Daily Papers

How can we test AI performance? This question seems trivial, but it isn't. Standard benchmarks often have problems such as in-distribution and small-size test sets, oversimplified metrics, unfair comparisons, and short-term outcome pressure. As a consequence, good performance on standard benchmarks does not guarantee success in real-world scenarios. To address these problems, we present Touchstone, a large-scale collaborative segmentation benchmark of 9 types of abdominal organs. This benchmark is based on 5,195 training CT scans from 76 hospitals around the world and 5,903 testing CT scans from 11 additional hospitals. This diverse test set enhances the statistical significance of benchmark results and rigorously evaluates AI algorithms across various out-of-distribution scenarios. We invited 14 inventors of 19 AI algorithms to train their algorithms, while our team, as a third party, independently evaluated these algorithms on three test sets. In addition, we also evaluated pre-existing AI frameworks--which, differing from algorithms, are more flexible and can support different algorithms--including MONAI from NVIDIA, nnU-Net from DKFZ, and numerous other open-source frameworks. We are committed to expanding this benchmark to encourage more innovation of AI algorithms for the medical domain.

Photos serve as a way for humans to record what they experience in their daily lives, and they are often regarded as trustworthy sources of information. However, there is a growing concern that the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) technology may produce fake photos, which can create confusion and diminish trust in photographs. This study aims to comprehensively evaluate agents for distinguishing state-of-the-art AI-generated visual content. Our study benchmarks both human capability and cutting-edge fake image detection AI algorithms, using a newly collected large-scale fake image dataset Fake2M. In our human perception evaluation, titled HPBench, we discovered that humans struggle significantly to distinguish real photos from AI-generated ones, with a misclassification rate of 38.7%. Along with this, we conduct the model capability of AI-Generated images detection evaluation MPBench and the top-performing model from MPBench achieves a 13% failure rate under the same setting used in the human evaluation. We hope that our study can raise awareness of the potential risks of AI-generated images and facilitate further research to prevent the spread of false information. More information can refer to https://github.com/Inf-imagine/Sentry.

Dark matter makes up approximately 85% of total matter in our universe, yet it has never been directly observed in any laboratory on Earth. The origin of dark matter is one of the most important questions in contemporary physics, and a convincing detection of dark matter would be a Nobel-Prize-level breakthrough in fundamental science. The ABRACADABRA experiment was specifically designed to search for dark matter. Although it has not yet made a discovery, ABRACADABRA has produced several dark matter search results widely endorsed by the physics community. The experiment generates ultra-long time-series data at a rate of 10 million samples per second, where the dark matter signal would manifest itself as a sinusoidal oscillation mode within the ultra-long time series. In this paper, we present the TIDMAD -- a comprehensive data release from the ABRACADABRA experiment including three key components: an ultra-long time series dataset divided into training, validation, and science subsets; a carefully-designed denoising score for direct model benchmarking; and a complete analysis framework which produces a community-standard dark matter search result suitable for publication as a physics paper. This data release enables core AI algorithms to extract the signal and produce real physics results thereby advancing fundamental science. The data downloading and associated analysis scripts are available at https://github.com/jessicafry/TIDMAD

Although AI systems have been applied in various fields and achieved impressive performance, their safety and reliability are still a big concern. This is especially important for safety-critical tasks. One shared characteristic of these critical tasks is their risk sensitivity, where small mistakes can cause big consequences and even endanger life. There are several factors that could be guidelines for the successful deployment of AI systems in sensitive tasks: (i) failure detection and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection; (ii) overfitting identification; (iii) uncertainty quantification for predictions; (iv) robustness to data perturbations. These factors are also challenges of current AI systems, which are major blocks for building safe and reliable AI. Specifically, the current AI algorithms are unable to identify common causes for failure detection. Furthermore, additional techniques are required to quantify the quality of predictions. All these contribute to inaccurate uncertainty quantification, which lowers trust in predictions. Hence obtaining accurate model uncertainty quantification and its further improvement are challenging. To address these issues, many techniques have been proposed, such as regularization methods and learning strategies. As vision and language are the most typical data type and have many open source benchmark datasets, this thesis will focus on vision-language data processing for tasks like classification, image captioning, and vision question answering. In this thesis, we aim to build a safeguard by further developing current techniques to ensure the accurate model uncertainty for safety-critical tasks.

The presence of decision-making algorithms in society is rapidly increasing nowadays, while concerns about their transparency and the possibility of these algorithms becoming new sources of discrimination are arising. In fact, many relevant automated systems have been shown to make decisions based on sensitive information or discriminate certain social groups (e.g. certain biometric systems for person recognition). With the aim of studying how current multimodal algorithms based on heterogeneous sources of information are affected by sensitive elements and inner biases in the data, we propose a fictitious automated recruitment testbed: FairCVtest. We train automatic recruitment algorithms using a set of multimodal synthetic profiles consciously scored with gender and racial biases. FairCVtest shows the capacity of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) behind such recruitment tool to extract sensitive information from unstructured data, and exploit it in combination to data biases in undesirable (unfair) ways. Finally, we present a list of recent works developing techniques capable of removing sensitive information from the decision-making process of deep learning architectures. We have used one of these algorithms (SensitiveNets) to experiment discrimination-aware learning for the elimination of sensitive information in our multimodal AI framework. Our methodology and results show how to generate fairer AI-based tools in general, and in particular fairer automated recruitment systems.

The PI-CAI (Prostate Imaging: Cancer AI) challenge led to expert-level diagnostic algorithms for clinically significant prostate cancer detection. The algorithms receive biparametric MRI scans as input, which consist of T2-weighted and diffusion-weighted scans. These scans can be misaligned due to multiple factors in the scanning process. Image registration can alleviate this issue by predicting the deformation between the sequences. We investigate the effect of image registration on the diagnostic performance of AI-based prostate cancer diagnosis. First, the image registration algorithm, developed in MeVisLab, is analyzed using a dataset with paired lesion annotations. Second, the effect on diagnosis is evaluated by comparing case-level cancer diagnosis performance between using the original dataset, rigidly aligned diffusion-weighted scans, or deformably aligned diffusion-weighted scans. Rigid registration showed no improvement. Deformable registration demonstrated a substantial improvement in lesion overlap (+10% median Dice score) and a positive yet non-significant improvement in diagnostic performance (+0.3% AUROC, p=0.18). Our investigation shows that a substantial improvement in lesion alignment does not directly lead to a significant improvement in diagnostic performance. Qualitative analysis indicated that jointly developing image registration methods and diagnostic AI algorithms could enhance diagnostic accuracy and patient outcomes.

Open-world survival games pose significant challenges for AI algorithms due to their multi-tasking, deep exploration, and goal prioritization requirements. Despite reinforcement learning (RL) being popular for solving games, its high sample complexity limits its effectiveness in complex open-world games like Crafter or Minecraft. We propose a novel approach, SPRING, to read the game's original academic paper and use the knowledge learned to reason and play the game through a large language model (LLM). Prompted with the LaTeX source as game context and a description of the agent's current observation, our SPRING framework employs a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with game-related questions as nodes and dependencies as edges. We identify the optimal action to take in the environment by traversing the DAG and calculating LLM responses for each node in topological order, with the LLM's answer to final node directly translating to environment actions. In our experiments, we study the quality of in-context "reasoning" induced by different forms of prompts under the setting of the Crafter open-world environment. Our experiments suggest that LLMs, when prompted with consistent chain-of-thought, have great potential in completing sophisticated high-level trajectories. Quantitatively, SPRING with GPT-4 outperforms all state-of-the-art RL baselines, trained for 1M steps, without any training. Finally, we show the potential of games as a test bed for LLMs.

Despite efforts to mitigate the inherent risks and biases of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, these algorithms can disproportionately impact culturally marginalized groups. A range of approaches has been proposed to address or reduce these risks, including the development of ethical guidelines and principles for responsible AI, as well as technical solutions that promote algorithmic fairness. Drawing on design justice, expansive learning theory, and recent empirical work on participatory AI, we argue that mitigating these harms requires a fundamental re-architecture of the AI production pipeline. This re-design should center co-production, diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), and multidisciplinary collaboration. We introduce an augmented AI lifecycle consisting of five interconnected phases: co-framing, co-design, co-implementation, co-deployment, and co-maintenance. The lifecycle is informed by four multidisciplinary workshops and grounded in themes of distributed authority and iterative knowledge exchange. Finally, we relate the proposed lifecycle to several leading ethical frameworks and outline key research questions that remain for scaling participatory governance.

AI-generated content (AIGC) methods aim to produce text, images, videos, 3D assets, and other media using AI algorithms. Due to its wide range of applications and the demonstrated potential of recent works, AIGC developments have been attracting lots of attention recently, and AIGC methods have been developed for various data modalities, such as image, video, text, 3D shape (as voxels, point clouds, meshes, and neural implicit fields), 3D scene, 3D human avatar (body and head), 3D motion, and audio -- each presenting different characteristics and challenges. Furthermore, there have also been many significant developments in cross-modality AIGC methods, where generative methods can receive conditioning input in one modality and produce outputs in another. Examples include going from various modalities to image, video, 3D shape, 3D scene, 3D avatar (body and head), 3D motion (skeleton and avatar), and audio modalities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of AIGC methods across different data modalities, including both single-modality and cross-modality methods, highlighting the various challenges, representative works, and recent technical directions in each setting. We also survey the representative datasets throughout the modalities, and present comparative results for various modalities. Moreover, we also discuss the challenges and potential future research directions.

The discovery of high-temperature superconducting materials holds great significance for human industry and daily life. In recent years, research on predicting superconducting transition temperatures using artificial intelligence~(AI) has gained popularity, with most of these tools claiming to achieve remarkable accuracy. However, the lack of widely accepted benchmark datasets in this field has severely hindered fair comparisons between different AI algorithms and impeded further advancement of these methods. In this work, we present the HTSC-2025, an ambient-pressure high-temperature superconducting benchmark dataset. This comprehensive compilation encompasses theoretically predicted superconducting materials discovered by theoretical physicists from 2023 to 2025 based on BCS superconductivity theory, including the renowned X_2YH_6 system, perovskite MXH_3 system, M_3XH_8 system, cage-like BCN-doped metal atomic systems derived from LaH_{10} structural evolution, and two-dimensional honeycomb-structured systems evolving from MgB_2. The HTSC-2025 benchmark has been open-sourced at https://github.com/xqh19970407/HTSC-2025 and will be continuously updated. This benchmark holds significant importance for accelerating the discovery of superconducting materials using AI-based methods.

Methane (CH_4) is the second most powerful greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide and plays a crucial role in climate change due to its high global warming potential. Accurately modeling CH_4 fluxes across the globe and at fine temporal scales is essential for understanding its spatial and temporal variability and developing effective mitigation strategies. In this work, we introduce the first-of-its-kind cross-scale global wetland methane benchmark dataset (X-MethaneWet), which synthesizes physics-based model simulation data from TEM-MDM and the real-world observation data from FLUXNET-CH_4. This dataset can offer opportunities for improving global wetland CH_4 modeling and science discovery with new AI algorithms. To set up AI model baselines for methane flux prediction, we evaluate the performance of various sequential deep learning models on X-MethaneWet. Furthermore, we explore four different transfer learning techniques to leverage simulated data from TEM-MDM to improve the generalization of deep learning models on real-world FLUXNET-CH_4 observations. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of these approaches, highlighting their potential for advancing methane emission modeling and contributing to the development of more accurate and scalable AI-driven climate models.

Recent AI algorithms are blackbox models whose decisions are difficult to interpret. eXplainable AI (XAI) seeks to address lack of AI interpretability and trust by explaining to customers their AI decision, e.g., decision to reject a loan application. The common wisdom is that regulating AI by mandating fully transparent XAI leads to greater social welfare. This paper challenges this notion through a game theoretic model for a policy-maker who maximizes social welfare, firms in a duopoly competition that maximize profits, and heterogenous consumers. The results show that XAI regulation may be redundant. In fact, mandating fully transparent XAI may make firms and customers worse off. This reveals a trade-off between maximizing welfare and receiving explainable AI outputs. We also discuss managerial implications for policy-maker and firms.

Human hands play a central role in interacting, motivating increasing research in dexterous robotic manipulation. Data-driven embodied AI algorithms demand precise, large-scale, human-like manipulation sequences, which are challenging to obtain with conventional reinforcement learning or real-world teleoperation. To address this, we introduce ManipTrans, a novel two-stage method for efficiently transferring human bimanual skills to dexterous robotic hands in simulation. ManipTrans first pre-trains a generalist trajectory imitator to mimic hand motion, then fine-tunes a specific residual module under interaction constraints, enabling efficient learning and accurate execution of complex bimanual tasks. Experiments show that ManipTrans surpasses state-of-the-art methods in success rate, fidelity, and efficiency. Leveraging ManipTrans, we transfer multiple hand-object datasets to robotic hands, creating DexManipNet, a large-scale dataset featuring previously unexplored tasks like pen capping and bottle unscrewing. DexManipNet comprises 3.3K episodes of robotic manipulation and is easily extensible, facilitating further policy training for dexterous hands and enabling real-world deployments.

Seismic advances in generative AI algorithms for imagery, text, and other data types has led to the temptation to use synthetic data to train next-generation models. Repeating this process creates an autophagous (self-consuming) loop whose properties are poorly understood. We conduct a thorough analytical and empirical analysis using state-of-the-art generative image models of three families of autophagous loops that differ in how fixed or fresh real training data is available through the generations of training and in whether the samples from previous generation models have been biased to trade off data quality versus diversity. Our primary conclusion across all scenarios is that without enough fresh real data in each generation of an autophagous loop, future generative models are doomed to have their quality (precision) or diversity (recall) progressively decrease. We term this condition Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD), making analogy to mad cow disease.

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading cause of vision loss in working-age adults. While screening reduces the risk of blindness, traditional imaging is often costly and inaccessible. Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms present a scalable diagnostic solution, but concerns regarding fairness and generalization persist. This work evaluates the fairness and performance of image-trained models in DR prediction, as well as the impact of disentanglement as a bias mitigation technique, using the diverse mBRSET fundus dataset. Three models, ConvNeXt V2, DINOv2, and Swin V2, were trained on macula images to predict DR and sensitive attributes (SAs) (e.g., age and gender/sex). Fairness was assessed between subgroups of SAs, and disentanglement was applied to reduce bias. All models achieved high DR prediction performance in diagnosing (up to 94% AUROC) and could reasonably predict age and gender/sex (91% and 77% AUROC, respectively). Fairness assessment suggests disparities, such as a 10% AUROC gap between age groups in DINOv2. Disentangling SAs from DR prediction had varying results, depending on the model selected. Disentanglement improved DINOv2 performance (2% AUROC gain), but led to performance drops in ConvNeXt V2 and Swin V2 (7% and 3%, respectively). These findings highlight the complexity of disentangling fine-grained features in fundus imaging and emphasize the importance of fairness in medical imaging AI to ensure equitable and reliable healthcare solutions.

Resection and whole brain radiotherapy (WBRT) are the standards of care for the treatment of patients with brain metastases (BM) but are often associated with cognitive side effects. Stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) involves a more targeted treatment approach and has been shown to avoid the side effects associated with WBRT. However, SRS requires precise identification and delineation of BM. While many AI algorithms have been developed for this purpose, their clinical adoption has been limited due to poor model performance in the clinical setting. Major reasons for non-generalizable algorithms are the limitations in the datasets used for training the AI network. The purpose of this study was to create a large, heterogenous, annotated BM dataset for training and validation of AI models to improve generalizability. We present a BM dataset of 200 patients with pretreatment T1, T1 post-contrast, T2, and FLAIR MR images. The dataset includes contrast-enhancing and necrotic 3D segmentations on T1 post-contrast and whole tumor (including peritumoral edema) 3D segmentations on FLAIR. Our dataset contains 975 contrast-enhancing lesions, many of which are sub centimeter, along with clinical and imaging feature information. We used a streamlined approach to database-building leveraging a PACS-integrated segmentation workflow.

Recent progress in large-scale language models has enabled breakthroughs in previously intractable computer programming tasks. Prior work in meta-learning and neural architecture search has led to substantial successes across various task domains, spawning myriad approaches for algorithmically optimizing the design and learning dynamics of deep learning models. At the intersection of these research areas, we implement a code-generating language model with the ability to modify its own source code. Self-programming AI algorithms have been of interest since the dawn of AI itself. Although various theoretical formulations of generalized self-programming AI have been posed, no such system has been successfully implemented to date under real-world computational constraints. Applying AI-based code generation to AI itself, we develop and experimentally validate the first practical implementation of a self-programming AI system. We empirically show that a self-programming AI implemented using a code generation model can successfully modify its own source code to improve performance and program sub-models to perform auxiliary tasks. Our model can self-modify various properties including model architecture, computational capacity, and learning dynamics.

Language is essentially a complex, intricate system of human expressions governed by grammatical rules. It poses a significant challenge to develop capable AI algorithms for comprehending and grasping a language. As a major approach, language modeling has been widely studied for language understanding and generation in the past two decades, evolving from statistical language models to neural language models. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been proposed by pre-training Transformer models over large-scale corpora, showing strong capabilities in solving various NLP tasks. Since researchers have found that model scaling can lead to performance improvement, they further study the scaling effect by increasing the model size to an even larger size. Interestingly, when the parameter scale exceeds a certain level, these enlarged language models not only achieve a significant performance improvement but also show some special abilities that are not present in small-scale language models. To discriminate the difference in parameter scale, the research community has coined the term large language models (LLM) for the PLMs of significant size. Recently, the research on LLMs has been largely advanced by both academia and industry, and a remarkable progress is the launch of ChatGPT, which has attracted widespread attention from society. The technical evolution of LLMs has been making an important impact on the entire AI community, which would revolutionize the way how we develop and use AI algorithms. In this survey, we review the recent advances of LLMs by introducing the background, key findings, and mainstream techniques. In particular, we focus on four major aspects of LLMs, namely pre-training, adaptation tuning, utilization, and capacity evaluation. Besides, we also summarize the available resources for developing LLMs and discuss the remaining issues for future directions.

Post-training quantization of Large Language Models (LLMs) has proven effective in reducing the computational requirements for running inference on these models. In this study, we focus on a straightforward question: When aiming for a specific accuracy or perplexity target for low-precision quantization, how many high-precision numbers or calculations are required to preserve as we scale LLMs to larger sizes? We first introduce a critical metric named the quantization ratio, which compares the number of parameters quantized to low-precision arithmetic against the total parameter count. Through extensive and carefully controlled experiments across different model families, arithmetic types, and quantization granularities (e.g. layer-wise, matmul-wise), we identify two central phenomenons. 1) The larger the models, the better they can preserve performance with an increased quantization ratio, as measured by perplexity in pre-training tasks or accuracy in downstream tasks. 2) The finer the granularity of mixed-precision quantization (e.g., matmul-wise), the more the model can increase the quantization ratio. We believe these observed phenomena offer valuable insights for future AI hardware design and the development of advanced Efficient AI algorithms.

3D building models are critical for applications in architecture, energy simulation, and navigation. Yet, generating accurate and semantically rich 3D buildings automatically remains a major challenge due to the lack of large-scale annotated datasets in the public domain. Inspired by the success of synthetic data in computer vision, we introduce SYNBUILD-3D, a large, diverse, and multi-modal dataset of over 6.2 million synthetic 3D residential buildings at Level of Detail (LoD) 4. In the dataset, each building is represented through three distinct modalities: a semantically enriched 3D wireframe graph at LoD 4 (Modality I), the corresponding floor plan images (Modality II), and a LiDAR-like roof point cloud (Modality III). The semantic annotations for each building wireframe are derived from the corresponding floor plan images and include information on rooms, doors, and windows. Through its tri-modal nature, future work can use SYNBUILD-3D to develop novel generative AI algorithms that automate the creation of 3D building models at LoD 4, subject to predefined floor plan layouts and roof geometries, while enforcing semantic-geometric consistency. Dataset and code samples are publicly available at https://github.com/kdmayer/SYNBUILD-3D.

With the rapid development and integration of artificial intelligence (AI) methods in next-generation networks (NextG), AI algorithms have provided significant advantages for NextG in terms of frequency spectrum usage, bandwidth, latency, and security. A key feature of NextG is the integration of AI, i.e., self-learning architecture based on self-supervised algorithms, to improve the performance of the network. A secure AI-powered structure is also expected to protect NextG networks against cyber-attacks. However, AI itself may be attacked, i.e., model poisoning targeted by attackers, and it results in cybersecurity violations. This paper proposes an AI trust platform using Streamlit for NextG networks that allows researchers to evaluate, defend, certify, and verify their AI models and applications against adversarial threats of evasion, poisoning, extraction, and interference.

Diffusion-weighted MRI (DWI) is essential for stroke diagnosis, treatment decisions, and prognosis. However, image and disease variability hinder the development of generalizable AI algorithms with clinical value. We address this gap by presenting a novel ensemble algorithm derived from the 2022 Ischemic Stroke Lesion Segmentation (ISLES) challenge. ISLES'22 provided 400 patient scans with ischemic stroke from various medical centers, facilitating the development of a wide range of cutting-edge segmentation algorithms by the research community. Through collaboration with leading teams, we combined top-performing algorithms into an ensemble model that overcomes the limitations of individual solutions. Our ensemble model achieved superior ischemic lesion detection and segmentation accuracy on our internal test set compared to individual algorithms. This accuracy generalized well across diverse image and disease variables. Furthermore, the model excelled in extracting clinical biomarkers. Notably, in a Turing-like test, neuroradiologists consistently preferred the algorithm's segmentations over manual expert efforts, highlighting increased comprehensiveness and precision. Validation using a real-world external dataset (N=1686) confirmed the model's generalizability. The algorithm's outputs also demonstrated strong correlations with clinical scores (admission NIHSS and 90-day mRS) on par with or exceeding expert-derived results, underlining its clinical relevance. This study offers two key findings. First, we present an ensemble algorithm (https://github.com/Tabrisrei/ISLES22_Ensemble) that detects and segments ischemic stroke lesions on DWI across diverse scenarios on par with expert (neuro)radiologists. Second, we show the potential for biomedical challenge outputs to extend beyond the challenge's initial objectives, demonstrating their real-world clinical applicability.

Oracle bone inscriptions(OBI) is the earliest developed writing system in China, bearing invaluable written exemplifications of early Shang history and paleography. However, the task of deciphering OBI, in the current climate of the scholarship, can prove extremely challenging. Out of the 4,500 oracle bone characters excavated, only a third have been successfully identified. Therefore, leveraging the advantages of advanced AI technology to assist in the decipherment of OBI is a highly essential research topic. However, fully utilizing AI's capabilities in these matters is reliant on having a comprehensive and high-quality annotated OBI dataset at hand whereas most existing datasets are only annotated in just a single or a few dimensions, limiting the value of their potential application. For instance, the Oracle-MNIST dataset only offers 30k images classified into 10 categories. Therefore, this paper proposes an Oracle Bone Inscriptions Multi-modal Dataset(OBIMD), which includes annotation information for 10,077 pieces of oracle bones. Each piece has two modalities: pixel-level aligned rubbings and facsimiles. The dataset annotates the detection boxes, character categories, transcriptions, corresponding inscription groups, and reading sequences in the groups of each oracle bone character, providing a comprehensive and high-quality level of annotations. This dataset can be used for a variety of AI-related research tasks relevant to the field of OBI, such as OBI Character Detection and Recognition, Rubbing Denoising, Character Matching, Character Generation, Reading Sequence Prediction, Missing Characters Completion task and so on. We believe that the creation and publication of a dataset like this will help significantly advance the application of AI algorithms in the field of OBI research.

In recent times, the grandeur of Large Language Models (LLMs) has not only shone in the realm of natural language processing but has also cast its brilliance across a vast array of applications. This remarkable display of LLM capabilities has ignited a surge in research contributions within this domain, spanning a diverse spectrum of topics. These contributions encompass advancements in neural network architecture, context length enhancements, model alignment, training datasets, benchmarking, efficiency improvements, and more. Recent years have witnessed a dynamic synergy between academia and industry, propelling the field of LLM research to new heights. A notable milestone in this journey is the introduction of ChatGPT, a powerful AI chatbot grounded in LLMs, which has garnered widespread societal attention. The evolving technology of LLMs has begun to reshape the landscape of the entire AI community, promising a revolutionary shift in the way we create and employ AI algorithms. Given this swift-paced technical evolution, our survey embarks on a journey to encapsulate the recent strides made in the world of LLMs. Through an exploration of the background, key discoveries, and prevailing methodologies, we offer an up-to-the-minute review of the literature. By examining multiple LLM models, our paper not only presents a comprehensive overview but also charts a course that identifies existing challenges and points toward potential future research trajectories. This survey furnishes a well-rounded perspective on the current state of generative AI, shedding light on opportunities for further exploration, enhancement, and innovation.

Open-source reinforcement learning (RL) environments have played a crucial role in driving progress in the development of AI algorithms. In modern RL research, there is a need for simulated environments that are performant, scalable, and modular to enable their utilization in a wider range of potential real-world applications. Therefore, we present Jumanji, a suite of diverse RL environments specifically designed to be fast, flexible, and scalable. Jumanji provides a suite of environments focusing on combinatorial problems frequently encountered in industry, as well as challenging general decision-making tasks. By leveraging the efficiency of JAX and hardware accelerators like GPUs and TPUs, Jumanji enables rapid iteration of research ideas and large-scale experimentation, ultimately empowering more capable agents. Unlike existing RL environment suites, Jumanji is highly customizable, allowing users to tailor the initial state distribution and problem complexity to their needs. Furthermore, we provide actor-critic baselines for each environment, accompanied by preliminary findings on scaling and generalization scenarios. Jumanji aims to set a new standard for speed, adaptability, and scalability of RL environments.

In the last decade, Deep Reinforcement Learning has evolved into a powerful tool for complex sequential decision-making problems. It combines deep learning's proficiency in processing rich input signals with reinforcement learning's adaptability across diverse control tasks. At its core, an RL agent seeks to maximize its cumulative reward, enabling AI algorithms to uncover novel solutions previously unknown to experts. However, this focus on reward maximization also introduces a significant difficulty: improper reward specification can result in unexpected, misaligned agent behavior and inefficient learning. The complexity of accurately specifying the reward function is further amplified by the sequential nature of the task, the sparsity of learning signals, and the multifaceted aspects of the desired behavior. In this thesis, we survey the literature on effective reward specification strategies, identify core challenges relating to each of these approaches, and propose original contributions addressing the issue of sample efficiency and alignment in deep reinforcement learning. Reward specification represents one of the most challenging aspects of applying reinforcement learning in real-world domains. Our work underscores the absence of a universal solution to this complex and nuanced challenge; solving it requires selecting the most appropriate tools for the specific requirements of each unique application.

Gravitational waves, detected a century after they were first theorized, are spacetime distortions caused by some of the most cataclysmic events in the universe, including black hole mergers and supernovae. The successful detection of these waves has been made possible by ingenious detectors designed by human experts. Beyond these successful designs, the vast space of experimental configurations remains largely unexplored, offering an exciting territory potentially rich in innovative and unconventional detection strategies. Here, we demonstrate the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to systematically explore this enormous space, revealing novel topologies for gravitational wave (GW) detectors that outperform current next-generation designs under realistic experimental constraints. Our results span a broad range of astrophysical targets, such as black hole and neutron star mergers, supernovae, and primordial GW sources. Moreover, we are able to conceptualize the initially unorthodox discovered designs, emphasizing the potential of using AI algorithms not only in discovering but also in understanding these novel topologies. We've assembled more than 50 superior solutions in a publicly available Gravitational Wave Detector Zoo which could lead to many new surprising techniques. At a bigger picture, our approach is not limited to gravitational wave detectors and can be extended to AI-driven design of experiments across diverse domains of fundamental physics.

Neural rendering combines ideas from classical computer graphics and machine learning to synthesize images from real-world observations. NeRF, short for Neural Radiance Fields, is a recent innovation that uses AI algorithms to create 3D objects from 2D images. By leveraging an interpolation approach, NeRF can produce new 3D reconstructed views of complicated scenes. Rather than directly restoring the whole 3D scene geometry, NeRF generates a volumetric representation called a ``radiance field,'' which is capable of creating color and density for every point within the relevant 3D space. The broad appeal and notoriety of NeRF make it imperative to examine the existing research on the topic comprehensively. While previous surveys on 3D rendering have primarily focused on traditional computer vision-based or deep learning-based approaches, only a handful of them discuss the potential of NeRF. However, such surveys have predominantly focused on NeRF's early contributions and have not explored its full potential. NeRF is a relatively new technique continuously being investigated for its capabilities and limitations. This survey reviews recent advances in NeRF and categorizes them according to their architectural designs, especially in the field of novel view synthesis.

Artificial intelligence (AI) enables machines to learn from human experience, adjust to new inputs, and perform human-like tasks. AI is progressing rapidly and is transforming the way businesses operate, from process automation to cognitive augmentation of tasks and intelligent process/data analytics. However, the main challenge for human users would be to understand and appropriately trust the result of AI algorithms and methods. In this paper, to address this challenge, we study and analyze the recent work done in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods and tools. We introduce a novel XAI process, which facilitates producing explainable models while maintaining a high level of learning performance. We present an interactive evidence-based approach to assist human users in comprehending and trusting the results and output created by AI-enabled algorithms. We adopt a typical scenario in the Banking domain for analyzing customer transactions. We develop a digital dashboard to facilitate interacting with the algorithm results and discuss how the proposed XAI method can significantly improve the confidence of data scientists in understanding the result of AI-enabled algorithms.

