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Dec 9

The EpiBench Platform to Propel AI/ML-based Epidemic Forecasting: A Prototype Demonstration Reaching Human Expert-level Performance

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a significant effort has gone into developing ML-driven epidemic forecasting techniques. However, benchmarks do not exist to claim if a new AI/ML technique is better than the existing ones. The "covid-forecast-hub" is a collection of more than 30 teams, including us, that submit their forecasts weekly to the CDC. It is not possible to declare whether one method is better than the other using those forecasts because each team's submission may correspond to different techniques over the period and involve human interventions as the teams are continuously changing/tuning their approach. Such forecasts may be considered "human-expert" forecasts and do not qualify as AI/ML approaches, although they can be used as an indicator of human expert performance. We are interested in supporting AI/ML research in epidemic forecasting which can lead to scalable forecasting without human intervention. Which modeling technique, learning strategy, and data pre-processing technique work well for epidemic forecasting is still an open problem. To help advance the state-of-the-art AI/ML applied to epidemiology, a benchmark with a collection of performance points is needed and the current "state-of-the-art" techniques need to be identified. We propose EpiBench a platform consisting of community-driven benchmarks for AI/ML applied to epidemic forecasting to standardize the challenge with a uniform evaluation protocol. In this paper, we introduce a prototype of EpiBench which is currently running and accepting submissions for the task of forecasting COVID-19 cases and deaths in the US states and We demonstrate that we can utilize the prototype to develop an ensemble relying on fully automated epidemic forecasts (no human intervention) that reaches human-expert level ensemble currently being used by the CDC.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 4, 2021

Enabling more efficient and cost-effective AI/ML systems with Collective Mind, virtualized MLOps, MLPerf, Collective Knowledge Playground and reproducible optimization tournaments

This white paper introduces my educational community initiative to learn how to run AI, ML and other emerging workloads in the most efficient and cost-effective way across diverse models, data sets, software and hardware. This project leverages Collective Mind (CM), virtualized MLOps and DevOps (CM4MLOps), MLPerf benchmarks, and the Collective Knowledge playground (CK), which I have developed in collaboration with the community and MLCommons. I created Collective Mind as a small and portable Python package with minimal dependencies, a unified CLI and Python API to help researchers and engineers automate repetitive, tedious, and time-consuming tasks. I also designed CM as a distributed framework, continuously enhanced by the community through the CM4* repositories, which function as the unified interface for organizing and managing various collections of automations and artifacts. For example, CM4MLOps repository includes many automations, also known as CM scripts, to streamline the process of building, running, benchmarking, and optimizing AI, ML, and other workflows across ever-evolving models, data, and systems. I donated CK, CM and CM4MLOps to MLCommons to foster collaboration between academia and industry to learn how to co-design more efficient and cost-effective AI systems while capturing and encoding knowledge within Collective Mind, protecting intellectual property, enabling portable skills, and accelerating the transition of the state-of-the-art research into production. My ultimate goal is to collaborate with the community to complete my two-decade journey toward creating self-optimizing software and hardware that can automatically learn how to run any workload in the most efficient and cost-effective manner based on user requirements and constraints such as cost, latency, throughput, accuracy, power consumption, size, and other critical factors.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 24, 2024

An MLCommons Scientific Benchmarks Ontology

Scientific machine learning research spans diverse domains and data modalities, yet existing benchmark efforts remain siloed and lack standardization. This makes novel and transformative applications of machine learning to critical scientific use-cases more fragmented and less clear in pathways to impact. This paper introduces an ontology for scientific benchmarking developed through a unified, community-driven effort that extends the MLCommons ecosystem to cover physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, climate science, and more. Building on prior initiatives such as XAI-BENCH, FastML Science Benchmarks, PDEBench, and the SciMLBench framework, our effort consolidates a large set of disparate benchmarks and frameworks into a single taxonomy of scientific, application, and system-level benchmarks. New benchmarks can be added through an open submission workflow coordinated by the MLCommons Science Working Group and evaluated against a six-category rating rubric that promotes and identifies high-quality benchmarks, enabling stakeholders to select benchmarks that meet their specific needs. The architecture is extensible, supporting future scientific and AI/ML motifs, and we discuss methods for identifying emerging computing patterns for unique scientific workloads. The MLCommons Science Benchmarks Ontology provides a standardized, scalable foundation for reproducible, cross-domain benchmarking in scientific machine learning. A companion webpage for this work has also been developed as the effort evolves: https://mlcommons-science.github.io/benchmark/

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 6

The Role of AI in Early Detection of Life-Threatening Diseases: A Retinal Imaging Perspective

Retinal imaging has emerged as a powerful, non-invasive modality for detecting and quantifying biomarkers of systemic diseases-ranging from diabetes and hypertension to Alzheimer's disease and cardiovascular disorders but current insights remain dispersed across platforms and specialties. Recent technological advances in optical coherence tomography (OCT/OCTA) and adaptive optics (AO) now deliver ultra-high-resolution scans (down to 5 {\mu}m ) with superior contrast and spatial integration, allowing early identification of microvascular abnormalities and neurodegenerative changes. At the same time, AI-driven and machine learning (ML) algorithms have revolutionized the analysis of large-scale retinal datasets, increasing sensitivity and specificity; for example, deep learning models achieve > 90 \% sensitivity for diabetic retinopathy and AUC = 0.89 for the prediction of cardiovascular risk from fundus photographs. The proliferation of mobile health technologies and telemedicine platforms further extends access, reduces costs, and facilitates community-based screening and longitudinal monitoring. Despite these breakthroughs, translation into routine practice is hindered by heterogeneous imaging protocols, limited external validation of AI models, and integration challenges within clinical workflows. In this review, we systematically synthesize the latest OCT/OCT and AO developments, AI/ML approaches, and mHealth/Tele-ophthalmology initiatives and quantify their diagnostic performance across disease domains. Finally, we propose a roadmap for multicenter protocol standardization, prospective validation trials, and seamless incorporation of retinal screening into primary and specialty care pathways-paving the way for precision prevention, early intervention, and ongoing treatment of life-threatening systemic diseases.

  • 3 authors
·
May 27

Assessing the Use of AutoML for Data-Driven Software Engineering

Background. Due to the widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for building software applications, companies are struggling to recruit employees with a deep understanding of such technologies. In this scenario, AutoML is soaring as a promising solution to fill the AI/ML skills gap since it promises to automate the building of end-to-end AI/ML pipelines that would normally be engineered by specialized team members. Aims. Despite the growing interest and high expectations, there is a dearth of information about the extent to which AutoML is currently adopted by teams developing AI/ML-enabled systems and how it is perceived by practitioners and researchers. Method. To fill these gaps, in this paper, we present a mixed-method study comprising a benchmark of 12 end-to-end AutoML tools on two SE datasets and a user survey with follow-up interviews to further our understanding of AutoML adoption and perception. Results. We found that AutoML solutions can generate models that outperform those trained and optimized by researchers to perform classification tasks in the SE domain. Also, our findings show that the currently available AutoML solutions do not live up to their names as they do not equally support automation across the stages of the ML development workflow and for all the team members. Conclusions. We derive insights to inform the SE research community on how AutoML can facilitate their activities and tool builders on how to design the next generation of AutoML technologies.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 20, 2023

Tiny Transformers for Environmental Sound Classification at the Edge

With the growth of the Internet of Things and the rise of Big Data, data processing and machine learning applications are being moved to cheap and low size, weight, and power (SWaP) devices at the edge, often in the form of mobile phones, embedded systems, or microcontrollers. The field of Cyber-Physical Measurements and Signature Intelligence (MASINT) makes use of these devices to analyze and exploit data in ways not otherwise possible, which results in increased data quality, increased security, and decreased bandwidth. However, methods to train and deploy models at the edge are limited, and models with sufficient accuracy are often too large for the edge device. Therefore, there is a clear need for techniques to create efficient AI/ML at the edge. This work presents training techniques for audio models in the field of environmental sound classification at the edge. Specifically, we design and train Transformers to classify office sounds in audio clips. Results show that a BERT-based Transformer, trained on Mel spectrograms, can outperform a CNN using 99.85% fewer parameters. To achieve this result, we first tested several audio feature extraction techniques designed for Transformers, using ESC-50 for evaluation, along with various augmentations. Our final model outperforms the state-of-the-art MFCC-based CNN on the office sounds dataset, using just over 6,000 parameters -- small enough to run on a microcontroller.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 22, 2021

CSR-Bench: Benchmarking LLM Agents in Deployment of Computer Science Research Repositories

The increasing complexity of computer science research projects demands more effective tools for deploying code repositories. Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Anthropic Claude and Meta Llama, have demonstrated significant advancements across various fields of computer science research, including the automation of diverse software engineering tasks. To evaluate the effectiveness of LLMs in handling complex code development tasks of research projects, particularly for NLP/CV/AI/ML/DM topics, we introduce CSR-Bench, a benchmark for Computer Science Research projects. This benchmark assesses LLMs from various aspects including accuracy, efficiency, and deployment script quality, aiming to explore their potential in conducting computer science research autonomously. We also introduce a novel framework, CSR-Agents, that utilizes multiple LLM agents to automate the deployment of GitHub code repositories of computer science research projects. Specifically, by checking instructions from markdown files and interpreting repository structures, the model generates and iteratively improves bash commands that set up the experimental environments and deploy the code to conduct research tasks. Preliminary results from CSR-Bench indicate that LLM agents can significantly enhance the workflow of repository deployment, thereby boosting developer productivity and improving the management of developmental workflows.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 9

Interactive Model Cards: A Human-Centered Approach to Model Documentation

Deep learning models for natural language processing (NLP) are increasingly adopted and deployed by analysts without formal training in NLP or machine learning (ML). However, the documentation intended to convey the model's details and appropriate use is tailored primarily to individuals with ML or NLP expertise. To address this gap, we conduct a design inquiry into interactive model cards, which augment traditionally static model cards with affordances for exploring model documentation and interacting with the models themselves. Our investigation consists of an initial conceptual study with experts in ML, NLP, and AI Ethics, followed by a separate evaluative study with non-expert analysts who use ML models in their work. Using a semi-structured interview format coupled with a think-aloud protocol, we collected feedback from a total of 30 participants who engaged with different versions of standard and interactive model cards. Through a thematic analysis of the collected data, we identified several conceptual dimensions that summarize the strengths and limitations of standard and interactive model cards, including: stakeholders; design; guidance; understandability & interpretability; sensemaking & skepticism; and trust & safety. Our findings demonstrate the importance of carefully considered design and interactivity for orienting and supporting non-expert analysts using deep learning models, along with a need for consideration of broader sociotechnical contexts and organizational dynamics. We have also identified design elements, such as language, visual cues, and warnings, among others, that support interactivity and make non-interactive content accessible. We summarize our findings as design guidelines and discuss their implications for a human-centered approach towards AI/ML documentation.

