In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide array of text-centric tasks. However, their `large' scale introduces significant computational and storage challenges, particularly in managing the key-value states of the transformer, which limits their wider applicability. Therefore, we propose to adaptively release resources from caches and rebuild the necessary key-value states. Particularly, we accomplish this by a lightweight controller module to approximate an ideal top-$K$ sparse attention. This module retains the tokens with the highest top-$K$ attention weights and simultaneously rebuilds the discarded but necessary tokens, which may become essential for future decoding. Comprehensive experiments in natural language generation and modeling reveal that our method is not only competitive with full attention in terms of performance but also achieves a significant throughput improvement of up to 221.8%. The code for replication is available on the https://github.com/WHUIR/ADORE.

Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs) struggle with hallucinations in visual instruction following task(s), limiting their trustworthiness and real-world applicability. We propose Pelican -- a novel framework designed to detect and mitigate hallucinations through claim verification. Pelican first decomposes the visual claim into a chain of sub-claims based on first-order predicates. These sub-claims consist of (predicate, question) pairs and can be conceptualized as nodes of a computational graph. We then use Program-of-Thought prompting to generate Python code for answering these questions through flexible composition of external tools. Pelican improves over prior work by introducing (1) intermediate variables for precise grounding of object instances, and (2) shared computation for answering the sub-question to enable adaptive corrections and inconsistency identification. We finally use reasoning abilities of LLM to verify the correctness of the the claim by considering the consistency and confidence of the (question, answer) pairs from each sub-claim. Our experiments reveal a drop in hallucination rate by $\sim$8%-32% across various baseline LVLMs and a 27% drop compared to approaches proposed for hallucination mitigation on MMHal-Bench. Results on two other benchmarks further corroborate our results.

Clinical documentation is an important aspect of clinicians' daily work and often demands a significant amount of time. The BioNLP 2024 Shared Task on Streamlining Discharge Documentation (Discharge Me!) aims to alleviate this documentation burden by automatically generating discharge summary sections, including brief hospital course and discharge instruction, which are often time-consuming to synthesize and write manually. We approach the generation task by fine-tuning multiple open-sourced language models (LMs), including both decoder-only and encoder-decoder LMs, with various configurations on input context. We also examine different setups for decoding algorithms, model ensembling or merging, and model specialization. Our results show that conditioning on the content of discharge summary prior to the target sections is effective for the generation task. Furthermore, we find that smaller encoder-decoder LMs can work as well or even slightly better than larger decoder based LMs fine-tuned through LoRA. The model checkpoints from our team (aehrc) are openly available.

The process mining community has recently recognized the potential of large language models (LLMs) for tackling various process mining tasks. Initial studies report the capability of LLMs to support process analysis and even, to some extent, that they are able to reason about how processes work. This latter property suggests that LLMs could also be used to tackle process mining tasks that benefit from an understanding of process behavior. Examples of such tasks include (semantic) anomaly detection and next activity prediction, which both involve considerations of the meaning of activities and their inter-relations. In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of LLMs to tackle such semantics-aware process mining tasks. Furthermore, whereas most works on the intersection of LLMs and process mining only focus on testing these models out of the box, we provide a more principled investigation of the utility of LLMs for process mining, including their ability to obtain process mining knowledge post-hoc by means of in-context learning and supervised fine-tuning. Concretely, we define three process mining tasks that benefit from an understanding of process semantics and provide extensive benchmarking datasets for each of them. Our evaluation experiments reveal that (1) LLMs fail to solve challenging process mining tasks out of the box and when provided only a handful of in-context examples, (2) but they yield strong performance when fine-tuned for these tasks, consistently surpassing smaller, encoder-based language models.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on various NLP tasks, yet their potential in more challenging and domain-specific task, such as finance, has not been fully explored. In this paper, we present CFinBench: a meticulously crafted, the most comprehensive evaluation benchmark to date, for assessing the financial knowledge of LLMs under Chinese context. In practice, to better align with the career trajectory of Chinese financial practitioners, we build a systematic evaluation from 4 first-level categories: (1) Financial Subject: whether LLMs can memorize the necessary basic knowledge of financial subjects, such as economics, statistics and auditing. (2) Financial Qualification: whether LLMs can obtain the needed financial qualified certifications, such as certified public accountant, securities qualification and banking qualification. (3) Financial Practice: whether LLMs can fulfill the practical financial jobs, such as tax consultant, junior accountant and securities analyst. (4) Financial Law: whether LLMs can meet the requirement of financial laws and regulations, such as tax law, insurance law and economic law. CFinBench comprises 99,100 questions spanning 43 second-level categories with 3 question types: single-choice, multiple-choice and judgment. We conduct extensive experiments of 50 representative LLMs with various model size on CFinBench. The results show that GPT4 and some Chinese-oriented models lead the benchmark, with the highest average accuracy being 60.16%, highlighting the challenge presented by CFinBench. The dataset and evaluation code are available at https://cfinbench.github.io/.

