arXiv subjects

Ning Ding

Publications and source records attributed to Ning Ding.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Negative piezoelectricity in quasi-two/one-dimensional ferroelectrics

In recent years, the investigation of low-dimensional ferroelectrics has attracted great attention for their promising applications in nano devices. Piezoelectricity is one of the most core properties of ferroelectric materials, which plays the essential role in micro-electromechanical systems. Very recently, the anomalous negative piezoelectricity has been predicted/discovered in many quasi-two-dimensional layered ferroelectric materials. In this Topical Review, we will briefly introduce on the negative piezoelectricity in quasi-two/one-dimensional ferroelectrics, including its fundamental concept, typical materials, theoretical predictions, as well as experimental phenomena. The underlying physical mechanisms for negative piezoelectricity are divergent and varying from case by case, which can be categorized into four types. First, the soft van der Waals layer is responsible for the volume shrinking upon pressure while the electric dipoles is from non van der Waals layer. Second, the noncollinearity of local dipoles creates a ferrielectricity, which leads to orthogonal ferroelectric and antiferroelectric axes. Third, the electric dipoles come from interlayer/interchain couplings, which can be enhanced during the volume shrinking. Fourth, the special buckling structure contributes to local dipoles, which can be enhanced upon pressure. In real materials, more than one mechanism may work together. Finally, the future directions of negative piezoelectricity and their potential applications are outlooked.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2024

Controllable Preference Optimization: Toward Controllable Multi-Objective Alignment

Alignment in artificial intelligence pursues the consistency between model responses and human preferences as well as values. In practice, the multifaceted nature of human preferences inadvertently introduces what is known as the "alignment tax" -a compromise where enhancements in alignment within one objective (e.g.,harmlessness) can diminish performance in others (e.g.,helpfulness). However, existing alignment techniques are mostly unidirectional, leading to suboptimal trade-offs and poor flexibility over various objectives. To navigate this challenge, we argue the prominence of grounding LLMs with evident preferences. We introduce controllable preference optimization (CPO), which explicitly specifies preference scores for different objectives, thereby guiding the model to generate responses that meet the requirements. Our experimental analysis reveals that the aligned models can provide responses that match various preferences among the "3H" (helpfulness, honesty, harmlessness) desiderata. Furthermore, by introducing diverse data and alignment goals, we surpass baseline methods in aligning with single objectives, hence mitigating the impact of the alignment tax and achieving improvements in multi-objective alignment.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Space evaluation based on pitch control using drone video in Ultimate

Ultimate is a sport in which teams of seven players compete for points by passing a disc into the end zone. A distinctive aspect of Ultimate is that the player holding the disc is unable to move, underscoring the significance of creating space to receive passes. Despite extensive research into space evaluation in sports such as football and basketball, there is a paucity of information available for Ultimate. This study focuses on the 3-on-3 format, which is widely practiced in Ultimate, and evaluates space during offensive play. The data collection process entailed the use of drones for filming and the subsequent correction of the angles for the purpose of obtaining positional data. The model is derived from the pitch control model of soccer and adapted to the rules of Ultimate, where the player holding the disc is stationary. The integration of position and distance weights with pitch control values enables the derivation of space evaluation metrics. The findings of this study indicate that movement to create space and accurate passing into that space are both significant factors in scoring. The code is available at https://github.com/shunsuke-iwashita/USO.

cs.CV↗

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

Empowering Private Tutoring by Chaining Large Language Models

Artificial intelligence has been applied in various aspects of online education to facilitate teaching and learning. However, few approaches has been made toward a complete AI-powered tutoring system. In this work, we explore the development of a full-fledged intelligent tutoring system powered by state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), covering automatic course planning and adjusting, tailored instruction, and flexible quiz evaluation. To make the system robust to prolonged interaction and cater to individualized education, the system is decomposed into three inter-connected core processes-interaction, reflection, and reaction. Each process is implemented by chaining LLM-powered tools along with dynamically updated memory modules. Tools are LLMs prompted to execute one specific task at a time, while memories are data storage that gets updated during education process. Statistical results from learning logs demonstrate the effectiveness and mechanism of each tool usage. Subjective feedback from human users reveal the usability of each function, and comparison with ablation systems further testify the benefits of the designed processes in long-term interaction.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2024

