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Jin Kim

Publications and source records attributed to Jin Kim.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Creators Have Difficulty Abandoning Ideas They Generated

Creativity researchers often distinguish between two stages of the creative process: generation versus selection. While much is known about the psychology of idea generation (e.g., the factors that lead to a greater number of novel and useful ideas), less is understood about the nature of selection, or how generation and selection interact. Here we investigate how the act of generating ideas may potentially distort the selection process. Using an incentive-compatible paradigm in which pairs of participants reviewed the same ideas and were rewarded for submitting only high-quality ideas, we find that people submit a greater number of lower-quality ideas when selecting among their own ideas than when selecting among another person's ideas (the Creative Endowment Effect). This effect generalizes across three tasks in two domains and is resistant to an informational intervention (i.e., explicitly telling people about the effect). However, having participants revisit their ideas several months later increases their selectivity. The broader implications for individuals and organizations are discussed.

econ.GN

A.X K2 Technical Report

We introduce A.X K2, a 688B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model trained from scratch as a high-performance foundation for \emph{agentic} applications. Trained on approximately 8.5T tokens---fewer than its predecessor, A.X K1---on a smaller but higher-quality mixture with substantially expanded agentic and software-engineering data, it nonetheless improves over A.X K1 across the board, by over 30 percentage points on some benchmarks, reflecting large gains in token efficiency. To support long contexts efficiently, we introduce Sparse Gated Attention (SGA), which combines sparse attention with gated attention, and adopt Gated Norm (GN) to stabilize large-scale training. SGA is trained natively at 128K through a \emph{sparse} indexer warmup that optimizes the indexer against its own sparse top-$k$ selection rather than the dense attention distribution, making adaptation markedly cheaper: each query reads only 2,048 positions, yet long-context quality is unchanged and A.X K2 scores 94.6 on RULER out to 256K. The outlier suppression of GN in turn keeps 4-bit NVFP4 serving within one point of FP8 accuracy. A simple yet effective Think-Fusion recipe further lets users switch between thinking and non-thinking modes within a single unified model. Extensive evaluations show that A.X K2 performs competitively against strong open-weight baselines, matching or exceeding them on math and Korean-language benchmarks.

cs.AI

A.X K1 Technical Report

We introduce A.X K1, a 519B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model trained from scratch. Our design leverages scaling laws to optimize training configurations and vocabulary size under fixed computational budgets. A.X K1 is pre-trained on a corpus of approximately 10T tokens, curated by a multi-stage data processing pipeline. Designed to bridge the gap between reasoning capability and inference efficiency, A.X K1 supports explicitly controllable reasoning to facilitate scalable deployment across diverse real-world scenarios. We propose a simple yet effective Think-Fusion training recipe, enabling user-controlled switching between thinking and non-thinking modes within a single unified model. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that A.X K1 achieves performance competitive with leading open-source models, while establishing a distinctive advantage in Korean-language benchmarks.

cs.CL

TRACE: Textual Reasoning for Affordance Coordinate Extraction

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) struggle to translate high-level instructions into the precise spatial affordances required for robotic manipulation. While visual Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods exist, they are often computationally intensive. In this work, we introduce TRACE (Textual Reasoning for Affordance Coordinate Extraction), a novel methodology that integrates a textual Chain of Reasoning (CoR) into the affordance prediction process. We use this methodology to create the TRACE dataset, a large-scale collection created via an autonomous pipeline that pairs instructions with explicit textual rationales. By fine-tuning a VLM on this data, our model learns to externalize its spatial reasoning before acting. Our experiments show that our TRACE-tuned model achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching 48.1% accuracy on the primary Where2Place (W2P) benchmark (a 9.6% relative improvement) and 55.0% on the more challenging W2P(h) subset. Crucially, an ablation study demonstrates that performance scales directly with the amount of reasoning data used, confirming the CoR's effectiveness. Furthermore, analysis of the model's attention maps reveals an interpretable reasoning process where focus shifts dynamically across reasoning steps. This work shows that training VLMs to generate a textual CoR is an effective and robust strategy for enhancing the precision, reliability, and interpretability of VLM-based robot control. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/jink-ucla/TRACE

