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Collaborating Authors

 White, Colin


Humanity's Last Exam

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Benchmarks are important tools for tracking the rapid advancements in large language model (LLM) capabilities. However, benchmarks are not keeping pace in difficulty: LLMs now achieve over 90\% accuracy on popular benchmarks like MMLU, limiting informed measurement of state-of-the-art LLM capabilities. In response, we introduce Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, designed to be the final closed-ended academic benchmark of its kind with broad subject coverage. HLE consists of 3,000 questions across dozens of subjects, including mathematics, humanities, and the natural sciences. HLE is developed globally by subject-matter experts and consists of multiple-choice and short-answer questions suitable for automated grading. Each question has a known solution that is unambiguous and easily verifiable, but cannot be quickly answered via internet retrieval. State-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate low accuracy and calibration on HLE, highlighting a significant gap between current LLM capabilities and the expert human frontier on closed-ended academic questions. To inform research and policymaking upon a clear understanding of model capabilities, we publicly release HLE at https://lastexam.ai.


Transformers Boost the Performance of Decision Trees on Tabular Data across Sample Sizes

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) perform remarkably well on tabular datasets in zero- and few-shot settings, since they can extract meaning from natural language column headers that describe features and labels. Similarly, TabPFN, a recent non-LLM transformer pretrained on numerous tables for in-context learning, has demonstrated excellent performance for dataset sizes up to a thousand samples. In contrast, gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDTs) are typically trained from scratch on each dataset without benefiting from pretraining data and must learn the relationships between columns from their entries alone since they lack natural language understanding. LLMs and TabPFN excel on small tabular datasets where a strong prior is essential, yet they are not competitive with GBDTs on medium or large datasets, since their context lengths are limited. In this paper, we propose a simple and lightweight approach for fusing large language models and TabPFN with gradient-boosted decision trees, which allows scalable GBDTs to benefit from the natural language capabilities and pretraining of transformers. We name our fusion methods LLM-Boost and PFN-Boost, respectively. While matching or surpassing the performance of the transformer at sufficiently small dataset sizes and GBDTs at sufficiently large sizes, LLM-Boost and PFN-Boost outperform both standalone components on a wide range of dataset sizes in between. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance against numerous baselines and ensembling algorithms. We find that PFN-Boost achieves the best average performance among all methods we test for all but very small dataset sizes. We release our code at http://github.com/MayukaJ/LLM-Boost .


LiveBench: A Challenging, Contamination-Free LLM Benchmark

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Test set contamination, wherein test data from a benchmark ends up in a newer model's training set, is a well-documented obstacle for fair LLM evaluation and can quickly render benchmarks obsolete. To mitigate this, many recent benchmarks crowdsource new prompts and evaluations from human or LLM judges; however, these can introduce significant biases, and break down when scoring hard questions. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark for LLMs designed to be immune to both test set contamination and the pitfalls of LLM judging and human crowdsourcing. We release LiveBench, the first benchmark that (1) contains frequently-updated questions from recent information sources, (2) scores answers automatically according to objective ground-truth values, and (3) contains a wide variety of challenging tasks, spanning math, coding, reasoning, language, instruction following, and data analysis. To achieve this, LiveBench contains questions that are based on recently-released math competitions, arXiv papers, news articles, and datasets, and it contains harder, contamination-free versions of tasks from previous benchmarks such as Big-Bench Hard, AMPS, and IFEval. We evaluate many prominent closed-source models, as well as dozens of open-source models ranging from 0.5B to 110B in size. LiveBench is difficult, with top models achieving below 65% accuracy. We release all questions, code, and model answers. Questions will be added and updated on a monthly basis, and we will release new tasks and harder versions of tasks over time so that LiveBench can distinguish between the capabilities of LLMs as they improve in the future. We welcome community engagement and collaboration for expanding the benchmark tasks and models.


Pretraining Codomain Attention Neural Operators for Solving Multiphysics PDEs

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Existing neural operator architectures face challenges when solving multiphysics problems with coupled partial differential equations (PDEs), due to complex geometries, interactions between physical variables, and the lack of large amounts of high-resolution training data. To address these issues, we propose Codomain Attention Neural Operator (CoDA-NO), which tokenizes functions along the codomain or channel space, enabling self-supervised learning or pretraining of multiple PDE systems. Specifically, we extend positional encoding, self-attention, and normalization layers to the function space. CoDA-NO can learn representations of different PDE systems with a single model. We evaluate CoDA-NO's potential as a backbone for learning multiphysics PDEs over multiple systems by considering few-shot learning settings. On complex downstream tasks with limited data, such as fluid flow simulations and fluid-structure interactions, we found CoDA-NO to outperform existing methods on the few-shot learning task by over $36\%$. The code is available at https://github.com/ashiq24/CoDA-NO.


TuneTables: Context Optimization for Scalable Prior-Data Fitted Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

While tabular classification has traditionally relied on from-scratch training, a recent breakthrough called prior-data fitted networks (PFNs) challenges this approach. Similar to large language models, PFNs make use of pretraining and in-context learning to achieve strong performance on new tasks in a single forward pass. However, current PFNs have limitations that prohibit their widespread adoption. Notably, TabPFN achieves very strong performance on small tabular datasets but is not designed to make predictions for datasets of size larger than 1000. In this work, we overcome these limitations and substantially improve the performance of PFNs by developing context optimization techniques for PFNs. Specifically, we propose TuneTables, a novel prompt-tuning strategy that compresses large datasets into a smaller learned context. TuneTables scales TabPFN to be competitive with state-of-the-art tabular classification methods on larger datasets, while having a substantially lower inference time than TabPFN. Furthermore, we show that TuneTables can be used as an interpretability tool and can even be used to mitigate biases by optimizing a fairness objective.


