With the proliferation of the Large Language Model (LLM), the concept of World Models (WM) has recently attracted a great deal of attention in the AI research community, especially in the context of AI agents. It is arguably evolving into an essential foundation for building AI agent systems. A WM is intended to help the agent predict the future evolution of environmental states or help the agent fill in missing information so that it can plan its actions and behave safely. The safety property of WM plays a key role in their effective use in critical applications. In this work, we review and analyze the impacts of the current state-of-the-art in WM technology from the point of view of trustworthiness and safety based on a comprehensive survey and the fields of application envisaged. We provide an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art WMs and derive technical research challenges and their impact in order to call on the research community to collaborate on improving the safety and trustworthiness of WM.

Landmark-based navigation (e.g. go to the wooden desk) and relative positional navigation (e.g. move 5 meters forward) are distinct navigation challenges solved very differently in existing robotics navigation methodology. We present a new dataset, OC-VLN, in order to distinctly evaluate grounding object-centric natural language navigation instructions in a method for performing landmark-based navigation. We also propose Natural Language grounded SLAM (NL-SLAM), a method to ground natural language instruction to robot observations and poses. We actively perform NL-SLAM in order to follow object-centric natural language navigation instructions. Our methods leverage pre-trained vision and language foundation models and require no task-specific training. We construct two strong baselines from state-of-the-art methods on related tasks, Object Goal Navigation and Vision Language Navigation, and we show that our approach, NL-SLAM, outperforms these baselines across all our metrics of success on OC-VLN. Finally, we successfully demonstrate the effectiveness of NL-SLAM for performing navigation instruction following in the real world on a Boston Dynamics Spot robot.

This work addresses the challenge of capturing the complexities of legal knowledge by proposing a multi-layered embedding-based retrieval method for legal and legislative texts. Creating embeddings not only for individual articles but also for their components (paragraphs, clauses) and structural groupings (books, titles, chapters, etc), we seek to capture the subtleties of legal information through the use of dense vectors of embeddings, representing it at varying levels of granularity. Our method meets various information needs by allowing the Retrieval Augmented Generation system to provide accurate responses, whether for specific segments or entire sections, tailored to the user's query. We explore the concepts of aboutness, semantic chunking, and inherent hierarchy within legal texts, arguing that this method enhances the legal information retrieval. Despite the focus being on Brazil's legislative methods and the Brazilian Constitution, which follow a civil law tradition, our findings should in principle be applicable across different legal systems, including those adhering to common law traditions. Furthermore, the principles of the proposed method extend beyond the legal domain, offering valuable insights for organizing and retrieving information in any field characterized by information encoded in hierarchical text.

Tensor parallelism provides an effective way to increase server large language model (LLM) inference efficiency despite adding an additional communication cost. However, as server LLMs continue to scale in size, they will need to be distributed across more devices, magnifying the communication cost. One way to approach this problem is with quantization, but current methods for LLMs tend to avoid quantizing the features that tensor parallelism needs to communicate. Taking advantage of consistent outliers in communicated features, we introduce a quantization method that reduces communicated values on average from 16 bits to 4.2 bits while preserving nearly all of the original performance. For instance, our method maintains around 98.0% and 99.5% of Gemma 2 27B's and Llama 2 13B's original performance, respectively, averaged across all tasks we evaluated on.

The rapid advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown great potential in medical diagnostics, particularly in radiology, where datasets such as X-rays are paired with human-generated diagnostic reports. However, a significant research gap exists in the neuroimaging field, especially for conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, due to the lack of comprehensive diagnostic reports that can be utilized for model fine-tuning. This paper addresses this gap by generating synthetic diagnostic reports using GPT-4o-mini on structured data from the OASIS-4 dataset, which comprises 663 patients. Using the synthetic reports as ground truth for training and validation, we then generated neurological reports directly from the images in the dataset leveraging the pre-trained BiomedCLIP and T5 models. Our proposed method achieved a BLEU-4 score of 0.1827, ROUGE-L score of 0.3719, and METEOR score of 0.4163, revealing its potential in generating clinically relevant and accurate diagnostic reports.

