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JoLT: Joint Probabilistic Predictions on Tabular Data Using LLMs

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We introduce a simple method for probabilistic predictions on tabular data based on Large Language Models (LLMs) called JoLT (Joint LLM Process for Tabular data). JoLT uses the in-context learning capabilities of LLMs to define joint distributions over tabular data conditioned on user-specified side information about the problem, exploiting the vast repository of latent problem-relevant knowledge encoded in LLMs. JoLT defines joint distributions for multiple target variables with potentially heterogeneous data types without any data conversion, data preprocessing, special handling of missing data, or model training, making it accessible and efficient for practitioners. Our experiments show that JoLT outperforms competitive methods on low-shot single-target and multi-target tabular classification and regression tasks. Furthermore, we show that JoLT can automatically handle missing data and perform data imputation by leveraging textual side information. We argue that due to its simplicity and generality, JoLT is an effective approach for a wide variety of real prediction problems.


DeepSeek drives 1.3 trillion China stock rally as funds pile in

The Japan Times

DeepSeek's breakthrough in artificial intelligence is helping drive a rotation of stock funds back into China from India. Hedge funds have been piling into Chinese equities at the fastest pace in months as bullishness on the DeepSeek-driven technology rally adds to hopes for more economic stimulus. In contrast, India is suffering a record exodus of cash on concerns over waning macro growth, slowing corporate earnings and expensive stock valuations. China's onshore and offshore equity markets have added more than 1.3 trillion in total value in just the past month amid such reallocations, while India's market has shrunk by more than 720 billion. The MSCI China Index is on track to outperform its Indian counterpart for a third-straight month, the longest such streak in two years.


Beyond Any-Shot Adaptation: Predicting Optimization Outcome for Robustness Gains without Extra Pay

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The foundation model enables general-purpose problem-solving and enjoys desirable rapid adaptation due to its adopted cross-task generalization paradigms, e.g., pretraining, meta-training, and finetuning. Recent advances in these paradigms show the crucial role of challenging tasks' prioritized sampling in enhancing adaptation robustness. However, ranking task difficulties exhausts massive task queries to evaluate, thus computation and annotation intensive, which is typically unaffordable in practice. This work underscores the criticality of both adaptation robustness and learning efficiency, especially in scenarios where tasks are risky or costly to evaluate, e.g., policy evaluations in Markov decision processes (MDPs) or inference with large models. To this end, we present Model Predictive Task Sampling (MPTS) to establish connections between the task space and adaptation risk landscape to form a theoretical guideline in robust active task sampling. MPTS characterizes the task episodic information with a generative model and directly predicts task-specific adaptation risk values from posterior inference. The developed risk learner can amortize expensive evaluation and provably approximately rank task difficulties in the pursuit of task robust adaptation. MPTS can be seamlessly integrated into zero-shot, few-shot, and many-shot learning paradigms. Extensive experimental results are conducted to exhibit the superiority of the proposed framework, remarkably increasing task adaptation robustness and retaining learning efficiency in contrast to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The code is available at the project site https://github.com/thu-rllab/MPTS.


How Do LLMs Acquire New Knowledge? A Knowledge Circuits Perspective on Continual Pre-Training

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite exceptional capabilities in knowledge-intensive tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) face a critical gap in understanding how they internalize new knowledge, particularly how to structurally embed acquired knowledge in their neural computations. We address this issue through the lens of knowledge circuit evolution, identifying computational subgraphs that facilitate knowledge storage and processing. Our systematic analysis of circuit evolution throughout continual pre-training reveals several key findings: (1) the acquisition of new knowledge is influenced by its relevance to pre-existing knowledge; (2) the evolution of knowledge circuits exhibits a distinct phase shift from formation to optimization; (3) the evolution of knowledge circuits follows a deep-to-shallow pattern. These insights not only advance our theoretical understanding of the mechanisms of new knowledge acquisition in LLMs, but also provide potential implications for improving continual pre-training strategies to enhance model performance. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/zjunlp/DynamicKnowledgeCircuits.


PlanGenLLMs: A Modern Survey of LLM Planning Capabilities

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

LLMs have immense potential for generating plans, transforming an initial world state into a desired goal state. A large body of research has explored the use of LLMs for various planning tasks, from web navigation to travel planning and database querying. However, many of these systems are tailored to specific problems, making it challenging to compare them or determine the best approach for new tasks. There is also a lack of clear and consistent evaluation criteria. Our survey aims to offer a comprehensive overview of current LLM planners to fill this gap. It builds on foundational work by Kartam and Wilkins (1990) and examines six key performance criteria: completeness, executability, optimality, representation, generalization, and efficiency. For each, we provide a thorough analysis of representative works and highlight their strengths and weaknesses. Our paper also identifies crucial future directions, making it a valuable resource for both practitioners and newcomers interested in leveraging LLM planning to support agentic workflows.


