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Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable achievements across various language tasks.To enhance the performance of LLMs in scientific literature services, we developed the scientific literature LLM (SciLit-LLM) through pre-training and supervised fine-tuning on scientific literature, building upon the iFLYTEK Spark LLM. Furthermore, we present a knowledge service system Spark Research Assistant (SparkRA) based on our SciLit-LLM. SparkRA is accessible online and provides three primary functions: literature investigation, paper reading, and academic writing. As of July 30, 2024, SparkRA has garnered over 50,000 registered users, with a total usage count exceeding 1.3 million.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success and have been applied across various scientific fields, including chemistry. However, many chemical tasks require the processing of visual information, which cannot be successfully handled by existing chemical LLMs. This brings a growing need for models capable of integrating multimodal information in the chemical domain. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{ChemVLM}, an open-source chemical multimodal large language model specifically designed for chemical applications. ChemVLM is trained on a carefully curated bilingual multimodal dataset that enhances its ability to understand both textual and visual chemical information, including molecular structures, reactions, and chemistry examination questions. We develop three datasets for comprehensive evaluation, tailored to Chemical Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Multimodal Chemical Reasoning (MMCR), and Multimodal Molecule Understanding tasks. We benchmark ChemVLM against a range of open-source and proprietary multimodal large language models on various tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that ChemVLM achieves competitive performance across all evaluated tasks. Our model can be found at https://huggingface.co/AI4Chem/ChemVLM-26B.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing the AI industry with their superior capabilities. Training these models requires large-scale GPU clusters and significant computing time, leading to frequent failures that significantly increase training costs. Despite its significance, this field lacks a metric for evaluating reliability. In this work, we introduce a novel reliability metric called \emph{Training Overhead Ratio} (TOR) to evaluate the reliability of fault-tolerant LLM training systems. TOR is defined as the ratio of optimal training time to the observed training time of a system, serving as a practical tool for users to estimate the actual time required to train an LLM on a given system. Furthermore, our investigation identifies the key factor for enhancing reliability and present TOR equations for various types of failures encountered in practice.

Previous research on emergence in large language models shows these display apparent human-like abilities and psychological latent traits. However, results are partly contradicting in expression and magnitude of these latent traits, yet agree on the worrisome tendencies to score high on the Dark Triad of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, which, together with a track record of derailments, demands more rigorous research on safety of these models. We provided a state of the art language model with the same personality questionnaire in nine languages, and performed Bayesian analysis of Gaussian Mixture Model, finding evidence for a deeper-rooted issue. Our results suggest both interlingual and intralingual instabilities, which indicate that current language models do not develop a consistent core personality. This can lead to unsafe behaviour of artificial intelligence systems that are based on these foundation models, and are increasingly integrated in human life. We subsequently discuss the shortcomings of modern psychometrics, abstract it, and provide a framework for its species-neutral, substrate-free formulation.

Workplace accidents due to personal protective equipment (PPE) non-compliance raise serious safety concerns and lead to legal liabilities, financial penalties, and reputational damage. While object detection models have shown the capability to address this issue by identifying safety items, most existing models, such as YOLO, Faster R-CNN, and SSD, are limited in verifying the fine-grained attributes of PPE across diverse workplace scenarios. Vision language models (VLMs) are gaining traction for detection tasks by leveraging the synergy between visual and textual information, offering a promising solution to traditional object detection limitations in PPE recognition. Nonetheless, VLMs face challenges in consistently verifying PPE attributes due to the complexity and variability of workplace environments, requiring them to interpret context-specific language and visual cues simultaneously. We introduce Clip2Safety, an interpretable detection framework for diverse workplace safety compliance, which comprises four main modules: scene recognition, the visual prompt, safety items detection, and fine-grained verification. The scene recognition identifies the current scenario to determine the necessary safety gear. The visual prompt formulates the specific visual prompts needed for the detection process. The safety items detection identifies whether the required safety gear is being worn according to the specified scenario. Lastly, the fine-grained verification assesses whether the worn safety equipment meets the fine-grained attribute requirements. We conduct real-world case studies across six different scenarios. The results show that Clip2Safety not only demonstrates an accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art question-answering based VLMs but also achieves inference times two hundred times faster.

This paper presents an unsupervised method for single-channel blind dereverberation and room impulse response (RIR) estimation, called BUDDy. The algorithm is rooted in Bayesian posterior sampling: it combines a likelihood model enforcing fidelity to the reverberant measurement, and an anechoic speech prior implemented by an unconditional diffusion model. We design a parametric filter representing the RIR, with exponential decay for each frequency subband. Room acoustics estimation and speech dereverberation are jointly carried out, as the filter parameters are iteratively estimated and the speech utterance refined along the reverse diffusion trajectory. In a blind scenario where the room impulse response is unknown, BUDDy successfully performs speech dereverberation in various acoustic scenarios, significantly outperforming other blind unsupervised baselines. Unlike supervised methods, which often struggle to generalize, BUDDy seamlessly adapts to different acoustic conditions. This paper extends our previous work by offering new experimental results and insights into the algorithm's performance and versatility. We first investigate the robustness of informed dereverberation methods to RIR estimation errors, to motivate the joint acoustic estimation and dereverberation paradigm. Then, we demonstrate the adaptability of our method to high-resolution singing voice dereverberation, study its performance in RIR estimation, and conduct subjective evaluation experiments to validate the perceptual quality of the results, among other contributions. Audio samples and code can be found online.

Our research presents a novel motion generation framework designed to produce whole-body motion sequences conditioned on multiple modalities simultaneously, specifically text and audio inputs. Leveraging Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQVAEs) for motion discretization and a bidirectional Masked Language Modeling (MLM) strategy for efficient token prediction, our approach achieves improved processing efficiency and coherence in the generated motions. By integrating spatial attention mechanisms and a token critic we ensure consistency and naturalness in the generated motions. This framework expands the possibilities of motion generation, addressing the limitations of existing approaches and opening avenues for multimodal motion synthesis.

