Zhang, Jianguo
ActionStudio: A Lightweight Framework for Data and Training of Large Action Models
Zhang, Jianguo, Hoang, Thai, Zhu, Ming, Liu, Zuxin, Wang, Shiyu, Awalgaonkar, Tulika, Prabhakar, Akshara, Chen, Haolin, Yao, Weiran, Liu, Zhiwei, Tan, Juntao, Niebles, Juan Carlos, Heinecke, Shelby, Wang, Huan, Savarese, Silvio, Xiong, Caiming
Action models are essential for enabling autonomous agents to perform complex tasks. However, training large action models remains challenging due to the diversity of agent environments and the complexity of agentic data. Despite growing interest, existing infrastructure provides limited support for scalable, agent-specific fine-tuning. We present ActionStudio, a lightweight and extensible data and training framework designed for large action models. ActionStudio unifies heterogeneous agent trajectories through a standardized format, supports diverse training paradigms including LoRA, full fine-tuning, and distributed setups, and integrates robust preprocessing and verification tools. We validate its effectiveness across both public and realistic industry benchmarks, demonstrating strong performance and practical scalability. We open-sourced code and data at https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/xLAM to facilitate research in the community.
PersonaBench: Evaluating AI Models on Understanding Personal Information through Accessing (Synthetic) Private User Data
Tan, Juntao, Yang, Liangwei, Liu, Zuxin, Liu, Zhiwei, Murthy, Rithesh, Awalgaonkar, Tulika Manoj, Zhang, Jianguo, Yao, Weiran, Zhu, Ming, Kokane, Shirley, Savarese, Silvio, Wang, Huan, Xiong, Caiming, Heinecke, Shelby
Personalization is critical in AI assistants, particularly in the context of private AI models that work with individual users. A key scenario in this domain involves enabling AI models to access and interpret a user's private data (e.g., conversation history, user-AI interactions, app usage) to understand personal details such as biographical information, preferences, and social connections. However, due to the sensitive nature of such data, there are no publicly available datasets that allow us to assess an AI model's ability to understand users through direct access to personal information. To address this gap, we introduce a synthetic data generation pipeline that creates diverse, realistic user profiles and private documents simulating human activities. Leveraging this synthetic data, we present PersonaBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate AI models' performance in understanding personal information derived from simulated private user data. We evaluate Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines using questions directly related to a user's personal information, supported by the relevant private documents provided to the models. Our results reveal that current retrieval-augmented AI models struggle to answer private questions by extracting personal information from user documents, highlighting the need for improved methodologies to enhance personalization capabilities in AI.
Hengqin-RA-v1: Advanced Large Language Model for Diagnosis and Treatment of Rheumatoid Arthritis with Dataset based Traditional Chinese Medicine
Liu, Yishen, Luo, Shengda, Zhong, Zishao, Wu, Tongtong, Zhang, Jianguo, Ou, Peiyao, Liang, Yong, Liu, Liang, Pan, Hudan
Large language models (LLMs) primarily trained on English texts, often face biases and inaccuracies in Chinese contexts. Their limitations are pronounced in fields like Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), where cultural and clinical subtleties are vital, further hindered by a lack of domain-specific data, such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA). To address these issues, this paper introduces Hengqin-RA-v1, the first large language model specifically tailored for TCM with a focus on diagnosing and treating RA. We also present HQ-GCM-RA-C1, a comprehensive RA-specific dataset curated from ancient Chinese medical literature, classical texts, and modern clinical studies. This dataset empowers Hengqin-RA-v1 to deliver accurate and culturally informed responses, effectively bridging the gaps left by general-purpose models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Hengqin-RA-v1 outperforms state-of-the-art models, even surpassing the diagnostic accuracy of TCM practitioners in certain cases.