This review examines how AI technologies are transforming democratic representation, focusing on citizen participation and algorithmic decision-making. The analysis reveals that AI technologies are reshaping democratic processes in fundamental ways: enabling mass-scale deliberation, changing how citizens access and engage with political information, and transforming how representatives make and implement decisions. While AI offers unprecedented opportunities for enhancing democratic participation and governance efficiency, it also presents significant challenges to democratic legitimacy and accountability. Social media platforms' AI-driven algorithms currently mediate much political discourse, creating concerns about information manipulation and privacy. Large Language Models introduce both epistemic challenges and potential tools for improving democratic dialogue. The emergence of Mass Online Deliberation platforms suggests possibilities for scaling up meaningful citizen participation, while Algorithmic Decision-Making systems promise more efficient policy implementation but face limitations in handling complex political trade-offs. As these systems become prevalent, representatives may assume the role of architects of automated decision frameworks, responsible for guiding the translation of politically contested concepts into technical parameters and metrics. Advanced deliberation platforms offering real-time insights into citizen preferences will challenge traditional representative independence and discretion to interpret public will. The institutional integration of these participation mechanisms requires frameworks that balance the benefits with democratic stability through hybrid systems weighting different forms of democratic expression.

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

Open-ended and AI-generating algorithms aim to continuously generate and solve increasingly complex tasks indefinitely, offering a promising path toward more general intelligence. To accomplish this grand vision, learning must occur within a vast array of potential tasks. Existing approaches to automatically generating environments are constrained within manually predefined, often narrow distributions of environment, limiting their ability to create any learning environment. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel framework, OMNI-EPIC, that augments previous work in Open-endedness via Models of human Notions of Interestingness (OMNI) with Environments Programmed in Code (EPIC). OMNI-EPIC leverages foundation models to autonomously generate code specifying the next learnable (i.e., not too easy or difficult for the agent's current skill set) and interesting (e.g., worthwhile and novel) tasks. OMNI-EPIC generates both environments (e.g., an obstacle course) and reward functions (e.g., progress through the obstacle course quickly without touching red objects), enabling it, in principle, to create any simulatable learning task. We showcase the explosive creativity of OMNI-EPIC, which continuously innovates to suggest new, interesting learning challenges. We also highlight how OMNI-EPIC can adapt to reinforcement learning agents' learning progress, generating tasks that are of suitable difficulty. Overall, OMNI-EPIC can endlessly create learnable and interesting environments, further propelling the development of self-improving AI systems and AI-Generating Algorithms. Project website with videos: https://dub.sh/omniepic

The first ACM/IEEE TinyML Design Contest (TDC) held at the 41st International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) in 2022 is a challenging, multi-month, research and development competition. TDC'22 focuses on real-world medical problems that require the innovation and implementation of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) algorithms on implantable devices. The challenge problem of TDC'22 is to develop a novel AI/ML-based real-time detection algorithm for life-threatening ventricular arrhythmia over low-power microcontrollers utilized in Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillators (ICDs). The dataset contains more than 38,000 5-second intracardiac electrograms (IEGMs) segments over 8 different types of rhythm from 90 subjects. The dedicated hardware platform is NUCLEO-L432KC manufactured by STMicroelectronics. TDC'22, which is open to multi-person teams world-wide, attracted more than 150 teams from over 50 organizations. This paper first presents the medical problem, dataset, and evaluation procedure in detail. It further demonstrates and discusses the designs developed by the leading teams as well as representative results. This paper concludes with the direction of improvement for the future TinyML design for health monitoring applications.

Open-ended algorithms aim to learn new, interesting behaviors forever. That requires a vast environment search space, but there are thus infinitely many possible tasks. Even after filtering for tasks the current agent can learn (i.e., learning progress), countless learnable yet uninteresting tasks remain (e.g., minor variations of previously learned tasks). An Achilles Heel of open-endedness research is the inability to quantify (and thus prioritize) tasks that are not just learnable, but also interesting (e.g., worthwhile and novel). We propose solving this problem by Open-endedness via Models of human Notions of Interestingness (OMNI). The insight is that we can utilize foundation models (FMs) as a model of interestingness (MoI), because they already internalize human concepts of interestingness from training on vast amounts of human-generated data, where humans naturally write about what they find interesting or boring. We show that FM-based MoIs improve open-ended learning by focusing on tasks that are both learnable and interesting, outperforming baselines based on uniform task sampling or learning progress alone. This approach has the potential to dramatically advance the ability to intelligently select which tasks to focus on next (i.e., auto-curricula), and could be seen as AI selecting its own next task to learn, facilitating self-improving AI and AI-Generating Algorithms. Project website at https://www.jennyzhangzt.com/omni/

Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) are an extension of the Traveling Salesperson Problem and are a fundamental NP-hard challenge in combinatorial optimization. Solving VRP in real-time at large scale has become critical in numerous applications, from growing markets like last-mile delivery to emerging use-cases like interactive logistics planning. Such applications involve solving similar problem instances repeatedly, yet current state-of-the-art solvers treat each instance on its own without leveraging previous examples. We introduce a novel optimization framework that uses a reinforcement learning agent - trained on prior instances - to quickly generate initial solutions, which are then further optimized by genetic algorithms. Our framework, Evolutionary Algorithm with Reinforcement Learning Initialization (EARLI), consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art solvers across various time scales. For example, EARLI handles vehicle routing with 500 locations within 1s, 10x faster than current solvers for the same solution quality, enabling applications like real-time and interactive routing. EARLI can generalize to new data, as demonstrated on real e-commerce delivery data of a previously unseen city. Our hybrid framework presents a new way to combine reinforcement learning and genetic algorithms, paving the road for closer interdisciplinary collaboration between AI and optimization communities towards real-time optimization in diverse domains.

This paper introduces an innovative approach to analyzing and improving multi-hop reasoning in AI systems by drawing inspiration from Hamiltonian mechanics. We propose a novel framework that maps reasoning chains in embedding spaces to Hamiltonian systems, allowing us to leverage powerful analytical tools from classical physics. Our method defines a Hamiltonian function that balances the progression of reasoning (kinetic energy) against the relevance to the question at hand (potential energy). Using this framework, we analyze a large dataset of reasoning chains from a multi-hop question-answering task, revealing intriguing patterns that distinguish valid from invalid reasoning. We show that valid reasoning chains have lower Hamiltonian energy and move in ways that make the best trade-off between getting more information and answering the right question. Furthermore, we demonstrate the application of this framework to steer the creation of more efficient reasoning algorithms within AI systems. Our results not only provide new insights into the nature of valid reasoning but also open up exciting possibilities for physics-inspired approaches to understanding and improving artificial intelligence.

Peer review is a critical process for ensuring the integrity of published scientific research. Confidence in this process is predicated on the assumption that experts in the relevant domain give careful consideration to the merits of manuscripts which are submitted for publication. With the recent rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), a new risk to the peer review process is that negligent reviewers will rely on LLMs to perform the often time consuming process of reviewing a paper. However, there is a lack of existing resources for benchmarking the detectability of AI text in the domain of peer review. To address this deficiency, we introduce a comprehensive dataset containing a total of 788,984 AI-written peer reviews paired with corresponding human reviews, covering 8 years of papers submitted to each of two leading AI research conferences (ICLR and NeurIPS). We use this new resource to evaluate the ability of 18 existing AI text detection algorithms to distinguish between peer reviews fully written by humans and different state-of-the-art LLMs. Additionally, we explore a context-aware detection method called Anchor, which leverages manuscript content to detect AI-generated reviews, and analyze the sensitivity of detection models to LLM-assisted editing of human-written text. Our work reveals the difficulty of identifying AI-generated text at the individual peer review level, highlighting the urgent need for new tools and methods to detect this unethical use of generative AI. Our dataset is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/IntelLabs/AI-Peer-Review-Detection-Benchmark.

Computing power, or "compute," is crucial for the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. As a result, governments and companies have started to leverage compute as a means to govern AI. For example, governments are investing in domestic compute capacity, controlling the flow of compute to competing countries, and subsidizing compute access to certain sectors. However, these efforts only scratch the surface of how compute can be used to govern AI development and deployment. Relative to other key inputs to AI (data and algorithms), AI-relevant compute is a particularly effective point of intervention: it is detectable, excludable, and quantifiable, and is produced via an extremely concentrated supply chain. These characteristics, alongside the singular importance of compute for cutting-edge AI models, suggest that governing compute can contribute to achieving common policy objectives, such as ensuring the safety and beneficial use of AI. More precisely, policymakers could use compute to facilitate regulatory visibility of AI, allocate resources to promote beneficial outcomes, and enforce restrictions against irresponsible or malicious AI development and usage. However, while compute-based policies and technologies have the potential to assist in these areas, there is significant variation in their readiness for implementation. Some ideas are currently being piloted, while others are hindered by the need for fundamental research. Furthermore, naive or poorly scoped approaches to compute governance carry significant risks in areas like privacy, economic impacts, and centralization of power. We end by suggesting guardrails to minimize these risks from compute governance.

Computing in the life sciences has undergone a transformative evolution, from early computational models in the 1950s to the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) seen today. This paper highlights key milestones and technological advancements through the historical development of computing in the life sciences. The discussion includes the inception of computational models for biological processes, the advent of bioinformatics tools, and the integration of AI/ML in modern life sciences research. Attention is given to AI-enabled tools used in the life sciences, such as scientific large language models and bio-AI tools, examining their capabilities, limitations, and impact to biological risk. This paper seeks to clarify and establish essential terminology and concepts to ensure informed decision-making and effective communication across disciplines.

The training paradigm for large language models (LLMs) is moving from static datasets to experience-based learning, where agents acquire skills via interacting with complex environments. To facilitate this transition we introduce GEM (General Experience Maker), an open-source environment simulator designed for the age of LLMs. Analogous to OpenAI-Gym for traditional reinforcement learning (RL), GEM provides a standardized framework for the environment-agent interface, including asynchronous vectorized execution for high throughput, and flexible wrappers for easy extensibility. GEM also features a diverse suite of environments, robust integrated tools, and single-file example scripts demonstrating using GEM with five popular RL training frameworks. Along with this, we also provide a set of baselines across 24 environments using REINFORCE with Return Batch Normalization (ReBN), which -- unlike GRPO -- is compatible with the full RL setting of dense per-turn rewards and offers better credit assignment. We further conduct apple-to-apple benchmarking of PPO, GRPO and REINFORCE in both single- and multi-turn settings using GEM to shed light on the algorithmic designs. Lastly, GEM also functions as a convenient evaluation toolkit besides a training environment. We hope this framework can help accelerate future agentic LLM research.

Coral reefs are on the brink of collapse, with climate change, ocean acidification, and pollution leading to a projected 70-90% loss of coral species within the next decade. Restoration efforts are crucial, but their success hinges on introducing automation to upscale efforts. We present automated deployment of coral re-seeding devices powered by artificial intelligence, computer vision, and robotics. Specifically, we perform automated substrate classification, enabling detection of areas of the seafloor suitable for coral growth, thus significantly reducing reliance on human experts and increasing the range and efficiency of restoration. Real-world testing of the algorithms on the Great Barrier Reef leads to deployment accuracy of 77.8%, sub-image patch classification of 89.1%, and real-time model inference at 5.5 frames per second. Further, we present and publicly contribute a large collection of annotated substrate image data to foster future research in this area.

The expanse of information available over the internet makes it difficult to identify whether a specific work is a replica or a duplication of a protected work, especially if we talk about visual representations. Strategies are planned to identify the utilization of the copyrighted image in a report. Still, we want to resolve the issue of involving a copyrighted image in a video and a calculation that could recognize the degree of similarity of the copyrighted picture utilized in the video, even for the pieces of the video that are not featured a lot and in the end perform characterization errands on those edges. Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are vital to address this problem. Numerous associations have been creating different calculations to screen the identification of copyrighted work. This work means concentrating on those calculations, recognizing designs inside the information, and fabricating a more reasonable model for copyrighted image classification and detection. We have used different algorithms like- Image Processing, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Image hashing, etc. Keywords- Copyright, Artificial Intelligence(AI), Copyrighted Image, Convolutional Neural Network(CNN), Image processing, Degree of similarity, Image Hashing.

In the pharmaceutical industry, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) has seen consistent growth over the past decade. This rise is attributed to major advancements in statistical machine learning methodologies, computational capabilities and the increased availability of large datasets. AI techniques are applied throughout different stages of drug development, ranging from drug discovery to post-marketing benefit-risk assessment. Kolluri et al. provided a review of several case studies that span these stages, featuring key applications such as protein structure prediction, success probability estimation, subgroup identification, and AI-assisted clinical trial monitoring. From a regulatory standpoint, there was a notable uptick in submissions incorporating AI components in 2021. The most prevalent therapeutic areas leveraging AI were oncology (27%), psychiatry (15%), gastroenterology (12%), and neurology (11%). The paradigm of personalized or precision medicine has gained significant traction in recent research, partly due to advancements in AI techniques hamburg2010path. This shift has had a transformative impact on the pharmaceutical industry. Departing from the traditional "one-size-fits-all" model, personalized medicine incorporates various individual factors, such as environmental conditions, lifestyle choices, and health histories, to formulate customized treatment plans. By utilizing sophisticated machine learning algorithms, clinicians and researchers are better equipped to make informed decisions in areas such as disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment selection, thereby optimizing health outcomes for each individual.

Machine vision enhances automation, quality control, and operational efficiency in industrial applications by enabling machines to interpret and act on visual data. While traditional computer vision algorithms and approaches remain widely utilized, machine learning has become pivotal in current research activities. In particular, generative AI demonstrates promising potential by improving pattern recognition capabilities, through data augmentation, increasing image resolution, and identifying anomalies for quality control. However, the application of generative AI in machine vision is still in its early stages due to challenges in data diversity, computational requirements, and the necessity for robust validation methods. A comprehensive literature review is essential to understand the current state of generative AI in industrial machine vision, focusing on recent advancements, applications, and research trends. Thus, a literature review based on the PRISMA guidelines was conducted, analyzing over 1,200 papers on generative AI in industrial machine vision. Our findings reveal various patterns in current research, with the primary use of generative AI being data augmentation, for machine vision tasks such as classification and object detection. Furthermore, we gather a collection of application challenges together with data requirements to enable a successful application of generative AI in industrial machine vision. This overview aims to provide researchers with insights into the different areas and applications within current research, highlighting significant advancements and identifying opportunities for future work.

In many text-generation problems, users may prefer not only a single response, but a diverse range of high-quality outputs from which to choose. Quality-diversity (QD) search algorithms aim at such outcomes, by continually improving and diversifying a population of candidates. However, the applicability of QD to qualitative domains, like creative writing, has been limited by the difficulty of algorithmically specifying measures of quality and diversity. Interestingly, recent developments in language models (LMs) have enabled guiding search through AI feedback, wherein LMs are prompted in natural language to evaluate qualitative aspects of text. Leveraging this development, we introduce Quality-Diversity through AI Feedback (QDAIF), wherein an evolutionary algorithm applies LMs to both generate variation and evaluate the quality and diversity of candidate text. When assessed on creative writing domains, QDAIF covers more of a specified search space with high-quality samples than do non-QD controls. Further, human evaluation of QDAIF-generated creative texts validates reasonable agreement between AI and human evaluation. Our results thus highlight the potential of AI feedback to guide open-ended search for creative and original solutions, providing a recipe that seemingly generalizes to many domains and modalities. In this way, QDAIF is a step towards AI systems that can independently search, diversify, evaluate, and improve, which are among the core skills underlying human society's capacity for innovation.

The rapid urbanization of cities and increasing vehicular congestion have posed significant challenges to traffic management and safety. This study explores the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine vision technologies in revolutionizing traffic systems. By leveraging advanced surveillance cameras and deep learning algorithms, this research proposes a system for real-time detection of vehicles, traffic anomalies, and driver behaviors. The system integrates geospatial and weather data to adapt dynamically to environmental conditions, ensuring robust performance in diverse scenarios. Using YOLOv8 and YOLOv11 models, the study achieves high accuracy in vehicle detection and anomaly recognition, optimizing traffic flow and enhancing road safety. These findings contribute to the development of intelligent traffic management solutions and align with the vision of creating smart cities with sustainable and efficient urban infrastructure.

In AI alignment, extensive latitude must be granted to annotators, either human or algorithmic, to judge which model outputs are `better' or `safer.' We refer to this latitude as alignment discretion. Such discretion remains largely unexamined, posing two risks: (i) annotators may use their power of discretion arbitrarily, and (ii) models may fail to mimic this discretion. To study this phenomenon, we draw on legal concepts of discretion that structure how decision-making authority is conferred and exercised, particularly in cases where principles conflict or their application is unclear or irrelevant. Extended to AI alignment, discretion is required when alignment principles and rules are (inevitably) conflicting or indecisive. We present a set of metrics to systematically analyze when and how discretion in AI alignment is exercised, such that both risks (i) and (ii) can be observed. Moreover, we distinguish between human and algorithmic discretion and analyze the discrepancy between them. By measuring both human and algorithmic discretion over safety alignment datasets, we reveal layers of discretion in the alignment process that were previously unaccounted for. Furthermore, we demonstrate how algorithms trained on these datasets develop their own forms of discretion in interpreting and applying these principles, which challenges the purpose of having any principles at all. Our paper presents the first step towards formalizing this core gap in current alignment processes, and we call on the community to further scrutinize and control alignment discretion.

To detect the deployment of large language models for malicious use cases (e.g., fake content creation or academic plagiarism), several approaches have recently been proposed for identifying AI-generated text via watermarks or statistical irregularities. How robust are these detection algorithms to paraphrases of AI-generated text? To stress test these detectors, we first train an 11B parameter paraphrase generation model (DIPPER) that can paraphrase paragraphs, optionally leveraging surrounding text (e.g., user-written prompts) as context. DIPPER also uses scalar knobs to control the amount of lexical diversity and reordering in the paraphrases. Paraphrasing text generated by three large language models (including GPT3.5-davinci-003) with DIPPER successfully evades several detectors, including watermarking, GPTZero, DetectGPT, and OpenAI's text classifier. For example, DIPPER drops the detection accuracy of DetectGPT from 70.3% to 4.6% (at a constant false positive rate of 1%), without appreciably modifying the input semantics. To increase the robustness of AI-generated text detection to paraphrase attacks, we introduce a simple defense that relies on retrieving semantically-similar generations and must be maintained by a language model API provider. Given a candidate text, our algorithm searches a database of sequences previously generated by the API, looking for sequences that match the candidate text within a certain threshold. We empirically verify our defense using a database of 15M generations from a fine-tuned T5-XXL model and find that it can detect 80% to 97% of paraphrased generations across different settings, while only classifying 1% of human-written sequences as AI-generated. We will open source our code, model and data for future research.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved astonishing successes in many domains, especially with the recent breakthroughs in the development of foundational large models. These large models, leveraging their extensive training data, provide versatile solutions for a wide range of downstream tasks. However, as modern datasets become increasingly diverse and complex, the development of large AI models faces two major challenges: (1) the enormous consumption of computational resources and deployment difficulties, and (2) the difficulty in fitting heterogeneous and complex data, which limits the usability of the models. Mixture of Experts (MoE) models has recently attracted much attention in addressing these challenges, by dynamically selecting and activating the most relevant sub-models to process input data. It has been shown that MoEs can significantly improve model performance and efficiency with fewer resources, particularly excelling in handling large-scale, multimodal data. Given the tremendous potential MoE has demonstrated across various domains, it is urgent to provide a comprehensive summary of recent advancements of MoEs in many important fields. Existing surveys on MoE have their limitations, e.g., being outdated or lacking discussion on certain key areas, and we aim to address these gaps. In this paper, we first introduce the basic design of MoE, including gating functions, expert networks, routing mechanisms, training strategies, and system design. We then explore the algorithm design of MoE in important machine learning paradigms such as continual learning, meta-learning, multi-task learning, and reinforcement learning. Additionally, we summarize theoretical studies aimed at understanding MoE and review its applications in computer vision and natural language processing. Finally, we discuss promising future research directions.

Assessing action quality is both imperative and challenging due to its significant impact on the quality of AI-generated videos, further complicated by the inherently ambiguous nature of actions within AI-generated video (AIGV). Current action quality assessment (AQA) algorithms predominantly focus on actions from real specific scenarios and are pre-trained with normative action features, thus rendering them inapplicable in AIGVs. To address these problems, we construct GAIA, a Generic AI-generated Action dataset, by conducting a large-scale subjective evaluation from a novel causal reasoning-based perspective, resulting in 971,244 ratings among 9,180 video-action pairs. Based on GAIA, we evaluate a suite of popular text-to-video (T2V) models on their ability to generate visually rational actions, revealing their pros and cons on different categories of actions. We also extend GAIA as a testbed to benchmark the AQA capacity of existing automatic evaluation methods. Results show that traditional AQA methods, action-related metrics in recent T2V benchmarks, and mainstream video quality methods perform poorly with an average SRCC of 0.454, 0.191, and 0.519, respectively, indicating a sizable gap between current models and human action perception patterns in AIGVs. Our findings underscore the significance of action quality as a unique perspective for studying AIGVs and can catalyze progress towards methods with enhanced capacities for AQA in AIGVs.

Over the last several decades, software has been woven into the fabric of every aspect of our society. As software development surges and code infrastructure of enterprise applications ages, it is now more critical than ever to increase software development productivity and modernize legacy applications. Advances in deep learning and machine learning algorithms have enabled numerous breakthroughs, motivating researchers to leverage AI techniques to improve software development efficiency. Thus, the fast-emerging research area of AI for Code has garnered new interest and gathered momentum. In this paper, we present a large-scale dataset CodeNet, consisting of over 14 million code samples and about 500 million lines of code in 55 different programming languages, which is aimed at teaching AI to code. In addition to its large scale, CodeNet has a rich set of high-quality annotations to benchmark and help accelerate research in AI techniques for a variety of critical coding tasks, including code similarity and classification, code translation between a large variety of programming languages, and code performance (runtime and memory) improvement techniques. Additionally, CodeNet provides sample input and output test sets for 98.5% of the code samples, which can be used as an oracle for determining code correctness and potentially guide reinforcement learning for code quality improvements. As a usability feature, we provide several pre-processing tools in CodeNet to transform source code into representations that can be readily used as inputs into machine learning models. Results of code classification and code similarity experiments using the CodeNet dataset are provided as a reference. We hope that the scale, diversity and rich, high-quality annotations of CodeNet will offer unprecedented research opportunities at the intersection of AI and Software Engineering.

In recent years, research on humanoid robots has garnered increasing attention. With breakthroughs in various types of artificial intelligence algorithms, embodied intelligence, exemplified by humanoid robots, has been highly anticipated. The advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have significantly improved the motion control and generalization capabilities of humanoid robots. Simultaneously, the groundbreaking progress in large language models (LLM) and visual language models (VLM) has brought more possibilities and imagination to humanoid robots. LLM enables humanoid robots to understand complex tasks from language instructions and perform long-term task planning, while VLM greatly enhances the robots' understanding and interaction with their environment. This paper introduces magenta{Trinity}, a novel AI system for humanoid robots that integrates RL, LLM, and VLM. By combining these technologies, Trinity enables efficient control of humanoid robots in complex environments. This innovative approach not only enhances the capabilities but also opens new avenues for future research and applications of humanoid robotics.

This paper presents novel game-playing AI agents based on the AlphaZero framework, enhanced with Vision Transformer (ViT): AlphaViT, AlphaViD, and AlphaVDA. These agents are designed to play multiple board games of various sizes using a single network with shared weights, thereby overcoming AlphaZero's limitation of fixed-board-size constraints. AlphaViT employs only a transformer encoder, whereas AlphaViD and AlphaVDA incorporate both transformer encoders and decoders. In AlphaViD, the decoder processes outputs from the encoder, whereas AlphaVDA uses a learnable embeddings as the decoder input. The additional decoder layers in AlphaViD and AlphaVDA provide flexibility to adapt to various action spaces and board sizes. Experimental results show that the proposed agents, trained on either individual games or multiple games simultaneously, consistently outperform traditional algorithms such as Minimax and Monte Carlo Tree Search and approach the performance of AlphaZero, despite using a single deep neural network (DNN) with shared weights. In particular, AlphaViT shows strong performance across all tested games. Furthermore, fine-tuning the DNN using pre-trained weights from small-board games accelerates convergence and improves performance, particularly in Gomoku. Interestingly, simultaneous training on multiple games yields performance comparable to, or even surpassing, single-game training. These results indicate the potential of transformer-based architectures to develop more flexible and robust game-playing AI agents that excel in multiple games and dynamic environments.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is starting to transform the research process as we know it by automating the discovery of new solutions. Given a task, the typical AI-driven approach is (i) to generate a set of diverse solutions, and then (ii) to verify these solutions and select one that solves the problem. Crucially, this approach assumes the existence of a reliable verifier, i.e., one that can accurately determine whether a solution solves the given problem. We argue that systems research, long focused on designing and evaluating new performance-oriented algorithms, is particularly well-suited for AI-driven solution discovery. This is because system performance problems naturally admit reliable verifiers: solutions are typically implemented in real systems or simulators, and verification reduces to running these software artifacts against predefined workloads and measuring performance. We term this approach as AI-Driven Research for Systems (ADRS), which iteratively generates, evaluates, and refines solutions. Using penEvolve, an existing open-source ADRS instance, we present case studies across diverse domains, including load balancing for multi-region cloud scheduling, Mixture-of-Experts inference, LLM-based SQL queries, and transaction scheduling. In multiple instances, ADRS discovers algorithms that outperform state-of-the-art human designs (e.g., achieving up to 5.0x runtime improvements or 50% cost reductions). We distill best practices for guiding algorithm evolution, from prompt design to evaluator construction, for existing frameworks. We then discuss the broader implications for the systems community: as AI assumes a central role in algorithm design, we argue that human researchers will increasingly focus on problem formulation and strategic guidance. Our results highlight both the disruptive potential and the urgent need to adapt systems research practices in the age of AI.

Due to the rapid development of large language models, people increasingly often encounter texts that may start as written by a human but continue as machine-generated. Detecting the boundary between human-written and machine-generated parts of such texts is a challenging problem that has not received much attention in literature. We attempt to bridge this gap and examine several ways to adapt state of the art artificial text detection classifiers to the boundary detection setting. We push all detectors to their limits, using the Real or Fake text benchmark that contains short texts on several topics and includes generations of various language models. We use this diversity to deeply examine the robustness of all detectors in cross-domain and cross-model settings to provide baselines and insights for future research. In particular, we find that perplexity-based approaches to boundary detection tend to be more robust to peculiarities of domain-specific data than supervised fine-tuning of the RoBERTa model; we also find which features of the text confuse boundary detection algorithms and negatively influence their performance in cross-domain settings.

Automated driving functions increasingly rely on machine learning for tasks like perception and trajectory planning, requiring large, relevant datasets. The performance of these algorithms depends on how closely the training data matches the task. To ensure reliable functioning, it is crucial to know what is included in the dataset to assess the trained model's operational risk. We aim to enhance the safe use of machine learning in automated driving by developing a method to recognize situations that an automated vehicle has not been sufficiently trained on. This method also improves explainability by describing the dataset at a human-understandable level. We propose modeling driving data as knowledge graphs, representing driving scenes with entities and their relationships. These graphs are queried for specific sub-scene configurations to check their occurrence in the dataset. We estimate a vehicle's competence in a driving scene by considering the coverage and complexity of sub-scene configurations in the training set. Higher complexity scenes require greater coverage for high competence. We apply this method to the NuPlan dataset, modeling it with knowledge graphs and analyzing the coverage of specific driving scenes. This approach helps monitor the competence of machine learning models trained on the dataset, which is essential for trustworthy AI to be deployed in automated driving.

Advancements in AI heavily rely on large-scale datasets meticulously curated and annotated for training. However, concerns persist regarding the transparency and context of data collection methodologies, especially when sourced through crowdsourcing platforms. Crowdsourcing often employs low-wage workers with poor working conditions and lacks consideration for the representativeness of annotators, leading to algorithms that fail to represent diverse views and perpetuate biases against certain groups. To address these limitations, we propose a methodology involving a co-design model that actively engages stakeholders at key stages, integrating principles of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) to ensure diverse viewpoints. We apply this methodology to develop a dataset and AI model for evaluating public space quality using street view images, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing diverse perspectives and fostering higher-quality data.

Obesity, the leading cause of many non-communicable diseases, occurs mainly for eating more than our body requirements and lack of proper activity. So, being healthy requires heathy diet plans, especially for patients with comorbidities. But it is difficult to figure out the exact quantity of each nutrient because nutrients requirement varies based on physical and disease conditions. In our study we proposed a novel machine learning based system to predict the amount of nutrients one individual requires for being healthy. We applied different machine learning algorithms: linear regression, support vector machine (SVM), decision tree, random forest, XGBoost, LightGBM on fluid and 3 other major micronutrients: carbohydrate, protein, fat consumption prediction. We achieved high accuracy with low root mean square error (RMSE) by using linear regression in fluid prediction, random forest in carbohydrate prediction and LightGBM in protein and fat prediction. We believe our diet recommender system, OBESEYE, is the only of its kind which recommends diet with the consideration of comorbidities and physical conditions and promote encouragement to get rid of obesity.