cs.RO

Learn2Reg 2024: New Benchmark Datasets Driving Progress on New Challenges

Medical image registration is critical for clinical applications, and fair benchmarking of different methods is essential for monitoring ongoing progress in the field. To date, the Learn2Reg 2020-2023 challenges have released several complementary datasets and established metrics for evaluations. Building on this foundation, the 2024 edition expands the challenge's scope to cover a wider range of registration scenarios, particularly in terms of modality diversity and task complexity, by introducing three new tasks, including large-scale multi-modal registration and unsupervised inter-subject brain registration, as well as the first microscopy-focused benchmark within Learn2Reg. The new datasets also inspired new method developments, including invertibility constraints, pyramid features, keypoints alignment and instance optimisation. Visit Learn2Reg at https://learn2reg.grand-challenge.org.

eess.IV

Autonomous Computer Vision Development with Agentic AI

Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant potential for complex reasoning, planning, and tool utilization. We demonstrate that a specialized computer vision system can be built autonomously from a natural language prompt using Agentic AI methods. This involved extending SimpleMind (SM), an open-source Cognitive AI environment with configurable tools for medical image analysis, with an LLM-based agent, implemented using OpenManus, to automate the planning (tool configuration) for a particular computer vision task. We provide a proof-of-concept demonstration that an agentic system can interpret a computer vision task prompt, plan a corresponding SimpleMind workflow by decomposing the task and configuring appropriate tools. From the user input prompt, "provide sm (SimpleMind) config for lungs, heart, and ribs segmentation for cxr (chest x-ray)"), the agent LLM was able to generate the plan (tool configuration file in YAML format), and execute SM-Learn (training) and SM-Think (inference) scripts autonomously. The computer vision agent automatically configured, trained, and tested itself on 50 chest x-ray images, achieving mean dice scores of 0.96, 0.82, 0.83, for lungs, heart, and ribs, respectively. This work shows the potential for autonomous planning and tool configuration that has traditionally been performed by a data scientist in the development of computer vision applications.

cs.CV

Beyond the LUMIR challenge: The pathway to foundational registration models

Medical image challenges have played a transformative role in advancing the field, catalyzing innovation and establishing new performance benchmarks. Image registration, a foundational task in neuroimaging, has similarly advanced through the Learn2Reg initiative. Building on this, we introduce the Large-scale Unsupervised Brain MRI Image Registration (LUMIR) challenge, a next-generation benchmark for unsupervised brain MRI registration. Previous challenges relied upon anatomical label maps, however LUMIR provides 4,014 unlabeled T1-weighted MRIs for training, encouraging biologically plausible deformation modeling through self-supervision. Evaluation includes 590 in-domain test subjects and extensive zero-shot tasks across disease populations, imaging protocols, and species. Deep learning methods consistently achieved state-of-the-art performance and produced anatomically plausible, diffeomorphic deformation fields. They outperformed several leading optimization-based methods and remained robust to most domain shifts. These findings highlight the growing maturity of deep learning in neuroimaging registration and its potential to serve as a foundation model for general-purpose medical image registration.

eess.IV

Structuring the Unstructured: A Multi-Agent System for Extracting and Querying Financial KPIs and Guidance

Extracting structured and quantitative insights from unstructured financial filings is essential in investment research, yet remains time-consuming and resource-intensive. Conventional approaches in practice rely heavily on labor-intensive manual processes, limiting scalability and delaying the research workflow. In this paper, we propose an efficient and scalable method for accurately extracting quantitative insights from unstructured financial documents, leveraging a multi-agent system composed of large language models. Our proposed multi-agent system consists of two specialized agents: the \emph{Extraction Agent} and the \emph{Text-to-SQL Agent}. The \textit{Extraction Agent} automatically identifies key performance indicators from unstructured financial text, standardizes their formats, and verifies their accuracy. On the other hand, the \textit{Text-to-SQL Agent} generates executable SQL statements from natural language queries, allowing users to access structured data accurately without requiring familiarity with the database schema. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed system effectively transforms unstructured text into structured data accurately and enables precise retrieval of key information. First, we demonstrate that our system achieves approximately 95\% accuracy in transforming financial filings into structured data, matching the performance level typically attained by human annotators. Second, in a human evaluation of the retrieval task -- where natural language queries are used to search information from structured data -- 91\% of the responses were rated as correct by human evaluators. In both evaluations, our system generalizes well across financial document types, consistently delivering reliable performance.

