Recent advancements in generative AI have flourished the development of highly adept Large Language Models (LLMs) that integrate diverse data types to empower decision-making. Among these, Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications are promising for their capability to combine the strengths of information retrieval and generative models, enhancing their utility across various domains, including biomedical research. This paper introduces AlzheimerRAG, a Multimodal RAG pipeline tool for biomedical research use cases, primarily focusing on Alzheimer's disease from PubMed articles. Our pipeline incorporates multimodal fusion techniques to integrate textual and visual data processing by efficiently indexing and accessing vast amounts of biomedical literature. Preliminary experimental results against benchmarks, such as BioASQ and PubMedQA, have returned improved results in information retrieval and synthesis of domain-specific information. We also demonstrate a case study with our RAG pipeline across different Alzheimer's clinical scenarios. We infer that AlzheimerRAG can generate responses with accuracy non-inferior to humans and with low rates of hallucination. Overall, a reduction in cognitive task load is observed, which allows researchers to gain multimodal insights, improving understanding and treatment of Alzheimer's disease.

Abstract-The integration of retrieval-augmented techniques with LLMs has shown promise in improving performance across various domains. However, their utility in tasks requiring advanced reasoning, such as generating and evaluating mathematical statements and proofs, remains underexplored. This study explores the use of Lean, a programming language for writing mathematical proofs, to populate the knowledge corpus used by RAG systems. We hope for this to lay the foundation to exploring different methods of using RAGs to improve the performance of LLMs in advanced logical reasoning tasks. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, but they still face significant challenges, particularly in generating accurate and reliable information. One of the key issues is their tendency to produce hallucinated or incorrect responses.

As a crucial step to enhance LLMs alignment with human intentions, Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) has a high demand on dataset quality. However, existing IFT datasets often contain knowledge that is inconsistent with LLMs' internal knowledge learned from the pre-training phase, which can greatly affect the efficacy of IFT. To address this issue, we introduce NILE (iNternal consIstency aLignmEnt) framework, aimed at optimizing IFT datasets to unlock LLMs' capability further. NILE operates by eliciting target pre-trained LLM's internal knowledge corresponding to instruction data. The internal knowledge is leveraged to revise the answer in IFT datasets. Additionally, we propose a novel Internal Consistency Filtering (ICF) method to filter training samples, ensuring its high consistency with LLM's internal knowledge. Our experiments demonstrate that NILE-aligned IFT datasets sharply boost LLM performance across multiple LLM ability evaluation datasets, achieving up to 66.6% gain on Arena-Hard and 68.5% on Alpaca-Eval V2. Further analysis confirms that each component of the NILE}framework contributes to these substantial performance improvements, and provides compelling evidence that dataset consistency with pre-trained internal knowledge is pivotal for maximizing LLM potential.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly being deployed as conversational assistants capable of performing complex real-world tasks through tool integration. This enhanced ability to interact with external systems and process various data sources, while powerful, introduces significant security vulnerabilities. In particular, indirect prompt injection attacks pose a critical threat, where malicious instructions embedded within external data sources can manipulate agents to deviate from user intentions. While existing defenses based on rule constraints, source spotlighting, and authentication protocols show promise, they struggle to maintain robust security while preserving task functionality. We propose a novel and orthogonal perspective that reframes agent security from preventing harmful actions to ensuring task alignment, requiring every agent action to serve user objectives. Based on this insight, we develop Task Shield, a test-time defense mechanism that systematically verifies whether each instruction and tool call contributes to user-specified goals. Through experiments on the AgentDojo benchmark, we demonstrate that Task Shield reduces attack success rates (2.07\%) while maintaining high task utility (69.79\%) on GPT-4o.

As deep learning models become larger and more expensive, many practitioners turn to fine-tuning APIs. These web services allow fine-tuning a model between two parties: the client that provides the data, and the server that hosts the model. While convenient, these APIs raise a new concern: the data of the client is at risk of privacy breach during the training procedure. This challenge presents an important practical case of vertical federated learning, where the two parties perform parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) of a large model. In this study, we systematically search for a way to fine-tune models over an API while keeping the labels private. We analyze the privacy of LoRA, a popular approach for parameter-efficient fine-tuning when training over an API. Using this analysis, we propose P$^3$EFT, a multi-party split learning algorithm that takes advantage of existing PEFT properties to maintain privacy at a lower performance overhead. To validate our algorithm, we fine-tune DeBERTa-v2-XXLarge, Flan-T5 Large and LLaMA-2 7B using LoRA adapters on a range of NLP tasks. We find that P$^3$EFT is competitive with existing privacy-preserving methods in multi-party and two-party setups while having higher accuracy.

Although the rise of large language models (LLMs) has introduced new opportunities for time series forecasting, existing LLM-based solutions require excessive training and exhibit limited transferability. In view of these challenges, we propose TimeRAG, a framework that incorporates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) into time series forecasting LLMs, which constructs a time series knowledge base from historical sequences, retrieves reference sequences from the knowledge base that exhibit similar patterns to the query sequence measured by Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), and combines these reference sequences and the prediction query as a textual prompt to the time series forecasting LLM. Experiments on datasets from various domains show that the integration of RAG improved the prediction accuracy of the original model by 2.97% on average.

