The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model has emerged as a prominent architecture in the field of Large Language Models (LLMs), providing a better balance between model performance and computational efficiency. However the General Matrix Multiply (GEMM) operations and large parameters introduce challenges related to computational efficiency and communication overhead, which become throughput bottlenecks during inference. Applying a single parallelism strategy like EP, DP, TP or a straightforward combination of them to MoE usually achieves sub-optimal inference throughput. This paper introduces EPS-MoE, a novel expert pipeline scheduler for MoE that surpasses the existing parallelism schemes. Our approach optimizes the computation of MoE FeedForward Network (FFN) modules by dynamically selecting the best kernel implementation of GroupGemm and DenseGemm for different loads and adaptively overlapping these computations with communication, leading to a substantial increase in throughput. Our experimental results demonstrate at most 52.4\% improvement in prefill throughput compared to existing parallel inference methods. Specifically, our method accelerated the highly optimized DeepSeekV2 model from a claimed 100K tokens per second to at least 120K tokens per second.

Recent work investigates whether LMs learn human-like linguistic generalizations and representations from developmentally plausible amounts of data. Yet, the basic linguistic units processed in these LMs are determined by subword-based tokenization, which limits their validity as models of learning at and below the word level. In this paper, we explore the potential of tokenization-free, phoneme- and grapheme-based language models. We demonstrate that small models based on the Llama architecture can achieve strong linguistic performance on standard syntactic and novel lexical/phonetic benchmarks when trained with character-level vocabularies. We further show that phoneme-based models almost match grapheme-based models in standard tasks and novel evaluations. Our findings suggest a promising direction for creating more linguistically plausible language models that are better suited for computational studies of language acquisition and processing.

It's impossible to ignore the rapid rise in the capabilities of artificial intelligence tools in recent months. Microsoft hasn't been shy in stuffing Windows full of AI features: Windows computers now come with a dedicated key for launching Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant, which has been integrated into the operating system. We'll guide you through everything you can use Copilot for on your Windows laptop or desktop, and how you can get it up and running. We'll also explain the difference between Copilot and a Copilot PC, which is a label you might have spotted if you've been shopping for a Windows computer lately. When it comes to the Copilot assistant inside Windows, it's very similar to the Copilot app on the web.

This study introduces SLLMBO, an innovative framework leveraging large language models (LLMs) for hyperparameter optimization (HPO), incorporating dynamic search space adaptability, enhanced parameter space exploitation, and a novel LLM-tree-structured parzen estimator (LLM-TPE) sampler. By addressing limitations in recent fully LLM-based methods and traditional bayesian optimization (BO), SLLMBO achieves more robust optimization. This comprehensive benchmarking evaluates multiple LLMs, including GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4o, Claude-Sonnet-3.5, and Gemini-1.5-Flash, extending prior work and establishing SLLMBO as the first framework to benchmark a diverse set of LLMs for HPO. By integrating LLMs' established strengths in parameter initialization with the exploitation abilities demonstrated in this study, alongside TPE's exploration capabilities, the LLM-TPE sampler achieves a balanced exploration-exploitation trade-off, reduces API costs, and mitigates premature early stoppings for more effective parameter searches. Across 14 tabular tasks in classification and regression, the LLM-TPE sampler outperformed fully LLM-based methods and achieved superior results over BO methods in 9 tasks. Testing early stopping in budget-constrained scenarios demonstrated competitive performance, indicating that LLM-based methods generally benefit from extended iterations for optimal results. This work lays the foundation for future research exploring open-source LLMs, reproducibility of LLM results in HPO, and benchmarking SLLMBO on complex datasets, such as image classification, segmentation, and machine translation.

Here, we present the outcomes from the second Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry, which engaged participants across global hybrid locations, resulting in 34 team submissions. The submissions spanned seven key application areas and demonstrated the diverse utility of LLMs for applications in (1) molecular and material property prediction; (2) molecular and material design; (3) automation and novel interfaces; (4) scientific communication and education; (5) research data management and automation; (6) hypothesis generation and evaluation; and (7) knowledge extraction and reasoning from scientific literature. Each team submission is presented in a summary table with links to the code and as brief papers in the appendix. Beyond team results, we discuss the hackathon event and its hybrid format, which included physical hubs in Toronto, Montreal, San Francisco, Berlin, Lausanne, and Tokyo, alongside a global online hub to enable local and virtual collaboration. Overall, the event highlighted significant improvements in LLM capabilities since the previous year's hackathon, suggesting continued expansion of LLMs for applications in materials science and chemistry research. These outcomes demonstrate the dual utility of LLMs as both multipurpose models for diverse machine learning tasks and platforms for rapid prototyping custom applications in scientific research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be susceptible to jailbreak attacks, or adversarial attacks used to illicit high risk behavior from a model. Jailbreaks have been exploited by cybercriminals and blackhat actors to cause significant harm, highlighting the critical need to safeguard widely-deployed models. Safeguarding approaches, which include fine-tuning models or having LLMs "self-reflect", may lengthen the inference time of a model, incur a computational penalty, reduce the semantic fluency of an output, and restrict ``normal'' model behavior. Importantly, these Safety-Performance Trade-offs (SPTs) remain an understudied area. In this work, we introduce a novel safeguard, called SafeNudge, that combines Controlled Text Generation with "nudging", or using text interventions to change the behavior of a model. SafeNudge triggers during text-generation while a jailbreak attack is being executed, and can reduce successful jailbreak attempts by 30% by guiding the LLM towards a safe responses. It adds minimal latency to inference and has a negligible impact on the semantic fluency of outputs. Further, we allow for tunable SPTs. SafeNudge is open-source and available through https://pypi.org/, and is compatible with models loaded with the Hugging Face "transformers" library.

