Multimodal Gen-AI for Fundamental Investment Research

This report outlines a transformative initiative in the financial investment industry, where the conventional decision-making process, laden with labor-intensive tasks such as sifting through voluminous documents, is being reimagined. Leveraging language models, our experiments aim to automate information summarization and investment idea generation. We seek to evaluate the effectiveness of fine-tuning methods on a base model (Llama2) to achieve specific application-level goals, including providing insights into the impact of events on companies and sectors, understanding market condition relationships, generating investor-aligned investment ideas, and formatting results with stock recommendations and detailed explanations. Through state-of-the-art generative modeling techniques, the ultimate objective is to develop an AI agent prototype, liberating human investors from repetitive tasks and allowing a focus on high-level strategic thinking. The project encompasses a diverse corpus dataset, including research reports, investment memos, market news, and extensive time-series market data. We conducted three experiments applying unsupervised and supervised LoRA fine-tuning on the llama2_7b_hf_chat as the base model, as well as instruction fine-tuning on the GPT3.5 model. Statistical and human evaluations both show that the fine-tuned versions perform better in solving text modeling, summarization, reasoning, and finance domain questions, demonstrating a pivotal step towards enhancing decision-making processes in the financial domain. Code implementation for the project can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/Firenze11/finance_lm.

Customizing 360-Degree Panoramas through Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Personalized text-to-image (T2I) synthesis based on diffusion models has attracted significant attention in recent research. However, existing methods primarily concentrate on customizing subjects or styles, neglecting the exploration of global geometry. In this study, we propose an approach that focuses on the customization of 360-degree panoramas, which inherently possess global geometric properties, using a T2I diffusion model. To achieve this, we curate a paired image-text dataset specifically designed for the task and subsequently employ it to fine-tune a pre-trained T2I diffusion model with LoRA. Nevertheless, the fine-tuned model alone does not ensure the continuity between the leftmost and rightmost sides of the synthesized images, a crucial characteristic of 360-degree panoramas. To address this issue, we propose a method called StitchDiffusion. Specifically, we perform pre-denoising operations twice at each time step of the denoising process on the stitch block consisting of the leftmost and rightmost image regions. Furthermore, a global cropping is adopted to synthesize seamless 360-degree panoramas. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our customized model combined with the proposed StitchDiffusion in generating high-quality 360-degree panoramic images. Moreover, our customized model exhibits exceptional generalization ability in producing scenes unseen in the fine-tuning dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/littlewhitesea/StitchDiffusion.

V2X-AHD:Vehicle-to-Everything Cooperation Perception via Asymmetric Heterogenous Distillation Network

Object detection is the central issue of intelligent traffic systems, and recent advancements in single-vehicle lidar-based 3D detection indicate that it can provide accurate position information for intelligent agents to make decisions and plan. Compared with single-vehicle perception, multi-view vehicle-road cooperation perception has fundamental advantages, such as the elimination of blind spots and a broader range of perception, and has become a research hotspot. However, the current perception of cooperation focuses on improving the complexity of fusion while ignoring the fundamental problems caused by the absence of single-view outlines. We propose a multi-view vehicle-road cooperation perception system, vehicle-to-everything cooperative perception (V2X-AHD), in order to enhance the identification capability, particularly for predicting the vehicle's shape. At first, we propose an asymmetric heterogeneous distillation network fed with different training data to improve the accuracy of contour recognition, with multi-view teacher features transferring to single-view student features. While the point cloud data are sparse, we propose Spara Pillar, a spare convolutional-based plug-in feature extraction backbone, to reduce the number of parameters and improve and enhance feature extraction capabilities. Moreover, we leverage the multi-head self-attention (MSA) to fuse the single-view feature, and the lightweight design makes the fusion feature a smooth expression. The results of applying our algorithm to the massive open dataset V2Xset demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art result. The V2X-AHD can effectively improve the accuracy of 3D object detection and reduce the number of network parameters, according to this study, which serves as a benchmark for cooperative perception. The code for this article is available at https://github.com/feeling0414-lab/V2X-AHD.

Virtual Prompt Injection for Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models

We present Virtual Prompt Injection (VPI) for instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs). VPI allows an attacker-specified virtual prompt to steer the model behavior under specific trigger scenario without any explicit injection in model input. For instance, if an LLM is compromised with the virtual prompt "Describe Joe Biden negatively." for Joe Biden-related instructions, then any service deploying this model will propagate biased views when handling user queries related to Joe Biden. VPI is especially harmful for two primary reasons. Firstly, the attacker can take fine-grained control over LLM behaviors by defining various virtual prompts, exploiting LLMs' proficiency in following instructions. Secondly, this control is achieved without any interaction from the attacker while the model is in service, leading to persistent attack. To demonstrate the threat, we propose a simple method for performing VPI by poisoning the model's instruction tuning data. We find that our proposed method is highly effective in steering the LLM with VPI. For example, by injecting only 52 poisoned examples (0.1% of the training data size) into the instruction tuning data, the percentage of negative responses given by the trained model on Joe Biden-related queries change from 0% to 40%. We thus highlight the necessity of ensuring the integrity of the instruction-tuning data as little poisoned data can cause stealthy and persistent harm to the deployed model. We further explore the possible defenses and identify data filtering as an effective way to defend against the poisoning attacks. Our project page is available at https://poison-llm.github.io.

