Rapid advancements in continual segmentation have yet to bridge the gap of scaling to large continually expanding vocabularies under compute-constrained scenarios. We discover that traditional continual training leads to catastrophic forgetting under compute constraints, unable to outperform zero-shot segmentation methods. We introduce a novel strategy for semantic and panoptic segmentation with zero forgetting, capable of adapting to continually growing vocabularies without the need for retraining or large memory costs. Our training-free approach, kNN-CLIP, leverages a database of instance embeddings to enable open-vocabulary segmentation approaches to continually expand their vocabulary on any given domain with a single-pass through data, while only storing embeddings minimizing both compute and memory costs. This method achieves state-of-the-art mIoU performance across large-vocabulary semantic and panoptic segmentation datasets. We hope kNN-CLIP represents a step forward in enabling more efficient and adaptable continual segmentation, paving the way for advances in real-world large-vocabulary continual segmentation methods. Figure 1: We propose kNN-CLIP to continually expand the vocabulary space of segmentation models.

Large language models (LLMs) are able to solve various tasks with only a few demonstrations utilizing their in-context learning (ICL) abilities. However, LLMs often rely on their pre-trained semantic priors of demonstrations rather than on the input-label relationships to proceed with ICL prediction. In this work, we term this phenomenon as the 'Demonstration Shortcut'. While previous works have primarily focused on improving ICL prediction results for predefined tasks, we aim to rectify the Demonstration Shortcut, thereby enabling the LLM to effectively learn new input-label relationships from demonstrations. To achieve this, we introduce In-Context Calibration, a demonstration-aware calibration method. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method in two settings: (1) the Original ICL Task using the standard label space and (2) the Task Learning setting, where the label space is replaced with semantically unrelated tokens. In both settings, In-Context Calibration demonstrates substantial improvements, with results generalized across three LLM families (OPT, GPT, and Llama2) under various configurations.

The NOSTR is a communication protocol for the social web, based on the w3c websockets standard. Although it is still in its infancy, it is well known as a social media protocol, thousands of trusted users and multiple user interfaces, offering a unique experience and enormous capabilities. To name a few, the NOSTR applications include but are not limited to direct messaging, file sharing, audio/video streaming, collaborative writing, blogging and data processing through distributed AI directories. In this work, we propose an approach that builds upon the existing protocol structure with end goal a decentralized marketplace for federated learning and LLM training. In this proposed design there are two parties: on one side there are customers who provide a dataset that they want to use for training an AI model. On the other side, there are service providers, who receive (parts of) the dataset, train the AI model, and for a payment as an exchange, they return the optimized AI model. The decentralized and censorship resistant features of the NOSTR enable the possibility of designing a fair and open marketplace for training AI models and LLMs.

Ensembling different large language models (LLMs) to unleash their complementary potential and harness their individual strengths is highly valuable. Nevertheless, vocabulary discrepancies among various LLMs have constrained previous studies to either selecting or blending completely generated outputs. This limitation hinders the dynamic correction and enhancement of outputs during the generation process, resulting in a limited capacity for effective ensemble. To address this issue, we propose a novel method to Ensemble LLMs via Vocabulary Alignment (EVA). EVA bridges the lexical gap among various LLMs, enabling meticulous ensemble at each generation step. Specifically, we first learn mappings between the vocabularies of different LLMs with the assistance of overlapping tokens. Subsequently, these mappings are employed to project output distributions of LLMs into a unified space, facilitating a fine-grained ensemble. Finally, we design a filtering strategy to exclude models that generate unfaithful tokens. Experimental results on commonsense reasoning, arithmetic reasoning, machine translation, and data-to-text generation tasks demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared with individual LLMs and previous ensemble methods conducted on complete outputs. Further analyses confirm that our approach can leverage knowledge from different language models and yield consistent improvement.

A building's age of construction is crucial for supporting many geospatial applications. Much current research focuses on estimating building age from facade images using deep learning. However, building an accurate deep learning model requires a considerable amount of labelled training data, and the trained models often have geographical constraints. Recently, large pre-trained vision language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4 Vision, which demonstrate significant generalisation capabilities, have emerged as potential training-free tools for dealing with specific vision tasks, but their applicability and reliability for building information remain unexplored. In this study, a zero-shot building age classifier for facade images is developed using prompts that include logical instructions. Taking London as a test case, we introduce a new dataset, FI-London, comprising facade images and building age epochs. Although the training-free classifier achieved a modest accuracy of 39.69%, the mean absolute error of 0.85 decades indicates that the model can predict building age epochs successfully albeit with a small bias. The ensuing discussion reveals that the classifier struggles to predict the age of very old buildings and is challenged by fine-grained predictions within 2 decades. Overall, the classifier utilising GPT-4 Vision is capable of predicting the rough age epoch of a building from a single facade image without any training.

