Financial sentiment analysis (FSA) is crucial for evaluating market sentiment and making well-informed financial decisions. The advent of large language models (LLMs) such as BERT and its financial variant, FinBERT, has notably enhanced sentiment analysis capabilities. This paper investigates the application of LLMs and FinBERT for FSA, comparing their performance on news articles, financial reports and company announcements. The study emphasizes the advantages of prompt engineering with zero-shot and few-shot strategy to improve sentiment classification accuracy. Experimental results indicate that GPT-4o, with few-shot examples of financial texts, can be as competent as a well fine-tuned FinBERT in this specialized field.

The unification of large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs (KGs) has emerged as a hot topic. At the LLM+KG'24 workshop, held in conjunction with VLDB 2024 in Guangzhou, China, one of the key themes explored was important data management challenges and opportunities due to the effective interaction between LLMs and KGs. This report outlines the major directions and approaches presented by various speakers during the LLM+KG'24 workshop.

Most alignment research today focuses on designing new learning algorithms using datasets like Anthropic-HH, assuming human feedback data is inherently reliable. However, little attention has been given to the qualitative unreliability of human feedback and its impact on alignment. To address this gap, we conduct a comprehensive study and provide an in-depth analysis of human feedback data. We assess feedback reliability using a committee of gold reward models, revealing that over 25% of the dataset shows low or no agreement with these models, implying a high degree of unreliability. Through a qualitative analysis, we identify six key sources of unreliability, such as mis-labeling, subjective preferences, differing criteria and thresholds for helpfulness and harmlessness, etc. Lastly, to mitigate unreliability, we propose Source-Aware Cleaning, an automatic data-cleaning method guided by the insight of our qualitative analysis, to significantly improve data quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models trained on our cleaned dataset, HH-Clean, substantially outperform those trained on the original dataset. We release HH-Clean to support more reliable LLM alignment evaluation in the future.

Despite significant advancements in the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), the lack of diverse reasoning solutions often makes them trapped in a limited solution search area. In this paper, we propose TypedThinker, a novel framework that enhances LLMs' problem-solving abilities by incorporating multiple reasoning types (deductive, inductive, abductive, and analogical). Our analysis across four benchmarks reveals that different reasoning types uniquely solve distinct sets of problems, highlighting the importance of diverse thinking approaches. TypedThinker addresses two key challenges: selecting appropriate reasoning types for given problems and effectively implementing specific reasoning types. Through self-training on successful experiences, TypedThinker learns an implicit policy for reasoning type selection and application. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over baseline models, with accuracy increases of 3.4% for Mistral 7B and 16.7% for LLaMA3 8B across four reasoning benchmarks. Notably, TypedThinker shows effective generalization to new benchmarks and can further enhance the reasoning capability of powerful models like GPT-4o. The code is released at https://github.com/dqwang122/ThinkHub.

Prompt-based fine-tuning has become an essential method for eliciting information encoded in pre-trained language models for a variety of tasks, including text classification. For multi-class classification tasks, prompt-based fine-tuning under low-resource scenarios has resulted in performance levels comparable to those of fully fine-tuning methods. Previous studies have used crafted prompt templates and verbalizers, mapping from the label terms space to the class space, to solve the classification problem as a masked language modeling task. However, cross-domain and fine-grained prompt-based fine-tuning with an automatically enriched verbalizer remains unexplored, mainly due to the difficulty and costs of manually selecting domain label terms for the verbalizer, which requires humans with domain expertise. To address this challenge, we introduce SciPrompt, a framework designed to automatically retrieve scientific topic-related terms for low-resource text classification tasks. To this end, we select semantically correlated and domain-specific label terms within the context of scientific literature for verbalizer augmentation. Furthermore, we propose a new verbalization strategy that uses correlation scores as additional weights to enhance the prediction performance of the language model during model tuning. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art, prompt-based fine-tuning methods on scientific text classification tasks under few and zero-shot settings, especially in classifying fine-grained and emerging scientific topics.

In tackling the challenges of large language model (LLM) performance for Text-to-SQL tasks, we introduce CHASE-SQL, a new framework that employs innovative strategies, using test-time compute in multi-agent modeling to improve candidate generation and selection. CHASE-SQL leverages LLMs' intrinsic knowledge to generate diverse and high-quality SQL candidates using different LLM generators with: (1) a divide-and-conquer method that decomposes complex queries into manageable sub-queries in a single LLM call; (2) chain-of-thought reasoning based on query execution plans, reflecting the steps a database engine takes during execution; and (3) a unique instance-aware synthetic example generation technique, which offers specific few-shot demonstrations tailored to test questions.To identify the best candidate, a selection agent is employed to rank the candidates through pairwise comparisons with a fine-tuned binary-candidates selection LLM. This selection approach has been demonstrated to be more robust over alternatives. The proposed generators-selector framework not only enhances the quality and diversity of SQL queries but also outperforms previous methods. Overall, our proposed CHASE-SQL achieves the state-of-the-art execution accuracy of 73.0% and 73.01% on the test set and development set of the notable BIRD Text-to-SQL dataset benchmark, rendering CHASE-SQL the top submission of the leaderboard (at the time of paper submission).

