Humans recognize objects after observing only a few examples, a remarkable capability enabled by their inherent language understanding of the real-world environment. Developing verbalized and interpretable representation can significantly improve model generalization in low-data settings. In this work, we propose Verbalized Representation Learning (VRL), a novel approach for automatically extracting human-interpretable features for object recognition using few-shot data. Our method uniquely captures inter-class differences and intra-class commonalities in the form of natural language by employing a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to identify key discriminative features between different classes and shared characteristics within the same class. These verbalized features are then mapped to numeric vectors through the VLM. The resulting feature vectors can be further utilized to train and infer with downstream classifiers. Experimental results show that, at the same model scale, VRL achieves a 24% absolute improvement over prior state-of-the-art methods while using 95% less data and a smaller mode. Furthermore, compared to human-labeled attributes, the features learned by VRL exhibit a 20% absolute gain when used for downstream classification tasks. Code is available at: https://github.com/joeyy5588/VRL/tree/main.

As the significance of understanding the cause-and-effect relationships among variables increases in the development of modern systems and algorithms, learning causality from observational data has become a preferred and efficient approach over conducting randomized control trials. However, purely observational data could be insufficient to reconstruct the true causal graph. Consequently, many researchers tried to utilise some form of prior knowledge to improve causal discovery process. In this context, the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to the costly acquisition of prior expert knowledge. In this work, we further explore the potential of using LLMs to enhance causal discovery approaches, particularly focusing on score-based methods, and we propose a general framework to utilise the capacity of not only one but multiple LLMs to augment the discovery process.

Recent researches on video large language models (VideoLLM) predominantly focus on model architectures and training datasets, leaving the interaction format between the user and the model under-explored. In existing works, users often interact with VideoLLMs by using the entire video and a query as input, after which the model generates a response. This interaction format constrains the application of VideoLLMs in scenarios such as live-streaming comprehension where videos do not end and responses are required in a real-time manner, and also results in unsatisfactory performance on time-sensitive tasks that requires localizing video segments. In this paper, we focus on a video-text duet interaction format. This interaction format is characterized by the continuous playback of the video, and both the user and the model can insert their text messages at any position during the video playback. When a text message ends, the video continues to play, akin to the alternative of two performers in a duet. We construct MMDuetIT, a video-text training dataset designed to adapt VideoLLMs to video-text duet interaction format. We also introduce the Multi-Answer Grounded Video Question Answering (MAGQA) task to benchmark the real-time response ability of VideoLLMs. Trained on MMDuetIT, MMDuet demonstrates that adopting the video-text duet interaction format enables the model to achieve significant improvements in various time-sensitive tasks (76% CIDEr on YouCook2 dense video captioning, 90\% mAP on QVHighlights highlight detection and 25% R@0.5 on Charades-STA temporal video grounding) with minimal training efforts, and also enable VideoLLMs to reply in a real-time manner as the video plays. Code, data and demo are available at: https://github.com/yellow-binary-tree/MMDuet.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential in a variety of applications due to their advanced language understanding and generation capabilities. However, their computational and memory requirements pose significant challenges to traditional hardware architectures. Processing-in-Memory (PIM), which integrates computational units directly into memory chips, offers several advantages for LLM inference, including reduced data transfer bottlenecks and improved power efficiency. This paper introduces PIM-AI, a novel DDR5/LPDDR5 PIM architecture designed for LLM inference without modifying the memory controller or DDR/LPDDR memory PHY. We have developed a simulator to evaluate the performance of PIM-AI in various scenarios and demonstrate its significant advantages over conventional architectures. In cloud-based scenarios, PIM-AI reduces the 3-year TCO per queries-per-second by up to 6.94x compared to state-of-the-art GPUs, depending on the LLM model used. In mobile scenarios, PIM-AI achieves a 10- to 20-fold reduction in energy per token compared to state-of-the-art mobile SoCs, resulting in 25 to 45~\% more queries per second and 6.9x to 13.4x less energy per query, extending battery life and enabling more inferences per charge. These results highlight PIM-AI's potential to revolutionize LLM deployments, making them more efficient, scalable, and sustainable.

Health-related discussions on social media like Reddit offer valuable insights, but extracting quantitative data from unstructured text is challenging. In this work, we present an adapted framework from QuaLLM into QuaLLM-Health for extracting clinically relevant quantitative data from Reddit discussions about glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists using large language models (LLMs). We collected 410k posts and comments from five GLP-1-related communities using the Reddit API in July 2024. After filtering for cancer-related discussions, 2,059 unique entries remained. We developed annotation guidelines to manually extract variables such as cancer survivorship, family cancer history, cancer types mentioned, risk perceptions, and discussions with physicians. Two domain-experts independently annotated a random sample of 100 entries to create a gold-standard dataset. We then employed iterative prompt engineering with OpenAI's "GPT-4o-mini" on the gold-standard dataset to build an optimized pipeline that allowed us to extract variables from the large dataset. The optimized LLM achieved accuracies above 0.85 for all variables, with precision, recall and F1 score macro averaged > 0.90, indicating balanced performance. Stability testing showed a 95% match rate across runs, confirming consistency. Applying the framework to the full dataset enabled efficient extraction of variables necessary for downstream analysis, costing under $3 and completing in approximately one hour. QuaLLM-Health demonstrates that LLMs can effectively and efficiently extract clinically relevant quantitative data from unstructured social media content. Incorporating human expertise and iterative prompt refinement ensures accuracy and reliability. This methodology can be adapted for large-scale analysis of patient-generated data across various health domains, facilitating valuable insights for healthcare research.

