In the era of data-driven decision-making, accurate table-level representations and efficient table recommendation systems are becoming increasingly crucial for improving table management, discovery, and analysis. However, existing approaches to tabular data representation often face limitations, primarily due to their focus on cell-level tasks and the lack of high-quality training data. To address these challenges, we first formulate a clear definition of table similarity in the context of data transformation activities within data-driven enterprises. This definition serves as the foundation for synthetic data generation, which require a well-defined data generation process. Building on this, we propose a novel synthetic data generation pipeline that harnesses the code generation and data manipulation capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to create a large-scale synthetic dataset tailored for table-level representation learning. Through manual validation and performance comparisons on the table recommendation task, we demonstrate that the synthetic data generated by our pipeline aligns with our proposed definition of table similarity and significantly enhances table representations, leading to improved recommendation performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to control robotic systems such as drones, but their risks of causing physical threats and harm in real-world applications remain unexplored. Our study addresses the critical gap in evaluating LLM physical safety by developing a comprehensive benchmark for drone control. We classify the physical safety risks of drones into four categories: (1) human-targeted threats, (2) object-targeted threats, (3) infrastructure attacks, and (4) regulatory violations. Our evaluation of mainstream LLMs reveals an undesirable trade-off between utility and safety, with models that excel in code generation often performing poorly in crucial safety aspects. Furthermore, while incorporating advanced prompt engineering techniques such as In-Context Learning and Chain-of-Thought can improve safety, these methods still struggle to identify unintentional attacks. In addition, larger models demonstrate better safety capabilities, particularly in refusing dangerous commands. Our findings and benchmark can facilitate the design and evaluation of physical safety for LLMs.

Idiomatic expressions are an integral part of human languages, often used to express complex ideas in compressed or conventional ways (e.g. eager beaver as a keen and enthusiastic person). However, their interpretations may not be straightforwardly linked to the meanings of their individual components in isolation and this may have an impact for compositional approaches. In this paper, we investigate to what extent word representation models are able to go beyond compositional word combinations and capture multiword expression idiomaticity and some of the expected properties related to idiomatic meanings. We focus on noun compounds of varying levels of idiomaticity in two languages (English and Portuguese), presenting a dataset of minimal pairs containing human idiomaticity judgments for each noun compound at both type and token levels, their paraphrases and their occurrences in naturalistic and sense-neutral contexts, totalling 32,200 sentences. We propose this set of minimal pairs for evaluating how well a model captures idiomatic meanings, and define a set of fine-grained metrics of Affinity and Scaled Similarity, to determine how sensitive the models are to perturbations that may lead to changes in idiomaticity. The results obtained with a variety of representative and widely used models indicate that, despite superficial indications to the contrary in the form of high similarities, idiomaticity is not yet accurately represented in current models. Moreover, the performance of models with different levels of contextualisation suggests that their ability to capture context is not yet able to go beyond more superficial lexical clues provided by the words and to actually incorporate the relevant semantic clues needed for idiomaticity.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) like GitHub Copilot has significantly enhanced programmers' productivity, particularly in code generation. However, these models often struggle with real-world tasks without fine-tuning. As LLMs grow larger and more performant, fine-tuning for specialized tasks becomes increasingly expensive. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, which fine-tune only a subset of model parameters, offer a promising solution by reducing the computational costs of tuning LLMs while maintaining their performance. Existing studies have explored using PEFT and LLMs for various code-related tasks and found that the effectiveness of PEFT techniques is task-dependent. The application of PEFT techniques in unit test generation remains underexplored. The state-of-the-art is limited to using LLMs with full fine-tuning to generate unit tests. This paper investigates both full fine-tuning and various PEFT methods, including LoRA, (IA)^3, and prompt tuning, across different model architectures and sizes. We use well-established benchmark datasets to evaluate their effectiveness in unit test generation. Our findings show that PEFT methods can deliver performance comparable to full fine-tuning for unit test generation, making specialized fine-tuning more accessible and cost-effective. Notably, prompt tuning is the most effective in terms of cost and resource utilization, while LoRA approaches the effectiveness of full fine-tuning in several cases.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates the issue of hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating information retrieval techniques. However, in the tourism domain, since the query is usually brief and the content in the database is diverse, existing RAG may contain a significant amount of irrelevant or contradictory information contents after retrieval. To address this challenge, we propose the QCG-Rerank model. This model first performs an initial retrieval to obtain candidate chunks and then enhances semantics by extracting critical information to expand the original query. Next, we utilize the expanded query and candidate chunks to calculate similarity scores as the initial transition probability and construct the chunks graph. Subsequently, We iteratively compute the transition probabilities based on an initial estimate until convergence. The chunks with the highest score are selected and input into the LLMs to generate responses. We evaluate the model on Cultour, IIRC, StrategyQA, HotpotQA, SQuAD, and MuSiQue datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the QCG-Rerank method.

