Art, as a universal language, can be interpreted in diverse ways, with artworks embodying profound meanings and nuances. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the availability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) raise the question of how these transformative models can be used to assess and interpret the artistic elements of artworks. While research has been conducted in this domain, to the best of our knowledge, a deep and detailed understanding of the technical and expressive features of artworks using LLMs has not been explored. In this study, we investigate the automation of a formal art analysis framework to analyze a high-throughput number of artworks rapidly and examine how their patterns evolve over time. We explore how LLMs can decode artistic expressions, visual elements, composition, and techniques, revealing emerging patterns that develop across periods. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limitations of LLMs in this context, emphasizing their ability to process vast quantities of art-related data and generate insightful interpretations. Due to the exhaustive and granular nature of the results, we have developed interactive data visualizations, available online https://cognartive.github.io/, to enhance understanding and accessibility.

Medical multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are becoming an instrumental part of healthcare systems, assisting medical personnel with decision making and results analysis. Models for radiology report generation are able to interpret medical imagery, thus reducing the workload of radiologists. As medical data is scarce and protected by privacy regulations, medical MLLMs represent valuable intellectual property. However, these assets are potentially vulnerable to model stealing, where attackers aim to replicate their functionality via black-box access. So far, model stealing for the medical domain has focused on classification; however, existing attacks are not effective against MLLMs. In this paper, we introduce Adversarial Domain Alignment (ADA-STEAL), the first stealing attack against medical MLLMs. ADA-STEAL relies on natural images, which are public and widely available, as opposed to their medical counterparts. We show that data augmentation with adversarial noise is sufficient to overcome the data distribution gap between natural images and the domain-specific distribution of the victim MLLM. Experiments on the IU X-RAY and MIMIC-CXR radiology datasets demonstrate that Adversarial Domain Alignment enables attackers to steal the medical MLLM without any access to medical data.

The increasing demand for high-quality, diverse training data poses a significant bottleneck in advancing vision-language models (VLMs). This paper presents VLM Dialog Games, a novel and scalable self-improvement framework for VLMs. Our approach leverages self-play between two agents engaged in a goal-oriented play centered around image identification. By filtering for successful game interactions, we automatically curate a high-quality dataset of interleaved images and text. We demonstrate that fine-tuning on this synthetic data leads to performance gains on downstream tasks and generalises across datasets. Moreover, as the improvements in the model lead to better game play, this procedure can be applied iteratively. This work paves the way for self-improving VLMs, with potential applications in various real-world scenarios especially when the high-quality multimodal data is scarce.

Speculative decoding is an effective and lossless method for Large Language Model (LLM) inference acceleration. It employs a smaller model to generate a draft token sequence, which is then verified by the original base model. In multi-GPU systems, inference latency can be further reduced through tensor parallelism (TP), while the optimal TP size of the draft model is typically smaller than that of the base model, leading to GPU idling during the drafting stage. To solve this problem, we propose EasySpec, a layer-parallel speculation strategy that optimizes the efficiency of multi-GPU utilization.EasySpec breaks the sequential execution order of layers in the drafting model, enabling multi-layer parallelization across devices, albeit with some induced approximation errors. After each drafting-and-verification iteration, the draft model's key-value (KV) cache is calibrated in a single forward pass, preventing long-term error accumulation at minimal additional latency. We evaluated EasySpec on several mainstream open-source LLMs, using smaller versions of models from the same series as drafters. The results demonstrate that EasySpec can achieve a peak speedup of 4.17x compared to vanilla decoding, while preserving the original distribution of the base LLMs. Specifically, the drafting stage can be accelerated by up to 1.62x with a maximum accuracy drop of only 7%, requiring no training or fine-tuning on the draft models.

