Large Language Model
EnerVerse: Envisioning Embodied Future Space for Robotics Manipulation
Huang, Siyuan, Chen, Liliang, Zhou, Pengfei, Chen, Shengcong, Jiang, Zhengkai, Hu, Yue, Gao, Peng, Li, Hongsheng, Yao, Maoqing, Ren, Guanghui
We introduce EnerVerse, a comprehensive framework for embodied future space generation specifically designed for robotic manipulation tasks. EnerVerse seamlessly integrates convolutional and bidirectional attention mechanisms for inner-chunk space modeling, ensuring low-level consistency and continuity. Recognizing the inherent redundancy in video data, we propose a sparse memory context combined with a chunkwise unidirectional generative paradigm to enable the generation of infinitely long sequences. To further augment robotic capabilities, we introduce the Free Anchor View (FAV) space, which provides flexible perspectives to enhance observation and analysis. The FAV space mitigates motion modeling ambiguity, removes physical constraints in confined environments, and significantly improves the robot's generalization and adaptability across various tasks and settings. To address the prohibitive costs and labor intensity of acquiring multi-camera observations, we present a data engine pipeline that integrates a generative model with 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS). This pipeline leverages the generative model's robust generalization capabilities and the spatial constraints provided by 4DGS, enabling an iterative enhancement of data quality and diversity, thus creating a data flywheel effect that effectively narrows the sim-to-real gap. Finally, our experiments demonstrate that the embodied future space generation prior substantially enhances policy predictive capabilities, resulting in improved overall performance, particularly in long-range robotic manipulation tasks.
Multi-Agent Conversational Online Learning for Adaptive LLM Response Identification
Dai, Xiangxiang, Xie, Yuejin, Liu, Maoli, Wang, Xuchuang, Li, Zhuohua, Wang, Huanyu, Lui, John C. S.
The remarkable generative capability of large language models (LLMs) has sparked a growing interest in automatically generating responses for different applications. Given the dynamic nature of user preferences and the uncertainty of LLM response performance, it is crucial to design efficient online learning algorithms to identify optimal LLM responses (i.e., high-quality responses that also meet user preferences). Most existing online algorithms adopt a centralized approach and fail to leverage explicit user preferences for more efficient and personalized LLM response identification. In contrast, this paper introduces \textit{MACO} (\underline{M}ulti-\underline{A}gent \underline{C}onversational \underline{O}nline Learning for Adaptive LLM Response Identification): 1) The online LLM response identification process is accelerated by multiple local agents (such as smartphones), while enhancing data privacy; 2) A novel conversational mechanism is proposed to adaptively conduct conversations for soliciting user preferences (e.g., a preference for a humorous tone over a serious one in generated responses), so to minimize uncertainty in preference estimation. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that \cadi\ is near-optimal regarding cumulative regret. Additionally, \cadi\ offers reduced communication costs and computational complexity by eliminating the traditional, computing-intensive ``G-optimal design" found in previous works. Extensive experiments with the open LLM \textit{Llama}, coupled with two different embedding models from Google and OpenAI for text vector representation, demonstrate that \cadi\ significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art in online LLM response identification.
Time Series Language Model for Descriptive Caption Generation
Trabelsi, Mohamed, Boyd, Aidan, Cao, Jin, Uzunalioglu, Huseyin
The automatic generation of representative natural language descriptions for observable patterns in time series data enhances interpretability, simplifies analysis and increases cross-domain utility of temporal data. While pre-trained foundation models have made considerable progress in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), their application to time series analysis has been hindered by data scarcity. Although several large language model (LLM)-based methods have been proposed for time series forecasting, time series captioning is under-explored in the context of LLMs. In this paper, we introduce TSLM, a novel time series language model designed specifically for time series captioning. TSLM operates as an encoder-decoder model, leveraging both text prompts and time series data representations to capture subtle temporal patterns across multiple phases and generate precise textual descriptions of time series inputs. TSLM addresses the data scarcity problem in time series captioning by first leveraging an in-context prompting synthetic data generation, and second denoising the generated data via a novel cross-modal dense retrieval scoring applied to time series-caption pairs. Experimental findings on various time series captioning datasets demonstrate that TSLM outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches from multiple data modalities by a significant margin.