SoundSignature is a music application that integrates a custom OpenAI Assistant to analyze users' favorite songs. The system incorporates state-of-the-art Music Information Retrieval (MIR) Python packages to combine extracted acoustic/musical features with the assistant's extensive knowledge of the artists and bands. Capitalizing on this combined knowledge, SoundSignature leverages semantic audio and principles from the emerging Internet of Sounds (IoS) ecosystem, integrating MIR with AI to provide users with personalized insights into the acoustic properties of their music, akin to a musical preference personality report. Users can then interact with the chatbot to explore deeper inquiries about the acoustic analyses performed and how they relate to their musical taste. This interactivity transforms the application, acting not only as an informative resource about familiar and/or favorite songs, but also as an educational platform that enables users to deepen their understanding of musical features, music theory, acoustic properties commonly used in signal processing, and the artists behind the music. Beyond general usability, the application also incorporates several well-established open-source musician-specific tools, such as a chord recognition algorithm (CREMA), a source separation algorithm (DEMUCS), and an audio-to-MIDI converter (basic-pitch). These features allow users without coding skills to access advanced, open-source music processing algorithms simply by interacting with the chatbot (e.g., can you give me the stems of this song?). In this paper, we highlight the application's innovative features and educational potential, and present findings from a pilot user study that evaluates its efficacy and usability.

Radiological services are experiencing unprecedented demand, leading to increased interest in automating radiology report generation. Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) suffer from hallucinations, lack interpretability, and require expensive fine-tuning. We introduce SAE-Rad, which uses sparse autoencoders (SAEs) to decompose latent representations from a pre-trained vision transformer into human-interpretable features. Our hybrid architecture combines state-of-the-art SAE advancements, achieving accurate latent reconstructions while maintaining sparsity. Using an off-the-shelf language model, we distil ground-truth reports into radiological descriptions for each SAE feature, which we then compile into a full report for each image, eliminating the need for fine-tuning large models for this task. To the best of our knowledge, SAE-Rad represents the first instance of using mechanistic interpretability techniques explicitly for a downstream multi-modal reasoning task. On the MIMIC-CXR dataset, SAE-Rad achieves competitive radiology-specific metrics compared to state-of-the-art models while using significantly fewer computational resources for training. Qualitative analysis reveals that SAE-Rad learns meaningful visual concepts and generates reports aligning closely with expert interpretations. Our results suggest that SAEs can enhance multimodal reasoning in healthcare, providing a more interpretable alternative to existing VLMs.

This paper examines how the sequencing of images and text within multi-modal prompts influences the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs). We performed empirical evaluations using three commercial LLMs. Our results demonstrate that the order in which modalities are presented can significantly affect performance, particularly in tasks of varying complexity. For simpler tasks involving a single image, modality sequencing had a clear impact on accuracy. However, in more complex tasks involving multiple images and intricate reasoning steps, the effect of sequencing diminished, likely due to the increased cognitive demands of the task. Our findings also highlight the importance of question/prompt structure. In nested and multi-step reasoning tasks, modality sequencing played a key role in shaping model performance. While LLMs excelled in the initial stages of reasoning, they struggled to re-incorporate earlier information, underscoring the challenges of multi-hop reasoning within transformer architectures. This suggests that aligning the sequence of modalities with the logical flow of reasoning steps is more critical than modality order alone. These insights offer valuable implications for improving multi-modal prompt design, with broader applications across fields such as education, medical imaging, and cross-modal learning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly becoming commodity components of larger software systems. This poses natural security and privacy problems: poisoned data retrieved from one component can change the model's behavior and compromise the entire system, including coercing the model to spread confidential data to untrusted components. One promising approach is to tackle this problem at the system level via dynamic information flow (aka taint) tracking. Unfortunately, the traditional approach of propagating the most restrictive input label to the output is too conservative for applications where LLMs operate on inputs retrieved from diverse sources. In this paper, we propose a novel, more permissive approach to propagate information flow labels through LLM queries. The key idea behind our approach is to propagate only the labels of the samples that were influential in generating the model output and to eliminate the labels of unnecessary input. We implement and investigate the effectiveness of two variations of this approach, based on (i) prompt-based retrieval augmentation, and (ii) a $k$-nearest-neighbors language model. We compare these with the baseline of an introspection-based influence estimator that directly asks the language model to predict the output label. The results obtained highlight the superiority of our prompt-based label propagator, which improves the label in more than 85% of the cases in an LLM agent setting. These findings underscore the practicality of permissive label propagation for retrieval augmentation.

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a strong class of generative models, paralleling state-of-the-art (SOTA) autoregressive (AR) performance across natural language modeling domains. While there have been advances in AR as well as both latent and discrete diffusion-based approaches for protein sequence design, masked diffusion language modeling with protein language models (pLMs) is unexplored. In this work, we introduce MeMDLM, an MDLM tailored for membrane protein design, harnessing the SOTA pLM ESM-2 to de novo generate realistic membrane proteins for downstream experimental applications. Our evaluations demonstrate that MeMDLM-generated proteins exceed AR-based methods by generating sequences with greater transmembrane (TM) character. We further apply our design framework to scaffold soluble and TM motifs in sequences, demonstrating that MeMDLM-reconstructed sequences achieve greater biological similarity to their original counterparts compared to SOTA inpainting methods. Finally, we show that MeMDLM captures physicochemical membrane protein properties with similar fidelity as SOTA pLMs, paving the way for experimental applications. In total, our pipeline motivates future exploration of MDLM-based pLMs for protein design.