Language models can be sampled multiple times to access the distribution underlying their responses, but existing methods cannot efficiently synthesize rich epistemic signals across different long-form responses. We introduce Consensus Graphs (ConGrs), a flexible DAG-based data structure that represents shared information, as well as semantic variation in a set of sampled LM responses to the same prompt. We construct ConGrs using a light-weight lexical sequence alignment algorithm from bioinformatics, supplemented by the targeted usage of a secondary LM judge. Further, we design task-dependent decoding methods to synthesize a single, final response from our ConGr data structure. Our experiments show that synthesizing responses from ConGrs improves factual precision on two biography generation tasks by up to 31% over an average response and reduces reliance on LM judges by more than 80% compared to other methods. We also use ConGrs for three refusal-based tasks requiring abstention on unanswerable queries and find that abstention rate is increased by up to 56%. We apply our approach to the MATH and AIME reasoning tasks and find an improvement over self-verification and majority vote baselines by up to 6 points of accuracy. We show that ConGrs provide a flexible method for capturing variation in LM responses and using the epistemic signals provided by response variation to synthesize more effective responses.

The rapid increase of the data scale in Internet of Vehicles (IoV) system paradigm, hews out new possibilities in boosting the service quality for the emerging applications through data sharing. Nevertheless, privacy concerns are major bottlenecks for data providers to share private data in traditional IoV networks. To this end, federated learning (FL) as an emerging learning paradigm, where data providers only send local model updates trained on their local raw data rather than upload any raw data, has been recently proposed to build a privacy-preserving data sharing models. Unfortunately, by analyzing on the differences of uploaded local model updates from data providers, private information can still be divulged, and performance of the system cannot be guaranteed when partial federated nodes executes malicious behavior. Additionally, traditional cloud-based FL poses challenges to the communication overhead with the rapid increase of terminal equipment in IoV system. All these issues inspire us to propose an autonomous blockchain empowered privacy-preserving FL framework in this paper, where the mobile edge computing (MEC) technology was naturally integrated in IoV system.

We are often interested in clustering objects that evolve over time and identifying solutions to the clustering problem for every time step. Evolutionary clustering provides insight into cluster evolution and temporal changes in cluster memberships while enabling performance superior to that achieved by independently clustering data collected at different time points. In this paper we introduce evolutionary affinity propagation (EAP), an evolutionary clustering algorithm that groups data points by exchanging messages on a factor graph. EAP promotes temporal smoothness of the solution to clustering time-evolving data by linking the nodes of the factor graph that are associated with adjacent data snapshots, and introduces consensus nodes to enable cluster tracking and identification of cluster births and deaths. Unlike existing evolutionary clustering methods that require additional processing to approximate the number of clusters or match them across time, EAP determines the number of clusters and tracks them automatically. A comparison with existing methods on simulated and experimental data demonstrates effectiveness of the proposed EAP algorithm.