This research showcases the innovative integration of Large Language Models into machine learning workflows for traffic incident management, focusing on the classification of incident severity using accident reports. By leveraging features generated by modern language models alongside conventional data extracted from incident reports, our research demonstrates improvements in the accuracy of severity classification across several machine learning algorithms. Our contributions are threefold. First, we present an extensive comparison of various machine learning models paired with multiple large language models for feature extraction, aiming to identify the optimal combinations for accurate incident severity classification. Second, we contrast traditional feature engineering pipelines with those enhanced by language models, showcasing the superiority of language-based feature engineering in processing unstructured text. Third, our study illustrates how merging baseline features from accident reports with language-based features can improve the severity classification accuracy. This comprehensive approach not only advances the field of incident management but also highlights the cross-domain application potential of our methodology, particularly in contexts requiring the prediction of event outcomes from unstructured textual data or features translated into textual representation. Specifically, our novel methodology was applied to three distinct datasets originating from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Queensland, Australia. This cross-continental application underlines the robustness of our approach, suggesting its potential for widespread adoption in improving incident management processes globally.

Incorporating the successful paradigm of pretraining and finetuning from Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing into decision-making has become increasingly popular in recent years. In this paper, we study Imitation Learning from Observation with pretrained models and find existing approaches such as BCO and AIME face knowledge barriers, specifically the Embodiment Knowledge Barrier (EKB) and the Demonstration Knowledge Barrier (DKB), greatly limiting their performance. The EKB arises when pretrained models lack knowledge about unseen observations, leading to errors in action inference. The DKB results from policies trained on limited demonstrations, hindering adaptability to diverse scenarios. We thoroughly analyse the underlying mechanism of these barriers and propose AIME-v2 upon AIME as a solution. AIME-v2 uses online interactions with data-driven regulariser to alleviate the EKB and mitigates the DKB by introducing a surrogate reward function to enhance policy training. Experimental results on tasks from the DeepMind Control Suite and Meta-World benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of these modifications in improving both sample-efficiency and converged performance. The study contributes valuable insights into resolving knowledge barriers for enhanced decision-making in pretraining-based approaches. Code will be available at https://github.com/argmax-ai/aime-v2.

MTL is a learning paradigm that effectively leverages both task-specific and shared information to address multiple related tasks simultaneously. In contrast to STL, MTL offers a suite of benefits that enhance both the training process and the inference efficiency. MTL's key advantages encompass streamlined model architecture, performance enhancement, and cross-domain generalizability. Over the past twenty years, MTL has become widely recognized as a flexible and effective approach in various fields, including CV, NLP, recommendation systems, disease prognosis and diagnosis, and robotics. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of MTL, encompassing the technical aspects of cutting-edge methods from traditional approaches to deep learning and the latest trend of pretrained foundation models. Our survey methodically categorizes MTL techniques into five key areas: regularization, relationship learning, feature propagation, optimization, and pre-training. This categorization not only chronologically outlines the development of MTL but also dives into various specialized strategies within each category. Furthermore, the survey reveals how the MTL evolves from handling a fixed set of tasks to embracing a more flexible approach free from task or modality constraints. It explores the concepts of task-promptable and -agnostic training, along with the capacity for ZSL, which unleashes the untapped potential of this historically coveted learning paradigm. Overall, we hope this survey provides the research community with a comprehensive overview of the advancements in MTL from its inception in 1997 to the present in 2023. We address present challenges and look ahead to future possibilities, shedding light on the opportunities and potential avenues for MTL research in a broad manner. This project is publicly available at https://github.com/junfish/Awesome-Multitask-Learning.

Table Question Answering (TQA) aims at composing an answer to a question based on tabular data. While prior research has shown that TQA models lack robustness, understanding the underlying cause and nature of this issue remains predominantly unclear, posing a significant obstacle to the development of robust TQA systems. In this paper, we formalize three major desiderata for a fine-grained evaluation of robustness of TQA systems. They should (i) answer questions regardless of alterations in table structure, (ii) base their responses on the content of relevant cells rather than on biases, and (iii) demonstrate robust numerical reasoning capabilities. To investigate these aspects, we create and publish a novel TQA evaluation benchmark in English. Our extensive experimental analysis reveals that none of the examined state-of-the-art TQA systems consistently excels in these three aspects. Our benchmark is a crucial instrument for monitoring the behavior of TQA systems and paves the way for the development of robust TQA systems. We release our benchmark publicly.

Speculative decoding has demonstrated its effectiveness in accelerating the inference of large language models while maintaining a consistent sampling distribution. However, the conventional approach of training a separate draft model to achieve a satisfactory token acceptance rate can be costly. Drawing inspiration from early exiting, we propose a novel self-speculative decoding framework \emph{Kangaroo}, which uses a fixed shallow sub-network as a self-draft model, with the remaining layers serving as the larger target model. We train a lightweight and efficient adapter module on top of the sub-network to bridge the gap between the sub-network and the full model's representation ability. It is noteworthy that the inference latency of the self-draft model may no longer be negligible compared to the large model, necessitating strategies to increase the token acceptance rate while minimizing the drafting steps of the small model. To address this challenge, we introduce an additional early exiting mechanism for generating draft tokens. Specifically, we halt the small model's subsequent prediction during the drafting phase once the confidence level for the current token falls below a certain threshold. Extensive experiments on the Spec-Bench demonstrate the effectiveness of Kangaroo. Under single-sequence verification, Kangaroo achieves speedups up to $1.68\times$ on Spec-Bench, outperforming Medusa-1 with 88.7\% fewer additional parameters (67M compared to 591M). The code for Kangaroo is available at https://github.com/Equationliu/Kangaroo.

