arXiv subjects

Cheng Qian

Publications and source records attributed to Cheng Qian.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Aligning LLMs with Individual Preferences via Interaction

As large language models (LLMs) demonstrate increasingly advanced capabilities, aligning their behaviors with human values and preferences becomes crucial for their wide adoption. While previous research focuses on general alignment to principles such as helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty, the need to account for individual and diverse preferences has been largely overlooked, potentially undermining customized human experiences. To address this gap, we train LLMs that can ''interact to align'', essentially cultivating the meta-skill of LLMs to implicitly infer the unspoken personalized preferences of the current user through multi-turn conversations, and then dynamically align their following behaviors and responses to these inferred preferences. Our approach involves establishing a diverse pool of 3,310 distinct user personas by initially creating seed examples, which are then expanded through iterative self-generation and filtering. Guided by distinct user personas, we leverage multi-LLM collaboration to develop a multi-turn preference dataset containing 3K+ multi-turn conversations in tree structures. Finally, we apply supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to enhance LLMs using this dataset. For evaluation, we establish the ALOE (ALign With CustOmized PrEferences) benchmark, consisting of 100 carefully selected examples and well-designed metrics to measure the customized alignment performance during conversations. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in enabling dynamic, personalized alignment via interaction.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Proactive Agent: Shifting LLM Agents from Reactive Responses to Active Assistance

Agents powered by large language models have shown remarkable abilities in solving complex tasks. However, most agent systems remain reactive, limiting their effectiveness in scenarios requiring foresight and autonomous decision-making. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of developing proactive agents capable of anticipating and initiating tasks without explicit human instructions. We propose a novel data-driven approach for this problem. Firstly, we collect real-world human activities to generate proactive task predictions. These predictions are then labeled by human annotators as either accepted or rejected. The labeled data is used to train a reward model that simulates human judgment and serves as an automatic evaluator of the proactiveness of LLM agents. Building on this, we develop a comprehensive data generation pipeline to create a diverse dataset, ProactiveBench, containing 6,790 events. Finally, we demonstrate that fine-tuning models with the proposed ProactiveBench can significantly elicit the proactiveness of LLM agents. Experimental results show that our fine-tuned model achieves an F1-Score of 66.47% in proactively offering assistance, outperforming all open-source and close-source models. These results highlight the potential of our method in creating more proactive and effective agent systems, paving the way for future advancements in human-agent collaboration.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

FastAttention: Extend FlashAttention2 to NPUs and Low-resource GPUs

FlashAttention series has been widely applied in the inference of large language models (LLMs). However, FlashAttention series only supports the high-level GPU architectures, e.g., Ampere and Hopper. At present, FlashAttention series is not easily transferrable to NPUs and low-resource GPUs. Moreover, FlashAttention series is inefficient for multi- NPUs or GPUs inference scenarios. In this work, we propose FastAttention which pioneers the adaptation of FlashAttention series for NPUs and low-resource GPUs to boost LLM inference efficiency. Specifically, we take Ascend NPUs and Volta-based GPUs as representatives for designing our FastAttention. We migrate FlashAttention series to Ascend NPUs by proposing a novel two-level tiling strategy for runtime speedup, tiling-mask strategy for memory saving and the tiling-AllReduce strategy for reducing communication overhead, respectively. Besides, we adapt FlashAttention for Volta-based GPUs by redesigning the operands layout in shared memory and introducing a simple yet effective CPU-GPU cooperative strategy for efficient memory utilization. On Ascend NPUs, our FastAttention can achieve a 10.7$\times$ speedup compared to the standard attention implementation. Llama-7B within FastAttention reaches up to 5.16$\times$ higher throughput than within the standard attention. On Volta architecture GPUs, FastAttention yields 1.43$\times$ speedup compared to its equivalents in \texttt{xformers}. Pangu-38B within FastAttention brings 1.46$\times$ end-to-end speedup using FasterTransformer. Coupled with the propose CPU-GPU cooperative strategy, FastAttention supports a maximal input length of 256K on 8 V100 GPUs. All the codes will be made available soon.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Optimized Biomedical Question-Answering Services with LLM and Multi-BERT Integration

