LIFBench: Evaluating the Instruction Following Performance and Stability of Large Language Models in Long-Context Scenarios

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance in natural language processing (NLP), their ability to stably follow instructions in long-context inputs has become crucial for real-world applications. While existing benchmarks assess various LLM capabilities, they rarely focus on instruction-following in long-context scenarios or stability on different inputs. In response, we introduce the Long-context Instruction-Following Benchmark (LIFBench), a scalable dataset designed to evaluate LLMs' instruction-following capabilities and stability across long contexts. LIFBench comprises three long-context scenarios and eleven diverse tasks, supported by 2,766 instructions generated through an automated expansion method across three dimensions: length, expression, and variables. For evaluation, we propose LIFEval, a rubric-based assessment framework that provides precise, automated scoring of complex LLM responses without relying on LLM-assisted evaluations or human judgments. This approach facilitates a comprehensive analysis of model performance and stability across various perspectives. We conduct extensive experiments on 20 notable LLMs across six length intervals, analyzing their instruction-following capabilities and stability. Our work contributes LIFBench and LIFEval as robust tools for assessing LLM performance in complex, long-context settings, providing insights that can inform future LLM development.

Stealthy Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models via Benign Data Mirroring

Large language model (LLM) safety is a critical issue, with numerous studies employing red team testing to enhance model security. Among these, jailbreak methods explore potential vulnerabilities by crafting malicious prompts that induce model outputs contrary to safety alignments. Existing black-box jailbreak methods often rely on model feedback, repeatedly submitting queries with detectable malicious instructions during the attack search process. Although these approaches are effective, the attacks may be intercepted by content moderators during the search process. We propose an improved transfer attack method that guides malicious prompt construction by locally training a mirror model of the target black-box model through benign data distillation. This method offers enhanced stealth, as it does not involve submitting identifiable malicious instructions to the target model during the search phase. Our approach achieved a maximum attack success rate of 92%, or a balanced value of 80% with an average of 1.5 detectable jailbreak queries per sample against GPT-3.5 Turbo on a subset of AdvBench. These results underscore the need for more robust defense mechanisms.

TimeMixer++: A General Time Series Pattern Machine for Universal Predictive Analysis

Time series analysis plays a critical role in numerous applications, supporting tasks such as forecasting, classification, anomaly detection, and imputation. In this work, we present the time series pattern machine (TSPM), a model designed to excel in a broad range of time series tasks through powerful representation and pattern extraction capabilities. Traditional time series models often struggle to capture universal patterns, limiting their effectiveness across diverse tasks. To address this, we define multiple scales in the time domain and various resolutions in the frequency domain, employing various mixing strategies to extract intricate, task-adaptive time series patterns. Specifically, we introduce a general-purpose TSPM that processes multi-scale time series using (1) multi-resolution time imaging (MRTI), (2) time image decomposition (TID), (3) multi-scale mixing (MCM), and (4) multi-resolution mixing (MRM) to extract comprehensive temporal patterns. MRTI transforms multi-scale time series into multi-resolution time images, capturing patterns across both temporal and frequency domains. TID leverages dual-axis attention to extract seasonal and trend patterns, while MCM hierarchically aggregates these patterns across scales. MRM adaptively integrates all representations across resolutions. This method achieves state-of-the-art performance across 8 time series analytical tasks, consistently surpassing both general-purpose and task-specific models. Our work marks a promising step toward the next generation of TSPMs, paving the way for further advancements in time series analysis.

Time-MoE: Billion-Scale Time Series Foundation Models with Mixture of Experts

Deep learning for time series forecasting has seen significant advancements over the past decades. However, despite the success of large-scale pre-training in language and vision domains, pre-trained time series models remain limited in scale and operate at a high cost, hindering the development of larger capable forecasting models in real-world applications. In response, we introduce Time-MoE, a scalable and unified architecture designed to pre-train larger, more capable forecasting foundation models while reducing inference costs. By leveraging a sparse mixture-of-experts (MoE) design, Time-MoE enhances computational efficiency by activating only a subset of networks for each prediction, reducing computational load while maintaining high model capacity. This allows Time-MoE to scale effectively without a corresponding increase in inference costs. Time-MoE comprises a family of decoder-only transformer models that operate in an auto-regressive manner and support flexible forecasting horizons with varying input context lengths. We pre-trained these models on our newly introduced large-scale data Time-300B, which spans over 9 domains and encompassing over 300 billion time points. For the first time, we scaled a time series foundation model up to 2.4 billion parameters, achieving significantly improved forecasting precision. Our results validate the applicability of scaling laws for training tokens and model size in the context of time series forecasting. Compared to dense models with the same number of activated parameters or equivalent computation budgets, our models consistently outperform them by large margin. These advancements position Time-MoE as a state-of-the-art solution for tackling real-world time series forecasting challenges with superior capability, efficiency, and flexibility.

Cost-effective Instruction Learning for Pathology Vision and Language Analysis

The advent of vision-language models fosters the interactive conversations between AI-enabled models and humans. Yet applying these models into clinics must deal with daunting challenges around large-scale training data, financial, and computational resources. Here we propose a cost-effective instruction learning framework for conversational pathology named as CLOVER. CLOVER only trains a lightweight module and uses instruction tuning while freezing the parameters of the large language model. Instead of using costly GPT-4, we propose well-designed prompts on GPT-3.5 for building generation-based instructions, emphasizing the utility of pathological knowledge derived from the Internet source. To augment the use of instructions, we construct a high-quality set of template-based instructions in the context of digital pathology. From two benchmark datasets, our findings reveal the strength of hybrid-form instructions in the visual question-answer in pathology. Extensive results show the cost-effectiveness of CLOVER in answering both open-ended and closed-ended questions, where CLOVER outperforms strong baselines that possess 37 times more training parameters and use instruction data generated from GPT-4. Through the instruction tuning, CLOVER exhibits robustness of few-shot learning in the external clinical dataset. These findings demonstrate that cost-effective modeling of CLOVER could accelerate the adoption of rapid conversational applications in the landscape of digital pathology.

