A4-Unet: Deformable Multi-Scale Attention Network for Brain Tumor Segmentation

Brain tumor segmentation models have aided diagnosis in recent years. However, they face MRI complexity and variability challenges, including irregular shapes and unclear boundaries, leading to noise, misclassification, and incomplete segmentation, thereby limiting accuracy. To address these issues, we adhere to an outstanding Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) design paradigm and propose a novel network named A4-Unet. In A4-Unet, Deformable Large Kernel Attention (DLKA) is incorporated in the encoder, allowing for improved capture of multi-scale tumors. Swin Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SSPP) with cross-channel attention is employed in a bottleneck further to study long-distance dependencies within images and channel relationships. To enhance accuracy, a Combined Attention Module (CAM) with Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) orthogonality for channel weighting and convolutional element-wise multiplication is introduced for spatial weighting in the decoder. Attention gates (AG) are added in the skip connection to highlight the foreground while suppressing irrelevant background information. The proposed network is evaluated on three authoritative MRI brain tumor benchmarks and a proprietary dataset, and it achieves a 94.4% Dice score on the BraTS 2020 dataset, thereby establishing multiple new state-of-the-art benchmarks. The code is available here: https://github.com/WendyWAAAAANG/A4-Unet.

Language Models can Self-Lengthen to Generate Long Texts

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their ability to process long contexts, yet a notable gap remains in generating long, aligned outputs. This limitation stems from a training gap where pre-training lacks effective instructions for long-text generation, and post-training data primarily consists of short query-response pairs. Current approaches, such as instruction backtranslation and behavior imitation, face challenges including data quality, copyright issues, and constraints on proprietary model usage. In this paper, we introduce an innovative iterative training framework called Self-Lengthen that leverages only the intrinsic knowledge and skills of LLMs without the need for auxiliary data or proprietary models. The framework consists of two roles: the Generator and the Extender. The Generator produces the initial response, which is then split and expanded by the Extender. This process results in a new, longer response, which is used to train both the Generator and the Extender iteratively. Through this process, the models are progressively trained to handle increasingly longer responses. Experiments on benchmarks and human evaluations show that Self-Lengthen outperforms existing methods in long-text generation, when applied to top open-source LLMs such as Qwen2 and LLaMA3. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/QwenLM/Self-Lengthen.

Neuron-based Personality Trait Induction in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly proficient at simulating various personality traits, an important capability for supporting related applications (e.g., role-playing). To further improve this capacity, in this paper, we present a neuron-based approach for personality trait induction in LLMs, with three major technical contributions. First, we construct PersonalityBench, a large-scale dataset for identifying and evaluating personality traits in LLMs. This dataset is grounded in the Big Five personality traits from psychology and is designed to assess the generative capabilities of LLMs towards specific personality traits. Second, by leveraging PersonalityBench, we propose an efficient method for identifying personality-related neurons within LLMs by examining the opposite aspects of a given trait. Third, we develop a simple yet effective induction method that manipulates the values of these identified personality-related neurons. This method enables fine-grained control over the traits exhibited by LLMs without training and modifying model parameters. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our neuron identification and trait induction methods. Notably, our approach achieves comparable performance as fine-tuned models, offering a more efficient and flexible solution for personality trait induction in LLMs. We provide access to all the mentioned resources at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/NPTI.

LLMBox: A Comprehensive Library for Large Language Models

To facilitate the research on large language models (LLMs), this paper presents a comprehensive and unified library, LLMBox, to ease the development, use, and evaluation of LLMs. This library is featured with three main merits: (1) a unified data interface that supports the flexible implementation of various training strategies, (2) a comprehensive evaluation that covers extensive tasks, datasets, and models, and (3) more practical consideration, especially on user-friendliness and efficiency. With our library, users can easily reproduce existing methods, train new models, and conduct comprehensive performance comparisons. To rigorously test LLMBox, we conduct extensive experiments in a diverse coverage of evaluation settings, and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our library in supporting various implementations related to LLMs. The detailed introduction and usage guidance can be found at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LLMBox.

Towards Coarse-to-Fine Evaluation of Inference Efficiency for Large Language Models

In real world, large language models (LLMs) can serve as the assistant to help users accomplish their jobs, and also support the development of advanced applications. For the wide application of LLMs, the inference efficiency is an essential concern, which has been widely studied in existing work, and numerous optimization algorithms and code libraries have been proposed to improve it. Nonetheless, users still find it challenging to compare the effectiveness of all the above methods and understand the underlying mechanisms. In this work, we perform a detailed coarse-to-fine analysis of the inference performance of various code libraries. To evaluate the overall effectiveness, we examine four usage scenarios within two practical applications. We further provide both theoretical and empirical fine-grained analyses of each module in the Transformer architecture. Our experiments yield comprehensive results that are invaluable for researchers to evaluate code libraries and improve inference strategies.

