Large language models (LLMs) are useful tools with the capacity for performing specific types of knowledge work at an effective scale. However, LLM deployments in high-risk and safety-critical domains pose unique challenges, notably the issue of ``hallucination,'' where LLMs can generate fabricated information. This is particularly concerning in settings such as drug safety, where inaccuracies could lead to patient harm. To mitigate these risks, we have developed and demonstrated a proof of concept suite of guardrails specifically designed to mitigate certain types of hallucinations and errors for drug safety, and potentially applicable to other medical safety-critical contexts. These guardrails include mechanisms to detect anomalous documents to prevent the ingestion of inappropriate data, identify incorrect drug names or adverse event terms, and convey uncertainty in generated content. We integrated these guardrails with an LLM fine-tuned for a text-to-text task, which involves converting both structured and unstructured data within adverse event reports into natural language. This method was applied to translate individual case safety reports, demonstrating effective application in a pharmacovigilance processing task. Our guardrail framework offers a set of tools with broad applicability across various domains, ensuring LLMs can be safely used in high-risk situations by eliminating the occurrence of key errors, including the generation of incorrect pharmacovigilance-related terms, thus adhering to stringent regulatory and quality standards in medical safety-critical environments.

Indoor robots rely on depth to perform tasks like navigation or obstacle detection, and single-image depth estimation is widely used to assist perception. Most indoor single-image depth prediction focuses less on model generalizability to unseen datasets, concerned with in-the-wild robustness for system deployment. This work leverages gradient-based meta-learning to gain higher generalizability on zero-shot cross-dataset inference. Unlike the most-studied meta-learning of image classification associated with explicit class labels, no explicit task boundaries exist for continuous depth values tied to highly varying indoor environments regarding object arrangement and scene composition. We propose fine-grained task that treats each RGB-D mini-batch as a task in our meta-learning formulation. We first show that our method on limited data induces a much better prior (max 27.8% in RMSE). Then, finetuning on meta-learned initialization consistently outperforms baselines without the meta approach. Aiming at generalization, we propose zero-shot cross-dataset protocols and validate higher generalizability induced by our meta-initialization, as a simple and useful plugin to many existing depth estimation methods. The work at the intersection of depth and meta-learning potentially drives both research to step closer to practical robotic and machine perception usage.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown significant potential to automate various software development tasks, including code completion, test generation, and bug fixing. However, the application of LLMs for automated bug fixing remains challenging due to the complexity and diversity of real-world software systems. In this paper, we introduce MarsCode Agent, a novel framework that leverages LLMs to automatically identify and repair bugs in software code. MarsCode Agent combines the power of LLMs with advanced code analysis techniques to accurately localize faults and generate patches. Our approach follows a systematic process of planning, bug reproduction, fault localization, candidate patch generation, and validation to ensure high-quality bug fixes. We evaluated MarsCode Agent on SWE-bench, a comprehensive benchmark of real-world software projects, and our results show that MarsCode Agent achieves a high success rate in bug fixing compared to most of the existing automated approaches.

Hallucinations can broadly when implementing AI in high-risk settings, such be categorized into two types [2]: faithfulness hallucinations, as autonomous cars, medicine, or insurances. Large where the LLM deviates from provided Language Models (LLMs) have seen a surge in popularity instructions, and factual hallucinations, where there in recent years, but they are subject to hallucinations, is a disparity between the generated content and which may cause serious harm in high-risk verifiable facts. The risk arises when individuals settings. Despite their success, LLMs are expensive unaware of these limitations mistakenly treat such to train and run: they need a large amount outputs as ground-truth, leading to decisions based of computations and memory, preventing the use on erroneous information -- a concern particularly of ensembling methods in practice.

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to interpret visual representations of data is crucial for advancing their application in data analysis and decision-making processes. This paper presents a novel synthetic dataset designed to evaluate the proficiency of LLMs in interpreting various forms of data visualizations, including plots like time series, histograms, violins, boxplots, and clusters. Our dataset is generated using controlled parameters to ensure comprehensive coverage of potential real-world scenarios. We employ multimodal text prompts with questions related to visual data in images to benchmark several state-of-the-art models like ChatGPT or Gemini, assessing their understanding and interpretative accuracy. To ensure data integrity, our benchmark dataset is generated automatically, making it entirely new and free from prior exposure to the models being tested. This strategy allows us to evaluate the models' ability to truly interpret and understand the data, eliminating possibility of pre-learned responses, and allowing for an unbiased evaluation of the models' capabilities. We also introduce quantitative metrics to assess the performance of the models, providing a robust and comprehensive evaluation tool. Benchmarking several state-of-the-art LLMs with this dataset reveals varying degrees of success, highlighting specific strengths and weaknesses in interpreting diverse types of visual data. The results provide valuable insights into the current capabilities of LLMs and identify key areas for improvement. This work establishes a foundational benchmark for future research and development aimed at enhancing the visual interpretative abilities of language models. In the future, improved LLMs with robust visual interpretation skills can significantly aid in automated data analysis, scientific research, educational tools, and business intelligence applications.