The integration of large language models (LLMs) into the planning module of Embodied Artificial Intelligence (Embodied AI) systems has greatly enhanced their ability to translate complex user instructions into executable policies. In this paper, we demystified how traditional LLM jailbreak attacks behave in the Embodied AI context. We conducted a comprehensive safety analysis of the LLM-based planning module of embodied AI systems against jailbreak attacks. Using the carefully crafted Harmful-RLbench, we accessed 20 open-source and proprietary LLMs under traditional jailbreak attacks, and highlighted two key challenges when adopting the prior jailbreak techniques to embodied AI contexts: (1) The harmful text output by LLMs does not necessarily induce harmful policies in Embodied AI context, and (2) even we can generate harmful policies, we have to guarantee they are executable in practice. To overcome those challenges, we propose Policy Executable (POEX) jailbreak attacks, where harmful instructions and optimized suffixes are injected into LLM-based planning modules, leading embodied AI to perform harmful actions in both simulated and physical environments. Our approach involves constraining adversarial suffixes to evade detection and fine-tuning a policy evaluater to improve the executability of harmful policies. We conducted extensive experiments on both a robotic arm embodied AI platform and simulators, to validate the attack and policy success rates on 136 harmful instructions from Harmful-RLbench. Our findings expose serious safety vulnerabilities in LLM-based planning modules, including the ability of POEX to be transferred across models. Finally, we propose mitigation strategies, such as safety-constrained prompts, pre- and post-planning checks, to address these vulnerabilities and ensure the safe deployment of embodied AI in real-world settings.

Despite the recent advancement in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, most retrieval methodologies are often developed for factual retrieval, which assumes query and positive documents are semantically similar. In this paper, we instead propose and study a more challenging type of retrieval task, called hidden rationale retrieval, in which query and document are not similar but can be inferred by reasoning chains, logic relationships, or empirical experiences. To address such problems, an instruction-tuned Large language model (LLM) with a cross-encoder architecture could be a reasonable choice. To further strengthen pioneering LLM-based retrievers, we design a special instruction that transforms the retrieval task into a generative task by prompting LLM to answer a binary-choice question. The model can be fine-tuned with direct preference optimization (DPO). The framework is also optimized for computational efficiency with no performance degradation. We name this retrieval framework by RaHoRe and verify its zero-shot and fine-tuned performance superiority on Emotional Support Conversation (ESC), compared with previous retrieval works. Our study suggests the potential to employ LLM as a foundation for a wider scope of retrieval tasks. Our codes, models, and datasets are available on https://github.com/flyfree5/LaHoRe.

The rise in cybercrime and the complexity of multilingual and code-mixed complaints present significant challenges for law enforcement and cybersecurity agencies. These organizations need automated, scalable methods to identify crime types, enabling efficient processing and prioritization of large complaint volumes. Manual triaging is inefficient, and traditional machine learning methods fail to capture the semantic and contextual nuances of textual cybercrime complaints. Moreover, the lack of publicly available datasets and privacy concerns hinder the research to present robust solutions. To address these challenges, we propose a framework for automated cybercrime complaint classification. The framework leverages Hinglish-adapted transformers, such as HingBERT and HingRoBERTa, to handle code-mixed inputs effectively. We employ the real-world dataset provided by Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) during CyberGuard AI Hackathon 2024. We employ GenAI open source model-based data augmentation method to address class imbalance. We also employ privacy-aware preprocessing to ensure compliance with ethical standards while maintaining data integrity. Our solution achieves significant performance improvements, with HingRoBERTa attaining an accuracy of 74.41% and an F1-score of 71.49%. We also develop ready-to-use tool by integrating Django REST backend with a modern frontend. The developed tool is scalable and ready for real-world deployment in platforms like the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal. This work bridges critical gaps in cybercrime complaint management, offering a scalable, privacy-conscious, and adaptable solution for modern cybersecurity challenges.

With the rapid advancement of LLM models, they have become widely useful in various fields. While these AI systems can be used for code generation, significantly simplifying and accelerating the tasks of developers, their use for students to do assignments has raised ethical questions in the field of education. In this context, determining the author of a particular code becomes important. In this study, we introduce AIGCodeSet, a dataset for AI-generated code detection tasks, specifically for the Python programming language. We obtain the problem descriptions and human-written codes from the CodeNet dataset. Using the problem descriptions, we generate AI-written codes with CodeLlama 34B, Codestral 22B, and Gemini 1.5 Flash models in three approaches: i) generating code from the problem description alone, ii) generating code using the description along with human-written source code containing runtime errors, and iii) generating code using the problem description and human-written code that resulted in wrong answers. Lastly, we conducted a post-processing step to eliminate LLM output irrelevant to code snippets. Overall, AIGCodeSet consists of 2,828 AI-generated and 4,755 human-written code snippets. We share our code with the research community to support studies on this important topic and provide performance results for baseline AI-generated code detection methods.