Auto-RT: Automatic Jailbreak Strategy Exploration for Red-Teaming Large Language Models
Liu, Yanjiang, Zhou, Shuhen, Lu, Yaojie, Zhu, Huijia, Wang, Weiqiang, Lin, Hongyu, He, Ben, Han, Xianpei, Sun, Le
Automated red-teaming has become a crucial approach for uncovering vulnerabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, most existing methods focus on isolated safety flaws, limiting their ability to adapt to dynamic defenses and uncover complex vulnerabilities efficiently. To address this challenge, we propose Auto-RT, a reinforcement learning framework that automatically explores and optimizes complex attack strategies to effectively uncover security vulnerabilities through malicious queries. Specifically, we introduce two key mechanisms to reduce exploration complexity and improve strategy optimization: 1) Early-terminated Exploration, which accelerate exploration by focusing on high-potential attack strategies; and 2) Progressive Reward Tracking algorithm with intermediate downgrade models, which dynamically refine the search trajectory toward successful vulnerability exploitation. Extensive experiments across diverse LLMs demonstrate that, by significantly improving exploration efficiency and automatically optimizing attack strategies, Auto-RT detects a boarder range of vulnerabilities, achieving a faster detection speed and 16.63\% higher success rates compared to existing methods.
SDPO: Segment-Level Direct Preference Optimization for Social Agents
Kong, Aobo, Ma, Wentao, Zhao, Shiwan, Li, Yongbin, Wu, Yuchuan, Wang, Ke, Liu, Xiaoqian, Li, Qicheng, Qin, Yong, Huang, Fei
Social agents powered by large language models (LLMs) can simulate human social behaviors but fall short in handling complex goal-oriented social dialogues. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in aligning LLM behavior with human preferences across a variety of agent tasks. Existing DPO-based approaches for multi-turn interactions are divided into turn-level and session-level methods. The turn-level method is overly fine-grained, focusing exclusively on individual turns, while session-level methods are too coarse-grained, often introducing training noise. To address these limitations, we propose Segment-Level Direct Preference Optimization (SDPO), which focuses on specific key segments within interactions to optimize multi-turn agent behavior while minimizing training noise. Evaluations on the SOTOPIA benchmark demonstrate that SDPO-tuned agents consistently outperform both existing DPO-based methods and proprietary LLMs like GPT-4o, underscoring SDPO's potential to advance the social intelligence of LLM-based agents. We release our code and data at https://github.com/AlibabaResearch/DAMO-ConvAI/tree/main/SDPO.
Rerouting LLM Routers
Shafran, Avital, Schuster, Roei, Ristenpart, Thomas, Shmatikov, Vitaly
LLM routers aim to balance quality and cost of generation by classifying queries and routing them to a cheaper or more expensive LLM depending on their complexity. Routers represent one type of what we call LLM control planes: systems that orchestrate use of one or more LLMs. In this paper, we investigate routers' adversarial robustness. We first define LLM control plane integrity, i.e., robustness of LLM orchestration to adversarial inputs, as a distinct problem in AI safety. Next, we demonstrate that an adversary can generate query-independent token sequences we call ``confounder gadgets'' that, when added to any query, cause LLM routers to send the query to a strong LLM. Our quantitative evaluation shows that this attack is successful both in white-box and black-box settings against a variety of open-source and commercial routers, and that confounding queries do not affect the quality of LLM responses. Finally, we demonstrate that gadgets can be effective while maintaining low perplexity, thus perplexity-based filtering is not an effective defense. We finish by investigating alternative defenses.
SaLoRA: Safety-Alignment Preserved Low-Rank Adaptation
Li, Mingjie, Si, Wai Man, Backes, Michael, Zhang, Yang, Wang, Yisen
As advancements in large language models (LLMs) continue and the demand for personalized models increases, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods (e.g., LoRA) will become essential due to their efficiency in reducing computation costs. However, recent studies have raised alarming concerns that LoRA fine-tuning could potentially compromise the safety alignment in LLMs, posing significant risks for the model owner. In this paper, we first investigate the underlying mechanism by analyzing the changes in safety alignment related features before and after fine-tuning. Then, we propose a fixed safety module calculated by safety data and a task-specific initialization for trainable parameters in low-rank adaptations, termed Safety-alignment preserved Low-Rank Adaptation (SaLoRA). Unlike previous LoRA methods and their variants, SaLoRA enables targeted modifications to LLMs without disrupting their original alignments. Our experiments show that SaLoRA outperforms various adapters-based approaches across various evaluation metrics in different fine-tuning tasks.