We present a novel multimodal preference dataset for creative tasks, consisting of over 250 million human ratings on more than 2.2 million captions, collected through crowdsourcing rating data for The New Yorker's weekly cartoon caption contest over the past eight years. This unique dataset supports the development and evaluation of multimodal large language models and preference-based fine-tuning algorithms for humorous caption generation. We propose novel benchmarks for judging the quality of model-generated captions, utilizing both GPT4 and human judgments to establish ranking-based evaluation strategies. Our experimental results highlight the limitations of current fine-tuning methods, such as RLHF and DPO, when applied to creative tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that even state-of-the-art models like GPT4 and Claude currently underperform top human contestants in generating humorous captions. As we conclude this extensive data collection effort, we release the entire preference dataset to the research community, fostering further advancements in AI humor generation and evaluation.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of artificial intelligence (AI), generative large language models (LLMs) stand at the forefront, revolutionizing how we interact with our data. However, the computational intensity and memory consumption of deploying these models present substantial challenges in terms of serving efficiency, particularly in scenarios demanding low latency and high throughput. This survey addresses the imperative need for efficient LLM serving methodologies from a machine learning system (MLSys) research perspective, standing at the crux of advanced AI innovations and practical system optimizations. We provide in-depth analysis, covering a spectrum of solutions, ranging from cutting-edge algorithmic modifications to groundbreaking changes in system designs. The survey aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the current state and future directions in efficient LLM serving, offering valuable insights for researchers and practitioners in overcoming the barriers of effective LLM deployment, thereby reshaping the future of AI.

B2B sales requires effective prediction of customer growth, identification of upsell potential, and mitigation of churn risks. LinkedIn sales representatives traditionally relied on intuition and fragmented data signals to assess customer performance. This resulted in significant time investment in data understanding as well as strategy formulation and under-investment in active selling. To overcome this challenge, we developed a data product called Account Prioritizer, an intelligent sales account prioritization engine. It uses machine learning recommendation models and integrated account-level explanation algorithms within the sales CRM to automate the manual process of sales book prioritization. A successful A/B test demonstrated that the Account Prioritizer generated a substantial +8.08% increase in renewal bookings for the LinkedIn Business.

Machine learning research has long focused on models rather than datasets, and prominent datasets are used for common ML tasks without regard to the breadth, difficulty, and faithfulness of the underlying problems. Neglecting the fundamental importance of data has given rise to inaccuracy, bias, and fragility in real-world applications, and research is hindered by saturation across existing dataset benchmarks. In response, we present DataPerf, a community-led benchmark suite for evaluating ML datasets and data-centric algorithms. We aim to foster innovation in data-centric AI through competition, comparability, and reproducibility. We enable the ML community to iterate on datasets, instead of just architectures, and we provide an open, online platform with multiple rounds of challenges to support this iterative development. The first iteration of DataPerf contains five benchmarks covering a wide spectrum of data-centric techniques, tasks, and modalities in vision, speech, acquisition, debugging, and diffusion prompting, and we support hosting new contributed benchmarks from the community. The benchmarks, online evaluation platform, and baseline implementations are open source, and the MLCommons Association will maintain DataPerf to ensure long-term benefits to academia and industry.

Two common approaches to sequential decision-making are AI planning (AIP) and reinforcement learning (RL). Each has strengths and weaknesses. AIP is interpretable, easy to integrate with symbolic knowledge, and often efficient, but requires an up-front logical domain specification and is sensitive to noise; RL only requires specification of rewards and is robust to noise but is sample inefficient and not easily supplied with external knowledge. We propose an integrative approach that combines high-level planning with RL, retaining interpretability, transfer, and efficiency, while allowing for robust learning of the lower-level plan actions. Our approach defines options in hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) from AIP operators by establishing a correspondence between the state transition model of AI planning problem and the abstract state transition system of a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Options are learned by adding intrinsic rewards to encourage consistency between the MDP and AIP transition models. We demonstrate the benefit of our integrated approach by comparing the performance of RL and HRL algorithms in both MiniGrid and N-rooms environments, showing the advantage of our method over the existing ones.

This paper explores the environmental impact of the super-linear growth trends for AI from a holistic perspective, spanning Data, Algorithms, and System Hardware. We characterize the carbon footprint of AI computing by examining the model development cycle across industry-scale machine learning use cases and, at the same time, considering the life cycle of system hardware. Taking a step further, we capture the operational and manufacturing carbon footprint of AI computing and present an end-to-end analysis for what and how hardware-software design and at-scale optimization can help reduce the overall carbon footprint of AI. Based on the industry experience and lessons learned, we share the key challenges and chart out important development directions across the many dimensions of AI. We hope the key messages and insights presented in this paper can inspire the community to advance the field of AI in an environmentally-responsible manner.

Can an AI autonomously design mechanisms for computer systems on par with the creativity and reasoning of human experts? We present Glia, an AI architecture for networked systems design that uses large language models (LLMs) in a human-inspired, multi-agent workflow. Each agent specializes in reasoning, experimentation, and analysis, collaborating through an evaluation framework that grounds abstract reasoning in empirical feedback. Unlike prior ML-for-systems methods that optimize black-box policies, Glia generates interpretable designs and exposes its reasoning process. When applied to a distributed GPU cluster for LLM inference, it produces new algorithms for request routing, scheduling, and auto-scaling that perform at human-expert levels in significantly less time, while yielding novel insights into workload behavior. Our results suggest that by combining reasoning LLMs with structured experimentation, an AI can produce creative and understandable designs for complex systems problems.

The complexity of laboratory environments requires solutions that simplify instrument interaction and enhance measurement automation. Traditional tools often require configuration, software, and programming skills, creating barriers to productivity. Previous approaches, including dedicated software suites and custom scripts, frequently fall short in providing user-friendly solutions that align with programming practices. We present LABIIUM, an AI-enhanced, zero-configuration measurement automation system designed to streamline experimental workflows and improve user productivity. LABIIUM integrates an AI assistant powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate code. LABIIUM's Lab-Automation-Measurement Bridges (LAMBs) enable seamless instrument connectivity using standard tools such as VSCode and Python, eliminating setup overhead. To demonstrate its capabilities, we conducted experiments involving the measurement of the parametric transfer curve of a simple two-transistor inverting amplifier with a current source load. The AI assistant was evaluated using different prompt scenarios and compared with multiple models, including Claude Sonnet 3.5, Gemini Pro 1.5, and GPT-4o. An expert solution implementing the Gradient-Weighted Adaptive Stochastic Sampling (GWASS) method was used as a baseline. The solutions generated by the AI assistant were compared with the expert solution and a uniform linear sweep baseline with 10,000 points. The graph results show that the LLMs were able to successfully complete the most basic uniform sweep, but LLMs were unable to develop adaptive sweeping algorithms to compete with GWASS. The evaluation underscores LABIIUM's ability to enhance laboratory productivity and support digital transformation in research and industry, and emphasizes the future work required to improve LLM performance in Electronic Measurement Science Tasks.

SpeechBrain is an open-source Conversational AI toolkit based on PyTorch, focused particularly on speech processing tasks such as speech recognition, speech enhancement, speaker recognition, text-to-speech, and much more. It promotes transparency and replicability by releasing both the pre-trained models and the complete "recipes" of code and algorithms required for training them. This paper presents SpeechBrain 1.0, a significant milestone in the evolution of the toolkit, which now has over 200 recipes for speech, audio, and language processing tasks, and more than 100 models available on Hugging Face. SpeechBrain 1.0 introduces new technologies to support diverse learning modalities, Large Language Model (LLM) integration, and advanced decoding strategies, along with novel models, tasks, and modalities. It also includes a new benchmark repository, offering researchers a unified platform for evaluating models across diverse tasks.

The MineRL competition is designed for the development of reinforcement learning and imitation learning algorithms that can efficiently leverage human demonstrations to drastically reduce the number of environment interactions needed to solve the complex ObtainDiamond task with sparse rewards. To address the challenge, in this paper, we present SEIHAI, a Sample-efficient Hierarchical AI, that fully takes advantage of the human demonstrations and the task structure. Specifically, we split the task into several sequentially dependent subtasks, and train a suitable agent for each subtask using reinforcement learning and imitation learning. We further design a scheduler to select different agents for different subtasks automatically. SEIHAI takes the first place in the preliminary and final of the NeurIPS-2020 MineRL competition.

In the field of eXplainable AI (XAI), robust "blackbox" algorithms such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are known for making high prediction performance. However, the ability to explain and interpret these algorithms still require innovation in the understanding of influential and, more importantly, explainable features that directly or indirectly impact the performance of predictivity. A number of methods existing in literature focus on visualization techniques but the concepts of explainability and interpretability still require rigorous definition. In view of the above needs, this paper proposes an interaction-based methodology -- Influence Score (I-score) -- to screen out the noisy and non-informative variables in the images hence it nourishes an environment with explainable and interpretable features that are directly associated to feature predictivity. We apply the proposed method on a real world application in Pneumonia Chest X-ray Image data set and produced state-of-the-art results. We demonstrate how to apply the proposed approach for more general big data problems by improving the explainability and interpretability without sacrificing the prediction performance. The contribution of this paper opens a novel angle that moves the community closer to the future pipelines of XAI problems.

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a pandemic disease, which has already caused thousands of causalities and infected several millions of people worldwide. Any technological tool enabling rapid screening of the COVID-19 infection with high accuracy can be crucially helpful to healthcare professionals. The main clinical tool currently in use for the diagnosis of COVID-19 is the Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), which is expensive, less-sensitive and requires specialized medical personnel. X-ray imaging is an easily accessible tool that can be an excellent alternative in the COVID-19 diagnosis. This research was taken to investigate the utility of artificial intelligence (AI) in the rapid and accurate detection of COVID-19 from chest X-ray images. The aim of this paper is to propose a robust technique for automatic detection of COVID-19 pneumonia from digital chest X-ray images applying pre-trained deep-learning algorithms while maximizing the detection accuracy. A public database was created by the authors combining several public databases and also by collecting images from recently published articles. The database contains a mixture of 423 COVID-19, 1485 viral pneumonia, and 1579 normal chest X-ray images. Transfer learning technique was used with the help of image augmentation to train and validate several pre-trained deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The networks were trained to classify two different schemes: i) normal and COVID-19 pneumonia; ii) normal, viral and COVID-19 pneumonia with and without image augmentation. The classification accuracy, precision, sensitivity, and specificity for both the schemes were 99.7%, 99.7%, 99.7% and 99.55% and 97.9%, 97.95%, 97.9%, and 98.8%, respectively.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been applied to scientific equation discovery, leveraging their embedded scientific knowledge for hypothesis generation. However, current methods typically confine LLMs to the role of an equation proposer within search algorithms like genetic programming. In this paper, we present SR-Scientist, a framework that elevates the LLM from a simple equation proposer to an autonomous AI scientist that writes code to analyze data, implements the equation as code, submits it for evaluation, and optimizes the equation based on experimental feedback. Specifically, we wrap the code interpreter into a set of tools for data analysis and equation evaluation. The agent is instructed to optimize the equation by utilizing these tools over a long horizon with minimal human-defined pipelines. Empirical results show that SR-Scientist outperforms baseline methods by an absolute margin of 6% to 35% on datasets covering four science disciplines. Additionally, we demonstrate our method's robustness to noise, the generalization of the discovered equations to out-of-domain data, and their symbolic accuracy. Furthermore, we develop an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework to enhance the agent's capabilities.

We present MIPS, a novel method for program synthesis based on automated mechanistic interpretability of neural networks trained to perform the desired task, auto-distilling the learned algorithm into Python code. We test MIPS on a benchmark of 62 algorithmic tasks that can be learned by an RNN and find it highly complementary to GPT-4: MIPS solves 32 of them, including 13 that are not solved by GPT-4 (which also solves 30). MIPS uses an integer autoencoder to convert the RNN into a finite state machine, then applies Boolean or integer symbolic regression to capture the learned algorithm. As opposed to large language models, this program synthesis technique makes no use of (and is therefore not limited by) human training data such as algorithms and code from GitHub. We discuss opportunities and challenges for scaling up this approach to make machine-learned models more interpretable and trustworthy.

Financial AI holds great promise for transforming modern finance, with the potential to support a wide range of tasks such as market forecasting, portfolio management, quantitative trading, and automated analysis. However, existing platforms remain limited in task coverage, lack robust multimodal data integration, and offer insufficient support for the training and deployment of large language models (LLMs). In response to these limitations, we present FinWorld, an all-in-one open-source platform that provides end-to-end support for the entire financial AI workflow, from data acquisition to experimentation and deployment. FinWorld distinguishes itself through native integration of heterogeneous financial data, unified support for diverse AI paradigms, and advanced agent automation, enabling seamless development and deployment. Leveraging data from 2 representative markets, 4 stock pools, and over 800 million financial data points, we conduct comprehensive experiments on 4 key financial AI tasks. These experiments systematically evaluate deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms, with particular emphasis on RL-based finetuning for LLMs and LLM Agents. The empirical results demonstrate that FinWorld significantly enhances reproducibility, supports transparent benchmarking, and streamlines deployment, thereby providing a strong foundation for future research and real-world applications. Code is available at Github~https://github.com/DVampire/FinWorld.

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

As financial institutions and professionals increasingly incorporate Large Language Models (LLMs) into their workflows, substantial barriers, including proprietary data and specialized knowledge, persist between the finance sector and the AI community. These challenges impede the AI community's ability to enhance financial tasks effectively. Acknowledging financial analysis's critical role, we aim to devise financial-specialized LLM-based toolchains and democratize access to them through open-source initiatives, promoting wider AI adoption in financial decision-making. In this paper, we introduce FinRobot, a novel open-source AI agent platform supporting multiple financially specialized AI agents, each powered by LLM. Specifically, the platform consists of four major layers: 1) the Financial AI Agents layer that formulates Financial Chain-of-Thought (CoT) by breaking sophisticated financial problems down into logical sequences; 2) the Financial LLM Algorithms layer dynamically configures appropriate model application strategies for specific tasks; 3) the LLMOps and DataOps layer produces accurate models by applying training/fine-tuning techniques and using task-relevant data; 4) the Multi-source LLM Foundation Models layer that integrates various LLMs and enables the above layers to access them directly. Finally, FinRobot provides hands-on for both professional-grade analysts and laypersons to utilize powerful AI techniques for advanced financial analysis. We open-source FinRobot at https://github.com/AI4Finance-Foundation/FinRobot.

The rising computational and energy demands of deep neural networks (DNNs), driven largely by backpropagation (BP), challenge sustainable AI development. This paper rigorously investigates three BP-free training methods: the Forward-Forward (FF), Cascaded-Forward (CaFo), and Mono-Forward (MF) algorithms, tracing their progression from foundational concepts to a demonstrably superior solution. A robust comparative framework was established: each algorithm was implemented on its native architecture (MLPs for FF and MF, a CNN for CaFo) and benchmarked against an equivalent BP-trained model. Hyperparameters were optimized with Optuna, and consistent early stopping criteria were applied based on validation performance, ensuring all models were optimally tuned before comparison. Results show that MF not only competes with but consistently surpasses BP in classification accuracy on its native MLPs. Its superior generalization stems from converging to a more favorable minimum in the validation loss landscape, challenging the assumption that global optimization is required for state-of-the-art results. Measured at the hardware level using the NVIDIA Management Library (NVML) API, MF reduces energy consumption by up to 41% and shortens training time by up to 34%, translating to a measurably smaller carbon footprint as estimated by CodeCarbon. Beyond this primary result, we present a hardware-level analysis that explains the efficiency gains: exposing FF's architectural inefficiencies, validating MF's computationally lean design, and challenging the assumption that all BP-free methods are inherently more memory-efficient. By documenting the evolution from FF's conceptual groundwork to MF's synthesis of accuracy and sustainability, this work offers a clear, data-driven roadmap for future energy-efficient deep learning.

We initiate a formal investigation into the design and analysis of LLM-based algorithms, i.e. algorithms that contain one or multiple calls of large language models (LLMs) as sub-routines and critically rely on the capabilities of LLMs. While LLM-based algorithms, ranging from basic LLM calls with prompt engineering to complicated LLM-powered agent systems and compound AI systems, have achieved remarkable empirical success, the design and optimization of them have mostly relied on heuristics and trial-and-errors, which is largely due to a lack of formal and analytical study for these algorithms. To fill this gap, we start by identifying the computational-graph representation of LLM-based algorithms, the design principle of task decomposition, and some key abstractions, which then facilitate our formal analysis for the accuracy and efficiency of LLM-based algorithms, despite the black-box nature of LLMs. Through extensive analytical and empirical investigation in a series of case studies, we demonstrate that the proposed framework is broadly applicable to a wide range of scenarios and diverse patterns of LLM-based algorithms, such as parallel, hierarchical and recursive task decomposition. Our proposed framework holds promise for advancing LLM-based algorithms, by revealing the reasons behind curious empirical phenomena, guiding the choices of hyperparameters, predicting the empirical performance of algorithms, and inspiring new algorithm design. To promote further study of LLM-based algorithms, we release our source code at https://github.com/modelscope/agentscope/tree/main/examples/paper_llm_based_algorithm.

Fairlearn is an open source project to help practitioners assess and improve fairness of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The associated Python library, also named fairlearn, supports evaluation of a model's output across affected populations and includes several algorithms for mitigating fairness issues. Grounded in the understanding that fairness is a sociotechnical challenge, the project integrates learning resources that aid practitioners in considering a system's broader societal context.

Recent advances in generative models enable highly realistic image manipulations, creating an urgent need for robust forgery detection methods. Current datasets for training and evaluating these methods are limited in scale and diversity. To address this, we propose a methodology for creating high-quality inpainting datasets and apply it to create DiQuID, comprising over 95,000 inpainted images generated from 78,000 original images sourced from MS-COCO, RAISE, and OpenImages. Our methodology consists of three components: (1) Semantically Aligned Object Replacement (SAOR) that identifies suitable objects through instance segmentation and generates contextually appropriate prompts, (2) Multiple Model Image Inpainting (MMII) that employs various state-of-the-art inpainting pipelines primarily based on diffusion models to create diverse manipulations, and (3) Uncertainty-Guided Deceptiveness Assessment (UGDA) that evaluates image realism through comparative analysis with originals. The resulting dataset surpasses existing ones in diversity, aesthetic quality, and technical quality. We provide comprehensive benchmarking results using state-of-the-art forgery detection methods, demonstrating the dataset's effectiveness in evaluating and improving detection algorithms. Through a human study with 42 participants on 1,000 images, we show that while humans struggle with images classified as deceiving by our methodology, models trained on our dataset maintain high performance on these challenging cases. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/mever-team/DiQuID.

Meta-learning usually refers to a learning algorithm that learns from other learning algorithms. The problem of uncertainty in the predictions of neural networks shows that the world is only partially predictable and a learned neural network cannot generalize to its ever-changing surrounding environments. Therefore, the question is how a predictive model can represent multiple predictions simultaneously. We aim to provide a fundamental understanding of learning to learn in the contents of Decentralized Neural Networks (Decentralized NNs) and we believe this is one of the most important questions and prerequisites to building an autonomous intelligence machine. To this end, we shall demonstrate several pieces of evidence for tackling the problems above with Meta Learning in Decentralized NNs. In particular, we will present three different approaches to building such a decentralized learning system: (1) learning from many replica neural networks, (2) building the hierarchy of neural networks for different functions, and (3) leveraging different modality experts to learn cross-modal representations.

While Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) is increasingly expanding more areas of application, little has been applied to make deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) more comprehensible. As RL becomes ubiquitous and used in critical and general public applications, it is essential to develop methods that make it better understood and more interpretable. This study proposes a novel approach to explain cooperative strategies in multiagent RL using Shapley values, a game theory concept used in XAI that successfully explains the rationale behind decisions taken by Machine Learning algorithms. Through testing common assumptions of this technique in two cooperation-centered socially challenging multi-agent environments environments, this article argues that Shapley values are a pertinent way to evaluate the contribution of players in a cooperative multi-agent RL context. To palliate the high overhead of this method, Shapley values are approximated using Monte Carlo sampling. Experimental results on Multiagent Particle and Sequential Social Dilemmas show that Shapley values succeed at estimating the contribution of each agent. These results could have implications that go beyond games in economics, (e.g., for non-discriminatory decision making, ethical and responsible AI-derived decisions or policy making under fairness constraints). They also expose how Shapley values only give general explanations about a model and cannot explain a single run, episode nor justify precise actions taken by agents. Future work should focus on addressing these critical aspects.

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly intelligent---in some cases, achieving superhuman performance---there is growing potential for humans to learn from and collaborate with algorithms. However, the ways in which AI systems approach problems are often different from the ways people do, and thus may be uninterpretable and hard to learn from. A crucial step in bridging this gap between human and artificial intelligence is modeling the granular actions that constitute human behavior, rather than simply matching aggregate human performance. We pursue this goal in a model system with a long history in artificial intelligence: chess. The aggregate performance of a chess player unfolds as they make decisions over the course of a game. The hundreds of millions of games played online by players at every skill level form a rich source of data in which these decisions, and their exact context, are recorded in minute detail. Applying existing chess engines to this data, including an open-source implementation of AlphaZero, we find that they do not predict human moves well. We develop and introduce Maia, a customized version of Alpha-Zero trained on human chess games, that predicts human moves at a much higher accuracy than existing engines, and can achieve maximum accuracy when predicting decisions made by players at a specific skill level in a tuneable way. For a dual task of predicting whether a human will make a large mistake on the next move, we develop a deep neural network that significantly outperforms competitive baselines. Taken together, our results suggest that there is substantial promise in designing artificial intelligence systems with human collaboration in mind by first accurately modeling granular human decision-making.

Rising concern for the societal implications of artificial intelligence systems has inspired a wave of academic and journalistic literature in which deployed systems are audited for harm by investigators from outside the organizations deploying the algorithms. However, it remains challenging for practitioners to identify the harmful repercussions of their own systems prior to deployment, and, once deployed, emergent issues can become difficult or impossible to trace back to their source. In this paper, we introduce a framework for algorithmic auditing that supports artificial intelligence system development end-to-end, to be applied throughout the internal organization development lifecycle. Each stage of the audit yields a set of documents that together form an overall audit report, drawing on an organization's values or principles to assess the fit of decisions made throughout the process. The proposed auditing framework is intended to contribute to closing the accountability gap in the development and deployment of large-scale artificial intelligence systems by embedding a robust process to ensure audit integrity.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is the canonical framework for large language model alignment. However, rising popularity in offline alignment algorithms challenge the need for on-policy sampling in RLHF. Within the context of reward over-optimization, we start with an opening set of experiments that demonstrate the clear advantage of online methods over offline methods. This prompts us to investigate the causes to the performance discrepancy through a series of carefully designed experimental ablations. We show empirically that hypotheses such as offline data coverage and data quality by itself cannot convincingly explain the performance difference. We also find that while offline algorithms train policy to become good at pairwise classification, it is worse at generations; in the meantime the policies trained by online algorithms are good at generations while worse at pairwise classification. This hints at a unique interplay between discriminative and generative capabilities, which is greatly impacted by the sampling process. Lastly, we observe that the performance discrepancy persists for both contrastive and non-contrastive loss functions, and appears not to be addressed by simply scaling up policy networks. Taken together, our study sheds light on the pivotal role of on-policy sampling in AI alignment, and hints at certain fundamental challenges of offline alignment algorithms.

As humans delegate more tasks and decisions to artificial intelligence (AI), we risk losing control of our individual and collective futures. Relatively simple algorithmic systems already steer human decision-making, such as social media feed algorithms that lead people to unintentionally and absent-mindedly scroll through engagement-optimized content. In this paper, we develop the idea of human agency by integrating philosophical and scientific theories of agency with AI-assisted evaluation methods: using large language models (LLMs) to simulate and validate user queries and to evaluate AI responses. We develop HumanAgencyBench (HAB), a scalable and adaptive benchmark with six dimensions of human agency based on typical AI use cases. HAB measures the tendency of an AI assistant or agent to Ask Clarifying Questions, Avoid Value Manipulation, Correct Misinformation, Defer Important Decisions, Encourage Learning, and Maintain Social Boundaries. We find low-to-moderate agency support in contemporary LLM-based assistants and substantial variation across system developers and dimensions. For example, while Anthropic LLMs most support human agency overall, they are the least supportive LLMs in terms of Avoid Value Manipulation. Agency support does not appear to consistently result from increasing LLM capabilities or instruction-following behavior (e.g., RLHF), and we encourage a shift towards more robust safety and alignment targets.

Reliable automatic seizure detection from long-term EEG remains a challenge, as current machine learning models often fail to generalize across patients or clinical settings. Manual EEG review remains the clinical standard, underscoring the need for robust models and standardized evaluation. To rigorously assess algorithm performance, we organized a challenge using a private dataset of continuous EEG recordings from 65 subjects (4,360 hours). Expert neurophysiologists annotated the data, providing ground truth for seizure events. Participants were required to detect seizure onset and duration, with evaluation based on event-based metrics, including sensitivity, precision, F1-score, and false positives per day. The SzCORE framework ensured standardized evaluation. The primary ranking criterion was the event-based F1-score, reflecting clinical relevance by balancing sensitivity and false positives. The challenge received 30 submissions from 19 teams, with 28 algorithms evaluated. Results revealed wide variability in performance, with a top F1-score of 43% (sensitivity 37%, precision 45%), highlighting the ongoing difficulty of seizure detection. The challenge also revealed a gap between reported performance and real-world evaluation, emphasizing the importance of rigorous benchmarking. Compared to previous challenges and commercial systems, the best-performing algorithm in this contest showed improved performance. Importantly, the challenge platform now supports continuous benchmarking, enabling reproducible research, integration of new datasets, and clinical evaluation of seizure detection algorithms using a standardized framework.

Face-to-face communication modeling in computer vision is an area of research focusing on developing algorithms that can recognize and analyze non-verbal cues and behaviors during face-to-face interactions. We propose an alternative to text chats for Human-AI interaction, based on non-verbal visual communication only, using facial expressions and head movements that mirror, but also improvise over the human user, to efficiently engage with the users, and capture their attention in a low-cost and real-time fashion. Our goal is to track and analyze facial expressions, and other non-verbal cues in real-time, and use this information to build models that can predict and understand human behavior. We offer three different complementary approaches, based on retrieval, statistical, and deep learning techniques. We provide human as well as automatic evaluations and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each direction.

A positive phrase or a sentence with an underlying negative motive is usually defined as sarcasm that is widely used in today's social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. In recent times active users in social media platforms are increasing dramatically which raises the need for an automated NLP-based system that can be utilized in various tasks such as determining market demand, sentiment analysis, threat detection, etc. However, since sarcasm usually implies the opposite meaning and its detection is frequently a challenging issue, data meaning extraction through an NLP-based model becomes more complicated. As a result, there has been a lot of study on sarcasm detection in English over the past several years, and there's been a noticeable improvement and yet sarcasm detection in the Bangla language's state remains the same. In this article, we present a BERT-based system that can achieve 99.60\% while the utilized traditional machine learning algorithms are only capable of achieving 89.93\%. Additionally, we have employed Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations that introduce explainability to our system. Moreover, we have utilized a newly collected bangla sarcasm dataset, BanglaSarc that was constructed specifically for the evaluation of this study. This dataset consists of fresh records of sarcastic and non-sarcastic comments, the majority of which are acquired from Facebook and YouTube comment sections.

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

Though significant advancements have been achieved in developing long-context large language models (LLMs), the compromised quality of LLM-synthesized data for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often affects the long-context performance of SFT models and leads to inherent limitations. In principle, reinforcement learning (RL) with appropriate reward signals can further enhance models' capacities. However, how to obtain reliable rewards in long-context scenarios remains unexplored. To this end, we propose LongReward, a novel method that utilizes an off-the-shelf LLM to provide rewards for long-context model responses from four human-valued dimensions: helpfulness, logicality, faithfulness, and completeness, each with a carefully designed assessment pipeline. By combining LongReward and offline RL algorithm DPO, we are able to effectively improve long-context SFT models. Our experiments indicate that LongReward not only significantly improves models' long-context performance but also enhances their ability to follow short instructions. We also find that long-context DPO with LongReward and conventional short-context DPO can be used together without hurting either one's performance.

The burgeoning field of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) is witnessing rapid advancements, particularly in video generation. This paper introduces AIGCBench, a pioneering comprehensive and scalable benchmark designed to evaluate a variety of video generation tasks, with a primary focus on Image-to-Video (I2V) generation. AIGCBench tackles the limitations of existing benchmarks, which suffer from a lack of diverse datasets, by including a varied and open-domain image-text dataset that evaluates different state-of-the-art algorithms under equivalent conditions. We employ a novel text combiner and GPT-4 to create rich text prompts, which are then used to generate images via advanced Text-to-Image models. To establish a unified evaluation framework for video generation tasks, our benchmark includes 11 metrics spanning four dimensions to assess algorithm performance. These dimensions are control-video alignment, motion effects, temporal consistency, and video quality. These metrics are both reference video-dependent and video-free, ensuring a comprehensive evaluation strategy. The evaluation standard proposed correlates well with human judgment, providing insights into the strengths and weaknesses of current I2V algorithms. The findings from our extensive experiments aim to stimulate further research and development in the I2V field. AIGCBench represents a significant step toward creating standardized benchmarks for the broader AIGC landscape, proposing an adaptable and equitable framework for future assessments of video generation tasks.

