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SubscribeREALM: A Dataset of Real-World LLM Use Cases
Large Language Models, such as the GPT series, have driven significant industrial applications, leading to economic and societal transformations. However, a comprehensive understanding of their real-world applications remains limited. To address this, we introduce REALM, a dataset of over 94,000 LLM use cases collected from Reddit and news articles. REALM captures two key dimensions: the diverse applications of LLMs and the demographics of their users. It categorizes LLM applications and explores how users' occupations relate to the types of applications they use. By integrating real-world data, REALM offers insights into LLM adoption across different domains, providing a foundation for future research on their evolving societal roles. A dedicated dashboard https://realm-e7682.web.app/ presents the data.
Demystifying Platform Requirements for Diverse LLM Inference Use Cases
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance across a wide range of applications, often outperforming human experts. However, deploying these parameter-heavy models efficiently for diverse inference use cases requires carefully designed hardware platforms with ample computing, memory, and network resources. With LLM deployment scenarios and models evolving at breakneck speed, the hardware requirements to meet SLOs remains an open research question. In this work, we present an analytical tool, GenZ, to study the relationship between LLM inference performance and various platform design parameters. Our analysis provides insights into configuring platforms for different LLM workloads and use cases. We quantify the platform requirements to support SOTA LLMs models like LLaMA and GPT-4 under diverse serving settings. Furthermore, we project the hardware capabilities needed to enable future LLMs potentially exceeding hundreds of trillions of parameters. The trends and insights derived from GenZ can guide AI engineers deploying LLMs as well as computer architects designing next-generation hardware accelerators and platforms. Ultimately, this work sheds light on the platform design considerations for unlocking the full potential of large language models across a spectrum of applications. The source code is available at https://github.com/abhibambhaniya/GenZ-LLM-Analyzer .
MobileLLM: Optimizing Sub-billion Parameter Language Models for On-Device Use Cases
This paper addresses the growing need for efficient large language models (LLMs) on mobile devices, driven by increasing cloud costs and latency concerns. We focus on designing top-quality LLMs with fewer than a billion parameters, a practical choice for mobile deployment. Contrary to prevailing belief emphasizing the pivotal role of data and parameter quantity in determining model quality, our investigation underscores the significance of model architecture for sub-billion scale LLMs. Leveraging deep and thin architectures, coupled with embedding sharing and grouped-query attention mechanisms, we establish a strong baseline network denoted as MobileLLM, which attains a remarkable 2.7%/4.3% accuracy boost over preceding 125M/350M state-of-the-art models. Additionally, we propose an immediate block-wise weight sharing approach with no increase in model size and only marginal latency overhead. The resultant models, denoted as MobileLLM-LS, demonstrate a further accuracy enhancement of 0.7%/0.8% than MobileLLM 125M/350M. Moreover, MobileLLM model family shows significant improvements compared to previous sub-billion models on chat benchmarks, and demonstrates close correctness to LLaMA-v2 7B in API calling tasks, highlighting the capability of small models for common on-device use cases.
MobileAIBench: Benchmarking LLMs and LMMs for On-Device Use Cases
The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on mobile devices has gained significant attention due to the benefits of enhanced privacy, stability, and personalization. However, the hardware constraints of mobile devices necessitate the use of models with fewer parameters and model compression techniques like quantization. Currently, there is limited understanding of quantization's impact on various task performances, including LLM tasks, LMM tasks, and, critically, trust and safety. There is a lack of adequate tools for systematically testing these models on mobile devices. To address these gaps, we introduce MobileAIBench, a comprehensive benchmarking framework for evaluating mobile-optimized LLMs and LMMs. MobileAIBench assesses models across different sizes, quantization levels, and tasks, measuring latency and resource consumption on real devices. Our two-part open-source framework includes a library for running evaluations on desktops and an iOS app for on-device latency and hardware utilization measurements. Our thorough analysis aims to accelerate mobile AI research and deployment by providing insights into the performance and feasibility of deploying LLMs and LMMs on mobile platforms.
Exploring the Impact of Instruction Data Scaling on Large Language Models: An Empirical Study on Real-World Use Cases
The success of ChatGPT has recently attracted numerous efforts to replicate it, with instruction-tuning strategies being a key factor in achieving remarkable results. Instruction-tuning not only significantly enhances the model's performance and generalization but also makes the model's generated results more consistent with human speech patterns. However current research rarely studies the impact of different amounts of instruction data on model performance, especially in the real-world use cases. In this paper we explore the performance of large language models based on instruction tuning across different scales of instruction data. An evaluation dataset consisting of 12 major online use cases is constructed in the experiment. With Bloomz-7B1-mt as the base model, the results show that 1) merely increasing the amount of instruction data leads to continuous improvement in tasks such as open-ended generation, 2) in tasks such as math and code, the model performance curve remains quite flat while increasing data size. We further analyze the possible causes of these phenomena and propose potential future research directions such as effectively selecting high-quality training data, scaling base models and training methods specialized for hard tasks. We will release our training and evaluation datasets, as well as model checkpoints.
LangFair: A Python Package for Assessing Bias and Fairness in Large Language Model Use Cases
Large Language Models (LLMs) have been observed to exhibit bias in numerous ways, potentially creating or worsening outcomes for specific groups identified by protected attributes such as sex, race, sexual orientation, or age. To help address this gap, we introduce LangFair, an open-source Python package that aims to equip LLM practitioners with the tools to evaluate bias and fairness risks relevant to their specific use cases. The package offers functionality to easily generate evaluation datasets, comprised of LLM responses to use-case-specific prompts, and subsequently calculate applicable metrics for the practitioner's use case. To guide in metric selection, LangFair offers an actionable decision framework.
An Actionable Framework for Assessing Bias and Fairness in Large Language Model Use Cases
Large language models (LLMs) can exhibit bias in a variety of ways. Such biases can create or exacerbate unfair outcomes for certain groups within a protected attribute, including, but not limited to sex, race, sexual orientation, or age. In this paper, we propose a decision framework that allows practitioners to determine which bias and fairness metrics to use for a specific LLM use case. To establish the framework, we define bias and fairness risks for LLMs, map those risks to a taxonomy of LLM use cases, and then define various metrics to assess each type of risk. Instead of focusing solely on the model itself, we account for both prompt-specific- and model-specific-risk by defining evaluations at the level of an LLM use case, characterized by a model and a population of prompts. Furthermore, because all of the evaluation metrics are calculated solely using the LLM output, our proposed framework is highly practical and easily actionable for practitioners. For streamlined implementation, all evaluation metrics included in the framework are offered in this paper's companion Python toolkit, LangFair. Finally, our experiments demonstrate substantial variation in bias and fairness across use cases, underscoring the importance of use-case-level assessments.
Network Digital Twin for Open RAN: The Key Enablers, Standardization, and Use Cases
The open radio access network (O-RAN), with its disaggregated and open architecture, is poised to meet the demands of the next generation of wireless communication. However, to unlock the full potentials of O-RAN, real-time network modeling and optimization are essential. A promising solution for such requirement is the use of network digital twin (NDT). NDT provides a comprehensive view of a network, covering both physical and logical components, including infrastructure, protocols, and algorithms. NDT, as a real-time virtual representation of O-RAN facilitates a variety of operations, such as emulations, test, optimization, monitoring, and analysis of a new configuration in a risk-free environment, without requiring them to be implemented in real network. Such capability enables the vendors and network operators for a faster adoption of new solutions with frequent updates, while ensuring the resiliency of the existing services via planning ahead under various "what-if" scenarios. In this paper, we first describe what exactly NDT means in the context of O-RAN, as well as its key enablers. We then describe the NDT application within the O-RAN in both prior and post-deployment. Finally, we provide two practical uses cases, namely network energy efficiency and traffic steering, where the NDT can be leveraged effectively.
EasyNER: A Customizable Easy-to-Use Pipeline for Deep Learning- and Dictionary-based Named Entity Recognition from Medical Text
Medical research generates a large number of publications with the PubMed database already containing >35 million research articles. Integration of the knowledge scattered across this large body of literature could provide key insights into physiological mechanisms and disease processes leading to novel medical interventions. However, it is a great challenge for researchers to utilize this information in full since the scale and complexity of the data greatly surpasses human processing abilities. This becomes especially problematic in cases of extreme urgency like the COVID-19 pandemic. Automated text mining can help extract and connect information from the large body of medical research articles. The first step in text mining is typically the identification of specific classes of keywords (e.g., all protein or disease names), so called Named Entity Recognition (NER). Here we present an end-to-end pipeline for NER of typical entities found in medical research articles, including diseases, cells, chemicals, genes/proteins, and species. The pipeline can access and process large medical research article collections (PubMed, CORD-19) or raw text and incorporates a series of deep learning models fine-tuned on the HUNER corpora collection. In addition, the pipeline can perform dictionary-based NER related to COVID-19 and other medical topics. Users can also load their own NER models and dictionaries to include additional entities. The output consists of publication-ready ranked lists and graphs of detected entities and files containing the annotated texts. An associated script allows rapid inspection of the results for specific entities of interest. As model use cases, the pipeline was deployed on two collections of autophagy-related abstracts from PubMed and on the CORD19 dataset, a collection of 764 398 research article abstracts related to COVID-19.
Clio: Privacy-Preserving Insights into Real-World AI Use
How are AI assistants being used in the real world? While model providers in theory have a window into this impact via their users' data, both privacy concerns and practical challenges have made analyzing this data difficult. To address these issues, we present Clio (Claude insights and observations), a privacy-preserving platform that uses AI assistants themselves to analyze and surface aggregated usage patterns across millions of conversations, without the need for human reviewers to read raw conversations. We validate this can be done with a high degree of accuracy and privacy by conducting extensive evaluations. We demonstrate Clio's usefulness in two broad ways. First, we share insights about how models are being used in the real world from one million Claude.ai Free and Pro conversations, ranging from providing advice on hairstyles to providing guidance on Git operations and concepts. We also identify the most common high-level use cases on Claude.ai (coding, writing, and research tasks) as well as patterns that differ across languages (e.g., conversations in Japanese discuss elder care and aging populations at higher-than-typical rates). Second, we use Clio to make our systems safer by identifying coordinated attempts to abuse our systems, monitoring for unknown unknowns during critical periods like launches of new capabilities or major world events, and improving our existing monitoring systems. We also discuss the limitations of our approach, as well as risks and ethical concerns. By enabling analysis of real-world AI usage, Clio provides a scalable platform for empirically grounded AI safety and governance.
Intent-based Prompt Calibration: Enhancing prompt optimization with synthetic boundary cases
Prompt engineering is a challenging and important task due to the high sensitivity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the given prompt and the inherent ambiguity of a textual task instruction. Automatic prompt engineering is essential to achieve optimized performance from LLMs. Recent studies have demonstrated the capabilities of LLMs to automatically conduct prompt engineering by employing a meta-prompt that incorporates the outcomes of the last trials and proposes an improved prompt. However, this requires a high-quality benchmark to compare different prompts, which is difficult and expensive to acquire in many real-world use cases. In this work, we introduce a new method for automatic prompt engineering, using a calibration process that iteratively refines the prompt to the user intent. During the optimization process, the system jointly generates synthetic data of boundary use cases and optimizes the prompt according to the generated dataset. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with respect to strong proprietary models on real-world tasks such as moderation and generation. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with a limited number of annotated samples. Furthermore, we validate the advantages of each one of the system's key components. Our system is built in a modular way, facilitating easy adaptation to other tasks. The code is available https://github.com/Eladlev/AutoPrompt{here}.
Direct-Scoring NLG Evaluators Can Use Pairwise Comparisons Too
As large-language models have been increasingly used as automatic raters for evaluating free-form content, including document summarization, dialog, and story generation, work has been dedicated to evaluating such models by measuring their correlations with human judgment. For sample-level performance, methods which operate by using pairwise comparisons between machine-generated text perform well but often lack the ability to assign absolute scores to individual summaries, an ability crucial for use cases that require thresholding. In this work, we propose a direct-scoring method which uses synthetic summaries to act as pairwise machine rankings at test time. We show that our method performs comparably to state-of-the-art pairwise evaluators in terms of axis-averaged sample-level correlations on the SummEval (+0.03), TopicalChat (-0.03), and HANNA (+0.05) meta-evaluation benchmarks, and release the synthetic in-context summaries as data to facilitate future work.
Federated Learning for Tabular Data using TabNet: A Vehicular Use-Case
In this paper, we show how Federated Learning (FL) can be applied to vehicular use-cases in which we seek to classify obstacles, irregularities and pavement types on roads. Our proposed framework utilizes FL and TabNet, a state-of-the-art neural network for tabular data. We are the first to demonstrate how TabNet can be integrated with FL. Moreover, we achieve a maximum test accuracy of 93.6%. Finally, we reason why FL is a suitable concept for this data set.
Knowledge Graph Induction enabling Recommending and Trend Analysis: A Corporate Research Community Use Case
A research division plays an important role of driving innovation in an organization. Drawing insights, following trends, keeping abreast of new research, and formulating strategies are increasingly becoming more challenging for both researchers and executives as the amount of information grows in both velocity and volume. In this paper we present a use case of how a corporate research community, IBM Research, utilizes Semantic Web technologies to induce a unified Knowledge Graph from both structured and textual data obtained by integrating various applications used by the community related to research projects, academic papers, datasets, achievements and recognition. In order to make the Knowledge Graph more accessible to application developers, we identified a set of common patterns for exploiting the induced knowledge and exposed them as APIs. Those patterns were born out of user research which identified the most valuable use cases or user pain points to be alleviated. We outline two distinct scenarios: recommendation and analytics for business use. We will discuss these scenarios in detail and provide an empirical evaluation on entity recommendation specifically. The methodology used and the lessons learned from this work can be applied to other organizations facing similar challenges.
Which Prompting Technique Should I Use? An Empirical Investigation of Prompting Techniques for Software Engineering Tasks
A growing variety of prompt engineering techniques has been proposed for Large Language Models (LLMs), yet systematic evaluation of each technique on individual software engineering (SE) tasks remains underexplored. In this study, we present a systematic evaluation of 14 established prompt techniques across 10 SE tasks using four LLM models. As identified in the prior literature, the selected prompting techniques span six core dimensions (Zero-Shot, Few-Shot, Thought Generation, Ensembling, Self-Criticism, and Decomposition). They are evaluated on tasks such as code generation, bug fixing, and code-oriented question answering, to name a few. Our results show which prompting techniques are most effective for SE tasks requiring complex logic and intensive reasoning versus those that rely more on contextual understanding and example-driven scenarios. We also analyze correlations between the linguistic characteristics of prompts and the factors that contribute to the effectiveness of prompting techniques in enhancing performance on SE tasks. Additionally, we report the time and token consumption for each prompting technique when applied to a specific task and model, offering guidance for practitioners in selecting the optimal prompting technique for their use cases.
Retrieval Augmented Structured Generation: Business Document Information Extraction As Tool Use
Business Document Information Extraction (BDIE) is the problem of transforming a blob of unstructured information (raw text, scanned documents, etc.) into a structured format that downstream systems can parse and use. It has two main tasks: Key-Information Extraction (KIE) and Line Items Recognition (LIR). In this paper, we argue that BDIE is best modeled as a Tool Use problem, where the tools are these downstream systems. We then present Retrieval Augmented Structured Generation (RASG), a novel general framework for BDIE that achieves state of the art (SOTA) results on both KIE and LIR tasks on BDIE benchmarks. The contributions of this paper are threefold: (1) We show, with ablation benchmarks, that Large Language Models (LLMs) with RASG are already competitive with or surpasses current SOTA Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) without RASG on BDIE benchmarks. (2) We propose a new metric class for Line Items Recognition, General Line Items Recognition Metric (GLIRM), that is more aligned with practical BDIE use cases compared to existing metrics, such as ANLS*, DocILE, and GriTS. (3) We provide a heuristic algorithm for backcalculating bounding boxes of predicted line items and tables without the need for vision encoders. Finally, we claim that, while LMMs might sometimes offer marginal performance benefits, LLMs + RASG is oftentimes superior given real-world applications and constraints of BDIE.