  • 4 authors
·
May 5, 2022

Enhancing End Stage Renal Disease Outcome Prediction: A Multi-Sourced Data-Driven Approach

Objective: To improve prediction of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) progression to End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models applied to an integrated clinical and claims dataset of varying observation windows, supported by explainable AI (XAI) to enhance interpretability and reduce bias. Materials and Methods: We utilized data about 10,326 CKD patients, combining their clinical and claims information from 2009 to 2018. Following data preprocessing, cohort identification, and feature engineering, we evaluated multiple statistical, ML and DL models using data extracted from five distinct observation windows. Feature importance and Shapley value analysis were employed to understand key predictors. Models were tested for robustness, clinical relevance, misclassification errors and bias issues. Results: Integrated data models outperformed those using single data sources, with the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model achieving the highest AUC (0.93) and F1 score (0.65). A 24-month observation window was identified as optimal for balancing early detection and prediction accuracy. The 2021 eGFR equation improved prediction accuracy and reduced racial bias, notably for African American patients. Discussion: Improved ESRD prediction accuracy, results interpretability and bias mitigation strategies presented in this study have the potential to significantly enhance CKD and ESRD management, support targeted early interventions and reduce healthcare disparities. Conclusion: This study presents a robust framework for predicting ESRD outcomes in CKD patients, improving clinical decision-making and patient care through multi-sourced, integrated data and AI/ML methods. Future research will expand data integration and explore the application of this framework to other chronic diseases.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 1, 2024

BusterX: MLLM-Powered AI-Generated Video Forgery Detection and Explanation

Advances in AI generative models facilitate super-realistic video synthesis, amplifying misinformation risks via social media and eroding trust in digital content. Several research works have explored new deepfake detection methods on AI-generated images to alleviate these risks. However, with the fast development of video generation models, such as Sora and WanX, there is currently a lack of large-scale, high-quality AI-generated video datasets for forgery detection. In addition, existing detection approaches predominantly treat the task as binary classification, lacking explainability in model decision-making and failing to provide actionable insights or guidance for the public. To address these challenges, we propose GenBuster-200K, a large-scale AI-generated video dataset featuring 200K high-resolution video clips, diverse latest generative techniques, and real-world scenes. We further introduce BusterX, a novel AI-generated video detection and explanation framework leveraging multimodal large language model (MLLM) and reinforcement learning for authenticity determination and explainable rationale. To our knowledge, GenBuster-200K is the {\it first} large-scale, high-quality AI-generated video dataset that incorporates the latest generative techniques for real-world scenarios. BusterX is the {\it first} framework to integrate MLLM with reinforcement learning for explainable AI-generated video detection. Extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art methods and ablation studies validate the effectiveness and generalizability of BusterX. The code, models, and datasets will be released.

  • 10 authors
·
May 18

MLR-Bench: Evaluating AI Agents on Open-Ended Machine Learning Research

Recent advancements in AI agents have demonstrated their growing potential to drive and support scientific discovery. In this work, we introduce MLR-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating AI agents on open-ended machine learning research. MLR-Bench includes three key components: (1) 201 research tasks sourced from NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML workshops covering diverse ML topics; (2) MLR-Judge, an automated evaluation framework combining LLM-based reviewers with carefully designed review rubrics to assess research quality; and (3) MLR-Agent, a modular agent scaffold capable of completing research tasks through four stages: idea generation, proposal formulation, experimentation, and paper writing. Our framework supports both stepwise assessment across these distinct research stages, and end-to-end evaluation of the final research paper. We then use MLR-Bench to evaluate six frontier LLMs and an advanced coding agent, finding that while LLMs are effective at generating coherent ideas and well-structured papers, current coding agents frequently (e.g., in 80% of the cases) produce fabricated or invalidated experimental results--posing a major barrier to scientific reliability. We validate MLR-Judge through human evaluation, showing high agreement with expert reviewers, supporting its potential as a scalable tool for research evaluation. We open-source MLR-Bench to help the community benchmark, diagnose, and improve AI research agents toward trustworthy and transparent scientific discovery.

  • 10 authors
·
May 26 1

MLGym: A New Framework and Benchmark for Advancing AI Research Agents

We introduce Meta MLGym and MLGym-Bench, a new framework and benchmark for evaluating and developing LLM agents on AI research tasks. This is the first Gym environment for machine learning (ML) tasks, enabling research on reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for training such agents. MLGym-bench consists of 13 diverse and open-ended AI research tasks from diverse domains such as computer vision, natural language processing, reinforcement learning, and game theory. Solving these tasks requires real-world AI research skills such as generating new ideas and hypotheses, creating and processing data, implementing ML methods, training models, running experiments, analyzing the results, and iterating through this process to improve on a given task. We evaluate a number of frontier large language models (LLMs) on our benchmarks such as Claude-3.5-Sonnet, Llama-3.1 405B, GPT-4o, o1-preview, and Gemini-1.5 Pro. Our MLGym framework makes it easy to add new tasks, integrate and evaluate models or agents, generate synthetic data at scale, as well as develop new learning algorithms for training agents on AI research tasks. We find that current frontier models can improve on the given baselines, usually by finding better hyperparameters, but do not generate novel hypotheses, algorithms, architectures, or substantial improvements. We open-source our framework and benchmark to facilitate future research in advancing the AI research capabilities of LLM agents.

Introducing v0.5 of the AI Safety Benchmark from MLCommons

This paper introduces v0.5 of the AI Safety Benchmark, which has been created by the MLCommons AI Safety Working Group. The AI Safety Benchmark has been designed to assess the safety risks of AI systems that use chat-tuned language models. We introduce a principled approach to specifying and constructing the benchmark, which for v0.5 covers only a single use case (an adult chatting to a general-purpose assistant in English), and a limited set of personas (i.e., typical users, malicious users, and vulnerable users). We created a new taxonomy of 13 hazard categories, of which 7 have tests in the v0.5 benchmark. We plan to release version 1.0 of the AI Safety Benchmark by the end of 2024. The v1.0 benchmark will provide meaningful insights into the safety of AI systems. However, the v0.5 benchmark should not be used to assess the safety of AI systems. We have sought to fully document the limitations, flaws, and challenges of v0.5. This release of v0.5 of the AI Safety Benchmark includes (1) a principled approach to specifying and constructing the benchmark, which comprises use cases, types of systems under test (SUTs), language and context, personas, tests, and test items; (2) a taxonomy of 13 hazard categories with definitions and subcategories; (3) tests for seven of the hazard categories, each comprising a unique set of test items, i.e., prompts. There are 43,090 test items in total, which we created with templates; (4) a grading system for AI systems against the benchmark; (5) an openly available platform, and downloadable tool, called ModelBench that can be used to evaluate the safety of AI systems on the benchmark; (6) an example evaluation report which benchmarks the performance of over a dozen openly available chat-tuned language models; (7) a test specification for the benchmark.

  • 97 authors
·
Apr 18, 2024 1

UVE: Are MLLMs Unified Evaluators for AI-Generated Videos?

With the rapid growth of video generative models (VGMs), it is essential to develop reliable and comprehensive automatic metrics for AI-generated videos (AIGVs). Existing methods either use off-the-shelf models optimized for other tasks or rely on human assessment data to train specialized evaluators. These approaches are constrained to specific evaluation aspects and are difficult to scale with the increasing demands for finer-grained and more comprehensive evaluations. To address this issue, this work investigates the feasibility of using multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as a unified evaluator for AIGVs, leveraging their strong visual perception and language understanding capabilities. To evaluate the performance of automatic metrics in unified AIGV evaluation, we introduce a benchmark called UVE-Bench. UVE-Bench collects videos generated by state-of-the-art VGMs and provides pairwise human preference annotations across 15 evaluation aspects. Using UVE-Bench, we extensively evaluate 16 MLLMs. Our empirical results suggest that while advanced MLLMs (e.g., Qwen2VL-72B and InternVL2.5-78B) still lag behind human evaluators, they demonstrate promising ability in unified AIGV evaluation, significantly surpassing existing specialized evaluation methods. Additionally, we conduct an in-depth analysis of key design choices that impact the performance of MLLM-driven evaluators, offering valuable insights for future research on AIGV evaluation. The code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/UVE.