Bridging the Data Provenance Gap Across Text, Speech and Video
Longpre, Shayne, Singh, Nikhil, Cherep, Manuel, Tiwary, Kushagra, Materzynska, Joanna, Brannon, William, Mahari, Robert, Dey, Manan, Hamdy, Mohammed, Saxena, Nayan, Anis, Ahmad Mustafa, Alghamdi, Emad A., Chien, Vu Minh, Obeng-Marnu, Naana, Yin, Da, Qian, Kun, Li, Yizhi, Liang, Minnie, Dinh, An, Mohanty, Shrestha, Mataciunas, Deividas, South, Tobin, Zhang, Jianguo, Lee, Ariel N., Lund, Campbell S., Klamm, Christopher, Sileo, Damien, Misra, Diganta, Shippole, Enrico, Klyman, Kevin, Miranda, Lester JV, Muennighoff, Niklas, Ye, Seonghyeon, Kim, Seungone, Gupta, Vipul, Sharma, Vivek, Zhou, Xuhui, Xiong, Caiming, Villa, Luis, Biderman, Stella, Pentland, Alex, Hooker, Sara, Kabbara, Jad
Progress in AI is driven largely by the scale and quality of training data. Despite this, there is a deficit of empirical analysis examining the attributes of well-established datasets beyond text. In this work we conduct the largest and first-of-its-kind longitudinal audit across modalities--popular text, speech, and video datasets--from their detailed sourcing trends and use restrictions to their geographical and linguistic representation. Our manual analysis covers nearly 4000 public datasets between 1990-2024, spanning 608 languages, 798 sources, 659 organizations, and 67 countries. We find that multimodal machine learning applications have overwhelmingly turned to web-crawled, synthetic, and social media platforms, such as YouTube, for their training sets, eclipsing all other sources since 2019. Secondly, tracing the chain of dataset derivations we find that while less than 33% of datasets are restrictively licensed, over 80% of the source content in widely-used text, speech, and video datasets, carry non-commercial restrictions. Finally, counter to the rising number of languages and geographies represented in public AI training datasets, our audit demonstrates measures of relative geographical and multilingual representation have failed to significantly improve their coverage since 2013. We believe the breadth of our audit enables us to empirically examine trends in data sourcing, restrictions, and Western-centricity at an ecosystem-level, and that visibility into these questions are essential to progress in responsible AI. As a contribution to ongoing improvements in dataset transparency and responsible use, we release our entire multimodal audit, allowing practitioners to trace data provenance across text, speech, and video.
SpecTool: A Benchmark for Characterizing Errors in Tool-Use LLMs
Kokane, Shirley, Zhu, Ming, Awalgaonkar, Tulika, Zhang, Jianguo, Hoang, Thai, Prabhakar, Akshara, Liu, Zuxin, Lan, Tian, Yang, Liangwei, Tan, Juntao, Murthy, Rithesh, Yao, Weiran, Liu, Zhiwei, Niebles, Juan Carlos, Wang, Huan, Heinecke, Shelby, Xiong, Caiming, Savarese, Silivo
Evaluating the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) is one of the most critical aspects of building a performant compound AI system. Since the output from LLMs propagate to downstream steps, identifying LLM errors is crucial to system performance. A common task for LLMs in AI systems is tool use. While there are several benchmark environments for evaluating LLMs on this task, they typically only give a success rate without any explanation of the failure cases. To solve this problem, we introduce SpecTool, a new benchmark to identify error patterns in LLM output on tool-use tasks. Our benchmark data set comprises of queries from diverse environments that can be used to test for the presence of seven newly characterized error patterns. Using SPECTOOL , we show that even the most prominent LLMs exhibit these error patterns in their outputs. Researchers can use the analysis and insights from SPECTOOL to guide their error mitigation strategies.
PRACT: Optimizing Principled Reasoning and Acting of LLM Agent
Liu, Zhiwei, Yao, Weiran, Zhang, Jianguo, Murthy, Rithesh, Yang, Liangwei, Liu, Zuxin, Lan, Tian, Zhu, Ming, Tan, Juntao, Kokane, Shirley, Hoang, Thai, Niebles, Juan Carlos, Heinecke, Shelby, Wang, Huan, Savarese, Silvio, Xiong, Caiming
We introduce the Principled Reasoning and Acting (PRAct) framework, a novel method for learning and enforcing action principles from trajectory data. Central to our approach is the use of text gradients from a reflection and optimization engine to derive these action principles. To adapt action principles to specific task requirements, we propose a new optimization framework, Reflective Principle Optimization (RPO). After execution, RPO employs a reflector to critique current action principles and an optimizer to update them accordingly. We develop the RPO framework under two scenarios: Reward-RPO, which uses environmental rewards for reflection, and Self-RPO, which conducts self-reflection without external rewards. Additionally, two RPO methods, RPO-Traj and RPO-Batch, is introduced to adapt to different settings. Experimental results across four environments demonstrate that the PRAct agent, leveraging the RPO framework, effectively learns and applies action principles to enhance performance.
