Toward Generalizing Visual Brain Decoding to Unseen Subjects

Visual brain decoding aims to decode visual information from human brain activities. Despite the great progress, one critical limitation of current brain decoding research lies in the lack of generalization capability to unseen subjects. Prior works typically focus on decoding brain activity of individuals based on the observation that different subjects exhibit different brain activities, while it remains unclear whether brain decoding can be generalized to unseen subjects. This study aims to answer this question. We first consolidate an image-fMRI dataset consisting of stimulus-image and fMRI-response pairs, involving 177 subjects in the movie-viewing task of the Human Connectome Project (HCP). This dataset allows us to investigate the brain decoding performance with the increase of participants. We then present a learning paradigm that applies uniform processing across all subjects, instead of employing different network heads or tokenizers for individuals as in previous methods, which can accommodate a large number of subjects to explore the generalization capability across different subjects. A series of experiments are conducted and we have the following findings. First, the network exhibits clear generalization capabilities with the increase of training subjects. Second, the generalization capability is common to popular network architectures (MLP, CNN and Transformer). Third, the generalization performance is affected by the similarity between subjects. Our findings reveal the inherent similarities in brain activities across individuals. With the emerging of larger and more comprehensive datasets, it is possible to train a brain decoding foundation model in the future. Codes and models can be found at https://github.com/Xiangtaokong/TGBD.

MEOW: MEMOry Supervised LLM Unlearning Via Inverted Facts

Large Language Models (LLMs) can memorize sensitive information, raising concerns about potential misuse. LLM Unlearning, a post-hoc approach to remove this information from trained LLMs, offers a promising solution to mitigate these risks. However, previous practices face three key challenges: 1. Utility: successful unlearning often causes catastrophic collapse on unrelated tasks. 2. Efficiency: many methods either involve adding similarly sized models, which slows down unlearning or inference, or require retain data that are difficult to obtain. 3. Robustness: even effective methods may still leak data via extraction techniques. To address these challenges, we propose MEOW, a simple yet effective gradient descent-based unlearning method. Specifically, we use an offline LLM to generate a set of inverted facts. Then, we design a new metric, MEMO, to quantify memorization in LLMs. Finally, based on the signals provided by MEMO, we select the most appropriate set of inverted facts and finetune the model based on them. We evaluate MEOW on the commonly used unlearn benchmark, ToFU, with Llama2-7B-Chat and Phi-1.5B, and test it on both NLU and NLG tasks. Results demonstrate significant improvement of MEOW in forget quality without substantial loss in model utility. Meanwhile, MEOW does not exhibit significant degradation in NLU or NLG capabilities, and there is even a slight improvement in NLU performance.

RelBench: A Benchmark for Deep Learning on Relational Databases

We present RelBench, a public benchmark for solving predictive tasks over relational databases with graph neural networks. RelBench provides databases and tasks spanning diverse domains and scales, and is intended to be a foundational infrastructure for future research. We use RelBench to conduct the first comprehensive study of Relational Deep Learning (RDL) (Fey et al., 2024), which combines graph neural network predictive models with (deep) tabular models that extract initial entity-level representations from raw tables. End-to-end learned RDL models fully exploit the predictive signal encoded in primary-foreign key links, marking a significant shift away from the dominant paradigm of manual feature engineering combined with tabular models. To thoroughly evaluate RDL against this prior gold-standard, we conduct an in-depth user study where an experienced data scientist manually engineers features for each task. In this study, RDL learns better models whilst reducing human work needed by more than an order of magnitude. This demonstrates the power of deep learning for solving predictive tasks over relational databases, opening up many new research opportunities enabled by RelBench.