RLAIF-V: Aligning MLLMs through Open-Source AI Feedback for Super GPT-4V Trustworthiness

Learning from feedback reduces the hallucination of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by aligning them with human preferences. While traditional methods rely on labor-intensive and time-consuming manual labeling, recent approaches employing models as automatic labelers have shown promising results without human intervention. However, these methods heavily rely on costly proprietary models like GPT-4V, resulting in scalability issues. Moreover, this paradigm essentially distills the proprietary models to provide a temporary solution to quickly bridge the performance gap. As this gap continues to shrink, the community is soon facing the essential challenge of aligning MLLMs using labeler models of comparable capability. In this work, we introduce RLAIF-V, a novel framework that aligns MLLMs in a fully open-source paradigm for super GPT-4V trustworthiness. RLAIF-V maximally exploits the open-source feedback from two perspectives, including high-quality feedback data and online feedback learning algorithm. Extensive experiments on seven benchmarks in both automatic and human evaluation show that RLAIF-V substantially enhances the trustworthiness of models without sacrificing performance on other tasks. Using a 34B model as labeler, RLAIF-V 7B model reduces object hallucination by 82.9\% and overall hallucination by 42.1\%, outperforming the labeler model. Remarkably, RLAIF-V also reveals the self-alignment potential of open-source MLLMs, where a 12B model can learn from the feedback of itself to achieve less than 29.5\% overall hallucination rate, surpassing GPT-4V (45.9\%) by a large margin. The results shed light on a promising route to enhance the efficacy of leading-edge MLLMs.

  • 11 authors
·
May 27, 2024

AILuminate: Introducing v1.0 of the AI Risk and Reliability Benchmark from MLCommons

The rapid advancement and deployment of AI systems have created an urgent need for standard safety-evaluation frameworks. This paper introduces AILuminate v1.0, the first comprehensive industry-standard benchmark for assessing AI-product risk and reliability. Its development employed an open process that included participants from multiple fields. The benchmark evaluates an AI system's resistance to prompts designed to elicit dangerous, illegal, or undesirable behavior in 12 hazard categories, including violent crimes, nonviolent crimes, sex-related crimes, child sexual exploitation, indiscriminate weapons, suicide and self-harm, intellectual property, privacy, defamation, hate, sexual content, and specialized advice (election, financial, health, legal). Our method incorporates a complete assessment standard, extensive prompt datasets, a novel evaluation framework, a grading and reporting system, and the technical as well as organizational infrastructure for long-term support and evolution. In particular, the benchmark employs an understandable five-tier grading scale (Poor to Excellent) and incorporates an innovative entropy-based system-response evaluation. In addition to unveiling the benchmark, this report also identifies limitations of our method and of building safety benchmarks generally, including evaluator uncertainty and the constraints of single-turn interactions. This work represents a crucial step toward establishing global standards for AI risk and reliability evaluation while acknowledging the need for continued development in areas such as multiturn interactions, multimodal understanding, coverage of additional languages, and emerging hazard categories. Our findings provide valuable insights for model developers, system integrators, and policymakers working to promote safer AI deployment.

  • 101 authors
·
Feb 19

BusterX++: Towards Unified Cross-Modal AI-Generated Content Detection and Explanation with MLLM

Recent advances in generative AI have dramatically improved image and video synthesis capabilities, significantly increasing the risk of misinformation through sophisticated fake content. In response, detection methods have evolved from traditional approaches to multimodal large language models (MLLMs), offering enhanced transparency and interpretability in identifying synthetic media. However, current detection systems remain fundamentally limited by their single-modality design. These approaches analyze images or videos separately, making them ineffective against synthetic content that combines multiple media formats. To address these challenges, we introduce BusterX++, a novel framework designed specifically for cross-modal detection and explanation of synthetic media. Our approach incorporates an advanced reinforcement learning (RL) post-training strategy that eliminates cold-start. Through Multi-stage Training, Thinking Reward, and Hybrid Reasoning, BusterX++ achieves stable and substantial performance improvements. To enable comprehensive evaluation, we also present GenBuster++, a cross-modal benchmark leveraging state-of-the-art image and video generation techniques. This benchmark comprises 4,000 images and video clips, meticulously curated by human experts using a novel filtering methodology to ensure high quality, diversity, and real-world applicability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 19

ProJudge: A Multi-Modal Multi-Discipline Benchmark and Instruction-Tuning Dataset for MLLM-based Process Judges

As multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) frequently exhibit errors when solving scientific problems, evaluating the validity of their reasoning processes is critical for ensuring reliability and uncovering fine-grained model weaknesses. Since human evaluation is laborious and costly, prompting MLLMs as automated process judges has become a common practice. However, the reliability of these model-based judges remains uncertain. To address this, we introduce ProJudgeBench, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating abilities of MLLM-based process judges. ProJudgeBench comprises 2,400 test cases and 50,118 step-level labels, spanning four scientific disciplines with diverse difficulty levels and multi-modal content. In ProJudgeBench, each step is meticulously annotated by human experts for correctness, error type, and explanation, enabling a systematic evaluation of judges' capabilities to detect, classify and diagnose errors. Evaluation on ProJudgeBench reveals a significant performance gap between open-source and proprietary models. To bridge this gap, we further propose ProJudge-173k, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset, and a Dynamic Dual-Phase fine-tuning strategy that encourages models to explicitly reason through problem-solving before assessing solutions. Both contributions significantly enhance the process evaluation capabilities of open-source models. All the resources will be released to foster future research of reliable multi-modal process evaluation.

On the Road to Clarity: Exploring Explainable AI for World Models in a Driver Assistance System

In Autonomous Driving (AD) transparency and safety are paramount, as mistakes are costly. However, neural networks used in AD systems are generally considered black boxes. As a countermeasure, we have methods of explainable AI (XAI), such as feature relevance estimation and dimensionality reduction. Coarse graining techniques can also help reduce dimensionality and find interpretable global patterns. A specific coarse graining method is Renormalization Groups from statistical physics. It has previously been applied to Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) to interpret unsupervised learning. We refine this technique by building a transparent backbone model for convolutional variational autoencoders (VAE) that allows mapping latent values to input features and has performance comparable to trained black box VAEs. Moreover, we propose a custom feature map visualization technique to analyze the internal convolutional layers in the VAE to explain internal causes of poor reconstruction that may lead to dangerous traffic scenarios in AD applications. In a second key contribution, we propose explanation and evaluation techniques for the internal dynamics and feature relevance of prediction networks. We test a long short-term memory (LSTM) network in the computer vision domain to evaluate the predictability and in future applications potentially safety of prediction models. We showcase our methods by analyzing a VAE-LSTM world model that predicts pedestrian perception in an urban traffic situation.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 26, 2024

Can MLLMs Read the Room? A Multimodal Benchmark for Verifying Truthfulness in Multi-Party Social Interactions

As AI systems become increasingly integrated into human lives, endowing them with robust social intelligence has emerged as a critical frontier. A key aspect of this intelligence is discerning truth from deception, a ubiquitous element of human interaction that is conveyed through a complex interplay of verbal language and non-verbal visual cues. However, automatic deception detection in dynamic, multi-party conversations remains a significant challenge. The recent rise of powerful Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), with their impressive abilities in visual and textual understanding, makes them natural candidates for this task. Consequently, their capabilities in this crucial domain are mostly unquantified. To address this gap, we introduce a new task, Multimodal Interactive Veracity Assessment (MIVA), and present a novel multimodal dataset derived from the social deduction game Werewolf. This dataset provides synchronized video, text, with verifiable ground-truth labels for every statement. We establish a comprehensive benchmark evaluating state-of-the-art MLLMs, revealing a significant performance gap: even powerful models like GPT-4o struggle to distinguish truth from falsehood reliably. Our analysis of failure modes indicates that these models fail to ground language in visual social cues effectively and may be overly conservative in their alignment, highlighting the urgent need for novel approaches to building more perceptive and trustworthy AI systems.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 31

MLAAD: The Multi-Language Audio Anti-Spoofing Dataset

Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology brings significant advantages, such as giving a voice to those with speech impairments, but also enables audio deepfakes and spoofs. The former mislead individuals and may propagate misinformation, while the latter undermine voice biometric security systems. AI-based detection can help to address these challenges by automatically differentiating between genuine and fabricated voice recordings. However, these models are only as good as their training data, which currently is severely limited due to an overwhelming concentration on English and Chinese audio in anti-spoofing databases, thus restricting its worldwide effectiveness. In response, this paper presents the Multi-Language Audio Anti-Spoof Dataset (MLAAD), created using 52 TTS models, comprising 19 different architectures, to generate 160.1 hours of synthetic voice in 23 different languages. We train and evaluate three state-of-the-art deepfake detection models with MLAAD, and observe that MLAAD demonstrates superior performance over comparable datasets like InTheWild or FakeOrReal when used as a training resource. Furthermore, in comparison with the renowned ASVspoof 2019 dataset, MLAAD proves to be a complementary resource. In tests across eight datasets, MLAAD and ASVspoof 2019 alternately outperformed each other, both excelling on four datasets. By publishing MLAAD and making trained models accessible via an interactive webserver , we aim to democratize antispoofing technology, making it accessible beyond the realm of specialists, thus contributing to global efforts against audio spoofing and deepfakes.