During the last two years there has been a plethora of large generative models such as ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion that have been published. Concretely, these models are able to perform tasks such as being a general question and answering system or automatically creating artistic images that are revolutionizing several sectors. Consequently, the implications that these generative models have in the industry and society are enormous, as several job positions may be transformed. For example, Generative AI is capable of transforming effectively and creatively texts to images, like the DALLE-2 model; text to 3D images, like the Dreamfusion model; images to text, like the Flamingo model; texts to video, like the Phenaki model; texts to audio, like the AudioLM model; texts to other texts, like ChatGPT; texts to code, like the Codex model; texts to scientific texts, like the Galactica model or even create algorithms like AlphaTensor. This work consists on an attempt to describe in a concise way the main models are sectors that are affected by generative AI and to provide a taxonomy of the main generative models published recently.

Learning to rank with biased click data is a well-known challenge. A variety of methods has been explored to debias click data for learning to rank such as click models, result interleaving and, more recently, the unbiased learning-to-rank framework based on inverse propensity weighting. Despite their differences, most existing studies separate the estimation of click bias (namely the propensity model) from the learning of ranking algorithms. To estimate click propensities, they either conduct online result randomization, which can negatively affect the user experience, or offline parameter estimation, which has special requirements for click data and is optimized for objectives (e.g. click likelihood) that are not directly related to the ranking performance of the system. In this work, we address those problems by unifying the learning of propensity models and ranking models. We find that the problem of estimating a propensity model from click data is a dual problem of unbiased learning to rank. Based on this observation, we propose a Dual Learning Algorithm (DLA) that jointly learns an unbiased ranker and an unbiased propensity model. DLA is an automatic unbiased learning-to-rank framework as it directly learns unbiased ranking models from biased click data without any preprocessing. It can adapt to the change of bias distributions and is applicable to online learning. Our empirical experiments with synthetic and real-world data show that the models trained with DLA significantly outperformed the unbiased learning-to-rank algorithms based on result randomization and the models trained with relevance signals extracted by click models.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a pivotal technique for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on specific tasks. However, prevailing RL fine-tuning methods predominantly rely on PPO and its variants. Though these algorithms are effective in general RL settings, they often exhibit suboptimal performance and vulnerability to distribution collapse when applied to the fine-tuning of LLMs. In this paper, we propose CORY, extending the RL fine-tuning of LLMs to a sequential cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning framework, to leverage the inherent coevolution and emergent capabilities of multi-agent systems. In CORY, the LLM to be fine-tuned is initially duplicated into two autonomous agents: a pioneer and an observer. The pioneer generates responses based on queries, while the observer generates responses using both the queries and the pioneer's responses. The two agents are trained together. During training, the agents exchange roles periodically, fostering cooperation and coevolution between them. Experiments evaluate CORY's performance by fine-tuning GPT-2 and Llama-2 under subjective and objective reward functions on the IMDB Review and GSM8K datasets, respectively. Results show that CORY outperforms PPO in terms of policy optimality, resistance to distribution collapse, and training robustness, thereby underscoring its potential as a superior methodology for refining LLMs in real-world applications.

Scaling up data, parameters, and test-time computation has been the mainstream methods to improve LLM systems (LLMsys), but their upper bounds are almost reached due to the gradual depletion of high-quality data and marginal gains obtained from larger computational resource consumption. Inspired by the abilities of human and traditional AI systems in learning from practice, constructing memory and continual learning frameworks for LLMsys has become an important and popular research direction in recent literature. Yet, existing benchmarks for LLM memory often focus on evaluating the system on homogeneous reading comprehension tasks with long-form inputs rather than testing their abilities to learn from accumulated user feedback in service time. Therefore, we propose a user feedback simulation framework and a comprehensive benchmark covering multiple domains, languages, and types of tasks to evaluate the continual learning abilities of LLMsys. Experiments show that the effectiveness and efficiency of state-of-the-art baselines are far from satisfying, and we hope this benchmark could pave the way for future studies on LLM memory and optimization algorithms.

Understanding the continuous states of objects is essential for task learning and planning in the real world. However, most existing task learning benchmarks assume discrete(e.g., binary) object goal states, which poses challenges for the learning of complex tasks and transferring learned policy from simulated environments to the real world. Furthermore, state discretization limits a robot's ability to follow human instructions based on the grounding of actions and states. To tackle these challenges, we present ARNOLD, a benchmark that evaluates language-grounded task learning with continuous states in realistic 3D scenes. ARNOLD is comprised of 8 language-conditioned tasks that involve understanding object states and learning policies for continuous goals. To promote language-instructed learning, we provide expert demonstrations with template-generated language descriptions. We assess task performance by utilizing the latest language-conditioned policy learning models. Our results indicate that current models for language-conditioned manipulations continue to experience significant challenges in novel goal-state generalizations, scene generalizations, and object generalizations. These findings highlight the need to develop new algorithms that address this gap and underscore the potential for further research in this area. See our project page at: https://arnold-benchmark.github.io

Driven by the recent advances in deep learning methods and, in particular, by the development of modern self-supervised learning algorithms, increased interest and efforts have been devoted to build foundation models (FMs) for medical images. In this work, we present our scalable training pipeline for large pathology imaging data, and a comprehensive analysis of various hyperparameter choices and training techniques for building pathology FMs. We release and make publicly available the first batch of our pathology FMs (https://github.com/kaiko-ai/towards_large_pathology_fms) trained on open-access TCGA whole slide images, a commonly used collection of pathology images. The experimental evaluation shows that our models reach state-of-the-art performance on various patch-level downstream tasks, ranging from breast cancer subtyping to colorectal nuclear segmentation. Finally, to unify the evaluation approaches used in the field and to simplify future comparisons of different FMs, we present an open-source framework (https://github.com/kaiko-ai/eva) designed for the consistent evaluation of pathology FMs across various downstream tasks.

The rapid advancement of deep learning has intensified the need for comprehensive data for use by autonomous driving algorithms. High-quality datasets are crucial for the development of effective data-driven autonomous driving solutions. Next-generation autonomous driving datasets must be multimodal, incorporating data from advanced sensors that feature extensive data coverage, detailed annotations, and diverse scene representation. To address this need, we present OmniHD-Scenes, a large-scale multimodal dataset that provides comprehensive omnidirectional high-definition data. The OmniHD-Scenes dataset combines data from 128-beam LiDAR, six cameras, and six 4D imaging radar systems to achieve full environmental perception. The dataset comprises 1501 clips, each approximately 30-s long, totaling more than 450K synchronized frames and more than 5.85 million synchronized sensor data points. We also propose a novel 4D annotation pipeline. To date, we have annotated 200 clips with more than 514K precise 3D bounding boxes. These clips also include semantic segmentation annotations for static scene elements. Additionally, we introduce a novel automated pipeline for generation of the dense occupancy ground truth, which effectively leverages information from non-key frames. Alongside the proposed dataset, we establish comprehensive evaluation metrics, baseline models, and benchmarks for 3D detection and semantic occupancy prediction. These benchmarks utilize surround-view cameras and 4D imaging radar to explore cost-effective sensor solutions for autonomous driving applications. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our low-cost sensor configuration and its robustness under adverse conditions. Data will be released at https://www.2077ai.com/OmniHD-Scenes.

The purpose of remote sensing image change detection (RSCD) is to detect differences between bi-temporal images taken at the same place. Deep learning has been extensively used to RSCD tasks, yielding significant results in terms of result recognition. However, due to the shooting angle of the satellite, the impacts of thin clouds, and certain lighting conditions, the problem of fuzzy edges in the change region in some remote sensing photographs cannot be properly handled using current RSCD algorithms. To solve this issue, we proposed a Body Decouple Multi-Scale by fearure Aggregation change detection (BD-MSA), a novel model that collects both global and local feature map information in the channel and space dimensions of the feature map during the training and prediction phases. This approach allows us to successfully extract the change region's boundary information while also divorcing the change region's main body from its boundary. Numerous studies have shown that the assessment metrics and evaluation effects of the model described in this paper on the publicly available datasets DSIFN-CD, S2Looking and WHU-CD are the best when compared to other models.

How well do AI systems perform in algorithm engineering for hard optimization problems in domains such as package-delivery routing, crew scheduling, factory production planning, and power-grid balancing? We introduce ALE-Bench, a new benchmark for evaluating AI systems on score-based algorithmic programming contests. Drawing on real tasks from the AtCoder Heuristic Contests, ALE-Bench presents optimization problems that are computationally hard and admit no known exact solution. Unlike short-duration, pass/fail coding benchmarks, ALE-Bench encourages iterative solution refinement over long time horizons. Our software framework supports interactive agent architectures that leverage test-run feedback and visualizations. Our evaluation of frontier LLMs revealed that while they demonstrate high performance on specific problems, a notable gap remains compared to humans in terms of consistency across problems and long-horizon problem-solving capabilities. This highlights the need for this benchmark to foster future AI advancements.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) to human preferences is a crucial step in building helpful and safe AI tools, which usually involve training on supervised datasets. Popular algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization rely on pairs of AI-generated responses ranked according to human feedback. The labeling process is the most labor-intensive and costly part of the alignment pipeline, and improving its efficiency would have a meaningful impact on AI development. We propose a strategy for sampling a high-quality training dataset that focuses on acquiring the most informative response pairs for labeling out of a set of AI-generated responses. Experimental results on synthetic HH-RLHF benchmarks indicate that choosing dissimilar response pairs enhances the direct alignment of LLMs while reducing inherited labeling errors. We also applied our method to the real-world dataset SHP2, selecting optimal pairs from multiple responses. The model aligned on dissimilar response pairs obtained the best win rate on the dialogue task. Our findings suggest that focusing on less similar pairs can improve the efficiency of LLM alignment, saving up to 65% of annotators' work.

The AI community has been pursuing algorithms known as artificial general intelligence (AGI) that apply to any kind of real-world problem. Recently, chat systems powered by large language models (LLMs) emerge and rapidly become a promising direction to achieve AGI in natural language processing (NLP), but the path towards AGI in computer vision (CV) remains unclear. One may owe the dilemma to the fact that visual signals are more complex than language signals, yet we are interested in finding concrete reasons, as well as absorbing experiences from GPT and LLMs to solve the problem. In this paper, we start with a conceptual definition of AGI and briefly review how NLP solves a wide range of tasks via a chat system. The analysis inspires us that unification is the next important goal of CV. But, despite various efforts in this direction, CV is still far from a system like GPT that naturally integrates all tasks. We point out that the essential weakness of CV lies in lacking a paradigm to learn from environments, yet NLP has accomplished the task in the text world. We then imagine a pipeline that puts a CV algorithm (i.e., an agent) in world-scale, interactable environments, pre-trains it to predict future frames with respect to its action, and then fine-tunes it with instruction to accomplish various tasks. We expect substantial research and engineering efforts to push the idea forward and scale it up, for which we share our perspectives on future research directions.

Explanatory inference is the creation and evaluation of hypotheses that provide explanations, and is sometimes known as abduction or abductive inference. Generative AI is a new set of artificial intelligence models based on novel algorithms for generating text, images, and sounds. This paper proposes a set of benchmarks for assessing the ability of AI programs to perform explanatory inference, and uses them to determine the extent to which ChatGPT, a leading generative AI model, is capable of making explanatory inferences. Tests on the benchmarks reveal that ChatGPT performs creative and evaluative inferences in many domains, although it is limited to verbal and visual modalities. Claims that ChatGPT and similar models are incapable of explanation, understanding, causal reasoning, meaning, and creativity are rebutted.

An important milestone for AI is the development of algorithms that can produce drawings that are indistinguishable from those of humans. Here, we adapt the 'diversity vs. recognizability' scoring framework from Boutin et al, 2022 and find that one-shot diffusion models have indeed started to close the gap between humans and machines. However, using a finer-grained measure of the originality of individual samples, we show that strengthening the guidance of diffusion models helps improve the humanness of their drawings, but they still fall short of approximating the originality and recognizability of human drawings. Comparing human category diagnostic features, collected through an online psychophysics experiment, against those derived from diffusion models reveals that humans rely on fewer and more localized features. Overall, our study suggests that diffusion models have significantly helped improve the quality of machine-generated drawings; however, a gap between humans and machines remains -- in part explainable by discrepancies in visual strategies.

AI led chess systems to a superhuman level, yet these systems heavily rely on black-box algorithms. This is unsustainable in ensuring transparency to the end-user, particularly when these systems are responsible for sensitive decision-making. Recent interpretability work has shown that the inner representations of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) were fathomable and contained human-understandable concepts. Yet, these methods are seldom contextualised and are often based on a single hidden state, which makes them unable to interpret multi-step reasoning, e.g. planning. In this respect, we propose contrastive sparse autoencoders (CSAE), a novel framework for studying pairs of game trajectories. Using CSAE, we are able to extract and interpret concepts that are meaningful to the chess-agent plans. We primarily focused on a qualitative analysis of the CSAE features before proposing an automated feature taxonomy. Furthermore, to evaluate the quality of our trained CSAE, we devise sanity checks to wave spurious correlations in our results.

Approximate nearest-neighbor search (ANNS) algorithms have become increasingly critical for recent AI applications, particularly in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agent-based LLM applications. In this paper, we present CRINN, a new paradigm for ANNS algorithms. CRINN treats ANNS optimization as a reinforcement learning problem where execution speed serves as the reward signal. This approach enables the automatic generation of progressively faster ANNS implementations while maintaining accuracy constraints. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates CRINN's effectiveness across six widely-used NNS benchmark datasets. When compared against state-of-the-art open-source ANNS algorithms, CRINN achieves best performance on three of them (GIST-960-Euclidean, MNIST-784-Euclidean, and GloVe-25-angular), and tied for first place on two of them (SIFT-128-Euclidean and GloVe-25-angular). The implications of CRINN's success reach well beyond ANNS optimization: It validates that LLMs augmented with reinforcement learning can function as an effective tool for automating sophisticated algorithmic optimizations that demand specialized knowledge and labor-intensive manual refinement.Code can be found at https://github.com/deepreinforce-ai/CRINN

Frontier AI systems, including large language models (LLMs), hold increasing influence over the epistemology of human users. Such influence can reinforce prevailing societal values, potentially contributing to the lock-in of misguided moral beliefs and, consequently, the perpetuation of problematic moral practices on a broad scale. We introduce progress alignment as a technical solution to mitigate this imminent risk. Progress alignment algorithms learn to emulate the mechanics of human moral progress, thereby addressing the susceptibility of existing alignment methods to contemporary moral blindspots. To empower research in progress alignment, we introduce ProgressGym, an experimental framework allowing the learning of moral progress mechanics from history, in order to facilitate future progress in real-world moral decisions. Leveraging 9 centuries of historical text and 18 historical LLMs, ProgressGym enables codification of real-world progress alignment challenges into concrete benchmarks. Specifically, we introduce three core challenges: tracking evolving values (PG-Follow), preemptively anticipating moral progress (PG-Predict), and regulating the feedback loop between human and AI value shifts (PG-Coevolve). Alignment methods without a temporal dimension are inapplicable to these tasks. In response, we present lifelong and extrapolative algorithms as baseline methods of progress alignment, and build an open leaderboard soliciting novel algorithms and challenges. The framework and the leaderboard are available at https://github.com/PKU-Alignment/ProgressGym and https://huggingface.co/spaces/PKU-Alignment/ProgressGym-LeaderBoard respectively.

Panoramic X-rays are frequently used in dentistry for treatment planning, but their interpretation can be both time-consuming and prone to error. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to aid in the analysis of these X-rays, thereby improving the accuracy of dental diagnoses and treatment plans. Nevertheless, designing automated algorithms for this purpose poses significant challenges, mainly due to the scarcity of annotated data and variations in anatomical structure. To address these issues, the Dental Enumeration and Diagnosis on Panoramic X-rays Challenge (DENTEX) has been organized in association with the International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) in 2023. This challenge aims to promote the development of algorithms for multi-label detection of abnormal teeth, using three types of hierarchically annotated data: partially annotated quadrant data, partially annotated quadrant-enumeration data, and fully annotated quadrant-enumeration-diagnosis data, inclusive of four different diagnoses. In this paper, we present the results of evaluating participant algorithms on the fully annotated data, additionally investigating performance variation for quadrant, enumeration, and diagnosis labels in the detection of abnormal teeth. The provision of this annotated dataset, alongside the results of this challenge, may lay the groundwork for the creation of AI-powered tools that can offer more precise and efficient diagnosis and treatment planning in the field of dentistry. The evaluation code and datasets can be accessed at https://github.com/ibrahimethemhamamci/DENTEX

The evaluation of machine learning models using human-labeled validation data can be expensive and time-consuming. AI-labeled synthetic data can be used to decrease the number of human annotations required for this purpose in a process called autoevaluation. We suggest efficient and statistically principled algorithms for this purpose that improve sample efficiency while remaining unbiased. These algorithms increase the effective human-labeled sample size by up to 50% on experiments with GPT-4.

Continuous cough monitors can greatly aid doctors in home monitoring and treatment of respiratory diseases. Although many algorithms have been proposed, they still face limitations in data privacy and short-term monitoring. Edge-AI offers a promising solution by processing privacy-sensitive data near the source, but challenges arise in deploying resource-intensive algorithms on constrained devices. From a suitable selection of audio and kinematic signals, our methodology aims at the optimal selection of features via Recursive Feature Elimination with Cross-Validation (RFECV), which exploits the explainability of the selected XGB model. Additionally, it analyzes the use of Mel spectrogram features, instead of the more common MFCC. Moreover, a set of hyperparameters for a multimodal implementation of the classifier is explored. Finally, it evaluates the performance based on clinically relevant event-based metrics. We apply our methodology to develop Cough-E, an energy-efficient, multimodal and edge AI cough detection algorithm. It exploits audio and kinematic data in two distinct classifiers, jointly cooperating for a balanced energy and performance trade-off. We demonstrate that our algorithm can be executed in real-time on an ARM Cortex M33 microcontroller. Cough-E achieves a 70.56\% energy saving when compared to the audio-only approach, at the cost of a 1.26\% relative performance drop, resulting in a 0.78 F1-score. Both Cough-E and the edge-aware model optimization methodology are publicly available as open-source code. This approach demonstrates the benefits of the proposed hardware-aware methodology to enable privacy-preserving cough monitors on the edge, paving the way to efficient cough monitoring.

Large Language Models have become the de facto approach to sequence-to-sequence text generation tasks, but for specialized tasks/domains, a pretrained LLM lacks specific capabilities to produce accurate or well-formatted responses. Supervised fine-tuning specializes a LLM by training it on dataset of example prompts with target responses, but real-world data tends to be noisy. While many fine-tuning algorithms exist, here we consider a data-centric AI perspective on LLM fine-tuning, studying how to systematically curate the training dataset to improve the LLM produced via any fine-tuning algorithm. We introduce an automated data curation pipeline CLEAR (Confidence-based LLM Evaluation And Rectification) for instruction tuning datasets, that can be used with any LLM and fine-tuning procedure. CLEAR estimates which training data is low-quality and either filters or corrects it. Automatically identifying which data to filter or correct is done via LLM-derived confidence estimates, to ensure only confident modifications to the dataset. Unlike existing data curation techniques, CLEAR is a comprehensive framework that can improve a dataset (and trained model outputs) without additional fine-tuning computations. We don't assume access to a stronger LLM than the model being fine-tuned (e.g.\ relying on GPT-4 when fine-tuning GPT-3.5), to see whether CLEAR can meaningfully improve the capabilities of any LLM. Experiments reveal that CLEAR consistently improves the performance of fine-tuned models across many datasets and models (like GPT-3.5 and Llama2).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are transforming the domain of Quantitative Trading (QT) through the deployment of advanced algorithms capable of sifting through extensive financial datasets to pinpoint lucrative investment openings. AI-driven models, particularly those employing ML techniques such as deep learning and reinforcement learning, have shown great prowess in predicting market trends and executing trades at a speed and accuracy that far surpass human capabilities. Its capacity to automate critical tasks, such as discerning market conditions and executing trading strategies, has been pivotal. However, persistent challenges exist in current QT methods, especially in effectively handling noisy and high-frequency financial data. Striking a balance between exploration and exploitation poses another challenge for AI-driven trading agents. To surmount these hurdles, our proposed solution, QTNet, introduces an adaptive trading model that autonomously formulates QT strategies through an intelligent trading agent. Incorporating deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with imitative learning methodologies, we bolster the proficiency of our model. To tackle the challenges posed by volatile financial datasets, we conceptualize the QT mechanism within the framework of a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). Moreover, by embedding imitative learning, the model can capitalize on traditional trading tactics, nurturing a balanced synergy between discovery and utilization. For a more realistic simulation, our trading agent undergoes training using minute-frequency data sourced from the live financial market. Experimental findings underscore the model's proficiency in extracting robust market features and its adaptability to diverse market conditions.

Camera traps have transformed how ecologists study wildlife species distributions, activity patterns, and interspecific interactions. Although camera traps provide a cost-effective method for monitoring species, the time required for data processing can limit survey efficiency. Thus, the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically Deep Learning (DL), to process camera-trap data has gained considerable attention. Using DL for these applications involves training algorithms, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), to automatically detect objects and classify species. To overcome technical challenges associated with training CNNs, several research communities have recently developed platforms that incorporate DL in easy-to-use interfaces. We review key characteristics of four AI-powered platforms -- Wildlife Insights (WI), MegaDetector (MD), Machine Learning for Wildlife Image Classification (MLWIC2), and Conservation AI -- including data management tools and AI features. We also provide R code in an open-source GitBook, to demonstrate how users can evaluate model performance, and incorporate AI output in semi-automated workflows. We found that species classifications from WI and MLWIC2 generally had low recall values (animals that were present in the images often were not classified to the correct species). Yet, the precision of WI and MLWIC2 classifications for some species was high (i.e., when classifications were made, they were generally accurate). MD, which classifies images using broader categories (e.g., "blank" or "animal"), also performed well. Thus, we conclude that, although species classifiers were not accurate enough to automate image processing, DL could be used to improve efficiencies by accepting classifications with high confidence values for certain species or by filtering images containing blanks.

With the rapid development of AI hardware accelerators, applying deep learning-based algorithms to solve various low-level vision tasks on mobile devices has gradually become possible. However, two main problems still need to be solved: task-specific algorithms make it difficult to integrate them into a single neural network architecture, and large amounts of parameters make it difficult to achieve real-time inference. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel network, SYENet, with only ~6K parameters, to handle multiple low-level vision tasks on mobile devices in a real-time manner. The SYENet consists of two asymmetrical branches with simple building blocks. To effectively connect the results by asymmetrical branches, a Quadratic Connection Unit(QCU) is proposed. Furthermore, to improve performance, a new Outlier-Aware Loss is proposed to process the image. The proposed method proves its superior performance with the best PSNR as compared with other networks in real-time applications such as Image Signal Processing(ISP), Low-Light Enhancement(LLE), and Super-Resolution(SR) with 2K60FPS throughput on Qualcomm 8 Gen 1 mobile SoC(System-on-Chip). Particularly, for ISP task, SYENet got the highest score in MAI 2022 Learned Smartphone ISP challenge.

Unlike in language or vision, one of the fundamental challenges in robot learning is the lack of access to vast data resources. We can further break down the problem into (1) data sparsity from the angle of data representation and (2) data scarcity from the angle of data quantity. In this thesis, I will discuss selected works on two domains: (1) tactile sensing and (2) rehabilitation robots, which are exemplars of data sparsity and scarcity, respectively. Tactile sensing is an essential modality for robotics, but tactile data are often sparse, and for each interaction with the physical world, tactile sensors can only obtain information about the local area of contact. I will discuss my work on learning vision-free tactile-only exploration and manipulation policies through model-free reinforcement learning to make efficient use of sparse tactile information. On the other hand, rehabilitation robots are an example of data scarcity to the extreme due to the significant challenge of collecting biosignals from disabled-bodied subjects at scale for training. I will discuss my work in collaboration with the medical school and clinicians on intent inferral for stroke survivors, where a hand orthosis developed in our lab collects a set of biosignals from the patient and uses them to infer the activity that the patient intends to perform, so the orthosis can provide the right type of physical assistance at the right moment. My work develops machine learning algorithms that enable intent inferral with minimal data, including semi-supervised, meta-learning, and generative AI methods.

This study provides a comprehensive analysis of artificial intelligence (AI) contribution to translation industry (ACTI) research, synthesizing it over forty-one years from 1980-2024. 13220 articles were retrieved from three sources, namely WoS, Scopus, and Lens. We provided two types of analysis, viz., scientometric and thematic, focusing on cluster, subject categories, keywords, burstness, centrality and research centers as for the former. For the latter, we thematically review 18 articles, selected purposefully from the articles involved, centering on purpose, approach, findings, and contribution to ACTI future directions. The findings reveal that in the past AI contribution to translation industry was not rigorous, resulting in rule-based machine translation and statistical machine translation whose output was not satisfactory. However, the more AI develops, the more machine translation develops, incorporating Neural Networking Algorithms and (Deep) Language Learning Models like ChatGPT whose translation output has developed considerably. However, much rigorous research is still needed to overcome several problems encountering translation industry, specifically concerning low-source languages, multi-dialectical and free word order languages, and cultural and religious registers.

Addressing fairness in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in medical AI, is crucial for ensuring equitable healthcare outcomes. Recent efforts to enhance fairness have introduced new methodologies and datasets in medical AI. However, the fairness issue under the setting of domain transfer is almost unexplored, while it is common that clinics rely on different imaging technologies (e.g., different retinal imaging modalities) for patient diagnosis. This paper presents FairDomain, a pioneering systemic study into algorithmic fairness under domain shifts, employing state-of-the-art domain adaptation (DA) and generalization (DG) algorithms for both medical segmentation and classification tasks to understand how biases are transferred between different domains. We also introduce a novel plug-and-play fair identity attention (FIA) module that adapts to various DA and DG algorithms to improve fairness by using self-attention to adjust feature importance based on demographic attributes. Additionally, we curate the first fairness-focused dataset with two paired imaging modalities for the same patient cohort on medical segmentation and classification tasks, to rigorously assess fairness in domain-shift scenarios. Excluding the confounding impact of demographic distribution variation between source and target domains will allow clearer quantification of the performance of domain transfer models. Our extensive evaluations reveal that the proposed FIA significantly enhances both model performance accounted for fairness across all domain shift settings (i.e., DA and DG) with respect to different demographics, which outperforms existing methods on both segmentation and classification. The code and data can be accessed at https://ophai.hms.harvard.edu/datasets/harvard-fairdomain20k.

A recent trend in explainable AI research has focused on surrogate modeling, where neural networks are approximated as simpler ML algorithms such as kernel machines. A second trend has been to utilize kernel functions in various explain-by-example or data attribution tasks. In this work, we combine these two trends to analyze approximate empirical neural tangent kernels (eNTK) for data attribution. Approximation is critical for eNTK analysis due to the high computational cost to compute the eNTK. We define new approximate eNTK and perform novel analysis on how well the resulting kernel machine surrogate models correlate with the underlying neural network. We introduce two new random projection variants of approximate eNTK which allow users to tune the time and memory complexity of their calculation. We conclude that kernel machines using approximate neural tangent kernel as the kernel function are effective surrogate models, with the introduced trace NTK the most consistent performer. Open source software allowing users to efficiently calculate kernel functions in the PyTorch framework is available (https://github.com/pnnl/projection\_ntk).

The lack of transparency and explainability hinders the clinical adoption of Machine learning (ML) algorithms. While explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) methods have been proposed, little research has focused on the agreement between these methods and expert clinical knowledge. This study applies current state-of-the-art explainability methods to clinical decision support algorithms developed for Electronic Medical Records (EMR) data to analyse the concordance between these factors and discusses causes for identified discrepancies from a clinical and technical perspective. Important factors for achieving trustworthy XAI solutions for clinical decision support are also discussed.

Generalizable manipulation skills, which can be composed to tackle long-horizon and complex daily chores, are one of the cornerstones of Embodied AI. However, existing benchmarks, mostly composed of a suite of simulatable environments, are insufficient to push cutting-edge research works because they lack object-level topological and geometric variations, are not based on fully dynamic simulation, or are short of native support for multiple types of manipulation tasks. To this end, we present ManiSkill2, the next generation of the SAPIEN ManiSkill benchmark, to address critical pain points often encountered by researchers when using benchmarks for generalizable manipulation skills. ManiSkill2 includes 20 manipulation task families with 2000+ object models and 4M+ demonstration frames, which cover stationary/mobile-base, single/dual-arm, and rigid/soft-body manipulation tasks with 2D/3D-input data simulated by fully dynamic engines. It defines a unified interface and evaluation protocol to support a wide range of algorithms (e.g., classic sense-plan-act, RL, IL), visual observations (point cloud, RGBD), and controllers (e.g., action type and parameterization). Moreover, it empowers fast visual input learning algorithms so that a CNN-based policy can collect samples at about 2000 FPS with 1 GPU and 16 processes on a regular workstation. It implements a render server infrastructure to allow sharing rendering resources across all environments, thereby significantly reducing memory usage. We open-source all codes of our benchmark (simulator, environments, and baselines) and host an online challenge open to interdisciplinary researchers.

This textbook covers principles behind main modern deep reinforcement learning algorithms that achieved breakthrough results in many domains from game AI to robotics. All required theory is explained with proofs using unified notation and emphasize on the differences between different types of algorithms and the reasons why they are constructed the way they are.

Advantage Actor-critic (A2C) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) are popular deep reinforcement learning algorithms used for game AI in recent years. A common understanding is that A2C and PPO are separate algorithms because PPO's clipped objective appears significantly different than A2C's objective. In this paper, however, we show A2C is a special case of PPO. We present theoretical justifications and pseudocode analysis to demonstrate why. To validate our claim, we conduct an empirical experiment using Stable-baselines3, showing A2C and PPO produce the exact same models when other settings are controlled.

