Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in code generation for popular programming languages. However, their performance on Low-Resource Programming Languages (LRPLs) and Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) remains a significant challenge, affecting millions of developers-3.5 million users in Rust alone-who cannot fully utilize LLM capabilities. LRPLs and DSLs encounter unique obstacles, including data scarcity and, for DSLs, specialized syntax that is poorly represented in general-purpose datasets. Addressing these challenges is crucial, as LRPLs and DSLs enhance development efficiency in specialized domains, such as finance and science. While several surveys discuss LLMs in software engineering, none focus specifically on the challenges and opportunities associated with LRPLs and DSLs. Our survey fills this gap by systematically reviewing the current state, methodologies, and challenges in leveraging LLMs for code generation in these languages. We filtered 111 papers from over 27,000 published studies between 2020 and 2024 to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in LRPLs and DSLs. We report the LLMs used, benchmarks, and metrics for evaluation, strategies for enhancing performance, and methods for dataset collection and curation. We identified four main evaluation techniques and several metrics for assessing code generation in LRPLs and DSLs. Our analysis categorizes improvement methods into six groups and summarizes novel architectures proposed by researchers. Despite various techniques and metrics, a standard approach and benchmark dataset for evaluating code generation in LRPLs and DSLs are lacking. This survey serves as a resource for researchers and practitioners at the intersection of LLMs, software engineering, and specialized programming languages, laying the groundwork for future advancements in code generation for LRPLs and DSLs.

Current Speech LLMs are predominantly trained on extensive ASR and TTS datasets, excelling in tasks related to these domains. However, their ability to handle direct speech-to-speech conversations remains notably constrained. We find that Speech LLMs often rely on an ASR-to-TTS chain-of-thought pipeline (A-T-T-A chain) to generate good responses. The pipeline first recognizes speech into text and generates corresponding text responses before generating speech responses, which introduces significant latency. We propose a method that implicitly internalizes ASR chain of thought into a Speech LLM (A-T-A chain), allowing it to bypass the ASR transcript generation but still maintain speech conversation capabilities. Our approach reduces latency and improves the model's native understanding of speech, paving the way for more efficient and natural real-time audio interactions. We also release a large-scale synthetic conversational dataset to facilitate further research.

This paper introduces a novel framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) for machine translation (MT). We start with one conjecture: an ideal translation should contain complete and accurate information for a strong enough LLM to recover the original sentence. We generate multiple translation candidates from a source language A to a target language B, and subsequently translate these candidates back to the original language A. By evaluating the cycle consistency between the original and back-translated sentences using metrics such as tokenlevel precision and accuracy, we implicitly estimate the translation quality in language B, without knowing its ground-truth. This also helps to evaluate the LLM translation capability, only with monolingual corpora. For each source sentence, we identify the translation candidate with optimal cycle consistency with the original sentence as the final answer. Our experiments demonstrate that larger LLMs, or the same LLM with more forward passes during inference, exhibit increased cycle consistency, aligning with the LLM model size scaling law [Kaplan et al. (2020)] and test-time computation scaling law [Snell et al. (2024)]. This work provide methods for, 1) to implicitly evaluate translation quality of a sentence in the target language, 2), to evaluate capability of LLM for any-to-any-language translation, and 3), how to generate a better translation for a specific LLM.

Activation sparsity denotes the existence of substantial weakly-contributed elements within activation outputs that can be eliminated, benefiting many important applications concerned with large language models (LLMs), such as computation acceleration and model interpretability. Although promoting greater activation sparsity within LLMs deserves deep studies, existing works lack comprehensive and quantitative research on the correlation between activation sparsity and potentially influential factors. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on the quantitative scaling properties and influential factors of the activation sparsity within decoder-only Transformer-based LLMs. Specifically, we propose PPL-p% sparsity, a precise and performance-aware activation sparsity metric that is applicable to any activation function. Through extensive experiments, we find several important phenomena. These demonstrate that ReLU is more efficient as the activation function than SiLU and can leverage more training data to improve activation sparsity. Secondly, the activation ratio linearly increases with the width-depth ratio below a certain bottleneck point, indicating the potential advantage of a deeper architecture at a fixed parameter scale. Finally, at similar width-depth ratios, we surprisingly find that the limit value of activation sparsity varies weakly with the parameter scale, i.e., the activation patterns within LLMs are insensitive to the parameter scale. These empirical laws towards LLMs with greater activation sparsity have important implications for making LLMs more efficient and interpretable. Activation sparsity refers to the phenomenon where considerable elements within the output of a neural layer (typically activation functions, as shown in Figure 1) are zero or low values and thus contribute weakly to the final model output given a specific input. Generally, a model with a greater sparsity ratio (i.e., the ratio of inactivated elements) has more potential in these scenarios.