  • 9 authors
·
Jan 17, 2024

Can AI Dream of Unseen Galaxies? Conditional Diffusion Model for Galaxy Morphology Augmentation

Observational astronomy relies on visual feature identification to detect critical astrophysical phenomena. While machine learning (ML) increasingly automates this process, models often struggle with generalization in large-scale surveys due to the limited representativeness of labeled datasets -- whether from simulations or human annotation -- a challenge pronounced for rare yet scientifically valuable objects. To address this, we propose a conditional diffusion model to synthesize realistic galaxy images for augmenting ML training data. Leveraging the Galaxy Zoo 2 dataset which contains visual feature -- galaxy image pairs from volunteer annotation, we demonstrate that our model generates diverse, high-fidelity galaxy images closely adhere to the specified morphological feature conditions. Moreover, this model enables generative extrapolation to project well-annotated data into unseen domains and advancing rare object detection. Integrating synthesized images into ML pipelines improves performance in standard morphology classification, boosting completeness and purity by up to 30\% across key metrics. For rare object detection, using early-type galaxies with prominent dust lane features ( sim0.1\% in GZ2 dataset) as a test case, our approach doubled the number of detected instances from 352 to 872, compared to previous studies based on visual inspection. This study highlights the power of generative models to bridge gaps between scarce labeled data and the vast, uncharted parameter space of observational astronomy and sheds insight for future astrophysical foundation model developments. Our project homepage is available at https://galaxysd-webpage.streamlit.app/.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 19

MIND-Edit: MLLM Insight-Driven Editing via Language-Vision Projection

Recent advances in AI-generated content (AIGC) have significantly accelerated image editing techniques, driving increasing demand for diverse and fine-grained edits. Despite these advances, existing image editing methods still face challenges in achieving high precision and semantic accuracy in complex scenarios. Recent studies address this issue by incorporating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) into image editing pipelines. However, current MLLM-based methods mainly rely on interpreting textual instructions, leaving the intrinsic visual understanding of large models largely unexplored, thus resulting in insufficient alignment between textual semantics and visual outcomes. To overcome these limitations, we propose MIND-Edit, an end-to-end image-editing framework integrating pretrained diffusion model with MLLM. MIND-Edit introduces two complementary strategies: (1) a text instruction optimization strategy that clarifies ambiguous user instructions based on semantic reasoning from the MLLM, and (2) an MLLM insight-driven editing strategy that explicitly leverages the intrinsic visual understanding capability of the MLLM to infer editing intent and guide the diffusion process via generated visual embeddings. Furthermore, we propose a joint training approach to effectively integrate both strategies, allowing them to reinforce each other for more accurate instruction interpretation and visually coherent edits aligned with user intent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MIND-Edit outperforms state-of-the-art image editing methods in both quantitative metrics and visual quality, particularly under complex and challenging scenarios.

  • 5 authors
·
May 25

Towards Secure and Private AI: A Framework for Decentralized Inference

The rapid advancement of ML models in critical sectors such as healthcare, finance, and security has intensified the need for robust data security, model integrity, and reliable outputs. Large multimodal foundational models, while crucial for complex tasks, present challenges in scalability, reliability, and potential misuse. Decentralized systems offer a solution by distributing workload and mitigating central points of failure, but they introduce risks of unauthorized access to sensitive data across nodes. We address these challenges with a comprehensive framework designed for responsible AI development. Our approach incorporates: 1) Zero-knowledge proofs for secure model verification, enhancing trust without compromising privacy. 2) Consensus-based verification checks to ensure consistent outputs across nodes, mitigating hallucinations and maintaining model integrity. 3) Split Learning techniques that segment models across different nodes, preserving data privacy by preventing full data access at any point. 4) Hardware-based security through trusted execution environments (TEEs) to protect data and computations. This framework aims to enhance security and privacy and improve the reliability and fairness of multimodal AI systems. Promoting efficient resource utilization contributes to more sustainable AI development. Our state-of-the-art proofs and principles demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in responsibly democratizing artificial intelligence, offering a promising approach for building secure and private foundational models.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 28, 2024

OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for General Computing Devices Use

The dream to create AI assistants as capable and versatile as the fictional J.A.R.V.I.S from Iron Man has long captivated imaginations. With the evolution of (multi-modal) large language models ((M)LLMs), this dream is closer to reality, as (M)LLM-based Agents using computing devices (e.g., computers and mobile phones) by operating within the environments and interfaces (e.g., Graphical User Interface (GUI)) provided by operating systems (OS) to automate tasks have significantly advanced. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of these advanced agents, designated as OS Agents. We begin by elucidating the fundamentals of OS Agents, exploring their key components including the environment, observation space, and action space, and outlining essential capabilities such as understanding, planning, and grounding. We then examine methodologies for constructing OS Agents, focusing on domain-specific foundation models and agent frameworks. A detailed review of evaluation protocols and benchmarks highlights how OS Agents are assessed across diverse tasks. Finally, we discuss current challenges and identify promising directions for future research, including safety and privacy, personalization and self-evolution. This survey aims to consolidate the state of OS Agents research, providing insights to guide both academic inquiry and industrial development. An open-source GitHub repository is maintained as a dynamic resource to foster further innovation in this field. We present a 9-page version of our work, accepted by ACL 2025, to provide a concise overview to the domain.

Chat with AI: The Surprising Turn of Real-time Video Communication from Human to AI

AI Video Chat emerges as a new paradigm for Real-time Communication (RTC), where one peer is not a human, but a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). This makes interaction between humans and AI more intuitive, as if chatting face-to-face with a real person. However, this poses significant challenges to latency, because the MLLM inference takes up most of the response time, leaving very little time for video streaming. Due to network uncertainty and instability, transmission latency becomes a critical bottleneck preventing AI from being like a real person. To address this, we propose Artic, an AI-oriented Real-time Communication framework, exploring the network requirement shift from "humans watching video" to "AI understanding video". To reduce bitrate dramatically while maintaining MLLM accuracy, we propose Context-Aware Video Streaming that recognizes the importance of each video region for chat and allocates bitrate almost exclusively to chat-important regions. To avoid packet retransmission, we propose Loss-Resilient Adaptive Frame Rate that leverages previous frames to substitute for lost/delayed frames while avoiding bitrate waste. To evaluate the impact of video streaming quality on MLLM accuracy, we build the first benchmark, named Degraded Video Understanding Benchmark (DeViBench). Finally, we discuss some open questions and ongoing solutions for AI Video Chat.

  • 4 authors
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Jul 14 2

Q-MLLM: Vector Quantization for Robust Multimodal Large Language Model Security

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in cross-modal understanding, but remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks through visual inputs despite robust textual safety mechanisms. These vulnerabilities arise from two core weaknesses: the continuous nature of visual representations, which allows for gradient-based attacks, and the inadequate transfer of text-based safety mechanisms to visual content. We introduce Q-MLLM, a novel architecture that integrates two-level vector quantization to create a discrete bottleneck against adversarial attacks while preserving multimodal reasoning capabilities. By discretizing visual representations at both pixel-patch and semantic levels, Q-MLLM blocks attack pathways and bridges the cross-modal safety alignment gap. Our two-stage training methodology ensures robust learning while maintaining model utility. Experiments demonstrate that Q-MLLM achieves significantly better defense success rate against both jailbreak attacks and toxic image attacks than existing approaches. Notably, Q-MLLM achieves perfect defense success rate (100\%) against jailbreak attacks except in one arguable case, while maintaining competitive performance on multiple utility benchmarks with minimal inference overhead. This work establishes vector quantization as an effective defense mechanism for secure multimodal AI systems without requiring expensive safety-specific fine-tuning or detection overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/Amadeuszhao/QMLLM.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 20

Bridging the Gap in Ophthalmic AI: MM-Retinal-Reason Dataset and OphthaReason Model toward Dynamic Multimodal Reasoning

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities with reinforcement learning paradigm. Although several multimodal reasoning models have been explored in the medical domain, most of them focus exclusively on basic reasoning, which refers to shallow inference based on visual feature matching. However, real-world clinical diagnosis extends beyond basic reasoning, demanding reasoning processes that integrate heterogeneous clinical information (such as chief complaints and medical history) with multimodal medical imaging data. To bridge this gap, we introduce MM-Retinal-Reason, the first ophthalmic multimodal dataset with the full spectrum of perception and reasoning. It encompasses both basic reasoning tasks and complex reasoning tasks, aiming to enhance visual-centric fundamental reasoning capabilities and emulate realistic clinical thinking patterns. Building upon MM-Retinal-Reason, we propose OphthaReason, the first ophthalmology-specific multimodal reasoning model with step-by-step reasoning traces. To enable flexible adaptation to both basic and complex reasoning tasks, we specifically design a novel method called Uncertainty-Aware Dynamic Thinking (UADT), which estimates sample-level uncertainty via entropy and dynamically modulates the model's exploration depth using a shaped advantage mechanism. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both basic and complex reasoning tasks, outperforming general-purpose MLLMs, medical MLLMs, RL-based medical MLLMs, and ophthalmic MLLMs by at least 24.92\%, 15.00\%, 21.20\%, and 17.66\%. Project Page: https://github.com/lxirich/OphthaReason{link}.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 22

MediConfusion: Can you trust your AI radiologist? Probing the reliability of multimodal medical foundation models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have tremendous potential to improve the accuracy, availability, and cost-effectiveness of healthcare by providing automated solutions or serving as aids to medical professionals. Despite promising first steps in developing medical MLLMs in the past few years, their capabilities and limitations are not well-understood. Recently, many benchmark datasets have been proposed that test the general medical knowledge of such models across a variety of medical areas. However, the systematic failure modes and vulnerabilities of such models are severely underexplored with most medical benchmarks failing to expose the shortcomings of existing models in this safety-critical domain. In this paper, we introduce MediConfusion, a challenging medical Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark dataset, that probes the failure modes of medical MLLMs from a vision perspective. We reveal that state-of-the-art models are easily confused by image pairs that are otherwise visually dissimilar and clearly distinct for medical experts. Strikingly, all available models (open-source or proprietary) achieve performance below random guessing on MediConfusion, raising serious concerns about the reliability of existing medical MLLMs for healthcare deployment. We also extract common patterns of model failure that may help the design of a new generation of more trustworthy and reliable MLLMs in healthcare.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 23, 2024

