A Water Efficiency Dataset for African Data Centers

AI computing and data centers consume a large amount of freshwater, both directly for cooling and indirectly for electricity generation. While most attention has been paid to developed countries such as the U.S., this paper presents the first-of-its-kind dataset that combines nation-level weather and electricity generation data to estimate water usage efficiency for data centers in 41 African countries across five different climate regions. We also use our dataset to evaluate and estimate the water consumption of inference on two large language models (i.e., Llama-3-70B and GPT-4) in 11 selected African countries. Our findings show that writing a 10-page report using Llama-3-70B could consume about \textbf{0.7 liters} of water, while the water consumption by GPT-4 for the same task may go up to about 60 liters. For writing a medium-length email of 120-200 words, Llama-3-70B and GPT-4 could consume about \textbf{0.13 liters} and 3 liters of water, respectively. Interestingly, given the same AI model, 8 out of the 11 selected African countries consume less water than the global average, mainly because of lower water intensities for electricity generation. However, water consumption can be substantially higher in some African countries with a steppe climate than the U.S. and global averages, prompting more attention when deploying AI computing in these countries. Our dataset is publicly available on \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/masterlion/WaterEfficientDatasetForAfricanCountries/tree/main}{Hugging Face}.

LLM-PySC2: Starcraft II learning environment for Large Language Models

This paper introduces a new environment LLM-PySC2 (the Large Language Model StarCraft II Learning Environment), a platform derived from DeepMind's StarCraft II Learning Environment that serves to develop Large Language Models (LLMs) based decision-making methodologies. This environment is the first to offer the complete StarCraft II action space, multi-modal observation interfaces, and a structured game knowledge database, which are seamlessly connected with various LLMs to facilitate the research of LLMs-based decision-making. To further support multi-agent research, we developed an LLM collaborative framework that supports multi-agent concurrent queries and multi-agent communication. In our experiments, the LLM-PySC2 environment is adapted to be compatible with the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) task group and provided eight new scenarios focused on macro-decision abilities. We evaluated nine mainstream LLMs in the experiments, and results show that sufficient parameters are necessary for LLMs to make decisions, but improving reasoning ability does not directly lead to better decision-making outcomes. Our findings further indicate the importance of enabling large models to learn autonomously in the deployment environment through parameter training or train-free learning techniques. Ultimately, we expect that the LLM-PySC2 environment can promote research on learning methods for LLMs, helping LLM-based methods better adapt to task scenarios.

Online Budgeted Matching with General Bids

Online Budgeted Matching (OBM) is a classic problem with important applications in online advertising, online service matching, revenue management, and beyond. Traditional online algorithms typically assume a small bid setting, where the maximum bid-to-budget ratio (\kappa) is infinitesimally small. While recent algorithms have tried to address scenarios with non-small or general bids, they often rely on the Fractional Last Matching (FLM) assumption, which allows for accepting partial bids when the remaining budget is insufficient. This assumption, however, does not hold for many applications with indivisible bids. In this paper, we remove the FLM assumption and tackle the open problem of OBM with general bids. We first establish an upper bound of 1-\kappa on the competitive ratio for any deterministic online algorithm. We then propose a novel meta algorithm, called MetaAd, which reduces to different algorithms with first known provable competitive ratios parameterized by the maximum bid-to-budget ratio \kappa \in [0, 1]. As a by-product, we extend MetaAd to the FLM setting and get provable competitive algorithms. Finally, we apply our competitive analysis to the design learning-augmented algorithms.

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning Medical Multimodal Large Language Models for Medical Visual Grounding

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) inherit the superior text understanding capabilities of LLMs and extend these capabilities to multimodal scenarios. These models achieve excellent results in the general domain of multimodal tasks. However, in the medical domain, the substantial training costs and the requirement for extensive medical data pose challenges to the development of medical MLLMs. Furthermore, due to the free-text form of answers, tasks such as visual grounding that need to produce output in a prescribed form become difficult for MLLMs. So far, there have been no medical MLLMs works in medical visual grounding area. For the medical vision grounding task, which involves identifying locations in medical images based on short text descriptions, we propose Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning medical multimodal large language models for Medcial Visual Grounding (PFMVG). To validate the performance of the model, we evaluate it on a public benchmark dataset for medical visual grounding, where it achieves competitive results, and significantly outperforming GPT-4v. Our code will be open sourced after peer review.

Bench4Merge: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Merging in Realistic Dense Traffic with Micro-Interactive Vehicles

While the capabilities of autonomous driving have advanced rapidly, merging into dense traffic remains a significant challenge, many motion planning methods for this scenario have been proposed but it is hard to evaluate them. Most existing closed-loop simulators rely on rule-based controls for other vehicles, which results in a lack of diversity and randomness, thus failing to accurately assess the motion planning capabilities in highly interactive scenarios. Moreover, traditional evaluation metrics are insufficient for comprehensively evaluating the performance of merging in dense traffic. In response, we proposed a closed-loop evaluation benchmark for assessing motion planning capabilities in merging scenarios. Our approach involves other vehicles trained in large scale datasets with micro-behavioral characteristics that significantly enhance the complexity and diversity. Additionally, we have restructured the evaluation mechanism by leveraging large language models to assess each autonomous vehicle merging onto the main road. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the advanced nature of this evaluation benchmark. Through this benchmark, we have obtained an evaluation of existing methods and identified common issues. The environment and vehicle motion planning models we have designed can be accessed at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Bench4Merge-EB5D

Dual-AEB: Synergizing Rule-Based and Multimodal Large Language Models for Effective Emergency Braking

Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) systems are a crucial component in ensuring the safety of passengers in autonomous vehicles. Conventional AEB systems primarily rely on closed-set perception modules to recognize traffic conditions and assess collision risks. To enhance the adaptability of AEB systems in open scenarios, we propose Dual-AEB, a system combines an advanced multimodal large language model (MLLM) for comprehensive scene understanding and a conventional rule-based rapid AEB to ensure quick response times. To the best of our knowledge, Dual-AEB is the first method to incorporate MLLMs within AEB systems. Through extensive experimentation, we have validated the effectiveness of our method. The source code will be available at https://github.com/ChipsICU/Dual-AEB.