Reconstructing past events requires reasoning across long time horizons. To figure out what happened, we need to use our prior knowledge about the world and human behavior and draw inferences from various sources of evidence including visual, language, and auditory cues. We introduce MARPLE, a benchmark for evaluating long-horizon inference capabilities using multi-modal evidence. Our benchmark features agents interacting with simulated households, supporting vision, language, and auditory stimuli, as well as procedurally generated environments and agent behaviors. Inspired by classic ``whodunit'' stories, we ask AI models and human participants to infer which agent caused a change in the environment based on a step-by-step replay of what actually happened. The goal is to correctly identify the culprit as early as possible. Our findings show that human participants outperform both traditional Monte Carlo simulation methods and an LLM baseline (GPT-4) on this task. Compared to humans, traditional inference models are less robust and performant, while GPT-4 has difficulty comprehending environmental changes. We analyze what factors influence inference performance and ablate different modes of evidence, finding that all modes are valuable for performance. Overall, our experiments demonstrate that the long-horizon, multimodal inference tasks in our benchmark present a challenge to current models.

Figure 1: Generations from DnD-Transformers trained on class-conditional ImageNet256 256 (a.top) and unconditional arXiv images (a.bottom). Unconditional rich-text image generations by trained diffusion (b.1) and autoregressive model (b.2), This work tackles the information loss bottleneck of vector-quantization (VQ) autoregressive image generation by introducing a novel model architecture called the 2-Dimensional Autoregression (DnD) Transformer. The DnD-Transformer predicts more codes for an image by introducing a new autoregression direction, model depth, along with the sequence length direction. Compared to traditional 1D autoregression and previous work utilizing similar 2D image decomposition such as RQ-Transformer, the DnD-Transformer is an end-to-end model that can generate higher quality images with the same backbone model size and sequence length, opening a new optimization perspective for autoregressive image generation. Furthermore, our experiments reveal that the DnD-Transformer's potential extends beyond generating natural images. It can even generate images with rich text and graphical elements in a self-supervised manner, demonstrating an understanding of these combined modalities. This has not been previously demonstrated for popular vision generative models such as diffusion models, showing a spark of vision-language intelligence when trained solely on images. The field of autoregressive (AR) image generation is experiencing a resurgence of interest, largely driven by groundbreaking advancements in large language models (LLMs), exemplified by the release of ChatGPT (OpenAI, 2022). Because typical AR image generation methods also predict output in a next-token prediction manner, this resemblance has sparked significant efforts in two main areas: 1) transferring advanced, large-scale training techniques and expertise from LLMs to AR image generation models (Bai et al., 2023; Tian et al., 2024; Sun et al., 2024), and 2) developing truly multimodal foundation models capable of both understanding and generating multimodal information within a unified training framework (Lu et al., 2022; 2023; Team, 2024).

Alert fatigue is a common issue faced by software teams using the DevSecOps paradigm. The overwhelming number of warnings and alerts generated by security and code scanning tools, particularly in smaller teams where resources are limited, leads to desensitization and diminished responsiveness to security warnings, potentially exposing systems to vulnerabilities. This paper explores the potential of LLMs in generating actionable security reports that emphasize the financial impact and consequences of detected security issues, such as credential leaks, if they remain unaddressed. A survey conducted among developers indicates that LLM-generated reports significantly enhance the likelihood of immediate action on security issues by providing clear, comprehensive, and motivating insights. Integrating these reports into DevSecOps workflows can mitigate attention saturation and alert fatigue, ensuring that critical security warnings are addressed effectively.

Text-to-SQLs enables non-expert users to effortlessly retrieve desired information from relational databases using natural language queries. While recent advancements, particularly with Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT and T5, have shown impressive performance on large-scale benchmarks such as BIRD, current state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLM-based Text-to-SQLs models often require significant efforts to develop auxiliary tools like SQL classifiers to achieve high performance. This paper proposed a novel approach that only needs SQL Quality Measurement to enhance LLMs-based Text-to-SQLs performance. It establishes a SQL quality evaluation mechanism to assess the generated SQL queries against predefined criteria and actual database responses. This feedback loop enables continuous learning and refinement of model outputs based on both syntactic correctness and semantic accuracy. The proposed method undergoes comprehensive validation on the BIRD benchmark, assessing Execution Accuracy (EX) and Valid Efficiency Score (VES) across various Text-to-SQLs difficulty levels. Experimental results reveal competitive performance in both EX and VES compared to SOTA models like GPT4 and T5.