We present a multi-modal trajectory generation and selection algorithm for real-world mapless outdoor navigation in challenging scenarios with unstructured off-road features like buildings, grass, and curbs. Our goal is to compute suitable trajectories that (1) satisfy the environment-specific traversability constraints and (2) generate human-like paths while navigating in crosswalks, sidewalks, etc. Our formulation uses a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) generative model enhanced with traversability constraints to generate multiple candidate trajectories for global navigation. We use VLMs and a visual prompting approach with their zero-shot ability of semantic understanding and logical reasoning to choose the best trajectory given the contextual information about the task. We evaluate our methods in various outdoor scenes with wheeled robots and compare the performance with other global navigation algorithms. In practice, we observe at least 3.35% improvement in traversability and 20.61% improvement in terms of human-like navigation in generated trajectories in challenging outdoor navigation scenarios.

Detecting vulnerabilities is a crucial task for maintaining the integrity, availability, and security of software systems. Utilizing DL-based models for vulnerability detection has become commonplace in recent years. However, such deep learning-based vulnerability detectors (DLVD) suffer from a shortage of sizable datasets to train effectively. Data augmentation can potentially alleviate the shortage of data, but augmenting vulnerable code is challenging and requires designing a generative solution that maintains vulnerability. Hence, the work on generating vulnerable code samples has been limited and previous works have only focused on generating samples that contain single statements or specific types of vulnerabilities. Lately, large language models (LLMs) are being used for solving various code generation and comprehension tasks and have shown inspiring results, especially when fused with retrieval augmented generation (RAG). In this study, we explore three different strategies to augment vulnerabilities both single and multi-statement vulnerabilities, with LLMs, namely Mutation, Injection, and Extension. We conducted an extensive evaluation of our proposed approach on three vulnerability datasets and three DLVD models, using two LLMs. Our results show that our injection-based clustering-enhanced RAG method beats the baseline setting (NoAug), Vulgen, and VGX (two SOTA methods), and Random Oversampling (ROS) by 30.80\%, 27.48\%, 27.93\%, and 15.41\% in f1-score with 5K generated vulnerable samples on average, and 53.84\%, 54.10\%, 69.90\%, and 40.93\% with 15K generated vulnerable samples. Our approach demonstrates its feasibility for large-scale data augmentation by generating 1K samples at as cheap as US$ 1.88.

Automated Short Answer Scoring (ASAS) is a critical component in educational assessment. While traditional ASAS systems relied on rule-based algorithms or complex deep learning methods, recent advancements in Generative Language Models (GLMs) offer new opportunities for improvement. This study explores the application of GLMs to ASAS, leveraging their off-the-shelf capabilities and performance in various domains. We propose a novel pipeline that combines vector databases, transformer-based encoders, and GLMs to enhance short answer scoring accuracy. Our approach stores training responses in a vector database, retrieves semantically similar responses during inference, and employs a GLM to analyze these responses and determine appropriate scores. We further optimize the system through fine-tuned retrieval processes and prompt engineering. Evaluation on the SemEval 2013 dataset demonstrates a significant improvement on the SCIENTSBANK 3-way and 2-way tasks compared to existing methods, highlighting the potential of GLMs in advancing ASAS technology.

We present Speech-MASSIVE, a multilingual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) dataset comprising the speech counterpart for a portion of the MASSIVE textual corpus. Speech-MASSIVE covers 12 languages from different families and inherits from MASSIVE the annotations for the intent prediction and slot-filling tasks. Our extension is prompted by the scarcity of massively multilingual SLU datasets and the growing need for versatile speech datasets to assess foundation models (LLMs, speech encoders) across languages and tasks. We provide a multimodal, multitask, multilingual dataset and report SLU baselines using both cascaded and end-to-end architectures in various training scenarios (zero-shot, few-shot, and full fine-tune). Furthermore, we demonstrate the suitability of Speech-MASSIVE for benchmarking other tasks such as speech transcription, language identification, and speech translation. The dataset, models, and code are publicly available at: https://github.com/hlt-mt/Speech-MASSIVE

Despite the remarkable performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), they still struggle with generating logically sound arguments, resulting in potential risks such as spreading misinformation. An important factor contributing to LLMs' suboptimal performance in generating coherent arguments is their oversight of logical fallacies. To address this issue, we introduce FIPO, a fallacy-informed framework that leverages preference optimization methods to steer LLMs toward logically sound arguments. FIPO includes a classification loss, to capture the fine-grained information on fallacy categories. Our results on argumentation datasets show that our method reduces the fallacy errors by up to 17.5%. Furthermore, our human evaluation results indicate that the quality of the generated arguments by our method significantly outperforms the fine-tuned baselines, as well as prior preference optimization methods, such as DPO. These findings highlight the importance of ensuring models are aware of logical fallacies for effective argument generation.

