Large Language Model
The Canary's Echo: Auditing Privacy Risks of LLM-Generated Synthetic Text
Meeus, Matthieu, Wutschitz, Lukas, Zanella-Béguelin, Santiago, Tople, Shruti, Shokri, Reza
How much information about training samples can be gleaned from synthetic data generated by Large Language Models (LLMs)? Overlooking the subtleties of information flow in synthetic data generation pipelines can lead to a false sense of privacy. In this paper, we design membership inference attacks (MIAs) that target data used to fine-tune pre-trained LLMs that are then used to synthesize data, particularly when the adversary does not have access to the fine-tuned model but only to the synthetic data. We show that such data-based MIAs do significantly better than a random guess, meaning that synthetic data leaks information about the training data. Further, we find that canaries crafted to maximize vulnerability to model-based MIAs are sub-optimal for privacy auditing when only synthetic data is released. Such out-of-distribution canaries have limited influence on the model's output when prompted to generate useful, in-distribution synthetic data, which drastically reduces their vulnerability. To tackle this problem, we leverage the mechanics of auto-regressive models to design canaries with an in-distribution prefix and a high-perplexity suffix that leave detectable traces in synthetic data. This enhances the power of data-based MIAs and provides a better assessment of the privacy risks of releasing synthetic data generated by LLMs.
Sce2DriveX: A Generalized MLLM Framework for Scene-to-Drive Learning
Zhao, Rui, Yuan, Qirui, Li, Jinyu, Hu, Haofeng, Li, Yun, Zheng, Chengyuan, Gao, Fei
End-to-end autonomous driving, which directly maps raw sensor inputs to low-level vehicle controls, is an important part of Embodied AI. Despite successes in applying Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for high-level traffic scene semantic understanding, it remains challenging to effectively translate these conceptual semantics understandings into low-level motion control commands and achieve generalization and consensus in cross-scene driving. We introduce Sce2DriveX, a human-like driving chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning MLLM framework. Sce2DriveX utilizes multimodal joint learning from local scene videos and global BEV maps to deeply understand long-range spatiotemporal relationships and road topology, enhancing its comprehensive perception and reasoning capabilities in 3D dynamic/static scenes and achieving driving generalization across scenes. Building on this, it reconstructs the implicit cognitive chain inherent in human driving, covering scene understanding, meta-action reasoning, behavior interpretation analysis, motion planning and control, thereby further bridging the gap between autonomous driving and human thought processes. To elevate model performance, we have developed the first extensive Visual Question Answering (VQA) driving instruction dataset tailored for 3D spatial understanding and long-axis task reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Sce2DriveX achieves state-of-the-art performance from scene understanding to end-to-end driving, as well as robust generalization on the CARLA Bench2Drive benchmark.
What Is a Good Caption? A Comprehensive Visual Caption Benchmark for Evaluating Both Correctness and Coverage of MLLMs
Liu, Zhihang, Xie, Chen-Wei, Wen, Bin, Yu, Feiwu, Chen, Jixuan, Zhang, Boqiang, Yang, Nianzu, Li, Pandeng, Zheng, Yun, Xie, Hongtao
Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have rendered traditional visual captioning benchmarks obsolete, as they primarily evaluate short descriptions with outdated metrics. While recent benchmarks address these limitations by decomposing captions into visual elements and adopting model-based evaluation, they remain incomplete-overlooking critical aspects, while providing vague, non-explanatory scores. To bridge this gap, we propose CV-CapBench, a Comprehensive Visual Caption Benchmark that systematically evaluates caption quality across 6 views and 13 dimensions. CV-CapBench introduces precision, recall, and hit rate metrics for each dimension, uniquely assessing both correctness and coverage. Experiments on leading MLLMs reveal significant capability gaps, particularly in dynamic and knowledge-intensive dimensions. These findings provide actionable insights for future research. The code and data will be released.
