Leveraging Open Knowledge for Advancing Task Expertise in Large Language Models

The cultivation of expertise for large language models (LLMs) to solve tasks of specific areas often requires special-purpose tuning with calibrated behaviors on the expected stable outputs. To avoid huge cost brought by manual preparation of instruction datasets and training resources up to hundreds of hours, the exploitation of open knowledge including a wealth of low rank adaptation (LoRA) models and instruction datasets serves as a good starting point. However, existing methods on model and data selection focus on the performance of general-purpose capabilities while neglecting the knowledge gap exposed in domain-specific deployment. In the present study, we propose to bridge such gap by introducing few human-annotated samples (i.e., K-shot) for advancing task expertise of LLMs with open knowledge. Specifically, we develop an efficient and scalable pipeline to cost-efficiently produce task experts where K-shot data intervene in selecting the most promising expert candidates and the task-relevant instructions. A mixture-of-expert (MoE) system is built to make the best use of individual-yet-complementary knowledge between multiple experts. We unveil the two keys to the success of a MoE system, 1) the abidance by K-shot, and 2) the insistence on diversity. For the former, we ensure that models that truly possess problem-solving abilities on K-shot are selected rather than those blind guessers. Besides, during data selection, instructions that share task-relevant contexts with K-shot are prioritized. For the latter, we highlight the diversity of constituting experts and that of the fine-tuning instructions throughout the model and data selection process. Extensive experimental results confirm the superiority of our approach over existing methods on utilization of open knowledge across various tasks. Codes and models will be released later.

Improving Factuality in Large Language Models via Decoding-Time Hallucinatory and Truthful Comparators

Despite their remarkable capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to generate responses that contradict verifiable facts, i.e., unfaithful hallucination content. Existing efforts generally focus on optimizing model parameters or editing semantic representations, which compromise the internal factual knowledge of target LLMs. In addition, hallucinations typically exhibit multifaceted patterns in downstream tasks, limiting the model's holistic performance across tasks. In this paper, we propose a Comparator-driven Decoding-Time (CDT) framework to alleviate the response hallucination. Firstly, we construct hallucinatory and truthful comparators with multi-task fine-tuning samples. In this case, we present an instruction prototype-guided mixture of experts strategy to enhance the ability of the corresponding comparators to capture different hallucination or truthfulness patterns in distinct task instructions. CDT constrains next-token predictions to factuality-robust distributions by contrasting the logit differences between the target LLMs and these comparators. Systematic experiments on multiple downstream tasks show that our framework can significantly improve the model performance and response factuality.

Unleashing the Power of Data Tsunami: A Comprehensive Survey on Data Assessment and Selection for Instruction Tuning of Language Models

Instruction tuning plays a critical role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preference. Despite the vast amount of open instruction datasets, naively training a LLM on all existing instructions may not be optimal and practical. To pinpoint the most beneficial datapoints, data assessment and selection methods have been proposed in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning. However, under the context of instruction tuning, there still exists a gap in knowledge on what kind of data evaluation metrics can be employed and how they can be integrated into the selection mechanism. To bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive review on existing literature of data assessment and selection especially for instruction tuning of LLMs. We systematically categorize all applicable methods into quality-based, diversity-based, and importance-based ones where a unified, fine-grained taxonomy is structured. For each category, representative methods are elaborated to describe the landscape of relevant research. In addition, comparison between latest methods is conducted on their officially reported results to provide in-depth discussions on their limitations. Finally, we summarize the open challenges and propose the promosing avenues for future studies. All related contents are available at https://github.com/yuleiqin/fantastic-data-engineering.

Reality Fusion: Robust Real-time Immersive Mobile Robot Teleoperation with Volumetric Visual Data Fusion

We introduce Reality Fusion, a novel robot teleoperation system that localizes, streams, projects, and merges a typical onboard depth sensor with a photorealistic, high resolution, high framerate, and wide field of view (FoV) rendering of the complex remote environment represented as 3D Gaussian splats (3DGS). Our framework enables robust egocentric and exocentric robot teleoperation in immersive VR, with the 3DGS effectively extending spatial information of a depth sensor with limited FoV and balancing the trade-off between data streaming costs and data visual quality. We evaluated our framework through a user study with 24 participants, which revealed that Reality Fusion leads to significantly better user performance, situation awareness, and user preferences. To support further research and development, we provide an open-source implementation with an easy-to-replicate custom-made telepresence robot, a high-performance virtual reality 3DGS renderer, and an immersive robot control package. (Source code: https://github.com/uhhhci/RealityFusion)

The Llama 3 Herd of Models

Modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems are powered by foundation models. This paper presents a new set of foundation models, called Llama 3. It is a herd of language models that natively support multilinguality, coding, reasoning, and tool usage. Our largest model is a dense Transformer with 405B parameters and a context window of up to 128K tokens. This paper presents an extensive empirical evaluation of Llama 3. We find that Llama 3 delivers comparable quality to leading language models such as GPT-4 on a plethora of tasks. We publicly release Llama 3, including pre-trained and post-trained versions of the 405B parameter language model and our Llama Guard 3 model for input and output safety. The paper also presents the results of experiments in which we integrate image, video, and speech capabilities into Llama 3 via a compositional approach. We observe this approach performs competitively with the state-of-the-art on image, video, and speech recognition tasks. The resulting models are not yet being broadly released as they are still under development.