PathAsst: A Generative Foundation AI Assistant Towards Artificial General Intelligence of Pathology

As advances in large language models (LLMs) and multimodal techniques continue to mature, the development of general-purpose multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has surged, offering significant applications in interpreting natural images. However, the field of pathology has largely remained untapped, particularly in gathering high-quality data and designing comprehensive model frameworks. To bridge the gap in pathology MLLMs, we present PathAsst, a multimodal generative foundation AI assistant to revolutionize diagnostic and predictive analytics in pathology. The development of PathAsst involves three pivotal steps: data acquisition, CLIP model adaptation, and the training of PathAsst's multimodal generative capabilities. Firstly, we collect over 207K high-quality pathology image-text pairs from authoritative sources. Leveraging the advanced power of ChatGPT, we generate over 180K instruction-following samples. Furthermore, we devise additional instruction-following data specifically tailored for invoking eight pathology-specific sub-models we prepared, allowing the PathAsst to effectively collaborate with these models, enhancing its diagnostic ability. Secondly, by leveraging the collected data, we construct PathCLIP, a pathology-dedicated CLIP, to enhance PathAsst's capabilities in interpreting pathology images. Finally, we integrate PathCLIP with the Vicuna-13b and utilize pathology-specific instruction-tuning data to enhance the multimodal generation capacity of PathAsst and bolster its synergistic interactions with sub-models. The experimental results of PathAsst show the potential of harnessing AI-powered generative foundation model to improve pathology diagnosis and treatment processes.

  • 9 authors
·
May 24, 2023

Towards Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment: A Systematic Review for Clarifications, Framework, and Future Directions

Recent advancements in general-purpose AI have highlighted the importance of guiding AI systems towards the intended goals, ethical principles, and values of individuals and groups, a concept broadly recognized as alignment. However, the lack of clarified definitions and scopes of human-AI alignment poses a significant obstacle, hampering collaborative efforts across research domains to achieve this alignment. In particular, ML- and philosophy-oriented alignment research often views AI alignment as a static, unidirectional process (i.e., aiming to ensure that AI systems' objectives match humans) rather than an ongoing, mutual alignment problem [429]. This perspective largely neglects the long-term interaction and dynamic changes of alignment. To understand these gaps, we introduce a systematic review of over 400 papers published between 2019 and January 2024, spanning multiple domains such as Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and others. We characterize, define and scope human-AI alignment. From this, we present a conceptual framework of "Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment" to organize the literature from a human-centered perspective. This framework encompasses both 1) conventional studies of aligning AI to humans that ensures AI produces the intended outcomes determined by humans, and 2) a proposed concept of aligning humans to AI, which aims to help individuals and society adjust to AI advancements both cognitively and behaviorally. Additionally, we articulate the key findings derived from literature analysis, including discussions about human values, interaction techniques, and evaluations. To pave the way for future studies, we envision three key challenges for future directions and propose examples of potential future solutions.

  • 24 authors
·
Jun 13, 2024

RE-Bench: Evaluating frontier AI R&D capabilities of language model agents against human experts

Frontier AI safety policies highlight automation of AI research and development (R&D) by AI agents as an important capability to anticipate. However, there exist few evaluations for AI R&D capabilities, and none that are highly realistic and have a direct comparison to human performance. We introduce RE-Bench (Research Engineering Benchmark, v1), which consists of 7 challenging, open-ended ML research engineering environments and data from 71 8-hour attempts by 61 distinct human experts. We confirm that our experts make progress in the environments given 8 hours, with 82% of expert attempts achieving a non-zero score and 24% matching or exceeding our strong reference solutions. We compare humans to several public frontier models through best-of-k with varying time budgets and agent designs, and find that the best AI agents achieve a score 4x higher than human experts when both are given a total time budget of 2 hours per environment. However, humans currently display better returns to increasing time budgets, narrowly exceeding the top AI agent scores given an 8-hour budget, and achieving 2x the score of the top AI agent when both are given 32 total hours (across different attempts). Qualitatively, we find that modern AI agents possess significant expertise in many ML topics -- e.g. an agent wrote a faster custom Triton kernel than any of our human experts' -- and can generate and test solutions over ten times faster than humans, at much lower cost. We open-source the evaluation environments, human expert data, analysis code and agent trajectories to facilitate future research.

  • 22 authors
·
Nov 22, 2024

Towards Trustworthy Machine Learning in Production: An Overview of the Robustness in MLOps Approach

Artificial intelligence (AI), and especially its sub-field of Machine Learning (ML), are impacting the daily lives of everyone with their ubiquitous applications. In recent years, AI researchers and practitioners have introduced principles and guidelines to build systems that make reliable and trustworthy decisions. From a practical perspective, conventional ML systems process historical data to extract the features that are consequently used to train ML models that perform the desired task. However, in practice, a fundamental challenge arises when the system needs to be operationalized and deployed to evolve and operate in real-life environments continuously. To address this challenge, Machine Learning Operations (MLOps) have emerged as a potential recipe for standardizing ML solutions in deployment. Although MLOps demonstrated great success in streamlining ML processes, thoroughly defining the specifications of robust MLOps approaches remains of great interest to researchers and practitioners. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the trustworthiness property of MLOps systems. Specifically, we highlight technical practices to achieve robust MLOps systems. In addition, we survey the existing research approaches that address the robustness aspects of ML systems in production. We also review the tools and software available to build MLOps systems and summarize their support to handle the robustness aspects. Finally, we present the open challenges and propose possible future directions and opportunities within this emerging field. The aim of this paper is to provide researchers and practitioners working on practical AI applications with a comprehensive view to adopt robust ML solutions in production environments.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 28, 2024

VidEgoThink: Assessing Egocentric Video Understanding Capabilities for Embodied AI

Recent advancements in Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have opened new avenues for applications in Embodied AI. Building on previous work, EgoThink, we introduce VidEgoThink, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating egocentric video understanding capabilities. To bridge the gap between MLLMs and low-level control in Embodied AI, we design four key interrelated tasks: video question-answering, hierarchy planning, visual grounding and reward modeling. To minimize manual annotation costs, we develop an automatic data generation pipeline based on the Ego4D dataset, leveraging the prior knowledge and multimodal capabilities of GPT-4o. Three human annotators then filter the generated data to ensure diversity and quality, resulting in the VidEgoThink benchmark. We conduct extensive experiments with three types of models: API-based MLLMs, open-source image-based MLLMs, and open-source video-based MLLMs. Experimental results indicate that all MLLMs, including GPT-4o, perform poorly across all tasks related to egocentric video understanding. These findings suggest that foundation models still require significant advancements to be effectively applied to first-person scenarios in Embodied AI. In conclusion, VidEgoThink reflects a research trend towards employing MLLMs for egocentric vision, akin to human capabilities, enabling active observation and interaction in the complex real-world environments.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 15, 2024 3

MLLM-as-a-Judge for Image Safety without Human Labeling

Image content safety has become a significant challenge with the rise of visual media on online platforms. Meanwhile, in the age of AI-generated content (AIGC), many image generation models are capable of producing harmful content, such as images containing sexual or violent material. Thus, it becomes crucial to identify such unsafe images based on established safety rules. Pre-trained Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer potential in this regard, given their strong pattern recognition abilities. Existing approaches typically fine-tune MLLMs with human-labeled datasets, which however brings a series of drawbacks. First, relying on human annotators to label data following intricate and detailed guidelines is both expensive and labor-intensive. Furthermore, users of safety judgment systems may need to frequently update safety rules, making fine-tuning on human-based annotation more challenging. This raises the research question: Can we detect unsafe images by querying MLLMs in a zero-shot setting using a predefined safety constitution (a set of safety rules)? Our research showed that simply querying pre-trained MLLMs does not yield satisfactory results. This lack of effectiveness stems from factors such as the subjectivity of safety rules, the complexity of lengthy constitutions, and the inherent biases in the models. To address these challenges, we propose a MLLM-based method includes objectifying safety rules, assessing the relevance between rules and images, making quick judgments based on debiased token probabilities with logically complete yet simplified precondition chains for safety rules, and conducting more in-depth reasoning with cascaded chain-of-thought processes if necessary. Experiment results demonstrate that our method is highly effective for zero-shot image safety judgment tasks.

  • 15 authors
·
Dec 30, 2024 2

AIGI-Holmes: Towards Explainable and Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection via Multimodal Large Language Models

The rapid development of AI-generated content (AIGC) technology has led to the misuse of highly realistic AI-generated images (AIGI) in spreading misinformation, posing a threat to public information security. Although existing AIGI detection techniques are generally effective, they face two issues: 1) a lack of human-verifiable explanations, and 2) a lack of generalization in the latest generation technology. To address these issues, we introduce a large-scale and comprehensive dataset, Holmes-Set, which includes the Holmes-SFTSet, an instruction-tuning dataset with explanations on whether images are AI-generated, and the Holmes-DPOSet, a human-aligned preference dataset. Our work introduces an efficient data annotation method called the Multi-Expert Jury, enhancing data generation through structured MLLM explanations and quality control via cross-model evaluation, expert defect filtering, and human preference modification. In addition, we propose Holmes Pipeline, a meticulously designed three-stage training framework comprising visual expert pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and direct preference optimization. Holmes Pipeline adapts multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for AIGI detection while generating human-verifiable and human-aligned explanations, ultimately yielding our model AIGI-Holmes. During the inference stage, we introduce a collaborative decoding strategy that integrates the model perception of the visual expert with the semantic reasoning of MLLMs, further enhancing the generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks validate the effectiveness of our AIGI-Holmes.

