, 50, 64, 98]. While the potential adversary in training data scenarios could be any API user, the threat during inference primarily stems from the model owner--typically the organization hosting the LLM. This inference stage poses a significant privacy risk, as prompts in natural language may include various types of sensitive information, from personally identifiable data like SSNs or credit card numbers to personal health or financial details. The ensuing privacy threat is exacerbated with the growing use of in-context learning, that involves presenting the LLM with a few training examples as part of the prompt during inference [17].
L3AC: Towards a Lightweight and Lossless Audio Codec
Zhai, Linwei, Ding, Han, Zhao, Cui, wang, fei, Wang, Ge, Zhi, Wang, Xi, Wei
Neural audio codecs have recently gained traction for their ability to compress high-fidelity audio and provide discrete tokens for generative modeling. However, leading approaches often rely on resource-intensive models and complex multi-quantizer architectures, limiting their practicality in real-world applications. In this work, we introduce L3AC, a lightweight neural audio codec that addresses these challenges by leveraging a single quantizer and a highly efficient architecture. To enhance reconstruction fidelity while minimizing model complexity, L3AC explores streamlined convolutional networks and local Transformer modules, alongside TConv--a novel structure designed to capture acoustic variations across multiple temporal scales. Despite its compact design, extensive experiments across diverse datasets demonstrate that L3AC matches or exceeds the reconstruction quality of leading codecs while reducing computational overhead by an order of magnitude. The single-quantizer design further enhances its adaptability for downstream tasks. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/zhai-lw/L3AC.