The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has necessitated the creation of benchmarks to evaluate their performance. These benchmarks resemble human tests and surveys, as they consist of sets of questions designed to measure emergent properties in the cognitive behavior of these systems. However, unlike the well-defined traits and abilities studied in social sciences, the properties measured by these benchmarks are often vaguer and less rigorously defined. The most prominent benchmarks are often grouped into leaderboards for convenience, aggregating performance metrics and enabling comparisons between models. Unfortunately, these leaderboards typically rely on simplistic aggregation methods, such as taking the average score across benchmarks. In this paper, we demonstrate the advantages of applying contemporary psychometric methodologies - originally developed for human tests and surveys - to improve the ranking of large language models on leaderboards. Using data from the Hugging Face Leaderboard as an example, we compare the results of the conventional naive ranking approach with a psychometrically informed ranking. The findings highlight the benefits of adopting psychometric techniques for more robust and meaningful evaluation of LLM performance.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has led to more diverse and higher-quality machine-generated text. However, their high expressive power makes it difficult to control outputs based on specific business instructions. In response, benchmarks focusing on the controllability of LLMs have been developed, but several issues remain: (1) They primarily cover major languages like English and Chinese, neglecting low-resource languages like Japanese; (2) Current benchmarks employ task-specific evaluation metrics, lacking a unified framework for selecting models based on controllability across different use cases. To address these challenges, this research introduces LCTG Bench, the first Japanese benchmark for evaluating the controllability of LLMs. LCTG Bench provides a unified framework for assessing control performance, enabling users to select the most suitable model for their use cases based on controllability. By evaluating nine diverse Japanese-specific and multilingual LLMs like GPT-4, we highlight the current state and challenges of controllability in Japanese LLMs and reveal the significant gap between multilingual models and Japanese-specific models.

Large language models have achieved remarkable success in recent years, primarily due to the implementation of self-attention mechanisms. However, traditional Softmax attention suffers from numerical instability and reduced performance as the length of inference tokens increases. This paper addresses these issues by decomposing the Softmax operation into a non-linear transformation and the $l_1$-norm. We identify the latter as essential for maintaining model performance. By replacing the non-linear transformation with the Softplus activation function and introducing a dynamic scale factor for different token lengths based on invariance entropy, we create a novel attention mechanism with performance better than conventional Softmax attention across various inference lengths. To further improve the length extrapolation ability of the proposed attention mechanism, we introduce a fine-tuning-free re-weighting mechanism that amplifies significant attention weights while diminishing weaker ones, enabling the model to concentrate more effectively on relevant tokens without requiring retraining. When combined with our proposed attention mechanism, this approach demonstrates significant promise in managing longer sequences, maintaining nearly constant validation loss even at 16$\times$ the training token length while ensuring numerical stability. Our code is available at: https://github.com/iminfine/freeatten.

Retrieval-augmented generation improves various aspects of large language models (LLMs) generation, but suffers from computational overhead caused by long contexts as well as the propagation of irrelevant retrieved information into generated responses. Context pruning deals with both aspects, by removing irrelevant parts of retrieved contexts before LLM generation. Existing context pruning approaches are however limited, and do not provide a universal model that would be both efficient and robust in a wide range of scenarios, e.g., when contexts contain a variable amount of relevant information or vary in length, or when evaluated on various domains. In this work, we close this gap and introduce Provence (Pruning and Reranking Of retrieVEd relevaNt ContExts), an efficient and robust context pruner for Question Answering, which dynamically detects the needed amount of pruning for a given context and can be used out-of-the-box for various domains. The three key ingredients of Provence are formulating the context pruning task as sequence labeling, unifying context pruning capabilities with context reranking, and training on diverse data. Our experimental results show that Provence enables context pruning with negligible to no drop in performance, in various domains and settings, at almost no cost in a standard RAG pipeline. We also conduct a deeper analysis alongside various ablations to provide insights into training context pruners for future work.

Autonomous aerial monitoring is an important task aimed at gathering information from areas that may not be easily accessible by humans. At the same time, this task often requires recognizing anomalies from a significant distance and/or not previously encountered in the past. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that leverages the advanced capabilities provided by Large Language Models (LLMs) to actively collect information and perform anomaly detection in novel scenes. To this end, we propose an LLM-based model dialogue approach, in which two deep learning models engage in a dialogue to actively control a drone to increase perception and anomaly detection accuracy. We conduct our experiments in a high fidelity simulation environment where an LLM is provided with a predetermined set of natural language movement commands mapped into executable code functions. Additionally, we deploy a multimodal Visual Question Answering (VQA) model charged with the task of visual question answering and captioning. By engaging the two models in conversation, the LLM asks exploratory questions while simultaneously flying a drone into different parts of the scene, providing a novel way to implement active perception. By leveraging LLM's reasoning ability, we output an improved detailed description of the scene going beyond existing static perception approaches. In addition to information gathering, our approach is utilized for anomaly detection and our results demonstrate the proposed method's effectiveness in informing and alerting about potential hazards.

