Time-series foundation models have the ability to run inference, mainly forecasting, on any type of time series data, thanks to the informative representations comprising waveform features. Wearable sensing data, on the other hand, contain more variability in both patterns and frequency bands of interest and generally emphasize more on the ability to infer healthcare-related outcomes. The main challenge of crafting a foundation model for wearable sensing physiological signals is to learn generalizable representations that support efficient adaptation across heterogeneous sensing configurations and applications. In this work, we propose NormWear, a step toward such a foundation model, aiming to extract generalized and informative wearable sensing representations. NormWear has been pretrained on a large set of physiological signals, including PPG, ECG, EEG, GSR, and IMU, from various public resources. For a holistic assessment, we perform downstream evaluation on 11 public wearable sensing datasets, spanning 18 applications in the areas of mental health, body state inference, biomarker estimations, and disease risk evaluations. We demonstrate that NormWear achieves a better performance improvement over competitive baselines in general time series foundation modeling. In addition, leveraging a novel representation-alignment-match-based method, we align physiological signals embeddings with text embeddings. This alignment enables our proposed foundation model to perform zero-shot inference, allowing it to generalize to previously unseen wearable signal-based health applications. Finally, we perform nonlinear dynamic analysis on the waveform features extracted by the model at each intermediate layer. This analysis quantifies the model's internal processes, offering clear insights into its behavior and fostering greater trust in its inferences among end users.

This paper proposes small and efficient machine learning models (TinyML) for resource-constrained edge devices, specifically for on-device indoor localisation. Typical approaches for indoor localisation rely on centralised remote processing of data transmitted from lower powered devices such as wearables. However, there are several benefits for moving this to the edge device itself, including increased battery life, enhanced privacy, reduced latency and lowered operational costs, all of which are key for common applications such as health monitoring. The work focuses on model compression techniques, including quantization and knowledge distillation, to significantly reduce the model size while maintaining high predictive performance. We base our work on a large state-of-the-art transformer-based model and seek to deploy it within low-power MCUs. We also propose a state-space-based architecture using Mamba as a more compact alternative to the transformer. Our results show that the quantized transformer model performs well within a 64 KB RAM constraint, achieving an effective balance between model size and localisation precision. Additionally, the compact Mamba model has strong performance under even tighter constraints, such as a 32 KB of RAM, without the need for model compression, making it a viable option for more resource-limited environments. We demonstrate that, through our framework, it is feasible to deploy advanced indoor localisation models onto low-power MCUs with restricted memory limitations. The application of these TinyML models in healthcare has the potential to revolutionize patient monitoring by providing accurate, real-time location data while minimizing power consumption, increasing data privacy, improving latency and reducing infrastructure costs.

The effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) is closely tied to the design of prompts, making prompt optimization essential for enhancing their performance across a wide range of tasks. Many existing approaches to automating prompt engineering rely exclusively on textual feedback, refining prompts based solely on inference errors identified by large, computationally expensive LLMs. Unfortunately, smaller models struggle to generate high-quality feedback, resulting in complete dependence on large LLM judgment. Moreover, these methods fail to leverage more direct and finer-grained information, such as gradients, due to operating purely in text space. To this end, we introduce GReaTer, a novel prompt optimization technique that directly incorporates gradient information over task-specific reasoning. By utilizing task loss gradients, GReaTer enables self-optimization of prompts for open-source, lightweight language models without the need for costly closed-source LLMs. This allows high-performance prompt optimization without dependence on massive LLMs, closing the gap between smaller models and the sophisticated reasoning often needed for prompt refinement. Extensive evaluations across diverse reasoning tasks including BBH, GSM8k, and FOLIO demonstrate that GReaTer consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art prompt optimization methods, even those reliant on powerful LLMs. Additionally, GReaTer-optimized prompts frequently exhibit better transferability and, in some cases, boost task performance to levels comparable to or surpassing those achieved by larger language models, highlighting the effectiveness of prompt optimization guided by gradients over reasoning. Code of GReaTer is available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/GreaTer.

Humor generation is a challenging task in natural language processing due to limited resources and the quality of existing datasets. Available humor language resources often suffer from toxicity and duplication, limiting their effectiveness for training robust models. This paper proposes CleanComedy, a specialized, partially annotated toxicity-filtered corpus of English and Russian jokes collected from various sources. We study the effectiveness of our data filtering approach through a survey on humor and toxicity levels in various joke groups. In addition, we study advances in computer humor generation by comparing jokes written by humans with various groups of generative jokes, including our baseline models trained on the CleanComedy datasets.

