Instruction-Following Pruning for Large Language Models

With the rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs), structured pruning has become a widely used technique to learn efficient, smaller models from larger ones, delivering superior performance compared to training similarly sized models from scratch. In this paper, we move beyond the traditional static pruning approach of determining a fixed pruning mask for a model, and propose a dynamic approach to structured pruning. In our method, the pruning mask is input-dependent and adapts dynamically based on the information described in a user instruction. Our approach, termed "instruction-following pruning", introduces a sparse mask predictor that takes the user instruction as input and dynamically selects the most relevant model parameters for the given task. To identify and activate effective parameters, we jointly optimize the sparse mask predictor and the LLM, leveraging both instruction-following data and the pre-training corpus. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a wide range of evaluation benchmarks. For example, our 3B activated model improves over the 3B dense model by 5-8 points of absolute margin on domains such as math and coding, and rivals the performance of a 9B model.

LWFNet: Coherent Doppler Wind Lidar-Based Network for Wind Field Retrieval

Accurate detection of wind fields within the troposphere is essential for atmospheric dynamics research and plays a crucial role in extreme weather forecasting. Coherent Doppler wind lidar (CDWL) is widely regarded as the most suitable technique for high spatial and temporal resolution wind field detection. However, since coherent detection relies heavily on the concentration of aerosol particles, which cause Mie scattering, the received backscattering lidar signal exhibits significantly low intensity at high altitudes. As a result, conventional methods, such as spectral centroid estimation, often fail to produce credible and accurate wind retrieval results in these regions. To address this issue, we propose LWFNet, the first Lidar-based Wind Field (WF) retrieval neural Network, built upon Transformer and the Kolmogorov-Arnold network. Our model is trained solely on targets derived from the traditional wind retrieval algorithm and utilizes radiosonde measurements as the ground truth for test results evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that LWFNet not only extends the maximum wind field detection range but also produces more accurate results, exhibiting a level of precision that surpasses the labeled targets. This phenomenon, which we refer to as super-accuracy, is explored by investigating the potential underlying factors that contribute to this intriguing occurrence. In addition, we compare the performance of LWFNet with other state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, highlighting its superior effectiveness and capability in high-resolution wind retrieval. LWFNet demonstrates remarkable performance in lidar-based wind field retrieval, setting a benchmark for future research and advancing the development of deep learning models in this domain.

LangYa: Revolutionizing Cross-Spatiotemporal Ocean Forecasting

Ocean forecasting is crucial for both scientific research and societal benefits. Currently, the most accurate forecasting systems are global ocean forecasting systems (GOFSs), which represent the ocean state variables (OSVs) as discrete grids and solve partial differential equations (PDEs) governing the transitions of oceanic state variables using numerical methods. However, GOFSs processes are computationally expensive and prone to cumulative errors. Recently, large artificial intelligence (AI)-based models significantly boosted forecasting speed and accuracy. Unfortunately, building a large AI ocean forecasting system that can be considered cross-spatiotemporal and air-sea coupled forecasts remains a significant challenge. Here, we introduce LangYa, a cross-spatiotemporal and air-sea coupled ocean forecasting system. Results demonstrate that the time embedding module in LangYa enables a single model to make forecasts with lead times ranging from 1 to 7 days. The air-sea coupled module effectively simulates air-sea interactions. The ocean self-attention module improves network stability and accelerates convergence during training, and the adaptive thermocline loss function improves the accuracy of thermocline forecasting. Compared to existing numerical and AI-based ocean forecasting systems, LangYa uses 27 years of global ocean data from the Global Ocean Reanalysis and Simulation version 12 (GLORYS12) for training and achieves more reliable deterministic forecasting results for OSVs. LangYa forecasting system provides global ocean researchers with access to a powerful software tool for accurate ocean forecasting and opens a new paradigm for ocean science.