RNA sequencing techniques, like bulk RNA-seq and Single Cell (sc) RNA-seq, are critical tools for the biologist looking to analyze the genetic activity/transcriptome of a tissue or cell during an experimental procedure. Platforms like Illumina's next-generation sequencing (NGS) are used to produce the raw data for this experimental procedure. This raw FASTQ data must then be prepared via a complex series of data manipulations by bioinformaticians. This process currently takes place on an unwieldy textual user interface like a terminal/command line that requires the user to install and import multiple program packages, preventing the untrained biologist from initiating data analysis. Open-source platforms like Galaxy have produced a more user-friendly pipeline, yet the visual interface remains cluttered and highly technical, remaining uninviting for the natural scientist. To address this, SeqMate is a user-friendly tool that allows for one-click analytics by utilizing the power of a large language model (LLM) to automate both data preparation and analysis (differential expression, trajectory analysis, etc). Furthermore, by utilizing the power of generative AI, SeqMate is also capable of analyzing such findings and producing written reports of upregulated/downregulated/user-prompted genes with sources cited from known repositories like PubMed, PDB, and Uniprot.

Referring Expression Segmentation (RES) aims to provide a segmentation mask of the target object in an image referred to by the text (i.e., referring expression). Existing methods require large-scale mask annotations. Moreover, such approaches do not generalize well to unseen/zero-shot scenarios. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a weakly-supervised bootstrapping architecture for RES with several new algorithmic innovations. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first approach that considers only a fraction of both mask and box annotations (shown in Figure 1 and Table 1) for training. To enable principled training of models in such low-annotation settings, improve image-text region-level alignment, and further enhance spatial localization of the target object in the image, we propose Cross-modal Fusion with Attention Consistency module. For automatic pseudo-labeling of unlabeled samples, we introduce a novel Mask Validity Filtering routine based on a spatially aware zero-shot proposal scoring approach. Extensive experiments show that with just 30% annotations, our model SafaRi achieves 59.31 and 48.26 mIoUs as compared to 58.93 and 48.19 mIoUs obtained by the fully-supervised SOTA method SeqTR respectively on RefCOCO+@testA and RefCOCO+testB datasets. SafaRi also outperforms SeqTR by 11.7% (on RefCOCO+testA) and 19.6% (on RefCOCO+testB) in a fully-supervised setting and demonstrates strong generalization capabilities in unseen/zero-shot tasks.

The emergence of multilingual large language models has enabled the development of language understanding and generation systems in Azerbaijani. However, most of the production-grade systems rely on cloud solutions, such as GPT-4. While there have been several attempts to develop open foundation models for Azerbaijani, these works have not found their way into common use due to a lack of systemic benchmarking. This paper encompasses several lines of work that promote open-source foundation models for Azerbaijani. We introduce (1) a large text corpus for Azerbaijani, (2) a family of encoder-only language models trained on this dataset, (3) labeled datasets for evaluating these models, and (4) extensive evaluation that covers all major open-source models with Azerbaijani support.

Fake news becomes a growing threat to information security and public opinion with the rapid sprawl of media manipulation. Therefore, fake news detection attracts widespread attention from academic community. Traditional fake news detection models demonstrate remarkable performance on authenticity binary classification but their ability to reason detailed faked traces based on the news content remains under-explored. Furthermore, due to the lack of external knowledge, the performance of existing methods on fact-related news is questionable, leaving their practical implementation unclear. In this paper, we propose a new multi-media research topic, namely manipulation reasoning. Manipulation reasoning aims to reason manipulations based on news content. To support the research, we introduce a benchmark for fake news detection and manipulation reasoning, referred to as Human-centric and Fact-related Fake News (HFFN). The benchmark highlights the centrality of human and the high factual relevance, with detailed manual annotations. HFFN encompasses four realistic domains with fake news samples generated through three manipulation approaches. Moreover, a Multi-modal news Detection and Reasoning langUage Model (M-DRUM) is presented not only to judge on the authenticity of multi-modal news, but also raise analytical reasoning about potential manipulations. On the feature extraction level, a cross-attention mechanism is employed to extract fine-grained fusion features from multi-modal inputs. On the reasoning level, a large vision-language model (LVLM) serves as the backbone to facilitate fact-related reasoning. A two-stage training framework is deployed to better activate the capacity of identification and reasoning. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) fake news detection models and powerful LVLMs like GPT-4 and LLaVA.

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides towards Artificial General Intelligence. However, training these models from scratch requires substantial computational resources and vast amounts of text data. In this paper, we explore an alternative approach to constructing an LLM for a new language by continually pretraining (CPT) from existing pretrained LLMs, instead of using randomly initialized parameters. Based on parallel experiments on 40 model sizes ranging from 40M to 5B parameters, we find that 1) CPT converges faster and saves significant resources in a scalable manner; 2) CPT adheres to an extended scaling law derived from Hoffmann et al. (2022) with a joint data-parameter scaling term; 3) The compute-optimal data-parameter allocation for CPT markedly differs based on our estimated scaling factors; 4) The effectiveness of transfer at scale is influenced by training duration and linguistic properties, while robust to data replaying, a method that effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting in CPT. We hope our findings provide deeper insights into the transferability of LLMs at scale for the research community.