A long-standing goal of data management systems has been to build systems which can compute quantitative insights over large corpora of unstructured data in a cost-effective manner. Until recently, it was difficult and expensive to extract facts from company documents, data from scientific papers, or metrics from image and video corpora. Today's models can accomplish these tasks with high accuracy. However, a programmer who wants to answer a substantive AI-powered query must orchestrate large numbers of models, prompts, and data operations. For even a single query, the programmer has to make a vast number of decisions such as the choice of model, the right inference method, the most cost-effective inference hardware, the ideal prompt design, and so on. The optimal set of decisions can change as the query changes and as the rapidly-evolving technical landscape shifts. In this paper we present Palimpzest, a system that enables anyone to process AI-powered analytical queries simply by defining them in a declarative language. The system uses its cost optimization framework to implement the query plan with the best trade-offs between runtime, financial cost, and output data quality. We describe the workload of AI-powered analytics tasks, the optimization methods that Palimpzest uses, and the prototype system itself. We evaluate Palimpzest on tasks in Legal Discovery, Real Estate Search, and Medical Schema Matching. We show that even our simple prototype offers a range of appealing plans, including one that is 3.3x faster and 2.9x cheaper than the baseline method, while also offering better data quality. With parallelism enabled, Palimpzest can produce plans with up to a 90.3x speedup at 9.1x lower cost relative to a single-threaded GPT-4 baseline, while obtaining an F1-score within 83.5% of the baseline. These require no additional work by the user.

In the field of medical image segmentation, tackling Out-of-Distribution (OOD) segmentation tasks in a cost-effective manner remains a significant challenge. Universal segmentation models is a solution, which aim to generalize across the diverse modality of medical images, yet their effectiveness often diminishes when applied to OOD data modalities and tasks, requiring intricate fine-tuning of model for optimal performance. Few-shot learning segmentation methods are typically designed for specific modalities of data and cannot be directly transferred for use with another modality. Therefore, we introduce SegICL, a novel approach leveraging In-Context Learning (ICL) for image segmentation. Unlike existing methods, SegICL has the capability to employ text-guided segmentation and conduct in-context learning with a small set of image-mask pairs, eliminating the need for training the model from scratch or fine-tuning for OOD tasks (including OOD modality and dataset). Extensive experimental demonstrates a positive correlation between the number of shots and segmentation performance on OOD tasks. The performance of segmentation when provided thre-shots is approximately 1.5 times better than the performance in a zero-shot setting. This indicates that SegICL effectively address new segmentation tasks based on contextual information. Additionally, SegICL also exhibits comparable performance to mainstream models on OOD and in-distribution tasks. Our code will be released after paper review.

Data-driven simulation surrogates help computational scientists study complex systems. They can also help inform impactful policy decisions. We introduce a learning framework for surrogate modeling where language is used to interface with the underlying system being simulated. We call a language description of a system a "system caption", or SysCap. To address the lack of datasets of paired natural language SysCaps and simulation runs, we use large language models (LLMs) to synthesize high-quality captions. Using our framework, we train multimodal text and timeseries regression models for two real-world simulators of complex energy systems. Our experiments demonstrate the feasibility of designing language interfaces for real-world surrogate models at comparable accuracy to standard baselines. We qualitatively and quantitatively show that SysCaps unlock text-prompt-style surrogate modeling and new generalization abilities beyond what was previously possible. We will release the generated SysCaps datasets and our code to support follow-on studies.

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in multimodal tasks like visual question answering or image captioning. However, inconsistencies between the visual information and the generated text, a phenomenon referred to as hallucinations, remain an unsolved problem with regard to the trustworthiness of LVLMs. To address this problem, recent works proposed to incorporate computationally costly Large (Vision) Language Models in order to detect hallucinations on a sentence- or subsentence-level. In this work, we introduce MetaToken, a lightweight binary classifier to detect hallucinations on the token-level at negligible cost. Based on a statistical analysis, we reveal key factors of hallucinations in LVLMs which have been overseen in previous works. MetaToken can be applied to any open-source LVLM without any knowledge about ground truth data providing a reliable detection of hallucinations. We evaluate our method on four state-of-the-art LVLMs demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.

