This paper introduces Multiple Choice Reasoning via. Process of Elimination using Multi-Modal models, herein referred to as Multi-Modal Process of Elimination (MM-PoE). This novel methodology is engineered to augment the efficacy of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in multiple-choice visual reasoning tasks. Diverging from conventional approaches that evaluate each option independently, MM-PoE employs a dual-step scoring paradigm that initially identifies and excludes implausible choices, subsequently concentrating on the most probable remaining options. This method emulates human test-taking strategies, where individuals typically eliminate clearly incorrect answers prior to selecting the optimal response. Our empirical evaluations, conducted across three benchmark datasets, reveal that MM-PoE significantly improves both zero-shot and few-shot performance of contemporary state-of-the-art VLMs. Critically, this approach not only broadens the application of the elimination process to multi-modal contexts but also allows few-shot experiments, thereby addressing two principal limitations concerning usage of PoE only in zero-shot settings and only with a language-only framework. As a result, MM-PoE not only refines the reasoning capabilities of VLMs but also broadens their applicability to complex visual question-answering scenarios. All code and documentation supporting our work are available at https://pypi.org/project/mm-poe/, enabling researchers and practitioners to easily integrate and further develop these techniques.

Creativity is the ability to produce novel, useful, and surprising ideas, and has been widely studied as a crucial aspect of human cognition. Machine creativity on the other hand has been a long-standing challenge. With the rise of advanced generative AI, there has been renewed interest and debate regarding AI's creative capabilities. Therefore, it is imperative to revisit the state of creativity in AI and identify key progresses and remaining challenges. In this work, we survey leading works studying the creative capabilities of AI systems, focusing on creative problem-solving, linguistic, artistic, and scientific creativity. Our review suggests that while the latest AI models are largely capable of producing linguistically and artistically creative outputs such as poems, images, and musical pieces, they struggle with tasks that require creative problem-solving, abstract thinking and compositionality and their generations suffer from a lack of diversity, originality, long-range incoherence and hallucinations. We also discuss key questions concerning copyright and authorship issues with generative models. Furthermore, we highlight the need for a comprehensive evaluation of creativity that is process-driven and considers several dimensions of creativity. Finally, we propose future research directions to improve the creativity of AI outputs, drawing inspiration from cognitive science and psychology.

The rapid advancement of Generative AI (Gen AI) technologies, particularly tools like ChatGPT, is significantly impacting the labor market by reshaping job roles and skill requirements. This study examines the demand for ChatGPT-related skills in the U.S. labor market by analyzing job advertisements collected from major job platforms between May and December 2023. Using text mining and topic modeling techniques, we extracted and analyzed the Gen AI-related skills that employers are hiring for. Our analysis identified five distinct ChatGPT-related skill sets: general familiarity, creative content generation, marketing, advanced functionalities (such as prompt engineering), and product development. In addition, the study provides insights into job attributes such as occupation titles, degree requirements, salary ranges, and other relevant job characteristics. These findings highlight the increasing integration of Gen AI across various industries, emphasizing the growing need for both foundational knowledge and advanced technical skills. The study offers valuable insights into the evolving demands of the labor market, as employers seek candidates equipped to leverage generative AI tools to improve productivity, streamline processes, and drive innovation.

This technical report introduces the EXAONE 3.5 instruction-tuned language models, developed and released by LG AI Research. The EXAONE 3.5 language models are offered in three configurations: 32B, 7.8B, and 2.4B. These models feature several standout capabilities: 1) exceptional instruction following capabilities in real-world scenarios, achieving the highest scores across seven benchmarks, 2) outstanding long-context comprehension, attaining the top performance in four benchmarks, and 3) competitive results compared to state-of-the-art open models of similar sizes across nine general benchmarks. The EXAONE 3.5 language models are open to anyone for research purposes and can be downloaded from https://huggingface.co/LGAI-EXAONE. For commercial use, please reach out to the official contact point of LG AI Research: contact_us@lgresearch.ai.

Synthetic data generation with Large Language Models is a promising paradigm for augmenting natural data over a nearly infinite range of tasks. Given this variety, direct comparisons among synthetic data generation algorithms are scarce, making it difficult to understand where improvement comes from and what bottlenecks exist. We propose to evaluate algorithms via the makeup of synthetic data generated by each algorithm in terms of data quality, diversity, and complexity. We choose these three characteristics for their significance in open-ended processes and the impact each has on the capabilities of downstream models. We find quality to be essential for in-distribution model generalization, diversity to be essential for out-of-distribution generalization, and complexity to be beneficial for both. Further, we emphasize the existence of Quality-Diversity trade-offs in training data and the downstream effects on model performance. We then examine the effect of various components in the synthetic data pipeline on each data characteristic. This examination allows us to taxonomize and compare synthetic data generation algorithms through the components they utilize and the resulting effects on data QDC composition. This analysis extends into a discussion on the importance of balancing QDC in synthetic data for efficient reinforcement learning and self-improvement algorithms. Analogous to the QD trade-offs in training data, often there exist trade-offs between model output quality and output diversity which impact the composition of synthetic data. We observe that many models are currently evaluated and optimized only for output quality, thereby limiting output diversity and the potential for self-improvement. We argue that balancing these trade-offs is essential to the development of future self-improvement algorithms and highlight a number of works making progress in this direction.

