Adoption of AI by criminal entities across traditional and emerging financial crime paradigms has been a disturbing recent trend. Particularly concerning is the proliferation of generative AI, which has empowered criminal activities ranging from sophisticated phishing schemes to the creation of hard-to-detect deep fakes, and to advanced spoofing attacks to biometric authentication systems. The exploitation of AI by criminal purposes continues to escalate, presenting an unprecedented challenge. AI adoption causes an increasingly complex landscape of fraud typologies intertwined with cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Overall, GenAI has a transformative effect on financial crimes and fraud. According to some estimates, GenAI will quadruple the fraud losses by 2027 with a staggering annual growth rate of over 30% [27]. As crime patterns become more intricate, personalized, and elusive, deploying effective defensive AI strategies becomes indispensable. However, several challenges hinder the necessary progress of AI-based fincrime detection systems. This paper examines the latest trends in AI/ML-driven financial crimes and detection systems. It underscores the urgent need for developing agile AI defenses that can effectively counteract the rapidly emerging threats. It also aims to highlight the need for cooperation across the financial services industry to tackle the GenAI induced crime waves.

Cross-lingual cross-modal retrieval (CCR) aims to retrieve visually relevant content based on non-English queries, without relying on human-labeled cross-modal data pairs during training. One popular approach involves utilizing machine translation (MT) to create pseudo-parallel data pairs, establishing correspondence between visual and non-English textual data. However, aligning their representations poses challenges due to the significant semantic gap between vision and text, as well as the lower quality of non-English representations caused by pre-trained encoders and data noise. To overcome these challenges, we propose LECCR, a novel solution that incorporates the multi-modal large language model (MLLM) to improve the alignment between visual and non-English representations. Specifically, we first employ MLLM to generate detailed visual content descriptions and aggregate them into multi-view semantic slots that encapsulate different semantics. Then, we take these semantic slots as internal features and leverage them to interact with the visual features. By doing so, we enhance the semantic information within the visual features, narrowing the semantic gap between modalities and generating local visual semantics for subsequent multi-level matching. Additionally, to further enhance the alignment between visual and non-English features, we introduce softened matching under English guidance. This approach provides more comprehensive and reliable inter-modal correspondences between visual and non-English features. Extensive experiments on four CCR benchmarks, \ie Multi30K, MSCOCO, VATEX, and MSR-VTT-CN, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Code: \url{https://github.com/LiJiaBei-7/leccr}.

Recent end-to-end speech language models (SLMs) have expanded upon the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating pre-trained speech models. However, these SLMs often undergo extensive speech instruction-tuning to bridge the gap between speech and text modalities. This requires significant annotation efforts and risks catastrophic forgetting of the original language capabilities. In this work, we present a simple yet effective automatic process for creating speech-text pair data that carefully injects speech paralinguistic understanding abilities into SLMs while preserving the inherent language capabilities of the text-based LLM. Our model demonstrates general capabilities for speech-related tasks without the need for speech instruction-tuning data, achieving impressive performance on Dynamic-SUPERB and AIR-Bench-Chat benchmarks. Furthermore, our model exhibits the ability to follow complex instructions derived from LLMs, such as specific output formatting and chain-of-thought reasoning. Our approach not only enhances the versatility and effectiveness of SLMs but also reduces reliance on extensive annotated datasets, paving the way for more efficient and capable speech understanding systems.

