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Domain Specialization as the Key to Make Large Language Models Disruptive: A Comprehensive Survey

September 3, 2025/in Publications/by NEC Labs America

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task-agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused by the heterogeneity of domain data, the sophistication of domain knowledge, the uniqueness of domain objectives, and the diversity of the constraints (e.g., various social norms, cultural conformity, religious beliefs, and ethical standards in the domain applications). Domain specification techniques are key to making large language models disruptive in many applications. Specifically, to solve these hurdles, there has been a notable increase in research and practices conducted in recent years on the domain specialization of LLMs. This emerging field of study, with its substantial potential for impact, necessitates a comprehensive and systematic review to summarize better and guide ongoing work in this area. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey on domain specification techniques for large language models, an emerging direction critical for large language model applications. First, we propose a systematic taxonomy that categorizes the LLM domain-specialization techniques based on the accessibility to LLMs and summarizes the framework for all the subcategories as well as their relations and differences to each other. Second, we present an extensive taxonomy of critical application domains that can benefit dramatically from specialized LLMs, discussing their practical significance and open challenges. Last, we offer our insights into the current research status and future trends in this area.

POND: Multi-Source Time Series Domain Adaptation with Information-Aware Prompt Tuning

August 27, 2024/in Publications/by NEC Labs America

Time series domain adaptation stands as a pivotal and intricate challenge with diverse applications, including but not limited to human activity recognition, sleep stage classification, and machine fault diagnosis. Despite the numerous domain adaptation techniques proposed to tackle this complex problem, they primarily focus on domain adaptation from a single source domain. Yet, it is more crucial to investigate domain adaptation from multiple domains due to the potential for greater improvements. To address this, three important challenges need to be overcome: 1). The lack of exploration to utilize domain-specific information for domain adaptation, 2). The difficulty to learn domain-specific information that changes over time, and 3). The difficulty to evaluate learned domain-specific information. In order to tackle these challenges simultaneously, in this paper, we introduce PrOmpt-based domaiN Discrimination (POND), the first framework to utilize prompts for time series domain adaptation. Specifically, to address Challenge 1, we extend the idea of prompt tuning to time series analysis and learn prompts to capture common and domain-specific information from all source domains. To handle Challenge 2, we introduce a conditional module for each source domain to generate prompts from time series input data. For Challenge 3, we propose two criteria to select good prompts, which are used to choose the most suitable source domain for domain adaptation. The efficacy and robustness of our proposed POND model are extensively validated through experiments across 50 scenarios encompassing four datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed POND model outperforms all state-of-the-art comparison methods by up to 66% on the F1-score.

Uncertainty Quantification for In-Context Learning of Large Language Models

June 20, 2024/in Publications/by NEC Labs America

In-context learning has emerged as a groundbreaking ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) and revolutionized various fields by providing a few task-relevant demonstrations in the prompt. However, trustworthy issues with LLMs response, such as hallucination, have also been actively discussed. Existing works have been devoted to quantifying the uncertainty in LLMs response, but they often overlook the complex nature of LLMs and the uniqueness of in-context learning. In this work, we delve into the predictive uncertainty of LLMs associated with in-context learning, highlighting that such uncertainties may stem from both the provided demonstrations (aleatoric uncertainty) and ambiguities tied to the models configurations (epistemic uncertainty). We propose a novel formulation and corresponding estimation method to quantify both types of uncertainties. The proposed method offers an unsupervised way to understand the prediction of in-context learning in a plug-and-play fashion. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the decomposition. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/lingchen0331/UQ_ICL.

Improving Open Information Extraction with Large Language Models: A Study on Demonstration Uncertainty

May 11, 2024/in Publications/by NEC Labs America

Open Information Extraction (OIE) task aims at extracting structured facts from unstructured text, typically in the form of (subject, relation, object) triples. Despite the potential of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT as a general task solver, they lag behind state-of-the-art (supervised) methods in OIE tasks due to two key issues. First, LLMs struggle to distinguish irrelevant context from relevant relations and generate structured output due to the restrictions on fine-tuning the model. Second, LLMs generate responses autoregressively based on probability, which makes the predicted relations lack confidence. In this paper, we assess the capabilities of LLMs in improving the OIE task. Particularly, we propose various in-context learning strategies to enhance LLM’s instruction-following ability and a demonstration uncertainty quantification module to enhance the confidence of the generated relations. Our experiments on three OIE benchmark datasets show that our approach holds its own against established supervised methods, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Prompt-based Domain Discrimination for Multi-source Time Series Domain Adaptation

December 21, 2023/in Publications/by NEC Labs America

Time series domain adaptation stands as a pivotal and intricate challenge with diverse applications, including but not limited to human activity recognition, sleep stage classification, and machine fault diagnosis. Despite the numerous domain adaptation techniques proposed to tackle this complex problem, their primary focus has been on the common representations of time series data. This concentration might inadvertently lead to the oversight of valuable domain-specific information originating from different source domains. To bridge this gap, we introduce POND, a novel prompt-based deep learning model designed explicitly for multi-source time series domain adaptation. POND is tailored to address significant challenges, notably: 1) The unavailability of a quantitative relationship between meta-data information and time series distributions, and 2) The dearth of exploration into extracting domain specific meta-data information. In this paper, we present an instance-level prompt generator and afidelity loss mechanism to facilitate the faithful learning of meta-data information. Additionally, we propose a domain discrimination technique to discern domain-specific meta-data information from multiple source domains. Our approach involves a simple yet effective meta-learning algorithm to optimize the objective efficiently. Furthermore, we augment the models performance by incorporating the Mixture of Expert (MoE) technique. The efficacy and robustness of our proposed POND model are extensively validated through experiments across 50 scenarios encompassing five datasets, which demonstrates that our proposed POND model outperforms the state-of the-art methods by up to 66% on the F1-score.

