Large Language Model
Beyond Diagnosis: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs for Pathology Localization in Chest Radiographs
Gosai, Advait, Kavishwar, Arun, McNamara, Stephanie L., Samineni, Soujanya, Umeton, Renato, Chowdhury, Alexander, Lotter, William
Recent work has shown promising performance of frontier large language models (LLMs) and their multimodal counterparts in medical quizzes and diagnostic tasks, highlighting their potential for broad clinical utility given their accessible, general-purpose nature. However, beyond diagnosis, a fundamental aspect of medical image interpretation is the ability to localize pathological findings. Evaluating localization not only has clinical and educational relevance but also provides insight into a model's spatial understanding of anatomy and disease. Here, we systematically assess two general-purpose MLLMs (GPT-4 and GPT-5) and a domain-specific model (MedGemma) in their ability to localize pathologies on chest radiographs, using a prompting pipeline that overlays a spatial grid and elicits coordinate-based predictions. Averaged across nine pathologies in the CheXlocalize dataset, GPT-5 exhibited a localization accuracy of 49.7%, followed by GPT-4 (39.1%) and MedGemma (17.7%), all lower than a task-specific CNN baseline (59.9%) and a radiologist benchmark (80.1%). Despite modest performance, error analysis revealed that GPT-5's predictions were largely in anatomically plausible regions, just not always precisely localized. GPT-4 performed well on pathologies with fixed anatomical locations, but struggled with spatially variable findings and exhibited anatomically implausible predictions more frequently. MedGemma demonstrated the lowest performance on all pathologies, but showed improvements when provided examples through few shot prompting. Our findings highlight both the promise and limitations of current MLLMs in medical imaging and underscore the importance of integrating them with task-specific tools for reliable use.
Privacy Preserving In-Context-Learning Framework for Large Language Models
Bhusal, Bishnu, Acharya, Manoj, Kaur, Ramneet, Samplawski, Colin, Roy, Anirban, Cobb, Adam D., Chadha, Rohit, Jha, Susmit
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly transformed natural language understanding and generation, but they raise privacy concerns due to potential exposure of sensitive information. Studies have highlighted the risk of information leakage, where adversaries can extract sensitive information embedded in the prompts. In this work, we introduce a novel private prediction framework for generating high-quality synthetic text with strong privacy guarantees. Our approach leverages the Differential Privacy (DP) framework to ensure worst-case theoretical bounds on information leakage without requiring any fine-tuning of the underlying models. The proposed method performs inference on private records and aggregates the resulting per-token output distributions. This enables the generation of longer and coherent synthetic text while maintaining privacy guarantees. Additionally, we propose a simple blending operation that combines private and public inference to further enhance utility. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on in-context-learning (ICL) tasks, making it a promising direction for privacy-preserving text generation while maintaining high utility. Our code is available at https://github.com/bhusalb/
Bias after Prompting: Persistent Discrimination in Large Language Models
Sivakumar, Nivedha, Mackraz, Natalie, Khorshidi, Samira, Patel, Krishna, Theobald, Barry-John, Zappella, Luca, Apostoloff, Nicholas
A dangerous assumption that can be made from prior work on the bias transfer hypothesis (BTH) is that biases do not transfer from pre-trained large language models (LLMs) to adapted models. We invalidate this assumption by studying the BTH in causal models under prompt adaptations, as prompting is an extremely popular and accessible adaptation strategy used in real-world applications. In contrast to prior work, we find that biases can transfer through prompting and that popular prompt-based mitigation methods do not consistently prevent biases from transferring. Specifically, the correlation between intrinsic biases and those after prompt adaptation remain moderate to strong across demographics and tasks -- for example, gender (rho >= 0.94) in co-reference resolution, and age (rho >= 0.98) and religion (rho >= 0.69) in question answering. Further, we find that biases remain strongly correlated when varying few-shot composition parameters, such as sample size, stereotypical content, occupational distribution and representational balance (rho >= 0.90). We evaluate several prompt-based debiasing strategies and find that different approaches have distinct strengths, but none consistently reduce bias transfer across models, tasks or demographics. These results demonstrate that correcting bias, and potentially improving reasoning ability, in intrinsic models may prevent propagation of biases to downstream tasks.
