Data quality is crucial for training Large Language Models (LLMs). Traditional heuristic filters often miss low-quality text or mistakenly remove valuable content. In this paper, we introduce an LLM-based line-level filtering method to enhance training data quality. We use GPT-4o mini to label a 20,000-document sample from FineWeb at the line level, allowing the model to create descriptive labels for low-quality lines. These labels are grouped into nine main categories, and we train a DeBERTa-v3 classifier to scale the filtering to a 10B-token subset of FineWeb. To test the impact of our filtering, we train GPT-2 models on both the original and the filtered datasets. The results show that models trained on the filtered data achieve higher accuracy on the HellaSwag benchmark and reach their performance targets faster, even with up to 25\% less data. This demonstrates that LLM-based line-level filtering can significantly improve data quality and training efficiency for LLMs. We release our quality-annotated dataset, FinerWeb-10BT, and the codebase to support further work in this area.

Semantic Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) systems struggle to map semantically similar objects in close proximity, especially in cluttered indoor environments. We introduce Semantic Enhancement for Object SLAM (SEO-SLAM), a novel SLAM system that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enhance object-level semantic mapping in such environments. SEO-SLAM tackles existing challenges by (1) generating more specific and descriptive open-vocabulary object labels using MLLMs, (2) simultaneously correcting factors causing erroneous landmarks, and (3) dynamically updating a multiclass confusion matrix to mitigate object detector biases. Our approach enables more precise distinctions between similar objects and maintains map coherence by reflecting scene changes through MLLM feedback. We evaluate SEO-SLAM on our challenging dataset, demonstrating enhanced accuracy and robustness in environments with multiple similar objects. Our system outperforms existing approaches in terms of landmark matching accuracy and semantic consistency. Results show the feedback from MLLM improves object-centric semantic mapping. Our dataset is publicly available at: jungseokhong.com/SEO-SLAM.

We introduce a group of related methods for binary classification tasks using probes of the hidden state activations in large language models (LLMs). Performance is on par with the largest and most advanced LLMs currently available, but requiring orders of magnitude fewer computational resources and not requiring labeled data. This approach involves translating class labels into a semantically rich description, spontaneous symmetry breaking of multilayer perceptron probes for unsupervised learning and inference, training probes to generate confidence scores (prior probabilities) from hidden state activations subject to known constraints via entropy maximization, and selecting the most confident probe model from an ensemble for prediction. These techniques are evaluated on four datasets using five base LLMs.

Semantic text similarity plays an important role in software engineering tasks in which engineers are requested to clarify the semantics of descriptive labels (e.g., business terms, table column names) that are often consists of too short or too generic words and appears in their IT systems. We formulate this type of problem as a task of matching descriptive labels to glossary descriptions. We then propose a framework to leverage an existing semantic text similarity measurement (STS) and augment it using semantic label enrichment and set-based collective contextualization where the former is a method to retrieve sentences relevant to a given label and the latter is a method to compute similarity between two contexts each of which is derived from a set of texts (e.g., column names in the same table). We performed an experiment on two datasets derived from publicly available data sources. The result indicated that the proposed methods helped the underlying STS correctly match more descriptive labels with the descriptions.