Large Language Model
$D^2LoRA$: Data-Driven LoRA Initialization for Low Resource Tasks
SeraJ, Javad, Mohajeri, Mohammad Mahdi, Dousti, Mohammad Javad
Tuning large language models is essential for optimizing their performance across diverse applications, particularly in scenarios with limited data availability. Tuning large language models in scarce data scenarios is crucial, particularly given that the convergence speed of the LoRA method is lower than that of full fine-tuning. In this paper, we present an analysis of post-training methods including Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and Odds Ratio Preference Optimization (ORPO) within the context of task-specific learning using the LoRA method. Next we introduce $D^2LoRA$, a data-driven approach for initializing LoRA metrics that enhances training efficiency, especially in limited-data settings. Our experiments compare $D^2LoRA$ with vanilla LoRA in terms of performance and catastrophic forgetting under extremely data-constrained conditions. The results demonstrate that $D^2LoRA$ achieves a 1% improvement GSM8K benchmark and a 2-point improvement in ROUGE score in title generation tasks. $D^2LoRA$ facilitates the adaptation of LLMs to multiple tasks even when task-specific data is scarce, thereby reducing training expenses and offering data cost.
PG-SAM: Prior-Guided SAM with Medical for Multi-organ Segmentation
Zhong, Yiheng, Luo, Zihong, Liu, Chengzhi, Tang, Feilong, Peng, Zelin, Hu, Ming, Hu, Yingzhen, Su, Jionglong, Geand, Zongyuan, Razzak, Imran
Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrates powerful zero-shot capabilities; however, its accuracy and robustness significantly decrease when applied to medical image segmentation. Existing methods address this issue through modality fusion, integrating textual and image information to provide more detailed priors. In this study, we argue that the granularity of text and the domain gap affect the accuracy of the priors. Furthermore, the discrepancy between high-level abstract semantics and pixel-level boundary details in images can introduce noise into the fusion process. To address this, we propose Prior-Guided SAM (PG-SAM), which employs a fine-grained modality prior aligner to leverage specialized medical knowledge for better modality alignment. The core of our method lies in efficiently addressing the domain gap with fine-grained text from a medical LLM. Meanwhile, it also enhances the priors' quality after modality alignment, ensuring more accurate segmentation. In addition, our decoder enhances the model's expressive capabilities through multi-level feature fusion and iterative mask optimizer operations, supporting unprompted learning. We also propose a unified pipeline that effectively supplies high-quality semantic information to SAM. Extensive experiments on the Synapse dataset demonstrate that the proposed PG-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our anonymous code is released at https://github.com/logan-0623/PG-SAM.
(G)I-DLE: Generative Inference via Distribution-preserving Logit Exclusion with KL Divergence Minimization for Constrained Decoding
We propose (G)I-DLE, a new approach to constrained decoding that leverages KL divergence minimization to preserve the intrinsic conditional probability distribution of autoregressive language models while excluding undesirable tokens. Unlike conventional methods that naively set banned tokens' logits to $-\infty$, which can distort the conversion from raw logits to posterior probabilities and increase output variance, (G)I-DLE re-normalizes the allowed token probabilities to minimize such distortion. We validate our method on the K2-Eval dataset, specifically designed to assess Korean language fluency, logical reasoning, and cultural appropriateness. Experimental results on Qwen2.5 models (ranging from 1.5B to 14B) demonstrate that G-IDLE not only boosts mean evaluation scores but also substantially reduces the variance of output quality.
Experience Retrieval-Augmentation with Electronic Health Records Enables Accurate Discharge QA
Ou, Justice, Huang, Tinglin, Zhao, Yilun, Yu, Ziyang, Lu, Peiqing, Ying, Rex
To improve the reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs) in clinical applications, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is extensively applied to provide factual medical knowledge. However, beyond general medical knowledge from open-ended datasets, clinical case-based knowledge is also critical for effective medical reasoning, as it provides context grounded in real-world patient experiences. Motivated by this, we propose Experience Retrieval Augmentation - ExpRAG framework based on Electronic Health Record (EHR), aiming to offer the relevant context from other patients' discharge reports. ExpRAG performs retrieval through a coarse-to-fine process, utilizing an EHR-based report ranker to efficiently identify similar patients, followed by an experience retriever to extract task-relevant content for enhanced medical reasoning. To evaluate ExpRAG, we introduce DischargeQA, a clinical QA dataset with 1,280 discharge-related questions across diagnosis, medication, and instruction tasks. Each problem is generated using EHR data to ensure realistic and challenging scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that ExpRAG consistently outperforms a text-based ranker, achieving an average relative improvement of 5.2%, highlighting the importance of case-based knowledge for medical reasoning.