Unseen Horizons: Unveiling the Real Capability of LLM Code Generation Beyond the Familiar

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential in code generation tasks. However, there are still gaps before they can be fully applied in actual software development processes. Accurately assessing the code generation capabilities of large language models has become an important basis for evaluating and improving the models. Some existing works have constructed datasets to evaluate the capabilities of these models. However, the current evaluation process may encounter the illusion of "Specialist in Familiarity", primarily due to three gaps: the exposure of target code, case timeliness, and dependency availability. The fundamental reason for these gaps is that the code in current datasets may have been extensively exposed and exercised during the training phase, and due to the continuous training and development of LLM, their timeliness has been severely compromised. The key to solve the problem is to, as much as possible, evaluate the LLMs using code that they have not encountered before. Thus, the fundamental idea in this paper is to draw on the concept of code obfuscation, changing code at different levels while ensuring the functionality and output. To this end, we build a code-obfuscation based benchmark OBFUSEVAL. We first collect 1,354 raw cases from five real-world projects, including function description and code. Then we use three-level strategy (symbol, structure and semantic) to obfuscate descriptions, code and context dependencies. We evaluate four LLMs on OBFU- SEVAL and compared the effectiveness of different obfuscation strategy. We use official test suites of these projects to evaluate the generated code. The results show that after obfuscation, the average decrease ratio of test pass rate can up to 62.5%.

Cross- and Intra-image Prototypical Learning for Multi-label Disease Diagnosis and Interpretation

Recent advances in prototypical learning have shown remarkable potential to provide useful decision interpretations associating activation maps and predictions with class-specific training prototypes. Such prototypical learning has been well-studied for various single-label diseases, but for quite relevant and more challenging multi-label diagnosis, where multiple diseases are often concurrent within an image, existing prototypical learning models struggle to obtain meaningful activation maps and effective class prototypes due to the entanglement of the multiple diseases. In this paper, we present a novel Cross- and Intra-image Prototypical Learning (CIPL) framework, for accurate multi-label disease diagnosis and interpretation from medical images. CIPL takes advantage of common cross-image semantics to disentangle the multiple diseases when learning the prototypes, allowing a comprehensive understanding of complicated pathological lesions. Furthermore, we propose a new two-level alignment-based regularisation strategy that effectively leverages consistent intra-image information to enhance interpretation robustness and predictive performance. Extensive experiments show that our CIPL attains the state-of-the-art (SOTA) classification accuracy in two public multi-label benchmarks of disease diagnosis: thoracic radiography and fundus images. Quantitative interpretability results show that CIPL also has superiority in weakly-supervised thoracic disease localisation over other leading saliency- and prototype-based explanation methods.

Step-by-Step Reasoning for Math Problems via Twisted Sequential Monte Carlo

Augmenting the multi-step reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been a persistent challenge. Recently, verification has shown promise in improving solution consistency by evaluating generated outputs. However, current verification approaches suffer from sampling inefficiencies, requiring a large number of samples to achieve satisfactory performance. Additionally, training an effective verifier often depends on extensive process supervision, which is costly to acquire. In this paper, we address these limitations by introducing a novel verification method based on Twisted Sequential Monte Carlo (TSMC). TSMC sequentially refines its sampling effort to focus exploration on promising candidates, resulting in more efficient generation of high-quality solutions. We apply TSMC to LLMs by estimating the expected future rewards at partial solutions. This approach results in a more straightforward training target that eliminates the need for step-wise human annotations. We empirically demonstrate the advantages of our method across multiple math benchmarks, and also validate our theoretical analysis of both our approach and existing verification methods.