TimeMixer: Decomposable Multiscale Mixing for Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is widely used in extensive applications, such as traffic planning and weather forecasting. However, real-world time series usually present intricate temporal variations, making forecasting extremely challenging. Going beyond the mainstream paradigms of plain decomposition and multiperiodicity analysis, we analyze temporal variations in a novel view of multiscale-mixing, which is based on an intuitive but important observation that time series present distinct patterns in different sampling scales. The microscopic and the macroscopic information are reflected in fine and coarse scales respectively, and thereby complex variations can be inherently disentangled. Based on this observation, we propose TimeMixer as a fully MLP-based architecture with Past-Decomposable-Mixing (PDM) and Future-Multipredictor-Mixing (FMM) blocks to take full advantage of disentangled multiscale series in both past extraction and future prediction phases. Concretely, PDM applies the decomposition to multiscale series and further mixes the decomposed seasonal and trend components in fine-to-coarse and coarse-to-fine directions separately, which successively aggregates the microscopic seasonal and macroscopic trend information. FMM further ensembles multiple predictors to utilize complementary forecasting capabilities in multiscale observations. Consequently, TimeMixer is able to achieve consistent state-of-the-art performances in both long-term and short-term forecasting tasks with favorable run-time efficiency.

Medical Dialogue: A Survey of Categories, Methods, Evaluation and Challenges

This paper surveys and organizes research works on medical dialog systems, which is an important yet challenging task. Although these systems have been surveyed in the medical community from an application perspective, a systematic review from a rigorous technical perspective has to date remained noticeably absent. As a result, an overview of the categories, methods, and evaluation of medical dialogue systems remain limited and underspecified, hindering the further improvement of this area. To fill this gap, we investigate an initial pool of 325 papers from well-known computer science, and natural language processing conferences and journals, and make an overview. Recently, large language models have shown strong model capacity on downstream tasks, which also reshaped medical dialog systems' foundation. Despite the alluring practical application value, current medical dialogue systems still suffer from problems. To this end, this paper lists the grand challenges of medical dialog systems, especially of large language models.

Capacity Maximization for Base Station with Hybrid Fixed and Movable Antennas

Six-dimensional movable antenna (6DMA) is an effective solution for enhancing wireless network capacity through the adjustment of both 3D positions and 3D rotations of distributed antennas/antenna surfaces. Although freely positioning/rotating 6DMA surfaces offers the greatest flexibility and thus highest capacity improvement, its implementation may be challenging in practice due to the drastic architecture change required for existing base stations (BSs), which predominantly adopt fixed-position antenna (FPA) arrays (e.g., sector antenna arrays). Thus, we introduce in this letter a new BS architecture called hybrid fixed and movable antennas (HFMA), which consists of both conventional FPA arrays and position/rotation-adjustable 6DMA surfaces. For ease of implementation, we consider that all 6DMA surfaces can rotate along a circular track above the FPA arrays. We aim to maximize the network capacity via optimizing the rotation angles of all 6DMA surfaces based on the users' spatial distribution. Since this problem is combinatorial and its optimal solution requires prohibitively high computational complexity via exhaustive search, we propose an alternative adaptive Markov Chain Monte Carlo based method to solve it more efficiently. Finally, we present simulation results that show significant performance gains achieved by our proposed design over various benchmark schemes.

MedDM:LLM-executable clinical guidance tree for clinical decision-making

It is becoming increasingly emphasis on the importance of LLM participating in clinical diagnosis decision-making. However, the low specialization refers to that current medical LLMs can not provide specific medical advice, which are more like a medical Q\&A. And there is no suitable clinical guidance tree data set that can be used directly with LLM. To address this issue, we first propose LLM-executavle clinical guidance tree(CGT), which can be directly used by large language models, and construct medical diagnostic decision-making dataset (MedDM), from flowcharts in clinical practice guidelines. We propose an approach to screen flowcharts from medical literature, followed by their identification and conversion into standardized diagnostic decision trees. Constructed a knowledge base with 1202 decision trees, which came from 5000 medical literature and covered 12 hospital departments, including internal medicine, surgery, psychiatry, and over 500 diseases.Moreover, we propose a method for reasoning on LLM-executable CGT and a Patient-LLM multi-turn dialogue framework.

Prompt-augmented Temporal Point Process for Streaming Event Sequence

Neural Temporal Point Processes (TPPs) are the prevalent paradigm for modeling continuous-time event sequences, such as user activities on the web and financial transactions. In real-world applications, event data is typically received in a \emph{streaming} manner, where the distribution of patterns may shift over time. Additionally, \emph{privacy and memory constraints} are commonly observed in practical scenarios, further compounding the challenges. Therefore, the continuous monitoring of a TPP to learn the streaming event sequence is an important yet under-explored problem. Our work paper addresses this challenge by adopting Continual Learning (CL), which makes the model capable of continuously learning a sequence of tasks without catastrophic forgetting under realistic constraints. Correspondingly, we propose a simple yet effective framework, PromptTPP\footnote{Our code is available at {\small \url{ https://github.com/yanyanSann/PromptTPP}}}, by integrating the base TPP with a continuous-time retrieval prompt pool. The prompts, small learnable parameters, are stored in a memory space and jointly optimized with the base TPP, ensuring that the model learns event streams sequentially without buffering past examples or task-specific attributes. We present a novel and realistic experimental setup for modeling event streams, where PromptTPP consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across three real user behavior datasets.