Instruction-following Evaluation through Verbalizer Manipulation

While instruction-tuned models have shown remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks, accurately evaluating their ability to follow instructions remains challenging. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on common instructions that align well with what the model learned during training. However, proficiency in responding to these instructions does not necessarily imply strong ability in instruction following. In this paper, we propose a novel instruction-following evaluation protocol called verbalizer manipulation. It instructs the model to verbalize the task label with words aligning with model priors to different extents, adopting verbalizers from highly aligned (e.g., outputting ``postive'' for positive sentiment), to minimally aligned (e.g., outputting ``negative'' for positive sentiment). Verbalizer manipulation can be seamlessly integrated with any classification benchmark to examine the model's reliance on priors and its ability to override them to accurately follow the instructions. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of four major model families across nine datasets, employing twelve sets of verbalizers for each of them. We observe that the instruction-following abilities of models, across different families and scales, are significantly distinguished by their performance on less natural verbalizers. Even the strongest GPT-4 model struggles to perform better than random guessing on the most challenging verbalizer, emphasizing the need for continued advancements to improve their instruction-following abilities.

AlpaGasus: Training A Better Alpaca with Fewer Data

Large language models~(LLMs) obtain instruction-following capability through instruction-finetuning (IFT) on supervised instruction/response data. However, widely used IFT datasets (e.g., Alpaca's 52k data) surprisingly contain many low-quality instances with incorrect or irrelevant responses, which are misleading and detrimental to IFT. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective data selection strategy that automatically identifies and removes low-quality data using a strong LLM (e.g., ChatGPT). To this end, we introduce AlpaGasus, which is finetuned on only 9k high-quality data filtered from the 52k Alpaca data. AlpaGasus significantly outperforms the original Alpaca as evaluated by GPT-4 on multiple test sets and its 13B variant matches $>90\%$ performance of its teacher LLM (i.e., Text-Davinci-003) on test tasks. It also provides 5.7x faster training, reducing the training time for a 7B variant from 80 minutes (for Alpaca) to 14 minutes \footnote{We apply IFT for the same number of epochs as Alpaca(7B) but on fewer data, using 4$\times$NVIDIA A100 (80GB) GPUs and following the original Alpaca setting and hyperparameters.}. Overall, AlpaGasus demonstrates a novel data-centric IFT paradigm that can be generally applied to instruction-tuning data, leading to faster training and better instruction-following models. Our project page is available at: \url{https://lichang-chen.github.io/AlpaGasus/}.

Fundamental Limits on Detection With a Dual-function Radar Communication System

This paper investigates the fundamental limits on the target detection performance with a dual-function multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) radar communication (RadCom) systems. By assuming the presence of a point-like target and a communication receiver, closed-form expressions for the maximum detection probability and the transmit waveforms achieving the optimal performance are derived. Results show that for the considered case, the dual-function system should transmit coherent waveforms to achieve the optimal detection performance. Moreover, the angle separation between the target and communication receiver has a great impact on the achievable detection performance.

STDAN: Deformable Attention Network for Space-Time Video Super-Resolution

The target of space-time video super-resolution (STVSR) is to increase the spatial-temporal resolution of low-resolution (LR) and low frame rate (LFR) videos. Recent approaches based on deep learning have made significant improvements, but most of them only use two adjacent frames, that is, short-term features, to synthesize the missing frame embedding, which suffers from fully exploring the information flow of consecutive input LR frames. In addition, existing STVSR models hardly exploit the temporal contexts explicitly to assist high-resolution (HR) frame reconstruction. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a deformable attention network called STDAN for STVSR. First, we devise a long-short term feature interpolation (LSTFI) module, which is capable of excavating abundant content from more neighboring input frames for the interpolation process through a bidirectional RNN structure. Second, we put forward a spatial-temporal deformable feature aggregation (STDFA) module, in which spatial and temporal contexts in dynamic video frames are adaptively captured and aggregated to enhance SR reconstruction. Experimental results on several datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art STVSR methods.

ESOD:Edge-based Task Scheduling for Object Detection

Object Detection on the mobile system is a challenge in terms of everything. Nowadays, many object detection models have been designed, and most of them concentrate on precision. However, the computation burden of those models on mobile systems is unacceptable. Researchers have designed some lightweight networks for mobiles by sacrificing precision. We present a novel edge-based task scheduling framework for object detection (termed as ESOD). In detail, we train a DNN model (termed as pre-model) to predict which object detection model to use for the coming task and offloads to which edge servers by physical characteristics of the image task (e.g., brightness, saturation). The results show that ESOD can reduce latency and energy consumption by an average of 22.13% and 29.60% and improve the mAP to 45.8(with 0.9 mAP better), respectively, compared with the SOTA DETR model.