RFUAV: A Benchmark Dataset for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Detection and Identification

In this paper, we propose RFUAV as a new benchmark dataset for radio-frequency based (RF-based) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) identification and address the following challenges: Firstly, many existing datasets feature a restricted variety of drone types and insufficient volumes of raw data, which fail to meet the demands of practical applications. Secondly, existing datasets often lack raw data covering a broad range of signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), or do not provide tools for transforming raw data to different SNR levels. This limitation undermines the validity of model training and evaluation. Lastly, many existing datasets do not offer open-access evaluation tools, leading to a lack of unified evaluation standards in current research within this field. RFUAV comprises approximately 1.3 TB of raw frequency data collected from 37 distinct UAVs using the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) device in real-world environments. Through in-depth analysis of the RF data in RFUAV, we define a drone feature sequence called RF drone fingerprint, which aids in distinguishing drone signals. In addition to the dataset, RFUAV provides a baseline preprocessing method and model evaluation tools. Rigorous experiments demonstrate that these preprocessing methods achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance using the provided evaluation tools. The RFUAV dataset and baseline implementation are publicly available at https://github.com/kitoweeknd/RFUAV/.

ALinFiK: Learning to Approximate Linearized Future Influence Kernel for Scalable Third-Parity LLM Data Valuation

Large Language Models (LLMs) heavily rely on high-quality training data, making data valuation crucial for optimizing model performance, especially when working within a limited budget. In this work, we aim to offer a third-party data valuation approach that benefits both data providers and model developers. We introduce a linearized future influence kernel (LinFiK), which assesses the value of individual data samples in improving LLM performance during training. We further propose ALinFiK, a learning strategy to approximate LinFiK, enabling scalable data valuation. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that this approach surpasses existing baselines in effectiveness and efficiency, demonstrating significant scalability advantages as LLM parameters increase.

Self-Taught Agentic Long Context Understanding

Answering complex, long-context questions remains a major challenge for large language models (LLMs) as it requires effective question clarifications and context retrieval. We propose Agentic Long-Context Understanding (AgenticLU), a framework designed to enhance an LLM's understanding of such queries by integrating targeted self-clarification with contextual grounding within an agentic workflow. At the core of AgenticLU is Chain-of-Clarifications (CoC), where models refine their understanding through self-generated clarification questions and corresponding contextual groundings. By scaling inference as a tree search where each node represents a CoC step, we achieve 97.8% answer recall on NarrativeQA with a search depth of up to three and a branching factor of eight. To amortize the high cost of this search process to training, we leverage the preference pairs for each step obtained by the CoC workflow and perform two-stage model finetuning: (1) supervised finetuning to learn effective decomposition strategies, and (2) direct preference optimization to enhance reasoning quality. This enables AgenticLU models to generate clarifications and retrieve relevant context effectively and efficiently in a single inference pass. Extensive experiments across seven long-context tasks demonstrate that AgenticLU significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prompting methods and specialized long-context LLMs, achieving robust multi-hop reasoning while sustaining consistent performance as context length grows.

Agent Laboratory: Using LLM Agents as Research Assistants

Historically, scientific discovery has been a lengthy and costly process, demanding substantial time and resources from initial conception to final results. To accelerate scientific discovery, reduce research costs, and improve research quality, we introduce Agent Laboratory, an autonomous LLM-based framework capable of completing the entire research process. This framework accepts a human-provided research idea and progresses through three stages--literature review, experimentation, and report writing to produce comprehensive research outputs, including a code repository and a research report, while enabling users to provide feedback and guidance at each stage. We deploy Agent Laboratory with various state-of-the-art LLMs and invite multiple researchers to assess its quality by participating in a survey, providing human feedback to guide the research process, and then evaluate the final paper. We found that: (1) Agent Laboratory driven by o1-preview generates the best research outcomes; (2) The generated machine learning code is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods; (3) Human involvement, providing feedback at each stage, significantly improves the overall quality of research; (4) Agent Laboratory significantly reduces research expenses, achieving an 84% decrease compared to previous autonomous research methods. We hope Agent Laboratory enables researchers to allocate more effort toward creative ideation rather than low-level coding and writing, ultimately accelerating scientific discovery.

GFormer: Accelerating Large Language Models with Optimized Transformers on Gaudi Processors

Heterogeneous hardware like Gaudi processor has been developed to enhance computations, especially matrix operations for Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) for generative AI tasks. However, our analysis indicates that Transformers are not fully optimized on such emerging hardware, primarily due to inadequate optimizations in non-matrix computational kernels like Softmax and in heterogeneous resource utilization, particularly when processing long sequences. To address these issues, we propose an integrated approach (called GFormer) that merges sparse and linear attention mechanisms. GFormer aims to maximize the computational capabilities of the Gaudi processor's Matrix Multiplication Engine (MME) and Tensor Processing Cores (TPC) without compromising model quality. GFormer includes a windowed self-attention kernel and an efficient outer product kernel for causal linear attention, aiming to optimize LLM inference on Gaudi processors. Evaluation shows that GFormer significantly improves efficiency and model performance across various tasks on the Gaudi processor and outperforms state-of-the-art GPUs.