Large language models trained on web-scale corpora can memorize undesirable datapoints such as incorrect facts, copyrighted content or sensitive data. Recently, many machine unlearning algorithms have been proposed that aim to `erase' these datapoints from trained models -- that is, revert model behavior to be similar to a model that had never been trained on these datapoints. However, evaluating the success of unlearning algorithms remains an open challenge. In this work, we propose the RESTOR framework for machine unlearning, which evaluates the ability of unlearning algorithms to perform targeted data erasure from models, by evaluating the ability of models to forget the knowledge introduced in these data points, while simultaneously recovering the model's knowledge state had it not encountered these datapoints. RESTOR helps uncover several novel insights about popular unlearning algorithms, and the mechanisms through which they operate -- for instance, identifying that some algorithms merely emphasize forgetting, and that localizing unlearning targets can enhance unlearning performance.

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly relied on in AI systems, predicting when they make mistakes is crucial. While a great deal of work in the field uses internal representations to interpret model behavior, these representations are inaccessible when given solely black-box access through an API. In this paper, we extract features of LLMs in a black-box manner by using follow-up prompts and taking the probabilities of different responses as representations to train reliable predictors of model behavior. We demonstrate that training a linear model on these low-dimensional representations produces reliable and generalizable predictors of model performance at the instance level (e.g., if a particular generation correctly answers a question). Remarkably, these can often outperform white-box linear predictors that operate over a model's hidden state or the full distribution over its vocabulary. In addition, we demonstrate that these extracted features can be used to evaluate more nuanced aspects of a language model's state. For instance, they can be used to distinguish between a clean version of GPT-4o-mini and a version that has been influenced via an adversarial system prompt that answers question-answering tasks incorrectly or introduces bugs into generated code. Furthermore, they can reliably distinguish between different model architectures and sizes, enabling the detection of misrepresented models provided through an API (e.g., identifying if GPT-3.5 is supplied instead of GPT-4o-mini). Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on a wide variety of tasks (Radford et al.), leading to their increased involvement in larger systems. For instance, they are often used to provide supervision (Bai et al., 2022; Sam et al., 2024), as tools in decision-making (Benary et al., 2023; Sha et al., 2023), or as controllers on agentic frameworks (Xi et al., 2023; Robey et al., 2024). Thus, it is crucial to understand and predict their behaviors, especially in high-stakes settings. However, as with any deep network, it is difficult to understand the behavior of such large models (Zhang et al., 2021). For instance, prior work has studied input gradients or saliency maps (Simonyan et al., 2013; Zeiler & Fergus, 2014; Pukdee et al., 2024)) to attempt to understand neural network behavior, but this can fail to reliably describe model behavior (Adebayo et al., 2018; Kindermans et al., 2019; Srinivas & Fleuret, 2020). Other work has studied the ability of transformers to represent certain algorithms (Nanda et al., 2022; Zhong et al., 2024) that may be involved in their predictions. One promising direction in understanding LLMs (or any other multimodal model that understands natural language) is to leverage their ability to interact with human queries. Recent work has demonstrated that a LLM's hidden state contains low-dimensional features of model truthfulness or harmfulness (Zou et al., 2023a).

Understanding the world and explaining it with scientific theories is a central aspiration of artificial intelligence research. Proposing theories, designing experiments to test them, and then revising them based on data are fundamental to scientific discovery. Despite the significant promise of LLM-based scientific agents, no benchmarks systematically test LLM's ability to propose scientific models, collect experimental data, and revise them in light of new data. We introduce BoxingGym, a benchmark with 10 environments for systematically evaluating both experimental design (e.g. collecting data to test a scientific theory) and model discovery (e.g. proposing and revising scientific theories). To enable tractable and quantitative evaluation, we implement each environment as a generative probabilistic model with which a scientific agent can run interactive experiments. These probabilistic models are drawn from various real-world scientific domains ranging from psychology to ecology. To quantitatively evaluate a scientific agent's ability to collect informative experimental data, we compute the expected information gain (EIG), an information-theoretic quantity which measures how much an experiment reduces uncertainty about the parameters of a generative model. A good scientific theory is a concise and predictive explanation. Therefore, to quantitatively evaluate model discovery, we ask a scientific agent to explain their model and then assess whether this explanation enables another scientific agent to make reliable predictions about this environment. In addition to this explanation-based evaluation, we compute standard model evaluation metrics such as prediction errors. We find that current LLMs, such as GPT-4o, struggle with both experimental design and model discovery. We find that augmenting the LLM-based agent with an explicit statistical model does not reliably improve these results.

This paper introduces PersonaAI, a cutting-edge application that leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and the LLAMA model to create highly personalized digital avatars capable of accurately mimicking individual personalities. Designed as a cloud-based mobile application, PersonaAI captures user data seamlessly, storing it in a secure database for retrieval and analysis. The result is a system that provides context-aware, accurate responses to user queries, enhancing the potential of AI-driven personalization. Why should you care? PersonaAI combines the scalability of RAG with the efficiency of prompt-engineered LLAMA3, offering a lightweight, sustainable alternative to traditional large language model (LLM) training methods. The system's novel approach to data collection, utilizing real-time user interactions via a mobile app, ensures enhanced context relevance while maintaining user privacy. By open-sourcing our implementation, we aim to foster adaptability and community-driven development. PersonaAI demonstrates how AI can transform interactions by merging efficiency, scalability, and personalization, making it a significant step forward in the future of digital avatars and personalized AI.