Rethinking Bias Mitigation: Fairer Architectures Make for Fairer Face Recognition

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Face recognition systems are widely deployed in safety-critical applications, including law enforcement, yet they exhibit bias across a range of socio-demographic dimensions, such as gender and race. Conventional wisdom dictates that model biases arise from biased training data. As a consequence, previous works on bias mitigation largely focused on pre-processing the training data, adding penalties to prevent bias from effecting the model during training, or post-processing predictions to debias them, yet these approaches have shown limited success on hard problems such as face recognition. In our work, we discover that biases are actually inherent to neural network architectures themselves. Following this reframing, we conduct the first neural architecture search for fairness, jointly with a search for hyperparameters. Our search outputs a suite of models which Pareto-dominate all other high-performance architectures and existing bias mitigation methods in terms of accuracy and fairness, often by large margins, on the two most widely used datasets for face identification, CelebA and VGGFace2. Furthermore, these models generalize to other datasets and sensitive attributes. We release our code, models and raw data files at https://github.com/dooleys/FR-NAS.


ForecastPFN: Synthetically-Trained Zero-Shot Forecasting

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The vast majority of time-series forecasting approaches require a substantial training dataset. However, many real-life forecasting applications have very little initial observations, sometimes just 40 or fewer. Thus, the applicability of most forecasting methods is restricted in data-sparse commercial applications. While there is recent work in the setting of very limited initial data (so-called `zero-shot' forecasting), its performance is inconsistent depending on the data used for pretraining. In this work, we take a different approach and devise ForecastPFN, the first zero-shot forecasting model trained purely on a novel synthetic data distribution. ForecastPFN is a prior-data fitted network, trained to approximate Bayesian inference, which can make predictions on a new time series dataset in a single forward pass. Through extensive experiments, we show that zero-shot predictions made by ForecastPFN are more accurate and faster compared to state-of-the-art forecasting methods, even when the other methods are allowed to train on hundreds of additional in-distribution data points.


When Do Neural Nets Outperform Boosted Trees on Tabular Data?

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Tabular data is one of the most commonly used types of data in machine learning. Despite recent advances in neural nets (NNs) for tabular data, there is still an active discussion on whether or not NNs generally outperform gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDTs) on tabular data, with several recent works arguing either that GBDTs consistently outperform NNs on tabular data, or vice versa. In this work, we take a step back and question the importance of this debate. To this end, we conduct the largest tabular data analysis to date, comparing 19 algorithms across 176 datasets, and we find that the 'NN vs. GBDT' debate is overemphasized: for a surprisingly high number of datasets, either the performance difference between GBDTs and NNs is negligible, or light hyperparameter tuning on a GBDT is more important than choosing between NNs and GBDTs. A remarkable exception is the recently-proposed prior-data fitted network, TabPFN: although it is effectively limited to training sets of size 3000, we find that it outperforms all other algorithms on average, even when randomly sampling 3000 training datapoints. Next, we analyze dozens of metafeatures to determine what properties of a dataset make NNs or GBDTs better-suited to perform well. For example, we find that GBDTs are much better than NNs at handling skewed or heavy-tailed feature distributions and other forms of dataset irregularities. Our insights act as a guide for practitioners to determine which techniques may work best on their dataset. Finally, with the goal of accelerating tabular data research, we release the TabZilla Benchmark Suite: a collection of the 36 'hardest' of the datasets we study. Our benchmark suite, codebase, and all raw results are available at https://github.com/naszilla/tabzilla.


Data Contamination Through the Lens of Time

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent claims about the impressive abilities of large language models (LLMs) are often supported by evaluating publicly available benchmarks. Since LLMs train on wide swaths of the internet, this practice raises concerns of data contamination, i.e., evaluating on examples that are explicitly or implicitly included in the training data. Data contamination remains notoriously challenging to measure and mitigate, even with partial attempts like controlled experimentation of training data, canary strings, or embedding similarities. In this work, we conduct the first thorough longitudinal analysis of data contamination in LLMs by using the natural experiment of training cutoffs in GPT models to look at benchmarks released over time. Specifically, we consider two code/mathematical problem-solving datasets, Codeforces and Project Euler, and find statistically significant trends among LLM pass rate vs. GitHub popularity and release date that provide strong evidence of contamination. By open-sourcing our dataset, raw results, and evaluation framework, our work paves the way for rigorous analyses of data contamination in modern models. We conclude with a discussion of best practices and future steps for publicly releasing benchmarks in the age of LLMs that train on webscale data.


Speeding up Fourier Neural Operators via Mixed Precision

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Fourier neural operator (FNO) is a powerful technique for learning surrogate maps for partial differential equation (PDE) solution operators. For many real-world applications, which often require high-resolution data points, training time and memory usage are significant bottlenecks. While there are mixed-precision training techniques for standard neural networks, those work for real-valued datatypes on finite dimensions and therefore cannot be directly applied to FNO, which crucially operates in the (complex-valued) Fourier domain and in function spaces. On the other hand, since the Fourier transform is already an approximation (due to discretization error), we do not need to perform the operation at full precision. In this work, we (i) profile memory and runtime for FNO with full and mixed-precision training, (ii) conduct a study on the numerical stability of mixed-precision training of FNO, and (iii) devise a training routine which substantially decreases training time and memory usage (up to 34%), with little or no reduction in accuracy, on the Navier-Stokes and Darcy flow equations. Combined with the recently proposed tensorized FNO (Kossaifi et al., 2023), the resulting model has far better performance while also being significantly faster than the original FNO.