Generative AI holds significant potential for ecological and environmental applications such as monitoring, data analysis, education, and policy support. However, its effectiveness is limited by the lack of a unified evaluation framework. To address this, we present the Environmental Large Language model Evaluation (ELLE) question answer (QA) dataset, the first benchmark designed to assess large language models and their applications in ecological and environmental sciences. The ELLE dataset includes 1,130 question answer pairs across 16 environmental topics, categorized by domain, difficulty, and type. This comprehensive dataset standardizes performance assessments in these fields, enabling consistent and objective comparisons of generative AI performance. By providing a dedicated evaluation tool, ELLE dataset promotes the development and application of generative AI technologies for sustainable environmental outcomes. The dataset and code are available at https://elle.ceeai.net/ and https://github.com/CEEAI/elle.

Geologic map, as a fundamental diagram in geology science, provides critical insights into the structure and composition of Earth's subsurface and surface. These maps are indispensable in various fields, including disaster detection, resource exploration, and civil engineering. Despite their significance, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often fall short in geologic map understanding. This gap is primarily due to the challenging nature of cartographic generalization, which involves handling high-resolution map, managing multiple associated components, and requiring domain-specific knowledge. To quantify this gap, we construct GeoMap-Bench, the first-ever benchmark for evaluating MLLMs in geologic map understanding, which assesses the full-scale abilities in extracting, referring, grounding, reasoning, and analyzing. To bridge this gap, we introduce GeoMap-Agent, the inaugural agent designed for geologic map understanding, which features three modules: Hierarchical Information Extraction (HIE), Domain Knowledge Injection (DKI), and Prompt-enhanced Question Answering (PEQA). Inspired by the interdisciplinary collaboration among human scientists, an AI expert group acts as consultants, utilizing a diverse tool pool to comprehensively analyze questions. Through comprehensive experiments, GeoMap-Agent achieves an overall score of 0.811 on GeoMap-Bench, significantly outperforming 0.369 of GPT-4o. Our work, emPowering gEologic mAp holistiC undErstanding (PEACE) with MLLMs, paves the way for advanced AI applications in geology, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of geological investigations.

The increasing demand for flexible and efficient urban transportation solutions has spotlighted the limitations of traditional Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) systems, particularly in accommodating diverse passenger needs and dynamic urban environments. Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems have emerged as a promising alternative, leveraging connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to provide responsive and adaptable services. However, existing methods primarily focus on either vehicle scheduling or path planning, which often simplify complex urban layouts and neglect the necessity for simultaneous coordination and mutual avoidance among CAVs. This oversimplification poses significant challenges to the deployment of AMoD systems in real-world scenarios. To address these gaps, we propose CoDriveVLM, a novel framework that integrates high-fidelity simultaneous dispatching and cooperative motion planning for future AMoD systems. Our method harnesses Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enhance multi-modality information processing, and this enables comprehensive dispatching and collision risk evaluation. The VLM-enhanced CAV dispatching coordinator is introduced to effectively manage complex and unforeseen AMoD conditions, thus supporting efficient scheduling decision-making. Furthermore, we propose a scalable decentralized cooperative motion planning method via consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) focusing on collision risk evaluation and decentralized trajectory optimization. Simulation results demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of CoDriveVLM in various traffic conditions, showcasing its potential to significantly improve the fidelity and effectiveness of AMoD systems in future urban transportation networks. The code is available at https://github.com/henryhcliu/CoDriveVLM.git.

With the rise and ubiquity of larger deep learning models, the need for high-quality compression techniques is growing in order to deploy these models widely. The sheer parameter count of these models makes it difficult to fit them into the memory constraints of different hardware. In this work, we present a novel approach to model compression by merging similar parameter groups within a model, rather than pruning away less important parameters. Specifically, we select, align, and merge separate feed-forward sublayers in Transformer models, and test our method on language modeling, image classification, and machine translation. With our method, we demonstrate performance comparable to the original models while combining more than a third of model feed-forward sublayers, and demonstrate improved performance over a strong layer-pruning baseline. For instance, we can remove over 21% of total parameters from a Vision Transformer, while maintaining 99% of its original performance. Additionally, we observe that some groups of feed-forward sublayers exhibit high activation similarity, which may help explain their surprising mergeability.

Problem-solving therapy (PST) is a structured psychological approach that helps individuals manage stress and resolve personal issues by guiding them through problem identification, solution brainstorming, decision-making, and outcome evaluation. As mental health care increasingly integrates technologies like chatbots and large language models (LLMs), understanding how PST can be effectively automated is important. This study leverages anonymized therapy transcripts to analyze and classify therapeutic interventions using various LLMs and transformer-based models. Our results show that GPT-4o achieved the highest accuracy (0.76) in identifying PST strategies, outperforming other models. Additionally, we introduced a new dimension of communication strategies that enhances the current PST framework, offering deeper insights into therapist-client interactions. This research demonstrates the potential of LLMs to automate complex therapeutic dialogue analysis, providing a scalable, efficient tool for mental health interventions. Our annotation framework can enhance the accessibility, effectiveness, and personalization of PST, supporting therapists in real-time with more precise, targeted interventions.