  • 10 authors
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Jul 3

Draw-and-Understand: Leveraging Visual Prompts to Enable MLLMs to Comprehend What You Want

The interaction between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) is a crucial factor that reflects the effectiveness of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, current MLLMs primarily focus on image-level comprehension and limit interaction to textual instructions, thereby constraining their flexibility in usage and depth of response. In this paper, we introduce the Draw-and-Understand project: a new model, a multi-domain dataset, and a challenging benchmark for visual prompting. Specifically, we propose SPHINX-V, a new end-to-end trained Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that connects a vision encoder, a visual prompt encoder and an LLM for various visual prompts (points, bounding boxes, and free-form shape) and language understanding. To advance visual prompting research for MLLMs, we introduce MDVP-Data and MDVP-Bench. MDVP-Data features a multi-domain dataset containing 1.6M unique image-visual prompt-text instruction-following samples, including natural images, document images, OCR images, mobile screenshots, web screenshots, and multi-panel images. Furthermore, we present MDVP-Bench, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark to assess a model's capability in understanding visual prompting instructions. Our experiments demonstrate SPHINX-V's impressive multimodal interaction capabilities through visual prompting, revealing significant improvements in detailed pixel-level description and question-answering abilities.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 29, 2024

GeoRef: Referring Expressions in Geometry via Task Formulation, Synthetic Supervision, and Reinforced MLLM-based Solutions

AI-driven geometric problem solving is a complex vision-language task that requires accurate diagram interpretation, mathematical reasoning, and robust cross-modal grounding. A foundational yet underexplored capability for this task is the ability to identify and interpret geometric elements based on natural language queries. To address this, we introduce the task of Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) for geometric problems, which evaluates whether models can localize points, shapes, and spatial relations in diagrams in response to textual prompts. We present GeoRef, a benchmark dataset constructed from existing geometric problem corpora, featuring diverse, high-quality annotations and queries. Due to the lack of annotated data for this task, we generate a large-scale synthetic training dataset using a structured geometric formal language, enabling broad coverage of geometric concepts and facilitating model adaptation. We explore two fine-tuning approaches: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Our results show that GRPO significantly outperforms SFT by better aligning model behavior with task-specific rewards. Furthermore, we propose a verify-and-regenerate mechanism that detects incorrect predictions and re-infers answers using contextual reasoning history, further boosting accuracy. Notably, even state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with this task, underscoring the necessity of explicitly evaluating and strengthening geometric grounding as a prerequisite for robust geometric problem solving. Moreover, models trained on GeoRef demonstrate measurable improvements on downstream geometric reasoning tasks, highlighting the broader value of REC as a foundation for multimodal mathematical understanding.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 25

Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity

Despite widespread adoption, the impact of AI tools on software development in the wild remains understudied. We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how AI tools at the February-June 2025 frontier affect the productivity of experienced open-source developers. 16 developers with moderate AI experience complete 246 tasks in mature projects on which they have an average of 5 years of prior experience. Each task is randomly assigned to allow or disallow usage of early 2025 AI tools. When AI tools are allowed, developers primarily use Cursor Pro, a popular code editor, and Claude 3.5/3.7 Sonnet. Before starting tasks, developers forecast that allowing AI will reduce completion time by 24%. After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20%. Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19%--AI tooling slowed developers down. This slowdown also contradicts predictions from experts in economics (39% shorter) and ML (38% shorter). To understand this result, we collect and evaluate evidence for 20 properties of our setting that a priori could contribute to the observed slowdown effect--for example, the size and quality standards of projects, or prior developer experience with AI tooling. Although the influence of experimental artifacts cannot be entirely ruled out, the robustness of the slowdown effect across our analyses suggests it is unlikely to primarily be a function of our experimental design.

  • 4 authors
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Jul 11

Insights into DeepSeek-V3: Scaling Challenges and Reflections on Hardware for AI Architectures

The rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs) has unveiled critical limitations in current hardware architectures, including constraints in memory capacity, computational efficiency, and interconnection bandwidth. DeepSeek-V3, trained on 2,048 NVIDIA H800 GPUs, demonstrates how hardware-aware model co-design can effectively address these challenges, enabling cost-efficient training and inference at scale. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the DeepSeek-V3/R1 model architecture and its AI infrastructure, highlighting key innovations such as Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) for enhanced memory efficiency, Mixture of Experts (MoE) architectures for optimized computation-communication trade-offs, FP8 mixed-precision training to unlock the full potential of hardware capabilities, and a Multi-Plane Network Topology to minimize cluster-level network overhead. Building on the hardware bottlenecks encountered during DeepSeek-V3's development, we engage in a broader discussion with academic and industry peers on potential future hardware directions, including precise low-precision computation units, scale-up and scale-out convergence, and innovations in low-latency communication fabrics. These insights underscore the critical role of hardware and model co-design in meeting the escalating demands of AI workloads, offering a practical blueprint for innovation in next-generation AI systems.

deepseek-ai DeepSeek
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May 14 5

MLRC-Bench: Can Language Agents Solve Machine Learning Research Challenges?

Existing evaluation of large language model (LLM) agents on scientific discovery lacks objective baselines and metrics to assess the viability of their proposed methods. To address this issue, we introduce MLRC-Bench, a benchmark designed to quantify how effectively language agents can tackle challenging Machine Learning (ML) Research Competitions. Our benchmark highlights open research problems that demand novel methodologies, in contrast to recent benchmarks such as OpenAI's MLE-Bench (Chan et al., 2024) and METR's RE-Bench (Wijk et al., 2024), which focus on well-established research tasks that are largely solvable through sufficient engineering effort. Unlike prior work, e.g., AI Scientist (Lu et al., 2024b), which evaluates the end-to-end agentic pipeline by using LLM-as-a-judge, MLRC-Bench measures the key steps of proposing and implementing novel research methods and evaluates them with newly proposed rigorous protocol and objective metrics. Our curated suite of 7 competition tasks reveals significant challenges for LLM agents. Even the best-performing tested agent (gemini-exp-1206 under MLAB (Huang et al., 2024a)) closes only 9.3% of the gap between baseline and top human participant scores. Furthermore, our analysis reveals a misalignment between the LLM-judged innovation and their actual performance on cutting-edge ML research problems. MLRC-Bench is a dynamic benchmark, which is designed to continually grow with new ML competitions to encourage rigorous and objective evaluations of AI's research capabilities.

  • 9 authors
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Apr 13 2

HumanSense: From Multimodal Perception to Empathetic Context-Aware Responses through Reasoning MLLMs

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show immense promise for achieving truly human-like interactions, progress is hindered by the lack of fine-grained evaluation frameworks for human-centered scenarios, encompassing both the understanding of complex human intentions and the provision of empathetic, context-aware responses. Here we introduce HumanSense, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the human-centered perception and interaction capabilities of MLLMs, with a particular focus on deep understanding of extended multimodal contexts and the formulation of rational feedback. Our evaluation reveals that leading MLLMs still have considerable room for improvement, particularly for advanced interaction-oriented tasks. Supplementing visual input with audio and text information yields substantial improvements, and Omni-modal models show advantages on these tasks. Furthermore, we argue that appropriate feedback stems from a contextual analysis of the interlocutor's needs and emotions, with reasoning ability serving as the key to unlocking it. Accordingly, we employ a multi-stage, modality-progressive reinforcement learning to enhance the reasoning abilities of an Omni model, achieving substantial gains on evaluation results. Additionally, we observe that successful reasoning processes exhibit highly consistent thought patterns. By designing corresponding prompts, we also enhance the performance of non-reasoning models in a training-free manner. Project page: brightpinkhttps://digital-avatar.github.io/ai/HumanSense/

  • 7 authors
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Aug 14 2

MedQ-Bench: Evaluating and Exploring Medical Image Quality Assessment Abilities in MLLMs

Medical Image Quality Assessment (IQA) serves as the first-mile safety gate for clinical AI, yet existing approaches remain constrained by scalar, score-based metrics and fail to reflect the descriptive, human-like reasoning process central to expert evaluation. To address this gap, we introduce MedQ-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark that establishes a perception-reasoning paradigm for language-based evaluation of medical image quality with Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). MedQ-Bench defines two complementary tasks: (1) MedQ-Perception, which probes low-level perceptual capability via human-curated questions on fundamental visual attributes; and (2) MedQ-Reasoning, encompassing both no-reference and comparison reasoning tasks, aligning model evaluation with human-like reasoning on image quality. The benchmark spans five imaging modalities and over forty quality attributes, totaling 2,600 perceptual queries and 708 reasoning assessments, covering diverse image sources including authentic clinical acquisitions, images with simulated degradations via physics-based reconstructions, and AI-generated images. To evaluate reasoning ability, we propose a multi-dimensional judging protocol that assesses model outputs along four complementary axes. We further conduct rigorous human-AI alignment validation by comparing LLM-based judgement with radiologists. Our evaluation of 14 state-of-the-art MLLMs demonstrates that models exhibit preliminary but unstable perceptual and reasoning skills, with insufficient accuracy for reliable clinical use. These findings highlight the need for targeted optimization of MLLMs in medical IQA. We hope that MedQ-Bench will catalyze further exploration and unlock the untapped potential of MLLMs for medical image quality evaluation.

