In a parallel with the 20 questions game, we present a method to determine whether two large language models (LLMs), placed in a black-box context, are the same or not. The goal is to use a small set of (benign) binary questions, typically under 20. We formalize the problem and first establish a baseline using a random selection of questions from known benchmark datasets, achieving an accuracy of nearly 100% within 20 questions. After showing optimal bounds for this problem, we introduce two effective questioning heuristics able to discriminate 22 LLMs by using half as many questions for the same task. These methods offer significant advantages in terms of stealth and are thus of interest to auditors or copyright owners facing suspicions of model leaks.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has created new opportunities for the automation of scientific research, spanning both experimental processes and computational simulations. This study explores the feasibility of constructing an autonomous simulation agent (ASA) powered by LLM, through sophisticated API integration, to automate the entire research process, from experimental design, remote upload and simulation execution, data analysis, to report compilation. Using a simulation problem of polymer chain conformations as a case study, we assessed the performance of ASAs powered by different LLMs including GPT-4-Turbo. Our findings revealed that ASA-GPT-4o achieved near-flawless execution on designated research missions, underscoring the potential of LLMs to manage complete scientific investigations autonomously. The outlined automation can be iteratively performed up to twenty cycles without human intervention, illustrating the potential of LLMs for large-scale autonomous research endeavors. Additionally, we discussed the intrinsic traits of ASAs in managing extensive tasks, focusing on self-validation mechanisms and the balance between local attention and global oversight.

Current open-vocabulary scene graph generation algorithms highly rely on both 3D scene point cloud data and posed RGB-D images and thus have limited applications in scenarios where RGB-D images or camera poses are not readily available. To solve this problem, we propose Point2Graph, a novel end-to-end point cloud-based 3D open-vocabulary scene graph generation framework in which the requirement of posed RGB-D image series is eliminated. This hierarchical framework contains room and object detection/segmentation and open-vocabulary classification. For the room layer, we leverage the advantage of merging the geometry-based border detection algorithm with the learning-based region detection to segment rooms and create a "Snap-Lookup" framework for open-vocabulary room classification. In addition, we create an end-to-end pipeline for the object layer to detect and classify 3D objects based solely on 3D point cloud data. Our evaluation results show that our framework can outperform the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-vocabulary object and room segmentation and classification algorithm on widely used real-scene datasets.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has quickly grown into a pivotal paradigm in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs). While much of the current research in this field focuses on performance optimization, particularly in terms of accuracy and efficiency, the trustworthiness of RAG systems remains an area still under exploration. From a positive perspective, RAG systems are promising to enhance LLMs by providing them with useful and up-to-date knowledge from vast external databases, thereby mitigating the long-standing problem of hallucination. While from a negative perspective, RAG systems are at the risk of generating undesirable contents if the retrieved information is either inappropriate or poorly utilized. To address these concerns, we propose a unified framework that assesses the trustworthiness of RAG systems across six key dimensions: factuality, robustness, fairness, transparency, accountability, and privacy. Within this framework, we thoroughly review the existing literature on each dimension. Additionally, we create the evaluation benchmark regarding the six dimensions and conduct comprehensive evaluations for a variety of proprietary and open-source models. Finally, we identify the potential challenges for future research based on our investigation results. Through this work, we aim to lay a structured foundation for future investigations and provide practical insights for enhancing the trustworthiness of RAG systems in real-world applications.

Mental health disorders are among the most prevalent diseases worldwide, affecting nearly one in four people. Despite their widespread impact, the intervention rate remains below 25%, largely due to the significant cooperation required from patients for both diagnosis and intervention. The core issue behind this low treatment rate is stigma, which discourages over half of those affected from seeking help. This paper presents MindGuard, an accessible, stigma-free, and professional mobile mental healthcare system designed to provide mental health first aid. The heart of MindGuard is an innovative edge LLM, equipped with professional mental health knowledge, that seamlessly integrates objective mobile sensor data with subjective Ecological Momentary Assessment records to deliver personalized screening and intervention conversations. We conduct a broad evaluation of MindGuard using open datasets spanning four years and real-world deployment across various mobile devices involving 20 subjects for two weeks. Remarkably, MindGuard achieves results comparable to GPT-4 and outperforms its counterpart with more than 10 times the model size. We believe that MindGuard paves the way for mobile LLM applications, potentially revolutionizing mental healthcare practices by substituting self-reporting and intervention conversations with passive, integrated monitoring within daily life, thus ensuring accessible and stigma-free mental health support.