Quasi-one-dimensional sliding ferroelectricity in NbI$_4$

Sliding ferroelectricity was originally proposed to elucidate the out-of-plane polarization generated by a specific stacking arrangement of non-polar van der Waals layers. However, the concept of sliding ferroelectricity can be generalized to more geometries. Here, the NbI$_4$ bulk is theoretical demonstrated as a quasi-one-dimensional sliding ferroelectric material, which exhibits a polarization of $0.11$ $μ$C/cm$^2$ perpendicular to the Nb's chains. The most possible ferroelectric switching path is found to be via the interchain sliding along the chain direction, while other paths like Peierls-dimerization of Nb pairs may also work. Moreover, its polarization can be augmented for $82\%$ by hydrostatic pressure up to $10$ GPa, beyond which NbI$_4$ becomes a polar metal. In addition, the negative longitudinal piezoelectricity is also predicted.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2024

UltraFeedback: Boosting Language Models with Scaled AI Feedback

Learning from human feedback has become a pivot technique in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, acquiring vast and premium human feedback is bottlenecked by time, labor, and human capability, resulting in small sizes or limited topics of current datasets. This further hinders feedback learning as well as alignment research within the open-source community. To address this issue, we explore how to go beyond human feedback and collect high-quality \textit{AI feedback} automatically for a scalable alternative. Specifically, we identify \textbf{scale and diversity} as the key factors for feedback data to take effect. Accordingly, we first broaden instructions and responses in both amount and breadth to encompass a wider range of user-assistant interactions. Then, we meticulously apply a series of techniques to mitigate annotation biases for more reliable AI feedback. We finally present \textsc{UltraFeedback}, a large-scale, high-quality, and diversified AI feedback dataset, which contains over 1 million GPT-4 feedback for 250k user-assistant conversations from various aspects. Built upon \textsc{UltraFeedback}, we align a LLaMA-based model by best-of-$n$ sampling and reinforcement learning, demonstrating its exceptional performance on chat benchmarks. Our work validates the effectiveness of scaled AI feedback data in constructing strong open-source chat language models, serving as a solid foundation for future feedback learning research. Our data and models are available at https://github.com/thunlp/UltraFeedback.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Enhancing Neural Radiance Fields with Depth and Normal Completion Priors from Sparse Views

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) are an advanced technology that creates highly realistic images by learning about scenes through a neural network model. However, NeRF often encounters issues when there are not enough images to work with, leading to problems in accurately rendering views. The main issue is that NeRF lacks sufficient structural details to guide the rendering process accurately. To address this, we proposed a Depth and Normal Dense Completion Priors for NeRF (CP\_NeRF) framework. This framework enhances view rendering by adding depth and normal dense completion priors to the NeRF optimization process. Before optimizing NeRF, we obtain sparse depth maps using the Structure from Motion (SfM) technique used to get camera poses. Based on the sparse depth maps and a normal estimator, we generate sparse normal maps for training a normal completion prior with precise standard deviations. During optimization, we apply depth and normal completion priors to transform sparse data into dense depth and normal maps with their standard deviations. We use these dense maps to guide ray sampling, assist distance sampling and construct a normal loss function for better training accuracy. To improve the rendering of NeRF's normal outputs, we incorporate an optical centre position embedder that helps synthesize more accurate normals through volume rendering. Additionally, we employ a normal patch matching technique to choose accurate rendered normal maps, ensuring more precise supervision for the model. Our method is superior to leading techniques in rendering detailed indoor scenes, even with limited input views.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