HEMM: Holistic Evaluation of Multimodal Foundation Models
Multimodal foundation models that can holistically process text alongside images, video, audio, and other sensory modalities are increasingly used in a variety of real-world applications. However, it is challenging to characterize and study progress in multimodal foundation models, given the range of possible modeling decisions, tasks, and domains. In this paper, we introduce Holistic Evaluation of Multimodal Models (HEMM) to systematically evaluate the capabilities of multimodal foundation models across a set of 3 dimensions: basic skills, information flow, and real-world use cases. Basic multimodal skills are internal abilities required to solve problems, such as learning interactions across modalities, fine-grained alignment, multi-step reasoning, and the ability to handle external knowledge. Information flow studies how multimodal content changes during a task through querying, translation, editing, and fusion. Use cases span domain-specific challenges introduced in real-world multimedia, affective computing, natural sciences, healthcare, and human-computer interaction applications. Through comprehensive experiments across the 30 tasks in HEMM, we (1) identify key dataset dimensions (e.g., basic skills, information flows, and use cases) that pose challenges to today's models, and (2) distill performance trends regarding how different modeling dimensions (e.g., scale, pre-training data, multimodal alignment, pre-training, and instruction tuning objectives) influence performance. Our conclusions regarding challenging multimodal interactions, use cases, and tasks requiring reasoning and external knowledge, the benefits of data and model scale, and the impacts of instruction tuning yield actionable insights for future work in multimodal foundation models.
Holistic Evaluation of Language Models
Language models (LMs) are becoming the foundation for almost all major language technologies, but their capabilities, limitations, and risks are not well understood. We present Holistic Evaluation of Language Models (HELM) to improve the transparency of language models. First, we taxonomize the vast space of potential scenarios (i.e. use cases) and metrics (i.e. desiderata) that are of interest for LMs. Then we select a broad subset based on coverage and feasibility, noting what's missing or underrepresented (e.g. question answering for neglected English dialects, metrics for trustworthiness). Second, we adopt a multi-metric approach: We measure 7 metrics (accuracy, calibration, robustness, fairness, bias, toxicity, and efficiency) for each of 16 core scenarios when possible (87.5% of the time). This ensures metrics beyond accuracy don't fall to the wayside, and that trade-offs are clearly exposed. We also perform 7 targeted evaluations, based on 26 targeted scenarios, to analyze specific aspects (e.g. reasoning, disinformation). Third, we conduct a large-scale evaluation of 30 prominent language models (spanning open, limited-access, and closed models) on all 42 scenarios, 21 of which were not previously used in mainstream LM evaluation. Prior to HELM, models on average were evaluated on just 17.9% of the core HELM scenarios, with some prominent models not sharing a single scenario in common. We improve this to 96.0%: now all 30 models have been densely benchmarked on the same core scenarios and metrics under standardized conditions. Our evaluation surfaces 25 top-level findings. For full transparency, we release all raw model prompts and completions publicly for further analysis, as well as a general modular toolkit. We intend for HELM to be a living benchmark for the community, continuously updated with new scenarios, metrics, and models.
SynthRAD2025 Grand Challenge dataset: generating synthetic CTs for radiotherapy
Medical imaging is essential in modern radiotherapy, supporting diagnosis, treatment planning, and monitoring. Synthetic imaging, particularly synthetic computed tomography (sCT), is gaining traction in radiotherapy. The SynthRAD2025 dataset and Grand Challenge promote advancements in sCT generation by providing a benchmarking platform for algorithms using cone-beam CT (CBCT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The dataset includes 2362 cases: 890 MRI-CT and 1472 CBCT-CT pairs from head-and-neck, thoracic, and abdominal cancer patients treated at five European university medical centers (UMC Groningen, UMC Utrecht, Radboud UMC, LMU University Hospital Munich, and University Hospital of Cologne). Data were acquired with diverse scanners and protocols. Pre-processing, including rigid and deformable image registration, ensures high-quality, modality-aligned images. Extensive quality assurance validates image consistency and usability. All imaging data is provided in MetaImage (.mha) format, ensuring compatibility with medical image processing tools. Metadata, including acquisition parameters and registration details, is available in structured CSV files. To maintain dataset integrity, SynthRAD2025 is divided into training (65%), validation (10%), and test (25%) sets. The dataset is accessible at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14918089 under the SynthRAD2025 collection. This dataset supports benchmarking and the development of synthetic imaging techniques for radiotherapy applications. Use cases include sCT generation for MRI-only and MR-guided photon/proton therapy, CBCT-based dose calculations, and adaptive radiotherapy workflows. By integrating diverse acquisition settings, SynthRAD2025 fosters robust, generalizable image synthesis algorithms, advancing personalized cancer care and adaptive radiotherapy.
Reading the unreadable: Creating a dataset of 19th century English newspapers using image-to-text language models
Oscar Wilde said, "The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read." Unfortunately, The digitally archived journalism of Oscar Wilde's 19th century often has no or poor quality Optical Character Recognition (OCR), reducing the accessibility of these archives and making them unreadable both figuratively and literally. This paper helps address the issue by performing OCR on "The Nineteenth Century Serials Edition" (NCSE), an 84k-page collection of 19th-century English newspapers and periodicals, using Pixtral 12B, a pre-trained image-to-text language model. The OCR capability of Pixtral was compared to 4 other OCR approaches, achieving a median character error rate of 1%, 5x lower than the next best model. The resulting NCSE v2.0 dataset features improved article identification, high-quality OCR, and text classified into four types and seventeen topics. The dataset contains 1.4 million entries, and 321 million words. Example use cases demonstrate analysis of topic similarity, readability, and event tracking. NCSE v2.0 is freely available to encourage historical and sociological research. As a result, 21st-century readers can now share Oscar Wilde's disappointment with 19th-century journalistic standards, reading the unreadable from the comfort of their own computers.
The Knesset Corpus: An Annotated Corpus of Hebrew Parliamentary Proceedings
We present the Knesset Corpus, a corpus of Hebrew parliamentary proceedings containing over 30 million sentences (over 384 million tokens) from all the (plenary and committee) protocols held in the Israeli parliament between 1998 and 2022. Sentences are annotated with morpho-syntactic information and are associated with detailed meta-information reflecting demographic and political properties of the speakers, based on a large database of parliament members and factions that we compiled. We discuss the structure and composition of the corpus and the various processing steps we applied to it. To demonstrate the utility of this novel dataset we present two use cases. We show that the corpus can be used to examine historical developments in the style of political discussions by showing a reduction in lexical richness in the proceedings over time. We also investigate some differences between the styles of men and women speakers. These use cases exemplify the potential of the corpus to shed light on important trends in the Israeli society, supporting research in linguistics, political science, communication, law, etc.
SAGDA: Open-Source Synthetic Agriculture Data for Africa
Data scarcity in African agriculture hampers machine learning (ML) model performance, limiting innovations in precision agriculture. The Synthetic Agriculture Data for Africa (SAGDA) library, a Python-based open-source toolkit, addresses this gap by generating, augmenting, and validating synthetic agricultural datasets. We present SAGDA's design and development practices, highlighting its core functions: generate, model, augment, validate, visualize, optimize, and simulate, as well as their roles in applications of ML for agriculture. Two use cases are detailed: yield prediction enhanced via data augmentation, and multi-objective NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) fertilizer recommendation. We conclude with future plans for expanding SAGDA's capabilities, underscoring the vital role of open-source, data-driven practices for African agriculture.
Late Chunking: Contextual Chunk Embeddings Using Long-Context Embedding Models
Many use cases require retrieving smaller portions of text, and dense vector-based retrieval systems often perform better with shorter text segments, as the semantics are less likely to be "over-compressed" in the embeddings. Consequently, practitioners often split text documents into smaller chunks and encode them separately. However, chunk embeddings created in this way can lose contextual information from surrounding chunks, resulting in suboptimal representations. In this paper, we introduce a novel method called "late chunking," which leverages long context embedding models to first embed all tokens of the long text, with chunking applied after the transformer model and just before mean pooling. The resulting chunk embeddings capture the full contextual information, leading to superior results across various retrieval tasks without the need for additional training. Moreover, our method is generic enough to be applied to any long-context embedding model.
YOLO26: Key Architectural Enhancements and Performance Benchmarking for Real-Time Object Detection
This study presents a comprehensive analysis of Ultralytics YOLO26, highlighting its key architectural enhancements and performance benchmarking for real-time object detection. YOLO26, released in September 2025, stands as the newest and most advanced member of the YOLO family, purpose-built to deliver efficiency, accuracy, and deployment readiness on edge and low-power devices. The paper sequentially details architectural innovations of YOLO26, including the removal of Distribution Focal Loss (DFL), adoption of end-to-end NMS-free inference, integration of ProgLoss and Small-Target-Aware Label Assignment (STAL), and the introduction of the MuSGD optimizer for stable convergence. Beyond architecture, the study positions YOLO26 as a multi-task framework, supporting object detection, instance segmentation, pose/keypoints estimation, oriented detection, and classification. We present performance benchmarks of YOLO26 on edge devices such as NVIDIA Jetson Nano and Orin, comparing its results with YOLOv8, YOLOv11, YOLOv12, YOLOv13, and transformer-based detectors(RF-DETR and RT-DETR). This paper further explores real-time deployment pathways, flexible export options (ONNX, TensorRT, CoreML, TFLite), and quantization for INT8/FP16. Practical use cases of YOLO26 across robotics, manufacturing, and IoT are highlighted to demonstrate cross-industry adaptability. Finally, insights on deployment efficiency and broader implications are discussed, with future directions for YOLO26 and the YOLO lineage outlined.
LCDC: Bridging Science and Machine Learning for Light Curve Analysis
The characterization and analysis of light curves are vital for understanding the physical and rotational properties of artificial space objects such as satellites, rocket stages, and space debris. This paper introduces the Light Curve Dataset Creator (LCDC), a Python-based toolkit designed to facilitate the preprocessing, analysis, and machine learning applications of light curve data. LCDC enables seamless integration with publicly available datasets, such as the newly introduced Mini Mega Tortora (MMT) database. Moreover, it offers data filtering, transformation, as well as feature extraction tooling. To demonstrate the toolkit's capabilities, we created the first standardized dataset for rocket body classification, RoBo6, which was used to train and evaluate several benchmark machine learning models, addressing the lack of reproducibility and comparability in recent studies. Furthermore, the toolkit enables advanced scientific analyses, such as surface characterization of the Atlas 2AS Centaur and the rotational dynamics of the Delta 4 rocket body, by streamlining data preprocessing, feature extraction, and visualization. These use cases highlight LCDC's potential to advance space debris characterization and promote sustainable space exploration. Additionally, they highlight the toolkit's ability to enable AI-focused research within the space debris community.
3D-MuPPET: 3D Multi-Pigeon Pose Estimation and Tracking
Markerless methods for animal posture tracking have been rapidly developing recently, but frameworks and benchmarks for tracking large animal groups in 3D are still lacking. To overcome this gap in the literature, we present 3D-MuPPET, a framework to estimate and track 3D poses of up to 10 pigeons at interactive speed using multiple camera views. We train a pose estimator to infer 2D keypoints and bounding boxes of multiple pigeons, then triangulate the keypoints to 3D. For identity matching of individuals in all views, we first dynamically match 2D detections to global identities in the first frame, then use a 2D tracker to maintain IDs across views in subsequent frames. We achieve comparable accuracy to a state of the art 3D pose estimator in terms of median error and Percentage of Correct Keypoints. Additionally, we benchmark the inference speed of 3D-MuPPET, with up to 9.45 fps in 2D and 1.89 fps in 3D, and perform quantitative tracking evaluation, which yields encouraging results. Finally, we showcase two novel applications for 3D-MuPPET. First, we train a model with data of single pigeons and achieve comparable results in 2D and 3D posture estimation for up to 5 pigeons. Second, we show that 3D-MuPPET also works in outdoors without additional annotations from natural environments. Both use cases simplify the domain shift to new species and environments, largely reducing annotation effort needed for 3D posture tracking. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to present a framework for 2D/3D animal posture and trajectory tracking that works in both indoor and outdoor environments for up to 10 individuals. We hope that the framework can open up new opportunities in studying animal collective behaviour and encourages further developments in 3D multi-animal posture tracking.
Auditing and Generating Synthetic Data with Controllable Trust Trade-offs
Data collected from the real world tends to be biased, unbalanced, and at risk of exposing sensitive and private information. This reality has given rise to the idea of creating synthetic datasets to alleviate risk, bias, harm, and privacy concerns inherent in the real data. This concept relies on Generative AI models to produce unbiased, privacy-preserving synthetic data while being true to the real data. In this new paradigm, how can we tell if this approach delivers on its promises? We present an auditing framework that offers a holistic assessment of synthetic datasets and AI models trained on them, centered around bias and discrimination prevention, fidelity to the real data, utility, robustness, and privacy preservation. We showcase our framework by auditing multiple generative models on diverse use cases, including education, healthcare, banking, human resources, and across different modalities, from tabular, to time-series, to natural language. Our use cases demonstrate the importance of a holistic assessment in order to ensure compliance with socio-technical safeguards that regulators and policymakers are increasingly enforcing. For this purpose, we introduce the trust index that ranks multiple synthetic datasets based on their prescribed safeguards and their desired trade-offs. Moreover, we devise a trust-index-driven model selection and cross-validation procedure via auditing in the training loop that we showcase on a class of transformer models that we dub TrustFormers, across different modalities. This trust-driven model selection allows for controllable trust trade-offs in the resulting synthetic data. We instrument our auditing framework with workflows that connect different stakeholders from model development to audit and certification via a synthetic data auditing report.
Injecting Domain Adaptation with Learning-to-hash for Effective and Efficient Zero-shot Dense Retrieval
Dense retrieval overcome the lexical gap and has shown great success in ad-hoc information retrieval (IR). Despite their success, dense retrievers are expensive to serve across practical use cases. For use cases requiring to search from millions of documents, the dense index becomes bulky and requires high memory usage for storing the index. More recently, learning-to-hash (LTH) techniques, for e.g., BPR and JPQ, produce binary document vectors, thereby reducing the memory requirement to efficiently store the dense index. LTH techniques are supervised and finetune the retriever using a ranking loss. They outperform their counterparts, i.e., traditional out-of-the-box vector compression techniques such as PCA or PQ. A missing piece from prior work is that existing techniques have been evaluated only in-domain, i.e., on a single dataset such as MS MARCO. In our work, we evaluate LTH and vector compression techniques for improving the downstream zero-shot retrieval accuracy of the TAS-B dense retriever while maintaining efficiency at inference. Our results demonstrate that, unlike prior work, LTH strategies when applied naively can underperform the zero-shot TAS-B dense retriever on average by up to 14% nDCG@10 on the BEIR benchmark. To solve this limitation, in our work, we propose an easy yet effective solution of injecting domain adaptation with existing supervised LTH techniques. We experiment with two well-known unsupervised domain adaptation techniques: GenQ and GPL. Our domain adaptation injection technique can improve the downstream zero-shot retrieval effectiveness for both BPR and JPQ variants of the TAS-B model by on average 11.5% and 8.2% nDCG@10 while both maintaining 32times memory efficiency and 14times and 2times speedup respectively in CPU retrieval latency on BEIR. All our code, models, and data are publicly available at https://github.com/thakur-nandan/income.
iSEA: An Interactive Pipeline for Semantic Error Analysis of NLP Models
Error analysis in NLP models is essential to successful model development and deployment. One common approach for diagnosing errors is to identify subpopulations in the dataset where the model produces the most errors. However, existing approaches typically define subpopulations based on pre-defined features, which requires users to form hypotheses of errors in advance. To complement these approaches, we propose iSEA, an Interactive Pipeline for Semantic Error Analysis in NLP Models, which automatically discovers semantically-grounded subpopulations with high error rates in the context of a human-in-the-loop interactive system. iSEA enables model developers to learn more about their model errors through discovered subpopulations, validate the sources of errors through interactive analysis on the discovered subpopulations, and test hypotheses about model errors by defining custom subpopulations. The tool supports semantic descriptions of error-prone subpopulations at the token and concept level, as well as pre-defined higher-level features. Through use cases and expert interviews, we demonstrate how iSEA can assist error understanding and analysis.