TrialBench: Multi-Modal Artificial Intelligence-Ready Clinical Trial Datasets

Clinical trials are pivotal for developing new medical treatments, yet they typically pose some risks such as patient mortality, adverse events, and enrollment failure that waste immense efforts spanning over a decade. Applying artificial intelligence (AI) to forecast or simulate key events in clinical trials holds great potential for providing insights to guide trial designs. However, complex data collection and question definition requiring medical expertise and a deep understanding of trial designs have hindered the involvement of AI thus far. This paper tackles these challenges by presenting a comprehensive suite of meticulously curated AIready datasets covering multi-modal data (e.g., drug molecule, disease code, text, categorical/numerical features) and 8 crucial prediction challenges in clinical trial design, encompassing prediction of trial duration, patient dropout rate, serious adverse event, mortality rate, trial approval outcome, trial failure reason, drug dose finding, design of eligibility criteria. Furthermore, we provide basic validation methods for each task to ensure the datasets' usability and reliability. We anticipate that the availability of such open-access datasets will catalyze the development of advanced AI approaches for clinical trial design, ultimately advancing clinical trial research and accelerating medical solution development. The curated dataset, metrics, and basic models are publicly available at https://github.com/ML2Health/ML2ClinicalTrials/tree/main/AI4Trial.

ESC-Eval: Evaluating Emotion Support Conversations in Large Language Models

Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is a crucial application, which aims to reduce human stress, offer emotional guidance, and ultimately enhance human mental and physical well-being. With the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), many researchers have employed LLMs as the ESC models. However, the evaluation of these LLM-based ESCs remains uncertain. Inspired by the awesome development of role-playing agents, we propose an ESC Evaluation framework (ESC-Eval), which uses a role-playing agent to interact with ESC models, followed by a manual evaluation of the interactive dialogues. In detail, we first re-organize 2,801 role-playing cards from seven existing datasets to define the roles of the role-playing agent. Second, we train a specific role-playing model called ESC-Role which behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4. Third, through ESC-Role and organized role cards, we systematically conduct experiments using 14 LLMs as the ESC models, including general AI-assistant LLMs (ChatGPT) and ESC-oriented LLMs (ExTES-Llama). We conduct comprehensive human annotations on interactive multi-turn dialogues of different ESC models. The results show that ESC-oriented LLMs exhibit superior ESC abilities compared to general AI-assistant LLMs, but there is still a gap behind human performance. Moreover, to automate the scoring process for future ESC models, we developed ESC-RANK, which trained on the annotated data, achieving a scoring performance surpassing 35 points of GPT-4. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/haidequanbu/ESC-Eval.

AvaTaR: Optimizing LLM Agents for Tool-Assisted Knowledge Retrieval

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capability in utilizing external tools and knowledge to boost accuracy and reduce hallucinations. However, developing the prompting techniques that make LLM agents able to effectively use external tools and knowledge is a heuristic and laborious task. Here, we introduce AvaTaR, a novel and automatic framework that optimizes an LLM agent to effectively use the provided tools and improve its performance on a given task/domain. During optimization, we design a comparator module to iteratively provide insightful and holistic prompts to the LLM agent via reasoning between positive and negative examples sampled from training data. We demonstrate AvaTaR on four complex multimodal retrieval datasets featuring textual, visual, and relational information. We find AvaTaR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches across all four challenging tasks and exhibits strong generalization ability when applied to novel cases, achieving an average relative improvement of 14% on the Hit@1 metric. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zou-group/avatar.

Optimizing Large Model Training through Overlapped Activation Recomputation

Large model training has been using recomputation to alleviate the memory pressure and pipelining to exploit the parallelism of data, tensor, and devices. The existing recomputation approaches may incur up to 40% overhead when training real-world models, e.g., the GPT model with 22B parameters. This is because they are executed on demand in the critical training path. In this paper, we design a new recomputation framework, Lynx, to reduce the overhead by overlapping the recomputation with communication occurring in training pipelines. It consists of an optimal scheduling algorithm (OPT) and a heuristic-based scheduling algorithm (HEU). OPT achieves a global optimum but suffers from a long search time. HEU was designed based on our observation that there are identical structures in large DNN models so that we can apply the same scheduling policy to all identical structures. HEU achieves a local optimum but reduces the search time by 99% compared to OPT. Our comprehensive evaluation using GPT models with 1.3B-20B parameters shows that both OPT and HEU outperform the state-of-the-art recomputation approaches (e.g., Megatron-LM and Checkmake) by 1.02-1.53x. HEU achieves a similar performance as OPT with a search time of 0.16s on average.

