The incivility in social media discourse complicates the deployment of automated text generation models for politically sensitive content. Fine-tuning and prompting strategies are critical, but underexplored, solutions to mitigate toxicity in such contexts. This study investigates the fine-tuning and prompting effects on GPT-3.5 Turbo using subsets of the CLAPTON dataset of political discussion posts, comprising Twitter and Reddit data labeled for their justification, reciprocity and incivility. Fine-tuned models on Reddit data scored highest on discussion quality, while combined noisy data led to persistent toxicity. Prompting strategies reduced specific toxic traits, such as personal attacks, but had limited broader impact. The findings emphasize that high-quality data and well-crafted prompts are essential to reduce incivility and improve rhetorical quality in automated political discourse generation.

State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as an appealing alternative to Transformers for large language models, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy with constant memory complexity which allows for holding longer context lengths than attention-based networks. The superior computational efficiency of SSMs in long sequence modeling positions them favorably over Transformers in many scenarios. However, improving the efficiency of SSMs on request-intensive cloud-serving and resource-limited edge applications is still a formidable task. SSM quantization is a possible solution to this problem, making SSMs more suitable for wide deployment, while still maintaining their accuracy. Quantization is a common technique to reduce the model size and to utilize the low bit-width acceleration features on modern computing units, yet existing quantization techniques are poorly suited for SSMs. Most notably, SSMs have highly sensitive feature maps within the selective scan mechanism (i.e., linear recurrence) and massive outliers in the output activations which are not present in the output of token-mixing in the self-attention modules. To address this issue, we propose a static 8-bit per-tensor SSM quantization method which suppresses the maximum values of the input activations to the selective SSM for finer quantization precision and quantizes the output activations in an outlier-free space with Hadamard transform. Our 8-bit weight-activation quantized Mamba 2.8B SSM benefits from hardware acceleration and achieves a 1.72x lower generation latency on an Nvidia Orin Nano 8G, with only a 0.9% drop in average accuracy on zero-shot tasks. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and practical applicability of our approach for deploying SSM-based models of all sizes on both cloud and edge platforms.

Subsequent The academic field of learning instruction-guided visual works leverage generic vision-language representations navigation can be generally categorized into high-level [18, 59, 61, 96, 97] to pretrain vision-language-action category-specific search and low-level language-guided policies [14, 16, 32, 34, 36, 60, 74, 81] (Figure 1b), finetuning navigation, depending on the granularity of language instruction, parameters for specific tasks while maintaining the in which the former emphasizes the exploration same model architecture. In this paper, we argue that the process, while the latter concentrates on following detailed essential difference between these tasks lies in the granularity textual commands. Despite the differing focuses of these of instruction, and the learning problems should be unified tasks, the underlying requirements of interpreting instructions, under the broader concept of language-guided visual comprehending the surroundings, and inferring action navigation (VLN), where the overarching goal is to create decisions remain consistent. This paper consolidates a versatile system that can interpret and execute arbitrary diverse navigation tasks into a unified and generic framework language instructions (Figure 1c).

With the advent of diffusion models, new proteins can be generated at an unprecedented rate. The \textit{motif scaffolding problem} requires steering this generative process to yield proteins with a desirable functional substructure -- a motif. While models have been trained to take the motif as conditional input, recent techniques in diffusion posterior sampling can be leveraged as zero-shot alternatives whose approximations can be corrected with sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms. In this work, we introduce a new set of guidance potentials to describe and solve scaffolding tasks by adapting SMC-aided diffusion posterior samplers with an unconditional model, Genie, acting as a prior. Against established benchmarks, we successfully scaffold several single-motif and multi-motif problems. The latter is possible by pairing reconstruction guidance with $\mathrm{SE}(3)$-invariant potentials. In the single-motif case, we find these potentials perform comparably to the conventional masking approach and that reconstruction guidance outperforms replacement methods when aided with SMC. We additionally consider a guidance potential for point symmetry constraints and produce designable internally symmetric monomers with our setup. Overall, this work highlights the capabilities and areas for improvement of zero-shot posterior samplers in motif scaffolding tasks. Code is available at: https://github.com/matsagad/mres-project

Text-to-3D generation is a valuable technology in virtual reality and digital content creation. While recent works have pushed the boundaries of text-to-3D generation, producing high-fidelity 3D objects with inefficient prompts and simulating their physics-grounded motion accurately still remain unsolved challenges. To address these challenges, we present an innovative framework that utilizes the Large Language Model (LLM)-refined prompts and diffusion priors-guided Gaussian Splatting (GS) for generating 3D models with accurate appearances and geometric structures. We also incorporate a continuum mechanics-based deformation map and color regularization to synthesize vivid physics-grounded motion for the generated 3D Gaussians, adhering to the conservation of mass and momentum. By integrating text-to-3D generation with physics-grounded motion synthesis, our framework renders photo-realistic 3D objects that exhibit physics-aware motion, accurately reflecting the behaviors of the objects under various forces and constraints across different materials. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves high-quality 3D generations with realistic physics-grounded motion.