Dropout's Dream Land: Generalization from Learned Simulators to Reality
A World Model is a generative model used to simulate an environment. World Models have proven capable of learning spatial and temporal representations of Reinforcement Learning environments. In some cases, a World Model offers an agent the opportunity to learn entirely inside of its own dream environment. In this work we explore improving the generalization capabilities from dream environments to real environments (Dream2Real). We present a general approach to improve a controller's ability to transfer from a neural network dream environment to reality at little additional cost. These improvements are gained by drawing on inspiration from Domain Randomization, where the basic idea is to randomize as much of a simulator as possible without fundamentally changing the task at hand. Generally, Domain Randomization assumes access to a pre-built simulator with configurable parameters but oftentimes this is not available. By training the World Model using dropout, the dream environment is capable of creating a nearly infinite number of different dream environments. Previous use cases of dropout either do not use dropout at inference time or averages the predictions generated by multiple sampled masks (Monte-Carlo Dropout). Dropout's Dream Land leverages each unique mask to create a diverse set of dream environments. Our experimental results show that Dropout's Dream Land is an effective technique to bridge the reality gap between dream environments and reality. Furthermore, we additionally perform an extensive set of ablation studies.
DataFlow: An LLM-Driven Framework for Unified Data Preparation and Workflow Automation in the Era of Data-Centric AI
The rapidly growing demand for high-quality data in Large Language Models (LLMs) has intensified the need for scalable, reliable, and semantically rich data preparation pipelines. However, current practices remain dominated by ad-hoc scripts and loosely specified workflows, which lack principled abstractions, hinder reproducibility, and offer limited support for model-in-the-loop data generation. To address these challenges, we present DataFlow, a unified and extensible LLM-driven data preparation framework. DataFlow is designed with system-level abstractions that enable modular, reusable, and composable data transformations, and provides a PyTorch-style pipeline construction API for building debuggable and optimizable dataflows. The framework consists of nearly 200 reusable operators and six domain-general pipelines spanning text, mathematical reasoning, code, Text-to-SQL, agentic RAG, and large-scale knowledge extraction. To further improve usability, we introduce DataFlow-Agent, which automatically translates natural-language specifications into executable pipelines via operator synthesis, pipeline planning, and iterative verification. Across six representative use cases, DataFlow consistently improves downstream LLM performance. Our math, code, and text pipelines outperform curated human datasets and specialized synthetic baselines, achieving up to +3\% execution accuracy in Text-to-SQL over SynSQL, +7\% average improvements on code benchmarks, and 1--3 point gains on MATH, GSM8K, and AIME. Moreover, a unified 10K-sample dataset produced by DataFlow enables base models to surpass counterparts trained on 1M Infinity-Instruct data. These results demonstrate that DataFlow provides a practical and high-performance substrate for reliable, reproducible, and scalable LLM data preparation, and establishes a system-level foundation for future data-centric AI development.
AgentInstruct: Toward Generative Teaching with Agentic Flows
Synthetic data is becoming increasingly important for accelerating the development of language models, both large and small. Despite several successful use cases, researchers also raised concerns around model collapse and drawbacks of imitating other models. This discrepancy can be attributed to the fact that synthetic data varies in quality and diversity. Effective use of synthetic data usually requires significant human effort in curating the data. We focus on using synthetic data for post-training, specifically creating data by powerful models to teach a new skill or behavior to another model, we refer to this setting as Generative Teaching. We introduce AgentInstruct, an extensible agentic framework for automatically creating large amounts of diverse and high-quality synthetic data. AgentInstruct can create both the prompts and responses, using only raw data sources like text documents and code files as seeds. We demonstrate the utility of AgentInstruct by creating a post training dataset of 25M pairs to teach language models different skills, such as text editing, creative writing, tool usage, coding, reading comprehension, etc. The dataset can be used for instruction tuning of any base model. We post-train Mistral-7b with the data. When comparing the resulting model Orca-3 to Mistral-7b-Instruct (which uses the same base model), we observe significant improvements across many benchmarks. For example, 40% improvement on AGIEval, 19% improvement on MMLU, 54% improvement on GSM8K, 38% improvement on BBH and 45% improvement on AlpacaEval. Additionally, it consistently outperforms other models such as LLAMA-8B-instruct and GPT-3.5-turbo.
LTX-Video: Realtime Video Latent Diffusion
We introduce LTX-Video, a transformer-based latent diffusion model that adopts a holistic approach to video generation by seamlessly integrating the responsibilities of the Video-VAE and the denoising transformer. Unlike existing methods, which treat these components as independent, LTX-Video aims to optimize their interaction for improved efficiency and quality. At its core is a carefully designed Video-VAE that achieves a high compression ratio of 1:192, with spatiotemporal downscaling of 32 x 32 x 8 pixels per token, enabled by relocating the patchifying operation from the transformer's input to the VAE's input. Operating in this highly compressed latent space enables the transformer to efficiently perform full spatiotemporal self-attention, which is essential for generating high-resolution videos with temporal consistency. However, the high compression inherently limits the representation of fine details. To address this, our VAE decoder is tasked with both latent-to-pixel conversion and the final denoising step, producing the clean result directly in pixel space. This approach preserves the ability to generate fine details without incurring the runtime cost of a separate upsampling module. Our model supports diverse use cases, including text-to-video and image-to-video generation, with both capabilities trained simultaneously. It achieves faster-than-real-time generation, producing 5 seconds of 24 fps video at 768x512 resolution in just 2 seconds on an Nvidia H100 GPU, outperforming all existing models of similar scale. The source code and pre-trained models are publicly available, setting a new benchmark for accessible and scalable video generation.
Weaver: Foundation Models for Creative Writing
This work introduces Weaver, our first family of large language models (LLMs) dedicated to content creation. Weaver is pre-trained on a carefully selected corpus that focuses on improving the writing capabilities of large language models. We then fine-tune Weaver for creative and professional writing purposes and align it to the preference of professional writers using a suit of novel methods for instruction data synthesis and LLM alignment, making it able to produce more human-like texts and follow more diverse instructions for content creation. The Weaver family consists of models of Weaver Mini (1.8B), Weaver Base (6B), Weaver Pro (14B), and Weaver Ultra (34B) sizes, suitable for different applications and can be dynamically dispatched by a routing agent according to query complexity to balance response quality and computation cost. Evaluation on a carefully curated benchmark for assessing the writing capabilities of LLMs shows Weaver models of all sizes outperform generalist LLMs several times larger than them. Notably, our most-capable Weaver Ultra model surpasses GPT-4, a state-of-the-art generalist LLM, on various writing scenarios, demonstrating the advantage of training specialized LLMs for writing purposes. Moreover, Weaver natively supports retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and function calling (tool usage). We present various use cases of these abilities for improving AI-assisted writing systems, including integration of external knowledge bases, tools, or APIs, and providing personalized writing assistance. Furthermore, we discuss and summarize a guideline and best practices for pre-training and fine-tuning domain-specific LLMs.
Faster Segment Anything: Towards Lightweight SAM for Mobile Applications
Segment anything model (SAM) is a prompt-guided vision foundation model for cutting out the object of interest from its background. Since Meta research team released the SA project, SAM has attracted significant attention due to its impressive zero-shot transfer performance and high versatility of being compatible with other models for advanced vision applications like image editing with fine-grained control. Many of such use cases need to be run on resource-constraint edge devices, like mobile Apps. In this work, we aim to make SAM mobile-friendly by replacing the heavyweight image encoder with a lightweight one. A naive way to train such a new SAM as in the original SAM paper leads to unsatisfactory performance, especially when limited training sources are available. We find that this is mainly caused by the coupled optimization of the image encoder and mask decoder, motivated by which we propose decoupled distillation. Concretely, we distill the knowledge from the image encoder ViT-H in the original SAM to a lightweight image encoder, which can be automatically compatible with the mask decoder in the original SAM. The training can be completed on a single GPU within less than one day, and the resulting lightweight SAM is termed MobileSAM which is more than 60 times smaller yet performs on par with the original SAM. For inference speed, MobileSAM runs around 10ms per image: 8ms on the image encoder and 2ms on the mask decoder. With superior performance and a higher versatility, our MobileSAM is 7 times smaller and 4 times faster than the concurrent FastSAM, making it more suitable for mobile applications. The code for MobileSAM project is provided at https://github.com/ChaoningZhang/MobileSAM
PersonaLLM: Investigating the Ability of Large Language Models to Express Personality Traits
Despite the many use cases for large language models (LLMs) in creating personalized chatbots, there has been limited research on evaluating the extent to which the behaviors of personalized LLMs accurately and consistently reflect specific personality traits. We consider studying the behavior of LLM-based agents which we refer to as LLM personas and present a case study with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to investigate whether LLMs can generate content that aligns with their assigned personality profiles. To this end, we simulate distinct LLM personas based on the Big Five personality model, have them complete the 44-item Big Five Inventory (BFI) personality test and a story writing task, and then assess their essays with automatic and human evaluations. Results show that LLM personas' self-reported BFI scores are consistent with their designated personality types, with large effect sizes observed across five traits. Additionally, LLM personas' writings have emerging representative linguistic patterns for personality traits when compared with a human writing corpus. Furthermore, human evaluation shows that humans can perceive some personality traits with an accuracy of up to 80\%. Interestingly, the accuracy drops significantly when the annotators were informed of the AI's authorship.
Generative Disco: Text-to-Video Generation for Music Visualization
Visuals are a core part of our experience of music, owing to the way they can amplify the emotions and messages conveyed through the music. However, creating music visualization is a complex, time-consuming, and resource-intensive process. We introduce Generative Disco, a generative AI system that helps generate music visualizations with large language models and text-to-image models. Users select intervals of music to visualize and then parameterize that visualization by defining start and end prompts. These prompts are warped between and generated according to the beat of the music for audioreactive video. We introduce design patterns for improving generated videos: "transitions", which express shifts in color, time, subject, or style, and "holds", which encourage visual emphasis and consistency. A study with professionals showed that the system was enjoyable, easy to explore, and highly expressive. We conclude on use cases of Generative Disco for professionals and how AI-generated content is changing the landscape of creative work.
LangNav: Language as a Perceptual Representation for Navigation
We explore the use of language as a perceptual representation for vision-and-language navigation. Our approach uses off-the-shelf vision systems (for image captioning and object detection) to convert an agent's egocentric panoramic view at each time step into natural language descriptions. We then finetune a pretrained language model to select an action, based on the current view and the trajectory history, that would best fulfill the navigation instructions. In contrast to the standard setup which adapts a pretrained language model to work directly with continuous visual features from pretrained vision models, our approach instead uses (discrete) language as the perceptual representation. We explore two use cases of our language-based navigation (LangNav) approach on the R2R vision-and-language navigation benchmark: generating synthetic trajectories from a prompted large language model (GPT-4) with which to finetune a smaller language model; and sim-to-real transfer where we transfer a policy learned on a simulated environment (ALFRED) to a real-world environment (R2R). Our approach is found to improve upon strong baselines that rely on visual features in settings where only a few gold trajectories (10-100) are available, demonstrating the potential of using language as a perceptual representation for navigation tasks.
TabPFN-2.5: Advancing the State of the Art in Tabular Foundation Models
The first tabular foundation model, TabPFN, and its successor TabPFNv2 have impacted tabular AI substantially, with dozens of methods building on it and hundreds of applications across different use cases. This report introduces TabPFN-2.5, the next generation of our tabular foundation model, built for datasets with up to 50,000 data points and 2,000 features, a 20x increase in data cells compared to TabPFNv2. TabPFN-2.5 is now the leading method for the industry standard benchmark TabArena (which contains datasets with up to 100,000 training data points), substantially outperforming tuned tree-based models and matching the accuracy of AutoGluon 1.4, a complex four-hour tuned ensemble that even includes the previous TabPFNv2. Remarkably, default TabPFN-2.5 has a 100% win rate against default XGBoost on small to medium-sized classification datasets (<=10,000 data points, 500 features) and a 87% win rate on larger datasets up to 100K samples and 2K features (85% for regression). For production use cases, we introduce a new distillation engine that converts TabPFN-2.5 into a compact MLP or tree ensemble, preserving most of its accuracy while delivering orders-of-magnitude lower latency and plug-and-play deployment. This new release will immediately strengthen the performance of the many applications and methods already built on the TabPFN ecosystem.
The Ethics of ChatGPT in Medicine and Healthcare: A Systematic Review on Large Language Models (LLMs)
With the introduction of ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs) have received enormous attention in healthcare. Despite their potential benefits, researchers have underscored various ethical implications. While individual instances have drawn much attention, the debate lacks a systematic overview of practical applications currently researched and ethical issues connected to them. Against this background, this work aims to map the ethical landscape surrounding the current stage of deployment of LLMs in medicine and healthcare. Electronic databases and preprint servers were queried using a comprehensive search strategy. Studies were screened and extracted following a modified rapid review approach. Methodological quality was assessed using a hybrid approach. For 53 records, a meta-aggregative synthesis was performed. Four fields of applications emerged and testify to a vivid exploration phase. Advantages of using LLMs are attributed to their capacity in data analysis, personalized information provisioning, support in decision-making, mitigating information loss and enhancing information accessibility. However, we also identifies recurrent ethical concerns connected to fairness, bias, non-maleficence, transparency, and privacy. A distinctive concern is the tendency to produce harmful misinformation or convincingly but inaccurate content. A recurrent plea for ethical guidance and human oversight is evident. Given the variety of use cases, it is suggested that the ethical guidance debate be reframed to focus on defining what constitutes acceptable human oversight across the spectrum of applications. This involves considering diverse settings, varying potentials for harm, and different acceptable thresholds for performance and certainty in healthcare. In addition, a critical inquiry is necessary to determine the extent to which the current experimental use of LLMs is necessary and justified.
Explore-Instruct: Enhancing Domain-Specific Instruction Coverage through Active Exploration
Instruction-tuning can be substantially optimized through enhanced diversity, resulting in models capable of handling a broader spectrum of tasks. However, existing data employed for such tuning often exhibit an inadequate coverage of individual domains, limiting the scope for nuanced comprehension and interactions within these areas. To address this deficiency, we propose Explore-Instruct, a novel approach to enhance the data coverage to be used in domain-specific instruction-tuning through active exploration via Large Language Models (LLMs). Built upon representative domain use cases, Explore-Instruct explores a multitude of variations or possibilities by implementing a search algorithm to obtain diversified and domain-focused instruction-tuning data. Our data-centric analysis validates the effectiveness of this proposed approach in improving domain-specific instruction coverage. Moreover, our model's performance demonstrates considerable advancements over multiple baselines, including those utilizing domain-specific data enhancement. Our findings offer a promising opportunity to improve instruction coverage, especially in domain-specific contexts, thereby advancing the development of adaptable language models. Our code, model weights, and data are public at https://github.com/fanqiwan/Explore-Instruct.