In real-world NLP applications, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising solutions due to their extensive training on vast datasets. However, the large size and high computation demands of LLMs limit their practicality in many applications, especially when further fine-tuning is required. To address these limitations, smaller models are typically preferred for deployment. However, their training is hindered by the scarcity of labeled data. In contrast, unlabeled data is often readily which can be leveraged by using LLMs to generate pseudo-labels for training smaller models. This enables the smaller models (student) to acquire knowledge from LLMs(teacher) while reducing computational costs. This process introduces challenges, such as potential noisy pseudo-labels. Selecting high-quality and informative data is therefore critical to enhance model performance while improving the efficiency of data utilization. To address this, we propose LLKD that enables Learning with Less computational resources and less data for Knowledge Distillation from LLMs. LLKD is an adaptive sample selection method that incorporates signals from both the teacher and student. Specifically, it prioritizes samples where the teacher demonstrates high confidence in its labeling, indicating reliable labels, and where the student exhibits a high information need, identifying challenging samples that require further learning. Our comprehensive experiments show that LLKD achieves superior performance across various datasets with higher data efficiency.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in certain dimensions, their ability to express implicit language cues that human use for effective communication remains unclear. This paper presents ExpressivityArena, a Python library for measuring the implicit communication abilities of LLMs. We provide a comprehensive framework to evaluate expressivity of arbitrary LLMs and explore its practical implications. To this end, we refine the definition and measurements of ``expressivity,'' and use our framework in a set of small experiments. These experiments test LLMs in creative and logical tasks such as poetry, coding, and emotion-based responses. They are then evaluated by an automated grader, through ExpressivityArena, which we verify to be the most pragmatic for testing expressivity. Building on these experiments, we deepen our understanding of the expressivity of LLMs by assessing their ability to remain expressive in conversations. Our findings indicate that LLMs are capable of generating and understanding expressive content, however, with some limitations. These insights will inform the future development and deployment of expressive LLMs. We provide the code for ExpressivityArena alongside our paper.

Humans excel at discovering regular structures from limited samples and applying inferred rules to novel settings. We investigate whether modern generative models can similarly learn underlying rules from finite samples and perform reasoning through conditional sampling. Inspired by Raven's Progressive Matrices task, we designed GenRAVEN dataset, where each sample consists of three rows, and one of 40 relational rules governing the object position, number, or attributes applies to all rows. We trained generative models to learn the data distribution, where samples are encoded as integer arrays to focus on rule learning. We compared two generative model families: diffusion (EDM, DiT, SiT) and autoregressive models (GPT2, Mamba). We evaluated their ability to generate structurally consistent samples and perform panel completion via unconditional and conditional sampling. We found diffusion models excel at unconditional generation, producing more novel and consistent samples from scratch and memorizing less, but performing less well in panel completion, even with advanced conditional sampling methods. Conversely, autoregressive models excel at completing missing panels in a rule-consistent manner but generate less consistent samples unconditionally. We observe diverse data scaling behaviors: for both model families, rule learning emerges at a certain dataset size - around 1000s examples per rule. With more training data, diffusion models improve both their unconditional and conditional generation capabilities. However, for autoregressive models, while panel completion improves with more training data, unconditional generation consistency declines. Our findings highlight complementary capabilities and limitations of diffusion and autoregressive models in rule learning and reasoning tasks, suggesting avenues for further research into their mechanisms and potential for human-like reasoning.

With the increase in the number of parameters in large language models, the process of pre-training and fine-tuning increasingly demands larger volumes of GPU memory. A significant portion of this memory is typically consumed by the optimizer state. To overcome this challenge, recent approaches such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA (Hu et al., 2021)), low-rank gradient projection (GaLore (Zhao et al., 2024a)), and blockwise optimization (BAdam (Luo et al., 2024)) have been proposed. However, in all these algorithms, the effective rank of the weight updates remains low-rank, which can lead to a substantial loss of information from the gradient. This loss can be critically important, especially during the pre-training stage. In this paper, we introduce FRUGAL (Full-Rank Updates with GrAdient spLitting), a new memory-efficient optimization framework. FRUGAL leverages gradient splitting to perform low-dimensional updates using advanced algorithms (such as Adam), while updates along the remaining directions are executed via statefree methods like SGD or signSGD (Bernstein et al., 2018). Our framework can be integrated with various low-rank update selection techniques, including GaLore and BAdam. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees for our framework when using SGDM for low-dimensional updates and SGD for state-free updates. Additionally, our method consistently outperforms concurrent approaches across various fixed memory budgets, achieving state-of-the-art results in pre-training and fine-tuning tasks while balancing memory efficiency and performance metrics. In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT (OpenAI, 2023) and LLaMA-3 Dubey et al. (2024) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various disciplines (Brown, 2020; Yang et al., 2024; Romera-Paredes et al., 2024). However, a critical factor in achieving these results is the size of these models (Hoffmann et al., 2022). A larger number of parameters not only increases computational cost but also significantly raises memory requirements. For instance, training an 8 billion parameter LLaMA model in a 16-bit format necessitates each parameter to occupy 2 bytes, resulting in 16GB for storing the parameters and an additional 16GB for gradients.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) through Transformer structures have dominated many machine learning tasks, especially text processing. However, these models require massive amounts of data for training and induce high resource requirements, particularly in terms of the large number of Floating Point Operations (FLOPs) and the high amounts of memory needed. To fine-tune such a model in a parameter-efficient way, techniques like Adapter or LoRA have been developed. However, we observe that the application of LoRA, when used in federated learning (FL), while still being parameter-efficient, is memory and FLOP inefficient. Based on that observation, we develop a novel layer finetuning scheme that allows devices in cross-device FL to make use of pretrained neural networks (NNs) while adhering to given resource constraints. We show that our presented scheme outperforms the current state of the art when dealing with homogeneous or heterogeneous computation and memory constraints and is on par with LoRA regarding limited communication, thereby achieving significantly higher accuracies in FL training.