Enhancing LLMs for Physics Problem-Solving using Reinforcement Learning with Human-AI Feedback

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in text-based tasks but struggle with the complex reasoning required for physics problems, particularly in advanced arithmetic and conceptual understanding. While some research has explored ways to enhance LLMs in physics education using techniques such as prompt engineering and Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG), not enough effort has been made in addressing their limitations in physics reasoning. This paper presents a novel approach to improving LLM performance on physics questions using Reinforcement Learning with Human and Artificial Intelligence Feedback (RLHAIF). We evaluate several reinforcement learning methods, including Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and Remax optimization. These methods are chosen to investigate RL policy performance with different settings on the PhyQA dataset, which includes challenging physics problems from high school textbooks. Our RLHAIF model, tested on leading LLMs like LLaMA2 and Mistral, achieved superior results, notably with the MISTRAL-PPO model, demonstrating marked improvements in reasoning and accuracy. It achieved high scores, with a 58.67 METEOR score and a 0.74 Reasoning score, making it a strong example for future physics reasoning research in this area.

Evaluating the effects of Data Sparsity on the Link-level Bicycling Volume Estimation: A Graph Convolutional Neural Network Approach

Accurate bicycling volume estimation is crucial for making informed decisions about future investments in bicycling infrastructure. Traditional link-level volume estimation models are effective for motorised traffic but face significant challenges when applied to the bicycling context because of sparse data and the intricate nature of bicycling mobility patterns. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first study to utilize a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) architecture to model link-level bicycling volumes. We estimate the Annual Average Daily Bicycle (AADB) counts across the City of Melbourne, Australia using Strava Metro bicycling count data. To evaluate the effectiveness of the GCN model, we benchmark it against traditional machine learning models, such as linear regression, support vector machines, and random forest. Our results show that the GCN model performs better than these traditional models in predicting AADB counts, demonstrating its ability to capture the spatial dependencies inherent in bicycle traffic data. We further investigate how varying levels of data sparsity affect performance of the GCN architecture. The GCN architecture performs well and better up to 80% sparsity level, but its limitations become apparent as the data sparsity increases further, emphasizing the need for further research on handling extreme data sparsity in bicycling volume estimation. Our findings offer valuable insights for city planners aiming to improve bicycling infrastructure and promote sustainable transportation.

Photon Inhibition for Energy-Efficient Single-Photon Imaging

Single-photon cameras (SPCs) are emerging as sensors of choice for various challenging imaging applications. One class of SPCs based on the single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detects individual photons using an avalanche process; the raw photon data can then be processed to extract scene information under extremely low light, high dynamic range, and rapid motion. Yet, single-photon sensitivity in SPADs comes at a cost -- each photon detection consumes more energy than that of a CMOS camera. This avalanche power significantly limits sensor resolution and could restrict widespread adoption of SPAD-based SPCs. We propose a computational-imaging approach called \emph{photon inhibition} to address this challenge. Photon inhibition strategically allocates detections in space and time based on downstream inference task goals and resource constraints. We develop lightweight, on-sensor computational inhibition policies that use past photon data to disable SPAD pixels in real-time, to select the most informative future photons. As case studies, we design policies tailored for image reconstruction and edge detection, and demonstrate, both via simulations and real SPC captured data, considerable reduction in photon detections (over 90\% of photons) while maintaining task performance metrics. Our work raises the question of ``which photons should be detected?'', and paves the way for future energy-efficient single-photon imaging.

Using a Distance Sensor to Detect Deviations in a Planar Surface

We investigate methods for determining if a planar surface contains geometric deviations (e.g., protrusions, objects, divots, or cliffs) using only an instantaneous measurement from a miniature optical time-of-flight sensor. The key to our method is to utilize the entirety of information encoded in raw time-of-flight data captured by off-the-shelf distance sensors. We provide an analysis of the problem in which we identify the key ambiguity between geometry and surface photometrics. To overcome this challenging ambiguity, we fit a Gaussian mixture model to a small dataset of planar surface measurements. This model implicitly captures the expected geometry and distribution of photometrics of the planar surface and is used to identify measurements that are likely to contain deviations. We characterize our method on a variety of surfaces and planar deviations across a range of scenarios. We find that our method utilizing raw time-of-flight data outperforms baselines which use only derived distance estimates. We build an example application in which our method enables mobile robot obstacle and cliff avoidance over a wide field-of-view.

Radiance Fields from Photons

Neural radiance fields, or NeRFs, have become the de facto approach for high-quality view synthesis from a collection of images captured from multiple viewpoints. However, many issues remain when capturing images in-the-wild under challenging conditions, such as low light, high dynamic range, or rapid motion leading to smeared reconstructions with noticeable artifacts. In this work, we introduce quanta radiance fields, a novel class of neural radiance fields that are trained at the granularity of individual photons using single-photon cameras (SPCs). We develop theory and practical computational techniques for building radiance fields and estimating dense camera poses from unconventional, stochastic, and high-speed binary frame sequences captured by SPCs. We demonstrate, both via simulations and a SPC hardware prototype, high-fidelity reconstructions under high-speed motion, in low light, and for extreme dynamic range settings.