Beyond Text: Implementing Multimodal Large Language Model-Powered Multi-Agent Systems Using a No-Code Platform
This study proposes the design and implementation of a multimodal LLM-based Multi-Agent System (MAS) leveraging a No-Code platform to address the practical constraints and significant entry barriers associated with AI adoption in enterprises. Advanced AI technologies, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), often pose challenges due to their technical complexity and high implementation costs, making them difficult for many organizations to adopt. To overcome these limitations, this research develops a No-Code-based Multi-Agent System designed to enable users without programming knowledge to easily build and manage AI systems. The study examines various use cases to validate the applicability of AI in business processes, including code generation from image-based notes, Advanced RAG-based question-answering systems, text-based image generation, and video generation using images and prompts. These systems lower the barriers to AI adoption, empowering not only professional developers but also general users to harness AI for significantly improved productivity and efficiency. By demonstrating the scalability and accessibility of No-Code platforms, this study advances the democratization of AI technologies within enterprises and validates the practical applicability of Multi-Agent Systems, ultimately contributing to the widespread adoption of AI across various industries.
CRAFT: Extracting and Tuning Cultural Instructions from the Wild
Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly evolved as the foundation of various natural language processing (NLP) applications. Despite their wide use cases, their understanding of culturally-related concepts and reasoning remains limited. Meantime, there is a significant need to enhance these models' cultural reasoning capabilities, especially concerning underrepresented regions. This paper introduces a novel pipeline for extracting high-quality, culturally-related instruction tuning datasets from vast unstructured corpora. We utilize a self-instruction generation pipeline to identify cultural concepts and trigger instruction. By integrating with a general-purpose instruction tuning dataset, our model demonstrates enhanced capabilities in recognizing and understanding regional cultural nuances, thereby enhancing its reasoning capabilities. We conduct experiments across three regions: Singapore, the Philippines, and the United States, achieving performance improvement of up to 6%. Our research opens new avenues for extracting cultural instruction tuning sets directly from unstructured data, setting a precedent for future innovations in the field.
Learning Interactive Real-World Simulators
Generative models trained on internet data have revolutionized how text, image, and video content can be created. Perhaps the next milestone for generative models is to simulate realistic experience in response to actions taken by humans, robots, and other interactive agents. Applications of a real-world simulator range from controllable content creation in games and movies, to training embodied agents purely in simulation that can be directly deployed in the real world. We explore the possibility of learning a universal simulator (UniSim) of real-world interaction through generative modeling. We first make the important observation that natural datasets available for learning a real-world simulator are often rich along different axes (e.g., abundant objects in image data, densely sampled actions in robotics data, and diverse movements in navigation data). With careful orchestration of diverse datasets, each providing a different aspect of the overall experience, UniSim can emulate how humans and agents interact with the world by simulating the visual outcome of both high-level instructions such as "open the drawer" and low-level controls such as "move by x, y" from otherwise static scenes and objects. There are numerous use cases for such a real-world simulator. As an example, we use UniSim to train both high-level vision-language planners and low-level reinforcement learning policies, each of which exhibit zero-shot real-world transfer after training purely in a learned real-world simulator. We also show that other types of intelligence such as video captioning models can benefit from training with simulated experience in UniSim, opening up even wider applications. Video demos can be found at https://universal-simulator.github.io.
GlotScript: A Resource and Tool for Low Resource Writing System Identification
We present GlotScript, an open resource and tool for low resource writing system identification. GlotScript-R is a resource that provides the attested writing systems for more than 7,000 languages. It is compiled by aggregating information from existing writing system resources. GlotScript-T is a writing system identification tool that covers all 161 Unicode 15.0 scripts. For an input text, it returns its script distribution where scripts are identified by ISO 15924 codes. We also present two use cases for GlotScript. First, we demonstrate that GlotScript supports cleaning multilingual corpora such as mC4 and OSCAR. Second, we analyze the tokenization of a number of language models such as GPT-4 using GlotScript and provide insights on the coverage of low resource scripts and languages by each language model. We hope that GlotScript will become a useful resource for work on low resource languages in the NLP community. GlotScript-R and GlotScript-T are available at https://github.com/cisnlp/GlotScript.
Text-To-Concept (and Back) via Cross-Model Alignment
We observe that the mapping between an image's representation in one model to its representation in another can be learned surprisingly well with just a linear layer, even across diverse models. Building on this observation, we propose text-to-concept, where features from a fixed pretrained model are aligned linearly to the CLIP space, so that text embeddings from CLIP's text encoder become directly comparable to the aligned features. With text-to-concept, we convert fixed off-the-shelf vision encoders to surprisingly strong zero-shot classifiers for free, with accuracy at times even surpassing that of CLIP, despite being much smaller models and trained on a small fraction of the data compared to CLIP. We show other immediate use-cases of text-to-concept, like building concept bottleneck models with no concept supervision, diagnosing distribution shifts in terms of human concepts, and retrieving images satisfying a set of text-based constraints. Lastly, we demonstrate the feasibility of concept-to-text, where vectors in a model's feature space are decoded by first aligning to the CLIP before being fed to a GPT-based generative model. Our work suggests existing deep models, with presumably diverse architectures and training, represent input samples relatively similarly, and a two-way communication across model representation spaces and to humans (through language) is viable.
Generative Modelling for Controllable Audio Synthesis of Expressive Piano Performance
We present a controllable neural audio synthesizer based on Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoders (GM-VAE), which can generate realistic piano performances in the audio domain that closely follows temporal conditions of two essential style features for piano performances: articulation and dynamics. We demonstrate how the model is able to apply fine-grained style morphing over the course of synthesizing the audio. This is based on conditions which are latent variables that can be sampled from the prior or inferred from other pieces. One of the envisioned use cases is to inspire creative and brand new interpretations for existing pieces of piano music.
HiFi-HARP: A High-Fidelity 7th-Order Ambisonic Room Impulse Response Dataset
We introduce HiFi-HARP, a large-scale dataset of 7th-order Higher-Order Ambisonic Room Impulse Responses (HOA-RIRs) consisting of more than 100,000 RIRs generated via a hybrid acoustic simulation in realistic indoor scenes. HiFi-HARP combines geometrically complex, furnished room models from the 3D-FRONT repository with a hybrid simulation pipeline: low-frequency wave-based simulation (finite-difference time-domain) up to 900 Hz is used, while high frequencies above 900 Hz are simulated using a ray-tracing approach. The combined raw RIRs are encoded into the spherical-harmonic domain (AmbiX ACN) for direct auralization. Our dataset extends prior work by providing 7th-order Ambisonic RIRs that combine wave-theoretic accuracy with realistic room content. We detail the generation pipeline (scene and material selection, array design, hybrid simulation, ambisonic encoding) and provide dataset statistics (room volumes, RT60 distributions, absorption properties). A comparison table highlights the novelty of HiFi-HARP relative to existing RIR collections. Finally, we outline potential benchmarks such as FOA-to-HOA upsampling, source localization, and dereverberation. We discuss machine learning use cases (spatial audio rendering, acoustic parameter estimation) and limitations (e.g., simulation approximations, static scenes). Overall, HiFi-HARP offers a rich resource for developing spatial audio and acoustics algorithms in complex environments.
PaVeRL-SQL: Text-to-SQL via Partial-Match Rewards and Verbal Reinforcement Learning
Text-to-SQL models allow users to interact with a database more easily by generating executable SQL statements from natural-language questions. Despite recent successes on simpler databases and questions, current Text-to-SQL methods still suffer from low execution accuracy on industry-scale databases and complex questions involving domain-specific business logic. We present PaVeRL-SQL, a framework that combines Partial-Match Rewards and Verbal Reinforcement Learning to drive self-improvement in reasoning language models (RLMs) for Text-to-SQL. To handle practical use cases, we adopt two pipelines: (1) a newly designed in-context learning framework with group self-evaluation (verbal-RL), using capable open- and closed-source large language models (LLMs) as backbones; and (2) a chain-of-thought (CoT) RL pipeline with a small backbone model (OmniSQL-7B) trained with a specially designed reward function and two-stage RL. These pipelines achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on popular Text-to-SQL benchmarks -- Spider, Spider 2.0, and BIRD. For the industrial-level Spider2.0-SQLite benchmark, the verbal-RL pipeline achieves an execution accuracy 7.4\% higher than SOTA, and the CoT pipeline is 1.4\% higher. RL training with mixed SQL dialects yields strong, threefold gains, particularly for dialects with limited training data. Overall, PaVeRL-SQL delivers reliable, SOTA Text-to-SQL under realistic industrial constraints. The code is available at https://github.com/PaVeRL-SQL/PaVeRL-SQL.
FlyMeThrough: Human-AI Collaborative 3D Indoor Mapping with Commodity Drones
Indoor mapping data is crucial for routing, navigation, and building management, yet such data are widely lacking due to the manual labor and expense of data collection, especially for larger indoor spaces. Leveraging recent advancements in commodity drones and photogrammetry, we introduce FlyMeThrough -- a drone-based indoor scanning system that efficiently produces 3D reconstructions of indoor spaces with human-AI collaborative annotations for key indoor points-of-interest (POI) such as entrances, restrooms, stairs, and elevators. We evaluated FlyMeThrough in 12 indoor spaces with varying sizes and functionality. To investigate use cases and solicit feedback from target stakeholders, we also conducted a qualitative user study with five building managers and five occupants. Our findings indicate that FlyMeThrough can efficiently and precisely create indoor 3D maps for strategic space planning, resource management, and navigation.
The Fused Kernel Library: A C++ API to Develop Highly-Efficient GPU Libraries
Existing GPU libraries often struggle to fully exploit the parallel resources and on-chip memory (SRAM) of GPUs when chaining multiple GPU functions as individual kernels. While Kernel Fusion (KF) techniques like Horizontal Fusion (HF) and Vertical Fusion (VF) can mitigate this, current library implementations often require library developers to manually create fused kernels. Hence, library users rely on limited sets of pre-compiled or template-based fused kernels. This limits the use cases that can benefit from HF and VF and increases development costs. In order to solve these issues, we present a novel methodology for building GPU libraries that enables automatic on-demand HF and VF for arbitrary combinations of GPU library functions. Our methodology defines reusable, fusionable components that users combine via high-level programming interfaces. Leveraging C++17 metaprogramming features available in compilers like nvcc, our methodology generates a single and optimized fused kernel tailored to the user's specific sequence of operations at compile time, without needing a custom compiler or manual development and pre-compilation of kernel combinations. This approach abstracts low-level GPU complexities while maximizing GPU resource utilization and keeping intermediate data in SRAM. We provide an open-source implementation demonstrating significant speedups compared to traditional libraries in various benchmarks, validating the effectiveness of this methodology for improving GPU performance in the range of 2x to more than 1000x, while preserving high-level programmability.
MMTU: A Massive Multi-Task Table Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark
Tables and table-based use cases play a crucial role in many important real-world applications, such as spreadsheets, databases, and computational notebooks, which traditionally require expert-level users like data engineers, data analysts, and database administrators to operate. Although LLMs have shown remarkable progress in working with tables (e.g., in spreadsheet and database copilot scenarios), comprehensive benchmarking of such capabilities remains limited. In contrast to an extensive and growing list of NLP benchmarks, evaluations of table-related tasks are scarce, and narrowly focus on tasks like NL-to-SQL and Table-QA, overlooking the broader spectrum of real-world tasks that professional users face. This gap limits our understanding and model progress in this important area. In this work, we introduce MMTU, a large-scale benchmark with over 30K questions across 25 real-world table tasks, designed to comprehensively evaluate models ability to understand, reason, and manipulate real tables at the expert-level. These tasks are drawn from decades' worth of computer science research on tabular data, with a focus on complex table tasks faced by professional users. We show that MMTU require a combination of skills -- including table understanding, reasoning, and coding -- that remain challenging for today's frontier models, where even frontier reasoning models like OpenAI o4-mini and DeepSeek R1 score only around 60%, suggesting significant room for improvement. We highlight key findings in our evaluation using MMTU and hope that this benchmark drives further advances in understanding and developing foundation models for structured data processing and analysis. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/MMTU-Benchmark/MMTU and https://huggingface.co/datasets/MMTU-benchmark/MMTU.
Amadeus-Verbo Technical Report: The powerful Qwen2.5 family models trained in Portuguese
This report introduces the experience of developing Amadeus Verbo, a family of large language models for Brazilian Portuguese. To handle diverse use cases, Amadeus Verbo includes base-tuned, merged, and instruction-tuned models in sizes of 0.5B, 1.5B, 3B, 7B, 14B, 32B, and 72B parameters. Thus, the main objective is to show how easy it is to fine-tune foundation models to democratize the open-source development of Brazilian Portuguese LLMs when data and resources are available. Amadeus-Verbo family models are all available at HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/collections/amadeusai/amadeus-verbo-qwen25-67cf2e7aae69ce2b3bcdcfda.
A Cost-Effective LLM-based Approach to Identify Wildlife Trafficking in Online Marketplaces
Wildlife trafficking remains a critical global issue, significantly impacting biodiversity, ecological stability, and public health. Despite efforts to combat this illicit trade, the rise of e-commerce platforms has made it easier to sell wildlife products, putting new pressure on wild populations of endangered and threatened species. The use of these platforms also opens a new opportunity: as criminals sell wildlife products online, they leave digital traces of their activity that can provide insights into trafficking activities as well as how they can be disrupted. The challenge lies in finding these traces. Online marketplaces publish ads for a plethora of products, and identifying ads for wildlife-related products is like finding a needle in a haystack. Learning classifiers can automate ad identification, but creating them requires costly, time-consuming data labeling that hinders support for diverse ads and research questions. This paper addresses a critical challenge in the data science pipeline for wildlife trafficking analytics: generating quality labeled data for classifiers that select relevant data. While large language models (LLMs) can directly label advertisements, doing so at scale is prohibitively expensive. We propose a cost-effective strategy that leverages LLMs to generate pseudo labels for a small sample of the data and uses these labels to create specialized classification models. Our novel method automatically gathers diverse and representative samples to be labeled while minimizing the labeling costs. Our experimental evaluation shows that our classifiers achieve up to 95% F1 score, outperforming LLMs at a lower cost. We present real use cases that demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enabling analyses of different aspects of wildlife trafficking.
Zero-Shot Scene Understanding for Automatic Target Recognition Using Large Vision-Language Models
Automatic target recognition (ATR) plays a critical role in tasks such as navigation and surveillance, where safety and accuracy are paramount. In extreme use cases, such as military applications, these factors are often challenged due to the presence of unknown terrains, environmental conditions, and novel object categories. Current object detectors, including open-world detectors, lack the ability to confidently recognize novel objects or operate in unknown environments, as they have not been exposed to these new conditions. However, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit emergent properties that enable them to recognize objects in varying conditions in a zero-shot manner. Despite this, LVLMs struggle to localize objects effectively within a scene. To address these limitations, we propose a novel pipeline that combines the detection capabilities of open-world detectors with the recognition confidence of LVLMs, creating a robust system for zero-shot ATR of novel classes and unknown domains. In this study, we compare the performance of various LVLMs for recognizing military vehicles, which are often underrepresented in training datasets. Additionally, we examine the impact of factors such as distance range, modality, and prompting methods on the recognition performance, providing insights into the development of more reliable ATR systems for novel conditions and classes.
GLARE: Google Apps Arabic Reviews Dataset
This paper introduces GLARE an Arabic Apps Reviews dataset collected from Saudi Google PlayStore. It consists of 76M reviews, 69M of which are Arabic reviews of 9,980 Android Applications. We present the data collection methodology, along with a detailed Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) and Feature Engineering on the gathered reviews. We also highlight possible use cases and benefits of the dataset.