Deep learning (DL) has made notable progress in addressing complex radio access network control challenges that conventional analytic methods have struggled to solve. However, DL has shown limitations in solving constrained NP-hard problems often encountered in network optimization, such as those involving quality of service (QoS) or discrete variables like user indices. Current solutions rely on domain-specific architectures or heuristic techniques, and a general DL approach for constrained optimization remains undeveloped. Moreover, even minor changes in communication objectives demand time-consuming retraining, limiting their adaptability to dynamic environments where task objectives, constraints, environmental factors, and communication scenarios frequently change. To address these challenges, we propose a large language model for resource allocation optimizer (LLM-RAO), a novel approach that harnesses the capabilities of LLMs to address the complex resource allocation problem while adhering to QoS constraints. By employing a prompt-based tuning strategy to flexibly convey ever-changing task descriptions and requirements to the LLM, LLM-RAO demonstrates robust performance and seamless adaptability in dynamic environments without requiring extensive retraining. Simulation results reveal that LLM-RAO achieves up to a 40% performance enhancement compared to conventional DL methods and up to an $80$\% improvement over analytical approaches. Moreover, in scenarios with fluctuating communication objectives, LLM-RAO attains up to 2.9 times the performance of traditional DL-based networks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, excelling in handling longer sequences. However, the inefficiency and redundancy in processing extended in-context tokens remain a challenge. Many attempts to address this rely on compressing tokens with smaller text encoders, yet we question whether text encoders are truly indispensable. Our journey leads to an unexpected discovery-a much smaller vision encoder, applied directly to sequences of text tokens, can rival text encoders on text tasks. When pre-trained on large amounts of data and transferred to multiple mid-sized or small text understanding benchmarks, VIST leads to comparable results with 16% fewer FLOPs and 50% less memory usage. We further uncover significant token redundancy and devise a frequency-based masking strategy to guide the focus of the visual encoder toward the most critical tokens. Interestingly, we observe the trained visual encoder performs like a summarizer, selectively ignoring less important words such as prepositions and conjunctions. This approach delivers remarkable results, outperforming traditional text encoder-based methods by 5.7% on average over benchmarks like TriviaQA, NQ, PopQA, TREF, SST2, and SST5, setting a new standard for token efficiency in LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made substantial strides in structured tasks through Reinforcement Learning (RL), demonstrating proficiency in mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, applying RL in broader domains like chatbots and content generation -- through the process known as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) -- presents unique challenges. Reward models in RLHF are critical, acting as proxies that evaluate the alignment of LLM outputs with human intent. Despite advancements, the development of reward models is hindered by challenges such as computational heavy training, costly evaluation, and therefore poor reproducibility. We advocate for using embedding-based input in reward model research as an accelerated solution to those challenges. By leveraging embeddings for reward modeling, we can enhance reproducibility, reduce computational demands on hardware, improve training stability, and significantly reduce training and evaluation costs, hence facilitating fair and efficient comparisons in this active research area. We then show a case study of reproducing existing reward model ensemble research using embedding-based reward models. We discussed future avenues for research, aiming to contribute to safer and more effective LLM deployments.

The optimal bit-width for achieving the best trade-off between quantized model size and accuracy has been a subject of ongoing debate. While some advocate for 4-bit quantization, others propose that 1.58-bit offers superior results. However, the lack of a cohesive framework for different bits has left such conclusions relatively tenuous. We present ParetoQ, the first unified framework that facilitates rigorous comparisons across 1-bit, 1.58-bit, 2-bit, 3-bit, and 4-bit quantization settings. Our findings reveal a notable learning transition between 2 and 3 bits: For 3-bits and above, the fine-tuned models stay close to their original pre-trained distributions, whereas for learning 2-bit networks or below, the representations change drastically. By optimizing training schemes and refining quantization functions, ParetoQ surpasses all previous methods tailored to specific bit widths. Remarkably, our ParetoQ ternary 600M-parameter model even outperforms the previous SoTA ternary 3B-parameter model in accuracy, using only one-fifth of the parameters. Extensive experimentation shows that ternary, 2-bit, and 3-bit quantization maintains comparable performance in the size-accuracy trade-off and generally exceeds 4-bit and binary quantization. Considering hardware constraints, 2-bit quantization offers promising potential for memory reduction and speedup.

Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) often requires costly human annotations. To address this, LLM-based judges have been proposed, which compare the outputs of two LLMs enabling the ranking of models without human intervention. While several approaches have been proposed, many confounding factors are present between different papers. For instance the model, the prompt and other hyperparameters are typically changed at the same time making apple-to-apple comparisons challenging. In this paper, we propose to systematically analyze and tune hyperparameter of LLM judges. To alleviate the high cost of evaluating a judge, we propose to leverage multi-objective multi-fidelity which allows to find judges that trades accuracy for cost and also reduce significantly the cost of the search. Our method identifies judges that not only outperform existing benchmarks in accuracy and cost-efficiency but also utilize open-weight models, ensuring greater accessibility and reproducibility.

We introduce AutoGraph, a novel autoregressive framework for generating large attributed graphs using decoder-only transformers. At the core of our approach is a reversible "flattening" process that transforms graphs into random sequences. By sampling and learning from these sequences, AutoGraph enables transformers to model and generate complex graph structures in a manner akin to natural language. In contrast to diffusion models that rely on computationally intensive node features, our approach operates exclusively on these sequences. The sampling complexity and sequence length scale linearly with the number of edges, making AutoGraph highly scalable for generating large sparse graphs. Empirically, AutoGraph achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse synthetic and molecular graph generation benchmarks, while delivering a 100-fold generation and a 3-fold training speedup compared to leading diffusion models. Additionally, it demonstrates promising transfer capabilities and supports substructure-conditioned generation without additional fine-tuning. By extending language modeling techniques to graph generation, this work paves the way for developing graph foundation models.