Training corpuses for vision language models (VLMs) typically lack sufficient amounts of decision-centric data. This renders off-the-shelf VLMs sub-optimal for decision-making tasks such as in-the-wild device control through graphical user interfaces (GUIs). While training with static demonstrations has shown some promise, we show that such methods fall short for controlling real GUIs due to their failure to deal with real-world stochasticity and non-stationarity not captured in static observational data. This paper introduces a novel autonomous RL approach, called DigiRL, for training in-the-wild device control agents through fine-tuning a pre-trained VLM in two stages: offline RL to initialize the model, followed by offline-to-online RL. To do this, we build a scalable and parallelizable Android learning environment equipped with a VLM-based evaluator and develop a simple yet effective RL approach for learning in this domain. Our approach runs advantage-weighted RL with advantage estimators enhanced to account for stochasticity along with an automatic curriculum for deriving maximal learning signal. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DigiRL using the Android-in-the-Wild (AitW) dataset, where our 1.3B VLM trained with RL achieves a 49.5% absolute improvement -- from 17.7 to 67.2% success rate -- over supervised fine-tuning with static human demonstration data. These results significantly surpass not only the prior best agents, including AppAgent with GPT-4V (8.3% success rate) and the 17B CogAgent trained with AitW data (38.5%), but also the prior best autonomous RL approach based on filtered behavior cloning (57.8%), thereby establishing a new state-of-the-art for digital agents for in-the-wild device control.

We present L4GM, the first 4D Large Reconstruction Model that produces animated objects from a single-view video input - in a single feed-forward pass that takes only a second. Key to our success is a novel dataset of multiview videos containing curated, rendered animated objects from Objaverse. This dataset depicts 44K diverse objects with 110K animations rendered in 48 viewpoints, resulting in 12M videos with a total of 300M frames. We keep our L4GM simple for scalability and build directly on top of LGM [49], a pretrained 3D Large Reconstruction Model that outputs 3D Gaussian ellipsoids from multiview image input. L4GM outputs a per-frame 3D Gaussian Splatting representation from video frames sampled at a low fps and then upsamples the representation to a higher fps to achieve temporal smoothness. We add temporal self-attention layers to the base LGM to help it learn consistency across time, and utilize a per-timestep multiview rendering loss to train the model. The representation is upsampled to a higher framerate by training an interpolation model which produces intermediate 3D Gaussian representations. We showcase that L4GM that is only trained on synthetic data generalizes extremely well on in-the-wild videos, producing high quality animated 3D assets.

Traditional reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) approaches relying on parametric models like the Bradley-Terry model fall short in capturing the intransitivity and irrationality in human preferences. Recent advancements suggest that directly working with preference probabilities can yield a more accurate reflection of human preferences, enabling more flexible and accurate language model alignment. In this paper, we propose a self-play-based method for language model alignment, which treats the problem as a constant-sum two-player game aimed at identifying the Nash equilibrium policy. Our approach, dubbed Self-Play Preference Optimization (SPPO), approximates the Nash equilibrium through iterative policy updates and enjoys a theoretical convergence guarantee. Our method can effectively increase the log-likelihood of the chosen response and decrease that of the rejected response, which cannot be trivially achieved by symmetric pairwise loss such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Identity Preference Optimization (IPO). In our experiments, using only 60k prompts (without responses) from the UltraFeedback dataset and without any prompt augmentation, by leveraging a pre-trained preference model PairRM with only 0.4B parameters, SPPO can obtain a model from fine-tuning Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 that achieves the state-of-the-art length-controlled win-rate of 28.53% against GPT-4-Turbo on AlpacaEval 2.0. It also outperforms the (iterative) DPO and IPO on MT-Bench and the Open LLM Leaderboard. Starting from a stronger base model Llama-3-8B-Instruct, we are able to achieve a length-controlled win rate of 38.77%. Notably, the strong performance of SPPO is achieved without additional external supervision (e.g., responses, preferences, etc.) from GPT-4 or other stronger language models. Codes are available at https://github.com/uclaml/SPPO.

A diverse array of reasoning strategies has been proposed to elicit the capabilities of large language models. However, in this paper, we point out that traditional evaluations which focus solely on performance metrics miss a key factor: the increased effectiveness due to additional compute. By overlooking this aspect, a skewed view of strategy efficiency is often presented. This paper introduces a framework that incorporates the compute budget into the evaluation, providing a more informative comparison that takes into account both performance metrics and computational cost. In this budget-aware perspective, we find that complex reasoning strategies often don't surpass simpler baselines purely due to algorithmic ingenuity, but rather due to the larger computational resources allocated. When we provide a simple baseline like chain-of-thought self-consistency with comparable compute resources, it frequently outperforms reasoning strategies proposed in the literature. In this scale-aware perspective, we find that unlike self-consistency, certain strategies such as multi-agent debate or Reflexion can become worse if more compute budget is utilized.