Differentiable Entropy Regularization: A Complexity-Aware Approach for Neural Optimization
Shihab, Ibne Farabi, Akter, Sanjeda, Sharma, Anuj
We introduce the first differentiable approximation of range-partition entropy, a complexity measure from computational geometry that directly bounds algorithmic runtime. Unlike architectural modifications, our method is a complementary regularizer that provides orthogonal efficiency gains when combined with existing optimizations. We establish theoretical guarantees in computational geometry, achieving 4-5 provable speedups on convex hull and triangulation with <0.2% error. On ImageNet-1K with ViT -Base, entropy regularization achieves 80.1% top-1 accuracy at 80% sparsity (1.60 standalone speedup), and when combined with FlashAttention yields 2.07 speedup versus 1.63 for FlashAttention alone. On large language models (LLaMA-2 7B, Mistral-7B, Phi-2), we achieve 1.48-1.60 Unlike prior regularization methods that target output distributions, we directly minimize representation complexity, yielding both efficiency gains and improved robustness through semantically structured sparsity patterns (IoU 0.73 vs 0.41 for magnitude pruning, CIFAR-100-C mCE 48.7 vs 55.4). Benefits are strongest for geometry and vision transformers, with more modest but measurable gains on LLMs, demonstrating that complexity regularization offers a principled pathway to joint efficiency-robustness optimization. Modern deep networks achieve impressive performance but face two critical challenges. They are fragile under distribution shift (Hendrycks & Dietterich, 2019) and require prohibitive computational costs (Strubell et al., 2019). The standard approach treats these problems independently, addressing robustness through data augmentation and efficiency through architectural changes. We ask: can a single principle address both? Our strongest results are in computational geometry and vision transformers; for large language models the overhead-benefit tradeoff is more nuanced, with improvements primarily in high-throughput deployment settings rather than research-scale fine-tuning. The key insight comes from computational geometry. Algorithmically simple representations, those with low complexity under geometric partitions, both enable faster algorithms via instance-optimal procedures (Chan, 1996) and generalize better by avoiding spurious features (Geirhos et al., 2020). However, no existing method provides a differentiable measure of algorithmic complexity that can be optimized end-to-end during neural network training. Robustness Label smoothing Y es No No No Adversarial training Y es No No No Info-theoretic Information bottleneck Y es No No No Fixed sparse Longformer, BigBird No No No No Kernel opt. Our goal is to connect representation learning to algorithmic complexity.
On the Alignment of Large Language Models with Global Human Opinion
Liu, Yang, Kaneko, Masahiro, Chu, Chenhui
Today's large language models (LLMs) are capable of supporting multilingual scenarios, allowing users to interact with LLMs in their native languages. When LLMs respond to subjective questions posed by users, they are expected to align with the views of specific demographic groups or historical periods, shaped by the language in which the user interacts with the model. Existing studies mainly focus on researching the opinions represented by LLMs among demographic groups in the United States or a few countries, lacking worldwide country samples and studies on human opinions in different historical periods, as well as lacking discussion on using language to steer LLMs. Moreover, they also overlook the potential influence of prompt language on the alignment of LLMs' opinions. In this study, our goal is to fill these gaps. To this end, we create an evaluation framework based on the World Values Survey (WVS) to systematically assess the alignment of LLMs with human opinions across different countries, languages, and historical periods around the world. We find that LLMs appropriately or over-align the opinions with only a few countries while under-aligning the opinions with most countries. Furthermore, changing the language of the prompt to match the language used in the questionnaire can effectively steer LLMs to align with the opinions of the corresponding country more effectively than existing steering methods. At the same time, LLMs are more aligned with the opinions of the contemporary population. To our knowledge, our study is the first comprehensive investigation of the topic of opinion alignment in LLMs across global, language, and temporal dimensions. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/ku-nlp/global-opinion-alignment and https://github.com/nlply/global-opinion-alignment.
Enabling MoE on the Edge via Importance-Driven Expert Scheduling
Zhu, Guoying, Li, Meng, Dai, Haipeng, Liu, Xuechen, Wang, Weijun, Li, Keran, xiao, Jun, Chen, Ligeng, Wang, Wei
Abstract--The Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture has emerged as a key technique for scaling Large Language Models by activating only a subset of experts per query. Deploying MoE on consumer-grade edge hardware, however, is constrained by limited device memory, making dynamic expert offloading essential. Unlike prior work that treats offloading purely as a scheduling problem, we leverage expert importance to guide decisions, substituting low-importance active experts with functionally similar ones already cached in GPU memory, thereby preserving accuracy. As a result, this design reduces memory usage and data transfer, while largely eliminating PCIe overhead. In addition, we introduce a scheduling policy that maximizes the reuse ratio of GPU-cached experts, further boosting efficiency. Our extensive evaluations show that, compared with state-of-the-art approaches, our method achieves a 48% reduction in decoding latency and maintains an expert cache hit rate above 60%, all while preserving nearly lossless accuracy. MoE architectures offer a promising approach for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices, addressing an increasingly critical need [31], [30], [22]. Y et, edge servers are often limited in computational capacity and GPU memory, restricting full model deployment and rapid [32], [39]. Compared with dense models that compute all parameters for every input, MoE architectures mitigate these constraints by partitioning feed-forward layers into multiple experts [19], activating only a sparse subset per token. This design thus can drastically reduces computation overhead. However, GPU memory limitations introduce a new bottleneck: experts must frequently be offloaded to CPU memory and repeatedly loaded back to the GPU, resulting in substantial inference latency.
