A survey on fairness of large language models in e-commerce: progress, application, and challenge

This survey explores the fairness of large language models (LLMs) in e-commerce, examining their progress, applications, and the challenges they face. LLMs have become pivotal in the e-commerce domain, offering innovative solutions and enhancing customer experiences. This work presents a comprehensive survey on the applications and challenges of LLMs in e-commerce. The paper begins by introducing the key principles underlying the use of LLMs in e-commerce, detailing the processes of pretraining, fine-tuning, and prompting that tailor these models to specific needs. It then explores the varied applications of LLMs in e-commerce, including product reviews, where they synthesize and analyze customer feedback; product recommendations, where they leverage consumer data to suggest relevant items; product information translation, enhancing global accessibility; and product question and answer sections, where they automate customer support. The paper critically addresses the fairness challenges in e-commerce, highlighting how biases in training data and algorithms can lead to unfair outcomes, such as reinforcing stereotypes or discriminating against certain groups. These issues not only undermine consumer trust, but also raise ethical and legal concerns. Finally, the work outlines future research directions, emphasizing the need for more equitable and transparent LLMs in e-commerce. It advocates for ongoing efforts to mitigate biases and improve the fairness of these systems, ensuring they serve diverse global markets effectively and ethically. Through this comprehensive analysis, the survey provides a holistic view of the current landscape of LLMs in e-commerce, offering insights into their potential and limitations, and guiding future endeavors in creating fairer and more inclusive e-commerce environments.

LAPTOP-Diff: Layer Pruning and Normalized Distillation for Compressing Diffusion Models

In the era of AIGC, the demand for low-budget or even on-device applications of diffusion models emerged. In terms of compressing the Stable Diffusion models (SDMs), several approaches have been proposed, and most of them leveraged the handcrafted layer removal methods to obtain smaller U-Nets, along with knowledge distillation to recover the network performance. However, such a handcrafting manner of layer removal is inefficient and lacks scalability and generalization, and the feature distillation employed in the retraining phase faces an imbalance issue that a few numerically significant feature loss terms dominate over others throughout the retraining process. To this end, we proposed the layer pruning and normalized distillation for compressing diffusion models (LAPTOP-Diff). We, 1) introduced the layer pruning method to compress SDM's U-Net automatically and proposed an effective one-shot pruning criterion whose one-shot performance is guaranteed by its good additivity property, surpassing other layer pruning and handcrafted layer removal methods, 2) proposed the normalized feature distillation for retraining, alleviated the imbalance issue. Using the proposed LAPTOP-Diff, we compressed the U-Nets of SDXL and SDM-v1.5 for the most advanced performance, achieving a minimal 4.0% decline in PickScore at a pruning ratio of 50% while the comparative methods' minimal PickScore decline is 8.2%. We will release our code.

Adversarial Training with OCR Modality Perturbation for Scene-Text Visual Question Answering

Scene-Text Visual Question Answering (ST-VQA) aims to understand scene text in images and answer questions related to the text content. Most existing methods heavily rely on the accuracy of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems, and aggressive fine-tuning based on limited spatial location information and erroneous OCR text information often leads to inevitable overfitting. In this paper, we propose a multimodal adversarial training architecture with spatial awareness capabilities. Specifically, we introduce an Adversarial OCR Enhancement (AOE) module, which leverages adversarial training in the embedding space of OCR modality to enhance fault-tolerant representation of OCR texts, thereby reducing noise caused by OCR errors. Simultaneously, We add a Spatial-Aware Self-Attention (SASA) mechanism to help the model better capture the spatial relationships among OCR tokens. Various experiments demonstrate that our method achieves significant performance improvements on both the ST-VQA and TextVQA datasets and provides a novel paradigm for multimodal adversarial training.

Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have strong capabilities in solving diverse natural language processing tasks. However, the safety and security issues of LLM systems have become the major obstacle to their widespread application. Many studies have extensively investigated risks in LLM systems and developed the corresponding mitigation strategies. Leading-edge enterprises such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic have also made lots of efforts on responsible LLMs. Therefore, there is a growing need to organize the existing studies and establish comprehensive taxonomies for the community. In this paper, we delve into four essential modules of an LLM system, including an input module for receiving prompts, a language model trained on extensive corpora, a toolchain module for development and deployment, and an output module for exporting LLM-generated content. Based on this, we propose a comprehensive taxonomy, which systematically analyzes potential risks associated with each module of an LLM system and discusses the corresponding mitigation strategies. Furthermore, we review prevalent benchmarks, aiming to facilitate the risk assessment of LLM systems. We hope that this paper can help LLM participants embrace a systematic perspective to build their responsible LLM systems.

More than Correlation: Do Large Language Models Learn Causal Representations of Space?

Recent work found high mutual information between the learned representations of large language models (LLMs) and the geospatial property of its input, hinting an emergent internal model of space. However, whether this internal space model has any causal effects on the LLMs' behaviors was not answered by that work, led to criticism of these findings as mere statistical correlation. Our study focused on uncovering the causality of the spatial representations in LLMs. In particular, we discovered the potential spatial representations in DeBERTa, GPT-Neo using representational similarity analysis and linear and non-linear probing. Our casual intervention experiments showed that the spatial representations influenced the model's performance on next word prediction and a downstream task that relies on geospatial information. Our experiments suggested that the LLMs learn and use an internal model of space in solving geospatial related tasks.