FEET: A Framework for Evaluating Embedding Techniques
In this study, we introduce FEET, a standardized protocol designed to guide the development and benchmarking of foundation models. While numerous benchmark datasets exist for evaluating these models, we propose a structured evaluation protocol across three distinct scenarios to gain a comprehensive understanding of their practical performance. We define three primary use cases: frozen embeddings, few-shot embeddings, and fully fine-tuned embeddings. Each scenario is detailed and illustrated through two case studies: one in sentiment analysis and another in the medical domain, demonstrating how these evaluations provide a thorough assessment of foundation models' effectiveness in research applications. We recommend this protocol as a standard for future research aimed at advancing representation learning models.
Domain-independent detection of known anomalies
One persistent obstacle in industrial quality inspection is the detection of anomalies. In real-world use cases, two problems must be addressed: anomalous data is sparse and the same types of anomalies need to be detected on previously unseen objects. Current anomaly detection approaches can be trained with sparse nominal data, whereas domain generalization approaches enable detecting objects in previously unseen domains. Utilizing those two observations, we introduce the hybrid task of domain generalization on sparse classes. To introduce an accompanying dataset for this task, we present a modification of the well-established MVTec AD dataset by generating three new datasets. In addition to applying existing methods for benchmark, we design two embedding-based approaches, Spatial Embedding MLP (SEMLP) and Labeled PatchCore. Overall, SEMLP achieves the best performance with an average image-level AUROC of 87.2 % vs. 80.4 % by MIRO. The new and openly available datasets allow for further research to improve industrial anomaly detection.
"We Need Structured Output": Towards User-centered Constraints on Large Language Model Output
Large language models can produce creative and diverse responses. However, to integrate them into current developer workflows, it is essential to constrain their outputs to follow specific formats or standards. In this work, we surveyed 51 experienced industry professionals to understand the range of scenarios and motivations driving the need for output constraints from a user-centered perspective. We identified 134 concrete use cases for constraints at two levels: low-level, which ensures the output adhere to a structured format and an appropriate length, and high-level, which requires the output to follow semantic and stylistic guidelines without hallucination. Critically, applying output constraints could not only streamline the currently repetitive process of developing, testing, and integrating LLM prompts for developers, but also enhance the user experience of LLM-powered features and applications. We conclude with a discussion on user preferences and needs towards articulating intended constraints for LLMs, alongside an initial design for a constraint prototyping tool.
Variational Learning is Effective for Large Deep Networks
We give extensive empirical evidence against the common belief that variational learning is ineffective for large neural networks. We show that an optimizer called Improved Variational Online Newton (IVON) consistently matches or outperforms Adam for training large networks such as GPT-2 and ResNets from scratch. IVON's computational costs are nearly identical to Adam but its predictive uncertainty is better. We show several new use cases of IVON where we improve finetuning and model merging in Large Language Models, accurately predict generalization error, and faithfully estimate sensitivity to data. We find overwhelming evidence that variational learning is effective.
Large Language Model Adaptation for Networking
Many networking tasks now employ deep learning (DL) to solve complex prediction and system optimization problems. However, current design philosophy of DL-based algorithms entails intensive engineering overhead due to the manual design of deep neural networks (DNNs) for different networking tasks. Besides, DNNs tend to achieve poor generalization performance on unseen data distributions/environments. Motivated by the recent success of large language models (LLMs), for the first time, this work studies the LLM adaptation for networking to explore a more sustainable design philosophy. With the massive pre-trained knowledge and powerful inference ability, LLM can serve as the foundation model, and is expected to achieve "one model for all" with even better performance and stronger generalization for various tasks. In this paper, we present NetLLM, the first LLM adaptation framework that efficiently adapts LLMs to solve networking problems. NetLLM addresses many practical challenges in LLM adaptation, from how to process task-specific information with LLMs, to how to improve the efficiency of answer generation and acquiring domain knowledge for networking. Across three networking-related use cases - viewport prediction (VP), adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) and cluster job scheduling (CJS), we showcase the effectiveness of NetLLM in LLM adaptation for networking. Results show that the adapted LLM surpasses state-of-the-art algorithms by 10.1-36.6% for VP, 14.5-36.6% for ABR, 6.8-41.3% for CJS, and also achieves superior generalization performance.
FeedbackLogs: Recording and Incorporating Stakeholder Feedback into Machine Learning Pipelines
Even though machine learning (ML) pipelines affect an increasing array of stakeholders, there is little work on how input from stakeholders is recorded and incorporated. We propose FeedbackLogs, addenda to existing documentation of ML pipelines, to track the input of multiple stakeholders. Each log records important details about the feedback collection process, the feedback itself, and how the feedback is used to update the ML pipeline. In this paper, we introduce and formalise a process for collecting a FeedbackLog. We also provide concrete use cases where FeedbackLogs can be employed as evidence for algorithmic auditing and as a tool to record updates based on stakeholder feedback.
Natural Language Processing in Electronic Health Records in Relation to Healthcare Decision-making: A Systematic Review
Background: Natural Language Processing (NLP) is widely used to extract clinical insights from Electronic Health Records (EHRs). However, the lack of annotated data, automated tools, and other challenges hinder the full utilisation of NLP for EHRs. Various Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL) and NLP techniques are studied and compared to understand the limitations and opportunities in this space comprehensively. Methodology: After screening 261 articles from 11 databases, we included 127 papers for full-text review covering seven categories of articles: 1) medical note classification, 2) clinical entity recognition, 3) text summarisation, 4) deep learning (DL) and transfer learning architecture, 5) information extraction, 6) Medical language translation and 7) other NLP applications. This study follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Result and Discussion: EHR was the most commonly used data type among the selected articles, and the datasets were primarily unstructured. Various ML and DL methods were used, with prediction or classification being the most common application of ML or DL. The most common use cases were: the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9) classification, clinical note analysis, and named entity recognition (NER) for clinical descriptions and research on psychiatric disorders. Conclusion: We find that the adopted ML models were not adequately assessed. In addition, the data imbalance problem is quite important, yet we must find techniques to address this underlining problem. Future studies should address key limitations in studies, primarily identifying Lupus Nephritis, Suicide Attempts, perinatal self-harmed and ICD-9 classification.
Querying Large Language Models with SQL
In many use-cases, information is stored in text but not available in structured data. However, extracting data from natural language text to precisely fit a schema, and thus enable querying, is a challenging task. With the rise of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs), there is now an effective solution to store and use information extracted from massive corpora of text documents. Thus, we envision the use of SQL queries to cover a broad range of data that is not captured by traditional databases by tapping the information in LLMs. To ground this vision, we present Galois, a prototype based on a traditional database architecture, but with new physical operators for querying the underlying LLM. The main idea is to execute some operators of the the query plan with prompts that retrieve data from the LLM. For a large class of SQL queries, querying LLMs returns well structured relations, with encouraging qualitative results. Preliminary experimental results make pre-trained LLMs a promising addition to the field of database systems, introducing a new direction for hybrid query processing. However, we pinpoint several research challenges that must be addressed to build a DBMS that exploits LLMs. While some of these challenges necessitate integrating concepts from the NLP literature, others offer novel research avenues for the DB community.
Your Diffusion Model is Secretly a Zero-Shot Classifier
The recent wave of large-scale text-to-image diffusion models has dramatically increased our text-based image generation abilities. These models can generate realistic images for a staggering variety of prompts and exhibit impressive compositional generalization abilities. Almost all use cases thus far have solely focused on sampling; however, diffusion models can also provide conditional density estimates, which are useful for tasks beyond image generation. In this paper, we show that the density estimates from large-scale text-to-image diffusion models like Stable Diffusion can be leveraged to perform zero-shot classification without any additional training. Our generative approach to classification, which we call Diffusion Classifier, attains strong results on a variety of benchmarks and outperforms alternative methods of extracting knowledge from diffusion models. Although a gap remains between generative and discriminative approaches on zero-shot recognition tasks, we find that our diffusion-based approach has stronger multimodal relational reasoning abilities than competing discriminative approaches. Finally, we use Diffusion Classifier to extract standard classifiers from class-conditional diffusion models trained on ImageNet. Even though these models are trained with weak augmentations and no regularization, they approach the performance of SOTA discriminative classifiers. Overall, our results are a step toward using generative over discriminative models for downstream tasks. Results and visualizations at https://diffusion-classifier.github.io/
TKN: Transformer-based Keypoint Prediction Network For Real-time Video Prediction
Video prediction is a complex time-series forecasting task with great potential in many use cases. However, conventional methods overemphasize accuracy while ignoring the slow prediction speed caused by complicated model structures that learn too much redundant information with excessive GPU memory consumption. Furthermore, conventional methods mostly predict frames sequentially (frame-by-frame) and thus are hard to accelerate. Consequently, valuable use cases such as real-time danger prediction and warning cannot achieve fast enough inference speed to be applicable in reality. Therefore, we propose a transformer-based keypoint prediction neural network (TKN), an unsupervised learning method that boost the prediction process via constrained information extraction and parallel prediction scheme. TKN is the first real-time video prediction solution to our best knowledge, while significantly reducing computation costs and maintaining other performance. Extensive experiments on KTH and Human3.6 datasets demonstrate that TKN predicts 11 times faster than existing methods while reducing memory consumption by 17.4% and achieving state-of-the-art prediction performance on average.
Unsupervised Matching of Data and Text
Entity resolution is a widely studied problem with several proposals to match records across relations. Matching textual content is a widespread task in many applications, such as question answering and search. While recent methods achieve promising results for these two tasks, there is no clear solution for the more general problem of matching textual content and structured data. We introduce a framework that supports this new task in an unsupervised setting for any pair of corpora, being relational tables or text documents. Our method builds a fine-grained graph over the content of the corpora and derives word embeddings to represent the objects to match in a low dimensional space. The learned representation enables effective and efficient matching at different granularity, from relational tuples to text sentences and paragraphs. Our flexible framework can exploit pre-trained resources, but it does not depends on their existence and achieves better quality performance in matching content when the vocabulary is domain specific. We also introduce optimizations in the graph creation process with an "expand and compress" approach that first identifies new valid relationships across elements, to improve matching, and then prunes nodes and edges, to reduce the graph size. Experiments on real use cases and public datasets show that our framework produces embeddings that outperform word embeddings and fine-tuned language models both in results' quality and in execution times.
Screen2Words: Automatic Mobile UI Summarization with Multimodal Learning
Mobile User Interface Summarization generates succinct language descriptions of mobile screens for conveying important contents and functionalities of the screen, which can be useful for many language-based application scenarios. We present Screen2Words, a novel screen summarization approach that automatically encapsulates essential information of a UI screen into a coherent language phrase. Summarizing mobile screens requires a holistic understanding of the multi-modal data of mobile UIs, including text, image, structures as well as UI semantics, motivating our multi-modal learning approach. We collected and analyzed a large-scale screen summarization dataset annotated by human workers. Our dataset contains more than 112k language summarization across sim22k unique UI screens. We then experimented with a set of deep models with different configurations. Our evaluation of these models with both automatic accuracy metrics and human rating shows that our approach can generate high-quality summaries for mobile screens. We demonstrate potential use cases of Screen2Words and open-source our dataset and model to lay the foundations for further bridging language and user interfaces.
NetSquid, a NETwork Simulator for QUantum Information using Discrete events
In order to bring quantum networks into the real world, we would like to determine the requirements of quantum network protocols including the underlying quantum hardware. Because detailed architecture proposals are generally too complex for mathematical analysis, it is natural to employ numerical simulation. Here we introduce NetSquid, the NETwork Simulator for QUantum Information using Discrete events, a discrete-event based platform for simulating all aspects of quantum networks and modular quantum computing systems, ranging from the physical layer and its control plane up to the application level. We study several use cases to showcase NetSquid's power, including detailed physical layer simulations of repeater chains based on nitrogen vacancy centres in diamond as well as atomic ensembles. We also study the control plane of a quantum switch beyond its analytically known regime, and showcase NetSquid's ability to investigate large networks by simulating entanglement distribution over a chain of up to one thousand nodes.
Semantic Segmentation of Underwater Imagery: Dataset and Benchmark
In this paper, we present the first large-scale dataset for semantic Segmentation of Underwater IMagery (SUIM). It contains over 1500 images with pixel annotations for eight object categories: fish (vertebrates), reefs (invertebrates), aquatic plants, wrecks/ruins, human divers, robots, and sea-floor. The images have been rigorously collected during oceanic explorations and human-robot collaborative experiments, and annotated by human participants. We also present a benchmark evaluation of state-of-the-art semantic segmentation approaches based on standard performance metrics. In addition, we present SUIM-Net, a fully-convolutional encoder-decoder model that balances the trade-off between performance and computational efficiency. It offers competitive performance while ensuring fast end-to-end inference, which is essential for its use in the autonomy pipeline of visually-guided underwater robots. In particular, we demonstrate its usability benefits for visual servoing, saliency prediction, and detailed scene understanding. With a variety of use cases, the proposed model and benchmark dataset open up promising opportunities for future research in underwater robot vision.
EMBER: An Open Dataset for Training Static PE Malware Machine Learning Models
This paper describes EMBER: a labeled benchmark dataset for training machine learning models to statically detect malicious Windows portable executable files. The dataset includes features extracted from 1.1M binary files: 900K training samples (300K malicious, 300K benign, 300K unlabeled) and 200K test samples (100K malicious, 100K benign). To accompany the dataset, we also release open source code for extracting features from additional binaries so that additional sample features can be appended to the dataset. This dataset fills a void in the information security machine learning community: a benign/malicious dataset that is large, open and general enough to cover several interesting use cases. We enumerate several use cases that we considered when structuring the dataset. Additionally, we demonstrate one use case wherein we compare a baseline gradient boosted decision tree model trained using LightGBM with default settings to MalConv, a recently published end-to-end (featureless) deep learning model for malware detection. Results show that even without hyper-parameter optimization, the baseline EMBER model outperforms MalConv. The authors hope that the dataset, code and baseline model provided by EMBER will help invigorate machine learning research for malware detection, in much the same way that benchmark datasets have advanced computer vision research.
3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation
This paper introduces a network for volumetric segmentation that learns from sparsely annotated volumetric images. We outline two attractive use cases of this method: (1) In a semi-automated setup, the user annotates some slices in the volume to be segmented. The network learns from these sparse annotations and provides a dense 3D segmentation. (2) In a fully-automated setup, we assume that a representative, sparsely annotated training set exists. Trained on this data set, the network densely segments new volumetric images. The proposed network extends the previous u-net architecture from Ronneberger et al. by replacing all 2D operations with their 3D counterparts. The implementation performs on-the-fly elastic deformations for efficient data augmentation during training. It is trained end-to-end from scratch, i.e., no pre-trained network is required. We test the performance of the proposed method on a complex, highly variable 3D structure, the Xenopus kidney, and achieve good results for both use cases.
Qwen2.5 Technical Report
In this report, we introduce Qwen2.5, a comprehensive series of large language models (LLMs) designed to meet diverse needs. Compared to previous iterations, Qwen 2.5 has been significantly improved during both the pre-training and post-training stages. In terms of pre-training, we have scaled the high-quality pre-training datasets from the previous 7 trillion tokens to 18 trillion tokens. This provides a strong foundation for common sense, expert knowledge, and reasoning capabilities. In terms of post-training, we implement intricate supervised finetuning with over 1 million samples, as well as multistage reinforcement learning. Post-training techniques enhance human preference, and notably improve long text generation, structural data analysis, and instruction following. To handle diverse and varied use cases effectively, we present Qwen2.5 LLM series in rich sizes. Open-weight offerings include base and instruction-tuned models, with quantized versions available. In addition, for hosted solutions, the proprietary models currently include two mixture-of-experts (MoE) variants: Qwen2.5-Turbo and Qwen2.5-Plus, both available from Alibaba Cloud Model Studio. Qwen2.5 has demonstrated top-tier performance on a wide range of benchmarks evaluating language understanding, reasoning, mathematics, coding, human preference alignment, etc. Specifically, the open-weight flagship Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct outperforms a number of open and proprietary models and demonstrates competitive performance to the state-of-the-art open-weight model, Llama-3-405B-Instruct, which is around 5 times larger. Qwen2.5-Turbo and Qwen2.5-Plus offer superior cost-effectiveness while performing competitively against GPT-4o-mini and GPT-4o respectively. Additionally, as the foundation, Qwen2.5 models have been instrumental in training specialized models such as Qwen2.5-Math, Qwen2.5-Coder, QwQ, and multimodal models.