OpenSearch-SQL: Enhancing Text-to-SQL with Dynamic Few-shot and Consistency Alignment
Xie, Xiangjin, Xu, Guangwei, Zhao, Lingyan, Guo, Ruijie
Although multi-agent collaborative Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant breakthroughs in the Text-to-SQL task, their performance is still constrained by various factors. These factors include the incompleteness of the framework, failure to follow instructions, and model hallucination problems. To address these problems, we propose OpenSearch-SQL, which divides the Text-to-SQL task into four main modules: Preprocessing, Extraction, Generation, and Refinement, along with an Alignment module based on a consistency alignment mechanism. This architecture aligns the inputs and outputs of agents through the Alignment module, reducing failures in instruction following and hallucination. Additionally, we designed an intermediate language called SQL-Like and optimized the structured CoT based on SQL-Like. Meanwhile, we developed a dynamic few-shot strategy in the form of self-taught Query-CoT-SQL. These methods have significantly improved the performance of LLMs in the Text-to-SQL task. In terms of model selection, we directly applied the base LLMs without any post-training, thereby simplifying the task chain and enhancing the framework's portability. Experimental results show that OpenSearch-SQL achieves an execution accuracy(EX) of 69.3% on the BIRD development set, 72.28% on the test set, and a reward-based validity efficiency score (R-VES) of 69.36%, with all three metrics ranking first at the time of submission. These results demonstrate the comprehensive advantages of the proposed method in both effectiveness and efficiency.
Universal Semantic Embeddings of Chemical Elements for Enhanced Materials Inference and Discovery
Jia, Yunze, Xian, Yuehui, Xu, Yangyang, Dang, Pengfei, Ding, Xiangdong, Sun, Jun, Zhou, Yumei, Xue, Dezhen
We present a framework for generating universal semantic embeddings of chemical elements to advance materials inference and discovery. This framework leverages ElementBERT, a domain - specific BERT - based natural language processing model trained on 1.29 million abstracts of alloy - related scientific papers, to capture latent knowledge and contextual relationships specific to alloys. These semantic embeddings serve as robust elemental descriptors, consistently outperforming traditional empirical descriptors with significant improvements across multiple downstream tasks . These include predicting mechanical and transformation properties, classifying phase structures, and optimizing materials properties via Bayesian optimization. Applications to titanium alloys, high - entropy alloys, and shape memory alloys demonstrate up to 23% gains in prediction accuracy. Our results show that ElementBERT surpasses general - purpose BERT variants by encoding specialized alloy knowledge. By bridging contextual insights from scientific literature with quantitative inference, our framework accelerates the discovery and optimization of advanced materials, with potential applications extending beyond alloys to other material classes.
Batayan: A Filipino NLP benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models
Montalan, Jann Railey, Layacan, Jimson Paulo, Africa, David Demitri, Flores, Richell Isaiah, Lopez, Michael T. II, Magsajo, Theresa Denise, Cayabyab, Anjanette, Tjhi, William Chandra
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on widely benchmarked high-resource languages; however, linguistic nuances of under-resourced languages remain unexplored. We introduce Batayan, a holistic Filipino benchmark designed to systematically evaluate LLMs across three key natural language processing (NLP) competencies: understanding, reasoning, and generation. Batayan consolidates eight tasks, covering both Tagalog and code-switched Taglish utterances. Our rigorous, native-speaker-driven annotation process ensures fluency and authenticity to the complex morphological and syntactic structures of Filipino, alleviating a pervasive translationese bias in existing Filipino corpora. We report empirical results on a variety of multilingual LLMs, highlighting significant performance gaps that signal the under-representation of Filipino in pretraining corpora, the unique hurdles in modeling Filipino's rich morphology and construction, and the importance of explicit Filipino language support and instruction tuning. Moreover, we discuss the practical challenges encountered in dataset construction and propose principled solutions for building culturally and linguistically-faithful resources in under-represented languages. We also provide a public benchmark and leaderboard as a clear foundation for iterative, community-driven progress in Filipino NLP.
EvoP: Robust LLM Inference via Evolutionary Pruning
Wu, Shangyu, Du, Hongchao, Xiong, Ying, Chen, Shuai, Kuo, Tei-wei, Guan, Nan, Xue, Chun Jason
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing tasks, but their massive size and computational demands hinder their deployment in resource-constrained environments. Existing structured pruning methods address this issue by removing redundant structures (e.g., elements, channels, layers) from the model. However, these methods employ a heuristic pruning strategy, which leads to suboptimal performance. Besides, they also ignore the data characteristics when pruning the model. To overcome these limitations, we propose EvoP, an evolutionary pruning framework for robust LLM inference. EvoP first presents a cluster-based calibration dataset sampling (CCDS) strategy for creating a more diverse calibration dataset. EvoP then introduces an evolutionary pruning pattern searching (EPPS) method to find the optimal pruning pattern. Compared to existing structured pruning techniques, EvoP achieves the best performance while maintaining the best efficiency. Experiments across different LLMs and different downstream tasks validate the effectiveness of the proposed EvoP, making it a practical and scalable solution for deploying LLMs in real-world applications.
