An Expert is Worth One Token: Synergizing Multiple Expert LLMs as Generalist via Expert Token Routing

We present Expert-Token-Routing, a unified generalist framework that facilitates seamless integration of multiple expert LLMs. Our framework represents expert LLMs as special expert tokens within the vocabulary of a meta LLM. The meta LLM can route to an expert LLM like generating new tokens. Expert-Token-Routing not only supports learning the implicit expertise of expert LLMs from existing instruction dataset but also allows for dynamic extension of new expert LLMs in a plug-and-play manner. It also conceals the detailed collaboration process from the user's perspective, facilitating interaction as though it were a singular LLM. Our framework outperforms various existing multi-LLM collaboration paradigms across benchmarks that incorporate six diverse expert domains, demonstrating effectiveness and robustness in building generalist LLM system via synergizing multiple expert LLMs.

Empowering Large Language Model Agents through Action Learning

Large Language Model (LLM) Agents have recently garnered increasing interest yet they are limited in their ability to learn from trial and error, a key element of intelligent behavior. In this work, we argue that the capacity to learn new actions from experience is fundamental to the advancement of learning in LLM agents. While humans naturally expand their action spaces and develop skills through experiential learning, LLM agents typically operate within fixed action spaces, limiting their potential for growth. To address these challenges, our study explores open-action learning for language agents. We introduce a framework LearnAct with an iterative learning strategy to create and improve actions in the form of Python functions. In each iteration, LLM revises and updates the currently available actions based on the errors identified in unsuccessful training tasks, thereby enhancing action effectiveness. Our experimental evaluations across Robotic Planning and Alfworld environments reveal that after learning on a few training task instances, our approach to open-action learning markedly improves agent performance for the type of task (by 32 percent in AlfWorld compared to ReAct+Reflexion, for instance) highlighting the importance of experiential action learning in the development of more intelligent LLM agents.

Large Language Models for Forecasting and Anomaly Detection: A Systematic Literature Review

This systematic literature review comprehensively examines the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in forecasting and anomaly detection, highlighting the current state of research, inherent challenges, and prospective future directions. LLMs have demonstrated significant potential in parsing and analyzing extensive datasets to identify patterns, predict future events, and detect anomalous behavior across various domains. However, this review identifies several critical challenges that impede their broader adoption and effectiveness, including the reliance on vast historical datasets, issues with generalizability across different contexts, the phenomenon of model hallucinations, limitations within the models' knowledge boundaries, and the substantial computational resources required. Through detailed analysis, this review discusses potential solutions and strategies to overcome these obstacles, such as integrating multimodal data, advancements in learning methodologies, and emphasizing model explainability and computational efficiency. Moreover, this review outlines critical trends that are likely to shape the evolution of LLMs in these fields, including the push toward real-time processing, the importance of sustainable modeling practices, and the value of interdisciplinary collaboration. Conclusively, this review underscores the transformative impact LLMs could have on forecasting and anomaly detection while emphasizing the need for continuous innovation, ethical considerations, and practical solutions to realize their full potential.

InfiAgent-DABench: Evaluating Agents on Data Analysis Tasks

In this paper, we introduce "InfiAgent-DABench", the first benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLM-based agents in data analysis tasks. This benchmark contains DAEval, a dataset consisting of 311 data analysis questions derived from 55 CSV files, and an agent framework to evaluate LLMs as data analysis agents. We adopt a format-prompting technique, ensuring questions to be closed-form that can be automatically evaluated. Our extensive benchmarking of 23 state-of-the-art LLMs uncovers the current challenges encountered in data analysis tasks. In addition, we have developed DAAgent, a specialized agent trained on instruction-tuning datasets. Evaluation datasets and toolkits for InfiAgent-DABench are released at https://github.com/InfiAgent/InfiAgent.

Accurate Fairness: Improving Individual Fairness without Trading Accuracy

Accuracy and fairness are both crucial aspects for trustworthy machine learning. However, in practice, enhancing one aspect may sacrifice the other inevitably. We propose in this paper a new fairness criterion, accurate fairness, to assess whether an individual is treated both accurately and fairly regardless of protected attributes. We further propose new fairness metrics, fair-precision, fair-recall and fair-F1 score, to evaluate the reliability of a machine learning model from the perspective of accurate fairness. Thus, the side effects of enhancing just one of the two aspects, i.e., true bias and false fairness, can be effectively identified with our criterion. We then present a fair Siamese approach for accurate fairness training. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a Siamese approach is adapted for bias mitigation. Case studies with typical fairness benchmarks demonstrate that our fair Siamese approach can, on average, promote the 17.4% higher individual fairness, the 11.5% higher fair-F1 score, and the 4.7% higher accuracy of a machine learning model than the state-of-the-art bias mitigation techniques. Finally, our approach is applied to mitigate the possible service discrimination with a real Ctrip dataset, by fairly serving on average 97.9% customers with different consumption habits who pay the same prices for the same rooms (20.7% more than original models).

