Large Language Model
Leveraging Large Language Models to Analyze Emotional and Contextual Drivers of Teen Substance Use in Online Discussions
Zhu, Jianfeng, Jin, Ruoming, Jiang, Hailong, Wang, Yulan, Zhang, Xinyu, Coifman, Karin G.
Adolescence is a critical stage often linked to risky behaviors, including substance use, with significant developmental and public health implications. Social media provides a lens into adolescent self-expression, but interpreting emotional and contextual signals remains complex. This study applies Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze adolescents' social media posts, uncovering emotional patterns (e.g., sadness, guilt, fear, joy) and contextual factors (e.g., family, peers, school) related to substance use. Heatmap and machine learning analyses identified key predictors of substance use-related posts. Negative emotions like sadness and guilt were significantly more frequent in substance use contexts, with guilt acting as a protective factor, while shame and peer influence heightened substance use risk. Joy was more common in non-substance use discussions. Peer influence correlated strongly with sadness, fear, and disgust, while family and school environments aligned with non-substance use. Findings underscore the importance of addressing emotional vulnerabilities and contextual influences, suggesting that collaborative interventions involving families, schools, and communities can reduce risk factors and foster healthier adolescent development.
Black-Box Adversarial Attack on Vision Language Models for Autonomous Driving
Wang, Lu, Zhang, Tianyuan, Qu, Yang, Liang, Siyuan, Chen, Yuwei, Liu, Aishan, Liu, Xianglong, Tao, Dacheng
Vision-language models (VLMs) have significantly advanced autonomous driving (AD) by enhancing reasoning capabilities; however, these models remain highly susceptible to adversarial attacks. While existing research has explored white-box attacks to some extent, the more practical and challenging black-box scenarios remain largely underexplored due to their inherent difficulty. In this paper, we take the first step toward designing black-box adversarial attacks specifically targeting VLMs in AD. We identify two key challenges for achieving effective black-box attacks in this context: the effectiveness across driving reasoning chains in AD systems and the dynamic nature of driving scenarios. To address this, we propose Cascading Adversarial Disruption (CAD). It first introduces Decision Chain Disruption, which targets low-level reasoning breakdown by generating and injecting deceptive semantics, ensuring the perturbations remain effective across the entire decision-making chain. Building on this, we present Risky Scene Induction, which addresses dynamic adaptation by leveraging a surrogate VLM to understand and construct high-level risky scenarios that are likely to result in critical errors in the current driving contexts. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple AD VLMs and benchmarks demonstrate that CAD achieves state-of-the-art attack effectiveness, significantly outperforming existing methods (+13.43% on average). Moreover, we validate its practical applicability through real-world attacks on AD vehicles powered by VLMs, where the route completion rate drops by 61.11% and the vehicle crashes directly into the obstacle vehicle with adversarial patches. Finally, we release CADA dataset, comprising 18,808 adversarial visual-question-answer pairs, to facilitate further evaluation and research in this critical domain. Our codes and dataset will be available after paper's acceptance.
Streaming Video Understanding and Multi-round Interaction with Memory-enhanced Knowledge
Xiong, Haomiao, Yang, Zongxin, Yu, Jiazuo, Zhuge, Yunzhi, Zhang, Lu, Zhu, Jiawen, Lu, Huchuan
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled the development of Video-LLMs, advancing multimodal learning by bridging video data with language tasks. However, current video understanding models struggle with processing long video sequences, supporting multi-turn dialogues, and adapting to real-world dynamic scenarios. To address these issues, we propose StreamChat, a training-free framework for streaming video reasoning and conversational interaction. $\StreamChat$ leverages a novel hierarchical memory system to efficiently process and compress video features over extended sequences, enabling real-time, multi-turn dialogue. Our framework incorporates a parallel system scheduling strategy that enhances processing speed and reduces latency, ensuring robust performance in real-world applications. Furthermore, we introduce StreamBench, a versatile benchmark that evaluates streaming video understanding across diverse media types and interactive scenarios, including multi-turn interactions and complex reasoning tasks. Extensive evaluations on StreamBench and other public benchmarks demonstrate that StreamChat significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy and response times, confirming its effectiveness for streaming video understanding. Code is available at StreamChat: https://github.com/hmxiong/StreamChat.