Scaling Synthetic Data Creation with 1,000,000,000 Personas
We propose a novel persona-driven data synthesis methodology that leverages various perspectives within a large language model (LLM) to create diverse synthetic data. To fully exploit this methodology at scale, we introduce Persona Hub -- a collection of 1 billion diverse personas automatically curated from web data. These 1 billion personas (~13% of the world's total population), acting as distributed carriers of world knowledge, can tap into almost every perspective encapsulated within the LLM, thereby facilitating the creation of diverse synthetic data at scale for various scenarios. By showcasing Persona Hub's use cases in synthesizing high-quality mathematical and logical reasoning problems, instructions (i.e., user prompts), knowledge-rich texts, game NPCs and tools (functions) at scale, we demonstrate persona-driven data synthesis is versatile, scalable, flexible, and easy to use, potentially driving a paradigm shift in synthetic data creation and applications in practice, which may have a profound impact on LLM research and development.
LMSYS-Chat-1M: A Large-Scale Real-World LLM Conversation Dataset
Studying how people interact with large language models (LLMs) in real-world scenarios is increasingly important due to their widespread use in various applications. In this paper, we introduce LMSYS-Chat-1M, a large-scale dataset containing one million real-world conversations with 25 state-of-the-art LLMs. This dataset is collected from 210K unique IP addresses in the wild on our Vicuna demo and Chatbot Arena website. We offer an overview of the dataset's content, including its curation process, basic statistics, and topic distribution, highlighting its diversity, originality, and scale. We demonstrate its versatility through four use cases: developing content moderation models that perform similarly to GPT-4, building a safety benchmark, training instruction-following models that perform similarly to Vicuna, and creating challenging benchmark questions. We believe that this dataset will serve as a valuable resource for understanding and advancing LLM capabilities. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/lmsys/lmsys-chat-1m.
On the rankability of visual embeddings
We study whether visual embedding models capture continuous, ordinal attributes along linear directions, which we term _rank axes_. We define a model as _rankable_ for an attribute if projecting embeddings onto such an axis preserves the attribute's order. Across 7 popular encoders and 9 datasets with attributes like age, crowd count, head pose, aesthetics, and recency, we find that many embeddings are inherently rankable. Surprisingly, a small number of samples, or even just two extreme examples, often suffice to recover meaningful rank axes, without full-scale supervision. These findings open up new use cases for image ranking in vector databases and motivate further study into the structure and learning of rankable embeddings. Our code is available at https://github.com/aktsonthalia/rankable-vision-embeddings.
Vibe Coding vs. Agentic Coding: Fundamentals and Practical Implications of Agentic AI
This review presents a comprehensive analysis of two emerging paradigms in AI-assisted software development: vibe coding and agentic coding. While both leverage large language models (LLMs), they differ fundamentally in autonomy, architectural design, and the role of the developer. Vibe coding emphasizes intuitive, human-in-the-loop interaction through prompt-based, conversational workflows that support ideation, experimentation, and creative exploration. In contrast, agentic coding enables autonomous software development through goal-driven agents capable of planning, executing, testing, and iterating tasks with minimal human intervention. We propose a detailed taxonomy spanning conceptual foundations, execution models, feedback loops, safety mechanisms, debugging strategies, and real-world tool ecosystems. Through comparative workflow analysis and 20 detailed use cases, we illustrate how vibe systems thrive in early-stage prototyping and education, while agentic systems excel in enterprise-grade automation, codebase refactoring, and CI/CD integration. We further examine emerging trends in hybrid architectures, where natural language interfaces are coupled with autonomous execution pipelines. Finally, we articulate a future roadmap for agentic AI, outlining the infrastructure needed for trustworthy, explainable, and collaborative systems. Our findings suggest that successful AI software engineering will rely not on choosing one paradigm, but on harmonizing their strengths within a unified, human-centered development lifecycle.
Quantization for OpenAI's Whisper Models: A Comparative Analysis
Automated speech recognition (ASR) models have gained prominence for applications such as captioning, speech translation, and live transcription. This paper studies Whisper and two model variants: one optimized for live speech streaming and another for offline transcription. Notably, these models have been found to generate hallucinated content, reducing transcription reliability. Furthermore, larger model variants exhibit increased latency and pose challenges for deployment on resource-constrained devices. This study analyzes the similarities and differences between three Whisper models, qualitatively examining their distinct capabilities. Next, this study quantifies the impact of model quantization on latency and evaluates its viability for edge deployment. Using the open source LibriSpeech dataset, this paper evaluates the word error rate (WER) along with latency analysis of whispercpp using 3 quantization methods (INT4, INT5, INT8). Results show that quantization reduces latency by 19\% and model size by 45\%, while preserving transcription accuracy. These findings provide insights into the optimal use cases of different Whisper models and edge device deployment possibilities. All code, datasets, and implementation details are available in a public GitHub repository: https://github.com/allisonandreyev/WhisperQuantization.git
Spider2-V: How Far Are Multimodal Agents From Automating Data Science and Engineering Workflows?
Data science and engineering workflows often span multiple stages, from warehousing to orchestration, using tools like BigQuery, dbt, and Airbyte. As vision language models (VLMs) advance in multimodal understanding and code generation, VLM-based agents could potentially automate these workflows by generating SQL queries, Python code, and GUI operations. This automation can improve the productivity of experts while democratizing access to large-scale data analysis. In this paper, we introduce Spider2-V, the first multimodal agent benchmark focusing on professional data science and engineering workflows, featuring 494 real-world tasks in authentic computer environments and incorporating 20 enterprise-level professional applications. These tasks, derived from real-world use cases, evaluate the ability of a multimodal agent to perform data-related tasks by writing code and managing the GUI in enterprise data software systems. To balance realistic simulation with evaluation simplicity, we devote significant effort to developing automatic configurations for task setup and carefully crafting evaluation metrics for each task. Furthermore, we supplement multimodal agents with comprehensive documents of these enterprise data software systems. Our empirical evaluation reveals that existing state-of-the-art LLM/VLM-based agents do not reliably automate full data workflows (14.0% success). Even with step-by-step guidance, these agents still underperform in tasks that require fine-grained, knowledge-intensive GUI actions (16.2%) and involve remote cloud-hosted workspaces (10.6%). We hope that Spider2-V paves the way for autonomous multimodal agents to transform the automation of data science and engineering workflow. Our code and data are available at https://spider2-v.github.io.
Trusted Machine Learning Models Unlock Private Inference for Problems Currently Infeasible with Cryptography
We often interact with untrusted parties. Prioritization of privacy can limit the effectiveness of these interactions, as achieving certain goals necessitates sharing private data. Traditionally, addressing this challenge has involved either seeking trusted intermediaries or constructing cryptographic protocols that restrict how much data is revealed, such as multi-party computations or zero-knowledge proofs. While significant advances have been made in scaling cryptographic approaches, they remain limited in terms of the size and complexity of applications they can be used for. In this paper, we argue that capable machine learning models can fulfill the role of a trusted third party, thus enabling secure computations for applications that were previously infeasible. In particular, we describe Trusted Capable Model Environments (TCMEs) as an alternative approach for scaling secure computation, where capable machine learning model(s) interact under input/output constraints, with explicit information flow control and explicit statelessness. This approach aims to achieve a balance between privacy and computational efficiency, enabling private inference where classical cryptographic solutions are currently infeasible. We describe a number of use cases that are enabled by TCME, and show that even some simple classic cryptographic problems can already be solved with TCME. Finally, we outline current limitations and discuss the path forward in implementing them.
Model Cards for Model Reporting
Trained machine learning models are increasingly used to perform high-impact tasks in areas such as law enforcement, medicine, education, and employment. In order to clarify the intended use cases of machine learning models and minimize their usage in contexts for which they are not well suited, we recommend that released models be accompanied by documentation detailing their performance characteristics. In this paper, we propose a framework that we call model cards, to encourage such transparent model reporting. Model cards are short documents accompanying trained machine learning models that provide benchmarked evaluation in a variety of conditions, such as across different cultural, demographic, or phenotypic groups (e.g., race, geographic location, sex, Fitzpatrick skin type) and intersectional groups (e.g., age and race, or sex and Fitzpatrick skin type) that are relevant to the intended application domains. Model cards also disclose the context in which models are intended to be used, details of the performance evaluation procedures, and other relevant information. While we focus primarily on human-centered machine learning models in the application fields of computer vision and natural language processing, this framework can be used to document any trained machine learning model. To solidify the concept, we provide cards for two supervised models: One trained to detect smiling faces in images, and one trained to detect toxic comments in text. We propose model cards as a step towards the responsible democratization of machine learning and related AI technology, increasing transparency into how well AI technology works. We hope this work encourages those releasing trained machine learning models to accompany model releases with similar detailed evaluation numbers and other relevant documentation.
SwiftKV: Fast Prefill-Optimized Inference with Knowledge-Preserving Model Transformation
LLM inference for popular enterprise use cases, such as summarization, RAG, and code-generation, typically observes orders of magnitude longer prompt lengths than generation lengths. This characteristic leads to high cost of prefill and increased response latency. In this paper, we present SwiftKV, a novel model transformation and distillation procedure specifically designed to reduce the time and cost of processing prompt tokens while preserving high quality of generated tokens. SwiftKV combines three key mechanisms: i) SingleInputKV, which prefills later layers' KV cache using a much earlier layer's output, allowing prompt tokens to skip much of the model computation, ii) AcrossKV, which merges the KV caches of neighboring layers to reduce the memory footprint and support larger batch size for higher throughput, and iii) a knowledge-preserving distillation procedure that can adapt existing LLMs for SwiftKV with minimal accuracy impact and low compute and data requirement. For Llama-3.1-8B and 70B, SwiftKV reduces the compute requirement of prefill by 50% and the memory requirement of the KV cache by 62.5% while incurring minimum quality degradation across a wide range of tasks. In the end-to-end inference serving using an optimized vLLM implementation, SwiftKV realizes up to 2x higher aggregate throughput and 60% lower time per output token. It can achieve a staggering 560 TFlops/GPU of normalized inference throughput, which translates to 16K tokens/s for Llama-3.1-70B in 16-bit precision on 4x H100 GPUs.
Cephalo: Multi-Modal Vision-Language Models for Bio-Inspired Materials Analysis and Design
We present Cephalo, a series of multimodal vision large language models (V-LLMs) designed for materials science applications, integrating visual and linguistic data for enhanced understanding and interaction within human-AI and multi-agent AI frameworks. A key innovation of Cephalo is its advanced dataset generation method, which employs a sophisticated algorithm to accurately detect and separate images and their corresponding textual descriptions from PDF documents, such as scientific papers. The method includes a careful refinement of image-text pairs through integrated vision and language processing, ensuring high-quality, contextually relevant, and well reasoned training data. Cephalo is trained on integrated image and text data extracted from thousands of scientific papers and science-focused Wikipedia pages demonstrates can interpret complex visual scenes, generate precise language descriptions, and answer queries about images effectively. The combination of a vision encoder with an autoregressive transformer supports complex natural language understanding in an integrated model, which can be coupled with other generative methods to create an image-to-text-to-image or image-to-text-to-3D pipeline. To explore the development of larger models from smaller ones, we merge sets of layers that originate from different pre-trained source models. This hybrid approach allows us to leverage the domain-specific expertise and general conversational capabilities to harness the strengths of multiple models. We examine the models in diverse use cases that incorporate biological materials, fracture and engineering analysis, protein biophysics, and bio-inspired design based on insect behavior. Generative applications include bio-inspired designs, including pollen-inspired architected materials, as well as the synthesis of bio-inspired material microstructures from a photograph of a solar eclipse.
State of What Art? A Call for Multi-Prompt LLM Evaluation
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the development of various evaluation benchmarks. These benchmarks typically rely on a single instruction template for evaluating all LLMs on a specific task. In this paper, we comprehensively analyze the brittleness of results obtained via single-prompt evaluations across 6.5M instances, involving 20 different LLMs and 39 tasks from 3 benchmarks. To improve robustness of the analysis, we propose to evaluate LLMs with a set of diverse prompts instead. We discuss tailored evaluation metrics for specific use cases (e.g., LLM developers vs. developers interested in a specific downstream task), ensuring a more reliable and meaningful assessment of LLM capabilities. We then implement these criteria and conduct evaluations of multiple models, providing insights into the true strengths and limitations of current LLMs.
Open Molecular Crystals 2025 (OMC25) Dataset and Models
The development of accurate and efficient machine learning models for predicting the structure and properties of molecular crystals has been hindered by the scarcity of publicly available datasets of structures with property labels. To address this challenge, we introduce the Open Molecular Crystals 2025 (OMC25) dataset, a collection of over 27 million molecular crystal structures containing 12 elements and up to 300 atoms in the unit cell. The dataset was generated from dispersion-inclusive density functional theory (DFT) relaxation trajectories of over 230,000 randomly generated molecular crystal structures of around 50,000 organic molecules. OMC25 comprises diverse chemical compounds capable of forming different intermolecular interactions and a wide range of crystal packing motifs. We provide detailed information on the dataset's construction, composition, structure, and properties. To demonstrate the quality and use cases of OMC25, we further trained and evaluated state-of-the-art open-source machine learning interatomic potentials. By making this dataset publicly available, we aim to accelerate the development of more accurate and efficient machine learning models for molecular crystals.
sudo rm -rf agentic_security
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as computer-use agents, autonomously performing tasks within real desktop or web environments. While this evolution greatly expands practical use cases for humans, it also creates serious security exposures. We present SUDO (Screen-based Universal Detox2Tox Offense), a novel attack framework that systematically bypasses refusal-trained safeguards in commercial computer-use agents, such as Claude for Computer Use. The core mechanism, Detox2Tox, transforms harmful requests (that agents initially reject) into seemingly benign requests via detoxification, secures detailed instructions from advanced vision language models (VLMs), and then reintroduces malicious content via toxification just before execution. Unlike conventional jailbreaks, SUDO iteratively refines its attacks based on a built-in refusal feedback, making it increasingly effective against robust policy filters. In extensive tests spanning 50 real-world tasks and multiple state-of-the-art VLMs, SUDO achieves a stark attack success rate of 24.41% (with no refinement), and up to 41.33% (by its iterative refinement) in Claude for Computer Use. By revealing these vulnerabilities and demonstrating the ease with which they can be exploited in real-world computing environments, this paper highlights an immediate need for robust, context-aware safeguards. WARNING: This paper includes harmful or offensive model outputs
On the Creation of Representative Samples of Software Repositories
Software repositories is one of the sources of data in Empirical Software Engineering, primarily in the Mining Software Repositories field, aimed at extracting knowledge from the dynamics and practice of software projects. With the emergence of social coding platforms such as GitHub, researchers have now access to millions of software repositories to use as source data for their studies. With this massive amount of data, sampling techniques are needed to create more manageable datasets. The creation of these datasets is a crucial step, and researchers have to carefully select the repositories to create representative samples according to a set of variables of interest. However, current sampling methods are often based on random selection or rely on variables which may not be related to the research study (e.g., popularity or activity). In this paper, we present a methodology for creating representative samples of software repositories, where such representativeness is properly aligned with both the characteristics of the population of repositories and the requirements of the empirical study. We illustrate our approach with use cases based on Hugging Face repositories.