This work presents a novel method for composing and improvising music inspired by Cornelius Cardew's Treatise, using AI to bridge graphic notation and musical expression. By leveraging OpenAI's ChatGPT to interpret the abstract visual elements of Treatise, we convert these graphical images into descriptive textual prompts. These prompts are then input into MusicLDM, a pre-trained latent diffusion model designed for music generation. We introduce a technique called "outpainting," which overlaps sections of AI-generated music to create a seamless and cohesive composition. We demostrate a new perspective on performing and interpreting graphic scores, showing how AI can transform visual stimuli into sound and expand the creative possibilities in contemporary/experimental music composition. Musical pieces are available at https://bit.ly/TreatiseAI

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities across various language tasks, but solving complex reasoning problems remains a challenge. While existing methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Tree-of-Thought (ToT) enhance reasoning by decomposing problems or structuring prompts, they typically perform a single pass of reasoning and may fail to revisit flawed paths, compromising accuracy. To address this, we propose a novel reasoning framework called Forest-of-Thought (FoT), which integrates multiple reasoning trees to leverage collective decision-making for solving complex logical problems. FoT utilizes sparse activation strategies to select the most relevant reasoning paths, improving both efficiency and accuracy. Additionally, we introduce a dynamic self-correction strategy that enables real-time error correction and learning from past mistakes, as well as consensus-guided decision making strategies to optimize correctness and computational resources. Experimental results demonstrate that the FoT framework, combined with these strategies, significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, enabling them to solve complex tasks with greater precision and efficiency.

Pursuing human-like interaction for Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents requires understanding the GUI context and following user instructions. However, existing works typically couple these two aspects and focus more on instruct-following abilities, while ignoring the importance of understanding the GUI context. In this paper, we introduce an instruction-free GUI navigation dataset, termed Insight-UI Dataset, to enhance model comprehension of GUI environments. Insight-UI Dataset is automatically generated from the Common Crawl corpus, simulating various platforms -- including iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux -- across multiple resolutions on 312K domains. Although GUI interactions vary by context, diverse interfaces share common internal patterns, such as clicking an item to view its details. It implies the feasibility of independent GUI operation learning, followed by joint optimization with instruction tuning. Thereby, we develop the GUI agent model Falcon-UI, which is initially pretrained on Insight-UI Dataset and subsequently fine-tuned on Android and Web GUI datasets, including AITW, AITZ, Android Control, and Mind2Web. With 7 billion parameters, Falcon-UI achieves accuracy comparable to the 72 billion-parameter Qwen2VL on AITZ, validating the alignment between GUI context comprehension and agent performance. Our code and dataset will be open-sourced.

Image tokenizers map images to sequences of discrete tokens, and are a crucial component of autoregressive transformer-based image generation. The tokens are typically associated with spatial locations in the input image, arranged in raster scan order, which is not ideal for autoregressive modeling. In this paper, we propose to tokenize the image spectrum instead, obtained from a discrete wavelet transform (DWT), such that the sequence of tokens represents the image in a coarse-to-fine fashion. Our tokenizer brings several advantages: 1) it leverages that natural images are more compressible at high frequencies, 2) it can take and reconstruct images of different resolutions without retraining, 3) it improves the conditioning for next-token prediction -- instead of conditioning on a partial line-by-line reconstruction of the image, it takes a coarse reconstruction of the full image, 4) it enables partial decoding where the first few generated tokens can reconstruct a coarse version of the image, 5) it enables autoregressive models to be used for image upsampling. We evaluate the tokenizer reconstruction metrics as well as multiscale image generation, text-guided image upsampling and editing.

Embedded IoT system development is crucial for enabling seamless connectivity and functionality across a wide range of applications. However, such a complex process requires cross-domain knowledge of hardware and software and hence often necessitates direct developer involvement, making it labor-intensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. To address this challenge, this paper introduces EmbedGenius, the first fully automated software development platform for general-purpose embedded IoT systems. The key idea is to leverage the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) and embedded system expertise to automate the hardware-in-the-loop development process. The main methods include a component-aware library resolution method for addressing hardware dependencies, a library knowledge generation method that injects utility domain knowledge into LLMs, and an auto-programming method that ensures successful deployment. We evaluate EmbedGenius's performance across 71 modules and four mainstream embedded development platforms with over 350 IoT tasks. Experimental results show that EmbedGenius can generate codes with an accuracy of 95.7% and complete tasks with a success rate of 86.5%, surpassing human-in-the-loop baselines by 15.6%--37.7% and 25.5%--53.4%, respectively. We also show EmbedGenius's potential through case studies in environmental monitoring and remote control systems development.

This paper introduces RuleArena, a novel and challenging benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow complex, real-world rules in reasoning. Covering three practical domains -- airline baggage fees, NBA transactions, and tax regulations -- RuleArena assesses LLMs' proficiency in handling intricate natural language instructions that demand long-context understanding, logical reasoning, and accurate mathematical computation. Two key attributes distinguish RuleArena from traditional rule-based reasoning benchmarks: (1) it extends beyond standard first-order logic representations, and (2) it is grounded in authentic, practical scenarios, providing insights into the suitability and reliability of LLMs for real-world applications. Our findings reveal several notable limitations in LLMs: (1) they struggle to identify and apply the appropriate rules, frequently becoming confused by similar but distinct regulations, (2) they cannot consistently perform accurate mathematical computations, even when they correctly identify the relevant rules, and (3) in general, they perform poorly in the benchmark. These results highlight significant challenges in advancing LLMs' rule-guided reasoning capabilities in real-life applications.