The feature maps of vision encoders are fundamental to myriad modern AI tasks, ranging from core perception algorithms (e.g. semantic segmentation, object detection, depth perception, etc.) to modern multimodal understanding in vision-language models (VLMs). Currently, in computer vision, the frontier of general purpose vision backbones is Vision Transformers (ViT), typically trained using contrastive loss (e.g. CLIP). A key problem with most off-the-shelf ViTs, particularly CLIP, is that these models are inflexibly low resolution. Most run at 224 times 224px, while the "high-resolution" versions are around 378-448px, but still inflexible. We introduce a novel method to coherently and cheaply upsample the feature maps of low-resolution vision encoders while picking up on fine-grained details that would otherwise be lost due to resolution. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach on core perception tasks as well as within agglomerative model training using RADIO as a way of providing richer targets for distillation. Code available at https://github.com/NVlabs/FeatSharp .

This paper studies the impact of artificial intelligence on innovation, exploiting the randomized introduction of a new materials discovery technology to 1,018 scientists in the R&D lab of a large U.S. firm. AI-assisted researchers discover 44% more materials, resulting in a 39% increase in patent filings and a 17% rise in downstream product innovation. These compounds possess more novel chemical structures and lead to more radical inventions. However, the technology has strikingly disparate effects across the productivity distribution: while the bottom third of scientists see little benefit, the output of top researchers nearly doubles. Investigating the mechanisms behind these results, I show that AI automates 57% of "idea-generation" tasks, reallocating researchers to the new task of evaluating model-produced candidate materials. Top scientists leverage their domain knowledge to prioritize promising AI suggestions, while others waste significant resources testing false positives. Together, these findings demonstrate the potential of AI-augmented research and highlight the complementarity between algorithms and expertise in the innovative process. Survey evidence reveals that these gains come at a cost, however, as 82% of scientists report reduced satisfaction with their work due to decreased creativity and skill underutilization.

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Gemini has posed new challenges for the academic community. With the help of these models, students can easily complete their assignments and exams, while educators struggle to detect AI-generated content. This has led to a surge in academic misconduct, as students present work generated by LLMs as their own, without putting in the effort required for learning. As AI tools become more advanced and produce increasingly human-like text, detecting such content becomes more challenging. This development has significantly impacted the academic world, where many educators are finding it difficult to adapt their assessment methods to this challenge. This research first demonstrates how LLMs have increased academic dishonesty, and then reviews state-of-the-art solutions for academic plagiarism in detail. A survey of datasets, algorithms, tools, and evasion strategies for plagiarism detection has been conducted, focusing on how LLMs and AI-generated content (AIGC) detection have affected this area. The survey aims to identify the gaps in existing solutions. Lastly, potential long-term solutions are presented to address the issue of academic plagiarism using LLMs based on AI tools and educational approaches in an ever-changing world.

This paper investigates the intriguing question of whether we can create learning algorithms that automatically generate training data, learning environments, and curricula in order to help AI agents rapidly learn. We show that such algorithms are possible via Generative Teaching Networks (GTNs), a general approach that is, in theory, applicable to supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, although our experiments only focus on the supervised case. GTNs are deep neural networks that generate data and/or training environments that a learner (e.g. a freshly initialized neural network) trains on for a few SGD steps before being tested on a target task. We then differentiate through the entire learning process via meta-gradients to update the GTN parameters to improve performance on the target task. GTNs have the beneficial property that they can theoretically generate any type of data or training environment, making their potential impact large. This paper introduces GTNs, discusses their potential, and showcases that they can substantially accelerate learning. We also demonstrate a practical and exciting application of GTNs: accelerating the evaluation of candidate architectures for neural architecture search (NAS), which is rate-limited by such evaluations, enabling massive speed-ups in NAS. GTN-NAS improves the NAS state of the art, finding higher performing architectures when controlling for the search proposal mechanism. GTN-NAS also is competitive with the overall state of the art approaches, which achieve top performance while using orders of magnitude less computation than typical NAS methods. Speculating forward, GTNs may represent a first step toward the ambitious goal of algorithms that generate their own training data and, in doing so, open a variety of interesting new research questions and directions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in general-purpose code generation. However, generating the code which is deeply hardware-specific, architecture-aware, and performance-critical, especially for massively parallel GPUs, remains a complex challenge. In this work, we explore the use of LLMs for the automated generation and optimization of CUDA programs, with the goal of producing high-performance GPU kernels that fully exploit the underlying hardware. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework called Feature Search and Reinforcement (FSR). FSR jointly optimizes compilation and functional correctness, as well as the runtime performance, which are validated through extensive and diverse test cases, and measured by actual kernel execution latency on the target GPU, respectively. This approach enables LLMs not only to generate syntactically and semantically correct CUDA code but also to iteratively refine it for efficiency, tailored to the characteristics of the GPU architecture. We evaluate FSR on representative CUDA kernels, covering AI workloads and computational intensive algorithms. Our results show that LLMs augmented with FSR consistently guarantee correctness rates. Meanwhile, the automatically generated kernels can outperform general human-written code by a factor of up to 179times in execution speeds. These findings highlight the potential of combining LLMs with performance reinforcement to automate GPU programming for hardware-specific, architecture-sensitive, and performance-critical applications.

Text-based open-ended questions in academic formative and summative assessments help students become deep learners and prepare them to understand concepts for a subsequent conceptual assessment. However, grading text-based questions, especially in large courses, is tedious and time-consuming for instructors. Text processing models continue progressing with the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms. Especially after breakthroughs in Large Language Models (LLM), there is immense potential to automate rapid assessment and feedback of text-based responses in education. This systematic review adopts a scientific and reproducible literature search strategy based on the PRISMA process using explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria to study text-based automatic assessment systems in post-secondary education, screening 838 papers and synthesizing 93 studies. To understand how text-based automatic assessment systems have been developed and applied in education in recent years, three research questions are considered. All included studies are summarized and categorized according to a proposed comprehensive framework, including the input and output of the system, research motivation, and research outcomes, aiming to answer the research questions accordingly. Additionally, the typical studies of automated assessment systems, research methods, and application domains in these studies are investigated and summarized. This systematic review provides an overview of recent educational applications of text-based assessment systems for understanding the latest AI/NLP developments assisting in text-based assessments in higher education. Findings will particularly benefit researchers and educators incorporating LLMs such as ChatGPT into their educational activities.

The traditional process of building interactive machine learning systems can be viewed as a teacher-learner interaction scenario where the machine-learners are trained by one or more human-teachers. In this work, we explore the idea of using a conversational interface to investigate the interaction between human-teachers and interactive machine-learners. Specifically, we examine whether teachable AI agents can reliably learn from human-teachers through conversational interactions, and how this learning compare with traditional supervised learning algorithms. Results validate the concept of teachable conversational agents and highlight the factors relevant for the development of machine learning systems that intend to learn from conversational interactions.

Research has a long history of discussing what is superior in predicting certain outcomes: statistical methods or the human brain. This debate has repeatedly been sparked off by the remarkable technological advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), such as solving tasks like object and speech recognition, achieving significant improvements in accuracy through deep-learning algorithms (Goodfellow et al. 2016), or combining various methods of computational intelligence, such as fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, and case-based reasoning (Medsker 2012). One of the implicit promises that underlie these advancements is that machines will 1 day be capable of performing complex tasks or may even supersede humans in performing these tasks. This triggers new heated debates of when machines will ultimately replace humans (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 2017). While previous research has proved that AI performs well in some clearly defined tasks such as playing chess, playing Go or identifying objects on images, it is doubted that the development of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) which is able to solve multiple tasks at the same time can be achieved in the near future (e.g., Russell and Norvig 2016). Moreover, the use of AI to solve complex business problems in organizational contexts occurs scarcely, and applications for AI that solve complex problems remain mainly in laboratory settings instead of being implemented in practice. Since the road to AGI is still a long one, we argue that the most likely paradigm for the division of labor between humans and machines in the next decades is Hybrid Intelligence. This concept aims at using the complementary strengths of human intelligence and AI, so that they can perform better than each of the two could separately (e.g., Kamar 2016).

This research paper presents an experimental approach to using the Reptile algorithm for reinforcement learning to train a neural network to play Super Mario Bros. We implement the Reptile algorithm using the Super Mario Bros Gym library and TensorFlow in Python, creating a neural network model with a single convolutional layer, a flatten layer, and a dense layer. We define the optimizer and use the Reptile class to create an instance of the Reptile meta-learning algorithm. We train the model using multiple tasks and episodes, choosing actions using the current weights of the neural network model, taking those actions in the environment, and updating the model weights using the Reptile algorithm. We evaluate the performance of the algorithm by printing the total reward for each episode. In addition, we compare the performance of the Reptile algorithm approach to two other popular reinforcement learning algorithms, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Deep Q-Network (DQN), applied to the same Super Mario Bros task. Our results demonstrate that the Reptile algorithm provides a promising approach to few-shot learning in video game AI, with comparable or even better performance than the other two algorithms, particularly in terms of moves vs distance that agent performs for 1M episodes of training. The results shows that best total distance for world 1-2 in the game environment were ~1732 (PPO), ~1840 (DQN) and ~2300 (RAMario). Full code is available at https://github.com/s4nyam/RAMario.

Financial risk prediction plays a crucial role in the financial sector. Machine learning methods have been widely applied for automatically detecting potential risks and thus saving the cost of labor. However, the development in this field is lagging behind in recent years by the following two facts: 1) the algorithms used are somewhat outdated, especially in the context of the fast advance of generative AI and large language models (LLMs); 2) the lack of a unified and open-sourced financial benchmark has impeded the related research for years. To tackle these issues, we propose FinPT and FinBench: the former is a novel approach for financial risk prediction that conduct Profile Tuning on large pretrained foundation models, and the latter is a set of high-quality datasets on financial risks such as default, fraud, and churn. In FinPT, we fill the financial tabular data into the pre-defined instruction template, obtain natural-language customer profiles by prompting LLMs, and fine-tune large foundation models with the profile text to make predictions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FinPT by experimenting with a range of representative strong baselines on FinBench. The analytical studies further deepen the understanding of LLMs for financial risk prediction.

The Game of Life (Life), a well known algorithm within the broader class of cellular automata (CA), exhibits complex emergent dynamics, with extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Modeling and predicting such intricate behavior without explicit knowledge of the system's underlying topology presents a significant challenge, motivating the development of algorithms that can generalize across various grid configurations and boundary conditions. We develop a decoder-only generative pretrained transformer model to solve this problem, showing that our model can simulate Life on a toroidal grid with no prior knowledge on the size of the grid, or its periodic boundary conditions (LifeGPT). LifeGPT is topology-agnostic with respect to its training data and our results show that a GPT model is capable of capturing the deterministic rules of a Turing-complete system with near-perfect accuracy, given sufficiently diverse training data. We also introduce the idea of an `autoregressive autoregressor' to recursively implement Life using LifeGPT. Our results pave the path towards true universal computation within a large language model (LLM) framework, synthesizing of mathematical analysis with natural language processing, and probing AI systems for situational awareness about the evolution of such algorithms without ever having to compute them. Similar GPTs could potentially solve inverse problems in multicellular self-assembly by extracting CA-compatible rulesets from real-world biological systems to create new predictive models, which would have significant consequences for the fields of bioinspired materials, tissue engineering, and architected materials design.

The success of machine learning algorithms generally depends on data representation, and we hypothesize that this is because different representations can entangle and hide more or less the different explanatory factors of variation behind the data. Although specific domain knowledge can be used to help design representations, learning with generic priors can also be used, and the quest for AI is motivating the design of more powerful representation-learning algorithms implementing such priors. This paper reviews recent work in the area of unsupervised feature learning and deep learning, covering advances in probabilistic models, auto-encoders, manifold learning, and deep networks. This motivates longer-term unanswered questions about the appropriate objectives for learning good representations, for computing representations (i.e., inference), and the geometrical connections between representation learning, density estimation and manifold learning.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is increasingly utilized to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, effectively scaling these RL methods presents significant challenges, primarily due to the difficulty in maintaining high AI accelerator utilization without generating stale, off-policy data that harms common RL algorithms. This paper introduces PipelineRL, an approach designed to achieve a superior trade-off between hardware efficiency and data on-policyness for LLM training. PipelineRL employs concurrent asynchronous data generation and model training, distinguished by the novel in-flight weight updates. This mechanism allows the LLM generation engine to receive updated model weights with minimal interruption during the generation of token sequences, thereby maximizing both the accelerator utilization and the freshness of training data. Experiments conducted on long-form reasoning tasks using 128 H100 GPUs demonstrate that PipelineRL achieves approximately sim 2x faster learning compared to conventional RL baselines while maintaining highly on-policy training data. A scalable and modular open-source implementation of PipelineRL is also released as a key contribution.

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT & Llama have demonstrated significant achievements in summarization tasks but struggle with factual inaccuracies, a critical issue in clinical NLP applications where errors could lead to serious consequences. To counter the high costs and limited availability of expert-annotated data for factual alignment, this study introduces an innovative pipeline that utilizes >100B parameter GPT variants like GPT-3.5 & GPT-4 to act as synthetic experts to generate high-quality synthetics feedback aimed at enhancing factual consistency in clinical note summarization. Our research primarily focuses on edit feedback generated by these synthetic feedback experts without additional human annotations, mirroring and optimizing the practical scenario in which medical professionals refine AI system outputs. Although such 100B+ parameter GPT variants have proven to demonstrate expertise in various clinical NLP tasks, such as the Medical Licensing Examination, there is scant research on their capacity to act as synthetic feedback experts and deliver expert-level edit feedback for improving the generation quality of weaker (<10B parameter) LLMs like GPT-2 (1.5B) & Llama 2 (7B) in clinical domain. So in this work, we leverage 100B+ GPT variants to act as synthetic feedback experts offering expert-level edit feedback, that is used to reduce hallucinations and align weaker (<10B parameter) LLMs with medical facts using two distinct alignment algorithms (DPO & SALT), endeavoring to narrow the divide between AI-generated content and factual accuracy. This highlights the substantial potential of LLM-based synthetic edits in enhancing the alignment of clinical factuality.

We present a method to formulate algorithm discovery as program search, and apply it to discover optimization algorithms for deep neural network training. We leverage efficient search techniques to explore an infinite and sparse program space. To bridge the large generalization gap between proxy and target tasks, we also introduce program selection and simplification strategies. Our method discovers a simple and effective optimization algorithm, Lion (Evo\textbf{Lved Sign Momentum}). It is more memory-efficient than Adam as it only keeps track of the momentum. Different from adaptive optimizers, its update has the same magnitude for each parameter calculated through the sign operation. We compare Lion with widely used optimizers, such as Adam and Adafactor, for training a variety of models on different tasks. On image classification, Lion boosts the accuracy of ViT by up to 2% on ImageNet and saves up to 5x the pre-training compute on JFT. On vision-language contrastive learning, we achieve 88.3% zero-shot and 91.1% fine-tuning accuracy on ImageNet, surpassing the previous best results by 2% and 0.1%, respectively. On diffusion models, Lion outperforms Adam by achieving a better FID score and reducing the training compute by up to 2.3x. For autoregressive, masked language modeling, and fine-tuning, Lion exhibits a similar or better performance compared to Adam. Our analysis of Lion reveals that its performance gain grows with the training batch size. It also requires a smaller learning rate than Adam due to the larger norm of the update produced by the sign function. Additionally, we examine the limitations of Lion and identify scenarios where its improvements are small or not statistically significant. The implementation of Lion is publicly available.

The performance of an algorithm often critically depends on its parameter configuration. While a variety of automated algorithm configuration methods have been proposed to relieve users from the tedious and error-prone task of manually tuning parameters, there is still a lot of untapped potential as the learned configuration is static, i.e., parameter settings remain fixed throughout the run. However, it has been shown that some algorithm parameters are best adjusted dynamically during execution, e.g., to adapt to the current part of the optimization landscape. Thus far, this is most commonly achieved through hand-crafted heuristics. A promising recent alternative is to automatically learn such dynamic parameter adaptation policies from data. In this article, we give the first comprehensive account of this new field of automated dynamic algorithm configuration (DAC), present a series of recent advances, and provide a solid foundation for future research in this field. Specifically, we (i) situate DAC in the broader historical context of AI research; (ii) formalize DAC as a computational problem; (iii) identify the methods used in prior-art to tackle this problem; (iv) conduct empirical case studies for using DAC in evolutionary optimization, AI planning, and machine learning.

We present AI-SARAH, a practical variant of SARAH. As a variant of SARAH, this algorithm employs the stochastic recursive gradient yet adjusts step-size based on local geometry. AI-SARAH implicitly computes step-size and efficiently estimates local Lipschitz smoothness of stochastic functions. It is fully adaptive, tune-free, straightforward to implement, and computationally efficient. We provide technical insight and intuitive illustrations on its design and convergence. We conduct extensive empirical analysis and demonstrate its strong performance compared with its classical counterparts and other state-of-the-art first-order methods in solving convex machine learning problems.

Recent advances in neural algorithmic reasoning with graph neural networks (GNNs) are propped up by the notion of algorithmic alignment. Broadly, a neural network will be better at learning to execute a reasoning task (in terms of sample complexity) if its individual components align well with the target algorithm. Specifically, GNNs are claimed to align with dynamic programming (DP), a general problem-solving strategy which expresses many polynomial-time algorithms. However, has this alignment truly been demonstrated and theoretically quantified? Here we show, using methods from category theory and abstract algebra, that there exists an intricate connection between GNNs and DP, going well beyond the initial observations over individual algorithms such as Bellman-Ford. Exposing this connection, we easily verify several prior findings in the literature, produce better-grounded GNN architectures for edge-centric tasks, and demonstrate empirical results on the CLRS algorithmic reasoning benchmark. We hope our exposition will serve as a foundation for building stronger algorithmically aligned GNNs.

Machine learning, the foundation of modern artificial intelligence, has driven innovations that have fundamentally transformed the world. Yet, behind advancements lies a complex and often tedious process requiring labor and compute intensive iteration and experimentation. Engineers and scientists developing machine learning models spend much of their time on trial-and-error tasks instead of conceptualizing innovative solutions or research hypotheses. To address this challenge, we introduce AI-Driven Exploration (AIDE), a machine learning engineering agent powered by large language models (LLMs). AIDE frames machine learning engineering as a code optimization problem, and formulates trial-and-error as a tree search in the space of potential solutions. By strategically reusing and refining promising solutions, AIDE effectively trades computational resources for enhanced performance, achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple machine learning engineering benchmarks, including our Kaggle evaluations, OpenAI MLE-Bench and METRs RE-Bench.

Artificial intelligence (AI) methods have become critical in scientific applications to help accelerate scientific discovery. Large language models (LLMs) are being considered as a promising approach to address some of the challenging problems because of their superior generalization capabilities across domains. The effectiveness of the models and the accuracy of the applications is contingent upon their efficient execution on the underlying hardware infrastructure. Specialized AI accelerator hardware systems have recently become available for accelerating AI applications. However, the comparative performance of these AI accelerators on large language models has not been previously studied. In this paper, we systematically study LLMs on multiple AI accelerators and GPUs and evaluate their performance characteristics for these models. We evaluate these systems with (i) a micro-benchmark using a core transformer block, (ii) a GPT- 2 model, and (iii) an LLM-driven science use case, GenSLM. We present our findings and analyses of the models' performance to better understand the intrinsic capabilities of AI accelerators. Furthermore, our analysis takes into account key factors such as sequence lengths, scaling behavior, sparsity, and sensitivity to gradient accumulation steps.

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex domains such as logical reasoning and experimental coding. Motivated by these advancements, numerous studies have explored the application of AI in the innovation process, particularly in the context of scientific research. These AI technologies primarily aim to develop systems that can autonomously conduct research processes across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Despite these significant strides, a comprehensive survey on AI for Research (AI4Research) remains absent, which hampers our understanding and impedes further development in this field. To address this gap, we present a comprehensive survey and offer a unified perspective on AI4Research. Specifically, the main contributions of our work are as follows: (1) Systematic taxonomy: We first introduce a systematic taxonomy to classify five mainstream tasks in AI4Research. (2) New frontiers: Then, we identify key research gaps and highlight promising future directions, focusing on the rigor and scalability of automated experiments, as well as the societal impact. (3) Abundant applications and resources: Finally, we compile a wealth of resources, including relevant multidisciplinary applications, data corpora, and tools. We hope our work will provide the research community with quick access to these resources and stimulate innovative breakthroughs in AI4Research.

In a compound AI system, components such as an LLM call, a retriever, a code interpreter, or tools are interconnected. The system's behavior is primarily driven by parameters such as instructions or tool definitions. Recent advancements enable end-to-end optimization of these parameters using an LLM. Notably, leveraging an LLM as an optimizer is particularly efficient because it avoids gradient computation and can generate complex code and instructions. This paper presents a survey of the principles and emerging trends in LLM-based optimization of compound AI systems. It covers archetypes of compound AI systems, approaches to LLM-based end-to-end optimization, and insights into future directions and broader impacts. Importantly, this survey uses concepts from program analysis to provide a unified view of how an LLM optimizer is prompted to optimize a compound AI system. The exhaustive list of paper is provided at https://github.com/linyuhongg/LLM-based-Optimization-of-Compound-AI-Systems.

Optimization can be found in many real-life applications. Designing an effective algorithm for a specific optimization problem typically requires a tedious amount of effort from human experts with domain knowledge and algorithm design skills. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Algorithm Evolution using Large Language Model (AEL). It utilizes a large language model (LLM) to automatically generate optimization algorithms via an evolutionary framework. AEL does algorithm-level evolution without model training. Human effort and requirements for domain knowledge can be significantly reduced. We take constructive methods for the salesman traveling problem as a test example, we show that the constructive algorithm obtained by AEL outperforms simple hand-crafted and LLM-generated heuristics. Compared with other domain deep learning model-based algorithms, these methods exhibit excellent scalability across different problem sizes. AEL is also very different from previous attempts that utilize LLMs as search operators in algorithms.

Discovering efficient algorithms for solving complex problems has been an outstanding challenge in mathematics and computer science, requiring substantial human expertise over the years. Recent advancements in evolutionary search with large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in accelerating the discovery of algorithms across various domains, particularly in mathematics and optimization. However, existing approaches treat the LLM as a static generator, missing the opportunity to update the model with the signal obtained from evolutionary exploration. In this work, we propose to augment LLM-based evolutionary search by continuously refining the search operator - the LLM - through reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning. Our method leverages evolutionary search as an exploration strategy to discover improved algorithms, while RL optimizes the LLM policy based on these discoveries. Our experiments on three combinatorial optimization tasks - bin packing, traveling salesman, and the flatpack problem - show that combining RL and evolutionary search improves discovery efficiency of improved algorithms, showcasing the potential of RL-enhanced evolutionary strategies to assist computer scientists and mathematicians for more efficient algorithm design.

This paper presents our winning submission to the AI Mathematical Olympiad - Progress Prize 2 (AIMO-2) competition. Our recipe for building state-of-the-art mathematical reasoning models relies on three key pillars. First, we create a large-scale dataset comprising 540K unique high-quality math problems, including olympiad-level problems, and their 3.2M long-reasoning solutions. Second, we develop a novel method to integrate code execution with long reasoning models through iterative training, generation, and quality filtering, resulting in 1.7M high-quality Tool-Integrated Reasoning solutions. Third, we create a pipeline to train models to select the most promising solution from many candidates. We show that such generative solution selection (GenSelect) can significantly improve upon majority voting baseline. Combining these ideas, we train a series of models that achieve state-of-the-art results on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. To facilitate further research, we release our code, models, and the complete OpenMathReasoning dataset under a commercially permissive license.

This paper aims to understand how neural networks learn algorithmic reasoning by addressing two questions: How faithful are learned algorithms when they are effective, and why do neural networks fail to learn effective algorithms otherwise? To answer these questions, we use neural compilation, a technique that directly encodes a source algorithm into neural network parameters, enabling the network to compute the algorithm exactly. This enables comparison between compiled and conventionally learned parameters, intermediate vectors, and behaviors. This investigation is crucial for developing neural networks that robustly learn complexalgorithms from data. Our analysis focuses on graph neural networks (GNNs), which are naturally aligned with algorithmic reasoning tasks, specifically our choices of BFS, DFS, and Bellman-Ford, which cover the spectrum of effective, faithful, and ineffective learned algorithms. Commonly, learning algorithmic reasoning is framed as induction over synthetic data, where a parameterized model is trained on inputs, traces, and outputs produced by an underlying ground truth algorithm. In contrast, we introduce a neural compilation method for GNNs, which sets network parameters analytically, bypassing training. Focusing on GNNs leverages their alignment with algorithmic reasoning, extensive algorithmic induction literature, and the novel application of neural compilation to GNNs. Overall, this paper aims to characterize expressability-trainability gaps - a fundamental shortcoming in learning algorithmic reasoning. We hypothesize that inductive learning is most effective for parallel algorithms contained within the computational class NC.

This paper introduces Adaptive Computation Time (ACT), an algorithm that allows recurrent neural networks to learn how many computational steps to take between receiving an input and emitting an output. ACT requires minimal changes to the network architecture, is deterministic and differentiable, and does not add any noise to the parameter gradients. Experimental results are provided for four synthetic problems: determining the parity of binary vectors, applying binary logic operations, adding integers, and sorting real numbers. Overall, performance is dramatically improved by the use of ACT, which successfully adapts the number of computational steps to the requirements of the problem. We also present character-level language modelling results on the Hutter prize Wikipedia dataset. In this case ACT does not yield large gains in performance; however it does provide intriguing insight into the structure of the data, with more computation allocated to harder-to-predict transitions, such as spaces between words and ends of sentences. This suggests that ACT or other adaptive computation methods could provide a generic method for inferring segment boundaries in sequence data.

We introduce a novel framework for incorporating human expertise into algorithmic predictions. Our approach leverages human judgment to distinguish inputs which are algorithmically indistinguishable, or "look the same" to predictive algorithms. We argue that this framing clarifies the problem of human-AI collaboration in prediction tasks, as experts often form judgments by drawing on information which is not encoded in an algorithm's training data. Algorithmic indistinguishability yields a natural test for assessing whether experts incorporate this kind of "side information", and further provides a simple but principled method for selectively incorporating human feedback into algorithmic predictions. We show that this method provably improves the performance of any feasible algorithmic predictor and precisely quantify this improvement. We find empirically that although algorithms often outperform their human counterparts on average, human judgment can improve algorithmic predictions on specific instances (which can be identified ex-ante). In an X-ray classification task, we find that this subset constitutes nearly 30% of the patient population. Our approach provides a natural way of uncovering this heterogeneity and thus enabling effective human-AI collaboration.

Today's AI systems have human-designed, fixed architectures and cannot autonomously and continuously improve themselves. The advance of AI could itself be automated. If done safely, that would accelerate AI development and allow us to reap its benefits much sooner. Meta-learning can automate the discovery of novel algorithms, but is limited by first-order improvements and the human design of a suitable search space. The G\"odel machine proposed a theoretical alternative: a self-improving AI that repeatedly modifies itself in a provably beneficial manner. Unfortunately, proving that most changes are net beneficial is impossible in practice. We introduce the Darwin G\"odel Machine (DGM), a self-improving system that iteratively modifies its own code (thereby also improving its ability to modify its own codebase) and empirically validates each change using coding benchmarks. Inspired by Darwinian evolution and open-endedness research, the DGM maintains an archive of generated coding agents. It grows the archive by sampling an agent from it and using a foundation model to create a new, interesting, version of the sampled agent. This open-ended exploration forms a growing tree of diverse, high-quality agents and allows the parallel exploration of many different paths through the search space. Empirically, the DGM automatically improves its coding capabilities (e.g., better code editing tools, long-context window management, peer-review mechanisms), increasing performance on SWE-bench from 20.0% to 50.0%, and on Polyglot from 14.2% to 30.7%. Furthermore, the DGM significantly outperforms baselines without self-improvement or open-ended exploration. All experiments were done with safety precautions (e.g., sandboxing, human oversight). The DGM is a significant step toward self-improving AI, capable of gathering its own stepping stones along paths that unfold into endless innovation.

The remarkable capabilities and intricate nature of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have dramatically escalated the imperative for specialized AI accelerators. Nonetheless, designing these accelerators for various AI workloads remains both labor- and time-intensive. While existing design exploration and automation tools can partially alleviate the need for extensive human involvement, they still demand substantial hardware expertise, posing a barrier to non-experts and stifling AI accelerator development. Motivated by the astonishing potential of large language models (LLMs) for generating high-quality content in response to human language instructions, we embark on this work to examine the possibility of harnessing LLMs to automate AI accelerator design. Through this endeavor, we develop GPT4AIGChip, a framework intended to democratize AI accelerator design by leveraging human natural languages instead of domain-specific languages. Specifically, we first perform an in-depth investigation into LLMs' limitations and capabilities for AI accelerator design, thus aiding our understanding of our current position and garnering insights into LLM-powered automated AI accelerator design. Furthermore, drawing inspiration from the above insights, we develop a framework called GPT4AIGChip, which features an automated demo-augmented prompt-generation pipeline utilizing in-context learning to guide LLMs towards creating high-quality AI accelerator design. To our knowledge, this work is the first to demonstrate an effective pipeline for LLM-powered automated AI accelerator generation. Accordingly, we anticipate that our insights and framework can serve as a catalyst for innovations in next-generation LLM-powered design automation tools.