ReasonAgain: Using Extractable Symbolic Programs to Evaluate Mathematical Reasoning

Existing math datasets evaluate the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) by either using the final answer or the intermediate reasoning steps derived from static examples. However, the former approach fails to surface model's uses of shortcuts and wrong reasoning while the later poses challenges in accommodating alternative solutions. In this work, we seek to use symbolic programs as a means for automated evaluation if a model can consistently produce correct final answers across various inputs to the program. We begin by extracting programs for popular math datasets (GSM8K and MATH) using GPT4-o. For those executable programs verified using the original input-output pairs, they are found to encapsulate the proper reasoning required to solve the original text questions. We then prompt GPT4-o to generate new questions using alternative input-output pairs based the extracted program. We apply the resulting datasets to evaluate a collection of LLMs. In our experiments, we observe significant accuracy drops using our proposed evaluation compared with original static examples, suggesting the fragility of math reasoning in state-of-the-art LLMs.

Model Tells Itself Where to Attend: Faithfulness Meets Automatic Attention Steering

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various real-world tasks. However, they often struggle to fully comprehend and effectively utilize their input contexts, resulting in responses that are unfaithful or hallucinated. This difficulty increases for contexts that are long or contain distracting information, which can divert LLMs from fully capturing essential evidence. To address this issue, many works use prompting to help LLMs utilize contextual information more faithfully. For instance, iterative prompting highlights key information in two steps that first ask the LLM to identify important pieces of context and then derive answers accordingly. However, prompting methods are constrained to highlighting key information implicitly in token space, which is often insufficient to fully steer the model's attention. To improve model faithfulness more reliably, we propose AutoPASTA, a method that automatically identifies key contextual information and explicitly highlights it by steering an LLM's attention scores. Like prompting, AutoPASTA is applied at inference time and does not require changing any model parameters. Our experiments on open-book QA demonstrate that AutoPASTA effectively enables models to grasp essential contextual information, leading to substantially improved model faithfulness and performance, e.g., an average improvement of 7.95% for LLAMA3-70B-Instruct. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/QingruZhang/AutoPASTA .

Zeroth-Order Fine-Tuning of LLMs with Extreme Sparsity

Zeroth-order optimization (ZO) is a memory-efficient strategy for fine-tuning Large Language Models using only forward passes. However, the application of ZO fine-tuning in memory-constrained settings such as mobile phones and laptops is still challenging since full precision forward passes are infeasible. In this study, we address this limitation by integrating sparsity and quantization into ZO fine-tuning of LLMs. Specifically, we investigate the feasibility of fine-tuning an extremely small subset of LLM parameters using ZO. This approach allows the majority of un-tuned parameters to be quantized to accommodate the constraint of limited device memory. Our findings reveal that the pre-training process can identify a set of "sensitive parameters" that can guide the ZO fine-tuning of LLMs on downstream tasks. Our results demonstrate that fine-tuning 0.1% sensitive parameters in the LLM with ZO can outperform the full ZO fine-tuning performance, while offering wall-clock time speedup. Additionally, we show that ZO fine-tuning targeting these 0.1% sensitive parameters, combined with 4 bit quantization, enables efficient ZO fine-tuning of an Llama2-7B model on a GPU device with less than 8 GiB of memory and notably reduced latency.

Lightweight Spatial Modeling for Combinatorial Information Extraction From Documents

Documents that consist of diverse templates and exhibit complex spatial structures pose a challenge for document entity classification. We propose KNN-former, which incorporates a new kind of spatial bias in attention calculation based on the K-nearest-neighbor (KNN) graph of document entities. We limit entities' attention only to their local radius defined by the KNN graph. We also use combinatorial matching to address the one-to-one mapping property that exists in many documents, where one field has only one corresponding entity. Moreover, our method is highly parameter-efficient compared to existing approaches in terms of the number of trainable parameters. Despite this, experiments across various datasets show our method outperforms baselines in most entity types. Many real-world documents exhibit combinatorial properties which can be leveraged as inductive biases to improve extraction accuracy, but existing datasets do not cover these documents. To facilitate future research into these types of documents, we release a new ID document dataset that covers diverse templates and languages. We also release enhanced annotations for an existing dataset.

Automatic Hallucination Assessment for Aligned Large Language Models via Transferable Adversarial Attacks

Although remarkable progress has been achieved in preventing large language model (LLM) hallucinations using instruction tuning and retrieval augmentation, it remains challenging to measure the reliability of LLMs using human-crafted evaluation data which is not available for many tasks and domains and could suffer from data leakage. Inspired by adversarial machine learning, this paper aims to develop a method of automatically generating evaluation data by appropriately modifying existing data on which LLMs behave faithfully. Specifically, this paper presents AutoDebug, an LLM-based framework to use prompting chaining to generate transferable adversarial attacks in the form of question-answering examples. We seek to understand the extent to which these examples trigger the hallucination behaviors of LLMs. We implement AutoDebug using ChatGPT and evaluate the resulting two variants of a popular open-domain question-answering dataset, Natural Questions (NQ), on a collection of open-source and proprietary LLMs under various prompting settings. Our generated evaluation data is human-readable and, as we show, humans can answer these modified questions well. Nevertheless, we observe pronounced accuracy drops across multiple LLMs including GPT-4. Our experimental results show that LLMs are likely to hallucinate in two categories of question-answering scenarios where (1) there are conflicts between knowledge given in the prompt and their parametric knowledge, or (2) the knowledge expressed in the prompt is complex. Finally, we find that the adversarial examples generated by our method are transferable across all considered LLMs. The examples generated by a small model can be used to debug a much larger model, making our approach cost-effective.