Disclaimer: Samples in this paper may be harmful and cause discomfort! Patronizing and condescending language (PCL) is a form of speech directed at vulnerable groups. As an essential branch of toxic language, this type of language exacerbates conflicts and confrontations among Internet communities and detrimentally impacts disadvantaged groups. Traditional pre-trained language models (PLMs) perform poorly in detecting PCL due to its implicit toxicity traits like hypocrisy and false sympathy. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), we can harness their rich emotional semantics to establish a paradigm for exploring implicit toxicity. In this paper, we introduce PclGPT, a comprehensive LLM benchmark designed specifically for PCL. We collect, annotate, and integrate the Pcl-PT/SFT dataset, and then develop a bilingual PclGPT-EN/CN model group through a comprehensive pre-training and supervised fine-tuning staircase process to facilitate implicit toxic detection. Group detection results and fine-grained detection from PclGPT and other models reveal significant variations in the degree of bias in PCL towards different vulnerable groups, necessitating increased societal attention to protect them.

The applications of large language models (LLMs) have been widely spread across all domains. However, the basic abilities such as the controllability of LLMs are still limited. To address this, we propose "Self-controller", a novel agentic framework bringing self-awareness into LLMs' reasoning logic. The core idea of this work is to maintain states based on the LLM's response, letting the LLM become self-aware of current status and think step by step in a multi-round chain-of-thought paradigm. Our experiment on the state of textual length has shown the controllability and effectiveness of the Self-controller. We further implement a binary search algorithm to accelerate the generation process based on the linearity and monotonicity of the textual length state. Another advantage of the Self-controller comes with DeepSeek's Context Caching technology, which significantly saves computational token consumption when a cluster of conversations shares the same prefix of context. Theoretically, we prove that in this scenario the extra time complexity is $O(c \log n)$. Results of the back-of-the-envelope estimation suggest that the token consumption of our method is no more than twice as much as that of the trivial single-round generation. Furthermore, our ablation study on word constraints demonstrates the Self-controller's consistent controllability across all foundation models.

Few-shot Continual Relations Extraction (FCRE) is an emerging and dynamic area of study where models can sequentially integrate knowledge from new relations with limited labeled data while circumventing catastrophic forgetting and preserving prior knowledge from pre-trained backbones. In this work, we introduce a novel method that leverages often-discarded language model heads. By employing these components via a mutual information maximization strategy, our approach helps maintain prior knowledge from the pre-trained backbone and strategically aligns the primary classification head, thereby enhancing model performance. Furthermore, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs), renowned for their wealth of knowledge, in addressing FCRE challenges. Our comprehensive experimental results underscore the efficacy of the proposed method and offer valuable insights for future work.

Mechanical reasoning is a fundamental ability that sets human intelligence apart from other animal intelligence. Mechanical reasoning allows us to design tools, build bridges and canals, and construct houses which set the foundation of human civilization. Embedding machines with such ability is an important step towards building human-level artificial intelligence. Recently, Li et al. built CogDevelop2K, a data-intensive cognitive experiment benchmark for assaying the developmental trajectory of machine intelligence (Li et al., 2024). Here, to investigate mechanical reasoning in Vision Language Models, we leverage the MechBench of CogDevelop2K, which contains approximately 150 cognitive experiments, to test understanding of mechanical system stability, gears and pulley systems, seesaw-like systems and leverage principle, inertia and motion, and other fluid-related systems in Large Vision Language Models. We observe diverse yet consistent behaviors over these aspects in VLMs.

Social dynamics in close human interactions pose significant challenges for Human Mesh Estimation (HME), particularly due to the complexity of physical contacts and the scarcity of training data. Addressing these challenges, we introduce a novel data generation method that utilizes Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) to annotate contact maps which guide test-time optimization to produce paired image and pseudo-ground truth meshes. This methodology not only alleviates the annotation burden but also enables the assembly of a comprehensive dataset specifically tailored for close interactions in HME. Our Ask Pose Unite (APU) dataset, comprising over 6.2k human mesh pairs in contact covering diverse interaction types, is curated from images depicting naturalistic person-to-person scenes. We empirically show that using our dataset to train a diffusion-based contact prior, used as guidance during optimization, improves mesh estimation on unseen interactions. Our work addresses longstanding challenges of data scarcity for close interactions in HME enhancing the field's capabilities of handling complex interaction scenarios.