Hallucination in large language models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge for their safe deployment, particularly due to its potential to spread misinformation. Most existing solutions address this challenge by focusing on aligning the models with credible sources or by improving how models communicate their confidence (or lack thereof) in their outputs. While these measures may be effective in most contexts, they may fall short in scenarios requiring more nuanced approaches, especially in situations where access to accurate data is limited or determining credible sources is challenging. In this study, we take North Korea - a country characterised by an extreme lack of reliable sources and the prevalence of sensationalist falsehoods - as a case study. We explore and evaluate how some of the best-performing multilingual LLMs and specific language-based models generate information about North Korea in three languages spoken in countries with significant geo-political interests: English (United States, United Kingdom), Korean (South Korea), and Mandarin Chinese (China). Our findings reveal significant differences, suggesting that the choice of model and language can lead to vastly different understandings of North Korea, which has important implications given the global security challenges the country poses.

Personalized Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly prevalent, showcasing the impressive capabilities of models like GPT-4. This trend has also catalyzed extensive research on deploying LLMs on mobile devices. Feasible approaches for such edge-cloud deployment include using split learning. However, previous research has largely overlooked the privacy leakage associated with intermediate representations transmitted from devices to servers. This work is the first to identify model inversion attacks in the split learning framework for LLMs, emphasizing the necessity of secure defense. For the first time, we introduce mutual information entropy to understand the information propagation of Transformer-based LLMs and assess privacy attack performance for LLM blocks. To address the issue of representations being sparser and containing less information than embeddings, we propose a two-stage attack system in which the first part projects representations into the embedding space, and the second part uses a generative model to recover text from these embeddings. This design breaks down the complexity and achieves attack scores of 38%-75% in various scenarios, with an over 60% improvement over the SOTA. This work comprehensively highlights the potential privacy risks during the deployment of personalized LLMs on the edge side.

We apply a simple method to machine translate datasets with span-level annotation using the DeepL MT service and its ability to translate formatted documents. Using this method, we produce a Finnish version of the SQuAD2.0 question answering dataset and train QA retriever models on this new dataset. We evaluate the quality of the dataset and more generally the MT method through direct evaluation, indirect comparison to other similar datasets, a backtranslation experiment, as well as through the performance of downstream trained QA models. In all these evaluations, we find that the method of transfer is not only simple to use but produces consistently better translated data. Given its good performance on the SQuAD dataset, it is likely the method can be used to translate other similar span-annotated datasets for other tasks and languages as well. All code and data is available under an open license: data at HuggingFace TurkuNLP/squad_v2_fi, code on GitHub TurkuNLP/squad2-fi, and model at HuggingFace TurkuNLP/bert-base-finnish-cased-squad2.

Background: Deception detection through analysing language is a promising avenue using both human judgments and automated machine learning judgments. For both forms of credibility assessment, automated adversarial attacks that rewrite deceptive statements to appear truthful pose a serious threat. Methods: We used a dataset of 243 truthful and 262 fabricated autobiographical stories in a deception detection task for humans and machine learning models. A large language model was tasked to rewrite deceptive statements so that they appear truthful. In Study 1, humans who made a deception judgment or used the detailedness heuristic and two machine learning models (a fine-tuned language model and a simple n-gram model) judged original or adversarial modifications of deceptive statements. In Study 2, we manipulated the target alignment of the modifications, i.e. tailoring the attack to whether the statements would be assessed by humans or computer models. Results: When adversarial modifications were aligned with their target, human (d=-0.07 and d=-0.04) and machine judgments (51% accuracy) dropped to the chance level. When the attack was not aligned with the target, both human heuristics judgments (d=0.30 and d=0.36) and machine learning predictions (63-78%) were significantly better than chance. Conclusions: Easily accessible language models can effectively help anyone fake deception detection efforts both by humans and machine learning models. Robustness against adversarial modifications for humans and machines depends on that target alignment. We close with suggestions on advancing deception research with adversarial attack designs.

In this paper, we introduce SAIL-VL (ScAlable Vision Language Model TraIning via High QuaLity Data Curation), an open-source vision language model (VLM) of state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with 2B parameters. We introduce three key improvements that contribute to SAIL-VL's leading performance: (1) Scalable high-quality visual understanding data construction: We implement a visual understanding data construction pipeline, which enables hundred-million-scale high-quality recaption data annotation. Equipped with this pipeline, we curate SAIL-Caption, a large-scale caption dataset with large quantity and the highest data quality compared with opensource caption datasets. (2) Scalable Pretraining with High-Quality Visual Understanding Data: We scale SAIL-VL's pretraining budget up to 131B tokens and show that even a 2B VLM benefits from scaled up training data sizes, exhibiting expected data size scaling laws in visual understanding and instruction following performance. (3) Scalable SFT via quantity and quality scaling: We introduce general guidance for instruction data curation to scale up instruction data continuously, allowing us to construct a large SFT dataset with the highest quality. To further improve SAIL-VL's performance, we propose quality scaling, a multi-stage training recipe with curriculum learning, to improve model performance scaling curves w.r.t. data sizes from logarithmic to be near-linear. SAIL-VL obtains the highest average score in 19 commonly used benchmarks in our evaluation and achieves top1 performance among VLMs of comparable sizes on OpenCompass (https://rank.opencompass.org.cn/leaderboard-multimodal). We release our SAIL-VL-2B model at HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/BytedanceDouyinContent/SAIL-VL-2B).