There are several improvements proposed over the baseline Absolute Positional Encoding (APE) method used in original transformer. In this study, we aim to investigate the implications of inadequately representing positional encoding in higher dimensions on crucial aspects of the attention mechanism, the model's capacity to learn relative positional information, and the convergence of models, all stemming from the choice of sinusoidal basis functions. Through a combination of theoretical insights and empirical analyses, we elucidate how these challenges extend beyond APEs and may adversely affect the performance of Relative Positional Encoding (RPE) methods, such as Rotatory Positional Encoding (RoPE). Subsequently, we introduce an innovative solution termed Orthogonal Polynomial Based Positional Encoding (PoPE) to address some of the limitations associated with existing methods. The PoPE method encodes positional information by leveraging Orthogonal Legendre polynomials. Legendre polynomials as basis functions offers several desirable properties for positional encoding, including improved correlation structure, non-periodicity, orthogonality, and distinct functional forms among polynomials of varying orders. Our experimental findings demonstrate that transformer models incorporating PoPE outperform baseline transformer models on the $Multi30k$ English-to-German translation task, thus establishing a new performance benchmark. Furthermore, PoPE-based transformers exhibit significantly accelerated convergence rates. Additionally, we will present novel theoretical perspectives on position encoding based on the superior performance of PoPE.

Automated essay scoring (AES) to evaluate second language (L2) proficiency has been a firmly established technology used in educational contexts for decades. Although holistic scoring has seen advancements in AES that match or even exceed human performance, analytic scoring still encounters issues as it inherits flaws and shortcomings from the human scoring process. The recent introduction of large language models presents new opportunities for automating the evaluation of specific aspects of L2 writing proficiency. In this paper, we perform a series of experiments using GPT-4 in a zero-shot fashion on a publicly available dataset annotated with holistic scores based on the Common European Framework of Reference and aim to extract detailed information about their underlying analytic components. We observe significant correlations between the automatically predicted analytic scores and multiple features associated with the individual proficiency components.

Recent research on instructable agents has used memory-augmented Large Language Models (LLMs) as task planners, a technique that retrieves language-program examples relevant to the input instruction and uses them as in-context examples in the LLM prompt to improve the performance of the LLM in inferring the correct action and task plans. In this technical report, we extend the capabilities of HELPER, by expanding its memory with a wider array of examples and prompts, and by integrating additional APIs for asking questions. This simple expansion of HELPER into a shared memory enables the agent to work across the domains of executing plans from dialogue, natural language instruction following, active question asking, and commonsense room reorganization. We evaluate the agent on four diverse interactive visual-language embodied agent benchmarks: ALFRED, TEACh, DialFRED, and the Tidy Task. HELPER-X achieves few-shot, state-of-the-art performance across these benchmarks using a single agent, without requiring in-domain training, and remains competitive with agents that have undergone in-domain training.

This paper explores the effectiveness of using large language models (LLMs) for personalized movie recommendations from users' perspectives in an online field experiment. Our study involves a combination of between-subject prompt and historic consumption assessments, along with within-subject recommendation scenario evaluations. By examining conversation and survey response data from 160 active users, we find that LLMs offer strong recommendation explainability but lack overall personalization, diversity, and user trust. Our results also indicate that different personalized prompting techniques do not significantly affect user-perceived recommendation quality, but the number of movies a user has watched plays a more significant role. Furthermore, LLMs show a greater ability to recommend lesser-known or niche movies. Through qualitative analysis, we identify key conversational patterns linked to positive and negative user interaction experiences and conclude that providing personal context and examples is crucial for obtaining high-quality recommendations from LLMs.

The surge in Large Language Models (LLMs) development has led to improved performance on cognitive tasks as well as an urgent need to align these models with human values in order to safely exploit their power. Despite the effectiveness of preference learning algorithms like Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback (RLHF) in aligning human preferences, their assumed improvements on model trustworthiness haven't been thoroughly testified. Toward this end, this study investigates how models that have been aligned with general-purpose preference data on helpfulness and harmlessness perform across five trustworthiness verticals: toxicity, stereotypical bias, machine ethics, truthfulness, and privacy. For model alignment, we focus on three widely used RLHF variants: Supervised Finetuning (SFT), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Through extensive empirical investigations, we discover that the improvement in trustworthiness by RLHF is far from guaranteed, and there exists a complex interplay between preference data, alignment algorithms, and specific trustworthiness aspects. Together, our results underscore the need for more nuanced approaches for model alignment. By shedding light on the intricate dynamics of these components within model alignment, we hope this research will guide the community towards developing language models that are both capable and trustworthy.