LiveIdeaBench: Evaluating LLMs' Scientific Creativity and Idea Generation with Minimal Context

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in scientific tasks, existing evaluation frameworks primarily assess their performance using rich contextual inputs, overlooking their ability to generate novel ideas from minimal information. We introduce LiveIdeaBench, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates LLMs' scientific creativity and divergent thinking capabilities using single-keyword prompts. Drawing from Guilford's creativity theory, our framework employs a dynamic panel of state-of-the-art LLMs to assess generated ideas across four key dimensions: originality, feasibility, fluency, and flexibility. Through extensive experimentation with 20 leading models across 1,180 keywords spanning 18 scientific domains, we reveal that scientific creative ability shows distinct patterns from general intelligence metrics. Notably, our results demonstrate that models like QwQ-32B-preview achieve comparable creative performance to top-tier models like o1-preview, despite significant gaps in their general intelligence scores. These findings highlight the importance of specialized evaluation frameworks for scientific creativity and suggest that the development of creative capabilities in LLMs may follow different trajectories than traditional problem-solving abilities.

Generating Unseen Nonlinear Evolution in Sea Surface Temperature Using a Deep Learning-Based Latent Space Data Assimilation Framework

Advances in data assimilation (DA) methods have greatly improved the accuracy of Earth system predictions. To fuse multi-source data and reconstruct the nonlinear evolution missing from observations, geoscientists are developing future-oriented DA methods. In this paper, we redesign a purely data-driven latent space DA framework (DeepDA) that employs a generative artificial intelligence model to capture the nonlinear evolution in sea surface temperature. Under variational constraints, DeepDA embedded with nonlinear features can effectively fuse heterogeneous data. The results show that DeepDA remains highly stable in capturing and generating nonlinear evolutions even when a large amount of observational information is missing. It can be found that when only 10% of the observation information is available, the error increase of DeepDA does not exceed 40%. Furthermore, DeepDA has been shown to be robust in the fusion of real observations and ensemble simulations. In particular, this paper provides a mechanism analysis of the nonlinear evolution generated by DeepDA from the perspective of physical patterns, which reveals the inherent explainability of our DL model in capturing multi-scale ocean signals.

SusGen-GPT: A Data-Centric LLM for Financial NLP and Sustainability Report Generation

The rapid growth of the financial sector and the rising focus on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations highlight the need for advanced NLP tools. However, open-source LLMs proficient in both finance and ESG domains remain scarce. To address this gap, we introduce SusGen-30K, a category-balanced dataset comprising seven financial NLP tasks and ESG report generation, and propose TCFD-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating sustainability report generation. Leveraging this dataset, we developed SusGen-GPT, a suite of models achieving state-of-the-art performance across six adapted and two off-the-shelf tasks, trailing GPT-4 by only 2% despite using 7-8B parameters compared to GPT-4's 1,700B. Based on this, we propose the SusGen system, integrated with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), to assist in sustainability report generation. This work demonstrates the efficiency of our approach, advancing research in finance and ESG.

Self-Ensembling Gaussian Splatting for Few-shot Novel View Synthesis

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated remarkable effectiveness for novel view synthesis (NVS). However, the 3DGS model tends to overfit when trained with sparse posed views, limiting its generalization capacity for broader pose variations. In this paper, we alleviate the overfitting problem by introducing a self-ensembling Gaussian Splatting (SE-GS) approach. We present two Gaussian Splatting models named the $\mathbf{\Sigma}$-model and the $\mathbf{\Delta}$-model. The $\mathbf{\Sigma}$-model serves as the primary model that generates novel-view images during inference. At the training stage, the $\mathbf{\Sigma}$-model is guided away from specific local optima by an uncertainty-aware perturbing strategy. We dynamically perturb the $\mathbf{\Delta}$-model based on the uncertainties of novel-view renderings across different training steps, resulting in diverse temporal models sampled from the Gaussian parameter space without additional training costs. The geometry of the $\mathbf{\Sigma}$-model is regularized by penalizing discrepancies between the $\mathbf{\Sigma}$-model and the temporal samples. Therefore, our SE-GS conducts an effective and efficient regularization across a large number of Gaussian Splatting models, resulting in a robust ensemble, the $\mathbf{\Sigma}$-model. Experimental results on the LLFF, Mip-NeRF360, DTU, and MVImgNet datasets show that our approach improves NVS quality with few-shot training views, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods. The code is released at https://github.com/sailor-z/SE-GS.

Heterogeneous Team Coordination on Partially Observable Graphs with Realistic Communication

Team Coordination on Graphs with Risky Edges (\textsc{tcgre}) is a recently proposed problem, in which robots find paths to their goals while considering possible coordination to reduce overall team cost. However, \textsc{tcgre} assumes that the \emph{entire} environment is available to a \emph{homogeneous} robot team with \emph{ubiquitous} communication. In this paper, we study an extended version of \textsc{tcgre}, called \textsc{hpr-tcgre}, with three relaxations: Heterogeneous robots, Partial observability, and Realistic communication. To this end, we form a new combinatorial optimization problem on top of \textsc{tcgre}. After analysis, we divide it into two sub-problems, one for robots moving individually, another for robots in groups, depending on their communication availability. Then, we develop an algorithm that exploits real-time partial maps to solve local shortest path(s) problems, with a A*-like sub-goal(s) assignment mechanism that explores potential coordination opportunities for global interests. Extensive experiments indicate that our algorithm is able to produce team coordination behaviors in order to reduce overall cost even with our three relaxations.

MIBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Model Inversion Attack and Defense

Model Inversion (MI) attacks aim at leveraging the output information of target models to reconstruct privacy-sensitive training data, raising widespread concerns on privacy threats of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Unfortunately, in tandem with the rapid evolution of MI attacks, the lack of a comprehensive, aligned, and reliable benchmark has emerged as a formidable challenge. This deficiency leads to inadequate comparisons between different attack methods and inconsistent experimental setups. In this paper, we introduce the first practical benchmark for model inversion attacks and defenses to address this critical gap, which is named \textit{MIBench}. This benchmark serves as an extensible and reproducible modular-based toolbox and currently integrates a total of 16 state-of-the-art attack and defense methods. Moreover, we furnish a suite of assessment tools encompassing 9 commonly used evaluation protocols to facilitate standardized and fair evaluation and analysis. Capitalizing on this foundation, we conduct extensive experiments from multiple perspectives to holistically compare and analyze the performance of various methods across different scenarios, which overcomes the misalignment issues and discrepancy prevalent in previous works. Based on the collected attack methods and defense strategies, we analyze the impact of target resolution, defense robustness, model predictive power, model architectures, transferability and loss function. Our hope is that this \textit{MIBench} could provide a unified, practical and extensible toolbox and is widely utilized by researchers in the field to rigorously test and compare their novel methods, ensuring equitable evaluations and thereby propelling further advancements in the future development.

Causality-based Subject and Task Fingerprints using fMRI Time-series Data

Recently, there has been a revived interest in system neuroscience causation models due to their unique capability to unravel complex relationships in multi-scale brain networks. In this paper, our goal is to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of using a causality-based approach for fMRI fingerprinting. Specifically, we propose an innovative method that utilizes the causal dynamics activities of the brain to identify the unique cognitive patterns of individuals (e.g., subject fingerprint) and fMRI tasks (e.g., task fingerprint). The key novelty of our approach stems from the development of a two-timescale linear state-space model to extract 'spatio-temporal' (aka causal) signatures from an individual's fMRI time series data. To the best of our knowledge, we pioneer and subsequently quantify, in this paper, the concept of 'causal fingerprint.' Our method is well-separated from other fingerprint studies as we quantify fingerprints from a cause-and-effect perspective, which are then incorporated with a modal decomposition and projection method to perform subject identification and a GNN-based (Graph Neural Network) model to perform task identification. Finally, we show that the experimental results and comparisons with non-causality-based methods demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. We visualize the obtained causal signatures and discuss their biological relevance in light of the existing understanding of brain functionalities. Collectively, our work paves the way for further studies on causal fingerprints with potential applications in both healthy controls and neurodegenerative diseases.

Multi-Robot Coordination Induced in Hazardous Environments through an Adversarial Graph-Traversal Game

This paper presents a game theoretic formulation of a graph traversal problem, with applications to robots moving through hazardous environments in the presence of an adversary, as in military and security applications. The blue team of robots moves in an environment modeled by a time-varying graph, attempting to reach some goal with minimum cost, while the red team controls how the graph changes to maximize the cost. The problem is formulated as a stochastic game, so that Nash equilibrium strategies can be computed numerically. Bounds are provided for the game value, with a guarantee that it solves the original problem. Numerical simulations demonstrate the results and the effectiveness of this method, particularly showing the benefit of mixing actions for both players, as well as beneficial coordinated behavior, where blue robots split up and/or synchronize to traverse risky edges.

On the Limited Generalization Capability of the Implicit Reward Model Induced by Direct Preference Optimization

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an effective approach for aligning language models to human preferences. Central to RLHF is learning a reward function for scoring human preferences. Two main approaches for learning a reward model are 1) training an EXplicit Reward Model (EXRM) as in RLHF, and 2) using an implicit reward learned from preference data through methods such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Prior work has shown that the implicit reward model of DPO (denoted as DPORM) can approximate an EXRM in the limit. DPORM's effectiveness directly implies the optimality of the learned policy, and also has practical implication for LLM alignment methods including iterative DPO. However, it is unclear how well DPORM empirically matches the performance of EXRM. This work studies the accuracy at distinguishing preferred and rejected answers for both DPORM and EXRM. Our findings indicate that even though DPORM fits the training dataset comparably, it generalizes less effectively than EXRM, especially when the validation datasets contain distribution shifts. Across five out-of-distribution settings, DPORM has a mean drop in accuracy of 3% and a maximum drop of 7%. These findings highlight that DPORM has limited generalization ability and substantiates the integration of an explicit reward model in iterative DPO approaches.

Foodfusion: A Novel Approach for Food Image Composition via Diffusion Models

Food image composition requires the use of existing dish images and background images to synthesize a natural new image, while diffusion models have made significant advancements in image generation, enabling the construction of end-to-end architectures that yield promising results. However, existing diffusion models face challenges in processing and fusing information from multiple images and lack access to high-quality publicly available datasets, which prevents the application of diffusion models in food image composition. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale, high-quality food image composite dataset, FC22k, which comprises 22,000 foreground, background, and ground truth ternary image pairs. Additionally, we propose a novel food image composition method, Foodfusion, which leverages the capabilities of the pre-trained diffusion models and incorporates a Fusion Module for processing and integrating foreground and background information. This fused information aligns the foreground features with the background structure by merging the global structural information at the cross-attention layer of the denoising UNet. To further enhance the content and structure of the background, we also integrate a Content-Structure Control Module. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our proposed method.