This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for the evaluation and validation of generative language models (GLMs), with a focus on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems deployed in high-stakes domains such as banking. GLM evaluation is challenging due to open-ended outputs and subjective quality assessments. Leveraging the structured nature of RAG systems, where generated responses are grounded in a predefined document collection, we propose the Human-Calibrated Automated Testing (HCAT) framework. HCAT integrates a) automated test generation using stratified sampling, b) embedding-based metrics for explainable assessment of functionality, risk and safety attributes, and c) a two-stage calibration approach that aligns machine-generated evaluations with human judgments through probability calibration and conformal prediction. In addition, the framework includes robustness testing to evaluate model performance against adversarial, out-of-distribution, and varied input conditions, as well as targeted weakness identification using marginal and bivariate analysis to pinpoint specific areas for improvement. This human-calibrated, multi-layered evaluation framework offers a scalable, transparent, and interpretable approach to GLM assessment, providing a practical and reliable solution for deploying GLMs in applications where accuracy, transparency, and regulatory compliance are paramount.

Several works have developed eviction policies to remove key-value (KV) pairs from the KV cache for more efficient inference. The focus has been on compressing the KV cache after the input prompt has been processed for faster token generation. In settings with limited GPU memory, and when the input context is longer than the generation length, we show that by also compressing the KV cache during the input processing phase, larger batch sizes can be used resulting in significantly higher throughput while still maintaining the original model's accuracy.

In-context learning (ICL) is the ability of a model to learn a new task by observing a few exemplars in its context. While prevalent in NLP, this capability has recently also been observed in Reinforcement Learning (RL) settings. Prior in-context RL methods, however, require entire episodes in the agent's context. Given that complex environments typically lead to long episodes with sparse rewards, these methods are constrained to simple environments with short episodes. To address these challenges, we introduce Retrieval-Augmented Decision Transformer (RA-DT). RA-DT employs an external memory mechanism to store past experiences from which it retrieves only sub-trajectories relevant for the current situation. The retrieval component in RA-DT does not require training and can be entirely domain-agnostic. We evaluate the capabilities of RA-DT on grid-world environments, robotics simulations, and procedurally-generated video games. On grid-worlds, RA-DT outperforms baselines, while using only a fraction of their context length. Furthermore, we illuminate the limitations of current in-context RL methods on complex environments and discuss future directions. To facilitate future research, we release datasets for four of the considered environments.

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their strong capabilities in various tasks, recent work has revealed LLMs also exhibit undesirable behaviors, such as hallucination and toxicity, limiting their reliability and broader adoption. In this paper, we discover an understudied type of undesirable behavior of LLMs, which we term Verbosity Compensation (VC), similar to the hesitation behavior of humans under uncertainty, where they respond with excessive words such as repeating questions, introducing ambiguity, or providing excessive enumeration. We present the first work that defines and analyzes Verbosity Compensation, explores its causes, and proposes a simple mitigating approach. Our experiments, conducted on five datasets of knowledge and reasoning-based QA tasks with 14 newly developed LLMs, reveal three conclusions. 1) We reveal a pervasive presence of VC across all models and all datasets. Notably, GPT-4 exhibits a VC frequency of 50.40%. 2) We reveal the large performance gap between verbose and concise responses, with a notable difference of 27.61% on the Qasper dataset. We also demonstrate that this difference does not naturally diminish as LLM capability increases. Both 1) and 2) highlight the urgent need to mitigate the frequency of VC behavior and disentangle verbosity with veracity. We propose a simple yet effective cascade algorithm that replaces the verbose responses with the other model-generated responses. The results show that our approach effectively alleviates the VC of the Mistral model from 63.81% to 16.16% on the Qasper dataset. 3) We also find that verbose responses exhibit higher uncertainty across all five datasets, suggesting a strong connection between verbosity and model uncertainty. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/VerbosityLLM.

Neurons in auto-regressive language models like GPT-2 can be interpreted by analyzing their activation patterns. Recent studies have shown that techniques such as dictionary learning, a form of post-hoc sparse coding, enhance this neuron-level interpretability. In our research, we are driven by the goal to fundamentally improve neural network interpretability by embedding sparse coding directly within the model architecture, rather than applying it as an afterthought. In our study, we introduce a white-box transformer-like architecture named Coding RAte TransformEr (CRATE), explicitly engineered to capture sparse, low-dimensional structures within data distributions. Our comprehensive experiments showcase significant improvements (up to 103% relative improvement) in neuron-level interpretability across a variety of evaluation metrics. Detailed investigations confirm that this enhanced interpretability is steady across different layers irrespective of the model size, underlining CRATE's robust performance in enhancing neural network interpretability. Further analysis shows that CRATE's increased interpretability comes from its enhanced ability to consistently and distinctively activate on relevant tokens. These findings point towards a promising direction for creating white-box foundation models that excel in neuron-level interpretation.