ReasVQA: Advancing VideoQA with Imperfect Reasoning Process
Liang, Jianxin, Meng, Xiaojun, Zhang, Huishuai, Wang, Yueqian, Wei, Jiansheng, Zhao, Dongyan
Video Question Answering (VideoQA) is a challenging task that requires understanding complex visual and temporal relationships within videos to answer questions accurately. In this work, we introduce \textbf{ReasVQA} (Reasoning-enhanced Video Question Answering), a novel approach that leverages reasoning processes generated by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to improve the performance of VideoQA models. Our approach consists of three phases: reasoning generation, reasoning refinement, and learning from reasoning. First, we generate detailed reasoning processes using additional MLLMs, and second refine them via a filtering step to ensure data quality. Finally, we use the reasoning data, which might be in an imperfect form, to guide the VideoQA model via multi-task learning, on how to interpret and answer questions based on a given video. We evaluate ReasVQA on three popular benchmarks, and our results establish new state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements of +2.9 on NExT-QA, +7.3 on STAR, and +5.9 on IntentQA. Our findings demonstrate the supervising benefits of integrating reasoning processes into VideoQA. Further studies validate each component of our method, also with different backbones and MLLMs, and again highlight the advantages of this simple but effective method. We offer a new perspective on enhancing VideoQA performance by utilizing advanced reasoning techniques, setting a new benchmark in this research field.
A Transformer-based Autoregressive Decoder Architecture for Hierarchical Text Classification
Yousef, Younes, Galke, Lukas, Scherp, Ansgar
Recent approaches in hierarchical text classification (HTC) rely on the capabilities of a pre-trained transformer model and exploit the label semantics and a graph encoder for the label hierarchy. In this paper, we introduce an effective hierarchical text classifier RADAr (Transformer-based Autoregressive Decoder Architecture) that is based only on an off-the-shelf RoBERTa transformer to process the input and a custom autoregressive decoder with two decoder layers for generating the classification output. Thus, unlike existing approaches for HTC, the encoder of RADAr has no explicit encoding of the label hierarchy and the decoder solely relies on the label sequences of the samples observed during training. We demonstrate on three benchmark datasets that RADAr achieves results competitive to the state of the art with less training and inference time. Our model consistently performs better when organizing the label sequences from children to parents versus the inverse, as done in existing HTC approaches. Our experiments show that neither the label semantics nor an explicit graph encoder for the hierarchy is needed. This has strong practical implications for HTC as the architecture has fewer requirements and provides a speed-up by a factor of 2 at inference time. Moreover, training a separate decoder from scratch in conjunction with fine-tuning the encoder allows future researchers and practitioners to exchange the encoder part as new models arise. The source code is available at https://github.com/yousef-younes/RADAr.
The Role of Generative AI in Software Student CollaborAItion
Kiesler, Natalie, Smith, Jacqueline, Leinonen, Juho, Fox, Armando, MacNeil, Stephen, Ihantola, Petri
Collaboration is a crucial part of computing education. The increase Khan [28] has proposed an inspiring vision of how AI could in AI capabilities over the last couple of years is bound to profoundly help realize personalized individual tutors for every learner. Complementing affect all aspects of systems and software engineering, including this, an expert panel from 2020 [49] draws a scenario collaboration. In this position paper, we consider a scenario where where "AI supports orchestration of the multiple types of activities, AI agents would be able to take on any role in collaborative processes learning partners, and interaction patterns that can enrich a classroom". in computing education. We outline these roles, the activities We believe the possibilities are even broader, and to help and group dynamics that software development currently include, think about them, we propose a thought experiment that not only and discuss if and in what way AI could facilitate these roles and accommodates emerging practices and visions but also suggests activities. The goal of our work is to envision and critically examine new use cases in education that (to the best of our knowledge) have potential futures. We present scenarios suggesting how AI not yet been explored.
