Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently garnered significant attention in various domains, including recommendation systems. Recent research leverages the capabilities of LLMs to improve the performance and user modeling aspects of recommender systems. These studies primarily focus on utilizing LLMs to interpret textual data in recommendation tasks. However, it's worth noting that in ID-based recommendations, textual data is absent, and only ID data is available. The untapped potential of LLMs for ID data within the ID-based recommendation paradigm remains relatively unexplored. To this end, we introduce a pioneering approach called "LLM for ID-based Recommendation" (LLM4IDRec). This innovative approach integrates the capabilities of LLMs while exclusively relying on ID data, thus diverging from the previous reliance on textual data. The basic idea of LLM4IDRec is that by employing LLM to augment ID data, if augmented ID data can improve recommendation performance, it demonstrates the ability of LLM to interpret ID data effectively, exploring an innovative way for the integration of LLM in ID-based recommendation. We evaluate the effectiveness of our LLM4IDRec approach using three widely-used datasets. Our results demonstrate a notable improvement in recommendation performance, with our approach consistently outperforming existing methods in ID-based recommendation by solely augmenting input data.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are vital for modern enterprises, providing a foundation for managing customer interactions and data. Integrating AI agents into CRM systems can automate routine processes and enhance personalized service. However, deploying and evaluating these agents is challenging due to the lack of realistic benchmarks that reflect the complexity of real-world CRM tasks. To address this issue, we introduce CRMArena, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on realistic tasks grounded in professional work environments. Following guidance from CRM experts and industry best practices, we designed CRMArena with nine customer service tasks distributed across three personas: service agent, analyst, and manager. The benchmark includes 16 commonly used industrial objects (e.g., account, order, knowledge article, case) with high interconnectivity, along with latent variables (e.g., complaint habits, policy violations) to simulate realistic data distributions. Experimental results reveal that state-of-the-art LLM agents succeed in less than 40% of the tasks with ReAct prompting, and less than 55% even with function-calling abilities. Our findings highlight the need for enhanced agent capabilities in function-calling and rule-following to be deployed in real-world work environments. CRMArena is an open challenge to the community: systems that can reliably complete tasks showcase direct business value in a popular work environment.

The telecommunications industry's rapid evolution demands intelligent systems capable of managing complex networks and adapting to emerging technologies. While large language models (LLMs) show promise in addressing these challenges, their deployment in telecom environments faces significant constraints due to edge device limitations and inconsistent documentation. To bridge this gap, we present TeleOracle, a telecom-specialized retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system built on the Phi-2 small language model (SLM). To improve context retrieval, TeleOracle employs a two-stage retriever that incorporates semantic chunking and hybrid keyword and semantic search. Additionally, we expand the context window during inference to enhance the model's performance on open-ended queries. We also employ low-rank adaption for efficient fine-tuning. A thorough analysis of the model's performance indicates that our RAG framework is effective in aligning Phi-2 to the telecom domain in a downstream question and answer (QnA) task, achieving a 30% improvement in accuracy over the base Phi-2 model, reaching an overall accuracy of 81.20%. Notably, we show that our model not only performs on par with the much larger LLMs but also achieves a higher faithfulness score, indicating higher adherence to the retrieved context.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) suffer from hallucination, resulting in misalignment between the output textual response and the input visual content. Recent research indicates that the over-reliance on the Large Language Model (LLM) backbone, as one cause of the LVLM hallucination, inherently introduces bias from language priors, leading to insufficient context attention to the visual inputs. We tackle this issue of hallucination by mitigating such over-reliance through preference learning. We propose Vision-guided Direct Preference Optimization (V-DPO) to enhance visual context learning at training time. To interpret the effectiveness and generalizability of V-DPO on different types of training data, we construct a synthetic dataset containing both response- and image-contrast preference pairs, compared against existing human-annotated hallucination samples. Our approach achieves significant improvements compared with baseline methods across various hallucination benchmarks. Our analysis indicates that V-DPO excels in learning from image-contrast preference data, demonstrating its superior ability to elicit and understand nuances of visual context. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YuxiXie/V-DPO.