Generalized Event Cameras

Event cameras capture the world at high time resolution and with minimal bandwidth requirements. However, event streams, which only encode changes in brightness, do not contain sufficient scene information to support a wide variety of downstream tasks. In this work, we design generalized event cameras that inherently preserve scene intensity in a bandwidth-efficient manner. We generalize event cameras in terms of when an event is generated and what information is transmitted. To implement our designs, we turn to single-photon sensors that provide digital access to individual photon detections; this modality gives us the flexibility to realize a rich space of generalized event cameras. Our single-photon event cameras are capable of high-speed, high-fidelity imaging at low readout rates. Consequently, these event cameras can support plug-and-play downstream inference, without capturing new event datasets or designing specialized event-vision models. As a practical implication, our designs, which involve lightweight and near-sensor-compatible computations, provide a way to use single-photon sensors without exorbitant bandwidth costs.

Streaming quanta sensors for online, high-performance imaging and vision

Recently quanta image sensors (QIS) -- ultra-fast, zero-read-noise binary image sensors -- have demonstrated remarkable imaging capabilities in many challenging scenarios. Despite their potential, the adoption of these sensors is severely hampered by (a) high data rates and (b) the need for new computational pipelines to handle the unconventional raw data. We introduce a simple, low-bandwidth computational pipeline to address these challenges. Our approach is based on a novel streaming representation with a small memory footprint, efficiently capturing intensity information at multiple temporal scales. Updating the representation requires only 16 floating-point operations/pixel, which can be efficiently computed online at the native frame rate of the binary frames. We use a neural network operating on this representation to reconstruct videos in real-time (10-30 fps). We illustrate why such representation is well-suited for these emerging sensors, and how it offers low latency and high frame rate while retaining flexibility for downstream computer vision. Our approach results in significant data bandwidth reductions ~100X and real-time image reconstruction and computer vision -- $10^4$-$10^5$ reduction in computation than existing state-of-the-art approach while maintaining comparable quality. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to achieve online, real-time image reconstruction on QIS.

Context-Enhanced Language Models for Generating Multi-Paper Citations

Citation text plays a pivotal role in elucidating the connection between scientific documents, demanding an in-depth comprehension of the cited paper. Constructing citations is often time-consuming, requiring researchers to delve into extensive literature and grapple with articulating relevant content. To address this challenge, the field of citation text generation (CTG) has emerged. However, while earlier methods have primarily centered on creating single-sentence citations, practical scenarios frequently necessitate citing multiple papers within a single paragraph. To bridge this gap, we propose a method that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate multi-citation sentences. Our approach involves a single source paper and a collection of target papers, culminating in a coherent paragraph containing multi-sentence citation text. Furthermore, we introduce a curated dataset named MCG-S2ORC, composed of English-language academic research papers in Computer Science, showcasing multiple citation instances. In our experiments, we evaluate three LLMs LLaMA, Alpaca, and Vicuna to ascertain the most effective model for this endeavor. Additionally, we exhibit enhanced performance by integrating knowledge graphs from target papers into the prompts for generating citation text. This research underscores the potential of harnessing LLMs for citation generation, opening a compelling avenue for exploring the intricate connections between scientific documents.

Mathify: Evaluating Large Language Models on Mathematical Problem Solving Tasks

The rapid progress in the field of natural language processing (NLP) systems and the expansion of large language models (LLMs) have opened up numerous opportunities in the field of education and instructional methods. These advancements offer the potential for tailored learning experiences and immediate feedback, all delivered through accessible and cost-effective services. One notable application area for this technological advancement is in the realm of solving mathematical problems. Mathematical problem-solving not only requires the ability to decipher complex problem statements but also the skill to perform precise arithmetic calculations at each step of the problem-solving process. However, the evaluation of the arithmetic capabilities of large language models remains an area that has received relatively little attention. In response, we introduce an extensive mathematics dataset called "MathQuest" sourced from the 11th and 12th standard Mathematics NCERT textbooks. This dataset encompasses mathematical challenges of varying complexity and covers a wide range of mathematical concepts. Utilizing this dataset, we conduct fine-tuning experiments with three prominent LLMs: LLaMA-2, WizardMath, and MAmmoTH. These fine-tuned models serve as benchmarks for evaluating their performance on our dataset. Our experiments reveal that among the three models, MAmmoTH-13B emerges as the most proficient, achieving the highest level of competence in solving the presented mathematical problems. Consequently, MAmmoTH-13B establishes itself as a robust and dependable benchmark for addressing NCERT mathematics problems.

TC-OCR: TableCraft OCR for Efficient Detection & Recognition of Table Structure & Content

The automatic recognition of tabular data in document images presents a significant challenge due to the diverse range of table styles and complex structures. Tables offer valuable content representation, enhancing the predictive capabilities of various systems such as search engines and Knowledge Graphs. Addressing the two main problems, namely table detection (TD) and table structure recognition (TSR), has traditionally been approached independently. In this research, we propose an end-to-end pipeline that integrates deep learning models, including DETR, CascadeTabNet, and PP OCR v2, to achieve comprehensive image-based table recognition. This integrated approach effectively handles diverse table styles, complex structures, and image distortions, resulting in improved accuracy and efficiency compared to existing methods like Table Transformers. Our system achieves simultaneous table detection (TD), table structure recognition (TSR), and table content recognition (TCR), preserving table structures and accurately extracting tabular data from document images. The integration of multiple models addresses the intricacies of table recognition, making our approach a promising solution for image-based table understanding, data extraction, and information retrieval applications. Our proposed approach achieves an IOU of 0.96 and an OCR Accuracy of 78%, showcasing a remarkable improvement of approximately 25% in the OCR Accuracy compared to the previous Table Transformer approach.