We present a refined approach to biomedical question-answering (QA) services by integrating large language models (LLMs) with Multi-BERT configurations. By enhancing the ability to process and prioritize vast amounts of complex biomedical data, this system aims to support healthcare professionals in delivering better patient outcomes and informed decision-making. Through innovative use of BERT and BioBERT models, combined with a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) layer, we enable more specialized and efficient responses to the growing demands of the healthcare sector. Our approach not only addresses the challenge of overfitting by freezing one BERT model while training another but also improves the overall adaptability of QA services. The use of extensive datasets, such as BioASQ and BioMRC, demonstrates the system's ability to synthesize critical information. This work highlights how advanced language models can make a tangible difference in healthcare, providing reliable and responsive tools for professionals to manage complex information, ultimately serving the broader goal of improved care and data-driven insights.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Experimental Quantum Byzantine Agreement on a Three-User Quantum Network with Integrated Photonics

Quantum communication networks are crucial for both secure communication and cryptographic networked tasks. Building quantum communication networks in a scalable and cost-effective way is essential for their widespread adoption, among which a stable and miniaturized high-quality quantum light source is a key component. Here, we establish a complete polarization entanglement-based fully connected network, which features an ultrabright integrated Bragg reflection waveguide quantum source, managed by an untrusted service provider, and a streamlined polarization analysis module, which requires only one single-photon detector for each end user. We perform a continuously working quantum entanglement distribution and create correlated bit strings between users. Within the framework of one-time universal hashing, we provide the first experimental implementation of source-independent quantum digital signatures using imperfect keys circumventing the necessity for private amplification. More importantly, we further beat the 1/3 fault-tolerance bound in Byzantine agreement, achieving unconditional security without relying on sophisticated techniques. Our results offer an affordable and practical route for addressing consensus challenges within the emerging quantum network landscape.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2024

Practical token pruning for foundation models in few-shot conversational virtual assistant systems

In an enterprise Virtual Assistant (VA) system, intent classification is the crucial component that determines how a user input is handled based on what the user wants. The VA system is expected to be a cost-efficient SaaS service with low training and inference time while achieving high accuracy even with a small number of training samples. We pretrain a transformer-based sentence embedding model with a contrastive learning objective and leverage the embedding of the model as features when training intent classification models. Our approach achieves the state-of-the-art results for few-shot scenarios and performs better than other commercial solutions on popular intent classification benchmarks. However, generating features via a transformer-based model increases the inference time, especially for longer user inputs, due to the quadratic runtime of the transformer's attention mechanism. On top of model distillation, we introduce a practical multi-task adaptation approach that configures dynamic token pruning without the need for task-specific training for intent classification. We demonstrate that this approach improves the inference speed of popular sentence transformer models without affecting model performance.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Tool Learning with Foundation Models

Humans possess an extraordinary ability to create and utilize tools, allowing them to overcome physical limitations and explore new frontiers. With the advent of foundation models, AI systems have the potential to be equally adept in tool use as humans. This paradigm, i.e., tool learning with foundation models, combines the strengths of specialized tools and foundation models to achieve enhanced accuracy, efficiency, and automation in problem-solving. Despite its immense potential, there is still a lack of a comprehensive understanding of key challenges, opportunities, and future endeavors in this field. To this end, we present a systematic investigation of tool learning in this paper. We first introduce the background of tool learning, including its cognitive origins, the paradigm shift of foundation models, and the complementary roles of tools and models. Then we recapitulate existing tool learning research into tool-augmented and tool-oriented learning. We formulate a general tool learning framework: starting from understanding the user instruction, models should learn to decompose a complex task into several subtasks, dynamically adjust their plan through reasoning, and effectively conquer each sub-task by selecting appropriate tools. We also discuss how to train models for improved tool-use capabilities and facilitate the generalization in tool learning. Considering the lack of a systematic tool learning evaluation in prior works, we experiment with 18 representative tools and show the potential of current foundation models in skillfully utilizing tools. Finally, we discuss several open problems that require further investigation for tool learning. In general, we hope this paper could inspire future research in integrating tools with foundation models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