Bridging Writing Manner Gap in Visual Instruction Tuning by Creating LLM-aligned Instructions
Jing, Dong, Fei, Nanyi, Lu, Zhiwu
In the realm of Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs), the instruction quality during the visual instruction tuning stage significantly influences the performance of modality alignment. In this paper, we assess the instruction quality from a unique perspective termed \textbf{Writing Manner}, which encompasses the selection of vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure to convey specific semantics. We argue that there exists a substantial writing manner gap between the visual instructions and the base Large Language Models (LLMs) within LMMs. This gap forces the pre-trained base LLMs to deviate from their original writing styles, leading to capability degradation of both base LLMs and LMMs. To bridge the writing manner gap while preserving the original semantics, we propose directly leveraging the base LLM to align the writing manner of soft-format visual instructions with that of the base LLM itself, resulting in novel LLM-aligned instructions. The manual writing manner evaluation results demonstrate that our approach successfully minimizes the writing manner gap. By utilizing LLM-aligned instructions, the baseline models LLaVA-7B and QwenVL demonstrate enhanced resistance to hallucinations and non-trivial comprehensive improvements across all $15$ visual and language benchmarks.
Surgical Action Planning with Large Language Models
Xu, Mengya, Huang, Zhongzhen, Zhang, Jie, Zhang, Xiaofan, Dou, Qi
In robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery, we introduce the Surgical Action Planning (SAP) task, which generates future action plans from visual inputs to address the absence of intraoperative predictive planning in current intelligent applications. SAP shows great potential for enhancing intraoperative guidance and automating procedures. However, it faces challenges such as understanding instrument-action relationships and tracking surgical progress. Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in understanding surgical video content but remain underexplored for predictive decision-making in SAP, as they focus mainly on retrospective analysis. Challenges like data privacy, computational demands, and modality-specific constraints further highlight significant research gaps. To tackle these challenges, we introduce LLM-SAP, a Large Language Models-based Surgical Action Planning framework that predicts future actions and generates text responses by interpreting natural language prompts of surgical goals. The text responses potentially support surgical education, intraoperative decision-making, procedure documentation, and skill analysis. LLM-SAP integrates two novel modules: the Near-History Focus Memory Module (NHF-MM) for modeling historical states and the prompts factory for action planning. We evaluate LLM-SAP on our constructed CholecT50-SAP dataset using models like Qwen2.5 and Qwen2-VL, demonstrating its effectiveness in next-action prediction. Pre-trained LLMs are tested zero-shot, and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with LoRA is implemented to address data privacy concerns. Our experiments show that Qwen2.5-72B-SFT surpasses Qwen2.5-72B with a 19.3% higher accuracy.
LakotaBERT: A Transformer-based Model for Low Resource Lakota Language
Parankusham, Kanishka, Rizk, Rodrigue, Santosh, KC
Lakota, a critically endangered language of the Sioux people in North America, faces significant challenges due to declining fluency among younger generations. This paper introduces LakotaBERT, the first large language model (LLM) tailored for Lakota, aiming to support language revitalization efforts. Our research has two primary objectives: (1) to create a comprehensive Lakota language corpus and (2) to develop a customized LLM for Lakota. We compiled a diverse corpus of 105K sentences in Lakota, English, and parallel texts from various sources, such as books and websites, emphasizing the cultural significance and historical context of the Lakota language. Utilizing the RoBERTa architecture, we pre-trained our model and conducted comparative evaluations against established models such as RoBERTa, BERT, and multilingual BERT. Initial results demonstrate a masked language modeling accuracy of 51% with a single ground truth assumption, showcasing performance comparable to that of English-based models. We also evaluated the model using additional metrics, such as precision and F1 score, to provide a comprehensive assessment of its capabilities. By integrating AI and linguistic methodologies, we aspire to enhance linguistic diversity and cultural resilience, setting a valuable precedent for leveraging technology in the revitalization of other endangered indigenous languages.