OccLLaMA: An Occupancy-Language-Action Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving

The rise of multi-modal large language models(MLLMs) has spurred their applications in autonomous driving. Recent MLLM-based methods perform action by learning a direct mapping from perception to action, neglecting the dynamics of the world and the relations between action and world dynamics. In contrast, human beings possess world model that enables them to simulate the future states based on 3D internal visual representation and plan actions accordingly. To this end, we propose OccLLaMA, an occupancy-language-action generative world model, which uses semantic occupancy as a general visual representation and unifies vision-language-action(VLA) modalities through an autoregressive model. Specifically, we introduce a novel VQVAE-like scene tokenizer to efficiently discretize and reconstruct semantic occupancy scenes, considering its sparsity and classes imbalance. Then, we build a unified multi-modal vocabulary for vision, language and action. Furthermore, we enhance LLM, specifically LLaMA, to perform the next token/scene prediction on the unified vocabulary to complete multiple tasks in autonomous driving. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OccLLaMA achieves competitive performance across multiple tasks, including 4D occupancy forecasting, motion planning, and visual question answering, showcasing its potential as a foundation model in autonomous driving.

ChatSchema: A pipeline of extracting structured information with Large Multimodal Models based on schema

Objective: This study introduces ChatSchema, an effective method for extracting and structuring information from unstructured data in medical paper reports using a combination of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) based on the schema. By integrating predefined schema, we intend to enable LMMs to directly extract and standardize information according to the schema specifications, facilitating further data entry. Method: Our approach involves a two-stage process, including classification and extraction for categorizing report scenarios and structuring information. We established and annotated a dataset to verify the effectiveness of ChatSchema, and evaluated key extraction using precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy metrics. Based on key extraction, we further assessed value extraction. We conducted ablation studies on two LMMs to illustrate the improvement of structured information extraction with different input modals and methods. Result: We analyzed 100 medical reports from Peking University First Hospital and established a ground truth dataset with 2,945 key-value pairs. We evaluated ChatSchema using GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro and found a higher overall performance of GPT-4o. The results are as follows: For the result of key extraction, key-precision was 98.6%, key-recall was 98.5%, key-F1-score was 98.6%. For the result of value extraction based on correct key extraction, the overall accuracy was 97.2%, precision was 95.8%, recall was 95.8%, and F1-score was 95.8%. An ablation study demonstrated that ChatSchema achieved significantly higher overall accuracy and overall F1-score of key-value extraction, compared to the Baseline, with increases of 26.9% overall accuracy and 27.4% overall F1-score, respectively.

Positive and Unlabeled Data: Model, Estimation, Inference, and Classification

This study introduces a new approach to addressing positive and unlabeled (PU) data through the double exponential tilting model (DETM). Traditional methods often fall short because they only apply to selected completely at random (SCAR) PU data, where the labeled positive and unlabeled positive data are assumed to be from the same distribution. In contrast, our DETM's dual structure effectively accommodates the more complex and underexplored selected at random PU data, where the labeled and unlabeled positive data can be from different distributions. We rigorously establish the theoretical foundations of DETM, including identifiability, parameter estimation, and asymptotic properties. Additionally, we move forward to statistical inference by developing a goodness-of-fit test for the SCAR condition and constructing confidence intervals for the proportion of positive instances in the target domain. We leverage an approximated Bayes classifier for classification tasks, demonstrating DETM's robust performance in prediction. Through theoretical insights and practical applications, this study highlights DETM as a comprehensive framework for addressing the challenges of PU data.

Online DPO: Online Direct Preference Optimization with Fast-Slow Chasing

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) improves the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values by training directly on human preference datasets, eliminating the need for reward models. However, due to the presence of cross-domain human preferences, direct continual training can lead to catastrophic forgetting, limiting DPO's performance and efficiency. Inspired by intraspecific competition driving species evolution, we propose a Online Fast-Slow chasing DPO (OFS-DPO) for preference alignment, simulating competition through fast and slow chasing among models to facilitate rapid adaptation. Specifically, we first derive the regret upper bound for online learning, validating our motivation with a min-max optimization pattern. Based on this, we introduce two identical modules using Low-rank Adaptive (LoRA) with different optimization speeds to simulate intraspecific competition, and propose a new regularization term to guide their learning. To further mitigate catastrophic forgetting in cross-domain scenarios, we extend the OFS-DPO with LoRA modules combination strategy, resulting in the Cross domain Online Fast-Slow chasing DPO (COFS-DPO). This method leverages linear combinations of fast modules parameters from different task domains, fully utilizing historical information to achive continual value alignment. Experimental results show that OFS-DPO outperforms DPO in in-domain alignment, while COFS-DPO excels in cross-domain continual learning scenarios.