Cognitive Kernel: An Open-source Agent System towards Generalist Autopilots
We introduce Cognitive Kernel, an open-source agent system towards the goal of generalist autopilots. Unlike copilot systems, which primarily rely on users to provide essential state information (e.g., task descriptions) and assist users by answering questions or auto-completing contents, autopilot systems must complete tasks from start to finish independently, which requires the system to acquire the state information from the environments actively. To achieve this, an autopilot system should be capable of understanding user intents, actively gathering necessary information from various real-world sources, and making wise decisions. Cognitive Kernel adopts a model-centric design. In our implementation, the central policy model (a fine-tuned LLM) initiates interactions with the environment using a combination of atomic actions, such as opening files, clicking buttons, saving intermediate results to memory, or calling the LLM itself. This differs from the widely used environment-centric design, where a task-specific environment with predefined actions is fixed, and the policy model is limited to selecting the correct action from a given set of options. Our design facilitates seamless information flow across various sources and provides greater flexibility. We evaluate our system in three use cases: real-time information management, private information management, and long-term memory management. The results demonstrate that Cognitive Kernel achieves better or comparable performance to other closed-source systems in these scenarios. Cognitive Kernel is fully dockerized, ensuring everyone can deploy it privately and securely. We open-source the system and the backbone model to encourage further research on LLM-driven autopilot systems.
Evaluating Language Model Agency through Negotiations
We introduce an approach to evaluate language model (LM) agency using negotiation games. This approach better reflects real-world use cases and addresses some of the shortcomings of alternative LM benchmarks. Negotiation games enable us to study multi-turn, and cross-model interactions, modulate complexity, and side-step accidental evaluation data leakage. We use our approach to test six widely used and publicly accessible LMs, evaluating performance and alignment in both self-play and cross-play settings. Noteworthy findings include: (i) only closed-source models tested here were able to complete these tasks; (ii) cooperative bargaining games proved to be most challenging to the models; and (iii) even the most powerful models sometimes "lose" to weaker opponents
Fine-tuning Aligned Language Models Compromises Safety, Even When Users Do Not Intend To!
Optimizing large language models (LLMs) for downstream use cases often involves the customization of pre-trained LLMs through further fine-tuning. Meta's open release of Llama models and OpenAI's APIs for fine-tuning GPT-3.5 Turbo on custom datasets also encourage this practice. But, what are the safety costs associated with such custom fine-tuning? We note that while existing safety alignment infrastructures can restrict harmful behaviors of LLMs at inference time, they do not cover safety risks when fine-tuning privileges are extended to end-users. Our red teaming studies find that the safety alignment of LLMs can be compromised by fine-tuning with only a few adversarially designed training examples. For instance, we jailbreak GPT-3.5 Turbo's safety guardrails by fine-tuning it on only 10 such examples at a cost of less than $0.20 via OpenAI's APIs, making the model responsive to nearly any harmful instructions. Disconcertingly, our research also reveals that, even without malicious intent, simply fine-tuning with benign and commonly used datasets can also inadvertently degrade the safety alignment of LLMs, though to a lesser extent. These findings suggest that fine-tuning aligned LLMs introduces new safety risks that current safety infrastructures fall short of addressing -- even if a model's initial safety alignment is impeccable, it is not necessarily to be maintained after custom fine-tuning. We outline and critically analyze potential mitigations and advocate for further research efforts toward reinforcing safety protocols for the custom fine-tuning of aligned LLMs.
GaNDLF: A Generally Nuanced Deep Learning Framework for Scalable End-to-End Clinical Workflows in Medical Imaging
Deep Learning (DL) has the potential to optimize machine learning in both the scientific and clinical communities. However, greater expertise is required to develop DL algorithms, and the variability of implementations hinders their reproducibility, translation, and deployment. Here we present the community-driven Generally Nuanced Deep Learning Framework (GaNDLF), with the goal of lowering these barriers. GaNDLF makes the mechanism of DL development, training, and inference more stable, reproducible, interpretable, and scalable, without requiring an extensive technical background. GaNDLF aims to provide an end-to-end solution for all DL-related tasks in computational precision medicine. We demonstrate the ability of GaNDLF to analyze both radiology and histology images, with built-in support for k-fold cross-validation, data augmentation, multiple modalities and output classes. Our quantitative performance evaluation on numerous use cases, anatomies, and computational tasks supports GaNDLF as a robust application framework for deployment in clinical workflows.
FastPathology: An open-source platform for deep learning-based research and decision support in digital pathology
Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the current state-of-the-art for digital analysis of histopathological images. The large size of whole-slide microscopy images (WSIs) requires advanced memory handling to read, display and process these images. There are several open-source platforms for working with WSIs, but few support deployment of CNN models. These applications use third-party solutions for inference, making them less user-friendly and unsuitable for high-performance image analysis. To make deployment of CNNs user-friendly and feasible on low-end machines, we have developed a new platform, FastPathology, using the FAST framework and C++. It minimizes memory usage for reading and processing WSIs, deployment of CNN models, and real-time interactive visualization of results. Runtime experiments were conducted on four different use cases, using different architectures, inference engines, hardware configurations and operating systems. Memory usage for reading, visualizing, zooming and panning a WSI were measured, using FastPathology and three existing platforms. FastPathology performed similarly in terms of memory to the other C++ based application, while using considerably less than the two Java-based platforms. The choice of neural network model, inference engine, hardware and processors influenced runtime considerably. Thus, FastPathology includes all steps needed for efficient visualization and processing of WSIs in a single application, including inference of CNNs with real-time display of the results. Source code, binary releases and test data can be found online on GitHub at https://github.com/SINTEFMedtek/FAST-Pathology/.
GPTKB v1.5: A Massive Knowledge Base for Exploring Factual LLM Knowledge
Language models are powerful tools, yet their factual knowledge is still poorly understood, and inaccessible to ad-hoc browsing and scalable statistical analysis. This demonstration introduces GPTKB v1.5, a densely interlinked 100-million-triple knowledge base (KB) built for $14,000 from GPT-4.1, using the GPTKB methodology for massive-recursive LLM knowledge materialization (Hu et al., ACL 2025). The demonstration experience focuses on three use cases: (1) link-traversal-based LLM knowledge exploration, (2) SPARQL-based structured LLM knowledge querying, (3) comparative exploration of the strengths and weaknesses of LLM knowledge. Massive-recursive LLM knowledge materialization is a groundbreaking opportunity both for the research area of systematic analysis of LLM knowledge, as well as for automated KB construction. The GPTKB demonstrator is accessible at https://gptkb.org.
OnPrem.LLM: A Privacy-Conscious Document Intelligence Toolkit
We present OnPrem.LLM, a Python-based toolkit for applying large language models (LLMs) to sensitive, non-public data in offline or restricted environments. The system is designed for privacy-preserving use cases and provides prebuilt pipelines for document processing and storage, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), information extraction, summarization, classification, and prompt/output processing with minimal configuration. OnPrem.LLM supports multiple LLM backends -- including llama.cpp, Ollama, vLLM, and Hugging Face Transformers -- with quantized model support, GPU acceleration, and seamless backend switching. Although designed for fully local execution, OnPrem.LLM also supports integration with a wide range of cloud LLM providers when permitted, enabling hybrid deployments that balance performance with data control. A no-code web interface extends accessibility to non-technical users.
KFinEval-Pilot: A Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for Korean Financial Language Understanding
We introduce KFinEval-Pilot, a benchmark suite specifically designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) in the Korean financial domain. Addressing the limitations of existing English-centric benchmarks, KFinEval-Pilot comprises over 1,000 curated questions across three critical areas: financial knowledge, legal reasoning, and financial toxicity. The benchmark is constructed through a semi-automated pipeline that combines GPT-4-generated prompts with expert validation to ensure domain relevance and factual accuracy. We evaluate a range of representative LLMs and observe notable performance differences across models, with trade-offs between task accuracy and output safety across different model families. These results highlight persistent challenges in applying LLMs to high-stakes financial applications, particularly in reasoning and safety. Grounded in real-world financial use cases and aligned with the Korean regulatory and linguistic context, KFinEval-Pilot serves as an early diagnostic tool for developing safer and more reliable financial AI systems.
Retro-Search: Exploring Untaken Paths for Deeper and Efficient Reasoning
Large reasoning models exhibit remarkable reasoning capabilities via long, elaborate reasoning trajectories. Supervised fine-tuning on such reasoning traces, also known as distillation, can be a cost-effective way to boost reasoning capabilities of student models. However, empirical observations reveal that these reasoning trajectories are often suboptimal, switching excessively between different lines of thought, resulting in under-thinking, over-thinking, and even degenerate responses. We introduce Retro-Search, an MCTS-inspired search algorithm, for distilling higher quality reasoning paths from large reasoning models. Retro-Search retrospectively revises reasoning paths to discover better, yet shorter traces, which can then lead to student models with enhanced reasoning capabilities with shorter, thus faster inference. Our approach can enable two use cases: self-improvement, where models are fine-tuned on their own Retro-Search-ed thought traces, and weak-to-strong improvement, where a weaker model revises stronger model's thought traces via Retro-Search. For self-improving, R1-distill-7B, fine-tuned on its own Retro-Search-ed traces, reduces the average reasoning length by 31.2% while improving performance by 7.7% across seven math benchmarks. For weak-to-strong improvement, we retrospectively revise R1-671B's traces from the OpenThoughts dataset using R1-distill-32B as the Retro-Search-er, a model 20x smaller. Qwen2.5-32B, fine-tuned on this refined data, achieves performance comparable to R1-distill-32B, yielding an 11.3% reduction in reasoning length and a 2.4% performance improvement compared to fine-tuning on the original OpenThoughts data. Our work counters recently emergent viewpoints that question the relevance of search algorithms in the era of large reasoning models, by demonstrating that there are still opportunities for algorithmic advancements, even for frontier models.
Generative AI in Medicine
The increased capabilities of generative AI have dramatically expanded its possible use cases in medicine. We provide a comprehensive overview of generative AI use cases for clinicians, patients, clinical trial organizers, researchers, and trainees. We then discuss the many challenges -- including maintaining privacy and security, improving transparency and interpretability, upholding equity, and rigorously evaluating models -- which must be overcome to realize this potential, and the open research directions they give rise to.
Harnessing Transfer Learning from Swahili: Advancing Solutions for Comorian Dialects
If today some African languages like Swahili have enough resources to develop high-performing Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, many other languages spoken on the continent are still lacking such support. For these languages, still in their infancy, several possibilities exist to address this critical lack of data. Among them is Transfer Learning, which allows low-resource languages to benefit from the good representation of other languages that are similar to them. In this work, we adopt a similar approach, aiming to pioneer NLP technologies for Comorian, a group of four languages or dialects belonging to the Bantu family. Our approach is initially motivated by the hypothesis that if a human can understand a different language from their native language with little or no effort, it would be entirely possible to model this process on a machine. To achieve this, we consider ways to construct Comorian datasets mixed with Swahili. One thing to note here is that in terms of Swahili data, we only focus on elements that are closest to Comorian by calculating lexical distances between candidate and source data. We empirically test this hypothesis in two use cases: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Machine Translation (MT). Our MT model achieved ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, and ROUGE-L scores of 0.6826, 0.42, and 0.6532, respectively, while our ASR system recorded a WER of 39.50\% and a CER of 13.76\%. This research is crucial for advancing NLP in underrepresented languages, with potential to preserve and promote Comorian linguistic heritage in the digital age.
Image2Struct: Benchmarking Structure Extraction for Vision-Language Models
We introduce Image2Struct, a benchmark to evaluate vision-language models (VLMs) on extracting structure from images. Our benchmark 1) captures real-world use cases, 2) is fully automatic and does not require human judgment, and 3) is based on a renewable stream of fresh data. In Image2Struct, VLMs are prompted to generate the underlying structure (e.g., LaTeX code or HTML) from an input image (e.g., webpage screenshot). The structure is then rendered to produce an output image (e.g., rendered webpage), which is compared against the input image to produce a similarity score. This round-trip evaluation allows us to quantitatively evaluate VLMs on tasks with multiple valid structures. We create a pipeline that downloads fresh data from active online communities upon execution and evaluates the VLMs without human intervention. We introduce three domains (Webpages, LaTeX, and Musical Scores) and use five image metrics (pixel similarity, cosine similarity between the Inception vectors, learned perceptual image patch similarity, structural similarity index measure, and earth mover similarity) that allow efficient and automatic comparison between pairs of images. We evaluate Image2Struct on 14 prominent VLMs and find that scores vary widely, indicating that Image2Struct can differentiate between the performances of different VLMs. Additionally, the best score varies considerably across domains (e.g., 0.402 on sheet music vs. 0.830 on LaTeX equations), indicating that Image2Struct contains tasks of varying difficulty. For transparency, we release the full results at https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/image2struct/v1.0.1/.
Exact Byte-Level Probabilities from Tokenized Language Models for FIM-Tasks and Model Ensembles
Tokenization is associated with many poorly understood shortcomings in language models (LMs), yet remains an important component for long sequence scaling purposes. This work studies how tokenization impacts model performance by analyzing and comparing the stochastic behavior of tokenized models with their byte-level, or token-free, counterparts. We discover that, even when the two models are statistically equivalent, their predictive distributions over the next byte can be substantially different, a phenomenon we term as "tokenization bias''. To fully characterize this phenomenon, we introduce the Byte-Token Representation Lemma, a framework that establishes a mapping between the learned token distribution and its equivalent byte-level distribution. From this result, we develop a next-byte sampling algorithm that eliminates tokenization bias without requiring further training or optimization. In other words, this enables zero-shot conversion of tokenized LMs into statistically equivalent token-free ones. We demonstrate its broad applicability with two use cases: fill-in-the-middle (FIM) tasks and model ensembles. In FIM tasks where input prompts may terminate mid-token, leading to out-of-distribution tokenization, our method mitigates performance degradation and achieves an approximately 18% improvement in FIM coding benchmarks, consistently outperforming the standard token healing fix. For model ensembles where each model employs a distinct vocabulary, our approach enables seamless integration, resulting in improved performance (up to 3.7%) over individual models across various standard baselines in reasoning, knowledge, and coding.
FreeCompose: Generic Zero-Shot Image Composition with Diffusion Prior
We offer a novel approach to image composition, which integrates multiple input images into a single, coherent image. Rather than concentrating on specific use cases such as appearance editing (image harmonization) or semantic editing (semantic image composition), we showcase the potential of utilizing the powerful generative prior inherent in large-scale pre-trained diffusion models to accomplish generic image composition applicable to both scenarios. We observe that the pre-trained diffusion models automatically identify simple copy-paste boundary areas as low-density regions during denoising. Building on this insight, we propose to optimize the composed image towards high-density regions guided by the diffusion prior. In addition, we introduce a novel maskguided loss to further enable flexible semantic image composition. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our approach in achieving generic zero-shot image composition. Additionally, our approach shows promising potential in various tasks, such as object removal and multiconcept customization.
HEST-1k: A Dataset for Spatial Transcriptomics and Histology Image Analysis
Spatial transcriptomics (ST) enables interrogating the molecular composition of tissue with ever-increasing resolution, depth, and sensitivity. However, costs, rapidly evolving technology, and lack of standards have constrained computational methods in ST to narrow tasks and small cohorts. In addition, the underlying tissue morphology as reflected by H&E-stained whole slide images (WSIs) encodes rich information often overlooked in ST studies. Here, we introduce HEST-1k, a collection of 1,108 spatial transcriptomic profiles, each linked to a WSI and metadata. HEST-1k was assembled using HEST-Library from 131 public and internal cohorts encompassing 25 organs, two species (Homo Sapiens and Mus Musculus), and 320 cancer samples from 25 cancer types. HEST-1k processing enabled the identification of 1.5 million expression--morphology pairs and 60 million nuclei. HEST-1k is tested on three use cases: (1) benchmarking foundation models for histopathology (HEST-Benchmark), (2) biomarker identification, and (3) multimodal representation learning. HEST-1k, HEST-Library, and HEST-Benchmark can be freely accessed via https://github.com/mahmoodlab/hest.