Towards Alignment-Centric Paradigm: A Survey of Instruction Tuning in Large Language Models
Han, Xudong, Yang, Junjie, Wang, Tianyang, Bi, Ziqian, Song, Xinyuan, Hao, Junfeng, Song, Junhao
Instruction tuning is a pivotal technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human intentions, safety constraints, and domain-specific requirements. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the full pipeline, encompassing (i) data collection methodologies, (ii) full-parameter and parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategies, and (iii) evaluation protocols. We categorized data construction into three major paradigms: expert annotation, distillation from larger models, and self-improvement mechanisms, each offering distinct trade-offs between quality, scalability, and resource cost. Fine-tuning techniques range from conventional supervised training to lightweight approaches, such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and prefix tuning, with a focus on computational efficiency and model reusability. We further examine the challenges of evaluating faithfulness, utility, and safety across multilingual and multimodal scenarios, highlighting the emergence of domain-specific benchmarks in healthcare, legal, and financial applications. Finally, we discuss promising directions for automated data generation, adaptive optimization, and robust evaluation frameworks, arguing that a closer integration of data, algorithms, and human feedback is essential for advancing instruction-tuned LLMs. This survey aims to serve as a practical reference for researchers and practitioners seeking to design LLMs that are both effective and reliably aligned with human intentions.
ReFactX: Scalable Reasoning with Reliable Facts via Constrained Generation
Pozzi, Riccardo, Palmonari, Matteo, Coletta, Andrea, Bellomarini, Luigi, Lehmann, Jens, Vahdati, Sahar
Knowledge gaps and hallucinations are persistent challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs), which generate unreliable responses when lacking the necessary information to fulfill user instructions. Existing approaches, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and tool use, aim to address these issues by incorporating external knowledge. Yet, they rely on additional models or services, resulting in complex pipelines, potential error propagation, and often requiring the model to process a large number of tokens. In this paper, we present a scalable method that enables LLMs to access external knowledge without depending on retrievers or auxiliary models. Our approach uses constrained generation with a pre-built prefix-tree index. Triples from a Knowledge Graph are verbalized in textual facts, tokenized, and indexed in a prefix tree for efficient access. During inference, to acquire external knowledge, the LLM generates facts with constrained generation which allows only sequences of tokens that form an existing fact. We evaluate our proposal on Question Answering and show that it scales to large knowledge bases (800 million facts), adapts to domain-specific data, and achieves effective results. These gains come with minimal generation-time overhead. ReFactX code is available at https://github.com/rpo19/ReFactX.
A Data-driven ML Approach for Maximizing Performance in LLM-Adapter Serving
Agullo, Ferran, Oliveras, Joan, Wang, Chen, Gutierrez-Torre, Alberto, Tardieu, Olivier, Youssef, Alaa, Torres, Jordi, Berral, Josep Ll.
With the rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), LLM-adapters have become increasingly common, providing lightweight specialization of large-scale models. Serving hundreds or thousands of these adapters on a single GPU allows request aggregation, increasing throughput, but may also cause request starvation if GPU memory limits are exceeded. To address this issue, this study focuses on determining the joint configuration of concurrent and parallel adapters that maximizes GPU throughput without inducing starvation, given heterogeneous adapter and traffic properties. We propose a data-driven ML approach leveraging interpretable models to tackle this caching problem and introduce the first Digital Twin capable of reproducing an LLM-adapter serving system, enabling efficient training data generation. Experiments with the vLLM framework and LoRA adapters show that the Digital Twin reproduces throughput within 5.1% of real results, while the ML approach predicts optimal numbers of concurrent and parallel adapters with an error of at most 7.2% under heterogeneous, real-world workloads. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/FerranAgulloLopez/GPULLMAdapterOptimization.
RAT: Bridging RNN Efficiency and Attention Accuracy via Chunk-based Sequence Modeling
Wei, Xiuying, Yadav, Anunay, Pascanu, Razvan, Gulcehre, Caglar
Transformers have become the cornerstone of modern large-scale language models, but their reliance on softmax attention poses a computational bottleneck at both training and inference. Recurrent models offer high efficiency, but compressing the full sequence into a fixed-size and holistic representation can suffer from memory degradation in long contexts and limit fine-grained retrieval. To address this, we propose RAT, an intermediate design that bridges the efficiency of RNNs and capacity of attention. RAT partitions the input into chunks, applies recurrence within each chunk for local dependencies, and softmax-based attention across chunks for long-range interactions. This design mitigates memory degradation and enables direct access to distant tokens, while retaining computational efficiency. Empirically, with a chunk size of 16, the RAT block achieves a 7$\times$ improvement in training speed for 100K sequence length and 9$times$ in generation at the 4K position, while maintaining similar performance compared to standard attention. We demonstrate this by training 1.3B parameter models from scratch and performing large-scale evaluations, including short- and long-context benchmarks, as well as supervised fine-tuning~(SFT). We further propose a hybrid architecture that interleaves RAT with local attention. By combining efficient long-range modeling with strong local interactions, this hybrid design not only improves inference speed and reduces cache memory usage, but also consistently enhances performance and shows the overall best results. Code is available at https://github.com/CLAIRE-Labo/RAT.