Analysis of Indic Language Capabilities in LLMs
Vaidya, Aatman, Prabhakar, Tarunima, George, Denny, Shah, Swair
This report evaluates the performance of text-in text-out Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand and generate Indic languages. This evaluation is used to identify and prioritize Indic languages suited for inclusion in safety benchmarks. We conduct this study by reviewing existing evaluation studies and datasets; and a set of twenty-eight LLMs that support Indic languages. We analyze the LLMs on the basis of the training data, license for model and data, type of access and model developers. We also compare Indic language performance across evaluation datasets and find that significant performance disparities in performance across Indic languages. Hindi is the most widely represented language in models. While model performance roughly correlates with number of speakers for the top five languages, the assessment after that varies.
Text-to-SQL based on Large Language Models and Database Keyword Search
Nascimento, Eduardo R., Avila, Caio Viktor S., Izquierdo, Yenier T., Garcรญa, Grettel M., Andrade, Lucas Feijรณ L., Facina, Michelle S. P., Lemos, Melissa, Casanova, Marco A.
Text-to-SQL prompt strategies based on Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance on well-known benchmarks. However, when applied to real-world databases, their performance is significantly less than for these benchmarks, especially for Natural Language (NL) questions requiring complex filters and joins to be processed. This paper then proposes a strategy to compile NL questions into SQL queries that incorporates a dynamic few-shot examples strategy and leverages the services provided by a database keyword search (KwS) platform. The paper details how the precision and recall of the schema-linking process are improved with the help of the examples provided and the keyword-matching service that the KwS platform offers. Then, it shows how the KwS platform can be used to synthesize a view that captures the joins required to process an input NL question and thereby simplify the SQL query compilation step. The paper includes experiments with a real-world relational database to assess the performance of the proposed strategy. The experiments suggest that the strategy achieves an accuracy on the real-world relational database that surpasses state-of-the-art approaches. The paper concludes by discussing the results obtained.
HWPQ: Hessian-free Weight Pruning-Quantization For LLM Compression And Acceleration
Kang, Yuhan, Luo, Zhongdi, Wen, Mei, Shi, Yang, He, Jun, Yang, Jianchao, Xue, Zeyu, Feng, Jing, Liu, Xinwang
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across numerous domains. However, the high time complexity of existing pruning and quantization methods significantly hinders their effective deployment on resource-constrained consumer or edge devices. In this study, we propose a novel Hessian-free Weight Pruning-Quantization (HWPQ) method. HWPQ eliminates the need for computationally intensive Hessian matrix calculations by introducing a contribution-based weight metric, which evaluates the importance of weights without relying on second-order derivatives. Additionally, we employ the Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) technique to bypass weight sorting, enabling the selection of weights that contribute most to LLM accuracy and further reducing time complexity. Our approach is extended to support 2:4 structured sparsity pruning, facilitating efficient execution on modern hardware accelerators. Experimental results demonstrate that HWPQ significantly enhances the compression performance of LLaMA2. Compared to state-of-the-art quantization and pruning frameworks, HWPQ achieves average speedups of 5.97x (up to 20.75x) in quantization time and 12.29x (up to 56.02x) in pruning time, while largely preserving model accuracy. Furthermore, we observe a 1.50x inference speedup compared to the baseline.
Predicting Compact Phrasal Rewrites with Large Language Models for ASR Post Editing
Zhang, Hao, Stahlberg, Felix, Kumar, Shankar
Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at rewriting tasks such as text style transfer and grammatical error correction. While there is considerable overlap between the inputs and outputs in these tasks, the decoding cost still increases with output length, regardless of the amount of overlap. By leveraging the overlap between the input and the output, Kaneko and Okazaki (2023) proposed model-agnostic edit span representations to compress the rewrites to save computation. They reported an output length reduction rate of nearly 80% with minimal accuracy impact in four rewriting tasks. In this paper, we propose alternative edit phrase representations inspired by phrase-based statistical machine translation. We systematically compare our phrasal representations with their span representations. We apply the LLM rewriting model to the task of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) post editing and show that our target-phrase-only edit representation has the best efficiency-accuracy trade-off. On the LibriSpeech test set, our method closes 50-60% of the WER gap between the edit span model and the full rewrite model while losing only 10-20% of the length reduction rate of the edit span model.