However, their remarkable capabilities come with significant computational and memory demands. This has raised considerable challenges when deploying these models in scenarios with limited resources or high concurrency. To address these challenges, low-bit quantization has emerged as a pivotal approach for enhancing the efficiency and deployability of LLMs. Low-bit quantization involves the process of reducing the bit-width of tensors, which effectively decreases the memory footprint and computational requirements of LLMs. By compressing weights, activations, and gradients of LLMs with low-bit integer/binary representation, quantization can significantly accelerate inference and training and reduce storage requirements with acceptable accuracy. This efficiency is crucial for enabling advanced LLMs to be accessible on devices with constrained resources, thereby broadening their applicability. In this paper, we aim to provide a survey with a comprehensive overview of low-bit quantization for large language models (LLMs), encompassing the fundamental concepts, system implementations, and algorithmic approaches related to low-bit LLMs. Compared with the traditional models, LLMs, as the representative paradigm of the foundation model, always feature a vast number of parameters, which presents unique challenges for effective quantization. As depicted in Figure 1, Section 2 introduces the fundamentals of low-bit quantization of LLMs, including new low-bit data formats and quantization granularities specific to LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are poised to revolutionize healthcare. Ophthalmology-specific LLMs remain scarce and underexplored. We introduced an open-source, specialized LLM for ophthalmology, termed Language Enhanced Model for Eye (LEME). LEME was initially pre-trained on the Llama2 70B framework and further fine-tuned with a corpus of ~127,000 non-copyrighted training instances curated from ophthalmology-specific case reports, abstracts, and open-source study materials. We benchmarked LEME against eight other LLMs, namely, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, three Llama2 models (7B, 13B, 70B), PMC-LLAMA 13B, Meditron 70B, and EYE-Llama (another ophthalmology-specific LLM). Evaluations included four internal validation tasks: abstract completion, fill-in-the-blank, multiple-choice questions (MCQ), and short-answer QA. External validation tasks encompassed long-form QA, MCQ, patient EHR summarization, and clinical QA. Evaluation metrics included Rouge-L scores, accuracy, and expert evaluation of correctness, completeness, and readability. In internal validations, LEME consistently outperformed its counterparts, achieving Rouge-L scores of 0.20 in abstract completion (all p<0.05), 0.82 in fill-in-the-blank (all p<0.0001), and 0.22 in short-answer QA (all p<0.0001, except versus GPT-4). In external validations, LEME excelled in long-form QA with a Rouge-L of 0.19 (all p<0.0001), ranked second in MCQ accuracy (0.68; all p<0.0001), and scored highest in EHR summarization and clinical QA (ranging from 4.24 to 4.83 out of 5 for correctness, completeness, and readability). LEME's emphasis on robust fine-tuning and the use of non-copyrighted data represents a breakthrough in open-source ophthalmology-specific LLMs, offering the potential to revolutionize execution of clinical tasks while democratizing research collaboration.

Identifying and classifying shutdown initiating events (SDIEs) is critical for developing low power shutdown probabilistic risk assessment for nuclear power plants. Existing computational approaches cannot achieve satisfactory performance due to the challenges of unavailable large, labeled datasets, imbalanced event types, and label noise. To address these challenges, we propose a hybrid pipeline that integrates a knowledge-informed machine learning mode to prescreen non-SDIEs and a large language model (LLM) to classify SDIEs into four types. In the prescreening stage, we proposed a set of 44 SDIE text patterns that consist of the most salient keywords and phrases from six SDIE types. Text vectorization based on the SDIE patterns generates feature vectors that are highly separable by using a simple binary classifier. The second stage builds Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based LLM, which learns generic English language representations from self-supervised pretraining on a large dataset and adapts to SDIE classification by fine-tuning it on an SDIE dataset. The proposed approaches are evaluated on a dataset with 10,928 events using precision, recall ratio, F1 score, and average accuracy. The results demonstrate that the prescreening stage can exclude more than 97% non-SDIEs, and the LLM achieves an average accuracy of 93.4% for SDIE classification.

