Optimal prompt selection is crucial for maximizing large language model (LLM) performance on downstream tasks. As the most powerful models are proprietary and can only be invoked via an API, users often manually refine prompts in a black-box setting by adjusting instructions and few-shot examples until they achieve good performance as measured on a validation set. Recent methods addressing static black-box prompt selection face significant limitations: They often fail to leverage the inherent structure of prompts, treating instructions and few-shot exemplars as a single block of text. Moreover, they often lack query-efficiency by evaluating prompts on all validation instances, or risk sub-optimal selection of a prompt by using random subsets of validation instances. We introduce HbBoPs, a novel Hyperband-based Bayesian optimization method for black-box prompt selection addressing these key limitations. Our approach combines a structural-aware deep kernel Gaussian Process to model prompt performance with Hyperband as a multi-fidelity scheduler to select the number of validation instances for prompt evaluations. The structural-aware modeling approach utilizes separate embeddings for instructions and few-shot exemplars, enhancing the surrogate model's ability to capture prompt performance and predict which prompt to evaluate next in a sample-efficient manner. Together with Hyperband as a multi-fidelity scheduler we further enable query-efficiency by adaptively allocating resources across different fidelity levels, keeping the total number of validation instances prompts are evaluated on low. Extensive evaluation across ten benchmarks and three LLMs demonstrate that HbBoPs outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

The field of video generation has made remarkable advancements, yet there remains a pressing need for a clear, systematic recipe that can guide the development of robust and scalable models. In this work, we present a comprehensive study that systematically explores the interplay of model architectures, training recipes, and data curation strategies, culminating in a simple and scalable text-image-conditioned video generation method, named STIV. Our framework integrates image condition into a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) through frame replacement, while incorporating text conditioning via a joint image-text conditional classifier-free guidance. This design enables STIV to perform both text-to-video (T2V) and text-image-to-video (TI2V) tasks simultaneously. Additionally, STIV can be easily extended to various applications, such as video prediction, frame interpolation, multi-view generation, and long video generation, etc. With comprehensive ablation studies on T2I, T2V, and TI2V, STIV demonstrate strong performance, despite its simple design. An 8.7B model with 512 resolution achieves 83.1 on VBench T2V, surpassing both leading open and closed-source models like CogVideoX-5B, Pika, Kling, and Gen-3. The same-sized model also achieves a state-of-the-art result of 90.1 on VBench I2V task at 512 resolution. By providing a transparent and extensible recipe for building cutting-edge video generation models, we aim to empower future research and accelerate progress toward more versatile and reliable video generation solutions.

However, the existence of such capability transfer between natural language and gene sequences/languages remains under explored.This study addresses this gap by drawing inspiration from the sentence-pair classification task used for evaluating sentence similarity in natural language. We constructed two analogous tasks: DNA-pair classification(DNA sequence similarity) and DNA-protein-pair classification(gene coding determination). These tasks were designed to validate the transferability of capabilities from natural language to gene sequences. Even a small-scale pre-trained model like GPT-2-small, which was pre-trained on English, achieved an accuracy of 78% on the DNA-pair classification task after being fine-tuned on English sentence-pair classification data(XTREME PAWS-X). While training a BERT model on multilingual text, the precision reached 89%. On the more complex DNA-protein-pair classification task, however, the model's output was barely distinguishable from random output.Experimental validation has confirmed that the transfer of capabilities from natural language to biological language is unequivocally present. Building on this foundation, we have also investigated the impact of model parameter scale and pre-training on this capability transfer. We provide recommendations for facilitating the transfer of capabilities from natural language to genetic language,as well as new approaches for conducting biological research based on this capability.This study offers an intriguing new perspective on exploring the relationship between natural language and genetic language.

Recent advancements in computational pathology have produced patch-level Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), but these models are limited by their inability to analyze whole slide images (WSIs) comprehensively and their tendency to bypass crucial morphological features that pathologists rely on for diagnosis. To address these challenges, we first introduce WSI-Bench, a large-scale morphology-aware benchmark containing 180k VQA pairs from 9,850 WSIs across 30 cancer types, designed to evaluate MLLMs' understanding of morphological characteristics crucial for accurate diagnosis. Building upon this benchmark, we present WSI-LLaVA, a novel framework for gigapixel WSI understanding that employs a three-stage training approach: WSI-text alignment, feature space alignment, and task-specific instruction tuning. To better assess model performance in pathological contexts, we develop two specialized WSI metrics: WSI-Precision and WSI-Relevance. Experimental results demonstrate that WSI-LLaVA outperforms existing models across all capability dimensions, with a significant improvement in morphological analysis, establishing a clear correlation between morphological understanding and diagnostic accuracy.