Autonomous agents powered by large vision and language models (VLM) have demonstrated significant potential in completing daily computer tasks, such as browsing the web to book travel and operating desktop software, which requires agents to understand these interfaces. Despite such visual inputs becoming more integrated into agentic applications, what types of risks and attacks exist around them still remain unclear. In this work, we demonstrate that VLM agents can be easily attacked by a set of carefully designed adversarial pop-ups, which human users would typically recognize and ignore. This distraction leads agents to click these pop-ups instead of performing the tasks as usual. Integrating these pop-ups into existing agent testing environments like OSWorld and VisualWebArena leads to an attack success rate (the frequency of the agent clicking the pop-ups) of 86% on average and decreases the task success rate by 47%. Basic defense techniques such as asking the agent to ignore pop-ups or including an advertisement notice, are ineffective against the attack.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across diverse Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including language understanding, reasoning, and generation. However, general-domain LLMs often struggle with financial tasks due to the technical and specialized nature of financial texts. This study investigates the efficacy of instruction fine-tuning smaller-scale LLMs, including Mistral-7B, Llama3-8B, and Phi3-mini, to enhance their performance in financial text classification tasks. We fine-tuned both instruction-tuned and base models across four financial classification tasks, achieving significant improvements in task-specific performance. Furthermore, we evaluated the zero-shot capabilities of these fine-tuned models on three unseen complex financial tasks, including argument classification, deal completeness classification, and causal classification. Our results indicate while base model fine-tuning led to greater degradation, instruction-tuned models maintained more robust performance. To address this degradation, we employed model merging techniques, integrating single-task domain-specific fine-tuned models with the base model. Using this merging method resulted in significant enhancements in zero-shot performance, even exceeding the original model's accuracy on certain datasets. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of instruction fine-tuning and model merging for adapting LLMs to specialized financial text classification tasks.

The emerging in-context learning (ICL) ability of large language models (LLMs) has prompted their use for predictive tasks in various domains with different types of data facilitated by serialization methods. However, with increasing applications in high-stakes domains, it has been shown that LLMs can inherit social bias and discrimination from their pre-training data. In this work, we investigate this inherent bias in LLMs during in-context learning with tabular data. We focus on an optimal demonstration selection approach that utilizes latent concept variables for resource-efficient task adaptation. We design data augmentation strategies that reduce correlation between predictive outcomes and sensitive variables helping to promote fairness during latent concept learning. We utilize the learned concept and select demonstrations from a training dataset to obtain fair predictions during inference while maintaining model utility. The latent concept variable is learned using a smaller internal LLM and the selected demonstrations can be used for inference with larger external LLMs. We empirically verify that the fair latent variable approach improves fairness results on tabular datasets compared to multiple heuristic demonstration selection methods.

As the development and application of Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance rapidly, enhancing their trustworthiness and aligning them with human preferences has become a critical area of research. Traditional methods rely heavily on extensive data for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), but representation engineering offers a new, training-free approach. This technique leverages semantic features to control the representation of LLM's intermediate hidden states, enabling the model to meet specific requirements such as increased honesty or heightened safety awareness. However, a significant challenge arises when attempting to fulfill multiple requirements simultaneously. It proves difficult to encode various semantic contents, like honesty and safety, into a singular semantic feature, restricting its practicality. In this work, we address this issue through ``Sparse Activation Control''. By delving into the intrinsic mechanisms of LLMs, we manage to identify and pinpoint components that are closely related to specific tasks within the model, i.e., attention heads. These heads display sparse characteristics that allow for near-independent control over different tasks. Our experiments, conducted on the open-source Llama series models, have yielded encouraging results. The models were able to align with human preferences on issues of safety, factuality, and bias concurrently.

Since the success of GPT, large language models (LLMs) have been revolutionizing machine learning and have initiated the so-called LLM prompting paradigm. In the era of LLMs, people train a single general-purpose LLM and provide the LLM with different prompts to perform different tasks. However, such empirical success largely lacks theoretical understanding. Here, we present the first theoretical study on the LLM prompting paradigm to the best of our knowledge. In this work, we show that prompting is in fact Turing-complete: there exists a finite-size Transformer such that for any computable function, there exists a corresponding prompt following which the Transformer computes the function. Furthermore, we show that even though we use only a single finite-size Transformer, it can still achieve nearly the same complexity bounds as that of the class of all unbounded-size Transformers. Overall, our result reveals that prompting can enable a single finite-size Transformer to be efficiently universal, which establishes a theoretical underpinning for prompt engineering in practice.

Recent advancements in large language models, including GPT-4 and its variants, and Generative AI-assisted coding tools like GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, and Tabnine, have significantly transformed software development. This paper analyzes how these innovations impact productivity and software test development metrics. These tools enable developers to generate complete software programs with minimal human intervention before deployment. However, thorough review and testing by developers are still crucial. Utilizing the Test Pyramid concept, which categorizes tests into unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, we evaluate three popular AI coding assistants by generating and comparing unit tests for opensource modules. Our findings show that AI-generated tests are of equivalent quality to original tests, highlighting differences in usage and results among the tools. This research enhances the understanding and capabilities of AI-assistant tools in automated testing.