In this paper, we give an in-depth analysis on the mathematical problem formulations and the probabilistic optimization explorations for some of the key components in Transformer model [33] in the field of generative AI. We explore and discuss some potential further enhancement for current state of the art methods for some key underlying technologies of generative AI models from algorithmic and probabilistic optimization perspective. In particular, we present an optimal solution for sub-word encoding (SWE) based on similar initial settings as that of byte-pair encoding (BPE) algorithm in [9] with similar objectives as that of WordPiece approach in [28, 31] to maximize the likelihood of the training data. We also present cross entropy optimization method to optimize hyperparameters for word2vec model [17]. In addition, we propose a factored combination of rotary positional encoding (RoPE) [32] and attention with linear biases (ALiBi) [23] with a harmonic series. We also present a probabilistic FlashAttention [6, 7] (PrFlashAttention) method with a probability distribution over block distances in the matrix to decide which block is likely to participate in a given round of attention computation while maintaining the lower triangle shape of the tensor for autoregressive language models by re-shaping the tensors. Finally, we present staircase adaptive quantization (SAQ) of key-value (KV) cache for multi-query attention (MQA) based on the framework presented in [16] to have gradual quantization degradation while achieving reasonable model quality and cost savings.

Besides natural language processing, transformers exhibit extraordinary performance in solving broader applications, including scientific computing and computer vision. Previous works try to explain this from the expressive power and capability perspectives that standard transformers are capable of performing some algorithms. To empower transformers with algorithmic capabilities and motivated by the recently proposed looped transformer (Yang et al., 2024; Giannou et al., 2023), we design a novel transformer block, dubbed Algorithm Transformer (abbreviated as AlgoFormer). Compared with the standard transformer and vanilla looped transformer, the proposed AlgoFormer can achieve significantly higher expressiveness in algorithm representation when using the same number of parameters. In particular, inspired by the structure of human-designed learning algorithms, our transformer block consists of a pre-transformer that is responsible for task pre-processing, a looped transformer for iterative optimization algorithms, and a post-transformer for producing the desired results after post-processing. We provide theoretical evidence of the expressive power of the AlgoFormer in solving some challenging problems, mirroring human-designed algorithms. Furthermore, some theoretical and empirical results are presented to show that the designed transformer has the potential to be smarter than human-designed algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate the empirical superiority of the proposed transformer in that it outperforms the standard transformer and vanilla looped transformer in some challenging tasks.

The ability to solve problems is a hallmark of intelligence and has been an enduring goal in AI. AI systems that can create programs as solutions to problems or assist developers in writing programs can increase productivity and make programming more accessible. Recently, pre-trained large language models have shown impressive abilities in generating new codes from natural language descriptions, repairing buggy codes, translating codes between languages, and retrieving relevant code segments. However, the evaluation of these models has often been performed in a scattered way on only one or two specific tasks, in a few languages, at a partial granularity (e.g., function) level and in many cases without proper training data. Even more concerning is that in most cases the evaluation of generated codes has been done in terms of mere lexical overlap rather than actual execution whereas semantic similarity (or equivalence) of two code segments depends only on their ``execution similarity'', i.e., being able to get the same output for a given input.

ML-augmented algorithms utilize predictions to achieve performance beyond their worst-case bounds. Producing these predictions might be a costly operation -- this motivated Im et al. '22 to introduce the study of algorithms which use predictions parsimoniously. We design parsimonious algorithms for caching and MTS with action predictions, proposed by Antoniadis et al. '20, focusing on the parameters of consistency (performance with perfect predictions) and smoothness (dependence of their performance on the prediction error). Our algorithm for caching is 1-consistent, robust, and its smoothness deteriorates with the decreasing number of available predictions. We propose an algorithm for general MTS whose consistency and smoothness both scale linearly with the decreasing number of predictions. Without the restriction on the number of available predictions, both algorithms match the earlier guarantees achieved by Antoniadis et al. '20.

In this paper, we introduce the AI Search Paradigm, a comprehensive blueprint for next-generation search systems capable of emulating human information processing and decision-making. The paradigm employs a modular architecture of four LLM-powered agents (Master, Planner, Executor and Writer) that dynamically adapt to the full spectrum of information needs, from simple factual queries to complex multi-stage reasoning tasks. These agents collaborate dynamically through coordinated workflows to evaluate query complexity, decompose problems into executable plans, and orchestrate tool usage, task execution, and content synthesis. We systematically present key methodologies for realizing this paradigm, including task planning and tool integration, execution strategies, aligned and robust retrieval-augmented generation, and efficient LLM inference, spanning both algorithmic techniques and infrastructure-level optimizations. By providing an in-depth guide to these foundational components, this work aims to inform the development of trustworthy, adaptive, and scalable AI search systems.

Recent work on neural algorithmic reasoning has investigated the reasoning capabilities of neural networks, effectively demonstrating they can learn to execute classical algorithms on unseen data coming from the train distribution. However, the performance of existing neural reasoners significantly degrades on out-of-distribution (OOD) test data, where inputs have larger sizes. In this work, we make an important observation: there are many different inputs for which an algorithm will perform certain intermediate computations identically. This insight allows us to develop data augmentation procedures that, given an algorithm's intermediate trajectory, produce inputs for which the target algorithm would have exactly the same next trajectory step. Then, we employ a causal framework to design a corresponding self-supervised objective, and we prove that it improves the OOD generalisation capabilities of the reasoner. We evaluate our method on the CLRS algorithmic reasoning benchmark, where we show up to 3times improvements on the OOD test data.

There has recently been a surge of work in explanatory artificial intelligence (XAI). This research area tackles the important problem that complex machines and algorithms often cannot provide insights into their behavior and thought processes. XAI allows users and parts of the internal system to be more transparent, providing explanations of their decisions in some level of detail. These explanations are important to ensure algorithmic fairness, identify potential bias/problems in the training data, and to ensure that the algorithms perform as expected. However, explanations produced by these systems is neither standardized nor systematically assessed. In an effort to create best practices and identify open challenges, we provide our definition of explainability and show how it can be used to classify existing literature. We discuss why current approaches to explanatory methods especially for deep neural networks are insufficient. Finally, based on our survey, we conclude with suggested future research directions for explanatory artificial intelligence.

Despite recent success in large language model (LLM) reasoning, LLMs struggle with hierarchical multi-step reasoning tasks like generating complex programs. For these tasks, humans often start with a high-level algorithmic design and implement each part gradually. We introduce Parsel, a framework enabling automatic implementation and validation of complex algorithms with code LLMs. With Parsel, we automatically decompose algorithmic tasks into hierarchical natural language function descriptions and then search over combinations of possible function implementations using tests. We show that Parsel can be used across domains requiring hierarchical reasoning, including program synthesis and robotic planning. We find that, using Parsel, LLMs solve more competition-level problems in the APPS dataset, resulting in pass rates over 75\% higher than prior results from directly sampling AlphaCode and Codex, while often using a smaller sample budget. Moreover, with automatically generated tests, we find that Parsel can improve the state-of-the-art pass@1 performance on HumanEval from 67\% to 85\%. We also find that LLM-generated robotic plans using Parsel are more than twice as likely to be considered accurate than directly generated plans. Lastly, we explore how Parsel addresses LLM limitations and discuss how Parsel may be useful for human programmers. We release our code at https://github.com/ezelikman/parsel

Artificial Intelligence is present in the generation and distribution of culture. How do artists exploit neural networks? What impact do these algorithms have on artistic practice? Through a practice-based research methodology, this paper explores the potentials and limits of current AI technology, more precisely deep neural networks, in the context of image, text, form and translation of semiotic spaces. In a relatively short time, the generation of high-resolution images and 3D objects has been achieved. There are models, like CLIP and text2mesh, that do not need the same kind of media input as the output; we call them translation models. Such a twist contributes toward creativity arousal, which manifests itself in art practice and feeds back to the developers' pipeline. Yet again, we see how artworks act as catalysts for technology development. Those creative scenarios and processes are enabled not solely by AI models, but by the hard work behind implementing these new technologies. AI does not create a 'push-a-button' masterpiece but requires a deep understanding of the technology behind it, and a creative and critical mindset. Thus, AI opens new avenues for inspiration and offers novel tool sets, and yet again the question of authorship is asked.

The growing importance of understanding and addressing algorithmic bias in artificial intelligence (AI) has led to a surge in research on AI fairness, which often assumes that the underlying data is independent and identically distributed (IID). However, real-world data frequently exists in non-IID graph structures that capture connections among individual units. To effectively mitigate bias in AI systems, it is essential to bridge the gap between traditional fairness literature, designed for IID data, and the prevalence of non-IID graph data. This survey reviews recent advancements in fairness amidst non-IID graph data, including the newly introduced fair graph generation and the commonly studied fair graph classification. In addition, available datasets and evaluation metrics for future research are identified, the limitations of existing work are highlighted, and promising future directions are proposed.

Planning is central to agents and agentic AI. The ability to plan, e.g., creating travel itineraries within a budget, holds immense potential in both scientific and commercial contexts. Moreover, optimal plans tend to require fewer resources compared to ad-hoc methods. To date, a comprehensive understanding of existing planning benchmarks appears to be lacking. Without it, comparing planning algorithms' performance across domains or selecting suitable algorithms for new scenarios remains challenging. In this paper, we examine a range of planning benchmarks to identify commonly used testbeds for algorithm development and highlight potential gaps. These benchmarks are categorized into embodied environments, web navigation, scheduling, games and puzzles, and everyday task automation. Our study recommends the most appropriate benchmarks for various algorithms and offers insights to guide future benchmark development.

Large language models hold promise as scientific assistants, yet existing agents either rely solely on algorithm evolution or on deep research in isolation, both of which face critical limitations. Pure algorithm evolution, as in AlphaEvolve, depends only on the internal knowledge of LLMs and quickly plateaus in complex domains, while pure deep research proposes ideas without validation, resulting in unrealistic or unimplementable solutions. We present DeepEvolve, an agent that integrates deep research with algorithm evolution, uniting external knowledge retrieval, cross-file code editing, and systematic debugging under a feedback-driven iterative loop. Each iteration not only proposes new hypotheses but also refines, implements, and tests them, avoiding both shallow improvements and unproductive over-refinements. Across nine benchmarks in chemistry, mathematics, biology, materials, and patents, DeepEvolve consistently improves the initial algorithm, producing executable new algorithms with sustained gains. By bridging the gap between unguided evolution and research without grounding, DeepEvolve provides a reliable framework for advancing scientific algorithm discovery. Our code is available at https://github.com/liugangcode/deepevolve.

We study a class of optimization problems motivated by automating the design and update of AI systems like coding assistants, robots, and copilots. We propose an end-to-end optimization framework, Trace, which treats the computational workflow of an AI system as a graph akin to neural networks, based on a generalization of back-propagation. Optimization of computational workflows often involves rich feedback (e.g. console output or user's responses), heterogeneous parameters (e.g. prompts, hyper-parameters, codes), and intricate objectives (beyond maximizing a score). Moreover, its computation graph can change dynamically with the inputs and parameters. We frame a new mathematical setup of iterative optimization, Optimization with Trace Oracle (OPTO), to capture and abstract these properties so as to design optimizers that work across many domains. In OPTO, an optimizer receives an execution trace along with feedback on the computed output and updates parameters iteratively. Trace is the tool to implement OPTO in practice. Trace has a Python interface that efficiently converts a computational workflow into an OPTO instance using a PyTorch-like interface. Using Trace, we develop a general-purpose LLM-based optimizer called OptoPrime that can effectively solve OPTO problems. In empirical studies, we find that OptoPrime is capable of first-order numerical optimization, prompt optimization, hyper-parameter tuning, robot controller design, code debugging, etc., and is often competitive with specialized optimizers for each domain. We believe that Trace, OptoPrime and the OPTO framework will enable the next generation of interactive agents that automatically adapt using various kinds of feedback. Website: https://microsoft.github.io/Trace

Many fields use search algorithms, which automatically explore a search space to find high-performing solutions: chemists search through the space of molecules to discover new drugs; engineers search for stronger, cheaper, safer designs, scientists search for models that best explain data, etc. The goal of search algorithms has traditionally been to return the single highest-performing solution in a search space. Here we describe a new, fundamentally different type of algorithm that is more useful because it provides a holistic view of how high-performing solutions are distributed throughout a search space. It creates a map of high-performing solutions at each point in a space defined by dimensions of variation that a user gets to choose. This Multi-dimensional Archive of Phenotypic Elites (MAP-Elites) algorithm illuminates search spaces, allowing researchers to understand how interesting attributes of solutions combine to affect performance, either positively or, equally of interest, negatively. For example, a drug company may wish to understand how performance changes as the size of molecules and their cost-to-produce vary. MAP-Elites produces a large diversity of high-performing, yet qualitatively different solutions, which can be more helpful than a single, high-performing solution. Interestingly, because MAP-Elites explores more of the search space, it also tends to find a better overall solution than state-of-the-art search algorithms. We demonstrate the benefits of this new algorithm in three different problem domains ranging from producing modular neural networks to designing simulated and real soft robots. Because MAP- Elites (1) illuminates the relationship between performance and dimensions of interest in solutions, (2) returns a set of high-performing, yet diverse solutions, and (3) improves finding a single, best solution, it will advance science and engineering.

Mathematical understanding and reasoning are crucial tasks for assessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI). However, existing benchmarks either require just a few steps of reasoning, or only contain a small amount of data in one specific topic, making it hard to analyse AI's behaviour with reference to different problems within a specific topic in detail. In this work, we propose Conic10K, a challenging math problem dataset on conic sections in Chinese senior high school education. Our dataset contains various problems with different reasoning depths, while only the knowledge from conic sections is required. Since the dataset only involves a narrow range of knowledge, it is easy to separately analyse the knowledge a model possesses and the reasoning ability it has. For each problem, we provide a high-quality formal representation, the reasoning steps, and the final solution. Experiments show that existing large language models, including GPT-4, exhibit weak performance on complex reasoning. We hope that our findings could inspire more advanced techniques for precise natural language understanding and reasoning. Our dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/whyNLP/Conic10K.

The powerful reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in mathematics and coding, combined with their ability to automate complex tasks through agentic frameworks, present unprecedented opportunities for accelerating scientific innovation. In this paper, we introduce AI-Researcher, a fully autonomous research system that transforms how AI-driven scientific discovery is conducted and evaluated. Our framework seamlessly orchestrates the complete research pipeline--from literature review and hypothesis generation to algorithm implementation and publication-ready manuscript preparation--with minimal human intervention. To rigorously assess autonomous research capabilities, we develop Scientist-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising state-of-the-art papers across diverse AI research domains, featuring both guided innovation and open-ended exploration tasks. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that AI-Researcher achieves remarkable implementation success rates and produces research papers that approach human-level quality. This work establishes new foundations for autonomous scientific innovation that can complement human researchers by systematically exploring solution spaces beyond cognitive limitations.

Humans interact with the environment using a combination of perception - transforming sensory inputs from their environment into symbols, and cognition - mapping symbols to knowledge about the environment for supporting abstraction, reasoning by analogy, and long-term planning. Human perception-inspired machine perception, in the context of AI, refers to large-scale pattern recognition from raw data using neural networks trained using self-supervised learning objectives such as next-word prediction or object recognition. On the other hand, machine cognition encompasses more complex computations, such as using knowledge of the environment to guide reasoning, analogy, and long-term planning. Humans can also control and explain their cognitive functions. This seems to require the retention of symbolic mappings from perception outputs to knowledge about their environment. For example, humans can follow and explain the guidelines and safety constraints driving their decision-making in safety-critical applications such as healthcare, criminal justice, and autonomous driving. This article introduces the rapidly emerging paradigm of Neurosymbolic AI combines neural networks and knowledge-guided symbolic approaches to create more capable and flexible AI systems. These systems have immense potential to advance both algorithm-level (e.g., abstraction, analogy, reasoning) and application-level (e.g., explainable and safety-constrained decision-making) capabilities of AI systems.

The rapid growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) has been a driving force in transforming various domains, reshaping the artificial general intelligence landscape. However, the increasing computational and memory demands of these models present substantial challenges, hindering both academic research and practical applications. To address these issues, a wide array of methods, including both algorithmic and hardware solutions, have been developed to enhance the efficiency of LLMs. This survey delivers a comprehensive review of algorithmic advancements aimed at improving LLM efficiency. Unlike other surveys that typically focus on specific areas such as training or model compression, this paper examines the multi-faceted dimensions of efficiency essential for the end-to-end algorithmic development of LLMs. Specifically, it covers various topics related to efficiency, including scaling laws, data utilization, architectural innovations, training and tuning strategies, and inference techniques. This paper aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners, laying the groundwork for future innovations in this critical research area. Our repository of relevant references is maintained at url{https://github.com/tding1/Efficient-LLM-Survey}.

Machine learning research has advanced in multiple aspects, including model structures and learning methods. The effort to automate such research, known as AutoML, has also made significant progress. However, this progress has largely focused on the architecture of neural networks, where it has relied on sophisticated expert-designed layers as building blocks---or similarly restrictive search spaces. Our goal is to show that AutoML can go further: it is possible today to automatically discover complete machine learning algorithms just using basic mathematical operations as building blocks. We demonstrate this by introducing a novel framework that significantly reduces human bias through a generic search space. Despite the vastness of this space, evolutionary search can still discover two-layer neural networks trained by backpropagation. These simple neural networks can then be surpassed by evolving directly on tasks of interest, e.g. CIFAR-10 variants, where modern techniques emerge in the top algorithms, such as bilinear interactions, normalized gradients, and weight averaging. Moreover, evolution adapts algorithms to different task types: e.g., dropout-like techniques appear when little data is available. We believe these preliminary successes in discovering machine learning algorithms from scratch indicate a promising new direction for the field.

Understanding a student's problem-solving strategy can have a significant impact on effective math learning using Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) and Adaptive Instructional Systems (AISs). For instance, the ITS/AIS can better personalize itself to correct specific misconceptions that are indicated by incorrect strategies, specific problems can be designed to improve strategies and frustration can be minimized by adapting to a student's natural way of thinking rather than trying to fit a standard strategy for all. While it may be possible for human experts to identify strategies manually in classroom settings with sufficient student interaction, it is not possible to scale this up to big data. Therefore, we leverage advances in Machine Learning and AI methods to perform scalable strategy prediction that is also fair to students at all skill levels. Specifically, we develop an embedding called MVec where we learn a representation based on the mastery of students. We then cluster these embeddings with a non-parametric clustering method where we progressively learn clusters such that we group together instances that have approximately symmetrical strategies. The strategy prediction model is trained on instances sampled from these clusters. This ensures that we train the model over diverse strategies and also that strategies from a particular group do not bias the DNN model, thus allowing it to optimize its parameters over all groups. Using real world large-scale student interaction datasets from MATHia, we implement our approach using transformers and Node2Vec for learning the mastery embeddings and LSTMs for predicting strategies. We show that our approach can scale up to achieve high accuracy by training on a small sample of a large dataset and also has predictive equality, i.e., it can predict strategies equally well for learners at diverse skill levels.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing in-context learning capabilities through scaling up model and data size. Despite this progress, LLMs are still unable to solve algorithmic reasoning problems. While providing a rationale with the final answer has led to further improvements in multi-step reasoning problems, Anil et al. 2022 showed that even simple algorithmic reasoning tasks such as parity are far from solved. In this work, we identify and study four key stages for successfully teaching algorithmic reasoning to LLMs: (1) formulating algorithms as skills, (2) teaching multiple skills simultaneously (skill accumulation), (3) teaching how to combine skills (skill composition) and (4) teaching how to use skills as tools. We show that it is possible to teach algorithmic reasoning to LLMs via in-context learning, which we refer to as algorithmic prompting. We evaluate our approach on a variety of arithmetic and quantitative reasoning tasks, and demonstrate significant boosts in performance over existing prompting techniques. In particular, for long parity, addition, multiplication and subtraction, we achieve an error reduction of approximately 10x, 9x, 5x and 2x respectively compared to the best available baselines.

Algorithmic reasoning refers to the ability to understand the complex patterns behind the problem and decompose them into a sequence of reasoning steps towards the solution. Such nature of algorithmic reasoning makes it a challenge for large language models (LLMs), even though they have demonstrated promising performance in other reasoning tasks. Within this context, some recent studies use programming languages (e.g., Python) to express the necessary logic for solving a given instance/question (e.g., Program-of-Thought) as inspired by their strict and precise syntaxes. However, it is non-trivial to write an executable code that expresses the correct logic on the fly within a single inference call. Also, the code generated specifically for an instance cannot be reused for others, even if they are from the same task and might require identical logic to solve. This paper presents Think-and-Execute, a novel framework that decomposes the reasoning process of language models into two steps. (1) In Think, we discover a task-level logic that is shared across all instances for solving a given task and then express the logic with pseudocode; (2) In Execute, we further tailor the generated pseudocode to each instance and simulate the execution of the code. With extensive experiments on seven algorithmic reasoning tasks, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Think-and-Execute. Our approach better improves LMs' reasoning compared to several strong baselines performing instance-specific reasoning (e.g., CoT and PoT), suggesting the helpfulness of discovering task-level logic. Also, we show that compared to natural language, pseudocode can better guide the reasoning of LMs, even though they are trained to follow natural language instructions.

Training algorithms, broadly construed, are an essential part of every deep learning pipeline. Training algorithm improvements that speed up training across a wide variety of workloads (e.g., better update rules, tuning protocols, learning rate schedules, or data selection schemes) could save time, save computational resources, and lead to better, more accurate, models. Unfortunately, as a community, we are currently unable to reliably identify training algorithm improvements, or even determine the state-of-the-art training algorithm. In this work, using concrete experiments, we argue that real progress in speeding up training requires new benchmarks that resolve three basic challenges faced by empirical comparisons of training algorithms: (1) how to decide when training is complete and precisely measure training time, (2) how to handle the sensitivity of measurements to exact workload details, and (3) how to fairly compare algorithms that require hyperparameter tuning. In order to address these challenges, we introduce a new, competitive, time-to-result benchmark using multiple workloads running on fixed hardware, the AlgoPerf: Training Algorithms benchmark. Our benchmark includes a set of workload variants that make it possible to detect benchmark submissions that are more robust to workload changes than current widely-used methods. Finally, we evaluate baseline submissions constructed using various optimizers that represent current practice, as well as other optimizers that have recently received attention in the literature. These baseline results collectively demonstrate the feasibility of our benchmark, show that non-trivial gaps between methods exist, and set a provisional state-of-the-art for future benchmark submissions to try and surpass.

Optimization problems are pervasive across various sectors, from manufacturing and distribution to healthcare. However, most such problems are still solved heuristically by hand rather than optimally by state-of-the-art solvers, as the expertise required to formulate and solve these problems limits the widespread adoption of optimization tools and techniques. We introduce OptiMUS, a Large Language Model (LLM)-based agent designed to formulate and solve MILP problems from their natural language descriptions. OptiMUS is capable of developing mathematical models, writing and debugging solver code, developing tests, and checking the validity of generated solutions. To benchmark our agent, we present NLP4LP, a novel dataset of linear programming (LP) and mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problems. Our experiments demonstrate that OptiMUS solves nearly twice as many problems as a basic LLM prompting strategy. OptiMUS code and NLP4LP dataset are available at https://github.com/teshnizi/OptiMUS{https://github.com/teshnizi/OptiMUS}

Compositional AI systems, which combine multiple artificial intelligence components together with other application components to solve a larger problem, have no known pattern of development and are often approached in a bespoke and ad hoc style. This makes development slower and harder to reuse for future applications. To support the full rapid development cycle of compositional AI applications, we have developed a novel framework called (Bee)* (written as a regular expression and pronounced as "beestar"). We illustrate how (Bee)* supports building integrated, scalable, and interactive compositional AI applications with a simplified developer experience.

We initiate a principled study of algorithmic collective action on digital platforms that deploy machine learning algorithms. We propose a simple theoretical model of a collective interacting with a firm's learning algorithm. The collective pools the data of participating individuals and executes an algorithmic strategy by instructing participants how to modify their own data to achieve a collective goal. We investigate the consequences of this model in three fundamental learning-theoretic settings: the case of a nonparametric optimal learning algorithm, a parametric risk minimizer, and gradient-based optimization. In each setting, we come up with coordinated algorithmic strategies and characterize natural success criteria as a function of the collective's size. Complementing our theory, we conduct systematic experiments on a skill classification task involving tens of thousands of resumes from a gig platform for freelancers. Through more than two thousand model training runs of a BERT-like language model, we see a striking correspondence emerge between our empirical observations and the predictions made by our theory. Taken together, our theory and experiments broadly support the conclusion that algorithmic collectives of exceedingly small fractional size can exert significant control over a platform's learning algorithm.

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

While the history of machine learning so far largely encompasses a series of problems posed by researchers and algorithms that learn their solutions, an important question is whether the problems themselves can be generated by the algorithm at the same time as they are being solved. Such a process would in effect build its own diverse and expanding curricula, and the solutions to problems at various stages would become stepping stones towards solving even more challenging problems later in the process. The Paired Open-Ended Trailblazer (POET) algorithm introduced in this paper does just that: it pairs the generation of environmental challenges and the optimization of agents to solve those challenges. It simultaneously explores many different paths through the space of possible problems and solutions and, critically, allows these stepping-stone solutions to transfer between problems if better, catalyzing innovation. The term open-ended signifies the intriguing potential for algorithms like POET to continue to create novel and increasingly complex capabilities without bound. Our results show that POET produces a diverse range of sophisticated behaviors that solve a wide range of environmental challenges, many of which cannot be solved by direct optimization alone, or even through a direct-path curriculum-building control algorithm introduced to highlight the critical role of open-endedness in solving ambitious challenges. The ability to transfer solutions from one environment to another proves essential to unlocking the full potential of the system as a whole, demonstrating the unpredictable nature of fortuitous stepping stones. We hope that POET will inspire a new push towards open-ended discovery across many domains, where algorithms like POET can blaze a trail through their interesting possible manifestations and solutions.

While machine learning has advanced through massive parallelization, we identify a critical blind spot: some problems are fundamentally sequential. These "inherently serial" problems-from mathematical reasoning to physical simulations to sequential decision-making-require dependent computational steps that cannot be parallelized. Drawing from complexity theory, we formalize this distinction and demonstrate that current parallel-centric architectures face fundamental limitations on such tasks. We argue that recognizing the serial nature of computation holds profound implications on machine learning, model design, hardware development. As AI tackles increasingly complex reasoning, deliberately scaling serial computation-not just parallel computation-is essential for continued progress.

While Generative AI rapidly advances in various domains, generating truly creative, aesthetic, and counter-intuitive outputs remains a challenge. This paper presents an approach to tackle these difficulties in the domain of chess puzzles. We start by benchmarking Generative AI architectures, and then introduce an RL framework with novel rewards based on chess engine search statistics to overcome some of those shortcomings. The rewards are designed to enhance a puzzle's uniqueness, counter-intuitiveness, diversity, and realism. Our RL approach dramatically increases counter-intuitive puzzle generation by 10x, from 0.22\% (supervised) to 2.5\%, surpassing existing dataset rates (2.1\%) and the best Lichess-trained model (0.4\%). Our puzzles meet novelty and diversity benchmarks, retain aesthetic themes, and are rated by human experts as more creative, enjoyable, and counter-intuitive than composed book puzzles, even approaching classic compositions. Our final outcome is a curated booklet of these AI-generated puzzles, which is acknowledged for creativity by three world-renowned experts.

As artificial intelligence (AI) systems play an increasingly prominent role in human decision-making, challenges surface in the realm of human-AI interactions. One challenge arises from the suboptimal AI policies due to the inadequate consideration of humans disregarding AI recommendations, as well as the need for AI to provide advice selectively when it is most pertinent. This paper presents a sequential decision-making model that (i) takes into account the human's adherence level (the probability that the human follows/rejects machine advice) and (ii) incorporates a defer option so that the machine can temporarily refrain from making advice. We provide learning algorithms that learn the optimal advice policy and make advice only at critical time stamps. Compared to problem-agnostic reinforcement learning algorithms, our specialized learning algorithms not only enjoy better theoretical convergence properties but also show strong empirical performance.

According to Algorithmic Information Theory (AIT) -- Intelligent representations compress data into the shortest possible program that can reconstruct its content, exhibiting low Kolmogorov Complexity (KC). In contrast, most visual representation learning systems use fixed-length representations for all inputs, ignoring variations in complexity or familiarity. Recent adaptive tokenization methods address this by allocating variable-length representations but typically require test-time search over multiple encodings to find the most predictive one. Inspired by Kolmogorov Complexity principles, we propose a single-pass adaptive tokenizer, KARL, which predicts the appropriate number of tokens for an image in a single forward pass, halting once its approximate KC is reached. The token count serves as a proxy for the minimum description length. KARL's training procedure closely resembles the Upside-Down Reinforcement Learning paradigm, as it learns to conditionally predict token halting based on a desired reconstruction quality. KARL matches the performance of recent adaptive tokenizers while operating in a single pass. We present scaling laws for KARL, analyzing the role of encoder/decoder size, continuous vs. discrete tokenization and more. Additionally, we offer a conceptual study drawing an analogy between Adaptive Image Tokenization and Algorithmic Information Theory, examining the predicted image complexity (KC) across axes such as structure vs. noise and in- vs. out-of-distribution familiarity -- revealing alignment with human intuition.

