TPD: Enhancing Student Language Model Reasoning via Principle Discovery and Guidance

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently showcased remarkable reasoning abilities. However, larger models often surpass their smaller counterparts in reasoning tasks, posing the challenge of effectively transferring these capabilities from larger models. Existing approaches heavily rely on extensive fine-tuning data or continuous interactions with a superior teacher LLM during inference. We introduce a principle-based teacher-student framework called ``Teaching via Principle Discovery'' (TPD) to address these limitations. Inspired by human learning mechanisms, TPD mimics the interaction between a teacher and a student using a principle-based approach. The teacher LLM generates problem-solving instructions and corrective principles based on the student LLM's errors. These principles guide the refinement of instructions and the selection of instructive examples from a validation set. This enables the student model to learn from both the teacher's guidance and its own mistakes. Once the student model begins making inferences, TPD requires no further intervention from the teacher LLM or humans. Through extensive experiments across eight reasoning tasks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of TPD. Compared to standard chain-of-thought prompting, TPD significantly improves the student model's performance, achieving $6.2\%$ improvement on average.

HiGen: Hierarchy-Aware Sequence Generation for Hierarchical Text Classification

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a complex subtask under multi-label text classification, characterized by a hierarchical label taxonomy and data imbalance. The best-performing models aim to learn a static representation by combining document and hierarchical label information. However, the relevance of document sections can vary based on the hierarchy level, necessitating a dynamic document representation. To address this, we propose HiGen, a text-generation-based framework utilizing language models to encode dynamic text representations. We introduce a level-guided loss function to capture the relationship between text and label name semantics. Our approach incorporates a task-specific pretraining strategy, adapting the language model to in-domain knowledge and significantly enhancing performance for classes with limited examples. Furthermore, we present a new and valuable dataset called ENZYME, designed for HTC, which comprises articles from PubMed with the goal of predicting Enzyme Commission (EC) numbers. Through extensive experiments on the ENZYME dataset and the widely recognized WOS and NYT datasets, our methodology demonstrates superior performance, surpassing existing approaches while efficiently handling data and mitigating class imbalance. The data and code will be released publicly.

LightSleepNet: Design of a Personalized Portable Sleep Staging System Based on Single-Channel EEG

This paper proposed LightSleepNet - a light-weight, 1-d Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based personalized architecture for real-time sleep staging, which can be implemented on various mobile platforms with limited hardware resources. The proposed architecture only requires an input of 30s single-channel EEG signal for the classification. Two residual blocks consisting of group 1-d convolution are used instead of the traditional convolution layers to remove the redundancy in the CNN. Channel shuffles are inserted into each convolution layer to improve the accuracy. In order to avoid over-fitting to the training set, a Global Average Pooling (GAP) layer is used to replace the fully connected layer, which further reduces the total number of the model parameters significantly. A personalized algorithm combining Adaptive Batch Normalization (AdaBN) and gradient re-weighting is proposed for unsupervised domain adaptation. A higher priority is given to examples that are easy to transfer to the new subject, and the algorithm could be personalized for new subjects without re-training. Experimental results show a state-of-the-art overall accuracy of 83.8% with only 45.76 Million Floating-point Operations per Second (MFLOPs) computation and 43.08 K parameters.

FinSQL: Model-Agnostic LLMs-based Text-to-SQL Framework for Financial Analysis

Text-to-SQL, which provides zero-code interface for operating relational databases, has gained much attention in financial analysis; because, financial professionals may not well-skilled in SQL programming. However, until now, there is no practical Text-to-SQL benchmark dataset for financial analysis, and existing Text-to-SQL methods have not considered the unique characteristics of databases in financial applications, such as commonly existing wide tables. To address these issues, we collect a practical Text-to-SQL benchmark dataset and propose a model-agnostic Large Language Model (LLMs)-based Text-to-SQL framework for financial analysis. The benchmark dataset, BULL, is collected from the practical financial analysis business of Hundsun Technologies Inc., including databases for fund, stock, and macro economy. Besides, the proposed LLMs-based Text-to-SQL framework, FinSQL, provides a systematic treatment for financial Text-to-SQL from the perspectives of prompt construction, parameter-efficient fine-tuning and output calibration. Extensive experimental results on BULL demonstrate that FinSQL achieves the state-of-the-art Text-to-SQL performance at a small cost; furthermore, FinSQL can bring up to 36.64% performance improvement in scenarios requiring few-shot cross-database model transfer.

Large Language Models are Efficient Learners of Noise-Robust Speech Recognition

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have promoted generative error correction (GER) for automatic speech recognition (ASR), which leverages the rich linguistic knowledge and powerful reasoning ability of LLMs to improve recognition results. The latest work proposes a GER benchmark with HyPoradise dataset to learn the mapping from ASR N-best hypotheses to ground-truth transcription by efficient LLM finetuning, which shows great effectiveness but lacks specificity on noise-robust ASR. In this work, we extend the benchmark to noisy conditions and investigate if we can teach LLMs to perform denoising for GER just like what robust ASR do}, where one solution is introducing noise information as a conditioner into LLM. However, directly incorporating noise embeddings from audio encoder could harm the LLM tuning due to cross-modality gap. To this end, we propose to extract a language-space noise embedding from the N-best list to represent the noise conditions of source speech, which can promote the denoising process in GER. Furthermore, in order to enhance its representation ability of audio noise, we design a knowledge distillation (KD) approach via mutual information estimation to distill the real noise information in audio embeddings to our language embedding. Experiments on various latest LLMs demonstrate our approach achieves a new breakthrough with up to 53.9% correction improvement in terms of word error rate while with limited training data. Analysis shows that our language-space noise embedding can well represent the noise conditions of source speech, under which off-the-shelf LLMs show strong ability of language-space denoising.

