Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is a perspective approach to detecting Large Language Model (LLM) hallucinations and low quality output. In this work, we address one of the challenges of UQ in generation tasks that arises from the conditional dependency between the generation steps of an LLM. We propose to learn this dependency from data. We train a regression model, which target variable is the gap between the conditional and the unconditional generation confidence. During LLM inference, we use this learned conditional dependency model to modulate the uncertainty of the current generation step based on the uncertainty of the previous step. Our experimental evaluation on nine datasets and three LLMs shows that the proposed method is highly effective for uncertainty quantification, achieving substantial improvements over rivaling approaches.

With the growing complexity of fact verification tasks, the concern with "thoughtful" reasoning capabilities is increasing. However, recent fact verification benchmarks mainly focus on checking a narrow scope of semantic factoids within claims and lack an explicit logical reasoning process. In this paper, we introduce CheckWhy, a challenging dataset tailored to a novel causal fact verification task: checking the truthfulness of the causal relation within claims through rigorous reasoning steps. CheckWhy consists of over 19K "why" claim-evidence-argument structure triplets with supports, refutes, and not enough info labels. Each argument structure is composed of connected evidence, representing the reasoning process that begins with foundational evidence and progresses toward claim establishment. Through extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models, we validate the importance of incorporating the argument structure for causal fact verification. Moreover, the automated and human evaluation of argument structure generation reveals the difficulty in producing satisfying argument structure by fine-tuned models or Chain-of-Thought prompted LLMs, leaving considerable room for future improvements.

With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), LLM-powered multi-agent systems (LLM-MA systems) have been proposed to tackle real-world tasks. However, their agents mostly follow predefined Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that remain unchanged across the whole interaction, lacking autonomy and scalability. Additionally, current solutions often overlook the necessity for effective agent cooperation. To address the above limitations, we propose MegaAgent, a practical framework designed for autonomous cooperation in large-scale LLM Agent systems. MegaAgent leverages the autonomy of agents to dynamically generate agents based on task requirements, incorporating features such as automatically dividing tasks, systematic planning and monitoring of agent activities, and managing concurrent operations. In addition, MegaAgent is designed with a hierarchical structure and employs system-level parallelism to enhance performance and boost communication. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MegaAgent through Gobang game development, showing that it outperforms popular LLM-MA systems; and national policy simulation, demonstrating its high autonomy and potential to rapidly scale up to 590 agents while ensuring effective cooperation among them. Our results indicate that MegaAgent is the first autonomous large-scale LLM-MA system with no pre-defined SOPs, high effectiveness and scalability, paving the way for further research in this field. Our code is at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MegaAgent-81F3.

To assist human fact-checkers, researchers have developed automated approaches for visual misinformation detection. These methods assign veracity scores by identifying inconsistencies between the image and its caption, or by detecting forgeries in the image. However, they neglect a crucial point of the human fact-checking process: identifying the original meta-context of the image. By explaining what is actually true about the image, fact-checkers can better detect misinformation, focus their efforts on check-worthy visual content, engage in counter-messaging before misinformation spreads widely, and make their explanation more convincing. Here, we fill this gap by introducing the task of automated image contextualization. We create 5Pils, a dataset of 1,676 fact-checked images with question-answer pairs about their original meta-context. Annotations are based on the 5 Pillars fact-checking framework. We implement a first baseline that grounds the image in its original meta-context using the content of the image and textual evidence retrieved from the open web. Our experiments show promising results while highlighting several open challenges in retrieval and reasoning. We make our code and data publicly available.

The use of traditional IVR (Interactive Voice Response) methods often proves insufficient to meet customer needs. This article examines the application of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to enhance the efficiency of IVR systems in call centers. A proposed approach is based on the integration of speech-to-text conversion solutions, text query classification using large language models (LLM), and speech synthesis. Special attention is given to adapting these technologies to work with the Kazakh language, including fine-tuning models on specialized datasets. The practical aspects of implementing the developed system in a real call center for query classification are described. The research results demonstrate that the application of AI technologies in call center IVR systems reduces operator workload, improves customer service quality, and increases the efficiency of query processing. The proposed approach can be adapted for use in call centers operating with various languages.

Most existing Question Answering Datasets (QuADs) primarily focus on factoid-based short-context Question Answering (QA) in high-resource languages. However, the scope of such datasets for low-resource languages remains limited, with only a few works centered on factoid-based QuADs and none on non-factoid QuADs. Therefore, this work presents MuNfQuAD, a multilingual QuAD with non-factoid questions. It utilizes interrogative sub-headings from BBC news articles as questions and the corresponding paragraphs as silver answers. The dataset comprises over 370K QA pairs across 38 languages, encompassing several low-resource languages, and stands as the largest multilingual QA dataset to date. Based on the manual annotations of 790 QA-pairs from MuNfQuAD (golden set), we observe that 98\% of questions can be answered using their corresponding silver answer. Our fine-tuned Answer Paragraph Selection (APS) model outperforms the baselines. The APS model attained an accuracy of 80\% and 72\%, as well as a macro F1 of 72\% and 66\%, on the MuNfQuAD testset and the golden set, respectively. Furthermore, the APS model effectively generalizes certain a language within the golden set, even after being fine-tuned on silver labels.

