A Systematic Survey of Automatic Prompt Optimization Techniques

Since the advent of large language models (LLMs), prompt engineering has been a crucial step for eliciting desired responses for various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, prompt engineering remains an impediment for end users due to rapid advances in models, tasks, and associated best practices. To mitigate this, Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) techniques have recently emerged that use various automated techniques to help improve the performance of LLMs on various tasks. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey summarizing the current progress and remaining challenges in this field. We provide a formal definition of APO, a 5-part unifying framework, and then proceed to rigorously categorize all relevant works based on their salient features therein. We hope to spur further research guided by our framework.

GuidedBench: Equipping Jailbreak Evaluation with Guidelines

Jailbreaking methods for large language models (LLMs) have gained increasing attention for building safe and responsible AI systems. After analyzing 35 jailbreak methods across six categories, we find that existing benchmarks, relying on universal LLM-based or keyword-matching scores, lack case-specific criteria, leading to conflicting results. In this paper, we introduce a more robust evaluation framework for jailbreak methods, with a curated harmful question dataset, detailed case-by-case evaluation guidelines, and a scoring system equipped with these guidelines. Our experiments show that existing jailbreak methods exhibit better discrimination when evaluated using our benchmark. Some jailbreak methods that claim to achieve over 90% attack success rate (ASR) on other benchmarks only reach a maximum of 30.2% on our benchmark, providing a higher ceiling for more advanced jailbreak research; furthermore, using our scoring system reduces the variance of disagreements between different evaluator LLMs by up to 76.33%. This demonstrates its ability to provide more fair and stable evaluation.

Towards Accurate Binary Spiking Neural Networks: Learning with Adaptive Gradient Modulation Mechanism

Binary Spiking Neural Networks (BSNNs) inherit the eventdriven paradigm of SNNs, while also adopting the reduced storage burden of binarization techniques. These distinct advantages grant BSNNs lightweight and energy-efficient characteristics, rendering them ideal for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. However, due to the binary synaptic weights and non-differentiable spike function, effectively training BSNNs remains an open question. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the challenge for BSNN learning, namely the frequent weight sign flipping problem. To mitigate this issue, we propose an Adaptive Gradient Modulation Mechanism (AGMM), which is designed to reduce the frequency of weight sign flipping by adaptively adjusting the gradients during the learning process. The proposed AGMM can enable BSNNs to achieve faster convergence speed and higher accuracy, effectively narrowing the gap between BSNNs and their full-precision equivalents. We validate AGMM on both static and neuromorphic datasets, and results indicate that it achieves state-of-the-art results among BSNNs. This work substantially reduces storage demands and enhances SNNs' inherent energy efficiency, making them highly feasible for resource-constrained environments.

Spiking Vision Transformer with Saccadic Attention

The combination of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) holds potential for achieving both energy efficiency and high performance, particularly suitable for edge vision applications. However, a significant performance gap still exists between SNN-based ViTs and their ANN counterparts. Here, we first analyze why SNN-based ViTs suffer from limited performance and identify a mismatch between the vanilla self-attention mechanism and spatio-temporal spike trains. This mismatch results in degraded spatial relevance and limited temporal interactions. To address these issues, we draw inspiration from biological saccadic attention mechanisms and introduce an innovative Saccadic Spike Self-Attention (SSSA) method. Specifically, in the spatial domain, SSSA employs a novel spike distribution-based method to effectively assess the relevance between Query and Key pairs in SNN-based ViTs. Temporally, SSSA employs a saccadic interaction module that dynamically focuses on selected visual areas at each timestep and significantly enhances whole scene understanding through temporal interactions. Building on the SSSA mechanism, we develop a SNN-based Vision Transformer (SNN-ViT). Extensive experiments across various visual tasks demonstrate that SNN-ViT achieves state-of-the-art performance with linear computational complexity. The effectiveness and efficiency of the SNN-ViT highlight its potential for power-critical edge vision applications.

Exploring Large Language Models in Healthcare: Insights into Corpora Sources, Customization Strategies, and Evaluation Metrics

This study reviewed the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in healthcare, focusing on their training corpora, customization techniques, and evaluation metrics. A systematic search of studies from 2021 to 2024 identified 61 articles. Four types of corpora were used: clinical resources, literature, open-source datasets, and web-crawled data. Common construction techniques included pre-training, prompt engineering, and retrieval-augmented generation, with 44 studies combining multiple methods. Evaluation metrics were categorized into process, usability, and outcome metrics, with outcome metrics divided into model-based and expert-assessed outcomes. The study identified critical gaps in corpus fairness, which contributed to biases from geographic, cultural, and socio-economic factors. The reliance on unverified or unstructured data highlighted the need for better integration of evidence-based clinical guidelines. Future research should focus on developing a tiered corpus architecture with vetted sources and dynamic weighting, while ensuring model transparency. Additionally, the lack of standardized evaluation frameworks for domain-specific models called for comprehensive validation of LLMs in real-world healthcare settings.