3DMIT: 3D Multi-modal Instruction Tuning for Scene Understanding

The remarkable potential of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) in comprehending both vision and language information has been widely acknowledged. However, the scarcity of 3D scenes-language pairs in comparison to their 2D counterparts, coupled with the inadequacy of existing approaches in understanding of 3D scenes by LLMs, poses a significant challenge. In response, we collect and construct an extensive dataset comprising 75K instruction-response pairs tailored for 3D scenes. This dataset addresses tasks related to 3D VQA, 3D grounding, and 3D conversation. To further enhance the integration of 3D spatial information into LLMs, we introduce a novel and efficient prompt tuning paradigm, 3DMIT. This paradigm eliminates the alignment stage between 3D scenes and language and extends the instruction prompt with the 3D modality information including the entire scene and segmented objects. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method across diverse tasks in the 3D scene domain and find that our approach serves as a strategic means to enrich LLMs' comprehension of the 3D world. Our code is available at https://github.com/staymylove/3DMIT.

Misconfidence-based Demonstration Selection for LLM In-Context Learning

In-context learning with large language models (LLMs) excels at adapting to various tasks rapidly. However, its success hinges on carefully selecting demonstrations, which remains an obstacle in practice. Current approaches to this problem either rely on hard-to-acquire external supervision or require frequent interactions with LLMs, resulting in high costs. We propose a new method called In-Context Reflection (ICR) to overcome these challenges. ICR strategically selects demonstrations to reduce the discrepancy between the LLM's outputs and the actual input-output mappings. Specifically, ICR starts with a random set of initial demonstrations, then iteratively refines it. In each step, it analyzes a pool of candidate examples and identifies the ones most likely to challenge the LLM's current understanding, measured by a new metric called misconfidence. These most confusing examples are then selected to replace the less informative demonstrations in the current set. Our comprehensive evaluation across five diverse datasets encompassing 13 subtasks shows the efficacy of ICR. Compared to existing methods, ICR achieves an average performance boost of 4%, while demonstrating remarkable cross-task generalization capabilities.

Multi-Channel Multi-Domain based Knowledge Distillation Algorithm for Sleep Staging with Single-Channel EEG

This paper proposed a Multi-Channel Multi-Domain (MCMD) based knowledge distillation algorithm for sleep staging using single-channel EEG. Both knowledge from different domains and different channels are learnt in the proposed algorithm, simultaneously. A multi-channel pre-training and single-channel fine-tuning scheme is used in the proposed work. The knowledge from different channels in the source domain is transferred to the single-channel model in the target domain. A pre-trained teacher-student model scheme is used to distill knowledge from the multi-channel teacher model to the single-channel student model combining with output transfer and intermediate feature transfer in the target domain. The proposed algorithm achieves a state-of-the-art single-channel sleep staging accuracy of 86.5%, with only 0.6% deterioration from the state-of-the-art multi-channel model. There is an improvement of 2% compared to the baseline model. The experimental results show that knowledge from multiple domains (different datasets) and multiple channels (e.g. EMG, EOG) could be transferred to single-channel sleep staging.

A Closed-loop Brain-Machine Interface SoC Featuring a 0.2$μ$J/class Multiplexer Based Neural Network

This work presents the first fabricated electrophysiology-optogenetic closed-loop bidirectional brain-machine interface (CL-BBMI) system-on-chip (SoC) with electrical neural signal recording, on-chip sleep staging and optogenetic stimulation. The first multiplexer with static assignment based table lookup solution (MUXnet) for multiplier-free NN processor was proposed. A state-of-the-art average accuracy of 82.4% was achieved with an energy consumption of only 0.2$\mu$J/class in sleep staging task.

Towards Modeling Uncertainties of Self-explaining Neural Networks via Conformal Prediction

Despite the recent progress in deep neural networks (DNNs), it remains challenging to explain the predictions made by DNNs. Existing explanation methods for DNNs mainly focus on post-hoc explanations where another explanatory model is employed to provide explanations. The fact that post-hoc methods can fail to reveal the actual original reasoning process of DNNs raises the need to build DNNs with built-in interpretability. Motivated by this, many self-explaining neural networks have been proposed to generate not only accurate predictions but also clear and intuitive insights into why a particular decision was made. However, existing self-explaining networks are limited in providing distribution-free uncertainty quantification for the two simultaneously generated prediction outcomes (i.e., a sample's final prediction and its corresponding explanations for interpreting that prediction). Importantly, they also fail to establish a connection between the confidence values assigned to the generated explanations in the interpretation layer and those allocated to the final predictions in the ultimate prediction layer. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, in this paper, we design a novel uncertainty modeling framework for self-explaining networks, which not only demonstrates strong distribution-free uncertainty modeling performance for the generated explanations in the interpretation layer but also excels in producing efficient and effective prediction sets for the final predictions based on the informative high-level basis explanations. We perform the theoretical analysis for the proposed framework. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed uncertainty framework.