Vision-language models (VLMs) are essential for contextual understanding of both visual and textual information. However, their vulnerability to adversarially manipulated inputs presents significant risks, leading to compromised outputs and raising concerns about the reliability in VLM-integrated applications. Detecting these malicious prompts is thus crucial for maintaining trust in VLM generations. A major challenge in developing a safeguarding prompt classifier is the lack of a large amount of labeled benign and malicious data. To address the issue, we introduce VLMGuard, a novel learning framework that leverages the unlabeled user prompts in the wild for malicious prompt detection. These unlabeled prompts, which naturally arise when VLMs are deployed in the open world, consist of both benign and malicious information. To harness the unlabeled data, we present an automated maliciousness estimation score for distinguishing between benign and malicious samples within this unlabeled mixture, thereby enabling the training of a binary prompt classifier on top. Notably, our framework does not require extra human annotations, offering strong flexibility and practicality for real-world applications. Extensive experiment shows VLMGuard achieves superior detection results, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Disclaimer: This paper may contain offensive examples; reader discretion is advised.

Accurate diagnosis of ocular surface diseases is critical in optometry and ophthalmology, which hinge on integrating clinical data sources (e.g., meibography imaging and clinical metadata). Traditional human assessments lack precision in quantifying clinical observations, while current machine-based methods often treat diagnoses as multi-class classification problems, limiting the diagnoses to a predefined closed-set of curated answers without reasoning the clinical relevance of each variable to the diagnosis. To tackle these challenges, we introduce an innovative multi-modal diagnostic pipeline (MDPipe) by employing large language models (LLMs) for ocular surface disease diagnosis. We first employ a visual translator to interpret meibography images by converting them into quantifiable morphology data, facilitating their integration with clinical metadata and enabling the communication of nuanced medical insight to LLMs. To further advance this communication, we introduce a LLM-based summarizer to contextualize the insight from the combined morphology and clinical metadata, and generate clinical report summaries. Finally, we refine the LLMs' reasoning ability with domain-specific insight from real-life clinician diagnoses. Our evaluation across diverse ocular surface disease diagnosis benchmarks demonstrates that MDPipe outperforms existing standards, including GPT-4, and provides clinically sound rationales for diagnoses.

Generative AI, in particular large transformer models, are increasingly driving HPC system design in science and industry. We analyze performance characteristics of such transformer models and discuss their sensitivity to the transformer type, parallelization strategy, and HPC system features (accelerators and interconnects). We utilize a performance model that allows us to explore this complex design space and highlight its key components. We find that different transformer types demand different parallelism and system characteristics at different training regimes. Large Language Models are performant with 3D parallelism and amplify network needs only at pre-training scales with reduced dependence on accelerator capacity and bandwidth. On the other hand, long-sequence transformers, representative of scientific foundation models, place a more uniform dependence on network and capacity with necessary 4D parallelism. Our analysis emphasizes the need for closer performance modeling of different transformer types keeping system features in mind and demonstrates a path towards this. Our code is available as open-source.

Surgical video-language pretraining (VLP) faces unique challenges due to the knowledge domain gap and the scarcity of multi-modal data. This study aims to bridge the gap by addressing issues regarding textual information loss in surgical lecture videos and the spatial-temporal challenges of surgical VLP. We propose a hierarchical knowledge augmentation approach and a novel Procedure-Encoded Surgical Knowledge-Augmented Video-Language Pretraining (PeskaVLP) framework to tackle these issues. The knowledge augmentation uses large language models (LLM) for refining and enriching surgical concepts, thus providing comprehensive language supervision and reducing the risk of overfitting. PeskaVLP combines language supervision with visual self-supervision, constructing hard negative samples and employing a Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) based loss function to effectively comprehend the cross-modal procedural alignment. Extensive experiments on multiple public surgical scene understanding and cross-modal retrieval datasets show that our proposed method significantly improves zero-shot transferring performance and offers a generalist visual representation for further advancements in surgical scene understanding.

Recent advancements in 3D Large Language Models (3DLLMs) have highlighted their potential in building general-purpose agents in the 3D real world, yet challenges remain due to the lack of high-quality robust instruction-following data, leading to limited discriminative power and generalization of 3DLLMs. In this paper, we introduce Robin3D, a powerful 3DLLM trained on large-scale instruction-following data generated by our novel data engine, Robust Instruction Generation (RIG) engine. RIG generates two key instruction data: 1) the Adversarial Instruction-following data, which features mixed negative and positive samples to enhance the model's discriminative understanding. 2) the Diverse Instruction-following data, which contains various instruction styles to enhance model's generalization. As a result, we construct 1 million instruction-following data, consisting of 344K Adversarial samples, 508K Diverse samples, and 165K benchmark training set samples. To better handle these complex instructions, Robin3D first incorporates Relation-Augmented Projector to enhance spatial understanding, and then strengthens the object referring and grounding ability through ID-Feature Bonding. Robin3D consistently outperforms previous methods across five widely-used 3D multimodal learning benchmarks, without the need for task-specific fine-tuning. Notably, we achieve a 7.8\% improvement in the grounding task (Multi3DRefer) and a 6.9\% improvement in the captioning task (Scan2Cap).