In the realm of software development, providing accurate and personalized code explanations is crucial for both technical professionals and business stakeholders. Technical professionals benefit from enhanced understanding and improved problem-solving skills, while business stakeholders gain insights into project alignments and transparency. Despite the potential, generating such explanations is often time-consuming and challenging. This paper presents an innovative approach that leverages the advanced capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to generate faithful and personalized code explanations. Our methodology integrates prompt enhancement, self-correction mechanisms, personalized content customization, and interaction with external tools, facilitated by collaboration among multiple LLM agents. We evaluate our approach using both automatic and human assessments, demonstrating that our method not only produces accurate explanations but also tailors them to individual user preferences. Our findings suggest that this approach significantly improves the quality and relevance of code explanations, offering a valuable tool for developers and stakeholders alike.

Generalizing metric monocular depth estimation presents a significant challenge due to its ill-posed nature, while the entanglement between camera parameters and depth amplifies issues further, hindering multi-dataset training and zero-shot accuracy. This challenge is particularly evident in autonomous vehicles and mobile robotics, where data is collected with fixed camera setups, limiting the geometric diversity. Y et, this context also presents an opportunity: the fixed relationship between the camera and the ground plane imposes additional perspective geometry constraints, enabling depth regression via vertical image positions of objects. However, this cue is highly susceptible to overfitting, thus we propose a novel canonical representation that maintains consistency across varied camera setups, effectively disentangling depth from specific parameters and enhancing generalization across datasets. W e also propose a novel architecture that adaptively and probabilistically fuses depths estimated via object size and vertical image position cues. A comprehensive evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach on five autonomous driving datasets, achieving accurate metric depth estimation for varying resolutions, aspect ratios and camera setups. Notably, we achieve comparable accuracy to existing zero-shot methods, despite training on a single dataset with a single-camera setup.

In this work, we compare the domain-specific translation performance of open-source autoregressive decoder-only large language models (LLMs) with task-oriented machine translation (MT) models. Our experiments focus on the medical domain and cover four language pairs with varied resource availability: English-to-French, English-to-Portuguese, English-to-Swahili, and Swahili-to-English. Despite recent advancements, LLMs exhibit a clear gap in specialized translation quality compared to multilingual encoder-decoder MT models such as NLLB-200. In three out of four language directions in our study, NLLB-200 3.3B outperforms all LLMs in the size range of 8B parameters in medical translation. While fine-tuning LLMs such as Mistral and Llama improves their performance at medical translation, these models still fall short compared to fine-tuned NLLB-200 3.3B models. Our findings highlight the ongoing need for specialized MT models to achieve higher-quality domain-specific translation, especially in medium-resource and low-resource settings. As larger LLMs outperform their 8B variants, this also encourages pre-training domain-specific medium-sized LMs to improve quality and efficiency in specialized translation tasks.

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) addresses the growing need for transparency and interpretability in AI systems, enabling trust and accountability in decision-making processes. This book offers a comprehensive guide to XAI, bridging foundational concepts with advanced methodologies. It explores interpretability in traditional models such as Decision Trees, Linear Regression, and Support Vector Machines, alongside the challenges of explaining deep learning architectures like CNNs, RNNs, and Large Language Models (LLMs), including BERT, GPT, and T5. The book presents practical techniques such as SHAP, LIME, Grad-CAM, counterfactual explanations, and causal inference, supported by Python code examples for real-world applications. Case studies illustrate XAI's role in healthcare, finance, and policymaking, demonstrating its impact on fairness and decision support. The book also covers evaluation metrics for explanation quality, an overview of cutting-edge XAI tools and frameworks, and emerging research directions, such as interpretability in federated learning and ethical AI considerations. Designed for a broad audience, this resource equips readers with the theoretical insights and practical skills needed to master XAI. Hands-on examples and additional resources are available at the companion GitHub repository: https://github.com/Echoslayer/XAI_From_Classical_Models_to_LLMs.

As large language models (LLMs) continue to evolve, efficient evaluation metrics are vital for assessing their ability to compress information and reduce redundancy. While traditional metrics like Matrix Entropy offer valuable insights, they are computationally intensive for large-scale models due to their \( O(n^3) \) time complexity with Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). To mitigate this issue, we introduce the Matrix Nuclear-Norm, which not only serves as a metric to quantify the data compression proficiency of LLM but also provides a convex approximation of matrix rank to capture both predictive discriminability and diversity. By employing the \( L_{1,2}\text{-norm} \) to further approximate the nuclear norm, we can effectively assess the model's information compression capabilities. This approach reduces the time complexity to \( O(n^2) \) and eliminates the need for SVD computation. Consequently, the Matrix Nuclear-Norm achieves speeds 8 to 24 times faster than Matrix Entropy for the CEREBRAS-GPT model as sizes increase from 111M to 6.7B. This performance gap becomes more pronounced with larger models, as validated in tests with other models like Pythia. Additionally, evaluations on benchmarks and model responses confirm that our proposed Matrix Nuclear-Norm is a reliable, scalable, and efficient tool for assessing LLMs' performance, striking a balance between accuracy and computational efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/MLGroupJLU/MatrixNuclearNorm.

