Abstract:As the field of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) continues to evolve, their potential to revolutionize artificial intelligence is particularly promising, especially in addressing mathematical reasoning tasks. Current mathematical benchmarks predominantly focus on evaluating MLLMs' problem-solving ability, yet there is a crucial gap in addressing more complex scenarios such as error detection, for enhancing reasoning capability in complicated settings. To fill this gap, we formally formulate the new task: multimodal error detection, and introduce ErrorRadar, the first benchmark designed to assess MLLMs' capabilities in such a task. ErrorRadar evaluates two sub-tasks: error step identification and error categorization, providing a comprehensive framework for evaluating MLLMs' complex mathematical reasoning ability. It consists of 2,500 high-quality multimodal K-12 mathematical problems, collected from real-world student interactions in an educational organization, with rigorous annotation and rich metadata such as problem type and error category. Through extensive experiments, we evaluated both open-source and closed-source representative MLLMs, benchmarking their performance against educational expert evaluators. Results indicate significant challenges still remain, as GPT-4o with best performance is still around 10% behind human evaluation. The dataset will be available upon acceptance.
Abstract:Students frequently make mistakes while solving mathematical problems, and traditional error correction methods are both time-consuming and labor-intensive. This paper introduces an innovative \textbf{V}irtual \textbf{A}I \textbf{T}eacher system designed to autonomously analyze and correct student \textbf{E}rrors (VATE). Leveraging advanced large language models (LLMs), the system uses student drafts as a primary source for error analysis, which enhances understanding of the student's learning process. It incorporates sophisticated prompt engineering and maintains an error pool to reduce computational overhead. The AI-driven system also features a real-time dialogue component for efficient student interaction. Our approach demonstrates significant advantages over traditional and machine learning-based error correction methods, including reduced educational costs, high scalability, and superior generalizability. The system has been deployed on the Squirrel AI learning platform for elementary mathematics education, where it achieves 78.3\% accuracy in error analysis and shows a marked improvement in student learning efficiency. Satisfaction surveys indicate a strong positive reception, highlighting the system's potential to transform educational practices.
Abstract:In addressing the persistent challenges of data-sparsity and cold-start issues in domain-expert recommender systems, Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) emerges as a promising methodology. CDR aims at enhancing prediction performance in the target domain by leveraging interaction knowledge from related source domains, particularly through users or items that span across multiple domains (e.g., Short-Video and Living-Room). For academic research purposes, there are a number of distinct aspects to guide CDR method designing, including the auxiliary domain number, domain-overlapped element, user-item interaction types, and downstream tasks. With so many different CDR combination scenario settings, the proposed scenario-expert approaches are tailored to address a specific vertical CDR scenario, and often lack the capacity to adapt to multiple horizontal scenarios. In an effect to coherently adapt to various scenarios, and drawing inspiration from the concept of domain-invariant transfer learning, we extend the former SOTA model UniCDR in five different aspects, named as UniCDR+. Our work was successfully deployed on the Kuaishou Living-Room RecSys.
Abstract:Kuaishou, is one of the largest short-video and live-streaming platform, compared with short-video recommendations, live-streaming recommendation is more complex because of: (1) temporarily-alive to distribution, (2) user may watch for a long time with feedback delay, (3) content is unpredictable and changes over time. Actually, even if a user is interested in the live-streaming author, it still may be an negative watching (e.g., short-view < 3s) since the real-time content is not attractive enough. Therefore, for live-streaming recommendation, there exists a challenging task: how do we recommend the live-streaming at right moment for users? Additionally, our platform's major exposure content is short short-video, and the amount of exposed short-video is 9x more than exposed live-streaming. Thus users will leave more behaviors on short-videos, which leads to a serious data imbalance problem making the live-streaming data could not fully reflect user interests. In such case, there raises another challenging task: how do we utilize users' short-video behaviors to make live-streaming recommendation better?
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed code completion tasks, providing context-based suggestions to boost developer productivity in software engineering. As users often fine-tune these models for specific applications, poisoning and backdoor attacks can covertly alter the model outputs. To address this critical security challenge, we introduce CodeBreaker, a pioneering LLM-assisted backdoor attack framework on code completion models. Unlike recent attacks that embed malicious payloads in detectable or irrelevant sections of the code (e.g., comments), CodeBreaker leverages LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) for sophisticated payload transformation (without affecting functionalities), ensuring that both the poisoned data for fine-tuning and generated code can evade strong vulnerability detection. CodeBreaker stands out with its comprehensive coverage of vulnerabilities, making it the first to provide such an extensive set for evaluation. Our extensive experimental evaluations and user studies underline the strong attack performance of CodeBreaker across various settings, validating its superiority over existing approaches. By integrating malicious payloads directly into the source code with minimal transformation, CodeBreaker challenges current security measures, underscoring the critical need for more robust defenses for code completion.