Embodied AI: From LLMs to World Models

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an intelligent system paradigm for achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), serving as the cornerstone for various applications and driving the evolution from cyberspace to physical systems. Recent breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLMs) and World Models (WMs) have drawn significant attention for embodied AI. On the one hand, LLMs empower embodied AI via semantic reasoning and task decomposition, bringing high-level natural language instructions and low-level natural language actions into embodied cognition. On the other hand, WMs empower embodied AI by building internal representations and future predictions of the external world, facilitating physical law-compliant embodied interactions. As such, this paper comprehensively explores the literature in embodied AI from basics to advances, covering both LLM driven and WM driven works. In particular, we first present the history, key technologies, key components, and hardware systems of embodied AI, as well as discuss its development via looking from unimodal to multimodal angle. We then scrutinize the two burgeoning fields of embodied AI, i.e., embodied AI with LLMs/multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) and embodied AI with WMs, meticulously delineating their indispensable roles in end-to-end embodied cognition and physical laws-driven embodied interactions. Building upon the above advances, we further share our insights on the necessity of the joint MLLM-WM driven embodied AI architecture, shedding light on its profound significance in enabling complex tasks within physical worlds. In addition, we examine representative applications of embodied AI, demonstrating its wide applicability in real-world scenarios. Last but not least, we point out future research directions of embodied AI that deserve further investigation.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 24

Navigating Dataset Documentations in AI: A Large-Scale Analysis of Dataset Cards on Hugging Face

Advances in machine learning are closely tied to the creation of datasets. While data documentation is widely recognized as essential to the reliability, reproducibility, and transparency of ML, we lack a systematic empirical understanding of current dataset documentation practices. To shed light on this question, here we take Hugging Face -- one of the largest platforms for sharing and collaborating on ML models and datasets -- as a prominent case study. By analyzing all 7,433 dataset documentation on Hugging Face, our investigation provides an overview of the Hugging Face dataset ecosystem and insights into dataset documentation practices, yielding 5 main findings: (1) The dataset card completion rate shows marked heterogeneity correlated with dataset popularity. (2) A granular examination of each section within the dataset card reveals that the practitioners seem to prioritize Dataset Description and Dataset Structure sections, while the Considerations for Using the Data section receives the lowest proportion of content. (3) By analyzing the subsections within each section and utilizing topic modeling to identify key topics, we uncover what is discussed in each section, and underscore significant themes encompassing both technical and social impacts, as well as limitations within the Considerations for Using the Data section. (4) Our findings also highlight the need for improved accessibility and reproducibility of datasets in the Usage sections. (5) In addition, our human annotation evaluation emphasizes the pivotal role of comprehensive dataset content in shaping individuals' perceptions of a dataset card's overall quality. Overall, our study offers a unique perspective on analyzing dataset documentation through large-scale data science analysis and underlines the need for more thorough dataset documentation in machine learning research.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 24, 2024

Data Cards: Purposeful and Transparent Dataset Documentation for Responsible AI

As research and industry moves towards large-scale models capable of numerous downstream tasks, the complexity of understanding multi-modal datasets that give nuance to models rapidly increases. A clear and thorough understanding of a dataset's origins, development, intent, ethical considerations and evolution becomes a necessary step for the responsible and informed deployment of models, especially those in people-facing contexts and high-risk domains. However, the burden of this understanding often falls on the intelligibility, conciseness, and comprehensiveness of the documentation. It requires consistency and comparability across the documentation of all datasets involved, and as such documentation must be treated as a user-centric product in and of itself. In this paper, we propose Data Cards for fostering transparent, purposeful and human-centered documentation of datasets within the practical contexts of industry and research. Data Cards are structured summaries of essential facts about various aspects of ML datasets needed by stakeholders across a dataset's lifecycle for responsible AI development. These summaries provide explanations of processes and rationales that shape the data and consequently the models, such as upstream sources, data collection and annotation methods; training and evaluation methods, intended use; or decisions affecting model performance. We also present frameworks that ground Data Cards in real-world utility and human-centricity. Using two case studies, we report on desirable characteristics that support adoption across domains, organizational structures, and audience groups. Finally, we present lessons learned from deploying over 20 Data Cards.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 3, 2022

Feedback-Based Self-Learning in Large-Scale Conversational AI Agents

Today, most large-scale conversational AI agents (e.g. Alexa, Siri, or Google Assistant) are built using manually annotated data to train the different components of the system. Typically, the accuracy of the ML models in these components are improved by manually transcribing and annotating data. As the scope of these systems increase to cover more scenarios and domains, manual annotation to improve the accuracy of these components becomes prohibitively costly and time consuming. In this paper, we propose a system that leverages user-system interaction feedback signals to automate learning without any manual annotation. Users here tend to modify a previous query in hopes of fixing an error in the previous turn to get the right results. These reformulations, which are often preceded by defective experiences caused by errors in ASR, NLU, ER or the application. In some cases, users may not properly formulate their requests (e.g. providing partial title of a song), but gleaning across a wider pool of users and sessions reveals the underlying recurrent patterns. Our proposed self-learning system automatically detects the errors, generate reformulations and deploys fixes to the runtime system to correct different types of errors occurring in different components of the system. In particular, we propose leveraging an absorbing Markov Chain model as a collaborative filtering mechanism in a novel attempt to mine these patterns. We show that our approach is highly scalable, and able to learn reformulations that reduce Alexa-user errors by pooling anonymized data across millions of customers. The proposed self-learning system achieves a win/loss ratio of 11.8 and effectively reduces the defect rate by more than 30% on utterance level reformulations in our production A/B tests. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first self-learning large-scale conversational AI system in production.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 6, 2019

MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone

The recent surge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has fundamentally reshaped the landscape of AI research and industry, shedding light on a promising path toward the next AI milestone. However, significant challenges remain preventing MLLMs from being practical in real-world applications. The most notable challenge comes from the huge cost of running an MLLM with a massive number of parameters and extensive computation. As a result, most MLLMs need to be deployed on high-performing cloud servers, which greatly limits their application scopes such as mobile, offline, energy-sensitive, and privacy-protective scenarios. In this work, we present MiniCPM-V, a series of efficient MLLMs deployable on end-side devices. By integrating the latest MLLM techniques in architecture, pretraining and alignment, the latest MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5 has several notable features: (1) Strong performance, outperforming GPT-4V-1106, Gemini Pro and Claude 3 on OpenCompass, a comprehensive evaluation over 11 popular benchmarks, (2) strong OCR capability and 1.8M pixel high-resolution image perception at any aspect ratio, (3) trustworthy behavior with low hallucination rates, (4) multilingual support for 30+ languages, and (5) efficient deployment on mobile phones. More importantly, MiniCPM-V can be viewed as a representative example of a promising trend: The model sizes for achieving usable (e.g., GPT-4V) level performance are rapidly decreasing, along with the fast growth of end-side computation capacity. This jointly shows that GPT-4V level MLLMs deployed on end devices are becoming increasingly possible, unlocking a wider spectrum of real-world AI applications in the near future.

  • 23 authors
·
Aug 3, 2024 7

The Future of MLLM Prompting is Adaptive: A Comprehensive Experimental Evaluation of Prompt Engineering Methods for Robust Multimodal Performance

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are set to transform how machines process and generate human-like responses by integrating diverse modalities such as text, images, and code. Yet, effectively harnessing their capabilities hinges on optimal prompt engineering. We present a comprehensive experimental evaluation of seven prompt engineering methods applied to 13 open-source MLLMs over 24 tasks spanning Reasoning and Compositionality, Multimodal Understanding and Alignment, Complex Code Generation and Execution, and Knowledge Retrieval and Integration. Our approach stratifies models by parameter count into Small (<4B), Medium (4B-10B), and Large (>10B) categories and compares prompting techniques including Zero-Shot, One-Shot, Few-Shot, Chain-of-Thought, Analogical, Generated Knowledge, and Tree-of-Thought. While Large MLLMs excel in structured tasks such as code generation, achieving accuracies up to 96.88% under Few-Shot prompting, all models struggle with complex reasoning and abstract understanding, often yielding accuracies below 60% and high hallucination rates. Structured reasoning prompts frequently increased hallucination up to 75% in small models and led to longer response times (over 20 seconds in Large MLLMs), while simpler prompting methods provided more concise and efficient outputs. No single prompting method uniformly optimises all task types. Instead, adaptive strategies combining example-based guidance with selective structured reasoning are essential to enhance robustness, efficiency, and factual accuracy. Our findings offer practical recommendations for prompt engineering and support more reliable deployment of MLLMs across applications including AI-assisted coding, knowledge retrieval, and multimodal content understanding.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 14 1

Multi-Modal Generative AI: Multi-modal LLM, Diffusion and Beyond

Multi-modal generative AI has received increasing attention in both academia and industry. Particularly, two dominant families of techniques are: i) The multi-modal large language model (MLLM) such as GPT-4V, which shows impressive ability for multi-modal understanding; ii) The diffusion model such as Sora, which exhibits remarkable multi-modal powers, especially with respect to visual generation. As such, one natural question arises: Is it possible to have a unified model for both understanding and generation? To answer this question, in this paper, we first provide a detailed review of both MLLM and diffusion models, including their probabilistic modeling procedure, multi-modal architecture design, and advanced applications to image/video large language models as well as text-to-image/video generation. Then, we discuss the two important questions on the unified model: i) whether the unified model should adopt the auto-regressive or diffusion probabilistic modeling, and ii) whether the model should utilize a dense architecture or the Mixture of Experts(MoE) architectures to better support generation and understanding, two objectives. We further provide several possible strategies for building a unified model and analyze their potential advantages and disadvantages. We also summarize existing large-scale multi-modal datasets for better model pretraining in the future. To conclude the paper, we present several challenging future directions, which we believe can contribute to the ongoing advancement of multi-modal generative AI.