Abstract--Recent research efforts focus on reducing the computational and memory overheads of Large Language Models (LLMs) to make them feasible on resource-constrained devices. Despite advancements in compression techniques, non-linear operators like Softmax and Layernorm remain bottlenecks due to their sensitivity to quantization. We propose SoftmAP, a softwarehardware co-design methodology that implements an integeronly low-precision Softmax using In-Memory Compute (IMC) hardware. Our method achieves up to three orders of magnitude improvement in the energy-delay product compared to A100 and RTX3090 GPUs, making LLMs more deployable without compromising performance. Softmax contributes up to 38% of the run time for longer sequence lengths.

Datasets collected from the open world unavoidably suffer from various forms of randomness or noiseness, leading to the ubiquity of aleatoric (data) uncertainty. Quantifying such uncertainty is particularly pivotal for object detection, where images contain multi-scale objects with occlusion, obscureness, and even noisy annotations, in contrast to images with centric and similar-scale objects in classification. This paper suggests modeling and exploiting the uncertainty inherent in object detection data with vision foundation models and develops a data-centric reliable training paradigm. Technically, we propose to estimate the data uncertainty of each object instance based on the feature space of vision foundation models, which are trained on ultra-large-scale datasets and able to exhibit universal data representation. In particular, we assume a mixture-of-Gaussian structure of the object features and devise Mahalanobis distance-based measures to quantify the data uncertainty. Furthermore, we suggest two curial and practical usages of the estimated uncertainty: 1) for defining uncertainty-aware sample filter to abandon noisy and redundant instances to avoid over-fitting, and 2) for defining sample adaptive regularizer to balance easy/hard samples for adaptive training. The estimated aleatoric uncertainty serves as an extra level of annotations of the dataset, so it can be utilized in a plug-and-play manner with any model. Extensive empirical studies verify the effectiveness of the proposed aleatoric uncertainty measure on various advanced detection models and challenging benchmarks.

Understanding the emotions in a dialogue usually requires external knowledge to accurately understand the contents. As the LLMs become more and more powerful, we do not want to settle on the limited ability of the pre-trained language model. However, the LLMs either can only process text modality or are too expensive to process the multimedia information. We aim to utilize both the power of LLMs and the supplementary features from the multimedia modalities. In this paper, we present a framework, Lantern, that can improve the performance of a certain vanilla model by prompting large language models with receptive-field-aware attention weighting. This framework trained a multi-task vanilla model to produce probabilities of emotion classes and dimension scores. These predictions are fed into the LLMs as references to adjust the predicted probabilities of each emotion class with its external knowledge and contextual understanding. We slice the dialogue into different receptive fields, and each sample is included in exactly t receptive fields. Finally, the predictions of LLMs are merged with a receptive-field-aware attention-driven weighting module. In the experiments, vanilla models CORECT and SDT are deployed in Lantern with GPT-4 or Llama-3.1-405B. The experiments in IEMOCAP with 4-way and 6-way settings demonstrated that the Lantern can significantly improve the performance of current vanilla models by up to 1.23% and 1.80%.

Automatic detection of depression is a rapidly growing field of research at the intersection of psychology and machine learning. However, with its exponential interest comes a growing concern for data privacy and scarcity due to the sensitivity of such a topic. In this paper, we propose a pipeline for Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate synthetic data to improve the performance of depression prediction models. Starting from unstructured, naturalistic text data from recorded transcripts of clinical interviews, we utilize an open-source LLM to generate synthetic data through chain-of-thought prompting. This pipeline involves two key steps: the first step is the generation of the synopsis and sentiment analysis based on the original transcript and depression score, while the second is the generation of the synthetic synopsis/sentiment analysis based on the summaries generated in the first step and a new depression score. Not only was the synthetic data satisfactory in terms of fidelity and privacy-preserving metrics, it also balanced the distribution of severity in the training dataset, thereby significantly enhancing the model's capability in predicting the intensity of the patient's depression. By leveraging LLMs to generate synthetic data that can be augmented to limited and imbalanced real-world datasets, we demonstrate a novel approach to addressing data scarcity and privacy concerns commonly faced in automatic depression detection, all while maintaining the statistical integrity of the original dataset. This approach offers a robust framework for future mental health research and applications.

Multimodal foundation models aim to create a unified representation space that abstracts away from surface features like language syntax or modality differences. To investigate this, we study the internal representations of three recent models, analyzing the model activations from semantically equivalent sentences across languages in the text and speech modalities. Our findings reveal that: 1) Cross-modal representations converge over model layers, except in the initial layers specialized at text and speech processing. 2) Length adaptation is crucial for reducing the cross-modal gap between text and speech, although current approaches' effectiveness is primarily limited to high-resource languages. 3) Speech exhibits larger cross-lingual differences than text. 4) For models not explicitly trained for modality-agnostic representations, the modality gap is more prominent than the language gap.