BERT-hLSTMs: BERT and Hierarchical LSTMs for Visual Storytelling

Visual storytelling is a creative and challenging task, aiming to automatically generate a story-like description for a sequence of images. The descriptions generated by previous visual storytelling approaches lack coherence because they use word-level sequence generation methods and do not adequately consider sentence-level dependencies. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel hierarchical visual storytelling framework which separately models sentence-level and word-level semantics. We use the transformer-based BERT to obtain embeddings for sentences and words. We then employ a hierarchical LSTM network: the bottom LSTM receives as input the sentence vector representation from BERT, to learn the dependencies between the sentences corresponding to images, and the top LSTM is responsible for generating the corresponding word vector representations, taking input from the bottom LSTM. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms most closely related baselines under automatic evaluation metrics BLEU and CIDEr, and also show the effectiveness of our method with human evaluation.

Generating Descriptions for Sequential Images with Local-Object Attention and Global Semantic Context Modelling

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end CNN-LSTM model for generating descriptions for sequential images with a local-object attention mechanism. To generate coherent descriptions, we capture global semantic context using a multi-layer perceptron, which learns the dependencies between sequential images. A paralleled LSTM network is exploited for decoding the sequence descriptions. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the baseline across three different evaluation metrics on the datasets published by Microsoft.

Collaborative Distillation in the Parameter and Spectrum Domains for Video Action Recognition

Recent years have witnessed the significant progress of action recognition task with deep networks. However, most of current video networks require large memory and computational resources, which hinders their applications in practice. Existing knowledge distillation methods are limited to the image-level spatial domain, ignoring the temporal and frequency information which provide structural knowledge and are important for video analysis. This paper explores how to train small and efficient networks for action recognition. Specifically, we propose two distillation strategies in the frequency domain, namely the feature spectrum and parameter distribution distillations respectively. Our insight is that appealing performance of action recognition requires \textit{explicitly} modeling the temporal frequency spectrum of video features. Therefore, we introduce a spectrum loss that enforces the student network to mimic the temporal frequency spectrum from the teacher network, instead of \textit{implicitly} distilling features as many previous works. Second, the parameter frequency distribution is further adopted to guide the student network to learn the appearance modeling process from the teacher. Besides, a collaborative learning strategy is presented to optimize the training process from a probabilistic view. Extensive experiments are conducted on several action recognition benchmarks, such as Kinetics, Something-Something, and Jester, which consistently verify effectiveness of our approach, and demonstrate that our method can achieve higher performance than state-of-the-art methods with the same backbone.

Performance-Oriented Neural Architecture Search

Hardware-Software Co-Design is a highly successful strategy for improving performance of domain-specific computing systems. We argue for the application of the same methodology to deep learning; specifically, we propose to extend neural architecture search with information about the hardware to ensure that the model designs produced are highly efficient in addition to the typical criteria around accuracy. Using the task of keyword spotting in audio on edge computing devices, we demonstrate that our approach results in neural architecture that is not only highly accurate, but also efficiently mapped to the computing platform which will perform the inference. Using our modified neural architecture search, we demonstrate $0.88\%$ increase in TOP-1 accuracy with $1.85\times$ reduction in latency for keyword spotting in audio on an embedded SoC, and $1.59\times$ on a high-end GPU.

Potential Applications of Machine Learning at Multidisciplinary Medical Team Meetings

While machine learning (ML) systems have produced great advances in several domains, their use in support of complex cooperative work remains a research challenge. A particularly challenging setting, and one that may benefit from ML support is the work of multidisciplinary medical teams (MDTs). This paper focuses on the activities performed during the multidisciplinary medical team meeting (MDTM), reviewing their main characteristics in light of a longitudinal analysis of several MDTs in a large teaching hospital over a period of ten years and of our development of ML methods to support MDTMs, and identifying opportunities and possible pitfalls for the use of ML to support MDTMs.