  • 10 authors
·
Sep 23, 2024

Multiscale Positive-Unlabeled Detection of AI-Generated Texts

Recent releases of Large Language Models (LLMs), e.g. ChatGPT, are astonishing at generating human-like texts, but they may impact the authenticity of texts. Previous works proposed methods to detect these AI-generated texts, including simple ML classifiers, pretrained-model-based zero-shot methods, and finetuned language classification models. However, mainstream detectors always fail on short texts, like SMSes, Tweets, and reviews. In this paper, a Multiscale Positive-Unlabeled (MPU) training framework is proposed to address the difficulty of short-text detection without sacrificing long-texts. Firstly, we acknowledge the human-resemblance property of short machine texts, and rephrase AI text detection as a partial Positive-Unlabeled (PU) problem by regarding these short machine texts as partially "unlabeled". Then in this PU context, we propose the length-sensitive Multiscale PU Loss, where a recurrent model in abstraction is used to estimate positive priors of scale-variant corpora. Additionally, we introduce a Text Multiscaling module to enrich training corpora. Experiments show that our MPU method augments detection performance on long AI-generated texts, and significantly improves short-text detection of language model detectors. Language Models trained with MPU could outcompete existing detectors on various short-text and long-text detection benchmarks. The codes are available at https://github.com/mindspore-lab/mindone/tree/master/examples/detect_chatgpt and https://github.com/YuchuanTian/AIGC_text_detector.

  • 8 authors
·
May 29, 2023 1

PhysToolBench: Benchmarking Physical Tool Understanding for MLLMs

The ability to use, understand, and create tools is a hallmark of human intelligence, enabling sophisticated interaction with the physical world. For any general-purpose intelligent agent to achieve true versatility, it must also master these fundamental skills. While modern Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) leverage their extensive common knowledge for high-level planning in embodied AI and in downstream Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, the extent of their true understanding of physical tools remains unquantified. To bridge this gap, we present PhysToolBench, the first benchmark dedicated to evaluating the comprehension of physical tools by MLLMs. Our benchmark is structured as a Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset comprising over 1,000 image-text pairs. It assesses capabilities across three distinct difficulty levels: (1) Tool Recognition: Requiring the recognition of a tool's primary function. (2) Tool Understanding: Testing the ability to grasp the underlying principles of a tool's operation. (3) Tool Creation: Challenging the model to fashion a new tool from surrounding objects when conventional options are unavailable. Our comprehensive evaluation of 32 MLLMs-spanning proprietary, open-source, specialized embodied, and backbones in VLAs-reveals a significant deficiency in tool understanding. Furthermore, we provide an in-depth analysis and propose preliminary solutions. Code and dataset are publicly available.

  • 9 authors
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Oct 10 2

Efficient and Scalable Agentic AI with Heterogeneous Systems

AI agents are emerging as a dominant workload in a wide range of applications, promising to be the vehicle that delivers the promised benefits of AI to enterprises and consumers. Unlike conventional software or static inference, agentic workloads are dynamic and structurally complex. Often these agents are directed graphs of compute and IO operations that span multi-modal data input and conversion), data processing and context gathering (e.g vector DB lookups), multiple LLM inferences, tool calls, etc. To scale AI agent usage, we need efficient and scalable deployment and agent-serving infrastructure. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we present a system design for dynamic orchestration of AI agent workloads on heterogeneous compute infrastructure spanning CPUs and accelerators, both from different vendors and across different performance tiers within a single vendor. The system delivers several building blocks: a framework for planning and optimizing agentic AI execution graphs using cost models that account for compute, memory, and bandwidth constraints of different HW; a MLIR based representation and compilation system that can decompose AI agent execution graphs into granular operators and generate code for different HW options; and a dynamic orchestration system that can place the granular components across a heterogeneous compute infrastructure and stitch them together while meeting an end-to-end SLA. Our design performs a systems level TCO optimization and preliminary results show that leveraging a heterogeneous infrastructure can deliver significant TCO benefits. A preliminary surprising finding is that for some workloads a heterogeneous combination of older generation GPUs with newer accelerators can deliver similar TCO as the latest generation homogenous GPU infrastructure design, potentially extending the life of deployed infrastructure.

  • 3 authors
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Jul 25

PEACE: Empowering Geologic Map Holistic Understanding with MLLMs

Geologic map, as a fundamental diagram in geology science, provides critical insights into the structure and composition of Earth's subsurface and surface. These maps are indispensable in various fields, including disaster detection, resource exploration, and civil engineering. Despite their significance, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often fall short in geologic map understanding. This gap is primarily due to the challenging nature of cartographic generalization, which involves handling high-resolution map, managing multiple associated components, and requiring domain-specific knowledge. To quantify this gap, we construct GeoMap-Bench, the first-ever benchmark for evaluating MLLMs in geologic map understanding, which assesses the full-scale abilities in extracting, referring, grounding, reasoning, and analyzing. To bridge this gap, we introduce GeoMap-Agent, the inaugural agent designed for geologic map understanding, which features three modules: Hierarchical Information Extraction (HIE), Domain Knowledge Injection (DKI), and Prompt-enhanced Question Answering (PEQA). Inspired by the interdisciplinary collaboration among human scientists, an AI expert group acts as consultants, utilizing a diverse tool pool to comprehensively analyze questions. Through comprehensive experiments, GeoMap-Agent achieves an overall score of 0.811 on GeoMap-Bench, significantly outperforming 0.369 of GPT-4o. Our work, emPowering gEologic mAp holistiC undErstanding (PEACE) with MLLMs, paves the way for advanced AI applications in geology, enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of geological investigations.

  • 11 authors
·
Jan 10

Stronger Together: on the Articulation of Ethical Charters, Legal Tools, and Technical Documentation in ML

The growing need for accountability of the people behind AI systems can be addressed by leveraging processes in three fields of study: ethics, law, and computer science. While these fields are often considered in isolation, they rely on complementary notions in their interpretation and implementation. In this work, we detail this interdependence and motivate the necessary role of collaborative governance tools in shaping a positive evolution of AI. We first contrast notions of compliance in the ethical, legal, and technical fields; we outline both their differences and where they complement each other, with a particular focus on the roles of ethical charters, licenses, and technical documentation in these interactions. We then focus on the role of values in articulating the synergies between the fields and outline specific mechanisms of interaction between them in practice. We identify how these mechanisms have played out in several open governance fora: an open collaborative workshop, a responsible licensing initiative, and a proposed regulatory framework. By leveraging complementary notions of compliance in these three domains, we can create a more comprehensive framework for governing AI systems that jointly takes into account their technical capabilities, their impact on society, and how technical specifications can inform relevant regulations. Our analysis thus underlines the necessity of joint consideration of the ethical, legal, and technical in AI ethics frameworks to be used on a larger scale to govern AI systems and how the thinking in each of these areas can inform the others.

  • 4 authors
·
May 9, 2023

LibVulnWatch: A Deep Assessment Agent System and Leaderboard for Uncovering Hidden Vulnerabilities in Open-Source AI Libraries

Open-source AI libraries are foundational to modern AI systems but pose significant, underexamined risks across security, licensing, maintenance, supply chain integrity, and regulatory compliance. We present LibVulnWatch, a graph-based agentic assessment framework that performs deep, source-grounded evaluations of these libraries. Built on LangGraph, the system coordinates a directed acyclic graph of specialized agents to extract, verify, and quantify risk using evidence from trusted sources such as repositories, documentation, and vulnerability databases. LibVulnWatch generates reproducible, governance-aligned scores across five critical domains, publishing them to a public leaderboard for longitudinal ecosystem monitoring. Applied to 20 widely used libraries, including ML frameworks, LLM inference engines, and agent orchestration tools, our system covers up to 88% of OpenSSF Scorecard checks while uncovering up to 19 additional risks per library. These include critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities, absent Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs), licensing constraints, undocumented telemetry, and widespread gaps in regulatory documentation and auditability. By translating high-level governance principles into practical, verifiable metrics, LibVulnWatch advances technical AI governance with a scalable, transparent mechanism for continuous supply chain risk assessment and informed library selection.

  • 10 authors
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May 13

A Skull-Adaptive Framework for AI-Based 3D Transcranial Focused Ultrasound Simulation

Transcranial focused ultrasound (tFUS) is an emerging modality for non-invasive brain stimulation and therapeutic intervention, offering millimeter-scale spatial precision and the ability to target deep brain structures. However, the heterogeneous and anisotropic nature of the human skull introduces significant distortions to the propagating ultrasound wavefront, which require time-consuming patient-specific planning and corrections using numerical solvers for accurate targeting. To enable data-driven approaches in this domain, we introduce TFUScapes, the first large-scale, high-resolution dataset of tFUS simulations through anatomically realistic human skulls derived from T1-weighted MRI images. We have developed a scalable simulation engine pipeline using the k-Wave pseudo-spectral solver, where each simulation returns a steady-state pressure field generated by a focused ultrasound transducer placed at realistic scalp locations. In addition to the dataset, we present DeepTFUS, a deep learning model that estimates normalized pressure fields directly from input 3D CT volumes and transducer position. The model extends a U-Net backbone with transducer-aware conditioning, incorporating Fourier-encoded position embeddings and MLP layers to create global transducer embeddings. These embeddings are fused with U-Net encoder features via feature-wise modulation, dynamic convolutions, and cross-attention mechanisms. The model is trained using a combination of spatially weighted and gradient-sensitive loss functions, enabling it to approximate high-fidelity wavefields. The TFUScapes dataset is publicly released to accelerate research at the intersection of computational acoustics, neurotechnology, and deep learning. The project page is available at https://github.com/CAMMA-public/TFUScapes.

  • 6 authors
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May 19