Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development (PTC) posits that the development of cognitive levels forms the foundation for human learning across various abilities. As Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown remarkable abilities across a wide variety of tasks, we are curious about the cognitive levels of current LLMs: to what extent they have developed and how this development has been achieved. To this end, we construct a benchmark CogLM (Cognitive Ability Evaluation for Language Model) based on PTC to assess the cognitive levels of LLMs. CogLM comprises 1,220 questions spanning 10 cognitive abilities crafted by more than 20 human experts, providing a comprehensive testbed for the cognitive levels of LLMs. Through extensive experiments across multiple mainstream LLMs with CogLM, we find that: (1) Human-like cognitive abilities have emerged in advanced LLMs (GPT-4), comparable to those of a 20-year-old human. (2) The parameter size and optimization objective are two key factors affecting the cognitive levels of LLMs. (3) The performance on downstream tasks is positively correlated with the level of cognitive abilities. These findings fill the gap in research on the cognitive abilities of LLMs, tracing the development of LLMs from a cognitive perspective and guiding the future direction of their evolution.

Cross-Lingual summarization (CLS) is a sophisticated branch in Natural Language Processing that demands models to accurately translate and summarize articles from different source languages. Despite the improvement of the subsequent studies, This area still needs data-efficient solutions along with effective training methodologies. To the best of our knowledge, there is no feasible solution for CLS when there is no available high-quality CLS data. In this paper, we propose a novel data-efficient approach, ConVerSum, for CLS leveraging the power of contrastive learning, generating versatile candidate summaries in different languages based on the given source document and contrasting these summaries with reference summaries concerning the given documents. After that, we train the model with a contrastive ranking loss. Then, we rigorously evaluate the proposed approach against current methodologies and compare it to powerful Large Language Models (LLMs)- Gemini, GPT 3.5, and GPT 4 proving our model performs better for low-resource languages' CLS. These findings represent a substantial improvement in the area, opening the door to more efficient and accurate cross-lingual summarizing techniques.

Recently, services and business models based on large language models, such as OpenAI Chatgpt, Google BARD, and Microsoft copilot, have been introduced, and the applications utilizing natural language processing with deep learning are increasing, and it is one of the natural language preprocessing methods. Conversion to machine language through tokenization and processing of unstructured data are increasing. Although algorithms that can understand and apply human language are becoming increasingly sophisticated, it is difficult to apply them to processes that rely on human emotions and senses in industries that still mainly deal with standardized data. In particular, in processes where brightness, saturation, and color information are essential, such as painting and injection molding, most small and medium-sized companies, excluding large corporations, rely on the tacit knowledge and sensibility of color mixers, and even customer companies often present non-standardized requirements. . In this paper, we proposed TENN to infer color recipe based on unstructured data with emotional natural language, and demonstrated it.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have markedly enhanced the interpretation and processing of tabular data, introducing previously unimaginable capabilities. Despite these achievements, LLMs still encounter significant challenges when applied in industrial scenarios, particularly due to the increased complexity of reasoning required with real-world tabular data, underscoring a notable disparity between academic benchmarks and practical applications. To address this discrepancy, we conduct a detailed investigation into the application of tabular data in industrial scenarios and propose a comprehensive and complex benchmark TableBench, including 18 fields within four major categories of table question answering (TableQA) capabilities. Furthermore, we introduce TableLLM, trained on our meticulously constructed training set TableInstruct, achieving comparable performance with GPT-3.5. Massive experiments conducted on TableBench indicate that both open-source and proprietary LLMs still have significant room for improvement to meet real-world demands, where the most advanced model, GPT-4, achieves only a modest score compared to humans.

Currently, a common approach in many speech processing tasks is to leverage large scale pre-trained models by fine-tuning them on in-domain data for a particular application. Yet obtaining even a small amount of such data can be problematic, especially for sensitive domains and conversational speech scenarios, due to both privacy issues and annotation costs. To address this, synthetic data generation using single speaker datasets has been employed. Yet, for multi-speaker cases, such an approach often requires extensive manual effort and is prone to domain mismatches. In this work, we propose a synthetic data generation pipeline for multi-speaker conversational ASR, leveraging a large language model (LLM) for content creation and a conversational multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) model for speech synthesis. We conduct evaluation by fine-tuning the Whisper ASR model for telephone and distant conversational speech settings, using both in-domain data and generated synthetic data. Our results show that the proposed method is able to significantly outperform classical multi-speaker generation approaches that use external, non-conversational speech datasets.