PianoMime: Learning a Generalist, Dexterous Piano Player from Internet Demonstrations

In this work, we introduce PianoMime, a framework for training a piano-playing agent using internet demonstrations. The internet is a promising source of large-scale demonstrations for training our robot agents. In particular, for the case of piano-playing, Youtube is full of videos of professional pianists playing a wide myriad of songs. In our work, we leverage these demonstrations to learn a generalist piano-playing agent capable of playing any arbitrary song. Our framework is divided into three parts: a data preparation phase to extract the informative features from the Youtube videos, a policy learning phase to train song-specific expert policies from the demonstrations and a policy distillation phase to distil the policies into a single generalist agent. We explore different policy designs to represent the agent and evaluate the influence of the amount of training data on the generalization capability of the agent to novel songs not available in the dataset. We show that we are able to learn a policy with up to 56\% F1 score on unseen songs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

CREATOR: Tool Creation for Disentangling Abstract and Concrete Reasoning of Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in utilizing tools, but their ability is limited by API availability and the instability of implicit reasoning, particularly when both planning and execution are involved. To overcome these limitations, we propose CREATOR, a novel framework that enables LLMs to create their own tools using documentation and code realization. CREATOR disentangles abstract tool creation and concrete decision execution, resulting in improved performance. We evaluate CREATOR on MATH and TabMWP benchmarks, respectively consisting of challenging math competition problems and diverse tabular contents. Remarkably, CREATOR outperforms existing chain-of-thought, program-of-thought, and tool-using baselines. Additionally, we introduce the Creation Challenge dataset, featuring 2K diverse questions, to emphasize the necessity and benefits of LLMs' tool creation ability. Further research demonstrates that leveraging LLMs as tool creators facilitates knowledge transfer, and LLMs exhibit varying levels of tool creation abilities, enabling them to adapt to diverse situations. The tool creation ability revolutionizes the LLM's problem-solving paradigm, driving us closer to the next frontier of artificial intelligence. All the codes and data are released.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Autonomous Path Planning for Intercostal Robotic Ultrasound Imaging Using Reinforcement Learning

Ultrasound (US) has been widely used in daily clinical practice for screening internal organs and guiding interventions. However, due to the acoustic shadow cast by the subcutaneous rib cage, the US examination for thoracic application is still challenging. To fully cover and reconstruct the region of interest in US for diagnosis, an intercostal scanning path is necessary. To tackle this challenge, we present a reinforcement learning (RL) approach for planning scanning paths between ribs to monitor changes in lesions on internal organs, such as the liver and heart, which are covered by rib cages. Structured anatomical information of the human skeleton is crucial for planning these intercostal paths. To obtain such anatomical insight, an RL agent is trained in a virtual environment constructed using computational tomography (CT) templates with randomly initialized tumors of various shapes and locations. In addition, task-specific state representation and reward functions are introduced to ensure the convergence of the training process while minimizing the effects of acoustic attenuation and shadows during scanning. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, experiments have been carried out on unseen CTs with randomly defined single or multiple scanning targets. The results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed RL framework in planning non-shadowed US scanning trajectories in areas with limited acoustic access.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Toolink: Linking Toolkit Creation and Using through Chain-of-Solving on Open-Source Model