Abstract:The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought in a new era of possibilities in the realm of education. This survey paper summarizes the various technologies of LLMs in educational settings from multifaceted perspectives, encompassing student and teacher assistance, adaptive learning, and commercial tools. We systematically review the technological advancements in each perspective, organize related datasets and benchmarks, and identify the risks and challenges associated with deploying LLMs in education. Furthermore, we outline future research opportunities, highlighting the potential promising directions. Our survey aims to provide a comprehensive technological picture for educators, researchers, and policymakers to harness the power of LLMs to revolutionize educational practices and foster a more effective personalized learning environment.
Abstract:Recent advances in large language models have revolutionized many sectors, including the database industry. One common challenge when dealing with large volumes of tabular data is the pervasive use of abbreviated column names, which can negatively impact performance on various data search, access, and understanding tasks. To address this issue, we introduce a new task, called NameGuess, to expand column names (used in database schema) as a natural language generation problem. We create a training dataset of 384K abbreviated-expanded column pairs using a new data fabrication method and a human-annotated evaluation benchmark that includes 9.2K examples from real-world tables. To tackle the complexities associated with polysemy and ambiguity in NameGuess, we enhance auto-regressive language models by conditioning on table content and column header names -- yielding a fine-tuned model (with 2.7B parameters) that matches human performance. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis (on multiple LLMs) to validate the effectiveness of table content in NameGuess and identify promising future opportunities. Code has been made available at https://github.com/amazon-science/nameguess.
Abstract:Label-free cell classification is advantageous for supplying pristine cells for further use or examination, yet existing techniques frequently fall short in terms of specificity and speed. In this study, we address these limitations through the development of a novel machine learning framework, Multiplex Image Machine Learning (MIML). This architecture uniquely combines label-free cell images with biomechanical property data, harnessing the vast, often underutilized morphological information intrinsic to each cell. By integrating both types of data, our model offers a more holistic understanding of the cellular properties, utilizing morphological information typically discarded in traditional machine learning models. This approach has led to a remarkable 98.3\% accuracy in cell classification, a substantial improvement over models that only consider a single data type. MIML has been proven effective in classifying white blood cells and tumor cells, with potential for broader application due to its inherent flexibility and transfer learning capability. It's particularly effective for cells with similar morphology but distinct biomechanical properties. This innovative approach has significant implications across various fields, from advancing disease diagnostics to understanding cellular behavior.
Abstract:Reducing unexpected urban traffic congestion caused by en-route events (e.g., road closures, car crashes, etc.) often requires fast and accurate reactions to choose the best-fit traffic signals. Traditional traffic light control systems, such as SCATS and SCOOT, are not efficient as their traffic data provided by induction loops has a low update frequency (i.e., longer than 1 minute). Moreover, the traffic light signal plans used by these systems are selected from a limited set of candidate plans pre-programmed prior to unexpected events' occurrence. Recent research demonstrates that camera-based traffic light systems controlled by deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms are more effective in reducing traffic congestion, in which the cameras can provide high-frequency high-resolution traffic data. However, these systems are costly to deploy in big cities due to the excessive potential upgrades required to road infrastructure. In this paper, we argue that Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can play a crucial role in dealing with unexpected traffic congestion because UAVs with onboard cameras can be economically deployed when and where unexpected congestion occurs. Then, we propose a system called "AVARS" that explores the potential of using UAVs to reduce unexpected urban traffic congestion using DRL-based traffic light signal control. This approach is validated on a widely used open-source traffic simulator with practical UAV settings, including its traffic monitoring ranges and battery lifetime. Our simulation results show that AVARS can effectively recover the unexpected traffic congestion in Dublin, Ireland, back to its original un-congested level within the typical battery life duration of a UAV.
Abstract:How can we learn effective node representations on textual graphs? Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that use Language Models (LMs) to encode textual information of graphs achieve state-of-the-art performance in many node classification tasks. Yet, combining GNNs with LMs has not been widely explored for practical deployments due to its scalability issues. In this work, we tackle this challenge by developing a Graph-Aware Distillation framework (GRAD) to encode graph structures into an LM for graph-free, fast inference. Different from conventional knowledge distillation, GRAD jointly optimizes a GNN teacher and a graph-free student over the graph's nodes via a shared LM. This encourages the graph-free student to exploit graph information encoded by the GNN teacher while at the same time, enables the GNN teacher to better leverage textual information from unlabeled nodes. As a result, the teacher and the student models learn from each other to improve their overall performance. Experiments in eight node classification benchmarks in both transductive and inductive settings showcase GRAD's superiority over existing distillation approaches for textual graphs.