Cooking meals can be difficult, causing many to resort to cookbooks and online recipes. However, relying on these traditional methods of cooking often results in missing ingredients, nutritional hazards, and unsatisfactory meals. Using Augmented Reality (AR) can address these issues; however, current AR cooking applications have poor user interfaces and limited accessibility. This paper proposes a prototype of an iOS application that integrates AR and Computer Vision (CV) into the cooking process. We leverage Google's Gemini Large Language Model (LLM) to identify ingredients in the camera's field of vision and generate recipe choices with detailed nutritional information. Additionally, this application uses Apple's ARKit to create an AR user interface compatible with iOS devices. Users can personalize their meal suggestions by inputting their dietary preferences and rating each meal. The application's effectiveness is evaluated through three rounds of user experience surveys. This application advances the field of accessible cooking assistance technologies, aiming to reduce food wastage and improve the meal planning experience.

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on natural language tasks can be improved through both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and in-context learning (ICL), which operate via distinct mechanisms. Supervised fine-tuning updates the model's weights by minimizing loss on training data, whereas in-context learning leverages task demonstrations embedded in the prompt, without changing the model's parameters. This study investigates the effects of these learning paradigms on the hidden representations of LLMs using Intrinsic Dimension (ID). We use ID to estimate the number of degrees of freedom between representations extracted from LLMs as they perform specific natural language tasks. We first explore how the ID of LLM representations evolves during SFT and how it varies due to the number of demonstrations in ICL. We then compare the IDs induced by SFT and ICL and find that ICL consistently induces a higher ID compared to SFT, suggesting that representations generated during ICL reside in higher dimensional manifolds in the embedding space.

Reverse Dictionary (RD) is the task of obtaining the most relevant word or set of words given a textual description or dictionary definition. Effective RD methods have applications in accessibility, translation or writing support systems. Moreover, in NLP research we find RD to be used to benchmark text encoders at various granularities, as it often requires word, definition and sentence embeddings. In this paper, we propose a simple approach to RD that leverages LLMs in combination with embedding models. Despite its simplicity, this approach outperforms supervised baselines in well studied RD datasets, while also showing less over-fitting. We also conduct a number of experiments on different dictionaries and analyze how different styles, registers and target audiences impact the quality of RD systems. We conclude that, on average, untuned embeddings alone fare way below an LLM-only baseline (although they are competitive in highly technical dictionaries), but are crucial for boosting performance in combined methods.

In the rapidly evolving field of Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring safety is a crucial and widely discussed topic. However, existing works often overlook the geo-diversity of cultural and legal standards across the world. To demonstrate the challenges posed by geo-diverse safety standards, we introduce SafeWorld, a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs' ability to generate responses that are not only helpful but also culturally sensitive and legally compliant across diverse global contexts. SafeWorld encompasses 2,342 test user queries, each grounded in high-quality, human-verified cultural norms and legal policies from 50 countries and 493 regions/races. On top of it, we propose a multi-dimensional automatic safety evaluation framework that assesses the contextual appropriateness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness of responses. Our evaluations reveal that current LLMs struggle to meet these criteria. To enhance LLMs' alignment with geo-diverse safety standards, we synthesize helpful preference pairs for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) alignment training. The preference pair construction aims to encourage LLMs to behave appropriately and provide precise references to relevant cultural norms and policies when necessary. Our trained SafeWorldLM outperforms all competing models, including GPT-4o on all three evaluation dimensions by a large margin. Global human evaluators also note a nearly 20% higher winning rate in helpfulness and harmfulness evaluation. Our code and data can be found here: https://github.com/PlusLabNLP/SafeWorld.

Linear Transformers have gained attention as efficient alternatives to standard Transformers, but their performance in retrieval and long-context tasks has been limited. To address these limitations, recent work has explored two distinct mechanisms: gating for adaptive memory control and the delta update rule for precise memory modifications. We observe that these mechanisms are complementary: gating enables rapid memory erasure while the delta rule facilitates targeted updates. Building on this insight, we introduce the gated delta rule and develop a parallel training algorithm optimized for modern hardware. Our proposed architecture, Gated DeltaNet, consistently surpasses existing models like Mamba2 and DeltaNet across multiple benchmarks, including language modeling, common-sense reasoning, in-context retrieval, length extrapolation, and long-context understanding. We further enhance performance by developing hybrid architectures that combine Gated DeltaNet layers with sliding window attention or Mamba2 layers, achieving both improved training efficiency and superior task performance.