Towards scalable efficient on-device ASR with transfer learning

Multilingual pretraining for transfer learning significantly boosts the robustness of low-resource monolingual ASR models. This study systematically investigates three main aspects: (a) the impact of transfer learning on model performance during initial training or fine-tuning, (b) the influence of transfer learning across dataset domains and languages, and (c) the effect on rare-word recognition compared to non-rare words. Our finding suggests that RNNT-loss pretraining, followed by monolingual fine-tuning with Minimum Word Error Rate (MinWER) loss, consistently reduces Word Error Rates (WER) across languages like Italian and French. WER Reductions (WERR) reach 36.2% and 42.8% compared to monolingual baselines for MLS and in-house datasets. Out-of-domain pretraining leads to 28% higher WERR than in-domain pretraining. Both rare and non-rare words benefit, with rare words showing greater improvements with out-of-domain pretraining, and non-rare words with in-domain pretraining.

OmniGenome: Aligning RNA Sequences with Secondary Structures in Genomic Foundation Models

The structures of RNA sequences play a vital role in various cellular processes, while existing genomic foundation models (FMs) have struggled with precise sequence-structure alignment, due to the complexity of exponential combinations of nucleotide bases. In this study, we introduce OmniGenome, a foundation model that addresses this critical challenge of sequence-structure alignment in RNA FMs. OmniGenome bridges the sequences with secondary structures using structure-contextualized modeling, enabling hard in-silico genomic tasks that existing FMs cannot handle, e.g., RNA design tasks. The results on two comprehensive genomic benchmarks show that OmniGenome achieves state-of-the-art performance on complex RNA subtasks. For example, OmniGenome solved 74% of complex puzzles, compared to SpliceBERT which solved only 3% of the puzzles. Besides, OmniGenome solves most of the puzzles within $1$ hour, while the existing methods usually allocate $24$ hours for each puzzle. Overall, OmniGenome establishes wide genomic application cases and offers profound insights into biological mechanisms from the perspective of sequence-structure alignment.

Intrinsic PAPR for Point-level 3D Scene Albedo and Shading Editing

Recent advancements in neural rendering have excelled at novel view synthesis from multi-view RGB images. However, they often lack the capability to edit the shading or colour of the scene at a detailed point-level, while ensuring consistency across different viewpoints. In this work, we address the challenge of point-level 3D scene albedo and shading editing from multi-view RGB images, focusing on detailed editing at the point-level rather than at a part or global level. While prior works based on volumetric representation such as NeRF struggle with achieving 3D consistent editing at the point level, recent advancements in point-based neural rendering show promise in overcoming this challenge. We introduce ``Intrinsic PAPR'', a novel method based on the recent point-based neural rendering technique Proximity Attention Point Rendering (PAPR). Unlike other point-based methods that model the intrinsic decomposition of the scene, our approach does not rely on complicated shading models or simplistic priors that may not universally apply. Instead, we directly model scene decomposition into albedo and shading components, leading to better estimation accuracy. Comparative evaluations against the latest point-based inverse rendering methods demonstrate that Intrinsic PAPR achieves higher-quality novel view rendering and superior point-level albedo and shading editing.

Local Manifold Learning for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Contrastive learning has considerably advanced the field of Image Quality Assessment (IQA), emerging as a widely adopted technique. The core mechanism of contrastive learning involves minimizing the distance between quality-similar (positive) examples while maximizing the distance between quality-dissimilar (negative) examples. Despite its successes, current contrastive learning methods often neglect the importance of preserving the local manifold structure. This oversight can result in a high degree of similarity among hard examples within the feature space, thereby impeding effective differentiation and assessment. To address this issue, we propose an innovative framework that integrates local manifold learning with contrastive learning for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA). Our method begins by sampling multiple crops from a given image, identifying the most visually salient crop. This crop is then used to cluster other crops from the same image as the positive class, while crops from different images are treated as negative classes to increase inter-class distance. Uniquely, our approach also considers non-saliency crops from the same image as intra-class negative classes to preserve their distinctiveness. Additionally, we employ a mutual learning framework, which further enhances the model's ability to adaptively learn and identify visual saliency regions. Our approach demonstrates a better performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in 7 standard datasets, achieving PLCC values of 0.942 (compared to 0.908 in TID2013) and 0.914 (compared to 0.894 in LIVEC).

MedThink: Inducing Medical Large-scale Visual Language Models to Hallucinate Less by Thinking More

When Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) are applied to multimodal medical generative tasks, they suffer from significant model hallucination issues. This severely impairs the model's generative accuracy, making it challenging for LVLMs to be implemented in real-world medical scenarios to assist doctors in diagnosis. Enhancing the training data for downstream medical generative tasks is an effective way to address model hallucination. Moreover, the limited availability of training data in the medical field and privacy concerns greatly hinder the model's accuracy and generalization capabilities. In this paper, we introduce a method that mimics human cognitive processes to construct fine-grained instruction pairs and apply the concept of chain-of-thought (CoT) from inference scenarios to training scenarios, thereby proposing a method called MedThink. Our experiments on various LVLMs demonstrate that our novel data construction method tailored for the medical domain significantly improves the model's performance in medical image report generation tasks and substantially mitigates the hallucinations. All resources of this work will be released soon.