MLLMs have demonstrated remarkable comprehension and reasoning capabilities with complex language and visual data. These advances have spurred the vision of establishing a generalist robotic MLLM proficient in understanding complex human instructions and accomplishing various embodied tasks. However, developing MLLMs for real-world robots is challenging due to the typically limited computation and memory capacities available on robotic platforms. In contrast, the inference of MLLMs involves storing billions of parameters and performing tremendous computation, imposing significant hardware demands. In our paper, we propose a Dynamic Early-Exit Framework for Robotic Vision-Language-Action Model (DeeR-VLA, or simply DeeR) that automatically adjusts the size of the activated MLLM based on each situation at hand. The approach leverages a multi-exit architecture in MLLMs, which allows the model to terminate processing once a proper size of the model has been activated for a specific situation, thus avoiding further redundant computation. Additionally, we develop novel algorithms that establish early-termination criteria for DeeR, conditioned on predefined demands such as average computational cost (i.e., power consumption), as well as peak computational consumption (i.e., latency) and GPU memory usage. These enhancements ensure that DeeR operates efficiently under varying resource constraints while maintaining competitive performance. On the CALVIN robot manipulation benchmark, DeeR demonstrates significant reductions in computational costs of LLM by 5.2-6.5x and GPU memory of LLM by 2-6x without compromising performance. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/yueyang130/DeeR-VLA.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities on not just language tasks, but also various tasks that are not linguistic in nature, such as logical reasoning and social inference. In the human brain, neuroscience has identified a core language system that selectively and causally supports language processing. We here ask whether similar specialization for language emerges in LLMs. We identify language-selective units within 18 popular LLMs, using the same localization approach that is used in neuroscience. We then establish the causal role of these units by demonstrating that ablating LLM language-selective units -- but not random units -- leads to drastic deficits in language tasks. Correspondingly, language-selective LLM units are more aligned to brain recordings from the human language system than random units. Finally, we investigate whether our localization method extends to other cognitive domains: while we find specialized networks in some LLMs for reasoning and social capabilities, there are substantial differences among models. These findings provide functional and causal evidence for specialization in large language models, and highlight parallels with the functional organization in the brain.

Multilingual LLMs have achieved remarkable benchmark performance, but we find they continue to underperform on non-Latin script languages across contemporary LLM families. This discrepancy arises from the fact that LLMs are pretrained with orthographic scripts, which are dominated by Latin characters that obscure their shared phonology with non-Latin scripts. We propose leveraging phonemic transcriptions as complementary signals to induce script-invariant representations. Our study demonstrates that integrating phonemic signals improves performance across both non-Latin and Latin languages, with a particularly significant impact on closing the performance gap between the two. Through detailed experiments, we show that phonemic and orthographic scripts retrieve distinct examples for in-context learning (ICL). This motivates our proposed Mixed-ICL retrieval strategy, where further aggregation leads to our significant performance improvements for both Latin script languages (up to 12.6%) and non-Latin script languages (up to 15.1%) compared to randomized ICL retrieval.

Current vision systems typically assign fixed-length representations to images, regardless of the information content. This contrasts with human intelligence --and even large language models--which allocate varying representational capacities based on entropy, context and familiarity. Inspired by this, we propose an approach to learn variable-length token representations for 2D images. Our encoder-decoder architecture recursively processes 2D image tokens, distilling them into 1D latent tokens over multiple iterations of recurrent rollouts. Each iteration refines the 2D tokens, updates the existing 1D latent tokens, and adaptively increases representational capacity by adding new tokens. This enables compression of images into a variable number of tokens, ranging from 32 to 256. Recurrent token processing with increasing representational capacity in each iteration shows signs of token specialization, revealing potential for object / part discovery. Representation learning (Bengio et al., 2013), which involves extracting meaningful and useful information from input observations, is crucial for decision-making. An effective representation should be compact while encoding all relevant information. However, what constitutes "relevant" information varies based on the specific task; for example, a coarse classification task may require a different latent representation compression factor for satisfactory performance compared to a task demanding perfect pixel-level reconstruction, which necessitates denser representations. Similarly, language models can describe content at various levels of abstraction depending on complexity, context (Graves, 2016; Dehghani et al., 2018), and familiarity (Baevski & Auli, 2018). In contrast, most current visual systems, such as VAEs, VQGANs, and ViTs (Kingma & Welling, 2022; Esser et al., 2020; Dosovitskiy et al., 2020), generate fixed-size representations for all images. In this work, we take a step toward learning adaptive and variable-length visual representations, emphasizing that each image requires a different representation capacity (see Sec. 4).

Expert-driven frameworks for impact assessments (IAs) may inadvertently overlook the effects of AI technologies on the public's social behavior, policy, and the cultural and geographical contexts shaping the perception of AI and the impacts around its use. This research explores the potentials of fine-tuning LLMs on negative impacts of AI reported in a diverse sample of articles from 266 news domains spanning 30 countries around the world to incorporate more diversity into IAs. Our findings highlight (1) the potential of fine-tuned open-source LLMs in supporting IA of AI technologies by generating high-quality negative impacts across four qualitative dimensions: coherence, structure, relevance, and plausibility, and (2) the efficacy of small open-source LLM (Mistral-7B) fine-tuned on impacts from news media in capturing a wider range of categories of impacts that GPT-4 had gaps in covering.