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in utilizing tools, but their closed-source nature and high inference costs pose limitations on their adaptability, necessitating a valid method that leverages smaller, open-sourced models. In this paper, we introduce Toolink, a comprehensive framework that performs task-solving by first creating a toolkit and then integrating the planning and calling of tools through a chain-of-solving (CoS) approach. We first validate the efficacy of Toolink in harnessing the model's creativity and CoS ability on ChatGPT. Subsequently, we curate CoS-GPT, a chain-of-solving dataset designed for tool-using, and finetune the LLaMA-7B model. It results in LLaMA-CoS, a powerful open-source model with advanced tool-planning and tool-calling capabilities. Evaluation of diverse tasks from BIG-bench demonstrates its CoS ability matches that of ChatGPT while its performance surpasses the chain-of-thought approach. Further studies highlight the generalization of LLaMA-CoS to unseen tasks and showcase its capability in using toolkits not explicitly tailored for the target task, affirming its robustness in real-world scenarios.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

LanePtrNet: Revisiting Lane Detection as Point Voting and Grouping on Curves

Lane detection plays a critical role in the field of autonomous driving. Prevailing methods generally adopt basic concepts (anchors, key points, etc.) from object detection and segmentation tasks, while these approaches require manual adjustments for curved objects, involve exhaustive searches on predefined anchors, require complex post-processing steps, and may lack flexibility when applied to real-world scenarios.In this paper, we propose a novel approach, LanePtrNet, which treats lane detection as a process of point voting and grouping on ordered sets: Our method takes backbone features as input and predicts a curve-aware centerness, which represents each lane as a point and assigns the most probable center point to it. A novel point sampling method is proposed to generate a set of candidate points based on the votes received. By leveraging features from local neighborhoods, and cross-instance attention score, we design a grouping module that further performs lane-wise clustering between neighboring and seeding points. Furthermore, our method can accommodate a point-based framework, (PointNet++ series, etc.) as an alternative to the backbone. This flexibility enables effortless extension to 3D lane detection tasks. We conduct comprehensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, demonstrating its superior performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Reconstruction-Based Anomaly Localization via Knowledge-Informed Self-Training

Anomaly localization, which involves localizing anomalous regions within images, is a significant industrial task. Reconstruction-based methods are widely adopted for anomaly localization because of their low complexity and high interpretability. Most existing reconstruction-based methods only use normal samples to construct model. If anomalous samples are appropriately utilized in the process of anomaly localization, the localization performance can be improved. However, usually only weakly labeled anomalous samples are available, which limits the improvement. In many cases, we can obtain some knowledge of anomalies summarized by domain experts. Taking advantage of such knowledge can help us better utilize the anomalous samples and thus further improve the localization performance. In this paper, we propose a novel reconstruction-based method named knowledge-informed self-training (KIST) which integrates knowledge into reconstruction model through self-training. Specifically, KIST utilizes weakly labeled anomalous samples in addition to the normal ones and exploits knowledge to yield pixel-level pseudo-labels of the anomalous samples. Based on the pseudo labels, a novel loss which promotes the reconstruction of normal pixels while suppressing the reconstruction of anomalous pixels is used. We conduct experiments on different datasets and demonstrate the advantages of KIST over the existing reconstruction-based methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Tell Me More! Towards Implicit User Intention Understanding of Language Model Driven Agents

Current language model-driven agents often lack mechanisms for effective user participation, which is crucial given the vagueness commonly found in user instructions. Although adept at devising strategies and performing tasks, these agents struggle with seeking clarification and grasping precise user intentions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Intention-in-Interaction (IN3), a novel benchmark designed to inspect users' implicit intentions through explicit queries. Next, we propose the incorporation of model experts as the upstream in agent designs to enhance user-agent interaction. Employing IN3, we empirically train Mistral-Interact, a powerful model that proactively assesses task vagueness, inquires user intentions, and refines them into actionable goals before starting downstream agent task execution. Integrating it into the XAgent framework, we comprehensively evaluate the enhanced agent system regarding user instruction understanding and execution, revealing that our approach notably excels at identifying vague user tasks, recovering and summarizing critical missing information, setting precise and necessary agent execution goals, and minimizing redundant tool usage, thus boosting overall efficiency. All the data and codes are released.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Investigate-Consolidate-Exploit: A General Strategy for Inter-Task Agent Self-Evolution

