From MOOC to MAIC: Reshaping Online Teaching and Learning through LLM-driven Agents

Since the first instances of online education, where courses were uploaded to accessible and shared online platforms, this form of scaling the dissemination of human knowledge to reach a broader audience has sparked extensive discussion and widespread adoption. Recognizing that personalized learning still holds significant potential for improvement, new AI technologies have been continuously integrated into this learning format, resulting in a variety of educational AI applications such as educational recommendation and intelligent tutoring. The emergence of intelligence in large language models (LLMs) has allowed for these educational enhancements to be built upon a unified foundational model, enabling deeper integration. In this context, we propose MAIC (Massive AI-empowered Course), a new form of online education that leverages LLM-driven multi-agent systems to construct an AI-augmented classroom, balancing scalability with adaptivity. Beyond exploring the conceptual framework and technical innovations, we conduct preliminary experiments at Tsinghua University, one of China's leading universities. Drawing from over 100,000 learning records of more than 500 students, we obtain a series of valuable observations and initial analyses. This project will continue to evolve, ultimately aiming to establish a comprehensive open platform that supports and unifies research, technology, and applications in exploring the possibilities of online education in the era of large model AI. We envision this platform as a collaborative hub, bringing together educators, researchers, and innovators to collectively explore the future of AI-driven online education.

Configurable Foundation Models: Building LLMs from a Modular Perspective

Advancements in LLMs have recently unveiled challenges tied to computational efficiency and continual scalability due to their requirements of huge parameters, making the applications and evolution of these models on devices with limited computation resources and scenarios requiring various abilities increasingly cumbersome. Inspired by modularity within the human brain, there is a growing tendency to decompose LLMs into numerous functional modules, allowing for inference with part of modules and dynamic assembly of modules to tackle complex tasks, such as mixture-of-experts. To highlight the inherent efficiency and composability of the modular approach, we coin the term brick to represent each functional module, designating the modularized structure as configurable foundation models. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive overview and investigation of the construction, utilization, and limitation of configurable foundation models. We first formalize modules into emergent bricks - functional neuron partitions that emerge during the pre-training phase, and customized bricks - bricks constructed via additional post-training to improve the capabilities and knowledge of LLMs. Based on diverse functional bricks, we further present four brick-oriented operations: retrieval and routing, merging, updating, and growing. These operations allow for dynamic configuration of LLMs based on instructions to handle complex tasks. To verify our perspective, we conduct an empirical analysis on widely-used LLMs. We find that the FFN layers follow modular patterns with functional specialization of neurons and functional neuron partitions. Finally, we highlight several open issues and directions for future research. Overall, this paper aims to offer a fresh modular perspective on existing LLM research and inspire the future creation of more efficient and scalable foundational models.

Multi-Modal Multi-Granularity Tokenizer for Chu Bamboo Slip Scripts

This study presents a multi-modal multi-granularity tokenizer specifically designed for analyzing ancient Chinese scripts, focusing on the Chu bamboo slip (CBS) script used during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period (771-256 BCE) in Ancient China. Considering the complex hierarchical structure of ancient Chinese scripts, where a single character may be a combination of multiple sub-characters, our tokenizer first adopts character detection to locate character boundaries, and then conducts character recognition at both the character and sub-character levels. Moreover, to support the academic community, we have also assembled the first large-scale dataset of CBSs with over 100K annotated character image scans. On the part-of-speech tagging task built on our dataset, using our tokenizer gives a 5.5% relative improvement in F1-score compared to mainstream sub-word tokenizers. Our work not only aids in further investigations of the specific script but also has the potential to advance research on other forms of ancient Chinese scripts.