SPikE-SSM: A Sparse, Precise, and Efficient Spiking State Space Model for Long Sequences Learning
Zhong, Yan, Zhao, Ruoyu, Wang, Chao, Guo, Qinghai, Zhang, Jianguo, Lu, Zhichao, Leng, Luziwei
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) provide a low-power, energy-efficient solution by utilizing the spike-based and sparse nature of biological systems. Since the advent of Transformers, SNNs have struggled to compete with artificial networks on long sequential tasks, until the recent emergence of state space models (SSMs), which offer superior computational efficiency and modeling capability. However, applying the highly capable SSMs to SNNs for long sequences learning poses three major challenges: The membrane potential is determined by the past spiking history of the neuron, leading to reduced efficiency for sequence modeling in parallel computing scenarios. Complex dynamics of biological spiking neurons are crucial for functionality but challenging to simulate and exploit effectively in large networks. It is arduous to maintain high sparsity while achieving high accuracy for spiking neurons without resorting to dense computing, as utilized in artificial neuron-based SSMs. To address these challenges, we propose a sparse, precise and efficient spiking SSM framework, termed SPikE-SSM. For, we propose a boundary compression strategy (PMBC) to accelerate the inference of the spiking neuron model, enabling parallel processing for long sequence learning. For, we propose a novel and concise neuron model incorporating reset-refractory mechanism to leverage the inherent temporal dimension for dynamic computing with biological interpretability. For, we hierarchically integrate the proposed neuron model to the original SSM block, and enhance the dynamics of SPikE-SSM by incorporating trainable thresholds and refractory magnitudes to balance accuracy and sparsity. Extensive experiments illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of SPikE-SSM on the long range arena benchmarks and large language dataset WikiText-103, showing the potential of dynamic spiking neurons in efficient long sequence learning. The code will be publicly available.
An Enhanced Federated Prototype Learning Method under Domain Shift
Kuang, Liang, Guo, Kuangpu, Liang, Jian, Zhang, Jianguo
Federated Learning (FL) allows collaborative machine learning training without sharing private data. Numerous studies have shown that one significant factor affecting the performance of federated learning models is the heterogeneity of data across different clients, especially when the data is sampled from various domains. A recent paper introduces variance-aware dual-level prototype clustering and uses a novel $\alpha$-sparsity prototype loss, which increases intra-class similarity and reduces inter-class similarity. To ensure that the features converge within specific clusters, we introduce an improved algorithm, Federated Prototype Learning with Convergent Clusters, abbreviated as FedPLCC. To increase inter-class distances, we weight each prototype with the size of the cluster it represents. To reduce intra-class distances, considering that prototypes with larger distances might come from different domains, we select only a certain proportion of prototypes for the loss function calculation. Evaluations on the Digit-5, Office-10, and DomainNet datasets show that our method performs better than existing approaches.
APIGen: Automated Pipeline for Generating Verifiable and Diverse Function-Calling Datasets
Liu, Zuxin, Hoang, Thai, Zhang, Jianguo, Zhu, Ming, Lan, Tian, Kokane, Shirley, Tan, Juntao, Yao, Weiran, Liu, Zhiwei, Feng, Yihao, Murthy, Rithesh, Yang, Liangwei, Savarese, Silvio, Niebles, Juan Carlos, Wang, Huan, Heinecke, Shelby, Xiong, Caiming
The advancement of function-calling agent models requires diverse, reliable, and high-quality datasets. This paper presents APIGen, an automated data generation pipeline designed to synthesize verifiable high-quality datasets for function-calling applications. We leverage APIGen and collect 3,673 executable APIs across 21 different categories to generate diverse function-calling datasets in a scalable and structured manner. Each data in our dataset is verified through three hierarchical stages: format checking, actual function executions, and semantic verification, ensuring its reliability and correctness. We demonstrate that models trained with our curated datasets, even with only 7B parameters, can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Berkeley Function-Calling Benchmark, outperforming multiple GPT-4 models. Moreover, our 1B model achieves exceptional performance, surpassing GPT-3.5-Turbo and Claude-3 Haiku. We release a dataset containing 60,000 high-quality entries, aiming to advance the field of function-calling agent domains.
MobileAIBench: Benchmarking LLMs and LMMs for On-Device Use Cases
Murthy, Rithesh, Yang, Liangwei, Tan, Juntao, Awalgaonkar, Tulika Manoj, Zhou, Yilun, Heinecke, Shelby, Desai, Sachin, Wu, Jason, Xu, Ran, Tan, Sarah, Zhang, Jianguo, Liu, Zhiwei, Kokane, Shirley, Liu, Zuxin, Zhu, Ming, Wang, Huan, Xiong, Caiming, Savarese, Silvio
The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on mobile devices has gained significant attention due to the benefits of enhanced privacy, stability, and personalization. However, the hardware constraints of mobile devices necessitate the use of models with fewer parameters and model compression techniques like quantization. Currently, there is limited understanding of quantization's impact on various task performances, including LLM tasks, LMM tasks, and, critically, trust and safety. There is a lack of adequate tools for systematically testing these models on mobile devices. To address these gaps, we introduce MobileAIBench, a comprehensive benchmarking framework for evaluating mobile-optimized LLMs and LMMs. MobileAIBench assesses models across different sizes, quantization levels, and tasks, measuring latency and resource consumption on real devices. Our two-part open-source framework includes a library for running evaluations on desktops and an iOS app for on-device latency and hardware utilization measurements. Our thorough analysis aims to accelerate mobile AI research and deployment by providing insights into the performance and feasibility of deploying LLMs and LMMs on mobile platforms.