cs.AI

Faster Parameter-Efficient Tuning with Token Redundancy Reduction

Parameter-efficient tuning (PET) aims to transfer pre-trained foundation models to downstream tasks by learning a small number of parameters. Compared to traditional fine-tuning, which updates the entire model, PET significantly reduces storage and transfer costs for each task regardless of exponentially increasing pre-trained model capacity. However, most PET methods inherit the inference latency of their large backbone models and often introduce additional computational overhead due to additional modules (e.g. adapters), limiting their practicality for compute-intensive applications. In this paper, we propose Faster Parameter-Efficient Tuning (FPET), a novel approach that enhances inference speed and training efficiency while maintaining high storage efficiency. Specifically, we introduce a plug-and-play token redundancy reduction module delicately designed for PET. This module refines tokens from the self-attention layer using an adapter to learn the accurate similarity between tokens and cuts off the tokens through a fully-differentiable token merging strategy, which uses a straight-through estimator for optimal token reduction. Experimental results prove that our FPET achieves faster inference and higher memory efficiency than the pre-trained backbone while keeping competitive performance on par with state-of-the-art PET methods.

cs.CV

How to Capture and Study Conversations Between Research Participants and ChatGPT: GPT for Researchers (g4r.org)

As large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT become increasingly integrated into our everyday lives--from customer service and education to creative work and personal productivity--understanding how people interact with these AI systems has become a pressing issue. Despite the widespread use of LLMs, researchers lack standardized tools for systematically studying people's interactions with LLMs. To address this issue, we introduce GPT for Researchers (G4R), or g4r.org, a free website that researchers can use to easily create and integrate a GPT Interface into their studies. At g4r.org, researchers can (1) enable their study participants to interact with GPT (such as ChatGPT), (2) customize GPT Interfaces to guide participants' interactions with GPT (e.g., set constraints on topics or adjust GPT's tone or response style), and (3) capture participants' interactions with GPT by downloading data on messages exchanged between participants and GPT. By facilitating study participants' interactions with GPT and providing detailed data on these interactions, G4R can support research on topics such as consumer interactions with AI agents or LLMs, AI-assisted decision-making, and linguistic patterns in human-AI communication. With this goal in mind, we provide a step-by-step guide to using G4R at g4r.org.

cs.HC

Context-aware Multimodal AI Reveals Hidden Pathways in Five Centuries of Art Evolution

The rise of multimodal generative AI is transforming the intersection of technology and art, offering deeper insights into large-scale artwork. Although its creative capabilities have been widely explored, its potential to represent artwork in latent spaces remains underexamined. We use cutting-edge generative AI, specifically Stable Diffusion, to analyze 500 years of Western paintings by extracting two types of latent information with the model: formal aspects (e.g., colors) and contextual aspects (e.g., subject). Our findings reveal that contextual information differentiates between artistic periods, styles, and individual artists more successfully than formal elements. Additionally, using contextual keywords extracted from paintings, we show how artistic expression evolves alongside societal changes. Our generative experiment, infusing prospective contexts into historical artworks, successfully reproduces the evolutionary trajectory of artworks, highlighting the significance of mutual interaction between society and art. This study demonstrates how multimodal AI expands traditional formal analysis by integrating temporal, cultural, and historical contexts.

cs.CV

The AI Penalty: People Reduce Compensation for Workers Who Use AI

We investigate whether and why people might adjust compensation for workers who use AI tools. Across 13 studies (N = 4,956), participants consistently lowered compensation for workers who used AI compared to those who did not. This "AI penalty" is robust across different work scenarios and work tasks, worker statuses, forms and timing of compensation, methods of eliciting compensation, and perceptions of output quality. Moreover, the effect emerges in both hypothetical compensation scenarios as well as real monetary compensation of gig workers. We find that perceived effort and perceived agency -- the degree to which an individual serves as the originating source of the core intellectual or creative contribution in a task -- explain decisions to reduce compensation for AI-users. However, the penalty is not inevitable. Workers who strategically retain creative agency over core tasks recover most of the AI penalty, and employment contracts that make compensation reductions impermissible provide structural means of reducing the AI penalty.