Quantifying A Firm's AI Engagement: Constructing Objective, Data-Driven, AI Stock Indices Using 10-K Filings
Following an analysis of existing AI-related exchange-traded funds (ETFs), we reveal the selection criteria for determining which stocks qualify as AI-related are often opaque and rely on vague phrases and subjective judgments. This paper proposes a new, objective, data-driven approach using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to classify AI stocks by analyzing annual 10-K filings from 3,395 NASDAQ-listed firms between 2011 and 2023. This analysis quantifies each company's engagement with AI through binary indicators and weighted AI scores based on the frequency and context of AI-related terms. Using these metrics, we construct four AI stock indices-the Equally Weighted AI Index (AII), the Size-Weighted AI Index (SAII), and two Time-Discounted AI Indices (TAII05 and TAII5X)-offering different perspectives on AI investment. We validate our methodology through an event study on the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT, demonstrating that companies with higher AI engagement saw significantly greater positive abnormal returns, with analyses supporting the predictive power of our AI measures. Our indices perform on par with or surpass 14 existing AI-themed ETFs and the Nasdaq Composite Index in risk-return profiles, market responsiveness, and overall performance, achieving higher average daily returns and risk-adjusted metrics without increased volatility. These results suggest our NLP-based approach offers a reliable, market-responsive, and cost-effective alternative to existing AI-related ETF products. Our innovative methodology can also guide investors, asset managers, and policymakers in using corporate data to construct other thematic portfolios, contributing to a more transparent, data-driven, and competitive approach.
Automating Legal Concept Interpretation with LLMs: Retrieval, Generation, and Evaluation
Luo, Kangcheng, Huang, Quzhe, Jiang, Cong, Feng, Yansong
Legal articles often include vague concepts to adapt to the ever-changing society. Providing detailed interpretations of these concepts is a critical task for legal practitioners, which requires meticulous and professional annotations by legal experts, admittedly time-consuming and expensive to collect at scale. In this paper, we introduce a novel retrieval-augmented generation framework, ATRI, for AuTomatically Retrieving relevant information from past judicial precedents and Interpreting vague legal concepts. We further propose a new benchmark, Legal Concept Entailment, to automate the evaluation of generated concept interpretations without expert involvement. Automatic evaluations indicate that our generated interpretations can effectively assist large language models (LLMs) in understanding vague legal concepts. Multi-faceted evaluations by legal experts indicate that the quality of our concept interpretations is comparable to those written by human experts. Our work has strong implications for leveraging LLMs to support legal practitioners in interpreting vague legal concepts and beyond.
How Toxic Can You Get? Search-based Toxicity Testing for Large Language Models
Corbo, Simone, Bancale, Luca, De Gennaro, Valeria, Lestingi, Livia, Scotti, Vincenzo, Camilli, Matteo
Language is a deep-rooted means of perpetration of stereotypes and discrimination. Large Language Models (LLMs), now a pervasive technology in our everyday lives, can cause extensive harm when prone to generating toxic responses. The standard way to address this issue is to align the LLM, which, however, dampens the issue without constituting a definitive solution. Therefore, testing LLM even after alignment efforts remains crucial for detecting any residual deviations with respect to ethical standards. We present EvoTox, an automated testing framework for LLMs' inclination to toxicity, providing a way to quantitatively assess how much LLMs can be pushed towards toxic responses even in the presence of alignment. The framework adopts an iterative evolution strategy that exploits the interplay between two LLMs, the System Under Test (SUT) and the Prompt Generator steering SUT responses toward higher toxicity. The toxicity level is assessed by an automated oracle based on an existing toxicity classifier. We conduct a quantitative and qualitative empirical evaluation using four state-of-the-art LLMs as evaluation subjects having increasing complexity (7-13 billion parameters). Our quantitative evaluation assesses the cost-effectiveness of four alternative versions of EvoTox against existing baseline methods, based on random search, curated datasets of toxic prompts, and adversarial attacks. Our qualitative assessment engages human evaluators to rate the fluency of the generated prompts and the perceived toxicity of the responses collected during the testing sessions. Results indicate that the effectiveness, in terms of detected toxicity level, is significantly higher than the selected baseline methods (effect size up to 1.0 against random search and up to 0.99 against adversarial attacks). Furthermore, EvoTox yields a limited cost overhead (from 22% to 35% on average).