Our goal is to enable embodied agents to learn inductively generalizable spatial concepts, e.g., learning staircase as an inductive composition of towers of increasing height. Given a human demonstration, we seek a learning architecture that infers a succinct ${program}$ representation that explains the observed instance. Additionally, the approach should generalize inductively to novel structures of different sizes or complex structures expressed as a hierarchical composition of previously learned concepts. Existing approaches that use code generation capabilities of pre-trained large (visual) language models, as well as purely neural models, show poor generalization to a-priori unseen complex concepts. Our key insight is to factor inductive concept learning as (i) ${\it Sketch:}$ detecting and inferring a coarse signature of a new concept (ii) ${\it Plan:}$ performing MCTS search over grounded action sequences (iii) ${\it Generalize:}$ abstracting out grounded plans as inductive programs. Our pipeline facilitates generalization and modular reuse, enabling continual concept learning. Our approach combines the benefits of the code generation ability of large language models (LLM) along with grounded neural representations, resulting in neuro-symbolic programs that show stronger inductive generalization on the task of constructing complex structures in relation to LLM-only and neural-only approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate reasoning and planning capabilities with learned concepts for embodied instruction following.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) large language models (LLM) have memory requirements that often exceed the GPU memory capacity, requiring costly parameter movement from secondary memories to the GPU for expert computation. In this work, we present Mixture of Near-Data Experts (MoNDE), a near-data computing solution that efficiently enables MoE LLM inference. MoNDE reduces the volume of MoE parameter movement by transferring only the $\textit{hot}$ experts to the GPU, while computing the remaining $\textit{cold}$ experts inside the host memory device. By replacing the transfers of massive expert parameters with the ones of small activations, MoNDE enables far more communication-efficient MoE inference, thereby resulting in substantial speedups over the existing parameter offloading frameworks for both encoder and decoder operations.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have made them indispensable, raising significant concerns over managing their safety. Automated red teaming offers a promising alternative to the labor-intensive and error-prone manual probing for vulnerabilities, providing more consistent and scalable safety evaluations. However, existing approaches often compromise diversity by focusing on maximizing attack success rate. Additionally, methods that decrease the cosine similarity from historical embeddings with semantic diversity rewards lead to novelty stagnation as history grows. To address these issues, we introduce DiveR-CT, which relaxes conventional constraints on the objective and semantic reward, granting greater freedom for the policy to enhance diversity. Our experiments demonstrate DiveR-CT's marked superiority over baselines by 1) generating data that perform better in various diversity metrics across different attack success rate levels, 2) better-enhancing resiliency in blue team models through safety tuning based on collected data, 3) allowing dynamic control of objective weights for reliable and controllable attack success rates, and 4) reducing susceptibility to reward overoptimization. Project details and code can be found at https://andrewzh112.github.io/#diverct.

Entity matching is a critical challenge in data integration and cleaning, central to tasks like fuzzy joins and deduplication. Traditional approaches have focused on overcoming fuzzy term representations through methods such as edit distance, Jaccard similarity, and more recently, embeddings and deep neural networks, including advancements from large language models (LLMs) like GPT. However, the core challenge in entity matching extends beyond term fuzziness to the ambiguity in defining what constitutes a "match," especially when integrating with external databases. This ambiguity arises due to varying levels of detail and granularity among entities, complicating exact matches. We propose a novel approach that shifts focus from purely identifying semantic similarities to understanding and defining the "relations" between entities as crucial for resolving ambiguities in matching. By predefining a set of relations relevant to the task at hand, our method allows analysts to navigate the spectrum of similarity more effectively, from exact matches to conceptually related entities.

Large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention for potential applications in digital health, while their application in mental health is subject to ongoing debate. This systematic review aims to evaluate the usage of LLMs in mental health, focusing on their strengths and limitations in early screening, digital interventions, and clinical applications. Adhering to PRISMA guidelines, we searched PubMed, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and the JMIR using keywords: 'mental health OR mental illness OR mental disorder OR psychiatry' AND 'large language models'. We included articles published between January 1, 2017, and December 31, 2023, excluding non-English articles. 30 articles were evaluated, which included research on mental illness and suicidal ideation detection through text (n=12), usage of LLMs for mental health conversational agents (CAs) (n=5), and other applications and evaluations of LLMs in mental health (n=13). LLMs exhibit substantial effectiveness in detecting mental health issues and providing accessible, de-stigmatized eHealth services. However, the current risks associated with the clinical use might surpass their benefits. The study identifies several significant issues: the lack of multilingual datasets annotated by experts, concerns about the accuracy and reliability of the content generated, challenges in interpretability due to the 'black box' nature of LLMs, and persistent ethical dilemmas. These include the lack of a clear ethical framework, concerns about data privacy, and the potential for over-reliance on LLMs by both therapists and patients, which could compromise traditional medical practice. Despite these issues, the rapid development of LLMs underscores their potential as new clinical aids, emphasizing the need for continued research and development in this area.

Multifaceted ideology detection (MID) aims to detect the ideological leanings of texts towards multiple facets. Previous studies on ideology detection mainly focus on one generic facet and ignore label semantics and explanatory descriptions of ideologies, which are a kind of instructive information and reveal the specific concepts of ideologies. In this paper, we develop a novel concept semantics-enhanced framework for the MID task. Specifically, we propose a bidirectional iterative concept flow (BICo) method to encode multifaceted ideologies. BICo enables the concepts to flow across levels of the schema tree and enriches concept representations with multi-granularity semantics. Furthermore, we explore concept attentive matching and concept-guided contrastive learning strategies to guide the model to capture ideology features with the learned concept semantics. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in MID, including in the cross-topic scenario.