In recent years, the rapid advancement and impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have been evident across various domains. This paper explores the application, implications, and potential of LLMs in building energy efficiency and decarbonization studies. The wide-ranging capabilities of LLMs are examined in the context of the building energy field, including intelligent control systems, code generation, data infrastructure, knowledge extraction, and education. Despite the promising potential of LLMs, challenges including complex and expensive computation, data privacy, security and copyright, complexity in fine-tuned LLMs, and self-consistency are discussed. The paper concludes with a call for future research focused on the enhancement of LLMs for domain-specific tasks, multi-modal LLMs, and collaborative research between AI and energy experts.

Advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence are transforming materials discovery. Yet, the availability of structured experimental data remains a bottleneck. The vast corpus of scientific literature presents a valuable and rich resource of such data. However, manual dataset creation from these resources is challenging due to issues in maintaining quality and consistency, scalability limitations, and the risk of human error and bias. Therefore, in this work, we develop a chemist AI agent, powered by large language models (LLMs), to overcome these challenges by autonomously creating structured datasets from natural language text, ranging from sentences and paragraphs to extensive scientific research articles. Our chemist AI agent, Eunomia, can plan and execute actions by leveraging the existing knowledge from decades of scientific research articles, scientists, the Internet and other tools altogether. We benchmark the performance of our approach in three different information extraction tasks with various levels of complexity, including solid-state impurity doping, metal-organic framework (MOF) chemical formula, and property relations. Our results demonstrate that our zero-shot agent, with the appropriate tools, is capable of attaining performance that is either superior or comparable to the state-of-the-art fine-tuned materials information extraction methods. This approach simplifies compilation of machine learning-ready datasets for various materials discovery applications, and significantly ease the accessibility of advanced natural language processing tools for novice users in natural language. The methodology in this work is developed as an open-source software on https://github.com/AI4ChemS/Eunomia.

This paper introduces an efficient strategy to transform Large Language Models (LLMs) into Multi-Modal Large Language Models. By conceptualizing this transformation as a domain adaptation process, i.e., transitioning from text understanding to embracing multiple modalities, we intriguingly note that, within each attention block, tuning LayerNorm suffices to yield strong performance. Moreover, when benchmarked against other tuning approaches like full parameter finetuning or LoRA, its benefits on efficiency are substantial. For example, when compared to LoRA on a 13B model scale, performance can be enhanced by an average of over 20% across five multi-modal tasks, and meanwhile, results in a significant reduction of trainable parameters by 41.9% and a decrease in GPU memory usage by 17.6%. On top of this LayerNorm strategy, we showcase that selectively tuning only with conversational data can improve efficiency further. Beyond these empirical outcomes, we provide a comprehensive analysis to explore the role of LayerNorm in adapting LLMs to the multi-modal domain and improving the expressive power of the model. Large Language Models (LLMs) have had many application scenarios since their debut. In particular, extending LLMs to handle multiple modalities has gathered much interest from both academia and industry.

We present an open-source Python library for building and using datasets where inputs are clusters of textual data, and outputs are sequences of real values representing one or more time series signals. The news-signals library supports diverse data science and NLP problem settings related to the prediction of time series behaviour using textual data feeds. For example, in the news domain, inputs are document clusters corresponding to daily news articles about a particular entity, and targets are explicitly associated real-valued time series: the volume of news about a particular person or company, or the number of pageviews of specific Wikimedia pages. Despite many industry and research use cases for this class of problem settings, to the best of our knowledge, News Signals is the only open-source library designed specifically to facilitate data science and research settings with natural language inputs and time series targets. In addition to the core codebase for building and interacting with datasets, we also conduct a suite of experiments using several popular Machine Learning libraries, which are used to establish baselines for time series anomaly prediction using textual inputs.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency in human-level reasoning and generation capabilities, which encourages extensive research on their application in mathematical problem solving. However, current work has been largely focused on text-based mathematical problems, with limited investigation in problems involving geometric information. Addressing this gap, we aim to enable LLMs to solve geometric problems by understanding image input. We first analyze the limitations of current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in this area: they struggle to accurately comprehending basic geometric elements and their relationships. To overcome these challenges, we take advantage of the unique characteristics of geometric problems (such as unique geometric logical form, and geometric scalability) and the capacity of the textual LLMs to build an enriched multimodal geometry dataset based on existing data. The augmented dataset, Geo170K, contains more than 170K geometric image-caption and question-answer pairs. Utilizing our constructed Geo170K dataset, we develop G-LLaVA, which demonstrates exceptional performance in solving geometric problems, significantly outperforming GPT-4-V on the MathVista benchmark with only 7B parameters.