LLM Hallucinations in Practical Code Generation: Phenomena, Mechanism, and Mitigation

Code generation aims to automatically generate code from input requirements, significantly enhancing development efficiency. Recent large language models (LLMs) based approaches have shown promising results and revolutionized code generation task. Despite the promising performance, LLMs often generate contents with hallucinations, especially for the code generation scenario requiring the handling of complex contextual dependencies in practical development process. Although previous study has analyzed hallucinations in LLM-powered code generation, the study is limited to standalone function generation. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to study the phenomena, mechanism, and mitigation of LLM hallucinations within more practical and complex development contexts in repository-level generation scenario. First, we manually examine the code generation results from six mainstream LLMs to establish a hallucination taxonomy of LLM-generated code. Next, we elaborate on the phenomenon of hallucinations, analyze their distribution across different models. We then analyze causes of hallucinations and identify four potential factors contributing to hallucinations. Finally, we propose an RAG-based mitigation method, which demonstrates consistent effectiveness in all studied LLMs. The replication package including code, data, and experimental results is available at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/LLMCodingHallucination

Temporal As a Plugin: Unsupervised Video Denoising with Pre-Trained Image Denoisers

Recent advancements in deep learning have shown impressive results in image and video denoising, leveraging extensive pairs of noisy and noise-free data for supervision. However, the challenge of acquiring paired videos for dynamic scenes hampers the practical deployment of deep video denoising techniques. In contrast, this obstacle is less pronounced in image denoising, where paired data is more readily available. Thus, a well-trained image denoiser could serve as a reliable spatial prior for video denoising. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised video denoising framework, named ``Temporal As a Plugin'' (TAP), which integrates tunable temporal modules into a pre-trained image denoiser. By incorporating temporal modules, our method can harness temporal information across noisy frames, complementing its power of spatial denoising. Furthermore, we introduce a progressive fine-tuning strategy that refines each temporal module using the generated pseudo clean video frames, progressively enhancing the network's denoising performance. Compared to other unsupervised video denoising methods, our framework demonstrates superior performance on both sRGB and raw video denoising datasets.

A Survey for Large Language Models in Biomedicine

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) offer unprecedented natural language understanding and generation capabilities. However, existing surveys on LLMs in biomedicine often focus on specific applications or model architectures, lacking a comprehensive analysis that integrates the latest advancements across various biomedical domains. This review, based on an analysis of 484 publications sourced from databases including PubMed, Web of Science, and arXiv, provides an in-depth examination of the current landscape, applications, challenges, and prospects of LLMs in biomedicine, distinguishing itself by focusing on the practical implications of these models in real-world biomedical contexts. Firstly, we explore the capabilities of LLMs in zero-shot learning across a broad spectrum of biomedical tasks, including diagnostic assistance, drug discovery, and personalized medicine, among others, with insights drawn from 137 key studies. Then, we discuss adaptation strategies of LLMs, including fine-tuning methods for both uni-modal and multi-modal LLMs to enhance their performance in specialized biomedical contexts where zero-shot fails to achieve, such as medical question answering and efficient processing of biomedical literature. Finally, we discuss the challenges that LLMs face in the biomedicine domain including data privacy concerns, limited model interpretability, issues with dataset quality, and ethics due to the sensitive nature of biomedical data, the need for highly reliable model outputs, and the ethical implications of deploying AI in healthcare. To address these challenges, we also identify future research directions of LLM in biomedicine including federated learning methods to preserve data privacy and integrating explainable AI methodologies to enhance the transparency of LLMs.

Differential Private Stochastic Optimization with Heavy-tailed Data: Towards Optimal Rates

We study convex optimization problems under differential privacy (DP). With heavy-tailed gradients, existing works achieve suboptimal rates. The main obstacle is that existing gradient estimators have suboptimal tail properties, resulting in a superfluous factor of $d$ in the union bound. In this paper, we explore algorithms achieving optimal rates of DP optimization with heavy-tailed gradients. Our first method is a simple clipping approach. Under bounded $p$-th order moments of gradients, with $n$ samples, it achieves $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{d/n}+\sqrt{d}(\sqrt{d}/n\epsilon)^{1-1/p})$ population risk with $\epsilon\leq 1/\sqrt{d}$. We then propose an iterative updating method, which is more complex but achieves this rate for all $\epsilon\leq 1$. The results significantly improve over existing methods. Such improvement relies on a careful treatment of the tail behavior of gradient estimators. Our results match the minimax lower bound in \cite{kamath2022improved}, indicating that the theoretical limit of stochastic convex optimization under DP is achievable.