AdaNAT: Exploring Adaptive Policy for Token-Based Image Generation

Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of token-based methods for visual content generation. As a representative work, non-autoregressive Transformers (NATs) are able to synthesize images with decent quality in a small number of steps. However, NATs usually necessitate configuring a complicated generation policy comprising multiple manually-designed scheduling rules. These heuristic-driven rules are prone to sub-optimality and come with the requirements of expert knowledge and labor-intensive efforts. Moreover, their one-size-fits-all nature cannot flexibly adapt to the diverse characteristics of each individual sample. To address these issues, we propose AdaNAT, a learnable approach that automatically configures a suitable policy tailored for every sample to be generated. In specific, we formulate the determination of generation policies as a Markov decision process. Under this framework, a lightweight policy network for generation can be learned via reinforcement learning. Importantly, we demonstrate that simple reward designs such as FID or pre-trained reward models, may not reliably guarantee the desired quality or diversity of generated samples. Therefore, we propose an adversarial reward design to guide the training of policy networks effectively. Comprehensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, i.e., ImageNet-256 & 512, MS-COCO, and CC3M, validate the effectiveness of AdaNAT. Code and pre-trained models will be released at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/AdaNAT.

AgentMonitor: A Plug-and-Play Framework for Predictive and Secure Multi-Agent Systems

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has led to the rise of LLM-based agents. Recent research shows that multi-agent systems (MAS), where each agent plays a specific role, can outperform individual LLMs. However, configuring an MAS for a task remains challenging, with performance only observable post-execution. Inspired by scaling laws in LLM development, we investigate whether MAS performance can be predicted beforehand. We introduce AgentMonitor, a framework that integrates at the agent level to capture inputs and outputs, transforming them into statistics for training a regression model to predict task performance. Additionally, it can further apply real-time corrections to address security risks posed by malicious agents, mitigating negative impacts and enhancing MAS security. Experiments demonstrate that an XGBoost model achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.89 in-domain and 0.58 in more challenging scenarios. Furthermore, using AgentMonitor reduces harmful content by 6.2% and increases helpful content by 1.8% on average, enhancing safety and reliability. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/chanchimin/AgentMonitor}.

Enhancing the Code Debugging Ability of LLMs via Communicative Agent Based Data Refinement

Debugging is a vital aspect of software development, yet the debugging capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) remain largely unexplored. This paper first introduces DEBUGEVAL, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the debugging capabilities of LLMs. DEBUGEVAL collects data from existing high-quality datasets and designs four different tasks to evaluate the debugging effectiveness, including BUG Localization, BUG Identification, Code Review, and Code Repair. Additionally, to enhance the code debugging ability of LLMs, this paper proposes a CoMmunicative Agent BaSed DaTa REfinement FRamework (MASTER), which generates the refined code debugging data for supervised finetuning. Specifically, MASTER employs the Code Quizzer to generate refined data according to the defined tasks of DEBUGEVAL. Then the Code Learner acts as a critic and reserves the generated problems that it can not solve. Finally, the Code Teacher provides a detailed Chain-of-Thought based solution to deal with the generated problem. We collect the synthesized data and finetune the Code Learner to enhance the debugging ability and conduct the NeuDebugger model. Our experiments evaluate various LLMs and NeuDebugger in the zero-shot setting on DEBUGEVAL. Experimental results demonstrate that these 7B-scale LLMs have weaker debugging capabilities, even these code-oriented LLMs. On the contrary, these larger models (over 70B) show convincing debugging ability. Our further analyses illustrate that MASTER is an effective method to enhance the code debugging ability by synthesizing data for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) LLMs.

MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone

The recent surge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has fundamentally reshaped the landscape of AI research and industry, shedding light on a promising path toward the next AI milestone. However, significant challenges remain preventing MLLMs from being practical in real-world applications. The most notable challenge comes from the huge cost of running an MLLM with a massive number of parameters and extensive computation. As a result, most MLLMs need to be deployed on high-performing cloud servers, which greatly limits their application scopes such as mobile, offline, energy-sensitive, and privacy-protective scenarios. In this work, we present MiniCPM-V, a series of efficient MLLMs deployable on end-side devices. By integrating the latest MLLM techniques in architecture, pretraining and alignment, the latest MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5 has several notable features: (1) Strong performance, outperforming GPT-4V-1106, Gemini Pro and Claude 3 on OpenCompass, a comprehensive evaluation over 11 popular benchmarks, (2) strong OCR capability and 1.8M pixel high-resolution image perception at any aspect ratio, (3) trustworthy behavior with low hallucination rates, (4) multilingual support for 30+ languages, and (5) efficient deployment on mobile phones. More importantly, MiniCPM-V can be viewed as a representative example of a promising trend: The model sizes for achieving usable (e.g., GPT-4V) level performance are rapidly decreasing, along with the fast growth of end-side computation capacity. This jointly shows that GPT-4V level MLLMs deployed on end devices are becoming increasingly possible, unlocking a wider spectrum of real-world AI applications in the near future.

RAGEval: Scenario Specific RAG Evaluation Dataset Generation Framework

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have demonstrated their advantages in alleviating the hallucination of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing RAG benchmarks mainly focus on evaluating whether LLMs can correctly answer the general knowledge. However, they are unable to evaluate the effectiveness of the RAG system in dealing with the data from different vertical domains. This paper introduces RAGEval, a framework for automatically generating evaluation datasets to evaluate the knowledge usage ability of different LLMs in different scenarios. Specifically, RAGEval summarizes a schema from seed documents, applies the configurations to generate diverse documents, and constructs question-answering pairs according to both articles and configurations. We propose three novel metrics, Completeness, Hallucination, and Irrelevance, to carefully evaluate the responses generated by LLMs. By benchmarking RAG models in vertical domains, RAGEval has the ability to better evaluate the knowledge usage ability of LLMs, which avoids the confusion regarding the source of knowledge in answering question in existing QA datasets--whether it comes from parameterized memory or retrieval.

PyBench: Evaluating LLM Agent on various real-world coding tasks

The LLM Agent, equipped with a code interpreter, is capable of automatically solving real-world coding tasks, such as data analysis and image editing. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on either simplistic tasks, such as completing a few lines of code, or on extremely complex and specific tasks at the repository level, neither of which are representative of various daily coding tasks. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{PyBench}, a benchmark encompassing five main categories of real-world tasks, covering more than 10 types of files. Given a high-level user query and related files, the LLM Agent needs to reason and execute Python code via a code interpreter for a few turns before making a formal response to fulfill the user's requirements. Successfully addressing tasks in PyBench demands a robust understanding of various Python packages, superior reasoning capabilities, and the ability to incorporate feedback from executed code. Our evaluations indicate that current open-source LLMs are struggling with these tasks. Hence, we conduct analysis and experiments on four kinds of datasets proving that comprehensive abilities are needed for PyBench. Our fine-tuned 8B size model: \textbf{PyLlama3} achieves an exciting performance on PyBench which surpasses many 33B and 70B size models. Our Benchmark, Training Dataset, and Model are available at: \href{https://github.com/Mercury7353/PyBench}{https://github.com/Mercury7353/PyBench}

Interior Object Geometry via Fitted Frames

We describe a representation targeted for anatomic objects which is designed to enable strong locational correspondence within object populations and thus to provide powerful object statistics. The method generates fitted frames on the boundary and in the interior of objects and produces alignment-free geometric features from them. It accomplishes this by understanding an object as the diffeomorphic deformation of an ellipsoid and using a skeletal representation fitted throughout the deformation to produce a model of the target object, where the object is provided initially in the form of a boundary mesh. Via classification performance on hippocampi shape between individuals with a disorder vs. others, we compare our method to two state-of-the-art methods for producing object representations that are intended to capture geometric correspondence across a population of objects and to yield geometric features useful for statistics, and we show improved classification performance by this new representation, which we call the evolutionary s-rep. The geometric features that are derived from each of the representations, especially via fitted frames, is discussed.