Machine learning (ML) has been applied in many facets of chemistry, and its use is rapidly growing. We argue in this perspective that despite this dramatic growth and impact, ML could be employed better and more extensively. Current work is still far from exhausting the potential of ML to advance theory and application in chemistry in terms of breadth, depth, and scale. In addition, the actual types of problems that ML could tackle, such as hypothesis generation or enabling internalized scientific understanding, are still areas of active research or open problems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted to process long-context tasks. However, the large memory overhead of the key-value (KV) cache poses significant challenges in long-context scenarios. Existing training-free KV cache compression methods typically focus on quantization and token pruning, which have compression limits, and excessive sparsity can lead to severe performance degradation. Other methods design new architectures with less KV overhead but require significant training overhead. To address the above two drawbacks, we further explore the redundancy in the channel dimension and apply an architecture-level design with minor training costs. Therefore, we introduce CSKV, a training-efficient Channel Shrinking technique for KV cache compression: (1) We first analyze the singular value distribution of the KV cache, revealing significant redundancy and compression potential along the channel dimension. Based on this observation, we propose using low-rank decomposition for key and value layers and storing the low-dimension features. (2) To preserve model performance, we introduce a bi-branch KV cache, including a window-based full-precision KV cache and a low-precision compressed KV cache. (3) To reduce the training costs, we minimize the layer-wise reconstruction loss for the compressed KV cache instead of retraining the entire LLMs. Extensive experiments show that CSKV can reduce the memory overhead of the KV cache by 80% while maintaining the model's long-context capability. Moreover, we show that our method can be seamlessly combined with quantization to further reduce the memory overhead, achieving a compression ratio of up to 95%.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a key method for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences through the use of reward models. However, traditional reward models typically generate point estimates, which oversimplify the diversity and complexity of human values and preferences. In this paper, we introduce Quantile Reward Models (QRMs), a novel approach to reward modeling that learns a distribution over rewards instead of a single scalar value. Our method uses quantile regression to estimate a full, potentially multimodal distribution over preferences, providing a more powerful and nuanced representation of preferences. This distributional approach can better capture the diversity of human values, addresses label noise, and accommodates conflicting preferences by modeling them as distinct modes in the distribution. Our experimental results show that QRM outperforms comparable traditional point-estimate models on RewardBench. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the additional information provided by the distributional estimates can be utilized in downstream applications, such as risk-aware reinforcement learning, resulting in LLM policies that generate fewer extremely negative responses. Our code and model are released at https://github.com/Nicolinho/QRM.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant potential in guiding embodied agents to execute language instructions across a range of tasks, including robotic manipulation and navigation. However, existing methods are primarily designed for static environments and do not leverage the agent's own experiences to refine its initial plans. Given that real-world environments are inherently stochastic, initial plans based solely on LLMs' general knowledge may fail to achieve their objectives, unlike in static scenarios. To address this limitation, this study introduces the Experience-and-Emotion Map (E2Map), which integrates not only LLM knowledge but also the agent's real-world experiences, drawing inspiration from human emotional responses. The proposed methodology enables one-shot behavior adjustments by updating the E2Map based on the agent's experiences. Our evaluation in stochastic navigation environments, including both simulations and real-world scenarios, demonstrates that the proposed method significantly enhances performance in stochastic environments compared to existing LLM-based approaches. Code and supplementary materials are available at https://e2map.github.io/.

Domain-specific Named Entity Recognition (NER), whose goal is to recognize domain-specific entities and their categories, provides an important support for constructing domain knowledge graphs. Currently, deep learning-based methods are widely used and effective in NER tasks, but due to the reliance on large-scale labeled data. As a result, the scarcity of labeled data in a specific domain will limit its application.Therefore, many researches started to introduce few-shot methods and achieved some results. However, the entity structures in specific domains are often complex, and the current few-shot methods are difficult to adapt to NER tasks with complex features.Taking the Chinese coal chemical industry domain as an example,there exists a complex structure of multiple entities sharing a single entity, as well as multiple relationships for the same pair of entities, which affects the NER task under the sample less condition.In this paper, we propose a Large Language Models (LLMs)-based entity recognition framework LLM-DER for the domain-specific entity recognition problem in Chinese, which enriches the entity information by generating a list of relationships containing entity types through LLMs, and designing a plausibility and consistency evaluation method to remove misrecognized entities, which can effectively solve the complex structural entity recognition problem in a specific domain.The experimental results of this paper on the Resume dataset and the self-constructed coal chemical dataset Coal show that LLM-DER performs outstandingly in domain-specific entity recognition, not only outperforming the existing GPT-3.5-turbo baseline, but also exceeding the fully-supervised baseline, verifying its effectiveness in entity recognition.