Long-short range time series forecasting is essential for predicting future trends and patterns over extended periods. While deep learning models such as Transformers have made significant strides in advancing time series forecasting, they often encounter difficulties in capturing long-term dependencies and effectively managing sparse semantic features. The state-space model, Mamba, addresses these issues through its adept handling of selective input and parallel computing, striking a balance between computational efficiency and prediction accuracy. This article examines the advantages and disadvantages of both Mamba and Transformer models, and introduces a combined approach, MAT, which leverages the strengths of each model to capture unique long-short range dependencies and inherent evolutionary patterns in multivariate time series. Specifically, MAT harnesses the long-range dependency capabilities of Mamba and the short-range characteristics of Transformers. Experimental results on benchmark weather datasets demonstrate that MAT outperforms existing comparable methods in terms of prediction accuracy, scalability, and memory efficiency.

Prompting ChatGPT to achieve complex goals (e.g., creating a customer support chatbot) often demands meticulous prompt engineering, including aspects like fluent writing and chain-of-thought techniques. While emerging prompt optimizers can automatically refine many of these aspects, we argue that clearly conveying customized requirements (e.g., how to handle diverse inputs) remains a human-centric challenge. In this work, we introduce Requirement-Oriented Prompt Engineering (ROPE), a paradigm that focuses human attention on generating clear, complete requirements during prompting. We implement ROPE through an assessment and training suite that provides deliberate practice with LLM-generated feedback. In a study with 30 novices, we show that requirement-focused training doubles novices' prompting performance, significantly outperforming conventional prompt engineering training and prompt optimization. We also demonstrate that high-quality LLM outputs are directly tied to the quality of input requirements. Our work paves the way for more effective task delegation in human-LLM collaborative prompting.

Open-vocabulary audio-language models, like CLAP, offer a promising approach for zero-shot audio classification (ZSAC) by enabling classification with any arbitrary set of categories specified with natural language prompts. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective method to improve ZSAC with CLAP. Specifically, we shift from the conventional method of using prompts with abstract category labels (e.g., Sound of an organ) to prompts that describe sounds using their inherent descriptive features in a diverse context (e.g.,The organ's deep and resonant tones filled the cathedral.). To achieve this, we first propose ReCLAP, a CLAP model trained with rewritten audio captions for improved understanding of sounds in the wild. These rewritten captions describe each sound event in the original caption using their unique discriminative characteristics. ReCLAP outperforms all baselines on both multi-modal audio-text retrieval and ZSAC. Next, to improve zero-shot audio classification with ReCLAP, we propose prompt augmentation. In contrast to the traditional method of employing hand-written template prompts, we generate custom prompts for each unique label in the dataset. These custom prompts first describe the sound event in the label and then employ them in diverse scenes. Our proposed method improves ReCLAP's performance on ZSAC by 1%-18% and outperforms all baselines by 1% - 55%.

Manually generating access control policies from an organization's high-level requirement specifications poses significant challenges. It requires laborious efforts to sift through multiple documents containing such specifications and translate their access requirements into access control policies. Also, the complexities and ambiguities of these specifications often result in errors by system administrators during the translation process, leading to data breaches. However, the automated policy generation frameworks designed to help administrators in this process are unreliable due to limitations, such as the lack of domain adaptation. Therefore, to improve the reliability of access control policy generation, we propose RAGent, a novel retrieval-based access control policy generation framework based on language models. RAGent identifies access requirements from high-level requirement specifications with an average state-of-the-art F1 score of 87.9%. Through retrieval augmented generation, RAGent then translates the identified access requirements into access control policies with an F1 score of 77.9%. Unlike existing frameworks, RAGent generates policies with complex components like purposes and conditions, in addition to subjects, actions, and resources. Moreover, RAGent automatically verifies the generated policies and iteratively refines them through a novel verification-refinement mechanism, further improving the reliability of the process by 3%, reaching the F1 score of 80.6%. We also introduce three annotated datasets for developing access control policy generation frameworks in the future, addressing the data scarcity of the domain.