Large language model (LLM)-based recommender models that bridge users and items through textual prompts for effective semantic reasoning have gained considerable attention. However, few methods consider the underlying rationales behind interactions, such as user preferences and item attributes, limiting the reasoning capability of LLMs for recommendations. This paper proposes a rationale distillation recommender (RDRec), a compact model designed to learn rationales generated by a larger language model (LM). By leveraging rationales from reviews related to users and items, RDRec remarkably specifies their profiles for recommendations. Experiments show that RDRec achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both top-N and sequential recommendations. Our source code is released at https://github.com/WangXFng/RDRec.

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools has revolutionized various facets of our lives, particularly in the realm of social media. For students, these advancements have unlocked unprecedented opportunities for learning, collaboration, and personal growth. AI-driven applications are transforming how students interact with social media, offering personalized content and recommendations, and enabling smarter, more efficient communication. Recent studies utilizing data from UniversityCube underscore the profound impact of AI tools on students' academic and social experiences. These studies reveal that students engaging with AI-enhanced social media platforms report higher academic performance, enhanced critical thinking skills, and increased engagement in collaborative projects. Moreover, AI tools assist in filtering out distracting content, allowing students to concentrate more on educational materials and pertinent discussions. The integration of LLMs in social media has further facilitated improved peer-to-peer communication and mentorship opportunities. AI algorithms effectively match students based on shared academic interests and career goals, fostering a supportive and intellectually stimulating online community, thereby contributing to increased student satisfaction and retention rates. In this article, we delve into the data provided by UniversityCube to explore how LLMs and AI tools are specifically transforming social media for students. Through case studies and statistical analyses, we offer a comprehensive understanding of the educational and social benefits these technologies offer. Our exploration highlights the potential of AI-driven tools to create a more enriched, efficient, and supportive educational environment for students in the digital age.

We focus on a conversational question answering task which combines the challenges of understanding questions in context and reasoning over evidence gathered from heterogeneous sources like text, knowledge graphs, tables, and infoboxes. Our method utilizes a graph structured representation to aggregate information about a question and its context (i.e., the conversation so far and evidence retrieved to find an answer), while also harnessing the reasoning and text generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Graph embeddings are directly injected into the LLM, bypassing the token embedding layers, and learned end-to-end by minimizing cross-entropy. Our model maintains a memory module to track and update past evidence, thus influencing the graph's structure, as the conversation evolves. Experimental results on the ConvMix benchmark(Christmann et al., 2022a) show that graph embeddings enhance the LLM's ability to reason, while the memory module provides robustness against noise and retrieval errors.

This research investigates prompt designs of evaluating generated texts using large language models (LLMs). While LLMs are increasingly used for scoring various inputs, creating effective prompts for open-ended text evaluation remains challenging due to model sensitivity and subjectivity in evaluation of text generation. Our study experimented with different prompt structures, altering the sequence of output instructions and including explanatory reasons. We found that the order of presenting reasons and scores significantly influences LLMs' scoring, with a different level of rule understanding in the prompt. An additional optimization may enhance scoring alignment if sufficient data is available. This insight is crucial for improving the accuracy and consistency of LLM-based evaluations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have taken the field of AI by storm, but their adoption in the field of Artificial Life (ALife) has been, so far, relatively reserved. In this work we investigate the potential synergies between LLMs and ALife, drawing on a large body of research in the two fields. We explore the potential of LLMs as tools for ALife research, for example, as operators for evolutionary computation or the generation of open-ended environments. Reciprocally, principles of ALife, such as self-organization, collective intelligence and evolvability can provide an opportunity for shaping the development and functionalities of LLMs, leading to more adaptive and responsive models. By investigating this dynamic interplay, the paper aims to inspire innovative crossover approaches for both ALife and LLM research. Along the way, we examine the extent to which LLMs appear to increasingly exhibit properties such as emergence or collective intelligence, expanding beyond their original goal of generating text, and potentially redefining our perception of lifelike intelligence in artificial systems.

Recent studies show bias in many machine learning models for depression detection, but bias in LLMs for this task remains unexplored. This work presents the first attempt to investigate the degree of gender bias present in existing LLMs (ChatGPT, LLaMA 2, and Bard) using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. From our quantitative evaluation, we found that ChatGPT performs the best across various performance metrics and LLaMA 2 outperforms other LLMs in terms of group fairness metrics. As qualitative fairness evaluation remains an open research question we propose several strategies (e.g., word count, thematic analysis) to investigate whether and how a qualitative evaluation can provide valuable insights for bias analysis beyond what is possible with quantitative evaluation. We found that ChatGPT consistently provides a more comprehensive, well-reasoned explanation for its prediction compared to LLaMA 2. We have also identified several themes adopted by LLMs to qualitatively evaluate gender fairness. We hope our results can be used as a stepping stone towards future attempts at improving qualitative evaluation of fairness for LLMs especially for high-stakes tasks such as depression detection.