econ.GN

ESPERANTO: Evaluating Synthesized Phrases to Enhance Robustness in AI Detection for Text Origination

While large language models (LLMs) exhibit significant utility across various domains, they simultaneously are susceptible to exploitation for unethical purposes, including academic misconduct and dissemination of misinformation. Consequently, AI-generated text detection systems have emerged as a countermeasure. However, these detection mechanisms demonstrate vulnerability to evasion techniques and lack robustness against textual manipulations. This paper introduces back-translation as a novel technique for evading detection, underscoring the need to enhance the robustness of current detection systems. The proposed method involves translating AI-generated text through multiple languages before back-translating to English. We present a model that combines these back-translated texts to produce a manipulated version of the original AI-generated text. Our findings demonstrate that the manipulated text retains the original semantics while significantly reducing the true positive rate (TPR) of existing detection methods. We evaluate this technique on nine AI detectors, including six open-source and three proprietary systems, revealing their susceptibility to back-translation manipulation. In response to the identified shortcomings of existing AI text detectors, we present a countermeasure to improve the robustness against this form of manipulation. Our results indicate that the TPR of the proposed method declines by only 1.85% after back-translation manipulation. Furthermore, we build a large dataset of 720k texts using eight different LLMs. Our dataset contains both human-authored and LLM-generated texts in various domains and writing styles to assess the performance of our method and existing detectors. This dataset is publicly shared for the benefit of the research community.

cs.CL

Enhancing Source-Free Domain Adaptive Object Detection with Low-confidence Pseudo Label Distillation

Source-Free domain adaptive Object Detection (SFOD) is a promising strategy for deploying trained detectors to new, unlabeled domains without accessing source data, addressing significant concerns around data privacy and efficiency. Most SFOD methods leverage a Mean-Teacher (MT) self-training paradigm relying heavily on High-confidence Pseudo Labels (HPL). However, these HPL often overlook small instances that undergo significant appearance changes with domain shifts. Additionally, HPL ignore instances with low confidence due to the scarcity of training samples, resulting in biased adaptation toward familiar instances from the source domain. To address this limitation, we introduce the Low-confidence Pseudo Label Distillation (LPLD) loss within the Mean-Teacher based SFOD framework. This novel approach is designed to leverage the proposals from Region Proposal Network (RPN), which potentially encompasses hard-to-detect objects in unfamiliar domains. Initially, we extract HPL using a standard pseudo-labeling technique and mine a set of Low-confidence Pseudo Labels (LPL) from proposals generated by RPN, leaving those that do not overlap significantly with HPL. These LPL are further refined by leveraging class-relation information and reducing the effect of inherent noise for the LPLD loss calculation. Furthermore, we use feature distance to adaptively weight the LPLD loss to focus on LPL containing a larger foreground area. Our method outperforms previous SFOD methods on four cross-domain object detection benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LPLD loss leads to effective adaptation by reducing false negatives and facilitating the use of domain-invariant knowledge from the source model. Code is available at https://github.com/junia3/LPLD.

cs.CV

Improving Visual Recognition with Hyperbolical Visual Hierarchy Mapping

Visual scenes are naturally organized in a hierarchy, where a coarse semantic is recursively comprised of several fine details. Exploring such a visual hierarchy is crucial to recognize the complex relations of visual elements, leading to a comprehensive scene understanding. In this paper, we propose a Visual Hierarchy Mapper (Hi-Mapper), a novel approach for enhancing the structured understanding of the pre-trained Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Hi-Mapper investigates the hierarchical organization of the visual scene by 1) pre-defining a hierarchy tree through the encapsulation of probability densities; and 2) learning the hierarchical relations in hyperbolic space with a novel hierarchical contrastive loss. The pre-defined hierarchy tree recursively interacts with the visual features of the pre-trained DNNs through hierarchy decomposition and encoding procedures, thereby effectively identifying the visual hierarchy and enhancing the recognition of an entire scene. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Hi-Mapper significantly enhances the representation capability of DNNs, leading to an improved performance on various tasks, including image classification and dense prediction tasks.