Quantization of foundational models (FMs) is significantly more challenging than traditional DNNs due to the emergence of large magnitude features called outliers. Existing outlier-aware algorithm/architecture co-design techniques either use mixed-precision, retaining outliers at high precision but compromise hardware efficiency, or quantize inliers and outliers at the same precision, improving hardware efficiency at the cost of accuracy. To address this mutual exclusivity, in this paper, we propose MicroScopiQ, a novel co-design technique that leverages pruning to complement outlier-aware quantization. MicroScopiQ retains outliers at higher precision while pruning a certain fraction of least important weights to distribute the additional outlier bits; ensuring high accuracy, aligned memory and hardware efficiency. We design a high-throughput, low overhead accelerator architecture composed of simple multi-precision INT processing elements and a novel network-on-chip called ReCoN that efficiently abstracts the complexity of supporting high-precision outliers. Additionally, unlike existing alternatives, MicroScopiQ does not assume any locality of outlier weights, enabling applicability to a broad range of FMs. Extensive experiments across various quantization settings show that MicroScopiQ achieves SoTA quantization performance while simultaneously improving inference performance by 3x and reducing energy by 2x over existing alternatives.

We consider the problem of model compression for Large Language Models (LLMs) at post-training time, where the task is to compress a well-trained model using only a small set of calibration input data. In this work, we introduce a new low-rank approach to correct for quantization errors of activations in LLMs: we propose to add low-rank weight matrices in full precision that act on the unquantized activations. We then solve a joint optimization problem over the quantized representation of the weights and additional low-rank weight matrices to quantize both weights and activations. We focus on the case of 4-bit weight-and-activation quantization (W4A4). Using ranks equivalent to 10% of the original weight matrix size, our approach reduces the accuracy gap with the original model by more than 50%. Using ranks equivalent to 30% of the original weight matrix, the accuracy gap is closed completely. We demonstrate our results on four recent LLMs, namely Llama-2, Llama-3, Phi-3 and Mixtral models. Large Language Models (LLMs) (Abdin et al., 2024; Dubey et al., 2024; Jiang et al., 2024) have demonstrated exceptional performances across a wide range of applications.

Are generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models only trained to predict the next token, or do they implicitly learn a world model from which a sequence is generated one token at a time? We examine this question by deriving a causal interpretation of the attention mechanism in GPT, and suggesting a causal world model that arises from this interpretation. Furthermore, we propose that GPT-models, at inference time, can be utilized for zero-shot causal structure learning for in-distribution sequences. Empirical evaluation is conducted in a controlled synthetic environment using the setup and rules of the Othello board game. A GPT, pre-trained on real-world games played with the intention of winning, is tested on synthetic data that only adheres to the game rules. We find that the GPT model tends to generate next moves that adhere to the game rules for sequences for which the attention mechanism encodes a causal structure with high confidence. In general, in cases for which the GPT model generates moves that do not adhere to the game rules, it also fails to capture any causal structure.

To ensure and monitor large language models (LLMs) reliably, various evaluation metrics have been proposed in the literature. However, there is little research on prescribing a methodology to identify a robust threshold on these metrics even though there are many serious implications of an incorrect choice of the thresholds during deployment of the LLMs. Translating the traditional model risk management (MRM) guidelines within regulated industries such as the financial industry, we propose a step-by-step recipe for picking a threshold for a given LLM evaluation metric. We emphasize that such a methodology should start with identifying the risks of the LLM application under consideration and risk tolerance of the stakeholders. We then propose concrete and statistically rigorous procedures to determine a threshold for the given LLM evaluation metric using available ground-truth data. As a concrete example to demonstrate the proposed methodology at work, we employ it on the Faithfulness metric, as implemented in various publicly available libraries, using the publicly available HaluBench dataset. We also lay a foundation for creating systematic approaches to select thresholds, not only for LLMs but for any GenAI applications.

This paper presents a novel framework for modeling and conditional generation of 3D articulated objects. Troubled by flexibility-quality tradeoffs, existing methods are often limited to using predefined structures or retrieving shapes from static datasets. To address these challenges, we parameterize an articulated object as a tree of tokens and employ a transformer to generate both the object's high-level geometry code and its kinematic relations. Subsequently, each sub-part's geometry is further decoded using a signed-distance-function (SDF) shape prior, facilitating the synthesis of high-quality 3D shapes. Our approach enables the generation of diverse objects with high-quality geometry and varying number of parts. Comprehensive experiments on conditional generation from text descriptions demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our method.

Direct preference learning offers a promising and computation-efficient beyond supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for improving code generation in coding large language models (LMs). However, the scarcity of reliable preference data is a bottleneck for the performance of direct preference learning to improve the coding accuracy of code LMs. In this paper, we introduce \underline{\textbf{D}}irect Preference Learning with Only \underline{\textbf{S}}elf-Generated \underline{\textbf{T}}ests and \underline{\textbf{C}}ode (DSTC), a framework that leverages only self-generated code snippets and tests to construct reliable preference pairs such that direct preference learning can improve LM coding accuracy without external annotations. DSTC combines a minimax selection process and test-code concatenation to improve preference pair quality, reducing the influence of incorrect self-generated tests and enhancing model performance without the need for costly reward models. When applied with direct preference learning methods such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO), DSTC yields stable improvements in coding accuracy (pass@1 score) across diverse coding benchmarks, including HumanEval, MBPP, and BigCodeBench, demonstrating both its effectiveness and scalability for models of various sizes. This approach autonomously enhances code generation accuracy across LLMs of varying sizes, reducing reliance on expensive annotated coding datasets.