LabTOP: A Unified Model for Lab Test Outcome Prediction on Electronic Health Records
Im, Sujeong, Oh, Jungwoo, Choi, Edward
KAIST, Republic of Korea Abstract Lab tests are fundamental for diagnosing diseases and monitoring patient conditions. However, frequent testing can be burdensome for patients, and test results may not always be immediately available. To address these challenges, we propose Lab Test Outcome Predictor (LabTOP), a unified model that predicts lab test outcomes by leveraging a language modeling approach on EHR data. Unlike conventional methods that estimate only a subset of lab tests or classify discrete value ranges, LabTOP performs continuous numerical predictions for a diverse range of lab items. We evaluate LabTOP on three publicly available EHR datasets and demonstrate that it outperforms existing methods, including traditional machine learning models and state-of-the-art large language models. We also conduct extensive ablation studies to confirm the effectiveness of our design choices. We believe that LabTOP will serve as an accurate and generalizable framework for lab test outcome prediction, with potential applications in clinical decision support and early detection of critical conditions. Data and Code Availability This paper uses the three EHR datasets, MIMIC-IV (Johnson et al., 2023), eICU (Pollard et al., 2018), and HiRID (Hy-land et al., 2020), which are publicly available on the PhysioNet repository (Johnson et al., 2020; Pollard et al., 2019; Faltys et al., 2021). More details about datasets can be found at Section 4.1. Our implementation code can be accessed at this repository. 1 Institutional Review Board (IRB) This research does not require IRB approval. These authors contributed equally 1. https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LabTOP-DE7B1. Introduction Electronic Health Records (EHR) are essential to modern healthcare systems, serving as comprehensive databases of patient data, including treatments, clinical interventions, and lab test results (Gunter and Terry, 2005). These records provide a longitudinal view of a patient's medical history, allowing for the tracking of individual health trends (Kruse et al., 2017).
Does Time Have Its Place? Temporal Heads: Where Language Models Recall Time-specific Information
Park, Yein, Yoon, Chanwoong, Park, Jungwoo, Jeong, Minbyul, Kang, Jaewoo
While the ability of language models to elicit facts has been widely investigated, how they handle temporally changing facts remains underexplored. We discover Temporal Heads, specific attention heads primarily responsible for processing temporal knowledge through circuit analysis. We confirm that these heads are present across multiple models, though their specific locations may vary, and their responses differ depending on the type of knowledge and its corresponding years. Disabling these heads degrades the model's ability to recall time-specific knowledge while maintaining its general capabilities without compromising time-invariant and question-answering performances. Moreover, the heads are activated not only numeric conditions ("In 2004") but also textual aliases ("In the year ..."), indicating that they encode a temporal dimension beyond simple numerical representation. Furthermore, we expand the potential of our findings by demonstrating how temporal knowledge can be edited by adjusting the values of these heads.
Effects of Prompt Length on Domain-specific Tasks for Large Language Models
Liu, Qibang, Wang, Wenzhe, Willard, Jeffrey
In recent years, Large Language Models have garnered significant attention for their strong performance in various natural language tasks, such as machine translation and question answering. These models demonstrate an impressive ability to generalize across diverse tasks. However, their effectiveness in tackling domain-specific tasks, such as financial sentiment analysis and monetary policy understanding, remains a topic of debate, as these tasks often require specialized knowledge and precise reasoning. To address such challenges, researchers design various prompts to unlock the models' abilities. By carefully crafting input prompts, researchers can guide these models to produce more accurate responses. Consequently, prompt engineering has become a key focus of study. Despite the advancements in both models and prompt engineering, the relationship between the two-specifically, how prompt design impacts models' ability to perform domain-specific tasks-remains underexplored. This paper aims to bridge this research gap.