Dual-Phase Accelerated Prompt Optimization

Gradient-free prompt optimization methods have made significant strides in enhancing the performance of closed-source Large Language Models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks. However, existing approaches make light of the importance of high-quality prompt initialization and the identification of effective optimization directions, thus resulting in substantial optimization steps to obtain satisfactory performance. In this light, we aim to accelerate prompt optimization process to tackle the challenge of low convergence rate. We propose a dual-phase approach which starts with generating high-quality initial prompts by adopting a well-designed meta-instruction to delve into task-specific information, and iteratively optimize the prompts at the sentence level, leveraging previous tuning experience to expand prompt candidates and accept effective ones. Extensive experiments on eight datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving a consistent accuracy gain over baselines with less than five optimization steps.

AMP: Autoregressive Motion Prediction Revisited with Next Token Prediction for Autonomous Driving

As an essential task in autonomous driving (AD), motion prediction aims to predict the future states of surround objects for navigation. One natural solution is to estimate the position of other agents in a step-by-step manner where each predicted time-step is conditioned on both observed time-steps and previously predicted time-steps, i.e., autoregressive prediction. Pioneering works like SocialLSTM and MFP design their decoders based on this intuition. However, almost all state-of-the-art works assume that all predicted time-steps are independent conditioned on observed time-steps, where they use a single linear layer to generate positions of all time-steps simultaneously. They dominate most motion prediction leaderboards due to the simplicity of training MLPs compared to autoregressive networks. In this paper, we introduce the GPT style next token prediction into motion forecasting. In this way, the input and output could be represented in a unified space and thus the autoregressive prediction becomes more feasible. However, different from language data which is composed of homogeneous units -words, the elements in the driving scene could have complex spatial-temporal and semantic relations. To this end, we propose to adopt three factorized attention modules with different neighbors for information aggregation and different position encoding styles to capture their relations, e.g., encoding the transformation between coordinate systems for spatial relativity while adopting RoPE for temporal relativity. Empirically, by equipping with the aforementioned tailored designs, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in the Waymo Open Motion and Waymo Interaction datasets. Notably, AMP outperforms other recent autoregressive motion prediction methods: MotionLM and StateTransformer, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed designs.

ChartX & ChartVLM: A Versatile Benchmark and Foundation Model for Complicated Chart Reasoning

Recently, many versatile Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged continuously. However, their capacity to query information depicted in visual charts and engage in reasoning based on the queried contents remains under-explored. In this paper, to comprehensively and rigorously benchmark the ability of the off-the-shelf MLLMs in the chart domain, we construct ChartX, a multi-modal evaluation set covering 18 chart types, 7 chart tasks, 22 disciplinary topics, and high-quality chart data. Besides, we develop ChartVLM to offer a new perspective on handling multi-modal tasks that strongly depend on interpretable patterns, such as reasoning tasks in the field of charts or geometric images. We evaluate the chart-related ability of mainstream MLLMs and our ChartVLM on the proposed ChartX evaluation set. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ChartVLM surpasses both versatile and chart-related large models, achieving results comparable to GPT-4V. We believe that our study can pave the way for further exploration in creating a more comprehensive chart evaluation set and developing more interpretable multi-modal models. Both ChartX and ChartVLM are available at: https://github.com/UniModal4Reasoning/ChartVLM

Cross-Task Linearity Emerges in the Pretraining-Finetuning Paradigm

The pretraining-finetuning paradigm has become the prevailing trend in modern deep learning. In this work, we discover an intriguing linear phenomenon in models that are initialized from a common pretrained checkpoint and finetuned on different tasks, termed as Cross-Task Linearity (CTL). Specifically, if we linearly interpolate the weights of two finetuned models, the features in the weight-interpolated model are approximately equal to the linear interpolation of features in two finetuned models at each layer. Such cross-task linearity has not been noted in peer literature. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence supporting that CTL consistently occurs for finetuned models that start from the same pretrained checkpoint. We conjecture that in the pretraining-finetuning paradigm, neural networks essentially function as linear maps, mapping from the parameter space to the feature space. Based on this viewpoint, our study unveils novel insights into explaining model merging/editing, particularly by translating operations from the parameter space to the feature space. Furthermore, we delve deeper into the underlying factors for the emergence of CTL, emphasizing the impact of pretraining.

Learning Non-Markovian Quantum Noise from Moiré-Enhanced Swap Spectroscopy with Deep Evolutionary Algorithm

Two-level-system (TLS) defects in amorphous dielectrics are a major source of noise and decoherence in solid-state qubits. Gate-dependent non-Markovian errors caused by TLS-qubit coupling are detrimental to fault-tolerant quantum computation and have not been rigorously treated in the existing literature. In this work, we derive the non-Markovian dynamics between TLS and qubits during a SWAP-like two-qubit gate and the associated average gate fidelity for frequency-tunable Transmon qubits. This gate dependent error model facilitates using qubits as sensors to simultaneously learn practical imperfections in both the qubit's environment and control waveforms. We combine the-state-of-art machine learning algorithm with Moir\'{e}-enhanced swap spectroscopy to achieve robust learning using noisy experimental data. Deep neural networks are used to represent the functional map from experimental data to TLS parameters and are trained through an evolutionary algorithm. Our method achieves the highest learning efficiency and robustness against experimental imperfections to-date, representing an important step towards in-situ quantum control optimization over environmental and control defects.