KoLA: Carefully Benchmarking World Knowledge of Large Language Models

The unprecedented performance of large language models (LLMs) necessitates improvements in evaluations. Rather than merely exploring the breadth of LLM abilities, we believe meticulous and thoughtful designs are essential to thorough, unbiased, and applicable evaluations. Given the importance of world knowledge to LLMs, we construct a Knowledge-oriented LLM Assessment benchmark (KoLA), in which we carefully design three crucial factors: (1) For \textbf{ability modeling}, we mimic human cognition to form a four-level taxonomy of knowledge-related abilities, covering $19$ tasks. (2) For \textbf{data}, to ensure fair comparisons, we use both Wikipedia, a corpus prevalently pre-trained by LLMs, along with continuously collected emerging corpora, aiming to evaluate the capacity to handle unseen data and evolving knowledge. (3) For \textbf{evaluation criteria}, we adopt a contrastive system, including overall standard scores for better numerical comparability across tasks and models and a unique self-contrast metric for automatically evaluating knowledge-creating ability. We evaluate $28$ open-source and commercial LLMs and obtain some intriguing findings. The KoLA dataset and open-participation leaderboard are publicly released at https://kola.xlore.cn and will be continuously updated to provide references for developing LLMs and knowledge-related systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

INTERVENOR: Prompting the Coding Ability of Large Language Models with the Interactive Chain of Repair

This paper introduces INTERVENOR (INTERactiVE chaiN Of Repair), a system designed to emulate the interactive code repair processes observed in humans, encompassing both code diagnosis and code repair. INTERVENOR prompts Large Language Models (LLMs) to play distinct roles during the code repair process, functioning as both a Code Learner and a Code Teacher. Specifically, the Code Learner is tasked with adhering to instructions to generate or repair code, while the Code Teacher is responsible for crafting a Chain-of-Repair (CoR) to serve as guidance for the Code Learner. During generating the CoR, the Code Teacher needs to check the generated codes from Code Learner and reassess how to address code bugs based on error feedback received from compilers. Experimental results demonstrate that INTERVENOR surpasses baseline models, exhibiting improvements of approximately 18% and 4.3% over GPT-3.5 in code generation and code translation tasks, respectively. Our further analyses show that CoR is effective to illuminate the reasons behind bugs and outline solution plans in natural language. With the feedback of code compilers, INTERVENOR can accurately identify syntax errors and assertion errors and provide precise instructions to repair codes. All data and codes are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/INTERVENOR

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

CoGenesis: A Framework Collaborating Large and Small Language Models for Secure Context-Aware Instruction Following

With the advancement of language models (LMs), their exposure to private data is increasingly inevitable, and their deployment (especially for smaller ones) on personal devices, such as PCs and smartphones, has become a prevailing trend. In contexts laden with user information, enabling models to both safeguard user privacy and execute commands efficiently emerges as an essential research imperative. In this paper, we propose CoGenesis, a collaborative generation framework integrating large (hosted on cloud infrastructure) and small models (deployed on local devices) to address privacy concerns logically. Initially, we design a pipeline to create personalized writing instruction datasets enriched with extensive context details as the testbed of this research issue. Subsequently, we introduce two variants of CoGenesis based on sketch and logits respectively. Our experimental findings, based on our synthesized dataset and two additional open-source datasets, indicate that: 1) Large-scale models perform well when provided with user context but struggle in the absence of such context. 2) While specialized smaller models fine-tuned on the synthetic dataset show promise, they still lag behind their larger counterparts. 3) Our CoGenesis framework, utilizing mixed-scale models, showcases competitive performance, providing a feasible solution to privacy issues.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

MiniCPM: Unveiling the Potential of Small Language Models with Scalable Training Strategies