Large language models (LLMs) have unlocked a plethora of powerful applications at the network edge, such as intelligent personal assistants. Data privacy and security concerns have prompted a shift towards edge-based fine-tuning of personal LLMs, away from cloud reliance. However, this raises issues of computational intensity and resource scarcity, hindering training efficiency and feasibility. While current studies investigate parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques to mitigate resource constraints, our analysis indicates that these techniques are not sufficiently resource-efficient for edge devices. To tackle these challenges, we propose Pluto and Charon (PAC), a time and memory efficient collaborative edge AI framework for personal LLMs fine-tuning. PAC breaks the resource wall of personal LLMs fine-tuning with a sophisticated algorithm-system co-design. (1) Algorithmically, PAC implements a personal LLMs fine-tuning technique that is efficient in terms of parameters, time, and memory. It utilizes Parallel Adapters to circumvent the need for a full backward pass through the LLM backbone. Additionally, an activation cache mechanism further streamlining the process by negating the necessity for repeated forward passes across multiple epochs. (2) Systematically, PAC leverages edge devices in close proximity, pooling them as a collective resource for in-situ personal LLMs fine-tuning, utilizing a hybrid data and pipeline parallelism to orchestrate distributed training. The use of the activation cache eliminates the need for forward pass through the LLM backbone,enabling exclusive fine-tuning of the Parallel Adapters using data parallelism. Extensive evaluation based on prototype implementation demonstrates that PAC remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving up to 8.64x end-to-end speedup and up to 88.16% reduction in memory footprint.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities, particularly in the domain of question answering (QA). However, their effectiveness in QA is often undermined by the vagueness of user questions. To address this issue, we introduce single-round instance-level prompt optimization, referred to as question rewriter. By enhancing the intelligibility of human questions for black-box LLMs, our question rewriter improves the quality of generated answers. The rewriter is optimized using direct preference optimization based on feedback collected from automatic criteria for evaluating generated answers; therefore, its training does not require costly human annotations. The experiments across multiple black-box LLMs and long-form question answering (LFQA) datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our method. This paper provides a practical framework for training question rewriters and sets a precedent for future explorations in prompt optimization within LFQA tasks. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/3244we/Question-Rewriter}.

Large language models (LLMs) have ushered in a new era for processing complex information in various fields, including science. The increasing amount of scientific literature allows these models to acquire and understand scientific knowledge effectively, thus improving their performance in a wide range of tasks. Due to the power of LLMs, they require extremely expensive computational resources, intense amounts of data, and training time. Therefore, in recent years, researchers have proposed various methodologies to make scientific LLMs more affordable. The most well-known approaches align in two directions. It can be either focusing on the size of the models or enhancing the quality of data. To date, a comprehensive review of these two families of methods has not yet been undertaken. In this paper, we (I) summarize the current advances in the emerging abilities of LLMs into more accessible AI solutions for science, and (II) investigate the challenges and opportunities of developing affordable solutions for scientific domains using LLMs.

The growing ubiquity of relational data structured as graphs has underscored the need for graph learning models with exceptional generalization capabilities. However, current approaches often struggle to effectively extract generalizable insights, frequently requiring extensive fine-tuning and limiting their versatility. Graph foundation models offer a transformative solution, with the potential to learn robust, generalizable representations from graph data. This enables more effective and adaptable applications across a wide spectrum of tasks and domains. In this work, we investigate a unified graph model, AnyGraph, designed to handle key challenges: i) Structure Heterogenity. Addressing distribution shift in graph structural information; ii) Feature Heterogenity. Handling diverse feature representation spaces across graph datasets; iii) Fast Adaptation. Efficiently adapting the model to new graph domains; iv) Scaling Law Emergence. Enabling the model to exhibit scaling law behavior, where its performance scales favorably with the amount of data and parameter sizes. To tackle these critical challenges, we build the AnyGraph upon a Graph Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. This approach empowers the model to effectively manage both the in-domain and cross-domain distribution shift concerning structure-level and feature-level heterogeneity. Furthermore, a lightweight graph expert routing mechanism is proposed to facilitate AnyGraph's fast adaptability to new data and domains. Our extensive experiments on diverse 38 graph datasets have demonstrated the strong zero-shot learning performance of AnyGraph across diverse graph domains with significant distribution shift. Furthermore, we have validated the model's fast adaptation ability and scaling law emergence, showcasing its versatility.