Inverse Constitutional AI: Compressing Preferences into Principles
Feedback data plays an important role in fine-tuning and evaluating state-of-the-art AI models. Often pairwise text preferences are used: given two texts, human (or AI) annotators select the "better" one. Such feedback data is widely used to align models to human preferences (e.g., reinforcement learning from human feedback), or to rank models according to human preferences (e.g., Chatbot Arena). Despite its wide-spread use, prior work has demonstrated that human-annotated pairwise text preference data often exhibits unintended biases. For example, human annotators have been shown to prefer assertive over truthful texts in certain contexts. Models trained or evaluated on this data may implicitly encode these biases in a manner hard to identify. In this paper, we formulate the interpretation of existing pairwise text preference data as a compression task: the Inverse Constitutional AI (ICAI) problem. In constitutional AI, a set of principles (or constitution) is used to provide feedback and fine-tune AI models. The ICAI problem inverts this process: given a dataset of feedback, we aim to extract a constitution that best enables a large language model (LLM) to reconstruct the original annotations. We propose a corresponding initial ICAI algorithm and validate its generated constitutions quantitatively based on reconstructed annotations. Generated constitutions have many potential use-cases -- they may help identify undesirable biases, scale feedback to unseen data or assist with adapting LLMs to individual user preferences. We demonstrate our approach on a variety of datasets: (a) synthetic feedback datasets with known underlying principles; (b) the AlpacaEval dataset of cross-annotated human feedback; and (c) the crowdsourced Chatbot Arena data set. We release the code for our algorithm and experiments at https://github.com/rdnfn/icai .
InspectorRAGet: An Introspection Platform for RAG Evaluation
Large Language Models (LLM) have become a popular approach for implementing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, and a significant amount of effort has been spent on building good models and metrics. In spite of increased recognition of the need for rigorous evaluation of RAG systems, few tools exist that go beyond the creation of model output and automatic calculation. We present InspectorRAGet, an introspection platform for RAG evaluation. InspectorRAGet allows the user to analyze aggregate and instance-level performance of RAG systems, using both human and algorithmic metrics as well as annotator quality. InspectorRAGet is suitable for multiple use cases and is available publicly to the community. The demo video is available at https://youtu.be/MJhe8QIXcEc
A User-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) are essential tools to collaborate with users on different tasks. Evaluating their performance to serve users' needs in real-world scenarios is important. While many benchmarks have been created, they mainly focus on specific predefined model abilities. Few have covered the intended utilization of LLMs by real users. To address this oversight, we propose benchmarking LLMs from a user perspective in both dataset construction and evaluation designs. We first collect 1846 real-world use cases with 15 LLMs from a user study with 712 participants from 23 countries. These self-reported cases form the User Reported Scenarios(URS) dataset with a categorization of 7 user intents. Secondly, on this authentic multi-cultural dataset, we benchmark 10 LLM services on their efficacy in satisfying user needs. Thirdly, we show that our benchmark scores align well with user-reported experience in LLM interactions across diverse intents, both of which emphasize the overlook of subjective scenarios. In conclusion, our study proposes to benchmark LLMs from a user-centric perspective, aiming to facilitate evaluations that better reflect real user needs. The benchmark dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Alice1998/URS.
Improving the Capabilities of Large Language Model Based Marketing Analytics Copilots With Semantic Search And Fine-Tuning
Artificial intelligence (AI) is widely deployed to solve problems related to marketing attribution and budget optimization. However, AI models can be quite complex, and it can be difficult to understand model workings and insights without extensive implementation teams. In principle, recently developed large language models (LLMs), like GPT-4, can be deployed to provide marketing insights, reducing the time and effort required to make critical decisions. In practice, there are substantial challenges that need to be overcome to reliably use such models. We focus on domain-specific question-answering, SQL generation needed for data retrieval, and tabular analysis and show how a combination of semantic search, prompt engineering, and fine-tuning can be applied to dramatically improve the ability of LLMs to execute these tasks accurately. We compare both proprietary models, like GPT-4, and open-source models, like Llama-2-70b, as well as various embedding methods. These models are tested on sample use cases specific to marketing mix modeling and attribution.
Enhancing Text-to-SQL Translation for Financial System Design
Text-to-SQL, the task of translating natural language questions into SQL queries, is part of various business processes. Its automation, which is an emerging challenge, will empower software practitioners to seamlessly interact with relational databases using natural language, thereby bridging the gap between business needs and software capabilities. In this paper, we consider Large Language Models (LLMs), which have achieved state of the art for various NLP tasks. Specifically, we benchmark Text-to-SQL performance, the evaluation methodologies, as well as input optimization (e.g., prompting). In light of the empirical observations that we have made, we propose two novel metrics that were designed to adequately measure the similarity between SQL queries. Overall, we share with the community various findings, notably on how to select the right LLM on Text-to-SQL tasks. We further demonstrate that a tree-based edit distance constitutes a reliable metric for assessing the similarity between generated SQL queries and the oracle for benchmarking Text2SQL approaches. This metric is important as it relieves researchers from the need to perform computationally expensive experiments such as executing generated queries as done in prior works. Our work implements financial domain use cases and, therefore contributes to the advancement of Text2SQL systems and their practical adoption in this domain.
TinyReptile: TinyML with Federated Meta-Learning
Tiny machine learning (TinyML) is a rapidly growing field aiming to democratize machine learning (ML) for resource-constrained microcontrollers (MCUs). Given the pervasiveness of these tiny devices, it is inherent to ask whether TinyML applications can benefit from aggregating their knowledge. Federated learning (FL) enables decentralized agents to jointly learn a global model without sharing sensitive local data. However, a common global model may not work for all devices due to the complexity of the actual deployment environment and the heterogeneity of the data available on each device. In addition, the deployment of TinyML hardware has significant computational and communication constraints, which traditional ML fails to address. Considering these challenges, we propose TinyReptile, a simple but efficient algorithm inspired by meta-learning and online learning, to collaboratively learn a solid initialization for a neural network (NN) across tiny devices that can be quickly adapted to a new device with respect to its data. We demonstrate TinyReptile on Raspberry Pi 4 and Cortex-M4 MCU with only 256-KB RAM. The evaluations on various TinyML use cases confirm a resource reduction and training time saving by at least two factors compared with baseline algorithms with comparable performance.
The ROOTS Search Tool: Data Transparency for LLMs
ROOTS is a 1.6TB multilingual text corpus developed for the training of BLOOM, currently the largest language model explicitly accompanied by commensurate data governance efforts. In continuation of these efforts, we present the ROOTS Search Tool: a search engine over the entire ROOTS corpus offering both fuzzy and exact search capabilities. ROOTS is the largest corpus to date that can be investigated this way. The ROOTS Search Tool is open-sourced and available on Hugging Face Spaces. We describe our implementation and the possible use cases of our tool.
Towards Explaining Distribution Shifts
A distribution shift can have fundamental consequences such as signaling a change in the operating environment or significantly reducing the accuracy of downstream models. Thus, understanding distribution shifts is critical for examining and hopefully mitigating the effect of such a shift. Most prior work focuses on merely detecting if a shift has occurred and assumes any detected shift can be understood and handled appropriately by a human operator. We hope to aid in these manual mitigation tasks by explaining the distribution shift using interpretable transportation maps from the original distribution to the shifted one. We derive our interpretable mappings from a relaxation of optimal transport, where the candidate mappings are restricted to a set of interpretable mappings. We then inspect multiple quintessential use-cases of distribution shift in real-world tabular, text, and image datasets to showcase how our explanatory mappings provide a better balance between detail and interpretability than baseline explanations by both visual inspection and our PercentExplained metric.
TorchNTK: A Library for Calculation of Neural Tangent Kernels of PyTorch Models
We introduce torchNTK, a python library to calculate the empirical neural tangent kernel (NTK) of neural network models in the PyTorch framework. We provide an efficient method to calculate the NTK of multilayer perceptrons. We compare the explicit differentiation implementation against autodifferentiation implementations, which have the benefit of extending the utility of the library to any architecture supported by PyTorch, such as convolutional networks. A feature of the library is that we expose the user to layerwise NTK components, and show that in some regimes a layerwise calculation is more memory efficient. We conduct preliminary experiments to demonstrate use cases for the software and probe the NTK.
RestoreX-AI: A Contrastive Approach towards Guiding Image Restoration via Explainable AI Systems
Modern applications such as self-driving cars and drones rely heavily upon robust object detection techniques. However, weather corruptions can hinder the object detectability and pose a serious threat to their navigation and reliability. Thus, there is a need for efficient denoising, deraining, and restoration techniques. Generative adversarial networks and transformers have been widely adopted for image restoration. However, the training of these methods is often unstable and time-consuming. Furthermore, when used for object detection (OD), the output images generated by these methods may provide unsatisfactory results despite image clarity. In this work, we propose a contrastive approach towards mitigating this problem, by evaluating images generated by restoration models during and post training. This approach leverages OD scores combined with attention maps for predicting the usefulness of restored images for the OD task. We conduct experiments using two novel use-cases of conditional GANs and two transformer methods that probe the robustness of the proposed approach on multi-weather corruptions in the OD task. Our approach achieves an averaged 178 percent increase in mAP between the input and restored images under adverse weather conditions like dust tornadoes and snowfall. We report unique cases where greater denoising does not improve OD performance and conversely where noisy generated images demonstrate good results. We conclude the need for explainability frameworks to bridge the gap between human and machine perception, especially in the context of robust object detection for autonomous vehicles.
A Longitudinal Dataset of Twitter ISIS Users
We present a large longitudinal dataset of tweets from two sets of users that are suspected to be affiliated with ISIS. These sets of users are identified based on a prior study and a campaign aimed at shutting down ISIS Twitter accounts. These users have engaged with known ISIS accounts at least once during 2014-2015 and are still active as of 2021. Some of them have directly supported the ISIS users and their tweets by retweeting them, and some of the users that have quoted tweets of ISIS, have uncertain connections to ISIS seed accounts. This study and the dataset represent a unique approach to analyzing ISIS data. Although much research exists on ISIS online activities, few studies have focused on individual accounts. Our approach to validating accounts as well as developing a framework for differentiating accounts' functionality (e.g., propaganda versus operational planning) offers a foundation for future research. We perform some descriptive statistics and preliminary analyses on our collected data to provide deeper insight and highlight the significance and practicality of such analyses. We further discuss several cross-disciplinary potential use cases and research directions.
The Dataset Nutrition Label (2nd Gen): Leveraging Context to Mitigate Harms in Artificial Intelligence
As the production of and reliance on datasets to produce automated decision-making systems (ADS) increases, so does the need for processes for evaluating and interrogating the underlying data. After launching the Dataset Nutrition Label in 2018, the Data Nutrition Project has made significant updates to the design and purpose of the Label, and is launching an updated Label in late 2020, which is previewed in this paper. The new Label includes context-specific Use Cases &Alerts presented through an updated design and user interface targeted towards the data scientist profile. This paper discusses the harm and bias from underlying training data that the Label is intended to mitigate, the current state of the work including new datasets being labeled, new and existing challenges, and further directions of the work, as well as Figures previewing the new label.
LightOn Optical Processing Unit: Scaling-up AI and HPC with a Non von Neumann co-processor
We introduce LightOn's Optical Processing Unit (OPU), the first photonic AI accelerator chip available on the market for at-scale Non von Neumann computations, reaching 1500 TeraOPS. It relies on a combination of free-space optics with off-the-shelf components, together with a software API allowing a seamless integration within Python-based processing pipelines. We discuss a variety of use cases and hybrid network architectures, with the OPU used in combination of CPU/GPU, and draw a pathway towards "optical advantage".
Speech Fusion to Face: Bridging the Gap Between Human's Vocal Characteristics and Facial Imaging
While deep learning technologies are now capable of generating realistic images confusing humans, the research efforts are turning to the synthesis of images for more concrete and application-specific purposes. Facial image generation based on vocal characteristics from speech is one of such important yet challenging tasks. It is the key enabler to influential use cases of image generation, especially for business in public security and entertainment. Existing solutions to the problem of speech2face renders limited image quality and fails to preserve facial similarity due to the lack of quality dataset for training and appropriate integration of vocal features. In this paper, we investigate these key technical challenges and propose Speech Fusion to Face, or SF2F in short, attempting to address the issue of facial image quality and the poor connection between vocal feature domain and modern image generation models. By adopting new strategies on data model and training, we demonstrate dramatic performance boost over state-of-the-art solution, by doubling the recall of individual identity, and lifting the quality score from 15 to 19 based on the mutual information score with VGGFace classifier.
SeQUeNCe: A Customizable Discrete-Event Simulator of Quantum Networks
Recent advances in quantum information science enabled the development of quantum communication network prototypes and created an opportunity to study full-stack quantum network architectures. This work develops SeQUeNCe, a comprehensive, customizable quantum network simulator. Our simulator consists of five modules: Hardware models, Entanglement Management protocols, Resource Management, Network Management, and Application. This framework is suitable for simulation of quantum network prototypes that capture the breadth of current and future hardware technologies and protocols. We implement a comprehensive suite of network protocols and demonstrate the use of SeQUeNCe by simulating a photonic quantum network with nine routers equipped with quantum memories. The simulation capabilities are illustrated in three use cases. We show the dependence of quantum network throughput on several key hardware parameters and study the impact of classical control message latency. We also investigate quantum memory usage efficiency in routers and demonstrate that redistributing memory according to anticipated load increases network capacity by 69.1% and throughput by 6.8%. We design SeQUeNCe to enable comparisons of alternative quantum network technologies, experiment planning, and validation and to aid with new protocol design. We are releasing SeQUeNCe as an open source tool and aim to generate community interest in extending it.
Spacerini: Plug-and-play Search Engines with Pyserini and Hugging Face
We present Spacerini, a modular framework for seamless building and deployment of interactive search applications, designed to facilitate the qualitative analysis of large scale research datasets. Spacerini integrates features from both the Pyserini toolkit and the Hugging Face ecosystem to ease the indexing text collections and deploy them as search engines for ad-hoc exploration and to make the retrieval of relevant data points quick and efficient. The user-friendly interface enables searching through massive datasets in a no-code fashion, making Spacerini broadly accessible to anyone looking to qualitatively audit their text collections. This is useful both to IR~researchers aiming to demonstrate the capabilities of their indexes in a simple and interactive way, and to NLP~researchers looking to better understand and audit the failure modes of large language models. The framework is open source and available on GitHub: https://github.com/castorini/hf-spacerini, and includes utilities to load, pre-process, index, and deploy local and web search applications. A portfolio of applications created with Spacerini for a multitude of use cases can be found by visiting https://hf.co/spacerini.
Text and Code Embeddings by Contrastive Pre-Training
Text embeddings are useful features in many applications such as semantic search and computing text similarity. Previous work typically trains models customized for different use cases, varying in dataset choice, training objective and model architecture. In this work, we show that contrastive pre-training on unsupervised data at scale leads to high quality vector representations of text and code. The same unsupervised text embeddings that achieve new state-of-the-art results in linear-probe classification also display impressive semantic search capabilities and sometimes even perform competitively with fine-tuned models. On linear-probe classification accuracy averaging over 7 tasks, our best unsupervised model achieves a relative improvement of 4% and 1.8% over previous best unsupervised and supervised text embedding models respectively. The same text embeddings when evaluated on large-scale semantic search attains a relative improvement of 23.4%, 14.7%, and 10.6% over previous best unsupervised methods on MSMARCO, Natural Questions and TriviaQA benchmarks, respectively. Similarly to text embeddings, we train code embedding models on (text, code) pairs, obtaining a 20.8% relative improvement over prior best work on code search.