Rapid advances in the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have raised widespread concerns regarding their potential for malicious use. Open-weight LLMs present unique challenges, as existing safeguards lack robustness to tampering attacks that modify model weights. For example, recent works have demonstrated that refusal and unlearning safeguards can be trivially removed with a few steps of fine-tuning. These vulnerabilities necessitate new approaches for enabling the safe release of open-weight LLMs. We develop a method, called TAR, for building tamper-resistant safeguards into open-weight LLMs such that adversaries cannot remove the safeguards even after thousands of steps of fine-tuning. In extensive evaluations and red teaming analyses, we find that our method greatly improves tamper-resistance while preserving benign capabilities. Our results demonstrate that tamper-resistance is a tractable problem, opening up a promising new avenue to improve the safety and security of open-weight LLMs.

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for medical question answering, there is limited work focused on tropical and infectious disease-specific exploration. We build on an opensource tropical and infectious diseases (TRINDs) dataset, expanding it to include demographic and semantic clinical and consumer augmentations yielding 11000+ prompts. We evaluate LLM performance on these, comparing generalist and medical LLMs, as well as LLM outcomes to human experts. We demonstrate through systematic experimentation, the benefit of contextual information such as demographics, location, gender, risk factors for optimal LLM response. Finally we develop a prototype of TRINDs-LM, a research tool that provides a playground to navigate how context impacts LLM outputs for health.

Recently, a diverse set of decoding and reranking procedures have been shown effective for LLM-based code generation. However, a comprehensive framework that links and experimentally compares these methods is missing. We address this by proposing Decoding Objectives for Code Execution, a comprehensive framework that includes candidate generation, $n$-best reranking, minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding, and self-debugging as the core components. We then study the contributions of these components through execution-based evaluation metrics. Our findings highlight the importance of execution-based methods and the difference gap between execution-based and execution-free methods. Furthermore, we assess the impact of filtering based on trial unit tests, a simple and effective strategy that has been often overlooked in prior works. We also propose self-debugging on multiple candidates, obtaining state-of-the-art performance on reranking for code generation. We expect our framework to provide a solid guideline for future research on code generation.

Role-playing is an easy task for Large Language Models (LLMs), as they are skilled at simulating human behaviors. Many current studies have enabled LLMs to generate responses in the tone of a specific role by fine-tuning the models or using specialized prompts. However, it is typically easy to recognize when a role is being played by LLMs. These models tend to perform poorly when confronted with knowledge that the assumed role does not possess, or a question that requires the specific experience or logic of the role to answer. To address this problem and make LLMs act more like real roles, we propose a Thinking Before Speaking (TBS) model in this paper. Unlike other studies, we first extend the data based on the character's real-life scenarios and the historical dialogue, supplementing each pair of dialogue with the character's mindset. Then we add few data points that include elements beyond the role's knowledge, and fine-tune the LLMs. This approach can help LLMs adopt the role's thought process and logic, avoiding responses that fall outside the role's knowledge base. We have also prepared a dataset and evaluation metrics to test these capabilities. Experimental results show that our TBS model can better emulate a role in terms of tone, knowledge, and mindset.

Although powerful, current cutting-edge LLMs may not fulfil the needs of highly specialised sectors. We introduce KodeXv0.1, a family of large language models that outclass GPT-4 in financial question answering. We utilise the base variants of Llama 3.1 8B and 70B and adapt them to the financial domain through a custom training regime. To this end, we collect and process a large number of publicly available financial documents such as earnings calls and business reports. These are used to generate a high-quality, synthetic dataset consisting of Context-Question-Answer triplets which closely mirror real-world financial tasks. Using the train split of this dataset, we perform RAG-aware 4bit LoRA instruction tuning runs of Llama 3.1 base variants to produce KodeX-8Bv0.1 and KodeX-70Bv0.1. We then complete extensive model evaluations using FinanceBench, FinQABench and the withheld test split of our dataset. Our results show that KodeX-8Bv0.1 is more reliable in financial contexts than cutting-edge instruct models in the same parameter regime, surpassing them by up to 9.24%. In addition, it is even capable of outperforming state-of-the-art proprietary models such as GPT-4 by up to 7.07%. KodeX-70Bv0.1 represents a further improvement upon this, exceeding GPT-4's performance on every tested benchmark.

After weeks of speculation about a new and more powerful AI product in the works, OpenAI today announced its first "reasoning model." The program, known as o1, may in many respects be OpenAI's most powerful AI offering yet, with problem-solving capacities that resemble those of a human mind more than any software before. Or, at least, that's how the company is selling it. As with most OpenAI research and product announcements, o1 is, for now, somewhat of a tease. The start-up claims that the model is far better at complex tasks but released very few details about the model's training.