Large Language Models refer to language models that are trained on exceptionally large datasets and have a vast number of parameters. These models leverage deep neural network architectures, such as transformers, and are pretrained on massive corpora to capture complex language patterns and contextual information.

While large language models have shown remarkable capabilities, their size and resource requirements have raised concerns about environmental impact, ethical considerations, and potential biases in training data. Ongoing research is focused on addressing these challenges while harnessing the benefits of powerful language models for various applications.

Posts

ECO-LLM: LLM-based Edge Cloud Optimization

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AI/ML techniques have been used to solve systems problems, but their applicability to customize solutions on-the-fly has been limited. Traditionally, any customization required manually changing the AI/ML model or modifying the code, configuration parameters, application settings, etc. This incurs too much time and effort, and is very painful. In this paper, we propose a novel technique using Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technology, wherein instructions can be provided in natural language and actual code to handle any customization is automatically generated, integrated and applied on-the-fly. Such capability is extremely powerful since it makes customization of application settings or solution techniques super easy. Specifically, we propose ECO-LLM (LLM-based Edge Cloud Optimization), which leverages Large Language Models (LLM) to dynamically adjust placement of application tasks across edge and cloud computing tiers, in response to changes in application workload, such that insights are delivered quickly with low cost of operation (systems problem). Our experiments with real-world video analytics applications i.e. face recognition, human attributes detection and license plate recognition show that ECO-LLM is able to automatically generate code on-the-fly and adapt placement of application tasks across edge and cloud computing tiers. We note that the trigger workload (to switch between edge and cloud) for ECO-LLM is exactly the same as the baseline (manual) and actual placement performed by ECO-LLM is only slightly different i.e. on average (across 2 days) only 1.45% difference in human attributes detection and face recognition, and 1.11% difference in license plate recognition. Although we tackle this specific systems problem in this paper, our proposed GenAI-based technique is applicable to solve other systems problems too.

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DFA-RAG: Conversational Semantic Router for Large Language Model with Definite Finite Automaton

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This paper introduces the retrieval-augmented large language model with Definite Finite Automaton (DFA-RAG), a novel framework designed to enhance the capabilities of conversational agents using large language models (LLMs). Traditional LLMs face challenges in generating regulated and compliant responses in special scenarios with predetermined response guidelines, like emotional support and customer service. Our framework addresses these challenges by embedding a Definite Finite Automaton (DFA), learned from training dialogues, within the LLM. This structured approach acts as a semantic router which enables the LLM to adhere to a deterministic response pathway. The routing is achieved by the retrieval-augmentation generation (RAG) strategy, which carefully selects dialogue examples aligned with the current conversational context. The advantages of DFA-RAG include an interpretable structure through human-readable DFA, context-aware retrieval for responses in conversations, and plug-and-play compatibility with existing LLMs. Extensive benchmarks validate DFA-RAG’s effectiveness, indicating its potential as a valuable contribution to the conversational agent.

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Self-Consistent Decoding for More Factual Open Responses

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Self-consistency has emerged as a powerful method for improving the accuracy of short answers generated by large language models. As previously defined, it only concerns the accuracy of a final answer parsed from generated text. In this work, we extend the idea to open response generation, by integrating voting into the decoding method. Each output sentence is selected from among multiple samples, conditioning on the previous selections, based on a simple token overlap score. We compare this “Sample & Select” method to greedy decoding, beam search, nucleus sampling, and the recently introduced hallucination avoiding decoders of DoLa, P-CRR, and S-CRR. We show that Sample & Select improves factuality by a 30% relative margin against these decoders in NLI-based evaluation on the subsets of CNN/DM and XSum used in the FRANK benchmark, while maintaining comparable ROUGE-1 F1 scores against reference summaries. We collect human verifications of the generated summaries, confirming the factual superiority of our method.

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LLM-ASSIST: Enhancing Closed-Loop Planning with Language-Based Reasoning

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Although planning is a crucial component of the autonomous driving stack, researchers have yet to develop robust planning algorithms that are capable of safely handling the diverse range of possible driving scenarios. Learning-based planners suffer from overfitting and poor long-tail performance. On the other hand, rule-based planners generalize well, but might fail to handle scenarios that require complex driving maneuvers. To address these limitations, we investigate the possibility of leveraging the common-sense reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT4 and Llama2 to generate plans for self-driving vehicles. In particular, we develop a novel hybrid planner that leverages a conventional rule-based planner in conjunction with an LLM-based planner. Guided by commonsense reasoning abilities of LLMs, our approach navigates complex scenarios which existing planners struggle with, produces well-reasoned outputs while also remaining grounded through working alongside the rule-based approach. Through extensive evaluation on the nuPlan benchmark, we achieve state-of-the-art performance, outperforming all existing pure learning- and rule-based methods across most metrics. Our code will be available at https://llmassist.github.io/

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

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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.

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