Enhancing Frame Detection with Retrieval Augmented Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing have significantly improved the extraction of structured semantic representations from unstructured text, especially through Frame Semantic Role Labeling (FSRL). Despite this progress, the potential of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models for frame detection remains under-explored. In this paper, we present the first RAG-based approach for frame detection called RCIF (Retrieve Candidates and Identify Frames). RCIF is also the first approach to operate without the need for explicit target span and comprises three main stages: (1) generation of frame embeddings from various representations ; (2) retrieval of candidate frames given an input text; and (3) identification of the most suitable frames. We conducted extensive experiments across multiple configurations, including zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings. Our results show that our retrieval component significantly reduces the complexity of the task by narrowing the search space thus allowing the frame identifier to refine and complete the set of candidates. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on FrameNet 1.5 and 1.7, demonstrating its robustness in scenarios where only raw text is provided. Furthermore, we leverage the structured representation obtained through this method as a proxy to enhance generalization across lexical variations in the task of translating natural language questions into SPARQL queries.


Simplify RLHF as Reward-Weighted SFT: A Variational Method

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is crucial for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values. However, RLHF has been continuously challenged by its high complexity in implementation and computation consumption. Even with recent simplifications, such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Advantage Leftover Lunch (A-LoL), the problems of over-fitting and training instability remain hindering the alignment process from the expected optimal performance. To address the existing challenges, we propose a novel simplification of RLHF from the perspective of variational inference, called $\textbf{V}$ariational $\textbf{A}$lignment with $\textbf{R}$e-weighting ($\textbf{VAR}$). More specifically, by directly minimizing the distribution gap between the learning LLM policy and the optimal solution of RLHF, we transform the alignment objective into a reward-driven re-weighted supervised fine-tuning (SFT) form, which only requires minor adjustment on the SFT loss to obtain noticeable improvement on training stability and effectiveness. On comprehensive alignment and generation benchmarks, our VAR method has numerically achieved competitive performance in LLM alignment helpfulness and harmlessness.


Generating Millions Of Lean Theorems With Proofs By Exploring State Transition Graphs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in generating mathematical proofs. However, a persistent challenge is that LLMs occasionally make mistakes, while even a minor mistake can invalidate an entire proof. Proof assistants like Lean offer a great remedy. They are designed for verifying each step of a proof in a formal language, and in recent years researchers have created AI models to generate proofs in their languages. However, the scarcity of large-scale datasets of Lean proofs restrict the performance of such Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) models. We developed LeanNavigator, a novel method for generating a large-scale dataset of Lean theorems and proofs by finding new ways to prove existing Lean theorems. By leveraging an interactive Lean client and an efficient method for proof step generation, LeanNavigator efficiently produces new theorems with corresponding proofs. Applying this approach to Mathlib4, we generated 4.7 million theorems totaling 1 billion tokens, surpassing previous datasets by more than an order of magnitude. Using this extensive dataset, we trained an AI model that outperforms the state-of-the-art ReProver model in theorem-proving tasks. These results confirm our hypothesis and demonstrate the critical role of large datasets in improving the performance of automated theorem provers.


Conversational Explanations: Discussing Explainable AI with Non-AI Experts

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Explainable AI (XAI) aims to provide insights into the decisions made by AI models. To date, most XAI approaches provide only one-time, static explanations, which cannot cater to users' diverse knowledge levels and information needs. Conversational explanations have been proposed as an effective method to customize XAI explanations. However, building conversational explanation systems is hindered by the scarcity of training data. Training with synthetic data faces two main challenges: lack of data diversity and hallucination in the generated data. To alleviate these issues, we introduce a repetition penalty to promote data diversity and exploit a hallucination detector to filter out untruthful synthetic conversation turns. We conducted both automatic and human evaluations on the proposed system, fEw-shot Multi-round ConvErsational Explanation (EMCEE). For automatic evaluation, EMCEE achieves relative improvements of 81.6% in BLEU and 80.5% in ROUGE compared to the baselines. EMCEE also mitigates the degeneration of data quality caused by training on synthetic data. In human evaluations (N=60), EMCEE outperforms baseline models and the control group in improving users' comprehension, acceptance, trust, and collaboration with static explanations by large margins. Through a fine-grained analysis of model responses, we further demonstrate that training on self-generated synthetic data improves the model's ability to generate more truthful and understandable answers, leading to better user interactions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first conversational explanation method that can answer free-form user questions following static explanations.


Logic.py: Bridging the Gap between LLMs and Constraint Solvers

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

W e present a novel approach to formalise and solve search-based problems using large language models, which significantly improves upon previous state-of-the-art results. W e demonstrate the efficacy of this approach on the logic puzzles benchmark ZebraLogicBench. Instead of letting the LLM attempt to directly solve the puzzles, our method prompts the model to formalise the problem in a logic-focused domain-specific language (DSL) called Logic.py . This formalised representation is then solved using a constraint solver, leveraging the strengths of both the language model and the solver. Our approach achieves a remarkable 65% absolute improvement over the baseline performance of Llama 3.1 70B on ZebraLogicBench, setting a new state-of-the-art with an accuracy of over 90%. This significant advancement demonstrates the potential of combining language models with domain-specific languages and auxiliary tools on traditionally challenging tasks for LLMs.