Language-Specific Neurons: The Key to Multilingual Capabilities in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable multilingual capabilities without being pre-trained on specially curated multilingual parallel corpora. It remains a challenging problem to explain the underlying mechanisms by which LLMs process multilingual texts. In this paper, we delve into the composition of Transformer architectures in LLMs to pinpoint language-specific regions. Specially, we propose a novel detection method, language activation probability entropy (LAPE), to identify language-specific neurons within LLMs. Based on LAPE, we conduct comprehensive experiments on two representative LLMs, namely LLaMA-2 and BLOOM. Our findings indicate that LLMs' proficiency in processing a particular language is predominantly due to a small subset of neurons, primarily situated in the models' top and bottom layers. Furthermore, we showcase the feasibility to "steer" the output language of LLMs by selectively activating or deactivating language-specific neurons. Our research provides important evidence to the understanding and exploration of the multilingual capabilities of LLMs.

Beyond Imitation: Leveraging Fine-grained Quality Signals for Alignment

Alignment with human preference is a desired property of large language models (LLMs). Currently, the main alignment approach is based on reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Despite the effectiveness of RLHF, it is intricate to implement and train, thus recent studies explore how to develop alternative alignment approaches based on supervised fine-tuning (SFT). A major limitation of SFT is that it essentially does imitation learning, which cannot fully understand what are the expected behaviors. To address this issue, we propose an improved alignment approach named FIGA. Different from prior methods, we incorporate fine-grained (i.e., token or phrase level) quality signals that are derived by contrasting good and bad responses. Our approach has made two major contributions. Firstly, we curate a refined alignment dataset that pairs initial responses and the corresponding revised ones. Secondly, we devise a new loss function can leverage fine-grained quality signals to instruct the learning of LLMs for alignment. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approaches by comparing a number of competitive baselines.

BAMBOO: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Long Text Modeling Capacities of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved dramatic proficiency over NLP tasks with normal length. Recently, multiple studies have committed to extending the context length and enhancing the long text modeling capabilities of LLMs. To comprehensively evaluate the long context ability of LLMs, we propose BAMBOO, a multi-task long context benchmark. BAMBOO has been designed with four principles: comprehensive capacity evaluation, avoidance of data contamination, accurate automatic evaluation, and different length levels. It consists of 10 datasets from 5 different long text understanding tasks, i.e. question answering, hallucination detection, text sorting, language modeling, and code completion, to cover core capacities and various domains of LLMs. We conduct experiments with five long context models on BAMBOO and further discuss four key research questions of long text. We also qualitatively analyze current long context models and point out future directions for enhancing long text modeling capacities. We release our data, prompts, and code at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/BAMBOO.

Towards Effective Ancient Chinese Translation: Dataset, Model, and Evaluation

Interpreting ancient Chinese has been the key to comprehending vast Chinese literature, tradition, and civilization. In this paper, we propose Erya for ancient Chinese translation. From a dataset perspective, we collect, clean, and classify ancient Chinese materials from various sources, forming the most extensive ancient Chinese resource to date. From a model perspective, we devise Erya training method oriented towards ancient Chinese. We design two jointly-working tasks: disyllabic aligned substitution (DAS) and dual masked language model (DMLM). From an evaluation perspective, we build a benchmark to judge ancient Chinese translation quality in different scenarios and evaluate the ancient Chinese translation capacities of various existing models. Our model exhibits remarkable zero-shot performance across five domains, with over +12.0 BLEU against GPT-3.5 models and better human evaluation results than ERNIE Bot. Subsequent fine-tuning further shows the superior transfer capability of Erya model with +6.2 BLEU gain. We release all the above-mentioned resources at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Erya.

Learning to Imagine: Visually-Augmented Natural Language Generation

People often imagine relevant scenes to aid in the writing process. In this work, we aim to utilize visual information for composition in the same manner as humans. We propose a method, LIVE, that makes pre-trained language models (PLMs) Learn to Imagine for Visuallyaugmented natural language gEneration. First, we imagine the scene based on the text: we use a diffusion model to synthesize high-quality images conditioned on the input texts. Second, we use CLIP to determine whether the text can evoke the imagination in a posterior way. Finally, our imagination is dynamic, and we conduct synthesis for each sentence rather than generate only one image for an entire paragraph. Technically, we propose a novel plug-and-play fusion layer to obtain visually-augmented representations for each text. Our vision-text fusion layer is compatible with Transformerbased architecture. We have conducted extensive experiments on four generation tasks using BART and T5, and the automatic results and human evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. We will release the code, model, and data at the link: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LIVE.