Numerous industrial sectors necessitate models capable of providing robust forecasts across various horizons. Despite the recent strides in crafting specific architectures for time-series forecasting and developing pre-trained universal models, a comprehensive examination of their capability in accommodating varied-horizon forecasting during inference is still lacking. This paper bridges this gap through the design and evaluation of the Elastic Time-Series Transformer (ElasTST). The ElasTST model incorporates a non-autoregressive design with placeholders and structured self-attention masks, warranting future outputs that are invariant to adjustments in inference horizons. A tunable version of rotary position embedding is also integrated into ElasTST to capture time-series-specific periods and enhance adaptability to different horizons. Additionally, ElasTST employs a multi-scale patch design, effectively integrating both fine-grained and coarse-grained information. During the training phase, ElasTST uses a horizon reweighting strategy that approximates the effect of random sampling across multiple horizons with a single fixed horizon setting. Through comprehensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-art time-series architectures and contemporary foundation models, we demonstrate the efficacy of ElasTST's unique design elements. Our findings position ElasTST as a robust solution for the practical necessity of varied-horizon forecasting.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved high accuracy, i.e., more than 90% pass@1, in solving Python coding problems in HumanEval and MBPP. Thus, a natural question is, whether LLMs achieve comparable code completion performance compared to human developers? Unfortunately, one cannot answer this question using existing manual crafted or simple (e.g., single-line) code generation benchmarks, since such tasks fail to represent real-world software development tasks. In addition, existing benchmarks often use poor code correctness metrics, providing misleading conclusions. To address these challenges, we create REPOCOD, a code generation benchmark with 980 problems collected from 11 popular real-world projects, with more than 58% of them requiring file-level or repository-level context information. In addition, REPOCOD has the longest average canonical solution length (331.6 tokens) and the highest average cyclomatic complexity (9.00) compared to existing benchmarks. Each task in REPOCOD includes 313.5 developer-written test cases on average for better correctness evaluation. In our evaluations of ten LLMs, none of the models achieve more than 30% pass@1 on REPOCOD, indicating the necessity of building stronger LLMs that can help developers in real-world software development. REPOCOD is available at https://github.com/lt-asset/REPOCOD

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable reasoning and planning capabilities. Most prior work in this area has used LLMs to reason through steps from an initial to a goal state or criterion, thereby effectively reasoning in a forward direction. Nonetheless, many planning problems exhibit an inherent asymmetry such that planning backward from the goal is significantly easier -- for example, if there are bottlenecks close to the goal. We take inspiration from this observation and demonstrate that this bias holds for LLM planning as well: planning performance in one direction correlates with the planning complexity of the problem in that direction. However, our experiments also reveal systematic biases which lead to poor planning in the backward direction. With this knowledge, we propose a backward planning algorithm for LLMs that first flips the problem and then plans forward in the flipped problem. This helps avoid the backward bias, generate more diverse candidate plans, and exploit asymmetries between the forward and backward directions in planning problems -- we find that combining planning in both directions with self-verification improves the overall planning success rates by 4-24% in three planning domains.

In-context learning (ICL) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have gained attention for their ability to enhance LLMs' reasoning by incorporating external knowledge but suffer from limited contextual window size, leading to insufficient information injection. To this end, we propose a novel framework, RuAG, to automatically distill large volumes of offline data into interpretable first-order logic rules, which are injected into LLMs to boost their reasoning capabilities. Our method begins by formulating the search process relying on LLMs' commonsense, where LLMs automatically define head and body predicates. Then, RuAG applies Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to address the combinational searching space and efficiently discover logic rules from data. The resulting logic rules are translated into natural language, allowing targeted knowledge injection and seamless integration into LLM prompts for LLM's downstream task reasoning. We evaluate our framework on public and private industrial tasks, including natural language processing, time-series, decision-making, and industrial tasks, demonstrating its effectiveness in enhancing LLM's capability over diverse tasks.

Mathematical optimization is fundamental to decision-making across diverse domains, from operations research to healthcare. Yet, translating real-world problems into optimization models remains a formidable challenge, often demanding specialized expertise. This paper formally introduces the concept of $\textbf{autoformulation}$ -- an automated approach to creating optimization models from natural language descriptions for commercial solvers. We identify the three core challenges of autoformulation: (1) defining the vast, problem-dependent hypothesis space, (2) efficiently searching this space under uncertainty, and (3) evaluating formulation correctness (ensuring a formulation accurately represents the problem). To address these challenges, we introduce a novel method leveraging $\textit{Large Language Models}$ (LLMs) within a $\textit{Monte-Carlo Tree Search}$ framework. This approach systematically explores the space of possible formulations by exploiting the hierarchical nature of optimization modeling. LLMs serve two key roles: as dynamic formulation hypothesis generators and as evaluators of formulation correctness. To enhance search efficiency, we introduce a pruning technique to remove trivially equivalent formulations. Empirical evaluations across benchmarks containing linear and mixed-integer programming problems demonstrate our method's superior performance. Additionally, we observe significant efficiency gains from employing LLMs for correctness evaluation and from our pruning techniques.

We showcase that ChatGPT can be used to disambiguate lemmas in two endangered languages ChatGPT is not proficient in, namely Erzya and Skolt Sami. We augment our prompt by providing dictionary translations of the candidate lemmas to a majority language - Finnish in our case. This dictionary augmented generation approach results in 50\% accuracy for Skolt Sami and 41\% accuracy for Erzya. On a closer inspection, many of the error types were of the kind even an untrained human annotator would make.