Open-Ended Commonsense Reasoning with Unrestricted Answer Scope

December 10, 2023/in Publications/by NEC Labs America

Open-ended Commonsense Reasoning is defined as solving a commonsense question without providing 1) a short list of answer candidates and 2) a pre-defined answer scope. Conventional ways of formulating the commonsense question into a question-answering form or utilizing external knowledge to learn retrieval-based methods are less applicable in the open-ended setting due to an inherent challenge. Without pre-defining an answer scope or a few candidates, open-ended commonsense reasoning entails predicting answers by searching over an extremely large searching space. Moreover, most questions require implicit multi-hop reasoning, which presents even more challenges to our problem. In this work, we leverage pre-trained language models to iteratively retrieve reasoning paths on the external knowledge base, which does not require task-specific supervision. The reasoning paths can help to identify the most precise answer to the commonsense question. We conduct experiments on two commonsense benchmark datasets. Compared to other approaches, our proposed method achieves better performance both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Beyond One Model Fits All: A Survey of Domain Specialization for Large Language Models

June 9, 2023/in Publications/by NEC Labs America

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. The great promise of LLMs as general task solvers motivated people to extend their functionality largely beyond just a chatbot, and use it as an assistant or even replacement for domain experts and tools in specific domains such as healthcare, finance, and education. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused by the heterogeneity of domain data, the sophistication of domain knowledge, the uniqueness of domain objectives, and the diversity of the constraints (e.g., various social norms, cultural conformity, religious beliefs, and ethical standards in the domain applications). To fill such a gap, explosively increase research, and practices have been conducted in very recent years on the domain specialization of LLMs, which, however, calls for a comprehensive and systematic review to better summarizes and guide this promising domain. In this survey paper, first, we propose a systematic taxonomy that categorizes the LLM domain specialization techniques based on the accessibility to LLMs and summarizes the framework for all the subcategories as well as their relations and differences to each other. We also present a comprehensive taxonomy of critical application domains that can benefit from specialized LLMs, discussing their practical significance and open challenges. Furthermore, we offer insights into the current research status and future trends in this area.

Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Machine Reading Comprehension via Inter-Sentence Dependency Graph

March 1, 2022/in Publications/by NEC Labs America

We target the task of cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) in the direct zero-shot setting, by incorporating syntactic features from Universal Dependencies (UD), and the key features we use are the syntactic relations within each sentence. While previous work has demonstrated effective syntax-guided MRC models, we propose to adopt the inter-sentence syntactic relations, in addition to the rudimentary intra-sentence relations, to further utilize the syntactic dependencies in the multi-sentence input of the MRC task. In our approach, we build the Inter-Sentence Dependency Graph (ISDG) connecting dependency trees to form global syntactic relations across sentences. We then propose the ISDG encoder that encodes the global dependency graph, addressing the inter-sentence relations via both one-hop and multi-hop dependency paths explicitly. Experiments on three multilingual MRC datasets (XQuAD, MLQA, TyDiQA-GoldP) show that our encoder that is only trained on English is able to improve the zero-shot performance on all 14 test sets covering 8 languages, with up to 3.8 F1 / 5.2 EM improvement on-average, and 5.2 F1 / 11.2 EM on certain languages. Further analysis shows the improvement can be attributed to the attention on the cross-linguistically consistent syntactic path. Our code is available at https://github.com/lxucs/multilingual-mrc-isdg.

Boosting Cross-Lingual Transfer via Self-Learning with Uncertainty Estimation

November 11, 2021/in Publications/by NEC Labs America

Recent multilingual pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable zero-shot performance, where the model is only finetuned on one source language and directly evaluated on target languages. In this work, we propose a self-learning framework that further utilizes unlabeled data of target languages, combined with uncertainty estimation in the process to select high-quality silver labels. Three different uncertainties are adapted and analyzed specifically for the cross lingual transfer: Language Heteroscedastic/Homoscedastic Uncertainty (LEU/LOU), Evidential Uncertainty (EVI). We evaluate our framework with uncertainties on two cross-lingual tasks including Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Natural Language Inference (NLI) covering 40 languages in total, which outperforms the baselines significantly by 10 F1 for NER on average and 2.5 accuracy for NLI.

DeepConf: Automating Data Center Network Topologies Management with Machine Learning

August 24, 2018/in Publications/by NEC Labs America

In recent years, many techniques have been developed to improve the performance and efficiency of data center networks. While these techniques provide high accuracy, they are often designed using heuristics that leverage domain-specific properties of the workload or hardware.In this vision paper, we argue that many data center networking techniques, e.g., routing, topology augmentation, energy savings, with diverse goals share design and architectural similarities. We present a framework for developing general intermediate representations of network topologies using deep learning that is amenable to solving a large class of data center problems. We develop a framework, DeepConf, that simplifies the process of configuring and training deep learning agents by using our intermediate representation to learn different tasks. To illustrate the strength of our approach, we implemented and evaluated a DeepConf-agent that tackles the data center topology augmentation problem. Our initial results are promising — DeepConf performs comparably to the optimal solution.

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