Seeing Sarcasm Through Different Eyes: Analyzing Multimodal Sarcasm Perception in Large Vision-Language Models

With the advent of large vision-language models (LVLMs) demonstrating increasingly human-like abilities, a pivotal question emerges: do different LVLMs interpret multimodal sarcasm differently, and can a single model grasp sarcasm from multiple perspectives like humans? To explore this, we introduce an analytical framework using systematically designed prompts on existing multimodal sarcasm datasets. Evaluating 12 state-of-the-art LVLMs over 2,409 samples, we examine interpretive variations within and across models, focusing on confidence levels, alignment with dataset labels, and recognition of ambiguous "neutral" cases. Our findings reveal notable discrepancies -- across LVLMs and within the same model under varied prompts. While classification-oriented prompts yield higher internal consistency, models diverge markedly when tasked with interpretive reasoning. These results challenge binary labeling paradigms by highlighting sarcasm's subjectivity. We advocate moving beyond rigid annotation schemes toward multi-perspective, uncertainty-aware modeling, offering deeper insights into multimodal sarcasm comprehension. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/CoderChen01/LVLMSarcasmAnalysis

An Efficient Learning Method to Connect Observables

Constructing fast and accurate surrogate models is a key ingredient for making robust predictions in many topics. We introduce a new model, the Multiparameter Eigenvalue Problem (MEP) emulator. The new method connects emulators and can make predictions directly from observables to observables. We present that the MEP emulator can be trained with data from Eigenvector Continuation (EC) and Parametric Matrix Model (PMM) emulators. A simple simulation on a one-dimensional lattice confirms the performance of the MEP emulator. Using $^{28}$O as an example, we also demonstrate that the predictive probability distribution of the target observables can be easily obtained through the new emulator.

ACCORD: Alleviating Concept Coupling through Dependence Regularization for Text-to-Image Diffusion Personalization

Image personalization has garnered attention for its ability to customize Text-to-Image generation using only a few reference images. However, a key challenge in image personalization is the issue of conceptual coupling, where the limited number of reference images leads the model to form unwanted associations between the personalization target and other concepts. Current methods attempt to tackle this issue indirectly, leading to a suboptimal balance between text control and personalization fidelity. In this paper, we take a direct approach to the concept coupling problem through statistical analysis, revealing that it stems from two distinct sources of dependence discrepancies. We therefore propose two complementary plug-and-play loss functions: Denoising Decouple Loss and Prior Decouple loss, each designed to minimize one type of dependence discrepancy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves a superior trade-off between text control and personalization fidelity.

Advancing Out-of-Distribution Detection via Local Neuroplasticity

In the domain of machine learning, the assumption that training and test data share the same distribution is often violated in real-world scenarios, requiring effective out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. This paper presents a novel OOD detection method that leverages the unique local neuroplasticity property of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs). Unlike traditional multilayer perceptrons, KANs exhibit local plasticity, allowing them to preserve learned information while adapting to new tasks. Our method compares the activation patterns of a trained KAN against its untrained counterpart to detect OOD samples. We validate our approach on benchmarks from image and medical domains, demonstrating superior performance and robustness compared to state-of-the-art techniques. These results underscore the potential of KANs in enhancing the reliability of machine learning systems in diverse environments.

Traffic and Safety Rule Compliance of Humans in Diverse Driving Situations

The increasing interest in autonomous driving systems has highlighted the need for an in-depth analysis of human driving behavior in diverse scenarios. Analyzing human data is crucial for developing autonomous systems that replicate safe driving practices and ensure seamless integration into human-dominated environments. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of human compliance with traffic and safety rules across multiple trajectory prediction datasets, including Argoverse 2, nuPlan, Lyft, and DeepUrban. By defining and leveraging existing safety and behavior-related metrics, such as time to collision, adherence to speed limits, and interactions with other traffic participants, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of each datasets strengths and limitations. Our analysis focuses on the distribution of data samples, identifying noise, outliers, and undesirable behaviors exhibited by human drivers in both the training and validation sets. The results underscore the need for applying robust filtering techniques to certain datasets due to high levels of noise and the presence of such undesirable behaviors.

Rodimus*: Breaking the Accuracy-Efficiency Trade-Off with Efficient Attentions

Recent advancements in Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have set new standards in natural language processing. However, the classical softmax attention incurs significant computational costs, leading to a $O(T)$ complexity for per-token generation, where $T$ represents the context length. This work explores reducing LLMs' complexity while maintaining performance by introducing Rodimus and its enhanced version, Rodimus$+$. Rodimus employs an innovative data-dependent tempered selection (DDTS) mechanism within a linear attention-based, purely recurrent framework, achieving significant accuracy while drastically reducing the memory usage typically associated with recurrent models. This method exemplifies semantic compression by maintaining essential input information with fixed-size hidden states. Building on this, Rodimus$+$ combines Rodimus with the innovative Sliding Window Shared-Key Attention (SW-SKA) in a hybrid approach, effectively leveraging the complementary semantic, token, and head compression techniques. Our experiments demonstrate that Rodimus$+$-1.6B, trained on 1 trillion tokens, achieves superior downstream performance against models trained on more tokens, including Qwen2-1.5B and RWKV6-1.6B, underscoring its potential to redefine the accuracy-efficiency balance in LLMs. Model code and pre-trained checkpoints will be available soon.