Researchers are investing substantial effort in developing powerful general-purpose agents, wherein Foundation Models are used as modules within agentic systems (e.g. Chain-of-Thought, Self-Reflection, Toolformer). However, the history of machine learning teaches us that hand-designed solutions are eventually replaced by learned solutions. We formulate a new research area, Automated Design of Agentic Systems (ADAS), which aims to automatically create powerful agentic system designs, including inventing novel building blocks and/or combining them in new ways. We further demonstrate that there is an unexplored yet promising approach within ADAS where agents can be defined in code and new agents can be automatically discovered by a meta agent programming ever better ones in code. Given that programming languages are Turing Complete, this approach theoretically enables the learning of any possible agentic system: including novel prompts, tool use, control flows, and combinations thereof. We present a simple yet effective algorithm named Meta Agent Search to demonstrate this idea, where a meta agent iteratively programs interesting new agents based on an ever-growing archive of previous discoveries. Through extensive experiments across multiple domains including coding, science, and math, we show that our algorithm can progressively invent agents with novel designs that greatly outperform state-of-the-art hand-designed agents. Importantly, we consistently observe the surprising result that agents invented by Meta Agent Search maintain superior performance even when transferred across domains and models, demonstrating their robustness and generality. Provided we develop it safely, our work illustrates the potential of an exciting new research direction toward automatically designing ever-more powerful agentic systems to benefit humanity.

AI audits are an increasingly popular mechanism for algorithmic accountability; however, they remain poorly defined. Without a clear understanding of audit practices, let alone widely used standards or regulatory guidance, claims that an AI product or system has been audited, whether by first-, second-, or third-party auditors, are difficult to verify and may exacerbate, rather than mitigate, bias and harm. To address this knowledge gap, we provide the first comprehensive field scan of the AI audit ecosystem. We share a catalog of individuals (N=438) and organizations (N=189) who engage in algorithmic audits or whose work is directly relevant to algorithmic audits; conduct an anonymous survey of the group (N=152); and interview industry leaders (N=10). We identify emerging best practices as well as methods and tools that are becoming commonplace, and enumerate common barriers to leveraging algorithmic audits as effective accountability mechanisms. We outline policy recommendations to improve the quality and impact of these audits, and highlight proposals with wide support from algorithmic auditors as well as areas of debate. Our recommendations have implications for lawmakers, regulators, internal company policymakers, and standards-setting bodies, as well as for auditors. They are: 1) require the owners and operators of AI systems to engage in independent algorithmic audits against clearly defined standards; 2) notify individuals when they are subject to algorithmic decision-making systems; 3) mandate disclosure of key components of audit findings for peer review; 4) consider real-world harm in the audit process, including through standardized harm incident reporting and response mechanisms; 5) directly involve the stakeholders most likely to be harmed by AI systems in the algorithmic audit process; and 6) formalize evaluation and, potentially, accreditation of algorithmic auditors.

Proof-oriented programs mix computational content with proofs of program correctness. However, the human effort involved in programming and proving is still substantial, despite the use of Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers to automate proofs in languages such as F*. Seeking to spur research on using AI to automate the construction of proof-oriented programs, we curate a dataset of 600K lines of open-source F* programs and proofs, including software used in production systems ranging from Windows and Linux, to Python and Firefox. Our dataset includes around 32K top-level F* definitions, each representing a type-directed program and proof synthesis problem -- producing a definition given a formal specification expressed as an F* type. We provide a program-fragment checker that queries F* to check the correctness of candidate solutions. We believe this is the largest corpus of SMT-assisted program proofs coupled with a reproducible program-fragment checker. Grounded in this dataset, we investigate the use of AI to synthesize programs and their proofs in F*, with promising results. Our main finding in that the performance of fine-tuned smaller language models (such as Phi-2 or StarCoder) compare favorably with large language models (such as GPT-4), at a much lower computational cost. We also identify various type-based retrieval augmentation techniques and find that they boost performance significantly. With detailed error analysis and case studies, we identify potential strengths and weaknesses of models and techniques and suggest directions for future improvements.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various aspects of engineering and science. Their utility is often bottlenecked by the lack of interaction with the external digital environment. To overcome this limitation and achieve integration of LLMs and Artificial Intelligence (AI) into real-world applications, customized AI agents are being constructed. Based on the technological trends and techniques, we extract a high-level approach for constructing these AI agents, focusing on their underlying architecture. This thesis serves as a comprehensive guide that elucidates a multi-faceted approach for empowering LLMs with the capability to leverage Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). We present a 7-step methodology that begins with the selection of suitable LLMs and the task decomposition that is necessary for complex problem-solving. This methodology includes techniques for generating training data for API interactions and heuristics for selecting the appropriate API among a plethora of options. These steps eventually lead to the generation of API calls that are both syntactically and semantically aligned with the LLM's understanding of a given task. Moreover, we review existing frameworks and tools that facilitate these processes and highlight the gaps in current attempts. In this direction, we propose an on-device architecture that aims to exploit the functionality of carry-on devices by using small models from the Hugging Face community. We examine the effectiveness of these approaches on real-world applications of various domains, including the generation of a piano sheet. Through an extensive analysis of the literature and available technologies, this thesis aims to set a compass for researchers and practitioners to harness the full potential of LLMs augmented with external tool capabilities, thus paving the way for more autonomous, robust, and context-aware AI agents.

Several recent advances in AI systems (e.g., Tree-of-Thoughts and Program-Aided Language Models) solve problems by providing a "scaffolding" program that structures multiple calls to language models to generate better outputs. A scaffolding program is written in a programming language such as Python. In this work, we use a language-model-infused scaffolding program to improve itself. We start with a seed "improver" that improves an input program according to a given utility function by querying a language model several times and returning the best solution. We then run this seed improver to improve itself. Across a small set of downstream tasks, the resulting improved improver generates programs with significantly better performance than its seed improver. Afterward, we analyze the variety of self-improvement strategies proposed by the language model, including beam search, genetic algorithms, and simulated annealing. Since the language models themselves are not altered, this is not full recursive self-improvement. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that a modern language model, GPT-4 in our proof-of-concept experiments, is capable of writing code that can call itself to improve itself. We critically consider concerns around the development of self-improving technologies and evaluate the frequency with which the generated code bypasses a sandbox.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) and AI systems have led to a paradigm shift in the design and optimization of complex AI workflows. By integrating multiple components, compound AI systems have become increasingly adept at performing sophisticated tasks. However, as these systems grow in complexity, new challenges arise in optimizing not only individual components but also their interactions. While traditional optimization methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) remain foundational, the rise of natural language feedback introduces promising new approaches, especially for optimizing non-differentiable systems. This paper provides a systematic review of recent progress in optimizing compound AI systems, encompassing both numerical and language-based techniques. We formalize the notion of compound AI system optimization, classify existing methods along several key dimensions, and highlight open research challenges and future directions in this rapidly evolving field. A list of surveyed papers is publicly available at https://github.com/MiuLab/AISysOpt-Survey.

Among the most important properties of algorithms investigated in computer science are soundness, completeness, and complexity. These properties, however, are rarely analyzed for the vast collection of recently proposed methods for planning with large language models. In this work, we alleviate this gap. We analyse these properties of using LLMs for planning and highlight that recent trends abandon both soundness and completeness for the sake of inefficiency. We propose a significantly more efficient approach that can, at the same time, maintain both soundness and completeness. We exemplify on four representative search problems, comparing to the LLM-based solutions from the literature that attempt to solve these problems. We show that by using LLMs to produce the code for the search components we can solve the entire datasets with 100\% accuracy with only a few calls to the LLM. We argue for a responsible use of compute resources; urging research community to investigate sound and complete LLM-based approaches that uphold efficiency.

In this paper, we present a novel approach, called LogicPro, to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) complex Logical reasoning through Program Examples. We do this effectively by simply utilizing widely available algorithmic problems and their code solutions. First, we constructed diverse test samples input based on algorithmic questions and code solutions. Then, we designed different complex reasoning questions based on algorithmic problems and test samples. Finally, combining the intermediate variable outputs of the code solutions and the complex reasoning questions, we derived the reasoning process and the final answer. With this approach, we can construct a dataset that is sufficiently difficult (all models are ineffective), diverse (synthesized from 2,360 different algorithmic questions), and scalable (building different test samples and collecting more algorithmic questions). In addition, we obtain a high-quality reasoning process guided by the values of intermediate variables. As a result, our approach achieves significant improvements in multiple models for the BBH^{27}, GSM8K, HellSwag, Logicqa, Reclor, and RTE datasets, outperforming a wide range of existing reasoning datasets.

We study the algorithm configuration (AC) problem, in which one seeks to find an optimal parameter configuration of a given target algorithm in an automated way. Recently, there has been significant progress in designing AC approaches that satisfy strong theoretical guarantees. However, a significant gap still remains between the practical performance of these approaches and state-of-the-art heuristic methods. To this end, we introduce AC-Band, a general approach for the AC problem based on multi-armed bandits that provides theoretical guarantees while exhibiting strong practical performance. We show that AC-Band requires significantly less computation time than other AC approaches providing theoretical guarantees while still yielding high-quality configurations.

Active learning (AL) algorithms may achieve better performance with fewer data because the model guides the data selection process. While many algorithms have been proposed, there is little study on what the optimal AL algorithm looks like, which would help researchers understand where their models fall short and iterate on the design. In this paper, we present a simulated annealing algorithm to search for this optimal oracle and analyze it for several tasks. We present qualitative and quantitative insights into the behaviors of this oracle, comparing and contrasting them with those of various heuristics. Moreover, we are able to consistently improve the heuristics using one particular insight. We hope that our findings can better inform future active learning research. The code is available at https://github.com/YilunZhou/optimal-active-learning.

The advancement of visual intelligence is intrinsically tethered to the availability of large-scale data. In parallel, generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has unlocked the potential to create synthetic images that closely resemble real-world photographs. This prompts a compelling inquiry: how much visual intelligence could benefit from the advance of generative AI? This paper explores the innovative concept of harnessing these AI-generated images as new data sources, reshaping traditional modeling paradigms in visual intelligence. In contrast to real data, AI-generated data exhibit remarkable advantages, including unmatched abundance and scalability, the rapid generation of vast datasets, and the effortless simulation of edge cases. Built on the success of generative AI models, we examine the potential of their generated data in a range of applications, from training machine learning models to simulating scenarios for computational modeling, testing, and validation. We probe the technological foundations that support this groundbreaking use of generative AI, engaging in an in-depth discussion on the ethical, legal, and practical considerations that accompany this transformative paradigm shift. Through an exhaustive survey of current technologies and applications, this paper presents a comprehensive view of the synthetic era in visual intelligence. A project associated with this paper can be found at https://github.com/mwxely/AIGS .

AlphaEvolve is a generic evolutionary coding agent that combines the generative capabilities of LLMs with automated evaluation in an iterative evolutionary framework that proposes, tests, and refines algorithmic solutions to challenging scientific and practical problems. In this paper we showcase AlphaEvolve as a tool for autonomously discovering novel mathematical constructions and advancing our understanding of long-standing open problems. To demonstrate its breadth, we considered a list of 67 problems spanning mathematical analysis, combinatorics, geometry, and number theory. The system rediscovered the best known solutions in most of the cases and discovered improved solutions in several. In some instances, AlphaEvolve is also able to generalize results for a finite number of input values into a formula valid for all input values. Furthermore, we are able to combine this methodology with Deep Think and AlphaProof in a broader framework where the additional proof-assistants and reasoning systems provide automated proof generation and further mathematical insights. These results demonstrate that large language model-guided evolutionary search can autonomously discover mathematical constructions that complement human intuition, at times matching or even improving the best known results, highlighting the potential for significant new ways of interaction between mathematicians and AI systems. We present AlphaEvolve as a powerful new tool for mathematical discovery, capable of exploring vast search spaces to solve complex optimization problems at scale, often with significantly reduced requirements on preparation and computation time.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology is revolutionizing the computing industry. Not only its applications have broadened to various sectors but also poses new system design and optimization opportunities. The technology is capable of understanding and responding in multiple modalities. However, the advanced capability currently comes with significant system resource demands. To sustainably scale generative AI capabilities to billions of users in the world, inference must be fast and efficient. This paper pinpoints key system design and optimization opportunities by characterizing a family of emerging multi-modal generation models on real systems. Auto-regressive token generation is a critical latency performance bottleneck, typically dominated by GPU idle time. In addition to memory-intensive attention across the generative AI models, linear operations constitute significant inference latency due to the feed forward networks in Transformer-based models. We demonstrate that state-of-the-art optimization levers, spanning from applications to system software and hardware, set a 3.88x better baseline.

We introduce Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments. The method is straightforward to implement, is computationally efficient, has little memory requirements, is invariant to diagonal rescaling of the gradients, and is well suited for problems that are large in terms of data and/or parameters. The method is also appropriate for non-stationary objectives and problems with very noisy and/or sparse gradients. The hyper-parameters have intuitive interpretations and typically require little tuning. Some connections to related algorithms, on which Adam was inspired, are discussed. We also analyze the theoretical convergence properties of the algorithm and provide a regret bound on the convergence rate that is comparable to the best known results under the online convex optimization framework. Empirical results demonstrate that Adam works well in practice and compares favorably to other stochastic optimization methods. Finally, we discuss AdaMax, a variant of Adam based on the infinity norm.

Optimization problems are pervasive in sectors from manufacturing and distribution to healthcare. However, most such problems are still solved heuristically by hand rather than optimally by state-of-the-art solvers because the expertise required to formulate and solve these problems limits the widespread adoption of optimization tools and techniques. This paper introduces OptiMUS, a Large Language Model (LLM)-based agent designed to formulate and solve (mixed integer) linear programming problems from their natural language descriptions. OptiMUS can develop mathematical models, write and debug solver code, evaluate the generated solutions, and improve its model and code based on these evaluations. OptiMUS utilizes a modular structure to process problems, allowing it to handle problems with long descriptions and complex data without long prompts. Experiments demonstrate that OptiMUS outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on easy datasets by more than 20% and on hard datasets (including a new dataset, NLP4LP, released with this paper that features long and complex problems) by more than 30%.

The rapid advancement of large language models has fundamentally shifted the bottleneck in AI development from computational power to data availability-with countless valuable datasets remaining hidden across specialized repositories, research appendices, and domain platforms. As reasoning capabilities and deep research methodologies continue to evolve, a critical question emerges: can AI agents transcend conventional search to systematically discover any dataset that meets specific user requirements, enabling truly autonomous demand-driven data curation? We introduce DatasetResearch, the first comprehensive benchmark evaluating AI agents' ability to discover and synthesize datasets from 208 real-world demands across knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive tasks. Our tri-dimensional evaluation framework reveals a stark reality: even advanced deep research systems achieve only 22% score on our challenging DatasetResearch-pro subset, exposing the vast gap between current capabilities and perfect dataset discovery. Our analysis uncovers a fundamental dichotomy-search agents excel at knowledge tasks through retrieval breadth, while synthesis agents dominate reasoning challenges via structured generation-yet both catastrophically fail on "corner cases" outside existing distributions. These findings establish the first rigorous baseline for dataset discovery agents and illuminate the path toward AI systems capable of finding any dataset in the digital universe. Our benchmark and comprehensive analysis provide the foundation for the next generation of self-improving AI systems and are publicly available at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/DatasetResearch.

The execution of graph algorithms using neural networks has recently attracted significant interest due to promising empirical progress. This motivates further understanding of how neural networks can replicate reasoning steps with relational data. In this work, we study the ability of transformer networks to simulate algorithms on graphs from a theoretical perspective. The architecture that we utilize is a looped transformer with extra attention heads that interact with the graph. We prove by construction that this architecture can simulate algorithms such as Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm, Breadth- and Depth-First Search, and Kosaraju's strongly connected components algorithm. The width of the network does not increase with the size of the input graph, which implies that the network can simulate the above algorithms for any graph. Despite this property, we show that there is a limit to simulation in our solution due to finite precision. Finally, we show a Turing Completeness result with constant width when the extra attention heads are utilized.

Mathematical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence and is applicable in various fields, including science, engineering, finance, and everyday life. The development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems capable of solving math problems and proving theorems has garnered significant interest in the fields of machine learning and natural language processing. For example, mathematics serves as a testbed for aspects of reasoning that are challenging for powerful deep learning models, driving new algorithmic and modeling advances. On the other hand, recent advances in large-scale neural language models have opened up new benchmarks and opportunities to use deep learning for mathematical reasoning. In this survey paper, we review the key tasks, datasets, and methods at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and deep learning over the past decade. We also evaluate existing benchmarks and methods, and discuss future research directions in this domain.

Efficiently solving problems with large action spaces using A* search has been of importance to the artificial intelligence community for decades. This is because the computation and memory requirements of A* search grow linearly with the size of the action space. This burden becomes even more apparent when A* search uses a heuristic function learned by computationally expensive function approximators, such as deep neural networks. To address this problem, we introduce Q* search, a search algorithm that uses deep Q-networks to guide search in order to take advantage of the fact that the sum of the transition costs and heuristic values of the children of a node can be computed with a single forward pass through a deep Q-network without explicitly generating those children. This significantly reduces computation time and requires only one node to be generated per iteration. We use Q* search to solve the Rubik's cube when formulated with a large action space that includes 1872 meta-actions and find that this 157-fold increase in the size of the action space incurs less than a 4-fold increase in computation time and less than a 3-fold increase in number of nodes generated when performing Q* search. Furthermore, Q* search is up to 129 times faster and generates up to 1288 times fewer nodes than A* search. Finally, although obtaining admissible heuristic functions from deep neural networks is an ongoing area of research, we prove that Q* search is guaranteed to find a shortest path given a heuristic function that neither overestimates the cost of a shortest path nor underestimates the transition cost.

This survey examines the rapidly evolving field of Deep Research systems -- AI-powered applications that automate complex research workflows through the integration of large language models, advanced information retrieval, and autonomous reasoning capabilities. We analyze more than 80 commercial and non-commercial implementations that have emerged since 2023, including OpenAI/Deep Research, Gemini/Deep Research, Perplexity/Deep Research, and numerous open-source alternatives. Through comprehensive examination, we propose a novel hierarchical taxonomy that categorizes systems according to four fundamental technical dimensions: foundation models and reasoning engines, tool utilization and environmental interaction, task planning and execution control, and knowledge synthesis and output generation. We explore the architectural patterns, implementation approaches, and domain-specific adaptations that characterize these systems across academic, scientific, business, and educational applications. Our analysis reveals both the significant capabilities of current implementations and the technical and ethical challenges they present regarding information accuracy, privacy, intellectual property, and accessibility. The survey concludes by identifying promising research directions in advanced reasoning architectures, multimodal integration, domain specialization, human-AI collaboration, and ecosystem standardization that will likely shape the future evolution of this transformative technology. By providing a comprehensive framework for understanding Deep Research systems, this survey contributes to both the theoretical understanding of AI-augmented knowledge work and the practical development of more capable, responsible, and accessible research technologies. The paper resources can be viewed at https://github.com/scienceaix/deepresearch.

Powerful foundation models, including large language models (LLMs), with Transformer architectures have ushered in a new era of Generative AI across various industries. Industry and research community have witnessed a large number of new applications, based on those foundation models. Such applications include question and answer, customer services, image and video generation, and code completions, among others. However, as the number of model parameters reaches to hundreds of billions, their deployment incurs prohibitive inference costs and high latency in real-world scenarios. As a result, the demand for cost-effective and fast inference using AI accelerators is ever more higher. To this end, our tutorial offers a comprehensive discussion on complementary inference optimization techniques using AI accelerators. Beginning with an overview of basic Transformer architectures and deep learning system frameworks, we deep dive into system optimization techniques for fast and memory-efficient attention computations and discuss how they can be implemented efficiently on AI accelerators. Next, we describe architectural elements that are key for fast transformer inference. Finally, we examine various model compression and fast decoding strategies in the same context.

We design a suite of minimal algorithmic tasks that are a loose abstraction of open-ended real-world tasks. This allows us to cleanly and controllably quantify the creative limits of the present-day language model. Much like real-world tasks that require a creative, far-sighted leap of thought, our tasks require an implicit, open-ended stochastic planning step that either (a) discovers new connections in an abstract knowledge graph (like in wordplay, drawing analogies, or research) or (b) constructs new patterns (like in designing math problems or new proteins). In these tasks, we empirically and conceptually argue how next-token learning is myopic and memorizes excessively; comparatively, multi-token approaches, namely teacherless training and diffusion models, excel in producing diverse and original output. Secondly, in our tasks, we find that to elicit randomness from the Transformer without hurting coherence, it is better to inject noise right at the input layer (via a method we dub hash-conditioning) rather than defer to temperature sampling from the output layer. Thus, our work offers a principled, minimal test-bed for analyzing open-ended creative skills, and offers new arguments for going beyond next-token learning and softmax-based sampling. We make part of the code available under https://github.com/chenwu98/algorithmic-creativity

Machine learning generated content such as image artworks, textual poems and music become prominent in recent years. These tools attract much attention from the media, artists, researchers, and investors. Because these tools are data-driven, they are inherently different than the traditional creative tools which arises the question - who may own the content that is generated by these tools? In this paper we aim to address this question, we start by providing a background to this problem, raising several candidates that may own the content and arguments for each one of them. Then we propose a possible algorithmic solution in the vision-based model's regime. Finally, we discuss the broader implications of this problem.

We automate deep step-by step reasoning in an LLM dialog thread by recursively exploring alternatives (OR-nodes) and expanding details (AND-nodes) up to a given depth. Starting from a single succinct task-specific initiator we steer the automated dialog thread to stay focussed on the task by synthesizing a prompt that summarizes the depth-first steps taken so far. Our algorithm is derived from a simple recursive descent implementation of a Horn Clause interpreter, except that we accommodate our logic engine to fit the natural language reasoning patterns LLMs have been trained on. Semantic similarity to ground-truth facts or oracle advice from another LLM instance is used to restrict the search space and validate the traces of justification steps returned as answers. At the end, the unique minimal model of a generated Horn Clause program collects the results of the reasoning process. As applications, we sketch implementations of consequence predictions, causal explanations, recommendation systems and topic-focussed exploration of scientific literature.

Recent reports claim that large language models (LLMs) now outperform elite humans in competitive programming. Drawing on knowledge from a group of medalists in international algorithmic contests, we revisit this claim, examining how LLMs differ from human experts and where limitations still remain. We introduce LiveCodeBench Pro, a benchmark composed of problems from Codeforces, ICPC, and IOI that are continuously updated to reduce the likelihood of data contamination. A team of Olympiad medalists annotates every problem for algorithmic categories and conducts a line-by-line analysis of failed model-generated submissions. Using this new data and benchmark, we find that frontier models still have significant limitations: without external tools, the best model achieves only 53% pass@1 on medium-difficulty problems and 0% on hard problems, domains where expert humans still excel. We also find that LLMs succeed at implementation-heavy problems but struggle with nuanced algorithmic reasoning and complex case analysis, often generating confidently incorrect justifications. High performance appears largely driven by implementation precision and tool augmentation, not superior reasoning. LiveCodeBench Pro thus highlights the significant gap to human grandmaster levels, while offering fine-grained diagnostics to steer future improvements in code-centric LLM reasoning.

1. The popularity of Machine learning (ML), Deep learning (DL), and Artificial intelligence (AI) has risen sharply in recent years. Despite this spike in popularity, the inner workings of ML and DL algorithms are often perceived as opaque, and their relationship to classical data analysis tools remains debated. 2. Although it is often assumed that ML and DL excel primarily at making predictions, ML and DL can also be used for analytical tasks traditionally addressed with statistical models. Moreover, most recent discussions and reviews on ML focus mainly on DL, missing out on synthesizing the wealth of ML algorithms with different advantages and general principles. 3. Here, we provide a comprehensive overview of the field of ML and DL, starting by summarizing its historical developments, existing algorithm families, differences to traditional statistical tools, and universal ML principles. We then discuss why and when ML and DL models excel at prediction tasks and where they could offer alternatives to traditional statistical methods for inference, highlighting current and emerging applications for ecological problems. Finally, we summarize emerging trends such as scientific and causal ML, explainable AI, and responsible AI that may significantly impact ecological data analysis in the future. 4. We conclude that ML and DL are powerful new tools for predictive modeling and data analysis. The superior performance of ML and DL algorithms compared to statistical models can be explained by their higher flexibility and automatic data-dependent complexity optimization. However, their use for causal inference is still disputed as the focus of ML and DL methods on predictions creates challenges for the interpretation of these models. Nevertheless, we expect ML and DL to become an indispensable tool in E&E, comparable to other traditional statistical tools.

A generally intelligent agent must be able to teach itself how to solve problems in complex domains with minimal human supervision. Recently, deep reinforcement learning algorithms combined with self-play have achieved superhuman proficiency in Go, Chess, and Shogi without human data or domain knowledge. In these environments, a reward is always received at the end of the game, however, for many combinatorial optimization environments, rewards are sparse and episodes are not guaranteed to terminate. We introduce Autodidactic Iteration: a novel reinforcement learning algorithm that is able to teach itself how to solve the Rubik's Cube with no human assistance. Our algorithm is able to solve 100% of randomly scrambled cubes while achieving a median solve length of 30 moves -- less than or equal to solvers that employ human domain knowledge.

This study evaluates large language models (LLMs) in generating code from algorithm descriptions from recent NLP papers. The task requires two key competencies: (1) algorithm comprehension: synthesizing information from papers and academic literature to understand implementation logic, and (2) coding expertise: identifying dependencies and correctly implementing necessary APIs. To facilitate rigorous evaluation, we introduce SciReplicate-Bench, a benchmark of 100 tasks from 36 NLP papers published in 2024, featuring detailed annotations and comprehensive test cases. Building on SciReplicate-Bench, we propose Sci-Reproducer, a multi-agent framework consisting of a Paper Agent that interprets algorithmic concepts from literature and a Code Agent that retrieves dependencies from repositories and implement solutions. To assess algorithm understanding, we introduce reasoning graph accuracy, which quantifies similarity between generated and reference reasoning graphs derived from code comments and structure. For evaluating implementation quality, we employ execution accuracy, CodeBLEU, and repository dependency/API recall metrics. In our experiments, we evaluate various powerful Non-Reasoning LLMs and Reasoning LLMs as foundational models. The best-performing LLM using Sci-Reproducer achieves only 39% execution accuracy, highlighting the benchmark's difficulty.Our analysis identifies missing or inconsistent algorithm descriptions as key barriers to successful reproduction. We will open-source our benchmark, and code at https://github.com/xyzCS/SciReplicate-Bench.

We extend the capabilities of neural networks by coupling them to external memory resources, which they can interact with by attentional processes. The combined system is analogous to a Turing Machine or Von Neumann architecture but is differentiable end-to-end, allowing it to be efficiently trained with gradient descent. Preliminary results demonstrate that Neural Turing Machines can infer simple algorithms such as copying, sorting, and associative recall from input and output examples.

In this study, we present an innovative fusion of language models and query analysis techniques to unlock cognition in artificial intelligence. Our system seamlessly integrates a Chess engine with a language model, enabling it to predict moves and provide strategic explanations. Leveraging a vector database to achieve retrievable answer generation, our OpenSI AI system elucidates its decision-making process, bridging the gap between raw computation and human-like understanding. Our choice of Chess as the demonstration environment underscores the versatility of our approach. Beyond Chess, our system holds promise for diverse applications, from medical diagnostics to financial forecasting.

Evaluation of reasoning language models gained importance after it was observed that they can combine their existing capabilities into novel traces of intermediate steps before task completion and that the traces can sometimes help them to generalize better than past models. As reasoning becomes the next scaling dimension of large language models, careful study of their capabilities in critical tasks is needed. We show that better performance is not always caused by test-time algorithmic improvements or model sizes but also by using impactful benchmarks as curricula for learning. We call this benchmark-driven selection of AI and show its effects on DeepSeek-R1 using our sequential decision-making problem from Humanity's Last Exam. Steering development of AI by impactful benchmarks trades evaluation for learning and makes novelty of test tasks key for measuring generalization capabilities of reasoning models. Consequently, some benchmarks could be seen as curricula for training rather than unseen test sets.

This study critically distinguishes between AI Agents and Agentic AI, offering a structured conceptual taxonomy, application mapping, and challenge analysis to clarify their divergent design philosophies and capabilities. We begin by outlining the search strategy and foundational definitions, characterizing AI Agents as modular systems driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Image Models (LIMs) for narrow, task-specific automation. Generative AI is positioned as a precursor, with AI Agents advancing through tool integration, prompt engineering, and reasoning enhancements. In contrast, Agentic AI systems represent a paradigmatic shift marked by multi-agent collaboration, dynamic task decomposition, persistent memory, and orchestrated autonomy. Through a sequential evaluation of architectural evolution, operational mechanisms, interaction styles, and autonomy levels, we present a comparative analysis across both paradigms. Application domains such as customer support, scheduling, and data summarization are contrasted with Agentic AI deployments in research automation, robotic coordination, and medical decision support. We further examine unique challenges in each paradigm including hallucination, brittleness, emergent behavior, and coordination failure and propose targeted solutions such as ReAct loops, RAG, orchestration layers, and causal modeling. This work aims to provide a definitive roadmap for developing robust, scalable, and explainable AI agent and Agentic AI-driven systems. >AI Agents, Agent-driven, Vision-Language-Models, Agentic AI Decision Support System, Agentic-AI Applications

Which transformer scaling regimes are able to perfectly solve different classes of algorithmic problems? While tremendous empirical advances have been attained by transformer-based neural networks, a theoretical understanding of their algorithmic reasoning capabilities in realistic parameter regimes is lacking. We investigate this question in terms of the network's depth, width, and number of extra tokens for algorithm execution. Our novel representational hierarchy separates 9 algorithmic reasoning problems into classes solvable by transformers in different realistic parameter scaling regimes. We prove that logarithmic depth is necessary and sufficient for tasks like graph connectivity, while single-layer transformers with small embedding dimensions can solve contextual retrieval tasks. We also support our theoretical analysis with ample empirical evidence using the GraphQA benchmark. These results show that transformers excel at many graph reasoning tasks, even outperforming specialized graph neural networks.