Big Learning Expectation Maximization

Mixture models serve as one fundamental tool with versatile applications. However, their training techniques, like the popular Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, are notoriously sensitive to parameter initialization and often suffer from bad local optima that could be arbitrarily worse than the optimal. To address the long-lasting bad-local-optima challenge, we draw inspiration from the recent ground-breaking foundation models and propose to leverage their underlying big learning principle to upgrade the EM. Specifically, we present the Big Learning EM (BigLearn-EM), an EM upgrade that simultaneously performs joint, marginal, and orthogonally transformed marginal matchings between data and model distributions. Through simulated experiments, we empirically show that the BigLearn-EM is capable of delivering the optimal with high probability; comparisons on benchmark clustering datasets further demonstrate its effectiveness and advantages over existing techniques. The code is available at https://github.com/YulaiCong/Big-Learning-Expectation-Maximization.

Future Full-Ocean Deep SSPs Prediction based on Hierarchical Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks

The spatial-temporal distribution of underwater sound velocity affects the propagation mode of underwater acoustic signals. Therefore, rapid estimation and prediction of underwater sound velocity distribution is crucial for providing underwater positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) services. Currently, sound speed profile (SSP) inversion methods have a faster time response rate compared to direct measurement methods, however, most SSP inversion methods focus on constructing spatial dimensional sound velocity fields and are highly dependent on sonar observation data, thus high requirements have been placed on observation data sources. To explore the distribution pattern of sound velocity in the time dimension and achieve future SSP prediction without sonar observation data, we propose a hierarchical long short-term memory (H-LSTM) neural network for SSP prediction. By our SSP prediction method, the sound speed distribution could be estimated without any on-site data measurement process, so that the time efficiency could be greatly improved. Through comparing with other state-of-the-art methods, H-LSTM has better accuracy performance on prediction of monthly average sound velocity distribution, which is less than 1 m/s in different depth layers.

Underwater Sound Speed Profile Construction: A Review

Real--time and accurate construction of regional sound speed profiles (SSP) is important for building underwater positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) systems as it greatly affect the signal propagation modes such as trajectory. In this paper, we summarizes and analyzes the current research status in the field of underwater SSP construction, and the mainstream methods include direct SSP measurement and SSP inversion. In the direct measurement method, we compare the performance of popular international commercial temperature, conductivity, and depth profilers (CTD). While for the inversion methods, the framework and basic principles of matched field processing (MFP), compressive sensing (CS), and deep learning (DL) for constructing SSP are introduced, and their advantages and disadvantages are compared. The traditional direct measurement method has good accuracy performance, but it usually takes a long time. The proposal of SSP inversion method greatly improves the convenience and real--time performance, but the accuracy is not as good as the direct measurement method. Currently, the SSP inversion relies on sonar observation data, making it difficult to apply to areas that couldn't be covered by underwater observation systems, and these methods are unable to predict the distribution of sound velocity at future times. How to comprehensively utilize multi-source data and provide elastic sound velocity distribution estimation services with different accuracy and real-time requirements for underwater users without sonar observation data is the mainstream trend in future research on SSP construction.

MoEController: Instruction-based Arbitrary Image Manipulation with Mixture-of-Expert Controllers

Diffusion-model-based text-guided image generation has recently made astounding progress, producing fascinating results in open-domain image manipulation tasks. Few models, however, currently have complete zero-shot capabilities for both global and local image editing due to the complexity and diversity of image manipulation tasks. In this work, we propose a method with a mixture-of-expert (MOE) controllers to align the text-guided capacity of diffusion models with different kinds of human instructions, enabling our model to handle various open-domain image manipulation tasks with natural language instructions. First, we use large language models (ChatGPT) and conditional image synthesis models (ControlNet) to generate a large number of global image transfer dataset in addition to the instruction-based local image editing dataset. Then, using an MOE technique and task-specific adaptation training on a large-scale dataset, our conditional diffusion model can edit images globally and locally. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach performs surprisingly well on various image manipulation tasks when dealing with open-domain images and arbitrary human instructions. Please refer to our project page: [https://oppo-mente-lab.github.io/moe_controller/]

CompoNeRF: Text-guided Multi-object Compositional NeRF with Editable 3D Scene Layout

Recent research endeavors have shown that combining neural radiance fields (NeRFs) with pre-trained diffusion models holds great potential for text-to-3D generation.However, a hurdle is that they often encounter guidance collapse when rendering complex scenes from multi-object texts. Because the text-to-image diffusion models are inherently unconstrained, making them less competent to accurately associate object semantics with specific 3D structures. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, dubbed CompoNeRF, that explicitly incorporates an editable 3D scene layout to provide effective guidance at the single object (i.e., local) and whole scene (i.e., global) levels. Firstly, we interpret the multi-object text as an editable 3D scene layout containing multiple local NeRFs associated with the object-specific 3D box coordinates and text prompt, which can be easily collected from users. Then, we introduce a global MLP to calibrate the compositional latent features from local NeRFs, which surprisingly improves the view consistency across different local NeRFs. Lastly, we apply the text guidance on global and local levels through their corresponding views to avoid guidance ambiguity. This way, our CompoNeRF allows for flexible scene editing and re-composition of trained local NeRFs into a new scene by manipulating the 3D layout or text prompt. Leveraging the open-source Stable Diffusion model, our CompoNeRF can generate faithful and editable text-to-3D results while opening a potential direction for text-guided multi-object composition via the editable 3D scene layout.