The burgeoning interest in developing Large Language Models (LLMs) with up to trillion parameters has been met with concerns regarding resource efficiency and practical expense, particularly given the immense cost of experimentation. This scenario underscores the importance of exploring the potential of Small Language Models (SLMs) as a resource-efficient alternative. In this context, we introduce MiniCPM, specifically the 1.2B and 2.4B non-embedding parameter variants, not only excel in their respective categories but also demonstrate capabilities on par with 7B-13B LLMs. While focusing on SLMs, our approach exhibits scalability in both model and data dimensions for future LLM research. Regarding model scaling, we employ extensive model wind tunnel experiments for stable and optimal scaling. For data scaling, we introduce a Warmup-Stable-Decay (WSD) learning rate scheduler (LRS), conducive to continuous training and domain adaptation. We present an in-depth analysis of the intriguing training dynamics that occurred in the WSD LRS. With WSD LRS, we are now able to efficiently study data-model scaling law without extensive retraining experiments on both axes of model and data, from which we derive the much higher compute optimal data-model ratio than Chinchilla Optimal. Additionally, we introduce MiniCPM family, including MiniCPM-DPO, MiniCPM-MoE and MiniCPM-128K, whose excellent performance further cementing MiniCPM's foundation in diverse SLM applications. MiniCPM models are available publicly at https://github.com/OpenBMB/MiniCPM .

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Memory-Space Visual Prompting for Efficient Vision-Language Fine-Tuning

Current solutions for efficiently constructing large vision-language (VL) models follow a two-step paradigm: projecting the output of pre-trained vision encoders to the input space of pre-trained language models as visual prompts; and then transferring the models to downstream VL tasks via end-to-end parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). However, this paradigm still exhibits inefficiency since it significantly increases the input length of the language models. In this paper, in contrast to integrating visual prompts into inputs, we regard visual prompts as additional knowledge that facilitates language models in addressing tasks associated with visual information. Motivated by the finding that Feed-Forward Network (FFN) of language models acts as "key-value memory", we introduce a novel approach termed memory-space visual prompting (MemVP), wherein visual prompts are concatenated with the weights of FFN for visual knowledge injection. Experimental results across various VL tasks and language models reveal that MemVP significantly reduces the training time and inference latency of the finetuned VL models and surpasses the performance of previous PEFT methods. Code: https://github.com/JieShibo/MemVP

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

TeamTrack: A Dataset for Multi-Sport Multi-Object Tracking in Full-pitch Videos

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a critical and challenging task in computer vision, particularly in situations involving objects with similar appearances but diverse movements, as seen in team sports. Current methods, largely reliant on object detection and appearance, often fail to track targets in such complex scenarios accurately. This limitation is further exacerbated by the lack of comprehensive and diverse datasets covering the full view of sports pitches. Addressing these issues, we introduce TeamTrack, a pioneering benchmark dataset specifically designed for MOT in sports. TeamTrack is an extensive collection of full-pitch video data from various sports, including soccer, basketball, and handball. Furthermore, we perform a comprehensive analysis and benchmarking effort to underscore TeamTrack's utility and potential impact. Our work signifies a crucial step forward, promising to elevate the precision and effectiveness of MOT in complex, dynamic settings such as team sports. The dataset, project code and competition is released at: https://atomscott.github.io/TeamTrack/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Predicting Emergent Abilities with Infinite Resolution Evaluation

The scientific scale-up of large language models (LLMs) necessitates a comprehensive understanding of their scaling properties. However, the existing literature on the scaling properties only yields an incomplete answer: optimization loss decreases predictably as the model size increases, in line with established scaling law; yet no scaling law for task has been established and the task performances are far from predictable during scaling. Task performances typically show minor gains on small models until they improve dramatically once models exceed a size threshold, exemplifying the ``emergent abilities''. In this study, we discover that small models, although they exhibit minor performance, demonstrate critical and consistent task performance improvements that are not captured by conventional evaluation strategies due to insufficient measurement resolution. To measure such improvements, we introduce PassUntil, an evaluation strategy with theoretically infinite resolution, through massive sampling in the decoding phase. With PassUntil, we conduct a quantitative investigation into the scaling law of task performance. The investigation contains two parts. Firstly, a strict task scaling law that is not conventionally known to exist, is identified, enhancing the predictability of task performances. Remarkably, we are able to predict the performance of the 2.4B model on code generation with merely 0.05\% deviation before training starts, which is the first systematic attempt to verify predictable scaling proposed by GPT-4's report. Secondly, we are able to study emergent abilities quantitatively. We identify a kind of accelerated emergence whose scaling curve cannot be fitted by standard scaling law function and has a increasing speed. We then examine two hypothesis and imply that the ``multiple circuits hypothesis'' might be responsible for the accelerated emergence.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Significantly Enhanced Vacancy Diffusion in Mn-containing Alloys