While high-performing language models are typically trained on hundreds of billions of words, human children become fluent language users with a much smaller amount of data. What are the features of the data they receive, and how do these features support language modeling objectives? To investigate this question, we train GPT-2 models on 29M words of English-language child-directed speech and a new matched, synthetic dataset (TinyDialogues), comparing to a heterogeneous blend of datasets from the BabyLM challenge. We evaluate both the syntactic and semantic knowledge of these models using developmentally-inspired evaluations. Through pretraining experiments, we test whether the global developmental ordering or the local discourse ordering of children's training data support high performance relative to other datasets. The local properties of the data affect model results, but somewhat surprisingly, global properties do not. Further, child language input is not uniquely valuable for training language models. These findings support the hypothesis that, rather than proceeding from better data, children's learning is instead substantially more efficient than current language modeling techniques.

The ARR Responsible NLP Research checklist website states that the "checklist is designed to encourage best practices for responsible research, addressing issues of research ethics, societal impact and reproducibility." Answering the questions is an opportunity for authors to reflect on their work and make sure any shared scientific assets follow best practices. Ideally, considering the checklist before submission can favorably impact the writing of a research paper. However, the checklist is often filled out at the last moment. In this work, we introduce ACLReady, a retrieval-augmented language model application that can be used to empower authors to reflect on their work and assist authors with the ACL checklist. To test the effectiveness of the system, we conducted a qualitative study with 13 users which shows that 92% of users found the application useful and easy to use as well as 77% of the users found that the application provided the information they expected. Our code is publicly available under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license on GitHub.

We present a novel prompting strategy for artificial intelligence driven digital avatars. To better quantify how our prompting strategy affects anthropomorphic features like humor, authenticity, and favorability we present Crowd Vote - an adaptation of Crowd Score that allows for judges to elect a large language model (LLM) candidate over competitors answering the same or similar prompts. To visualize the responses of our LLM, and the effectiveness of our prompting strategy we propose an end-to-end framework for creating high-fidelity artificial intelligence (AI) driven digital avatars. This pipeline effectively captures an individual's essence for interaction and our streaming algorithm delivers a high-quality digital avatar with real-time audio-video streaming from server to mobile device. Both our visualization tool, and our Crowd Vote metrics demonstrate our AI driven digital avatars have state-of-the-art humor, authenticity, and favorability outperforming all competitors and baselines. In the case of our Donald Trump and Joe Biden avatars, their authenticity and favorability are rated higher than even their real-world equivalents.

Accessibility is crucial for inclusive app usability, yet developers often struggle to identify and fix app accessibility issues due to a lack of awareness, expertise, and inadequate tools. Current accessibility testing tools can identify accessibility issues but may not always provide guidance on how to address them. We introduce FixAlly, an automated tool designed to suggest source code fixes for accessibility issues detected by automated accessibility scanners. FixAlly employs a multi-agent LLM architecture to generate fix strategies, localize issues within the source code, and propose code modification suggestions to fix the accessibility issue. Our empirical study demonstrates FixAlly's capability in suggesting fixes that resolve issues found by accessibility scanners -- with an effectiveness of 77% in generating plausible fix suggestions -- and our survey of 12 iOS developers finds they would be willing to accept 69.4% of evaluated fix suggestions.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous in natural language processing (NLP) applications, ensuring their robustness, trustworthiness, and alignment with human values has become a critical challenge. This paper presents a novel framework for contextual grounding in textual models, with a particular emphasis on the Context Representation stage. Our approach aims to enhance the reliability and ethical alignment of these models through a comprehensive, context-aware methodology. By explicitly capturing and representing relevant situational, cultural, and ethical contexts in a machine-readable format, we lay the foundation for anchoring a model's behavior within these contexts. Our approach leverages techniques from knowledge representation and reasoning, such as ontologies, semantic web technologies, and logic-based formalisms. We evaluate our framework on real-world textual datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in improving model performance, fairness, and alignment with human expectations, while maintaining high accuracy. Furthermore, we discuss the other key components of the framework, including context-aware encoding, context-aware learning, interpretability and explainability, and continuous monitoring and adaptation. This research contributes to the growing body of work on responsible AI, offering a practical approach to developing more reliable, trustworthy, and ethically-aligned language models. Our findings have significant implications for the deployment of LLMs in sensitive domains such as healthcare, legal systems, and social services, where contextual understanding is paramount.