We present Aptly, an extension of the MIT App Inventor platform enabling mobile app development via natural language powered by code-generating large language models (LLMs). Aptly complements App Inventor's block language with a text language designed to allow visual code generation via text-based LLMs. We detail the technical aspects of how the Aptly server integrates LLMs with a realtime collaboration function to facilitate the automated creation and editing of mobile apps given user instructions. The paper concludes with insights from a study of a pilot implementation involving high school students, which examines Aptly's practicality and user experience. The findings underscore Aptly's potential as a tool that democratizes app development and fosters technological creativity.

Large-scale high-quality training data is important for improving the performance of models. After trained with data that has rationales (reasoning steps), models gain reasoning capability. However, the dataset with high-quality rationales is relatively scarce due to the high annotation cost. To address this issue, we propose \textit{Self-motivated Learning} framework. The framework motivates the model itself to automatically generate rationales on existing datasets. Based on the inherent rank from correctness across multiple rationales, the model learns to generate better rationales, leading to higher reasoning capability. Specifically, we train a reward model with the rank to evaluate the quality of rationales, and improve the performance of reasoning through reinforcement learning. Experiment results of Llama2 7B on multiple reasoning datasets show that our method significantly improves the reasoning ability of models, even outperforming text-davinci-002 in some datasets.

In patent prosecution, image-based retrieval systems for identifying similarities between current patent images and prior art are pivotal to ensure the novelty and non-obviousness of patent applications. Despite their growing popularity in recent years, existing attempts, while effective at recognizing images within the same patent, fail to deliver practical value due to their limited generalizability in retrieving relevant prior art. Moreover, this task inherently involves the challenges posed by the abstract visual features of patent images, the skewed distribution of image classifications, and the semantic information of image descriptions. Therefore, we propose a language-informed, distribution-aware multimodal approach to patent image feature learning, which enriches the semantic understanding of patent image by integrating Large Language Models and improves the performance of underrepresented classes with our proposed distribution-aware contrastive losses. Extensive experiments on DeepPatent2 dataset show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art or comparable performance in image-based patent retrieval with mAP +53.3%, Recall@10 +41.8%, and MRR@10 +51.9%. Furthermore, through an in-depth user analysis, we explore our model in aiding patent professionals in their image retrieval efforts, highlighting the model's real-world applicability and effectiveness.

Music composition represents the creative side of humanity, and itself is a complex task that requires abilities to understand and generate information with long dependency and harmony constraints. While demonstrating impressive capabilities in STEM subjects, current LLMs easily fail in this task, generating ill-written music even when equipped with modern techniques like In-Context-Learning and Chain-of-Thoughts. To further explore and enhance LLMs' potential in music composition by leveraging their reasoning ability and the large knowledge base in music history and theory, we propose ComposerX, an agent-based symbolic music generation framework. We find that applying a multi-agent approach significantly improves the music composition quality of GPT-4. The results demonstrate that ComposerX is capable of producing coherent polyphonic music compositions with captivating melodies, while adhering to user instructions.

As model context lengths continue to increase, the number of demonstrations that can be provided in-context approaches the size of entire training datasets. We study the behavior of in-context learning (ICL) at this extreme scale on multiple datasets and models. We show that, for many datasets with large label spaces, performance continues to increase with hundreds or thousands of demonstrations. We contrast this with example retrieval and finetuning: example retrieval shows excellent performance at low context lengths but has diminished gains with more demonstrations; finetuning is more data hungry than ICL but can sometimes exceed long-context ICL performance with additional data. We use this ICL setting as a testbed to study several properties of both in-context learning and long-context models. We show that long-context ICL is less sensitive to random input shuffling than short-context ICL, that grouping of same-label examples can negatively impact performance, and that the performance boosts we see do not arise from cumulative gain from encoding many examples together. We conclude that although long-context ICL can be surprisingly effective, most of this gain comes from attending back to similar examples rather than task learning.