Manipulating point defects for tailored macroscopic properties remains a formidable challenge in materials science. This study demonstrates a proof-of-principle for a universal law involving element Mn, significantly enhancing vacancy diffusion through an unprecedented anomalous Friedel Oscillations phenomenon, across most metals in the periodic table. The correlation between Mn-induced point-defect dynamic changes and intrinsic macro-properties is robustly validated through the first-principles theory and well-designed experiments. The physical origin stems from Mn's exceptionally large effective intra-elemental 3d electron interactions, surpassing the Coulomb attraction induced by vacancy and disrupting the electron screening effect. Given the ubiquitous nature of vacancies and their recognition as the most crucial defects influencing nearly all physical and mechanical properties of crystalline materials, this outcome may drive advances in a broad domain.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2024

Advancing LLM Reasoning Generalists with Preference Trees

We introduce Eurus, a suite of large language models (LLMs) optimized for reasoning. Finetuned from Mistral-7B and CodeLlama-70B, Eurus models achieve state-of-the-art results among open-source models on a diverse set of benchmarks covering mathematics, code generation, and logical reasoning problems. Notably, Eurus-70B beats GPT-3.5 Turbo in reasoning through a comprehensive benchmarking across 12 tests covering five tasks, and achieves a 33.3% pass@1 accuracy on LeetCode and 32.6% on TheoremQA, two challenging benchmarks, substantially outperforming existing open-source models by margins more than 13.3%. The strong performance of Eurus can be primarily attributed to UltraInteract, our newly-curated large-scale, high-quality alignment dataset specifically designed for complex reasoning tasks. UltraInteract can be used in both supervised fine-tuning and preference learning. For each instruction, it includes a preference tree consisting of (1) reasoning chains with diverse planning strategies in a unified format, (2) multi-turn interaction trajectories with the environment and the critique, and (3) pairwise data to facilitate preference learning. UltraInteract allows us to conduct an in-depth exploration of preference learning for reasoning tasks. Our investigation reveals that some well-established preference learning algorithms may be less suitable for reasoning tasks compared to their effectiveness in general conversations. Inspired by this, we derive a novel reward modeling objective which, together with UltraInteract, leads to a strong reward model.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Mastering Text, Code and Math Simultaneously via Fusing Highly Specialized Language Models

Underlying data distributions of natural language, programming code, and mathematical symbols vary vastly, presenting a complex challenge for large language models (LLMs) that strive to achieve high performance across all three domains simultaneously. Achieving a very high level of proficiency for an LLM within a specific domain often requires extensive training with relevant corpora, which is typically accompanied by a sacrifice in performance in other domains. In this paper, we propose to fuse models that are already highly-specialized directly. The proposed fusing framework, UltraFuser, consists of three distinct specialists that are already sufficiently trained on language, coding, and mathematics. A token-level gating mechanism is introduced to blend the specialists' outputs. A two-stage training strategy accompanied by balanced sampling is designed to ensure stability. To effectively train the fused model, we further construct a high-quality supervised instruction tuning dataset, UltraChat 2, which includes text, code, and mathematical content. This dataset comprises approximately 300,000 instructions and covers a wide range of topics in each domain. Experiments show that our model could simultaneously achieve mastery of the three crucial domains.

cs.CL↗