Long Is More Important Than Difficult for Training Reasoning Models
Shen, Si, Huang, Fei, Zhao, Zhixiao, Liu, Chang, Zheng, Tiansheng, Zhu, Danhao
Difficult problems, which often result in long reasoning traces, are widely recognized as key factors for enhancing the performance of reasoning models. However, such high-challenge problems are scarce, limiting the size of available datasets. In this paper, we propose a simple method to decouple the reliance on problem difficulty. First, we empirically demonstrate that reasoning length, rather than problem difficulty, primarily influences the performance of trained models. Second, we identify a scaling law on reasoning length, showing that model performance increases in a log-linear fashion as the reasoning data length grows. Finally, we introduce a straightforward technique to generate reasoning data of arbitrary length, and show that synthesized data is effective for training reasoning models. After fine-tuning the Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct language model on our Long1K dataset, we present our model, Long1K-32B, which achieves remarkable performance with only 1,000 training samples, achieving 95.6\% accuracy on MATH, and 71.1\% on GPQA outperforming DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B. The model, code, and dataset are all open-sourced, available at https://huggingface.co/ZTss/LONG1.
Debiasing Multimodal Large Language Models via Noise-Aware Preference Optimization
Zhang, Zefeng, Tang, Hengzhu, Sheng, Jiawei, Zhang, Zhenyu, Ren, Yiming, Li, Zhenyang, Yin, Dawei, Ma, Duohe, Liu, Tingwen
Multimodal Large Language Models excel in various tasks, yet often struggle with modality bias, where the model tends to rely heavily on a single modality and overlook critical information in other modalities, which leads to incorrect focus and generating irrelevant responses. In this paper, we propose using the paradigm of preference optimization to solve the modality bias problem, including RLAIFVBias, a debiased preference optimization dataset, and a Noise Aware Preference Optimization algorithm. Specifically, we first construct the dataset by introducing perturbations to reduce the informational content of certain modalities, compelling the model to rely on a specific modality when generating negative responses. To address the inevitable noise in automatically constructed data, we combine the noise robust Mean Absolute Error with the Binary Cross Entropy in Direct Preference Optimization by a negative Box Cox transformation, and dynamically adjust the algorithm noise robustness based on the evaluated noise levels in the data. Extensive experiments validate our approach, demonstrating not only its effectiveness in mitigating modality bias but also its significant role in minimizing hallucinations.
SLIDE: Sliding Localized Information for Document Extraction
Singh, Divyansh, Martinez, Manuel Nunez, Dorr, Bonnie J., Galunder, Sonja Schmer
Constructing accurate knowledge graphs from long texts and low-resource languages is challenging, as large language models (LLMs) experience degraded performance with longer input chunks. This problem is amplified in low-resource settings where data scarcity hinders accurate entity and relationship extraction. Contextual retrieval methods, while improving retrieval accuracy, struggle with long documents. They truncate critical information in texts exceeding maximum context lengths of LLMs, significantly limiting knowledge graph construction. We introduce SLIDE (Sliding Localized Information for Document Extraction), a chunking method that processes long documents by generating local context through overlapping windows. SLIDE ensures that essential contextual information is retained, enhancing knowledge graph extraction from documents exceeding LLM context limits. It significantly improves GraphRAG performance, achieving a 24% increase in entity extraction and a 39% improvement in relationship extraction for English. For Afrikaans, a low-resource language, SLIDE achieves a 49% increase in entity extraction and an 82% improvement in relationship extraction. Furthermore, it improves upon state-of-the-art in question-answering metrics such as comprehensiveness, diversity and empowerment, demonstrating its effectiveness in multilingual and resource-constrained settings.