This paper introduces Investigate-Consolidate-Exploit (ICE), a novel strategy for enhancing the adaptability and flexibility of AI agents through inter-task self-evolution. Unlike existing methods focused on intra-task learning, ICE promotes the transfer of knowledge between tasks for genuine self-evolution, similar to human experience learning. The strategy dynamically investigates planning and execution trajectories, consolidates them into simplified workflows and pipelines, and exploits them for improved task execution. Our experiments on the XAgent framework demonstrate ICE's effectiveness, reducing API calls by as much as 80% and significantly decreasing the demand for the model's capability. Specifically, when combined with GPT-3.5, ICE's performance matches that of raw GPT-4 across various agent tasks. We argue that this self-evolution approach represents a paradigm shift in agent design, contributing to a more robust AI community and ecosystem, and moving a step closer to full autonomy.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Triple Simplex Matrix Completion for Expense Forecasting

Forecasting project expenses is a crucial step for businesses to avoid budget overruns and project failures. Traditionally, this has been done by financial analysts or data science techniques such as time-series analysis. However, these approaches can be uncertain and produce results that differ from the planned budget, especially at the start of a project with limited data points. This paper proposes a constrained non-negative matrix completion model that predicts expenses by learning the likelihood of the project correlating with certain expense patterns in the latent space. The model is constrained on three probability simplexes, two of which are on the factor matrices and the third on the missing entries. Additionally, the predicted expense values are guaranteed to meet the budget constraint without the need of post-processing. An inexact alternating optimization algorithm is developed to solve the associated optimization problem and is proven to converge to a stationary point. Results from two real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in comparison to state-of-the-art algorithms.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Coexistence of multiuser entanglement distribution and classical light in optical fiber network with a semiconductor chip

Building communication links among multiple users in a scalable and robust way is a key objective in achieving large-scale quantum networks. In realistic scenario, noise from the coexisting classical light is inevitable and can ultimately disrupt the entanglement. The previous significant fully connected multiuser entanglement distribution experiments are conducted using dark fiber links and there is no explicit relation between the entanglement degradations induced by classical noise and its error rate. Here we fabricate a semiconductor chip with a high figure-of-merit modal overlap to directly generate broadband polarization entanglement. Our monolithic source maintains polarization entanglement fidelity above 96% for 42 nm bandwidth with a brightness of 1.2*10^7 Hz/mW. We perform a continuously working quantum entanglement distribution among three users coexisting with classical light. Under finite-key analysis, we establish secure keys and enable images encryption as well as quantum secret sharing between users. Our work paves the way for practical multiparty quantum communication with integrated photonic architecture compatible with real-world fiber optical communication network.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

"Merge Conflicts!" Exploring the Impacts of External Distractors to Parametric Knowledge Graphs

Large language models (LLMs) acquire extensive knowledge during pre-training, known as their parametric knowledge. However, in order to remain up-to-date and align with human instructions, LLMs inevitably require external knowledge during their interactions with users. This raises a crucial question: How will LLMs respond when external knowledge interferes with their parametric knowledge? To investigate this question, we propose a framework that systematically elicits LLM parametric knowledge and introduces external knowledge. Specifically, we uncover the impacts by constructing a parametric knowledge graph to reveal the different knowledge structures of LLMs, and introduce external knowledge through distractors of varying degrees, methods, positions, and formats. Our experiments on both black-box and open-source models demonstrate that LLMs tend to produce responses that deviate from their parametric knowledge, particularly when they encounter direct conflicts or confounding changes of information within detailed contexts. We also find that while LLMs are sensitive to the veracity of external knowledge, they can still be distracted by unrelated information. These findings highlight the risk of hallucination when integrating external knowledge, even indirectly, during interactions with current LLMs. All the data and results are publicly available.

cs.CL↗