Estimating Probabilities of Causation with Machine Learning Models

Probabilities of causation play a crucial role in modern decision-making. This paper addresses the challenge of predicting probabilities of causation for subpopulations with insufficient data using machine learning models. Tian and Pearl first defined and derived tight bounds for three fundamental probabilities of causation: the probability of necessity and sufficiency (PNS), the probability of sufficiency (PS), and the probability of necessity (PN). However, estimating these probabilities requires both experimental and observational distributions specific to each subpopulation, which are often unavailable or impractical to obtain with limited population-level data. We assume that the probabilities of causation for each subpopulation are determined by its characteristics. To estimate these probabilities for subpopulations with insufficient data, we propose using machine learning models that draw insights from subpopulations with sufficient data. Our evaluation of multiple machine learning models indicates that, given sufficient population-level data and an appropriate choice of machine learning model and activation function, PNS can be effectively predicted. Through simulation studies, we show that our multilayer perceptron (MLP) model with the Mish activation function achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of approximately 0.02 in predicting PNS for 32,768 subpopulations using data from around 2,000 subpopulations.

Learning Human Skill Generators at Key-Step Levels

We are committed to learning human skill generators at key-step levels. The generation of skills is a challenging endeavor, but its successful implementation could greatly facilitate human skill learning and provide more experience for embodied intelligence. Although current video generation models can synthesis simple and atomic human operations, they struggle with human skills due to their complex procedure process. Human skills involve multi-step, long-duration actions and complex scene transitions, so the existing naive auto-regressive methods for synthesizing long videos cannot generate human skills. To address this, we propose a novel task, the Key-step Skill Generation (KS-Gen), aimed at reducing the complexity of generating human skill videos. Given the initial state and a skill description, the task is to generate video clips of key steps to complete the skill, rather than a full-length video. To support this task, we introduce a carefully curated dataset and define multiple evaluation metrics to assess performance. Considering the complexity of KS-Gen, we propose a new framework for this task. First, a multimodal large language model (MLLM) generates descriptions for key steps using retrieval argument. Subsequently, we use a Key-step Image Generator (KIG) to address the discontinuity between key steps in skill videos. Finally, a video generation model uses these descriptions and key-step images to generate video clips of the key steps with high temporal consistency. We offer a detailed analysis of the results, hoping to provide more insights on human skill generation. All models and data are available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/KS-Gen.

Towards THz-based Obstacle Sensing: A Generative Radio Environment Awareness Framework

Obstacle sensing is essential for terahertz (THz) communication since the subsequent beam management can avoid THz signals blocked by the obstacles. In parallel, radio environment, which can be manifested by channel knowledge such as the distribution of received signal strength (RSS), reveals signal propagation situation and the corresponding obstacle information. However, the awareness of the radio environment for obstacle sensing is challenging in practice, as the sparsely deployed THz sensors can acquire only little a priori knowledge with their RSS measurements. Therefore, we formulate in this paper a radio environment awareness problem, which for the first time considers a probability distribution of obstacle attributes. To solve such a problem, we propose a THz-based generative radio environment awareness framework, in which obstacle information is obtained directly from the aware radio environment. We also propose a novel generative model based on conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN), where U-net and the objective function of the problem are introduced to enable accurate awareness of RSS distribution. Simulation results show that the proposed framework can improve the awareness of the radio environment, and thus achieve superior sensing performance in terms of average precision regarding obstacles' shape and location.

Automating a Complete Software Test Process Using LLMs: An Automotive Case Study

Vehicle API testing verifies whether the interactions between a vehicle's internal systems and external applications meet expectations, ensuring that users can access and control various vehicle functions and data. However, this task is inherently complex, requiring the alignment and coordination of API systems, communication protocols, and even vehicle simulation systems to develop valid test cases. In practical industrial scenarios, inconsistencies, ambiguities, and interdependencies across various documents and system specifications pose significant challenges. This paper presents a system designed for the automated testing of in-vehicle APIs. By clearly defining and segmenting the testing process, we enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to focus on specific tasks, ensuring a stable and controlled testing workflow. Experiments conducted on over 100 APIs demonstrate that our system effectively automates vehicle API testing. The results also confirm that LLMs can efficiently handle mundane tasks requiring human judgment, making them suitable for complete automation in similar industrial contexts.

Label Anything: An Interpretable, High-Fidelity and Prompt-Free Annotator

Learning-based street scene semantic understanding in autonomous driving (AD) has advanced significantly recently, but the performance of the AD model is heavily dependent on the quantity and quality of the annotated training data. However, traditional manual labeling involves high cost to annotate the vast amount of required data for training robust model. To mitigate this cost of manual labeling, we propose a Label Anything Model (denoted as LAM), serving as an interpretable, high-fidelity, and prompt-free data annotator. Specifically, we firstly incorporate a pretrained Vision Transformer (ViT) to extract the latent features. On top of ViT, we propose a semantic class adapter (SCA) and an optimization-oriented unrolling algorithm (OptOU), both with a quite small number of trainable parameters. SCA is proposed to fuse ViT-extracted features to consolidate the basis of the subsequent automatic annotation. OptOU consists of multiple cascading layers and each layer contains an optimization formulation to align its output with the ground truth as closely as possible, though which OptOU acts as being interpretable rather than learning-based blackbox nature. In addition, training SCA and OptOU requires only a single pre-annotated RGB seed image, owing to their small volume of learnable parameters. Extensive experiments clearly demonstrate that the proposed LAM can generate high-fidelity annotations (almost 100% in mIoU) for multiple real-world datasets (i.e., Camvid, Cityscapes, and Apolloscapes) and CARLA simulation dataset.