Foundation models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling diverse modalities and tasks, outperforming conventional artificial intelligence (AI) approaches that are highly task-specific and modality-reliant. In the medical domain, however, the development of comprehensive foundation models is constrained by limited access to diverse modalities and stringent privacy regulations. To address these constraints, this study introduces a novel knowledge injection approach, FedKIM, designed to scale the medical foundation model within a federated learning framework. FedKIM leverages lightweight local models to extract healthcare knowledge from private data and integrates this knowledge into a centralized foundation model using a designed adaptive Multitask Multimodal Mixture Of Experts (M3OE) module. This method not only preserves privacy but also enhances the model's ability to handle complex medical tasks involving multiple modalities. Our extensive experiments across twelve tasks in seven modalities demonstrate the effectiveness of FedKIM in various settings, highlighting its potential to scale medical foundation models without direct access to sensitive data.

This paper introduces and examines the phenomenon of "visual sycophancy" in multimodal language models, a term we propose to describe these models' tendency to disproportionately favor visually presented information, even when it contradicts their prior knowledge or responses. Our study employs a systematic methodology to investigate this phenomenon: we present models with images of multiple-choice questions, which they initially answer correctly, then expose the same model to versions with visually pre-marked options. Our findings reveal a significant shift in the models' responses towards the pre-marked option despite their previous correct answers. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that visual sycophancy is a consistent and quantifiable behavior across various model architectures. Our findings highlight potential limitations in the reliability of these models when processing potentially misleading visual information, raising important questions about their application in critical decision-making contexts.

Resolving the dichotomy between the human-like yet constrained reasoning processes of Cognitive Architectures and the broad but often noisy inference behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a challenging but exciting pursuit, for enabling reliable machine reasoning capabilities in production systems. Because Cognitive Architectures are famously developed for the purpose of modeling the internal mechanisms of human cognitive decision-making at a computational level, new investigations consider the goal of informing LLMs with the knowledge necessary for replicating such processes, e.g., guided perception, memory, goal-setting, and action. Previous approaches that use LLMs for grounded decision-making struggle with complex reasoning tasks that require slower, deliberate cognition over fast and intuitive inference -- reporting issues related to the lack of sufficient grounding, as in hallucination. To resolve these challenges, we introduce LLM-ACTR, a novel neuro-symbolic architecture that provides human-aligned and versatile decision-making by integrating the ACT-R Cognitive Architecture with LLMs. Our framework extracts and embeds knowledge of ACT-R's internal decision-making process as latent neural representations, injects this information into trainable LLM adapter layers, and fine-tunes the LLMs for downstream prediction. Our experiments on novel Design for Manufacturing tasks show both improved task performance as well as improved grounded decision-making capability of our approach, compared to LLM-only baselines that leverage chain-of-thought reasoning strategies.

Research on multi-modal contrastive learning strategies for audio and text has rapidly gained interest. Contrastively trained Audio-Language Models (ALMs), such as CLAP, which establish a unified representation across audio and language modalities, have enhanced the efficacy in various subsequent tasks by providing good text aligned audio encoders and vice versa. These improvements are evident in areas like zero-shot audio classification and audio retrieval, among others. However, the ability of these models to understand natural language and temporal relations is still a largely unexplored and open field for research. In this paper, we propose to equip the multi-modal ALMs with temporal understanding without loosing their inherent prior capabilities of audio-language tasks with a temporal instillation method TeminAL. We implement a two-stage training scheme TeminAL A $\&$ B, where the model first learns to differentiate between multiple sounds in TeminAL A, followed by a phase that instills a sense of time, thereby enhancing its temporal understanding in TeminAL B. This approach results in an average performance gain of $5.28\%$ in temporal understanding on the ESC-50 dataset, while the model remains competitive in zero-shot retrieval and classification tasks on the AudioCap/Clotho datasets. We also note the lack of proper evaluation techniques for contrastive ALMs and propose a strategy for evaluating ALMs in zero-shot settings. The general-purpose zero-shot model evaluation strategy ZSTE, is used to evaluate various prior models. ZSTE demonstrates a general strategy to evaluate all ZS contrastive models. The model trained with TeminAL successfully outperforms current models on most downstream tasks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP), providing versatile capabilities across various applications. However, their application to complex, domain-specific tasks, such as cyber-security, often faces substantial challenges. In this study, we introduce SecKnowledge and CyberPal.AI to address these challenges and train security-expert LLMs. SecKnowledge is a domain-knowledge-driven cyber-security instruction dataset, meticulously designed using years of accumulated expert knowledge in the domain through a multi-phase generation process. CyberPal.AI refers to a family of LLMs fine-tuned using SecKnowledge, aimed at building security-specialized LLMs capable of answering and following complex security-related instructions. Additionally, we introduce SecKnowledge-Eval, a comprehensive and diverse cyber-security evaluation benchmark, composed of an extensive set of cyber-security tasks we specifically developed to assess LLMs in the field of cyber-security, along with other publicly available security benchmarks. Our results show a significant average improvement of up to 24% over the baseline models, underscoring the benefits of our expert-driven instruction dataset generation process. These findings contribute to the advancement of AI-based cyber-security applications, paving the way for security-expert LLMs that can enhance threat-hunting and investigation processes.