Neural algorithmic reasoning is an emerging research direction that endows neural networks with the ability to mimic algorithmic executions step-by-step. A common paradigm in existing designs involves the use of historical embeddings in predicting the results of future execution steps. Our observation in this work is that such historical dependence intrinsically contradicts the Markov nature of algorithmic reasoning tasks. Based on this motivation, we present our ForgetNet, which does not use historical embeddings and thus is consistent with the Markov nature of the tasks. To address challenges in training ForgetNet at early stages, we further introduce G-ForgetNet, which uses a gating mechanism to allow for the selective integration of historical embeddings. Such an enhanced capability provides valuable computational pathways during the model's early training phase. Our extensive experiments, based on the CLRS-30 algorithmic reasoning benchmark, demonstrate that both ForgetNet and G-ForgetNet achieve better generalization capability than existing methods. Furthermore, we investigate the behavior of the gating mechanism, highlighting its degree of alignment with our intuitions and its effectiveness for robust performance.

Generative AI tools hold promise to increase human productivity. This paper presents results from a controlled experiment with GitHub Copilot, an AI pair programmer. Recruited software developers were asked to implement an HTTP server in JavaScript as quickly as possible. The treatment group, with access to the AI pair programmer, completed the task 55.8% faster than the control group. Observed heterogenous effects show promise for AI pair programmers to help people transition into software development careers.

The prevailing paradigm for scaling large language models (LLMs) involves monolithic, end-to-end training, a resource-intensive process that lacks flexibility. This paper explores an alternative, constructive approach to model development, built upon the foundation of non-trainable, deterministic input embeddings. In prior [1], we established that high-level semantic reasoning can emerge in Transformers using frozen embeddings derived from the visual structure of Unicode glyphs. Here, we demonstrate that this fixed representational substrate acts as a universal "docking port," enabling two powerful and efficient scaling paradigms: seamless modular composition and progressive layer-wise growth. First, we show that specialist models trained on disparate datasets (e.g., Russian and Chinese text) can be merged into a single, more capable Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, post-training, with zero architectural modification. This is achieved by simply averaging their output logits. The resulting MoE model exhibits immediate performance improvements on reasoning benchmarks like MMLU, surpassing its constituent experts without catastrophic forgetting. Second, we introduce a layer-wise constructive training methodology, where a deep Transformer is "grown" by progressively stacking and training one layer at a time. This method demonstrates stable convergence and a clear correlation between model depth and the emergence of complex reasoning abilities, such as those required for SQuAD. Our findings suggest a paradigm shift from monolithic optimization towards a more biological or constructive model of AI development, where complexity is built incrementally and modules can be composed freely. This opens new avenues for resource-efficient scaling, continual learning, and a more democratized ecosystem for building powerful AI systems. We release all code and models to facilitate further research.

Combinatorial optimization finds an optimal solution within a discrete set of variables and constraints. The field has seen tremendous progress both in research and industry. With the success of deep learning in the past decade, a recent trend in combinatorial optimization has been to improve state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization solvers by replacing key heuristic components with machine learning (ML) models. In this paper, we investigate two essential aspects of machine learning algorithms for combinatorial optimization: temporal characteristics and attention. We argue that for the task of variable selection in the branch-and-bound (B&B) algorithm, incorporating the temporal information as well as the bipartite graph attention improves the solver's performance. We support our claims with intuitions and numerical results over several standard datasets used in the literature and competitions. Code is available at: https://developer.huaweicloud.com/develop/aigallery/notebook/detail?id=047c6cf2-8463-40d7-b92f-7b2ca998e935

This paper addresses the scalability challenge of architecture search by formulating the task in a differentiable manner. Unlike conventional approaches of applying evolution or reinforcement learning over a discrete and non-differentiable search space, our method is based on the continuous relaxation of the architecture representation, allowing efficient search of the architecture using gradient descent. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, ImageNet, Penn Treebank and WikiText-2 show that our algorithm excels in discovering high-performance convolutional architectures for image classification and recurrent architectures for language modeling, while being orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art non-differentiable techniques. Our implementation has been made publicly available to facilitate further research on efficient architecture search algorithms.

Recent studies of the applications of conversational AI tools, such as chatbots powered by large language models, to complex real-world knowledge work have shown limitations related to reasoning and multi-step problem solving. Specifically, while existing chatbots simulate shallow reasoning and understanding they are prone to errors as problem complexity increases. The failure of these systems to address complex knowledge work is due to the fact that they do not perform any actual cognition. In this position paper, we present Cognitive AI, a higher-level framework for implementing programmatically defined neuro-symbolic cognition above and outside of large language models. Specifically, we propose a dual-layer functional architecture for Cognitive AI that serves as a roadmap for AI systems that can perform complex multi-step knowledge work. We propose that Cognitive AI is a necessary precursor for the evolution of higher forms of AI, such as AGI, and specifically claim that AGI cannot be achieved by probabilistic approaches on their own. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for large language models, adoption cycles in AI, and commercial Cognitive AI development.

Several recently proposed stochastic optimization methods that have been successfully used in training deep networks such as RMSProp, Adam, Adadelta, Nadam are based on using gradient updates scaled by square roots of exponential moving averages of squared past gradients. In many applications, e.g. learning with large output spaces, it has been empirically observed that these algorithms fail to converge to an optimal solution (or a critical point in nonconvex settings). We show that one cause for such failures is the exponential moving average used in the algorithms. We provide an explicit example of a simple convex optimization setting where Adam does not converge to the optimal solution, and describe the precise problems with the previous analysis of Adam algorithm. Our analysis suggests that the convergence issues can be fixed by endowing such algorithms with `long-term memory' of past gradients, and propose new variants of the Adam algorithm which not only fix the convergence issues but often also lead to improved empirical performance.

We consider the problem of how a teacher algorithm can enable an unknown Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) student to become good at a skill over a wide range of diverse environments. To do so, we study how a teacher algorithm can learn to generate a learning curriculum, whereby it sequentially samples parameters controlling a stochastic procedural generation of environments. Because it does not initially know the capacities of its student, a key challenge for the teacher is to discover which environments are easy, difficult or unlearnable, and in what order to propose them to maximize the efficiency of learning over the learnable ones. To achieve this, this problem is transformed into a surrogate continuous bandit problem where the teacher samples environments in order to maximize absolute learning progress of its student. We present a new algorithm modeling absolute learning progress with Gaussian mixture models (ALP-GMM). We also adapt existing algorithms and provide a complete study in the context of DRL. Using parameterized variants of the BipedalWalker environment, we study their efficiency to personalize a learning curriculum for different learners (embodiments), their robustness to the ratio of learnable/unlearnable environments, and their scalability to non-linear and high-dimensional parameter spaces. Videos and code are available at https://github.com/flowersteam/teachDeepRL.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithms automate the task of finding optimal deep learning architectures given an initial search space of possible operations. Developing these search spaces is usually a manual affair with pre-optimized search spaces being more efficient, rather than searching from scratch. In this paper we present a new framework called Neural Architecture Type System (NeuralArTS) that categorizes the infinite set of network operations in a structured type system. We further demonstrate how NeuralArTS can be applied to convolutional layers and propose several future directions.

We introduce FrontierMath, a benchmark of hundreds of original, exceptionally challenging mathematics problems crafted and vetted by expert mathematicians. The questions cover most major branches of modern mathematics -- from computationally intensive problems in number theory and real analysis to abstract questions in algebraic geometry and category theory. Solving a typical problem requires multiple hours of effort from a researcher in the relevant branch of mathematics, and for the upper end questions, multiple days. FrontierMath uses new, unpublished problems and automated verification to reliably evaluate models while minimizing risk of data contamination. Current state-of-the-art AI models solve under 2% of problems, revealing a vast gap between AI capabilities and the prowess of the mathematical community. As AI systems advance toward expert-level mathematical abilities, FrontierMath offers a rigorous testbed that quantifies their progress.

Ensuring safe and effective use of AI requires understanding and anticipating its performance on novel tasks, from advanced scientific challenges to transformed workplace activities. So far, benchmarking has guided progress in AI, but it has offered limited explanatory and predictive power for general-purpose AI systems, given the low transferability across diverse tasks. In this paper, we introduce general scales for AI evaluation that can explain what common AI benchmarks really measure, extract ability profiles of AI systems, and predict their performance for new task instances, in- and out-of-distribution. Our fully-automated methodology builds on 18 newly-crafted rubrics that place instance demands on general scales that do not saturate. Illustrated for 15 large language models and 63 tasks, high explanatory power is unleashed from inspecting the demand and ability profiles, bringing insights on the sensitivity and specificity exhibited by different benchmarks, and how knowledge, metacognition and reasoning are affected by model size, chain-of-thought and distillation. Surprisingly, high predictive power at the instance level becomes possible using these demand levels, providing superior estimates over black-box baseline predictors based on embeddings or finetuning, especially in out-of-distribution settings (new tasks and new benchmarks). The scales, rubrics, battery, techniques and results presented here represent a major step for AI evaluation, underpinning the reliable deployment of AI in the years ahead. (Collaborative platform: https://kinds-of-intelligence-cfi.github.io/ADELE.)

Fully automating machine learning pipelines is one of the key challenges of current artificial intelligence research, since practical machine learning often requires costly and time-consuming human-powered processes such as model design, algorithm development, and hyperparameter tuning. In this paper, we verify that automated architecture search synergizes with the effect of gradient-based meta learning. We adopt the progressive neural architecture search liu:pnas_google:DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1712-00559 to find optimal architectures for meta-learners. The gradient based meta-learner whose architecture was automatically found achieved state-of-the-art results on the 5-shot 5-way Mini-ImageNet classification problem with 74.65% accuracy, which is 11.54% improvement over the result obtained by the first gradient-based meta-learner called MAML finn:maml:DBLP:conf/icml/FinnAL17. To our best knowledge, this work is the first successful neural architecture search implementation in the context of meta learning.

The recent progress of AI can be largely attributed to large language models (LLMs). However, their escalating memory requirements introduce challenges for machine learning (ML) researchers and engineers. Addressing this requires developers to partition a large model to distribute it across multiple GPUs or TPUs. This necessitates considerable coding and intricate configuration efforts with existing model parallel tools, such as Megatron-LM, DeepSpeed, and Alpa. These tools require users' expertise in machine learning systems (MLSys), creating a bottleneck in LLM development, particularly for developers without MLSys background. In this work, we present Redco, a lightweight and user-friendly tool crafted to automate distributed training and inference for LLMs, as well as to simplify ML pipeline development. The design of Redco emphasizes two key aspects. Firstly, to automate model parallism, our study identifies two straightforward rules to generate tensor parallel strategies for any given LLM. Integrating these rules into Redco facilitates effortless distributed LLM training and inference, eliminating the need of additional coding or complex configurations. We demonstrate the effectiveness by applying Redco on a set of LLM architectures, such as GPT-J, LLaMA, T5, and OPT, up to the size of 66B. Secondly, we propose a mechanism that allows for the customization of diverse ML pipelines through the definition of merely three functions, eliminating redundant and formulaic code like multi-host related processing. This mechanism proves adaptable across a spectrum of ML algorithms, from foundational language modeling to complex algorithms like meta-learning and reinforcement learning. Consequently, Redco implementations exhibit much fewer code lines compared to their official counterparts.

In online algorithm selection (OAS), instances of an algorithmic problem class are presented to an agent one after another, and the agent has to quickly select a presumably best algorithm from a fixed set of candidate algorithms. For decision problems such as satisfiability (SAT), quality typically refers to the algorithm's runtime. As the latter is known to exhibit a heavy-tail distribution, an algorithm is normally stopped when exceeding a predefined upper time limit. As a consequence, machine learning methods used to optimize an algorithm selection strategy in a data-driven manner need to deal with right-censored samples, a problem that has received little attention in the literature so far. In this work, we revisit multi-armed bandit algorithms for OAS and discuss their capability of dealing with the problem. Moreover, we adapt them towards runtime-oriented losses, allowing for partially censored data while keeping a space- and time-complexity independent of the time horizon. In an extensive experimental evaluation on an adapted version of the ASlib benchmark, we demonstrate that theoretically well-founded methods based on Thompson sampling perform specifically strong and improve in comparison to existing methods.

The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), including AI in Science (AIS), should be done following the principles of responsible AI. Progress in responsible AI is often quantified through evaluation metrics, yet there has been less work on assessing the robustness and reliability of the metrics themselves. We reflect on prior work that examines the robustness of fairness metrics for recommender systems as a type of AI application and summarise their key takeaways into a set of non-exhaustive guidelines for developing reliable metrics of responsible AI. Our guidelines apply to a broad spectrum of AI applications, including AIS.

Intelligence is a crucial trait for species to find solutions within a limited number of trial-and-error attempts. Building on this idea, we introduce Survival Game as a framework to evaluate intelligence based on the number of failed attempts in a trial-and-error process. Fewer failures indicate higher intelligence. When the expectation and variance of failure counts are both finite, it signals the ability to consistently find solutions to new challenges, which we define as the Autonomous Level of intelligence. Using Survival Game, we comprehensively evaluate existing AI systems. Our results show that while AI systems achieve the Autonomous Level in simple tasks, they are still far from it in more complex tasks, such as vision, search, recommendation, and language. While scaling current AI technologies might help, this would come at an astronomical cost. Projections suggest that achieving the Autonomous Level for general tasks would require 10^{26} parameters. To put this into perspective, loading such a massive model requires so many H100 GPUs that their total value is 10^{7} times that of Apple Inc.'s market value. Even with Moore's Law, supporting such a parameter scale would take 70 years. This staggering cost highlights the complexity of human tasks and the inadequacies of current AI technologies. To further investigate this phenomenon, we conduct a theoretical analysis of Survival Game and its experimental results. Our findings suggest that human tasks possess a criticality property. As a result, Autonomous Level requires a deep understanding of the task's underlying mechanisms. Current AI systems, however, do not fully grasp these mechanisms and instead rely on superficial mimicry, making it difficult for them to reach an autonomous level. We believe Survival Game can not only guide the future development of AI but also offer profound insights into human intelligence.

Ongoing efforts that span over decades show a rise of AI methods for accelerating scientific discovery, yet accelerating discovery in mathematics remains a persistent challenge for AI. Specifically, AI methods were not effective in creation of formulas for mathematical constants because each such formula must be correct for infinite digits of precision, with "near-true" formulas providing no insight toward the correct ones. Consequently, formula discovery lacks a clear distance metric needed to guide automated discovery in this realm. In this work, we propose a systematic methodology for categorization, characterization, and pattern identification of such formulas. The key to our methodology is introducing metrics based on the convergence dynamics of the formulas, rather than on the numerical value of the formula. These metrics enable the first automated clustering of mathematical formulas. We demonstrate this methodology on Polynomial Continued Fraction formulas, which are ubiquitous in their intrinsic connections to mathematical constants, and generalize many mathematical functions and structures. We test our methodology on a set of 1,768,900 such formulas, identifying many known formulas for mathematical constants, and discover previously unknown formulas for pi, ln(2), Gauss', and Lemniscate's constants. The uncovered patterns enable a direct generalization of individual formulas to infinite families, unveiling rich mathematical structures. This success paves the way towards a generative model that creates formulas fulfilling specified mathematical properties, accelerating the rate of discovery of useful formulas.

In deep learning, performance is strongly affected by the choice of architecture and hyperparameters. While there has been extensive work on automatic hyperparameter optimization for simple spaces, complex spaces such as the space of deep architectures remain largely unexplored. As a result, the choice of architecture is done manually by the human expert through a slow trial and error process guided mainly by intuition. In this paper we describe a framework for automatically designing and training deep models. We propose an extensible and modular language that allows the human expert to compactly represent complex search spaces over architectures and their hyperparameters. The resulting search spaces are tree-structured and therefore easy to traverse. Models can be automatically compiled to computational graphs once values for all hyperparameters have been chosen. We can leverage the structure of the search space to introduce different model search algorithms, such as random search, Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS), and sequential model-based optimization (SMBO). We present experiments comparing the different algorithms on CIFAR-10 and show that MCTS and SMBO outperform random search. In addition, these experiments show that our framework can be used effectively for model discovery, as it is possible to describe expressive search spaces and discover competitive models without much effort from the human expert. Code for our framework and experiments has been made publicly available.

Rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) technology have brought about a plethora of new challenges in terms of governance and regulation. AI systems are being integrated into various industries and sectors, creating a demand from decision-makers to possess a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the capabilities and limitations of these systems. One critical aspect of this demand is the ability to explain the results of machine learning models, which is crucial to promoting transparency and trust in AI systems, as well as fundamental in helping machine learning models to be trained ethically. In this paper, we present novel metrics to quantify the degree of which AI model predictions can be easily explainable by its features. Our metrics summarize different aspects of explainability into scalars, providing a more comprehensive understanding of model predictions and facilitating communication between decision-makers and stakeholders, thereby increasing the overall transparency and accountability of AI systems.

Real-world medical image segmentation has tremendous long-tailed complexity of objects, among which tail conditions correlate with relatively rare diseases and are clinically significant. A trustworthy medical AI algorithm should demonstrate its effectiveness on tail conditions to avoid clinically dangerous damage in these out-of-distribution (OOD) cases. In this paper, we adopt the concept of object queries in Mask Transformers to formulate semantic segmentation as a soft cluster assignment. The queries fit the feature-level cluster centers of inliers during training. Therefore, when performing inference on a medical image in real-world scenarios, the similarity between pixels and the queries detects and localizes OOD regions. We term this OOD localization as MaxQuery. Furthermore, the foregrounds of real-world medical images, whether OOD objects or inliers, are lesions. The difference between them is less than that between the foreground and background, possibly misleading the object queries to focus redundantly on the background. Thus, we propose a query-distribution (QD) loss to enforce clear boundaries between segmentation targets and other regions at the query level, improving the inlier segmentation and OOD indication. Our proposed framework is tested on two real-world segmentation tasks, i.e., segmentation of pancreatic and liver tumors, outperforming previous state-of-the-art algorithms by an average of 7.39% on AUROC, 14.69% on AUPR, and 13.79% on FPR95 for OOD localization. On the other hand, our framework improves the performance of inlier segmentation by an average of 5.27% DSC when compared with the leading baseline nnUNet.

Neural networks are sensitive to hyper-parameter and architecture choices. Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is a promising paradigm for automating these choices. Current ML software libraries, however, are quite limited in handling the dynamic interactions among the components of AutoML. For example, efficientNAS algorithms, such as ENAS and DARTS, typically require an implementation coupling between the search space and search algorithm, the two key components in AutoML. Furthermore, implementing a complex search flow, such as searching architectures within a loop of searching hardware configurations, is difficult. To summarize, changing the search space, search algorithm, or search flow in current ML libraries usually requires a significant change in the program logic. In this paper, we introduce a new way of programming AutoML based on symbolic programming. Under this paradigm, ML programs are mutable, thus can be manipulated easily by another program. As a result, AutoML can be reformulated as an automated process of symbolic manipulation. With this formulation, we decouple the triangle of the search algorithm, the search space and the child program. This decoupling makes it easy to change the search space and search algorithm (without and with weight sharing), as well as to add search capabilities to existing code and implement complex search flows. We then introduce PyGlove, a new Python library that implements this paradigm. Through case studies on ImageNet and NAS-Bench-101, we show that with PyGlove users can easily convert a static program into a search space, quickly iterate on the search spaces and search algorithms, and craft complex search flows to achieve better results.

Despite their success in many domains, large language models (LLMs) remain under-studied in scenarios requiring optimal decision-making under uncertainty. This is crucial as many real-world applications, ranging from personalized recommendations to healthcare interventions, demand that LLMs not only predict but also actively learn to make optimal decisions through exploration. In this work, we measure LLMs' (in)ability to make optimal decisions in bandits, a state-less reinforcement learning setting relevant to many applications. We develop a comprehensive suite of environments, including both context-free and contextual bandits with varying task difficulties, to benchmark LLMs' performance. Motivated by the existence of optimal exploration algorithms, we propose efficient ways to integrate this algorithmic knowledge into LLMs: by providing explicit algorithm-guided support during inference; and through algorithm distillation via in-context demonstrations and fine-tuning, using synthetic data generated from these algorithms. Impressively, these techniques allow us to achieve superior exploration performance with smaller models, surpassing larger models on various tasks. We conducted an extensive ablation study to shed light on various factors, such as task difficulty and data representation, that influence the efficiency of LLM exploration. Additionally, we conduct a rigorous analysis of the LLM's exploration efficiency using the concept of regret, linking its ability to explore to the model size and underlying algorithm.

AI is increasingly playing a pivotal role in transforming how scientific discoveries are made. We introduce The AI Scientist-v2, an end-to-end agentic system capable of producing the first entirely AI generated peer-review-accepted workshop paper. This system iteratively formulates scientific hypotheses, designs and executes experiments, analyzes and visualizes data, and autonomously authors scientific manuscripts. Compared to its predecessor (v1, Lu et al., 2024 arXiv:2408.06292), The AI Scientist-v2 eliminates the reliance on human-authored code templates, generalizes effectively across diverse machine learning domains, and leverages a novel progressive agentic tree-search methodology managed by a dedicated experiment manager agent. Additionally, we enhance the AI reviewer component by integrating a Vision-Language Model (VLM) feedback loop for iterative refinement of content and aesthetics of the figures. We evaluated The AI Scientist-v2 by submitting three fully autonomous manuscripts to a peer-reviewed ICLR workshop. Notably, one manuscript achieved high enough scores to exceed the average human acceptance threshold, marking the first instance of a fully AI-generated paper successfully navigating a peer review. This accomplishment highlights the growing capability of AI in conducting all aspects of scientific research. We anticipate that further advancements in autonomous scientific discovery technologies will profoundly impact human knowledge generation, enabling unprecedented scalability in research productivity and significantly accelerating scientific breakthroughs, greatly benefiting society at large. We have open-sourced the code at https://github.com/SakanaAI/AI-Scientist-v2 to foster the future development of this transformative technology. We also discuss the role of AI in science, including AI safety.

We present a framework for using transformer networks as universal computers by programming them with specific weights and placing them in a loop. Our input sequence acts as a punchcard, consisting of instructions and memory for data read/writes. We demonstrate that a constant number of encoder layers can emulate basic computing blocks, including embedding edit operations, non-linear functions, function calls, program counters, and conditional branches. Using these building blocks, we emulate a small instruction-set computer. This allows us to map iterative algorithms to programs that can be executed by a looped, 13-layer transformer. We show how this transformer, instructed by its input, can emulate a basic calculator, a basic linear algebra library, and in-context learning algorithms that employ backpropagation. Our work highlights the versatility of the attention mechanism, and demonstrates that even shallow transformers can execute full-fledged, general-purpose programs.

Learning and Artificial Intelligence (ML/AI) techniques have become increasingly prevalent in high performance computing (HPC). However, these methods depend on vast volumes of floating point data for training and validation which need methods to share the data on a wide area network (WAN) or to transfer it from edge devices to data centers. Data compression can be a solution to these problems, but an in-depth understanding of how lossy compression affects model quality is needed. Prior work largely considers a single application or compression method. We designed a systematic methodology for evaluating data reduction techniques for ML/AI, and we use it to perform a very comprehensive evaluation with 17 data reduction methods on 7 ML/AI applications to show modern lossy compression methods can achieve a 50-100x compression ratio improvement for a 1% or less loss in quality. We identify critical insights that guide the future use and design of lossy compressors for ML/AI.

Label efficiency has become an increasingly important objective in deep learning applications. Active learning aims to reduce the number of labeled examples needed to train deep networks, but the empirical performance of active learning algorithms can vary dramatically across datasets and applications. It is difficult to know in advance which active learning strategy will perform well or best in a given application. To address this, we propose the first adaptive algorithm selection strategy for deep active learning. For any unlabeled dataset, our (meta) algorithm TAILOR (Thompson ActIve Learning algORithm selection) iteratively and adaptively chooses among a set of candidate active learning algorithms. TAILOR uses novel reward functions aimed at gathering class-balanced examples. Extensive experiments in multi-class and multi-label applications demonstrate TAILOR's effectiveness in achieving accuracy comparable or better than that of the best of the candidate algorithms. Our implementation of TAILOR is open-sourced at https://github.com/jifanz/TAILOR.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various artificial intelligence problems. However, they fail to plan reliably, even when prompted with a detailed definition of the planning task. Attempts to improve their planning capabilities, such as chain-of-thought prompting, fine-tuning, and explicit "reasoning" still yield incorrect plans and usually fail to generalize to larger tasks. In this paper, we show how to use LLMs to generate correct plans, even for out-of-distribution tasks of increasing size. For a given planning domain, we ask an LLM to generate several domain-dependent heuristic functions in the form of Python code, evaluate them on a set of training tasks within a greedy best-first search, and choose the strongest one. The resulting LLM-generated heuristics solve many more unseen test tasks than state-of-the-art domain-independent heuristics for classical planning. They are even competitive with the strongest learning algorithm for domain-dependent planning. These findings are especially remarkable given that our proof-of-concept implementation is based on an unoptimized Python planner and the baselines all build upon highly optimized C++ code. In some domains, the LLM-generated heuristics expand fewer states than the baselines, revealing that they are not only efficiently computable, but sometimes even more informative than the state-of-the-art heuristics. Overall, our results show that sampling a set of planning heuristic function programs can significantly improve the planning capabilities of LLMs.

This paper is an opinion paper that looks at the future of computing in the age of Generative \& Agentic AI. Current software systems are static and inflexible, leading to significant challenges in translating human goals into computational actions. "Living software systems" powered by generative AI offer a solution to this fundamental problem in computing. Traditional software development involves multiple layers of imperfect translation, from business requirements to code, resulting in rigid systems that struggle to adapt to changing user needs and contexts. Generative AI, particularly large language models, can serve as a universal translator between human intent and computer operations. This approach enables the creation of more flexible, context-aware systems that can dynamically evolve to meet user goals. Two pathways for implementing living software systems are explored: using generative AI to accelerate traditional software development, and leveraging agentic AI to create truly adaptive systems. New skills like Prompt Engineering are necessary. By reimagining software as a living, adaptable entity, we can create computing interfaces that are more intuitive, powerful, and responsive to human needs.

The emergence of pre-trained AI systems with powerful capabilities across a diverse and ever-increasing set of complex domains has raised a critical challenge for AI safety as tasks can become too complicated for humans to judge directly. Irving et al. [2018] proposed a debate method in this direction with the goal of pitting the power of such AI models against each other until the problem of identifying (mis)-alignment is broken down into a manageable subtask. While the promise of this approach is clear, the original framework was based on the assumption that the honest strategy is able to simulate deterministic AI systems for an exponential number of steps, limiting its applicability. In this paper, we show how to address these challenges by designing a new set of debate protocols where the honest strategy can always succeed using a simulation of a polynomial number of steps, whilst being able to verify the alignment of stochastic AI systems, even when the dishonest strategy is allowed to use exponentially many simulation steps.

In fine art, especially painting, humans have mastered the skill to create unique visual experiences through composing a complex interplay between the content and style of an image. Thus far the algorithmic basis of this process is unknown and there exists no artificial system with similar capabilities. However, in other key areas of visual perception such as object and face recognition near-human performance was recently demonstrated by a class of biologically inspired vision models called Deep Neural Networks. Here we introduce an artificial system based on a Deep Neural Network that creates artistic images of high perceptual quality. The system uses neural representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary images, providing a neural algorithm for the creation of artistic images. Moreover, in light of the striking similarities between performance-optimised artificial neural networks and biological vision, our work offers a path forward to an algorithmic understanding of how humans create and perceive artistic imagery.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced the capabilities of AI-driven agents across various tasks. However, existing agentic systems, whether based on fixed pipeline algorithms or pre-defined meta-learning frameworks, cannot search the whole agent design space due to the restriction of human-designed components, and thus might miss the globally optimal agent design. In this paper, we introduce G\"odel Agent, a self-evolving framework inspired by the G\"odel machine, enabling agents to recursively improve themselves without relying on predefined routines or fixed optimization algorithms. G\"odel Agent leverages LLMs to dynamically modify its own logic and behavior, guided solely by high-level objectives through prompting. Experimental results on mathematical reasoning and complex agent tasks demonstrate that implementation of G\"odel Agent can achieve continuous self-improvement, surpassing manually crafted agents in performance, efficiency, and generalizability.

We introduce a benchmark to evaluate the capability of AI to solve problems in theoretical physics, focusing on high-energy theory and cosmology. The first iteration of our benchmark consists of 57 problems of varying difficulty, from undergraduate to research level. These problems are novel in the sense that they do not come from public problem collections. We evaluate our data set on various open and closed language models, including o3-mini, o1, DeepSeek-R1, GPT-4o and versions of Llama and Qwen. While we find impressive progress in model performance with the most recent models, our research-level difficulty problems are mostly unsolved. We address challenges of auto-verifiability and grading, and discuss common failure modes. While currently state-of-the art models are still of limited use for researchers, our results show that AI assisted theoretical physics research may become possible in the near future. We discuss the main obstacles towards this goal and possible strategies to overcome them. The public problems and solutions, results for various models, and updates to the data set and score distribution, are available on the website of the dataset tpbench.org.