Full fine-tuning is a popular approach to adapt Transformer-based pre-trained large language models to a specific downstream task. However, the substantial requirements for computational power and storage have discouraged its widespread use. Moreover, increasing evidence of catastrophic forgetting and overparameterization in the Transformer architecture has motivated researchers to seek more efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods. Commonly known parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods like LoRA and BitFit are typically applied across all layers of the model. We propose a PEFT method, called Stratified Progressive Adaptation Fine-tuning (SPAFIT), based on the localization of different types of linguistic knowledge to specific layers of the model. Our experiments, conducted on nine tasks from the GLUE benchmark, show that our proposed SPAFIT method outperforms other PEFT methods while fine-tuning only a fraction of the parameters adjusted by other methods.

Recent advancements in natural language processing have led to the proliferation of large language models (LLMs). These models have been shown to yield good performance, using in-context learning, even on tasks and languages they are not trained on. However, their performance on African languages is largely understudied relative to high-resource languages. We present an analysis of four popular large language models (mT0, Aya, LLaMa 2, and GPT-4) on six tasks (topic classification, sentiment classification, machine translation, summarization, question answering, and named entity recognition) across 60 African languages, spanning different language families and geographical regions. Our results suggest that all LLMs produce lower performance for African languages, and there is a large gap in performance compared to high-resource languages (such as English) for most tasks. We find that GPT-4 has an average to good performance on classification tasks, yet its performance on generative tasks such as machine translation and summarization is significantly lacking. Surprisingly, we find that mT0 had the best overall performance for cross-lingual QA, better than the state-of-the-art supervised model (i.e. fine-tuned mT5) and GPT-4 on African languages. Similarly, we find the recent Aya model to have comparable result to mT0 in almost all tasks except for topic classification where it outperform mT0. Overall, LLaMa 2 showed the worst performance, which we believe is due to its English and code-centric~(around 98%) pre-training corpus. Our findings confirms that performance on African languages continues to remain a hurdle for the current LLMs, underscoring the need for additional efforts to close this gap.

In the ever-evolving landscape of machine learning, seamless translation of natural language descriptions into executable code remains a formidable challenge. This paper introduces Linguacodus, an innovative framework designed to tackle this challenge by deploying a dynamic pipeline that iteratively transforms natural language task descriptions into code through high-level data-shaping instructions. The core of Linguacodus is a fine-tuned large language model (LLM), empowered to evaluate diverse solutions for various problems and select the most fitting one for a given task. This paper details the fine-tuning process, and sheds light on how natural language descriptions can be translated into functional code. Linguacodus represents a substantial leap towards automated code generation, effectively bridging the gap between task descriptions and executable code. It holds great promise for advancing machine learning applications across diverse domains. Additionally, we propose an algorithm capable of transforming a natural description of an ML task into code with minimal human interaction. In extensive experiments on a vast machine learning code dataset originating from Kaggle, we showcase the effectiveness of Linguacodus. The investigations highlight its potential applications across diverse domains, emphasizing its impact on applied machine learning in various scientific fields.

Large language models have shown their ability to become effective few-shot learners with prompting, revoluting the paradigm of learning with data scarcity. However, this approach largely depends on the quality of prompt initialization, and always exhibits large variability among different runs. Such property makes prompt tuning highly unreliable and vulnerable to poorly constructed prompts, which limits its extension to more real-world applications. To tackle this issue, we propose to treat the hard prompt and soft prompt as separate inputs to mitigate noise brought by the prompt initialization. Furthermore, we optimize soft prompts with contrastive learning for utilizing class-aware information in the training process to maintain model performance. Experimental results demonstrate that \sysname outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 7.20% in accuracy and reduces the standard deviation by 2.02 on average. Furthermore, extensive experiments underscore its robustness and stability across 7 datasets covering various tasks.

We analyze how well pre-trained large language models (e.g., Llama2, GPT-4, Claude 3, etc) can do linear and non-linear regression when given in-context examples, without any additional training or gradient updates. Our findings reveal that several large language models (e.g., GPT-4, Claude 3) are able to perform regression tasks with a performance rivaling (or even outperforming) that of traditional supervised methods such as Random Forest, Bagging, or Gradient Boosting. For example, on the challenging Friedman #2 regression dataset, Claude 3 outperforms many supervised methods such as AdaBoost, SVM, Random Forest, KNN, or Gradient Boosting. We then investigate how well the performance of large language models scales with the number of in-context exemplars. We borrow from the notion of regret from online learning and empirically show that LLMs are capable of obtaining a sub-linear regret.