CoBa: Convergence Balancer for Multitask Finetuning of Large Language Models

Multi-task learning (MTL) benefits the fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) by providing a single model with improved performance and generalization ability across tasks, presenting a resource-efficient alternative to developing separate models for each task. Yet, existing MTL strategies for LLMs often fall short by either being computationally intensive or failing to ensure simultaneous task convergence. This paper presents CoBa, a new MTL approach designed to effectively manage task convergence balance with minimal computational overhead. Utilizing Relative Convergence Scores (RCS), Absolute Convergence Scores (ACS), and a Divergence Factor (DF), CoBa dynamically adjusts task weights during the training process, ensuring that the validation loss of all tasks progress towards convergence at an even pace while mitigating the issue of individual task divergence. The results of our experiments involving three disparate datasets underscore that this approach not only fosters equilibrium in task improvement but enhances the LLMs' performance by up to 13% relative to the second-best baselines. Code is open-sourced at https://github.com/codefuse-ai/MFTCoder.

SDP: Spiking Diffusion Policy for Robotic Manipulation with Learnable Channel-Wise Membrane Thresholds

This paper introduces a Spiking Diffusion Policy (SDP) learning method for robotic manipulation by integrating Spiking Neurons and Learnable Channel-wise Membrane Thresholds (LCMT) into the diffusion policy model, thereby enhancing computational efficiency and achieving high performance in evaluated tasks. Specifically, the proposed SDP model employs the U-Net architecture as the backbone for diffusion learning within the Spiking Neural Network (SNN). It strategically places residual connections between the spike convolution operations and the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) nodes, thereby preventing disruptions to the spiking states. Additionally, we introduce a temporal encoding block and a temporal decoding block to transform static and dynamic data with timestep $T_S$ into each other, enabling the transmission of data within the SNN in spike format. Furthermore, we propose LCMT to enable the adaptive acquisition of membrane potential thresholds, thereby matching the conditions of varying membrane potentials and firing rates across channels and avoiding the cumbersome process of manually setting and tuning hyperparameters. Evaluating the SDP model on seven distinct tasks with SNN timestep $T_S=4$, we achieve results comparable to those of the ANN counterparts, along with faster convergence speeds than the baseline SNN method. This improvement is accompanied by a reduction of 94.3\% in dynamic energy consumption estimated on 45nm hardware.

E2LLM: Encoder Elongated Large Language Models for Long-Context Understanding and Reasoning

In the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs), the ability to process long contexts is increasingly crucial for tasks such as multi-round dialogues, code generation, and document summarization. This paper addresses the challenges of enhancing the long-context performance, reducing computational complexity, and leveraging pretrained models collectively termed the "impossible triangle." We introduce E2LLM (Encoder Elongated Large Language Models), a novel approach that effectively navigates this paradox. The method involves splitting long contexts into chunks, compressing each into embedding vectors via a pretrained text encoder, and utilizing an adapter to align these representations with a decoder-only LLM. Two training objectives, focusing on reconstruction of the encoder output and long-context instruction fine-tuning, are employed to facilitate the understanding of soft prompts by the LLM. Experimental results demonstrate that E2LLM achieves superior performance in long-context scenarios while balancing efficiency, performance, and compatibility with pretrained models. Our framework thus represents a significant advancement in the field, contributing to effective long-text modeling.

GALLa: Graph Aligned Large Language Models for Improved Source Code Understanding

Programming languages possess rich semantic information such as data flow that is represented by graphs and not available from the surface form of source code. Recent code language models have scaled to billions of parameters, but model source code solely as text tokens while ignoring any other structural information. Conversely, models that do encode structural information of code make modifications to the Transformer architecture, limiting their scale and compatibility with pretrained LLMs. In this work, we take the best of both worlds with GALLa - Graph Aligned Large Language Model. GALLa utilizes graph neural networks and cross-modal alignment technologies to inject the structural information of code into LLMs as an auxiliary task during finetuning. This framework is both model-agnostic and task-agnostic, as it can be applied to any code LLM for any code downstream task, and requires the structural graph data only at training time from a corpus unrelated to the finetuning data, while incurring no cost at inference time over the baseline LLM. Experiments on five code tasks with four different baseline LLMs ranging in size from 350M to 8B validate the effectiveness of GALLa, demonstrating consistent improvement over the baseline, even for powerful models such as LLaMA3.