MLLMGuard: A Multi-dimensional Safety Evaluation Suite for Multimodal Large Language Models

Powered by remarkable advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities in manifold tasks. However, the practical application scenarios of MLLMs are intricate, exposing them to potential malicious instructions and thereby posing safety risks. While current benchmarks do incorporate certain safety considerations, they often lack comprehensive coverage and fail to exhibit the necessary rigor and robustness. For instance, the common practice of employing GPT-4V as both the evaluator and a model to be evaluated lacks credibility, as it tends to exhibit a bias toward its own responses. In this paper, we present MLLMGuard, a multidimensional safety evaluation suite for MLLMs, including a bilingual image-text evaluation dataset, inference utilities, and a lightweight evaluator. MLLMGuard's assessment comprehensively covers two languages (English and Chinese) and five important safety dimensions (Privacy, Bias, Toxicity, Truthfulness, and Legality), each with corresponding rich subtasks. Focusing on these dimensions, our evaluation dataset is primarily sourced from platforms such as social media, and it integrates text-based and image-based red teaming techniques with meticulous annotation by human experts. This can prevent inaccurate evaluation caused by data leakage when using open-source datasets and ensures the quality and challenging nature of our benchmark. Additionally, a fully automated lightweight evaluator termed GuardRank is developed, which achieves significantly higher evaluation accuracy than GPT-4. Our evaluation results across 13 advanced models indicate that MLLMs still have a substantial journey ahead before they can be considered safe and responsible.

STaRK: Benchmarking LLM Retrieval on Textual and Relational Knowledge Bases

Answering real-world user queries, such as product search, often requires accurate retrieval of information from semi-structured knowledge bases or databases that involve blend of unstructured (e.g., textual descriptions of products) and structured (e.g., entity relations of products) information. However, previous works have mostly studied textual and relational retrieval tasks as separate topics. To address the gap, we develop STARK, a large-scale Semi-structure retrieval benchmark on Textual and Relational Knowledge Bases. We design a novel pipeline to synthesize natural and realistic user queries that integrate diverse relational information and complex textual properties, as well as their ground-truth answers. Moreover, we rigorously conduct human evaluation to validate the quality of our benchmark, which covers a variety of practical applications, including product recommendations, academic paper searches, and precision medicine inquiries. Our benchmark serves as a comprehensive testbed for evaluating the performance of retrieval systems, with an emphasis on retrieval approaches driven by large language models (LLMs). Our experiments suggest that the STARK datasets present significant challenges to the current retrieval and LLM systems, indicating the demand for building more capable retrieval systems that can handle both textual and relational aspects.

From GPT-4 to Gemini and Beyond: Assessing the Landscape of MLLMs on Generalizability, Trustworthiness and Causality through Four Modalities

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive abilities in generating reasonable responses with respect to multi-modal contents. However, there is still a wide gap between the performance of recent MLLM-based applications and the expectation of the broad public, even though the most powerful OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini have been deployed. This paper strives to enhance understanding of the gap through the lens of a qualitative study on the generalizability, trustworthiness, and causal reasoning capabilities of recent proprietary and open-source MLLMs across four modalities: ie, text, code, image, and video, ultimately aiming to improve the transparency of MLLMs. We believe these properties are several representative factors that define the reliability of MLLMs, in supporting various downstream applications. To be specific, we evaluate the closed-source GPT-4 and Gemini and 6 open-source LLMs and MLLMs. Overall we evaluate 230 manually designed cases, where the qualitative results are then summarized into 12 scores (ie, 4 modalities times 3 properties). In total, we uncover 14 empirical findings that are useful to understand the capabilities and limitations of both proprietary and open-source MLLMs, towards more reliable downstream multi-modal applications.