Robotic manipulation in open-world settings requires not only task execution but also the ability to detect and learn from failures. While recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) have improved robots' spatial reasoning and problem-solving abilities, they still struggle with failure recognition, limiting their real-world applicability. We introduce AHA, an open-source VLM designed to detect and reason about failures in robotic manipulation using natural language. By framing failure detection as a free-form reasoning task, AHA identifies failures and provides detailed, adaptable explanations across different robots, tasks, and environments. We fine-tuned AHA using FailGen, a scalable framework that generates the first large-scale dataset of robotic failure trajectories, the AHA dataset. FailGen achieves this by procedurally perturbing successful demonstrations from simulation. Despite being trained solely on the AHA dataset, AHA generalizes effectively to real-world failure datasets, robotic systems, and unseen tasks. It surpasses the second-best model (GPT-4o in-context learning) by 10.3% and exceeds the average performance of six compared models including five state-of-the-art VLMs by 35.3% across multiple metrics and datasets. We integrate AHA into three manipulation frameworks that utilize LLMs/VLMs for reinforcement learning, task and motion planning, and zero-shot trajectory generation. AHA's failure feedback enhances these policies' performances by refining dense reward functions, optimizing task planning, and improving sub-task verification, boosting task success rates by an average of 21.4% across all three tasks compared to GPT-4 models.

Integrating hyperscale AI into national defense modeling and simulation (M&S) is crucial for enhancing strategic and operational capabilities. We explore how hyperscale AI can revolutionize defense M\&S by providing unprecedented accuracy, speed, and the ability to simulate complex scenarios. Countries such as the United States and China are at the forefront of adopting these technologies and are experiencing varying degrees of success. Maximizing the potential of hyperscale AI necessitates addressing critical challenges, such as closed networks, long-tail data, complex decision-making, and a shortage of experts. Future directions emphasize the adoption of domestic foundation models, the investment in various GPUs / NPUs, the utilization of big tech services, and the use of open source software. These initiatives will enhance national security, maintain competitive advantages, and promote broader technological and economic progress. With this blueprint, the Republic of Korea can strengthen its defense capabilities and stay ahead of the emerging threats of modern warfare.

Model fusing has always been an important topic, especially in an era where large language models (LLM) and multi-modal language models (MLM) with different architectures, parameter sizes and training pipelines, are being created all the time. In this work, we propose a post-hoc framework, aiming at fusing heterogeneous models off-the-shell, which we call \textit{likelihood composition}, and the basic idea is to compose multiple models' likelihood distribution when doing a multi-choice visual-question-answering task. Here the core concept, \textit{likelihood}, is actually the log-probability of the candidate answer. In \textit{likelihood composition}, we introduce some basic operations: \textit{debias}, \textit{highlight}, \textit{majority-vote} and \textit{ensemble}. By combining (composing) these basic elements, we get the mixed composition methods: \textit{mix-composition}. Through conducting comprehensive experiments on 9 VQA datasets and 10 MLMs, we prove the effectiveness of \textit{mix-composition} compared with simple \textit{ensemble} or \textit{majority-vote} methods. In this framework, people can propose new basic composition methods and combine them to get the new mixed composition methods. We hope our proposed \textit{likelihood composition} can provide a new perspective of fusing heterogeneous models and inspire the exploration under this framework.

Despite demonstrating superior performance across a variety of linguistic tasks, pre-trained large language models (LMs) often require fine-tuning on specific datasets to effectively address different downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning these LMs for downstream tasks necessitates collecting data from individuals, which raises significant privacy concerns. Federated learning (FL) has emerged as the de facto solution, enabling collaborative model training without sharing raw data. While promising, federated fine-tuning of large LMs faces significant challenges, including restricted access to model parameters and high computation, communication, and memory overhead. To address these challenges, this paper introduces \textbf{Fed}erated \textbf{P}roxy-\textbf{T}uning (FedPT), a novel framework for federated fine-tuning of black-box large LMs, requiring access only to their predictions over the output vocabulary instead of their parameters. Specifically, devices in FedPT first collaboratively tune a smaller LM, and then the server combines the knowledge learned by the tuned small LM with the knowledge learned by the larger pre-trained LM to construct a large proxy-tuned LM that can reach the performance of directly tuned large LMs. The experimental results demonstrate that FedPT can significantly reduce computation, communication, and memory overhead while maintaining competitive performance compared to directly federated fine-tuning of large LMs. FedPT offers a promising solution for efficient, privacy-preserving fine-tuning of large LMs on resource-constrained devices, broadening the accessibility and applicability of state-of-the-art large LMs.