Vision Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) represents a frontier in embodied AI, demanding agents to navigate freely in unbounded 3D spaces solely guided by natural language instructions. This task introduces distinct challenges in multimodal comprehension, spatial reasoning, and decision-making. To address these challenges, we introduce Cog-GA, a generative agent founded on large language models (LLMs) tailored for VLN-CE tasks. Cog-GA employs a dual-pronged strategy to emulate human-like cognitive processes. Firstly, it constructs a cognitive map, integrating temporal, spatial, and semantic elements, thereby facilitating the development of spatial memory within LLMs. Secondly, Cog-GA employs a predictive mechanism for waypoints, strategically optimizing the exploration trajectory to maximize navigational efficiency. Each waypoint is accompanied by a dual-channel scene description, categorizing environmental cues into 'what' and 'where' streams as the brain. This segregation enhances the agent's attentional focus, enabling it to discern pertinent spatial information for navigation. A reflective mechanism complements these strategies by capturing feedback from prior navigation experiences, facilitating continual learning and adaptive replanning. Extensive evaluations conducted on VLN-CE benchmarks validate Cog-GA's state-of-the-art performance and ability to simulate human-like navigation behaviors. This research significantly contributes to the development of strategic and interpretable VLN-CE agents.

Human feedback on conversations with language language models (LLMs) is central to how these systems learn about the world, improve their capabilities, and are steered toward desirable and safe behaviors. However, this feedback is mostly collected by frontier AI labs and kept behind closed doors. In this work, we bring together interdisciplinary experts to assess the opportunities and challenges to realizing an open ecosystem of human feedback for AI. We first look for successful practices in peer production, open source, and citizen science communities. We then characterize the main challenges for open human feedback. For each, we survey current approaches and offer recommendations. We end by envisioning the components needed to underpin a sustainable and open human feedback ecosystem. In the center of this ecosystem are mutually beneficial feedback loops, between users and specialized models, incentivizing a diverse stakeholders community of model trainers and feedback providers to support a general open feedback pool.

Background: Log messages provide valuable information about the status of software systems. This information is provided in an unstructured fashion and automated approaches are applied to extract relevant parameters. To ease this process, log parsing can be applied, which transforms log messages into structured log templates. Recent advances in language models have led to several studies that apply ChatGPT to the task of log parsing with promising results. However, the performance of other state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) on the log parsing task remains unclear. Aims: In this study, we investigate the current capability of state-of-the-art LLMs to perform log parsing. Method: We select six recent LLMs, including both paid proprietary (GPT-3.5, Claude 2.1) and four free-to-use open models, and compare their performance on system logs obtained from a selection of mature open-source projects. We design two different prompting approaches and apply the LLMs on 1, 354 log templates across 16 different projects. We evaluate their effectiveness, in the number of correctly identified templates, and the syntactic similarity between the generated templates and the ground truth. Results: We found that free-to-use models are able to compete with paid models, with CodeLlama extracting 10% more log templates correctly than GPT-3.5. Moreover, we provide qualitative insights into the usability of language models (e.g., how easy it is to use their responses). Conclusions: Our results reveal that some of the smaller, free-to-use LLMs can considerably assist log parsing compared to their paid proprietary competitors, especially code-specialized models.

The recent advance in Large Language Models (LLMs) has shaped a new paradigm of AI agents, i.e., LLM-based agents. Compared to standalone LLMs, LLM-based agents substantially extend the versatility and expertise of LLMs by enhancing LLMs with the capabilities of perceiving and utilizing external resources and tools. To date, LLM-based agents have been applied and shown remarkable effectiveness in Software Engineering (SE). The synergy between multiple agents and human interaction brings further promise in tackling complex real-world SE problems. In this work, we present a comprehensive and systematic survey on LLM-based agents for SE. We collect 106 papers and categorize them from two perspectives, i.e., the SE and agent perspectives. In addition, we discuss open challenges and future directions in this critical domain. The repository of this survey is at https://github.com/FudanSELab/Agent4SE-Paper-List.

Equipped with the capability to call functions, modern large language models (LLMs) can leverage external tools for addressing a range of tasks unattainable through language skills alone. However, the effective execution of these tools relies heavily not just on the advanced capabilities of LLMs but also on precise user instructions, which often cannot be ensured in the real world. To evaluate the performance of LLMs tool-use under imperfect instructions, we meticulously examine the real-world instructions queried from users, analyze the error patterns, and build a challenging tool-use benchmark called Noisy ToolBench (NoisyToolBench). We find that due to the next-token prediction training objective, LLMs tend to arbitrarily generate the missed argument, which may lead to hallucinations and risks. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, Ask-when-Needed (AwN), which prompts LLMs to ask questions to users whenever they encounter obstacles due to unclear instructions. Moreover, to reduce the manual labor involved in user-LLM interaction and assess LLMs performance in tool utilization from both accuracy and efficiency perspectives, we design an automated evaluation tool named ToolEvaluator. Our experiments demonstrate that the AwN significantly outperforms existing frameworks for tool learning in the NoisyToolBench. We will release all related code and datasets to support future research.