cs.CV

The Adoption and Efficacy of Large Language Models: Evidence From Consumer Complaints in the Financial Industry

Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping consumer decision-making, particularly in communication with firms, yet our understanding of their impact remains limited. This research explores the effect of LLMs on consumer complaints submitted to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from 2015 to 2024, documenting the adoption of LLMs for drafting complaints and evaluating the likelihood of obtaining relief from financial firms. We analyzed over 1 million complaints and identified a significant increase in LLM usage following the release of ChatGPT. We find that LLM usage is associated with an increased likelihood of obtaining relief from financial firms. To investigate this relationship, we employ an instrumental variable approach to mitigate endogeneity concerns around LLM adoption. Although instrumental variables suggest a potential causal link, they cannot fully capture all unobserved heterogeneity. To further establish this causal relationship, we conducted controlled experiments, which support that LLMs can enhance the clarity and persuasiveness of consumer narratives, thereby increasing the likelihood of obtaining relief. Our findings suggest that facilitating access to LLMs can help firms better understand consumer concerns and level the playing field among consumers. This underscores the importance of policies promoting technological accessibility, enabling all consumers to effectively voice their concerns.

cs.HC

Layer-wise Auto-Weighting for Non-Stationary Test-Time Adaptation

Given the inevitability of domain shifts during inference in real-world applications, test-time adaptation (TTA) is essential for model adaptation after deployment. However, the real-world scenario of continuously changing target distributions presents challenges including catastrophic forgetting and error accumulation. Existing TTA methods for non-stationary domain shifts, while effective, incur excessive computational load, making them impractical for on-device settings. In this paper, we introduce a layer-wise auto-weighting algorithm for continual and gradual TTA that autonomously identifies layers for preservation or concentrated adaptation. By leveraging the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM), we first design the learning weight to selectively focus on layers associated with log-likelihood changes while preserving unrelated ones. Then, we further propose an exponential min-max scaler to make certain layers nearly frozen while mitigating outliers. This minimizes forgetting and error accumulation, leading to efficient adaptation to non-stationary target distribution. Experiments on CIFAR-10C, CIFAR-100C, and ImageNet-C show our method outperforms conventional continual and gradual TTA approaches while significantly reducing computational load, highlighting the importance of FIM-based learning weight in adapting to continuously or gradually shifting target domains.

cs.LG

SteloCoder: a Decoder-Only LLM for Multi-Language to Python Code Translation

With the recent focus on Large Language Models (LLMs), both StarCoder (Li et al., 2023) and Code Llama (Rozi\`ere et al., 2023) have demonstrated remarkable performance in code generation. However, there is still a need for improvement in code translation functionality with efficient training techniques. In response to this, we introduce SteloCoder, a decoder-only StarCoder-based LLM designed specifically for multi-programming language-to-Python code translation. In particular, SteloCoder achieves C++, C#, JavaScript, Java, or PHP-to-Python code translation without specifying the input programming language. We modified StarCoder model architecture by incorporating a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) technique featuring five experts and a gating network for multi-task handling. Experts are obtained by StarCoder fine-tuning. Specifically, we use a Low-Rank Adaptive Method (LoRA) technique, limiting each expert size as only 0.06% of number of StarCoder's parameters. At the same time, to enhance training efficiency in terms of time, we adopt curriculum learning strategy and use self-instruct data for efficient fine-tuning. As a result, each expert takes only 6 hours to train on one single 80Gb A100 HBM. With experiments on XLCoST datasets, SteloCoder achieves an average of 73.76 CodeBLEU score in multi-programming language-to-Python translation, surpassing the top performance from the leaderboard by at least 3.5. This accomplishment is attributed to only 45M extra parameters with StarCoder as the backbone and 32 hours of valid training on one 80GB A100 HBM. The source code is release here: https://github.com/sade-adrien/SteloCoder.

cs.CL