With the rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), numerous evaluation benchmarks have emerged. However, comprehensive assessments of their performance across diverse industrial applications remain limited. In this paper, we introduce MME-Industry, a novel benchmark designed specifically for evaluating MLLMs in industrial settings.The benchmark encompasses 21 distinct domain, comprising 1050 question-answer pairs with 50 questions per domain. To ensure data integrity and prevent potential leakage from public datasets, all question-answer pairs were manually crafted and validated by domain experts. Besides, the benchmark's complexity is effectively enhanced by incorporating non-OCR questions that can be answered directly, along with tasks requiring specialized domain knowledge. Moreover, we provide both Chinese and English versions of the benchmark, enabling comparative analysis of MLLMs' capabilities across these languages. Our findings contribute valuable insights into MLLMs' practical industrial applications and illuminate promising directions for future model optimization research.

The film Her features Samantha, a sophisticated AI audio agent who is capable of understanding both linguistic and paralinguistic information in human speech and delivering real-time responses that are natural, informative and sensitive to emotional subtleties. Moving one step toward more sophisticated audio agent from recent advancement in end-to-end (E2E) speech systems, we propose LUCY, a E2E speech model that (1) senses and responds to user's emotion, (2) deliver responses in a succinct and natural style, and (3) use external tool to answer real-time inquiries. Experiment results show that LUCY is better at emotion control than peer models, generating emotional responses based on linguistic emotional instructions and responding to paralinguistic emotional cues. Lucy is also able to generate responses in a more natural style, as judged by external language models, without sacrificing much performance on general question answering. Finally, LUCY can leverage function calls to answer questions that are out of its knowledge scope.

Known by more than 1.5 billion people in the Indian subcontinent, Indic languages present unique challenges and opportunities for natural language processing (NLP) research due to their rich cultural heritage, linguistic diversity, and complex structures. IndicMMLU-Pro is a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) across Indic languages, building upon the MMLU Pro (Massive Multitask Language Understanding) framework. Covering major languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu, our benchmark addresses the unique challenges and opportunities presented by the linguistic diversity of the Indian subcontinent. This benchmark encompasses a wide range of tasks in language comprehension, reasoning, and generation, meticulously crafted to capture the intricacies of Indian languages. IndicMMLU-Pro provides a standardized evaluation framework to push the research boundaries in Indic language AI, facilitating the development of more accurate, efficient, and culturally sensitive models. This paper outlines the benchmarks' design principles, task taxonomy, and data collection methodology, and presents baseline results from state-of-the-art multilingual models.

This study introduces RelCAT (Relation Concept Annotation Toolkit), an interactive tool, library, and workflow designed to classify relations between entities extracted from clinical narratives. Building upon the CogStack MedCAT framework, RelCAT addresses the challenge of capturing complete clinical relations dispersed within text. The toolkit implements state-of-the-art machine learning models such as BERT and Llama along with proven evaluation and training methods. We demonstrate a dataset annotation tool (built within MedCATTrainer), model training, and evaluate our methodology on both openly available gold-standard and real-world UK National Health Service (NHS) hospital clinical datasets. We perform extensive experimentation and a comparative analysis of the various publicly available models with varied approaches selected for model fine-tuning. Finally, we achieve macro F1-scores of 0.977 on the gold-standard n2c2, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art performance, and achieve performance of >=0.93 F1 on our NHS gathered datasets.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still struggle with hallucinations despite their impressive capabilities. Recent studies have attempted to mitigate this by applying Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to multimodal scenarios using preference pairs from text-based responses. However, our analysis of representation distributions reveals that multimodal DPO struggles to align image and text representations and to distinguish between hallucinated and non-hallucinated descriptions. To address these challenges, in this work, we propose a Cross-modal Hierarchical Direct Preference Optimization (CHiP) to address these limitations. We introduce a visual preference optimization module within the DPO framework, enabling MLLMs to learn from both textual and visual preferences simultaneously. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical textual preference optimization module that allows the model to capture preferences at multiple granular levels, including response, segment, and token levels. We evaluate CHiP through both quantitative and qualitative analyses, with results across multiple benchmarks demonstrating its effectiveness in reducing hallucinations. On the Object HalBench dataset, CHiP outperforms DPO in hallucination reduction, achieving improvements of 52.7% and 55.5% relative points based on the base model Muffin and LLaVA models, respectively. We make all our datasets and code publicly available: https://github.com/LVUGAI/CHiP.