We present counting reward automata-a finite state machine variant capable of modelling any reward function expressible as a formal language. Unlike previous approaches, which are limited to the expression of tasks as regular languages, our framework allows for tasks described by unrestricted grammars. We prove that an agent equipped with such an abstract machine is able to solve a larger set of tasks than those utilising current approaches. We show that this increase in expressive power does not come at the cost of increased automaton complexity. A selection of learning algorithms are presented which exploit automaton structure to improve sample efficiency. We show that the state machines required in our formulation can be specified from natural language task descriptions using large language models. Empirical results demonstrate that our method outperforms competing approaches in terms of sample efficiency, automaton complexity, and task completion.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds large language model (LLM) output by leveraging external knowledge sources to reduce factual hallucinations. However, prior works lack a comprehensive evaluation of different language families, making it challenging to evaluate LLM robustness against errors in external retrieved knowledge. To overcome this, we establish NoMIRACL, a human-annotated dataset for evaluating LLM robustness in RAG across 18 typologically diverse languages. NoMIRACL includes both a non-relevant and a relevant subset. Queries in the non-relevant subset contain passages manually judged as non-relevant or noisy, whereas queries in the relevant subset include at least a single judged relevant passage. We measure LLM robustness using two metrics: (i) hallucination rate, measuring model tendency to hallucinate an answer, when the answer is not present in passages in the non-relevant subset, and (ii) error rate, measuring model inaccuracy to recognize relevant passages in the relevant subset. We build a GPT-4 baseline which achieves a 33.2% hallucination rate on the non-relevant and a 14.9% error rate on the relevant subset on average. Our evaluation reveals that GPT-4 hallucinates frequently in high-resource languages, such as French or English. This work highlights an important avenue for future research to improve LLM robustness to learn how to better reject non-relevant information in RAG.

Providing natural language explanations for recommendations is particularly useful from the perspective of a non-expert user. Although several methods for providing such explanations have recently been proposed, we argue that an important aspect of explanation quality has been overlooked in their experimental evaluation. Specifically, the coherence between generated text and predicted rating, which is a necessary condition for an explanation to be useful, is not properly captured by currently used evaluation measures. In this paper, we highlight the issue of explanation and prediction coherence by 1) presenting results from a manual verification of explanations generated by one of the state-of-the-art approaches 2) proposing a method of automatic coherence evaluation 3) introducing a new transformer-based method that aims to produce more coherent explanations than the state-of-the-art approaches 4) performing an experimental evaluation which demonstrates that this method significantly improves the explanation coherence without affecting the other aspects of recommendation performance.

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked interest in their application to sequential recommendation tasks as they can provide supportive item information. However, due to the inherent complexities of sequential recommendation, such as sequential patterns across datasets, noise within sequences, and the temporal evolution of user preferences, existing LLM reasoning strategies, such as in-context learning and chain-of-thought are not fully effective. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel reasoning principle: Dynamic Reflection with Divergent Thinking within a retriever-reranker framework. Our approach starts with a collaborative in-context demonstration retriever, which collects sequences exhibiting collaborative behaviors as in-context examples. Following this, we abstract high-level user preferences across multiple aspects, providing a more nuanced understanding of user interests and circumventing the noise within the raw sequences. The cornerstone of our methodology is dynamic reflection, a process that emulates human learning through probing, critiquing, and reflecting, using user feedback to tailor the analysis more effectively to the target user in a temporal manner. We evaluate our approach on three datasets using six pre-trained LLMs. The superior performance observed across these models demonstrates the efficacy of our reasoning strategy, notably achieved without the need to fine-tune the LLMs. With our principle, we managed to outperform GPT-Turbo-3.5 on three datasets using 7b models e.g., Vicuna-7b and Openchat-7b on NDCG@10. This research not only highlights the potential of LLMs in enhancing sequential recommendation systems but also underscores the importance of developing tailored reasoning strategies to fully harness their capabilities.

Emotion significantly impacts our daily behaviors and interactions. While recent generative AI models, such as large language models, have shown impressive performance in various tasks, it remains unclear whether they truly comprehend emotions. This paper aims to address this gap by incorporating psychological theories to gain a holistic understanding of emotions in generative AI models. Specifically, we propose three approaches: 1) EmotionPrompt to enhance AI model performance, 2) EmotionAttack to impair AI model performance, and 3) EmotionDecode to explain the effects of emotional stimuli, both benign and malignant. Through extensive experiments involving language and multi-modal models on semantic understanding, logical reasoning, and generation tasks, we demonstrate that both textual and visual EmotionPrompt can boost the performance of AI models while EmotionAttack can hinder it. Additionally, EmotionDecode reveals that AI models can comprehend emotional stimuli akin to the mechanism of dopamine in the human brain. Our work heralds a novel avenue for exploring psychology to enhance our understanding of generative AI models. This paper is an extended version of our previous work EmotionPrompt (arXiv:2307.11760).