Trigger warnings are labels that preface documents with sensitive content if this content could be perceived as harmful by certain groups of readers. Since warnings about a document intuitively need to be shown before reading it, authors usually assign trigger warnings at the document level. What parts of their writing prompted them to assign a warning, however, remains unclear. We investigate for the first time the feasibility of identifying the triggering passages of a document, both manually and computationally. We create a dataset of 4,135 English passages, each annotated with one of eight common trigger warnings. In a large-scale evaluation, we then systematically evaluate the effectiveness of fine-tuned and few-shot classifiers, and their generalizability. We find that trigger annotation belongs to the group of subjective annotation tasks in NLP, and that automatic trigger classification remains challenging but feasible.

There is a belief that learning to compress well will lead to intelligence. Recently, language modeling has been shown to be equivalent to compression, which offers a compelling rationale for the success of large language models (LLMs): the development of more advanced language models is essentially enhancing compression which facilitates intelligence. Despite such appealing discussions, little empirical evidence is present for the interplay between compression and intelligence. In this work, we examine their relationship in the context of LLMs, treating LLMs as data compressors. Given the abstract concept of "intelligence", we adopt the average downstream benchmark scores as a surrogate, specifically targeting intelligence related to knowledge and commonsense, coding, and mathematical reasoning. Across 12 benchmarks, our study brings together 30 public LLMs that originate from diverse organizations. Remarkably, we find that LLMs' intelligence -- reflected by average benchmark scores -- almost linearly correlates with their ability to compress external text corpora. These results provide concrete evidence supporting the belief that superior compression indicates greater intelligence. Furthermore, our findings suggest that compression efficiency, as an unsupervised metric derived from raw text corpora, serves as a reliable evaluation measure that is linearly associated with the model capabilities. We open-source our compression datasets as well as our data collection pipelines to facilitate future researchers to assess compression properly.

This paper presents an exploration of preference learning in text-to-motion generation. We find that current improvements in text-to-motion generation still rely on datasets requiring expert labelers with motion capture systems. Instead, learning from human preference data does not require motion capture systems; a labeler with no expertise simply compares two generated motions. This is particularly efficient because evaluating the model's output is easier than gathering the motion that performs a desired task (e.g. backflip). To pioneer the exploration of this paradigm, we annotate 3,528 preference pairs generated by MotionGPT, marking the first effort to investigate various algorithms for learning from preference data. In particular, our exploration highlights important design choices when using preference data. Additionally, our experimental results show that preference learning has the potential to greatly improve current text-to-motion generative models. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/THU-LYJ-Lab/InstructMotion}{https://github.com/THU-LYJ-Lab/InstructMotion to further facilitate research in this area.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is widely deployed to solve problems related to marketing attribution and budget optimization. However, AI models can be quite complex, and it can be difficult to understand model workings and insights without extensive implementation teams. In principle, recently developed large language models (LLMs), like GPT-4, can be deployed to provide marketing insights, reducing the time and effort required to make critical decisions. In practice, there are substantial challenges that need to be overcome to reliably use such models. We focus on domain-specific question-answering, SQL generation needed for data retrieval, and tabular analysis and show how a combination of semantic search, prompt engineering, and fine-tuning can be applied to dramatically improve the ability of LLMs to execute these tasks accurately. We compare both proprietary models, like GPT-4, and open-source models, like Llama-2-70b, as well as various embedding methods. These models are tested on sample use cases specific to marketing mix modeling and attribution. NTRODUCTION Marketing is an important function of many businesses. Historically, marketing was done primarily through a limited number of channels, such as print, radio, and linear TV advertising, but as the internet became more widely used, digital marketing increased dramatically. One of the benefits of digital marketing was the trove of additional data that companies could acquire related to the efficacy of their marketing efforts. However, drawing insights from this data requires significant effort from analysts, often utilizing a variety of different marketing software solutions. Machine learning based marketing software further complicates this effort because, while providing more sophisticated and accurate insights, it can be difficult to understand how models work. To address these difficulties, enterprise software companies often have extensive implementation teams that configure applications and explain insights in detail. This situation is not optimal because it makes deployments more expensive, and it can take a nontrivial amount of time to get questions answered as they arise.

A key requirement in developing Generative Language Models (GLMs) is to have their values aligned with human values. Preference-based alignment is a widely used paradigm for this purpose, in which preferences over generation pairs are first elicited from human annotators or AI systems, and then fed into some alignment techniques, e.g., Direct Preference Optimization. However, a substantial percent (20 - 40%) of the preference pairs used in GLM alignment are noisy, and it remains unclear how the noise affects the alignment performance and how to mitigate its negative impact. In this paper, we propose a framework to inject desirable amounts and types of noise to the preferences, and systematically study the impact of preference noise on the alignment performance in two tasks (summarization and dialogue generation). We find that the alignment performance can be highly sensitive to the noise rates in the preference data: e.g., a 10 percentage points (pp) increase of the noise rate can lead to 30 pp drop in the alignment performance (in win rate). To mitigate the impact of noise, confidence-based data filtering shows significant benefit when certain types of noise are present. We hope our work can help the community better understand and mitigate the impact of preference noise in GLM alignment.