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on their linguistic reasoning capabilities is an important task to understand the gaps in their skills that may surface during large-scale adoption. In this work, we investigate the abilities of such models to perform abstract multilingual reasoning through the lens of linguistic puzzles on extremely low-resource languages. As these translation tasks involve inductive and deductive reasoning from reference instances, we examine whether diverse auxiliary demonstrations can be automatically induced from seed exemplars, through analogical prompting. We employ a two-stage procedure, first generating analogical exemplars with a language model, and then applying them in-context along with provided target language exemplars. Our results on the modeLing dataset show that analogical prompting is effective in eliciting models' knowledge of language grammar similarities, boosting the performance of GPT-4o by as much as 8.1% and Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct by 5.9% over chain-of-thought approaches. These gains are attributable to the analogical demonstrations, both when self-generated as well as when produced by weaker multilingual models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our method generalizes to other tasks present in Linguistics Olympiad competitions, achieving sizable improvements across all problem types and difficulty levels included in the LINGOLY dataset with GPT-4o. We also report several findings about interesting phenomena which drive linguistic reasoning performance, suggesting that such puzzles are a valuable benchmark for new reasoning methods.

The increasing integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into society necessitates robust defenses against vulnerabilities from jailbreaking and adversarial prompts. This project proposes a recursive framework for enhancing the resistance of LLMs to manipulation through the use of prompt simplification techniques. By increasing the transparency of complex and confusing adversarial prompts, the proposed method enables more reliable detection and prevention of malicious inputs. Our findings attempt to address a critical problem in AI safety and security, providing a foundation for the development of systems able to distinguish harmless inputs from prompts containing malicious intent. As LLMs continue to be used in diverse applications, the importance of such safeguards will only grow.

Prompting and fine-tuning have emerged as two competing paradigms for augmenting language models with new capabilities, such as the use of tools. Prompting approaches are quick to set up but rely on providing explicit demonstrations of each tool's usage in the model's prompt, thus coupling tool use to the task at hand and limiting generalisation. Fine-tuning removes the need for task-specific demonstrations of tool usage at runtime; however, this ties new capabilities to a single model, thus making already-heavier setup costs a recurring expense. In this paper, we introduce language hooks, a novel framework for augmenting language models with new capabilities that is decoupled both from the model's task-specific prompt and from the model itself. The language hook algorithm interleaves text generation by the base model with the execution of modular programs that trigger conditionally based on the existing text and the available capabilities. Upon triggering, programs may call external tools, auxiliary language models (e.g. using tool specific prompts), and modify the existing context. We benchmark our method against state-of-the-art baselines, find that it outperforms task-aware approaches, and demonstrate its ability to generalise to novel tasks.

Contrastively-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have become the de facto approach for discriminative vision-language representation learning. However, these models have limited language understanding, often exhibiting a "bag of words" behavior. At the same time, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), which combine vision encoders with LLMs, have been shown capable of detailed vision-language reasoning, yet their autoregressive nature renders them less suitable for discriminative tasks. In this work, we propose to combine "the best of both worlds": a new training approach for discriminative fine-tuning of LVLMs that results in strong discriminative and compositional capabilities. Essentially, our approach converts a generative LVLM into a discriminative one, unlocking its capability for powerful image-text discrimination combined with enhanced language understanding. Our contributions include: (1) A carefully designed training/optimization framework that utilizes image-text pairs of variable length and granularity for training the model with both contrastive and next-token prediction losses. This is accompanied by ablation studies that justify the necessity of our framework's components. (2) A parameter-efficient adaptation method using a combination of soft prompting and LoRA adapters. (3) Significant improvements over state-of-the-art CLIP-like models of similar size, including standard image-text retrieval benchmarks and notable gains in compositionality.

READY AND WILLING: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, on Sunday said he is looking forward to working with the incoming Trump administration, adding that he thinks President-elect Trump will succeed at helping to make America a world-leading force in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. 'NEW CHAPTER': Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry praised Meta's plans to build a new artificial intelligence data center in the Pelican State, calling it the "largest private capital announcement." PRESS FOR FAIRNESS: LA Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong announced the upcoming AI feature on Wednesday in an interview with conservative commentator and newly appointed Times editorial board member Scott Jennings on "The Mike Gallagher Show," which Jennings was guest-hosting. Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong explains what direction he wants to take the paper. 'NOT THAT WORRIED': Elon Musk's possible political influence under the incoming Trump administration is not a concern for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who dismissed claims that the X owner would use lawfare to stifle competition.